The International Turn in Far-Right Studies: A Critical Assessment

Abstract

In recent years, there has been an intense public debate regarding the worldwide re-emergence of far-right politics and the ways in which it has engaged with the international. Surprisingly, thus far there have been no reflections on the broader implications of conceptualising the far-right in its international, transnational, and global dimensions. This article argues that we are witnessing an international turn in far-right studies that posits the international as constitutive of far-right politics, opening new forms of understanding it both from a historical and theoretical point of view. It develops a conceptual assessment of the international turn in three steps: first, it identifies that what binds this interdisciplinary literature together and breaks away from mainstream approaches is a shared critique of methodological nationalism; second, it classifies innovations in two different conceptual levels: the ‘globalisation front’, which sees transformations in the nature of far-right politics due the intensification of globalisation, and the ‘historiographical front’, which claims that the far-right has always been an international phenomenon. The article then analyses the main limitations of the international turn and offers a way to overcome it by articulating an intersocietal approach to the study of the far-right that draws from Global Historical Sociology.

Le tournant international dans les études sur l’extrême droite : Une évaluation critique

Introduction

The spectre of the far-right continues to haunt world politics. Despite recent electoral losses, Mudde’s claim ¹ that the far-right has successfully mainstreamed in politics will remain valid insofar as not only elected governments but political parties, social movements, institutions, and media outlets continue to polarise constituencies and empower conspiracy theories, ² resulting in the call to actively distrust democratic institutions, multicultural values, and scientific evidence. ³

In academia, researchers have been equally haunted by this phenomenon, especially due to its pronounced international qualities. For an increasing number of scholars, the far-right has gone ‘global’, ⁴ challenging us with a ‘Nationalist International’ movement that seeks to reshape the landscape of the political. ⁵ In these arguments, the growing prominence and success of far-right movements and parties across the world cannot be seen as coincidental nor ‘explained with reference only to domestic politics’, insofar as it has ‘an international agenda and a vision for a radically transformed world order’ ⁶ and a distinctive ‘international theory’. ⁷ According to Robinson, ⁸ the novelty of the contemporary far-right lies not in the particular manifestations of nationalist discourses and authoritarian regimes, but the way in which social forces such as Trumpism in the United States or Bolsonarism in Brazil are ‘decidedly not national but global’.

Moreover, in the last decade or so, far-right extremism has been marked by the transnationalisation of symbolic imageries such as the Knights Templar and the use of Confederate or Rhodesian flags, ⁹ while white supremacist manifestos often draw inspiration from ideologues of different nationalities and engage in cross-border networking and cooperation. ¹⁰ Extremists ‘no longer subscribe to a narrow concept of nationalism but instead imagine themselves as participants in a global struggle against a global enemy’. ¹¹

At first, this cross-border activity may appear contradictory. What the far-right generally offers is an alternative political framework of strong national borders that aims to restrict immigration, tight regimes of surveillance against the ‘undesirable’ or the ‘underserving’ classes at home, and enhanced constitutional majority privileges that protect the ‘elected’ people from either minority threats or from the more amorphous, ‘globalist elites’. Thus, far-right claims are directed from and for the national territory. Despite this, these movements are also doing more: the far-right has been successful in expanding its actions through cross-national links and transnational cooperation among party and non-party organisations, as these seem to have found novel ways of connecting ‘through information sharing, repertoires of contention, discourse, ideology, learning, and norm diffusion’. ¹²

In this sense, the global, transnational, and international dimensions of the far-right ¹³ seem to be a booming line of research in the current wave of scholarly debate. However, and rather surprisingly, there has been thus far rather limited efforts to integrate these lines of inquiry. What do these dimensions mean conceptually and methodologically to far-right studies, which are known for its rigid national borders? Likewise, what are the assumptions that make possible claims about the existence of a Global Far-Right? And how consistent are these assumptions? With these questions in mind, this article draws attention to the unrealised fact that far-right studies are currently undergoing an international turn with its own sets of questions, methodologies, and analytical tools that require further exploration in International Relations (IR) literature.

Attention to the far-right has never been fully absent in IR, although it hardly made to mainstream debates. ¹⁴ In the last decade, a burgeoning literature has acknowledged a ‘far-right turn’ in IR ¹⁵ attempting to assess, for instance, the threats and impacts that radical right populism may represent to the global liberal order, ¹⁶ the foreign policy characteristics of far-right governments, ¹⁷ and the relationship between global governance structures and far-right electoral successes. ¹⁸ Most of this literature, however, takes the ‘international’ and the ‘far-right’ as independent variables that meet in the present conjuncture of crisis.

More recently, a renewed perspective aimed at understanding the far-right from its own international dimensions has begun to emerge. Rather than seeing the far-right as an anomaly to the current liberal order, this shift suggests complex forms of adaptation within global capitalism, alongside novel forms of sociability among far-right organisations, which are at the heart of the methodological claim that the international is constitutive of the far-right. ¹⁹ This is precisely what is potentially original in the research agenda as opposed to mainstream approaches. This article seeks therefore to contribute in moving from the far-right in IR to an internationally oriented perspective of the far-right, spelling out its conceptual contributions and problematisations.

The main argument developed is that the international turn in far-right studies represents a break with past scholarship by offering a critique of methodological nationalism – a traditional way of analysing social phenomenon as bounded to nation-states, therefore creating rigid distinctions between the domestic and international realms of politics – which has in turn opened new possibilities for interpreting the far-right. This can be understood on two different conceptual fronts.

On the first, here considered as the ‘globalisation front’, scholars have claimed that a shift in the nature of far-right politics can be observed which owes to the intensification of globalisation and changes in the structure of capitalism. On the second, considered as the ‘historiographical front’, scholars have provided historical and methodological insights to the international ontology of the far-right not only in its present but also in past manifestations, claiming that rather than a novelty, the far-right has always been an international phenomenon.

Moreover, both conceptual fronts can be subdivided into ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ conceptions of the international which relates more broadly to IR literature. By ‘thin’ I refer to the more empiricist and descriptive cataloguing of interactions, shared repertoires, and networking of the far-right at the transnational level, which is akin to sub-fields such as constructivism, transnational history, and social movements analysis; while by ‘thick’ I mean approaches that have a stronger analytical tradition, combining theory and history in the explanation of social processes by unpacking the far-right’s material and ideological basis through broader causal mechanisms and overarching structures, which is more akin to neo-Gramscian International Political Economy (IPE) and International Historical Sociology (IHS).

