International relations and the revolutionary geopolitics of the European New Right

Abstract

The international politics of the 21st century has seen a remarkable surge in geopolitical thinking and rhetoric, in evocations of both Europe and the West, and in widespread challenges to US hegemony and liberal norms and institutions. This article examines one of the most troubling and increasingly influential contributions to these developments, namely that of the European New Right. For nearly half a century, radical conservative intellectuals associated with the European New Right and its national iterations have cultivated distinctively anti-liberal, civilisationalist engagements with geography and global politics as part of an expanding ideological agenda. This civilisationalist mode of geopolitics departs from those commonly associated with political realism and more conventional strands of conservative thought. It seeks to generate geopolitical utopias that can transmute long-standing narratives of civilisation decay into forward-looking modes of ethno-political socialisation. We argue that the significance of these alternative visions of Europe and world order lies less in their concrete political proposals than in the strategic articulations and broad transversal coalitions they enable. Geopolitics in this sense is less about the ‘immutable’ facts and the impact of geography found in more traditional approaches. It is involved above all in the creation of political imaginaries and movements capable of realigning international politics in overtly anti-liberal directions.

Geopolitics is back. After decades when it seemed confined largely to a sub-genre of strategic thinking, or to the discourses of foreign policy establishments and think tanks, geopolitics has become one of the catchphrases of the era. With a dizzying range of adjectives appended, geopolitical ideas, analyses and rhetoric are suddenly ‘everywhere’ (Nickel, 2024: 3; see also Brands, 2023; Guzzini, 2012; Mead, 2014), a phenomenon accelerated by the upheavals in the international order associated with the second Trump administration in the United States. Part of this popularity may lie in the concept’s seeming ability to offer something for everyone and to be applicable to almost anything. Culture, gender, technology, as well more traditional themes such as energy and natural resources, all seem susceptible to geopolitical analysis. Moreover, the very term carries an air of seriousness, of important historical shifts and issues of high political salience. As a rhetoric and political performance, as well as an analytic frame, geopolitics has attractions.

However, the return of geopolitics is not necessarily innocent. It is not simply an abstract conceptual apparatus or the return of much-needed ‘realism’. It also has historical and contemporary associations with a range of reactionary political movements and foreign policies. As numerous commentators have pointed out, the evolution of geopolitical thinking from the late 19th century through the middle of the twentieth was deeply entwined with imperial, racist, and reactionary political projects. This history by no means invalidates contemporary uses of geopolitics. Nor does it in any way tar them with legacies of the past. But it should encourage caution about the politics of geopolitics, and the visions and movements associated with it.

In this article, we survey one of the most troubling of these associations, that with the European New Right (ENR). The ENR is a diverse movement. Originating mainly in the activities of a group of intellectuals associated with what came to be known as the French Nouvelle Droite in the late 1960s, the movement has expanded across Europe to form a loosely connected network of intellectual communities that see themselves as the vanguard of a comprehensive revolt against liberal modernity. Despite being one of the most pro-active and ideologically innovative conservative forces in Europe for more than four decades, ENR contributions to intellectual and political debates on geopolitics and the future of world order have until quite recently been largely absent from public attention. However, the increasing prominence of radical Right parties and movements, and the contraction of the political space between the radical Right and the centre Right in many liberal democratic countries in recent decades has given these geopolitical visions renewed and often worrying relevance.

While IR scholarship has begun to acknowledge the growing significance of New Right positions in these conjectures (Abrahamsen et al., 2020; De Orellana and Michelsen, 2019; Drolet et al., 2018, 2022; Estrada Campos, 2023; Reid Ross, 2024), the geopolitical dimensions of this ambitious ideological agenda remain largely unexamined. ¹ This study seeks to address this important gap through three main contributions. The first section explores the historical contours of ENR geopolitical thinking, drawing particular attention to its civilisational dimensions. The international politics of the 21st century has seen a remarkable surge in civilisational rhetoric, in evocations of both Europe and the West, and in widespread challenges to US hegemony and liberal norms and institutions (Amitav, 2020; Bettiza et al., 2023; Brubaker, 2017; Coker, 2019). We show that the ENR has been an important force campaigning for civilisationalist visions of Europe, cultivating a distinctively anti-liberal engagement with geography and global politics as part of an expanding ideological agenda. In this framework, geopolitics becomes part of rhetorical strategies striving to mobilise and legitimate civilisational thinking and conceptions of political order. These controversial geopolitical repertoires work as parts of performative strategies that shape the identity and agenda of the ENR, constructing its own historical lineages, and seeking to provide a sense of conservative authenticity and post-fascist credibility for its ideological designs and aspirations.

The second section examines some of the most influential visions emerging from these intellectual circles since the end of the Cold War, particularly their revival and resignification of familiar (and often disgraced) geopolitical metaphors and categories such as Empire, the West, Großraum, spheres of influence, race, the nation, and so on. This mode of civilisational geopolitics departs from those commonly associated with political realism and more conventional strands of conservative or strategic thought. It seeks to generate geopolitical utopias that can transmute long-standing narratives of civilisational decay into forward-looking modes of ethno-political socialisation.

The third and concluding section argues that the significance of these alternative visions of Europe and world order lies less in their concrete political proposals than in the strategic articulations and broad transversal coalitions they enable. Geopolitics in this sense is less about the ‘immutable’ facts and impact of geography found in more traditional approaches. It is involved instead in the creation of political imaginaries and movements capable of realigning international politics in overtly anti-liberal directions. Although New Right conceptions of political communities and continental integration often exceed the territorial and ethical boundaries of the modern nation-state, they remain congenial to the disruptive strains of nationalist populism that have been shaping European politics and International Relations over the past decade.

Geopolitics: the view from the right

Geopolitical ideas and reactionary politics share a long if not necessarily identical history, and this history is central to the self-understanding of the ENR and what its intellectuals call ‘metapolitics’. In New Right jargon, metapolitics denotes a partial tactical retreat from day-to-day political debates and electoral politics to adopt a counter-hegemonic programme of cultural subversion and ideological saturation (De Benoist, 2011; GRECE Collective, 1977; Vial, 1979). This approach was first developed during 1970s by the leading theorist of the French Nouvelle Droite Alain de Benoist (1943-) and others such as Dominique Venner (1935–2013), Jean Mabire (1927–2006) and Pierre Vial (1942-) associated with the Nouvelle Droite’s think tank Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE). It was subsequently adapted in various guises by other New Right factions in Italy, Germany, Scandinavia, and elsewhere across Europe and Russia. The aim is to provide the radical Right with a global and sociological framing, as well as transforming collective mentalities and shared normative languages to facilitate a regeneration of ethno-politics across the continent and beyond (Griffin, 2000; O’Meara, 2013b; Wegierski, 1993).

