“At Risk of Extinction”: Immigration, national identity, and global class conflict according to “Population Replacement Conspiracy Theory” in contemporary Italy

This chapter focuses on the political significance of the conspiracy theory of population replacement in contemporary Italy. After a brief historical overview, it analyzes the three most popular forms of that theory today: Eurabia, the Kalergi Plan, and the Soros Plan. Their proliferation and political legitimacy are contextualized in relation to the structural elements that have characterized the dominant discourse on immigration over the past 30 years. The chapter also shows how they reconfigure the public debate on the meaning of European/Western civilization, the basis of nationality, and the definition of cultural otherness. Finally, it highlights how they portray foreign immigrants as unwitting and innocent “victims” of the strategies of a cynical global elite. This image works as a rhetorical gambit that enables center-right politicians and intellectuals to pose as champions of workers’ rights; legitimizes overtly racist discourses that insist on the right to defend and preserve one’s ethno-national identity against a multi-ethnic conception of society; checkmates anti-racist narratives against the criminalization and exclusion of migrants; and welds into a single ideological construction increasingly restrictive migration policies, “sovereignist” claims against an oppressive European technocracy, and a nativist conception of belonging to a political community.