The state and radicalization: Overlooked perspectives for internationalist far-right scholarship

Introduction

In recent years the far-right has seemingly gone global, with intensifying polarization, radicalization, and anti-democratic sentiments challenging liberal democracy on an international scale. From political parties and social movements to terrorism and criminality, the far-right has been the focus of many scholars and journalists worldwide who seek to understand this trend. With these international, transnational, and global dimensions of studying the far-right becoming more important, an international turn is taking place in far-right scholarship with new inquiries and methodologies coming to the forefront (Campos, 2023; Worth, 2017).

The purpose of this review essay is to examine four monographs that study the far-right and discuss their approaches as is relevant to the international level of analysis. What is unique about these monographs is that they engage with international analysis but do so in a way that has generally not been covered by the mainstream political science approaches to the far-right. Radical Right Populism in Germany by Havertz (2021) and The Rise of the Dutch New Right by Oudenampsen (2021) both take a statist approach that explores the transnational and domestic development of far-right ideology in Germany and the Netherlands. Hate in the Homeland by Miller-Idriss (2020) and The Women of the Far Right by Leidig (2023) use a radicalization approach with a focus on the space and place of the far-right. This review essay will consider the international implications of these approaches and highlight key themes and methodologies that may prove useful to international far-right scholarship.

This review essay will proceed in three parts. First, the mainstream political science approaches and international approaches to the far-right will be addressed and used as a framework for the rest of this discussion. Then the merits and shortcomings of the statist perspective and the radicalization perspective will be addressed and its relevance to internationalist far-right approaches will be expanded on. This article concludes with the place of these monographs in the international far-right literature and the scope of this article.

Mainstream and international far-right approaches

The mainstream approaches to studying the far-right in political science are primarily dominated by two sub-fields: comparative political science and the history of political ideas (Anievas and Saull, 2022; Campos, 2023; Saull, 2023). The comparativist approach is commonly a quantitative analysis that provides ‘explanations on party competition and dislocations, public opinion indicators, electoral performances, and parliamentary composition’ (Campos, 2023: 898). ¹ Through this research, scholars attempt to ‘identify cross-country patterns and commonalities as to who supports the far-right and why, as well as what explains the specificities of each national far-right expression’ (Anievas and Saull, 2022: 5). The history of political ideas approach focuses on defining the far-right and its many forms throughout history in order to define the ideologies of the far-right and how they relate to one another and the right-wing as a whole. ²

Mainstream far-right literature, especially the comparativist approach, generally downplays the international and focuses on national far-right political parties, governments, and social movements. Mainstream far-right literature focuses on a ‘narrow historicization’ and ‘methodological internalism’ (Saull, 2023: 19) that tends to view the far-right ‘within particular national locales and specific temporal moments’ (Saull et al., 2015: 7). In doing this, mainstream far-right literature often ignores international levels of analysis and dimensions that lead to methodological nationalism. Methodological nationalism is when the state becomes the central unit of analysis and the nation is considered the ‘natural’ political and social organization of people (Wimmer and Schiller, 2002). Internationalist far-right scholars consider methodological nationalism and internalism to be limited in that the state is considered to be the ‘home’, while the international remains ‘foreign’ (Campos, 2023: 899). This paradoxical shift to the international far-right as national and international logics are separated with methodological internalism keeping the far-right within the boundaries of the nation-state and neglecting theories situated in the international level of analysis (Campos, 2023). Methodological nationalism from mainstream far-right literature has created an absence of desperately needed IR approaches to the far-right.

Campos (2023) identifies the two main fronts of internationalist far-right literature: the ‘globalization front’ and the ‘historiographical front’ with either a ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ international approach. Scholars from the globalization front claim ‘that a shift in the nature of far-right politics can be observed which owes to the intensification of globalization and changes in the structure of capitalism’ (Campos, 2023: 896). Scholars that instead consider the historiographical front provide a ‘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’ (Campos, 2023: 896).

In the critique of state-centric far-right analysis, the longue durée approach is the most effective. The longue durée a sociological and historical analysis from the mid-19th century to the present day that analyzes the ‘socioeconomic, political, and geopolitical’ (Saull, 2023: 43) dimensions of the far-right through an international ontology that looks to the conjectures of crisis that arise from capitalist development (Anievas and Saull, 2019; Saull, 2023; Saull et al., 2015). The longue durée is located in the historiographical front with a thick conception of the international (Campos, 2023: 907). The longue durée is theoretically organized around four themes ‘the spatial politics derived from uneven and combined capitalist development; the conditionalities of the international and geopolitics; the antinomies of liberalism and, finally, the master signifier of race in the ideology of the far-right’ (Saull, 2023: 44). In undergoing this thematic approach, the longue durée moves beyond internalism and focuses on international developments of capitalism and political economy that create the political and ideological positions of the far-right (Campos, 2023; Saull et al., 2015).