The articulation of geopolitical analyses and alternative visions of world order in this metapolitical framework thus works to connect broad assemblages of splinter groups, affiliates, strategic partners, and counter-hegemonic initiatives more systematically with foreign policy institutions and the materiality of the society of states (Steuckers, 2016a: 138). De Benoist (2018 [1977]) wrote his first major statement on the subject in his anthology of conservative ideas Vu de droite, which received the Académie Française’s prestigious Prix de l’essai in 1978. Since then, he has played a pivotal role in the dissemination of geopolitical ideas, texts and analyses across New Right networks and beyond through his leadership of GRECE and his directorship of publications such as Nouvelle École, Éléments and Krisis. Also highly influential in this geopolitical context is the political theorist and journalist Guillaume Faye (1949–2019). Faye joined GRECE in 1970 and became head of its Secretariat for Research and Studies until he left the group over ideological and financial disagreements at the end of 1986. From the late 1990s until his death in 2019, Faye developed an apocalyptic neo-Spenglerian mode of geopolitics that earned him near cult status among radical Right identitarians and white supremacist ideologues and activists around the world. ² During his time at GRECE and after, Faye was close to the Belgian (Flemish) New Right geopolitician and writer Robert Steuckers (1956-), who founded the journals Orientations (1980–1991) and Vouloir (1983–1999) and formed the pan-European nationalist organisation Synergies Européennes with other GRECE dissidents in 1994. Steuckers also acted as one of the main ideological conduits between the ENR and the Russian radical conservative thinker Alexander Dugin (1962-), who went on to become one the ENR’s leading geopolitical interlocutors and allies in Russian radical right circles (Laruelle, 2015; Shekhovtsov, 2009).

Geopolitical tropes also figure prominently in the discourses of a younger generation of identitarian ideologues such as writer and founder of the Estonian Conservative People’s Party’s youth organisation ‘Blue Awakening’ Ruuben Kaalep (1993-), and leading German New Rightist Götz Kubitschek (1970-), who publishes the magazine Sezession and established the recently defunct Institut für Staatspolitik in 2000 with nationalist historian Karlheinz Weißmann (1959-). In his sympathetic survey of the ENR movement, Swedish New Rightist Joakim Andersen characteristically describes these converging, inter-generational initiatives as a right-wing appropriation of Gramsci’s ‘war of position’ fused with a recovery of the classical tradition of geopolitical thinking (Andersen, 2018: 82–83; see also Abrahamsen et al., 2024; O’Meara, 2013b).

All these thinkers harken to a distinct tradition of geopolitical thinking that emerged during the late 19th and early 20th centuries on the back of the nationalist and colonial ideologies shaping great power rivalries. Analytically, geopolitics stresses the political and strategic importance of geography and climate, including the broad differences and relationships between land and sea power, as well as factors such as maritime routes, coastal lengths, access to warm water ports, border permeability, and transit advantages. For conservatives, the appeal of geopolitics begins from the notion that geography (in terms of topography and the absolute distance between two locations) is relatively permanent and therefore tends to be favourable to the preservation of traditions, historical communities and civilisational values against the destructive forces of liberal modernity. As De Benoist (2018 [1977]) put it in an early programmatic statement:

Geopolitics puts into perspective the weight of merely ideological factors, unstable by definition, and recalls the existence of large constants that transcend political regimes as well as intellectual debates [. . ..] The chief notion of geopolitics is homogeneity. The Siberian plain, for instance, is homogenous from the Amur to the Ural: not a single point acts as a physical barrier between these extremities. Homogeneity could also be the result of history. Geopoliticians have pointed out the existence of long-lasting ‘civilizational fronts’ such as the ancient Roman limes, which has left an indelible mark upon Europe in every domain (p. 65; see also De Benoist et al., 2022).

Yet far from reducing geography to an immutable stage upon which the drama of international history is played out, geopolitics emphasises human-made factors such as technology, scientific discovery, and the creation and dissolution of alliances that can alter the physical barriers and temporal constraints of topography. This constantly changes the meaning and impact of geography on human interaction and political decision-making. It affects how people think and develop a ‘sense of place’ constitutive of their identities and value choices, shaping perceptions of the possibilities and opportunities for re-imagining how different political units in the world might interact and be organised.

This more voluntarist, socially constructed dimension of geopolitics can go in many different political directions. But to its ENR advocates, geopolitics is a part of a comprehensive worldview underpinned by a deeply pessimistic interpretation of politics as a zero-sum struggle in which every community is a potential rival, and survival depends on controlling territory (Dugin, 2000 [1997]: 17–18; Faye, 2010 [1998]; Kaalep and Meister, 2020: 79; Steuckers, 2017). Central to this worldview is the historical struggle between land and sea powers emphasised by some of the leading figures in the classical geopolitical tradition, such as Alfred Thayer Mahan, Halford John Mackinder, Karl Haushofer and Carl Schmitt. Land-oriented approaches to politics focused on the ways in which a territory was ordered by a particular value system based on delimited borders, models of legitimate sovereignty and socio-economic hierarchy within a people. By contrast, sea-oriented powers considered space a function of the geometrical perspective used in maritime navigation, in which there are no particularities of terrain or of culture, and no physical limitations to expansion. Whereas land-oriented approaches directed human thought towards its terrestrial existence here and now, sea-based approaches embraced linear, future-oriented philosophies of history that eroded and flattened all symbols of permanence manifested in space.

There are significant overlaps here with the realist tradition in IR. As Matthew Specter (2022) has shown, pre-World War Two forms of realism had close entwinements with geopolitical thinking, and as Dan Deudney (2000) notes, most usages of the term today are ‘casual synonyms for realist views of international strategic rivalry and interaction’ (p. 79). But this association must be treated with caution. From the perspective of the ENR, IR is an Anglo-American tradition primarily concerned with maintaining and expanding the hegemony of liberal ideals, norms and structures of interests. Even realism emerged and developed within the horizon of this Atlanticist outlook on world politics. Those who laid its foundations during the postwar period saw realism as part of a wider attempt to craft a more conservative ‘Cold War liberalism’ based on a clear-eyed focus on the realities of military power and the primacy of the national interest (Drolet and Williams, 2021). Conceptually, realism takes the legal equality and nominal sovereignty of all nation-states as an analytical given, eliding the fact that for most of the period since International Relations as we now know it began, relations of power between political communities were not mediated through the institutions of the sovereign state but through imperial or colonial relations. For the ENR, this means that although realism recognises the significance of geography and its relationship to other elements of national power, it tends to be biased towards the modern sovereign state in ways that overlook the diverse historical experiences and ethno-demographic composition of states, as well as ignoring the continued significance of race, civilisational fault-lines and neo-colonial relations of dependency.

As Dugin (2021: 36) emphasises, these are criticisms that neo-Marxist, post-structuralist and post-colonial theories have articulated in various guises since the 1980s, exposing the Eurocentrism of the discipline and providing valuable deconstructions of liberal universalism as a manifestation of a deceitful ‘will to power’. The problem, he contends, is that these critical traditions do not face up to the harsh realities of power they identify. Instead, they defend progressive ethical positions that do not follow from their own critique of ideology and counter-hegemonic mode of analysis. Rather than ‘subjecting to deconstruction the principles of “freedom”, “democracy”, “equality”, etc’., its protagonists demand ‘“more freedom”, “real democracy”, and “full equality”, and criticise modernity for failing to deliver these’ (Dugin, 2021b: 31; see also Von Hoffmeister, 2025).

