BarOn FrenchNewRight 2014

The French New Right: Neither Right, nor Left?
Author(s): Tamir Bar-On

Source: Journal for the Study of Radicalism , Vol. 8, No. 1 (Spring 2014), pp. 1-44
Published by: Michigan State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/jstudradi.8.1.0001
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TAMIR BAR-ON
The French New Right

Neither Right, nor Left?
L
ed by Alain de Benoist (b. 1943), the French nouvelle droite (ND—
New Right) is a school of thought that was created in 1968 and saw
its intellectual and political apogee in the France of the late 1970s.
The ND focused on the cultural terrain to differentiate itself from extreme
right-wing political parties and ultranationalist terrorist movements.
Second, the ND valorizes an illiberal, pagan political legacy, which is
antagonistic to counterrevolutionary, conservative, and Anglo-American
(neoliberal) right-wing traditions, and uneasy about fascism. It was
accused of “fascism with a human face” by elements of the liberal-left
intelligentsia in France in two mass media “storms” in 1979 and 1993.
Third, the ND’s ideological syncretism and its antiliberal and anticapitalist
“leftist” drift beginning in the 1980s puzzled political commentators. Yet,
using Norberto Bobbio’s inequality-equality schism to position right and
left,1 ND thinkers are more on the right than left because they reject
administrative and legal equality, the republican heritage of the 1789
French Revolution, and what they call the “religion of human rights.” In
short, it is the claim of this article that despite the ND’s sincere attempts
to transcend right and left, the right-wing positioning of the ND remains.
In Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity,2 I offer
four conceptual tools for analyzing ND intellectuals: (1) The ND as a quasi-
fascist movement created for antifascist times; (2) A challenge to the
Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2014, pp. 1–44. ISSN 1930-1189
© 2014 Michigan State University. All rights reserved. 1

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2 Tamir Bar-On
traditional right-left political spectrum; (3) A variant of alternative modernity

within a broader modernist framework3 (That is, ND thinkers seek
revolutionary alternatives to liberal and socialist variants of modernity rather
than destroying all aspects of modernity tout court); and (4) A species of the
“religion of politics”4 in the context of a more secular age. It is my claim that
ND thinkers embody all four conceptual tools. Moreover, these four
aforementioned conceptual tools all illuminate the ND’s central concerns
surrounding modernity and postmodernity in the early twenty-first century.
It is my principle argument that modernity and postmodernity form the
central backdrop behind the ND’s worldview. The ND’s vehement rejection
of right and left as political categories (a distinction which dates to the French
Revolution), quest for a radical body politic grounded in an alternative
modernity, and conversion to a civil religion of politics that emerges only in
the late eighteenth century all highlight the ND’s seminal preoccupation with
the modern world.
The purpose of this article will be to focus on one conceptual tool for
analyzing the ND, namely, their intellectuals’ desire to forge a new
political synthesis that is neither right, nor left. It is my argument that
right and left is a political division that dates back to the bloody birth
pangs of the French Revolution, the most significant modern revolution
in Europe. Moreover, the political instinct seeking to transcend right and
left is a modernist one, emerges as a consequence of the two great liberal
republican revolutions of the eighteenth century (that is, the American
and French revolutions), and leads to the eventual creation of “neither
right, nor left” movements and political parties in the late nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Moreover, I argue that the ND’s metapolitical
approach should not obfuscate the reality that its intellectuals desire what
the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm defines as a revolution, namely, “a
wholescale political change in which men are conscious of introducing an
entirely new epoch in human history.”5
I begin the article by tracing the origins of right and left and various
intellectuals’ assessment of the political spectrum. I then demonstrate how
Europe’s rising extreme right-wing tide from the 1990s onward was in part
due to the collapse of the Communist Soviet Union, a key edifice of the
right-left political divide. In addition, I argue that like contemporary
extreme right-wing parties, the ND was the beneficiary of a shifting,

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The French New Right 3
antiliberal political and cultural climate, which predated the fall of the
Soviet Union but was exacerbated by the rapid demise of Communist
states and movements in Europe and worldwide.
The ND was not alone in its quest to transcend right and left. Fascist thinkers of
the interwars, viewed mistakenly as “antimodern,” also sought to supersede and
synthesize right and left in a modernist framework. Furthermore, while the ND’s
“neither right, nor left” synthesis is revolutionary and indeed unique because of
the mixture of Conservative Revolution6 and New Left (NL) thought,7 I argue
that numerous contemporary intellectuals from other political camps also saw
problems with the right-left spectrum. Finally, I demonstrate that the ND’s
desire to create a revolutionary new political order led it to ally itself with sectors
of the American and French NL in the context of the end of the Cold War and
the official demise of the Communist Soviet Union. While I make it clear that
the ND is not equivalent to the NL, its attempts to transcend “outdated”
categories such as right and left, as well as supersede three main political
ideologies of the twentieth century (that is, conservatism, liberalism, and social-
ism), showed that it was in the intellectual vanguard of seeking a decidedly
modernist, secular, and revolutionary synthesis.
Still a Right and Left?

The Right and Left are relatively modern concepts, born of the rivers of
blood of the French Revolution and Robespierre’s Reign of Terror (1793–
1794), which killed an estimated 17,000 people through the illegal use of
violence by the state.8 In the new liberal republican political experiment, if
you sat on the right in parliament you were a restorationist seeking to
revive the ancien régime (old regime), the defeated aristocratic system, and
the monarchy. A rightist was a conservative for king, country, Church,
and the established aristocratic, hierarchical order. The hierarchical order
and its institutions from the family to the monarchy were seen as
reflections of the natural order of the universe. Any attempts to tamper
with that natural, hierarchical order of the universe (for example, by
erecting an egalitarian, liberal democracy) was viewed as a social evil that
contradicted God, common sense, and human experience.9 If, on the
other hand, you sat on the left, you were for republicanism, secularism,
political change, the universal rights of the people, workers’ rights, and a
more egalitarian social order.

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4 Tamir Bar-On
Yet what if you want to establish a theocracy, rule based on divine law?
You might be more on the right than left, but surely few if any modern
right- and left-wing political movements in the European context are so
religious that they would overturn the Enlightenment’s secular legacy of
separation of church and state. In Mexico, the Cristero War between 1926
and 1929 was the one period when the Mexican state was threatened by
“Christian nationalists,” which rejected the anticlerical provisions of the
1917 Mexican Constitution. In the Cristero War, the Mexican people were
caught by the savagery of the army and state, on the one hand, and the
“fighters for Christ,” on the other hand.10 It is estimated that 90,000
Mexicans lost their lives in the Cristero War. While the Cristeros were a
more right-wing and traditionalist movement fearful of liberal
republicanism and the loss of power for the Church in Mexico, they were
certainly not fascists. So might the category of a theocracy longed for by
the “fighters for Christ” be “beyond right and left”?
In practice, the far left made a mockery of its egalitarian ethos through
the experiences of the gulags in the Soviet Union and the corruption of
Communist Party officials. Was Leninism really on the left if it abandoned
the mass, workers’ revolution in favor of an elitist, violent push from
exalted intellectuals above? Was Stalinism leftism, or as A. J. Gregor
points out,11 a perverse form of “national communism” with fascist traits?
Did the littered dead corpses on the altar of Maoism die for China, or left-
wing communist internationalism? One scholar suggested that right and
left no longer have the same analytical value as they once had, and those
that think it does have an ideological axe to grind.12
On the other side of the political spectrum, the contemporary right is
generally no longer driven by theocratic or monarchical impulses in
Europe or the Americas, but defends the remnants of the status quo,
hierarchy, inequality, and the established social order, whether “big
business” or the military. Some rights such as the ND have premodern streaks
and claim to be “anticapitalist,” arguing that unrestrained capitalism destroys
national or regional cultural traditions. Other rights like the Anglo-American
New Right, which encompass Nobel Prize winner in Economics Milton
Friedman (1912–2006), former U.S. President Ronald Reagan, and the Tea
Party Movement formed in 2009, are more solidly procapitalist, neoliberal,
and critical of state bureaucratization and the excesses of the welfare state.

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Fascism and Nazism were special cases in the interwar years. Although in
public consciousness they are associated with the Right, major fascist thinkers
from Benito Mussolini to Oswald Mosley had intellectual roots on the left:
socialism, the “revisionist,” anti-Marxist left, and anarcho-syndicalism.13 Did
this make fascism a right- or left-wing movement? Or, are we to believe the
subjective aspirations of fascists themselves who opined that they were “ni
droite, ni gauche” (“neither right, nor left”)?
The French ND sought to supersede narrow French ultranationalism
and create a revolutionary, pan-European project in which Europe rather
than the nation was the new mythical home,14 while claiming to be
beyond “outdated” categories such as right and left.15 Created in the wake
of the spectacular student and worker protests of May 1968 in France, the
ND is heavily indebted to the cultural strategies, regionalist orientation,
antiliberalism, critique of dominant ideologies, and postmodern
sensibilities of the NL.16 Yet key ND thinkers in France largely began their
careers as revolutionary right-wing ultranationalists, which defended
French colonial presence in Algeria and even the “burden of the white
man.” The question remained: Is the ND right, left, or beyond? Whether it
was the gulag experiences of “real existing socialism,” or the ideological
legacies of fascism or ND, the question we might ask today is whether
there is still a right and left?
Intellectuals, Right, and Left

Intellectuals offered different interpretations of the terms right and left
since the official demise of the Communist Soviet Union in 1991. One
writer laments the confusion associated with the meanings of right and
left: “Terms like ‘Left’ and ‘Right’ no longer seem to have any clear, widely
accepted reference points or definitions, and political actors themselves
have not helped matters.”17 Others are not so hasty in their desire to
seriously question the value of terms such as right and left. The esteemed
Italian philosopher Norberto Bobbio attempted to convince his
compatriots that the right-left political divide still had great political
significance. He penned Left and Right: The Significance of a Political
Distinction to help Italian voters in the post-Cold War era make sense of
whether the social justice claims of socialists still had value in an era of

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6 Tamir Bar-On
liberal triumphalism? As left-wing parties collapsed, vacated political

space, or reconstituted themselves under new banners in Italy and
throughout Europe, Bobbio argued that the main distinction between
right and left remained: the “pole star” of the Left is equality, and the
Right’s is inequality (or hierarchy).18 For Bobbio, equality simultaneously
connotes legal or administrative equality, the liberal notion of equality of
opportunity, the socialist meaning of equality of condition, and the moral,
spiritual, and biological equality of human beings in a universal spirit.
In addition, Bobbio pointed out that when fascism, which was
considered a right-wing movement, came crashing down to earth (and
rightfully so he posits) in 1945, the “pole star” of the Left rose to dizzying
heights of public approval in post-World War II European political life.19
In short, Bobbio highlights the symbiotic relationship between right and
left and their “mimetic rivalry,” but is adamant that right and left remain
useful anchors for understanding European political debates even after
the end of the Cold War. That is, left-wing movements and parties are far
more likely than their right-wing counterparts to in theory support more
egalitarian policies in citizenship laws, the right of immigrants to vote, the
legal rights of non-EU citizens, welfare and housing benefits, or even
legalized marriage for gays and lesbians.
After the final nail in the coffin of Soviet Communism in 1991, political
results battered the European left with a vengeance. Left-wing political
movements and parties in Western Europe suffered badly at the polls.
Whereas in 1976 the Italian Communist Party garnered an impressive 36
percent of the popular vote and was on the verge of joining a “historic
compromise” national government, by the 2008 Italian elections to the
Chamber of Deputies, Communists could only manage a paltry four percent
of the popular vote. Communists throughout Europe, from France to
Germany, were decimated in the polls, as some scholars questioning the
viability of the EU also asked whether “the European left is also now
bankrupt?”20 For Étienne Balibar and others on the left, the left-right
distinction was increasingly meaningless because the left-wing parties had
become accomplices in legitimizing the worst excesses of capitalism.
Balibar’s position was echoed by de Benoist who in the new millennium
opened debates with Italian left-wing, anticapitalist, antiglobalization, and
anti-imperialist intellectuals such as Costanzo Preve (b. 1943) and Danilo

