Co-opting the rural: Regionalization as narrative in international populist authoritarian movement organizing in the United States and France

Abstract

With the increasing emergence of populist, authoritarian actors, from sub-national groups such as the Alt-Right in the US, to the rise (and fall) of the far-right National Front party in France, is the international system becoming more antagonistically regionalized by invocations of particular ‘rural’ imaginaries? This paper examines ways in which groups on the far-right of the political spectrum are fundamentally challenging perceptions of liberal globalization through co-opted narratives of nation-as-homogeneous-rural. In attempts to gain power, authoritarian populist leaders bargain for increased personal legitimacy at the expense of state sovereignty. National authority, regulations, and norms are weakened as right-authoritarian rural imaginaries are heightened. Yet simultaneously, this opens space for wider contestations and practices of rural identity, resulting in emergent challenges and movements (such as the Gilet Jaunes and rural progressive organizing in the US). As struggles to define ‘rural’ manifest through, by, and against populist authoritarian movements, the regionalization of state identity has a potentially defining impact on new forms of globalization and international norm construction. These contestations vis-à-vis banal rurality (everyday performance of the rural) offers critical insights into the ways in which state power can be deployed through appropriation of identity to serve the needs of nationalist, right-wing groups internationally. Specifically, by examining the successful rise of the Alt-Right in the US and the rise but ultimate defeat of the National Front in France, our research analyzes the contemporary critical juncture of the mobilization of ‘the rural’ in efforts of populist authoritarians to reframe national identities and weaken state sovereignty in order to gain individual political power.