Global Right, Global White: South Africa & the Geopolitical Imaginary of the Radical Right
Professor Rita Abrahamsen from the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at University of Ottawa has been invited by CERI to inaugurate this new academic year, with a conference entitled “Global Right, Global White: South Africa and the Geopolitical Imaginary of the Radical Right”. She has recently co-authored World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order (Cambridge University Press). She answers our questions to introduce her current work and her talk during CERI's rentrée solennelle, in this short interview.
What makes the radical Right a global movement?
To many, it may seem counter-intuitive to see the Right as anything but national and nationalist. Because the many diverse radical Right movements and parties around the world are almost invariably nationalist, they tend to be studied as a series of distinct national phenomena. As a result, the study of the Right has traditionally resided within the discipline of Comparative Politics rather than International Relations, and it is only recently that scholars have begun to think more seriously of what it might mean to think about a global Right, and this is one of the key questions we explore in World of the Right. For my co-authors and I, the radical Right is global or transnational in several ways.
Most obviously, it is increasingly networked through various international conferences and summits, such as the Nat-Con1 conferences and the CPAC2 conferences. These have become political theatres where the radical Right from all over the world mingle and meet, learn from each other, and perform their strength and unity.
But this is not all there is to it. The contemporary radical Right is in significant ways constituted by transnational interactions operating at multiple scales, and it also in important ways defines itself and is co-constituted by its relation to the global, not just to the national. Their ideology, for example, is centrally defined in opposition to liberal globalisation and the global liberal elite, or the “New Class”, as they often call them. As such these movements and ideas are in important ways constituted by the global.
Capturing these various global entanglements is far from easy. It requires a theoretical approach that breaks away from established, pre-defined categories of state, nation and society, recognising their fluid interactions, profound relationality, and the co-constitution of identities. In the book, we develop an approach that understands the radical Right, its conditions of possibility, its ideologies, worldviews, and sensibilities, as simultaneously global and local. It is by no means the same everywhere—far from it; the Right has its own distinct articulations in different countries and places, but these movements are not entirely endogenous or explicable with reference to domestic factors alone.
Perhaps before we continue, you could define what you mean by the radical Right?
Definitions are always fraught with difficulties because as we all know categorisations are never neutral but are parts of political struggles. This is particularly so when it comes to conservatism and the Right. In the book, we have a long discussion about this, but briefly put, I use the term radical Right to refer to various groups that, broadly speaking, accept democracy but are illiberal and reformist and tend to opt for institutional means to attain power. This contrasts with the extreme Right, which rejects democracy, is more revolutionary and sometimes supports and advocates violence. Both are part of the broader family of the Far Right, which excludes more conventional conservatives that advocate gradual change. Importantly, this is a sliding scale and the definition of what counts as the Right is itself a space to be struggled over—and that space is global as much as it is local. For me, it is important to keep this space of struggle in mind, as definitions can also become an obstacle to understanding, especially of the relations and power play between positions.
The radical Right thinkers seem to target the cosmopolitan and managerial elite as the “identifiable enemy”, by appealing to various social classes and building networks and alliances around the idea of traditional culture. What are your thoughts on this?
The radical Right is often described as populist, in the sense that they mobilise an opposition between the people and the elite—“us” versus “them”. This is true, but populism is also often seen as a thin ideology, as one that does not have any distinctiveness or centre. From our perspective, this cannot capture the radical Right’s ideological cohesion, nor its affective force and ability to forge transversal alliances across boundaries. Instead, we approach the distinction between the global elite and the people as empty signifiers than can be filled with different content, depending on time and place. The elite and the global elite can thus have different faces in different context, but diverse people can still find common ground in opposition to the global, cosmopolitan elite that they see as lacking respect for local cultures and traditions.
It is however important to underline that this is not simply a populist dislike of elites. The radical Right has over several decades developed a distinct ideological critique of global liberal managerialism, which we argue is the core ideological content of the radical Right’s understanding of the world. In their view, the essence of contemporary world politics is not the age-old story of realist power politics, the liberal tale of progress through institutions, or the corrosive spread of neoliberal capitalism. It is instead the rise to power of a global liberal managerial elite, the so-called New Class of experts and bureaucrats. Detached and unmoored from their national identities and cultures, the interests of this elite lie in yet further globalisation and liberalisation, and against the interests of traditional national values and local communities. Within this managerialist sociology, the unequal experiences of globalisation and late modern politics are not the unavoidable consequences of anonymous market dynamics or economic modernisation. On the contrary, they are the result of the actions of specific, identifiable agents and institutions that produce, dominate, and benefit from the system. It is this that provides the radical Right with a common enemy—the global liberal elite—which, as I mentioned above, may have different faces in different geographical locations, but which nevertheless facilitates powerful equivalences and transversal alliances than spans nations and regions. In this way, liberal managerialism is not only a central part of the radical Right’s conception of the world, but also the foundation and means of its radicalisation and globalisation.
