www.new-right.org

V ingtieme: Who was part of the New Right’s audience during the 1980s?

Taguieff: GRECE claimed to have 2500 full members in 1985-86. There were between 5000 and 8000 people in the movement (these figures come from Alain de Benoist and are collated with others, but they seem exaggerated). Since 1978-79 GRECE’s annual “national” colloquia have been based on particular themes.[1] They drew from 700 to 1200 people (the proceedings were published afterwards). As for the different journals connected with GRECE, Elements has around 5000 subscribers (for a printing of 15,000), Nouvelle Ecole has about 2000 subscribers, Etudes et Recherches (the new edition, No. 1, Spring, 1983) between 500 and 600, and Panorama des Idles Actuelles (No. 1, March, 1985) between 800 and 1000 (along with Nouvelle Ecole, which went from a triquarterly to a yearly review, the latter two journals have never appeared regularly). As for Krisis, “a journal of ideas and debates” (No. 1, Summer 1988), edited by Benoist, clearly tries to distance itself from the New Right’s sphere of influence (it had 600 subscribers in 1992). Most of the texts published in it — often reprints or interviews — are written by decidedly leftist authors (Olivier Mongin, Jean-Michel Palmier, Alain Caille, Claude Julien, Dominique Wolton, Pierre Fougeyrollas, Bruno Etienne, Max Gallo, Jacques Julliard, etc.). Its declared intention is to transcend “old” splits by championing controversies that tend to make “new” ones beyond the opposition between Left and Right. It is certainly legitimate to ask about the functions of such a journal: does it play a “metapolitical” role in the context of GRECE’s strategy or does it allow Benoist, the public figure who is tired of being “ghettoized,” to regain cultural respectability? In the latter case, could one not claim that, by dint of mimicking the intellectual Left, its values are inadvertently adopted? This is the prevailing opinion within Catholic Le Pen circles about Benoist’s leftward “drift.” Before GRECE revamped its political and cultural credentials during the 1980s, Jean Madiran stigmatized the New Right as an enterprise with a Left ideology because of its anti-Christian atheism: “The radically and-Christian New Right is spiritually Left. One cannot rule out the possibility that it is a Left enterprise”[2] But this is all too obviously a conspiracy theory. Read more…

Jim Green French New Right

Fear of the New

To the extent that, as Hegel remarked, philosophy is its own time apprehended in thought, major historical events cannot be fully understood until well after they occur — after reflection has generated new, more adequate categories of analysis. Thus it is not surprising that the collapse of the Soviet system and the fading of the Cold War were initially misread as, e.g., “the end of history” (by naive liberal apparatchiks) or as the dawn of “authentic socialism” (by diehard Leftists, who saw contingent authoritarian encrustations as the only problem with an otherwise sound “really existing socialism”). These apologetic hermeneutical exercises are easy to understand: in both cases the objective is, first and foremost, to relegitimate internalized ideological assumptions by reducing the new to a mere extension of the old. The price one pays, however, is to miss what is really new. It is that same process Marx so vividly described at the beginning of The Eighteenth Brumaire, whereby a present inevitably trapped in its immediacy can only deal with the future from the viewpoint of the past. Read more…

Jim Green French New Right

In the following essay and interview, Professor Warren takes a close look at the “European New Right,” a cultural-intellectual movement that offers not only an unconventional view of the past, but a challenging perspective on the present and future. This piece admittedly represents a departure from the Journal’s usual content and tone. All the same, we hope and trust that readers will appreciate this look at an influential movement that not only revives an often neglected European intellectual-cultural tradition, but which also — as French writer Alain de Benoist explains here — seeks to chart Europe’s course into the 21st century. — The EditorDuring the postwar era — approximately 1945-1990 — European intellectual life was dominated by Marxists (most of them admirers of the Soviet experiment), and by supporters of a liberal-democratic society modeled largely on the United States. Aside from important differences, each group shared common notions about the desirability and ultimate inevitability of a universal “one world” democratic order, into which individual cultures and nations would eventually be absorbed. Read more…

Jim Green French New Right

Inspiration from France

This article appeared in the October 2001 issue of ‘Middle American News’ in the US under the title ‘French Manifesto Could Be Basis For A New Political Movement’.
The Centre for Research and Study on European Civilisation (Groupement de Recherche et d’Études sur la Civilisation Européene – GRECE) was founded in France in 1968. It is the most prominent representative of the European New Right (Nouvelle Droite) – which is in no way to be confused with the Anglo-American free-market New Right – and is closely identified with its leading member, Alain de Benoist.

