The Far Right and the Environment

Politics, Discourse and Communication

Bernhard Forchtner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138477865
• eBook ISBN: 9781351104029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, both the crisis of liberal democracy, as visible in, for example, the rise of far-right actors in Europe and the United States, and environmental crises, from declining biodiversity to climate change, are increasingly in the public spotlight. Whilst both areas have been analysed extensively on their own, The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication provides much needed insights into their intersection by illuminating the environmental communication of far-right party and non-party actors in Europe and the United States. Although commonly perceived as a 'left-wing' issue today, concerns over the natural environment by the far right have a long, ideology-driven history. Thus, it is not surprising that some members of the far right offer distinctive ecological visions of communal life, though, for example, climate-change scepticism is voiced too. Investigating this range of stances within their discourse about the natural environment provides a window into the wider politics of the far right and points to a close connection between the politics of identity and the imagination of nature. Connecting the fields of environmental communication and study of the far right, contributions to this edited volume therefore offer timely assessments of this often-overlooked dimension of far-right politics.

1

FAR-RIGHT ARTICULATIONS OF THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT

An introduction

Bernhard Forchtner

Any national movement that is to be taken seriously can be seen as a national-ecological movement according to its own self-conception.

Michael Howanietz (2005: 25)

Introducing The Far Right and the Environment: Politics, Discourse and Communication

The far right, ranging from the radical right which opposes some elements of liberal democracy to the anti-democratic extreme right, is commonly investigated for their stance on immigrants and refugees, as well as, for example, their memory politics and their views on gender. However, what is not usually looked at are their politics concerned with the natural environment, their environmental communication.¹ Indeed, given the common association of environmental issues with the (liberal) left today, environmental communication by the far right might come as a surprise. However, it should be anything but surprising – and it is this often overlooked dimension of far-right politics which this edited volume illuminates. After all, although it is true that both anti-liberal, but increasingly mainstream and (nominally) democratic, far-right parties, such as the Freedom Party of Austria and the French National Rally (formerly: National Front), as well as anti-democratic actors, including the National Democratic Party of Germany and various ‘autonomous’ extreme-right groupuscules, are not well-known for their environmental politics, the natural environment (and concerns over it) has – to varying extent – its place in these actors’ ideology.

Indeed, meanings attributed to the natural environment are not inherent in nature itself, but, as Staudenmaier (2011[1995]: 41f) reminds us, are linked to ideology.² In fact, the natural environment has long played a role in nationalist and far-right political thinking. This has ranged from a full-blown ecological worldview which stresses the interconnectedness of flora, fauna, the nation and its homeland, including the naturalisation of social relations and the significance of ‘the land’ for the reproduction of ‘the people’, to the aesthetic idealisation of certain elements of the community’s landscape. The significance of environmental, and sometimes even ecological, considerations is starkly visible in the ‘epigraph by Michael Howanietz, a member of the Freedom Party of Austria, who has consistently thematised issues related to the natural environment’.³

It is against this background that contributions to this volume shed light on environmental communication by a diverse range of party and non-party actors populating the far-right spectrum. In so doing, the contributors to this book provide a reference volume concerning an area hardly investigated; an area, however, through which these actors have long reproduced their ideology. Indeed, it is because the ‘politics of nature is at the same time a politics of identity’ (Olsen 1999: 29) that far-right environmental communication has to be scrutinised too.

Inquiring into the far right and the environment is a timely endeavour as we are faced today with the intersection of (communication about) two crises: on the one hand, large sections of ‘the West’ are experiencing a crisis of liberal democracy. The rise of far-right parties (but also non-party actors) in Europe, parts of the Brexit debate in the United Kingdom, and the successful presidential campaigns of Donald Trump in the United States (US) and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil illustrate this. On the other hand, anthropogenic environmental crises, although not just with us since industrialisation and urbanisation, are now a global phenomenon, with climate change, a paradigmatic unintended consequence of previous modernisation (Beck 2009), at the heart of public debates. Yet, this intersection of crises and the ways in which they are communicated has hardly been analysed, and it is here that this volume intervenes by providing a comprehensive account of far-right environmental communication in contemporary Europe and beyond. Importantly, however, we do not expect the far right to communicate in a uniform way. Thus, the goal is not to illuminate this intersection in general terms, but to highlight, first, differences and similarities within the far-right spectrum. That is, to illuminate differences and similarities between the anti-liberal radical right and the anti-democratic extreme right (Mudde 2007) in how these actors engage with the natural environment (if at all) due to ideology (more or less ‘extreme’/organic ethnonationalist), diverging historical backgrounds, and diverse discursive and political contexts. Second, contributions to this volume furthermore point to equally relevant tensions within individual actors due to competing ideological elements.

