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Abstract

What is the far-right’s foreign policy outlook? Although International Relations scholarship has provided important insights into the foreign policy preferences of far-right actors, it has predominantly analysed these political actors under the label of populism and focused on the effects of populism on foreign policy positions. Consequently, we lack a clear understanding of the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy beliefs and preferences. This article provides a theorization of far-right foreign policy by deriving its key characteristics from far-right ideology. It tests this theoretical framework through a comparative analysis of the foreign policy preferences of the populist radical-right Alternative for Germany and the extreme-right, Neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany. The comparative analysis of primary textual data reveals a shared far-right foreign policy outlook characterized by (1) ultra-nationalism, (2) group-based enmity, (3) authoritarianism, (4) revisionism and reactionism and (5) producerist-nationalistic economic positions, but also some important variations in the pursuit of these positions.

Keywords

far right populism foreign policy ideology Germany

Introduction

Given the global rise of radical and insurgent politics, mainly on the right of the political spectrum, ranging from the election of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro to the electoral successes of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and National Rally in Europe, there has been a growing interest in the impact of ideologies on foreign policy. Interestingly, International Relations (IR) scholarship has predominantly analysed these and other political actors under the label of populism (Destradi et al., 2021; Stengel et al., 2019; Löfflmann, 2022). Although this scholarship generally agrees that populism is a ‘thin’ ideology and always combined with ‘thicker’ ideologies (Mudde, 2004),¹ it has thus focused on how the ‘thin’ ideology of populism influences foreign policy orientations and outputs rather than the more substantial – radical-right/far-right – ideology.² Even those studies that use the terminology of the ‘populist radical right’ (PRR) or ‘far-right populism’ and discuss its effects on foreign policy typically locate their research within populism scholarship and hardly draw on far-right scholarship, if at all (De Sá Guimaraes and De Oliveira e Silva, 2021; Ostermann and Stahl, 2022; Verbeek and Zaslove, 2015).

Consequently, although this literature provides important insights into the foreign policy positions of these political actors, it does not clearly define and discuss the role of far-right politics. This, in turn, hampers a clear distinction between populist and far-right ideology and evaluation of the ideological roots of certain foreign policy preferences and decisions. Apart from the widespread tendency to use terms such as populism, right-wing populism and far-right politics interchangeably, it remains, for example, unclear how scholars determine that opposition to multilateralism, globalization and global public good provision or the pursuit of narrowly defined national interests are evidence for a ‘populist foreign policy’ (Chryssogelos, 2017; Plagemann and Destradi, 2019) or a ‘populist radical-right foreign policy’ (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022) rather than a result of far-right ideology. This points to a wider theoretical problem: we lack a clear understanding of the nature of far-right foreign policy outlooks.

The far right is an umbrella term for right-wing actors located on the rightmost end of the left-right political spectrum (Mudde, 2019; Pirro, 2022), including radical conservatives, New Right, neo-fascists, neo-Nazis and racial supremacists. Mudde makes a useful distinction between the ‘extreme right’ and the ‘radical right’: While all far-right actors are ‘hostile to liberal democracy’, the extreme right ‘rejects the essence of democracy, that is, popular sovereignty and majority rule’, whereas the ‘radical right accepts the essence of democracy, but opposes fundamental elements of liberal democracy, most notably minority rights, rule of law, and separation of powers’ (Mudde, 2019: 7). According to Mudde, the extreme right’s anti-democratic outlook implies that it cannot be populist, whereas the radical right can be populist and this amalgamation of radical-right and populist ideology has given rise to the ‘PRR’ party family (Mudde, 2007).³

This article provides a theorization of far-right foreign policy and a comparative analysis of the foreign policy preferences of extreme-right and radical-right parties. Thus, it aims to address the following research questions: (1) what are the distinctive features of the far-right foreign policy outlook? (2) to what extent do the foreign policy preferences of extreme-right and (populist) radical-right parties differ? In addressing these research questions, the article identifies and discusses the key ideological elements of the far right, including the differences between extreme and radical right, and derives a set of foreign policy preferences from these ideological elements. Based on independently collected textual data, it then analyses to what extent the foreign policy rhetoric and positioning of the extreme-right, neo-Nazi party National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD)⁴ and the PRR party AfD are consistent with the developed theoretical framework and whether there are any substantial differences in the policy positions of NPD and AfD.

Hence, the article makes two contributions to existent scholarship: Theoretically, it carves out the far-right’s foreign policy beliefs and preferences. Empirically, it offers a comparative analysis of the foreign policy positions of extreme-right and (populist) radical-right parties, thereby pointing to a fruitful new research agenda and addressing the lack of research on the extreme right’s foreign policy positions. In doing so, the article also aims to foster a better understanding of populism and far right and discern whether there actually is a distinct PRR foreign policy programme.

The article demonstrates that far-right foreign policy is characterized by the strict belief in a natural order of essentialized inequalities and that this natural order is embodied by the ethnoculturally or racially homogeneous nation-state. The highest goal of foreign policy is to create an ethnopluralist world order and to defend the folk community against its internal and external enemies in the eternal, social-Darwinist struggle between different peoples. This translates into a set of core far-right foreign policy positions: (1) ultra-nationalism, (2) group-based enmity, (3) authoritarianism, (4) revisionism and reactionism, (5) producerist-nationalistic economic outlook. The article argues that the differences between extreme and radical right concern predominantly less the basic programmatic orientation of foreign policy than the dogmatism and the means with which these foreign policy positions are pursued. The analysis shows that NPD and AfD share a relatively similar far-right foreign policy outlook. Both parties propagate an ultra-nationalist foreign policy and seek to ‘restore’ the ethnocultural identity of Germany and assert its independence against the United States, supranational organizations, non-native ‘enemies’ and ‘globalists’ by promoting an ethnopluralist and multipolar order. Two important differences concern the attitude towards Israel and irredentism. Given the similarities in the foreign policy outlooks of the non-populist, extreme-right NPD and populist radical-right AfD, the article raises doubts about the impact of populist/PRR ideology on foreign policy preferences.

The article is structured as follows: The first section discusses the nexus between foreign policy and ideology, including the state of research on populist and far-right foreign policy. The second section develops a theoretical framework for the study of far-right foreign policy positions. The third section outlines the case selection, research method and analysed data. The fourth section presents and discusses the results of the comparative analysis of the NPD and AfD’s foreign policy positions.

Foreign Policy and (Far-Right) Ideology

Scholarship on the nexus between foreign policy and ideology has shown that political/party ideologies can decisively influence foreign policy preferences and decision-making (Nincic and Ramos, 2010; Raunio and Wagner, 2020). Following Michael Freeden (1996: 3), political ideologies can be defined as ‘those systems of political thinking, [. . .] through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding’. Accordingly, ideologies are necessary ideational frameworks through which individuals and political collectives make sense of politics and organized political action becomes possible by justifying, changing or contesting the broader arrangements of a specific political community as well as its policies, ranging from the use of military force to membership in international organizations.

While many studies show how the left/right cleavage matters in foreign policy and can explain divergences between different political parties and governments (e.g. Noël and Thérien, 2008; Rathbun, 2004), they focus on centre-left and centre-right parties and mainstream ideologies. Hence, this literature has so far not conceptualized and analysed the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy.

