Capital, Race and Space: The Far Right from ‘post-fascism’ to Trumpism (2) (Studies in Critical Social Sciences, 250) 9789004539501, 9789004539549, 9004539506

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Capital, Race and Space Volume 2

Studies in Critical Social Sciences Series Editor David Fasenfest (Wayne State University) Editorial Board Eduardo Bonilla-​Silva (Duke University) Chris Chase-​Dunn (University of California–​Riverside) William Carroll (University of Victoria) Raewyn Connell (University of Sydney) Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (University of California, Los Angeles/​ Columbia University) Raju Das (York University) Heidi Gottfried (Wayne State University) Karin Gottschall (University of Bremen) Alfredo Saad-​Filho (King’s College London) Chizuko Ueno (University of Tokyo) Sylvia Walby (Lancaster University)

volume 250

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​scss

Capital, Race and Space Volume 2 The Far-Right from ‘Post-​Fascism’ to Trumpism By

Richard Saull

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Trump Supporters Hold “Stop The Steal” Rally in dc Amid Ratification of Presidential Election. By Getty Images. The Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data is available online at https://​cata​log​.loc​.gov lc record available at https://​lccn​.loc​.gov​/2023018203

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 1573-​4 234 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 3950-​1 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​5 3954-​9 (e-​book) Copyright 2023 by Richard Saull. Published by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill nv reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

In memory of my grandmother, Josephine Saull

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Contents  Acknowledgements ix  Prologue xi 1  Fascist Legacies, the Far-​Right and the Making of the Cold War Liberal Order 1 1  The Theoretical Framing of the Cold War Western Liberal Order 7 1.1  Hegemony and the Far-​Right in the Making of Liberal Order 12 2  The Cold War Liberal Order and the Far-​Right after 1945 15 2.1  Fascist Legacies in the Post-​War European Liberal State 16 2.2  Far-​Right Movements and Parties in the Liberal Constitutional Order 34 2.3  Far-​Right Violence, Para-​Politics, and the Post-​War Liberal State 42 2.4  Racialized Anti-​Communism and Political Economy in the US Cold War Liberal Order 56 2.4.1  Racialized Anti-​Communism, Para-​Politics, and the Liberal Historical Bloc 59 2.4.2  Racialized Capitalism and the Political Economy of the New Deal 64 3  Conclusions 73 2  Neoliberal Globalization and the Rise of the ‘New’ Far-​Right 76 1  Racial Imaginaries, the Far-​Right and the Origins of Neoliberalism 89 1.1  Neoliberal Thinking 89 1.2  Neoliberal Politics 104 2  Neoliberal Globalization and the New International Political Economy of the Far-​Right 129 2.1  The Geography of Neoliberal Capitalist Accumulation 133 2.2  Neoliberal Financialization 138 2.3  Neoliberal Globalization and the Class Politics of ‘National Labour’ 143 2.4  The Neoliberal International Institutional Order 149 2.5  The Post-​Cold War Geopolitical Landscape 156 3  The Politics of the Neoliberal Far-​Right 160 3.1  Social Bases of Political Support 162

viii Contents

3.2  Racialized Social Conservatism 166 3.3  Welfare Nativism and Racialized Social Protectionism 171 3.4  Political Economy and the Nature and Limits of the Far-​Right’s ‘Anti-​Capitalism’ 173 3.5  The Framing of the International in the Neoliberal Far-​Right 181 3.6  Post-​Fascism and Commitment to Liberal Democracy 184 4  Conclusions 194 3  Crisis Neoliberalism and the Far-​Right 197 1  The Neoliberal Crisis and Its Consequences 201 2  Crisis Neoliberalism and the Onward March of the Far-​Right 215 2.1  Trump and the American Far-​Right 216 2.1.1  Trumpism and the Post-​2007–​8 Political Economy of the United States 224 2.1.2  The Post-​Crisis Far-​Right 230 2.1.3  Sources and Spaces of Trumpism 236 2.1.4  The Trump Presidency 241 2.2  Britain: Brexit and Crisis Neoliberalism 250 2.2.1  Britain’s Post-​Crisis Political Economy 252 2.2.2  The Brexit Far-​Right 258 2.2.3  Sources and Spaces of Brexit 268 2.2.4  Post-​Referendum Politics and Political Economy 273 2.3  Europe: The Contradictions of the EU’s Neoliberal Order and the Refugee Crisis 279 2.3.1  Europe’s Post-​Crisis Political Economy and the Fault-​ Lines of the Sovereign Debt Crisis 283 2.3.2  The Advances –​and Limits –​of the Post-​Crisis Far-​Right 302 2.3.3  Germany 305 2.3.4  France 311 2.3.5  Italy 322 2.3.6  Greece 331 3  Conclusions 338 4  Conclusions 341  References 349  Index 414

Acknowledgements This project has its origins in a conversation with Alexander Anievas, Neil Davidson and Adam Fabry in the Marlborough Arms pub in Bloomsbury in November 2011 where we met while attending the Annual Conference of the journal Historical Materialism. This meeting laid the basis for a series of ongoing conversations and collaborations about the history and politics of the far-​ right and, in particular, how to explain its origins, development and mutations by addressing what we all saw as the neglected and under-​theorized significance of international relations and geopolitics. Our conversation led to a two-​day workshop held at Queen Mary, University of London in October 2012 which enriched the discussion by bringing in Nicola Short, Mark Rupert, Owen Worth, Stuart Shields and Ishay Landa and which resulted in the co-​edited volume, the Longue Durée of the Far-​Right: An International Historical Sociology (Saull et al., 2015). I owe a debt of gratitude to all the above for helping me develop my knowledge and thinking on the far-​right. Since then, I have continued to work with Alexander Anievas (Anievas and Saull, 2020, 2022) and I also co-​wrote an article with Neil Davidson (Davidson and Saull, 2017). Neil sadly passed away in 2020 and I, like many others, miss him. His work on nationalism, uneven and combined development, and neoliberalism along with his encyclopaedic knowledge of Marxist theory have significantly influenced my thinking on the far-​right and it is a great loss that he is no longer around to discuss these ideas. My thinking on the far-​right has also benefited from discussions and collaborations with colleagues in the School of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary. I teach a second-​year undergraduate module with Ray Kiely in which the nineteenth century history of the far-​right, inter-​war fascism and the inter-​connections between the far-​right and neoliberalism all feature. We also co-​edited a forum in Critical Sociology on ‘Neoliberalism and the Right’ (2017) for which we provided the introduction. I have also benefited from conversations with Jean-​Francois Drolet, another colleague, and a foremost authority on Neoconservatism and the American right. My former colleague, Robbie Shilliam, has been a major influence on my thinking about race and racism and that also extends to Gurminder Bhambra and Lisa Tilley and the wider collaboration involving others that resulted in the special issue of New Political Economy in 2018 on ‘Raced Markets’. The most important influence on my thinking on the far-​right has been Alexander Anievas. Since we worked on the Longue Durée volume, Alex and I have been in conversation about the history and politics of the far-​right, presenting

x Acknowledgements papers at conferences and organizing panels, co-​writing articles as well as regularly talking on Skype given that we are separated by the Atlantic Ocean. I am very grateful to Alex for his time, friendship and his deep engagement with my work and I have also learnt a lot from his own work on uneven and combined development, inter-​war Germany and British appeasement policy. He read through a very rough first draft of the manuscript (of both volumes) and the quality of the two volumes –​which is for others to decide –​owes a great deal to his input. I would also like to thank my partner, Liza, for providing me with love and support during the researching and writing of these two volumes and for reading through several chapters of the final draft. Writing is a solitary activity and I have been lucky to have such a wonderful and supportive partner who has also been a great sounding-​board. I would also like to thank the Series Editor, David Fasenfest, for his patience and support in getting the final manuscript to the publisher. These two volumes are dedicated to my grandmother, Josephine Saull. She died in 2018. She had been an integral part of my life for as long as I can remember. Growing up, she would visit us –​my parents and brother and I –​ most weekends and, in some respects, she was almost an additional mother. And after my mum died when I was 18 her love, support and encouragement became even more important to me. My nan was also very supportive of me in my academic studies. I lived with her whilst I completed my Masters degree and then, later, a PhD at the lse. I don’t think that she fully understood what these studies involved –​she had not benefited from a decent primary let alone a higher education –​or much about my career as a university lecturer, but she always made clear to me and to others how very proud of me she was. I will be forever in her debt. I miss her deeply and hope that she knew how important she was to me.

Prologue This work, compromising two volumes (Volume 1: The Far-​Right from Bonapart­ ism to Fascism and Volume 2: The Far-​Right from ‘Post-​Fascism’ to Trumpism), provides an international historical sociology of the far-​right that focuses on its origins, development, and transformations within the advanced capitalist states. Less a comparative survey of parties and movements, the work addresses the enabling conditions –​socioeconomic, political, ideological and geopolitical –​that have abetted the development and advance of this kind of politics from the middle of the nineteenth century up until the present day. The existing literature on the far-​right –​which I examine in depth in the first chapter of Volume 1 –​is vast, incorporating work in the fields of national histories, comparative politics and the history of ideas. These literatures provide a huge reservoir of resources for understanding and explaining the history and present of the far-​right, and much of my argument across both volumes draws on the contributions of these scholars. But I offer a different way of conceptualizing the far-​right, with the aim of outlining an argument that explains how and why the far-​right persists –​and, in particular, how it is determined by ‘the international’. This is an ontological question revealed in the spatial assumptions of the methodological internalism that tends to characterise historical and contemporary work on the far-​right –​work in which the structures, processes and relations that make up the inter-​societal connections that cut across the borders of discrete political communities are either neglected or undertheorized. Focusing on the boundary between the domestic and the international, my argument specifically addresses the ways in which the evolving character and configuration of the international political economy and geopolitics shapes the conditions of possibility of far-​right politics. In what ways does the international –​in its political, ideological, economic and geopolitical dimensions –​ enable and produce the far-​right? And how does the mutating organization and character of the international contribute to its shifting ideo-​political ­character ? In what follows I argue that the various historical instantiations of national far-​right politics are always conditioned and structured by the way in which the international –​in its various political, socioeconomic, ideological, and geopolitical dimensions –​interacts with, conditions, and to some extent even constitutes, the domestic political contexts within which the far-​right emerges and develops. That the international constitutes the ideology and politics of the far-​right in both the material and the imaginary senses means that the precise

xii Prologue ideological character of the far-​right in any particular time or place is always drawn from and reflects the specific properties of the international system at that time. Thus, the unique properties of fascism as an expression of the far-​ right were a product of the distinct character of the international system (in relation to mass politics, capitalist imperialism, racism and the legacies of total war) in the same way that the contemporary, or neoliberal, far-​right reflects the particular form, character and contradictions of the existing neoliberal international order associated with the workings of a financialized transnational capitalism, transnational political and legal governance structures, and a populist political mood connected to ‘anti-​politics’. Consequently, the argument outlined across these two volumes aims to make a contribution to the developing historical-​sociological literature in the fields of International Relations (ir) and International Political Economy (ipe). This literature has sought both to historicize particular aspects of international relations and, more broadly, to integrate the specific political, sociological, economic and geographical characteristics of states into the structures of an historical evolving capitalist world economy and geopolitics. This work provides the first contribution to this literature that addresses the politics of the far-​right. The methodology and argument that frames the historical analysis that follows relies on the conceptual fragments of ‘uneven and combined development’ (ucd), originally outlined by Leon Trotsky (Trotsky, 1962, 2008) and developed more recently by a number of other thinkers working broadly within the academic discipline of International Relations (Allinson and Anievas, 2009; Anievas, 2013, 2014; Davidson, 2006; Rosenberg, 1996, 2006, 2010, 2016). I outline the framework of ucd in the first chapter of Volume 1. Theorizing the historical sociology of the far-​right through the lens of ucd provides a way of explaining how this particular expression of politics emerges, evolves and advances over the longue durée out of the contradictory dynamics of capitalist development, in which the spatial and temporal dimensions of the far-​right –​that are often overlooked –​are properly understood and explained. Thus, we can see how the most recent political breakthroughs of the far-​right in the vote for Brexit and the election of Donald Trump in 2016 reveal the workings of an ideational imaginary of the ‘reproduction of the past in the present’ (Saull et al., 2015: 10–​11). In both cases the far-​right succeeded through offering a way of addressing the crisis of the present through political messaging that drew on the reservoir of an idealized past. However, its success and appeal to specific political constituencies also relied on a connection to distinct spatial domains and social layers that are produced by the contradictory outcomes of uneven capitalist develop­ ment. The temporality of the far-​right is revealed, then, in specific moments of

Prologue

xiii

capitalist crisis when its political appeal and ideological invective gains much greater political traction than before and how such moments rely on political references to an idealized and racialized past that become much more powerful within such crisis conditions. The work is organized as follows. In Volume 1: The Far-​Right from Bonapartism to Fascism, following an Introduction, Chapter 1 provides a survey and critique of existing approaches, in which I also outline my methodology and theoretical argument, framing the historical discussions that follow. The volume then addresses the first three historical phases of the far-​right. Chapter 2 focuses on its emergence as a distinct ideo-​political imaginary drawing on distinct petit-​ bourgeois social layers in the midst of the 1848–​49 European Revolutions that laid the foundations for Bonapartism –​an ‘ideal-​type’ authoritarian state form of the far-​right. Chapter 3 discusses the consolidation of the far-​right as a subaltern, anti-​system and mass-​based politics that grew as a consequence of the contradictions associated with the socioeconomic transformations powered by capitalist imperialism over the last two decades of the nineteenth century up until World War i. The final chapter focuses on the rise of fascism as the ‘revolution of the right’ emergent from within a hyper-​militarized capitalist imperialism alongside the emergence of the Soviet Union, with the associated threat of the internationalization of communist revolution, and an analysis of the political economy of Italian and German fascism and the characteristics of Nazi imperialism. In Volume 2: The Far-​Right from ‘Post-​Fascism’ to Trumpism, the historical survey encompasses three chapters that chart the transformation of the far-​ right as a ‘post-​fascist’ form of politics in the early years of the Cold War, up until the recent political advances of the far-​right in Britain –​specifically, England –​the United States and Western Europe in a context of overlapping crises in the geopolitical organization and social reproduction of the liberal international order. Chapter 1 addresses the construction of a new liberal international order under the aegis of American hegemony in the immediate period after World War ii, excavating and re-​centring the various ways in which far-​right, and specifically fascist legacies were crucial to the construction of a post-​war order safe for private property, capital accumulation and the crushing of the radical and democratic potential bequeathed by the defeat of fascism. Chapter 2 provides an analysis of the revival of a new form of far-​right politics in the 1980s and its connection to the emergence and success of the hegemonic neoliberalism within Britain and the United States that grew out of the period of systemic crisis across the advanced capitalist world in the 1970s. Chapter 3 addresses the way in which the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis and the subsequent policy responses to it in the US, Britain and across

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xiv Prologue the EU supercharged the fortunes of the far-​right. Specifically, I will examine how and why the far-​right succeeded in becoming the dominant ‘anti-​system’ form of populism as revealed in Brexit, the election of Trump to the White House and the major advances made by far-​right parties such as the League in Italy, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany and the Front National in France. Across these two volumes, my theoretical argument –​articulated more fully in the first chapter of Volume 1 –​is integrated into the substantive historical analysis. My empirical focus is limited to the principal advanced liberal-​ capitalist powers from the mid nineteenth century. This is partly a function of the necessity of limiting the sheer length of a study like this, but also reflects the fact that these states have been the most important sites of the working-​ out of the contradictions of the evolving liberal modernity that is my primary concern. This geopolitical focus obviously imposes an analytical limit on my argument as it relates to the global far-​right –​in particular, constraining what I am able to say about the far-​right across the Global South. Nonetheless, while I do not address them directly here, I hope that the argument developed in this work may be useful in explaining the far-​right in these different geopolitical contexts.

­c hapter 1

Fascist Legacies, the Far-​Right and the Making of the Cold War Liberal Order The military defeat of the fascist regimes marked a watershed in the politics of the far-​right.1 The Allied victory terminated the short-​lived experiment in fascist political economy and its accompanying state form. Thereafter, fascism was forever associated with the primary responsibility for unleashing the unprecedented destruction of World War ii and the Holocaust of European Jews. Analytically, as discussed in the first chapter of Volume One, the fascist experience and fascist ideology has also come to provide the dominant template for the discussion of the post-​war and contemporary far-​right and the political assessment that contemporary strands of the far-​right tend to be assessed by. Thus whenever a far-​right form of politics develops and, particularly, when it gains widespread political support and access to political power, inevitably (and rightly in many respects) a reference is made to historical fascism. This was particularly evident in the case of the election campaign and presidency of Donald Trump (see Riley, 2018; Eley, 2021). The fascist experience and historical legacy of notoriety has also provided a major problem for the post-​war and contemporary far-​right. Fascism’s connection with war and genocide, indeed, arguably its legacy as the most violent, terroristic, and oppressive form of political regime to emerge in the modern era has meant that very few political movements –​who wish to gain mass popularity or traction within liberal democratic institutional settings –​have tended to identify with it. Accordingly, the contemporary far-​right has tried to disavow any connection with fascism to various degrees of success even while some of these movements –​such as the Austrian Freheit Partei, (fpö) the Swedish Democrats and the Italian National Alliance –​actually originated out of post-​war fascist and Nazi groupings. Fascism provides the high watermark, the fundamental set of criteria for assessing the politics of the far-​right and, in its absence as a mass or popular movement contending for political power, much of the substance behind the claim that the post-​war era reflects a ‘post-​ fascist’ form of politics.

1 This chapter draws on my collaborations with Alexander Anievas and, in particular, Anievas and Saull (2020 and forthcoming).

© Richard Saull, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004539549_002

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Chapter 1

A dominant assumption within the fields of analytical enquiry and popular opinion is that the defeat of fascism marked the extinguishing of fascist forms of politics and ideo-​political currents across the liberal democratic world after 1945. This idea of the making of a liberal democratic order across the West after the war tends to rest on an ideological assumption that the West –​and its history –​provides a distinct kind of politics that is different to and antagonistic towards forms of totalitarian regime of which fascism provides one case (and the exception) but which the ussr and its allied system of states provided in the Cold War after 1945. In this telling the legacies of fascism are, in effect, air-​ brushed from post-​war Western Cold War history and historiography based on the definitive rupture provided by 1945. There is obviously some basis to such claims. Thus the combination of the widespread discrediting and condemnation of fascism at the war’s end alongside the establishment of a Western European ‘anti-​fascist’ settlement –​based on a form of ‘social democratic consensus’ –​severely reduced the ideological spaces and socio-​political openings for the far-​right across Western Europe. Indeed, some scholars have argued that the very discrediting of the far-​right and its fascist variants after the end of World War ii was one of the primary reasons for the stability and longevity of the post-​w wii settlement enshrined in a new and more legitimate liberal-​democratic consensus across the advanced capitalist world (see, for example, Maier, 1981: 330–​331). At the international level these domestic developments were further consolidated through the decisions of the main European colonial powers to accede to the demands of anti-​colonial movements and implement a policy of decolonization. While the politics of this process and consequences were, as we shall see later, far from straightforward or free of a far-​right dimension, this international political transformation was nevertheless significant in two key senses. First, decolonization and the ostensible ‘end of empire’ served to partially de-​couple the political economy of capitalist development from a geopolitics of imperial rivalry and conflict –​a key historical foundation of the political economy of the far-​right and thus a source of far-​right political currents and social mobilizations. Decolonization –​under the auspices of American hegemony –​helped transform the geopolitical structure and workings of the capitalist world economy (see Panitch and Gindin, 2012) such that capitalist accumulation and the (domestic) reproduction of capitalist classes was, in effect, separated from contiguous spatial logics, laying the geographical and institutional foundations for the ‘transnational’ form of a globalizing capitalism in the 1980s. In a word, capitalism no longer needed empire and the racialized and spatialized ideologies and mass mobilizations from below that championed such a politics. Secondly, the cultural-​ideological praxis of racism

Fascist Legacies, the Far-Right and the Making

3

grounded on an explicit white supremacism –​another political trope of the historical far-​right –​was gradually erased from the mainstream political discourse of Western polities serving to weaken the ideo-​political underpinnings of the far-​right. In addition to these developments, the Cold War –​or, more precisely, the type of liberal-​capitalist international order that emerged across the political geography of industrialised capitalist states after 1945 –​was founded on a political-​institutional consensus based upon US liberal hegemony that was constituted by a liberal-​democratic social coalition across Western Europe, itself fostered by US diplomacy –​what John Gerard Ruggie (Ruggie, 1982) termed ‘embedded liberalism’. In sum, the post-​w wii era saw a confluence of historically-​specific domestic and international developments that helped to establish a distinct type of post-​fascist political and social order –​at both the domestic and international levels –​serving to expunge the far-​right from European politics. The overturning of the connections between a capitalist imperialism grounded on racist imaginaries of white supremacy and co-​ordinated through geopolitical framings based on inter-​imperial rivalry and geopolitical antagonism must be seen as a defining moment of rupture in the longue durée of the far-​right. For this transformation broke the hard-​wired organic and institutional connections between the state, capital and the far-​right that had been inaugurated after 1848. As we shall see, the playing out or full realization of this rupture came to constitute much of the political history of post-​war Western Europe and the Cold War arrangements in the West were crucial to it. Further, the de-​coupling of capital accumulation from geopolitical circuits that had defined the era between 1870 and 1945 meant that as the Western Cold War liberal order was consolidated and the bases of a liberal international political economy were laid, the spatial and institutional locations of ruling class power in the state and in capital that had provided important political and institutional facilitators and reservoirs of support for the far-​right, largely disappeared. Under the US led geopolitical and political-​economic settlement that emerged, the role or place of the far-​right as a material component of capitalist political economy was, in many respects, displaced or excommunicated from the ideology and accumulation strategies of the dominant fractions of capitalist classes across the West. This meant that the organizational and institutional, as well as the material logics of capitalism, were much less reliant on and connected to far-​right social forces and ideological frameworks. This was, consequently, a unique and unprecedented international transformation in the longue durée of the far-​right. It also meant that the management of international frictions and

4

Chapter 1

disputes rested on an overwhelming US geopolitical predominance that militated against any prospect of the return of a far-​right inspired military revanchism2 and, at the same time, the establishment of international institutional and legal frameworks –​the institutional and procedural substance of liberal international order –​that facilitated international co-​operation and consensus. In recognizing these shifts and their political consequences for the future of the far-​right, there is much to concede to this broadly liberal framing and narrative as to the nature and construction of the post-​war liberal international order in the West and, cognately, how this demonstrates the differentiation between liberal and far-​right forms of politics in general and, more specifically, the mechanisms and workings of liberal-​democratic as opposed to far-​right forms of international order. However, we should not get too carried away in accepting this narrative or verdict on how the liberal order came to be. Indeed, as we shall see below –​and what is the main focus of this c­ hapter –​the post-​ war history of the West and the character of the liberal political order that emerged after 1945, was also constituted and realized through some important continuities with the politics and political forces of the past. In particular, the significant role played by far-​right and neo-​fascist political forces and ideas in the making of this liberal order. Thus, and as will be outlined in what follows, I will draw attention to the role of far-​right forces in the construction and maintenance of the distinctly anti-​communist and anti-​democratic form of liberal order that came to structure and dominate the basis of liberal democratic politics across several states that were integral to the making of the liberal international order.3 This emphasis on the mutual interconnections of domestic and international order construction not only underscores some neglected aspects of Cold War history, but also better accounts for the specific ideo-​political properties of the post-​1945 liberal order by identifying the agency of a post-​fascist far-​right; something that much of the scholarship in the field of International Relations (ir) in particular has largely overlooked (but see Rupert, 2015 and 2 And this obviously undermined the ideological and political utility of militarism and militarized nationalism –​the sine qua non –​of the historical far-​right and fascism. 3 In what follows my main focus will be on the post-​war politics of the former fascist powers of Germany and Italy for obvious reasons, as well as France –​due to the legacy of occupation and Vichy –​and the United States. In singling out these states, I recognize that the role of the far-​right and fascist legacies in the construction and evolution of the early post-​war liberal order was uneven. And, in this respect, the absence of Britain –​as a polity that was conditioned in significant ways by far-​right ideo-​political currents centred around race and Empire –​is not insignificant. These themes in relation to Britain will be touched on in the following chapter.

Fascist Legacies, the Far-Right and the Making

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Drolet and Williams, 2021). Simply put, the assumption that the far-​right was a marginal factor in the (geo-​)politics of the Cold War within the West4 will be fundamentally challenged. The argument in this chapter is informed by –​and sympathetic to –​scholars who have offered similarly critical accounts of the post-​war liberal order through concentrating on its coercive and undemocratic dimensions. Notably, the work of Cold War Revisionists in the field of diplomatic history who emphasized the coercive aspects of Western order construction after 1945 (see Kolko and Kolko 1972; LaFeber 1997; McCormick 1995; see also Leffler, 1992) and scholars within the discipline of ir (Barkawi and Laffey 2001) who have also offered critiques of the assumptions around those states supposedly recognized as liberal-​democratic, as well as how the foreign policy of the United States in particular was defined by overt and covert forms of military intervention to undermine and overthrow leftist and democratically elected governments. However, my focus here, in contrast to these scholars, is centred on the liberal-​capitalist core rather than the Global South. In what follows the far-​right is theorized as an organic and constitutive element of the liberal-​capitalist order rather than being exogenous to it. Further, and with specific reference to the Cold War context, far-​right forces were not only a product of the contradictory workings of liberal political economy; they were also particularly revealed within the para-​political dimensions of liberal hegemony. Thus the connections between liberal democracy and the far-​right played out during the Cold War through the ‘strategic selectivity’ of the capitalist state (Jessop, 1990: 260) whereby far-​right authoritarian currents –​be they ideological framings and/​or political agents –​found openings and forms of collaboration within the coercive and security apparatuses of the state targeted at the radical left. In those early post-​war moments after the military defeat of fascism the far-​right provided a distinct nationalist and authoritarian political imaginary as a legitimate current within liberal democracy (Singh, 2017) –​in contrast to all shades of the radical left; not just communists –​even if it was partially antagonist to elements of the functioning of liberal democracy and

4 Although there has been commentary on US support for right-​wing dictatorships (see Schmitz, 1999, 2006) and particularly in the Western Hemisphere, this literature has tended to ignore both the role of the far-​right in the European ‘theatre’ of the Cold War and, from a theoretical perspective, how a consideration of the role of the far-​right might alter our general understanding of the origins, nature, and dynamics of the post-​w wii Cold War and the nature of liberal international order more generally. I take up both of these significant themes below.

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liberal international order (see Davidson, 2015; Saull 2015b, 2015c). Thus it was not only militantly anti-​communist but also supportive of the private property basis of economic liberalism. As we will see below, different manifestations and forms of far-​right –​in the form of ideological assumptions and personnel (involving ex-​fascists) –​came to play important roles in constituting the specific ideological character of the post-​war liberal order. This was revealed in its role in the drawing-​up of the limits in the remit and operation of social and democratic power, as well as in the continuing structural role of race and racism in configuring the character of the socioeconomic order within these liberal states and in policing its ‘boundaries of tolerance’. Consequently, while my main focus in this chapter will be on the fascist legacies in the constitution and construction of the post-​war liberal democratic order, I will also refer to and comment on the continuing role of race and racialized structures of power in determining the substance of social order and politics, particularly in the case of the United States. These issues are analytically and politically significant in themselves: they reflect the embedded role of race and racism in the reproduction of ostensibly liberal democratic political orders and, consequently, how liberal and far-​ right political imaginaries and political assumptions overlapped in post-​war politics reflecting a longue durée continuity in the significance of the far-​right mediated through race. They are also constitutive elements in the post-​war liberal order that most liberal accounts of it have largely ignored (see Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam, 2015). Further, the politics of race has come to play a defining role in the politics of neoliberalism, which is the focus of the following two chapters, and where crises associated with race in the US (and Britain) came to play an important role in the origins of actually existing neoliberalism from the early 1980s. The discussion is organized in the following way. First, I will discuss some of the most prominent explanations within the ir literature on international and liberal order-​building focusing specifically on the work on G. John Ikenberry, the most important and influential exemplar of the ‘orthodox’ liberal-​internationalist account of the Cold War Western liberal international order. Here I tease out the connections and theorization of the relationship between the domestic social, ideological, and institutional components of the constitutive members of the liberal order and their association with the construction and maintenance of its international aspects. In doing so, I also identify some of the principal analytical weaknesses of this liberal account –​that also extends to some Neo-​Gramscian inspired explanations of the nature and construction of the post-​war liberal order.

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I follow this with an empirical analysis of the central strategic place of far-​ right forces and ideo-​political currents in the making and reproduction of the US-​centred liberal international order after 1945. First, I draw attention to the continued presence of the personnel of the fascist state –​in the upper echelons of the military, bureaucracy, and judiciary –​within several post-​war liberal states, alongside how the legal legacies of fascism continued to limit the boundaries of who were deemed legitimate political actors that not only affected communists but also, in some cases, the broader democratic left. Secondly, I examine the activities and roles of far-​right/​neo-​fascist movements and political parties within the post-​war liberal order. In doing so, while recognizing that the post-​war political context was much less favourable to a fascist politics, I demonstrate that the fascist legacy –​as evidenced in the role of parties and movements founded on fascists and fascist ideology –​played a much less marginal role than prevailing accounts maintain. Moreover, the role that they played was not only antagonistic to post-​war liberal order construction but, in many respects, supportive and where they sometimes worked with liberal and conservative elites as well as the US. Thirdly, I focus on the way in which far-​right terrorism and violence was indulged and, in some respects, assisted by the United States and nato. Such collusion saw support for and the cover-​up of far-​right terrorist acts, most notably in Italy, that were part of a co-​ordinated effort to delegitimize the radical left and thwart any attempts by the Italian Communist Party (pci) to participate in government. This so-​ called ‘strategy of tension’ that came to dominate Italian politics through the late 1960s and 1970s played out at precisely the time when the pci looked like it might gain access to state power for the first time since 1947. Finally, I examine the persistent resonance of far-​right ideological tropes and social forces that were defining of the US political economy and society after 1945 through to the 1960s. In the home of the liberal historical bloc the far-​right was an active agent conditioning the combined workings of both a racialized democracy and a racialized capitalism. That the far-​right was a contradictory component does not mean that it did not play an active and causal role in constituting the ideological and social substance of American hegemony both within and without. 1

The Theoretical Framing of the Cold War Western Liberal Order

The term ‘international order’ tends to refer to the specific social and political arrangements organized between different forms of territorially-​bounded or geopolitically organized units. Assessing the mechanisms through which states relate to each other, the values and ideology that underpins them and

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the common institutions created to foster and/​or manage such international relations provides an important perspective in understanding the nature of the political relations within and between the states that are party to that order. In this respect, while the domestic properties of the individual members of the order are not determining for the character and form of liberal international order (i.e., non liberal states can be party to and members of a liberal international order assuming that they abide by some of the key and foundational principles upon which the order is based) the degree to which the members of the order share some common domestic political properties is seen as key to the long-​term maintenance, stability and reproduction of the liberal order. And this has been especially so in the understanding of the US-​led post-​war liberal international order. Several scholars working within the disciplinary field of ir have provided important accounts of both the nature and development of the post-​war international order and its liberal-​democratic differentia specifica in particular. It has been those writers associated with and working within the liberal-​institutional approach in ir theory (see Deudney and Ikenberry, 1999; Ikenberry, 1989,1998-​ 99, 2001, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2011; Risse-​Kappen, 1995; Ruggie, 1982) that have provided the most comprehensive, systematic, and thorough accounts of the distinctly liberal-​democratic dimensions of the post-​war Western international order and how it contrasts with those that preceded it. John Ikenberry’s work stands out within this literature in its emphasis on the liberal and democratic dimensions of American hegemony and how the post-​war order that the US created was centred on the construction and promotion of liberal democratic forms of polity within its key constituent members across Western Europe after 1945. As Ikenberry makes clear, it was the specifically democratic character of those states involved in the development of the array of institutions and regimes facilitating and grounding the post-​ wwii international order that primarily accounts for both these states’ ability to achieve such historically unprecedented results in terms of the order’s stability and durability, and the institutions particularly strong ‘binding’ power. As he puts it, ‘European and American leaders argued quite explicitly that their willingness to establish binding ties with each other hinged on their shared democratic institutions. Democracy was both an end and a means’ (Ikenberry, 2001: 164). Consequently, for Ikenberry and the broader liberal account of the nature of post-​war Western liberal order there existed a virtuous circle between the domestic ideo-​political properties of tits constituent members and the international institutional arrangements and political relations between them. Their shared institutional and ideological bases in liberal democracy alongside their

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common aspirations to further develop, expand and entrench such provisions were integral to its legitimacy and long-​term stability. And this was facilitated by a largely US-​designed post-​war international legal and institutional architecture that worked to reinforce and uphold these internal social and political co-​ordinates. Simply put, liberal democracy within was causal of liberal democratic order without and the liberal international institutional framing from without was causal for the establishment and reproduction of liberal democracy within the multiple locales that made up the membership of the liberal international order. This conception of US hegemony is also broadly shared by some (neo-​ Marxist) scholars who draw on a Neo-​Gramscian conceptual apparatus upon which they have also tended to emphasize the more consensual and ‘legitimate’ nature of US hegemony in the post-​w wii period through the formation of a new international or transnational ‘historical bloc’ (see Cox, 1987: 215; Gill and Law, 1989; Gill, 1993; Rupert, 1995: 43, 2000: 23–​8; Pijl, 1984: 90–​94, 138–​77). While giving ontological primacy to the social relations of production and class agency these Neo-​Gramscian accounts nonetheless share Ikenberry’s emphasis on civil society as the space where the ideological basis of US hegemony was constructed, consolidated, and politically legitimated. Moreover, both perspectives tend to focus on the internal properties of the constituent members of the post-​w wii international order in assessing its general character. In these ways, both liberal-​internationalist and Neo-​Gramscian ir largely converge around the idea that the making of the US-​led post-​w wii order witnessed the triumph of ‘liberal internationalist’ forces in solidifying a geopolitical and world economic order in their own image (Ruggie 1982; Cox 1987; Gill and Law 1989; Risse-​Kappen 1995; Rupert 1995; Deudney and Ikenberry 1999; Ikenberry 2001, 2011; Pijl, 1984). Both of these approaches largely accept the idea that the post-​war liberal order was of a fundamentally different quality to the previous era, and this was –​to varying degrees –​based on the way in which hegemonic arrangements were organized through inter and intra-​class forms of collaboration and political consensus. Such consensual arrangements were rooted in a regime of capital accumulation that smoothed out and nullified the political effects of class conflict alongside the stabilization and legitimization of liberal democratic forms of governance. Consequently, both perspectives also tend to neglect consideration of the fascist legacies and ideo-​political continuities in the construction and evolution of this liberal order after 1945. Indeed, Ikenberry’s analysis does not give much consideration to the diplomatic relations of the main liberal powers during the inter-​war era and, specifically, in their contrasting relations with the two forms –​fascist and

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communist –​of authoritarian and ‘revolutionary’ state in the lead up to the Second World War. Treating World War ii as both a geopolitical and ideological break with the past and its ending as a kind of tabula rasa, allows Ikenberry to pass over this history which reveals the workings of cold war ideological assumptions and geopolitical axes that stemmed from the liberal powers’ antagonism towards Moscow and international communism. Consequently, recognition of the Anglo-​American engagement with the fascist powers as a bulwark against the communist threat right up until 1939 (see Chapter 4 in Volume One) challenges the underlying assumption within liberal accounts –​ typified by Ikenberry’s work –​that the end of the war reflected an ideological clean sheet and opening for genuinely co-​operative diplomatic relations among the Allies. And as if the deep-​rooted ideological suspicions towards the radical left –​not just communists –​had disappeared as a consequence of the war and the struggle against fascism. In historically contextualizing and chronologically sequencing the diplomatic history of the early post-​war period –​that seals off and isolates the 1930s from the period after 1944–​5 –​Ikenberry (and the broader liberal account) decouples liberal diplomatic and geopolitical strategy from domestic politics such that he identifies the consolidation of liberal democracy across the West in the immediate period after the war as causal of the Cold War geopolitical stand-​off with Moscow. Yet, the consolidation of what Ikenberry defines as liberal democracy was intimately connected to a political strategy based on the anti-​leftist ideological attitudes of liberal and conservative elites and US state managers in particular. And it was the decisions that they took in Anglo-​ American occupied Western Europe after 1944–​5 that conditioned the precise ideological and institutional complexion of the liberal democracies that emerged. Indeed, and as will be demonstrated below, the precise form of (il) liberal democracy that emerged after 1945 was based on such deep-​seated insecurities about the domestic lefts, as much as they were about the external threat of the ussr based on its imposition of communist-​rule across Central-​ Eastern Europe. Thus throughout the war, and especially as it moved towards its closing stages, these anti-​leftist and anti-​communist sentiments became increasingly central to the strategic thinking and post-​war planning of the Anglo-​American powers (see Kolko, 1968: 4–​6, 31–​37, 56–​63; Leffler, 1992; 7–​8, 30–​33; Hearden, 2002: 13–​14, 22, 88–​90). It was this and the specific conjuncture of the immediate period after the defeat of fascism and the ideo-​political vacuums that emerged across formerly occupied and fascist Europe that meant that former fascists –​alongside fascist-​era political and legal frameworks –​were utilized to help secure a new liberal-​capitalist order centred on American geopolitical

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hegemony. Accordingly, the erasure in the liberal account of the pre-​war historical connections between the liberal powers and fascism –​that was founded on a mutual anti-​communism –​is one side of a coin. Its other side reveals the expurgation of the ideological proclivity for and strategy of liberal and conservative forces –​backed by the Anglo-​American powers –​to embrace former fascists as a central part of the strategy to consolidate a distinct kind of liberal and anti-​communist liberal democracy after the war. Consequently, it was the construction of the precise social form of liberal democracy that emerged premised on the excommunication of the (radical) left within some of the core Western European states that necessitated a geopolitical confrontation. That is, the external geopolitical landscape of the early post-​war era was central and causal to the ‘bastardized forms’ of liberal democracy that subsequently emerged in countries such as Italy and Germany. Therefore, while Soviet actions in Central-​Eastern Europe and, specifically, the Stalinization of the countries under Soviet occupation over 1945–​48 demonstrated the role of Soviet agency in the breakdown of the wartime ‘Grand Alliance,’ domestic trends in the West of Europe towards anti-​communism and hostility towards the ussr encouraged by the Anglo-​American powers pre-​dated Soviet actions in the East. Such a chronology-​sequencing indicates that the Stalinization of Central-​Eastern Europe was not the primary causal factor in either determining the anti-​communist political settlement in much of Western Europe nor the geopolitical division of Europe. Indeed, while Western liberals may have had cause for concern about the ‘subversive qualities’ of Soviet-​allied communist parties operating within the West, the type of liberal democratic arrangements that were established and consolidated in the years after 1945 extended the remit as to who was subversive or incompatible with liberal democratic order well beyond the communist and Soviet-​aligned lefts. And it was this ideological constriction as to who were designated as legitimate democratic actors that was instrumental in both the forging, and the social and political substance of the liberal international order that emerged after 1945. Accordingly, one of the most striking features of the post-​war liberal international order was the significance and necessary role played by illiberal, and anti-​democratic political forces including former fascists. So soon after the war –​and the genocidal horrors associated with it –​the inclusion of the far-​right and fascists in the post-​war liberal historical bloc5 reveals the highly compromised character of it, and the ambiguous 5 While there was a clear geographical (and racial) dimension to the spatial boundaries of the Cold War liberal order, the criteria for membership tended to privilege the organization of political economy within its prospective or non-​Western members over that of liberal

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relationship between liberalism and the far-​right that has been a defining, it not always sufficiently recognized, feature of liberal-​capitalist modernity over the longue durée. In sum, the liberal-​internationalist account of liberal order construction in Western Europe after 1945 not only fails to recognize and adequately account for the important ideo-​political continuities with the inter-​war era, but also rests on a misleading temporal sequencing and spatial origin for the emergence of the Cold War and its actual significance in the making of the post-​ war liberal international order. Consequently, what caused the Cold War was the precise socioeconomic and ideological form of liberal order that the US and its allies crafted after 1945 that necessitated an ideological and geopolitical confrontation with the ussr. The foundational key was the locking out of the radical left –​the most powerful social agency at the war’s end –​and it was this that facilitated the rapid rehabilitation and re-​entry of the far-​right into the structure and workings of liberal democracy. 1.1 Hegemony and the Far-​Right in the Making of Liberal Order As I argued in Volume One, the connections between liberalism as a form of political economy and international order and the far-​right stem from the structural or organic properties of liberalism and the distinct forms of social and political contradictions that define it. In what follows I spell out these structural contradictions in relation to the period after the war when the Cold

democracy. Thus, in the case of those western and southern European states where forms of far-​right authoritarian institutional arrangements defined the state rather than liberal democracy after 1945, (as was the case in Spain and Portugal and also Greece after the civil war and also between 1967 and 1974), what ultimately mattered was that these states remained committed to a geopolitical posture antagonistic towards the ussr and, domestically, the social and political forces of the radical left, as reflected in their domestic authoritarianism which also provided the basis for the preservation and reproduction of capitalist forms of political economy (i.e., the authoritarian state rather than the liberal democratic one was the means by which capitalism was managed and private property rights secured over the social interests of labour in particular). And although these arrangements did not permit entry into the inner sanctums of the institutions of the liberal international order, the absence of democracy did not bar these states from forms of geopolitical and security co-​operation nor economic connections, investment flows and trade agreements. It was this kind of framework that characterized the generalized relations between the core Western liberal democratic powers with those of non-​western far-​right authoritarian regimes across the Global South after 1945 even if some of these regimes were defined by forms of state terror and violence that approximated the institutional arrangements of fascist forms of state.

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War liberal order was constructed. In doing so, I map out the alternative theoretical framework that informs the historical and empirical discussion that follows. The main structural property that forms part of the longue durée of liberal order construction is sourced in the destabilizing geosocial consequences of the uneven and combined nature of capitalist development and how such processes and their outcomes come to affect, if not determine, the concrete ideo-​political conditions upon which liberal international orders are built. Liberalism and, with it, liberal orders do not tend to be constructed on ideal social foundations because the capitalist economic properties that undergird liberal orders produce uneven and combined development. The consequence of which is that the spatial, social and ideological cognates of any liberal order also contain within them contradictory and antagonistic anti-​liberal elements –​from the left and the right –​that problematize the stability of the ‘liberal centre’. Far-​right ideo-​political forces are part of this contradictory social and ideological amalgam upon which liberal orders are constructed. This reveals a contradictory clash of structural forces pushing a (liberal) universalizing dynamic centred on individual freedom, constitutional order, and representative government –​as the ideal-​typical political framing for the market economy –​against a concrete and embedded amalgam of the old and the new, the hostile and the supportive, within historically specific social formations. And it is here where we can situate the far-​right as organic to and constitutive of liberal orderings. The relevance of this point for explaining both the construction and political characteristics of the post-​1945 international order is that these contradictions –​which had helped to drive the world to war again in 1939 –​remained, to a significant degree, in place after the military defeat of the fascist states. Thus, in the former European fascist states the social-​political conditions for constructing the bases of liberal order were problematized because of the continuing political legacies of their uneven and combined development, which the war had reconstituted rather than resolved. Whereas the primary threat to the consolidation of liberal order after 1918 –​and which ended up driving into breakdown and war in 1939 –​was from fascism, at the war’s end, and because of the defeat of fascism and the widespread discrediting of traditional political elites and ruling classes, the threat came from a revitalized radical left. The crises and conflicts that defined the interwar period, and which fatally undermined attempts to reconstruct a liberal international order, had not, then, disappeared. Instead, the challenge that now confronted US political strategists was the problem of constructing a liberal international order out of social and political conditions in some of its key geopolitical zones that were antagonistic

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to the very principles of the specific kind of liberal order that they had in mind. This was the primary dilemma faced by US policymakers after the war: the recurring problem of reconstructing and managing the contradictory dynamics of an international liberal order wherein its constituent social elements were hardly conducive to it. Indeed, this persistent problematic produced from capitalism’s combined development means that the far-​right –​in terms of ideological tropes and political forces –​has, historically, played a constitutive role in liberal order construction. This can be seen in the way it has, in certain conjunctures (associated with moments of revolutionary crisis or major political instability), provided a mass or popular bulwark against the radical left, a kind of coercive and populist ‘reserve army’ against the democratic left –​fascism being but one important case. This dimension has both a quasi-​democratic and para-​political element given the importance of the deployment of the coercive apparatuses of the capitalist state in responding to periods of social disorder and political instability and the close connections nurtured by these parts of the state and far-​right authoritarian currents and organizations within civil society. The importance and role of the far-​right has also been revealed through the way in which it has provided an alternative form of ideological legitimation for the security of capitalist social property relations, re-​centring the demos with a racialized idea and practice of citizenship and in helping to extinguish domestic forms of class conflict through externalizing social contradictions as of geopolitical (or racial) rather than social origin (see Trump’s election in 2016 as a recent example of this). The significance of this for the possibilities bequeathed by the ideological, social, and political consequences of the military defeat of fascism for the construction of a post-​war liberal democratic order was that, for a brief moment –​ between 1944 and 1947 –​an unprecedented socio-​political conjuncture for constructing a social and democratically centered (liberal) international order presented itself. Such a moment was closely tied to the combined weakness of liberal and conservative political elites mainly because of their (especially the latter’s) accommodation with fascism and the revival of a communist-​led democratic left that had played a leading role in anti-​fascist wartime resistance. Further, this immediate post-​fascist environment was quickly moving towards consolidating and expanding democratic structures over the political and economic spheres, as evidenced by the advances of subaltern classes linked to left-​ wing political parties committed to democratic societal transformation organized through state planning and organized labour. The outlines of a radically new social settlement based on a fundamental rooting out of the social and political sources of fascism, and a new kind of European international order

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with significant limits on the social power of capital and privileges of private property were all on the horizon (Eley, 2002; Halperin, 2004). That this did not emerge –​or was significantly curtailed in its realization –​ was, in part, because of the way in which the left was fractured and undermined by Soviet actions in Central-​Eastern Europe (Ikenberry, 2001: 166). However, what was determining and what, ultimately, explains the failure of this radical democratic moment to be fully realized were the combined activities and inter-​play between the Anglo-​American occupying forces and their most able and active collaborators across liberated Western Europe, which included the quickly rehabilitated forces of fascism. And it was this domestic/​international interplay and inter-​activity that produced the specific kind of post-​war liberal order that was constructed from the mid-​to-​late 1940s to the early 1960s. And it was here where the political agency of the post-​fascist far-​right was central; as this was a political order premised on a curtailment of the democratic possibilities bequeathed by the war, a marginalization and ostracization of the democratic left, and the integration of the far-​right into the historical bloc within several West European states at the heart of this new liberal international order. 2

The Cold War Liberal Order and the Far-​Right after 1945

The full realization of the democratic potential bequeathed by the war did, indeed, reveal the reality of the fears that Western elites had identified and framed policy around in the 1930s, as to the ultimate beneficiaries of another European war, as discussed in Volume One. Thus at the war’s end Soviet geopolitical power had increased significantly, even if we qualify this –​as we must –​ through recognition of the enormous material and human destruction that the ussr suffered in its victory over Nazi Germany (see Deutscher, 1960; Dibb, 1986; Hobsbawm, 1994; Roberts, 1999). Further, the forces of the radical left –​and in France and Italy in particular under the leadership of their respective communist parties –​emerged stronger, better organized and more popular than ever, given the roles that each had played in leading anti-​fascist resistance struggles. This contrasted with the material damage to private property and industry and the political discrediting of ruling classes based on their links, acquiescence and, in many respects, collaboration with fascism and/​or Nazi occupation and the traditional political sources of the conservative right. What this meant was that the material and social bases for the restoration or reconstitution of liberal-​capitalist order in several states –​including (West) Germany –​that were to be integral to the establishment and

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reproduction of the post-​war liberal international order reflected a likely democratic outcome in the immediate months of peace that seriously threatened to jeopardize the particular kind of liberal democratic and capitalist social order that was the primary objective of US (and British) policy makers at the war’s end. What I am suggesting is that the balance of socio-​political forces across much of Western Europe over 1944–​47 was conducive to a different kind of liberal-​democratic order than what subsequently emerged. And it was precisely this contradiction –​and outcome of combined development –​that facilitated a revival of the European far-​right and its significant role in the construction of the type of liberal democratic order that did subsequently emerge. One that was very much more conducive to protecting and upholding the rights of private property and the social and political interests of the capitalist class and excommunicating the left –​social democratic as much as communist –​from access to state power, while, at the same time welcoming former fascist and far-​right fellow-​travellers back into the political fold. So, while the circumstances of the immediate post-​war era were very different from the earlier historical episodes of the European far-​right nevertheless these same social forces came to play a key role –​as they had done in the past –​in determining the make-​up of European liberal democratic politics. Thus, exposing the constitutive contradiction and tension within liberalism between its ‘political’ and ‘economic’ bases, as reflected in the need to impose political and institutional bulwarks against the democratic threat –​inherent within liberalism’s political sphere –​to capitalist social property relations and, relatedly, the kind of international order that the US aimed to construct. And it is within this social and political context where the processes of passive revolution played out. This was revealed in both the limited way in which subaltern political participation was accommodated within the workings of the new post-​war liberal states (Cox, 1987; Rupert, 1995; Pijl, 1984) and the molecular changes in the organization and workings of capitalist political economy. The radicalizing and democratizing dynamics of the struggle against fascism were, with the assistance of US intervention in particular, dispersed and co-​ opted into the state forms –​based on new forms of capitalist political rule –​ that emerged, which left existing and hierarchical class arrangements largely in place and closed off the possibilities of radical-​democratic transformation. 2.1 Fascist Legacies in the Post-​War European Liberal State The conceptualization –​as detailed above in the arguments of Ikenberry, Ruggie, Cox and others –​of the post-​war liberal international order rests on the premise of a mutually reinforcing transformation at the domestic and

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international levels. In the former, states were liberalized and democratized –​ at least to the extent that they were reconstituted through the creation of new institutions, norms, and structures to facilitate their integration into the new liberal order (Cox, 1987: 214–​7; Rupert, 1995; 43). In the latter, on the other hand, the transformation concerned membership of nato as a collective security organization and a shift towards the multilateral management of international economic relations through the Bretton Woods institutions and gatt and, at a regional level, European integration. In addition to these political-​institutional transformations, the socioeconomic character of the state also changed with the emergence of more developed and comprehensive welfare systems alongside commitments to full-​employment that served to ‘socially democratise’ the state to some extent. These changes developed out of what Geoff Eley (2002: 288) argues was the high-​point of the radical-​democratic impulse that accompanied the liberation of Europe from fascism between 1942–​43 and 1947. Here, the forces of the left including and, in France and Italy in particular, led by their respective communist parties, encapsulated the radical-​revolutionary possibilities bequeathed by a liberation where the left was, momentarily, in political and ideological terms, hegemonic. It was the changes identified above that emerged from this social and political milieu that not only reflected the transitory weakness and disorientation of the dominant social classes, especially in those countries where they had appeared to embrace collaboration with fascism and/​or Nazi occupation, but also the temporary banishment of the far-​right from mainstream politics. Further, and with respect to prevailing accounts of the emergence of the post-​war liberal international order, it was these changes that provided the evidence of the social and democratic dimensions of the liberal democratic transformation. However, what this analytical framing –​Neo-​Gramscian as much as liberal internationalist –​largely overlooks is the real possibility that such changes could have been extended and deepened in a social and democratic sense, resulting in a more radical, indeed, revolutionary social and political transformation of Western Europe after the defeat of fascism. The principal reason why such radical momentum was not maintained, and such radical transformation was forestalled was due to the onset of the ‘Second’ Cold War and the political, economic, and ideological re-​equipping of political elites and ruling classes, through American intervention. In many respects, and especially so with regard to the democratization of state and society, the possibilities bequeathed by ‘democratic liberation’ were not fulfilled. Further, the campaign to limit the possibilities of post-​war radical transformation not only involved, indeed, required US political and economic intervention, but also the re-​admittance

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and reliance on those elements within the state who could be most trusted to thwart and oppose any moves towards radical social transformation: the servants of fascism. Consequently, the central issue here, concerns the social and ideological constitution of West European states after the war as the Cold War set in to structure politics. Taking the liberal and existing Neo-​Gramscian accounts at face value, these states were liberal in the sense that they had been transformed by liberation and in the immediate period thereafter via US political and economic intervention organized through the Marshall Plan. For Robert Cox, as much as for John Ikenberry, Western European states were fundamentally reconstituted in what Cox (1987) terms a new ‘historical bloc’ premised on the inclusion of organized labour and other sections of the left into the new hegemonic arrangements, alongside a restructuring of the institutions of the state and its relations with civil society. Such arguments, nonetheless, downplay the evidence of continuity within the state and, in particular, with the personnel and ideology of fascism in some states that came to constitute the liberal international order. Indeed, the incorporation of labour into the historical bloc was premised on its subordination within the organization and workings of the bloc (see Rupert, 1995), its commitment to productivism (see Maier, 1977; Rupert, 1995) such that wage rises did not undermine profit rates, as well as its commitment to a general passivity in terms of challenging the fundamental sanctity of private property rights and the excommunication of the communist left from being recognized as –​in any way –​a legitimate representative of democratic forces. Indeed, the scope of the democratic transformation after 1945 extended only so far and for so long as left-​wing forces were hegemonic. Within the space of three-​to-​four years the possibility of a ‘democratic springtime’ had morphed into a much more constricted liberal democratic order founded on the excommunication of the left and (partial) embrace of the far-​right. This shift was a product of both the shared suspicions and fears of traditional political elites, ruling classes and US authorities towards the radical ambitions of domestic lefts which was accentuated by Soviet behaviour in the East. However, while such suspicions as to the authoritarian and coercive character of the Soviet-​aligned communist parties may have been well-​ founded, these suspicions extended to the non-​communist and anti-​Stalinist lefts as well. Such parties, the Socialists in Italy and the Social Democrats (spd) in West Germany, maintained a strong commitment to working within a liberal democratic framework, even in moments of crisis –​as demonstrated in the immediate periods before fascists were invited into power. This made their rhetorical commitment to democracy that much more convincing than those

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liberals and conservatives that had enabled and collaborated with fascists even if their post-​war branding in the new political vehicle of ‘Christian Democracy’ tried to distance them from such associations (see Kurlander, 2009). A concern with a left/​communist form of authoritarianism was not then the reason, or only reason, for the willingness of liberal and conservative forces to engage with the far-​right and former fascists to isolate and contain the broader left (Bale, 2017; Eisenberg 1996; Eley, 2002; Ferraresi, 1996: 440). Indeed, the kind of suspicions that defined US policy toward leftists in general throughout the postcolonial world, and which fostered its collaboration with far-​right forces, was also evident in its geopolitical strategizing across the zones of the liberal-​ capitalist core. The transformations at the domestic level across Western European states –​ the sine qua non of the realization of liberal democracy of the post-​war era –​ were highly uneven and, after the initial waves of anti-​fascist purges, saw the return of the personnel of fascist states in Germany and Italy and collaborators in France and, especially in Greece, to positions of power and authority. Such tendencies were evident early on as the Allies entered the western reaches of the Reich in the early spring of 1945 in their attitudes towards the local anti-​ fascist committees (largely made up of social democrats and communists who had gone underground during the Nazi period) that quickly sprung up as the Wehrmacht retreated. Stepping up to provide food and shelter to refugees and offering to co-​operate and assist Anglo-​American forces, as a well as identify fascists, they were either ignored or actively dismantled by the Allies, neutering any possibility for developing local and organic forms of anti-​fascism taking root upon which a new social and political dispensation might be established (Eley, 2002: 297). And, by May 1945 with Nazism defeated, the Allies banned the homegrown and leftist-​led anti-​fascist movement in Germany thus destroying at birth the possibility of a radical and democratic Germany after the war (Graf, 1984: 166; see also Boehling, 1996: 1–​3; 102–​4, 124, 158, 207). Instead, the Allies quickly turned to the remnants of the Nazi state to provide the basis for the new Germany (Kiatsky, 2005: ix, 77) and, the potential for democratic structural change represented by some of the Antifas’ activities scarcely survived after their formal prohibition in the early summer of 1945, and virtually expired after the reinstitution of democratic elections in the spring of 1946. boehling, 1996: 170

As in the other states tarnished by fascist government or occupation, liberation saw a purge of leading fascists and, in the German case –​with Nazi

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responsibility for the Holocaust –​war crimes tribunals were instituted leading to the execution and/​or imprisonment of leading Nazi figures.6 The initial purge saw tens of thousands of Nazi officials and functionaries removed but within two years most of these purged Nazis –​many of them occupying senior roles across the state apparatus –​had been allowed back to their posts. As Graf (1984: 167) informs us, of the 53,000 state functionaries originally dismissed by the Western Allies due to their Nazi connections, only 1,000 were permanently excluded and, in the case of the judiciary, almost every single person who was purged was allowed back. At the end of 1948, the reintegration of former Nazis back into the state (in the Western zones) was virtually complete. In Hessen and Bavaria nearly all of those originally dismissed had been allowed to return to power (Volnhas, 1998: 193; see further, Boehling, 1996: 51–​71; Hayse, 2003; 157; Herz, 1982). In Bavaria in 1951, Tony Judt (2010: 57–​8) details that 94 per cent of judges and senior prosecutors, 77 percent of finance ministry employees and 60 percent of civil servants in the regional Agricultural Ministry were former Nazis. He goes on, [b]‌y 1952 one in three Foreign Ministry officials in Bonn was a former member of the Nazi Party. Of the newly-​constituted West German Diplomatic Corps, 43 percent were former ss men and another 17 percent had served in the sd or Gestapo. William Griffith, the US official responsible for de-​Nazification in Bavaria, lamented, [t]‌he very top Nazis –​were temporarily immobilized, but otherwise, Nazis, militarists, industrialists and bureaucrats were free to re-​enter society. And they re-​entered in thousands; the flood of ‘renazification’ ran full tide. From 40 to 80 per cent of the officials in many branches of public administration are now reinstated Nazis. More important, many of them are present-​day authoritarians. cited in boehling, 1996: 239

In one of the most notorious examples of this trend, Hans Globke –​a co-​author of the Nuremburg Nazi race laws –​ended up as one of Konrad Adenauer’s (the first Chancellor of West Germany) top advisers and General Reinhard Gehlen, 6 However, it was in West Germany where the smallest numbers of former fascists were either executed or imprisoned after the war compared to the rest of Europe (Deák et al., 2000: 4; Judt, 2010).

