Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity is a companion to my first book, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Whereas Where Have All the Fascists Gone? focused on the relationship between ND intellectuals, fascism, neo-fascism, and the extreme and revolutionary right-wing milieux, Rethinking the French New Right sought to shift the discussion to the ND’s appraisal of modernity and postmodernity, as well as its thinkers’ solutions for Europe’ ‘ills’ in the twenty-first century. I argued that modernity and its attendant ‘crises’ (or the ‘malaises of modernity’) form the backdrop to understanding the ND’s worldview.
My three conceptual tools for analysing the ND (that is, the desire to supersede right and left, the quest for alternative modernities, and the aim of creating a re-sacralized society and state based on a secular ‘religion of politics’) are all related to modernity. First, the goal of transcending right and left political divisions in a revolutionary framework that is neither liberal nor socialist was only possible after the French Revolution. As pointed out in Chapter 3, for numerous scholars the French Revolution constitutes an integral event in the birth of modernity. Remember that Hannah Arendt saw the French and American revolutions as the ‘beginning’ of a ‘new story’; a novel, revolutionary ‘story’ never told before in the history of humanity. Second, the desire to erect alternative conceptions of modernity is only possible in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with the birth of an array of modernist movements. In this respect, I noted that the ND’s ideological synthesis, a mazeway resynthesis consisting of allegedly incompatible political and philosophical influences, is a decidedly modernist one. I also pointed out that the quest for alternative modernities entails abolishing the most ‘destructive’ aspects of modernity (for example, for the ND, the egalitarian legacy of 1789, multiculturalism, excessive egoism spawned by capitalism, etc.), while maintaining its most redeeming features (for example, secularism, the use of reason against myth and superstition, and support for the technical aspects of modernity). I also posited that ND thinkers are neither complete ‘boosters’, nor complete ‘knockers’ of technology, but would like to transform the West’s excessive faith in technology through a new post-liberal and revolutionary political framework. I argued that the ND sought to transcend the most destructive aspects of modernity, but not modernity tout court. In addition, the ND’s goal of creating a new ‘religion of politics’ to replace liberalism as Europe’s ‘civil religion’ is modern, secular, and revolutionary, while also differentiating it from conservative, neo-liberal, ‘anti-modern’, or ‘reactionary’, counter-revolutionary forces on the right.
Moreover, I am adamant that the ND’s metapolitical stance or right-wing positioning on the political spectrum did not mean that it abandoned its penchant for revolution, or the desire for a ‘new epoch in human history’. Or, as Michael Walker, a British thinker responsible for spreading ND ideas throughout the anglophone world, posited: ‘We look forward to a revolution, a cultural revolution’ (Walker in Jackson 2008: 7). This metapolitical strategy had its critics within the ND and among the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces of the extreme and revolutionary right, but it had the merit of producing a coherent body of right-wing thought that could not be matched by any contemporary forces on the left. As ND leader de Benoist declared in 2012, the ND offers a different, non-mainstream ‘conception of the world’, ‘intelligence’, and ‘tracks of reflections’ for the key political and philosophical debates of this century (2012: 260). The ND, added de Benoist, can assist us in ‘understanding the epoch we currently live in’ and, even more, ‘the one to come’; in helping people ‘decolonize the imaginary’ (Serge Latouche’s phrase; Latouche 2003); in proposing alternatives to the market; and in giving peoples and cultures a ‘will’ to ‘maintain their identity’ while also reviving it.
ND intellectuals are certainly against many aspects of the modern and postmodern epochs and they are no cheerleaders of many of the processes associated with globalization, but they also propose concrete solutions for Europe’s multiple ‘ills’. These solutions range from alternative models of citizenship and immigration policies to stem the perceived loss of national and regional identities to a federalist, imperial (yet anti-imperialist) model of governance that would allow Europeans to be great geopolitical players in world history again. ND thinkers rejects the liberal and socialist models of revolution because they connote ‘nihilistic’ trends associated with the most ‘destructive’ aspects of modernity such as egalitarianism and the ‘religion’ of individual rights or human rights above duties to one’s ethnic communities and ancestors. Leading ND figures might reject the political and cultural aspects of modernity, but they are wedded to an alternative modernist framework that is secular, Promethean, technologically activist, economically developmental, and statist (albeit critical of ‘technocratic’ and excessively pro-capitalist statism). As my analysis of the ND’s manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’ in Chapter 7 made clear, there is no way to return to a premodern rural paradise before modernity ‘shattered’ the European continent. ND thinkers also view the monarchical, counter-revolutionary tradition as irrelevant and archaic. Rather, Europe’s ‘way out’ will be modern, secular, and revolutionary in that it will supersede liberal or socialist alternatives, while synthesizing the most redeeming features of the modern, postmodern, and premodern epochs.
