Experiments of authoritarian sustainability: Völkisch settlers and far-right prefiguration of a climate behemoth

Abstract

Despite the possibility of unintended side effects, experiments in civil society like urban gardens, sustainable housing projects, ecovillages, and so forth are associated with transformative capacities in light of an increasingly serious social-ecological crisis. The tide of the political far right, however, demonstrates that outcomes of civil society engagement undermining emancipatory sustainability are hardly just unintended effects. Therefore, I analyze the role of experimental ecopolitics for the far right by means of the example of völkisch settlers in Germany, which are diverse far-right actors practicing a strategy of rural community building. After discussing whether these practices can be understood as ecopolitical experimentation, I reflect on its tensions with far-right climate-change denialism and its relevance for future scenarios of climate politics. I suggest that despite ideological differences, far-right environmentalism of everyday corresponds with characteristic elements of experimental practices of non-far-right experimentation. Representing far-right politics beyond anti-environmentalism and denial, far-right experimentation might provide bridge building and enable potential cooptation of non-far-right experiments and participatory sustainability governance. Further, it represents an agenda of exclusive authoritarian sustainability and ethno-securitization of climate change that—as recent COVID-19 protests have indicated—has a potential for social resonance far beyond the organized far right.

Keywords:

• Experimentation
• prefigurative politics
• social innovation
• far right
• authoritarian sustainability
• ethno-securitization

Introduction

Current debates on social-ecological transformation in the global North most vividly emphasize the transformative capacities of experimentation in civil society beyond mere protest and advocacy (Frantzeskaki et al. 2016; Schlosberg 2019). But how consistent are the social-ecological hopes attributed to civil society with the recent normalization of the far right in the global North and beyond?¹ Gaining momentum after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, mobilizations in civil society like urban gardens, community-supported agriculture, food cooperatives, transition towns, repair cafés, sharing platforms, sustainable housing projects, and ecovillages have provoked ongoing debates about their transformative capacities (Blühdorn and Deflorian 2021; Bosi and Zamponi 2015). Lacking a canonical term, these initiatives are portrayed inter alia as “promising pioneers of change” (WBGU 2011), “post-growth avant-gardes” (Paech 2012), and “concrete utopias” (Muraca 2017). Despite their differences, these denominations reflect the shared emphasis on the transformative character of experiments that collectively test and offer hands-on alternatives to the satisfaction of needs by the liberal-democratic state or the capitalist market economy. Due to this hands-on character of addressing social-ecological problems as well as their embeddedness in local communities and everyday practices it is assumed that they enable resonance beyond activist milieus (Meyer 2015). Further, commentators have argued that they provide innovations altering unsustainable systems of provision as well as contest the status quo while prefiguring sustainable futures (Asara 2020; Brand et al. 2021; Paech 2012; Seyfang and Smith 2007).

Scholars have problematized these portrayals of experimentation in civil society in several respects by highlighting a variety of potential unintended side effects such as neoliberal cooptation, depoliticization, and simulation (Blühdorn 2017, 2023 in this special issue; Mouffe 2013; Rosol 2012; van Dyk 2018). The aim in this article is not to discuss, let alone resolve, these ambiguities concerning the transformative capacities of experimentation but rather I seek to supplement the debate on the unintended effects that predominantly focuses on potentially progressive initiatives. Based on reasonable doubts regarding an often assumed inevitable positive correlation of engagement in civil society, the quality of democracies and emancipatory agendas (Chambers and Kopstein 2001; Kopecký and Mudde 2003; Rydgren 2009) and more specifically by the recent normalization of the far right, it seems promising to include far-right initiatives in the debate. Although research on the far right in the global North focuses primarily on parties and elections, its momentum is finding its counterparts in civil society (Castelli Gattinara 2020, Hutter and Weisskircher 2022). However, the relevant groups and constituencies are rarely considered in debates about the transformative capacities of ecopolitical experimentation (Du Plessis and Husted 2022, Yates and de Moor 2022).

By their very nature, the far right contests agendas of egalitarian and emancipatory sustainability. Environmental agencies and treaties, the validity and legitimacy of climate science, activism, or infrastructure projects of decarbonization are increasingly devalued and attacked. Consequently, some observers warn against a global uprising of “fossil fascism” (Daggett 2018; Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021). However, although the far right tries to delegitimize values of universal inclusion and equality that once nurtured ideas of sustainability, it is not anti-environmentalist and climate-denialist per se (Forchtner and Lubarda 2022; Lubarda 2020; Moore and Roberts 2022). Most importantly regarding the high transformative capacities associated with experimentation, the far-right repertoire of action in civil society is neither limited to mere advocacy nor protest (Froio and Castelli Gattinara 2016). Some actors of the far right perform alternative ecological practices, including maintaining a vegan diet, sharing consumer goods and other equipment, practicing or participating in organic agriculture, and residing in eco-communities (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019; Forchtner and Tominc 2017). But are these practices forms of experimentation and prefiguration? What role do these practices actually play for the far right and are they rather negligible considering the climate-change skepticism that otherwise dominates its political discourse?

The aim of this article is to answer these questions by discussing the applicability of the categories of experimentation and prefigurative politics to German far-right ecopolitics. To this end, I draw on the example of the so-called völkisch settlers in the country. These are an estimated 1,000 extreme-right activists who, on one hand, try to live their ideology in everyday life in rural communities and, on the other hand, use this as a strategy to disguise their ideology in order to ultimately mobilize politically by means of social recognition (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). I argue that the transferability of the concepts of experimentation and prefigurative politics to such contexts is limited due to ideological differences to non-far right experiments. Nevertheless, the German far right pursues practices of experimentation and prefiguration. Therefore, it is reasonable to also consider their transformative potentials and to discuss them along the potentials attributed to non-far-right initiatives.

