4 The search for alternative modernity1
In Chapter 3, I introduced the reader to the notion of alternative modernity and sought to distinguish between the modern, postmodern, and premodern periods. I also pointed out that the ‘malaises of modernity’ are central to the ND worldview. In this chapter, I highlight my second conceptual tool for analysing the ND. I argue that the ND represents a species of modernism (that is, the desire of its theorists to forge alternative modernities) and seek to determine whether this analytical model can enlighten us about the ND’s relationship to fascism.
The ND and fascism
Defining fascism is no Sunday afternoon picnic in the park. It is probably as difficult as defining terrorism (Bar-On and Goldstein 2005). Academics have argued for many decades about what constitutes fascism. Fascism presents the analyst with tricky methodological issues. Ze’ev Sternhell recently told an Israeli court that there is no universally accepted consensus definition of fascism. As a major historian of fascism, Sternhell was asked by the court to give his analysis of fascism for a libel case against the Israeli right-wing, extra-parliamentary political movement Im Tirtzu (‘If you will it’) in which their opponents put up a Facebook page calling them ‘fascists’. Sternhell argued that ‘there is no clear and unequivocal definition of a fascist movement, and that no movement in history has all the components of the definition’ (Hasson 2012). A special issue of German journal Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik (Deliberation, Knowledge, Ethics) (2004) assembled all the world’s leading experts of fascism, but there was a failure to achieve a consensus definition of fascism and to determine what constitutes post-war neo-fascism.
A pioneer in fascist studies, Ernst Nolte (1968) argued that fascism consisted of six principles: (1) anti-Marxism; (2) anti-liberalism; (3) the Führer principle; (4) the paramilitary party; (5) the tendency to anti-conservatism; and (6) the aim of totalitarianism. Moreover, even if we define fascism, some scholars like Robert Paxton (1998) argue that fascism must be studied in different time periods or stages, from ideology and movement to power and radicalization or entropy. Roger Eatwell (2010, 1996b) insisted that the quest for a ‘fascist minimum’ needs to be supplemented by the ‘fascist matrix’. For Eatwell (2010), the ‘fascist matrix’ contrasts ‘the different ways in which fascists could interpret three partly overlapping key themes’: the quest for a ‘new man’ (this ‘distinguishes fascism from the reactionary and reformist right’) and the goals of forging a new sense of nation and state. Eatwell insisted that while ideology is not unimportant, the fascist matrix moves beyond mere ‘definitional abstraction’ and ‘can offer insights into concrete historical situations’.
In Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (2007), I examined the relationship of ND thinkers to fascism, extreme right-wing political parties, and the revolutionary right-wing milieux. First, I pointed out that both minimalist (one or few criteria) and maximalist (many criteria) typological descriptions and definitions of fascism, must be examined if we are to understand fascism and then attempt to relate fascism to the ND. Second, with such a complex subject as fascism, my preference is for maximalist descriptions and understanding how fascism is simultaneously an ideology, movement, and regime in power.
Eatwell (2003) correctly insists that fascism, like other political ideologies from liberalism to socialism, is a coherent political ideology consisting of a view of human nature, ideal model political and social organization, and assessment about the processes of history. Eatwell (1996a, 1996b: 313) proposed the following as a fascist minimum:
An ideology that strives to forge social rebirth based on a holistic-national radical Third Way, though in practice fascism has tended to stress style, especially action and the charismatic leader, more than detailed programme, and to engage in a Manichean demonisation of its enemies.
Undoubtedly, the ND seeks ‘social rebirth’ for Europe, its regions, and nations. This ‘rebirth’ will be ‘based on a holistic-national radical Third Way’ because the ND seeks to supersede liberalism and socialism in a radical (revolutionary) new synthesis, which pays homage to ‘leftist’ economics in a non-internationalist context (that is, pan-European, national, or regional). The ND does engage in ‘Manichean demonisation’ of its liberal and left-wing ‘enemies’, but is less focused on style and action compared to fascists of the interwar years because of its metapolitical orientation. The ND rejects the charismatic leader principle and offers a detailed programme, including its 1999 manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, to usher in ‘social rebirth’.
A minimalist definition was proposed by Ze’ev Sternhell (1996, 1994), who posited that fascism was a synthesis of ultra-nationalism and Marxist socialist revisionism. Roger Griffin (1995: 9) defined fascism as ‘a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’. Both Sternhell and Griffin’s definitions can be applied to the ND, with the caveat that the ND’s ‘ultra-nationalism’ is today framed as ‘ultra-regionalism’ through the notion of a ‘Europe of a hundred flags’. Yet, this ‘ultra-regionalism’ conceives of the rebirth of hundreds of homogeneous ethnically ‘pure’ states within a larger post-liberal, pan-European framework (Spektorowski 2007).
I now turn to maximalist definitions of fascism. Paxton (2004: 18) defined fascism in a manner that would today omit the ND because they reject the cult of violence and the imperialist notion of ‘external expansion’. According to Paxton, fascism is:
A form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.
Stanley Payne’s (1995: 7) typological description of fascism along the lines of ideology and goals, the fascist negations, and style and organization applies merely to interwar fascist movements. However, in an earlier work, Payne (1980: 174) not only used a typological description of fascism, but also applied it to post-war fascist movements outside Europe, arguing that Argentina’s Peronism (1946–55) ‘had most but not all the characteristics of European fascism’. If we were to borrow Payne’s description of fascism for post-war movements, the ND meets many but not all of the characteristics of fascism. So, for example, ND doyen Alain de Benoist has criticized numerous characteristics of fascism, including the charismatic leadership principle, the party army, the aim of totalitarianism, colonial expansion, and nationalism. On the other hand, the ND meets all of fascism’s negations (that is, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, and anti-conservatism). In addition, the ND longs for a corporatist political framework; a secular, ‘spiritual’, and revolutionary new order; and ethnically homogenous political communities – all goals of interwar fascists.
Third, I argued that sectors of the post-war revolutionary right-wing milieu such as Maurice Bardèche (1961), from which the ND’s thinkers originated, needed to engage in ‘cave dwelling’ if they were to survive in a liberal, ‘anti-fascist’ era. That is, if ‘crypto-fascism’ were to make a comeback, it needed to go underground akin to cave dwellers to regain energies, rethink strategies, and reshape ideological discourses. Could the ND’s co-optation of NL themes and tactical support for liberal democracy be read within the context of this survivalist, ‘cave dwelling’ strategy, or is it a necessity related to grappling with the horrors wrought by fascism? Given the ND’s ideological and tactical diversity (as will be highlighted in Chapter 8), it is unclear whether the ND’s leading scholar de Benoist is really a ‘cave dweller’, whereas the Russian thinker Aleksandr Dugin takes extreme ultra-nationalistic and expansionist positions that mimic interwar fascists.
Fourth, unlike dogmatic guardians of orthodox patterns of thought who see an imaginary fascism everywhere, my aim is not to settle political scores or ‘hunt fascists’, but to show how political ideologies mutate in changing times. As pointed out in Chapter 1, it was the French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche (1961) who openly declared his fascism in the post-Second World War era, while arguing that fascism would emerge one day with ‘another name, another face’. The French neo-fascist insisted that the ‘famous fascist methods’ would be constantly revised to suit changing times. Bardèche influenced the ideological and tactical changes of the revolutionary right, including de Benoist (Bar-On 2011, 2008).
Finally, as also mentioned in Chapter 1, it is important to note that the ND does not work from a fascist tradition per se, but is wedded to an interwar CR tradition that nonetheless provided ideological ammunition for the Nazis in power (Woods 2007, 1996). ND leader de Benoist (2002) defended Carl Schmitt against a claim in Le Monde that he was a ‘Nazi philosopher’. In this respect, it should be remembered that Schmitt willingly joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and acted as its crown jurist. Moreover, Schmitt created a juridical rationale for the ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in which the Sturmabteilung (SA), the inner paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, was decapitated through a state terror attack.
Writing in the New York Review of Books, the Italian novelist and philosopher Umberto Eco (1995) argued for an ‘eternal fascism’ linking interwar fascists and Nazis with post-war neo-fascists and ‘post-fascists’. Eco argued that post-war fascism ‘could come back under the most innocent of disguises’. Indeed, Eco had the ND in mind, as well as other post-war movements and parties that could even appear to be on the left, but nonetheless craved the homogeneous racial and ideological purity of the fascist past. Eco also made it clear that fascism is ‘eternal’ and ‘implies the rejection of modernism’:
Both Fascists and Nazis worshipped technology, while traditionalist thinkers usually reject it as a negation of traditional spiritual values. However, even though Nazism was proud of its industrial achievements, its praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth (Blut und Boden). The rejection of the modern world was disguised as a rebuttal of the capitalistic way of life. The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity.