In the hands of the ENR, geopolitics thus offers an alternative conceptual medium for constructing a counter-hegemonic radical conservatism that can resist liberalism not from the realist point of view of pragmatic interests and balance of power considerations but from the metaphysical point of view of civilisational values and foundations. Thinking in terms of continents, peoples and communities, it apprehends globalisation and the state system through a longue durée approach to history and identity that emphasises ‘cultural integrity’, ethnic diversity and racial differences unreconciled through moral visions of universal unity and one-world conceptions of the global.

As suggested in the introduction, the residual taboo associated with the murky history of the classical geopolitical tradition also plays an important performative role in those discourses. After the Second World War, the widespread belief that Haushofer, Schmitt and other German geopoliticians had educated Hitler and powered the Third Reich plans for world domination had largely discredited geopolitics in professional academic milieus across Europe, North America and beyond. Yet, geopolitical concepts, thinking and metaphors continued to exercise a significant influence on the strategic mindsets of expanding foreign policy establishment in the United States and Western Europe. The main channel for this continuity was the conflict with the Soviet Union and attending debates over the Western alliance’s containment policy. Among those who contributed actively to those debates were figures such as Edmund A. Walsh, Isaiah Bowman, Robert Strausz-Hupé, James Burnham, Stefan Possony, Harold and Margaret Sprout and other Atlanticists with varying degree of affinity with realism who saw it as their mission to instruct Americans and their Western European allies in the power of geopolitics, while avoiding its nihilistic ‘German’ formulations (Drolet and Williams, 2021; Ó’Tuathail, 2000; Rosenboim, 2017; Schuman, 1942).

On the radical Right, conservative intellectuals continued to write on geopolitics and exercised a considerable subterranean influence in right-wing circles across Europe. Haushofer committed suicide in 1946, but Schmitt continued to publish until the early 1970s. Other notable figures, including the Austrian officer and diplomat Jordis von Lohausen (1907–2002), the Belgian political theorist and Nazi collaborator Jean Thiriart (1922–1992), the French neo-fascist art critic and writer Maurice Bardèche (1907–1998), the American Nazi sympathiser Francis Parker Yockey (1917–1960) and his collaborator the British fascist politician Oswald Mosley (1896–1980) all contributed to a continuing engagement with geopolitics.

But it was not until the 1970s that the Right was able to capitalise on the return of explicitly geopolitical modes of analysis into the mainstream, as the association with Nazi Germany’s foreign policy faded from collective memory. Henry Kissinger’s extensive use of geopolitics to express a wide range of realist positions and geography-related issues regarding international security while serving as National Security Adviser (1969–1973) and US Secretary of State (1973–1977) played an important role in facilitating these trends (Hepple, 1986: 27–28), and the strategist Colin Grey (1977) did much to rehabilitate Haushofer and reassert the continued relevance of classical geopolitics in his Geopolitics of the Nuclear Era. This rehabilitation was particularly momentous in France, where the influential leftwing geographer Yves Lacoste established his journal Hérodote in 1976 to promote a new, more global conception of geopolitics as part of a radical geography of action. By the end of the decade, French academics, journalists, military commanders and politicians were all turning to geopolitics to make sense of France’s ‘special relationship’ with Africa and its troubled partnership with NATO (Bassin, 2022; Lévy, 2000).

In this changing environment, the younger generation of intellectuals who established the French Nouvelle Droite and what would become the ENR saw an opportunity to fertilise the ideological terrain between the far right and other varieties of conservative thought and action (Andersen, 2011). Metapolitically, the mobilisation of geopolitics as a dark art of macro-political ordering could work as part of a wider repertoire of normative transgression uniting ENR intellectuals and their supporters. At the same time, the ideological conflation of geopolitics with the more reputable realist tradition provided degrees of ambiguity allowing the ENR to maintain continuity with the far-right intellectual habitus of the 1930s and 1940s, while disavowing its racist Nazi associations and developing it in novel contemporary directions.

Central to these initiatives was the idea of Großraum (greater space) that New Rightists appropriated from Schmitt to rethink continental integration and emphasise the alienating, anti-European character of America’s ‘sea-based’ grand strategic vision. Partly inspired by the Monroe Doctrine, Großraum theory maintained that the nation-state was maladjusted to the changing techno-economic, political and cultural realities of the late-modern age, and that the future belonged to much larger scale forms of spatial orderings, complexes and arrangements (Schmitt, 2011 [1939–1941]). This had direct implications for how New Rightists conceptualised the Cold War and Europe’s strategic relationship to the two main superpowers.

Like Schmitt, New Rightists understood the Cold War as a division of the world between two variants of the same techno-economic and organisational mind-set. In their eyes, the ideological confrontation between the US and the USSR was designed to justify the usurpation of European sovereignty and prevent Europeans from pursuing a distinctive civilisational project (Cartry, 1982; De Benoist, 1982a; Faye, 1980). Despite their rivalry, both superpowers considered a European consolidation on the ‘Inner Crescent’ or ‘Rimland’ inimical to their geopolitical interests and to be avoided at all costs. This is what Guillaume Faye called the ‘Américo-Soviétique condominium’ (Faye, 1985: 37, 73).

By the mid-1980s, New Rightists concluded that what was commonly referred to as ‘the West’ in Cold War debates did not denote a distinct civilisational entity but an ‘Americano-sphere’ – a zone of liberal managerial occupation constantly adapting to the demands of market capitalism with scant regard for existing ethnic, cultural and spiritual traditions (Faye, 1980, 1981; Thiriart, 2018 [1981]). In this view, European social democracy was not an alternative to US-style capitalism but one of its most deceptive and dangerous incarnations (De Benoist, 1982a: 135). New Rightists also took strong positions against conservative forces that adopted the neoconservative fusion of cultural conservatism, economic neoliberalism and crusading anti-communism of the type advocated by Reagan and Thatcher at the time. As Michael O’Meara (2013b) explains in his sympathetic survey, the New Right was strongly anti-communist. Its intellectuals denounced ‘Soviet Russia (l’Amérique inversé) as a pathological product of the Enlightenment project, criminal in the great numbers of people it killed . . . and detestable in the way it inculcated a spirit of mediocrity and servility in the Russian people’ (pp. 212-213). Yet they believed that the anti-communist hysteria of the postwar Right ‘helped justify the Americanization of Europe, recuperating, in effect, the anti-liberal forces for the sake of US interests’. Thus while Soviet imperialism had to be confronted, the American incarnation of liberal modernity ultimately posed a greater threat, if only because it relied on much more insidious and complex mechanisms of cultural and ideological control (De Benoist, 1982b; Faye, 1985: 16; Gerfaut, 1985; Steuckers, 1987).