Campos (2023) proposes a ‘Global Historical Sociology’ as developed by Go and Larson (2017), to serve as ‘an intersocial approach to social phenomena and a radical shift towards methodological relationalism’ that ‘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’ (918). This approach takes into account the often ignored Global South in international far-right studies and considers both the far-right in the Global North and Global South to center research questions on the ‘complex entanglements that operate across local, regional, transnational, international, and global scales’ (919).

The statist and radicalization perspectives

The statist perspective is a broad approach that studies the far-right through international and historical dimensions that compose far-right ideologies in a specific state. This approach is focused on a state’s government or policies, but rather on the far-right ideas of a specific state and the development of those ideas relating to structural shifts such as changing demographics, economic shifts, new technologies, and globalization (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 2).

The statist perspective is different from a history of ideas or comparativist approaches. The statist approach focuses on the far-right of a specific state as opposed to a comparative approach that undertakes an analysis of many states. The two statist monographs, Radical Right Populism in Germany and The Rise of the Dutch New Right, focus on a qualitative, post-positivist approach as opposed to comparativist ‘positivist and empiricist mode of enquiry’ (Saull et al., 2015: 1). The history of ideas approach does focus on defining the many forms of the far-right and examining their ideologies, the statist approach is more so concerned with describing the far-right in their respective states as opposed to defining the far-right. Similar to these mainstream approaches, the statist perspective is grounded in methodological nationalism and methodological internalism that limits the usefulness of this approach for internationalist far-right analysis. State-centric themes from German volkish nationalism to Dutch romantic irony and nihilism that shape a state specific far-right, though interesting for scholars focused on the far-right in Germany and the Netherlands respectively, perpetuates methodological nationalism.

In Radical Right Populism in Germany: AfD, Pegida, and the Identitarian Movement, Ralf Havertz (2021) focuses on ‘the analysis of populism as ideology and discourse’ (5) and to ‘give an exhaustive overview and analysis of the main ideological facets of radical right populism in Germany’ (5). Havertz (2021) does this by analyzing the precursor parties and history of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party (22-51), identifying volkish nationalism as a central theme to the AfD’s far-right ideology, and that the tactics and propaganda used by the AfD. The AfD is defined to be a radical right populist party and garners support through their positions on Euroscepticism, Islamophobia, and antisemitism (Havertz, 2021, 65). The book follows the framing of the AfD being radical right populists as the AfD leadership argues that an ‘oligarchy’ of German political parties is corrupt and ‘has betrayed “the people” and sold them out to supranational institutions and transnational corporations’ with AfD arguing that they represent the ‘people’s will’ and that only the AfD can return this power to ‘the people’ (Havertz, 2021, 65). Havertz (2021) uses this in-group and out-group ideology of the radical right populist to show how the AfD’s politics and media revolve around this idea. The AfD uses the fear of Euroscepticism, islamophobic, and xenophobic positions to mobilize voters following an increase in the immigrant population in Germany and across Europe (Havertz, 2021: 72). The AfD is an ‘anti-gender’ party that supports traditional gender norms and argues that the mainstreaming of gender studies is actually ‘gender ideology’ and is ‘politically motivated’ and therefore argues that only they can protect children by implementing ‘states sponsored re-education programmes in kindergartens and schools’ (Havertz, 2021: 123). According to Havertz (2021), the AfD uses a ‘strategy of ambivalence’ to support an ordoliberal capitalist regime with some political actors supporting free markets, and some supporting labor, that ultimately agree that ‘exclusive solidarity’ supports the ‘ethnicization of the social, where social relations and divisions are primarily interpreted along ethnic lines’ that support the ‘real Germans’ and keeps out those considered to be outsiders such as Muslims and immigrants (148).

