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Политология
Comparison between Russian and British Politics: Has British Politics Become More Virtual?
Comparison between Russian and British Politics: Has British Politics Become More Virtual?
The thesis assumes that there is an ideological dimension to virtual politics. The Andrew Wilson’s concept of virtual politics. Virtual Politics: Definition, Origin and Evolution. Political Technology and Protest. Populist Nationalism and Dramaturgiiya.
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For example, public opinion was particularly hostile to Georgia around about 2008, the year when Russian invaded. Thereafter, dislike for Georgia seems to drop down to low levels, and, from 2013 onwards antipathy towards Ukraine rises - the year before Russia annexed Crimea. Both of these events were preceded by aggressive media campaigns against the country in question, and, in both cases had the effect of restoring national pride. Russia was able to exhibit themselves as the dominant force in the post-Soviet space while promoting the dramaturgiiya of `Slavic solidarity against outsider threats of fascism and American hegemony' (Wilson, 2015).
Moreover, the interventions demonstrated Russian sovereignty, as both the invasion in Georgia in 2008, and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 were in direct contrast with American and European foreign policy interests. In 2012, Putin's approval ratings had hit a low following the protests already discussed, often sitting at around sixty percent. In 2015, a year after the annexation of Crimea, they had risen sharply to eighty-nine percent in June of that year (Nardelli, Rankin & Arnett, 2015). The increased approval ratings were accompanied by exuberant outbursts of national pride, with the creation of new songs about the regaining of the peninsula, and new flags with the words `Crimea- Ours' emblazoned across them and, of course, a new national holiday (Moscow Times, 2019). The link between establishing enemies and restoring or manufacturing national pride seems clear. The extent to which national enemies change in such a short period of time is testament to the significance of invention in both nationalism and virtual politics.
Populist Nationalism and Dramaturgiiya
This brings us to one of the main questions of the thesis - the relationship between nationalist narratives and virtual politics. It seems that populist nationalism has the appropriate virtual qualities to produce virtual politics. Populist nationalism is fundamentally underpinned by the fabrication of an `us', the people as a nation, which is the same `us' which features so heavily in dramaturgiiya. As there are no clearly identifiable boundaries of what constitutes `us', the scope for manipulation and invention is extended. Populist nationalism in Russia also shares some basic characteristics of dramaturgiiya, insofar as, the nation is experienced through the TV and is built upon artificially constructed precepts, such as; `the people', national identity, a narrativised history, national enemies, flags, songs, traditions, symbols, stories of origin etc. The sense of national cohesion that people experience as a result of these things, is largely the result of an invented reality, like the scripts produced by political technologists. In this regard, we can think of populist nationalism as a virtual ideology, as the creation of a national identity, is, itself a process of inventing reality. This means that the dramaturgiiya produced by political technologists is not tied down or rooted in objective reality, because they revolve around a fictional and imagined sense of the nation, that was without essential characteristics in the first place.
As the political technologists are already dealing with untruths (what constitutes the nation) it is easier for them to pedal their own untruths about what threats the nation faces and what its values are. It is on the constructed and artificial nature of a nation that virtual politics can be performed. We can think of populist nationalism as one big construction or meta-narrative; about who the people are and what their national story is, which subsumes the smaller constructed scripts of the political technologists. Their dramaturgiiya is required to reference the main meta-narrative of nationalism in order to be intelligible and appealing to the public. So, for example, the oligarchs are only an appropriate enemy when they are set up against the Russian people. Similarly, Ukrainians are only a problem when they represent a threat from the West to the Russian people. In both cases, the Russian people as an existing, singular and identifiable national unit are presupposed. Without this presupposition, the dramaturgiiya fall apart. Indeed, it is from this presupposition, that the dramaturgiiya generate their own untruths; who the enemies of the people are, what the people value, what the people's symbols and traditions are, and, finally, how they should understand their own history. In other words, if people do not accept the invented precepts of national identity, they will not consent to and be mobilised by the propositions made in dramaturgiiya.
Chapter 3
Has British politics become more virtual?
The divergences between British and Russian politics are vast and the two nations are rarely compared with each other. This is for good reason, as their cultural, historic, geographical and economic divergences have led to the formation of distinct and in many ways contrasting political cultures. However, it seems clear that British politics has experienced fundamental change since the referendum vote to leave the EU in June 2016. A decision that `generated international concern about the effects of populist forces, and stunned disbelief from Berlin to Paris' (Norris, 2019, p.368). Others have described it as a revolution (Fotopoulos, 2016) and it is often considered to be, along with the election of Trump in America, one of the most significant consequences of the `wave' of right wing populism that has spread across the democratic world (McBride, 2016). This thesis regards both the way in which the referendum was conducted and the subsequent political developments as indicative of the changing nature of British politics.