This introduction constitutes a first step in this attempt and starts by offering a brief clarification of what is meant when speaking of the far right in the following. I will subsequently provide an overview of aspects related to the natural environment in the literature on nationalism and the far right before offering an overview of contributions to this volume.

The far right…

It has become common to mourn the lack of coherence concerning the name of the referent of those studying actors to the right of conservative parties. Besides, for example, ‘right wing’, ‘radical right’, ‘extreme right’ and ‘right-wing extremist’, and ‘far right’, we sometimes find the designator ‘ultra-nationalist’ and even ‘(neo-)fascist’ and ‘(neo-)Nazi’. At times, this variety is simply due to linguistic and political preferences, but it is also rooted in actual differences. Anti-liberal, but (nominally) democratic parties such as the Danish People’s Party and the aforementioned National Rally are increasingly ‘mainstream’ (a ‘mainstream’ which co-evolves with these parties, a ‘mainstream’ they co-shape). Other actors, however, are anti-democratic, for example Golden Dawn in Greece and so-called Autonomous Nationalists across Europe. Against this background, this volume, in line with the name of the series in which it is published, employs ‘far right’ as the overarching name of this continuum of actors.

At the core of far-right actors, we find ethnonationalism – linking membership in the nation to biological/racial and/or cultural traits – and authoritarianism (Bonikowski 2017; Rydgren 2018a). Besides these core ideological features, elements more or less dominantly present include, for example, ethnopluralism, anti-socialism, proclivity for scapegoating ‘others’, and an uncritical view on the community’s historical past. The latter results in, for example, the denial of war guilt or, in Austria and Germany in particular, the Holocaust (see Holzer 1994; Salzborn 2014). In some cases, the far right is also ‘populist’. Here, populism signifies a ‘thin-centred ideology’ which considers society to be divided in two camps, ‘pure people’ versus ‘corrupt elite’, and stresses the need to defend the general will of ‘the people’ (Mudde 2007: 23), though others conceptualise it as a political logic (Laclau 2005) or primarily a style (Moffitt 2016). Depending on how dominantly these core (and additional) criteria are present, far-right actors will populate different positions on a continuum. Accordingly, contributions to this volume deal with an array of actors, ranging from rather anti-liberal, today often mainstream radical right ones to anti-democratic, extreme-right actors.

As these contributions will indicate, a variety of elements appear to affect environmental communication by the far right, including the position the respective actor takes on the far-right continuum as well as the origins of these actors and their links to, for example, historical fascism and National Socialism; the respective party system, political opportunity structure and the media landscape; the intellectual abilities of these actors to engage with eco-theoretical questions (being able to go beyond ‘green is left’ knee-jerk reactions); the historical salience that environmental issues carry in particular contexts; and the configuration of discourses about the environment in these contexts. Dryzek (2012: 15–17), for example, identifies four basic environmental discourses (subsequently providing more specific types), understood by him as shared ways of apprehending the world, of providing legitimate knowledge and constructing meaning as well as relationships. These basic discourses are problem-solving (status quo needs adjustment, but no radical change is needed to cope with environmental problems), limits and survival (the limits of the Earth demand radical steps – though options to tackle these are set by industrialism), sustainability (economic growth and environmental protection can go hand in hand) and green radicalism (industrial society is rejected by Green romantics, deep ecologists and so forth).⁴ While I cannot elaborate on this typology here, such discourses need to be acknowledged as the far right, even though it comes with its own background convictions, does operate in a wider, societal context. Each of the following chapters will illustrate this complexity – but it is a more general look at the relation between the ideology of ethnonationalist forces and the natural environment to which I turn next.

…on its natural environment

Communication concerned with the protection of the natural environment is often considered to be a relatively new phenomenon, a relatively new site through which society actively reproduces its symbolic boundaries. What Radkau (2014) has termed the Age of Ecology is furthermore primarily associated with political forces on the (liberal) left of the political spectrum. As such, the contemporary concern for the natural environment is commonly informed by a universalist perspective in the tradition of the Enlightenment, stressing one humanity and its responsibility for Earth. However, the history of environmental protection and campaigning does not begin in the 1960s and ’70s. Instead, it can, at least, be traced back to the nineteenth century when the price of industrialisation and urbanisation was becoming apparent. Radkau (ibid.: 11–24), in fact, points to the period between Rousseau and the Romantic, arguing that it was in the 1790s that Europe saw a debate familiar to present-day controversies, back then concerning the shortage of wood and the potential risk of facing the destruction of forests. Indeed, it is since this period that universalist thought is criticised by various conservative and far-right actors, also in relation to nature and people. The Romantic response emphasised the particularity of both nature and peoples, spontaneity, originality and authenticity. According to this tradition, it is uniqueness and diversity which need to be celebrated, not ‘cold’ and ‘abstract’ universal reason.

