Transnationalism and The French Nouvelle

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Patterns of Prejudice
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Transnationalism and the French

Nouvelle Droite
Tamir Bar-On
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Patterns of Prejudice, Vol. 45, No. 3, 2011
Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite
TAMIR BAR-ON
ABSTRACT Born in 1968, the French Nouvelle Droite (ND) is a ‘cultural school of
thought’. It created a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the revolu-
tionary right in an anti-fascist age; it helped to nurture the discourse of ‘political
correctness’ among extreme right-wing political parties, and turned former French
ultra-nationalists into pan-Europeanists seeking to smash the egalitarian heritage of
Downloaded by [Ms Barbara Rosenbaum] at 05:44 08 August 2011
1789. Bar-On argues that the ND world-view has been shaped by transnational
influences and that the ND has, in turn, shaped a decidedly more right-wing political
culture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND ideas is a
product of three key factors: first, the intellectual output and prestige of ND leader
Alain de Benoist; second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European
project that mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war neo-
fascists into the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened up by the
decline of the European left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. Bar-On
concludes by considering the influence of the ND on contemporary European
politics, as well as the implications for the struggles against racism and the extreme
right.
KEYWORDS Alain de Benoist, anti-racism, Conservative Revolution, European New

Right, extreme right, French Nouvelle Droite, mazeway resynthesis, New Left, New
Right, Nouvelle Droite, racism, right-wing Gramscianism, transnationalism
an Tyrrell insists that transnational history ‘concerns the movement of

I peoples, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries’.1
Transnational history developed in the era after the Peace of Westphalia
(1648), the rise of sovereign nation states and democratic revolutions in the
United States and France in 1776 and 1789, respectively. The aim of
transnational history, reasons Tyrrell, is to examine ‘the relationship between
nation and factors beyond the nation’.2 In short, transnational history is
based on the premise that national identity competes for loyalty with other
identities both within and outside the nation. For Sven Beckert, the starting
point of transnational history is ‘the interconnectedness of human history as
a whole, and while it acknowledges the extraordinary importance of states,
1 Ian Tyrrell, ‘What is transnational history?’, paper presented at the École des hautes
études en sciences sociales, Paris, January 2007, available on Ian Tyrrell’s website at
http://iantyrrell.wordpress.com/what-is-transnational-history (viewed 19 April 2011).
2 Ibid.
ISSN 0031-322X print/ISSN 1461-7331 online/11/030199-25 # 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2011.585013
200 Patterns of Prejudice
empires, and the like, it pays attention to networks, processes, beliefs, and
institutions that transcend these politically defined spaces’.3 Let me offer
three examples of transnational history. The first is the forced migration of
Sephardi Jews from the Iberian peninsula in the fifteenth century and the
creation of Spanish-speaking Sephardi communities in diverse locations
from Tangiers to Sarajevo and London to Antwerp. The second is the
establishment of three successive Communist Internationals in 1864, 1889
and 1919, respectively, which attempted to unite socialist movements,
parties and trade unions to form a common front against capitalism
worldwide. The third example is the attempt to create an interwar ‘fascist
international’ by elements of the Italian Fascist Party.4
The aim of this paper is not to examine any of the three aforementioned
transnational phenomena, but rather the contemporary French Nouvelle

Droite (ND, New Right). Following Tyrrell, I use the French ND to examine
‘the relationship between nation and factors beyond the nation’. And,
following Beckert, I focus on ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’
that transcend the importance of states.
Born in 1968, the French ND is neither a political party nor a violent
extra-parliamentary outfit. The ND is rather a ‘cultural school of thought’,5
and a metapolitical movement that originated largely as a synthesis of two
ideological currents: the revolutionary right-wing Conservative Revolution
(CR),6 and the New Left.7 The CR refers to non-Nazi fascisms of the interwar
period. CR thinkers combined German ultra-nationalism, defence of the
organic folk community, technological modernity and socialist revisionism,
which valorized the worker and the soldier as models for a reborn
authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian ‘decadence’ of liberalism,
socialism and traditional conservatism. Among such thinkers were Carl
Schmitt (the Nazi crown jurist), Arthur Moeller van den Bruck (inventor of
the term ‘Third Reich’) and Ernst Jünger (ultra-nationalist war veteran who
3 Sven Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’,

American Historical Review, vol. 111, no. 5, 2006, 1441 64 (1459).
4 See, for example, Michael Arthur Ledeen, Universal Fascism: The Theory and Practice of
the Fascist International, 1928 1936 (New York: Howard Fertig 1972); and Gert Sørensen
and Robert Mallet (eds), International Fascism 191945 (London and Portland, OR: Frank
Cass 2002).
5 This is the term used by Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol in Visages de la nouvelle droite: le
GRECE et son histoire (Paris: Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques
1988).
6 Armin Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, in Roger Griffin (ed.), Fascism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1995), 351 4; Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar
Republic (New York: St Martin’s Press 1996).
7 See Tamir Bar-On, ‘The ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968 1999’, The European
Legacy, vol. 6, no. 3, 2001, 333 51; Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
(Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate 2007), 33 78; and Tamir Bar-On, ‘Fascism to
the Nouvelle Droite: the dream of pan-European empire’, Journal of Contemporary
European Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, 327 45.
TAMIR BAR-ON 201
penned In Stahlgewittern,8 a hymn to First World War soldierly virtues). The

term ‘Conservative Revolution’ was popularized by the Swiss-born philo-
sopher Armin Mohler, who wrote a doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers in the
late 1940s.9 Mohler called CR thinkers the ‘Trotskyites of the German
Revolution’,10 and was sympathetic to their brand of fascism.
The ND has been shrouded in controversy, owing to its roots in French
ultra-nationalism and its attachment to CR authors who legitimized the Nazi
regime (1933 45). In two polemical media storms in France, in 1979 and
1993, ND thinkers were bitterly attacked by the liberal and left-wing
intelligentsia as racists and/or closet fascists.11 So, for example, in 1993
forty prominent European intellectuals signed ‘An Appeal to Vigilance’,
printed in Le Monde, warning of the ND’s ‘dangerous’ post-Cold War
strategy, including its desire to form alliances with disgruntled Communists.

The ‘Appeal to Vigilance’ was signed by an additional 1,500 European
intellectuals one year later. The ND was also accused of covert racism and
fascism by the historian of fascism Roger Griffin.12 ND doyen Alain de
Benoist claimed he was ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’, indifferent to the terms
‘right’ and ‘left’, and that he sought to create a new political paradigm for a
new millennium.13 A scholar sympathetic to the ND argued that ‘An Appeal
to Vigilance’ was the work of a left-wing intelligentsia fearful of the left’s
total demise after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.14
A rich literature on the ND has grown up, mostly in French, but
increasingly also in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian and other
languages.15 While the ND’s historical origins, ideological evolution, world-
view, impact on civil society, connections to fascism, racism, antisemitism
8 First privately printed in 1920 and reprinted in revised versions several times; first
published in English as The Storm of Steel, trans. from the German by Basil Creighton
(London: Chatto and Windus 1929).
9 The thesis was later revised and published as Armin Mohler, Die Konservative
Revolution in Deutschland 19181932: Ein Handbuch (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft 1972).
10 Ibid.; English translation in Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, 351.
11 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 11.
12 See, for example, Roger Griffin’s introduction to Cyprian P. Blamires (ed.), World
Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, 2 vols (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO 2006), I, 23 5.
13 Alain de Benoist, ‘What is racism?’, Telos, no. 114, Winter 1999, 11 48; Alain de
Benoist, ‘The end of the left right dichotomy: the French case’, Telos, no. 102, Winter
1995, 73 89; Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite: anthologie critique des idées contemporaines
(Paris: Éditions Copernic 1977).
14 Frank Adler, ‘Left vigilance in France’, Telos, no. 98 9, Winter 1993 Spring 1994,
23 33.
15 For the most comprehensive French literature on the ND, see Stéphane François, Les
Néo-Paganismes et la nouvelle droite 19802006: pour une autre approche (Milan: Archè
2008); Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Sur la nouvelle droite: jalons d’une analyse critique (Paris:
Descartes 1994); and Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite. For English
literature with a focus on the French ND and Italian Nuova Destra, see Bar-On,
Where Have All the Fascists Gone?. For the German Neue Rechte, see Roger Woods,
and centre-right and extreme-right political parties have been analysed, a

