Where Have All the Fascists Gone? [1 ed.] 0754671542, 9780754671541

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
About the Author
Foreword
Preface
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins: The Right-Wing Roots
Ideological Origins: The Counter-Revolution Against 1789
The Post-War Years: Gradual Metapolitical Turn
2 The ENR’s Birth and Development in France: A New Right?
GRECE’s “Cultural War” Begins
The French New Right in the 1970s: Dark Days to Respectability
The “Hot Summer” in 1979
3 The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Opening to the Left
The Nouvelle Droite in the 1990s and Beyond: Fascism Revisited or Mere Cultural Criticism?
The Second “Hot Summer” in 1993
4 The ENR and the Legacy of May 1968 – A Critical Turning Point
ENR Perceptions of May 1968: We Alone Carry The Flame
The ENR New Guard
The Context of French, European and International Politics in 1968
5 ENR Influences and Worldview: The Primacy of Metapolitics and the “Right to Difference”
The Consistent Metapolitical Thread: A Break with the Old Right?
Traditional Politics of the “Masses” Versus the Metapolitics of the “Philosopoher Kings”
The ENR’s Focus on the “Culture Wars”: A Stroke of Genius?
The ENR’s Other Faith: Anti-Egalitarianism or the “Right to Difference”
The ENR’s Nightmare: A Universal, Egalitarian World Society of Happy Consumers
6 Ambiguities in the ENR Worldview
Cultural Metapolitics versus Traditional Politics
Paganism versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition
Intellectual Elitism versus Popular Social Change
The “Conservative Revolution” versus New Left
Conservative versus Revolutionary View of the World
Scientism-Intellectualism versus Myth-Making
Simplistic Anti-Americanism versus Recycling of American Federalism
Pro-Third World Stance versus Pronounced Euro-Centrism
A Communitarian “Destiny” versus Intellectual Freedom
7 Interpreting the ENR
Classification of the Scholarly Literature
Position One: “Designer Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism”?
Position Two: A New Political Paradigm?
Position Three: Ideological Synthesis of Old and New Right?
Position Four: Confusion and Ambiguity
The Griffin-Taguieff Debate: Fascism or Post-Fascism?
A Note of Academic Caution
8 The Influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe and Beyond: A Right-Wing International?
The Nouvelle Droite’s Pan-European Context
The Italian Nuova Destra: Fascism’s Kiss of Death?
The ENR in North America: The Isolated Case of Telos or a Broader Cultural and Political Trend?
A Short History of Telos: The Drift from Left to Right
Telos Considers the Merits of the ENR Worldview: The 1993-4 Debates
Telos and the ENR Debates: Idiosyncratic or Broader Phenomenon?
Lessons of the ENR-Telos Rapprochement
9 The ENR’s Relationship to the Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascism
Divergences Between the ENR and Alain de Benoist and the Front National (FN)
The Affinity Between the ENR and Extreme-Right: The Anti-Egalitarian Ethos and the Obsessive Quest for Identity?
ENR Connections to Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascist Circles
10 Treason of the Intellectuals?
The Failure to Claim Historical Responsibility: Recycling the Demons of the Past?
The Role of Modern Intellectuals: All Traitors?
ENR Intellectuals: The Reign of Interests or the Fires of Idealism?
Metapolitics, Apoliteia and Political Power
ENR Views of Human Nature and Political Power: Between Malleable Man and “Eternal” Conflict
Conclusion
References
Index

Citation preview

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FASCIStS GONE?

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

TAMIR BAR-ON George Brown College, Toronto, Canada With a Preface by Roger Griffin

First published 2007 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Tamir Bar-On 2007 Tamir Bar-On has asserted his moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Bar-On, Tamir Where have all the fascists gone? 1. Conservatism - Europe 2. Fascism - Europe 3. Right-wing extremists - Europe I. Title 320.5'2'094 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bar-On, Tamir. Where have all the fascists gone? / by Tamir Bar-On. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7154-1 1. Conservatism--Europe. 2. Fascism--Europe. 3. Right and left (Political science) I. Title. JC573.2.E85B37 2007 320.53'3094--dc22

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-7154-1 (hbk)

2007001513

Contents About the Author Foreword Preface Acknowledgements Introduction

vii viii xvii xviii 1

1

The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins: The Right-Wing Roots Ideological Origins: The Counter-Revolution Against 1789 The Post-War Years: Gradual Metapolitical Turn

21 23 29

2

The ENR’s Birth and Development in France: A New Right? GRECE’s “Cultural War” Begins The French New Right in the 1970s: Dark Days to Respectability The “Hot Summer” in 1979

33 35 36 40

3 The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Opening to the Left The Nouvelle Droite in the 1990s and Beyond: Fascism Revisited or Mere Cultural Criticism? The Second “Hot Summer” in 1993

54 54

4

57 59 67 71

The ENR and the Legacy of May 1968 – A Critical Turning Point ENR Perceptions of May 1968: We Alone Carry The Flame The ENR New Guard  The Context of French, European and International Politics in 1968

45

5 ENR Influences and Worldview: The Primacy of Metapolitics and the “Right to Difference” 79 The Consistent Metapolitical Thread: A Break with the Old Right? 84 Traditional Politics of the “Masses” Versus the Metapolitics of the “Philosopoher Kings” 86 The ENR’s Focus on the “Culture Wars”: A Stroke of Genius? 89 The ENR’s Other Faith: Anti-Egalitarianism or the “Right to Difference” 91 The ENR’s Nightmare: A Universal, Egalitarian World Society of Happy Consumers 94 6

Ambiguities in the ENR Worldview Cultural Metapolitics versus Traditional Politics Paganism versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition  Intellectual Elitism versus Popular Social Change

99 100 103 104

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

vi



The “Conservative Revolution” versus New Left 105 Conservative versus Revolutionary View of the World 107 Scientism-Intellectualism versus Myth-Making 108 Simplistic Anti-Americanism versus Recycling of American Federalism109 111 Pro-Third World Stance versus Pronounced Euro-Centrism A Communitarian “Destiny” versus Intellectual Freedom 112

7

Interpreting the ENR Classification of the Scholarly Literature Position One: “Designer Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism”?  Position Two: A New Political Paradigm? Position Three: Ideological Synthesis of Old and New Right? Position Four: Confusion and Ambiguity The Griffin-Taguieff Debate: Fascism or Post-Fascism?  A Note of Academic Caution

115 119 121 128 132 135 136 138

8 The Influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe and Beyond: A Right-Wing International? 141 The Nouvelle Droite’s Pan-European Context 142 The Italian Nuova Destra: Fascism’s Kiss of Death? 144 The ENR in North America: The Isolated Case of Telos or a Broader Cultural and Political Trend? 148 A Short History of Telos: The Drift from Left to Right 149 Telos Considers the Merits of the ENR Worldview: The 1993-4 Debates 151 157 Telos and the ENR Debates: Idiosyncratic or Broader Phenomenon? Lessons of the ENR-Telos Rapprochement 160 9 The ENR’s Relationship to the Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascism Divergences Between the ENR and Alain de Benoist and the Front National (FN) The Affinity Between the ENR and Extreme-Right: The Anti-Egalitarian Ethos and the Obsessive Quest for Identity? ENR Connections to Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascist Circles

165

10 Treason of the Intellectuals? The Failure to Claim Historical Responsibility: Recycling the Demons of the Past?  The Role of Modern Intellectuals: All Traitors? ENR Intellectuals: The Reign of Interests or the Fires of Idealism? Metapolitics, Apoliteia and Political Power ENR Views of Human Nature and Political Power: Between Malleable Man and “Eternal” Conflict

177 178 180 184 185

Conclusion

191

References Index

207 217

166 169 172

187

About the Author Dr Tamir Bar-On received his Ph.D. in political science from McGill University. He currently teaches political science and sociology at George Brown College in Toronto, Canada. Dr Bar-On has published numerous academic articles on neofascism and terrorism, including in World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia (ABC-CLIO, 2006) and Fascism Past and Present, West and East (ibidem-Verlag, 2006).

Foreword

Another Face? Another Mazeway? Reflections on the Newness and Rightness of the European New Right Roger Griffin

A Faceless Fascism? Commenting on the social importance of speaking with a ‘good’ accent in Britain’s class-obsessed society, George Bernard Shaw wrote in Pygmalion that ‘It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth, without making some other Englishman despise him.’ By the same token it appears that the subject of fascism is still so contentious that it is impossible to make a pronouncement about it without exciting the wrath or scorn of some other intellectual who feels almost personally affronted by the position that has been adopted within the debate. Some prime examples emerged from the heated controversy ignited in the pages of a German ‘forum discussion’ journal by my contention that fascism changed its ‘faces’ in the post-war period, several direct descendants from interwar movements undergoing radical changes in ideology and ‘style’, while one adopted the exclusively ‘metapolitical’ expression now familiar as the European New Right (ENR). To judge from the highly polarized reception of my own article, irreconcilable ideological and methodological divides – too often exacerbated by bitter personal enmities and soured communications – are bound to condition any serious discussion of the ENR, which is in any case sufficiently polymorphous and polysemic to provide grist to a number of rival interpretive mills. As long as this situation prevails, Tamir  Roger Griffin, ‘Fascism’s new faces (and new facelessness) in the “post-fascist” epoch, and its threats to contemporary democracy’, Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik, 15.3 (2003). The entire issue was republished as Andreas Umland, Werner Loh, Roger Griffin (eds.) Fascism Past and Present, West and East (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2006). For particularly vitriolic reactions see especially the contributions of Bärbel Meuerer, Klaus Holz, Friedrich Pohlmann, and James Gregor.  It is worth noting that for Julius Evola, one of the principal influences on the ENR especially in Italy and Russia, the ‘liberal’ human sciences are mired a priori in assumptions about the nature of knowledge, history, and culture, which reflect the decadence of the modern age since they operate ‘outside the Tradition’ of higher metapolitical knowledge of the world. See in particular the introduction to his seminal pre-war text La Rivolta contro il mondo moderno (1934), published by Inner Traditions in English as The Revolt against the Modern World (1995), translated by Guido Stucco.

Foreword

ix

Bar-On’s carefully crafted account of the ENR’s debt to ‘historic fascism’ in its genesis – amazingly the first scholarly monograph to appear on the movement in English by a non-fellow-traveller – and his documentation of the tenuous connections to the conventional extreme right it retains to this day, are likely to alienate at least three constituencies of readers, no matter how much they are appreciated elsewhere in ‘mainstream’ academia. The first is made up of intellectuals of a neo-Trotskyite or hard-line Socialist persuasion who, unlike some of their Marxist fraternity, have resisted the temptation to allow their visions of universal social justice to be lured onto the rocks of radical right utopias by metapolitical sirens. Unencumbered by the methodological soulsearching of liberals, they have no qualms about branding the New Right as neofascist along with the neo-populism of Jean-Marie Le Pen or Jörg Haider, but would place the forces of capitalist and anti-socialist reaction underlying the ENR’s antiracist, anti-nationalist, and anti-totalitarian sophistry at the centre of their analysis. Then there is a significant group of historians for whom the era of fascism effectively died in April 1945, after which the species of politics in which armed massparties carried out assaults on liberal democracy withered to such insignificance that it no longer poses a threat to civil society. As a result their panoramic accounts of fascism pay scant attention to post-war developments. Where they do take it into account, the focus is either on movements that have aped Fascism or Nazism before their seizure of power (e.g., the National Front in Britain), or electoral parties that attempted in vain to disguise their continuing affiliation to them (e.g. Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano and the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands in Germany). Such historians remain unimpressed by the argument that one of fascism’s responses to defeat might have been deliberately to change its spots by shedding its paramilitary, party-political dimension, and charismatic style of leadership. This is because they assume these traits to be definitional of fascism, along with the uniforms, cult of violence, spectacular (‘religious’) mode of politics, attempted mass-mobilization, and rabid nationalism, all of which are conspicuous by their absence in the ENR.  For a thorough exploration of the ENR in Germany see Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), which complements BarOn’s book with its main focus on the French New Right.  See for example Nick Lowles’ article ‘The Men who are creating a new BNP’s ideology’, Searchlight online, http://www.searchlightmagazine.com/index.php?link=templat e&story=194 (accessed 13/04/2007).  A number of such historians took part in the EWE debate.  e.g. Stanley Payne’s seminal A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (London: University College London Press, 1995), Michael Mann, Fascists (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism (London: Allen Lane, 2004) all of which briefly consider post-1945 developments in fascism but portray the topic as largely irrelevant, in the process omitting any reference to the ENR as one of its possible manifestations. James Gregor addresses the putative neo-fascist identity of the nouvelle droite in his The Search for Neofascism: the Use and Abuse of Social Science (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 72-4, but as part of such a scathing attack on academics who find neofascism a useful political category that he can safely be counted as one of the sceptics about the value of the historical investigation Bar-On offers here.



Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

Last, but certainly not least, among the natural antagonists of Bar-On’s narrative are likely to be those politically engaged intellectuals scattered throughout the Western world – some of whom are still ensconced in university faculties but have resolutely thrown off the shackles of an ivory tower existence – who believe it their duty to prepare the ideological ground for the regenerative transformation in the ethos of the West destined to bring the present interregnum to an end. For these, the ENR represents a much-needed ideological break-through beyond the spiritually bankrupt liberal capitalist age and its historically superseded fixations with left and right, with communism and fascism, with material progress and decline. In this perspective any book dedicated to its analysis whose title deliberately summons up the spectre of fascism can only be the fruit of a profound misunderstanding, betraying at the very outset the failure to comprehend the originality and sheer scope of its grandiose metapolitical project for the resurrection of the West. First and foremost among these are prominent ENR thinkers themselves, some of whose cultural production is extraordinarily prolific, and nearly all of whom adamantly deny even the most tenuous affinity with fascism, historic or otherwise.10 Instead they see themselves as heirs of a ‘healthy’ Conservative Revolution’ – its ‘Trotskyite’ wing – leagues apart from its catastrophic ‘Stalinist’ travesty perpetrated by Nazism.11  See Roger Griffin, ‘Interregnum or endgame? Radical Right Thought in the “Postfascist” Era’, The Journal of Political Ideologies, 5.2 (July 2000), pp. 163-78.  Two outstandingly prolific maîtres à penser of the New Right are Alain de Benoist and Marco Tarchi, both of whom have written to me expressing their deep indignation at my insistence on suggesting a common denominator exists between the core principles of generic fascism and the palingenetic mindset underlying the ENR’s preoccupation with renewing cultural homogeneity and a sense of belonging and ‘roots’ within a reborn Europe. Let me therefore stress once again that I am not suggesting a direct connection exists between the ENR rejection of liberal democracy and inter-war fascism, let alone Nazi racism, any more than there is a direct connection between the Quakers’ ‘Society of Friends’ and the Spanish Inquisition as different manifestations of Christianity. On this issue I still maintain what I asserted in the introduction to my anthology of primary sources over a decade ago, namely that designating a form of political thinking as ‘fascist’ does not ‘imply its author’s guilt by association’ for the crimes of interwar fascist regimes, and that ‘it is quite possible to contribute to some of the newer discourses of fascism, such as revisionism or the New Right without harbouring any sympathy for organized fascism at all’. See Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: OUP, 1995), p. 11.  One exception is no less a figure than Alexander Dugin who as the leader of the Russian branch of the ENR called for ‘a fascism as boundless as our [Russian] territory’: see Erwägen, Wissen, Ethik, 15.3 (2003), p. 425. See also A. Ingram, ‘Alexander Dugin: geopolitics and neofascism in post-Soviet Russia’, Political Geography 20.8 (November 2001), pp. 1029-51. 10 For an example of how rank-and-file ENR thinkers react to the imputation that their ideological position has a historical continuity with inter-war fascism see the sarcastic review by Vasiili E. Molodiakov of my anthology Fascism, which included extracts from Alain de Benoist and Pierre Krebs in the section on post-war fascism. It was published by the British ENR periodical The Scorpion, issue 18 (n.d. circ. 1996), downloadable at http://thescorp. multics.org/18fascism.html (accessed 13/04/2007). 11 It is to be noted that both Jünger and Evola on occasion acknowledged their affinity with fascism, while some Conservative Revolutionaries demonstrated it by accepting high-

Foreword

xi

Given this situation it is thus particularly ironic that one of the key premises behind Bar-On’s book, namely the possibility that fascism could survive after 1945 in the metapolitical guise which I have elsewhere compared to the smile of the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland,12 was articulated with rare lucidity not by a Marxist activist or liberal political scientist, but by one of fascism’s most prominent post-war theorists. Some five years before Alain de Benoist’s all-important ‘cultural turn’, his compatriot Maurice Bardèche wrote in the seminal text What is Fascism? the passage cited by Bar-On: The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism. […] The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. More important than the mechanism is the idea which fascism has created for itself of man and freedom. […] With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living.13

It is worth spelling out the significance of this passage for understanding the ENR in the way that both Bar-On and I have independently come to see it. For Bardèche – a self-proclaimed fascist – its core principles do not necessarily manifest themselves outwardly solely in the single-party terror state, or in the theatrical politics of the leader cult branded in the collective memory of Europeans by interwar Fascism and Nazism. In fact, it is capable of morphing into a completely different type of organization and ideological formation in order to realize its idiosyncratic and uniquely definitional idea of freedom and joy – there is a liberating and hedonistic dimension to fascism for its most passionate protagonists no matter how perverse this may seem to outsiders. In the process this descendant of fascism becomes unrecognizable, invisible even, when contemporary history is monitored only for the organizational vectors and political strategies of its project familiar from interwar politics. In the same book Bardèche goes on to assert that this ‘idea’ can only be fulfilled in its entirety through a communal rebirth from the prevailing decadence of Western modernity. This is to be achieved not within the framework of individual nations, as so many interwar fascists erroneously believed till the closing stages of the war, but through the struggle for a new Europe able to act as a bulwark against the cultural and spiritual depredations inflicted – as it seemed to him at the height profile positions under Nazism or Fascism whether or not they were card-carrying party members. ENR writers also tend to ‘neglect to mention’ the fact that Oswald Spengler and Ernst Niekisch, who refused to join the NSDAP, did so because they aspired to lead fascist movements of their own against the ‘decadence’ of liberal democracy. They were thus not anti-fascist, but anti-Nazi fascists. 12 Roger Griffin, ‘Plus ça change!: The fascist pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite’, in Edward Arnold (ed.) The Development of the Radical Right in France 1890-1995 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 239. 13 Maurice Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1961), pp. 175-176.

xii

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

of the Cold War – by the rival materialisms of American individualism and Soviet collectivism locked in a mortal struggle over the destiny of the continent. The relevance of such an analysis to the core ideology of the ENR should be self-evident to all specialists in the field who are not trapped in a state of profound – because ideologically conditioned – denial or disingenuous mauvaise foi. Once fascism is teased free from its contingent expression as a specific type of historical movement and regime, it can be conceptualized ideal-typically for strictly heuristic purposes (and certainly not in an ‘essentialist’ spirit), as a particular politico-cultural project. This can externalize itself in a substantially altered form, even to the point where, as in the case of the ENR, it assumes a purely metapolitical expression as a polycentric ‘school of thought’ bent on achieving cultural hegemony by taking over the West’s ‘laboratories of thinking’. If Marurice Bardèche and Tamir Bar-On are – for their own contrasting reasons – right on this point, then the transformation of some currents of fascist racism into the nouvelle droite in the 1960s conforms to one of the scenarios predicted by Primo Levi, one of the most famous victims of the ‘Axis’ between Mussolini and Hitler. He warned of the possibility ‘a new fascism, with its trail of intolerance, of abuse, and of servitude […] walking on tiptoe and calling itself by other names’.14 In short, at least some of those who would have been card-carrying or even uniformed fascists in the inter-war period have ‘vanished’ into the metapolitics of the ENR. The ENR as a Modern Revitalization Movement However, it is ultimately sterile and counterproductive for academics to become fixated with how far the ENR still exhibits telltale signs from its genesis within the French fascist subculture. Once the debate surrounding this issue becomes a dialogue of the deaf, investigations into the ENR as a form of political thought quickly turn into a cul-de-sac. What is needed instead is a broad conceptual thoroughfare, which leads to a comprehensive evaluation of its nature and significance as a critique of Western liberal democracy and as a project for historical change. In any case, the question of its ‘fascistic’ dimension is, quite rightly, only one among several key themes explored in Tamir Bar-On’s book. Rather than rehearse his wide-ranging argument here, I would like to propose another ‘tack’ altogether to the problem of getting a conceptual handle on the ENR. If it is in many respects a round peg in the square hole of ‘fascism’, it fits far more snugly into a certain way of conceiving ‘modernism’ when it operates in the sphere of revolutionary politics. As I have argued at length elsewhere,15 it is possible to define modernism in a way that makes it applicable not just to innovative experiments in aesthetic form and style, but to 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 an overarching ‘nomos’ or ‘sacred canopy’ under the fragmenting and secularizing impact of modernity. Once scrutinized 14 Primo Levi, If This is a Man (London: Sphere Books, 1987), p. 397. 15 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (London: Palgrave, 2007).

Foreword

xiii

through this conceptual lens, phenomena as apparently unrelated as Expressionism, Futurism, vitalism, Theosophy, psychoanalysis, nudism, eugenics, utopian town planning and architecture, modern dance, Bolshevism, organic nationalism – and even the cult of self-sacrifice that sustained the hecatomb of the First World War – disclose a common cause and psychological matrix in the fight against (perceived) decadence. In their contrasting ways, all represent bids to access a supra-personal experience of reality in which individuals transcend their own mortality and break the curse of ‘dead’ time. Subjectively they conquer anomie, and make history instead of being its victims. This maximalist reading of modernism highlights its quest, whether at the level of an individual life, of a fresh artistic or philosophic vision, of a social movement, or of an entire ‘totalitarian’ regime, to establish an alternative modernity, sustained by an ethos of what has been called, ‘the temporality of the new’.16 A neglected but potentially important aspect of modernism opens up when the aspiration to achieve a new modernity beyond decadence is placed in the context of the ‘revitalization movements’ that have occurred throughout human history when an established social order has entered a profound structural crisis, and hence what is known to social anthropologists as a ‘liminoid state’. The characteristic of such a movement is that it consists of a segment of the ‘dying’ society, which attempts to secede from the old order to form an improvised communitas that legitimises itself from within through its own internal charismatic dynamics. Retrospectively this can be seen as the embryo of a new society, but in the transitional phase it acts as an ‘antistructure’ engaged in elaborating the transformed worldview and social hierarchy needed to establish a viable, socially coherent new order. This it is often able to do only thanks to the spontaneous emergence of a propheta whose life is changed by the belief in the mission to lead his or her followers into the ‘new world’. Two well-charted aspects of this process of autonomous cultural renewal deserve particular attention in the context of the ENR’s anti-structural revolt against existing modernity, one that exists solely in the form of a largely ‘virtual’ intellectual community. First, its alternative worldview is formulated through a process of ‘mazeway resynthesis’ in which old and new ideological and ritual elements – some of which would previously have been incongruous or incompatible – are forged through ‘ludic recombination’ into a totalizing worldview. The result is a palingenetic ‘metanarrative’ in which the old order is portrayed as needing to be abandoned or purged of impurity so that the redemptive community can bring closure to the liminoid phase of ‘crisis’ and usher in the new era. Second, the new mazeway frequently invokes a legendary or mythicized historical past, which symbolically re-grounds and re-centres the new society, not in a spirit of nostalgia for some idealized past or Edenic state, but in order to create a rooted futurity, a new reality re-established on firm metaphysical foundations. Even from this over-condensed and simplistic summary of the highly complex cosmological and cosmogonic processes involved in a revitalization movement, it is possible to make out the broad outlines of a radical reappraisal of the ENR’s 16 Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time. Modernity and the Avant-garde (London: Verso, 1995).

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

relationship to contemporary Western politics, which is profoundly compatible with Bar-On’s analysis. Such a reappraisal is particularly overdue now that mainstream liberalism has passed beyond the era of totalitarianism of the right and left and now exists in a twilight state wrongly taken by some to be ‘the end of history’ tout court. Carried out within the framework of a primordialist conception of modernism, it offers the prospect of locating it firmly within modern history while avoiding excessive preoccupation with the legacy of fascism and the role of major ‘personalities’ in shaping its agenda. Simultaneously, it provides a fresh perspective on some of the principal features of the ENR thrown into relief by Bar-On’s multifaceted analysis. For example, it reveals a deeper ethnological significance to the ENR’s belief that Westernized humanity is living in an ‘interregnum’ destined to give way sooner or later to a new era. This is a notion that corresponds closely to the way social anthropologists conceive the liminoid phase, namely as one in which human beings instinctively strive to transcend the sense of societal decay in a new social order. It also highlights a deeper structural logic at work in de Benoist’s invocation of Armin Mohler’s conception of time as ‘spherical’ concept, one that allows for the possibility of an unexpected ‘breakthrough’ into a new historical era. Second, it underlines the presence at the heart of ENR thought of a feature common to all but the most resolutely futural dialects of modernism, namely what Friedrich Nietzsche calls in The Birth of Tragedy the bid to establish ‘a fixed horizon framed by myth’; a totalizing vision of the world, which banishes pluralism, relativism, and anomie and at the same time subsumes mythicized elements of the past. Third, it highlights the way the ENR’s drive towards closure, to find a new sheltering sky and metaphysical home for all humanity within its variegated cultures leads to its obsessive preoccupation with rootedness, myth, and supra-personal identity. In doing so it helps explain the profound repugnance (or angst?) induced in ENR thinkers by the spectre of increasing multiculturalism, materialism, massification, levelling, commodification, atomization, and globalization (or ‘mondialization’), all of which have become synonymous with a modernity that blocks all portals to personal transcendence or to an ‘immortal’ historical or metaphysical realm. Fourth, the anthropologically informed primordialist concept of modernism we have outlined helps explains the extraordinary degree of syncretism, of ‘ludic recombination’, so characteristic of ENR intellectuals – here again de Benoist leads by example – between past and present thought, between science and myth, between left and right, between the technological and the ecological, between the political and the metapolitical. Finally, it throws into relief the way several major ENR thinkers, principally de Benoist himself, have assumed the mantle of propheta for their followers. It is consistent with his primordial role as the animator and shaman of a modern revitalization movement, as the master of ceremonies and promulgator of a new mazeway, that in the last four decades he has written literally millions of words in the verbal battle for cultural hegemony. Thus whether we consider the ENR from the perspective of comparative fascist studies or a primordialist conception of modernism, or simply focus on the importance it attaches to pre-Christian mythology and inter-war Conservative Revolutionaries, there is much that is ‘old’ in the New Right. Nor does its posturing as an ultramodern movement beyond left and right camouflage its origins in the extreme-right

Foreword

xv

and its continuing fidelity to its origins. But it is not enough to explain or categorise the ENR. The challenge it poses to those ‘liberal’ academics among us who are genuinely ‘neither right nor left’ is to show in our responses that we are not what one Evola zealot once dismissed as mere ‘technicians of an increasingly myopic specialism, a caste proud and jealous of its techniques like the caste of mummy embalmers in ancient Egypt’.17 The ENR’s critique of actually existing liberalism raises legitimate and profound issues about the continuing need of all citizens of the ‘modern world’ for roots, for identity, for a continuity of past and a future, for a fixed horizon framed by myth. They are needs, which our morally indefensible and ecologically unsustainable society in its present mode seems to be able to address only by offering ever more insidiously commercialized forms of material or psychological addiction, and which political parties and terrorist organizations based on a radicalized sense of national, ethnic, or religious identity seek to satisfy with policies and actions leading to even more violence, destruction, and suffering. ‘Our’ political scientists should at least be able to rise to the task of showing convincingly, perhaps drawing on anthropological history and science to do so, why ENR plans to reconstitute Europe as an organic spiritual empire made up of re-homogenized peoples and ethnic communities (ethnies) is the equivalent of wanting to putting back together again a Humpty Dumpty who never existed – and why this project is still fundamentally the fruit of an extreme right wing political imagination. ‘Our’ historians also have abundant data from the twentieth century at their disposal to demonstrate that any attempt to turn into praxis the ethnological fantasies and metapolitical myths confabulated to underpin such a project is doomed to create yet more episodes of ‘man-made’ human misery. The practical policies and concrete measures imposed by a state executive ruthlessly determined to reverse multiculturalism and reconstitute essentially mythical homogeneous ethnic communities would have ‘unintended consequences’ for society of cataclysmic proportions. It is clear from the chapters that follow how much the ENR Weltanschauung belongs to the delusional realm of Baron Munchhausen rather than to the world of twenty-first-century realities. The revolutionary project for which it wants to secure cultural hegemony is at bottom yet another variant of the unrealizable or unsustainable transformation of society that Immanuel Kant termed palingenesis. Meanwhile, at least to those not blinded by metaphysical categories of thought, it becomes clearer with every day that passes that the groundedness so desperately sought by the ENR must be provided by none other than planet earth itself. Surely sustainable transformation, what Kant called metamorphosis, can for hard scientific reasons only come about through the pragmatic realization at least by power elites that a global human community peacefully coexisting in all its diversity – the only communitas worth striving for – must be based on an indefinitely sustainable culture in the fullest biological, socio-economic, and ecological sense of the word. It is a realization that adds fresh connotations, both concrete and redemptive, to T. S. Eliot’s affirmation that ‘home is where we start from’. They are connotations apparently beyond the ken of the metapoliticians of the ENR, whose draconian schemes for 17 Adriano Romualdi, Julius Evola: L’uomo e l’opera (Rome: Volpe, 1979), p. 5.

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

resolving humanity’s condition of homelessness are the subject of Tamir Bar-On’s important book.

Preface When I was a young boy, I dreamt of playing in a thrilling professional football match at Wembley or Anfield. I did not dream of writing a book about continuity and change in fascist ideology after the horrors of the gas chambers. Yet, there is a thread connecting my passion for football, which has gone on much longer than childhood, and my decision to write Where Have All The Fascists Gone? The golden thread tying the two is passion, love, self-surpassing and the way of the heart. I have always insisted that what we do, whether as footballers, academics, carpenters, manual labourers, translators, chefs or artists, is less important than the passion we have for the discipline and life in general. I have had a long-term passion for understanding why scores of intelligent men and women were and continued to be seduced by a fascist ideology that on the surface smelled of nihilism, irrationality and boundless myth-making. With a subject as tricky and polemical as fascism, passion alone is inadequate. One needs a measure of objectivity and detachment in order to critically assess the subject matter at hand. One needs to remain beyond the fray of political storms. This might sometimes antagonize those on the left, right or beyond. But the job of an academic is to both describe the world as it is and unsettle our standard understanding of reality. Years later after the dreams of Wembley and Anfield have faded into mist, I still dream of the importance of ideas and debates even with radically opposing methodological orientations and political camps. In this passion for debate and understanding, I am still like that little boy that once dreamt of scoring in an FA Cup final at Wembley. I hope that Where Have All The Fascists Gone? reflects this passionate spirit for understanding one of the critical political ideologies of our times. Tamir Bar-On, Toronto, December 2006

Acknowledgements I would like to thank my wonderful, loving parents who inspired in me a love of knowledge and a passion for life. To Saggy, my brother, and Maria, I love you both. I salute my friends from Toronto Maccabi, Bosnia United, Saeed, Ugo, Nebojsa, Amanda, Ken and Ekholme since radical, noxious ideas did not question our unique friendships. Academically, I want to signal my debt to Harvey Simmons at York University and Roger Griffin at Oxford Brookes University who were my champions in more difficult times. My time at McGill University’s McLennan Library working on my Ph.D. on a dark, snowy November day alerted me to the special 1993-4 Telos double issue on the nouvelle droite, which got me started on Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Finally, I want to thank my editors at Ashgate, particularly Kirstin Howgate, who saw the merits of this project, as well as Gemma Lowle.

As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities. – Voltaire

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Introduction I will always salute as I did yesterday because it gives me a sense of belonging to my people. – Paulo Di Canio, Italian footballer, justifying his fascist salute in 2005

Tim Parks, the author of a study of Italian soccer hooliganism, argues that “Ferocious taunting is a staple of Italian football matches… Hard-core supporters of the competing teams occupy opposite ends of the stadium generating a wild energy of chants and offensive gestures that electrifies the atmosphere” (Parks 2002). In a December 2005 Serie A soccer match between Rome outfit Società Sportiva (SS) Lazio and Livorno, Italian footballer Paulo Di Canio gave the infamous fascist salute to the hard-core Lazio fans with ties to fascism and neo-Nazism. Lazio was Benito Mussolini’s favourite team. The salute had even more political resonance because Livorno’s ultras (hard-core fans) have pro-communist sympathies. Di Canio was in hot water before. He brandished the fascist salute in another match against Associazione Sportiva (AS) Roma and was unapologetic about his fascist sympathies. Facing possible sanctions from the Italian Football Federation, Di Canio said: “I will always salute as I did yesterday because it gives me a sense of belonging to my people” (The Independent 21 December 2005). Di Canio received unqualified support from Ignazio La Russa, a member of the Alleanza Nazionale (AN – National Alliance), formerly the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – Italian Social Movement): “Let everybody salute as they like. It doesn’t seem to me a violent gesture. There’s nothing dramatic about it” (The Independent 21 December 2005). Daniela Fini, the wife of Gianfranco Fini (the leader of the AN), Italy’s deputy minister at the time, said Di Canio was the victim of media bias against the right and argued there was little criticism of the closed-fist communist salutes of Livorno fans. “It should be his own affair, but every time it happens it becomes a matter of state” (Yahoo Sport! UK 14 December 2005), said Fini, a Lazio supporter. The controversial Di Canio received a one match suspension from the Italian Football Federation and was fined 10,000 euros ($12,000). If a member of the AN gave his support to Di Canio, it is more understandable, given the party’s roots in neo-fascism. Yet, what explains Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s suggestions that Di Canio was not a fascist, saying the Lazio striker was merely an exhibitionist and his salute had no significance? Di Canio might be an exhibitionist, but he also consciously plays to Lazio’s hard-core neofascist and neo-Nazi constituencies. In 1999, when Lazio played Roma, a team widely supported by Rome’s Jewish population, Lazio’s ultras reached dizzying anti-Semitic heights when they unfurled a 50-metre banner around their section of Rome’s Olympic Stadium that read: “Auschwitz is your town, the ovens are your



Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

houses” (Molinaro 2005). Seeking to appeal his one-match ban, the Italian footballer defensively stated, “I am a fascist, but not racist.” At the height of its strength in the late 1920s, many Jews joined the Italian Fascist Party before the adoption in 1938 of Nazi-style race laws and most Italian Jews survived the Holocaust. Cyprian Blamires points out that 230 Jews were involved in the fascist March on Rome in 1922 and one of those Jewish fascists, Ettore Ovazza, later founded a pro-fascist journal (Blamires 2006, 47). He estimates that by the mid-1930s one-third of adults in Italy’s small Jewish community (47,000 in 1938) were members of the Fascist Party (Blamires 2006, 47). Mussolini also had a Jewish mistress, Margherita Sarfatti-Grassini, who he met at the 1911 Socialist Party Congress. An art critic and speechwriter for Mussolini, Sarfatti-Grassini participated in producing the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals in Bologna; organized important salons for leading Italian fascists; and played a key role in “endowing Italian Fascism with a cultural aura that counterbalanced the general impression of philistinism which clung to a movement that was addicted to violence and brutality.” (Blamires 2006, 586-7) But could Lazio’s ultras care for the distinctions between fascism and racism, or neo-Nazism and neo-fascism? Had the Lazio ultras not held up swastikas and banners of Arkan (Zeljko Raznjatovic), the Serb paramilitary leader during the wars in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990s who was responsible for the worst crimes of ethnic cleansing? Racism today is rife in many European soccer stadiums. In a match in November 2005, Ivory Coast defender Marc Zoro was reduced to tears after the racial taunting of Inter Milan fans and threatened to leave the pitch. What was rare about Di Canio’s fascist salute was that it was an overt display by a player with fascist sympathies. Di Canio has an obsession with Mussolini and even tattooed Dux, the Latin word for Duce and nickname of the dictator, on his arm. His salute conjured memories of the Italian World Cup winning squad of 1934 saluting the fascist dictator. For others it must have resurfaced painful memories associated with the crimes of the fascist period. Yet others see it as the playing out of ritualized tribal games. Di Canio’s gesture called into question the post-war fascism taboo. Outside of theocratic Iran where a 2006 state-sanctioned pseudo-academic conference sought to assess the “scientific” evidence for the Holocaust, small nostalgic neo-Nazi and neo-fascist circles, or some Arab press outlets where in Orwellian doublespeak Holocaust negation is stated as fact, open displays of fascism and Nazism are more rare today in Europe. Few people today are as honest as Di Canio, although he later claimed his salute was not a political act. Di Canio, like most fascists in a “post-fascist” age, plays a clever double game. On the one hand, he provokes with the infamous fascist salute. On the other hand, he claims it is normal, banal and apolitical. His double game is mirrored by the far right throughout Europe. Jean Marie Le Pen, the French leader of the anti-immigrant Front National (FN – National Front), refuses the fascist label and even calls himself an anti-racist. He calls the anti-racists anti-French racists. Gianfranco Fini, the leader of the Italian AN, has rehabilitated a formerly fascist party and now calls it a “postfascist” political outfit. Fini was rewarded by joining the government in a right-wing coalition led by Forza Italia in 1994 and again in 2001. He has won praise for distancing the party from the fascist past and virulent displays of anti-Semitism. He

Introduction



visited Israel as Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister in 2003 to ask forgiveness for Italy’s treatment of the Jews and described fascism’s racial laws as “an absolute evil.” From 2004 until 2006 Fini was Italy’s Foreign Minister. Hardly any contemporary European will say that they are a blackshirt or brownshirt. Where have all the fascists gone? This book seeks to answer this question by examining how former neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist intellectuals, known as the nouvelle droite (ND) or European New Right (ENR), have contributed to the demise of conspicuous fascism and a “post-fascist” discourse. Whether these thinkers have buried the fascist or proto-fascist longings of the past is open to serious question. I have serious reservations on this question, owing to my careful reading of ENR texts, fascists of the past and the important works of historians of fascism from Stanley Payne and Ernst Nolte to Ze’ev Sternhell and Roger Griffin. The ENR is still facing polemical storms because it has never fully distanced itself from aspects of the far right or neo-fascist milieu, while left-wing intellectuals find the ENR a convenient scapegoat for the left’s demise after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Moreover, I insisted elsewhere that “the greatest danger to the European body politic in terms of a ‘fascist threat’ comes from within: the steady slide towards what Jean Baudrillard saw emerging as an anti-immigrant, white, fundamentalist, protectionist Europe through metapolitical, democratic, and legal means” (Bar-On 2004, 308). In a post-September 11th climate, this threat is multi-dimensional and does not merely involve the ENR, but also political actors from mainstream parties on the right and left who have increasingly co-opted ENR themes vis-à-vis issues such as culture, immigration, race and national identity. Or more menacingly, as in Italy and Austria, when far right-wing parties join national coalition governments. Very few English-language works have been dedicated to the continental ENR intellectuals or ND (Sunic 1990; O’Meara 2004). Moreover, the two exceptions were penned by ENR partisans. Tomislav Sunic was included in a 1998 collection of ENR sympathisers celebrating the group’s thirtieth anniversary, while Michael O’Meara argues that Europeans face extinction as a race and culture and the ENR is the most credible anti-liberal, revolutionary antidote to the destruction of European civilization in the post-war era. While admittedly the tone of Sunic’s work on the subject is descriptive and objective, O’Meara’s book is an unabashed defense of the ENR. Both scholars are ill-equipped to seriously grapple with the ENR’s origins in the ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist milieux. This work aims to fill the gap with a more critical appraisal of the ENR project. Having said that, this book does not claim to definitively account for the rehabilitation of neo-fascism and neo-Nazism in two key countries, namely, post-communist Germany and Russia. Others have recently tackled these important subjects (Griffin, Loh, and Umland 2006; Umland 2005). Born around the May 1968 wave of political unrest sweeping industrialized countries, the ENR is composed of clusters of think tanks, cultural institutes and journals formed initially in France and later other European countries. Its intellectuals are mainly editors, writers, liberal professionals, academics and professors of various disciplines. ENR intellectuals now claim to be one of the few remaining cultural or political forces along with the Greens, which challenge liberal democracy and triumphalist global capitalism. Its contemporary theoreticians are heavily influenced by the ideals of the New Left and emulate the example of the 1968 revolutionaries



Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

who pined for a more humane and spiritualised post-liberal social order. ENR intellectuals are currently scattered throughout most Western and numerous Central and East European nations. Furthermore, ENR intellectuals attempted to spread their ideas in the post-communist, post-Cold War confusion and chaos of Russia in the 1990s. Despite the serious protestations of many journalists and academics about a more subtle and sinister fascism dressed in new emperor’s robes, the ENR is not necessarily a homogeneous body of thought (Duranton-Crabol 1988), but has meant different things according to differing contexts, time periods, countries, regions, ideological strands and rival personalities. This heterogeneity on the right correspondingly applies to the important distinctions, which exist on the left between social democrats, communists, Leninists, Trotskyites, Stalinists, Maoists and various anarchist tendencies. Historically, there have also been many “rights,” including the counterrevolutionary/monarchical, Catholic integralist, Nazi, fascist, Evolian, neoliberal and republican traditions, and they have meant different things in differing countries, contexts and periods of time (Bar-On 2001, 333; Giddens 1994, 8-9). To this long list of “rights,” we should add the ENR intellectuals. With the proliferation of social issues such as immigration, the environment or the war in Iraq that transcend traditional right and left political categories, the end of the Cold War, the fall of communist regimes in the East after 1989 and the historical movement of the left in Europe towards an accommodation with liberal capitalism, the ENR has argued that the terms “right” and “left” have lost much of their meaning and significance. Contemporary ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier of France insist that there is a general trend towards the implosion of right-wing ideologies and that there are now a whopping 36 different right-wing political groupings belonging to the general spiritual family of the right! (De Benoist and Champetier 1999). With the fall of the right’s traditional communist enemy, Europe does not have a political landscape based on unanimous right-wing support for the neo-liberal, new world order. Rather, the ENR represents one of those right-wing currents of thought that, on the exoteric plane, resembles the left in its radical antiliberalism and anti-capitalism, and its revolutionary stances vis-à-vis the dominant ideologies of the age. The ENR’s main tasks since 1968 have been the publication of intellectual journals on various ideas and subjects, and conducting cultural and political debates and conferences throughout the learned centres of opinion within Europe. The ENR thinkers have sought to offer a theoretical response to the main existential problems of the contemporary period. In the process, they have attempted to rehabilitate the cultural and political legacies of the non-Nazi, revolutionary right. The most prominent ENR journals include the following: Nouvelle Ecole, Eléments, Krisis (France), The Scorpion (England) and Trasgressioni and Diorama letterario (Italy). Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain and Russia also have their respective ENR journals. Several ENR national branches, namely, the English, French, Italian, German and Russian sections of the ENR, are well represented on the Internet (e.g., http://www. grece-fr.net/accueil.php; http://www.alaindebenoist.com). In the current post-communist age of triumphant liberal capitalism, these ENR journals generally

Introduction



represent an eclectic and outwardly ambiguous synthesis of revolutionary right-wing and New Left ideals. This post-modern synthesis unites the various ENR tendencies. At the same time, ENR thinkers remain a loose, heterogeneous cultural “school of thought” (Duranton-Crabol 1988), to use Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol’s phrase, rather than a larger, centrally co-ordinated movement or political party. What makes the ENR a relatively coherent cultural “school of thought”? In the first place, contemporary ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier (France), Michael Walker (England), Marco Tarchi (Italy), Pierre Krebs (Germany), Robert Steuckers (Belgium) and Marcel Rüter (Holland) generally share a long-term, right-wing metapolitical strategy akin to the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937). His Prison Notebooks were penned while imprisoned by Mussolini’s Fascist regime and gave him an international reputation as a Marxist scholar. Yet his real innovation was that “political movements need to attain ‘cultural hegemony’ in society in order to be successful” (Bar-On and Balmires in Blamires 2006, 286). The ENR advanced the notion of right-wing Gramscianism designed to awaken certain individuals, namely, intellectual, political and economic elites, to new ways of seeing and being, to change hearts and minds and to gain support for alternative, counter-hegemonic conceptions of the world (Badinter 1985; Levitas 1986; Griffin 1995). For Gramsci, like the ENR, the precondition for all successful revolutions in history has first been a revolt against both the dominant spirit and cultural apparatus of the age. This non-violent, metapolitical stance is directed primarily at European societal elites and intellectuals rather than the masses and has been a practical and tactical choice conditioned by the public’s negative historical associations with the right since World War Two, particularly the legacies of fascism and Nazism. In the case of the French New Right, the choice of focusing on the cultural, metapolitical realm was also influenced by the bitter debacle of the revolutionary right’s illfated attempt to maintain Algérie française (French Algeria) and the eventual decolonization of Algeria, which began in 1962. In Italy, the New Right sought to use the metapolitical terrain in order to supersede the sterile and outmoded debates that had characterized the neo-fascist parliamentary-based MSI, as well as to escape violent and fringe elements of the radical right such as Ordine Nuovo (ON – New Order). A second factor makes the ENR a cohesive cultural “school of thought.” ENR thinkers share a number of recurring anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian and anti-capitalist themes. The ENR’s intense valorization of anti-egalitarianism and le droit à la différence, or the “right to difference” of all local cultures and regions around the globe, what Martin Lee has dubbed “cultural ethnopluralism” (Lee 1997, 168-83), is one such set of themes in ENR works. In the summer of 2004, Robert de Herte, a pseudonym for ENR leader Alain de Benoist, argued that the major malaise of modernity is the obliteration of differences or collective identities (De Herte 2004). ENR thinkers see both anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference” as almost natural, God-given absolutes. For the ENR, the “right to difference” of individuals and communities must constantly be nourished and promoted in order to allow all world cultures to maintain their uniqueness and distinctiveness against what is viewed as the grey, drab, lifeless and levelling materialism and egalitarianism of



Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

liberal and socialist doctrines. The latter two ideologies, seen as rooted in JudeoChristian biblical monotheism, are viewed as “totalitarian” and “intolerant.” For the ENR, liberalism and socialism are full of missionary zeal because they allegedly originate from a culturally insensitive and universalistic belief in one god, which respects neither Europe’s polytheistic, pagan past, nor the differing values and cultural standards of other peoples around the world. In post-communist Europe, liberalism and the United States, viewed as the liberal nation of the world par excellence, became the ENR’s dominant enemies. The ENR argues that both the United States and liberal ideology seek to accelerate an insidious, hyper-materialist and “soft totalitarian” capitalist worldview and ignore the richness of the world’s cultural diversity and organic principles of community and solidarity. The ENR insists that the liberal capitalist worldview is egoistic and essentially views the entire planet as one large, vulgar supermarket where all cultures and nations fall under the homogenizing prey of the profit principle and the spell of ethnocentric, cultural Westernization. In addition, while the old communist enemy is dead, the United States and other Western countries have used the new discourse on human rights and the “war on terrorism” to justify post-communist military adventures in Iraq (1991 and 2003), Kosovo (1999) and Afghanistan (2001). In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the ENR argues that the United States might take further pre-emptive military action against “terrorists” and “rogue states” around the world, thus necessitating a pan-European military force capable of curtailing the United States’ global military hegemony and unilateralism (De Benoist 2001a). In 2005, Alain de Benoist argued that a third Gulf War led by the United States against the nuclear ambitions of Iran is a distinct possibility in the near future (De Benoist 2005d). Anti-Americanism, which is especially virulent in Europe among the far left, radical right, certain sectors of the ecology movement and Islamic fundamentalists, as well as many mainstream political forces such as the Gaullists in France, can be easily tapped by the ENR to spread its message. In the Kosovo and Iraq wars, the ENR circulated anti-war petitions, which were often signed wittingly or unwittingly by left-wingers and peace advocates. The unprecedented, mass, worldwide anti-war demonstrations before the war in Iraq in February 2003 warmed the hearts of the ENR and radicals of all political stripes precisely because the main enemy became the United States rather than the regime of Saddam Hussein. Centered around the intellectual mentor of the ENR, Alain de Benoist of France, Groupement de recherche et d’étude pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE – Group for Research and Studies on European Civilization) was founded in 1968 and is the leading nouvelle droite cultural institute and publishing house in continental Europe. If his 1978 prize from l’Académie française for Vu de Droite (Seen From the Right) is an indication, de Benoist is undoubtedly the most sophisticated and lucid of the ENR intellectuals. His works have been translated into several European languages from Italian to Romanian and Croatian to English. He continues to publish an array of books, articles and interviews, while providing commentary on the events of September 11, the loss of French and European identity, the European Union (EU) referenda, the youth riots in France in November 2005 or the Muhammad cartoon scandal in Denmark in 2006 (De Benoist 2005c; 2005d; 2005e).

Introduction



An impressive list of personalities have collaborated with GRECE either as members of the think tank, editors of its various journals or as influential writers. These include the following: neo-fascist political theorist Maurice Bardèche (the most important post-war fascist ideologue, a defender of Vichy-Nazi collusion and brother-in-law of French fascist writer Robert Brasillach) (Bardèche 1961; Griffin 1995, 319-21), writer Jean Cau, university professor and philosopher Louis Rougier, Thierry Maulnier of l’Académie française, sociologist Julien Freund, Swiss philosopher Armin Mohler (who deserted the Swiss army to join the Waffen-SS; a former secretary of the “conservative revolutionary” idol Ernst Jünger from 1949 to 1953; and “an unrepentant fascist to the end of his life”) (Blamires 2006, 431), journalist Jean Parvulesco, founder of French daily Le Figaro Louis Pauwels and English novelist Anthony Burgess. Nouvelle Ecole, a principal GRECE journal, has featured among its major writers and influences several towering intellectual figures of this century: the neo-Gnostic writer Raymond Abellio (a former French collaborator), Mircea Eliade (who flirted with the fascism of the Romanian Iron Guard), the psychologist Hans Eysenck, the former communist Arthur Koestler and the ethnologist and Nobel Prize winner Konrad Lorenz (who expressed regret for his pro-war Nazi writings, yet used pro-Nazi language to commend the Nazi regime for advocating policies to preserve racial purity) (Billig in Blamires 2006, 392; Duranton-Crabol 1991, 251-58). This trend of attracting high profile intellectuals to the cause has been mirrored by right-wing theoreticians like Derek Turner, editor of the patriotic, right-wing British publication Right Now! Turner, in conjunction with Michael Walker, editor of the ENR publication The Scorpion, has introduced British and American audiences to the ideas of the ENR. Turner’s board of patrons has included such outstanding names as Victor Serebriankoff of Mensa, Professor Antony Flew and Hans Eysenck. When asked in an interview how he gathered such a reputable advisory board, Turner gave this reply: “Simple – I asked them! There are still some people in important places who believe strongly enough in patriotism and in freedom of expression to permit the use of their names as patrons. They do not necessarily agree with everything that appears in the magazine – but then nor do I!” (Turner 2000). It must be stressed that the ENR is a coherent “cultural school of thought” with historical origins in ultra-nationalism, the revolutionary right and fascism. Yet, ENR theorists consciously separate themselves from both the parliamentary and extraparliamentary wings of the revolutionary right milieux by working on a long-term project to win hearts and minds. Nonetheless, ENR intellectuals have influenced the style and discourse of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist political parties, such as France’s FN, Austria’s Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ – Freedom Party of Austria), the German Republikaner (REP – The Republicans) and the Italian MSIAN, although many of its principal theorists have distanced themselves from what they view as the “vulgar,” populist extreme-right and neo-fascist political outfits (Simmons 1996, 207-36). In the ENR manifesto “The French New Right in the Year 2000,” the call for restrictive immigration echoes the sympathies of far rightwing politicians such as Le Pen in France and Jörg Haider in Austria (De Benoist and Champetier 1999). In the early 1980s, a number of prominent ENR theorists, including former GRECE secretary-general Pierre Vial, joined the FN. Despite



Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

internal divisions between the ENR and extreme right-wing political parties, most contemporary extreme right-wing or neo-fascist political parties have mirrored the ENR’s metapolitical orientation. This metapolitical fixation was heavily influenced by the rise of the New Left and the events of May 1968. The right, the ENR believed, had to outflank the left on the cultural terrain in order to gain political respectability and success. Like the ENR, the political parties on the far right also deny any association with the extreme-right or fascist labels, but instead focus on the so-called “novelty” of the New Right. In addition, like ENR thinkers, the extreme-right and neo-fascist political outfits attempt to distance themselves from overt forms of antiSemitism and affinity for the symbolism of the discredited fascist and Nazi past. Finally, the ENR’s formulation of the ambiguous notion of the “right to difference” has been picked up by the extreme-right and neo-fascist political parties in order to legitimize their ultra-nationalist, chauvinist and anti-immigrant politics. The relationship of the ENR to right-wing populist, ultra-nationalist, extremeright or neo-fascist political parties has attained a new significance in light of the revival of the right-wing parliamentary forces in recent years. The most dramatic and publicized rise of the far right has come in France. Jean-Marie Le Pen, the leader of the FN, first survived challenges to his authority from his second-in-command, Bruno Megret, who subsequently left to form the Mouvement National Républicain (MNR). Yet, the FN still garnered an unprecedented 17 per cent of the first poll in the presidential election in 2002 and entered the second round in what amounted to an international black eye for France and a terrible defeat for the Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. Although President Jacques Chirac won 82 per cent of the vote in the second round, Le Pen’s dramatic ascent to mainstream French political life was wildly interpreted by some commentators as a threat to the Fifth Republic. In other parts of Europe, the far right was also scoring impressive victories. In Austria, Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party (FPÖ) won 22 per cent of the popular vote in 1996 and three years later 27 per cent. Like France, Austria received international condemnation for allowing Haider’s anti-immigrant party to join the national coalition government. In Italy, the far right also gained national prominence by joining a unity government. After the Italian elections in 2002, media giant Silvio Berlusconi again broke the taboo of co-operating with the far right by including in his Forza Italia-led government, Gianfranco Fini and Umberto Bossi, leaders of the AN and the xenophobic, anti-southern, anti-immigrant Lega Nord (Northern League) respectively. In Denmark, the right-wing Danish People’s Party plays a key role in the coalition government and the same is true for a similar right-wing party in Norway. Finally, in Holland, a land with an international reputation for liberalism and multiculturalism, has also seen the meteoric rise of the far right. After the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, his Lisjt Fortuyn Party took nearly one fifth of the seats in the May 2002 Dutch election and a number of Dutch far right-wing political parties scored impressive gains in the 2006 national elections. While the British far right has had major difficulties due to historical reasons, infighting and the co-optation strategies of the Conservatives, a sanitized British National Party (BNP) was able to win three seats in local elections in Burnley by playing on racial divisions.

Introduction



It should be pointed out that the ENR did not get its start in the parliamentary political arena. Rather, the ENR reached its intellectual and cultural apogee in the late 1970s by penetrating various mass media outlets and publishing houses. The prestigious French daily Le Figaro even opened its pages to Alain de Benoist and other ENR thinkers in the late 1970s. In 1977 Le Figaro editor Louis Pauwels sought to distinguish between an “Old Right” and “New Right” and to rid the right of its “irrational” anti-Semitism. The year 1979 is considered the ENR’s “hot summer” of widespread press attention in France. Its ideas influenced the French mainstream political right in the mid-1970s. In 1993, it received important media attention once again in France and Western Europe generally with some sustained coverage in the prestigious daily Le Monde. On both occasions, numerous ENR critics, especially prominent liberal and socialist thinkers, movements and political parties, raised the spectre of fascism and Nazism, thus marginalizing the ENR’s theorists and possibly missing the “novel” features of the ENR ideological synthesis. The ENR, then, is not a political party or new social movement, but rather a collection of varied European cultural organizations, study groups and intellectual networks. Its real originality might lie in its right-wing Gramscian ideological message and the cultural strategy of attempting to capture what it views as the “real” power centres of civil society and the cultural apparatus. For the ENR thinkers, the cultural realm is the main vector of political contestation because it seeks to displace the dominant societal consensus through the creation of a coherent counter-hegemonic conception of the world. This ENR counter-hegemonic ideology is intended to undermine the hegemonic legitimization and rationalization of the existing liberal capitalist order. The fact that the ENR is a pagan, anti-Christian and anti-Western Right might be another example of its originality. Finally, born in 1968 at around the same period as the political rise of the New Left and the May student and worker protest movements in France, ENR intellectuals have co-opted a number of New Left ideas in combination with their older, revolutionary right-wing worldview. A number of critics see this New Left-New Right synthesis as a revival of the “neither right, nor left” fascist synthesis of the inter-war era, while others contend that it represents a break with the revolutionary right-wing view of the past and fascism, and even constitutes a new political paradigm. While ENR thinkers have vehemently denied the association and label of fascism, they simultaneously continue to pay homage to a pantheon of “conservative revolutionary” authors such as Oswald Spengler (author of The Decline of the West in 1923) and Ernst Jünger (who penned The Storm of Steel in 1920, his homage to soldierly virtues and the mystic communion of the trenches) and other writers, including revolutionary leftists and syndicalists from Georges Sorel to Vladimir Lenin, which theoretically inspired Italian Fascism or German Nazism. (Griffin 1995, 351-54) The term “conservative revolution” was popularized by Jünger’s private secretary Armin Mohler in his 1950 work Die Konservative Revolution. It connoted a complex catalogue of non-Nazi variants of fascism and other anti-democratic ideas under the Weimar Republic. Mohler actively promoted ENR leader de Benoist in the 1980s. Of the five book-length texts reprinted on Alain de Benoist’s website, one is about conservative revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (1876-1925) and another a savage critique of the Rights of Man. There is also a lengthy “critical” text

10

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

published in 2002 devoted to Julius Evola, the editor of the Italian Fascist journal Regime Fascista in the 1930s and the inspiration for violent neo-fascist groups such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale (AN – National Vanguard) in the postwar era (De Benoist 2002). It must be pointed out that the major contemporary ENR intellectuals, particularly Alain de Benoist, Michael Walker and Marco Tarchi, all began their careers as figures connected with right-wing extremism or even neo-fascism. In France, de Benoist was involved in extreme nationalist and pan-European, revolutionary rightwing student politics in the 1960s; Michael Walker was a former British National Front (BNF) organizer for central London; and Marco Tarchi became disillusioned with the Italian neo-fascist MSI (Duranton-Crabol 1991, 68-72; 113-14). In order to counter the perception of a revival of revolutionary right or quasifascist ideals, the ENR has tended to cultivate an aura of what can be termed “constructive ambiguity” and a stance of intellectual victimisation (a “New Inquisition” is the common ENR cry) vis-à-vis the “hegemonic” European liberalleft cultural establishment (De Herte 1974; De Benoist and Champetier 1999). One ENR strategy might be to maintain its core of revolutionary right-wing intellectual support, while also enhancing its levels of acceptance and support among liberal and left-wing intellectuals. Some intellectuals on the left, including those associated with the American critical theory journal Telos, are now completely free of the stable ideological anchor of Marxism after the shock of 1989. Consequently, these former leftists have found the ENR ideological synthesis appealing and have actually been published in ENR journals. In turn, ENR intellectuals have increasingly published their works in Telos. At the same time, Alain de Benoist initiated a sort of opening to the left when he began the publication of his limited-circulation journal Krisis in 1988. The debates in Telos and Krisis resemble each other in that both journals tend to pursue a double critique of Marxist and liberal democratic ideologies, as well as publish decidedly “leftist” and anti-liberal authors. Moreover, the two journals focus on similar anti-capitalist themes and offer a scathing critique of Western notions of “progress.” Both the former New Left-influenced journal and the ENR seek to reinvigorate cultural, regional and ecological bonds of communal solidarity as a reply to the homogenising logic of capitalism, nationalism, bureaucratic life and “New Class” forms of domination. New Right criticisms of the United States’ “imperialist” war in Iraq also mirrored those of the far left throughout Europe. Aware of the right’s historical lessons from the experiences of fascism and decolonization, ENR thinkers have attempted to gradually rehabilitate the cultural and political legacies of the non-Nazi, revolutionary right. In the mid-1970s and again in the early 1990s, the ENR gained some support among the haute intelligentsia in continental Europe. A number of cultural and political trends tended to give the ENR intellectuals more public exposure and credibility. In the first place, the star of the left rose so high after World War Two because fascism and Nazism were thoroughly discredited and associated with the right. The communist Red Army’s decisive role in the defeat of Nazism and the Soviet Union’s massive loss of life in the world war served to create an anti-fascist consensus in both East and West. However, the left’s Stalinist-like excesses in the East and the far left’s perceived intellectual and cultural hegemony and dogmatism in continental Europe (e.g., the slavish pro-

Introduction

11

Soviet, Stalinist historical record of the French Communist Party and prominent European intellectuals) made the cultural and political revival of the right almost inevitable. Second, the crumbling of communist states in Eastern Europe after 1989 left an ideological vacuum, which the ENR intellectuals could tap into with their distinct New Left influences. Finally, unlike the Anglo-American world, continental Europe has deep ideological and historical affinities for a peculiar anti-liberal, anticapitalist revolutionary right. The ENR is seriously indebted to this revolutionary right-wing intellectual tradition, whether it is the writings of the nineteenth century French counter-revolutionary Joseph de Maistre, the German jurist Carl Schmitt who willingly joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and became its “crown jurist,” or the “Marcuse” of the Italian post-war radical right Julius Evola, to use the memorable expression of former Italian MSI leader Giorgio Almirante. In spite of new opportunities presented by the changing political landscape, there has been a constant attempt to publicly marginalize the ENR intellectuals, throughout continental Europe and especially in France. The prevailing journalistic view was that ENR intellectuals were re-hashing pernicious fascist and Nazi ideas from the past. Furthermore, the ENR’s own post-modern denunciation of most intellectual and political cliques and fads of the age likely frightened the existing cultural and intellectual authorities. Its appropriation of quasi-leftist ideas and antiWestern, anti-Christian pagan orientation tended to threaten liberal and socialist cultural and political elites, the ultra-nationalist, Catholic right and the neo-liberal right. The ENR’s ideological synthesis of revolutionary right-wing and New Left traditions gave the ENR a sense of constant intellectual vigour and energy, which could not be fully ignored by even its harshest critics. Could it be that as existing cultural and political elites were marginalizing ENR ideals in order to score political points, they were simultaneously accepting the school of thought’s valorization of cultural particularism within Europe’s social and political system? In both 1979 and again 1993, particularly in France, the ENR intellectuals received some important media coverage for a brief period of time, but only to be largely dismissed as closet fascists by most of its intellectual opponents. French scholars willing to engage in dialogue with the ENR, including the late French philosopher Raymond Aron and the contemporary political scientist Pierre André Taguieff, have been criticized by some sectors of the left for giving the ENR an aura of legitimacy. Also, this dialogue with the ENR has unleashed polemical guilt-byassociation tactics against “lax” liberals and leftists from a dogmatic wing of the hard left intelligentsia nostalgic for the clear and unambiguous left-right dichotomy. In 1993, forty European intellectuals signed “An Appeal to Vigilance” in Le Monde as a result of a supposedly “alarming” ENR dialogue with former communist theorists, what Roger-Pol Droit called a revival of “national Bolshevism” (Droit 1993-4, 145-6; 157-8). A year later the Appeal was republished and signed by 1500 additional intellectuals. Some critics, like those from Telos, have suggested that a defeated cultural left staged the entire affair in order to maintain outdated leftright boundaries in the post-communist era (Adler 1993-4, 23-33). The Appeal was curious since it failed to even name its opponents. Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN, a greater political threat for many critics than the ENR, is not even mentioned in the Appeal. Thus, one scholar has even concluded that the aim of the Appeal was to keep liberal

12

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

and left-wing scholars who study or engage in dialogue with the ENR on a sort of hard left dogma leash: A Europeanized variant of the North American political correctness “thought police” (Adler 1993-4, 23-33). In contrast to what they consider the “dinosaurs” on the Old Right and Old Left, ENR thinkers denied the fascist label of their opponents and flaunted an aura of tolerance based on an eclectic, heterogeneous body of thought without a common platform or dogmatic interpretation of the world (Sunic 1990, 159-60). ENR political thought has been influenced by radically different sources from the conservative revolution to ecologism, from the New Left to federalism and from paganism and feminism to scientism (Caillé 1993, 74-130). Critics have noted the repression and intolerance in ancient, pagan Greece and Rome, the chilling “racial paganism” of Nazi Germany and the revival of paganism by some contemporary far right-wing political movements (Sunic 1990, 154-5; Biehl and Staudenmaier 1995). Despite these protestations, others have hailed the ENR’s “novel” positions such as feminism, paganism, federalism, pro-Third World solidarity, anti-imperialism, anti-totalitarianism, anti-racism and the valorization of the “right to difference” (Tonini 2003-4). These positions have been the product of several facelifts between the late 1960s and 1990s (Taguieff 1993-4a, 34-54; 1993-4c). The ENR’s “open” attitude towards issues once dominated by the left and use of authors concerned with pressing existential and spiritual questions, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Julius Evola, Arthur Koestler and J. R. R. Tolkien, even appealed to the subjective aspirations of a particular segment of European youth in the early 1980s and 1990s. In the 1990s, many of the ENR’s primary concerns reflected those of the New Left, born in the wake of the American anti-Vietnam war movement in the 1960s. This ENR intellectual overhaul and opening to the left has led the most reputable scholar of the ENR phenomenon, Pierre-André Taguieff, to suggest that the French nouvelle droite journal Krisis now falls outside the orbit of right-wing extremism or neofascist taxonomic categories (Taguieff 1994, 313). Despite Taguieff’s optimistic interpretation of the ENR’s most avowedly leftist journal, Krisis still contains a mixture of revolutionary right and New Left influences. The ENR’s harshest critics argue that its esoteric, aristocratic elitism and violent revolt against Enlightenment-driven reason and progress, positivism, materialism, capitalism, communism, egalitarianism, universalism and liberal parliamentarism were all menacingly echoed in this century by fascist ideologues. These critics also point out that the ENR’s attempt to transcend categories like left and right found echoes in European fascist theoreticians of the past, whether Georges Valois in France, Benito Mussolini and Giovanni Gentile in Italy or Primo De Rivera in Spain. In addition, the ENR’s radical and violent anti-liberalism mimics antibourgeois forces from previous epochs: Latin inter-war anarcho-syndicalists, “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s that oscillated between right and left and conservative revolutionaries. One recent historical work has linked Alain de Benoist’s elitist, metapolitical non-conformism of the nouvelle droite, fascism and Alexandre Marc’s communitarian “third way” under Ordre Nouveau in the 1930s and 1940s (Hellman 2002, 192-200). One must also remember that during the inter-war years the revolutionary right and left resembled each other as mirror, polar opposites in their radical anti-

Introduction

13

bourgeois, anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary and anti-materialist worldviews. The ENR is still indebted to both right-wing and left-wing revolutionary poles, but from a cultural rather than explicitly political perspective. As Professor Stephen Holmes elegantly explained, the cultural curiosity of the post-communist 1990s is that antiliberalism became a common pole of attraction for the ENR, as well as numerous American leftist and communitarian critics of Western liberal democracies, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Roberto Unger and the editors of American critical theory journal Telos (Holmes 1996). These American communitarians, contends Holmes, echo classical fascists and ENR intellectuals in their revolutionary anti-liberalism. De Benoist’s Krisis devoted an entire journal issue in 1994 to the thought of North American communitarian thinkers, including Alasdair MacIntyre, Christopher Lasch, Amitai Etzioni and Charles Taylor. Using these aforementioned examples as models for a new radical synthesis between right and left against bourgeois liberalism and deflecting claims of a revival of cultural fascism, ENR theoreticians, in a manner reminiscent of the New Left, argue that they seek to spiritually rejuvenate European societies with more refined and humane values. That is, the ENR thinkers seek to reverse the trances of Americanization, rampant capitalist egoism, the notion of unlimited economic growth as the ultimate standard of “progress,” the dominant reign of materialism, techno-utopianism and the scientific “religion.” In a Schmittian tone, the ENR wants to restore the political rather than economic or moral realms to its ascendant role in European societies. In the ENR’s view, ancient, pagan, hierarchical and organic European societies would serve as models for the creation of a social order where the political and military realms are sovereign entities, which supersede the economic realm in the chain of social imperatives. Finally, the ENR calls for a plurality of significant political opinions and conflicts internally, and several great power blocs on the world stage rather than what they view as the homogenizing, unipolar and dangerous world order dominated by the United States. During the Cold War era, the ENR called for a “spiritual” European-Third World alliance as one such power bloc against the “materialism” of the Russian and American superpowers (De Benoist 1986). This last point has even more resonance for the ENR today in a world under the “decadent” spell of Pax Americana. The goal of this book, then, is to examine the emergence of the intellectual New Right, particularly in France, but in Europe more generally, from the late 1960s and into the new millennium. Its basic assumption is that the cultural and political activity of this group of intellectuals must be taken seriously. In the first place, the ENR represents the most theoretically coherent right-wing current of thought in continental Europe in the post-World War Two period. No similar ideological overhaul exists on the left. While the ENR ideological synthesis between revolutionary right and New Left worldviews appears contradictory, it is both intellectually and politically cultivated for our changing “post-fascist” times. In an age when socialist ideology has been seriously discredited after the fall of communist regimes in the East in 1989 and the rise of neo-liberal capitalist ideology in the West, the ENR ideological synthesis could conceivably fill a contemporary ideological void within European societies. Moreover, the ENR’s ideas have helped to directly and indirectly influence the discourse, nature and shape of European cultural and political life, particularly the

14

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

increasing salience of cultural questions, national and regional identity, immigration, the roles of the United States and Europe on the world stage and the critique of the dominant liberal capitalist model. Finally, the ENR’s marginalization from political debate is not a sign of its insignificance and might one day be its strength. Do we forget that Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 which would lead to the fascist conquest of the state only involved 25,000 blackshirts and would not have been possible without the vacillation and fear of King Victor Emmanuel III and other established authorities? Was Hitler’s Mein Kampf not written only a decade before the Nazis swept to power in 1933 and changed the course of European history? This book is especially a genealogical history of ideas, in this case, the ideas and ideological programs of the ENR. I will seek to understand why the ENR arose in the late 1960s, why it achieved public notoriety in France in 1979 and 1993 and why it appeals to a cross-section of European intellectuals. Furthermore, I will also briefly examine the ENR’s ideological programs, rhetorical strategies, organizational activity in civil society (and linkages across Europe) and relations with conventional actors in state structures, party systems and social movement sectors. This work will attempt to address these important questions by tracing the historical, political and intellectual trajectory of ENR theorists. Since the major French New Right organization GRECE was formed in 1968, this date will form the starting point of my analysis. For both the French New Right and American New Left intellectuals, the year 1968 can be viewed as a critical turning point; a death-blow to their most cherished hopes and ideals for a post-liberal, revolutionary order; a period which provoked intense personal and societal reflection; and also a reference point of reconciliation for the two anti-liberal “enemies” in the post-communist period. By the 1990s, ENR intellectuals had appropriated many of the themes of the American New Left from the 1960s. This reconciliation between sectors of the New Left and New Right was clearly apparent in the nouvelle droite’s manifesto published in the French New Right journal Eléments in February 1999. In a sense, both the French New Right and certain remnants of the American New Left were attempting to re-kindle the idealistic flames of the student radicals from the 1960s. Both the French New Right and American New Left lamented that these New Left ideals were either co-opted by the cultural and political establishment, or shattered as a result of the more institutionalized and conservative climate of the post-1968 era. An important dimension of the ENR’s “newness” resides with this pronounced New Left influence, its exclusively Gramscian metapolitical orientation and its anti-Western and anti-Christian paganism. In essence, the ENR is, in part, a “new” right-wing cultural movement, deeply indebted to the cultural ideas of the New Left, which hitherto had not existed before the late 1960s. The thesis of this book, then, will attempt to demonstrate that the ENR worldview draws on two dominant yet antagonistic political traditions, namely, the conservative revolutionary right and New Left. The fundamental contribution of this book will be an investigation of the ENR’s primary sources, including books, articles, journals, interviews and histories of principal ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist, Charles Champetier, Marco Tarchi and Michael Walker. This type of careful reading of ENR sources has generally been absent from the Anglo-American literature on the subject and, aside

Introduction

15

from Pierre-André Taguieff and Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol, even from its Frenchlanguage counterparts. Since Alain de Benoist is the most brilliant and prolific of the ENR intellectuals, I will especially focus on his works. The question of whether ENR thinkers practice a refined and more subtle form of cultural fascism, what Umberto Eco has dubbed “Ur-fascism” (Eco 1995), will be an integral aspect of this study. This undertaking is not without difficulties for several reasons. In the first place, the issue of what constitutes fascism is a messy one because there are so many competing and contradictory definitions and interpretations of the term. Roger Griffin claims that there is a growing consensus in the Anglophone world of fascist studies to define fascism as a “a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism” (Griffin 2003, 5). Ze’ev Sternhell insists that the fascist ideological core was formed around World War One and involves a simple equation: ultra-nationalism + socialism = fascism (Sternhell 1986; 1994). More to the point, syndicalists and left-wing activists like Henri De Man in Belgium sought to revise and supersede materialist Marxism by creating an “ethical socialism” reflected in the slogan socialisme national (national socialism). Others like Stanley Payne have produced exhaustive checklist definitions of fascism (Payne 1980). In his 2004 work The Anatomy of Fascism, R.O. Paxton defines fascism (in a manner that would omit the ENR) as a form of political behaviour marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cultures of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion (Paxton 2004, 218).