The IR populism literature has analysed the foreign policies of far-right politicians and parties, but places emphasis on the impact of populist ideology and is thus primarily interested in capturing the ‘peculiarities of populist foreign policy’ (Destradi et al., 2021: 670) and analysing ‘the independent effect of populism on the policy preferences of populist parties’ (Chryssogelos, 2017). Similarly, studies that seemingly take the ‘thick’ ideology more seriously and aim to analyse ‘how populism and radical-right ideology jointly produce a distinct foreign policy positioning’ (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022: 1) typically focus on populism and discuss the concept of populism at length, while they provide no clear definition of radical-right/far-right ideology and do not unpack its core concepts. For example, Verbeek and Zaslove (2015: 527) merely state that ‘[t]he core ideology of the PRR is nativism and authoritarianism’. Ostermann and Stahl’s study on ‘PRR foreign policy’ briefly lists some elements of radical-right ideology and then notes that the ‘combination of thin [populist] and thick [radical right] ideology elements’ results in ‘a unique combination of nativist, sovereigntist, anti-pluralist, and anti-elite foreign policy positioning’ (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022: 5). However, radical-right ideology is here primarily reduced to ‘social conservativism’ and ‘nativism’ and the resulting ‘xenophobic and anti-immigration attitudes’, whereas the authors, interestingly, view sovereignty and opposition to global governance as a result of populist ideology (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022: 4–5) rather than the radical right’s nationalism.

Lopes et al. (2022) explore whether ‘the far right breed a new variety of foreign policy’, using Bolsonaro in Brazil as a case study. However, the article is less interested in discerning the programmatic content of far-right foreign policy than in the institutional factors enabling and preventing radical foreign policy change. The authors do not discuss far-right ideology, but draw on the populism literature and conflate, like other studies (see, De Sá Guimaraes and De Oliveira e Silva, 2021), the far right with conservatism and populism.⁵

While this does not invalidate the very insightful empirical findings of these studies, it does show that the existing literature on the PRR, including studies that use the AfD as case study (see, Lewandowsky, 2016; Ostermann and Stahl, 2022; Wojczewski, 2022), tend to focus on populism rather than far-right ideology. In particular, these studies do not provide a clear conceptualization of far-right politics and do not discuss its impact on foreign policy outlooks. This, in turn, raises questions with regard to the actual role of populism/PRR in foreign policy and the validity of the cause-and-effect relationship imputed by some of these studies.

The far-right literature does discuss inter- and transnational issues such as (neoliberal) globalization or the transnational links between far-right actors (e.g. Caiani, 2018; Saull et al., 2014; Worth, 2019). However, it has not systematically analysed the far-right’s foreign policy outlook yet. In IR, scholars have explored the intellectual history of the New Right (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet and Williams, 2018). While not primarily focusing on far-right party ideologies, these studies provide some important insights for developing a theoretical framework for the study of far-right foreign policy by showing that the New Right promotes a ‘reactionary internationalism’ that challenges the ‘liberal belief in human universality’ and advocates its ‘unravelling so as to liberate subjects understood as defined by their birth-cultural identity’ (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019: 748f.). However, the New Right is merely one manifestation of the contemporary far right. It refers to a loose, transnational network of self-identified conservative thinkers and activists who draw inspiration from the works of the so-called young conservatives in the Weimar Republic as well as Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony (Bar-On, 2007).

Having outlined the links between foreign policy and ideology and identified some gaps in the existing literature on (populist) radical-right/far-right foreign policy, particularly the lack of a proper conceptualization of far-right ideology and discussion of its programmatic content, the article’s following section theorizes far-right foreign policy by identifying and discussing its ideological core and its conceptual foundations.

Far-Right Foreign Policy

The term far-right captures variants of right-wing politics situated on the rightmost end of the left/right ideological spectrum. According to Noberto Bobbio’s influential work, the ideological left/right distinction revolves around attitudes towards (in)equality: the left is driven by egalitarianism and strives to remove or at least reduce key inequalities between people, the right, by contrast, is non-egalitarian and regards the main inequalities between people as natural, necessary and legitimate. In addition to the egalitarian/non-egalitarian axis, political actors can be classified along the authoritarianism/liberty axis that distinguishes between anti-pluralist and pluralist rule (Bobbio, 1996).

In contrast to the centre right, the far right is not only decisively more exclusionary and uncompromising with respect to the principle of inequality, but also objects to liberal constitutionalism and thus to individual and minority rights, rule of law, and checks and balances (Pirro, 2022: 4–5). In addition, the far right – unlike the centre, conservative right – does not strive to conserve the status quo, but favours either the creation of a new social order or the restoration of a past order (Eatwell, 1996: 313; Mudde, 2007: 27). Thus, the far right refers to a political spectrum that (1) strictly believes in a natural order of inequalities and a resulting ‘social-Darwinist conception of life’ as constant struggle (Virchow, 2017: 10) and (2) features an authoritarian orientation (Mudde, 2019: 7).

As we have seen, the far right can be further divided into an anti-democratic extreme right and an illiberal, but still democratic radical right, including the PRR party family. The differences between both political actors concern not only the means with which their political positions are pursued, more revolutionary and violent (extreme right) versus more reformist (radical right) (Mudde, 2019: 7), but also their dogmatism. As anti-system parties, the extreme right is more dogmatic than the radical right and thus less concerned about the constraints of the liberal-democratic polity (Vasilopoulou, 2018: 48ff.). Yet, while acknowledging the differences between extreme and radical right, this article follows the emerging consensus in the literature that highlights their shared ideological core and the various links between these political actors and therefore uses the umbrella concept of the far right (Brown et al., 2023; Camus and Lebourg, 2017; Halikiopoulou and Vlandas, 2019; Mudde, 2019; Pirro, 2022).

Building on far-right scholarship, the article will now theorize far-right foreign policy by deriving its key characteristics from far-right ideology. The structure and selection of these characteristic features follows Freeden’s argument that ideologies always have an indispensable core concept – in our case, the strict belief in a natural order of inequalities – and a series of hierarchically structured adjacent and peripheral concepts, which shape the ideology’s ideational content and are in one way or the other all related to the core concept (Freeden, 2013: 125).

Ultra-Nationalism

The far right’s strict belief in natural inequalities between people finds first and foremost expression in its ultra-nationalism (Carter, 2018; Minkenberg, 2000; Pirro, 2022; Rydgren, 2018). While nationalism ‘has been the founding ideology of the global division of territory into (so-called) nation-states since the late eighteenth century’ (Mudde, 2007: 17), the far-right’s ultra-nationalism differs from the more moderate, civic variants in important respects:

First, ultra-nationalism is based on a primordialist view of the nation as an organic community with some given and largely unchanging essentialized features rooted in ethnicity, culture and/or race. By considering the nation as a natural and closed entity that has a transcendental persona or essence (Camus and Lebourg, 2017: 22; Bar-On, 2018: 21), ultra-nationalism regards other forms of identity and community that are not based on ethnocultural and/or racial foundations as artificial, destructive and dangerous. In foreign policy, we can expect that this worldview sets very strict boundaries for, and motivates the active contestation of, identity and community construction beyond this essentialized nation. While this foreign policy preference does not necessarily lead to a withdrawal from international relations, it does translate into a form of international engagement that regards the defence of national sovereignty as the highest goal and, therefore, generally opposes the transfer of decision-making authorities to inter-/supranational institutions and their interference into the affairs of the national community. As a result, we can expect the far right to oppose, in particular, advanced forms of supranational cooperation such as the European Union (EU) that contest the primacy of national sovereignty and national identity. However, building on Vasilopoulou’s research on the far right’s Euroscepticism,⁶ we can hypothesize that extreme-right parties are more rigid in their opposition, while radical-right parties, due to ideological and strategic reasons, might provide weak support to regional and global institutions (Vasilopoulou, 2018).