The European New Right is, in de Benoist’s own words, ‘in no sense a political movement, but rather a current of thought and cultural action’ (Interview for Right Now magazine, April 1997 – echoing the opening lines of the ‘Manifesto of the New Right’ below). Its activities encompass the publishing of magazines and books, the organisation of conferences and debates and so forth, rather than either electioneering of paramilitary action. De Benoist himself has published something in the region of forty books – among them Vu de Droite (Seen from the Right) for which he was awarded a prize by the Académie Française in 1978 – and either founded or been associated with a number of magazines (Nouvelle École, Éléments and Krisis).

De Benoist has in these endeavours been particularly influenced by the theories of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was a critic of the Marxist belief that power stems simply from the ownership of capital. He stressed instead the importance of people like journalists, academics and teachers in creating a climate of ideas which would be the precursor to successful political change. De Benoist set out to institute a ‘Gramsciism of the Right’, in which respect he met with some degree of success. In particular when in 1978 he and other key members of the New Right were appointed to the staff of the French daily Le Figaro. These appointments helped to spread the ideas of the New Right far more widely than would otherwise have been possible. The outcry from the left at this only served to increase publicity and ensured the ideas were even more widely disseminated. All this is credited with preparing the ground for the electoral breakthrough of the National Front in France in the early 1980s.

So what are these ideas? The defining document of the New Right is GRECE’s ‘Manifesto of the New Right’ (Manifeste de la Nouvelle Droite), co-written by de Benoist and Charles Champetier. I think it justifies examination in some detail.

The Manifesto is divided into three sections, preceded by a short introduction. The first section provides an analysis of the ills of present-day society, the second expresses de Benoist and Champetier’s vision of man and the world and the third states their position on major contemporary issues.

The introduction opens by making it clear that the New Right is a school of thought rather than a political movement. And taking up the Gramscian theme, the writers stress the importance of ideas in shaping human history. Philosophers, theologians, political thinkers and their like have through their ideas brought about revolutions the effects of which are still felt today. The history of ideas – as de Benoist says in the Right Now interview (following Herder) – is the key to the history of deeds.

De Benoist and Champetier also bring in another vital theme in the introduction – the need to think across accepted political divisions. We are living in an age, they tell us, in which traditional institutions (the political parties, the unions etc) are losing their power and the traditional left-right dichotomy is – along with other similar categorisations – becoming obsolete. In the fluidity and uncertainty of the modern world they seek therefore to develop a ‘transversal’ (transversal) mode of thought which ignores these decaying mental barriers.

The first of the three main sections of the Manifesto begins by declaring that we are today at a historical turning point: the end of modernity. How do the writers justify this rather startling claim?

They start by telling us exactly what they mean by ‘modernity’. It is defined as the political and philosophical movement of the last three centuries of western history, and ascribed five principal characteristics: individualism, ‘massification’ (i.e. the adoption of standardised behaviour and lifestyles), the triumph of scientific over religious interpretations of the world, the triumph of the mercantile mentality and technology, and the planet-wide spread of a model of society – the western one – presumed the sole rationally possible.

The various schools of political thought of modernity may differ on many things, de Benoist and Champetier say, but all agree on this: that there exists a sole and universal solution to social, moral and political questions. Humanity must realise its historical unity, and in this respect the diversity of the world becomes an obstacle and what differentiates men from one another must be eliminated. Modernity has tried therefore by all possible means to tear individuals from their surroundings in order to universalise them and – introducing a theme that is a common thread throughout de Benoist’s many works – the most effective means it has used to do this is the market.

De Benoist and Champetier go on to outline what they see as the crisis of modernity. Its central values – liberty and equality – have been betrayed. Cut off from the communities which protect them and give sense and form to their existence, individuals are subject to the iron rule of immense mechanisms (the market, technology etc) in relation to which their liberty is purely formal. And the promise of equality has brought on the one hand barbarous communist regimes and on the other capitalist societies which give equality in principle but in practice allow huge inequalities.

