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Towards great ethno-civilizations and spiritual empires? How the European New Right imagines a post-liberal world order
Abstract
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.
A tanulmány a mai magyar politikai rendszer civilizációs diskurzusát vizsgálja, illetve a rendszer külpolitikájának makrokulturális és diszkurzív olvasatát kínálja. Kiemelten foglalkozik a magyar politikai vezetésnek a nyugati liberalizmussal szembeni konfrontatív politikájának elemzésével, amelynek során specifikusan a kultúra és az identitás területére fókuszál. A legfőbb állítás szerint a civilizációs diskurzus összefügg az identitáspolitika globális térnyerésével, és az állami szuverenitás elleni folyamatos kihívások közepette az államok hatalmának megerősítését szolgálja. A tanulmányban először a kutatás alapjául szolgáló kereteket és fogalmakat (civilizációs állam, civilizációs diskurzus, virtuális felnagyítás) tárgyalom. Ezt követően, a 2010 utáni magyar helyzet elemzése során a tanulmány szerkezete a magyar kormány diskurzusának civilizációs vonatkozású témái (revizionista múltértelmezés, migráció, segélypolitika, nyugatellenesség, vallásos diskurzus, magyar modell és regionális törekvések) szerint alakul. A tanulmány a következtetésekkel zárul, amelyben a magyar példára támaszkodva a civilizációs államok kilátásait értékelem.
I artiklen viser vi, at den identitære bevægelse har været med til at forny den islamkritiske debat og aktionsform i Danmark. Historisk har den indvandringskritiske højrefløj udvist en nationalistisk skepsis over for både indvandring og det europæiske projekt. Med Generation Identitær har det ændret sig. Nu er det en fælles europæisk identitet, der skal forsvares mod islam. Ikke fordi islamisk kultur er mindre værd, men fordi den ikke hører til i Europa. Ydermere føres den nye islamdebat med nye midler inspireret af bevægelser og aktionsformer, man normalt forbinder med venstrefløjen f.eks. happenings og banneraktioner. Endelig er deres mål ikke kun at anspore den partipolitiske højrefløj til handling, men at ændre måden man taler om indvandring i hele samfundet.
Across the globe, radical conservative political forces and ideas are influencing and even transforming the landscape of international politics. Yet IR is remarkably ill-equipped to understand and engage these new challenges. Unlike political theory or domestic political analyses, conservatism has no distinctive place in the fields’ defining alternatives of realism, liberalism, Marxism, and constructivism. This paper seeks to provide a point of entry for such engagement by bringing together what may seem the most unlikely of partners: critical theory and the New Right. Important parts of today’s New Right represent self-conscious appropriations of Critical themes and thinkers—turning them to self-declared “reactionary” ends. Developing outside the confines of the academy, these forms of thought have woven insights from across Critical theory into new and mobilizing forms of conservative ideology, seeking to link that ideology to social forces that play increasingly active roles in global politics. Our intention here is not to somehow blame Critical perspectives for the ideas of the New Right, either directly or by association. Rather, we seek to show how an engagement with Critical theory helps us understand the New Right, while also demonstrating some of the direct challenges the New Right poses for critical perspectives.
The rise of the radical Right over the last decade has created a situation that demands engagement with the intellectual origins, achievements, and changing worldviews of radical conservative forces. Yet, conservative thought seems to have no distinct place in the theoretical field that has structured debates within the discipline of IR since 1945. This article seeks to explain some of the reasons for this absence. In the first part, we argue that there was in fact a clear strand of radical conservative thought in the early years of the field's development and recover some of these forgotten positions. In the second part, we argue that the near disappearance of those ideas can be traced in part to a process of ‘conceptual innovation’ through which postwar realist thinkers sought to craft a ‘conservative liberalism’ that defined the emerging field's theoretical alternatives in ways that excluded radical right-wing positions. Recovering this history challenges some of IR's most enduring narratives about its development, identity, and commitments – particularly the continuing tendency to find its origins in a defining battle between realism and liberalism. It also draws attention to overlooked resources to reflect upon the challenge of the radical Right in contemporary world politics.