Second, ultra-nationalism places the nation above the individual and their civic and human rights and thus links the existence, identity, dignity and rights of humans to their membership in a specific national community (Jaschke, 1994: 31/55f.). In foreign policy, this is expected to lead the far right to reject any form of universalism (e.g. universal norms such as human rights) in favour of these particular identities by contesting and replacing ‘liberal assumptions of universal humanity and its protection through institutions, with the promotion of inequality among identities’ (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019: 749).

Third, ultra-nationalism strives for internal homogenization and external exclusiveness by radicalizing ethnic, racial, religious and/or cultural criteria of exclusion to achieve a congruence between state and nation and to conjure the notion of the nation as an extremely homogeneous collective (Minkenberg, 2000: 175). In foreign policy, this nativism⁷ is expected to lead to very restrictive immigration and asylum policies and the demand for an ethnopluralist world order. As the far right’s ultra-nationalism believes that ethnocultural and/or racial homogeneity creates harmony, stability and peace, it aims to externalize heterogeneity. While the notion of ethnopluralism, which replaced more openly racist conceptions of order in large parts of the far right, states that ‘different ethnicities are not necessarily superior or inferior, only different, incompatible, and incommensurable’ and thus ‘they have to be kept separated’ (Rydgren, 2018: 3–4), the far right’s postulated linkage between heterogeneity and conflicts implies that the relations between different ethno-nationalist communities will hardly be harmonious and peaceful.

Fourth, as the far right regards, in a social-Darwinist fashion, struggle and competition as natural state of affairs (Häusler, 2017: 147ff.), it is expected that it propagates a chauvinistic foreign policy characterized by the hard and ruthless assertion of the nation’s interests at the expense of the interests and rights of other nations (or races). This includes a general reluctance to consider the well-being and concerns of others and to contribute to global public good provision, ranging from development assistance to peacekeeping. While this can take the form of an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy, resulting in the coercion, invasion and domination of other nations, it can also be more inward-looking in that it aims to defend the nation against ‘foreign’ domination, interference and demands.

Group-Based Enmity

Far-right ideology is based on a strict us-versus-them antagonism (Mudde, 2019: 46). The Other (‘them’) lies at the heart of far-right politics, which views the world in terms of a constant struggle and translates the Other into the enemy (Ramet, 1999: 3–4). Group-based enmity⁸ captures this antagonistic, fearmongering and apocalyptic mode of Othering through which particular groups are turned into enemies and social, political and economic problems (e.g. crime and financial crises) are personalized by projecting them, often in a conspiracist fashion, onto these groups as the alleged root cause of all evil. While the identification of the ‘enemy Other’ is context-dependant in far-right politics, it is not arbitrary, but always related to the far right’s ideological core: the strict belief in natural inequalities between people. In the following, four central forms of far-right group-focused enmity are discussed: nativism, racism, antisemitism and anti-globalism.

Nativism is expected to put foreign policy in the service of containing or eliminating the non-native Other by turning immigrants, refugees and ethnic or religious minorities into enemies and potentially into a fifth column of enemy nation-states. While nativism is generally considered the ideological core element of the PRR (Mudde, 2007), this article expects that the extreme right is more nativist than the radical right in that it not merely aims to contain non-native elements (e.g. through very restrictive immigration policies) but to remove or eliminate them altogether.

The far right’s nativism is rooted in an open or indirect racism (Newth, 2021). Racism divides mankind into distinct races, each with specific, naturally given biological, physical, behavioural and/or cultural features, and believes in a clear racial hierarchy, thereby justifying forms of domination and exclusion (Garner and Selod, 2015: 11). A racist foreign policy is expected to use this ideological framework to determine friend and enemy and the patterns of international alignment (e.g. belief in White supremacy) by racializing a specific group of humans (e.g. Muslims). This racist mode of Othering can be underpinned by conspiracy theories that suspect, for example, a secret plot behind migration (Häusler, 2017: 163).

The most persistent far-right conspiracy theory is the antisemitic belief in a diabolic Jewish world conspiracy (Salzborn, 2020: 25). It draws on historical notions of the uprooted, cosmopolitan and thus anti-national Jew and constructs Jews as powerful, greedy and cunning global string-pullers. A more indirect hostility towards Jews finds expression in secondary antisemitism which relates to the Holocaust (e.g. Holocaust relativization) and Israel (Wodak, 2018: 61/64f.). As antisemitic conspiracy theories link Jews to power and money, they also regularly suspect a Jewish influence behind the foreign policy of the US as the current superpower (Salzborn, 2020: 25).

This amalgamation of anti-Americanism and antisemitism finds expression in the far right’s ‘globalist’ conspiracy theory (Mudde, 2007: 184ff.; Grumke, 2013). This conspiracy theory imagines globalization, ranging from global governance, trade and financial crises to migration and pandemics, as the evil deeds of a globalist cabal, located at the US East Coast in particular, with the goal of creating a borderless and multicultural world. It suspects that globalization is merely a tool of the US (and typically the ‘Jewish string-pullers’ behind them) to achieve world domination by imposing its political model – individualism, multiculturalism, consumerism and so on – onto the rest of the world (Virchow, 2007: 221f.).

Authoritarianism

The far right’s authoritarianism can result in non-democratic rule (as in the case of the extreme right), but also in a set of attitudes and practices that are authoritarian in nature, namely the belief in order, clear hierarchies, authority and the severe punishment of deviation from existing rules and values through the means of force (Carter, 2018: 169; Mudde, 2019: 19). In foreign policy, this authoritarianism is expected to promote militarist positions. Militarism can be defined as ‘the acquisition of the potential for force or the relative weight and importance of the state’s military in relation to its society’ (Mabee and Vucetic, 2018: 98). While the far right’s militarism can take the form of the glorification of war and the active preparation for it as an end in itself, as in the case of historical Nazism and Fascism (Eatwell, 2013: 482), this study does not expect that far-right parties necessarily propagate war and military expansionism. Militarism can also express itself in calls for a strong army to defend national sovereignty or for ‘carrying military mentality and modes of acting and decision into the civilian sphere’ (Vagts, 1959: 17). This can result in the militarization of certain policies or the propagation of military values within society such as discipline, strength and comradeship.

Militarism is, as feminist IR scholarship has shown, closely linked to toxic masculinity (e.g. Enloe, 2016; Sjoberg and Via, 2010). The far right’s fierce antifeminist opposition to gender results not only from its strict belief in natural inequalities between people, but also from its fear of an effemination of society, which erodes its ability to defend itself against internal and external enemies. Accordingly, the present study expects that far-right foreign policy idealizes the ‘masculinist strongman’ (Ben-Ghiat, 2020) and views supposedly female behavioural traits such as empathy and compromise as a national security threat. Hence, the far right’s authoritarianism is expected to promote the militarized, assertive and masculine society and state that acquires the means to wield state power and punishes the deviation from existing rules and values through the use of coercion.

