I have thus examined three conceptual tools for understanding the ND, all wedded to the ND’s assessment of the modern and postmodern conditions. Furthermore, I argued that the ND’s assessment of modernity is consistent with other revolutionary right-wing thinkers of previous generations from Charles Maurras to Ernst Jünger, as well as the desire of various political forces in the twentieth century to achieve alternative modernities. In this chapter, I begin applying the three conceptual tools to ND goals and practices. I examine how the ND’s views of modernity are inextricably linked to the goal of restoring what I call premodern cultural consciousness (or ‘race-based’ consciousness) to Europe’s ‘original’ peoples and the desire to raze liberal, multicultural Europe and erect in its place an imperial, federal, ‘Europe for Europeans’.
By ‘Europe for Europeans’, I connote the following: (1) a Europe that is united and sovereign politically and militarily and does not obey the dictates of any external power(s); (2) a Europe that is united to fight the perceived decadence of liberal universalism and capitalism; (3) a Europe that has a ‘long memory’ for the hierarchical, pagan, Indo-European past as opposed to the ‘imposition’ of ‘foreign’, egalitarian influences such as the Judaeo-Christian tradition and its secular derivatives liberalism and socialism (under the influence of French historian Georges Dumézil, de Benoist pointed to his preference for the ‘tripartite ideology of the Indo-Europeans’ in which the first function corresponds to political, juridical, and religious sovereignty; the second to the warrior function; and the third to the economic function. Liberal societies inverted the organic, hierarchical order of the past by privileging the order Dumézil considered the most base, namely, the economic function and thus denigrating the military and political functions) (de Benoist 2012: 164–5); (4) a Europe that rejects official multiculturalism and immigration, while seeking to create hundreds of homogeneous ethnic communities privileging ‘natives’ above ‘non-Europeans’ in citizenship, jobs, and government services; (5) a Europe no longer wedded to the ‘divisiveness’ of the right–left division (conceptual tool one), but instead united by its civilizational challenge to advance the interests of ‘Europeans first’; and (6) a united Europe in the foreign policy domain that is able to overcome its current cultural fatigue and ‘decadence’, as well as create heroic rebels (elites), which will recreate a Europe that is true to its peoples and its roots as one of the great geopolitical players of history.
As the ND longs for a ‘Europe for Europeans’, it makes it clear that it is against the EU as it is currently constituted. De Benoist (2012: 247) cites four main reasons for his rejection of the EU today: (1) the creation of the EU began from economic-commercial or technocratic premises, whereas political and cultural bonds should have been the basis for Europe; (2) the crafting of the European project was not from ‘below’ but from ‘above’ (that is, the European institutions of Brussels), thus creating a ‘Jacobin’ and ‘authoritarian’ EU; (3) after the fall of the Communist Soviet Union, the hasty integration of former communist states not sufficiently prepared to enter the EU; and (4) the lack of clearly defined geographical borders for what constitutes Europe (as demonstrated by the debate on Turkish entrance into the EU). Moreover, de Benoist (2012: 247) insists that the EU is a project that has ignored the will of its various peoples, thus creating a constant ‘democratic deficit’, institutional paralysis, and a ‘weakened’ Europe. While he sees the ‘political construction of Europe’ as ‘an absolute necessity’, it must have at its base not liberal multiculturalism but rather ‘the peoples of Europe’ – all born from the same ‘cultural and historical matrix’ (2012: 247). In short, Europe’s ‘natural vocation’ must be the creation of an ‘original culture and civilization’ that challenges Anglo-American mercantilism; a Europe that plays an ‘independent’ geopolitical role on the continent in a ‘multipolar world’; a Europe at the forefront of ‘regulating globalisation’ (de Benoist 2012: 248). In short, de Benoist states that Europe must strive to overcome its ‘existential uncertainty’ based on both ‘strategic’ and ‘identity’ considerations in order to mould a ‘Europe for Europeans’ in all its manifestations (2012: 249). It is rather significant that for de Benoist the two seminal events of the twentieth century were not a catalogue of genocides, the Holocaust, or the Soviet gulags, but the unification of Germany after 1989 and communist Vietnam’s victory over the USA in the Vietnam War with the fall of Saigon in 1975 (2012: 308). The two events contributed to de Benoist’s dream of a more powerful and united Europe with a ‘strategic’ vision and ‘identity’, as well as the weakening of Europe’s ‘primary enemy’ the USA.
While this goal of a ‘Europe for Europeans’ is dubbed ‘reactionary’ by its liberal and left-wing critics, the project is far from ‘anti-modern’. The ND calls for economic self-sufficiency for Europe’s diverse regions, technological progress, a degree of state re-engineering, and a secular, modernist political framework that is neither liberal nor socialist. This non-mainstream yet modernist political framework is viewed by ND thinkers as a rational alternative to liberal and socialist models of modernity. In line with conceptual tool two, the ND’s quest for alternative modernities seeks to abolish liberal democracy, erect a new European homeland called ‘Euro-Siberia’ (Europe including Russia) (Faye 2006), and implement ‘direct democracy’ along homogeneous, ethnic lines. Moreover, the ND’s new political synthesis supersedes the traditional right–left spectrum (conceptual tool one) and is based on creating a new civil or perhaps political religion (conceptual tool three).
Arif Dirlik (2007: 70–1) cogently argues that the contemporary age has spawned ‘multiple/alternative modernities’. ‘Multiple modernities’, he adds (Dirlik 2007: 81), signifies ‘the proliferation of modernities (in its multiplicity) or its universalization (with the multiplicities as local inflections of a common discourse but also as its agents)’. For Dirlik, ‘alternative modernities’ entails political projects of nativist renewal, which are anti-capitalist, post-colonial, and post-socialist. He highlights the uniqueness of the current age:
One fundamental aspect of our times, which cannot be stressed too much, is that it is a time of reversals when traditions and ideologies that were assigned by modernization discourse to the dustbin of history have made a comeback with a vengeance, empowered by reconfiguration in global relations and legitimized by the repudiation of Eurocentrism.
(Dirlik 2007: 70–1)
For the ND, despite the profound advance of modernization processes on the European continent, regional and national traditions ought to be the centre of political life and the key to the search for alternative modernities. Global relations will be reconfigured with continents or large civilizations becoming the key geopolitical agents of history. In an attack on assimilationist Eurocentric models of modernity and the global superpower status of the USA, the ND longs for a ‘multipolar world’ and a rejection of the colonialist zeal of the past. It longs for alternative modernities suited for changing times, even if some of its thinkers such as de Benoist have acknowledged the significance of a new type of modernity or postmodernity. The ND is not alone as China and states of the Global South from Brazil and Venezuela to the Islamic Republic of Iran and South Africa are all candidates ‘that claim alternative modernities’ (Dirlik 2007: 158). Moreover, the ND has also called for a broad alliance of anti-liberal movements of all political stripes worldwide in order to give coherence and seriousness to the quest for alternative modernities. The proliferation of alternative modernities worldwide, reason ND thinkers, will lead to the implosion of the prevailing US-led neo-liberal order.