Contrary to mainstream historiography on the subject, Ernst Nolte includes the French Action française led by Charles Maurras as “fascist” in conjunction with Germany’s National Socialists and the Fascist Party of Italy (Nolte 1965). Given the diversity of interpretations of fascism, do we accept minimalist or maximalist conceptions of what constitutes fascism? Was fascism merely epochal? Did fascism spread beyond Europe to Japan or Brazil? So, for example, Payne argues that Peronism in Argentina had most though not all the characteristics of fascism. Second, the fascist label carries an intense historical stigma and polemical ring, which has possibly prevented more serious academic investigation of ENR texts. There is no doubt that that the Holocaust, the culmination of the most extreme manifestation of fascism in its racialist Nazi permutation, was unique in the twentieth century in that it targeted “for extermination men, women and children because they were born as they were” (Furet in Nolte and Furet 2001, 66). A vigilant anti-fascism was an understandable reaction to the excesses of fascism and Nazism. Yet, I am also reminded of what François Furet said shortly before he died about Hitler’s defeat: “History seemed to give a certificate of democracy to Stalin” (Furet in Furet and Nolte 2001, 16). Stalin’s Red Army played a major role in the defeat of Nazism. This led Stalin to wave the anti-fascist banner loudly, but rhetorical anti-fascism alone, as Furet argued, did not suffice for championing freedom (Furet in Furet and Nolte 2001, 17). For years many on the European left ignored Stalinist and Maoist

16

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

atrocities, including the liquidation of the kulaks in Ukraine, horrors of the gulags or forced deportations of the Chechens and Ingush. Stalinism cannot be excused for the “gentleness of its intentions,” to use Furet’s shocking phrase for communism (Furet in Furet and Nolte 2001, 65). Thus, this work is an appeal to unrestricted and open debate on the history of fascism, its relationship to its mortal communist “enemy” and the question of continuity and change in fascist discourse in the postmodern period. If the ENR is to be accused of fascism, then it must be with proofs, evidence, logical arguments and by tracing the historical genealogy of its works vis-à-vis fascism, Nazism and other revolutionary right-wing traditions. If we are serious about the liberty of ideas, ad hominem attacks, ideological favouritism, the silencing of noxious perspectives or legal remedies should all be resisted. If ENR ideas about the demise of European identity appear unconvincing or irrational, then we must counter them with more convincing and rational arguments. Third, in an age when both nationalism and socialism, the two pillars of the fascist ideological synthesis from one perspective (Sternhell 1986), are in serious decline as a result of attack from forces both above and below the nation-state, one wonders whether the term fascism has lost some of its precise analytical value. This problem is compounded because former neo-fascist political outfits like the Italian AN today refuse the fascist label. Can one refuse the fascist label and yet secretly long for the dawn of a new fascist epoch? Are fascist methods pliable to suit changing times? In this context, novelist Upton Sinclair and most recently Chris Hedges in a work on the Christian Right insist that fascism will come to the United States dressed in the Bible and wrapped in the flag (Hedges 2006). Fourth, if we take Stanley Payne’s exhaustive definition of fascism along the lines of ideology and goals, the fascist negations and style and organization,1 we would be hard-pressed to find that the ENR meets all the requirements of a fascist movement. That is, in taking the metapolitical route the ENR rejects violence in practice, while it has attacked the notions of a charismatic leader, nationalism and territorial expansion. If we use Nolte’s fascist minimum of anti-Marxism, antiliberalism, anti-conservatism, the leadership principle, a party army and the aim of totalitarianism, the ENR meets the first three requirements but not the last three. Using Griffin’s ultra-minimalist definition of fascism as a form of palingenetic ultranationalism, the ENR meets the criteria but so do other non-fascist, nationalistic right-wing movements. In this sense, we should remember the distinction Martin Blinkhorn made between fascism as a permanent, ultra-nationalist revolutionary movement seeking to transcend the nihilism of the period to save the nation or race, on the one hand, and right-wing conservatism with its defense of established interests such as the bourgeoisie, Church or monarchy, on the other hand (Blinkhorn 1990). In practice, co-operation and conflict existed between conservatives and fascists. In Spain, Franco generally controlled and co-opted fascists, while in Fascist Italy, for example, Mussolini could say in 1929 after having signed the Concordat with the Holy See that Italy “is Catholic, but it is Fascist, in fact above all, exclusively, essentially Fascist” (Gentile in Blamires 2006, 560). At the edge of the new century, could the “post-fascist” rather than fascist label be more accurate for the ENR theorists because they have generally criticized the homogenizing thrust of all modern ideologies, including fascism, nationalism (and

Introduction

17

the concept of the nation-state), socialism and liberalism? The ENR’s critique of nationalism, for example, has distanced it from the Front National, while its support of global “ethnoregionalism” and the “right to difference” confounds scholars from anthropologists and political scientists that seek to find linkages with historical fascism and the way it glorified the national community and state above all other values (Spektorowski 2000, 352-61; 2003, 55-70; Ethnos 2003, 554-72; Talshir 2005, 311-35). Furthermore, the ENR operates from a particular cultural tradition that has been historically more attached to the values of the Nietzschean-like conservative revolution rather than official variants of fascism. Notwithstanding, the chapter interpreting the ENR will highlight the positions of cultural critics that claim the ENR intellectuals represent a new form of subtle cultural fascism, those arguing the ENR theorists have moulded a novel political paradigm and others that urge caution rather than the reflex desire to hastily classify the ENR intellectuals. On the one hand, the astute Italian political scientist Marco Revelli argues that the ENR has been unable to “invent forms of articulation at the level of practical politics either nationally or internationally, or even, when all is said and done, of producing really original culture (the intellectual Pantheon it fields are almost all located between the beginning of the century and the early 1930s)” (Revelli 1996, 361-65). On the other hand, born in the wake of the rise of the New Left and May 1968 events, the ENR was firmly positioned to differentiate itself from all the historical right’s previous stances. In ENR journals, revolutionary right-wing themes of the past, namely, the aristocratic conception of life, the military ethic of honour and courage, the “internal empire of the spirit,” the search for primordial, common cultural origins and the powerful attachment to myths mingle in uneasy coexistence with more recent New Left, federalist, ecological and democratizing impulses. The ENR is a rightwing movement that would not have been possible without a post-World War Two reflection about the nature of historical fascism and the revolutionary right, on the one hand, and the events of May 1968, the phenomenon of the New Left and the influence of the Left in general, on the other hand. In its esoteric, hybrid and perhaps sexy melange of ideas and influences, one might be tempted to ask the crucial question of whether the ENR has created a “post-fascist” synthesis or rather laid the intellectual groundwork necessary for the revival of a fascist ideology that was buried in the ashes of World War Two. The plan of this book will be the following. While the first part of the book will more generally focus on the ENR’s historical trajectory and its ideological universe, the second part will examine its relationship to the real world of culture and politics (i.e., its relationship to political forces, the connection of ENR intellectuals to centres of power and its cultural connections throughout Europe, North America and the world in general). The first chapter will trace the ENR’s right-wing historical and ideological origins in France and Europe more generally. The second chapter will examine the ENR’s birth and development in France from 1968 until the late 1970s. The third chapter will examine the ENR’s “opening to the left” in the 1980s and 1990s. The fourth chapter will trace the ENR’s left-wing roots both in relation to the fascist past and particularly in the contemporary period with the key influences of Gramscian cultural theories, the ideals of the New Left from the 1960s and its

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affinity and flirtation with the old, revolutionary left. The fifth chapter will examine the ENR’s major influences and basic worldview. I will argue that from the late 1960s and into the new century the primacy of cultural metapolitics and valorization of the anti-egalitarian notion of the “right to difference” have been the main pillars of the ENR Weltanschauung. The sixth chapter will consist of an analysis of the ambiguities and tensions within the ENR’s worldview. The seventh chapter will be an interpretation of the academic literature surrounding the ENR phenomenon. The eighth chapter will focus on the French nouvelle droite’s relationship with other ENR branches throughout Europe and its interesting yet limited cultural impact in North America. The ninth chapter will grapple with the ENR’s uneasy relationship with the extreme right, revolutionary right and neo-fascist camps. The final chapter situates the ENR within the larger framework of intellectuals, which can play an oppositional or subservient, legitimizing function in relation to the dominant powers and ideologies of the day. The inability of the ENR to definitively break with the radical right milieu prevents it from playing the role of authentically oppositional intellectuals and creating a truly post-fascist ideological synthesis. Endnotes 1. For Payne, the typological description of fascism includes the following: A. Ideology and Goals: Espousal of an idealist, vitalist, and voluntaristic philosophy, normally involving the attempt to realize a new modern, self-determined, and secular culture. Creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state not based on traditional principles or models. Organization of a new highly regulated, multiclass, integrated national economic structure, whether called national corporatist, national socialist, or national syndicalist. Positive evaluation and use of, or willingness to use, violence and war. The goal of empire, expansion, or a radical change in the nation’s relationship with other powers. B. The Fascist Negations: Antiliberalism Anticommunism Anticonservatism (though with the understanding that fascist groups were willing to undertake temporary alliances with other sectors, most commonly with the right). C. Style and Organization: Attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia.

Introduction

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Emphasis on aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political liturgy, stressing emotional and mystical aspects. Extreme stress on the masculine principle and male dominance, while espousing a strongly organic view of society. Exaltation of youth above other phases of life, emphasizing the conflict of generations, at least in effecting the initial political transformation. Specific tendency toward an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command, whether or not the command is to some degree initially elective. See Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism: 1914-1945 (London: UCL Press, 1995), p. 7.

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Chapter 1

The ENR’s Historical and Ideological Origins: The Right-Wing Roots A form of resistance to transcendence. – Ernst Nolte’s minimal definition of fascism

In 1988, German historian Ernst Nolte’s automobile was set on fire. The car was parked at the Free University in Berlin, where Nolte is a professor. An anonymous letter, which was sent to a Berlin news agency, declared: “It is useless to argue with such characters. It only legitimates their status as pseudo-scholars, thereby reducing debate to ‘academic disputes’ and disguising their role as imperialist agents within the university and beyond” (Zitelmann 1995, 32). “We attack Nolte because he is one of those who personally represents the continuity of fascism,” the letter continued. Nolte was a major figure in West Germany’s “historian’s dispute” (1986-7) between revisionist scholars who called for a more “objective” examination of modern German history and left-wing academics such as Jürgen Habermas, who reject any “neutral” discussion of the Nazi era. While a large category of historians both in Germany and abroad from Martin Broszat and Hans Mommsen to Ian Kershaw and Michael Marrus denounced Nolte, historians Klaus Hildebrand and Hagen Schulze came to his defence. Nolte was widely criticised for his position that Germany’s Final Solution against the Jews during World War Two, which he admits was one of “widespread liquidation,” was no more unique than other mass genocides in history. He sees Nazism as a copycat totalitarianism that was merely reacting to the greater threat from the Bolshevik Soviet Union. Nolte insists that the moral dividing line between the “social extermination” of the gulags and “biological extermination” of Auschwitz is not pronounced in reality (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 69). The German scholar has been accused of ignoring Nazism’s evil particularism, normalising Germany’s past and more ominously, seeking to revive German nationalism. Unlike Nolte, the writer, chemist and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi (1919-87) insisted on the evil particularism of Nazism. Levi argued that while Nazi and Soviet camps mirrored each other in terms of the hard physical work, poor rations and “models of hell,” the death rates of the Lager (Nazi concentration camps) in contrast to the Soviet regime’s gulags were higher and the aim of the former was the complete elimination of the Jews as a racial rather than religious group (Levi 1987). For Nolte, fascism which was officially born in 1919 with the founding of the Italian Fascist Party in the aftermath of Italian and German national defeats, feeds off the rise of the Bolshevik rise to power in Russia in 1917. It is a revolutionary

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imitation of communism or a “mimicry of Bolshevism,” to cite Maurice MerleauPonty writing in 1947 (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 47). Nolte’s greatest taboo is to question the number of deaths at Auschwitz while not denying the existence of the gas chambers. His other great taboo is to claim that there was a “rational core of Nazi anti-Judaism,” which Nolte relates to the Nazi appraisal of communism and capitalism as anti-national, materialist, universalist and Jewish movements (Nolte in Furet and Nolte 2001, 29). Nolte cites the disproportionate role played by Jews in leadership positions in the Bolshevik Revolution ignited the ire of ultra-nationalists like Hitler, who claimed that “Jews pulled the strings of world history.” Furet rightly points out that the October Revolution might have been Hitler’s pretext to use the Jews as a scapegoat, but Christian anti-Semitism and the critique of the Jew hiding behind abstract universality and the Rights of Man predated the 1917 Revolution (Furet in Nolte and Furet 2001, 60-1). When ENR thinker Alain de Benoist came to deliver a lecture in Berlin in February 1993, he was shockingly beaten by Autonomen, far left-wing, anti-fascist militants (Zitelmann 1995, 32). In 1998, de Benoist mirrored Nolte’s revisionist approach in an essay “Nazism and Communism: Evil Twins?” (De Benoist 1998, 15-24). Post-war German youth in both West and East had been reared on a statesupported anti-fascist, anti-Nazi ideology, which nourished feelings of guilt and hate vis-à-vis their parents for participating in the excesses of Nazism. The Autonomen, as well as other radical left-wing terrorist groups like the Red Army Faction (RAF) or Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s, were militant, violent anti-fascists. One former female RAF member told one academic: “We hated our parents because they were former Nazis, who had never come clean about their past” (Hudson 1999, 44). Since Nazism was the most extreme permutation of fascism, it was no accident that in the post-war era the most militant anti-fascism should come from Germany. As scholars on the right, Nolte and de Benoist have paid a price in an era when anti-fascism became the unifying ideology. To be a man on the right risked the fascism label. Yet, even in France the anti-fascist credo was more mythical than real. Far right-wing and fascist ideas flourished in France between the wars. For historian Ze’ev Sternhell, fascism was born in France rather than Germany or Italy and it was not merely an ideology of the right (Sternhell 1995). Fascism, Sternhell argued, was a union of constant revision of anti-Marxist socialism by left-wing dissidents and ultra-nationalism. Although France is the birthplace of the 1789 Revolution and the universal declaration of the Rights of Man, it is simultaneously the nation with one of the most historically potent and sophisticated revolutionary right-wing traditions in Europe. These revolutionary right-wing traditions are united by a vehement counterrevolutionary ethic, a sort of anti-1789 stance, in relation to the most basic principles of the French Revolution and Enlightenment-based ideals, such as science, reason, personal and societal moral betterment, universalism and linear visions of “progress.” Nolte once described this revolutionary right-wing rejection of the Enlightenment tradition and progress (including fascism and Nazism) as a practical and violent “form of resistance to transcendence” (Nolte 1965). For Nolte, fascism meant “hostility to liberalism’s and socialism’s a priori vision of a ‘new man’, radically uprooted from tradition” (Nolte in Eatwell, 2003).

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Many of the leading French New Right thinkers, including its head Alain de Benoist, have their origins in the anti-Enlightenment, revolutionary right and ultranationalist milieux of the 1950s and 1960s, especially the struggle for French Algeria. In this period, some French New Right thinkers were filled with sympathy or lingering nostalgia for the Vichy collaborationists of the 1940s, the French and German “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s and even certain aspects of Italian Fascism and German Nazism. A number of contemporary French New Right thinkers continue to look for revolutionary inspiration from a number of these rightwing traditions. As Tomislav Sunic has neatly explained, although the ENR does not explicitly profess any of these aforementioned currents of thought, in reality it remains indebted to all of them (Sunic 1990, 6). This chapter will seek to highlight the most important revolutionary right-wing strains of thought within France and Europe generally in order to situate the rightwing historical and ideological origins of the ENR. This is especially important if we are to understand the polemical storms surrounding ENR ideas, which many on the left viewed as a sophisticated form of fascism. The main argument of the first four chapters and this work more generally, then, is that the French New Right and ENR have been shaped by an ambiguous set of intellectual and political legacies. On the one hand, the French New Right and ENR have been influenced by the political and intellectual heritages of both French and continental European right-wing traditions. Yet, on the other hand, formed in 1968 shortly before the student and worker revolts, the French New Right and ENR have been deeply shaped by the cultural, intellectual and political trajectory and fortunes of the French Left and New Left. In addition, the French New Right has displayed a measure of sympathy for the revolutionary left because it shares with it a common anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-materialist and radical stance vis-à-vis the liberal democratic system. It is my argument that the interaction and dynamic relationship between right and left in France has seriously shaped the evolution of the French New Right and ENR in general. The years of left-wing and anarchist student and worker agitation in 1968 and the “earthquake” Socialist electoral victory of François Mitterrand in France in 1981 loom particularly large in my analysis. These two dates are critical for the evolution of the French New Right. In short, the years 1968 and, to a lesser extent, 1981, have radically shaped the intellectual, cultural and political choices of the French New Right and ENR in general. Ideological Origins: The Counter-Revolution Against 1789 Man in general, if reduced to himself, is too wicked to be free. – Joseph de Maistre

The Frenchman Joseph de Maistre (1753-1821) was the earliest and leading theoretician of the traditionalist, anti-Enlightenment counter-revolutionary heritage, which waged a metapolitical “war” on the entire metaphysical edifice of the liberal French Revolution and the “abstract” notion of individual or human rights. Exiled to Switzerland by the French Revolution and later a member of the Russian court in

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St. Petersburg for 14 years, his best work, Les Soirées de Saint-Petersbourg (1821), acclaimed the public executioner as the ultimate guardian of the social order. He remained convinced of the need for the conservation of tradition, the supremacy of Christianity and the absolute rule of both sovereign and pope. Attacking the ideas of liberal philosophes such as Francis Bacon, Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and John Locke, de Maistre rallied all his life against Enlightenment-driven notions, especially their faith in science, empiricism, humanity and progress. One of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, Isaiah Berlin, has even argued that de Maistre was an early precursor of fascism (Berlin 1991): The shared pessimistic and apocalyptic vision of life, the gloomy world of an eternal graveyard of executioners and executionees (or friends and foes), the violent revolutionary ethos tinged with traditionalism, complete individual self-abnegation to a higher reality (i.e., god or nation), the intense anti-egalitarianism and anti-humanism, and the complete hatred of the “decadent,” materialist “disorders” of liberalism and democracy. Despite the fervent Catholicism of de Maistre, Paul Gottfried highlights how ENR publications abound with praise for Catholic counter-revolutionaries such as de Maistre and the Spanish statesman and theologian Juan Donoso Cortés (18091853). Both are critics of the French Revolution, its “debilitating” egalitarianism, “abstract” individualism and “intolerant, revolutionary universalism” (Gottfried in Sunic 1990, “Preface,” ix-x). In addition, France rather than Germany is cited by some scholars as the theoretical birthplace of “scientific racism” (Weinberg 1987). The French thinker Joseph-Arthur Comte de Gobineau (1816-1882) is the most representative figure of this school of “scientific racism” and is renowned for the publication of his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races (1853-1855). In this four-volume text, Gobineau asserted that the fate of civilizations is determined by racial composition and that Aryan societies flourish as long as they remain free of yellow and black racial strains. Gobineau also claimed that the more a civilization’s racial character is diluted through miscegenation the more likely it is to lose its creativity and vitality and sink into the wilderness of corruption, immorality and decadence. His racial thinking had a wide influence on hyper-nationalist, völkisch German circles, including Adolf Hitler who turned to Gobineau for inspiration. While Gobineau was largely concerned with a scholarly examination of human social life rather than racial political programs, he did influence the racialist thinking of Richard Wagner, the English racist politician Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolf Hilter’s “guiding star” and “the spiritual father of National Socialism” Dietrich Eckart. A number of French New Right thinkers, including Alain de Benoist, embraced this racialist and colonialist thinking in the 1950s and 1960s through ultra-nationalist, pro-Western and pan-European publications such as Défense de l’Occident and Europe Action. In his major work Vu de droite, de Benoist devotes several pages to Arthur Gobineau. He claims that Gobineau is “the victim of a double prejudice,” which only sees him as the author of Essay on the Inequality of Human Races and this work as “the bible of a perverse racism;” or neglects to explain that the French writer was one of the “fathers” of federalism, the theory of elites and “the first important visionary of racial conflict” (De Benoist 1979b, 261-64).

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In the twentieth century, prominent French writers Maurice Barrès (1862-1923) and Charles Maurras (1868-1952) both gave French ultra-nationalist ideology its theoretical foundations and aura of respectability. Sternhell has argued that both thinkers helped to pave the ideological groundwork for the fascist synthesis between ultra-nationalism and socialism (Sternhell 1978). Barrès nurtured an entire generation on the mythic solidarity of the national community; the quasi-mystical legend of the eternal unity of the “blood, soil, and dead.” Barrès had his roots in the short-lived revanchist movement of General Georges Boulanger (1837-1891), the former French Minister of War between 1886 and 1887, and the leading figure of a right-wing protest movement, which firmly rejected the notion of parliamentarism in favour of direct populism. Sternhell argues that Barrès broke with traditional conservatism to create a new revolutionary right-wing discourse combining a Nietzschean struggle against the French Enlightenment, Cartesian rationalism, Kantian ethics, the Rights of Man, liberal democracy and progress that presaged fascism (Sternhell 1972). Maurras was the leader of the influential neo-royalist, anti-Semitic and ultranationalist inter-war movement, Action française, founded in 1898. Like his predecessor Edouard Drumont (1844-1917) who published the infamous antiSemitic, conspiracy tract La France juive (1886) and was elected a deputy of Algiers in 1898, Maurras was deeply committed to Catholicism and royalism in order to safeguard the “honour” of the French nation and save it from “decadent” materialism, liberalism and parliamentarism. Nolte argues that when the anti-clerical Maurras and his Action française movement were ostracized by the Vatican hierarchy in Rome in 1926 this was a decisive turn from a Catholic conservative nationalism towards revolutionary fascism (Nolte 1965). Barrès and Maurras were firmly rooted in the anti-liberal, anti-democratic, antiindividualist and anti-Dreyfusard camp, which attempted to completely sabotage and transform the revolutionary heritage of 1789. For Nolte, the Action française is a precursor of Italian Fascism and German Nazism and a fascist movement, or what he views as a deeply reactionary, anti-emancipatory movement whose fundamental aim was the annihilation of Marxism (Nolte 1965). In the tumult of the inter-war years, the Action française paved the way for a constellation of France’s extreme rightwing political forces, including numerous ultra-nationalist and fascist leagues (e.g., François de La Rocque’s immensely popular Croix-de-Feu, Jean Renaud’s Solidarité française, Bucard’s Le Francisme, etc.) (Soucy 1986). These ultra-nationalist leagues would constantly threaten the future of French parliamentary democracy. They contributed greatly to the project of derailing French liberal democracy and the legacy of 1789. The French defeat in 1940 and the emergence of the anti-liberal, anti-democratic Vichy collaborationist regime helped to fulfil the revolutionary aspirations of the ultra-nationalist leagues. French scholars René Rémond and Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol have observed a close resemblance between the role of Charles Maurras in the Action française and Alain de Benoist with the nouvelle droite: the similar focus on the intellectual domain, the idea of the primacy of the “cultural war” and the vision of an elitebased cultural group in hostile conflict with the dominant political and intellectual establishment (Rémond 1982, 283-89; Duranton-Crabol 1988, 22-3). The major difference between Maurras and de Benoist, however, was that the latter rejected the

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rigid Catholic clericalism and assimilationist nationalism of the former in favour of an anti-religious, pagan Nietzscheanism. While Maurras was an agnostic officially ostracized by the Catholic Church in Rome, he thought that it was imperative to stress the royalist and Catholic roots of France because they remained an integral part of the French nation’s cultural identity and created a vast reservoir of potential for popular, ultra-nationalist agitation against French parliamentarism and the heritage of 1789. De Benoist, on the other hand, totally rejected Christianity in both its religious and secular manifestations, while instead espoused an affinity with the pre-Christian, pagan period. In 2001, de Benoist gave a long interview to Bulletin Charles Maurras in which he argued that Maurras was not a racist in the classical sense of term, while situating his own thought within the European imperial model (De Benoist 2001b). Moreover, recent French historiography has shown that, contrary to the mainstream thesis of René Rémond French fascism was not a minor, imported ideology (Rémond 1982). Numerous scholars such as Ze’ev Sternhell and William Irvine have challenged this prevalent French academic view of fascism as a “paranthesis” in French history. For Sternhell, between 1885 and the eve of World War One in 1914, it was France that was the birthplace of the “neither right, nor left” fascist ideological synthesis (Sternhell 1985). Irvine and other scholars, on the other hand, claim that fascism was both widespread in France during the inter-war years and clearly on the political right rather than among dissident French leftists attempting to revise Marxism (Wohl 1991). Irvine and Sternhell stand united against Rémond’s traditionalist thesis of French fascism as a minor, imported ideology, although the two scholars part on Sternhell’s insistence that French fascism has predominantly left-wing roots. Both Sternhell and Irvine triggered a new wave of scholarship documenting the mainstream nature of nativist manifestations of extreme-right and fascist ideology in France during the inter-war years, especially the extra-parliamentary leagues such as the Croix-de-Feu, Action française and Jeunesses Patriotes. For these scholars, then, the French right includes native, French strains of fascism and ultra-nationalism along with Rémond’s traditional classification of three right-wing traditions within the country: monarchist, liberal Orleanist and Bonapartist (Rémond 1982). Originating from the right, the French New Right was well-placed to borrow from the thought of French inter-war era political fascists such as Georges Valois, Jacques Doriot and Marcel Déat; cultural fascists such as Henri Montherlant, Robert Brasillach and Drieu de la Rochelle; or other French “non-conformists” of the 1920s or 1930s like Georges Sorel, which could express sympathy for either radical right or left as a result of their common anti-materialist idealism, hatred of liberal democracy and capitalism and revolutionary longings. The examination of cultural fascists was an integral part of de Benoist’s progression as a Paris university student writing in the early 1960s for the ultra-nationalist journal Cahiers universitaires, an intellectual precursor of several GRECE journals founded in the late 1960s and 1970s (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 23-5). Despite his profound resonance within the “national-revolutionary” and “national-communist” milieux in Germany, with Italian syndicalist thinkers such as Arturo Labriola and Enrico Leone, Italian fascists Giovanni Gentile and Benito Mussolini and the Soviet Bolshevik regime, the French “non-conformist” thinker Georges Sorel (who praised collective action, violence,

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myth and idealism above thought), continued to influence de Benoist’s thought into the 1970s and beyond (De Benoist 1979b, 275-78). Two characters are especially instructive in the French radical right-wing milieu: Jacques Doriot and Georges Valois. The former was the inter-war leader of the “left-wing fascist” Parti Populaire Français (PPF) as well as a former highranking member of the French Communist Party (PCF) that was expelled from the party. His movement was mildly corporatist and wildly anti-communist with 60,000 to 300,000 followers in 1938, depending on the sources (Soucy 1986; 1995). Doriot was appointed to the National Council in Vichy, but then turned towards ultracollaboration and was the first to propose the Légion des Volontaires Français (LVF). He even fought on the Eastern Front during the war. Valois, on the other hand, had a political career that shifted from right to left. He was the founder of Le Faisceau in 1925 after leaving the Action française. Le Faisceau under Valois veered left with the claim that the “national revolution” would be a radicalization of the French Revolution. When the movement died in 1928, Valois returned to his youthful attraction for anarchism, calling for a syndicalist republic and sanctions against Nazi Germany and participating in the resistance (Douglas 1992). He died in Bergen-Belsen. Furthermore, modern academic research has also pointed out that the World War Two French collaborationist Vichy regime under Marshal Pétain was more than simply a hiccup in that nation’s history. A number of reputable scholars since the 1980s (Marrus and Paxton 1981; Cohen 1993) have highlighted how this nativist authoritarian regime was more mainstream in intellectual and popular circles than once suspected and how it smashed the entire edifice of 1789 within a period of less than one year during the Nazi occupation of France in 1940. More precisely, the most sacred principles of 1789 were destroyed free of Nazi exhortations by the French Vichy regime when it implemented the infamous statut des juifs and later wilfully participated in the genocide of 75,000 French Jews by handing them to the Nazi authorities. The scope of French Vichy collaboration was made more evident when former French Socialist President François Mitterrand shocked the nation when he admitted to a short flirtation with the Vichy regime. Numerous allegedly liberal or leftist French intellectuals, including Emmanuel Mounier, Thierry Maulnier and Bertrand de Jouvenel, were also accused of collaborating with the Vichy regime. The myth of a massive French resistance to Nazi Germany slowly began to crumble under the weight of historical evidence. In short, a long intellectual assault on the principles of 1789, which began in the late nineteenth century and was rooted in revolt against the “established disorder” and “materialist decadence” of positivism, liberalism, democracy and parliamentarism, prepared the groundwork for France’s Vichy turn in 1940. For many Vichyites or their numerous fellow travellers, almost any new post-liberal, anti-materialist order was preferable to the hated evils of liberal parliamentarism and capitalist materialism. While Vichy’s inherent conservatism, authoritarianism and clericalism embodied in the regime’s slogan “Patrie, Famille, Travail” (Fatherland, Family, Work) does not exactly suit the more revolutionary worldview of ENR thinkers, the ENR shared with it a common disdain for the principles of 1789 and many colleagues were attracted to Vichy’s marked elitism or hierarchical and organic social vision. In short,

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the historical memory of Vichy could serve as a model for GRECE elites wishing to radically overturn liberal democracy and capitalism. Vichy provided the perfect metapolitical scenario that GRECE would mirror: internal “decay” and crisis, an external enemy and the elite-driven crushing of the hated liberal and parliamentary order (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 22-3). Another source of inspiration for de Benoist and the French revolutionary right came from the partisans of Algérie française, especially active in the 1950s and early 1960s; the radical pieds noirs colonialists in favour of imposing the supposedly superior French civilization on the Muslim Arab and Berber civilizations of Algeria; the anti-Gaullists of the clandestine, paramilitary and revolutionary Organisation de l’armée secrète (OAS- Secret Army Organization), which sought to overthrow the French government in order to “save” the West and stem the tide of de-colonisation; all those French Algerians who claimed to remain faithful to the military ethic of honour and loyalty, or what they saw as the cause of the fatherland against the “treason” of bourgeois compromise and materialism. Working on these aforementioned themes and the anxiety of the newly exiled pieds noirs after the loss of Algeria in 1962, Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, a lawyer and radical supporter of Algérie française, gained about six per cent of the national vote during the French presidential elections of 1965. Aside from the anti-tax, anti-state and populist Poujadist “flash in the pan” (i.e., a mixture of anti-Semitism and an appeal to the “little guys” fearful of capitalist modernization) in the 1956 legislative elections, which garnered 52 seats and 2.5 million national votes, this was the best electoral result for an explicitly revolutionary right-wing political candidate in post-World War Two France until the meteoric rise of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in the early 1980s and again in 2002 when his party reached the final round of the presidential elections. Whether operating under the influence of a French, ultra-nationalist or panEuropean, revolutionary perspective, a number of future French New Right thinkers, including de Benoist, played an active role in attempting to maintain support for a French Algeria. His early works, including Le courage est leur patrie (1965) and Rhodésie, terre des lions fidèles (1967), are firmly embedded within this ultranationalist or pan-European, pro-colonialist and militaristic tone calling for the revival of elite, chivalric warrior societies where honour and courage superseded material considerations. Was not the title of de Benoist’s 1965 work eerily reminiscent of the Nazi SS slogan “My honour is loyalty”? In short, varied home-grown currents of radical right-wing thought united by an anti-1789 ethos, whether counter-revolutionary monarchical, Catholic integralist, ultra-nationalist, fascist, Vichyite or the national, revolutionary partisans of Algérie française, would continue to sustain the post-World War Two generation of revolutionary right-wing “losers.” Yet, the revolutionary right faded as it was swept by the strong wave of Gaullism in the 1950s and 1960s with its emphasis on French nationalism, independence, anti-parliamentarism and its quasi-authoritarian, populist strain. Nonetheless, these right-wing traditions in both France and Europe generally provided crucial reference points and an element of continuity for ENR intellectuals. As late as 1993, political scientist Pierre-André Taguieff traced the ideological origins of the ENR thinkers to the “classical French far Right” (Taguieff 1993b, 3-22).

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Unlike Germany, which was burdened by the horrors of Nazism and the Holocaust, the resurgence of a revolutionary right was more plausible in France since it contained a healthy dosage of well-established, nativist right-wing strains of thought and yet never maintained an outright taboo of these traditions. While France’s legacy of 1789 has been historically dominant, the revolutionary right was often more influential than acknowledged and always waiting for its chance to upturn the hated “disorder” of 1789. In the post-World War Two period, this revolutionary right-wing heritage would continue to haunt the French political scene in both older and newer guises. One manifestation was the ENR thinkers, which first emerged in France in the mid-1960s. The Post-War Years: Gradual Metapolitical Turn The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. – Maurice Bardèche, neo-fascist writer

In the post-World War Two era, the French revolutionary right continued its survival in tiny pockets of fragmented monarchists, radical counter-revolutionaries, ex-Vichyites, Catholic integralists, extreme nationalists, Third Way militants, neo-fascists and neoNazis. In general, however, the French revolutionary right languished in a moribund state: A loose collection of minute groupuscules, various ideological tendencies, quarrelsome personalities, and regional differences (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 244). Nonetheless, there were revolutionary right-wing traditions in other parts of Europe, including the inter-war era German conservative revolutionaries and the cult-like status of philosopher Julius Evola among radical right-wing circles in Italy, which could be used as points of reference in the age after the “defeat.” Despite an isolated, alienated and discredited affinity to the fascist culture of the past, Evola’s rejection of the liberal order’s “vulgar,” quantitative economism, anti-Americanism and image of a qualitative warrior elite “riding the tiger” amid the ruins was reassuring for the generation of fascists, which tasted the war’s bitter defeat. Indeed, Evola became a crucial reference point for several generations within the European revolutionary right milieux between the 1950s and 1970s, especially for the parliamentary neofascists in the MSI and radical right terrorist groups such as Ordine Nuovo in Italy, which sought to break the “sickness” of bourgeois materialism and lifestyles with an esoteric warrior ethic and Eastern-influenced mysticism (Ferraresi 1996, 30-50). Julius Evola and conservative revolutionaries such as Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger had the advantage of being imbued with a revolutionary ethos and yet they were not supposedly tainted by their relationship to the Nazi or Fascist regimes as a result of their distant, esoteric elitism. Did not one conservative revolutionary thinker, Moeller van den Bruck, criticize Hitler for his “proletarian primitiveness” upon meeting him? And did he not simultaneously have his 1923 work Das Dritte Reich (The Third Reich) appropriated as the political slogan of the Nazi regime? While Evola was an inspiration to the milieu of the revolutionary right in Italy and other European countries, it would be the conservative revolutionaries, what Armin Mohler dubbed the “healthy Trotskyites” of the German Revolution (1918-

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1933) in contrast to the Hitlerian “travesty” (Griffin 1995, 351-4), which would be more explicitly rehabilitated by the French nouvelle droite in the 1970s. Alain de Benoist has listed the conservative revolutionary thinkers as one of his primary influences in his work Les idées à l’endroit, wrote a positive essay about its leading figure Ernst Jünger and is indebted to the latter through his radical Nietzschean nominalism, spherical view of history, warrior ethic, the belief in a particular spirit for each culture, the support for a hierarchical organic community and a more violent anti-materialist, anti-liberalism than anti-Marxism (De Benoist 1979a, 31-48; 1994). Despite rejecting the plebeian nature of Nazi and Fascist regimes, Jünger and other conservative revolutionaries provided a veritable treasure-trove of ideas for the Nazi regime. It was this type of cultural recuperation of what many view as “proto-fascist” thought, which would eventually allow the revolutionary right to escape the “burden of history” and its self-inflicted “ghetto” status. For the revolutionary right in France, as in other parts of Europe, the long march through the political wilderness would begin neither through the intimidation and fear of violent street action, nor in the “compromise chamber” of the parliamentary realm. For some, the return to political respectability necessitated a questioning of these traditional methods used by the revolutionary right to attain and maintain power. Besides, aside from the modest electoral results of the Italian MSI and the clerical authoritarian regimes of Franco and Salazar in Spain and Portugal, was not the revolutionary right throughout Europe condemned to marginality and in need of new paths of exploration? (DurantonCrabol 1988, 244-5). While others continued the routes of violent confrontation or parliamentary politics, a new generation of thinkers from the revolutionary right milieu began to steer a third path: The primacy of cultural metapolitics. It would first begin in the early 1960s with its own small press outlets, relatively unknown publishing houses, obscure journals, tireless editors and radical nationalist student organisations. Thus, the anti-conservative radical right would begin its slow ascent to normalcy and respectability. Were these early metapolitical efforts a form of selfcritique, a type of reflection about “quasi-fascist” ideas or an obvious continuity with the discredited fascist heritage of the past? One of the most significant of these metapolitical endeavours was the work of the French neo-fascist author Maurice Bardèche. A literary critic and brother-inlaw of the French fascist author Robert Brasillach, who was executed for treason in 1945, Bardèche frequented Vichyite and revolutionary right-wing circles during World War Two. He took the fascist label as a badge of honour rather than one of shame and defeat. Bardèche founded the explicitly pro-Western, Europeanist and racialist journal Défense de l’Occident in 1952, which included future members of the principal French ENR think tank GRECE. Among these former GRECE collaborators with Bardèche’s journal was Fabrice Laroche, one pseudonym of the ENR’s leading figure Alain de Benoist. The latter would especially remember the lesson of the journal’s anti-communism and anti-Sovietism, which never slavishly celebrated the merits of the opposite liberal capitalist American camp. More importantly, it was against the backdrop of the Algerian War in 1961 that Bardèche published his infamous text called Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (What is fascism?)

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(Bardèche 1961). Bardèche’s book was considered a classical work for the entire revolutionary right and neo-fascist milieux in the post-war era (Griffin 1998, 4). Another important metapolitical effort, Pour une critique positive, was published by revolutionary right-wing militant Dominique Venner a year later in 1962 and is considered the “fascist equivalent” of Vladimir Lenin’s revision of Marxism in What is to be done? (Griffin 1998, 4). It is important to understand that 1962 was a crushing turning point for the revolutionary Right, the year of France’s de-colonisation exit from the bitter debacle of the Algerian War. The Algerian War had convinced Venner that it was through a new ideological orientation, a pan-European framework and not a weakened France, that the battle must continue against the “subversion” and materialist “decadence” of the liberal capitalist United States and communist Soviet Union. Like Bardèche, Venner was firmly rooted in revolutionary right-wing circles. He was the son of an ardent supporter of Jacques Doriot’s fascist Parti populaire français during the 1930s and 1940s and belonged to the neo-fascist Jeune Nation and Jeune Europe groups in the 1950s. In a 1975 article for French New Right journal Eléments, Venner defended the absolute necessity of the martial spirit against the “boredom” of bourgeois liberal and socialist ideas (Venner 1975). A combatant during the Algerian War, Venner served in prison from 1961-1962 as a result of his membership in the French OAS. Venner was also a founder of the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN), the ultra-nationalist union of French university students and editor of the revolutionary right-wing journal of the “white man” Europe Action in the early 1960s. Alain de Benoist, the ENR leader, also belonged to FEN and was a member of Europe Action, for which he wrote articles and served as editor-in-chief of its weekly publication Europe-Action Hebdomadaire. He has publicly admitted his intellectual roots in these revolutionary right-wing circles (De Benoist 1993-4a, 189). The early metapolitical initiatives of Bardèche and Venner within Europe Action and Défense de l’Occident, including the student-based FEN organization and journal Cahiers universitaires, were filled with future GRECE members. These efforts were based on the realization that in order to politically survive they must adapt the excessive tactics of the revolutionary right and fascism such as extreme chauvinism, excessive militarism, quasi-mystical leader cult, the totalitarian one party state and police brutality. The discredited revolutionary right-wing ideas of the inter-war years had to be made more palatable to French and European public opinion. This adaptation process, which seriously began around the time of the Algerian War, would entail the transformation of fascist and Nazi discourse and the avoidance of making any conspicuous links with the discredited fascist culture of the past. Europe’s Right was tarred with the brushes of Fascism and Nazism, while only a European-wide metapolitical effort would rehabilitate the right in general and revolutionary right in particular. Jeune Europe best exemplified the pan-European flavour of the revolutionary right in the 1950s and 1960s. The organization was based in thirteen European countries and guided by the Belgian pan-European revolutionary right-wing activist Jean Thiriart. Jeune Europe was an early precursor to Alain de Benoist’s idea of a “spiritual European empire” against both Washington and Moscow, while also

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influencing the ENR doyen’s pro-Third World anti-Americanism and philo-Soviet tendencies (Lee 1997, 168-83). Among the changes made by Europe Action, Harvey Simmons cites several which would later condition the nouvelle droite founders of the late 1960s: the dumping of the Führer-prinzip or the hyper-veneration of the charismatic leader, a “scientific” doctrine of racism and conditional support of the liberal parliamentary system (Simmons 1996, 209). Duranton-Crabol has pointed out other Europe Action themes later borrowed by the nouvelle droite: the anti-Christian stance, a marked elitism, the racial notion of a unified Europe, the beginning of a change from biological to cultural definitions of “difference” and the sophisticated inversion of terms like racism and anti-racism (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 28). This early metapolitical turn of certain sections of the revolutionary right in the late 1950s and early 1960s clearly sought to rejuvenate fascism through new tactical and ideological disguises. This point can be corroborated by neo-fascist author and GRECE sympathiser Maurice Bardèche, who warned about the return of a new, revised, subtle and mysterious type of fascism: The single party, the secret police, the public displays of Caesarism, even the presence of a Führer are not necessarily attributes of fascism. … The famous fascist methods are constantly revised and will continue to be revised. More important than the mechanism is the idea which fascism has created for itself of man and freedom. … With another name, another face, and with nothing which betrays the projection from the past, with the form of a child we do not recognize and the head of a young Medusa, the Order of Sparta will be reborn: and paradoxically it will, without doubt, be the last bastion of Freedom and the sweetness of living. (Bardèche 1961, 175-6)

Chapter 2

The ENR’s Birth and Development in France: A New Right? Che Guevara symbolically represented for them (the 1968ers) and represents today for me, the only worthwhile hope. – Pierre Vial, former GRECE secretary-general

When Maurice Bardèche appealed for the constant revision of the “famous fascist methods,” he found a welcome ear in French New Right leader Alain de Benoist. He would begin this re-orientation process of the revolutionary right in 1968 and would be undeniably influenced by the events of that year. The principal ENR think tank Groupement de recherche et d’étude pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE – Group for Research and Studies on European Civilization) was officially established in the southern port city of Nice, France, in January 1968 by forty European members, including Alain de Benoist, and two prominent future secretarygenerals, Pierre Vial and Jean-Claude Valla. Nice provided a particularly favourable atmosphere for GRECE as a result of the large presence of French pieds noirs excolonists returning from Algeria and the avowedly right-wing views of its longserving mayor Jacques Médecin. The GRECE members were largely bourgeois professionals and intellectuals: teachers, university professors, writers, journalists, doctors and engineers. De Benoist was a graduate of the faculty of law and letters from the prestigious Sorbonne. GRECE modelled itself on left-wing think tanks seeking to re-invigorate socialist doctrines such as the French Club Jean Moulin of the 1960s: a collection of like-minded intellectuals, civil servants and politicians (Simmons 1996, 208). At the same time, they also claimed to aspire towards a more objective, detached style of research reminiscent of the prestigious Parisbased research institute, the Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 32). Its purpose was the formation of a “community of work and thought” and the establishment of a coherent ideological corpus for the revolutionary right milieu (d’Appolonia 1987, 320). Harvey Simmons has traced the intellectual roots of GRECE directly to the racist and anti-Semitic Europe Action group and the journal of the same name, which existed between 1963-1966 (Simmons 1996, 209-10). Alain de Benoist was an influential figure in the creation of both projects. The GRECE project was a union of three different revolutionary right-wing generations: the inter-war era, World War Two and the Algerian War. It would increasingly become dominated by a new generation geared towards the metapolitical terrain and new social issues in the mould of the New Left. De Benoist, a product of this third youth generation, would endorse

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the aphorism that the French right was the “dumbest in the world” (De Benoist 1979b, 15-26) and argued beginning with Europe Action and later GRECE that the revolutionary right must abandon the naked violence, petty infighting and sterile doctrinal disputes of the 1940s and 1950s in order to return to political respectability. De Benoist also sought to Europeanize the French right, or to link the project of the revolutionary right in France with other European countries. Simmons stresses how two traumatic events, the debacle of the Algerian War or the loss of Algérie française and the events of May 1968, would indelibly leave their mark on the future thinking of GRECE members (Simmons 1996, 209). While many GRECE figures were loyal to the cause of French Algeria and some even had ties to the outlawed OAS, in the late 1960s some of its members realized the futility of the Algérie française project and the fallacy of colonialism. In this context, Alain de Benoist wrote these lines in Vu de droite: “The OAS enterprise revealed itself to be enormously sterile. … The independence of the Third World produced neither the miracles the left hoped for, nor the catastrophes the right predicted” (De Benoist 1979b, 71). For de Benoist, the de-colonization process and the ascent to international power of the Third World was clear evidence of the irreconcilable differences between world cultures. This cultural argument for the preservation of “difference” and its potential for confronting American “imperialism” would sustain de Benoist’s thinking into the new millennium. The events of May 1968 imbued many GRECE members with a strange cocktail of shock and envy for the leftist student radicals. They were especially impressed by the sophistication of Marxist cultural theories and the idealistic fervour of the students battling in the barricades. The New Left ideas of the 1968 generation would become central to the worldview of ENR intellectuals. In the 1990s, some bold political commentators like Ernesto Galli Della Loggia claimed that the ENR thinkers had recuperated so many of the themes and ideas of the 1968 leftist radicals that they constituted one of the few remaining left-wing cultural movements in the post-communist age and were definitely no longer part of the world of neo-fascism or the right as it is historically understood (Sacchi 1993-4, 80). Formed in 1968, the French New Right was deeply shaped by the political events and political dynamics of French politics in 1968 and the politics of the French left: the fatigue with the centre-right and de Gaulle, the May waves of protest and emergence of new social issues, the idealistic calls for radical social transformation and their instantaneous mass media reverberations and impact throughout the world (e.g., the Czechoslovak “Prague Spring” in 1968). Like the New Left, the New Right would claim to rally against the inorganic, bureaucratization of social and political life, institutional paralysis and President Charles de Gaulle’s quasi-authoritarian rule under the revamped Fifth Republic. Pierre Vial, an original founder of GRECE and former secretary-general, expressed his affinity for the leftist student revolutionaries of 1968 in November 1984: Twenty years ago I laughed at my fellow students who used to pin up Che Guevara’s photograph in their rooms. I was wrong. Che Guevara symbolically represented for them and represents today for me, the only worthwhile hope. The only chance of fighting to

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attempt to change an intolerable world. I mean a world of petty mediocre pleasures, of old-boy networks and fixers, of fiddling and money grabbing. (Vial in Cohen 1986, 52)

GRECE’s “Cultural War” Begins The French right is Leninist without having read Lenin. It hasn’t realized the importance of Gramsci. It hasn’t seen that cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Hoping to emulate the political and cultural successes of the left in 1968, the revolutionary right milieu under GRECE began to adapt Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism for their own partisan ends: A truncated Gramsci free of his class-based, materialist dimension (van Craenenburg 1998, 1-4). Like Gramsci, GRECE argued that the most important route to political power was not elections or violent street combat, but in thoroughly changing the dominant zeitgeist and people’s acceptable ideas and worldviews. The cultural terrain, whether the Internet, print press, television, radio, film, theatre, painting, literature or education, was seen as the most potent tool for shaping a social consensus, achieving ideological hegemony, determining acceptable “taken for granted” notions and ultimately controlling society itself. This cultural power, deemed GRECE, was more fundamental to the capture and maintenance of state power than traditional sectors of power such as the army, police, prisons, judiciary, administration and government – what Louis Althusser termed the “repressive” apparatus of the state as opposed to “ideological” state apparatuses such as the press, political parties, family, churches and cultural institutions (Althusser 2001, 96). For GRECE, the cultural realm conditions and determines the political terrain. All revolutionary movements, GRECE believed, must therefore focus their collective energy on the cultural, metapolitical realm in order to achieve a durable political triumph of its specific ideals. In his magnum opus Vu de droite, Alain de Benoist explains the prime importance of the revolutionary-like “cultural war” in de-stabilizing the existing state apparatus: Without a precise theory, there is no effective action. … All the revolutions of history have only transposed into facts an evolution that had already occurred in spirit. One can’t have a Lenin before having had Marx. … The French right is Leninist without having read Lenin. It hasn’t realized the importance of Gramsci. It hasn’t seen that cultural power threatens the apparatus of the state. (De Benoist 1979b, 19)

It was no accident, then, that GRECE’s first official seminar in November 1968 was dubbed “What is Metapolitics?”: A preparation for the long-term struggle of “cultural war” against the “hegemonic” liberal and left-wing cultural and political establishment. “Cultural War” was also the title of the August 1979 issue of the French New Right journal Eléments. GRECE’s metapolitics borrowed from Gramsci, but was also indebted to Charles Maurras and the Action française, which once remarked: “It was necessary to first ‘monarchize’ the nation before considering the restoration of the monarch” (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 141). This metapolitical framework was also markedly elitist as GRECE urged its members to mix with the

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most powerful decision-makers and to create a capable revolutionary elite force for the future. According to an important 1969 GRECE bulletin, this concentrated strategy sought to unify the thought and action of France’s 1000 brightest and most powerful people in order to create the possibility of an anti-liberal revolution (Eléments May 1969, 16). Another critical aspect of GRECE’s focus on the metapolitical realm was the launching of the first ENR journal Nouvelle Ecole by Alain de Benoist in February 1968. Nouvelle Ecole circulated its first printed issue to a wider audience than the coterie of 40 GRECE founders in January 1969. In that same year, as a result of the revolutionary right-wing political militancy of many of its members in the past, GRECE circulated a confidential internal bulletin to be later destroyed, which contained a warning against the use of outmoded fascist or proto-fascist language: “It is necessary to be very prudent in the conclusions which are drawn in Nouvelle Ecole. It is equally necessary to be prudent in the vocabulary used. It is necessary to abandon an outdated vocabulary” (Eléments May 1969, 16). GRECE was to clearly understand that even language and words were an integral part of the cultural struggle and critical if the revolutionary right wanted a return to political respectability. The upshot of the GRECE bulletin was that the public was to be shielded from the possible neo-fascist or ultra-nationalist sympathies of GRECE members. The early issues of Nouvelle Ecole between 1969 and 1971 differed little in their preoccupations from those of the racist Europe Action, which contained future GRECE members: the themes of “biological realism,” heredity, race, mixing of races and “selection” and eugenics. The one point of departure between the two journals was that, unlike Europe Action, Nouvelle Ecole remained fixated on cultural metapolitics and abandoned the immediate quest for political power. The French New Right in the 1970s: Dark Days to Respectability From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, the doctrine of GRECE had a major impact on the ideology of the entire right. – Harvey Simmons, political science professor

While the late 1960s were dark days for GRECE in terms of the slow emergence of a French New Right, there were signs in the early 1970s that the nouvelle droite was slowly coming to life. In 1972, GRECE began to receive some rather limited press coverage. The most scathing attack in the press came in 1972 from the pen of Le Canard enchaîné journalist Dominique Durand who wondered whether GRECE’s Paris-based office was a Nazi sanctuary (Durand 20 December 1972). In that same year, GRECE and the journal Nouvelle Ecole were harshly denounced by a young organization and journal, La Nouvelle action française, for what it viewed as the former’s “barbaric racism,” anti-humanism and anti-Christian positions (DurantonCrabol 1988, 172-86). These violent critiques against GRECE foreshadowed others, which came during the “hot summer” in 1979 from Catholics, Protestants, Jews, liberals and socialists. This was also the year of the founding of the Front National,

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France’s strongest extreme right-wing political party, which would eventually co-opt a number of prominent GRECE ideas and personnel. By 1973, GRECE was well-established and a second nouvelle droite journal, Eléments (pour la civilisation européenne), began its circulation to the larger public. While Nouvelle Ecole is distributed in France and abroad (including Europe, South America and South Africa), Eléments is largely circulated in France. Both audiences are mainly composed of well-educated and culturally cultivated bourgeois elites, although Eléments probably has a higher number of university students. According to one leading ENR specialist, Eléments has a larger annual subscription rate than Nouvelle Ecole (i.e., 5000 to 2000 yearly subscribers) (Taguieff 1993-4c, 159). Eléments generally appeals to GRECE’s younger, more militant audience. Eléments might also be more populist and nationalist than the more aristocratic Nouvelle Ecole. A 1993 poll would reveal that 35 per cent of Eléments subscribers feel politically close to the French Front National (Duranton-Crabol 1998, 51). In contrast, Alain de Benoist, the founder of Nouvelle Ecole, has often expressed a measure of disdain for Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen’s “vulgar,” ultra-nationalist populism. Eléments, too, is read by partisans belonging to different right-wing currents, whether national revolutionaries, federalists, ultra-nationalist racists, personalist communitarians, libertarians, neo-liberals and Gaullists. The splits within the Right were made even more conspicuous in 1974 when ex-members of GRECE created another metapolitical think tank, the Club de l’horloge (Clock Club). The Club de l’horloge was composed of Ecole nationale d’administration (ENA) graduates, intellectuals, civil servants and politicians. ENA is France’s most prestigious school of civil administration. Unlike GRECE which adopted a long-term metapolitical plan to slowly re-capture hearts and minds, the Club de l’horloge opted for a more short-term strategy, “entryism,” which attempted to subtly infiltrate all French political parties on the right and influential politicians and civil servants. However, the irreconcilable schism between GRECE and the Club de l’horloge was obviously ideological. GRECE’s anti-Western, anti-Christian, antiAmerican, anti-capitalist positions were diametrically opposed to those of the Club de l’horloge (Bar-On in Blamires 2006, 290-1). The neo-liberal, hyper-capitalism espoused by the Club de l’horloge is reminiscent of intellectuals Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, as well as Anglo-American New Right (AANR) political forces such as Thatcherism and Reaganism. The AANR’s neo-liberalism has often been dubbed the ENR’s “principal enemy” and is the source of vitriolic attacks against the United States, seen as the major representative of this materialistic worldview (De Benoist 1982b). With roots in an older continental European counterrevolutionary, communitarian and anti-capitalist tradition largely absent in the Anglo-American world, the ENR has been sharply critical of the AANR’s defence of unfettered free market forces largely indifferent to tradition, religion, community, nation, nature and slower organic rhythms of life in the past. Unlike the pro-capitalist, AANR-influenced Club de l’horloge, GRECE and the ENR attack the evils of an egoistic global capitalism, the rapid Westernization of the world, the steady erosion of cultural differences and diversity and a de-spiritualized humanity devoid of tragedy, mystery and beauty.

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GRECE and the ENR are especially critical of the Club de l’horloge and AANR for holding contradictory positions: The simultaneous espousal of economic neoliberalism and a social, cultural and political conservatism. The de-traditionalizing forces of capitalist markets so often praised by the AANR usually rupture the older orders of religion, tradition, morality, family values, state and nation. In addition, the AANR’s other logical fallacy, some critics contend, is to call for government cuts in the realms of education and social welfare, but simultaneously expand the budget for law, order, police and army functions – presumably in order to preserve the harshness of the so-called “free market” (Levitas 1990). In the eyes of renowned sociologist Anthony Giddens, the AANR has now become a kind of right-wing radicalism preaching the universal application of unfettered market capitalism above all other principles, while the left has turned conservative and defensive in its desperate attempt to maintain the post-World War Two gains of the besieged welfare state compromise (Giddens 1994, 9). While a clear ideological chasm separates the AANR-driven Club de l’horloge and GRECE of the ENR, political scientist Harvey Simmons has neatly summarized the influential role of think tanks GRECE and especially the Club de l’horloge on the French political scene of the 1970s and 1980s: Two clubs played key roles in renovating right-wing doctrine and in establishing links with the National Front and with the mainstream right: GRECE and the Club de l’horloge. From the early 1970s to the early 1980s, the doctrine of GRECE had a major impact on the ideology of the entire right. In recent years the club has declined, and its leaders have gone their separate ways. But the NF was particularly influenced by GRECE’s ideas on race and immigration, although the club’s idiosyncratic ideas on religion (it vehemently attacked the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West and supported neopaganism) led the NF as well as the mainstream right to keep its distance. By contrast, the Club de l’horloge, an offshoot of GRECE established in 1974 by ex-members of GRECE, continues to play an extremely important part in the National Front and, to a certain extent, in Giscard d’Estaing’s Republican Party. Although the Club de l’horloge follows the same line as GRECE on race, immigration, and equality, its more orthodox views on religion and its pro-American attitude helped it assume a role similar to that played by American or British think tanks as a testing ground for unusual or new ideas, an intellectual powerhouse, and an elite pressure group within the right. (Simmons 1996, 208)

Despite the split between GRECE and the Club de l’horloge in 1974, GRECE continued its slow metapolitical ascent to respectability by attempting to expand its audience within elite, influential decision-making sectors of the French state. In one of its few direct metapolitical interventions, GRECE called for the French population to support the mainstream right’s candidate Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in the presidential elections of 1974. Reeling from some negative press coverage mostly from pro-Christian groups in the same year, an internal GRECE bulletin urged its members to respond to “virulent” press articles against the organization (Dranton-Crabol 1988, 180-2). In a trend later followed by the FN in the 1980s and 1990s in order to enhance its public acceptance by denying it possessed a racist or fascist worldview, GRECE members were told to cite the influential intellectuals

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connected to the organization, list their own professional credentials and university affiliations and always praise the “respectability” of the think tank. Between 1975 and 1976, GRECE sought to enlarge its influence within the national military and teaching sectors. As part of this strategy, GRECE created the Comité de liaison des officiers et sous-officiers de réserve (CLOSOR) for France’s high-ranking military personnel and another, Groupe d’études pour une nouvelle éducation (GENE), for teaching professionals (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 47). Both the military and university teaching milieux were well organized and included regional circles across the country and their respective bulletins. The nouvelle droite even began to publish a special bulletin, Nation armée, in order to influence the military and intelligence services of the state. GENE even made some contacts with the National Education Ministry and had its own journal, Nouvelle Education. It mainly tried to influence university students, teachers and professors. GENE’s most important points of influence were the universities of Paris, Lyon III and Aix-Marseille (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 47). The education and military sectors were key targets for GRECE because they were highly sensitive vectors of political influence and were part of a larger metapolitical strategy designed to subvert what they viewed as the “decadent,” egalitarian “Marxification” of the schools and universities. GRECE’s goal was to restore France to its hierarchical and organic Indo-European roots; its pre-Christian, pagan warrior ethic of courage, heroism and honour. Under the spell of Carl Schmitt’s decisionism, GRECE lamented the purely mercantilist ethos of liberal capitalism and sought to make the political and military functions once again sovereign vis-àvis the economic domain. For GRECE, like Schmitt, the essence of politics is neither economics nor morality, but the crucial differentiation between political friends and enemies both internally and externally. It should be pointed out that a similar strategy of infiltration within the military milieu by Italian radical right-wing terrorist groups and clandestine elite pressure groups such as Propaganda-Due (P-2) was part of a larger “strategy of tension” to highjack Italian democracy in the mid-1970s. The right-wing “strategy of tension” has revealed serious charges of collusion with the highest state authorities, including the military, police, intelligence services, judiciary and civil service (Ferraresi 1996). While GRECE’s long-term metapolitical orientation diverged from what it believed was the Old Right or radical right-wing Italian terrorist groups, both sought to implant an anti-liberal regime on European soil. By the late 1970s, it appeared that GRECE began to bear some of the fruits of its long-term metapolitical struggle. In 1976, GRECE founded its own publishing house, Copernic, in order to propagate its view of the world to a larger European public. Keen to wrest France’s cultural balance of power from what it called the “hegemonic” 1968 generation of leftists, GRECE’s ambition was to be a sort of right-wing equivalent of the successful left-wing publisher Maspero (DurantonCrabol 1988, 188). The choice of names, Copernic (Copernicus), after the visionary Polish scientist, was intended to highlight GRECE’s creation of a new way of seeing the world; the dawn of a new age; a brand new political paradigm; and the creation of a nouvelle droite or New Right as distinct from the Old Right. GRECE argued that it had created a novel political paradigm, which contrasted with the “intellectual terrorism” and “new Inquisition” of its “dogmatic” and dominant liberal and left-

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wing opponents (De Benoist 1979b, 403-11). The implicit message of using the name Copernic was that GRECE’s worldview, much maligned by some in the cultural and political establishment of the day as was Copernicus, would triumph and dominate the thinking of another epoch. In 1977, Copernic published Alain de Benoist’s Vu de droite (Seen from the Right), an anthology of essays, which essentially traces his major influences and ideological roots and de-legitimizes the major tenets of liberal democracy. Using the term “right” as a badge of honour, de Benoist had learned that the political terrain was slowly shifting towards a greater acceptance of the right’s ideas. De Benoist recognized that the key was to discharge the term right of any affinity with its old negative connotations such as fascism and Nazism. His impressive encyclopedic-like knowledge and intellectualism had returned a much-needed aura of respectability to the right. In 1978, de Benoist was soundly rewarded for his efforts when he received the Essay Prize of the prestigious Académie française for Vu de droite. The nouvelle droite leader was now hailed as one of the most brilliant intellectuals in France and was said to possess the finest personal library in Paris (Johnson in Cheles 1991, 236). In addition, 1978 was a breakthrough year for GRECE in terms of receiving larger access to the mainstream public. A number of important GRECE figures, including Alain de Benoist, began to write regular articles that year in the right-wing Le Figaro Magazine. The editor of the paper, Louis Pauwels, had written in the revolutionary right’s Cahiers universitaires in the 1960s. He displayed definite sympathy for the ENR and perhaps originated the term nouvelle droite to distinguish himself from the old bourgeois, reactionary Catholic and conservative right (Pauwels 29 March 1979). The “Hot Summer” in 1979 The left was quick to seize upon the opportunity of creating a scare. – Douglas Johnson, commenting on the left’s reaction to the nouvelle droite

It was in 1979 that GRECE’s slow metapolitical orientation would finally allow the nouvelle droite to reach a larger mass audience beyond its own specialized journals, conferences and debates. The inclusion of several GRECE writers into the mainstream right-wing press, particularly Le Figaro Magazine in 1978, paved the way for the nouvelle droite’s “hot summer” of press coverage in 1979. The year 1979 began well for the nouvelle droite when the publishing house Libres-Hallier launched Alain de Benoist’s Les idées à l’endroit. Moreover, between June and September 1979 the nouvelle droite was situated at the heart of a bitterly contested mass media debate about its own ideas largely conducted by the French intelligentsia. The nouvelle droite debate and the fierce polemics surrounding its worldview was officially launched during the early summer of 1979 by Le Monde journalist Thierry Pfister in an article entitled “La nouvelle droite s’installe” (Pfister 22 June 1979). This was followed ten days later by an article in le Nouvel Observateur, “Les habits neufs de la droite française.” The two articles implied that the nouvelle droite was a new cultural and political force to be reckoned with for the entire political landscape

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of France and that it was largely dressed in new guises in order to keep its distance from its revolutionary right-wing and quasi-fascist origins. Duranton-Crabol has pointed out that the nouvelle droite was the topic of approximately 500 written articles in the mainstream French press during the “hot summer” in 1979 (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 243). Another French political scientist has argued that the “hot summer” in 1979 marked the acceptance of the nouvelle droite within the larger intellectual landscape and calculated that the press campaign surrounding the nouvelle droite generated a whopping 2,267 articles between 1979 and December 1984 (Kretzschmar 1985, 5). These included some articles by the most respected and gifted French intellectuals of the day: the political scientist Maurice Duverger, journalist Alain Rollat in Le Monde, sociologist Alain Touraine, former prime minister Michel Debré in Le Matin and philosopher Raymond Aron in L’Express. The nouvelle droite also received some important national television coverage, especially when Alain de Benoist presented his book Les idées à l’endroit on “Apostrophes,” the highly rated and popular cultural and literary program. While some scholars such as Raymond Aron attempted to offer a more nuanced reading of the nouvelle droite phenomenon by pointing out that it was a largely rightwing anti-liberal yet syncretic school of thought mostly devoid of anti-Semitism (Aron 21 July 1979), many journalists furnished an image of the French New Right as a counterrevolutionary, fascist or Nazi force bent on destroying egalitarianism, the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West, the foundations of liberal democracy and the legacy of 1789. Numerous left-wing intellectuals, Christian and Jewish groups and anti-racist organizations such as Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples (MRAP) and Ligue internationale contre le racisme et l’antisémitisme (LICRA) refused all dialogue with what they argued was the “new racism” bordering on Nazism of the nouvelle droite. The nouvelle droite, on the other hand, protested its innocence as an honest and purely cultural, metapolitical force not connected to any one political force or the vulgar “politics of politicians.” It insisted that the dominant liberal and left-wing cultural establishment was waging a scare campaign against the “new” political paradigm of the nouvelle droite. In the view of the nouvelle droite, the fact that there were fierce polemics surrounding it and few intellectuals bothered to read their actual texts suggested that the hegemony of liberal-left cultural and political elites was crumbling rapidly. Officially in existence since the late 1960s, why was the nouvelle droite suddenly making such huge waves on the French cultural and political scenes in the late 1970s? Is it not the nature of long-term metapolitical struggle to operate on a delayed reaction principle? In essence, there were a number of intervening cultural and political factors, which contributed to the rise of the nouvelle droite during the “hot summer” in 1979. Douglas Johnson has offered two major hypotheses: a cultural and political vacuum as a result of the perceived outmoded nature of all received intellectual ideologies of the period and the invention of established French political forces, particularly on the French left. Johnson elaborates: It was suggested that all this (the rise of the nouvelle droite) stemmed from the discrediting of old creeds. No one believed in Marxism or in the Soviet Union anymore. The churches had little appeal. Since 1968, revolution seemed impossible. De Gaulle had no successor as

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? the leader of the nation. Liberalism and capitalism were both uninspiring and unsuccessful. Since intellectuals detest a vacuum, something had to take the place of what was missing. … Embarrassed by the revelations of the Soviet gulag and the supposed discrediting of Marxism, disappointed by the failure to bring about a union of the Socialists, Communists and Radicals and to win the 1978 elections, the left was quick to seize upon the opportunity of creating a scare. What France-Soir called ‘la basse police intellectuelle’ of the left brandished the old monster of Fascism in order to give life to what was a strategy in shambles and a cause which many thought of as lost. The Giscardiens, then in power, were also believed to have an interest in magnifying the importance of the nouvelle droite (ND). They constantly sought to enlarge their support in the centre and they were only too pleased to suggest that they were liberals who had nothing in common with the right as exemplified by the ND and which they too viewed with hostility and apprehension. (Johnson in Cheles 1991, 236-7)

Another reputable scholar echoes the explanations of Douglas Johnson for the rise of the nouvelle droite in 1979: the political rivalry between right and left, the political rivalries within both right and left exacerbated by the electoral victory of the right in 1978 and ideological tension between a right seeking a modernized image and a left often rooted to its outdated Marxism (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 243). Duranton-Crabol also cites a concrete factor to her list of explanations for the meteoric rise of the nouvelle droite: the rivalry for readership and profits between Le Figaro on the right and Le Monde on the left with the emergence of the right-wing Hersant press empire (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 243). It can also be said that the nouvelle droite rose to mass media prominence in 1979 because of an intellectual curiosity “domino effect” surrounding its idiosyncratic leftlike anti-Judeo-Christian, anti-Western, anti-nationalist and anti-colonialist ideas, unique “anti-racist” discourse and intellectually brilliant leader Alain de Benoist. Could it be that some elements within the New Left generation of 1968 recognized in the nouvelle droite an exotic cultural movement with a kindred spirit? Or, were there real fears about a resurrected fascism with a new name and methods? It has also been suggested that the nouvelle droite was the fickle Parisian intelligentsia’s latest exaggerated trend and was bound to be a temporary reality which is dropped after a short time (Johnson in Cheles 1991, 240). The nouvelle droite’s widespread denunciation in the mainstream press as racist, fascist or a looming danger for democracy was bound to create some intellectual scepticism and even support in an age riddled with ideological uncertainty or mass conformity. Alain de Benoist’s breathtaking knowledge, fascination for intellectuals on the right and left and the ability to present complicated authors and ideas in a simple manner was appealing to many and a respite from the hyper-intellectualism of the French structuralists. The fact that the nouvelle droite was the first post-World War Two movement to openly display the right-wing label as a badge of pride was also a source of curiosity for some people. Its emphasis on the “new” rather than “right” was also appealing to “New Class” intellectuals looking to transcend the received ideologies, individualistic fellow travellers or sympathisers searching for a new ideological way to overturn the liberal capitalist system. Mass media focus on the French New Right during the “hot summer” made the nouvelle droite somewhat uneasy for a number of reasons. First, its essential ideas,

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especially their potential novelty, seemed to be lost in the acrimonious atmosphere of the debates during the summer of 1979. Second, the nouvelle droite had made a long-term pledge to conquer hearts and minds in an oblique metapolitical fashion, which was the antithesis of the incessant newspaper and television coverage of 1979. Third, the esoteric elitism of major nouvelle droite ideologues was light years divorced from the more populist, mainstream press coverage they received in 1979. The nouvelle droite was clearly more comfortable with a sort of ivory-tower intellectualism and the pagan world of ancient Indo-European festivals and initiation rites than the populism of the mass media. To reiterate, this chapter has attempted to trace the ENR’s birth and development in France beginning with the founding of GRECE in 1968, as well as its cultural and political development after the death of the New Left in 1968. I noted that the French New Right’s apogee was the “hot summer” in 1979. While this chapter was generally devoted to the right-wing cultural and political origins of the French New Right, we saw that it was open to flirting with the Left and New Left. This left-wing heritage included the choice of the Gramscian metapolitical struggle, its praise of revolutionary figures on the left and its ability to co-opt some of the themes of the New Left. In the next chapter, I turn to the ENR’s “opening to the left” in the 1980s and 1990s. It was this left-wing turn that provoked great hostility from some liberals and leftists, which saw ENR thinkers like de Benoist as recyclers of respectable fascism.

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Chapter 3

The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Opening to the Left It is better to wear the helmet of the Red Army than to live under the yoke of American cultural imperialism by eating a steady diet of hamburgers in Brooklyn. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Like its 1968 leftist counterparts, the New Right would champion the proliferation of new post-materialist issues in the 1980s and 1990s, whether youth questions, feminism, the environment, regional and cultural autonomy and pro-Third World solidarity. Was this strategy a type of revised cultural fascism in the mould of Bardèche or an authentic search for a new political alternative? Like the New Left, the New Right was critical of the harmful effects of capitalist modernization, the despiritualized vision of Western “progress” and questioned the merits of the colonialist project. The French New Right began to see the New Left as a spiritually and politically allied movement and common idealistic partner in their battle to destroy liberal democracy, capitalism and the gradual Westernization of the world. Besides, post-materialist issues tended to be transversal; they transcended the traditional categories of right and left; and they offered hope for a reconciliation between the revolutionary poles on the far right and left against liberal democracy. The other lesson the French New Right learned from the 1968 leftist radicals was that the opposition’s ideas could one day enter the mainstream of political life in terms of co-opting both ideals and key cultural and political personnel within the state, administration, mass media and universities. The ENR never tired of lamenting that it was the New Left generation of the 1968ers, which completely controlled the cultural apparatus of French social life in the 1970s and 1980s. The leftist generation of 1968, then, acted as the ENR’s model in the battle to reclaim cultural hegemony, viewed as the key for any lasting political power. The New Left revolutionaries would continue to imprint the thinking of New Right revolutionaries at the beginning of the 21st century. This pervasive New Left influence was a major sign of the ENR’s “novelty,” but for some critics part of what Bardèche called the constant revision of “the famous fascist methods.” Yet, the ENR’s “opening to the left” had been presaged by the political migrations of other intellectuals, whether “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s, the turn of Mussolini from socialism to pro-war leftism or more recent examples. Intellectuals can change with the times, whether under the weight of newly discovered realities like the gulags, opportunism or the exploration of new directions. In post-World War Two New York, the sons of working class Jewish immigrants who were radicals

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formed the anti-Stalinist left and were publishers of influential magazines such as Partisan Review, Commentary, The Public Interest and Dissent. News of the horrors of the Soviet Union led some of the New York intellectuals like Irving Kristol “progressing all the way to the right, reconciling with capitalism and becoming neoconservatives” (Silliman 2004). Whereas the New York intellectuals were noted for their pugnacious style, sophistication and freedom because they sat outside the walls of the academy, they later joined the academic world: Daniel Bell at Harvard and later Columbia, Irving Howe at City University and Stanford University, Nathan Glazer at Harvard and Irving Kristol at New York University. More recently after 9/11, the British journalist and literary critic Christopher Hitchens, originally a Trotskyite with the magazine International Socialism, has turned right-wing demagogue in The Nation by excoriating the left, “Islamofascists” like Osama bin Laden and supported George Bush Jr.’s war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq (Hitchens 8 October 2001; 8 November 2004). Hitchens saw the war in Iraq as a major front in the conflict between secular democracy and “theocratic fascism.” He argued that it was a moral necessity to support Iraqi and Kurdish leftwing secularists. He made parallels with the left’s response to the Spanish Civil War and insisted that neutrality was not an option. In his view, the anti-war left has abandoned the principles of secularism, liberal democracy and feminism by favoring isolationism, or by allying themselves with the “insurgents” who firmly reject these principles. If Hitchens and the New York intellectuals drifted towards the right, de Benoist went the other way from right to left. Indeed, the extension of boundaries beyond its traditional right-wing or neo-fascist milieux is what defined the ENR in the 1980s and 1990s. Hitchens would argue that he remained faithful to secular, Enlightenmentbased ideals. In opening to the left, de Benoist could also argue that he stayed true to his core ideals, which had generous samplings of conservative revolutionary thinkers, the non-conformists, Evola and Sorel all rolled into one. If the late 1970s were the zenith of the nouvelle droite as a French cultural and political force, the early 1980s witnessed its declining influence and the exploration of new themes and directions. In this period, the nouvelle droite made overtures to the left. The political context for the crisis in its own ranks and decline of the nouvelle droite in the early 1980s was the earthquake presidential electoral victory of the Socialists in 1981 after numerous decades of right-wing rule. Another important factor was the rise of the extreme right-wing FN as a political force in the early 1980s. In short, with the rise of the FN and the shocking electoral victory of the left in 1981, GRECE was divided by those thirsty for direct politics within the FN or the mainstream right and the more esoteric and elitist metapolitical wing of the organization. GRECE also began to explore some new themes and directions, including an increased anti-Western, anti-American and anti-liberal stance based on a radical anti-totalitarian and anti-racist ethnopluralist defense of all peoples against the “ethnocidal” and materialist “world beast” directed by American civilization. GRECE’s anti-liberalism and anti-capitalist, anti-materialism were so dominant in the 1980s that it even led to a brief flirtation with the ancient enemies of the Old Right, the Soviet Union and communism. This philo-communism certainly alienated

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many on the right and even led to defections from GRECE. GRECE’s anti-Western, anti-Christian and anti-capitalist stances in the 1970s had previously alienated other GRECE members or sympathisers. Its philo-communism of the early 1980s, however, was consistent with its envy for the leftist radicals of 1968. For certain elements of GRECE, fascination with left-wing revolutionaries and the ideas of the New Left was bound to breed emulation. Against the dark backdrop of the left’s rise to power, schisms in the ranks, financial worries and a declining role as a cultural force, GRECE maintained a loyalty to its metapolitical project. Despite its opening to the left, GRECE’s 16th national colloquium in the early 1980s was “Pour un gramscisme de droite” (“For a right-wing Gramscianism”). Its 17th national colloquium in November 1983 called for “fifteen years of uninterrupted work in the domains of theoretical reflection” (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 206), in the words of ENR doyen de Benoist. For GRECE, ideas lead and will always lead the world and shape history. In this respect, GRECE continued to argue that the right must continue to wrest cultural power from the hands of the “hegemonic” liberal and left-wing establishment. It even insisted that in the 1970s, when the mainstream right was in power politically, the left retained its weapon as the dominant cultural force in the country (De Benoist 1979b, 15-26). For GRECE, the political alternations of left and right are empty vessels without the more indispensable cultural revolution against the dominant spirit of the age. In 1980, GRECE member Guillaume Faye published a scathing critique of Western civilization, which he argued was more Anglo-Saxon than European (Faye April 1980). In 1983, Faye penned Contre l’économisme (Against Economism), based on an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American mantra mixed with the decisionist ideas of his mentors, the German legal scholar Carl Schmitt and French philosopher Julien Freund (Faye 1983). These themes were to dominate the thinking of the nouvelle droite in the 1980s as anti-liberal, anti-materialism became more central than anticommunist, anti-materialism. As a result, the liberal capitalist materialism of the United States was seen as a greater world danger than the communist materialism of the Soviet Union. In the early 1980s, GRECE’s rejection of the “totalitarian” economic logic of liberal capitalism and its principal proponent, the United States, led it to undertake a brief flirtation with the Soviet Union and communism. GRECE began to call for an “organic economy” in order to replace liberal capitalism’s economic penetration of life into all spheres of existence (i.e., “economism”) and the shattering of the three basic functions of ancient, hierarchical Indo-European societies (i.e., the political/sovereign, military and social/economic realms). It called for a Europe where the “will to power” and the primacy of the political dominated. GRECE’s anti-economism, the attacks on the “universal religion” of human rights and the “ethnocidal” nature of immigration (thus necessitating a repatriation of immigrants to their host country for the mutual benefit of both French and immigrant cultures) often resembled the stances of the French FN. Like Faye, the FN believed that French culture was being annihilated by a liberal capitalist ethos, which used the pseudo-tolerance of global multiculturalism and pro-immigrant policies, but was nothing more than the political manifestation of dark, cosmopolitan market forces bent on killing French culture and its people.

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While GRECE’s anti-capitalist, anti-Americanism had in reality existed since 1975 after the split with the pro-capitalist, pro-American Club de l’horloge, its philocommunism and affinity for the Soviet Union in the 1980s was seen as new for the revolutionary right because communist “subversion” was usually its major enemy in the past, whether during the inter-war years or the Cold War period. In the Soviet Union and communism, GRECE discovered the revolutionary virtues of the socialist movement, a revolutionary fervour, which the New Right sought to emulate, and the Old Right, they claimed, never really possessed. In contrast to the vulgarity of liberal “economism” and its main representative, the United States, GRECE praised communism and the Soviet Union for its collectivism, revolutionary hopes and unity of purpose. Pierre Vial spoke of the Soviet Union as holding “the key to the future of the world” (Vial 1981, 22) and Alain de Benoist claimed that it was more Russian than Marxist, as well as a positive force of resistance against the naked materialistic, egalitarian and cosmopolitan order of the United States (De Benoist 1982b, 46). Pierre Vial went beyond sympathy for the New Left generation of 1968 to express adoration for the Old Left. Vial praised revolutionary left-wing “heroes,” including Che Guevara, the German Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Italian Red Brigades. For Vial, the hope of these revolutionaries was that they were all willing to fight and die for a higher cause in a “petty” and “intolerable” materialistic world; to die for the “beauty” of a sacred myth, which he argued gives life its meaning and glory. De Benoist even shocked those within GRECE and the right generally when he declared that it was preferable to wear the helmet of the Red Army than to live under the yoke of American cultural imperialism by regularly eating hamburgers in Brooklyn (De Benoist 1982b, 48). During the 1984 campaign for the European elections, de Benoist stirred the pot again when he declared his intentions to vote for what he viewed as the only credible anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American force in French politics, namely, the Communist Party. The United States was dubbed as GRECE’s “principal enemy” (De Benoist 1982b). As the French Socialists turned social democratic, bourgeois and towards the free-market after 1983, the French New Right now carried the torch of radicalism. The other right-wing, revolutionary children born in the wake of the May 1968 events were simply trying to outduel their leftist opponents on their own cultural terrain. This affinity with the 1968ers led GRECE to develop a unique form of antiliberalism, which no longer saw the left or communism as its main enemy. While for GRECE Marxism and liberalism derived from the same materialist and egalitarian essence, liberalism is more dangerous because in its extreme egalitarianism it realizes theoretical Marxism more than the socialist countries themselves. In addition, the communitarian nature of the left appealed to GRECE’s own “organic,” communitarian societal project in contrast to what it argued was the hyper-individualism and lack of social bonds in a liberal capitalist society. For de Benoist, GRECE’s anti-communism was not primary, but really secondary, a natural derivative of its anti-egalitarianism. Borrowing the distinction made by Charles Maurras between “organic,” socialist nationalism versus “decadent,” Marxist internationalism, GRECE also borrowed from early French socialists such as Joseph Proudhon, Etienne Cabet, Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 46).