Revisionism and Reactionism

The far right is revisionist (cf. Valencia-García, 2020). It conjures up existential crises and threats and prescribes the revision of the current system as the only way of dealing with them. In foreign policy, this revisionism can take different forms: First, it can aim to restructure domestic and international norms, institutions and practices in keeping with its strict belief in natural inequalities between people; second, the far right’s ultra-nationalism might result in irredentism – the desire to revise the territorial status quo by annexing the territory of another state (e.g. recovery of ‘lost’ territory) (Burnett, 2020: xvii); third, it can involve the revision of historical accounts of a nation’s past (Benz, 2009; Couperus et al., 2024), including its foreign policy, in keeping with an ultra-nationalist narration.

While reactionary sentiments such as the rejection of universal norms or recent liberalization processes figure in the far right as a whole (Salzborn, 2020: 22), reactionism is only a defining feature of certain forms of far-right politics such as the New Right. Reactionism can be defined as the belief that ‘the world was once better: a past political order, now lost, shows us retrospectively how things should be but no longer are’ (MacKay and LaRoche, 2018: 234). This drive to recreate an imagined past order can take the form of a ‘reactionary internationalism’ that aims to dismantle the ‘liberal belief in human universality’ and restore ‘the nation as the dominant actor in international relations’ (de Orellana and Michelsen, 2019: 749/765). However, the revisionism of other far-right actors is not primarily modelled on past political orders but driven by the desire to create an alternative modernity by ‘reconciling’ nationalism, conservatism, capitalism and socialism (Eatwell, 1996: 313; Griffin, 2000: 167f.).

Producerist-Nationalistic Economic Outlook

In the far right, we can find different economic positions, ranging from the endorsement of neoliberal capitalism to anti-capitalism or mixture of both (Betz, 1994; Minkenberg, 2000; Saull, 2015; Sommer, 2008). However, there is a common ideological denominator: the strict belief in a natural order of inequalities and a resulting struggle for survival. This explains not only why far-right parties pursue seemingly divergent economic policies, but also why far-right parties such as the Front National⁹ can relatively easily change their economic policy positions. This shared minimal ideological core translates into what can be called a producerist-nationalistic economic outlook. Producerism is based on the notion that the world can be divided into productive and capable people, on the one hand, and parasites, sluggards and moochers, on the other (Betz, 1994: 141; Weinberg and Assoudeh, 2018: 414). By drawing a line between those who create wealth in tangible, material ways and the non-productive finance capital (Kazin, 1998: 13), producerism is also compatible with antisemitic conspiracy theories, which associate the latter with the transnational Jewry (Byford, 2021). For the far right, this producerist divide is clearly organized along nationalist lines and thus framed as an ethnocultural and/or racial struggle between in-group and out-groups.

Accordingly, the more neoliberal inclined far right endorses the free market economy and blames ‘benefit scroungers’ and, in particular, the ‘foreign Other’ such as immigrants, supranational organizations or other national states for economic hardships. Ideologically, this support for the free market economy can be explained against the backdrop of neoliberalism’s social-Darwinist dimension that is interpreted by the far right as the struggle of different nations for survival, with economic inequalities being attributed to ethnicity, culture or race (Butterwegge, 2008). The more anti-capitalist inclined far right advocates a corporatist or third way economic model (Bastow, 2002). Drawing on capitalism (accepting private property) and socialism (concern for the national community and welfare), it envisions the state to ‘clamp down on “parasitic” capital while ensuring that “productive” capital operated in the national interest’ (Eatwell, 2013: 482). In particular, it aims to shield the national economy from the global market and re-nationalize the economy through excluding ‘foreign’ capital, labour and welfare claims (Griffin, 2000: 168; Grumke, 2009: 148ff.). As these are ideological endpoints, far-right party preferences can also be located in between these positions.

Case Selection, Research Method and Data

To apply this theoretical framework and evaluate the foreign policy outlooks of PRR and extreme-right parties, this article has selected the case of Germany. This is a suitable and significant case for three reasons: first, with Nazism, Germany has produced the most extreme far-right regime and decisively influenced the development of far-right ideology, organizations and movements; second, Germany has long been considered an outlier case in that far-right parties could not, unlike in other European countries, make any electoral breakthroughs (Arzheimer, 2015). With the rise of the AfD, this is no longer the case; third, the case of Germany allows for the in-case comparison of a PRR (AfD) and extreme-right (NPD) party, thus accounting for context-specific factors. As the present study aims to analyse the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy positions and whether there are any substantial differences in the foreign policy positions of PRR and extreme-right parties, it is crucial that there is a broad consensus in the literature¹⁰ on the categorization of the parties.

The AfD was founded in 2013 as a self-declared national-liberal, conservative and soft Eurosceptic party opposed to bailout programmes for crisis-hit member states of the Eurozone (Rensmann, 2018: 44–45). However, in the context of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015/2016, the AfD developed into a radical right party that adopted a radical anti-immigration stance as its signature issue (Arzheimer, 2020: 92). The AfD is the most successful far-right party in post-war German history. Though the AfD is a somewhat unusual PRR party that, unlike some other PRR parties, has become more radical over time, its categorization as PRR party is not contested in the literature and with its nativist, populist and illiberal, but not anti-democratic outlook it displays the typical features of this party family (Arzheimer, 2020; Häusler, 2016; Havertz, 2021; Lees, 2018; Rensmann, 2018).

The NPD is ‘the most significant neo-Nazi party to emerge after 1945’ in Germany (Davies and Lynch, 2002: 315). Founded in 1964, the party initially sought to unify the German far right and half-heartedly distance itself from the Nazis (Pfahl-Traughber, 2019: 57ff.). Yet, the NPD, as Salzborn argues, has always been a ‘neo-Nazi party’, which merely occasionally de-emphasized its clear ‘neo-national-socialist orientation’ for opportunistic and strategic reasons (Salzborn, 2020: 15/54).¹¹ In the mid-1990s, the party underwent a process of ‘radicalization’ and ‘Nazification’ that had far-reaching personnel and programmatic consequences (Botsch, 2012: 111ff.). On the one hand, the party opened up to militant neo-Nazi organizations, with many members of these organizations assuming leadership positions in the NPD (Pfahl-Traughber, 2019: 85). On the other hand, the party openly endorsed ‘national socialism’ and declared its goal to spearhead a national-revolutionary movement that will dismantle the Federal Republic of Germany (Backes, 2007: 305ff.; Jesse, 2007: 287). Since then, there is a broad consensus in the literature on the categorization of the NPD as an extreme-right, neo-Nazi party (Backes and Steglich, 2007; Carter, 2005; Mudde, 2019; Pfahl-Traughber, 2019; Virchow et al., 2017).

As this article aims to study the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy beliefs and preferences and compare the PRR and extreme right’s foreign policy outlooks, it deliberately analyses parties that are in opposition and focuses on their programmatic statements rather than what far-right parties do when in government. This approach ensures a high degree of ideological purity in their foreign policy positions and the comparability of different types of far-right parties. As there are currently no extreme-right parties in government, it is not possible to compare contemporary PRR and extreme-right parties in government, and the comparison of past extreme-right parties such as the Nazis with contemporary PRR parties could lead to wrong inferences in terms of the similarities and differences in their foreign policy outlooks. A similar problem could arise, when comparing the foreign policy practices of governing PRR parties with the foreign policy preferences of extreme-right parties in opposition due to the various domestic and international factors that might constrain parties in government in the pursuit of their foreign policy preferences.¹²

For studying the foreign policy preferences of AfD and NPD, the article carries out a qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz and Rädiker, 2023). Qualitative content analysis is a well-established method for studying the core features of party ideologies (Mudde, 2007: 38f.). This article employs a deductive coding design based on the five far-right ideological core elements and their conceptualization discussed above. The textual data consist of the latest party manifesto, the latest three election manifestos (both German and European elections) and, from each party, 100 foreign policy-related statements and speeches by leading politicians in the time period between 2015 and 2022, with a minimum of five texts for each year to ensure a relatively even distribution of text documents for the time period of investigation. The texts were selected by searching for the key words ‘foreign policy’, ‘security’, ‘defence’, ‘globalization’ and ‘Europe’. The purpose of the study is to analyse to what extent the five core far-right ideological factors figure in and influence the foreign policy orientations of the two parties.

