Abstract
This chapter focuses on the ideological dimension of contemporary right-wing politics and what it might portend for liberal democracy, as expressed in one of the more sophisticated intellectual movements currently operating in Europe, the New Right. This New Right, or ‘Nouvelle Droite’, is a group composed primarily of French intellectuals from research institutes such as GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’étude pour la Civilization Européenne) or cultural journals like Nouvelle Ecole, Eléments and Krisis published during the 1980s.1 It originally began in the 1960s as a purely reactionary group composed mostly of students, supporting the struggles of the West in Angola, Rhodesia, South Vietnam and Algeria. Eventually, however, the New Right turned into a primarily intellectual group whose main goal today is to advance a cultural, metapolitical strategy designed to provide the theoretical and ideological underpinnings for radical right-wing politics in Europe. The main reason for studying this particular intellectual group is to fill a theoretical gap in the analysis of right-wing politics in general. Indeed, although much has been written about the different social features and political activities of radical right-wing movements, the updating of both fascist and national-socialist concepts and thought — now underway among New Right intellectuals — has received little scholarly attention.
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Notes
Although Alain de Benoist is unquestionably the intellectual leader of the New Right, other thinkers in France, Germany, and Italy have contributed to transform this intellectual movement into a European movement. Diorama Letterario in Italy and the Thule Seminar in Germany, organized by Pierre Krebs, have also served as Neu Right intellectual forums. For an analysis of the continuity among all the national right movements in France — Jeune Nation, FEN, Europe-Action, MNP/REL and GRECE — see P. A. Taguieff, ‘La stratégie culturelle de la Nouvelle Droite en France (1968–1983)’ in Vous avez dit fascisme? (Paris: Arthaud/Montalba, 1984), p. 19. As an intellectual movement, the New Right appeared in France at the end of the 1960s, when GRECE was founded by Alain de Benoist, Jacques Bruyas, and Jean Jacques Mourreau with the collaboration of Claude Valla and Dominique Venner. The creation of GRECE was the logical alternative for young French nationalist militants after the dissolution of the Jeune Nation movement in 1958, the dissolution of the OAS, and the defeat of the Rassemblement européen de la liberté (REL) in the 1967 legislative elections. This group continued the ideological line of the Mouvement Nationaliste du Progrès (MNP), which was the political expression of the nationalists working for the journal Europe Action and of the students’ organization FEN, which published the Cahiers Universitaires. The latest and most important book providing a critical ideological analysis of the French New Right is
Pierre A. Taguieff, Sur la Nouvelle Droite: Jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris: Descartes and Cia, 1994). Another solid work is Anne-Marie Duranton Crabol, Visages de la Nouvelle Droite: La GRECE et son histoire (Presses de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1988).
I posit that the fascist ideology arose as a mature system of ideas before the actual appearance of the fascist movement in Italy. Fascism’s first ideological manifestation was the synthesis of integral, non-liberal nationalism and anti-marxist socialism expressed in the political writings of Georges Sorel. The first formulation of fascist ideology was developed in the Italian journal La Lupa and the French Les Cahiers du Cercle Proudhon in 1910 and 1911. At that time, intellectuals of L’Action Française met Sorel’s followers and began the ideological synthesis of a third ‘national socialist way’, an alternative to marxist socialism and liberal democracy. See Ze’ev Sternhell, ‘Fascist ideology’, in Fascism: A Reader’s Guide, ed. W. Laqueur, (New York, 1976).
See also Ze’ev Sternhell, Ni droite ni gauche (Paris: Ed. Seuil, 1983), and Z. Sternhell, Mario Sznajder and Maia Asherri, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Paris: Fayard 1990).
An opposite thesis is presented by Piero Ignazi, ‘The changing profile of the Italian social movement’ in Encounters with the Contemporary Radical Right, eds Peter Merkl and L. Weinberg (Westview Press, 1993).
Alain de Benoist, Vu de Droite (Paris: Copernic, 1979), p. 316.
Louis Depeux, ‘Rivolozione conservatrice e modernita’, Diorama letterario, 79, Feburary 1985. Cited by R. Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 354.
Otto Koellreutter, Volk und Staat in der Welanschauung des Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 1935), quoting Rosenberg from Volkischer Beobachter (9 January 1934).
Cited in Jane Kaplan, Government without Administration: State and Civil Service in Weimar and Nazi Germany (Oxford, 1988).
Alain de Benoist, ‘The idea of Empire’, TELOS 98–99, winter 1993-spring 1994, 95. Originally delivered as a lecture at GRECE’s 24th National Congress, devoted to the topic ‘Nation and Empire’, Paris, 24 March 1991.
Alain de Benoist, ‘The idea of Empire’, TELOS 98–99, winter 1993-spring 1994, 93–7. Originally delivered as a lecture at GRECE’s 24th National Congress, devoted to the topic ‘Nation and Empire’, Paris, 24 March 1991.
Julius Evola, ‘United Europe: The spiritual prerequisite’, Scorpion, 9, 1986, 18–20; adapted from Gli uomini e le rovine [Man and the Ruins] (Rome: Giovanni Volpe, 1972; 1st ed. 1953), cited in R. Griffin (ed.), Fascism, (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 343.
Alain de Benoist, ‘Europe: La question allemande’, Eléments, 65 (1989), 17.
Alain de Benoist, ‘Vous avez dit “Mitteleuropa”?’ Eléments, 65 Spring 1989, 22.
Hans-George Betz, Radical Right Wing Populism in Western Europe (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1994), p. 4.
This explanation is provided by Ronald Inglehart in Cultural Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 275–9.
B. Poche, ‘The Lombard League: From cultural autonomy to integral federalism’, TELOS 90 winter 1991–92, 75.
U. Bossi with D. Vimercati, La Rivoluzione: La Lega: storia e idee (Milan: Sperling & Kupfer, 1993), p. 170.
Seymour M. Lipset, ‘The revolt against modernity,’ in Mobilization, Center Periphery Structures and National Building ed. Per Torsvik (Bergen: Universitetforlaget, 1981), p. 477.
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Spektorowski, A. (1997). The Ideological Challenge from the ‘New Right’. In: Shain, Y., Klieman, A. (eds) Democracy: The Challenges Ahead. St Antony’s Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25776-8_6
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