Augusta DellÕOmo: Welcome to Right Rising, a podcast from the Center for the Analysis of the Radical Right. I'm your host Augusta DellÕOmo. Today I'm joined by Michael Zeller, a Doctoral Candidate in Political Science at Central European University. He's here with us today to help us understand for right demonstrations and subsequently mobilization efforts by governments. Michael, thanks for being here.

Michael Zeller: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

AD: So let's start off with understanding why demonstrations are important. Much of the current concerns surrounding far right movements and social actors increasingly focuses on digital spaces like 4chan and incel culture. So why do we need to direct specific attention to far right demonstrations?

MZ: Sure, that's a good question. Far right movements are in the modern world, really, in many instances centered on those digital spheres. But to understand the importance of demonstrations for the far right, you have to consider their history and how that still resonates today. So the first modern far right movements, the post-World War I fascist movements, asserted their strength through demonstrations. In popular imagination, this is often associated with the Nuremberg rallies. But demonstrations were a central tactic long before that. Mussolini's Black Shirts, for example, profited enormously by taking control of the streets in many Italian towns, beating off leftists and oppositional activists. And the famed march on Rome, Mussolini's sort of bluff into power in 1922, was another important demonstration. In Weimar Germany too, the Nazis demonstrated as a show of force. Such examples are pretty abundant in the interwar period. In the English speaking world, the Battle of Cable Street is probably the most famous where Jewish and anti-fascist activists beat back an attempt by Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists to march through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood of London. 

Fast forward to today, and demonstrations remain important for the far right, for many, far right social movement organizations. Part of this is historical continuity, an element of tradition and nostalgia with these earlier fascist movements and other far right movements trying to recapture sort of that glory. But demonstrations also serve important instrumental purposes. Internally, they can help to mobilize existing members and promote solidarity and bonding between those members. Externally, they can help attract new participants, they can facilitate networking between groups. And perhaps most fundamentally, they raise awareness of far right agenda items and claim a space in the public sphere, which was for many countries after the Second World War, closed to the far right. 

Even during COVID and the current emergency, when some far right groups were quick to seize on an ideal opportunity for online activism and also for community politics and when demonstrations, for obvious reasons, were less palatable options to tactically pursue - it would seem Ð far right groups still pushed to get demonstration mobilized again and this is what you saw with several demonstrations in Germany opposing government lockdown measures or in England with the Protect Our Monuments demonstrations. So even in non-ideal circumstances, there's still this impulse among many far right groups to organize demonstrations because some of the benefits that they bring can't really be replaced by digital activism. 

AD: Thanks for that, Michael and I think the phrase that you just finished with Òimpulse for organizationÓ is really important. And so when these groups are organizing, you mentioned marches. I think one of the common images that people have is, as you mentioned, the Nuremberg Marches. So when you say demonstration, what kinds of activities can fall into this category? And have these demonstrations changed over time? Are there new demonstration tactics that are being used by the far right today that are different maybe from the more historical fascist demonstrations that you mentioned earlier?

MZ: Well, demonstrations to take the first part of your question refers to all manner of public events, rallies, marches, public meetings, where the far right activists, activists and organizations are accessible and attempting to project something in the public sphere. And these events often become rituals, repeated actions that that serve those expressive and instrumental objectives that I mentioned. They have changed somewhat from from earlier forms of far right demonstrations. For example, in the interwar period, there were several cases where the far right provocatively marched into Jewish neighborhoods, or neighborhoods of other minorities. This is much more exceptional these days. It still happens, there were a series of very ominous torch lit demonstrations by a far right group in Hungary, through Roma neighborhoods. But by and large, that sort of demonstration has been forbidden, or prevented by state authorities for just how explosive they can be. But, the fundamental logic of demonstrations remains consistent from those early forms to present day demonstration campaigns, they still serve those internal and external purposes. And so when we talk about far right demonstrations, and demonstration campaigns, we might contrast this with their private organizing, planning and socializing within far right groups or even within the movement, but also with other distinct tactics of activism, such as some of the online spaces that you mentioned. Also, community politics that are more about individual interactions, or local elections for far right groups, unlike these sorts of areas, far right demonstrations are intended as if they are a show of force of mobilizing capacity, and as well as moving together movement activists.

AD: That's really helpful context as we're moving into actually what you predominantly study which is demobilization efforts, and you mentioned just a little bit ago, how state authorities have tried to combat these demonstration efforts. So, what is demobilization and why is this important when we're thinking about how to combat far right demonstrators?