Together, these conceptual innovations problematise traditional ways of conceiving the far-right, but they also raise new challenges, the most relevant of which is the persistence of a Western-centric approach and underrepresentation of Global South far-right experiences. In order to overcome these limitations and push the research agenda on the global far-right, I propose a new methodology for analysing the global far-right drawing on an intersocial approach inspired by Global Historical Sociology (GHS). ²⁰ This framework opens the way to recognise how far-right actors are entangled across multiple spatial scales in a way that does away with analytical bifurcations and foregrounds the distinctive characteristics of far-right politics in postcolonial settings.

The article is organised as follows. The first section turns to the intellectual context of the international turn in far-right studies which sets it against mainstream approaches, the latter largely characterised by a dismissal of international theorising. The second section spells out the conceptual innovations brought by the international turn and their shared assumptions across disciplines. The third section analyses the limitations of the international turn, and the final section provides the building blocks for a GHS of the far-right as a way to overcome these limitations. Before proceeding, a quick note on definition is warranted.

I consider ‘far-right’ as an umbrella term encompassing a tradition that shifts further away from the mainstream right (economic liberals and conservatives) in its commitment to transform, and not only preserve, state–society relations. Following Saull et al., ideologically the ‘key appeal is to “the people,” understood as a racially defined demos, premised on a gendered social hierarchy and obscuring the class cleavages associated with capitalist development’. ²¹ The types of actors involved, and the methods applied to achieve this transformation are varied, but here it is useful to draw on Mudde’s ²² distinction between the extreme right, which is revolutionary and rejects the essence of democracy – understood as popular sovereignty and majority rule – and the radical right, which is more reformist in nature, accepting the essence of democracy whilst opposing the fundamental elements of liberal democracy such as minority rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers. Whereas the former can include anything from terrorist far-right groups to fascist movements or regimes predicated on the use of violence to ‘cleanse’ the body-politic, the latter includes those social movements and political parties that are uneasily accommodated by the political system and resort to contentious tactics that are not outright violent but nonetheless disruptive. While acknowledging there are overlaps and key differences between those groups, in this article I refer to them interchangeably by the term ‘far-right’.

Breaking With Tradition: The Critique of Methodological Nationalism

Far-right studies are hard to demarcate, not least because of the lack of consensus regarding definition. ²³ According to Anievas and Saull, ²⁴ mainstream far-right studies are covered by two sub-fields: comparative political science and history of political ideas. Comparativist approaches have focused mainly on (Western) radical right populism, providing explanations on party competition and dislocations, public opinion indicators, electoral performances, and parliamentary composition. ²⁵ In the history of political ideas, research has focused more on the ideological characteristics of the far-right and its coherence across different forms of historical movements such as pre-fascism, fascism, neo-fascism, post-fascism, and authoritarian populism. ²⁶ Undoubtedly, the approach that received most attention and currently sparks heated debate is on (Western) radical right populism.

If there is one thing that this diverse and often conflicting literature can agree on, it is that the international – however one may conceive it to be – occupies little theoretical importance in far-right studies. ²⁷ This is evident not only in the way in which international matters are marginalised in all-encompassing edited volumes, ²⁸ but also in the downplaying of how international factors may impact either the demand or supply side of far-right politics. For instance, Mudde, ²⁹ the leading scholar in far-right studies, has criticised what he calls ‘sensationalist narratives’ and ‘conspiracy theories’ about a nationalist international, reminding readers how short-lived any such experiments have been in history. Thus, the dominant approach to far-right studies has been through the lenses of comparative political science, with little openings from disciplines such as IR.

Because the far-right is usually portrayed by its nationalism and populist discourse, it seems quite natural to study it based on the very ‘nation-ness’ its movements and governments claim to represent, in other words, through national history. But as much debate in social and political scholarship has demonstrated, the congealment of a movement or a style of politics through the lenses of exclusive national determinants risks reifying the nation-state and neglecting other dimensions and experiences that fall short of its bounded, national categories. ³⁰ This has been referred to as methodological nationalism: the idea that the nation-state should be regarded as the principal unit of analysis – a self-enclosed system of social relations that can be compared with similar units to generate general theories and test hypotheses about the social phenomenon being studied.

The driving force of methodological nationalism is the notion that ‘modernity’s deep-seated structural trends and features are seen as the sum of a number of different national trajectories’, ³¹ and that political identity and territory are coterminous. ³² A bifurcation between ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ is introduced in methodological nationalism as a way of separating causal explanations, the former confining social dynamics to a particular territory whilst the latter bracketing the ‘international realm into a discrete sphere of analysis with its own distinct logics’. ³³ Thus, considering how far-right forces act as gatekeepers of this contained model of polity that ‘distinguishes between the national home and the wilderness of the foreign’, ³⁴ and how methodological nationalism reinforces the separation between domestic and international logics, it is no wonder how paradoxical the shift to a global far-right seems to be. ³⁵

However, for much of the recent scholarship on the rise of the far-right that does take this paradox into account, they are still made on the assumption of comparable national variables, and international factors continue to be regarded as ad hoc explanations, that is, of secondary importance.

Take Norris and Inglehart’s ³⁶ influential study on the rise of authoritarian populism. By surveying what explanations had been given for the rise of Trump and similar developments across the Global North, the authors give credit to accounts focusing on the role of contingent events in catalysing unexpected electoral outcomes, but they also alert the shortcomings of this approach:

[. . .] accounts that focus only on Trump’s rise cannot understand the deeper roots of this phenomenon within the Republican Party and the American electorate. And those focused only on America cannot explain why support for populist parties has roughly doubled across Europe in recent decades, with leaders strikingly similar to Trump rising to power in many places around the world. The phenomenon is much more broader than any individual and thus requires a more general theory. ³⁷

The authors’ concern lies not in overcoming methodological nationalism – they give in fact wholesale support to this perspective throughout their comparative study – but the quote neatly grasps the paradox behind the ‘global far-right’: recent events prove to be at once deeply embedded in national trajectories (‘the deeper roots’ of the phenomenon in the American electorate) and deeply disembedded (‘the phenomenon is much more broader’). The interesting theoretical implication that such a claim raises is however left untouched.