Further, the far-right experimentation of völkisch settlers in Germany highlights two important aspects for evaluating future scenarios of climate politics in the global North in general. First, there is no such thing as a single form of far-right environmental and climate politics that can be reduced to anti-environmentalism and climate denial. Rather, there is an ambivalence of the far right that, on one hand, contests any form of international cooperation on climate mitigation in a populist manner as allegedly projects of cosmopolitan elites undermining interests of the people, the nation, and ultimately the supremacy of the West. Climate skeptical positions are, on the other hand, closely linked to far-right environmentalism and doomsday scenarios. These imaginations of decay and a mystical rootedness of local, regional, and national identities in local, regional, and national natures—for example specific landscapes, but also representing a holistic category functioning as a blueprint for naturalistic and organicist visions of racialized nature-society relations (Lubarda 2020)—lead to an emphasis on the ethno-securitization of climate politics (Moore and Roberts 2022). Second, especially in times of further escalating climate crisis, the latter displays the dangers of far-right cooptation of local experiments for social-ecological change and the reinterpretation of adaptation, resilience, and sustainability in exclusive, nationalist, and authoritarian forms. From this vantage point, I argue, evaluation of the transformative capacities of experimentation in civil society should recognize that civil society is not only being unintentionally coopted by neoliberal agendas of unsustainability, but actively pursuing radicalized forms of exclusive and authoritarian sustainability. These observations do not necessarily lead to denying any transformative capacities of civil society for an emancipatory social-ecological transformation. But it forces us to consider the ongoing polarization within civil society when analyzing and assessing its transformative potentials in light of authoritarian forms of sustainability to be found far beyond far-right milieus (Blühdorn 2022; Swyngedouw 2022).

To unfold this argument, I proceed in four steps. First, to establish categories of analysis for potential far-right experimentation I reconstruct the portrayals of civil society-driven experiments in social-ecological change in environmental social science to identify core elements of experimentation and associated transformative capacities. Second, I introduce völkisch settlers as an example for potential experimentation by the far right and—against the backdrop of the established portrayals—discuss the experimental character and transformative potential of their practices. Third, I reflect on the role of experimental ecopolitics by the far right in relation to climate-change denial which might signal its insignificance. Finally, I conclude by arguing for the integration of far-right experimentation into evaluations of the capacities of experimentation in civil society for a social-ecological transformation.

Experimentation for social-ecological change in civil society

While hardly a new development, experimentation for social-ecological change in civil society has recently attracted a considerable amount of attention. A variety of labels like “direct social action” (Bosi and Zamponi 2015), “prefigurative politics” (Yates 2015), “concrete utopias” (Muraca 2017), “grassroots experiments” (Sengers, Wieczorek, and Raven 2019), “interstitial politics” (MacGregor 2021), “politics of everyday life” (Schlosberg 2019), “refigurative politics” (Deflorian 2021), or “exit-variety of critique” (Wallmeier 2017) are used to describe mostly the same practices in civil society. Examples given in environmental contexts are inter alia urban gardens, community-supported agriculture, transition towns, repair cafés, sharing platforms, sustainable housing projects, and ecovillages.

These initiatives are heterogeneous and differ, for example, in terms of practices aimed at satisfying a whole range of different needs including food, housing, energy, currencies, mobility, or property relations. However, core elements of these practices of change can be identified to establish categories of comparison for far-right experimentation. These include first and foremost the addressees of action and critique, hence a specific imaginary of transformation. In contrast to protest or other forms of advocacy seeking to speak directly truth to power, experimentation with alternative everyday practices, as Pellizzoni argues, pursues modes of “circumventing, rather than challenging, existing relations of domination” (Pellizzoni 2021, 365). Bosi and Zamponi further state that direct social actions “focus instead on a ‘self- changing’ society as part of everyday politics, in which the distinction between the public and private spheres is blurred” (Bosi and Zamponi 2015, 368f.). Rather than addressing the state or actors of the market economy, they collectively experiment with producing and “allocating everyday goods” (Deflorian 2021, 347), alternative understandings of community, collective identity formation, and decision-making processes.

Through this orientation toward alternative practices of everyday life, they are embedded not only in everyday life, but also in specific local, mostly urban, spatial relations, communities, and natures. With regard to the implicit conception of society, experimentation challenges notions of social totality. In stark contrast to assuming an uncircumventable totality, experiments display contingency and seek to realize the changeability of societal relations (to nature) in the here and now (Loick 2021). Therefore, experiments—by “doing what they preach”—enfold an appeal by their consistency of living rightly and compel justifications of everyday indifference. In doing so, they question teleological perceptions of history, which “postpone important questions until after the revolution” (Swain 2019, 49). This leads Erik Olin Wright (2010) to the assumption that the politics of experimentation represent an interstitial, micro-political strategy of transformation leading beyond the reform-revolution dichotomy. In light of these characteristics, experimentation in civil society is understood in the following discussion as collective, locally embedded practices of change in the everyday that engage with alternative systems of provision, allocation, identity, and decision-making in the here and now.

To further highlight transformative capacities associated with experimentation in environmental social science at least two interpretations of experimentation can be distinguished on the basis of Swain’s analytical distinction between “ends-effacing” and “ends-guided” prefiguration (Swain 2019). On one hand, there are ends-effacing interpretations of experiments that—based on a rather procedural understanding of experimentation—test modes, pathways, and ends of transformation and blur the boundaries between means and ends. On the other hand, there are ends-guided interpretations of experiments which primarily aim to test solutions to specific technological, political, societal, or psychological challenges that drive social transformation strategically toward relatively specific ends. Additionally, a third perception of experimentation represents experimentation as a form of refusal and exit.

Prefiguration

Ends-effacing conceptualizations of experimentation are currently formulated in discourses on political ecology, critical (environmental) political theory, and degrowth. Although decidedly committed to ends such as equality, autonomy, and sustainability, experimentation is rather understood as an open, iterative process, in which the leverages of transformation and the meanings of these ends are constantly reflected upon and potentially revised. Experiments are considered as contestations of problematic depoliticizations of nature-society relations while revealing their contingency and nurturing the desire for change (Kallis and March 2015; MacGregor 2021; Bulkeley 2023 in this special issue). Opening spaces for the experience of alternative provision, imaginaries, subjectivities, and nature relations in deliberative forms of democratic decision-making, experimentation becomes an end in itself reorienting desires and imaginaries, prefiguring desired futures while experiencing self-efficacy and mutual help (Asara 2020; Monticelli 2021; Schlosberg 2019). As practices of the everyday, they enable more resonance in broader parts of society than vanguardist and revolutionary forms of environmental activism (Meyer 2015, 2023 in this special issue). Hence, beyond transforming the individual experimenters and their community, it is assumed that experiments trigger change by enabling new imaginaries, repoliticization, affirming alternative pathways, and demonstrating the possibility of doing things differently. In light of the provisional character of ends and a procedural understanding of experimentation, proponents of ends-effacing conceptualizations of experimentation assume guiding visions of equality, democracy, and emancipation not to be the result but—at least partly—already realized in the process of experimentation. Nevertheless, it is expected that these practices serve emancipatory and ecological ends, however they may be finally defined (MacGregor 2021; Muraca 2017).

