1   The French New Right’s transnationalism¹

Ian Tyrrell (2007) posits that transnational history ‘concerns the movement of peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries’. Transnational history developed in the era after the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the rise of sovereign nation-states, and democratic revolutions in the USA and France in 1776 and 1789, respectively. The aim of transnational history, reasons Tyrrell (2007), is to examine ‘the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation’. In short, transnational history is based on the premise that the nation competes for loyalty with other identities both within and outside the nation. For Sven Beckert (2006: 1459), the starting point of transnational history is ‘the interconnectedness of human history as a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states, empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces’. Let me offer three examples of transnational history. The first is the forced migration of Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth century and the creation of Spanish-speaking Sephardic communities in diverse locations from Tangiers to Sarajevo and London to Antwerp. The second is the institution of three Communist Internationals in 1864, 1889, and 1919, respectively, which attempted to unite socialist movements, parties, and trade unions worldwide in a common front against capitalism. The third example is the attempt to create a ‘fascist international’ by elements of the Italian Fascist Party (Ledeen 1972; Sørensen and Mallet 2002).

The aim of this chapter is not to examine any of the three aforementioned transnational phenomena, but rather the historical trajectory and transnational impact of the French ND. Following Tyrrell, I use the 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.

As pointed out in the Introduction, the ND is neither a political party nor a violent extra-parliamentary outfit. Rather the ND is a cultural ‘school of thought’ dating back to 1968 and a metapolitical movement that originated largely as a synthesis of two ideological currents: the revolutionary right-wing CR (Griffin 1995: 351–4; Woods 1996) and the American and French NL (Bar-On 2001, 2007, 2008). The CR connotes non-Nazi fascisms of the interwar period. CR thinkers combined German ultra-nationalism, defence of the organic folk community, technological modernity, and socialist revisionism, which valorized the worker and soldier as models for a reborn authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian ‘decadence’ of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism. CR thinkers included Carl Schmitt (the Nazi crown jurist), Arthur Moeller van den bruck (inventor of the term ‘Third Reich’), and Ernst Jünger (ultra-nationalist war veteran who penned In Stahlgewittern [The Storm of Steel], a hymn to First World War soldierly virtues first privately printed in 1920). The term ‘Conservative Revolution’ was popularized by the Swiss-born philosopher Armin Mohler, who wrote a doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers in the late 1940s. The thesis was later revised and published by Mohler in 1972. Mohler called the CR thinkers the ‘Trotskyites of the German Revolution’ and was sympathetic to their brand of fascism (quoted in Griffin’s ‘German Nihilism’, 1995: 351). ND leader Alain de Benoist (2012: 214) correctly points to three different strains of the CR: young conservatives, national revolutionaries, and a Völkisch wing. De Benoist (2012: 215–16) was a fan of the CR because of their trenchant critique of liberalism; their attempts to reconcile the most redeeming features of ‘modernity’ and anti-modernity’, thus producing the expression ‘Conservative Revolution’; and their ethnic conservatism that was revolutionary and dynamic rather than based on a backward-looking nostalgia.

The ND has been shrouded in controversy, owing to its roots in French ultra-nationalism and attachment to CR authors who legitimized the Nazi regime (1933–45). As pointed out in the Introduction, de Benoist (2012: 215) has not helped matters by never fully breaking with CR thinkers, even suggesting in 2012 that the CR could have been a genuine ‘alternative’ to Nazism by pointing to CR thinkers who were ‘silenced’, ‘persecuted’, ‘imprisoned’, or ‘executed’ by the Nazi regime, yet conveniently failing to point out CR thinkers who were collaborators or fellow-travellers. In two polemical mass-media storms in France in 1979 and 1993, ND thinkers were bitterly attacked by the liberal and left-wing intelligentsia as racists or closet fascists (Bar-On 2007: 11). So, for example, in 1993 40 prominent European intellectuals signed ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’ in Le Monde, warning of the ND’s ‘dangerous’ post-Cold War strategy, which included its desire to form alliances with disgruntled communists. The ‘Appeal to Vigilance’ was signed by an additional 1,500 European intellectuals one year later. The ND was also accused of covert racism and fascism by the historian of fascism, Roger Griffin (2006: 23–5). ND doyen de Benoist 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 a new millennium (de Benoist 1999b: 11–48, 1995a: 73–90). A scholar sympathetic to the ND argued that ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’ was the work of a left-wing intelligentsia fearful of the left’s total demise after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Adler 1993–4: 23–33).

A rich literature on the ND has grown up, mostly in French, but increasingly also in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, and other languages (François 2008; Bar-On 2007; Woods 2007; Taguieff 1994; Sunic 1990). While the ND’s historical origins, ideological evolution, worldview, impact on civil society, and connections to fascism, racism, anti-Semitism, and centre-right and radical right-wing populist parties have been analysed, a hitherto unexplored subject is the French movement’s transnational identity and impact. The ND helped to create a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the revolutionary right in an anti-fascist age; it nurtured the ‘politically correct’ discourse changes of radical right-wing political parties; and turned former French ultra-nationalists into ethnically fixated pan-Europeanists seeking to smash the egalitarian heritage of 1789. This chapter argues that the development of the ND worldview has been shaped by transnational influences, and that the ND itself in turn shaped a decidedly more right-wing political culture throughout Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND ideas has been a product of three key factors: first, the encyclopaedic intellectual output and prestige of ND leader Alain de Benoist; second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European project, which mimicked earlier attempts to unite the revolutionary right among interwar fascists and post-war neo-fascists in the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened by the decline of the European left and Communist regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

More to the point, the French ND has increasingly been called the European New Right to highlight the transnational impact of its ideas on the European continent generally (Bar-On 2007; Sacchi 1993–4; Sunic 1990). As the ND lost its influence in French politics after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained more transnational currency in the 1990s as new political opportunities emerged in the ‘Communism in ruins’ era for all political forces that rejected liberalism and the sole remaining superpower, the USA.

A history of the ND

The ND’s intellectual path has indeed been a unique one. In the 1960s, its leader Alain de Benoist was an ultra-nationalist sympathetic to the cause of French Algeria, to circles close to Vichy collaboration, to defence of the ‘white man’, and to the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia (Bar-On 2007: 21–32). In 1961 he met François d’Orcival, a journalist and member of the French neo-fascist organization Jeune Nation (Young Nation) founded in 1949. De Benoist later joined the vehemently anti-Marxist, ultra-nationalist, and pro-French Algeria Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN, Federation of Nationalist Students), which was founded in 1960 by d’Orcival and other revolutionary nationalists. In 1962, de Benoist became the editor of Cahiers universitaires, the journal published by FEN.