As for the idea of progress – the promise of an ever-improving future – for many this future is not now full of hope but rather of fear. Each generation faces a world different from that which the previous one faced. The speed of change produces anxiety not happiness.

We are living in the most empty civilisation in human history, the writers say: adspeak is our paradigm language, all is commercialised, technology rules and criminality, violence and incivility are widespread.

This shows that modernity is drawing to a close, according to de Benoist and Champetier. We are entering a period of post-modernity which will be not so much a return to what has gone before but rather a rediscovery of certain pre-modern values but now looked at in a post-modern way.

In the second section of the Manifesto that most vital and most controversial of contemporary issues – race – begins to make its presence felt.

Man’s belonging to the human species is always expressed through a particular context we are told. Humanity is plural by nature – not one race. Diversity is of its very essence. Differences between cultures are neither an illusion, nor transitory, nor accidental, nor of trivial importance. All of which will have our anti-racist ideologues foaming at the mouth.

Human existence, the writers go on to tell us, is also inextricably linked to the communities and social groups in which it is set, the most basic of these being the extended family. This is an idea which would be anathema, they say, to the modern individualist and universalist who associates community with hierarchy, parochialism and claustrophobia.

In reality, though, modernity has not set men free by breaking the old bonds of family, locality, race, religion etc. It has, de Benoist and Champetier tell us (taking up again a theme from the first section of the Manifesto), just submitted them to different constraints – and harder ones at that because more distant, impersonal and demanding. In becoming more solitary man has also become more vulnerable and powerless. He has no sense of where to place himself in the world. The great project of emancipation has resulted in alienation on a massive scale. We must therefore reinstate the idea of community.

And on the economy again: contrary to what liberals and Marxists suppose, the writers assert, the economy has never formed the ‘infrastructure’ of society. In pre-modern societies the economy was embedded within and contextualised by the rest of human activity. Though it is undeniable that economic development has brought benefits it will eventually lead us to an impasse, not least because the world has finite resources.

De Benoist and Champetier say that the commercialisation of the world in the last few centuries has been one of the most important phenomena in human history and that its decommercialisation will be one of the great issues of the twenty-first century. The economy must be recontextualised. All the other important elements must be put back into the equation – ecological equilibrium and everything else. Even one might venture – though they do not mention it directly – the greatest bogeyman of all: race.

And there is a corresponding critique of the idea of universal human rights. Rights are social, we are told. They are only conceivable within a specific setting. Rights, like the economy, must be put back within a social context. What might our rapidly-proliferating human rights gurus and missionaries think of this?

Towards the end of the second section de Benoist and Champetier come back to the subject of diversity. They stress again that diversity is inherent in life itself – that there exists a plurality of races, languages, customs and religions – and that there are two opposing attitudes to this. There are those who believe such a diversity is a burden and always seek to reduce men to what they have in common and there are those – like the New Right – who believe differences are riches that should be preserved and cultivated. A good system, say the writers, is one that transmits at least as many differences as it has received.

The word ‘diversity’ here is quite rightly recaptured from our present rulers and their entourage of race relations experts. The New Right are the true upholders of diversity. When the proponents of our present multi-racial society use this word – as they so frequently do – they are being disingenuous. Racial diversity for these people is not something of value in itself. It is just a stepping-stone to their ultimate goal – the destruction of race through mass inter-breeding (the mixed-race society, one might say).

De Benoist and Champetier also take two other important and sensitive concepts – imperialism and ethnocentrism – and show just who stands where on these today. The attempt by our political class to impose the social and economic system and moral standards (human rights) of the west on the rest of the planet is the modern-day equivalent of the crusades or colonialism. It is an imperialist and ethnocentric movement which seeks to efface all differences through the imposition of one supposedly superior model. It is the New Right who are its opponents.

But unstoppable though our leaders’ vision of society seems at present there are growing signs that they will not succeed. This is not the ‘end of history’ whereby the western model of society finally and permanently triumphs over all competing versions. Other civilisations are on the rise. The new century will see the birth of a multi-polar world in which power will be defined as the ability to resist the influence of other cultures rather than to impose one’s own. Let us hope they are correct about this!