A Comparative Analysis of the Foreign Policy Positions of AfD and NPD

This section goes through the five core elements of far-right ideology and discusses whether the foreign policy positions derived from them match the foreign policy outlook of AfD and NPD.

Ultra-Nationalism

AfD and NPD both regard the ethnoculturally homogeneous nation-state as the natural basis of political order and the highest authority in world politics (NPD, 2013: 11; Gauland, 2016b). Accordingly, both parties view the strict defence or rather recapturing of ‘national sovereignty’ as key priority of foreign policy (AfD, 2018a: 41; NPD, 2015a: 3). By prioritizing ‘the right to national self-determination’ (NPD, 2013: 14) and the ‘strict adherence to the principle of non-interference into the internal affairs of other states’ (AfD, 2017: 18), they are very sceptical towards regional and global institution- and norm-building.

As expected, the extreme-right NPD is more dogmatic in its demands than the radical-right AfD. While the NPD regards ‘the restoration of Germany’s national sovereignty as its most important goal’ and ‘therefore demands the departure from NATO and EU’ (NPD, 2015a: 6–7), the AfD merely contemplates a ‘Dexit’ (AfD, 2019b: 12) and principally supports, though has recently began to question the long-term strategic utility of, NATO membership (AfD, 2021d: 64).¹³ However, like the AfD, the NPD supports the notion of a ‘Europe of fatherlands’ (NPD, 2019b). While the NPD envisions a new, but unspecified form of loose European inter-state cooperation, the AfD aims to abolish the EU in its current form and remodel it into an ‘intergovernmental’ organization but retain the customs union and elements of the common market (AfD, 2018a: 17; AfD, 2021d: 28f.). This finding supports Vasilopoulou’s argument that Europe’s far right accepts a common cultural heritage of European peoples but that far-right parties differ in their hostility towards the EU (Vasilopoulou, 2018). While the NPD regards Germany’s militarily dependence on ‘the US-led NATO’ as a ‘surrender of national sovereignty’ (NPD, 2018c), the AfD’s criticism of NATO – further amplified by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for which the party, like the NPD (2022b), partially blames the US-led NATO (AfD, 2022c; Chrupalla, 2022a) – is also informed by a concern for national sovereignty and ‘strategic autonomy’ (AfD, 2017: 19; AfD, 2021d: 62). The AfD regularly accuses Germany’s allies of denying Germany its sovereignty and dragging it into unnecessary conflicts: ‘The Federal Republic pursues a disoriented foreign policy. As a result, other states and institutions are increasingly influencing and steering German foreign and security policy’ (AfD, 2018a: 56; also AfD, 2021b).

These foreign policy preferences are closely linked to both parties’ ultra-nationalist strive for an ethnopluralist world order. By claiming to respect and defend the (allegedly) ‘natural differences between humans’ based on ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’, NPD and AfD oppose multicultural societies (NPD, 2013: 8/11; similar AfD, 2018a: 91f.) as well as the promotion of human rights as a ‘universalist value imperialism’ (AfD, 2021e). Consequently, both parties oppose and aim to delegitimize other forms of identity and institution-building such as the EU or the notion of a global humanity/community as ‘ersatz identities’ (Gauland, 2016b), ‘artificial construct[s]’ (NPD, 2021b) or delusional ‘one world utopias’ (AfD, 2021d: 98), while defending the ethnoculturally homogeneous nation-state as the natural order (Gauland, 2016b; NPD, 2021b).

Ultra-nationalism and its underlying strive for ethnopluralism also shed light on the conditions under which AfD and NPD are willing to cooperate with other nation-states. On the one hand, both parties seek to create a xenophobic and racist ‘fortress Europe’ (Meuthen, 2018; NPD, 2019b) and to position Europe as an independent power bloc in a ‘multipolar world order’ (AfD, 2021d: 62; NPD, 2019b). This aspired ‘Europe of sovereign fatherlands’ is intended to ‘protect Europe’s external borders against further migration and related threats’ and to ensure that ‘Europe remains the living space of white European peoples’ and their ‘unique, occidental culture’ (NPD, 2019b; similar AfD, 2019b: 37/51f.; Gauland, 2018a).

However, both parties’ ultra-nationalist view of international relations hampers international cooperation. A persistent theme in their programmatic statements is that, unlike Germany, all states seek to defend their narrow national interests (NPD, 2018c) and that Germany must finally adopt an ‘interest-based foreign policy’ (AfD, 2017: 18) that always puts ‘Germany first’ (NPD, 2021c). As a result of this chauvinistic foreign policy outlook, both parties not only regularly blame other nation-states or supranational organizations such as the EU for exploiting Germany as ‘paymaster’ and imposing unacceptable political and economic burdens on the German people (AfD, 2021d: 29; NPD, 2018a), but also display a general disregard for the well-being, rights and interests of others and thus for making contributions to regional or global public good provision. For example, although both parties claim that they are committed to the right of national self-determination and non-interference, they opposed sanctions against Russia (AfD, 2022a; NPD, 2022b) and the support of Ukrainian refugees on economic grounds (Chrupalla, 2022b). For similar reasons, both parties have opposed humanitarian interventions or development assistance (AfD, 2021a; NPD, 2019a).

Hence, there is clear evidence for a shared ultra-nationalist outlook characterized by the chauvinistic defence of the sovereignty and interests of the (imagined) organic and exclusionary nation against inter-/supranational organizations, norms and commitments. However, despite its criticism of EU and NATO, the AfD does not, unlike the NPD, demand the immediate departure from these institutions, which are central pillars of Germany’s post-war foreign policy.

Group-Based Enmity

The ‘enemy Other’ is at the heart of the AfD and NPD’s party ideology. Both parties conjure up an existential struggle between the German people and dangerous non-native Others and demand a nativist foreign policy, which strengthens ‘borders’ and protects ‘the nation-state’ and its ‘homogeneous people’ against ‘foreigners’ and ‘foreign influences’ that ‘destroy our identity’ and ‘values’ (Gauland, 2016b, 2019). AfD and NPD not only regularly blame migrants and religious and ethnic minorities for social, political and economic problems, ranging from ‘crime’ to ‘the erosion of the welfare state’ (NPD, 2017: 13ff.), but suggest that Germany has experienced a ‘mass invasion of foreigners’ (NPD, 2019b) who pose ‘a serious threat to social peace and the existence of the nation as cultural unit’ (AfD, 2018a: 91). Both parties particularly fear immigration from Africa and the Middle East and the ‘Islamization’ of Europe (AfD, 2018a: 91/116; NPD, 2017: 5f.).

NPD and AfD both employ a racialized mode of Othering that pits the ‘civilized’ and ‘orderly’ Occident against the ‘primitive’ and ‘anarchic’ Oriental Other:

Only the West has managed to organise its nation-states in a way that it domesticated the forces of religion and ethnicity and subordinated them under a secular law. [. . .] We import the decay by importing religious, ethnic and tribal conflicts through migration (Gauland, 2018a; similar NPD, 2019b).