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Hitler’s former intelligence chief on the Eastern Front, became head of the Bundesrepublik’s federal intelligence service in 1956 (Kiatsky, 2005: ix, 77; Judt, 2010: 58). At the same time that the Allies were moving to re-​instate former Nazis they moved to repress the left, which came to a head with the outlawing of the German Communist Party in August 1956. The newly established West German state was based on an ideological continuity with Nazism: a foundational anti-​communism that went beyond its geopolitical insecurity derived from the communist basis of the German Democratic Republic in the east. This ideological orientation came close to replicating the hysterical paranoia of the German ruling class against the left in general over the history of the Weimar Republic (Abraham, 1986; Anievas, 2014: 142–​162; Mann, 2004: 177–​206). Indeed, as Rebecca Boehling (1996: 170) has argued, the bureaucratic continuity in the post-​war period with that of the Weimar and Reich periods was as important as capitalist continuity in defining post-​war West Germany. Further, the re-​population of the state with former Nazis –​what its new Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, called ‘fellow travellers’7 was an important development in the determination of the precise character of the liberal international order that emerged. Thus the remaking the West German state was central to the broader post-​fascist reconstitution of the wider European order not only through the defining anti-​communist ‘common sense’ that pervaded its post-​war political culture and institutional make-​up, but also throughout the 1950s and the role that former Nazis played in this process and in the workings of the new legal-​political institutions of what became the European Economic Community (see Joerges, 2003; Wilkinson, 2016: 11–​21). Lest one is tempted by the explanation that the re-​employment of Nazis was necessary or inevitable because of the need to use the only available expertise and knowledge for the tasks of reconstruction, there were, however, political alternatives in post-​war West Germany to what the Western Allies supervised and encouraged. Further, these alternatives were as hostile to the Cold War division of Europe and Soviet manoeuvrings in Central and Eastern Europe, as they were to the type of tainted political compromise that defined the Bundesrepublik throughout the early decades of the post-​war era. In particular, the alternative offered by the spd under Kurt Schumacher’s leadership was significantly different. Far from sympathetic and, in some respects, hostile to German communists (see Jackson, 2006: 63–​8; Hook, 2004: 45), the spd 7 In a speech in May 1946 –​only a year after the Nazi defeat –​the future cdu Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, spoke out against denazification measures demanding that ‘Nazi “fellow travellers” be left in peace.’ He made the same point two months later saying that it was ‘lasting too long and doing no good’ (cited in Judt, 2010: 56–​7).

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was much more seriously committed to de-​Nazification and, with it, a very different kind of post-​war liberal democratic state, as well as one based on a very different geopolitical orientation: de-​militarised, neutral and united (Granieri, 2003: 9–​12; Judt, 2010: 126: Küsters, 1995: 57).8 As Schumacher put it, perceptively, in 1945, [t]‌he contest over foreign policy is at the same time the contest over internal policy and the social content of the political order … Foreign policy sets the limits to the possibilities of our economic and social policy. cited in granieri, 2003: 9

The spd, not just the Communist Party, was also committed to a more substantial socioeconomic reckoning with the capitalists that had collaborated with Nazism. Initially, and particularly in the British zone of occupation, the spd’s commitment to decartelization through the socialization of heavy industry9 and the banking and insurance sectors secured a positive response from the British occupation authorities. Indeed, across parts of the cdu the socialization of heavy industry –​that sector identified as the most reactionary fraction of capital –​was seen as a post-​war necessity. However, US opposition which had hardened by mid-​1947, forced the British to renege on their promises to the spd. The failure to fundamentally restructure German industry and deal with ‘Nazi capital’ after 1945 ensured that the traditional and authoritarian attitudes and mind-​sets that had prevailed across large sectors of the German capitalist class remained well into the 1950s (see Berghahn, 1986: 12–​15). Such an outcome would have seriously undermined the type of socioeconomic order that the US was committed to achieving after the war. It would have been social democratic rather than liberal-​capitalist and it would not have rested on the type of anti-​communism that dominated Ikenberry’s liberal order (Judt, 2010: 100–​128). This distinct post-​war vision for Germany associated with the spd, continued until the early 1960s. That this did not play out after 1945 was obviously connected to the electoral victories of the new incarnation of German nationalist conservatism, in the form of the Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (cdu) that came to dominate post-​war

8 The spd did not accept the post-​war political-​economic settlement until their 1959 Bad Godesberg party conference and only in 1960 West German membership of nato (Granieri, 2003: 12). 9 The US had broadly committed to such policies as part of the Potsdam Agreement as embodied in jcs1067 (see Eisenberg, 1982: 24).

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West German politics, but this outcome was far from assured or likely in the immediate period after the destruction of the Nazi state in 1945. Indeed, it was the combination of Western and, specifically, US occupation policy, that came to rely on such conservative socio-​political forces and the incorporation of significant elements of the Nazi-​state apparatus into the new administration and leadership of the new Bundesrepublik after 1948, that determined both its specific post-​war ideo-​political complexion as a virulently anti-​communist state and, consequently, its membership of the post-​war liberal international order. Here we can see a direct connection between the specific configuration of the domestic political constituents of post-​war West Germany with the character and direction of the international order that emerged. It is important to note that the developments discussed above –​the pre-​ emptive moves to marginalize the left, the foreclosing of the possibilities for a comprehensive programme of de-​Nazification and a more extensive democratization of state and society –​began sometime before the breakdown of the wartime alliance and the emergence of the Cold War. This was evident in the restricting of the scope and depth of the ‘Four-​D’ programme of de-​Nazification. Accordingly, by 1948 three of the ‘Ds’ (de-​Nazification, de-​cartelization10 and democratization) had been heavily diluted and with West Germany’s entry into nato in 1955, the final one was effectively abandoned (Boehling, 1996: 58–​ 59; Eisenberg, 1996: 121–​165; Graf, 1984: 167; Reich, 1994: 246–​261). The aborted nature of Western and US de-​Nazification in particular, was a consequence of several factors but ‘the most overriding was’ according to Carolyn Eisenberg (1996: 164–​165), the affinity of American businessmen for Germany's old economic elite and their unshakable conviction that only the experienced private owners and managers of capital were capable of restoring the country’s productive apparatus … The other was a virulent anticommunism that flowed through many of the veins of Military Government. What we can take from the way that the US intervened in West Germany after 1945 is that it reflected a common global approach –​evident in other 10

De-​cartelization was connected to an initial programme to purge directors of the large industrial cartels that had served the Nazi regime and used slave labour, yet almost all of those representatives of big business identified by the US Kilgore commission as war criminals, including the notorious Nazi industrialists Alfried Krupp and Friedrich Flick, were largely back in their companies by 1948 (Graf, 1984: 167; Judt, 2010: 58; Pingel, 1998: 82–​5).

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geopolitical zones outside of the capitalist core –​which reflected the geopolitical management of the legacies of antecedent forms of combined development (Rosenberg 1996: 12; Anievas, 2014) that had produced social and political forces and material circumstances far from ideal for the kind of liberal-​ capitalist order that American hegemony was committed to. And it was this actual geo-​social context that US state managers confronted: the need to put former fascist countries ‘back to work’ through stabilizing their economies and steadying social and political order that made the embrace of former fascists so attractive and especially when the left alternative had a very different idea as to what needed to be done and how. Yet, in each case, the forces of the far-​ right exercised significant agency in their own right while being strategically engaged by US state managers as bulwarks against ‘communist subversion.’ It is important not to dismiss the significance of this turn of events in West Germany –​that reflected a more general pattern evident in other Western European states –​for consideration of the social and ideological foundations of the post-​war liberal international order. Of course, the fact that these former Nazi officials –​many of whom may not have been ‘ideological followers’ –​were now operating within a different type of political context obviously ensured that the post-​war German state was not fascist.11 However, there is evidence to indicate that the liberal-​democratic character of the new West German state was heavily tainted by a constitutive hostility to the left that ensured that reactionary, authoritarian and far-​right impulses remained at the heart of the way in which the state viewed and responded to the left in general, and not just communists. For example, one of the key anti-​subversive laws of the new West German state that specifically targeted the left through its reference to specific political attitudes was drafted by former Nazi lawyers. This led to thousands of political trials against leftist campaigners and demonstrators. In effect, a use of law to silence those who were willing to challenge the post-​war anti-​ communist ‘political consensus’ (Kühnl, 1998: 266–​8). In contrast to the treatment of former fascists and holocaust deniers –​who quickly re-​organised themselves into post-​fascist parties and were allowed to participate in the political process (Eatwell, 2003: 277; Tauber, 1967) –​the Bundesrepublik’s anti-​communist pathology was central to its liberal-​democratic shortcomings. This particular narrowing of what constituted the legitimate political spectrum brings to mind Carl Schmitt’s critique of the Weimar Republic (Cristi, 1998; Müller, 2003) and politics as fundamentally resting 11

However, the Nazi-​drafted civil service code of 1937 remained in force until 1953 when it was replaced by a Federal Civil Service Law, but this was not made binding on all Länder until after 1957 (Hayse, 2003: 93–​4).

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on the identification of ‘the enemy’ and their casting out of the political process. Unlike Weimar, however –​and hence the spectre of Schmidt (although officially denounced as a former Nazi legal adviser) –​while the Communist Party (kpd) had been permitted to participate in democratic politics (i.e., ‘the enemy’ was recognised as a ‘legitimate’ political participant) this was not the case after 1945. And while the Nazi party was hostile to Weimar and ended up dissolving it, the post-​fascists of the Bundesrepublik were integrated into it as loyal anti-​communists and ‘cold warriors’. The early post-​war history of Italy demonstrated several similarities with West Germany regarding the continuation of a fascist presence within the state after liberation. However, there were two key differences in the Italian case which are of deep significance for any consideration of the liberal-​democratic character of post-​war Italy and the inter-​connections between the domestic and international in the construction and workings of the post-​war liberal international order. First, unlike in Germany where de-​Nazification was, effectively, carried through by the occupying Allied forces, in Italy –​because of the partial liberation of the country in 1943 –​the liberated zone in the South came under the jurisdiction of a new Royalist-​led government which took the lead in effecting anti-​fascist purges. And this local-​Italian agency continued to take on this responsibility after the final defeat of the rump fascist state (the so-​called Republic of Salò) with the full liberation of Italy in April 1945. A major consequence of this was that the crimes of Italian fascism –​including its invasion and brutal occupation of Ethiopia between 1935 and 194112 –​were never subject to international public scrutiny and prosecution through an international criminal tribunal in the way that the crimes of Nazism were. And this failure by the Allies provided a lasting legacy for the post-​war reputation of Mussolini and the fascist regime which also came to taint the political culture of the new post-​fascist state. The importance of this conservative break with Mussolini –​in the form of the combined moves by several disenchanted fascists (notably Marshal Pietro Badoglio) and the King, and the Allies willingness to recognize them as 12

Of which the massacre of nearly 20,000 Ethiopians by Italian forces in February 1937 on the orders of General Rodolfo Graziani (the Viceroy of East Africa) after an assassination attempt, was one of the most notorious. While Graziana was sentenced to a long prison term for collaboration with the Nazis, he only served a few months. And with the British government playing a leading role in fending off Ethiopia’s demands for Graziana and others (including Marshal Pietro Badoglio) to be prosecuted, he, like all the others involved in Italy’s occupation of Ethiopia, was never made to answer for his colonial crimes. Instead, he was quickly rehabilitated, joining the msi and celebrated as a local hero (see Campbell, 2017).

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the legitimate government of liberated Italy –​was that a powerful myth of (dis) continuity in the Italian state was established. This apparent ‘break’ with fascism worked to undermine left-​wing calls for a more fundamental and radical rupture with the fascist state, a consequence of which was that this ‘break’ did little or nothing to ensure a discontinuity in the actual ideological and administrative character of the state in the post-​fascist era (Ferraresi, 1996: 16; see also Duggan, 1995: 2–​3). The second key difference was the role played by the pci in Italy’s liberation and its status as the largest and most organized political force in Italy at the war’s end. It was the significance of the pci in Italian political life after the war that was to strongly influence the far-​right dimensions of Italy’s so-​called liberal and democratic order after 1945 up until the late 1970s. The significance of local Italian ownership of the purge of fascists from state and other offices was that many of those overseeing the purge across the liberated zones were either former fascists (such as Pietro Badoglio, Prime Minister of the ‘post-​fascist’ Italian state between July 1943 and June 1944), or who had been sympathetic to fascism because of their fear of the democratic and radical left, such as Royalist forces and the Roman Catholic hierarchy in particular (Domenico, 1991). The upshot of this was that in the South, many fascists remained in office after September 1943 (Dunnage, 1996: 167–​80). However, the combined pressures from the Allies for a coherent and comprehensive programme of de-​fascistization alongside demands from the left saw a shift away from the reactionary clique associated with the King, Victor Emmanuel iii, with the replacement of Badoglio as prime minister in June 1944 by a former liberal premier from the pre-​fascist era, Ivanoe Bonomi. This shift was to see a change in the momentum of Italian anti-​fascism with a new law promulgated in July that focused on purging and prosecuting fascists (Woller, 1998: 537). However, in spite of this, the anti-​fascist purges made little impact in helping to lay the basis for a new state freed from the influence of fascism.13 Indeed, many judges who were responsible for upholding the new law remained sympathetic to the fascist past (Duggan, 1995: 4) and the implementation of the law was 13

Even by 1960, the legacy of fascism on the administrative structure of the post-​war Republic continued to be pronounced. As Ferraresi (1996: 18; see also Ginsborg, 1990: 92) details, of 64 first-​class prefects, 62 had served the fascist state as well as all 241 deputy prefects, the 135 Questori (provincial chiefs of state police), and the 139 deputy chiefs. Ferraresi suggests that these figures underestimate the fascist presence in the post-​war police hierarchy with many leftists who had entered the police as the war ended being quickly dismissed and roles and openings provided for fascist police who had served in Africa and in the rsi, including some who had been convicted of war crimes and then pardoned.

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stuck with a ‘catch-​22’ as many civil servants worked to obstruct its operation in the absence of consistent pressure from the Allies (Woller, 1998: 537; see also, Duggan, 1995: 4–​5; Ginsborg, 1990: 53; 91–​3). The significance for the post-​fascist and liberal-​democratic character of post-​war Italy, however, went well beyond fascist judges remaining in post and extended to some of the key elements of the legal apparatus of fascism. As Christopher Duggan (1995: 5; see also Dunnage, 1997: 76–​81) outlines, the 1948 Constitution stated that pre-​existing (i.e., fascist) statutes including the Public Security Law of 1926 and the Rocco Penal Code of 1931 ‘should remain in force until the Constitutional Court had decided on whether or not they were compatible with the new constitution.’ However, since the Constitutional Court was not properly established and working until the mid-​1950s such decisions ended up being left to the main appeal court, the Court of Cassation ‘whose judgements were in general highly conservative.’ Consequently, ‘during the 1950s the state not only kept at its disposal most of the repressive legislation that been issued under fascism but used it as well.’14 Further, and in a foretaste of the encroaching Cold War that was soon to become defining of the nature of Italy’s post-​war liberal democratic order, the governing left-​right coalition (involving the pci and the Italian Socialist Party (psi) and the newly founded Christian Democrats (cd)) quickly became engulfed in political deadlock based on the divisions over the extent and oversight of de-​fascistization with the cd s refusing to implement a more rigorous policy.15 Thus while the left wanted to refound Italy as an explicitly post-​fascist state, the right, in the form of the cd leader Alcide de Gasperi, regarded fascists as defeated opponents who needed to be re-​integrated and not expelled from the political system (Domenico, 1991; Woller, 1998: 538). The upshot was that soon after the short burst of anti-​fascist momentum over 1944–​5 under both Bonomi and de Gasperi the existing state structure and personnel that

14

15

And as Johnathan Dunnage (1997: 78) notes, this fascist-​era legislation –​which was explicitly targeted at repressing the political activities of the left and which also gave licence to police violence and the use of torture in interrogations –​continued to be deployed by the police authorities throughout the 1950s against the pci. This did not stop the pci from accepting a new –​much more generous –​amnesty law in June 1946 as a way of preserving the government of national unity (Ferraresi, 1998: 588–​9). What was particularly significant about this amnesty was that it effectively pardoned a large number of fascists who had killed and tortured partisans who had been fighting both the Wehrmacht and the remaining Italian fascist forces associated with the post-​ Mussolini Republic of Salò. This was a particularly bitter pill for the pci to swallow.

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the first post-​war governments inherited from fascism was ‘quietly consolidated’ (Ginsborg, 1990: 91; Dunnage, 1997: 80). Gasperi and the cd’s willingness to overlook and forgive the crimes of fascism did not, however, extend to the left. And through monopolizing the levers of state power in the first decade and more after liberation, the government permitted the courts –​in many cases staffed by former fascist judges –​to treat partisans as criminals in contrast to the armed units of the rsi who were legally categorized as ‘belligerents’ and so with the legal protections that came with this designation. In sum, we can agree with Paul Ginsborg’s (1990: 52; see also Dunnage, 1997: 79) verdict that in spite of the massive popular impetus –​as evidenced by the sacrifices of many Italians, not just partisans, in the final year of the war –​‘the immense desire and potential for reform remained almost entirely unrealized’ and this outcome was in part a consequence of the decisions of the Allies. We will come back to the nature and development of the post-​war Italian state and its fascist dimensions in subsequent sections below, but we now turn to the specifically international –​read US –​dimensions to these developments. Repeating the dynamic that played out in West Germany (and other parts of formerly occupied Western Europe), because of the size and widespread popularity of the pci, the US made several interventions into Italian politics that speak to the weaknesses in liberal-​internationalist and Neo-​Gramscian accounts of the nature and construction of the post-​war liberal international order. As already suggested in the discussion above, the US and Britain remained concerned, above all, to protect and cultivate elements within the traditional Italian political elite and ruling class to provide the backbone for the new post-​fascist state. Thus, while the primary responsibility for the limits of the anti-​fascist purge lay with the Italian right the US was also instrumental. The US took it upon itself to become much more active in determining the nature of post-​war Italy, thus fusing the domestic bases of liberal order with its international dimension. They did so by actively working to curtail the possibilities for a (radical) democratic transformation after liberation by following the generalised and long-​standing logic of anti-​communism. Specifically, with its entrenched hostility towards the pci, US state managers sought to ensure that the party would not have access to the levers of state power16 throughout the period of the Cold War in spite of it not only being the largest 16

Such hostility extended to the left in general as the psi was also considered persona non grata. Indeed, it was not until the mid-​1960s that the US came around to accepting a role for the socialists in the government of Italy but only after the party had re-​branded itself as a loyal anti-​communist force. Italy was the last West European liberal democracy (thus

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party in Italy, but also the primary organization of anti-​fascist resistance. The framing and organization of post-​war Italian politics based, as it was, on the explicit goal of excluding, indeed, denying the possibility of the pci having access to state power severely compromised, if it did not fundamentally corrode, the democratic basis of Italy’s liberal democratic order. The key intervention in this regard was the US funding of the right and sponsorship of the propaganda against the pci and wider left17 in the 1948 general election. As has been well-​documented, the US pumped millions of dollars (Ginsborg, 1990: 115–​16)18 into Italy in support of the Christian Democrats19 and funded a range of civil society actors, particularly the Roman Catholic Church, to provoke fear across Italy over the possibility of a victory for the left in the election. In addition to this, it also made clear that any funding for post-​war reconstruction would be terminated if the pci/​left were victorious (Ledeen, 1987: 56–​7). Behind the scenes the US, and some of its key decision-​makers, such as George Kennan (still a leading figure in the State Department) –​in a memo of March 1948 –​argued for the cancellation of the election or the banning of the pci and, if the left won, the deployment of US troops to ‘protect Italian democracy’ (frus, 1974: 848–​9). What we can take from this regarding the construction of the US-​led liberal international order after wwii was that the US actively intervened in 1948 and in subsequent years and decades20 to destroy the potential of the pci and

17 18

19

20

excluding the far-​right regimes in Portugal, Spain, and Greece) to have a left-​wing led government, which had to wait until 1983. US ambassadors in the first decade or so after the war regarded the psi as a ‘communist “Trojan horse” that echoed US perceptions of leftist forces in the post-​colonial world’ (Kiatsky, 2005: 113). Timothy Smith (1991: 35; see also Barnes, 1982; Kiatsky, 2005: 113; Miller, 1983) suggests that the cia spent us$1 million in the 1948 election and approximately us$65 million over the period 1948–​68 in keeping the left out of power. In addition to this several US companies have also acknowledged their funding of the right during the Cold War. According to Blum (2003: 120) Exxon-​Mobil donated between us$46–​49 million to political parties and other organizations over the period 1963–​72. The US also played a similar role in West Germany with funds flowing to Adenauer and the cdu particularly in the 1953 election. While the pci was seen as the primary threat to US political and strategic interests in Italy, it was the spd in West Germany. John Foster Dulles, the US Secretary of State, warned in September 1953 that ‘catastrophic consequences will follow an spd victory in the forthcoming [1953] election’ (cited in Kiatsky, 2005: 25). In the period of the so-​called ‘strategy of tension’ –​from the late 1960s through to the late 1970s –​the US funding of right-​wing anti-​communist groupings also extended to the neo-​ fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (the post-​war descendent of the Fascist party) under the direction of the US ambassador, Graham Martin (Platt and Leonardi, 1978: 211–​212). That this funding occurred at a time when msi elements were involved in acts of terrorism and

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the wider left as a possible government of Italy, thus depriving a large part of Italian society from democratic representation and the possibilities of democratic change. In doing so, the US actively engaged with and cultivated far-​right and neo-​fascist forces21 as it did elsewhere in Europe. Further, the US considered military intervention to thwart the left should it come to power via the ballot box (Ginsborg, 1990: 116; Miller, 1983: 47–​51; Smith, 1991: 17–​36); its generic response across much of the post-​colonial world. And although it is obviously speculation to raise the question as to ‘what if?’ regarding the counter-​factual of a left victory in the 1948 election, we are on strong historical ground in suggesting that even if the US had not launched a direct military intervention itself it would have –​as I will highlight in a subsequent section below –​deployed a range of covert instruments in the pursuit of the violent subversion and overthrow of that government (Ganser, 2004: 63–​83). What was to become the standard tool-​kit of US intervention in much of the post-​colonial world in response to leftists coming to power –​even by ‘bourgeois-​democratic means’ –​ originated, then, in the liberal-​capitalist core and not the Global South. Such covert activities demonstrate the para-​political dimensions of US hegemonic agency that formed a crucial ingredient of US Cold War strategy underwriting these varied forms of passive revolution. And the support for these kinds of covert and anti-​democratic activities in the form of ‘political’ and ‘psychological warfare’ was made in an April 1948 memorandum of the Policy Planning Staff (pps) authored by George Kennan. This memo encapsulated the key elements of the para-​political, centred on the relations between institutionalized state power and the political processes and arrangements operating outside and beyond the public state (Wilson 2012). The form of US intervention in the 1948 Italian election was typical in this regard. However, US policymakers also agreed that, if necessary, military power would be deployed to thwart the left from coming to power (Miller, 1983: 47–​51; Smith, 1991: 17–​36; Leffler, 1992: 195–​196). In a memorandum of March 8, 1948

21

coup-​plotting demonstrates further evidence of the para-​political dimensions of the US Cold War strategy and the Italian state’s strategic selectivity (Jessop, 1990: 260) towards the far-​right. Indeed, under US pressure De Gasperi decided to dissolve the coalition-​unity government involving the left in May 1947, thus effectively expelling the pci from government. This administration was replaced by a minority Christian Democrat government which had to rely on support from the neo-​fascist Italian Social Movement (msi) in the following months (Miller, 1983: 40). US intelligence officials also maintained close relations with a ‘number of small but violently anti-​communist paramilitary groups dispersed throughout northern Italy’ led by ‘disgraced former army officers who had once served loyally under Mussolini’ (Ventresca, 2004: 81).

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(nsc 1/​3), the National Security Council advised that ‘[i]‌n the event of that the Communists obtain domination of the Italian government by legal means,’ the United States should provide the ‘anti-​communist Italian underground with financial and military assistance’ while undertaking a ‘limited mobilization’ of US military forces and further strengthening its military position in the Mediterranean (frus 1974: 779). The US intervention in the April 1948 election was probably the most significant act in helping to ensure that the left was kept out of power. However, given that the pci (and the psi until the mid-​1960s) remained a major and popular political force throughout the period of the Cold War, US funds channelled through its Rome embassy continued to assist the Right’s election campaigns throughout most of the history of the First Republic and under Ambassador Graham Martin over 1969–​1973 US funding also extended to the neo-​fascist msi (Platt and Leonardi, 1978: 211–​12).We will come back to the fascist components of the post-​war Italian state subsequently, but now we turn to the Greek case, where the tendencies evident –​but never fully manifested –​in the establishment and consolidation of liberal order in the West German and Italian cases were displayed in the establishment of the liberal order in Greece after the conclusion of the civil war that erupted quickly after the end of the German occupation. The immediate post-​war situation in Greece after the retreat of German occupying forces in late 1944 opened up a political vacuum with the forces of the left (led by the Communist party –​kke) –​organized in the National People’s Liberation Army (elas) –​facing off against the remnants of a pro-​ royalist far-​right22 who had collaborated with the Nazi occupiers and who were also bitterly opposed to the prospect of any radical social and political transformation. Consequently, it was to be in Greece where the political logic of cold war and the struggle between a radical democratic transformation and a reactionary far-​right was to play out in its most intense and violent form as a civil war quickly ensued. It was armed conflict and anti-​communist violence –​ backed by the intervention of first Britain23 and then the United States –​that 22

23

As Mark Mazower (2000: 214) suggests, after liberation the dominant forces within the Greek state –​that the Nazi occupation had largely left untouched –​moved quickly to purge those deemed to have leftist sympathies running counter to the momentum –​ though uneven and short-​lived –​of anti-​fascist/​collaborator purges that took place across the rest of Western Europe. Significantly, it was also the case that without the British intervention in the immediate period after the German withdrawal ‘political power in Greece would almost certainly have passed into the hands of communist-​led forces at liberation or a few months later’ (Baerentzen and Close, 1993: 91).

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was the means through which liberal order was established and consolidated24 in Greece and not through the formal process and constitutional trappings that characterized the process elsewhere. The evolution of the politics of the civil war and the actions of London and Washington over the 1944–​47 period demonstrate that the creation of liberal democracy in post-​war Greece was built on the funeral pyre of the Greek radical left. In short, the liberal democratic politics of Greece after wwii rested on the physical elimination of Greek communism even after communist forces (in the form of elas, the National People’s Liberation Army) had disarmed and, in effect, committed themselves to participation in the liberal democratic process (See Baerentzen and Close, 1993; Iatrides, 1995: 8).25 The complexities of the Greek situation –​mirroring that of the brutal conflict in northern Italy between communist-​led partisans and the forces of the Republic of Salò –​saw elas forces fighting the ‘security battalions’ that the collaborationist state had created. However, while in Italy both sides were disarmed (the fascists were defeated and the partisans agreed to disarm at liberation), in Greece both sides remained armed at the time of the Allied entry into Greece in late 1944. What followed saw the British not only tolerate the former servants of Nazism, rather than disarm them, but actively equip and support them in preparation for a likely struggle with the left. The simmering conflict between the two sides that saw revenge killings carried out by both parties soon erupted into open civil war with the massacre of unarmed leftist demonstrators in Athens –​who were calling for a radical democratization of Greece and no return of the monarchy –​in December 1944 by elements from

24

25

It is important to note that even before the defeat of Axis forces in Greece the British authorities –​who commanded the remnants of the Greek army that had been evacuated to Egypt in 1941 –​had disbanded those regiments that they regarded as too left-​wing and detained left-​wing officers. The newly organized Greek army that fought with the British forces was made up of those that had been vetted as ‘more ideologically reliable’ than their radical predecessors (Mouzelis, 1976: 59). As Mark Mazower (1997: 133–​9, 141–​2) has argued, there were significant overlaps –​both ideologically and institutionally –​in the distorted character of Greek democracy prior to the fascist occupation with the post-​1918 constitutional order organized upon a virulent and all pervasive anti-​communism. This revealed itself in the law introduced by the liberal government of Eleftherios Venizelos in 1928 that outlawed the discussion of communist ideas and was used to prevent the activities of ordinary labour organizers campaigning for better wages as much as it did the actual ‘illegal’ activities of the Communist Party. Such trends were deepened under the Metaxas dictatorship that came to power in 1934 which saw the development of close connections in the realm of ‘anti-​communist policing’ between the dictatorship and Nazi Germany.

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33

the former security battalions under the eyes of British forces (Close, 1995: 128–​ 31; Mazower, 1997: 130; Pascos and Papadimitrou, 1998: 1719–​51).26 With elas and far-​right forces now in open conflict, the British managed to secure a cease-​fire with the Varkazia Agreement of February 1945, which resulted in the disarming of the bulk of elas forces. However, this was not matched by the forces of the far-​right who, instead, were merged and absorbed into the new Greek army. In the weeks and months that followed, the Greek left –​and not just communists –​was subject to a ‘white terror’ carried out by those forces who had served the Nazi occupation (Blum, 2003: 35; Mazower, 1997: 144). In doing so, they not only provoked a new round of civil war but with Anglo-​American assistance –​as officially announced with the declaration of the Truman Doctrine in March 1947 –​succeeded in eliminating the Greek left as an active part of Greece’s post-​war politics for a generation and helping to install a right-​wing dictatorship under the veneer of democratic elections and a state dominated by the personnel and tendencies of the far-​right (Close, 1993, 1995; Mouzelis, 1976). Such an arrangement has been labelled ‘repressive parliamentarianism’ with government organized around the formal trappings of parliamentary democracy, but where the political organizations of the left had been smashed and its personnel either killed in the white terror or exiled. Citizens could vote for a plurality of parties, but the right maintained a stranglehold on electoral politics until the early 1960s and political power was very much concentrated in the triarchy of monarchy, army, and the political right (Mouzelis, 1976: 59). This was not fascism but a right-​wing authoritarian state that rested on a high degree of police repression some distance from what most observers would regard as a liberal democratic order. What the Greek episode demonstrates is that as far as London and Washington were concerned the foundation of liberal democracy in Greece necessitated the elimination of the Greek left. What was realised through political-​legal repression in West Germany and external political pressure and local political machinations and corruption in Italy, was to be achieved through physical force and terror in Greece even though elas had made concrete moves towards disarmament and had committed itself to participation in the liberal democratic process (Baerentzen and Close, 1993: Iatrides, 1995). Further, while tensions were emerging between Moscow and the West, 26

In response to the massacre significant sections of the Athenian working class besieged police stations demanding justice and even though most of the demonstrators involved in the insurrection did not attack British troops, London viewed the insurrection as an attempt by the Communist Party to seize power and the raf was deployed to strafe rebellious areas of the capital (see Mazower, 1997: 131).

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the key decisions over the need to crush the left to ensure liberal democracy in Greece took place before the ussr had moved to install communist domination over Central and Eastern Europe and after Stalin had agreed with Churchill that Moscow would not support a communist government in Greece in the so-​called ‘Percentages agreement’ of October 1944. As the above discussion demonstrates, the reconstitution of West European state-​society relations after 1945 along more liberal-​capitalist lines rested on both the structural absorption (and limiting of) more radical social forces and democratic demands into new state-​society relations and the (re-​)appropriation and incorporation of rearticulated far-​right forces and ideopolitical currents into these same structures. The post-​war conjuncture revealed forms of passive revolution whereby a new liberal Cold War historical bloc or amalgam was formed that ended up incorporating some elements of the radical/​progressive upsurge that erupted during the immediate period of liberation, but also a conservative and right-​wing segment that included former fascists and a broader far-​right. Superintended above the restoration of the class power of capital, this new historical bloc was united through a virulent anti-​communism that came to structure the state and the wider political culture. These fascist currents were central to –​as we shall see below –​the coercive and para-​political dimensions of liberal order and demonstrated the still-​birth of the democratic emancipation that the defeat of fascism had, fleetingly, presented. And the kind of liberal international order that emerged –​and which scholars such as Ikenberry celebrate –​is inexplicable without factoring in the agency of the far-​ right in its origins and construction. 2.2 Far-​Right Movements and Parties in the Liberal Constitutional Order As well as maintaining an important and, in some respects, constitutive presence within several post-​war West European states –​that formed key elements of the post-​war liberal international order –​far-​right currents quickly returned to play a role in the domestic party-​political systems within a number of liberal democracies through their participation in electoral politics. Unsurprisingly, given the temporal proximity with the war and the popular stigma associated with fascism, none of the post-​fascist far-​right and neo-​fascist parties managed to carve out a long-​standing popular position within the political systems of Western Europe that came anyway close to approximating their earlier electoral-​political significance. Still, it is quite remarkable that within months of defeat, neo-​fascist and far-​right movements –​though quite small –​began to

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35

re-​appear in Italy, Germany and France in particular.27 This gives some idea of the nature and limits of the scope and depth of de-​fascistization in that former fascists, Nazis and collaborators began to establish organizations and participate in the liberal democratic political process from 1946 onwards. All of these parties made sure that they trod a fine line between maintaining a distinct far-​ right political orientation –​not only rabidly anti-​communist, nationalist and critical of parliamentary democracy and revisionist on the causes of the war (and in the West German case the beginnings of holocaust denial; see Eatwell, 1991: 120–​46) –​and explicitly endorsing a neo-​fascist position which might result in them being outlawed.28 In many respects, the structure of the political terrain or political party system in several West European countries –​and Italy and Germany in particular –​mirrored that of the strongly anti-​communist and, largely, ambivalent, positions of the state in these countries towards the far-​right. Thus while in West Germany the kpd was banned (in 1956) many far-​right (and some neo-​ Nazi) groupings were tolerated up to and including the National Democratic Party (ndp) that was founded in 1964.29 They never came close to gaining acceptance as part of the political mainstream or access to power, but the fact that they continued to exist and participate in West German politics when the kpd could not, gives some indication as to the limits and contortions of the post-​war liberal-​democratic order and the pervasive influence of anti-​ communism within it. In Italy, although the pci was tolerated –​to have banned such a large party-​movement risked triggering civil war –​the msi, the party that emerged in December 194630 out of the ashes of Italy’s fascist state and made up of former fascists, played an active role in supporting the Christian Democrat 27

28

29 30

Roger Eatwell (2003: 277) describes how the German Conservative Party-​German Right Party (dkp-​d rp) –​which had been formed in 1946 and was originally based on Alfred Hugenberg’s former far-​right German National People’s Party –​not only quickly attracted former Nazis but also, by 1949, was campaigning in some areas on a clear neo-​Nazi programme. In the case of the West German Socialist Reich Party (established in 1949) its combined neo-​Nazi orientation and success in local elections in parts of West Germany moved the Federal Chancellor, Adenauer, to request that the Constitutional Court ban it as he was concerned to ensure that the new Christian Democratic Union (cdu) did not have to compete with the far-​right in monopolizing the right-​wing vote. The court duly obliged and the srp was banned in 1951 (Eatwell, 2003: 278; Nietzhammer, 1998: 70–​1). See Tauber (1967) for an exhaustive survey of the post-​war far-​right and neo-​Nazi currents in Germany up until the early 1960s. Franco Ferraresi (1996: 23) notes that both the Vatican and elements within the Christian Democrat controlled Ministry of Interior were supportive of this development.

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governments through to the early 1960s31 and was even more active in local politics running local councils in areas of the South (Colarizi and Morlino, 1998: 472). As we shall see below, the msi also flirted with violence,32 terrorism and coup-​plotting, but the significant issue here is that it managed to maintain a permanent presence within Italian political life –​averaging just over 5 percent of the vote (with a high of 8.7 percent in 1972) through to the late 1980s (Beyme, 1988: 7). Moreover, for the first two decades of the post-​war liberal order it was an important player in ensuring Christian Democracy remained in power, thus contributing to the general consolidation and stability of Italy’s post-​war liberal democratic order. In short, the msi played a crucial role in ensuring the success of Italy’s post-​war transition into the distinct type of anti-​ communist liberal state that it became.33 Perhaps the highpoint of the msi’s involvement in the stabilization of post-​ war bourgeois politics in Italy came in 1960 with the so-​called ‘Tambroni experiment.’ Here, a new Christian Democrat government headed (by the former fascist) Fernando Tambroni relied on the votes of msi deputies. In response to msi support the Christian Democrats acceded to the party’s request to hold its national congress in Genoa, one of the major cities of Italian anti-​ fascism. To add insult to injury, the msi insured that the honorary chairman of the Congress was one Baron Carlo Barile, a notorious fascist and former Salò Republic ‘capo’ in the city, responsible for the killing of scores of partisans. As Leonard Weinberg (1998: 566) remarks ‘it is hard to imagine a gesture better calculated to symbolize the triumph of neo-​fascism over the resistance than this.’ As it was, when the Congress took place, the city was engulfed in an insurrection –​in which several demonstrators were killed –​against the msi Congress and which also triggered the collapse of the cd government and a gradual shift of the cd s away from their dependence on the msi (Ferraresi, 1996: 27). 31 32 33

msi parliamentary support was also required to ensure that Christian Democrat nominations for the Presidency were approved in 1955, 1962 and 1971 (Weinberg, 1998: 562; Caciagli, 1988: 19–​20). Ferraresi (1996: 25) suggests that the first msi-​linked bombings occurred in the early 1950s with an attack on a cinema in Rome. msi militants were also instrumental in attempts to forge a European ‘fascist international’ after the war with their hosting and organizing of several European fascist and far-​right figures including Oswald Moseley in Rome in March 1950. While this initiative was soon overcome by splits and factionalism, msi members came to be centrally involved in a range of such international initiatives through the post-​war period, some of which, as we shall see below, also involved terrorism and violence (see Bale, 2017: 80–​90; Ganser, 2004).

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The suggestion that this meant that the msi was not really neo-​fascist or far-​ right because of its involvement in the parliamentary process is only credible if we ignore the role of fascist parties in the parliamentary process in the decades prior to 1945 (which also, of course, included the Nazi party) and the fact that while participating in liberal democratic politics, significant elements within the msi and its offshoots34 also became involved in far-​right terrorism which expressly sought the destruction of the liberal and democratic aspects of the post-​war Italian political settlement (Chiarini, 1991: 33–​6; Eatwell, 2003: 256–​7; Willan, 1991). Until the early 1960s the Italian political elite and ruling class, alongside the United States, were willing to tolerate a neo-​fascist presence at the heart of Italian politics. Indeed, the electoral arithmetic of the mid-​1960s indicated that the maintenance of Christian Democratic political hegemony could no longer be realized through a politics located exclusively on the right (and its close connection with the msi)35 and, in consequence, the idea of ruling with the support and inclusion in some governmental posts of the more moderate wing of the psi was increasingly seen as more preferable. This is what happened from the mid-​1960s, but it also opened up a new set of political strategies that implicated the violent wing of the msi and the so-​called ‘strategy of tension’ which I deal with in the next section. In short, the significance of the msi in electoral politics was such that it not only provided an important source of political support sustaining right-​wing and anti-​ communist political hegemony after 1945 through to the early 1960s –​and hence a significant part of the early post-​war liberal historical bloc –​but it also provided a key interlocutor and actor with elements within the security apparatus who engaged with terrorist methods to thwart any further prospect of left-​wing advance into Italy’s political institutions and key offices of state from 34

35

The principal ones were Ordine Nuovo (New Order) founded by a former msi militant in 1954 and Avanguardia Nazionale (National Vanguard) in 1959 –​both of which were heavily implicated in the waves of far-​right terrorism that afflicted Italy from the mid-​1960s through to the early 1980s. As Ferraresi (1996: 70–​1) points out, the social basis of the right’s hegemony that rested on the political isolation of the left had been undermined by the consequences of the post-​war economic boom and social transformation of Italy with the emergence of a new urbanized middle class and the destruction of the post-​war agrarian compact. With the left/​p si vote increasing –​notably in 1963 –​stable government required a recalibration of the country’s political centre that for the left wing of the cd s under Aldo Moro necessitated an opening to the moderate wing of the psi. As it was, while the psi did come to form part of the government in 1963, Italy and the left had to wait until 1983 before a left-​wing party (which by then had significantly moved towards the political centre such that it was a shadow of the party it was in the early decades after the war) came to lead a government, the last West European liberal democracy to do so.

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the mid-​1960s onwards. The msi was, then, the primary agency of the para-​ political dimensions of Italian liberal hegemony up until the early 1980s. In France, although far-​right and neo-​fascist groupings quickly re-​formed –​ if operating at the margins of political life –​in the immediate months and early years after liberation (Anderson, 1974: 269–​75), it was the confluence of the Cold War with the colonial war in Indochina in the early 1950s (and especially after the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu in 1954) that helped to breathe new life into the far-​right. This revival was also a result of the impact of post-​ war economic reconstruction and modernization on certain spatial locales effecting petty bourgeois social layers in particular. In this sense, the stigma of Vichy and collaboration quickly disappeared from French political life by the early 1950s, as the primary means through which France saw itself regaining its international and great power reputation became increasingly connected to a nationalism strongly tinted with anti-​communism of which the no-​longer dormant far-​right was the prime progenitor of. What was also significant about the role of far-​right currents within French political life after the war was that, in many respects, they came to be associated, to some extent, with the figure of Charles de Gaulle and Gaullism, as a politics symbolizing and promoting the restoration of French greatness rooted in a presidential system and the dismantling of the parliamentary system of the Fourth Republic that was established after the fall of Vichy. De Gaulle (and his party) was no fascist but that did not stop Gaullists joining demonstrations with the far-​right against the left during the late 1940s and early 1950s (Shields, 2007: 62). Further, de Gaulle –​a military leader –​reflected a particular strand of French nationalism that was both anti-​communist and ambivalent towards the United States and the nato-​led order (see Rice-​Maximin, 1984). De Gaulle36 can also be considered as a type of politician and reflective of a form of politics more attuned to a far-​right aesthetic and method (Williams, 1964: 145–​6): the charismatic leader born of war-​time and military service, the embodiment of la patrie and reflecting the interest of the nation and people over the squabbling and vested interests of political parties and his demand for a political system that would centralize power (weakening parliamentary democracy) and provide the basis of an authoritarian system.

36

An ambivalence that worked both ways as Washington saw the authoritarian and nationalist dimensions of de Gaulle’s politics as a threat to the consolidation of a US-​led liberal international order in Europe. This pushed US policymakers to initially focus on the creation of a coalition of the right and the moderate wing of the Socialist Party centred on Leon Blum as the basis for France’s post-​war political settlement (see Kiatsky, 2005: 124–​5; Rice-​Maximin, 1984; Williams, 1964).

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Indeed, Williams (1964: 145) refers to Gaullism’s appeal as being rooted in a psychology that ‘was marked by the cult of authority and of the infallible leader’ –​ the preferred institutional form of the far-​right. Consequently, for many on the left –​and in spite of de Gaulle’s hostility towards Vichy –​de Gaulle was viewed as, potentially, the most serious fascist threat to the newly restored republic after the war (Shields, 2007: 62–​3; see also Hazareesingh, 2019). De Gaulle’s moment was to come in a period of intense political crisis within the Fourth Republic over 1957–​8 that was centred on the violent struggle in Algeria between the anti-​colonial National Liberation Front (fln) and the forces of French colonialism backed by the million or so metropolitan French settlers –​the so-​called ‘pieds-​noirs’. In this sense, ‘de Gaulle’s moment’ or ‘second coming’ was marked by immediate political circumstances of subversion, riot and military plotting that ‘gave maximum scope to whatever fascist tendencies were latent in the [Gaullist] movement’ (Williams, 1964: 146). De Gaulle was seen as the saviour of both France and Algeria, but his return to office rested on the dismantling of the Fourth Republic and the establishment of a much more centralized and presidential system –​with its authoritarian possibilities enshrined –​in the Fifth Republic. I will come back to this in the following section, as the creation of the Fifth Republic and de Gaulle’s accession to power and the political changes that this inaugurated in France after 1958 were also fundamentally connected to state and para-​political violence which implicated the far-​right. The authoritarianism of Gaullism –​and the politics it inspired –​was not the only far-​right electoral current that played an important role in the French political system after the war. Accordingly, a far-​right recrudescence also developed in the form of the short-​lived political phenomenon known as Poujadism. Named after its founder and leader, Pierre Poujade, a shopkeeper from the Lot region in south-​west France, Poujadism exploded onto the French political scene over 1955–​56 rapidly –​in a matter of months from its founding as a tax protest movement in late 1953 –​morphing into a mass movement peaking at approximately 400,000 members in 1955. It quickly shifted from a tax protest by traditional petty bourgeois elements to a movement that spearheaded the campaign against decolonization and a militant, anti-​Semitic laced anti-​(big) capitalism (Shields, 2007: 69, 82–​4).37 Poujadism reflected both the continuation of Vichyite (and longer-​term far-​right) ideas and also drew support from 37

In electoral terms its highpoint came in the 1956 parliamentary elections when it secured over two and half million votes (11.6 percent of the total) securing 52 seats (Anderson, 1974: 276; Camus, 2000: 198). However, within two years these gains had been wiped out and by the end of the 1950s it had disappeared as a significant political current within France. However, one of its key protagonists, one Jean-​Marie Le Pen, was to become

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the traditional social layers of the far-​right and fascism: provincial shopkeepers (like Poujade himself) and artisans surviving on slim profit margins consequent on the competition from bigger concerns (such as new supermarkets) that reflected geographically uneven post-​war modernization and the eating away of the small scale, traditional local and consumer base of such social layers. And it was the end of rationing that undermined the security of the local bind between small firms and their market (Shields, 2007: 68–​9, 71–​2) that triggered its emergence. Although it would be difficult to identify Poujadism as a fascist movement, its rhetoric and political orientation of virulent anti-​communism, hostility towards ‘big capital’ (with some strong hints of anti-​Semitism), condemnation of the corruption of the political class and the institutions of the Fourth Republic and the claims of betrayal over the ‘loss’ of Indochina combined with a reactionary stance towards France’s progress towards urbanization and industrialization, clearly marked it out as a far-​right movement (Davies, 2002: 128–​ 30; Eatwell, 2003: 306–​8; Shields, 2007: 71–​2; Williams, 1964: 163). Consequently, Poujadism echoed much of the Gaullist critique38 of the Fourth Republic (and the longer-​term far-​right animus as reflected in the anti-​parliamentarianism and anti-​republican and monarchist currents that characterized the right’s vitriol towards the Third Republic) if it did so in a more explicitly racist and vulgar vernacular pregnant with a violent undercurrent (Williams, 1964: 164) and, with it, a willingness to engage in extra-​parliamentary and street politics in contrast to most of de Gaulle’s followers. Shields (2007: 73) describes it as ‘a poor man’s Gaullism’. The significance of Poujadism for our consideration of the construction and development of a liberal order after the war is not that Poujadism mirrored the msi in assisting the maintenance of a stable right-​wing and anti-​communist government –​and, with it, an implicit acceptance of the far-​right into the political regime of the early post-​war French state –​but, rather, that it demonstrated that the social and cultural foundations for liberal democracy within France after 1945 were remarkably fragile. While Poujadism was a short-​lived phenomenon its appearance and influence revealed the continuing long-​term, structural roots of the far-​right and fascism in France derived from its precise geo-​ social form of combined development. Thus the role of a sense of international weakness (read Algeria for Alsace-​Lorraine after 1870), the fear of the forces of international (socialist) revolution –​now given added potency in the context

38

instrumental in the creation and development of a new far-​right political force, the Front National, which he helped co-​found in 1972. Indeed, many Poujadist parliamentary deputies ended up voting for Gaullist proposals for the constitutional changes that ushered in the Fifth Republic (Williams, 1964: 166).