hitherto unexplored subject is the French movement’s transnational identity
and impact. In short, the ND’s world-view is a transnational synthesis of
revolutionary right-wing and left-wing ideas from France, Germany, Italy
and the United States, and including anti-western influences. The ND
helped to create a sophisticated European-wide political culture of the
revolutionary right in an anti-fascist age; it nurtured the ‘politically correct’
discourse of extreme right-wing political parties, and turned former French
ultra-nationalists into ethnically fixated pan-Europeanists seeking to smash
the egalitarian heritage of 1789. This article argues that the development of
the ND’s world-view has been shaped by transnational influences, and that
the ND itself in turn shaped a decidedly more right-wing political culture
throughout Europe in a transnational spirit. The transnational impact of ND
ideas has been a product of three key factors: first, the encyclopaedic
intellectual output and prestige of ND leader Alain de Benoist; second, the
‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the ND’s pan-European project, which
mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war neo-
fascists in the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space opened up
by the decline of the European left and Communist regimes after the fall of
the Soviet Union in 1991.
More to the point, the French ND has increasingly been called the
European New Right, which highlights the transnational impact of its ideas
on the European continent generally.16 As the ND lost its influence in French
politics, after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained more transnational currency
in the 1990s as new political opportunities emerged in the ‘Communism in
ruins’ era for all political forces that rejected liberalism and the sole
remaining superpower, the United States.
A history of the ND
The ND’s intellectual journey has indeed been a unique one. In the 1960s, its
leader Alain de Benoist was an ultra-nationalist sympathetic to the cause of
French Algeria, to circles close to Vichy collaboration, to defence of the
‘white man’ and the apartheid regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.17 In
1961 he met François d’Orcival, a journalist and member of the French neo-
fascist organization Jeune Nation (Young Nation), founded in 1949. Benoist
Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave
Macmillan 2007). For an introduction to the subject of the ND by a fellow-traveller, see
Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York:
Peter Lang 1990).
16 Examples of works that use the ‘European New Right’ label include Sunic, Against
Democracy and Equality; Franco Sacchi, ‘The Italian New Right’, Telos, no. 98 9, Winter
1993 Spring 1994, 71 80; and Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?.
17 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 10, 21 32.
TAMIR BAR-ON 203
later joined the vehemently anti-Marxist, ultra-nationalist and pro-French

Algeria Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN, Federation of Nation-
alist Students), which was founded in 1960 by d’Orcival and other
revolutionary nationalists. In 1962 Benoist became the editor of Cahiers
universitaires, the journal published by FEN.
In the early 1960s, Benoist also met Dominique Venner, a founder of
Europe-Action, which was both a revolutionary right-wing organization and
its eponymous journal from 1963 7. Europe-Action imbued French revolu-
tionary right-wing militants with a new pan-national Europeanism, and
adopted the turn away from narrow nationalism espoused by the French
neo-fascist writer Maurice Bardèche (1907 98). It should be noted that
Venner’s father was a member of the Parti populaire français (PPF), a French
fascist party founded by Jacques Doriot in 1936 that collaborated with Nazi
Germany. Benoist wrote articles for Europe-Action, which also published an
assortment of former Vichy collaborators and Organisation de l’armée
secrète (OAS, Secret Army Organization) supporters. The OAS engaged in
armed struggle in its campaign to maintain French Algeria in the late 1950s
and early 1960s. In his manifesto ‘Pour une critique positive’, penned in
1962,18 Venner sought to redefine French nationalism by giving it a more
pan-European flavour, while also questioning the value of the sterile path
that the ultra-nationalist milieu was taking following the loss of French
Algeria that year.19 Venner also influenced Benoist’s ethnic differentialist
positions, which in the 1970s held that the right should be for white power,
but also for yellow and red power.20 Numerous Europe-Action and Jeune
Nation activists became supporters of the ND during those years.
In 1968 Benoist and about forty other ultra-nationalists helped found
Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne
(GRECE, Research and Study Group for European Civilization), the ND’s
principal think-tank. The following year, Benoist, Pierre Vial and Jean-
Claude Valla, two prominent future secretary-generals, established GRECE
as a legal organization. The name of the think-tank suggested a more
European path for the revolutionary right, and hinted at the restoration of
the glories of an Indo-European civilization. When GRECE was founded, its
aim was four-fold: first, to reorient the ultra-nationalist French political
milieu, which was pro-French Algeria and had lingering sympathies for the
pro-Nazi Vichy regime, towards greater doctrinal sophistication and the
transcendence of internecine conflicts between various ultra-nationalist
18 Dominique Venner, ‘Pour une critique positive’, 1962, available online at http://
1000tempetes.free.fr/venner_critique_positive.pdf (viewed 26 April 2011).
19 Roger Griffin, ‘Plus ça change! The fascist pedigree of the Nouvelle Droite’, paper
presented at conference ‘The extreme right in France 1880 to the present’, Dublin, 26
8 April 1998, version dated 17 August 1998 available online at ah.brookes.ac.uk/
resources/griffin/pluscachange.pdf (viewed 20 April 2011).
20 Benoist, Vu de droite, 156.
tendencies; second, to reject the right’s dominant parliamentary and extra-

parliamentary methods of seizing power; third, to regain cultural power
from the liberal-left by seizing the ‘laboratories of thought’ throughout
Europe in a right-wing Gramscian spirit, and to restore the credibility of a
revolutionary right-wing milieu battered by the excesses of fascist race laws
and the Holocaust; and, finally, to rethink the dominant ideological legacy of
the ultra-nationalist right, which tended to be based on ethnic, biological or
racist conceptions of the nation, and to be associated with militaristic
expansionism. Influenced by Maurice Bardèche, who paradoxically openly
declared his fascism, Benoist understood that one day fascism might re-
emerge with ‘another name, another face’.21
While Benoist and most members of GRECE came from the extreme right,
they recognized that times had changed and that post-war Europe was
firmly anti-fascist politically, and culturally more liberal and left-wing. The
spectacular events of May 1968 in which 10 million French men and women
brought France to a standstill and threatened revolution convinced Benoist
and company that the liberal-left held the key to power in France, since it
now supposedly controlled the schools, universities, media and the thinking
of the key state elites. Benoist argued that the right was wrong to think that
either electoral politics or terrorist violence was the way to power; following
the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891 1937), he claimed that it was
‘cultural hegemony’ in civil society*control of dominant values, attitudes,
and ways of seeing and being*that promised long-term, durable power.22
Capture the hearts and minds of the masses, as well as of key elites, and
liberal democracy would fall, reasoned Benoist. May 1968 was a success, he
argued, because liberal and leftist elites were able to capture the levers of
cultural power in civil society. He insisted that, when cultural power in civil
society became divorced from the values of those in the state, a revolution
became far more plausible.
In 1968, rightists Benoist and GRECE were still reeling from the loss of
French Algeria and the weak showing of Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancourt, the
extreme right-wing candidate who gained 5.2 per cent of the popular vote in
the 1965 French presidential elections. Although Benoist ideologically
rejected the New Left and Maoist protestors of 1968, he envied them
because, like them, he sought to abolish liberal democracy and to develop a
‘third way’ politically and economically that rejected the hegemony of the
two superpowers, but, because they had cultural power, the key to political
power, their protests were able to have an impact that was felt well beyond
the borders of France, in Italy, Czechoslovakia, Mexico, the United States and
elsewhere.
21 Maurice Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs 1961), 175 6;
English translation in Maurice Bardèche, ‘Lenin was right’, in Griffin (ed.), Fascism,
319 21.
22 Alain de Benoist, Les Ideés à l’endroit (Paris: Libres-Hallier 1979), 258 9, 456 60.
TAMIR BAR-ON 205
With a combination of hatred and sheer envy for the 1968ers,23 then,
Benoist embarked on the project of reorienting the entire culture of the ultra-
nationalistic right. What interests us here is that he founded ND journals that
were read by followers of the ultra-nationalist milieu in France and around
Europe. Benoist’s prestige rose across the continent in the mid-1970s when Le
Figaro opened its pages to him. And, when he won France’s highest literary
prize from the Académie française in 1978 for Vu de droite (Seen from the
Right), his star status catapulted him into the consciousness of a European-
wide reading audience. His works were translated into numerous languages,
from Spanish and English to Italian and Croatian. This allowed ND ideas to
be transmitted beyond a narrow milieu in France. It is estimated that Vu de
droite alone has sold more than 25,000 copies throughout Europe.24 In
addition, GRECE’s 1998 collection, Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite, showed the