(Eco 1995: 12)
While I do not doubt that fascism can be resurrected as an ideology and movement ‘under the most innocent of disguises’, I challenge Eco’s claim that fascism and Nazism’s ‘praise of modernism was only the surface of an ideology based upon blood and earth’. For Eco, fascist and Nazi technological prowess and rapid industrial developments are insufficiently explained away as mere ‘surface’ phenomena, while the core of these regimes was ‘blood, soil, and the dead’.
Moreover, I highlight continuity between CR thinkers, fascism, Nazism, and the ND in terms of their ambivalent relationship to modernity and their common search for alternative modernities that supersede liberal and social notions of modernity. ND intellectuals sought to reply to the multiple crises of our age by straddling a bridge consisting of modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies. On the one hand, in a postmodern vein, the ND laments the fact that capitalist Western societies, as they are currently constituted, are blocked and ‘totalitarian’ in a Marcusian vein since they are structured to produce egoistic and materialistic ‘one-dimensional man’. The ND argues that revolutionary hopes have been shattered by the sirens of totalitarianism in the twentieth century (that is, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, and Maoism), which liberal societies use as an excuse to prevent radical political change. On the other hand, ND thinkers insist that humans are unique as future-oriented beings since they are able to subdue and master nature in order to create historically new and revolutionary modern political projects. For the ND, this new mythical and revolutionary political project would adequately integrate the masses into political life, while paying homage to the ‘hierarchical’ (elitist) premodern values of the past. It would also shatter liberal democracy and ‘rescue’ European regions and nations from perceived cultural ‘genocide’. While change is longed for in a revolutionary sense, the prospects of it seem diminished due to economic, technological, and political integration processes known as ‘globalization’, ‘late modernity’, ‘liquid modernity’, or ‘postmodernity’. The tasks of ND thinkers are to create alternative conceptions of modernity in civil society; to dislodge the ‘hegemonic’ multicultural and globalizing ‘elitism’ of current liberal-left elites; and to cause a rupture in a populist mould between elites and masses in a manner that would make the bulk of Europeans question the merits of liberal parliamentary democracy, multiculturalism, immigration, established conceptions of national or regional identity, and even equality in the legal and administrative senses.
Arif Dirlik (2007: 79) correctly observes that ‘[c]laims to alternative modernity, ironically, are voiced most strongly in societies empowered by success in the capitalist economy’. One of the most historically successful regions of the global capitalist economy, Europe, spawned the ND’s search for alternative modernities, which, as Dirlik (2007: 78) points out, is nominally ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘post-colonial’, and ‘post-socialist’. One might predict the flourishing of alternative modernities in other regions of the world that have been ‘empowered by success in the capitalist economy’. The point is that modernities can be of various types and we must not merely assume that the narratives of liberalism and socialism represent the only viable modernist paths.
It is falsely assumed that the right firmly favours tradition and completely rejects modernity. This was certainly true of the counter-revolutionary, monarchical tradition, which rebelled against the French liberal republican and revolutionary legacy of 1789. While de Benoist has favoured an anti-Christian, anti-Jewish paganism, the French intellectual is no Joseph de Maistre. Like other revolutionary right-wing tendencies from the CR to fascism, there can be no going back to the ‘golden age’ of the ancien régime. So, for example, de Benoist (2012: 185) rejects as ‘naïve’ the conservative traditionalist idea that cultural ‘rootedness’ can be preserved in the same way in the modern era as if we were living in ‘traditional societies’. On the cultural plane, however, de Benoist does mimic the intellectual orientation of leading Action française ideologue Charles Maurras, an ardent French counter-revolutionary monarchist, who nonetheless was ostracized by the Vatican in 1926 for his paganism, agnosticism, and ultra-nationalism. In short, Maurras was already an extreme right-wing modernist. The German historian Ernst Nolte (1966) argued that the Action française was a modern, secular, and fascist political movement.
Yet, ND intellectuals understand that political and historical processes in Europe today are so divorced from the counter-revolutionary tradition that there is no possibility of returning to some lost paradise when the king was the state. While it is true that the ND mythologizes the premodern Indo-European pagan past, its views of the state and politics, the economy, technological processes, and its support for a Promethean ‘will to power’ are firmly within a modernist framework, which is anti-liberal, anti-socialist, and anti-communist. Although the ND borrows from the metapolitical orientation of Maurras, its thinkers long for alternative modernities that synthesize modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies, antagonistic right-wing and left-wing political traditions, and scientific and mythical impulses.
Conceptual tool two
I now highlight my second conceptual tool for analysing the ND, which borrows from Roger Griffin’s (2008, 2007a: 54–5, 179–82) definitions of ‘ideal type modernism’ and ‘fascism as political modernism’. Contrary to the interpretation of the revolutionary right (that is, CR, fascism, or ND) as ‘reactionary modernists’2 or ‘anti-modern Traditionalists’ (Eco 1995), I argue that the ND operates within a modernist revolutionary framework rooted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most ND thinkers search for an alternative modernity superseding liberal and socialist metanarratives about modernity and the ‘end of history’.
The ND’s search for alternative modernity is rooted in an apparently contradictory bricolage of modern, postmodern, and premodern political and philosophical influences, which Griffin (2008, 2007a, 2007b) calls ‘mazeway resynthesis’. Mazeway resynthesis is a term Griffin (2007a: 105–6) borrows from Anthony Wallace, who wrote about revitalization movements and the role of a prophet who seeks to undertake the salvation of a community through an ideological synthesis of ancient and modern ideas. Mazeway resynthesis connotes a syncretic worldview, which emerges in ‘liminod situations’, as a reaction to real or perceived cultural or political crises and the decline of an overarching nomos (that is, socially created ordering of experience). For both interwar fascists and the ND, modernity (particularly its political and cultural repercussions) is seen in dark and gloomy terms as destroying Europe’s ‘sacred canopy’ of meaning. A ‘ludic recombination’ of worldviews from past, present, and future would help usher in a revolutionary ‘new beginning’ and restore a sense of sacred meaning to the continent and its inhabitants.
Those who are opponents of the ND’s drive for an illiberal, hierarchical, imperial (yet anti-imperialist), pagan, and internally homogeneous roots-based ‘Europe for Europeans’ will be tempted to see their project as ‘reactionary’, ‘archaic’, or ‘anti-modern’. I insist that viewing the ND as a ‘reactionary’ project is a mistake for several reasons. In the first place, the ND as a movement was created in 1968. Thus, ND thinkers digested most of the philosophical and political tendencies which straddle the modern and postmodern epochs. To borrow a distinction made by N. J. Rengger, discussed in Chapter 3, ND thinkers both experienced postmodernity as ‘mood’ and saw in the late twentieth century the birth of a new ‘socio-cultural form’. ‘Modernity as mood’, Rengger (1995: 41) adds, is often ‘a response within/to the structure of modern life’, whereas modernity as ‘socio-cultural form’ emphasizes ‘the structure of modern life’ (that is, the institutional, social, and economic structures associated with modernity). In short, ND philosophers have reacted virulently to some of the structures of modern life, while questioning the frameworks associated with liberal and socialist conceptions of modernity. As the ND ‘old guard’ dies out, postmodern sensibilities, the focus on media and images, diversity and differentiation, and ‘bottom-up’ popular and regional autonomy against the ‘excesses’ of the state, corporate gigantism, and the EU will only grow in importance. Older themes and debates related to fascism, Nazism, and even the CR might lose their relevance.
Second, ND intellectuals are certainly against many aspects of the modern and postmodern epochs and they are no cheerleaders of all aspects of globalization (a common denominator with CR thinkers), but they also propose concrete modern (or postmodern) solutions for Europe’s multiple ‘ills’ that are neither liberal nor socialist, as well as introduce new salient themes such as immigration that were of lesser concern to revolutionary right-wingers of the past. These solutions range from alternative models of citizenship and immigration to stem the perceived loss of national and regional identities to post-liberal, modernist models of governance that would allow Europeans to be great geopolitical players in world history again (Champetier and de Benoist 1999, 2000, 2010).
Third, leading ND figures might reject political and cultural aspects of modernity (for example, state-sanctioned legal equality, liberalism, socialism, social democracy, and multiculturalism), but they are not opposed to the technical and scientific advances of modernity. ND thinkers are wedded to an alternative modernist framework that is secular, Promethean, technologically activist, economically developmental, and statist (albeit critical of ‘technocratic’ and excessively neo-liberal statism, as well as ‘technophobia’ and ‘technophilia’).