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of Cold War (and especially after the humiliation of Dien Bien Phu) –​helped to facilitate the re-​entry of the far-​right into the French body-​politic with decolonization providing a ‘redemptive casus belli’ (Shields, 2007: 65). To this was added the sense of alienation across significant sections of the French ­population –​mainly small town and rural –​from the country’s democratic institutions, the insecurities of capitalist modernization and hostility to big/​ international capital (again unevenly distributed across geography and class), a sense of loss of the French rural-​agrarian ideal and the continuing poison of the conspiratorial politics of anti-​Semitism. This toxic brew that contributed to the success of Poujadism paralleled the earlier manifestations of the French far-​right in the form of Boulangsim and the Ligue des Patriotes. Indeed, in the case of the former, the electoral strength of Poujadism in Paris almost exactly replicated the same districts that had been drawn to Boulanger’s banner in the late 1880s (Williams, 1964: 167; Shields, 2007). And, further, its success in mobilizing support in smaller towns and the countryside of south-​western France would also be replicated in the geographic concentrations of support for the Front National in the 1980s and thereafter (Mitra, 1988: 48), that contrasted with its general lack of success in larger towns and big industrial areas. A spatial framing that surely reveals the enduring structures of the political geography of uneven and combined development in conditioning the openings for the far-​right then and now. Williams (1964: 167) notes, ‘[i]‌n the countryside it tended to be strongest in areas where the poverty of the small shopkeeper reflected that of his customers; for, curiously enough, the movement was born and flourished precisely where least taxes were paid.’ The persistence of these structural forces demonstrated the specifically illiberal foundations of France’s post-​war socio-​political order and, in consequence, its insertion into and constitution of the political fabric of the post-​ war liberal international order –​at least until the mid-​late 1960s. Furthermore, the populist insurgency that was Poujadism dovetailed with the most serious political crisis within France after wwii concerning the Algerian War between 1958 and 1962 and where Poujadism explicitly aligned itself with the pieds-​ noirs in Algeria.39 The significance of this is that Poujadism was a political-​ ideological current that went beyond the formal party politics of the ucda (Defence Union of Shopkeepers and Artisans) reflecting the remnants of Vichy and the deeper historical forces of the French far-​right and the social

39

Thus, one of its candidates in a parliamentary by-​election in 1957 was one of the key military conspirators against the Fourth Republic, General Jacques Faure (Williams, 1964: 167).

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constituencies that were opposed to France’s withdrawal from Algeria. We will come back to the significance of this, below, in the next section. 2.3 Far-​Right Violence, Para-​Politics, and the Post-​War Liberal State The construction and development of the post-​war liberal-​democratic order within Western Europe reflected a significant shift in reducing the scope and level of violence as determining of the domestic politics of these states compared to the past. Although violence –​directed at and by state agencies –​did not disappear it became a much less acceptable and legitimate means of politics than in the past and especially compared to the fascist era. Indeed, perhaps, this was one of the most significant historical lessons from the fascist experience. In recognizing this, however, the scope and depth of this ‘liberal democratic peace’ was uneven and fluctuating. Thus within some of the constituent elements of the post-​war liberal international order, far-​right sources and agents of violence –​both within and outside of the state –​did come to play an important role in determining the character of politics within several of these states. This was reflected in coup plotting as well as the overthrow of democratic government itself, and terrorism associated with far-​right groups. Furthermore, in all of these cases, far-​right violence –​be it terrorist bombing, assassination, or coup plotting –​involved and implicated the security apparatuses of the local states where such events took place, as well as the wider intelligence and security machinery of the key Western powers, notably Britain and the US. The substance of liberal democracy was, accordingly, conditioned by political violence and the involvement of para-​political forces located at the interstices between non-​state spaces and state security agencies. And this also reflected a collusion between elements within the liberal state apparatus and components of the US ‘imperial state’ as, in some respects, necessary elements in the constitution and maintenance of the US-​led liberal order. In many respects, this aspect of the post-​war history of West European politics reveals the extra-​ liberal and extra-​democratic dimensions in the overall maintenance of the liberal order and, in particular, its clearest anti-​communist dimensions. While the cases that I will examine, below, do not indicate that the liberal order –​at both the domestic and international levels –​was constituted and reproduced through state coercion and violence à la fascism; it does demonstrate the fundamental limits of the liberal order and the deliberate strategies of the US and its key allies to –​where necessary –​subvert the rule of democratic politics in the interests of securing the privileges of the capitalist properties of this liberal order, even if this meant embracing illiberal and far-​right forces through the deployment of illegal and extra-​constitutional force and violence

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targeted at the left. Violence was fundamentally oriented towards preventing the immanent possibilities contained with liberal democracy for radical social and democratic transformations, or even –​at a more modest level –​revising the precise form of ideo-​political hegemony that had been initially established in the early post-​war period at the time when the domestic consolidation of liberal democracy coalesced with the intensification of ‘East-​West’ tensions and the emergence of Cold War. And this was very much about preventing the establishment of a new and alternative political centre of gravity further to the left. In this respect, these extra-​democratic interventions were not counter-​ revolutionary as such, as the likelihood of revolutionary social transformation –​in contrast to the immediate months after the defeat of fascism –​was somewhat removed. Rather, these interventions took place within a liberal democratic context even if the institutions and processes of liberal democratic governance were being pressured through increasing social militancy, as was the case in Italy and Germany after 1968 and Greece after 1965, that threatened to widen the spaces of social democratic power and, accordingly, clip the wings of existing social and political elites. What they revealed, then, was that for the first time since the start of the Cold War, there was the possibility of radical leftist forces –​and not just communists –​gaining access to state power and shifting politics and society in a different direction from that which prevailed. In none of these cases were the fundamental rights and interests of capital under threat; these were not ‘dress rehearsals’ for ‘another October.’ And the fact that the actual reality of revolutionary social and democratic transformation across those Western European states was rather limited and unlikely should not lead us to marginalise the significance of these developments. On the contrary, they tend to underline their importance in highlighting the continuing paranoia and suspicions towards the operation of liberal democracy across many of the ruling classes and state managers within these states over the Cold War that served to demonstrate the enduring power of the ideology of the far-​right (See Mayer, 1971; Mulholland, 2012). The persistence of para-​political violence in the liberal democratic core underscores the similarities in the character of US global leadership that was more typically evidenced across the post-​colonial world as evidenced in the deployment of overt and covert interventions in support of anti-​communist conservative and far-​right forces. Thus despite the liberal democratic consolidation by the early 1950s and the marginalization of the radical left, many of these polities rested on rather fragile social foundations and where the radical potential bequeathed in the defeat of fascism had not been fully extinguished. Consequently, a coercive and ‘counter-​revolutionary’ current maintained a

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significant presence within the state apparatus over this period, evocative of the Caesarism of Carl Schmitt’s advocacy of ‘commissarial dictatorship’ as a necessary strategy in moments of crisis to ensure the preservation of the liberal separation of the political and economic (McCormick, 1999) and a coercive firewall to limit the encroachments of democracy and ‘the social’ on ­private property rights and market-​based freedoms. As detailed in the investigatory journalism that brought to light the so-​ called ‘Gladio network’ in the early 1990s (see Bale, 2017; Ganser, 2004, 2009; Tunander, 2009; and Willan, 1991: 146–​59), soon after World War ii had ended and before the Cold War had firmly set in to structure relations between Washington and Moscow, the US and the UK laid the foundations for a covert network of armed operatives who would be deployed if and when a communist or radical leftist government came to power and/​or the Red Army invaded Western Europe. This ‘Gladio’ (or Sword) network existed across Western Europe and saw British and American covert agencies (mi6 and the cia) work with and through local secret services and covert para-​political forces to provide an extensive network of trained and armed anti-​communist insurgents. The full story on the activities of this network has yet to be written and –​given its connection with the deep-​imperial state –​may never be. However, what does seem to be clear based on court proceedings, the testimonies of witnesses and investigative journalism, is that some of these Gladio operatives were activated in several liberal democratic states during the Cold War, through their involvement in terrorist acts against the left and, in particular, to both discredit the left and, as suggested above, to provoke a sense of crisis; what was known in Italy from the mid-​1960s to the late 1970s as the ‘strategy of tension’. The most pronounced and significant involvement of the Gladio network in terrorism in collusion with far-​right forces within and without the state –​effecting a para-​political dimension to liberal hegemony –​was in Italy. From the mid-​late 1960s40 to the late 1970s –​some time into the history of the post-​war liberal international order –​far-​right militants, many of whom were members or associates of the msi, conspired with sections of the Italian secret state to intimidate the left through assassinations and bombings. Further, the far-​right state/​terrorist axis also worked to destabilize liberal democracy and provide cover for an increasing authoritarianism from the late 1960s, with the ultimate aim of establishing an ‘emergency politics’ based on the suspension of the democratic process (Ganser, 2004, Bale, 2017; Poulantzas, 1978; Tunander, 2009),

40

The first bombing by far-​right terrorists connected to the msi was in Rome in 1953 (Ferraresi, 1996: 25).

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as the constitutional means by which to prevent the radical or communist left from gaining access to state power via democratic means. It is important to contextualise far-​right inspired terrorism in Italy. For the relationship between far-​right activists,41 the Italian secret state and, in some cases –​US security agencies, blossomed in moments of perceived crisis for Italy’s dominant social interests and state managers when the left looked like it may secure access to governmental power and/​or –​as was the case in the so-​called ‘Hot Autumn’ of 1969 –​a new wave of worker militancy undermined the stable reproduction of capitalist social order. The first crisis and collusion between the Italian far-​right and authoritarian elements within the state came in the early-​ mid 1960s with the coup plot known as ‘Piano Solo’ of 1964 (Bale, 2017: Ferraresi, 1996: 74–​83, 1998: 603–​4; Ganser, 2004, 2009; Ginsborg, 1990: 276–​8). The immediate circumstances that provided the political context of the coup plot was the chronic instability of Christian Democratic governments based, as they were, on fragile majorities and a concern over the party’s dependence on the votes of msi deputies. Further, the 1963 elections had seen significant gains for the combined left parties (with the pci gaining its largest share of the overall vote–​over 25 percent) along with growing demands from within the left-​wing of the cd s to allow the Socialist Party into government, as a basis for ensuring more stable majorities and reducing the need to rely on msi votes. The immediate trigger for the coup went beyond the parliamentary stability of CD governments as the violent disturbances in Genoa in the summer of 1960 cast a dark shadow over the CDs continued reliance on MSI votes. Thus the granting of permission by the newly formed CD government –​that relied on the support of MSI deputies, and which was led by the former fascist, Fernando Tambroni –​for the MSI to hold its national congress in the city of Genoa was deeply controversial. Indeed, choosing a city that was associated with the memory of partisan resistance as the location for its congress that was to be presided over by a notorious former local fascist ‘capo’ was not only seen as a gross provocation but also suggested that neofascists felt particularly emboldened. In many respects this can be seen as the high point of MSI influence but it was to be short lived as the mass demonstrations spearheaded by the left that broke out in Genoa and elsewhere against the holding of the congress and which saw the police kill several demonstrators sparked a crisis that resulted in the collapse of the Tambroni administration. And it was this that helped push a majority of CD deputies to support Aldo Moro’s proposal 41

Some of the key far-​right activists were former members of the msi who had broken off to form more militant organizations more focused on extra-​parliamentary activities such as Ordine Nuovo and Avanguardia Nazionale.

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to consider a move towards accepting elements of the moderate wing of the psi into a new government (Ginsborg, 1990: 256–​9). The possibility of the left and the psi –​previously regarded as persona non grata in terms of taking on ministerial responsibilities –​gaining access to state power for the first time in Italy sent shock waves through ruling class organs such as Confindustria and the thousands of fascist holdovers42 who remained embedded within the state as well as setting off alarm bells in Washington.43 It was out of this context that a coup plot developed that was centred around the Carabinieri General, Giovanni de Lorenzo, that involved other senior figures within the Italian security state, as well as msi-​associated militants. The conspiracy was also supported by the president of the republic, Antonio Segni (Faini, 2016). The aim was to intern the leading figures of the left (over 800 were listed as ‘dangerous elements’ to be interned) as a ‘counter-​subversive’ or ‘counter-​revolutionary’ intervention, thus ‘saving’ Italian liberal democracy from socialist revolution (Chiarini, 1991: 33; Eatwell, 2003: 256–​7; Ferraresi, 1998: 603–​4). The justification of such a strategy was directly connected to the social and political context of the time and, specifically, the first major economic downturn since the start of the post-​war boom –​and a bout of worker militancy stoking inflation. As Ferraresi (1996: 74–​5) argues, voices on the right of the dc and in Confindustria blamed Moro’s government and the involvement of the psi as reflecting an increasing ‘coziness’ to organized labour and were deeply fearful as to what lay ahead with the left appearing to be ascendant. As it was, the coup was aborted at the last minute but not before the psi had decided –​no doubt aware of the pressures from the right and the rumours circulating in the press and through the offices of the Presidency of the imminent suspension of parliamentary government (Ferraresi, 1996: 80; Ginsborg, 1990: 277) –​to withdraw their more radical ministers and objectives from the newly formed government, thus reassuring the right (Ferraresi, 1998: 605; Ganser, 2004: 71–​72). 42

43

Significant parts of the dc alongside Confindustria were implacably opposed to the psi coming into government, which they feared would lead to regional reform allowing the left to permanently ‘seize’ chunks of territory under left-​wing jurisdiction’ (Ferraresi, 1996: 71). The US Military Attaché in the Rome embassy, General Vernon Walters, suggested a military intervention should a centre-​left government be formed that included Socialist ministers. Other key figures in the embassy including the cia operative, Thomas Karamessines, ended up playing a key role in the drawing up of the ‘Prometheus Plan’ –​a coup strategy to overturn the left coming to power by democratic means –​which was activated with the military coup in Greece in 1967 led by Colonel George Papadopolous (Ginsborg, 1990: 276–​7).

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The details of the coup plot came to light in 1967 but it was only in 1991 that the relevant classified material was finally released, which meant that de Lorenzo and other key figures associated with it were never prosecuted.44 This material made clear that Piano Solo was a criminal conspiracy that implicated the cia and leading figures within Confindustria (Ferraresi, 1996: 82). Interestingly, Ferraresi (1996: 71–​3) draws attention to the ‘Pollio Conference’ of spring 1965 in Rome that focused on countering ‘revolutionary war’ (the legacies of the Algerian War and French counter-​insurgency techniques being a central concern of the conference) that was sponsored by the Italian Chiefs of Staff. Ferraresi emphasizes this not only because of its proximity to de Lorenzo’s counter-​revolutionary ‘preventative’ coup plot, but the fact that the conference was a public meeting, sponsored by leading agents of the liberal state and which also involved the participation of several neo-​fascist sympathizers who openly discussed the legitimacy of forms of military intervention as a strategy for countering the democratic advance of the left. There was a further coup plot involving a similar coalition of elements in 1970 (See Bale, 2017: 212–​363; Ganser, 2004: 76–​7, Ferraresi, 1996: 117–​24 and Willan, 1991: 91–​120) and here, again, such plotting was connected to a sense of ruling class crisis and fear triggered by the wave of sustained and widespread worker unrest; the so-​called ‘hot autumn’ of 1969–​70 (see Lumley, 1990: 9–​46; 167–​270; Tarrow, 1989: 59–​193). This saw a series of strikes and factory occupations across northern Italy that challenged the post-​war capitalist consensus in capital-​labour relations within the workplace that concerned Italian industrialists and state managers as well as the US embassy. In this case, the leading figure was the former fascist aristocrat, Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, who had joined the msi in 1951. What was different about this particular coup plot from Piano Solo was that it was organized and planned outside of the formal state apparatus and was centred on the involvement of the far-​right terrorist groups Ordine Nuevo and Avanguardia Nazionale.45 The Borghese coup plot emerged within a similarly febrile political context where the left threatened to dismantle the core social, cultural, and political pillars of the post-​war restoration. However, this was a far from revolutionary

44 45

De Lorenzo subsequently became a msi parliamentary deputy. Ordine Nuevo was created in 1954 by several disillusioned msi militants led by Pino Rauti and was implicated in a number of bombings and massacres through the 1960s and 1970s. Avanguardia Nazionale was founded in 1959 again by former msi militants led by Stefano Delle Chiale and Franco Freda who were frustrated at the parliamentary strategy of the msi (Bale, 2017: 145).

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moment, or one where the left was on the precipice of overseeing fundamental transformation, but rather the possibility that workers might secure a much greater say in the management of the economy through diluting the power of business leaders on the factory shop-​floor and in pushing through progressive legislation including constitutional and divorce law reform. Revolutionary or not the forces of the authoritarian right –​inside and outside of the state and supported by the US embassy in Rome46 –​mobilized for a pre-​emptive intervention to scupper any parliamentary opening to the left. And with the May 1968 elections revealing a strengthening of the left in terms of vote share and a disappointing result for the favoured centrist current of the Unified Socialist Party (psu), even some parts of the dc were willing to consider a constitutional pact with the pci (Bale, 2017: 282). The significance of the Borghese coup plot went beyond the conspiracy itself and the particular strategy of the coup. The coup was part of a wider and co-​ordinated anti-​leftist para-​political strategy known as the ‘strategy of tension’ that intensified through the late 1960s and early 1970s. Involving terrorist attacks –​bombings and massacres –​the coup plot was situated within a wider context of instability, crisis and widespread public fear in which the radical left and ‘anarchists’ were blamed by leading politicians, the church and much of the press for violence that in nearly all cases was carried out by far-​right mili­ tants of on and av. And while such attacks were meant to provide the basis for tension and fear which was blamed on left-​wing ‘extremists,’ coup-​plotting was undertaken and framed as the way of resolving the crisis associated with terrorist violence. Coup plots reflected the most direct attempts to subvert the workings of parliamentary democracy under the direction of parts of the security apparatus of the state, while terrorist attacks –​blamed on the left –​were utilized across broader civil society, the political establishment, and sections of the ruling class as a way of discrediting and stigmatizing the left (through so-​called psych-​ops and propaganda). And at a time when the pci –​on the back of its success in increasing its vote share –​had moved towards the so-​called ‘historic compromise’ whereby the party committed itself to working with bourgeois forces including the cd s to help stabilize and protect the democratic order, the strategy of tension was directly focused on undermining and destroying 46

In the autumn of 1969, the virulent anti-​communist, Graham Martin, was appointed as the US Ambassador in Rome. Once in post Martin and his cia underlings moved quickly to assist and engage with Borghese in his coup planning on the basis of preventing Italy from moving to the left and the pci getting close to political power –​even if by constitutional means (Bale, 2017: 282–​3).

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the possibility of this coming to fruition with the pci participating in government. Indeed, the ultimate objective of the strategy of tension was not just preventing the pci from gaining access to state power –​through sewing fear and panic across a public who might otherwise be sympathetic to the pci ‘coming in from the cold’ –​but a more fundamental suspension of the workings of liberal democracy through the introduction of a state of emergency as a way of ‘restoring order’ based on the legal suppression of the left and the outlawing of the pci. As Bale (2017: 364–​5) notes, [t]‌o accomplish [the] central objective [of preventing the left coming to power], the sponsors and perpetrators of the ‘strategy of tension’ covertly conditioned the political environment by means of a combination of public bombings, assassinations, coup plots, infiltration of left-​wing groups, provocations, and psychological warfare. These developments in Italy did not, ultimately, realize the end point of the ‘strategy of tension’ in the constitutional suspension of the democratic order and the legal suppression of the left. But this was not for want of trying. Italy was not brought to the brink but the workings of its democratic processes and institutions were severely compromised by the activities of far-​right para-​ politics and terrorism and the involvement of state agencies and elements within the wider liberal civil society ecosystem in blaming the left for the violence. Indeed, the violence and instability of the strategy of tension played an important role in undermining the pci’s electoral strategy and the possibility of Italy overcoming its fascist legacies (see Ginsborg, 1990: 333–​4). Further, it also revealed a return to the kinds of policing –​and its associated violence –​of left-​wing activists that had characterized the early years of the Cold War (see Spotts and Weiser, 1992: 162–​6).47 The conditioning role of political violence in determining the shape of the Western liberal order within the Cold War was not confined to what played out in Italy. In Greece and France coercion and violence were also significant in determining the tolerance and limits of liberal democracy. In the case of Greece, as we have already noted, the type of regime that emerged from the civil war –​and which was founded on the elimination of communists from 47

And while this does not excuse the left-​wing terrorism of the Brigate Rosso after its founding in 1970 –​that also contributed to the sense of public anxiety during the 1970s and fears as to the stability of Italy’s democratic order –​it is not unreasonable to see the causal connections between this and the violence of the state and its para-​political allies towards the non-​violent left of the strategy of tension.

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the Greek body politic by the end of the 1940s –​had the formal trappings of a parliamentary democracy but, in reality, rested on the decimation of the institutions and organizational forms of the political left and a constitutional regime that ensured the dominance of the right. Further, behind the façade of ‘competitive’ elections48 and the workings of parliamentary democracy, political power did not reside in the decisions of the demos nor the formal representative institutions of Greek democracy but, rather, the triumvirate of army, far-​right and monarchy (Mouzelis, 1976; ‘Athenian’, 1972: 33–​5). However, it was in the context of the emergence of an escalating challenge to this authoritarian-​conservative order that far-​right forces –​centred on the petty bourgeois ideology of the officer corps defined by a ‘racism … virulent anti-​communism, religious obscurantism, intransigent moralism, [and] populism’ (Tsoucalas 1969: 9) –​re-​asserted themselves with the so-​called ‘Colonel’s coup’ in April 1967. What is telling about this case is how it bears similarity with the right’s response to the pci’s offer of the historic compromise –​as discussed above –​even though there is little evidence to suggest that the existing socio-​ political order in Greece was at risk from a radical democratic insurgency. Most writers who have looked at the origins of the coup have pointed to a crisis within the internal politics of the ruling regime (see ‘Athenian’, 1972; Clogg and Yannopoulos, 1972; Mouzelis, 1976; Woodhouse, 1985) and a paranoid fear of the possibilities of Greece becoming a properly functioning pluralistic democracy –​even without a large communist party akin to the pci. Instead, it was the emergence of a new left party (the United Left) which contained elements from the kke, alongside the popularity of George Papandreou’s centrist Centre Union that raised the possibility of a new governing coalition including the left for the first time.49 In this respect, developments in Greece between 1965 and 1967 mirrored those in Italy over 1963–​64 as in both cases the impetus for coup plotting focused on the prospect of the

48

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Assisted by a combination of the workings of the electoral system, fraud and the legacies of the suppression of the organized left, the established right of the Hellenic League and then, after 1956, the National Radical Union, won large majorities over four consecutive general elections: 1952, 82 per cent of the seats; 1956, 56 per cent; 1958, 59 per cent; 1961, 63 per cent (Tsoucalas 1969: 4). The 1964 General Election saw the Centre Union capture 52 percent of the vote, breaking the Right’s stranglehold on parliamentary power. And with its commitment to political and institutional reform it posed a major challenge to the privileges and powers of the monarchy, the army and the big bourgeoisie that had undergirded the post-​civil war settlement (Tsoucalas 1969: 7–​8; Kassimeris, 2006: 64).

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(non-​communist) left gaining access to state power for the first time in each country’s history.50 Such political developments were, as in Italy, the consequence of longer-​term socioeconomic trends associated with uneven development as revealed in urbanization –​especially concentrated in Athens –​and shifts in the political loyalties of significant sections of the peasantry away from their traditional support for the established Right due to class recomposition (Tsoucalas, 1969: 5). In addition to this, Papandreou’s son, Andreas, was also emerging as a possible future leader of the Centre Union and he was seen as a major threat with his calls for a reconsideration of Greece’s membership of nato and the status of the monarchy and army in the running of the state (Kassimeris, 2006: 63–​4; Maragkou, 2009: 351; Miller, 2009: 119–​26; Mouzelis, 1976: 72; Zaharopoulos, 1972: 23). The machinations of far-​right forces within the state with the support of the US Embassy in Athens first emerged in July 1965 with the ‘monarchical coup’ against Papandreou’s Centre Union government. Through a combination of the King’s meddling and the US-​funded bribing of Centre Union deputies, Papandreou’s government –​victorious from the February 1964 elections –​was effectively toppled (Blum, 2003; 216; Kapetanyannis, 1991: 198; Miller, 2009: 123; Mouzelis, 1976: 72; Zaharopoulos, 1972: 28) ushering in a political hiatus as right-​wing forces with the support of the US and triumvirate worked to engineer a ‘parliamentary solution’ that would prevent the possibility of leftist forces coming to power that might question the post-​civil war anti-​communist settlement. However, with a new election scheduled for late May 1967 and the likelihood of a centre-​left victory, a coup was launched in April resulting in the declaration of martial law and the suspension of liberal democracy in Greece.

50

Indeed, the parallels between developments in Greece and that of Italy went beyond this with what appears as a Greek version of the strategy of tension playing out in 1965 with the so-​called ‘night of fires’ in Athens in August 1965. In this case there were a series of incidents of sabotage, bombing and violence, as well as widespread arson attacks on the night of August 20 that provided the context of insecurity, fear and panic in which the  subsequent coup plot was carried out. And, as in Italy, these attacks were blamed on the left by leading politicians and the press when they were most likely carried out by agents provocateurs in the pay of the Greek secret service (the kyp) as part of a ‘strategy of tension’ to discredit the democratic left to pave the way for the need to ‘restore order’ and ‘prevent communist subversion and revolution’. Indeed, this was exactly how the coup leaders justified their overturning of liberal democracy and the seizure of power (see Ferraresi, 1996: 87).

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Fearful of the possible outcomes of liberal democracy, US state managers’ acceded to far-​right plotting.51 Accordingly, while the US and other nato allies went through the ritual condemnation of the overturning of constitutional order, this did not result in Greece’s suspension from nato nor a significant delay in the resumption of economic and military ties after a short period of public condemnation had lapsed (Goldbloom 1972: 241; Kassimeris, 2006: 65–​8; Maragkou, 2009; Treholt, 1972: 210–​27).52 Indeed, the coup plot was based on a nato-​authorized plan called ‘Prometheus’ which focused on the possibility of communist advance in Greece requiring a preventative military intervention to ‘save’ Greece from communist subversion and possible revolution. Given that the coup prevented the likelihood of the anti-​n ato figurehead of Andreas Papandreou coming to power the intervention had a clear ‘nato logic’ to it which was especially important for Washington given the strategic importance of Greece for nato’s southern flank (Kassimeris, 2006: 65–​8). Thus although some nato members –​in Scandinavia in particular –​did express concern and condemn the coup, its main powers (not just Britain and the US) quickly moved to engage with the new regime (Maragkou, 2009: 353–​5; Pedaliu, 2007). State collusion with the far-​right violence and coup-​plotting in Italy and Greece was also evident in France. Here, far-​right coup plotting and terrorism was less a result of state/​ruling class strategies to deflect the radical left but rather a consequence of the conflicts within the French state over decolonization and the difficulties that the parliamentary regime confronted in incubating French domestic politics from the savage violence of the Algerian War (see Horne, 1979: 415–​60; Shields, 2007: 90–​116). Thus there was significant collusion between parts of the French state’s security apparatus with far-​right forces in Algeria and mainland France with the attempted coup in May 1958 to overthrow the parliamentary government and establish a right-​wing authoritarian regime, as the means to reinvigorate the war against the National Liberation Front (fln). Moreover, de Gaulle’s accession to power in 1958 can only be understood in the context of the coup. So while de Gaulle was not involved in the plot, he took maximum political advantage of it to ensure that his return to

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The US Embassy was aware of the coup plot and made no interventions to prevent it (see Blum, 2003: 218; Goldbloom, 1972: 237–​40; Keeley, 2010: 44–​65; Miller, 2009: 134; Woodhouse, 1985: 20). In many respects US attitudes towards the Greek coup foreshadowed the official US pronouncement on relations with right-​wing dictatorship as authored by the controversial US Ambassador to the UN under the Reagan administration, Jeanne Kirkpatrick (1982).

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power was on his terms. And this transfer of power and the creation of a new constitution was far from a conventional constitutional process and certainly not a democratic one. As already noted, France’s struggle against national liberation movements was closely connected to the development of the Cold War within French domestic politics as an initial anti-​fascist consensus that included the Communist party (pcf) soon shifted to a Cold War anti-​communist consensus fuelled, in particular, by the struggle against the Viet Minh in Indo-​China and, especially after the defeat of French forces in May 1954 at Dien Bien Phu. Thus the Cold War/​decolonization nexus played an important role in freezing out  the pcf from any chance of government and recalibrating –​as evident with the emergence of Poujadism and some elements within Gaullism –​the initial hostility towards the far-​right as reflected in a revision in attitudes towards Vichy and its legacy (Shields, 2007: 91). Further, and particularly with respect to the conflict in Algeria, the Poujadist far-​right insurgency in the mid-​ late 1950s also provided an important popular basis for this anti-​communism and opposition to any talk of making concessions to the fln. Such tendencies were to come to the fore in the final stages of the struggle in Algeria as elements within the French army and state backed by the pieds-​noirs in Algeria and far-​right elements in metropolitan France organized coups and then a campaign of terrorism through the Organisation Armée Secrète (oas) during the early 1960s. The first coup attempt took place in May 1958 with the seizure and occupation of government buildings in Algiers and followed on the back of continuing political turmoil in metropolitan France and days of violent demonstrations by pieds-​noirs against any negotiations with the fln. Led by Pierre Lagaillarde, a local politician, and supported by the army leadership in Algeria it saw the short-​lived establishment of the Committee of Public Safety under the leadership of General Jacques Massu, in place of the civilian administration. This was the final act that brought the end of the Fourth Republic, which, for the right and the army, had been a key source of weakness in the prosecution of the war in Algeria. And in whipping up the pieds-​noirs parts of the the army and right-​ wing politicians (including Gaullists) used the threat of a full-​blown military coup to engineer both the dismantling of the existing constitutional order and its replacement –​in the personage of General de Gaulle –​with a new constitutional order more befitting of strong and effective authoritarian leadership. Thus having reached a crisis-​point of inertia and weakness highlighted by the Algerian War, de Gaulle positioned himself as the saviour of France and French

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honour and it was through this that he insisted on a new constitutional settlement as the quid pro quo for his intervention.53 The second coup attempt occurred in April 1961 less than three years after the first and this time the plot was targeted at the primary political beneficiary of the first, President de Gaulle. It was launched on the eve of the French Referendum on the Evian Agreement that de Gaulle had negotiated with the fln to end the conflict and which paved the way for Algerian independence. Again, the coup was masterminded by a group of army generals based in Algeria (Raoul Salan, Maurice Challe and Edmond Jouhard) who planned to use forces from the Parachute Regiment to take control of government buildings in Paris (Ambler, 1996: 93–​4; Horne, 436–​60). This conspiracy aimed to not only prevent the Evian Agreement being implemented –​thus ensuring that Algeria remained French –​but also to ensure a transformation in the structure of the French state in a more authoritarian or ‘Caesarist’ direction. Indeed, it was the struggle over Algeria that provided a defining moment –​and the greatest opportunity –​for the post-​war far-​right in France (Davies, 2002: 122).54 The plot fizzled out as key units in metropolitan France remained loyal to de Gaulle and a mass mobilizations of trade unions and political forces across the spectrum secured the new republic. However, this did not stop the forces of the far-​right. Those linked to the conspiracy –​many of whom fled to the far-​right bastions of Spain and Portugal –​established the oas55 to pursue a clandestine 53

In many respects the coup was successful in that it triggered the collapse of the Fourth Republic and its hated parliamentary regime. And while the coup was led by elements within the French military leadership in Algeria it also involved several civilian and para-​ military organizations such as Joseph Ortiz’s neo-​fascist Front National Français, as well as those close to Poujadism. Further, government ministers such as the Defence Minister, Robert Lacoste were also, at the time, briefing against the Republic and suggesting the need for a ‘government of public safety’ if France was to avoid a ‘diplomatic Dien Bien Phu’ in Algeria (see Ambler, 1966: 240–​1, 243, 254–​6; Horne, 1979: 273–​98). 54 De Gaulle’s role in the crisis and the coup and its aftermath was crucial. Thus, had he agreed to military landings in France and had he not been invested by the National Assembly on June 1, 1958, the coup (called Operation Resurrection) would have been fully implemented with likely violent consequences in mainland France (Ambler, 1966: 245). 55 The oas emerged within the French security and military apparatuses during the Algerian War from the para-​military and counter-​insurgency strategies that France deployed in its struggle with the fln. It was implicated in the two coup plots mentioned above, as well as numerous bombings and assassinations (including numerous attempts on de Gaulle’s life) within metropolitan France throughout the 1960s and particularly as France moved towards a negotiated settlement with the fln. Its significance, however, extended far beyond France and the struggle over Algeria. oas members were key to the establishment of Aginter Press in 1966 which was based in Lisbon (until 1974) which provided the base for a far-​right anti-​leftist counter-​insurgency and terrorist network that operated in

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struggle against the authorities in France. In Algeria itself they joined forces with radicalized elements within the pieds-noirs and attempted to provoke a racial war between the local Arab and European communities with the oas implicated in the killing of twelve hundred Algerians in April 1962 (Horne, 1979: 480–​504; Ambler, 1966: 260). The inter-​connections between the far-​right and the Algerian conflict, however, went beyond these coup plots through the deeper connections and legacies of fascism and Vichy in the security institutions of the post-​war liberal state. Thus one of the most controversial incidents in the history of post-​war France took place in October 1961 when scores of Algerian fln supporters were massacred by the Parisian police on the orders of the notorious Vichy official and Nazi collaborator, Maurice Papon. Estimates as to the numbers killed are disputed56 but what remains uncontroversial is that a large number of Algerians were thrown into the River Seine by the police.57 The French state and France’s liberal democratic order weathered the crisis but these developments between 1958 and 1962 centred on the conflict in Algeria with coup plotting, elite political manoeuvring, and the far-​right terrorist violence of the oas also demonstrated the enduring strengths of the far-​ right in France and the legacies of fascism in the reproduction of its liberal political order. As a liberal state, France’s commitment to decolonization –​a key principle of the post-​war liberal international order –​was highly compromised and, further, the actual internal institutional mechanisms within the French state for managing such change were found wanting. The ideologies of imperialism and racism were not only still entrenched within the French state, but also across much of French society given the widespread political support that the pieds-​noirs cause could muster in the mid-​late 1950s. The French crisis over Algeria was not only an opportunity for the far-​right to reinsert itself into the mainstream of French politics and, in doing so, to a significant degree rid itself of the stigma of Vichy and collaboration (Davies, 2002: 121–​27; Shields, 2007: 90–​116), but it also revealed the continuing illiberalism and far-​right

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Europe as well as Latin America and sub-​Saharan Africa. For an extended discussion see Bale (2017: 136–​211; Dongen et al., 2014). The French government officially admitted in 1998 that the massacre had happened and that there were forty victims. Other sources suggest that the number killed extended to over a hundred victims and possibly as many as 300. In addition to this incident, Papon was also implicated in the so-​called ‘Charonne massacre’ of February 1962 when French police killed nine members of the Confédération Générale du Travail (cgt trade union) who were demonstrating against the activities of the oas.

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legacies within the French polity that can only be understood as limiting and challenging the political and ideological basis of the liberal international order. The para-​political collusion between elements within the liberal state apparatus and far-​right forces is suggestive of how these ideo-​political forces were necessary –​if contradictory and in some respects antagonistic –​elements in the constitution and maintenance of the liberal international order throughout much of the Cold War. They also reveal the significant shortcomings and limitations of the liberal and democratic dimensions of it, and how the deliberate strategies of the United States and its allies regularly subverted the rule of democratic politics in the interests of the liberal-​capitalist socioeconomic order. Reflecting the constitutive tension within the liberal/​capitalist social formation between its political and democratic features with those of its economic underpinnings these episodes combined the necessity of extra-​ parliamentary/​democratic strategies and violence to limit the possibilities of peaceful democratically-​engineered social and political change and the protection of institutional forms and ideologies closely aligned with the authoritarian right. Further, this para-​political dimension was a much more central and active component of US hegemonic agency involved in liberal order construction –​across the international/​domestic and state/​civil society nexuses –​ that was connected to the enabling of far-​right and neo-​fascist elements than has been adequately recognized. Such connections and the para-​politics that they produced serve to blur the geopolitical boundaries separating the liberal democratic ‘heartlands’ from the Global South, where such activities and policies have been more widely documented. Consequently, it is suggestive of a more mediated, uneven, and shifting separation between the two zones that, at certain points, saw the logic and modus operandi of US counter-​revolutionary policy across the Global South play out in parts of the North. Moreover, it represents the point at which the coercive and illegitimate characteristics of hegemony come to the fore, which, in the US case, finds deep roots in the long history of countersubversive practices against –​real and perceived –​enemies from within and without (Seymour 2016). Racialized Anti-​Communism and Political Economy in the US Cold War Liberal Order58 In this final part of the chapter I turn to the question of race as a constitutive feature of the liberal Cold War order with a focus on the racial politics of the 2.4

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For reasons of space this section focuses exclusively on the racial politics and political economy of the United States. However, within the broader context of liberal order construction that this chapter is concerned with, the issue of race in a post-​colonial setting is

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United States. The politics of race and racism have been central if not defining of the far-​right; race and racially-​inscribed imaginaries can be seen to be over-​determining of the politics of the far-​right. However, as we have seen in previous chapters the relationship between liberalism –​as a set of political ideas and in practice working through the institutions and structures of liberal democracy –​and racialized exclusions and hierarchies has been ambivalent at best and, in some cases, active in reproducing such racialized structures of power and oppression. This is particularly so in the history of the United States within the context of the Cold War order. To be clear and to restate my position as outlined earlier in Volume One, the racial politics and consequent structures of oppression associated with and ideologically propagated by the far-​right and liberalism are different. Indeed, liberalism offers possibilities and openings to undermine, subvert and, in some cases, overcome pre-​existing racial hierarchies and this is certainly evident in the experience of liberal democracy in the United States in the mid-​1960s with the passing of civil rights legislation. However, we also need to recognize the interwoven character and overlapping dimensions of racism across the far-​right and liberalism in practice that have never gone away (as we shall see in the following chapters on neoliberalism). This is not to suggest that liberal racism is, ultimately, reducible to or derivative of far-​right racism, but it is to recognize the contradictory dimensions of liberal democratic politics and the contingent character of its possibilities for promoting and realizing a post-​racial politics. Accordingly, liberalism and especially in societies –​like the United States –​originating as colonial-​settler states is constitutively racialized and racist and while attempts within American political liberalism have made some anti-​racist advances, such possibilities for constructing a post-​racial society have never managed to challenge the structural impact and legacies of the racial capitalism that defines the United States. Simply put, the political and normative aspirations of liberalism as a basis of a post-​racial politics are organically thwarted by its originating and economic dimension. The realization of

very much pertinent to understanding the racialized character of the post-​colonial liberal orders within France and Britain after the war. Thus, in both cases the specific kinds of liberal political order and political economy that were constructed in the early decades after the war were saturated with a set of racialized ideological imaginaries associated –​to varying degrees –​with a white supremacy connected to the far-​right and forms of political economy that were, to a significant degree, segregated. For a discussion of these developments within Britain and France see Schwarz (1996); Virdee (2014: 98–​122); Silverman (1992) and Wolfreys and Fysh (2003).

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the former requires the dissolution of the latter based on an appropriate historical reckoning. In focusing on the United States the point is to question the liberal democratic credentials of US hegemony or, at least its domestic socioeconomic, political, and ideological properties. This is important because it goes to the heart of the liberal internationalist account of the Cold War order and post-​war politics across the capitalist democracies in general. Specifically, I will examine two aspects of the relationship between racism, liberal order and the far-​right. First, through understanding the distinct ideo-​political properties of American anti-​communism we can get a better sense of the motivations and causes behind US decisions over the post-​war future of Western Europe and its decisions to support some political groupings and isolate and excommunicate others. American anti-​communism was racialized; meaning that it was inscribed with racial epitaphs rooted in the long-​standing racialized animus towards the revolutionary left. In short, US anti-​communism –​at home and abroad –​drew on far-​right ideological imaginaries and this racialization provided a structural and institutional opening for the persistence of far-​right social and political forces in liberal America after the war. Racialized anti-​communism provided an important impulse for the development of the para-​political dimensions of American liberalism after 1917, as well as after 1945 and especially in response to the development of the campaign for civil rights. Secondly, I look at the political economy of the United States and the role of race and racialized structures within it. This obviously has its roots in the combined colonial origins and plantation slavery of the American republic based on the violent expropriation of indigenous Americans and Atlantic slavery in the ‘primitive accumulation’ and foundation and structuring of American merchant capitalism. My focus, however, starts at the point of the New Deal as the defining liberal intervention in the US political economy, which came to structure it through to the late 1960s. The New Deal is rightly lauded for seeking to address the economic misery of the Great Depression (see Brinkley, 1996; Katznelson, 2013), but it was also significant for structuring the political economy of American capitalist development for the next three decades helping to define the parameters of political discussion and the structuring of racism within America. However, it also went beyond this in accommodating the racist political economy of the South into the liberal Cold War historical bloc that was the domestic foundation for US international hegemony after 1945 (see Anievas, forthcoming).

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Racialized Anti-​Communism, Para-​Politics, and the Liberal Historical Bloc The significance of the racialized character of American anti-​communism goes beyond the specific racial tropes, stereotypes and ideological assumptions that framed how communism was understood by elites, but also extended across significant swathes of popular opinion within the United States after 1917. Such ideas had material consequences because they permitted; indeed, they advantaged the racist social system of Jim Crow and the political settlement that helped reproduce it (alongside its associated para-​political violence) in the former Confederate states of the American south. Recognition of the way in which this –​as we shall see –​generalized racial anti-​communism defined American anti-​communism (that was not limited to the former confederacy), ensured that both Southern political elites and the representatives of the dominant fractions of Southern capital were incorporated into the broader liberal historical bloc (see Anievas, forthcoming). It was racialized anti-​communism that provided the ideological cohesion within the liberal historical bloc through what Richard Seymour describes as an ‘open signifier’ (Seymour, 2016: 122, 267, 270). Such an open concept propagated by far-right political leaders, elected officials, newspapers, radio broadcasters and church leaders covered the activities of the Communist Party of the USA to standard liberal proposals to overturn segregated education or enforce the civil rights of African-​Americans to vote or hold political office, thus endowing anti-​communism with an ideological range that subsumed its evident contradictions. It was a term with such a wide-​ranging ideological catch-​all that approximated the role of anti-​Semitism in the French far-​right of the late nineteenth century that was addressed in Volume One. Anti-​communism could be articulated and justified as a defence of freedom and ‘the American way’ in the rarefied liberal bastions of New York bourgeois society and, at the same time, in the unreconstructed bigoted South when what the term actually meant in these different contexts was not always consistent. The language of anti-​ communism and its racialized underpinnings were crucial in not only cementing an alliance between the liberal and far-​right elements of the historical bloc, but also played a more specific and concrete role in the South in helping to give a further boost of life –​through its ‘popular’ and ‘common-​sense’ legitimacy –​ to the maintenance of the Jim Crow racial order in an economic context where its material basis was disintegrating, and in the wider Cold War context of geopolitical rivalry and the turn towards militarized containment and ‘rollback’ in the early 1950s. Thus the combination of its domestic ideological currency alongide its increasingly militarized geopolitical significance served to reinforce the ideological strength of the traditional ‘solid South’. Moreover, it also

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helped to sustain Jim Crow and the significance of the reactionary far-​right for much longer than would have been the case had anti-​communism not been so prevalent and all-​encompassing (Marable, 2007: 17–​18). Such an understanding provides a major qualification and revision to both liberal internationalist and Neo-​Gramscian accounts as to the social and political foundations of US hegemony. That this historical bloc contained contradictory elements that became ever more pronounced by the late 1950s –​and especially after the Brown vs. the Board of Education Supreme Court ruling of 1954 which confirmed that segregated education was unconstitutional –​ does not mean that the social and political forces of Southern racism were not part of the historical bloc. Indeed, in the context of the early Cold War and particularly before the US made its geopolitical commitment to a militarized global anti-​communism, the militant and aggressive anti-​communism of the South was a key political constituency within the US supportive of such an orientation. Moreover, the fact that this geopolitical shift, as evidenced in the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, nsc’68 and other commitments dovetailed with a more general and right-​wing shift within US domestic politics –​as highlighted by McCarthyism and the associated paranoia and red-​ baiting that defined it –​tends to reinforce, as Anievas (forthcoming) insists, such an inter-​connection. Consequently, the solidity and strength of the liberal historical bloc after the war reflected the partial convergence of interests and positions of liberal-​internationalist and far-​right forces entwined in a contradictory unity of opposites –​a complexio oppositorum –​facilitating the rise and expansion of American hegemonic power after 1945. While such an arrangement did not remain fixed or stable –​by the early 1960s it was coming apart –​ it nonetheless helped solidify the domestic basis of the liberal historical bloc upon which US hegemony was organized and ensured that the social and political forces of the South were a crucial part of the second phase of the Cold War. The concerns over the connections between revolutionary left-​wing or socialist-​inspired politics and anti-​colonial and black liberation had been a longstanding one for capitalist-​imperialist ruling classes and political elites. Anti-​Semitism had been an important and primary dimension of this as reflected in the widely propagated idea that Marxism was a ‘Jewish creed’ and that socialism was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’ (see Battini, 2016; Hanebrink, 2018). However, it was the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution that was to radically reinforce and shift this racism onto a different ideological and political plane. This was for two reasons. First, Russia itself –​or at least its new Bolshevik character –​was understood in racial terms as a part-​Asiatic and non-​White/​Christian entity (Borstelmann, 2001: 50; Stoddard, 1921). With the violent overthrow of the existing socio-​political order and the emergence of a self-​proclaimed

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workers’ state committed to promoting international revolution and subverting the international colonial and racial order, its racialized ideological imagining became that much greater. For now, socialism took the form of a state and all the political and material advantages that came with it for propagating and spreading its ideas and supporting movements and struggles associated with it. Indeed, the response to the Bolshevik seizure of power across Western political elites –​not just fascists like Hitler –​was to regard the revolution itself and the state that emerged from it as both the product of a Jewish conspiracy59 and an ‘Orientalist’ and ‘Mongrel’ Other that was outside of, inferior to, and a threat to a Western civilization grounded on the racial hierarchy of white supremacy (Anievas, 2014: 133–​38; Borstelmann, 2001: 21–​22; Kovel, 1997: 14–​22; Seymour, 2016: 123–​8, 263). In this way, anti-​communism was baptized in a racial imaginary whereby the international objectives associated with it were seen in racial as much as social and political terms, especially as race was implicated in these domains and this was because racial hierarchy was viewed as a major bulwark against socialist revolution. Indeed, because anti-​communism was infused, ab initio, with racial metaphors and assumptions, as emphasized by Richard Seymour (2016), it also provided important and powerful political advantages to the social and political coalition of the racist South within US politics throughout the early decades of the Cold War. I will come back to this in a moment. The initial reception of Bolshevism after 1917 as a racial as much as a class antagonist meant that the political identities of African-​Americans and colonialized peoples were regarded as being particularly vulnerable to communist subversion in a way that white Christians could never be. Almost immediately demands for and campaigns associated with racial justice in the United States tended to be understood through the ideological prism of racial anti-​ communism and this was particularly so in the case of the so-​called ‘Red Summer’ of 1919 when worker militancy coalesced with African-​American agitation for civil rights (Heale, 1990: Kornweibel, 1998: 19–​35; Kovel, 1997: 14–​22; Woods, 2004: 16–​17). And in this case with the imagined fears of both Jim Crow racists and Northern liberals being given a concrete social expression the full force of the state apparatus –​including its para-​political dimensions –​and wider conservative and liberal civil society were deployed to crush this outbreak of inter-​racial class militancy. And, in doing so, helping to consolidate

59

That appeared to ‘vindicate’ the notorious anti-​Semitic forgery and template of far-​right conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that had emerged at the start of the twentieth century and which prophesized Jewish ‘revolutionary conspiracy’.

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Jim Crow and the wider racial order at a time when it was, momentarily, vulnerable. The racialized origins of anti-​communism meant that not only were politically active African-​Americans viewed as ideologically suspect but that when the campaign for civil rights (re)emerged after World War ii it did so within an ideological context that helped reinforce the opposition to it that was spearheaded by the racist social and political forces of the Jim Crow South. This not only delayed the progress of civil rights for almost two decades, but also undermined and conditioned the actual substance of the civil rights campaign through the decisions taken by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naccp) and other leading organizations. This was done by marginalizing its more radical elements and those associated with the radical and communist left to make it more palatable to mainstream opinion and to ward off claims from the right that the campaign was a communist front (Woods, 2004: 86). Such an ideological framing of civil rights was connected to a wider common sense (Rupert, 2015) saturated with racialized assumptions that went well beyond the South and thus provided an important ideological glue helping to cleave together otherwise contradictory positions of liberal and far-​right currents within the historical bloc and working against the rapid fulfilment of liberalism’s promise of racial equality after the war. What is also revealed by the South’s participation within the liberal historical bloc or what might be framed as the liberal ‘embrace of the far-​right’ based on the shared ideology of (racialized) anti-​communism, is the precise para-​ political dimensions of liberal order construction and maintenance within the United States. Again, while this arrangement –​and especially in the way that different state agencies across the South were implicated in the racist violence of the Klan against both African-​Americans and civil rights campaigners –​ would come under political pressure from the late 1950s, eventually breaking down in the mid-​1960s, it is suggestive nevertheless of a distinct kind of racialized socio-​political order across the American South. And this meant that the norms and procedures of liberal democracy did not operate at this time and within these geographical zones for a good portion of the Cold War period. The workings of American liberal democracy in the southern states of the US for the first two decades of the Cold War, then, reflected not only a racialized or white democracy but one that was instituted to a significant degree by para-​ political arrangements deeply connected to a far-​right social and political eco-​ system and the violence and terrorism that helped sustain it.

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The forces of the far-​right and their para-​political character were particularly evident in the segregationist mobilization of ‘Massive Resistance’ against the campaign for civil rights during the 1950s. Triggered by the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in the Brown versus Board of Education case, Massive Resistance involved local state authorities, state and national politicians, the key organizations of the capitalist class across the South60 and civil society including some local churches and para-​political forces centred on the terrorism of the Klan. From the late 1950s through to the mid-​1960s the combined forces of the conservative and segregationist South –​in courthouses, police forces, high society to lumpen elements from small businesses and Protestant churches to the racial terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan –​deployed the full range of political tactics (administrative delay, judicial obstructionism and obfuscation, public meetings and protests, the coercive apparatus of the local state machinery and the brutal and the performative violence of the Klan) to forestall and prevent the imposition of federally sanctioned and enforced civil rights across the South. As C. Vann Woodward describes it, [b]‌ooks were banned, libraries were purged, newspapers were slanted, magazines disappeared from stands, television programs were withheld, films were excluded. Teachers, preachers, and college professors were questioned, harassed, and many were driven from their positions or fled the South. The naacp was virtually driven underground in some states. woodward, 2002: 165–​66

And while this did not manage to stop the momentum behind the campaign for civil rights it both delayed its realization and conditioned its legal-​ constitutional and socio-​political content in watering down its potential for a more fundamental reckoning with racial capitalism and the residual of a new far-​right that was to emerge in the decades that followed. It also, as we will see in the following chapter, laid the foundations for a racialized neoliberalism that emerged in the 1980s; what some have characterized as the racist reaction to the ‘second reconstruction’ delivered by the civil rights movement (Johnson, 2020; Marable, 2007).