But for a small yet burgeoning literature on the international far-right, methodological nationalism is considered untenable, for it overlooks forms of relations and particular kinds of dynamics deemed important for understanding the persistence and contemporary expansion of far-right politics. ³⁸ This is where the split with tradition leads to the international turn in far-right studies. ³⁹

Two Internationalist Critiques

Two sets of conceptual arguments question the persistence of methodological nationalism in debates about the far-right. I label the first argument as the ‘globalisation front’, which posits a shift in far-right politics owed to the intensification of globalisation and changes in the structure of capitalism. The second argument is considered the ‘historiographical front’, which provides an analytical insight into the study of the far-right either present or past. My argument here is that most internationalist analyses of the far-right align with one of the two arguments above while also advancing a ‘thin’ or ‘thick’ conception of the international.

The Globalisation Front

Regarding the first conceptual front, developments such as globalisation, technological transformations, integration processes, and shifts in the dynamics of capitalism have provided compelling grounds for the incorporation of the international into far-right studies. Many studies pointed out how the consequences of globalisation affect the growth of far-right forces worldwide in the form of a backlash that has both cultural and economic dimensions. ⁴⁰ But debates have also identified contradictory responses to globalisation by far-right forces that vary from critical stances to accomodation with neoliberal economics. ⁴¹ These debates have, in turn, opened the space for another argument to be made about how the far-right operates in, and benefits from, globalisation.

Beginning with a ‘thin’ internationalist approach, research has shown that internationalisation processes such as the deepening of the European Union (EU) has not stood as a barrier to the growth of the far-right, but actually helped fuel its dynamism and expansion. ⁴² Although many movements have expanded their reach based on Eurosceptic narratives, ⁴³ this has actually fostered an alternative transnational organising that can be observed both at the party, elite, and social movement levels. ⁴⁴ Thus, in the European Parliament, far-right parties have become increasingly more cohesive in their positions against admission of new member states, demonstrating capacity to mobilise and cooperate around common themes and values. ⁴⁵ Framing their collective struggle in international terms, these parties are now offering alternative visions to what the EU should look like (‘Alt-Europe’), away from more stark campaigning to leave the bloc (‘EUxit’) – such as the strategy adopted by the UK under Brexit. ⁴⁶

Crucial to understanding this and other far-right transnational experiences is the changing nature of the means of communication and information technologies, which offer movements with new opportunities for mobilisation and support. The far-right has adapted accordingly, and this affects not only its mode of operation, but its willingness to expand through transnational networks on the internet in order to construct common identity, acquire resources, foster agitation, and engage in contentious politics across different settings. ⁴⁷ Studies have shown how online far-right sentiments instigate violent political action, from mob violence to terrorist attacks. ⁴⁸ Moreover, in the far-right’s contemporary eco-system, recruitment and mobilisation appear to be more effective through bonds forged in social media rather than party structures. ⁴⁹

The electoral phenomena of Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Modi in India are a testament to the power of social media, where platforms such as 4chan, 8chan, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube, Whatsapp, Telegram, and online gaming communities have been weaponised by mobilising the electorate against constructed threats. ⁵⁰ Further, the far-right has been particularly engaged in waging strategies of disruptive communication in electoral processes, where troll factories and bots spread fake news targeting opponents ‘as a form of strategic information warfare’. ⁵¹ Cultural Marxism, Templar Knight symbolism, the ‘Replacement’ myth, climate change denialism, etc., are all transnationalised discourses that have gained political ascendancy in online communities in the last two decades. ⁵² Globalisation has therefore stimulated social activism in far-right circles. ⁵³

Moving to a ‘thick’ internationalist approach, other types of research have provided a more structural reasoning for these changes. As the distance between local and global issues becomes increasingly eased by the deregulation of markets, the digitalisation of the economy, and the changing structure of the state into an increasingly transnationalised entity, ⁵⁴ societal dynamics become increasingly interdependent and new socio-spatial practices have emerged from them. ⁵⁵ What role does the far-right play in this broader shift? A look at the security field – arguably the most contentious area of the far-right, where it shapes its identity, constructs social problems, and offers political solutions to them – can offer relevant insights.

Global dynamics such as the privatisation of security, the transformation of warfare and military doctrine, and the post-Cold War security agenda of globalised threats and risks emanating from sources other than discernible territories (terrorism, pandemics, environmental disasters, etc.), have all implied a deep restructuring of the state. This implies that the globalised security field has rearticulated the logics of the global-national or public-private divides. Instead, the new security structures and practices have become simultaneously public and private, global and local, giving rise to new practices and forms of power that cannot be neatly contained within the geographical boundaries of the nation-state. ⁵⁶ The result is that ‘a pure logic of “state” security, in which decisions about the provision of internal security are completely divorced from transnational influences, is increasingly rare’. ⁵⁷ Thus, when considering how the far-right seeks to capture the state and re-orient politics, it is important to ground this in the context of ‘changing spatial dimensions of state practices and the exercise of state power’. ⁵⁸

Many analysts have pointed out that since the War on Terror and later with the post-2008 economic restructuring, there has been an intensification of the coercive and authoritarian elements of capitalism. ⁵⁹ In this perspective, there is a ‘shift from social welfare to social control or police states’ as governments resort to a series of ‘mechanisms of coercive exclusion’ which are increasingly integrated in transnational systems of social control. ⁶⁰ The result is the abandoning of efforts of integration of the popular sectors via redistributive policies ⁶¹ or active consensus ⁶² and the adoption, instead, of repressive policies that find vast market opportunities and reinforce the mobilisation of nationalist and sometimes supremacist narratives. ⁶³ This is due to the growing inability of political elites to tackle the crisis arising from processes of neoliberal market reforms:

[i]n the wake of the fracturing of dominant modes of political incorporation, political elites have struggled to create forms of legitimacy for capitalist social relations. The mobilisation of cultural nationalism and anti-pluralist politics by both societal actors and political leaders must be understood in this context. ⁶⁴

