Fascism to the Nouvelle Droite: The Dream of Pan-European Empire

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to trace continuity in the attachment of the nouvelle droite to a homogeneous notion of pan-European identity since its birth in 1968. Like the nouvelle droite, early post-war neo-fascism and significant fascist elements in Italy were similarly obsessed with the decline of homogeneous pan-European or Western identities. Despite the ultra-nationalistic origins of historical fascism, early post-war neo-fascism and the nouvelle droite in different historical periods, the thread tying them together is the notion of a strong, unified, homogeneous, pan-European empire regenerated in defense against the dominant ‘materialist’ ideologies such as liberalism, conservatism, social democracy, socialism, capitalism and communism.

Keywords:

• nouvelle droite
• neo-fascism
• fascism
• conservative revolution
• New Left
• pan-Europeanism
• empire

Notes

¹ Les Amis d'Alain de Benoist, available online at http://www.alaindebenoist.com.

² The glaring exception was the neo-fascist Movimento Sociale Italaliano (MSI, Italian Social Movement). Founded in 1946, it gained between 5 and 8% of the national vote until 1992. It reached its high mark of 8.7% in 1972. In 1995 the MSI dissolved and was replaced by the allegedly ‘post-fascist’ Alleanza Nazionale (AN, National Alliance). (See Ignazi, 1997, pp. 47–64).

³ The CR connotes a school of non-Nazi German cultural pessimism in the inter-war years, best represented by thinkers such as Oswald Spengler, Moeller van den Bruck and Ernst Jünger. They united an elitist ultra-nationalism, a rejection of reactionary conservatism and a revolutionary conservatism dedicated to total state mobilization of workers and owners in a military framework. Armin Mohler dubbed them the ‘healthy Trotskyites’ of German revolutionary nationalism, in contrast to the ‘Hitlerian travesty’. (See Griffin, 1995, pp. 104–114).

⁴ For a comprehensive Russian site with English translations of Alexander Dugin's works, see Arctogaia, available online at http://www.my.arcto.ru/public/eng/.

⁵ The 1969 memorandum, which was reprinted in the May 1969 issue of Eléments, stated that it is ‘necessary to be prudent in the vocabulary used. It is necessary to abandon an outdated vocabulary’ (quoted in Bar-On, 2007b, p. 36).

⁶ There are tensions within the nouvelle droite around the ‘cause of peoples’ slogan, with Guillaume Faye arguing that de Benoist's radical, cultural ethnopluralism has led him to neglect Europe's traditional racial homogeneity and thus become complicit with existing liberal, pro-multicultural elites (see Faye, 2003). Also, in the same issue, see ‘An interview With Alain de Benoist.’

⁷ For a more unambiguous defense of this racialist position see Raspail (2004) or his politically incorrect, anti-immigrant novel The Camp of the Saints (Raspail, 1994).

⁸ For J.L. Talmon liberal and totalitarian variants of democracy can be traced to the French Revolution, with the latter embodied in figures like Robespierre and Saint-Just, who combined dictatorship based on mass enthusiasm with a liberal, perfectionist ideology (see Talmon, 1952).