Innovation

In contrast, a rather instrumental, ends-guided understanding of experimentation currently prevails in some strands of research on sustainability transitions (Köhler et al. 2019) that mainly focuses on ecologically unsustainable socio-technical systems of provision. Considering the complexity of ecological problems, experimental niches are supposed to be central in triggering sustainability transitions that are envisioned as large-scale, disruptive, uncertain, and co-evolutionary processes of technological and social changes in systems of provision (Geels 2010). In these niches, proponents argue, innovators are protected “from mainstream market selection” and can experiment with, develop, and test solutions for ecological problems (Köhler et al. 2019, 4). Experiments in civil society are perceived as laboratories for social and grassroots innovations that create, test, and enhance more sustainable technologies and social practices (Seyfang and Haxeltine 2012). In contrast to market actors, experimenters in civil society are strongly driven by ideology and “respond to the local situation and the interests and values of the communities involved” (Seyfang and Smith 2007, 585), which is supposed to enable a higher ecological impact. However, to trigger sustainability transitions grassroots innovations need to be upscaled or amplified from potentially unstable niches into the mainstream (Lam et al. 2020). Therefore, it is argued, niche actors depend on public support and integration into participatory modes of governance on multiple levels (Kemp and Loorbach 2006). Experimentation in civil society is, therefore, understood as a strategic trial and error process to realize visions of ecologically sustainable systems of provision by upscaling niche innovations with public support under conditions of uncertainty.

Refusal

Contrary to these accounts of experimentation, Pellizzoni (2021) highlights a third dimension of experimentation, stressing the limits of affirmation. In light of the ability of late capitalism as institutionalized social order to incorporate and valorize the affirmative aspects of critique, he emphasizes the negativistic character of experiments. In the tradition of the nineteenth century environmental philosopher Henry David Thoreau, as well as in alignment with concepts of refusal, exodus, exit, and subtraction, this interpretation highlights that experiments reformulate Bartleby’s expression: “I would prefer not to” (Hardt and Negri 2003; Hirschman 1970; Marcuse 1964; Naegler 2018; Walzer 1998). Pursuing a very different agenda than Pellizzoni, nevertheless the appeal of withdrawal is reflected in Niko Paech’s (2012) interpretation of experimentation. Considering the strong dependency of late-modern welfare states, social contracts, and individual well-being in post-war liberal democracies on economic growth and mass consumption, this post-growth scholar doubts the efficacy of voluntary change. Rather, he expects increasing catastrophic social-ecological events. Under this condition, experiments become preparatory grounds for resilient practices of self-sufficiency, subsistence, and simplicity in relocalized, community-based economies. Not likely to prevent the catastrophe, experiments are considered crucial for building capacities of adaptation and resilience. In this interpretation, experiments still prefigure anticipated futures, but rather than embodying democracy and emancipation, they are portrayed as testing resilient practices and coping strategies in times of crises. In this respect, they are understood as an avant-garde of post-growth futures, contradicting a critique of vanguardism in the context of ends-effacing experimentation (Paech 2012; Meyer 2023 in this special issue).

Experimental ecopolitics of the far right

One dimension of the crisis of liberal democratic, late-capitalist societies today that is hardly considered by the aforementioned perspectives in environmental social science on experimentation is the increasing normalization of far-right politics, especially in the United States and Europe (Görg et al. 2017). Although mainly studied by focusing on the outcomes of elections, this process of mainstreaming is not limited to parliaments, nor are the activities of the far right in civil society limited to protest and advocacy (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro 2019).² Practices that can be described as “direct social actions” are part of their repertoire (Froio and Castelli Gattinara 2016). Although underexplored, direct actions also play a role in the far right with regard to environmental and climate issues (Forchtner 2019). In line with a long-standing tradition of environmental concerns in some expressions of far-right thought (Barry 2007; Bramwell 1989; Uekötter 2014), these practices range from seemingly harmless activities such as collecting garbage and planting trees, adopting vegan lifestyles, or directly helping victims of natural disasters to debates in ecofascist, accelerationist echo chambers to attacking sites of infrastructures or justifying terrorism by ecofascist motives (Forchtner and Tominc 2017; Froio et al. 2020; Loadenthal 2022; Tarant 2019). Whereas these activities might be described as direct social action, lifestyle politics, and terrorism, they do not represent experimentation in the sense of engaging collectively with alternative systems of provision, allocation, and decision-making in the everyday. However, ecopolitical experimentation may be identified in the practices of rural communities across the spectrum of the far right seeking to integrate ecological claims into their practices of everyday life. Similar to far-right intentional communities in the United States that identify as bioregionalists like the Northwest Front (Taylor 2019), the völkisch settlers in Germany represent a type of far-right intentional communities.

Völkisch settlers in Germany

Despite extensive media coverage, research on so-called völkisch settlers in Germany is extremely limited, apart from investigative journalistic work and reports by political foundations (exceptions are Brauckmann 2012; Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019; Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Thüringen 2020; Röpke and Speit 2019; Schmidt 2014; Schuldt 2021). On the basis of these contributions, however, it can be stated that völkisch settlers comprise at least 1,000 heterogeneous extreme-right activists who seek to establish intentional communities in the countryside (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). The Katapult magazine and the Amadeu Antonio Foundation identify 163 suspected locations of völkisch settlement projects. A higher concentration is found in the states of Lower Saxony (39) and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania (19). With the exception of the state of Saarland and the city states of Hamburg, Bremen, and Berlin, they are located across the entire territory of Germany (Schuldt 2021).

