The unification of the ‘New Right’? On Europe, identity politics and reactionary ideologies

When we spoke of the ‘New Right’ in the late 1970s, we were referring to two distinct configurations. Firstly, a political one based on an Anglo-American axis, and represented by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Secondly, an intellectual one born in France, and embodied by thinkers such as Alain de Benoist and Guillaume Faye, which extensively spread in Europe. Although sharing a label, these two formations had pretty much nothing in common. The political New Right claimed social Conservatism and the market economy; the intellectual New Right combined anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism and an opposition to Judeo-Christianity. The expansion of the French New Right led some of his members as well as academics working on it to speak about a European New Right (Bar On, 2007; Milza, 2002). Recent studies have been dedicated to the global dimension of the New Right (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet and Williams, 2018). The emergence of the ‘alt-right’ which played an active part in the campaign and election of Donald Trump and which was influenced by the French New Right also mattered in such a process. The current intellectual and political convergence which allows us to speak of the New Right as a singular phenomenon would have been unthinkable 50 years ago. The forms that it may take today suggest the radicalization of the right, or to put it otherwise, a growing porosity between the right and the far right on a global level. But, this does not mean homogeneity. It is this plurality, and the new connections that have been made possible in particular since the 2010s, that I would like to examine here. To do so, I focus on an object which is omnipresent in conservative and more broadly reactionary discourses: Europe. The arguments of the political New Right as embodied, for example, by Margaret Thatcher had often consisted in claiming a lack of common values and European identity so as to criticize the legitimacy of EU authority (Coman and Leconte, 2019). More globally in reactionary rhetoric, Europe has been made a common target and presented as the cradle of liberalism, abstract human rights and bureaucracy, destructive of traditional social bonds. But, on the side of what was then the intellectual New Right, Europe has also been appropriated. At the crossroads of these two perspectives, since the 2010s, Central Europe governments and intellectuals have contested Europe by promoting another idea of Europeanness. At the core of this redefinition lies the historical opposition between Conservatives and Progressives in the context of what Hunter (1991) has defined