Researchers of nationalism have long observed that such views of nature and the natural environment play a role in the nationalist imaginary.⁵ It is in the sense of something not being corrupted by civilisation or, as far-right actors might say today, not being distorted by the zeitgeist, that nationalism’s nature is one ‘which rejects any suggestion of the contrived, of the consciously arranged’ (Kedourie 1966: 57). This nature is, furthermore, territorially specific, it is the homeland, that is, the land where ‘terrain and people have exerted mutual, and beneficial, influence over several generations’ (Smith 1991: 9). These are ‘poetic spaces’ (ibid.: 78) or ‘‘ethno-scape[s]’ in which a people and its homeland become increasingly symbiotic’ (Smith 2009: 50). As such, the nation’s landscape is more than sheer matter, it is symbolically charged, creating a link between past, present and future (Palmer 1998: 191; Cosgrove 2004: 61). Memories are thus attached to sites, including natural ones (from forests to mountains and so on); and as communal being is projected onto sites, the latter are imputed with meaning and, as such, become a matter of identity. Schama, (1995: 10) too, emphasises the link between (national) identities and landscape, pointing out that the latter entered the English language via the Dutch landschap (the Netherlandish flood fields being a manifest site of human engineering with clear relevance for the identity of this particular community). In the Dutch and other cases of national identity, the latter would indeed ‘lose much of its ferocious enchantment without the mystique of a particular landscape tradition: its topography mapped, elaborated, and enriched as a homeland’ (ibid.: 15).

The significance of the local and particular is furthermore stressed by Barcena et al. (1997: 302), who argue that nationalism and ecologism share a fundamental philosophical stance in their ‘rejection of the leveling perversion of the universal and defense of the particular’. Particular ecosystems appear as seemingly stable and orderly, with different species in different habitats, and the resulting proximity between the discourse about the nation and the discourse about the environment, between the protection of the homeland and the protection of the environment, easily leads to a rejection of so-called ‘invasive species’, both animals and plants. While also visible in wider public debates, a concern over such ‘intruders’ is arguably particularly prevalent in far-right discourses in which ‘the supposed threat of foreign species, on the one hand, and, on the other, the perceived threat of foreign races and cultures to the native populations of their countries’ (Olwig 2003: 61; for concerns over biodiversity and ‘invasive species’ in the far right’s imaginary in particular, see Forchtner 2019a).

Today, such thinking draws regularly on, and is reinvigorated by, the Nouvelle Droite (Bar-On 2013). Like the ‘old’ far right, here too the social is naturalised and essentialised. Indeed, the Nouvelle Droite celebrates the ‘right to difference’ which leads to ethnopluralism, a concept forged by Henning Eichberg (Camus and Lebourg 2017: 130), that is, the protection of cultures and ethnicities by avoiding mixture. Thus, the Nouvelle Droite suggests concern for the preservation of cultures in general, but also in relation to the natural environment in particular. This derives from the Nouvelle Droite’s view, as represented by its main intellectual Alain de Benoist, of liberalism as the main carrier of modernity, as the ‘main enemy’ (de Benoist and Champetier 1999). Modernity, it is said, denies human nature, while the Nouvelle Droite postulates the necessarily biological nature of our species – a nature which unites us (this is not the ‘race’ of Social Darwinist racism) – before stressing that ‘[m]an is rooted by nature in his culture’. Humans thus construct themselves ‘historically and culturally’ within the species’ limitations; and diversity of cultures is consequently part of humanity’s essence. In this neo- or cultural racism (Taguieff 1990; Balibar 1991), nature, landscape and soil are significant – though no longer simply in the sense of a biological connection between land and people (‘blood and soil’), but in a symbolic way. Furthermore, de Benoist and Champetier (1999) argue, that...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Far-right articulations of the natural environment: An introduction
• PART I Two fields, many topics
• PART II Western Europe
• PART III Nordic countries
• PART IV Central Europe
• PART V Beyond Europe
• Index