In these communities völkisch settlers participate in neo-pagan customs, wear traditional clothing, practice ancient crafts, organize cultural events such as theater and concerts as well as youth camps, but some also engage in organic farming and animal husbandry of endangered, local breeds of livestock (Röpke and Speit 2019). On one hand, this represents an explicit metapolitical strategy—a key concept of the New Right in general, which adopts Antonio Gramsci’s idea of fighting cultural and ideological struggles for hegemony outside of institutionalized politics (Griffin 2000). To lay the foundation for political victory, advocates of a metapolitical strategy focus “their energies on changing hearts and minds and the ‘conquest’ of civil society” (Bar-On 2016, 3). Accordingly, völkisch settlers usually appear as alternative ecologists and peasants, craftsmen, and neighbors ready to help in sparsely populated, rural, and economically left-behind municipalities and seek to convince others of their ideology through demonstration of an attractive way of everyday life as well as their ecological and social engagement in local communities. In addition, the settlers are often even more fundamentally concerned with living their ideology in their everyday life and anticipating the desired rebirth of the ethno-nation in the here and now (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019).

Völkisch settlers strive to realize almost every element of völkisch ideology in the everyday by preserving the “racial purity” of community, subordinating the individual to the community, exposing children to the training of physical strength to educate their ability to put up a fight, or practicing a strictly hierarchical family structure as well as the radicalizing of traditional, patriarchal gender roles (Röpke and Speit 2019).³ Moreover, they are also concerned with ecological claims that are firmly embedded in the ideological spectrum of the far right. Far from being merely instrumental, ecological concerns represent an integral aspect of far-right ideologies in Europe and beyond (Forchtner 2019). Imagining that societies are or should be based on a natural, organicist order, far-right environmentalism conceptualizes national identity and community as closely linked to specifically nationalized and regionalized geographic and symbolic natures as esthetic landscape, resource, and myth (Lubarda 2020).⁴ Preserving nature serve to preserve the national community and vice versa (Campion 2021; Olsen 1999). From this perspective, some völkisch settlers in Germany move to the countryside and “back to nature” seeking to live in romanticized harmony with an imagined pristine nature to escape urban centers allegedly succumbing to national decay. Late-modern lifestyles criticized as decadent and alienating are contrasted with rural practices praised as authentic forms of autarky, self-sufficiency, and frugality (Brauckmann 2012; Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019).

Regarding their ideological foundation of organic farming, völkisch settlers are in direct tradition with the National Socialist agrarian ideology of “blood and soil.” This holistic worldview, which goes—in its fascist form—back to Minister of Agriculture during the Third Reich Richard Walter Darré, assumes a “geo-cultural linkage of race and place” (Gerhard 2005, 131) as well as rural life as a superior genetic resource for the “Aryan race.” In fact, some of the völkisch settlers see themselves as descendants of the Artaman League, a völkisch youth movement that founded several farms and settlements in the 1920s and 1930s for the purpose of rural labor service of urban populations (Botsch 2012; Brauckmann 2012; Forchtner and Özvatan 2019). Despite differences regarding the absence of a comprehensive organization of practitioners today, völkisch settlers take up the ideological core of their predecessors by embracing, for instance, organic farming embedded in an idea of an ineluctable connection of nature and the survival of a racialized community. This continues the traditions of organic agriculture under National Socialism, although its significance for National Socialism is highly controversial (Bramwell 1989; Gerhard 2005; Staudenmaier 2013; Uekötter 2014). Being part of the anti-democratic, self-proclaimed antimodernist and anticapitalistic fraction of the far right identifying with National Socialism, the neo-Artamans and other völkisch settlers can, therefore, be identified within the broader spectrum of far-right environmentalism as extreme-right ecofascists (Campion 2021; Lubarda 2020).⁵

Ecofascist experimentation

But are they really experimental? To answer this question, I discuss similarities and differences between the völkisch settlers and the different perspectives on experimentation in environmental social science. The explicit aim is not to identify ideological overlaps to discredit the experimental activities of environmental activists in non-far-right civil society, but to highlight characteristics of German far-right experimentation as a transformative strategy enabling conclusions about their potential impact.

The classification of the völkisch settlers as a form of experimental politics is supported by the fact that they do not address the state or market actors, but take change into their own hands. Instead, they build communities and address first and foremost their own community and secondarily other spectators such as far-right networks and subcultures as well as the neighbors and local residents in the inhabited regions. In line with metapolitical strategies, they are not targeting institutionalized politics but their grassroots work is assumed to be more important and they are concerned with changes in cultural spheres and everyday life (Röpke and Speit 2019). In this way, they serve as a model for new-right initiatives that see rural areas as an experimental field for their forms of political action. For example, the German association Ein Prozent (One Percent), whose chairperson also regularly publishes articles in the far-right environmental magazine Die Kehre (The Turn), has announced the project Netzwerk Landraum (Network Rural Space). Here, too, the aim is to attract like-minded people to rural communities (Ein Prozent 2018). In their fixation on rural areas, there is an essential difference to experiments in other parts of civil society, in which rural life is sometimes romanticized, but which are mostly located in urban areas. However, the extreme right also has imitators in cities, for example in a now closed housing project of the Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (Identitarian Movement Germany) in Halle, for which both the völkisch settlers and the Italian squatters of CasaPound were inspirations.⁶ This housing project hosted, among other activities, lectures on experimental practices such as community-supported agriculture and permaculture (Röpke and Speit 2019).