In Mémoire vive, de Benoist recalled with nostalgia his FEN days: ‘I loved the electric atmosphere of the demonstrations, the movements of the crowds, the way the slogans and cries propagated, the confrontations with the police, the smell of tear gas’ (2012: 64, my translation). He was especially impressed by the original, ‘revolutionary style’ of FEN; its attempt to create ‘revolutionary soldiers’; its ‘sacerdotal character’ in the spirit of revolutionaries such as Georges Sorel and Vladimir Lenin; and its conception of participating in politics as if one belonged to a ‘religion’ (de Benoist 2012: 65). In Chapter 5, I return to this point when I examine the ND’s quest for a new ‘religion of politics’ (conceptual tool three). Finally, de Benoist (2012: 71) insisted that at the time FEN and other ultra-nationalist groups used the French Algeria cause as a way to spark a revolution; a ‘second French Revolution’. He stated that in his youth he was for the ultra-nationalist, pro-French Algeria Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organization), but had he been Algerian he would have been for the ‘terrorist’, pro-independence Front de Libération Nationale (FLN, National Liberation Front) (de Benoist 2012: 72). The OAS engaged in armed struggle in its campaign to maintain French Algeria in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In the early 1960s, de Benoist also met Dominique Venner, a founder of Europe-Action, which was both a revolutionary right-wing organization and journal from 1963 to 1967. Europe-Action imbued French revolutionary 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 Bardèche (1907–98). It should be noted that Venner’s father was a member of the Parti populaire français (PPF), a French fascist party founded by Jacques Doriot in 1936 that collaborated with Nazi Germany. De Benoist wrote articles for Europe-Action, which included an assortment of former Vichy collaborators and OAS supporters. In his manifesto ‘Pour une critique positive’, penned in 1962, Venner sought to redefine French nationalism by giving it a more pan-European flavour (that is, a ‘European nation’) (de Benoist 2012: 89), while also questioning the value of the sterile path that the ultra-nationalist milieu was taking following the loss of French Algeria that year (Griffin 1998). Venner also influenced de 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 (de Benoist 1979: 156). Numerous Europe-Action and Jeune Nation activists became supporters of the ND during those years.

Between 4 and 5 May 1968 in the French city of Lyon, de Benoist and almost 40 other ultra-nationalists helped found Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE, Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the ND’s principal think tank. De Benoist (2012: 106) pointed out that of the 36 founding members of GRECE, 27 were from the ultra-nationalist, militant, and pro-French Algeria FEN or its affiliated journal Cahiers universitaires. For de Benoist (2012: 109), GRECE was a  ‘synthesis’ of the leftist Frankfurt School, the extreme right-wing inspiration of the royalist Action française, and the prestigious academic ‘neutrality’ of Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Thus began the ND’s process of Europeanization and metapoliticization of the revolutionary right; a process rejected by more radical and pragmatic sectors of the revolutionary right. The following year, de 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 restoration of the glories of an Indo-European civilization. When GRECE was founded, its aims were four-fold: (1) to reorient the ultra-nationalist French political milieu towards greater doctrinal sophistication and the transcendence of internecine conflicts between various ultra-nationalist tendencies; (2) to reject the right’s dominant parliamentary and extra-parliamentary methods of seizing power; (3) to regain cultural power from the liberal-left by seizing the ‘laboratories of thought’ throughout Europe in a right-wing Gramscian spirit, and to restore credibility to the revolutionary right-wing milieu battered by the excesses of fascist race laws and the Holocaust; and (4) to rethink the dominant ideological legacy of the ultra-nationalist right, which tended to be based on ethnic, biological, or racist conceptions of the nation and to be associated with militaristic expansionism.

De Benoist (2012: 272) argued that GRECE’s metapolitical vocation was essential because the right in France was ‘seriously de-legitimized’, ‘discredited’, and viewed with ‘suspicion’ after being twice ‘decapitated’: after the Liberation from Nazism and the Algerian War. He acknowledged that the right would have to use new language and ‘take its distance vis-à-vis its heritage’ (2012: 272). Influenced by Bardèche (1961: 175–6), who paradoxically openly declared his fascism, de Benoist understood that one day fascism might re-emerge with ‘another name, another face’. Moreover, he argued (2012: 101) that by 1963, while still with Europe-Action, the future ND learned two key lessons from the Algerian War and the OAS struggle: (1) the best political path was the ‘combat of ideas’; and (2) revolutionary violence is only useful in ‘objectively revolutionary circumstances’ and, if those ‘circumstances’ do not exist, you merely prop up the ‘established disorder’.

While de Benoist and most members of GRECE came from the extreme right, they recognized that times had changed and that post-war Europe was firmly anti-fascist politically and culturally more liberal and left-wing. The spectacular events of May 1968 in which ten million French men and women brought France to a standstill and threatened revolution convinced de Benoist and company that the liberal-left held the key to power in France, since it now supposedly controlled the schools, universities, media, and the thinking of the key state elites. De Benoist (1979: 258–9, 456–60) argued that the right was wrong to think that either elections or terrorist violence were the ways to power; following the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), it was ‘cultural hegemony’ in civil society – control of dominant values, attitudes, and ways of seeing and being – that promised long-term, durable power. Capture the hearts and minds of the masses, as well as key elites, and liberal democracy would fall, reasoned de Benoist. May 1968 was a success, he argued, because liberal and leftist elites were able to capture the levers of cultural power in civil society. He insisted that, when cultural power in civil society becomes divorced from the values of those in the state, a revolution would become far more plausible.

In 1968, rightists de Benoist and GRECE were still reeling from the loss of French Algeria and the weak showing of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, the extreme right-wing candidate who gained 5.2 per cent of the popular vote in the 1965 French presidential elections. Although de Benoist ideologically rejected the NL and Maoist protesters of 1968, he envied them because, like them, he wished to abolish liberal democracy and sought a ‘third way’ politically and economically that rejected the hegemony of the two superpowers, but because the protesters had cultural power, the key to political power, their protests were able to have an impact that was felt well beyond the borders of France, in a spirit of transnational protest, in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the USA, and elsewhere.