Fourth, ND thinkers make it very clear, particularly in their de facto manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ (Champetier and de Benoist 1999, 2000), that there is no way to return to a rural paradise before aspects of modernity ‘destroyed’ the European continent, or to the pre-French revolutionary days when the king was the state. Rather, Europe’s ‘way out’ of its multiple ‘crises’ will be modern, secular, and revolutionary in that it will supersede liberal or socialist alternatives, while synthesizing the most redeeming features of the modern, postmodern, and premodern epochs. The website of Alain de Benoist (Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist, 2010, 2012) makes this point unambiguously:
Indifferent to contemporary ideological models or fashions, and rejecting all forms of intolerance and extremism, Alain de Benoist also rejects any ‘restorationist’ nostalgia. When he criticizes modernity, it is less in the name of an idealized past than a preoccupation with postmodern concerns.
In rejecting ‘contemporary ideological models or fashions’, the ND leader attacks the ‘outdated’ right–left political schism (conceptual tool one). Furthermore, in attacking ‘any restorationist nostalgia’ (for example, the monarchical tradition or fascism of the interwar years) (de Benoist 2012: 58, 110), he demonstrates his futurist framework that aims to erect a post-liberal, secular, and revolutionary framework along alternative modernist lines (conceptual tool two). In the ND worldview of the twenty-first century, seemingly contradictory CR and NL ideals mingle in uneasy coexistence, seeking to overthrow liberalism along revolutionary lines (Bar-On 2008: 329).
According to Hannah Arendt (1963: 21–58), modern revolutions recreate longings conceived in the Ancient Greek polis (city-state) in which citizens have ‘the right and possibility of participating actively in the affairs of the common-wealth’ (Hobsbawm 2007: 271). As explained in the Introduction, for Arendt the modern notion of revolution was unknown before the late-eighteenth-century liberal revolutions and implies that ‘the course of history suddenly begins anew’.
With ND intellectuals in mind, I propose a broader understanding of revolutions beyond the violent models of 1789 (the French Revolution) or 1917 (the Bolshevik Revolution). It is possible to ‘examine long-term revolutionary processes with no precise dates, which nonetheless engender profound and radical changes in society, its institutions, and its dominant values’ (Bar-On 2010: 7). Contemporary ND thinkers long for their own ‘Quiet Revolution’3 on the European continent, a ‘non-violent’ revolution against liberalism and socialism that will arise through the triumph of its cultural values in the political realm and the emergence of what Eric Hobsbawm (2007: 269) called ‘an entirely new epoch in human history’. About 45 years since its foundation in 1968, the failed revolutionary movement of May 1968 in France is still viewed by ND thinkers as inspirational because it was largely non-violent and demonstrated that ‘revolution in an advanced industrial country was possible in the conditions of peace, prosperity, and apparent political stability’ (GRECE 1998; Hobsbawm 2007: 307). While we often equate revolutions with violence, Arendt (1963: 18) posited that, ‘[t]o be sure, not even wars, let alone revolutions, are ever completely determined by violence’.
In short, the ND’s metapolitical orientation did not mean that it abandoned modernist and revolutionary goals. The ND’s quest for alternative modernity should be read as an integral part of the ‘sense-making’ modernist project born of multiple ‘crises’. Griffin (2007a, 2007b: xii) defines modernism as
any initiative in the cultural, social, or political sphere which seeks to restore a sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching ‘nomos’ or ‘sacred canopy’ under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity.
In the words of its leading theoretician, the ND’s project seeks to overcome a world impregnated with ‘nihilism’, by which he means ‘the de-valorization of the real’; the substitution of a ‘real world with a fictitious, inauthentic world’ (de Benoist 2012: 311). For de Benoist, the ‘fictitious, inauthentic world’ is a ‘conquering’ liberal universalism for which ‘Europe is a victim’ (2012: 311). Inspired by Nietzsche and the Ancient Greeks, he insists that ‘nihilism’ can be overcome not through ‘a return to the past’, but by searching for ‘the conditions of a new beginning’ (de Benoist 2012: 312).
Moreover, Griffin (2007a: 181) defines fascism in an exhaustive manner, but the first line of the definition is worth quoting:
Fascism is a species of political modernism originating in the early twentieth century whose mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth or palingenesis, of the nation.
Griffin (2007a: 182) also offers a ‘shorthand definition of fascism’:
Fascism is a form of programmatic modernism that seeks to conquer political power in order to realize its totalizing vision of national or ethnic rebirth. Its ultimate end is to overcome the decadence that has destroyed a sense of communal belonging and drained modernity of meaning and transcendence and usher in a new era of cultural homogeneity and health.
It is my claim that Griffin’s definitions of modernism and fascism can be applied to the ND. The ND seeks to conquer power by winning the battle of ideas in civil society. The French cultural school of thought insists that ‘ethnic rebirth’ can be engineered through activist elites and the people united against liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and multiculturalism. Regional, national, or European preference rather than universalist criteria are promoted by the ND in immigration policies, citizenship laws, welfare benefits, and state support for corporations. For the ND, ‘ethnic rebirth’ is a ‘totalizing’ project because it would ultimately lead to a radical, hierarchical Europe in which non-Europeans are banished from the body politic. For the ND, liberalism leads to societal ‘decadence’ and a loss of meaning because it focuses on individual rights rather than community, ethnic ties, and duties. Furthermore, ND theorists posit that liberalism creates abstract legal citizens wedded to false liberal, universalist principles. Or, following Carl Schmitt, de Benoist (2012: 188) insists that he puts more faith in ‘concrete realities’ than ‘pure abstractions’, as well as ‘particular contexts’ rather than in ‘universal generalizations’. Communal belonging, meaning and transcendence, and community health will be restored in a ‘new era of cultural homogeneity’, which abolishes liberal multiculturalism from the European continent and replaces it with a hierarchical, ethnically homogeneous, secular, and revolutionary political order.
Lamenting the ‘excesses’ of the modern world from immigration and multicultural societies to administratively imposed equality and the demise of structured and ethnically homogeneous communities of meaning wedded to a world framed by myth, rituals, and magic, ND thinkers advanced a secular, revolutionary, and modernist framework as an alternative to mainstream liberal and socialist responses to modernity. Moreover, the ND’s quest for alternative modernity should be viewed as a ‘dialectical relationship to modernity, one that entails not the negation of modernity but an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform it’ (Euben 1997: 429). It therefore follows that alternative modernity entails a radical questioning of modernity, but not the desire to negate or abolish all aspects of modernity. Rather the aim is to create a different type of modernity (alternative modernity) to highlight deep disdain with mainstream liberal and socialist responses to modernity. As a result, the ND favours many (yet not all) technical and scientific aspects of modernity, but rejects modernity’s social, cultural, and political consequences (Habermas 1993, 1990). Alternative modernity also connotes the questioning of postmodern discourses (Lyotard 1984) that overstate claims of modernity’s death (Rengger 1995; Lunn 1982), while ignoring the reality that modernity is the ‘house’ we increasingly all inhabit.
The ND as alternative modernity
In line with my interpretation of the ND’s quest for alternative modernity, Ulrich Beck (1995: 9) sees the current age not as a ‘post-modernity’ but rather as a ‘new modernity’. Beck views the new social movements of the 1990s not as examples of phenomena that stand against modernity, but rather as carriers of the banners of the Enlightenment and modernity in a radicalized tone. The ND is not ‘anti-modern’ because they do not fully reject all the processes associated with the Enlightenment and modernity. In short, the ND does not oppose or contradict modernity and its rational and scientific impulses, but instead continues the legacy of modernity in an alternative, revolutionary mode. An astute ND commentator, Paul Gottfried (1980) recognized this in a letter to the editor of Commentary about a piece entitled ‘France’s New Right’ penned by Robert Kaplan more than 30 years ago. Gottfried (1980) argued that de Benoist’s ‘philosophy is unabashedly atheistic and rooted in the Enlightenment’s scientific materialism’ and points to the ND leader’s ‘attacks’ on Christianity as ‘empirically indefensible and as a hindrance to scientific progress’. Gottfried continues the letter by stating that de Benoist’s positions are ‘unusual’ for an alleged Pétainiste (supporter of the pro-Nazi collaborationist Vichy regime), although they are ‘entirely appropriate for a child of the Enlightenment’. He concludes the letter by stating that ‘Mr. Kaplan does not pay sufficient attention to de Benoist’s scientific materialism or to GRECE’s repeated pleas for Western European unity.’
