Far-Right Politics in Europe

319 Pages·2017·13.596 MB·English

by  Jean-Yves Camus, Nicolas Lebourg

Far- Right Politics in Europe
7

Far- Right
Politics
in Eu rope
Jean- Yves Camus
Nicolas Lebourg
translated by jane marie todd
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts
London, England
2017
Copyright © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First Printing
This book was originally published as Les droites extrêmes en
Eu rope © Éditions du Seuil, 2015
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Camus, Jean- Yves, 1958– author. | Lebourg, Nicolas, 1974– author.
Title: Far- right politics in Eu rope / Jean- Yves Camus and
Nicolas Lebourg ; translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Other titles: Droites extrêmes en Eu rope. En glish
Description: Cambridge, Mas sa chu setts : The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2017. | “This book was originally published
as Les droites extrêmes en Eu rope © Éditions du Seuil, 2015”—
Title page verso. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016042033 | ISBN 9780674971530 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Right- wing extremists— Europe. | Po liti cal culture— Europe. |
Europe— Politics and government—21st  century.
Classification: LCC JC573.2.E85 C3613 2017 | DDC 320.53/3094— dc23
LC rec ord available at https:// lccn . loc . gov / 2016042033
Contents
Introduction: How the Far Right Came into Being 1
1 What to Do after Fascism? 53
2 White Power 98
3 The New Right in All Its Diversity 120
4 Religious Fundamentalism 152
5 The Populist Parties 178
6 What’s New to the East? 210
Conclusion: Might the Far Right Cease to Be? 250
Notes 257
Acknowl edgments 293
Index 295

Far- Right Politics in Eu rope
7

Introduction: How the
Far Right Came into Being
The expression “far right” has dominated commentary and analy sis
of the French po liti cal scene ever since the Front National (FN;
National Front) began to have success at the polls in the mid-1980s.
Outside France, events as diverse as the inclusion in the Austrian
government of the Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (FPÖ) under
the leadership of Jörg Haider (2000), the race riots in Burnley, Brad-
ford, and Oldham in the United Kingdom (2001), and the attacks
committed by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway (2011) have made
the term even more familiar. Its fundamental ambiguity lies in the
fact that it is generally used by po liti cal adversaries of the “far right”
to disqualify and stigmatize all forms of partisan nationalism by
reducing them to the historical experiments of Italian Fascism,
German National Socialism, and national variations more or less
close to them from the first half of the twentieth c entury. The label
“far right” is practically never used by those who belong to it:1 they
prefer to call themselves a “national movement” or the “national
right.”
All the scholarly lit er a ture concurs that a family of far- right par-
ties does exist, however. Nonetheless, belief in the universality of
demo cratic values does not automatically entail the idea that the
split between right and left is atemporal or universal. The “far right”