The novelty is that there would be an increasing convergence between the deployment of repressive systems of population control, the militarisation of the global economy or militarised accumulation, and its legitimation by far-right ideological forces, an interrelated process that Robinson has termed the Global Police State (GPS). ⁶⁵ The GPS emerges as a response to the structural crisis of overaccumulation that besets capitalism and a fraction of transnational capitalist elites, who turn to repression and war economies as a strategy to offload capital in face of stagnation. ⁶⁶ Far-right ideology provides legitimacy to this by conjuring enemies and scapegoating minorities and marginal groups as responsible for the crisis, whereas the military–security–industrial complex is contracted to open up markets and secure investment opportunities while being themselves venues for profit. ⁶⁷ As such, Robinson sees a triangulation of

far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist forces in civil society, reactionary political power in the state, and transnational corporate capital, especially speculative finance capital, the military–industrial–security complex, and the extractive industries, all three of which are in turn dependent on and interwoven with high-tech or digital capital. ⁶⁸

Although there may be some exaggeration to the scale of this process in terms of it representing a hegemonic bloc in the making, ⁶⁹ it nevertheless underscores how the expansion of this global violence industry finds political form in the current cycle of far-right governments, as can be seen with the acceleration of punitivst, law-and-order projects, the militarisation of social life, exceptional policies against minorities, and private armamentism. ⁷⁰

The methodological insight here is that these dynamics, and the far-right particularly, cannot be seen as isolated, nation-state projects. According to Robinson, this is not to neglect that each manifestation of the far-right develops on the ‘basis of particular national and regional histories, social and class forces, political conditions and conjunctures’, but rather that it is inseparable from these countries’ entanglement in webs of global wars and militarized transnational accumulation, or global war economy’. ⁷¹ Thus, notwithstanding its nationalistic discourse of ‘taking back control’ of the country against ‘globalism’ and international liberal institutions, ‘Trumpism in the United States, Bolsonarism in Brazil, and to varying degrees other far-right movements around the world’ represent instead a process of ‘extension of capitalist globalization by other means’. ⁷²

The key-point is that far-right politics has shifted, operating in an intertwined system whose economic, political and technological features set it aside from previous waves of emergence, mobilisation, and mainstreaming. The far-right in a world economy of nation-state-operated capitalism was one thing; the far-right in a global economy of transnational capital, a different phenomenon. ⁷³

The Historiographical Front

Recognising changes in the structure of capitalism, globalisation, and communication technologies can lead us to think of it in terms of epochal shifts which reinforce a view of the past of the far-right as more in line with methodological nationalism. ⁷⁴ Wimmer and Schiller ⁷⁵ caution us that this can raise a misconception whereby ‘the past was static, the present was fluid; the past contained homogeneous cultures while now we lived in a world of hybridity and complexity’.

The second conceptual innovation contained in the international turn invites for analytical insights brought from historical disciplines into the study of the far-right with not only present but also past manifestations. The innovations brought here are twofold. First, through a ‘thin’ internationalist approach, these analyses show that the far-right has essentially been a transnational historical phenomenon. Second, in a more ‘thick’ internationalist register, historical sociologists seek to provide ways to conceptualise the international as an ontological mode of causality of far-right politics in its long-maturing historical development and not only since the recent intensification of globalisation.

In the ‘thin’ approach, Historians associated with the ‘transnational turn’ have claimed in the last decade that the Right as a broad category has always been transnational. A pioneering study was the edited volume by Durham and Power ⁷⁶ , New Perspectives on the Transnational Right, which bolstered a new research agenda on the topic. Scholars in this field have shown that social forces such as the ‘New Right’, ‘Neoconservatives’, or ‘Cold-War anticommunists’, all emerged transnationally, ‘in circuits that transcend borders and were peopled by activists who trotted the globe’. ⁷⁷ Although ‘deeply rooted’ in their national setting, these movements were ‘willing and able to move beyond the local and the national to attempt to build – some successfully, others less so – alliances with their like-minded counterparts’. ⁷⁸

Many studies have followed this lead. Interwar fascism, for instance, had attempted to build a global network for the circulation of ideas and cooperation among movements in Europe and beyond, and since its inception it had been overgrown with conceptions and practices of fascist internationalism. ⁷⁹ More recently, a volume dedicated to the transnational history of right-wing extremism has sought to ‘trace transnational contacts among right-wing terrorists, examine shared ideological assumptions, analyse patterns of violence which have circulated across borders through imitation and learning, and follow the transnational trade routes of arms and services’. ⁸⁰ In this sense, transnationalism as constitutive of, rather than complementary to, the far-right has provided analytical insights that research reliant on methodological nationalism could otherwise downplay, such as the degree of flexibility and pragmatism with which certain movements change ideas and practices to meet political needs, and how radical ideologies travel from country to country and are then appropriated and reinterpreted in a social process of reception.

IR has also seen recent innovative scholarship attempting to problematise common-held assumptions about the far-right as a historical force that rejects or is incompatible with internationalism. For instance, in their discursive analysis of the New Right’s philosophy, Orellana and Michelsen claim that a conceptual assemblage has been advanced by this movement’s intellectuals seeking to engage in a form of reactionary internationalism: ‘the belief that the sources of problems are international, and that solutions necessitate restructuring international norms to liberate birth-culture’s potential’. ⁸¹ Drolet and Williams have explored the historical roots of this movement, pointing out that the New Right brings about a ‘vision of an alternative international order based on assertively anti-liberal principles and structures that self-consciously echoes older traditions of geopolitics’, which they trace to the conservative-revolutionary tradition defended by interwar fascist intellectuals such as Carl Schmitt and Oswald Spengler. ⁸² With their activism defined as ‘metapolitical’, a conscious intellectual strategy of seeking cultural transformations in institutions like education, media, and the entertainment industry, the New Right has developed their own distinctive international political sociology ⁸³ that draws from ‘marginalised or forgotten lineages of radical conservative international theory’. ⁸⁴

Moving to the ‘thick’ internationalist approach, IHS has arguably offered the most refined critique of methodological nationalism in the study of the far-right. Scholars writing in this field have produced a wealth of analysis that touch on both theoretical, methodological, and empirical aspects of studying the far-right from an international perspective. ⁸⁵ Here I will focus on the theoretical insights brought by the edited volume by Saull et al., The Longue Durée of the Far-Right: An International Historical Sociology. ⁸⁶ The authors claim that the predominant approach of comparative social sciences has provided explanations at the level of national variations in many issue-areas – such as ideological taxonomies and electoral performance – but that this comes at the expense of neglecting important and constitutive aspects of the far-right. By relying on a positivist and empiricist framework comparing static and isomorphic structures, historical development is seen as going back and forth in a rather linear fashion, to which the re-emergence of the far-right is often set against the template of interwar fascism or ‘generic’ fascism. The result

is not only that the contemporary far-right is set up to fall short of fascism, thus appearing to question its ‘far-right’ qualities, but also that the longer-term historical and broader political membership of the far-right are overlooked. ⁸⁷