The rise of radical right-wing leaders, parties, movements, and ideas have transformed not only domestic political landscapes but also the direction and dynamics of international relations. Yet for all their emphasis on nationalist identity, on “America First” and “Taking Back Control,” there is an unmistakable international dimension to contemporary nationalist, populist movements. Yet these movements are also often transnationally linked. We argue that a constitutive part of this globality is the New Right's (NR) own distinctive international political sociology (IPS). Key thinkers of the contemporary NR have, over several decades, theorized and strategically mobilized globalized economic dislocation and cultural resentment, developing a coherent sociological critique of globalization. Drawing on the oft-neglected tradition of elite managerialism, NR ideologues have borrowed freely from Lenin and Schmitt on the power of enmity, as well as from Gramsci and the Frankfurt School on counterhegemonic strategies. Against the temptation to dismiss right-wing ideas as “merely” populist and by implication as lacking in ideological and theoretical foundations, we are faced with the much more challenging task of engaging a position that has already developed its own international political sociology and incorporated it into its political strategies.
The rise of the radical ‘New Right’ (NR) across much of the global political landscape is one of the most striking political developments of recent years. This article seeks to foster international theory’s critical engagement with the NR by providing an overview of its thinking about world politics and the challenges it presents. We argue that in many ways international theory is in fact uniquely positioned to provide such an engagement, and that it is essential that international theory comes to terms more fully with its political vision and theoretical claims if it is to engage effectively with this increasingly potent and often deeply troubling intellectual and political movement.
Why is there no reactionary international theory? International relations has long drawn on a range of traditions in political thought. However, no current, or even recent, major school of international-relations theory embraces reactionary doctrine. This is more surprising than some might assume. Reaction was once common in the field and is now increasingly common in world politics. In this note, we define reaction and show that no active and influential school of international-relations theory falls within its ideological domain. Nonetheless, reactionary ideas once deeply shaped the field. We identify two distinct kinds of reactionary international politics and illustrate them empirically. We argue that the current lack of reactionary international relations undermines the field's ability to make sense both of its own history and of reactionary practice. Finally, we offer some preliminary thoughts about why reactionary ideas hold little sway in contemporary international-relations theory.
World order is once again a matter of broad discussion and has entered influential critical theory with Hardt and Negri and Giorgio Agamben. A key reference has been Carl Schmitt's international thought, particularly his concept of nomos. Rather than address Schmitt's historical jurisprudence of international law, which has been done elsewhere, the present article examines the role of philology and mythology in his international thought. Such an approach reveals the considerable power of the concept of nomos and the intelligibility afforded by his striking account of it in terms of the elements of land, sea and air. Schmitt's jurisprudence proves to be inseparable from his approaches to language and mythology. This mythology also indicates significant ethical as well as intellectual problems in Schmitt's work, not least stemming from his association with Nazism and his anti-Jewish statements during the 1930s. This article argues that mythology and philology are both necessary to the intellectual task of making world order thinkable and map-able, and form conditions of global political action and decisive authority. It recommends, however, an ethos of modesty and plurality that remains aware of the dangers of drawing political consequences from the mythological inscriptions upon the earth.
While the annexation of Crimea boosted Putin's popularity at home, the Donbas insurgency shattered the domestic ideological status quo. The Kremlin's position appeared somehow hesitant, fostering the resentment of Russian nationalist circles that were hoping for a second annexation. In this article, I explore the term Novorossiya as a live mythmaking process orchestrated by different Russian nationalist circles to justify the Donbas insurgency. The powerful pull of Novorossiya rests on its dual meaning in announcing the birth of a New Russia geographically and metaphorically. It is both a promised land to be added to Russia and an anticipation of Russia's own transformation. As such, Novorossiya provides for an exceptional convergence of three underlying ideological paradigms - “red” (Soviet), “white” (Orthodox), and “brown” (Fascist). The Novorossiya storyline validates a new kind of geopolitical adventurism and blurs the boundaries, both territorial and imaginary, of the Russian state.