In their focus on everyday life, the völkisch settlers are like other experimenters concerned with implementing their own ideas for social change in the here and now (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). In this regard, these groups are also experimenting with alternative systems of provision, forms of community, collective identity, and decision-making that differ distinctly from conventional ways of life. With communal organic farming and the call for exchange rings, for example, they engage in precisely those practices that are commonly considered experimental. As far as völkisch settlers do not act in isolated, individual families, but in association in a manifest or at least imagined community, these are also collective spaces of experimentation that shape forms of collective identities. The decision-making processes are also far detached from the social mainstream. Of course, they are not directed toward egalitarian forms of participation, but rather, against the backdrop of the ideologically founded rejection of democracy and equality, toward hierarchical and authoritarian decision-making (Röpke and Speit 2019). Like other experiments in civil society, völkisch settlers demonstrate that current social relations (with nature) are contingent and practicably changeable. Performing experimental attempts of change in relatively stable families and communities, they especially signal the viability of far-right ecopolitical experimentation in contrast to the typically instable organizations within the constantly shifting landscape of extreme-right organizations. Further, völkisch settlers show a high degree of consistency between ideology and everyday life compared to other organizational forms of the radical and extreme right. Therefore, it does not seem surprising that they are sometimes admired within the larger network of the far right (Fielitz 2018). Hence, leaving aside serious ideological-normative differences to other experiments in civil society, there are no fundamental reasons not to categorize the practices of the völkisch settlers as experimental. Thus, to highlight different aspects especially regarding the transformative capacities of völkisch experimentation it seems promising to discuss their practices against understandings of experimentation as ends-effacing, ends-guided, and forms of refusal.

The intuitively strongest objection is raised by the comparison to ends-effacing interpretations of experimentation. Due to the closed völkisch worldview, it cannot be assumed that for völkisch settlers ends are not irreversibly fixed and that these are subject to the possibility of iterative reconsideration. Nor is it plausible to state a departure from teleological conceptions of history, closely associated with notions of ends-effacing prefiguration, given the widespread notion of doomsday scenarios and the waiting for the end of the interregnum in the extreme right. Nevertheless, the völkisch settlers are not inactive until this anticipated time, but explicitly conceive of themselves as political. Although they are rather organized in cultural associations and youth groups, they are closely integrated into far-right networks and occasionally are members of extreme-right organizations such as the German Identitarian Movement or the National Democratic Party (Röpke and Speit 2019).⁷ With their practice, which is not based on reform but also not (yet) directly on revolution and especially because of their orientation toward local needs in left-behind rural regions, they too are located in the interstices of the capitalist social order. Further, a high consistency of means and ends can be stated and völkisch concrete utopias, as Fielitz (2018) argues, “prefiguratively embody their ideal of the national community.” Hence, they enfold an imaginary power of ecofascism beyond the online space (Hughes, Jones, and Amarasingam 2022).

Considering rather ends-guided notions of experimentation, it can be noted that the ecological practices of the völkisch settlers show great proximity to developments regularly identified as grassroots innovations. Standing in stark contrast to values of equality and democracy, which are closely linked to notions of social innovation, the direct ecological impact, however, may hardly be distinguishable. Further, like grassroots innovations, völkisch settlers are strongly driven by ideology and seek to respond to the needs of local communities. As other experiments, their aim is to socially diffuse their practices by affirmation and example (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). But, unlike more customary grassroots innovations, they are highly exclusive and much less integrated into governance processes and public funding. In contrast, they are under surveillance by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution). However, there are also far-right attempts to subvert participatory processes of funding ecopolitical experiments. For example, the organization LebensRaum (Living Space), which journalists locate in the milieu of the Anastasia and Reichsbürger movement, participated in the 2018 competition Zukunftsstadt Dresden (Future City Dresden) sponsored by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (German Federal Ministry of Education and Research) in order to win €200,000 in funding for eco-settlements in the Dresden area (Sächsische Zeitung 2018).⁸ However, völkisch settlers do not depend on public funding as much as other experiments because they can rely on their close networks and like-minded subcultures for financial resources. This makes their niche very stable, but potentially undermines diffusion into the mainstream. Still ecological practices in particular offer opportunities to act as bridge builders to non-far-right ecopolitical experiments and the possibility of exploiting participatory governance while veiling their ideology (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). Hypothetically this bridge-building function might not only have the potential of infiltration and cooptation of non-far-right experiments by the far right, but also open up opportunities for deradicalization of far-right activists. However, since in the outlined context far-right experimentation is embedded into an intentional metapolitical strategy, this potential seems to be highly limited.

Their relative social isolation suggests an association of völkisch settlers with the interpretation of experimentation as a form of refusal. The völkisch settlers also profoundly “prefer not to” participate in late-modern lifestyles and systems of provision. In fundamental opposition to the social order, they therefore choose to withdraw into rural areas. Unlike experiments envisioned by Niko Paech (2012), völkisch settlers are not disenchanted with liberal democracy and its ecological performance but are fundamentally hostile to it. Nevertheless, they share the assessment that the current juncture is not promising for the realization of their goals. Therefore, they see themselves as being in a phase of perseverance and preparation (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019). In distinction to far-right forms of protest, which some of them consider to be rather unpromising, they prepare for more favorable times for their idea of liberation, often accompanied by accelerationist imaginaries of doom (ecological), catastrophe, and subsequent rebirth (Loadenthal 2022).⁹ In doing so, these preparations are strongly linked to motifs of defensibility, self-sufficiency, and resilience bringing to mind diverse prepper and militia movements. In their preparations, völkisch settlers see themselves as the moral, but also the political, elite of the extreme-right movement, an authoritarian avant-garde (Röpke and Speit 2019). As mentioned above, however, they do not withdraw from other extreme-right political organizations. In fact, they even serve occasionally as refuges for extreme-right terrorists. Based on these characteristics, experimentation of the völkisch settlers can be understood as forms of community organized and ideologically consolidated “exit as radicalization” (Fielitz and Wallmeier 2019).¹⁰

In sum, given the dedication to taking change into their own hands, refusing to address the state or markets, and their ecological practices, völkisch settlers can be identified as participants in far-right forms of ecopolitical experimentation in civil society. In the discussion of different interpretations of experimentation, differences—but also overlaps—can be identified. Especially because of their ecological practices, which can serve as a bridge builder to other experiments and public funding, völkisch settlers can be interpreted as an ecofascist form of experimentation.