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Specifically, the Southern States Industrial Council (ssic) as the primary representative of Southern capital (Anievas, forthcoming; Jewell, 2017).

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2.4.2 Racialized Capitalism and the Political Economy of the New Deal The Wall Street Crash of October 1929 had a profound impact on the United States. Indeed, the economic effects of the Great Depression on the United States in the early 1930s paralleled much of the misery that afflicted Weimar Germany (see Galbraith, 1992; Kennedy, 1999). The US did not succumb to fascism but the New Deal –​which was crafted under the Roosevelt presidency between 1933 and 1938 –​created a new form of capitalist political economy that marked an unprecedented ‘political’ intervention in the structure and working of American capitalism (see Schivelbusch, 2006). The New Deal involved a range of federal and state-​level initiatives associated with the welfare state, labour rights, industrial organization, public investment, and trade protectionism that culminated in a significant increase in the social power of organized labour and the foundations for an accumulation model that was later called ‘Fordism’ which was internationalized across the capitalist world after 1945 (see Panitch and Gindin, 2012; Rupert, 1995). The significance of the New Deal for our considerations here is that it provided the specific domestic configuration of political economy upon which US liberal hegemony was built. Consequently, an account of it is crucial to understanding and conceptualizing the nature of liberal hegemony, the historical bloc, and the specific place of the far-​right within it. My concern here, then, is not to provide an autopsy on the New Deal –​that would be well beyond the scope of this section/­​­chapter –​but, rather, to focus on the politics or political economy of the New Deal in two respects: (i) the racialized character of political economy of the South; and (ii) the racialized character of the welfare state and how both were connected to the wider liberal hegemony forged in this period. In doing so, the aim is to complement the previous discussion through accounting for the prevalence and reproduction of racialized structures of exclusion and oppression within the US political economy that continued through to the 1960s and to which anti-​communist ideology helped to sustain and preserve. What it demonstrates is both the profoundly uneven and combined character of the American capitalist formation that continued –​if in a less pronounced and contradictory form –​after the dismantling of the South’s slave system economy. In terms of its mode of surplus extraction, the structure of labour relations and the forms of accumulation, the South differed from the wider industrial capitalist and agrarian capitalist economy. It also differed in its social, ideological, and cultural characteristics with an obvious focus on the semi-​formalized regime of Jim Crow and the ever-​present threat of racial punishment for any African-​American who strayed from the social and cultural codes of it. This was very much a far-​right form of political economy whereby

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the interstices of racism explicitly conditioned the economic logic of capitalist development in a way that was different –​even if racism continued to persist within the US writ large –​from the structure of racism elsewhere. The pervasive power of racist ideology not only set the terms for the lived experience of African-​Americans, but also the wider reproduction of class hierarchy within the white population. Accordingly, racism and Jim Crow were necessary for the continuation of the specific social and cultural codes that complimented the material reproduction of the dominant classes across the South (Du Bois, 1965; Roediger, 2008). The pre-​civil rights South bears comparison with the political economy of European colonialism with the experience of African-​Americans paralleling that of colonial subjects in terms of the racial exclusions that they lived through, the ever-​present spectre of punitive and extreme violence if and when a non-​white subject transgressed, and in the role of white supremacist ideology and institutions in cementing the reproduction of these social orders and tying subaltern whites into the structures of oppression. Of course, African-​ Americans could migrate; but for those who did not –​most of the descendants of emancipated enslaved people stayed in the South –​their experience was comparable. And, with respect to the specific period under discussion here, my account also demonstrates that –​while a subaltern and declining element within broader capitalist development –​the racist South and, with it, far-​right social and ideological forces, were central to the liberal Cold War historical bloc that was inaugurated in the New Deal. This obviously questions the prevailing understandings and accounts of the domestic bases of the US-​led post-​ war international order discussed earlier in the chapter. The political economy of the South on the eve of the Great Depression was one configured by the re-​structuring consequent on the abolition of plantation slavery. Thus although the labour regime of slavery had been abolished, post-​ bellum labour relations in the South were marked out by a relatively low level of unionization and enforced segregation based on Jim Crow and the para-​ political structures and methods –​including terrorism and violence –​that enforced such arrangements. The political economy and political regime that emerged out of Reconstruction reflected the victory of the South’s capitalist-​ plantation class, as it managed the transition from slavery to Jim Crow. And this was how the social relations of Jim Crow originated and were reproduced even if it meant that the South continued to be defined by a relative economic backwardness (Kelly, 2004: 11) within the overall American political economy. Consequently, such backwardness –​and the distinct forms of spatialized racism and gendered hierarchies that were reproduced within it –​reflected a form of combined development that revealed something in common with European

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capitalist states even if the distinct racial underpinnings of the South were not replicated. With the onset of the Great Depression in 1930 such arrangements entered a new period of crisis testing the white racial contract as mills closed, workers were sacked, and wages were cut (Biles, 1994: 16–​35), resulting in sparks of intense labour militancy that also included pockets of inter-​racial labour struggle (Katznelson, 2013: 175; Korstad and Lichtenstein, 1988). It was in this much more socially polarized and economically distressed context that the New Deal was received in the South. The New Deal was, no doubt, seen by Southern capital as a ‘poisoned pill’ given the way it involved federal intrusions into the South and the opening up of greater possibilities for labour organization with the passing of the National Labor Relations (or Wagner) Act in 1935, but it also helped resuscitate the South’s economy before the more significant shift inaugurated with the militarized production of the war and Cold War came to provide a new material basis for capitalist accumulation. The New Deal also created the basic infrastructure of the American welfare state. While there were significant pieces of legislation passed after the war and, indeed, through to the 1960s –​if one includes Johnson’s ‘war on poverty’ –​ the key pieces of legislation passed in the 1930s with the National Recovery Act of 1933 and the Social Security and Labor (sic) Relations Acts of 1935 laid the foundations for the type of welfare state, social security, and labour relations that American workers would be habituated to in the coming decades. These interventions have provided the bellwether of American liberalism (Brinkley, 1996; Katznelson, 2013) and, in many respects, a vindication of the liberal democratic mode of politics and the possibilities for progressive change within it. Such testimony reflects the impact of these laws in addressing some of the misery caused by the Great Depression that, to some extent, also had a positive impact on African-​Americans (Lieberman, 2001; Poole, 2006) not just white workers. However, the New Deal can and should be seen as a paradoxical intervention that reflected the organic legacies of racism within the United States, the workings of its political economy and, most significantly, the revitalization of the racist South in a moment of crisis. The racialized paternity of the New Deal reflected the continuing influence of far-​right social forces and ideology within the United States. In the words of Ira Katznelson’s (2013: 17–​18) magisterial survey of it, [t]‌he New Deal permitted, or at least turned a blind eye toward, an organized system of racial cruelty. This alliance was a crucial part of its supportive structure. The New Deal thus collaborated with the South’s racial hegemony as it advanced liberal democracy at home and campaigned to

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promote liberal democracy abroad. In pursuing these purposes, the New Deal did not just tolerate discrimination and social exclusion; its most notable and noble achievements stood on the shoulders of this southern bulwark, all the while ultimately creating the conditions for their amelioration. The New Deal rested on a political compromise within the Democratic Party which in the South was fundamentally racist to its core. The passing of New Deal legislation was overseen and carried through by a Congress that empowered the Southern Dixiecrats who made sure that legislation maintained and reinforced the political economy and culture of Jim Crow. For Katznelson, the significance of this Southern agency was not just in the legislation itself and its impact thereafter, but also in a wider sense given the generalized crises that the liberal democracies were engulfed in at the time. Thus the New Deal in Katznelson’s (2013: 23–​4) view, was a decisive moment that saved America from fascism, as those conservative forces –​that in parts of Europe had turned to fascism in response to the crisis –​decided to maintain their commitment to and participation in liberal democracy in the US, which the New Deal helped realize. Whether or not Katznelson is correct, the issue for this study is that the New Deal ended up involving, if not, empowering the forces of the far-​right and expanding and exaggerating their overall significance within the wider political economy and American politics. Furthermore, it reflected a broader political logic within many liberal democracies at the time with respect to a generalized embrace of the far-​right, as the means by which to stabilize and save capitalist social property relations. This was not fascism, but the political logic involved in the realization of the New Deal came from the same political genus that saw German capitalists and political elites embrace Hitler and likewise Mussolini in Italy. In what ways did the New Deal reinforce a racialization of the South and wider US society? As Anthony Badger (2007: 44) notes, at the time of the Great Depression the federal government ‘lacked the bureaucratic and administrative capacity to impose radical change on the South.’ Consequently, the Roosevelt administration had to work with, rather than against, the existing political leadership of the South and because the aim of the New Deal was to help resuscitate the South’s economy it ended up restoring the political legitimacy of both the ruling class and the political elite. It succeeded such that by the late 1930s the white supremacist forces of the South moved to row-​ back against further New Deal intrusions and especially any that concerned race relations. Indeed, because of the dominance of the ‘Dixiecrats’ across the

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South and their presence on Capitol Hill, the drafting and passing of key elements of New Deal legislation bore their ideological imprint. Further, given the delegated character of aspects of New Deal legislation, it was local state administrations rather than federal agencies with local legal primacy and administrative clout that implemented, oversaw and enforced the new dispensation. In this sense, even though elements of New Deal legislation may have had a surface universality and ‘colour-​blind’ equality, the fact that any challenge would come before a Southern judge was likely to ensure the preservation of racial exclusions. However, Jim Crow and the particular racial pathologies of Southern capitalism61 were also hard-​wired into the New Deal, as Southern legislators carefully and precisely inserted exclusions for categories of employment, the particularities of social security and the eligibility requirements for assistance (Roediger, 2008: 178; see also Biles, 1994: 58–​82) that were most likely to negatively affect African Americans62 over that of white workers and the white poor in the South (Brown, 1999; Jewell, 2017: 77–​ 83; Katznelson, 2013: 241–​2; Lieberman, 2001: 25–​6; Quadagno, 1988; Roediger, 2008; Schulman, 1991: 31; Valocchi, 1994: 353; Williams, 2003). The significance of the New Deal went beyond its racialized character as evident in the grafting of the exclusions and violence of Jim Crow onto its architecture. The New Deal was also about rescuing or resuscitating the American economy in the depths of economic crisis and the strains that this imposed on American society and its political system. In this respect, the New Deal was also fundamentally about an attempt to (re)integrate the political economy of the South and its associated racist pathologies and imaginaries into the US political system. And, as already suggested, it laid the groundwork for the South’s incorporation and, in some respects, leadership, of the broader anti-​ communist and liberal historical bloc that provided the domestic basis for US international hegemony and Cold War leadership. However, while the New Deal helped rescue Jim Crow capitalism in the short-​term, it also put into a place a set of developmental trajectories that suggested its economic logic would become even harder to sustain over the long-​ term. One of the most significant developments in this respect emerged out

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The 1933 National Recovery Act failed to eliminate racial wage differentials; instead enshrining them in law to preserve the privileges of whites in Southern labour markets (Roediger, 2008: 176). For example, housing policy reinforced segregation –​across the United States not just in the South. Further, the social security provisions excluded domestic workers and farm workers which accounted for two-​thirds of all African-​American employees in the South (Katznelson, 2013: 163).

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of the modernizing dynamic within the New Deal that undermined the paternalistic model of industrial relations that had previously characterized the South, as the industrial and urbanized working class expanded and mill towns, tenant farmers and day labourers suffered (Anievas, forthcoming; Sosna, 1987; Wright, 1986). Accordingly, the paradoxical nature and consequences of the New Deal and the developmental tendencies it opened-​up took a decisive turn with the wartime mobilization after 1940 (Higgs, 2006). War production resulted in a dramatic expansion of manufacturing employment across the South: between 1939 and 1942 by 50 percent and wage rises of up to 40 percent (Lewis, 2007; Schulman, 1991: 72). The most significant element of this was revealed in labour migration as ‘a quarter of the rural population of the South left the plantations and farms for jobs in northern and southern cities’ (Gaughan, 1999; Sosna, 1997: xiv-​xv; Cobb, 1997: 5, 9–​11), which helped consolidate a working class and also provided greater opportunities for organized labour to secure a foothold and the possibilities of anti-​racist struggle therein, thus further eroding the basis of segregationist power. The mobilization for war witnessed a significant expansion of the writ and power of the federal state across the South intensifying the logic of the New Deal but in a way that undermined the social and material pillars of Jim Crow. Thus liberal elements within the federal state moved to ban racial discrimination in the employment practices of defence contractors (Jewell, 2017: 206; Ward, 2011: 39) –​at the time a growing element within the South’s economy –​ which contributed to a generalized trend resulting in the growth of the urbanized and industrial economy at the expense of a shrinkage of the rural/​post-​ plantation economy (Cobb, 1997: 5, 9–​11, 2004: 51–​2; Schulman, 1991: 63-​97; Sosna, 1997: xiv–​x v). The upshot of which was that at the war’s end –​and which was to continue as Cold War militarization was rolled out through the 1950s –​the South’s economy was increasingly dependent on federal spending and thus the political intrusions of the liberal-​managerial state. The ideological and political contradictions that the original New Deal had introduced into the South in the early 1930s intensified after the war, as the South’s political leaders continued to resist and oppose federal oversights and pressure for civil rights reform and upheld and reinforced segregation even while its economic logic –​given the shifts and restructuring of the South’s political economy away from the traditional agrarian formula of Jim Crow –​subverted it. It was in this context that the Congress of Industrial Organizations’ (cio) launched ‘Operation Dixie’ to unionize the South to address the structural wage inequality between the north and the south. However, the hopes of labour organizers were to be dashed as the continuing strength of the forces

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of Southern reaction were quickly revealed in the wall of opposition that the CIO faced from the combined forces of planter-​industrial capital and their para-​political allies. Operation Dixie could be seen as the high-​point of the left-​turn, or its possibility, within the political economy of the New Deal that the industrial mobilization and socioeconomic transformation of the war had unleashed. And the significance of such developments went beyond labour relations to the possibilities of civil rights that had also risen up the political agenda during the war. Thus with the formalization of Cold War after 1947 the initial openings and momentum of civil rights that had emerged in the immediate post-​war period were quickly crushed as the South’s apparatus of ideological and political oppression was now augmented with that of the federal state, newly galvanized by Cold War and anti-​communist hysteria. Indeed, Manning Marable (2007: 18) summarizes it thus, [t]‌he democratic upsurge of black people which characterized the late 1950s could have happened a decade earlier … most of the important Supreme Court decisions that aided civil rights proponents had been passed some years before. … yet for almost ten years there was no overt and mass movement which challenged racism in the streets. … The impact of the Cold War, the anti-​communist purges and near-​totalitarian social environment, had a devastating impact upon the cause of blacks’ civil rights and civil liberties. Consequently, there was a clear imbalance between the South’s economic clout within the wider US economy and its political role in the ideological context of the Cold War. This was because the ideological utilization of the latter by Southern elites weakened those local forces at the forefront of the struggle against Jim Crow and for civil rights. Thus using the ideological cover of a revitalized anti-​communism, the South’s coercive and judicial apparatuses implemented a campaign of red-​baiting that not only clamped down on the post-​war mobilization for civil rights, but also made more than enough liberals both cautious and complicit in failing to push through anti-​racist legislation that appeared to be in the offering for fear of undermining a key social and regional bulwark of the Cold War order. As Alex Anievas (forthcoming) affirms, the post-​war political, economic, and ideological foundations upon which the domestic sources of America’s liberal hegemony were established in the period after 1945 reflected a contradictory composite based on the continuing legacies of America’s combined development and the ideology of white supremacism that was intimately connected to it. Such arrangements ensured the continuing political relevance of the racist

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South to the wider liberal order even while the economic logic within it was gradually undermining the social and economic foundations of white supremacy and the actually existing hegemonic apparatus of the far-​right across the South, as economic restructuring and modernization destroyed the class foundations and material logic of white supremacy. Such an arrangement –​and the amalgam of the racist ideo-​political currents of the South and its associated backward economy combined with the advanced nature of northern industrial-​technological Fordism alongside its liberal internationalism –​reflected the specific contradictory arrangements of uneven and combined development within the American social formation. And it was here where the distinct ideo-​political character of the South made a key ideological contribution to the Cold War historical bloc and the concrete legislative and policy interventions in the early years of the Cold War. Yet, the contradictory nature of this arrangement within the internal logic of a liberal Cold War order and the fact that it did not last obviates its apparent functionalism even if it qualifies the material determination of that order. The importance of the Cold War for the future of the South and the manner of its political and economic integration into the wider liberal order was, as we have already noted above, refracted through the ideological centrality of Cold War anti-​communism. Yet, alongside this, the war-​time developmental tendencies of its political economy were also reinforced by the onset of militarization and the role this played in shaping the economic transformation of the South through the 1950s and 1960s. Militarization reinforced the South’s economic dependency on the US Treasury and federal government largesse63 and while it accelerated and intensified the moves towards a region increasingly characterized by industrialization and urbanization,64 alongside a growing middle-​class, this did not, inevitably or smoothly, translate into a quiet and predictable dismantling of the political and legal infrastructure of white supremacy and the social and political forces of the far-​right (Lewis, 2007). Indeed, even when major employers established new production facilities in the South such as Du Pont (as part of a major nuclear installation at the 63

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Seymour (2016: 131; see also Frederickson, 2013) details that the twelve Southern states ‘accumulated a vastly disproportionate share of military contracts (beginning in World War Two and continuing in the Cold War), so that by the early 1970s, the South provided the Pentagon with 52% [sic] of its ships, 46% of its air frames, 42% of its petroleum, and 27% of its ammunition’ which assisted its longstanding organic militarism dating to the period of plantation slavery. By 1960 agricultural employment totalled 10 percent across the region and manufacturing 21 percent and per capita income was at 76 percent of the national average (Cobb, 2004: 53).

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Savannah River Plant in South Carolina) in the early 1950s, the company shied away from using its economic power to weaken the social and cultural hold of white supremacy and Jim Crow in the local area (Frederickson, 2013: 15, 70–​ 89). In some respects, elements of organized labour –​as in the case of the mine-​workers union –​were also implicated in the continuing acceptance of explicit forms of racial discrimination in employment practices alongside corporations (Cobb, 2004: 85). Modernization and economic transformation did not necessarily ensure an economic improvement for the region’s African-​ American population nor a significant shift in their wider social position in the South. It was only the massive and persistent campaign for civil rights that realized a significant change in their social fortunes and in terms of employment, and so the transformation of the South’s economy managed to co-​exist with the structural racism that continued to define the region (Cobb, 2004: 85) well into the 1960s. Rising wage levels and an economy increasingly urban and industrial broke the back of the social and political power of the planter class and this social transformation of the South that realized a much closer alignment and integration with the wider American economy. And by the late 1960s and thereafter this developmental trajectory was also increasingly fuelled by the private investment of US and foreign multinationals, and notably the US auto-​giants (see Cobb, 1990: Hülsemann, 2001). The demise of the planter-​economy and its associated class structure undermined the economic sources of traditional white supremacy across the South. Politically, this was revealed in the weakening grip of the Democrat Party and/​or its Dixiecrat off-​shoots as the gop began to draw on increasing levels of support beginning with Eisenhower’s presidential victory in 1952 (where he won four Southern states that had formerly been part of the Democrats’ so-​called ‘solid South’). By the mid-​1960s, as evidenced in the presidential campaign of Barry Goldwater, the South had become a political battleground where the Republican Party was increasingly influential (Lowndes, 2008: 45–​139). In this respect, the transformation of the region’s class structure –​in both dominant and subaltern layers –​helped produce a shift in the form of racial hierarchy across the region and this was not an insignificant factor on the subsequent triumph of civil rights in the mid-​1960s, as the ideological basis of racism shifted from the public and legal domain of Jim Crow and its associated para-​political apparatus of intimidation and violence, to a ‘privatized racism’ (see Goldberg, 2009: 337–​41) that operated in the market sphere and which, politically, became increasingly articulated by and associated with the Republican Party. Well into the Cold War and, to a significant degree, fuelled by the ideological context of it, a political economy of white supremacy and structural racial

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segregation and discrimination continued to be reproduced in the Southern states. The dominant social forces served by such arrangements and the political elites of the South were also intimately connected to the broader liberal historical bloc upon which US global hegemony was organized. Defined by a set of contradictions that eventually worked themselves out in the dismantling of the South’s traditional political economy and class structure and, with it, the prevailing form of white supremacy and far-​right politics, the Cold War nevertheless provided a complex and ambivalent context and set of impulses operating across the South. While the structural form of racism was eventually dismantled and, with it, the specific social form and articulation of a far-​right by the late 1960s, the length of time for such an outcome to be realized demonstrated the embedded nature of the far-​right in the post-​war United States and the ambivalences and difficulties that liberals confronted and responded to in constructing and maintaining a liberal hegemonic order after 1945. Such a verdict not only demonstrates the legacies of fascism and far-​right in post-​war American politics, but also the enduring and ontological ambivalence of liberal political economy towards the far-​right. This is something that I will come back to in the following chapters and, in particular, how new forms of racism within the emerging neoliberal political economy (Hohle, 2015; MacLean, 2017) opened up a new avenue for the re-​articulation of an American far-​right. 3

Conclusions

The military defeat of the fascist powers and the reconstitution of the international capitalist order under the aegis of US hegemony transformed the international context within which a far-​right politics operated within and was constituted by. In many respects the establishment of the US-​led post-​war order fulfilled the ‘liberal promise’ of a world –​at least in the West –​safe for capital, as the contradictions produced by its uneven and combined development were to no longer reveal themselves in geopolitical rivalry and military conflict as demonstrated in the history of post-​war international relations between the major capitalist powers. Concomitantly, the termination of inter-​ capitalist and inter-​imperialist militarized geopolitical rivalry was realized through the gradual decoupling of capitalist accumulation from fixed geopolitical boundaries as capital moved more freely across borders and the US hegemon pumped capital and sourced demand fuelling the long-​boom of the post-​war era and the formation of transnational class fractions antithetical to nationalist protectionism and social alliances with the far-​right. Indeed, this period was an unprecedented one in the longue durée of the far-​right with a

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transformed international system undermining a major geopolitical and ideational source of its ideo-​political reproduction, a reconstitution of liberal state forms and a break in the social partnership between capitalist ruling classes and the subaltern layers of the far-​right. To a significant extent, this transformation authored by US state-​managers and its capitalist class continues to frame the international and geopolitical context that the contemporary far-​ right operates within. However, as this chapter has shown, the idea and reality of a post-​fascist politics and a wider marginalization of the social forces and politics of the far-​ right in the post-​war world was more complex and, in many respects, far from the case. Thus neo-​fascist and the wider forces of the far-​right not only quickly regrouped, but also became subsumed –​if in a highly contradictory and unstable fashion –​into the broader liberal historical bloc upon which the new post-​ war capitalist order was organized and managed. While such arrangements varied across different liberal states –​alongside, the distinct and localized far-​right articulations within each national political formation –​a generic and common element in all of them was the recognition by liberal and conservative forces that the far-​right was an important and militant bulwark against the advance of the communist and socialist lefts. This was the ideo-​political continuity with the previous era of the far-​right, implicating political elites and the new US hegemon, alongside the continuing way the para-​political dimensions of the liberal-​democratic state lent itself via its ‘strategic selectivity’ to connections with and support for the far-​right in a range of ways that subverted and, at certain moments, threatened to overturn the social and political advances achieved by the ‘forces of democracy’ (Eley, 2002). We can explain this absorption of the far-​right within the broader framework of liberal order in the early post-​war years as a particular form of passive revolution, wherein radical social forces, and political demands from below were molecularly absorbed from above in ways conditioned by and constitutive of the international. Consequently, post-​war international relations were infused with a distinct social logic and moral purpose (the defence of liberal capitalism from the democratic forces of radical-​left) that should be seen as the concrete manifestation of ‘the (geo)political management of social change in domestic orders emanating from the uneven and combined character of capitalist development more generally’ (Anievas and Saull, 2020: 391). As before (and after) the substantive political content of actually existing liberalism encompassed ideo-​political currents, social forces and political agents that were, in many respects, outside and antithetical to liberal democracy but in ways that were also necessary and integral to its particular form and development. Thus,

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it makes more sense to conceptualize the postwar ‘historical bloc’ spearheading the US-​led international liberal order after wwii as representing a broader social penumbra (including elements of the far-​right) that orbited around a ‘hardcore’ of liberal social forces proper. And, in times of hegemonic crisis, it was these auxiliary non-​liberal layers that were strategically deployed in defending and stabilizing the domestic-​international liberal-​capitalist order. anievas and saull, 2020: 391

Thus the realization and workings of liberal democracy and the ontological core of liberalism as analytical perspective and political practice rests on the dominance of its economic basis rooted in private property rights and capitalist production. Such capitalist hegemony forecloses the remit of what is recognized as a legitimate politics and the scope of democratic agency, deliberation, and action. And while not always operationalized, within it –​as demonstrated in the preceding discussion –​the possibilities of an authoritarian liberalism provide an organic connection and political rationality for an ‘embrace of the far-​right’ (Davidson and Saull, 2017). The far-​right did not, then, disappear; even if its geopolitical and material bases, to some extent, did. The continuing significance of racial hierarchy and racism within the social and cultural fabric and, to some degree, the political economy, of post-​war liberal states also provided an important fillip for the far-​ right even if the legacies of fascist racism and the Holocaust altered the public defence of racism and its framing within the legal and political apparatuses of liberal states. This was especially evident in the liberal heartland of the United States with the persistence of Jim Crow and the way in which the post-​war geopolitical context of the Cold War came to (re)enable it through the 1940s and 1950s. Further, and as we shall see in the following chapter, the precise way in which the regime of Jim Crow was terminated provided the means by which a new and neoliberal far-​right came to emerge in the 1980s.

­c hapter 2

Neoliberal Globalization and the Rise of the ‘New’ Far-​Right This chapter examines the relationship between the origins and evolution of neoliberal political economy and the revitalization of the far-​right across the developed capitalist states. Although there was no universal and consistent upsurge in the political fortunes of far-​right parties over this period, it is possible to identify both an increase in their electoral support in several states from the 1990s and an increasing relevance for ideas and arguments articulated by far-​right parties into the political mainstream. And this was especially so in regard to concerns over the future of the welfare state, immigration, and the integration of Muslim populations. Thus, over the periods of 1980–​89 and 1990–​99, the votes of far-​right parties within Western Europe doubled from an average of 4.75 percent to 9.73 percent, with their average representation in national parliaments increasing from six in the early 1980s to 15 by the mid-​ 1990s (Ignazi, 2003: 1; see also Hainsworth, 2000: 2; Norris, 2005: 6–​8).1 The discussion covers a broad canvas from the 1980s through to the 1990s and early 2000s. The chapter that follows focuses on the relationship in the context of the crisis of neoliberalism triggered by the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis. While the entry of neoliberal ideas was initially realized in the policies of the far-​right Pinochet dictatorship in Chile after the 1973 military coup (Fischer, 2009; Klein, 2008) my focus here will be on developments within Britain and the United States and the role of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations in establishing a neoliberal policy framework of global consequence. The significance of the elections of these two right-​wing leaders is that they inaugurated a broader right-​wing political and ideological offensive beyond the jurisdictions of the two states that they led. Thus their impact was felt internationally, most notably in their role in fuelling the so-​called ‘New’ Cold War during 1 Electoral success of far-​right parties in France, Austria, Italy, Belgium and parts of Scandinavia during the 1990s is evident in the following: in France the Front national (fn) secured 10–​ 15 percent of the vote between 1984–​1998; in Austria, the Freedom Party (fpö) went from 9.7 percent in 1986 to 28 percent in 1996; in Italy, the National Alliance gained 13.5 percent in 1994 and 15.7 percent in 1996; in Belgium the Vlaams Blok gained 15.5 percent in Flanders in 1999 and 28.5 percent in the Antwerp local election in 1994; in Norway, the Progress Party secured 15.3 percent in 1997 and the Danish People’s Party got 7.4 percent of the vote in the in the 1997 election (Hainsworth, 2000: 2).

© Richard Saull, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004539549_003

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the 1980s (see Halliday, 1986; Saull, 2007), as well as in their promotion of a set of neoliberal-​informed policy prescriptions in the workings of the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund (imf) and the World Bank). These two administrations –​and those that came after them –​were also highly influential in directing the negotiations (initiated in 1986) that laid the foundations of what became the World Trade Organization (wto) in 1995. Focusing on developments within these two key states of the Anglosphere from the early 1980s is suggestive of the temporal and spatial unevenness of the impact of neoliberalism across the major capitalist democracies and, to some extent, its causal relationship in explaining the rise of the ‘new’ far-​right in general. Thus, while neoliberalism and its relationship with far-​right ideo-​ political currents was evident in the US and Britain from the early 1980s, this was less so in the other major capitalist states. Further, the sources or impetus for the development of neoliberalism (which came later in continental Europe), was specifically associated with the neoliberal shift in the policies of what was then known as the European Economic Community (eec) and, specifically, the project to complete the Single Market that was inaugurated in 1986 with the signing of a treaty (the Single European Act) by the members of the eec. What seems clear, however, is that throughout the 1990s it is possible to identify a generic trend across the main capitalist democracies reflected in the emergence of a new wave of far-​right parties and movements gaining greater vote share and occupying a much more significant place in the politics of these states. Moreover, this trend was directly connected to the spatial, institutional, material, and social transformations within the world economy driven by neoliberal globalization. These processes were the primary and general cause of the rise of the new far-​right even if there were distinct local and national dimensions to each particular expression of far-​right politics within each of these states. As we shall see in the discussion below –​and which a number of scholars have recognized (Bruff, 2014; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Kiely, 2018a; Kundnani, 2021; Saull, 2018; Shilliam, 2021; Slobidian, 2018, 2019) –​it was no coincidence that neoliberal ideas were initially politically realized through right-​wing and far-​right forms of government. Neoliberal thinking, in terms of its political theory of the state, its ambivalence and, in some respects, hostility towards democracy, and in the racialized assumptions that underpin most of the different theoretical strands within it, all point to its affinity and cross-​fertilization with the politics of the right and, in some cases, the far-​right. The fact that this relationship is far from harmonious –​indeed, in some respects, there are deep fissures and antagonisms across these two distinct ideological systems –​does not discount the political reality of such relationships and the way that these

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concrete political combinations have served to produce a right-​wing and far-​ right operationalization of neoliberal political economy. The rise of neoliberal ideas and their influence on policy-​making was born out of the crisis in the organization and workings of the international economy during the early 1970s (Gamble, 1994: 12–​33; Glyn, 2006; Hobsbawm, 1994: 403–​ 32). The crisis –​which led to the first major worldwide recession of the post-​ war era –​ended up shattering both the international institutional structure of the post-​war international capitalist economy and its domestic socioeconomic underpinnings in core capitalist states, and in Britain and the United States specifically. The crisis saw the end of the period of a generalized political consensus –​both within and across the major capitalist democracies –​and the social contract between capital and organized labour that had played a key role in helping to secure this consensus, as well as the legitimacy of the international institutional arrangements associated with the post-​war international economic order.2 The post-​war international economic order that unravelled in the early 1970s could be seen as a unique period in both the history of capitalism and that of the far-​right. This did not mean, as the previous chapter demonstrated, that far-​right ideo-​political forces were absent or marginal players in the construction and consolidation of it. However, the combination of a consistent and sustained period of economic growth that was connected to unprecedented (at the time) international co-​operation among the principal capitalist states –​as evidenced in the establishment of rules-​based international institutions –​with rising living standards and varying degrees of class compromise, all helped to consolidate liberal democracy as the hegemonic form of politics and political economy after the war. The result was that although the forces of the far-​right never went away and, in some cases, they played an important role in helping to consolidate these post-​war arrangements, they had a much more marginal presence within the structures of the state and failed to secure a major presence in the party systems that emerged after the war. This was a period, then, when the far-​right was, in political-​representative terms, relatively marginal, and significantly so in comparison to the period between 1870 and 1945 and since the 1990s. 2 Interestingly, for Britain, the crisis resulted in a fundamental shift in its geopolitical and economic orientation with its accession to the European Economic Community (eec) in January 1973. In many respects, this reflected a political defeat of the traditional imperial-​ minded elite and the far-​right ideo-​political currents associated with it. And while this decision was not free of significant levels of political opposition, the mass base of this opposition was organized through the labour movement and the left.

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The crisis that opened up the political opportunity for neoliberalism to emerge as a hegemonic source of policy ideas and, alongside it, establish a new and more favourable political-​economic context for the far-​right was multi-​ layered. Internationally, the crisis was a consequence of the longer-​term and structural developmental trajectories within the post-​war capitalist system which began to exert themselves in the workings of the Bretton Woods managed exchange rate system by the late 1960s. The key issues were the growing misalignment between the value of the US dollar and the relative productive strength of the US economy vis-​à-​vis its major trading partners in Western Europe and Japan, and the institutional mechanism for managing such imbalances. With the US economy moving to a deficit in its trade balance for the first time in the post-​war era in 1971, and the decline in US gold reserves –​upon which the Bretton Woods managed exchange-​rate system was based –​the Nixon administration moved, unilaterally, to suspend dollar-​gold convertibility in August 1971 and also implemented a number of protectionist measures aimed at its key competitors shortly thereafter. In many respects, these decisions –​that became known as the ‘Nixon shock’ –​reflected an expression of economic nationalism and, given that they came from the United States –​the hegemonic authority underpinning the post-​war international economic order –​their impact was highly significant. Nixon’s interventions were aimed at restoring US global competitiveness via a de facto devaluation of the dollar and using geopolitical leverage to secure economic concessions from its key trading partners and allies. The turn towards economic nationalism obviously reflected not only a challenge to the prevailing liberal assumptions about the workings of the international economy and the longer-​term tendencies towards convergence and equilibrium, but also, in a political sense, the assertion of nationalist economic interests that have long been associated with the politics of the right and far-​right. The economic significance of the Nixon shock was important in itself because it set in motion a crisis in the international financial system which undermined global economic confidence. But its impact became all the more profound with the hike in oil prices after the start of the oil embargo organized by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) cartel in 1973. With the first major world-​wide recession during 1973–​75 that followed on from these developments, a crisis situation emerged across the major capitalist democracies at multiple levels. Internationally, the crisis revealed itself in over-​production in key manufacturing sectors and in the impact that this had on profitability (Brenner, 2005; Tooze, 2019a). And the recession was in many respects the outcome of this, as less efficient producers would –​according to an economic logic at least –​be subject to competitive pressures resulting in

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bankruptcies and mergers ensuring a re-​balancing of productive capital and global capacity. The crisis also revealed itself in the collapse of the existing international institutional arrangements of the Bretton Woods system for managing the international financial system, and of the framework for managing trade relations via gatt (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) with demands for a New International Economic Order (nieo) by the Group of 77 former colonies in the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. Such challenges played themselves out locally within each national capitalist economy as governments responded to the crisis and tried to maintain growth, profitability, and employment. Indeed, it was over this period that struggles took place in those economies most exposed to the crisis and where the levels of class conflict between capital and labour was the most intense. These developments –​unprecedented in the post-​war era –​appeared to demonstrate the failure of traditional policy instruments largely derived from Keynesian assumptions to deal with it and establish a new path of sustained economic growth. Consequently, as the crisis continued, a number of political and economic thinkers on the right3 began to compare it with that of the 1930s and –​with respect to the ability and effectiveness of governments to respond to it –​the crisis of the Weimar Republic before Hitler came to power, through the idea of ‘government overload’ (Brittan, 1975; Crozier, Huntington and Watanuki, 1975). In short, the 1970s were characterized by social and political polarization whereby the domestic social and political settlements of the post-​war era came apart as the international framework and economic structures that had helped consolidate them disintegrated, and this was particularly pronounced in Britain and the United States. And while these developments took years to work through politically, the elections of Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980 respectively reflected a fundamental social and political shift that was to see the construction of a very different kind of liberal order. Neoliberalism emerged as the primary intellectual and ideological beneficiary of the crisis even if, as we shall see below, its influence over government policy in Britain, the United States and elsewhere from the 1980s was far from uniform, consistent or singular. Such unevenness is reflective of the generic characteristics of an international capitalist economy defined by uneven and 3 On the Marxist left, Nicos Poulantzas (Poulantzas, 1978) also saw the authoritarian dimensions of the crisis in the 1970s in countries such as Britain, but less as a means to resolve it and rather as a consequence of the ‘authoritarian statism’ that had emerged out of the 1960s as capitalist democracies tried to manage –​increasingly via authoritarian means –​the contradictions and complexities of societies where the former (Fordist) regime of accumulation was breaking down.

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combined development and the singular configurations of political economy within each national locale and the associated balance of class forces therein. Further, it also reflected the uneven political manifestations and forms of the far-​right that emerged within this new neoliberal economic context. Indeed, in terms of both neoliberalism and the far-​right, there was also a temporal unevenness in the way in which the connections between neoliberalism and the far-​right played-​out across the main capitalist democracies and the specific political sources that constituted such connections. As I will demonstrate, below, the question of race and racialized conceptions of politics played important and, in many respects, quite distinct roles in the political projects of Thatcher and Reagan that were intimately connected to the precise forms of social crisis within Britain and the United States through which neoliberalism emerged and took advantage of. It also inflected the particular form of neoliberalism that became hegemonic within these countries. Thus the two states that, arguably, led the ‘neoliberal revolution’ during the 1980s and 1990s were also defined by racialized forms of politics that drew on far-​right ideological imaginaries and political forces in significant ways (Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2018).4 While the question of race may have been less central or defining of the neoliberal experience in other Western liberal democracies, it was also the case that the extent and depth of neoliberal transformation, the impact of forms of international exchange in the fabric and workings of their political economies –​as in France and Italy in particular –​under the organizational auspices of the eec/​e u, was significant in producing new political opportunities for the far-​right. Thus, although a political identity and electoral-​political strategy framed around race helped insert far-​right infused ideas into the centre of public debate in Britain and the United States throughout the 1980s and beyond, the different ‘racial contexts’ in electoral politics over this period (the 1980–​90s) in other liberal democratic contexts also allowed far-​right political forces to benefit from the changes unleashed and the uncertainties and insecurities created and normalized by neoliberalism. Indeed, the impact of neoliberal political economy developed later in Western Europe during the 1990s as the EU

4 As Andrew Gamble (1994: 197), notes, ‘the Thatcherite project was about reclaiming the nation and the family from the ideological and political forces unleashed in the 1960s that threatened to subvert both. Thatcherism appeared as the authentic voice of white, working-​ class patriarchal values, preaching the importance of a strong nation and a strong family for social cohesion.’ Such sentiments were closely associated with the concerns and orientation of the far-​right.

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moved towards completing the Single Market and monetary integration with the project for a single European currency –​the Euro –​which was inaugurated in 1999. What, then, have been the connections between neoliberal political economy and the far-​right and why has the neoliberal era seen a revival of the far-​ right? The relationship between neoliberalism and the far-​right has, above all, been paradoxical and ambivalent. Thus, the instabilities, crises and insecurities that have become much more common and regular features of the neoliberal era have obviously opened up social spaces and political contexts that the far-​ right has taken advantage of. This has been revealed in the uneven geography of neoliberalism, reflected in the intensification of spatial unevenness produced from a specifically neoliberal form of capitalism. This has been particularly evident in the national/​global nexus of tension within neoliberal political economy. While this has been a longstanding or organic/​constitutive dimension of capitalist development that has contributed to the rise of the far-​right through the consequences of uneven and combined development producing particular localized expressions of far-​right politics, this dimension has been further accelerated and exponentially magnified within neoliberal political economy. Thus, since the early 1980s, the spatial domains of the main capitalist economies have become increasingly incoherent and fractured from the perspective of national and democratic economic planning and management. We can see this on two levels. First, national economies across the capitalist world have become increasingly inter-​connected, be it through the liberalization of trade associated with wto membership or regional initiatives such as the EU’s Single Market, increasing levels of foreign direct investment (fdi) as a proportion of the capital stock, an increasing role of multi-​national firms (MnCs) in delivering services and selling products in different national locales, as well as in the significance of migration flows and the internationalization of national labour markets. While these processes of internationalization or globalization have been uneven –​in the European case economies like Britain, Ireland and the Netherlands have seen such developments to a much greater degree than France or Italy –​it has nevertheless been a generalized phenomenon. What has also been significant about it –​and which will be addressed in the following ­chapter –​is that its spatialized character has also produced distinct geopolitical effects in the form of the rise of China as a distinct pole of capital accumulation. And given the racial/​cultural differences associated with this development, the rise of China has provided a historically distinct opportunity for the weaponization of such ‘racial differences’ in the ideological armoury of the far-​right and its insertion into the political mainstream after the 2007–​8 financial crisis.

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Running in parallel to these processes of internationalization and their consequent structural effects, has been an increasing fragmentation and breakdown in the socioeconomic structures within national political economies. Given that governments maintain a number of important political levers to manage the economy and that, more importantly, they are held politically responsible through the electoral-​democratic process, these pathologies have become an increasingly pronounced feature dominating the electoral landscape. Indeed, in some respects, they can be regarded as a permanent feature of neoliberal political economy –​as evidenced in the de-​industrialized and de-​ populated areas of former manufacturing areas such as the upper mid-​west in the United States, parts of the English Midlands and north in the UK, the mining region of north-​east France and the eastern Länder of the former German Democratic Republic in the newly unified Germany after 1989. These places are juxtaposed with the internationally-​networked cosmopolitan hubs that have become the key nodes of neoliberal political economy, geographically within the same national space as those areas scarred by de-​industrialization, economic stagnation, and demographic atrophy, and also in the same political system. Yet, in social and economic terms, both are in and part of very different social and cultural worlds. In a word, the national coherence of states has been severely tested in the neoliberal era and it is no surprise that a political identity so wrapped up with and defined by nationhood and an exclusivist and hierarchical concept of citizenship has emerged within these deprived locales as an important political voice of despair, fear, resentment, and anger. Accordingly, in a political setting where the national demos continues to define the spatial and institutional limits of democratic imaginaries, we can see how the far-​ right has a structural advantage in such contexts of spatial incoherence and socioeconomic crises. This neoliberal geography of uneven and combined development relates to the activities of capitalist classes and state managers –​the principal agents behind these transformations. It is here where a key source of ambivalence and contradiction in the relationship between the far-​right and neoliberalism lies. Thus, though far from universal, dominant fractions within national capitalist classes have become increasingly integrated into and part of transnational structures of production and accumulation. Simply put, the reproduction of dominant fractions of capital have become ever more connected to international and transnational circuits and structures of exchange resulting in both a loosening of their national locations and a political orientation towards the consolidation and expansion of such international and transnational networks. Capitals then, working in alliance with state elites and, increasingly, transnational technocrats, have been the primary authors of legislative initiatives

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that have opened or liberalized domestic markets and they have also been the primary drivers of internationalization. Other fractions have also promoted the internationalization of labour markets through migration as a means to drive down the social wage, intensify the exploitation of labour and continue the broader disciplining and fragmentation of collectivized labour that has defined the neoliberal era. In this respect, we can talk of cosmopolitan neoliberal capitalism as the dominant fraction which, in many respects, is aligned with the dominant strands within neoliberal theory as regards the role of competition and international trade (Kiely, 2018a: 95–​125; Slobidian, 2018: 27–​54). The impact of this in fuelling the far-​right extends beyond the re-​location or off-​shoring of capital investment, production, and accumulation away from national domiciles to an increasing embrace of international legal and institutional frameworks –​most evident in the structures and institutions of the EU –​that appear to and, in some cases, do usurp the democratic political prerogatives of national governments in economic management. Such developments are unprecedented in the history of capitalism and, notably so with respect to the historical connections between capitalist ruling classes and far-​right mobilizations from below. Thus, prior to the neoliberal era, the connections between the far-​right and capital were much closer and, in some respects, organic or constitutive. This was especially so in the imperialist era of capitalist development over the period 1870–​1945. Here, the social, material, and political reproduction of capitalist ruling classes were directly connected to and part of imperial and geopolitically-​determined social relations whereby the spatial parameters and forms of accumulation were closely connected with and constituted by political and coercive means of surplus extraction (see Arendt, 1968: 123–​266; Harvey, 2003: 87–​182). Further, such colonial-​ imperial structures were also connected to racist imperial imaginaries rooted in a social imperialism based on race and gender hierarchies and exclusions drawn from the far-​right. This was not a functional or frictionless arrangement or alliance. Nevertheless we can say that, over the period between 1870 and the start of World War Two, the far-​right acted as a popular and mass base of capitalist imperialism and imperial ruling classes embraced the politics of the far-​right. Such tendencies were to reach their apotheosis in fascism. In contrast, the neoliberal era and, along with it, much of the legal, political, and institutional architecture underlying these new globalized material circuits of neoliberal capitalism are, structurally antithetical to the social interests of the far-​right. Consequently, the political connections between dominant social forces and the far-​right have, to a significant degree, been broken. And the fact that capitalist forces have been central to the spatial and socioeconomic transformations described above implies that these fractions of capital are the enemy

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of the far-​right and that a new far-​right ‘anti-​capitalism’ has been consolidated. Indeed, the ascendancy of the twin elements of the international or cosmopolitan properties of capitalism alongside that of its most cosmopolitan element –​finance –​has played a significant role in the mobilizations produced from far-​right populist imaginaries located within a broader anti-​globalization framing. This detachment or ambivalence between capital –​or dominant fractions thereof –​and the far-​right has not only been a consequence of the ‘laws of motion’ of capitalist economy, but also the altered ideo-​political context heralded by the end of the Cold War and the collapse of historical communism. The far-​right was a politics and ideology that emerged in the shadow of and in response to the political challenge to the capitalist state from the revolutionary left and socialism. Indeed, the specificities of fascism as a distinct mutation of a far-​right politics are only explicable from within a political context conditioned by the consequences of social revolution –​the creation of a revolutionary state (the ussr) and an ideological and social progeny committed to replicating that experience elsewhere. Yet fascism was more than just a response to communism. It was the political outcome of the failure of socialist revolution (Mann, 2004: 60–​2), with fascism realizing the need for revolutionary salvation in the absence of a (defeated) socialist agency in moments of crisis. The period after 1917 transformed the relationship between socialism and the far-​right from one that was born in 1848 in the European revolutions and the response of ruling classes to mobilize a nationalist far-​right as a means to stop the revolutionary contagion. After 1917 the left –​and in many cases the left beyond its communist and revolutionary forms –​was framed in a way that magnified its ‘alien,’ cosmopolitan, and ‘treasonous’ tendencies because it was defined as an agent of or ally of an external geopolitical power, the ussr. The threat from the left in this rendering went beyond that of its threats to private property rights and existing bourgeois constitutional order and extended to reflecting an alien ideology connected to the geopolitical interests of a foreign power. Socialism was problematized in national(ist) terms and ex-​ communicated as a legitimate expression of politics. The far-​right, on the other hand, was viewed as the antithesis of the left’s potential for betrayal through its mobilization around an over-​determined nationalist imaginary that depicted a tendency towards socialism in racialized terms. The end of the Cold War brought an end to this ideological framing of politics and what were considered legitimate and acceptable forms of political expression. The disappearance of this existential threat to ‘Western civilization’ –​exaggerated or not –​undermined the social and ideological bonds that

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linked the far-​right with capital based on their mutual anti-​communism and anti-​Sovietism that was key to the promotion of militarism over the post-​ war era. As much as fascism, had constituted a distinct far-​right response to the transformed ideo-​political context of a world that now included a self-​ proclaimed Workers’ state and a wider party-​form subversive of liberal democracy, so the transformed ideo-​political context signalled by the demise of these threats to capitalist social order was also consequential for the ideology and political form of the post-​Cold War far-​right. Within this transformed context of political economy, the far-​right has maintained its distinct ideo-​political position by framing its politics and response to the transformation to a post-​Cold War era as a form of a racialized moral economy. Thus, the political appeal of the far-​right in the neoliberal era has not just been a consequence of the internationalizing and uneven spatial dimensions of neoliberalism, but also as a result of the corrosive impact and destruction of the moral and cultural fabric caused by neoliberal welfare policies. Consequently, the dismantling of the post-​war social democratic settlement –​ uneven though it has been –​across the capitalist world since the 1980s has provided an important source of far-​right critique and political mobilization. Neoliberalism has articulated a new, highly individualized, and economistic social ontology that is radically anti-​collectivist.5 This has played out in its critique of and challenge to forms of social-​welfare universalism, which it regards as a form of collectivism founded upon public monopolies rooted in the idea and protections afforded to collectivist labour. Such positions and the institutions associated with welfare and social or labour collectivism that emerged after 1945 were, as we saw in the previous chapter (see also Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018; Kundnani, 2021; Shilliam, 2018, 2021), rooted in distinct cultural and racialized imaginaries that privileged white and/​or western/​ European workers over the post-​colonial/​immigrant working class. However, despite such limits to ‘welfare universalism’ neoliberal policies have moved to dismantle forms of social security and welfare based on a collectivist moral economy or social contract that rested on a formal –​if not always substantive –​ principle of universalism.

5 However, as Quinn Slobidian (2019) has convincingly argued, in terms of culture and the cultural identities of individuals, most neoliberal thinkers assume some form of collective group identity based on shared cultural assumptions and norms and, in some cases, relate this to an explicit racial identity akin to scientific racism as reflected in a branch of the Austrian School (see Hoppe, 2001, 2015; Lynn, 2008).

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This position –​that Hayek saw as a fundamental element in the neoliberal idea of individual freedom –​was most infamously recognized in comments made by Margaret Thatcher in 1987 where she stated, and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.6 While the justifications of welfare reform in the neoliberal era have not always been articulated via a neoliberal position based on the idea of radical individualism, they have nevertheless resulted in the dismantling of a social and moral collectivist imaginary and institutions that provided a collectivized social safety net for all citizens. The significance of this for thinking about the connections between the revival of the far-​right and neoliberalism is, however, more complex. Indeed, the far-​right itself was and has been a critic of the post-​ war social democratic/​welfare state and the collectivist ideological consensus associated with it (Betz, 1994; Hainsworth, 2008; Kitschelt, 1995; Mudde, 2007; Rydgren, 2013; Wodack et al., 2013). Accordingly, through the 1990s, far-​right parties singled out the welfare state as an institution and set of practices that they deemed immoral, corrupt, inflated and decidedly problematic. Their position, however –​in contrast to neoliberal arguments –​has been premised on a racialized form of moral economy, which equates citizenship rights to particular racialized national groups. In the US, then, the criticisms of the New Deal settlement have been based on moral narratives of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor which are ­connected to longstanding racialized tropes about the moral virtues of white citizens as paragons of work and thrift compared to the ‘lazy and idle’ stereotype of the non-​white/​African-​American (Omi and Winant, 2015; Rana, 2010). Consequently, it is possible to see the neoliberal subject as articulated by neoliberal thinkers as resting on racialized (if unstated) and cultural assumptions about the ideal-​typical individual –​who is white, male, and propertied –​and 6 The full wording of the quote is as follows, ‘I think we have gone through a period where too many children and people have been given to understand “I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!” or “I have a problem. I will go and get a grant to cope with it!” … “I am homeless, the government must house me!” and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families, and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations’ (Thatcher, 1987).

