Federalist Fascism

Nicolai Von Eggers

doi:10.1163/22116257-bja10003

Abstract

Abstract This article analyses the New Right’s understanding of the French Revolution. Since the most prominent intellectual of the New Right, Alain de Benoist, frames ‘Jacobinism’ as the New Right’s main enemy, the New Right may be understood as a counter-tradition to what it understands as Jacobinism. De Benoist defines Jacobinism as an ideology that makes people essentially equal and identical by means of the state. Against this, he posits what he calls ‘federalism’—a project which aims at promoting and defending ethnic, cultural and other differences. In this article, the author shows how the New Right creates a mythical counter-tradition of federalism. We should understand this as a ‘federalist fascism’: instead of mass parties and an authoritarian nation-state, the New Right seeks the mythical rebirth of an Indo-European community consisting of various regional peoples who will supposedly realise their authentic nature through ethnically purified societies governed by a federal European-wide system.

Highlights

With increased media attention to movements such as Generation Identity and the Alt-Right and with the electoral success of parties such as the Rassemblement National, Lega Nord and the AfD the ideas of the intellectual current known as the New Right, first emerging in the late 1960s, have started to have via free access federalist fascism more of a real, political impact in recent years.[1]
We should understand this as a ‘federalist fascism’: instead of mass parties and an authoritarian nation-state, the New Right seeks the mythical rebirth of an Indo-European community consisting of various regional peoples who will supposedly realise their authentic nature through ethnically purified societies governed by a federal European-wide system
For movements such as Generation Identity, this means using the political form of activist mobilisations calculated to draw media attention to New Right talking points such as the imagined identitarian roots of regional peoples and call for the remigration of migrants back to their alleged homelands.[3]

Summary

Introduction

With increased media attention to movements such as Generation Identity and the Alt-Right and with the electoral success of parties such as the Rassemblement National, Lega Nord and the AfD the ideas of the intellectual current known as the New Right, first emerging in the late 1960s, have started to have via free access federalist fascism more of a real, political impact in recent years.[1].

Results

Conclusion