The Rise of the Dutch New Right: An Intellectual History of the Rightward Shift in Dutch Politics by Merijn Oudenampsen focuses on the political ideas of the New Right in the Netherlands in which the far-right, specifically radical right-wing populism, is a subset of the broader New Right (48). Oudenampsen (2021: 3) focuses on the ideological origins of the Dutch New Right that looks at its intellectual history, and aims ‘to trace the contours of a conservative ‘movement of ideas’ that transcends parties, by examining the writings of leading Dutch politicians, journalists and academics in the 1990s and 2000s’. Oudenampsen (2021: 6) identifies the New Right as having its start in the 1960s in which those on the right wing began to react to the progressive changes in Dutch society, leading to the New Right countering the New Left in the 1990s and 2000s. The Dutch New Right would be influenced by the New Right from the United States and the United Kingdom from the political and economic philosophies of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, such as neoliberalism and neoconservatism, that were introduced to the Netherlands by political actors such as Frits Bolkestein, Pim Fortuyn, and Geert Wilders (Oudenampsen, 2021). The Dutch strain of the New Right is unique in that Dutch society is progressive, so many of the right wing political actors in Dutch society used these progressive ideas to justify anti-immigrant and Islamophobic beliefs as describing their progressive society to be a part of the ‘culture’ that was endangered by foreigners (Oudenampsen, 2021: 101).

The radicalization perspective focuses on far-right channels of communication and looks at the mechanisms of radicalization by examining the space and place of radicalization and the iconography of the far-right. The monographs Hate in the Homeland and The Women of the Far Right are concerned with the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of radicalization (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 3) that focus on the far-right channels of communication and look at the mechanisms of radicalization. This does not fit into either of the mainstream approaches as the state is of little importance in this scholarship and describes far-right ideas and their transmission as opposed to defining far-right ideas throughout history or how they relate to other far-right ideologies. The radicalization perspective does not engage with methodological nationalism and is relevant to the broad internationalist far-right.

In Hate in the Homeland: The New Global Far Right, Cynthia Miller-Idriss (2020: (2) seeks to understand why people join far-right movements, what is driving the growth of the contemporary far-right, and how people should respond to far-right violence and propaganda. The main focus of the book is to analyze the spaces where young people, especially young men, are being radicalized by ‘extremist messages and ideas in their ordinary lives—perhaps long before they have made an ideological commitment to the far right—and the role that these new, mainstream gateways may play in shaping extremist engagement’ (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 4). These radicalization gateways include gyms, fight clubs, coffee shops, music, college campuses, schools, social media, and sports clubs, and this also includes groups that can overlap with the far-right such as gun shows, evangelical churches, and doomsday preppers (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 3). Gateways can also be geographic and symbolic spaces that can be real or imagined (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 4). The space and place that matter to the far-right both physically and symbolically include white ethnostates and national homelands as well as recruitment and propaganda efforts that can occur at college campuses, mixed martial arts events and gyms, music festivals, and online spaces where the far-right can interact with and market products such as apparel that can contribute to the growth of the far-right (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 44). Miller-Idriss (2020: 164-168) concludes that to address far-right radicalization is through a ‘herd immunity’ approach in which educators meet youth in school, fitness clubs, college campuses, social media, and other everyday places to educate and create spaces that prevent far-right radicalization.

The spaces and places of far-right radicalization rely on the internet for communication, as many social media websites have low barriers to entry and algorithms that can recommend right wing content that is not distinguished from far-right content that can lead to radicalization (Leidig, 2023: 37; Miller-Idriss, 2020: 146-151). The internet is central to the growth of the far-right and is the primary focus of the monograph The Women of the Far Right: Social Media Influencers and Online Radicalization by Eviane Leidig (2023). Leidig (2023) uses interviews from far-right academics, far-right scholarship, and digital ethnography ³ to study far-right women influencers (Leidig, 2023: 10-13). She finds that far-right parties and politicians have entered the mainstream on a global stage where these far-right women influencers ‘influence the echelons of state diplomacy and legislative chambers but are also deeply involved with on-the-ground mobilization and protest events’(Leidig, 2023: 151). This includes organizing online with the Identitarian movement in Europe (Leidig, 2023: 152) and publicly meeting and posting with far-right academics and politicians such as Russian far-right philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, leader of the French far-right National Rally party Marine Le Pen, and far-right British activist Tommy Robinson (Leidig, 2023: 161-162). These discussions between far-right women influencers and others on the far-right give the far-right global connections that appeal to a broad audience whose message is spread across Europe, Australia, and North America (Leidig, 2023: 169). Leidig (2023: 171) concludes her monograph on the ‘“Four D’s of content moderation”: deplatforming, demonetization, deranking, and detection’ which can be used by tech companies to remove the far-right on social media, cut the monetization of far-right influencers, shadowbanning far-right posters, and using better detection algorithms to identify far-right content (Leidig, 2023: 182).