From these changes, the thesis does not aim to say that the two countries share the same political systems, but, instead, to discern some features of recent British politics which resemble existing elements of virtual politics in Russian. Hopefully, this can shed light on some of the changes that have occurred in Britain during, and, after the Brexit referendum and also, the way in which populist nationalism is married to deceptive political manoeuvring. This will revolve around two main areas; firstly, the tactics used to win the referendum, and, secondly, its accompanying set of ideas, or broadly speaking, its ideology. This, hopefully, connects the two parts of the thesis, as the fundamental similarity observed between the countries, is precisely this combination of populist nationalism and the manipulation of truth and facts. As the first part of the thesis attempted to demonstrate, both ideology and deception are fundamental and interconnected elements of virtual politics. The political technologists in Russia and the proponents of Brexit in Britain are simultaneously unconventionally deceptive in their tactics and quite unimaginative in their ideology.
The basic premise in this section is to suggest that a similar interrelation between ideology and deception is present in Britain as in Russia, as we have witnessed a shift from persuasion, to manipulation of the electorate. From this suggestion, we can propose that British politics has become `more' virtual, without necessarily saying it has become entirely virtual - a Britain that is less connected with political reality and closer to the world of populist nationalist rhetoric and illusion.
One other important element that will be included is the transition of key Vote Leave members from opposition to the government in 2016, to forming the government in 2019. As already observed, one of the crucial developments of political technology in Russia was its monopolisation and centralisation under Putin. In Britain the proponents of deceptive tactics and populist nationalism, have now also found themselves at the heart of government.
Micro-Targeting
Firstly, we will look at the deceptive tactics associated with Brexit, which reflect elements of virtual politics. Indeed, Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director for Vote Leave and the man widely credited with introducing micro-targeting tactics into British politics, described winning the referendum as `hacking the political system' (Cummings, 2017). This metaphor immediately expresses the language and spirit of political technology, in which shortcuts to political power can be devised, rather than earnt on the merit of policy or debate. Cummings, in his blog post, `how the Brexit referendum was won', outlines the role of a new data science team which effectively exploited data analysis to disseminate `a billion targeted digital adverts regardless of all complaints' (Cummings, 2017).
By using these targeted messages and in such volume, the Vote Leave campaign was able to undercut traditional forms of scrutiny usually expected in political communication in Britain. In particular, there was no media scrutiny to test and question the validity of the claims and content of the messages, a key element of any functioning democracy. As noted by Amazeen, the Brexit campaign, due to the excessive usage of deception by politicians, `illustrates the necessity of vigilant fact-checking that the distributed network media model requires' (2020, p.96). Fact-checking may be understood as a democracy-building tool because it `seeks to publicize political misinformation', thereby educating the public and improving political behaviour (ibid, p. 99).
Therefore, a lack of media scrutiny in the UK provided Vote Leave with an unprecedented scope for controlling and shaping their narrative, as they were able to spread their political message without checks. This is reminiscent of the fixation with control over the television held by political technologists, for whom `media technologies' are pivotal. Moreover, dissemination of misleading, targeted advertising shares the same disregard for scrutiny and evaluation of political messaging, which is a fundamental aspect of the media landscape engineered by political technologists.
Social Media and The People
The significance lies not just in the volume of messages that were able to be sent and the ability for these messages to circumvent traditional scrutiny, but also in the way in which they identified targets. Cummings explains that `our GOTV effort targeted crucial voters identified by traditional polling, a new type of experimental polling, the ground campaign, and the social media campaign, all overseen by the data science team' (Cummings, 2017). GOTV refers to `Get out the vote', which is an effort to try and increase voter turnout in elections or referenda by mobilising or encouraging disillusioned voters to become active.
One of the most novel and mysterious aspects of the Vote Leave campaign was the use of social media to identify new voters. Thomas Borwick, the chief technology officer for Vote Leave, has revealed details of the manner in which the social media campaign was run. He explains that social media groups provide a very accurate image of potential group motivation. Social media groups reflect the private interests of members, for example, whether individuals are for or against Gay marriage, animal rights etc. (Pomerantsev, 2019, p.212). Borwick's job was to identify these personal and, in some cases,, seemingly apolitical, preferences and facets of people's lives and attach them to the Vote Leave campaign, despite the fact the link may be non-existent or tenuous (Vote Leave had no policy with regard to gay marriage). He claims, that for a country of twenty million, seventy to eighty types of targeted messages will be required, each message referring to one of these types (pro/anti-gay marriage, animal rights etc) (ibid.). The inclination to quantify public opinion recalls the political technologist's attitude towards politics, in which people are predictable and outcomes controllable.