This vision of the Cold War was supplemented by the idea that Russia’s land-based geopolitical outlook was more conducive to the recovery of European autonomy than the sea-based universalism of the United States. Dugin emphasises the importance of Jean Thiriart’s geopolitical legacy in this context. By the 1960s, Thiriart had concluded that European emancipation from American thalassocracy required the creation of a union between Europe and the USSR, moving ‘from a geopolitical scheme involving three main zones – the West, Europe, and Russia (USSR) – to one with only two components, i.e. the West and the Eurasian continent’ (Dugin, 2021a; see also Reid Ross, 2024: 11–14). Thiriart saw Europe’s natural, industrial, agricultural and demographic resources as insufficient to sustain a policy of autarky. Instead, with his sights on the raw materials and energy resources afforded by a potential access to Siberia, Thiriart called for the formation of a ‘Euro-Soviet empire from Vladivostok to Dublin’ that could push back against the Westernisation of the world (Thiriart, 2018 [1981], 2021 [1964]). Jordis Von Lohausen (1979), Steuckers (1983), and other leading New Right figures also articulated different versions of this anti-Atlanticist vision during the 1980s (Mabire, 1978; Parvulesco, 1991; Terraciano, 2012 [1986]). As Faye explained in his own cautious overture to the Soviet Union in 1985, the New Right needed to stay open to the idea of an eventual European-Russian rapprochement based on geographical conditions and imperatives that took precedence over ‘ideological differences or racial and cultural similarities’ (1985: 18).

In more immediate practical terms, the anti-Atlanticism of the New Right translated into a policy of strategic neutrality that would put European interests first and re-orient Western Europe away from the US towards Germany and Mitteleuropa. This would involve withdrawing from NATO and developing an independent European nuclear capability. The GRECE collective also called for cooperation with national-populist forces resisting US and Soviet expansionism in the Arab Middle East, Africa and elsewhere (De Benoist, 1986; Faye, 1981; Steuckers, 1983). This New Right ‘Third Worldism’ rested on a ‘differentialist’ anthropology that emphasised the diversity of cultures, ethnic groups, races and civilisations, and advocated substantial separation between them. While asserting the absence of objective criteria for determining a normative hierarchy between different cultural communities, it cast itself as an ethno-political response to the imperialist universalism of Cold War ideologies of modernization and development, and the perceived threat posed by liberal multiculturalism and ethnic and racial miscegenation (Taguieff, 1985).

After 1989, the ENR again cast itself as the guardian of a distinctively territorial conception of political ordering. Against triumphalist discourses of globalisation and systemic unipolarity, its ideologues insisted that markets and economic interdependence were not bringing the world together but tearing it apart, multiplying conflicts over values, meanings and natural resources at all levels of human interaction (Champetier, 1999; De Benoist, 1990; Vial, 1989). In ways that strongly resonate with Huntington’s influential ‘Clash of Civilizations’ thesis, many held that fragmentation would spur the re-organisation of world order into regional blocs under the leadership of powerful states claiming to represent not just particular nations or groups of nations but distinct civilisations (De Benoist, 2011: 25–29, 2023; Dugin, 2012: 101–120; Faye, 2010 [1998]; Steuckers, 2022).

In partial contrast to Huntington, however, New Right ideologues place less emphasis on religion as the core attribute of civilisational blocs and focus more on civilisations as large cultural communities based on primarily ethnicity and constellations of values, worldviews, customs and spiritual beliefs growing organically out of a particular geography (De Benoist and Champetier, 1999: 227). In this view, Huntington’s typology of eight civilisations reflects an American vision of the world that underappreciates the pre-Christian sources of European civilisation along with the land-based Weltanschauung that sets it apart from the maritime, liberal civilisationism envisioned by Anglo-American powers. As De Benoist (2011) explained:

‘power under these emerging conditions of multipolarity is being re-defined as the ability to resist the influence of others rather than to impose one’s own. The main enemy of this pluriverse will be any civilization pretending to be universal and regarding itself entrusted with a redeeming mission (“Manifest Destiny”) to impose its model on all others’ (p. 28).

Significantly, New Rightists also do not present their civilisational arguments as disinterested social scientific observations. They are a geopolitical project to be realised through what Faye (2010 [1998]) characteristically describes as a neo-Spenglerian ‘vitalistic-constructivism’:

‘Through “constructivism” it stands for historical and political will to power, an aesthetic project of civilisation-building, and the Faustian spirit. Through “vitalism” it stands for realism, an organic and non-mechanistic mentality, respect for life, self-discipline based on autonomous ethics, humanity (the opposite of “humanitarianism”), and an engagement with bio-anthropological problems, including those of ethnic groups’ (p. 35).

As Dugin (2021b) similarly emphasises, the idea of civilisations as agents of international relations is not some sort of return to the pre-modern age, but a postmodern attempt to create a sense of continuity and evolution from past origins:

‘Civilizations are that which needs to be created. There is a cultural, sociological, historical, mental, psychological base for civilizations, and it is empirical. But the transition from civilization as a cultural and sociological given to civilization as a source of agency in a multipolar world requires effort’ (pp. 58–59).

These civilisationalist visions developed in a number of directions, some more speculative or fanciful than others. To sketch their main contours, we group them around four themes: Empire, Eurosiberia, Eurasia, and the Intermarium. These clusters illustrate the diversity of geopolitical ideas in the ENR, as well as their overlaps and interactions.

Empire

A good starting point for this brief survey is De Benoist’s vision of an ethnopluralist European empire, a proposal that provides an important reference point in the agenda of the ENR and its interactions with its allies and interlocutors in Russia, North America and beyond (Bar-On, 2008; Spektorowski, 2003). The ENR’s geopolitical fascination with empire is obviously deeply at odds with the state sovereigntism that continues to dominate the 21st century. But this is precisely the point. For the ENR’s leading geopolitical thinkers, imperialism is essential to addressing the problems caused by the historical fractioning of European civilisation into nation-states, and the increasing inability of those states to deal with the challenges of globalisation in a postmodern age (De Benoist, 1993, 1995, 1996, 2011).

Developed mainly during the 1990s and the 2000s as an alternative to the European Union’s hybrid system of liberal intergovernmentalism and economic supranationalism, De Benoist’s vision is inspired by earlier radical conservative thinkers such as Moeller van den Bruck, Francis Parker Yockey and, especially, Julius Evola. In this interpretation, empire is not a form of government as such but a supranational, quasi-mystical and inspirational form of authority whose highest source of political unity is not territory, language, ethnicity, or race but a spiritual or juridical idea:

‘Of course, an empire covers a wider area than the nation-state. What is important, however, is that the emperor holds power by virtue of embodying something which goes beyond simple possession. . .. He rules over sovereigns, not over territories, and represents a power transcending the community he governs’ (De Benoist, 1993: 88). ³

By defining empire in this way, De Benoist seeks to restrict the phenomenon to the Roman, Byzantine, Germanic Roman, and Ottoman Empires. In this view, France’s Napoleonic Empire, Germany’s Third Reich and the British, Dutch and other European colonial empires are not genuine forms of empire. Like the ‘informal’ post-colonial imperialisms of the United States and the Soviet Union, they are merely cases of predatory nation-states seeking to expand their territory and sphere of influence through military, political and economic conquest. De Benoist (1993) also emphasises that empire is not a form of government like a republic, a monarchy or an autocracy, but a vertical form of political unity based on commitments to autonomy and respect for cultural diversity that are in principle compatible with a variety of governmental regimes:

‘Whereas the nation engenders its own culture or finds support in culture in the process of its formation, the empire embraces various cultures. Whereas the nation tries to make the people and the state correspond, the empire associates different peoples’ (pp. 91–93).