Moving away from methodological nationalism, then, requires a historical sensibility of the long-term historical patterns of change which are variegated and multilinear in nature. According to the authors, differences in the historical manifestations or cycles of the far-right can only be understood by reference to the antecedent socioeconomic conditions from which it emerged and not from an idealised model built with reference to a specific national experience (for instance Nazism in Germany or Fascism in Italy). This does not mean that fascist elements may not be present in some of the far-right’s current expressions (or yet other reactionary elements from even earlier experiences before fascism), but that the contemporary era is defined by a set of distinct socioeconomic conditions which were not present during the interwar era (such as neoliberal ideology). Hence, there are ‘structural aspects of the capitalist system at any time which are likely to be adopted by far-right parties: nationalism is a defining characteristic of the far-right, but nationalization is not’. ⁸⁸

In this sense, the authors posit a need to move beyond both internalism and externalism and advocate an understanding of the international as a constitutive mode of causality of the far-right. While by internalism they mean that theoretical arguments are derived from ‘cross-national synchronous comparisons of different far-right movements’, externalism considers international factors only as ‘an ad hoc theoretical addendum to an overwhelmingly static set of nationally-constituted comparative cases’. ⁸⁹ To do this, they rely on a longue durée historical perspective and Marxist-inspired IPE, whose unifying logic is to break with focus on ‘particular national locales and specific temporal moments’ and instead treat the far-right as a ‘long-term and structural political-ideological current generated within specific international socio-economic structures and processes’. ⁹⁰

According to this perspective, the international is analytically important not only for specific junctures of crisis that gives rise to far-right politics, but it is also seen as a constitutive ontology of the far-right itself. This is explained at two levels. First, far-right movements are fixated on the international as the ‘“spectre” and source of fear, hostility and opportunity’. ⁹¹ Its identity and orientation centrally draw on the international to resolve local and domestic problems through ‘racializing’ and ‘ethnicizing’ the world and exteriorizing otherness in order to present the ‘people’s’ unity and purpose as deteriorated by the pathologies of international, corruptive forces. Second is the methodological stance on how the domestic political spaces in which far-right operates ‘provides both opportunities and openings based on how the international comes to constitute the material and ideological fabric of domestic political life’. ⁹² That is, the multiple and shifting ways by which states are connected to the international structures – such as relations of dependency, integration processes, and imperialism – and ‘how far they may be seen as benefiting or securing particular material and/or ideological advantages from the structure and constitution of the international system’ (Saull et al., 2015, p. 14). Thus, the global structure of capitalism interacts with the shifting geopolitical constellations in which states and other actors are situated, providing the socioeconomic bases of the far-right. ⁹³

As seen in this section, the intellectual production on the so-called global far-right has gone beyond ‘sensationalist media narratives’ about its interconnectedness, transnational activism, and engagement with the international. ⁹⁴ Across academic disciplines, we begin to observe a truly international turn in far-right studies that seeks to break with traditional approaches that have been thus far heavily reliant on methodological nationalism. While innovative at the historical and theoretical level, the international turn is not exempt from criticism and conceptual challenges. These will be addressed in the next section.

The Limits of the International Turn

Two sets of challenges confront the international turn in far-right studies. First – and this equally applies to mainstream far-right studies – is the persistent lack of Global South experiences in the literature accounting for the global far-right. Second is the criticism raised about the limitations of transnational activism of the far-right and equating the balance between domestic and international factors in explaining causal mechanisms. Although these critiques are not impairing theoretical arguments that question the whole framework of the international turn, they do pose challenges that future research needs to address if the claim that the transnational, international, or global are constitutive of far-right politics is to maintain validity. Below I will address these critiques and spell out their related conceptual underpinnings.

First, the global far-right literature is noticeably Eurocentric, and at face value this is problematic if one considers that what is being counted as ‘global’ are predominantly Global North experiences. This bias can be seen from two angles: (1) the range of case-study focus is narrowly European and US-based, with often extensions to other countries regarded in the West category such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia; and (2) the social mechanisms that typically account for the emergence and dynamics of the far-right are mainly fit for analysing the experience of consolidated Western liberal democracies, that is, the core countries of the global capitalist system. ⁹⁵ As such, the current context of crisis is seen as creating a binary distinction between institutional normalcy (a functional liberal democracy) and exceptional policies (undemocratic and illiberal parties/regimes), a distinction that is very fragile and often non-existent in the wider Global South, plagued by hyper-inequalities and highly militarised societies.

While it is common in articles and dedicated volumes to refer vaguely to the Global South – such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, Modi in India, Duterte in the Philippines, and Putin in Russia – in order to make the claim that the far-right has gone global, analysis tend to quickly narrow down to studies of Western liberal democracies and to intellectual trajectories of the far-right that are markedly Western-centric. ⁹⁶ In this sense, the literature has very little to say about whether the specificities of postcolonial periphery countries – where far-right politics may appear as much more structural to the political system ⁹⁷ – are commensurate to the far-right in the North, and, likewise, if those experiences disprove theoretical claims about the existence of a global far-right altogether. ⁹⁸

In Latin America, for instance, the far-right has been historically not limited to political parties or social movements but played a decisive role in state-sponsored terrorism during the era of military dictatorships between 1960 and 1980s, which was often operated in covert groups or illegitimate actors such as government-backed militias. While this is not exclusive to the Global South experience, the fact that these regimes were backed by US interventionism and received support from other Western powers like France and the UK does brings to question the persistence of relations of dependency between the periphery and the core, which has been further evidenced in the recent process of democratic backsliding in Latin America. ⁹⁹ Particularly in Brazil, far-right forces have been present in state institutions ever since the beginning of the Republican period, achieving quasi-hegemonic status throughout various junctures of crisis to offset democratic pressures from society. ¹⁰⁰

