Towards great ethno-civilizations and spiritual empires? How the European New Right imagines a post-liberal world order

Far-right parties and pundits are often portrayed as parochial nationalists obsessed with the idea of national sovereignty. Opposed to a liberal world order, they prefer a rogue world of nation-states on the loose. This essay seeks to complicate that narrative. It suggests that alongside political parties with a nationalist agenda, an increasing number of voices on the radical Right are now pushing for a re-spiritualized world order in which cultures, civilizations, and empires are to set the scene. This vision of global order echoes Christopher Coker’s recent claim that “we now live in a world in which civilization is fast becoming the currency of international politics.” But, why does this strand of the far-right prefer civilizations to nation-states? To ponder this question, this essay zooms in on the European New Right and more precisely two of its main luminaries, Alain de Benoist and Aleksandr Dugin. It shows how the New Right stretches back to classical geopolitics to imagine a future polycentric world order in which large civilizations are set free from American hegemony. The empires of the future are no longer underpinned by nation-states but by ethnopluralism—a “blossoming variety” of local, ethnic, agrarian polities.

Political philosophy and Australian far-right media: A critical discourse analysis of The Unshackled and XYZ

A 21st-century growth in prevalence of extreme right-wing nationalism and social conservatism in Australia, Europe, and America, in certain respects belies the positive impacts of online, new, and alternative forms of global media. Cross-national forms of ‘far-right activism’ are unconfined to their host nations; individuals and organisations campaign on the basis of ethno-cultural separatism, while capitalising on internet-based affordances for communication and ideological cross-fertilisation. Right-wing revolutionary ideas disseminated in this media, to this end, embody politico-cultural aims that can only be understood with attention to their philosophical underpinnings. Drawing on a dataset of articles from the pseudo-news websites, XYZ and The Unshackled, this paper investigates the representation of different rightist political philosophical traditions in contemporary Australia-based far-right media. A critical discourse and content analysis reveal XYZ and TU’s engagement with various traditions, from Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution, to the European New Right and neo-Nazism.

White Extinction: Metaphysical Elements of Contemporary Western Fascism

The Euro-American far-right represents a highly diverse political movement comprising numerous ideological tendencies. It includes the European New Right, the US ‘alt-right’ and ‘alt-lite’, far-right accelerationism, traditionalism, and new forms of political misogyny. Despite the diversity in ideas and activities, this article argues that an overarching theme of the ‘fear of white extinction’ travels across and animates each major contemporary far-right tendency. The article explores a variety of older and contemporary metaphysical themes that are deployed in contemporary fascism. These include new configurations of racism, occultist ideas of nature and vitalism, the rendering of culture and civilization in ‘biocultural’ and ‘anthropological’ terms, and ideas about cosmic destiny. The article considers how older ideas from Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Hans Günther, Ludwig Klages, Arnold Gehlen and others are mobilized in contemporary fascism to generate a critique of liberal modernity, one which leads remorselessly to a logic of white supremacy and apocalyptic violence.

Alexander Dugin and Eurasianism

This chapter discusses the life and work of Alexander Dugin who, since the mid-1990s, has been the best marketed of all Russian ideologists, both in Russia and in the West. Well-read in mainstream philosophy and the humanities, Dugin is an impressive aggregator of radical Right ideologies. He brings together doctrines from diverse origins: völkisch occultism, Traditionalism, Conservative Revolution, European New Right, Eurasianism, and the like. He is the main intellectual figure in Russia to have selected European radical Right doctrinal traditions as his ideological marketing product, and his success at home has been limited. His efforts to influence Russia’s broader geopolitical narrative have prospered, but his work to introduce doctrinal content inspired by the European völkisch tradition has not. Nevertheless, thanks to his well-developed outreach strategies; his ability to speak various European languages, to translate and to be translated; and his networks in several European countries, Dugin has become Russia’s best-known New Right thinker.

The Radical Right and Fascism

Within the political science community, scholars typically draw a sharp distinction between the “radical right” and “fascism.” This chapter challenges such a distinction, and encourages scholars to reprise fascism’s relationship to the radical right. It suggests that (neo)fascism’s past offers the best route to understanding the present-day radical right. Such a historical interpretation seeks to enhance our understanding of the central importance of the neofascist European New Right as the “missing link” between fascism and contemporary radical right-wing populism. Moreover, much of the scholarly literature theorizing the radical right also fails to take into account activist cultures and shared domains. Rather than breaking the historical link between the radical right and fascism, this chapter calls on those studying this field to reinstate this important link, thereby acknowledging the continuing presence of fascism in today’s radical right.

Lev Gumilev and the European New Right

The striking affinities that have developed between radical-conservative movements in Western Europe and Russia since the end of the Cold War have been widely noted. This essay considers these affinities through the example of the Soviet historian and geographer Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev (1912–1992). It argues that Gumilev and the European New Right developed perspectives that were highly comparable, founded on similar principles, and articulated through similar images and allusions. Yet despite the powerful resonances in terms of basic concepts and theoretical orientation, there were nonetheless deep differences in terms of the conclusions regarding the practical implications for their respective societies that Gumilev and the Europeans deduced from these principles.