De Benoist concedes that the concentration of powers and competences provided by the centralising nationalism of the nation-state was a competitively superior means of political organisation through the early 20th century. But the great phase of globalisation that took off after 1945 has rendered the defence of sovereignty at the level of the nation-state increasingly untenable. The nation-state is

‘challenged from below by new social movements: by the persistence of regionalisms and new communitarian claims. It is as if the intermediate forms of socialization which it once suppressed were born again today in new forms. The divorce between civil society and the political class is reflected in the proliferation of networks and the multiplication of ‘tribes’’.

The nation-state is also challenged from above, increasingly stripped of its ‘powers by the world market and international competition, by the formation of supranational or communitarian institutions, by intergovernmental bureaucracies, techno-scientific apparati, global media messages or international pressure groups’ (De Benoist, 1993: 94). Under these conditions, a comprehensive re-organisation of the continental space into a federated empire would help preserve a meaningful degree of geopolitical sovereignty in world politics, while also allowing for a regeneration of regional identities, intermediary associations and community relations within Europe (De Benoist, 1999a, 1999b). This ‘Europe of a Hundred Flags’ would not suppress but affirm the autonomy of its constituent peoples, nations and linguistic communities through the principles of cultural ‘differentialism’ and a neo-Althusian conception of subsidiarity at all levels:

The existing states must federalize from within, in order to better federalize with each other. Each level of the association should have its own role and its own dignity, not derived from approval from above, but based on the will and consent of all those who participate. The only decisions that would come from the summit of this structure would be those relating to all the peoples and federal communities: diplomatic matters, military affairs, big economic issues, fundamental legal questions, protection of the environment, etc. European integration is equally necessary in certain areas of research, industry, and new communications technology. A single currency ought to be managed by a central bank under the control of European political authority (De Benoist and Champetier, 1999: 235).

New Rightists believe that regionalist trends are to be strongly encouraged. Regions and rural communities better preserve traditional values and customs than the metropolises and cultural centres more directly connected to the cosmopolitan Atlanticism of ‘the West’. According to De Benoist, this differentialist model of federalism would regenerate regional cultures and local autonomies and encourage participatory democracy, linking ethnic kinship to qualitative civic participation more directly and substantively. It would also allow for more organic and robust mechanisms of immigration control by raising intimidating cultural barriers against foreigners (De Benoist, 2021 [1985]; De Benoist and Champetier, 1999: 236–237, 240–241; see also Spektorowski, 2003).

New Rightists hold neoliberal capitalism largely responsible for mass migration and the influx of foreign workers said to be destroying the cultural fabric of European states and societies and draining the developmental capabilities of the Global South. In response, De Benoist argues that the new Europe must embrace a more communitarian variant of capitalist economy that rejects the ‘productivist’ ethos of liberal modernity. This includes the introduction of a universal basic income, negotiated reductions of the length of the workweek, the gradual elimination of consumerism and other measures designed to end an era that ‘has made of work a value in itself’ and turned salary into ‘the principal means of integration into social life’. In this vision, social solidarity would

‘no longer be seen as the result of an anonymous equality (poorly) guaranteed by the welfare state, but rather as the result of a reciprocity implemented from the bottom up by organic communities taking charge of such matters as insurance and equitable distribution’ (De Benoist and Champetier, 1999: 231–236, 241).

The restrictive immigration policies enabling these transformations would be supported internationally by a cancellation of the ‘Third World’s debt’ and the establishment of collaborative pacts with countries in the Global South purporting to foster autonomous forms of development reflecting their cultural traditions and natural environment (De Benoist and Champetier, 1999: 239).

The geopolitical clout for this exit from the managerial complex of ‘the West’ could come from a re-organisation of European economic and military power around the technological, natural and industrial resources of Germany and Mitteleuropa. The limited strategic partnership with the Soviet Union cautiously envisaged during the 1980s here gives way to a full diplomatic and ideological pivot towards Russia, raising the prospect of a Paris-Berlin-Moscow axis committed to the construction of a multipolar world order organised in civilisational blocs (De Benoist, 1989, 1999a, 2022, 2023).

Eurosiberia

A more explicitly biopolitical, xenophobic, and sometimes/intermittently anti-Semitic alternative to De Benoist’s ethnopluralist vision is Faye’s ‘archeofuturist’ project for the creation of a ‘Eurosiberian’ great space. As a core member of GRECE between 1970 and 1986, Faye (1985:106) defended a cultural mode of pan-European political mobilisation in which he expressed support for the Arab world in the fight against the ‘American-Zionist Axis’ (p. 106). But after leaving GRECE in the mid-1980s, he made a spectacular return to the metapolitical front-line as a leading identitarian theorist of nativism obsessively focused on Islam and Arab-Muslim migration.

Faye’s (2011 [2001]) post-Cold War discourse abandoned his earlier resistance to ideology and ethnic identity as determinants of geopolitical orientation and emphasised the role of affects, ‘primordial mentalities’ (p. 137) and ‘ways of seeing’ (Faye, 2010 [1998]: 83, 2012 [2004]: 48–90) as key drivers for the civilisational power politics of the 21st century. In addition to adopting a more conciliary attitude towards the US and Israel, Faye (2011 [2001]) more than any other New Right geopolitician put explicit emphasis on race as a marker of civilisational identity and a ‘biological constituent of ethnicity’ (p. 228). He apprehends these civilisational formations through identitarian conceptual bricolages such as the notions of ‘ethno-spheres’ ‘ethno-biological blocs’ and ‘ethnobiology’ (Faye, 2010 [1998]: 80, 177), in which ‘the ethnic foundations of a civilization rest on its biological roots and those of its peoples’ (Faye, 2011 [2001]: 118, 2017 [2004]: 202).

Like many influential New Right figures, Faye (2017 [2004]: 185) considers the nation-state an artificial Jacobin invention and believes Europe must reconfigure itself as a federated empire and pivot towards illiberal Russia if it is to preserve its diversity of cultures and break free from the managerial complex of the West. This pivot is necessary because the major geopolitical fault line in the 21st century is no longer between East and West but between North and South. Although still railing against the decadence of American culture and its incursion into Europe, Faye (2017 [2004]) was convinced that the ‘White world’ had to unite to contain Islam and repel the alien non-native masses trying to silently colonise the demographically ageing North through migration while preserving a formidable ‘home base’ in the ‘motherlands’ (p. 76).

We noted earlier that during the 1980s Faye (1985: 18) raised the prospect of a pragmatic geopolitical alliance with Russia, despite the significant ideological, cultural and racial differences. During the 1990s, this ethno-racial re-articulation of the European project allowed him and his identitarian followers to assert that White Slavic Russia was also an historical and biological constituent of Europe and should therefore be part of a pan-European empire superseding the European Union. This is what he calls ‘Eurosiberia’, an ethnocentric alliance of the whole of peninsular and Central Europe with Russia stretching ‘from the tip of Brittany to the Bering Strait’ (Faye, 2006, 2010 [1998]: 192, 2011 [2001]: 68–70).