With a combination of hatred and sheer envy for the 1968ers (GRECE 1998), then, de 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-nationalistic milieu in France and around Europe. De Benoist’s prestige rose throughout Europe in the mid-1970s when Le Figaro opened its pages to him. When he won France’s highest literary prize from the Académie française in 1978 for Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), his star status catapulted him into the consciousness of a Europe-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 (de Benoist 2002). In addition, GRECE’s 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 for the Green Party) for not betraying their youthful ideals (GRECE 1998). Today the 1968ers shamelessly defend capitalism and wars of humanitarian intervention, insisted de Benoist, thus necessitating a ‘second May 1968’; a second revolution to overthrow liberalism and capitalism (de Benoist 2012: 107–8).

In 1969 de Benoist created the first ND journal, Nouvelle École (New School). The name was based on a historical reference to Georges Sorel’s ‘new school’ of revolutionary syndicalism (de Benoist 2012: 104). Nouvelle École made sure to avoid the ‘outdated vocabulary’ associated with fascism, racism, colonialism, and anti-Semitism in order to restore the right’s credibility. Following the launch of Éléments in 1973, a third ND journal, Krisis, was introduced by de Benoist in 1988. Krisis in Greek connotes ‘tear’, ‘choice’, or ‘decision’. With the launch of Krisis the ND doyen announced a new phase in the ND’s intellectual development; the ‘changing of an epoch’ as modernity was ending and postmodernity was beginning (conceptual tool two); and the right–left political divide would be superseded by a new political synthesis (conceptual tool one) (de Benoist 2012: 143). From the 1970s to the early 1980s, de Benoist wrote regularly in Le Figaro and Spectacle du Monde. He estimates that at the ND’s height in 1979 Figaro-Magazine could boast two to three million readers (de Benoist 2012: 129). From 1980 to 1992, the ND leader was a regular guest on Le Panorama, a radio show broadcast daily on France Culture. Moreover, he was the director of several publishing concerns, including Éditions Copernic (1977–81), Éditions de Labyrinthe (since 1982), Éditions Pardès (1989–93), and L’Âge d’Homme (since 2003). Copernic and Labyrinthe are the publishing arms of GRECE, while Pardès promoted ND paganism, traditionalism, and the cause of Julius Evola (1898– 1974) (François 2005: 224–33). Evola was an Italian philosopher who wrote Fascist Italy’s manifesto of ‘spiritual racism’; he was a hero to the neo-fascist milieu after the war; and although de Benoist rejected Traditionalism2 per se, Evola influenced his pagan, anti-Western traditionalism.

Éditions L’Âge 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, de Benoist saw little difference between the political systems led by Moscow and Washington. In 1986 he wrote: ‘Totalitarianism in the East imprisons, persecutes and kills the body, but it leaves hope. Totalitarianism in the West creates happy robots. Such totalitarianism air-conditions hell and kills the soul’ (de Benoist 1986: 219). For him, both communism and liberalism represented totalitarian systems, which had their roots in the alleged ‘totalitarianism’ of the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition. As a result, de Benoist could disingenuously claim that contemporary liberal states were ‘totalitarian’ in that they ‘imposed’ administrative equality (that is, Western political and cultural homogenization) on diverse ethnic groups in Europe and worldwide.

While in the 1960s de Benoist and the ND were sympathetic to white racialist circles and colonialism, in the 1970s they experimented with biological racism. De Benoist changed his tune again in the 1980s. With the publication of his Europe, Tiers monde, même combat in 1986, de 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 de Benoist further developed his differentialist theories, which insisted that no culture was superior and that all cultures have a right to be different and preserve their distinctiveness. This position was a tactical change for a man who once was ready to die for French Algeria. De Benoist and Guillaume Faye (1981), a prominent ND thinker in the 1970s that I return to in Chapter 8, claimed that the defence of culture was imperative in the age of capitalist globalization and rapid immigration, as uncontrolled immigration harmed both home and host cultures. 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. In line with conceptual tool three and the attempt to mould a new ‘religion of politics’, de Benoist (2012: 160) followed the Italian extreme right-wing journalist Giorgio Locchi (1923–92) in insisting that all these aforementioned ideologies had their origins in ‘theological form’ (that is, Christianity or the Judaeo-Christian tradition), were transformed into ‘secular ideologies’, and then falsely claimed to be ‘scientific’.

By the late 1980s, de Benoist began the limited circulation journal, Krisis, which claimed to be ‘neither right nor left’, but at ‘the heart of matters’ and located in ‘the centre of the world’ (quoted in Cheles et al. 1995: 241). Bear this ‘neither right nor left’ synthesis in mind when I examine the first conceptual tool in Chapter 2: the ND’s desire to forge a new political synthesis superseding right and left. As they faded as political forces in Europe after 1989, communism and the Soviet Union were definitively replaced by liberalism, capitalism, the USA, and the West as de Benoist’s enemies (de Benoist 1982a: 37–40, 2005). In 1990 he bitterly attacked former FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen for his excessive anti-immigrant scapegoating, crude ultra-nationalism, liberalism, and Christian traditionalism (de Benoist 1990: 31–3). And by the early 1990s, de 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 USA, the world’s only remaining superpower. Of the three phases of the ND’s intellectual evolution (that is, 1968–79, 1980–9, and 1990 until today), the last phase has been called the most intellectually ‘mature’ by de Benoist (2012: 113).

While de Benoist’s stock rose due to well-publicized controversies and the sheer volume of his output, the ND leader was busy turning the ideologically insular French ultra-nationalism into a truly pan-national European phenomenon. Pierre-André Taguieff (1993–4: 34–54) has pointed out how de Benoist borrowed from left-wing anti-colonialism and the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-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. 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 provided the ideological ammunition for contemporary radical right-wing populist parties such as the French FN, the Italian LN, 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 (Shields 2007: 237–44). These political parties have called 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 is that it rejected time-honoured pillars of the right for many centuries, namely, the nation-state and nationalism. De Benoist claimed that the French Fifth Republic was destructive of regional identities, whether Basque, Breton, Corsican, or Occitanian, all of which were buried by the notion of the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic. Old rightists such as Charles Maurras (1868–1952) had similarly attacked the French revolutionary state that was born in 1789 for having destroyed local, regional, and linguistic cultures in the process of constructing the ‘one and indivisible’ French Republic. The new goal of the ND would be a regionally diverse ‘Europe of a hundred flags’. This ‘Europe of a hundred flags’ would be a pan-national European empire with a hierarchical, authoritarian, corporatist, and pagan orientation, cleansed of immigrants and bent on preserving ethnic homogeneity within the ‘authentic’, historic regions of Europe (Bar-On 2009; Spektorowski 2003: 55–70). While it is true that fascists and Nazis could not consider such an anti-nationalist conception of the nation as that proposed by the ND, the fascists of the interwar years shared with the ND the goals of empire, authoritarian corporatism, and internal homogeneity. It is fascinating how the ND reinterpreted the ‘right to difference’ in a transnational or pan-national European framework in order to promote a ‘multiculturalism of the right’ (Spektorowski 2012), aimed at publicly recognizing differences in order to preserve the ‘authentic’ regions of Europe against the influx of non-European immigrants. In revisiting the ethnoregional identities repressed by the French Republic in the past, the ND aims to attack nationalism (a key plank of fascism) and simultaneously support a new ethnic exclusionism closed to the idea of integrating immigrants or foreigners.