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Zolo (b. 1936) in pro-ND journals such as Éléments and Diorama Letterario.21
Zolo is an Italian philosopher and jurist, as well as a professor in the Faculty of
Law at the University of Florence. The University of Florence is also the
academic home of Italian New Right thinker Marco Tarchi. Zolo’s positions
are similar to those of de Benoist as he is an ardent political realist, a
supporter of “pluriversalism” against liberal universalism, and a critic of wars
of imperialist “humanitarian intervention” and their defense by liberal and
left-wing intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas and Ulrich Beck.22
Preve is considered one of Europe’s most important anticapitalist, anti-
imperialist thinkers, and his thought dovetails with de Benoist’s vitriolic
anticapitalist, antiliberal, and anti-U.S. positions. Preve was heavily influenced
by Marxist thinkers Louis Althusser and Georg Lukacs; gave lectures to the
Anti-imperialist Camp (a collection of leftist, anti-imperialist activists
worldwide); criticized U.S. imperialism’s armed interventions through the
valorization of the discourse of the Rights of Man as more dangerous than
Islamist terrorism, neo-Nazism, and neo-Stalinism; espoused radically anti-
Zionist views; criticized leftists such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (the
authors of Empire) for legitimizing global capitalism and U.S. imperialism in
the former Yugoslavia and Iraq; and in 2004 founded a geopolitical journal
Eurasia, which sought to rediscover “the spiritual unity of Eurasia.” All these
positions were supported by de Benoist, who saw in Preve an ally in his desire
to undermine the hegemony of the United States for its liberal imperialism, as
well as in superseding the “old” right-left cleavage that saw its heyday from
the French Revolution in 1789 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Preve,
like de Benoist, insisted that the right-left cleavage was now irrelevant because
left-wing parties are today structurally part of the capitalist system; there is no
longer any real struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat; and the
division is “artificial” and reflects political correctness more than concrete
realities in Europe. For Preve, what will emerge to replace the right-left
distinction are cleavages that no longer reflect the right or left division, or the
creation of “lefts” and “rights” that are hitherto “unheard of.”
For other reasons related to a legitimization of liberalism, Francis
Fukuyama argued for the end of the right-left dichotomy.23 A Hegelian
political thinker indebted to the Russian-born, French neo-Marxist
thinker Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968), Fukuyama argued that the fall of
the Berlin Wall in 1989 represented the “end of history,” the triumph of

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8 Tamir Bar-On
liberalism on a planetary scale, and the imminent arrival of a “universal

homogeneous state.” Right and left, fascism and socialism, and old
ideological enmities would dissolve in an era of cultural, economic,
technological, and political globalization in which the world would
inevitably embrace “free markets” and liberal democracy. Fukuyama
viewed the right and left as empty terms in an age when Communist China
undertakes market reforms and Iranian youth under a theocratic regime long
for cultural products from the United States from rap music to CNN. The
turn away from military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1980s and the
fall of Communist states in the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe
seemed to confirm Fukuyama’s thesis of the inexorable spread of liberal
democracy worldwide. Fukuyama unambiguously rejected Bobbio’s thesis,
insisting that right and left will no longer be torn by grand ideological
struggles and would merely be concerned with mundane technical questions
and “perhaps” the environment.
The Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Žižek viewed the “end of history”
as synonymous with the rise of the “postpolitical,” or a “politics which
claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focuses on
expert management and administration.”24 Moreover, writing in the New
Left Review, Žižek pointed out that the political space vacated by the
collapse of the radical, anticapitalist, and “antisystem” Communists in
Europe has been filled by extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant political
parties such as the French Front National (National Front), the Austrian
Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs (The Freedom Party of Austria), and
Italian Lega Nord (Northern League).25 The Front National stunned the
European political landscape when it reached the second round of the
French presidential elections in 2002 with nearly 20 percent of the popular
vote. Italy’s Lega Nord, in conjunction with the “postfascist” Movimento
Sociale Italiano-Alleanza Nazionale (The Italian Social Movement—
National Alliance), joined center-right national coalition governments in
1994, 2001, and 2008. The Alleanza Nazionale is the predecessor of the
overtly neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano. In 1994, the Movimento
Sociale Italiano made history by becoming the first extreme right-wing or
neofascist party to join a European national governing coalition since the
ignominious defeats of German Nazism and Italian fascism in 1945.
Despite widespread international condemnation, the extreme right-wing

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Freedom Party joined the national coalition government in Austria in

2000. In both the Italian and Austrian cases, center-right political parties
broke the post-World War II taboo of refusing to cooperate with the
extreme-right or neofascists. As Italy was the birthplace of fascism and
Austria enthusiastically collaborated with the Nazis, the developments
were interpreted by some commentators as potential threats to the health
of liberal democracy.
Žižek indirectly indicted the European left for the rise of the extreme-
right, which he argued progressively abandoned its populist, anticapitalist
radicalism through neoliberal “third way” formulations. These “third
way” positions, argued Žižek, amounted to a retreat from labor welfarism
and a defense of neoliberal capitalism. As European Communists were
“tamed,” parliamentary Eurocommunists and socialists such as former
French President François Mitterand (1981–1995) dropped radical, statist
nationalization schemes. The Left became a pale shadow of its
“anticapitalist” self. For Žižek, the anticapitalist mantra, which was once
the preserve of the Left, was picked up by extreme right-wing, anti-
immigrant political parties such as the French Front National. The Front
National claimed to reject homogenizing global capitalism, “corrupt
speculation,” and the “elitist” and “antinational” EU project. The Front
National called for an organic, ultranationalist conception of the nation in
which national preference for the “French French” (white, native, Catholic,
and European) prevailed in welfare rights, government jobs, and even
citizenship.26 Thus, Žižek upholds the right-left spectrum, but is adamant
that the Left is to blame for its demise and the rise of the extreme-right.
The extreme-right, he prophetically warned, would increasingly steal
votes from working class voters, which feel abandoned by leftist parties
due to the “corruption” of all established political parties, economic
uncertainties associated with globalization, and the perceived cultural and
political homogenization of the EU.
Rising Extreme Right-Wing Tide

Žižek’s warnings were correct. In France the extreme-right already made
its first inroads in the mid-1980s, and Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National
was an inspiration for other extreme right-wing parties throughout

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10 Tamir Bar-On
Europe.27 Yet despite the early successes of the Front National, their rising
vote share did not translate into seizing government power. In contrast,
Sarah L. de Lange points out that many other “radical right-wing populist
parties” have done the unimaginable: participation in five different
national governments in Western Europe in the new millennium (that is,
Austria—2000/2003 , Denmark—2001/2005/2007, Italy—2001/2005/2008,
Netherlands—2002, and Norway—2001) and four different national
governments in Eastern Europe in the 1990s and new millennium (that is,
Estonia—1992/1994, Poland—2006, Romania—1993, and Slovakia—1992/
1994/2006).28
Since the 1990s, the tide of extreme right-wing political parties rose
across Europe in relation to established center-, right-, and left-wing
political parties. Jörg Haider, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the radical right did
appeal to working-class voters and even make inroads with those voters
abandoned by the Left and tired of the “predictable” policies of the
liberal-left. In 2012 French presidential elections, Marine Le Pen’s Front
National scored nearly 18 percent of the popular vote, while the virulently
anti-immigrant Golden Dawn gained 18 seats in Greek parliamentary
elections in the same year. Even formerly social democratic bastions as the
Scandinavian nations saw extreme right-wing political parties scoring
impressive victories in national and EU elections. In 2009 European
elections, the anti-immigrant British National Party gained its first two
seats, while other extreme right-wing political parties from Hungary,
Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Finland, Denmark, Holland, Austria, and
Italy all made impressive gains. In Norwegian parliamentary elections in
2009, the anti-immigrant Progress Party became the country’s second
largest party with nearly 23 percent of the popular vote. In 2010
Hungarian parliamentary elections, Jobbik Magyarországért Mozgalom
(Jobbik—The Movement for a Better Hungary) became the country’s
third largest political party with 47 seats and nearly 17 percent of the
popular vote. Jobbik also gained three seats in the 2009 European
parliamentary elections. Jobbik supporters wear paramilitary uniforms,
espouse openly anti-Roma and anti-immigrant sentiments, and railed
against “Jewish financial capital.”
All these aforementioned political parties expressed skepticism or
outright rejection of the EU, an anti-immigrant national preference

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orientation, and anti-Muslim and sometimes anti-Semitic fervor. Geert

Wilders, the charismatic leader of the Dutch Partij voor de Vrijheid (Party
for Freedom), compared the Qur’an with Hitler’s Mein Kampf.29 In 2010
Dutch general elections, the Party for Freedom became Holland’s third
largest party with 24 seats. Volen Siderov, the head of the Bulgarian
Natsionalen Sa˘yuz Ataka (National Union Attack), warned all Bulgarian
“patriots” that “one day Muslims will conquer us indeed” and “annex
whole regions” in Europe.30 The Freedom Party of Austria campaigned
strongly against letting Muslim Turkey into the EU, as well as Israel,
although Israel has never formally applied.
Yet echoing the “anti-racist” discourse of ND leader Alain de Benoist,
the extreme right-wing parties insist they are not racist. After capturing a
seat in the European parliament and ten percent of the popular vote,
Timo Soini, the leader of Finland’s Perussuomalaiset (True Finns) said: “I
am offended by allegations that I or my party is racist.”31 Nick Griffin, the
British National Party leader who received more than 17 percent of the
popular vote, argued perversely that racism exists in Britain, but it is
largely “anti-white racism.”32 A Jobbik candidate for the European
parliamentary elections in 2009, Judit Szima, argued that there was no
racism in their electoral slogan, “Hungary belongs to the Hungarians,”
but went further when she said the following: “Given our current
situation, anti-Semitism is not just our right, but it is the duty of every
Hungarian homeland lover, and we must prepare for armed battle against
the Jews.”33 Similarly, despite a disturbing peak wave of anti-Semitic
incidents in France from 2002 to 2006 perpetrated by traditional
ultranationalist Jew haters and ethnic minority youth living in the poor
banlieues (suburbs), anti-Semites could disingenuously claim that they
were merely “anti-Zionists” making Jews “pay” as a “collective” (people
and/or nation) for Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians.34 Or Jörg
Haider, the deceased leader of the Freedom Party of Austria, could play
on the alleged lack of free speech and “political correctness” in his country
by expressing his admiration for the “honorable men” of the Nazi armies
who “did their duty” on the Eastern front during World War II.35
While the ND took some distance from the extreme right-wing
political parties, its discourse innovations such as the claims that they
were not racist and that their liberal-left opponents were the “real racists”

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12 Tamir Bar-On
were borrowed from de Benoist and other ND thinkers such as Guillaume

