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Transnationalism and the FrenchNouvelle DroiteTamir Bar-On

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To cite this article: Tamir Bar-On (2011): Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite,Patterns of Prejudice, 45:3, 199-223

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Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite

TAMIR BAR-ON

ABSTRACT Born in 1968, the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) is a ‘cultural school of

thought’. It created a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the revolu-

tionary right in an anti-fascist age; it helped to nurture the discourse of ‘political

correctness’ among extreme right-wing political parties, and turned former French

ultra-nationalists into pan-Europeanists seeking to smash the egalitarian heritage of

1789. Bar-On argues that the ND world-view has been shaped by transnational

influences and that the ND has, in turn, shaped a decidedly more right-wing political

culture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND ideas is a

product of three key factors: first, the intellectual output and prestige of ND leader

Alain de Benoist; second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European

project that mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war neo-

fascists into the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened up by the

decline of the European left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Bar-On

concludes by considering the influence of the ND on contemporary European

politics, as well as the implications for the struggles against racism and the extreme

right.

KEYWORDS Alain de Benoist, anti-racism, Conservative Revolution, European NewRight, extreme right, French Nouvelle Droite, mazeway resynthesis, New Left, NewRight, Nouvelle Droite, racism, right-wing Gramscianism, transnationalism

Ian Tyrrell insists that transnational history ‘concerns the movement ofpeoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries’.1

Transnational history developed in the era after the Peace of Westphalia

(1648), the rise of sovereign nation� states and democratic revolutions in the

United States and France in 1776 and 1789, respectively. The aim of

transnational history, reasons Tyrrell, is to examine ‘the relationship between

nation and factors beyond the nation’.2 In short, transnational history is

based on the premise that national identity competes for loyalty with other

identities both within and outside the nation. For Sven Beckert, the starting

point of transnational history is ‘the interconnectedness of human history as

a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states,

1 Ian Tyrrell, ‘What is transnational history?’, paper presented at the Ecole des hautesetudes en sciences sociales, Paris, January 2007, available on Ian Tyrrell’s website athttp://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/what-is-transnational-history (viewed 19 April 2011).

2 Ibid.

Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011

ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/11/030199-25 # 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.585013

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empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, andinstitutions that transcend these politically defined spaces’.3 Let me offerthree examples of transnational history. The first is the forced migration ofSephardi Jews from the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century and thecreation of Spanish-speaking Sephardi communities in diverse locationsfrom Tangiers to Sarajevo and London to Antwerp. The second is theestablishment of three successive Communist Internationals in 1864, 1889and 1919, respectively, which attempted to unite socialist movements,parties and trade unions to form a common front against capitalismworldwide. The third example is the attempt to create an interwar ‘fascistinternational’ by elements of the Italian Fascist Party.4

The aim of this paper is not to examine any of the three aforementionedtransnational phenomena, but rather the contemporary French NouvelleDroite (ND, New Right). Following Tyrrell, I use the French ND to examine‘the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation’. And,following Beckert, I focus on ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’that transcend the importance of states.

Born in 1968, the French ND is neither a political party nor a violentextra-parliamentary outfit. The ND is rather a ‘cultural school of thought’,5

and a metapolitical movement that originated largely as a synthesis of twoideological currents: the revolutionary right-wing Conservative Revolution(CR),6 and the New Left.7 The CR refers to non-Nazi fascisms of the interwarperiod. CR thinkers combined German ultra-nationalism, defence of theorganic folk community, technological modernity and socialist revisionism,which valorized the worker and the soldier as models for a rebornauthoritarian state superseding the egalitarian ‘decadence’ of liberalism,socialism and traditional conservatism. Among such thinkers were CarlSchmitt (the Nazi crown jurist), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (inventor ofthe term ‘Third Reich’) and Ernst Junger (ultra-nationalist war veteran who

3 Sven Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’,American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 5, 2006, 1441� 64 (1459).

4 See, for example, Michael Arthur Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice ofthe Fascist International, 1928� 1936 (New York: Howard Fertig 1972); and Gert Sørensenand Robert Mallet (eds), International Fascism 1919�45 (London and Portland, OR: FrankCass 2002).

5 This is the term used by Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol in Visages de la nouvelle droite: leGRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques1988).

6 Armin Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, in Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press 1995), 351� 4; Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the WeimarRepublic (New York: St Martin’s Press 1996).

7 See Tamir Bar-On, ‘The ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968� 1999’, The EuropeanLegacy, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001, 333� 51; Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?(Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2007), 33� 78; and Tamir Bar-On, ‘Fascism tothe Nouvelle Droite: the dream of pan-European empire’, Journal of ContemporaryEuropean Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, 327� 45.

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penned In Stahlgewittern,8 a hymn to First World War soldierly virtues). Theterm ‘Conservative Revolution’ was popularized by the Swiss-born philo-sopher Armin Mohler, who wrote a doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers in thelate 1940s.9 Mohler called CR thinkers the ‘Trotskyites of the GermanRevolution’,10 and was sympathetic to their brand of fascism.

The ND has been shrouded in controversy, owing to its roots in Frenchultra-nationalism and its attachment to CR authors who legitimized the Naziregime (1933�45). In two polemical media storms in France, in 1979 and1993, ND thinkers were bitterly attacked by the liberal and left-wingintelligentsia as racists and/or closet fascists.11 So, for example, in 1993forty prominent European intellectuals signed ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’,printed in Le Monde, warning of the ND’s ‘dangerous’ post-Cold Warstrategy, including its desire to form alliances with disgruntled Communists.The ‘Appeal to Vigilance’ was signed by an additional 1,500 Europeanintellectuals one year later. The ND was also accused of covert racism andfascism by the historian of fascism Roger Griffin.12 ND doyen Alain deBenoist claimed he was ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’, indifferent to the terms‘right’ and ‘left’, and that he sought to create a new political paradigm for anew millennium.13 A scholar sympathetic to the ND argued that ‘An Appealto Vigilance’ was the work of a left-wing intelligentsia fearful of the left’stotal demise after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.14

A rich literature on the ND has grown up, mostly in French, butincreasingly also in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and otherlanguages.15 While the ND’s historical origins, ideological evolution, world-view, impact on civil society, connections to fascism, racism, antisemitism

8 First privately printed in 1920 and reprinted in revised versions several times; firstpublished in English as The Storm of Steel, trans. from the German by Basil Creighton(London: Chatto and Windus 1929).

9 The thesis was later revised and published as Armin Mohler, Die KonservativeRevolution in Deutschland 1918�1932: Ein Handbuch (Darmstadt: WissenschaftlicheBuchgesellschaft 1972).

10 Ibid.; English translation in Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, 351.11 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 11.12 See, for example, Roger Griffin’s introduction to Cyprian P. Blamires (ed.), World

Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2006), I, 23� 5.13 Alain de Benoist, ‘What is racism?’, Telos, no. 114, Winter 1999, 11� 48; Alain de

Benoist, ‘The end of the left� right dichotomy: the French case’, Telos, no. 102, Winter1995, 73� 89; Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: anthologie critique des idees contemporaines(Paris: Editions Copernic 1977).

14 Frank Adler, ‘Left vigilance in France’, Telos, no. 98� 9, Winter 1993� Spring 1994,23� 33.

15 For the most comprehensive French literature on the ND, see Stephane Francois, LesNeo-Paganismes et la nouvelle droite 1980�2006: pour une autre approche (Milan: Arche2008); Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris:Descartes 1994); and Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite. For Englishliterature with a focus on the French ND and Italian Nuova Destra, see Bar-On,Where Have All the Fascists Gone?. For the German Neue Rechte, see Roger Woods,

TAMIR BAR-ON 201

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and centre-right and extreme-right political parties have been analysed, ahitherto unexplored subject is the French movement’s transnational identityand impact. In short, the ND’s world-view is a transnational synthesis ofrevolutionary right-wing and left-wing ideas from France, Germany, Italyand the United States, and including anti-western influences. The NDhelped to create a sophisticated European-wide political culture of therevolutionary right in an anti-fascist age; it nurtured the ‘politically correct’discourse of extreme right-wing political parties, and turned former Frenchultra-nationalists into ethnically fixated pan-Europeanists seeking to smashthe egalitarian heritage of 1789. This article argues that the development ofthe ND’s world-view has been shaped by transnational influences, and thatthe ND itself in turn shaped a decidedly more right-wing political culturethroughout Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of NDideas has been a product of three key factors: first, the encyclopaedicintellectual output and prestige of ND leader Alain de Benoist; second, the‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European project, whichmimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war neo-fascists in the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened upby the decline of the European left and Communist regimes after the fall ofthe Soviet Union in 1991.