Indeed the ND’s faith in ‘scientific materialism’ could be further corroborated through an editorial piece written by Sebastian J. Lorenz (n.d.) in the pro-ND Spanish journal Elementos. In the editorial for a ‘Debate on the French New Right’, the author insists that ND positions on the man–nature debate are different from today’s classical conservatives and left-wing ecologists, as the latter valorize nature above man. Lorenz argues that ND positions are avowedly modernist, or similar to the ‘left-wing progressives of the 19th century’, because they believe in technological progress and scientific innovation in which man controls nature.
Moreover, the ND criticizes modernity from a framework that is non-mainstream (that is, neither liberal nor socialist) in order ‘to restore a sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world’ and counteract the ‘fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity’. The ND posits a ‘dialectical relationship to modernity, one that entails not the negation of modernity but an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform it’. The ND aims to create a different type of modernity, or alternative modernity, in order to highlight deep disdain with mainstream responses to modernity. Modernity, ND thinkers argue, entails a set of contradictory imperatives whereby socio-political and cultural effects of modernity (for example, the notion of ‘progress’, excessive individualism, unrestrained capitalism, egalitarianism, liberalism, neo-liberalism, socialism, communism, multiculturalism, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights) ought to be abolished, while others (for example, secularism, scientific modes of analysis, economic dynamism, and technological progress) might be maintained or transformed. In short, the ND’s project both rejects and supports modernity, while seeking to transform and supersede its most destructive aspects in a new ideological synthesis (mazeway resynthesis) consisting of modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies.
An ‘ideal type’ modernism
The British historian Roger Griffin (2008: 15) offers an exhaustive and heuristically useful definition of modernism:
MODERNISM is a generic term for a vast array of heterogeneous individual and collective initiatives undertaken in Europeanized societies in many spheres of cultural production, social activism, and political militancy from the 19th century onwards. Their common denominator lies in the bid to reinstate a sense of transcendent value, meaning, or purpose in order to reverse Western culture’s progressive loss of a homogeneous value system and overarching cosmology (nomos) caused by the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernization. The late 19th century modernists’ rebellion against contemporary modernity was shaped by innate predispositions of the human consciousness and mythopoeic faculty to create culture, construct utopias, and to find a subjective access to a superhuman temporality. This faculty is closely bound with the need to belong to a community united by a shared culture which acts as a refuge from the potentially life-threatening fear of personal death bereft of any sort of transcendence. Modernism can assume an exclusively artistic expression, often involving extreme experimentation with new aesthetic forms conceived to express glimpses of a ‘higher reality’ that throw into relief the anomie and spiritual bankruptcy of contemporary history (‘epiphanic modernism’). Alternatively, it can focus on the creation of a ‘new world’, either through the capacity of art and thought to formulate a vision capable of revolutionizing society as a whole, or through the creation of new ways of living or an alternative socio-political culture that will ultimately transform not just art, but humankind itself, or at least a chosen segment of it, under the leadership of a new elite (‘programmatic modernism’).
Griffin’s definition of modernism is useful for two reasons. In the first place, it helps us comprehend the profound changes taking place in Europe in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that produced numerous responses to the ‘crises’ of the modern world in differing realms of life from the cultural to the political. Second, I argue that Griffin’s ‘ideal type’ definition of modernism is applicable to the ND. ND thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye in France do fit the alternative modernist mould. Faye (2010a, 2010b, 2009a, 2009b, 1998, 1996) can be considered the most hyper-modernist of ND thinkers, particularly regarding his idiosyncratic notion ‘archeofuturism’. Faye believes that the right needs to transcend the old division between those who wish to restore traditions of the past and those who are calling for new social and technological structures. He calls for a mazeway resynthesis between these two positions, which will synthesize the most redeeming features of premodern and modern epochs.
‘Ideal type’ modernism and the ND
The ND is an example of what Griffin calls ‘programmatic modernism’. ‘Programmatic modernism’ connotes the desire for ‘the creation of a ‘new world’ and ‘a vision capable of revolutionizing society as a whole’. In line with ‘programmatic modernism’, the ND embodies an ‘alternative socio-political culture that will ultimately transform not just art, but humankind itself, or at least a chosen segment of it, under the leadership of a new elite’. The ‘new elite’ is led by Alain de Benoist and a collection of like-minded intellectuals throughout Europe (for example, Charles Champetier and Guillaume Faye in France, Marco Tarchi in Italy, and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia) who seek to smash the cultural and political legacies of modern liberal societies and ‘construct utopias’ with a ‘remembrance of things past’.
Despite the agnosticism of most ND thinkers, like modernists they recognize that the modern world represented a profound loss for humans in contrast to the structured meaning of premodern religion or spirituality. In his piece ‘Psychologie du conspirationnisme’, de Benoist (n.d.) even dated the rise of conspiracy theories to the acceleration of processes associated with modernity. For de Benoist and other ND thinkers, political aspects of modernity such as liberalism and multiculturalism are interpreted as a conspiracy to ‘kill’ Europe’s ‘original’ ethnic groups (Faye 2001, 2000, 1981). Historically, the revolutionary and extreme right-wing milieux argued for internationalist Masonic or Jewish conspiracies directed against the ‘nation’, while de Benoist jettisons these ‘bogus’ or ‘irrational’ conspiracies for more empirically rational and defensible conspiracies directed by ‘liberal-left elites’ against ‘original’ European cultures, regions, and nations. In short, the ND views unfettered immigration and multiculturalism as real ‘conspiracies’ designed to homogenize, ‘colonize’, and ultimately destroy Europe’s rooted cultures (Faye 2000).
In the Introduction, I pointed out that the ND is a loose school of thought created in France. Yet, as mentioned in Chapter 1, the ND is also a transnational movement with like-minded intellectuals throughout Europe who view Europe as the new ‘common home’. One kindred movement of the ND is the Spanish Nueva Derecha (New Right). Modernity, for the authors of a Spanish manifesto influenced by the ND, represents a loss of ‘identity’, ‘feeling’, and ‘common destiny’; the ‘death of the spirit’; and the notion that the economic represents the most important function in a society whereas traditionally it represented merely a part (usually less valorized) of the social order (Sanromán 2006b). As a result, ND thinkers long ‘to reinstate a sense of transcendent value, meaning, or purpose in order to reverse Western culture’s progressive loss of a homogeneous value system and overarching cosmology (nomos) caused by the secularizing and disembedding forces of modernization’ (Griffin 2008: 15). In step with modernists of previous centuries and globalization’s awakening of identities, ND thinkers ‘need to belong to a community united by a shared culture which acts as a refuge from the potentially life-threatening fear of personal death bereft of any sort of transcendence’ (Griffin 2008: 15). For ND thinkers, what Griffin calls the ‘community united by a shared culture’ connotes the ‘original inhabitants’ of the European continent: white Indo-Europeans devoted to the paganism of their ancestors. If modern liberal societies are becoming devoid of meaning, or worse yet nihilistic, ND theorists have a political programme to ‘rescue’ the continent and its peoples from its current ‘winter of nihilism’. In ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, Champetier and de Benoist (2000, 1999) long for ‘a radical restructuring’ (that is, a new revolutionary order) of the European continent, which will ‘exorcise’ ‘anomie and contemporary nihilism’. Individualism, egalitarianism, and universalism are viewed as synonyms of a ‘nihilistic’ global capitalism, which is destructive of the ‘land’ and its diverse cultures and undermines the historical and hierarchical ordering of European societies (that is, political, military, and economic in descending order) (Sanromán 2006b). The rediscovery of a common European cultural identity or ‘common origins’ will ‘rescue’ a continent suffering from the ‘loss of memory’ under the fragmenting weight of modernity.
In order to reconstruct Griffin’s definition of modernism, I offer a checklist summary below of the major tendencies of modernism (Griffin 2007a: 45–6, 115–17):
This list of characteristics of modernism can be applied to ND intellectuals. First, the ND is a rebirth movement, or a modern revitalization movement, with Alain de Benoist its pan-European leader and ‘prophet’, reacting to perceived anarchy and cultural decay resulting from the transformation of traditional institutions, social structures, and homogeneous belief systems due to Western modernization processes (Bar-On 2009). While de Benoist was once a pro-colonialist with little respect for cultural differences, the loss of French Algeria led the ND doyen to lament the ‘Westernization of the world’ and the perceived destruction of traditional European cultures and non-Western cultures. Created in 1968 long after the first wave of modernists in the late nineteenth century, the ND focused on ‘rooted’ regionalist, nationalist, and pan-European revivalism through the sphere of ‘cultural production’. Its thinkers railed against the most ‘decadent’ aspects of the modern world, its ‘cult of progress’, its excessive rationalism (or ‘instrumental reason’), and its fixations on technical solutions for non-technical questions. The loss of ‘transcendent value, meaning, or purpose’ in modern European societies ought to give way to a horizon grounded in ‘myths’ (that is, principally pagan Indo-Europeanism and ‘common origins’) of pan-European rebirth (Champetier and de Benoist 2000).