In this paper we present an analysis of the German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt as a spatial thinker whose work contains many elements relevant to the concerns of political geography. In examining his fun- damental concern with how to ground modern political order without theological foundation, we identify a conceptual matrix between space, political order and conflict that underpins his thought. Charting the development of his spatial theory across his work, we focus on two key spatial moments from immediately before and after the Second World War: first, his theory of Großraum (‘greater space’) order as a refor- mulation of global order after the eclipse of the state and its complicated entanglements with Nazi spatial thinking and expansionism in eastern Europe; second, his notion of nomos, developed after the war to embrace both a geo-elemental spatial ontology and an account of the rise and fall of Eurocentric global order. We conclude by noting Schmitt’s failure to move beyond an understanding of order grounded on spatial divi- sion and his increasing retreat into eschatological fantasy as global spatio-political relations became increas- ingly more complex in the late 20th century.
1. The term “sovereign dictatorship” and the emphasis of the dictatorial pattern of constitution making do return in Verfassungslehre even if now less frequently, given the change of topics. (Schmitt 1993, 59–60).
2. This is still called omnipotence in Political Theology I (Schmitt 2002, 43) but to be replaced already in that work by a theology of the miracle, understood as the exception.
3. This formulation is slightly altered in Verfassungslehre (Schmitt 1993, 79).
4. He has made this point himself in the Concept of the Political, after again denouncing the “superficial poltical theology” of the omnipotence of the state (Schmitt 2002, 42–43). Also see Political Theology I, where he presented the theological conception of universal guilt, implying the division [Einteilung] of the saved and the damned, a model for the friend enemy concept of the political (2002, 63–64).
5. In Concept of the Political this idea is maintained in terms of the declaration and proscription of the internal enemy (Schmitt 2002, 46–47).
6. I agree with Laclau that Lefort tended at times to operate with the rigid alternative of democracy and totalitarianism, leaving no room for anything in between. On this see below.
7. Thus Lefort, I think mistakenly and in a contradictory fashion, at times sees the reign of terror as ultimately democratic (Flynn 2005, 138; 244–245) because it is directed at keeping the place of power empty, as against usurpations. But he equally says that the logic of the terror springs from the need to extract “the people” from the people (Flynn 2005, 135) that highlights the authoritarian dimension.
8. The two-bodies conception becomes a three-bodies conception when the representation of the ideal segment of the people, “the plebs” or “underdog” in Laclau (2005a), becomes a problem to the representation of the people as a whole.
9. For one of the many places in Lefort see “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” (Lefort 1988, 255). For Habermas see “Popular Sovereignty as Procedure” (Habermas 1996), where what is left from popular sovereignty is only decentered and temporally disaggregated, multiple procedures of largely informal democratic communication. Its formal preconditions are fundamental rights, and its organizational bases are the associations of civil society. Habermas repeatedly rejects the idea that popular sovereignty should refer to a collective body, or will or even a subject of any kind (1996, 472–3; 486–7). His communicative, de-substantialized translation of “the people” is convincing, but it is unclear why this should be called sovereignty at all.
10. Such further secularization in the dimension of the constituent power is the aim of my project, tentatively titled Post-Sovereign Constitution Making: From Practice to Theory.
11. The reference here to a variety of bodies, as against one under the old regime, makes little sense in Laclau’s conception that stresses unification and single person leadership. The only way to interpret this “variety” is as three bodies: the empirical people, the part that embodies its will, and the leader’s body that unifies the part that still has heterogeneity in a modern society.
12. He is quite explicit about this move. In his text “Populism: What’s in a Name?” he asks: Does populism become synonymous with politics? His answer is “the answer can only be affirmative. Populism means putting into question the institutional order by constructing an underdog as an historical agent—that is, an agent that is an other in relation to the way thing stand. But this is the same as politics” (Laclau 2005b). (I thank Carlos de la Torre for this reference). I think the text should have said the political, in spite of the fact that Castoriadis, who is being used without attribution, reversed the normal French usage and called the extraordinary version invented by the Greeks “politics” (la politique) (Castoriadis 1991).