Second, while the international turn has targeted loopholes untouched by the traditional/mainstream approach to far-right studies, the lack of theoretical integration between the two – which often translates in a tendency to overestimate either the domestic/national or the international/global dimensions of the far-right – implies that there may be important limitations not only to the former but equally to the international turn. For instance, there is an acknowledged scepticism in mainstream studies regarding the ‘global determinants’ of far-right politics beyond the realms of methodological nationalism. Leading the debate, Mudde vouches for this scepticism arguing that

[t]here is no doubt that global factors help to explain why far-right politics can find more or less receptive audiences during certain time periods and in particular geographical regions, but far-right success is first and foremost a consequence of political supply, most notably from far-right leaders and organizations themselves. ¹⁰¹

He further reminds us that international collaboration among groups from both the extreme and radical right face endemic limitations due to: (1) its limited resources; (2) its volatile political nature, with few stable organizations; (3) the weight of dominant leaders, who are not used to collaborating or sharing power; and (4) insurmountable differences because of their nationalism. ¹⁰² One would be inclined to agree with this scepticism by simply looking at the failure of former US national security advisor to Trump, Steve Bannon, in his project to articulate a wider network of far-right movements at a transnational level. ¹⁰³

Similar scepticism, however, has also been raised from scholars working from the transnational paradigm. Mammone, ¹⁰⁴ for instance, warns of the methodological perils of both extremes of the local and global divide, stating that a transnational perspective allows to ‘break away from the exceptionalist parochialism which so often characterizes the single-country focus, but without falling into the opposite trap of excessively general conceptual models (with inadequate empirical testing)’. Albanese and Hierro were well aware of this problem when writing their transnational history of twentieth-century fascism, and despite envisioning a methodology seeking to overcome methodological nationalism, they nonetheless recognise that the ‘transnational approach does not possess full explanatory capabilities [. . .] a number of issues and debates within the [Spanish-Italian neo-fascist] network were still heavily influenced by the nation-state, or even by local factors’. ¹⁰⁵ However, the effect of these studies is also to reinforce analytical bifurcation and reify the nation.

Further, the thick internationalist approaches covered in both the globalisation and the historiographical fronts suffer from a mix of the limitations highlighted above. In the case of the former, accounts of the relationship between global capitalism and the rise of the global far-right, like in Robinson’s Global Police State framework, ¹⁰⁶ tends to override differentiation among cases in favour of a unified theory of spatial convergence that spans the whole globe. Thus, we are left without understanding why particular societies develop strong far-right movements while others do not, aside from downplaying the continuous significance of the North–South/core-periphery divide. ¹⁰⁷ In the case of the latter, IHS has arguably advanced the most sophisticated critique of methodological nationalism in far-right studies. However, while foregrounding the internationally constitutive ontology of far-right politics, IHS also falls short of integrating the role of transnational scales in the formation of far-right identity on the one hand, and of distinguishing the characteristics of Global North/South far-right politics beyond broad geopolitical constellations. ¹⁰⁸ The status of the international, therefore, is far from secured.

Towards a Global Historical Sociology of the Far-Right

Despite the increasing recognition of the global nature of the far-right, ¹⁰⁹ a general theory of global far-right politics is yet to be developed. However, before such a theory can be constructed, it is necessary to explore the diverse ways in which far-right politics is manifested across time and space. Although I have no space to elaborate on such a theory here, in this section I will focus on building the methodological foundations for a framework that can integrate the various perspectives of the international turn and overcome its limitations.

Adapting Delanty’s ¹¹⁰ insights on the implications of transnationalism for historical sociology, I propose that such a framework needs to meet the following underlying criteria: (1) acknowledging that nations are not homogeneous entities; (2) recognising that nations are not autonomous actors relatively isolated from each other; (3) understanding that the Western far-right cannot be studied in isolation; and (4) avoiding automatic translation of Western concepts and theories to the study of non-Western far-right movements. If the first two criteria relate to the issue of scaling, the latter two highlight the specific type of relationships between social orders across different scales in the study of the global far-right. Thus, the challenge is to tackle both methodological nationalism and Eurocentric narratives that consider the Western/Global North far-right as the default model of far-right politics, as well as the temporal fetish that sees ‘developments occurring first in Europe and the rest catching up’. ¹¹¹ Here I would like to suggest that GHS as developed by Go and Lawson ¹¹² is the framework that best meets this challenge and provides the necessary tools to conceptualise the far-right in truly global terms.

GHS starts from the assumption of ‘interconnectedness and socially expansive social relations’ rather than analytical bifurcation between the national and global realms, ¹¹³ which implies that ‘domestic factors’ cannot be analysed in isolation from transnational, international, and global entanglements. According to Go, ¹¹⁴ the aim is to ‘radically shift – or rather rescale – our objects of analyses, making transnational and global social relations and processes our categories of analysis’. This applies to both historical processes like revolutions, ¹¹⁵ capitalism, ¹¹⁶ as well as to any social actors like states, ¹¹⁷ armies, ¹¹⁸ or far-right movements. The challenge of GHS, therefore, is to integrate multiple scales into a causal sequence. ¹¹⁹

Particularly useful to the study of the global far-right is the intersocial approach to social phenomena advanced by GHS. An intersocial approach highlights the ways in which social groups are connected and intertwined with one another across different scales. It charts how these connections drive the origins, trajectories, and outcomes of social processes. In studying the global entanglement of revolutions, Lawson argued that an ‘intersocial approach is concerned with the ways in which differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites drive the development of revolutions’. ¹²⁰ This implies a shift away from territorially bounded entities to the focus on ‘entanglements, connections, circulations and exchange as units of investigations’. ¹²¹

Additionally, intersocial inquiries can be both descriptive and analytic. Descriptively, it ‘tracks the empirical connections between differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites’, while analytically, it centres on the ‘logics through which differentially located, but interactively engaged, social sites affect causal pathways’. ¹²² This distinction can be easily mapped onto the ‘thin’ (descriptive) and ‘thick’ (analytical) conceptions that have underpinned the international turn in far-right studies. As the ‘international turn’ literature makes clear, the far-right cannot be understood in the form of discrete national cases. Rather, the global far-right is ‘differentially articulated across an array of intertwined scales’ and is ‘always interconnected and co-constituted’. ¹²³ The caveat that GHS makes is that ‘it does not presume that the objects of analysis are societies, nations, or states respectively’. ¹²⁴