The ND’s modernist political framework is not a recent discovery. As de Benoist (1979: 316) wrote in Vu de droite, ‘European civilization is not in danger because of technical progress, but because of the egalitarian utopia which seems to be gaining nowadays and is proving to be in contradiction with the needs of a modern society’. In short, unlike radical anti-modernists, de Benoist supports ‘technical’ aspects of modernity and ‘the needs of a modern society’, but not its ‘egalitarian utopia’, which produced liberalism, socialism, multiculturalism, feminism, and the ‘destruction’ of ‘rooted’ European ethnic communities. In this context, terms such as ‘anti-modern’ or ‘reactionary’ are insufficient for describing ND thinkers. While the past, tradition, and historical roots are fundamental to all ND thinkers from the most pro-technology and futuristic (Guillaume Faye) to the most traditionalist (Aleksandr Dugin), all nonetheless champion a modernist political framework that aims to revive premodern forms of cultural consciousness as a response to the fragmenting and alienating forces associated with the political and cultural effects of modernity.
I begin the chapter by highlighting the ND’s rejection of the cultural and political aspects of modernity, as well as desire to revive premodern forms of cultural consciousness. I then examine how the ND’s model of community belonging and citizenship is rooted in the notion of a homogeneous ethnic group (ethnos) above considerations for the populace (demos) along liberal democratic lines. I contrast the ND’s rejection of modern ‘representative’ models of democracy with different variants of ‘direct democracy’, including those that favour one’s own ethnicity above ‘foreigners’ irrespective of their place of birth. I conclude the chapter by pointing to the ND’s conception of the modern liberal state as the ‘enemy’ of ethnic groups worldwide and contradictions in respect of the ND’s views of multiculturalism. On the one hand, the ND calls for the end of immigration and especially non-European immigration to Europe. On the other hand, in a modernist vein that valorizes the ethic of authenticity, ND thinkers defend the right of cultural communities in Europe to maintain their ‘rooted’ cultures against the tendency of Western modernization processes (that is, capitalism, bureaucratic states, assimilationist language policies of national governments, etc.) to homogenize cultures. It is unclear if the ND has sufficiently resolved this contradiction, while the contradiction acts to create schisms within the revolutionary and radical right-wing milieux. As will be shown in Chapter 8, Guillaume Faye heavily criticized de Benoist for his nuanced anti-immigration stance that blames capitalism, globalization, and Americanization more than immigrants for France and Europe’s loss of culture and identity.
Modernity as ‘fall’
For the ND, modernity is equated in nearly biblical terms with the beginning of the ‘fall’ for humanity. In ND texts, modernity connotes processes of secularization, the triumph of individualism, the ‘dictatorship’ of ‘instrumental reason’, the cult of money, technological mastery over nature, the increasing participation of the masses in political life to the detriment of Europe’s political ‘health’, and the demise of organic, hierarchical, roots-based community values and institutions. Modernity, Roger Woods (2007: 39) explains in his trenchant analysis of the German New Right, ‘means the dissolution of cultural bonds and a lack of rootedness’. Liberalism, social democracy, socialism, feminism, and multiculturalism are seen as products of the revolutionary legacy of 1789 and the demise of cultural rootedness. These aforementioned ideologies are viewed as outgrowths of Judaeo-Christian egalitarianism and the politics of ressentiment (that is, generalized resentment and hostility) of the masses. In modern liberal societies, ressentiment is generalized throughout the body politic in a negation of ‘heroic’, spiritualized, and hierarchical European societies of the past. The sin of modern liberal societies, posit ND thinkers, is that the ‘slaves’ (masses) become the ‘masters’ (ruling elites). That is, the egalitarian political order is turned on its head contrary to the organic and hierarchical spirit of the pagan past. Moreover, liberal societies usher in the ‘death of immortality’ (Lefort 1986: 267) and the end of a spirit of heroic sacrifice on behalf of the cultural or ethnic community.
Whereas modernity is viewed suspiciously by ND thinkers, the ‘golden age’ before modernity cannot be a point of return. Rather, in a postmodern vein, ND thinkers embody a cultural project that is somewhat pessimistic about superseding modernity. Instead ND thinkers long to use technological and economic aspects of modernity in a communitarian, modernist mould, while rejecting the cultural and political aspects of modernity – liberalism, pluralism, feminism, the absence of shared meaning and spirituality, and especially multiculturalism. Moreover, the ND stresses the importance of conservative values, the favouring of one’s own community over outsiders (Woods 2007: 39), as well as the rejection of ‘uncontrolled immigration’. Modernity destroys all that is precious from the past, reason ND thinkers, while connoting ‘creative destruction that leaves humankind without fixed points to guide its thoughts and actions’ (Woods 2007: 39).
Given their profound unease with modernity, ND thinkers are somewhat pessimistic about the future. If modernity has destroyed community bonds and rooted regional and national cultures, then how can one create ‘a sense of community between people when all norms of behaviour are called into question’ (Woods 2007: 40)? As community breaks down under the weight of modernity and the individual is no longer connected to a ‘greater whole’, alienation, isolation, indifference towards others, and rampant egoism accelerates (Woods 2007: 40). Darwinian, individualistic capitalist market values accentuate these trends, while liberal society undermines the pillars of older organic societies: hierarchy, authority, order, and discipline (Woods 2007: 40). People want to sacrifice themselves for the ‘greater whole’, or a myth of transcendence, believing they will recover community cultural bonds that have been shattered with the era of modernity (Woods 2007: 40). Yet, ND thinkers argue, liberal societies are incapable of sacrifice for the ‘greater whole’ since they seek to abolish the ‘friend’ and ‘foe’ distinction posited by Carl Schmitt (1976) that alone defines the sphere of the political.
When it comes to resolving the ‘ills’ of the modern world, ND thinkers certainly do not speak with one monolithic voice. One ND sympathizer, the German philosopher Günter Figal (quoted in Woods 2007: 40–1) sees modernity as characterized by change and hence sees no going back to some ‘paradise’ lost before modernity:
Sooner or later it becomes clear that we do not just bring about change; we are subject to change. The changeable world is also the world in which we are objects of undeniable change. We are caught up in the vortex of events and there are no fixed or reliable points. The world cannot be taken back to some ultimate foundation. Rather it is subject to, as Nietzsche once called it, a ‘sovereign becoming’.
Against the ‘progressive’ nature of liberal and socialist projects in which history unfolds towards better and more evolved societies, whether the ‘end of history’ composed of peaceful democratic states or a Marxist international classless order, Figal and other New Right thinkers view the Enlightenment project in pessimistic, Nietzschean terms. Rooted cultural traditions, regionalism, national belonging, or common pan-European origins are far better guides of the future than modern notions such as freedom, democracy, and social justice. If modernity is a process of ‘disenchantment’ for ND thinkers, ‘re-enchantment’ will arise with ‘the creation of meaning’ (Woods 2007: 35). In this context, de Benoist (2004a:10) argues that
the question of identity appears, first, as a reaction to the dissolution of the social network and the disappearance of traditional points of reference brought about by modernity, and, second, in connection with the notion of the individual in the Western world.
For ND thinkers meaning is created from a long-term cultural project to undermine the dominant liberal-left and the ‘right to difference’ of cultures, regions, and nations against the multicultural homogenization of liberalism and neo-liberalism. For de Benoist (2004a: 16), modernity clashes with premodern cultures, which are seen as ‘reactionary’ relics of the past: ‘Emerging modernity constantly fought organic communities, and repeatedly discredited them as obstacles to human emancipation because of their ties to the past and to traditions.’
