The Revival of Right Wing Extremism in the Nineties

Peter H. Merkl, Leonard Weinberg, Peter H. Merkl, Leonard Weinberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781135245498
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Most studies of the radical right concentrate on movements in a single country, neglecting to some extent the international dimensions of right-wing extremism. Here, Merkl and Weinberg adopt a comparative perspective, concentrating on the revival of the right across a variety of countries.

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Why Are They So Strong Now? Comparative Reflections on the Revival of the Radical Right in Europe

Peter H. Merkl

‘This is exactly the way things began the last time, in Hitler’s time. First you hear speeches full of hate, then come the firebombs, and then suddenly it’s out of control,’ a New York Times correspondent quoted a German schoolgirl on the occasion of the 1992 killing of three Turkish women at Moelln, near Hamburg, by right-wing skinheads. The German press and the opposition Social Democrats and Greens likewise linked the anti-foreign violence of that annus horribilis to visions of the old stormtroopers on the march and, for a touch of contemporary realities, to the immigration and asylum policies of the ruling Christian Democrats, specifically their desire to modify the constitutional article (Basic Law article 16) promising political asylum to all comers.¹ In the bitter partisan controversies – the amending of article 16 in mid-May of 1993 led to a veritable siege of the Bonn parliament – and with the supercharged media campaigns in Germany and the United States, everyone was so concerned with making a point that they forgot that schoolgirls do not always make good historians or detached social scientists.²

In the meantime, it has become obvious that this ‘German disease’ has not only long spread to other countries of Western Europe and North America, but was present all along in many of them, in particular in France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, and of course in the United States. Everywhere in the West, there are movements of the extreme right and, by now, also manifestations of pronounced prejudice and violence against visible and imagined foreigners. At this point it becomes absolutely necessary to define our terms of reference clearly and carefully. What and whom exactly are we referring to as radical right or extreme rightist? How do organized movements or parties and violent young groups and their outrages relate to one another? Are we describing here a set of beliefs, an organizational history, or the continuities of right-wing personnel or family socialization, or current extremist activities, or all of the above?

In this volume we will argue that the current resurgence of extreme right movements and activities is largely new and sui generis, and should be investigated accordingly, as a largely new and disturbing phenomenon related to and largely caused by recent conditions and circumstances. It is not enough to point to the inter-war French fascists of the ‘revolutionary right’ (Zeev Sternhell) of different colours, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, the Spanish Falange, Mussolini’s blackshirts, or Hitler’s brownshirts to shed much light on the present radical right in these countries. The misuse of the old labels both by the right-wing radicals themselves and their pejorative use in partisan debates or by today’s media has prevented us from recognizing the newness and the profound changes in the situation of today as compared to the inter-war ‘fascist epoch’, as Ernst Nolte called the twenties and thirties.

Defining the Radical Right

There is little reason to make a great mystery of who and what belongs to the extreme right today. As the term makes clear, the definition is first and foremost a situational one: To the extent that we still place political parties, movements, and activities on a Right–Left scale – and some people question the validity of such a universal measuring stick – extreme right means just that.³ Given a particular issue of importance to them, for example immigration, or the rights of asylum, a radical right position is likely to be more hostile or punitive than those advanced by all the other parties, movements, or persons. It may threaten extreme, even cruel measures against illegal immigrants and question the rights of foreign-born legal citizens, as has become common verbiage from the French Front National throughout anti-foreign movements all over Western Europe and, last but not least, in Canada and the United States. Extreme measures and violations of the rights of immigrants have also appeared in the form of hostile police or immigration officer treatment of aliens and even of legal residents and citizens associated with them, as for example in the massive police attack ordered by the Paris Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon, on a 1961 demonstration of Algerians, most of them French citizens who were peacefully protesting a curfew imposed on French Algerians.⁴

This last example also hints at the racism, prejudices, and, in some cases, genocidal tendencies we associate with the extreme right. However, our insistence on a situational definition rather than the usual search for a quasi-Platonic ‘essence of fascism’ avoids the pitfalls of partisan finger-pointing and personal polemics that so often obscure the nature of a particular movement. Calling a candidate or movement ‘fascist’, ‘neo-’ ‘crypto-’, or ‘quasi’-fascist sheds no more light on the matter than did the old charges of ‘communist’, crypto-, quasi- communist, or ‘communist sympathizer’ in the not too distant past.⁵ On the other hand, a situational definition leads to other difficulties. Not only is it perfectly possible for a party or movement that is at the rightmost end of the political spectrum on one important issue to be moderate on other issues that it may make it more difficult to classify it. An extreme right position may also pertain to the space available within a moderate or even an extreme left-wing party or movement. When, for example, reborn communist parties in the successor states of the former Soviet Union – a frequent source of confusion of right and left in our accepted sense of the terms – adopt stridently nationalistic policies and threaten the use of the old army and secret police against the challenge of systematic reform, they obviously are no longer on the extreme left and, frequently, close to an extreme right course.