The goal of a pan-national European empire, one that rejects what ND thinkers consider the excessively pro-capitalist and technocratic EU of today, provided the ND with an ideological makeover that could increase the transnational thrust of ND ideas. It is no accident that contemporary radical right-wing populist parties such as the French FN have called for pan-European unity and a more robust geopolitical alliance against the USA and other potential powers. This is the same position as that of the ND leader. Like the former FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who scapegoated Arabs at home and yet called them allies against the USA during the Gulf War, de Benoist has supported radical anti-Western regimes in order to challenge the post-Cold War global hegemony of the USA. In short, the stance of the ND and many radical right-wing populist parties is the same: support for pan-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, near the French city of Tours. He is an intellectual, philosopher, journalist, and political commentator. He claims to have never belonged to a political party, although he has been a member of the pro-regionalist Mouvement normand for about 40 years in its quest to ‘defend Normand heritage’ and ‘reunite Normandy’ (de Benoist 2012: 144–5). He has also been a member of the patronage committee of the International Association for the Defense of the World’s Indigenous Peoples (de Benoist 2012: 116). It is estimated that he has published approximately 90 books and 2,000 articles, while also giving a whopping 350 interviews (de Benoist 2012: 149), and is said to possess ‘the biggest private library in France’, numbering perhaps 150,000 to 200,000 books (de Benoist 2012: 300). A revolutionary right-wing activist in the 1960s, de Benoist (2012: 103) was the most visible face of the ND at the height of its mass-media attention in France in the late 1970s. In line with a metapolitical perspective, he insists that la vita contemplativa is ‘more important’ for him than la vita activa, or direct political engagement. In his 2012 interview, de Benoist (2012: 151–2) asserted that he is not a man of ‘one author’ or ‘one master’, but instead a non-partisan in search of the ‘truth’, whether those ‘truths’ are on the right or left (conceptual tool one). He has criticized intellectuals on the right and left for upholding the ideology of the ‘rights of man’, as this merely serves to ‘legitimate’ the Western, ‘imperialistic’ spread of the market (de Benoist 2012: 148). He argues that ecology, local concerns, and cultural defence are all issues that might potentially dislodge the ‘outdated’ right–left political cleavage (de Benoist 2012: 148).

Given the range of his writings – in areas as diverse as philosophy, politics, cultural anthropology, arts, and sports, as well as including commentary on the political affairs of the day – and his encyclopaedic knowledge, high profile, and prestige, the French intellectual was able to spread ND ideas beyond a narrow elite circle. De Benoist’s ideas were disseminated throughout Europe by other intellectuals, including Guillaume Faye in France, Marco Tarchi in Italy, Michael Walker and Troy Southgate in Britain, Robert Steuckers in Belgium, and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia, not to mention others in Germany, Holland, Spain, Croatia, Romania, Poland, and other European countries. In Chapter 8 I further explore the worldviews of Faye, Tarchi, and Dugin, seeking to demonstrate that the ideas of these intellectuals are representative of the three conceptual tools for analysing the ND. De Benoist acted as the ND’s key transnational messenger throughout Europe. According to Sven Beckert, as quoted earlier, transnationalism implies ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that transcend the importance of states. For de Benoist and the ND, a web of shared networks (such as think tanks, journals, and conferences) and beliefs (such as the extreme and revolutionary right-wing shift from narrow nationalism to a ‘European home’) created processes that transcended the centrality of state actors. While de Benoist and the ND recognize ‘the extraordinary importance’ of states and empires, they also pay attention to ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend[ed] these politically defined spaces’ (Beckert 2006). The ND reasoned that major changes in belief systems across nations eventually result in revolutionary political change.

And, for the ND, revolutionary political change needed revolutionary intellectuals with a mission to destroy liberalism. De Benoist cemented ties with revolutionary right-wing intellectuals throughout Europe in order to spread ND ideas beyond France. Currently a political science professor at the University of Florence, Marco Tarchi is considered the leading figure of the Italian Nuova Destra (New Right). The Nuova Destra emerged in 1974 after intellectual exchanges with the French ND (Bar-On 2007: 145). Tarchi was a former youth leader of the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social Movement) and the editor of a journal, Diorama letterario, that modelled itself on the French ND journals created by de Benoist. Michael Walker was a former organizer with the British National Front in central London; he sheltered the Italian neo-fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore in the 1980s; and created an ND-influenced journal, The Scorpion. Inspired by the French ND, Troy Southgate is an avowed National Anarchist and created the New Right movement in London in 2005 and later the journal New Imperium. Robert Steuckers is considered the head of the Belgian New Right, was a member of GRECE, and is the founder of the journal, Vouloir, which was influenced by de Benoist’s ND. Steuckers accused the ND of being overly metapolitical, and later supported the anti-immigrant political party Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc). In 1994, Steuckers and other ND dissidents such as Gilbert Sincyr founded Synergies européennes, a pan-European association based in Belgium dedicated to a pan-European geopolitical perspective. The organization sought to increase its ideological pull within European universities and break the hermetically sealed, excessively intellectualized universe of the ND. Aleksandr Dugin is viewed as one of the greatest proponents of Russian expansionism, ultra-nationalism, and Eurasianism (a European–Asian alliance against the neo-liberal USA) along imperial lines. Dugin is close to the National Bolshevik Party and Eurasia Movement, which is said to have the ear of leading Russian politicians and President Vladimir Putin. After contacts were established with de Benoist in Moscow in the early 1990s, Dugin created a Russian New Right journal called Elementy, modelled on the French ND’s Éléments. De Benoist briefly served on the editorial board of Elementy, but resigned because he was troubled by Dugin’s open ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism.