ND doyen de Benoist, Woods (2007: 38) insists, ‘is clearly in the feelgood camp’ in relation to culture and the themes of rootedness and identity. De Benoist (quoted in Woods 2007: 39) favours the revival of European regional or national consciousness and insists a human being ‘dies’ outside his or her natural cultural birth environment:
Everywhere a reawakening of the regions and relentlessly reemerging nationalisms. These efforts may or may not be well founded, but one thing is certain: whoever they are and wherever they live, people are bound to a country, to a piece of earth they regard as theirs; they are willing to fight to preserve its independence and integrity.
Against the ‘fragmenting’, de-sacralizing and de-territorializing tendencies of modernity, capitalism, and globalization, de Benoist sets the ‘comforting notion of tradition’ (Woods 2007: 39). As de Benoist (2004a: 62) puts it in respect of global capitalism: ‘The logic of capital is nihilistic in that it eradicates the symbolic, and achieves the disenchantment of the world, reaching thus the negation of all horizons.’ He adds that global capitalism has led to an ‘identity crisis’, ‘alienation and disorientation’, a ‘feeling of emptiness, a loss of self-esteem, uncertainty about what really matters’ (de Benoist 2004a: 63–4). The ND leader also points out that the loss of identity for individuals in modern societies means the ‘exit from the symbolic’; a ‘wandering in the perpetual present’ without a ‘goal or an end’ (de Benoist 2004a: 64).
To counter the fragmenting and de-territorializing tendencies of modernity and global capitalism, de Benoist valorizes regionalist and nationalist belonging, rootedness, and preference for ‘one’s own’ people above ‘abstract’ notions such as ‘humanity’, the ‘universal rights of man’, or ‘humanitarian intervention’. Following this logic, de Benoist and other ND thinkers posit the notion of a ‘Europe for Europeans’. That is, a Europe ideally cleansed of immigrants; a Europe where citizenship is dictated by biological, cultural, and primordialist considerations rather than the liberal, republican model based on non-racial criteria and civic activism. As a Polish New Right thinker influenced by the ND, Jaroslaw Tomasiewicz, put it (Sanromán 2006a), most people are ‘deeply rooted in their cultures’ and ‘I am not a citizen of the world’. This primordialist position is based on the German Romantic idea of the eighteenth century, especially influenced by Johann Gottfried Herder, which posits that nations are ancient and natural or organic phenomena springing from a common language group (Barry et al. 2003: 330).
Moreover, this ‘Europe for Europeans’ also posits a European geopolitical destiny governed by Europeans rather than the USA or any other foreign power. In ND publications, there is a sense that Europe is ‘conquered’ externally by the USA and internally by its pro-liberal egalitarian political elites (Sanromán n.d.: 5). The ND’s aim is the ‘regeneration’ of a ‘conquered’ Europe and the West. This process of ‘regeneration’ must begin, reasons the ND, through the demise of a liberal-left political culture and the triumph of a radicalized right-wing political culture throughout the continent.
Ethnos trumps demos
The primordial concerns of the ND for about 45 years have been its idiosyncratic rejection of multiculturalism and the creation of ‘rooted’, homogeneous ethnic communities within a pan-European context. In the ND worldview, individual rights, human rights, multiculturalism, liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, and administratively imposed equality all seek to destroy local, particular communities worldwide (Faye 1981). Even democracy, which the ND has valorized in recent years in the mould of ancient Athenian ‘direct democracy’, is a lower-order concern compared to the restricted notion of ethnic belonging. As de Benoist (1985: 84) argued in his analysis of democracy, democracy (by which he means an ethnically ‘pure’ and ‘organic’ democracy) is not necessarily ‘antagonistic’ towards ‘strong power’, ‘authority’, and the ‘selection of elites’ akin to neo-Machiavellian thinkers such as Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) and Roberto Michels (1876–1936).
In short, despite its ‘opening to the left’ and democratic discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, the ND is partly wedded to a counter-revolutionary tradition dating back to the eighteenth century that accords greater value to the community notion of ethnicity (ethnos) over rule by the people (demos). For the ND, the ethnos is the most ‘real’, first-order community identity. Put another way, the homogeneous ethnos plus political autonomy is the ‘real’ demos. As de Benoist (2003: 52) explains: ‘To some extent demos and ethnos coincide: democracy could not be conceived in relationship to the individual, but only in the relationship to the polis, that is to say, the city in its capacity as an organized community.’ It follows that de Benoist completely rejects liberalism because it is too individualistic and seeks instead a communitarian political system that fuses ancient democratic longings with ethnic homogeneity.
For the ND, the ethnos is opposed to the demos, particularly its modern ‘representative’ liberal, multicultural variant, which is viewed as a ‘false’ community imposed by ‘New Class’ administrators. Those ‘New Class’ administrators are liberal and left-wing politicians, European cultural institutions, and mainstream mass-media elites, which support the ‘technocratic’ EU as it is currently constituted. The ND argues that New Class ‘elites’ impose their policies on recalcitrant ordinary people, regions, and cultural communities throughout Europe and worldwide. In a Gramscian mould from the right, the goals of the ND are to cause a rupture between people and leaders and cultural elites on questions related to cultural identity, immigration, and notions of belonging, as well as undermine liberal multicultural notions of community and assist in the fall of a blocked, ‘totalitarian’ system (de Benoist 1979: 250–9).
Let me clarify the meanings of ethnos and demos. Ethnos connotes people of the same ‘race’ or nationality who share a distinctive culture. The ethnos can be constituted in biological or cultural formulations. The demos, on the other hand, is the personification of the populace, especially in a democracy, and comes from the Greek word meaning ‘the people’. Demos can mean either: (1) the common people or the populace, or (2) the common people in an Ancient Greek state. The ND seeks the triumph of ethnic belonging, as well as the fusion of homogeneous ethnos and demos in the mould of ancient Athenian democracy.
It should be pointed out that while liberal democracies generally attempt to privilege the demos above the ethnos, they also consider the ethnos in their respective national state institutions. To cite one example, German citizenship is essentially based on birth by blood (jus consanguinis), including a Right of Return law for ethnic Germans in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, but it also allows for citizenship on a more limited basis according to the birthplace on the soil of the state (jus soli). On 1 January 2000, Germany reformed its nationality law to make it easier for foreigners and their children living in Germany on a long-term basis to acquire citizenship. In addition, New World states such as the USA and Canada make it easier to achieve citizenship based on jus soli compared to a European state such as France where citizenship is in principle based on jus soli, yet easier to attain through jus consanguinis (provided that one of your parents is French). For example, the 1992 reform of the French citizenship code forced children born in France of foreign parents to request French nationality on reaching adulthood, instead of automatically granting it.
In liberal democracies, the principle of the demos generally trumps the ethnos because there are institutions, laws, and conventions that seek to advance, if not always perfectly, the rights of all individuals within the demos above the restricted connection to a biologically or culturally based homogeneous ethnos. It is on this point that the ND parts with the current French state, most European states, and the EU by insisting on the supremacy of the homogeneous ethnos above the entire demos in public life, citizenship rules, and welfare benefits. In practical terms, the ND supports ‘national preference’, ‘regional preference’, or ‘European preference’ in the allocation of citizenship, welfare benefits, state-subsidized housing, employment, or support for ‘native’ corporations.