Faye’s (2007) discourse thus divests Siberia of its meaning as a resource-rich geographical region extending across North Asia and re-signifies it as an idealised version of Russia, one that belongs ‘to the same genetic, ethnic, and civilizational layer’ as Europe and excluding non-European and non-White populations of the Caucasus and Central Asia. As we show in a moment, Faye (2006) explicitly rejects the Eurasianism promoted by Dugin and other Russian and German New Right thinkers because they include Asia within Russia’s multi-racial civilisation and thus deny the racial exclusivity of greater Europe. Like his contemporary Pierre Vial, who established the Terre et Peuple movement in the mid-1990s, Faye wanted to put an end to all forms of racial, ethnopluralist cohabitation. As he told an attentive international audience gathered in Moscow for the 2006 conference on ‘The Future of the White World’:

Eurosiberia must be founded on the principle of the ‘separation of peoples’. Each one in its place, and in good relations with its neighbours, if possible. The economic model, which breaks completely with today’s ‘globalization’ and planetary free trade, follows the principle that each civilizational realm must be self-sufficient. It is the economic theory of the autarky of great spaces that I developed following the work of the German Historical School and of Maurice Allais, a ‘third way’ that simultaneously rejects the old obsolete capitalist and Marxist paradigms. To each group of peoples its own economic, political, and ethnic model (Faye, 2006).

In Archeofuturism, Faye provides a brief thought-experiment (or fantasy) of the ‘two-tier’ global economic model accompanying these geopolitical transformations.

‘First off, most of humanity would revert to a pre-technological subsistence economy based on agriculture and the crafts, with a neo-medieval demographic structure. The African population, like that of all other poor countries, would be fully involved in this revolution. Communitarian and tribal life would reassert its rights’.

As a result, he contends, populations living in non-industrialised countries, as well as large segments in industrialised countries such as India, Brazil, Argentina, Russia and China would experience a higher degree of stability and ‘social happiness’, living archaic and environmentally sensitive socio-economic modes of existence that consume few resources. ‘Second, a minority percentage of humanity would continue to live according to the techno-scientific economic model based on ongoing innovation by establishing a “global exchange network” of about a billion people’. Only this techno-scientific segment of humanity would have access to this network. The neo-archaic economies would be confined to their respective continental blocs, and no exchange between them would be permitted. Likewise, the ‘techno-scientific portion of humanity would have no right to intervene in the affairs of the neo-medieval communities forming the majority of the population, nor – most importantly – would it in any way be obliged to “help” them’. Faye believes that this is the only viable solution to prevent a complete destruction of the global ecosystem that would still allow the North to maintain a techno-scientific way of life. Once released from the humanitarian and economic burden of supporting ‘modernisation’ and ‘development’ in the Global South, techno-scientific innovation would take place at a much faster pace than at present: ‘Here too, the return to archaism can be seen to foster futurism and vice versa’ (Faye, 2010 [1998]: 85–86).

In this neo-fascistic vision, Eurosiberia will be unambiguously inegalitarian, aristocratic and devoid of obstructive humanist reservations in its pursuit of military power and autarkic economic development, ‘combining techno-scientific progress with a return to the traditional answers that stretch back into the mists of time’ (Faye, 2010 [1998]: 45–46). Faye (2010 [1998]: 73–74, 85–86) accordingly emphasises the need for heavy investment in nuclear energy to address the climate catastrophe and assert the geopolitical sovereignty of the Eurosiberian bloc, the development of electro-magnetic weaponry, and the use of biotechnologies and genetic engineering to create a ‘stronger’, modified racial pool. The aim is to carry out ‘an inversion of values’ in which ‘the Anglo-Saxon world, the West, the United States, will cease to control the ethnic, political, and economic destiny of Whites, to be replaced by the Eurosiberian bloc’ (Faye, 2006).

Globally, Faye envisages an eventual alliance between Eurosiberia and all the territories controlled by White peoples of European origin around the world, including in North America, Australia, Argentina, South Africa and elsewhere. This ‘septentrional’ alliance would be based on the common ‘atavistic mentality’ and ‘mental predisposition’ that he claims binds all ‘Whites’ despite the geopolitical rivalries that have divided their communities in the past (Faye, 2006, 2017 [2004]: 196). Faye was convinced that the political will for this re-organisation of world order would grow out of the convergence of ecological, military, demographic and socio-economic catastrophes emerging in the 21st century. In the meantime, he insisted that conservative forces must abandon their nostalgic attachments to the nationalism of the nation-state, and instead seek a conservative revolution from within the European Union that will radically transform it in preparation for the construction of Eurosiberia.

Neo-Eurasianism

Another important variation on these themes that shifts the centre of gravity more explicitly towards the Russian heartland is the geopolitical ideology of neo-Eurasianism, whose most well-known and influential exponent in contemporary ENR circles is the self-styled philosopher and geopolitician Alexander Dugin. After a series of unsuccessful involvements in post-Soviet ultra-nationalist party politics, Dugin focused on developing his metapolitical influence with the military, police and policy-makers by placing classical geopolitics and the idea of Eurasia at the forefront of Russian foreign policy and strategic debates (Ingram, 2001; Laruelle, 2015; Shekhovtsov, 2009). ⁴

Dugin’s neo-Eurasianism is an adaptation of long-standing themes in the intellectual history of the idea of Greater Russia and has its origins in the early 1920s writings of a group of Russian aristocrat émigrés who claimed that Russia as a Eurasian polity was the product of a long history of intensive cultural exchanges among peoples of Slavic, Turkic, Mongol and other Asian origins. In Europe and Mankind (1920), one of the leading theorists of the movement, the linguist and historian Nikolai Trubetzkoy, presented a comprehensive critique of Eurocentrism and Western colonialism that urged Russian intellectual elites to abandon their obsession with everything European and instead embrace the legacy of Genghis Khan to create a continent-spanning Eurasian state. Like many other figures in the movement, Trubetzkoy rejected communism as a debilitating European import and envisaged the revitalization of the Russian Orthodox church as the main source of socio-cultural cohesion across Eurasia, albeit with considered tolerance for the many other religions practised in this vast territory. By the end of the decade, however, Eurasianists divided between those who refused to cooperate with the Bolsheviks, and those who came to see the Soviet experiment as a possible staging platform for engineering a new national identity that better reflected Russia’s unique Eurasian civilisation and geopolitical situation (Glebov, 2017; Ishboldin, 1946). Eurasianism was suppressed in the Soviet Union, but it re-surfaced in a distinctively biopolitical garb during the perestroika period of the late 1980s under the intellectual leadership of the eccentric historian-geographer Lev Gumilyov (1990 [1978]).