Today the ND’s influence, particularly de Benoist’s writings, can be discerned in publications as diverse as Telos and The Occidental Quarterly (USA), The Mankind Quarterly and The Scorpion (United Kingdom), Punto y coma and Hespérides (Spain), Neue Anthropologie (Germany), and Maiastra (Romania). According to Minkenberg (2000: 170–88), the ND is intellectually close to the German Neue Rechte, the New Right in the United Kingdom, Nieuw Rechts in the Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium), Forza Nuova in Italy, Imperium Europa in Malta, and New Right forces in the USA connected to Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation. Roger Woods (2007: 25–64) has demonstrated how the German Neue Rechte, although troubled by its own special connection to Germany’s extraordinary Nazi genocidal past, was nonetheless influenced by the ND and especially de Benoist, including his reading of CR thinkers, project of cultural hegemony, critique of modernity, cultural pessimism, fear of multicultural societies, and alarmist predictions about rising non-Western powers due to the ‘demographic explosion’ outside Europe.

In 1999 de Benoist and Charles Champetier (a former head of the French ND’s youth wing) published the ND manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ (1999: 10–23). The manifesto was translated into English (‘The New Right for the Year 2000’), German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish, and Hungarian by ND or ND-friendly journals, including Telos (USA), Junge Freiheit (Germany), Diorama letterario (Italy), Hespérides (Spain), TeKos (the Netherlands), and Nomos (Denmark). The manifesto was the first major comprehensive ND document of the new millennium; it offered an appraisal of the modern (or postmodern) world and an analysis of the movement’s philosophical foundations, as well as its positions on contemporary issues such as immigration, democracy, ecology, supranational organizations, and the market system. In Chapter 7 I analyse ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ and explore the way the manifesto embodies an alternative modernist ethos and the ND’s desire to supersede right and left and create a new religion of politics. In the twenty-first century, de Benoist (2004–5, 2004b, 2004d) continued his affinity for revolutionary right-wing authors, publishing a massive four-volume work on the French right and far-right milieu and a vehement rejection of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, titled Au-delà des droits de l’homme (Beyond the Rights of Man). He also sought to co-opt NL, ecological, ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’, and democratic discourses in the spirit of the times. His aims were to destroy liberalism, neo-liberalism, socialism, social democracy, and communist resurgence, all rooted in a Judaeo-Christian worldview that was thoroughly egalitarian and opposed to natural hierarchies and the need for elite rule (de Benoist 1982b: 167–84).

De Benoist has served as the key messenger of ND ideas within France and throughout Europe, as well as in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Latin America. For example, Disenso was an Argentinian journal edited by Alberto Buela from 1994 to 1999 that was influenced by ND ideas and distributed throughout Latin America (de Benoist 2006). Buela was a PhD graduate in philosophy from the prestigious Sorbonne in Paris. Both de Benoist and Buela agreed that US geopolitical influence in Latin America could be challenged by the resurgence of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist regimes and movements in the mould of Simón Bolívar (1783–1830), a Venezuelan politician and military hero who helped liberate Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and Venezuela from colonial rule. In Australia and New Zealand, ND ideas were promoted through the website of New Right Australia/New Zealand (2011). In addition, the ND is technologically savvy. De Benoist’s (2011) website provides translations of his works in eight European languages: French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, and Czech. GRECE (2011) and Éléments (2011) also have websites, and numerous ND journals, from Junge Freiheit (2011) in Germany to Diorama letterario (2011) in Italy, have an Internet presence. Metapedia (2011), an ‘alternative’ to Wikipedia, was created by ND supporters in Sweden in order to disseminate ND ideas worldwide.

Right-wing Gramscianism: a transnational vocation

As demonstrated above, Alain de Benoist, GRECE, and the ND made sure that their ideas would not be limited to France alone. If the egalitarian ‘poisons’ of communism, liberalism, socialism, and social democracy were to be defeated, it would be not merely in France but throughout Europe. To counter the alleged cultural hegemony of the liberal-left in Europe, due to the profound impact of the 1968 generation on European culture, de Benoist created an organizational framework, including journals, think tanks, conferences, and links to centre-right and radical right-wing political movements and parties throughout Europe. If leftist internationalism were to be defeated, a right-wing Europeanism (or internationalism) was also needed, reasoned de 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, the failure of capitalist globalization, liberal multiculturalism, the rising tide of Islamism, and the future of the EU, de 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 Gramsci free of its class-based analysis and implications, de Benoist sought to control the ‘laboratories of thought’ throughout Europe, whether in the mass media, schools, universities, 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 heightened dialogue with leftists and ecologists. He made it known that the ND was neither fascist, nor racist, and certainly not against democracy. De Benoist supports ‘direct’, ethnic democracy as opposed to ‘representative’ democracy. He regretted that ND intellectual Tomislav Sunic wrote a book about the European New Right (which includes the ND) with the ‘inappropriate’ title Against Democracy and Equality (de Benoist 2009: 64). In Chapter 6 I further explore the ND’s support for ‘direct’ democracy as a mechanism to attain a ‘Europe for Europeans’, or ethnic political dominance for ‘indigenous’ Europeans.

Was the ND’s Gramscian project designed to create a ‘right-wing international’ (Bar-On 2007: 141–63)? The ND was in no position to create a right-wing international because it was largely a cultural movement that did not hold definitive political power in any European state in the post-1968 period. Moreover, as Chapter 8 demonstrates, ND thinkers are rather intellectually and politically diverse, thus putting into question the unity and coherence of the school of thought. Yet, what the ND was more interested in accomplishing was creating 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 changes 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 showed, 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 gained the support of a major world superpower, the Communist USSR. Yet there were divisions within it, including pro-war 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. So, for example, the ND 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’ connotes rejection of an economic system in which profit is the highest value and cultures are homogenized to the logic of the market, and a degree of nostalgia for the premodern era before the emergence of global capitalism. The ND distances itself from the monarchical counter-revolutionary right, Catholic nationalist right, 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 revolutionary right milieu. The revolutionary right wants to radically overturn liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, social democracy, parliamentarism, and the egalitarian heritage of the 1789 French Revolution. The revolutionary right is not necessarily anti-modern, as will be demonstrated in Chapters 3 and 4, but is often 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 ‘abstract’ rights of man and multiculturalism, as well as the 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 USA, 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 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.