Furthermore, I argued that the search for alternative modernities (conceptual tool two) should be read as an integral part of the ‘sense-making’ modernist project, which sought to respond to a series of crises in the transition from premodern to modern epochs. In the case of the ND, these alternative modernities seek to transcend right and left in a new, revolutionary political framework (conceptual tool one), which aims at creating a novel, sacralized ‘religion of politics’ that is related yet distinct from liberalism and socialism (conceptual tool three). As highlighted in Chapter 4, Roger Griffin (2007b: xii) defined modernism as:
any initiative in the cultural, social, or political sphere which seeks to restore a sense of sublime order and purpose to the contemporary world, thereby counteracting the (perceived) erosion of an overarching ‘nomos’ or ‘sacred canopy’ under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity.
I applied Griffin’s ‘ideal type’ definition of modernism and controversially claimed that, using his definition, the ND embodies a type of fascist modernism. Lamenting the ‘excesses’ of the modern world from immigration and multicultural societies to administratively imposed equality and the demise of structured and ethnically homogeneous communities of meaning wedded to a world framed by myth, rituals, and magic, ND thinkers advanced a secular, revolutionary, and modernist framework as an alternative to mainstream responses to modernity. Moreover, as pointed out in Chapter 3, the ND’s quest for alternative modernities should be viewed as a ‘dialectical relationship to modernity, one that entails not the negation of modernity but an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform it’ (Euben 1997: 429). The ND’s ideological mazeway resynthesis does not entail a ‘reactionary’ project, but ‘an attempt to simultaneously abolish, transcend, preserve and transform’ modernity. It therefore follows that alternative modernity entails a radical questioning of modernity, but not the desire to negate or abolish all aspects of modernity. Rather the aim is to create different types of modernities in order to highlight deep disdain with mainstream liberal and socialist responses to modernity. Alternative modernity also connotes the questioning of postmodern discourses that overstate claims of modernity’s death, while ignoring the reality that modernity is the ‘house’ we increasingly all inhabit.
In On Revolution, Hannah Arendt (1963: 29) points out that fundamental ‘to any understanding of revolutions in the modern age is that the idea of freedom and the experience of a new beginning should coincide’. For ND thinkers, freedom is reinterpreted to mean the freedom of ‘original’ European ethnic communities (that is, before mass waves of asylum-seekers, immigrants, foreigners, and multicultural policies ‘colonized’ the continent) in selecting the governments of their choice (that is, free from the pressures of the pro-liberal ‘New Class’ elites). For the ND, Isaiah Berlin’s notion of ‘negative liberty’, in which individuals are ‘free’ to act without the constraints of the state, is far less important than the ‘positive liberty’ to select your government. In short, the ND’s notion of liberty is more wedded to ancient rather than modern conceptions of liberty. Moreover, ND philosophers long for a revolutionary, post-liberal, hierarchical, pagan Europe. As demonstrated in Chapters 1, 8, and 9, the ND’s impact was not limited to France but especially extended to Italy and Russia; its main intellectuals cultivated a transnational agenda and a collection of like-minded think tanks, journals, conferences, and networks throughout Europe; its thinkers influenced the personnel, themes, and discourse changes of radical right-wing populist parties; and its theoreticians insist that Europe rather than the nation is the ‘new home’.
