Place and New Right Politics

The purpose of this paper is to exemplify an ideological articulation between a movement constructing a place and neo-liberalism and to relate it with the perspective of the new Right, hegemonic ideology in contemporary politics. Neo-liberalism promotes globalization and extends the logic of the market to the social. The approach of this paper is discourse analysis, referring to the problematic of critical geopolitics, centered on political geography since the early 1990s. Its major agenda is to clarify the connections between geographical representations and power in politics.<br>The subject of analysis is the discourse of the Lega Nord (Northern League), which is one of the major political parties in Italy. Its fundamental claim is to bring autonomy to regions in northern Italy. In 1996, the Lega began to represent almost the whole of northern Italy as "Padania" and to seek secession from Italy.<br>In the context of the rise of this movement, there was a process of transformation from the Welfare State to the neo-liberal state in Italy. While the mechanism of political representation was brought down in the early 1990s due to corruption in traditional popular parties, an economic crisis, changing subjectivities and so on, already in the 1980s small firms of the Post-Fordist mode of production, a so-called "third Italy", in northern and central Italy had developed rapidly. The Lega succeeded in representing such small firms especially in a rural and local area near the Alps, as so-called "Pedemontania". In 1996, also being affected by the external constraint of the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) of Europe, the reforms of the Italian Welfare State, for example, federal reforms, deregulation, and fiscal reforms, were important and pressing problems.<br>In this context, the geopolitics of the Lega Nord is to change the meaning of northern Italy from "Italy" to "Padania", namely to "Europe". First, as a populist party, the Lega Nord represents "people" excluded from political decisions by political class and bureaucratic elites, against the (welfare) state. It then proposes that all the political-economic difficulty in Italy derives from southern Italy. Therefore, it argues that the North should secede from the South, and that only the North should enter the EMU. Second, the Lega defines what place "Padania" is. "Padania" articulates chiefly three elements: "North", "localism", and "Europe". The Lega describes the new history and geography of "Padania". According to the Lega, "the people of Padania", who respect laws, moral norms, and the value of work, constitute local and autonomic communities.<br>Such a "Padania" in 1996 was a neo-liberal place. It was the place for economic activities and social integration of neo-liberalism that took no account of the political. After "Padania", however, the Lega Nord increasingly became more conservative and more xenophobic, focusing on the theme of immigration outside the EU. As a far right party, it began to take a strong attitude towards globalization and the EU, claiming that cultural differences must be protected. Thus, "Padania" had become a closed place. Consequently, the popularity of the Lega declined sharply in some elections, even in its strongholds. Such a process of shifting position exemplifies that the articulation, a characteristic of the new Right, between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatives, is unstable and contradictory.