However, the NPD is, as expected, more nativist than the AfD in that it seeks to prohibit immigration and deport all non-ethnic Germans (NPD, 2013: 28ff.), whereas the AfD seeks to radically reduce and restrict migration, including banning refugees from Germany and easing the deportation of migrants (AfD, 2021d: 91ff.); yet, the content analysis shows that the AfD’s nativist views have hardened over time, and some statements by AfD politicians go beyond the official party line and target non-ethnic Germans (Pfahl-Traughber, 2019: 105). However, while the radical-right AfD accepts limited migration of ‘assimilable’ people and accepts assimilated non-ethnic citizens in their own ranks, the extreme-right NPD demands complete ethnocultural homogenization and opposes assimilation (NPD, 2013: 8).

Like other far-right actors such as Trump and National Rally (Wojczewski, 2023: 278), NPD and AfD both mobilize conspiracy theories such as the ‘great replacement’ (Gauland, 2018b; NPD, 2019b), which they view as part of a wider ‘globalist’ world conspiracy. Accordingly, they regard globalization as the secret master plan of a powerful ‘globalist class’ who follows a ‘globalist programme of dissolving the nation-state’ and ‘ethnocultural homogenization’ in order to create a totalitarian ‘one world’ and force ‘people into the grey death of diversity’ (Gauland, 2018b, 2018c). In keeping with their ultra-nationalist ideology, both parties view ‘globalism’ – ‘a world of a unified mankind’ – as the ‘antagonist of a spatially organized nationalism’, which believes in natural inequalities between people and aims to separate them into ethnoculturally homogeneous and sovereign nation-states (NPD, 2021b). By imagining a globalist world conspiracy, both parties portray mainstream and leftist parties as ‘anti-national traitors’ who place the well-being of foreigners and an obscure world community over their own people (AfD, 2019a; NPD, 2021b). While the AfD’s anti-globalism is more, though not exclusively, directed against cultural and political globalization (Gauland, 2018c), the NPD’s anti-globalism has additionally a strong economic dimension:

globalisation is the planetary expansion of the capitalist economy under the leadership of big money. The latter, although by its nature placeless, has its politico-militarily shielded location mainly on the East Coast of the USA. Therefore, globalisation is a blunt imperialist strategy of the USA to impose the American way of life – better: American way of death – exploitable by US corporations on the whole world (NPD, 2015b).

Though the anti-American underpinning of the ‘globalist’ conspiracy theory is more prominent within the NPD, it can also be found in parts of the AfD. For example, Björn Höcke refers to the US as ‘rainbow empire’ and leader of the ‘globalist West’ that has not only ‘declared war’ on ‘the nation through mass migration’, ‘the traditional family’, ‘man and woman’ and ‘tradition and history’, but has also instigated wars, conflicts and crises to bolster the ‘US global claim to power’ (Höcke, 2022; similar NPD, 2019b).

With ‘globalists’ (Gauland, 2018c) or ‘US East Coast’ (NPD, 2015b), both parties invoke well-established antisemitic codes and conspiracy theories. The AfD displays a more indirect and ambiguous secondary antisemitism (cf. also Salzborn, 2018). While the party publicly stages itself as protector of Jews in Germany and friend of the state of Israel, it relativizes the holocaust (Gauland, 2018d) and promotes antisemitic tropes, for example, by depicting George Soros – a main target of far-right conspiracy theories – as cunning string-puller who influences not only German politics, but steers global events (AfD, 2018b). The NPD’s antisemitism, by contrast, is more direct and radical and has a strong antizionist dimension. It targets not only ‘George Soros’ and finance institutions such as ‘Rothschild and the bank Goldman-Sachs’ (NPD, 2019c), but also Israel. Labelling Israel a ‘terror state’, the party seeks to systematically delegitimize the Israeli state (NPD, 2018d). Thus, AfD and NPD both conjure in their foreign policy outlook an existential struggle of the ethnoculturally defined nation and racially defined partners against ‘anti-national enemy Others’. However, these ‘enemy Others’ are not completely identical, as the different attitudes towards Israel show.

Authoritarianism

AfD and NPD both propagate the acquisition and display of the means to wield state power and the re-militarization of society. However, in contrast to the expansionist militarism of the Nazis, they follow a more inward-looking militarism that strives to shield the nation from external interferences and threats and prepare the autochthonous population for conflicts with the non-native Other within Germany. While AfD as well as NPD stage themselves as principled ‘peace party’ (Chrupalla, 2022b) and regularly attack the establishment parties or the US as ‘warmongers’ (Voigt, 2022), both parties are not anti-militarist; on the contrary, they regard ‘a strong Bundeswehr as cornerstone of German sovereignty’ (AfD, 2018a: 61; NPD, 2021a) and demand ‘the restoration of Germany’s defence capability’ (AfD, 2021d: 66), the re-introduction of mandatory subscription (AfD, 2018a: 62; NPD, 2017: 15) and the revitalization of the ‘traditions of German military history’ and ‘soldierly virtues’ such as ‘honour, loyalty, comradeship and bravery’ within ‘the Bundeswehr’ and ‘the public’ (AfD, 2021d: 67; similar NPD, 2013: 47).

In this context, both parties deplore that Germans ‘have lost their will to self-assertion’ (NPD, 2022a) and their ‘capability and will to fight’ (AfD, 2022b). This essential lack is attributed to Germany’s radical break with its past and the ‘culture of guilt’ (NPD, 2018c) as well as the loss of masculinity: ‘We need to rediscover our masculinity’, Höcke demanded, ‘[b]ecause only when we rediscover our manhood do we become manly. And only when we become manly do we become militant, and we must become militant [. . .]’ (quoted in Kaiser (2021: 14)). This ideal of militarized manhood indicates why AfD and NPD glorify strong, nationalist leaders such as Otto von Bismarck (Gauland, 2016a, 2017; NPD, 2015a).

This militarized authoritarianism is regarded as essential for securing Germany’s national order, sovereignty and survival, in particular against the ‘dangerous’ non-native Other within or at the gates of Germany (AfD, 2019b: 51f., 2021d: 77/92; NPD, 2019d). On the one hand, both parties demand the militarization of immigration and border policies by depicting migration as a foreign invasion and conquest (Gauland, 2019; NPD, 2019b) and calling for the use of the Bundeswehr to protect German/European borders against mass migration, if necessary, by military force (AfD, 2018a: 53; NPD, 2017). On the other hand, the revival of a martial spirit in Germany is intended ‘to restore internal security through law-and-order’ policies (NPD, 2013: 45; similar AfD, 2019b: 51f.) and, if necessary, to prepare ethnic Germans for the conjured potential ‘civil war’ with the non-native Other (NPD, 2013: 44; Gauland, 2018a). By promoting the militarized, assertive and masculine society and state that punishes the deviation from existing rules and values through the use of violence and coercion, both parties thus display similar authoritarian traits.

