In Chapter 1, I demonstrated the key role of Alain de Benoist in spreading ND ideas throughout the European continent and beyond in a transnational spirit. De Benoist (2012: 119) insisted that the aim of the ND was no rightist ‘international’, but that the ND’s influence spread to ‘many people in many countries’, owing to the translation of de Benoist’s books into about 15 languages; contacts in Russia with key political and military elites through Aleksandr Dugin; his key role in the creation of la Fondation Delta and the journal TeKos (which even borrowed the GRECE logo) in Flanders, Belgium; and especially the foundation of the Italian Nuova Destra, a cultural movement that ‘evolved’ in a manner ‘most comparable’ to the French ND. Yet, de Benoist received assistance in spreading his worldview from numerous intellectuals throughout Europe and even in the Americas. For example, Liber Amicorum Alain de Benoist (Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist 2004) gathered the testimonies of 60 Alain de Benoist sympathizers from various countries and political camps, which shifted the debate from whether de Benoist was a ‘crypto-fascist’ to a focus on the man and his moral values. As François-Emmanuël Boucher (2007: 93–101) points out, Liber Amicorum Alain de Benoist sought to propagate de Benoist’s ideas throughout Europe by stressing the French intellectual’s personal qualities: intelligence, ‘objectivity’, leadership skills, courage, honesty, generosity, ‘aristocratic spirit’, and his ‘magnetic’ abilities to ‘awaken’ and inspire others. By shifting attention away from the polarizing and polemical figure of de Benoist and his past, it was hoped that the book could help in spreading ND ideas through the notion that an ‘ethical’ man like de Benoist must necessarily be in favour of a politics we might all support. This was a clever use of metapolitics designed to win hearts and minds, while skirting the connections of ND authors to fascism, Nazism, Vichyism, CR authors, or the struggle for French Algeria.
In this chapter, I focus on three key messengers of ND ideas in France, Italy, and Russia. Guillaume Faye (France), Marco Tarchi (Italy), and Aleksandr Dugin (Russia) have all produced a body of intellectual works that are heavily indebted to Alain de Benoist and the pioneering legacy of the French ND. I have chosen the three figures because they represent a broad ideological spectrum of ND ideas. All three thinkers also reflect the three conceptual tools in respect of the ND: the desire to supersede right and left; the quest for an alternative modernist political framework; and the goal of creating a Europe-wide religion of politics that rejects liberal multiculturalism and seeks to restore ethnically homogeneous and re-spiritualized communities. In addition, the three thinkers under consideration highlight the ideological eclecticism of the ND, or what Roger Griffin calls mazeway resynthesis consisting of a pastiche of modern, premodern, and postmodern ideas.
As an ‘archeo-futurist’, Faye represents the most modernist of the three thinkers. Faye was especially critical of the ND’s pro-Traditionalist stances in the mid-1980s in journals such as Nouvelle École and Éléments, which dovetailed with the cultural movement’s anti-Westernism and valorization of India as the guardian of a polytheistic, Indo-European paganism eradicated by Christianity and the West (François 2009). Faye had more faith in the pioneering, modernist, and technological spirit of the West compared to the other two thinkers under consideration. Dugin embodies the most Traditionalist of the thinkers in question, although recall that in Chapter 4 I called Dugin a ‘right-wing modernist’. Dugin supports a geopolitical union between Islamic and Orthodox Christian civilizations as Traditionalist antidotes to the ‘materialistic’ liberal West and USA. Of the three thinkers under consideration, Tarchi is the most open to postmodern sensibilities, questions of shifting identities, multiculturalism, and the NL legacy of the 1968 generation.
Yet, de Benoist has not always seen eye to eye with Dugin because of the Russian thinker’s overt anti-Semitism. Also, the ND doyen distanced himself from Faye, who championed a harsher stance on immigration, particularly regarding immigrants from Muslim countries. Nevertheless, while the three thinkers are divided by geographical and national barriers, as well as tactical differences and differing solutions for Europe’s (including Russia’s) ‘ills’, they are united by the following characteristics:
It is important to note that from the list above it is clear that ND thinkers embody all three of the conceptual tools analysed in previous chapters. Numbers 1, 3, and 4 reflect the ND’s desire for creating a novel political synthesis that transcends right and left. The ND insists that its political synthesis is new precisely because its thinkers only emerged after 1968, thus digesting some of the political positions of the NL. The ND’s goal of erecting alternative modernities is reflected in numbers 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, and 11. Finally, the ND’s quest for a new, sacralized secular religion of politics focused on the pagan past and homogeneous forms of ethnic belonging is embodied in numbers 3, 7, 8, 9, and 11.
At this point, I thoroughly examine the worldviews of the three thinkers under consideration. I begin with Guillaume Faye.
Guillaume Faye: biography
Born on 7 November 1949, Guillaume Faye is a French journalist, writer, and political commentator. He graduated with a PhD from the prestigious Sciences Po, or Institut d’études politiques (Institutes of Political Studies) in Paris. In the 1970s and 1980s, Faye was one of the major thinkers of the French ND. Michael O’Meara (2010) points out that by 1973 Faye had become the ND’s ‘number two’ behind de Benoist, a role he would play until 1986. In 1973, Faye was appointed as the head of GRECE’s Secretariat for Research and Studies (de Benoist 2012: 115). A member of the principal ND think tank GRECE, Faye split from the organization and de Benoist’s leadership in 1986. Faye has been a journalist with the Paris-based conservative Le Figaro, which opened its pages to ND writers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Faye also wrote for Paris-Match and briefly had his own journal, J’ai tout compris! (I Understood Everything!). His major work, in which he outlines his idiosyncratic ‘archeo-futurist’ political vision, is L’Archéofuturisme (Faye 1998).
In the late 1980s, Faye took a hiatus from politics and metapolitics. In the early 1990s, he appeared on numerous French television programmes, including Skyman and Télématin on France 2. In 2000, Faye relaunched his journal J’ai tout compris! as a monthly edition. In J’ai tout compris! Faye highlights some of the themes that dominate his writings:
Unlike de Benoist, who has been keen to present the image of a non-reactionary ‘new right’, Faye has not been shy about flirting with radical right-wing journals such as the pro-FN Rivarol and Pierre Vial’s (a former GRECE secretary-general) pagan and blatantly anti-immigrant Terre et Peuple. Faye has also endorsed US White ultra-nationalist groups such as American Renaissance by participating in one of their conferences in 2006. O’Meara (2010) corroborates the chasm between the intellectually effervescent Faye and de Benoist’s more subtle metapolitical yet revolutionary project:
Less prolific and encyclopedic than de Benoist, the younger Faye was considered by some the more creative (le véritable moteur intellectuel de la nouvelle droite) [the veritable intellectual engine of the ND]. He played second fiddle, though, to the master, who seemed bent on blunting the edge of New Right radicalism. There was, as a consequence, a certain implicit tension between their different notions of the anti-liberal project.