Fascist Italy of course attempted to create a ‘fascist international’, as early as 1925 (Bar-On 2008). 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 national sovereignty, it saw no problem with militaristic expansionism and the creation 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 Malmö, Sweden in 1951, including neo-fascists and fascists from 14 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 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 Bardèche (1961: 35–7), a participant at the Malmö meeting, argued that fascism would re-emerge one day, but as a pan-European project harking back to the European values of the SS and the pan-European Nazi brigades.

Following Beckert’s logic in which ‘processes, beliefs, and institutions’ transcend the ‘politically defined spaces’ of states, Martin Durham and Margaret Power’s (2011) 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. Andrea Mammone (2008: 213–36) has shown how French and Italian neo-fascists, including the ND, created united national fronts in response to the events of May 1968. 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 the 1980s. Founded in 1946 by Italian former fascists sympathetic to the pro-Nazi Italian Social Republic (1943–5), the MSI consistently gained between 5 and almost 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 former leader Jean-Marie Le Pen. Mammone also points out that a British party, the National Front, which influenced the discourse shifts of the French FN, and Nick Griffin, the British 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, while there is 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 international’ during the Second World War. In the interwar years, fascist ideas spread throughout Europe and to Japan, South Africa, Chile, Argentina, and Brazil (Griffin 1995: 228–41). Stanley Payne (1995: 516), an eminent historian of fascism, insists that fascism emerged in Ba’athist Iraq in the regime of Saddam Hussein, which neatly fit Payne’s maximalist definition of fascism in respect of ideology and goals, negations, and organization and style. Aristotle Kallis (2009) has shown how the union of fascism and genocide was a pan-European project that reached its apogee in Nazi Germany. The drive for a new beginning that eliminates the ‘decadence’ associated with aspects of modernity, liberalism, and socialism was shared by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany (Griffin 2007a).

As for the efficacy of the ND’s Gramscian strategy, its ideas and discourse shifts soon spread to French political figures on the centre-right and the extreme right, including former President Giscard d’Estaing, Interior Minister Michel Poniatowski (in the governments of Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barre), the Gaullist politician Alain Devaquet, and the former FN leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (Shields 2007: 154–7). ND discourse formulations, such as the ‘right to difference’ and ‘anti-French racism’, and politicians, such as Pierre Vial, Yvan Blot, and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, migrated to the FN in the early 1980s after the victory of French Socialist François Mitterand in the presidential election of 1981 (McCulloch 2006: 154–7).

Marina Peunova (2008) and Anton Shekhovtsov (2009b; 2008) have shown how the ND’s geopolitical ideas, as interpreted by Aleksandr Dugin and political philosopher Aleksandr Panarin (1940–2003), have influenced the Russian New Right and found the ear of key Russian political elites. The entire spectrum of European extreme right-wing political groupings, from the Italian LN to Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium, has been influenced by the anti-immigrant French FN and ‘politically correct’ language (anti-racist and pro-democracy) of the ND. If radical right-wing political forces have been flourishing all over Europe since the mid-1990s, it is in part due to the cultural influence of the ND. The MSI–Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance – AN) and LN in Italy and the FPÖ participated in national coalitions in 1994, 2001, 2008 (Italy), and 2000 (Austria). These political parties claimed to be ‘post-fascist’ and ‘anti-fascist’, discursive shifts borrowed from the ND. They also represented the end of the post-Second World War taboo against co-operating with neo-fascist or radical right-wing parties as part of a broad anti-fascist consensus. These changes speak to the cultural shift in attitudes towards liberalism, multiculturalism, and the mainstream political class since the 1980s, a shift the ND helped promote. In the next chapter I further explore these shifting values and the way they assisted the ND in promoting their ‘neither right nor left’ political synthesis (conceptual tool one). It is only a shift in political circumstances that allow key European elites and the mass public to ‘convert’ to the ND, as they did en masse to ‘fourth way’ political ideologies throughout Europe in the interwar years (Bar-On 2009: 241–64). By ‘fourth way’ I mean a revolutionary political ideology that rejects liberal, conservative, and socialist solutions for Europe’s ‘ills’.

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 left and the collapse of communist regimes worldwide after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The left tumbled to new electoral lows throughout Europe in the 1990s and beyond. Whereas, in 1976, the Italian Communist Party garnered an impressive 36 per cent of the popular vote and was on the verge of joining a ‘historic compromise’ national government, by the 2008 Italian elections to the Chamber of Deputies the hard left could manage only a paltry 4 per cent of the popular vote. Communist candidates throughout Europe from France to Germany were decimated in the polls, and some critics wondered whether there was a left left. The left had already been discredited by the experience of ‘real existing socialism’ and the so-called nouveaux philosophes (new philosophers) of the 1970s, including terrible revelations about the Soviet gulags and the machinations of totalitarian communist states. These new philosophers, who received widespread press coverage in France and abroad in the 1970s (at the height of the ND’s notoriety) included Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut, and Jean-Marie Benoist, who broke with Marxism and their often Maoist pasts.

The vacuum created by the left’s precipitous decline and the questioning of the certainties of a right–left political spectrum by the ND led the ND to embrace apparently odd political alliances. The movement was always uneasy with the right-wing label, arguing that the label ‘nouvelle droite’ was imposed on it by its critics. De Benoist (2012: 134) put more emphasis on the ‘new’ rather than ‘right’ and saw the ND project as the attempt to create a  ‘new culture’ as much as a ‘new right’. In France-Soir Louis Pauwels (1979), the editor of Le Figaro who invited de Benoist to write in his newspaper, insisted the ND was on the right, but a ‘new right’ that had nothing to do with the old right, fascism, or reactionary and bourgeois conservatism. This despite the fact that, for about 45 years, the ND has vehemently rejected egalitarianism, the key plank of both liberalism and socialism. However, de Benoist (1979: 22–5) was prophetic when he said in the late 1970s that, although he was a man of the right since he rejected egalitarianism, he could imagine himself one day on the left. This point will be further analysed in the next chapter in respect of conceptual tool one. With communism and the Soviet Union gone as the main enemies of the right, in the 1990s de Benoist’s new enemies became liberalism and the USA. Duranton-Crabol (1988: 46) points out that de Benoist’s shift from anti-communism to anti-liberalism dates from the early 1980s when he declared that he was willing to vote for the French Communist Party and wear the helmet of the Red Army rather than eat a steady diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn. In 1988 de Benoist founded the journal Krisis, which has increasingly blurred political boundaries and sought dialogue between rightists, leftists, ecologists, and anti-Western anti-utilitarians.