More to the point, the French ND has increasingly been called theEuropean New Right, which highlights the transnational impact of its ideason the European continent generally.16 As the ND lost its influence in Frenchpolitics, after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained more transnational currencyin the 1990s as new political opportunities emerged in the ‘Communism inruins’ era for all political forces that rejected liberalism and the soleremaining superpower, the United States.

A history of the ND

The ND’s intellectual journey has indeed been a unique one. In the 1960s, itsleader Alain de Benoist was an ultra-nationalist sympathetic to the cause ofFrench Algeria, to circles close to Vichy collaboration, to defence of the‘white man’ and the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.17 In1961 he met Francois d’Orcival, a journalist and member of the French neo-fascist organization Jeune Nation (Young Nation), founded in 1949. Benoist

Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Basingstoke and New York: PalgraveMacmillan 2007). For an introduction to the subject of the ND by a fellow-traveller, seeTomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York:Peter Lang 1990).

16 Examples of works that use the ‘European New Right’ label include Sunic, AgainstDemocracy and Equality; Franco Sacchi, ‘The Italian New Right’, Telos, no. 98� 9, Winter1993� Spring 1994, 71� 80; and Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?.

17 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 10, 21� 32.

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later joined the vehemently anti-Marxist, ultra-nationalist and pro-French

Algeria Federation des etudiants nationalistes (FEN, Federation of Nation-

alist Students), which was founded in 1960 by d’Orcival and other

revolutionary nationalists. In 1962 Benoist became the editor of Cahiers

universitaires, the journal published by FEN.In the early 1960s, Benoist also met Dominique Venner, a founder of

Europe-Action, which was both a revolutionary right-wing organization and

its eponymous journal from 1963�7. Europe-Action imbued French revolu-

tionary right-wing militants with a new pan-national Europeanism, and

adopted the turn away from narrow nationalism espoused by the French

neo-fascist writer Maurice Bardeche (1907�98). It should be noted that

Venner’s father was a member of the Parti populaire francais (PPF), a French

fascist party founded by Jacques Doriot in 1936 that collaborated with Nazi

Germany. Benoist wrote articles for Europe-Action, which also published an

assortment of former Vichy collaborators and Organisation de l’armee

secrete (OAS, Secret Army Organization) supporters. The OAS engaged in

armed struggle in its campaign to maintain French Algeria in the late 1950s

and early 1960s. In his manifesto ‘Pour une critique positive’, penned in

1962,18 Venner sought to redefine French nationalism by giving it a more

pan-European flavour, while also questioning the value of the sterile path

that the ultra-nationalist milieu was taking following the loss of French

Algeria that year.19 Venner also influenced Benoist’s ethnic differentialist

positions, which in the 1970s held that the right should be for white power,

but also for yellow and red power.20 Numerous Europe-Action and Jeune

Nation activists became supporters of the ND during those years.In 1968 Benoist and about forty other ultra-nationalists helped found

Groupement de recherche et d’etudes pour la civilisation europeenne

(GRECE, Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the ND’s

principal think-tank. The following year, Benoist, Pierre Vial and Jean-

Claude Valla, two prominent future secretary-generals, established GRECE

as a legal organization. The name of the think-tank suggested a more

European path for the revolutionary right, and hinted at the restoration of

the glories of an Indo-European civilization. When GRECE was founded, its

aim was four-fold: first, to reorient the ultra-nationalist French political

milieu, which was pro-French Algeria and had lingering sympathies for the

pro-Nazi Vichy regime, towards greater doctrinal sophistication and the

transcendence of internecine conflicts between various ultra-nationalist

18 Dominique Venner, ‘Pour une critique positive’, 1962, available online at http://1000tempetes.free.fr/venner_critique_positive.pdf (viewed 26 April 2011).

19 Roger Griffin, ‘Plus ca change! The fascist pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite’, paperpresented at conference ‘The extreme right in France 1880 to the present’, Dublin, 26�8 April 1998, version dated 17 August 1998 available online at ah.brookes.ac.uk/resources/griffin/pluscachange.pdf (viewed 20 April 2011).

20 Benoist, Vu de droite, 156.

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tendencies; second, to reject the right’s dominant parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods of seizing power; third, to regain cultural powerfrom the liberal-left by seizing the ‘laboratories of thought’ throughoutEurope in a right-wing Gramscian spirit, and to restore the credibility of arevolutionary right-wing milieu battered by the excesses of fascist race lawsand the Holocaust; and, finally, to rethink the dominant ideological legacy ofthe ultra-nationalist right, which tended to be based on ethnic, biological orracist conceptions of the nation, and to be associated with militaristicexpansionism. Influenced by Maurice Bardeche, who paradoxically openlydeclared his fascism, Benoist understood that one day fascism might re-emerge with ‘another name, another face’.21

While Benoist and most members of GRECE came from the extreme right,they recognized that times had changed and that post-war Europe wasfirmly anti-fascist politically, and culturally more liberal and left-wing. Thespectacular events of May 1968 in which 10 million French men and womenbrought France to a standstill and threatened revolution convinced Benoistand company that the liberal-left held the key to power in France, since itnow supposedly controlled the schools, universities, media and the thinkingof the key state elites. Benoist argued that the right was wrong to think thateither electoral politics or terrorist violence was the way to power; followingthe Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891�1937), he claimed that it was‘cultural hegemony’ in civil society*control of dominant values, attitudes,and ways of seeing and being*that promised long-term, durable power.22

Capture the hearts and minds of the masses, as well as of key elites, andliberal democracy would fall, reasoned Benoist. May 1968 was a success, heargued, because liberal and leftist elites were able to capture the levers ofcultural power in civil society. He insisted that, when cultural power in civilsociety became divorced from the values of those in the state, a revolutionbecame far more plausible.

In 1968, rightists Benoist and GRECE were still reeling from the loss ofFrench Algeria and the weak showing of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, theextreme right-wing candidate who gained 5.2 per cent of the popular vote inthe 1965 French presidential elections. Although Benoist ideologicallyrejected the New Left and Maoist protestors of 1968, he envied thembecause, like them, he sought to abolish liberal democracy and to develop a‘third way’ politically and economically that rejected the hegemony of thetwo superpowers, but, because they had cultural power, the key to politicalpower, their protests were able to have an impact that was felt well beyondthe borders of France, in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the United States andelsewhere.

21 Maurice Bardeche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs 1961), 175� 6;English translation in Maurice Bardeche, ‘Lenin was right’, in Griffin (ed.), Fascism,319� 21.