In the early 1990s, Faye was especially critical of de Benoist’s ‘ambiguous’ stances: support for a ‘Europe for Europeans’ and rooted, homogeneous cultures, yet an admission that little could be done in the face of a Europe ‘colonized’ by immigrants (hence, support for ‘the right to difference’ of immigrants on European soil). Faye also argued that the ND’s flirtation with the NL only confused its core supporters on the right, while doing little to assuage the fears of liberal or left-wing intellectuals about a resurgent revolutionary right. Convinced that the ND was losing its support because of its ambiguous and impractical positions, in the late 1990s Faye began to lean towards the radical, identity-focused wing of the revolutionary right. In 2000, ND leader de Benoist criticized Faye for his ‘extremism’ in Area, a journal sympathetic to the Italian AN, particularly on immigration issues (Camus 2006). Like de Benoist, the AN offers a more nuanced interpretation of the immigration issue by blaming a ‘cruel capitalist system’ for immigration rather than immigrants themselves. Remember that it was in 1990 that de Benoist similarly attacked Le Pen for his ‘sickening’ and ‘disheartening’ anti-immigrant scapegoating. Yet, the gap between de Benoist and Faye was merely about ‘optics’ as both thinkers consistently argued for the end of immigration to Europe because immigration ultimately represented a ‘cultural loss’ for both immigrants and ‘host’ societies.
In 2007, Faye published La Nouvelle question juive (The New Jewish Question) in which he vociferously attacked Holocaust deniers, Third Positionists, national revolutionaries, radical Catholic anti-Semites, and anti-Zionists from Alain Soral to Christian Bouchet for their ‘nonsensical anti-Zionism’. In their anti-Zionism, extreme right-wingers and left-wingers united in their hatred of Israel’s existence. Yet, right-wingers were making a grave error since the real enemy was a resurgent political Islamism, insisted Faye. Israel could be Europe’s ally in fighting political Islamism, he argued.
No doubt wedded to a lingering anti-Semitism in rejecting the existence of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state, some of the extreme right-wing milieu called Faye a ‘national-Zionist’ and a ‘paid agent’ of Zionism in a conspiratorial tone. It should be pointed out that some sectors of the ND, including Troy Southgate in Britain, are conspicuous in their anti-Zionist, anti-Israel polemics. For example, in one interview Southgate (2001) stated: ‘For us personally there is no question that the world is being ruthlessly directed (but perhaps not completely controlled) by International Zionism.’
Faye even denounced de Benoist’s philo-immigrant positions in the new millennium as pro-Islamic and pro-immigrant ‘collaboration’. The language was purposeful and played on French Vichy collaboration with Nazism. It implied that today’s ‘collaboration’ between intellectuals, established political parties, and left- and right-wing political movements supporting a pro-immigrant regime was worse than Vichy collaboration because it was leading to the ‘extinction’ of white Europeans. Elements of the extreme and revolutionary right-wing milieux hit back at Faye, including Pierre Vial, who took his distance from Faye.
Faye has a long list of publications with pro-GRECE publishers such as Copernic and Éditions du Labyrinthe. Some of these include the following: Le Système à tuer les peuples (1981), L’Occident comme déclin (1984), Les Nouveaux enjeux idéologiques (1985a), Nouveau discours à la nation européenne (1985b), La Colonisation de l’Europe: Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’Islam (2000), Pourquoi nous combattons: Manifeste de la résistance européenne (2001), Balades au cœur de l’Europe païenne (2002), La Convergence des catastrophes (written under the pen name Guillaume Corvus) (2004a), Le Coup d’État mondial, essai sur le nouvel imperialisme américain (2004b), and La Nouvelle question juive (2007).
La Nouvelle question juive (2007), L’Archéofuturisme (1998), and Le Système à tuer les peuples (1981) most enhanced Faye’s notoriety inside and outside the extreme and revolutionary right-wing milieux. Faye’s L’Archéofuturisme was translated into English as Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (Arktos Media) (Faye 2010a). Also, the Guillaume Faye Archive (2011) includes Faye’s works in French, as well as Portuguese, Spanish, English, Italian, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Catalan. Yet, without doubt Faye’s corpus of work repeats ND themes, albeit with a more pressing and catastrophic tone in respect of the dangers of Europe’s ‘uncontrolled’ immigration regime. These themes include the following:
Faye’s archeofuturism
I now focus on Faye’s (2010a, 2010b) L’Archéofuturisme. The work in question is an example of the ND’s quest for alternative modernity through ideological mazeway resynthesis, which is neither liberal nor socialist (conceptual tools one and two). In L’Archéofuturisme Faye insists that there will be a massive world-civilizational crisis within two decades provoked by what he calls a ‘convergence of catastrophes’. This ‘convergence of catastrophes’, Faye argues, ‘will bring down modernity, its worldwide saga and its global ideology’. He posits that ‘an alternate vision of the world will necessarily impose itself’. In the world after the ‘catastrophes’, Faye calls for the construction of a pan-European empire based on a union of essential, ‘archaic values’, and the hyper-modern, aggressive exploitation of science and technology. He states that the ‘convergence of catastrophes’ will ‘bring down modernity’, but this claim is partially contradicted by his Promethean and Faustian valorization of technological innovation. For Faye, the concept of ‘archeofuturism’ connotes the union of modern, postmodern, and premodern values in line with the search for alternative modernities (conceptual tool two). Faye is adamant that the current neo-liberal order will one day give way to ‘archaic social configurations in a new context’.
Faye (2010b) highlights the ‘archeofuturist’ conception of the world, which is consistent with the notion of ideological mazeway resynthesis and the ND’s quest for alternative modernities:
It is necessary, first, to return the word ‘archaic’ to its true meaning, which, in its Greek etymon archê, is positive and non-pejorative, signifying both ‘foundation’ and ‘beginning’ – that is, ‘founding impetus’. Archê also means ‘that which is creative and immutable’ and refers to the central concept of ‘order’. To attend to the ‘archaic’ does not imply a backward-looking nostalgia, for the past produced egalitarian modernity, which has run aground, and thus any historical regression would be absurd. It is modernity itself that now belongs to a bygone past.
It should be noted that for Faye the ‘archaic’ foundations for Europe will be the polytheistic, pagan, and ‘rooted’ premodern past (that is, in line with conceptual tool three, the desire for a new religion of politics that pays homage to pre-Judaeo-Christian civilization and the ethnically homogeneous ‘ancestors’). Yet, he makes it clear that the ‘order’ created by the pagan past has nothing to do with ‘a backward-looking nostalgia’. It also has nothing to do with ‘the past produced egalitarian modernity’. Faye, like de Benoist, insists that the modern world is nearing its end, or that we are already living in a postmodern age. In short, any ‘historical retrogression’ is for Faye ‘absurd’, this implying that while modernity might be dead or dying, its historical phase will form a part of the dawning of the new epoch. Moreover, in a postmodern vein, Faye argues that modernity itself ‘now belongs to a bygone past’. The upshot is that aspects of modernity will be superseded by a combination of modern and postmodern tendencies and modes of analysis, hyper-modern technical methods, and a revival of premodern, pagan values.