When the first Gulf War began in 1990, de Benoist (2012: 145–6) could boast of marching in protests arm-in-arm with communists against the ‘liberal imperialism’ of the USA and its allies. Against what he considered the ‘fake moralism’ of wars of humanitarian intervention, he would also ‘stand with the Serbs’ against NATO’s bombardment of Serbia in 1999. In the 1990s, the political climate shifted to the right in both economic (neo-liberal) and cultural terms, which assisted the ND and extreme right-wing political parties (Ignazi 2006: 22–6). Contemporary issues – such as the insecurities associated with globalization, the excesses of capitalist modernity (that is, rampant socio-economic inequality, the attack on the welfare state, corruption, and global financial scandals), malaise about the EU project, the questioning of immigration and multiculturalism, rising Islamism in the post-9/11 climate, the environment, the demise of direct democracy, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – paved the way for new political alliances. These new political alliances superseded right and left (conceptual tool one) and suited ND ideological preferences to destroy its primary enemies: liberalism and the USA. In the mid-1980s de Benoist has also increasingly turned anti-colonial and anti-Western, borrowing from post-colonial theory and the left. Traditional conservatives, indigenous movements, ecological groups, and anti-Western movements and regimes that rejected capitalism, communism, neo-liberalism, and the USA all deserved the support of the ND. As a defender of traditional European cultures, the ND and former Third World anti-colonial states had a common cause: fighting the rapid ‘Westernization of the world’ built on ‘false’ promises by capitalism and communism of permanent progress (Sylvain 2005: 27; Latouche 1996). De Benoist argued that the USA and its liberal ideology, spread worldwide through arms, ‘soft power’, and neo-liberal capitalism, would be defeated when all anti-capitalist forces of the right, left, and beyond were united against it. De Benoist saw no greater danger to the survival of world cultures in human history than the USA.

One example of the strange alliances promoted by the ND in a transnational spirit is de Benoist being invited to write in the NL journal Telos. Both the revolutionary right and NL were searching, after the fall of the Soviet Union, for alliances in order to defeat liberalism, unfettered capitalism, parliamentarism, and the USA. In 1993–4, Telos published a special double issue on the ND. In it, the editor of Telos, Paul Piccone (1993 –4: 3–23), asked whether the ND was not the NL in disguise? Piccone insisted that the ND had swallowed whole most of the ideals of the American and French NL, such as rejection of the socialist and liberal ‘new class’, regionalism, direct democracy, and vehement anti-Americanism. He argued that de Benoist had nothing to do with fascism or the old right (a false claim given the ND’s indebtedness to the German CR thinkers who influenced Nazism), but was seeking to create a new political paradigm. The ND leader must have been in heaven. He was being published by a prestigious left-leaning journal in culturally sophisticated New York, and its editor was defending de Benoist’s decidedly anti-egalitarian project.

As mentioned in the Introduction, the ND does not operate from within the fascist tradition per se. The ND is indebted to the CR tradition that sought an ‘anti-fascist fascism’ (that is, an anti-regime fascism) for Germany in the interwar years. Moreover, the ND has never definitively broken from the CR milieu. Historical fascism was born as a union of contradictory political ideologies: ultra-nationalism and socialist revisionism. Ze’ev Sternhell (1994) insists that fascism as an ideology was first born in France between the 1880s and the eve of the First World War. Most historiography posits that fascism was created as a movement and party in Italy in 1919 under the guidance of Benito Mussolini, who united a collection of ultra-nationalist war veterans, syndicalists, and renegade socialists. De Benoist would have been familiar with all these interwar tendencies on the right and left, as well as influenced by the ‘non-conformists’3 of the 1930s and like-minded groups in France, Italy, Belgium, and Germany (Hellman 2002: 192–200). These political tendencies were all guided not by a ‘third way’ politics, but a ‘fourth way’ that looked to a new model of secular politics and economics that superseded traditional conservatism, socialism, and liberalism. De Benoist’s ND resurrected the idea of a ‘fourth way’ within a pan-national European framework, while remaining sufficiently tactically astute to avoid overt links with fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism.

The ND’s worldview: a transnational ideological cocktail

ND ideas have spread beyond France to intellectuals, think tanks, and centre-right and radical right-wing movements and parties in Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom, Romania, Poland, Russia, and other European countries. These ideas have largely been influenced by right-wing thinking in France (for example, the philosopher Julien Freund taught de Benoist that the goal of politics is to ‘advance political ends’ such as power or the survival of the state rather than any ‘moral end’; or the philosopher Louis Rougier influenced de Benoist’s love for Greco-Latin culture; the purported ‘tolerance’ of pagan antiquity; and the critique of a dogmatic, sole, and ‘unique’ God with one universal truth) (de Benoist 2012: 197, 94–5) and other European countries such as Germany (the seminal influences of Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt) and Austria (the influence of the Austro-Marxist School with figures such as Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, or Max Adler. It was the first Marxist school to take the ‘national question’ seriously and defend ‘cultural autonomy’) (de Benoist 2012: 209), left-wing thinkers from Italy (the key influence of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci) and the European and American NL (Frankfurt School thinkers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse), as well as left-wing, anti-Western anti-colonialism (Claude Lévi-Strauss). Other ND influences include French pre-Marxist socialists such as Charles Péguy who criticized the liberal notion of progress, non-conformists of the 1930s such as Alexandre Marc, anti-utilitarians such as Serge Latouche and Alain Caillé, Italian syndicalists, and North American neo-communitarian thinkers such as Amitai Etzioni and Charles Taylor. Apart from the neo-communitarians, what all of these had in common was a radical rejection of liberalism, unfettered capitalism, representative democracy, and the USA.

De Benoist was undoubtedly rooted in the cultural traditions of the old French right, be they the writings of the counter-revolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, Maurice Barrès (who valorized the ultra-nationalist trinity of blood, soil, and the dead), Robert Brasillach (the French fascist writer executed by firing squad in 1945), or Charles Maurras. Maurras was the theoretician of the royalist, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic, and extra-parliamentary Action Française, founded in 1899. He acted as the model for the metapolitics of a more sophisticated ND in the post-fascist age (Duranton-Crabol 1988: 22–3). While de Benoist did not explicitly emerge out of any of these old right French milieux, he was in reality indebted to all of them.