Prefiguring futures of authoritarian sustainability

But what, one might ask, is gained by this assessment against the background of climate change. Are völkisch settlers not a” fringe phenomenon” (Forchtner 2020) and an extreme-right ecofascist groupuscule (Griffin 2003), irrelevant to the development of the far right, which is much more occupied with climate denial? In fact, the influence of ecofascist positions on far-right ideology and practice is very limited. Far-right parties in power mainly represent positions and take actions that are hostile to a climate-change agenda, international agreements, and collaboration on climate mitigation and adaptation. One has to agree with Malm and the Zetkin Collective, who have so far presented the most comprehensive examination of the positions on climate change of, in particular, European far-right parties, that “for the far right of the 2010s, denial remained the preponderant position…and green nationalism a subsidiary” (Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021, 172). To explain the connection of the far right and denialism, they refer to “dominant class interests, rooted in fossil fuels” (239). And indeed, a large body of empirical research points to the origins of the “climate change denial machine” in conservative and more radical-right organizations closely linked to fossil capital (Dunlap and McCright 2011; Farrell 2016; Plehwe 2014). In contrast to this interpretation of the nexus of the far right and denial, as well as structural explanations linking denial and the far right by the appeal to losers of accelerated modernization, Lockwood (2018) argues that rather the thin ideology of populism is causing this close connection. Far-right populism, Lockwood’s argument runs, assumes that “the people” are victims of the vested interests of corrupt left, liberal, cosmopolitan elites. Since climate policy and science would be perceived as part of these interests, denial prevails. These explanations rightly illuminate specific aspects of the close connection between denial and the far right. However, Moore and Roberts (2022) argue that Lockwood’s approach obscures the heterogeneity and adaptability of far-right environmental and climate political positions, which is particularly obstructive with regard to future scenarios of climate politics.

In their book Climate Leviathan, Wainwright and Mann (2020) present reasoned speculation about future scenarios of global climate politics. They distinguish four possible global political responses to climate change: Climate Leviathan, Climate Mao, Climate X, and Climate Behemoth. First, the Climate Leviathan is portrayed as a strategy of green capitalism that Wainwright and Mann consider to be the most likely scenario (for a diverging interpretation see Blühdorn 2023 in this special issue). Through international institutions and hegemonic powers, global capitalism is adapting to climate change while sustaining current political and economic inequalities. Second, Climate Mao represents a scenario in which a strong state, together with those segments of the world’s population most affected by climate change, break this hegemony and enforce climate mitigation on the planet in authoritarian ways. Third, the Climate X scenario, which Wainwright and Mann consider highly desirable but unlikely, represents a just response to climate change that has a strong resonance with the assumed promises of experimentation in environmental social science. Through forms of radical democracy, a variety of social movements will collectively unite different movements, protests, and experiments to address climate change by subverting capitalism on the basis of local and global solidarity. Finally, the fourth scenario sketches a vision of the future role of the far right in climate politics. Climate Behemoth would unite fossil capital, the far right, and the poor. Climate change would be ignored and attempts to prevent greenhouse gas-induced change would be abandoned. Elites and the poor would fight climate politics in nationalist ways for the sake of growth, jobs, and “one’s own” freedom and lifestyle.¹¹

Thinking through these scenarios seems absolutely essential in light of the worsening climate crisis. However, as Blumenfeld correctly points out, in particular the portrayal of Climate Behemoth by Wainwright and Mann has weaknesses:

Climate denial is no longer socially acceptable, and moreover, no longer necessary. One can now accept the irrefutable truth of climate change without giving up one’s love of fossil fuels or hatred of immigrants (Blumenfeld 2022, 11).

One might add: without giving up one’s love for nature. As with Lockwood, far-right environmentalism is a blind spot of Wainwright and Mann’s Climate Behemoth. Further, the scenarios do not necessarily exclude each other, but rather a certain simultaneity is to be assumed. Even if capitalism could be greened, the consequences of prevailing denial and delay would still be devastating. Under these circumstances, it is likely that the far right would benefit from increasing uncertainties and social dislocations, and thus far-right environmentalism might gain in importance. Both Malm and The Zetkin Collective (2021) as well as Moore and Roberts (2022) point out that denial and far-right environmentalism are not mutually exclusive: “Far-right governments who reject the need for, or the possibility of, mitigation nevertheless pursue adaptation (in the form of securitization)” (Moore and Roberts 2022, 57). Climate-change denial and exclusive ethno-securitization are rather two sides of the same coin: outside extractivist without taking any responsibility in mitigation and adaptation and inside exclusive, nativist environmentalist adaptation for the few. In times of securitization of climate change, which is increasingly visible in the context of the current war in Ukraine, far-right environmentalism then takes on a special significance in justifying the defense of “one’s own way of life.”¹² This might enable the far right to exploit the negative impacts of climate change by green nationalism, a subset of far-right environmentalism that represents “a belief in protection of the white nation as protection of nature. Here the ecological crisis is not denied but enlisted as a reason to fortify borders and keep aliens out” (Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021, 154ff.).

To this end, the far right can draw on a long tradition of environmental thinking, arguing for the protection of borders for the sake of national natures and the use of environmental positions for exclusive and militarized immigration policies (Barry 2007; Humphrey 2007). Most recently, not only ecofascist terrorists such as those in Christchurch (New Zealand), El Paso (Texas, United States), and Halle (Germany), but also Marine LePen’s 2019 European and 2022 presidential election campaigns, inspired by the French Nouvelle Droite, have adopted such positions (Boukala and Tountasaki 2019).¹³ A turn of European far-right parties from straightforward denial (evidence skepticism) to other forms of skepticism can be interpreted as the rising significance of green nationalism, which Turner and Bailey (2022) refer to as “ecobordering” (see also Forchtner and Lubarda 2022). In addition, the normalization of green nationalism can already be found among parties that are traditionally identified as part of the mainstream right. For example, the former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, in explaining his government coalition with the Greens, spoke of the need to “protect the climate and borders” (Der Standard 2020). This kind of rhetoric signals—in contrast to Blühdorn’s (2022) suggestion of a radicalization of unsustainability—that the idea of sustainability might be abandoning its core of inclusive intra- and intergenerational justice and turning into an exclusive and ethno-securitized form of authoritarian sustainability.