13. Lefort of course could and would not deny the incorporating role of populism, by no means universal, which under a democracy would further extend the democratic logic. But with populist embodiment, the democratic institutions have been transformed in authoritarian directions, and the inclusion occurs in a polity that is not democratic. It is another matter that a future democracy could then...
A prominent UK-based political and historical geographer analyzes ethnogeopolitics, a new trend in Russian political discourse that is distinguished by the primary role it assigns to ethnicity (rather than the nation-state) as a geopolitical factor-i.e., recognizing formal (often poly-ethnic) ethno-national groupings on their respective ethnic spaces as important "geopolitical subjects" in their own right with a certain autonomy in world politics. After defining and otherwise setting out the differences between ethno-geopolitics and the more mainstream school of Russian geopolitics emerging after the disintegration of the USSR, the author proceeds to assess the extent to which ethno-geopolitics is shaping current Russian geopolitical thought in two critically important arenas: (1) Russia's relations with other great powers at the global level and (2) the dynamics of ethnicity (and inter-ethnic relations) within its own boundaries as well as in neighboring states. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: Y900, Z190.71 references.
The purpose of this paper is to trace continuity in the attachment of the nouvelle droite to a homogeneous notion of pan-European identity since its birth in 1968. Like the nouvelle droite, early post-war neo-fascism and significant fascist elements in Italy were similarly obsessed with the decline of homogeneous pan-European or Western identities. Despite the ultra-nationalistic origins of historical fascism, early post-war neo-fascism and the nouvelle droite in different historical periods, the thread tying them together is the notion of a strong, unified, homogeneous, pan-European empire regenerated in defense against the dominant ‘materialist’ ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, social democracy, socialism, capitalism and communism.
This article considers the place of political geography and geopolitics in Samuel Huntington's celebrated work Clash of Civilizations. It is argued that Huntington's engagement with geography is fundamentally ambivalent. On the one hand, he frames his entire analysis as a form of what he calls political geography, and he invokes geographical factors in various ways throughout the entire text. At the same time, however, he explicitly discounts the significance of space or territory in the civilisational framework that he depicts. An analysis of Huntington's inconsistency in this regard contributes to a broader critique of his overall premises, logic, and conclusions. Beyond this, it provides insight into the uncertain position of geography more broadly in contemporary discourses of international relations and international security. Ultimately, I suggest that the ambivalences in the Clash of Civilizations are indicative of certain 'fault lines' - to borrow from Huntington's own lexicon - that have been characteristic for the American security imagination across much of the twentieth century.
The conviction of Russia’s uniqueness, both in the past as well as at present, is widespread among Russian conservative intellectuals and currently enjoys the support of President Putin. However, its most coherent, expressive, and distinct form can be found in Russian far-right circles. This study presents the concept of Russia as a civilization according Aleksandr G. Dugin, a controversial Russian scholar and political activist. This concept is supposed to prove Russia’s civilizational uniqueness and its exceptional place in the world history. The article presents Dugin’s criticism towards the Western view on contemporary civilizational transformations (1). It discusses Dugin’s attitude to Huntington’s theory (2) in order to, consequently, describe Dugin’s concept of civilization (3–5). Finally, it explains the socio-political significance of his concept in Russia’s contemporary internal and international situation (6). Although Dugin’s ideas can be considered extreme in numerous aspects, they do reflect Russia’s pursuit to radically separate itself from any foreign influences. This pursuit is a result of not only temporary political interests of Russian elites but it is also rooted in the whole Rus’ social and religious tradition.
