**6. Conclusions**

The previous sections have outlined the important parallels in the positions on national identity of the two parties under discussion. In an overview of papers presented at a roundtable with the theme "Why has Nationalism not run its Course"? (Harris 2016) speaks of three particular triumphs of the contemporary nation-state: National identity, sovereign statehood, and democracy. It is instructive to consider briefly these three concepts in the light of the positions of AfD and Vox which view all three as being in a situation of crisis. In addition, the three are inseparable from each other, and the parties state that their aim is to preserve them from forces which are equally inseparable from the

contemporary world: Migration (leading to population diversity), supranational political organisations, and economic Europeanisation/globalisation. (Pirro et al. 2018) have spoken of the frames by which populist Eurosceptic parties view and present European crises; this paper has extended this model also to the right-wing Vox in Spain.

The importance given by the parties to notions of language, culture, ancestry, descent (all relating to a mythical or admirable past which is extended into the present) are to be found in *Heimat*, *arraigo*, *hispanidad*, *deutsche Leitkultur* and are fundamental for their view of national identity. They demonstrate the backwards step away from any idea of the nation as a constructed community or community of choice à la Hobsbawm or Anderson. The parties present their *Volk* or *nación* as a homogenous ethno-cultural nation and in dire need of protection. This ethnic participation to the maximum extent possible in political decisions at the nation-state level is the guarantee of democracy. It is also a characteristic Europe-wide phenomenon which functions within a set of European values, one important source of which is Christianity. All these factors mark a fundamental distinction from Islam and its middle-Eastern or African adherents living in Europe or moving towards Europe.

(Harris 2016) also writes that these nineteenth-century ideas of political organisation have created "a set of political references whose meaning is so deeply entrenched in people's consciousness that the absence of an e ffective alternative creates a near existential anxiety". This view is elaborated on by Hosking in one of the papers given at the roundtable which Harris is summarising (Hosking 2016). It is the absence of "an e ffective alternative" which is key in the two cases studied. As has been seen, Vox and AfD are at pains to emphasise that the alternative which appears to exist, the EU, is neither effective in its promotion of the wellbeing of the people, nor is it legitimate in its existence. This is because the people are the only legitimate source of sovereignty and there is no European sovereign people. In their eyes the Union's existence and development have weakened national sovereignty and therefore democracy. The EU is also, they argue, attempting to weaken national identity by propagating social values alien to ones anchored in tradition and Christianity, including the relationship of men and women, and the definition of the family.

The situation, then, is the following: In the view of each of the parties, the processes of Europeanisation (allowed and encouraged by incompetent or corrupt politicians) have created a crisis for their view of national identity and the nation state—a crisis which they set out ostensibly to combat, but in fact are exploiting and even extending in order to consolidate and develop their own influence by means of the continuing performance of crisis. Their view is in fundamental opposition to the conviction, developed by European states and by the European Union in the late twentieth century, of the urgen<sup>t</sup> necessity of shared sovereignty and mutual responsibility in order to promote political, social, and economic wellbeing across a fractious and fractured European continent which is now also faced with the economic forces of globalisation. To promote and perform their view of the crisis of national identity the parties are using the technological achievements of the twenty-first century to attack the late-twentieth-century political and social achievements of the European Union in order to replace them with the nineteenth-century concept of the distinct ethno-cultural nation unrestrictedly sovereign in its own nation-state. For the two countries in question which currently define themselves as active and committed members of the European Union, this would mean a radical shift in national identity.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding. **Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