22 Alain de Benoist, Les Idees a l’endroit (Paris: Libres-Hallier 1979), 258� 9, 456� 60.

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With a combination of hatred and sheer envy for the 1968ers,23 then,

Benoist embarked on the project of reorienting the entire culture of the ultra-

nationalistic right. What interests us here is that he founded ND journals that

were read by followers of the ultra-nationalist milieu in France and around

Europe. Benoist’s prestige rose across the continent in the mid-1970s when Le

Figaro opened its pages to him. And, when he won France’s highest literary

prize from the Academie francaise in 1978 for Vu de droite (Seen from the

Right), his star status catapulted him into the consciousness of a European-

wide reading audience. His works were translated into numerous languages,

from Spanish and English to Italian and Croatian. This allowed ND ideas to

be transmitted beyond a narrow milieu in France. It is estimated that Vu de

droite alone has sold more than 25,000 copies throughout Europe.24 In

addition, GRECE’s 1998 collection, Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite, showed the

degree to which French, German, Italian and Croatian ultra-nationalists of

the period shared a hostility for the 1968 generation for ‘selling out’, while

praising themselves and ‘real 1968ers’ such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (currently

a member of the European Parliament from the Green Party) for not

betraying their youthful ideals.25

In 1969 Benoist created the first ND journal Nouvelle Ecole. Nouvelle Ecole

made sure to avoid the ‘outdated vocabulary’ associated with fascism,

racism, colonialism and antisemitism in order to restore the right’s

credibility. Following the launch of Elements in 1973, a third ND journal,

Krisis, was introduced by Benoist in 1988. From the 1970s to the early 1980s,

Benoist wrote regularly for Le Figaro and Spectacle du Monde. From 1980 to

1992, the ND leader was a regular guest on Le Panorama, a radio show

broadcast daily on France Culture. Moreover, Benoist was the director of

several publishing concerns, including Editions Copernic (1977�81),

Editions du Labyrinthe (since 1982), Editions Pardes (1989�93), and Editions

L’Age d’Homme (since 2003). Copernic and Labyrinthe are publishing arms

of GRECE, while Pardes specializes in promoting ND paganism, tradition-

alism and Julius Evola (1898�1974).26 Evola was an Italian philosopher who

wrote Fascist Italy’s manifesto of ‘spiritual racism’; he was a hero to the

23 See, for example, the collection of essays by European New Right thinkers publishedon the thirtieth anniversary of May 1968: Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (Paris: Editionsdu Labyrinthe 1998). The multinational cast of contributors includes Alain de Benoist,Charles Champetier, Maurice Rollet, Jean-Jacques Mourreau, Marco Tarchi, TomislavSunic and Gunter Maschke.

24 Alain de Benoist, ‘Preface a la nouvelle edition de ‘‘Vu de droite’’ (2002)’, availableonline at www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/preface_nouvelle_edition_vu_de_droite.pdf(viewed 20 April 2011).

25 See the essays in Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite, particularly those by Benoist, Sunic andRollet.

26 Stephane Francois, ‘Les Paganismes de la Nouvelle Droite (1980� 2004)’, doctoraldissertation, Universite de Lille II, 2005, 224� 33.

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neo-fascist milieu after the war, and influenced Benoist’s pagan, anti-westerntraditionalism.

Editions L’Age d’Homme is dedicated to publishing the works of ex-

Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Zinoviev. An anti-Communist, Zinoviev

insisted that both liberal democracies and socialist regimes were totalitarian.

Like Zinoviev, Benoist saw little difference between the political systems led

by Moscow and Washington. In 1986 Benoist wrote: ‘Totalitarianism in the

East imprisons, persecutes and kills the body, but it leaves hope. Totalitar-

ianism in the West creates happy robots. Such totalitarianism air-conditions

hell and kills the soul.’27 For him, both communism and liberalism

represented totalitarian systems that had their roots in the alleged

‘totalitarianism’ of the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition. As a result,

Benoist could disingenuously claim that contemporary liberal states were

‘totalitarian’ in that they ‘imposed’ administrative equality (that is, westernpolitical and cultural homogenization) on diverse ethnic groups in Europe

and worldwide.While, in the 1960s, Benoist and the ND were sympathetic to white

racialist circles and colonialism, in the 1970s they experimented with

biological racism. Benoist changed his tune again in the 1980s. With the

publication of his Europe, tiers monde, meme combat in 1986, Benoist began to

argue that Europe and the Third World ought to unite geopolitically against

liberal democracy and communism alike, and defend their rooted cultural

identities against the alleged homogenization imposed by both Washington

and Moscow. It is in this period that Benoist further developed his

differentialist theories, insisting that no culture was superior and that all

cultures had a right to be different and preserve their distinctiveness. Thisposition was a tactical change for a man who once was ready to die for

French Algeria. Benoist and Guillaume Faye, a prominent ND thinker in the

1970s, claimed that the defence of culture was imperative in an age of

capitalist globalization and rapid immigration, as uncontrolled immigration

harmed both home and host cultures.28 Liberalism, socialism, social

democracy, capitalism, communism, immigration and multiculturalism

were all viewed by the ND as homogenizing ideologies, destructive of

Europe’s rooted cultural, regional and national diversity.By the late 1980s, Benoist had launched the limited circulation journal

Krisis, which claimed to be ‘neither right nor left’ but at ‘the heart of matters’

and located at ‘the centre of the world’.29 As they faded as political forces in

Europe after 1989, Communism and the Soviet Union were definitively

27 Alain de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde, meme combat (Paris: Robert Laffont 1986), 219;English translation in Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, 64.

28 See Guillaume Faye, Le Systeme a tuer les peuples (Paris: Editions Copernic 1981).29 Quoted in Douglas Johnson, ‘The new right in France’, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie

Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan (eds), The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe,2nd edn (London: Longman 1995), 241.

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replaced by liberalism, capitalism, the United States and the West as

Benoist’s primary enemies.30 In 1990 he bitterly attacked former Front

National (FN, National Front) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen for his excessive

anti-immigrant scapegoating, nationalism, liberalism and Christian tradi-

tionalism.31 And, by the early 1990s, Benoist was collaborating with Telos, a

major leftist journal based in New York, and searching for alliances with

leftists, ecologists, traditionalists and indigenous movements against the

liberal United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.While Benoist’s stock rose due to well-publicized controversies and his

sheer encyclopaedic output, the ND leader was busy turning the ideologi-

cally insular French ultra-nationalism into a truly pan-national European

phenomenon. Pierre-Andre Taguieff has demonstrated how Benoist bor-

rowed from left-wing anti-colonialism and the French anthropologist Claude

Levi-Strauss (1908�2009) to transform the ND in three stages: outright white

racism and superiority in the 1960s; biological racism in the early 1970s; and

cultural racism from the 1980s onwards.32 The ND cleverly co-opted the

notion of a ‘right to difference’ from the French Socialists to insist that France

should be for the French and Algeria for the Algerians. That is, we all have

the right to preserve our cultural, regional or national identities, and the best

place to do so is within our respective territories. This type of politics

furnished the ideological ammunition for contemporary extreme right-wing

political parties such as the French FN, the Italian Lega Nord (LN, Northern

League), and the British National Party (BNP), all of which have claimed

they are not racist but culturally protective of both ‘home’ and ‘host’ cultures

in their wish to end non-white, non-European immigration.33 These extreme

right-wing political parties call their opponents ‘anti-French’ or ‘anti-

English’ ‘racists’ since they promote liberalism and multiculturalism,

allegedly homogenizing ideologies destructive of all rooted national or

regional cultures. This now widespread strategy of inversion, of turning

universalist, multicultural anti-racism into a form of racism, was picked up

from the ND.What was most shocking about the ND’s ideological makeover was that

it rejected time-honoured pillars of the right: namely, the nation� state and

nationalism. Benoist claimed that the French Fifth Republic was destructive

of regional identities, whether Basque, Breton, Corsican or Occitan, all of

which were buried under the notion of the ‘one and indivisible’ French

30 Alain de Benoist, ‘L’ennemi principal’, Elements, no. 41, March� April 1982, 37� 40,45� 8; Alain de Benoist, ‘Entretien avec Novopress (2005)’, available online at www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/entretien_avec_novo_press.pdf (viewed 20 April 2011).

31 Alain de Benoist, ‘Entretien’, Le Choc du mois, no. 31, July� August 1990, 31� 3.32 Pierre-Andre Taguieff, ‘From race to culture: the New Right’s view of European

identity’, Telos, no. 98� 9, Winter 1993� Spring 1994, 34� 54.33 J. G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Petain to Le Pen (London: Routledge

2007), 237� 44.