Borwick has claimed that the most successful message for mobilising uninterested voters had been about animal rights. Vote Leave went on to argue that animal rights were not protected in the EU, citing Spanish bullfighting (ibid, p.213). In terms of micro-targeting, Bowrick was able to `focus even tighter, sending graphic ads featuring mutilated animals to one type of voter and more gentle ads with pictures of cuddly sheep to others' (ibid.). In doing so Borwick distorts reality, by presenting the EU as a threat to whatever any given individual holds dearest. The significance lies in the chronology of his method, he first identifies individual likes or dislikes and then attaches it to leaving the EU. This distorted image is then directly transmitted into the lives and homes of individuals via their phones or computers. Similar to the way in which political technologists use the television, or, how the troll farm operates, the aim is to constantly surround an individual with political messaging which may appeal to them. The appeal it has for the individual is virtual though, both due to its existence on the internet, and, also its disconnectedness with political reality - the EU, in this case, absorbing all sorts of dislikes from a wide range of individuals. The true nature of the EU and its relationship with British citizens, was not the point.
Moreover, the lack of voter knowledge of the EU's mechanisms and relation to the UK provided the Vote Leave campaign with a greater scope to produce their own `realities' and images of the EU. Tellingly, according to Google's Twitter account, the day after the release of the referendum results, the question "What is the European Union?", became the second most searched question about the EU by UK internet users (Hasse, 2016). In general, the search trends indicate that `many voters appear to have been unaware of what they were deciding and what the real implications were' (ibid.).
While the Vote Leave methods certainly represent an interesting and powerful technical innovation - the capability to send up to a billion targeted messages into the homes of individuals catered to their personal interests - it seems from a political theory perspective, their work is not so unconventional or original. It is important to note that Borwick still relies on a friend enemy distinction like political technologists. Similarly, the enemy is framed in national terms, as a foreign threat to animal rights or gay marriage in the form of the EU. What Borwick, in effect, is able to do with the advent of social media campaigning, is create tailor made enemies to mobilise the voters.
As David Runciman notes, the collection of metadata is an increasing problem in democracies:
Democratic states like the US and Britain have turned out to be prolific accumulators and hoarders of metadata. The democratic process in these countries has sought to put these activities under judicial oversight, but that is no solution to the difficulty of misaligned incentives...Who watches the watchers is the question to which representative democracy has no good answer. (Runciman, 2019, p.117).
The other side of this, of course, is those who know how to acquire and manipulate data suddenly become inordinately powerful and unaccountable. In this case, the Vote Leave campaign.
Likewise, this development has been mirrored in political technology in Russia. As we observed with Cantadora, the fictional troll-farm character designed to engage disinterested housewives with politics. She was only effective when she attacked the US or the EU. Borwick, himself acknowledges the utility of creating a virtual enemy, stating `I believe that a well-identified enemy is probably a 20 per cent kicker to your vote' (Pomerantsev, 2019, p.213) However, he does not recognise that in his other work, sending targeted messages to people on animal rights, he is also creating enemies and relying on Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, in particular a national enemy. This suggests Borwick and Vote Leave, like political technologists in Russia, are constrained to implementing their deceptive techniques within the ideological paradigm of populist nationalism. It's just that now, with the help of social media, he is able to create more personalised and sophisticated enemies. The important point is that the creation of an enemy still acts as the real source of motivation to mobilise disillusioned voters. Borwick was just able to identify which enemies work best - a foreign threat to animal rights.
The social media techniques helped to formulate a loose construction of `the people'. For one thing, animal rights enthusiasts may have markedly different approaches to crucial questions about the EU - the imposition of EU law over UK law, or, the question of freedom of movement. Secondly, the targeted messages draw in disillusioned voters with a wide array of disparate interests, from environmental activists to people concerned with potholes (Pomerantsev, 2019, p. 212). Suddenly, these disconnected and isolated groups and individuals, with their own agendas, are soldered together to form `the people'. But it is unclear who `the people' are, do they want protection for animal rights, less immigration or the sovereignty of British law?
From having held personal interests on smaller issues, they have become united in their disdain for the EU. Earlier, it was discussed that with the use of TV, political technologists are able to reimagine the Russian national community for members of the public by controlling its depiction. The Vote Leave campaign was similarly able to imagine the enemy for British individuals via social media micro-targeting, and in doing so, reconstruct them together as `the people'. The accumulation of these disparate concerns with the EU, helped constitute `the people'. This then became the fundamental source of legitimacy for subsequent governments - acting on behalf of `the people' (Clement-Davies, 2016). While the ability to create `the people' or imagine the nation are enhanced by modern techniques, they are still rooted in a basic appeal to populist nationalism - creating a friend-enemy divide, in which the friends represent the people as a national entity.
It is important to note that we can never know how decisive the use of micro-targeting was in the referendum result. However, Cummings himself repeatedly acknowledges the fine margins upon which the success of the Vote Leave campaign hinged - he cites the effectiveness of certain slogans and the ability to get politicians such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to agree to them as decisive (Cummings, 2017). The fine margins of the campaign are borne out in the result, in which Leave recorded 51.9% of the vote compared to Remain's 48.1%, from a 72.2% voter turnout (BBC, 2016). In such conditions, it is not unreasonable to suggest micro-targeting was highly influential in the outcome. Borwick's own assessment confirms this, as he explains `we are now in a trench warfare mentality where we are fighting at the margins' in which the aim is to target the `17 people that will flip their view' (Pomerantsev, 2018, 00:18:28 - 00:18:31).