Faye. The extreme right-wing political parties fused an organic,
ultranationalistic, and populist conception of the nation with welfare
chauvinism privileging ethnic nationals above “foreigners” broadly
defined. The extreme-right political parties played the “antisystem,”
anticapitalist role once occupied by Communists, whether in France or
Italy. It was no accident that extreme right-wing parties increasingly
appealed to disgruntled workers, while taking positions against the EU,
“international capital and speculation” (as opposed to “indigenous
capital”), immigration, crime, the welfare state, and political corruption
across ideological party lines. In a populist vein, they appealed to
“ordinary people” against “liberal-left elites,” which are viewed as the
“guardians” of a hypercapitalist, promulticultural, and homogenizing
“New World Order.” For the extreme-right “liberal-left elites” (that is,
both culturally and politically) are an integral part of a “global
conspiracy” to destroy nation-states and national identities. Despite the
“hateful” anti-immigrant agenda of these extreme right-wing parties, Tel
Aviv University’s Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary
Antisemitism and Racism could declare that they “do not represent an
immediate threat to democracy in Europe” and that many commentators
label these parties as “populist” rather than “fascist.”36
A “Leftist Right”?
While intellectuals such as Bobbio, Fukuyama, and Žižek sought to make
sense of the shifting political sands in the post-Cold War era, Tomislav
Sunic, a Croatian ND fellow traveler, confused matters further by asking
whether the ND is a “leftist right”?37 He also pointed out that ND thinkers
reject two fundamental principles: equality and democracy. By the new
millennium, the ND mimicked or co-opted so many of the ideas of the
Left in its cultural “war of position” that the question could be asked
more objectively whether they were a “leftist right”? In previous works, I
argued that the ND’s worldview could be summarized in the following
formula: Conservative Revolution (CR) ⫹ New Left (NL) ⫽ ND.38 If this
was the case, then was the ND right or left? Or is the ND “neither right
nor left”?

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Other scholars asked more questions about how to situate the ND on

the political map. Was the ND’s attachment to the German Conservative
Revolution more fundamental compared with its NL identity? A Spanish
intellectual wondered whether the French ND could be classified as an
“anarchist” or “nonconformist” right-wing movement?39 Or was the ND
an example of “postmodern right-wing political existentialism”?40
While the ND synthesized two main currents of thought, the
Conservative Revolution and NL, its thinkers were influenced by
transnational political traditions in an ideological synthesis consisting of
right-wing, left-wing, and “neither right, nor left” positions.41 As an
example of the ND’s ideological “mazeway resynthesis,” an intellectual
connected to the Polish Nowa Prawica (New Right) noted in a
correspondence with a Spanish intellectual that his thinking embodied a
“postmodernist collage.”42 The intellectual in question, Jaroslaw
Tomasiewicz, argued that he was ideologically close to the “left wing of
the New Right (de Benoist, Tarchi),” indebted to the Austro-Marxist
notion of “national-cultural autonomy,” and supported the “renewal of
nationalist forces,” “left-leaning communitarian” positions, and even
“Wallerstein’s World Systems theory.”43
Key inspirational figures for the ND include leftist revolutionaries such
as Antonio Gramsci, Che Guevara, and the German Red Army Faction.
Yet the ND never forgot its revolutionary right-wing roots, including
Conservative Revolution thinker Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, French
ultraroyalist intellectual Charles Maurras, and the Italian neofascist Julius
Evola. Non-Western, anti-Western, and anticolonial influences include
Serge Latouche, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Frantz Fanon (1925–1961).
Finally, a motley collection of other thinkers influenced the ND: pre-
Marxist socialists such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Italian syndicalists such as
Arturo Labriola and Sergio Panunzio, French nonconformists such as
Alexandre Marc (1904 –2000) and Emmanuel Mounier (1905–1950), and
North American “neocommunitarians” of a leftist stripe such as Amitai
Etzioni and Charles Taylor. With the exception of the “neocommunitarians,”
what united all these thinkers and traditions was a vehement, revolutionary
rejection of liberalism, unrestrained capitalism, and parliamentary
democracy. They shared a desire to smash the “established disorder” of

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14 Tamir Bar-On
liberal capitalist democracy, to borrow a phrase from Emmanuel

Mounier, the founder of French literary journal Esprit in 1932.
The ND’s diverse and antagonistic political influences highlighted the
reality that there are many rights. Roger Eatwell and Anthony Wright list
five distinctive right-wing traditions: reactionary, fascist, moderate,
neoliberal, and new right.44 In a controversial position that ignored
indigenous fascist traditions in France, the French historian René Rémond
insisted that French political life consisted of counterrevolutionary, liberal
Orléanist, and Bonapartist right-wing traditions. (Rémond, however,
argued that fascism was a continuation of the Bonapartist tradition.)45
If we examine the Right in its contemporary permutations, there is a
profound ideological split between the procapitalist Anglo-American New
Right and more “leftist” ND. In a 2012 interview, de Benoist defined himself
as a man “on the left of the right” and “on the right of the left.”46 Other
revolutionary right-wing traditions include Evolianism, Traditionalism, neo-
Nazism, National Anarchism, Third Positionism, Strasserism, and
National Bolshevism. Yet if we take Bobbio’s right-left conceptualization,
some right-wing tendencies such as the moderate, Anglo-American, and
liberal Orléanist rights support administrative or legal equality. Others
such as the ND, Evolians, and National Bolsheviks reject administrative or
legal equality, the Communist notion of equality of condition, or the idea
that individuals are equal morally, spiritually, or biologically.
A Shifting Cultural and Political Climate

For European rebirth to occur, the ND counted on its “cultural soldiers,” its
intellectuals around Europe, to change dominant attitudes, perceptions, and mean-
ings of the right. De Benoist was adamant that the ND was a “new right,” although
there were residues of the “old” and “right” in the “new right.” At the same time
that de Benoist was fêted in French newspapers and television stations in the
late 1970s and early 1980s, two distinctive tendencies grew in cultural and
political prestige: (1) Anglo-American theoreticians and politicians from
Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics to President Ronald
Reagan in the United States and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in
Britain; and (2) extreme right-wing political parties such as the French Front
National in the early 1980.47 The two political tendencies combined to

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undermine the liberal-left’s post-World War II welfare state consensus and

its positions on market-state relations. In addition, trend two also proposed
a conception of national or regional identity based on the illiberal notion of
jus sanguinis (right of blood). Jus sanguinis challenged the liberal, multicul-
tural, and civic notion of citizenship based on jus soli, or citizenship ac-
quired through birth on the soil of the national territory. The ND favored a
primordialist, organic, and biological conception of belonging rooted to the
notion of jus sanguinis.
De Benoist and other ND theorists were stated foes of the Anglo-
American New Right. In the 1990s, liberalism and the United States,
rather than communism, cemented their places as the ND’s “principal
enemies.” Yet writing in the New York-based left-wing journal Telos in
the 1990s, the French intellectual painted a picture of global capitalism,
Anglo-American neoliberal theorists, and Austrian School luminary
Friedrich Hayek (1899 –1992), which made him sound like an
antiglobalization guru in the mold of Naomi Klein. De Benoist’s attitude
toward the new extreme right-wing parties was more nuanced. In Le choc
du mois, de Benoist declared an intellectual war against Jean-Marie Le
Pen’s Front National for its excessive liberalism, moralism, integralism,
and xenophobic racism.48 De Benoist did not reject the anti-immigrant
substance of Le Pen’s crude anti-immigrant scapegoating, but merely the
tone which was making it more difficult for a “new right” to be more
acceptable to the larger European public. Moreover, as the French ND’s
official manifesto made clear, immigration was officially rejected and an
organic conception of citizenship based on shared ethnic homogeneity
supported.49
Italy’s neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano participated in the
national coalition government in 1994, while its successor the Alleanza
Nazionale repeated the feat in 2001 and 2008. In 2009, the Alleanza
Nazionale officially merged with Prime Minister’s Silvio Berlusconi’s
center-right Forza Italia under the conservative-right Il Popolo della
Libertà. Over the years, the Alleanza Nazionale stances on immigration
became more moderate, blamed immigration on a cruel and rapacious
global capitalism, and sought to avoid scapegoating of immigrants in a
manner echoing de Benoist.50 Fini even called for the right of immigrants
to vote in local elections in 2005. The Lega Nord, an Italian national

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16 Tamir Bar-On
coalition partner in 1994, 2001–2006, and 2008, borrowed its proregionalist,

autonomist theses from the ND, yet its anti-immigrant polemics were far
more radical and anti-Islamic than the formerly neofascist Alleanza
Nazionale. To confuse matters, while the Alleanza Nazionale was born out
of the Movimento Sociale Italiano’s lingering nostalgia for Italian fascism
and the pro-Nazi Social Republic (1943–1945), the Lega Nord under
Umberto Bossi originated from an antifascist tradition that nonetheless
stigmatized immigrants and Southerners as the cause of Northern Italy’s
ills from fiscal corruption and the breakdown of law and order to the
demise of regional traditions.
The ND’s assault on liberal democracy since 1968 was one aspect of a
profoundly new, fear-based, and more conservative political climate in the
twenty-first century ignited by the following trends and events:
(1) The decline of the Left before and especially after the official fall of the
Communist Soviet Union in 1991.
(2) The penchant for neoliberal solutions across European political parties.
(3) The rise of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant parties rooted in party
systems throughout the continent. The “Arab Spring,” which began in
Tunisia in December 2010 and later spread throughout North Africa
and the Middle East in 2011 and 2012, inspired anti-immigrant senti-
ments in Italy and France as state elites and ordinary people feared a
“flood” of Muslim Arab immigrants into Europe because of repression
and uncertainty in the Arab world.
(4) The rise of mainstream political leaders from German Chancellor An-
gela Merkel to British Prime Minister David Cameron and the French
President Nicolas Sarkozy, who increasingly question multicultural-
ism for creating radicalized “ethnic ghettoes” cut off from the “host
culture”; undermining loyalty to the existing nation-state; circum-
venting liberal values such as the rule of law, secularism, and wom-
en’s rights; and engendering a “pseudotolerance” where racism
against whites is tolerated, while racism by nonwhites or non-
Europeans is not punished.
(5) The intensification of radical Islamism in the post-9/11 climate (for
example, Mohammed Merah’s jihadist inspired shooting spree in
France in 2012 that killed four French Jews and three French soldiers, as

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well as the Madrid and London subway terrorist bombings in 2004 and
2007, respectively). The terrorist attacks in France and England were the
works of a French citizen and British citizens of the Islamic faith, thus
promoting the perception of a “clash of civilizations” and “civil war”
within Europe.
(6) Participation of European armies in Muslim states such as Iraq and
Afghanistan, which increased the ire of Islamists, provoked suicide
attacks against Europeans and Westerners, and heightened insecurity in
European cities about possible terrorist attacks.
(7) The increasing equation of Islam with radical otherness, terrorism,
fanaticism, and a threat to Western secular values. Gabriele Marranci
argues that Europe conceives of Islam as a “transruptive force that
through transculturation processes, might be able to challenge the
alleged Judaeo-Christian heritage of Europe.”51 The terrorist attacks of
9/11 and Madrid and London, and recently Burgas, exacerbated these
sentiments about Islam in both popular and political discourses. It
mattered little that in the Middle Ages Muslim Spain was regarded as an
era of toleration and coexistence, or that the German philosopher
Herder praised Arab Andaulsia as the “first Enlightenment” and the
Arabs as the “educators of Europe.”52 In the West, what is often remem-
bered is that Arab Andalusia was a “theocratic model of political dom-
ination” in which Christians and Jews were accorded the status of “alien
minorities” and remained “second-class citizens.”53 Exaggerated fears of
Islamic theocracy haunt Europeans (for example, Jean-Marie Le Pen
once predicted that France would become an Islamic state), while
Muslim imperial power of the past from Muslim Spain to the Ottoman
Empire makes Islamists giddy with expectations for a new world order
dominated by Muslims.
(8) Other recent events have added to the negative perceptions of Islam. In
2012, a crude anti-Islamic video, Innocence of Muslims, led to massive
anti-American protests and 50 deaths throughout the Muslim world. In
2005, a major scandal surrounding the Danish newspaper Jyllands-
Posten erupted because it depicted 12 editorial cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad, including one with a bomb. Protests in the Muslim world
and Europe led to more than 100 deaths, the storming of Western
embassies, and the burning of Danish and other European flags. A year

