The Politics of the Danish Cartoon Affair: Hegemonic Intervention by the Extreme Right

It is more than five years ago the Danish cartoon affair appeared for the first time on the monitors of the mainstream media, but the saga still continues. The controversy resulted in countless journal articles and more than two dozen books analyzing every aspect of the cartoon crisis. This was a true case of incitement to discourse about cultural and philosophical differences between Islam and the “West.” As such, the cartoons produced the effect that the publishers had hoped for. I argue in this article that the cartoon controversy should be understood in the context of populist radical right's hegemonic intervention. Through incessant series of moral panics around Muslim immigrants and their cultural practices, European populist right movements hijacked and culturalized public discourse and thus achieved unprecedented influence on how societies conceive of themselves. The international dimension involves the ideological and organic connections between right wing forces, and the agendas that they are constantly pushing onto the public debate.