Right-wing Extremism in the Twenty-first Century

Peter Merkl, Weinberg LEONARD, Peter Merkl, Weinberg LEONARD

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135764203
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Histoire
• Categoría: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

Revising the 1997 first edition, this study covers events that occurred in Oldham and Bradford after the year 2000. The rise of right-wing extremist groups is put under scrutiny in a number of states including Britain, Germany, Austria, Russia and France.

Part 1
The Extreme Right in the Ascendancy

CHAPTER ONE
Stronger than Ever
Peter H.Merkl

‘WHY ARE They so Strong Now?’ was the title of my essay in The Revival of Right-Wing Extremism in the Nineties published only five years ago. The answers by the editors and contributors were ambiguous. We were rather sceptical of the widespread stereotypes that had characterized the contemporary radical right in the perception of the public and the media. We found most comparisons of today’s right-wing extremism with interwar fascist movements and Nazism rather wanting, and emphasized instead the diversity of contemporary manifestations, cultural and social trends, movements, skinheads and radical right parties. Instead of the old right-wing causes of 50–75 years ago —even of 30 years ago—a whole range of new confrontations, social problems and issues now appear to trigger responses on the radical right. There are new elements that are often hardly susceptible to the strong-arm solutions of yesteryear. Many of the new problems, in fact, may have no solutions at all, or at least few governmental ones that would not place democracy itself at risk.

Typical among the new confrontations was the 1960s and 1970s challenge of the New Left, of the 1968 youth rebellion and its issues from anti-authoritarianism to feminism, pacifism and racial (or minority group) equality.¹ Another major factor that did not play an appreciable role in the interwar period are the nativist reactions to migrations of refugees, really a manifestation of the inequalities among nations, in particular between north and south. The ever-swelling ranks of the oppressed, hungry and underemployed of the world that are pushing their way into the small minority of developed societies on earth have triggered extreme and violent responses on the far right of the political spectrum, and considerable hostility from the moderate right. This is quite different from the effect of migrations of the early twentieth century, say in 1917 or 1935, when the flight from communist or fascist takeovers spread the polarization between extreme left and right throughout the West. Finally, the advanced democratic societies have undergone tremendous social change in the last 30 years that obliterated the significance of important old divisions, such as the class struggle, and replaced them with new ones and new problems such as the ‘new individualism’, the information revolution, and the ‘digital divide’. Contemporary movements of the extreme right that draw heavily upon unskilled working-class youth and on young unemployed obviously owe much to these new experiences of helplessness and alienation. The forces of economic and cultural globalization reinforce the rage of being left behind.

STRONGER THAN EVER

The first decade of the new century and millennium finds several of the radical right movements and trends we observed earlier stronger than ever. The largest of them in percentage terms is the Romanian PRM of Corneliu Vadim Tudor which towards the end of 2000 won 33 per cent of the popular vote in the presidential run-off elections. Born of a newspaper of the same name, Greater Romania, the ultranationalist PRM is about a decade old and some of its leaders, particularly ‘Vadim’, have a revealing national communist background with the media of the old communist regime. Vadim and Eugen Barbu, among other things, are former editors of the extreme communist culture weekly, Saptamana, in which Vadim praised the Ceauşescu regime as Romania’s ‘years of light’.² Now revealed as rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Hungarian, in 1990 Vadim was close to the Securitate and to Ceauşescu’s nemesis, Ion Iliescu, who narrowly defeated him and his PRM in 2000. The PRM advocates imperial expansion at the expense of Bulgaria and Moldova, and is anti-Hungarian, anti-gypsy and anti-Semitic. It is now the leading opposition in a rather fragmented parliament.