ND doyen Alain de Benoist argues that what he proposes is not a counter-revolution or a return to the monarchical system before the French Revolution, but rather a revolution in mentalities and values; a revolution that will ultimately produce a new, revolutionary political and social system that destroys liberalism and neo-liberalism. While the ‘social question’ was fundamental for the French Revolution, it was not as critical for the American Revolution, where ‘freedom’ and ‘rights’ became the revolutionary watchwords (Arendt 1963: 59–140). For the ND, the ‘social question’ was reformulated to connote: (1) a duty to take care of your ‘own’ European ethnic groups above all other ethnic groups in citizenship, jobs, housing provisions, state welfare services, and state corporate support (what in Chapter 6 I called the desire to create ethnocracies and a ‘Europe for Europeans’); (2) a critique of neo-liberalism because of its tendency to exacerbate social conflicts; and (3) as demonstrated in Chapter 2, a co-optation of NL themes that are critical of the most harmful aspects of global capitalism, liberalism, and socialist state engineering. Yet, the ND did not view the ‘social question’ through communist and socialist lenses because such economic and political systems are based on the principle of egalitarianism, which must be ‘abolished’ because it contradicts elite rule, nature, and Europe’s ‘rooted’ and imperial past. As highlighted in Chapter 2, although the ND seeks to create a new political framework beyond right and left, it still sits on the right more than the left. Moreover, although the right–left spectrum might be ‘outdated’, the ND has not been able to adequately propose alternatives to the right–left division. What might be the new political divisions of this century? And if those divisions have still not emerged, then does the right–left division still have analytical value? Or, are the scathing criticisms of the right–left spectrum within and outside the ND a harbinger of new political divisions?
In Chapters 3 and 4, I traced the ND’s complex relationship to modern, postmodern, and premodern epochs. In expressing angst and uncertainty about the project of modernity, ND thinkers echo postmodern, Frankfurt School, or even Green thinkers that question the merits of Enlightenment-based liberal and social metanarratives about the ‘end of history’. These metanarratives promised secularized variants of heaven on earth. A staggering 169 million people were killed worldwide by their own governments between 1900 and 1987, with the most notorious being three prototypical modernist regimes (that is, Stalin’s Soviet Union, Mao’s China, and Hitler’s Nazi Germany) (Rummel 1994). It is estimated that these three regimes killed 43, 38, and 21 million people respectively (Pojman 2006: 3). As a result, the aforementioned mega-murderers of a secular modernist hue made most political forces suspicious of the state and its capacity for human betterment based on Enlightenment ideals. After the gulags, Auschwitz, and the genocides in Armenia, Cambodia, Iraq, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda, and Sudan, we might be tempted to echo the ND’s claim that history is a vicious cycle of executions with no possibility for human evolution or betterment.
The ND’s focus on decentralized forms of governance, or ‘bottom-up’, federalist, and regional autonomy, certainly fits within a postmodern framework, which questions the ability of large, bureaucratized, and modern states to solve the complexity of today’s problems. Like most of his contemporaries today, de Benoist is a democrat but in the Ancient Greek and Althusian rather than modern liberal or socialist moulds.
In rejecting the EU as it is currently constituted (that is, liberal, excessively capitalist, and ‘technocratic’) yet calling for a united, imperial Europe that would challenge the USA’s ‘empire’, the ND also works from a postmodern perspective. As international relations theorist John Ruggie (1993: 140) pointed out, the EU represents the world’s ‘first truly postmodern international political form’ since sovereignty is increasingly shared between states and transnational bodies above the state. The ND proposes an alternative, illiberal, hierarchical, and elitist EU, which challenges the EU’s pro-liberal and pro-multiculturalist ‘elitism’. The ND especially seeks to challenge the USA as the world’s sole remaining superpower by creating a politically unified Europe.
When the events of 9/11 shocked the entire world, ND leader de Benoist declared that we had crossed the Rubicon from the modern to postmodern epochs. ND thinkers are not the rural-based Luddites that we reflexively associate with some sectors of the traditionalist, conservative right. They are totally in tune with changing technological, economic, and socio-cultural changes, which have ushered in definitive breaks in values, institutions, and structures in the transition from premodern to modern (and postmodern) epochs. One author of ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, Charles Champetier, was born in 1968, the year of the ND’s foundation and the spectacular events of May 1968. Marco Tarchi, the leading figure of the Italian New Right, was born in 1952, nine years after Alain de Benoist, and expressed his profound admiration for the 1968ers and the NL.
Yet, as Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrated, ND thinkers are certainly no cheerleaders for the modern world and display nostalgia for the premodern age, its homogeneous values, and rituals. In 2009, at a café in Querétaro, Mexico, I discovered Traditionalist authors, to whom sectors of the ND are sympathetic because of their total ‘revolt against the modern world’. Nonetheless, in Chapters 4 and 8 I argued that even the most Traditionalist of ND-influenced thinkers, the Russian academic Aleksandr Dugin, is a ‘right-wing modernist’.