The third and final section expresses the New Right’s position on a range of contemporary issues. The spread is wide and includes gender, democracy, Europe, the role of work in society, the modern urban environment, ecology and freedom of speech. I just want to concentrate here on a few points most relevant to my own interests (principally racial issues).

De Benoist and Champetier express their opposition to both homogenisation and tribalism and their support instead for what they term ’strong identities’ (des identités fortes). Homogenisation, they say, leads to extreme reactions – chauvinistic nationalism, tribal savagery and the like. By denying individuals the right to an identity the western system has paradoxically given birth to hysterical forms of self-affirmation. The question of identity is sure to become more and more important over the coming decades. Who could doubt that they are right about this?

And they continue by saying that the New Right is the defender of the cause of peoples. It defends not only its own difference but the right of others to be different too. The right to difference is not a means of excluding others for being different.

The right to an identity or the right to difference. A new human right? A universal right which is not universal, one might say. It is interesting to note that this type of right also appears, for example, in the programme of the Austrian Freedom Party where it is termed the right to a cultural identity.

De Benoist and Champetier go on to make clear the distinction between the right to difference and racism. Racism, they say, is a theory which holds that there exist between races inequalities which mean that one can distinguish ’superior’ and ‘inferior’ races, that the value of an individual can be deduced from which racial group he or she belongs to, and that race is the central explaining factor of human history. All three of these assertions, the writers maintain, are false. Races differ but one cannot put them in a hierarchy.

Opposed to racism de Benoist and Champetier distinguish two very different forms of anti-racism: a universalist form and a differentialist form. The first, they say, is as bad as the racism it denounces. It values in peoples only what they have in common. These kind of anti-racists – the ones with whom we are all only too familiar, sadly – are incapable of recognising and respecting differences. Differentialist anti-racism, on the other hand – the New Right kind – considers the plurality of the human race to be a positive thing. The New Right, in short, rejects both exclusion and assimilation, the writers say. Neither apartheid nor the melting-pot are for them desirable forms of society.

But they then make it quite clear where they stand on immigration. In view of its rapidity and massive scale it is, they say, incontestably a negative phenomenon. And the responsibility for the problem lies not principally with the immigrants themselves but with the western system which has reduced man ‘à l’état de marchandise délocalisable’ (to the status of an uprootable commodity). Immigration is desirable neither for the immigrants themselves nor for the peoples of the receiving nations who are confronted with unwished-for and often brutal modifications to their environment. The problems of developing nations are not resolved by the large-scale transfer of population to the developed world. The New Right, we are told, therefore favours a restrictive immigration policy.

De Benoist and Champetier go on to say that as regards the immigrant population in France today it would be illusory to expect their mass departure (something which I could never accept in relation to the immigrant population of Britain, France or any other northern European country). But the writers declare themselves firmly in favour of immigrants being encouraged to retain their own cultures, rather than their being pressurised into integration – which I could hardly disagree with at least as a stop-gap or second-best measure.

There is just one further point I would like to pick out. Towards the end of the Manifesto – during a critique of modern capitalism – de Benoist and Champetier do a bit of very important transversal thinking. Taking up a cause which is normally thought of as belonging to the left they call for the cancellation of third world debt, the freeing of developing economies from the dictates of the World Bank and IMF and other changes to the relationship between the developed and developing world.

This kind of transversal thinking is not quite unique – there are elements of it in the programmes of many major radical right parties in northern Europe (the National Front in France, the Flemish Bloc in Belgium, the Freedom Party in Austria and the Danish People’s Party, for example). You will also find such thinking in the programme of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and, though approached from a very different angle, in the famous speech given by the late Bernie Grant MP in the House of Commons in December 1995 in which he advocated government assistance for people from the Caribbean to return home. It is always welcome to see people prepared to ignore obsolescent political divisions in this way.

The Manifesto provides a strong foundation for the modern radical right. One can draw a huge amount of inspiration from it – for example, as regards the need for transversal thinking (as demonstrated above), or from the way the writers quite rightfully reclaim the word ‘diversity’, or from their analysis of what racism really means.