degree to which French, German, Italian and Croatian ultra-nationalists of
the period shared a hostility for the 1968 generation for ‘selling out’, while
praising themselves and ‘real 1968ers’ such as Daniel Cohn-Bendit (currently
a member of the European Parliament from the Green Party) for not
betraying their youthful ideals.25
In 1969 Benoist created the first ND journal Nouvelle Ecole. Nouvelle Ecole
made sure to avoid the ‘outdated vocabulary’ associated with fascism,
racism, colonialism and antisemitism in order to restore the right’s
credibility. Following the launch of Éléments in 1973, a third ND journal,
Krisis, was introduced by Benoist in 1988. From the 1970s to the early 1980s,
Benoist wrote regularly for Le Figaro and Spectacle du Monde. From 1980 to
1992, the ND leader was a regular guest on Le Panorama, a radio show
broadcast daily on France Culture. Moreover, Benoist was the director of
several publishing concerns, including Éditions Copernic (1977 81),
Éditions du Labyrinthe (since 1982), Éditions Pardès (1989 93), and Éditions
L’Âge d’Homme (since 2003). Copernic and Labyrinthe are publishing arms
of GRECE, while Pardès specializes in promoting ND paganism, tradition-
alism and Julius Evola (1898 1974).26 Evola was an Italian philosopher who
wrote Fascist Italy’s manifesto of ‘spiritual racism’; he was a hero to the
23 See, for example, the collection of essays by European New Right thinkers published
on the thirtieth anniversary of May 1968: Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite (Paris: Éditions
du Labyrinthe 1998). The multinational cast of contributors includes Alain de Benoist,
Charles Champetier, Maurice Rollet, Jean-Jacques Mourreau, Marco Tarchi, Tomislav
Sunic and Gunter Maschke.
24 Alain de Benoist, ‘Preface a la nouvelle edition de ‘‘Vu de droite’’ (2002)’, available
online at www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/preface_nouvelle_edition_vu_de_droite.pdf
(viewed 20 April 2011).
25 See the essays in Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite, particularly those by Benoist, Sunic and
Rollet.
26 Stéphane François, ‘Les Paganismes de la Nouvelle Droite (1980 2004)’, doctoral
dissertation, Université de Lille II, 2005, 224 33.
neo-fascist milieu after the war, and influenced Benoist’s pagan, anti-western
traditionalism.
Éditions L’Âge d’Homme is dedicated to publishing the works of ex-
Soviet dissidents such as Alexander Zinoviev. An anti-Communist, Zinoviev
insisted that both liberal democracies and socialist regimes were totalitarian.
Like Zinoviev, Benoist saw little difference between the political systems led
by Moscow and Washington. In 1986 Benoist wrote: ‘Totalitarianism in the
East imprisons, persecutes and kills the body, but it leaves hope. Totalitar-
ianism in the West creates happy robots. Such totalitarianism air-conditions
hell and kills the soul.’27 For him, both communism and liberalism
represented totalitarian systems that had their roots in the alleged
‘totalitarianism’ of the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian tradition. As a result,
Benoist could disingenuously claim that contemporary liberal states were

‘totalitarian’ in that they ‘imposed’ administrative equality (that is, western
political and cultural homogenization) on diverse ethnic groups in Europe
and worldwide.
While, in the 1960s, Benoist and the ND were sympathetic to white
racialist circles and colonialism, in the 1970s they experimented with
biological racism. Benoist changed his tune again in the 1980s. With the
publication of his Europe, tiers monde, même combat in 1986, Benoist began to
argue that Europe and the Third World ought to unite geopolitically against
liberal democracy and communism alike, and defend their rooted cultural
identities against the alleged homogenization imposed by both Washington
and Moscow. It is in this period that Benoist further developed his
differentialist theories, insisting that no culture was superior and that all
cultures had a right to be different and preserve their distinctiveness. This
position was a tactical change for a man who once was ready to die for
French Algeria. Benoist and Guillaume Faye, a prominent ND thinker in the
1970s, claimed that the defence of culture was imperative in an age of
capitalist globalization and rapid immigration, as uncontrolled immigration
harmed both home and host cultures.28 Liberalism, socialism, social
democracy, capitalism, communism, immigration and multiculturalism
were all viewed by the ND as homogenizing ideologies, destructive of
Europe’s rooted cultural, regional and national diversity.
By the late 1980s, Benoist had launched the limited circulation journal
Krisis, which claimed to be ‘neither right nor left’ but at ‘the heart of matters’
and located at ‘the centre of the world’.29 As they faded as political forces in
Europe after 1989, Communism and the Soviet Union were definitively
27 Alain de Benoist, Europe, Tiers monde, même combat (Paris: Robert Laffont 1986), 219;
English translation in Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality, 64.
28 See Guillaume Faye, Le Système à tuer les peuples (Paris: Éditions Copernic 1981).
29 Quoted in Douglas Johnson, ‘The new right in France’, in Luciano Cheles, Ronnie
Ferguson and Michalina Vaughan (eds), The Far Right in Western and Eastern Europe,
2nd edn (London: Longman 1995), 241.
TAMIR BAR-ON 207
replaced by liberalism, capitalism, the United States and the West as

Benoist’s primary enemies.30 In 1990 he bitterly attacked former Front
National (FN, National Front) leader Jean-Marie Le Pen for his excessive
anti-immigrant scapegoating, nationalism, liberalism and Christian tradi-
tionalism.31 And, by the early 1990s, Benoist was collaborating with Telos, a
major leftist journal based in New York, and searching for alliances with
leftists, ecologists, traditionalists and indigenous movements against the
liberal United States, the world’s only remaining superpower.
While Benoist’s stock rose due to well-publicized controversies and his
sheer encyclopaedic output, the ND leader was busy turning the ideologi-
cally insular French ultra-nationalism into a truly pan-national European
phenomenon. Pierre-André Taguieff has demonstrated how Benoist bor-
rowed from left-wing anti-colonialism and the French anthropologist Claude

Lévi-Strauss (1908 2009) to transform the ND in three stages: outright white
racism and superiority in the 1960s; biological racism in the early 1970s; and
cultural racism from the 1980s onwards.32 The ND cleverly co-opted the
notion of a ‘right to difference’ from the French Socialists to insist that France
should be for the French and Algeria for the Algerians. That is, we all have
the right to preserve our cultural, regional or national identities, and the best
place to do so is within our respective territories. This type of politics
furnished the ideological ammunition for contemporary extreme right-wing
political parties such as the French FN, the Italian Lega Nord (LN, Northern
League), and the British National Party (BNP), all of which have claimed
they are not racist but culturally protective of both ‘home’ and ‘host’ cultures
in their wish to end non-white, non-European immigration.33 These extreme
right-wing political parties call their opponents ‘anti-French’ or ‘anti-
English’ ‘racists’ since they promote liberalism and multiculturalism,
allegedly homogenizing ideologies destructive of all rooted national or
regional cultures. This now widespread strategy of inversion, of turning
universalist, multicultural anti-racism into a form of racism, was picked up
from the ND.
What was most shocking about the ND’s ideological makeover was that
it rejected time-honoured pillars of the right: namely, the nation state and
nationalism. Benoist claimed that the French Fifth Republic was destructive
of regional identities, whether Basque, Breton, Corsican or Occitan, all of
which were buried under the notion of the ‘one and indivisible’ French
30 Alain de Benoist, ‘L’ennemi principal’, Éléments, no. 41, March April 1982, 37 40,
45 8; Alain de Benoist, ‘Entretien avec Novopress (2005)’, available online at www.
alaindebenoist.com/pdf/entretien_avec_novo_press.pdf (viewed 20 April 2011).
31 Alain de Benoist, ‘Entretien’, Le Choc du mois, no. 31, July August 1990, 31 3.
32 Pierre-André Taguieff, ‘From race to culture: the New Right’s view of European
identity’, Telos, no. 98 9, Winter 1993 Spring 1994, 34 54.
33 J. G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Pétain to Le Pen (London: Routledge
2007), 237 44.
republic. (Old rightists such as Charles Maurras (1868 1952) had similarly
attacked the French revolutionary state that was born in 1789 for having
destroyed local, regional and linguistic cultures in the process of construct-
ing the ‘one and indivisible’ French republic.) The new goal of the ND would
be a regionally diverse ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’. This ‘Europe of a
Hundred Flags’ would be a pan-national European empire with a hierarch-
ical, authoritarian, corporatist and pagan orientation, cleansed of immigrants
and bent on preserving ethnic homogeneity within the ‘authentic’, historic
regions of Europe.34 While it is true that fascists and Nazis could not
consider such an anti-nationalist conception of the nation as the one
proposed by the ND, the fascists of the interwar years shared with the ND
the goals of empire, authoritarian corporatism and internal homogeneity.
It is fascinating how the ND reinterpreted the ‘right to difference’ in a
transnational or pan-national European framework in order to promote a

