The French New Right's Quest for Alternative Modernity
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Fascism 1 (2012) 18–52 brill.nl/fasc The French New Right’s Quest for Alternative Modernity Tamir Bar-On Department of International Relations and Humanities, Tecnológico de Monterrey (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education), Campus Querétaro, Mexico E-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract The purpose of this paper is to offer a new interpretation of the French nouvelle droite (ND – New Right). The author argues that the ND is a heterogeneous, pan-European “school of thought” consisting of different ideological tendencies. Yet, contrary to the predominant inter- pretation of the revolutionary right as “anti-modern” and “reactionary”, key ND thinkers, including its leader Alain de Benoist, are wedded to a revolutionary, alternative modernist con- ception of politics which is neither liberal nor socialist. The paper in question begins by assess- ing whether the ND is a fascist movement. The paper then focuses on Roger Griffin's “ideal type” definitions of modernism and fascism to argue that ND theorists fit within modernist and fascist frameworks with roots in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The ND's modernist framework seeks to “rescue” contemporary Europe from its profound “decadence” and “crises” in a seem- ingly contradictory ideological pastiche (i.e., “mazeway resynthesis”) combining premodern, modern, and postmodern political and philosophical influences. Keywords French New Right; nouvelle droite; pan-Europeanism; modernism; fascism; alternative moder- nity; mazeway resynthesis; Roger Griffin Introduction This paper focuses on the French nouvelle droite (ND – New Right), which is today a pan-European transnational right-wing movement that did not exist before 1968 and saw its apogee in French media and academic debates of the late 1970s.1 Led by French intellectual Alain de Benoist (b. 1943), the ND is a 1) My Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007) reviews the most important scholarship on the ND in French and English. Please note that there is also substantive body of research on the French ND and German Neue Rechte in German. See also: Tomislav Sunic. Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right. New York: Peter Lang, 1990; Tamir Bar-On. “Transnationalism and the French nouvelle droite.” Patterns of Prejudice, 45 (2011) 4, 199-223; Ibid. “Understanding Political Conversion and Mimetic Rivalry.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 10 (2009) 3, 241-264; Ibid. “Fascism to the Nouvelle © 2012 Tamir Bar-On DOI 10.1163/221162512X631198 This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC 3.0) License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/ T. Bar-On / Fascism 1 (2012) 18–52 19 “cultural school of thought” (école de pensée)2 with various ideological tenden- cies from modernist to more Traditionalist currents,3 all wedded to the cultural terrain and the battle of ideas to differentiate themselves from extreme right- wing political parties and ultra-nationalist, violent extra-parliamentary movements. Given de Benoist's vast writing production, the French intellectual spread ND ideas beyond a narrow elite circle. De Benoist's ideas are today dissemi- nated throughout Europe by other intellectuals, including Marco Tarchi in Italy, Michael Walker and Troy Southgate in England, Robert Steuckers in Belgium, and Aleksandr Dugin in Russia. ND-friendly intellectuals can also be found in Germany, Holland, Spain, Croatia, Romania, Poland, and other European countries. De Benoist acted as the ND's key transnational messenger within Europe. For de Benoist and the ND, a web of shared networks (e.g., think-tanks, journals, conferences, etc.) and beliefs (e.g., the extreme and rev- olutionary right-wing shift from narrow nationalism to a new “European home”) created processes which transcended the centrality of state actors. While de Benoist and the ND recognize “the extraordinary importance” of states and empires, they also pay attention to “networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces.”4 The ND rea- soned that major changes in belief systems across nations eventually yield revolutionary political changes throughout Europe. For the ND, revolutionary political changes needed radical intellectuals with a mission to destroy liberalism. De Benoist cemented ties with revolu- tionary right-wing intellectuals throughout Europe in order to spread ND ideas beyond France. Currently a political science professor at the University of Florence, Marco Tarchi is considered the leading figure of the Italian Nuova Destra (New Right). He has also been a Visiting Professor at the University of Turku in Finland. The Nuova Destra was born in 1974 after intellectual exchanges with the French ND.5 Tarchi was a former youth leader of the neo- fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI – Italian Social Movement) and the editor of a journal, Diorama letterario, which modeled itself on French ND journals created by de Benoist. Walker was a former organizer with the British Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 16 (2008) 3, 327-345; Ibid. “The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999.” The European Legacy, 6 (2001) 3, 333-351. 2) Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol. Visages de la Nouvelle Droite: le GRECE et son histoire. Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques, 1988. 3) Stéphane François. 2009. “Contre Le Monde Moderne: La Nouvelle Droite et La Tradition.” Etudes et analyses, 21 (2009) juillet: 1-12; Ibid. Les Néo-paganismes et la Nouvelle Droite: pour une autre approche. Milan: Archè, 2009. 4) Sven Beckert. “Symposium ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’.” The American Historical Review , 111 (2006) 5, 1459. 5) Bar-On. Where Have All The Fascist Gone?, 145 20 T. Bar-On / Fascism 1 (2012) 18–52 National Front (BNF) in central London, sheltered the Italian neo-fascist ter- rorist Roberto Fiore in the 1980s, and created an ND-influenced journal, The Scorpion. Inspired by the French ND, Troy Southgate is an avowed “National Anarchist” and created the New Right movement in London in 2005 and later the journal New Imperium. Steuckers is considered the head of the Belgian New Right, belonged to GRECE,6 and is the founder of a journal, Vouloir, which was influenced by de Benoist's ND. Steuckers accused the ND of being too metapolitical and later supported the anti-immigrant political party Vlaams Blok (Flemish Bloc). The geopolitical thinker Aleksandr Dugin (b. 1962) is viewed today as one of the greatest proponents of Russian expansionism, ultra-nationalism, fascism, and Eurasianism (i.e., a European-Asian alliance against the neo-liberal USA) along imperial lines.7 Dugin is close to the National Bolshevik Party and Eurasia Movement, which is said to have the ear of leading Russian politicians and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin's anti-democratic and hypernationalist govern- ment.8 The Russian intellectual has important ties to the executive and legisla- tive branches of the Russian state, as well as a large following among Russian academics, journalists, publicists, and activists. After contacts were estab- lished with de Benoist in Moscow in the early 1990s, Dugin created a Russian New Right journal, Elementy, modeled on the French ND's Éléments. De Benoist briefly served on the editorial board of Elementy, but resigned because he was troubled by Dugin's open ultra-nationalism and anti-Semitism. In more recent 6) GRECE is the French acronym for the key ND think-tank Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilization). The French acronym GRECE means Greece and GRECE pined for the paganism of Greek antiquity. Founded legally in 1969 by Alain de Benoist and about forty other intellectuals, GRECE fol- lowed French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche (1907-98) in seeking to avoid the “outdated vocabu- lary” of the fascist past. See Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, 30-32. 7) On the question of whether Dugin is a fascist and a debate about Griffin's “fascist minimum”, see the special bilingual (English and German) issue of Deliberation, Knowledge, Ethics, 15 (2004) 3, which takes as its starting point a piece by Roger Griffin entitled “Fascism's new faces (and new facelessness) in the ‘post-fascist’ epoch.” On Dugin's purported fascism, see the pieces by Andreas Umland and A. James Gregor, with the latter arguing that Dugin is not a fascist and the former insisting the Russian thinker is a fascist. See also: Alan Ingram. “Alexander Dugin: Geopolitics and Neo-Fascism in Post-Soviet Russia,” Political Geography, 20 (2001) 8, 1029-1051; Marlene Laurelle. “Aleksandr Dugin: a Russian Version of the European Radical Right.” Kennan Institute Occassional Paper #294 (2006). http:// www.scribd.com/mstolpness%C3%A6ter/d/48735479-Aleksandr-Dugin-A-Russian-Version -of-the-European-Radical-Right-by-Marlene-Laruelle. Accessed January 22, 2012; Andreas Umland. “Fascist Tendencies in Russia's Political Establishment.” Russian Analytical Digest, 60 (2009), 13-17; Ibid. The Nature of Russian ‘Neo-Eurasianism’: Approaches to Aleksandr Dugin's Post-Soviet Movement of Radical Anti-Americanism. Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2009. 8) Anton Shekhovtsov. “Aleksandr Dugin's Neo-Eurasianism: The New Right à la Russe.” Religion Compass, 3 (2009) 4, 697-716; Ibid. “The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin's Worldview.” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 9 (2008) 4, 491-506. T. Bar-On / Fascism 1 (2012) 18–52 21 years, de Benoist visited and spoke at the prestigious Moscow State University where Dugin is a Professor and Acting Chair of International Sociology. In the new millennium, Dugin has also met several ND thinkers in Paris, Antwerp, and London.9 Today the ND's influence, particularly de Benoist's writings, can be felt on diverse publications such as Telos and The Occidental Quarterly (USA), The Mankind Quarterly and The Scorpion (United Kingdom), Punto y coma and Hespérides (Spain), Neue Anthropologie (Germany), and Maiastra (Romania).