In the 1990s, many in Western European countries believed that the post-socialist nations to their East were merely “younger” versions of theirs. Their free markets were going through adolescent rebellion and democratic institutions were present but not fully formed. Yet, with uncertainty came an exciting sense of possibility. According to this vision, Central and Eastern Europe would follow the economic liberalization and globalization that North America and Western Europe went through after World War II.

Few imagined that a mere 25 years later, it would be Western Europe and the United States drifting towards the xenophobic populism that triumphed first in Hungary and Poland, before moving Westward toward France, the Netherlands, and the U.K. In the past ten years, new right wing political movements have brought together coalitions of Neo-Nazis with mainstream free-market conservatives, normalizing political ideologies that in the past rightly caused alarm. In Western Europe this network of mainstreamers and their sometimes violent street-level supporters are winning ever larger electoral majorities; in countries like Poland and Hungary they are already in power, and attempting to restructure education, immigration, and the judiciary in their own illiberal image.

In her new book Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right, Liz Fekete does not diagnose this upsurge of right-wing activity as a working-class reaction to worsening economic opportunities and weakened support from the state. Rather, she argues, it is an ugly mishmash of old prejudices re-inflamed by the war on terror, giving racism a new platform in European in the name of security.

Since terrorist attacks in Nice, at the offices of Charlie Hebdo, and at the Bataclan nightclub in 2014 and ‘15, the Right has taken advantage of real terror threats, Fekete writes, in order to increase surveillance and deportation. In France, state of emergency laws have allowed for a dramatic relaxation of search and arrest procedures, while in Belgium, Germany, and the Netherlands police have drawn up lists of suspects, often young people of color, who are then subjected to surveillance. In the United Kingdom it’s increasingly common to threaten immigrants who commit minor crimes, such as drug offenses, with deportation. As Fekete puts it, the new Europe is defined by a chiseling away of citizenship in order to create national sub-populations of “deportable subjects.”

EUROPE’S FAULT LINES: RACISM AND THE RISE OF THE RIGHT by Liz Fekete Verso, 224 pp., $29.95

European societies are, Fekete writes, “increasingly divided between citizens, demi-citizens and non-citizens,” some of whom are no longer guaranteed certain fundamental rights, depending on their race, class, religion, immigration status, incarceration, and political beliefs. These people include immigrants, Muslims, and the poor—in fact, anyone outside of the dominant ethnicity or the reigning political ideology. In Hungary for instance, human rights groups with international funding must register as “foreign agents.” Similarly, in Poland, the right wing Law and Justice Party has targeted human rights groups, feminists, and pro-immigration activists through media censorship, new laws around the teaching of holocaust history, and frequent raids on the offices of groups that criticize the government. The fallout from the Syrian Civil War intensified these trends. As millions fled, many into Europe, the right attacked the principle of freedom of movement within the Schengen Area of European Union; some countries started to impose passport checks at their borders with EU countries and many more sent police onto trains to detain brown and black passengers.