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18 Tamir Bar-On
earlier there was the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo

van Gogh by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim. Van Gogh had made films
such as Submission, which were especially critical of Islam’s treatment of
women. The series of riots by mainly Muslim youth in Paris and other
French cities, and the declaration of a state of emergency in November
2005, further added to the perception of a fanatical Islam (fuelled by an
immigrant underclass status in the discourse of the French Left). Fi-
nally, there has been a desire by a tiny minority of European Islamists to
push the shari’a (Islamic law), or a separate “Muslim” parliament in
Britain “on the grounds that the Islamic population of the country
constitutes a separate political entity.”54 This has ignited charges of
Muslim “disloyalty” and popular movements to ban the veil and new
mosques in France (2010) and Switzerland (2009), respectively. More-
over, the notion of a radical, secular state that rejects even the smallest
signs of religiosity in the public sphere (for example, the expulsion of
French school girls for wearing the hijab) has become entrenched
throughout Europe. The questioning of the loyalty of Muslims in Eu-
rope is based on the radical perception of Islam, on the idea that some
Muslims want to abolish the European secular state, and changing
Muslim demographics (that is, both citizens and illegals) within Europe
(see point 11 below).
(9) Fears surrounding the EU in terms of the loss of national sovereignty,
the “democratic deficit,” and uncertainty about “deepening” and “wid-
ening” of EU institutions and member states. In terms of EU “widen-
ing,” there are fears in respect of Muslim Turkey’s possible accession
into the EU. As Angelos Giannakopoulos writes, “Since Turkey is char-
acterised historically, politically and culturally as ‘different,’ should
Turkey become an EU member, the ‘European project’ could be under
threat.”55 Turkey has about 80 million Muslims and while some Euro-
pean governments support its application to get into the EU as an
antidote to rising Islamism, European states such as France and the
mass public generally reject Turkey’s entrance along demographic,
cultural/religious, and human rights criteria.
(10) The malaise about Europe’s diminishing geopolitical power in an “anti-
imperial” or “postimperial” age56 and uncertainties about the EU’s
ability to act as a unified, muscular foreign policy player. As James

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Anderson argues, the imperative of empire pushed by the EU will only

grow because “If the past is European and the present American, it
seems the future is Asian.”57 The ND favors a united European empire to
counter Europe’s real and perceived loss of geopolitical power.
(11) Falling white European birthrates and the concomitant rise in nonwhite
birthrates both within and outside Europe.58 These demographic trends
aggravate the perceptions of Europeans that in the near future they will
lose political power both at home and abroad. It is interesting to note
that among European conservatives and the extreme-right, there is a
revisionist romanticization of white, Christian immigrant communities
(for example, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, or Belgian immigration to
France) compared with the recent wave of immigrants from mostly
Muslim source countries. Conservatives or the extreme-right view Mus-
lim immigrants in more problematic terms because of supposedly irrec-
oncilable cultural and religious differences, greater propensity for crime,
welfare abuse, and competition with the white working class for dwin-
dling jobs and state resources.
(12) Western Europe’s relative economic decline in the global economy and
the rise of “xenophobic nationalism” in which the majority ethnic group
within a state “feels or fears that it is losing strength, is somehow in
decline.”59 A feeling of national decline is exacerbated in “times of great
economic difficulty” such as the global financial troubles in 2009 and
2010, while xenophobia has accelerated “in the political life of states
around the world.”60 In this context, anti-immigrant discourses and
policies are also in evidence in traditional immigrant-receiving New
World countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia. One
of the most publicized of those anti-immigrant measures was the pas-
sage of Arizona law SB 1070 in 2010, which makes “the failure to carry
immigration documents a crime and gives the police broad power to
detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally.”61
(13) The rise of what Slavoj Žižek calls “today’s predominant mode of poli-
tics, postpolitical biopolitics, which is a politics of fear, formulated as a
defense against a potential victimization or harassment.”62 Dominique
Moïsi similarly argues that the contemporary West (North America and
Europe) is paralyzed by an emotionally driven “politics of fear” in both
domestic and foreign policies.63

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20 Tamir Bar-On
Given the 13 events and trends mentioned above, Europe in the new
millennium is no longer the liberal cultural and political climate of 1968
with its penchant for permissiveness, experimentation, and cultural
tolerance. This changing political climate cuts across traditional right-left
divisions, particularly with issues such as multiculturalism, immigration,
state secularism, the attack on the welfare state, terrorism and war, and
doubts about both the “deepening” and “widening” of the EU. In short,
ND intellectuals understood that the shifting cultural and political climate
assisted it in gaining more popular and elite support for its ideas, as well
as vindicating its “neither right, nor left” political synthesis. De
Benoist argued that the key cleavages of the twenty-first century were
wedded to a “transversal” reality superseding right and left: sovereigntists
versus Europeanists, liberal republicans versus communitarians, cultural
“identitarians” versus supporters of a homogenized “one world” system,
populists versus antipopulists, supporters of direct versus representative
democracy, and Atlanticists versus supporters of a multipolar world.64 For
de Benoist, the “traditional” right-left cleavage is thus no longer useful to
situate the political players of our day.
The broader political climate also expressed great anguish about liberal
democracy. So, for example, Human Rights Watch condemned the Dutch
government for discriminatory citizenship tests, which were passed into
law in 2006, because EU citizens and other non-EU citizens from “select”
mostly Western states did not need to take the tests. In 2010, French
President Nicolas Sarkozy received the opprobrium of the EU Justice
Commissioner for expelling Roma from France to EU states (Bulgaria and
Romania) contrary to EU laws. Also, following Spain and Belgium, in 2010
the French lower house of parliament and later Senate overwhelmingly
banned the full-face Islamic veil in public. In a 2009 referendum in
Switzerland, a constitutional amendment banning new minarets was
approved by more than 57 percent of the population. While valorizing the
“right to difference” of all cultures in a xenophile rather than xenophobic
spirit, the ND nonetheless supported a ban on new immigration and
longed for the erection of numerous “homogeneous communities” in a
regionalist, antiliberal, and pan-European framework. Moreover, the ND
understood that the changing cultural and political climate provided it

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with new opportunities to abolish the right-left division by forging new

political alliances that reconciled and superseded left and right.
Arthur Versluis argues that the ND is a political movement transcending “out-
moded” categories such as right and left by promoting “antimodernism,” which
meant that it could advance “red-black” or “green-conservative” alliances
“to cut across political boundaries that often claimed to be impermeable.”65
As a result, it was no accident, insisted Versluis, that leftists of an “antimod-
ern” hue such as Noam Chomsky, Jean Baudrillard, and Paul Virilio could
unite with “right-wing antimodernists” such as Alain de Benoist, Aleksandr
Dugin, and Patrick Buchanan because they “share a profound distrust of
American imperialism, of the corporatization and bureaucratization of
modern life, and of the superficiality of what is termed the ‘consumerist’
society of the spectacle, of ‘entertainment.’”66 I challenge the characteriza-
tion of de Benoist and Dugin as “right-wing antimodernists” by arguing that
they are right-wing modernists searching for alternative modernities.67 Yet
Versluis is correct to point out that the culturally based (or racially based)
agenda of the ND has the potential to challenge traditional right-left bound-
aries and create new movements and parties that transcend those barriers.
The ND and extreme-right parties were not alone in questioning the liberal
multicultural model and the existing immigration regime in Europe. As the
center-left mayor of Rome in 2007, Walter Veltroni ordered deportations of
thousands of Romanian immigrants. In the mid-1980s, Socialist French
President François Mitterand participated in highly publicized
deportations. Center-right parties in Italy and Austria were instrumental
in legitimizing extreme right-wing parties by inviting them to join
national coalition governments in the mid-1990s and new millennium. In
a Gramscian mold, the ND wished to influence key cultural, political,
administrative, military, and police officials across the right-left
ideological divide, as well as the mass of ordinary Europeans. The ND
argued that the “silent majority” (white, European, and Christian) rejected
Europe’s “genocidal” immigration policies.68 If referenda on immigration,
citizenship laws, welfare benefits, and tougher law and order measures were
held throughout Europe, reasoned de Benoist and other ND thinkers, the
“silent majority” would vote to halt the “elitist,” liberal multicultural policies
of the continent. Already in 1973 in his politically incorrect, anti-immigrant
novel Le Camp des Saints (The Camp of the Saints), French writer and

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22 Tamir Bar-On
Académie française winner Jean Raspail echoed the ND’s position on the
“victimization” of the white “silent majority”:
It wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of

sentiment . . . the human race no longer formed one great fraternal
whole—as the popes, philosophers, intellects, politicos, and priests of the
West had been claiming for much too long. Man never has really loved
humanity all of a piece—all its races, its peoples, its religions— but only
those creatures he feels are his kin, a part of his clan, no matter how vast.69
The ND generally, if not idiosyncratically, rejects immigration, multi-

culturalism, minority rights, and liberal democracy as “negative”
phenomena, which undermine the richness and diversity of the world as
embodied by “rooted” cultural or ethnic communities. Like Raspail, the
ND holds the “popes, philosophers, intellects, politicos, and priests of the
West” partially responsible for opening the doors to uncontrolled
immigration and choosing humanity, the masses of poor humanity, above
their “own” European ethnic groups. In the long run, Raspail, like ND
leader de Benoist, argued that immigration and demographic trends will
mean the steady demise of white European cultures to more
demographically assertive Arab, African, Indian, and Chinese cultures. In
a piece published in Le Figaro entitled “La patrie trahie par la République”
(“The Fatherland Betrayed by the Republic”), Raspail argued that the
“tender heart” of Christianity or liberalism will not save white Europeans
from a “cruel” period of possible cultural extinction at some period in the
future.70 His positions mirrored de Benoist’s and other ND intellectuals,
especially Guillaume Faye. Yet, Faye’s positions were more honest and
politically incorrect than de Benoist’s. They did not pander to the
“antiracist” and “antifascist” discourses of their liberal and leftist
opponents.
A New New Left?

Yet other intellectuals asked whether the ND was a “new New Left”? After
the official fall of the Communist Soviet Union in 1991, the former editor
of NL journal Telos Paul Piccone asked two questions: (1) Is the NL dead?