For the ND, hierarchical, elite, ‘organic’ aristocratic rule is generally favoured above the rule of the demos, or the common people at large. De Benoist’s affinity for elitist thinkers is pronounced in his major work, Vu de droite (1979): Vladimir Lenin, Gustave Le Bon, Alexis Carrell, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Julius Evola. The ND’s call for ‘organic’, hierarchical societies mimics CR thinkers, national syndicalists, fascists, and ‘non-conformist’ thinkers of the interwar era. Yet, in the 1980s and 1990s, in conjunction with the rise of radical right-wing political parties like the French FN, the ND became fascinated with the ‘new populism’ and North American neo-communitarians such as Charles Taylor and Amitai Etzioni. The ND realized that in light of a post-war anti-fascist consensus, calling oneself a democrat scored you political points and that liberal democracies were themselves sensitive to internal critiques of democracy. In his assault on liberal democracy, the Anglo-American New Right, and the excesses of capitalist globalization, ND leader de Benoist (1998, 1996a) often sounded like a new leftist of the 1968 generation.
The liberal-left saw a problem with de Benoist’s alleged ‘leftist’ turn. It was not based on de Benoist’s valorization of the demos in its ancient Athenian sense. Rather it was in his primordial commitment to a political project based on the centrality of a homogeneous ethnos within the demos. De Benoist (1995b: 65–75) traced his fundamental views in respect of the demos and ethnos. He praised direct democracy in contrast to mass societies, which need political intermediaries because they have ceased to embody ‘collectively lived meaning’, but carefully circumscribes his notion of direct democracy. He claims that direct democracy is ‘primarily associated with the notion of a relatively homogeneous people conscious of what makes them a people’ (de Benoist 1995b: 75). This position stems from his distinction between community and society, borrowed from the German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies (1855–1935), where a community in contrast to society preserves a ‘social link’ of an ‘organic nature’ that allows a collectivity (ethnic group) to flourish based on ‘shared values’ (de Benoist 2012: 228). De Benoist (1995b: 75) elaborates his homogeneous, anti-liberal, and anti-multicultural model of democracy that is indebted to the notion of community:
The proper functioning of both Greek and Icelandic democracy was the result of cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared heritage. The closer the members of a community are to each other the more they are likely to hold common sentiments, values and ways of looking at the world, and it is easier for them to make collective decisions in the regard to the common good without the help of mediators.
Richard Wolin (2004: 22) summarized the ND preference for ethnos above demos: ‘The prerogatives of cultural belonging trump considerations of right.’ From this perspective, the ND’s democratizing impulses can be read as a secondary, by-product of its primary goal: the reconstitution of relatively homogeneous ethnic communities within the context of a ‘heterogeneous world’. The ND might long for a more ‘heterogeneous world’ to counter what they consider the ‘one-dimensional’ project of Pax Americana, yet internal cultural homogenization is a necessary prerequisite. For example, Belgian New Right thinker Robert Steuckers (in Southgate 2010) quotes Carl Schmitt’s notion of ‘European Grand Space (Grossraum)’ in which ‘Out-of-Space’ powers are ‘prevented to intervene within the frame of this Great Space’. Steuckers calls for a geopolitically ascendant ‘Europe for the Europeans’ to counter the USA’s Monroe Doctrine and its notion of ‘America for the Americans’ (really America for the United States of America). It is no accident that the title of a recent academic tract on the foreign and security policy of the ‘populist radical right’ in Europe is titled ‘Europe for the Europeans’ (Schori Liang 2007). Tom McCulloch (2006: 176–7) went further than Wolin and saw few differences between the ND’s exclusionary project and those of Italian Fascist and Nazi regimes:
Fascists, Nazis, and nouvelle droitistes systematically refused the rights and sought the active exclusion of the ‘other’, a homogenizing process that was based (deliberately for fascism and more ambiguously in ND terms) on the superiority of the ‘chosen’ race, people, or culture to the outsider. Despite Alain de Benoist’s (1979) claim that ‘no people or race is superior’, the ND recognized a hierarchy of ethnic relations, with positions on the societal spectrum determined by which ‘belonged’ to the dominant cultural or ethnic faction and which did not. By stigmatizing ethnic groups because they were not ‘French’ and through active dissuasion of cultural mixing and crossover, it seems logical to suggest that the exclusivity of the ND vision of halted immigration atomized communities and would lead to cultural ignorance and racial persecution.
The reconstituted ethnos
ND theorists such as Alain de Benoist in France or Marco Tarchi in Italy were too sophisticated to hark back to the race theories of the Nazis, open virulent anti-Semitism, or even defence of colonialism based on ‘white superiority’. A 1969 ‘secret’ GRECE memorandum urged its members to jettison ‘outdated vocabulary’ (Bar-On 2007: 36). When in Chapter 5 I made a distinction between exoteric and esoteric ideas, I certainly had in mind GRECE’s ‘secret’ memorandum. Thus begun a long-term campaign by the ND to capture European hearts and minds by carefully omitting language and themes connected to fascism and Nazism, as well as reformulating the discourse of the revolutionary right in the context of a decidedly anti-fascist and liberal post-war climate.
Piere-André Taguieff (1993–4) argued that the French ND went through three discourse changes in three decades in order to stay faithful to the notion of a ‘rooted’ and homogeneous ethnos: a defence of the ‘white man’ and colonialism along racial lines in the late 1960s; a biological perspective influenced by science, anthropology, and IQ findings in the 1970s; and support for the ‘right to difference’ of world cultures in a xenophile, ‘ethnopluralist’ spirit in the 1980s and 1990s. It is the third position that the ND favours in the contemporary period.
The ND’s discourse changes revolved around a cultural defence of the ethnos that sought to get rid of outdated, discredited racial or biological notions of the ethnos. The ND slogan of the 1980s was le droit à la différence (‘the right to difference’), which they co-opted from the French Socialists under President François Mitterand (1981–95). The slogan was in turn picked up by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s anti-immigrant FN. Taguieff (1994) correctly argued that ‘the right to difference’ can be utilized for diametrically opposed ends by racists and anti-racists; the right and left; liberal republicans and radical anti-Jacobins; radical separatists and republican integrationists. De Benoist (1993–4: 195) rejected the idea of liberal critics that ‘the right to difference’ was equivalent with racism, insisting it ‘is no different from recognition theory’. De Benoist’s (1999b) logic was that if he explicitly recognized other cultures according to cultural rather than biological criteria and rejected the notion of cultural superiority, then how could he be labelled a ‘racist’?
As a result of these discourse changes, the ND’s notion of the ethnos is today more nuanced, dialogical, and ambiguous compared to the 1960s or 1970s. This is best highlighted by the ND’s manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’. A comprehensive analysis of the manifesto follows in Chapter 7. In the manifesto, the ND rejects the ‘assimilationist’ bent of the nation-state and the ‘exterminationist’ spirit of colonialism. It also calls for ‘the right to difference’ of all communities in a xenophile spirit, while rejecting immigration as a cultural loss for both ‘host’ and immigrant societies alike. Moreover, the ND rejects both standard racism of the scapegoat variety and anti-racist discourses that seek to erode all ‘rooted’ forms of cultural particularism. Finally, the ND argues that liberal democracies seek to abolish cultural differences through the twin homogenizing forces of the global market and state-supported multiculturalism.