As with CR thinkers of the interwar years, for the ND the quarrel is not with the modern world per se, but rather with the political and cultural repercussions of 1789. ND thinkers argue that 1789 embodies all that is wrong politically and socially with the modern world:
In short, the ND rejects the political and cultural effects of 1789: liberalism, neo-liberalism, social democracy, socialism, multiculturalism, feminism, and gay and lesbian rights. All these aforementioned tendencies are viewed as usurping the ‘natural’, anti-egalitarian nature of individuals and communities and ‘killing’ an aristocratic spirit inherent to the human species. Yet, the ND never fully lapses into a total, Evolian ‘revolt against the modern world’. Born into the modern world, ND thinkers are also inheritors of the legacy of 1789: its revolutionary project, secularism, statism, scientism, faith in economic and technological progress, and quest to erect alternative modernities and a ‘religion of politics’ as a reaction to the multiple ‘crises’ of modernity.
In Chapters 6, 7, 8, and 9 I applied my three conceptual tools to ND worldviews, practices, transnational links, and relationships to radical right-wing populist parties. I do not want to overestimate the importance of ND ideas, but they certainly had a cultural and political impact in respect of immigration and identity issues throughout Europe, especially in France, Italy, and Russia. Paradoxically, as the ND’s cultural impact weakened in the early 1980s, the stature of radical right-wing political parties grew in Europe. What is more significant is that the ND will be remembered for reviving the fortunes of a de-legitimized right and challenging the liberal-left on its own terrain with a rational, coherent response to the crises of modernity.
Let me complete the conclusion with some thoughts about prospects for the spread of ND ideas throughout Europe. In Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Bar-On 2007: 3), I pointed out that the greatest danger to Europe today is the slide towards an ‘anti-immigrant, white, fundamentalist, protectionist Europe through metapolitical, democratic, and legal means’. The ‘danger’ remains the same today. Yet, I might add that the ‘danger’ has expanded to more solidly social democratic nations from the Scandinavian countries to the Netherlands, as well as Central and Eastern European countries such as Hungary, Romania, and Russia where the radical and revolutionary right-wing milieux have made impressive gains in parliamentary elections and the general political cultures of those states. Prominent European leaders have openly spoken out about the ‘failure’ of multiculturalism and the Netherlands and Denmark even reversed established multicultural positions and turned towards official monoculturalism (Bissoondath 2002). It is indeed troubling that in the new millennium the two nations that brought us fascism and Nazism, Italy and Germany, have demonstrated disturbing trends in which neo-fascists (or ‘post-fascists’) joined Italian governing national coalitions and the German chancellor spoke of the ‘total failure’ of the multicultural model. In Austria, the radical right-wing populist FPÖ entered a conservative coalition government in 2000 and was awarded numerous ministerial positions. In France in 2002, the firebrand ultra-nationalist Jean-Marie Le Pen stunned all of Europe when he reached the final round of the presidential elections, while his daughter Marine Le Pen gained nearly 18 per cent of the popular vote in the 2012 presidential elections. Furthermore, mainstream political parties have been all too happy to co-opt the anti-immigrant discourse and policies of the radical right-wing parties, while disingenuously acting as ‘guardians’ of the liberal democratic system.
Without the arguments furnished by the ND, it is unimaginable that the political climate would have shifted in Europe so dramatically towards positions that the ND supports. The role played by ND thinkers cannot be overestimated with their concrete impact limited to a few countries such as France, Italy, and Russia. Moreover, it is only in Russia that an ND-influenced thinker had substantive political impact, while in France the ND’s influence was limited to an ideological current among many tendencies within the FN. Yet, today it is more acceptable to question multiculturalism and openly attack immigrants and Muslims, as evidenced by the anti-Muslim text of Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (2002) (which sold 1.5 million copies in Europe). In contemporary Europe it is more acceptable to question whether immigrants should receive welfare benefits, and even propose citizenship changes towards birth by blood criteria. Timing indeed makes a difference. Immanuel Wallerstein (2010) points out that we are witnessing the rise of nativist and fundamentalist movements worldwide as reactions to globalization, the threats of perceived homogenization due to capitalism, and recent economic crises that have hit European countries such as Greece, Iceland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Italy, and Slovakia very hard. He also points out that new economic and technological innovations are often accompanied by cycles of economic recession or depression, which often precipitate major changes in world power relationships. Yet, economic crises alone do not translate into support for the ND or radical right populist parties. So, for example, the radical right is just becoming a credible force in Greek politics after the 2012 elections (18 seats for the virulently anti-immigrant Golden Dawn). Greece is one of the countries most deeply affected by the economic crisis, as demonstrated by the EU bailout schemes. Yet, the radical right populists are increasingly a major player in the Netherlands – a country less troubled by the economic crisis. Political entrepreneurs have to be alert and gifted in order to capitalize on the economic crises by positing viable ‘alternative modernities’ from the right, left, or beyond.