‘multiculturalism of the right’, aimed at publicly recognizing differences in
order to preserve the ‘authentic’ regions of Europe against the onslaught of
non-European immigrants.
The goal of a pan-national European empire, one that rejects what ND
thinkers consider to be the excessively pro-capitalist and technocratic
European Union (EU) of today, provided the ND with an ideological
makeover that could increase the transnational thrust of ND ideas. It is no
accident that contemporary extreme right-wing parties such as the French
FN have called for pan-European unity and a more robust geopolitical
alliance against the United States and other potential powers. This is the
same position as the ND leader’s. Like the former FN leader Jean-Marie Le
Pen in France, who scapegoated Arabs at home and yet called them allies
against the United States during the Gulf War, Benoist has supported
radical anti-western regimes in order to challenge the post-Cold War global
hegemony of the United States. In short, the stances of the ND and most
extreme right-wing political parties have become identical: support for
pan-European unity, and rejection of the contemporary ‘technocratic’ EU.
Alain de Benoist: the ND’s transnational messenger
Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien, near

the French city of Tours. He is an intellectual, philosopher and political
commentator. Benoist was the most visible face of the ND at the height of its
media attention in France in the late 1970s. Given the range of his writings*
in areas as diverse as philosophy, politics, cultural anthropology, arts and
sports, and including commentary on the political affairs of the day*as well
34 Bar-On, ‘Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite’; Alberto Spektorowski, ‘Ethnoregionalism:

the intellectual new right and the Lega Nord’, Global Review of Ethnopolitics (now
Ethnopolitics), vol. 2, no. 3 4, 2003, 55 70.
TAMIR BAR-ON 209
as his encyclopaedic knowledge, high profile and prestige, the French

intellectual was able to spread ND ideas beyond a narrow elite circle. These
ideas were further disseminated 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, not
to mention others in Germany, Holland, Spain, Croatia, Romania, Poland
and other European countries. Benoist acted as the ND’s key transnational
messenger throughout Europe. According to Sven Beckert, as quoted earlier,
transnationalism implies ‘networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that
transcend the importance of states. For Benoist and the ND, a web of shared
networks (such as think-tanks, journals and conferences) and beliefs (such as
the extreme and revolutionary right-wing shift from narrow nationalism to a
‘European home’) created processes that transcended the centrality of state
actors. While Benoist and the ND recognized ‘the extraordinary importance’

of states and empires, they also paid attention to ‘networks, processes,
beliefs, and institutions that transcend[ed] these politically defined spaces’.35
The ND reasoned that major changes in belief systems across nations would
eventually result in revolutionary political change.
And, for the ND, revolutionary political change needed revolutionary
intellectuals on a mission to destroy liberalism. Benoist cemented ties with
revolutionary 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). The Nuova Destra emerged in 1974 out of
intellectual exchanges with the French ND.36 Tarchi was formerly a youth
leader of the neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI, Italian Social
Movement) and the editor of the journal Diorama letterario that modelled
itself on the French ND journals created by Benoist. Michael Walker had
been an organizer for the British National Front in central London; he
sheltered the Italian neo-Fascist terrorist Roberto Fiore in the 1980s, and
created the ND-influenced journal The Scorpion. Inspired by the French ND,
Troy Southgate is an avowed National Anarchist who created the New Right
movement in London in 2005 and later the journal New Imperium. Robert
Steuckers, who is considered to be the head of the Belgian New Right, was a
member of GRECE, and is the founder of the journal Vouloir, which was
influenced by Benoist’s ND. Steuckers accused the ND of being overly
metapolitical, and later supported the anti-immigrant political party Vlaams
Blok (Flemish Bloc). Aleksandr Dugin is viewed as one of the most
important proponents of Russian expansionism, ultra-nationalism and
Eurasianism (a European-Asian alliance against the neoliberal United States)
along imperial lines. Dugin is close to the National Bolshevik Party and
Eurasia Movement, which is said to have the ear of leading Russian
35 Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’.

36 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 145.
politicians and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. After contacts were estab-
lished with Benoist in Moscow in the early 1990s, Dugin created a Russian
New Right journal called Elementy, modelled on the French ND’s Éléments.
Benoist briefly served on the editorial board of Elementy, but
resigned because he was troubled by Dugin’s open ultra-nationalism and
antisemitism.37
Today the ND’s influence, particularly Benoist’s writings, can be discerned
in publications as diverse as Telos and The Occidental Quarterly (USA), The
Mankind Quarterly and The Scorpion (UK), Punto y coma and Hespérides
(Spain), Neue Anthropologie (Germany) and Maiastra (Romania). According to
Michael Minkenberg, the ND is intellectually close to the German Neue
Rechte, the New Right in the United Kingdom, the Nieuw Rechts in the
Netherlands and Flanders (Belgium), Forza Nuova in Italy, Imperium
Europa in Malta, and the New Right forces in the United States connected
to Paul Weyrich and the Free Congress Foundation.38 Roger Woods has
demonstrated how the German Neue Rechte, although troubled by its own
special connection to Germany’s extraordinary Nazi genocidal past, was
nonetheless influenced by the ND and especially Benoist, including his
reading of CR thinkers, project of cultural hegemony, critique of modernity,
cultural pessimism, fear of multicultural societies and alarmist predictions
about rising non-western power due to the ‘demographic explosion’ outside
Europe.39
In 1999 Benoist and Charles Champetier (a former head of the French
ND’s youth wing) published the ND manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an
2000’.40 The manifesto was translated into English (‘The French New Right
in the Year 2000’), German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Danish and Hungarian
by ND or ND-friendly journals, including Telos (USA), Junge Freiheit
(Germany), Diorama letterario (Italy), Hespérides (Spain), TeKos (Holland)
and Nomos (Denmark). The manifesto was the first major comprehensive ND
document of the new millennium; it offered an appraisal of the modern (or
postmodern) world and an analysis of the movement’s philosophical
foundations, as well as its positions on contemporary issues such as
immigration, democracy, ecology, supranational organizations and the
market system. In the twenty-first century, Benoist continued to demonstrate
an affinity with revolutionary right-wing authors, publishing a massive four-
volume work on the French right and far-right milieux,41 and a vehement
37 ‘Three interviews with Alain de Benoist’, Telos, no. 98 9, Winter 1993 Spring 1994,
209 10.
38 Michael Minkenberg, ‘The renewal of the radical right: between modernity and anti-
modernity’, Government and Opposition, vol. 35, no. 2, 2000, 170 88.
39 Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics, 25 64.
40 Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, Éléments,
no. 94, February 1999, 10 23.
41 Alain de Benoist, Bibliographie générale des droites françaises, 4 vols (Paris: Dualpha
2004 5).
TAMIR BAR-ON 211
rejection of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, Au-delà des droits de

l’homme (Beyond the Rights of Man).42 He also sought to co-opt New Left
ecological, ‘anti-racist’, ‘anti-fascist’ and democratic discourses in the spirit
of the times. His aims were to destroy liberalism, neo-liberalism, socialism,
social democracy and any communist resurgence, all rooted in a Judaeo-
Christian world-view that was thoroughly egalitarian, and opposed to
natural hierarchies and the need for elite rule.43
Benoist has served as the key messenger of ND ideas within France and
throughout Europe, as well as in the United States, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand and Latin America. Disenso, for example, is an Argentine journal
edited by Alberto Buela that is influenced by ND ideas, and is distributed
throughout Latin America. In Australia and New Zealand ND ideas are
promoted through the site New Right Australia/New Zealand.44 In addition,
the ND is technologically savvy. Benoist’s website provides translations of

his works in eight European languages: French, English, German, Italian,
Spanish, Dutch, Polish and Czech.45 GRECE and Éléments also have
websites,46 and numerous ND journals, from Junge Freiheit in Germany to
Diorama letterario in Italy, have an Internet presence.47 Metapedia, an
‘alternative’ to Wikipedia, was created by ND supporters in Sweden in order
to disseminate ND ideas worldwide.48
Right-wing Gramscianism: a transnational project
As demonstrated above, Alain de Benoist, GRECE and the ND made sure