MZ: Yeah. demobilization basically, encompasses the way in which activism ends. This can be positive demobilization, such as when a movement achieves its goals. But more often, movements negatively demobilize either because of internal or external pressures. Often, such campaigns are meant as a sort of perpetual motion machine, the organizers just want them to keep going want them to live up to that ideal of ritual and tradition, and to keep serving those purposes of attracting new activists and keeping existing activists engaged. But external pressures or internal divisions put an end to these campaigns. They demobilize even if the far right organization behind it lives on fight another day. 

So demobilization works at various levels of analysis in studying social movements, and of studying far right movements, particularly. And the significance for understanding demobilization processes at all levels, is that it tells us something about the life cycle of movements, movement organizations, and individual activists generally, which is something that's received relatively less attention in scholarly examination of social movements. And specifically about the far right, it can explain how aggressive attempts by far right organizations to project control onto the streets or into the public sphere can be met by the state and other social actors and what leads to demobilization and what does not.

AD: That's fascinating, Michael, and I think that really leads well into my next question, which is, how do you actually track demobilization efforts? Far right groups are notoriously fluid, difficult to keep track of, they constantly seem to reform and then you have actors in multiple groups. So how do you actually track demobilization as a scholar and as a researcher?

MZ: Before you get into the specifics, you have to figure out how you're approaching this sort of study, you have to establish a conception of how demobilization works and, essentially it is that demobilization is a process, it occurs over time. This applies to most of the levels of analysis of social movements, whether you're looking at activists, organizations or whole movements. Then you have to figure out how do we explain this process in causal terms? What is our ontological view of this demobilization phenomenon that we want to explain? We know from cursory examination of cases that multiple factors impinge on demobilization processes, multiple things are affecting. Some of these factors are causally influential sometimes, other times not. We know also that demobilization refers to distinct processes and it's not just a failure to mobilize a failure to get a movement or a campaign going, even if the sort of parallelism between those two terms might suggest such a symmetrical relationship. These causal characteristics help us to select a or create a method for analyzing the phenomenon.

In this specific type of case of far right demonstration campaigns, the causal characteristics that I alluded to suggest case based methods. These include case studies, in which you can trace the course of individual demobilization processes. But it can also mean multiple comparative methods like qualitative comparison. These methods, essentially, match with how we think demobilization occurs. And you can contrast this with statistical methods, for example, where, say, variables are viewed additively, more repression equals more demonstration. That's an oversimplification. But the point is, that the view of causation and statistical methods is not compatible with what we already know, theoretically and empirically about demobilization. 

After you've established those foundations, you can design studies to look at particular instances of demobilization. And with specifically tracking for movements, you do raise an important issue there, because oftentimes, far right organizations are covert and very, studiously hiding their activities. However, this is not the case when it comes to demonstration campaigns, since the basic idea is to get out on the streets and show what your organization can do, the number of activists that can mobilize. So with that in mind, there's a lot of tracking of far right organizations in this specific area. And the most basic one is a news report covers how activists appear on on the street, what their number was, what they were doing, why they were doing it, how they were met by police and counter-mobilizing activists. My study, which concerns large far right demonstration campaigns in England, Germany, and Austria, between 1990 and 2015. This selection of cases gives some empirical twist to our theoretical mill, and helps improve existing theories of demobilization and of far right activism.

AD: Thanks for that Michael. I think that theoretical and statistical breakdown that you just gave us is really important to contextualize my next question, which is, what patterns of demobilization have you identified from these specific case studies? And can you give us an example of what this looks like in practice? So maybe take us through one of the organizations that you've followed in your research. 

MZ: Sure. Well, first to talk about the overarching patterns that emerged from my study. So looking at 32 cases, across these three countries, and in this time period, four patterns emerge. 

First, there are cases where state authorities exercise a channeling form of social control. And when I say channeling, think of indirect, repressive measures here. Preventing certain speakers from taking part in an event, restricting access to certain neighborhoods, things which don't, which don't cancel, or prevent far right demonstrations perse, but limit their ability to mobilize. When this sort of action is applied to long running campaigns, demobilization can occur and this basically means a closing of opportunity for the far right organization. 

Second, there are cases when the far right exercises coercive social control. And this just means they physically prevent the far right demonstration. This often occurs with police power, where intended demonstration routes or sites are blocked, far right activists attempting to demonstrate might be arrested. And when this meets relatively short lived demonstration campaigns, it can produce demobilization, and this is down to the decisive impact of state repression. 