In the new millennium, an entire series of events made many ordinary Europeans increasingly equate Islam with terrorism, fanaticism, fundamentalism, disloyalty, or a ‘threat’ to Western or European values related to tolerance, the rule of law, secularism, or even Christianity. The Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979, Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1988 fatwa against Salman Rushdie and subsequent book burnings of The Satanic Verses in Britain by British Muslims, the rise to power of the Taliban in Afghanistan (and their support for al-Qaeda and the 9/11 suicide bombers), ethnic cleansing in Darfur by Muslims against non-Muslims, and a spate of suicide bombings by Muslims in Europe (for example, London, Madrid, and Burgas), Central Asia, Russia, Pakistan, and the Middle East have further aggravated perceptions of fanaticism in Europe in respect of Islam. Historical memories of the conflicts between Muslim and Christian empires further fuel mutual distrust between Europeans and Muslims, as well as perceptions of a ‘clash of civilizations’ within the heart of Europe. Both faiths were historically universalist and have global ambitions to capture hearts and minds, which further increases their competitiveness and mistrust.
Muslims are Europe’s ‘new Jews’, except that they have the EU behind them, which might increasingly exclude non-Europeans from the body politic but has certainly not imposed a ‘final solution’ on Europe’s Muslims. In Chapter 2, I pointed to 13 trends and events from 9/11 to the growing strength of radical right-wing populist (and anti-immigrant) parties in the ‘post-communist’ age, which crystallized for ordinary Europeans the perception of a ‘fanatical’ Islam, unease about multiculturalism, and the possibilities of Europe’s loss of power both at home and abroad to demographically, economically, and politically assertive non-Europeans. The ND assault on liberal democracy since 1968 was merely one aspect of a profoundly new, fear-based, and more conservative political climate in the twenty-first century. Yet, the ND influenced the broader European political culture in line with its metapolitical strategy known as ‘right-wing Gramscianism’.
Of the 13 trends and events I cited, number 11 was falling white European birthrates and the concomitant rise in non-white birthrates both within and outside Europe. I added that these demographic trends aggravate the perceptions of Europeans that in the near future they will lose political power both at home and abroad. The most radical ND thinker, Guillaume Faye, fears a ‘Eurabia’ within Europe; a Europe that is increasingly Arabized and Islamicized; a Europe that is unable to preserve its ‘rooted’ ethnic groups and cultures, secular tradition, and key geopolitical role in world history.
While numbers do not tell us much without attention to political, socio-economic, and cultural trends, numbers and the perception of numbers indeed matter. Anders Behring Breivik, the perpetrator of the 2011 Norway terrorist attacks and the author of 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, was, not unlike Guillaume Faye, obsessed with the demographic decline of white Christian Europeans compared to Muslims and drew extensive and apocalyptic charts to highlight this trend. Like Faye, he held the ‘traitorous’ liberal-left political parties responsible for destroying the peoples of Europe through unfettered immigration and official multiculturalism. Breivik and Faye are no doubt alarmed that there are 1.65 billion Muslims worldwide, or 24 per cent of the world’s population (Kettani 2010: 1). ‘Original’ or ‘native’ European populations are decreasing, while Muslim populations are expected to increase steadily in the new millennium. In Europe, it is estimated that there are 50 million Muslims, forming 6.6 per cent of the continent’s total population (Kettani 2010: 1). Many of those Muslims are outside the EU, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Albania, and Macedonia, regions where Muslims are indigenous rather than immigrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. In France, the birthplace of the ND, Muslims now make up 10 per cent of the population (Kettani 2010: 28). The growth rate of the Swiss Muslim population tripled in the 1990s and is more than 12 times the population growth of non-Muslim Swiss (Kettani 2010: 30). In Russia, 15 per cent of the population is Muslim. Cities such as Paris, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Oslo, and Stockholm have all seen a dramatic increase in their Muslim populations in a short period.
