Cultural and neoliberal logics in the Flemish nationalist project of the New Flemish Alliance

Culture is one of the key categories that have centered debates on diversity, multiculturalism and nationalism in Europe. The notion has been used with frequency in order to estabilish a variety of partially overlapping and reductive dichotomies: Western/Non-Western, Judeo-Christian/Islamic, North-South and the like. However, reified notions of culture have also been used in order to draw lines of division within countries and regions. This is certainly the case in Belgium. Culture has played a big historical role in popular and nationalist conceptions of Flemish identity in relation to migrant minority members with Islamic backgrounds. But it has also played its role in the way nationalists position themselves in relation to Belgium as a multilingual and federal state. The continued electoral success of the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) between 2003 and 2014 went hand in hand with the articulation of a discourse on Belgium as a country hosting two languages (French and Dutch), two cultures (Walloon and Flemish), two media-systems (there are no bilingual or federal public media) and democracies (the north votes right wing and the south votes left wing). In analogy with the notion of blocked identity, Flemish nationalists claimed that Belgium suffered from a blocked democracy in which neither the North (Flanders) or the South (Walonia) of the country managed to realize their cultural or political ideas. Within this logic, Belgium cannot hope to be a democracy because it (supposedly) consists of two cultures. In spite of the intertextual success of this type of discourse, the latest electoral success was marked by an important discursive shift towards a neoliberal austerity-based discourse. Relying on a combination of the logics approach of Glynos and Howarth on the one hand, and on linguistic pragmatics as a method for empirical ideology research on the other, this paper will investigate this shift in the N-VA discourse from an interpretive logic that relies on a strategy of culturalisation to one that draws on neoliberal fantasies and logics. Based on earlier publications as well as on new analyses of multimodal 2014 N-VA campaign materials, the author will present the continuities and ruptures within this hegemonic project. Special attention will go to the way culturalist and neoliberal logics have been (dis)articulated in the discourse of the N-VA.