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Could Alain de Benoist and elements within GRECE embrace communism and still remain loyal to their revolutionary right-wing roots? Was GRECE’s philo-Sovietism and pro-communism something profoundly novel? Or, did de Benoist’s thinking echo the old fascist synthesis between right and left? We can find earlier historical echoes of GRECE’s flirtation with proto-communism during the early 1980s. We have already mentioned the influence of Maurras in terms of the valorization of “socialist nationalism,” a term likely borrowed from the ultranationalist Maurice Barrès and part of the legacy of the inter-war era’s revolutionary “non-conformists” on both the right and left, which longed for a socialism within one country. Furthermore, the influence of the “conservative revolution,” the many references to Ernst Jünger and the primordial hatred of the bourgeois rationalist against the worker’s “heroic realism” all suggested that GRECE was more anticapitalist and anti-liberal than anti-communist. In his heyday during the 1930s, Ernst Jünger, like de Benoist, was often accused of crypto-communist sympathies. The Nazi-Soviet pact of 1940 even found its circles of support within a current of German thought known as “National Bolshevism” led by Ernst Niekisch (1889-1967): the call for a German-Russian rapprochement against the “decadent materialism” of the United States. Niekisch was the leading exponent of “National Bolshevism” during the inter-war era. This “National Bolshevism” argued for a radical anti-capitalism and close relationship between the “nationalist” revival Niekisch interpreted into the nature of communist Russia and a German renaissance in order to save the West from the “decadent” rule of the masses and anti-spiritual materialism. In the early 1980s, de Benoist’s thesis of a Germany released from the materialist yoke of the two superpowers, or an anti-American German-Soviet rapprochement, mirrored the views of German New Right nationalist revolutionaries such as Hennig Eichberg and Armin Mohler. Both Eichberg and Mohler, a conservative revolutionary and personal friend of de Benoist, were affiliated with GRECE’s Nouvelle Ecole. Mohler was also a press secretary for Martin Heidegger, the author of Being and Time (1927) who joined the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP) in 1933 after being appointed Rector of University of Freiburg, resigned one year later and remained with the Nazi Party until the end of World War Two. By the mid-1990s, a so-called “red-brown” scandal erupted in France over the supposed links between communists and the extreme right, or concrete attempts to build National Bolshevism in France. These attempts to create a National Bolshevist tendency supposedly involved ENR intellectuals. The French satirical weekly Le Canard enchaîné first revealed links between communists and right-wing extremists, including the collaboration of certain journals such as L’Idiot International and Le Choc du Mois. The relative failure of the ENR to infiltrate the mainstream right and the collapse of communism created new opportunities for the ENR. The Belgian New Right first began to study the writings of National Bolshevist Ernst Niekisch. In May 1993, de Benoist pleaded for the end of the left-right distinction and called for an ideological regrouping of all political forces that reject liberal capitalism. Amazingly, de Benoist made this pronouncement at a conference organized by Franceue Lazare, a member of the executive council of the French Communist Party. In that same month, GRECE magazine Eléments invited Marc Cohen, a Communist

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Party member and editor of L’Idiot International, to speak about the possible “recomposition of the French intellectual landscape.” It should be recalled that GRECE’s short-lived philo-Sovietism and protocommunism, a product of its radicalization after the left’s triumph in 1981, did not endear the organization to neither the mainstream right, nor the traditionalist, ultranationalist and Catholic Right. Numerous GRECE members were uneasy with de Benoist’s overt proto-communist positions. Between 1983 and 1984, influential GRECE members Claude Bardet and former secretary Pierre Vial took the plunge towards Jean-Marie Le Pen’s FN and isolated de Benoist from his own generation of revolutionary right-wing militants with roots in the quasi-fascist Jeune Nation or Europe Action organizations of the 1950s and 1960s. Other GRECE intellectuals joined the FN in the 1980s: Pierre de Meuse, Jean Haudry and Jean Varenne (Flood 1997, 105). This followed a trend in which GRECE provided the theoretical ammunition and some intellectual personnel for the revolutionary right’s minor party formed in 1974, the Parti des forces nouvelles (PFN), the mainstream right’s Giscardiens in the 1970s and the Gaullist Rassemblement pour la République (RPR) in the 1980s. The old taste for political action had been too great for some GRECE militants who saw new opportunities for the right in the late 1970s and early 1980s and grew weary of its long-term metapolitical strategy. Despite the critical defections, GRECE and Alain de Benoist continued to reject this “vulgar” path of the “politics of politicians.” They remained committed to metapolitics in order to restore a “plurality” of values to a grey, homogenized world dominated by mass, reductionist egalitarianism. De Benoist argued that he differed from the FN in its primarily ideological plan, the different audience it addressed and its rejection of the party’s key themes: proWestern Atlanticism, the anti-immigrant campaign and Old Right holdovers such as pro-capitalism, liberalism, moralism and ultra-nationalism. In the 1990s, de Benoist would publicly declare that he was a “stranger” to the FN’s ideas and “sickened” and “disheartened” by the party’s crude immigration proposals and simplistic populist logic (De Benoist 1990; 1992). In a direct jab at the FN, he argued that those that remain silent on capitalism cannot critique France’s immigration policy. In the mid-1980s, however, GRECE moved beyond its idiosyncratic protocommunism and returned to its more typical “third way” positions against both the conservative right and socialist left. GRECE’s worldview was again similar to many revolutionary right-wing political outfits of the past: neither liberalism, nor communism, and neither an Anglo-American-dominated Atlanticism, nor proSovietism. It attacked the diabolical egalitarian trinity of a world controlled by “Jesus, Marx, and Coca-Cola,” where Christian values, socialism and Americanstyle consumerism strangled Europe’s search for its anti-egalitarian, organic roots. In this respect, there was a sort of rapprochement in 1985 between the ideas of GRECE and those of French nationalist revolutionary Jean-Gilles Malliarakis and other older Parti des Forces Nouvelles (PFN) militants (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 218). This “nationalist revolutionary” strand was designed to act as a counter-weight to the more populist, “national liberal” pole increasingly dominant within the ranks of the FN (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 218).

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In addition, while the left’s rise to power in 1981 and the meteoric rise of the FN in the early 1980s was followed by GRECE’s years of crisis, general decline and a dispersion of personnel as different strains of thought and sensibilities clashed, in the mid-1980s there was a slow return to normalcy. In this period, GRECE looked to expand its worldview beyond the European continent in order to compensate for its decline at home when it launched its bilingual (i.e., English and Afrikaans) journal in South Africa Ideas for a Cultural Revolution and even increased its activity in the remote French Indian Ocean island département of Réunion (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 224). In 1984, Etudes et recherches, a limited circulation GRECE journal, began publication again after a prolonged seven-year hiatus. In that same year, Labyrinthe was established as GRECE’s official publisher as a replacement for the loss of Copernic in 1981. Labyrinthe promised to situate itself against the dominant prevailing ideologies of the age. In March 1985, Eléments, a principal GRECE journal, began publication of a monthly supplement, Panorama des idées actuelles, which analyzed the ideas of a number of journalists and intellectuals with nouvelle droite affinities. In 1986, GRECE once again returned to public notoriety, but not nearly on the same massive scale as the “hot summer” in 1979. In the “Roques Affair” of that year, a few nouvelle droite thinkers were linked to the pernicious theories of Holocaust negationists. The “Notin Affair” in 1990 was based on similar accusations against some nouvelle droite figures. In the “Roques Affair,” Henri Roques, a man with clear connections to GRECE journal Nouvelle Ecole, wrote a successfully defended thesis questioning the Nazi gas chambers. Jean-Claude Rivière of the University of Nantes, a GRECE founder and member of the Nouvelle Ecole editorial committee since 1968, sat on Roques’ thesis jury committee. Other committee members included an ex-GRECE member, Jean-Paul Allard, and Pierre Zind, author of a text with GRECE publisher Copernic, which lamented the lack of free expression during the “hot summer” in 1979. Rumours circulated that the University of Nantes, LyonIII University and the nouvelle droite were impregnated with proto-fascist and Nazi sympathisers (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 225-6). After a public outcry, French Education Minister Alain Devaquet annulled Roques’ thesis and his thesis director, Jean-Claude Rivière, was suspended for one year. By 1987, GRECE hit a new crisis as its influence began to seriously wane. Once again, GRECE faced financial problems and had to declare a temporary halt of its journal Eléments after the fall of 1987. In 1987, GRECE was stung with a new defection as influential intellectual Guillaume Faye left the organization. In the following year, Alain de Benoist would declare that he was no longer a member of GRECE. While GRECE might have been gaining in homogeneity, it was terribly crippled by the constant losses of key intellectual personnel. These two losses added to the defections of GRECE members such as the film critic Michel Marmin after de Benoist’s controversial Red Army remark; Louis Pauwels for the group’s intense anti-Christian polemics; Raymond Bourgigne and François d’Orcival for the organization’s anti-American and anti-Christian stances; and Jean d’Ormesson for its intensely anti-Western and anti-Christian diatribes (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 227-9). The anti-Western position of GRECE became especially pronounced with the 1986 publication of de Benoist’s Europe, Tiers monde, même combat, a call for

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a European-Third World political and spiritual alliance against the United States’ “cultural imperialism” and glorification of the universal homo oeconomicus (De Benoist 1986). For most people both within and outside ENR circles, this radical anti-Westernism went far beyond the revolutionary right’s standard de-legitimization of liberal democracy as exemplified by de Benoist’s 1985 work Démocratie: le problème (De Benoist 1985a). GRECE was slowly losing its impact in the late 1980s, but it had already penetrated a wide range of influential contemporary debates, authors, political parties and some key decision-makers. Although the nouvelle droite was seeing the end of its concentrated influence and glorious heyday, fragments of its doctrine continued to survive through ex-GRECE figures, sympathisers and its general influence on people in culturally and politically prestigious positions. This was in sharp contrast to the days of nouvelle droite notoriety in the late 1970s and early 1980s when GRECE journals Eléments had upwards of 20,000 subscribers per issue and Nouvelle Ecole about 10,000 (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 227). Moreover, in this period, the nouvelle droite worldview reached a large-scale French audience through the regular columns of its philosophers within mainstream newspapers such as Spectacle du monde, Valeurs actuelles and Figaro Magazine. The former two had a daily circulation of about 100,000 subscribers each, while the latter could draw 500,000 daily readers (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 227). In the late 1970s and early 1980s, GRECE also influenced key personnel within the mainstream political right; generated the ideological ammunition for the discourse and basic theses of the extreme right-wing FN; penetrated centres of learned opinion within universities; influenced the themes of writers on the left and right as diverse as Régis Debray and Pascal Bruckner; provided the intellectual arguments for ultra-regionalists; contributed to making the themes of inequality and “difference” à la mode; and restored the credibility of an older revolutionary right-wing heritage (Duranton-Crabol 1988). After its period of mass media lights, GRECE was constantly under scrutiny for what many viewed as a “proto-fascist” image and an ossified organizational framework fixated on old biological positions and exotic neo-pagan rituals. In 1988, former GRECE members led by de Benoist launched the new journal Krisis. A limited circulation journal published three times each year for an elite, university-educated audience of about 600 subscribers, Krisis is a journal of contemporary ideas and debates. Each issue takes a precise theme (e.g., ecology, community, federalism, etc.), while attempting to provide questions and answers through the clash of divergent ideas and personalities. The journal views itself as a reaction to the mainstream and shallow journalism of the age, as well as a political, social and spiritual reply to the multiple crises of our time. It claims to attack the standard political dogmas of our epoch and to offer a free spirit of academic investigation. Krisis argued that it sought an authentic dialogue between right and left and did tend to attract a transversal, atypical audience. The journal wanted to be a model for the shifting cultural and political alliances of the future. In starting Krisis, de Benoist saw new intellectual and political opportunities. He also recognized that the capture of the cultural realm must be the task of an even smaller, ultra-elitist force fighting against the “established disorder.”

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This elitist view was also shared by Charles Champetier, formerly from the French New Right’s youth wing Nouvelle Droite Jeneusse (NDJ). Champetier was the editor of the short-lived metapolitical journal, Métapo, founded in 1989. Champetier’s praise for the New Left, Guy Debord and the Situationists also mirrors de Benoist’s appropriation of explicitly leftist authors (Champetier 1993-4, 149-56). Yet, the new window of opportunity that de Benoist could probably see was the increasing fatigue of Western leftist intellectuals with Marxism and the greater realization of the horrors of “real existing socialism” in the East. Glasnost in the Soviet Union was also changing the political landscape. Krisis explicitly targeted leftist French intellectuals and claimed to transcend the “fictitious” left-right political dichotomy. As Douglas Johnson writes, Krisis claimed, “it would be on the left, on the right, at the heart of matters and in the middle of the world” (Johnson 1991, 241). Krisis was renowned for its collaboration with prominent left-wing intellectuals such as the sociologist Jean Baudrillard, the former director of the prestigious Christian and left-wing review Esprit, Oliver Mongin and Jean-Pierre Vernant. Did this type of transversal collaboration between what appeared to be remnants of the New Left and New Right against capitalist materialism and the threat of global Americanization strike fear into the hearts of liberal and Old Left intellectuals? The media return of the French nouvelle droite in the summer of 1993 would reveal the real trepidation of some mainstream intellectuals against this possible synthesis of revolutionary right and left. When the Berlin Wall, the Cold War and communism in the East all shattered into scattered pieces in 1989, Alain de Benoist’s launching of Krisis must have seemed extremely prophetic. An entire generation of Western intellectuals nourished on the gods of Marxism and socialism were left in a state of shock and disarray. The old intellectual certainties had been finally crushed under the heavy weight of reality. Was de Benoist not correct to realize that certain leftist intellectuals would not stomach this new ideological vacuum or intellectual black hole? In his extreme anti-Americanism, idiosyncratic anti-Westernism, vitriolic anti-capitalist polemics and disdain for the “pettiness” and materialism of liberal democracy, de Benoist clearly resembled those leftist intellectuals reeling after the “nightmare” of 1989. He would even appeal to American leftist intellectuals within the prestigious New Yorkbased critical theory journal Telos in the mid-1990s. There was a hitch in de Benoist’s opening to the left. A common left-right antiliberal, anti-materialism did not necessarily mean that the leftist intellectuals de Benoist sought to “convert” to a new ideological synthesis would remain on the same side of the political fence. Writing about the ENR, Paul Gottfried made this trenchant remark: “It will have to recognize that not all who are against something are necessarily on the same side” (Gottfried in Sunic 1990, “Preface”). Despite oscillations between right and left, it is unlikely that most intellectuals abandon their core ideological convictions and flee en masse to another political ideology. In short, fragments of de Benoist’s revolutionary right-wing heritage survive, while the same must be said of the leftist intellectuals fleeing from the stable ideological anchor of analytical Marxism. New directions and an opening to the left did not entail the complete abandonment of de Benoist’s entire revolutionary right-wing Weltanschauung, but did signal an important departure from past positions.

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The Nouvelle Droite in the 1990s and Beyond: Fascism Revisited or Mere Cultural Criticism? A core ideology of national rebirth (palingenesis) that embraces a vast range of highly concrete historical permutations. – Roger Griffin’s minimal definition of fascism

According to Pierre-André Taguieff, the ENR label in the 1990s became empty and deceptive; a name without a clear reference (Taguieff 1993-4c, 171). Historically, the nouvelle droite designation was clearer: the attempt to ideologically re-evaluate and re-create the pan-European, ultra-nationalism GRECE began in the late 1960s (Taguieff 1993-4c, 171; Bar-On in Blamires 2006, 211-13). While the heady days of the late 1970s and early 1980s vanished for the nouvelle droite in the 1990s, major ENR thinkers such as de Benoist continued their exclusively metapolitical campaign in order to dislodge liberal democracy. A conflict continues to brew among academics whether de Benoist and the nouvelle droite’s radical form of cultural criticism contains basic “proto-fascist” themes (Roger Griffin), or is a non-violent form of cultural criticism divorced from revolutionary right-wing milieux of the past (Pierre-André Taguieff). Others like Paul Piccone have taken Taguieff’s lead to further suggest that the nouvelle droite has created a radically new political paradigm akin to the New Left thinkers. This conflict erupted in France in 1993 when the nouvelle droite made its short-lived mass media return in prestigious dailies such as Le Monde. Its tremors were felt as far away as North America, especially with the major intellectual debates conducted about the ENR within Telos in 1993 and 1994. In a more recent debate on fascism between Anglo-American and German intellectuals in the German journal Deliberation, Knowledge, Ethics (2004), the English historian Roger Griffin sought to argue that a “new consensus” has emerged in Anglophone fascist studies (Griffin 2004, 287-300). This “new consensus” identifies a fascist minimum in “a core ideology of national rebirth (palingenesis) that embraces a vast range of highly concrete historical permutations” (Griffin 2004, 287). While Griffin identifies the Third Reich “as an outstanding example of a fascist regime” (Griffin 2004, 287), he also adds the New Right as an example of post-war fascism. While one can be critical of Griffin’s failure to pay attention to the left-wing influences and exoteric novelty of the ENR, the ENR’s notion of a “heterogeneous world of homogeneous communities” revives “a myth of revolutionary, populist, national renewal that eerily echoes the ‘conservative revolution’ and perhaps even Italian Fascism and German Nazism” (Bar-On 2004, 307). The Second “Hot Summer” in 1993 In the summer of 1993, the nouvelle droite returned to mass media notoriety. Its mass media comeback in 1993 was reminiscent of the “hot summer” in 1979 for its highly polemical atmosphere. On July 13, 1993, the most reputable French daily Le Monde published “The Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals” in order to fight the “resurgence of anti-democratic currents of far Right thought in French and European intellectual life” (Le Monde 13 July 1993). As a parallel to historical

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fascism within a radically different context, 41 intellectuals signed the Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals in 1925 on the inspiration of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Amendola. It was a response to the Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals published earlier that year after Giovanni Gentile convened a Conference on Fascist Culture in Bologna attended by 250 delegates. The 1993 Appeal wanted to counter “the far Right’s current strategy of legitimation” and encourage all media and cultural outlets to adopt the “necessary opposition” and “vigilance” against this deceptive strategy called “involuntary complicity”. The Appeal was especially concerned with what it called “a big seduction campaign targeting democratic personalities, some of whom are known as leftists.” It raised alarm bells vis-à-vis the far right’s “seduction campaign,” which included debates about the end of ideology, the abolishing of the gap between left and right and the revival of ideas concerning nation, cultural identity and a “clever” racist, anti-racism. The Appeal stated that it would categorically refuse all cultural collaboration “organized by people whose connections with the far Right have been demonstrated.” It argued that this stance was imperative throughout Europe because “the ideas of the far Right are not like those espoused by others; they incite exclusion, violence, and crime.” The Appeal was signed by influential European intellectuals including the following: Rosanna Rossanda, Arlette Farge, Nadine Fresco, Lydia Flem, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Léon Poliakov, Jacques Revel and Paul Virilio. Exactly one year after the original Appeal, Le Monde published another advertisement entitled “Appeal to Vigilance” (Le Monde 13 July 1994). It called for a “perpetual vigilance” against a sinister and insidious “new fascism” aided by the far right’s clever “strategy of legitimation.” More than 1500 intellectuals throughout Europe signed the second Appeal. Other important intellectuals wrote articles in the French press about the nouvelle droite between 1993 and 1994. On July 13, 1993, the same day that the first Appeal was published, Roger-Pol Droit penned “The Confusion of Ideas” in which the nouvelle droite and especially Alain de Benoist are accused of creating a “National Bolshevist” alliance between militant communists and their neo-fascist supporters (Droit 13 July 1993). Droit argues that these “National Bolshevist” alliances should be taken seriously. He contends that de Benoist creates confusion within the left by appropriating many of its most cherished themes and presenting a liberal face, while still operating esoteric connections to the far right-wing cultural milieu. De Benoist’s launching of Krisis in 1988 with the co-operation of many leftist authors had begun to trouble many intellectuals. On that same day within Le Monde, Pierre VidalNaquet, an important French philosopher, accused the scholar Pierre-André Taguieff of playing a “dangerous game” by entering into dialogue with ENR thinkers, which completely “trapped” him (Naquet 27 July 1993). In separate articles, both Taguieff and de Benoist responded to the accusations a few weeks later in Le Monde (De Benoist; Taguieff 27 July 1993). In the ENR press, Charles Champetier wrote an article in Eléments entitled “The Summer of the Dinosaurs: Violent Press Campaign Against the New Right,” which Telos reprinted (Champetier 1993-4). He accused the mainstream French press of “lacking balance,” “settling scores” with political foes and launching a “delirious campaign” with conspiratorial, McCarthyite overtones. Furthermore, Champetier slams the

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Appeal for its failure to name its defined enemies on the far right, while attempting to indict ENR intellectuals such as de Benoist who has publicly criticized the FN’s populist, ultra-nationalism. Champetier ends by denouncing the 1993 mass media campaign against the ENR as the work of an Old Left McCarthyism designed to assure the continued existence of the established ideological powers. Moreover, he attacks the Appeal and the “vigilants” for “sadly” and even “farcically” being more concerned with outdated left-right divisions and their own intellectual careers rather than proclaiming an authentic vigilance against the racism of the FN, or the more ominous racist crimes of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia. While most observers believed that the nouvelle droite was a dying force in the 1990s, why did it return to mass media notoriety in the summer of 1993? A number of scholars, including both Frank Adler and Paul Piccone, have suggested that the answer to the entire affair does not lie with the ascendancy of the right, but with the terrible decline of the left after the official fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 (Adler 1993-4, 23-33; Piccone 1993-4, 3-22). Seeking to maintain the purity of the left-right “Maginot Line” as the defining barrier of all political conflict, these scholars argue that a defeated Old Left staged the entire affair in order to discredit the right and revive the fading fortunes of the left. Using McCarthyite-like tactics of silence, the end of dialogue with “suspects” connected to the right, and guiltby-association techniques, they contend that the Appeal was more likely aimed at ENR intellectuals such as de Benoist rather than more menacing and anti-democratic right-wing political forces such as Le Pen’s FN. In addition, Taguieff claims that the Appeal was designed to keep “lax” liberal and leftist scholars like him within the traditional left-right orbit and to discredit his more nuanced, historical-genealogical and academic approach to the phenomenon. The constant attacks of the “vigilants” directed at Taguieff for “legitimating” far right-wing forces without any names or proofs showed how far the left was prepared to travel in order to restore its shattered credibility. We must remember that Taguieff is undoubtedly the most accomplished expert on the ENR phenomenon. In this context, attempts to derail his meticulous research on the subject was bound to be seen by more objective thinkers as the machinations of an Old Left, political correctness “thought police.”

Chapter 4

The ENR and the Legacy of May 1968 – A Critical Turning Point What is left of the New Left? Perhaps the New Right! – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

In chapter 3, I showed how the ENR flirted with left-wing ideas in the 1980s and 1990s that for some critics harkened back to the fascist “third way” between capitalism and communism. In 1998, the French nouvelle droite published a provocative, collaborative work Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (The New Right’s May 1968). In this chapter, I further examine the nouvelle droite’s left-wing flirtation, namely, the profound impact of its New Left legacy connected to the events of 1968. While during the events of 1968 most of the French nouvelle droite intellectuals were firmly rooted in the ultra-nationalist, anticommunist camp, the events of May 1968 still represented a critical turning point in the school of thought’s cultural and political evolution and appraisal of modernity. This becomes clearer by examining the events of May 1968 and the ENR thinkers’ perceptions of those events. On the one hand, there was an affinity for the student radicals and the revolutionary potential of the May 1968 events. Yet, on the other hand, a violent criticism of the New Left generation of 1968 for its excessive hedonism and the political and cultural co-optation of former New Left figures into the liberal capitalist system they once heavily criticized. In the 1990s, the continental New Right intellectuals saw themselves as the true revolutionary heirs of the New Left ideals of the mid1960s that have been largely abandoned by the New Left. The French New Right was particularly influenced by the New Left’s focus on the cultural terrain, the proliferation of New Left social issues and especially the revolutionary potential of the events of May 1968. In the contemporary period, the New Right continues to claim the New Left as one of its ideological descendants. Moreover, the ENR theorists now seek a cultural and political synthesis between the radicals of the New Left and New Right against the worldwide “hegemony” of capitalist materialism and liberal democracy. This New Left-New Right reconciliation against the excesses of global capitalism has been revived in continental Europe, as well as between some sectors of the American New Left and French New Right. Although GRECE and the French nouvelle droite’s first major theoretical journal Nouvelle Ecole were formed in the early months of 1968 (i.e., the first issue of Nouvelle Ecole appeared in February-March) before the outbreak of radical student protests in May 1968, the events of May-June 1968 were undoubtedly a critical turning point in the development of the nouvelle droite. The events of May 1968

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and the New Left ideas of the student radicals continue to radically inform the worldview of the ENR theorists in the new millennium. So, for example, the French nouvelle droite’s manifesto for the year 2000, “Le manifeste de la nouvelle droite de l’an 2000,” is undoubtedly a synthesis of older revolutionary right-wing European traditions combined with standard New Left themes. These New Left themes include the following: the critique of modernity, liberalism and global capitalism; the valorization of regionalism, federalism and local communities; quality of life and ecological concerns; feminist themes; the critique of the liberal and socialist “New Class”; pro-Third World solidarity; the incessant attacks on capitalist materialism, technological utopianism and bureaucratic gigantism; and the call for more humane, spiritual and free-thinking European societies that are not governed by a political correctness “thought police” (De Benoist and Champetier 1999, 10-23). With the nouvelle droite, we have the unique phenomenon of a right that appears as much spiritually on the left as it is on the right. On the other hand, the ENR’s belief in the explicit separation of the economic and political realms and the sovereignty of the latter as the “essence” of politics, view of man as a “rooted” being, vision of society as a “body of communities,” its pagan and spherical conception of time, critique of immigration as a loss of cultural identity for both the “host” and “home” cultures, valorization of strong cultural identities and the “cause of peoples” and quest for a new, post-liberal revolutionary order appear more closer to its revolutionary right-wing traditions (De Benoist and Champetier 1999, 10-19). As the European left has largely made its peace with the liberal capitalist order and generally abandoned its anti-capitalist, revolutionary thrust, this vacuum is now filled by the ENR intellectuals. This ideological vacuum is creating unusual alliances between the far left and revolutionary right on a number of issues such as globalisation, the nature of the European Union (EU) project, United States-led interventionist wars abroad and capitalist homogenisation and Americanization (Bar-On in Blamires 2006, 280-1). These alliances were predicted and have been encouraged by the ENR in order to defeat liberal capitalism in Europe. De Benoist argues that the fact that the French nouvelle droite was born at about the same time as the New Left was dying in 1968 is not merely “coincidental,” but is part of a major generational shift in values (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 13). The ENR has published an important collection of eighteen partisan accounts about the events of May 1968 in Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (The New Right’s May 1968). The title of the edited collection combined with the red and black lettering of the work’s cover (an allusion to the banners of the “red” leftists and the “black” anarchists that were both central to the social and political unrest of May 1968) suggests a symbiotic relationship between the ideas of the New Left and those of the French and European New Right. This work also tells us that it was not the left alone that was beginning to challenge the dominant liberal intellectual and political landscape. The French nouvelle droite had already begun to radically re-evaluate its positions, values and ideas slightly before May 1968. The debacle of the loss of Algérie française had already led to a period of soul-searching for the French ultranationalist and revolutionary right. The continuing stigma of being on the right, often associated with the fascist and Nazi “losers” of World War Two, further ensured the

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exploration of new pathways to escape the “ghetto” status of the right. This would eventually lead to the creation of the nouvelle droite in 1968. It is with the events of May 1968 that the sudden emergence of the New Left influenced the intellectual and political evolution of the French New Right. The nouvelle droite was especially fascinated by the cultural theories of the New Left that challenged the hegemony of liberal democracy and capitalist consumerism, particularly the works of Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer. In addition, they were also attracted to the revolutionary and heretical orientation of the 1968 generation because they seemed to challenge all the received ideologies of the age. The nouvelle droite’s choice of the metapolitical terrain emulated liberal and leftist cultural elites that had allegedly understood the fundamental importance of cultural power above both parliamentary power and the monopoly control of the “hard” powers of the state. For the nouvelle droite, the left and New Left had learned the key lesson on which all power is based, namely, cultural power and gaining popular adherence to a particular set of deeply ingrained values, habits and ways of thinking. Besides, the revolutionary right of the 1960s needed a change because it languished in political isolation and continued what de Benoist considered its “infantile” adherence to the old, violent, and extraparliamentary right-wing tactics of the past. The events of May 1968, then, would strengthen the nouvelle droite’s commitment to a metapolitical turn since the New Left was, it claimed, rather successful at engaging in a long-term re-education of hearts and minds that ultimately proved central to unleashing the radical events of May 1968 and led to long-term societal value changes after 1968. ENR Perceptions of May 1968: We Alone Carry The Flame Nous sommes toujours là trente ans après! Nous seuls qui n’avons pas trahi…Nous seuls qui n’avons pas renoncé à notre idéal juvénile…Nous seuls qui savons qu’un autre Mai reste a faire…Nous seuls.” [We are still here thirty years later. We alone did not commit treason. We alone did not abandon our youthful ideal. We alone know that another May must still be made…We alone.] – Maurice Rollet, GRECE founding member

Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite was published by ENR intellectuals in 1998, the 30th anniversary of the May 1968 events. The collection of ENR writings includes the most prominent contemporary ENR figures: Alain de Benoist (the leading brainchild of the ENR project), Charles Champetier (the current editor of the French nouvelle droite journal Eléments), Marco Tarchi (the leading figure of the Italian New Right), Tomislav Sunic (the Croatian author of a rare English-language study on the ENR), Gunter Maschke (a German specialist and translator of Carl Schmitt and Donoso Cortés), Pierre Bérard (a founding member of GRECE), Jean Jouven (a former member of GRECE), Maurice Rollet (a medical doctor, writer and founding member of GRECE), Michel Marmin (the renowned journalist, editor and film critic formerly connected to Le Figaro and Valeurs Actuelles, and also a regular contributor to Eléments), Pierre Le Vigan (a regular voice in French nouvelle droite

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journals Eléments and Krisis) and Grégory Pons (an essayist for French New Right journal Eléments). The authors ranged in age from 12 to 30 during the critical turning point of the May 1968 events. Almost all the writers have been at one time or another connected to the ENR as committed intellectual activists, former GRECE members, or “fellowtravellers.” In addition, a number of the authors recognize the singular importance of May 1968 in terms of their subjective political experiences, the revolutionary spirit of those days, and its fundamental impact on the future of French and European societies. The accounts of the authors, however, offer us a complex, diverse, plural, and, at times, contradictory evaluation of the events of May 1968 and the birth of the nouvelle droite. The majority of writers are especially critical of the student radicals of 1968 for engaging in “treason” or “selling-out” its basic anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-materialist revolutionary principles. The former New Left student radicals, many ENR thinkers contend, have neatly made the transition from the revolutionary fervour of the student barricades of May 1968 to become the comfortable “New Class” administrators of the global, neo-liberal and multicultural New World Order dominated by the reign of capital and the hijacking of the world’s rooted cultural differences. As an example, Tomislav Sunic has argued that these universalist, leftist and liberal “New Class” intellectuals made a pain-free transition from an adherence to the ideals of Maoism to the luxurious comforts of the “Rotary Club”: from radical leftist agitation to smug official positions within cultural, academic, political or business sectors (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 151-56). Examples of former 1968ers with key official political posts are numerous. Bernard Kouchner became the major United Nations’ official responsible for “crimes against humanity,” Lord Robertson a Secretary-General of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Lionel Jospin France’s prime minister and Gerhard Schroeder Germany’s Chancellor. The ENR argues that it alone continues to carry the banner and the faith of burning fidelity to the anti-materialist, revolutionary spirit of May 1968, while liberals, socialists and the New Left have become bourgeois socialists that have joined the status quo they once claimed to vehemently reject. Maurice Rollet, a founding member of GRECE with roots in the far right-wing activism of Jeune Nation, Europe Action and the OAS, has clearly expressed this pro-1968 sentiment in a mythical and mystical manner, which is a traditional staple of the revolutionary right: Mai 68 ne sera plus qu’un petit événement dans les manuels scolaires (et encore est-ce bien sûr?) que nous serons toujours là: pour l’Europe et pour nos dieux…Nous sommes toujours là trente ans après! Nous seuls qui n’avons pas trahi…Nous seuls qui n’avons pas renoncé à notre idéal juvénile…Nous seuls qui savons qu’un autre Mai reste a faire… Nous seuls. [May 68 will no longer be a small event in the scholarly press (and of course) we will always be there: for Europe and our Gods…We alone always there thirty years later! We who did not commit treason!...We who did not abandon our youthful ideal…We alone know that another May must be made…We alone.] (Rollet in GRECE 1998, 139)

In essence, Rollet thought that in May 1968 the world changed; that nothing would be the same again (Rollet in GRECE 1998, 135). Rollet explains how the French New Right had its own 1968 four months before the barricades in which they

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formed the nouvelle droite; longed for a changed world; and hoped for a world based on the European, pagan ideal (Rollet in GRECE 1998, 136). In a measure of fidelity to his revolutionary right-wing ideals of the past, Rollet rejected the “nihilist” and “hedonist” conception of the 1968ers, the world where it was “forbidden to forbid.” To this conception of the world, Rollet opposed another revolutionary view of the world; a heroic one forged by the “hard laws of life”; of life lived as a “permanent combat”; of an “organic” Europe of the regions (Rollet in GRECE 1998, 138). In a manner consistent with the revolutionary right-wing ethos of the past, Rollet argues that history has a meaning through the European paganism espoused by the nouvelle droite. Rollet insists that the ENR will always continue to wage an “eternal” war for Europe and its gods. After thirty years, Rollet believes that it was only GRECE and the ENR that did not commit treason; only they that did not renounce their youthful ideals; only the nouvelle droite that knows that another revolutionary May is still to be accomplished. For Rollet, the revolutionary spirit and idealism of May 1968 cannot die, but eternally returns through its spiritual propagation to the next generation. Rollet’s words also found their echoes in the ideas of nouvelle droite guru Alain de Benoist. In an interview with the German New Right journal Jünge Freiheit in 1995, de Benoist sardonically summed up his view of the contemporary New Left: “What is left of the New Left? Perhaps the New Right!” (De Benoist 1996c, 30). Nonetheless, de Benoist expressed a high degree of romantic, mythical affinity towards the events of May 1968 and the ideals of the New Left. De Benoist writes that 1968 “gave birth to a myth, and in another sense, marked a generation” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 10). What especially attracted de Benoist and the other ENR thinkers towards the leftist and anarchist radicals of May 1968 was their revolutionary ethos or spirit; the desire to overturn the hated world of the bourgeoisie, of liberalism, of the capitalist consumer society, of alienated daily existence and of what Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle.” De Benoist explains his ambiguous evaluation of the student radicals: “My ideas, however, were not those of the demonstrators, or were perhaps only at the margins. But still, there was something there which warmed the heart” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 10). As a deeply committed revolutionary, de Benoist continues even more nostalgically for the taste of revolution: “How can one forget that forest of red flags, its inflamed discourse, this exaltation? Yes, May 68 was an exalted moment, a hope for revolution” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 11). These aforementioned sentiments were simultaneously expressed by romantic, revolutionary leftists such as Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn (the former a Sicilian anarchist and the latter a Scottish socialist) while the barricades of May 1968 were still on fire: “We would like to convince the incredulous, to encourage those daring to hope, and to aggravate the uneasy dreams of those still asleep” (Quattrocchi and Nairn 1998, “Foreword”). If 1968 was a mythical date for the French New Right and de Benoist, myth was also glorified in the fascist worldview of the past. Rolão Preto, leader of the Portuguese Blue Shirts co-opted or crushed by the Salazar regime, was certain in 1934 that fascism in Italy and Germany was a mythical turning point in world history:

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? The reaction against the materialist and corrupting utilitarianism of a whole age is the beginning of the great Revolution whose spirit is going to burn and purify the earth. It is a singular aspect of the human condition that the onset of man’s decadence and death always create the conditions of his salvation and deliverance. (Preto in Blamires 2006, 499)

Or, on the eve of the March on Rome, Mussolini cited Sorel who valorised the power of a revolutionary myth and then declared: We have created our myth. The myth is a faith, a passion. It is not necessary for it be a reality. It is a reality in the sense that it is a stimulus, is hope, is faith, is courage. Our myth is the nation, our myth is the greatness of the nation! And to this myth, this greatness, which we want to translate into a total reality, that we subordinate everything else. (Mussolini in Blamires 2006, 446)

De Benoist chastises many members of the New Left that let the myth of 1968 die and today espouse a neo-liberal philosophy and populate the world of French politics, culture, mass media, academia and the business sector. He especially praises Daniel Cohn-Bendit (France’s leader of the European Greens), the New Left student leader of May 1968, for remaining faithful to his ideals and a few other radicals who remained loyal and poor in continuing to struggle on behalf of their cherished myths and ideals. As an astute cultural and political figure with a penchant for revolutionary change, de Benoist followed with a rare intensity all the various factions of the hard, revolutionary left: Maoist, Stalinist, Trotskyite and New Left. Furthermore, de Benoist, like the New Left radicals of 1968, contends that the New Left’s counter-culture guru Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man deeply affected him (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 12). While de Benoist has fond memories for the events of May 1968, it did not “really represent a defining moment of my existence. The defining moment, of the age, was more the creation of the journal Nouvelle Ecole. The act of the birth of the New Right” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 12). Yet, de Benoist was attracted to the revolutionary potential of 1968: “To return to May 1968. I did not share the ideas of the ‘children of May’, but I had sympathy for them” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 15). In short, de Benoist shared with the radicals of May 1968 a revolutionary search for an anti-liberal, anti-materialist new order and the hatred for the existing liberal capitalist and parliamentary systems. De Benoist’s prevailing view is that the radicals on either extreme should fight together against the system because this division benefits the existing liberal, capitalist order. He argues that the old battles between the leftist radicals and the radical right were tantamount to defending the status quo. He cites the example of Weimar Germany shortly before the 1920s, when Ernst Von Salomon and the other Freikorps (Free Corps) of the ultra-nationalist, extra-parliamentary right battled against the Communist Spartacists in Berlin. The implicit argument is that the remnants of the New Left and New Right should unite to fight the existing neo-liberal New World Order in order to create a new, post-liberal revolutionary order. For de Benoist, the “principal enemy,” like the New Left, is not communism, but the bourgeois, liberal, capitalist order. De Benoist essentially saw the communists as competitors rather than enemies. Marxism, for de Benoist, was

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a false idea, but he was never a “primary anticommunist” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 15). De Benoist’s shared his penchant for revolution and anti-bourgeois liberalism with the radicals of May 1968: “My conviction is that all who want to destroy bourgeois society are objectively allies” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 15). Today, de Benoist claims the capitalist world can sleep as its adversaries destroy each other, whether left or right, fascist or anti-fascist (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 15). The clear message for the contemporary age is the need to unite all anti-liberal and anti-capitalist forces in a common revolutionary front: communists, anarchists, fascists, national revolutionaries, ecologists, traditionalists, regionalists, New Left, New Right, Islamist militants, etc. De Benoist reproached the student radicals for not contesting the system enough, for their hedonistic orientation was completely consistent with market values. Besides, the political contestation of the New Left, contends de Benoist, was not radical in the realm of ideas. This is something that the ENR would rectify with its singular attention to ideas and metapolitics. Or, even more forcefully attacking the revolutionary thrust of the New Left student radicals, de Benoist writes: “The revolts of May 1968 put nothing into question fundamentally: they provoked troubles, but a disorder is not a revolution. More precisely, they contested the society in place in the name of its own principles, by reproaching it for having committed treason against them” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 15). De Benoist laments that the effects of May 1968 were rather short in France where people quietly forgot the events and returned home or to work. Ultimately, while the revolutionary potential of May 1968 fizzled, they taught de Benoist that theoretically it could be possible to “have a rupture without violence and blood” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 16). This is the ultimate long-term aim and hope of the ENR’s cultural, metapolitical framework: A nonviolent revolution demanded by the people. Perhaps this was the critical legacy of May 1968: the origins of a new consciousness and novel societal trends that marked the next generation, whether new social movements, feminism, a liberalization of values, ecologism, union power sharing and regionalism. It is these long-term effects on both individuals and the larger society that the ENR sought to emulate with its metapolitical framework and its adoption of some of these aforementioned New Left ideals and practices. In the end, however, May 1968 only left de Benoist with “a vague nostalgia,” but what remained, above all, is an immense sense of nausea from what he views as the artificiality and “treason” of the French New Left generation (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 17-18). De Benoist praises those who remained faithful to the flame of their youthful New Left ideals and those who stayed loyal to an alternative lifestyle and politics, whether in the pro-Third World or ecology movements. The implication is that these “authentic” New Left elements can join the French New Right in fighting the New World Order and the hegemonic reign of global capitalism. Yet, in de Benoist’s eyes, the ideals of the New Left and the spirit of May 1968 have been betrayed and attacked as the French Communist Party has become social-democratic and the Socialists are now converted to the logic of the market (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 19). A final dimension of de Benoist’s appraisal of the events of May 1968 is the contention that critical thought has been abandoned in favour of the logic of the market. Furthermore, the breaking of boundaries and

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taboos, an outgrowth of the spirit of 1968, has been replaced with an intolerant and politically correct anti-fascism, liberalism or leftism (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 19). De Benoist contends that the events of May 1968 provided the world with some colour and hope, in contrast to the homogenizing logic of the routines of everyday life in the West (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 20). De Benoist has empathy for the New Left radicals of May 1968 because there were numerous “rebel hearts”; because he claims that there will always be “rebel hearts”; and there will always be “hearts that dream of another world; hearts that desire to leave the old world behind them” (De Benoist in GRECE 1998, 20). It is, then, principally the revolutionary spirit of May 1968, the rebellious spirit of the 1968 generation, that energizes de Benoist and the ENR’s own revolutionary project. Other ENR thinkers, too, offer us a complex portrayal of the events of May 1968 and the New Left generation. Pierre Bérard, a former French ultra-nationalist, chastizes this New Left generation for their switch from leftist revolutionaries to complete support for free trade, the Rights of Man and what he calls the “king” of money (Bérard in GRECE 1998, 22-3). In Bérard’s view, the New Left and May 1968 were simply ruses on behalf of capitalism and marked the emergence of a neo-liberal world the leftist radicals ultimately craved. For Bérard, the 1968ers have helped to consolidate the domination of global capitalism through “free sex” and the suffocating dominance of Marxism-Leninism on the cultural plane (Bérard in GRECE 1998, 31). While 1968 ended up accelerating the logic of market society, what remains for Bérard from 1968 is a magical rupture with the banality of daily life, or what French philosopher Raymond Aron saw as a type of “carnival” spirit (Bérard in GRECE 1998, 34). For Philippe Conrad, a former revolutionary right-wing activist, the 1968ers and the New Left generation are viewed as a ridiculous expression of feeble, uninspiring leftism. While The Old Left had the revolutionary heroism of the October Revolution, the International Brigades and the mythical combat against Nazism and colonialism, the 1968ers are seen as simple, naive caricatures, which looked for inspiration to the “deceptions” of Soviet Marxism and Chinese Maoism (Conrad in GRECE 1998, 54). In the end, Conrad argues that the events of May 1968 led to the long-term acceleration of consumer society and cultural Americanization, and a heightened sense of individualism, hedonism and materialism. In contrast, Conrad longs for the revival of the spiritual life and the vision of the “eternal return” (Conrad in GRECE 1998, 55-6). The former ultra-nationalist Jean Jouven saw the events of 1968 as an expression of “the good wind; the beautiful wind of May” (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 63). In his fidelity to life as a “temperament,” flux, change, insecurity and the “god” of revolt, Jouven expresses affinity for the 1968ers (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 64). For Jouven, the “spirit of ‘68” was akin to his own: a rejection of “soft totalitarianism,” a revolt against a uniform and homogenized world and an attack on a world impregnated with the “stench” of money (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 64). In what can be read as the ENR intellectual’s rejection of all contemporary political ideologies, Jouven approvingly quotes the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem: “We must seize and realize the project of individual liberty perverted by liberalism: the project of collective liberty perverted by socialism, the project of re-discovering nature, perverted by

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fascism, the project of the total man, perverted by the Marxist ideologues” (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 64). The crux of the ENR’s affinity for the student radicals of May 1968 is essentially their common belief in an anti-liberal, anti-materialist revolution. As a result of the common pro-revolutionary sentiments, ENR thinkers such as Jouven even admired the revolutionary fervour of the Old Left, or Lenin’s Soviet Union and Maoist China. Jouven also explains how the liberal-leftist French daily Le Monde called de Benoist the last descendant of the 1968 generation due to his anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro-ecological, pro-Third World and pro-immigrant stances (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 76). In contrast, Jouven argues, the New Left 1968ers became the neo-liberals of the 1990s. Consequently, Jouven contends that we now live in the time of an “anti-1968” ideology; an epoch of generalized violence without hope (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 81). In Jouven’s eyes, 1968 was at least redeeming because it was all about hope; the romantic hope for a better world (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 82). For Jouven, this “eternal” hope of a revolution is a strike against the indifference or hate of the world today. 1968 taught us, Jouven insists, that the world could transform both spiritually and psychically. In the end, Jouven enlists the memory of the old pagan gods to make both man and the world divine; to make the spontaneous spirit of May 1968 return forever (Jouven in GRECE 1998, 85). In Jouven, the revolutionary right’s and New Left’s idealism mingle in an ambiguous, uneasy political synthesis. Quoting the French fascist author Drieu de la Rochelle, the Eléments writer Pierre Le Vigan argues that we are more faithful to an attitude than ideas, and also praises those who did not abandon their New Left ideals of 1968 (Le Vigan in GRECE 1998, 91-92). At the same time, Le Vigan also questions the old partisans of the revolutionary right “Third Way” by expressing a pro-1968 sentiment: “Yes, there was something beautiful and good to change in 1968. Yes, the question of the limits of progress, of the impostors of progress was raised. From this point of view, we are always the descendants of 68” (Le Vigan in GRECE 1998, 92). As a new advocate of the ecological critique of capitalist “progress,” Le Vigan continues to support a revolutionary anti-materialist philosophy that saw its apogee in the events of May 1968. For the ENR, like the New Left, “progress” is not merely material, but about a greater quality of life, substantive democratic participation, a communitarian political vision and a political as well as existential destiny stamped with meaning. Gunter Maschke, a disillusioned former German communist, claims to be a perpetual renegade and found them hard to find in 1968 among the “so-called student radicals” of 1968 (Maschke in GRECE 1998, 101). For Maschke, the 1968 heritage is largely a form of self-liberation about money, fun or vulgar hedonism. In a tone reminiscent of the revolutionary right, Maschke claims that there was already a slide towards “decadence” in the key German state institutions, which has been reinforced by the arrival of the 1968ers into official political positions (Maschke in GRECE 1998, 103). In Maschke’s eyes, the New Left leads the contemporary drive towards a vulgar “McDonaldization” of the world and support for the “imperialist” policies of the United States. Ultimately, Maschke claims that 1968 became a “New Inquisition” of thought and conformism, and a movement that was firmly installed in the major institutions of the German Republic in 1970s (Maschke in GRECE 1998, 111-112).

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For Jean-Jacques Mourreau, an early Nouvelle Ecole writer, it is a nostalgia for elsewhere, for the impossible, for another world that attracted him to the radicals of May 1968 (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 113). As one of those ultra-nationalist partisans that could not forget the loss of French Algeria, Mourreau is pulled towards the 1968ers because they represent a similar form of nostalgia for a better, more spiritual world (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 113-114). While avidly reading revolutionary right-wing authors such as Ernst Von Salomon and the French fascist Drieu de la Rochelle, Mourreau simultaneously expresses his affinity for the students radicals of 1968: “The red flag did not make us fearful; the black flag did not debilitate us. We were libertarians, in our own way” (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 114). As a heretical revolutionary able to criss-cross between right and left, Mourreau argues, “May ‘68 gave us the taste for transgressions” (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 117). Yet, Mourreau expresses the ambiguity of the ENR’s synthesis of thought between revolutionary right and New Left ideals. In a vein that would make many internationalist, anarchist or left-wing ecologists uncomfortable, Mourreau claims that the ecological battle cannot be disconnected from defending rooted cultural identities (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 118). Citing Yann Fouéré, the author of L’Europe aux cents drapeaux (A Europe of A Hundred Flags), Mourreau favours the acceleration of Alsatian regionalism against Jacobinism combined with an ecological perspective. Like a number of other ENR thinkers, Mourreau ends his piece in a Nietzschean tone: “Living is made of eternal renaissances. From the worst can spring the unexpected” (Mourreau in GRECE 1998, 119). In a revolutionary right-wing tone, Jean-Charles Personne, a Paris lawyer, favours a world of honour and courage, of duty combined with passion for liberty and of austerity mingled with sovereignty (Personne in GRECE 1998, 121). Personne explains that his ultra-nationalist camp in 1968 consisted of “soldiers of honour,” but the 1968 generation committed “treason” against them (Personne in GRECE 1998, 122-3). For Personne, in May 1968 nothing really happened; it was a game of roles; the Communist Party’s head Georges Marchais even denounced the student radicals as “pseudo-revolutionaries”; and, in reality, the revolution went “nowhere” (Personne in GRECE 1998, 123). With Schmittian decisionist overtones, Personne claims that he knew that the state under de Gaulle would return to its tradition where it alone makes decisive political decisions; it alone sanctions rights and duties; and it alone could forcefully crush the events of May 1968 (Personne in GRECE 1998, 124). In discussing the events of May 1968, the ideals of the revolutionary right are clearly conspicuous in Grégory Pons’s attraction to a new, heroic and elite chivalric order (Pons in GRECE 1998, 125). For Pons, a regular Eléments contributor, his anti-communism during May 1968 was a type of rejection of intellectual “absurdity.” Pons belonged to a sort of dissident, non-aligned right. Yet, Pons’s dissident style, vehement anti-materialism and taste for revolutionary action enamoured him to the “hard” left: I remained rather at ease with my leftist friends; a generational phenomenon of the same friends, music, the same taste for violence, and the same reflex of revolt against the world. The Maoists were really in their style authentic neo-fascists with the same confidence

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in the future; when they spoke of a onedimensional man I understood these Bolsheviks. (Pons in GRECE 1998, 131)

Pons’s honesty is exceptional in a post-fascist era. He admits his own proclivity for violence and neo-fascist ideals. His words echo F.T. Marinetti’s 1909 Manifesto of Futurism that valorised the “beauty” and “necessity of violence” and “war as the only hygiene for the world.” Marinetti’s mixture of anarchism, syndicalism, ultranationalism, imperialism and idealism resembled the fascist synthesis that was to emerge ten years later with the creation of the Italian Fascist Party. In addition, Pons echoes fascism scholar A. James Gregor who highlighted affinities between neo-fascists and Maoists in their style of revolt, tactics and faith in the future. In typical controversial form, Gregor argues in The Face of Janus that fascism was predominantly a left-wing philosophy (Gregor 2000). Yet, Pons laments that there was no major rupture in 1968, but rather 1968 produced a “scent” of decadence, of treason and the total reign of high technology and late capitalism (Pons in GRECE 1998, 132). As the architect and sculptor Michel de Sablet notes, the events of 1968 were mythical, but cannot compare to the anticommunist revolutions of 1989, the European revolts of 1830 and 1848 or the Paris Commune of 1871 (De Sablet in GRECE 1998, 141). In short, 1968 was not really imbued with the same authentic revolutionary aura as these other critical events in political history. The implication is that the ENR is attracted to the idea of revolution; the idea that people fight and die for their non-negotiable values and ideals. In a sense, de Sablet and other ENR thinkers criticize the 1968ers because they were not revolutionary enough in fighting permanently against the liberal capitalist order. In short, the ENR wishes to use the New Left’s ideals as well as the legacy of the failed revolution of 1968 in order to forge a new, post-liberal revolutionary order. The ENR New Guard Tomislav Sunic, Marco Tarchi and Charles Champetier belong to the youngest generation of ENR thinkers and sympathisers. Tarchi, the former head of the Italian MSI’s youth wing, is part of this ENR youth generation born well after the memories of World War Two and fascism. Charles Champetier is the former head of the Nouvelle Droite Jeunesse and editor of Eléments. Finally, Sunic has written a scholarly work on the ENR intellectuals and has sat on the editorial board of French nouvelle droite journal Eléments. It is this generation that is likely the most receptive to the ideals of the New Left and least attached to the most traditionalist, anti-modern aspects of the revolutionary right-wing milieu. They are, therefore, well positioned to attempt a synthesis between the ideals of the New Left and those of the revolutionary right (or conservative revolutionary) milieux. While Sunic rejected the “vulgar” Marxism of the 1968ers, he appreciated that they had a spirit of rebellion, or of non-conformism which pleased and seduced him (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 152.) He found it difficult to politically situate himself as a Croatian youth living in Zagreb during the events of May 1968: “I couldn’t really classify myself as a rightist since my rebel character came close to a leftist type”

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(Sunic in GRECE 1998, 152). At the same time, however, Sunic was also an anticommunist who rejected the hypocrisy of Tito and the sentimental romanticism of the 1968ers (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 153). In a tone that was to imbue the ENR with a critical spirit for all received ideologies, Sunic argues that the French writer Céline taught him to obey nowhere and no one; taught him the fundamental importance of the total critical spirit (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 153). Like many of the ENR thinkers, Sunic is disillusioned with the New Left generation of 1968. So, for example, Sunic wonders why the 1968ers did not say much about communist “barbarism,” the gulags and about the numerous political camps which imprisoned its dissidents? (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 156). Furthermore, Sunic rejects what he considers the political correctness of the 1968 generation. Finally, he laments that the 1968 generation has lapsed into a pure materialism it once so radically claimed to reject. This 1968 generation, Sunic claims, is today largely concerned with designer labels and the nicest cars. Sunic writes this about the New Left generation of 1968: “All passes like nothing ever happened” (Sunic in GRECE 1998, 156). In the eyes of Sunic, the 1968 generation cannot be pardoned for its full-scale “treason” against its own antimaterialist and revolutionary ideals. Marco Tarchi, a political science professor at the University of Florence and the Italian head of the New Right, has no regrets for the events of May 1968 and the world before (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 157). A youngster during the events of 1968, Tarchi was actually more affected by the killing in Kent State of four antiwar protesters by the United States’ National Guard in 1971. His old revolutionary worldview was evident during this period. Tarchi insists that while the revolutionary left and right differed on means, they still had the same passion for the absolute, the same refusal to compromise, the same rejection of traditional politics, the same hatred of the power of multinational corporations and the same utopian ambition to create a totally new and more just world (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 160). This revolutionary desire to merge the extreme poles of left and right continues to mould Tarchi’s worldview and would lead the ENR intellectuals to seek a synthesis with the remnants of the New Left in the 1990s. In a vein that was to guide the ENR’s own cultural project from the right, Tarchi expresses a degree of affinity for the New Left’s cultural impact on European societies. He argues that while the events of 1968 did not alter the strictly political realm in a profound manner, its effects on culture were more important and had a great impact on the collective, cultural mentality of the age that was “not always negative” (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 161). While Tarchi was not immediately affected by the events of May 1968, the revolt of the 1968ers made him more receptive to the angst of this generation, its main concerns and did not allow him to be seduced by what he viewed as the reign of bourgeois comfort. Thus, Tarchi began to appropriate some of the ideas of the New Left generation. Attacking what he considered the psychological conformism of an entire generation, Tarchi allowed himself to be “contaminated” by aspects of 1968, which best suited his subjective aspirations (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 161). Like the New Left, the example of 1968 led Tarchi to a critique of existing ideologies; to search for a model of a better world. Whereas the ENR insists that many of the 1968ers have abandoned this hope for a more humane world, Tarchi claims that he has not renounced this hope. Moreover, he argues that the ideals of the

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1968ers allowed him to abandon the sterile traditionalism of the past and a number of incapacitating myths that had been the lifeblood of the ultra-nationalist and neofascist milieux. In this respect, a reflection about the events of May 1968 drove Tarchi towards a more communitarian mode of thought, increased his ecological sensibility, and even modified his use of language (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 161). While Tarchi rejected the “infantile” traits of the 1968ers, he appears grateful to them because they sought to destroy the old world’s formalism, rigid moral order and its devotion for whatever constituted order (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 162) In addition, Tarchi supports the 1968ers for their rejection of the social and political orthodoxies of the day, particularly the Marxist-Leninist ideology. Without the events of 1968, Tarchi argues that the world would entail an even greater domination of the “worst” liberal and bourgeois values: individualism, the quantitative and materialist life, cultural, political, and mental homogenisation, utilitarianism and a general destruction of our quality of life (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 162). In a spirit that now guides the ENR’s search for a “novel” synthesis with the ideals of the New Left, Tarchi expresses a measure of generosity for the 1968 generation since they broke the traditional societal taboos of the past. Tarchi even goes further in his desire to seek a reconciliation between the ideals of the New Right and New Left: He insists that the ENR must re-read Frankfurt School theorists such as Adorno and Horkheimer and return to an examination of Marcuse’s notion of “one-dimensional man” (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 162). In a ringing endorsement of the New Right-New Left synthesis, Tarchi argues that 1968 gives him a hope that in the future all “heretical” cultures, or all those schools of thought that reject the tyranny of “la pensée unique,” (“hegemonic” or “totalitarian” thought) can join in defeating a world impregnated with a neoliberal, materialist ethic (Tarchi in GRECE 1998, 162). For Champetier, the youngest of the ENR figures, 1968 is important because it was the last time France and Europe experienced a generational revolt (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 166). Champetier captures the angst of his generation: They are the children of the crises of our age, whether political, economic, social, intellectual, moral or civilizational. Like most of the ENR figures, Champetier is revolted by the travesty of the 1968ers in terms of their betrayal of their own anti-materialist ideals; the petty search for petit bourgeois jobs and comfort. Champetier insists that the most utopian aspects of 1968 are dead and the new generation has seen the rapid acceleration of individualism, utilitarianism and the “law of money” (Chameptier in GRECE 1998, 168). In Champetier’s view, his world has seen the vulgar commodification of the 1968 personalities and ideals, including the mass marketing of Che Guevara t-shirts. In this scenario where even the mainstream appropriates the heroic revolutionaries, Champetier asks, how can our generation transgress the old boundaries like the 1968ers did in the past? Despite what Champetier envisioned as the hopes of the Situationists, he vehemently attacks the 1968ers by claiming, “the political contestation of the spectacle has become the spectacle of political contestation” (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 169). It is in the mass media and the world of advertisement, adds Champetier, that we find many of the 1968ers. For Champetier, the events of 1968 did not prevent, or perhaps even accelerated, the domination of our world by the trinity of the “megamachine” of the market, mass technology and the “circus” of consumption and the mass media. In today’s world

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completely devoid of the redeeming hope of the 1968ers for a better world, adds Champetier, today’s graffiti walls should read “Consume or disappear” rather than the 1968 slogan “Consume more, you will live less” (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 170). Like the ENR in general, Champetier attacks the general conformism of the left that still views the world in terms of an “unimaginative,” shrill and intolerant antifascism (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 171). Furthermore, like his ENR colleagues, Champetier indicts the “treason” of the 1968 generation; a New Left generation of the “converted” or “repentant”; a “caviar Left” that continues to make easy money; and a generation that once attacked the de-humanization of capitalism and the Vietnam war’s imperialist thrust, but has now converted to the neo-liberal positions of Reaganism and Thatcherism and support for the Western massacres of Iraqi civilians during and after the Gulf War (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 171). Champetier is especially critical of the lack of a critical perspective in both the cultural and political domains. The alleged domination of liberal and left-wing values obviously makes it difficult for the ENR to engage in a successful metapolitical project and prevents the arrival of the future revolutionary order longed for by its adherents. For Champetier, the old 1968ers now dominate the cultural landscape, and liberty of thought in France has never been more endangered than under the reign of this “Inquisition” generation. Champetier asserts that the 1968ers are the new “watchdogs” of the liberal capitalist system (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 169-72). These “watchdogs,” claims Champetier, use ideals such as cultural tolerance and relativism in order to mask a more profound closure of debate, while actual racism multiplies throughout Europe. This rejection of the left’s critical faculties, argues Champetier, led him to embrace the ideals of French nouvelle droite and to begin the project of the NDJ, the youth-wing of the New Right. For Champetier, the most redeeming features of 1968 are carried by today’s ENR. From Champetier’s perspective, the ENR’s creation in 1968 has led to real support for the ideals of the New Left generation: a deep liberty of thought; a rejection of capitalism and a negation of orthodox Marxism; and the attack on the “cadavers” of fascism and Nazism (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 169-72). In what appears to be an ambiguous love-hate relationship with the radicals of May 1968, Champetier ends his reflection on 1968 by insisting that on his right-wing side of the barricades “utopia is married to reality, the dream to action, and myth to reason” (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 172). Champetier is grateful to the 1968ers for providing the world with a utopia, a dream, a myth, an alternative world vision and a “higher” reality. Yet, he is simultaneously critical of the 1968ers for not marrying this search for a new, romantic order with the harsh realistic lessons of politics and life. In short, Champetier has married the left’s vision of “progress” with the right’s attachment to hierarchy and political realism; the voluntarist, mythopeic thrust of the revolutionary right with the radical search of the New Left for a better world; and the logos of the liberal worldview with the mythos of the revolutionary perspective. The implication is that, given the hindsight of experience, both the remnants of the New Left and the ENR can fight for a new, more revolutionary 1968 in the future. Mirroring the New Left’s own valorisation of creativity, autonomy and free expression and thought, Champetier contends that the future will be based on

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a combat for autonomy, diversity and beauty played out on all levels: the local, planetary, social, intellectual, political and religious (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 172-3). For Champetier, the future world will likely implode into a multitude of sovereign realms, thus destroying the “soft totalitarianism” of our current age. In a revolutionary perspective, Champetier explains that as modern thinking begins to deconstruct, the world it holds decomposes. In a revolutionary tone akin to both the revolutionary right of the past and the New Left 1968ers, Champetier argues that in the shadow of progress will germinate the revolts of the future (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 173) His taste for revolution is unambiguous; a revolution that will pay its special debt to both the old revolutionary right-wing fighters of the past as well as the New Left revolutionaries of the pre-1968 era: “We will spring the first flowers of this spring that will not just last a month, but an eternity” (Champetier in GRECE 1998, 173). The difference, of course, is that Champetier claims that the ENR’s future revolution, unlike the aborted one of the New Left in 1968, will be long-term, truly mythical and “eternal.” The Context of French, European and International Politics in 1968 May 1968 changed France. The failed revolution ended up revolutionizing society, and the French do not always realize it. – Laurent Joffrin, French journalist and writer

While it is clear that the members or sympathisers of GRECE and the nouvelle droite were deeply affected by the events of May 1968 and the revolutionary anticapitalist, anti-materialist ideals of the New Left, it is also important to understand the formation of GRECE in relation to the context of French politics in the period around 1968. What were the most salient features of the French political landscape of this epoch? How did this larger French political context influence the decision of former ultra-nationalist and neo-fascist militants to create the nouvelle droite? Finally, what was the main thrust of the events of May 1968 and how did it influence the French New Right? No historical event can be isolated from its social, cultural, economic and political contexts. This especially applies to the important events of May 1968 where both domestic and international factors contributed to a student revolt throughout Europe in 1967 and 1968. As Tarik Ali and Susan Watkin explain, the events of May 1968 had such a profound global impact that they even led to one inconspicuous success, namely, a generalized revolt that ousted the United States-backed military dictatorship in Pakistan led by Field-Marshal Ayub Khan (Ali and Watkin 1998). Yet, as John Gretton writes, “it is only in France that there occurred a gigantic social upheaval which at times took on the airs of a revolution and left many Frenchmen afterwards feeling that civil war had only been averted by a hair’s breadth” (Gretton 1969, 15). Moreover, as Arthur Hirsh contends, it is also in France that “the intellectual origins of New Left social theory are most obvious in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and others. And it is also in France that the clearest expression of the New Left occurred – the May 1968 upheaval” (Gretton 1969, “Preface”).

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Like the battle over Algeria, May 1968 divided French men and women into two hostile, antagonistic camps for and against the student and worker radicals. May 1968 represented the hopes and aspirations of an entire generation for a new, revolutionary and more spiritual social order. As the French writer J.-J. ServanSchreiber saw it, the “spirit of May” encompassed the “magnificent dreams of our young people and the constraining imperatives of economic development” (ServanSchreiber 1969, ix). Servan-Schreiber adds that May 1968 embodied the authentic search for “an original model of industrial society that would be more human than the models being offered us and eventually will be imposed upon us” (ServanSchreiber 1969, 18). May 1968, insists Servan-Schreiber, was not “a movement primarily designed to win material benefits” (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 29). Or, as Hirsh claims, 1968 represented not simply a material phenomenon, but a cultural and civilizational clash against industrial society and material “progress” as well as “something perhaps intangible” (Hirsh 1981, 42). Most of all, Hirsh argues that since the “new working class” (Andre Gorz) no longer had starvation wages and was shielded by the welfare state, 1968 was really a strike against traditional politics. It was an attack against the alienation and boredom of mass, industrial societies as well as against the rigid, bureaucratic chain and command of power and authority. It was a rejection of the lack of delegating authority and democratic discussions. It was a revolt against the alienation of modern, mass consumption and what the Situationists saw as the “totalitarian management” of society which conditions and manipulates individuals to seek fulfilment in material consumption and “spectacle” rather than creativity, authenticity, autonomy or the quality of life (Hirsh 1981, 142-6). Whether one agrees or disagrees with Servan-Schreiber’s or Hirsh’s analyses of the events of May 1968, it is clear that the events of May and June 1968 mark “the turning point in the history of the Fifth Republic, so much so that during the next decade France would undergo a process of irreversible change that constitutes a watershed in modern French history” (Cornick in Hughes and Reader 1998, 364) Opinion polls consistently demonstrate that it is the events of May 1968 that are the most frequently recalled by the French in the post-World War Two era. Given the importance of the events of May 1968 within France and Europe in general, the nouvelle droite found that it was a cultural and political necessity to integrate the ideals of the 1968ers into their new ideological synthesis. The events of May 1968 were paradoxical in nature. On the one hand, no one could foresee the sheer magnitude of the crisis and, on the other hand, the events of May 1968 are usually said to constitute a “failed” or a “non-revolution” which ended up transforming both France and its peoples in a fundamental way. Interpretations of May 1968 are often blinded by political, partisan allegiances, but one thing is certain: “After May 1968, France would not be the same again” (Cornick in Hughes and Reader 1998, 364). For the New Left, the hopes for radical social transformation were dashed and they were not able to “formulate viable conceptions of how such a transformation could take place” (Hirsh 1981, 6). The French New Right now insists that it alone continues to carry the flame in the name of the failed 1968 revolution and the ideals of the New Left. Whereas the ENR saw the aborted May 1968 revolution as a politically manipulated fiasco, it longs for an allegedly more pure and mythical May 1968 revolution in the future.

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Robert Gildea claims that the events of May 1968 “may be considered France’s last great revolution” (Gildea 1996, 1). Yet, it is probably incorrect to view the events of May 1968 as a revolution in the traditional political sense of the term. In the first place, the so-called “revolution” of 1968 was likely more a “revolution” in terms of changes in social consciousness, habits, ways of thinking and lifestyles. In the second place, the French regime was “neither overturned nor replaced – if anything, in the immediate turn, it was reinforced” (Cornick in Hughes and Reader 1998, 368). In short, many scholars have argued that the revolutionary dimension of May 1968 lies in its “long-term” impact on contemporary French and European attitudes, values, cultural trends and the importance of youth culture, music, drugs and fashion. The “long-term” consequences of 1968 were also discernible in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of the development of “progressive” working practices, left-wing politics, feminism, ecology, decentralization and movements of regional autonomy or separatism. As Laurent Joffrin succinctly writes, “May 1968 changed France. The failed revolution ended up revolutionizing society, and the French do not always realize it” (Joffrin in Cornick 1998, 368). It was this long-term impact of the 1968ers on the European cultural and political landscapes that especially fascinated de Benoist and other ENR intellectuals. Like the 1968ers, the French New Right wished to operate a long-term transformation of values in order to prepare the groundwork for the emergence of an elitist, revolutionary and post-liberal social order in the future. The lesson that the French New Right would learn from the 1968 generation was that a long-term change of societal values required plenty of patience, but was ultimately the most fruitful route in the quest for a revolutionary, post-liberal order. So, for example, the 1968 revolution in values had already begun in the 1950s with the rise of the “beat” generation and later the emergence of the hippie movement in the 1960s in both the United States and Europe. A large minority of bourgeois youth began to abandon many conventional norms and adopted a number of values diametrically opposed to the dominant, materialistic ethos of Western culture. It was this “counter-culture” that suddenly emerged at the university campus at Berkeley, California in 1964 to challenge the relationship of the school to the military-industrial complex as well as question the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War. This “counter-culture” created greater support for the civil rights struggle and rejected the hegemonic values of the capitalist, consumer society. Its adherents searched for the creation of a new libertarian order where both the powers of the state and multinational corporations would be weakened by more decentralized, communal forms of solidarity. These libertarian, socialist and anarchist ideals would then spread throughout Europe and around the globe: the Free University of Berlin’s student protests in 1965 to mark the twentieth anniversary of the end of Hitlerian Nazism; various European-wide student protests in 1967 and 1968; the Czech Prague Spring of 1968; the student and worker revolts in France between May and June 1968; and the world-wide student and worker denunciations of American “imperialism,” proThird World solidarity and support for radical independence movements. While few could anticipate the scale of the revolt in France from May-June 1968, there were warning signs that academics had spoken about for a period of time well before the actual events. In this regard, the French sociologist Michel Crozier has

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said that the France of the period was essentially a “stalemate society” that was stuck in the outmoded hierarchical, quasi-authoritarian institutional structures that typified Gaullist France (Crozier 1975). In this type of society, students and workers were completely abandoned in the democratic consultation process and individual autonomy and expression were clearly lacking. Traditional values and institutions, state bureaucratic, business and political elites and the quasi-mystical President Charles de Gaulle exclusively decided the fate of the French nation. In a sense, the French New Right was also revolting against this “stalemate society,” the traditional ideologies of the period and the sterility of right-wing ideologies. French society was especially centralized and regimented as a result of its liberal, universal Jacobin model inherited from the French Revolution and heavy bureaucratic framework imposed by the state on its various regions, cultures and civil society in general. As John Gretton clearly writes, “The trouble started with the French Revolution and the idea that there should be no intermediary between the citizen and the state” (Gretton 1969, 155). While the French New Left, would reject this highly centralist Jacobin model, it was the French New Right that would later follow the lead and also critique the homogenizing, assimilationist and ethnocentric orientation of the nation-state and the nationalist project. While the FN and Le Pen continue to support this ultranationalist, Jacobin model of political integration, the French New Right appears closer to the New Left in terms of its support for a plurality of decentralized, federal communities within a pan-European framework. The intellectual trends anticipating the events of 1968 were also built between the late 1940s and 1960s. From this fact, the French New Right took heart for its own patient, oblique metapolitical strategy. In this respect, the leftist critique of Marxism especially contributed to the ideals of the New Left and the student radicals in 1968. Three such critiques are especially conspicuous: Sartre’s existentialist critique of a lack of Marxist subjectivity; Henri Lefebvre’s French “revisionism” of Marxism that sought to account for contemporary changes in social structure and the critique of the alienating nature of everyday life; and the gauchiste critique of Cornelius Castoriadis, which insisted that Marxism had lost its revolutionary status and transformed itself into a bureaucratic ideology (Hirsh 1981, “Preface”). Already in October 1966, the International Situationist group (influenced by Debord and Lefebvre) had put out its pamphlet in Strasbourg, which analyzed student and worker alienation, modern consumer culture and called for the overthrow of capitalist, communist and industrial societies by stressing “real life,” creativity, play and the disruption of the typical bourgeois rhythms of life (Hirsh 1981, 144-5). They would be credited with most of the wall writings of May 1968 against consumer society and the banality of everyday life: “Demand the impossible” or “Consumer society must die a violent death. Alienated society must die a violent death. We want a new and original world. We reject a world where security against starvation is brought for the risk of death by boredom.” Or, another slogan was “power to the imagination.” Thus, in the eyes of the ENR intellectuals, an intellectual and cultural revolt against the dominant values and attitudes of the age was a vital precondition for the explosion of May 1968. In essence, May 1968 was also a protest against the authoritarian, hierarchical character of Gaullism, a mixture of historical Bonapartism and Orleanism. John Gretton goes so far as to claim that “there is something inherently totalitarian about

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Gaullism” (Gretton 1969, 239). While this claim seems to be a wild exaggeration for the decorated leader of the French Resistance during World War Two, it does express the deep antipathy that the 1968ers felt for the hierarchical, suffocating leadership of de Gaulle. For a brief moment during what Hirsh called the “New Left apocalypse” in May-June 1968 the student radicals superseded the Gaullist leadership and “tasted life beyond alienation” (Hirsh 1981, 139-42). While de Gaulle often displayed a master stroke of political intuition as with his support for the ideas of Algerian decolonization and belief in an independent defence policy for both France and Europe (i.e., free of its dependency on the United States), the generation of May 1968 called for greater dialogue with his regime, a sharing of political responsibility, more democratization reforms within the state and a general redistribution of political and economic power (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 144). For Servan-Schreiber, “the essence of Gaullism is monologue and what is condemned by the spirit of May is the idea that modern society can be governed by monologue” (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 144). While the French New Right has a measure of admiration for the charismatic, independent-minded leadership of de Gaulle, there is a fundamental chasm between the Gaullists who remain loyal to the institutions of the Fifth Republic and the revolutionary right, which displays total disdain towards those liberal institutions and values. The ENR sees itself as supporting a number of the Gaullists’ old domestic and foreign policies, but criticizes the modern-day Gaullists for their proliberal, pro-capitalist and anti-revolutionary orientation. Certain elements of the revolutionary right also cannot forgive de Gaulle for abandoning French Algeria, but the ENR today supports the idea of self-determination for Algeria and all other national, cultural and regional communities around the world. Until the student explosion of rage in May 1968, “French society was strikingly resistant to change” (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 22). May 1968 saw the collision between a rigid social and political order and accelerating technological, scientific and intellectual transformations (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 21). The May 1968ers attacked the unlimited notions of materialist progress, while they began to seriously attack the power and authority of the old social and political order. In the face of such vast societal changes, the 1968 generation questioned all forms of authority since they did not want to be impotent subjects driven by impersonal social, economic and historical forces in what they considered a harsh, inhumane, conservative and inorganic society (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 31). The old castes and class barriers were falling rapidly and the 1968ers searched for a new collective consensus based on multiple centres of power, more local structures of decision-making and a general turn towards democratization and the redistribution of traditional power relations. It is for these aforementioned reasons that the student radicals attacked “barbaric patriotic wars” based on the “absolute respect for death by command” (Servan-Schreiber 1969, 74). The old order of things based on the hierarchical society, command and obedience gave way to new experiments with decentralized modes of thought and institutions. The new industrial society, feared the 1968ers, would corrupt human relations and endanger the creation of more democratic social institutions. The hallmarks of the 1968 generation, then, were a desire for self-determination and personal autonomy, freedom from physical oppression and social restraint

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and the rejection of state and private sector oppression and authority. May 1968 called for the involvement of all social elements in the social and political decisionmaking process of the nation. The 1968ers expressed deep disillusionment with liberal capitalist societies and attempted to humanize our dominant materialist, technological civilization. They questioned Jacobin centralism and the myth of the Gaullist “One and Indivisible Republic” by attempting to build localized, regional forms of communal solidarity. They questioned all political parties, including the Communist Party, which feared the project of the 1968ers and did not embrace them. They paved the way for the explosion of a new range of social issues from feminism and regionalism to ecology and multiculturalism. If one examines the worldview of the contemporary ENR intellectuals, its thinkers have co-opted mostly all of these New Left ideals save its rejection of what it considers the “homogenizing” logic of the Westernized multicultural, multiracial society. In its idiosyncratic rejection of multiculturalism, the ENR remains indebted to the anti-egalitarian revolutionary right-wing milieu. As the 1968 generation was radically questioning the dominant values of French society and its institutions, the nouvelle droite was also undergoing its own kind of May 1968, but based on the re-evaluation of the entire culture of the right. France and the world were rapidly changing, thus necessitating an examination of the basic ideas of the right that were already politically battered by the weight of recent historical experiences. To cite one such example, nationalism, the very raison d’être and lifeblood of the French right, was undergoing transformation as the French nation was threatened from above by the growing influence of multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, the United Nations and the supranational orientation of the European Common Market. Nationalism was also now threatened from below by the demands of the 1968 generation for an abolition of Jacobin centralism and the vindication of regional and local communities. Therefore, the French New Right adapted itself to the changing times by calling for a common, united Europe within the pluralistic context of a “Europe of a Hundred Flags.” Like the anti-liberal, revolutionary “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s (Loubet del Bayle 1969), the contemporary French New Right was deeply affected by the ideals and changing fortunes of the left. Like the “non-conformists,” the French New Right claimed to unite and synthesize the most positive and redeeming features of both left and right. Did not the fascists or national socialists make the same claim? The ENR also insisted that the revolutionary right and left should cease their internecine wars that ultimately benefited the liberal capitalist system. Instead, the French nouvelle droite argued that the New Right and New Left must collectively combat the upholders of mainstream liberal democracy and global capitalism since they were committing cultural “ethnocide” on a vast planetary scale. In short, the New Right remained deeply indebted to the events of May 1968 and the legacy of the New Left. By the late 1980s and 1990s, the main ENR intellectuals had become impregnated with a decidedly New Left-like critique of liberal democracy, capitalist modernity and Western notions of “progress.” This leftist orientation was clearly apparent in ENR journals such as Krisis in France, as well as the publication of ENR authors in Telos, the American critical theory journal. From the May 1968ers, the ENR gained an appreciation for a number of ideas from federalism and regionalism to

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ecology and feminism. With the May 1968ers, the ENR shared an anti-capitalist, revolutionary ethos as well as a fascination with the cultural terrain of political contestation. The ENR contends that it was the 1968ers that would go on to dominate France’s “laboratories of thought.” In the 1970s, the ENR insisted that it was its turn to re-capture the cultural terrain from the 1968ers. In order to accomplish this task, it recognized that political formations must adapt to changing social, economic and political circumstances. As a result, its major theorists have co-opted a number of New Left influences and themes. Like the New Left and 1968ers, the ENR desires the erection of a new post-liberal social order. 1968 was one of the French New Right’s and ENR’s critical turning points in terms of both its intellectual and political trajectories. I now turn towards an examination of the ENR’s major intellectual influences as well as its basic worldview.