This is not to suggest that, say, the far-right in India or Brazil should not be considered Indian or Brazilian anymore, but instead that these identities are co-constituted in the ‘juxtaposition, entanglement and exchanges between different social worlds’ and that the larger structures of these social worlds are themselves ‘entangled and thus co-constitutive’. ¹²⁵ As such, the Indian far-right’s Hindutva ideology, which posits the vision that the sacred motherland of India is for Hindus only, can be traced to a transnational dialogue with US white nationalism around race and indigeneity that has in turn shaped both ideologies and mobilised diasporic subjects outside of India. ¹²⁶

Whereas in Brazil, if we consider how the structures of colonialism still affect the ideological world-view of the far-right, and that many white upper-class Bolsonaristas are ‘descendants of the dominant sectors of tropical colonial agriculture’, ¹²⁷ then tracing Christian white nationalism needs to take into account not only how colonialism was defined in terms of global flows of slave trade, extractivism, and plantation systems, but by its deeply entangled position of being a colony and metropole after the Portuguese throne was transferred to Brazil in 1808. The result is a juxtaposition of multiple social orders connected across multiple scales. Furthermore, we would also need to consider how present-day white Christian nationalism ‘benefits from ideas, agendas, and resources coming from far-right religious movements abroad, notably the United States, but is also responsible for exporting ideas, agendas, and resources to neighbouring countries and overseas religious organisations’. ¹²⁸

Thus, instead of positing that national determinants are ultimately more important to understand the origins, trajectories, and outcomes of far-right politics, GHS does away with the attributional mode of thinking that considers national units as pre-existing entities that then engage in interactions with transnational, international, and global scales and processes. ¹²⁹ Underlying GHS’s critique of methodological nationalism is methodological relationalism, the idea that all places, local or global, are constituted by complex relationships to other places. Further, the relationships between spaces are also constitutive of the units under analysis. ¹³⁰ Thus, an intersocial relational approach requires attention to ‘processes of emergence and change, processes that include the birth of new social forms or, more broadly, the ‘casing’ of relations as patterns of interaction that are repeated and take on the appearance of fixed substances’. ¹³¹

For instance, while it is common for accounts of the rise of capitalism to bifurcate analysis between Western and Eastern regions/civilisations, with the former supposedly going through endogenous social and technological breakthroughs that the latter failed to catch up on, GHS considers instead that these regions/civilisations mutually interact and come to shape and constitute each other in these interactions. In the words of Hobson, methodological relationalism

replaces the idea of ‘societies-as-billard-balls’ (i.e. that they are self-contained, self-constituting entities that unfold through a nonlinear modernisation process) with that of ‘hybrid amalgams’, as non-Western processes – economic, technological, institutional, and ideational – shape and retrack Europe to help enable its transition to capitalism. ¹³²

How would this translate to the study of the global far-right? On the one hand, this would require the effort to rescale far-right politics in its temporal and spatial manifestations to prioritise transboundary encounters, that is, ‘the contact zones and/or interstitial spaces where actors engage in novel interactions’. ¹³³ What impact these encounters had/have on the emergence of the far-right in one locale or synchronously across multiple spaces entangled by processes such as the Global Police State? ¹³⁴ How did/do these encounters, in the form of transnational frames of contentions and identity building ¹³⁵ shape the trajectories of far-right social movements and governments? And what were/are the outcomes of such far-right entanglements on broader geopolitical constellations and order-building? ¹³⁶

On the other hand, rescaling the far-right requires a radical shift towards relationalism that de-provincialises far-right studies by qualifying the specific types of relationships between spaces. Rather than explaining the global far-right by reference to a Global North template or considering that it operates in a world of spatial convergence that overrides differentiation, a GHS framework requires the unpacking of persistent and pervasive spatial hierarchies between Global North and Global South, and analysing how they impact far-right politics.

The issue of relationality is crucial here. For not only does the far-right exist and claim its identity in relation to cross-border movements and forces it negates (socialists, feminists, globalists, immigrants, etc.), but it is also equally shaped by, and dynamically engaged with, complex colonial, postcolonial, and imperialist entanglements that permeate local, transnational, regional, and global geopolitical contexts. Thus, if relations of dependency between core and periphery of capitalism are co-constitutive, ¹³⁷ then so are far-right political actors constituted by these relations.

For instance, in Southern Africa during the Cold War, the far-right regimes from apartheid-era South Africa, Rhodesia (in modern Zimbabwe), and the Portuguese Estado Novo colonial rule in Mozambique, engaged in extensive transnational networking at the regional and international level attempting to shore up a white supremacist alliance in the context of wider de-colonial struggle in the African continent. ¹³⁸ In the case of Rhodesia, white settler resistance identity was constructed in what the regime considered to be a global struggle against the decline of ‘white Christian civilisation’, which was also framed in the form of a critique against former imperial powers themselves undergoing internal transformations in race relations. ¹³⁹

Pivoting a ‘white settler Global South’ against a ‘decaying Global North’ – the former being an idealised archetype of white male rule-based traditional Christian values, monoculture over vast farmlands, extractivism, and racial segregation, while the latter being the birth-place of Western civilisation threatened by industrialisation, multiculturalism, and secularism – has had a long-lasting effect on the social imaginary of today’s far-right. ¹⁴⁰ For instance, white supremacists in the Global North receive inspiration from the symbolism associated with apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, ¹⁴¹ while influential conspiracy networks operating within the military in Brazil consider land demarcation for natives and environmental protection policies as a plot by a ‘globalist’ ideology operating from former colonial metropoles to take over the Amazon. ¹⁴²

Another analytical cue is to look at the ‘constitutive role played by backward places in more advanced polities’. ¹⁴³ Eurocentric scholarship tends to consider that modern global political movements and ideologies have a transmission belt that travels from ‘West to the rest’. GHS turns this conception upside down by considering how, in the process of co-constitution and interaction, the ‘backward South’ plays a key role in triggering political processes such as revolutions, ¹⁴⁴ capitalism, ¹⁴⁵ and Enlightenment ideology. ¹⁴⁶ Far-right studies are scarce in this, but recent research from transnational history has begun to decentralise historiographical assumptions about the origins of far-right movements and the process of diffusion of their ideas to other parts of the world. For instance, while it has been common to associate emerging forms of far-right religious moralism in Latin America to the influence of US evangelicalism, recent studies have pointed out the importance of Global South countries like Brazil to gestation of the transnational far-right movements throughout the 20th century. ¹⁴⁷ In the words of Cowan, account ‘from the north tend to ignore the simultaneity of right-wing religious ascendancy in Brazil and the United States’. ¹⁴⁸