When Faye calls for a return to premodern values, he is, like Armin Mohler (the man most responsible for influencing the ND’s support for German CR thinkers), espousing a spherical conception of time in which a return is possible, but one never returns to the same place as the past. In the spherical conception of time, the thoughts of the past, present, and future are inextricably bound. The past can return, but it is related to the present and future. Moreover, if the past returns, its significance changes because we all live under the spell of different epochs with their differing values. Such a conception of the world sees man as unique in moulding his future (that is, free of an external force such as a god, the liberal notion of progress, or the iron laws of Marxist historical materialism). In a Nietzschean vein, nothing is impossible, for man is the ultimate shaper of his destiny. Faye, like CR thinkers of another epoch, insists that all revolutions connote a revision of received ideas. Revolutionary European ‘supermen’ and ‘heroes’ are necessary to take the ‘tired’ continent out of its current phase of liberal multicultural ‘decadence’. Moreover, in returning to ‘archaic configurations’ Faye understands that the return is no mere repetition of the past because these configurations are transformed by their new epochal contexts. Yet, Faye understands that the return to the ‘archaic’ is necessary because, like Martin Heidegger, he believes that all that man has accomplished that is ‘great’ was due to him being rooted to a tradition. Finally, this return to the ‘archaic’ is, as de Benoist has pointed out, within us; will be ‘original’ for each generation since history repeats itself without ‘serving up the same dish twice’; and entails an adventurous journey to the ‘origin of our being’. For de Benoist and Faye, the journey to our ‘origins’ necessarily means that the highest destiny of man is to identify with his people; to long for what in Chapter 6 I called a ‘Europe for Europeans’. In a Nietzschean mould, this means ‘the longest memory’ for the hierarchical, Indo-European, and pagan past. From ‘the longest memory’ springs a revolutionary desire for a primordial return to the origins of ‘European Being’, long before the imposition of a ‘false’ linear conception of time grounded in Judaeo-Christian egalitarianism. Nietzsche, like Faye, is convinced that the Ancient Greeks cannot come back, but allowing the spirit that produced the Ancient Greeks or Indo-Europeans to thrive would lead to the ‘regeneration of history’. Moreover, Faye, like Nietzsche and de Benoist (2012: 118, 55–6), longed to be a ‘good European’ by promoting a philosophy of ‘becoming’ (that is, transformation and even revolution) that would smash all the idols of the Judaeo-Christian-inspired liberal-left: progress, happiness for all, the Rights of Man, the vengeance of the weak, a fake moralism, etc.
Does Faye view his ‘archeo-futurist’ conception of the world as ‘Traditionalist’? Here is his answer, which rejects the universalist and egalitarian ‘tradition’ born out of the French Revolution:
Is ‘archaism’ a form of traditionalism? Yes and no. Traditionalism advocates the transmission of values and, correctly, combats the doctrines of the tabula rasa. But it all depends on which traditions are transmitted. Not every tradition is acceptable – for example, we reject those of universalist and egalitarian ideologies or those which are fixed, ossified, demotivating. It is surely preferable to distinguish from among various traditions (transmitted values) those which are positive and those which are detrimental.
(Faye 2010b)
Faye (2010b) posits a monumental series of ‘catastrophes’, which he insists ‘are already archaic’ and ‘disturb the contemporary world and threaten egalitarian modernity’ rather than modernity per se:
All these issues, writes Faye, ‘take us back into age-old questions, consigning to oblivion the quasi-theological political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. As the modern world only brought us ‘catastrophes’, Faye argues, humanity will necessarily ‘return to archaic values’, or what he calls ‘biological and human (anthropological) values’. In ‘The Essence of Archaism’, Faye (2010b) argues that these ‘archaic values’ will include:
If we examine Faye’s 13 positions, nine of the positions in question are designed to inspire a ‘revolt against the modern world’ (that is, political and cultural ‘revolt against the modern world’) and revive organic, hierarchical, ‘rooted’, and ethnic forms of belonging. Yet, Faye does not call for an ordinary ‘revolt against the modern world’. A hierarchical political system, science and technology, and duty to ‘a diachronic community of shared destiny’ (that is, an ethnically based community of ‘shared destiny’ throughout the ages, which is rooted in the here and now) are designed to achieve a more efficient, totalizing, and non-mainstream model of modernity (that is, alternative modernity).
Moreover, Faye (1996) penned a piece in Lutte du Peuple entitled ‘Le traditionalisme: voilà l’ennemi’ (‘Traditionalism: This Is the Enemy!’), in which he derided elements of the ‘anti-liberal right’ milieux for being fixated with an ‘infantile’ Traditionalism in the mould of Julius Evola and Martin Heidegger. Faye argued that the errors of Traditionalism were the following:
In essence, Faye is light years away from a complete and total rejection of the modern world. He is the most hyper-modernist of the ND thinkers under consideration. Note that Faye’s ‘community of shared destiny’ is ‘diachronic’, meaning the community is in a state of change or becoming over time. In short, a ‘diachronic community of shared destiny’: (1) recalls the ‘archaic’ values, rites, and institutions of pagan European ‘ancestors’; (2) utilizes technical aspects of the modern world and banishes its ‘corroding’ political and cultural effects such as equality and the republican legacy of 1789; and (3) imagines a post-catastrophe future and the general contours of a new, postmodern Europe in its political, economic, social, and spiritual totality. A ‘diachronic community of destiny’ ultimately embodies both ideological mazeway resynthesis and the search for alternative modernities (conceptual tool two). The ‘diachronic community of destiny’ is ‘archeofuturist’ in that it fuses modern, postmodern, and premodern philosophies. It is a ‘community of destiny’ that is certainly not ‘reactionary’ or ‘anti-modern’ in the sense that it is critical of mere Traditionalism and its desire to merely return to a ‘golden age’ of premodern ‘archaic’ values. Moreover, Faye’s ‘community of destiny’ will supersede traditional conservatism, liberalism, and socialism (conceptual tool one), while answering the crisis of meaning of liberal societies through the creation of a new, secular religion of politics that pays homage to the ancestors, traditions, homogeneous ethnic solidarity, and a hierarchical social and political framework (conceptual tool three).
In line with de Benoist’s Nietzschean nominalism, Faye continues a modern (or postmodern) tradition in which values are forged out of the chaos and nothingness of the universe. Citing Nietzsche’s notion of ‘the eternal recurrence of the identical’, Faye argues Europeans ‘will in some way revisit these archaic values’, whether the worship of ancestors, sacerdotal organization, initiatory rites and tests, or the revival of ethnic and popular traditions.
Yet, Faye has a special animus for the new ‘enemy’ of Europeans, which is not socialism, communism, or liberalism, but rather Islam. As he explained in an interview with Flemish magazine Menzo (2005),
For it [Islam] is not simply a religion, but a political doctrine. And this doctrine is imperialist. Twice before in history it has sought to conquer Europe. The first time it was stopped by Charles Martel at Poitiers [in 732]; the second time, in the 17th century, it was beaten back at the walls of Vienna. Islam’s present conquering ambition was revived in Egypt in the 1920s. I’m convinced that certain Islamic leaders believe the moment is now right for a third offensive against the West. As the former Algerian president Houari Boumediène once boasted, the Islamic world today carries in the wombs of its women the weapons that will conquer Europe.
Faye exhorts Europeans to fight Islam both at Europe’s gates and beyond by recalling their pagan, hierarchical, and martial values as opposed to their modern, ‘free market values’. The project of ‘fighting Islam’, Faye insists, will necessitate a destruction of liberalism, a project of demographic renewal for white ethnic European groups, the halting of non-European immigration to the continent, and pan-national European ethnic solidarity against the geopolitically ascendant Muslim world.