Importantly, in a winner-takes-all referendum, the majority, however slim, became the sole proprietors of the tag `the people'. Presumably, if leave votes had acquired 49% then pro-Europeans would have constituted `the people'. In other words, who `the people' are has very little do with a percentage of the population or broad consensus of the public's opinion, but rather, who can be constructed as the people momentarily for the purpose of gaining political power. In this sort of referendum, therefore, `the people' can be created and subsequently invoked for political legitimacy by influencing and manipulating just enough individuals or small groups to surpass a 50% majority. The ardent and real Eurosceptics only became `the people' once they had narrowly won the referendum with the help of those who had been manipulated. Virtual politics is fundamentally underpinned by the attempt to invent authority (Wilson, 2005, p.16), in contemporary British politics, it seems, authority can be derived from inventing `the people'. This instrumental view of `the people' is a departure from the ideals of representative democracy, which seeks to act as `a mechanism for determining government's responsiveness to the public' (Urbinati, 2006, p.17) and a move towards the manipulative and virtual construction of the people and the nation which characterises political technology in Russia.
Fairy tales
Despite the use of modern social media techniques, the Vote Leave campaign also bears some resemblance with nascent political technology from Russia in the 1990s. According to the polling which Cummings relied upon, he discovered that about a third of the population was pro-European, another third was Eurosceptic and a fifth were swing voters who may have voted for either (Cummings, 2017). Indeed, in Britain, there had been a growing level of voter disenfranchisement due to a ten-year austerity programme after the 2008 financial crash and increasing divide between the rich and the poor (Lindner, 2017, p.22). People felt powerless in their personal lives and disillusioned with their political elites. The consequences of the 2008 financial crash exposed the neo-liberal world order, which was supposed to, in the form of trickle-down economics, profit everybody (Sitaraman, 2019). This left people disillusioned with the type of society they were living in, for which they had been told there was no alternative (Calhoun, 2017, p.62). Consequently, Vote Leave was preoccupied with finding a new voter, a new cause to get people engaged in politics and a new vision of the world. They knew, in line with their prodigious polling, if they could mobilise this new voter, they would massively increase their chance of success.
The 1990s in Russia, was a time of even greater social and political change and collapse. It was in this period that political technologists emerged and polled the nation `incessantly' (Pomerantsev, 2019, p.221). The aim too was to find what people would vote for, given the general disbelief and mistrust in politics. As we already discussed Gleb Pavlovskii described the situation as a `blank canvas' for political technologists. In his polling, Pavlovskii found that most people no longer fitted into old conceptions of left and right politics. Rather than trying to create a winning electorate by appealing to left or right politics, Pavlovskii focused on collecting different social groups and assembling them into a majority. He explains the process; `you collect them for a short period literally for a moment, but so that they all vote together for one person. To do this you need to build a fairy tale that will be common to all of them' (ibid., p.220). This echoes Bowrick's idea that you can gather disparate groups together momentarily for the purpose of gaining political power.
Prior to this point, we have been analysing these `fairy tales' as dramaturgiiya. We can recall the successful scripts of the 1990s as the creation of revanchist fascist Communists in 1996 as well as in 1999 Putin against the Chechens and the story of the country's regeneration. Dramaturgiiya, which identifies an enemy in order to create a sense of national cohesion and identity, was especially important after the collapse of communism, when Russian identity was emerging as a new phenomenon, distinct from the multi-ethnic Soviet Union. By creating enemies, political technologists were in fact shaping the sense of Russian national identity. This is what links the illusory world of virtual politics and ideology, as the dramaturgiiya is in reference to the illusory and constructed world of nationalism and national identity.
A similar story can be told with the Brexit vote, in which the deception of people was used to reinforce a sense of identity. While Cummings does not use the word fairy tale, he argues that Vote Leave was successful because it `focused attention more effectively than the other side on a simple and psychologically compelling story' (Cummings, 2017, emphasis mine). The story which fuelled Brexit was that of anti-globalisation and a return to the principles of a nation state. Lots of British people, especially in rural settings, felt that their identity had been eroded by years of liberalism (Fukuyama, 2018, p.101). The left-wing were perceived as no longer representative of the working class, but solely interested in promoting the interest of identity groups such as ethnic minorities, women and the LGBT community (Fukuyama, 2018, p.16).
This is why it is often commented on that the Brexit vote was `grounded in nostalgia' (Calhoun, 2017, p.60). This much is evident in the distribution of the votes across both age and population density. 70% of young people (18-24), generally more in favour of cosmopolitan and liberal values, voted to remain in the EU, while 60% of those over 65 voted to leave (Curtice, 2018). Likewise, those living in cities, especially cosmopolitan ones, were significantly more likely to vote Remain, than those living in places with a lower density (Beckett, 2016). The cultural divide between pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics was demonstrated by Mayor of London (a predominantly `Remain' city) Sadiq Kahn's usage of the 2016 Gay Pride parade as an occasion to `emphasize tolerance and inclusion not only for gay residents but also for EU citizens' (Calhoun, 2017, p.71).