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their supposed ability to realize the possibility of the idea of neoliberal freedom and of living in and contributing to a neoliberal social order. Thus, the attacks on the social democratic welfare state, and with it, on ideologies of collectivism occurred in contexts where the racialized Other was depicted as a(n) (undeserving) recipient (or possible recipient) of social welfare and therefore threatening the traditional racial hierarchies and privileges of whiteness. And in the US context of the late 1960s –​after the political rights of African-​ Americans had finally been guaranteed with the passing of civil rights legislation –​President Lyndon Johnson’s move towards addressing wider social rights connected to housing and education through the ‘Great Society’ reforms threatened to not only extend collectivist norms but, in doing so, also subvert the racial assumptions underpinning the wider social order. It was precisely in this context –​with the images of burning cities after urban disturbances in the late 1960s fresh in the minds of many whites –​that far-​right informed critiques of welfare connected-​up with and helped reinforce neoliberal attacks on collectivism (Hohle, 2015, 2017). Similarly, in Britain the ideological justifications for the dismantling of universal forms of collectivist welfare provision have been informed by narratives of deserving and undeserving which have rested on a combined racialized imaginary (see Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018; Shilliam, 2018) that was connected to the possibility of welfare going to citizens of Caribbean and South-​ Asian origin and, later, to immigrants from the EU. These kinds of racialized ideological tropes have been generalized across the major capitalist democracies since the 1990s, with an anti-​immigration hysteria –​also known as ‘nativism’ –​providing the entry-​point for welfare reform and the dismantlement of the post-​war social democratic settlement. That this has been a highly contradictory process in which far-​right parties and movements have, in some respects, come to act as political bedfellows and allies of neoliberal-​oriented reforms of welfare systems and labour markets –​even when such policies have had a negative impact on the social wellbeing of all social layers and racial groups (including whites) –​has not altered the significance of the connections between far-​right insecurities and racialized resentments and the ‘ending of welfare as we know it’. What I intend to do in the rest of this chapter is flesh out these introductory positions in more depth. The aim is to emphasize the paradoxical ways in which neoliberalism has facilitated the revival of the far-​right while recognizing, at the same time, the antagonistic dimensions of this relationship which has become ever more pronounced in the context of the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis. Following the general argument that has framed and driven my analysis throughout, I relate the uneven –​spatial and temporal –​expressions

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of the far-​right as a consequence of the crisis-​driven politics and associated ideological imaginaries that are generated within capitalist development connected to the contradictions of liberal democratic forms of political economy. Further, race is foregrounded as a particular expression of hierarchical class relations. I begin the discussion with an examination of the role of racial imaginaries connected to the far-​right in the origins of neoliberal political economy focusing on the Anglosphere. In the following section I focus on the interstices between neoliberalism and the far-​right. First, I focus on neoliberal doctrine giving particular attention to the themes of race and authoritarianism within neoliberalism –​those elements most intimately connected to far-​right ideo-​ political currents. Secondly, I move to examine the particular national political contexts –​in the US and Britain during the 1980s –​where neoliberal doctrine was first made politically operational within liberal democratic states in the form of electoral politics and the policy and administration of political economy, and also where the impact of neoliberal doctrine has been most pronounced. Here, I refer back to the inter-​connections and affinities between neoliberal doctrine as concerns race and authoritarian state forms and the significance for the realization of neoliberal political practice of its connections to right-​wing and far-​right forms of politics. After outlining the connections between neoliberalism and the far-​right in the politics of Thatcher and Reagan, I move to examine the specificities of neoliberal globalization: how this transformed the international political economy of the Western capitalist democracies and the contradictory ways in which these processes facilitated the re-​emergence and re-​constitution of the far-​right. The chapter ends with a survey of the evolving articulations of far-​right politics across different national contexts over this period throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. 1

Racial Imaginaries, the Far-​Right and the Origins of Neoliberalism

1.1 Neoliberal Thinking Neoliberalism –​as a set of ideas and ideological assumptions about the nature and ideal organization of political economy –​emerged in central Europe in the early 1930s. The location and temporal moment were far from coincidental. Indeed, neoliberal ideas emerged in a context of profound capitalist crisis; perhaps the most serious in the history of capitalism and, with it, many of the pre-​existing liberal ideological assumptions that had, up until this point, underpinned its operations. The crisis –​as we saw earlier –​was, in many respects, decisive for the rise of Nazism in Germany. For Neoliberals such as

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Friedrich Hayek, however, the rise of Nazism was regarded as part of a broader and generalized collectivist and statist response that extended to include Roosevelt’s New Deal and Britain’s move towards protectionism after 1932, as well as Stalinism in the ussr (Hayek, 2001). Consequently, for the neoliberals who met in Paris in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann –​which is regarded as the first major international meeting of neoliberal intellectuals –​statism and collectivism were viewed as existential threats to the liberal civilization that had developed throughout the nineteenth century and to its principle social and political achievement: the defence and promotion of individual freedom and personal responsibility rooted in private property and market competition (Cockett, 1995; Hartwell, 1995; Hayek, 2001; Kiely, 2018a). There is not the space here to discuss the evolution of what Dieter Plehwe has termed the ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (Plehwe, 2009: 4).But suffice to say that, from its origins in the early 1930s, neoliberalism developed after the war into a major source of critique of the prevailing postwar consensus across the capitalist world. This critique focused on the role of fiscal policy in stimulating demand, and on the creation of ‘universal’ welfare states and other forms of state planning in the workings of capitalist markets. And while there were (and are) important differences across the different strands of neoliberal thought, most of the thinkers who have been associated with the Mont Pelerin Society –​the key intellectual institution of neoliberal thinking after the war –​tended to converge on a defence of the price mechanism as the key source of economic information determining market behaviour, alongside the promotion of free enterprise, liberalized trade structures and capital flows, competition and a strong and impartial state (see Plehwe, 2009: 14; Davis, 2017; Kiely, 2018a).7

7 Ray Kiely (2018a: 9–​10) provides the following compelling definition of neoliberalism recognizing the problematic connection between doctrine and practice, ‘neoliberalism is a body of thought and a practice of government, or governmentality, which takes as its starting point a distinction between spontaneous markets and constructed politics. However, in both theory and practice, this distinction cannot hold, and neoliberalism is itself an example of a constructivist project. This takes a variety of forms within neoliberal theory … and practice … Put differently, neoliberalism promises spontaneity but cannot avoid constructivism … [N]‌eoliberalism is a utopian project in that it seeks to eradicate politics, to eliminate the collective or social and to rid the world of moral hazard, all in the name of individual responsibility, but it requires politics, the social, collective institutions and, therefore, moral hazard to do so.’ Such a paradox and, in particular, neoliberalism’s necessary dependence on politics and electoral politics –​in liberal democracies at least –​provide the opening for its relationship with the far-​right (see Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2018).

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For our concerns here, however, we need to take note of two aspects of neoliberalism that have an important bearing on our consideration of the far-​ right: the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarian state forms (i.e., the concrete substance of the ‘strong and impartial state’) and, secondly, its relationship to race and the legacies of capitalist imperialism and colonial dispossession. Both of these aspects are not only crucial in considering the character of neoliberal forms of political economy in practice and the impact of neoliberal-​inspired policy interventions in capitalist societies since the early 1980s, but also on how neoliberalism can be seen to rest on a number of ideological assumptions and policy commitments that overlap –​if in a contradictory and de-​stabilizing fashion –​with that of the far-​right. My concern, then, is with neoliberal-​inspired policy interventions and, specifically, their connections with the far-​right in a two-​fold sense. On the one hand, through the way in which neoliberalism has provoked or helped cause far-​right mobilizations and antagonisms as a consequence of the social insecurities, instabilities, anxieties, and social grievances that have been part and parcel of the experience of neoliberal economic restructuring and transformation for large numbers of people. In this respect, the neoliberal form of capitalism can be seen as a historically distinct form of capitalist accumulation in the history of the longue durée of capitalist development that rests on an overturning and reconfiguration of the key elements of the political economy of capitalism that prevailed between the mid-​1930s and the early 1970s. Such restructuring had a material dimension in the organization of production and the labour process but was also reflected in its distinct international institutional and geopolitical characteristics. On the other hand, the relationship and inter-​connections between neoliberalism and the far-​right can be examined through the way in which some of the elements of the neoliberal critique of post-​war collectivism and/​or social democracy have chimed and overlapped with far-​right parties, to such an extent to that much of the contemporary far-​right is in fact committed to forms of neoliberal political economy, even if in a very contradictory sense (see Davidson, 2015; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2015d; Worth, 2015, 2019). Before I begin the analysis of these two aspects of neoliberalism in the politics of the major capitalist states from the 1980s, it is necessary to spend a little while examining what neoliberal thinkers themselves have written with respect to these matters. This is particularly important because neoliberals have tended to argue –​like liberals in general –​that their views are critical of and incompatible with the political authoritarianism usually associated with the far-​right, as well as suggesting that the implementation of neoliberal models of political economy are ‘colour-​blind’ (i.e., do not racially discriminate in

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their operations and actually undermine pre-​existing structures of racial hierarchy) and, in some respects, are ‘anti-​racist’ (see Pitcher, 2016).8 As noted, neoliberal ideas emerged in a political context where pre-​ existing forms of liberal constitutional order were under severe strain and political assault. While the establishment of the ussr after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution introduced a state-​political form and regime of political economy that was in many respects the antithesis of liberal constitutional order, it was the turn towards statism and political authoritarianism within the main capitalist economies in the early 1930s which was seen as a fundamental threat to the liberal order and individual freedom in general (Hayek, 2001: 12–​17; see also Alves and Meadowcroft, 2014). With the emergence of the Hitler dictatorship in 1933 several thinkers, including Hayek, began to outline critiques of this new statism and authoritarianism which was to subsequently congeal into the concept of ‘totalitarianism’ (Hayek, 2001; see also Tormey, 1995). In the context of the Cold War after 1945, totalitarianism was used to describe both Nazism and Stalinism and was a key ideological tool of Cold War liberals (Gleason, 1995; Traverso, 2019: 151–​76). But in its original neoliberal framing it was something that was used to describe the generic turn towards statism and collectivist provision that characterized all of the major capitalist economies after the early 1930s, including Roosevelt’s New Deal. The suggestion that a single concept –​totalitarianism –​could adequately explain the essence of what defined Stalinism and Nazism in spite of their superficial similarities is arguable, but to suggest that the New Deal (and Keynesianism in general) could be regarded as deriving from the same theoretical and political genus as Stalinism and Nazism stretches the concept beyond credibility9 (Tormey, 1995; Kiely, 2018a: 35–​65).

8 From the perspective of its intellectual progenitors and ideological cheerleaders, neo-​ liberalism is an intellectual position and ideological perspective that is ‘post-​racial’ or ‘colour-​blind’. Thus, in the writings of Hayek, Friedman, Becker and others, while there is little reference to questions of race and/​or how racialised practices and hierarchies may condition the operation of neo-​liberal models of political economy, there is also an implicit –​and sometimes explicit –​see Becker (1971) and Friedman (2002) –​suggestion that neo-​liberalism will erase racism from the economy through the consequences of rational and individualised economic preferences. 9 As Friedman (2002: 201) claimed, ‘[t]‌he preservation and expansion of freedom are today threatened from two directions. The one threat is obvious and clear. It is the external threat coming from the evil men in the Kremlin who promise to bury us. The other threat is far more subtle. It is the internal threat coming from men of good intentions and good will who wish to reform us.’

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Nevertheless, the different strands of neoliberalism that emerged in the 1930s claimed to be the political and intellectual heirs of the classical liberal tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, based on the defence of the primacy of individual freedom and clear limits on political interventions in the operations of the market economy, which they considered as the primary location for the realization of individual freedom. Thus, Hayek argued that Nazi Germany was a threat to liberal civilization10 because ‘if we are ready to recognise that the rise of Fascism and Nazism was not a reaction against the socialist trends of the preceding period, but a necessary outcome of these tendencies’ (Hayek, 2001: 4). Further, in an attempt to differentiate his position on Nazism from Carl Schmitt –​someone who shared some of Hayek’s reservations about the rise of ‘mass society’ –​Hayek famously labelled him as ‘Hitler’s crown jurist’ (Hayek, 1967: 169). Although these claims should not be dismissed out of hand –​the growth of state power in Britain in the 1930s and in the New Deal United States did have an impact on the economic freedom of individuals, although less so than in the cases of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany –​we need to consider them in relation to the broader liberal and elite concerns about the rise of so-​called ‘mass society’ and the real and potential democratic encroachments on the autonomy of markets and entrepreneurs and capitalists that was the prevailing intellectual and political context of the time (see Kiely, 2017: 4). In this respect, the neoliberal critique of collectivism, statism and social democracy in general reflected a profound unease across nearly all shades of liberal opinion (including that of Hayek’s intellectual nemesis, John Maynard Keynes) as to the threat posed to liberal societies from democracy, which they tended to understand as a mechanism for realizing ‘governments of the masses’ or ‘democratic tyranny’ (Buchanan, 1993; Buchanan and Tullock, 1962; Hayek, 2001: 73–​4; Röpke, 1969: 97). As we have seen from the discussion in previous chapters, such views chimed with the longstanding liberal ambivalence towards the extension of the electoral franchise to the working class and towards the unpropertied and democratic forms of social and political power in general. For Hayek and other thinkers such as Hannah Arendt (Arendt, 1968), the ‘totalitarian dictators (Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin)’ were consequences of ‘mob rule’ and an inherent possibility contained within mass democracy. Consequently, political authoritarianism, in this rendering, was not a consequence of a crisis of capitalism as 10 In The Road to Serfdom (2001: 31) Hayek quoted his mentor Ludwig von Mises, ‘[t]‌he philosophy of the Nazis … is the purest and most consistent manifestation of the anti-​ capitalistic and socialistic spirit of the age.’

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suggested by Karl Polanyi (Polanyi, 2001) but, rather, the degenerative dimensions inherent within democratic systems of government where executive power and the operation of the rule of law are not sufficiently insulated from mass pressures and democratic majorities. In short, neoliberals were articulating a politics of ‘limited democracy’ premised on forms of elite rule that were in line with some of the writings of John Stuart Mill (Mill, 2010: 120) and Alexis de Tocqueville (2004: 310). Indeed, while Hayek, his mentor, Ludwig von Mises, and Milton Friedman avoided endorsing dictatorship over democracy as the preferable or default political-​institutional form for the realization of market freedom, they were consistent in identifying the threats to market qua individual freedom from the workings of democratic processes and democratic collectivities. Accordingly, when the workings of democratic systems appear to fundamentally threaten the sanctity of private property rights, neoliberals have shown themselves to be more than willing to endorse dictatorial forms of government based on the violent overthrow of democratic systems. Hayek and Friedman’s support for and engagement with the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile provides the clearest example of this, and the decision by the Mont Pelerin Society to hold their annual meeting in 1981 in Viña del Mar, Chile –​the place where Pinochet planned the coup d’état –​merely reinforces the point. Thus, Hayek justified his support for the Pinochet dictatorship because he would ‘prefer a liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism’ because ‘it is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way’ (Hayek, cited in Slobidian, 2018: 277). These observations accorded with that of Mises in the context of the 1920s and the emergence of fascist dictatorship in Italy (Mises, 1985). Such views and support for dictatorship were most clearly expressed in the writings of the so-​called ‘ordo-​liberals’ concentrated in the University of Freiburg. In contrast to Hayek –​who based his critique of mass democracy and state authoritarianism on the idea of markets and their liberal political regimes as reflective of ‘spontaneous’ social orders (Hayek, 1948: 50, 1973: 101–​ 2, 1979: 107–​9) –​the ordo-​liberals made explicit calls for a reconstitution of the state and politics through the idea of ‘commissarial dictatorship’ ( Röpke, 1942: 256, 1998: 130), something that was also articulated by Carl Schmitt in relation to his critique of Weimar Democracy (Heller, 2015; Bonefeld, 2017a: 148; Wilkinson, 2021: 26–​30). Indeed, for Schmitt and the ordo-​liberal strand of neoliberalism, a clear theory of dictatorship and political authoritarianism was regarded as necessary to reconstitute a free society based on a market-​ order (see Cristi, 1998; Bonefeld, 2017a; Kiely, 2017). The justification for this as a defence of liberal freedom rested on what Schmitt (Schmitt, 1998: 216, 226–​7)

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and the ordo-​liberals regarded as the weakening of the state through it being overwhelmed by a plurality of social interests and demands that derived from mass society and the entry of the masses into the state via democracy. While the ordo-​liberals offered this as the basis of a general position necessary for the maintenance of a market order, it was fundamentally connected to the specificities of the Weimar Republic and the crisis with which it was engulfed after the onset of the world economic crisis in late 1929. The Weimar Republic was seen as the exemplar of the degenerative impact of democracy and particularly social democracy on the ability of the state to function as the upholder of market order and market freedom under the rule of law. It was this –​governmental stasis because of the workings of parliamentary democracy alongside the social democratic institutional and political presence of the working class within the state –​that, for Schmitt and the ordo-​ liberals, fundamentally weakened and undermined the workings of a liberal state. In the words of Schmitt, democracy requires … first homogeneity and second –​if the need arises –​elimination and eradication of heterogeneity … A democracy demonstrates its political power by knowing how to refuse or keep at bay something foreign and unequal that threatens its homogeneity. schmitt, 1988: 9

And, further, only a strong state can depoliticize, only a strong state can openly and effectively decree that certain activities … remain its privilege and as such ought to be administered by it, that other activities belong to the … sphere of self-​management, and that all the rest be given to the domain of a free economy. schmitt, 1998: 226–​7

In this rendering the state is defined, above all else, as ‘market police’ (Bonefeld, 2017a) and, consequently, a justification is provided for legal-​political authoritarianism to ‘cleanse the state of pluralism’ thus reconstituting it as a market police through the expulsion of organized labour and its ‘monopoly tendencies’ thus allowing the social and political disciplining of organized labour. As Bonefeld (2017a) notes, the argument here rested on how authoritarian means could be justified to reconstitute economic freedom. This was one of the reasons why Schmitt turned to support the Nazi dictatorship in 1933 and it also

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provided the intellectual foundations for Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s (1982) notorious defence of right-​wing authoritarian regimes in the Cold War through the distinction between authoritarian regimes (politically repressive but where private property rights are largely defended as reflected in Pinochet’s Chile after 1973) and totalitarian (communist and leftist regimes where private property rights had been repressed). It was also the argument that Hayek and Milton Friedman used to justify their support for the Pinochet dictatorship (Hayek, 1978; Klein, 2008). What we can take from these neoliberal positions on the primacy of individual freedom located in a market framework is a profound distrust of a state and political order founded on democratic and, in particular, social democratic principles.11 And although the social democracy of the Weimar Republic and the crisis that it was engulfed in during the early 1930s do not reflect the generalized state of liberal democracy since then, it is the case that neoliberal arguments, necessarily, invoke executive power and legal-​constitutional guarantees freed from democratic pressures and constraints and the imperative of authoritarian pro-​market interventions in moments of crisis (see Bruff, 2014; Wilkinson, 2021). Indeed, it was precisely in the context of a combined economic and political crisis of governmentality (Davies, 2017; Foucault, 2008; see also Dardot and Laval, 2014) in the 1970s that the spectre of Weimar returned to the politics of liberal democracies, as evidenced in the first major economic recession of the post-​war period that combined with significant labour militancy and the inability to restore capitalist profitability (Harvey, 2005). It was in this context that neoliberal arguments associated with the need for a strong state began to reappear and gain political traction (Brittan, 1975, 1983; Bonefeld, 2017b; Gamble, 1994; Hall et al., 2013: 268–​317; Levitas, 1986). In sum, neoliberal theory contains the seeds of a political authoritarianism that is particularly directed at organized labour. While this, in itself, does not imply a green light for fascism, it does lend itself to forms of right-​wing authoritarianism and the associated systematic abuse of human rights and political brutality that have tended to be associated with such states. Accordingly, there 11

It is important to note that the neoliberal defence of the primacy of the individual and a politics focused on the promotion of individual economic freedom, has also been the subject of extensive conservative critique. In Irving Kristol’s words, Hayek’s thought is reflective of a ‘cultural nihilism’ (Kristol, 1995: 92–​105; 1978; see also Kiely, 2018a: 82–​3) because of the absence of a collective moral-​cultural framework within which capitalist markets originally emerged and developed and which neoliberal consumerism and the fetishization of economic exchange has, for Kristol and other conservative thinkers, eroded. For a discussion of the connections and overlaps between neoliberalism and the conservative right within the politics of the US Republican party since the late 1950s see Kiely (2018a: 70–​5).

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is nothing inconsistent about neoliberalism working with and embracing a far-​ right politics committed to private property rights and competitive markets. Further, the confusion within some popularizing of neoliberalism as a form of ‘anti-​statism’ needs to be clearly refuted or qualified as neoliberalism is not the same as libertarianism and in one form or another is based on an argument that calls for a fundamental strengthening of the state based on the dismantling of the existing social democratic institutional machinery, legal frameworks, and democratic participation within the liberal state. Consequently –​and in spite of Hayek’s criticism of Carl Schmitt noted above –​such a position in a context of actually existing liberal (or social) democracy closely approximates to Schmitt’s idea of a ‘state of exception’ as the necessary legal privilege of the sovereign (Schmitt, 2004, 2013) to restore political order in moments of political crisis, which was fundamentally concerned with eliminating the political influence of organized labour and its associated ideology of collectivism on the workings of the state. The question of race in neoliberal thinking tends to reflect a generalized silence, though there are some exceptions. Neoliberal thinking is largely blind to the historical act and consequences of colonial dispossession (Saull, 2018; Shilliam and Tilley, 2018). Thus, from the perspective of some of its intellectual progenitors and ideological cheerleaders, neoliberalism offers the possibility of realizing a ‘post-​racial’ or ‘colour-​blind’ society. Such claims are particularly associated with the Chicago School work of Gary Becker (1971) and Milton Friedman (2002) based on the assumption that providing a market environment that allows rational and individualized economic preferences to flourish will, ultimately, lead to the erasure of racism as reflective of an irrational way of thinking and behaving. These thinkers operate from within a social ontology that is removed from any recognition of colonial dispossession and the legacies of enslavement. Contemporary society and its racial legacies and racialized structures rooted in the imperial-​colonial past are, in effect, cordoned off from that past. This allows these writers to argue that any politically-​directed and state-​based ‘affirmative action’ policies that are sensitive to such historical racial (and gender) legacies are forms of ‘racial privileging’ through offering advantages to one racial group to the cost of other groups (Omi and Winant, 2015:53–​73). This also extends to their claim that such policies –​because of their ‘market distorting effects’ –​create a ‘culture of poverty and dependence’ (see Bonilla-​Silva, 2009; McCarthy, 2016). What we might regard as a ‘purposeful neglect’ of race and racism in the neoliberal imaginary does not, however, fully reflect the neoliberal theoretical corpus. Consequently, it is possible to identify a clear set of racialized

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assumptions and racist tropes in significant strands of neoliberal thinking and with respect to the Austrian School and ordo-​liberal traditions in particular. Thus in the former, as Quinn Slobidian (2019) opines, Austrian School thinkers have tended to both privilege cultural groupings and collectivities as providing the basic foundations for political communities and the inequalities between different cultural groups. Their radical individualist social ontology sits within a wider set of culturalized assumptions about human groups which implicitly informs their understandings of how markets work. Following on from this, while Hayek and Mises (and contemporary Austrian School writers such Peter Boettke) recognize the cultural diversity of the world and the evolving and changing character of national or group cultures, they also tend to see different cultural groupings as possessing relatively fixed sets of cultural attributes and, further, such attributes go a long way to explain the persistent levels of inequality across these different cultural groups. In this way, forms of cultural hierarchy are established –​with white Europeans at the top –​and explanations for economic inequality are essentialized to a set of cultural characteristics which come very close to approximating the kind of racial tropes that informed European imperial projects. Indeed, in a recent piece, Arun Kundnani (2021) provides a provocative intervention on the racial dimensions of neoliberal thought specifically focusing on Hayek’s theory of cultural evolution, the consequences of which have been the creation of a distinct kind of neoliberal racism beyond that of the racist legacies of colonialism and, instead, is a necessary production of ‘surplus populations’ always outside of the supposedly universal neoliberal order and policed by imperial exclusions and violence. Such flirtations with racialized tropes become much more pronounced in the Austrian School’s more radical-​anarchic sibling associated with the Freedom and Property Society and figures such as Hans-​Hermann Hoppe and Richard Lynn. They put forward an argument for radical individualism and market freedom associated with a vision of down-​sized ethno-​nationalist states rooted in forms of biological racism using explicit justifications based on biology and genetics to argue for race purity/​separation and racial hierarchy. Committed to a political vision that is antagonistic to the existing organization of the state and the wider states-​system (hence their advocacy of secession), this approach aligns with the far-​right through its racist social ontology and its apparent willingness to consider coercive and violent measures to enforce and uphold such separation. It is why these thinkers are so closely aligned with the so-​called ‘Alt-​Right’ movement (see Cooper, 2021). As well as the Austrian School, a number of thinkers associated with the ordo-​liberal tradition of neoliberalism have based their arguments on racialized

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framings and the explicit use of race categories.12 Specifically, in the writings of Wilhelm Röpke there is a clear and explicit set of racialized assumptions concerning both the nature of communism –​that chimed with thinking across parts of the US political spectrum during the Cold War as discussed in the previous ­chapter –​as well as in a ‘colonial mentality’ as regards the possibility of self-​government for former colonies in sub-​Saharan Africa in particular (see Slobidian, 2018: 146–​81; Solchany, 2014).13 Röpke attacked aspects of US foreign policy towards the third world both in terms of the objectives of promoting economic development via ‘Modernization theory’ and the assumptions therein that African countries could pursue a western-​oriented developmental path as thinkers such as Walt Whitman Rostow argued. Such views extended to his support for colonialism and the racist regimes in southern Africa as ‘bastions of civilization’. As Quinn Slobidian (2018: 152–​7,168–​72, 172–​8) details, Röpke was happy to be in the intellectual and political company of biological racists and supporters of white supremacism. His views dovetailed with the developing Conservative backlash in the United States towards the civil rights movement and decolonization in Africa as reflected in the case of the editor of the National Review throughout the 1950s and 1960s, William F. Buckley.14 What we can take from this brief survey of neoliberal thinking on race is that while –​in most cases –​there is not an explicit defence of racialized tropes and forms of white supremacy, there is a tendency to deny that race is a fundamental category and cleavage within political economy that is connected to its blindness towards the racist legacies of colonialism and, in the US context,

12

13

14

In a recent work, Nancy MacLean (2017) also highlights the position of James Buchanan –​ a leading writer associated with the ‘Virginia school’ or Public Choice strand of neoliberalism –​who was a supporter of Jim Crow and a long-​standing opponent of affirmative action policies. Ray Kiely (2018a: 91) also notes the role of such assumptions within Mont Pelerin discussions on decolonization during the late 1950s that were based on a widely-​shared concern about the extension of democracy to the post-​colonial world with figures such as Arthur Shenfield at the 1957 meeting echoing a fear that in a world where liberalism was not fully secure the West should not abandon its colonial outposts and its support for the white settler regimes in Africa. Such hostility to the growing momentum behind decolonization was also reflected in Karl Brandt’s call for an ‘enlightened liberalism’ that would facilitate more white settlement to colonial areas. Buckley wrote an editorial for the National Review published on August 24, 1957, entitled, ‘Why the South Must Prevail’ supporting segregation on the basis that ‘whites were “the advanced race” and that science proved “the median cultural superiority of White over Negro”’ (cited in Slobidian, 2018: 168).

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nation building. Consequently, neoliberal thinkers and ideologues have played an important role in assisting the intellectual and political denigrating of civil rights activists and anti-​racist struggles that put them in the company of the far-​right. Indeed, American neoliberals such as Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, among others, provided intellectual cover for Southern racists and Jim Crow apologists through their criticism of the ‘over-​extension’ of the power and jurisdiction of the federal State through civil rights legislation and the defence of ‘states’ rights’ (see Friedman, 2002: 101; Burgin, 2012: 202) that was a key plank of the opposition of the campaign of ‘Massive Resistance’ in the late 1950s. There are important distinctions and contradictions in the relationship between neoliberalism and race –​not least as reflected in the embrace of neoliberalism and the celebration of it as a reflecting a form of ‘colour-​blindness’ (see Pitcher, 2012, 2016). But the discussion that follows will demonstrate that the denial of race helps to delegitimize anti-​racist struggles and facilitate the ‘post-​racism’ of the new far-​right, particularly with respect to how the quintessential neoliberal subject as deployed in neoliberal models closely corresponds –​if in an implicit and ‘invisible’ way –​to the racialized subjectivity of the white male property owner. Neoliberal subjectivity draws, then, on the longstanding civilizational assumptions and prejudices regarding the qualities and conditions of liberal citizenship. While this can lend itself to challenging existing racialized hierarchies based on white supremacy as has been evident in the realization of decolonization and civil rights after 1945, it has also rested –​and continues to do so –​on a racially inscribed sense of what it means to be a legitimate and equal citizen. Consequently, within neoliberalism there is a –​usually unstated –​racialized assumption connected to whiteness as the default historical figure of the aspiring bourgeois individual whereby the idealized and normative practices of the individual neoliberal economic subject are those that refer to the concrete and socially constructed practices of the white male property owner. What follows from this is that the absence of such properties in individual behaviour and/​or that of population groups is understood as a racialized deficit, especially through the explanatory root of culture (Saull, 2018; Lentin and Titley, 2011). Thus, those that do not conform to a neoliberal individuality and especially those who resist it –​collectively –​tend to be racialized in the sense of how cultural tropes are deployed to describe and explain such behaviours. As we shall see below, much of the reconfiguration of the liberal state under neoliberalism has been precisely about methods and techniques being deployed to normalize and shift forms of cultural behaviour with the targeting of particular racialized attitudes and subjectivities. While such policies and

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interventions have not, in general, been connected to explicit racialized narratives that were part and parcel of the era of white supremacism, they have had, undeniably, racialized targets –​be it welfare policy15 or law-​and-​order policies –​and racialized consequences. Indeed, the denial of the legacies of colonialism and slavery and the neoliberal attacks on the collectivist forms of social and political solidarity that have contested liberal forms of political economy in the post-​colonial era are indicative of a set of racialized assumptions that have defined neoliberal thought. Be it a political economy resting on subsistence as defended by indigenous peoples or those committed to forms of social-​collective solidarity and/​or reparations, the combination of neoliberal silence and/​or refutation speaks volumes as to their –​at best –​ambivalence towards racial injustice and prevailing racialized hierarchies and, in many respects, an acceptance of such injustices. There is one other element of neoliberal thinking that relates to race that we need to consider that is particularly pertinent to the practices of neoliberal political economy and that concerns immigration. The idea of a borderless world, or one of free movement of labour, would seem to be consistent with a neoliberal understanding of efficient markets regulated by competition based on price. Indeed, this would seem to equate with neoliberal opposition to what they regard as the monopoly on labour (supply and functioning of labour markets) that are a consequence of the structural power of organized labour which the control of borders and migration flows could be seen as helping to reinforce.16 The commitment of neoliberal thinkers to free movement of labour, however, has been far from consistent. This is not to suggest that neoliberal positions parallel those of the far-​right, though it does seem to demonstrate that the freedoms associated with the factors of production and the competitive efficiencies associated with such freedoms (as well as their

15

16

In this respect the report by Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1965 (Moynihan, 1965), entitled ‘The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,’ provided important ‘intellectual’ ammunition to neoliberal arguments about welfare reform in the United States even though Moynihan was not a neoliberal ideologue, with its emphasis on the cultural sources of African-​American ‘welfare dependency’ rather than the structures of state and societal racism. This obviously raises the question, in a context of the present of an actually existing world of capitalist/​territorially bordered states, as to how far a progressive and socialist political economy can be realized within such a bordered world. And, as we shall in the following chapter, questions about immigration and labour markets and issues around citizenship have come to pre-​occupy a difficult political and electoral position for social democratic parties.

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defence of individual freedom), appear to be highly qualified in the case of labour. Hayek made few specific remarks about immigration, but in the context of debates on immigration in British politics in the late 1970s that were –​in the run-​up to the 1979 General Election –​to become politically significant in Margaret Thatcher’s election victory, Hayek wrote a letter to the Times newspaper in early February 1978 in which he praised Thatcher’s call for tightening controls on immigration which he justified in terms of the, ordinary man only slowly reconciles himself to a large increase in foreigners among his neighbours, even if they differ only in language and manners, and … therefore the wise statesman, to prevent an unpleasant reawakening of primitive instincts, ought to aim at keeping the rate of influx low. hayek, 1978 quoted in edgar, 1986: 71

Hayek’s views on immigration, were, like those of Milton Friedman, connected to the assumption of the existence of a welfare state and social security; specifically, they regarded such public provisions as having deleterious consequences on the workings of markets and individual freedom and personal responsibility. Further, because they saw the welfare state as a source of immigration –​ especially from poorer countries –​resulting in an increase in public provision, their views on immigration were, necessarily, ambivalent and, to some extent, informed by significant doses of racism. In Hayek’s own words, the existence of social security in a country like Britain, necessitates certain limits on the free movement of men [sic] across frontiers [and] [t]‌here exist … other reasons why such restrictions appear unavoidable so long as certain differences in national or ethnic traditions (especially differences in the rate of propagation) exist. hayek, 2013: Vol iii: 56, Vol ii: 58, 131

While Hayek referred to his expectation and hopes as to the disappearance of borders and national boundaries as barriers to free movement in the (very) longer-​term (see Slobidian, 2019) he seemed in tune with prevailing conservative concerns and suspicions about migration flows. Hayek’s position here connects to his earlier observation as to the rise of anti-​Semitism in his native Austria which he explained as a response to ‘visibly different’ Jewish refugees from Poland (see Ebenstein, 2003: 294). In other comments Hayek appeared to criticize the racism of Apartheid South Africa (see Ebenstein, 2003: 294–​5)

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as being at odds with the idea of freedom under the law and he also supported civil rights legislation in the US in the 1960s (Kiely, 2018a: 89). What we can deduce from these interventions is Hayek’s recognition of the principle of racial discrimination that is connected to restrictions on labour movement/​ migration with a political judgement that, at other times, seems to endorse policies based on racialized stereotypes. Milton Friedman appears to have a more explicit position supporting free movement of labour. Thus, in a letter/​email in 2006 (Friedman, 2006) he welcomes ‘free and open immigration,’ but he qualifies this through referring to a ‘libertarian state’ context. Elsewhere he refers to the immigration pattern prior to 1914 as approximating the conditions of a libertarian state. However, in the context of a welfare state Friedman is much more circumspect, and he refers to how the ‘supply of immigrants will become infinite’ and will have, consequently, costly fiscal consequences on the funding of the welfare state. This led him to support illegal immigration with respect to Mexican migrants in a welfare state context on the basis that such migrants would not be able to access the resources of the welfare state. On face value, then, it appears that Friedman does not appear to espouse a culturalist or integrationist position on immigration or, at least, does not privilege this as a reason for restricting immigration. Instead, immigration is a problem for the establishment of a free society because it might permit an expansion of the welfare state which legal migrants would be permitted to take advantage of. In itself, however, the endorsement of illegal immigration, is, obviously, not without controversy in the context of the welfare state. On the one hand, it is likely to have a negative impact on wages in those parts of the economy –​informal and formal –​where such migrants are concentrated and exploited and, consequently, it also links to issues around criminality. Both of these points connect to the political context/​scenario depicted by the far-​right which serves to scape-​goat immigrants and fuel their marginalization and vulnerability in the actually existing political economy. In recognizing this, it does appear that Friedman and the broader neoliberal framing of labour and labour markets seems very much at odds with the far-​ right’s social ontology and political economy. Indeed, as we shall see below, actually existing neoliberalism has been characterized by significant migration flows –​legal and illegal –​from poorer geopolitical locales to richer capitalist countries and this has provided a major source of antagonism between the far-​ right and those –​not just neoliberals –​who have championed labour migration. However, this has not always or, necessarily, been a source of antagonism between the far-​right and neoliberals. Accordingly, as highlighted by Friedman’s position on immigration in relation to the welfare state, immigration and the

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racialization of the labour market and welfare state has been a primary focus of far-​right animus and mobilization and in ways that have also assisted and overlapped with the broader –​if less explicitly racialized (colour-​blind) –​neoliberal attacks on the welfare state. 1.2 Neoliberal Politics While neoliberal ideas had been circulating in universities and think-​tanks and on the margins of political debate for decades, in the context of the social, economic, and political crises that developed in the late 1960s through to the mid-​ 1970s across the advanced capitalist democracies, political openings emerged for these ideas to gain wider circulation and to be adopted by political elites. It was in Britain and the United States –​arguably where the social polarization consequent on the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the post-​war consensus was most pronounced –​where these ideas would become the most politically significant in shaping and directing social, political and economic change. Indeed, the elections of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in 1980 are widely considered as watersheds; reflecting moments of transition that realized fundamental shifts to new forms of capitalist accumulation and state forms that were heavily influenced by neoliberal thinking (Gamble, 1994; Harvey, 2005). The adoption and implementation of neoliberal ideas were, then, politically-​framed within a broader right-​wing politics –​what some scholars have described as a ‘New Right’ (see Ansell, 1998; Levitas, 1986; Thompson, 1990) that was also informed by significant far-​right ideo-​political currents, even if the actual political agency of the Conservative Party in the UK and the Republican Party in the US were not far-​right political organs. Despite this, as bastions of the traditional Conservative right, both of these parties had drawn support from and flirted with far-​right ideas and political forces over the post-​war period and, in the case of the immediate period before they came to power, both made explicit overtures to such currents. As David Edgar (Edgar, 1986: 51–​6; see also Walker, 1977: 117–​20) highlights, the Monday Club –​an anti-​ immigration and neo-​imperialist grouping on the fringes of the Conservative Party whose members included some Tory mp s –​was a reflection of this strand of thinking and their far-​right credentials extended to the holding of a joint meeting with the neo-​fascist National Front in September 1972. And in the early 1980s, some Tory mp s associated with it also echoed the demand of the National Front for the repatriation of Commonwealth immigrants.17 In the US, 17

And Thatcher’s election victory in 1979 –​not long after National Front (nf) had made some political gains in the east end of London and the West Midlands (Solomos, 1989: 132;

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Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’ based on ‘dog-​whistle’ racism had laid the foundations for a post-​civil rights racialized politics on the right, and Reagan’s election campaign in 1980 drew on such tropes in stoking the fears of suburban whites, as well as in its visceral anti-​communism (see Carter, 1996; Lassiter, 2006; Phillips, 1969). The significance of the specific right-​wing political form and the articulation of politics that neoliberalism was framed within draws attention to the affinity of neoliberal ideas and doctrine discussed above and the politics of the right and far-​right. And while the history of neoliberal politics and policy has also extended to a broader political compass –​as evidenced in the 1990s with the so-​called ‘Third Way’ of the British Labour Party and the Democrats in the US –​ the original baptism or electoral articulation of neoliberalism with the politics of the right has remained significant in the operations of actually existing neoliberalism. The significance of neoliberalism –​as both ideology and policy –​ within the Anglosphere in the 1980s and thereafter needs to be considered within the liberal democratic context in which it was articulated and operated. So, although neoliberalism has had an obvious impact on politics within these states (and others) in terms of the workings of and relations between political institutions, the functioning of electoral democracy, political campaigning and populism –​to some extent resulting in the ‘hollowing out’ of democratic deliberation (Brown, 2015) –​the fact that neoliberal ideas can only be implemented by states governed by political parties that win elections means that (at least within functioning liberal democracies) democratic politics has, to varying degrees, exercised a qualifying and paradoxical impact on the operationalization of these ideas. In part, this stems from the anti-​collectivist and ‘anti-​political’ character of neoliberalism, reflected in its hostility towards collectivist imaginaries and solidarities that are given content in political parties and nation-​states (Mair, 2013; Streeck, 2011, 2016). Indeed, the ideal state form within the neoliberal ideological imaginary is one that is defined by a technocratic conception of politics dominated by elites and where the demos and elected representatives and democratic and representative institutions have significantly less power than is the case in existing liberal democracies. As a result, the consolidation and deepening of neoliberal ideas over policy-​making in liberal democracies ends up conditioning and, to some extent, transforming the nature of politics and the workings of democratic institutions. Thus, the influence of neoliberal ideas on the workings of liberal Walker, 1977: 178–​202) –​came on the back of an electoral campaign that made explicit appeal to voters who might be tempted to vote for nf by voicing a concern about levels of immigration and with respect to the policing of the inner-​cities (Hall et al., 2013: 321–​89).

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democratic states is evidenced in the increasingly technocratic character of politics –​the depoliticization of areas of former political deliberation and the hollowing out of the democratic mechanisms within the state (Brown, 2015; Crouch, 2004; Streeck, 2016). Yet, for such outcomes to be realized or to be possible is also highly problematic for the consistency of neoliberal doctrine as neoliberal ideas and policies are subject to the influence of democratic debates, and electoral and populist pressures are never far away from neoliberal policy interventions; precisely the political context that neoliberal thinkers have been most concerned with and opposed to. Necessarily, then, there has been and is no implementation of a pure or doctrinal neoliberalism because of the fluctuations and influences of democratic politics on policy-​ making (Peck, 2010). However, it goes beyond this, as revealed in the history of actually existing neoliberalism and the necessary connections between neoliberalism and the workings of liberal democratic politics and winning elections. What this means is that, while some neoliberal tropes associated with ‘individual freedom’ or ‘value for money’ and ‘consumer choice’ have been useful in securing the support of some voters, neoliberalism has come to depend on existing political parties and other –​sometimes antagonistic ideas, values and motives associated with them –​to secure its electoral hegemony (Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2018). On its own and on its own terms, neoliberalism is politically vulnerable given its animosity towards the idea and workings of democratic politics and the collectivist ideological solidarities imbued within the functioning of liberal democracy. Accordingly, singular neoliberal forces –​with their commitment to a radical individualism and dismantling of welfare states and existing forms of collectivist provision –​largely fail to secure the necessary electoral support to gain access to the levers of state power. Therefore, neoliberal politics is, in Jamie Peck’s (Peck et al., 2012) phrasing, distinctly ‘hybrid’ involving, in practice, a connection with the politics of the right and centre-​left over the course of its hegemony from the 1980s up until the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis (Davidson and Saull, 2017; Kiely, 2018a). However, the political breakthrough for neoliberalism and one which came to provide a defining and enduring aspect of its ideo-​political hegemony, as I have argued elsewhere (Saull, 2018; see also Davidson and Saull, 2017), came through neoliberalism’s ‘embrace of the far-​right.’ The elections of both Thatcher and Reagan and the political course that they each followed in the context of a New Cold War (which they helped promote) signalled a major rightward political shift which, to a significant extent, drew on far-​right ideas and themes. Indeed, we could go further and say that the populism that helped the electoral prospects of a political economy influenced by neoliberal ideas

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has, to a significant extent, be founded on racialized tropes and imaginaries that can be seen as a necessity for the realization of neoliberalism without which it may not have made its electoral-​political breakthrough.18 This reference to and articulation of racialized imaginaries connected to the far-​right has provided a set of distinct ideological sources of solidarity rooted in the non-​economic and non-​political collectivity of culture, that in its political dimensions, neoliberalism has otherwise been committed to dissolving, but without which its electoral prospects would have floundered. In this sense, race and the far-​right have provided an important and, arguably, defining compensatory and collectivist moral economy against the radically individualist and ‘anti-​political’ ontology of neoliberalism (Saull, 2018). This brings us back to the core ideas of neoliberalism discussed above and, specifically, the question of its authoritarian tendencies and its ambivalence towards existing structures of racialized hierarchy. The political contexts within the United States and Britain in which neoliberal ideas emerged and began to influence public policy were deeply connected to social and political crises connected to race.19 Within both Britain and the United States the issue of race had been a serious and, in the US case in particular, a defining influence shaping the contours of politics over the post-​war period. Indeed, a key contradiction within the US New Deal (as we saw in the previous chapter) and the post-​war US liberal order concerned its association and acquiescence with and, in some respects, facilitation of the racial segregation of Jim Crow. The mobilization around civil rights from the mid-​1950s that resulted in the passing of civil rights legislation between 1964 and 1968 exposed the contradiction at the heart of post-​war US liberalism and, for a brief moment, opened up the possibility of a new social and racial dispensation within the United States that drew on the popular and legislative momentum from the encoding of civil rights for African-​Americans. This, obviously, did not happen. The ‘second reconstruction,’ like the first, was thwarted by the revival of the forces of white supremacy. So while Jim Crow was dismantled and has not returned, new forms of racialized exclusion and racial injustice emerged –​pathologies that were closely associated with the neoliberal turn in the US political economy and the re-​articulation and 18

19

As Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2015: 211; see also Kundnani, 2021) outline in regard to the United States, ‘[n]‌eoliberalism took charge under the banners of anti-​statism and authoritarian populism. Although it was led by big capital, it owed its ascent to the mass electoral base that only the new right could provide. Neoliberalism was at its core a racial project as much as a capitalist accumulation project.’ The rest of this section draws on Saull (2018: 7–​15).

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re-​positioning of the far-​right within the political mainstream of American politics. Thus the re-​positioning of race within America’s political economy occurred in parallel with and, to a significant extent, through the neoliberal transformation that accelerated from the early 1980s (Ansell, 1998; Hohle, 2015, 2017; Omi and Winant, 2015; Rana, 2010). Although the explanation for this development is obviously connected to decisions taken by senior figures within the Republican Party –​that was already evident in Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential election campaign (see Goldwater, 2007; Horwitz, 2013) –​it took on a more concrete and developed form under Nixon with the crafting of the so-​called ‘southern strategy’ which was a deliberate attempt to tap into white racial resentment and grievance after the mobilization around civil rights had reached a crescendo in the late 1960s (see Carter, 1996: 24–​54; Lassiter, 2006; Phillips, 1969).20 Nixon did not follow the former Alabama Governor and pro-​segregationist George Wallace in explicitly focusing on white racial fears in the 1968 presidential campaign. However, his coded appeals referring to fear of crime, resentments against school busing and the sense of economic distress which was implicitly blamed on the economic gains of African-​Americans, all tapped into both the prevailing sense of economic decline felt by some lower income white voters and their racial fears, but in a way that allowed white voters to vote for a candidate who was, in many respects, articulating the same racialized tropes as Wallace without the need to vote for someone like Wallace (Schaller, 2007: 19–​20). Yet as Dan Carter has remarked, while the Republican Right, since Nixon, has tried to erase any relationship between it and the racism of George Wallace, ‘the fundamental differences between the public rhetoric of the Alabama governor and the new conservativism sometimes seem more a matter of style than substance’ (Carter, 1996: xiv). Nixon and the Republican party took the lead in fashioning the beginnings of what we might call a ‘privatized racism’ (Goldberg, 2009; Duggan, 2003), and they could do so because of the long-​standing constitutive and structural problems within the political economy of liberalism that the mobilization around civil rights had exposed. So while civil rights –​the means through which it developed as a politics of racial and social justice and the legislative 20

In private, Nixon was reported to have described African-​Americans as ‘genetically inferior’ and ‘just down from the trees’ (cited in Schaller, 2007: 19). And in terms of political strategy, ‘[t]‌he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to. Problem [sic] with overall welfare plan is that it forces whites into the same position as blacks … We have to get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality. There has never in been an adequate black nation, and they are the only race of which this is true’ (cited in Haldeman, 1994).

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achievements associated with it –​reflected the possibilities of liberalism as a politics that could further the cause of progressive social and political change, it also exposed the fundamental and structural limits of liberalism or liberal political economy in particular, as well as the racial and class hierarchies perpetually reproduced within it. These were given visible form with the explosion of social and racial disturbances that engulfed several American cities in the late 1960s. This reflected the shortcomings of civil rights legislation especially in terms of how it addressed racial discrimination in housing, education and employment that was particularly pronounced in many northern cities, alongside the coercive and covert interventions of US domestic security and police agencies towards African-​American communities and especially radical political activists within these areas. The urban unrest and disturbances that took place in Watts, Chicago, Newark, Detroit and elsewhere demonstrated the structural limits of civil rights and of the possibilities of the liberal anti-​or post-​racism of lbj’s ‘Great Society’ programme, and illustrated the continuing authoritarian and racist temptations within the para-​political dimensions of the liberal national security state. And it was this –​the appearance and representation of African Americans ‘rioting’ and ‘looting’ –​that provided, as it always does, the spectre of white racialized fears of the menace of the ‘black criminal’ that delivered the rapid re-​activation of embedded far-​right imaginaries within US mainstream politics. The fact that this had occurred so soon after the progress of civil rights and the ‘concessions’ of white voters made it a political opportunity too good to ignore for Nixon and those who followed him. Thus the politics of American neoliberalism originated within a context of a racial crisis that was seized upon and taken advantage of by the social and political forces of the right and far-​ right which were to finally come together in a new hegemonic project ushered in by Reagan’s election in 1980. The connections between neoliberalism and the far-​right in the politics and policies of the Reagan administration are evident across a range of distinct policy domains, but for our purposes we will concentrate on welfare and law and order issues. Both of these policy-​fields had become lightning rods of white racial resentment by the late 1970s. They played defining roles in the electoral-​ political strategy of Reagan and the construction of the new Republican social and political bloc that brought Reagan to power, and which continues to shape American politics. Thus, in a context of relative economic stagnation and a society revealing the impact of the cultural revolutions of the 1960s –​that extended beyond the extension of civil rights to African-​Americans –​policies such as affirmative action became a focal point for a strategy of ‘reverse racism’ whereby the Republican right and far-​right began to articulate a politics

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of grievance based on what they framed as the legal discrimination against white men. Reagan’s appointment of William Bradford Reynolds –​an outspoken opponent of affirmative action and civil rights –​as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1981 signalled a commitment to work with this politics of racial grievance. As Dan Carter notes, Reynolds, with the support of his boss, Attorney General Edwin Meese, used his legal authority to try and push back the legal advances in civil rights of the past two decades (Carter, 1996: 56–​ 7). This reflected a broader agenda of hostility to civil rights and affirmative action (Laham, 1998) and even though Reagan’s attempts to curtail federal enforcement of civil rights legislation failed –​because of popular-​backed Congressional opposition –​it nevertheless indicated the animus towards racial justice that was and is the sine qua non of the far-​right.21 The grievance against what the politics of white resentment saw as black advances in the spheres of employment, welfare and civil rights was combined with a racialized fear consequent on the legacies of the urban disturbances of the late 1960s and the rise in reported crime and violent crime throughout the 1970s. This produced the other side of the racialized politics that defined the Reagan era: on the one hand the resentment against federal legal protections and spending outlays that were seen as disproportionately benefiting minority communities and African-​Americans in particular; and on the other hand a racialized fear of the black (male) criminal popularized in the media as the violent drug-​dealer and robber. Such racialized fears would play out during the 1980s in what one writer termed as ‘the new Jim Crow’ (Alexander, 2010) with the massive increase in the number of incarcerated felons in the US prison system. However, it was also a potent political weapon, as was illustrated by the 1988 presidential election campaign of Reagan’s Vice-​President, George H. W. Bush, against the Democrat governor of Massachusetts Michael Dukakis. Here the Bush campaign used the case of Willie Horton (an African-​American 21

An example of such policies in action was the decision by Reynolds to over-​turn a federal court judgement that had barred segregated private schools from securing tax-​exempt status. Reynold’s decision was eventually over-​turned but this policy intervention not only helped Reagan to secure the backing of the Christian Right (Carter, 1996: 57); it also revealed the distinct racial blindness of neoliberalism concerning discrimination within the private sphere in that these particular expressions of private enterprise did not benefit from the tax-​emption status that other private schools did because of their segregated admissions policies. That this was a private matter rather than a public policy of racial discrimination was all that mattered for neoliberal doctrine. But because of its (clearly intended) racialized effects –​segregation and hierarchy –​such expressions of private property rights and individual choice (of parents choosing to have their children educated with their racial peers) aligned with the position of the far-​right.