In addition, Islam will be defeated not through ‘lax’ liberalism, multiculturalism, egalitarianism, and Enlightenment values, but by recalling the ‘archaic’ values of the past, argues Faye (2010b):
True to human nature from time immemorial, these archaic values reject the Enlightenment error of the emancipation of the individual, which has only ended in the isolation of this individual and in social barbarism. These archaic values are just, in the ancient Greek sense of the term, because they take man for what he is, a zoon politicon (‘a social and organic animal integrated into a communitarian city-state’), and not for what he is not, an isolated and asexual atom fitted out with universal but imprescriptible pseudo-rights.
Faye highlights a discourse that supports Samuel Huntington’s (1993) thesis of a ‘clash of civilizations’. In the period before the 9/11 events led to a conflation in some mainstream media and political circles of Islam and fundamentalist Islamism, Faye (2000) already saw Islam as the ‘principal enemy’ since it was colonizing Europe through ‘uncontrolled immigration’ of both the legal and illegal varieties. Faye’s L’Archéofuturisme, which is no less politically incorrect on immigrants and the steady Islamicization of Europe, was written two years before La Colonisation de l’Europe. Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’Islam (The Colonization of Europe. The Truth about Immigration and Islam).
Faye’s style and solutions
Guillaume Faye’s style is certainly different from that of ND leader de Benoist. Faye is more politically incorrect, openly hostile to Islam, and less shy about openly calling for a white Europe cleansed of non-European immigrants (that is, as posited in Chapter 6, a ‘Europe for Europeans’). When the ND said it would focus on the newness of the movement, or on the ‘new’ rather than ‘right’, Faye simply marched to his own beat. He refused to pay lip service to the ‘subterranean’ ND project, which tended to hide or ignore aspects of its members, organizations, journals, and influences that did not fit with the dominant post-war anti-fascist, liberal consensus. Faye (2007) even angered elements of the revolutionary right-wing milieux in France and Italy (including ‘Maoist-Fascists’ or ‘Maoist-Nazis’ such as Franco Freda and Claudio Mutti, a Traditionalist and revolutionary Italian New Right thinker who converted to Islam). François (2009: 9) points out that Faye was outraged by the aforementioned European radical Traditionalists and anti-Semites, who allied with Traditionalists (Islamists) in the Muslim Arab world against Israel and liberal democracy in order to destroy ‘internationalist’, ‘cosmopolitan’ (codeword for ‘rootless’), and ‘plutocratic Judaeo-capitalism’. There are even elements of the ND, such as Troy Southgate in Britain, that challenged Faye’s pro-Israel positions with a virulent anti-Zionism, while proclaiming ‘crude racial separatism, open antisemitism, homophobia, and antifeminism’ (Sunshine 2008: 8).
While the ND tended to avoid open racism and anti-Semitism, the revolutionary right-wing milieu and its supporters cannot easily abandon the ‘socialism of fools’. Certainly one finds in Europe today elements of the revolutionary right and left uniting in their hatred of the state of Israel, or an anti-Zionism that can often be a mask for anti-Semitism precisely because it denies the collective right of the Jewish people alone among the peoples of the world to have the right to a sovereign state (Taguieff 2004). Due to its anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-liberal turn in the mid-1980s, it was inevitable that the ND under de Benoist would be critical of Israel, the key Middle Eastern ally of the liberal USA. Geopolitically, the USA–Israel alliance also undermined France’s traditional ‘friendship’ with the Arab world. It must be remembered that in 1967, de Gaulle, a conservative rightist leader, had called the Jews an ‘elite’ and ‘domineering people’ in the wake of Israel’s stunning victories against the Arab world in the Six Day War. In short, Faye broke the taboo of the revolutionary right-wing milieu by making Israel an ‘ally’ in the ‘war’ with a resurgent Islamic world. For the revolutionary right in general, Israel as a liberal and allegedly ‘Western outpost’ was backed militarily, politically, economically, and morally by the liberal USA, now seen as ‘the main enemy’ in the post-Cold War era.
Faye (2009b) does not mince his words in his criticism of the revolutionary right-wing milieu, which is slavishly anti-Israel, anti-Zionist, anti-Semitic (for example, its sympathy for Holocaust denial or revisionism), anti-American, and romantically embraces the Islamic world:
Some suffer from an obsessional antisemitism, coupled with a kind of Stockholm Syndrome which makes them love the true enemy. The Muslims will not hold any liking of them for it: the French ‘identitarians’ who perhaps admired the actions attributed to bin Laden will have their throats cut like the others! Islam is a religion of force which leads certain nationalist militants to prostrate in front of the conquering religion with the fascination of a colonized people. But even if they convert, which is already the case for some, they are always, as Occidentals, only second-class Muslims. Pro-Islamism in the nationalist Right is common enough. Plus these people are ‘nazis’ in the most primary sense of the word, anti-Americans in the most idiotic sense of the term, and plus they are pro-Muslims, without knowing either America or Islam besides. They are fascinated by the neo-romantic illusions which they have of Islam. In circles which claim to be radical, there is an infantile reaction: these people are perhaps extremists, but not radical, because the radicals are those who go to the root of things.
Israel was not the only score that Faye had to settle with the ND. Faye tended to accuse de Benoist, Tarchi, and other ND intellectuals of being too obsessed with a metapolitics, which for him had little political impact and kept intellectuals in their ivory towers. In an interview with The Occidental Quarterly, Faye (2009b) spoke of an expansion of ND ideas along multiple tracks:
One needs parties, publishers, associations, trade unions. It is necessary that our ideas be present in civil society. But all the forms of action are necessary: we should not oppose metapolitics to politics. All action, political, cultural, should be connected by the same vision of the world. It is not a strategy of withdrawal, but of spreading out, comparable to that of the Trotskyists – who are today at the head of the State and of the Catholic Church! – from the ’60s.
It is the metapolitical ‘fixations’ of the ND, or the notion that ideas alone will ultimately rule the world, that led Faye to break with GRECE in the mid-1980s. He accused the ND of being too intellectual and nostalgic, as well as lacking in the willpower of the Nietzschean ‘hammer’ that could really change the world in a revolutionary way. In a piece penned for Elementos, entitled ‘El Balance de la Nueva Derecha’, Faye (n.d.: 38–51) lamented the ND’s ‘marginalization’ related to French and European political debates starting in the mid-1980s and beyond, which he blamed on external factors such as a politically correct liberal-left cultural elite, but focused on internal factors that the ND did little to change: (1) the growth of the FN and a superficial understanding of Antonio Gramsci that focused on hegemonic ideas yet excluded practical political strategies and concrete economic and social issues; (2) in the face of mass media and cultural censure, the ND slavishly accepted its ‘silencing’ without hitting back at its opponents; (3) a weak editorial strategy in its journals in relation to modern telecommunications systems; a strategy that failed to properly target the educated public and key political elites; (4) an antiquated organizational approach to solving problems that is inadequate for a ‘school of thought’; (5) an inconsistent ideological corpus that, on the one hand, supports an imperial, United Europe, and, on the other hand, a discourse that is ‘ethnopluralist’ and ultimately pro-immigration (other inconsistencies included the ND’s leftist drift, pro-paganism, anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism, and pro-Third World stances, which were all confusing to its natural constituency on the right); (6) a doctrinal weakness in tackling issues related to science and the economy; and (7) a failure to propose positive solutions based on political actions.