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Chapter 5

ENR Influences and Worldview: The Primacy of Metapolitics and the “Right to Difference” I have never been the disciple of just one man. Rather my way of thinking is built on a systematic study of great many different authors. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

When de Benoist made his opening to the left in the 1980s, some on the right thought he had lost his mind. Almost a century before Mussolini scandalised the Italian left with his switch to pro-war leftism: From 1912 to 1914, Mussolini was the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary… The First World War began in August 1914 without Italian involvement. Should Italy join Britain and France against Germany and Austria, or stay out of the war? All the top leaders and intellectuals of the Socialist Party, Mussolini among them, were opposed to Italian participation. In October and November 1914, Mussolini switched to a pro-war position. He resigned as editor of Avanti!, joined with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist Party, and launched a new pro-war socialist paper, Il Popolo d’Italia (People of Italy). To the Socialist Party leadership, this was a great betrayal, a sell-out to the whoremasters of the bourgeoisie, and Mussolini was expelled from the Party. It was as scandalous as though, 50 years later, Guevara had announced that he was off to Vietnam, to help defend the South against North Vietnamese aggression. (Ramsay Steele 29 January 2002)

Mussolini was beginning to create a fascist synthesis between disgruntled leftists, syndicalists, ultra-nationalists and war veterans. Is de Benoist creating a post-fascist synthesis or merely reinventing fascism in new forms? This chapter seeks to assist in the answer to this question by highlighting the major influences and fundamental worldview of ENR intellectuals. I begin with a general overview of the ENR’s ideals and influences. This will be followed by an examination of the ENR’s metapolitical orientation and an appraisal of the ENR’s valorisation of the “right to difference.” I conclude the chapter with an examination of the type of world the ENR intellectuals fear and how these fears were reflected in the works of a number of diverse cultural critics in the past.

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In this chapter, I will attempt to demonstrate that the writings of the ENR’s principal theoreticians, whether Alain de Benoist of France, Marco Tarchi of Italy, Pierre Krebs of Germany, or Michael Walker of England, reveal two constant themes from the nouvelle droite’s birth in 1968 until the contemporary period: The stress on the cultural or metapolitical realm as the most fundamental terrain of political contestation and the incessant valorisation of the “right to difference” of communities and individuals. It is this support for the “right to difference” that saw some ENR critics accusing it of “fascism with a human face.” In spite of variations across time within ENR thought, these two principles have generally remained sacrosanct for all its major thinkers for nearly forty years. Stressing the ENR’s heterogeneity, Pierre-André Taguieff has listed three ideological traditions within GRECE (i.e., traditional counter-revolutionaries, Europeanist conservative revolutionaries and neo-conservatives of a neo-liberal orientation), each of which, in turn, are divided into “schools of thought” or intellectual orientations, and four doctrinal phases taking the organization from a focus on “difference” between races in the 1960s to biology in the 1970s, and finally culture in the 1980s and 1990s (Taguieff 1993-4a, 99-125). However, two recurring ENR themes, metapolitical struggle and the idea that cultural “difference” enhances the richness, diversity and beauty of the world, continue to structure the ENR’s worldview in the new millennium. In fact, these two ENR constants are inextricably linked because, as the ENR contends, cultural metapolitics acts as the principal form of political action in order to displace liberal democracy and restore cultural diversity and pluralism to the world. The ENR’s appropriation of the Gramscian terrain of “cultural war” as the fundamental avenue towards revolutionary political change is intended to shatter what it sees as the intellectual hegemony of both the Old Right and Old Left. For the ENR, the sterile Manicheanism between Old Right and Old Left could possibly be replaced by a New Right-New Left political synthesis for the new millennium (De Herte 1979, 348-50). In the process, the ENR seeks to prepare the cultural groundwork for the triumph of a new, revolutionary cultural elite in a post-liberal order. The ENR vehemently criticizes the Old Right for its lack of theoretical sophistication, its neglect of the vital cultural realm and its obsessions with capturing power. Old Right tactics, whether violent street politics of a neo-fascist or neo-Nazi persuasion, the so-called “strategy of tension,” or parliamentary politics, are viewed by the ENR as thoroughly outmoded and incapable of radically transforming mentalities and Europe’s zeitgeist. For the ENR, this cultural transformation of mentalities is more critical to the maintenance of a long-term, revolutionary society than the combined “hard” powers of the army, police, intelligence services, or any other “repressive” arm of the state apparatus. While the ENR offers an internal critique of the Old Right, in Vu de droite its leader launches a scathing indictment of Old Left Marxism, liberalism and what he views as their combined dogmatic cultural hegemony over Europe’s cultural milieu (De Benoist 1979b, 26). Although the ENR wages a “cultural battle” against the combined forces of liberal, Old Left and Old Right intellectual elites, it praises some elements of the New Left and the 1968ers as potential allies of the future as well as certain leftists, such as Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara and Régis Debray. The latter leftists are

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praised because, like the ENR theorists, they allegedly remained eternally faithful to the flickering flame of their ideals all their lives. The ENR has a fair measure of envy for the left in general, what it considers as the left’s fundamental understanding of the primary importance of the cultural realm as the ultimate threat to state power and the left’s apparent ability to dominate the cultural landscape of post-World War Two and especially post-1968 West European societies. The aforementioned “eternal” leftists are also highly esteemed models of emulation for former revolutionary rightwing activists now under the ENR banner attempting to stay loyal to what they claim are their own sacred ideals. These ideals, especially the martial virtues of heroism, honour and courage against the commercial ethic of liberal capitalism, are already neatly spelled out in Alain de Benoist’s earliest works, such as Le courage est leur patrie (1965), Les Indo-Européens (1966) and Rhodésie, terre des lions fidèles (1967) (De Benoist 1965; 1966; 1967). They find their greatest expression in de Benoist’s classic text Vu de droite (1977). In L’empire intérieur De Benoist invokes a strong attachment to the proud ethic of chivalry and honour espoused during the Hundred Years War by the French horseman Louis d’Estouteville: “Where honour is, where loyalty is, there lies my country” (De Benoist 1996b). Under the influence of a sort of Nietzschean nominalism, the ENR uses the metapolitical terrain in order to uncover what they consider the roots of Europe’s finde-siècle malaise. In Les idées à l’endroit, de Benoist and the ENR locate these roots in the universal imposition on diverse societies of a vulgar egalitarian, reductionist and assimilationist Judeo-Christian monotheism (viewed as a form of “racism” and “totalitarianism” for its belief in a single truth) and its various secular, materialistic offshoots, such as liberalism, social democracy and socialism (De Benoist 1979a, 145-94). In contrast to the polytheistic pluralism of ancient Indo-European societies, the latter three ideologies are seen as pseudo-universalist and “ethnocidal,” or working to suffocate the “cause of peoples.” Furthermore, they are viewed as the carriers of an inorganic, foreign, “abstract,” and intolerant “religion” called “human rights,” which is viewed as devoid of political duty and citizen participation (De Benoist 1982b; Hunke, 1985). In a 2004 issue of Eléments, de Benoist praised the “real” populism of the English Luddites, Russian populists, revolutionary syndicalists and French socialists (De Herte 2004). In La cause des peuples, ENR leader de Benoist even dubbed the Judeo-Christian tradition as the “Bolshevism of Antiquity” (De Benoist 1982a,167-84). In contrast, the ENR has called for the revival of Europe’s pre-Christian and pagan roots in ancient Greece and the return of the old IndoEuropean deities of Celtic, Germanic and Scandinavian ancestry. De Benoist has devoted several works to his anti-Christian, pagan ideals such as Comment peut-on être païen? (1980), L’éclipse du sacré (1986) and L’empire intérieur (1996). Borrowing from the works of conservative revolutionary thinkers and the French Indo-Europeanist Georges Dumézil, the ENR has called for the rejuvenation of ancient, organic and hierarchical European societies where diversity reigned and the political-military and spiritual functions were supposedly sovereign, or free of “contamination” from the economic realm. The ENR laments the current age of liberal European societies because they argue that a myopic and jungle-like global capitalism dictated only by the reign of profits has obscured the old “tripartite” (i.e., sovereign political, war and production functions) destiny of Europeans and

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has insidiously penetrated the considerations of once separate entities such as the political-military or spiritual-philosophical domains. For the ENR, the vulgar economic realm must be naturally subordinated to the Schmittian-like “decisionism” of the political and military realms. In addition, in Les idées à l’endroit de Benoist argued that Europe had the duty to remain true to its philosophical roots by politically and spiritually challenging the globalist and homogenising tendencies of the two materialist superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union, during the Cold War era (De Benoist 1979a, 263-82). In the post-1989 era, the ENR increasingly turned its venom to the remaining world superpower, the United States, seen as the ultimate embodiment of the most homogenising, demonic and profit-hungry machine in world history (Gotffried 1993-4, 127-34). GRECE’s annual colloquium in 1991 was fittingly “Danger: United States” (Taguieff 1993-4c, 159). In 2003, after the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq, in an Eléments piece de Benoist lamented at what he viewed the outlaw, unilateral and hegemonic regime of the United States (De Benoist 2003).The ENR’s stance in the post-communist era was to support all sorts of pro-Third World and anti-American alliances, including flirtations with Islamic traditionalists and the Russian New Right. In 2006, de Benoist gave two interviews to Radio Tehran in Iran, an Islamic republic that challenged the United States, the West and Israel by seeking to acquire nuclear weapons. In 2005, de Benoist insisted that what key political authorities in Washington feared most was a Paris-Berlin-Moscow alliance. For the ENR, the ultimate goal of these informal alliances was to restore plurality to world politics through reviving a plethora of world cultural communities adamantly opposed to liberal capitalism and the United States. With the NATO-led war in Kosovo in 1999, the ENR’s anti-Americanism had reached fever pitch. An ENR anti-war petition led by Laurent Ozon, director of Nouvelle écologie, the ecology branch of GRECE (which is closely connected to the FN), made it clear that the United States was enemy number one (Krebbers 1999). The ENR saw NATO merely an instrument of United States’ imperialism, while neo-American military colonialism also came with a more insidious cultural and economic variant of imperialism. As one erudite critic noted about the ENR’s antiwar petition that was able to attract notable personalities on the left, Not a word in the petition is spent on European imperialism. Nationalism, so abundant in the post-Yugoslavian wars, is not seen as a problem by the committee. On the contrary, they themselves argue solely using nationalist concepts. The petition does not incorporate anti-racism, feminism and workers’ struggle, as would be the case in a genuinely leftwing analysis. The whole of the European New Right signed Ozon’s petition, but also many prominent left-wing intellectuals like the British playwrights Harold Pinter and film director Ken Loach (“Land and Freedom”). On the list are also communists, anarchists and greens. Some didn’t know about the origins of the petition and immediately withdrew their signature once they heard. But others didn’t mind. Worse, they seemed to agree with the extreme-right analysis offered in the petition. (Krebbers 1999)

Besides the ENR’s right-wing conservative revolutionary influences, the New Left and Antonio Gramsci, the ENR has enlisted an eclectic array of political references, philosophical influences and authors for its metapolitical “war” against

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the primary enemies of liberalism and global capitalism. This has allowed the ENR to claim that it was attempting to search for a new synthesis between right and left while transcending its revolutionary right-wing or neo-fascist roots. Stressing Arthur Koestler’s arguments against any sort of intellectual reductionism and claiming in Telos that the “French New Right has never been committed to any kind of dogmatic catechism, but was a real intellectual effort with no preconceived ideas” (De Benoist 1993-4a, 191), Alain de Benoist’s lengthy career has included a diverse set of philosophical and political influences in his metapolitical “war” against the dominant ideologies of the age. De Benoist’s wide range of influences include the following: the Prussian military specialist Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831), the nineteenth century French thinkers Arthur de Gobineau, Alexis de Tocqueville and Ernest Renan, the towering influence of Friedrich Nietzsche, the conservative revolutionary thinkers, the Italian revolutionary syndicalists, the “non-conformists” of the inter-war era, French socialists such as Georges Sorel and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, neo-Machiavellians such as Vilfredo Pareto and Gustave Le Bon, the Marxists thinkers Vladimir Lenin, Mao and Antonio Gramsci, New Left writers like Herbert Marcuse, Louis Althusser, Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer, the post-war radical right’s guru Julius Evola, pro-Third World anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, the ecological, regionalist and feminist movements, federalism, paganism, scientism and biology, contemporary anti-utilitarians, French postmodernism and the contemporary North American communitarians. This long list of influences reveals a unique synthesis between the older revolutionary right-wing legacy and newer New Left traditions. The ENR’s wide range of influences gives it an air of intellectual openness and tolerance. This combines well with the ENR’s conception of history as highlighted by de Benoist in Les idées à l’endroit. In this work, de Benoist espouses a nonlinear view of history as chaos where all received dogmas are open to question and investigation; the future is written nowhere; man is always a malleable being; and a perpetual creator of his destiny (De Benoist 1979a, 31-48). In a 1997 interview with the self-described “politically incorrect” and “patriotic” British magazine Right Now!, Alain de Benoist added to his extensive set of eclectic influences when he highlighted his major philosophical influences: I have never been the disciple of just one man. Rather my way of thinking is built on a systematic study of great many different authors. It would be difficult to say which have influenced me the most. At a philosophical level, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, but also the great theoreticians of philosophical anthropology, Arnold Gehlen and Helmut Plessner, have been the principal influences upon me. At an epistemological level, authors who have attacked scientific reductionism have influenced me above all others. I am thinking in particular of Arthur Koestler, whom I had the good fortune to meet in London many times before his death, but also of Ludwig Bertalanffy and Stephane Lupasco. I am also greatly indebted to the sociologists of the German school (Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Max Weber, Werner Sombart) and to those of the French school from Marcel Mauss to Louis Dumont, Edgar Morin and Michel Maffesoli. With regard to the study of religious myths, I would mention Walter F. Otto, Mircea Eliade, Carl Gustav Jung, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Gilbert Durand, David Miller, etc. As for political doctrine, I would begin with the work of Johann Gottfried Herder

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? and the German Romantics, as well as the French socialists, chiefly Georges Sorel and PJ Proudhon. I would continue with the “non-conformists” of the thirties (Alexandre Marc, Thierry Maulnier, Bernard Charbonneau, Georges Battaille), the Italian revolutionary syndicalists, certain German conservative revolutionary authors (Moeller van den Bruck, Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger) down to the “situationists” of the 1960s (Guy Debord) and the “post-modernists” of the 1970s. In recent times, I attach the greatest importance to the anti-utilitarian school (Alain Caille, Serge Latouche), who carry on and bring up to date the ground breaking work of Marcel Mauss and Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation), as well as the innovative views of the North American neo-populist theoreticians such as Christopher Lasch, or the communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor and Michael Sandel. (De Benoist 1997, 2)

The Consistent Metapolitical Thread: A Break with the Old Right? What we must do today is illuminate the fundamental novelty of the New Right, to put the emphasis on the ‘new’ and no longer on the term ‘Right’. – Marco Tarchi, political science professor and ENR theorist

From the ENR’s beginnings with the foundation of French think tank GRECE in 1968, ENR thinkers have consistently repeated their primary commitment to the cultural realm and metapolitical “combat” against the dominant egalitarian ideologies of post-World War Two Europe, namely, liberal democracy and socialism. For the ENR, metapolitics simply denotes the Gramscian idea that the social consensus created within the cultural world conditions the political realm. A basic aim of the ENR’s metapolitical struggle was to restore respectability to a revolutionary rightwing heritage battered by its twentieth century history. In short, the ENR used the more sophisticated terrain of “cultural war” and an eclectic array of post-modern influences in order to revive a part of this revolutionary right-wing heritage, although officially distancing itself from its most horrendous historical manifestations. A number of analysts claimed that the ENR would ultimately create a more ominous form of fascism because its principal theorists harboured “proto-fascist” tendencies, while simultaneously denying these allegations. In the process, they claimed the ENR had resurrected a new form of “ideal-type” fascism, which now breathed life under new names and innocent disguises (Griffin 1995, 8-9). If this claim was correct, then how was anti-fascism to survive and fight against “proto-fascists” that refused to proudly display the fascist banner? The ENR denied these charges of fascism and argued that the exclusive focus on the metapolitical terrain was a danger for the left because it represented an intelligent break with the theoretical “stupidity,” violent recklessness and addiction to nearly extinct dinosaur-like, lost causes of the Old Right (Pauwels L’Aurore 6 July 1979). The ENR argued that the main thrust of its long-term metapolitical combat was the creation of a new political paradigm, likely with sectors of the New Left, as well as the creation of a novel political synthesis that was well-divorced from the stifling sterility of the Old Right and fascism. Louis Pauwels, the former editor of Figaro Magazine and an ENR sympathiser, took his distance from the Old Right when he explained in a 1979 France-Soir article that “my positions are those of what we can

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call the ‘new right’ and which have nothing to do with the bourgeois, conservative, and reactionary right” (Pauwels 29 March 1979). In a similar vein, Michael Walker, the editor of the English ENR journal The Scorpion, made this scathing indictment of the Old Right: The baggage of the old right, were it the nationalist right, the Nazi right, the Christian right, the imperialist right, the liberal right, with its simplistic slick solutions to the issues of the day, left young people profoundly unsatisfied. The far right, shrill, monotonous and wholly predictable was an insult to the intelligence. (Walker 1986b, 8)

Marco Tarchi, an Italian New Right ideologue, called for a stress on the novelty of the “New Right” in order to revive the right’s battered credibility and transcend the ideas of the “Old Right”: What we must do today is illuminate the fundamental novelty of the New Right, to put the emphasis on the ‘new’ and no longer on the term ‘Right’. Otherwise we will still be clinging to the heritage of the decrepit and worm-eaten currents of thought of the 1950s and 1960s which, in the face of all opposition, are still churning out the same old slogans with their whole perception of reality built around bygone political divisions. The desire to restore chauvinistic nationalisms is part of this archaic way of thinking…It is up to us, to our generation, to definitively surpass these outworn ideas. (Tarchi 1991-2, 23)

De Benoist, the doyen of the ENR, has rejected the French historian René Rémond’s classification of the French right into three categories: a revolutionary right with roots in the ultras of the Restoration period, an Orleanist, liberal right and a nationalist, Bonapartist right. For de Benoist, Rémond’s traditional categorization of the different right-wing currents in France fails to account for the novelty of the ENR itself. As de Benoist writes, “I do not identify with any of René Rémond’s ‘rights’” (De Benoist in Brunn 1979, 188). In a 1985 interview, de Benoist said that he belonged to a right which was “neither traditionalist, neither fascist, neither Christian” (De Benoist 1985b). By de Benoist’s own admission he is on the right, but it is not a Catholic, fascist or Nazi right. Could it be a right co-opted or crushed by the political rulers of Italian Fascism, German Nazism or Vichy France, which is less populist, more elitist and revolutionary? Did not Ernst Jünger nourish ideas that helped Nazism flourish, while he privately lamented the persecution of Jews and still remained a detached observer? Or, is de Benoist’s “New Right” in reality divorced from fascism? Meanwhile, de Benoist lamented the confusing polemical storm surrounding ENR ideas and called for a new, “authentic” political paradigm. In a 1997 interview with Right Now!, De Benoist explains that he has never been satisfied with the term “New Right” because his basic project is devoted to the cultural realm, the ENR transcends traditional right-left political divisions and it should not be confused with the pro-capitalist American New Right: First, the name smacks of politics, while the New Right is in no sense a political movement, but a current of thought and cultural action, whose only activity in nearly thirty years of existence has been to publish books and magazines, to co-ordinate theoretical, intellectual and philosophical work, to organize conferences and debates, etc. Furthermore, while

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? the term “right-wing” does not shock me, it does seem inappropriate to me to describe a school of thought which has from the beginning sought to rise above obsolete divisions. There have always been many Rights, just as there have always been many Lefts, and some of these Rights may have things in common with some of these Lefts. This term can, finally, lead to confusion with the American New Right, a political tendency with which the French New Right feels that it has nothing in common. (De Benoist 1997, 8-9)

Traditional Politics of the “Masses” Versus the Metapolitics of the “Philosopoher Kings” I might add that, like Herder, I believe firmly that the history of ideas is the key to the history of deeds. – Alain de Benoist, ENR doyen

For de Benoist, political parties and street protest represented traditional, outdated modes of political confrontation and are implicitly associated with the “vulgarity” and ephemeral fixations of the masses. In de Benoist’s view, metapolitics is the most intelligent and evolved form of political “combat.” From his perspective, metapolitics did not entail an apolitical or anti-political orientation, but the most cerebral and advanced form of politics. Metapolitics was the preserve of an intellectual elite, which GRECE and other ENR think tanks sought to cultivate and mould. Moreover, de Benoist argued that cultural metapolitics was the most revolutionary force in the movement of history. In short, de Benoist argued that it was ideas, which moved the actions of the world and shaped its history. De Benoist reiterated this position as late as 1997: I might add that, like Herder, I believe firmly that the history of ideas is the key to the history of deeds. The great changes in the history of mankind are above all those that have affected our intellectual life. Aristotle’s revolution, Copernicus’ revolution and Kant’s revolution were without doubt more important than the French Revolution of 1789 or the Russian Revolution of 1917, which were no more than the continuations of previous ideological transformations. (De Benoist 1997, 3)

De Benoist’s disdain for traditional politics and faith in the importance of ideas as the key to the movement of history remained unwavering in the 1990s. De Benoist showed his continuing commitment to a patient, long-term metapolitical struggle in a 1994 interview with Telos: First of all, what can a political party do? Obviously, not a lot. None of the major changes during the last century have been brought about by party activities or by government policies. There are always people who claimed that theories are useless, only political forces are acceptable. However, these people forget that theories set powers in motion (often unnoticed). What, then, can a think tank do? It can contribute to the development of ideas and wait for their impact. (De Benoist 1993-4a, 182-3)

As mentioned earlier, GRECE’s first annual seminar in 1968 was entitled “What is Metapolitics?” and its 16th in 1981 was “For a Right-Wing Gramscianism.” In

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late 1977, GRECE looked towards a rejuvenated, post-liberal age when it published its tenth anniversary collection of metapolitical essays and cultural influences Dix ans de combat culturel pour une renaissance (Vial 1979). In the 1970s, de Benoist had begun his elaboration of the cultural ideas of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, which he transmitted to GRECE and the ENR in general. In several of his texts in the period, including Vu de droite and Les idées à l’endroit, de Benoist pays tribute to the Italian Marxist with several essays (De Benoist 1979b, 456-60; 1979a, 250-9). Following Gramsci, de Benoist gives intellectuals a precise role in history: To win the “cultural war” and make the masses accept its conception of the world as self-evident and natural. Acting as the vanguard of what Gramsci called “organic intellectuals,” the ENR intellectuals sought to displace the “hegemonic” ideological control of “traditional intellectuals,” or the liberal and leftist intellectual establishment. The ENR intellectuals attempted to alter the dominant egalitarian and materialistic spirit of the age. De Benoist was confident about the metapolitical route he had chosen, like Gramsci, because in Les idées à l’endroit he views the inherent weakness of liberal democratic political systems (De Benoist 1979a, 258-9). In the first place, the intelligentsia had a considerable role in shaping modern societies as a result of the democratization of the school system, the vast importance of the mass media and the use of updated polls. Therefore, de Benoist argued that modern public opinion was especially vulnerable to the more subtle metapolitical messages of this expanded cultural realm. In the long run, de Benoist claimed that a novel, film, theatre piece, television program or Internet article was more politically efficacious because it is not viewed in political terms, yet can still provoke a slow evolution of mentalities from one value system to another. The “open” nature of liberal democratic societies, argued de Benoist, would even lead to the system’s self-inflicted demise. This openness makes liberal democratic societies especially vulnerable to the process of transforming mentalities in which the ENR specialized. In an “open,” liberal and pluralist order, even the subversive counter-hegemonic ideology of the ENR cannot be eliminated since the system runs the risk of becoming tyrannical and contradicting its most sacred principles of free expression. The problem is that this pluralism of liberal democracies, claims de Benoist, is beneficial only when there is consensus of the majority of the masses. However, liberal democratic societies create a weak consensus because of the pluralism of political actors, institutions and values and the liberty of intellectuals to exercise their critical function. Thus, de Benoist argued that liberal democratic societies are highly vulnerable to a metapolitical project founded on a cohesive, alternative view of the world. The ENR’s ultimate hope was for the gradual erosion of the social consensus and subsequent demand for new elites and intellectuals to fill the vacuum with a new sensibility and social order. For the ENR, it was only through the attainment of cultural power that they would achieve the reversal of the dominant, liberal-left ideological majority. GRECE and other ENR think tanks saw themselves as the new Leninist intellectual vanguard, but now the “war” was conducted on the cultural and mental landscapes rather than the physical battlefront with revolutionary soldiers.

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Other ENR intellectuals shared de Benoist’s elitist penchant for metapolitical “combat.” Pierre Krebs, a prominent ideologue of Germany’s New Right (Neue Rechte), was also keenly aware of the metapolitical lessons of Antonio Gramsci: An Italian Marxist, Antonio Gramsci, was the first to understand that the State is not confined to a political apparatus. In fact, he established that the political apparatus runs parallel to the so-called civil apparatus. In other words, each political apparatus is reinforced by a civil consensus, the psychological support of the masses. This psychological support expresses itself through a consensus on the level of culture, world-view, and ethos. In order to exist at all, political power is thus dependent on a cultural power diffused within the masses. On the basis of this analysis Gramsci understood why Marxists could not take over power in bourgeois democracies: they did not have cultural power. To be precise, it is impossible to overthrow a political apparatus without previously having gained control of cultural power. The assent of the people must be won first: their ideas, ethos, ways of thinking, the value-system, art, and education system have to be worked on and modified. Only when people feel the need for change as a self-evident necessity will the existing political power, now detached from the general consensus, start crumbling and be overthrown. Metapolitics can be seen as the revolutionary war fought out on the level of world-views, ways of thinking, and culture. (Krebs in Griffin 1995, 348-9)

Like de Benoist, Krebs firmly rejects mass-oriented politics and stresses the ENR’s primary commitment to a revolutionary form of metapolitics: It is precisely the metapolitical level which is our starting point. We want to take over the laboratories of thinking. … We are not interested in political factions but in attitudes to life. What motivates us cannot be accommodated within the framework of a political party, but—and we insist on this point—solely within the framework of a metapolitical, exclusively cultural project. … In this way we aim to prepare the groundwork for what is to come. (Krebs in Griffin 1995, 349)

This notion of seizing cultural control over Europe’s “laboratories of thinking,” whether its libraries, schools, universities, mass media or cultural institutes, was still prevalent within the German Neue Rechte’s thinking in the late 1990s. So, for example, in 1998 the slogan of one German New Right think tank, Thule-Seminar, was the following: “Nothing can stop the arrival of a Europe of study groups.” Describing itself as a “party of the mind,” the German Neue Rechte’s Thule-Seminar was founded by Pierre Krebs in 1980 and its name was suspiciously reminiscent of a quasi-Masonic lodge founded in Munich in 1917, which provided the intellectual cadres for the Nazi secret police, the NSDAP and Hitler’s inner circle (Lee 1997, 451). In the 1998 issue of the English-based ENR journal The Scorpion, its editor Michael Walker also reiterated the primary importance of metapolitics. In the editorial to this 1998 issue, Walker wrote this clearly right-wing Gramscian perspective: We are not in the business of propaganda in the sense that it is commonly understood. We are doing something much more long-term, namely, helping to provide a comprehensive philosophical and cultural basis for an alternative worldview. … If we are unable to educate, to convince, to lead into a new world, no other success of any kind, political or economic, will last. … The originality of organizations like GRECE in France lay in

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the fact that they understood the importance of education before political change. It is a common error to believe that education follows political change. (Walker 1998, 1)

Furthermore, Walker’s article “For A New Education” in the 19th issue of The Scorpion can be seen as a neat encapsulation of the ENR’s metapolitical positions and its continuing commitment to the cultural terrain (Walker 1998, 2-6). While Walker’s prescriptions for an alternative, “nationalist” British education system against what he considers are the egalitarian, materialist ideologies of liberalism and socialism does not sit well with all the ENR’s differing tendencies, they share a common belief in right-wing metapolitics. Attacking the “value free” teachings of liberal society, Walker has no qualms about stressing the ultimately political and elitist character of all education from the American and French revolutionary governments in the eighteenth century to Ivan Illich’s “de-schooling” movement of the early 1970s: There is a “selfishness” to every theory of education. … What use are any values if we do not wish to see them flourish? And if we wish to see them flourish then it is logical that we wish at the same time that competing values do not flourish. … No revolutionary could hope to change society permanently unless the educational system which formerly existed has been replaced with one in accord with the new priorities of society. … Education is political or it is nothing. (Walker 1998, 2)

The ENR’s Focus on the “Culture Wars”: A Stroke of Genius? No word is innocent. – French Front National pamphlet, 1990

The ENR’s fixation on the metapolitical terrain has been apparent from the mid1960s to the present and it may have also been its stroke of genius for three principal reasons. In the first place, GRECE and other ENR think tanks had injected the right with newly discovered intelligence and credibility which were badly battered by the dual heritages of fascism and Nazism, and which had been lacking until the 1970s. Before the 1970s, one had to go back to the inter-war era’s conservative revolutionaries from Germany or France’s Action française to find an “intelligent” right. In his Sur la nouvelle droite, the ENR’s foremost scholar has highlighted this point: GRECE’s great innovation was to take cultural questions seriously from the standpoint of the Right. The political Right had abandoned the intellectual-cultural field to the Marxist Left, while the radical nationalist movements (the “extreme Right”) were engaged in antiintellectual activism, which bore resemblances to the anti-intellectualism of poujadisme and which was linked to a type of populist revolt. In this respect GRECE reestablished links with the tradition of historian-writers of the Action française. (Taguieff 1994)

Second, the ENR’s exclusive use of the metapolitical terrain would give its major theorists the opportunity in the future to absolve themselves of blame for potential crimes committed in the political or military realms. This was often the

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tactic of influential intellectuals who were temporarily tainted by their association or collaboration with fascism or Nazism, whether Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger or Julius Evola. They claimed to take their elitist-like, “spiritual” distance from the mass, “vulgar” populism of the fascists and Nazis. Or, they could even argue that while the fascists or Nazis cynically appropriated their works, they had at some point denounced the fascists or Nazis. These thinkers were anti-regime, antiFascist fascists. Third, the ENR was following a long lineage in European history, which gave primary importance to culture and the “war” of ideas. So, for example, there was an old French saying, which Alain de Benoist always followed: “Si c’était à refaire, je commencerais par la culture” [“If we had to do it again, I would start with culture”] (Duranton-Crabol 1988). Had not Napoleon said, “Three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.” (Duranton-Crabol 1988) In a famous aphorism often attributed to the second highest ranking Nazi politician Hermann Goering yet written by German playwright Hans Johst (head of the Nazi Chamber of Literature), the fundamental political importance of culture is unambiguously stated: “When I hear the word culture, I reach for my revolver.” For de Benoist and the ENR theorists, culture was itself the revolver used to kill the universalist, egalitarian and materialist “menaces” of liberalism and socialism in order to return Europe to its “authentic” pagan, Indo-European roots. A 1978 editorial by de Benoist in Eléments stated this position succinctly: “The principal danger remains, more than ever, uniformity, robotization: universalism” (De Benoist 1978). For the ENR, even the manipulation of words, slogans, language and ultimately historical memories was a crucial aspect of this “total war” conducted on the cultural and educational terrains. When the French Front National stated in a 1990 pamphlet “No word is innocent” (Simmons 1996, 207), they were merely following the lead taken by GRECE and other ENR think tanks. In the post-modern age, the ENR believed that the boundaries of war had become blurred and “information war” was the most effective form of political “combat.” The ENR’s strength was this focus on the “cultural war,” which allowed it to simultaneously revive the heritage of the revolutionary right and integrate new political and post-modern influences in order to distance itself from the fascist past. In his groundbreaking study on the ENR, Tomislav Sunic has also stressed the importance of cultural and intellectual figures in terms of their subtle and disproportionate influence on French and European political life: In Europe in general, and in France in particular, culture and politics seem to be interwoven and hardly discernible from each other. Great cultural figures often play quiet, yet prominent, roles in the political arena, and their influence has sometimes more bearing on the political process than that of genuinely elected governmental dignitaries. From de Gaulle to Mitterrand, from Adenauer to Kohl, European leaders have frequently vied for the support of prominent intellectuals, and often the political survival of their governments has depended on the tacit support of their handpicked intellectuals. Cultural and artistic figures, although not politically visible, have an advantage to operate in governmental affairs in the capacity of “grey eminences”; they provide each decision-maker with a sense of political respectability; yet, they seldom take the blame in case a political decision goes sour. (Sunic 1994, 13-14)

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The ENR’s Other Faith: Anti-Egalitarianism or the “Right to Difference” I believe that this diversity is the wealth of the world, and that egalitarianism is killing it. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Besides its metapolitical “war,” anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference” have remained constant and sacrosanct ENR ideas from the mid-1960s to the beginning of the twenty-first century. As de Benoist explained in a series of three Telos interviews in 1994, “The desire to maintain a diversity of communities and cultures, which are the wealth of mankind, was a constant. The main problem today is to find the cultural and political means to resist the technological, economic, and mass-media-driven homogenisation of the world” (De Benoist 1993-4a, 192). These two interconnected notions, anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference,” were espoused in racial terms in the 1960s, a biology-driven, non-racial perspective in the 1970s and finally cultural manifestations such as “SOS-ROOTS” (a word-play against what GRECE considered the “pseudo-universalism” of the French anti-racist organization “SOSRACISME”) and the “right to difference” in the 1980s and 1990s. For the ENR, the world of human affairs, like the biological world, only thrives and grows on “difference,” “pluralism” and “diversity.” This “difference” must be enhanced in cultural, political and geopolitical realms. The ENR argues that the bio-diversity of different world cultures, each with their own unique conceptions of the world, enhances the pluralism, majesty and mystery of the world. The incommensurability of cultures, the ENR contends, should not lead to the reductionist and assimilationist Western imposition of “our” cultural values upon other cultures. In this thinking, we can hear the echoes of Herder, Vico, Lévi-Strauss and the conservative revolutionary Oswald Spengler all rolled into one. In the postcolonial era, the ENR argues that all cultures are inherently unique and different, and the old assimilationist logic of European colonialism is forcefully rejected. All “rooted” cultures in the post-communist age, argue the ENR intellectuals, should make common cause against the American-led, global capitalist vision based on the domination of the homo oeconomicus. Picking up from left-wing and ecological critiques of capitalism, Dutch New Right thinker Ruter argues that he wants “to share the whole cosmic living space with the animals, plants and matter, and wants to hand it over unharmed to the next generations” (Ruter in Krebbers 1999). His New Right colleague, Veldman, speaks of solidarity with “peoples that struggle to save their own identity and with all those offering resistance against the destruction of flora and fauna, against the limitless power and influence of multinational companies and against the international consumption society” (Veldman in Krebbers 1999). The Dutch New Right has even championed the cause of Native American “nations” fighting to preserve their cultural identities in the face of capitalist and North American assimilationist policies. De Benoist has neatly outlined these twin notions of anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference” in his fundamental 1977 work Vu de droite. In this text, de Benoist declares himself on the right because he contends that it is founded on the idea that the diversity of the world and the relative inequalities it produces is something “good” and the progressive homogenisation of the world produced by

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the two thousand year old discourse of Judeo-Christian egalitarianism is an “evil” (De Benoist 1979b, 16). De Benoist adds that this does not mean that he approves of all inequalities. In reality, de Benoist claims that the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West and the ideas derived from the French Revolution underpin numerous unjust inequalities. For de Benoist, to rally around an anti-egalitarian conception of life is to realize that diversity is the pre-eminent rule of the world. It entails the future creation of a post-liberal, organic and hierarchical society where both intellectuals and warriors will play key roles. In another crucial passage from Vu de droite, de Benoist argues that the steady erosion of diversity and difference on the planet as a result of the emergence of a materialist, egalitarian “global civilization” is the principal menace of the contemporary age. It is worth quoting de Benoist’s passage at length: What is the greatest threat today? It is the progressive disappearance of diversity from the world. The levelling-down of people, the reduction of all cultures to a world civilization made up of what is the most common. It can be seen already how from one side of the planet to the other the same types of construction are being put up and the same mental habits are being ingrained. Holiday Inn and Howard Johnson are the templates for the transformation of the world into a grey uniformity. I have travelled widely, on several continents. The joy which is experienced during a journey derives from seeing differentiated ways of living which are still well rooted, in seeing different people live according to their own rhythm, with a different skin colour, another culture, another mentality—from recognizing they are proud of their difference. I believe that this diversity is the wealth of the world, and that egalitarianism is killing it. For this it is important not just to respect others but to keep alive everywhere the most legitimate desire there can be: the desire to affirm a personality which is unlike any other, to defend a heritage, to govern oneself in accordance with what one is. And this implies a head-on clash both with a pseudo-antiracism which denies differences and with a dangerous racism which is nothing less than the rejection of the Other, the rejection of diversity. (De Benoist 1979b, 25)

It is interesting how de Benoist and other GRECE members who once could die for the colonialist and assimilationist idea of Algérie française now embraced the mantra of diversity and attacked both racist and anti-racist ideologies. While de Benoist has expressed solidarity with the immigrant detached from his unique cultural roots in what he calls a “heartless” capitalist system (De Benoist 1993-4a, 185-6), the difference in the 1980s was that the former immigrants from the French colonies were now on “our” soil in larger numbers and increasingly perceived as a cultural, economic and political threat to the French Catholic majority. In the 1980s, the ideas of GRECE would be used by the FN to argue for a “differential racism”: the repatriation of even French citizens from Algeria and others of North African descent in order to “mutually benefit” the “right to difference” of the “foreigners” and host culture of the “French French.” In contrast to the FN, however, de Benoist claimed to support the “right to difference” of all individuals and communities, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, throughout France. Besides, argued de Benoist, the French would have the same problems without immigrants because they no longer had their own unique identity and internal strength to fight against the steamroller of cultural globalisation and Americanization (De Benoist 1993-4a, 173-4). De Benoist has even

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gone so far as to embrace a defence of Jewish, Muslim and Vietnamese particularism within France as a result of the strong family roots and sense of cohesion within these cultures, which allows them to resist cultural homogenisation (De Benoist 1993-4a, 188-9). In a 1997 interview, twenty years after the publication of Vu de droite, de Benoist pointed out the two major problems confronting the West. Once again the loss of planetary diversity was cited as one of the central problems of our age as well as the dissolution of social bonds (De Benoist 1997, 3). Both problems were seen as consequences of the extension of a frenetic, global market-based society where individuals are increasingly isolated, vulnerable and homogenized by capitalist materialism and mass media technologies. De Benoist goes on to call for a revival of “bottom up” social bonds in order to repair the damage of the “capitalist mentality” which corrodes these social bonds, organic solidarity and different cultural identities. The “mercantile mentality” based on egoistic individualism, a contractual theory of the state and the reduction of society to the marketplace model is harshly attacked by de Benoist for its negation of diversity in the world and its lack of both societal destiny and spiritual purpose: “It has separated people and cultures from their roots, destroyed the environment, made life appear purposeless, reduced humanity to an anonymous mass, brought about an obsession with money making and profit, so leading to the world without points of reference in which we live today” (De Benoist 1997, 2). For de Benoist, then, one of the main threats to the world is the dissolution of diversity in the world: “The future of the world is staked on the preservation of diversity in the world. In other words, the cause of peoples, of all peoples against the American homo oeconomicus” (De Benoist in Taguieff 1993-4c, 172). The same themes about the loss of “diversity” and “difference” in the world haunt other ENR theorists. Pierre Krebs, the most prolific German Neue Rechte ideologue, has also made this same refrain: “The tragedy of the contemporary world is the tragedy of disloyalty: the uprooting of every culture, estrangement from our true natures, the atomization of man, the levelling of values, the uniformity of life” (Krebs in Griffin 1995, 349). Guillaume Faye, a member of GRECE, echoed the same theme in Eléments: “This is the hideous face of a civilization, which, with an implacable logic, has forced itself onto every culture, gradually levelling them, bringing all peoples into the gamut of a one-world system” (Faye 1983-4). For the ENR, this egalitarian levelling towards an American-led capitalist, mass and world civilization could only mean a vulgar world dominated by McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Disneyland; a world where the rooted diversity of Europe’s various peoples is destroyed; quality of life has been abandoned for the frenzy of the materialistic “rat race”; individuals are turned into mere units of consumption to be sold to the highest bidder; and the society is atomized by purely inward-directed egos with no “higher,” spiritual purpose or common destiny.

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The ENR’s Nightmare: A Universal, Egalitarian World Society of Happy Consumers A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. – Carl Schmitt, German jurist and political theorist

In its haunted visions of a universal, egalitarian and pacified globe fixated by entertainment and other petty materialistic pleasures, the ENR theorists were elaborating the ideas of earlier cultural critics of the twentieth century, including the Spanish conservative Ortega y Gasset, the German jurist Carl Schmitt and the English fiction writer Aldous Huxley. In this type of emerging world society, the ENR contended that the ancient pagan societies of Europe would be forever lost. In the ENR’s worldview, both socialist and liberal democratic societies share this materialist-driven tendency towards a bleak global uniformity. De Benoist approvingly quotes the conservative revolutionary Ernst Jünger about the imminent arrival of the “universal state,” or fusion between the liberal West and socialist East: “The difference between the red and the white star is only the fluttering which accompanies the rising of a star on the horizon. Let it rise into the sky, and let unity be unveiled” (Jünger in De Benoist 1996a, 131). In the eyes of ENR intellectuals, the only difference between the communist and liberal capitalist systems was about how to distribute their material goods. They remained in essence linked by the same drive towards a global conformity of life-styles and a materialist, anti-spiritual ethos. The ENR claimed to reject both the “hard” totalitarianism of former socialist societies in Eastern Europe and the “soft” totalitarianism of liberal democratic societies (Walker 1986b, 8-14). In a controversial passage in Europe, Tiers monde, même combat, Alain de Benoist has elaborated on his greater fear of “soft totalitarianism” rather than “hard totalitarianism”: It is true that there are two forms of totalitarianism, different in causes and consequences, but both being dangerous. Totalitarianism in the East imprisons, persecutes and kills the body, but it leaves hope. Totalitarianism in the West creates happy robots. Such totalitarianism “air-conditions” hell and kills the soul. (De Benoist 1986, 219)

In an Eléments article in 2005, de Benoist cites the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to argue that in the post-9/11 “war on terrorism” we live under a new, “totalitarian” surveillance society where the exceptional (e.g., spying on citizens, e-mail security checks, arrests without official charges, state of alert, etc.) is increasingly the rule (De Herte 2005). De Benoist, like Agamben, sees the United States’ military prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo (Cuba), where basic laws of war and normal legal procedures are jettisoned, as the microcosm for what EuroAmerican societies will become in the near future. Today the targets are largely Islamist terror suspects, but increasingly the targets will be citizens of England, France, Canada or the United States. De Benoist’s views have their roots in European philosophers from the 1920s and 1930s. José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish conservative cultural critic and author

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of The Revolt of the Masses (1931), has expressed a similar aristocratic disdain for the mass “tyranny” of liberal democratic societies where materialism reigns and spiritual visions and duties are absent both individually and socially. De Benoist has even cited Gasset in Telos regarding a passage where the latter speaks of the same “mental idiocy” and “moral paralysis” which plague both the right and left political camps. (De Benoist 1995, 89). Gasset has littered The Revolt of the Masses with references to Oswald Spengler, an elitist German conservative revolutionary author to which de Benoist is deeply indebted (Gasset 1932, 19). De Benoist could have easily written a celebrated passage from Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses: The characteristic of the hour is that the commonplace mind, knowing itself to be commonplace, has the assurance to proclaim the rights of the commonplace and to impose them wherever it will. As they say in the United States: “to be different is to be indecent.” The mass crushes beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated. (Gasset 1932, 18)

For Gasset, like de Benoist, anti-egalitarianism and “difference” are almost inherently natural, God-given facts of individual, social and political reality. For de Benoist, if a given society is to prevent the lapse into decadent, static and egalitarian “barbarism,” “difference” must become a sort of embedded absolute of social existence. It is what Gasset calls the “directing minorities,” or the “gifted” and “noble” elites of GRECE and other think tanks, which should rule European societies. In this valorisation of the aristocratic, spiritual conception of life, the disdain of the masses, of non-conformist anti-liberalism and of the necessity of sovereign elites blocking the “corporate rule” of the modern capitalist world, the French philosopher Raymond Aron argued that de Benoist’s thinking resembled that of the “national socialists” or fascists (Aron 1983, 701). De Benoist responded that he was “against all genocides” (Brunn 1979, 324) and that all societies, of whatever political constitution, required authoritative, well-trained and sophisticated elites driven by a life purpose, constant self-striving and both a communitarian and spiritual vision of life. Under the influence of Carl Schmitt’s “decisionism” from his The Concept of the Political (1928), de Benoist feared what Aldous Huxley described in his prophetic novel Brave New World (1932) and non-fictional companion Brave New World Revisited (1958): A sort of soft totalitarianism; a world in which “neutral” liberal societies ruled through moralism and the cult of money; a totally administered society where people are not free and yet regard themselves as free; and a society without the essence of politics, the friend and foe. Schmitt’s fears of the liberal model of a de-politicized, universal globe in The Concept of the Political neatly dovetail with the ideas of Alain de Benoist. These are Schmitt’s words from The Concept of the Political: A world in which the possibility of war is utterly eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics. It is conceivable that such a world might contain very interesting antitheses and contrasts, competitions and intrigues of every kind, but there would not be a meaningful

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De Benoist has actually referred to Schmitt’s notion of the political in several interviews and devotes several pages to the German jurist in Vu de droite (De Benoist 1979b, 216-19). In a Schmittian tone, he has frequently attacked the hypocrisy of liberal democratic societies, whether what he viewed as its economically motivated 1991 Gulf War masquerading as a war for “humanity,” or what he called the “WASP hegemony” of the United States “filled with morals and economics, while lacking consideration for minorities and the poor” (De Benoist 1993-4a, 201). In 2002 upon the publication of Schmitt’s work The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes in France, de Benoist defended Schmitt against the claim in Le Monde that he was a “Nazi philosopher” (De Benoist, “Schmitt in France”). He insists that Schmitt was not a “Nazi theoretician” and a jurist rather than philosopher. While de Benoist is correct to point out that Schmitt was a jurist and that he has been recycled by left-wing Schmittians, he also willingly joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and acted as the party’s crown jurist. He created a juridical rationale for the “Night of the Long Knives” in which the Sturm Abteilung (SA), the inner paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party, was decapitated through a state terror attack. De Benoist could have enlisted this Carl Schmitt quote to condemn the 1991 Gulf War, or his total rejection of the “American war” in Iraq in 2003: To demand seriously of human beings that they kill others and be prepared to die themselves so that industry and trade flourish for the survivors or that purchasing power of grandchildren may grow is sinister and crazy. It is a manifest fraud to condemn war as homicide and then demand of men that they wage war, kill and be killed, so that there will never again be war. (Schmitt 1976, 48)

Praising Proudhon’s famous dictum that “whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat,” Schmitt argued that this deceptive tactic is used by liberal democratic societies with disastrous consequences: “To confiscate the word humanity, to invoke and monopolize such a term has certain incalculable effects, such as denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity; and a war can thereby be driven to the most extreme inhumanity” (Schmitt 1976, 54). For Schmitt a liberal, pacifist-motivated “war to end all wars,” to borrow the phrase of former American President Woodrow Wilson, would be particularly intense, cruel and inhumane because the enemy is seen in explicitly moral terms as an evil monster that must be defeated and destroyed. While liberals condemn war and trumpet the horn of “humanity,” Schmitt argues that they would then be forced to conduct punitive expeditions, pacification measures and acts of war in order to defend the so-called “global peace.” Schmitt was especially harsh on the tendency of liberal societies to use economics, entertainment and morality to escape the essential, political friend-enemy distinction and ultimately the seriousness, drama and tragedy of life itself. De Benoist was indebted to Schmitt’s anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian and tragic conception of politics as a model for restoring a “rightful plurality” of different visions, societies and power blocs in a materialist, uniform world devoid of intellectual,

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cultural and political diversity. Arguing in 1994 that the merits of the works of Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola transcended their respective flirtations with the Nazi and Fascist regimes (De Benoist 1993-4a, 202-3), de Benoist used the German thinker in order to highlight the contradictions of liberal democratic societies and dislodge both liberal and left intellectual elites from their position of comfortable cultural dominance. Although de Benoist’s “combat” of Gramscian counter-hegemony is a sort of “war of position” which does not entail the Schmittian commitment to sacrificial, physical violence, the ENR leader could still use the German thinker because they shared the same critique of liberalism and global capitalism. In 2003, he dedicated a Berlin published international bibliography of the works of Carl Schmitt to Günter Maschke, an ENR fellow traveler (De Benoist 2003a). Schmitt was simply one of the many thinkers used by de Benoist in order to wage “cultural war” against the liberal-left intelligentsia and prepare the intellectual and organizational groundwork for a post-liberal “organic” social order. In the long run, de Benoist longed to restore a pan-European “spiritual empire” of the regions where hierarchy, diversity, courage and honour prevailed. This would be an “empire” which returned to its “common” Indo-European and pagan ancestry. In de Benoist’s view, it would be an “empire” where the “tyranny of money” would be abated by the sovereignty and fidelity of political and military elites committed to a non-material principle of existence. For de Benoist, it would be a noble, aristocratic “empire” where culture, ideas, values, matters of the soul, strength of character and quality of life would count for more than the frenzy of corporate profits, the latest Gross National Product (GNP) figures and the materialist “pleasure principle.” In a similar vein, the Madrid-based El Mundo published an ENR manifesto in 2002 against the “death of the spirit” as a result of the global fixation on production, consumption and work, which was reprinted in Eléments in 2003 (Mutis and Ruiz Portella 2003). While blatant manifestations of racialism and anti-Semitism were usually absent from de Benoist’s texts, his anti-materialist idealism and spiritualism were seen as mere window-dressing for ideas which, some argued, resembled those of the fascist and Nazi ideologues of the past. Other New Right ideologues such as Robert Steuckers from Belgium were less subtle in their anti-Semitic overtones: “The time of the cross has gone. The sun wheel will return, and we will be liberated from the Jewish God, and our people will get back its honour” (Steuckers in Krebbers 1999). If the New Right was against the Judeo-Christian tradition in total, then why did Steuckers single out Judaism for opprobrium rather than both Judaism and Christianity? In a typical anti-Semitic discourse, Jews were held responsible for Europe’s ills because all the monotheistic faiths originated from Judaism. In this chapter, I attempted to show how the ENR worldview was always driven by two primary principles from 1968 into the new millennium: the commitment to an oblique, long-term metapolitical cultural strategy and the valorisation of the “right to difference.” In the mid-1960s, this cultural “right to difference” was originally expressed by future GRECE members in racial terms, the defence of the West and the colonialist sense of superiority along the lines of “eternal” racial differences between “us” and “them.” GRECE attempted to overhaul this outdated racialist mode of thinking from the late 1960s, which was linked to the discredited memories of imperialism, fascism and Nazism. In the 1970s, GRECE dropped its

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explicitly racial orientation and adopted a biological and scientific perspective in order to keep alive the ideas of a “natural” anti-egalitarianism and of “differences” within and between cultures. It called for a “scientific order” where hierarchy was an “absolute” and there was a “predetermined” selection of elites. This sociobiological perspective, which preached the value of anti-egalitarianism and the importance of “selected elites,” was keen to enlist the works of famous European scientists, such as Alexis Carrel, Konrad Lorenz and Hans Eysenck. Carrel was a Nobel Prize winner, a Hitler admirer and set up the Foundation for the Study of Human Problems under the Vichy regime to implement his race hygiene ideas. The ENR was accused of a “scientific racism” or an “intelligent racism,” which sought to restore the golden age of Indo-European purity before the arrival of the “foreign” ideology of JudeoChristian monotheism and egalitarianism. De Benoist claimed that the JudeoChristian tradition had “transformed our house, causing us to lose in the darkness of passing time the very consciousness of who we are” (De Benoist in Brunn 1979, 14). He insisted that he merely used the arguments of science, although he remained firmly against all types of purely reductionist intellectual formulas. By the early 1980s, the biological perspective of GRECE and the ENR had given way to a cultural discourse valorising the “right to difference” of all cultures in a xenophile spirit. All cultures had the duty to search for their roots, to answer the questions of “Who am I?” and “Where do I come from?,” and the right to protect and nourish their unique cultural differences. Claiming to be the heir of a late nineteenth century anti-colonialist tradition on the right which preceded the left anti-colonialism of the New Left in the 1960s, in Europe, Tiers monde, même combat de Benoist steered the ENR against both the assimilationist, colonialist racism of the past and what he saw as a fictitious anti-racist, liberal universalism which negated the “right to difference” of all cultural groups (De Benoist 1986, 21-51). Whereas historically the right was often associated with militarism, imperialism and expansionism, here was a right under the ENR label which was neither for colonialism, nor for the nation because they were seen as destructive of the “right to difference” of all cultures to live according to their own natural rhythms and traditions. This was a long way from GRECE’s roots in the racialism and ultra-nationalist cause of Algérie française in the mid-1960s, but many critics were not convinced by the impressive theoretical changes. These critics often cited the new discourse of the rabidly anti-immigrant, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish Front National in the mid-1980s, which closely resembled the ENR’s hyper-valorisation of the “anti-racist” concept of the “right to difference.” In moving from discourses of race to biology to culture, the ENR had learned to keep alive its fidelity to anti-egalitarianism and “difference.” Thus, with the advent of the “hot summer” in 1979, it could also argue against the other forces on the right, whether extra-parliamentary or parliamentary, that its faith in a long-term cultural “combat” was also the right choice. While ENR themes changed as in the vital anti-Judeo-Christian turn in the mid-1970s or the shift away from a primary anti-communism to a primary anti-capitalism and anti-liberalism in the early 1980s, it was always within the framework of two constant themes: cultural metapolitics and an anti-egalitarian ideal expressed as the “right to difference.”

Chapter 6

Ambiguities in the ENR Worldview In the long run there is the risk of ending up in a planetary and military version of the scenario, ‘Jihad vs. McWorld’. My feeling is that we must reject the Jihad without being the tools of ‘McWorld’. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Fascism, which was a unique syncretic ideology combining among other ideas antiMarxism, populist ultra-nationalism, syndicalism, corporatism and socialism, was bound to have major ambiguities. Fascist theoreticians fused extreme anti-modern traditionalism with a hyper-modern faith in technology and the future; irrational with rational philosophies. Writing in The New Statesman, Terry Eagleton highlights the ambiguities of fascism in relation to the Nazis’ Final Solution: “The Holocaust was both barbarism and the triumph of a ‘scientific’, full-bloodedly modern rationality. If it was a revolt against Enlightenment reason for some thinkers, it was the consummation of it for others” (Eagleton 2004). Eagleton insists that since “fascism is among other things a carnival of unreason, it would be odd to expect from it a coherent theoretical case” (Eagleton 2004). Contrary to Terry Eagleton’s claims, fascism’s “carnival of unreason” was based on a coherent, vitalist worldview defending violence, the sanctity of the nation and the pre-eminence of the state. However, Eagleton is correct to point to a major ambiguity between the fascist appeal to workers and their simultaneous defence of capitalism: “If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class groups, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact” (Eagleton 2004). Despite Fascist Italy’s corporatist orientation, one scholar argues that the regime had “complete control over the labour force but very little control of the nation’s economic structure” (Tannenbaum 1973, 100). Similarly, the ENR’s oscillation between radical right-wing traditions and leftwing influences has tended to create intellectual confusion, ambiguity, fascination or charges of fascism. In this chapter, I seek to uncover the major ambiguities, tensions and contradictions within the ENR’s worldview. It is through an understanding of the ambiguities within the ENR worldview that we are better able to glimpse the heterogeneity of positions and ideas within this cultural school of thought; to gauge both continuity and change vis-à-vis its revolutionary right-wing ideological roots; and to determine whether ENR theorists have reincarnated fascism in a new guise. In examining the ambiguities within the ENR worldview, I highlight the ENR’s ideological distance and proximity to the revolutionary right-wing milieu. In short,

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this examination will provide support for my contention that the ENR is an ambiguous cultural and political project, which is tied between an older revolutionary rightwing heritage and extensive New Left influences. In reading ENR texts, I discovered nine major ambiguities within the ENR worldview: (1) the primary focus on cultural metapolitics and the traditional “politics of politicians”; (2) the ENR’s violent anti-Judeo-Christian paganism and the JudeoChristian heritage of mainstream Europeans; (3) intellectual elitism and the desire for popular social change; (4) a revolutionary right-wing heritage and affinity for the ideals of the New Left; (5) its dual conservative and revolutionary views of human nature and social existence; (6) a commitment to scientism and intellectualism, on the one hand, and to myths of origins, identity and belonging, on the other hand; (7) its simplistic anti-Americanism and simultaneous espousal of a North Americanlike federalism as a potential model for its future vision of a “Europe of a Hundred Flags”; (8) its pro-Third World, anti-Westernism and its tendency towards a veiled Euro-centrism; and (9) its communitarian project and the right of individuals and communities to intellectual freedom and anti-conformism. I will, in turn, briefly analyze these major ENR ambiguities by showing how the ENR synthesis resembles revolutionary ideologies of the past such as the conservative revolution, which nourished Fascism and Nazism. So, for example, the McGill University historian Stephen Hellman noted that ENR ambiguities mirror those of radical right-wing youth ideologies in Germany that were defeated or co-opted by the Nazi regime (e.g., Strasserism), French radical right-wing ideologies that were more revolutionary than the Vichy regime and non-conformist thinkers of the 1930s like Alexandre Marc (Hellman 2002, 192-200). It is this resemblance with revolutionary ideologies on both the right and left that keeps the ENR constantly seeking to fight off critics, which see the revival of a more covert, sophisticated form of fascism. Cultural Metapolitics versus Traditional Politics The first ambiguity within the ENR’s worldview is between its primary focus on the metapolitical, cultural terrain and its more traditional forms of political intervention, especially its commentary on the politics of its day, its infiltration of right-wing political parties and attempts to influence the higher echelons of decision-making power within the state, universities and mass media. As pointed out before, the ENR was a unique political force in explicitly situating itself on the terrain of the cultural contestation of ideas. This divided the ENR thinkers from two post-World War Two political forces originating from the revolutionary right-wing milieu: ultranationalist or neo-fascist parliamentary parties and violent, extra-parliamentary street forces (e.g., neo-fascist or neo-Nazi skinheads) dedicated to direct action and terrorism. However, this did not mean that there were no formal and informal channels of contact between these traditional political outfits and the culturally fixated world of the ENR thinkers. Some important ENR thinkers eventually went on to careers within the extreme-right or neo-fascist political parties. In addition, the nouvelle droite’s ideas and themes, often in the form of cynically manipulated political formulas, began to penetrate into the programs of extreme right-wing or

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neo-fascist political parties such as the French Front National or Italy’s Movimento Sociale Italiano. Furthermore, on several occasions, GRECE took official positions on the French presidential contests of the 1970s. There were also intensive efforts in the 1970s to penetrate and influence the top decision-makers of France, whether through administrative, political, military or educational sectors. All these traditional methods of politics breached the ENR’s strictly cultural orientation of publishing, conducting conferences and simply holding debates with its political friends and critics. There was even some tension within the ENR about whether to remain a strict, long-term cultural force or to immediately attempt to infiltrate the political parties on the right, whether the mainstream or far right. The latter position, “entryism,” can account for GRECE’s flirtation with the French RPR and UDF in the 1970s and the fact that several prominent GRECE intellectuals, including former secretarygeneral Pierre Vial, joined the extreme right-wing FN in the early 1980s. One must remember that a number of ENR thinkers in France and elsewhere throughout Europe were former right-wing revolutionaries who perhaps still had the thirst for action, or were growing impatient with a long-term cultural strategy to unseat the liberal democratic system. In any case, it must have been particularly difficult and traumatic for some right-wing revolutionaries who vehemently detested the existing liberal capitalist order to abandon their guns and re-orient the political struggle through other discreet, cultural means. While there was a tension between the ENR’s focus on cultural metapolitics and more traditional political forms of contestation, it can generally be argued that the ENR’s main theorists remained faithful to their cultural vocation begun by GRECE in 1968. In spite of two “hot summers” of widespread mass media press attention in France in 1979 and 1993, ENR thinkers continued to primarily focus on cultural activities: publishing its journals, writing books and articles, hosting academic conferences and entering into dialogue with other “non-conformist,” anti-capitalist forces such as the New Left, Greens and the French anti-utilitarian school led by Serge Latouche. ENR thinkers such as de Benoist steadfastly believed that only a change in the dominant cultural apparatus and spirit of the age, especially the opinions of key cultural elites, could pave the definitive road towards a new, durable and long-lasting post-liberal order. For de Benoist, the climate of the post-World War Two era meant that it was intellectually and politically suicidal for a right-wing force to attempt to seize political power without first controlling the dominant cultural apparatus of the period and gaining general support. De Benoist recognized that the metapolitical struggle to displace liberalism, socialism and the Judeo-Christian heritage would be a difficult one, but remained true to his metapolitical vocation from 1968, which many of his comrades long ago abandoned for the more immediate taste of direct political power. While these defections might have weakened the ENR’s credibility about their commitment to the cultural terrain, they tended to enhance the profile and credibility of its leader. Another interesting development that highlights the ENR tensions between metapolitics and traditional politics are its attempts to reach out to the ecology movement beginning in the 1990s. According to one writer, this strategy has been relatively successful, particularly if we consider that British millionaire and

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ecologist guru Edward Goldsmith financially and spiritually supports the union of the revolutionary left, far right and ENR to fight the destruction of nature, “free trade” and globalisation (Krebbers 1999). Goldsmith is chief-editor of the British magazine The Ecologist and his magnum opus is The Way. Edward Goldsmith has not only been sought by the ENR, but he has promoted the ENR and its major figures in France, Belgium and Britain. He is by now a very welcome guest in New Right circles in Belgium and France. On the occasion of GRECE’s 28th colloquium in November 1994, Goldsmith was Alain de Benoist’s guest of honour. Goldsmith regularly attends GRECE meetings, reads de Benoist works and insists that the ENR “have changed very much these last dozen years” (Krebbers 1999). On November 11th, 1997, Goldsmith was the main guest at the third TeKoS colloquium in Antwerp, Belgium. TeKoS is a sister organisation of GRECE, and losely connected to the Flemish extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant party the Vlaams Blok. The colloquium also included de Benoist and Luc Pauwels, one of the founders of the Vlaams Blok. Moreover, Laurent Ozon, the head of GRECE’s ecology branch, is a faithful Goldsmith follower and his Le recours aux forêts magazine regularly includes articles by de Benoist and several members of the FN (Krebbers 1999). Ozon and Goldsmith have never been fully satisfied with mere metapolitics. Both regularly visit de Benoist’s GRECE meetings and Ozon asked Goldsmith to run in the European elections in June 1999 under the Mouvement écologiste indépendante (MEI), a right-wing ecological party with only about 1,000 members. Goldsmith made Ozon his spokesman, yet insisted that Antoine Waechter was to head the party’s list. Waechter founded Les Verts, the French Green Party, back in 1973. Goldsmith wanted to invest huge sums of money in MEI, but after outrage in the French press in respect of Waechter’s extreme right-wing ideas, Goldsmith withdrew from the party on February 16th, 1999. Robert Steuckers, a Belgian New Right theoretician, has also embraced Goldsmith’s more activist orientation. Steuckers is the brainchild and secretarygeneral of the European network of New Right think tanks, Synergies Européennes (SE). Beginning in 1981, Steuckers was de Benoist’s assistant and assumed successor. In 1993, after an internal disagreement he left GRECE together with a small group of followers and founded SE. Steuckers argues that the New Right “should not only discuss ideology, but also engage in the reality of politics and power” (Krebbers September 1999). He seeks to break divisions between left and right by stimulating alliances between nationalist groups and old communist parties and trade unions. In addition, many SE sections tend to also enthusiastically support Goldsmith’s ecological writings. SE has already built sister affiliates in France, Belgium, Portugal, Russia, Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, the former Yugoslavia, Italy and Germany. It should also be pointed out that the alleged de Benoist-Steuckers split has not prevented GRECE and SE from co-operating. So, for example, SE member Robert Cousty was co-founder of Le recours aux forêts, which is essentially a GRECE project. Could it be that the apparent tensions between metapoliticians like de Benoist and activists like Steuckers and Goldsmith are more superficial than substantive? Perhaps, it is more appropriate to see that there is a necessary division of labour between the

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proponents of metapolitics and the followers of a traditional, activist political route. More to the point, de Benoist, Steuckers and Goldsmith complement each other with the first being the doyen of metapolitics; the second the bridge between metapolitics and traditional politics; and the third playing the role of a monied elite capable of financing revolutionary ideas and helping to turn an oblique strategy of metapolitics into the dominant ideas and political platforms of the mainstream. Paganism versus the Judeo-Christian Tradition The second ambiguity in the ENR’s worldview is that although it holds an antiJudeo-Christian worldview based on the valorisation of Europe’s ancient pagan roots, this is a not a worldview held by the vast majority of Europeans. The ENR’s violent invectives against the Judeo-Christian roots of Europe have alienated numerous monotheistic believers, liberals and socialists. For the ENR, the latter two political categories are equivalent with a monotheistic, egalitarian and universalist Judeo-Christian worldview that is seen as the precursor to a full-scale, dogmatic and mass totalitarianism. While historically the zeal of a universalising, proselytizing Christianity had led to the loss of numerous non-Western cultures and massive slaughter of numerous non-believers, pagans and heretics throughout the world, it is also true that paganism had its fair share of repression in ancient times. Tomislav Sunic challenges the ENR’s pro-pagan views by pointing to the more sinister side of both ancient and modern manifestations of paganism: Incidentally, the New Right still has to demonstrate how will it counter criticism that departure from Christianity, and possibly a return to paganism, may also have unpalatable political consequences, as shown by recent European history. After all, if one accepts the thesis that monotheistic religions have traditionally been repressive throughout history, one must admit that paganism has also had its share of repression. One need only read some classics in order to become convinced of the magnitude of pagan violence in antiquity. Thus far, the New Right has not examined in more detail the scope of religious and political intolerance in ancient Greece, murderous wars and persecutions in the Roman Empire, as well as the social and political implications of “paganism” in Nazi Germany. (Sunic 1990, 154-5)

There are other problems with the ENR’s “new paganism.” In the first place, in the period before the fall of the Soviet Union and the decline of communism, the Christian heritage of the West was seen by the mass of believers and even prominent public figures as a bulwark against atheist, communist “subversion.” In this atmosphere, the ENR’s “new paganism” was unlikely to receive a warm public reception. Second, for many intellectuals and public figures, whether believers, atheists or agnostics, the Judeo-Christian tradition must be preserved because it is seen as one of the sole remaining ideologies capable of erecting a communitarian social order as a rallying point against the rampant egoism and anomie of liberal capitalist societies. For these critics, Christianity can still act as a counter-force and spiritual ethic against the prevailing materialistic thrust of liberal democracies. They point to more nondogmatic, mystical, millenarian or esoteric strains of Christianity from Theresa de

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Avila to the Quakers, which could still re-spiritualise a de-spiritualised world viewed by the ENR intellectuals as dominated by materialism, technology and the capitalist “law of the jungle” (Huxley 1990). Finally, it is unlikely that the ENR’s “new paganism” will have mass support in a European continent thoroughly conditioned by what Ernst Bloch called the “principle of hope” (Bloch 1995). Both Christian and Marxist eschatological visions and worldviews share this “principle of hope”. The “principle of hope” stands in stark contrast to the more pagan, tragic, Promethean and Nietzschean worldview of the ENR thinkers. The ENR thinkers’ esoteric intellectualism, elitism, self-striving and self-surpassing have been largely rejected by a Europe still firmly anchored to the Judeo-Christian tradition, its basic values and its principles of mass hope. The ENR’s all-out “war” against the Judeo-Christian tradition will continue to arouse suspicion among both masses and elites, especially due to the eerie “pagan” connotations associated with Nazism. However, the thirst in liberal societies for a renewed spiritualism, as evidenced by the contemporary proliferation of New Age philosophies, might still make the ENR ideological synthesis appealing. Intellectual Elitism versus Popular Social Change The third ambiguity within the ENR worldview is between its marked intellectual elitism and commitment to revolutionary social change. The ENR has directed its journals, books and conferences to an elite, university-educated audience. The ENR views these intellectual elites as the prime movers of history and the greatest hope for a massive, revolutionary wave of social change. The problem with this Gramscian-like strategy of cultural and intellectual hegemony is that it assumes that the new ideas and myths of the intellectual elites will eventually seduce the masses. It perhaps underestimates the strength of mass, popular support for the prevailing liberal democratic system. Furthermore, what is to prevent the ENR intellectuals from one day becoming the “New Class” of political exploiters they have so vehemently denounced in their works? Does not the Gramscian project of the ENR mask a subtler bid to gain power? It is probably with such critiques in mind, related to the ENR’s esoteric elitism and standard anti-egalitarian views, that in the mid-1980s Alain de Benoist began to espouse “organic democracy,” “bottom-up” social change and the re-constitution of direct, regional or local social bonds of solidarity. In this valorisation of “organic democracy,” de Benoist was clearly appropriating the ideological influences of the New Left generation and the May 1968 student revolutionaries. The New Left’s concerns with “grass-roots” democracy against bureaucratic and impersonal representative democracy, the preservation of regional cultures and the protection of an environment torn asunder by capitalism for profits were all injected into de Benoist’s re-formulated worldview of the 1980s and 1990s. De Benoist was also now deeply indebted to the anti-Western, “anti-progress” ideals of the French anti-utilitarians. De Benoist had similar critiques of global capitalism, and liberal and socialist notions of “progress” as deeply embedded within a materialist, prodevelopment ethic, which estranged Europeans from nature, their cultural roots and

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organic bonds of social solidarity. It is no accident, then, that the New Left, Greens, anti-utilitarians and ENR mingled in the same conferences, debates and journals, whether it was the American-based Telos, or the joint Latouche-de Benoist debates on the environment in the early 1990s. In addition, de Benoist even praised the works of French anti-utilitarian thinkers such as Serge Latouche, the author of The Westernization of the World (Latouche 1996) and their organization Mouvement antiutilitariste dans les Sciences Sociales (MAUSS). Franco Sacchi corroborates the close relationship between ENR and MAUSS thinkers: “The Italian New Right and French New Right have paid considerable attention to their ideas (MAUSS) and have opened a constructive debate with them” (Sacchi 1993-4, 77). This type of co-operation with former left-oriented and Green-inclined scholars, deeply connected to an egalitarian ethos, probably gave the ENR thinkers a less elitist aura and a more credible position in their calls for revolutionary social change. This likely lessened the ENR’s tension between its aloof, intellectual elitism and its disdain for mass populism, viewed as the antithesis of the cultivated, aristocratic life able to simultaneously join the contemplative and active, political lives. If we are to accept the ENR’s turn towards “organic democracy,” then presumably it is the masses of ordinary Europeans who would lead the way towards revolutionary social change within different regional and cultural contexts. Intellectuals would supposedly have a secondary role within these newly formed societies. In any case, it is somewhat unclear that the ENR thinkers have completely resolved their tension between an aristocratic elitism, or a disdain for the masses, and their metapolitical commitment to popular, revolutionary social change. Metapolitics appeals to the ENR intellectuals as a strategy precisely because it is elitist, anti-egalitarian and aristocratic in nature. It allows the ENR to gage and hopefully direct populist, ultranationalist or ultra-regionalist sentiments. The “Conservative Revolution” versus New Left The fourth ambiguity within the ENR’s worldview is that it oscillates between an older, revolutionary right-wing conservative revolutionary heritage derived from German, Italian and French inter-war era sources, on the one hand, and a New Left identity born in the wake of the ENR’s foundation and the radical events of May 1968, on the other hand. Both the ENR’s conservative revolutionary heritage and New Left identification claim to take their ideological distance from historical fascism, on the one side, and Old Left Marxism, on the other side. For a cultural movement, which originated on the right, it was important for the ENR to avoid any direct links and references to the discredited worldviews of historical fascism and Nazism. The use of conservative revolutionary thinkers was one way of avoiding any clearly conspicuous connections to fascism and Nazism, and by extension, return the right to cultural and political respectability. Yet, the ENR continually burnt in polemical flames by recycling Schmitt, Evola, or more recently in Eléments, Christoph Steding, a more obscure Nazi writer persecuted by the Nazis (De Benoist 2003b). The identification with cultural themes of the New Left was also conditioned by a tactical consideration. In the late 1960s, the Old Left began to lose its credibility