A manifesto (2011) penned by the Spanish Nueva Derecha in El Mundo in 2002 attacks a Western civilization based merely on production, consumption, and play; a world where a dominant materialism has supplanted ‘feeling’ and ‘heart’, while producing the ‘death’ of spiritual life and the ‘disenchantment of the world’ without attachment to ‘land’, ‘values’, ‘destiny’, gods, myths, mystery, meaning, aristocratic spirit, and community goals (Sanromán 2006b). Westerners have even forgotten to conceive, adds the manifesto, of a world where there are ‘higher values’ than the material, or the empirical world that can be seen everyday. The authors of this manifesto, El manifesto contra la muerte del espíritu y la tierra (Manifesto against the Death of the Spirit and the Land ), Javier Ruiz Portella and Álvaro Mutis, argue that we live in the era of Nietzsche’s ‘last man’; a time of ‘disorientation’ of all realms of life and especially of the ‘loss’ of a ‘transcendental destiny’ (Sanromán 2006b). As he lived in Belgium for many years, Ruiz Portella is the author of a French-language work, La liberté et sa détresse. Le désenchantement de la modernité (1993), which echoes the Weberian thesis that modernity represents a ‘disenchantment of the world’: a rational, scientific, bureaucratic, and secular understanding of the world, which is more highly valued than belief, myths, or mysticism.
It is no accident that in the post-9/11 climate de Benoist (n.d.), in his piece ‘Terrorism, State of Emergency’, writes that contemporary Westerners ‘live in a disenchanted world where, for most of the people, nothing is superior to life’. De Benoist adds that throughout history ‘this sentiment has been the exception rather than the rule’. He then implies that the 9/11 suicide bombers cannot be conceived of as ‘absurd nihilists’ but ‘spiritualists’ who do not fear death like modern Westerners. The act of ‘heroic sacrifice’ to the community and the myth it engenders, in contrast to our contemporary fixation on the here and now, appeals to the ND leader.
How do the authors of the aforementioned Spanish manifesto hope to supersede the ‘nihilism’ of the current age and ‘re-sacralize the world’? They call for greater attention in respect of the ecological crisis, the turn towards art, symbolism, and religion broadly speaking (including ‘myths’ and ‘magic’), the revival of ‘mystery’ and the ‘sacred’ through paganism, and the creation of popular communities wedded to their specific homogeneous identities. Sanromán (2006b) rightly points out that paganism is for the Spanish New Right (like the French ND) a type of ‘civil religion’, which restores a sense of ‘common purpose’ (that is, shared by all the community) and engenders communal myths, as well as structures time, space, and daily life. In Chapter 5, I explore my third conceptual tool for interpreting the ND, namely, the notion of creating a new religion of politics.
Sanromán (2006b) proposes seven solutions to ‘re-sacralize’ and ‘re-enchant’ modern Europe in a transnational spirit, which are essentially the same as those proposed by de Benoist in his magnum opus Vu de droite (1979):
The loss of transcendent value, purpose, or meaning is a concern of many cultural and political movements from ecologists and Traditionalists to the ND. Western culture’s progressive loss of a homogeneous value system due to secularizing and modernizing forces affects the ND as it did late-nineteenth-century modernists such as Charles Maurras or Georges Sorel. For the ND, the materialist, ‘one-dimensional’ nature of modern, secular, and multicultural liberal and socialist societies undermines a primary sense of ‘duty’ to regional and national communities within Europe. In liberal societies, we constantly ask for individual rights, reason ND thinkers, without demanding corresponding duties of citizens in an activist framework (de Benoist 2004a, 2003). A liberal, egalitarian society loses its purpose because its members are treated alike under the law. In reality, argue ND thinkers, inequality and hierarchy are ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ and also promote the aristocratic spirit of excellence and self-surpassing, which are necessary for the ‘health’ of any society. Meaning has been lost in liberal societies due to the progressive loss of a homogeneous value system under the weight of secularizing modernity.
Although ND thinkers are largely rational and secular or agnostic, they argue for the necessity of societal myths in order to restore the sacred canopy of community meaning destroyed by the materialism and individualism of modern societies. The myth of internally homogeneous regions and nations attached to the hierarchical, pagan past will be the necessary myth that restores meaning and pride to Europe’s diverse peoples. Dominique Venner (2002), a renowned French historian sympathetic to the ND and a former elite paratrooper in the cause of French Algeria, calls the current age one of ‘nihilism’ in which traditional forms of European identity (dating back 30,000 years) have given way to a ‘false’ and ‘homogeneous’ liberal multicultural identity.
Finally, transcendent value will be restored to Europe when it adopts a hierarchical, authoritarian, imperial (yet anti-imperialist), and federal political framework, which challenges liberalism and Western models of modernity and the USA as the world’s only remaining superpower (Champetier and de Benoist 1999). As history is cyclical for the ND, their thinkers insist that a revolutionary new era will inevitably emerge to undermine the notion that we are ‘owners and masters’ of nature, as well as lead to the ‘subversion of modernity’ in which the trinity of rationalism, equality, and the ‘disenchantment of the world’ reign supreme (Sanromán 2006b).
ND philosophers insist that liberal societies have no values save the all-encompassing value of the market’s profits. Liberal societies feign moral values, whether the penchant for humanitarian intervention, a ‘war on terror’ in defence of ‘our’ liberal values, cultural equality, family values in Protestant Anglo-American societies, or ‘freedom’ (de Benoist 1993 –4). Yet, the reality is that the moral values of the liberal West are bankrupt, hijacked by the ‘almighty dollar’ and the false desire to banish ‘enemies’, conflict, and hence politics from world history. Liberal Western values are merely masks for the ‘will to power’, the ‘will to technology’, or the ‘will for capital’. Moreover, ND thinkers insist that liberal societies lack the spiritual and ritual aspects of premodern societies that gave life meaning and structure against the ‘terror of nothingness’.
For ND thinkers, the net effect of all modernizing processes is a ‘totalitarian’ model of life and society; the homogenization of world cultures to a ‘colonial’ Western model; and the imposition on diverse societies, cultures, and indigenous peoples of a dehumanizing, ‘ethnocentric’ model of progress. What we have gained in the West in economic progress, gadgets, comfort, predictability of life, and the speed of modern life, we have lost in meaning, enchantment, mystery, spiritual awakening, and life purpose. ND theorists point to a perceived contradiction as European societies once provided meaning and a sense of shared belonging through our ‘rooted’ and homogeneous cultural communities, but how can those communities provide meaning when societies around the globe are increasingly forced to think alike and obey the same rhythms of a modern homogenized, liberal, multicultural model?
In addition, the ND supports a ‘new’, spherical conception of history and the future that rejects linear time associated with industrialization, capitalism, and modernity. It also remains ‘open’ to the realization of a utopian, revolutionary, hierarchical, pan-European, and internally homogeneous ‘Europe of a hundred flags’, which will revive the mythical community rituals, traditions, and celebrations of premodern pagan Europe within a circumscribed historical time. In a Nietzschean tone, a revolution can occur at any moment in the current modern age of ‘decadence’, which will usher in an era of ‘rebirth’, ‘cleansing’, or ‘renewal’ for European societies. The dawn of a new European springtime of hopes will restore the continent to a mythical, roots-based, ‘festival time’ or ‘superhuman temporality’ where past, present, and future merge. The inauguration of ‘festival time’ would banish the utter alienation and the fear of death of modernity and provide individuals with a shared sense of collective meaning from birth to death.
It is no accident that the authors of the manifesto of the Spanish New Right invoke the German Romantic poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843): ‘But where danger is, grows the saving power also’ (Sanromán 2006). In turn, the ghost of Hölderlin resurfaced with exactly the same quotation by Martin Heidegger (1993: 333) in ‘The Question Concerning Technology’ in 1953. Hölderlin is cited by Heidegger because despite the ‘decadence’ associated with many aspects of modernity, all is not lost. The Nietzschean ‘superman’ will arise in this hour of greatest ‘danger’, but that ‘superman’ can paradoxically only arise in the ‘danger’ that is the modern world. Moreover, ‘where danger is, grows the saving power also’ connotes that while modernity is indeed ‘dangerous’, it is from its ‘danger’ that will spring a revolutionary new era to usher away the worst ‘excesses’ of modernity. The hour of greatest ‘danger’ is also the time of the ‘gods’ and ‘titans’, to paraphrase a leading thinker of the CR, Ernst Jünger – a philosopher who markedly influenced de Benoist (1997). It is the time for the possible ‘re-enchantment of the world’ destroyed by the ‘decadence’ and multiple ‘crises’ of modernity.