Extreme right movements, as Leonard Weinberg has pointed out, furthermore, differ strikingly from conservative parties both in aims and particularly in their uninhibited use of any means to their ends – ‘dirty tricks’, subversion, and violence.⁶ But we may also find on the extreme right of moderate conservative parties, and particularly of very conservative parties, such as the French Gaullists (RPR), groups and persons of radical right views. For years the tough-minded present Interior Minister of France, Charles Pasqua (RPR), authorized police actions of great severity and ‘covered’ them when casualties resulted, for example among Islamic youths. His much-quoted statement in 1988, that the Gaullists shared most of the values of Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National (FN), on the other hand, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. It is true that the RPR made him a leading figure and continues to support him, but it has evidently shied away from openly endorsing all of his views and methods.⁷ His high-handed actions and strong statements have also caused other RPR leaders such as Premier Edouard Balladur, at times, to distance themselves from him.

Extremist politics, to quote Weinberg again, also tends to be intolerant of a plurality of opinions, and disdainful of those who come up with ‘complicated answers to simple questions’, as the American populist presidential candidate George C. Wallace reportedly said in the 1964 campaign. To them there is only one answer, the truth, and, to paraphrase right-wingers from Mussolini to Pierre Poujade, ‘in your hearts you know we [alone] are right’.⁸ With such certainty of the truth, naturally the extreme right feels entitled to impose it in the most authoritarian fashion on whomsoever does not believe it, and, if necessary, by brute force. It sees no point in parliamentary or other political discussion of the truth and rejects the concept of a democratic market-place of competing ideas in which decisions are made by majority rule.

Some writers on the subject, for example Roger Eatwell,⁹ have also drawn attention to the fact that, since the French Revolution, right-wing movements seem to have been principally preoccupied with resisting or even reversing the tides of social change that have come over Western societies, but this only explains a part of a many-sided phenomenon. To be sure, the extreme right often shares with the moderate right an aversion to change. But it also tends to envision the ‘good old days’ in wildly unrealistic ways, a social world without conflict over class exploitation, gender and environmental issues, or racial discrimination – the way we never were. The Germans call it the image of the heile Welt (a world intact) and, as compared to it, the world today and in the immediate past is always found wanting or kaputt (broken). People who remind us of the imperfections in our world by fighting them, for example advocates of working-class interests or the homeless, feminists, environmentalists, and advocates of minority interests often arouse a tremendous hatred among the members of the radical right. The unrealistic expectations of many a rightist, however, tend to make extreme rightism a Utopian ideology at least as often as it may be a reactionary one. It postulates a social order that (contrary to its own claims) never really existed in the past or present¹⁰ and, in frustration over the alleged imperfections of real society, threatens to impose its Utopia by force. The determination to impose its ‘order’ is at least as much the hallmark of the extreme right as may be the nature of the Utopia in the minds of these zealots.¹¹

Attempts at Substantive Definition

There is another dimension to the radical right which is usually ignored by accounts written in the spirit of political liberalism because it is so antithetical to liberal thinking about politics. Rather than explaining the appeal of a right-wing leader, programme, or movement in the customary terms of the material interests of the followers, this dimension emphasizes ‘spirituality’, idealism, and imponderables of ‘style’ as the great attractions of right-wing charisma. Well-known to fascist leaders of the inter-war period in various guises, this aspect has reached a new prominence in the age of television and sophisticated advertisement and public relations, far beyond the uses of the radical right. To give examples, a skilful demagogue like Adolf Hitler always knew that appealing to the longing of young Germans for heroic idealism, self-sacrifice, and even a hero’s death was infinitely more powerful than promising them material rewards. Visions of an ideal, or ‘spiritual’ Reich won hands-down over the rationalistic notions of democracy and democratic representation. He and Mussolini were veritable magicians at the art of manipulating symbols and elements of style – including the brown or black uniforms of their stormtroopers and the dramaturgy of their huge rallies and demonstrations¹² – in order to appeal to the hidden fears and longings of their audiences.

