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.