Third, modernism accelerated momentum in the second part of the nineteenth century when liberal, capitalist, and Enlightenment myths of progress lost the cultural hegemony they gained during the French Revolution and early Industrial Revolution. De Benoist (1979, 2004–5, 2005) has praised intellectuals within the revolutionary, ultra-nationalist right-wing, pre-fascist, or French fascist milieu, including Arthur de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bon, Édouard Drumont, Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Robert Brasillach, Henry Montherlant, and Georges Valois. De Benoist penned a work in the twenty-first century that rejected the Rights of Man and the liberal republican heritage of 1789 (2004b). These aforementioned revolutionary right-wing thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries radically questioned the individualist ethos of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution’s propensity to tear asunder communities. As modernity’s materialist and de-territorializing impact cemented in European societies, these right-wing revolutionaries ignited their polemical flames against the modern world. Similarly, while de Benoist has questioned the liberal and socialist ‘cults of progress’ since the 1960s, the official demise of the Communist Soviet Union in 1991 allowed de Benoist to attack the ‘myths’ of liberalism, neo-liberalism, unrestrained capitalism, the USA, and cultural and political aspects of Enlightenment progress with heightened venom. For the ND, from the late 1980s the ‘primary enemy’ became liberalism rather than communism.
Fourth, modernity became associated by cultural and intellectual elites in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with decline, decadence, and degeneration. Yet, modernity also offered visions of ‘total rebirth’, a ‘new humanity’, and ‘creative destruction’. ND thinkers view the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the processes of modernity in semi-religious terms as the ‘fall’ of European societies from structured meaning, hierarchical order, and roots-based, community belonging. The decline of European societies, argue ND thinkers, accelerated with the realization of the individualist values of 1789 in Western European liberal societies and reached its peak with the achievement of egalitarian socialist societies in the Soviet Union and states of Central and Eastern Europe. Fascism and communism attempted to stem the tide of decadence and degeneration of European societies, but were woefully unsuccessful and spawned the horrors of totalitarianism. The post-Second World War welfare consensus in Western Europe was increasingly shattered in the mid-1980s, while communism officially died with the fall of the Soviet Communist regime in 1991. Contemporary liberal capitalist Europe is again today between a period of ‘black decadence’ (kali yuga in Traditionalist discourse) and absolute degeneration. Only radically new models of state, society, and economy can rescue Europe’s varied cultures and regions from ‘decadence’ and cultural ‘genocide’. These radical models for change would be commandeered by ‘the leadership of a new elite’, which could usher in a re-spiritualized world of ‘rebirth’, if not for all of humanity, then ‘at least a chosen segment of it’ (that is, ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ white Europeans and their descendants).
Modernist movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries oscillated between dialectical polar opposites such as chaos and new order, despair and hope, decadence and renewal, and destruction and creation. They all sought a way out from the perceived chaos, despair, decadence, crises, and destruction associated with modernity. The old religious and cultural certainties of the premodern era, as well as the hierarchical and cosmic orders of epochs past, were ripped apart by the alienating, fragmenting, and individualist impulses of modernity. Visions of hope, renewal, and creation were offered by the modernists who longed for a new overarching structure of meaning and community order in order to compensate for the loss of meaning of the modern world.
With certain modernists such as Nietzsche, destruction and creation, decadence and renewal, and despair and hope mingled in uneasy coexistence in a ‘sick’ age that necessitated the ‘re-evaluation of all values’. Similarly, the ND subscribes to a modernist framework that seeks to destroy the edifice of liberal and Western modernity in order to create a new polytheistic, hierarchical, and imperial Europe devoted to the ‘health’ of its regions, nations, and Europe. Despair at the depth of the political, spiritual, social, and economic problems plaguing Europe and the prospects of revolutionary change in a postmodern age is coupled with hope that at any moment the revolution (of mentalities and later structures) will take place to rescue Europe from its ‘terminal sicknesses’. The problems are compounded for the ND because the ‘roots’ of Europe’s decadence are in the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition, born thousands of years before the arrival of the modern era. Yet, if Europeans are honest enough to see the scope and breadth of European ‘decadence’, particularly its key elites, they might renew their societies through a revolutionary, modernist framework, which synthesizes the most redeeming features of modern, postmodern, and premodern epochs.
Fifth, between the 1860s and the Second World War, modernism was a diffuse cultural force for redemptive social and moral transformation. Cultural movements as diverse as nudism and vegetarianism, as well as artistic, literary, and political movements on the right, left, and beyond also sought to transcend existing modernity using distinctively modernist lenses and techniques. Nietzsche, Marinetti and the Futurists, Antoine Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, and Georges Bataille all embodied a modernist ethos, which saw the desires for ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ supersede conventions, morality, the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and the ‘bourgeois’ ethic of order (Taylor 1991: 65–6).
The ‘cult of violence’ central to fascist militarization of society, state, and external relations also evoked a modernist desire to raze away the ‘corrupt’ bourgeois order of the past. It promised to: (1) restore ‘transcendent value, meaning, or purpose’ to life against the backdrop of decay, anomie, and social breakdown of ‘actually existing modernity’; and (2) create a reborn society of ‘total’, new men and women completely devoted to an alternative conception of modernity that used the state to rescue the nation and ‘race’ from modernity’s ‘decay’ and ‘decadence’. While the ND today gives tactical acceptance to liberal democracy through its metapolitical struggle for ‘European rebirth’, a key source of its identity is its romanticization of German CR thinkers who embodied a modernist ethos grounded in defence of the ‘total state’, hyper-modern statist mobilization of technology and economic development, and the primary ‘commitment’ of all members of the community to the hierarchical, warrior-based, organic folk community.
Modernism spawned countless artistic, literary, personal, political, and collective projects to establish a healthier and ethical basis for society, as well as new visions for socio-political order. Created in 1968, the ND is merely the latest collectivist, modernist project seeking to establish a ‘healthy’, ‘virile’, elitist, roots-based European political framework through devotion to a strictly cultural project.
CR and ‘non-conformist’ (Hellman 2002; Woods 1996; Loubet del Bayle 1969) thinkers of the interwar era similarly focused on cultural renewal in order to create their visions for a reborn, anti-materialistic, ‘spiritual’ socio-political order, although CR thinkers such as Carl Schmitt (1888– 1985) collaborated in legitimizing all the worst excesses of the Nazi state. It is Schmitt (quoted in de Benoist’s ‘Terrorism, State of Emergency’, n.d.) who insisted that
he who is sovereign is the one who decides in the case of the exception, but is also sovereign he who decides about the exception itself, that is who decides that it is no longer a normal situation and that the rules no longer apply.
Schmitt’s decisionism became a model for the ND because it highlighted that the realm of the political is based on friends and foes, and that in all regimes (irrespective of ideological colours) decisions must be made in ‘exceptional’ or ‘emergency’ situations (that is, political or socio-economic crises, insurrections, civil wars, terrorism, etc.), which ultimately restores the hierarchical nature of the socio-political order and supplants the legal order. The danger, adds de Benoist, following Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942), is ‘the exception as a permanent norm’. It is here that liberal states can become tyrannical like authoritarian regimes. Nonetheless, Schmittian decisionism in the context of a modern, rational, and bureaucratic state is invoked by de Benoist because in a modernist framework ‘the leadership of a new elite’ would usher in the radical transformation of ‘at least a chosen segment of’ humanity.
Sixth, the new modernist order was often conceived of as an alternative modernity that sought to end political, cultural, moral, and physical decline through the emergence of a ‘new man’ and society. The ND searches for an alternative modernity that seeks to end political, cultural, moral, and physical decline of European societies through the emergence of a ‘new man’, reborn society, and novel models of statecraft. Their intellectuals diagnose the roots of Europe’s contemporary ills not only with the modern period, but also the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition, which produced processes such as the Enlightenment and modernity, as well as its secular derivatives liberalism, social democracy, socialism, communism, and feminism. Yet, in seeking to end the current age of ‘decadence’ ushered in by the modern world, with its attendant loss of transcendent and overarching meaning and roots-based, hierarchical communities, the ND calls for an alternative modernity that differs from mainstream liberal and socialist responses to modernity. The drive for alternative modernity in the post-9/11, postmodern period will ‘exorcise’ the most ‘unhealthy’ aspects of modernity and supersede aspects of the modern world (de Benoist 2001). Yet, the ND argues that superseding modernity will only occur through the simultaneous recuperation of ‘premodern’ values, as well as the technical and scientific advances, high-technology telecommunications, economic dynamism, and secular state engineering associated with modernity.