In the context of ‘the right to difference’ discourse, de Benoist (1979: 156) wrote these words in the late 1970s: ‘We have the right to be for Black Power, but on the condition of simultaneously being in favour of White Power, Yellow Power and Red Power.’ In the 1970s, de Benoist developed his radical, cultural differentialism after the wounds of French de-colonization in Algeria. In this worldview France would belong to the French, Algeria to the Algerians, and Vietnam to the Vietnamese (Bar-On 2007: 170). Le Pen’s slogans of ‘France for the French’ and ‘The French first’ were crude representations of de Benoist’s ethnic differentialism, although the historical genealogy can be traced to the royalist and anti-Semitic Action française and the racial legislation of the Vichy regime in the 1940s (Le Pen 1984; Bar-On 2007: 170).
The ND’s ethnic differentialism was clever and confusing. Liberal and left-wing communitarians such as Charles Taylor (1994) and Will Kymlicka (2001) endorsed a liberal multiculturalism that seemed to echo de Benoist’s ethnic differentialism. These scholars claim that the Québécois, Basques, or Catalans are in a struggle for survival against centralizing nation-states and thus condition their support for allowing new immigrants. If the aforementioned ethnic groups could maintain their dominance or immigrants assimilated into the dominant culture, then immigrants were indeed welcomed.
In the case of the ND, its ethnic differentialism was admittedly less liberal than the aforementioned neo-communitarian scholars. The ND’s differentialism ultimately promoted:
Some might be seduced by the ND’s focus on a ‘Europe of a hundred flags’, or the substitution of a nationalist for a regionalist discourse. Nonetheless, as James Anderson (2007: 14) trenchantly comments, ‘[t]here are good reasons for questioning the benign ideology of regionalism and its assumption that “small” is necessarily “beautiful”. Regionalisms, like nationalisms, can also be parochial, even xenophobic’. Or, as Alberto Spektorowski (2000: 352) points out: ‘The question remains whether there is a close correlation between a more regionalist and pluralist Europe and a more liberal Europe’. In short, we falsely assume that regionalism can be equated with more democracy and liberty in relation to the assimilationist tendencies of the nation-state or EU. Yet, the ND’s notion of a Europe des peuples (Europe of the peoples) or a ‘federation of ethnicities’ is conceived to undermine the ‘decadence’ associated with the liberal multicultural state, while promoting homogeneous ethnic solidarity at the regional level that both the state and EU are said to undermine.
For the ND, like the FN, the ethnos represents the ‘first order’ of loyalty. In a Telos interview in the mid-1990s, Taguieff (1993–4: 172) said this about the ND: ‘Roots, identities: These are the new absolutes.’ In the same Telos issue, de Benoist (1993–4) stated: ‘National identity is a real problem and so is immigration.’
The heightened attention to democracy in the context of valorizing the ‘new populism’ in the 1990s was certainly part of the ND’s survival strategy. For as late as 1985 de Benoist penned a book entitled Démocratie: le problème (Democracy: The Problem). The ND was no fan of the egalitarian ‘babble’ that was democracy. It argued that democracies endlessly discussed and deliberated social and political problems while never taking decisive courses of action. Moreover, democracies were often ‘hostage’ to ‘monied elites’, and so could not discuss particular problems for fear of losing support from its ‘paymasters’. In addition, modern democracies were too divorced from the people and their specific regions. For de Benoist (2012: 153–4), Jacobin-style nationalism per se was repudiated because the nation was equivalent with the people (that is, the dominant ethnic group), but the liberal-left ‘elites’ rather than people were the architects of the liberal republican and assimilationist state. Democracies were said to rarely represent their actual constituencies in an age where the EU and the nation-state were ‘too big’ to solve local problems. Conversely, modern democracies could not solve larger problems such as environmental disasters and international crime, which transcended national frontiers.
Obviously the ND rejected liberal ‘representative’ forms of democracy. Instead the ND longed for Athenian or Althusian variants of ‘direct democracy’. The first model harked back to the glories of Ancient Greece, the name of the ND’s main think tank being GRECE (‘Greece’ in French). The second model refers not to the Marxist thinker Louis Althusser (1918–90), but to the Calvinist theologian Johannes Althusius (1557–1638), one of the first European federalists and an ardent proponent of popular sovereignty. De Benoist (1999a) evoked the legacy of Althusius in order to cement his ‘democratic’ credentials. He recalled Althusius in order to delegitimize a universalist and individualist human rights discourse, which he argued trumped all other rights, whether ‘the cause of peoples’ or absolute, popular sovereignty.
Using a combination of Athenian and Althusian models of democracy, ND thinkers longed for a demos that culturally and ethnically corresponded to the dominant ethnos within a given European region or nation. That is, a demos that did not represent a ‘rooted’ ethnos in a homogeneous mode did not deserve the ND’s support because it lacked ‘popular sovereignty’. Most contemporary European states lacked ‘popular sovereignty’, reasoned the ND, because they were liberal multicultural states never freely constituted, but rather ‘imposed’ on the ‘sovereign people’ by ‘anti-national’ or ‘anti-regional elites’. Elite political and cultural classes, unlike the popular classes, did not have sufficient devotion to their respective ethnies (ethnic communities). Rather, ‘elitist’ pro-liberal and pro-multicultural politicians and cultural figures were hijacking democracy by splitting it from its connection to the common ‘destiny’ of particular, ‘rooted’ ethnic communities.
Like most of his contemporaries today, de Benoist (2003: 55) is a democrat but of the ancient rather than modern liberal or socialist moulds:
The democracy of antiquity was communitarian and ‘holist’; modern democracy is primarily individualist. Ancient democracy defined citizenship by a man’s origins, and provided him with the opportunity to participate in the life of the city. Modern democracy organizes atomized individuals into citizens viewed through the prism of abstract egalitarianism. Ancient democracy was based on the idea of organic community; modern democracy, heir to Christianity and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, on the individual.
As pointed out in Chapter 2, as the ND was created in 1968 it was no accident that the ND focused on the ethnos and, to a lesser extent, the demos. In the wake of the 1968 protests, we witnessed a return to ethnic and democratic appeals against both liberal and dogmatic Marxist ideologies: the rise of black separatism, radical nationalist anti-colonialism, feminism, regionalism, and calls for democratic participation in institutions from the state to workers’ councils (Nairn and Quattrocchi 1998). Moreover, ND leader de Benoist was especially indebted to the German philosopher and poet Johan Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803) and the tradition of radical cultural heterogeneity as beneficial for the evolution of humanity, which was far more important to the ND leader than a concern for democracy (Bar-On 2007: 132). This Herderian tradition stressed:
the flowering of the world’s cultural diversity and uniqueness; the inherent value and beauty of all world cultures; and the duty to preserve these cultural differences because they entail a rich multiplicity of different ways of feeling, seeing and living in the world.