This left Britain without a coherent national identity, in which huge divides exist between the rich and the poor, the liberal and the traditional, pro-European and Eurosceptic, not to mention the competing identities of the different nations which constitute the United Kingdom. Specifically, it is noted that a `sense of Englishness correlates more strongly with Euroscepticism' (Ashcroft & Bevir, 2016, p.356). This inclination may be explained by the transformation of British national identity over the course of history, as Kumar summarized:
With the loss of the British Empire, large?scale immigration, the call of Europe, and renewed nationalist movements that threaten the `break?up' of Britain, it is the English who find themselves most acutely faced with questions of national identity. Hence the new interest in national identity, especially among the English but also generally throughout the United Kingdom as other groups seek to imagine alternative futures for themselves. (Kumar, 2006, p. 428)
As previously discussed, the lingering issues of self-identification in Russia - conflicting between civic and ethnic notions of nationality - left it particularly exposed to a virtual unification, achieved in the creation of a national enemy. Perhaps, we can say Britain's unclear sense of national identity, also left it vulnerable to the appeals of unity promised by populist nationalism and a constructed enemy. Indeed, it can be argued that `pluralism of culture, national identity, and citizenship helped cause the current chaos in Britain' (Ashcroft & Bevir, 2016, p. 356). In fact, there is a clear link between English nationalism and Euroscepticism. In general, `Eurosceptics focus on the apparent threat to Britain and Britishness posed by Brussels'', but English citizens who felt more English than British `were the most (overwhelmingly) hostile' towards the EU. (Henderson, 2016, p.194) The confrontation with the EU caused a rise in populist nationalistic sentiment and strengthened English national identity during the Brexit process.
Take Back Control
Thus, like any dramaturgiiya the `story' of Brexit required an enemy. The EU was framed as the embodiment of globalist multicultural values which were often rejected by specific demographics (namely by older people living in rural areas).Institutions (such as free movement of people or law making procedures), seemingly contributed to the blurring and loss of English national identity and independence. These feelings of resentment and dissatisfaction were expressed in the ubiquitous Vote Leave slogan `Take Back Control'. Cummings, who came up with the slogan, explains that the word `back' was particularly resonant as it `plays into a strong evolved instinct - we hate losing things, especially control'. He adds that `a lot of people have given me a lot of credit for coming up with it but all I really did was listen' (Cummings, 2017). Leaving the EU was clearly not only presented as a negative decision, but the positive opportunity to `recapture something' (Runciman, 2019, p.59).
What, then, would taking back control mean? Cummings answers this himself by stating the two messages which proved `necessary to win' (Cummings, 2017). Firstly, the country would be able to send an additional 350 million pounds a week to the National Healthcare Service (NHS) (the money was to be returned from weekly payments to Brussels). Secondly, to avoid Turkey's admission into the EU and, thus, a large number of new migrants who would have visa-free access to Britain (Cummings, 2017). Control is also a direct reference to sovereignty, another key reason for Britain to leave the EU - to prevent laws made in Brussels overriding British parliamentary law.
These were largely fictional threats. Cummings, himself admits the figure of 350 million pounds was deceptive; `There is no single definitive figure because there are different sets of official figures, but the Treasury gross figure is slightly more than Ј350m of which we get back roughly half' (Cummings, 2017). The Vote Leave campaign also used the official NHS logo without permission (British Medical Journal, 2016). This conferred their spurious claim with NHS support, in a move that recalls the type of practices used by Russian political technologists
Moreover, the NHS receives a disproportionate amount of its staff from migrants - 28.4% of doctors identify themselves as non-British (Alderwick & Allen, 2019), while the migrant population of the UK stands at around 14% (Migration Observatory, 2019). Being hostile to immigration is, therefore, not necessarily a demonstration of endorsement towards the NHS. On the Turkish question, it is unlikely the EU were going to or will grant Turkey membership, and, in any case, Britain as a member of the EU would always have been in a position to veto their prospective admission. (Ker-Lindsay, 2018).
However, the important factor is not the veracity of the claims, but how it positioned those in favour of Vote Leave. Firstly, it aligned them with having a deep interest in the country's health via their support for the new weekly sums. While of course, it is a fairly normal political expression to have a well-funded healthcare service, this claim, importantly, identified the deteriorating British health service with a foreign entity - the EU. Rather than the years of `unprecedented slowdown in NHS funding growth since 2010' (The King's Fund, 2017), a domestic political decision, the fortune of the nation's health rested on membership of the EU. Secondly, it positioned those in favour of Brexit as not just against immigration, in the form of Turkey's accession, but, in turn, as supporting and defending British people and culture.