Third, there's cases where relatively new far right demonstration campaigns are met with private channeling and this is where we can think of civil counter-mobilizations, such as protests and pickets, or simultaneous demonstrations to the far right event. This conjunction of causes can produce demobilization, but it's partial because far right campaigns have not been around long enough to become strong rituals, and the civil counter-mobilization deters those efforts. 

And the last type that emerges we could call militant anti-far right action. And this is most popularly associated with Antifa, but there are other examples. This coercive social control from private actors is an attempt to beat far right activists off the street into demobilizing their campaigns. So these four patterns cover the main causal combinations of demonstration, campaign mobilization. 

And I think, maybe just to take one example, an interesting one from the form of demobilization where the state exercises social control, where the state exercises coercive social role, applies physical repression through its policing powers. This doesn't happen without prompting. So in the early 1990s, shortly after the reunification of Germany, there was a group of far right activists who organized a series of memorial marches for Rudolf Hess, famously, one of Hitler's main acolytes. They organized a yearly event where they would go to this city in northeastern Bavaria called Wunsiedel and process down the main road of the city to the graveyard where Rudolf Hess was buried. And this was thousands of activists in a pretty small area. Showing that essentially, they could double the population of the town in one day, by turning out all their activists onto it. Eventually, it was demobilized by state authorities stepping in with bans on this activity in the mid and early 19900s preventing for right activists from assembling in Wunsiedel And then from assembling in, in nearby towns, and activists who tried were subject to arrest and detention. 

And eventually, at least for a time, the far right had to abandon this campaign. But the imposition of state authority here, the application of these repressive measures probably would not have happened if not for the fact that Antifa activists from Berlin physically assaulted the far right demonstration in 1991. That caused such a threat to public security that the state felt it had to intervene. And its solution was to ban all demonstrations on this this weekend, in which the far right was intending to hold its commemoration. So when you look at this in sort of a timeline view, you see these interlocking events that act as like cogs in a machine. The far right mobilizes, then this prompts counter mobilization from violent oppositional activists. And that pushes the state into applying its coercive force. So, from this sort of example, we get a view of demobilization processes in practice.

AD: I think that mechanism that you highlighted just at the end, where far right demonstration breeds counter protests, often violent, that then pushes a state response. I think that's a really clear causal chain that's useful for us when thinking about demonstrations. So let's, you know, as we're wrapping up this episode, what does your research tell us about far right groups and how societies and states respond. So what are your key takeaways from your research?

MZ: My research today tells us about the multiple pressures that inveigh against far right demonstration campaigns. And one of the interesting things is that internal pressure is, is in some ways rare, at least once these campaigns are mobilized. The far right can build demonstration campaigns into a coalition and build it into that ritual and tradition that I mentioned at the top of the show. Maybe more fundamentally, it's that there's no silver bullet, or permanent fix, to demobilizing the far right and their demonstration campaigns. This area of movement activism, far right social movements are really quite wedded to the tactic of demonstrations. And that might slowly shift as online activism becomes more prominent, but that's a long development and demonstrations for the far right are going to continue to be important for many years, for the foreseeable future. 

So when considering how to confront these or how to address them, It's important to realize that it's not a one to one answer. The far right activists have done this in this context, this is where the demonstration campaign is situated, so if we apply this, then. It's not that simple. It's it depends on how these demobilization processes unfold. 

Now, that being said, I think one of the important things that emerges from my study is that counter-mobilization is always important, even in Germany with its so-called militant democracy, where the state is, at least supposed to be, geared towards proactive counteraction against the far right, to prevent lapsing back into prominent far right actors in the public sphere. Even then, the intervention of state action rarely occurs without some prompting social action or lobbying. So understanding that aspect of far right demobilization processes underscores the importance of responding to these far right activities, and alerts society, other social actors, to the importance of not ceding that public space to far right activists, and personally, that's what I find most compelling in looking at these demobilization processes. 

AD: Well, thank you, Michael, so much for being here today. For people that are interested in learning more about your research. Where can they find you? Are you on Twitter? Where can they find your work?

MZ: Sure, thank you again for having me. I appreciated the chance to talk about this. I am on Twitter. I'm relatively new and just getting going with posting but you can find me on MichaelCZeller and I have articles currently under review, probably up for publication next year with the journals, Social Movement Studies, and Mobilization. And you can also find out about related research that I'm doing with an EU Horizon 2020 research project called ÒBuilding Resilience Against Violent Extremism and PolarizationÓ and information about that is readily available. 

AD: Thank you again, Michael, for being here. This has been another episode of Right Rising. We'll see you next time.