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and (2) Could the French ND and remnants of the American and French
NL unite to create a new political paradigm?71 Piccone summarized his
views of the ND: “The French New Right, if it is still possible to place
them anywhere on the Right— have redefined themselves by
incorporating 95 percent of standard New Left ideas, but on the whole,
there is no longer anything that can be identified as ‘Right.’”72 This
sounded rather strange coming from a journal with roots in antidogmatic
Western Marxism, the NL, and protest movements of the 1960s. How do
we explain that a journal with sympathies for left-wing protest
movements against the United States’ involvement in the Vietnam War
and the May 1968 events in France suddenly embraced the ND?
Piccone’s position about the ND as the “new New Left” was overstated
as the ND’s notion of a “Europe of a Hundred Flags” is a form of
regionalism that can be interpreted as the desire to create more internally
homogeneous European nations. In his “Notes on Nationalism” written
in 1945, the English writer George Orwell defines nationalism in a manner
that would include the ND under its ambit: “The habit of identifying
oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil
and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests.”73
Nonetheless, the crucial point of reference linking the NL and ND are
the spectacular events of May 1968. While the events of 1968 highlighted
the rising tide of the NL worldwide, few are aware that an obscure
metapolitical “school of thought” with roots in the revolutionary right
emerged in the same year.74
Alain de Benoist and approximately 40 other right-wing activists
founded the ND in Nice in 1968 to rethink the outdated legacies of the
revolutionary right: French support for Algerian colonialism, Vichy
collaboration, fascism, and Nazism. Across the Atlantic, Telos was
founded as an academic journal in 1968 with the goal of providing the NL
with greater ideological coherence. Both GRECE75 (the main ND think
tank) and Telos were assigned the tasks of ideological innovation for the
ND and NL, respectively.
Despite Piccone’s optimism regarding reconciliation between the ND and
NL, I argue that the two political movements differ in terms of their attitudes
toward protest, the “people” and “elites,” established political actors, and
assessments of liberal and socialist readings of history. In addition, while the

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24 Tamir Bar-On
NL is a political force in decline, the ND made political inroads from the

late 1970s to new millennium by influencing the discourse changes of
Europe’s contemporary extreme right-wing political parties and a broader
European political culture, which increasingly questions immigration,
multiculturalism, and liberalism.76
Let me now identify the main thinkers and characteristics of the NL
and the ND. Second, I examine the shared positions of the NL and ND.
Third, despite Piccone’s aforementioned statement about the ND being a
“new New Left,” I highlight the fundamental differences between the NL
and ND. I conclude by determining the lasting cultural and political
impact of the two political forces, as well as what they mean for protest
issues and actions today.
Identifying the New Left

Identifying the main characteristics and thinkers of the NL is no simple
task. While the events of May 1968 in France are widely viewed as the
political apogee of the NL because for one month about 10 million people
threatened revolution against Gaullism, the emergence of a “New Left”
predated those events.77 Three examples will suffice.
Kenny argues that there were a number of “New Lefts,” and that the
“first New Left” consisted of a group of British intellectuals from the
1950s, including Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and Edward
Thompson.78 These intellectuals criticized Stalinism and the Soviet
Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956, stressed the importance of popular
culture in a Gramscian mold, and sought to find a “third way” between
Marxism-Leninism and an intellectually barren labor tradition in Britain.
Based in London and founded in 1960, the New Left Review was first
under the direction of Stuart Hall and later Perry Anderson and Sue
Watkins. It became the intellectual “flagship” of the Western NL long
before the 1968 events. In the same year, U.S. sociologist C. Wright Mills
wrote his seminal “Letter to the New Left” in the New Left Review.79
Finally, it could be argued that the American NL was born with the
creation of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in 1960, probably the
largest and most influential radical student organization in the 1960s. Two
years later, the SDS penned the “Port Huron Statement of the Students for

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a Democratic Society” in Michigan, a key NL document. It is believed that

the document was largely written by Tom Hayden, a member of the
California Senate from 1992 to 2000. The SDS dissolved in 1969.
A case could also be made for dating the NL to a strain of Marxism
called Western Marxism, which has its roots in the writings of the Italian
Marxist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) and his notion of cultural
hegemony rather than the repressive apparatus of the state as the key to
maintaining liberal capitalist democracies.80 Kellner points out that early
Western Marxists such as Gramsci, Ernst Bloch (1885–1977), Karl Korsch
(1886 –1961), and the Frankfurt School in the 1930s and 1940s (for example,
Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer) were already
critical of the “Old Left.” In general, Western Marxists paved the way for
new leftists by taking the following positions: (1) a critical attitude toward
orthodox Marxism as represented by the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union; (2) a belief in expanding the role of the revolution beyond the
working class; (3) a stress on the importance of the broader culture as the
key to overthrowing liberalism and capitalism; and (4) a more autonomist
leftism that attacked excessive faith in “instrumental reason” in both
socialist and liberal societies.
It follows that the events of 1968 in France were expressions of a “third
New Left” or “fourth New Left,” which emerged on the heels of Western
Marxism, the British NL, and American NL. Yet what is undeniable is that
the events of May 1968 were the most conspicuous and spectacular
expressions of the New Left. George Katsiaficas argues that the rise of the
NL in 1968 represented a Hegelian “world-historical movement” akin to
1848, 1905, and 1917.81 This “world historical movement,” points out
Katsiaficas, encompassed Mexico and Latin America, Canada, the United
States, England, West Germany, Italy, Spain, France, Czechoslovakia,
Yugoslavia, Poland, Pakistan, China, Japan, and numerous other
countries.82 While France was on the brink of revolution in May 1968, in
that same year we witnessed the following events: the Prague Spring and
Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, the March student
and intellectual protests against the Communist Polish government, anti-
Vietnam and “Black power” protests at Howard University in the United
States, a seven-day hunger strike by students at Belgrade University
(Yugoslavia), the closing of the University of Rome for 12 days due to

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26 Tamir Bar-On
student radicalism, demonstrations against the Franco dictatorship in

Spain, the infamous Tlatelolco Massacre in Mexico, and the fall of the
Pakistani military dictatorship. In many of the protests, including in
France and Italy, students were joined by intellectuals and workers.
All this begs the question: What did the 1968ers want? Certainly the
demands of Mexican student protestors at the National Autonomous
University (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) were different
from their Polish or French counterparts, but the NL-inspired 1968ers
stood for five basic principles:
(1) Opposition to racial, political, and patriarchal domination, as well as

economic exploitation.
(2) A conception of freedom as not only freedom from material deprivation,
but also freedom to create new human beings.
(3) The extension of the democratic process and the rights of the individual.
(4) Expanding the base for the revolution.
(5) An emphasis on direct action, as opposed to leaders or elites, whether
communist, socialist or social democratic parties, or labor unions.83
If we examine the five aforementioned characteristics, there is a

definitive break with the “Old Left.” In point one, the NL sought to
reconcile the traditional social justice claims of the “Old Left” with
antiauthoritarianism and an opening to the “Third World,” minorities,
women, and sexual difference. Instead of the Old Left’s “Dictatorship of
the Proletariat,” the NL embraced the slogan “All Power to the People.” In
point two, we recognize that the NL was generally not born of economic
deprivation, but rather of political, psychological, and cultural revolt
against “one dimensional man,” “cultural imperialism,” and bureaucratic
state authoritarianism. In point three, in contrast with the “elitist”
dominance of existing liberal or socialist regimes, the new leftists
promoted individual autonomy, dialogue, and persuasion against Stalinist
force and bottom-up democratic practices. As a consequence, new leftists
promoted national independence of “oppressed” Third World states,
women’s liberation, worker self-management of factories, and
participatory rather than politician-directed representative democracy. In
point four, whereas the Old Left focused on the liberation of industrial

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workers, the NL expanded the base of the revolution to hitherto

unrepresented groups: students, youth, women, oppressed national
minorities, and the lumpenproletariat. Many Old Left Communist parties
and regimes, the Social Democrats in Germany, and Labor Party in
England all feared the new social movements and failed to support the
new leftists. In point five, in contrast with the centralizing and
authoritarian thrust of the Old Left and its leaders, the NL exalted direct
action, spontaneity, and confrontation to win supporters and overturn the
existing order.
Identifying the ND
Recall that in the mid-1990s, the former editor of NL journal Telos Paul
Piccone insisted that the ND is no longer right-wing and that they are
akin to a “new New Left.” I want to challenge Piccone’s claims by pointing
to the revolutionary right-wing origins of the main players associated with
the ND and other like-minded European intellectuals influenced by their
ideas. Alain de Benoist in France, Marco Tarchi in Italy, Michael Walker
in England, and other ND intellectuals began their careers as
revolutionary right-wing political activists.84 De Benoist was a proracialist,
pro-French Algeria ultranationalist as a student in the 1960s; Tarchi an
activist in the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano; and Walker an
organizer for the anti-immigrant British National Front in central
London.
Moreover, while the right-left political spectrum with roots in the
French Revolution is somewhat outdated, I use Norberto Bobbio to
argue for its continued relevance. Recall that Bobbio claimed that the
Right stands for inequality and the Left for equality. Using Bobbio’s
classification, the leader of the ND Alain de Benoist is on the right
because he argued in Vu de droite (Seen from the right) that egalitarian-
ism is the major ill of the modern world.85 He repeated this claim in an
interview given to the Spanish television network Tele Madrid in 2005.
For de Benoist, liberal and socialist administratively enforced equality
are rejected for three reasons: (1) people are inherently unequal; (2)
cultures and sexes are diverse and “different” (and hence cannot be

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28 Tamir Bar-On
“homogenized” via the “abstract equality” of liberal societies); and (3)

elite, hierarchical rule is favored above representative democracies.
The ND's Ideal Society and State

Any political ideology requires a view of human nature, model forms of
social and political organization, and an assessment of the processes of
history.86 Given this definition of political ideology, what type of model
social and political order do ND intellectuals long for? I argue that the
ND’s ideal society and state have six characteristics:
(1) An organic and hierarchical social order with primary duties to one’s
ancestors, regions or nations, and Europe.
(2) As the ND rejects the egalitarian Judaeo-Christian, it calls for an Indo-
European, pagan, roots-based, mythical, and homogeneous social order.
ND thinkers stress the mystical aspects of life to restore community
meaning torn asunder by unrestrained capitalism and liberalism, and the
most “decadent” trends associated with liberal and socialist variants of
modernity.
(3) A revolutionary, secular, and alternative modernist (neither liberal nor
socialist) political order synthesizing modern, postmodern, and premod-
ern philosophies. In this respect, the ND unites two primary worldviews,
the German Conservative Revolution and NL. The ND rejects the polit-
ical and social effects of the modern world from legal equality and liberal
multiculturalism to excessive individualism and materialism, while it
supports the technical and scientific advances of modernity. Moreover,
the revolutionary order that the ND longs for is “neither right, nor left,”
or a “fourth way” superseding liberalism, socialism, and traditional con-
servatism.87
(4) It follows from three above that the ND calls for the end of liberal or
socialist multiculturalism and non-European immigration to Europe. It
longs for the demise of the “technocratic” EU, as well as a new social
framework rooted in regional or national preference against neoliberalism
and unfettered capitalist globalization. Most significantly, the ND wants
to make citizenship contingent on ethnic origins.
(5) A regional, imperial (yet anti-imperialist), and federalist political order.
This political order will allow for the erection of ethnically homogeneous

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regions or nations, challenge the “technocratic” and excessively capitalist

EU, weaken the world’s sole remaining superpower (the United States),
and allow Europe to be a more decisive geopolitical player in world
history again.
(6) A capitalist market constrained by ethnically conscious, activist elites and
“the people” (that is, one’s own ethnic group employing techniques of
“direct democracy” such as referenda) in a collectivist, corporatist vision.
It is assumed that referenda on key issues such as immigration and
multiculturalism will subvert the proimmigration regime of liberal or
left-wing national governments and the EU, and erect a “Europe for
Europeans.”
Shared Positions of New Left and French New Right

Having established the thinkers and characteristics of the NL and ND, I
now examine the shared positions of the two movements. Below is a
checklist highlighting the common negations (that is, what they are both
against) of the NL and ND:
(1) A rebellion against established (“old”) political ideologies and elites of

both the right and left.
(2) An attack on statist and corporate authoritarianism.
(3) A total disdain for unrestrained global capitalism.
(4) A rejection of liberalism and neoliberalism.
(5) A rejection of traditional conservatism.
(6) A rejection of orthodox variants of socialism and communism.
(7) A pronounced geopolitical anti-Americanism.
If we “positively” examine what the NL and ND stand for, we have the

following checklist:
(1) For new political and cultural elites to dislodge the discredited, estab-
lished elites.
(2) For “the people,” broadly defined, against political or cultural “elitism.”
(3) For a political system consisting of smaller government, regional political
units, and “direct democracy” rather than “representative democracy.”