As a part of the symbols and iconography of the far-right radicalization perspective, this can include traditional foods and a fixation on national heritage that can be seen globally through Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn and German extremist party The Third Way in having food distribution events that only allow for ‘Greek’ or ‘German’ people only (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 77). Far-right symbols can appear on clothing and apparel that spreads far-right iconography into the mainstream and make far-right brands such as far-right content creators, influencers, and musicians more profitable and to be used to support the far-right movement (Leidig, 2023: 135; Miller-Idriss, 2020: 77). The ‘tradwife’ aesthetic for far-right women influencers also uses iconography in portraying the ‘happy heterosexual families’ (Leidig, 2023: 98) and engage with viewers as a lifestyle and beauty brand that can serve as ‘cover for more insidious political opinions’ (Leidig, 2023: 101) and legitimize far-right ideology. Dog whistles are also common, with internet memes and humor being used to engage people and incubate far-right ideology to be used for radicalization through coded language (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 154). This methodology that is focused on far-right iconography can be useful to study the far-right transnationally ‘such as the Knights Templar and the use of Confederate or Rhodesian flags’ (Campos, 2023: 894). ⁴

Both the statist perspective and the radicalization perspective cover that the mainstreaming of far-right ideas is adopting women’s and LGBTQ + rights into their ideology to attack the out-group, Muslims and immigrants. Both in Germany and in the Netherlands, some on the far-right are interested in protecting women’s rights and gay rights insofar that they can be used to attack Muslims and immigrants (Havertz, 2021: 119; Oudenampsen, 2021: 167) with far-right groups culturalizing these progressive values to make them conservative without supporting any further progressive reforms (Oudenampsen, 2021: 108-109). (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017) found that far-right parties in Western Europe supported ‘gender equality most enthusiastically as a weapon against the alleged ‘Islamization’ of Europe’ (28) with Muslim men being stereotyped as a threat to women (Havertz, 2021: 119). The AfD in their campaign programs promote ‘equal opportunities’ for the sexes but opposes state actions and ‘rejects an equality policy in the sense of equality of results’ (Havertz, 2021: 127). Both Miller-Idriss (2020) and Leidig (2023) identify femonationalism and homonationalism, which can be described as the far-right using women’s rights and LGBTQ + as anti-feminist and anti-Muslim propaganda in casting Islam as being homophobic and intolerant of women’s rights. ⁵ These views are uncommon in the US but are used primarily by the far-right in Europe. Femonationalism is used by far-right women influencers, but instead of supporting progressive strides in women’s rights, these influencers instead are anti-feminist and believe that feminism is destroying traditional gender norms (Leidig, 2023: 65). This theme could be integrated and expanded on by internationalist far-right scholars as the culturalization of progressive values is mostly covered by statist or mainstream perspectives.

Conclusion

The monographs used in this essay demonstrate the overlooked statist and radicalization perspective in the context of the far-right literature. This paper covered the mainstream political science approaches and internationalist approaches to far-right scholarship as to frame and qualify the unique perspectives of the monographs selected. The broader discussion on these monographs that were divided into the statist and radicalization approaches was done as to discuss the relevance and usefulness of the approaches, their ontologies, and themes in the context of the far-right internationalist and IR literature.

The statist perspective generally has the same shortcoming of the mainstream approaches when it comes to studying the internationalization of the far-right in that methodological nationalism limits its use for internationalist and IR scholars.

The radicalization perspective brings an interesting theme of the spaces and places of radicalization that are not really focused on by any of the other approaches. Questions that should be considered in the internationalist far-right approaches should include ‘Where do people encounter extremist messages in their day-to-day lives? What are the new spaces and places of contemporary far-right extremism?’ (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 3) ‘What are the mechanisms that help previously extreme ideas move into the realm of acceptable discourse, or that bring about shifts in the Overton window?’ (Miller-Idriss, 2020: 47).

All four monographs serve as overviews on the topics of the space and place of radicalization, far-right women influencers, the Dutch New Right, and the German radical right populists. These monographs as post-positivist qualitative overviews that lack an empirical or quantitative analysis that is important to studying far-right voting (Georgiadou et al., 2021: 112), mapping far-right violence (Ravndal and Jupskås, 2021: 132), and the far-right messaging on social media (Muis et al., 2021: 148). The monographs used also focus exclusively on the Global North, with studies of the far-right in the Global South and in non-Western countries remain largely unexplored.

Ultimately, both the far-right statist and radicalization perspectives offer different considerations for far-right scholarship. Though the statist perspective and radicalization perspectives do not ontologically consider the international, many of the themes such the spaces and places of radicalization, iconography and symbolism, the weaponization of progressive values can be useful to far-right internationalist and IR approaches.