It seems to me, in fact, that de Benoist, Champetier and other like-minded people are the only true opponents of globalisation in the west. Their sole rival in this respect is the green movement. But greens are inconsistent in their opposition to globalisation. Whilst they are staunch opponents of economic globalisation they also tend, bizarrely, to be among the most enthusiastic supporters of the globalisation of people – i.e. of increased immigration, particularly the de facto mass immigration scheme known as the asylum system, and of the multi-racial society generally (this, incidentally, is a mirror image of the criticism that is often made of Enoch Powell – that his views were inconsistent because he opposed immigration and the multi-racial society yet was at the same time a strong supporter of capitalism).

There are things I would disagree with in the Manifesto too. Not only the dismissal of the possibility of the departure of non-white immigrants but also the pre-eminent position accorded to the market as regards responsibility for our present ills. I would put the largest share of the blame on the perverse doctrine of universalist anti-racism with the capitalist economic system as its hand maiden (it is the economic system that goes naturally with such a credo). After all, as I have pointed out elsewhere, how many non-Oriental immigrants are there in the paradigm capitalist society of Hong Kong, or in Japan? Though they have the most capitalist of economies they have relatively few immigrants because they do not suffer from the sickness of universalist anti-racism.

So when are the kind of ideas contained in the Manifesto going to be taken up by a political organisation in Britain? When is there going to be some concrete, pragmatic initiative? The creation of an organisation which displays similar transversal thinking in its programme. And one too, I would argue, which focuses very much on the tackling of the most sensitive and difficult issue of all – race – and does so in a more daring and forthright manner than de Benoist and Champetier. We had better hope it is soon.

Jim Green French New Right

The future belongs to those with the longest memory.Friedrich Nietzsche

The Third Way

To understand the French New Right, it is necessary to begin with its identitarian philosophy of history. This philosophy, however, is so entangled in an ideological thicket of critical scorn that it is all but impossible to approach with impartiality. Like revolutionary conservatism, national bolshevism, and various expressions of populism and syndicalism, the French New Right seeks a revolutionary course beyond the Left-Right politics it rejects; and, like these other “Third Way” tendencies, it, too, is routinely compared with the most notorious of the Third Way movements: fascism and National Socialism.(n1) While liberalism, social democracy, and communism, as different expressions of the Left, are not similarly equated (and tainted), there is a certain, if tenuous logic to these comparisons in that all Third Way tendencies oppose the modernist order. Less certain still is the inquisitional intent of these comparisons.(n2) Efforts by Alain de Benoist’s GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d’Etudes pour la Civilisation Europeenne),(n3) the principal French proponent of the Third Way, to challenge the liberal paradigm or to evoke the Indo-European heritage as a spur to cultural renewal, have led to numerous McCarthy-style allegations of Nazism and “Aryan supremacy”(n4) — even though for thirty years Benoist and his Grecistes have denounced Nazism as a “brown Jacobinism” and have characterized racism as an offshoot of the totalizing modernity they oppose. The greatest obstacle to understanding the Third Way may stem, however, from the fact that these comparisons mistakenly assume that ideology, an “outgrowth of modernity” that reduces the world to itself, and philosophy, which is an opening to the world, are analogous, and that, therefore, the philosophical disposition of a school of thought, such as the GRECE’s, can be deduced from its politics.(n5) Since all these stigmatizing comparisons endeavor to delegitimate, rather than to explain such non-conformist tendencies, it is hardly surprising that they also have succeeded in marginalizing them.(n6)