Revisionism and Reactionism

AfD and NPD pursue a strongly revisionist foreign policy agenda. As we have seen in the previous sections, both parties seek to revise institutions and norms that challenge the (alleged) natural inequalities between people. This includes the EU’s supranational institutions, the international promotion of human rights and international treaties such as the Geneva Conventions (AfD, 2019b: 11f., 2021d: 50ff./91; NPD, 2017: 15/26ff.). The AfD formulates a clearly reactionary vision of international relations, which idealizes the German Empire under Reichskanzler Otto von Bismarck (AfD, 2021d: 160f.; Gauland, 2017) and seeks to return to ‘a realpolitik in the German interest’ (Hampel, 2019) and ‘the European balance-of-power’ system of the 19th century (Gauland, 2018a). While the NPD shares the goal of restoring the sovereign nation-state as key actor in world politics, it does not clearly model its vision of international relations on a past order, but stages itself as ‘a national-revolutionary force’ (Jesse, 2007: 287) that strives for a national-socialist, post-imperial world order (NPD, 2019b).

While the NPD embraces anti-imperialism and formally distances itself from Nazi expansionism (Backes, 2007: 313), it opposes existent territorial settlement treaties such as the Two Plus Four Agreement and formulates an irredentist claim to the ‘reunification of Germany within its historically evolved borders’ (NPD, 2013: 32). By striving – through supposedly ‘peaceful means’ – to revise existent borders in Europe and unifying all (ethnocultural) Germans in a single state (NPD, 2013: 33), the party contests the post-war European order. While similar irredentist claims exist within the AfD (Klikauer, 2018: 82), they are not part of the official party programme. However, like the NPD (2015a), the AfD embraces Carl Schmitt’s idea of ‘the prohibition of intervention by raumfremde Mächte [or extra-spatial powers]’ (AfD, 2021c) and shows understanding for ‘the collection of Russian soil’ in Ukraine by the Putin regime (Gauland, 2016a), thus indirectly supporting the irredentist claims of great powers and their right to intervention in their spatial ‘sphere of influence’.

AfD and NPD both engage in historical revisionism by contesting Germany’s mainstream memory politics and relativizing the German guilt for World War II and the Holocaust. For example, AfD leader Gauland claims that ‘[w]e have a glorious history, which is longer than these 12 years’ and that ‘Hitler and the Nazis are nothing more than a piece of bird shit in more than 1000 years of German history’ (Gauland, 2018d); the NPD speaks of an ‘imposed culture of guilt’ and agitates against ‘the glorification of Allied war criminals’ and against viewing ‘the 8 May 1945’ as ‘a day of liberation’, but as ‘the defeat and occupation of our country’ (NPD, 2013: 34). Hence, AfD and NPD seek to reclaim a positive image of the German nation and portray Germans as victims. By speaking of an ‘Anglo-American Bomb Holocaust’ (Voigt, 2017), the NPD relativizes not only the German guilt for the war and the crimes of the Nazis, but also the singularity of the Holocaust. This historical revisionism has profound foreign policy implications. It puts into question and would jeopardize Germany’s strong commitment to the Westbindung and reconciliation with the Allies as well as Israel, and it reinforces both parties’ commitment to ‘a strong and sovereign [. . .] multi-vectoral approach to foreign policy’ (AfD, 2021e) by redefining Germany’s relations with the US in favour of closer ties with anti-Western states such as Russia (AfD, 2021d: 64, 2021e; NPD, 2015a). Hence, there is clear evidence for a shared revisionist foreign policy agenda informed by far-right ideology, with the NPD being notably more revisionist than the AfD. In particular, the NPD’s openly irredentist positions distinguish it from the AfD.

Producerist-Nationalistic Outlook

The AfD started out as a decisively neoliberal – or, more precisely, ordoliberal – party that highlights free enterprise, market competition and trade within a regulatory framework set by the government to guarantee the free market economy (Havertz, 2019). While the AfD is still formally committed to ‘a market economic policy’ (AfD, 2021d: 42) and pleads for ‘foreign trade’ based on ‘market economic principles’ and ‘ideally regulated by multilateral treaties’ (AfD, 2018a: 133), its ordoliberal positions on the economy and social welfare policies have increasingly been contested and partially been replaced by a more interventionist economic nationalism and preference for a nativist social policy in recent years (Havertz, 2021: 44/142).

However, despite this partial policy shift and ambivalence, the AfD’s economic policy has a clear ideological foundation since the party’s inception: a producerist-nationalistic economic outlook. Using the neoliberal logic of competition in combination with chauvinist-nationalistic stereotypes, the AfD initially juxtaposed the ‘diligent’, ‘economical’ and ‘productive’ Germans to the ‘corrupt’, ‘lazy’ and ‘inept’ Southern Europeans (Bebnowski, 2016: 28f.) and thus blamed the ‘foreign Other’ for economic problems in Germany and for ripping off ‘German taxpayers’ through a ‘‘transfer union’’ (AfD, 2021d: 51). Later, it merely extended this mode of Othering to migrants and ethnic minorities and blamed the latter for ‘unemployment’, ‘stagnant wages’ and ‘looting the social welfare state’ (AfD, 2021d: 91/99; Gauland, 2018b). This producerist-nationalistic outlook is well-illustrated by AfD leader Alice Weidel (2018), when she states, ‘Burkas, headscarf girls, alimented knife men and other losers will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and the welfare state’. The producerist-nationalistic logic is the common denominator between the party’s more neoliberal forces and those who demand a ‘solidarist patriotism’ (Höcke, 2019). The recent reinforcement of the nationalistic dimension of this economic outlook explains why the party now criticizes ‘the neoliberal ideologists of the one-world-capitalism’ (Petry, 2017) and opposed all recent multilateral ‘free trade agreements’ on the grounds that they would undermine ‘German sovereignty’ (AfD, 2018a: 134f.).

The NPD initially ran on a market economic platform underpinned by economic protectionism (Brandstetter, 2007: 332), but has, like the AfD, changed and radicalized its economic policy over time. Since the mid-1990s, it has embraced a social-revolutionary, anti-capitalist rhetoric and demands the ‘national socialism’ (Backes, 2007: 305f.; Botsch and Kopke, 2013: 39f.). Staging itself as ‘the voice of the national and social Germany’, the NPD regards ‘globalized capitalism’ as existential threat:

Poverty, low wages and the widening gap between the rich and the poor are the direct result of an out-of-control capitalism and an extremely asocial globalization. [. . .] Globalization stands for the world dictatorship of big capital, which culturally assimilates peoples, politically disenfranchises them, economically exploits them and ethnically destroys them (NPD, 2013: 9f., 2018b).

In keeping with the Nazi ideology (Kailitz, 2007), the NPD’s national socialism strives to create a strictly ethnoculturally homogeneous ‘Volksgemeinschaft’ and a ‘spatially-oriented national economy’, which would supposedly dissolve the ‘class antagonism’ and reconcile capitalism and socialism (NPD, 2013: 19/23). This is to be achieved by excluding non-ethnic Germans from the social welfare state and largely from the labour market and by ensuring that ‘the economy serves the people’ through an interventionist, demand-driven and mercantilist economic policy that protects the German economy from ‘international competition’, ‘foreign capital’ and ‘multinational corporations’ and aims for national autarky by largely replacing ‘global free trade’ with ‘national economic production cycles’ (NPD, 2013: 16/19/23f.).

