The long game of the European New Right

In 2007, Canadian political theorist Tamir Bar-On wrote a book with a provocative title: Where have all the fascists gone? In 2017, Bar-On’s question may seem to many readers no longer that perplexing.

Beginning with the GFC, the last decade has seen the most dramatic rise of far Right political forces in the Western world since the interwar years.

2009 was the breakthrough year for UKIP (the UK Independence Party) in European elections. It also saw notable gains for Rightwing parties from Norway, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Austria, and Italy.

In 2010, Jobbik, “The Movement for a Better Hungary” whose supporters wear paramilitary uniforms and rail against immigrants, the Roma people and “Jewish financial capital”, became Hungary’s third largest Party.

Last year, the world knows, Donald Trump’s brand of “America First” populism won over first the GOP and then the White House. Britain, led by UKIP, voted to leave the EU.

This year, Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party in the Netherlands failed to win the Dutch elections. Yet his Party increased its representation from 15 to around 20 seats, confirming Wilders’ as Holland’s second political Party.

All of these New Right Parties deny the tag of fascism, indelibly tarnished by the revelations after 1944 of the heinous atrocities of Hitler’s NSDAP.

Yet each of them, to different degrees, challenges established post-war divisions of Left and Right, just as the interwar fascists and “national socialists”. Each calls into question the basic legitimacy of parliamentary market regimes, as the interwar fascists did. Each hones in upon anti-immigration and anti-Islamic fears. Each plays up opposition to treacherous domestic “elites” as a key point of electoral appeal.

Each proposes the reclaiming of “sovereignty” in a sweeping national rebirth: an idea once more close to the very heart of interwar forms of fascism.

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Today’s rise to mainstream political legitimacy of these parties, as well as the commonalities between them, bespeak common ideological inspirations, as well as the changing times.

Bar-On’s 2007 study of the European New Right thus takes on new pertinence in 2017. Where have all the fascists gone?, an almost unique study in the English language, seeks out and analyses in detail the ideological seeds of European anti-liberalism that are increasingly bearing electoral fruit in the second decade of the new millennium.

The book asks several questions that, as things now appear, have been asked far too little in the liberal West. Just how did the ideas of the European Far Right develop after the “zero hour” of 1945, in the transformed post-fascist world?

Was it reasonable to suppose that military defeat in 1944-45 would forever discredit the ideas of the Far Right that had commanded mass support in Germany, Italy, Spain, Romania and elsewhere?

Wasn’t it, on the contrary, always more likely that these ideas would go underground and bide their time, cultivating esoteric modes of expression whilst waiting for their moment to bid for renewed political power?

A New New Right

In Australia as in the US until recently, the term “New Right” described political supporters of the suite of policies known as “neoliberalism” or “economic rationalism”.

New Righters on this AngloAmerican model believe in the fundamental beneficence and efficiency of free market exchange. They oppose, at least in theory, any nation-State that would intervene in these markets. They oppose, in theory and practice, the organisation of workers in unions, progressive forms of income taxation, and automatic state provision of welfare and other forms of social insurance.

Instead, these “dries” espouse the selling of public assets and the removal of tariffs and other barriers to free trade. Their theorists envisage a world of open borders. Capital from any which “where” should be free to move from country to country, choosing local conditions most propitious for banking profits.



At the height of the 1990s’ euphoria about “globalisation”, thinkers of this New Right were forecasting the end of the nation state in a borderless utopia of “24-7” trade.

The European New Right (ENR) has different ideas and other sources.

Indeed, when its spokespeople are not viscerally anti-American—as almost all were, until 2016—they are deeply opposed to “liberalism” in any forms. They are thus deeply hostile to the kinds of economic cosmopolitanism espoused by Messrs Hayek, Friedman and their admirers, however much they share some political foes.

For the thinkers of the ENR, free markets are not the objects of celebration and faith, but of profound suspicion.

It is not the invariant tendency of these markets to produce growing material inequalities that troubles them. What the ENR thinkers contest is how unregulated free markets operate in almost complete indifference, or active hostility to local traditions, religions, communities, nations, and (in some cases) nature herself.

The AngloAmerican New Right have long proposed that markets inculcate in subjects a hardy independence of spirit and canny self-reliance, through the ongoing demands of competitive survival.

The ENR, unafraid to draw on Marxian cultural theories, proposes that the commodification of culture in later capitalism cheapens everything, uproots individuals from their families and solidarity with their fellows, and destroys the differences between local, regional and national ways of life.

In the ENR optic, moreover, the floods of immigrants who have presented themselves at the borders of Western nations in the last decades are a symptom of the “globalist” system. They are the other side of the cheap imported consumer goods that have also flooded the West since the 1980s. To echo Alain de Benoist, one of the fathers of the ENR, he who remains silent about capitalism should also remain silent about the problems of immigration.

We are a long way from the New Right we are familiar with down under.