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convicted of murder who, while temporarily out of prison –​benefitting from a state-​mandated weekend release programme –​committed an assault, robbery and rape before being captured) to encapsulate white racial fears of black criminality, as well as the narrative of liberal/​democrat ‘softness’ on crime as a defining factor in the campaign (see Carter, 1996: 72–​9; Omi and Winant, 2015: 222; Williams, 2003: 186–​92). Reagan’s 1980 election campaign saw the coming together of the politics of the post-​Jim Crow far-​right and neoliberalism as the response to the sense of white economic decline. Prior to the election Reagan had made a name for himself as an outspoken critic of both civil rights and the remnants of the New Deal. Throughout the late 1970s he repeatedly deployed racialized stereotypes, referring to ‘“welfare cheats” picking up their checks in Cadillacs and “welfare queens” having more and more babies in order to get increased benefits’ (Reagan, cited in Ansell, 2001: 184). Using such tropes, Reagan was not explicitly referring to African-​Americans, but he and his audience knew who he was referring to –​through the use of a dog whistle racism that communicated racial epithets without explicit racial references –​and how such terms framed African-​American women as ‘irresponsible’ and ‘promiscuous’ and men as ‘lazy’ and ‘workshy’ (Williams, 2003: 185; Omi and Winant, 2015: 215). The significance of this racially charged discourse and demagoguery was that racist attitudes towards African-​Americans in particular were re-​ articulated and re-​embedded in a post-​civil rights context in a popular ‘colour-​ blind’ mind-​set. This discourse and moral framing –​through the use of moral panics –​has been central to the legitimization of neoliberal political economy in the US such that ‘although most people associated welfare negatively with Blacks, it [is] not viewed as racist to be against welfare’ (Davis, 2007: 348). Indeed the popular image produced from this, and which soon became part of a right-​wing and racialized common-​sense –​embedding far-​right tropes into mainstream political discourse –​was of welfare as a ‘program that pays young, unmarried black women in decrepit, violent, drug-​infested neighborhoods to have many children by different men, none of whom they marry’ (Lieberman, 2001: 4; see also Goldberg, 2009: 336–​7). The Great Society welfare state reforms were depicted as indulging a ‘lazy’ and ‘ungrateful’ (see the urban disturbances of the late 1960s) African-​ American population to the harm of ‘hard-​working’ and ‘deserving’ whites, and white men in particular. In this new racialized imaginary grounded on a politics of white grievance and resentment, civil rights was ‘recast as an attack on whites [and] reframed as a redistribution of resources away from whites –​ deserving, hard-​working, family-​values whites –​and towards people of color’ (Omi and Winant, 2015: 211). This, what Michael Omi and Howard Winant

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describe as ‘reverse racism’ (Omi and Winant, 2015: 219), provided the basis for the extension of the ‘southern strategy’ and mobilized a mass base of suburban whites on a platform of cuts to welfare and taxes and of terminating affirmative action programmes. The platform combined an articulation of ‘neoliberal fairness’ as ‘post-​racism’ with a far-​right inspired racial grievance connected to embedded racialized tropes and stereotypes of African-​Americans in particular as undeserving, lazy, promiscuous, and criminal. Cuts to welfare expenditure and the closing of affirmative action program­ mes could therefore be seen or articulated as ‘race neutral’ because these neoliberal policy initiatives were regarded as overly advantaging blacks –​thereby following the logic of neoliberal doctrine as discussed above with regard to the ‘racist effects’ of such ‘political’ interventions in the operations of markets. Though defended, officially, in ‘colour-​blind’ terms –​this was about ensuring ‘equal access and benefits for all Americans’ –​the political-​electoral articulation of these initiatives was communicated through dog-​whistle racism that helped to re-​animate pre-​existing far-​right and white supremacist assumptions and imaginaries based on racially-​coded political messages and targeted campaigning that developed Nixon’s ‘southern strategy’. Indeed, the campaign to win over white working class voters was explicitly connected to racialized stereotypes and fears and served to re-​racialize American welfare thus returning it to its default setting of the New Deal era (Katznelson, 2005; Lieberman, 2001; Omi and Winant, 2015: 194–​5; Poole, 2006; Quadagno, 1994).22 To a significant degree, such electoral strategies reflect the political barrenness of neoliberalism as an ideology –​given its underlying antipathy to an autonomous realm of the political and its associated ideas, rationalities, and normative commitments –​with respect to engaging with and mobilizing existing social and political collectivities. The latter was required to secure electoral victory and political hegemony. Grounded on a social ontology rooted in an economistic individualist rationality that struggles to recognize and accept the significance and agency of collectivities based on forms of solidarity, neoliberalism –​when it confronts the challenge of democratic and electoral 22

As Omi and Winant (2015: 195) sum-​up, ‘[t]‌he perceived failure of the Great Society and other liberal experiments focused the new right’s wrath not only on the undeserving (and implicitly black) poor, who had the nerve to demand “handouts”, but also on the welfare state.’ The state was viewed as an alliance between the racially identified poor and a new class of educators, administrators, planners, consultants, and journalists, who advocated the expansion of welfare state policies –​what far-​right ideologues such as Sam Francis described as the ‘liberal-​managerial state’ (Francis, 2016). For the new right, the Great Society was not the continuation of the New Deal –​from which many white working-​ class families had benefited greatly –​but its opposite.

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politics –​has required alternative ideological means or justifications through which it draws on the agency of political collectivities rooted in forms of racialized solidarity to help secure political power. As this case demonstrates, the objective of reconfiguring the American welfare state was achieved by racialized political messaging and campaigning. Thus, in political terms the ­realization of neoliberal objectives such as shrinking the size of the federal payroll and increasing the scope of market tools and mechanisms in determining social behaviour required the mobilization of a political coalition that went beyond arguments over economic rationality and amoral self-​interest. And racialized tropes drawing on far-​right imaginaries provided much of the ideological underpinning for such a strategy. In office Reagan moved to enact such racialized resentments through swinging cuts to welfare, targeting social security provisions that were particularly significant for African-​American families. And his attacks on organized labour23 and the consequences of his broader supply-​side economic strategy had a disproportionate material impact on African-​Americans in terms of employment, income and living standards. This was not a race war in name, but its effects devastated large sections of the African-​American population nevertheless. Reagan’s first budget in 1981 initiated cuts in federal government outlays targeting social security. Between 1980 and 1983, government spending on the poor saw a fall of 7.3 percent on levels inherited by Reagan (Hoover and Plant, 1989: 113). These cuts fell particularly hard on single/​female-​headed families and the cuts to afdc (Aid to Families with Dependent Children) –​a provision seen as particularly ‘indulgent’ of African-​American women –​that the administration proposed at a level of over 28 percent was reduced –​after opposition from a Democrat-​controlled Congress –​to 14.3 percent (Hoover and Plant, 1989: 113; see also Piven and Cloward, 1982: 1–​3). The result of these and other cuts was a massive increase in poverty, especially among African-​Americans. The poverty rate for black children reached a staggering 45.6 percent by 1987 (Hoover and Plant, 1989: 126; see also Jacob, 1990: 152). A 1984 report from the Centre on Budget and Policy Priorities highlighted that ‘the average black family in every income strata –​from poor to affluent –​suffered a decline in its disposable income and standard of living since 1980’ (cited in Wilkins, 1990: 155). Because of Congressional opposition from Democrats, the depth and spread of cuts to welfare provision were more limited than they would otherwise

23

Reagan authorized the sacking of 12,000 striking federal air-​traffic controllers soon after coming into office in August 1981 (Schaller, 2007: 53).

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have been, but this did not mean that their impact was not severe. And while the broader socioeconomic consequences of Reaganomics reinforced the class divisions between capital and labour, because its impact was disproportionately felt by people of colour and its justification was communicated in the coded racialized language that was meant to assuage white grievance (see Bonilla-​Silva, 2009; Hohle, 2015, 2017, MacLean, 2017; Omi and Winant, 2015: 211; Williams, 2003), it helped to cement a significant white racial constituency behind neoliberalism (see Frank, 2005). The Republican attack on the welfare state inaugurated in the Reagan presidencies and continued thereafter –​and especially in the administrations of Bill Clinton over 1993–​2001 –​reflected both the operationalization of a neoliberal doctrine in terms of the reduction in public expenditure on welfare provision and the deployment of forms of economic compulsion to force the poor to make themselves more active labour market participants as well as the cultivation and promotion of a wider cultural common sense of economic individualism. Yet its political articulation and electoral basis were engineered via a resurrection of embedded racialized and cultural tropes about American identity and a racialized framing of moral economy that, in various ways, depicted African-​Americans in particular as either lazy or dangerous. Such articulations, although not deployed in the vernacular of the Jim Crow era, nevertheless reflected a resurrection of a reconstituted far-​right, and also the consolidation of a new white-​racial political bloc as the electoral platform of the Republican party. This not only encompassed Republican hegemony over much of the former Democrat/​Dixiecrat South but its hold also spread increasingly over significant layers of white workers in the rapidly de-​industrializing and post-​organized labour north and mid-​west. While the former reflected, in many respects, the racist legacies of Jim Crow alongside the transformation of the South’s political economy as discussed in the previous chapter, the appeal to white workers was tightly framed as a politics of resentment that combined with anti-​elitist and populist tropes all familiar to the far-​right electoral playbook. And, in a context of economic insecurity and cuts to welfare, such a politics combined a racialized commitment to ‘look after our own’ and to demonize those deemed undeserving. Further, the connection between neoliberalism and the far-​right was evident in what Randolph Hohle (2015: 4–​5) has described as the ‘white-​private/​ black-​public binary’ whereby de facto racial segregation could be realized through the cutting back on public expenditure and public works that were regarded as black domains combined with tax cuts to benefit the overwhelmingly white domains of the private sphere. Neoliberal wealth or tax redistribution, then, helped recreate the spaces of white privilege that the logic of

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civil rights legislation had undermined through ensuring that fewer tax dollars were spent on a public realm that undercut such hierarchy. Thus the maintenance of racial hierarchy and class privilege was no longer realized via the apparatus of Jim Crow but by control of state budgets and ‘fiscal responsibility.’ Accompanying the racial reconfiguration of American welfare was the acceleration in the authoritarian turn in law and order after Nixon’s initiation of the ‘war on drugs’ in 1971. Arguably more visible than in the sphere of welfare policy, the far-​right-​inflected character of neoliberalism in this policy domain could be seen to reflect a neoliberal emphasis on individual moral responsibility and the implicit –​and sometimes explicit –​reference to cultural and racial assumptions embedded in their theoretical musings. In this respect, as much as welfare policy reflected a far-​right/​neoliberal nexus in the idea of a culture of ‘welfare dependency’ (see Murray, 1984) that was deemed to be inherited among the African-​American population, such racialized assumptions fed into the racist stereotyping of permanent black asociability and criminality that drove the right-​ward turn in law and order policies. Such sentiments could be seen as a reaction to the perceived break down in social (and moral) order that had characterized the 1960s –​the so-​called ‘permissive society’ –​that went beyond racial rights and extended to gender, sexuality and lifestyle and also public protest and challenges to existing forms of private and public authority and which Neo-​Conservative thinkers such as Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz (1970, 1978; Podhoretz, 1979), among others, had originally given voice to in the 1960s. The far-​right imaginary was promoted, then, by both the perceived disorder in the world and American weakness –​as evidenced by the defeat in South-​East Asia in 1975, the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 and the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis over 1979–​81 –​and how these international setbacks were narrated as having been caused by a fundamental social and moral collapse of moral political authority at home (Halliday, 1986: 105–​33; Saull, 2007: 119–​79; see also Sanders, 1983; Suri, 2008). This populist appeal to an idealized past is a foundational trope of the far-​ right that sits –​if uncomfortably –​as necessary for a neoliberal politics. This raises the question as to the racist motives or assumptions of neoliberal thinkers and politicians. At a minimum, the acceptance of racialized political messaging and, to a significant extent, the terms of political debate about race as defined by the far-​right indicate a tolerance for racial tropes which should be seen as helping to reproduce racism as an ‘acceptable’ vernacular within liberal democratic politics. An even more indulgent position towards neoliberal thinkers and politicians would only find them wanting in their attitude and response to racism. Simply put, with the weight of empirical evidence as to

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its racialized effects all around them and especially so in those areas of policy affected by neoliberal ideology –​such as in housing, education and law-​and-​ order –​neoliberals appear to either not care about racism or accept it as a something less morally or politically objectionable than what they regard as the fundamental normative issue of individual economic freedom based on private property. With respect to electoral politics, this is not only about how a rhetoric focused on ‘law and order’ and being ‘tough on crime’ speaks to the instrumentalization of racialized fears of particular electoral constituencies; it was also about the need to construct a neoliberal state and to deal with the casualties of neoliberal restructuring and crisis in terms of both political resistance and delinquency. In the case of the former, the ‘anti-​statism’ of the neoliberal attack on social democracy (i.e., the welfare and social state) discussed above combines with the requirement to strengthen the executive, coercive and administrative over the (social) democratic dimensions of the state (as promoted by ordo-​liberals in particular) as the latter are seen as beholden to or dominated by a plurality of interests and demands that encroach on and undermine market exchange. Neoliberalism requires a strong and authoritarian state to realize its social and political objectives and especially in terms of its project of dismantling the power of organized labour and workers’ rights (Bonefeld, 2017b: 47–​67; Gamble, 1994: 65–​8, 170–​3). And far-​right narratives and framings were key to this reorganization of the state as the objective of ‘restoring order’ was ideologically supplemented with far-​right critiques of the liberal state’s upholding of legal protections for law-​breakers and limits on police powers.24 Under Reagan the re-​militarization of US foreign policy against the ussr after the period of détente and through multiple interventions in the global South, was paralleled with an increasing militarization of domestic policing alongside the intensification of the rightward shift in law-​and-​order policies. This was both rhetorical –​appealing to white racial fears of urban and black lawlessness –​and political in the increasing development of the ‘prison-​ industrial complex’ bringing in private capital to build, operate and benefit from rising rates of incarceration and in the staggering rise in the number of young African-​American men brought within the American criminal and penal system. Thus the prison-​industrial-​complex which developed under Reagan 24

Indeed, the increase in fiscal outlays for policing and criminal justice that has characterized much of the neoliberal era across the Anglosphere was not only a reflection of the influence of far-​right ideas, but also reflected the specificities of much neoliberal thinking concerning the need to reconfigure the state to make it a more effective guardian of a market order (see Cristi, 1998; Cooper, 2017).

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reflected a means by which labour and the poor could be both exploited through the use of inmates to produce goods for the market at wage rates that would be intolerable in a non-​prison context, and by disciplining dissent and through substituting welfare with penal policy as a means to manage the ‘collateral damage’ of neoliberal insecurities (Alexander, 2010; Gottschalk, 2015; Murakawa, 2014; Wacquant, 2010). On Reagan’s entry into office in 1981, US prisons –​both state and federal –​housed around 325,000 inmates; by the end of the decade this figure had more than doubled to nearly 800,000 (Schaller, 2007: 139). Such figures do not capture the distinct racial profile of felons and what appeared to be a systemic programme of criminalizing young African-​American men in particular. Comprising around twelve percent of the overall population, African American (men) made up an astonishing 50 percent of the prison population by the early 1990s, and one in three of all black males between the ages of twenty and twenty-​nine were under some form of criminal justice control at this time (Schaller, 2007: 141; see also Gottschalk, 2006; Murakawa, 2014; Wacquant, 2010). While the response to rising reported crime in the 1970s reflected a generic concern in terms of policing and sentencing, the specifically racialized consequences of this on the levels of incarceration of young African-​American men suggests the fulfilment of a far-​right infused white racial angst that developed out of the late 1960s and which was cultivated by the Republican right in a supercharged fashion after 1980. This development may not constitute a ‘new Jim Crow’ (see Alexander, 2010) but the US prison-​industrial complex appears to demonstrate an embrace of neoliberal dogma through the logic of market provision in prison construction. It was also a source of accumulation strategy alongside the realization of a post-​Jim Crow far-​right objective of disciplining and, in some cases, terrorizing, black communities –​given the levels of police violence towards unarmed young African-​American men –​and of removing large numbers of the surplus labour force and putting them to work in the coercive labour conditions of the prison-​industrial complex (see Jay, 2019). The significance of the rightward shift in law and order politics, however, goes beyond its specific parameters; under the neoliberal/​far-​right nexus, penal policy has merged with welfare policy. In other words, the former has, increasingly, become an element in the provisioning and structure of the latter with the dismantling of the barriers that formerly existed between the social security and law-​and-​order spheres (see Schram et al., 2008; Soss et al., 2011: 295; Wacquant, 2010). Indeed, the significance of the rightward turn in US penal policy and the need for aspiring politicians and especially Democrat-​Presidential candidates (after the defeat of Michael Dukakis in 1988) to appear ‘tough on crime’ meant

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that the rightward shift continued even after Republicans lost political office. Thus this right-​wing political common sense on law and order was quickly internalized within the Democratic party after Dukakis’ defeat in 1988 to the extent that its candidate in the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton, went as far as attending the execution of the mentally-​impaired African-​American, Ricky Ray Rector, during the campaign as a way of clearly countering any gop claims that he was ‘soft on crime’ (Klinkner, 1999).25 The connections between societal racism and the spectre of racialized violence were a little less pronounced and constitutive of the neoliberal/​far-​right nexus that came to power in Britain with the election of the Thatcher government in May 1979.26 Britain’s racial complexion changed significantly after the war with Commonwealth immigration from South Asia and the Caribbean settling in England’s major cities and helping to plug labour and skills gaps in industry and the National Health Service in particular. Despite being ‘invited to Britain,’ the experience of these immigrants was one of systemic discrimination and racial hierarchy in housing, education and employment. It extended to much of the trade union movement as well (see Joshi and Carter, 1984; Lewis, 1996; Paul, 1997; Virdee, 2014). And while the racist policing and street attacks from gangs of white racists did provoke some resistance on the streets from black youths –​such as in the Notting Hill area of London in 1958 and 1976 –​that, to some degree, paralleled the race politics of the United States of the 1960s, it was the socioeconomic crisis of the mid-​1970s, reflected in the collapse of the social contract between capital and labour in the midst of the first major worldwide recession since the war, that was the primary driver for establishing the conditions of neoliberal electoral-​political hegemony in Britain. Labour militancy and the appearance of governmental weakness after 25

26

Thus, although we can identify differences in both policy and rhetoric under the ‘centre-​ left neoliberalism’ of New Labour compared with that of the Clinton Democrats, both upheld the core dimensions of the neoliberal/​far-​right nexus established under Reagan and Thatcher with regard to welfare reform and law-​and-​order policies. In both cases, forms of workfare and a punitive sanctions regime remained in place. In terms of penal policy (racialized) incarceration rates actually increased (see Sim, 2015; Murakawa, 2014). Robbie Shilliam (2021) puts forward a persuasive argument that, a couple of decades before Thatcher’s election victory, Enoch Powell had carved out a distinct kind of politics such that he was Britain’s first neoliberal populist politician. Examining Powell’s writing and speeches through to the late 1960s and his infamous ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in April 1968, Shilliam highlights how Powell’s was the first articulation of a racialized neoliberal politics that rested on combining a distinct racialized view of Englishness/​citizenship with a radical market individualism that prefigured much of the ideology of Thatcherism and the kind of populism that also underpinned an important current of the Brexit campaign.

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Heath’s defeat in the 1974 election –​an election that he had called after an industrial confrontation with the most militant representatives of organized labour (the National Union of Mineworkers) –​alongside the ‘Winter of discontent’ in 1978–​79 all provided a spectre of disorder, governmental weakness and the ‘rule of the mob’ that led some commentators on the right to talk of ‘government overload’ and a political situation that echoed that of the final days of the Weimar Republic (Brittan, 1975; for a critical commentary see Hall et al., 2013: 268–​317). While far-​right upsurges –​as revealed in London dockworkers marching in support of Enoch Powell in 1968 after he was sacked from the Conservative front bench after his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Gamble, 1994: 78–​81; see also Shilliam, 2021)27 and the spikes of support for the neo-​fascist National Front in the mid-​1970s (Solomos, 1989: 132; Walker, 1977: 177–​202) 28 –​provided indications of the possibilities for the development of a far-​right ‘from below’ at this time, the major sources of far-​right threat actually resided within the security apparatus and para-​political dimensions of the British state and elements within the capitalist class. They viewed the instability and breakdown of the post-​war social and political settlement through ‘Weimar eyes’ (Hall et al., 2013: 268–​317). Samuel Brittan (Brittan, 1975: 129–​30) voiced such concerns most explicitly, leading him to endorse the benefits of limiting the democratic demands on the state. Kiely (2017: 12) rightly notes that the questions and concerns that confronted neoliberal thinkers such as Samuel Brittan in the 1970s echoed those of the original neoliberals in the context of the Weimar crisis of the early 1930s. Both were concerned with the effects of mass democracy and how it must be limited for the sake of market civilization, and also with the need for forms of authoritarian intervention through the state to expel such ‘mass’ influences from the state. For leading Conservatives –​with the anger and humiliation of the 1974 miners’ strike still fresh in their minds –​a commitment to destroying the social and political power of organized labour was a priority. And the ‘captains of 27 28

Interestingly Powell was one of the few politicians in Britain during the 1960s who supported the neoliberal ideas being championed and promoted by the Institute of Economic Affairs (see Kiely, 2018a: 76 and Gamble, 1974: 116; Edgar, 1986: 60–​1). Membership –​of between 14,000 to 20,000 –​and electoral support for the National Front peaked in the period between 1972 and 1974 in the context of Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community (eec) and the arrival of hundreds of Ugandan Asians fleeing the Idi Amin dictatorship (Solomos. 1989: 132). It gained 9.4 percent of the vote in an east London constituency in the October 1974 General Election –​its best result in a General Election –​and 16 percent in West Bromwich in the West Midlands in a by-​ election in May 1973 (Walker, 1977: 126, 142).

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industry’ also looked upon such an objective favourably given their plans for industrial restructuring in response to the world economic crisis (Brenner, 2006; Harvey, 2005). That would be that much easier to achieve without resistance from the trade unions. Indeed, speculation appeared in Britain’s newspaper of record, The Times, in the summer of 1974 that referred to plans to co-​ordinate a response by leading capitalists against either further industrial action or in response to the threat of nationalisation (see Glyn, 2006: 8; see also Gamble, 1994: 89) that not only invoked the spectre of the ‘ungovernability’ of Britain for the rule of capital, but also the need for extra-​constitutional and extra-​parliamentary means to protect private property rights. So while it would be an exaggeration to suggest that a Labour victory in May 1979 or the election of a weak/​minority government might have triggered coup-​plotting (the high-​point of the crisis and the industrial confrontations had peaked before the election) by the ‘establishment far-​right,’ Thatcher’s election victory and the kind of politics it inaugurated was clearly connected to a political spectre that invoked the politics of a right-​wing authoritarianism (Gamble, 1994: 61–​8, 174–​84; Hall, 1983). In its commitment to destroy the social and political power of organized labour, the Thatcher government deployed a range of tools –​legal and semi-​legal, including the forces of the para-​political state drawing on the far-​right elements within the British national security state apparatus –​in its year-​long struggle with the National Union of Mineworkers (num) in 1984–​5 (Milne, 2004). This assault on the rights of workers was articulated through a broader populist-​demagogic ideological framing involving Thatcher’s media cheerleaders such as the Sun and the Daily Mail that cast trade unions and so-​called ‘looney left’ Labour-​controlled metropolitan councils as part of the ‘enemy within.’29 Such an ideological framing was intimately connected with the government’s hostility towards the ussr as the ‘enemy without’ which obviously implied that the normal, legal and legitimate activity of opposition to government –​that local councils and trade unions were undertaking and which forms a fundamental part of the social and political fabric of democratic societies –​was now depicted as almost treasonous or equivalent to being allies of the Kremlin and an existential threat to Britain’s security and democracy. Such ideological invective revealed the classic workings of a Schmittian and far-​right understanding of politics based upon the identification of ‘the enemy’ 29

This demagoguery was similar to that parroted by these same newspapers soon after the 2016 Brexit Referendum when they accused judges on the Supreme Court –​who had returned a decision ensuring that Parliament rather than the executive would have the final say on the deal to leave the European Union –​of being ‘traitors’.

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and the consequent anti-​democratic legal and political sanctions enacted by an authoritarian state targeted at normal and legitimate democratic actors. And while the Thatcher governments did not move towards a Schmittian solution, the wider democratic political culture was infused with pronounced far-​right and authoritarian impulses –​something that Stuart Hall described as ‘authoritarian populism’ (Hall, 1983) –​which also formed a key part of the popular common sense that underpinned the new Thatcherite hegemonic bloc. The key pieces of legislation that focused on weakening trade union power and the collective strengths of organized workers were the Employment Acts –​ passed in 1980, 1982 and 1984 –​that ended closed-​shops, made strike ballot’s compulsory, protected strike breakers, imposed limits on secondary picketing, and opened up trade unions to claims for damages consequent from industrial action (Hoover and Plant, 182; Gamble, 1994: 126; Kavanagh, 1987: 236–​40). These pieces of legislation fundamentally transformed the landscape of industrial relations and, arguably, made Britain the most hostile place in Western Europe for workers to collectively organize and defend their class interests. However, the wider economic context within which such legislation was passed and operated –​that of mass unemployment –​was also crucial in breaking the power of organized labour. Unemployment rose dramatically after 1979 and remained high throughout the 1980s, reaching over three million in early 1982 and staying at this level until July 1987 (Gamble, 1994: 126). Unemployment not only destroyed jobs and created severe economic hardship; it also permanently removed the workforce that organized labour was strongest and most densely represented in.30 The weakening of the collective social power of labour is a defining feature of the neoliberal prognosis, and the Thatcher government had achieved this by the mid-​1980s. In doing so, Thatcherism revealed the relationship between neoliberal economic doctrine and a far-​right political imaginary through the deliberate intervention of the state’s legal and political forces to destroy the institutions and openings for workers to collectively organize, but alsothe wider sense of the ideological offensive that defined the new hegemonic ideology of the neoliberal historical bloc. This social bloc had expelled organized labour and had created an ideological context that was deeply hostile to it such that demands for collective rights for workers –​a defining element in the fabric of democratic societies –​could be depicted as ‘wanting Britain to be like the ussr.’ To a significant extent, then, the necessity of economic restructuring

30

Trade union membership fell by almost three million from 1979 (13.5 million) to 1985 (10.7 million).

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which, in the case of Britain after 1979, required large parts of manufacturing industry to collapse and resulted in mass unemployment and social distress, was a key element of neoliberalism in that it helped secure the termination of social plurality within the workings of the state and, specifically, the influence of the ‘monopoly of labour.’ It destroyed organized collectivism in the economy. That this required the construction of a strong and authoritarian state reflective of a far-​right politics was also necessary. This was because of the resistance to such policies from workers and of the need to deal with the social consequences of mass unemployment and the possibilities of disorder that flowed from such economic distress (Lentin and Titley, 2011: 160–​92). While the collective power of organized labour provided the principal animus for the Thatcherite neoliberal/​far-​right nexus, a racialized politics infused with far-​right ideological currents was also a significant feature in the ideological framing and political project of Thatcherism. Consequently, the recurring racialized themes of the post-​war era31 of Commonwealth immigration, integration, national identity and criminality and social disorder were also important features of the right-​wing shift in British politics associated with Thatcher. In particular, it was Margaret Thatcher’s reference to white people ‘feeling swamped’ (Thatcher, 1978) by Commonwealth immigration,32 that many commentators regard as a deliberate intervention invoking race, not only as a tactical means to try and take support away from the neofascist National Front (Eatwell, 1992: 186), but also, and more profoundly, a reference to a white British identity that her government aimed to promote and defend more broadly.33 31 32

33

For discussions of the racialized character of British social democracy and earlier far-​right interventions see: Gilroy, (1987); Joshi and Carter, (1984); Layton-​Henry, (1992); Miles and Phizacklea, (1984); Paul, (1997); Picther, (2016); Solomos, (1989); Virdee, (2014). The full extract is as follows, ‘[w]‌ell now, look, let us try and start with a few figures as far as we know them, and I am the first to admit it is not easy to get clear figures from the Home Office about immigration, but there was a committee which looked at it and said that if we went on as we are then by the end of the century there would be four million people of the new Commonwealth or Pakistan here. Now, that is an awful lot and I think it means that people are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture and, you know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law and done so much throughout the world that if there is any fear that it might be swamped people are going to react and be rather hostile to those coming in’ (Thatcher, 1978). Thatcher’s shift to the right brought electoral dividends in the 1979 General Election with the Tories taking support from the National Front after its earlier spike. Though official Conservative policy after 1979 did not include the racist policy of the repatriation of ‘coloured’ Commonwealth immigrants (which was a key policy of the nf), it did not stop mp s on the Conservative right associated with the far-​right Monday Club making public calls for such repatriations (see Seidel, 1986: 111).

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Thatcher’s reference to immigration was also connected –​as Stuart Hall and others identified (Hall et al., 2013 1978; Gilroy, 1987: 72–​113) –​to questions of law and order and the widespread myth that young black men were responsible for a ‘crime wave’ involving robbery and violence across British cities. And it was the racist policing of Britain’s black community through the use of so-​called ‘sus laws’ (police powers of stop and search) particularly targeted at Afro-​Caribbean communities that provided a trigger for urban disturbances within several cities in the early 1980s (Hall et al., 2013: 390; Solomos, 1989: 99–​ 121). These disturbances were a symptom of a deeper structural racism that confronted Britain’s minority communities despite the declining significance of the white supremacist violence that an earlier generation had to deal with (Panayi, 1996; Sivanandan, 2000). Such sentiments were positioned within a wider ideological narrative of political subversion focused on the radical left and manifested in the political resistance to Thatcherism (and neoliberalism) from the trade unions and some Labour-​led metropolitan local authorities during the early 1980s. This collective animus encapsulating race and class reflected not only a far-​right alignment with neoliberalism as to the need for social order and robust political authority in realizing a neoliberal transformation, but also an ideological disposition directed at the ‘enemies from within’ (Thatcher, 1984) that extended to sexual minorities, feminists, anti-​racists and trade unionists and which was a particularly powerful ideological signifier in a context of increased Cold War tensions (Halliday, 1986). The ideological topography and common sense established by the Thatcher governments after 1979 determined, in effect, the terrain of political debate thereafter and, in consequence, a significant ideological opening for the far-​ right/​neoliberal nexus. Indeed, the popular common sense that underpinned Thatcherite ideological hegemony was such that the existence of poverty and inequality were increasingly regarded as a consequence of individual and racialized moral deficiencies rather than a logical consequence of government policies, the inequities of market exchange and class hierarchies. And such positions aligned with significant strands of neoliberal thinking and its associates on the far-​right (Murray, 1984). Moreover, the mobilizing power of a racialized (post)-​imperial white national identity that was cemented by the Falklands War not only realized a far-​right inflection on the ‘centre ground’ of British politics, but also served to embed far-​right sentiments over national identity, citizenship and the (re)militarized nature of the state and British political identity thereafter in political debates (Barnett, 1982; Gamble, 1994: 128; Gray, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1983). The militarism associated with both the Falklands War and the New Cold War of the early 1980s combined with the racialized moral panic linked to the

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inner-​city urban riots of the early 1980s which were regarded, on the right, as both a reflection of a propensity towards criminality among black youths, and an inherent moral deficiency to ‘respect authority’ (Solomos, 1989: 100–​7, 135). And while a militarist posture defined Britain’s international relations, the Thatcher government shifted domestically towards an authoritarian rhetoric on law and order issues, fanned by its right-​wing media allies, and a policy shift with increased spending and legislative changes to aid the police and address what they saw as sources of social disorder.34 The authoritarian shift in law and order dovetailed with an increasingly punitive and disciplinary dimension to the workings of the welfare state that bear some similarity with developments in the United States under the Reagan and Clinton administrations. Under Thatcher, the government moved to restructure social security provision and the ideology and workings of the welfare state away from universal provision based on a collectivist ethos, to an increasingly selective and limited one connected to individualized moral sanctions and means testing framed around the binary of a deserving/​undeserving poor. In the short-​term –​and given the massive increase in unemployment and the resulting poverty –​welfare spending did not fall as a proportion of public expenditure, but this should not obscure the severity of the cuts to unemployment benefits and the reform of the Social Fund for the poorest households which shifted from providing grants for essential family provisions to loans (Hoover and Plant, 1989: 179). As Hill and Walker (2014: 80, 96–​7) note, after 1985, reform of the welfare state became much more ‘ideologically driven’ based on an ideological common-​ sense –​fuelled by ministers and right-​wing tabloid newspapers alike –​of a ‘scrounger-​phobia’ that saw the government increasingly resorting to the penal system to address the myth (that they helped propagate) of large numbers of welfare claimants systematically defrauding the system. Thatcher, herself, concisely captured such thinking in the following, [w]‌elfare benefits, distributed with little or no consideration of their effects on behaviour, encouraged illegitimacy, facilitated the breakdown of families, and replaced incentives favouring work and self-​reliance with perverse encouragement for idleness and cheating. cited in hill and walker, 2014: 96–​7

34

Thus, the 1982 Criminal Justice Act gave the Courts more extensive and flexible sentencing powers; the 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act extended police powers of stop and search, arrest, detention and interrogation; and the Public Order Act of 1986 provided the police with new powers to limit and contain demonstrations (Hayes, 1994: 79; Gamble, 1994: 241–​2).

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The Thatcher governments, then, not only redefined the political parameters of key areas of public policy that affected the New Labour governments after 1997, but also reflected a distinct combination of neoliberal doctrine with an authoritarian and far-​right influenced politics. In doing so, they laid the ideological foundations for the subsequent development of a far-​right politics in a context of neoliberal globalization which began to manifest in the 1990s as revealed in the development of the most significant party on the far-​right; ukip (United Kingdom Independence Party), which was established in 1993. As we shall see below, the politics of ukip revolved around a supercharged neo-​Thatcherite neoliberalism concerning welfare reform, trade liberalization, competition and privatized provision, alongside a racialized social conservativism and authoritarian populism that aligned them with a far-​right ideo-​political position (Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Seymour, 2015). However, what explains the rise of ukip and the political position that it and its successors became most associated with –​that of Euroscepticism and of a policy of abandoning Britain’s involvement in the project of European integration –​was a product of the contradiction within the neoliberal/​far-​right nexus of Thatcherism centred on Britain’s membership of the eec that began to develop after 1985. The Thatcher administration was a primary mover in pushing the then eec towards neoliberalism in the 1980s, with Britain arguing that other member states should follow Britain’s domestic reforms centred on competition, privatization, and de-​regulation. These and other policies would become the basis of the bloc’s major neoliberal reform package to create a single and unified market across all member-​state jurisdictions which was inaugurated with the passing of the Single European Act of 1987. This piece of legislation and inter-​governmental treaty established the legal and institutional and governance framework within which a range of largely neoliberal inspired policies would be implemented and policed –​by the European Commission –​within the eec. The Thatcher government signed the treaty even though it required an increased role for qualified majority voting (qmv) within the (European) Council in realizing this new direction for the eec. It was a pill that Thatcher agreed to swallow on the basis that the use of qmv was seen as essential to prevent vetoes from other states frustrating policy implementation. However, the introduction of qmv was also a major dilution of British sovereignty with respect to its ability to oppose and withdraw from the wider legal and policy architecture that came to associated with the creation of the Single Market especially in employment rights. Consequently, the project of European integration and the legal and policy consequences that flowed from the 1987 Single European Act came to supply the dominant political issue around which a British far-​right began to congeal in the 1990s within the Conservative Party

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and then ukip. Such a development was not an inevitable outcome of the neoliberal/​far-​right nexus that the Thatcher governments had established after 1979 –​indeed, it reflected a fracturing and reconstitution of this political formula –​nevertheless, the emergence of a far-​right infused Euroscepticism was closely associated with the contradictions between a globalizing neoliberalism and the legal-​institutional architecture that developed in association with it and nationalist-​framed forms of political identity and authority that were at the heart of the Thatcherite project. And these tensions became particularly concentrated on the difficulties that the Conservative government –​especially that of John Major after 1990 –​had of passing the legislation load required for the realization of the Single Market though the early 1990s. Such tensions and sources of conflict between the UK and other member states also began to reveal themselves in Britain’s membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (erm) which was a key pillar of financial stability for its members after the foreign-​exchange crisis of the 1970s as well as the project of constructing the European single currency. Membership of the erm reflected a (West) European response to the post-​Bretton Woods system of the international monetary system and the rise of global finance that the British state and British-​domiciled global capital had been associated with through the centrality of the City of London in foreign exchange markets. The eec project of the Single Market reflected the implementation of a set of neoliberal-​ aligned and UK-​supported policies, but which also involved a major supranationalist shift in the logic and institutionalization of European integration. Both developments, then, were seen on the Conservative right as leading to forms of supranationalist governance structures within the eec that not only opened up the possibility of a ‘socialism imposed by Brussels,’ as suggested by Thatcher in her ‘Bruges speech’ (Thatcher, 1988), but also a significant challenge to the ideo-​political currency of British nationalism that Thatcherism –​ as the distinct form of neoliberalism in Britain –​rested on. It was European neoliberalism, then, as institutionalized within the eec and then the European Union (EU) and that had been originally supported by the Thatcher government, which came to provide the primary motif of the British far-​right during the 1990s and the dominant articulation of a Brexit politics thereafter. And it was in this framing of international political economy that the decoupling of the dominant fractions of the capitalist class in Britain and the forces of the far-​right began to be revealed. This is something that I will come back to in the following chapter. The origins and realization of neoliberal political economy in the United States and Britain were intimately connected to far-​right inspired imaginaries and policy prescriptions that flourished in a prevailing context of

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racially-​infused political and economic crises based on an idea of ‘democratic overload’. Such contexts brought out the embedded, but not always visible, sinews of racism and racialized tropes associated with threats to social order and social breakdown that were related to the spectre of black criminality. Such ideological bromides existed (and persist) in the post-​war liberal hey-​day that was defined by a very different set of economic circumstances: that of strong economic growth, rising living standards and the political legitimacy of existing political arrangements. In this way, they are inseparable from the workings of actually-​existing liberal democracy and expose the limits and problems within liberal political theory as concerns race. However, this does not mean that the distinctions between the far-​right and liberalism on race and the perpetuation of racism are marginal or insignificant –​then or now. Indeed, it was within liberal democratic political and institutional spaces and modes of politics, and in the alliances forged between liberal and leftist forces in opposition to the right and far-​right, that policies associated with overcoming existing forms of racial injustice and discrimination were articulated, encouraged and, in some respects, realized –​as in the case of the landmark pieces of civil rights legislation between 1964 and 1968 in the US, and anti-​discriminatory legislation as codified in the 1965 Race Relations Act in the UK. Anti-​racists and leftists took advantage of the institutional and normative possibilities inherent within liberal democracy to advance an anti-​racist politics that not only made them antagonists of the far-​ right, but also demonstrated the material differences between liberalism and the far-​right as concerned actually-​existing racism. To be clear, the politics of Thatcher and Reagan did not amount to an incarnation of the far-​right taking state power: in both cases, while political authoritarianism and state-​sanctioned racism were augmented, in neither case did either government tip over into a far-​right political-​institutional state form and political regime.35 However, the forces of the far-​right were still ascending

35 Indeed, in the case of Britain, while the electoral-​ political bloc associated with Thatcherism was based on an articulation of politics that asserted a national identity connected to a sense of whiteness, traditional family values and hostility towards cultural pluralism as a way of reasserting patriarchy, in policy terms such views were not directly or consistently realized. Racial signifiers continued to be deployed but Britain remained culturally plural and, in many respects, more so after Thatcher had left office. And although immigration policy was tightened in 1981 with the British Nationality Act, there was little sign that the far-​right demand of repatriating Commonwealth immigrants was ever seriously considered. There was also no attempt to revise existing race equality legislation (see Gamble, 1994: 199–​200, 244; Hayes, 1994: 97–​8).

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and increasingly mainstreamed. This was revealed in the turn towards a more militant and aggressive anti-​communism in the developing world –​with the US sponsorship of far-​right and terrorist death-​squads in Latin America36 and elsewhere37 –​and the broader policy of geopolitical confrontation with the ussr that drew on far-​right inspired critiques of the policy of détente during the 1970s (see Halliday, 1986; Saull, 2007).38 Further, this far-​right inspired ‘New’ Cold War coalesced with attacks on domestic sources of collectivist opposition to neoliberal restructuring that defined the new politics ushered in by the elections of Thatcher and Reagan and the specific articulations of neoliberalism therein. Indeed, the reconstitution of the ideo-​ political order across the Anglosphere heralded by the elections of Thatcher and Reagan laid out a new racialized terrain of politics that was not only central in assisting much of the realization of neoliberalism across these two countries, but also conditioned the politics of subsequent and centre-​left governments that came to power thereafter. And although the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis exposed the deep fault-​lines in the political-​economic regime inaugurated by Thatcher and Reagan because it was always so racialized in its fundaments, the far-​right not only benefited from the impact of the crisis itself, but also from the way in which race was so central to the origins, reproduction political legitimization of the neoliberal economic order. Simply put, the realization of neoliberalism, as reflected in the transformations of Anglo-​American political economy and the welfare state from the early 1980s, were directly connected –​if in variegated ways –​to a racialized politics that drew on far-​right political sentiments.

36 37

38

Jeanne Kirkpatrick –​Reagan’s ambassador to the UN –​infamously defended the distinction between left-​wing and right-​wing form of authoritarian/​violence in her 1979 book, drawing on an argument first outlined by Hayek (1944). In Afghanistan, beginning at the end of the Carter administration and expanded under Reagan, the US became a significant funder and diplomatic supporter of far-​right Islamist militias grouped under the umbrella of the ‘Mujahedeen’ fighting the Soviet occupation. It was within this context –​both ideological and geopolitical –​that Al-​Qaeda and other reactionary Islamist terrorists groups emerged after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (for commentary see Saull, 2010). In spite of this, far-​right critiques of Reagan’s policies towards the ussr accused him of ‘appeasement’ (see Podhoretz, 1983).

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Neoliberal Globalization and the New International Political Economy of the Far-​Right

The connections between the ideas and forces of the far-​right and neoliberalism first came to have material effects and political-​institutional consequences in Britain and the US throughout the 1980s. In many respects, capitalist ruling class agencies were integral to these developments –​at least in offering support to the political right in a context of social and labour militancy and the urgency of crafting new paths and platforms of capital accumulation after the end of the long-​boom. However, as Neil Davidson (2017a) and others (see Gamble, 1994: 92–​104, 192–​3) have remarked –​and in contrast to David Harvey’s (2005) explanation for the origins and rise of neoliberalism –​the role of capitalist ruling class agency was far from consistent, unified, or ‘strategic’ in the sense of a having a clear long-​term plan that they simply implemented and realized to produce ‘neoliberal globalization’. Given the crisis context of the 1970s the primary concerns for the dominant fractions of capital were to secure new sources of accumulation, address the nationalist and protectionist impulses that had re-​emerged in the 1970s and, relatedly, deal with the threat of a revitalized and radicalized left. It is through this lens that we should see the connection between neoliberal ideologues and political cheerleaders, capitalists, and the social and political forces on the right in Britain and the US in particular. Indeed, by the 1990s –​and with threat from protectionist forces and the political left largely seen off and with new growth and accumulation streams having emerged –​the dynamics and inter-​connections between dominant fractions of what was increasingly neoliberal capital and the political right and far-​right became much more contradictory and, in some ways, antagonistic. These contradictions, which had originally emerged in the US-​instituted post-​ war liberal international settlement and which had characterized aspects of post-​war politics, now became much more manifest as the far-​right became –​ in the context of the collapse of historical communism and the wider fracturing of the left –​the leading electoral-​political articulation of ‘anti-​capitalism’ understood as a globalized capitalism. In many respects, then, the seeds that have come to fruition after the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis which helped to produce the Brexit Referendum result and the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, among other far-​right surges across Western Europe, were sown and began to germinate in the period from the 1990s through to the 2000s. What I intend to do in the rest of this section is to sketch the broader transformations towards a globalized neoliberal capitalism and, in particular, to emphasize this as a form of continuing uneven and combined development

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through the way in which neoliberal globalization reconfigured the political economy, class structure and social relations within the major capitalist states and, consequently, produced a new spatial and socioeconomic context within which far-​right politics have (re)emerged and thrived. Indeed, neoliberal capitalism has supercharged the inherent logic of unevenness constitutive of capitalism through reshaping spatial and material relations not in a way to usher in the ‘flat earth’ and ‘borderless world’ of globalization’s early cheerleaders (see Friedman, 2007; Ohmae, 1999) but rather, instead, to fundamentally problematise the social and political basis of capitalist nation-​states of which the far-​right revival is a primary symptom. This spatial unevenness has been matched by the reproduction of combination or combined development in the form of the emergence and proliferation of multi-​level forms of international and regional governance and institutional arrangements that have come to parallel and, in some respects, replace and supersede the institutions and structures of the democratic state. And this has helped produce what has become an increasingly important political divide and ideological clash across Western democracies between cosmopolitan-​infused social and ideological forces and communitarian and nativist and racist political ones. The point here, then, is to provide a geography of the re-​emergent and emboldened far-​right, that has had distinct spatial dimensions shaped by neoliberal capitalist development, which will be discussed in the following section. In addition to surveying the material dynamics and resulting structural architecture of capitalist accumulation, I will also connect this to the geopolitics of the emerging post-​Cold War era and its accompanying international institutional structure which has come to provide a defining focus of the new far-​right. The elections of Thatcher and Reagan marked the starting point of a series of new political struggles and social conflicts that took place within these states and internationally –​particularly through the new Cold War –​that laid the foundations for new sources of capital accumulation and new frameworks for managing this accumulation at the international level (Glyn, 2006; Harvey, 2005). By the start of the 1990s, the foundations had been laid for an acceleration and intensification of neoliberal globalization that was to have a significant impact in rekindling the flames of the far-​right. Such developments were, however, far from universal in both temporal and spatial senses. Neoliberal policies associated with attacks on organized labour, the reconfiguration of the state as a facilitator of market competition, the privatization of public assets (Glyn, 2006:37–​42), tax cuts and financial de-​regulation and the accompanying massive shifts in wealth and social power, went furthest and came much sooner in Britain and the United States than was the case in Western Europe and Japan. In the case of the main continental European capitalist states, the transformations associated with neoliberalism would only really begin in the 1990s

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and were particularly concentrated on completing the European Single Market and establishing a common currency –​the Euro. In recognizing the distinct temporality and quality of neoliberal transformation in Europe, nevertheless, this process has been fundamentally connected to and shaped by ‘global processes of capitalist restructuring’ (Apeldoorn, 2002: 2, original emphasis, 2013; see also Cafruny and Ryner, 2007). Indeed, it was the wider context of globalization (and the shifts in the possibilities and openings for accumulation that became associated with it) that pushed the dominant fractions of European capital to embrace a strategy for growth centred on neoliberal globalization rather than one more oriented towards a regionalist agenda and its concomitant protectionist or mercantilist leanings. The role of the eec/​e u and the process of European integration in the internationalization of neoliberalism has been the subject of much debate (Apeldoorn, 2002, 2013; Bieler, 2013; Cafruny and Ryner, 2003, 2007). In the early 1980s, soon after Thatcher’s election victory in Britain, elements in the eec appeared to favour developing supranational social policies (see Ross, 1995: 388; Streeck, 1993) that suggested a very different dynamic to that beginning to emerge within Britain and the US. That this agenda did not come to fruition reflected the shift within both the Commission and most member governments in that while the centre of political gravity within the eec at the time (and, in many respects continuing through to the 1990s) remained committed to universalizing and standardizing social rights and promoting an agenda of a ‘social Europe,’ these priorities were also secondary to the dominant economic ones that focused on the imperative of stimulating economic growth through promoting competition and laying the foundations for a single currency, which was seen as crucial to securing the eec’s long term competitiveness after the stagnation and crisis of the 1970s.39 Thatcher’s opposition to the social rights agenda was important given the need, in some areas of decision-​making and legislation, for unanimity; but this was not the only reason why the social rights agenda never managed to gain political ascendancy. This agenda was seen as undermining the focus on growth and competition which implicitly, at the time, suggested the need for reforms of labour markets –​what later became known as ‘labour flexibility’ –​ rather than strengthening the social bargaining power of labour.40 It was also

39 40

Falling levels of profits were especially evident in the manufacturing sector from the late 1960s –​fuelled by competition (east Asia) and strikes. oecd data indicates a secular decline in profits from the end of the 1960s through to the early 1980s (Glyn, 2006: 7). Implicit in the focus on competitiveness was a critique of the post-​war welfare state regimes, as well as the social power of organized labour as both –​in their existing/​social

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because of the fears across many of the richer states that developing social rights would –​following the logic of Milton Friedman and other neoliberals –​ draw in immigrants from poorer member states who wished to access such benefits. The way forward within the eec in the 1980s –​which not only secured Thatcher’s blessing, but which also indicated an increasingly pro-​market or neoliberal tilt to the eec’s development –​was the project to create a Single Market with the signing of the Single European Act in 1986 (Apeldoorn, 2002; Cafruny and Ryner, 2003; Green Cowles, 1995). This treaty was to become the touchstone for subsequent neoliberal initiatives that accelerated and intensified during the 1990s and thereafter,41 and was also associated with the fierce opposition of the dominant transnational fractions of European capital to the realization of a ‘social Europe’ based on the proposals of the Commission President, Jacques Delors. Thus, as Loukas Tsoukalis (1993: 99, 335) affirmed, the instigation of the Single Market in 1992 introduced a ‘qualitatively new phase in which, for the first time, the integration process came to intervene directly in the existing socioeconomic order in the different member states’ that was also associated with ‘an intensifying process of neo-​liberal restructuring.’42 Such temporal differences were significant in conditioning the re-​ emergence of the far-​right. The neoliberal form of capitalism was significant, then, not only in terms of the new forms of capitalist accumulation that emerged, but also in the way that pre-​existing capitalist states were transformed and particularly with regard to the relative power and influence of different social classes within the state.43 In the case of the former, the post-​war international capitalist model based on politically-​co-​ordinated national capitalist states connected to a relatively stable international framework framed around US hegemony and US capital

41

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democratic configurations –​were regarded as obstacles to productivity growth and a source of inflationary pressures because wages were seen as rising faster than productivity and pressure on labour to make concessions was undermined by full employment and extensive welfare protections (see Lipietz, 1987: 26; Grahl and Teague, 1990: 20, 168–​75). As George Ross (1995: 388) noted, ‘[t]‌he social policy order of the day has shifted from constructing social regulatory policies at the European level, as attempted by Jacques Delors at the end of the 1980s and early 1990s, to reconfiguring labor market and other arrangements to allow the European economy to compete in the world market.’ Apeldoorn (2002: 148) suggests that, ‘[i]‌n retrospect, the Maastricht “social chapter” was in fact the high-​point of the efforts by the Commission to create a “social dimension”, and the very weakness of the text can be taken as a measure of the defeat of Delors and “his” social democratic project’ (see also, Ziltener, 2000). As Panitch and Gindin, (2003: 20) explain, globalization ‘not only increased global integration but affected “domestic” class structures.’ There were no longer clearly demarcated territorial blocs of national capital, but national capitalist states whose reproduction ‘was increasingly tied to the rules and structures of the American-​led global order’. This meant

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exports –​that also incorporated a commitment to the creation of national welfare states and significant material gains for the working classes –​was gradually dismantled and reconstituted. Thus, whereas the post-​war era had seen the development of co-​ordinated national capitalisms with national industrial bases,44 and significant autonomy in the domains of fiscal and monetary policy and channels for the exercise of direct social and political pressure by workers on national governments and ruling classes, the onset of the neoliberal era saw a significant shift away from this framework. I now move on to address the different dimensions of the transformed neoliberal globalized economy within which the neoliberal far-​right has prospered, beginning with the significance of its spatial characteristics 2.1 The Geography of Neoliberal Capitalist Accumulation One of the defining features of the neoliberal era has been how the spatial and material dimensions of capitalist accumulation have shifted increasingly beyond specific national capitalist contexts (Dicken, 2011: 14–​50; Glyn, 2006: 77–​103; Harvey, 1997, 2006; Kiely, 2007: 131–​59,193–​229; McNally, 2009). While this was far from a universal and globalizing phenomenon as its ideological cheerleaders have maintained, nevertheless since the early 1980s there has been a major shift in the geopolitics and spatial frames of capital accumulation, as reflected in the investment strategies of firms and the location of profit streams and also in increasingly internationalized structures of capitalist development.45 It also had a drastic and largely, negative impact on national labour (Bieler, 2012, 2013; Dicken, 2011: 475–​523; Castree et al., 2004;

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that, from the 1970s onwards, ‘all nation states involved came to accept a responsibility for creating the necessary internal conditions for sustained international accumulation, such as stable prices, constraints on labour militancy, national treatment of foreign investment and no restrictions on capital outflows’. This had a dramatic impact on the structure of Western capitalist classes –​as much as it did workers –​with the destruction of manufacturing capital in the 1980s that was not confined to Britain. As Eric Hobsbawm (1994: 304) noted, Britain lost 25 per cent of its manufacturing industry between 1980 and 1984. And, more broadly, he estimated that by the end of the 1980s the total number of workers employed in manufacturing in the original six members of the eec had fallen by seven million compared to the levels of manufacturing employment in the early 1970s. As Swank and Betz (2003: 219–​20) recognize, from the 1980s onwards, Western European economies became much more open in terms of trade and capital flows with average fdi as a proportion of gdp increasing tenfold between 1976 and 1998. This inward trend was also matched by capital flows exiting Europe towards Asia and China in particular from the mid-​1980s, with German fdi quadrupling between 1985 and 1990 and doubling again by 1995 (McNally, 2009: 50).