De Benoist’s main cultural influences, however, came from Germany and the German-speaking world: Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-democratic, anti-Judaeo-Christian elitism, and CR thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Moeller van den Bruck. The Swiss thinker Armin Mohler was influential in imbuing de Benoist with the CR’s elitism, ultra-nationalism, warrior ethic, spherical view of history, and the fusion of hyper-modern technological and economic proposals for revolutionary national-authoritarian renewal against liberal and socialist ‘decadence’ and the rootedness of cultural conservatism (de Benoist 1979: 31–48; Mohler in Griffin 1995: 351–3).

If de Benoist’s main right-wing influence, the CR, originated in Germany, his key left-wing influences also travelled from abroad: the Italian Marxist Gramsci and the American NL. De Benoist was also influenced by the French NL, including Guy Debord (1931–94) and Henri Lefebvre (1901–91). It is rather fascinating how the most sophisticated and unique far 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 European New Right. Yet, this European New Right was itself a product of influences, which synthesized French and German right-wing thinkers with left-wing, NL, and anti-colonial traditions from Italy, France, the USA, and the Third World. The defeat of the French right after the loss of French Algeria and the questioning of open racism had convinced ND thinkers like de Benoist that anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1925–61) were right: anti-colonialism, national sovereignty, the revolt of the colonized slaves, and the rejection of overt racism would increasingly be the face of global politics in the 1970s and beyond.

In being shaped by diverse European ideological and philosophical influences and, in turn, shaping numerous European national political cultures, the French ND had become a truly transnational phenomenon in the new millennium. The ND worldview was the product of transnational influences and it simultaneously played a major role in reorienting the culture of the extreme right-wing milieu in a more pan-national European direction. In line with Beckert’s framework, the ND has proven that the spread of networks and beliefs across national borders does not necessarily supplant the importance of states, but creates new ties of belonging that compete, complement, or subvert the loyalty of citizens with respect to their states.

It should be stressed that the ND’s transnational worldview is what Roger Griffin (in Bar-On 2007: xiii) calls ‘mazeway resynthesis’ in which ‘old and new ideological and ritual elements – some of which would previously have been incongruous or incompatible – are forged through “ludic recombination” into a totalizing worldview’. As will be demonstrated in Chapter 4, mazeway resynthesis is an integral part of the ND’s quest for alternative modernity (conceptual tool two). As a manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ is a pastiche of modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies. Apparently ‘incompatible’ left- and right-wing traditions (that is, CR and NL) coexist with scientific and mythical worldviews, including the promotion of rituals harking back to Europe’s distant pagan past. The ND does not use the term ‘anti-modern’ but rather the ‘politically correct’ ‘premodern’ in order to avoid any 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 republican values of 1789.

Lessons for fighting racism and the extreme right

This chapter has attempted to demonstrate that what began as a French metapolitical movement in the heady days of revolutionary activities in May 1968 has been transformed into a transnational political phenomenon. While born in France, the ND’s worldview is a product of transnational influences and the ND helped to shape a decidedly more right-wing political culture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The French ND has increasingly been dubbed the ‘European New Right’, which highlights the transnational impact of its ideas on the European continent at large. As the ND lost its influence in French politics after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained more transnational currency in the 1990s and into the new millennium due to the dramatic political decline of the left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In this chapter, it has been my argument that the transnational impact of ND ideas is related to three key ingredients: (1) the encyclopaedic intellectual output and prestige of French ND leader Alain de Benoist, who has acted as the uniting figure and transnational messenger of ND ideas throughout Europe and beyond; (2) the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the pan-European ND project, which mimicked earlier attempts to unite the interwar fascists and post-war neo-fascists into the revolutionary right; and (3) the political space opened up by the dramatic decline of the European left and communist regimes worldwide after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to understand the ND’s transnational project, I pointed to Beckert’s notion of ‘the interconnectedness of human history as a whole’, the acknowledgement of ‘the extraordinary importance of states and empires’, and ‘attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that transcend the ‘politically defined spaces’ of states.

Recent transnational research demonstrates that the right, like the left, thinks and acts transnationally in what has been simultaneously called the ‘age of globalization’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘information’, and ‘networks’. In fact, the right’s transnational links in the interwar years pre-date the qualitative changes of the global environment in the new millennium. If the rhetoric of the 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 the revolutionary left, the revolutionary right, theorized and behaved through a transnational lens. The ND is one such revolutionary right-wing movement that continues to build transnational networks throughout Europe. If all the rights are not the same and some rights, like the ND, today increasingly resemble the left on the surface (de Benoist 1996a: 117–37, 1998: 71–104), this has not stopped the ND’s pan-European ambitions along Gramscian lines. Despite the ND’s turn towards the left, NL, and ecological movement in the post-communist period (de Benoist 2007a), as well as its ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’ formulations, the ND ultimately seeks a return to ‘common origins’, based on pan-national European, authoritarian, imperial factors and according to which ethnic belonging trumps republican, civic values (Champetier and de Benoist 1999). The ND desires the reversal of administrative equality and multiculturalism throughout Europe.

The rise in support for radical right-wing populist parties throughout Europe in the new millennium, the continuing rejection of Muslim Turkey as an EU member, the 2009 referendum on banning minarets in Switzerland, and the 2010 government law in France banning the wearing of veils in public places highlight the cultural shift in Europe against liberalism, multiculturalism, and immigration, as well as fears associated with the figure of the Islamic Other. This cultural shift is born of real material and political problems in Europe, but has been cultivated by ND theorists and has influenced civil society and state actors alike in some European countries, such as France and Italy, more than others. The metapolitical project that the ND began in 1968 is finally paying off for de Benoist and company. Liberals and leftists should be concerned. While the ND today claims to be the heir of the failed leftist revolutionaries of 1968, its project is in part born of a revolutionary right-wing worldview that seeks to abolish liberal democracy 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-anti-Semitic’, is coded to suit the changing times. For those concerned with fighting racism and anti-Semitism, it must be clear that open racists and fascists are becoming an extinct species. Furthermore, the tasks of fighting racism and potentially a revived ‘metapolitical fascism’ have become complicated since the ND wages its ‘wars’ against liberalism, equality, representative democracy, and multiculturalism not by using castor oil and fists, but by seeking to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Europeans and key state elites. Moreover, stigmatization of the Other may come in new forms, like the ND’s ‘multiculturalism of the right’, which paradoxically recognizes the right of others to be ‘different’ (for example, de Benoist’s defence of the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab in France) (de Benoist 2004c) in order to exclude non-Europeans from the continent. I now turn to Chapter 2 and my first conceptual tool for analysing the ND.