By Toby Greene
Dr Toby Greene joined the School of Politics and International Relations in 2019 as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow and is researching the impact of rising populist parties on foreign policy decision making in Europe. Toby’s research and publications focus on foreign policy decision making, European foreign policy, the role of civilizational identities in international relations, and the politics of the Middle East, and especially Israel.
Judeo-Christian civilizationism: Challenging common European foreign policy in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, published in Mediterranean Politics
https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2020.1739928
The EU’s identity is said to shape its role as a ‘normative actor’ promoting universal democratic values, including to its neighbourhood. Yet a competing civilizationist version of European identity – increasingly invoked on the radical right – frames Europe as representing ‘Judeo-Christian’ values in opposition to non-European cultures, especially Islam. This paper argues that these identity variations shape divergent responses to foreign policy challenges, by showing the growing influence of civilizationist discourse on European attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian arena. The paper focuses on Austria’s 2017–2019 ÖVP-FPÖ coalition to identity links between rising civilizationist politics and significant policy shifts regarding the Israeli-Palestinian arena.
You can find the article at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13629395.2020.1739928