The NPD’s national socialism does neither propagate the collectivization of the means of production nor strive for an egalitarian society, rather it externalizes the inherent contradictions of capitalism and postulates that ‘solidarity’ and ‘the social’ can only be organized ‘nationally’ (NPD, 2019b). Like the AfD, the NPD employs a producerist-nationalist logic and pits the ‘productive’ Germans against the ‘unproductive’ and ‘parasitic’ foreign Other, when it deplores, for example, that Germany serves as ‘social welfare state of the world’ and that ‘foreigners’ (i.e. migrants and non-ethnic Germans) are predominantly ‘unemployed’, ‘low-skilled’ and ‘social welfare tourists’ and responsible for ‘wage dumping’ and ‘the dramatic cuts in social welfare’ in Germany (NPD, 2017: 16ff.). Unlike the AfD, the NPD’s producerist-nationalistic economic platform has a strong antisemitic dimension, manifesting in the fixation on the destructive role of the – supposedly Jewish-dominated – ‘finance capital’ and ‘international big banks’ (NPD, 2019b) and the resulting ‘primacy’ of ‘finance markets’, ‘speculation’ and ‘usury’ over the ‘real economy’ and ‘production’ (NPD, 2013: 17/21).

Hence, there is evidence for a shared producerist-nationalist outlook, but the NPD’s envisioned economic policy is less market-oriented and more radical in that it would result in the almost complete disentanglement from the world economy. Yet, given the AfD’s recent programmatic changes, there is a partial convergence between both parties.

Conclusion

This article analysed the impact of far-right ideology on foreign policy beliefs and preferences. For this purpose, it developed a theoretical framework that captures and unpacks the main ideological elements of the far-right foreign policy outlook. As shown, the far-right’s worldview is based on a strict, social-Darwinist belief in natural inequalities between people and characterized by five central foreign policy positions: (1) ultra-nationalism, (2) group-based enmity, (3) authoritarianism, (4) revisionism and reactionism, (5) producerist-nationalistic economic outlook.

Against the backdrop of the global rise of far-right leaders and parties, this article’s starting point was the puzzling observation that large parts of IR scholarship have analysed this political phenomenon within the conceptual framework of populism. The present article argued that, for comprehending the political motivation, purpose and goals of parties and leaders that are today discussed under the label of (right-wing) populism, we need to pay more attention, both conceptually and empirically, to the more substantive – far right – host ideologies of these political actors rather than the ‘thin ideology’ of populism. Likewise, the evaluation of the populist/PRR impact on foreign policy presupposes a clear understanding of far-right ideology and analysis of the far right’s foreign policy outlook.

Based on the theorization of far-right foreign policy, this article disputed that foreign policy positions often attributed to populism such as the ‘strong prioritization of the (narrowly understood) “national interest”’ (Plagemann and Destradi, 2019: 287), ‘negative attitude[s] towards the US and globalization’ (Chryssogelos, 2017) or the opposition to ‘sovereignty-infringing global governance’ (Ostermann and Stahl, 2022: 4) are the result of populism. To be clear, this does in no way invalidate the empirical findings of any of these studies. However, it does raise doubts with regard to the extent to which the imputed effects of populism, or an amalgamation of populist and radical-right ideology, on foreign policy preferences are valid. This question is not only important for analytical reasons, but also has political implications: when scholars, for example, discuss the opposition to global governance under the label of populism, they give the impression that the far right is driven by a democratic concern for popular sovereignty rather than an ultra-nationalist strive for a sovereign ethnocracy, and thereby unintentionally help the far right in legitimizing and mainstreaming its ideas and demands (see also, Brown et al., 2023).

Through the comparative analysis of the foreign policy positions of the populist radical-right AfD and extreme-right NPD, the article demonstrated that, first, the theoretical expectations for far-right foreign policy could be confirmed, while the theoretical framework also allowed for internal variation. Second, AfD and NPD share a relatively similar far-right foreign policy outlook. They propagate an ultra-nationalist foreign policy that seeks to defend the sovereignty of the ethnocultural nation against inter-/supranational organizations, norms and commitments and that always puts ‘Germany first’ in an aspired ethnopluralist, multipolar order. Except for Israel, they identify the same ‘enemy Others’ and favour authoritarian ideals of state and society. They follow a strictly revisionist foreign policy agenda and propagate a nationalistic economic producerism. The divergent attitudes towards Israel point to an important difference between AfD and NPD: While an aggressive antisemitism is a central feature of extreme-right, Neo-Nazi parties, the AfD, like other PRR parties (see, Subotic, 2022), displays a peculiar combination of secondary antisemitism and pro-Zionism. Overall, the differences between AfD and NPD concern less their basic foreign policy orientation than the dogmatism with which certain positions such as national self-determination or nativism are pursued. However, this can have profound foreign policy implications, as the NPD’s revisionism shows. Third, given the significant similarities in the foreign policy outlooks of a PRR party and (non-populist) extreme-right party, the article finds no evidence for a distinct PRR foreign policy outlook and thus for the claim that populist and radical-right ideology jointly generate a distinct foreign policy positioning. Rather, it is far-right ideology that explains the AfD’s foreign policy positions as well as the similarities with the NPD, while the differences can be attributed to internal variation in political orientations within the far-right camp in terms of the identification of the prime ‘enemy Other’ (e.g. Jews or Islam), the means to achieve ends (reformist or revolutionary) and the different levels of dogmatism. Although the AfD has hardened its stance on certain policy issues such as immigration since 2015, it still adopts, like other PRR parties, a more compromising Euroscepticism and restrained criticism of NATO and the US that appeal to wider audiences.

These findings do not imply that populism does not matter. They do, however, suggest that populism has, neither in its pure form nor in combination with radical-right ideology, any clear and distinctive effects on substantive foreign policy preferences and that we should focus more on the manifestations and effects of far-right ideology.¹⁴ Future research can apply the theoretical framework developed here to other cases to buttress evidence further and to analyse specific issue areas such as trade, alliances or the use of military force. Given the salience of foreign policy issues such as globalization or the Russian invasion of Ukraine in far-right discourses, far-right and IR scholarship should pay more attention to the way in which far-right parties use foreign policy for appealing to, mobilizing and agitating their supporters and analyse what the far right wants in international relations. While this article’s focus on far-right parties in opposition ensured a higher degree of ideological purity in terms of their foreign policy positions, it is important to consider the various domestic and international constraints (such as coalition politics and geopolitical factors) that governing far-right parties are facing and that might force them to moderate their positions, as the case of Fratelli d’Italia shows. Hence, we should neither expect that governing far-right parties can simply implement their foreign policy vision nor that they necessarily feature the same degree of ideological purity as the parties discussed in this article. Future research can use the theoretical framework developed here to scrutinize the impact of far-right ideology on the foreign policies of governing far-right parties and to discuss how being in government might affect their foreign policy positions. Yet, any analysis and assessment of the impact of far-right government formation on a country’s foreign policy presupposes a clear understanding of far-right ideology and its basic foreign policy outlook that the present article provided.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Thorsten Wojczewski

Notes

Author Biography

Thorsten Wojczewski is a Lecturer in International Relations at Coventry University. His research focuses on foreign policy, populism and the far right, world order, poststructuralist discourse theory and critical security studies. His research has been published in International Affairs, International Studies Review, International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis, amongst others.

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Theorizing Far-Right Foreign Policy: Insights From Germany

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Foreign Policy and (Far-Right) Ideology

Far-Right Foreign Policy

Ultra-Nationalism

Group-Based Enmity

Authoritarianism

Revisionism and Reactionism

Producerist-Nationalistic Economic Outlook

Case Selection, Research Method and Data

A Comparative Analysis of the Foreign Policy Positions of AfD and NPD

Ultra-Nationalism

Group-Based Enmity

Authoritarianism

Revisionism and Reactionism

Producerist-Nationalistic Outlook

Conclusion

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author Biography

References