that their ideas would not be limited to France alone. If the egalitarian
‘poisons’ of communism, liberalism, socialism and social democracy were
to be defeated, it would not merely be in France but throughout Europe. To
counter the alleged cultural hegemony of the liberal-left in Europe, due to
the profound impact of the 1968 generation on European culture, Benoist
created an organizational framework, including journals, think-tanks,
conferences and links to centre-right and extreme right-wing political
42 Alain de Benoist, Au-delà des droits de l’homme: pour défendre les libertés (Paris: Krisis
2004).
43 Alain de Benoist, La Cause des peuples (Paris: Éditions du Labyrinthe 1982), 167 84.
44 New Right Australia/New Zealand is available online at http://newrightausnz.blogs
pot.com (viewed 20 April 2011).
45 The website Les Amis d’Alain de Benoist is available online at www.alaindebenoist.com
46 GRECE’s website is available online at http://grece-fr.com (viewed 26 April 2011); the
Éléments website is available online at www.revue-elements.com/index.php (viewed
20 April 2011).
47 The websites of Junge Freiheit and Diorama letterario are available online at
www.jungefreiheit.de and www.diorama.it, respectively (both viewed 20 April 2011).
48 Metapedia is available online at www.metapedia.org (viewed 20 April 2011).
movements and parties throughout Europe. If leftist internationalism was to

be defeated, a right-wing Europeanism (or internationalism) was needed,
reasoned Benoist. In line with Beckert’s idea that ‘networks, processes,
beliefs, and institutions’ can transcend the importance of states and empires,
the ND used its novel ‘Gramscianism of the right’ to focus on changing
European civil society rather than governments per se.
To win the hearts and minds of key European elites and the masses of
Europeans on key issues such as regional and national identity, immigration,
liberal multiculturalism, the failure of capitalist globalization, the rising tide
of Islamism and the future of the EU, Benoist borrowed from Antonio
Gramsci. Gramsci died in a Fascist-controlled clinic and remains a hero for
the Italian left. He understood that liberal democracy survived not because
of a repressive apparatus of the state, but due to cultural hegemony in civil

society. Using a version of Gramsci shorn of its class-based analysis and
implications, Benoist sought to control the ‘laboratories of thought’
throughout Europe, whether in the mass media, schools, universities, the
art world or on the Internet. He sought to influence the key decision-makers
in France, as well as to create contacts with like-minded intellectuals, think-
tanks, journals and movements beyond France. In the spirit of the age, he
also cleverly downplayed his ties to the extreme right, and increased his
dialogue with leftists and ecologists. He made it known that the ND was
neither fascist nor racist, and certainly not against democracy.49
Was the ND’s Gramscian project designed to create a ‘right-wing
international’?50 The ND was in no position to do so since it was largely a
cultural movement with no real political power in any European state in the
post-1968 period. What the ND was more interested in accomplishing was
creating a chasm between key European cultural and political elites and the
masses of Europeans, on the one hand, and the current rulers of European
states and the EU, on the other. Should key European elites accept the anti-
egalitarian, anti-liberal, anti-multicultural theses of the ND, political change
would necessarily follow for the rulers would fear a loss of legitimacy in the
eyes of the mass of Europeans.
As the history of the European left shows, left-wing internationalism was
able to achieve a remarkable degree of unity in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries by creating political movements, trade unions and
political parties that challenged liberal democracy. The left had great cultural
power worldwide, and the support of a major world superpower, the
Communist USSR. Yet there were divisions within it, including pro-war
49 Benoist supports ‘direct’, ethnic democracy as opposed to ‘representative’ democracy.

He has even regretted that the ND intellectual Tomislav Sunic wrote a book with the
‘inappropriate’ title Against Democracy and Equality. See Alain de Benoist, ‘The
European New Right forty years later: Tomislav Sunic’s Against Democracy and
Equality’, Occidental Quarterly, vol. 9, no. 1, 2009, 61 74 (64).
50 Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 141 63.
TAMIR BAR-ON 213
leftists versus anti-war leftists in the First World War, revolutionaries versus
social democrats, Maoists versus Leninists, to name just a few.
Similarly, the right has its divisions, and a right-wing internationalism
uniting all the rights is impossible. The ND, for example, is a right that is
metapolitical, pagan, anti-Judaeo-Christian and pro-regionalist, while also
claiming to be ‘anti-capitalist’. The ND’s ‘anti-capitalism’ entails a rejection
of an economic system in which profit is the highest value and cultures are
homogenized as a result of the logic of the market, and a degree of nostalgia
for a pre-modern era before the emergence of globalized capital. The ND
distances itself from the monarchical counter-revolutionary right, the
Catholic nationalist right, the Anglo-American New Right, the extreme
right, neo-fascism, neo-Nazism and the conservative right. As does the left,
the right consists of a diversity of ideological tendencies, and they do not all
have the same tactics or goals.
Having said that, there is a degree of co-operation possible between
different right-wing tendencies, particularly if they belong to the revolu-
tionary right milieu. The revolutionary right wants to radically overturn
liberalism, socialism, capitalism, communism, social democracy, parliamen-
tarism and the egalitarian heritage of the 1789 French Revolution. The
revolutionary right is not necessarily anti-modern, and is willing to use
modern technology and the state in the service of rooted cultural, regional
and national identities. Among these revolutionary right-wing forces, we
might include the ND, elements within the French FN, conservative
revolutionaries, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, Third Positionists, National
Anarchists and National Bolsheviks. Ideological kinship against the ‘ab-
stract’ Rights of Man and multiculturalism, as well as a desire to create an
elitist, hierarchical, authoritarian, secular and often pan-national European
political framework, link the aforementioned revolutionary right-wing
tendencies. The ND and the FN might differ on tactics and specifics, but
they share an antipathy for liberalism, immigration, multiculturalism and
the United States, thus making co-operation possible. It is no accident that
some key ND figures like Pierre Vial moved to the FN in the early 1980s. The
1999 ND manifesto, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, with its goals of
stopping immigration into Europe and changing the basis of French
citizenship in favour of common ethnic origins and away from civic
republican values, would certainly win the approval of the FN and other
anti-immigrant parties throughout Europe.51
Fascist Italy of course attempted to create a ‘fascist international’ as early
as 1925. This project funded fascist movements throughout Europe that were
modelled on Mussolini’s Italian Fascism. Fascist internationalism was later
promoted by Nazi Germany as it became the de facto leader of European
fascism after 1933. Although fascism was nationalistic and a proponent of
51 Benoist and Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’.

national sovereignty, it had no problem with militaristic expansionism or the

creation of a ‘fascist international’ that challenged the sovereignty of local
fascisms.
In the period after the defeat of Fascism and Nazism, pan-European neo-
fascists also tried to create a ‘right-wing international’. A pan-European
fascist gathering was held in Malmö, Sweden in 1951, including neo-fascists
from fourteen European countries calling for a pan-national European
fascism. The Belgian Jean Thiriart and the former leader of the British
Union of Fascists, Oswald Mosley, were among the participants. They
shifted away from narrow nationalism towards a pan-national Europeanism,
and argued that fascism needed to be more tactically astute if it were to be
reborn in an ‘anti-fascist’ age. The French neo-fascist Maurice Bardèche, a
participant at the Malmö meeting, argued that fascism would re-emerge one
day, but as part of a pan-European project harking back to the European
values of the SS and the pan-European Nazi brigades.52
Following Beckert’s logic in which ‘processes, beliefs, and institutions’
transcend the ‘politically defined spaces’ of states, Martin Durham and
Margaret Power’s edited collection demonstrates how the right in general
(that is, fascists, neo-fascists, the extreme right and conservatives) organizes
across national barriers, linking together movements in different states.53
Andrea Mammone has shown how French and Italian neo-fascists, including
the ND, created united national fronts in reaction to the events of May
1968.54 He also demonstrates how French neo-fascist groups such as Ordre
Nouveau (New Order) and the FN were influenced by Italy’s neo-fascist
MSI, the most successful neo-fascist or extreme right-wing party in post-
Second World War Europe until the dramatic rise of the French FN in the
1980s. Founded in 1946 by former Italian Fascists sympathetic to the pro-
Nazi Italian Social Republic (1943 5), the MSI consistently gained between 5
and 9 per cent of the national vote from 1948 to 1972. It became the model for
the foundation of the French FN under its charismatic leader Jean-Marie Le
Pen. Mammone also points out that it was a British party, the National Front,
that influenced the discourse shifts of the French FN, and that Nick Griffin,
the English leader of the BNP in the European Parliament since 2009, had
strong ties with Italian neo-fascists. Furthermore, international fascists met
in Milan in 2009, and there is also an extreme right-wing group of European
MPs.
The pan-European SS Brigades from Bosnia and Croatia in the Balkans to
Latvia and Ukraine in the East testify to the existence of this ‘fascist
52 Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, 35 7.