Faye (2001) made his solutions for Europe clear in his Pourquoi nous combattons (Why We fight). Here are his ten reasons for continuing the revolutionary struggle, which fit well within an ND worldview and the search for alternative modernities (conceptual tool two):
Aleksandr Dugin: pole of traditionalism
Whereas Guillaume Faye represents the hyper-modern pole of the ND, the Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin epitomizes the ND’s Traditionalist wing. Dugin is also an ND-influenced thinker with the most explicitly political orientation, including important connections to the Kremlin and the Russian military (Dunlop 2003). Of all the ND thinkers and sympathizers under consideration (including its leader Alain de Benoist), Dugin has attained the most substantive political influence. In Mémoire Vive, de Benoist (2012: 119) points out that history is ‘unpredictable’ and recalls with pride his invitation by Dugin to visit Moscow to speak to generals of the former Red Army at the Russian military academy; the meeting with deputies of the Soviet parliament; his press conference at the newspaper Pravda; and giving sociology and geopolitics courses at the Lomonosov University in Moscow and the University of St Petersburg.
Born on 7 January 1962 in Moscow, Dugin gained his doctorate in political science and is today a prominent geopolitical thinker. He openly longs for Russian ultra-nationalist revival and expansionism:
For the Russian people to survive in these hard circumstances, for the Russian nation’s demographics to rise, for the improvement of its severe condition in the ethnic, biological and spiritual sense, it is necessary to appeal to the most radical forms of Russian nationalism. Without it, no technical or economical measures will yield any results.
(in Shekhovtsov 2008: 496)
Andreas Umland (2009b) has accused Dugin of pro-fascist tendencies. The Russian thinker has been accused of fascism because of his sympathy for Nazism, as well as vitriolic, ethnically tinged ultra-nationalism combined with geopolitical theories that call for the restoration of the Russian empire and the return of territories in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea with Russian-speakers to Russia. Dugin is also a leading organizer of the National Bolshevik Party, National Bolshevik Front, and Eurasia Party, which all promote an anti-Western, anti-American, anti-liberal, and socialist ultra-nationalist authoritarianism, as well as the union of Traditionalist Orthodox and Asiatic and Islamic civilizations engaged in a ‘clash of civilizations’ with the West (what he calls ‘neo-Eurasianism’).
Dugin borrowed from the cultural metapolitics of Alain de Benoist while the latter briefly served on the editorial board of Dugin’s journal Elementy, which modelled itself on French ND journal Éléments (Bar-On 2007; Shekhovtsov 2008, 2009a, 2009b). An important Dugin scholar situates his idiosyncratic notion known as ‘neo-Eurasianism’ within the ND or European New Right worldview (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 697): ‘Dugin’s Neo-Eurasianism implies a very specific type of nationalism, namely the nationalism of the New Right, and can itself be considered a Russian version of the broad pan-European movement called the European New Right.’
Dugin is not politically correct in respect of his fascist revisionism, anti-Semitism, and extreme ultra-nationalism. Nonetheless, Shekhovtsov (2009b) points out that Dugin followed de Benoist in his fixation on ideas as being the motors of world revolutionary change and radical ethnopluralism along imperial lines. Shekhovtsov (2009b: 700) positions Dugin’s worldview in line with the ND’s, arguing that Dugin’s historico-religious association Arktogeia (Northern land) ‘became a Russian “node” of the broad European New Right network’. When in 1992 Dugin launched Elementy (Elements), Dugin invited ND thinkers Alain de Benoist and Robert Steuckers to speak at a roundtable discussion in Moscow. The leader of the Russian Communists, Gennadiy Zyuganov, was also part of the roundtable, thus signalling the desire of the ND to forge alliances with all anti-liberal forces worldwide. This was yet another demonstration of the ND’s desire to supersede the ‘outdated’ right–left political divide (conceptual tool one).
Dugin and de Benoist were fascinated by the post-Cold War, post-communist era and the possibilities Russia represented for fighting liberalism, the ND’s ‘enemy number one’. Russia in the early 1990s saw the emergence of so-called ‘red–brown alliances’, or attempts at political union between the Russian revolutionary right and left. Dugin and de Benoist were promoters of these ‘red–brown alliances’ because they shared an antipathy for liberalism, the USA, and sometimes the West. Russian communists became national-communists and were increasingly influenced by ND ideas, which saw liberalism as a greater universal danger than communism. As highlighted in Chapter 2, the ND had an almost left-wing critique of capitalism and bourgeois liberalism, which appealed to Dugin, national-communists, Traditionalists, and Eurasianists. Yet, de Benoist was disappointed when he visited Dugin in Moscow as he was ‘disturbed by the crude imperialism and Jacobinism of the vast majority of the so-called patriots’, some of whom ‘thought about nothing but the restoration of the old Russian domination over Eastern and even Central European countries’. Dugin continued to champion GRECE and the ND as Eurasian projects, but de Benoist declared his rupture from Dugin not because he essentially rejected the substance of Dugin’s ideas, but because Dugin’s style appeared more ‘old’ than ‘new right’ (Bar-On 2007).
It should be pointed out that despite the apparent rift between de Benoist and Dugin, co-operation has again occurred in recent years. In 2005, Dugin had meetings with ND followers, including participating in the inauguration of the British New Right under Troy Southgate and Belgian New Right journal TeKoS, closely associated with Synergies européennes. As Shekhovtsov (2009b: 701) writes, ‘[d]uring his 2005 trip to Europe, Dugin met and interviewed another European New Right thinker, Jean Parvulesco and de Benoist, thus apparently overcoming the 12-year rupture between him and the latter’. Moreover, in September 2008, Aleksandr Dugin, by then a professor in sociology at the prestigious Moscow State University (MSU), established the Centre for Conservative Research (CCR) at the MSU’s Faculty of Sociology. In November 2008 de Benoist became the first guest speaker at the CCR. In line with his faith in metapolitics, de Benoist spoke of the great importance of ‘capturing’ the educational sector because it can exert direct influence upon those who will form public opinion and govern countries in the future.
Dugin’s Eurasianist worldview
Dugin’s geopolitical views are certainly in line with those of the broader ND. He longs for a sovereign, imperial Russia that obeys the dictates of neither the USA nor any other foreign power. Dugin understands Mackinder’s thesis about geopolitical control of Eurasia as essential for Russia’s geopolitical future. The Russian thinker has promoted an alliance between Russia and Asiatic and Islamic civilizations that can challenge the hegemony of the liberal USA in the post-Cold War era. Finally, he has even endorsed Guillaume Faye’s notion of a European–Siberian empire along homogeneous ethnic lines. In all these geopolitical possibilities, Dugin’s aim is to keep the USA and ‘Westernized’ Europe out of Eurasia by creating a sovereign, autonomous political sphere of influence that is controlled and directed by Russia.
De Benoist has also called for a pan-national European empire along federal and homogeneous ethnic lines. Yet, he would have been merely disturbed by Dugin’s open ultra-nationalism and imperialism, as de Benoist called for a regionalist ‘Europe of a hundred flags’. In 2008, Dugin stood in front of a tank with a Kalashnikov belonging to the South Ossetian insurgent army, which was backed by Russia in its conflict with Georgia. Dugin not only supported the pro-Russian Ossetians, but called for Russian tanks to march to Tbilisi, the Georgian capital, in order to recapture Georgia as an integral part of ‘Mother Russia’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 698). When the Russian Duma (parliament) recognized the secessionist South Ossetians and gave them citizenship, Dugin saw this as one aspect of ‘the long awaited renaissance of the Russian empire’ (Clarfield 2009).