Another frontrunner in the radical right of today is Austria’s Jörg Haider whose FPÖ is analysed below by Richard Luther and others. Although he and his movement have been around for some time,³ many Americans and Europeans became alarmed about Haider only in February 2000 when his party entered the Austrian conservative government of Wolfgang Schüssel (leader of the ÖVP). Haider himself remained in Carinthia province where he has been governor. A flamboyant demagogue, Haider ‘needs scandals and tumults as Narcissus required a mirror’, according to Werner Perger writing in Die Zeit.⁴He likes to present a youthful, dynamic image as a skier, marathon runner, mountain climber and bungee-jumper, but has also been a dictator and the agent of ruthless purges in his own, centralized party. Among his eyebrow-raising contacts in recent years was a visit to Muammar Gadafy, one to the Pope, and past connections to right-wing politicians in France and Germany who often speak of him with disdain and—especially after his recent electoral triumphs—with envy. The entry of the FPÖ into the national government drew massive protest demonstrations throughout the country— involving at least 300,000 protesters atVienna’s Heldenplatz—and in some other European cities. Chancellor Schüssel, who was blamed by many for lending respectability to FPÖ, responded to the demonstrations by attributing them to ‘the far left, the hippie generation, the youth, and the Internet crowd’. Haider claimed the protesters were paid as much as 1,800 schillings (about $130) a day, but retreated somewhat from the soapbox by turning over his party chairmanship to Susanne Riess-Passer, which may have been merely a preliminary manoeuvre prior to campaigning for chancellor himself.

In the European Union, a hard-line anti-Austrian faction was formed by Portugal, France and Belgium—Britain, Denmark and Greece expressed a fear of isolating Austria. The EU along with the United States eventually agreed to impose diplomatic sanctions on Austria. The downgrading of diplomatic relations by the other 14 EU nations and the United States was supposed to pillory Austria until the FPÖ would step down. Some countries recalled their ambassadors to Vienna and the Austrian representatives in EU councils often found themselves cast in pariah roles. As Italian Prime Minister Massimo D’Alema put it, Austria had ignored the ‘common standards of values underlying European unity’ by entertaining a government coalition with the extreme right. He neglected to mention that the Berlusconi governments of 1994 (and 2001) did the same thing by bringing Gianfranco Fini’s Alleanza Nazionale (AN), the successor to the neo-fascist MSI, into the Italian national government.

By September 2000, after half a year of weak sanctions and strong words, however, at least six EU members were already trying to retreat from their position of severity even though emissaries of the European Court of Human Rights were still searching for concrete violations of the human rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers by Austria. Hardnosed press assessments of the EU stance began to call it a case of the pot calling the kettle black. Several of the other EU governments have also featured occasional collaboration between moderate and radical right parties, for example of local French Gaullists (RPR) with the FN or the German Christian Democrat Party (CDU) with right-wing dissidents from its midst. In the United States, of course, the inclusion of radical right figures and issues, e.g. of the religious right, in Republican administrations is not unheard of. And almost all the governments of the EU and the United States have experimented with the various curbs on immigration and asylum-seeking of which they now accuse the Schüssel-Haider government. While the exclusion of radical elements may be a noble goal, it is clearly not enough for ostracizing a member from the EU. Short of concrete findings of violations of common laws and policies, such efforts at controlling the internal politics of member states run the risk of blunting the weapon of sanctions and of crying wolf once too often.

Haider and his FPÖ are not entirely defenceless in this all-European purge attempt. In August of 2000 the Austrian government passed an 18-point plan to achieve the lifting of the EU sanctions, including an Austrian plebiscite on them.⁵ If such a popular referendum did pass with the expected majority, however, it could backfire disastrously among the EU partners who had just been treated to the spectacle of another typical FPÖ national convention (1 May 2000) at which all internal dissent and discussion were stifled and Haider’s allegedly surrendered leadership was reasserted in a manner reminiscent of the rhythmically clapping parliament of Ceauşescu’s heyday.