Lastly, a GHS framework can also re-orient research towards analysing the distinguishing social and political dynamics of the far-right in the Global South as compared to the Global North. This is not to suggest isolating both spatial realities as bifurcated analytical units but acknowledging the (re)production of social hierarchies, uneven capitalist development, authoritarianism, and geopolitical conflicts in expanding relations of dependency between core and periphery. For instance, de Oliveira ¹⁴⁹ has analysed the role of overexploitation of labour as an entrenched mechanism of accumulation in different waves of re-emergence of the Latin American far-right, while Bello’s ¹⁵⁰ study of the South-Eastern Asia experience shows the importance of rapidly changing countryside dynamics and land struggle between peasants and rural elites in triggering counter-revolutionary movements. The issue here is one of paying attention to how postcolonial structures – ‘the inherited legacies of “race”, “religion” and “nation”’ that continue to shape the politics of the socio-economic behavior of individuals, the attitudes of collectivities, the implicit hierarchies of/within international institutions’ ¹⁵¹ – affect the ideological and material pathways of far-right in the Global South.

An initial – albeit partial – account of these distinctive dynamics would take the following characteristics. In Global North countries, the far-right shares a political commitment to reconstruct its self-attributed civilisational superiority in a context of perceived threats arising from China and ‘Islamification’ of the ‘Judeo-Christian West’, which is expressed in both racialised cultural assumptions ¹⁵² as well to neo-colonial modes of engagement with its former colonies. ¹⁵³ According to Stewart, ¹⁵⁴ far-right elites ‘seek to refurbish the ideological superstructure that serves to legitimize both the global capitalist system and the supremacy of the transatlantic bloc within it’.

Regarding the far-right in the Global South, political and social dynamics would take a markedly different route. First, at a more structural level, far-right governments undertake a much more violent neoliberal restructuring (compared to its Global North counterpart) to reinstate the super-exploitation of labour after failed reformist attempts ¹⁵⁵ Second, the far-right tends to be actively organised in paramilitary groups that seek support from repressive agents of the state such as the police or the military, seeking to co-opt and indoctrinate them into a particular ideology of violence targeted against social demographics deemed ‘dangerous’. This has been particularly prominent in places like Brazil, India, and the Philippines. Third, far-right forces tend to take advantage of the semi-proletarianized social formation in the peripheries, aggravating gender, race, caste, or communal hierarchies by capitalising on, or scapegoating against, such divisions. These divisions are heavily politicised and serve both as the backdrop for processes of domination and resistance. Yeros and Jha interpret this as a process where ‘the Bandung nationalism of the past is being overtaken by fundamentalist Christianity, Islam and Hinduism – across Africa, Asia and Latin America’. ¹⁵⁶

These dynamics are not meant to overshadow complex nuances and distinctions between far-right movements across the Global South – for instance, how despite both far-right governments embracing authoritarian neoliberalism, Modi in India seeks to actively avoid isolationist policies while Bolsonaro in Brazil sought to do the contrary – but to set common denominators that seem to beset these postcolonial societies where the far-right has taken root. ¹⁵⁷ A GHS framework would focus on the common traits, entanglements, as well as the differentiating histories and causal mechanisms of the far-right in the Global North and South.

Conclusion

This article has demonstrated that an international turn has marked far-right studies in the last years, which in turn has allowed for conceptual and methodological innovations in the field. While a breadth of cross-disciplinary research has emerged to deal with this phenomenon from an international perspective, there had been no previous attempt of bridging their common assumptions and conceptual frameworks into a coherent sub-area of IR research. Although organised in distinct isles of intellectual labour, I have argued that what unites this scholarship is (1) a shared critique of methodological nationalism that breaks away with mainstream approaches and (2) a way of characterising the international as constitutive of the far-right political landscape. Moreover, innovations in these directions can be clustered into two broad conceptual fronts, the globalisation and historiographical fronts, each bringing forth ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ understandings of the international.

While this study hopes to contribute to a future research agenda on the global far-right that is more self-aware of its premises and conceptual tools, there are noticeable shortcomings that are yet to be addressed. First and foremost is the pervading Eurocentrism that is found not only in case study selection but more fundamentally in assumptions about the emergence and functioning of the far-right, which typically takes consolidated liberal democracies as its starting point of analysis. Given the lack of theorising about the far-right from a Global South perspective, one would be pressed to ask whether there can be such a thing as a global far-right in the first place.

Second, criticism has been raised about the limits of thin and thick internationalist approaches to far-right analysis. Scholars identified in the international turn have considered that although the far-right has historically made powerful transnational connections, national conditionings and articulations have ultimately been more relevant factors in explaining the rise and mobilisation of far-right actors, leading to reinforcing rather than overcoming analytical bifurcation. On the other hand, thick approaches tend to either overgeneralise the global dimension of far-right politics, dismiss transnational entanglements, or downplay distinctions between Global North and Global South far-right politics.

I have proposed that GHS provides the necessary tools to overcome these limitations by offering an integrated framework to the international turn literature. Specifically, by drawing on an intersocial approach to social phenomena and a radical shift towards methodological relationalism, GHS foregrounds ways to conceptualise the co-constitutive nature of far-right identities across multiple overlapping scales or transboundary encounters in a way that avoids analytical bifurcation. Further, it brings Global North and Global South to the centre of far-right studies, framing not only the mutual dependencies of the far-right in core/periphery relations, but also the social dynamics of far-right movements in postcolonial settings that differ from their Global North counterparts.

GHS opens an array of possibilities that far-right studies can tap on to enrich analyses. From identity formation of far-right movements to the process of mainstreaming and ebbing of far-right parties and governments, and to the racialised and gendered politics of the far-right, GHS’s intersocial and relational methodology prioritises research questions centring on the complex entanglements that operate across local, regional, transnational, international, and global scales, with a special interest on the connecting points and distinguishing political dynamics between the Global North and Global South far-right.