Dugin builds on these intellectual lineages to call for all Russian-speaking peoples to unite into a Eurasian bloc led by ethnic Russians. Although heavily influenced by Gumilyov’s idiosyncratic theories of ethnicity and ‘genotypes’, Dugin (2000 [1997]: 249) locates the natural character of ethnic groups more explicitly in their wider ecological and cultural environment, insisting on the need to preserve and reproduce ethno-cultural enclaves and create individual ‘national realities’ for Russians, Tatars, Chechens, Armenians and the other constituent groups. Drawing on Heidegger and the traditionalism of René Guénon, Dugin believes the Russian nation is undergoing a phase of decay, increasingly estranged from its mystical origins. Eurasianism thus seeks to reverse the liberal betrayal of the 1990s by re-affirming the imperial identity of the Russian nation as the custodian of the Steppic region and Eastern Orthodoxy against Western Christianity and the pseudo-universalist civilisation of the Atlantic world (Dugin, 2014, 2015; see also Shekhovtsov, 2008).

In Eurasian Mission (2014) and his more recent Theory of a Multipolar World (Dugin, 2021b), Dugin envisions this geopolitics as part of a comprehensive re-organisation of the Westphalian state system based on two overlapping vectors of integration. The first entails the creation of metaphysically incommensurable civilisational structures or ‘Great Spaces’, each including several nation-states or unions of states. The second involves the vertical integration of these Great Spaces into one of four larger autarkic ‘meridian zones’, or ‘geo-economic belts’: a Euro-African belt, inclusive of the European Union, Islamic-Arab Africa, and sub-Saharan (Black) Africa; an Asian-Pacific belt, comprising Japan, the countries of Southeastern Asia, Indochina, Australia, and New Zealand; a Eurasian continental belt that would include Russia, India, China, the countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States, and the countries of continental Islam; and an American belt including North America, Central America and South America (Dugin, 2014: 60–69, 2021: 61–62, 126–132).

These new structures would be developed through a network of anti-liberal strategic alliances. Unlike Faye and many other New Right figures, Dugin is not an Islamophobe. He sees Shi’a Islam as a natural ally of Eurasia and believes that some traditionalist aspects of Sunni Islam are also compatible with his anti-liberal vision of world order (Dugin, 2014: 151–154). He puts special emphasis on the formation of Moscow-Tehran and Moscow-Ankara strategic axes in facilitating Eurasian integration in the Caucasus, bringing stability to a fractious region prone to foreign meddling. A strategic alliance between Russia and India would play a similar role in diffusing tensions between Delhi and Islamabad over Kashmir (Dugin, 2014: 49–51). And while he previously saw China as a threat, Dugin (2020) now believes that ruthless economic competition between the US and China has converted China into a powerful Eurasian ally. If consolidated, this alliance could effectively balance the power of the United States and Dugin sees the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, the Eurasian Economic Union and the BRICS as encouraging signs of these developments.

Ukraine is of course central to the success or failure of this neo-Eurasianist project. Since the movement’s beginnings in the 1920s, Eurasianists have dismissed Ukrainian nationalism as a Europhilic propaganda campaign based on unsubstantiated assertations concerning the distinctive ethnic properties of the different peoples of Greater Russia (Trubetzkoy, 1991 [1927]: 263). Dugin recuperates these interwar arguments with a vengeance: ‘Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning. It has no special cultural heritage, no geographical uniqueness, and no ethnic exclusiveness. The historical meaning of Ukraine is reflected in its very name “Ukraine”, i.e. “outskirts”, “border territories”’ (Dugin, 2000 [1997]: 369–370). For this reason, Ukraine is subject to constant Western interference and poses a fundamental threat to the whole of Eurasia: ‘The continued existence of a unitary Ukraine is geopolitically unacceptable’. A strong supporter of Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and 2022 invasion, Dugin claims that war became inevitable after the Soviet Union disintegrated, simply because this part of the world cannot remain geopolitically neutral. For him, however, this is not ‘a war with Ukraine, but a war for Ukraine: between the Russian civilisation, Eurasia, the Heartland, and our opponents – the Atlanticists’ (Dugin, 2023).

Intermarium and the Europe of Nations

Dugin’s stance on Ukraine has divided his admirers and interlocutors outside Russia. For many, aligning his neo-Eurasian vision with Vladimir Putin’s aggression towards another sovereign nation-state raised serious doubts over the alleged pluralism of this ethno-politics of great spaces (Andersen, 2018; Wolters, 2022). An intriguing statist alternative emerging from these positions is a conservative Europe of Nations centred around the geopolitical concept of the Intermarium (lands between the seas) and the historical experience of Eastern Europe. Here, European civilisation’s spiritual heritage is said to have best survived the ravages of late-modern liberalism, providing the foundations for a restoration of all European ethno-states. As Ruuben Kaalep and August Meister (2020) argue in their ‘ethno-futurist’ manifesto for the Baltic New Right:

The Intermarium is the last refuge of a living European tradition. . .. If there is a place in Europe where all the golden eras of our civilisation can still be felt, even merging into one with the current technological age and giving ground for hope that new achievements can be made, untainted by the destructive impulse of ultraliberalism, it is Eastern Europe, which has survived the communist years and shows the promise of surviving even more vicious strains of the same ideology (pp. 87–88).

The idea of Intermarium was originally developed by the Polish statesman and military leader Józef Piłsudski in the early interwar period. It proposed a (con)federative union of the ‘lands between the seas’, initially referring to Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, and Belarus, but later including a larger territory from (at least) the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Adriatic in the south. This geopolitical project was meant to emulate the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (1569–1795), thus forming a counterweight to Russian and German imperialisms. More recently, it has been linked to the Three Seas Initiative launched in 2015 by Polish President Andrzej Duda and Croatian President Kolinda Grabar-Kitarović. Seeking to distance itself from the predatory geopolitics of Piłsudski’s original project, the Initiative is a diplomatic forum involving twelve EU states running along a north–south axis from the Baltic Sea to the Adriatic Sea and Black Sea, focused on improving economic development, transport and energy infrastructure in the region. ⁵

For many New Right ideologues in the region, however, the Intermarium remains a distinct geopolitical project based on cultural-civilisational similarities between the nation-states of Central and Eastern Europe (Kott, 2017; Matecki, 2017). According to this narrative, its geopolitical impetus comes from the EU’s intrusion into state sovereignty, the diminishing willingness of the United States and NATO to provide credible security guarantees in the face of expansionist behaviour by Russia, and the neo-colonial ‘belt and road’ economic initiatives of China. It also reflects a paradoxical combination of marginalisation and opportunity. Its proponents claim that despite proximity to rich Western European and Scandinavian countries and access to the EU common market and structural funds, most Eastern European countries have remained

‘outside the main transatlantic and transpacific routes of capital circulation. . . The routes leading to us from the western centres are only an extension of the main roads or a function of the (so far rickety) land exchange with the East’ (Radziejewsky, 2008).

At the same time, however, this relative exclusion from the main networks of neoliberal capitalism has provided a buffer against the worst cultural consequences of liberal modernity, such as multiculturalism, genderism, cultural Marxism, anti-racism, Islamicization, political correctness and the like. For the radical Right, this provides a wealth of opportunities to advance the geopolitical status of the region as a leading civilisational agency in the struggle against the Eurasian imperialism of Russia, the Atlanticist imperialism of the United States, and an increasingly decadent secular Western Europe that has turned its back on its Christian heritage (Kaalep and Meister, 2020: 87–88).