What does the New Right want from international relations? In this article, we argue that the philosophy of the New Right is not reducible to a negation of internationalism. The New Right coalesce around a conceptualisation of the international driven by analytics and critiques of specific subjects, norms and practices, that should be treated as a distinct international theoretical offering. We refer to this vision as Reactionary Internationalism. This article examines and locates this vision within the intellectual history of nationalism and internationalism by drawing on poststructuralist approaches to intellectual history and drawing evidence from a discourse analysis of recent Lega, Front National, Brexit, and Trump campaigns. We find that, rather than advocating for the end of internationalism, the New Right seeks to reconstitute its normative architecture on the basis of inequality among identities. This entails dismantling liberal economic and rights-based norms and reframing them around transactionalism and power grounded on identity. Reactionary Internationalism emerges as a distinct philosophy that identifies a hegemonic normative bind and advocates its unravelling so as to liberate subjects understood as defined by their birth-cultural identity.
These are not happy times for liberal internationalists. No one can be sure how deep the crisis of liberal internationalism runs. However, in what follows, I argue that despite its troubles, liberal internationalism still has a future. The nature of the crisis is surprising. The threats to liberal internationalism were expected to come from rising non-western states seeking to undermine or overturn the postwar order. In the face of hostile, revisionist states, the United States and Europe were expected to stand shoulder to shoulder to protect the gains from 70 years of cooperation. But, in fact, liberal internationalism is more deeply threatened by developments within the West itself. The centrist and progressive coalitions that lay behind the postwar liberal order have weakened. Liberal democracy itself appears fragile and polarized, vulnerable to far right populism and backlash politics. In recent decades, the working and middle classes in advanced industrial democracies—the original constituencies and beneficiaries of an open and cooperative international order—have faced rising economic inequality and stagnation. Within the West, liberal internationalism is increasingly seen, not as a source of stability and solidarity among like-minded states, but as a global playing field for the wealthy and influential. Liberal internationalism has lost its connection to the pursuit of social and economic advancement within western countries.
The essay inquires into the cultural production of ‘Novorossiya’ as a politically-coloured territorial ‘brand’, promoted by pro-Kremlin intellectuals, activists of the Donbas rebellion, and internet users. It argues that ‘Novorossiya’ is not only constructed from the building blocks of historical traditions, but also framed by geographical metaphors in popular imagination. Drawing on studies in critical geopolitics and fan fiction, this research interprets ‘Novorossiya’s’ constituency in the Russian-language internet as a sort of political ‘fandom’. Relative to the annexation of Crimea, however, this ‘brand’ has been less successful on the ‘market’ of geopolitical projects.
Europe was the place where two great models of polity, of political unity, were elaborated, developed and clashed: the nation, preceded by the monarchy, and the empire. The last emperor of the Latin West, Romulus Augustus, was deposed in 475. Only the Eastern empire remained. But after the Western empire was dismantled, a new unitary consciousness seems to have arisen. In 795, Pope Leon III started to date his encyclicals based on the reign of Charles, king of the Franks and patrician of the Romans, rather than on the reign of the emperor of Constantinople. Five years later in Rome, on Christmas Day in the year 800, Leon III placed the imperial crown on Charlemagne's head.
In this article, Mark Bassin explores Lev Gumilev's theory of ethnicity. Developing his ideas in the context of post-Stalinist debates about the relationship of society to the natural world, Gumilev maintained that the etnos was a wholly natural, quasi-biological entity. Although this naturalism involved an important genetic dimension, Gumilev denied that ethnicity was determined by race and emphasized instead its ecological quality as an organic part of biogeocenoses or natural-landscape ecosystems. Although he remained marginalized in his day by the Soviet ethnographic establishment, his essentialist perspective is powerfully appealing for post-Soviet audiences, who find his “ecology of ethnicity” singularly useful for the purposes of ethnopolitical discourse.
Throughout the development or the French New Right as a intellectual movement, Alain de Benoist has exercised a remarkable degree of control. From its break with the Catholic nationalist Right (in the late 1960s) through its redefinition as a European national movement with a socio-biological focus to its more recent engagement on behalf of Third World as well as European communitarian identities, the New Right has been primarily the evolving creation of a single mind. Whether under pseudonyms like Robert de Herte or in collaboration with Pierre Vial, Jean Mabire, Guillaume Faye, Giorgio Locchi, and other like-minded thinkers, Benoist has had a tree hand in moulding his movement.