Despite their tactical and stylistic differences, there are similarities between the reformulated alternative modernist notion of the ‘nation’ proposed by Dugin and de Benoist:
By repudiating the ‘modernist’ idea of the nation-state, or a political union of the nation-states (i.e., the European Union), the ENR (European New Right) thinkers propose a seemingly ‘post-modernist’ concept of ‘a decentralized federation of organic, ethno-cultural identities that portray the deep “historical” spirit of cultural Europe.’ The concept itself is a result of the ultimately modernist, or rather alternative modernist, re-synthesis of the older notion of organic nationalism that holds that ‘nations and their characters are organisms that can be easily ascertained by their cultural differentiae’ and ‘that the members of nations may, and frequently have, lost their national self-consciousness along with their independence,’ while ‘the duty of nationalists is to restore that self-consciousness and independence to the “reawakened” organic nation.’ The re-synthesised nature of the ENR’s concept of an organic nation incorporates the New Left’s ideas of political regionalism, thus shifting the emphasis from an organic nation to a federation of organic nations, or mythologized ‘ethnie[s] as homogeneous historical or ethnic communities’.
(Shekhovtsov 2009b: 702–3)
Note that Shekhovtsov insists that the ND’s conception of the nation is ‘alternative modernist’, while its synthesis in conceptualizing the nation is an ‘older notion of organic nationalism’ combined with the NL’s ‘political regionalism’. This reformulation of the nation fits within the alternative modernist framework of conceptual tool two, while the union of antagonistic right-wing and left-wing tradition connotes a desire to forge a new political synthesis beyond right and left (conceptual tool one). Moreover, Dugin and de Benoist share a desire for a pan-national European empire in order to restore ‘greatness’ to the continent:
As Dugin believes the nature of an ethnic community to be superior to, and deeper than, that of a state, Neo-Eurasianism refutes the idea of a modern nation-state, even the Russian one, and promotes the concept of a ‘Eurasian empire’ built on the principles of ‘Eurasian federalism’. According to the concept, all the political units of this ‘empire’ should be established in accordance with cultural, historical, and ethnic identifications rather than simple administrative division.
(Shekhovtsov 2009b: 703)
It should be pointed out that there is one other difference between de Benoist and Dugin related to different appraisals of what constitutes the ‘community of destiny’. Whereas since the mid-1970s the ND has valorized a radical cultural ethnopluralism that distanced itself from older biological or race-based notions of community belonging (‘nation’ or ‘common European home’), the same could not be said for Dugin. As Shekhovtsov (2009b: 703) explains: ‘The Neo-Eurasianist doctrine does not stress culture and cultural identity as prominently as the ideological constructs of its French counterparts.’ For culture is merely one important aspect of an ethnic community, or ethnie. Dugin borrowed his ideas from Soviet ethnologist and anthropologist Lev Gumilev’s (1912–92) theory of ethnogenesis, which essentially legitimized racist discourse within the Soviet scientific and academic communities. For Gumilev, like Dugin, ‘the etnos is a biologised organic community – with its life-energy determined by the forces from outer space – subject to certain irresistible laws of historical development, as it passes the stages of the rise, climax, and convolution’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 704). De Benoist (2012: 244) saw as worthy Gumilev’s idea that each ethnos must be linked to a defined territorial space; the notion that the destiny of an ethnic community is linked to its control of territorial space; and how a change in territorial space connected to new geopolitical configurations could be ‘fatal’ for an ethnic group and even lead to its ‘disappearance’.
It is true, however, that both Dugin and de Benoist see their ethnic communities in a period of ‘decadence’ and great geopolitical and spiritual ‘decline’, which can only be reversed by turning away from liberalism, socialism, egalitarianism, excessive capitalist globalization, and Americanization. The ‘turn around’ or revolution will come for Europe and Russia when they return to the hierarchical, elitist, homogeneous, ‘rooted’, and ‘traditional’ values of ethnic communities of the premodern past. Dugin sees Russian decline in mystical terms as alienation from its Traditionalist and Orthodox core, whereas de Benoist’s vision of European decline is more indebted to scientific and empirical explanations of decline. Dugin calls for the reversal of Russia’s current historical decline by ameliorating the Russian peoples’ ‘condition in the ethnic, biological and spiritual sense’, as well as the cultural realm. De Benoist, on the other hand, tried to avoid Dugin’s language, which smacked of the ‘backward’ imagery of ‘our’ ‘racial stock’ and ‘theirs’ in mortal confrontation akin to Nazism.
Yet, in his geopolitical hatred of the USA and liberalism as the ‘main enemies’, as well as the West’s penchant for universalizing its cultures, values, and institutions, Dugin fits the ND mould. In his most important book, Osnovy geopolitiki (Foundations of Geopolitics) (1997), Dugin takes his main aim at demonizing the West, while expressing outright hostility for the USA and the Anglo-Saxon world in general (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 705). According to Dugin’s imperialist geopolitics, the earth is divided into three large spaces: the World Island (principally the USA and Britain), Eurasia (predominantly Central Europe, Russia, and Asia), and the Rimland (the states between the World Island and Eurasia). Dugin sees permanent geopolitical conflict between the ‘sea power’ led by the USA-dominated ‘homogenizing New World Order’ and the ‘land power’ of a Russian-led ‘New Eurasian Order’, which allegedly tries to resist globalization and ethnocultural universalization. Using religious imagery, Dugin demonizes the USA and the Anglo-Saxon, Atlanticist ‘World Island’ as a ‘reign of Antichrist’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 705). Like Dugin, CR thinkers, National Bolshevists, Julius Evola, and de Benoist today all posit a fundamental conflict between Anglo-Saxon values, on the one hand, and European, Germanic, or Russian values, on the other hand. The aim of all these thinkers is to sever the idea of technical modernity from the Enlightenment values of 1789, or to unite technical modernity with ethnic and national revival in a homogeneous political framework. In short, these thinkers long for the creation of alternative modernities (conceptual tool two).
Like de Benoist, Dugin sees the ‘natural’ allies of Europe and Russia as all those ethnic groups, cultures, indigenous groups, and religions that seek to preserve their ‘rooted’ cultures against the homogenizing logic that wants to turn all states into liberal imitators of the USA. Former Third World states, the ND’s federal ‘Europe of a hundred flags’, and Dugin’s Russian empire of ethnocultural origins would all act as bulwarks against the values of the liberal and Western USA. Borrowing from the dominant language of the liberal-left, the ND and Dugin affirm that all peoples and civilizations contribute to the rich diversity of the world. This diversity is first and foremost threatened by the USA and the West, which seek to impose their dominant model of civilization on unique cultures and civilizations worldwide in what amounts to a form of neo-colonialism and ‘cultural genocide’. Yet, both the ND and Dugin are far from liberal or leftist, but utilize the notion of ‘the right to difference’ of cultures worldwide not to protect ‘oppressed minorities’, but as ‘an instrument for legitimating the most extreme appeals for the self-defence of a “threatened” national (and/or European) identity’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 705). In short, it is white, Christian Europeans and Russians, the dominant groups in their respective regions, which have taken on the role of victimhood threatened with imminent cultural extinction in relation to the homogenizing logic of the liberal, Western USA. Cultural exclusionism is ultimately accepted by the ND and Dugin by rejecting ‘race mixing’ and multiculturalism within Europe or Russia, while upholding worldwide cultural and ethnic pluralism in an apparently liberal spirit.