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Glyn, 2006: 104–​28; Moody, 2017). Consequently, it also reflected the ongoing dynamic of uneven and combined development as capitalism took on new spatial dimensions and spatial-​temporal fixes that intensified and overlaid existing forms of uneven development. New centres of material accumulation emerged, others were reconfigured, while development and economic activity in other locales atrophied triggering de-​industrialization and economic decline. The political significance of this spatial dimension associated with the expansion of neoliberal globalization was to be especially pronounced –​as we shall see in the following c­ hapter –​in the context of the social catastrophe and political turmoil brought on by the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis. Thus it was precisely within those spaces across much of the US upper mid-​west,46 the north-​east of France and the north of England and the English Midlands that had been deleteriously affected by neoliberal uneven development –​as evidenced in de-​industrialization and the off-​shoring of formerly secure, skilled, and well-​remunerated employment –​that would provide important sources of working class support for the far-​right. Moreover, this spatial logic was also directly connected to the other major geopolitical development associated with neoliberal globalization: the rise of China or the ‘China shock’. The rapid economic transformation of China from the late 1970s –​after the Party’s decision to open up the Chinese economy and irrevocably shift away from Maoist self-​reliance under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping –​revealed a direct causal connection between Chinese industrialization and social transformation with the economic atrophy of traditional industrialized spaces in the West (see Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019; Dippel et al., 2015; Malgouyres, 2017). And, as we shall see, this was more than just the working out of uneven development replicating the rise of the so-​called nic s (Newly Industrialized Countries) in the 1970s and the emergence of the manufacturing export powerhouse of Japan in the early 1980s and its economic challenge to the United States. The rise of China has been of an altogether different level of geopolitical magnitude and social impact that also has a racial dimension in terms of how such developments have been politically narrated and weaponized as evidence of ‘white decline’ and ‘rising Asia’ as well. This spatial/​geopolitical configuration of capitalist development has, arguably, become the definitive framing of the far-​right’s political economy, as 46

As a bell-​whether of US manufacturing in general through the early 1980s a quarter of the jobs in the automobile sector were lost. By the end of the decade foreign firms had captured almost half the market and, with it, the re-​location production to the non-​ unionized south and west of the country (Panitch and Gindin, 2012: 188–​9).

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capitalism has been seen as defined by the twin spatial imperatives of national capitals exporting jobs and investment overseas while, at the same time, foreign capitalists and ‘cosmopolitan capitalism’ have become an increasing presence with nominally ‘national’ locales.47 In recognizing the geographical ­differentiations in these processes, the dominant material trend since the 1980s, however, has revealed –​for the leading fractions of capitalist classes at least –​a commitment to internationalizing or ‘de-​nationalizing’ their sources of accumulation through investment strategies, location of plants and off-​ shoring48 and benefiting from differential and competitive tax jurisdictions. Much of this spatial re-​scaling of production has been associated with the increasing dominance of multi-​national firms (MnCs) in manufacturing connected to the development of international and global commodity chains in the production of goods. In consequence, while production might be organized within a single firm, spatially, it involves inputs and processes (including labour) that are differentiated across numerous nation-​states and regions. So, although national production continues –​whereby inputs, processes, and profits (from sale) remain aligned with a national political-​economic space –​ increasingly, sectors such as automobiles, consumer goods, aircraft, computing and telecommunications and high-​end manufacturing, are carried out through international/​global commodity chains involving multiple spaces. The significance of this form of production is that, from assembly to sale, production has become de-​nationalized such that any attempt to ‘nationalize’ or ‘protect’ an industry or jobs connected to such supply and commodity chains has become much more politically challenging and, for most states, economically damaging. The embeddedness of transnational economic linkages have made it much harder for politically-​driven economic interventions focused on privileging or protecting a specific national industry or sector given that such interventions are likely to be based on a partial rather than complete coverage of all of the component and inputs involved in the production process. While these processes do not amount to a universal trend, they have resulted in a new 47

48

According to Andrew Glyn (2006: 66) the value of and thus material dependence of capital accumulation on foreign held assets of the major capitalist countries massively increased throughout the 1980s and 1990s, rising from the equivalent of 36 percent of gdp in 1980 to 71 percent in 1995. This was mirrored by the level of import penetration of domestic manufacturing markets which, based on oecd data between 1974 through to 2001, amounted to rising levels of penetration: in the US, from 6 to 21 percent and Europe, from 17 to 39 percent. An article in the Wall Street Journal stated that in the decade after 2000, US-​domiciled MnCs cut their US labour force by three million workers while adding almost 2.5 million to their foreign payrolls (Wessel, 2011).

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geopolitical configuration and orientation on the part of dominant capitalist fractions across the advanced capitalist world throughout the 1990s and 2000s with the opening up of new spatial zones for accumulation and increasing dependence on international sources of profit. The results have seen an increasing shift of investment and job creation outside of the traditional manufacturing zones of Western Europe and North America –​be it to East Asia, Central-​Eastern-​Eastern Europe, or central America –​as capital has taken advantage of its spatial mobility and the dismantling of curbs on capital flows and fdi (Dicken, 2011: 14–​50, 109–​68, Glyn, 2006: 77–​103). The overwhelming consequence of these spatial developments is not only that a major and historically unique material contradiction has opened up between the social reproduction of capitalist classes and the social forces associated with the far-​right, but that the spatial locales where the far-​right has developed a political footprint have been geographically concentrated in the zones of industrial decline that have marked the neoliberal era. In this sense, neoliberalism has been, to a significant degree, causal of the far-​right because of the way its operations have had such uneven spatial consequences, producing social and industrial landscapes that have provided the back-​drop of significant far-​right social mobilizations. These spatial developments have not only been reflected in inter-​societal ways, (i.e., in the shifts of economic activity and nodal points of capital accumulation across different national jurisdictions) but have also fractured the internal spatialized socioeconomic foundations upon which the political legitimacy of nation-​states have tended to rest. Thus while capital has increasingly migrated beyond the borders of its domicile for profit streams and new markets, the unevenness of capitalist development has been further accentuated by the increasing geographical concentrations of investment and accumulation within particular zones of different capitalist states. Most notoriously evidenced in London and the south-​east of England in the UK (Dorling, 2010; Hazeldine, 2017, 2021) in part based on the global facing character of the City of London as a wealth accumulator and driver of uneven development, it has also been the case in Paris and its environs in France, in the major coastal conurbations in the USA, in the north and central-​belt of Italy especially centred on Milan, and in the western Länder of the reunified Federal Republic of Germany. This undermining and, to some degree, decoupling and regional unevenness of capital from nation-​state has stretched the socioeconomic and geographical coherence of these states to breaking point in some cases as vast material and political gaps have emerged between these areas –​increasingly cosmopolitan in demography, outward looking politically and dominated by new industrial developments and fdi –​and those of the national interior and periphery that

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have been either starved of investment and/​or where existing industries have collapsed. And while regional policies have not disappeared, particularly in the context of the eec/​e u, the generalized trend associated with neoliberalism towards opposing forms of state-​led investment and industrial strategy have further problematized these developments. What we can take from these combined spatial and material developments is that the coherence of a national or geopolitically discrete form of political economy tying the accumulation strategies and social reproduction of the politically dominant fractions of capital to that of ‘national labour’ and associated welfare states has been severely eroded and, in some cases, has collapsed. Materially, this has contributed to a transformed socioeconomic landscape reflected in de-​industrialization and immigration that has provided an important backdrop that the far-​right has managed to respond to and secure a mainstreamed mode of a racialized politics of grievance. Indeed, the apparent sequencing of and connection between industrial decline –​as reflected in the closing of traditional industries that were closely associated with culture and place as much as their socioeconomic significance for working class identities in places like Burnley in northern England (Hazeldine, 2021; Makin-​ Waite, 2021) –​and immigration provided a highly fertile social terrain for far-​ right agitation. While this has tended to concentrate on immigration and the liberal state as the primary sources of blame, the following chapter will show that it has not excluded an animus towards significant properties of neoliberal capitalism and its key social and political enablers in the state and capitalist class. In this respect, then, the agency of neoliberal capitalist ruling classes has been a causal factor in generating far-​right grievances and this is a significant departure from the historical relationship between the far-​right and capital generating, in some respects, an antagonism (see Davidson, 2015; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2015a, 2015d; Worth, 2015). Yet, at the same time, such developments can be understood as revealing a structural limit on the far-​right in terms of how far they are able –​should they come to power –​to actually act on their nationalist grievance, and also in terms of how their de-​coupling from dominant social forces also poses political problems in their ability to secure political support (Saull, 2015a, 2015d; Davidson and Saull, 2017). Indeed, as we shall see in the section below, several of the new far-​right movements of the 1990s and 2000s mapped their racist anti-​immigrant animus and welfare nativism onto a number of neoliberal shibboleths concerning de-​regulation, competition, privatization, tax cuts and cuts to welfare spending that elide with neoliberalism on a number of counts.

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2.2 Neoliberal Financialization To these spatially-​focused changes inaugurated and promoted by neoliberal globalization we can add financialization. Financialization refers to the increasing significance of the financial sector (banks, insurance companies, pension funds and other credit-​creating institutions) in the wider capitalist economy since the 1980s. It not only concerns the growth of this sector vis-​ à-​vis other sectors of the economy and the increasing role of ostensibly non-​ financial corporations in forms of financial arbitrage as a source of profits, but also a wider process evident in the creation and proliferation of financial (credit and debt-​based) instruments in the working of the economy that also relates to consumption, housing and the wider social reproduction of labour through debt-​financing (see French, Leyshon and Wainwright, 2011: 800–​1; Krippner, 2005, 2011; Orhangazi, 2008; Lapavitsas, 2013).49 Thus, as much as the capitalist class and its political allies in the state pursued a new spatial strategy of accumulation, so they –​notably in Britain and the USA50 –​also promoted an increased financialization of the economy (Glyn, 2006: 51–​70; McNally, 2009) and, with it, shifted more and more people into the circuits of finance and a dependence on financial-​sourced accumulation, as the means through which to reproduce themselves. This, provided the basic seeds for the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis.51 The rise of finance capital emerged –​like the broader set of ideas and forces associated with neoliberalism –​in a context of crisis. Consequently, financialization must also be understood as a ‘profoundly spatial phenomenon’ that 49

However, as David McNally (2009: 56 emphasis in original) has made clear, financialization should not be taken to include the acceptance that finance-​capitalists and their interests now dominate capitalism in general. Instead, the essence of what characterizes financialization and that distinguishes this particular period in the longue durée of capitalism, is a ‘set of transformations through which relations between capitals and between capital and wage-​labour have been increasingly financialized –​that is, increasingly embedded in interest-​paying financial transactions.’ 50 The eec/​e u –​through the project to create a single currency (the Euro) –​has also been closely connected and committed to financialization. Indeed, the emergence of the Single Currency has boosted the development of the bloc’s financial sector and intensified the processes of financialization in both a material sense through its impact on the wider economy, flows of credit and investment decisions etc., and also in the governance structures associated with the Euro that became so politically problematic after the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis. 51 Andrew Glyn (2006: 52) argues that the expansion of finance has been most pronounced in the US, ‘where aggregate profits of financial corporations rose from one-​fifth as big as non-​financial profits in the 1970s and 1980s to a half after 2000. The stock market valuation of US financial companies (a reflection of expected long-​term profits) was 29% [sic] of the value on non-​financials in 2004, a fourfold increase over the previous 25 years.’

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is intimately connected to the organic tendency within capitalist development towards the ongoing ‘search for a financialized spatial-​temporal fix(es)’ (French, Leyshon and Wainwright, 2011: 800; see Harvey, 2003) for the crises of neoliberal capitalism. Here, the mobility of finance capital in the form of financial speculation, provision of credit and leverage can and are deployed to ‘displace in time and across space’ the contradictions of contemporary capitalism (French, Leyshon and Wainwright, 2011: 812).52 The significance of financialization for our consideration of the re-​ emergence of the far-​right in the 1990s and thereafter is that financialization contributed to both an increasing instability in the workings of global capitalism as witnessed in the frequency and intensity of financial crises (Glyn, 2006: 69–​75; McNally, 2009: 35–​41, 56–​9, 66–​76; Wade, 2008),53 as well as the way in which it has contributed to class recomposition and growing levels of inequality between different social layers within the major capitalist democracies (see Heidenreich, 2016: 22–​47; Piketty and Saez, 2003; oecd, 2008; Streeck, 2014: 29–​30). Further, and in the context of European financialization, the establishment of the Euro as a transnational currency replacing national currencies in 1999 –​with notes entering circulation in 2002 –​was also highly significant. The introduction of the Euro was as much a political development as it was economic in the shift towards accelerated and intensified integration that flowed from the 1987 Single European Act. Thus, the introduction of the Euro was connected to the establishment of the European Central Bank (ecb) in June 1998 and the termination of the ability of the member states of the Eurozone to exercise an independent monetary policy. The establishment of the ecb and, in particular, its governance structures that are removed from any direct democratic pressures or intervention from elected politicians, reflected 52

53

The authors (French, Leyshon and Wainwright, 2011: 813) focus on the sub-​prime mortgage sector as an example of such a spatial-​temporal fix. The rise of subprime lending (and thus the basis of the 2007–​8 crisis) was driven by a demand for the return on capital with higher average returns being based on the higher risk premiums of borrowers in a context where other assets or investment sources provided lower levels of growth or investment return. International finance capital took advantage, then, of a geographically specific (primarily Anglo-​American) financialized housing market as the basis of a spatial-​temporal fix in the search for ever higher returns as a basis of capital accumulation (see Tooze, 2019a: 1–​22). Financial crises had been effectively eliminated for the almost thirty years after World War Two but have increased in frequency since the early 1980s with the most significant including: Mexican/​Third World Debt Crisis (1982); ‘Black Monday’-​global stock exchange crash (1987); US Savings and Loans crisis (1989); ‘Black Wednesday’ –​the UK’s exit from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism (1992); Mexican Peso Crisis (1994–​95); Asian Financial Crisis (1997); ‘Dot-​Com’ crisis (2001).

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a distinctly neoliberal vision of technocratic regulation (Bonefeld, 2002).54 However, it was the significant dilution of the economic sovereignty of member states that combined with the bank’s strict inflation-​targeting mandate and the practical difficulties of establishing a coherent interest rate for a set of highly diverse and uneven economies that came to play a particularly central role in the strengthening of far-​right forces after the 2010 Eurozone crisis. This is something that I will come back to in the following chapter. Financialization –​through its connection to crisis –​has operated as a distinct vector of uneven and combined development, as reflected in its spatial and material logics and as revealed in financial concentrations allied with property booms in particular geographical zones and increasing levels of wealth inequality grounded in fictitious capital. But this is also a combined process through the contradictions generated by financialization in the ability of nation-​states to both manage and benefit from the workings of neoliberal capitalism. Indeed, as the series of financial crises that have characterized the neoliberal era have demonstrated, including the most recent one of 2007–​8, combination has revealed itself in the inability of state authorities to regulate and stabilize financial capitalism and also in fundamentally undermining the tax bases and social contract that lays at the heart of the democratic state (Streeck, 2011, 2014). Financialization, then, has developed hand-​in-​glove with the processes that have contributed to the growing fiscal vulnerabilities of the state (Streeck, 2014: 47–​96) as tax cuts55 and politically-​determined limits on public borrowing have increased the power of private finance and the rentier class of globally-​ connected financiers and financial institutions associated with it. Accordingly, we can see financialization as the basis of an important if not dominant strand within neoliberal hegemony as capitalist states –​led by Britain and the US –​ throughout the 1990s began to promote processes of financialization as core to the wider functioning and well-​being (see Harmes, 2001; Martin, 2002; Cutler and Waine, 2001; Streeck, 2014: 61–​2) of the economy in general and 54 55

Hayek argued for a federalist and supranationalist governance framework and specifically with respect to monetary arrangements as an important means to thwart inflationary pressures and to help maintain price stability and transparency (see Hayek, 1996). Particularly concerning levels of corporation tax that have been fuelled by the mobility of capital and competition among tax jurisdictions seeking to lure multinational firms to relocate tax points in such jurisdictions. In the UK, ‘[t]‌he 1981 budget saw the start of a series of tax cuts, with the top rate falling from 70 per cent to 50 per cent in 1981, and then down to 28 per cent in 1986’ (Stedman Jones, 2012: 265). The tax burden for the richest 10 per cent fell by about 10 per cent in the period from 1977 to 1987 (Plant and Hoover, 1989: 118). For Glyn, (2006: 164–​5, 169) falls in rates of corporation tax across the oecd

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in society through financialized debt instruments, not least mortgage finance, which replaced the public provision of housing as a key part of the post-​war welfare state. Because of its connection with globalization and the gradual lifting of exchange and capital controls from the 1980s,56 finance capital has become associated with transnational class forces (Apeldoorn, 2002: 11–​49; Carroll, 2010; Robinson, 2004; Sklair, 2001) suspended above the jurisdictions of nation-​ states and their democratic structures in particular. This relates to the international institutional and geopolitical structures associated with neoliberalism that I will discuss below, but it has also provided a political framing that has re-​introduced and helped legitimise anti-​Semitic currents (and not just on the right) who evoke the image of the Jewish financier and money-​lender as the racialized incarnation of finance capital. In terms of class forces and the democratic accountability of nation-​states, the emergence of this transnational rentier class has produced a serious contradiction and tension in the functioning and legitimacy of the advanced capitalist states. Specifically, the deliberate policy shift since the early 1980s of consolidating or limiting the revenues flowing into state treasuries through taxation has been offset by the ‘liberation of finance’ with international finance providing the compensatory mechanism to fund public spending but, at the same time, a means of disciplining states and democratic publics as to how much money can be spent and on what. With levels of public debt increasing,57 states and their publics are disciplined by economic forces beyond the scope of national democratic accountability, yet on which they are also increasingly dependent for the funding of key sources of public and social provision. The outcome of this has clearly imposed structural limits on what democratic publics can demand from the state and has played an important role in the self-​fulfilling logic of neoliberalism: the need to limit and cut back on public spending, and where the public spending that does take place contributes

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from the early 1980s to 2001 were as follows: France –​41/​30; Germany –​56/​34; UK –​36/​26; US –​ 39/​29; oecd Average –​40/​29. These changes are linked to attracting fdi with lower levels being seen as more attractive to inward fdi flows. Since the early 1980s, the universal trend has been the expansion of countries defined by the imf as having ‘open capital markets’ compared with the post-​war era. Across the oecd –​the group of the richest and most developed capitalist economies –​by 1988 only one was classified as having significant capital controls. One important upshot of this has been the massive increase in foreign exchange trading that reached us$1,900 billion per day by 2004 (Glyn, 2006: 65–​6). The growth of debt led to a ‘quadrupling of private and public debt in the US from slightly more than $10 trillion to $43 trillion’ between 1987 and 2005 (McNally, 2009: 61).

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to the enrichment of finance capital. Wolfgang Streeck (2014) describes this as the transformation of the ‘tax state’ –​that which characterised the political economy of the major capitalist states after 1945 through to the 1970s –​to a ‘debt state’ as a defining aspect of actually existing neoliberalism. Following Streeck, this amounts to a major structural transformation in the relationship between capital and democracy in favour of the former as the (democratic) state –​the institutional mechanism through which the demands of a democratic citizenry are implemented –​is increasingly configured and organized in a way to secure a buffer or ‘firewall’ between it and the demos as a means to maintain secure access to international finance. Indeed, the consequences of financialization –​unintended or otherwise –​have helped to create and empower a globalized financial strata who live off the debt interest secured from loans to states and individuals as public and private debt grows as a consequence of a combination of stagnant levels of taxation and as growing numbers of workers come to depend on private credit from the international financial sector to cover and compensate their reduced access to a welfare state and, secondly, falling real wages due to the deliberate emasculation of organized labour (see Gamble, 2009; Streeck, 2011, 2014).58 In this scenario finance capital is both a key source of the problem –​its empowerment has been a direct consequence of fiscal consolidation from the early 1980s –​and the only accepted means in the contemporary capitalist era by which state authorities fund the provision of public goods and services. Such developments have provided an important material and ideational source of far-​right politics in the neoliberal era. Thus, finance capital has long provided the basis of the far-​right’s ‘anti-​capitalism’ that concentrates on and fetishizes finance as a uniquely cosmopolitan and ‘Jewish’ form of capitalism detached from the productive, ‘natural’ and national forms of capitalism rooted in naturalized private property connected to a specific and 58

As David McNally (2009: 60) has noted, the growth of financial markets and profitability therein is connected to wage compression which ‘was accomplished by way of social and spatial reorganization of labour markets and production processes’: (1) the geographic relocation of production –​especially though not exclusively focused on East Asia; (2) the downward pressure on wages triggered by the huge expansion in the reserve army of global labour through dispossession of peasants in China and elsewhere; (3) an increase in relative surplus value brought about through boosts to labour productivity and new technologies; (4) an increase in absolute surplus-​value triggered by increasing work hours especially in the USA; (5) sharp cuts to real wages brought about by union-​bashing, two-​ tiered wage systems and cuts to the social wage of the welfare state. Taken together, these resulted in significant increases in income inequality and wealth inequality and a major recomposition of the working class.

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geographically and racialized people. While the rhetoric of the far-​right has sometimes avoided making explicitly anti-​Semitic comments as to the power and agency of finance as the source of a country’s economic woes, reference to ‘Wall Street’ or ‘banking interests’ or, more recently, ‘George Soros’ can provide a more acceptable rhetorical substitute though, in essence, the same racialized animus is at work. Finance is, as I have made clear, a key factor and agent within neoliberalism but it is not separable from the broader logic of capitalism and the structure and workings of the real economy of production. It is, obviously, not dominated by Jews either. The point here is how well-​established and embedded racist tropes and stereotypes are quickly deployed to offer convenient explanations that can gain resonance within certain population layers. This relates to the other reality associated with finance that far-​right inspired anti-​Semitic demagoguery speaks to and that is the role of debt-​financing within communities as the neoliberal mechanism of ensuring social reproduction in a context of stagnant wages and cuts to welfare. This is something that I will come back to in the following section when I look at the character, activities and electoral performance and wider political significance of far-​right parties over the neoliberal era. In many respects the consequences of the changes associated with globalized neoliberal capitalism have been most marked and politically significant in the politics of the working classes across the advanced capitalist states. This is something that I will come back to in the following chapter when I examine the social constituencies behind Trump’s election and Brexit in particular that have become popularized as a ‘backlash of the white working class’ (see Gest, 2016; Williams, 2017; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Goodhart, 2017). For now, it requires some comment as to the socioeconomic topography upon which politics has played out over the last thirty years and how these changes have shattered the social compact of the post-​war social democratic order that was defined by significant gains for European workers –​especially men –​and those organized within trade unions in particular. 2.3 Neoliberal Globalization and the Class Politics of ‘National Labour’ The post-​war period –​from the late 1940s to the mid-​late 1970s –​could be seen to reflect a high point for organized labour59 founded on job security, rising wages and living standards, social stability, and political recognition through

59

The high point of trade union density was reached in the late 1970s with a figure of 44.8 percent as an average within 19 oecd countries (Glyn, 2006: 4).

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the multiple ways in which organized labour was institutionalized within the workings of the social democratic state. Capitalism worked to reproduce ‘national labour’ where working class politics and identity were closely allied with forms of what were, in effect, exclusive regimes of political and social citizenship connected to both the welfare state and ‘national roads to social democracy’. This was an arrangement that provided advantages for white and male workers over women and minorities, in particular, as well as those geopolitically outside the industrialized zones across much of the former colonial Global South. Free trade regimes were limited in ambition under the General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (gatt) framework and both the limits on capital movements and the management of exchange rates through the Bretton Woods system provided forms of social protection for the working classes across the main capitalist democracies. As this arrangement was racialized, it also meant that the character of working class politics remained –​to varying degrees –​defined by it even if it did not always (as in most cases it did not) lend itself to a politics of the far-​right. National labour was the racialized form of the dominant rendering of working class politics over this period; a form of class politics that was based on a national class compact with capital mediated by the state and superintended under US hegemony. However, this compact has been torn apart under neoliberalism. The social constituencies of national labour and the political identities and political-​institutional culture that underpinned it –​a project of over 150 years in the making in some places (see Eley, 2002; Sassoon, 1996) –​has been displaced and dismantled under neoliberalism and, with it, a crisis of white male identity across these social layers has emerged. The resulting fragmentation of the working classes across the major capitalist democracies has had a profound impact on the general political topography within them, and on the fortunes of the far-​right in particular, as such fracturing (Panitch and Leys, 2000) –​connected to a weakened institutional and cultural presence in many former industrialized areas –​has opened up social spaces and contexts where the far-​right has gained access and entry that were not available to it in the past. There is, of course, an irony in this in that the institutions and culture of organized labour and the social democratic and communist (in Italy and France specifically) lefts were, themselves, to a significant degree defined by racialized attitudes to immigrant members of the working class and, in some cases, acted to promote discriminatory policies towards them with respect to employment, housing and education. The left’s antipathy and opposition to the far-​right and the difficulties that far-​right movements and parties confronted in trying to secure support from the working class during this period did not, then, result

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from a consistent left anti-​racism. However, the institutional strength of organized labour and a deep and widespread political culture of anti-​fascism and class solidarity helped immunize most workers from far-​right appeals. It also meant that there were openings –​and in many respects these were the only social and political openings for immigrants and/​or ethnic minorities –​to build alliances and solidarity networks and to engage in social and political struggles with other white workers for common ends that were beneficial to the social and political livelihoods of minority communities. Indeed, in the heat of the global economic crisis of the 1970s, there were moves made to develop and strengthen forms of multi-​racial working class struggle in Britain and the US in particular, but these did not develop into a re-​invigorated form of working class politics and socialist political strategy. Instead, neoliberal reforms which, in nearly all cases, have been premised on dismantling the institutional access of organized labour within the state and on aggressively attacking workers’ rights have, alongside the transformations in the structure and workings of political economy discussed above, moved to radically reconfigure the socioeconomic landscape and the fabric of working class life over the last twenty-​to-​thirty years. The idea of national labour as a racialized construction –​can it be anything else? (see Balibar, 1991, 1999) –​has, however, remained as a residual class identity, if spatially concentrated in an uneven way. And in the context of globalization has become an important ideological entry-​point for the new far-​right connected to a welfare-​nativism and anti-​migrant rhetoric framed around demands such as ‘British jobs for British workers’ (Brown, 2007).60 The spatial transformations of neoliberal globalization have over-​ determined the nationalness of organized labour as a political force and, while it has not developed into a racialized working class politics led by the far-​right, the remnants of a labour politics have become uniquely propitious for the far-​ right. In particular, the impact of neoliberal globalized economic restructuring has had both uneven geographic and sectoral consequences, and has created increasingly bifurcating labour markets between globalization’s ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ whereby the impact of economic restructuring and, specifically, liberalization of markets and economic openness has benefited some, small sections of the working and middle-​classes involved in skilled forms of labour, in contrast to vulnerabilities and insecurities for low and unskilled workers in particular (Frieden, 1991: 426; Moody, 2017; Rodrik, 1997). The assumption here is that the combination of capital mobility and immigration can contribute 60

See also Bale et al., 2009.

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to both employment insecurity and falls in wages in those areas of the labour market where jobs and skills can be sourced more cheaply outside a particular locale and where flexible labour markets permit immigrants to enter national labour markets and under-​cut existing pay rates and/​or prop-​up and sustain a low-​wage economy. As I will discuss in the following chapter, immigration has become an increasing source of far-​right mobilizations within the neoliberal era. Labour migration has worked –​if unevenly –​to press down on wage levels and, concomitantly, to increase levels of exploitation in those sectors where the impact of labour migration –​in services, hospitality, construction, and, of course in the informal sector –​has been most pronounced. In undermining the arrangements underpinning national labour, labour migration has, obviously, also opened up fissures within the politics of the working class, breaking the post-​ war social contract that limited levels of labour migration and also opened up significant opportunities for the far-​right not only because of the economic impact of migration on the livelihoods of workers, but also in a cultural sense with the rapid alteration of communities through the presence of ‘foreign labour’. Indeed, as we shall see in the following section, in the politics of the parties and movements of the far-​right, the influx of migrant labour within a wider context of neoliberal restructuring and the retrenchment of welfare provision has helped generate a toxic but powerful politics of welfare nativism (Kitschelt, 1995: 22; Mudde, 2007: 132) in which the far-​right has made some successful inroads in securing support from sections of the working class. Surveys of the impact of globalization/​openness on the advanced capitalist economies have tended to identity some level of causal relationship –​always uneven because the level of openness and the structure of economies and labour markers is varied –​between the spread and deepening of neoliberal globalization and increasing levels of economic insecurity and falls in pay for lower-​skilled workers in particular (Swank and Betz, 2003: 221). Yet the actual political impact of these structural changes in economies and labour markets has gone well beyond what the available evidence suggests because voters have tended to perceive these processes as having had much greater and deleterious effects. Drawing on a number of surveys across the major capitalist economies Swank and Betz (2003: 222–​3) concluded that a majority of workers –​and not just those actually affected –​considered globalization as a source of uncertainty and insecurity and, thus, were more inclined to respond favourably to calls for protectionism and limits on globalization. This was particularly pronounced in those social layers that had lower levels of education and skills. This widespread perception and, in some cases, material reality opened up a major source of entry for the far-​right and especially in those party-​systems

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where the traditionally dominant force on the left has tended to be identified as either a weak opponent or facilitator of such processes, as has been the case with the Democratic Party in the US and (New) Labour in the UK. In recognizing this, as in other domains of capitalist political economy –​ neoliberal or otherwise –​unevenness and combination –​prevail. And this is something that I will come back to in the following chapter. However, in the case of the period under examination here from the 1980s through to the early 2000s, the precise institutional forms and political economies across the advanced capitalist world of labour politics varied, in part because the scale and intensity of political and legal attacks that characterized the Anglo-​American experience were not (and have not been) repeated in the European context. In this respect the German case as discussed by Magnus Ryner (2003: 201–​ 27)61 is revealing for the durability of a ‘national compact’ between organized labour and big capital within the framework of European integration and an internationalizing and globalizing dynamic of neoliberal capitalist development. In this German case, which to some extent remains the case today, organized labour has remained central as a social partner of manufacturing export-​oriented capital in the management of Germany’s political economy. And this reflects a form of social mercantilist and corporate class compromise mediated by each of the two dominant parties of the Republic –​the Christian Democrats and the spd. This arrangement has been central to the distinct –​ export and manufacturing-​led –​orientation and structure of Germany’s political economy (particularly after unification in 1990) and reflects an important qualification in the claims about neoliberal globalization and its limits and national particularities. Although organized labour’s role has helped secure the maintenance of a relatively generous welfare state and employment security for existing workers, it has not come without costs –​in Germany and across other countries in the EU –​as it has been anchored in a distinctly ‘ordo-​liberal’ ideational universe based on tight monetary policy and low inflation and an aversion to deficit spending. Indeed this arrangement, while mitigating class conflict in Germany and promoting social and political stability, has come –​via the EU’s Single Market and Euro strategies –​at a major social and economic cost to other European economies that has undermined their social and political stability. 61

As Ryner (2003: 202) notes, ‘[t]‌he importance of Germany for disciplinary neoliberalism in Europe contains an irony, which is … that while Germany has the role, which its central bankers, finance ministers, and chancellors have played with great application, Germany has also one of the most highly developed and deeply entrenched apparatuses of labor protection and welfare states in Europe.’

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This has become particularly pronounced after the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis which I will discuss in the following chapter. And even though it is a long way away from replicating a form of ‘German Grossraum’ –​fulfilling the dreams of early twentieth century German imperial strategists and nationalists –​it does reflect the uneven and combined character of EU integration and Europe’s political economy that has helped re-​invigorate the far-​right as class relations have become increasingly nationalized through the vectors of ‘surplus’ or ‘deficit-​hawk’ states such as Germany lined-​up against what German politicians and newspapers have described as ‘southern European profligacy, inefficiency and corruption’. In such dog-​whistle framing, economic relations of exploitation, marginalization and expropriation are understood as a battle of national and popular wills that encourage rival populisms. Overall, this arrangement in Germany can be seen as a defensive model of class compromise and has worked against and undermined developing forms of international and EU wide forms of class solidarity (see Bieler, 2011, 2012, 2013), as well as labour militancy.62 Nevertheless, it does reflect a distinct social arrangement and a form of class/​labour politics more closely connected to the ‘Fordist past’ than compared with Britain and the US over this period, and this has also had a bearing on the relative strength of the far-​right in Germany. In the French case and certainly after the ‘U-​turn’ of Mitterrand’s socialist government in 1983 –​itself an indication of the strengthening balance of social forces of neoliberal capital over national labourist forces –​organized labour maintained an important, if ever shrinking, social and political strength. In this case, and in contrast to the corporatist compromise in Germany, French organized labour, particularly in the public sectors of transportation and education, deployed militancy to preserve its privileges and social protections. That this has not been connected to a successful political or economic strategy to ward off neoliberal forces hovering over and within the EU and Eurozone reflects its defensiveness and, with it, nationalist tendencies, as the focus of

62

This orientation of German organized labour could also be seen to reflect a ‘defensive’ mode more generally across the EU as the recognition of being a ‘social partner’ –​that has allowed labour ‘to be at the table’ –​has also come with significant drawbacks for workers as reflected in commitment of the unions to a policy of pay restraint based on pay levels below productivity increases, a (partial) opening of pay bargaining from sector to company level, the acceptance of higher pay differentials, an acceptance of the need to reform welfare regimes to ensure that they become less of a drain on the public purse and the shifting of tax regimes away from income (or direct) taxation to forms of indirect taxation such as vat on consumption goods (see Bieling, 2003: 242). While labour’s participation has resulted in some gains such as the working time directive the wider concessions and limits to what it is willing to mobilize around has demonstrated its ‘supplicant’ status.

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class animus has been increasingly concentrated on EU technocrats and the forces of ‘mondialization’. The militancy of a section of organized labour contrasts with falling levels of unionization and persistently high levels of unemployment63 that have served to weaken labour’s bargaining power, as well as generating divisions between the employed and unionized and the unemployed. So while the defensive militancy of the trade union mobilization of 1995 (Jefferys, 1996) against a major reform of the pensions system in a financialized direction was a significant victory that reflects a broader truth in that France was not –​or only partially –​ neoliberalized over this period, it has also been subject to neoliberal forces and strictures via France’s membership of the Eurozone. This has foreclosed (fiscal) deficit spending –​through the strictures of the Stability and Growth Pact that was inaugurated in 1997 –​and monetary (devaluation) options after the establishment of the Euro in 1999 as ways of stimulating growth. Instead, French political elites’ –​of both left and right –​commitment to increasing integration and the extension of the political and legal scope of supranationalism has been the main strategy and hope for crafting a new European-​wide settlement upon which to rekindle growth and foster a post-​industrial future. That this has not happened is a reflection of the balance of political and economic power in the EU connected to EU expansion eastwards (promoted by the UK and other liberalizing member-​states) and the wider forces of globalization engendering shifts of capital, technology and social power outside of Europe. The spatial dimensions of the anaemic growth performance of the French economy since the early 1990s have combined with the atrophy of the French communist tradition which, as elsewhere across much of the post-​war developed capitalist democracies, helped immunize the culture and institutions of much of the French industrial working class from the tentacles of the far-​right. 2.4 The Neoliberal International Institutional Order The issues around national labour and the spatial and material consequences of neoliberalism are intimately connected to the final aspect of neoliberal globalization that I will focus on here: the international and globalizing institutional, political, and geopolitical properties of the neoliberal period. While dreams of a global or cosmopolitan state are far from being realized,64 63

64

As Ben Clift (Clift, 2003: 183) notes, the persistence of high unemployment in France as the means by which competitive disinflation has been secured –​sound money/​tighter finance –​has improved the external competitiveness of French firms but at the cost of higher unemployment: 8.3 percent in 1983 continuing to 12.6 percent in 1997. An irony here is that one of the key, if not dominant, representatives of European transnational capital, the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ert), has consistently (since

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the political and institutional arrangements governing and managing the workings of capitalism have become increasingly internationalized and de-​ politicized through the burgeoning and increasing significance of technocratic legal arrangements divorced from democratic oversight and pressure. So since the 1980s, political and legal decision-​making over the workings of the capitalist economy have been increasingly out-​sourced to international bodies based on treaties and, in many cases, ‘independent’ forms of adjudication and decision-​making. Such developments provide the cosmopolitan gloss to neoliberal articulations of international relations, and appear to reflect evidence of international co-​operation, compromise and of the declining significance of national jurisdictions, power, and political conflict. These claims may be arguable but, nevertheless, developments associated with the role of the wto in international trade, central banks in monetary policy and, in the context of the Eurozone, the European Commission and ecb, all point to a transformation in governance structures that are increasingly divorced from structures and mechanisms of democratic oversight. Further, decisions are increasingly taken by technocrats or ‘experts’ rather than those connected to a transparent political representation or interest. Such developments could be seen as reflecting the objectives of neoliberal thinkers. These thinkers have always been suspicious of democracy and, above all, of interventions by institutions that reflect the collective will of democratic citizens on the operation of the market economy (Hayek, 2001: 73–​4). One of the most significant political objectives of neoliberalism has therefore been to reconfigure (institutionally) and reconstitute, (politically) the workings of democratic structures and processes and, specifically, how they relate to the organization and workings of the economy (see Bonefeld, 2017a, 2017b; Brown, 2015; Dardot and Laval, 2014; Kiely, 2017, 2018a; Peck et al., 2012; Plehwe et al., 2006). the late 1980s) argued and pressed the Commission and EU governments to introduce supranational and EU-​wide labour market reforms based on flexibility and what Bob Jessop (1993) refers to as ‘Schumpeterian Workfare’ as a key plank in its proposals to promote the competitiveness, productivity and efficiency of the EU economy, as well as to improve the rates of profitability for firms. Such a shift would have a profound, if not fundamental, impact on the relations between EU states and their citizens and would, if realized, be a major step towards the EU adopting a state-​like form. That this has not happened is in part due to the residual strengths and political attachments of national labour, many of which prefer their existing national regime both for its relative privileges (see the Scandinavian countries and Germany in particular) even though it has put organized labour at a structural disadvantage vis-​a-​vis transnational capitalist forces (see also Apeldoorn, 2002: 144–​6).

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In the context of the world economic crisis in the 1970s and the concerns about ‘democratic overload,’ elite policy makers –​aided by corporate funded think-​tanks and elite interest groups such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists (See Apeldoorn, 2002; Gill, 2003) –​were concerned to avoid a repeat of the 1970s when they perceived the causes of the economic crisis and stagnating growth were a direct consequence of inflationary popular demands on the state that squeezed out private competitive initiatives making western capitalism increasingly uncompetitive. In many respects, then, this internationalization of neoliberal economic governance has been about ensuring that international business investors are treated equally (with domestic firms) and that there is a consistency and transparency in business rules free from ‘populist’ or, more accurately, democratic political interventions. This is seen as providing a basis for policy and legal stability and consistency: a key element of neoliberal doctrine and what it regards as a foundation for economic success. Indeed, Hayek’s writings on the international governance structures appropriate for a ‘free market’ economy emphasized a federalized set of arrangements based on a set of common rules rigorously enforced by an independent and transnational judicial body and where democratic structures of oversight and intervention were marginalized (Hayek, 1996). The wto framework has done much to realize a neoliberal vision of trade in terms of reducing trade barriers and limiting the scope of member states –​ sometimes responding to local democratic pressures –​of intervening through ‘unilateral’ market interventions to protect a particular industry or region from the consequences of liberalizing trade flows and investment decisions. Likewise in the EU context the freedoms of capital, goods, services and labour have deterred democratic states from making market interventions lest they face censure from the European Court of Justice (ecj). To be clear, these developments do not approximate a neoliberal utopia, but they do reflect a combined process and institutionalization of internationalization and technocracy based on the assumption that removing political pressures and politicians from decision-​making roles is good for the workings of the economy. Such an assumption itself reflects the embeddedness of a neoliberal common sense and undoubtedly reduces the capacities and relevance of the democratic nation-​state to make meaningful interventions. Drawing on the insights of Wolfgang Streeck (2014), the legal-​institutional architecture of the Eurozone –​and its approximation of a ‘supranational (monetary) sovereignty’ –​has come to play a central role in the revival of a politics infused with a symbolism and language connected to the far-​right. Revealing the advance of a neoliberal hegemonic common sense, this shift has been officially promoted as an example of the ‘sound macroeconomic principles’

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of consistent and transparent policy-​making in monetary policy –​an important way of reassuring the financial markets upon which national economies and individual citizens together supposedly depend –​and to ensure sound and expert policy decisions free from short-​term political pressure. However, the closing off of the democratic oversight of these institutions and their operations could also be seen as reflecting the capture of a significant arm of the state by the interests of transnational financial-​rentier layers. Indeed, though he was not referring specifically to financial neoliberalism (nor the EU), the words of Alan Greenspan, the former Chair of the US Federal Reserve, on the eve of the North Atlantic financial crisis ring true of how neoliberal ideologues and ruling class policy makers viewed and understood such developments, [w]‌e are fortunate that, thanks to globalization, policy decisions in the US have been largely replaced by global market forces. National security aside, it hardly makes any difference who will be the next president. The world is governed by market forces. cited in streeck, 2014: 85

Hyperbole though it may be, Greenspan’s declaration does point to something significant about the relationship between democratic processes and institutions in key decisions concerning the economy. National economies have become much more closely inter-​connected and integrated, especially so in the context of the EU and the Eurozone, and this has engendered elite-​level diplomatic bargaining and the construction of international technocratic regimes to manage these increasingly complex and inter-​connected networks of economic relations. So while capitalist classes are still unevenly connected to one or other national jurisdiction (see Panitch and Gindin, 2012) –​hence we can still talk of ‘national capitals’ –​the conditions for their collective reproduction are increasingly set and determined in institutional frameworks at the EU or Eurozone level that are largely off-​limits to any democratic oversight from European publics. Consequently, the social and political connections between the dominant fractions of neoliberal capital and subaltern classes across the advanced capitalist economies are fundamentally different from previous eras. Thus, the political-​legal and institutional framework that upholds private property rights and core market rules are determined in institutional settings and via legal arrangements largely outside the oversight of democratic structures, which are still substantively rooted in nation-​state locales. In contrast to the past, capitalist classes are much less dependent on right and far-​right ‘democratic’ mobilizations from below or on constructing cross-​class alliances to ward off

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leftist democratic threats and challenges than they were in the past. And, as demonstrated above, because of the continuing national focus and institutional location of democratic possibilities within a national-​demos, this can result in contradictions and antagonisms emerging between the class interests of the dominant fractions of neoliberal capital and far-​right political articulations that continue to reify the national as the singular moral and political space for political deliberation and authority. In many respects these developments reflect the social and lobbying power of transnational capitalist social forces over the neoliberal era (Apeldoorn, 2002, 2013; Carroll et al., 2010; Gill, 2002, 2009) that dovetail with the reconfiguration of both the institutional form and the political substance of international economic governance which has largely sidelined the institutional locations of organized workers and the wider demos from being able to intervene in and contribute to the drafting of regulations. In contrast to the relative sidelining of organized labour (Bieler, 2011, 2012, 2013), business lobbying groups such as the European Roundtable of Industrialists (ert) have taken advantage of the institutional matrix of both eec/​e u policy-​making initiatives concentrated in the ‘technocratic hothouse’ of the Commission65 and the new regulatory frameworks organized through the Commission and supervised by the ecj. By means of both policy suggestions and using the revolving door of working in the Commission, groups such as the ert have played a significant role in driving the policy-​making momentum along neoliberal lines since the early 1990s with constant calls for increasing ‘the competitiveness of Europe’ by ‘making it possible to build an integrated free market economic system, with a maximum of flexibility and a minimum of regulation’ (Holman and Pijl, 2003: 83 –​emphasis in original). The role of European transnational capital, particularly through the ert, can be seen as complementing the material and spatial changes of capitalist restructuring that have characterized the neoliberal era. With its emphasis on competitiveness, organizations like the ert have aligned themselves with 65

As Bastian van Apeldoorn (2002: 85–​6, 113–​4) posits, ‘the formation of the ert took place in the context of a close interaction between prominent European business leaders … and [European] Commissioner [Etienne] Davignon … from the very beginning … the Roundtable had the highest-​level access to the Commission and was perceived to be a legitimate player by Europe’s policy-​makers.’ In all, the relationship between the ert and Commission reflects a ‘transnational policy-​space’ where the borders between corporate lobbyists, the interests of multinational capital and the ‘independent expertise’ of ‘disinterested’ European technocrats are blurred to say the least and, above all else, free of any meaningful democratic oversight –​notwithstanding any surveillance and oversight provided by the European parliament.

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particular neoliberal inclined European governments oriented towards globalization, as both an opportunity and source of economic-​market discipline and with an emphasis on labour market reform via the bromide of ‘flexibility’. In doing so, the ERT has helped establish this ideological prescription as both the normative reference point for governmental reform of labour markets and welfare states and pressed for supranational regulation and policy to impose a neo-​liberal infused supranational alternative to Delors’ project for a ‘social Europe’. European transnational capital, then, can be seen as a social force that has promoted not only transnational capital formation, as it did over this period and thereafter but, equally, transnational class formation in general through such policies. A consequence of this is the dilution of national labour markets as markers of citizenship –​a red-​flag for the far-​right. That the eec/​e u has come to endorse many of these proposals that push for both flexible labour markets and their standardization across the bloc like any other commodity –​ rinsed of national and geographic specificities –​has, obviously, resulted in the EU coming to be seen as a vehicle for both Europeanization and neoliberalism which has invoked hostility from both the radical left and far-​right. International governance and especially its elite and technocratic dimensions housed in international institutions that are largely immune from democratic pressures and/​or oversight has become a major focus of the political animus of the far-​right over the neoliberal era. It has helped cultivate a ‘conspiratorial politics’ targeted at neoliberal cosmopolitan elites –​the supposed and, in many respects, real architects and beneficiaries of these new governance arrangements. In the European context, Euroscepticism is badge of pride worn by the far-​right with the governance structures of the EU providing the concrete reference for the ‘anti-​establishment’ and ‘anti-​system’ politics that it articulates. Such a position and the degree to which it has gained political traction is, in part, a consequence of the disintegration of social democracy and a coherent leftist response to these neoliberal developments, both economic (in the form of the transnationalization and financialization of capitalism) and political (in the form of the construction of pseudo-​cosmopolitan forms of democratic mobilization and identity and structures of political oversight and participation). Indeed, the social democratic left has been, in many respects, politically complicit in the neoliberalization of European integration through its willingness to sign-​up to institutional changes and political commitments in a forlorn hope that a reversal of neoliberal momentum is possible at the EU level. Thus the difficulty, in economic terms, of constructing a ‘national road to socialism’ after the 1980s has paralleled the ‘backwardness’ or continuing national limits of democratic identity and imaginary across most of the populations of

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European nation states and many workers in particular –​another indication of the politics of combined development manifesting itself. Thus, the left has been caught between its internationalist orientation and the continuing social and political legacies of national labour. This has resulted in attempts at forms of ‘triangulation’ through trying to use EU level institutional machinery to promote social democratic initiatives that are aimed at benefiting their respective national political constituents (such as the working time directive and other elements of the ‘social chapter’)66 but –​because of residual nativism –​those on the left have either refused, or been unable, to construct a political coalition at the EU level to move towards a universalization of social welfare provision. And enlargement initiatives, in particular, have only made attempts at crafting a pan-​EU working class solidarity even harder. This is the context that has provided an opening to the far-​right. Though as we shall see below, its political economy is itself far from consistent and oppositional or contradictory towards many of the changes associated with neoliberal globalization. Where it has developed a distinct and consistent position –​in contrast to the moderate right and lefts –​has been in its implacable opposition towards elite-​level and international institutional structures of governance on the basis that these reflect an ‘alien’ set of structures imposed on nations and peoples by a conspiratorial cosmopolitan elite that has usurped a national (democratic) sovereignty and denied ‘the people’ their sovereign rights. Though this may be an exaggeration, it does speak to the fundamental disconnect –​that reflects a form of combined development –​between nation-​ state democratic structures and social and political imaginaries with that of EU-​level governance of the European economy. This now seems to be a permanent and embedded feature of the politics within EU states that has advantaged the far-​right, or at least given it a legitimacy and respectability –​given that it does relate to a genuinely problematic issue of democratic governance. This political advantage afforded to the far-​right bequeathed by EU neoliberalism, however, contrasts with how dominant social and political forces –​ in the economy and state –​are now, in general, aligned in opposition to the

66

However, even if we accept this, as Apeldoorn (2002: 146–​7) and others have also argued, especially at the highpoint of social democratic supranationalist initiatives for a ‘social Europe’ in the late 1980s that was connected to Commission President Jacques Delors, such initiatives rested on a basic acceptance of some of the fundamental assumptions associated with neoliberalism such as the primacy of the market as the means for economic distribution and the focus on competitiveness etc. And such assumptions came to dominate social democratic governments in office throughout the 1990s –​in Britain and Germany in particular.

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far-​right. This is a significant difference from the historical far-​right whose racialized and imperialist geopolitics and geoeconomics were central to capitalist development up until 1945 and who also, as we saw in the previous chapter, remained an important political ally against the forces associated with the ussr and historical communism during the Cold War. These institutional and material facts weaken the far-​right in terms of its ability to channel the grievances and resentments of its supporters into a coherent politics of state power and governing. This also relates to how the broader international institutional and geopolitical structures that govern international capitalism have, since 1945, helped manage the contradictions and crises generated within it. Thus, while the neoliberal period has been defined by an escalating number, frequency, and intensity of crises, these have not yet generated major geopolitical consequences or conflict. And this includes the immediate fall-​out of the 2007–​8 crisis, which I will address in following chapter. The durability of the institutional architecture created by the major capitalist powers under US hegemony in the early decades of the Cold War has, then, stood firm. So although the deepening and expanding internationalization of these structures and institutions have proved to be an important source of mobilization for the far-​right in a post-​Cold War world, this institutionalization of neoliberal capitalism –​and the accompanying cultures of socialization and embeddedness across ruling classes and political elites that have developed in parallel to it –​has also, to a significant extent, in effect cut off the international and geopolitical roots for the far-​right; roots that it has always depended on to seriously challenge and realize state power.67 The overall consequences of neoliberalism on the far-​right have, then, been highly contradictory –​both causal and limiting in equal measure. 2.5 The Post-​Cold War Geopolitical Landscape As mentioned above, the neoliberal/​ far-​ right nexus in the politics of Thatcherism and Reaganism during the 1980s was strongly influenced by the return of geopolitical antagonism and ideological rivalry after the collapse of détente at the end of the 1970s. The virulent anti-​communism and militarism of the Thatcher and Reagan governments provided important ideological 67

As Neil Davidson (2015: 139–​40) suggested, we might see this as a reflection of the ‘status quo’ or non-​revolutionary dimensions of the far-​right (in spite of its claims), at least within the sphere of political economy, as far-​right forms of political economy have tended to remain limited by the fact that their horizons as to what is possible and realizable conforms with the prevailing and hegemonic form of capitalist political economy at any one time.