53 Martin Durham and Margaret Power (eds), New Perspectives on the Transnational Right
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2011).
54 Andrea Mammone, ‘The transnational reaction to 1968: neo-fascist fronts and political
cultures in France and Italy’, Contemporary European History, vol. 17, no. 2, 2008,
213 36.
TAMIR BAR-ON 215
international’ during the Second World War. In the interwar years, fascist
ideas spread throughout Europe as well as to Japan, South Africa, Chile,
Argentina and Brazil.55 Stanley Payne, an eminent historian of fascism,
insists that fascism emerged in Ba’athist Iraq in the regime of Saddam
Hussein, which neatly fulfilled Payne’s maximalist definition of fascism as to
ideology and goals, negations, and organization and style.56 Aristotle Kallis
has shown how the union of fascism and genocide was a pan-European
project that reached its apogee in Nazi Germany.57 The drive for a new
beginning that would eliminate the ‘decadence’ associated with modernity,
liberalism and socialism, according to Roger Griffin, was shared by Fascist
Italy and Nazi Germany.58 It is evident from this overview that there were
numerous historical models of pan-Europeanism or internationalism on the
right available to the ND.

As for the efficacy of the ND’s Gramscian strategy, its ideas and discourse
shifts soon spread to French political figures and parties on the centre-right and
the extreme right, including former President Giscard d’Estaing, Interior
Minister Michel Poniatowski (in the governments of Jacques Chirac and
Raymond Barre), the Gaullist politician Alain Devaquet, and the FN leader
Jean-Marie Le Pen.59 ND discourse formulations, such as the ‘right to difference’
or ‘anti-French racism’, and personnel, such as Pierre Vial, Yvan Blot and Jean-
Yves Le Gallou, migrated to the FN in the early 1980s after the victory of French
Socialist François Mitterand in the presidential election of 1981.60
Marina Peunova and Anton Shekhovtsov have shown how the ND’s
geopolitical ideas, as interpreted by Aleksandr Dugin and the political
philosopher Aleksandr Panarin (1940 2003), have influenced the Russian
New Right, and found the ear of key Russian political elites.61 The entire
spectrum of European extreme right-wing political groupings, from the
Italian LN to Vlaams Belang (Flemish Interest) in Belgium, has been
influenced by the anti-immigrant French FN and the ‘politically correct’
55 See the essays on ‘Non-European fascisms’, in Griffin (ed.), Fascism, 228 41.
56 Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism, 191945 (London: UCL Press 1995), 516.
57 Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: The Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (New
York: Routledge 2009).
58 Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2007).
59 Shields, The Extreme Right in France from Pétain to Le Pen, 154 7.
60 Tom McCulloch, ‘The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: ideology and entryism,
the relationship with the Front National’, French Politics, vol. 4, no. 2, 2006, 158 78.
61 Marina Peunova, ‘An eastern incarnation of the European New Right: Aleksandr
Panarin and new Eurasianist discourse in contemporary Russia’, Journal of Con-
temporary European Studies, vol. 16, no. 3, 2008, 407 19; Anton Shekhovtsov,
‘Aleksandr Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism: the New Right à la Russe’, Religion Compass,
vol. 3, no. 4, 2009, 697 716; Anton Shekhovstov, ‘The palingenetic thrust of Russian
neo-Eurasianism: ideas of rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s worldview’, Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions (now Politics, Religion & Ideology), vol. 9, no. 4,
2008, 491 506.
language (anti-racist and pro-democracy) of the ND. If extreme right-wing

political forces have been flourishing all over Europe since the mid-1990s, it is
in part due to the cultural influence of the ND. The MSI-Alleanza Nazionale
(National Alliance) and the LN in Italy,62 and the Freiheitliche Partei
Österreichs (Austrian Freedom Party) in Austria participated in national
coalitions in 1994, 2001, 2008 (Italy), and 2000 (Austria). These political parties
claimed to be ‘post-fascist’ and ‘anti-fascist’, discursive shifts borrowed from
the ND. They also ended the post-Second World War taboo against co-
operating with neo-fascist or extreme right-wing parties as part of a broad
anti-fascist consensus. These changes speak to the cultural shift in attitudes
towards liberalism, multiculturalism and the mainstream political class since
the 1980s, a shift that the ND helped to shape. It is only a matter of time,
reasons Benoist, that ND ideas will be the dominant and ruling ideas of
Europe. It only needs a shift in political circumstances that allows key

European elites and the mass public to ‘convert’ to them, as they did en masse
to ‘fourth way’ political ideologies throughout Europe in the interwar years.63
New political spaces post-1989: the ND’s strange alliances
New political spaces opened for the ND as a result of the decline of the left
and the collapse of Communist regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in
1991. The left tumbled to new electoral lows throughout Europe in the 1990s
and beyond. Whereas, in 1976, the Italian Communist Party garnered an
impressive 36 per cent of the popular vote and was on the verge of joining a
‘historic compromise’ national government, by the 2008 Italian elections for
the Chamber of Deputies, the hard left could only manage a paltry 4 per cent
of the vote. Communist candidates throughout Europe from France to
Germany were decimated in the polls, and some critics wondered whether
there was a left left. The left had already been discredited by the experience
of ‘real existing socialism’ and the so-called ‘new philosophers’ of
the 1970s,64 including terrible revelations about the Soviet gulags and the
machinations of the totalitarian Communist states.
62 The AN became the successor to the MSI in 1995. In 2009 the AN dissolved and joined
Silvio Berlusconi’s centre-right Il Popolo della Libertà (The People of Freedom). At the
time of writing in 2011, Il Popolo della Libertà is Italy’s governing party.
63 By ‘fourth way’, I mean a revolutionary political ideology that rejects liberal, socialist
and conservative solutions for Europe’s ‘ills’. See Tamir Bar-On, ‘Understanding
political conversion and mimetic rivalry’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions
(now Politics, Religion & Ideology), vol. 10, no. 3 4, 2009, 241 64.
64 The nouveaux philosophes* who received widespread press coverage in France and
abroad in the late 1970s* included Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and Jean-
Marie Benoist, who broke with Marxism and their often Maoist pasts. They were
heavily indebted, in turn, to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Michel Foucault and Jacques
Lacan.
TAMIR BAR-ON 217
The vacuum created by the left’s precipitous decline and a questioning of

the certainties of a left right political spectrum led the ND to embrace
apparently odd political alliances. The movement was always uneasy with
a right-wing categorization, arguing that the label ‘nouvelle droite’ was
imposed on the ND by its critics. Louis Pauwels, the editor of Le Figaro who
invited Benoist to write in his paper, insisted the ND was on the right, but a
‘new right’ that had nothing to do with the old right, fascism or reactionary
and bourgeois conservatism.65 This despite the fact that, for more than forty
years, the ND had vehemently rejected egalitarianism, the key plank of both
liberalism and socialism. However, Benoist was prophetic when he said in
the late 1970s that, although he was a man of the right since he rejected
egalitarianism, he could imagine himself one day on the left.66 With
Communism and the Soviet Union gone as the principal enemies of the
right, in the 1990s Benoist’s new enemies became liberalism and the United
States. Anne-Marie Duranton-Crabol points out that Benoist’s shift from
anti-communism to anti-liberalism dates back to the early 1980s when he
declared that he was willing to vote for the French Communist Party and
wear the helmet of the Red Army rather than eat a study diet of hamburgers
in Brooklyn.67 In 1988 Benoist founded the journal Krisis, which has
increasingly blurred political boundaries and sought dialogue between
rightists, leftists, ecologists and anti-western anti-utilitarians.
In the 1990s the political climate shifted to the right in both economic
(neoliberal) and cultural terms, which assisted the ND and extreme right-
wing political parties.68 Contemporary issues*such as the insecurities
associated with globalization, the excesses of capitalist modernity (rampant
socio-economic inequality, the attack on the welfare state, corruption and
global financial scandals), malaise about the EU project, the questioning of
immigration and multiculturalism, rising Islamism in the post-9/11 climate,
the environment, the demise of direct democracy, and the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq*paved the way for new political alliances. These
new alliances suited the ND’s ideological preference for the destruction of its
primary enemies: liberalism and the United States. In the mid-1980s Benoist
had also increasingly turned anti-colonial and anti-western, borrowing from
postcolonial theory and the left. Traditional conservatives, indigenous
movements, ecological groups and anti-western movements and regimes
that rejected capitalism, communism, neoliberalism and the United States all
deserved the support of the ND. As a defender of traditional European
cultures, the ND and former Third World anti-colonial states had a common
cause: fighting the rapid ‘westernization of the world’ built on the ‘false’
65 Louis Pauwels, France-Soir, 29 March 1979.