Gramsci seems to have a particular place in your research on the radical right, would you mind telling us more about it?
Yes, this is fascinating. Gramsci is of course a hero of the political Left, but he is also surprisingly an inspiration for the radical Right. Since the 1960s and 1970s, we find references to Gramsci amongst the “paleoconservative” forerunners of the American New Right, or the Nouvelle Droite in France, and in recent years we see references to the Italian Marxist by right-wing intellectuals and activists across the globe, including in India, and Brazil. Gramsci developed the ideas of a counter-revolution and counter-hegemony, showing how political power relies to a significant extent on cultural dominance and the “common sense” of how people think and feel. For the Right, this has meant waging a “war of position” through cultural institutions to change the dominant “liberal” culture and ideas that they see as dominating contemporary societies. This is a prior step to winning power at the ballot box. This understanding of a broader cultural struggle is one of the main reasons why the radical Right has been so busy not only on social media and various online platforms, but also engaging strategically and deliberately in the battle of ideas by starting new publishing houses, think tanks and even new universities. In this way, they seek to build counter-hegemonic movements and to educate and train the new elite; an elite that is fully immersed in the worldviews of the radical Right and that will go on to re-create the world in their image.
As an aside, this shows that while the radical Right is opposed to the New Class or the managerial elite, they are not anti-elitist. They are quite happy with hierarchy and elites—as long as it is the right kind of elite! It is this that the counter-hegemonic struggle with help produce.
How does the radical right discourse fit with the growing anti-imperialism & anti-western sentiment in Africa?
This is also a really interesting and important question. To many, the very idea that the radical Right has an appeal or alliances in Africa and other parts of the Global South is counter-intuitive. This perspective risks badly underestimating the influence and reach of the radical Right. In The World of the Right , we explain this at length in the final chapter. The key themes are nativism or ethno-nationalism, anti-universalism, and recognition. While the radical Right is often associated with white supremacy— and there is no doubt that many of its followers can be classified as such—it is nevertheless important to recognise that the ideology of the contemporary radical Right is profoundly anti-universalist. Briefly put, they argue that liberalism has destroyed the distinctiveness of cultures and that this is the great failure, or tragedy, of liberalism, including its drive to spread human rights and impose democracy or regime change around the word. For the contemporary radical Right, cultures or civilizations are incommensurably different, but none have a claim to universal or global superiority. In this sense, they are nativist or ethno-nationalist, arguing that all cultures have a right to their difference (providing, of course, that difference is elsewhere). It is this anti-universalism and anti-imperialism that allow the radical Right to make common cause with many individuals, activists, groups and governments in Africa and other parts of the Global South that also feel dominated or oppressed by the demands of global liberalism. So we see, for example, African cultural nativists making common cause with their analogical global allies—a good example is the relationship between the radical pan-Africanist Kemi Seba, the éminence grise of the French Nouvelle Droite Alain de Benoit, and the Russian radical Right ideologue Alexander Dugin. In the book we explore this through the concept of “recognition” and show how transversal alliances join together very diverse forces from the radical Right, religious organizations, African politicians and activists around the notion of the “natural family” in opposition to the promotion of liberal rights such as abortion and LGBTQ+.
There is much, much more to be said about this topic, but it is important to recognise that the anti-universalism and ethno-nationalism of the radical Right allows for and facilitate often surprising alliances with anti-imperialist activists and agendas in the global South.
What does the South African case bring to the understanding of the continuous rise of the radical Right movement?
One shortcoming of the study of the Right to date has been its methodological nationalism, or the tendency to study the Right as a series of distinct national projects, or perhaps comparing two or three different countries or parties. My current research on South Africa is very different. Rather than a national “case”, I seek to illustrate the global interconnectness and entanglements of these political movements. In a way, it’s an effort to study the radical Right from the South African ground up, using it as a window on the global Right. While the increasing prominence of radical Right forces in South Africa has its own distinct causes, linked to the country’s particular apartheid past, its conditions of possibility are simultaneously global. By the same token, the Afrikaner minority in South Africa occupies a particular place in the political imaginary of the radical Right in many parts of the world and helps mobilise support and legitimise their views and arguments. In this way, I hope that my research will help us better understand the complex entanglements of the global and the local, and of race, nation, and culture that enable and strengthen the contemporary radical Right.
Interview by Miriam Périer, CERI.
For a full bibliography, visit Rita Abrahamsen's personal webpage here.