In this view, multipolarity and the inevitable rise of Chinese and Indian civilisations in parallel with American decline marks the beginning of a new post-liberal era of geopolitical competition and conflict that Europeans are bound to lose unless they break decisively with the liberal worldview embraced by its elites in the postwar era. Its proponents find encouragement in the proliferation of ‘youthful, energetic and intellectual nationalism’ across the continent, and argue that demographic and geopolitical threats posed by Islam and the rise of non-Western civilisations can help overcome old European ethnonationalist grievances and divisions (Kaalep and Meister, 2020: 85). This ‘ethno-futurist’ nationalism will revitalise the project of European integration by rediscovering and reactivating a tribal mentality, spirituality and archaic worldview adapted to contemporary military, technological, and macroeconomic transformations. This project of a Europe of Nations foresees a two-stage process of dissolution and reconstruction:

The first level is the regionalisation of the EU that has already started with Brexit. It will not create a domino effect but rather a classical checkerboard situation, where the division between Western and Eastern Europe will intensify. While Western Europe will be submitted to more and more extreme forms of Islamisation until it reaches some critical phase, ‘New Europe’ – or ‘Intermarium’ – bears within itself the seeds of vitality and resilience [. . ..]

In the second stage, all of Europe would be included in the project, operating according to principles that are appropriate to the European traditions of self-determination and identity. Whether this is to happen by reforming the EU into a union of nation-states with broad autonomy and by strengthening local identities, or by creating an entirely new union, is a question of tactics, to which it is presently too early to give an answer (Kaalep and Meister, 2020: 88, 91).

Conclusion: civilisational geopolitics and political contestation

The ENR represents a throughgoing rejection of the complex architecture of International Relations constructed following the Second World War. However, its geopolitical discourses are not simple reversions to an idealised account of 19th or early 20th century nationalisms. Despite strong attachments to old geopolitical concepts and metaphors, its alternative visions of world order are responses to contemporary developments arising from neoliberal globalisation and socio-cultural postmodernity. It is not simply nostalgic: it seeks to disrupt the dominant geographical imaginaries of global liberal governance, offering new ways of making the world meaningful and mobilising agents to these ends. At this time of profound geopolitical disruption in Europe, it is essential to be aware of its ideas and their potential influence and implications.

We must avoid the temptation to exaggerate the unity and cohesion of these challenges to the LIO. Like other movements of its kind, the ENR is afflicted by long-standing ideological disagreements and quarrels between its different constituent factions, affiliates, and interlocutors across Europe and beyond. As Tamir Bar-On (2008) has argued, neither the French Nouvelle Droite nor its more inclusive European iteration is capable ‘of creating a united, organizationally mobilized, revolutionary right-wing international. Tensions between its pan-European regionalism and old-style ultra-nationalism cannot be fully reconciled’ (p. 331). Similarly, the ways that these ideas have filtered (or have failed to filter) into the wide range of right-wing movements in Europe today varies widely (Varga and Bugozany, 2022).

Nonetheless, these divisions should not distract from the ways that ENR positions interact either directly or, more importantly, within the wider political, social, and cultural field. Despite tensions and disagreements, pan-European and ultra-nationalist New Right factions are connected through a shared mode of civilisational geopolitics centred around securitization of the homeland and other nativist myths of autochthony and cultural autarky. In this vision, postmodernity and the relative decline of the West has freed international politics from teleological accounts of a common globality, allowing each civilisational bloc to evolve according to its own epistemic, cultural and spiritual system of belief. The ‘post-postmodern’ (Laruelle, 2022) politics of the ENR thus puts the ‘geo’ back into the political by affirming the value of territorially grounded customs, traditions and norms against the homogenising abstractions of a global liberal elite accused of losing all sense of place and concrete attachments to the earth. The aim is to preserve what its thinkers see as a healthy degree of cultural pluralism while at the same time pushing back against cultural hybridization and miscegenation. As Dugin (2021b) recently put it:

‘Let there be an Atlantic objectivity and Western justice. A Eurasian objectivity and Russian justice will counter them. And the Chinese world will look different than the Islamic one [. . .] Black and white depend on the structure of the world order: what is black and what is white is determined by who has enough power to determine it’ (pp. 89, 149).

As the French political scientist Olivier Roy (2024 [2023]) has pointed out, the conservative politics of the contemporary radical Right seems to be driven ‘less by a desire to preserve a continuity than to redefine cultural boundaries that delimit identities rather than actual societies’ (p. 80). From an IR perspective, the problem is not only that the ENR’s vision of cultural diversity is disingenuously narrow, but also that it leaves little room for symbolic and diplomatic structures of interaction that could mediate estrangement between radically divergent worldviews – or that could constrain the exercise of power through shared institutions of international law, multilateral security networks, or structures of strategic stability.

Yet the ethical limitations and strategic dangers of New Right visions of world order do not diminish their political relevance. For a long time, New Right geopolitical critiques of the LIO and transformative proposals stood beyond the margins of mainstream political debate. But the erosion of the traditional dominance of centre-right and centre-left political parties within EU and national institutions has changed this situation. In this context, the ‘return of geopolitics’ carries the potential for the revival of very unsavoury intellectual and political positions, as well as novel political alignments in Europe and around the globe. Far from being historical anachronisms or intellectual curiosities, they are part of the ideological environment of radical conservative forces that are continuing to gain influence and power in world politics.

From a wider perspective, by delineating the boundaries and plotting the fault-lines between civilisations, ENR geopolitical imaginaries facilitate a wide variety of tactical alliances between nationalist and post-nationalist forces promoting anti-globalist agendas around the world. The ‘differentialist’ standpoint sustaining these civilisational discourses also allows the ENR to disavow the doctrines of racial and cultural superiority associated with European colonialism, historical fascism and the ‘old Right’. This allows the construction of ambiguous but powerful ideological equivalences between New Right counter-hegemonic positions and those of other subaltern forces (Abrahamsen et al., 2024: 150–167). Transversal alliances can thus be built with actors in the Global South on the basis of their common commitment to differentialism (and, often, state sovereignty), validating shared claims for thick recognition of fundamental traditions and political-cultural differences and mobilising shared resentment towards liberalism’s efforts to erase those traditions and differences (Adler-Nissen and Zakarol, 2021).

These equivalences can quite easily be extended to include wider articulations with anti-imperialist positions, where liberal colonialism (and neo-colonialism) become joint targets of resentment and opposition (Laruelle, 2022). They also intersect with Russian and Chinese efforts to build a multipolar international order and their rejection of Western universalism (Bettiza et al., 2023: 12). Although the radical Right in the North is often virulently alarmist about the ‘China threat’, the convergence of these diverse oppositional stances is paradoxically a crucial part of the contemporary challenge to the LIO, defying geographical boundaries and mobilising powerful new identities and political allegiances. The net effect of these multiple circulations is a transnational ideological ecosystem that seeks not simply to hobble the LIO but to become part of a defining struggle over the emerging world order. It is certainly true that geopolitics is back in political and analytic discourse. Its implications for international politics may be even more far-reaching than many appreciate.