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30 Tamir Bar-On
(4) For an economic system in the “service of the people,” rather than
“elites,” states, or corporations.
(5) For a communitarian-based welfare politics to counter the excessive
egoism and individualism of capitalism and liberalism.
(6) For greater geopolitical pluralism to counter the United States’ singular
superpower status in the post-Cold War era, or the two superpowers (the
United States and USSR) during the Cold War.
(7) For experimentation with hitherto novel ideological syntheses that reject
both the established right and left.
(8) For a revolutionary and secular political system, superseding traditional
conservatism, liberalism, and orthodox variants of socialism.
Differences between New Left and French New Right

From the above, it is evident that despite their emergence from opposite
political camps, the NL and ND share numerous negations and common
positions. Yet despite Piccone’s optimism regarding reconciliation
between the ND and NL, the two political movements differ in terms of
their attitudes toward protest, the “people” and “elites,” established
political actors, and assessments of liberal and socialist readings of history.
Following Roger Eatwell, I reiterate that the NL and ND differ in terms of
their views of human nature, processes of history, and ideal sociopolitical
arrangements. In short, the NL and ND come from different philo-
sophical, political, and ideological traditions.
Let me begin with the respective views of human nature of the two
political forces. The NL’s view of human nature is certainly more
optimistic than the ND’s. While critical of “instrumental reason,” “New
Class” domination of Communist elites in power, and the prospects for
revolution of the working classes, the NL is nonetheless rooted within a
modernist and secularist Enlightenment-based faith in the capacity of
reason to “liberate” individuals and humanity from the “tyranny” of myth
and superstition. Second, following Bobbio, the NL works from a left-
wing egalitarian tradition that valorizes the equality of human beings
legally, socioeconomically, biologically, and spiritually. In contrast, the
ND might be a “new right,” but there is a lot “old” about it, including its
rejection of legal or administrative equality, as well as the notion that

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individuals and cultures are not equal in terms of their “fitness to rule.”
Second, the ND sees history in tragic terms and rejects the excessive
optimism of liberal and socialist readings of history, arguing that both
political models promote a false egalitarianism and universalism and are
even “ethnocentric” and “neoimperialist.” While the ND is not merely
“reactionary” in that it does not want a return to the era when the king
was the state, it has integrated elements of the counterrevolutionary
tradition of Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821). De Maistre famously argued
that he had never met “human beings,” but merely members of different
cultures from French and English to Persian and Arab. ND leader Alain de
Benoist has endorsed de Maistre’s famous dictum and, like de Maistre,
rejects the liberal, republican, and egalitarian heritage of 1789. The ND
also rails against the “abstract” discourse of universal human rights, or the
notion of humanitarian intervention.
In terms of processes of history, while the NL might be less optimistic
about the fall of capitalism and liberalism than the “Old Left,” it does still
see the possibilities for progress of both individuals and societies
worldwide. The ND, however, sees history in darker, more pagan, and
cyclical terms. History is a perpetual struggle for power between dom-
inant elites; of executions and executioners; of cycles of “decadence” and
“decline” and momentary progress.88 Each culture has its own visions of
progress. There is a total rejection of the notion of universal “progress”
for all of humanity in the spirit of liberalism or socialism. There is no
possibility of a universal, Marxist classless order or “end of history,” as
posited by liberal thinker Francis Fukuyama in the context of the fall of
the Berlin Wall and eroding power of the Communist Soviet Union.89
Against Hegel, the ND sees no possibility in the hidden, evolutionary, and
progressive meaning of history.
The NL and ND also differ in terms of their ideal sociopolitical
arrangements. Despite their common rejection of dominant “superpowers,”
liberalism, mainstream conservatism, and orthodox variants of communism
and socialism, NL and ND do not stand for the same type of social and
political community. As mentioned earlier, Katsiaficas pointed out that the
NL opposes racial, political, and patriarchal domination, as well as economic
exploitation. This is not completely the case for the ND. It is true that the
contemporary ND is not expansionist and imperialist. Its calls for “direct

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32 Tamir Bar-On
democracy” and focuses on regional autonomy and ecological themes that

mimic the NL. Yet the ND’s conception of politics is elitist and hierarchical. It
implies the domination of “original” European ethnic groups in citizenship,
welfare benefits, and jobs in relation to non-Europeans (irrespective of their
place of birth) and immigrants. Moreover, as the ND supports organic
communities of belonging, it does not favor the use of legal or administrative
mechanisms to rectify racial or patriarchal domination. While the ND is no
fan of the excesses of capitalism, it does not attack economic exploitation
within European societies by calling for communism or anarchism.
Furthermore, the ND even promotes economic inequalities and exploitation
by “native” Europeans against non-Europeans by supporting homogeneous
political communities cleansed of nonnatives. It also promotes the “peaceful”
return of immigrants and non-Europeans (especially Muslims) to their
“home” countries for the “mutual benefit” of Europeans and non-
Europeans.90
Second, Katsiaficas argues that the NL supports a conception of
freedom as not only freedom from material deprivation, but also freedom
to create new human beings. The same can be said for the ND, except for
a few caveats. The ND longs to create revolutionary, pan-national, pro-
European elites and a population that comes to legally and metapolitically
reject the “technocratic,” excessively capitalist, and “proimmigration” EU
as it is currently constituted. Unlike the NL, material deprivation of non-
Europeans both within and outside Europe is not the ND’s primary
concern. ND thinkers long for an ethnocracy, a social system based on the
political, socioeconomic, cultural, and legal dominance of “original”
European ethnic groups.91
Third, Katsiaficas insists that the NL favors the extension of the
democratic process and the rights of the individual, not their constraint.
Here it is important to distinguish between different types of democracies.
As the ND rejects liberal and socialist variants of democracy, it will not
extend the democratic process to more individuals and groups in a
liberal-leftist spirit. It longs for the extension of “direct democracy”
against the “homogenizing logic” of global capitalism, the nation-state,
and the EU. Yet the aim of the ND’s “direct democracy” discourse is to
undermine popular support for liberal “representative democracy” and
extend national, regional, or European “preference” for “original

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Europeans.” ND thinkers long for the use of more referenda, particularly

on questions related to immigration and regional/national identity, to
bypass parliament and “New Class” (national and EU) politicians and
cultural elites that favor a proimmigrant, multicultural Europe. They view
popular and aristocratic values as a more accurate reflection of European
values compared with the “elitist” and “internationalist” values of the
mass media, intellectuals, or political elites.
Fourth, Katsiaficas notes that the NL seeks to expand the base for the
revolution: the former Third World, blacks in the United States, women,
new social classes, excluded regions, and environmental activists. For the
ND, the revolution against liberalism also needs to be extended beyond
the “outdated” rightist nationalism of the past to Europe’s regions and the
European continent at large. Moreover, if the revolution is to be
successful, argue ND intellectuals, it must focus on changing values and
mentalities in the cultural realm before trying to seize power through
elections or violent extraparliamentary tactics. This metapolitical
approach does not change the ND’s quest for a new, revolutionary, and
illiberal political order.
Finally, Katsiaficas points out that for the NL, there is an emphasis on
direct action, as opposed to leaders or elites. This is not the case for the
ND, which certainly appeals to the “people” against dominant political
and cultural “elites” in a populist mold yet favors elitist, hierarchical
societies. Popular direct action is jettisoned for an elitist, long-term
metapolitics, which will eventually win the “hearts and minds” of key
European elites and the mass public. It was back in the late 1970s that de
Benoist wrote these telling lines:
Without a precise theory, there is no effective action. . . . All the revolutions

of history have only transposed into facts an evolution that had already
occurred in the spirit. One can’t have a Lenin before having had
Marx. . . . The French right is Leninist without having read Lenin. It hasn’t
realized the importance of Gramsci. It hasn’t realized that cultural power
threatens the apparatus of the state.92
Recall that Paul Piccone argued that the contemporary ND incorporated

“95 percent of standard New Left ideas” and that they can no longer be

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34 Tamir Bar-On
identified as “Right.” I challenged both of Piccone’s assertions by pointing

to the theoretical differences between the ND and NL. I demonstrated the
continued “rightness” of the ND, but do not doubt that ND thinkers
subjectively believe that they are creating a new “neither right, nor left”
political synthesis. The ND is creating a new political synthesis that
challenges established political forces on the right and left, but that it
objectively transcends right and left is a matter for debate.
Having said that, it is true that a reconciliation was possible between
remaining sectors of the NL and ND in the post-Communist, post-Soviet
era. Both the NL and ND were against liberalism, neoliberalism,
mainstream conservatism, orthodox variants of socialism, and the world’s
sole remaining superpower. Yet this did not mean that the two political
forces longed for the same type of society. As a result of their common
hatred of liberalism, Piccone and de Benoist overstated the possible
reconciliation between the NL and ND. Rather, the NL and ND
fundamentally differ in terms of their views of human nature, processes of
history, and ideal sociopolitical arrangements.
The NL and ND also have differing attitudes toward protest, the
“people” and “elites,” established political actors, and assessments of
liberal and socialist readings of history. The ND is more explicitly elitist
than the NL, while it views the “people” in a more ethnically based rather
than universalist spirit. While the NL has more faith in the “progressive”
socialist view of history, the ND rejects liberal or socialist notions of the
“end of history.” Finally, while the NL is no great fan of liberal democracy,
new leftists first completely rejected established political actors in 1968 and
were later co-opted by the system. Tony Blair, Gerhard Schröder, and
Lord Robertson were all radical new leftists before they became Britain’s
prime minister, Germany’s chancellor, and NATO’s secretary-general,
respectively. In contrast, while the ND rejected the “politics of the
politicians,” they were more practical about their political project and
sought to win the “hearts and minds” of the entire European political
culture, whether on the right, left, or beyond. While center-right and
extreme right-wing political parties were rather important for the French
ND, the longed for revolution from the right against liberalism,
neoliberalism, egalitarianism, immigration, and multiculturalism called
for changes in values and mentalities across the political spectrum. It