In this constellation, far-right initiatives in civil society of the global North are gaining in importance, if they offer a response to the connection between border control and environmental concerns. Especially those practices of far-right movements that succeed in distinguishing themselves by a high degree of dedication to the environmental cause might then be able to affect and to legitimize an agenda of authoritarian sustainability. The experimental practices of the völkisch settlers in Germany, or possibly adaptations of experimental practices in the form of cultural racism of the New Right also in other countries, represent a prefiguration of authoritarian sustainability, in which this scenario is already anticipated in the here and now. With an intensification of the climate crisis, these actors might be able to further singularize themselves as environmental avant-garde. This is especially relevant at a time when adaptation and resilience are taking precedence over mitigation (see Blühdorn 2023 in this special issue; de Moor 2022). Further, the far right, especially in the United States and Europe, but also in Brazil, already presents itself as anti-authoritarian and rebellious grassroots response to neoliberalism, defenders of free speech, human rights, and liberators of “the people” fighting for “real” and direct democracy (Blühdorn, Butzlaff, and Haderer 2022; Lütjen 2022; Mondon and Winter 2020).¹⁴ Far-right environmental experimentation fits well in this list. In this context, far-right experimentation may fall on fertile ground, since the resonance potential for an aggressive defense of a privileged way of life with simultaneous support for environmental values extends far beyond the immediate network of the organized far right (Blühdorn and Butzlaff 2019; Brown 2019). During the COVID-19 protests in Germany and Austria, far-right politicians and activists already started to mingle with other participants of the Querdenken (diagonal thinking) protests (Callison and Slobodian 2021; Katsambekis and Stavrakakis 2020). These heterogeneous diagonalists—being composed of “well-off families with children, hippies who have grown old, opponents of nuclear power, esoterics and a variety of right-wingers” (Amlinger and Nachtwey 2022, 253, author's translation)—share several ideas with far-right environmentalism, i.e., being skeptical about (the sovereignty of) the contemporary state, liberal-democratic institutions, mainstream media, and scientific experts, and believing in esotericism and conspiratorial thinking. Further, they are often inspired by harmonious imaginations of “back to nature” narratives; self-perceptions as being a political, rebellious avant-garde; environmental concerns; and alternative lifestyles (Amlinger and Nachtwey 2022; Hentschel 2021; Opratko et al. 2021). Representing a conjunction of transformed understandings of democracy and freedom, environmental concerns. and alternative lifestyles, environmental experimentation by the far right seems to be an ideal bridge builder that can normalize—more or less hidden—far-right beliefs and practices in broader parts of civil society. In fact, the diagonalists in Germany developed from a “movement being open to the far-right to an open—at least in parts—right-wing movement in which extreme-right activists played a leading role in many places” (Amlinger and Nachtwey 2022, 255, author's translation).

Conclusion

The initial observation of this article is that experimental practices might not only be located in parts of the public sphere committed to enabling progressive and emancipatory change or having at most unintended side effects regarding emancipatory, sustainable futures. Therefore, the objective has been to explore experiments in far-right parts of the political spectrum. They remain analytically mostly excluded from both the category of civil society and research on its role in a social-ecological transformation due to normative reasons and the fact that climate skepticism is currently dominating far-right eco- and climate politics. Considering the ongoing normalization of the far right—which is mainly explored with a focus on elections but mostly disregarded by research on change toward sustainability—these practices, however, have a crucial role in assessing potentially transformative outcomes of experimentation in civil society.

First, the example of völkisch settlers in Germany shows that despite ideological and other differences far-right ecopolitical practices of provision in the everyday correspond with characteristic elements of experimental practices identified by research in environmental social science on non-far-right experimentation. Rather than addressing the state and the market economy, they collectively seek to foster hands-on alternatives in the here and now and to test alternative systems of provision, understandings of community, collective identities, and decision-making processes in everyday life. In doing so, they not only demonstrate the contingency of the status quo, but that alternatives can actually be practically implemented. With high consistency between means and ends, völkisch settlers are detached from unsustainable ways of life in mainstream society, prefigure their vision of a völkisch society, and seek to provide answers to the needs of local communities. Therefore, their ecofascist forms of experimentation might perform a function of bridge building to other ecopolitical experiments in civil society and the appreciation of alternative lifestyles of COVID-19 protesters as well as enabling the potential cooptation of environmental, participatory governance.

Second, völkisch settlers represent that far-right environmental and climate politics are not restricted to anti-environmentalism and climate-change denial, which prevails in research on far-right initiatives in civil society. Addressing the question of the significance of these practices for far-right positions on environmental and climate politics, it must be stated, that it is at present marginal. However, in view of future scenarios of global climate politics they are of non-negligible significance since they seem to be able to combine the connection of environmental values with the defense of privileges and “one’s own” way of life in times of ongoing securitization of climate change. The political line of tension in climate politics might shift from conflicts between positions of acceptance and denial to a focus based on inclusion or exclusion. There are also experiments that pursue goals quite different from a just transformation toward sustainable, emancipated futures: an agenda of an exclusive, authoritarian sustainability that leaves the core of inclusive inter- and intragenerational justice and equality of sustainability behind for a vision of ethno-security. Given the current normalization of the far right, this agenda is gaining momentum and polarizing civil society. The recent COVID-19 protests had already indicated potential resonance in broader parts of civil society, which far-right ecopolitical experimenters can take advantage of.

Thus, it has become evident that researchers should include far-right experimentation in the assessment of the transformative capacities of experimentation in civil society. However, this requires further empirical clarification regarding far-right experimentation and attempts to co-opt other ecopolitical experiments in civil society and participatory processes in sustainability governance, as well as analytical illumination of their significance for conceptualizing the role of participation for a social-ecological transformation. The comparative analysis of experiments from different parts of the political spectrum could also give hope regarding the normalization of an agenda of authoritarian sustainability. Critical accounts of experimentation have emphasized the volatility of participation of late-modern subjects limiting the transformative capacities of experiments (Deflorian 2021), their post-political character (Kenis and Mathijs 2014; Mouffe 2013), limited productivity in comparison to capitalist markets (Davidson 2017), and their reaffirmation of and cooptation by neoliberal responsibilization (Rosol 2012; van Dyk 2018), as well as a simulative character of experimentation that leaves the larger social order untouched (Blühdorn 2017). All this severely underplays the transformative potentials of experimentation in civil society. If this is the case, and if it also applies to far-right experimentation in civil society, it would be good news, as far as it concerns the latter. Given the ongoing normalization of the far right, however, there are grounds on which to question this speculative contention. An ongoing mainstreaming of the far right, however, is not inevitable.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers, Ingolfur Blühdorn, Margaret Haderer, and Michael Deflorian as well as the participants at the Joint Sessions Workshop “Changing Societies Meet Political Inertia: Common Grounds for Climate Activists and Populists?” held in April 2022 and organized by the European Consortium for Political Research for their helpful and encouraging comments on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under Grant P 31226.