Another prop of Haider’s strength is the curious foreign aid package—25 million dollars—from Libya with which the Carinthian governor, for example, arranged for on-the-spot discounts on Libyan gasoline for his citizenry. Gadafy has long been known for distributing his largesse to neo-fascist and terrorist groups. Haider’s Libyan contact apparently dates back to 1988 when the FPÖ had its first modest electoral success. The party also has a faithful paladin in Gadafy’s son, Saif al-Islam, who lives in an exclusive Vienna suburb with his two pet Bengal tigers.⁶ Finally, we should mention the ambiguous light cast on Haider by his December 2000 visit to the Pope for the purpose of bringing the Vatican an 81-foot fir tree for a Christmas display on St Peter’s Square. Large crowds of anti-fascist demonstrators had to be held back while John Paul II granted a half-hour audience and graciously accepted the tree. A papal aide gave Haider a copy of the Holy Father’s recent World Peace Message which included a denunciation of racist nationalism, among other things. Haider is a devoted Catholic and the Vatican, whatever it may think of him privately, is reluctant to offend Austrian Catholics.

How seriously neo-Nazi is the Haider movement? Austrian President Thomas Klestil made the Schüssel government pledge to accept collective responsibility for the ‘monstrous crimes of the national socialist regime’, which is more than current French governments have ever admitted about their own collaborationist Vichy period. Provincial governor Haider, who is a member of the ‘coalition coordinating committee’ that meets every month in Vienna, has described himself as ‘a modernizer, a national populist of the free market persuasion’. He obviously knows his Austrians well, of whom over 50 per cent in surveys expressed the belief that Jews were responsible for their own persecution and 37 per cent are ‘not sure’ they could shake hands with a Jew.⁷Haider has also praised the ‘honorable veterans of the Waffen-SS’, and calls both Churchill and Hitler ‘war criminals’. On German TV, the 50-year old said: ‘If Jews receive reparations for their sufferings under Nazism, then Germans expelled from Czechoslovakia and former Austrian POWs in the Soviet Union should be similarly compensated.’ But he simply denies the relevance of any of this to the present: ‘I am a child of postwar Austria. Why should I take upon myself the problems of the past?’⁸ In neighbouring Switzerland, almost a carbon copy of the FPÖ has arisen with the SVP. Once the smallest of the four ‘cartel parties’ of the consociational establishment, the SVP doubled its share of the vote under the demagogic Christoph Blocher to 23 per cent in 1999 which made it the largest of all the Swiss parties. Blocher hews closely to the Haider line but is prone to putting his foot in his mouth as for example, when he endorsed a booklet, The Decline and Fall of Swiss Freedom by Jürgen Graf who turned out to be a notorious denier of the Holocaust.

IMMIGRATION: THE UNIVERSAL IRRITANT

Austrian National Socialism (Nazism) in the earlier half of the twentieth century had many causes: the imperial collapse of Habsburg, the powerful socialist and labour upsurge after World War I, multi-ethnic competition and others. The hostilities generated by refugees and immigration played a minor role. Today, however, immigration appears to be the mighty irritant that stirs up right-wing protest from Austria to California, and even Australia. Haider’s following is clearly energized by it when he speaks of ‘Überfremdung’ (being overrun by foreigners and foreign culture), and claims that the Austrian welfare state coddles immigrants and encourages them to have large families which may eventually bring about a ‘degeneration of the Austrian nation’. These are typical stereotypes of ‘welfare chauvinism’ and xenophobic anti-immigrant propaganda everywhere. They can also be heard from the Belgian VB of Filip Dewinter, the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkparti, DF) of Pia Kjaersgaard, the Norwegian Progress Party (FRPn), the Swedish Democrats, the French FN, the Italian AN, the British BNP, several German radical right parties, and from the extreme right movements of such prospective EU member countries as Poland, the Czech and Slovak republics, Hungary and Turkey. Eurobarometer and other polls give depressing evidence of the receptiveness to the appeal of such messages of a significant percentage of the population in all these countries.

There are a number of recent examples of European countries that in the past seemed to be more or less free of the disease of immigrant—and minority-bashing but have since come down with it. One of them is the Netherlands where the Ministry of the Interior commissioned a study at the University of Leiden, ‘Monitor—Racism and Right-Wing Extremism’. The disquieting report by, among others, Jaap van Donselaar (a contributor to this book), revealed that the Dutch police routinely failed to disclose the full extent of Dut...