66 Benoist, Vu de droite, 22 5.
67 Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite, 46.
68 Piero Ignazi, Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press
2006), 22 6.
promises by capitalism and communism of permanent progress.69 Benoist

argued that the United States and its liberal ideology, spread worldwide
through arms, ‘soft power’ and neoliberal capitalism, would be defeated
when all the anti-capitalist forces of the right, left and beyond were united
against it. Benoist saw no greater danger to the survival of world cultures in
human history than the United States.
One example of the strange alliances promoted by the ND in a
transnational spirit is Benoist being invited to write in the New Left journal
Telos. Both the revolutionary right and the New Left were searching, after the
fall of the Soviet Union, for alliances in order to defeat liberalism, unfettered
capitalism, parliamentarism and the United States. In 1993 4 Telos published
a special double issue on the ND. In it, the editor of Telos, Paul Piccone, asked
whether the ND was not the New Left in disguise?70 Piccone insisted that the
ND had swallowed whole most of the ideals of the American and French
New Left, such as rejection of the socialist and liberal ‘new class’,
regionalism, direct democracy and vehement anti-Americanism. He argued
that Benoist had nothing to do with fascism or the old right (a false claim
given the ND’s indebtedness to the German CR thinkers who influenced
Nazism), but was seeking to create a new political paradigm. The ND leader
must have been in heaven. He was being published by a prestigious left-
leaning journal in culturally sophisticated New York, and its editor was
defending Benoist’s decidedly anti-egalitarian project.
I am not suggesting that the ND is fascist, or that it works inside an
explicitly fascist tradition. In reality, the ND is indebted to the CR tradition
that sought an ‘anti-fascist fascism’ (that is, an anti-regime fascism) for
Germany in the interwar years. Moreover, the ND has never definitively
broken out of the CR milieu. Historical fascism was born as a union of
contradictory political ideologies: ultra-nationalism and socialist revision-
ism. Zeev Sternhell insists that fascism as an ideology was first born in
France between the 1880s and eve of the First World War.71 Most
historiography claims that fascism was born as a movement and a party
in Italy in 1919 under the guidance of Benito Mussolini, who united a
collection of ultra-nationalist war veterans, syndicalists and renegade
socialists. Benoist would have been familiar with all these interwar
tendencies on the right and the left, as well as influenced by the ‘non-
conformists’ of the 1930s, such as Alexandre Marc in France and like-minded
69 Bryan Sylvian, ‘European son: an interview with Alain de Benoist’, Occidental Quarterly,
vol. 5, no. 3, 2005, 7 27 (27); Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World: The
Significance, Scope and Limits of the Drive towards Global Uniformity, trans. from the French
by Rosemary Morris (Cambridge and Cambridge, MA: Polity Press 1996).
70 Paul Piccone, ‘Confronting the French New Right: old prejudices or a new political
paradigm?’, Telos, no. 98 9, Winter 1993 Spring 1994, 3 23.
71 Zeev Sternhell, with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From
Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, trans. from the French by David Maisel
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1994).
TAMIR BAR-ON 219
groups in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany.72 These political tendencies

were all guided not by a ‘third way’ politics, as Roger Eatwell suggests,73 but
a ‘fourth way’ that looked to a new model of secular politics and economics
that superseded traditional conservatism, socialism and liberalism. Benoist’s
ND resurrected the idea of a ‘fourth way’ within a pan-national European
framework, while remaining sufficiently tactically astute to avoid overt links
with fascism, racism and antisemitism.
The ND’s world-view: a transnational ideological cocktail
ND ideas have spread beyond France to intellectuals, think-tanks and centre-

right and extreme right-wing movements and parties in Italy, Germany,
Belgium, Holland, Spain, England, Romania, Poland, Russia and other

European countries. These ideas have largely been influenced by right-wing
thinking in France and other European countries such as Germany, left-wing
thinkers from Italy (the key influence of Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci),
and the European and American New Left (Frankfurt School thinkers such
as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse), as well as left-
wing, anti-western anti-colonialism (Claude Lévi-Strauss and Serge La-
touche). Other ND influences include French pre-Marxist socialists, Italian
syndicalists and North American neo-communitarian thinkers like Amitai
Etzioni and Charles Taylor. Apart from the neo-communitarians, what all
these have had in common is a radical rejection of liberalism, unfettered
capitalism, representative democracy and the United States.
Benoist was undoubtedly rooted in the cultural traditions of the old
French right, be they the writings of the counter-revolutionary thinker
Joseph de Maistre, Maurice Barrès (who valorized the ultra-nationalist
trinity of blood, soil and the dead), Robert Brasillach (the French fascist
writer executed by firing squad in 1945) or Charles Maurras. Maurras was
the head of the royalist, ultra-nationalist, antisemitic and extra-parliamen-
tary Action Française, founded in 1899. He acted as the model for the
metapolitics of a more sophisticated ND in the post-fascist age.74 While
Benoist did not explicitly emerge out of any of these old right French
milieux, he was in fact indebted to all of them.
Benoist’s main cultural influences, however, came from Germany and the
German-speaking world: Friedrich Nietzsche’s anti-democratic, anti-Judaeo-
Christian elitism, and CR thinkers from Carl Schmitt to Moeller van den
Bruck. The Swiss thinker Armin Mohler was influential in imbuing Benoist
72 John Hellman, The Communitarian Third Way: Alexandre Marc and Ordre Nouveau,
19302000 (Montreal, Kingston and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press 2002),
192 200.
73 Roger Eatwell, Fascism: A History (London: Vintage 1996).
74 Duranton-Crabol, Visages de la nouvelle droite, 22 3.
with the CR’s elitism, ultra-nationalism, warrior ethic, spherical view of

history and fusion of hyper-modern technological and economic proposals
for revolutionary national-authoritarian renewal against liberal and socialist
‘decadence’ and the rootedness of cultural conservatism.75
If Benoist’s main right-wing influence, the CR, originated in Germany, his
key left-wing influences also travelled from abroad: the Italian Marxist
Gramsci and the American New Left. Benoist was also influenced by the
French New Left, including Guy Debord (1931 94) and Henri Lebevre
(1901 91). It is rather fascinating how the most sophisticated and distinctive
extreme right-wing current of thought in the post-war era*namely, pagan,
ethnic differentialist, anti-colonial, anti-nationalist and technically non-
violent*was born in France and helped to shape a genuinely European
New Right. Yet this European New Right was itself a product of influences,
which synthesized French and German right-wing thinkers with left-wing,
New Left and anti-colonial traditions from Italy, France, the United States
and the Third World. The defeat of the French right after the loss of French
Algeria and the questioning of open racism had convinced ND thinkers like
Benoist that anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon (1925 61) were
right: anti-colonialism, national sovereignty, the revolt of the colonized
slaves and the rejection of overt racism would increasingly be the face of
global politics in the 1970s and beyond.
In being shaped by diverse European ideological and philosophical
influences and, in turn, shaping numerous European national political
cultures, the French ND had become a truly transnational phenomenon in
the new millennium. The ND world-view was the product of transnational
influences and it simultaneously played a major role in reorienting the
culture of the extreme right-wing milieu in a more pan-national European
direction. In line with Beckert’s framework, the ND has proven that the
spread of networks and beliefs across national borders does not necessarily
supplant the importance of states, but creates new ties of belonging that may
compete with, complement or subvert the loyalty of citizens with respect to
their states.
It should be stressed that the ND’s transnational world-view is what Roger
Griffin calls a ‘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’.76 The ND’s ‘French Nouvelle Droite dans l’an 2000’, as a
manifesto, is a pastiche of modern, postmodern and pre-modern philoso-
phies. Apparently ‘incompatible’ left- and right-wing traditions (that is, CR
and New Left) co-exist with scientific and mythical world-views, including
75 Benoist, Vu de droite, 31 48; Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, 351 3.