The author proposes an imperial genealogy of Schmitt's concept of the katechon. Engaging debates about the role of the concept in Schmitt's political theology, the author reads the katechon as a scenario of imperial ruin gazing, tracing its emergence in essays about World War II, which focused on the theme of imperial rise and decline. With the katechon, Schmitt re-conceptualized Reich/empire/nomos as the inextricable link between beginning and end.
World politics is entering a new phase, in which the great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of international conflict will be cultural. Civilizations - the highest cultural groupings of people - are differentiated from each other by religion, history, language and tradition. These divisions are deep and increasing in importance. From Yugoslavia to the Middle East to Central Asia, the fault lines of civilizations are the battle lines of the future. In this emerging era of cultural conflict the United States must forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values wherever possible. With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other.
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Today the concept of globality is widely used to describe a condition characterized by the presence a single sociopolitical space on a planetary scale. Yet international relations theory has been either unwilling or unable to understand the global realm in sui generis terms. This paper argues that if we want to make coherent sense of the global realm and its relationship to the international system, we must account for how globality has been constructed as a social fact. The paper then tries to provide some of the foundations of such an account by analyzing how a distinctively global space was forged out of changing cosmological beliefs about the makeup of the terrestrial surface during the Renaissance, and how these new beliefs in turned conditioned the possibility of modern practices of territorial demarcation and national identity construction. If valid, this interpretation implies that the order of analytical priority between the international system of states and the global realm ought to be reversed, and hence also that a sui generis account of globality must be built on the recognition that the world was global well before it became international in any recognizably modern sense of this latter term.
This ambitious study, first published in 2000, rewrites the terms of debate about globalization. Martin Shaw argues that the deepest meaning of globality is the growing sense of worldwide human commonality as a practical social force, arising from political struggle not technological change. The book focuses upon two new concepts: the unfinished global-democratic revolution and the global-Western state. Shaw shows how an internationalized, post-imperial Western state conglomerate, symbiotically linked to global institutions, is increasingly consolidated amidst worldwide democratic upheavals against authoritarian, quasi-imperial non-Western states. This study explores the radical implications of these concepts for social, political and international theory, through a fundamental critique of modern 'national-international' social thought and dominant economistic versions of global theory. Required reading for sociology and politics as well as international relations, Theory of the Global State offers a historical, theoretical and political framework for understanding state and society in the emerging global age.
Contre le libéralisme. La société n’est pas un marché
- De Benoist
- Tjalve V. S.
The ghost of a lieutenant: our name is Strelkov
- A Dugin
The Rise of the Civilizational State
- C Coker
Eurasian Mission. An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism
- A Dugin
A Textbook Case of Doctrinal Entrepreneurship: Aleksandr Dugin. Russian Nationalism, Imaginaries, Doctrines, and Political Battlefields
- M Laruelle
The faces of national conservatism. Speech at the Nat-com convention in Rome
- M Maréchal
Theory Talk #66: Aleksander Dugin on Eurasianism, the Geopolitics of Land and Sea, and a Russian Theory of Multipolarity
- M Millerman
Geopolitical Amnesia
- V S Tjalve
Alain de Benoist: fascism with a human face
- T Bar-On
Eurasianism and the European Far Right: Reshaping the Europe-Russia Relationship
- A Shekhovtsov
Let us create another culture war
- K Stoeckl
- A Mikhailovskiy
The Politics of Globality since 1945
- R Van Munster
- C Sylvest
Le Siècle du populisme
- P Rosanvallon
The French origins of you will not replace us
- T C Williams
Key Thinkers of the Radical Right
- M Sedgwick
Aleksandr Dugin: The Time Has Come to Forge New Empires. The Budapest Beacon
- C Tóth
The Tribalization of Europe: Defense of Our Liberal Values
- M Wind
Speech at the Nat-com convention in Rome
- M Maréchal