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among Western Marxists as there were growing revelations of the Stalinist horrors of the Soviet Union, the bitter realities of “real existing socialism” and the growing phenomenon of “New Class” exploitation by the privileged, unaccountable communist leadership. By the 1970s, the general failure of the working class and left to seize revolutionary power within Western Europe contributed to a more benign form of parliamentary Euro-communism and to the general de-legitimation of Marxism as an analytical and practical tool of politics. It was, then, in the ENR’s tactical interest to identify with a fresher 1968 New Left youth generation, which was preoccupied with new themes and concerns than with an Old Left already hounded by a dogmatic image and tarnished by its associations with the crimes of Stalinism and the Soviet Union. The ENR thinkers have claimed to synthesize the ideas of their older conservative revolutionary heritage and more modern, New Left identity. Beginning in the 1980s, however, they tended to emphasize the New Left identity. This led a number of reputable scholars, including Pierre-André Taguieff, to wonder whether the ENR thinkers had vacated extreme right-wing political space or completely abandoned the ultra-nationalist or neo-fascist milieux. For other scholars, the ENR intellectuals are more attached to their older, conservative revolutionary heritage, with all its “proto-fascist” baggage, than to the New Left. The reason for the ENR’s marked emphasis on its New Left identity in the 1990s was an attempt to create a large coalition of anti-liberal, anti-capitalist forces in both Europe and abroad, which would challenge both the United States and global capitalism. As communism faded with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the ENR understood that they could fill the ideological vacuum by appealing to revolutionary forces on both the right and left. The advantage of its New Left identity was that it was less politically discredited than the neo-fascist or radical right-wing milieux. The ENR’s more recent flirtations with the New Left combined with its conservative revolutionary affinities now means that it is under severe attack on several fronts: a hostile traditionalist, religious and ultra-nationalist right, the Old Left or other left-wing tendencies raising the haunting spectre of fascism and a liberal cultural and political elite keen on preserving its power base and the existing ideological status quo. The task of the ENR intellectuals has been to play an uneasy balancing act between what appears to be two contradictory political influences, namely, the conservative revolution and New Left. As a rather heterogeneous school of thought, ENR thinkers and sympathisers ran the gamut of individual affinities from the extreme pole of the conservative revolutionary milieu to a more predominant New Left affinity. Hence, one advantage of a cultural school of thought, unlike a political party in power, is that it can be a sort of scavenger of political and cultural influences without fully confronting its internal ideological tensions, or facing the ultimate choice between two perhaps irreconcilable identities. Conservative versus Revolutionary View of the World The fifth ambiguity within the ENR worldview is between a conservative and revolutionary view of the world. Originating from a revolutionary right-wing tradition,

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ENR thinkers generally subscribe to a hierarchical, organic and conservative view of human social existence which, they claim, is often deeply stamped by one’s cultural origins. On the other hand, the ENR’s Nietzschean and conservative revolutionary influences have meant its embrace of a sort of revolutionary nominalism, which attempts to raze a given individual and society totally in order to transform both individuals and the world. For ENR thinkers, what makes man such a revolutionary creature is that he is completely malleable, and always in the process of a revolutionary new creation. The revolutionary possibilities of man clash with the imprint of cultural and historical conditioning, whether as a member of a given culture, language, region, nation or historical epoch. The ENR’s valorisation of European “ethnopluralism,” or of the right of each European culture to maintain its cultural distinctiveness, could actually hamper the emergence of a revolutionary future where man is forged, in Nietzschean-like fashion, out of chaos and nothingness. The ENR’s tension between its conservative and revolutionary worldviews has several other dimensions. The ENR straddles a conservative view of man governed by man’s dark history and the will to power of the strongest elites, and a revolutionary, left-wing drive associated with the progressive possibilities of moulding a “new man”; between a revolutionary commitment to science and reason and a more conservative, anti-rationalist ethos connected to mystery, identity or myth; between conservative resignation and disdain for the mass, materialist “decadence” of late capitalist modernity and heroic, revolutionary visions of ancient classical thought; between a conservative harkening back to a pre-Christian, pagan era and revolutionary longings for a splendid, post-liberal new tomorrow. One scholar writing in the Journal of Theoretical Politics argues that this tension between conservative and revolutionary outlooks similarly nurtured the views of inter-war era German conservative revolutionary thinkers such as Ernst Jünger and Moeller van den Bruck, or even the classical theoreticians of historical fascism like Giovanni Gentile (Eatwell 1992, 161-94). The ENR’s origins in the revolutionary right-wing milieu and appropriation of conservative revolutionaries have left their major intellectual figures with a heavy historical burden, which they have not fully shaken. ENR thinkers have stressed conservative revolutionary thinkers in order to emphasize their leftist, socialist, dissident and revolutionary roots against what they claim was the fascist or Nazi regimes’ “perverted” mass populism and conservative courting of Church and industrial-business elites. Is the implication that the ENR is more revolutionary than the fascists? Is the message that a revised fascism can still rise phoenix-like from the ashes of a dying European civilization? Does this position imply that “real existing fascism” has not yet existed and that the fascist revolution is still to be made? Scientism-Intellectualism versus Myth-Making The sixth tension within the ENR’s worldview is between a profound acceptance of the latest scientific breakthroughs and the intellectual tools of analytical reasoning and the scientific method, on the one hand, and a more anti-rational, mythical quest for cultural roots, on the other hand. In short, while the ENR thinkers are modern in

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their beliefs in science and reason, they are critical of the excessive use of both which they claim is a common fault of both liberal democratic and socialist societies. For the ENR, like the New Left, there is a profound critique of the limits and excesses of science, reason, universalism and the general ideals of the Enlightenment. ENR thinkers argue that the Western countries have been blinded by their materialistic affinity to science and reason as the new gods of the contemporary age. The quest for a mythical, pre-Christian, pagan European sense of identity and belonging is intended to counter this faith in science and reason, and give each culture the opportunity to be “different” and flourish rather than accept the world-wide imposition of an “abstract” and “pseudo-universalist” liberal or socialist ideology. The ENR’s quest for an “original” European identity, or a search for common European origins, has led to two contradictory interpretations. On the one hand, the primordial affinity for Europe’s ancient, pagan past is seen as a reformulated form of cultural racism with close parallels to the “paganism” of the inter-war era’s Latin fascists or Germany’s National Socialists. Furthermore, ENR thinkers have tended to attack both racist and anti-racist ideologies as assimilationist cousins bent on destroying the cultural diversity of the planet. The ENR’s critics contend that its attack on the universalist ideology of anti-racism and criticisms of multiracial, multicultural societies is a disguised form of racism. On the other hand, there is little evidence of conspicuous racism and anti-Semitism within official ENR sources and even a denunciation of both these Old Right tendencies, thus leading some critics to claim that it is a genuine cultural movement holding a truly dialogical, relational view of identity and defensively rallying against the liberal, capitalist West’s planetary homogenisation of lifestyles, mentalities and cultures. Beginning in the late 1970s, the ENR moved beyond its explicitly biological, scientistic orientation towards a more cultural tone. The ENR’s faith in reason, science and “progress” waned, as like the New Left, it increasingly claimed that they were largely used in the service of giant multinational corporations and at the expense of human communities with their growing army of global poor, catastrophic waves of environmental destruction and the loss of global cultural diversity. The ENR still uses the findings of science in order to legitimise and advance its antiegalitarian and “differentialist” view of the world, but it is thoroughly open to postmodern, irrational and existentialist currents of thought, which question the merits of “progress.” The ENR theorists, then, use the findings of science and the traditional tools of reason in order to give their cultural school of thought a sense of intellectual prestige and enhance their base of support within elite, intellectual circles. One could claim that ENR theorists could use science in order to combat any notions of common, pre-Christian, Indo-European roots. Yet, the search for an “authentic” identity and cultural roots are at the heart of the ENR’s worldview, thus militating against this particular option. Thus, the ENR has invented a mythical pagan past in order to recreate an organic, social glue allegedly uniting all “Indo-Europeans.” With many agnostics and Nietzscheans in their ranks, ENR thinkers rationally utilize a powerful myth of origins and identity in order to remain faithful to the ethic of “difference” and simultaneously appeal to a discontented, alienated and egoistic European population torn apart from its cultural and spiritual roots. The problem is

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that this form of “paganism” has never achieved unanimous public support. Rather, it has created tension with liberals, the left, Catholic ultra-nationalists and traditional monotheistic believers throughout Europe, whether Catholics, Protestants, Jews or Muslims. Simplistic Anti-Americanism versus Recycling of American Federalism The seventh tension within the ENR’s worldview is between a traditional, simplistic anti-Americanism and a recycling of “organic democracy” and a defence of regional identities in the mid-1980s, which somewhat resembled the thrust of eighteenth century American theories of federalism, their defence of state and local identities and impulse towards local self-government and democratic political control (Gottfried 1993-4, 127-33). In ENR journals, the United States, the Anglo-American world generally and the Anglo-American New Right are singled out for the most violent polemical attacks. All these forces are viewed as synonymous with the “egoistic” liberal ethos, the hyper-defence of the capitalist law of the “jungle” and a form of materialist “decadence,” which seeks to convert the entire planet towards a uniform, egalitarian world vision dictated by Walt Disney, Coca-Cola and McDonald’s; a world where, ENR theorists argue, cultural diversity, human solidarity, and spirituality are obliterated in the march towards Americanization and the final victory of the homo oeconomicus. Paul Gottfried has argued that the ENR’s anti-Americanism is rather simplistic because both Frenchmen and Americans belong to the same civilization and the ENR’s federalist turn in the mid-1980s has close affinities with eighteenth century American federalism, which was ironically less universalist, less culturally assimilationist and less centralist in its thrust than the French republican, Jacobin model (Gottfried 1993-4, 132-3). However, the ENR’s view of the United States and the Anglo-American world as an old, dying “prostitute” which simply obeys the “law of cash,” a charge de Benoist labelled at the West generally and the United States in particular in Eléments during the 1990 Gulf War (De Herte 1990, 3), was more typical of the ENR’s diatribes against the United States. The United States is often viewed within ENR publications as a land of Puritan religious moralists, putrefied materialists, cultural dinosaurs, racists and subverters of all foreign national, cultural or regional traditions. For the ENR thinkers, the United States’ “intolerant” Protestant path stands in contrast to its neo-paganism, which seeks to re-establish harmony with nature; accepts multiple gods and cosmic orders; and nurtures communal, organic, Indo-European solidarity against the “decadent” liberal paths of individualism, egalitarianism, technological materialism and the subjugation of nature. In the wake of the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the ENR joined the sometimes-fashionable chorus on the right and left arguing that it was an “inevitable” response to the United States’ “state terrorism” and “imperialism.” De Benoist was especially indignant by claiming that the United States would manipulate the events of September 11 to justify global repression, while urging Europeans and others around the globe to break from the so-called “American” civilizational model:

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? The US is not going to fail to utilize these recent events as a pretext for reaffirming its hegemony over its allies and for silencing the criticisms which have been raised against it for some time (in regard to the Near East, the death penalty, the environment, the global listening network “Echelon” etc.) Consistent with their past behaviour, they will claim to incarnate and to defend the cause of “civilization.” It is the duty of Europeans to say firmly that this “civilization” is not necessarily theirs, and that does not exclude, in any case, other models of civilization. The worst thing to happen, which is probably also the most probable, would be to slip by successive stages into a struggle that goes beyond the “Islamic terrorist movement” to include Arab-Muslim countries in general, then all states or peoples judged sufficiently arrogant to challenge the dominant American model. (De Benoist Padania 19 September 2001)

In the aforementioned interview, de Benoist continues by reproaching the United States’ government for its pro-Israeli and anti-Palestinian stances. He insinuates that the United States, Israel and Russia will use the pretext of September 11 to wage aggressive wars against Muslim-Arab countries, the Palestinians and Chechens respectively. The ENR scholar also chastises the United States for its irresponsible foreign policy, while claiming to distance himself from both Bin Laden’s pan-Islamic fundamentalist, “jihad” civilizational model and the “fundamentalism” of the United States-led “McWorld” model: We are paying the price for American inconsistencies vis-à-vis the Arab-Muslim world. Let us not forget that the Taleban in Afghanistan were first supported and armed by Washington in order to struggle against the Russian army, and that Osama Bin Laden himself, the ultimate irony, was trained by the CIA. In the long run there is the risk of ending up in a planetary and military version of the scenario, “Jihad vs. McWorld. My feeling is that we must reject the Jihad without being the tools of “McWorld.” (De Benoist Padania 19 September 2001)

In this interview, de Benoist is making an indirect reference to two important works on globalisation, namely, Benjamin Barber’s Jihad Versus McWorld (1995) and Tariq Ali’s The Clash of Fundamentalisms (2003). His position sounds rational yet does not hold on closer examination. In practice, the ENR seems to have implicitly endorsed a type of “jihad”-like politics when they initiated and signed an anti-war petition in Kosovo in 1999 that was also circulated among the left; a petition that railed against the “American war in Europe” and yet failed to speak out against the systematic ethnic cleansing of the Milosevic regime (Telos 1999, 1556). While the anti-war manifesto expresses solidarity with the civilian population that are being bombed, it refuses to express solidarity with the Muslim, Kosovar Albanians, which were the victims of systematic ethnic cleansing at the hands of Milosevic’s security forces. For a cultural school of thought that claims to defend ethnic particularism around the planet, this stance amounts to a less than subtle defence of ethnic cleansing. This type of position confirms that the ENR has not yet escaped the mythical, revolutionary longings of the radical right-wing milieu. In short, the ENR’s goal is to create an anti-American front, which allows it to avoid complex problems by using simplistic slogans. The ENR’s singular and “demonic” view of the United States does not correspond to both the American reality, which is more regionally and culturally complex than

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the ENR viewpoint, or to the tremendous violence and intolerance of pagan antiquity. With these criticisms in mind, de Benoist published an article in Eléments in which he argued that in politics there is no absolute, evil enemy and defended the United States Europeans love; the other United States of Jefferson, Thoreau, Poe, Sacco and Vanzetti, Charles, Sontag and Chomsky (De Herte 2005). The Americans and Europeans are members of a common civilization, regardless of whether they view each other as friends or foes, and thus it is European civilization which should also be equally indicted by the ENR for its history of imperialism, nationalist excesses, destruction of non-Western cultures and common liberal, capitalist materialist “obsessions.” ENR thinkers do make such criticisms of European societies, but the anti-American ticket is especially pronounced and often an acceptable and resonant reflex public reaction in both Europe and the former Third World for both the right and left, as well as more traditionalist forces. Pro-Third World Stance versus Pronounced Euro-Centrism The ENR’s eighth tension is between its pro-Third World solidarity stance inherited in the mid-1980s and a pronounced tendency to focus largely on Europe, its cultural identity, its debates, its thinkers and its political and historical influences. While there is no reason to believe that the ENR’s pro-Third World solidarity positions are not genuine, this stance is largely a geopolitical one dictated by the will of many Europeans to politically weaken the United States as a global political force. In 1997, Eléments dedicated its issue to the “Asian revival,” which included articles on Evola as the prophet of European geopolitical awakening and whether the twenty-first century would be Asia’s century (De Herte 1997; Peyerfitte 1997). ENR debates are still largely European, with European authors and essentially European themes and references. The ENR’s pro-Third World authors, whether the uses of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss or the economist Serge Latouche, are based on decidedly Western modes of analysis. The ENR’s post-materialist bent, especially its adherence to the cultural “right to difference” of Western and non-Western cultures alike, could find some support in the former Third World countries, but the majority of non-Westerners are increasingly tied down by materialist preoccupations, which have reduced their lives to the daily grind of mass poverty, starvation, disease and cycles of endless militarization. The prevailing question for this growing army of global poor is not, like the ENR thinkers claim, namely, the preservation of “difference” in the world, but how to end this cycle of poverty and despair, which has both external and internal causes. One could similarly argue, as does Roger Griffin in a personal correspondence with the author, that it is the environmental catastrophe, which is the greatest danger in the world today rather than the preservation of the world’s cultural differences: A destroyed environment and planet would put an end to all life, which would naturally put an abrupt halt to the world’s planetary bio-diversity in terms of both human culture and non-human forms of life (Griffin 1998). In turn, contends Griffin, the ENR might see the eradication of cultural differences as the principle threat to the world today,

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but an environmental catastrophe or a nuclear winter would quickly destroy all the world’s inhabitants and its cultural differences. The ENR’s ingenuity has been its recognition, inherited from the New Left, that world power will increasingly shift from the United States and Europe to the former Third World countries. It has also understood the longings of all peoples and cultures throughout the world, whether Kurds, Basques, Quebecois, Samis, Palestinians, Native Americans, or the East Timorese, to freely practice their cultures, determine their own affairs and duly contribute to the family of nations and international community. This type of radical cultural “ethnopluralism” has some definite appeal in a Europe with deep regional and cultural roots, which historically preceded the foundation of the nation-state project in the late seventeenth century. From the ENR’s viewpoint, a diverse world with several centres of power might be a preferable one, a more politicized world, to a unipolar or bipolar world determined by the whims of one or two superpowers. It might not necessarily be a safer, just or more ordered world as the ethnic violence in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia has so aptly demonstrated. In short, the ENR’s pro-Third World solidarity stance could have some political uses in a post-communist age where former Third World countries are increasingly immiserated by the lack of funds from their former communist clients in Eastern Europe and the cutbacks of liberal Western nations for Third World aid projects. While Europe will remain the focus of the ENR’s worldview and identity, the former Third World will increasingly become a concern as a result of vast disparities between North and South, its economic and strategic interests, the growing economic and political clout of non-Western nations (communist China, Japan, and nuclear powers India and Pakistan), the rising spectre of anti-Western Islamic fundamentalism, the vast increase of non-Western immigrants to the European continent since the 1960s and the de facto emergence of pluralistic societies on European soil. In an ironic twist, could it be long before one day the former Third World provides the models, frameworks and alliances for the Europe of tomorrow? A Communitarian “Destiny” versus Intellectual Freedom The final tension within the ENR’s worldview is between its support for a communitarian, organic, European political project, on the one hand, and its attacks on intellectual conformity and defence of intellectual freedom, on the other hand. In essence, a communitarian project necessarily clashes with the desire of intellectuals for completely free expression, autonomy, creativity and even the planned provocations of anti-conformist opinions. As a cultural school of thought, the ENR thinkers can shock liberal democratic societies with their opinions and themes without facing the direct political consequences. For ENR theorists, this state of affairs smells of “soft totalitarianism” because the existing powers are said to ignore “non-conformist” intellectuals completely, denounce them as marginal cranks or leave them spiritually deadened. The ENR has argued that a society with a more communitarian “destiny,” on the other hand, pays more attention to its intellectuals, fears the power of words as a destabilizing element within the body politic and

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consequently imprisons or obliterates its intellectual critics. The conundrum for the ENR theorists is that while in a liberal democratic society they can publish all sorts of marginal and “non-conformist” opinions, they might be taken more seriously, perhaps even denounced, imprisoned or killed, by regimes with a communitarian, authoritarian or totalitarian orientation. I have attempted to underscore nine points of ambiguity within the ENR’s general worldview. Its major ambiguity is its affinity for both revolutionary right and New Left ideals. Its claim is that it denies creating a revived form of cultural fascism and insists that it has constructed a post-fascist synthesis. While ENR thinkers do share numerous points of political and spiritual intersection, they have a number of unresolved ambiguities. For ENR thinkers, a number of the tensions pointed out earlier are irrelevant because the point of a new political paradigm, the ENR’s purported aim, is to ultimately unite, synthesize and transcend the barriers between formerly antagonistic ideas and political forces. For this reason, the ENR has tended to search for allies equally on the left and right of the political spectrum. This, of course, will not resolve all the ENR’s ambiguities, but it is precisely its cultural ambiguity which is its defining feature and at the core of its identity. Its cultural ambiguity prepares ENR intellectuals for a prominent cultural role in any new postliberal, revolutionary order, whether it is on the right, left or beyond.

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Chapter 7

Interpreting the ENR The ND (nouvelle droite) at the height of its influence was thus a classic example of the adage ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ – Roger Griffin, English historian of fascism

Interpretations of fascism are numerous ranging from Marxist, structural, psychological-historical, modernization and fascist minimum approaches (Kitchen 1976; Lipset 1960; Adorno et al. 1950; Gentile in Mora 1991; De Felice 1977). Juan Linz (1976) broke with the negative definition of fascism in the literature to argue that fascism combined hypernationalism, the planned destruction of political enemies and the positive aim of “national social integration through a single party and corporative representation” (Linz in Blamires 2006, 37) Sternhell, Mosse, Gregor, Griffin and others attempted to supersede the focus on the “anti-” dimension of fascism or the fascist negations, which included anti-communism, anti-capitalism, anti-Marxism, anti-liberalism, anti-conservatism, anti-individualism, anti-parliamentarism, etc. (Griffin in Blamires 2006, 36-7). In the emerging “new consensus” in fascist studies, “the ‘inhuman’ negative effects of fascism are now interpreted as the direct product of its bid to achieve, what in its own perception, are positive goals, rather than of its inherently destructive or nihilistic nature” (Griffin in Blamires 2006, 37). Despite fascism’s destruction of the working class, chilling elimination of racial and ideological enemies and abolition of the parliamentary system, from this perspective fascism is seen as a revolutionary ideology designed to bring a total rebirth of man (woman), society and nation or racial community along secular, modern lines. A recent approach by A. James Gregor even challenges the view that Marxism and fascism are ideologies on opposite sides of the political spectrum, with Marxism on the “left” side and fascism residing on the “right” (Gregor 2000). Gregor argues that in conjunction with this view of Marxism is the belief that it is more progressive and humanitarian, and that fascism is more malicious, regressive and evil. He insists that these characterizations are faulty and blur the essential similarities between the two ideologies (Rua in Gregor 2000, 17). The traditional Marxist approach saw fascist dictatorships arise because the ruling bourgeoisie attempted to thwart the impending socialist revolution by installing a dictatorship that would protect their interests. Gregor argues that the Fascist regimes of both Mussolini and Hitler displaced the traditional bourgeoisie from power and subordinated the bourgeoisie’s interests to the collective national interest (Gregor 2000, 40-42). One writer has neatly highlighted this nationalist project: “According to fascist ideology, the means of production and the forces of the market, under the control but not the ownership of the state, are seen as instruments to coordinate

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and harmonize the productive forces of the nation for the good of all classes” (Rua 2000). For Gregor, Fascist regimes do not operate in the service of any one particular class, but seek a harmony between all the classes. Gregor’s thesis becomes more controversial when he argues that the practical applications of Marxist-Leninist theory took on an essentially “fascist” appearance. Mao and Stalin both conceived of the world as divided between “less-developed nations and advanced industrial democracies” (Rua in Gregor 2000, 73). This gave rise to the nationalistic policies of each country, which stressed revolutionary violence and submission to the charismatic leader. Gregor adds that since these characteristics are usually described as “right-wing” it was “never made quite clear whether Maoism (or Stalinism) was a form of ‘right-wing extremism’ or ‘left-wing adventure,’ which suggests that the distinction was never really clear or convincing” (Rua in Gregor 2000, 75). Although Hitler did display his debt to the Bolsheviks when he declared that he would make Munich “the Moscow of our movement,” Gregor misses the point that although Maoist and Stalinist terror tactics mirrored the fascists, they saw themselves on the left rather than right. Gregor’s distinction is based on a common misunderstanding of fascist ideology. In examining the writings of fascist theorists, he posits that fascism is a “variant of revolutionary Marxism designed to address the reality of lesser developed nations” (Rua in Gregor 2000, 133). Fascist ideology emerged, Gregor argues, in part around the Italian syndicalist attempt to enhance the productive capacity of Italy in the face of international exploitation at the hands of developed industrial countries. Syndicalists argued for the collaboration of all the productive forces of a nation through the intervention of the state. Syndicalist and later Fascist ideologue Roberto Michels insisted that fascism is the “the revolutionary nationalism of the poor” (Michels in Gregor 2000, 133). Mussolini’s corporate state was a way of harmonizing the interests of all social classes. The result is a society in which labour and business is coordinated under the leadership and control of the state. Fascism transformed the Marxist theory of international revolution by emphasizing an ideology that stressed the conflict between nations. Syndicalist-Fascist thinkers such as Benito Mussolini, Sergio Panunzio and Enrico Corradini saw the world as divided between developing plutocracies and lesser developed nations that seemed to be destined for exploitation at the hands of those plutocracies (Rua in Gregor 2000, 139-40). According to these thinkers any theory emphasizing internationalism was “a product of late capitalism, serving ‘free trade’ interests of imperialism” and destined to leave “proletarian nations” “the victims of exploitation” (Rua in Gregor 2000, 140). Thus, these thinkers saw fascism as the socialism of the proletarian nations (Rua in Gregor 2000, 135). Gregor’s interpretation allows him to argue that “left-wing” communism transformed into “right-wing” fascism, while Mussolini, a former time leader of the “left-wing” Italian Socialist party, became the “right-wing” leader of Fascist Italy. While Gregor’s interpretation of fascism is based on meticulous scholarly research, de Benoist has mirrored Gregor’s approach by asking the question in Telos of whether fascism and communism were evil twins (De Benoist 1998a). While his work is also of a high scholarly calibre, might de Benoist’s goal be to equate fascism and communism in order to restore the respectability of ideas that helped

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nourish the former? In her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) Hannah Arendt saw Nazi Germany and the Stalinist Soviet Union as a common, “novel form of government” in which ideological fiction reigned and totalitarian terror was an end in itself (Arendt 1951). A contrasting position has been offered by Slavoj Zizek who sees fascism as radically more evil than Stalinism and challenges Nolte’s attempts to equate the two because Nazi racial struggle obfuscates the more authentic class-based political struggle of communism (Zizek 2005). Zizek points to a further chasm between Nazism and Stalinism: Stalinism conceived itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, according to which, truth being accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved, everyone must be regarded as responsible for his crimes. But for the Nazis the guilt of the Jews was a fact of their biological constitution: there was no need to prove they were guilty, since they were guilty by virtue of being Jews. (Zizek 2005)

Zizek points to disturbing trends in the Europe of the new millennium such as a group of conservative members of the European Parliament, mostly from excommunist countries, demanding the banning of communist symbols such as the hammer and sickle and red star, thus making the red star equivalent with the banned swastika. In September 2003, Silvio Berlusconi created an outcry when he claimed that Mussolini, unlike Hitler, Stalin or Saddam Hussein, never killed anyone. In the context of a more acceptable conservative climate that attempts to unravel the antifascist coalition of the post-war era, Zizek writes the following: It is necessary to take sides and proclaim Fascism fundamentally ‘worse’ than Communism. The alternative, the notion that it is even possible to compare rationally the two totalitarianisms, tends to produce the conclusion – explicit or implicit – that Fascism was the lesser evil, an understandable reaction to the Communist threat. (Zizek 2005)

If interpretations of fascism are varied and numerous, interpretations of the ENR are even more difficult in the age after the official defeat of Fascist regimes. Moreover, if we take Payne’s exhaustive typological, checklist approach to fascism (Payne 1995, 7), in terms of ideology and goals, the ENR espouses elements of an idealist, vitalist and voluntaristic philosophy, and seeks to create a new, modern, selfdetermined, secular culture combining conservative revolutionary, New Right and New Left ideas to replace liberal democracy. While the ENR’s economic goals tends to mirror the fascist desire for a highly regulated, multiclass, integrated economic structure, that structure is not national corporatist, nationalist socialist or national syndicalist, but rather regionalist and pan-European corporatist. While the ENR has used many authors like Evola and Schmitt with a positive evaluation of violence, its own metapolitical framework officially eschews its own willingness to use violence and war. Yet, it does not seek a nationalist authoritarian state based on traditional principles or models because it rejects both nationalism and authoritarianism in favour of older federalist models of governance. Neither does it seek the goal of old European colonialist empires or expansion, although it does pay homage to the

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idea of empire and seeks to strengthen Europe’s geopolitical standing vis-à-vis the United States. In terms of Payne’s fascist negations, the ENR clearly fits the fascist mould. It is definitively and unambiguously anti-liberal, anti-communist, anti-conservative and revolutionary in its worldview. It is here that de Benoist comes closest to fascist theoreticians such as Giovanni Gentile and José Antonio Primo De Rivera, the leader of the Falange Española Party who was executed in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War and usurped by General Franco as the undisputed leader of the Spanish Nationalists. In the 1932 edition of the Enciclopedia Italiana, the doctrine of “Fascism” attributed to Mussolini but written by Gentile, defined Fascism as a total rejection of individualist liberalism and defended a totalitarian conception of the state: It is opposed to classical Liberalism, which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people. (Mussolini and Gentile in Schnapp 2000, 48-9)

De Benoist has written similar scathing critiques of liberalism minus the fascist preoccupation with the total state. While his anti-communism can be questioned due to a brief philo-communist period, this flirtation was temporary and secondary; a byproduct of his complete and primary rejection of liberalism, the ENR’s number one enemy. With style and organization, however, the ENR is less fascist precisely because of its metapolitical orientation and its conscious effort starting with GRECE to get rid of outdated fascist vocabulary. So, for example, unlike fascists, the ENR has not attempted mass mobilization with militarization of political relationships and style and with the goal of a mass party militia. It rejects political parties as sterile, while seeking a subtle form of mass mobilization without militarization on issues such as race, culture, identity, multiculturalism and globalization. The ENR is a broad school of thought and unlike fascists does not stress an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style of command due to the differing national and regional leaders and differing influences. While the ENR emphasizes the conflict of generations with rival intellectuals and political classes, it does not particularly exalt youth above other phases of life like the fascists. While like the fascists the ENR has called for a strongly organic, hierarchical view of society, it does not stress the masculine principle and male dominance like the fascists, preferring to merge its “male” revolutionary longings with more feminist influences. Having said that, ENR intellectuals and groups are largely male and their attention to issues concerning women have been negligent. While fascists had an emphasis on the aesthetic structure of meetings,

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symbols and political liturgy, stressing emotional and mystical aspects, the ENR’s valorisation of paganism, pagan rituals, ancient symbols of the past and emotional and mystical attachment to myths of Indo-European origins all echo the fascists’ cultural or racial obsessions. Previous chapters have examined the central ideological positions within the worldview of the ENR. In this chapter, I examine some of the prevailing interpretations of the intellectual activity of the ENR. I close the chapter by discussing what I term the “Griffin-Taguieff debate” in respect of the ENR, as well as offering a note of academic caution about evaluating ENR theorists. Roger Griffin is a historian from Oxford Brookes University in England who argues for a fascist minimum theory, while Pierre-Andre Taguieff is the leading expert of the ENR from France. While Taguieff traces the intellectual migrations of leading ENR theorists such as Alain de Benoist away from the neo-fascist and ultra-nationalist camps, Griffin views the ENR intellectual makeovers in the 1980s and 1990s as surface phenomena that hide the ENR’s more lasting commitment to a fascist politics suited for the new millennium. While Griffin and Taguieff have written extensively on the ENR, there are three fundamental reasons why there has been a relative dearth of academic literature on the ENR: the right’s self-inflicted “burden of history” (thus leading critics to believe that the right was ideologically and politically dead), the polemical journalistic storm surrounding ENR ideas in France in both 1979 and 1993, and, beginning in the early 1980s, the academic focus on the emergence of more conspicuous mass media phenomena on the right, such as the Anglo-American New Right (AANR), Thatcherism, Reaganism and the rise of extreme-right and neo-fascist movements and political parties. Classification of the Scholarly Literature I want to suggest that the academic interpretations of the ENR phenomenon fall into four basic positions: (1) The ENR ideologues represent a new form of cultivated and sinister cultural-intellectual fascism; (2) The ENR theorists have fashioned a new political paradigm transcending the traditional right-left dichotomy; (3) The ENR thinkers have created a unique post-modern synthesis of an older, right-wing ideological legacy combined with more recent and left-wing themes; and (4) The ENR theorists have created a pervasive sense of ambiguity and confusion within the scholarly community. These four categories are naturally “ideal” types and some scholars often fall into several categories. The first position is related to the second because the proponents of the latter argue that the ENR has both tactically and ideologically distanced itself from its fascist or extreme-right legacies of the past and now constitutes a novel political paradigm: A New Right or post-right variant of the more humane, eclectic and spiritually-inclined New Left, which sought to displace a dogmatic, outdated Old Left. The first position has tended to dominate the literature on the subject and has also been the most contested and polemical. In contrast, the second position is probably the least popular and a minority position in the literature. Its adherents have

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often been accused by the left of falling into the ENR’s seductive trap, its subtle attempts to satisfy the eclectic tastes of different constituencies, or what Roger Eatwell saw as the distinction between its different exoteric and esoteric doctrines (Eatwell in Cheles 1991, 320). In the 1993 Appeal to Vigilance, left-wing thinkers or scholars were even accused of collusion with an ascendant, sinister extreme rightwing or neo-fascist agenda. The third position acts as a sort of moderating force between the first two and often overlaps with the fourth. The claims for the third and fourth positions have been clearly a product of the revolutionary right’s political and tactical pragmatism in light of its “burden of history” and a scholarly acceptance of sustained ENR attacks on Old Right pillars. These positions have gained some intellectual ground because of perceived ENR ideological changes away from the Old Right legacies such as fascism, totalitarianism, ultra-nationalism, colonialism, racism, anti-Semitism, Catholic integralism, moralism, economic liberalism and extra-parliamentary street violence. Conflicting academic definitions of fascism and neo-fascism also enhance the claims of these positions, while the ENR’s past and present links to the revolutionary right has prevented some critics from reading the phenomenon as a completely new political paradigm. For the purposes of intellectual and political life, the first position’s claim of the ENR as a new form of intellectual fascism and the second’s of a new political paradigm are clearly the most influential. If scholars of the first camp are correct, then the ENR has ingenuously created a new form of cultural fascism, which denies the tags of fascism, totalitarianism and racism. For this intellectual camp, the ENR’s sophisticated metapolitical acumen paved the road towards a greater acceptance of “differential racism” used so effectively by contemporary extreme right-wing political parties such as France’s Front National. On the other hand, if the scholars in the second camp are correct, then the ENR has moulded a new political paradigm, which has serious implications for both the disciplines of political theory and future political alliances and practices. This group of scholars points to the polemical attitude towards the ENR by individuals and groups of all political stripes during their height of French mass media exposure in 1979 and 1993 as evidence of panic in both Old Right and Old Left camps because they feared a new political paradigm, which was “free” of all received ideologies and the comfort of intelligentsia “cliques.” In both instances, the ENR ideological synthesis is highly relevant to both intellectual and political life. It is my contention that both the first and second positions reveal a kernel of truth, but not the entire picture about the ENR thinkers. The fourth position stands on tenuous grounds because it might reveal real confusion in the minds of scholars studying the ENR rather than the “constructed ambiguity” of the ENR theorists themselves. This leaves my claim closest to the third camp: An ideological synthesis between older and newer intellectual schools of thought. In short, given the ENR’s various tendencies and ideological overhaul, the ENR phenomenon is perhaps neither completely a new form of cultural fascism, nor an entirely new political paradigm. So, for example, in previous chapters I examined how the ENR attempted to forge an ideological synthesis between the ideas of the revolutionary right and New Left. Griffin argues that it might be possible to identify within the ENR an entire range of possible strands of thought: More and less neo-fascist strains, more and less culturally

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pessimist, more or less beyond right and left and moving towards a new political paradigm (Griffin 1998). So, for example, Michael Walker’s ENR journal in England The Scorpion is closer to the revolutionary nationalist, conservative revolutionary and anti-Jewish, neo-fascist milieux than Charles Champetier’s French-based journal Eléments or even Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Ecole. Furthermore, it is questionable that the ENR’s strictly cultural framework is a sign of a new political paradigm. Charles Maurras, the French founder of integral nationalism and the anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist inter-war movement the Action française, largely devoted himself to the metapolitical terrain and remains a likely model for major ENR thinkers such as Alain de Benoist (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 32). In fact, a large pantheon of ENR intellectual ancestors, including thinkers tarnished by their association with fascism and Nazism such as Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, originate from an older right-wing generation of thought located between the beginning of the century to the 1930s. In essence, the ENR remains a heterogeneous and ambiguous project consisting of Nietzschean nominalism, a conservative revolutionary heritage, the inter-war era “non-conformists,” New Left, scientism, ecologism, paganism and federalist influences. Position One: “Designer Fascism” or “Ur-Fascism”? Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent disguises. – Umberto Eco, Italian novelist and semiotician

Several respectable scholars have argued for this first proposition, namely, that the ENR represents a disguised form of cultural and intellectual fascism. This position has been the dominant one in the English-language literature on the subject. It is best exemplified by Richard Wolin’s term “designer fascism” for the ENR intellectuals (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 48-60). In Wolin’s view, the old revolutionary right has replaced designer suits for the old jackboots and brownshirts and created a modernized, democratic veneer and unique metapolitical discourse to replace the extra-parliamentary violence of the inter-war years (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 48-60). As Harvey Simmons argues, this refusal to accept the extremist or fascist label and loudly proclaim an allegiance to democracy behind a rhetorical fog of coded language and slogans is now an integral part of contemporary European culture and politics (Simmons 1996, “Preface”). The first position can be succinctly summarized by the stance of Italian author Umberto Eco writing in a 1995 piece in the New York Review of Books: Ur-Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, ‘I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.’ Life is not that simple. UrFascism can come back under the most innocent disguises. (Eco 1995)

The Italian radical right-wing guru Julius Evola edited a cultural review between 1927 and 1929 called Ur, which is synonymous with traditionalist themes such as fire, origins and the primordial. Eco perhaps had de Benoist in mind when he claimed

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that “Ur-Fascism can come back under the most innocent disguises.” De Benoist’s cultural vocation was presumed to be innocent and even waved the anti-fascist flag. It was these “innocent disguises” that worried Eco. Fascism could reappear in new, unrecognisable permutations for a public that could not decipher the novel fascist code. The earliest work on the subject from the “Ur-Fascism” position was La nouvelle droite: le dossier du “procès,” an edited collection of ENR writers and their critics assembled by the French scholar Julien Brunn in 1979 (Brunn 1979). While the work did not hide its partisan support as a sort of “trial” of pernicious ENR ideas, it did have a redeeming quality in exposing the actual works of ENR thinkers or supporters, including Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vial and Louis Pauwels. It also included an assessment of the ENR phenomenon by some renowned French thinkers such as Maurice Duverger, Raymond Aron and Alain Touraine. Moreover, this work on the nouvelle droite sought to point out the ENR linkages with its Old Right revolutionary milieu, whether through extreme right-wing political parties such as the short-lived Parti des forces nouvelles (PFN) in the 1970s, its attempted infiltration into army circles or relationship to “quasi-fascist” publishers and journals. It also pointed to GRECE’s statements and bulletins in the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to abandon “outdated language,” focus on the “respectable” credentials of its members and attempt to infiltrate the highest levels of political decision-making. Brunn’s implicit claim was that what Eco dubbed “Ur-Fascism” was returning under the most unlikely masks through the works of the ENR thinkers. Another early work from this first position was a 1981 article written by philosopher Thomas Sheehan comparing what he called the “fascism” of Italian philosopher Julius Evola and the ENR’s Alain de Benoist (Sheehan 1981). Julius Evola, a traditionalist in the mould of French counterrevolutionary thinker Joseph de Maistre, was the author of the Italian Fascist regime’s manifesto of “spiritual racism” against Nazism’s merely “biological racism,” and in the aftermath of the war’s ruins would become the guiding light for Italy’s radical right-wing groups. He was so revered in revolutionary right-wing circles that former MSI leader Giorgio Almirante once called him “our Marcuse, only better.” In his seminal work Vu de droite, de Benoist has five pages devoted to Evola (De Benoist 1979b, 432-6), but neglects to mention his relationship to Italian Fascism and the fact that Evola translated the infamous and conspiratorial anti-Semitic forgery of the Russian czar, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Franco Ferraresi, an Italian scholar of the radical right, has recently shattered the myth of Evola’s claim of a higher order “spiritual racism” with evidence of explicit racism and anti-Semitism (Ferraresi 1996, 43-50). De Benoist also claims that Evola’s “aristocratic pessimism” made him a large number of adversaries within the Fascist Party, including Giovanni Gentile, its leading theoretician (De Benoist 1979b, 433). In any case, while de Benoist’s Nietzschean, existentialist nominalism is clearly incompatible with Evola’s traditionalism which borrowed heavily from French esoteric traditionalist René Guénon, Sheehan claims that the two are both “Eurofascists” providing the ideological ammunition for extreme right-wing groups dedicated to terrorism “in the name of saving Europe from both capitalism and Marxism” (Sheehan 1981, 45). Sheehan agrees that the metaphysics of Evola and de Benoist might diverge, but argues that the prevalence of myth, “theoretical violence,”

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the common belief in a forceful, organic and hierarchical state and subtle racism (e.g., he cites Evola’s “spiritual racism” and de Benoist’s praise of the Celts over Mediterranean peoples) makes them both imbued with a fascist Weltanschauung (Sheehan 1981, 64-73). French scholar Robert Badinter also wrote an early piece supporting the first position. For Badinter, there are close parallels between the fascist ideological synthesis, conservative revolutionary thinkers and the ideas of contemporary ENR theorists (Badinter 1985). According to Badinter, the ENR represents a new form of updated post-war fascism trying to subtly revive a series of ideas and a standard pantheon of revolutionary right-wing authors, which had underpinned fascism. Cultural critic Henry Weinberg and Ciaran Maolain, author of an encyclopaedic, world-wide directory of the radical right, also expressed similar views two years later in 1987. For Weinberg, the ENR is, to some extent, a reincarnation of the Old Right, but which has modernized its crude racism and elitism to increase its appeal, projected a learned and sensible image prepared to debate all opponents and expressed faith in science and the future against the prevailing intellectual pessimism of the age (Weinberg 1987, 111-30). Weinberg has called the French nouvelle droite “a sophisticated form of racism” and charged that its anti-Judeo-Christian stance is simply a rhetorical trope for its congenital anti-Judaism (Weinberg 1987, 11920). In a country where intelligence and intellectual discussion are highly valued, Weinberg concludes that the public forum given to the nouvelle droite has resulted in the legitimisation of “quasi-fascist” concepts by a rather unsuspecting public. Mirroring Weinberg’s view of what he calls the “quasi-fascist” nouvelle droite, Maolain writes the following assessment about its principal think tank GRECE: GRECE provides a platform of right-wing interpretations of social, economic, cultural, genetic and historical topics. It rarely comes close to endorsing fascist or white supremacist ideas in an open manner, and specifically opposes fascist terrorism, but provides an intellectual forum in which elitist, pan-Europeanist and quasi-fascist ideas are developed. GRECE is anti-egalitarian, anti-American, anti-Soviet and pro-authoritarian, and regards the Judeo-Christian tradition as decadent and debilitating. (Maolain 1987, 97)

In the 1990s, a number of other scholars published pieces supporting the first proposition I have called “designer fascism” or “Ur-Fascism.” Roger Griffin has been the most careful and thorough of this group of scholars in undertaking a close textual analysis of ENR authors, their historical antecedents and current influences and then relating it to the fascist legacy. Griffin has neatly pointed out the ENR’s historical continuity with the tradition of the inter-war’s German conservative revolutionaries who used metapolitics to bypass discredited manifestations of fascism and Nazism: Its spherical view of history oscillating between spiritual decadence and renewal, anti-egalitarian elitism, warrior ethic and the savage attacks on liberal Weimar institutions, “parasitic capitalism,” positivism, the notion of one civilization and linear “progress” world-improvement schemes of liberals and socialists (Griffin 1998, 7-12). Challenging Pierre-André Taguieff’s claim that with the launch of Alain de Benoist’s journal Krisis in 1988 the latter transcended his revolutionary right-wing origins, Griffin argued that the ENR leader’s stance of detached cultural criticism

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and non-violent metapolitics known as apoliteia did not mean his abandonment of a refined ultra-nationalist, palingenetic and ideal type fascist worldview (Griffin 1998, 13-17). Griffin likened de Benoist’s apoliteia stance to Julius Evola’s idea of “riding the tiger” in order to resist the spiritual corruption and decadence of the post-war era and remain faithful to the flame of a “higher reality”: A kind of “inner emigration” and a cultivated aloofness from conventional politics and the standard mass media version of world events (Griffin 1998, 14). He also pointed to more recent de Benoist texts, including the celebration of a revolutionary “return to the clarity of myth” in his work L’empire intérieur, as continuing evidence of a palingenetic, fascist-like orientation (Griffin 1998, 16) Griffin argues that the ENR is intellectually dangerous because a similar form of metapolitical speculation during the inter-war era helped to smash liberal democracy and launch the horrors of fascism and Nazism. He concludes that the novelty of the nouvelle droite was not a new paradigm for interpreting modernity, but instead “a new intellectual passport with which it has been able to operate largely incognito as a purely metapolitical form of cultural speculation” (Griffin 1998, 11). Griffin clearly summarizes his support for the notion of “designer fascism”: Despite elements of genuine renewal, and the fact that ever since its formation in the late 1960s the ND has been engaged in a constant process of evolution and diversification, it did not offer a new paradigm as Piccone suggests. Nor was it primarily a product of the crisis of the Left as Revelli implies: rather it was the product of the acute crisis of credibility which fascism faced as a viable extra-systemic ideology in the post-war era, fruit of a concerted effort at transforming fascism’s strategy and discourse as to keep its palingenetic project alive. In IT terms the ND did not offer a new type of programme. Rather it is to be compared to a series of new or modified editions of an old software product (Wordperfect versions 4.1 to 6.3?), whose basic design and purpose are recognizably unchanged underneath all the impressive improvements to the display and the vast range of new functions which have been added to bring it in line with rival products. The ND at the height of its influence was thus a classic example of the adage ‘plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.’ (Griffin 1998, 10-11)

Another important English historian of the fascist phenomenon, Roger Eatwell, has forcefully argued for the first proposition. Echoing the earlier views of cultural critic Henry Weinberg, Eatwell argues that while not overtly anti-Semitic and racist, the nouvelle droite operates different agendas for its elitist think tanks and mass public in order to disguise its racism and anti-Semitism, and deep hatred for multicultural societies (Eatwell 1996, 248-50). Eatwell claims that there is a widespread consensus in the literature that the ENR is essentially racist (Eatwell 1996, 250). Pierre-André Taguieff has even argued that the ENR’s early 1980s turn towards xenophilia is ultimately a form of “new cultural racism” or “differentialist racism.” (Taguieff 1990, 109-22). This “right to difference” has been appropriated by the ENR in order to win the “cultural war” against a culturally “superior” left. The “right to difference” has not been uncommon to sections of the New Left, the Frankfurt School and even the French Socialist Party under François Mitterrand in the early 1980s.

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In Eatwell’s view, ENR ideological pillars of recent years such as the “right to difference,” the stress on organic and Indo-European roots, cultural diversity and cultural particularism against the “homogenising tyranny” of global capitalism, the nation-state and Westernization, are simply veiled code words for a radical opposition to the project of a multicultural, multiracial France or Europe (Eatwell 1996, 250). If the German New Right’s slogan of a “heterogeneous world of homogeneous communities” is an indication of this trend, then Eatwell’s fears are not unwarranted. Eatwell’s implicit message is that the ENR is a tactical, metapolitical and intellectual response to counter the rise of European cultural diversity and immigration. Eatwell’s warning is that the ENR is an intelligent and dangerous reply to the rise of de facto multicultural societies and the discourse of liberal universalism, while at the same time avoiding the vulgar, populist legitimisation of extremist, anti-immigrant politics. The author leaves us eerily wondering what a mythical return to a “heterogeneous world of homogeneous communities” will mean in practice for liberals, leftists, anarchists, democrats, multiculturalists, internationalists, immigrants, Jews, dissidents and the “political homeless”? Like Eatwell, political scientist Harvey Simmons concurs with the first position. In a chapter devoted to GRECE and their revision of post-war fascism, Simmons argues that ENR attacks on egalitarianism and Judeo-Christian values might be a tactical and ideological way of dressing racism and anti-Semitism in a semirespectable guise (Simmons 1996, 212-15). The ENR, we have noted earlier, holds that historically Judaism had presaged Christianity in creating a prosaic, dogmatic, monotheistic and hence “totalitarian” worldview devoid of spiritual striving and mystery. Moreover, Simmons insists that the ENR is attempting to renew what Sternhell saw as the “neither right nor left” formula of the fascist ideological synthesis by blurring distinctions between right and left, and distinguishing themselves from both communist and socialist positions, and also conservative and reactionary ones (Simmons 1996, 261-2). For Simmons, the ENR and especially the French nouvelle droite are essentially sophisticated tactical responses to near extinction: A cultural rehabilitation of the revolutionary right and fascism in the post-war and post-colonial (i.e., post-Algeria) era. According to Simmons, political respectability and capturing the hearts of public opinion were the ENR’s main goal and thus no Old Right pillars were any longer sacrosanct: The West, “white race,” Judeo-Christian tradition, colonialism, nationalism, cultural superiority and “progress” (Simmons 1996, 209). Simmons insists that the violent tactics of the past had ghettoised the fascist cause and failed to culturally indoctrinate elites and public alike with a deep-seated, revolutionary spirit. This would explain the ENR concern and envy with cultural issues in the mould of the New Left. The focus on the cultural realm would allow the ENR to achieve more political success than violent street battles and terrorism directed against the rising left, or the route of parliamentary politics against an “impotent” conservative establishment. Simmons shows how the ENR fixation on the terrains of culture, language and metapolitics has been praised by explicitly neo-fascist political theorists such as Maurice Bardèche and mirrored by extreme-right or neofascist political parties like the French Front National (Simmons 1996, 212-31). Like several other adherents of this first position, Simmons has also traced GRECE’s

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continued relationship and even exchange of personnel with extreme-right or neofascist political parties. This position has also attempted to highlight the alleged linkages between sophisticated cultural networks such as GRECE and violent radical right-wing groups, whether “black terrorists,” Nazi-oriented skinheads or Holocaust negationist organisations. In the late 1990s, Michalina Vaughan, Martin Lee and Richard Wolin continued to provide ammunition for the first position. In the 1970s, Vaughan contends that the ENR was fairly influential in rehabilitating a number of previously indefensible, “proto-fascist” ideas through its elitist discourse, scientific orientation and emphasis on the “authentic” roots of European culture (Vaughan in Cheles 1991, 219-20). Vaughan even traced the ENR’s continuity of personnel and major ideological tenets to the revolutionary nationalists of the anti-Gaullist, pro-French Algeria underground conspirators centred around the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète (OAS- Secret Army Organization) (Vaughan in Cheles 1991, 217-20). Despite clear differences with the ultra-nationalist, royalist and integralist Action française of the inter-war era, Vaughan maintains that the ENR shared with its penchant for intellectual reform as a preliminary to societal change and both fostered a climate of opinion in which right-wing extremism could thrive (Vaughan in Cheles 1991, 219). Martin Lee is even more unambiguous than Vaughan about the ENR’s relationship to fascism. Lee was adamant that France’s leading nouvelle droite philosopher Alain de Benoist shrewdly espoused fashionable ideas borrowed from the New Left such as “ethnopluralism” and the “right to difference” in order to facilitate a resurgence of Eurofascism (Lee 1997, 171-216). While he did not intentionally support racial superiority, claimed Lee, the ENR’s major thinker could not prevent his ideas from being utilized by neo-fascist or extreme right-wing politicians in order to justify racism and xenophobia. Lee concludes that sophisticated tacticians such as de Benoist understood that there were multiple ways to play the neo-fascist game. This included dropping the fascist label in order to stay in touch with modern times, as well as not openly expressing the old faith. In this way, Lee writes, “The torch of fascism still burns in new disguises” (Lee 1997, 12). Wolin asserts that a cultural, metapolitical “designer fascism” was central to the ENR’s project and relatively successful in its goal of bringing extreme right-wing or fascist ideas into the mainstream of French and European political life. So, for example, Wolin writes this sober assessment about the relative success of the nouvelle droite’s cultural strategy in both France in particular and Europe in general: When one speaks of the French New Right or Nouvelle Droite, one is referring to a group of intellectuals, many of whom had prominent ties to fascist groups during the 1960s. Their agenda has been relatively straightforward: in a post-war era in which the extreme Right has been delegitimated owing to the taint of collaboration, they have sought to bring right-wing ideas into the political mainstream once again. And while, as intellectuals, many of the leading figures of the Nouvelle Droite have remained marginal, in historical retrospect one would have to say they succeeded in their aim. In essence, they have been able to relegitimate a discourse of race and racism that has had an insidious influence on the French politics of the 1980s and 1990s. … In his attempt to revitalize fascist ideology, Benoist strove for a type of intellectual saturation effect – as he once put it, “the intellectual education of everyone in whose hands the power of decision will come to rest in coming

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years.” To this end, he established an international network of publications, study groups, and front organizations designed to ensure that extreme right ideas would be received by French and European political elites. (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 51)

Wolin argues that the success of the nouvelle droite was built on a change in the early 1980s from what he called the “orthodox fascist concept of biological racism” to a new “cultural racism” based on a liberal sounding “anti-racist” discourse, which was theoretically non-hierarchical and respectful of all cultural differences (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 55). Its origins date back to the anti-republican attacks on the “abstract” Rights of Man and anti-universalist sentiments of European counterrevolutionaries such as Joseph de Maistre. In his Considerations on the French Revolution (1797), de Maistre once declared the following: “In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. … But as for man, I declared I’ve never encountered him; if he exists he is unknown to me” (De Maistre in Berlin 1991). Yet, practically speaking, Wolin maintains that this “right to difference” meant that where “Algerians should enjoy civil liberties was Algeria, “France for the French” (an old racist slogan from the 1930s), Europe for the Europeans, and so on” (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 55-6). He compares de Benoist’s valorisation of the “right to difference” with JeanMarie Le Pen’s justification of ethnic particularism by contrasting their respective statements about immigration in the early 1980s. Wolin cites this remark made by de Benoist in the early 1980s: “The truth is that people must preserve and cultivate their differences. … Immigration merits condemnation because it strikes a blow at the identity of the host culture as well as the immigrant’s identity” (De Benoist in Golsan 1998, 55-6). Moreover, Wolin makes a connection between de Benoist’s aforementioned statement and this more ominous one made by Le Pen in favour of what he terms “parliamentary ethnic cleansing” which echoes the Vichy period’s racial legislation: Peoples cannot be summarily qualified as superior or inferior, they are different, and one must keep in mind these physical or cultural differences. I love North Africans, but their place is in the Maghreb. … I am not a racist, but a national. … For a nation to be harmonious, it must have a certain ethnic and spiritual homogeneity. … We must resolve, to France’s benefit, the immigration problem, by the peaceful, organized return of immigrants. (Le Pen in Golsan 1998, 55)

While Wolin’s warning of a revival of a subtle form of “designer fascism” is central to his analysis of the ENR thinkers, his conclusions about why their ideas have an appeal is also especially instructive. This particular interpretation shows a stark resemblance between the fears and insecurities, which allowed for the rise of the ENR in the 1970s and fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. The major difference, however, is that whereas in the 1920s, the fascists and the revolutionary right could play on fears of a tyrannical, communist internationalism and the fresh memories of the 1917 Russian Bolshevik Revolution, in the 1990s this card was temporarily buried by the fateful collapse of the Soviet Union and communist regimes in Eastern Europe. In a post-September 11 climate, are political and cultural authorities reviving fear with the new threat from Islamist extremism? For Wolin, profound global social and economic changes, the creation of a knowledge-based post-industrial economy

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and the attack on the welfare state has meant the arrival of a “two-thirds” society in which two-thirds of the population lives in relative affluence and the other third leads a marginalised, miserable existence (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 59). Also, Wolin argues that the new global technological and economic order has ushered in a generalized anxiety, insecurity and malaise, the loss of the comfort of identity, meaning and life purpose, powerlessness, hyper-individualism and isolation. The ENR’s contemporary celebration of cultural differences and stress on “permanent values,” Wolin explains, is a clearly planned strategy constructed as an alleviating substitute for the insecurities of what he calls the “brave new world”: The pronounced ideological emphasis in the discourse of the New European Right on “values” and questions of “collective identity” -- be it ethnic, regional, or national – is consciously cultivated. It is intended to compensate for the instability and disorientation sensed by those who have become supernumeraries in a profoundly threatened global economy or “world society” – a highly impersonal, brave new cybertechnological order. For world society has had the effect of eroding and destabilizing traditional networks of social solidarity on which individuals previously could rely as a source of normative integration: family and extended family, occupational groupings, neighbourhoods, communities – even the sacrosanct autonomy of the traditional nation-state. (Wolin in Golsan 1998, 59-60)

Position Two: A New Political Paradigm? What makes the French New Right particularly interesting is that it does not merely propose a bizarre reversal of positions, but the end of the traditional contraposition of Left and Right in favour of a new political paradigm. – Paul Piccone, editor of Telos

In complete contrast to the advocates of “designer fascism,” position two scholars argue that the ENR theorists have created a new political synthesis and paradigm divorced from the Old Right, fascism, Nazism, totalitarianism, imperialism, racism, anti-Semitism, militarism, extra-parliamentary violence and leader cult of the interwar years. This group of thinkers includes Paul Piccone, Mark Wegierski, Franco Sacchi, Pierro Ignazi, Roberto Chiarini and Pierre-André Taguieff. The high number of Italian intellectuals within this position might be explained by the different appraisal of the phenomenon in Italy and France, the two countries’ divergent historical relationships to fascism and possibly a more open intellectual atmosphere within Italy towards forging a genuine, novel political paradigm beyond left and right. This position has been succinctly expressed by frequent Telos contributor and editor Paul Piccone: “What makes the French New Right particularly interesting is that it does not merely propose a bizarre reversal of positions, but the end of the traditional contraposition of Left and Right in favour of a new political paradigm” (Piccone 1993-4, 7). Echoing the claim of Ernesto Galli Della Loggia that the Italian New Right (INR) might be one of the rare remaining revolutionary left-wing movements in the country, Piccone has even suggested that the nouvelle droite leader Alain de Benoist may be one of the few New Left intellectuals left! (Piccone 1993-4, 7).

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This second position has argued that the ENR’s principal theorist, Alain de Benoist, has had a profound influence in shaping the movement and moved it beyond its revolutionary right-wing roots in the 1960s to embrace a number of novel positions between the late 1970s and 1990s. This position points to the allegedly “new” ENR stances of recent years: An indictment of liberalism, economism and the United States rather than communism as the “principal enemies” in the 1970s; a radical critique of nationalism in favour of a federalist “Europe of a Hundred Flags,” “organic democracy and a pro-Third World, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-Enlightenment stance directed primarily against U.S. economic and cultural imperialism and homogenisation in the late 1980s and 1990s (Taguieff 1993-4a, 99-126); the extreme parasitism on Marxist and New Left sources such as Lenin, Gramsci and the Frankfurt School to the point of a brief philo-Soviet flirtation and envy for the left’s fidelity to its ideals; and the attack on liberal societies’ “robotic” and materialistic-oriented ideological conditioning mechanisms (i.e., contemporary mass, cultural and informational technologies such as television and the Internet). The ENR thinkers have claimed that they are merely searching for more authentic, humane and multiple spiritual values and roots in order to counter the myths of “progress,” techno-utopianism, the rule of quantity, unlimited material desire, selfish egoism, unfettered market capitalism and the shallow capitalist horizon based on utilitarian calculation and the cult of money. Perhaps, this claim has had some impact on the proponents of this second position. Similarly, Mark Wegierski and Franco Sacchi have pointed to the ENR’s “new” ideological overhaul of recent years. For both scholars, the ENR intellectuals are novel thinkers with a new political paradigm for several fundamental reasons: The slow, protracted Gramscian metapolitical struggle rather than older extreme rightwing and fascist tendencies towards direct revolutionary action and open hostility towards liberalism and the parliamentary system; the rejection of Old Right theses such as virulent nationalism, racial superiority, racism, colonialism, “hygienic” militarism, heroism, combat, Christian moralism and economic liberalism; the orientation towards an anti-totalitarian, anti-nationalist, anti-Jacobin federalism within a pan-European context; the stress on classical roots and anti-Christian, anti-Jewish paganism; and the sacrosanct “right to difference” of diverse world communities and individuals against the “tyranny” of a homogenized global order (Wegierski 1993-4, 55-69; Sacchi 1993-4, 71-80). These two critics, then, claim that the ENR is an innovative force of cultural criticism far divorced from the violent, jackboot nationalism of the extreme-right or fascism. In the eyes of Wegierski and Sacchi, the allegations of a new subtle form of fascism, position one, are both intellectually perverse and inaccurate. The ENR, Sacchi and Wegierski imply, are revolutionary in their analysis of modernity, but neither Nazi-like (nor neo-fascist) nor conservative in outlook. Two Italian political scientists, Piero Ignazi and Roberto Chiarini, have further given some support for the new political paradigm thesis. Ignazi has claimed that the nouvelle droite is both a cultural and political movement, which has no relation with contemporary extreme right-wing political parties. Its worldview, argues Ignazi, differs drastically from that of the extreme right-wing and fascists, especially its rupture with nationalism in favour of federalism, its call for the preservation of

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diverse ethnic and regional identities and its total rejection of state, bureaucratic, communist, or capitalist social engineering (Ignazi in Weinberg and Merkl 1993, 76-7). Chiarini argues that the Italian Nuova Destra was a post-fascist phenomenon born from the ashes of a right in disarray and in the wake of the movimento del’77, a youth protest movement which came into existence in 1977, transcended political ideologies, and was mostly interested in the fulfilment of subjective aspirations (Chiarini in Johnson 1991, 34). The Italian Nuova Destra was committed to the realms of culture, ideology, philosophy and civil society. According to Chiarini, the aims of the Nuova Destra were to distance itself from all the right’s previous stances, both legal and illegal, and to genuinely re-think the right’s cultural paradigm to free it of sterile, backward-looking positions in order to prepare it for the future (Chiarini in Johnson 1991, 34). Chiarini’s implicit message is that the Nuova Destra emerged from a new generational era, which had no direct ties to the fascist past and some of its members sought to authentically forge a new political paradigm. In contrast to the “official” neo-fascist Italian Movimento Sociale Italiano’s (MSI) parliamentary orientation and the illegal, “black” terrorism of Ordino Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale, the Nuova Destra was indifferent to the fascist and Evolian references of both tendencies. Instead, like its French counterpart, the Nuova Destra believed that liberal democracy could only be superseded through a metapolitical process of cultural renewal and “hegemonisation.” As a result, many standard Nuova Destra ideas have even penetrated into the worldview of rank and file MSI and Alleanza Nazionale (AN) members, thus giving it the profile of a more libertarian party open to the left rather than a standard neo-fascist party. Ignazi has asked the important question of whether this apparently impressive shift in political culture within the MSI-AN towards many essential Nuova Destra ideas might not eventually prove fatal to a party nurtured on the ideas, myths and memories of Italian fascism and the Sàlo Republic? (Ignazi in Merkl and Weinberg 1993, 92). The answer to this question depends on one’s assessment of whether in joining the national coalition government the AN has definitively moved in a post-fascist direction. Pierre-André Taguieff has provided the most important endorsement of this second position. In his classical work on the subject, Sur la nouvelle droite, Taguieff boldly asserted that ENR doyen Alain de Benoist moved outside the orbit of the extreme-right or fascist camp with the launch of his limited-circulation journal Krisis in 1988 (Taguieff 1994, 313). Taguieff claims that de Benoist entered into the realm of scientific detachment and pure cultural criticism, or what Roger Griffin has called apoliteia: An Evolian-like spiritual distance and cultivated aloofness from the conventional, materialistic view of mass media and politics. This concept of apoliteia, however, has been the chasm, which separates Griffin’s support for the “designer fascism” position and Taguieff’s limited support of the new political paradigm thesis. Griffin has used an ideal-type definition of generic fascism to convincingly argue that position two advocates confuse means with ends (i.e., fascism is not about the distinction between non-violent metapolitics and the violent means of past years which were often shared with extreme communists, but about basic unifying ideas and the vision of a post-liberal, ultra-nationalist future cleansed of decadence) and fail to see the continuity of fascist ideas within the ENR worldview (Griffin 1995, 1-12). Unlike Taguieff, Griffin insists that one can pursue a cultural strategy of

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detached apoliteia as the ENR practices, while still maintaining an eternal faith to an ideal-type, fascist-like Weltanschauung. For Griffin, de Benoist’s apoliteia stance still has a metapolitical goal in the desire to have its particular ideas and worldview triumph and is thus not simply equivalent to the realm of memoirs, poetry, quietism or esoteric mysticism. In any case, we can conclude that de Benoist’s apoliteia orientation has several possible motivations: the wish to escape the “ghetto” of the old, revolutionary right and fascism; a reaction of disgust against suicidal Old Right tactics of direct action and confrontation with the liberal capitalist system; a deliberate strategy of “constructed ambiguity” in order to win new followers among the left and “political homeless”; keeping alive a sort of “ideological and cultural bio-diversity” in the world; a preparation of elites for the new post-liberal order after the potential collapse or implosion of the liberal order; and a long-term, inward spiritual preparation against the current age of “decadence” before the internal collapse of the existing system from its own contradictions (i.e., what Evola dubbed “riding the tiger” and remaining loyal to the flame of your sacred ideals and inner vision even in the post-World War Two age of materialist “black decadence” and ruins). Moreover, it is clear that while apoliteia is for de Benoist an intellectual rejection of “politics first,” the “politics of politicians,” parliamentary politics and street politics, it can also be read as the latest reincarnation of the project of long-term metapolitics designed to “awaken” selected elites and create the conditions for the hegemonic supremacy of ENR ideas on the European continent. In this sense, then, apoliteia cannot be confused with traditional politics, anti-politics, or the de-politicisation of the masses, but is the continuation of politics through the cultural “war” of ideas. Apoliteia can be seen as the extension of the cultural and political “wars” through other means. Apoliteia is not the only point of differentiation between positions one and two. The ENR’s incessant valorisation of the “right to difference,” its sacrosanct position for the last four decades, has been contested and analyzed by position one scholars and a number of other thinkers. Both French scholars Taguieff and Duranton-Crabol are not convinced by the ENR’s supposedly liberal and tolerant appropriation of the notion of the “right to difference.” For Duranton-Crabol, the “differentialist” orientation of the ENR has anti-democratic implications because it has tended to take racial prejudices and cultural differences for granted, or make them a banal fact of everyday life (Duranton-Crabool 1988, 241-6). In his Face au racisme Taguieff, too, argues that “differentialist racism” is the new European political reality and is based on the love of rather than hate of cultural differences since racists actually love differences and have a terrible fear of racial mixing (i.e., “mixophobia”) (Taguieff 1991). According to Taguieff, this new “cultural racism” has caught both the antiracist movement and old-style racists alike with the surprising sophistication of its “differentialist” discourse. Taguieff insists that this form of “cultural racism” is far more subtle and pernicious than standard biological variants of racism. Position one scholars have argued that this “cultural racism” has been employed by a number of extreme-right and neo-fascist parties to support a modern fascism within one ethnic group, region or country rather than the fascist desire of the interwar years to spread the ideology internationally. In the end, “cultural racism” can mask its racism with an updated “anti-racist,” anti-superiority and “differentialist”

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rhetoric in the mould of Jean-Marie Le Pen; it undermines the natural cultural and racial mixing of multicultural societies; possibly legitimizes hierarchy, domination, and inequality on the part of “unique” or “different” local communities each with their own relative moral standards; and can use the banner of the inherent “right to difference” as a way of refusing common humanistic or international standards of behaviour. In response to these arguments about the manipulation of the “right to difference” for racialist ends, position two scholars have argued for de Benoist’s genuine defence of both individual and community manifestations of difference, and “relational” and “dialogical” interpretations of the “right to difference.” So, for example, they point out that while in 1989 and 2004 the French Front National used the infamous “foulard affair” (“scarf affair”) to fuel anti-immigrant, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments, Alain de Benoist actually defended the “right to difference” of three Muslim school girls expelled by a principal in Creil, France in 1989 for wearing the chador (Islamic headscarf) in the secular public school system. In addition, it can be claimed, as position two thinkers have, that the ENR’s “differentialist” rather than ethnocentric spirit is based on a particular and long European tradition dating from the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668-1777) to the German thinker Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), and from a right anti-colonialism to the New Left. This tradition has stressed the flowering of the world’s cultural diversity and uniqueness; the inherent value and beauty of all world cultures; and the duty to preserve these cultural differences because they entail a rich multiplicity of different ways of feeling, seeing and living in the world. It is essentially a tradition of radical cultural heterogeneity, which believes that even incommensurable values between cultures are, from an evolutionary perspective, culturally and spiritually beneficial for humanity. Thus, the ENR’s use of apoliteia, its metapolitical stance, and the notion of the “right to difference” have led to differing interpretations of the ENR between position one supporters of “designer fascism” and position two advocates of a new political paradigm. For the first position, apoliteia and the route of metapolitics are simply culturally civilised masks hiding fascist or “proto-fascist” ideas such as the “right to difference.” On the other hand, position two scholars argue that the switch of certain ENR thinkers towards apoliteia and the ENR’s long-term metapolitical battle represent substantive rather than tactical changes in the direction of a novel political paradigm. For this second group, metapolitics is the most cultivated and logical approach in order to restore diversity and the “right to difference” to a grey, homogenized global order increasingly under the spell of large corporate interests. Position Three: Ideological Synthesis of Old and New Right? What is new about the New Right is not that all these various (old) right-wing ideas are enjoying a new ascendancy, but that they have been welded together in a new ideological synthesis. – Ruth Levitas, professor of sociology

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While the first and, to a lesser extent, the second positions, have formed the bulk of the scholarly literature on the ENR thinkers, the third position of a new ideological synthesis between Old Right and New Right ideas is less prominent in the literature. It is a position that has been, at times, acknowledged by scholars supporting the majority position one and its antithesis, position two. Ruth Levitas, Tomislav Sunic, Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol and Pierre-André Taguieff are the most representative figures of this position. The third position’s merits are of exposing both what is simultaneously old and new within the ENR worldview. Consequently, it fills in the missing gaps of the “designer fascism” and “new political paradigm” perspectives. Ruth Levitas has neatly summarized this position: “What is new about the New Right is not that all these various (old) right-wing ideas are enjoying a new ascendancy, but that they have been welded together in a new ideological synthesis” (Levitas 1986, 5). As an example of position three, Tomislav Sunic has situated the ENR in relationship to other right-wing currents in Europe to show how they are heirs of an older conservative tradition connected to diverse religious and pagan thinkers such as Catholic counterrevolutionaries Joseph de Maistre and Juan Donoso Cortés, conservative revolutionary thinkers Oswald Spengler, Vilfredo Pareto and Carl Schmitt, and the inter-war Latin fascists Gabriel d’Annunzio, Henry Montherlant and Julius Evola (Sunic 1990, 8). At the same time, Sunic argues that the ENR is new because they claim a radical split with legal and extra-legal extreme right-wing parties and movements; claim all of Europe as a homeland rather than one country or region; and its members and sympathisers come from a younger post-World War Two generation facing new social issues previously unknown in Europe (Sunic 1990, 11). Given this ENR mixture of older ideological legacies and new issues and themes, Sunic wonders whether we are dealing with a “New Right,” “Fascist Right,” or what he calls “European Leftist Conservatives?” He expresses the ENR’s peculiar, ambiguous ideological position by comparing it to other “Rights” each with their different historical experiences and each with their share of influence on the ENR worldview: There is today a liberal right profoundly committed to parliamentary institutions and opposed to all right-wing movements violating these institutions. But there is also a certain right which has traditionally derided parliamentary systems, even when it stubbornly insisted on being admitted to parliament. Furthermore, there is also a certain right which glorifies nationalism and opposes doctrines espousing internationalism. And finally there is the European New Right which professes none of the above, yet remains indebted to all of them. (Sunic 1990, 6)

Duranton-Crabol has also endorsed this third position. She argues that the goal of GRECE, the key nouvelle droite think tank, was to rejuvenate French nationalism and the legacy of the revolutionary right using the historical examples of ultranationalist thinkers such as Charles Maurras (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 96-7). We have already mentioned her criticisms of the ENR’s racialist manipulation of the “right to difference.” Yet, Duranton-Crabol has also acknowledged the ENR’s ideological heterogeneity and its originality based on a strictly ideological, metapolitical

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orientation designed to hegemonically capture the terrain of civil society (DurantonCrabol 1988, 96-7). Taguieff has located the ENR’s originality elsewhere, while still pointing out how the conservative revolutionary milieu continues to inform the ENR worldview. For Taguieff, the ENR’s essential innovation is the break with the Old Right pillars of tradition, the once sacred Christian past, or more generally, the monotheistic JudeoChristian heritage (Taguieff 1993-4c, 163). This has allowed the ENR to claim that this Judeo-Christian heritage has produced the seeds of totalitarianism through its imposition of a reductionist, moralistic and dogmatic egalitarian, universalist philosophy. Liberalism, socialism and multiculturalism are simply seen as identical secular manifestations of an egalitarian, Christian worldview. In turn, this has led the ENR to argue that it stands forcefully “Against All Totalitarianisms” (Walker 1986b, 3-6). According to Taguieff, this break with the Judeo-Christian tradition in favour of an aristocratic, pagan notion of politics is clearly novel because it takes its distance from the Old Right’s rigid adherence to Catholicism as an integral part of French nationalist identity. In short, we have seen that position three scholars hold that the ENR’s mixture of Old and New Right ideas have created a unique post-modern ideological synthesis. This new ideological synthesis stands between the position one stance of a reincarnated fascism and the anti-totalitarian, anti-fascism claims of position two. It is a position that is wary of what it views as the reductionist claims of both positions one and two. While the former sees fascism everywhere within ENR thought, the latter refuses to see how Old “proto-fascist” ideas continue to influence ENR thinkers and politicians. Position one scholars point out the ENR’s incessant repetition of fascistlike themes: elitism, myth, the sacred, the spiritual, renewal and regeneration from materialist decadence, the search for Indo-European roots, the valorisation of warrior and aristocratic values against merchant values, the call for hierarchical “tripartite” societies and a return to idealized, mythical, homogeneous organic communities. We also know that the ENR is heavily indebted to the older German conservative revolutionary tradition as well as inter-war Latin fascists “who pined for the gods of the ancient city and for a redivinized pagan Nature” (Gottfried in Sunic 1990, “Preface”). At the same time, its novelty might reside in its sensitivity to the newer subjective influences of the New Left, scientism, paganism, ecology, federalism and “organic democracy.” For position two scholars, the ENR’s essential paradigm shift is that it is an audaciously anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, antinationalist and anti-Western right. Furthermore, the ENR’s preference and focus on the metapolitical terrain is a substantive shift away from the older activist, revolutionary right-wing project of seizing state power towards capturing the levers of elite and public opinion within civil society. This does not necessarily entail a return to fascism, or a new political paradigm. The ENR intellectuals, as Taguieff once remarked about Alain de Benoist in a Telos interview, are smart enough to realize that the horrors of the gas chambers have forever discredited fascism (Taguieff 1993-4c, 166-7). Simultaneously, it is unclear whether all the differing ENR strains have sufficiently transcended their revolutionary right-wing roots to mould a new political paradigm. Metapolitics or apoliteia are not in themselves a sufficient basis to claim a new political paradigm

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because Oswald Spengler and Ernst Jünger as well as Charles Maurras’ Action française were all firmly situated on this cultural terrain of political contestation. Moreover, their ideas would eventually have a profound impact on the respective ideas of the Nazis in Germany, the Vichyites in France and, in general, the French inter-war and post-war ultra-nationalist right. The ENR’s metapolitical appropriation of leftists such as Lenin, Che Guevara and Gramsci as well as the New Left might not point to a new political paradigm, but could rather be a survival strategy of the right and tactical stance of ideological deception against the left. Similarly, its notion of the “right to difference” can be traced to both the right and left and has been used for diametrically opposed ends. Position Four: Confusion and Ambiguity There is every reason to believe that the nouvelle droite has become a centre of confusion as well as controversy, and that this reduces its importance. – Douglas Johnson, political analyst

This final position is the residual and minoritarian one based on the genuine confusion and ambiguity ENR intellectuals and ideas have created for scholars. The confusion and ambiguity has been a product of the ENR’s important tactical and theoretical changes since its university student origins in ultra-nationalist, radical right-wing and pan-European racialist circles of the early 1960s. This has included the turns towards metapolitics, anti-Christian paganism, anti-colonialism, anti-nationalism and pro-Third World anti-Westernism. The anti-communist, anti-capitalist refrain against materialist decadence and in favour of cultural “rootedness” and “eternal” spiritual values has remained from the early 1960s until the present. This particular critique of modernity has its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century revolt against positivism, liberalism, socialism and parliamentarism – all seen as the same side of the decadent materialist coin. Radical right-wing, fascist and “non-conformist” forces borrowed this critique in the inter-war era in order to simultaneously combat capitalist and communist materialism. It should be pointed out that this ambiguity has been carefully nurtured by the ENR itself in order to satisfy its different strains, audiences and ideological tastes. Two important representatives of the fourth position are Douglas Johnson and Jean-Marie Domenach. In an anthology on the “Far Right,” Douglas Johnson appears to deliver no authoritative judgement on the ENR’s political identity and goals. In addition, Johnson argues that the movement has become mired in mass confusion and ambiguity, thus reducing the impact of its potentially substantive ideas in the future. Johnson writes what can be considered a microcosm of this position: There is every reason to believe that the nouvelle droite has become a centre of confusion as well as controversy, and that this reduces its importance. As it denies allegations of anti-Semitism, negationism and Pétainism, it is lost in a welter of self-justification which weakens whatever message it still intends to put forward in the future. (Johnson 1991, 242)

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Yet, as one astute expert of the phenomenon has noted, it is still unclear whether the confusion is in the minds of ENR thinkers or their critics (Griffin 1998, 1). Most “designer fascism” or new paradigm thesis proponents would likely argue that position four scholars are themselves at the root of the confusion of ENR ideas. This claim is probably slightly harsh given that the ENR is itself a peculiar right without the standard associations evoked by the term, whether a rigid defence of the materially privileged, Catholicism, crown, empire, nation or the West. Jean-Marie Domenach, the former editor of the respected left-leaning, French Christian journal Esprit, has underlined his sense of intellectual confusion around the positions of the ENR and GRECE. This position four advocate is especially unclear about the ENR’s implications for political theory. Domenach states his intellectual conundrum: Here is a right which is not for colonization, not for the nation nor for the West – for Europe no doubt, but a Europe which looks to its origins, which do not lie in Asia where Christianity came from, but to the North from whence poured forth the poetic and hierarchical barbarians: Celts, Vikings and Germans. (Domenach in Simmons 1996, 211)

The biggest merit of Domenach’s stance of intellectual ambiguity is that it honestly admits that its object of study is both confusing and problematic. Its greatest drawback is that, unlike the authoritative stances of the other three positions, it suspends judgement on the ENR because the phenomenon does not fit into an accustomed order of neat, unambiguous categories. Furthermore, this position misses the fundamental insights of the other three positions, namely, the residues of the old revolutionary right, its fundamental novelty and a synthesis of the two within the ENR worldview. The essential problem of this position, however, is that it is not likely to produce any lasting, definitive work on the subject of the ENR intellectuals. It will too often be interpreted as a failure of the scholar studying the phenomenon rather than an acknowledgement of genuine intellectual confusion. The Griffin-Taguieff Debate: Fascism or Post-Fascism? His (Alain de Benoist’s) credibility will only be beyond reproach when he publishes an argumentative text in which he both clearly breaks with the neo-nationalist or “revolutionary-conservative” milieu and clarifies the reasons for this break. – Pierre-André Taguieff, French ENR expert

Roger Griffin and Pierre-André Taguieff present alternative views of the ENR intellectuals in the new century. While Griffin sees the ENR thinkers perpetuating a fascist-like worldview, Taguieff has argued that certain ENR thinkers might have now moved beyond the worlds of fascism and the revolutionary right. The English scholar Griffin would have lamented the treatment of fellow intellectual Taguieff in the French mass media during the summer of 1993, but he was still not convinced by the latter’s claim that de Benoist had moved beyond extreme right-wing political space in the 1990s. For Griffin, de Benoist continued his fidelity to a fascist-like worldview within a strictly cultural, metapolitical orientation. Griffin contends that

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the ENR and de Benoist’s revision of fascism tried to de-historicize classical fascism by borrowing from the thought of the inter-war era’s conservative revolution and focusing exclusively on the metapolitical terrain of political contestation. For Griffin, this ENR metapolitical revision of fascism still practised by de Benoist today entailed five tactical changes from the older revolutionary right-wing worldview: (1) the pluralistic, multicultural society of liberal democracy would be replaced not by a racially pure national community led by a charismatic leader, but by a homogeneous ethnic cultural community (ethnie) within the framework of an imperial or federal “spiritual” Europe; (2) democracy, universal human rights, equality and individual rights would be replaced by an “organic democracy” which respected natural inequality and aristocratic elitism; (3) the xenophobic spirit of the past with its stress on the superiority of the West, sanctity of national roots and a mythical past would give way to a xenophile spirit which celebrates the “right to difference” of all world cultures; (4) the old fascist enemies such as communism or the Jews are replaced by a generalized attack on the now “stable” individualist and materialist liberal capitalist system, and on multicultural, “cosmopolitan” forces bent on destroying regional or national identities for the sake of profit; and (5) the fascist political, military and nationalist-oriented Third Way between liberal democracy and socialism has been revamped by a culturally-centred, social and economic Third Way replete with post-modern influences, a new syncretism of ideologies and disciplines (especially after the demise of communism) and the influence of numerous leftist and ecological thinkers (Griffin 1998, 5-6). Griffin has used this aforementioned categorization to show how de Benoist’s worldview in the 1990s continued to be deeply imbued with a fascist-like ethos. Claiming to offer an objective, scientific analysis of modernity in a spirit of cultural criticism without clear solutions in the 1990s, Griffin maintains that de Benoist still longs for a “palingenetic” rebirth of a revolutionary post-liberal order where the current age of spiritual darkness and materialist decadence are completely shattered. An example of such a neutral, scientific and detached stance of cultural criticism is de Benoist’s 1996 article in Telos entitled “Confronting Globalization” (De Benoist 1996a, 117-37). If one was not aware of de Benoist’s revolutionary right-wing origins, one could easily believe that a scholar with liberal or leftist ideological roots wrote it. However, Griffin contends that this detached stance of cultural criticism is not common to all of de Benoist’s works in the 1990s. So, for example, Griffin points to the lasting residues from de Benoist’s days within the revolutionary right-wing milieu: a 1990 edited work on the thinkers of the conservative revolution, an edited volume on the key thinkers of the right and his 1995 book, L’empire intérieur, which praises the revolutionary “clarity” of the myth and calls for a spiritualized, European empire of the soul where warrior values such as honour, fidelity and courage reign. On the other side of the debate, Taguieff claimed that de Benoist’s stance of cultural criticism had allowed the doyen of the ENR to move beyond extreme rightwing political space. For Taguieff, de Benoist moved definitively outside the realm of the extreme right-wing or neo-fascism with the unveiling of his limited circulation journal Krisis in 1988. Taguieff has pointed out how GRECE was a novel force on the right in denouncing the entire Judeo-Christian heritage of the West. He also alludes to de Benoist’s public statements that declare a break with the Old Right’s

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liberalism, moralism, Catholic integralism and racism. He insists that de Benoist distinguishes himself with disdain from the GRECE members who joined the Front National and support their “intolerable” and populist “scapegoat logic.” At the same time, however, Taguieff is too informed to fully accept, at face value, de Benoist’s radical overhaul from his revolutionary right-wing roots in the mid-1960s. Like Griffin, Taguieff still finds residues of right-wing thought from de Benoist’s more militant, ultra-nationalist days. When asked in a 1994 Telos interview whether de Benoist had now become a leftist, Taguieff was far from convinced: Let us not be so hasty or naïve. Benoist’s undeniable intellectual evolution, which part of GRECE followed, did not reflect or result in an unambiguous political evolution. His credibility will only be beyond reproach when he publishes an argumentative text in which he both clearly breaks with the neo-nationalist or “revolutionary-conservative” milieu and clarifies the reasons for this break. For example, the obvious parallels between his Third World positions and those of some communist or Left groups are not in themselves certificates of pride. The wearing of the Islamic chador in schools can certainly be defended with diametrically opposed arguments, creating an ambiguous field in which racism and anti-racism turn into each other in this ideological oscillation or redistribution of opinions which is the “right to difference.” (Tagiueff 1993-4c, 160)

A Note of Academic Caution After classifying the various bodies of literature on the ENR thinkers, I now offer a note of academic caution. The heterogeneous nature of ENR thinkers and sympathisers in terms of divergent ideological tendencies, differing national or regional contexts and theme changes across time should inhibit any reductionist or categorical reading of ENR intellectuals. Taguieff has listed three intellectual tendencies within the French nouvelle droite: traditional counter-revolutionaries or integral nationalism in the tradition of Charles Maurras, René Guénon or Julius Evola; European conservative revolutionaries who are partisans of a “third way,” including revolutionary nationalists, neo-fascists and neo-pagans associated with GRECE; and neo-conservatives of a “liberal’ stripe, whether the Club de l’Horloge’s national liberalism, liberal, republican national populism, the Front National’s “popular capitalism,” anti-state libertarians or the “new economists” (Taguieff, 1993-4c, 99-100). The first two tendencies are extremely hostile to the third, the neoconservative “liberals,” seeing this tendency as a mere extension of the utilitarian, “jungle capitalism” of the Anglo-American New Right, or the political wing of global market forces of “decadent” consumerism. Along with the ENR’s recovery of many themes from its left-wing adversaries, including anti-liberal capitalism, antieconomism, “organic democracy,” anti-Americanism and pro-Third World solidarity in recent years, these different strains of thought make the phenomenon all the more difficult to evaluate in a definitive manner. If we also add the divergence and even outright hostility between different national or regional tendencies (e.g., French New Right, Italian New Right, German New Right, Belgian New Right, Russian New Right, etc.) and their differing areas of focus, we are left with a staggering academic task.