To complete the picture of Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism, the Russian thinker advances the idea of ‘positive ethnic pluralism’, a project focused on keeping a positive or at least zero-sum demographic balance to prevent the disappearance of Eurasian ethnic communities. Yet, Dugin ultimately longs ‘for a politically divided Eurasia to give way to a federal Eurasian empire led spiritually by the Russian Federation’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 706). For Dugin, political frontiers will be abolished in favour of new ‘natural, organic, ethnic borders’. He asserts that these borders do not imply the political domination of one ethnic community over another; however, they inherently lead to the appearance of ethnocultural ghettos for Russians, Tatars, Chechens, Armenians, and other ethnic groups (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 706). Dugin insists that the Russian nation is in need of keeping its ethnic identity and that there should be special legal regulations to secure preservation of the Russian nation’s ethnic identity (and dominance) within the supranational Eurasian empire. This position means that Dugin longs for what in Chapter 6 I called a ‘Europe for Europeans’ within the framework of an ethnocracy dominated by ethnic Russians. Dugin calls for ‘norms of ethno-cultural hygiene’ to protect Russians from demographic and geopolitical decline. The ND’s imperial federalism and Dugin’s neo-Eurasianist doctrine in the long run seek ‘an exclusionary national-socialist Europe’, or an alternative modernist Europe which is neither liberal nor socialist. Dugin’s desire to supersede right and left, alternative modernist credentials in a revolutionary tone, and aim to create a re-spiritualized religion of politics (conceptual tools one, two, and three) can be demonstrated with these ominous words:
Already in the twentieth century, some supposedly modern ideologies implicitly appealed to the idea of cyclic time, which implies degradation to be succeeded by a new golden age. The most striking ideologies of this kind were National Socialism and Bolshevism. The capitalist bourgeois regime was perceived as the pinnacle of degradation, and the red and brown romantics set off brilliant prospects of a New World and the renewal of the golden age. The active pessimism of the radicals directed the masses to achieve two objectives: The destruction of the degenerated (old) mankind and the creation of an ultimately new heavenly civilization. Behind the Bolshevik and Nazi purges and bloodshed, there were hidden mystical motives. This was not an excess of sadism, brutality or inhumanity. The elites were just confident: ‘Man is indeed degraded!’ The evening hours are inexorably approaching the twilight, but in the womb of darkness, there is a New Dawn ripening: The new world.
(Dugin in Shekhovtsov 2008: 499–500)
In order to sweep away a ‘decadent’ world associated with liberal modernity and usher in a ‘New Dawn’, a ‘new world’, or a revolutionary epoch, Dugin follows the ND’s metapolitical path with a more activist political orientation. While ND ideas had their heyday in the mid-1970s and early 1980s in France in terms of more direct political influence on politicians, political parties, state officials, military elites, and cultural figures, Dugin’s geopolitical ideas are influencing Russian political authorities today. In 1999, Dugin was appointed as a special adviser to the contemporary Duma speaker Gennadiy Seleznev, who openly argued that Dugin’s geopolitical doctrine be made part of the Russian school curriculum (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 707). From 1999 to 2003, Dugin was a leading figure in the Centre of Geopolitical Expertise – the expert consultation board of national security established under Seleznev. The esteemed political commentator Ivan Demidov stated that it was high time to implement Dugin’s ideas (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 707– 8). Dugin was also appointed director of the Ideological Directorate of the Political Department of Edinaya Rossiya’s (United Russia, the political party led by then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin) Central Executive Committee (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 708). In short, Dugin had the ears of Russia’s most powerful contemporary politician, the current President Vladimir Putin.
Moreover, at the popular level, neo-Eurasianist ideas are rising in importance, as exemplified by the Russian bestseller status of neo-Eurasianist historian Lev Gumilev after his death in 1992. Putin called Gumilev ‘the greatest Eurasianist of our times’ (Clarfield 2009). Having said that, the Kremlin has not adopted Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism as official state policy. This is good news for non-Russian ethnic groups within Russia and its ‘near abroad’ since the neo-Eurasianists support an imperial form of political organization and ‘rhetorical cult of national diversity combined with a dismissal of real autonomy for minorities’ (Clarfield 2009). However, as Shekhovtsov (2009b: 708) argues, Dugin’s main aim is not ‘to immediately influence the Russian authorities per se’. Undoubtedly, Dugin is the ND-influenced thinker with the most profound influence on political authorities of any ND thinker. Yet, Dugin’s strategy is to win hearts and minds in line with the ND’s long-term ‘Gramscianism from the right’. The key for Dugin, like the ND, is ‘the importance of developing radical right-wing culture within Russian society, particularly, through higher education’ (Shekhovtsov 2009b: 708). Once this right-wing culture captures civil society, state authorities will need to follow suit, or else they will be threatened by a more violent revolution. This right-wing culture fits the ND mould, although slightly more politically incorrect in its open ultra-nationalism, imperialism, and appraisal of fascism. Whereas de Benoist has praised German CR thinkers and attacked fascism, Dugin gave the following positive assessment of fascism:
Fascism – this is nationalism yet not any nationalism, but a revolutionary, rebellious, romantic, idealistic [form of nationalism] appealing to a great myth and transcendental idea, trying to put into practice the Impossible Dream, to give birth to a society of the hero and Superhuman, to change and transform the world.
(Dugin in Shekhovtsov 2008: 503)
Marco Tarchi: postmodern ‘hobbit’
The Italian thinker Marco Tarchi is the most postmodern of the three ND thinkers examined in this chapter. Unlike Dugin who longs for a ‘right-wing modernist Traditionalism’ along revolutionary lines and Faye who has vehemently criticized Traditionalists, Tarchi has been particularly sensitive to the issues of the NL and his ‘post-1968’ generation: concern for youth and alternative lifestyles, decentralization, cultural autonomy, a disdain for big government, and criticisms of dogmatic variants of socialism and liberalism.
Born in 1952, Tarchi is today a professor in la Facoltà di Scienze Politiche (Faculty of Political Science) ‘Cesare Alfieri’ at the University of Florence. He was also a visiting professor at the University of Turku in Finland. He is considered the leading ideologue of the Italian New Right (Nuova Destra) and the editor of its major journals, Diorama letterario (2011) and Trasgressioni. While Tarchi began his career as an activist and head of the neo-fascist MSI’s Fronte della Gioventu (Youth Front) in the early 1980s, in 1994 he declared that the right–left cleavage no longer had any relevance (Tarchi 1994: 381–96). In line with conceptual tool one, Tarchi sought to create a new political synthesis transcending right and left.