Europe’s Identitarian Crisis

An interest in the past generally begins with an interest in the future. As its appellation suggests, the GRECE’s interest is European civilization. Unlike globalists and Altanticists, who tout its wealth and economic prominence, Grecistes believe Europe is in decline.(n7) The continent, they argue, is no longer governed by European criteria. Self-serving technocracies, guided by liberal managerial imperatives, now rule its lands with a generic conception of man that disparages its particularistic cultures and historic continuities.(n8) The ensuing weakening of collective identities has been compounded by a stunted system of socialization, educational policies that denigrate traditional standards, a proliferation of social pathologies and cretinizing spectacles, and a vast influx of inassimilable Afro-Asian immigrants.(n9) Buttressed by the liberal “Right” and the Social Democratic Left, as they converge in extolling the virtues of the world market, these technocracies focus almost exclusively on “the battle for exports” and the dictates of globalization, seemingly indifferent to the breakdown of social-cultural solidarities.(n10) Even more deleterious than these technocratic threats to European identity has been the loss of sovereignty that followed in the wake of the “Thirty Years’ War” (1914-1945), when Europe was occupied and divided by the two extra-European powers. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War allegedly altered only the character of this heteronomy. Though accepting Heidegger’s contention that the techno-economic civilizations of communist Russia and liberal America were “metaphysically the same,” with similar materialist philosophies of history, Grecistes believe the American occupation was the more pernicious: where the Soviets crushed any assertion of East European independence, the US not only occupied Western Europe militarily in the name of defending it, but colonized it culturally in ways that decomposed and Americanized European life.(n11) “A people,” Raymond Ruyer has written, “more often perishes by losing its soul than its resources.”(n12)

To Grecistes, this seems to be the case today. In their view, the US represents the purest embodiment of liberal modernity, and thus the chief worldwide force for cultural homogenization. Nowhere, they argue, were the modernist principles born in the 18th-century Enlightenment –the principles of equality, rationality, universalism, individuality, economism, and developmentalism — as thoroughly realized as in the new republic “liberated from the dead hand of the European past.”(n13) In this spirit, the US was founded on a concept of its citizenry as autonomous self-interested subjects, homo oeconomicus, oriented to market exchanges and contractual relations, but devoid of high culture or ethnic identification. As such, the denizens of this modernist “enterprise” (constituting a demos, rather than an ethnos) have tended to substitute mercantile conventions for tradition, to define themselves in terms of a materialist way of life, and to elevate “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness,” i.e., the monadic conception of freedom, to the pinnacle of their concerns. Any notion of a “people” or of particularistic cultural organisms imbued with historically-shaped destinies, has been entirely foreign to their “national” project.(n14) For this reason, the “culturally-primitive upper class” (Oswald Spengler) of this former colony, in its role as modernity’s elect, has been occupied almost exclusively with promoting consumer choice in open markets and enhancing the “rationality” of these choices by disembedding individuals from their communities and ascriptive ties. US power was accordingly imposed on Europe as if the entire continent, not just the US, were frozen in an eternal here and now, concerned solely with matters of economic advantage. Aided by marketing and media lures that circumvented elite structures and catered to the libidinous impulses of mass taste, Europe’s postwar Americanization displaced, if not discredited much of the continent’s millennial heritage. Grecistes thus look on America as a “murderer” of culture and history, a civilizational no-man’s-land bent on turning the world into a single global market where everything is exchangeable.(n15) As Benoist writes, the US “is not like other countries. It is a country that seeks to destroy all others.”(n16) This Greciste view of the New World as a cultural threat to the Old World’s survival is especially relevant, since many Europeans have succumbed to America’s hegemonic designs and have abandoned not a few of their defining particularisms. As John Gray writes,(n17) Europe today “confronts the phenomenon of a culture permeated throughout by a hatred of its own identity.”

The Longest Memory

To strip a people of their culture and history, as America’s universalist and homogenizing project entails, is tantamount, Grecistes argue, to severing a people’s roots, and a people can no more live with severed roots than can a tree. Without a memory of its collective past and the foundational myths that define and distinguish it from others –without, that is, the encompassing forrces that tie a multiple of related individuals to a larger identity — a people ceases to be a people.(n18) For this reason, Grecistes consider the erosion of Europe’s cultural foundations to be the greatest danger facing its civilization. Consequently, the cultural front has become the primary theater of their operations.(n19) In defending Europe’s patrimony, their line of march has commenced with a metapolitical assault on the cosmopolitan forces of modernity. Like Antonio Gramsci, they believe that power and politics follow culture, and that Europe continues to betray itself as long as its culture remains infused with anti-European influences. To combat the hegemony of American-style modernity and to instill in their people a will to be themselves, they have taken up a Gramscian metapolitics that treats culture as if it were a strategic high-ground to be contested by “organic intellectuals” beating different views of what it means to be European.(n20) In this spirit, they straggle for a re-Europeanization of the continent. Read more…

Jim Green French New Right