If we add total immigrant numbers to Europe, the figure is 20–30 million non-Europeans in Europe, or 3–4 per cent of the population of Europe including Russia. Yet, immigrants today make up about 14 per cent of the population of Ukraine, 12 per cent of that of Germany, about 10 per cent of Spain, France, and Italy, 9 per cent of the United Kingdom, and 8 per cent of Russia. Since the 1990s non-European immigration has increased dramatically in Norway, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Spain. Even Portugal, a country that was once a net emigration country, is today a country of net immigration largely from its former colonies from Brazil to Cape Verde.
There are also rising anti-Roma sentiments in Europe, as evidenced by the razing of Roma temporary houses in Italy and expulsions from France to fellow EU members (Romania and Bulgaria), contrary to national or European laws. There are only 5–10 million Romani people in the world, making up about 2 per cent of Hungary’s population, just under 2 per cent in Spain, and over 4 per cent in Bulgaria. Anti-Roma sentiments and racist violence have increased in Central and Eastern European countries such as Slovakia and Hungary.
Anti-Semitism has also reared its ugly head in Europe again, whether from the extreme nationalist right, sectors of the anti-globalist left, or anti-Zionists denying the right of the Jewish people to self-determination (that is, negating Israel’s very existence). There are about only one million Jews left in Western Europe, but they are subject to a ‘new anti-Semitism’ from both ‘European Europeans’ and Europeans with immigrant roots. It should be stressed that the EU in particular has acted as a bulwark against the rise of a genocidal anti-Semitism and racism akin to the interwar years. In 2012, public legal campaigns against Jewish (and Muslim) ritual circumcision in Germany and Austria spoke of a more intolerant political climate and disdain for liberal multiculturalism.
I am not suggesting that the ND is alone responsible for a changing anti-Muslim and ‘anti-Other’ climate. ND thinkers are divided between radical anti-Islamic (Guillaume Faye) and more philo-Islamic (Alain de Benoist) thinkers. Concrete political and material factors have led to a climate where it is increasingly legitimate to stigmatize non-Europeans, particularly Muslims, in cultural and political discourse. Ideas also matter in the sweep of human history. ND ideas, marginal to most Europeans about 45 years ago, have increasingly entered the mainstream of European culture and politics. If we are to follow the logic of constructivist thinkers such as Alexander Wendt (1992), shared identities become the basis for shared interests and institutions. With the dwindling sovereignty of the nation-state and the rise of the EU, the ‘burden’ of two world wars, and pressure from radical right-wing populists and theses borrowed from the ND, Europe’s shared identities are being transformed. Yet, they are being transformed in relation to sub-regional identities, the identities of non-Europeans, and more cosmopolitan models of belonging. So, for example, it matters if ‘native-born’ Europeans see Muslims as Muslims in Europe or as Muslim citizens of Europe. In addition, it matters how Muslims perceive themselves and Europeans in relation to the current largely assimilationist integration models of European states and the spectre of a rising Islamist militancy.
Finally, I argued that the ND’s responses to modernity are non-mainstream and rejected by conservative, liberal, and socialist political movements and parties. Nonetheless, ND analyses and solutions for the modern world are as coherent and rational as their liberal and left-wing counterparts. The fact that we might not be fans of those solutions does not mean we should label them as ‘reactionary’, ‘anti-modern’, or ‘irrational’.
I stress that despite the ND’s metapolitical orientation their thinkers are wedded to a revolutionary view of history that seeks to abolish liberalism. Overt violence is not a necessary prerequisite for a revolution, nor is right-wing positioning on the political spectrum. For the ND a non-violent revolution in values and worldviews precedes a revolution in institutions and socio-political structures. While I argued that the ND is generally not anti-modernist (including the most Traditionalist thinker Aleksandr Dugin), the anti-modernist revolutionary terrorist Theodore Kaczynski (known as the Unabomber) stated in his Industrial Society and Its Future: ‘We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system’ (Kaczynski in Versluis 2006: 111). In a manner that echoes de Benoist’s metapolitics, Kaczynski added: ‘This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades’ (Kaczynski in Versluis 2006: 111–12). Kaczynski’s revolutionary posture is completed in a manner that would not be foreign to de Benoist: ‘This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be not to overthrow governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society’ (Kaczynski in Versluis 2006: 112). In the postmodern age, de Benoist argues that a real revolutionary is not one that is obsessed with seizing power immediately, but one that prepares the cultural groundwork for changing the dominant worldviews and values of the epoch. De Benoist was adamant that before all political revolutions, as well as major changes in the dominant socio-economic apparatus, come revolutions of the spirit.