Tarchi published numerous books and academic articles including: Partito unico e dinamica autoritaria (1981), La ‘rivoluzione legale’ (1993), Cinquant’anni di nostalgia: La destra italiana dopo il fascismo (1995), Esuli in patria: I fascisti nell’Italia repubblicana (1995), Dal MSI ad AN: organizzazione e strategie (1997), L’Italia populista: Dal qualunquismo ai girotondi (2003), Il fascismo: Teorie, interpretazioni, modelli (2003), and Contro l’americanismo (2004). These books are attempts to analyse the history of fascism and authoritarianism, the historical trajectory of the Italian right, populism, and anti-Americanism. Tarchi has become an expert on the ‘new populism’, including contemporary radical right-wing populist parties. His latest book, La rivoluzione impossibile: Dai Campi Hobbit alla nuova Destra (2010), traces the birth of the Italian New Right from the neo-fascist ‘hobbit camps’ of the early 1980s and their search for an ‘impossible revolution’ to combat liberalism. For those that insist that metapolitics means the abandonment of revolutionary politics, they might read La rivoluzione impossibile and similar revolutionary texts by Tarchi, Dugin, Faye, or de Benoist. It is clear that what Tarchi longs for is not a reformist path transcending right and left, but like fascists or non-conformists of the interwar years, a new, revolutionary political synthesis beyond right and left (conceptual tool one). According to the ND leader de Benoist, Tarchi today no longer even uses the phrase ‘new right’ (de Benoist 2012: 120), instead evoking the desire to create a ‘new culture’ that will supersede right and left in order to defeat liberalism.
In general, it is important to note that Tarchi has sought to offer an image of the right that is a ‘new right’, which is intelligent, sophisticated, and academically neutral. Yet, Tarchi’s corpus of works is devoted to an analysis of fascism, the legacy of the pro-Nazi Italian Social Republic, the transformation of Italian neo-fascists to ‘post-fascists’, and the history of Italian populism. These are not themes which de Benoist deals with directly, instead focusing on German CR thinkers supposedly on the fringes of fascism. In addition, in line with the ND Tarchi is particularly polemical in relation to the liberal (or neo-liberal) model promoted by the USA worldwide, its alleged ‘cultural imperialism’, the attack on ‘rooted’ ethnic groups in Europe, and the way Europe is increasingly a ‘colony’ of the USA.
Given these aforementioned themes, it is no accident that Alain de Benoist is a frequent contributor to Italian New Right journals Trasgressioni and Diorama letterario. The Italian New Right ‘was born in 1974 as a result of exchanges with its French counterparts’ (Bar-On 2007: 145). Of all the movements that the ND influenced throughout Europe, its Italian counterpart was spiritually closest to the French ND. De Benoist (2012: 119–20) has stated that Italy as a country and Tarchi as his messenger were the most ‘open’ to receive French ND ideas and themes such as federalism, regionalism, and localism. It is estimated that about 30 of de Benoist’s books have been translated into Italian. While he was ‘most fascinated’ with Germanic culture and possessed some 40,000 books in German alone, de Benoist (2012: 118, my translation) called Italians ‘the most cultivated people I know’, no doubt also owing to the positive reception of his ideas on the other side of the Alps. De Benoist (2012: 120) even suggested that he has more Italian readers than readers in his native France!
The Italian New Right sought to supersede the ‘petty parliamentarism’ of the neo-fascist MSI and the extra-parliamentary violence of neo-fascist ultra-nationalist or left-wing groups of the late 1970s. David J. Whittaker (2007) estimates that in the Italy of the 1970s and early 1980s there were 14,000 terrorist attacks in what was called the neo-fascist ‘strategy of tension’. In the period, some terrorist attacks were blamed on leftist groups such as the Red Brigades and others on revolutionary right-wing groups such as Ordine Nuovo.
It was in the late 1970s that Tarchi began to focus on the importance of metapolitics, calling it ‘the primary engine, an indispensable tool’ (Sacchi 1993–4: 74). As pointed out in Chapter 5, he also helped to found a number of youth camps called Campo Hobbit, a national and popular festival named after the seminal novel by the British fantasy writer J. R. R. Tolkien. The youth camps tried to unite dissidents of the right and left through ‘an opening to the left’ and sensitivity to ecological issues (conceptual tool one), while stressing the fundamental importance of a ‘new culture’, a ‘new avant-garde in the arts’, and the subjective and spiritual aspirations of a ‘new generation’ (Bar-On 2007: 145). In line with other ND thinkers searching for alternative modernities and the creation of a new, anti-liberal religion of politics (conceptual tools two and three), Tarchi believed in the centrality of myths in moving history, premodern ‘sacred time’, or ‘festive time’ (that is, cyclical time rooted in the here and now) against the ‘dead’ linear time of modernity, and ‘alternative cosmologies’ rooted in the pagan past (Bar-On 2007: 145). Yet, Tarchi’s ideological synthesis was eclectic, a veritable ideological mazeway resynthesis, fusing modern and postmodern philosophies and experiences with premodern values.
Born in 1952, Tarchi was especially sensitive to the concerns of the NL and postmodern modes of analysis. To revisit a distinction I made in Chapter 3, Tarchi understood postmodernity as both ‘mood’ and ‘socio-cultural form’. In an interview Tarchi (1999) gave this author, the Italian political scientist ‘rejected the fascist past, criticized the authoritarian thrust of the neo-fascist milieu, defended the democratic principle, and accepted the cultural “other” as well as substantive intercultural dialogue’. Tarchi longs for a modern world rooted in ‘the autonomy of regions and local communities’ as a counterweight to neo-liberal globalization (Bar-On 2007: 146–7). Reacting against the charge that the autonomy of regions will spell ‘apartheid’ and the creation of ‘homogeneous communities’ cleansed of ‘outsiders’, Tarchi is adamant that he is ‘open and ready to assimilate new influences and members’ (Bar-On 2007: 146). The aforementioned position makes Tarchi probably the most postmodern of ND thinkers, as well as the ND thinker most attracted to the political and cultural influences of the left and NL. Like elements of the NL, Tarchi longed for a novel ‘neither right, nor left’ political synthesis (conceptual tool one). Tarchi’s approach appears to even supersede de Benoist’s dialogical vision of identity and imitate Charles Taylor’s neo-communitarianism most often associated with the social-democratic left.
Despite Tarchi’s postmodern turn, Roger Griffin (1998: 17) remains convinced that Tarchi never abandoned his ‘proto-fascist’ desire for a revolutionary, post-liberal social order. In Chapter 5, I discussed the issue of the purported ‘conversion’ to ‘post-fascism’ of the Italian neo-fascist political party MSI and key politicians such as Gianfranco Fini and Gianni Alemanno. It is important to stress that Tarchi came out of the milieu of the MSI and in this respect it is unclear whether Tarchi’s ‘conversion’ to post-fascism is indeed definitive.
In conclusion, this chapter examined the ideas of three key ND messengers. ND ideas have spread throughout Europe as a result of the tireless metapolitical efforts of Guillaume Faye, Aleksandr Dugin, Marco Tarchi, and other ND-friendly intellectuals. As pointed out in Chapter 1, the intellectual pivot behind these intellectuals is the ND leader Alain de Benoist. Moreover, while the intellectuals in question differed in their tactical and doctrinal strategies, I argued that the three thinkers share an eclectic ideological cocktail known as mazeway resynthesis, which is grounded in the search for alternative modernities (conceptual tool two). I also pointed out that all three thinkers long to smash the right–left political divide and create a new anti-liberal and anti-egalitarian state (conceptual tool one), as well as erect a novel religion of politics that pays homage to the ancestors of centuries past and prides itself on ethnic solidarity along homogeneous lines (conceptual tool three).