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republic. (Old rightists such as Charles Maurras (1868�1952) had similarlyattacked the French revolutionary state that was born in 1789 for havingdestroyed local, regional and linguistic cultures in the process of construct-ing the ‘one and indivisible’ French republic.) The new goal of the ND wouldbe a regionally diverse ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’. This ‘Europe of aHundred Flags’ would be a pan-national European empire with a hierarch-ical, authoritarian, corporatist and pagan orientation, cleansed of immigrantsand bent on preserving ethnic homogeneity within the ‘authentic’, historicregions of Europe.34 While it is true that fascists and Nazis could notconsider such an anti-nationalist conception of the nation as the oneproposed by the ND, the fascists of the interwar years shared with the NDthe goals of empire, authoritarian corporatism and internal homogeneity.It is fascinating how the ND reinterpreted the ‘right to difference’ in atransnational or pan-national European framework in order to promote a‘multiculturalism of the right’, aimed at publicly recognizing differences inorder to preserve the ‘authentic’ regions of Europe against the onslaught ofnon-European immigrants.

The goal of a pan-national European empire, one that rejects what NDthinkers consider to be the excessively pro-capitalist and technocraticEuropean Union (EU) of today, provided the ND with an ideologicalmakeover that could increase the transnational thrust of ND ideas. It is noaccident that contemporary extreme right-wing parties such as the FrenchFN have called for pan-European unity and a more robust geopoliticalalliance against the United States and other potential powers. This is thesame position as the ND leader’s. Like the former FN leader Jean-Marie LePen in France, who scapegoated Arabs at home and yet called them alliesagainst the United States during the Gulf War, Benoist has supportedradical anti-western regimes in order to challenge the post-Cold War globalhegemony of the United States. In short, the stances of the ND and mostextreme right-wing political parties have become identical: support forpan-European unity, and rejection of the contemporary ‘technocratic’ EU.

Alain de Benoist: the ND’s transnational messenger

Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien, nearthe French city of Tours. He is an intellectual, philosopher and politicalcommentator. Benoist was the most visible face of the ND at the height of itsmedia attention in France in the late 1970s. Given the range of his writings*in areas as diverse as philosophy, politics, cultural anthropology, arts andsports, and including commentary on the political affairs of the day*as well

34 Bar-On, ‘Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite’; Alberto Spektorowski, ‘Ethnoregionalism:the intellectual new right and the Lega Nord’, Global Review of Ethnopolitics (nowEthnopolitics), vol. 2, no. 3� 4, 2003, 55� 70.

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as his encyclopaedic knowledge, high profile and prestige, the Frenchintellectual was able to spread ND ideas beyond a narrow elite circle. Theseideas were further disseminated throughout Europe by other intellectuals,including Marco Tarchi in Italy, Michael Walker and Troy Southgate inEngland, Robert Steuckers in Belgium, and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, notto mention others in Germany, Holland, Spain, Croatia, Romania, Polandand other European countries. Benoist acted as the ND’s key transnationalmessenger throughout Europe. According to Sven Beckert, as quoted earlier,transnationalism implies ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ thattranscend the importance of states. For Benoist and the ND, a web of sharednetworks (such as think-tanks, journals and conferences) and beliefs (such asthe extreme and revolutionary right-wing shift from narrow nationalism to a‘European home’) created processes that transcended the centrality of stateactors. While Benoist and the ND recognized ‘the extraordinary importance’of states and empires, they also paid attention to ‘networks, processes,beliefs, and institutions that transcend[ed] these politically defined spaces’.35

The ND reasoned that major changes in belief systems across nations wouldeventually result in revolutionary political change.

And, for the ND, revolutionary political change needed revolutionaryintellectuals on a mission to destroy liberalism. Benoist cemented ties withrevolutionary right-wing intellectuals throughout Europe in order to spreadND ideas beyond France. Currently a political science professor at theUniversity of Florence, Marco Tarchi is considered the leading figure of theItalian Nuova Destra (New Right). The Nuova Destra emerged in 1974 out ofintellectual exchanges with the French ND.36 Tarchi was formerly a youthleader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian SocialMovement) and the editor of the journal Diorama letterario that modelleditself on the French ND journals created by Benoist. Michael Walker hadbeen an organizer for the British National Front in central London; hesheltered the Italian neo-Fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore in the 1980s, andcreated the ND-influenced journal The Scorpion. Inspired by the French ND,Troy Southgate is an avowed National Anarchist who created the New Rightmovement in London in 2005 and later the journal New Imperium. RobertSteuckers, who is considered to be the head of the Belgian New Right, was amember of GRECE, and is the founder of the journal Vouloir, which wasinfluenced by Benoist’s ND. Steuckers accused the ND of being overlymetapolitical, and later supported the anti-immigrant political party VlaamsBlok (Flemish Bloc). Aleksandr Dugin is viewed as one of the mostimportant proponents of Russian expansionism, ultra-nationalism andEurasianism (a European-Asian alliance against the neoliberal United States)along imperial lines. Dugin is close to the National Bolshevik Party andEurasia Movement, which is said to have the ear of leading Russian

35 Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’.36 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 145.

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politicians and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. After contacts were estab-lished with Benoist in Moscow in the early 1990s, Dugin created a RussianNew Right journal called Elementy, modelled on the French ND’s Elements.Benoist briefly served on the editorial board of Elementy, butresigned because he was troubled by Dugin’s open ultra-nationalism andantisemitism.37

Today the ND’s influence, particularly Benoist’s writings, can be discernedin publications as diverse as Telos and The Occidental Quarterly (USA), TheMankind Quarterly and The Scorpion (UK), Punto y coma and Hesperides(Spain), Neue Anthropologie (Germany) and Maiastra (Romania). According toMichael Minkenberg, the ND is intellectually close to the German NeueRechte, the New Right in the United Kingdom, the Nieuw Rechts in theNetherlands and Flanders (Belgium), Forza Nuova in Italy, ImperiumEuropa in Malta, and the New Right forces in the United States connectedto Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation.38 Roger Woods hasdemonstrated how the German Neue Rechte, although troubled by its ownspecial connection to Germany’s extraordinary Nazi genocidal past, wasnonetheless influenced by the ND and especially Benoist, including hisreading of CR thinkers, project of cultural hegemony, critique of modernity,cultural pessimism, fear of multicultural societies and alarmist predictionsabout rising non-western power due to the ‘demographic explosion’ outsideEurope.39

In 1999 Benoist and Charles Champetier (a former head of the FrenchND’s youth wing) published the ND manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an2000’.40 The manifesto was translated into English (‘The French New Rightin the Year 2000’), German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and Hungarianby ND or ND-friendly journals, including Telos (USA), Junge Freiheit(Germany), Diorama letterario (Italy), Hesperides (Spain), TeKos (Holland)and Nomos (Denmark). The manifesto was the first major comprehensive NDdocument of the new millennium; it offered an appraisal of the modern (orpostmodern) world and an analysis of the movement’s philosophicalfoundations, as well as its positions on contemporary issues such asimmigration, democracy, ecology, supranational organizations and themarket system. In the twenty-first century, Benoist continued to demonstratean affinity with revolutionary right-wing authors, publishing a massive four-volume work on the French right and far-right milieux,41 and a vehement

37 ‘Three interviews with Alain de Benoist’, Telos, no. 98� 9, Winter 1993� Spring 1994,209� 10.

38 Michael Minkenberg, ‘The renewal of the radical right: between modernity and anti-modernity’, Government and Opposition, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, 170� 88.

39 Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics, 25� 64.40 Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, Elements,

no. 94, February 1999, 10� 23.41 Alain de Benoist, Bibliographie generale des droites francaises, 4 vols (Paris: Dualpha

2004� 5).