ND thinkers are neither outright ‘reactionaries’ nor ‘restorationists’ in the sense that they do not want to return to the rural world of the log cabin, or the age when the state was the monarch. As de Benoist stated in a 2012 interview, while he was a fan of popular European traditions, those traditions could no longer play the role they once did as they were wedded to a rural life that has ‘almost disappeared’ (2012: 115). Or, he explains in a manner that is certainly neither ‘reactionary’, nor ‘anti-modernist’: ‘Some theories of the ancien régime no longer have any validity in a modern era, some key notions of the modern era have lost their meaning with the advent of post-modernity’ (2012: 153, my translation). In Chapter 6 I thoroughly analyse ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’. In this manifesto, suffice it to say for now that the ND views the twentieth century as the ‘end of modern times’ and the beginning of the postmodern era. Using ideological mazeway resynthesis, Champetier and de Benoist (1999, 2000) insist that in this century we will turn away from the most corrosive aspects of modernity, using ‘premodern values’ in a ‘postmodern dimension’.
Yet, ND thinkers are not ‘progressives’ in the liberal and left-wing connotations since they have doubts about the political and cultural aspects of modernity, its egalitarian ethos, its understanding of progress, the individualistic and fragmenting nature of modern life, multiculturalism, and the demise of distinctive regional and national cultures to the homogenizing logic of the state and global capitalist market. In an interview with British ND fellow-traveller Troy Southgate (2010) for The Occidental Quarterly, Robert Steuckers, a Belgian thinker who was part of ND think tank GRECE until 1993, made this remark which puts him in confrontation with liberalism and socialism: ‘The principal idea I acquired at a young age was that all ideologies, thoughts or blue prints which wanted to get rid of the past, to sever the links people have with their historical continuities, were fundamentally wrong.’
Nonetheless, the ND shares with Enlightenment-driven liberals and leftists a positive faith in reason, science and technology, the mastery of man over nature, and modern, secular models of the ideal state. In line with the modernist political wave of the twentieth century from the Bolsheviks to Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and the Italian Fascists to the Swedish social democratic state in the post-war era, ND thinkers valorize Isaiah Berlin’s (1969) notion of ‘positive liberty’. In contrast to ‘negative liberty’ in which the state is a minimal one and does not generally interfere in the lives of its citizens, the ND calls for ‘positive liberty’ in which the people ‘freely’ choose ‘authentic’ leaders divorced from liberal-left elites. For the ND, an illiberal, unified pan-European state (albeit a regionalist and federally based state) would act decisively in numerous domains from the economy to the environment and foreign affairs to ‘free’ diverse European ethnic groups from the ‘shackles’ of the contemporary liberal state.
The ND and fascist modernism
I have pointed out that the ND is certainly not ‘reactionary’ or ‘anti-modernist’, but rather fits within a modernist framework that seeks alternative modernities. It is true that modernists come in all political stripes and that there are left- and right-wing forms of modernism (Griffin 2007a: 137–8). Julius Evola (1995), the author of Fascist Italy’s so-called ‘manifesto of spiritual racism’, an influence on de Benoist, and a cult hero to the post-war revolutionary right in Italy, is viewed by Griffin (2007a: 138) as an embodiment of a ‘right-wing form of modernism’ with a ‘futural, palingenetic agenda to erect a new sacred canopy in a decadent world’.
An interesting question that concerns us here is whether ND thinkers can be considered fascist modernists of a right-wing persuasion. I earlier cited Griffin’s ‘shorthand definition’ of fascism. At this point, it is useful to quote Griffin’s (2007a: 181) full definition of fascism, which I suggest applies to the ND:
FASCISM is a revolutionary species of political modernism originating in the early twentieth century whose mission is to combat the allegedly degenerative forces of contemporary history (decadence) by bringing about an alternative modernity and temporality (a ‘new order’ and a ‘new era’) based on the rebirth or palingenesis, of the nation. Fascists conceive the nation as an organism shaped by historic, cultural, and in some cases, ethnic and hereditary factors, a mythic construct incompatible with liberal, conservative, and communist theories of society. The health of this organism they see undermined as much by the principles of institutional and cultural pluralism, individualism, and globalized consumerism promoted by liberalism as by the global regime of social justice and human equality identified by socialism in theory as the ultimate goal of history, or by the conservative defence of ‘tradition’.
Moreover, Griffin (2007a: 182) points out that fascists seek to overcome the current age of ‘decadence’, erect a new canopy of sacred meaning based on ‘national or ethnic rebirth’ and ‘cultural homogeneity’, and usher in an age of ‘communal belonging’, ‘meaning and transcendence’ (which have been ‘destroyed’ by the alienating tendencies of modernity).
If we apply Griffin’s definition to the ND, we can conclude the following:
An examination of the ND’s ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ (Champetier and de Benoist 1999) highlights the degree to which it conforms with Griffin’s aforementioned definition of fascism and an alternative modernist framework (Bar-On 2012a). For now I point out that for the ND, mythical rebirth will be based on a return to ‘common origins’ wedded to ethnic criteria rather than liberal, civic models of belonging. Furthermore, this rebirth will be based on a novel political framework that longs for non-liberal alternative modernities. The ideal ND society is a heterogeneous Europe cleansed of ethnic non-Europeans within its homogeneous regions or nations. The ND’s rejection of the ‘melting pot’ is an attack on both the purported state assimilationist policies of the USA and France. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the ND’s multiculturalism of the right is designed to open greater public spaces for ‘indigenous’ Europeans, while invoking referenda on issues such as immigration in order to block immigrants from non-European source countries. The implicit argument of the ND is that in the new millennium France has become the colony of uncontrolled immigration, the new Algeria is mainland France, and perhaps the ‘common sense’ of the people united in the framework of an ethnos can vote to democratically reverse this ‘ethnocidal’4 project destructive of Europe’s pagan past and historic regions and nations.
Modernist models of the past
ND thinkers are not trail-blazers in longing for alternative modernities. While those on the liberal-left logically have ideological bones to pick with the ND, the modernist credentials of its thinkers are indeed profound. The ND could draw on modernist revolutionary models from the past, including the agnostic secularism of Charles Maurras, German CR thinkers, fascist modernizers such as Mussolini and Hitler, and even revolutionary left-wing modernists such as Lenin and Stalin or right-wing modernists such as Evola and Dugin. All of these diverse political tendencies longed for alternative modernities as a response to the ‘disenchantment of the world’ produced by the rise of an ‘alienating’ modernity. They all understood that modernity ushered in broad societal changes, anomie as religious and rural-based homogeneous community values declined, and the loss of a sacred canopy of meaning. These modernists spanning political movements from the right to left all saw the necessity of new, mythical, modern, and secular political projects, which restored community belonging and meaning in an age rife with unrestrained egoism. Each age necessitated its own solutions, as the ‘dictatorship’ of modern values accelerated. Yet, those solutions could only be revolutionary if they created a radical, new political order by integrating elements of the modern world. The ND’s eclectic ideological mazeway resynthesis did exactly this by synthesizing modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies.
Modernism was a shared reality that particularly affected the European continent in the period of multiples crises between the two world wars. Griffin (2007a) pointed out how Mussolini and Hitler longed for a new historical beginning using novel, modern models of the state and economy to end the ‘decadence’ of the interwar years and restore a sense of sacred meaning to Italians and Germans challenged by the alienating aspects of the modern world and the egalitarian legacy of the French Revolution. In his Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Baumann (1989) analysed the Nazi ‘gardening state’, which used goal-oriented, modernist, bureaucratic, and distancing techniques in the service of the mythical Aryan race during the butchery of the Final Solution against the Jews and other ‘non-Aryans’. Aristotle Kallis (2009) insists that modernizing, exterminationist techniques were part of a pan-European drive in the interwar years, which reached their dizzying apogee in Nazi Germany in the 1940s. Marius Turda (2010) highlights the history of eugenics, which found its culmination in the Nazi policies of genocide, but was also an integral part of European modernity in which the state and the individual sought to create an idealized national community. Shane Weller (2010) argues that the most influential strains of philosophical, political, and aesthetic modernism grow out of the conviction that modernity is nihilistic. He points out that an understanding of modernism and postmodernism is impossible without reflecting on the notion of modernity as nihilistic. A. J. Gregor (2000) has demonstrated how the leading theoreticians of Italian fascism longed for ‘developmental dictatorship’ in order to rescue Italy from economic ‘backwardness’. In another work, Gregor (2004: 17) argues that fascist intellectuals such as Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini were just as ‘rational’ and ‘modern’ as their liberal or leftist counterparts in their solutions for Europe’s perceived ills in the early twentieth century: ‘However Fascism is judged by history, the movement, the revolution, and the regime itself had, at their disposal, as talented and moral a cadre of intellectuals as any found in the ranks of revolutionary Marxism or traditional liberalism.’ D. D. Roberts (2006) has shown how totalitarianism was a modernist drive shared by the Marxist–Leninist Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany.