One of the ND’s great successes has been to restore cultural and intellectual legitimacy to a right that was historically tarred with the brushes of ‘reaction’, racism, anti-Semitism, fascism, Nazism, and colonialism. At the same time, the ND continues to controversially defend CR authors tainted by their relationship with Nazism, and its leader is haunted by his past. In this respect, Vérité pour l’Afrique du Sud (1964) was published by Alain de Benoist under the pen name Fabrice Laroche. The work in question defended apartheid South Africa in rather crude terms. Yet, as one French critic astutely pointed out, the absence of this book in the bibliography of his Mémoire vive (2012) means that either de Benoist has rejected these ‘youthful’ ideals, or that it was not an ‘accident’ that the work was not included in the bibliography (Lowenfeld 2012).
In short, I concur with Versluis (2006: 124) that alternative modernities such as those proposed by ND thinkers, as well as more violent variants, will gain ground due to the ‘excesses of modernity’. This is a point of view shared today by more traditionalists, conservatives, liberals, leftists, and Greens. The worldwide protests due to the financial crises in places as diverse as Iceland, Israel, Chile, Spain, Portugal, and Greece, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and Arab Spring revolts certainly have different domestic causes, but share a profound disdain for actually existing capitalism, neo-liberalism, or established forms of governance. From some of those protests there might emerge ‘alternative modernities’ and visions of ‘alternative futures’, which are neither liberal nor socialist. In short, ‘the pattern of economic centralization and bureaucratization’ in Europe, North America, and growing portions of the former Third World, as well as increasing divisions between the ‘political-corporate elite’ and the masses, will increase ‘powerlessness’ and a ‘modern sense of alienation, loss, and fragmentation’ (Versluis 2006: 106). Echoing the ND’s ‘Europe of a hundred flags’, I would not be surprised that if in the twenty-first century we witness the proliferation of autonomous, separatist communities of various ideological stripes from anarchist and religious to racist. Moreover, as with the ND’s pagan revivalism, we might also see the explosion of spiritual and religious forms of community belonging to compensate for modernity’s excessive materialism and egoism, destruction of nature, the decline of social safety nets, and the loss of premodern, traditional forms of worship. Following Samuel Huntington (1993: 26), the ‘unsecularization of the world’ (George Weigel’s notion) might become a general world pattern as a consequence of modernity’s loss and even denigration of religion and spirituality. In this respect, the ND’s quest to erect a new, sacralized religion of politics (conceptual tool three) is one response to modernity’s loss of meaning, myths, structured worldview, and homogeneous community belonging.
More Europeans insist that modern life is too mechanized, bureaucratized, and de-spiritualized; the natural world has been devastated; traditional forms of life have been attacked or ridiculed; and their quality of life has been eroded. In short, the modern and postmodern conditions produce their share of social and political discontent with or without the ND. In the West, modernity has spawned spectacular social, economic, and political advances, but also a ‘dark side’ filled with destructiveness, excessive faith in ‘instrumental reason’, and a centralization of power that separates and fragments us from communities and ourselves. As Versluis (2006: 129) correctly observes, ‘if we continue to follow our present course, we may well end in catastrophe’. While some of my readers might be ideologically horrified with the ND’s ‘alternative future’, it does not take a prophet to see that modernity is no utopia. For those who reject the ND’s alternative modernities, it is incumbent on them to propose other rational and comprehensive programmes to match the ND’s. If more than 20 years ago Francis Fukuyama (1989) argued that the ‘universalization’ of liberalism was leading to the ‘end of history’, he also pointed out that the ‘end of history’ will paradoxically be the moment when history ‘restarts’. With its historical communist foe buried and its ‘main enemy’ liberalism far from defeated, the ND longs for the end of the ‘end of history’. ND thinkers reason that the proliferation of hundreds or thousands of alternative modernities, both in Europe and worldwide, will lead to the emergence of a new, illiberal and revolutionary political synthesis capable of defeating the ‘nihilistic’ political and cultural legacies of 1789.