Hippler, J., & Kamali-Chirani, F. (2018). Cultural civil war. In European Union National Institutes for Culture, Culture Report: EUNIC Yearbook 2017/2018 (pp. 36-41). Stuttgart, Germany: European Union National Institutes for Culture.
Brief overview provided by the authors:
For a long time, Europe and the United States have presented themselves through “Western values” such as liberalism, liberty, and democracy; nevertheless, currently they are in a state of what can be described as cultural civil war. On one hand stands US President, Donald Trump, who proudly applies the “America first” policy. On the other hand stands Brexit, which demonstrates the rise of populism and Euroscepticism in the UK. At the same time, governments in Poland and Hungary are cultivating extreme nationalist discourses, again with strong xenophobic elements and anti-Muslim hysteria. Remarkably, there has also been a weakening of the independence of the courts, restricting freedom of expression, and aiming for a kind of democracy controlled from above. In France, the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, and Italy there has been a rise of right-wing populist movements doing well at the polls. Such trends are not specific to the West alone. Putin, Erdoğan, and Duterte are part of the right-wing populism that has emerged on every continent. We have to accept that today we are going through a cultural civil war. Jochen Hippler and Fatemeh Kamali-Chirani argue in their article that this war is not being fought with weapons but in people’s minds at the grassroots of society, online, on radio and TV, and in print media. They also present solutions for how to win this war by dealing with the causes of the breakdown of the political culture in the West, and by going on the offensive culturally, in order to re-conquer the hill of cultural hegemony.