Notes

1 In line with Camus and Lebourg (2017) and Mudde (2019), the term “far right” covers nationalist political actors of the radical and extreme right and their ideologies and practices. These include inter alia populist radical right parties, the New and Alt-Right, Fascists and neo-Fascists, Nazis and neo-Nazis, to be distinguished from the “mainstream right.” With “mainstreaming” and “normalization” of the far right, I refer to the “forth wave” (Mudde 2019) of the far right which addresses the tide of heterogeneous far-right parties and movements in Europe, the United States, and beyond (Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2021; Mudde 2019; Wodak 2020).

2 For analyses of the normalization of the far right beyond an electoral focus see especially the following discursive accounts (e.g., Brown, Mondon, and Winter 2021; Moffitt 2022; Stavrakakis and Jäger 2018; Wodak 2020) as well as these social theoretical treatments (e.g., Amlinger and Nachtwey 2022; Blühdorn 2022; Brown 2019; Reckwitz 2021).

3 For discussions of the gender-nature nexus and the far right see, for example, Daggett (2018), Hughes, Jones, and Amarasingam (2022), and Hultman (2019).

4 In line with Lubarda’s (2020) framework of “far-right ecologism,” the term “far-right environmentalism” refers to environmental politics in the broader far-right spectrum representing a generic term for other conceptualizations as “ecofascism” (Biehl and Staudenmaier 2011; Campion 2021), “right-wing ecology” (Olsen 1999), or “green nationalism” (Malm and The Zetkin Collective 2021). In contrast to Lubarda (2020), however, the term ecologism is understood in accordance with Dobson (2007) as an ideology in its own right, which pre-empts the framework of far-right ecologism.

5 According to Campion (2021, 8), ecofascism can be defined as “a reactionary and revolutionary ideology that champions the regeneration of an imagined community through a return to a romanticised, ethnopluralist vision of the natural order” (italics in original). On the history and current forms of ecofascism, see also Biehl and Staudenmaier (2011), Hughes, Jones, and Amarasingam (2022), Rueda (2020), and Szenes (2021).

6 The Identitäre Bewegung Deutschland (Identarian Movement in Germany) is a German extreme-right movement organization seeking to contest an alleged “Great Replacement.” It is part of a wider transnational coalition of organizations built after the model of the French Génération identitaire in 2012 (Nissen 2022). CasaPound is an Italian extreme-right organization which considers itself as successors of Italian classical fascism and was established in the midst of a squatting episode at a state-owned building in 2003 (Froio et al. 2020).

7 This simultaneous engagement in experimental and protest movements applies also to non-far-right actors (de Moor and Verhaegen 2020).

8 The name LebensRaum connotatively resembles the colonial concept of Lebensraum which was prominent during the colonial era of Wilhemine Germany and the expansionary racism fostered under National Socialism. The Anastasia movement is rooted in the esoteric-nationalist books of the Russian author Vladimir Megre. Advocating for a “nationwide land reform and a society based on self-sufficient, multigenerational homesteads practicing small-scale agriculture” (Davidov 2015, 3), it is a network of ecovillages spreading from its core in Russia (close to 200 in 2015) to the United States, Canada, Germany, Australia, Sweden, and beyond. Reich citizens are heterogenous actors in Germany doubting the legitimacy of the Federal Republic of Germany. Based on the conspiracy theory that it is still governed by the Allies or the United States, they are in — sometimes violent and homicidal — opposition to the state and have occasionally declared “their own states, which at times resembled an esoteric, libertarian, right-wing cult” (Buchmayr 2021, 111).

9 Accelerationism, which has been promoted by both far-right (Griffin 2000; Loadenthal 2022) and radical-left (Srnicek and Williams 2015) intellectuals and activists alike, asks for a severe intensification of economic and technological progress to escalate social contradictions and crises. Perceptions of experimentation as form of preparatory refusal and völkisch ecopolitical experimentation signal the limits of prevailing conceptions of experimentation and accelerationism as antagonistic political strategies (e.g., Srnicek and Williams 2015; Monticelli 2021).

10 In any case, this form of refusal can only be partly realized. From a social theoretical perspective, experiments outside the monetized market sphere represent preconditions that late-capitalist societies build on and simultaneously erode (Fraser 2022). Further, experiments pursue the realization of norms of self-determination and self-realization that are central to the culture of late-capitalist societies (Blühdorn 2017). Considering the far right, this feature becomes apparent with regard to its resemblance to neoliberalism and prevailing perceptions of freedom (Biebricher 2020; Brown 2019; Lütjen 2022).

11 Besides Schmitt ([1938] 2008), Wainwright and Mann’s concept of Behemoth refers particularly to Neumann’s analysis of the Nazi state (Neumann [1942] 1983).

12 On the securitization of climate change, see Warner and Boas (2019).

13 In 2019, 51 people were killed in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch (New Zealand), 23 as a result of an attack aimed at Latinos at a Walmart in El Paso (Texas, United States), and two people after an unsuccessful attempt to enter a synagogue in Halle (Germany). The three extreme-right attackers all cited inter alia environmental and climate-political justifications for their homicidal actions.

14 This prevailing self-perception as anti-authoritarian might signal a contradiction with the concept of authoritarian sustainability. However, this self-perception can be regarded as rather a misrepresentation of altered perceptions of authority in late-capitalist societies characterized by identification with an internal authority: the internalized, self-centered norm of competition directed toward the exclusion and disparagement of “others” (Amlinger and Nachtwey 2022, 171–206).