What do they talk about when they talk about Europe? Euro-ambivalence in far right ideology

ABSTRACT

Euroscepticism is frequently presented as a key ideological feature of far right parties, however, this definition masks important variations between them. This paper argues that far right positions on Europe are characterized by long-standing ambivalence rather than straightforward opposition. While far right parties frequently oppose the EU, ideological flexibility, the malleability of European integration and the protean nature of Europe also lead them to display support towards certain aspects of it and towards Europe as a civilization. The argument is illustrated through a qualitative analysis of the party literature of the Movimento Sociale Italiano and the Front National. The analysis shows that these parties conceived of Europe as an identity, a space of liberty, an endangered heritage and a construction where national interests must be defended. In each theme, they offered ambivalent readings of Europe, oscillating between opposition and support depending on how Europe and the EU were defined.

KEYWORDS:

• Far right
• ideology
• Euroscepticism
• European Union
• Europe
• neo-fascism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Following Vasilopoulou (2018, 6), “far right” is used as an umbrella term to encompass radical and extreme right parties.

2 This is a purposeful sample selected from a larger corpus of 400 party documents. The selected documents represented the key trends of the full corpus and illustrated most clearly the parties’ definition of Europe.

3 This “plausibility check” was meant to ensure that the identified themes were credible and potentially transferrable (Guba 1981).

4 While there is significant overlap between this understanding of liberty and the notion of national sovereignty, this paper opts for the former as to reflect the parties’ language.