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A second more practical concern for academics is the precedent of the successful lawsuit launched against the Israeli historian of fascism Ze’ev Sternhell for his accusations of fascism made against French writer Bertrand de Jouvenel (Griffin 1998, 27). It is conceivable that an ENR theorist could take any journalist or academic to court that labels him a “fascist,” where the ENR thinker would surely proclaim an anti-totalitarian, anti-fascist, anti-racist stance. Given the large number of accusations of a re-incarnated fascism made against the nouvelle droite within the French press, especially in its heady days of mass media glory in 1979 and 1993, this is certainly a legitimate possibility. It should be pointed out, however, that the ENR and even the Front National have generally opted to publicly protest the fascist tag made by scholars and journalists with letter writing campaigns, through the use of influential French dailies such as Le Monde and national television channels like Télévision Française (TF1). Finally, the last note of academic caution is based on an alarming trend set by the 1993 Appeal to Vigilance against the ENR and its intellectual “lackeys” launched by 40 French and European intellectuals and signed by an additional 1500 a year later within the reputable daily Le Monde. Unfortunately, the appeal might have also had the effect of discouraging scholarship on the phenomenon by accusing scholars studying the phenomenon of contributing to the unconscious legitimisation and rise of the “Far Right.” These implicit accusations against meticulous scholars such as Pierre-André Taguieff appear to be unfair and inaccurate. Honest and well-researched scholarship is surely not intended to support the narrow interests of right or left, or any other political faction. Should we similarly accuse those who undertake studies of neoNazism, “black terrorism” in Italy, or the French Front National of supporting these anti-democratic tendencies? Moreover, should not an appeal to vigilance against the legitimisation of the “Far Right” have precise names, groups and targets? If this had been the case, then perhaps the rabidly anti-immigrant Front National and elements of the entire French political class, including the Communists, Socialists, RPR and UDF, would be shown to be responsible for the rise of what Jean Baudrillard called a chilling anti-immigrant, “white fundamentalist Europe” (Baudrillard 1996, 1356). It might also be demonstrated that we require just as much “vigilance” against these mainstream political forces as with the intellectual nouvelle droite or scholars studying the phenomenon. Another essential aspect of the Appeal to Vigilance was that the manifesto even called for the boycott of ENR publishing houses and, in short, a banishment of the ENR from the forum of public ideas. In this partisan, McCarthy-like atmosphere of allegations and innuendo, there is a need to assert a humanistic ethos of unrestricted access to debate for all cultural and political forces. This should naturally be coupled with an authentic search for knowledge and truths, and a high degree of scholarly rigour. The privileges of the intellectual and the contemplative life do not entail the silencing of even the bitterest opponents. In following this path, the signatories of the Appeal to Vigilance serve neither the noble causes of democracy, nor the liberty of ideas.

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Chapter 8

The Influence of the Nouvelle Droite in Europe and Beyond: A Right-Wing International? The primary engine, an indispensable tool. – Marco Tarchi, describing the ENR’s fascination with cultural power

In his edited work Fascism, Roger Griffin shows how abortive fascist movements flowered in Europe in the inter-war years from Britain and Ireland to Latvia and Portugal. Yet, he also argues that fascism was also non-European, spreading to Chile, Brazil, South Africa and Japan (Griffin 1995, 228-41). In a fascinating passage Griffin offers us an extract from Japanese fascist Nakano Seigo written in 1942 shortly before his last major appearance: “I know that many quote Hitler, but only a few have read Mein Kampf carefully. Read it in German, if possible…It provides good material to discipline your Japanese spirit… You should write your own Mein Kampf on your own reality, as a testimony to your personal physical struggle on this earth” (Seigo in Griffin 1995, 241). Some scholars disagree with Griffin about fascism’s spread beyond the European continent. However, in the same way that fascism had universal resonance, the nouvelle droite sought to spread its message to Europe and beyond. This chapter tells that story. Having already examined the ideological universe and worldview of the ENR thinkers as well as competing interpretations of the ENR phenomenon, I will now highlight the ENR’s relationship to various cultural and political forces throughout Europe and around the world, particularly on the right. This chapter will deal with the relationship between the French nouvelle droite and various other ENR formations. Does this mean that the ENR represents a sort of right-wing international, or is it more of a loosely constituted school of thought? This question will be further examined in the following chapter when I examine the ENR’s linkages to extremeright, neo-fascist and mainstream right-wing political forces. I will also closely consider the interesting ways in which the French nouvelle droite’s ideas made their arrival within the cultural milieu of some former New Left intellectual sectors in North America in the mid-1990s.

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The Nouvelle Droite’s Pan-European Context Michael Walker has his own views, which are certainly different from mine. – Alain de Benoist’s letter to the author distancing himself from the British New Right leader

While the French nouvelle droite was essentially born with GRECE in the mid-1960s, its cultural and political influences extended beyond France to numerous European countries, including Belgium, Holland, Italy, Spain, Germany, England, Romania and even Russia. ENR journals, debates, conferences or offices even extended around the world: the French island of La Réunion, South Africa, Argentina, Peru, Argentina, the United States and Canada. In 2000, de Benoist’s Communism and Nazism was partially translated into Farsi in Iran. In 2004, he gave four different interviews to Radio Tehran. Given Iran’s purported Indo-European roots, could this involvement with Iran have anything to do with de Benoist’s obsession with Indo-European identity? In the same year, de Benoist had interviews with the press in Sarajevo and Mexico City among many other European cities. Yet, Europe’s cultural, historical, spiritual and political destiny stood at the heart of the ENR’s metapolitical battle against liberal democracy and global capitalism. The nouvelle droite’s influence on centres of intellectual opinion throughout Europe, however, did not mean that the ENR was a homogeneous revolutionary right-wing international. GRECE is divided into various schools of thought. Similarly, the ENR is a heterogeneous vanguard with national and regional differences, competing ideological strains and personality conflicts between intellectual leaders from different countries. Finally, the ENR’s romantic New Left, ecological, federalist and pro-local democracy positions in the 1990s often resembled the ideals of left-wing or Green political forces rather than those of the right. These aforementioned positions would not appeal to the traditional right-wing constituency. Nonetheless, these differences did not prevent the European-wide co-operation of ENR intellectuals from various nations in leading debates and conferences, creating academic journals, conducting university exchanges or establishing formal and informal channels of communication. In short, co-operation was possible between different ENR thinkers throughout Europe because they were generally united by their primary focus on cultural metapolitics and an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian and anti-capitalist view of social and political existence. Moreover, the relative success of the French nouvelle droite and its celebrated intellectual Alain de Benoist served as a model for other New Right formations across Europe. As a result, there is an especially close ideological relationship between a number of French nouvelle droite journals and their Italian, Belgian, Dutch and Spanish counterparts. While the German New Right is important for obvious historical reasons, related to that nation’s Nazi past, the Italian New Right was probably more intellectually brilliant and successful. Moreover, the Italian New Right could draw on its own strong local cultural and historical manifestations of revolutionary right-wing and fascist currents of thought. After all, it was in Italy that fascism was born in actual practice after the Fascists’ infamous March on Rome in 1922. Given its conspicuous sympathy for “Red-Brown” alliances, the Russian New Right is also important as a result of the political and economic chaos produced by the transition

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to a market economy after the sudden collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the official disintegration of the Marxist-Leninist Soviet Union in 1991. Both Germany and Russia are also geopolitical powers of immense political importance with historically prominent strains of ENR-like anti-Americanism. Given the strongly embedded cultural currents of revolutionary right-wing thought in France, Italy, Germany and Russia, it is in these countries that the ENR “cultural war” could have its most important political influence in the future. With its long history of antidemocratic, anti-capitalist and hyper-nationalist traditions, Eastern Europe might also be susceptible to a number of ENR ideas. The New Right’s ideas found some resonance in Romania in the late 1990s where, as its leader pointed out, during the ENR’s “hot summer” in 1979 Ceaucescu’s security services ordered an investigation of the New Right (Radulescu 1997). Duranton-Crabol has demonstrated some of the cultural links between the French nouvelle droite and other ENR chapters. While insisting on the ideological heterogeneity of the ENR, Duranton-Crabol has also recognized the “multinational” character of GRECE (Duranton-Crabol 1991, 68-73). So, for example, the German Neue Rechte is modelled after France’s GRECE and its first journal, Elemente, is named after its French sister publication Eléments. Armin Mohler and Hennig Eichberg, two prominent Neue Rechte thinkers, have encouraged the exchange of rebels between the French and German New Right. Despite serious differences between the French nouvelle droite and the Italian Nuova Destra, the launching of the journal Elementi in 1978 followed the model of France’s Eléments. Franco Sacchi has explained how the Italian Nuova Destra was born in 1974 after contacts were established and guidance given from the French nouvelle droite (Sacchi 19934, 73). There are other examples of multinational co-operation between the French New Right and intellectuals from other European countries. Alexander Dugin’s Russian New Right journal Elementy is modelled on its French counterpart and Alain de Benoist briefly served on its editorial board. Both de Benoist and Robert Steuckers, head of the Belgian New Right and its journals Vouloir and Orientations, went to Moscow in March 1992 to participate in various public meetings run by Alexander Dugin. GRECE’s influence can also be found in Spain with the journal Punto y coma and England through the Mankind Quarterly and Michael Walker’s The Scorpion. The latter along with university professors Marco Tarchi of Italy and Tomislav Sunic of Croatia are also on the editorial board of the French New Right journal Eléments. Furthermore, GRECE’s source of contacts, conferences and exchanges extend to Portugal, Greece and Austria. The New Right also started a journal in Spain, Hespérides, under José Javier Esparza in the mid-1990s. It began a Romanian New Right journal, Maiastra, in late 1998 under the leadership of Bogdan Radulescu. The nouvelle droite also has a kind of sister publication for Dutch and Flemish speakers called TeKos edited by Luc Pauwels. Interestingly, there is even an Argentinean New Right journal, Disenso, under the direction of Alberto Buela. Disenso manages to issue its publication throughout Latin America. Despite these contacts and exchanges between different nationalities, the ENR also had its share of disagreement and conflict. While often singing the philosophical, artistic, geopolitical and historical praises of Germany, de Benoist has accused the

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German Neue Rechte of being obsessively fixated with its own internal and national issues (De Benoist 1993-4a, 181-2). De Benoist’s federalist leanings of recent years are a far cry from the ultra-nationalist longings of the Neue Rechte, their desire to rehabilitate Germany’s stained past from what they call the “intolerable” taboos of the post-World War Two and New Left-influenced 1968 generations and to return Germany to political normalcy (i.e., where the Germans once again take their role as one of the great world powers.) (Habermas 1989). Similarly, de Benoist has taken his ideological distance from the German New Right’s thinker Pierre Krebs, Michael Walker of the English language ENR-influenced publication The Scorpion and Alexander Dugin from the Russian New Right. De Benoist claimed not to have had contact with Krebs for about twenty years and argued that Walker “has his own views” which are “certainly” different from his own (De Benoist, letter to author, Paris 26 September 1999). A brief examination of Walker’s The Scorpion shows that it is impregnated with overt ultra-nationalist, racist and Holocaust denial ideals. In contrast, de Benoist’s published works contain no conspicuous attachment to the racist, ultra-nationalist, anti-Semitic or Holocaust revisionist sectors of the revolutionary right-wing milieu. Furthermore, de Benoist’s current New Left, ecological, federalist and democratizing impulses are incompatible with Walker’s positions. In terms of Russia, de Benoist has claimed that he never authorized Alexander Dugin, the head of the Russian New Right, to put his name on the editorial board of Elementy. At his request, de Benoist’s name was later removed from Elementy’s editorial board in the early 1990s. De Benoist was likely turned off by the openly nationalistic and anti-Semitic sentiments of the Russian New Right. From a pragmatic perspective, the open expression of hyper-nationalist views was politically detrimental to the right as a whole. Moreover, on the ideological terrain, de Benoist and Dugin have essentially parted company. In a Telos interview in the mid-1990s, De Benoist publicly dissociated himself from the Russian New Right (De Benoist 1993-4a, 209-10). There is a vast gap between de Benoist’s IndoEuropean, federalist and differentialist vision of a “spiritual” European empire and Dugin’s more traditionalist and idiosyncratic concept known as “Eurasianism,” an Orthodox Christian-Islamic empire fighting Western (American) materialism and homogenized “totalitarianism.” The Italian Nuova Destra: Fascism’s Kiss of Death? A metapolitical movement representing one of the most interesting developments in Italy today. – Franco Sacchi, commenting on the Italian New Right

The Italian Nuova Destra also points to the relatively independent path it has charted vis-à-vis the French nouvelle droite. Some thinkers claimed that the emergence of Italy’s Nuova Destra had meant the creation of a new post-fascist, revolutionary outfit divorced from the traditionalist or revolutionary right. These critics essentially argued that the modernising thrust of the Italian New Right might spell fascism’s

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demise. Writing in the 1990s, Franco Sacchi called the Italian Nuova Destra “a metapolitical movement representing one of the most interesting developments in Italy today” (Sacchi 1993-4, 71). While its origins are linked to the Italian extraparliamentary, radical right and the official neo-fascist political party, Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI), it diverges from both by focusing exclusively on the terrain of culture rather than direct, violent street action or parliamentary politics. In this regard, it has an affinity for the metapolitical framework of the French nouvelle droite. While the Nuova Destra was born in 1974 as a result of exchanges with its French counterparts, it was in 1977 that it began to steer its own course of action. Attacking Old Right pillars and the MSI’s “petty” parliamentarism, the Nuova Destra began to also lament the loss of “black, red and white” (i.e., fascist, communist and liberal) youth during the radical spate of Italian terrorism in the 1970s. The Nuova Destra thought that a genuine convergence was possible between revolutionaries on the extreme-right and extreme-left against liberal democracy. An initial hardedged journal of the 1970s, La voce della fogna (The Voice of the Sewers), later gave way to the more refined Diorama letterario which took its distance from its various French counterparts. As mentioned earlier, another Nuova Destra journal Elementi was launched in 1978, but it has now been superseded by other journals like Trasgressioni. The Nuova Destra’s important opportunity, however, came in 1977 when fascist and extreme right-wing forces were in disarray and in the wake of the birth of movimento del ’77, a youth protest movement formed in 1977 which transcended political ideologies and was mostly interested in the fulfilment of subjective aspirations. This generational difference also led to a divergence between the Nuova Destra and the French nouvelle droite, heirs of an older post-war, post-colonial generation of political memories and distinct national experiences. This new generational phenomenon within the Nuova Destra led to the claims that it distanced itself from all the right’s previous stances, both legal and illegal, and was re-thinking the right’s cultural paradigm in order to free it from sterile, backward-looking positions (Chiarini in Cheles 1991, 34). For the Nuova Destra, the future could only be prepared through metapolitics and cultural power, what Marco Tarchi dubbed “the primary engine, an indispensable tool” (Tarchi in Sacchi 1993-4, 74). Thousands of Nuova Destra youth sympathisers began this cultural “combat” through Marco Tarchi’s help with the foundation of Campo Hobbit, a national and popular festival named after one of the novels of the English fantasy writer J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), which focused on the importance of myth and “sacred time.” These Hobbit camps were held in Italy in 1977, 1978 and 1980. Stressing the idea of what Tarchi called “festive time” and the search for alternative cosmologies, Campo Hobbit included political dissidents from the left and right in an attempt to transcend the barriers between the two camps. Campo Hobbit included the following agenda: a focus on youth issues, subjective and spiritual aspirations, a desire to create an eclectic culture, an opening to the left and ecological issues and the creation of a new avant-garde in the arts. In Campo Hobbit, as with Alain de Benoist’s thinking, we can see the indelible marks of the basic ideas of the New Left revolutionaries from May 1968. Thus, the Italian New Right was grafting a New Left-like ideology onto

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its original revolutionary right-wing heritage. In the eyes of some cultural critics, it was actually creating a new ideological synthesis, or a novel political paradigm divorced from fascism. Shortly after the last Campo Hobbit, Marco Tarchi, the future leader of the Nuova Destra, was purged from the neo-fascist MSI in 1981. This was another turning point for the Nuova Destra as it held numerous meetings in 1980 and 1981 in order to analyze the experiences of the 1970s and clarify both its positions and objectives. Later, Tarchi would become the editor of Trasgressioni and one of the harshest rightwing critics of the MSI, its successor Alleanza Nazionale (AN) and other right-wing political parties throughout Italy. The Nuova Destra under Tarchi claimed to reject all the right’s previous positions. Its main enemy is not modernity itself, but the inconsistencies and contradictions of liberal democracy. In an interview with the author, Tarchi insisted that he has rejected the fascist past, criticised the authoritarian thrust of the neo-fascist milieu, defended the democratic principle and accepted the cultural “other” as well as substantive intercultural dialogue (Tarchi 1999). His philosophical influences include a diverse and wide range of authors on the right, left and beyond: Julius Evola (during his youth), Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Pitrim Sorokin, Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies, Serge Latouche, Charles Taylor and Alain de Benoist (Tarchi 1999). Fighting for federalism and the preservation of cultural identities, the Nuova Destra attacks the hyper-materialism of liberal capitalism, which they argue tears asunder communal existence. Tarchi has called for a “new communitarianism” and a “society of communities” against the homogenized “steamroller” of universal ideologies such as nationalism, liberalism and socialism (Sacchi 1993-4, 79-80). For Tarchi, this form of communitarianism would not be slavishly imposed from above as in the colonial experience or the Jacobin model of the nation-state, but would entail a fluid, negotiated pattern of existence between diverse cultural communities. These communities, argues Tarchi, would avoid a generalized apartheid by being open and ready to assimilate new influences and members. Reminiscent of Charles Taylor’s “sources of the self” (Taylor 1989), Tarchi holds that the maintenance of cultural differences can only occur in a relational, dialogical fashion rather than the assimilationist or exterminationist spirit of the fascist past. In Krisis and Telos, de Benoist has similarly expressed these pro-communitarian positions. What does Tarchi consider to be the most pressing problems of our age? He has listed a number of problems, which confirms my analysis that the ENR’s worldview is especially driven by its central notion of the “right to difference.” So, for example, Tarchi writes that “if we cannot reverse the homogenising and individualist tendencies which characterise our age, the world loses its richness: the plurality of differences, which constituted the world from the beginning of epochs” (Tarchi 1999). In short, Tarchi argues that modern man must recover a sense of the common good; abandon his egoism; restore man’s quality of life and a positive relationship between man and nature; and adopt a positive multicultural attitude within the context of human relations, which allows both humanity and its various peoples to maintain (or rediscover) their identities and coexist in harmony (Tarchi 1999). In addition, Tarchi is adamant that modern man must re-consider the autonomy of regions and local

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communities in order to create large spaces of self-determination as a counterweight against the arrival of a materialist, global system (Tarchi 1999). Given Tarchi’s views, many supporters of the Nuova Destra no longer see themselves as part of the right as it is historically known. Several critics, including Mark Wegierski, have even concluded that the Italian New Right and ENR in general have made major efforts to break with its revolutionary right-wing origins and no longer even deserve the right-wing label because they oppose both Anglo-American conservatism (with its emphasis on bourgeois individualism, capitalism and property rights) and traditional continental conservatism (with its fixation on monarchy and Church) (Wegierski 1993-4, 55-6). In an age of communism in ruins, could the Italian New Right be one of the few remaining left-wing movements in Italy today? Or, is this simply a case of a rightist strategy of cultural appropriation, solidly derived from the most essential New Left ideas, in order to mask its fundamental revolutionary right-wing historical origins and worldview? In the end, Tarchi still “dreams” of the revival of a political “Third Way” beyond liberalism and communism, but one that is not seduced by the “sirens of the totalitarian mirage” (Tarchi 1999). In this context, Tarchi insists that political rivals will likely increasingly find themselves allies in the common struggle of individuals and peoples against liberalism and global capitalism (Tarchi 1999). Yet, this political project, Tarchi adds, will not be possible if the ENR remains a cultural school of thought without a larger following and does not become involved in a movement of social renewal (Tarchi 1999). For Tarchi, this movement for social renewal must begin from the “bottom-up” and hope for “the invention of another future and a better world than the one we now live in” (Tarchi 1999). Like de Benoist and several other ENR thinkers, Tarchi has been seriously influenced by the romantic, revolutionary notions of the intellectual New Left and the 1968ers. As in the case of his French New Right counterpart Alain de Benoist, Roger Griffin is not completely convinced that Marco Tarchi, who became a political science professor at the University of Florence in 1998, has abandoned his old revolutionary right-wing worldview. While claiming to transcend left-right divisions and withdrawing from the sphere of activist politics to cultural criticism, Griffin argues that Tarchi has not abandoned his “proto-fascist” dreams of a “palingenetic,” post-liberal social order. He cites Tarchi’s edited journal Diorama letterario which in the late 1990s continued its kinship with the nouvelle droite by publishing an article by Alain de Benoist, advertised for the French nouvelle droite journal Eléments, reviewed the biography of Carl Schmitt and included in its “special books” section works by Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt and J.R.R. Tolkien’s cult classics on “sacred time,” as well as explicitly fascist or conservative revolutionary authors, such as Drieu de La Rochelle, Ezra Pound, Giovanni Gentile, Armin Mohler and Ernst Jünger. Attacking the claim that Tarchi’s Diorama letterario has purely cultural, apolitical concerns, Griffin writes the following: “It would make the message Diorama letterario transmits to its subscribers less ambiguous if it stopped advertising texts which are capable of nurturing extreme right nostalgia and palingenetic imaginings” (Griffin 1998, 17). Griffin also pointed out how the Italian Nuova Destra and other New Right cultural groups in France, Germany, Belgium, England and Russia have

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provided the philosophical arguments and their fair share of personnel for extremeright and neo-fascist political parties (Griffin 1998, 9-12). In general, we have seen how the nouvelle droite, born in France in the late 1960s, eventually spread its tentacles to other European as well as a number of non-European countries. However, despite its contacts, exchanges and conferences between different European nations, the ENR never constituted a full-scale revolutionary right-wing international. There are explicit differences between the French, Italian, German and Russian New Right. Instead, the ENR is a loosely formed and heterogeneous “school of thought,” which collectively preaches the primacy of cultural metapolitics and an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian revolutionary worldview. At minimum, the nouvelle droite has helped to restore the credibility of a once dying revolutionary right-wing ideology throughout Europe as well as helped to shift the focus of the French and larger European cultural landscapes. Moreover, some critics have gone one step further to claim that the ENR ideological synthesis is both novel and unique, thus leading to both fear and distrust from established cultural and political elites. The ENR in North America: The Isolated Case of Telos or a Broader Cultural and Political Trend? Marxist economics were a joke, the concept of class never made any sense, the Leninist Party was no better than the Mafia, the Marxists could not deal with culture, and feminism was a liberal hang-up. – Paul Piccone, editor of Telos

In this particular section, I discuss the unique case of the United States-based academic journal Telos which in the early 1990s began to seriously debate the works of ENR intellectuals, especially French New Right thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and, to a lesser extent, Italian New Right intellectuals like Marco Tarchi. I begin by tracing the historical and ideological trajectory of the iconoclastic journal of critical political theory, which, like the ENR, came into existence in the wake of the New Left’s rise to political prominence in May 1968. I then examine and analyze the context and contents of the special Telos double issue on the ENR entitled “The French New Right: New Right-New Left-New Paradigm?” published between the winter of 1993 and spring of 1994. While the ENR had its ideological birthplace in France and the European continent in general, it now received the intense attention and scrutiny of disgruntled former leftists and anarchists from Telos. The New Left children of Telos were now embracing the other revolutionaries of May 1968, namely, the former radical right-wing revolutionaries of the French New Right. Was this simply the isolated case of an idiosyncratic editor and journal, or part of a broader cultural and political trend sweeping the post-communist world? Did the Telos exposure of ENR thinkers to North America years after the nouvelle droite’s heyday in France in 1979 corroborate the veracity of the ENR’s own strategy of remaining faithful to a longterm metapolitical confrontation against liberal democracy?

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A Short History of Telos: The Drift from Left to Right The French New Right had taken up the best features of the American New Left, which the American New Left had forgotten. – Paul Piccone, Telos editor

Telos, a quarterly journal of critical thought, was born around May 1968 and has been committed to the development of an American critical theory, and the analysis of American and international questions from a broad geopolitical perspective. It has attempted to navigate between a symbiosis of American and European critical theory, and is especially indebted to German, French and Italian intellectual and political debates. In the late 1960s and 1970s, Telos was highly influenced by the political, social and cultural practices and concepts of the American New Left born out of the anti-Vietnam war movement, various social movements for emancipation, the calls for equal human rights and dignity, social solidarity, peace, justice, cultural autonomy, intellectual and artistic self-expression, the right to control one’s life circumstances and the search for participatory educational and professional structures. It especially rejected what Telos editor Paul Piccone, in a Marcuse-like vein, called the materialist “onedimensionality of American society” (Piccone 1999). The American academic journal was originally dedicated to neo-Marxist critical theory and the famous debates of Frankfurt School luminaries such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the 1930s and 1940s. Telos was firmly rooted in the tradition of Western Marxism and the phenomenology of German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859-1938). The journal prided itself on a sort of “non-conformist” critical political theory. Rejecting the idea that it had firmly “neo-Marxist” origins, Telos editor Paul Piccone claimed, “Marxist economics were a joke, the concept of class never made any sense, the Leninist Party was no better than the Mafia, the Marxists could not deal with culture, and that feminism was a liberal hang-up” (Piccone 1999). Its circulation tended to reach a rather limited, elite audience of about 3000 subscribers and the special double issue on the French New Right in 1993 and 1994 tended to be fairly requested yet retained a similar circulation rate (Piccone 1999). Beginning in the 1990s, however, the “non-conformism” of Telos became increasingly evident when it published and debated the works of French and Italian New Right theorists. In the mid-1980s, the American journal also began to translate and debate the writings of ENR intellectual heirs, including the controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt and the renowned Schmitt scholar Julien Freund (1921-1993) (Freund 1995). A special 1997 Telos issue was devoted to Schmitt’s thought. In the late 1980s and mid-1990s, Telos turned towards studies related to the phenomenon of populism, “rooted organic communities” and federalism, including the writings and views of the ENR’s leader Alain de Benoist and Italian political science professor Gianfranco Miglio, the former theoretician of the federalist-inspired Northern League under Umberto Bossi (Miglio 1993; De Benoist 1995b). Renate Holub, a University of California at Berkeley professor, explained how the populist, conservative and New Right turn of Telos in the 1980s tended to definitively abandon its own “neoMarxist,” critical perspective:

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? The main ideological line emerging from Telos over the past few years has systematically suggested that the journal’s initial European/American symbiosis of critical theory, has now evolved into a new symbiosis, called “new populism.” What it does not systematically argue, but what it systematically does, is denigrate critical thought. While it is not quite clear why a discussion of the theories and concepts associated with “new populism” such as federalism, direct democracy, and conservatism need to lead to an ideological embracement of the political formations of populisms in the United States and in Europe, it is clear that the major editors of Telos have chosen to embrace them. They have therefore abandoned their original emancipatory program. For, all assurances to the contrary, legitimations of Italy’s Northern Leagues, or of France’s New Right, or of Carl Schmitt’s “political theology” for that matter, are rooted not in a critical paradigm, but in a form of neo-conservatism. … Let me say simply here that I see no rhyme or reason why Telos had to uncritically legitimate, rather than critically reflect on, the Italian Leagues, French New Right intellectuals, and German Historical Right intellectuals, such as Carl Schmitt. (Holub 1997, 1)

In short, given its decidedly leftist origins, Telos searched for new ideological alternatives as communism fell to ruins in 1989. It was even ready to abandon its own critical, neo-Marxist roots in order to avoid an intellectual and political vacuum. Thereafter, Telos tended to oscillate between a commitment to anti-capitalism and radical social and political change, on the one hand, and a more detached, objective form of cultural criticism attacking all received ideological dogmas. With the launching of the French New Right journal Krisis in 1988, de Benoist published many leftist, “anti-utilitarian” and “non-conformist” authors, thus presaging his entrance within the pages of the left-oriented Telos. When de Benoist began to write in Telos in the 1990s, the New Left revolutionary children of 1968 finally saw eyeto-eye with the French New Right revolutionaries born in that same year. The end of communism, the intellectual vacuum and their common antipathy for global capitalism, liberalism and orthodox variants of Marxism made debates and alliances possible. For the Telos editorial staff, this aforementioned “new populist” and right-wing turn was made especially possible by the fateful collapse of the Berlin Wall and communist states in 1989. In short, one needs only to reread the back issues of Telos to get a sense of the decidedly left-wing, communitarian anarchist, “non-conformist” or ecological bent of the journal before the mid-1980s. The thinkers who appeared in Telos in the period before the entrance of the ENR theorists included the following who’s who of prominent left-leaning intellectuals: Herbert Marcuse, Jean-Paul Sartre, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Michel Foucault, Christopher Lasch, Alvin Gouldner, Murray Bookchin, William Leiss, Russell Jacoby, Georg Lukacs and Antonio Gramsci. Rallying against intellectual conformity and “New Class” cultural and political systems of administration and domination, Telos desperately searched for a nonMarxist, alternative critique of a triumphalist global capitalism and liberal democracy, which was starting to prematurely trumpet the “end of history.” Like the ENR, Telos is radically anti-capitalist and also critical of the destructive, homogenising cultural and technological tendencies of the United States and various modern ideologies such as nationalism, liberal democracy, socialism and fascism. Both cultural forces,

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the ENR thinkers and Telos editorial staff, seek to arrest the uncontested reign of global capitalism and liberal democracy, and also struggle against the “steamroller” of global Westernization in lifestyles and mentalities. Both the Telos agenda and its counterpart with ENR intellectuals in the 1990s sought to combat all homogenising ideologies and the bureaucratization of the “life-world,” to use the language of Jürgen Habermas, in order to restore social solidarity, political decisionism and the revival of organic, small-scale, self-sufficient and self-governing political communities. Both Telos and the ENR intellectuals retained a marginal position within the respective politics of the two continents which, for Paul Piccone, gave them intellectual “vitality” and “honesty” (Piccone 1999). In the late 1990s, Telos editor Paul Piccone argued that the journal reaches “people with open minds – they have to be, given the sort of things we publish” (Piccone 1999). Recognizing its intellectual “non-conformism,” Telos’ main lines of political analysis revolved around the following issues: “The involution of modernity, the rise of the New Class and new modes of domination, the disintegration of community and of personality, populism, federalism, new modes of social organization” (Piccone 1999). These ideas neatly dovetailed with both the concerns of the American New Left and the French New Right. In Paul Piccone’s eyes, “The French New Right had taken up the best features of the American New Left, which the American New Left had forgotten” (Piccone 1999). The New Right’s official manifesto for the year 2000 tended to reflect many of the concerns of the New Left in the 1960s. Moreover, in analysing Piccone’s aforementioned quotation, we recognize that both he and the ENR’s de Benoist were uniting the most revolutionary, anti-systemic ideas of both right and left. In a sense, they were both carrying on the revolutionary struggle that they claim the 1968ers had long ago abandoned. Telos Considers the Merits of the ENR Worldview: The 1993-4 Debates Under no circumstances can the European New Right be characterized as a neo-fascist residue. – Mark Wegierski, Canadian writer and researcher

In the mid-1980s, Telos began its post-modern and right-wing turn by appropriating a sort of left-wing Schmittian decisionist perspective and praising populism and federalism against the homogenising thrust of all modern ideologies. In the mid1990s, it began to open its pages to ENR intellectuals such as Alain de Benoist and Marco Tarchi (Tarchi 1995). This was a matter of enormous prestige for European intellectuals to be published in a reputable academic journal on the North American continent, in the United States, and in English, the world’s dominant cultural language. It might have even increased the cultural capital of these ENR intellectuals back home on the European continent. With the publication of the special Telos double issue in 1993-4, there was now a serious consideration of the merits of the ENR worldview. One could even find authors such as the editor Paul Piccone who gave a qualified and temporary embrace of the ENR worldview in his piece “Confronting the French New Right: Old

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Prejudices or a New Political Paradigm?” (Piccone 1993-4, 3-22). The title of the special double issue, “The French New Right: New Right-New Left-New Paradigm,” and the arguments of its editor Piccone and other authors such as Frank Adler, Mark Wegierski and Franco Sacchi gave the distinct possibility of a rapprochement and novel political synthesis between the New Left children of 1968 and their leftist-like, French New Right counterparts born in the same year. A number of Telos editors and authors argued unambiguously that the ENR had transcended its revolutionary right-wing roots in the 1960s and did not bear any relationship to historical fascism or neo-fascist currents of thought. For example, Franco Sacchi gave this positive judgement of the French nouvelle droite: It has “absolutely nothing to do with the world of neo-fascism” (Sacchi 1993-4, 80). Mark Wegierski was equally adamant about distancing the ENR intellectuals from the ideological world of neo-fascism: “Under no circumstances can the European New Right be characterized as a neofascist residue” (Wegierski 1993-4, 69). The special 1993-4 double issue on the European New Right was a major collection of its ideas consisting of the following: the writings of ENR authors such as Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, three in-depth interviews with de Benoist, an interview and two scholarly articles by Pierre-André Taguieff, articles by Paul Piccone, Frank Adler, Mark Wegierski, Franco Sacchi and Paul Gottfried on the merits and contradictions of the worldviews of the Italian and French New Right and the manifesto, documents and letters (Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Roger-Pol Droit) related to the 1993 “Appeal to Vigilance by Forty Intellectuals” signed in Le Monde on July 13 and re-published exactly one year later with 1500 more signatures. In a certain sense, the special double issue was a Telos response to the 1993 Appeal, itself signed by mostly leftist intellectuals who saw the ENR as a new form of sinister, subtle cultural fascism. It especially gave prominent space to Taguieff, the key scholar of the ENR phenomenon, and Alain de Benoist, the ENR doyen, because the two were prime targets of the 1993 Appeal, the latter for apparently reviving fascism and the former for unwittingly legitimising the ideas of the nouvelle droite by entering into dialogue with its thinkers. Telos editors and authors essentially argued that the entire affair surrounding the ENR in 1993, years after a similar polemical response in 1979, was the product of a vigilant, McCarthylike left raising the ugly ghosts of fascism in order to discredit the right and revive a moribund left. While the Telos double issue attempted to offer a more nuanced appraisal of de Benoist’s ideas by criticising the distortions surrounding his works, they were especially keen to defend the scholarship of Taguieff, a “non-conformist,” leftleaning scholar with a solid reputation for the highest academic quality and integrity. The Telos staff was especially angry that a scholar with a known reputation for meticulous scholarship could be the target of the Appeal, viewed by Telos as an Old Left witch-hunt of an outdated Parisian intellectual establishment. In this respect, Telos cited the outpouring of French intellectual and public support for Taguieff as a result of the treatment he received from the signatories of the Appeal. So, for example, there was an important collective letter defending Taguieff’s excellent scholarship published in the prestigious French journal L’Esprit in January 1994 and signed by sixty-nine scholars, who unlike the signatories of the Appeal, were

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especially knowledgeable in issues connected to the right, far right, fascism, ENR, World War Two, the Vichy regime, the Algerian War, Islam, immigration, racism, anti-Semitism and communism (Adler 1993-4, 30-1). The scholars included all the top French intellectuals in the field: Pierre Hassner, Gilles Kepel, Nona Mayer, Gérard Noiriel, Henry Rousso, Emmanuel Todd, Dominique Schnapper, Bruno Etienne, Pierre Rosanvallon, Patrick Weil, Michel Wieviorka and Michel Winock. Yet, Telos editorial associate Frank Adler went beyond the position of the leftleaning L’Esprit scholars, who defended Taguieff, to also call for intellectual solidarity with de Benoist, despite political differences and in respect of the broader ethics of intellectual freedom and truth (Adler 1993-4, 31). In addition, the special double issue tended to stress the ENR’s novelty, “new” themes such as the predominant focus on cultural metapolitics, anti-Christian paganism and anti-Western positions, left-wing affinities with the 1968 generation and attempts to create a new political paradigm uniting New Right and New Left against the political “dinosaurs” of the Old Right and Old Left. In the process, the ENR’s revolutionary right-wing or neofascist roots were not sufficiently probed and examined by the Telos special double issue. In the rush to discover a new political synthesis, it was in the interest of Telos to downplay the ENR’s revolutionary right-wing and conservative revolutionary roots and influences, and to show that they were unambiguously distanced from the Old Right and cultural fascism. Although the ENR, as Taguieff has pointed out in an interview, might have a credibility problem because of its numerous theme changes over its history (Taguieff 1993-4c, 160), Telos editor Paul Piccone was willing to give the ENR and de Benoist the benefit of the doubt in terms of accepting its exoteric agenda, or writings and interviews, at face value: “What one explicitly says and writes must be considered more important than what can be surmised about what one ‘really’ means, on the basis of conspiracy theories, intuition, or just plain suspicion” (Piccone 1993-4, 14). Aside from the ENR’s rejection of administratively and legally imposed equality, one would be hard pressed to find many differences between the anti-capitalist critique of modernity and all established political ideologies found in Telos and the worldview of ENR intellectuals. Many Telos writers tended to paint the ENR intellectuals and especially de Benoist in a fairly positive light: the victims of an anti-intellectual, anti-spiritual campaign of archaic, McCarthyite-like forces on the Old Left and Old Right, and as a truly unique cultural force seeking a new political paradigm. So, for example, Frank Adler of Telos condemned the “simplistic and anachronistic” French left, “vigilant” signatories of the 1993 Appeal, for making de Benoist the “real enemy” and a “neoNazi” rather than Jean-Marie Le Pen (Adler 1993-4, 28-9). In this respect, Telos was especially close to merely swallowing the ENR’s own claims about the “decadence” of capitalist modernity, liberal democracy and the “New Class” of intellectuals seeking to impose a universal, abstract and homogenising liberal or socialist agenda on all individuals, regions and cultures. So, for example, these lines written by Telos editor Paul Piccone protesting against the liberal and left-leaning academic establishment could have been easily penned by a more linguistically incorrect ENR ideologue like Michael Walker:

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone? Liberals and the remnants of the New Left are extremely dogmatic and unwilling to confront discordant voices. They usually respond by not responding, basking in their position of official authority within academia. Check the idiotic liberal reception of Carl Schmitt to get a general idea. All they can talk about is Nazism, without actually understanding what it was all about. Political Correctness is good for one’s career. (Piccone 1999).

The special Telos double issue contained numerous other examples of this trend where the academic journal left the house of objectivity and entered the partial house of partisanship searching for a novel political paradigm. So, for example, Paul Piccone argues that the French New Right “deserves to be taken seriously rather than censured by self-righteous apparatchiks unable or unwilling to deal with rational arguments on their own grounds” (Piccone 1993-4, 22). Piccone went even further when he insisted on the novelty and key cultural impact of the ENR intellectuals: “The refusal to seriously study and learn from opponents may result in missing what is truly original in their views and, in the particular case of the French New Right, why its ideas are having such a profound impact throughout Europe” (Piccone 19934, 22). For Piccone, what was “original” about the French New Right was that it was essentially a left-wing movement supporting standard 1968-like New Left positions such as participatory democracy, self-determination, local autonomy and opposition to capitalism, bureaucratic domination, nationalism, racism and traditional imperialism (Piccone 1993-4, 6). Piccone explains his interpretation of the ENR as a left-wing cultural movement: “The French New Right, if it is still possible to place them anywhere on the Right – have redefined themselves by incorporating 95% of standard New Left ideas, but on the whole, there is no longer anything that can be identified as ‘Right’” (Piccone 1993-4, 19). By Piccone’s own admission, incorporating 95 per cent of the New Left’s ideals means that the ENR is still connected to a number of its older revolutionary right-wing ideas, which give it some meaning. In any case, both born under the spell of the New Left ideas of 1968, the New Right and New Left should have been mortal political enemies, but were making common cause against global capitalism and liberal democracy. New Right and New Left in two different continents sought to join their ideas in order to prepare for the revolutionary, post-liberal social order of the future. While the Telos double issue was generally sympathetic to the claims of the ENR intellectuals, there were also residues of doubt surrounding the agenda of de Benoist and the old revolutionary right-wing worldview of a number of prominent ENR theorists, including the ENR doyen. The most critical analyst of the ENR in the Telos double issue was the French thinker Pierre-André Taguieff. Taguieff’s scepticism is more pronounced than the Telos editorial staff, which desperately longed for a new political paradigm after 1989, although the former remained faithful to his nonpartisan and long-standing academic credentials. In reply to an interview question asking whether de Benoist can be considered a left-wing thinker from the French journal Vingtième Siècle and re-printed in the special Telos issue on the ENR, Taguieff gave this reply: “Let us not be so hasty or naïve. Benoist’s undeniable intellectual evolution, which part of GRECE followed, did not reflect or result in an unambiguous political evolution” (Taguieff 1993-4a, 160).

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In Taguieff’s view, de Benoist still retained residues, themes and values which did not break with either the French neo-nationalist, conservative revolutionary, or “third way” milieux of his revolutionary right-wing student days in the Paris of the early 1960s. Despite his appropriation of numerous leftist-like themes, Taguieff argues that de Benoist has never officially and completely broken with this revolutionary right-wing worldview. De Benoist’s article in the special 1993-4 issue “The Idea of Empire” helps to corroborate Taguieff’s thesis on the remaining residues of the former’s revolutionary right-wing worldview. In this aforementioned article, de Benoist follows the lead of Julius Evola to call for the end of the nation or the “anti-empire” and a revival of “the spiritual character of the imperial principle” where supporting a common, supra-national idea allows one to transcend a narrow belonging to the same soil, blood-line or language (De Benoist 1993-4b, 81-98). In addition, de Benoist calls for the empire because he claims it is a primary vehicle for preserving regional and cultural diversity and organic, holistic and mediated social ties against the “abstract individualism” and closed nature of national construction. It is precisely this type of article with echoes of clearly revolutionary right-wing references, which concerns Taguieff, but seemed to largely elude the analysis of the Telos editorial staff. De Benoist re-states this position in favour of empire and myths, two older revolutionary right-wing staples, within his work L’empire intérieur. Moreover, Telos published a number of de Benoist’s articles in both the early and late 1990s, which had faint echoes of his former revolutionary right-wing milieu. In a 1998 review article comparing Nazism and Stalinist communism, which discredits the traditional liberal view that the former was a greater evil than the latter, de Benoist argues that the two totalitarian ideologies are in fact “evil twins” (De Benoist 1998b, 178-92). Moreover, in a 1995 article entitled “Democracy Revisited” (De Benoist 1995a, 6575), de Benoist praises direct democracy in contrast to mass modern societies, which need political intermediaries because they have ceased to embody “collectively lived meaning,” but carefully circumscribes his notion of direct democracy. That is, de Benoist claims that direct democracy is “primarily associated with the notion of a relatively homogeneous people conscious of what makes them a people” (De Benoist 1995a, 75). De Benoist continues by elaborating his rather specific, homogeneous and anti-multicultural view of the democratic model: The proper functioning of both Greek and Icelandic democracy was the result of cultural cohesion and a clear sense of shared heritage. The closer the members of a community are to each other the more they are likely to hold common sentiments, values and ways of looking at the world, and it is easier for them to make collective decisions in the regard to the common good without the help of mediators. (De Benoist 1995a, 75)

Why did Telos choose to publish works of a decidedly right-wing flavour from all of de Benoist’s vast output of articles and books? As a journal with New Left roots, could it not have re-printed one of de Benoist’s more leftist-inspired articles? In fairness to Telos, it has published a number of de Benoist’s more left-wing forms of cultural criticism, including “Confronting Globalization” (De Benoist 1996a, 11737) in which he attacks the rapid monopolisation of world capital, the immiseration

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of the masses and the decline of the nation-state. It also published a violent critique of the neo-liberal guru of Austrian economics Friedrich A. (von) Hayek in a paper “Hayek: A Critique” (De Benoist 1998b, 71-104). This latter work expresses the wide gulf between the Anglo-American New Right’s view of the limited state and support of unfettered market forces, on the one hand, and the ENR and de Benoist’s belief in a strong “organic state” restraining capitalist forces within the context of a politically and culturally sovereign Europe, on the other hand. In any case, Telos followed a trend, which began in the mid-1980s and recycled right-wing authors such as Carl Schmitt and Julien Freund, or transversal themes like federalism and populism, in order to give them a more left-wing or anarcho-ecologist spin. The focus on populism and federalism was also used to counter criticisms that the Telos editorial staff represented a distant, overly cerebral and elitist “New Class” of intellectuals. It neatly dovetailed with the leftist, quasi-anarchist and ecological focus of the ENR in the late 1980s and 1990s in favour of “organic democracy,” small-scale, “natural” and independent communities running their own internal affairs and the preservation of regional and cultural diversity. This type of New Left-New Right reconciliation process sought to re-invent a critique of late capitalist modernity and liberal democracy in order to prepare for the possible political fault lines of the future between those in favour of global capitalism, liberal democracy and Americanization, and all radically anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-American, and even anti-Western forces. There were other Telos voices of doubt surrounding the “real” agenda of de Benoist and the ENR theorists, but they still tended to give the ENR intellectuals a fair measure of sympathy. In this regard, this is the assessment of Telos editor Paul Piccone made in favour of the ENR thinkers and against the charges of a new cultural fascism: Are the new views on race merely rhetorical decoys to legitimate the same old biological racism of a couple of decades earlier? Is the “right to difference” a stratagem to justify a new kind of cultural apartheid meant to guarantee the purity of European (Aryan?) civilization? Is the critique of the nation and the re-discovery of federalism by attacking equality and thereby indirectly relegitimating old hierarchical structures? Is the critique of liberalism ultimately a justification for the standard conservative project of dismantling the centralized redistributive state apparatus? Presumably, the Left vigilants would answer most if not all these questions in the affirmative. On the basis of what has been published, there is a remote possibility that they could be right, but this is extremely unlikely. At any rate, no convincing arguments have been provided to that effect and, consequently, it remains idle speculation concerning possible motives. (Piccone 1993-4, 13-14)

Thus, while Piccone initially followed Taguieff in questioning the ENR’s basic agenda and the possibility of reviving old revolutionary right-wing ideas under new guises, he ends up actually embracing the ENR’s own claims that they are novel political thinkers, full of original ideas and in the process of moulding a New LeftNew Right political paradigm. While Piccone is correct to point out the multitude of old prejudices and Nazi-like accusations against the ENR theorists, his notion of the ENR intellectuals as trail-blazing thinkers with a novel political paradigm is less than credible. As both Telos and the ENR intellectuals are proponents of a new political

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synthesis and paradigm, they are likely to accentuate the New Left face of ENR ideas and downplay, ignore or hide its residual revolutionary right-wing tendencies. If it were not for the inclusion of Taguieff in the Telos special collection, then the ENR’s revolutionary right-wing roots would have been lost on the readers. In the process, the Telos editorial staff entered de Benoist’s own cultural terrain by joining a detached style of objective academic research to a partisan form of radical social criticism where the ultimate aims were the fashioning of a new political paradigm and the erection of a new, revolutionary social order. In 1993 and 1994, not only did Telos consider the merits of the ENR worldview, its editor and writers practically embraced it in its entirety. Telos and the ENR Debates: Idiosyncratic or Broader Phenomenon? The seduction of uneason. – Richard Wolin, on intellectuals’ romance with fascism

The debates surrounding the ENR theorists within Telos in 1993 and 1994 can be seen as either the narrow, peculiar and idiosyncratic manifestation of the Telos staff and its editor Paul Piccone, or part of a broader cultural and political phenomenon sweeping industrialised societies in both the West and East in the 1990s. Like the “non-conformists” of the 1920s and 1930s in Europe, Telos always prided itself on taking iconoclastic positions, which seriously challenged the logic of global capitalism and liberal democracy, and the prevailing intellectual climate of the age. In addition, the post-communist age after 1989 left Telos questioning the safe analytical anchor of critical Marxist theory. Thus, its less than veiled sympathy for the ENR intellectuals was not simply connected to the idiosyncratic nature of its editorial board. The essentially pro-ENR stances of Telos in 1993 and 1994 were also related to the broader phenomenon of new cultural and political antagonists of liberal democracy and global capitalism uniting even for short-term purposes, irrespective of major ideological differences, in order to displace the existing intellectual and political status quo. In this respect, the common starting points for both the French New Right and Telos were the influential New Left ideas of the student radicals born during May 1968. Both the French New Right and Telos came to embrace the anticapitalist radicalism and idealistic eclecticism of the May 1968 revolutionaries. While it is true that Telos was a unique, “non-conformist” academic journal for North American standards by playing its own solitary ideological tunes and paths, even refusing to get involved in the highly polemical American academic “cultural wars” in the 1980s and 1990s, it did embrace a new form of cultural conservatism through its sympathetic portrayal of the French and Italian New Right, the political thought of Carl Schmitt, the federalist theories of the bourgeois-oriented Italian Northern League and its veneration of the “new populism” and direct democracy. In this sense, as Telos tended to be seriously influenced by European “hegemonic intellectuals” and predominantly European debates, it was simply following a conservative trend which hit Europe in the late 1970s and 1980s; a cultural backlash against liberalism and Marxism according to which not all people are seen as equal

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and hence should not have access to the same kinds of rights and privileges. This cultural backlash, of course, included the rise of the ENR intellectuals as well as their distinctly different Anglo-American New Right counterparts incessantly calling for the “god” of unrestrained “free-market” capitalism. In the 1980s, this cultural backlash and new conservatism also hit American university campuses and the political stage with the rise of the Ronald Reagan phenomenon. To add to the common New Right and Telos affinity for the New Left 1968ers and the cultural conservatism of the late 1970s and 1980s, the Telos decision to essentially embrace New Right intellectuals such as de Benoist in the 1990s was also related to another broader international phenomenon: The search for an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, anti-Western global front or network of alliances. In this regard, in the 1990s there were numerous cultural and political forces, including the ENR intellectuals and the New Left-inspired editors of Telos who after 1989 argued that they refused to believe in the inevitable global march of market capitalism and the Westernization of lifestyles and mentalities. These political and cultural forces are diverse, at times even antagonistic ideologically, but all remain firmly rooted to an anti-capitalist and usually anti-American, anti-Western mantra. To its credit, Telos has tended to avoid a simplistic form of anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism. These political forces may include the following: European New Right, New Left, Old Left Marxists, Maoists, Trotskyites, anarchists, Green environmentalists, organic conservatives, conservative revolutionaries, national communists, regional autonomists or separatists, religious fundamentalists and Third or Fourth World cultural preservationists. The Russian “national-communist,” “patriotic-communist” or “Red-Brown” alliances of the 1990s revealed that these left-right intellectual debates and exchanges were more than just academic hot air. The French New Right’s brief flirtation in the early 1990s with the Russian New Right’s leader Alexander Dugin, an active promoter of “Red-Brown” alliances, also showed that it was slightly more than a merely detached, critical cultural force. In a sense, the French New Right under the guidance of GRECE and de Benoist had taken a similar course to Telos, but in precisely the opposite direction. Whereas Telos had drifted towards the right and a new, radical cultural conservatism, the French New Right’s de Benoist increasingly alienated traditional vestiges of rightwing support, whether monarchical, Catholic integralist, extreme chauvinist or more conservative, private property-minded elements, by appropriating most of the themes of the New Left student revolutionaries born in 1968. In short, both Telos and the French New Right were viewed with suspicion from their traditional constituencies. Many elements on the Old Left and some from the New Left resented the right-wing thrust of Telos in the 1980s and 1990s because they claimed that it had abandoned its Marxist internationalism, its concern for the growing army of global poor and critical neo-Marxist tone. On the other side, the ultra-nationalist right, fascist right, Catholic right and mainstream, conservative right were all weary of the French New Right’s intellectual evolution and often tended to see de Benoist as a sort of closet communist. Thus, as common intellectual and political outcasts both heavily indebted to the May 1968 events, the French New Right and New Left-inspired Telos became allies in the struggle to displace liberal democracy, restore “social solidarity” and confront

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the dangers of rapid capitalist globalisation. Both had taken idiosyncratic political trajectories from revolutionary right and left respectively to claim a new political paradigm which attempted to synthesize and salvage the best features of right and left. The New Right-New Left synthesis, or in Russia the Old Right-Old Left alliance, was also starting to have its concrete political impact in the 1980s and 1990s. The new types of alliances reminded many of the inter-war era’s “non-conformists,” conservative revolutionaries, aristocratic socialists, anarcho-syndicalists, nationalpopulists and politically “homeless” who tended to drift indiscriminately from right to left or left to right in the radical attempt to overturn the materialist “poisons” of liberal parliamentarism and capitalism. Although both the ENR intellectuals and Telos editorial staff marched towards solitary and idiosyncratic intellectual paths, they were also reflecting broader intellectual and political trends sweeping the European and North American continents: The steady demise of Western Marxism as a cultural force, the return to conservative cultural critics in the late 1970s and 1980s as the welfare state began to crumble and memories of World War Two, fascism and the right faded, the collapse of socialism as a political force after 1989, the ensuing blurring of boundaries between right and left and the rumblings of new radical, anti-capitalist alliances between right and left (or united Western and anti-Western forces challenging the hegemonic global capitalist and liberal order increasingly dictated by the terms of the sole remaining superpower, the United States). What especially united the ENR intellectuals and the New Left-inspired editors of Telos was the common place of intellectual birth around the events of May 1968. The anti-materialist idealism of the New Left student radicals would radically influence the cultural and political stances of both of these apparently diametrically opposed social critics of liberal democracy. The outright anti-egalitarianism and elitism of the ENR theorists and the veiled elitism of the Telos staff longing for the world of “high culture” was also a point of intersection. Both claimed to invent a new political paradigm constructed by intellectuals, despite the valorisation of a “new populism.” Also, both the Telos editors and ENR theorists inherently believed that the ideas of the few could ultimately move history, the masses and change the world. A final point of reconciliation between de Benoist and Piccone revolves around increasing intellectual disdain for the Enlightenment, the rise of post-modernism and what Richard Wolin calls “the seduction of unreason” and fascism (Wolin 2004). In the 1930s, thinkers not normally associated with the right such as Carl Jung, HansGeorg Gadamer and Georges Battaile were fascinated with fascism and its potential for destroying liberalism. De Benoist and Piccone also want to destroy liberalism and almost any revolutionary philosophy is enlisted in seeking to smash it. With the rise of post-modernism’s destruction of grand narratives truth and ethical questions are sacrificed for the “will to power” (Nietzsche), “sovereignty” (Bataille), an “other beginning” (Heidegger), “difference” (Derrida) or a “different economy of bodies and pleasures” (Foucault)” (Rorty 2004). Today’s intellectuals on the left, argues Wolin, are abandoning their normative qualities in mirroring the trends of the 1930s where fascism greatly swayed intellectuals on both sides of the political spectrum.

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Lessons of the ENR-Telos Rapprochement The Capitalist Threat – George Soros, billionaire philanthropist, title of his 1997 article

There are several important lessons, which can be gleaned from the unique intellectual debates and partnership between the ENR intellectuals and the Telos editors, which began in the late 1980s and reached their zenith in the Telos debates between the two forces in 1993 and 1994. There are essentially eight major lessons, which can be drawn from the arrival of the ENR thinkers to Telos and the North American continent. In the first place, the ENR-Telos rapprochement of ideas revealed the deep trouble with the socialist ideology as communist states suddenly crumbled in the East in 1989. Naturally, all ideologies are engulfed with trials, tribulations and crises. The fall of the Soviet Union, the main flag bearer of communism, however, was more than simply a crisis or trial. It represented the almost complete collapse of a once dominant worldwide ideology, a myth and a hope to many followers around the world. Those who remained faithful to the communist creed in the West were seen as old dinosaurs or naïve followers without the knowledge of the horrors of totalitarianism, Stalinism, Maoism and “real existing socialism.” The end of this dominant challenging ideology to liberal democracy meant the blurring of leftright boundaries and the emergence of dialogue between the ENR intellectuals and Telos. Second, the dialogue between the ENR and Telos demonstrated that intellectuals rooted to solid ideological markers such as analytical Marxism detest a vacuum and quickly attempt to fill the void by claiming to invent a new political paradigm. For former neo-Marxist leftist intellectuals with Telos, it was also a matter of creating new intellectual ideas and work in order to survive as a cultural force. No cultural force, whether the ENR or Telos, could avoid an intellectual confrontation with the historical events of 1989. In a certain sense, this intellectual evolution came earlier for Telos with the realization that both the institutionalized Communists in Eastern European states and Western unions in the post-World War Two welfare state era had helped to moderate and dampen the revolutionary impulses of the popular classes. Third, there was a historical precedent to the ENR-Telos debates in search of a new intellectual and political synthesis. During the inter-war years between the two world wars, numerous “non-conformist” cultural and political forces throughout Europe sought to find a political paradigm which combined elements of right and left, and transcended both liberalism and socialist Marxism. This sort of intellectual paradigm provided the groundwork for the fascist synthesis, conservative revolutionary worldview, national-anarcho-syndicalist position and various other “third way” permutations, which straddled between left-wing social commitment and right-wing fidelity to the patriotism of the nation. Thus, the Telos editorial staff and ENR intellectuals such as de Benoist did not work in a complete intellectual vacuum, but could look to the lessons of history for answers and questions. The difference between these aforementioned “third way” forces and the ENR-Telos symbiosis was that the latter was also deeply indebted in its experiences and major

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themes to the New Left student revolutionaries who suddenly hit the political scene of industrialised societies on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean in May 1968. Fourth, the success of the ENR intellectuals in North America, albeit limited to an intellectual, academic journal like Telos, did somewhat confirm the ENR’s own claim that “cultural war” must be a slow and methodical process. There was a gap of about fifteen years between the French New Right’s heyday in 1979 and its definitive entrance onto the pages of Telos in 1993 and 1994. It was somewhat ironic that the ENR intellectuals received a better reception in New York than Paris where many of the latter’s intellectuals were more firmly connected to analytical Marxism and perhaps more cognisant of its historical and ideological origins in the revolutionary right-wing milieu. For the ENR thinkers, like the Telos editors, the cultural ideas of the New Left and Marxist Antonio Gramsci were crucial for any lasting political success. For both culturally fixated forces, it was not the numbers of people that mattered in terms of changing the world and smashing liberal democracy, but the support of enough cultural elites who could then propagate their own hegemonic view of the world and alter the basic zeitgeist of the age. At this point, then, both cultural forces believed that the call of the masses to oust liberal democratic elites and dismantle market capitalism would become natural and self-evident. Fifth, if the ENR ideological synthesis was well received in limited academic circles within the United States, could it possibly have a future in other parts of the United States and Canada? With its heavy focus on maintaining the regional and cultural roots of the past through a federalist-oriented Europe, the ENR worldview has some similarities to the federalism of the American Founding Fathers such as John Madison, John Jay and Alexander Hamilton. Despite the ENR’s vitriolic antiAmericanism, its valorisation of cultural difference, regional diversity and “organic democracy” in the late 1980s and 1990s resembles the eighteenth century longings of the Founding Fathers for a federalism, which protected the diversity of the different states, the cultural differences between North and South and the strong American local traditions of self-government. Canada, too, has a long history of federalism which dovetails with the federalism of ENR intellectuals like de Benoist. As an official, constitutionally recognized federal system since its birth in 1867, Canada has neatly protected its regional, cultural and linguistic diversity. In 2006, Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper even recognized Quebec as a nation within a united Canada. Canada might also appeal to the ENR thinkers because it is differentiated from the United States historically, culturally, linguistically and intellectually. Its strong conservative, Tory strain of organic thought and more minor socialist strand are also somewhat reminiscent of the ENR’s communitarian, antiegalitarian, anti-capitalist identity. The danger with federalism, of course, is that it can lead very close to separation as with the two referendums for sovereignty-association and sovereignty in 1980 and 1994 in the majority francophone province of Quebec. In the American South, too, a heightened sense of cultural distinctiveness and sense of alienation and deprivation vis-à-vis the North led to a catastrophic Civil War in the 1860s. Federalism is no guarantee of political peace, but for ENR intellectuals such as de Benoist this political structure is a logical route towards the preservation of regional and local cultures trampled by the “steamroller” of Americanization and Westernization. The

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ENR, as Paul Gottfried claims, might be wise to re-consider its simplistic antiAmericanism in order to make cultural and political inroads in a North American continent deeply attached to the values of federalism (Gottfried 1993-4, 127-33). This will be unlikely given the ENR’s intense pan-Europeanism, Eurocentric focus, its need to challenge the American superpower status and its primordial quarrel with an “egalitarian” North America, seen as the antithesis of the ENR’s organic, antiegalitarian worldview. As firm proponents of the stability of cultural differences, the ENR is not likely to spend too much time trying to win over what it often views as a “colonised” North American continent perpetually hostage to neo-liberalism, the “all-mighty dollar” and the trances of spectacles and television. Sixth, the ENR-Telos rapprochement was perhaps a precursor to the transversal and eclectic sorts of political alliances and syntheses we might witness in the new millennium. As right and left lose their political persuasiveness, anti-capitalist forces from around the world will make alliances, even temporary, short-term or tactical ones, in order to fight the “hegemony” of liberal democracy, global capitalism and United States or Western-led cultural imperialism propagated by large multinational corporations upon non-Western countries and cultures. It is not only with anticapitalist forces of different persuasions that one hears worries about the spread, pace, and de-humanising effects of globalisation or the anti-liberal, anti-democratic trends of liberal democracies. In several public statements and interviews, French President Jacques Chirac has argued that globalisation is an inevitable reality, but that its most harmful human effect, the increase of global poverty both at home and abroad, will lead to social exclusion and conflict. In the influential journal Foreign Policy, Jacques Attali, the former special advisor to French President François Mitterrand, argued against the West’s post-Cold War triumphalism because he claimed that the “dictatorship” of the market would eventually annihilate both democracy and Western civilization (Attali 1997, 54-64). The wealthy American philanthropist George Soros has expressed similar fears about capitalist globalisation and its threat to democratic values and institutions (Soros 1997). In 2005, Jimmy Carter, the former President of the United States, launched a scathing indictment of Gerorge Bush regime’s notion of pre-emptive war and what he shockingly calls the “imperialistic” zeal of a tiny, neo-conservative cabal dominating Washington, which is qualitatively different in its disregard for morality and international law from any other post-war United States administration (Carter 2005). ENR and Telos ideas did not obviously live in a vacuum of pure marginalisation. Seventh, the fact that Telos embraced the “new populism” and ENR intellectuals should tell us that they are likely more concerned with social and political change than a strict reflection on these aforementioned different cultural and political forces. Populism, by its very definition and essence, is anti-intellectual, anti-reflective and a denial of the critical faculties of reason and analysis. In this sense, although the ENR has tended to be anti-populist, it has rejected the “New Class” of intellectual imposing its “abstract” and “universal” ideals on recalcitrant world regions and cultures with their own unique values. In addition, the ENR belief that myths move history, people and the world could be viewed as a similar suspension of the critical focus of the intellectual. The intellectual evolution of both de Benoist and the Telos

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editorial staff, at minimum, suggests a credibility problem and the need to question the precise motives of their idiosyncratic intellectual migrations. Last, despite the rapprochement between dissident forces of the left from Telos and ENR intellectuals, historical descendants from the revolutionary right-wing political camp, we should not overestimate the cultural and political impact of this dialogue. Debates and dialogue within the limited circles of the intellectual, academic press is not a signpost of widespread acceptance of this synthesis between left-wing and right-wing dissidents searching for a new intellectual and political home. In reality, there was plenty of resistance in France to this type of political synthesis as the two “hot summers” of 1979 and 1993 showed. The reception for this new political synthesis was warmer in Italy and too limited to a small academic audience in the United States to have serious political consequences. It was in the chaos of post-communist Russia that it had its clearest, most fruitful political manifestation. For most intellectuals and the public at large, however, this New Right-New Left synthesis remained a strange, marginal and intellectual aberration divorced from the major political ideologies of our age, or the concrete social, economic and political problems of common people. In conclusion, this chapter has sought to bring the ENR worldview into full view in the 1990s by examining the relationship between the French nouvelle droite, other ENR intellectuals throughout Europe and disgruntled sectors of the New Left in North America. I sought to point out that the French nouvelle droite was active in the cultural realm in different European countries, but that this did not necessarily mean the formation of a clearly co-ordinated right-wing international. In North America, the post-communist age allowed for a cultural alliance between the ENR and Telos. This alliance was like manna from the sky for two cultural forces seeking to re-orient themselves under radically new cultural and political conditions. I sought to convey the idea that both the ENR and Telos intellectuals were deeply indebted to the ideals of the New Left since they were both born around 1968, the year of the student and worker protests. Moreover, the two cultural forces sought to reconcile and synthesize the most essential ideals of the New Right and New Left. In essence, the Telos staff was convinced that the French New Right was the sole left-wing cultural force today that was continuing to carry the revolutionary flame of the New Left’s idealism. In the process, Telos argued that the French New Right, like itself, sought the creation of a new political paradigm, which transcended the categories of right and left. While this political paradigm was partially new in that it integrated numerous New Left positions, it was not completely novel because the ENR still displayed a residual fidelity to its other ideological heritage, namely, the revolutionary right.