(Bar-On 2007: 132)
In a celebrated passage from Vu de droite, de Benoist echoes the Herderian tradition: ‘What is the greatest threat today. It is the progressive disappearance of diversity from the world. The levelling-down of people, the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization’ (1979: 25). In the same passage, he argues that there is ‘joy’ in travelling the world, seeing multiple ‘rooted’ ways of living, and that people are ‘proud’ of their differences. He continues with these words, which certainly put him outside the liberal democratic orbit: ‘I believe that this diversity is the wealth of the world, and that egalitarianism is killing it’ (de Benoist 1979: 25). What Thomas Sheehan (1980) wrote about de Benoist’s anti-egalitarianism more than 30 years ago at the apogee of the French ND’s success still applies today:
This much is sure: the one thing Alain de Benoist does not like is egalitarianism – not equality, which he takes to be an impossibility, but the myth of equality, the very idea that men should be equal and should build societies on that notion. Not that he wants inequality per se. Rather, he wants diversity, ‘the right to difference,’ especially in racial matters, and with that a hierarchy, an elite, and a corresponding order, and, inevitably, then relative inequality.
Ethnos for the new millennium
In the new century, the ND has reformulated the notion of the ethnos against liberal and socialist assimilationist, state-led engineering projects, as well as exterminationist legacies of colonialism, Nazism, or fascism. While ND thinkers de Benoist and Champetier (1999) were not against all aspects of the modern world, they denounced the ‘modernist’ idea in which a ‘unique and universal solution exists to all social, moral, and political phenomena’. De Benoist and Champetier had particular animus for Christianity for its proselytism and moral universalism, as well as liberalism and socialism since their ideologues championed universal solutions for humankind in terms of the worldwide spread of liberal democracies, or the emergence of an international classless order. Instead they proposed an alternative variant of modernity (conceptual tool two) that rejected liberalism and socialism while paying homage to the centrality of the ethnic past and the rebirth of hundreds of homogeneous European ethnic communities in the near future. The ND’s reformulated ethnos is regional, national, federal, imperial, and pan-European in nature (Champetier and de Benoist 1999). The ND’s ‘Europe of a hundred flags’ is viewed as an antidote to nation-state assimilation, the ‘technocratic’ EU, the excesses of global capitalism, and cultural Americanization (GRECE 1998: 118–19). In practice, de Benoist (2012: 154) says he retains ‘sympathy’ for the regions of Europe without states, even as he seeks to preserve the ‘old nations’ of Europe. He urges older nation-states like France to opt for federalism in order to protect the cultural diversity of their regions, while suggesting that smaller regions and nations create federations in an age when even large states retain little sovereignty (de Benoist 2012: 154). All these changes, insists de Benoist, must take place within a pan-European framework. For de Benoist (2012: 213), a pan-European federalism is the best form of government because it connotes: (1) respect for subsidiarity (an organizing principle that holds that decision-making should be made at the lowest level possible); (2) localism in decision-making; (3) a defence of regionalism and autonomism against the assimilationist, Jacobin nation-state; (4) an economic perspective based on local self-sufficiency; and (5) the democratic participation of the people.
In ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ the ND is obsessed with the ethnos, albeit a smaller-scale regionalist variant than that of most right-wingers of the past. Suffice it to say for now, in numerous sections of the manifesto de Benoist and Champetier directly or indirectly express their concern for the ‘rooted’ notion of a homogeneous ethnos. In the manifesto, it is somewhat surprising that the ND came out clearly against immigration after publicly criticizing Jean-Marie Le Pen’s crude anti-immigrant scapegoat logic in 1990 (de Benoist 1990). Yet, it is less surprising that in section 3, clause 2 of the manifesto, the ND rejects racism and supports ‘the right to difference’ of cultures worldwide. In the post-9/11 climate, de Benoist (2001) claimed to be against both the ‘tribalism’ and ‘fundamentalism’ of US president George Bush’s administration and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network. Therefore, it is not surprising that section 3, clause 1 of the ND manifesto denounces ‘tribalism’, while paradoxically calling for strong (that is, ‘rooted’) ethnic identities.
It is rather stunning that the word multiculturalism is omitted from the ND manifesto. Yet this is carefully constructed. ND texts abound with criticism of multiculturalism as a destructive force for ethnic groups worldwide. Yet a public manifesto must be more careful since to be against multiculturalism is liable to get you pinned with the racist label. The ND has long tried to claim, along with the FN, that they are not racist. Moreover, liberal universalism, multiculturalism, the French state, and the EU undertake policies that are said to lead to the ‘destruction’ of French culture and its distinctive regions. These forces conspire to undermine ‘the right to difference’ of the ‘French French’ in their own country. In a perverse reversal of discourse, the ‘homogenizing’, multicultural liberal-left is viewed as ‘racist’ and an enemy of ‘the cause of peoples’ worldwide (de Benoist 1982b).
For the ND, the liberal multicultural state is, as one fellow traveller put it, ‘the enemy of the ethnos’ (Johnson n.d.). ND supporters such as Tomislav Sunic (1990: 103) fear both multicultural and multinational states:
A large nation coexisting with a small ethnic group within the same body politic, will gradually come to fear that its own historical and national identity will be obliterated by a foreign and alien body unable or unwilling to share the same national, racial, and historical consciousness.
For ND theorists and supporters, ethnicity is the primary basis of social life because it is what philosophers call a ‘first-order loyalty’. For Tomislav Sunic (n.d.), a Croatian intellectual sympathetic to the ND, the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s and the ‘artificial blending of people’ under Tito’s Yugoslavian communist state led him to the conclusion that there is a fundamental chasm between the liberal state and homogeneous ethnic cultural communities: ‘The rights of peoples are incompatible with universalism. Ethnic particularities cannot coexist in a state that places abstract principles of human rights over the real principles of peoples’ rights.’
The ND sees the liberal multicultural state as ‘destructive’ of ‘rooted’ ethnic communities worldwide from the Palestinians and Kurds to the Bretons and Basques. It was no accident that de Benoist (2012: 154) was a friend of Olier Mordrel (1901–85), an architect, Breton nationalist, and wartime collaborator with the Third Reich who founded the separatist Breton National Party and was exiled to Argentina after the Second World War. De Benoist conveniently ignores the former’s Nazi collaborationism, instead focusing on Mordrel as a ‘Breton’ activist courageously fighting against the assimilationist French state. For the ND, political elites throughout Europe are ‘destroying’ the cultural distinctiveness of Europeans through a combination of the capitalist market, EU bureaucratization, hedonistic North American cultural lifestyles, and pro-multicultural policies of the liberal state. ND thinkers insist the quicker ordinary people within the demos realize these grave ‘threats’ to European existence, the faster they will rebel against the ‘artificial’ and ‘elitist’ liberal multicultural state.
In a frontal attack on the liberal multicultural state, Sunic (n.d.) writes these telling lines: ‘Peoples are not the same; they never have been and never will be.’ He less than subtly suggests that violence is either endemic to ethnic groups or a reaction to the liberal universalist state, and that violence can only be reduced through radical ethnic separatism (thus making a mockery of the ND’s ‘right to difference’ slogan):
Ethnic groups can be compared to the inmates of large American prisons, who usually begin to respect each only when their turf is staked out and when their cells are separated by massive stone walls. Thrown into one cell they are likely to devour each other in a perpetual conflict over ‘territorial imperative’.