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rejection of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, Au-dela des droits del’homme (Beyond the Rights of Man).42 He also sought to co-opt New Leftecological, ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’ and democratic discourses in the spiritof the times. His aims were to destroy liberalism, neo-liberalism, socialism,social democracy and any communist resurgence, all rooted in a Judaeo-Christian world-view that was thoroughly egalitarian, and opposed tonatural hierarchies and the need for elite rule.43

Benoist has served as the key messenger of ND ideas within France andthroughout Europe, as well as in the United States, Canada, Australia, NewZealand and Latin America. Disenso, for example, is an Argentine journaledited by Alberto Buela that is influenced by ND ideas, and is distributedthroughout Latin America. In Australia and New Zealand ND ideas arepromoted through the site New Right Australia/New Zealand.44 In addition,the ND is technologically savvy. Benoist’s website provides translations ofhis works in eight European languages: French, English, German, Italian,Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Czech.45 GRECE and Elements also havewebsites,46 and numerous ND journals, from Junge Freiheit in Germany toDiorama letterario in Italy, have an Internet presence.47 Metapedia, an‘alternative’ to Wikipedia, was created by ND supporters in Sweden in orderto disseminate ND ideas worldwide.48

Right-wing Gramscianism: a transnational project

As demonstrated above, Alain de Benoist, GRECE and the ND made surethat their ideas would not be limited to France alone. If the egalitarian‘poisons’ of communism, liberalism, socialism and social democracy wereto be defeated, it would not merely be in France but throughout Europe. Tocounter the alleged cultural hegemony of the liberal-left in Europe, due tothe profound impact of the 1968 generation on European culture, Benoistcreated an organizational framework, including journals, think-tanks,conferences and links to centre-right and extreme right-wing political

42 Alain de Benoist, Au-dela des droits de l’homme: pour defendre les libertes (Paris: Krisis2004).

43 Alain de Benoist, La Cause des peuples (Paris: Editions du Labyrinthe 1982), 167� 84.44 New Right Australia/New Zealand is available online at http://newrightausnz.blogs

pot.com (viewed 20 April 2011).45 The website Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist is available online at www.alaindebenoist.com

(viewed 20 April 2011).46 GRECE’s website is available online at http://grece-fr.com (viewed 26 April 2011); the

Elements website is available online at www.revue-elements.com/index.php (viewed20 April 2011).

47 The websites of Junge Freiheit and Diorama letterario are available online atwww.jungefreiheit.de and www.diorama.it, respectively (both viewed 20 April 2011).

48 Metapedia is available online at www.metapedia.org (viewed 20 April 2011).

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movements and parties throughout Europe. If leftist internationalism was tobe defeated, a right-wing Europeanism (or internationalism) was needed,

reasoned Benoist. In line with Beckert’s idea that ‘networks, processes,

beliefs, and institutions’ can transcend the importance of states and empires,

the ND used its novel ‘Gramscianism of the right’ to focus on changing

European civil society rather than governments per se.To win the hearts and minds of key European elites and the masses of

Europeans on key issues such as regional and national identity, immigration,

liberal multiculturalism, the failure of capitalist globalization, the rising tide

of Islamism and the future of the EU, Benoist borrowed from Antonio

Gramsci. Gramsci died in a Fascist-controlled clinic and remains a hero for

the Italian left. He understood that liberal democracy survived not because

of a repressive apparatus of the state, but due to cultural hegemony in civil

society. Using a version of Gramsci shorn of its class-based analysis andimplications, Benoist sought to control the ‘laboratories of thought’

throughout Europe, whether in the mass media, schools, universities, the

art world or on the Internet. He sought to influence the key decision-makers

in France, as well as to create contacts with like-minded intellectuals, think-

tanks, journals and movements beyond France. In the spirit of the age, he

also cleverly downplayed his ties to the extreme right, and increased his

dialogue with leftists and ecologists. He made it known that the ND was

neither fascist nor racist, and certainly not against democracy.49

Was the ND’s Gramscian project designed to create a ‘right-wing

international’?50 The ND was in no position to do so since it was largely a

cultural movement with no real political power in any European state in the

post-1968 period. What the ND was more interested in accomplishing wascreating a chasm between key European cultural and political elites and the

masses of Europeans, on the one hand, and the current rulers of European

states and the EU, on the other. Should key European elites accept the anti-

egalitarian, anti-liberal, anti-multicultural theses of the ND, political change

would necessarily follow for the rulers would fear a loss of legitimacy in the

eyes of the mass of Europeans.As the history of the European left shows, left-wing internationalism was

able to achieve a remarkable degree of unity in the late nineteenth and

twentieth centuries by creating political movements, trade unions and

political parties that challenged liberal democracy. The left had great cultural

power worldwide, and the support of a major world superpower, the

Communist USSR. Yet there were divisions within it, including pro-war

49 Benoist supports ‘direct’, ethnic democracy as opposed to ‘representative’ democracy.He has even regretted that the ND intellectual Tomislav Sunic wrote a book with the‘inappropriate’ title Against Democracy and Equality. See Alain de Benoist, ‘TheEuropean New Right forty years later: Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy andEquality’, Occidental Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, 61� 74 (64).

50 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 141� 63.

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leftists versus anti-war leftists in the First World War, revolutionaries versus

social democrats, Maoists versus Leninists, to name just a few.Similarly, the right has its divisions, and a right-wing internationalism

uniting all the rights is impossible. The ND, for example, is a right that is

metapolitical, pagan, anti-Judaeo-Christian and pro-regionalist, while also

claiming to be ‘anti-capitalist’. The ND’s ‘anti-capitalism’ entails a rejection

of an economic system in which profit is the highest value and cultures are

homogenized as a result of the logic of the market, and a degree of nostalgia

for a pre-modern era before the emergence of globalized capital. The ND

distances itself from the monarchical counter-revolutionary right, the

Catholic nationalist right, the Anglo-American New Right, the extreme

right, neo-fascism, neo-Nazism and the conservative right. As does the left,

the right consists of a diversity of ideological tendencies, and they do not all

have the same tactics or goals.Having said that, there is a degree of co-operation possible between

different right-wing tendencies, particularly if they belong to the revolu-

tionary right milieu. The revolutionary right wants to radically overturn

liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, social democracy, parliamen-

tarism and the egalitarian heritage of the 1789 French Revolution. The

revolutionary right is not necessarily anti-modern, and is willing to use

modern technology and the state in the service of rooted cultural, regional

and national identities. Among these revolutionary right-wing forces, we

might include the ND, elements within the French FN, conservative

revolutionaries, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Third Positionists, National

Anarchists and National Bolsheviks. Ideological kinship against the ‘ab-

stract’ Rights of Man and multiculturalism, as well as a desire to create an

elitist, hierarchical, authoritarian, secular and often pan-national European

political framework, link the aforementioned revolutionary right-wing

tendencies. The ND and the FN might differ on tactics and specifics, but

they share an antipathy for liberalism, immigration, multiculturalism and

the United States, thus making co-operation possible. It is no accident that

some key ND figures like Pierre Vial moved to the FN in the early 1980s. The

1999 ND manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, with its goals of

stopping immigration into Europe and changing the basis of French

citizenship in favour of common ethnic origins and away from civic

republican values, would certainly win the approval of the FN and other

anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe.51

Fascist Italy of course attempted to create a ‘fascist international’ as early

as 1925. This project funded fascist movements throughout Europe that were

modelled on Mussolini’s Italian Fascism. Fascist internationalism was later

promoted by Nazi Germany as it became the de facto leader of European

fascism after 1933. Although fascism was nationalistic and a proponent of

51 Benoist and Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’.

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national sovereignty, it had no problem with militaristic expansionism or thecreation of a ‘fascist international’ that challenged the sovereignty of local

fascisms.In the period after the defeat of Fascism and Nazism, pan-European neo-

fascists also tried to create a ‘right-wing international’. A pan-European

fascist gathering was held in Malmo, Sweden in 1951, including neo-fascists

from fourteen European countries calling for a pan-national European

fascism. The Belgian Jean Thiriart and the former leader of the British

Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, were among the participants. They

shifted away from narrow nationalism towards a pan-national Europeanism,

and argued that fascism needed to be more tactically astute if it were to be

reborn in an ‘anti-fascist’ age. The French neo-fascist Maurice Bardeche, a

participant at the Malmo meeting, argued that fascism would re-emerge one

day, but as part of a pan-European project harking back to the Europeanvalues of the SS and the pan-European Nazi brigades.52