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Chapter 9

The ENR’s Relationship to the Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascism Modern fascism is not merely skinheads and an Austrian political thug. – John Pilger, British journalist

Increasingly today it is fashionable on the left to bash globalisation, the United States and Israel. All three are easily pinned with the fascist label, while the term fascism loses its precise analytical value and the actual fascism of the 1920s and 1930s is diluted or forgotten. Here is a typical example from London’s New Statesman in 2001: Modern fascism is not merely skinheads and an Austrian political thug. There has long been a geopolitical fascism overseen by the United States, assisted by Britain. Its record is truly blood-drenched: Vietnam, Indonesia, Chile, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Iraq, Palestine, Turkey and Colombia. Remembering them is as important as remembering the Holocaust. Globalisation, the advance of rapacious capital, is another phase, with a new militarism known as humanitarian intervention. (Pilger 2001)

In John Pilger’s piece, fascism is a combination of neo-Nazi skinheads, the Haider phenomenon in Austria, the geopolitical ambition of the United States, capitalist globalisation and humanitarian intervention. In short, fascism loses any definitional core. In a tasteless comparison, Pilger adds that remembering the “other” fascisms is as important as remembering the Holocaust. There can be no doubt that the ENR similarly has attempted to muddy the waters in respect of its relationship to historical fascism or neo-fascism. This chapter will discuss the ambiguous relationship between the ENR intellectuals and extreme-right and neo-fascist political forces, especially parliamentary-based political parties such as the French Front National (FN) and the Italian Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) and Alleanza Nazionale (AN). I will first attempt to show the major differences and marginal similarities between ENR thinkers such as de Benoist and the French FN. These differences include the following: the FN’s quest for immediate power versus the ENR’s cultural metapolitics or apoliteia stances as a reaction against both the parliamentary politics and extra-legal street action of the Old Right; the FN’s marked populism versus the ENR’s intellectualism and aristocratic elitism; the FN’s largely pro-Christian, pro-West stances versus the ENR’s attacks on Judeo-Christian traditions, and its pro-Third World solidarity positions; the FN’s dominant “national-liberalism” versus the ENR’s violent anti-capitalism and organic, communitarian agenda; and the FN’s ultra-French nationalism versus the ENR’s

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pan-European quest for common Indo-European roots within the framework of a “federalist empire” which acts as the guardian of regional and cultural diversity. In addition, however, this chapter demonstrates how the ENR’s metapolitical orientation, worldview, themes and discourse have influenced the parliamentary political forces on the extreme right-wing or neo-fascist ends of the political spectrum. This aforementioned point does not mean that the rise to power of the FN in France, the Vlaams Blok in Belgium, the Freedom Party in Austria, the AN in Italy, or the rise of other extreme right-wing or neo-fascist political parties in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s can be directly attributed to the rising cultural and political influence of ENR intellectuals. Rather, concrete issues including disillusionment with established political parties, unemployment, generalized insecurity about the future in a more global economy and the breakdown of “lawful” immigration, the centrepiece of the platforms of most extreme right-wing parties, were likely more responsible for the ascendancy of extreme right-wing and neo-fascist forces than the more intellectual ideas of the ENR theorists. The ENR’s tension with the traditional parliamentary or extra-legal forces on the revolutionary right has some obvious historical precedents. The intellectual, cultural fascists of the inter-war era, various “non-conformists” of the period and conservative revolutionaries such as Ernst Jünger and Julius Evola also had an ambiguous relationship to both the movements and regimes of Nazism and fascism. While these intellectuals claimed to take their distance from these regimes, the works of these figures were appropriated by the Nazi and Fascist regimes, thus giving the respective regimes an aura of intellectual credibility irrespective of real affinities or connections. Could we say that the same sort of ambiguous, symbiotic relationship applies between ENR intellectuals such as de Benoist, Tarchi and Michael Walker, on the one hand, and the parliamentary forces of an extreme-right or neo-fascist bent, on the other hand? Divergences Between the ENR and Alain de Benoist and the Front National (FN) As for my position concerning the National Front, it is quite simple. I see in it no ideas which are my own and give meaning to my life. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

In the mid-1980s as certain former ENR figures such as Pierre Vial and Claude Bardet jumped on the FN bandwagon, de Benoist and the French nouvelle droite generally began to officially take their distance from the ideas of the FN. So, for example, in 1988 Alain de Benoist made the following statement, which showed the ENR’s divergences from the FN’s political orientation, their different types of public support and a chasm in terms of basic ideas: Nous ne nous situons pas sur le même plan, nous ne nous adressons pas au même public et, quant aux idées, dont les rares domaines où le Front national a fait connaître les siennes, celles-ci m’apparaissent comme tout à fait étrangères aux nôtres. Partisans de la cause des peuples, d’une solidarité entre l’Europe et le Tiers Monde, d’une lutte contre l’idéologie occidentale et la politique des blocs, nous ne saurions approuver l’atlantisme

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du Front national, pas plus que sa critique du gaullisme ou des institutions de la Cinquième République. Nous sommes également en désaccord avec toute campagne anti-immigré. … (De Benoist in Duranton-Crabol 1988, 216)

It should be pointed out that the year de Benoist made this frontal attack on the FN was 1988, the year of the launch of his left-leaning journal Krisis. In the aforementioned passage, de Benoist claims that in contrast to the FN the ENR favours the “cause of peoples,” a solidarity between Europe and the Third World, and a struggle against Westernization, the bipolar bloc system and Atlanticism. Given the metapolitical approach of the ENR, de Benoist also rejects the FN critiques of Gaullism and the institutions of the Fifth Republic. In the 1990s, de Benoist continued to make a number of public statements, which confirmed his disdain for the FN in general, and “Lepenisme” in particular. These statements also created a stir within FN circles and press, which either resented his polemics against Christianity or suspected him of harbouring subversive, procommunist sympathies. In 1990, Alain de Benoist made a statement about the French right and FN in Le choc du mois, which amounted to a declaration of “ideological war”: For nearly half a century the French Right was conspicuous by its absence from all the great debates. … As for my position concerning the National Front, it is quite simple. I see in it no ideas which are my own and give meaning to my life. I think that the Right always ran the risk of falling into four major positions: liberalism, moral order, integralism, and racism. I fear that the National Front, a basically national-populist party, is falling into all four by varying degrees. (De Benoist 1990, 32)

Already critical of the French right and the FN’s tendencies towards neoliberalism, moralism, Catholic integralism and racism, de Benoist further cemented his anti-FN views in a 1992 interview. In this 1992 interview with the French magazine Les dossiers de l’histoire, de Benoist was even more precise about his distaste for the FN’s hegemonic anti-immigrant logic: “Personally, the ideas of the National Front dishearten me. … Especially its ideas about immigration, because I cannot stand its scapegoat logic” (De Benoist 1992, 149-50). These statements created a stir within pro-FN circles and press outlets, which began to denounce de Benoist as an anti-French nationalist as well as a pro-Russian, communist sympathiser. In the pro-FN press, Roland Gaucher, the editor of National Hebdo, accused de Benoist of “treachery” for denouncing the FN and Le Pen and simultaneously becoming the “little guru” of the “National Bolsheviks,” or embracing the “dirty hands” of both Russian Bolsheviks and conservative, anti-Western and ultra-nationalist Russian imperialists (Gaucher 1993, 9). Already back in the nouvelle droite’s “hot summer” of press coverage in 1979, de Benoist was vehemently denounced in ultra-nationalist circles as a representative of a “false,” pagan and anti-Christian right (Figueras 28 July 1979). In the 1980s and 1990s, the ultra-Catholic, anti-Semitic wing of the FN press, whether in Présent, National Hebdo or Rivarol, regularly denounced the neo-paganism of GRECE and de Benoist. The FN’s ultra-nationalist, Catholic wing was especially fearful that its publications would be taken over by the neo-pagans of GRECE. In 1992,

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for example, Gérald Penciolelli bought the extreme-right publications Minute and Le choc du mois, and Jean-Claude Valla, a former GRECE secretary-general, was appointed the editorial director of Minute (Simmons 1996, 198). Nonetheless, the neo-pagans of GRECE were one of many distinct tendencies within the FN and actually declined in influence in the 1990s. Undeterred by these aforementioned criticisms, de Benoist continued to elaborate his differences with the FN and Jean-Marie Le Pen in the mid-1990s. Responding to the claim that the ENR has had a great impact on the FN, de Benoist denied the allegation, called for “solidarity” with immigrants whom he saw as the victims of both hyper-capitalist global expansion and “ethnocidal” policies of national assimilation and American cultural homogenisation. He also criticised the French and the FN for their narrow focus on immigration, their pro-capitalist orientation, their lack of a social agenda and tactic of blaming all their problems, including a loss of cultural identity, on immigrants. It is worth quoting this passage at length in order to demonstrate the deep chasm between the FN and de Benoist: This “great impact” exists only in the minds of those who ascribe it to us. This allegation surprises me all the more since we often took a public stand against the National Front. I was regularly attacked in its media. I have not the slightest sympathy for a movement which, by manipulating the population’s fears and confusion, de facto intensifies xenophobia by letting the French believe that immigration is the cause of all their problems. National identity is a real problem and so is immigration. Such problems cannot be solved by merely finding a scapegoat. Identity is not an unchangeable essence that remains the same and is not affected by outside influences. On the contrary, identity is a dynamic process by which a people moulds itself and by which it shapes others. Identity has more than one definition, and one does not defend it by retreating into a bunker. Le Pen defends French identity against others. I defend the identity of all people while retaining solidarity with my own identity. The principal “my country, right or wrong,” implies that under no circumstances can a people be wrong. … One has to have the courage to admit the real causes of the destruction of identity are internal. Immigrants are not to blame when it is impossible for the French to lead a life corresponding to their own essence. Immigrants are also not responsible for the subjugation to the logic of commodities that has destroyed and torn apart the social fabric. Immigrants cannot be blamed for colonizing France when the French watch only American films on tv. It is also not the case that French identity is endangered because there are immigrants. On the contrary, identity has already been lost – which explains why France cannot deal with immigration. Historically, the phenomenon of immigration was triggered by the worldwide expansion of capitalism. Those who remain silent about capitalism should not complain about immigration. (De Benoist 19934a, 185-6)

De Benoist was not the only ENR figure to denounce what he viewed as the FN’s slick, simplistic, anti-immigrant, national-populism. Others in GRECE had problems with the FN’s rather crude view of immigration and national identity issues. Numerous GRECE leaders and their sympathisers also criticised the FN for its extreme populism, complete denigration of ideas, opportunistic campaign appeals and immediate search for the levers of political power. In 1990, Jacques Marlaud, the then president of GRECE, highlighted the ENR’s five major points of departure from the far right’s FN:

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Currently the differences between the far Right and the ‘New Right’ seem insurmountable. First, the National Front is impregnated with a Catholic messianism incompatible with our paganism. Second, the National Front’s identitarian doctrine can be summed up as a narrow ‘Frenchified’ nationalism whereas we are European before being French. Third, the National Front is opposed to mosques and chadors. We stand for the imprescriptible right of peoples to remain as they are; on our soil or elsewhere. Fourth, the securityconscious and superficial identitarian attitudes of the Front’s members hide the fact that they lack a social agenda which would break with the consumer society we have denounced as a ‘system for killing people.’ Fifth, the prevailing military atmosphere in this party is irreconcilable with our libertarian and aristocratic conception of excellence. (Marlaud 1990).

The major cleavages, then, between the ENR and the FN are the following: a pagan versus Christian conception of existence; an elitist versus populist orientation; different evaluations of liberal capitalism; and a pan-European search for identity versus a more restricted form of French nationalism. In terms of tactics, the ENR remained faithful to a strategy of long-term metapolitics and a search for greater theoretical sophistication. In contrast, the FN was geared towards the direct capture of political power, whether winning local councils or the most powerful political office of the land, the French presidency. The Affinity Between the ENR and Extreme-Right: The Anti-Egalitarian Ethos and the Obsessive Quest for Identity? National identity is a real problem and so is immigration. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Although there are significant ideological and tactical differences between the ENR intellectuals and the extreme right-wing FN, the cultural school of thought and the political party share two points of intersection: an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian orientation and their overwhelming fixation on cultural identity and “rootedness.” In their respective newspapers and journals, the ENR theorists and the FN ask similar questions and have the same thematic obsessions, but often have different styles, answers and audiences. So, for example, in the aforementioned Telos interview given by de Benoist in 1994, he clearly stated his preoccupations with national identity and immigration: “National identity is a real problem and so is immigration” (De Benoist 1993-4a). Or, at the culmination of a 1985 conference re-printed in Une certaine idée de la France, de Benoist defined the highest value of GRECE and the ENR: “Some call for SOS-RACISME. We answer: SOS-ROOTS” (De Benoist 1985b). While de Benoist has been critical of the FN’s racism, in Les idées à l’endroit he has also vehemently condemned anti-racist organisations such as SOS-RACISME, multicultural policies and anti-racism as an ideology for its allegedly negative tendency to assimilate and homogenise all cultural differences (De Benoist 1979a, 145-56). It was de Benoist, not Jean-Marie Le Pen, who wrote the following ringing affirmation of all “racial” and cultural identities in Les idées à l’endroit: “We have the right to be for Black Power, but on the condition of simultaneously being in favour of White

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Power, Yellow Power and Red Power” (De Benoist 1979a, 156). After the wounds of de-colonisation associated with the French pieds noirs, de Benoist developed his radical cultural “differentialism” in the 1970s where France was to belong to the French, Algeria to the Algerians and Vietnam to the Vietnamese. This doctrine could, in practice, have a number of (mutually irreconcilable) interpretations, but was racially manipulated by the FN and Le Pen to call for legal measures in favour of a pure, Catholic France cleansed of “inassimilable” Muslim and North African immigrants. Moreover, we have already seen how the ENR’s most vital concern is with the disappearance of individual and cultural differences in a world increasingly dominated by “levelling” egalitarian ideologies such as liberalism and socialism, the materialist “beast” of global capitalism and American cultural homogenisation. Taguieff has succinctly expressed the main ideological fixation of de Benoist and the ENR: “Roots, identities: these are the new absolutes” (Taguieff 1993-4c, 172). The FN has similar fixations as the ENR over issues such as national identity, immigration and the cultural “right to difference.” The immigration ticket, connected by the FN to all of France’s ills, from the loss of national identity and the breakdown of law and order to rampant unemployment, has been the source of its greatest success. Arguing in 1984 that a Third World immigrant population was culturally submerging France, Le Pen claimed that “civil war was at our gates” and “the very existence of the French people is at stake” (Le Pen in Simmons 1996, 160). Claiming that French culture and values are not superior to any others, the FN still insists that Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians cannot impose their values on a long established French culture and identity. For the FN, the French have the right to defend the integrity of their national identity. The FN, like the ENR, also vehemently attacks as “racists” those liberal and socialist universalists who wish to get rid of national identity and cultural differences through the creation of a mondialiste, or “one-world,” materialistic philosophy. The major slogans of the FN, “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”) and “Les Français d’abord” (“The French First”) (Le Pen 1984), were crude representations of de Benoist’s cultural “differentialism” which tended to be more pan-European and relational, although these types of slogans had a long history in France dating back to Charles Maurras’ Action française and the racial legislation of Marshal Petain’s Vichy regime. Despite their claims to valorise all cultures with equal force (the FN’s claim is clearly tainted by its consistent, vitriolic insults against immigrants, foreigners, Muslims, North Africans and Jews), both the FN and ENR maintain an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian orientation. JeanMarie Le Pen and the FN belong to a long right-wing anti-egalitarian tradition in France dating back to political forces as diverse as the Catholic counterrevolutionary tradition, Boulangism in the 1880s and the Vichy regime of the 1940s. It must be remembered that even Gaullism’s view of man, society and politics was tinged with a markedly elitist, anti-egalitarian tendency. This well-established French tradition has also included prominent French writers and intellectuals on the far right such as De Maistre, Drumont, Barrès, Maurras, Brasillach, Drieu la Rochelle and Bardèche. Also, Jean-Marie Le Pen has constantly praised the anti-egalitarian ethos of Nazi collaborators such as the Belgian Léon Degrelle and authoritarian leaders or dictators, including Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet, Juan Peron, Antonio Salazar, Anastasio Somoza and Saddam Hussein (Le Pen in Simmons 1996, 4). In

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1987, Le Pen called the Holocaust a “point of detail in history.” In 2007 in the context of his last presidential campaign, Le Pen was in hot water again when he “regretted” French president Jacques Chirac’s statement asking forgiveness for the nation’s Vichy collaborationist past and role in the extermination of the Jews. In addition, Le Pen has frequently alluded to a hierarchical, organic order where some people “naturally” have more rights than others (Simmons 1996, 4). Jean-Marie Le Pen was sympathetic to the attempts by the OAS army generals, the partisans of Algérie française, to overthrow the French republic in the 1960s. Finally, the official FN press is littered with a clear-cut anti-egalitarian view of human existence and the desire to squash liberal democracy’s egalitarian premise of equal treatment under the law for all citizens. This especially applies to the FN’s policy platforms in the infamous 300 mesures pour la renaissance de la France (1993), including its idea of “national preference” for the “French French” and desire to repatriate even French citizens of “immigrant” origins. The ENR’s de Benoist, too, subscribes to an anti-liberal, anti-egalitarian view of man, the social world and the political order. If the ENR’s journals were an indication, the ENR’s ideal-type of society would be organic, hierarchical and elitist in its essential thrust. In addition, de Benoist’s right-wing Gramscian strategy seeks to unify in thought and action the brightest and most capable European political elites. Moreover, in de Benoist’s classical text, Vu de droite, the theoretical influences suggest an anti-egalitarian, elitist view of the world: the father of “scientific racism” Arthur de Gobineau, the sociologist of elite theory Vilfredo Pareto, the “non-conformist” French socialist Georges Sorel who praised the power of myths and elites in moving history, the theorist of “crowd psychology” Gustave Le Bon and the Nobel prizewinning doctor Alexis Carrel who longed for an anti-egalitarian, hierarchical and organic “spiritual” and “biological” aristocracy in order to replace the “decadent” reigns of democracy and capitalism (De Benoist 1979b, 261-88). Finally, as pointed out earlier, to be on the right, for de Benoist, means to support anti-egalitarianism and “difference,” especially the hierarchical principal of “unity in diversity,” against the homogenising egalitarian tendencies of Christianity, liberalism, socialism and the Left in general (De Benoist 1979b, 16). While the ENR and FN differ in terms of some ideological positions and tactical choices, they share a common search for cultural identity and an intensely antiliberal, anti-egalitarian view of existence. While the ENR and de Benoist claim a complete break with the FN’s “Old Right” mentality and ideological positions, it is better to view the two as what French political journalist Alain Rollat called “les cousins ennemis” or “enemy cousins” (Rollat 1985, 143). That is, Rollat argued that the French nouvelle droite, Le Pen’s FN and the extreme right-wing party of the 1970s and early 1980s PFN were generally “cousins” of the same revolutionary, right-wing spiritual family, but could also be bitter “enemies” in terms of internal quarrels, tactics and differing ideological positions. Rollat’s aforementioned expression is probably the best way to encapsulate both the historical similarities and divergences between the ENR as a long-term cultural “school of thought” and the FN as an extreme right-wing political party eager to immediately seize power.

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ENR Connections to Extreme-Right and Neo-Fascist Circles It is normal for all men to prefer the culture they belong to. – Alain de Benoist, ENR leader

Although the ENR intellectuals have denied any affiliations with the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary forces of the extreme-right and neo-fascism, a number of prominent GRECE figures joined the FN in the early 1980s and the cultural focus of GRECE has been neatly appropriated by the FN in terms of tactics, style, discourse and theme changes. The FN’s pronounced focus on culture and a number of key FN slogans, including “France for the Frenchmen,” “anti-French racism,” the “right to difference,” “pro-Third World solidarity,” “anti-racism,” “anti-fascism” and “anti-totalitarianism” have been likely borrowed from the cultural ideas of GRECE and the ENR thinkers. In both France and Italy, many extreme-right or neo-fascist leaders and supporters read ENR publications which have, in turn, influenced the ideas and themes of the extreme-right and neo-fascist political parties. In 1998, one scholar claimed that one-third of readers in French New Right publication Eléments felt an ideological affinity with Le Pen’s FN (Duranton-Crabol 1998, 51). The MSI’s “progressive” and “liberal” positions and the influence of post-materialist and postmodern issues on its agenda, such as opposition to the death penalty, a willingness to increase aid to the Third World, the relative empathy for marginal groups like homosexuals, drug addicts and even immigrants and a cautious attitude towards the official authorities of law and order reflects the influence of right-wing positions which are nouvelle droite-like rather than standard right-wing ones and could prove fatal to the party’s traditional fascist ideology (Ignazi in Merkl and Weinberg 1993, 92). In any case, the existence of a serious intellectual and cultural movement like the ENR gives these political parties on the far right some credibility regardless of the real affinities or connections. Another intellectual source of the FN’s ideas and slogans was the neo-liberal and national-populist think tank the Club de l’horloge which, according to Pierre-André Taguieff, became more influential on the FN worldview in the 1980s as GRECE faded from the political scene and became less directly involved in traditional politics (Taguieff 1993-4c, 168). Two key Club de l’horloge members, Yvan Blot and Jean-Yves Le Gallou, bolted to the FN in the mid-1980s and the latter provided the FN’s key anti-immigrant slogan, “national preference,” with his book La préférence nationale: réponse à l’immigration (Le Gallou 1985). While GRECE was vehemently anti-capitalist, anti-Christian, anti-American and anti-West and the Club de l’horloge represented the antithesis of these positions, it did share with the Club de l’horloge a common fixation with “roots,” “identity” and the protection of cultural identity against the forces of capitalist globalisation and homogenisation. Despite differences between the Club de l’horloge and nouvelle droite, both think tanks shared an ideological core: the defence of collective identities and a rejection of egalitarianism (McCulloch 2006, 158-78). Due to the commonality of discourse between the groups, as well as overlapping strategic and political concerns, leading nouvelle droite ideologues joined the FN in the 1980s. One scholar argues that the nouvelle droite constituted a powerful party faction within the FN, which acted as

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a conduit for the passing of its key concepts into FN ideology and policy proposals (McCulloch 2006, 158-78). In addition, a number of ENR thinkers and sympathisers have some affiliations with racialist, negationist and even terrorist circles close to extreme-right and neofascist forces. So, for example, Michael Walker, the English editor of ENR journal The Scorpion, has personally sheltered Roberto Fiore, the young Italian radical right-wing terrorist who fled to London after the 1980 Bologna bombing. The Sting, a companion newsletter to The Scorpion, has an unmistakable sympathy for neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers (Lee 1997, 450). Moreover, it should be remembered that many ENR thinkers and sympathisers are probably susceptible to the pull of revolutionary right-wing ideas because many have their origins in the extreme-right and neo-fascism milieux. There are probably few ENR thinkers who are completely free of the ideological residues and themes, which nourished various revolutionary right-wing currents of thought. Sensing impatience and fatigue with the ENR’s long-term metapolitical stance, a number of GRECE figures longed for the taste for action and jumped into the political realm of the extreme-right and neo-fascist political parties. DurantonCrabol has pointed out how the French extreme right-wing party the PFN, founded in 1974, had many ideological convergences with the ENR and the principal founders of the PFN and GRECE both belonged to the Centre national des indépendants et paysans (CNIP) organization (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 213). Some old PFN militants would later join le Mouvement nationaliste révolutionnaire (MNR) under JeanGilles Malliarakis, which had a sort of rapprochement with ENR thinkers such as de Benoist (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 218). In a review article on the think tank GRECE, Alain Bihr argues that both the PFN and MNR had definite fascist-like tendencies (Bihr January 1993, 1). In this period during the 1970s, however, a greater number of GRECE members were tempted by the mainstream right, especially the Gaullist RPR and UDF, a number of RPR members attended GRECE cultural activities and GRECE members such as Yvan Blot and others even joined the RPR (DurantonCrabol 1988, 213). It was in the 1980s, however, that a number of prominent GRECE intellectuals, including the former secretary-general Pierre Vial and Claude Bardet, joined the FN. Claude Bardet became editor-in-chief of the FN’s theoretical journal of “national studies” Identité. A founding member of GRECE and a lecturer in history at the University of Lyon III, Vial joined the FN in 1988, became a member of its central committee in 1990, its political bureau in 1994 and created the FN bulletin Terre et peuple, which stressed the primacy of “cultural war” and the “total ethnic war” of the future (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 217). A number of other prominent GRECE figures either joined the FN or flirted with this extreme-right, national-populist party: members of the Nouvelle Ecole patronage or editorial committees in the 1970s and 1980s such as Hervé Lavenir, Bernard Asso (RPR regional councillor who declared himself “ultra-nationalist” and solicited the FN’s support), Roland Gaucher (ran for the FN in 1986 legislative elections), Jean-Jacques Mourreau, Pierre Debray-Ritzen (rallied for the FN in 1985) and Jean-Yves Le Gallou (joined the FN central committee in 1985) (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 216-17). For the 1979 European elections under

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the FN banner, the ENR’s doyen, Alain de Benoist, even allowed his name to be put on the Euro-Right’s list. (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 124). Other GRECE figures, whether Alain de Benoist, Pierre Vial or Guillaume Faye, influenced the discourse of the FN in terms of the centrality of national identity, cultural roots and immigration (d’Appollonia 1988, 420). Le Pen’s anti-fascist, antitotalitarian and anti-racist discourse was first formulated by GRECE thinkers de Benoist and Faye. When Le Pen argues that he is not a racist, especially not an “anti-French racist,” one can hear the faint echoes of de Benoist’s pronouncements of France for the French or Algeria for the Algerians. Also, it was de Benoist writing in Eléments that stated, “It is normal for all men to prefer the culture they belong to” (De Benoist 1974-5, 16). While de Benoist has been critical of Le Pen’s narrow idea of concentric circles of affinity because he argues that the closest people are not necessarily the nicest or most honourable (De Benoist 1993-4a, 174) (i.e., Le Pen’s concentric circles idea argues that he prefers his daughters to his cousins, his cousins to the neighbours, the neighbours to the foreigners, foreigners to the enemies, Frenchmen to other cultures and then Europeans above non-Europeans), the two share an affinity for maintaining strong cultural roots. The distinct difference is that whereas the preservation of the French identity is primary for Le Pen, de Benoist’s valorisation of cultural identity is more pan-European in nature. While de Benoist focused on Europe’s search for common pre-Christian, pagan roots, Faye’s call for the repatriation of immigrants to their countries of origin and Vial’s idea of an imperial European community of regions and “destiny” are examples of what Duranton-Crabol calls “objective convergences” between the ideas of GRECE and the FN (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 234). Also, the FN’s antiAmericanism and pro-Third World solidarity stance during the 1990 Gulf War when Le Pen visited the Iraqi leader Sadaam Hussein finds its intellectual counterpart in de Benoist’s 1986 work entitled Europe, Tiers monde, même combat. Yet, Le Pen’s virulent anti-Arab stance within France somewhat made a mockery of his alleged friendship with the Arab peoples and the Iraqi dictator, although his motives were both geopolitical and economic. De Benoist has supported this rapprochement with the Arabs in a post-9-11 climate. Furthermore, de Benoist’s stance on immigration appears to be more aware of the global economic dimension of immigration as well as subscribing to a more dialogical view of cultural identity than Le Pen’s FN. The FN’s close attention paid to coded language, the cultural terrain and attempts to attain respectability by distancing themselves from the extra-parliamentary revolutionary right, whether neo-Nazi skinheads or ultra-nationalist terrorist groups, also mirrors the pattern of the ENR intellectuals. FN city councillors have even attempted to ban “anti-national” liberal and left-wing books in certain French cities where the FN has captured power such as Toulon, Orange and Marignane. On the cultural and ideological front, there were also alliances between the nouvelle droite and extreme-right or neo-fascist forces. Until the disappearance of Maurice Bardèche’s explicitly fascist journal Défense de l’Occident in 1982, the GRECE journal Eléments regularly advertised for the former and opened its columns to Robert Poulet, Yves Bataille and Alain Sanders, all writers for extreme right-wing, pro-FN publications such as Rivarol and Jeune nation solidariste (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 124). As Roger Griffin correctly points out within the context of the late 1990s, ENR

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journals such as Eléments in France, Diorama letterario in Italy or The Scorpion in England continue to be appropriated by extreme-right parties and to publish a large number of their articles, advertisements and numerous book reviews on extremeright, fascist or “third way” topics (Griffin 1998, 1-28). Despite the intense conflicts between the ENR and FN over the appraisal of the Judeo-Christian heritage, elitism versus populism and the divide between a focus on long-term cultural power and short-term political conquest, the two adversaries recognized a measure of affinity with the basic ideas of GRECE thinkers: elitism, anti-egalitarianism, the intense hatred for liberal democracy, the cult of heroes and the primordial importance of myths for both shaping history and guiding political destiny. Even in Présent, the FN journal for its Catholic integralist wing, one could hear some common convictions between the FN and GRECE. While Présent and other Catholic fundamentalist sections of the FN never tired of vehemently denouncing the irreligious, paganism and Nietzschean nominalism of GRECE, they did see common cause with old revolutionary right-wing comrades such as de Benoist and other GRECE thinkers against liberalism, democracy and the Rights of Man (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 125). Even more troubling for a think tank searching to enhance the right’s aura of respectability were the linkages between ENR thinkers and collaborationist, racialist or Holocaust negationist circles, journals and organisations. The French writer Raymond Abellio (1908-1986) was an old French collaborator who was part of the patronage committee of GRECE journal Nouvelle Ecole and heavily influenced de Benoist’s ideas of a “spiritual” Europe fighting against the materialism of the Soviet East and Anglo-American West (De Benoist 1979b, 428-31). Roger Pearson, the President of the racist Northern League, which Michael Billig claimed was part of an active “racist international” in the 1970s, belonged to the patronage committee of GRECE journal Nouvelle Ecole along with a number of other GRECE sympathisers who were also connected to allegedly racist journals, namely, The Mankind Quarterly of England and Neue Anthropologie of Germany (Duranton-Crabol 1988, 148). This chapter has attempted to describe the ambiguous relationship between the ENR theorists and the extreme-right and neo-fascists. A post-1968 cultural force influenced by the revolutionary ideas of the former leftist student radicals, the ENR thinkers have situated themselves on a distinctly different terrain of political contestation, namely, cultural confrontation, from both parliamentary and extraparliamentary political forces. A number of their ideas also diverge from some standard right-wing ideas of the past, including their rejection of ultra-nationalism, Catholic fundamentalism, the defence of the “white man” and Western heritage. Political forces such as the French FN have cynically appropriated the works of ENR intellectuals like de Benoist, but the chasm between the two is deep and wide in terms of means, ends and ultimate ideals about the future society. The two forces, one largely cultural and the other generally political, are spiritual, political and historical cousins embedded in common right-wing influences and yet divided on both tactical and ideological fronts. Born in the period of student unrest in May 1968, it is no accident, then, that the ENR thinkers have attempted to distance themselves from the FN’s older right-wing currents of thought and to enlist the support of left and New Left ideals in their struggle against liberal democracy,

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neo-liberalism and American cultural homogenisation. For the ENR, these left-wing forces are closer spiritually than the FN because they wish to fight the same common liberal capitalist enemies, whereas they claim the FN has now become a hollow social force in the wake of the death of the old communist scarecrow.

Chapter 10

Treason of the Intellectuals? The intellectuals of our time are all traitors. – Raymond Aron, French philosopher

In his work The Intellectuals, the British historian Paul Johnson draws a parallel line between many intellectuals, political violence and the rise of fascism: The association of intellectuals with violence occurs too often to be dismissed as an aberration. Often it takes the form of admiring those ‘men of action’ who practise violence. Mussolini had an astonishing number of intellectual followers, by no means all of them Italian. In his ascent to power, Hitler consistently was most successful on the campus, his electoral appeal to students regularly outstripping his performance among the population as a whole. He always performed well among teachers and university professors. Many intellectuals were drawn into the higher echelons of the Nazi Party and participated in the more gruesome excesses of the SS. (Johnson 1988, 319)

Does the ENR play a similar intellectual role in maintaining within its pantheon authors that have glorified violence in order to create an allegedly “postfascist” synthesis? Why de Benoist’s meticulous, nuanced defense of an Evola or Schmitt rather than a Sartre on the hard left? As Steve Fuller argues in a recent work, intellectuals play numerous roles: Sophists that are skeptical about absolute knowledge claims; Platonists that search for eternal and true ideas (more suspect in a post-modern era); investigators suspicious of power structures; sniffers of a big, marketable idea or searchers for the whole truth (Fuller 2005). Intellectuals make enemies because they challenge existing truths. They might even fabricate claims to advance their conception of reality. They can play the role of serving power, or being perpetually in opposition to the centres of power. Intellectuals in opposition might be convenient in a legitimizing function for liberal democracy. They might also be testers of new or unusual ideas. Where does the ENR stand in relation to intellectuals and power in an age of diminishing respect for intellectuals? In the closing chapter, I examine the general relationship between intellectuals and political power, as well as the particular role of ENR intellectuals. I will attempt to argue that intellectuals in the last two centuries have generally been the servants of political power either behind the scenes in the safety of the cultural realm, as the “cultivated criminals” of the establishment, or as the new “saviours” of both rightwing and left-wing revolutionary movements. Despite constant attacks from the Old Left, Old Right and liberal intellectuals, as well as its claims of scientific objectivity based on their alleged lack of any preconceived dogmas, the ENR intellectuals have also generally followed this modern trend.

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I then proceed to answer some basic questions surrounding the theme of intellectuals and their linkages to political power. What is the role of contemporary intellectuals and how does this differ from the past? Are they integral members of the established order or indispensable motors of revolutionary change in the Gramscian mould of an elite vanguard? Is there an ideal role for the intellectual? Do material interests and power, or pure idealism motivate intellectuals and under what conditions does one or the other prevail? What is the connection between merely cultural or intellectual ideas, as the ENR claims to espouse, and the rise of brutal political practices, the physical and spiritual silencing of opponents and totalitarianism? Are Plato and Hegel, as the eminent philosopher Karl Popper claims, the founding fathers of totalitarianism? (Popper 1962, 60-78). Did Marx and Lenin pave the way for the hell of the Soviet gulags? Was the pan-European cultural assault on liberal democratic values during the inter-war years decisive in terms of the meteoric rise of fascism and Nazism? Similarly, can the ENR’s constant attacks on liberal democracy, global capitalism and the United States create the necessary climate for the eventual rise of a post-liberal, anti-egalitarian and “post-fascist” social order? ENR intellectuals have been accused of either nurturing a neo-fascist ideology or creating a novel political paradigm transcending both Old Right and Old Left positions. If the first claim is correct, the ENR intellectuals can be viewed as the latest incarnation of what the legendary French intellectual Julien Benda, writing in the turbulent 1920s, called the “treason of the intellectuals”: the complete abandonment of disinterested intellectual activity, the end of an objective search for eternal and universal truths and the decline in the pursuit of a spiritual existence in favour of practical, materialist goals and narrow political, class, racial and national passions (Benda 1969). On the other hand, if the second proposition has some merit, the ENR theorists may be seen by some intellectuals as the new “saviours” fighting against the indignities of an age thoroughly infected with the “viruses” of “decadent” materialism, progress and mass conformity. The Failure to Claim Historical Responsibility: Recycling the Demons of the Past? Under fascism, he had the courage to write publically that he was not a fascist. – Alain de Benoist, commenting on Julius Evola

As the debates around Vichy collaboration with the Nazis in France in the 1980s and 1990s showed, the notion of intellectuals as handmaidens of political power and their burden of historical responsibility are hotly contested post-World War Two issues. In Europe generally, the demons of the World War Two era have never been fully buried and periodically they rise from the ashes to trouble nations plagued by amnesia and denial. This was the case surrounding the role of certain intellectuals, which either influenced or collaborated with the Fascist and Nazi regimes and continue to exert their impact on the ENR worldview such as Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck, Ernst Jünger, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, Georges Sorel and Julius Evola. The ENR insists that some of the basic ideas of these thinkers outweigh the

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negative spectre of their collaborationist political decisions, although some of its critics claim that the basic thoughts and visions of these intellectuals have been fully tarnished by their relationship to fascism or Nazism. The “discovery” of Schmitt by left-wingers on both sides of the Atlantic is a case in point. Yet, as Alain de Benoist’s series of interviews in Telos in the 1990s demonstrated, the ENR has a tendency to downplay the relationship of these intellectuals to fascism or Nazism by arguing that it has moulded a unique post-modern synthesis of ideas and that Europe should move beyond what he considers the old, stifling categories of fascism and anti-fascism (De Benoist 1993-4a). An example of this relativist, historicizing tendency is de Benoist’s lengthy response made to a question regarding Julius Evola’s so-called “spiritual racism” and anti-Semitism: … Evola published interesting works about ethics, spirituality and philosophy of religions. His work is vast and one does not have to accept all of it. Politically, he made many mistakes. However, your description of his views is a bit excessive. Under fascism, he had the courage to write publically that he was not a fascist. He was never a member of the Fascist Party. His journal, La Torre, was banned by the fascist authorities in 1930 and he was continuously under attack by many of the regime’s leaders (even if he was protected by some others). He wrote a very interesting critique of nationalism and fought violently against any form of biological racism. He opposed Giovanni Gentile at a time when Gentile was the most celebrated thinker of the fascist regime. Even his anti-Semitism, which is beyond doubt, is more complex than may appear at first sight. This is no excuse, but a thinker should not be reduced only to part of his life or part of his work. Céline’s anti-Semitism does not prevent him from being recognized nowadays as one of this century’s greatest literary figures. When Telos sought to introduce Carl Schmitt’s works to the American public, you also had to explain his mistaken attitude toward the Nazis between 1933 and 1936-37. Clearly, the value of Schmitt’s work lies beyond these years. The same goes for Evola. (De Benoist 1993-4a, 202-3)

As the new century opens, de Benoist continues to subtly defend Schmitt by arguing that his political choices were complex and that he was victimized by sectors of the Nazi regime (De Benoist, “Schmitt in France”). De Benoist, like Evola, could claim that his work was misunderstood, distorted or cynically manipulated for political ends. Both can also contend that the relationship of the intellectual to political power is rather nuanced and rarely clear-cut, thus skirting the issue of personal and moral responsibility for possible “crimes against humanity.” Also, like Evola, de Benoist would use the forum of cultural “combat” in order to mould a detached stance of Olympian, aristocratic elitism, which supposedly distanced itself from the petty world of mass political involvement. Yet, the fact remains that Evola’s “spiritual racism” was, on closer investigation, either a myth or a clearly a disguised form of racism and anti-Semitism (Ferraresi 1996, 43-50). So, for example, Evola explicitly praised the blood-thirsty, anti-Semitic fascism of the Romanian Iron Guard under Codreanu in the 1930s and also penned Mussolini’s manifesto of “spiritual racism.” The same is true in relation to Carl Schmitt, who willingly joined the Nazi Party in 1933 and even wrote several anti-Semitic, legal tracts for the Nazis in the mid-1930s. Schmitt’s political and juridical works are exceptional and it is true that

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he sought to create a legal basis to curtail extreme forces on both right and left, but why the need to downplay Schmitt’s seduction and involvement with Nazism? De Benoist’s post-war reading of Evola and Schmitt were obviously intended to create some confusion and ambiguity in order to satisfy diverse ideological appetites and cover his own reputation in both the present and possible future, post-liberal order. It should also be pointed out that de Benoist’s aim in recycling Schmitt, as well as Evola to a lesser extent, was to demonstrate how even left-wing revolutionaries (or left-wing Schmittians) could be utilized in order to delegitimise liberal democracy. In this regard, although de Benoist’s public statements in the 1990s against the anti-immigrant racism of the FN, the calls for public participation and greater democratization and his praise of the Greens as the only authentic anticapitalist force on the French political scene appeared genuine, he simultaneously published works in the same period which had echoes of his revolutionary rightwing past: an edited collection of the classics on the right which includes the works of counterrevolutionary writer Joseph de Maistre, the anti-Semitic author of La France Juive Edouard Drumont and collaborationist fascists like Robert Brasillach and Pierre Drieu la Rochelle; and the use of standard right-wing themes such as: empire, spiritual anti-materialism and myths in L’empire intérieur in 1995 (Griffin 1998, 15-16). De Benoist’s constructed ambiguity was, therefore, a subtle way of avoiding complete historical responsibility; shielding his revolutionary right-wing influences from complete scrutiny; and also remaining faithful to some of his old ideals and myths from his youth. It can also be viewed as a right-wing Gramscian strategy intended to appeal to both traditional forces on the right and disgruntled leftists searching for a political home after the rapid demise of communism in 1989. In using Schmitt, Evola or other thinkers from the radical right milieu, de Benoist wants to keep alive the notion of a more pure, revolutionary, elitist right supposedly untainted by ties to fascism and Nazism. Moreover, if as the British fascist James Strachey Barnes wrote in 1931 that the “basic idea of fascism is the spiritual interpretation of history” (Barnes 1931, 43), was de Benoist not using Evola or Schmitt to advance an anti-materialist, idealistic, spiritual interpretation of history? The Role of Modern Intellectuals: All Traitors? I am not deploring the facts that the cults of honour and courage should be preached by human beings; I am deploring the fact that they are preached by the ‘clerks’. – Julien Benda, French intellectual

According to French philosopher Raymond Aron, “the intellectuals of our time are all traitors” because they have given an articulate and rational form to the political interests of states and enmity between peoples, thus betraying their mission to serve higher, permanent values, such as truth, justice and spiritual salvation (Aron 1957, 301). Working in the tradition of fellow French intellectual Julien Benda who lamented the spectacle of his fellow colleagues like Maurice Barrès, Charles Maurras, Georges Sorel and Emile Durkheim serving particular political and economic interests and

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scorning universal truths and the metaphysical realm of existence, Aron did not call for a return to a mythical golden age of intellectuals. Instead, like Benda before him, Aron did not simply deplore the “base,” anti-intellectual political or material life, but that it was now preached by intellectuals for political and material gain in the “secular kingdom.” Arguing that the revolutions of the twentieth century have been largely carried out by intellectuals rather than the proletariat, Aron contends that intellectuals could no longer perform their traditional role: to give a sense of doubt, guilt or regret to the inevitable sense of superiority of the political and military authorities or modern revolutionaries (Aron 1957, 323). In this orientation, we hear the influence of Julien Benda who attacked the sudden turn of the clerks from otherworldly, spiritual matters to the causes of the new gods, namely, state, country and class (Benda 1969, 39). Benda elaborates his ideal, anti-materialistic notion of the intellectual, which Aron would have likely shared: Must I repeat that I am not deploring the facts that the cults of honour and courage should be preached by human beings; I am deploring the fact that they are preached by the “clerks.” Civilization, I repeat, seems to me possible only if humanity consents to a division of functions, if side by side with those who carry out the lay passions and extol the virtues serviceable to them there exists a class of men who depreciate these passions and glorify the advantages which are beyond the material. (Benda 1969, 139)

In the contemporary age, Edward Said has been especially adamant about the need for critical intellectuals with common universal standards: …The attempt in these lectures is rather to speak about intellectuals as precisely those figures whose public performances can neither be predicted nor compelled into some slogan, orthodox party line, or fixed dogma. What I was trying to suggest was that standards of truth about human misery and oppression were to be held despite the individual’s party affiliation, national background, and primeval loyalties. Nothing disfigures the intellectual’s public performance as much as trimming, careful silence, and retrospective apostasy. …Universality means taking a risk in order to go beyond the easy certainties provided us by our background, language, and nationality, which so often shield us from the reality of others. It also means looking for and trying to uphold a single standard for human behaviour when it comes to such matters as foreign and social policy. (Said 1994, xi-xii)

If we examine the role of intellectuals in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we can concur with Said, Benda and Aron that intellectuals betrayed their primordial roles as the mental and spiritual conscience of humanity and instead turned to political action above the values of universality, knowledge, spirituality and truth. Turning to their pens as swords, contemporary intellectuals became what Benda called “the spiritual militia of the material” (Benda 1969, 75). In the last two centuries, intellectuals, whether on behalf of Western colonialist powers, nationalist euphoria, Fascist, Nazi or collaborationist regimes, Marxist visions of a materialist paradise on earth or even liberal democratic polities with an aggressive pro-market, antiwelfare state bent, have legitimized the worst sorts of mass, technological brutality, violence and death in the history of humanity. They have given a cultivated face and legal façade to the most heinous crimes of what Hannah Arendt dubbed our

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“totalitarian century.” Other intellectuals, whether the cultural fascists or conservative revolutionary thinkers of the inter-war era to which the ENR is heavily indebted to, helped to create a congenial climate for the rise of anti-liberal, anti-democratic movements. History teaches us the critical lesson that we should never dismiss the ENR intellectuals or any other intellectual group as marginal cranks. The marginal ideas of yesterday can easily become the ascendant, ruling ideas of today. As Edward Said clearly shows in his 1979 classic Orientalism, the conquest of the so-called “Orient” by the West was only possible as a result of the alliance of knowledge and political power, and meticulous intellectual research and preparation for the colonialist enterprise: The priests, administration, army and police merely followed on the heels of the superiority-laden ideas of the researchers, writers and intellectuals (Said 1979). This Western, colonialist pattern was followed for other conquests of non-Western lands and which we will continue to feel the reverberations for years to come. Furthermore, the number of the most prominent intellectuals of the twentieth century who jumped on the fascist or Nazi bandwagon or had “proto-fascist” sympathies is overwhelming. Here is a small sampling of the most infamous intellectuals: Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Giovanni Gentile, Roberto Michels and Julius Evola. Was not the celebrated Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, the winner of the 1920 Nobel Prize in literature, an avid supporter of Nazism? Did not the celebrated Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung argue that Nazism was necessary for Germany’s spiritual growth and “a chaotic precondition for the birth of a new world” (Jung in Blamires 2006, 358)? While right-wing intellectuals justified the barbarism of racial laws and the Holocaust, Marxists could also see the Stalinist gulags as a mere “parenthesis in history,” to use Benedetto Croce’s telling expression about Italian Fascism, because they were convinced about the inevitable march towards the classless utopia of the future. Besides, history was on the side of the “victims,” or the proletariat, and even rivers of blood were justified in the inevitable, Marxist march of “progress.” The West, too, had its share of Stalinist apologists such as Sartre within the leftist intelligentsia from France and Britain to Germany and the United States. Moreover, intellectuals in the Western liberal democratic polities increasingly use their more intricate university connections to corporations, governments and the mass media in order to shield the system from its excesses, or remain silent in terms of its most flagrant anti-liberal and anti-democratic tendencies (Chomsky 1988; 1994). These included the following: rising poverty levels at home and mass starvation zones abroad, selective Western militarism from Iraq to Kosovo, ecological disasters, child labour, a chilling anti-immigrant consensus in Europe, the steady de-politicization of the masses and the growing de facto political control of transnational multinational corporations or supra-national obligations under the European Union and Maastricht Treaty, the loss of cultural identities to an imposed neo-liberal, global order and the “silence of the intellectuals” over racist crimes of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Rwanda and the Sudan. Thus, we seem a long way from the ideal vision of the intellectual espoused by Julien Benda and Raymond Aron, who took as their model the infamous Dreyfus affair in the 1890s. Emile Zola and fellow intellectual defenders of Alfred Dreyfus,

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an obscure French artillery officer falsely accused of treason, essentially sought the respect for truth, justice and the universal above partisan interests like the prestige of the French army and national grandeur. The ENR intellectuals, like many of its intellectual colleagues of other political stripes, too, cannot claim to uphold the ideal model of the intellectual constructed by Benda, Aron and Said. In the first place, the ENR would have called for the revival of numerous forms of cultural particularism and rejected the liberal universalism of Benda and Aron, or what it views as an “abstract” pseudo-universalism upholding the false “religion” of human rights against the authentic “cause of peoples.” For the ENR, the credo of human rights was a false dawn, which assumed a genuinely Western, ethnocentric code of ethics masquerading as true universalism. Second, while the ENR sought to appeal to a diverse ideological cross-section of intellectuals and criticized the “silence of the intellectuals,” they were still intent on a long-term Gramscian cultural strategy, which smacked of political involvement rather than the search for truth, justice, knowledge or the spiritual mysteries of the world. The ENR’s desire to resurrect a world where anti-egalitarianism and the “right to difference” dominated also meant that its scientific veneer masked its political desire to bring about its own rightwing vision of the world. In what could be construed as political opportunism or an understanding of realpolitik, in Vu de droite Alain de Benoist has stated that the political landscape will dictate if he is on the right or left side of the political spectrum (De Benoist 1979b, 15). In the end, Benda would have seen de Benoist as another clerk committing intellectual treason, although the latter would have claimed that he was part of a larger subversive and permanent, metapolitical revolution. The role of intellectuals in the twentieth century, regardless of whatever chic ideological plummage they chose to adorn themselves with, has been largely as members of and apologists for the establishment, which historically has no motivation to examine the merits of its “sinister” and “anti-democratic” political enemies. Régis Debray, a revolutionary leftist ally of Che Guevara in Bolivia and an advisor to former French President François Mitterand, gives support for this aforementioned claim in his historical study of the French intelligentsia (Debray 1981). Debray argues that between 1880 and 1930 French intellectuals were principally connected to the prestigious Sorbonne and were protected as secular guardians of knowledge against the shrill partisanship of the Church, nationalist excesses and Bonapartism. After 1930, the Sorbonne began to lose its influence to new publishing houses, but until the 1960s French intellectual giants such as: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, François Mauriac, André Gide and André Malraux superseded the professors of the Sorbonne and other universities in terms of their free-ranging work and credo of intellectual freedom. Ironically, around the time of the student and worker protests in 1968, argues Debray, intellectuals flocked to the mass media and their work was now entirely dependent on their employers and viewers rather than fellow colleagues. This reduced the impartial nature of the intelligentsia and increasingly bred intellectual conformity and specialization. In the process, intellectuals were often moved by profit or reward rather than the love for truth, justice or an attention to the larger, spiritual picture of existence. The Canadian philosopher George Grant (1918-1988), like Régis Debray, has been especially critical of the contemporary role of intellectuals in the West. For

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Grant, the “treason of the clerks” was firmly rooted in the late twentieth century because of the overwhelming belief of both right and left, business and labour and the university community in the prime vision of the Western world, namely, the “infinite” pursuit of technological mastery and dynamism (Grant 1969, 113-33). For Grant, the near societal unanimity of this techno-utopian view of progress combined with the solid support of the intelligentsia meant the arrival of a “winter of nihilism” where “demonic” technological forces stunt the quest for knowledge, erase alternative discourses and worldviews and usher in a de-spiritualized age devoid of mystery and rife with egoism and materialism (Grant 1969, 113-33). In Grant’s eyes, the critical intellectual was becoming an extinct species because the West had generally decided that the technological age was its ticket to salvation. The ENR would likely agree with Debray and Grant on the increasing silence, conformity and material self-protection mechanisms of the intellectual classes in the age of technology, television and Internet. De Benoist frequently highlights the “soft totalitarianism” of liberal societies. He rails against the hysterical attitude of the mainstream press to the works of Carl Schmitt, his treatment due to the rejection of Taguieff’s thesis on the new global Judeophobia that combines Old Right antiSemitism and New Left anti-Zionist anti-Semitism in order to Nazify Israel (De Benoist 2005d; Taguieff 2004), or the violent rejection of his own doctrines by the liberal and left-wing intelligentsia. ENR intellectuals have frequently criticized the techno-utopian shallowness of the Western world. Although he claims that the Greens are too naïve in their political worldview, in an interview with RightNow! de Benoist has endorsed the Greens as the only French political force ready to fight capitalist materialism and break completely with its dominant ideology based on egotistical self-interest, the rush for profits and the terrible environmental destruction of the earth (De Benoist 1997, 3). Under the influence of Carl Schmitt’s political decisionism and a boundless, tragic Prometheanism, de Benoist cannot fully endorse the Greens because their “naivete” consists in not sharing his tendency towards an eternally conflictual vision of politics and sombre, Hobbesian-like view of human nature. In this sense, although de Benoist and the ENR are critical of technoutopianism and the Western conception of “progress,” they were not against the use of technology, science and the military in order to create a new, anti-liberal, organic European home. ENR Intellectuals: The Reign of Interests or the Fires of Idealism? Not ideas, but material and ideal [ideological] interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very frequently the world images that have been created by ideas, like a switchman, have determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. – Max Weber, German sociologist, 1920

It is clear that many contemporary intellectuals in the twentieth century were driven by the reign of material and political interests, but how many were driven by the burning fires of idealism? Or, as the German sociologist Max Weber pointed out long ago, ideas are themselves really interests. Ze’ev Sternhell’s works on the cultural

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fascists of the inter-war era clearly shows how anti-materialist idealism united disparate non-conformist forces on the right and left in a mortal combat with the forces of liberal parliamentarism and decisively prepared the terrain for the rise of Fascism in Italy and Nazi collaborationist regimes throughout Europe (Sternhell 1996). Did idealism fire the minds of communist idealists like Che Guevara in the 1960s, Spanish anarchists during the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939 and intellectuals supporting the Stalinist regimes in the communist East? As a largely cultural force, the ENR has remained immune from the label of opportunism and has been able to remain faithful, albeit with some revisions, to its core beliefs of antiegalitarianism and the “right to difference.” Its anti-mercantilism or anti-capitalism has also remained prominent, although not with the same consistency as the antiegalitarian credo, which would continue to exist under a capitalist order. If the record of other oppositional cultural or political forces is an indication, then political ideology and rhetoric are not in themselves complete measures of how these same forces will act once the hour of power comes calling. The acquisition of power, as the communists, fascists, social democrats or Greens are well aware, entails a negotiation between core ideological beliefs, the constraints of organizational factors and a measure of compromise with powerful sectors in society, whether Church, business elites or aristocratic elements. As a cultural or metapolitical force, the ENR has been able to largely avoid the thorny issue of political involvement and the constraints of power. It can conveniently claim the banner of fidelity to the burning flame of a higher idealism against what it considers the mass materialism of capitalism and communism. It is also true that a combination of interests and idealism can both operate as motivational factors for intellectuals, but an authentic idealism is clearly nonnegotiable in terms of its values and ideals. The road to hell is either paved by the sinister plans of political authorities and their intellectual servants, or the good intentions of utopian idealists. The ENR has often been accused of seeking to revive a sinister neo-fascism, while their anti-materialistic idealism looks to the golden age of pagan Indo-European roots and classical Greek antiquity in order to lead contemporary Europe to a brighter tomorrow. Metapolitics, Apoliteia and Political Power Riding the Tiger – Julius Evola, post-war “spiritual” notion and title of book

In pursuing a strategy of metapolitics or a more aloof form of what the ancient Greeks called apoliteia, Roger Griffin explains how the French nouvelle droite was respectively indebted to Armin Mohler’s spherical concept of time and Julius Evola’s notion of “riding the tiger” amid the “decadent,” materialist ruins of postWorld War Two Europe (Griffin 1998, 7-15). In the process, after the collapse of the “decadent” liberal democratic system either through the metapolitical “war” or apoliteia, a stoic, eternal faith to one’s inner vision, the ENR believed that the new age would dawn at any moment in order to cancel out the black age of absolute

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barbarism and materialism. The advantage of this worldview was that the ENR could carry out supposedly neutral, detached analysis of the existing “totalitarian” liberal democratic system, as with Alain de Benoist’s articles in Krisis or Telos, yet still remain confident about the West’s imminent collapse. Moreover, the ENR could also claim that its analysis was far removed from any affinities for political forces of the past like fascism and Nazism and even more modern ones like Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National. In this sense, the ENR are the undisputed heirs of the “cultural pessimism” of conservative revolutionary thinkers such as: Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger and Moeller van den Bruck. In fact, the “cultural pessimism” of the ENR increased by the 1990s, thus replacing its scientific faith and more positive social predictions of the 1970s. In the process, the Evolian notion of apoliteia now seems more attractive than metapolitics to certain ENR figures like de Benoist and Tarchi because it provides a more reassuring and “beautiful” myth to what they view as a blocked, “totalitarian” society with possibly no hope for revolution in their lives. A clear example of this apoliteia stance is the position taken by Marco Tarchi in a 1996 issue of the Italian New Right journal called Diorama letterario: Is it a utopia to believe that it could be possible to create a space of reflection outside the sphere of everyday politics and its subterfuges in which to bring together the energies of those who do not think that in the dialectic right/left/centre the answers can be found to the great questions which confront us, such as the defence of the quality of life, the search for adequate solutions to the problems posed by multi-ethnic societies, the reconstruction of a concept of common good that can be shared by all? (Tarchi 1996)

The problem with Tarchi’s stance of apoliteia is that his periodical, Diorama leterrario, has also included in the same 1996 issue a book on Ernst Jünger, the writings of Julius Evola for the Fascist periodical Lo stato (1934-45) and a review of the biography of Carl Schmitt. This similar trend plagues de Benoist’s supposedly neutral apoliteia orientation, whether in Eléments, Krisis, the Italianbased Trasgressioni or his articles in the former leftist journal Telos. Like Tarchi, de Benoist still has “palingenetic” longings of a Europe reborn, phoenix-like from the decadence of liberal democracy. In Telos, for example, de Benoist published a 1994 article the “Idea of Empire” in which he essentially argued that the solution to the “cynical and arrogant vector” of American imperialism, which is reducing the world to a homogeneous, deculturalising, and depersonalizing mass of anonymous consumers is becoming European “citizens of an idea in the imperial tradition” (De Benoist 1993-4b). This clearly Evolian reference to a European empire of the “spirit” would, in the ENR’s view, create a sort of federalism which would accommodate the “right to difference” of various cultural identities against the “one-worldism” of the global system bent on destroying all world cultures. At other times, the apoliteia or metapolitical stances of a few ENR journals are not as subtle and have even included an apologia for inter-war fascism, Hitlerism and the belief in the necessity of myths to serve the most infamous causes (Cagni 1995). We should keep in mind that the ENR intellectuals, whether they engage in metapolitics, apoliteia or eventually turn to the political realm, seek the hasty arrival of an anti-egalitarian, anti-liberal alternative to the hated materialism and decadence of liberal parliamentarism and global capitalism. For the ENR, all revolutionary and

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idealistic opposition to the existing system is essentially positive because it heralds the end of the old system and the arrival of an allegedly splendid age after the ruins. In this way, the ENR theorists clearly resemble the inter-war era’s “non-conformist” intellectuals like Sorel and Valois who indiscriminately criss-crossed between the extreme-right and extreme-left in order to defeat the detested parliamentarism and materialism of the liberal democratic system. If the political landscape provides him with the opportunity, de Benoist could easily imagine himself on the left rather than right side of the political divide. This will all depend on which cultural and political forces can best engineer the arrival of a post-liberal order. It is no accident that the virulent anti-American, anti-war sentiments before the Iraq War in 2003 often emanated from the extremes of the European political spectrum: the far left, radical right and anti-Western Islamic fundamentalists. These radical forces, including the ENR, have been able to slowly delegitimize the West, the United States and liberal democracy, while also making inroads among more mainstream European public opinion. De Benoist and the ENR want the liberal democratic system to fall and they therefore assemble allies from all political camps in order to help the process along. ENR Views of Human Nature and Political Power: Between Malleable Man and “Eternal” Conflict Any elite which is not prepared to join in battle to defend its position is in full decadence, and all that is left to it is to give way to another elite having the virile qualities it lacks. –Vilfredo Pareto, French-born Italian sociologist

From the ENR’s perspective, man is neither good, nor evil, but a perpetually malleable creature, which can lead the world out of its greatest crises to the heights of a new, more spiritual tomorrow. It rejects the Judeo-Christian view that man is inherently evil and the path to salvation can only come through an unbending faith to the one God. For the ENR, man alone is the measure of all things, the creator and mover of history and the arbiter of all moral values. This Nietzschean nominalism combined with a tragic, pagan view of existence has meant that political conflict is essential to the ENR view of history. The ENR attacks the Judeo-Christian tradition and its secular offshoots, including liberalism and socialism, as too linear and ahistorical and calls for a spherical view of history as an “eternal return.” Whereas these aforementioned ideologies see the possibility of the “end of history” and spiritual or secular salvation, the ENR argues that it is only an “eternal” conflict of values and worldviews, which allows man to forge his own special destiny in the world. This has meant that the ENR has tended to legitimize the views of Carl Schmitt’s “decisionism” and the “terror of history” against the parliamentary constraints of liberal democracy and the onslaught of the universalist, pacified and materialist state where conflict, change, cultural difference and history cease to exist. It has also meant that the ENR, in their rush for primordial Indo-European origins against Judeo-Christian “totalitarianism,” failed to fully acknowledge the implications of its

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pagan view of history and its share of repression: the terrible spectre of religious and political intolerance and violence in ancient Greece or the negative connotations of “paganism” associated with Nazi Germany. Yet, is there not a contradiction between the ENR’s view of the world as an “eternal” battleground between different competing worldviews and ideologies and the view of man as socially and politically malleable. If man is truly malleable, then conceivably he can be moulded to end the reign of “eternal” conflict in the world and the martial view of life so close to ENR hearts. However, the ENR’s view of human nature and political power, on closer examination, reveals that it comes close to endorsing a Hobbesian and Machiavellian view of man, which is flawed, evil and largely devoid of ethical considerations. This does not indicate a view of man, which is always malleable. The ENR’s use and praise of thinkers such as: de Maistre, Nietzsche, Pareto and Schmitt indicates that politics and history are a perpetual, blood-thirsty terror of events between competing ideologies and the most powerful forces in a given society. In Nietzschean terms, politics is simply the expression of the highest “will to power”; for Pareto, politics is a an “eternal graveyard of aristocracies” and a cyclical return of victims and victimizers alternating in their roles; for de Maistre, history is an endless executioner of bodies and spirits; and for Schmitt, politics is an inevitable struggle between “friend” and “foe.” There is nothing to indicate that the ENR does not subscribe to these gloomy visions of human nature, politics and history. They simply contend that these aforementioned views are a realistic appraisal of human nature, politics and history. The ENR’s valorization of anti-egalitarianism, “difference” and aristocratic elitism as near absolutes has meant that they view “eternal” conflict as the only mechanism in order to prevent the arrival of a homogenized global order and remain faithful to their ideals. In conclusion, I have attempted to relate the ENR intellectuals to other intellectual forces in the modern era. In the past century, intellectuals have had a prominent role in their relationship to political power as esteemed cultural figures, advisors to power, manipulators of public opinion, handmaidens to wealth and political power or servants of class, nation or race. The ENR intellectuals, oscillating in the new millennium between metapolitics and apoliteia in order to defeat the existing liberal democratic system, have also not been immune from the charge of “treason of the intellectuals.” Although waving the banners of detached intellectualism, scientism and a tolerance for multiple ideological influences, in reality the ENR thinkers have generally espoused a revolutionary right-wing Gramscian project, which contradicts these very claims of objectivity. Moreover, the ENR refuses any internationally imposed standards of behaviour, especially what it calls the “inorganic religion of human rights,” because this is seen as a pseudo-universalist form of ethnocentrism and an “ethnocidal” attack on the rights of all cultures to follow their own unique cultural paths. The ENR cannot claim complete objectivity when it already has pre-determined the type of society it wishes to emerge in the future: elitist, hierarchical, organic, spiritual and European. They are forever straddling an ambiguous path between the detached spirit of intellectual investigation and the desire to authoritatively elaborate and stamp their mythical, revolutionary vision on the world. In this chapter, I sought to convey the message that merely cultural or intellectual ideas do not live independently of social and political reality. Despite divergences

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between the two forces, ENR ideas and personnel have influenced the impressive discourse and theme changes of extreme-right and neo-fascist parties throughout Europe. In France, ENR ideas in the late 1970s and early 1980s also influenced certain elements of the mainstream, republican right. In both France and Italy, a significant number of revolutionary right-wing leaders and members have read official ENR journals and sources. In Italy, this has led to a tremendous number of ENR issues penetrating the worldviews of the supporters of neo-fascist parliamentary forces. In this regard, intellectuals like the ENR cannot claim innocence and a lack of responsibility for their ideals. When Julius Evola in the past or Alain de Benoist today attack nationalism or distance themselves from the “plebian” nature of fascism, it is not because they wish to see a better or less violent world, but instead to usher in the advent of a more elitist, detached and martial post-liberal order. In this abdication of intellectual and moral responsibility and the rush to represent particular political and material interests, the ENR intellectuals have joined the other intellectuals of this century in forgetting about the universal and essentially committing treason. Only a future post-liberal order will tell whether these ENR “thoughts of treason” translate into terrible “acts of treason.” In the meantime, as with the “non-conformists” and “cultural pessimists” of the inter-war era, the ENR simply prepares and shapes modern elites in a slow metapolitical orientation, patiently waiting for what it views as the eventual destruction of the liberal democratic order and the triumph of its antiliberal, anti-egalitarian, anti-capitalist and anti-American ideals.

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Conclusion In the mid-1980s ENR leader Alain de Benoist railed against the “soft totalitarianism” of liberal societies where the role of intellectuals is increasingly diminished in the face of the logic of the market. Alice Kaplan, who wrote The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach (2000) said the following: “There aren’t many intellectuals today — and certainly not many literary intellectuals — who have the political influence and power that Robert Brasillach had in France in a moment of national crisis” (Kaplan, “An Interview With Alice Kaplan”). Brasillach was a prolific writer and editor of the major fascist and anti-Semitic Je Suis Partout newspaper in Paris. Kaplan points out that when he was executed by firing squad for collaborationist treason with the Nazis, Brasillach was the only really respectable writer who went to his death during the post-war purge of collaborators. In the aftermath of the war 50,000 French men and women were tried for collaboration and 1,500 were executed. Why is the story of Brasillach more worthy of retelling than those of other collaborators? What makes him special? Among all the collaborators who were tried and punished in the liberation era, Brasillach is special because he was condemned to death for his words—fighting words. A writer, a bookish type like Brasillach, who gets himself in that much trouble is interesting. (Kaplan, “An Interview With Alice Kaplan”)

Kaplan is correct to highlight how numerous writers and intellectuals circulated a petition to be sent to de Gaulle, asking him to pardon Brasillach (Kaplan, “An Interview with Alice Kaplan”). Camus signed it as a protest against the death penalty, while Sartre and de Beauvoir did not give their signatures, presumably because they were on the left. The petition was signed by a number of conservatives in the Académie Française, from whom de Benoist won his prize for Vu de Droite in the late 1970s. In a spirit of exceptional generosity, François Mauriac, the Catholic novelist and resistance fighter, did all he could to gather signatures, despite the fact that Brasillach violently attacked him during the Nazi Occupation. The Brasillach execution stunned French intellectuals and writers of all political camps. Did de Benoist long to be the Brasillach of our times? Did he pine for an age when words meant more, when words could get you killed like in authoritarian or totalitarian regimes? He was at the centre of two polemical storms in France in the late 1970s and early 1990s and even had intellectuals from the left signing petitions rightfully defending his write to express even noxious, unpleasant and far rightwing ideas in a liberal society. Yet, while de Benoist’s words had changed and could still rattle established intellectuals and classes, they could no longer be expressed as openly as in Brasillach’s era when fascism seduced the European continent. This work has attempted to trace the cultural, philosophical, political and historical trajectories of the French nouvelle droite in particular and the European New Right (ENR) in general. As a cultural school of thought, the ENR intellectuals have sought to distance themselves from all the historical right’s previous stances,

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whether fascism, Nazism, Evolianism, Catholic integralism or the monarchical, counterrevolutionary tradition. In addition, the nouvelle droite views the neoliberalism of the Anglo-American New Right as its greatest enemy. In order to accomplish this difficult task of re-orienting the cultural and political framework of the right, the nouvelle droite began a long period of soul-searching in 1968, which was interestingly the same year as the New Left-inspired student and worker revolts in France in particular and throughout Europe in general. In short, it has been my general argument that the cultural and political syntheses of the ENR intellectuals is a unique combination of both New Left-like and postmodern influences, on the one hand, and residues of the older revolutionary rightwing or conservative revolutionary worldview, on the other hand. Moreover, while the nouvelle droite’s undeniable intellectual and political origins are on the right and cultural critics have generally labelled it as a right-wing current of thought, its current exoteric positions give it a more left-wing and ecological rather than right-wing aura. In a sense, then, the ENR ideological synthesis is a novel one because it would not have been possible without the spectacular events of May 1968 and the general impact of both the American and French New Left. As vehement opponents of liberal democracy and global capitalism, I have also pointed out that the ENR intellectuals were not averse to flirting with the revolutionary ideas of the radical left in general. Yet, at the same time, the major themes and obsessions of the ENR intellectuals, whether anti-egalitarianism, the notion of the right to difference, its marked elitism, the extreme focus on cultural preservation or the radical critique of the foundations of liberal democracy, all ring echoes of an earlier revolutionary right-wing legacy from the inter-war era of the 1920s and 1930s. Thus, it is this ambiguity between its dual affinities for the modern New Left and the older revolutionary right-wing milieu, which is at the heart and core of the ENR’s worldview. ENR intellectuals straddle the uneasy tight rope between what some critics view as a renewed form of sinister cultural fascism and others view as a radically new, post-modern and postfascist cultural and political paradigm. This book began with a historical and ideological account of the origins, birth and development of the nouvelle droite in France. The first two chapters sought to highlight the explicitly right-wing roots and origins of the nouvelle droite in particular and the ENR in general. I also attempted to demonstrate how the nouvelle droite insisted that it was only through a long-term Gramscian-like capture of the cultural terrain that the right would be able to escape its post-World War Two “ghetto” status of the past; regain cultural and political respectability and legitimacy; and eventually gain a durable hold on the levers of political power. Consequently, in contrast to the Old Right, the nouvelle droite and ENR intellectuals abandoned what they considered the sterile parliamentary and extra-parliamentary realms of political contestation in favour of a long-term strategy of capturing hearts and minds. The ENR’s leading ideologues, including its main theoretician Alain de Benoist, reasoned that if peoples’ worldviews were radically altered (especially within elite cultural, political and economic sectors of opinion), then the ENR’s anti-liberal, antiegalitarian revolution would be much closer to fruition. The third and fourth chapters highlighted how the new cultural project of the ENR would look to the left, New Left and the spirit of May 1968 as sources of

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inspiration in order to re-orient the cultural and political trajectories of the right in general. Indeed, May 1968 was a critical philosophical and political turning point for the ENR intellectuals, despite the fact that most of its thinkers originated within the revolutionary right and neo-fascist camps. While many ENR thinkers rejected what they considered the manipulative and hedonistic aura of the 1968 protests, as well as the elite co-optation of the former 1968ers into the liberal capitalist system they once sought to vehemently overthrow, they shared with the 1968 generation a thirst for a post-liberal revolutionary order; a primordial anti-materialist idealism; and the longing for a better, more spiritual world. Whereas ENR intellectuals now claimed that the old 1968ers had largely abandoned the fight against liberal capitalism and the search for a more authentic and humane world, it was they who now raised the banner of May 1968 and called themselves the true revolutionary carriers of the idealistic flames of 1968. It is no accident, then, that by the late 1980s and 1990s ENR journals such as Krisis, Eléments and Trassgresioni were replete with New Left-like themes: the heavy indictment of the logic of Western, capitalist or communist notions of progress; pro-Third World solidarity; the critique of the subtle New Class forms of political and bureaucratic modes of domination; the valorisation of federalism and small-scale political and economic communities; a pronounced ecological agenda; and the right of differing local cultural identities to resist the homogenising, assimilationist logic of capitalism and the nation-state. The ENR’s ultimate goal was to unite with the most revolutionary remnants of the 1968 generation in order to create a supposedly novel political synthesis for the new millennium. In chapter 5, I began to more thoroughly uncover the ENR’s political and philosophical influences and worldview. I sought to explain that both the focus on cultural metapolitics and the valorisation of the right to difference represent the two central tenets of the ENR’s worldview. On the one hand, the exclusive focus on the cultural terrain allowed the ENR to gain a measure of cultural and political respectability by distancing itself from the right’s most horrific political legacies, namely, fascism and Nazism. On the other hand, the ENR’s use of the rather ambiguous notion known as the “right to difference” was a way in which the right could distinguish itself from the egalitarian-based politics of the left and simultaneously gain a degree of sympathy from the revolutionary anti-capitalist sectors of the left and New Left. This left-wing agenda became especially important after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of communist states in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and the intellectual demise of socialist ideology. That is, with the rise of a global, neo-liberal capitalist ethic and the attack on the welfare state consensus in Western Europe in the 1980s and 1990s, the revolutionary anticapitalist forces of the far right and far left could conceivably unite against liberal democracy and the triumphant march of global capitalism. In a sense, then, the ENR intellectuals had already anticipated these new cultural and political alliances before the fateful events of 1989. In the post-communist, post-Cold War era, the ENR clearly anticipates that the political alliances of the future will not reflect the neat left-right divisions of the past; such alliances might be shifting and fluid rather than clearly defined and unambiguous; and could be both novel and bizarre in terms of the nature of the political alliances.

