The longue durée of transnational white nationalism

Abstract

This edited collection originated from a workshop at Trinity College, Dublin in 2017. If the book’s origins were a response to the societal shocks in 2016 of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump as President of the United States, then its publication in 2020 coincided with the global protests for social and racial justice in response to the police murder of George Floyd (xv). In the three years between the book’s conception and publication, there was a wave of extreme-right terrorist attacks that provided ample evidence of the global dangers of white nationalist violence. These included murderous attacks on synagogues and mosques in London in the United Kingdom, Pittsburgh in the United States, in Christchurch, New Zealand and in Halle, Germany, as well as other mass casualty incidents motivated by white supremacy. More recently, of course, we saw a mob of Trump supporters—including members of several extreme right groups—attack the US Capitol building. One of this book’s greatest strengths is to demonstrate that the extreme right’s imaginary of ethnic purity and ‘cleansing’ violence has long historical roots imbricating with the racial brutality of slavery and colonialism. The origins of the transnational networking and ideological cross-pollination of extreme-right organizations date back deep into the twentieth century (4). Although the book focuses on Anglophonic right-wing extremism, it makes a significant contribution to a body of recent scholarship that has delineated the transnational history of the global far right to include nonEnglish-language-speaking countries. The book consists of an introduction and nine case study chapters ordered into four sections: ‘In the shadow of slavery and empire’, ‘Opposing civil rights’, ‘Nostalgia for white rule’ and ‘The far right in the Anglosphere’.