Following Beckert’s logic in which ‘processes, beliefs, and institutions’

transcend the ‘politically defined spaces’ of states, Martin Durham and

Margaret Power’s edited collection demonstrates how the right in general

(that is, fascists, neo-fascists, the extreme right and conservatives) organizes

across national barriers, linking together movements in different states.53

Andrea Mammone has shown how French and Italian neo-fascists, including

the ND, created united national fronts in reaction to the events of May

1968.54 He also demonstrates how French neo-fascist groups such as Ordre

Nouveau (New Order) and the FN were influenced by Italy’s neo-fascist

MSI, the most successful neo-fascist or extreme right-wing party in post-

Second World War Europe until the dramatic rise of the French FN in the1980s. Founded in 1946 by former Italian Fascists sympathetic to the pro-

Nazi Italian Social Republic (1943�5), the MSI consistently gained between 5

and 9 per cent of the national vote from 1948 to 1972. It became the model for

the foundation of the French FN under its charismatic leader Jean-Marie Le

Pen. Mammone also points out that it was a British party, the National Front,

that influenced the discourse shifts of the French FN, and that Nick Griffin,

the English leader of the BNP in the European Parliament since 2009, had

strong ties with Italian neo-fascists. Furthermore, international fascists met

in Milan in 2009, and there is also an extreme right-wing group of European

MPs.The pan-European SS Brigades from Bosnia and Croatia in the Balkans to

Latvia and Ukraine in the East testify to the existence of this ‘fascist

52 Bardeche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, 35� 7.53 Martin Durham and Margaret Power (eds), New Perspectives on the Transnational Right

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011).54 Andrea Mammone, ‘The transnational reaction to 1968: neo-fascist fronts and political

cultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History, vol. 17, no. 2, 2008,213� 36.

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international’ during the Second World War. In the interwar years, fascistideas spread throughout Europe as well as to Japan, South Africa, Chile,Argentina and Brazil.55 Stanley Payne, an eminent historian of fascism,insists that fascism emerged in Ba’athist Iraq in the regime of SaddamHussein, which neatly fulfilled Payne’s maximalist definition of fascism as toideology and goals, negations, and organization and style.56 Aristotle Kallishas shown how the union of fascism and genocide was a pan-Europeanproject that reached its apogee in Nazi Germany.57 The drive for a newbeginning that would eliminate the ‘decadence’ associated with modernity,liberalism and socialism, according to Roger Griffin, was shared by FascistItaly and Nazi Germany.58 It is evident from this overview that there werenumerous historical models of pan-Europeanism or internationalism on theright available to the ND.

As for the efficacy of the ND’s Gramscian strategy, its ideas and discourseshifts soon spread to French political figures and parties on the centre-right andthe extreme right, including former President Giscard d’Estaing, InteriorMinister Michel Poniatowski (in the governments of Jacques Chirac andRaymond Barre), the Gaullist politician Alain Devaquet, and the FN leaderJean-Marie Le Pen.59 ND discourse formulations, such as the ‘right to difference’or ‘anti-French racism’, and personnel, such as Pierre Vial, Yvan Blot and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, migrated to the FN in the early 1980s after the victory of FrenchSocialist Francois Mitterand in the presidential election of 1981.60

Marina Peunova and Anton Shekhovtsov have shown how the ND’sgeopolitical ideas, as interpreted by Aleksandr Dugin and the politicalphilosopher Aleksandr Panarin (1940�2003), have influenced the RussianNew Right, and found the ear of key Russian political elites.61 The entirespectrum of European extreme right-wing political groupings, from theItalian LN to Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium, has beeninfluenced by the anti-immigrant French FN and the ‘politically correct’

55 See the essays on ‘Non-European fascisms’, in Griffin (ed.), Fascism, 228� 41.56 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 1919�45 (London: UCL Press 1995), 516.57 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New

York: Routledge 2009).58 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and

Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007).59 Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Petain to Le Pen, 154� 7.60 Tom McCulloch, ‘The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: ideology and entryism,

the relationship with the Front National’, French Politics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2006, 158� 78.61 Marina Peunova, ‘An eastern incarnation of the European New Right: Aleksandr

Panarin and new Eurasianist discourse in contemporary Russia’, Journal of Con-temporary European Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, 407� 19; Anton Shekhovtsov,‘Aleksandr Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism: the New Right a la Russe’, Religion Compass,vol. 3, no. 4, 2009, 697� 716; Anton Shekhovstov, ‘The palingenetic thrust of Russianneo-Eurasianism: ideas of rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s worldview’, TotalitarianMovements and Political Religions (now Politics, Religion & Ideology), vol. 9, no. 4,2008, 491� 506.

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language (anti-racist and pro-democracy) of the ND. If extreme right-wingpolitical forces have been flourishing all over Europe since the mid-1990s, it isin part due to the cultural influence of the ND. The MSI-Alleanza Nazionale(National Alliance) and the LN in Italy,62 and the Freiheitliche ParteiOsterreichs (Austrian Freedom Party) in Austria participated in nationalcoalitions in 1994, 2001, 2008 (Italy), and 2000 (Austria). These political partiesclaimed to be ‘post-fascist’ and ‘anti-fascist’, discursive shifts borrowed fromthe ND. They also ended the post-Second World War taboo against co-operating with neo-fascist or extreme right-wing parties as part of a broadanti-fascist consensus. These changes speak to the cultural shift in attitudestowards liberalism, multiculturalism and the mainstream political class sincethe 1980s, a shift that the ND helped to shape. It is only a matter of time,reasons Benoist, that ND ideas will be the dominant and ruling ideas ofEurope. It only needs a shift in political circumstances that allows keyEuropean elites and the mass public to ‘convert’ to them, as they did en masseto ‘fourth way’ political ideologies throughout Europe in the interwar years.63

New political spaces post-1989: the ND’s strange alliances

New political spaces opened for the ND as a result of the decline of the leftand the collapse of Communist regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in1991. The left tumbled to new electoral lows throughout Europe in the 1990sand beyond. Whereas, in 1976, the Italian Communist Party garnered animpressive 36 per cent of the popular vote and was on the verge of joining a‘historic compromise’ national government, by the 2008 Italian elections forthe Chamber of Deputies, the hard left could only manage a paltry 4 per centof the vote. Communist candidates throughout Europe from France toGermany were decimated in the polls, and some critics wondered whetherthere was a left left. The left had already been discredited by the experienceof ‘real existing socialism’ and the so-called ‘new philosophers’ ofthe 1970s,64 including terrible revelations about the Soviet gulags and themachinations of the totalitarian Communist states.

62 The AN became the successor to the MSI in 1995. In 2009 the AN dissolved and joinedSilvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Il Popolo della Liberta (The People of Freedom). At thetime of writing in 2011, Il Popolo della Liberta is Italy’s governing party.

63 By ‘fourth way’, I mean a revolutionary political ideology that rejects liberal, socialistand conservative solutions for Europe’s ‘ills’. See Tamir Bar-On, ‘Understandingpolitical conversion and mimetic rivalry’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions(now Politics, Religion & Ideology), vol. 10, no. 3� 4, 2009, 241� 64.

64 The nouveaux philosophes*who received widespread press coverage in France andabroad in the late 1970s* included Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut and Jean-Marie Benoist, who broke with Marxism and their often Maoist pasts. They wereheavily indebted, in turn, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michel Foucault and JacquesLacan.