In our age of media-wise politics and professional political ‘handlers’ and hucksters, this symbolic and style dimension of politics has been appropriated with unlimited campaign chests and conspicuous success by conservative politicians from Ronald Reagan to Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian television mogul and, briefly, prime minister. By comparison, contemporary movements of the radical right, for lack of money and talent, seem less adept at their old art of cultivating charisma. A closer look, however, suggests that here again lies a subtle dividing line between the conservative and the radical right clientele, though not always of their leadership.¹³ Though they may value the art of political salesmanship as a welcome means to an end – usually the control of governmental intervention in the economy – moderate conservatives never see in it a purpose in itself. The radical right tends to identify the style of leadership and of their leaders with their distinctive aesthetized view of political reality. It has always been their alternative to ‘politics as usual’ – politics as the grand, heroic spectacle.

There is merit to the attempts to map out a ‘core’ of extreme right beliefs as, for example, Piero Ignazi has done in his survey in this work. Some analysts even strive for a model of ‘generic fascism’¹⁴ that would include all the historic inter-war fascist movements and regimes as well as serving as a touchstone of true rightwing extremist character today. Such a core of beliefs for the movements originating 1917–23 would have included 1) the Great War (the First World War) as an opportunity for national and individual greatness (regardless of casualties); 2) upper-and middle-class revulsion at the Russian Revolution and its domestic followers; 3) ethnic hatred (including anti-Semitism) and cultural xenophobia; 4) rebellion against Western parliamentary democracy, liberalism, and capitalism; and 5) identification with such rebels against the victorious West and its peace treaties (Versailles, etc.) as Mussolini, Ataturk and others. However, we must not forget that most historians are quite sceptical already that the inter-war fascist movements and regimes had much in common besides rather superficial patterns of imitation – often including some communist movements and the Soviet Union as well – and a label of identification attached by themselves or their enemies after the fact. What most of them did have in common was their times, that is the cataclysmic impacts of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, and the crisis of the pre-war order among the social classes and on the economies, social life, and culture throughout Europe.

None of these major commonalities, of course, apply after 1945, but there are now a few new commonalities that might unite the far right of the various countries: nostalgic memories of the fascist hegemony that was whipsawed between the Eastern and Western victors of the Second World War, 40 years of the Cold War, the provocations of the 1968 generation, and the immigrant and refugee question. Fascist nostalgia probably faded with the passing of the generations by the end of the sixties with the exception of the sizable fascist subculture underlying the Italian successor party MSI and other groups where families and youth organizations may have continued socializing the young.¹⁵ The anticommunism of the Cold War years is fading along with the last vestiges of communist power in the East. The challenges of the New Left of the late sixties, for example in the form of student rebellion, feminism, the post-industrial ‘new individualism’, and the environmental and life-style social movements of the seventies will be discussed below. The immigrant and refugee streams, especially of the eighties and nineties are the other common preoccupation that seems to bring together radical right movements from California to Saxony.

Mislabelling Radical Right Movements

The ghosts of the fascist era of half a century and more ago continue to becloud our analysis of the phenomena of the most recent past. It is not just tabloid journalism that prefers the stereotypical old label to exploring the complex and often embarrassing reality before us –Americans hardly need to go to Europe to find immigrant-bashing, racism, and violent youth – but there are plenty of academics who are slow to address th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Original Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Why are they So Strong Now? Comparative Reflections on the Revival of the Radical Right in Europe
• 2. The Extreme Right in Europe: A Survey
• 3. The New Right in France and Germany. Nouvelle Droite, Neue Rechte, and the New Right Radical Parties
• 4. The New Extreme Right-Wingers in Western Europe: Attitudes, World Views and Social Characteristics
• 5. The Extreme-Right Political Movements in Post-Communist Central Europe
• 6. Post-Communist Right Radicalism in Romania
• 7. The Radical Right in Post-Communist Russian Politics
• 8. Radical Right Parties and Civic Groups in Belarus and the Ukraine
• 9. The American Radical Right in Comparative Perspective
• 10. The Quiet Dog: The Extreme Right and the South African Transition
• Conclusions
• Index