Nationalism Online: The Case of ‚El Paraiso Verde’, a Gated Community for Germans in Paraguay

Abstract

At the end of 2017, a couple from Austria began building up a settlement projected eventually to house up to 20,000 inhabitants in an area of 16km² in rural Paraguay, which they called “El Paraíso Verde”. To go to Paraguay, according to the promotion material available on their website and YouTube Channel, entails a rejection of the decisions taken by the European Union and disagreement with a lifestyle associated with it. By conducting a digital ethnography and analyzing the discourse and tropes in interviews that the couple conducted in 2017 to promote the initiative on their websites, and in the comment section of their YouTube Channel, I show that there is a strong nationalist component in their discourse. The ‘nation’ that, apparently, needs defending, rather than existing spatially, represents a set of ‘universal’ values (i.e., a transnational/deterritorialized form of nationalism) that may be relocated elsewhere. Moreover, I argue that digital media plays a crucial role, not only in bringing like-minded people together and helping them to create “imagined communities”, but also in providing a platform that serves the modern need for self-design, creating a sense of agency and reinforcing the national project as a matter of autonomy-seeking.