Enigmatic Empire: The French New Right and Europeanism

Abstract

The French New Right, la Nouvelle Droite, was born in the eventful year of 1968. It has been identified as belonging to the Far Right by scholars and represented an attempt of constructing a metapolitical intellectual movement from the Right that could challenge the hegemonic Left. Its ideological doctrine is traditionally perceived as anchored in historical nationalism and fascism but differs from its predecessors in that it concerned primarily with the European continent rather than the nation-state. The suggested transnational character of its doctrine ensured that it in principle became transferrable beyond both state- and continental borders. Consequently, it should be viewed as having allowed for past nationalisms to morph into a continental equivalent we might term Europeanism. Europeanism is a continental nationalism which suggests discarding the nation-state in order to construct a federalist European Empire of ethnocultural regions based on pre-historical premises, with heavy emphasis on Indo-Europeans and the history of Pre-Christian Europe. By taking to ground that ‘national’ is something explicitly based on ethnic descend, its assumed principal goal was to exclude those who did not have their historical origin in Europe. This thesis examines whether the myths and histories upon which the Europeanism of the Nouvelle Droite is based are plausible, and how the choice of histories meant to strengthen their views, may be interpreted as destructive, rather than contributing, to their credibility. It concludes that the historical premise for Europeanism stands at risk of eroding in the difficulty of confirming a historical continuation from the mythical Indo-Europeans to the present.