Yet, without doubt ND thinkers were most indebted to the CR and its Nietzschean shadow in their search for alternative modernity. While CR thinkers glorified the organic folk community and German ultra-nationalism, they were hyper-modern in their valorization of the worker and soldier as models of the new, revolutionary, authoritarian collectivist state. For Jünger, the figure of the worker embodied the glories of socialist collectivism, while that of the soldier helped to create a rising ultra-nationalist tide based on the ‘blood socialism of the trenches’. In the figure of the soldier, Jünger saw no bourgeoisie or proletariat, the two sectors of society thought to be in a titanic class struggle according to traditional Marxist theory. In the worker, Jünger saw the possibilities of total devotion to the metaphysical glories of the state and nation. In the soldier and worker, Jünger invoked the modern possibility to synthesize the most redeeming features of socialism with those of ultra-nationalism in the service of the folk nation and state. Economic dynamism and technological development would be utilized to create a revolutionary, ultra-nationalist warrior-worker state.
This chapter began by examining the difficulties in defining fascism and asking whether the ND is fascist. Most of the maximalist definitions of fascism utilized suggested that the ND had some but not all the characteristics of fascism. I then utilized Griffin’s ‘ideal type’ definition of modernism and fascism, which was applied to the ND. I argued that ND thinkers long for revolutionary, pan-European alternative modernities that are neither liberal nor socialist. In addition, I demonstrated how modern right-wing and left-wing movements of the past were also wedded to a modernist framework. While the ND rejects political and cultural aspects of the modern world and the French Revolution, it remains rooted to a modernist worldview. The ND’s modernist worldview valorizes limited faith in ‘instrumental reason’, scientific and technological progress, the modern, secular state apparatus, the ‘dialogical character’ of mutual cultural recognition, and the ‘ethic of authenticity’ (‘being oneself’). The ND’s version of the ‘ethic of authenticity’ would solve the ‘ills’ of modern society by harking back to mythical, ‘rooted’, ‘original’, and ‘homogeneous’ pagan European communities of belonging, while synthesizing the most redeeming features of the modern and postmodern epochs (mazeway resynthesis). The ND seeks the flowering of alternative modernities, which will be achieved through what Griffin called a ‘ludic recombination’ of seemingly incompatible political and philosophical ideas.
I also insist that the ND’s alternative modernist framework is indeed revolutionary. The metapolitical approach of ND thinkers should not obfuscate the reality that ND theorists seek a ‘radical restructuring’ of the political, economic, social, and cultural institutions throughout Europe, as well as the emergence of radically novel human beings wedded to a new and re-spiritualized epoch in human history. As Champetier and de Benoist (2000, 1999) argue, the worst aspects of modernity will be ‘transcended’ through a ‘radical restructuring’ that will banish ‘anomie and contemporary nihilism’. In proposing a revolution from the right, ND thinkers are wedded to a modern, secular, and utopian conception of politics, which ironically has its roots in the egalitarian American and French Revolutions they want to abolish. Nonetheless, the ND rejects the former revolutions because they connote ‘decadent’ trends associated with modernity such as egalitarianism and the ‘abstract religions’ of individual and human rights above duties to one’s ethnic communities and ancestors.
ND doyen de Benoist insists that what he proposes is not a counter-revolution, a return to the monarchical system before the French Revolution, but rather a revolution in mentalities and values that will ultimately produce a new, revolutionary political and social system that destroys liberalism and neo-liberalism. While the ‘social question’ was fundamental for the French Revolution, it was not as critical for the American Revolution where ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ became the revolutionary watchwords (Arendt 1963: 59–140). For the ND, the ‘social question’ was reformulated to connote: (1) a duty to take care of one’s ‘own’ European ethnic groups above all other ethnic groups or cultures in citizenship, jobs, housing provision, state welfare services, and corporate support (that is, regional, national, or European preference and the goal of an ethnocracy based on the legal, political, economic, and cultural dominance of ‘original’ Europeans above non-Europeans) (Butenschøn 1993); (2) a critique of neo-liberalism because of its tendency to exacerbate social conflicts; and (3) co-optation of NL themes that are critical of the most harmful aspects of global capitalism, liberalism, and socialist state engineering. Yet, the ND did not view the ‘social question’ through communist and socialist lenses because the aforementioned economic and political systems are based on the principle of egalitarianism, which must be ‘destroyed’ because it contradicts elite rule, nature, and Europe’s ‘rooted’ and imperial past.
Aware of the changing geopolitical fortunes of Europeans, who were once the key players in history with colonial possessions spanning the globe, the ND is engaged in a process of reshaping hearts and minds with the aim of restoring the European continent to its past glories. The ND’s long-term historical memories are of a Europe at the centre of international affairs: British, French, Dutch, and Spanish colonialism, the Holy Roman Empire, the Hapsburg Empire, and the Roman Empire. The ND seeks to gather a coalition of forces that would challenge the USA’s impressive ‘empire’ spanning all the oceans of the globe and other potential rivals on its eastern frontiers in Asia. Yet, the ND is conscious that we live in a postmodern, ‘anti-imperial’ or ‘post-imperial’ age where one cannot rule others through force or in contravention of the principle of self-determination (Ignatieff 2003). Hence the ND’s valorization of the ‘right to difference’ of homogeneous cultural communities worldwide and constant refrains against the homogenizing logic of globalization, liberalism, capitalism, and multiculturalism, all viewed as variants of Western ‘cultural imperialism’. In short, the ND longs for a new Europe based on an alliance between European and non-European ethnic, cultural, and religious identities against the liberal and plutocratic USA.
As European identities are in flux, the ND model of identity has shifted dramatically to suit changing times. In the 1960s Alain de Benoist was a supporter of the colonial project of French Algeria and the ‘burden of the white man’. Today de Benoist is a ‘democrat’ and for the ‘right to difference’ of cultures worldwide (de Benoist 2003).
The European continent is a site of contestation for competing models of identity. It is true that the EU has played a major role in shaping those identities, but the scepticism surrounding the EU in Denmark, France, Ireland, and other sovereign states suggests that the identity question is never definitively closed. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated, Europe has not fully created a united foreign policy, a key goal of the ND.
To the question of ‘who are we?’, ND thinkers reply that they are simultaneously pagan Europeans, as well as members of internally homogeneous regions and nations with their distinctive histories, institutions, traditions, and rituals. Political and cultural aspects of modernity are seen as corrosive to the shared sense of community meaning inherited from premodern European societies. A political revolution will come to Europe, argues the ND, because there will first be a revolution in values. Aspects of modernity, insist the ND, will sow the seeds of its own destruction. A revolutionary, hierarchical, imperial (yet anti-imperialist), and illiberal political order will ‘save’ the European continent, argue the ND.
I pointed out that Heidegger wrote: ‘Where grows the greatest danger, there also grows the saving power.’ The ND leader, Alain de Benoist, is no Nazi fellow-traveller, but like Heidegger he sees a modern world impregnated with ‘danger’, ‘crises’, ‘decadence’, and ‘decay’. His solutions to ‘rescue’ the continent from the self-inflicted ‘ethnocide’ (genocide) of its ‘original peoples’ borrow from politically correct NL, Green, and direct democracy positions. Yet, neither liberal nor socialist (and certainly not conservative), the ND’s quest for alternative modernities is profoundly revolutionary in that it connotes ‘a wholesale political change in which men are conscious of introducing an entirely new epoch in human history’. Should the ND’s project be adopted, it would lead to the ‘death of 1789’ and the pain of homelessness for millions of Europeans who reject this project, or are deemed ‘non-Europeans’. The twenty-first century and its ‘crises’ will be the ND’s opportunity, as well as that of all opponents of liberalism worldwide, to bury liberalism.