For Sunic (n.d.), the ethnos connotes ‘a people that has a common heritage and a will to a common destiny’. This ethnos, adds Sunic (n.d.), ‘exists despite superficial cleavages such as parties, interest groups, and passing trends in ideologies’. Most importantly, echoing Georges Dumézil, Mircea Eliade, and Carl Jung, Sunic argues that a people needs a collective, founding myth that gives birth to its cultural goals and political destiny. For liberal states, Sunic implies that multiculturalism is that myth. This myth must be destroyed and replaced by the myth of homogeneous cultural belonging within a regional or national pan-European framework. This myth would restore Europeans to their particular ‘rooted’ cultures and would constitute ‘authentic’ freedom based on what one ND supporter calls ‘the right to live with those with whom you share a common bond’. This myth would be the ND’s civil religion of politics (conceptual tool three), which would simultaneously supersede the right–left political division (conceptual tool one) and be grounded in the creation of an alternative modernist political framework (conceptual tool two).
It is no accident, then, that ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ is disproportionately concerned with the preservation of ‘rooted’ ethnic communities, as well as the desire to unite ethnos and demos in a homogeneous ethnic political framework. As will be further demonstrated in the next chapter, there is hardly a section in the manifesto that does not directly or indirectly express this preference for ‘rooted’, homogeneous communities. The manifesto clearly privileges ethnic belonging, as well as arguing that the only ‘authentic’ demos is a state, which is representative of the majority ethnos within a given nation or region. In a key passage from the manifesto, Champetier and de Benoist (1999) unite ethnos and demos: ‘The essential idea of democracy is neither that of the individual nor of humanity, but rather the idea of a body of citizens politically united into a people.’ This people is not all of the people or demos based on liberal or socialist frameworks, but a circumscribed, homogeneous people along rooted ethnic lines. In short, for the ND, ethnic belonging trumps concern for liberal democracy. If democracy is invoked, it is the Athenian or Althusian models rather than ‘representative’ liberal democracy. Moreover, democracy is valorized in order to revive that notion of homogeneous ethnic belonging. For the ND, the ‘real’ demos is a homogeneous ethnos within the context of a ‘heterogeneous, pluralistic world’.
The Italian LN, an anti-immigrant party, which has participated in national coalition governments, is one concrete model of a political outfit that closely mimics ND ideas. LN leader Umberto Bossi has called for a ‘rooted’ Italian federalism that especially respects the cultural diversity of the North, as well as calling for referenda to defeat Italy’s ‘elitist’ multicultural and ‘immigrant-friendly’ regimes. In LN propaganda posters, Italian Northerners are portrayed as equivalent to the indigenous peoples of the Americas in their struggle to preserve their cultures against the ‘steamrollers’ of the Italian state, multiculturalism, and globalization. The claim is disingenuous as the Northern Italians have not faced a recent history of genocidal practices like the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In any case, both the LN and ND have sought to create a new European rights framework in which the collective rights of the ethnic group trumps individual rights, as well as the rights of all the people (demos).
The ND’s multiculturalism in practice
There are ambiguities in respect of the ND’s relationship to multiculturalism. In its idiosyncratic rejection of official multiculturalism, the ND sits within the revolutionary right-wing milieu. Yet, in seeking to privilege the homogeneous ethnos above the liberal democratic notion of demos, the ND has often straddled pro- and anti-multiculturalism positions. As pointed out earlier, the notion of ‘the right to difference’ can be used for diametrically opposed ends: liberal, universal anti-racism versus cultural separatism or even racism.
We often assume that the revolutionary right is against multiculturalism, immigration, and minorities. They are certainly against democracy, as most of de Benoist’s works show, including his most famous text Vu de droite, which de-legitimizes all the major tenets of liberal democracy from popular rule to the idea of administratively imposed equality. Yet, few are aware that ultra-nationalist revolutionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries such as Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, and Edouard Drumont despised the homogenizing role of republican liberal democracy (Sternhell 1985). They argued that the rich multiplicity of French regional cultures were destroyed by the revolutionary legacy of 1789. Barrès claimed that Jews were representatives of a ‘different species’ and could never become French. He went so far as to indict the assimilationist colonialism of the ‘left’ Third Republic, its penchant for recognizing ‘non-national foreigners’, and its lack of respect for the cultural diversity of the vrai pays (real country) composed of its sub-national identities (Krulic 2007). Barrès decried the ‘inhuman’ nature of French republicanism, which ‘forced’ foreigners to become part of the assimilating country. For Barrès, the vrai pays was not the ‘imposed’ and ‘elitist’ Third Republic of Paris, but the decentralized and agrarian France of Alsace, Lorraine, and Brittany (Krulic 2007). Similarly, de Benoist holds French and EU ‘elites’ responsible for undermining the ‘real’ nations and regions of Europe by opening up Europe’s borders to non-European nationals. He has gone so far as to suggest that as Europe gave up its colonies it in turn became ‘colonized’ by non-European immigrants, US ‘cultural imperialism’, and a homogenizing neo-liberal capitalism. He now claims to reject four forms of ‘colonialism’: (1) unfettered non-European immigration to Europe; (2) the assimilationist policies of the French republican state and EU vis-à-vis the regions; (3) the racialist colonialism of the European past (for example, French Algeria); and (4) the cultural and geopolitical ‘colonialism’ of the liberal capitalist USA and its Western allies in Iraq or Libya.
Maurice Barrès proposed a ‘multiculturalism (and regionalism) of the right’ years ago that has been applied by some scholars to the contemporary ND and, in particular, Alain de Benoist (Spektorowski 2012, 2007). In the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries, de Benoist chimed in on the French hijab (veil) controversy when he defended the right of Muslim girls to wear their headscarves against the ‘radical secularism’ of the French Republic. Against Le Pen’s crude anti-immigrant polemics, de Benoist (in Warren 1994) stated: ‘Criticizing uncontrolled immigration doesn’t mean criticizing immigrants.’ The new ‘pro-multiculturalism’ stance could be dated to 1999 and infuriated many in the extreme and revolutionary right-wing milieux, including ND thinker Guillaume Faye. Faye argued that de Benoist’s stance pushed to its logical conclusion ultimately defended existing multiculturalism within France and Europe.
De Benoist’s (2004c) main quarrel was with the liberal-left mainstream whom he called the ‘ayatollahs’ of the French republican model. Unlike the ‘ayatollahs’ in Iran who defended theocratic rule, today’s ‘ayatollahs’ peddle modern, secular, Enlightenment values, which are ‘destructive’ of collective cultural and ethnic identities. This was not the standard revolutionary right of the past: predictable, shrill, racist, and openly intolerant. Yet, it was a stance designed to shame the ‘French French’ or other regional communities such the Bretons, Basques, and Corsicans to ‘wake up’ to the reality that Muslims have maintained their cultures away from home, while the French have lost theirs on their own soil. The headscarf controversy also provoked growing anti-Islamic sentiments in France and Europe, as well as a turn towards a ‘defence of militant secularism’ in order to preserve modern Enlightenment rationalism and the heritage of the West against radical Islamism (Coates 2004). In his piece ‘On Identity’, de Benoist (2004a: 55) writes, ‘The reproach [criticism] against immigrants is that they have their identity, while we have none.’ De Benoist also chastized the ‘French French’ for being increasingly indifferent to culturally ‘disastrous’ and ‘destructive’ forces: the homogenization of Western lifestyles, the narcissism of capitalism, immigration or demographic trends favouring non-white, non-Europeans, and even the seductive impact of North American films.