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should also be pointed out that more high profile new leftists switched
political camps than ND thinkers.
What is the lasting cultural and political impact of the NL and ND?
What do the two political forces mean for protest issues and actions
today? Although the heyday of the NL was the failed revolution in France
in 1968, the ideals of the NL certainly influenced the broader political
culture in a profound manner. As Laurent Joffrin writes, “May 1968
changed France. The failed revolution ended up revolutionizing society,
and the French do not always realize it.”93 In France, Europe, the United
States, and Latin America, the NL did not come to power directly in the
1960s, but it had a “long-term impact” on contemporary “attitudes,
values, cultural trends and the importance of youth culture, music, drugs
and fashion.”94 The “long-term” impact of the 1968ers and the NL was
also discernible in the 1970s and 1980s in “the development of
‘progressive’ working practices, left-wing politics, feminism, ecology,
decentralization and movements of regional autonomy or separatism.”95
1968ers and new leftists decidedly influenced the North American and
European cultural and political climates of the 1970s and 1980s.
The ND had its heyday in France in 1979, but its cultural and political
impact is being felt today with the rise of extreme right-wing, anti-immigrant
political parties throughout Europe. Numerous extreme right-wing parties
have participated in national coalition governments in both Western and
Central and Eastern Europe. France’s Front National reached the second
round of the presidential elections in 2002, while its new leader Marine Le Pen
recently scored nearly 18 percent of the popular vote (6.4 million votes) in the
first round of the 2012 French presidential elections. The right-wing turn of
Europe in the 1990s and beyond was certainly assisted by the ND, which
provided personnel and novel discourse formulations for extreme right-wing
political parties such as “the right to difference” and “anti-French racism.”
Europe’s growing attacks against liberalism, multiculturalism, existing
immigration policies, and immigrants certainly please ND thinkers. The post-
9/11 climate, Islamist terrorist attacks on European soil, Europe’s geopolitical
decline, changing Muslim demographics within and outside Europe, disdain
with mainstream political parties, and economic crises all play into the hands
of the ND and extreme right. I also suggest that the Norwegian “lone wolf”
terrorist Anders Behring Breivik only differs from the ND in his violent

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36 Tamir Bar-On
tactics, but not the substance of his anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural

views and belief that Europe’s political and cultural elites are “traitorous” by
opening their borders to millions of Muslim immigrants.96 In this respect, the
violently anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim views of ND thinker Guillaume Faye
are substantively no different from those of Anders Behring Breivik.
As ND ideas reach the mainstream of European political life (for example,
extreme right-wing participation in national coalition governments
throughout Europe, more restrictive immigration policies across Europe,
popular movements banning minarets and Islamic veils in Switzerland and
France in 2009 and 2010, and the open questioning of multiculturalism by
British Prime Minister David Cameron and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel), the more egalitarian legacy of the NL is in decline. It was no
accident, then, that in 1995 ND leader Alain de Benoist echoed Paul Piccone
when he sardonically stated: “What is left of the New Left? Perhaps the New
Right!”97 In 1998, the ND’s principal think tank GRECE published Le Mai 68
de la nouvelle droite (The New Right’s May 1968),98 which highlighted the
affinities of ND thinkers for the events of 1968 and NL. De Benoist, Tarchi,
Sunic, and other thinkers in the aforementioned collection influenced by the
ND use the 1968ers and the NL as their models to demonstrate: (1) the
possibilities for broader political cultural change in mentalities and values; (2)
faith in a nonviolent right-wing revolution in an “antifascist” era; and (3) the
creation of “counterhegemonic” right-wing discourses, which challenge
liberalism, neoliberalism, multiculturalism, mainstream conservatism, social
democracy, socialism, and unfettered global capitalism. ND thinkers argue
that the revolutionary fervor of the 1968ers has been largely abandoned for
pragmatism and power, while its thinkers alone remain the faithful carriers of
the failed revolution of 1968.
What do the respective trajectories of the NL and ND mean for protest
issues and actions today? First, it should be clear that all those that have
common negations are not necessarily on the same side in terms of their
views of human nature, visions of history, and ideal sociopolitical
arrangements. A walk through any of the “anti-globalization” protests in
the twenty-first century or Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011 highlights
the way the protestors reject the existing socioeconomic system or the
same political elites and institutions, but are not in favor of the same types
of ideal societies. Despite the rhetoric of de Benoist or Piccone on a

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common front between the ND and “authentic” new leftists in the age of
“communism in ruins,” one ought to be careful about the alliances one
makes. In his desire for revolution and hatred for neoliberalism, global
capitalism, and the United States as “empire,” Piccone ignores the anti-
egalitarian essence of the ND and forgets his egalitarian NL roots. In
embracing the ND, Piccone wittingly or unwittingly supports a politics of
homogeneous communities cleansed of nonnative “others” and jettisons the
importance of existing liberal or socialist notions of administrative and legal
equality. He forgets that legal equality has profound consequences on lived
political communities and provides the impetus for the inexorable march of
more equality for hitherto neglected groups.
Second, from a historical perspective, the lesson of the interwar years
was that liberal-leftists and even conservatives of all political stripes could
have done more to stem the tides of fascism by making broader allian-
ces against fascist movements and parties. As liberals or moderate
conservatives and liberal and social democrats and Communists fought
among themselves, the likes of Mussolini and Hitler only gained in
stature. Paxton also argues that inviting fascists or Nazis into coalition
governments to “tame” them was a monumental historical mistake.99
Similarly, as modern European states invite former neofascists or extreme
right-wingers into coalition governments, the entire political system is
increasingly illiberal and anti-immigrant through legal, cultural, and
“democratic” political means. If the new leftists increasingly “governed”
European societies in the 1970s and 1980s through the dominance of their
ideals, can ND ideas become the mainstream of the early twenty-first
century?
Recapitulating this article, I highlighted one of my four conceptual
tools for understanding the ND. I suggested that the ND is not merely a
reactionary school of thought, but rather an alternative modernist
movement that seeks to supersede the traditional right-left dichotomy. I
also argued that the ND’s “neither right, nor left” political synthesis was
only possible after the birth of political modernity (that is, the American
and French revolutions in the late eighteenth century). Those two seminal
political revolutions introduced the notions of right and left from which
the ND and other political forces in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries could then claim to transcend right and left. I pointed out that

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38 Tamir Bar-On
numerous intellectuals of various political stripes also rejected and even

expressed disdain for the right-left dichotomy. I also posited that the ND’s
novel political synthesis presented analytical problems for scholars
studying the ND. The profound degree to which the ND sought to create
a new modernist (or postmodernist) synthesis was its reconciliation with
idiosyncratic sectors of the NL in the 1990s as a result of the fall of the
Communist Soviet Union. I argued that a changing political and cultural
climate with new salient and transversal issues that cut across the
traditional right-left divide (for example, immigration, terrorism,
defending the secular state, terrorism, anguish about the EU project, the
attack on the welfare state in a period of economic decline, and anti-
Americanism) assisted the rise of extreme right-wing political parties and
vindicated the claims of the ND about the increasingly obsolete nature of
right and left as analytical categories in the new millennium. Finally, I am
adamant that the metapolitical orientation of the ND does not negate its
revolutionary desire to smash liberalism and introduce what Hobsbawm
called “an entirely new epoch in human history.”
NOTES
1. Norberto Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction, trans. Allan
Cameron (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 60 –79.
2. Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity (Abingdon:
Routledge, 2013). A changed version of this paper appears in Chapter 2 of Rethinking the
French New Right: Alternatives to Modernity.
3. See Roger Griffin, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and
Hitler (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007) and Roger Griffin, “Foreword. Another
Face? Another Mazeway? Reflections on the Newness and Rightness of the European
New Right,” in Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, by Tamir Bar-On (Aldershot,
England: Ashgate, 2007), viii–xvi.
4. Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2006).
5. Eric Hobsbawm, Revolutionaries (London: Abacus, 2007), 269.
6. The Conservative Revolution (CR) connotes non-Nazi fascisms of the interwar period.
CR thinkers combined German ultranationalism, defense of the organic folk

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community, technological modernity, and socialist revisionism, which valorized the

worker and soldier as models for a reborn authoritarian state superseding the egalitarian
“decadence” of liberalism, socialism, and traditional conservatism. CR thinkers included
Carl Schmitt (the Nazi crown jurist), Arthur Moeller van den bruck (inventor of the
term “Third Reich”), and Ernst Jünger (ultranationalist war veteran who penned In
Stahlgewittern [The Storm of Steel], a hymn to World War I soldierly virtues first
privately printed in 1920). The term “Conservative Revolution” was popularized by the
Swiss-born philosopher Armin Mohler, who wrote a doctoral thesis under Karl Jaspers
in the late 1940s. The thesis was later revised and published by Mohler in 1972. Mohler
called the CR thinkers the “Trotskyites of the German Revolution” and was sympathetic
to their brand of fascism. See Roger Griffin, “German nihilism” in Fascism, ed. Roger
Griffin (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 351.
7. See, for example, Tamir Bar-On, “Transnationalism and the French nouvelle droite,”
Patterns of Prejudice 45, no. 3 (2011): 199 –223; “Understanding Political Conversion and
Mimetic Rivalry,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 10, no. 3 (December
2009): 241– 64; and Where Have All The Fascists Gone? (Aldershot, England: Ashgate,
2007).
8. Tamir Bar-On and Howard Goldstein, “Fighting Violence: A Critique of the War on
Terrorism,” International Politics 42 (June 2005): 227; Jonathan Barker, The No-Nonsense
Guide to Terrorism (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2003).
9. Martin Breaugh, “Conservative Ideology from Yesterday to Today,” Lecture delivered at
Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Querétaro, Querétaro, Mexico (20 February 2012).
10. Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between Church and State,
1926 –1929, trans. Richard Southern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).
11. A. J. Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century (New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).
12. Arthur Versluis, “What’s Right?: A Review Essay,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism 2,
no. 2 (2009): 153.
13. A. J. Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2004); Ze’ev Sternhell, Neither Right Nor Left: Fascist
Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1996); Ze’ev Sternhell (with M. Asheri and M. Sznajder), The Birth of Fascist Ideology,
trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
14. Tamir Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire,”
Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16, no. 3 (December 2008), 327– 45.

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00
40 Tamir Bar-On
15. Alain de Benoist, “End of the Left-Right Dichotomy: The French Case,” Telos 102 (1995):
73–90.
16. Tamir Bar-On, “The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968 –1999,” The European
Legacy 6, no. 3 (2001): 333–51.
17. Versluis, “What’s Right?: A Review Essay,” 153.
18. Bobbio, Left and Right, 60 –79.
19. Bobbio, Left and Right, 10 –11.
20. Étienne Balibar, “Europe Is a Dead Political Project,” guardian.co.uk, 25 May 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/25/eu-crisis-catastrophic-
consequences (accessed 27 January 2011).
21. See, for example, Alain de Benoist, “Il Pensiero Ribelle di Alain de Benoist,” Diorama
Letterario 286 (2007): 5–12; Alain de Benoist, Giuseppe Giaccio, and Costanzo Preve,
Dialoghi sul presente. Alienazione, globalizzazione, Destra/Sinistra, atei devote (Napoli:
ControCorrente, 2005); and Alain de Benoist’s interviews with Costanzo Preve in
Eléments: “Relire Marx” 115 (2004 –2005): 34 – 40 and “Quand la culture de gauche
légitime le capitalisme” 116 (2005): 48 –53.
22. Pablo Ródenas Utray, Entrevista a Danilo Zolo, “Universalismo y ‘pluriversalismo’ ante
el nuevo orden mundial,” Revista Internacional de Filosofía Política 27 (2006): 187–202.
23. Francis Fukuyama, “The End of History?,” The National Interest 16 (1989): 3–18.
24. Slavoj Žižek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 40.
25. Slavoj Žižek, “Why We All Love To Hate Haider,” New Left Review 2 (2000),
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view⫽2228 (accessed 9 February 2011).
26. J. Jens Rydgren, ed. Movements of Exclusion: Radical Right-Wing Populism in the
Western World (Hauppauge, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2005).
27. Andrea Mammone, “The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporization of
Neo-Fascism across Britain, France and Italy,” Journal of Contemporary European
Studies 17, no. 2 (2009): 176.
28. Sarah L. De Lange, “Radical Right-Wing Parties in Office,” in The Extreme Right in
Europe: Current Trends and Perspectives, ed. Uwe Backes and Patrick Moreau
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht), 173, 192.
29. Bruno Waterfield, “Geert Wilders ‘Delighted’ after Being Cleared of ‘Hate Speech,’”
The Telegraph, 23 June 2011, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/
netherlands/8594836/Geert-Wilders-delighted-after-being-cleared-of-hate-speech.html
(accessed 24 February 2013).
30. Al Arabiya News, “Cracks Show in Bulgaria’s Muslim Ethnic Model,” 1 June 2009,
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2009/06/01/74479.html (accessed 24 February 2013).