In this regard, by producing a fake and foreign enemy in the EU, Vote Leave was also able to manufacture a positive national identity for people to rally around - defending British health and culture. Those who are British patriots, became identified with being Eurosceptics. As Calhoun puts it more generally, `Nationalism is revealed to be a response to extranational challenges, not simply a product of national culture and traditions' (Calhoun, 2017, p.73).
This allowed people to recover a sense of national identity, which they felt had been lost to globalisation and immigration. However, the identity only became manifest when it was confronted with an enemy - the EU. Political technologists created a positive national identity, via the depiction of virtual threats in the 1990s when Russia required a new unifying concept. A similar political occurrence seems to have taken place in Britain, as the negative depiction of the EU produced a positive British (or English) identity. Cummings explained he only had to listen to people to devise his campaign rhetoric. The concerns people had over migration and the NHS were real and maybe even legitimate. However, instead of finding a solution in the real world, he invented a virtual enemy onto which those concerns could be projected. This reflects the same combination of deception and populist nationalism which exists within virtual politics. In order to mobilise nationalist sentiment, Vote Leave had to deceptively create an enemy, as in reality, there were no foreign threats to the NHS.
The extent to which the EU as an enemy to the British people was invented can be observed in polling before the referendum took place. According to Ipsos MORI, six months prior to the referendum, when answering the question, `What do you see as the most important issue facing Britain today?', the answers were in first place `defence/foreign affairs/terrorism' (42%), in second place `immigration/immigrants' (40%) and in third place `NHS/Hospitals/ Healthcare' (34%). The EU did not feature in the top 10 concerns, so its score was not published on their website (Ipsos MORI, 2015). It seems clear that by attaching immigration, sovereignty and the NHS to the EU, Vote Leave was able to take real pre-existing concerns and project them onto a foreign entity. It echoes the chronology of Borwick's method, when he first identified individual likes or dislikes and then attached it to leaving the EU. Sergei Markov, a political technologist in Russia, notes, `public opinion is changing, it is not disappearing, but it is becoming more artificially created' (Wilson, 2014, p.23). As we saw with the graph on Russian enemies, it seems in both Russia and Britain it is possible to rapidly change and manipulate public opinion for a nationalist cause.
Exceptionalism
Similarly to the intertextual nature of dramaturgiiya in Russia, the deceptive efforts to depict the EU as a threat to Britain feed into existing nationalist discourses, namely about British or English exceptionalism. English exceptionalism has predominantly been understood in opposition to Europe. Its origins lie in the protestant reformation, a split from Catholic Europe (Fukuyama, 2018, p.124). Since then the country developed a culture of political independence, embodied by the industrial revolution and its empire, resulting in `a widely accepted orthodoxy that state and society developed differently in England' (Eastwood, 1997, p.1). Britain only became subject to an external foreign authority in 1975 when it joined the EU. However, the country has always been an uneasy member and often looked for preferential treatment and avoided increased integration (Tunzelmann, 2019). The physical manifestation of this can be seen in the rejection of the common currency and the Schengen area. This is partly the reason behind a developed and historic Euroscepticism among some British politicians which is not common in many other European countries (Vines, 2014).
A significant reason behind Britain's reluctant membership of the EU, is the country's `strong attachment to Parliamentary sovereignty' (Auer, 2017. p.41). This was expressed, although not always clearly, through the campaign. As mentioned, the slogan `Take back control', is a reference to sovereignty in its simplest form - control over law and borders. Importantly, the discourse on sovereignty was not just presented in the form of regaining control, but as David Runciman puts it, the sentiment among many leave voters was reduced down to `Europe stole British sovereignty!' (Runciman, 2019, p.59). The notion of parliamentary sovereignty is technical, elusive and complex (Ringeisen-Biardeaud, 2017). Therefore, populist nationalist sentiment, that it was something that had been taken and needed to be recovered, could not possibly address its complexity in the detail it requires.
However, the emphasis on ownership of Parliamentary sovereignty interacted with the pre-existing discourse on exceptionalism - that it is uniquely British and should not be shared with neighbouring countries. This meant the complicated issue of Parliamentary sovereignty was understood in populist nationalist terms `us' or `ours' vs `them'. This reflects the use of dramaturgiiya in Russia, which also creates deceptively simple enemies by embedding them in developed social discourse. Rather than focusing on the real entity at hand (the true nature of the communist party in 1996/the complexity of parliamentary sovereignty), attention is diverted towards a virtual enemy by incorporating them into the paradigm of populist nationalism.