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In chapter 6, I further elaborated on the ENR’s worldview by examining its ambiguities and tensions. I pointed to a number of different ambiguities within the ENR worldview. In the first place, the ENR is a unique ideological mixture between two polar opposite worldviews, namely, the revolutionary right and New Left. This has created a sense of great confusion for academics, concerned intellectuals and political activists alike. Second, the ENR is an ambiguous cultural project since it denies the fascist and extreme right-wing labels, but continues to display an affinity for the anti-liberal themes of the right-wing conservative revolutionary milieu, which nourished both the Fascist and Nazi regimes of the past. The third major ambiguity within the ENR’s worldview is that it is a right-wing movement, which searches for new alliances more often on the left than the right and has been attacked with equal ardour by the left and right. On the left, the ENR is seen as a respectable form of fascism, while by some on the far right as crypto-communists. The ENR has been vehemently denounced by the pro-capitalist Anglo-American Right for its anti-capitalist and anti-Western stances and the Catholic right for its irreligious, pagan and anti-Judeo-Christian positions. Fourth, there is a deep tension between traditional forms of politics and the ENR’s elitist focus on cultural metapolitics. Fifth, the ENR’s commitment to a detached form of scientism and intellectualism clashes with its attachment to revolutionary myths, as well as a myth of cultural belonging. Finally, it could be argued that there is a contradiction between the ENR’s espousal of cultural tolerance, polytheism and pluralism, on the one hand, and its valorisation of particular forms of cultural identity, on the other hand. That is, if the ENR rejects the idea of one god and one truth, then it cannot in the same breath resurrect the idea of homogeneous cultural belonging as the new idol. In chapter 7, I examined competing interpretations of the ENR phenomenon. I attempted to thoroughly classify the academic literature surrounding the ENR intellectuals. The ENR has not been able to shake the fascist label, particularly in France. At minimum, accusations of fascism seem analytically inaccurate today when applied to the ENR thinkers because they have rejected all homogenising modern ideologies (including fascism) and work from a more conservative revolutionary rather than explicitly fascist tradition. In addition, the ENR now supports the bottomup concept of local democracy, which is an affront to the hierarchical, top-down elitism of fascism and Nazism. Moreover, the fascist label presents us with many problems because fascism was simultaneously an ideology, political movement and form of government, and there is little consensus among political scientists and historians as to what constitutes fascism. Using a few minimum definitions of fascism from Griffin and Sternhell to more exhaustive ones by Payne, we found that the ENR meets some yet not all of the prerequisites of fascism. With minimum definitions of fascism, the ENR more neatly fits into the fascist paradigm. Chapter 8 was generally devoted to the ENR’s relationship to contemporary cultural and political forces, especially in Europe as well as North America. The chapter asked the question of whether the nouvelle droite and the ENR in general constituted a sort of right-wing international. The first part of chapter 8 focused on the ENR’s cultural contacts in Europe, while the second part examined its idiosyncratic relationship with Telos, the North American critical theory journal. While it is true that the different ENR formations throughout Europe shared a commitment to long-

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term cultural metapolitics and an obsession with the right to difference of individuals and communities (as well as a hatred of egalitarianism, liberal democracy, global capitalism and the United States), it is difficult to argue that the differing national and regional branches constitute a co-ordinated right-wing international. Some ENR formations, it appeared, had more affinity for the left and New Left rather than the right as is perhaps the case with the Italian New Right. Moreover, there were even outright schisms between some national branches, including the split between Alexander Dugin’s Russian New Right and Alain de Benoist’s French nouvelle droite. Finally, given the vast differences and bitter antagonisms between the ENR intellectuals and their neo-liberal and paleo-conservative Anglo-American counterparts, a right-wing international is rather difficult to accomplish in practice. An interesting cultural development of the 1990s was an attempt by ENR intellectuals in France, Italy and even North America to appeal to former left-wing rather than right-wing radicals in the struggle against liberal capitalism. The ENR’s entrance onto the pages of the American critical theory journal Telos was one such attempt to unite the radical anti-capitalist poles of the ENR with disgruntled New Left intellectuals from the United States. While the editors of Telos claimed that the ENR had definitively left behind their old revolutionary right-wing or neo-fascist milieux of the past, other critics saw this development as a co-ordinated right-wing cultural and political strategy of deception, manipulation and legitimisation. In short, these critics contend that the right was simply adapting to the changing times and its dominant cultural and political environment by co-opting a number of New Left, ecological, democratic, anti-racist, anti-totalitarian and pro-Third World themes in order to escape the right’s “burden of history” and appeal to a new generation of Europeans born without the bitter memories of fascism and two world wars. Some critics pointed out that the fascist ideological synthesis was, like the ENR’s worldview, a strange cocktail of numerous right-wing and left-wing influences and tastes. The ENR’s advantage was that in the 1990s, unlike in 1979 when many critics heavily vilified it in the French press as a quasi-fascist cultural movement, an ideological vacuum had been opened with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the old socialist project. Yet, at the same time, the problem for the ENR was that fewer cultural and political critics were paying attention to the ENR in the 1990s than in the late 1970s. However, as economic and political conditions potentially deteriorate both in Europe and abroad as a result of cultural and economic globalisation, perhaps the ENR’s anti-capitalist message embedded within the framework of cultural preservation will become more appealing as a rallying cry for some contemporary political elites. In the second part of chapter 8, I looked at the interesting ways in which the ENR’s ideas had travelled to North America in the early 1990s and found a refuge within the left-wing journal Telos. Was this cultural development an isolated case or part of a broader cultural and political trend? Was this co-operation between former right-wing and left-wing radicals a harbinger for the new cultural and political alliances in the post-communist era? I also sought to draw both modern and historical lessons from this unique rapprochement between the former forces of the revolutionary right and revolutionary left. In an age of greater economic and cultural globalisation, as well as an ascendant, institutionalized neo-liberal capitalist agenda

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which increases the power of large corporations and weakens the democratic power of both national parliaments and local citizens (e.g., through the policies of the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and the regional trade agreements in Europe, the Americas and Asia), one can expect more of these apparently strange anti-capitalist, anti-liberal alliances between the extreme poles of the right and left. Will these potentially new post-communist, post-welfare state alliances lead to the creation of a new ideological synthesis, or rather the revival of an older, more pernicious political agenda reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s? In their extreme, revolutionary hatred of capitalism and liberal parliamentarism, many intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s oscillated between the far poles of right and left and were actually indifferent to whether the system fell from the right or left. This might also describe the revolutionary stance of ENR intellectuals vis-à-vis what they consider a decadent contemporary liberal democracy. It is no accident that the ENR seeks revolutionary allies on the far left, among militant anti-American Muslim fundamentalists or even radical ecologists. In chapter 9, I examined the ENR’s problematic relationship to the revolutionary right, extreme-right and neo-fascists. I sought to uncover the differences between ENR thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and the extreme right-wing French Front National. At the same time, I pointed out that there is an affinity between ENR thinkers and extreme right-wing political parties in terms of their common anti-egalitarian ethos and obsessive quest for the maintenance of particularistic cultural identities. Both the ENR and the extreme-right and neo-fascist milieux reject the egalitarian and universalist dimensions of the Enlightenment and liberal democracy. In addition, I also examined the ENR’s connections, both real and imagined, to extreme-right and neo-fascist circles. GRECE and ENR intellectuals and supporters desperately sought to escape the right’s “ghetto” status of the past, thus distancing themselves from the revolutionary right, extreme right-wing, neo-fascist and Holocaust denial sectors of the right. They were not always successful in this endeavour. In chapter 10, I attempted to show how the ENR intellectuals are not necessarily novel in terms of their strategic and metapolitical calculations. That is, intellectuals of all political stripes have sought to create legitimating strategies for established political forces, or new ideological syntheses as a reaction to mainstream politics. Yet, as a cultural movement with origins on the right, the ENR is unique in terms of questioning major tenets of the Old Right and co-opting a number of New Left themes. In general, then, this work has sought to convey the main idea that the ENR, a cultural school of thought born around the time of the New Left-inspired student and worker protests in 1968, represents a rather unique and ambiguous ideological synthesis between the ideals of the New Left and those of the revolutionary right. In addition, I have attempted to explain that while the ENR is a relatively marginalised cultural and political force, its ideological synthesis could have greater political influence in the future due to the ideological and political vacuum left after 1989. Moreover, the ENR actually embodies one of the most interesting and innovative cultural developments in the post-World War Two era because it claims to transcend the revolutionary right and neo-fascist milieux by offering us a new political paradigm for the new millennium. Yet, as I have already pointed out, a number of cultural and

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political critics are not so ready to accept the ENR’s impressive ideological overhaul at face value and continue to insist that its project is, at its central core, revolutionary right-wing in nature. On the one hand, in still retaining a number of residues of revolutionary right-wing themes, the ENR cannot be considered a completely new political paradigm. On the other hand, in attempting to open towards the left, New Left and post-modern themes, the ENR appears to transcend its roots in the revolutionary right-wing and neo-fascist milieux. The ENR’s cultural trajectory in the 1990s provides us with some clear examples of this ideological synthesis between revolutionary right-wing and New Left currents of thought. Alain de Benoist’s limited circulation journal Krisis is filled with leftwing, ecological, anti-utilitarian and post-modern authors rather than revolutionary right-wing authors: Ignacio Ramonet (the editor of the prestigious French political and cultural monthly Le Monde diplomatique), Jean-Marie Domenach (the former editor of the left-wing, Christian journal Esprit), the renowned French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, the former French communists Roger Garaudy and Régis Debray, the deep ecologist guru Arne Naess and the head of the French Green Party Antoine Waechter, the French anti-utilitarians Serge Latouche and Alain Caillé and other leftleaning authors, such as Jean-Pierre Vernant and Thierry Maulnier. So, for example, a number of Krisis issues in the 1990s, including September 1993 (ecology), June 1994 (community) and March 1999 (federalism), are devoted to left-wing and ecological themes and authors. The ecology issue even includes an interview with the French Green leader Antoine Waechter as well as an article by the deep ecology guru Arne Naess. The community issue contains an article by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as re-printed articles from several North American neo-communitarian thinkers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre, Amitai Etzioni, Michael Sandel and Amy Gutmann. Finally, the issue on federalism contains a text by the nineteenth century French leftist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the Italian left-wing writer Massimo Cacciari, several articles about the father of federalism Johannes Althusius (1557-1638) and a number of articles by Paul Piccone and Paul D’Amico from the left-leaning Telos. Nonetheless, despite the allegedly left-wing and ecological orientation of Krisis, the older revolutionary right-wing or conservative revolutionary themes still manage to creep into the contents of the journal. The ecology issue contains an article, “Le recours aux forêts,” by the leading figure of the conservative revolutionary milieu, Ernst Jünger (Jünger 1993, 165-8). Furthermore, the community issue has an important article by Carlo Gambescia about using the communitarian ideology in the service against liberal universalism as well as the Western paradigm of capitalist modernization (Gambescia 1994, 122-41). This subtle affinity for revolutionary right-wing themes can be found in a number of other Krisis issues, perhaps the most explicitly left-wing of all ENR publications. Issue number four consists of articles by former collaborator Raymond Abellio in respect of power, knowledge and invisible history as well as the nineteenth century Spanish counterrevolutionary Donoso Cortés. Issue number five contains an article by the German conservative revolutionary Arthur Moeller van den Bruck about Germany as the power bridge between Europe and the West. Issue number six is explicitly devoted to the question of myth, a staple of revolutionary right-wing thinking, with articles by the French

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revolutionary writer Georges Sorel, Alain de Benoist and Augusto Del Noce. Issue number eight contains articles by the Carl Schmitt scholar Julien Freund, Friedrich Nietzsche and even a reprinted piece about genetic determinism and morality by Edward O. Wilson. Finally, issues numbers ten to fourteen contain articles by Carl Schmitt, Carl von Clausewitz and the French fascist author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. Thus, even in Krisis, the most avowedly left-wing of the ENR journals, the old revolutionary right-wing authors and themes seem to mingle in a rather strange sort of ideological cocktail with left-wing, New Left, ecological and post-modern influences, themes and authors. Born in 1968 at around the same period as the New Left-influenced student and worker revolts in France, it became almost second nature for the French nouvelle droite to co-opt all the standard New Left themes and concerns. Besides, the ENR’s left-wing co-optation strategy had the advantage of giving the right a new aura of intelligence, prestige and credibility. In co-operating with a number of left-wing authors and journals in France, Italy and even North America, the ENR’s legitimacy was further enhanced. This cultural co-operation between former intellectual dissidents from the revolutionary right and left also allowed the ENR to claim that it was in the midst of creating a new political paradigm, which both challenged the hegemonic liberal democratic ideology and filled the ideological vacuum left by the erosion of the socialist ideology after 1989. If we turn to one of Alain de Benoist’s last pieces of the twentieth century, we get an indication of the ENR’s ambiguous ideological synthesis in the new millennium. Take, for example, de Benoist’s 1999 Telos article “What is Racism?” (De Benoist 1999b). Written in a rather neutral, detached and scientific tone, the aforementioned article investigates the historical, cultural, philosophical and political manifestations and meanings of racism. By attempting to argue that racism is difficult to define and understand because it is connected to a larger political agenda, which tries to pejoratively discredit its opponents with the racist tag, de Benoist argues that the term has become vague and discourages meaningful analysis. We also know from other ENR works that their intellectuals view racism and totalitarianism as rooted in the monotheistic Judeo-Christian tradition, as well as the imposition of Western models of economic and political development on the entire planet. Thus, perhaps de Benoist’s purpose is to define racism in a particular and circumscribed manner (i.e., above all, racism is viewed as a theory of racial hierarchy and inequality) in order to prevent the ENR itself from being labelled as racist in nature. In arguing that racism is essentially a theory of racial hierarchy and inequality, de Benoist and the ENR can argue that they are not racist because they firmly believe in the right to difference of all world cultures in a xenophile spirit. The French scholar Pierre-André Taguieff has repeatedly pointed out that the right to difference can be both xenophobic or xenophile in spirit; both differentialist and anti-differentialist in orientation; both racist and anti-racist in its ideological rhetoric. There is a further problem with de Benoist’s Telos article about racism. In the article, de Benoist appears to go out of his way to defend Julius Evola, the architect of the Italian Fascist Manifesto of “spiritual racism,” as well as Arthur de Gobineau, the French philosopher famous for his theory of racial conflict. In a sense, there is a definite line of ideological continuity between this Telos piece written in 1999 and

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de Benoist’s most famous text published in 1977, Vu de droite. In the earlier work, we must recall that de Benoist also went to great lengths to downplay and sanitise the real nature of the historical works of Evola and de Gobineau. In short, as late as 1999, de Benoist’s affinity for the revolutionary right-wing milieu and its themes had not completely faded. Irenaus Eibl-Eibesfeldt reveals the core of the ENR’s ideological project in the final quote of de Benoist’s Telos article: One often hears the argument that only a single world civilization, with a total mixture of all races, would resolve the tensions and conflicts between groups. That does not appear to me necessary or desirable. If one could teach man to be tolerant, i.e., to be ready to understand and accept other lifestyles both within civilizations and between various peoples, then ethnocentrism will find itself defused without it being necessary for groups to surrender their cultural uniqueness nor pride in their own civilization. Establishing peace among peoples need not be accompanied over the dead bodies of civilizations and races. (Eibl-Eibesfeldt in De Benoist 1999b, 48)

While this type of discourse might not support the harsh, racist, anti-immigrant politics of Le Pen in France, Haider in Austria or Schonhuber in Germany, it is also against the idea of so-called race mixing and the creation of truly multicultural, multiethnic societies where all cultures are equal and no one dominant culture exists. Moreover, Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s position ultimately supports a type of politics, which thoroughly discredits the liberal and leftist politics of cultural pluralism, multiculturalism and universalism. In fearing the arrival of a single world civilization dominated by capitalist or Marxist materialism, or even Euro-American cultural homogenisation, the ENR expresses its most basic desire, namely, the need to hold onto a rooted European cultural identity, which has been forever lost or might never have existed as they see it. Furthermore, it is interesting that the right, which once vigorously and almost unanimously defended the homogenising projects of both the nation-state and colonialism, has all of a sudden, become the big defender of all world cultures. Has the ENR become truly multiethnic in spirit, or rather does it wish to create a so-called “heterogeneous world of homogeneous communities” in order to defend the differing European cultures and communities from the alleged onslaught of foreigners? This sort of project can easily play into a political formula, which dreads multicultural societies by alleging that the French, Bretons or Europeans are in danger of cultural assimilation or extinction. Why does the ENR not fully defend the principle of multiculturalism in practice in a spirit, which guarantees both cultural integration as well as respects cultural understanding and difference? In short, the ENR’s cultural agenda cannot be simply taken at face value because it is often actions rather than words, which ultimately guide both politics and history. Naturally, ideas can have a significant impact on the movement of politics and history as we saw in the last century with the magnetic appeal of the ideas of Karl Marx on the worldwide socialist movement. Alain de Benoist is not Karl Marx, but his ideas might increasingly appeal to cultural, political and economic elites wishing to create a revolutionary, post-liberal social order. The ENR’s ideological overhaul and opening to the left as well as use of numerous post-modern themes have been startling and impressive for the right, which has generally been associated with tradition, the old

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moral order or the rigid defence of private property and the social and economic status quo. Yet, as I explained throughout this work, the older revolutionary rightwing themes and authors have never been fully abandoned by the ENR’s major theorists. Therefore, the ENR sits at a rather indeterminate precipice between an older, discredited revolutionary right-wing worldview and more contemporary, postmodern and New Left currents of thought. At minimum, the ENR has given the continental European right a greater aura of cultural and political credibility and legitimacy, which has now increased after the demise of the socialist ideology in 1989. However, in contrast to the neo-liberal, hyper-capitalist Anglo-American Right and in a manner reminiscent of the New Left, the ENR has rejected all the major ideologies of this century (i.e., liberal democracy, socialism, social democracy, fascism, etc.) as well as the triumphant march of global capitalism which, it argues, threatens to homogenise all world cultures, destroy the environment, increase gaps between rich and poor and obliterate all notions of communal solidarity. The ENR’s proximity to the New Left does not end with the rejection of global capitalism and liberal democracy. Like the New Left, the ENR valorises a type of political project which rejects the universal spread of Western modes of instrumental thinking, its technological mastery over the forces of nature, the capitalist model of modern development as the hallmark of progress and Western lifestyles and mentalities. In contrast, the ENR, like the New Left, supports the right to difference of all world cultures, regions, languages or unique institutions and ways of life. These different cultures, the ENR contends, can survive and flourish autonomously by rejecting homogenising tendencies of contemporary political ideologies, the nationstate, the supra-national European Union (EU) project or the interference of large transnational corporations. Moreover, in giving an excessive preference to particular identities and cultures as opposed to the liberal-left’s logic of universalism, the ENR is also similar to the New Left which supported regional movements, radical nationalist tendencies, the cultural right to difference of immigrants, feminist, gay and lesbian politics and revolutionary black separatist or pan-African politics. In short, both ENR and New Left projects can conceivably lead to insular, narrow and particularistic forms of politics. The New Right and New Left particularistic, anti-universal forms of thinking often resemble the inward-looking, hyper-nationalist dogmas of the past. Greater cultural, political and economic globalisation and Americanization might only enhance this turn towards the particular, and to local forms of fundamentalism. In a sense, the ENR has firmly recognized one important global trend of the contemporary age, namely, what the American political scientist Benjamin Barber has called “Jihad versus McWorld” (the clash between local, particular forms of fundamentalism and the universal spread of Western, materialist corporate culture) (Barber 1995), or what another political pundit has dubbed the coming world “clash of civilizations” (Huntington 1998). For the ENR, like the New Left, the universal spread of capitalist consumerism is in fact a particularistic, jihad-like form of politics, which masquerades, in universal guises. The New Left might lament the comparisons to the ENR and claim to be more universalist and tolerant than the ENR, but their common critique of Western universalism and the United States and celebration of the cult of difference might, as the ENR wishes, leave room for cultural and political co-

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operation in the future. Yet, the ENR is probably well aware that common hatreds do not lead to common societal blueprints for the future. Despite its radical facelift in the late 1980s and 1990s, the ENR remained a right-wing movement in the first five years of the century. In a 2001 conference paper on immigration in France, de Benoist lamented how immigration was less European since the 1960s; how it was not a choice but a product of capitalism and the tearing asunder of the immigrants’ cultural roots; how the republican model was assimilationist and destructive of the cause of the pluralism of all peoples; how the old integrative mechanisms for immigrants such as the schools and army are in crisis; and how the left’s view of immigrants’ culture and lifestyles as a threat to secular values and progress is an attack on cultural differences (De Benoist, “Immigration: le cas français”). While de Benoist bypasses the scapegoat logic of Le Pen, in his love of cultural differences and the desire to solve the immigration issue in the cause of world ethnopluralism does he not subtly mirror Le Pen’s hatred of the immigrant other? Did more radical right-wing forces not echo his obsessions with “rooted” culture and identity in the inter-war period? In the wake of a second foulard affair in 2004, de Benoist defended the right of Muslim girls to wear the headscarf in the French public school system. His main quarrel was with the liberal-left mainstream who he called the “ayatollahs” of the republican model, which was based on secular, Enlightenment values that were destructive of collective cultural identities (De Benoist, “Sur le foulard islamique”). For de Benoist, the key fight of the century was the right to difference of cultural communities and identities rather than individuals within a market-driven framework, as well as the right to self-determination and work in your country of origin (De Benoist, “Immigration: le cas français”). In December 2002, he approvingly quoted Giuliano Ferrara in Il Foglio who enthusiastically rejected the Rights of Man: “The rights of man are not universal if they include the right not to believe in the dogma of the universality of rights” (De Benoist, “Universalité et non-universalité des droits de l’homme”). In 2004 in a Présent interview, he again rejected the “abstract,” individualist nature of the Rights of Man, which he viewed as an exception rather than rule for human societies (De Benoist, “Interview in Présent”). De Benoist’s attack on the tenets of liberal democracy was combined in the new century with a recycling of decidedly conservative revolutionary or ultra-nationalist writers such as Armin Mohler, Ernst Jünger, Julius Evola, Carl Schmitt and Charles Maurras. In the Catholic journal La nef in 2003, de Benoist said that while he rejected a number of Maurrasian ultra-nationalistc principles, he saw something “heroic” in Maurras (De Benoist, “Maurras”). He praised Mohler for his obstinate fidelity to his country of origin, rebel spirit and to his faith in privileging the image above abstract man (De Benoist, “Mohler: un regard”). De Benoist was especially indebted to Mohler’s “image of a man on the Right with a conviction that was neither liberal nor Nazi” (De Benoist, “Mohler: un regard”). We know de Benoist is anti-liberal and today almost everyone must be an anti-Nazi after the gas chambers. Notice the absence of fascist in de Benoist’s words, but that is purposefully cultivated in order to remain faithful to a conservative revolutionary tradition that was so similar to fascism that the public cannot really know. If we recall, the vow was taken by GRECE back in 1969 to avoid “outdated language” and fascism was the major taboo

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word for the ENR. In the German magazine Junge Freiheit in 2005, de Benoist echoed the “third way” fascism theses of Sternhell or Mosse (1999) when he called on Schmitt to argue that the “adversary of yesterday is the ally of tomorrow” (De Benoist, “Une polémique sur Carl Schmitt”). In the magazine Zinnober he laments the way the thesis about France as “victims” of Nazism (a falsehood given Vichyism) has been turned into a caricature of French society as Nazi collaborators during World War Two (De Benoist, “Zinnober Entretien”). In order to take his distance from fascism, de Benoist cleverly states that he appreciated the independent spirit of the “second” intellectual phase of the life of Georges Valois, the founder of the French fascist party Le Faisceau in 1925 (De Benoist, “Zinnober Entretien”). In his abiding fidelity to conservative revolutionary authors, images, myths, allegories and cultural rootedness de Benoist was still more on the right than left. Anti-fascists with a political agenda would have a field day with him, while even respected academics like Taguieff are not convinced that he has vacated the revolutionary right-wing or neo-fascist milieux. In the end, what can we conclude from the ENR’s entrance onto the European and cultural scenes in 1968, the precise year of the student and worker revolts in France? In the first place, the ENR reached its apogee of mass media as well as political exposure and influence in France in the late 1970s after which it declined in importance as a result of the earthquake Socialist electoral victory of Mitterrand in 1981. Yet, the decline of the French and European left in general, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the socialist ideology in the 1990s might allow the ENR ideological synthesis to make a political comeback in the future. The ENR’s ideas might also receive greater cultural and political credibility in the future as a result of the somnambulistic tendencies of a younger generation, which does not remember the spectres of fascism, Nazism and pro-Nazi collaborationist regimes throughout Europe. The ENR’s unique ability to integrate May 1968-like New Left, ecological, pro-Third World, pro-democratic, anti-racist and anti-totalitarian themes and authors helps this cultural movement to outwardly distance itself from the haunting revolutionary right-wing ghosts of the past. This brings us to the ENR’s relationship to liberal democracy. In essence, the ENR’s entire cultural project is designed to de-legitimise liberal democracy and eventually create a revolutionary post-liberal social order. However, the mass media focus on the ENR in 1979 and 1993 in France served to conveniently aid the political forces of the French left by raising the sinister spectre of fascism. In the process, a number of more menacing anti-democratic trends were obfuscated throughout the French and European political landscape, whether it is the Stalinist nature of the Old French Left or the rise of anti-immigrant political movements and parties throughout Europe, such as the French Front National, the Austrian Freedom Party, the Belgian Vlaams Blok, Sweden’s New Democracy, Germany’s Republikaner Party or Italy’s Northern League. These insular, nationalistic or regionalist tendencies are even more prominent in Eastern Europe as a result of the ideological vacuum left by the demise of socialism as well as the lack of democratic and pluralistic political traditions in the region. More importantly, as the political scientist Martin Schain pointed out as early as 1987, we must recognize that European political parties and elites of all ideological stripes have participated in consciously or unconsciously accepting and

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legitimising this rising anti-liberal, anti-immigrant ethic in both their ideological rhetoric and government policies (Schain 1987). In this political atmosphere, did liberal and left-wing forces use the ENR as a sort of expanded fascist monster in order to hide the contradictions, shortcomings and excesses of these aforementioned political forces as well as the liberal democratic system in general? If the ENR wishes to avoid the cynical manipulation of its cultural ideas, it would have to clarify and break its relationship with the revolutionary right-wing milieu, thus avoiding any accusations of fascism, Nazism and the like. It would have to sever all affinities and connections with the fascist or neo-fascist milieux. The ENR would need to get an intellectual and practical divorce from the fascist and neofascist camps in order to allow us to claim that fascism is finally dead within the ENR’s worldview. Yet, in reality, the ENR has never fully severed its relationship to this revolutionary right-wing milieu and desires the revolutionary overthrow of what it considers a decadent, egalitarian and materialistic liberal capitalist system along ultra-regionalist or pan-European lines. In turn, the ENR has undertaken a patient, long-term, Gramscian-like cultural project as a precondition for the arrival of a highly elitist, hierarchical and anti-liberal revolutionary social and political order where the capitalist economy is firmly restrained by the powerful will of political, military and cultural elites. With historical hindsight, it is fairly clear that this type of social re-engineering might be a convenient political mechanism of new elites and can conceivably create more chaos and pain to common people than the current liberal democratic system. Intellectual and ideological overhauls in the cultural realm as with the ENR’s combination of New Left and revolutionary right-wing ideals, however impressive and sophisticated they might appear to be at first glance, are no guarantee for the way its ideas will be used by political actors in the future. At present, the ENR resembles the New Left in its analysis of liberal democracy and global capitalism; it cultivates ties with cultural and political forces on the right, left and beyond; and patiently waits for it ideas to spread through peoples’ hearts and minds as well as the heart of the body politic. This New Left orientation led one respectable scholar in 2006 to claim that Alain de Benoist “has moved away from fascism in more recent years” (Bastow in Blamires 2006, 88). I must also add that there is a general danger of any cultural or political project, which preaches the merits of anti-egalitarianism and elitism in combination with a return to a mythical, pre-Christian and pagan cultural identity. This type of political project can often be mistaken for a revived form of Nazi-like paganism. Moreover, this political project assumes that elites always shape and make history, while ordinary people are the mere spectators of history. Furthermore, it is a political project, which might have difficulty with cultural differences within societies more than between societies because it views multiculturalism as a form of cultural “ethnocide.” Finally, the complete lack of faith in ordinary people smacks of a deep resentment for the principles of egalitarianism and the rule of the masses. If the ENR is serious about its principles of organic democracy and the idea of local self-governance, then it is the people themselves rather than political, cultural and economic elites that must decide the future direction of their respective societies. For the ENR, like numerous other intellectual and cultural outfits across the political landscape, the idea of select elite rule is a comforting thought because it allows certain people in the world the

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right to feel a false sense of superiority vis-à-vis other unselected people. There is no reason to believe that, given other criteria for political rule, common people would have more political influence and intellectuals would occupy a less privileged position than the one charted by the ENR. In the end, it is difficult to fully reconcile the ENR’s highly elitist Gramscian project and Promethean view of life, on the one hand, and its calls for organic democracy, local self-governance, federalism and the like. The former project is highly elitist, while the latter is democratic in the original Athenian meaning of the term. Its calls for organic democracy is designed to split the people from “false,” liberal, New Class ideologies and politicians, and to make them conscious of themselves as particular, homogeneous peoples within a heterogeneous world. It should also become increasingly apparent that the ENR’s ideological synthesis began to have more saliency in the post-1989 period and the blurring of ideological boundaries as a result of the demise of socialism. At a time when the left increasingly moderates itself and makes its peace with capitalism by turning to compromise solutions in the “Third Way” mould of Tony Blair or Gerhardt Schroeder, the ENR has taken up radically anti-capitalist and even ecological positions which are more traditionally associated with the left. Indeed, the ENR has argued that right and left are rather fluid ideological anchors, which change over time, country and issue dimensions. As the right and left increasingly co-operate over issues such as immigration, the preservation of cultural identity and ecological questions, it becomes more difficult to classify the right and left. Were the rather bizarre alliances which formed against the pro-European integration and supranational Maastricht Treaty or the Iraq War in 2003 between the extreme nationalist forces of the far right and the vigorously anti-capitalist communist parties on the left in France and throughout Europe what the ENR intellectuals had in mind when they envisioned the new alliances of the post-communist era? Are there not people on the right and left that reject Muslim Turkey’s bid to join the EU? De Benoist and the ENR dream of uniting the far poles of right and left against the triumphant march of global capitalism and liberal democracy. Depending on the shifting political landscape and the quickest route to make the liberal democratic system fall, the ENR doyen could easily be on the left or right. In the future, then, what will actually separate right and left: economic issues, cultural questions, the environment, the war on terrorism, or the stance vis-à-vis the former Third World? Does the left still stand for equality and the right for inequality as a neat demarcation line? (Bobbio 1996). Given the destructive nature of Western notions of progress in which both right and left have participated in perpetuating, is the left really more progressive than the right? Moreover, we should also keep in mind that most ideological syntheses which have attempted to reconcile and unite the main features of right and left, whether with the fascists or the current vogue of the so-called “third way” common to European social democratic parties, have generally favoured the right, if the right is taken to mean the established forces of law and order, big business and private property. Can the same be said about the ENR ideological synthesis, which unites what it considers the best features of right and left?

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The Italian National Alliance has already participated in national coalition precisely because it allegedly disavowed its fascist heritage of the past, or was it perhaps because the entire political class had drifted towards an accommodation with the far right? In any case, this was the first time in the post-World War Two European era in which a revolutionary right-wing political outfit had been accepted into a coalition government. In short, the cultural and political climate had radically changed in the 1990s, thus making the right less of an ostracized, illegitimate political pariah as in the 1960s and 1970s. On the cultural terrain, the ENR has worked patiently and tirelessly for the days when the right was no longer an object of political scorn and a marginalised entity in general. Yet, given the ENR’s deep indebtedness to the New Left and 1968 revolutionary tradition, could its intellectuals more suitably be called organic, synthetic utopians rather than right-wing or new right thinkers? (Bar-On 1999). Therefore, I come to my last point about the importance of the cultural realm and ideas in general in changing the political, social and economic direction of history. Ideas, which were once marginalised, like the idea of a sun-centred universe, are today firmly mainstream ideas. The same can be said about political ideas, which like democracy were once ridiculed by ancient Greek philosophers as the basest form of political rule, but today there is no political ruler in the world, which does not, at minimum, give lip service to the idea of democracy and the rule of the people. Today, everyone is a democrat across the political landscape and the ENR intellectuals are no exception to this trend. In any case, it is highly plausible that once marginalised political ideas, including those of the ENR theorists, can gain increasing ascendancy, normalcy and mainstream status in the future. In a de-ideological and de-spiritualised age without grand visions, is it not possible for the emergence of new political elites, which will mirror ENR ideas? The ENR ideological synthesis has some appeal in continental Europe for cultural, historical and political reasons. While material conditions are highly important in shaping and determining one’s worldview and ideological universe, we know from the history of the last century that the ideas of the few can move scores of men and women towards the longing for agitation in support of a revolutionary new social order. Working on the metapolitical terrain for nearly forty years now, the ENR still patiently waits for the full impact of its ideas in the political realm. Does the ENR, unlike the footballer Paulo Di Canio who proudly favours the conspicuous fascist salute, long for the day when fascism is re-born with a new name in a “post-fascist” synthesis?

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Index Abellio, Raymond, 7, 175, 197; see also Vichy; collaboration abstract universality, critique of, 22; see also Furet, François Académie française, 40, 191 Action française, 15, 25-7, 35-6, 89, 121, 126, 135, 170 ostracized by Vatican, 25; see also Maurras, Charles Adler, Frank, 56, 152-3 Adorno, Theodor, 59, 83, 146, 149-50 A Europe of A Hundred Flags, 66 Agamben, Giorgio, 94 Algerian War, 30-1, 33-4, 153 Algérie française (French Algeria), 5, 28, 34, 58, 92, 98, 171 Alleanza Nazionale (AN - National Alliance - NA), 1, 130, 146, 165; see also Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) Almirante, Giorgio, 11, 122 Althusius, Johannes, 197 Althusser, Louis, 35, 59, 83 repressive vs. ideological state apparatus, 35 American federalism, model for ENR, 109 Americanization, 13, 53, 58, 64, 92, 109, 156, 161, 200 An Appeal to Vigilance, 11, 139; see also Le Monde anarchists, 58, 63, 82, 125, 148, 158, 185 anarcho-syndicalists, 12, 159; see also nonconformists Anglo-American New Right (AANR), 37, 109, 119, 138, 158, 192 anti-Americanism, of ENR, 6, 29, 32, 48, 53, 82-3, 100, 109, 138, 143, 158, 162 anti-Arab views, of FN, 98, 132, 174; see also Front National anti-capitalism, of ENR, 4, 49, 98, 150, 165, 185; of fascism, 115 anti-colonialism, of ENR, 12, 98, 132, 135

anti-economism, of GRECE, 47 anti-Dreyfusard camp, 25; see also Barrès, Maurice; Maurras, Charles anti-egalitarianism, of ENR, 5, 24, 48, 91, 95, 98, 159, 171, 175, 183, 188, 192, 203 anti-fascism, 15, 22, 172 ENR critique of; 64, 84, 172, 179 anti-Fascist fascists, 90; see also Evola, Julius; Jünger, Ernst anti-French racism, 172; see also Front National anti-liberalism, 12-13, 30, 46, 95, 98, 115 anti-Marxism, 16, 30, 99, 115 anti-materialism, of ENR, 46-7, 53, 66, 180 anti-racism as disguised racism, 32, 55, 82, 138 ENR claims of, 12, 138, 172 ENR critique of, 108, 169 anti-Semitism ENR disguised, 124-5, 135, 184 ENR distance from, 2, 8-9, 22, 41, 97, 108, 128 of Italian fascism, 122, 179 soccer, 1-2 anti-Sovietism, of ENR, 30 anti-totalitarianism, of ENR, 12, 172 anti-utilitarian school, ENR influences, 84, 101, 104, 150, 197 anti-war left, ENR smpathy for, 6, 46, 82, 110, 187 anti-Westernism, of ENR, 52-3, 83, 100, 135, 158 apoliteia, 124, 130-2, 134, 165, 185-6, 188; see also Evola, Julius; Griffin, Roger aristocratic, view of life, 12, 17, 122, 37, 95, 97, 105, 122, 134, 157, 159, 165, 169, 179, 185, 188 Aron, Raymond, 11, 41, 64, 95, 122, 177, 180, 182 Associazione Sportiva (AS) Roma, 1

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Auschwitz, 1, 21-2, 121 comparison with gulags, 21-2 Avanguardia Nazionale (AN – National Vanguard), 10, 130

Bulletin Charles Maurras, 26 burden of history, 30, 119-20, 195 see also metapolitics Bush, George Jr., 48, 82, 162

Baader-Meinhof Gang, 22, 48 Badinter, Robert, 123 Barber, Benjamin, 200; see also Jihad versus McWorld Bardèche, Maurice, 7, 29-30, 32-3, 45, 135, 170; see also neo-fascism; metapolitics Bar-On, Tamir, 37, 54, 58, 205 Barnes, James Strachey, 180; see also fascism Barrès, Maurice, 25, 49, 170, 180; blood, soil and dead, 25 Bastow, Steve, 203 De Benoist, away from fascism, 203 Battaile, Georges, 159; see also intellectuals and seduction with fascism Baudrillard, Jean, 3, 53, 139, 197 fascism within as anti-immigrant Europe, 3, 139 Belgian New Right, 49, 102, 138, 143; see also Steuckers, Robert Benda, Julien, 178, 180-3; see also treson of clerks Bérard, Pierre, 59, 64 Berlin, Isaiah, 24; see also de Maistre, Joseph Berlusconi, Silvio, 1, 8, 117 Bihr, Alain, 173 biological extermination, Nazism, 21; see also Nolte, Ernst biological racism, 122, 127, 156, 179 ENR as, 127, 156; see also Evola, Julius Blair, Tony, 204 Blamires, Cyprian, 2 Bobbio, Norberto, 204 Bonapartist, 26, 85; see also Rémond, René book banning, 174; see also Front National Bossi, Umberto, 8, 149 Boulanger, General George, 25 Brasillach, Robert, 7, 26, 30, 170, 180, 191 Je Suis Partout, 191 petition, execution, 191 British National Front (BNF), 10 British National Party (BNP), 8

Cahiers universitaires, 26, 31, 40; see also neo-fascism; ultra-nationalism Caillé, Alain, 12, 84, 197; see also antiutillitarian school Campo Hobbit, 145-6 festive time, 145 sacred time, 145; see also Italian New Right; Movimento Sociale Italiano; Tarchi, Marco Camus, Albert, 183, 191 Carrel, Alexis, 98, 171 Carter, Jimmy, 162 Catholic integralism, 120, 138, 167, 192; see also Action française; Maurras, Charles Céline, Louis-Ferdinand, 68 Centre nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), 33 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 24 Champetier, Charles, 4-5, 14, 53, 55, 59, 67, 152; see also Nouvelle Droite Jeneusse (NDJ); European New Right Chiarini, Roberto, 128-30; see also ENR as new paradigm; Italian New Right Chirac, Jacques, 8, 162 clash of civilizations, 200; see also Huntington, Samuel Clausewitz, Carl von, 83, 198 Club de l’Horloge (Clock Club), 37-8, 48, 138, 172 split with GRECE, 37-8 Club Jean Moulin, 33 Codreanu, Corneliu Zelea, 179; see also Romanian Iron Guard Cohn-Bendit, Daniel, 62 collaboration, 27, 126, 178, 191; see also Doriot, Jacques; Vichy; Pétain, Marshal Philippe Comment peut-on être païen?, 81; see also De Benoist, Alain; paganism; communism De Benoist vs. Nazism, 22, 116, 142, 155

Index ENR, anti-communism, 12, 30, 50, 57, 66, 98, 106, 118, 147, 185 ENR, philo communism, 46-9, 118 fall of Berlin Wall, Soviet Union, 49, 53, 103, 106, 142, 147, 150, 160, 180 fascism, rejection of, 115, 137 fascism-communism equivalence Furet on, 16 strategy, 116-17 Gregor as fascism, 116 Nolte vs. Nazism, 22 Zizek, 117 Comité de liaison des officiers et sousofficiers de réserve (CLOSOR), 39; see also GRECE Communism and Nazism, 142; see also De Benoist, Alain Communist Party (France), 11, 27, 48-9, 53, 76 communists, 4, 42, 49, 55, 63, 82, 130, 139, 158, 160, 185, 197 links to far right, 49, 55 national communists, 158 tactical affinities with fascism, 130 communitarian destiny, ENR, 112-13 communitarians, ENR influences, 13, 57, 83-4, 146 conflict, ENR view of, 187-9, 198 Conrad, Philippe, 64 conservative revolution, 9, 12, 17, 49, 54, 100, 105-6, 137; see also Mohler, Armin; De Benoist, Alain conservative revolutionaries, influences on ENR, fascism, 12, 29-30, 80, 89, 107, 123, 138, 166 conspiracy theories, 22, 25, 39, 122, 170, 180 Drumont, Edouard, 25, 170, 180 Hitler, Jews and Bolshevik Revolution, 22 P-2, 39 Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 122 Copernic, 39-40, 51 Corradini, Enrico, 116 cosmpolitan forces, 137 counter-revolution, ENR as, 23-32 counter-revolutionaries, 24, 29, 80, 138; see also De Maistre, Joseph; Maurras, Charles

219

Croce, Benedetto, 55, 152; see also Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals Croix-de-Feu, 25-6; see also de La Rocque, François culture annihilation, FN, 47 coded language, 121, 125-6, 172 cultural preservation, ENR, 30-1, 108, 170, 172, 174, 201 cultural war, ENR, 89-90 escaping fascist culture, ENR, 29, 130, 145 fears of homogenisation, world civilization, ENR, 92-3 immigration as cultural loss, 127, 201 New Left counter-culture, 62, 68, 73-4 re-examination right-wing, 76, 80 right-wing Gramscianism, 88 cultural ethnopluralism, 5; see also Lee, Martin; right to difference cultural hegemony, achieving Gramsci, 5 liberal-left, ENR, 10, 45, 80 cultural tolerance critique of, ENR, 70 support of, ENR, 194, 199 d’Annunzio, Gabriele, 133 Déat, Marcel, 26 De Beauvoir, Simone, 183, 191 De Benoist, Alain attacked, 22 colonization rejected, 34 Confronting Globalization, 155-6 declaration of war, FN, 166-7 Democracy Revisited, 155 Evola defense, 178-80 fascism-anti-fascism, superseding, 179 Gramscian defense of culture, 35 Hayek: A Critique, 156 immigration critique, France, 169, 201 influence on FN, 174 Maurras, 25, 201 Mohler, 201 Nazism, Stalinism, evil twins, 22, 155 realpolitik, 183 Red Army remark, 45 Rights of Man, rejection of, 201

220

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scarf affair, defense of Muslim school girls, 201 Schmitt defense, 179-180, 201-2 The Idea of Empire, 155 third way comments, 202 ultra-nationalist past, 23-4, 30-1 Valois, support of second phase, 202 Vichy apology, rejection of, 202 What is Racism?, 198; see also De Herte, Robert; ENR Debord, Guy, 53, 61, 74, 84 Debray, Régis, 52, 80, 183-4 decadence far right, fascist critique of liberalism as 24, 27, 31, 123-4, 130, 187 ENR critique of modernity, 62, 67, 107, 109, 130-1, 134-5, 186 Telos critique of modernity, 153 Défense de l’Occident, 24, 31 definitions, of fascism, 15, 18, 21-2, 115-18 ENR, 117-19 Gentile, 118 Gregor, 115-16 Griffin, 15 Linz, 115 minimalist, ENR as fascist, 15, 194 maximalist, ENR not fascist, 18 Nolte, 21-2 Paxton, 15 Payne, 18 Sternhell, 15, 22; see also fascism De Gaulle, Charles, 34, 41, 66, 74-5, 191 far right, rejection of, 75; see also Gaullism De Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur (Comte), 24, 83, 171, 198-99; see also scientific racism Degrelle, Léon, 170 De Herte, Robert, 5, 81, 94; see also De Benoist, Alain De Jouvenel, Bertrand, 27, 139 De la Rochelle, Drieu, 26, 65-6, 147 De Maistre, Joseph, 11, 23-4, 122, 127, 133, 170, 180, 188; see also counterrevolutionaries Démocratie: le problème, 52; see also De Benoist, Alain Derrida, Jacques, 55, 159 De Rivera, José Antonio Primo, 12, 118

De Sablet, Michel, 67 designer fascism, 121-8, 130, 132-3, 136 Di Canio, Paulo, 1-2, 205; fascist salute 1-2 differential racism, 32, 92, 120; see also Taguieff, P.-A. Diorama letterario, 4, 145, 147, 175, 186; see also Italian New Right direct democracy, ENR praise of, 155, 157 Disenso, 143 diversity, ENR view of, 6, 37, 71, 80-1, 913, 97, 108-9, 131-2, 155-6, 166, 171 Dix ans de combat culturel pur une renaissance, 87; see also Vial, Pierre Domenach, Jean-Marie, 135-6, 197 Donoso, Juan Cortés 24, 59, 133, 197; see also counter-revolutionaries Doriot, Jacques, 26-7; see also collaboration; fascism Dreyfus, Alfred, 182-3 Dreyfus affair, 182-3 Droit, Roger-Pol, 11, 55, 152 Drumont, Edouard, 25, 170, 180 La France juive, 25, 180; see also conspiracy theories Dugin, Alexander, 143-4, 158; see also Russian New Right Duranton-Crabol, Anne-Marie, 15, 25, 32, 41, 131, 133, 143, 174 Dutch New Right, 91 Eagleton, Terry, 99 Eatwell, Roger, 107, 120, 124-5 ENR as disguised racism, 124-5 Eckart, Dietrich, 24; see also Nazism education system, pro-nationalist, Walker, 88-9; see also Walker, Michael Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenaus, 199 Eléments, 4, 14, 31, 35-37, 49-52, 55, 59-60, 65, 67, 81-2, 90, 93-4, 97, 105, 109, 111, 121, 143, 147, 172, 174-5, 186, 193; see also De Benoist, Alain; ENR; French New Right; GRECE; nouvelle droite Elementy, 143-4; see also Dugin, Alexander; Russian New Right Eliade, Mircea, 7, 83 elitism, elite theory, 24

Index of ENR, 12, 32, 43, 100, 104-5, 137, 159, 165, 175, 179, 188, 192, 203 of fascism, conservative revolution, Vichy, 27-9, 123, 134, 194 Telos, 159 Enciclopedia Italiana, 118; see also Gentile, Giovanni entryism, 37, 101; see also metapolitics Esprit, 53, 136, 197 Essay on the Inequality of Human Races, Gobineau, 24 esoteric ENR worldview, 12, 17, 43, 104, 120, 131 fascism, conservative revolution, neofascism, traditionalism, 29, 122 established disorder, fascist, ENR worldviews, 27, 52 eugenics, ENR, 36 Euro-Centrism, of ENR, 100, 111-12 Europe Action, 24, 30-4, 36, 50, 60; see also metapolitics; ultra-nationalism European New Right (ENR), ambiguities, 99-113 birth, development, 33-43 critique of technology, 67, 69, 184 confusion and ambiguity, 135-6 corporate critique, 95, 97, 132, 200 critique of multiculturalism, multiracialism, 47, 76, 118, 134, 199, 203 designer fascism, 121-7 fascism or post-fascism, 136-8 FN affinity, 168-70 FN divergences, 166-9 globalization critique, 118, 137, 155 historical, ideological origins, 21-31 ideological synthesis, 132-5 influences, worldview, 79-97 interpretations of, 115-39 legacy of 1968, 57-77 metapolitical turn, 29-32 metapolitics, 79-85 new paradigm, 128-31 opening to left, 45-56 pan-Europeanism, 141-47 principal enemy, AANR, 37, 48, 62 relationship to extreme-right, neofascism, 165-75

221

relationship to FN, 166-71 rejection of Atlanticism, 167 rejection of bipolar bloc system, 167 right-wing roots, 21-31 tactical, style and discourse changes, 132, 137, 172 Telos rapprochement, 148-163 treason of clerks, 177-89; see also GRECE; nouvelle droite; Nuova Destra; De Benoist, Alain Esparza, José Javier, 143; see also Spanish New Right ethnocide, 76, 168, 203; see also ENR, critique of multiculturalism Etzioni, Amitai, 13, 197 European-Third World alliance, ENR, 13; see also anti-Americanism European Union (EU), ENR critique of, 6, 58, 200 Evola, Julius 10-12, 29, 90, 97, 105, 11, 121-2, 131, 146-7, 155, 179, 186-9, 198-9 apoliteia, 186-9 De Benoist defense of, 177-80, 198-9 La Torre, 179 Lo stato, 186; see also conservative revolutionaries; MSI; Ordine Nuovo; ultra-nationalism spiritual racism manifesto, 179 exoteric, 4, 54, 120, 153, 192 ENR as mask, 54, 120 ENR left affinity, 4, 153, 192 extra-parliamentary right, 26, 62, 100, 1201, 128, 172, 192 ENR rejection of, 120-1, 128, 192 extreme-right, 7-8, 26, 100, 119, 125-6, 12931, 145, 165-75 ENR connections to, 100, 165-75, 1256, 131 ENR divergences from, 7-8, 119, 12930, 166-8 Eysenck, Hans, 7, 98 Falange Española Party, 118 fascism, interpretations, as mimicry of Bolshevism, 21 carnival of unreason, 99 famous fascist methods, 29, 32-3, 45 freedom and joy, 32

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Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

ideal type, Griffin, 84, 124, 130-1 negative, 115 Nolte, 15 or post-fascism, ENR, 136-8 positive, 115 revised Marxism plus ultra-nationalism, 22 revision of, ENR, 31, 33, 45, 125-6, 137 fascist leagues (France), 25 Fascist Party (Italy), 2, 15, 21, 67, 122, 179 fascist synthesis, 9, 25, 49, 67, 79, 160 Faye, Guillaume, 47, 51, 93, 174 federalism, ENR influences, 12, 52, 58, 83, 100, 109-12, 129, 134, 146, 149-51, 161 father of, Gobineau, 24 Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN), 31 feminism, anti-feminism, ENR, 82, 148-9 ENR influences, 12, 45 New Left, 73, 76-7 Ferrara, Giuliano, 201 Ferraresi, Franco, 29, 179; Evola as racist, 179 Fifth Republic (France), 8, 34, 75, 167 support, rejection of, ENR, 75, 167 Fini, Gianfranco, 1-3, 8; see also Alleanza Nazionale Fiore, Robero, 173 Forza Italia, 2, 8 Foucault, Michel, 150, 159 France, ENR Catholic majority, loss of, 92 French French, FN, 92, 171 identity, loss of, 168-70 immigration, restrictive, 3-4, 7, 14, 38, 47, 58, 125, 127, 169-70, 174, 201 rejection of anti-immigrant position, 50, 58, 167-68 Franco, Francisco, 30, 170 Frankfurt School, ENR influences, 69, 124, 129, 149 freedom of expression, 7, 16, 21; attack on Nolte, 21 Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs - FPÖ), 7-8, 166, 202 free-market capitalism, 158; see also AngloAmerican New Right (AANR)

Free University (Berlin), 21, 73 Freikorps (Free Corps), 62 French Algeria, see Algérie française French New Right, 5, 7, 14, 23 birth, 33-43 break with Old Right, 84-6 New Left influences, 57-77 opening to left, 45-55 right-wing origins, 21-31; see also European New Right; De Benoist, Alain Freund, Julien, 7, 49, 147, 156, 198 Front National (FN), 2, 7-8, 11, 38, 56, 167, 175, 180 affinity with ENR, 169-71 borrowing from GRECE, 92, 101 destruction of French culture, immigration, 46-7 divergences from ENR, 165-6 ENR members join, 50 impact on ENR, 168 national preference, 171 300 mesures pour la renaissance de la France, 171; see also Le Pen, JeanMarie Fuller, Steve, 177 Furet, François, 15-16, 21-2 gentle intentions, communism, 16 Nazi particularism, 15 rhetorical anti-fascism, 15 Galli Della Loggia, Ernesto, 34, 128 gas chambers, 22, 51, 134, 201 questioning of, 22, 51 Gasset, Ortega y, 94-5 Gaucher, Roland, 167, 173 Gaullism, 28, 74-5, 167 far right critiques of, 28, 167; see also De Gaulle, Charles Gentile, Giovanni, 12, 26, 55, 107, 118, 122, 147, 179, 182 fascism defined, 118; see also Fascist Party (Italy) German New Right, 49, 61, 88, 138, 125, 142-3 ghetto status, escape from, far right, ENR, 30, 59, 192, 196 Giddens, Anthony, 38 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 38

Index global civilization, fear of, ENR, 92 globalization, unemployment, rise of anti-immigrant agenda, 166, 170 Goering, Hermann, 90 Goldsmith, Edward, 102-3 Gottfried, Paul, 24, 53, 109, 152, 162 Gramsci, Antonio, 5, 35, 59, 80, 82-3, 87-8, 135, 150, 161, right-wing Gramscianism, ENR, 5, 35, 82-3, 87-8 Grant, George, 183-4 Greens, 3, 62, 82, 185 ENR potential allies, 3, 101, 105, 180, 184 Gregor, A.J., 67, 115-16 Gretton, John 71, 74-5 Griffin, Roger, Foreword, 3, 15, 111, 141 ENR fascist, 15, 54, 115, 119-21, 123-4, 130, 136-8, 147-8, 174-5, 180, 185, 194 Griffin-Taguieff debate, fascism-postfascism, ENR, 136-8 Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE), 6, 7, 14, 142, 160 anti-Christian, anti-West paganism, 46-7 as fascist, racist, 123 break with FN, 168-9, 172 critics of, 36 cultural war begins, 35-6 defections, 50 dropping fascist vocabulary, 36, 97-8, 201 far right roots, connections, 26, 28, 304, 173-5 hot summer, 40-3 human rights critique, 47 immigration critique, 47 impact on right, 36, 38 philo-communism, 47-9 right-Gramscianism, 87-90 similarities with ENR, 169, 174 split with Clock Club, 36; see also ENR, De Benoist, Alain; Vial, Pierre Guevara, Ernesto Che, 69, 79, 180, 185 ENR praise of, 33-4, 80, 135 gulags, 16, 21, 45, 68, 178, 182

223

comparison with Holocaust, concentration camps, 21 Gulf War, ENR critique of, 6, 70, 96, 109, 174 Habermas, Jürgen, 21, 151 Haider, Jörg, 7, 165, 199; see also Freedom Party of Austria Hamsun, Knut, 182 Hedges, Chris, 16 hegemony, cultural, ENR views of gaining, 5, 10, 35, 41, 45, 57, 59, 80, 97, 104, 162 Heidegger, Martin, 49, 83, 90, 159, 178, 182 Hellman, Stephen, 12, 100 Herder, Johann Gottfried, influence on De Benoist, 83, 86, 91, 132 hierarchical society, ENR, 92 tripartite Indo-European societies, ENR model, 81, 134 Hirsh, Arthur, 71-2, 75 historical responsibility, intellectual failure, 178-80; see also intellectuals, treason of clerks Hitchens, Christopher, 46 Hitler, Adolph, 22, 24, 29, 98, 115-16, 117, 141, 177 debt to Bolsheviks, 115 intellectual support, 177 Hobbesian worldview, ENR, 184, 188 Holocaust, 2, 15, 29, 99, 165, 182, 196 Auschwitz, 21 compared to gulags, Stalinism, 21 ENR links, denial, 126, 144, 173, 175 denial conference (Iran), 2 negationism, 2, 51, 126, 144 Le Pen, point of detail, 171 uniqueness, 21 Holub, Renate, 149-50 Holy See, relationship to Fascist Italy, 16; see also Vatican homogeneous communities, heterogeneous world of, 54, 125, 199; see also German New Right homogenisation, ENR fears of, 58, 69, 91, 93, 108, 168, 170, 172, 176, 199 Horkheimer, Max, ENR influences, 59, 69, 83, 146, 149 hot summer, ENR, 1979, 40-3, 1993, 54-6

224

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

human nature, political power, 187-89 human rights, ENR critique of, 6, 47, 81, 137, 183, 188 Huntington, Samuel, 200 Hussein, Saddam, 6, 117, 170, 174 meeting with Le Pen, 174 Huxley, Aldous, 94-5; see also totalitarianism idealism, political, 26-7, 61, 65, 97 New Left, New Right, 34, 159, 163, 193 or interests, 184-5 identity, loss of French, European, see ENR; De Benoist; FN; GRECE Ignazi, Pierro, 128-30 immigration, loss of identity, see De Benoist; FN; GRECE; Le Pen Indo-European roots, return to, ENR, 39, 90, 108, 125, 134, 142, 166, 185 intellectual freedom, 100, 112-15, 153, 183 intellectuals seduction with fascism, 177 silence in West, 182 treason of clerks, 177-89 victimisation of ENR, New Inquisition claim, 10, 39, 65 intercultural dialogue, 146 see also De Benoist, Italian New Right, Tarchi Iraq War, critique of, ENR, 187, 204 Irvine, William, 26 Islamic fundamentalists, 6, 187 Italian New Right (INR), Nuova Destra (ND), 59, 85, 105, 138, 142, 148-9, 157, 186, 195 as left-wing movement, 128; see also Tarchi, Marco as new paradigm, post-fascism, 128, 144-8 Italian Social Movement, see Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) Jacobin model, critique of, ENR, 74, 76, 109, 129, 146 Jihad vs. McWorld, 200, De Benoist, rejection of, 99, 110; see also Barber, Benjamin Joffrin, Laurent, 71, 73

Johnson, Douglas, 40-2, 53, 135 Johnson, Paul, The Intellectuals, 177 Jouven, Jean, 59, 64-5 Jeune Europe, 31 Jeune nation, 31, 50, 60 Johst, Hans, 90 Judeo-Christian tradition, rejection of, ENR, 103-4, 81, 97-8, 123, 125, 134, 187, 198 Jung, Carl Gustav, 83, 182 Junge Freiheit, 61, 202 Jünger, Ernst, 7, 9, 29-30, 49, 84-5, 90, 94, 107, 121, 135, 166, 178, 186, 197, 201; see also conservative revolutionaries; intellectuals, treason; Nazism Kaplan, Alice, The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach, 191; see also Brasillach, Robert Kent State, killings of, 68; see also Tarchi, Marco Koestler, Arthur, ENR influence, 7, 12, 83 Krebs, Pierre, 5, 80, 88, 93, 144; see also German New Right; Gramsci; rightwing Gramscianism Krisis, 4, 10, 12-13, 52-3, 55, 60, 76, 123, 130, 137, 146, 150, 167, 186, 193, 197-8; see also De Benoist, Alain; ENR, opening to left; fascism, postfascism; Taguieff, P.-A. laboratories of thought, capturing of, 77; see also Gramsci, right-wing Gramscianism La cause des peuples, 81, 166 Laroche, Fabrice, 30; see also De Benoist, Alain Latouche, Serge, 84, 101, 105, 111, 146, 197; see also anti-utilitarian school Le Bon, Gustave, 83, 171 Le choc du mois, 49, 167-8 L’éclipse du sacré, De Benoist, Molnar, 81 Le courage est leur patrie, 28, 81, De Benoist, Alain, 28, 81 Le Faisceau, 27, 202; see also Valois, Georges Left ENR as fascist, 41-2

Index opening to left, ENR, 45-56; see also Communists, French Communist Party; Trotskyites left-wing Schmittians, 96, 180 Lega Nord (Northern League), 8, 149, 157, 202; see also Bossi, Umbero Legion des Volonataires Français (LVF), 27 see also collaboration; Doriot, Jacques Lee, Martin, 5, 32, 88, 126; ENR disguised fascism, 126 Le Figaro, 7, 9, 40, 42, 59 left-right divisions, end of, ENR, 56, 147, 193 legitimisation strategies, ENR, 123, 125, 195 Le Gallou, Jean-Yves, 172-3; see also FN, national preference Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (The New Right’s May 1968), GRECE, 57-9 Le Monde, 9, 11, 40-2, 54-5, 65, 96, 139, 152; Appeal to Vigilance, 44-5 L’empire intérieur, De Benoist, Alain, 81, 137 Lenin, Vladimir, 9, 35, 83, 129, 178 De Benoist, philo-Leninism, 35, 135 Leninism, intellectual vanguard, 87 Le Pen, Jean-Marie, 2 anti-immigrant stances, 170-1 concentric circles, 174 controversial statements, Vichy, Holocaust, 170-1 La France aux français, 170 Les Français d’abord, 170 levelling, 93; see also homogenisation, ENR fears of Levi, Primo, 21 Lager versus gulags, 21 Nazism evil particularlism, 21 Le Vigan, Pierre, 59, 65 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 83, 91, 111, 197 Levitas, Ruth, 132-3 liberal democracy, ENR critique of, 3, 25, 28, 40-1, 45, 53-4, 57, 59, 76, 80, 84, 117, 124, 130, 137, 142, 145-6, 148, 150-1, 153-4, 156-62, 175, 177-8, 180, 186-7, 192-3, 195-6, 200-4 Lisjt Fortuyn, 8 Livorno, pro-communist soccer fans, 1

225

Lorenz, Konrad, 7, 98 Loubet del Bayle, J.-L., 76; see also nonconformists MacIntyre, Alasdair, 13, 84, 197 Maiastra, 143 manifesto, ENR, The French New Right in the Year 2000, 7, 97 Manifesto of Anti-Fascist Intellectuals, 55 Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals, 2, 55 Manifesto of Futurism, 67 Mankind Quarterly, 143 Maoism, 160 affinities with fascism, Gregor, 66-7 crimes of, 160 ENR critique, Maoists, 60, 64 March on Rome, 2, 14, 62, 142 Mussolini praise of myth, nation, Sorel, 62; see also fascism; Fascist Party of Italy Marchais, Georges, 66; see also Communist Party (France) Marcuse, Herbert, 11, 59, 83, 122, 149, 150 One-Dimensional Man, 62 ENR influences, 59, 83, 149 Evola, MSI’s Marcuse, only better, 11, 122 Marinetti, F.T., 67 market model, ENR critique of, 93; see also anti-capitalism; ENR; De Benoist, Alain Marlaud, Jacques, GRECE break with FN, 168-9 Marmin, Michel, 51, 59; left GRECE, Red Army remark, 59 Marrus, Michael, 21, 27 Marxism, 10, 15, 31, 53 critique of, 74, 150, 157, 159-61 cultural power, ENR, 63-4, 80 ENR, anti-Marxism, 30, 48, 67, 70 failure of, 41-2, 106 fascism, anti-Marxism, 22, 115 fascism as Marxist revision, 15, 25-6 fascism, similarities, 115-16 Gramscianism, 35; see also Old Left Maschke, Gunter, 59, 65, 97 masses traditional politics of, ENR, 86-93 revolt of, 95

226

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

revolt of ENR, 203 Maspero, 39 Maulnier, Thierry, 7, 27, 84, 197 Mauriac, François, 183, 191 Maurras, Charles, 15, 25-6, 48, 121, 133, 135, 138, 170, 180 as fascist, 15 influence on De Benoist, 26, 35, 201; see also Action française MAUSS, 105; see also anti-utilitarian school Mauss, Marcel, 83-4 May 1968, 3, 8, 17, 34, 48, 104-5, 148-9, 192-3, 202 context of, 71-7 ENR, legacy of, 57-77 ENR, lessons from, 73-4 Telos influences, ENR, 157-9 The New Right’s May 1968, 58; see also New Left; anarchists; communists McCulloch, Tom., 172-3; see also ENR; entryism; GRECE; FN McDonaldization, GRECE, 65; see also homogenisation; globalization, critique of, ENR Mein Kampf, Hitler, Adolph, 14, 141 metapolitics, ENR, 18, 30, 50, 63, 123-5, 1305, 145, 148, 153, 169, 188, 194-5 apoliteia, political power, 185-7 Gramscianism, ENR, 35-6, 88-9 of the philolospher kings, 86-9 primacy of, ENR, 79-91 vs. traditional politics, 100-3; see also De Benoist; ENR; Gramsci; GRECE; Walker Michels, Robert, 116, 182 Miglio, Gianfranco, 149 Minute, 168 Mitterand, Francois, 187 earthquake Socialist victory, 23 Vichy flirtation, 27 Mohler, Armin, 7, 9, 49, 143, 147 De Benoist, praise of, 201 healthy Trotskyites, 29 spherical time, 185; see also conservative revolutionaries monarchical, tradition, 4, 26, 28, 158, 192; see also Action française; Maurras

mondialiste (one-world), FN, 170; see also ENR, globalization critique; homogenisation Montherlant, Henri, 26, 133 Mounier, Emmanuel, 27 Mourreau, Jean-Jacques, 66, 173 Movimento Italiano Sociale (MSI), Italian Social Movement, 1, 5, 10-11, 2930, 122, 130, 165 impact on INR, 145-6; see also Alleanza Nazionale; Almirante; fascism; neofascism; post-fascism Mussolini, Benito, 1-2, 12, 26 Berlusconi comments, on, 117 fascism defined, 118 fascist synthesis, 79 intellectual support, 177 myth, nation, praise of, 62 pro-war leftism, 45, 79 relationship to Church, 16 relationship to communism, Stalinism, 115-16 multiculturalism rejection of, ENR, 76, 134, 199, 203 support of, De Benoist, 132 support of, Tarchi, 146 myths, 17, 62, 69, 100, 104, 119, 129-30, 155, 162, 171, 175, 180, 186, 194, 202 ENR, 100, 119, 171 180, 194, 202 fascism, 62, 119, 130 186 progress, ENR, 129 rejection of past, 69; see also fascism; ENR Naess, Arne, 197 National Alliance (NA); see Alleanza Nazionale (AN) national Bolshevism, 11, 49 ENR accused of, 11 Ernst Niekisch, 49 Red-Brown scandal, 49 National Hebdo, 167 nationalism ENR critique of, 16, 56, 74, 125, 129, 146, 150, 165, 169, 189 ENR rejuvenates, 133, 138 fascism, 18, 22, 25-6, 26, 62, 99

Index FN, 169-71; see also fascism; ultranationalism national populism, 138, 168; see also FN; Le Pen National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), 82, 88; see also Nazism neo-Machiavellians, 83 Neue Anthropologie, 175 New Class, ENR critique of, 10, 42, 58, 60, 104, 106, 150-1, 153, 156, 162, 193, 204; see also intellectuals; Telos New Inquisition, see intellectuals, victimisation, ENR New Left, 3, 5, 8-14, 17, 23, 33-4, 42-3, 45, 47 80, 82-3, 98 ENR influences, 57-77, 128, 132, 144, 148-9, 155-6, 192-3, 195-6, 200, 202-3 Telos, 148-50, 151-63 vs. conservative revolution, synthesis ENR,105-7; see also Telos; May 1968 new populism, 150, 159, 162; see also Telos New Right; see De Benoist, Alain; ENR; French New Right; GRECE New Right-New Left reconciliation, 69, 80, 148-9, 152, 159, 163; see also Telos New York intellectuals, 46 Napoleon, 90 National Front (NF), see Front National national socialism (socialism national), de Man, Henri, 15; see also Sternhell; definitions, fascism Nazism, 2, 5, 9-10, 15-6, 29, 31 accusations of, ENR, 41, 203 attack on, Champetier, 70 attack on, ENR, 97, 192 communism, evil twins, De Benoist, 22, 155 conservative revolution, influences, 901, 178-80 echoes of, ENR, 41, 53, 100 evil particularlism, 21 intellectuals, seduced by, 182 Levi on, 21 Nolte on, 25 victims, France, De Benoist, 202 Zizek, 117; see also collaboration; fascism; ultra-nationalism

227

Nazi race laws, Italy, 2 neo-conservatism, 80, 150 neo-fascism, 1-2, 120 AN, 1 ENR accused, 165 superseded, ENR, 34, 137, 152 relationship, ENR, 10, 165-75; see also fascism; Griffin neo-liberalism, 37, 162, 176; see also ANNR Neue Rechte (New Right), Germany, 88, 93, 143-4 Niekisch, Ernst, 49; see also national Bolshevism Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 83, 159, 188, 198, Nietzschean nominalism, ENR, 30, 81, 121, 175, 187 nightmares, the ENR, 91-6; see also ENR, globalization critique Nolte, Ernst, 3 Auschwitz taboo, 22 definition of fascism, 15, 21-2, 25 Furet correspondence, 21-2 historians’ dispute, 21 interpretation of Bolshevism, 21-2 non-conformists, 12, 23, 26, 45-6, 49, 76, 159, 189 influence on, De Benoist, 83-4; see also Loubet del Bayle; Ordre Nouveau; Marc Nouvelle Ecole, 4, 7, 37, 49, 51-2, 57, 62, 121, 173, 175 avoid fascist language, 36 Holocaust denial controversy, 51 impact on, De Benoist, 57, 62; see also De Benoist; GRECE Nouvelle écologie, Ozon, Laurent, 82 Nuova Destra (ND), Italy, see Italian New Right; Tarchi objective convergences, Duranton-Crabol, 174; see also ENR, FN, affinity, 168-70 Old Left ENR disdain for, 12, 53, 80 ENR support for, 64-5 loss, credibility, 105-6 McCarthyism claims, ENR, 55-6, 152-3; see also communists

228

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

Old Right, 39, 46, 48, 80, 192 beyond, 153 declared break, ENR, 9, 12, 50 ENR, possible break with, 84-6, 108, 120, 125, 128-9, 132-4, 165, 196 links to, 122, 169-76 O’Meara, Michael, 3 Ordine Nuova (ON - New Order - NO), Italy, 5, 10, 29 Ordre Nouveau (France), Marc, Alexandre, 12; see also non-conformists organic society, solidarity, 93; see also hierarchical society organic democracy, ENR support for, 104-5, 129, 134, 137, 156, 161, 203-4 Organisation de l’Armée secrète (OAS – Secret Army Organization), 28, 31, 34, 60, 126, 171 De Benoist, circles of, 29, 31; see also ultra-nationalism Orientations, 143; see also Belgian New Right Orleanist, 26, 85; see also Rémond Ovazza, Ettore, 2, Jews, Fascist Party, Italy, 2 paganism as cultural racism, 108 ENR, 12, 14, 61, 83, 203 Nazism, 12, 103, 108, 188, 203 vs. Judeo-Christian tradition, 103-4 pan-Europeanism, ENR, 54, 74, 142-4, 162 military force, 6 regionalist, 74, 117, 203 revolutionary right, 10, 28, 31, 135 Pannuzio, Sergio, 116 Pareto, Vilfredo, 83, 133, 171, 187-8 Parks, Tim, 1 Patrie, Famille, Travail (Fatherland, Family, Work), 27; see also Vichy patriotism, 7, 160 Pauwels, Louis, 7, 9, 40, 51, 84-5; see also French New Right Pauwels, Luc, 102, 143; see also Belgian New Right; TeKos Pax Americana, 13; see also antiAmericanism, ENR Paxton, R. O., fascism defined, 27 Payne, Stanley, 3, 15, 18-19, 117, 194,

checklist definition, fascism, 18-19 Personne, Jean-Charles, 66 Peron, Juan, 170 Peronism as fascist, 15 PFN – Parti des forces nouvelles, 50, 122, 171, 173 philo-communism, ENR, 47-9 Piccone, Paul, 54, 56, 148-9, 151-4, ENR, new paradigm, 128; see also Telos pieds noirs, 28, 33, 170 Pilger, John, 165 geopolitical fascism, 165 political correctness, ENR-Telos claims of, 12, 56, 58, 68, 154 political parties ENR, rejection of, 86, 100-1, 118 neo-fascist, extreme right-wing, 7-8, 172-3 Pons, Grégory, 60, 66-7 Popper, Karl, 178 post-fascism, 2, 136-8; see also AN; ENR; Griffin-Taguieff debate Poujadism, 27, 89 Présent, 167 Preto, Rolão, 61 progress, ENR critique of, 65, 71-2, 76, 104, 108, 123, 125, 129, 178, 184, 193, 200-1 propaganda, 88 pro-Third World, ENR, 12, 32, 65, 111-2, 174, 202; see also De Benoist; ENR Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 122 proto-fascism, 84 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 48, 83-4, 197 pseudo-universalism, ENR view of, universalism, 91, 183 Punto y coma, 143 Quest-ce que le fascisme? (What is Fascism?), 30; see also Bardèche, Maurice race conflict, 24 racism De Benoist defines, 198 ENR as, 32, 36, 41, 123-6, 128 ENR distance from, 119-20, 129 ENR views on, 70, 81, 92 FN, 169-72

Index s cientific, 24, 32, 98 soccer, 1-2 spiritual, Evola, 122; see also ENR; ultra-nationalism; fascism realpolitik, De Benoist, 183 Radulescu, Bogdan, 143 Ramonet, Ignacio, 197 reconciliation, French New Right-American New Left, 14, 57, 69, 156, 159; see also Telos Red Army, 15, 45, 48, 51, De Benoist remark, 45, 48; see also anti-fascism Red Brigades (Italy), 48 Regime Fascista, 10; see also Evola, Julius regionalists, 52, 63 Rémond, René, 25-6 republicanism, 4, 38, 109, 138 critique of model, ENR, 201 Republikaner (REP – The Republicans), Germany, 7, 202 resistance to transcendence, 24-5; see also Nolte, Ernst Revelli, Marco, 17, 124 revitalization movements, ENR as, see Griffin, Foreword revolution Bolshevik, 22, 64 conservative revolution, ENR influences, 9, 12, 54, 105-7 ENR penchant for, counter-revolution, 23-8 ENR penchant for, anti-liberal, 36, 61, 65, 67, 71 fascist, 62 French Revolution, 23-4, 27, 74, 86, 92 metapolitical, ENR, 47, 67, 73, 86, 183 revolutionary right ENR distance from, 10, 34, 84, 123 ENR origins in, 4-5, 7, 9, 10-11, 23, 28, 33, 138, 155, 195 ENR, synthesis, New Left, 12-3, 17, 60, 105-6, 192, 197, 200, 203 neo-fascism, 31 pragmatism, 134-5, 137; see also conservative revolutionaries; ENR; fascism Rhodésie, terre des lions fidèles, De Benoist, 28

229

riding the tiger, 29, 124, 131, 185; see also apoliteia; Evola, Julius right ENR, FN, far right-wing links, 165-75 ENR, right-wing roots, 21- 31 GRECE, birth, New Right, 33-5; see also New Right; Old Right; ultranationalism Right Now!, 7, 83 Rights of Man, 21-2 ENR critique, 9, 64, 175, 201 fascism, counterrevolutionary critiques, 25, 127 Nolte, Furet debate on, 21 right to difference, ENR, 5, 8, 12, 17-18, 79, 91-3, 97-8, 135, 186 as dialogical, 132, 156, 200 as new racism, 124-7, 132, 170, 172, 201 for different ends, 137-8, 193, 198 right-wing international, attempts, ENR, 141-2, 148, 163, 194-5 Rivarol, 167, 174 Robertson, Lord, 60 Rollat, Alain, 171 Rollet, Maurice, 59-61 Roques affair, 51; see also Holocaust denial Rorty, Richard, 159 royalism, 25; see also Action française; Maurras, Charles Rua, Kevin, 115-16 Russian New Right, 138; see also Dugin, Alexander Ruter, Marcel, 91 Sacchi, Franco, 34, 105, 128 Said, Edward, 181 Salazar, Antonio 30, 170 Sandel, Michael, 197 Sarfatti-Grassini, Margherita, 2 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 150, 183 scarf affair, 132 Schain, Martin anti-immigrant consensus, 202-3 Schmitt, Carl, 59, 90, 133, 149, 157, 186-8, De Benoist, Piccone, defense of, 97, 105, 117, 154, 177-80, 184, 201-2 Nazi crown jurist, 11 pacified globe, 94

230

Where Have All The Fascists Gone?

Schmittian decisionism, ENR, 13, 39, 47, 66, 82, 95-6, 150-1 Schroeder, Gerhardt, 205 scientific racism, 24 scientism, ENR influences, 12, 83, 100, 121, 153, 188, 194 Siego, Nakano, 141 September 11, 3, 6, 127 post-September 11 climate, ENR, 10910 Servan-Schreiber, J.-J., 72 Sheehan, Thomas, 122-3 Simmons, Harvey, 32-34, 36, 38, 121, 125, 171 Situationists, the, ENR influences, 53, 69, 72, 84 soccer hooliganism, 1-2 soccer racism, 1-2 social consensus, 35; see also Gramsci, Antonio social democrats, 4, 185 Socialist Party Congress (Italy), 2 Società Sportiva (SS) Lazio, 1-2 Sorbonne, 33, 183 Sorel, Georges, 9, 26, 62, 83-4, 171, 178, 180, 187, 198, influence on fascism, 9, 62; see also non-conformists SOS-RACISME, 91 SOS-ROOTS, 91 Soucy, Robert, 25, 27 Soviet Union, see communism, fall of Soviet Union Spanish New Right, 143 spectacle, society of the, Debord, Guy, 69 Spengler, Oswald, 9, 29, 84, 95, 133, 135, 178, 186; see also conservative revolutionaries spherical view of history, ENR, 30, 58, 123, 185, 187; see also Jünger; Mohler spiritualism, ENR, 104, 202, fascism, 3-4, 97; see also De Benoist; GRECE spiritual racism, 122; see also Evola, Julius SA, 96 SS, 28 stalemate society, 74 Stalinism, 16, 106, 116-17, 160, lesser evil, vs. Nazism, 117

statut des juifs, 27 Steding, Christoph, 105 Sternhell, Ze’ev, 135, 184, 194, 202 fascism defined, 15-16, 22, 25-6, 115 Steuckers, Robert, 97, 102-3, 143; see also Belgian New Right strategy of tension, 39, 80 Sunic, Tomislav, 3, 23, 59-60, 67, 90, 103, 133-4, 143 Sur la nouvelle droite, De Benoist, Alain, 89, 130 syndicalism, impact on fascism, 67, 99 Synergies Européennes (SE), 102 Taboos fascism, communism comparison, 21-2 fascism, Nazism, 29 fascist language, 201-2 fascist salute, Di Canio, 1-2 Holocaust denial neo-fascists in government, 8 Nolte, Ernst, 21-2 Taguieff, P.-A., 11-12, 152-3, 170, 172, 202 anti-Zionist anti-Semitism, 184 attack on, Appeal, 55-6 De Benoist, beyond fascism, 130 doubts, De Benoist, beyond fascism, 138, 154-5 ENR break, Judeo-Christian tradition, 134 ENR cultural racism, 124, 131, 198 ENR facelifts, 12 ENR far right origins, 28, 54 ENR schools of thought, 80 GRECE’s metapolitical innovation, 89 Griffin, debate, 136-7 Tarchi, Marco, 5, 10, 14, 59 Campo Hobbit, creation of Nuova Destra, 145-7 far right roots, 10; see also Italian New Right; Movimento Sociale Italiano influence of 1968, 67-9 metapolitics, 84-5, 141, 145, 186 Taylor, Charles, influence on ENR, 13, 84, 146 TeKos, 102, 143 Telos, 10-11, 13, 53 De Benoist in, 86, 91, 137 ENR debates, 1993-4, 148-63

Index ENR rapprochement, 160-3 history, 149-50 right-turn, 149-51; see also De Benoist; ENR Terre et peuple total ethnic war, FN, 173 terrorism, neo-fascist, 100, 122-3, 125, 130, 139, 145; see also ON; AN; war on terrorism The Clash of Fundamentalisms, Ali, Tariq, 110 The Concept of the Political, Schmitt, Carl, 95 The Third Reich, 29, 54; see also Nazism; van den Bruck, Moeller think tank, 7, 30, 33, 37, 39, 84, 86, 88, 123, 172-3, 175 role of, De Benoist, 86; see also Club de l’horloge; GRECE; metapolitics third way ENR, 50, 147, 155, 160, 175, 202 far right, fascism, 29, 57, 65, 137-8, 160, 175 non-conformists, 12 social democrats, 204 Tixier-Vignancourt, Jean-Louis, 28 Tolkien, J. R. R., 12, 145 The Scorpion, 4, 7, 85, 88-9, 121, 1434, 173, 175; see also ENR; Holocaust negationism; right-wing Gramscianism; Walker, Michael Thule-Seminar, 88 totalitarianism, ENR ENR definition of, 94 hard, rejection of, 94 soft, rejection of, 64, 71, 94-5, 184, 191 total war, ENR, 90 traditionalists, 63, 82 traditional politics ENR involvement, 172 masses, 86-9 rejection of, ENR, 86, 168 vs. metapolitics, 100-3; see also metapolitics Trasgressioni, 4, 145-6, 186; see also Italian New Right Trotskyites, 4, 158 Turner, Derek, 7

231

ultra-nationalism, 7, 15, 22, 25-6, 50, 54, 56, 99, 120 ENR rejection of, 175; see also nationalism; fascism ultras, neo-fascist, neo-Nazi, 1-2 uniformity, ENR fears of, 90-4; see also homogenisation United States, see anti-Americanism, ENR universalism, ENR critique of, 12, 22, 24, 90-1, 98, 108, 125, 183, 197, 200 universal standards, Said, 181 University of Florence, 68, 147 Ur-Fascism, see designer fascism utopians, organic, synthethic, ENR, 205 Valla, Jean-Claude, 33, 168; see also GRECE Valois, Georges, 12, 26-7, 187, 202; see also Le Faisceau; fascism van den Bruck, Arthur Moeller, 9, 29, 84, 107, 178, 186, 197; see also conservative revolutionaries; Nazism Vaughan, Michalina, 126 Venner, Dominique, Pour une critique positive, 31; see also fascism; ultranationalism Vial, Pierre, joins FN, 7, 50, 101, 166, 173-4 Che Guevara, support of, 31, 33-5 philo-Sovietism, 48; see also ENR; FN Vico, Giambattista, 91, 132 Vichyism, 7, 23, 25, 27-8, 85, 98, 100, 127, 170-1, 178, 202 French collaboration, 27-8; see also collaboration Le Pen support statement, 171 race legislation, 27, 85, 98 Victor Emmanuel III, 14 vigilance, left, ENR as fascist, 11, 54-6, 120, 139, 152; see also An Appeal to Vigilance; Le Monde Vlaams Blok, 102, 166, 202 volkisch circles, 24; see also ultranationalism Voltaire, xix, 24 Vouloir, 143; see also Belgian New Right Vu de Droite, De Benoist, Alain, 6, 24, 34-5, 40, 80-1, 87, 91-3, 96, 122, 171, 183, 191, 199

232

Where Have All The Fascists Gone? c olonialism critique, 34 defense of difference, fear of world civilization, 92-3 right-wing Gramscianism, 35, 87

Waechter, Antoine, 102, 197; see also Greens Walker, Michael, 5, 7, 14, 80, 94 break from De Benoist, 142, 144 far right roots, 10 right-wing Gramscianism, 85, 88-9; see also ENR; The Scorpion war on terrorism, 6, 94, 204 warrior ethic, influence on ENR, radical right, 29-30, 39, 123 Weber, Max, 184; influence on ENR, 83, 146

Wegierski, Mark, 128-9, 147, 151-2; ENR not fascist, 151 Weinberg, Henry, 24, 123-4, 130 What is to be done?, Lenin, Vladimir, 31 white fundamentalist Europe, Baudrillard, 139 Wolin, Richard, 126, 157, 159 xenophilia, as cultural racism, ENR, 124; see also Taguieff, P.-A. xenophobia, 126, 168; see also FN, antiimmigrant stances Zitelmann, R., 21-2 Zizek, Slavoj, 117