76 Roger Griffin’s Foreword, ‘Another face? Another mazeway? Reflections on the
newness and rightness of the European New Right’, in Bar-On, Where Have All the
Fascists Gone?, xiii.
TAMIR BAR-ON 221
the promotion of rituals harking back to Europe’s distant pagan past. The ND
does not use the term ‘anti-modern’ but rather the ‘politically correct’ ‘pre-
modern’ in order to avoid any association with the longstanding suspicion
(dating from the French Revolution) that the right is the carrier of ‘anti-
modern values’ and populated by political players who reject the republican
values of 1789.
Lessons for fighting racism and the extreme right
This article has attempted to demonstrate that what began as a French

metapolitical movement around the heady days of revolutionary activities in
May 1968 has been transformed into a transnational political phenomenon.
While born in France, the ND’s world-view is a product of transnational

influences and has helped to shape a decidedly more right-wing political
culture in Europe in a transnational spirit. The French ND has increasingly
been dubbed the ‘European New Right’, which highlights the transnational
impact of its ideas on the European continent at large. As the ND lost its
influence in French politics after its apogee in 1979, its ideas gained greater
transnational currency in the 1990s and into the new millennium due to the
dramatic political decline of the left after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991.
I argue that the transnational impact of ND ideas is related to three key
ingredients: first, the encyclopaedic intellectual output and prestige of
French ND leader Alain de Benoist, who has acted as the uniting figure
and transnational messenger of ND ideas throughout Europe and beyond;
second, the ‘right-wing Gramscianism’ of the pan-European ND project,
which mimicked earlier attempts to unite interwar fascists and post-war
neo-fascists into the revolutionary right; and, finally, the political space
opened up by the dramatic decline of the European left and Communist
regimes after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. In order to understand the
ND’s transnational project, I point to Sven Beckert’s notion of ‘the
interconnectedness of human history as a whole’, the acknowledgement of
‘the extraordinary importance of states and empires’, and ‘attention to
networks, processes, beliefs, and institutions’ that transcend the ‘politically
defined spaces’ of states.
Recent transnational research demonstrates that the right, like the left,
thinks and acts transnationally in what has been simultaneously called the
age of ‘globalization’, ‘postmodernity’, ‘information’ and ‘networks’. In fact,
the right’s transnational links in the interwar years pre-date the qualitative
changes of the global environment in the new millennium. If the rhetoric of
the left was always more transnational, as in Marx’s famous dictum
‘Workers of the World Unite!’, it is also true that the mimetic rival of the
revolutionary left, the revolutionary right, theorized and behaved through a
transnational lens. The ND is one such revolutionary right-wing movement
that continues to build transnational networks in the contemporary period,
particularly throughout Europe. If all the rights are not the same and some
rights, like the ND, today increasingly resemble the left on the surface, this
has not stopped the ND’s pan-European ambitions along Gramscian lines.77
Despite the ND’s turn towards the left, New Left and ecological movements
in the post-Communist period,78 as well as its ‘anti-fascist’ and ‘anti-racist’
formulations, the ND ultimately seeks a return to ‘common origins’,79 based
on pan-national European, authoritarian, imperial factors and according
to which ethnic belonging trumps republican, civic values. The ND desires
the reversal of administrative equality and multiculturalism throughout
Europe.
The rise in support for extreme right-wing political parties throughout
Europe in the new millennium, the continuing rejection of Muslim Turkey as
an EU member, the 2009 referendum on the banning of minarets in
Switzerland, and the 2010 government law in France banning the wearing
of veils in public places highlight the cultural shift in Europe against
liberalism, multiculturalism and immigration, as well as rising fears
associated with the figure of the Islamic Other. This cultural shift is born
of real material and political problems in Europe, but it has been cultivated
by ND theorists and has influenced civil society and state actors alike in
some European countries, such as France and Italy, more than in others. The
metapolitical project the ND began in 1968 is finally paying off for Benoist
and company. Liberals and leftists should be concerned. While the ND today
claims to be the heir of the failed leftist revolutionaries of 1968, its project is
born of a revolutionary right-wing world-view that seeks to abolish liberal
democracy through legal and metapolitical channels.
The ND’s ‘politically correct’ discourse, which is allegedly ‘anti-racist’,
‘anti-fascist’, ‘anti-nationalist’ (or pro-regionalist and pan-European) and
‘anti-antisemitic’, is coded to suit the changing times. For those concerned
with fighting racism and antisemitism, it must be clear that open racists and
fascists are becoming an extinct species. Furthermore, the tasks of fighting
racism and a revived ‘metapolitical fascism’ have become complicated
since the ND wages its ‘wars’ against liberalism, equality, representative
democracy and multiculturalism not by using castor oil and fists, but by
seeking to win the hearts and minds of the majority of Europeans and key state
elites. Moreover, stigmatization of the Other may come in new forms, like the
ND’s ‘multiculturalism of the right’, which paradoxically recognizes the right
77 Examples of ND pieces that, on the surface, seem left-wing are Alain de Benoist,
‘Hayek: a critique’, Telos, no. 110, Winter 1998, 71 104; and Alain de Benoist,
‘Confronting globalization’, Telos, no. 108, Summer 1996, 117 37.
78 Alain de Benoist, Demain, la décroissance! Penser l’écologie jusqu’au bout (Paris: Edite
2007).
79 The phrase is from the manifesto ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’, section 2, clause 8.
See Benoist and Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’.
TAMIR BAR-ON 223
of others to be ‘different’ (for example, to wear Islamic veils), in order to

exclude non-Europeans from the continent.80
Tamir Bar-On is Full Professor in the Department of International Relations

and Humanities at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de
Monterrey (ITESM), Campus Querétaro, in Mexico. He is the author of Where
Have All the Fascists Gone? (Ashgate 2007) and Modernism and the European
New Right: The Search for Alternative Modernity (Palgrave Macmillan forth-
coming 2011).
80 For Benoist’s defence of the right of Muslim women to wear the hijab in France in
May 2004, see Alain de Benoist, ‘Sur le foulard islamique* Réponse à une enquête
(2004)’, available online at www.alaindebenoist.com/pdf/sur_le_foulard_islamique.pdf

Transnationalism and The French Nouvelle

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Transnationalism and The French Nouvelle

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On: 08 August 2011, At : 05: 44

Transnationalism and the French

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Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite

KEYWORDS Alain de Benoist, anti-racism, Conservative Revolution, European New

an Tyrrell insists that transnational history ‘concerns the movement of

transnational phenomena, but rather the contemporary French Nouvelle

3 Sven Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’,

penned In Stahlgewittern,8 a hymn to First World War soldierly virtues). The

strategy, including its desire to form alliances with disgruntled Communists.

and centre-right and extreme-right political parties have been analysed, a

later joined the vehemently anti-Marxist, ultra-nationalist and pro-French

tendencies; second, to reject the right’s dominant parliamentary and extra-

addition, GRECE’s 1998 collection, Le Mai 68 de la nouvelle droite, showed the

Benoist could disingenuously claim that contemporary liberal states were

replaced by liberalism, capitalism, the United States and the West as

rowed from left-wing anti-colonialism and the French anthropologist Claude

transnational or pan-national European framework in order to promote a

Alain de Benoist: the ND’s transnational messenger

Alain de Benoist was born on 11 December 1943 in Saint-Symphorien, near

34 Bar-On, ‘Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite’; Alberto Spektorowski, ‘Ethnoregionalism:

as his encyclopaedic knowledge, high profile and prestige, the French

actors. While Benoist and the ND recognized ‘the extraordinary importance’

35 Beckert, in the symposium ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’.

rejection of the French revolutionary principles of 1789, Au-delà des droits de

the ND is technologically savvy. Benoist’s website provides translations of

Right-wing Gramscianism: a transnational project

As demonstrated above, Alain de Benoist, GRECE and the ND made sure

movements and parties throughout Europe. If leftist internationalism was to

of a repressive apparatus of the state, but due to cultural hegemony in civil

49 Benoist supports ‘direct’, ethnic democracy as opposed to ‘representative’ democracy.

51 Benoist and Champetier, ‘La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000’.

national sovereignty, it had no problem with militaristic expansionism or the

52 Bardèche, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme?, 35 7.

right available to the ND.

language (anti-racist and pro-democracy) of the ND. If extreme right-wing

Europe. It only needs a shift in political circumstances that allows key

New political spaces post-1989: the ND’s strange alliances

The vacuum created by the left’s precipitous decline and a questioning of

65 Louis Pauwels, France-Soir, 29 March 1979.

promises by capitalism and communism of permanent progress.69 Benoist

groups in France, Italy, Belgium and Germany.72 These political tendencies

The ND’s world-view: a transnational ideological cocktail

ND ideas have spread beyond France to intellectuals, think-tanks and centre-

Belgium, Holland, Spain, England, Romania, Poland, Russia and other

with the CR’s elitism, ultra-nationalism, warrior ethic, spherical view of

75 Benoist, Vu de droite, 31 48; Mohler, ‘German nihilism’, 351 3.

Lessons for fighting racism and the extreme right

This article has attempted to demonstrate that what began as a French

While born in France, the ND’s world-view is a product of transnational

of others to be ‘different’ (for example, to wear Islamic veils), in order to

Tamir Bar-On is Full Professor in the Department of International Relations

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