The preoccupation with the restoration of national pride, whether it be sovereignty or culture, relates to another fundamental characteristic of populism - the politicisation of victimhood. When the source of this politicised victimhood is identified with a foreign entity, we can describe it as reflecting populist nationalism. Although populist nationalism often accentuates the greatness of `the people' or the nation, it is so entrenched in the `us' vs `them' binary, it also, paradoxically, presents `the people' as victims (Kelly, 2018, pp.62-63). There is typically a perpetrator obstructing their path to greatness. Victimhood is not always a negative experience as it also represents a powerful source of group cohesion because it naturally `identifies clear antagonistic Others to fight against' (Oaten, 2014, p.344). In this way victimhood is closely tied up with the principles of populism as it divides the political territory into two irreconcilable groups - the victims and the perpetrators.
Victimhood
Victimhood, as a feature of populist politics, can be observed in contemporary British politics with regards to the EU. Former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader, and prominent Eurosceptic Nigel Farage, reflected this dichotomy between victim and perpetrator, stating, the vote to leave the EU was about `ordinary people' revolting against the elites and `big politics' in order to become an `independent, self -governing' nation (Bell, 2017, p.52). His assessment merges both internal and external enemies, to depict a victimised population with a clear perpetrator. In this way he is able to galvanize and unite the `ordinary people', enforcing a sense of common identity.
As one commentator has put it `Brexit evolved into a meticulous orchestration of ressentiment, a propaganda machine, manipulatively encouraging voters to find a righteous pride in their socio-economic marginalisation' (Green et al, 2016, p.487). In Russia a sense of national injury and victimhood is also mobilised against a foreign perpetrator, as Putin has built a `narrative of a Russia that was wronged and humiliated by the U.S until it decided to push back' (Bershidsky, 2017). The stories being told share an analogous relationship with victimhood. In particular, victimhood is instrumentalised to form a sense of national unity against a foreign threat. It seems this is a significant characteristic of both contemporary British and Russian politics.
This also relates to virtual politics as it is fundamentally a distortion of reality. Both countries face huge social and political problems which have very little to do with external foreign threats, and a lot more to do with internal policy decisions. In the 10 years prior to the EU referendum Britain experienced significant welfare cuts. State spending on children has fallen, child poverty is at its highest level since before the second world war, infant mortality rose for the first time in two generations and the country became accustomed to increasing prevalence of food banks, homelessness, payday loans, bedroom taxes and zero-hours jobs. Perhaps most tellingly of all, was that for the first time in a century, life expectancy had stopped growing and for women in poor areas it had actually fallen (Toynbee & Walker, 2020).
Similarly, ordinary Russians also suffer from a lack of government spending. The country faces an acute problem with male mortality, the collapse of infrastructure, huge ecological and depopulation issues (Holmes, 2016, p.36). The social problems in both countries are different and they are not, in of themselves, the point of comparison. The similarity lies in the misguided mobilisation towards a foreign threat. It seems there are many victims in both countries, but populist nationalism offers few solutions to their plight and instead unites `the people' by diverting their anger towards an `imaginary enemy' (Green et al., 2016, p.487). In some regards, populist nationalism is forced to be deceptive in this way as politicians are required to maintain the unity and division which fuels populism, while their purported faith in the nation prevents serious introspection.
Nostalgia
A further way which populist nationalism obfuscates the political reality of the present is by its engrossment with nostalgic depictions of the nation. Replacing real social problems with the nostalgia of a `better' era is an essentially virtual endeavour, as the history it seeks to reproduce is unattainable. In Britain the language of nostalgia permeated the Brexit discourse, as Calhoun notes, `the vote was grounded in nostalgia… good reasons [to leave the EU] played a secondary role in this referendum. The Brexit campaign… played on an old idea of sovereignty, old English ideas about the difference between the island nation and the mainland of Europe' (Calhoun, 2017, p.60). According to Krickovic a similar relationship with nostalgia can be observed in Russia, in which post-Soviet integrationist projects `reflect a deep psychological need… to come to grips with the country's loss of empire and its degraded international status' (Krickovic, 2014, p.510).
The response of populist nationalism is to promise the country's regeneration. This is evident in the Brexit slogan `Take back control' and Putin's promise to seamlessly transition from victimhood to greatness with his phrase `Get Russia off its knees' (Riabov & Riabova, 2008, p.250). Alexei Yurchak has linguistically analysed the consistent use of slogans and key words in populist politics, arguing that it represents a performative shift; `in this case the performative dimensions of political discourse (how successfully it represents) is emphasized at the expense of its constative dimension (how truthfully it represents)' (Yurchak, 2018, p.98). In other words, the slogans of nostalgia do not reflect a value of truth or falsehood which can be verified but speak to the virtual world of performative representation.