The unique ND take on multiculturalism was not a completely new stance. Recall that in 1990 de Benoist and GRECE president Jacques Marlaud publicly criticized the FN for its ‘sickening’ and ‘disheartening’ scapegoating of immigrants. As pointed out earlier, de Benoist also valorized the federal idea of a ‘Europe of a hundred flags’, as well as defended ‘the right to difference’ of ‘rooted’ Jewish and Vietnamese communities in France – presumably successful, law-abiding communities in France in contrast to Muslim Arab and African communities (de Benoist 1993–4).
At the same time, we should not assume that de Benoist had all of a sudden embraced immigration, minorities, multiculturalism, or representative democracy. In 2004, de Benoist (2004b) explicitly rejected the Rights of Man, a key aspect of liberal democracies, arguing that its universality was a threat to particular cultures. He continues to recycle and defend the works of CR authors, which were so close to fascism and Nazism ideologically (not to mention concrete collaboration of these scholars with fascist and Nazi regimes), because he perhaps laments the plebeian nature of those regimes. In a 2001 conference paper, he said that the key struggle of the century was of defending cultural communities and called for the right of people to work in their country of origin (Bar-On 2007: 201). He also supported a ‘heterogeneous world of homogeneous communities’, a key slogan of the German New Right. Some of his personnel, perhaps tired of the long metapolitical march through the wilderness, jumped ship to the FN in the 1980s. More ominously, in another multiculturalism (or anti-multiculturalism) moment in practice, in 1999 the ND’s anti-war manifesto was put out at the height of NATO’s war in the former Yugoslavia, which decried the ‘American war’ and never once expressed solidarity with one of the victims of ‘ethnic cleansing’, the Muslim Kosovar Albanians (Bar-On 2007: 82). Numerous left-wing and liberal scholars signed the manifesto, some no doubt aware of the ND’s anti-multicultural orientation and others perhaps less so.
Richard Wolin (2004: 22) argues that in the ND worldview, cultural belonging supersedes rights, with the ultimate goal being that European politicians sympathetic to the ND seek ‘to advance a type of parliamentary ethnic cleansing’. Wolin (2004: 22) is not shy to link the ND’s cultural project to historical fascism: ‘As with the proponents of interwar fascism, today’s antidemocrats seek to exploit the openness of the constitutional state to undermine democratic norms.’ In short, no longer content with older right-wing tactics such as extra-parliamentary violence or support for political parties, liberal democratic structures are utilized by the ND to shift attitudes and policies on immigration, identity, and cultural belonging across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, in the twenty-first century established political forces on both the right and left have been willing to co-opt the call of extreme right-wing political parties for a more restrictive immigration regime, particularly towards non-EU citizens. From the ND’s perspective, the ethnos might still be saved by a more awakened demos, which has steadily been sold the modern liberal ‘lies’ of universalism, the brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity, and multiculturalism.
For the ND, the defence of ‘rooted’ ethnic communities through the cultural terrain is, in Clausewitzian language, a ‘war by other means’. The ND insinuates what Jean Raspail in his novel The Camp of the Saints (1995) and British politician Enoch Powell in his infamous 1968 ‘rivers of blood’ speech spelled out unambiguously, namely, the coming, cruel ‘total ethnic war’ between Europeans and non-Europeans from the impoverished South. ND thinker Guillaume Faye believes that a ‘total ethnic war’ between Europeans and largely non-European Muslims has already begun. In 2008, Faye was fined for racial incitement by a European court for his La colonisation de l’Europe (The Colonization of Europe), which argued that Europe would gradually be overtaken by Muslims and that they had already ‘colonized’ some territories such as the banlieues (suburbs) of Paris. The 2005 riots throughout France, argued Faye, were a harbinger of a ‘cruel’ and ‘total’ ethnic war throughout the continent. A new European civil war would erupt between Europeans and Muslims, which Faye viewed as part of a new Reconquista to gain territories ceded to the Muslim ‘enemy’. Reconquista refers to the ‘Reconquest’ in the Middle Ages of European Christian territories from Muslim rulers in the Iberian Peninsula. It is instructive that Faye, like deceased al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden, has invoked the Reconquista metaphor in order to advance the notion of an apocalyptic ‘clash of civilizations’ between Muslims and Europeans.
Against the apocalyptic scenario highlighted by Faye, the ND generally argues that this European ‘civil war’ can be averted through ‘parliamentary ethnic cleansing’ in which ‘original’ Europeans vote to halt and even ‘peacefully’ remove non-Europeans from the body politic. If ‘parliamentary ethnic cleansing’ takes place according to ND plans, the demos would be equivalent with homogeneous ethnies throughout the continent. If the anti-immigrant discourse and disdain for liberal democracy spreads across the heart of the body politic, reasons the ND, then immigrants might choose a ‘peaceful’ return to their country of origins. Such a return to one’s country of origin will presumably benefit immigrants and non-immigrants alike.
If ND dreams are not fulfilled, there is always the distinct possibility of society plunging into open violence. ND thinkers and supporters such as Guillaume Faye and Tomislav Sunic prophetically warn of imminent ‘civil war’ between immigrant and ‘host’ communities throughout Europe. Yet, most ND thinkers begrudgingly give tacit approval to the non-violent rules of the game of a modern liberal society, while romantically praising revolutionaries of all political stripes who heroically died serving their ideals. Some ND-influenced thinkers such as Robert Steuckers (in Southgate 2010) are so politically incorrect that in defending hierarchical orders of the past they simultaneously defend fascist orders such as the Legion of Michael the Archangel in Romania and the Verdinaso in Belgium:
Fundamental political ideas are better served in my eyes by ‘Orders’ than by political parties. Orders provide a continuous education of the affiliated and stress the notion of service. They feel reluctant in front of the mere politicians’ petty ambitions. Such Orders are the Chivalric Orders of the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in Europe, the notion of fatwa in the Persian Islamic world as well as later experiments, including in the 20th Century (The Legion of Michael the Archangel in Romania, the Verdinaso in Flanders, etc.).
A third possibility championed by ND thinkers is a more restrictive immigration regime throughout Europe, which is gradually supported by the ‘silent majority’ of Europeans and political parties of all political tendencies. As early as 1993 the French FN called for ‘national preference’ in respect of government programmes, allocation of welfare benefits, and citizenship. The position has been supported by the ND, but using more politically correct language. Ultimately the ND views the liberal multicultural state as ‘colonized’ by immigrants and indigenous ‘traitors’. Yet, whereas in the past Europeans were colonizers from Algeria to Indonesia, ‘original’ Europeans are today the alleged ‘victims’ of colonization perpetrated by non-European immigrants, their ‘elitist’ liberal-left political supporters, and the ‘dehumanizing’ and homogenizing capitalist ‘new world order’ supported by the imperial power of the USA. A ‘colonized’ Europe can only restore its lost glories and create a ‘Europe for Europeans’ by superseding the ‘outdated’ right–left political divide as it is no longer suitable for a postmodern age (conceptual tool one); creating a secular and revolutionary political framework rooted in alternative modernities (conceptual tool two); and constructing a sacralized religion of politics based on the ‘worship’ of idealized, homogeneous ethnic communities of the pagan past (conceptual tool three).