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00
31. Terhi Kinnunen, “True Finns Party Sparks Immigration Debate in Finland,”
Expatica.com, 27 May 2009, http://www1.expatica.com/be/employment/
employment_information/True-Finns-party-sparks-immigration-debate-in-
Finland-_14116.html (accessed 24 February 2013).
32. Nigel Copsey, Contemporary British Fascism: The British National Party and the Quest
for Legitimacy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 100 –23.
33. Yehudah Lahav, “Proud Hungarians Must Prepare for War against the Jews,” Ha’aretz,
1 June 2009, http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/2.209/proud-hungarians-must-
prepare-for-war-against-the-jews-1.277076 (accessed 24 February 2013).
34. Timothy Peace, “Un antisémitisme nouveau? The Debate about the ‘New Antisemitsm
in France,’” Patterns of Prejudice 43, no. 2 (2009): 103–21; Pierre-André Taguieff, Rising
from the Muck: The New Anti-Semitism in Europe, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago:
Ivan Dee, 2004).
35. Mammone, “The Eternal Return? Faux Populism and Contemporization of
Neo-Fascism across Britain, France and Italy,” 171.
36. Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and Racism, “The
Extreme Right in the European Parliamentary Elections: A Culture of Hate,” Topical
Brief No. 1, 2009, http://www.tau.ac.il/Anti-Semitism/articles/eu-parliament.pdf
(accessed 30 November 2010).
37. Tomislav Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality: The European New Right (New York:
Peter Lang, 1990).
38. See, for example, Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, “Fascism to the Nouvelle
Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire,” and “The French New Right’s Quest for
Alternative Modernity,” Fascism: Journal of Contemporary Fascist Studies 1, no. 1 (2012):
18 –52.
39. D. L. Sanromán, “Tomasiewicz-Sanromán Correspondence on Polish New Right II,”
Nomadas 13, no. 1 (2006), http://www.ucm.es/info/nomadas/13/dlsanroman1.pdf (accessed
2 January 2011).
40. Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism
(Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 184.
41. Roger Griffin, “Modernity, Modernism, and Fascism. A Mazeway Resynthesis,”
Modernism/Modernity 15, no. 1 (2008): 9 –24; Bar-On, “Transnationalism and the
French nouvelle droite.”
42. Sanromán, “Tomasiewicz-Sanromán Correspondence on Polish New Right II.”
43. Sanromán, “Tomasiewicz-Sanromán Correspondence on Polish New Right II.”

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00
42 Tamir Bar-On
44. Roger Eatwell, “Introduction: What Are Political Ideologies?,” in Contemporary

Political Ideologies, ed. Roger Eatwell and Anthony Wright (London: Continuum,
2003), 1–22.
45. René Rémond, Les droites aujourd’hui (Paris: Louis Audibert, 2005).
46. Alain de Benoist, Mémoire vive: Entretiens avec François Bousquet (Paris: Éditions de
Fallois), 163.
47. Piero Ignazi, The Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press), 1–20.
48. Alain de Benoist, “Entretien avec Alain de Benoist,” Le choc du mois 31 (juillet-août
1990).
49. Charles Champetier and Alain de Benoist, “La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000,” Éléments
94 (février 1999): 10 –23. In particular, see Section 3, Position 3 of the manifesto entitled
“Against Immigration; For Cooperation.”
50. Ignazi, The Extreme Right Parties in Western Europe, 45–52.
51. Gabriele Marranci, “Multiculturalism, Islam, and the Clash of Civilisations Theory:
Rethinking Islamophobia,” Culture and Religion 5, no. 1 (2004): 105.
52. Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity), 176.
53. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 178 –79.
54. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, 115.
55. Angelos Giannakopoulos, “What Is to Become of Turkey in Europe? European Identity
and Turkey’s EU Accession,” Perceptions (2004): 60 – 61.
56. Zbigniew Brzezinski, Second Chance: Three Presidents and the Crisis of American
Superpower (New York: Basic, 2007).
57. James Anderson, “Singular Europe: An Empire Once Again?,” in Geopolitics of European
Union Enlargement: The Fortress Empire, ed. Warwick Armstrong and James Anderson
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 24.
58. Houssain Kettani, “2010 World Muslim Population,” 8th Hawaii International
Conference on Arts and Humanities, Honolulu (January 2010), http://www.pupr.edu/
hkettani/papers/HICAH2010.pdf (accessed 9 February 2011).
59. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Xenophobia All Over the Place?,” Commentary 288 (1
September 2010), Fernand Braudel Center, http://www.iwallerstein.com/xenophobia-all-
over-the-place/ (accessed 8 November 2010).
60. Wallerstein, “Xenophobia All Over the Place?.”
61. R. C. Archibold, “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration,” New York Times, 23
April 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html (accessed 11
January 2011).

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00
62. Slavoj Žižek, Virtue and Terror: Maximilien Robespierre, trans. John Howe (London:
Verso, 2007), xxvi.
63. Dominique Moïsi, La géopolitique de l’émotion (Paris: Flammarion, 2009).
64. De Benoist, Mémoire vive: Entretiens avec François Bousquet, 270.
65. Arthur Versluis, “Antimodernism,” Telos 137 (2006): 123.
66. Versluis, “Antimodernism,” 123.
67. Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right.
68. Guillaume Faye, La Colonisation de l’Europe. Discours vrai sur l’immigration et l’Islam
(Paris: L’Æncre, 2000) and Le Système à tuer les peuples (Paris: Copernic, 1981).
69. Jean Raspail, Le Camp des saints (The Camp of the Saints), trans. Norman Shapiro
(Petoskey, MI : The Social Contract Press).
70. Jean Raspail, “La patrie trahie par la République,” Le Figaro (17 juin 2004).
71. Paul Piconne, “Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or a New Political
Paradigm?,” Telos 98 –99 (1993–1994), 3–23.
72. Piccone, “Confronting the French New Right: Old Prejudices or a New Political
Paradigm?,” 19.
73. George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism” in George Orwell: Essays (London: Penguin,
2000), 300.
74. Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone? and Rethinking the French New Right.
75. GRECE is the acronym for Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation
européenne (Research and Study Group for European Civilization). The idea behind
the think tank was born in 1968 with about 40 revolutionary right-wing political
activists in France, but the organization was legally created in 1969. In French,
GRECE means Greece and GRECE thinkers such as Alain de Benoist longed for the
values of pagan antiquity against the egalitarian heritage of the Judaeo-Christian
tradition.
76. Tom McCulloch, “The Nouvelle Droite in the 1980s and 1990s: Ideology and Entryism,
the Relationship with the Front National,” French Politics and Society 4 (2006): 158 –78;
Roger Woods, Germany’s New Right as Culture and Politics (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2007).
77. Tom Nairn and Angelo Quattrocchi, The Beginning of the End, France, May 1968
(London: Verso, 1998).
78. Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin (London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1995).
79. C. R. Mills, “Letter to the New Left,” New Left Review 5 (1960), http://www.marxists.org/
subject/humanism/mills-c-wright/letter-new-left.htm (accessed 9 March 2011).

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00
44 Tamir Bar-On
80. Douglas Kellner, “Western Marxism” in Modern Social Theory: An Introduction, ed.
Austin Harrington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 154 –74.
81. G. N. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left: A Global Analysis of 1968 (Cambridge,
MA: South End Press, 1987), 3–16.
82. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, 37–70.
83. Katsiaficas, The Imagination of the New Left, 23–27.
84. Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone?, 10.
85. Alain de Benoist, Vu de droite (Paris: Copernic, 1979), 16, 25.
86. Eatwell, “Introduction: What Are Political Ideologies?,” 17.
87. Bar-On, “Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite,” 328 –29.
88. Sunic, Against Democracy and Equality.
89. Fukuyama, “The End of History?”
90. Charles Champetier and Alain de Benoist, “La Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000,” Section 3,
Clause 3.
91. Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right, particularly chapter 6.
92. De Benoist, Vu de droite, 19.
93. Quoted in Martyn Cornick, “May 1968,” Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture,
ed. Alex Hughes and Keith Reader (London: Routledge, 1998), 368.
94. Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, 73.
95. Bar-On, Where Have All The Fascists Gone?, 73.
96. Andrew Berwick, 2083—A European Declaration of Independence (London 2011),
http://estaticos.elmundo.es/documentos/2011/07/27/manifiesto.pdf (accessed 23 August
2011).
97. Alain de Benoist, “Horizon 2000: Trois entretiens avec Alain de Benoist,” Point de Vue
(Paris: GRECE, 1996), 30.
98. GRECE, ed., Le Mai 1968 de la nouvelle droite (Paris: Le Labyrinthe).
99. Robert Paxton, “The Five Stages of Fascism,” Journal of Modern History 70, no. 1 (1998):
1–23.

197.221.254.71 on Sun, 05 May 2024 15:22:33 +00:00

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The French New Right: Neither Right, nor Left?

Author(s): Tamir Bar-On

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The French New Right

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traditional right-left political spectrum; (3) A variant of alternative modernity

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Still a Right and Left?

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Intellectuals, Right, and Left

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liberal triumphalism? As left-wing parties collapsed, vacated political

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liberalism on a planetary scale, and the imminent arrival of a “universal

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Freedom Party joined the national coalition government in Austria in

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orientation, and anti-Muslim and sometimes anti-Semitic fervor. Geert

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were borrowed from de Benoist and other ND thinkers such as Guillaume

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Other scholars asked more questions about how to situate the ND on

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liberal capitalist democracy, to borrow a phrase from Emmanuel

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undermine the liberal-left’s post-World War II welfare state consensus and

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coalition partner in 1994, 2001–2006, and 2008, borrowed its proregionalist,

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earlier there was the murder of a controversial Dutch filmmaker Theo

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with new opportunities to abolish the right-left division by forging new

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It wasn’t a matter of tender heart, but a morbid, contagious excess of

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NL is a political force in decline, the ND made political inroads from the

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a Democratic Society” in Michigan, a key NL document. It is believed that

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student radicalism, demonstrations against the Franco dictatorship in

(1) Opposition to racial, political, and patriarchal domination, as well as

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workers, the NL expanded the base of the revolution to hitherto

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“homogenized” via the “abstract equality” of liberal societies); and (3)

The ND's Ideal Society and State