Rafael Behr outlines the consequences of indulging in nostalgia in Britain, although his analysis could easily be applied to Russia; `the romanticised past that would restore us is, of course, unavailable, so it fails to deliver on its promises. Someone must then be blamed. The two commonest candidates are hostile states and a fifth column at home' (Behr, 2016). In Russia, various actors have been singled out as internal enemies, especially since the Bolotnaya protests, including `opposition activists, journalists, NGO representatives and gay people' (Radnitz, 2018). In Britain, new internal threats have been located as well. Perhaps most famously was the attack on the judiciary by the media, in which one prominent paper carried the headline `Enemies of people' (Phipps, 2016). The judges had been accused of obstructing the will of the people, as the high court ruled that parliament and not the executive would need to decide on the enabling of Article - 50 (The bill which begins the process of withdrawing from the EU). Similarly, `there are remainers across the political spectrum who are accused of flouting the will of the people' (Seidler, 2018, p.163).The misleading promises of a nostalgic return to a golden point in history is unobtainable in the first place, resultantly there is no identifiable reason for its unfulfillment. The only reasons that can exist are virtual enemies obstructing a fictional vision for the future.
Conspiracy
The declaration of internal enemies is closely linked to another illusory world - that of conspiracy theories. Yablokov, an analyst of conspiracy theories in Russia explains that `the prevailing method of vocalizing conspiracy theories on a political level is through the use of populist rhetoric' (Yablokov, 2014, p.625). This is because `conspiracy theories possess an important communicative function by helping to unite the audience as “the people” against the imagined “Other” represented by the secretive “power bloc”' (ibid.). In Russian history the ultimate `Other' has been the West and in the mind of a `typical Russian nationalist with anti-Western views, the West appears as an ultimate “Other” seeking to undermine the progress of the Russian nation to its glorious future' (ibid., p.626). Conspiracy theories, resultantly, marry well with populist rhetoric as they can facilitate the gathering of the people in opposition to the enemy - in this case Russians against the West.
An example of this can be observed in the Pussy Riot scandal after the band had stormed the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow. Patriarch Kirill declared that Orthodoxy was under attack and the Church had become victim of an information war (ibid., p.627). This view was corroborated by political technologist Sergei Markov who stated that `powerful forces at work both within and outside the country wished to deprive the Russian people of their mission' (ibid., p.628).
While there is no analogously hysteric event in Britain, there does exist a connection between conspiracy theory and ideology. Research has suggested that there is a relatively low propensity towards standard conspiracy theories in Britain. For example, only 8% of the population agreed with the statement “The AIDS virus was created and spread around the world on purpose by a secret group or organization” (Drochon, 2018, p.3).
However, when respondents were presented with political conspiracies about the EU and migration, the number of sceptics diminished significantly. For example, 55% of respondents agreed with the statement “The Government is deliberately hiding the truth about how many immigrants really live in this country”, and 52% concurred with the view that “officials of the EU are gradually seeking to take over all law-making powers in this country” (ibid., my emphasis). Even more tellingly, the number of UKIP voters who believed the government were deliberately misleading the public about the number of migrants, stood at 87% (ibid., p.5). It seems that conspiracy theories in Britain are most effective when they relate to the EU or immigration. This suggests that conspiracy theories play a similar role in British and Russian politics, insofar as they reflect a populist proclivity for `the people' to identify themselves in opposition to an imaginary and foreign enemy.
Spreading from The Core
Up until this point the discussion on British politics has focused on the tactics of Vote Leave and the accompanying ideological justification for the Brexit vote. This marks a significant contrast to Russian politics, as Vote Leave and the Brexit movement more generally, were in opposition to the government and the `establishment'. Their victory in the referendum was against the government, the Labour party and `almost every entity with power in Britain, Europe, and the world from senior civil service to the CBI to the big investment banks, to Obama and the world bureaucracy' (Cummings, 2017). Political technology in Russia, on the other hand, has been centrally controlled under Putin. This is an important distinction because opposition movements are not necessarily a reflection on the general political system in a country. This distinction may have meant there were insufficient grounds for a comparison between the two countries in the first place.
Wilson describes the significance of this difference:
Western political systems have huge problems at the margins: declining institutions and falling voter participation, manipulation by our own `oligarchs', politics as media and spin. But in Russia, the problems spread from the core. (Wilson, 2014, p.24)
This contrast may not be so clear in Britain today. In December 2019 Boris Johnson's Conservative party won the General Election, forming the largest majority government the country has had since 1987 - he pledged to lead a `people's government' (BBC, 2019b). From the Vote Leave campaign Dominic Cummings (who had also directed Johnson's election campaign) is now Chief Advisor to the Prime Minister and Michael Gove is Minister for the Cabinet Office (BBC, 2020). This meant the new `people's government' included the two most influential politicians from the Vote Leave campaign (one as Prime Minister), and the campaign director. The opposition, whose tactics and ideology have been analysed thus far, are now in control of the British government.
It is important to note that Johnson was already Prime Minister prior to the 2019 General election, as he succeeded Theresa May after her resignation - a process which does not require a General Election. This means during the 2019 campaign, he was not the opposition but the government. However, it was only after the October 2019 election that he acquired a significant majority in the House of Commons and received great public support. Analysis of the subsequent government he formed is limited due to the recency of their election and the disruption caused in early 2020 by the coronavirus pandemic.
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