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The vacuum created by the left’s precipitous decline and a questioning ofthe certainties of a left� right political spectrum led the ND to embraceapparently odd political alliances. The movement was always uneasy witha right-wing categorization, arguing that the label ‘nouvelle droite’ wasimposed on the ND by its critics. Louis Pauwels, the editor of Le Figaro whoinvited Benoist to write in his paper, insisted the ND was on the right, but a‘new right’ that had nothing to do with the old right, fascism or reactionaryand bourgeois conservatism.65 This despite the fact that, for more than fortyyears, the ND had vehemently rejected egalitarianism, the key plank of bothliberalism and socialism. However, Benoist was prophetic when he said inthe late 1970s that, although he was a man of the right since he rejectedegalitarianism, he could imagine himself one day on the left.66 WithCommunism and the Soviet Union gone as the principal enemies of theright, in the 1990s Benoist’s new enemies became liberalism and the UnitedStates. Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol points out that Benoist’s shift fromanti-communism to anti-liberalism dates back to the early 1980s when hedeclared that he was willing to vote for the French Communist Party andwear the helmet of the Red Army rather than eat a study diet of hamburgersin Brooklyn.67 In 1988 Benoist founded the journal Krisis, which hasincreasingly blurred political boundaries and sought dialogue betweenrightists, leftists, ecologists and anti-western anti-utilitarians.

In the 1990s the political climate shifted to the right in both economic(neoliberal) and cultural terms, which assisted the ND and extreme right-wing political parties.68 Contemporary issues*such as the insecuritiesassociated with globalization, the excesses of capitalist modernity (rampantsocio-economic inequality, the attack on the welfare state, corruption andglobal financial scandals), malaise about the EU project, the questioning ofimmigration and multiculturalism, rising Islamism in the post-9/11 climate,the environment, the demise of direct democracy, and the wars inAfghanistan and Iraq*paved the way for new political alliances. Thesenew alliances suited the ND’s ideological preference for the destruction of itsprimary enemies: liberalism and the United States. In the mid-1980s Benoisthad also increasingly turned anti-colonial and anti-western, borrowing frompostcolonial theory and the left. Traditional conservatives, indigenousmovements, ecological groups and anti-western movements and regimesthat rejected capitalism, communism, neoliberalism and the United States alldeserved the support of the ND. As a defender of traditional Europeancultures, the ND and former Third World anti-colonial states had a commoncause: fighting the rapid ‘westernization of the world’ built on the ‘false’

65 Louis Pauwels, France-Soir, 29 March 1979.66 Benoist, Vu de droite, 22� 5.67 Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite, 46.68 Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press

2006), 22� 6.

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promises by capitalism and communism of permanent progress.69 Benoistargued that the United States and its liberal ideology, spread worldwidethrough arms, ‘soft power’ and neoliberal capitalism, would be defeatedwhen all the anti-capitalist forces of the right, left and beyond were unitedagainst it. Benoist saw no greater danger to the survival of world cultures inhuman history than the United States.

One example of the strange alliances promoted by the ND in atransnational spirit is Benoist being invited to write in the New Left journalTelos. Both the revolutionary right and the New Left were searching, after thefall of the Soviet Union, for alliances in order to defeat liberalism, unfetteredcapitalism, parliamentarism and the United States. In 1993�4 Telos publisheda special double issue on the ND. In it, the editor of Telos, Paul Piccone, askedwhether the ND was not the New Left in disguise?70 Piccone insisted that theND had swallowed whole most of the ideals of the American and FrenchNew Left, such as rejection of the socialist and liberal ‘new class’,regionalism, direct democracy and vehement anti-Americanism. He arguedthat Benoist had nothing to do with fascism or the old right (a false claimgiven the ND’s indebtedness to the German CR thinkers who influencedNazism), but was seeking to create a new political paradigm. The ND leadermust have been in heaven. He was being published by a prestigious left-leaning journal in culturally sophisticated New York, and its editor wasdefending Benoist’s decidedly anti-egalitarian project.

I am not suggesting that the ND is fascist, or that it works inside anexplicitly fascist tradition. In reality, the ND is indebted to the CR traditionthat sought an ‘anti-fascist fascism’ (that is, an anti-regime fascism) forGermany in the interwar years. Moreover, the ND has never definitivelybroken out of the CR milieu. Historical fascism was born as a union ofcontradictory political ideologies: ultra-nationalism and socialist revision-ism. Zeev Sternhell insists that fascism as an ideology was first born inFrance between the 1880s and eve of the First World War.71 Mosthistoriography claims that fascism was born as a movement and a partyin Italy in 1919 under the guidance of Benito Mussolini, who united acollection of ultra-nationalist war veterans, syndicalists and renegadesocialists. Benoist would have been familiar with all these interwartendencies on the right and the left, as well as influenced by the ‘non-conformists’ of the 1930s, such as Alexandre Marc in France and like-minded

69 Bryan Sylvian, ‘European son: an interview with Alain de Benoist’, Occidental Quarterly,vol. 5, no. 3, 2005, 7� 27 (27); Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World: TheSignificance, Scope and Limits of the Drive towards Global Uniformity, trans. from the Frenchby Rosemary Morris (Cambridge and Cambridge, MA: Polity Press 1996).

70 Paul Piccone, ‘Confronting the French New Right: old prejudices or a new politicalparadigm?’, Telos, no. 98� 9, Winter 1993� Spring 1994, 3� 23.

71 Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: FromCultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. from the French by David Maisel(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994).

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groups in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany.72 These political tendencieswere all guided not by a ‘third way’ politics, as Roger Eatwell suggests,73 buta ‘fourth way’ that looked to a new model of secular politics and economicsthat superseded traditional conservatism, socialism and liberalism. Benoist’sND resurrected the idea of a ‘fourth way’ within a pan-national Europeanframework, while remaining sufficiently tactically astute to avoid overt linkswith fascism, racism and antisemitism.

The ND’s world-view: a transnational ideological cocktail

ND ideas have spread beyond France to intellectuals, think-tanks and centre-right and extreme right-wing movements and parties in Italy, Germany,Belgium, Holland, Spain, England, Romania, Poland, Russia and otherEuropean countries. These ideas have largely been influenced by right-wingthinking in France and other European countries such as Germany, left-wingthinkers from Italy (the key influence of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci),and the European and American New Left (Frankfurt School thinkers suchas Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse), as well as left-wing, anti-western anti-colonialism (Claude Levi-Strauss and Serge La-touche). Other ND influences include French pre-Marxist socialists, Italiansyndicalists and North American neo-communitarian thinkers like AmitaiEtzioni and Charles Taylor. Apart from the neo-communitarians, what allthese have had in common is a radical rejection of liberalism, unfetteredcapitalism, representative democracy and the United States.

Benoist was undoubtedly rooted in the cultural traditions of the oldFrench right, be they the writings of the counter-revolutionary thinkerJoseph de Maistre, Maurice Barres (who valorized the ultra-nationalisttrinity of blood, soil and the dead), Robert Brasillach (the French fascistwriter executed by firing squad in 1945) or Charles Maurras. Maurras wasthe head of the royalist, ultra-nationalist, antisemitic and extra-parliamen-tary Action Francaise, founded in 1899. He acted as the model for themetapolitics of a more sophisticated ND in the post-fascist age.74 WhileBenoist did not explicitly emerge out of any of these old right Frenchmilieux, he was in fact indebted to all of them.

Benoist’s main cultural influences, however, came from Germany and theGerman-speaking world: Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-democratic, anti-Judaeo-Christian elitism, and CR thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Moeller van denBruck. The Swiss thinker Armin Mohler was influential in imbuing Benoist

72 John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau,1930�2000 (Montreal, Kingston and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002),192� 200.

73 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Vintage 1996).74 Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite, 22� 3.

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with the CR’s elitism, ultra-nationalism, warrior ethic, spherical view ofhistory and fusion of hyper-modern technological and economic proposalsfor revolutionary national-authoritarian renewal against liberal and socialist‘decadence’ and the rootedness of cultural conservatism.75

If Benoist’s main right-wing influence, the CR, originated in Germany, hiskey left-wing influences also travelled from abroad: the Italian MarxistGramsci and the American New Left. Benoist was also influenced by theFrench New Left, including Guy Debord (1931�94) and Henri Lebevre(1901�91). It is rather fascinating how the most sophisticated and distinctiveextreme right-wing current of thought in the post-war era*namely, pagan,ethnic differentialist, anti-colonial, anti-nationalist and technically non-violent*was born in France and helped to shape a genuinely EuropeanNew Right. Yet this European New Right was itself a product of influences,which synthesized French and German right-wing thinkers with left-wing,New Left and anti-colonial traditions from Italy, France, the United Statesand the Third World. The defeat of the French right after the loss of FrenchAlgeria and the questioning of open racism had convinced ND thinkers likeBenoist that anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1925�61) wereright: anti-colonialism, national sovereignty, the revolt of the colonizedslaves and the rejection of overt racism would increasingly be the face ofglobal politics in the 1970s and beyond.

In being shaped by diverse European ideological and philosophicalinfluences and, in turn, shaping numerous European national politicalcultures, the French ND had become a truly transnational phenomenon inthe new millennium. The ND world-view was the product of transnationalinfluences and it simultaneously played a major role in reorienting theculture of the extreme right-wing milieu in a more pan-national Europeandirection. In line with Beckert’s framework, the ND has proven that thespread of networks and beliefs across national borders does not necessarilysupplant the importance of states, but creates new ties of belonging that maycompete with, complement or subvert the loyalty of citizens with respect totheir states.

It should be stressed that the ND’s transnational world-view is what RogerGriffin calls a ‘mazeway resynthesis’ in which ‘old and new ideological andritual elements*some of which would previously have been incongruous orincompatible*are forged through ‘‘ludic recombination’’ into a totalizingworldview’.76 The ND’s ‘French Nouvelle Droite dans l’an 2000’, as amanifesto, is a pastiche of modern, postmodern and pre-modern philoso-phies. Apparently ‘incompatible’ left- and right-wing traditions (that is, CRand New Left) co-exist with scientific and mythical world-views, including

75 Benoist, Vu de droite, 31� 48; Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, 351� 3.76 Roger Griffin’s Foreword, ‘Another face? Another mazeway? Reflections on the

newness and rightness of the European New Right’, in Bar-On, Where Have All theFascists Gone?, xiii.

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the promotion of rituals harking back to Europe’s distant pagan past. The NDdoes not use the term ‘anti-modern’ but rather the ‘politically correct’ ‘pre-modern’ in order to avoid any association with the longstanding suspicion(dating from the French Revolution) that the right is the carrier of ‘anti-modern values’ and populated by political players who reject the republicanvalues of 1789.

Lessons for fighting racism and the extreme right

This article has attempted to demonstrate that what began as a Frenchmetapolitical movement around the heady days of revolutionary activities inMay 1968 has been transformed into a transnational political phenomenon.While born in France, the ND’s world-view is a product of transnationalinfluences and has helped to shape a decidedly more right-wing politicalculture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The French ND has increasinglybeen dubbed the ‘European New Right’, which highlights the transnationalimpact of its ideas on the European continent at large. As the ND lost itsinfluence in French politics after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained greatertransnational currency in the 1990s and into the new millennium due to thedramatic political decline of the left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

I argue that the transnational impact of ND ideas is related to three keyingredients: first, the encyclopaedic intellectual output and prestige ofFrench ND leader Alain de Benoist, who has acted as the uniting figureand transnational messenger of ND ideas throughout Europe and beyond;second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the pan-European ND project,which mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-warneo-fascists into the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political spaceopened up by the dramatic decline of the European left and Communistregimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to understand theND’s transnational project, I point to Sven Beckert’s notion of ‘theinterconnectedness of human history as a whole’, the acknowledgement of‘the extraordinary importance of states and empires’, and ‘attention tonetworks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that transcend the ‘politicallydefined spaces’ of states.

Recent transnational research demonstrates that the right, like the left,thinks and acts transnationally in what has been simultaneously called theage of ‘globalization’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘information’ and ‘networks’. In fact,the right’s transnational links in the interwar years pre-date the qualitativechanges of the global environment in the new millennium. If the rhetoric ofthe left was always more transnational, as in Marx’s famous dictum‘Workers of the World Unite!’, it is also true that the mimetic rival of therevolutionary left, the revolutionary right, theorized and behaved through atransnational lens. The ND is one such revolutionary right-wing movementthat continues to build transnational networks in the contemporary period,

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particularly throughout Europe. If all the rights are not the same and somerights, like the ND, today increasingly resemble the left on the surface, thishas not stopped the ND’s pan-European ambitions along Gramscian lines.77

Despite the ND’s turn towards the left, New Left and ecological movementsin the post-Communist period,78 as well as its ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’formulations, the ND ultimately seeks a return to ‘common origins’,79 basedon pan-national European, authoritarian, imperial factors and accordingto which ethnic belonging trumps republican, civic values. The ND desiresthe reversal of administrative equality and multiculturalism throughoutEurope.

The rise in support for extreme right-wing political parties throughoutEurope in the new millennium, the continuing rejection of Muslim Turkey asan EU member, the 2009 referendum on the banning of minarets inSwitzerland, and the 2010 government law in France banning the wearingof veils in public places highlight the cultural shift in Europe againstliberalism, multiculturalism and immigration, as well as rising fearsassociated with the figure of the Islamic Other. This cultural shift is bornof real material and political problems in Europe, but it has been cultivatedby ND theorists and has influenced civil society and state actors alike insome European countries, such as France and Italy, more than in others. Themetapolitical project the ND began in 1968 is finally paying off for Benoistand company. Liberals and leftists should be concerned. While the ND todayclaims to be the heir of the failed leftist revolutionaries of 1968, its project isborn of a revolutionary right-wing world-view that seeks to abolish liberaldemocracy through legal and metapolitical channels.

The ND’s ‘politically correct’ discourse, which is allegedly ‘anti-racist’,‘anti-fascist’, ‘anti-nationalist’ (or pro-regionalist and pan-European) and‘anti-antisemitic’, is coded to suit the changing times. For those concernedwith fighting racism and antisemitism, it must be clear that open racists andfascists are becoming an extinct species. Furthermore, the tasks of fightingracism and a revived ‘metapolitical fascism’ have become complicatedsince the ND wages its ‘wars’ against liberalism, equality, representativedemocracy and multiculturalism not by using castor oil and fists, but byseeking to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Europeans and key stateelites. Moreover, stigmatization of the Other may come in new forms, like theND’s ‘multiculturalism of the right’, which paradoxically recognizes the right

77 Examples of ND pieces that, on the surface, seem left-wing are Alain de Benoist,‘Hayek: a critique’, Telos, no. 110, Winter 1998, 71� 104; and Alain de Benoist,‘Confronting globalization’, Telos, no. 108, Summer 1996, 117� 37.

78 Alain de Benoist, Demain, la decroissance! Penser l’ecologie jusqu’au bout (Paris: Edite2007).

79 The phrase is from the manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, section 2, clause 8.See Benoist and Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’.

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of others to be ‘different’ (for example, to wear Islamic veils), in order toexclude non-Europeans from the continent.80

Tamir Bar-On is Full Professor in the Department of International Relationsand Humanities at the Instituto Tecnologico y de Estudios Superiores deMonterrey (ITESM), Campus Queretaro, in Mexico. He is the author of WhereHave All the Fascists Gone? (Ashgate 2007) and Modernism and the EuropeanNew Right: The Search for Alternative Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan forth-coming 2011).

80 For Benoist’s defence of the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab in France inMay 2004, see Alain de Benoist, ‘Sur le foulard islamique*Reponse a une enquete(2004)’, available online at www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/sur_le_foulard_islamique.pdf(viewed 22 April 2011).

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