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entry points for the far-​right into the broader right-​wing mainstream and the New Cold War historical bloc (see Halliday, 1986). Consequently, with the collapse of the ussr and the demise of historical communism, a major and defining ideological foe within the far-​right ideological imaginary disappeared. Further, it weakened not only the ‘strategic selectivity’ of the liberal state’s necessity of engaging with the far-​right –​as a radical and militant bulwark of anti-​communism (see Anievas and Saull, 2020, forthcoming) –​thus paralleling the material disarticulation of neoliberal and transnational fractions of the capitalist class from the far-​right, but also resulted in a re-​orientation of the far-​right’s geopolitical orientation. Thus, the ‘defence of the Christian West’ against communism permitted an implicit alignment of the far-​right with the geopolitics of liberalism. However, in a post-​Cold War context and one, increasingly characterized by US global pre-​eminence and the US-​fueled globalization that flowed from this during the 1990s, the far-​right –​at least in Western Europe –​moved towards a geopolitical posture of anti-​Americanism connected to a hostility to the idea of a ‘new world order’ under American global leadership. In Western Europe, then, the United States was regarded as a threat to the continent’s autonomy and distinct cultural traditions now that the greater threat of communism had been vanquished (Rensmann, 2003). This did not, however, reveal itself in a commitment to the project of European integration, or at least not consistently, and especially as European integration moved towards a much greater embrace of the emerging globalizing order. Instead, the altered geopolitical circumstances alongside the emergence of globalized structures of governance served to push far-​right forces and ideological currents towards an anti-​globalization politics and one that was committed to national isolationism and separation. This was also the case in the United States. Here, the ideological currency of the ‘new world order’ translated into a conspiratorial politics connecting the Clinton administration to the United Nations and to an international subversion of the republic by ‘globalist’ forces (Berlet and Lyons, 2000; Rupert, 2000: 95–​117) that was specifically associated with paleo-​conservative currents within the Republican party and Pat Buchanan in particular. Buchanan ran as a candidate for the gop’s presidential ticket in the 1990s. The demise of communism and the new geopolitical context of American unipolarity provided a new international or cosmopolitan foe in the ideological imagination of the far-​right. And while the militarism of the Cold War and the geopolitical threat of the ussr had provided an important source of relevance and legitimation for it, the lessening of global geopolitical rivalries and the absence of any visible geopolitical threats obviously undermined the

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ability of the far-​right to mobilize support given its dependence on sourcing its politics of fear in external threats. Its aversion to the liberal militarist humanitarianism that characterized much of the international politics of the 1990s with Western states engaging in a series of ‘humanitarian interventions’ might have provided a geopolitical fillip to reinforce its claims as to American imperialism and empire. But the initial phase of the post-​Cold War era ultimately undermined the geopolitical narrative of the far-​right even if the economic dynamics of globalization and the emerging institutional and governance structures that developed in tandem with it revitalized the spectre of the international as a threat and subversive of national autonomy. In this respect the broader shifts within liberal modernity at the end of the twentieth century were suggestive of a fundamental rupture in the organization and character of the international order that had helped bring the far-​ right into being in the nineteenth century and had continued to nourish it thereafter. Although capitalist development had been decoupled from geopolitics and its associated rivalry and antagonism after 1945, the geopolitical threat of the ussr and international communism meant that the far-​right continued to benefit from post-​war geopolitical arrangements. With the end of the Cold War, the shift in orientation both in terms of geography and form –​the US rather than the ussr, and neoliberal governance rather than social revolution and international communism –​significantly diluted both the sources that had tended to cultivate a far-​right politics and the specific character of the far-​right itself. This is not to underestimate the significance of the post-​Cold War far-​right nor the threats that it posed and poses to the workings of liberal democracy and to the safety and livelihoods of ethnic and other minorities within these states. However, it does mean that these shifts have contributed to reconfigure the character of the far-​right in a way that has reduced its radical and anti-​systemic character in relation to its earlier and, especially, fascist incarnations. Yet at the same time, it has also allowed it to immerse itself into a much more mainstream politics. And this is something that I will come back to in the following chapter and the challenges this poses for the left and especially the extent to which a politics of ‘anti-​fascism’ is adequate in providing an effective response to the neoliberal far-​right. The transformed geopolitical context associated with US unipolarity or ‘American Empire’ of the 1990s was to be short-​lived. The Anglo-​American imperial hubris signaled by the attack on Iraq in early 2003 –​after the mass-​casualty 9/​11 Al-​Qaeda terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C. –​opened up a new geopolitical fault-​line centred on US attempts at

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reconfiguring the geopolitics of the Middle East. Quickly becoming immersed in fighting an insurgency, the intervention in Iraq, alongside the US occupation of Afghanistan from late 2001, combined to produce a weeping sore on the US body politic thereafter. This served to galvanize isolationist and nativist strands on the far-​right through both the way in which US imperialism was seen as an orientation overly embroiled in and responsible for the world to the neglect of the homeland and American citizens –​and this view became much more widespread in the context of the fall-​out of the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis –​and, on the other hand, the way in which, after 9/​11, anti-​Muslim racism became a core feature of far-​right agitation and mobilization. This focus on Muslims as the primary racial threat also provided an important re-​entry point for far-​right ideo-​political currents into mainstream and liberal communitarian concerns; and in a way that paralleled, to some degree, the affinities between far-​right and liberal forms of anti-​communism during the Cold War. American Muslims, like their counterparts in Britain and Europe, were racialized by connecting the racial/​security threat that they supposedly represented to the geopolitical instability of the Middle East and West Asia. It was the regional instability and violence unleashed by Anglo-​American imperialism that helped the far-​right cultivate imaginaries of Muslims as not only ‘terrorists’ but also as the embodiments of a ‘clash of civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996). Geopolitics and US imperialism, then, appeared to vindicate far-​right racism: Muslims were ‘from violent, oppressive and anti-​Western places’ and they ‘were killing Americans’. And this imaginary of anti-​Muslim racism was a powerful driver of the far-​right during the 2000s. Huntington’s ‘Clash of Civilizations’ (Huntington, 1996) argument did not just single-​out Muslims. It also referred to China as a civilizational ‘Other’ and threat to the West. However, it was to be the geopolitical rise of China –​that was developing as its economy boomed –​under the auspices of American-​led globalization throughout the 1990s that was to produce the basis for a new geopolitical antagonism for the US and the wider West. This is something that I will address in the next chapter as its political significance for the politics of the right did not fully reveal itself until after the 2007–​8 North Atlantic ­financial crisis. China’s rise extends beyond the ‘China shock’ derived from its integration into a globalized capitalist world economy to include culture and geopolitics: a peer economy that challenges the geopolitical privileges of the US and its Western allies for the first time since the end of the Cold War and, given its cultural otherness, a primary opportunity for its weaponizing as a racialized threat.

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The Politics of the Neoliberal Far-​Right

As mentioned at the start of this chapter, one of the defining political features of the neoliberal era has been the re-​emergence of the far-​right as a significant electoral and political force. This has not been a universal or consistent development and, in some respects, the political significance of far-​right parties within some Western nation-​states has only really been felt in the context of the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–​8 and its aftermath. Nevertheless, a generalized trend has been noticeable given the broader shifts in capitalist political economy and geopolitical relations outlined above. Further, a small number of far-​right parties –​the Lega Nord (1994–​95, 2001–​6, 2008–​11) and the National Alliance (1994–​95, 2001–​6) in Italy; the Austrian Freedom Party (fpö) (2000–​3, 2003–​7) participated in governing coalitions, and the Dutch Partij voor deVrijheid (between 2010 and 2012) and the Danish People’s Party (between 2001 and 2011) provided parliamentary support to centre-​right governments.68 An emphasize on the revival of the electoral fortunes of the far-​right during the neoliberal era is not to suggest that the far-​right was marginal to the politics of liberal democracies after the war. As we have seen, in a number of liberal democracies far-​right and neofascist forces played an important role in consolidating the post-​war anti-​communist and Cold War liberal order (see Anievas and Saull, 2020, forthcoming). Further, with respect to electoral politics, there were some moments where far-​right forces were, if fleetingly, politically significant. Such cases included the Poujadist insurgency in France during the late 1950s, as well as a spike in support for the Front National in the early 1980s, the consolidation of the German far-​right in 1964 resulting in some electoral gains in Länder elections between 1966 and 1968 for a party directly linked to Nazism, and spikes in electoral support for the National Front in Britain in the mid-​1970s. All of these were momentary and passing in terms of their electoral significance and the wider fabric and context of politics. The post-​Cold War period, however, has been another story. Reviving in the period after the end of the Cold War and the intensification of neoliberal globalization, far-​right parties –​several of which have clear fascist legacies (the Italian National Alliance, the Austrian Freedom Party and the Swedish Democrats) –​quickly inserted themselves into the party systems of several Western European liberal democracies. In doing so, these parties have, 68

In the US state of Louisiana in 1990, David Duke, a former leading figure in the Ku Klux Klan –​running on a Republican ticket –​won 43 percent of the vote in a senatorial election almost defeating the Democratic incumbent (see Serwer, 2017).

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for the first time since 1945, in effect normalized and mainstreamed the far-​ right as a significant and, to all intents and purposes, ‘accepted’ political ­current in these states. Given the legacies of the far-​right and its historical connections to fascism, such a development is, in many respects, shocking. However, as outlined in the previous chapter and throughout this book, while far-​right parties may have been relatively marginal in electoral terms and with regard to the structure of party-​systems in the post-​war era, the ideas and assumptions of the far-​right continued to circulate and exercise political influence and helped condition the character of post-​war politics to a significant degree. The neoliberal far-​right encompasses a range of movements and parties that extends from the far-​right and Eurosceptic fringes of mainstream Conservative parties such as the Conservatives in the UK, the gop in the US and European Conservative (or Christian-​Democratic) parties, to groups and organizations such as ukip, the Tea-​Party in the US and more extremist organizations and movements that much more clearly reflect fascist legacies such as the Front National in France, the British National Party, the National Democratic Party in Germany and the National Alliance in Italy. There are obvious differences across these different strands of the far-​right that reflect a historical continuity from the far-​right’s origins in the nineteenth century. These differences relate to the historical origins and connections to fascism of some of these parties compared with others as well as, as we shall see below, in their connections to and alignment with neoliberal doctrinal assumptions. Further, there are also some differences in terms of which social layers they tend to draw support from. Thus some parties are more oriented towards mobilizing a working class base, while others tend to be more identified with petty bourgeois and middle-​ class layers. It is also the case that, in spite of a generalized and publicly professed commitment of most, if not all, of these parties to accepting and working within the constitutional framework and limits of liberal democracy, some have been associated with violent street movements and demonstrations as well as, in a small number of cases, far-​right terrorism. While it is important to recognize these differences, it is possible to treat these diverse strands of the neoliberal far-​right as a common body of politics unified by several mutual themes and issues. Further, these commonalities also connect the neoliberal far-​right to its historical forbears as the themes, tropes and language that animate and characterize these parties correspond to a significant degree with the nineteenth century far-​right. The common themes that I will focus on in the rest of this section of the chapter consist of the following: (1) its social base of political support; (2) its ideology of social conservatism rooted in a racialized hierarchical ideological imaginary that also extends to issues around gender and sexuality; (3) the welfare nativism

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that provides a key element in its social conservatism and racialized national protectionism and also where its ability to traverse the ideo-​political terrain of both neoliberalism and social democracy is most evident; (4) its political economy and the significance of immigration in particular in defining the neoliberal far-​right, as well as the nature and limits of supposedly ‘anti-​capitalist’ and ‘anti-​systemic’ radicalism; (5) its international orientation and the role of international relations and geopolitics in its overall political orientation; and finally, (6) its attitude towards and presence within the constitutional politics of liberal democracy and the extent to which the neo-​liberal far-​right can be considered post-​fascist (see Traverso, 2019: 3–​7). 3.1 Social Bases of Political Support First, there is a continuing base of membership and political support that draws, disproportionately, from men based in petty bourgeois social layers in particular and parts of the working class.69 I will come back to this in the subsequent chapter given the talk of a ‘white working class’ being the key social agency behind Brexit and Trump’s election. However, within the comparative politics literature on the far-​right, there exists a significant current of opinion that has argued that the neoliberal far-​right is increasingly defined by its support from members of the working class (see Arzheimer, 2013: 83; Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018; Ignazi, 2003: 216; Mudde, 2007; Oesch, 2008; Rydgren, 2013), leading to the suggestion that these are now ‘working class parties’ (Bornschier and Kriesi, 2013: 12). Indeed, the changes in social structure and class recomposition discussed above and, notably, the decline of organized labour and its associated culture and the increasing fragmentation of the working class, has opened up more entry points into the working class for the far-​right (Holmes, 2000; Grahl, 2010; Oesch, 2008; Swank and Betz, 2003: 216), resulting in some workers joining and supporting these parties. Recognizing this does not mean, however, that these parties can be considered as working class parties in terms of their political orientation, membership and support. Thus, the primary consequence of the decline of organized labour and the weakened connections between social democratic and labourist parties on working class voters has been a 69

As Swank and Betz (2003: 218) recognize, prior to the 1980s support for far-​right parties was concentrated within petty bourgeois social layers which is suggestive of the impact of the consequences of the changes unleashed by neoliberal political economy across the macro-​structures of national economies with regard to manufacturing and industrial employment, the fragmentation of the working class and the weakening of the social and cultural power of organized labour.

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disengagement with the political process and participation in elections (see Mondon, 2013, 2014; Seymour, 2015), as reflected in a secular (if uneven) trend across countries of falling voter turn-​out that tends to be concentrated on sections of the unskilled working class in particular. What also tends to be underplayed in some of the analysis of working class support for the far-​right –​and which was especially pronounced in much of the coverage of support for Brexit and Trump in 2016 (see Bhambra, 2017 and Virdee and McGeever, 2018) –​is the racial complexion of the working class which could be seen to rest implicitly on racial assumptions as to who constitutes the working class. Thus, given the not insignificant proportion of ethnic minorities and immigrants located in larger cities who make up the working class in most Western states, the assumption that tends to cut across some of these arguments that workers are a racially (and gendered) homogenous group and thus more likely to be drawn to the far-​right is highly problematic, both analytically and politically. Recognizing that some workers and even, in some cases, increasing numbers of workers might support and vote for far-​right parties is one thing, but to suggest that the far-​right have become working class parties or ‘voices of the working class’ is to conflate demographic data with political orientation and substance in a way that parallels some of the discussions of working class support for inter-​war fascism addressed in Volume One. Indeed, as Neil Davidson (2017b) posited, these movements ‘cannot base themselves on the working class organizations, since one of their defining characteristics is to seek the destruction of such movements.’ One thing, however, is clear –​reflecting a constitutive element of working class politics and political subjectivity –​is that workers who are members of and who have been integrated into the institutions and culture of organized labour and who tend to ascribe to a form of class politics are the least likely to support and vote for the far-​right. This is a significant qualification to those accounts that tend to (over)emphasize working class support for far-​right parties in the neoliberal era. Further, geography acts as an important intervening variable or causality where significant patches of working class support for the far-​right have been identified and it is this connection to specific types of spaces and locales (Rydgren, 2013; see also Hazeldine, 2021; Makin-​Waite, 2021)70 that implicate 70

Support for the far-​right has always and continues to be conditioned by geography. Thus consideration of the social basis of the neoliberal far-​right needs to factor in the very uneven dimensions of neoliberal growth and how this has accentuated the pre-​existing spatial unevenness of capitalist political economy. In the context of a generalized period of neoliberal economic growth during the 1990s and early 2000s, such growth was highly uneven and concentrated within specific sectors and locales –​most notably absent in a

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a wider set of factors as explanatory (Norris, 2005: 257) rather than it being singularly one of class background. Thus questions of age, levels of education and the specific experience of recent employment vulnerability tend to assert important influence over the attitudes of individual workers at particular times (see Lubbers et al., 2002; Norris, 2005 257). Recent experience of unemployment and proximity to migrants and perceived competition in the local labour market also play significant roles in determining levels of support. Even if we accept the claims of increased worker support for the far-​right, demographic and voting data over this period (prior to the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis) continued to reveal a distinct social profile of its membership and supporters connected to petty bourgeois layers –​concentrated in small businesses, low and middle-​level white collar functionaries (see Betz and Immerfall, 1998: 1–​10; Kitschelt, 1995: 24–​42; Norris, 2005: 137–​9, 257). Indeed, the ideology and rhetoric of the neoliberal far-​right –​echoing that of its historical forbears –​tends to be associated with a distinct petty bourgeois reactionary ideational imaginary focused on a fetishization of small-​ scale and local producers and an underlying scepticism and hostility towards big and international capital, and financial capital in particular, which tends to be described as ‘unproductive’ and ‘speculative’ and associated with cosmopolitan elites (Berezin, 2009: 130–​5, 218; Jacobs, 2011; Mudde, 2007: 79–​84, 127; Postone, 2006; Sykes, 2005: 136–​7).71 As Mabel Berezin (Berezin, 2009: 70) opines –​regarding the former head of the fn, Jean-​Marie Le Pen, Le Pen identifies the heads of small and medium-​sized businesses, independent professionals and workers who work ‘conscientiously’ in their industries and enterprises –​the little people at the heart of the ‘true France’ –​as agents of renewal.

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range of ‘post-​industrial enclaves’ providing an important spatial dimension to spikes in working class support in such locales where jobs and decent job security are absent and where the traditional institutions of organized labour and social democratic parties have been hollowed out or abandoned the local political terrain (see Holmes, 2000; Goodwin, 2011a: 6–​8, 2011b: 97–​119). As J. G. Shields (Shields, 2007: 308) nicely summarizes in the case of the fn, ‘[w]‌hen the fn promotes the instincts of the people over oligarchic elites, it echoes Maurice Barrès; when it calls for a stronger executive with recourse to popular referenda, it evokes General Boulanger; when it denounces “anti-​French racism” and raises the alarm against France’s enemies within, we hear Charles Maurras; when it inveighs against the confiscation of democracy or the “fiscal inquisition”, it is redolent of Poujadism. The discourse of Le Pen and the fn is a compendium of ideas, fears and prejudices that have a long pedigree.’

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The far-​right is opposed to ‘monopoly capital’ and the claims associated with small and local producers against ‘unfair competition,’ which is matched by its hostility to the ‘monopoly of labour’ in the form of the organized working class and, in this, it shares much in common with significant currents of neoliberal thinking. The key point about the social basis of support for the far-​right is, perhaps, less a fixed relationship between a particular class or classes but, rather, an emphasis on support drawn from particular social layers –​the petty bourgeoisie specifically and among some workers who fear a deterioration in their economic situation related to current dynamics of economic change (Givens, 2002; Kreisi, 1999; Swank and Betz, 2003: 219). While much academic commentary has focused on the role of workers in the neoliberal far-​right, much less attention has been paid to the political agency of the capitalist class –​in historical terms an important constituency and facilitator of the far-​right. What, then, can we say about the relationship between dominant social classes, state elites and the contemporary far-​right? The first thing to note is that the geoeconomic structure of the global capitalist economy that emerged after the war, alongside the geoeconomic changes of neoliberal globalization, have, to all intents and purposes, produced an arrangement whereby the dominant fractions of the capitalist class have been and are oriented towards transnational circuits of capital accumulation largely decoupled from geopolitical alignments. Given that capital accumulation has been, in effect, de-​territorialized, if remaining geographically uneven, capital is much less oriented towards the political concerns of a far-​right positioned towards forms of national protectionism, attacks on international regulatory and governance structures and the nationalization of accumulation. Consequently, the politics of the neoliberal far-​right and the social constituencies it speaks to and claims to represent is much less associated with the capitalist class and existing political elites than in the past. And this defining characteristic of the neoliberal far-​right has come to play an important role in its self-​identification as ‘anti-​capitalist’ or ‘anti-​systemic’ and populist. When a political (and geopolitical) context defined by the absence of any significant revolutionary threat or challenge to capitalist private property rights is also considered, it is clear that due to the strengthened hegemonic political foundations of capitalism in the post-​Cold War era and its spatialized character and the means by which the dominant fractions of the capitalist class are socially reproduced, the historical and organic connection between the far-​ right and capital has largely broken down. Such a scenario has, on the one hand, weakened the far-​right as it has lost a significant –​but not all –​dimension of its ‘strategic selectivity’ with respect to the apparatuses of the capitalist state and the social and political support of the dominant class fractions within society.

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However, on the other, this decoupling from capital has also provided it with a significant ideological advantage in terms of its supposed radical and anti-​ elite character and, to a not insignificant extent, allowed it to challenge the maintenance and reproduction of neoliberal hegemony and the spatialized/​ globalized form of capitalist accumulation that has characterized the neoliberal era (Saull, 2015a, 2015d; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Worth, 2015, 2019). The decoupling of transnational capital from the far-​right is a significant and, in many respects, unprecedented development in the historical development of the far-​right that has come to inflect the specific character of its politics and strategies of social mobilization and electoral competition. However, as we shall see below –​when we look at the political economy advocated by far-​right parties –​the distance and antagonism between the neoliberal far-​ right and the capitalist class is much less evident and where, as I have argued elsewhere (Saull, 2015a, 2015d, 2018 and Davidson and Saull 2017), the relationship can be described as an ‘embrace’ that reflects a shared set of principles associated with neoliberal ideological positions regarding de-​regulation, fiscal policy, privatization and attacks on organized labour and aspects of the welfare state. Understood in this way, the class basis of the far-​right –​in terms of where its support comes form and who its policies are most likely to actually benefit –​is much more ambiguous and contingent and in a way that much of the existing academic literature insufficiently recognizes. Further, such relationships, connections, ambiguities and contingencies are reflective of the class pedigree of the longue durée far-​right even if accept –​as we should –​the important recomposition of the capitalist and working classes over the neoliberal era that have altered its class basis. 3.2 Racialized Social Conservatism The second characteristic that unites the different strands of the neoliberal far-​ right –​neofascist and conservative alike –​is a generalized position of extreme social conservatism, implicitly or explicitly connected to race and racial differentiations and hierarchies, which also tends to extend to gender and sexual orientation, organized around a defence of the traditional white, heterosexual, patriarchal and Christian family (Brown, 2019; De Hart, 1991; Coffé, 2013). Thus the common ideological orientation of the neoliberal far-​right has much in common with its historical antecedents in reifying the traditional family and the associated social structure based on hierarchy, clearly-​defined gender roles, and citizenship and state grounded on ethnic homogeneity and race. In some cases, notably with regard to the Dutch Freedom Party, far-​right parties have also latched onto a liberal communitarianism that gained greater political traction in the context of the post-​2001 war on terror through defending

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‘Judeo-​Christian’ or ‘European’ values and freedoms linked to gender and sexual orientation claiming to be defenders of gay and women’s rights which they counterpose to the ‘oppressive beliefs’ of Muslims (Betz, 2013a; Betz and Meret, 2009). In this respect, the far-​right has sought to claim the mantle of the most uncompromising defender of a ‘liberal heritage’ and the supposed threat to it from public displays of Islamic faith (Betz and Johnson, 2004: 319), and it is also here where its rhetoric has aligned with the views of a range of liberal and conservative commentators (Fekete, 2004, 2006; Kundnani, 2001; Lentin and Titley, 2011; Yilmaz, 2012). This social conservatism is the key ideological glue that binds the different strands of the far-​right acting as the racialized ontology and epistemology through which the world is known and understood and through which political problems are attributed and explained. Indeed, what defines the far-​right is a ‘naturalized ontology’ based on racial and gender difference and hierarchy as defining of naturalized and nationalized human collectivities that expounds all aspects social life and which provides the prism through which the social world is filtered, ordered, ranked, and made sense of. Through this racialized ideological prism, the neoliberal far-​right –​like its historical forbears –​fetishizes the political and economic problems of the neoliberal era into a set of racial and cultural fixations and grievances where problems in the institutional workings of liberal democratic governance and political representation and unemployment, falling living standards, and problems in access to and in welfare provision are framed as the responsibility of immigrants, ethnic and religious minorities (or outsiders) or international-​cosmopolitan conspiracies based in international institutions and networks. These grievances are responses to legitimate and real political and economic concerns and problems that have defined the neoliberal era, even if the far-​right response to them is both racist and flawed. In this respect, the neoliberal far-​right provides a permanent and constant flow of political invective targeting ‘treacherous cosmopolitan elites,’ and explaining and sourcing real problems in the visible Other of the immigrant which has become increasingly conflated with Muslims (Yilmaz, 2012). The social conservatism and authoritarianism of the neoliberal far-​right has some distinct characteristics. The first is the particular form that far-​right racism takes and its connection to and hostility towards what it regards as ‘multiculturalism’ and ethnic and cultural pluralism.72 This is an area which provides

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As Rydgren (2013: 3) notes, these parties tend to see ethnic mixing as resulting in the ‘cultural extinction’ of European societies.

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an important differentiation with the form of racism that characterized the historical far-​right and fascism. Thus the focus of the neoliberal far-​right is less on a global assumption and promotion of a white supremacism and the implicit logic of imperialism that goes along with it73 but, rather, an inward looking and domestically focused orientation based on ethnic purity and cultural homogeneity at home. Thus, the racialized differentiation that tends to be deployed by the neoliberal far-​right is not formally, hierarchical and, instead, draws from a doctrine of ethno-​pluralism that stresses the differences, incompatibility and incommensurability between different ethno-​cultural groups; what Pierre Taguieff (1993: 98–​99, 122–​4) has labelled ‘differentialist racism’.74 Such ideas were developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s by thinkers associated with the French Nouvelle Droite (see Bar-​On, 2014; Spektorowski, 1997). This articulation of race politics is a reflection of both an international post-​colonial context and a domestic social one of European societies that are increasingly plural in their ethnic and cultural make-​up or, to some extent, multicultural, as well as a political imperative of wanting to avoid articulating a race-​politics that could be seen as fascist. Consequently, the political logic that follows from this is less subordination and extermination and more expulsion and, in some cases, assimilation (Fennema, 2005). For the far-​right the consequences of immigration have been a dilution of the traditional ethnic or racial homogeneity of the nation-​state (Balibar, 1991; Tamás, 2015) as ethnic minorities have not only become more socially visible but society has come to reflect, to some extent, such social and cultural pluralism. In protesting that its concerns about multi-​culturalism and immigration are not racist –​in the sense of white supremacy –​the neoliberal far-​right has drawn on an element of multiculturalism through emphasizing white ethno-​ pluralism, meaning that European societies have a right –​within a wider global context of ethno-​cultural plurality –​to preserve European culture and/​ or to insist that minorities and immigrants must assimilate to it. Thus, the 73

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Indeed, within the far-​right there are important strands of thinking that are fundamentally opposed to liberal interventionism and imperialism –​be it in the form of humanitarian projects and democracy promotion and membership of and participation in international institutional arrangements. See Drolet and Williams (2018, 2019) for further discussion. As Taguieff, (1993: 122) asserts, differentialist racism is ‘imbued with the categorical imperative of preserving the identity of the group, whose very “purity” makes it sacred –​the identity of heredities and heritages’. Filip Dewinter, a leading members of the Vlaams Blok in Belgium asserts that ‘racism means a belief that on the basis of racial features a group of people is superior or inferior to another. This isn’t what we believe; everyone is equal but not all the same’ (cited in Betz and Johnson, 2004: 316).

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new far-​right is characterized by what can be described as a form of ‘defensive racism’ that homogenizes minorities, and Muslims in particular, as a distinct racial category of persons that can never be integrated because of the supposed fixed, inherent, and inherited characteristics of all immigrants/​minorities/​Muslims, as argued by the Austrian Freedom Party leader Jörg Haider and Umberto Bossi, the former leader of the Italian Lega (Nord) Party in the 1990s (see Zaslove 2004a). For Muslims to assimilate –​that is to meet the cultural conditions of ‘legitimate’ citizenship insisted upon by the far-​right would –​in effect, amount to a renunciation of their faith or any visible and public indication or demonstration of it.75 Such a discourse and rhetoric, while publicly disavowing racism, is obviously racist as its objective is to more clearly delineate not only who the people are in a society but who are the ‘legitimate people’ who can claim to be citizens and benefit from the rights accorded to citizens. This is achieved through designating certain groups as falling outside such categories because of their collective-​group identities as Muslims, homosexuals, immigrants, etc. This framing of c­ itizenship also relates to how the far-​right understands the workings of liberal democracy and the kinds of populist political appeals that it makes. Thus its populist attacks on ‘the cosmopolitan/​liberal elite’ are couched in a pseudo-​democratic discourse over what the far-​right defines as ‘genuine democracy’ which is really about excluding those citizens that the far-​right designates as non-​people or illegitimate citizens –​ethnic minorities and immigrants in particular –​from the democratic process. And it is in this respect that we can see a clear difference between right-​wing and left-​wing populism. Citizenship, from this perspective, is not a universal right but rather, for some minority groups –​and Muslims in particular –​conditional, based on qualifications (connected to race, descent, religion and language) that relates to the long-​standing idea of the nation-​state as representing a historical ethnic community. This is closely connected to the way in which the institutional structures of European states and their legal machineries have been deeply inscribed by a discrimination against ‘aliens’ as a defining aspect of political modernity (Balibar, 1991; Wimmer, 2002: 222).76 Indeed, the far-​right’s focus 75

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In this respect, the rhetoric of the neoliberal far-​right has moved a small step away from its earlier demands in the 1970s concerning immigrants. Thus, rather than demanding –​as they did in the past –​compulsory repatriation of immigrants, they now tend to demand assimilation as the condition of citizenship (Betz and Johnson, 2004: 319) rather than repatriation. Marine Le Pen of the Front National has framed this a natural and legitimate element of nation-​statehood in response to charges that immigration controls and an insistence of assimilation is racism, ‘every social life is founded on affiliations that legitimately

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on the ethnic and cultural dimensions of citizenship could be seen to reflect a militant defence of Western liberalism through the way that they have sought to elide ethnic homogeneity with the idea and practices of liberal tolerance and to depict Islam as a doctrine inherently antagonistic and incompatible with some key values of liberal society such as gender rights, and religious and sexual freedom. Through this, the far-​right has attempted to paint itself as the ultimate defender of liberal civilization and the political mainstream as cowed and subservient to multiculturalist forces that promote increasing social and cultural concessions to Muslims. In this respect, some aspects of the far-​right’s defence of ethnocracy and worries over the political consequences of ethno-​pluralism overlap with a strand of liberal and conservative communitarianism that has become increasingly visible and strident since 2001 and as reflected in the writings of Christopher Caldwell (2010), David Goodhart (2017), Erik Kaufmann (2018) and Douglas Murray (2018) among others. Framed around the question of integration, these writers have tended to single out Muslims as needing to publicly and continually demonstrate their commitment to the society that they are living in through integration and assimilation. Triadafilos Triadfilopoulos (2011; see also Lentin and Titley, 2011) has called this practice ‘Schmittian Liberalism’ whereby membership of a liberal society and participation in politics necessitates a form of cultural homogenization premised on the abandonment of multiculturalism and an implicit social authoritarianism directed at Muslim communities.77 In this framing, liberalism is identified by its Other in the form of Muslims, and especially those Muslims who act out cultural pluralism, which has become particularly focused on the wearing of the hijab and niqab in public by Muslim women. Opposition to multiculturalism and calling for limits on social and cultural pluralism as the basis for ethnocracy or racial democracy (see Fekete, 2012) is

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determine inclusion and, on the contrary, exclusion. Religion, nation, family, enterprise, association: they all represent communities of members, which legitimately exclude those who are not members, without causing them injustice or violence. It is therefore undisputable that France has the duty to control who enters and to regulate the inflows according to her possibilities and capacity to receive them’ (cited in Betz and Johnson, 2004: 317). As Triadfilopoulos (2011: 862) notes, ‘[t]‌he message advanced is relatively straightforward: immigrants who willingly opt for inclusion are to be accepted, on the condition that they successfully demonstrate that they have internalised prevailing “values”. Conversely, immigrants judged to have rejected liberal democratic norms, through their deeds and/​or speech, are to be excluded through the revocation of their rights to citizenship and legal residency and, in extreme cases, their detention, denaturalisation and deportation.’

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closely connected to the substantive socioeconomic rights of citizenship and, in particular, access to the welfare state. While immigration flows and a dilution of the ethnic homogeneity of the advanced capitalist societies has been an important feature of the neoliberal era, one of the main fields of political contention in public policy has been the welfare state –​what services it should provide and to whom. As we have seen, this has always been racialized in some form or another. But in a neoliberal context where demands upon it have increased and where the political consensus around its funding and scope has broken down, the politics of welfare has been a prominent feature of the far-​right where it has brought together its concerns about ethno-​pluralism, immigration, and anti-​elitist populism. 3.3 Welfare Nativism and Racialized Social Protectionism Demanding restrictions on access to the welfare state and/​or privileging certain types of (racially coded) citizens with access to it, is a key element in the far-​right’s articulation of conditional or ethnic-​based citizenship rights and its overall objective of establishing ethnocracy in place of liberal democracy. Consequently, it is here –​in its calls for a restructuring of the welfare state and the fundamental principles and values associated with it –​where the consequences of far-​right positions play into a broader political framing associated with neoliberal attacks on the universality and comprehensiveness of existing welfare provision. Neoliberal attacks on welfare provision are not explicitly grounded on race. Instead, they focus on how welfare goods can and do undermine the workings of the labour market and impose costs on capital. However, their underlying assumption concerns an imperative towards work and participation in the labour market as an implicit (and in some cases explicit) condition of citizenship. It is here where a connection and overlap with the far-​right is evident, as the latter’s critique of immigration and ethno-​pluralism rests on racialized assumptions about immigrants and ethnic minorities as either criminals, welfare-​scroungers and/​or competitors with ‘native’ low-​skilled workers who end-​up having to depend on welfare (Mudde, 2007: 130–​2; Betz and Meret, 2013). Far-​right welfare chauvinism or nativism elides, then, with a neoliberal assumption that the existing welfare state is ‘bloated’, ‘corrupt’ and ‘wasteful’ because many of those who rely on it are undeserving (Shilliam, 2018). This moral framing of welfare provision is a powerful mobilizing force in a context of globalization –​as we have seen from the discussion above –​which imposes financial limits on welfare provision and also enforces forms of labour market discipline requiring changes to the structure and provision of the welfare state

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that expands the possibilities for the far-​right. Consequently, while a racialized form of moral economy underlined the post-​war social democratic welfare states and their universalism (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2018; Shilliam, 2018), the formal institutional framings associated with collective rights –​rather than individual responsibilities –​and the democratic consensus on welfare provision meant that these racialized assumptions did not prevent minorities and immigrants from either accessing the welfare state, or from making successful demands for access through articulating their demands through the ideational and moral norms of universalism and collectivism. The upshot of this is that, despite their racialized limitations, the social universalism of post-​war welfare states did have some material substance. However, in the context of a wider and hegemonic neoliberal political consensus about the need to de-​universalize and individualize and limit welfare provision, racialized ideological tropes have been re-​activated and deployed in a way that has –​intentionally or not –​helped facilitate a mainstreaming of far-​right ideas in debates over welfare reform and especially as the social democratic and ‘progressive’ lefts have been in the forefront of articulating and sustaining a politics (in the infamous words of Bill Clinton) to ‘end welfare as we know it’ (Clinton, 1993). Indeed, the contradictory connection between neoliberalism and the far-​ right over welfare provision is revealed in that while, on the one hand neoliberals and the far-​right share an assumption as to the inadequacies of the welfare state and the need to reform it to ensure those ‘most deserving’ benefit from it, on the other the workings and consequences of neoliberal political economy have created a set of permanent insecurities and economic vulnerabilities connected to economic restructuring and de-​industrialization, unemployment, falling real wage levels and increasing levels of personal debt that have helped fuel and provide the openings for the far-​right. Neoliberalism has provided the fuel for the far-​right, but in a way that relates to the specifically globalized context within which such economic transformations have played out and been imagined (Davison and Shire, 2015; Roberts and Mahtani, 2010). The far-​right’s focus on the welfare state has seen it both attack its universalism –​which they claim is reflected in ethnic minorities accessing its services and provisions and in its ‘privileging’ of migrants as well as in the management and directing of welfare by liberal and social-​democratic elites –​and, at the same time, claim to be its most outspoken defenders in terms of the ‘deserving poor’ and ‘genuine citizens’. In this respect, the complicity of the major parties of the left with neoliberal-​driven welfare retrenchment, alongside the misalignment between a welfare state organized around national

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labour and a post-​war structure of political economy in an increasingly globalized economy –​defined by increasing skill and employment differentiation and opportunity leading to spatially uneven and bifurcated labour markets –​ has provided such a significant opportunity for the far-​right. In many respects, then, the far-​right is seen as the defender of the welfare state, even while it has aligned itself with some of the neoliberal criticisms of it and attacked its universalism. Universalism is associated with a project of a cosmopolitan elite who are also seen (rightly in many respects) as the authors of globalization and, in this way, far-​right rhetoric has a political credibility because people see a pressurized welfare state that, in many respects, is unable to meet the needs of citizens and, at the same time, see governments embracing neoliberal globalization and increasing numbers of migrants participating in the economy. And although the empirical evidence is clear that increased migration is not responsible for the deficiencies in and pressures on most aspects of welfare provision (see Dustmann and Frattini, 2014; Peri, 2013; Wadsworth, 2014), the combinations of welfare retrenchment, more differentiated labour markets and more immigrants has provided a propitious environment for far-​right rhetoric to gain political traction. Political Economy and the Nature and Limits of the Far-​Right’s ‘Anti-​Capitalism’ The welfare chauvinism or nativism that has characterized the different strands of the neoliberal far-​right is closely connected to the broader political economy advocated by it. Here, issues around neoliberal restructuring with respect to trade liberalization, privatization, de-​regulation, entrepreneurialism and immigration have been central to the specific far-​right articulations of political economy over the neoliberal period. Further, and as we shall see in the following chapter, it is in the domain of political economy and, specifically, in the context of the fall-​out from the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis that several far-​right parties have managed to gain significant levels of electoral support. In this respect, the far-​right has built up a distinct political profile as oppositional to the neoliberal economic policy consensus and upon which its supposed ‘radical’, ‘populist’ and ‘anti-​system’ characteristics have been based (Löwy and Sitel, 2015: 53). Such a framing –​as self-​identified by far-​right politicians and some academic commentators –​obviously overlooks or downplays the commonalities between the far-​right and the neoliberal consensus, even if we should accept the challenges that the rise of the far-​right poses to the continuation, stabilization, and normalization of neoliberalism (Davidson, 2015; Davidson and Saull, 2017; Worth, 2015, 2019; Kiely, 2020). 3.4

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Such assertions as to the far-​right’s anti-​systemic character and radicalism in political economy share a similarity with the assessment of the inter-​war politics and political economy of fascism, which has also been regarded as reflecting a ‘revolutionary’ and ‘anti-​systemic’ form of anti-​capitalism (see Volume One). However, then as now, the far-​right’s anti-​capitalism largely remains confined to existing within the broader hegemonic forms of international political economy, which significantly questions the extent to which the far-​right is anti-​capitalist and offers a radical alternative to the neoliberal consensus. It is also the case that while the neoliberal far-​right is largely united around its emphasis on privileging small-​scale and local producers as well as having a commitment to entrepreneurialism –​following its constitutive petty bourgeois ideological disposition –​it has also been possible to identify some significant differences across its different national instantiations. The orientation of the political-​economy of neoliberal far-​right parties has been largely consistent as regards their suspicions and hostility towards international and transnational forms of governance that have defined the n ­ eoliberal era, as well as their opposition to immigration. They offer an inward-​looking and nationalist political economy centred on the local, family-​ owned and small-​scale producer, that is seen as reflecting a combination of the ideal-​type of a traditional and local firm, based on hard-​work and individual ­initiative and effort (Betz and Immerfall, 1998: 1; Mudde, 2007: 127). Such petty bourgeois sentiments, however, have also been connected to a set of varied and shifting positions concerning the role of the state and fiscal policy across the neoliberal far-​right. Consequently, although there have been examples of ‘statism’ in certain parts of the far-​right, there has been little evidence of a revival of a neo-​fascist corporatist model or of the autarchic forms of protectionism that characterized the earlier history of the far-​right. Indeed, as the far-​right has tended to frame its political economy within the prevailing structure of capitalist political economy rather than promoting a radical and revolutionary departure from such a framing, this should not surprise us. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the fn and the bnp could be seen to reflect the more statist and protectionist strands of the far-​right but in a way that focused less on a programme committed to a significant reconfiguration of the national economy and much more on imposing limits on foreign competition and participation in the domestic market through tariff barriers and other forms of regulation (Mudde, 2007: 126; Shields, 2007: 273–​4; Sykes, 2005: 136–​7). However even in these examples, and especially with regard to the fn, such positions fluctuated with demands for tax cuts and privatization of public enterprises (Betz and Meret, 2013: 114; Kaplan and Weinberg, 1998: 50) that reflected both the prevailing political climate and also appeals to different

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class constituencies –​across small business owners and parts of the working class in particular.78 While the bnp and fn could be seen to reflect the more statist and protectionist strands of the neoliberal far-​right at this time, the Austrian fpö and the Swiss People’s Party (svp) reflected those strands most aligned with some key sentiments of neoliberalism (see Afonso, 2013; Bernhard, 2017; Betz, 1994: 110–​ 19). Thus Jörg Haider, the (former) leader of the fpö called for the dissolution of the country’s traditional corporatist economic structure and the party also described itself as appealing ‘to people who attach value to personal achievement, who are willing to accept responsibilities of freedom rather than sacrifice personal goals to apparent collective security’ (cited in Betz and Meret, 2013: 115). The svp has shown itself to be the ‘strongest and most consistent opponent of state intervention, fighting “the corset of state regulations and restrictions” and calling for “a minimum of state and a maximum of market”’ (svp cited in Mudde, 2007: 128) that has sat alongside its championing of small businesses (Skenderovic, 2007, 2009; see also Betz, 2001; Husbands, 2000). What we can surmise from the economic positions of the neoliberal far-​ right is that the significance of its political economy lies less in its recognition by far-​right parties as a core and defining element in their own party-​political identities and, much more, the insertion of a distinct and racialized moral narrative and framing of what the economy is and who should benefit from its workings and/​or be protected from its convulsions, in political debate. The far-​right’s racialized moral economy has, then, asserted a significant degree of political traction in a context of neoliberal globalization. Consistent with the fundamentals of capitalism and international economic relations, its political influence has come via its questioning of significant aspects of the spatial and institutional dimensions of neoliberal globalization, not of its material or overall socioeconomic features. Accordingly, the far-​right has been the most prominent oppositional voice to globalization through tending to oppose the opening-​up of national economies to foreign investment and competition, trade liberalization and particularly international agreements connected to international and transnational governance structures associated with the wto and EU. Consequently, the neoliberal far-​right has managed to graft on an idea of racial solidarity with other aspects of political economy and policy

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Thus, in 1995 Le Pen tried to seize the mantle of defender of the militant working class through supporting the public sector strikes but he did this less through a focus on the contradictions and inequities of a capitalist political economy and rather on the instabilities of globalization and the consequences of the Maastricht Treaty (Shields, 2007: 273).

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preferences that would not look out of place from a manifesto of a mainstream social democratic or Christian Democratic party (see Mudde, 2007: 125). This is significant in analytical and political terms. In the former, its lack of radicalism and its muted anti-​systemic character reflects a constitutive and ontological displacement –​by the far-​right –​of material and social issues located in the structure and workings of capitalism to the racial, cultural, and geopolitical spheres. This means that viewing ‘economic factors’ (such as levels of unemployment, wage rates and living standards etc) or viewing ‘the economy’ as the primary explanatory factor for the revival of the far-​right reveals a set of bourgeois economic assumptions about the structure of the political economy of capitalism that accepts the separation of the economy from the political, rather than seeing the capitalist economy as co-​constituted by the state and a wider set of spatialized relationships. Consequently, trying to separate out ‘economic’ factors as ‘causal’ of far-​right support over ‘cultural’ factors, as if these are in some way distinct (likewise that of globalization as a distinct or separate explanatory variable), is also problematic as the cultural and the spatial/​institutional are deeply embedded and part of the economic. In political terms it means that far-​right strategy largely avoids an assessment of and coherent and distinct policy prescription towards the structure and workings of the capitalist economy. And while its historical tendency towards an ‘anti-​capitalism’ rooted in anti-​Semitism has been less explicit and evident –​though far from absent –​in the neoliberal context, its understanding of capitalism and the workings of the economy rests on a fundamental misconception of capitalism as divided between ‘national capitalism’ and ‘globalizing capitalism’ with the latter the source of economic malaise and ontologically separate. Consequently, while the transformations, instabilities and crises associated with capitalist development have been and are central to analytically explaining the socioeconomic and political context in which the far-​right thrives, this does not mean or require that the political utterances of the far-​right will necessarily draw attention to materialist factors. This is because the far-​right concerns itself with the reification or fetishization of cultural, ethnic and racial differences as determining of politics and economics (Postone 2003, 2006). In short, for the far-​right, social, economic and political problems –​even deep economic crisis –​are understood and are to be resolved primarily through reconfiguring the cultural, political, institutional and ethnic/​racial aspects of society and state.79 The political economy of the neoliberal far-​right, like that 79

It is not, then, the core defining socioeconomic properties of capitalism –​centred on privatised relations of exchange, the sanctity of private property and the capitalist command

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of its historical predecessors, over-​determines the economy and capitalism to the spheres of culture/​race and space as signified in the institutional organization and governance structures of the world economy and in the form of the figure of the Other –​be it the foreign ceo or leader of an international institution and the figure and increasing visibility of the immigrant. This does not mean that the resulting ‘anti-​capitalism’ is insignificant –​how can it be when the reproduction of capitalist classes is so deeply connected to international and globalized structures and circuits of exchange and accumulation –​but is does mean that the fundamental essentials of capitalism, and its class structure based on capital’s exploitation of wage labour, are left intact and removed from political contestation. However, one of the defining aspects of neoliberal globalization centred on the structure and workings of labour markets that has been a common theme across the neoliberal far-​right concerns the increased levels of immigration and the far-​right’s opposition to it. Immigrants have become a catch-​all category that has also come to include refugees and asylum-​seekers (Fekete, 2018: 151–​ 72) for the neoliberal far-​right, and they reflect the physical embodiment of globalization as the racialized Other and which the far-​right has framed as the primary form of threat to the social well-​being, cultural fabric, and political security of the nation. Immigrants are the primary ciphers of the far-​right’s political economy and perform several inter-​connected roles in the racialized moral economy of the far-​right. Thus the immigrant represents the visible threat of cheap labour and ‘unfair’ competition for native workers (Mudde, 2007: 6, 186–​90), alongside competition for and the draining of resources from a more restricted form of welfare provision consequent of neoliberal reform. And after 2001 the socioeconomic menace of the immigrant was also increasingly securitized in the form of a terrorist threat associated with Muslims. The spectre of the immigrant in the far-​right imaginary is also revealed in what they see as the cultural and spatial transformation of the locality and homeland consequent on immigrant settlement. For the far-​right and its supporters, metropolitan and cosmopolitan hubs such as London, Paris, Berlin, New York and Los Angeles represent the ultimate realization of the cosmopolitan and multicultural project of globalization based on immigration, as reflected in white or native displacement. For the far-​right, such cities are ‘foreign enclaves;’ they are ‘external’ spatialized zones within the homeland of the production process via the exploitation of wage labour –​that concern the far-​right. It is, rather, the cultural and ethnic origins of capitalists and/​or their respective geographical location that matter, as well as whether or not capitalist firms are concerned with the production of physical commodities rather than commodities linked to financialization.

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where white natives are a declining proportion or minority of the population and where the physical and cultural character of such spaces is seen as historically unrecognizable to the past. Immigrants represent the visible and material consequences of globalization as the racial Other is now either daily visible –​ through media framings as much as in a shared local space or as a neighbour –​ rather than ‘over there,’ outside the controlled, sealed and secure borders of the state. It is this proximity –​virtual as much as real (Schain, 2006)80 –​that has fostered the defensive racism mentioned earlier and why immigrants are depicted as more than just economic competitors. Instead, they are portrayed as an existential threat to the spatial, social and cultural imaginaries of sections of the populace, be it through the introduction of shops catering to immigrant communities, or spaces (such as Mosques) for religious worship and, particularly, since 9/​11 the visibility of Muslim women wearing the niqab. It is also through immigration that the far-​right’s ontology of the international has been transformed. Thus, while in the past the international tended to be understood in geopolitical terms –​based on fortified territorial borders as the basis for securing the cultural and racial homogeneity of the nation and where the threat and mobilizing power of the international tended to be concentrated on an external Other framed as a geopolitical entity –​in the radically transformed spatial context of neoliberal globalization such an understanding is no longer valid. In a world of more porous borders, more fluid populations and increased levels of migration, borders have become conceptualized in the figures of immigrants as they are seen as the manifestation of an ‘invasion of Others’ that borders once kept out, and who are now not only inside the nation but, in some cases, have become neighbours and fellow-​workers. Immigrants are, to all intents and purposes, the most important outcome or reality of neoliberal globalization. The complex, multi-​faceted set of political and economic processes and institutional changes associated with globalization are crystallized and broken down, in the framing of the far-​right, to the person of the immigrant. And in focusing on the immigrant –​and in the same way that far-​right parties have tended to focus on international institutions and agreements –​the far-​right problematizes and undermines an important

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In discussing the impact of proximity to immigrants and the rise in the vote for the far-​ right, Martin Schain (2006: 276–​7) notes that in the French case based on data covering the mid-​1980s to the mid-​1990s, the fn vote ‘has been consistently highest in the 32 départements with the highest percentage of Maghrebin and Turkish immigrants.’ However, the qualification as to the explanatory significance of proximity to immigrants is qualified in that ‘support for fn has grown faster in the two-​thirds of départements with smaller immigrant concentrations’.

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part of the ideological hegemony and political stability of neoliberalism and the material interests of significant fractions of the capitalist class. This is because immigration has been connected to helping to realize flexible, open and competitive labour markets through the combination of offshoring production to low-​wage zones and encouraging migrants (trends that have also been stimulated in those countries that have provided the sources of migration through a combination of neoliberal transformations therein combined with historical legacies of uneven and combined development) to enter the labour markets of the developed capitalist economies and thereby helping to put further downward pressure on the social wage and driving up the level of exploitation (Theodore, 2007: 252–​53). Migration has also helped undermine what neoliberals see as trade unions’ ‘monopoly on labour,’ while also being justified by neoliberal cheerleaders as a reflection of its ‘colour-​blind’ meritocracy. And when the immigrant is not identified as the beneficiary of globalization then it is the racial Other overseas that is depicted as benefitting from the outsourcing of cheap labour and unfair competition consequent on trade liberalization and the opening up of domestic markets to foreign competition or ‘social dumping’. Neoliberal immigration and the logic or imperative associated with it –​in terms of economic efficiency, market openness and the disciplining of organized labour –​sits at odds with the culturalized and racialized assumptions that inform those aspects of the neoliberal project concerning the reconfiguration of the welfare state, particularly the withdrawal of the public and democratic oversight of, and responses to, inequalities and discrimination based on race. Immigration contributes to the racialized spectre of citizenship rights that neoliberalism draws on while also promoting –​through the underlying racist assumptions –​that welfare is no longer a universal right of citizenship but is, instead, only for those who actively demonstrate that they deserve it through mimicking neoliberal subjectivities. Consequently, immigration challenges the prevailing sense of whiteness, especially among some sections of the working class. The social insecurities that have come to increasingly pervade the working classes in the neoliberal era are the result of the simultaneous offshoring of traditional occupations with the perception –​if not always the reality –​of greater competition from migrants for work in their locales. Working class (male) whiteness has tended to be associated with employment that has provided a sense of social and moral worth (see Lamont, 2002), and a basis of citizenship that appears to have disappeared as the social contract between capital and labour mediated by the social democratic state that structured the post-​war political economy has been dismantled. Loss of work opportunities combined with increasing

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pressures on access to social and material resources takes place within an underlying ideological narrative that whites or natives are deserving of welfare and social assistance rather than non-​whites and immigrants, who are seen as culturally deficient because they supposedly do not wish to integrate and/​or adopt a neoliberal subjectivity. This further fuels a crisis of white identity that is increasingly racialized through the destruction of the structures and institutions of social solidarity rooted in class. It is these developments that go some way in helping to explain the shifts in the political orientation of significant numbers of white workers from their traditional political loyalties toward the social democratic left to the parties of the right and far-​right. Such developments are reflective of a crisis of white working class identity –​that has also been evident in some locales in the UK that used to be defined by a culture of militant and activist organized labour that has disappeared (see Edgar, 2021) –​as exemplified in increasingly culturalized forms of social and political compensation for socioeconomic disadvantage. And, in doing so, reflecting a new racially-​charged dynamic to class politics that has allowed far-​right politicians such as ukip’s Nigel Farage to take on the mantle of defending British qua white workers on the basis that immigration is ‘good for the rich because it’s cheaper nannies and cheaper chauffeurs and cheaper gardeners, but it’s bad news for ordinary Britons … It has left the white working class effectively as an underclass and that, I think, is a disaster’ (cited in Jones, 2014). This recourse to attributing economic distress and social crisis to immigration reflects a historical continuity in the far-​right’s racialized moral economy dating back to the nineteenth century. Then, while immigrants were blamed for unfair competition and economic distress, the lower levels of immigrant participation in national labour markets meant that the spectre of the Other was framed in a much more geopolitical imaginary based on national competition and inter-​state rivalry associated with anti-​Semitism. In the era of neoliberalism where the structure of national economies and their sociological make-​up have been transformed, if unevenly, by globalization, the geopolitical spectre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has morphed into the contemporary figure of the immigrant. Yet, and with specific reference to Muslim immigration and refugees since 9/​11, the figure of the immigrant is also framed as a security threat as much as a political and economic one (Davidson and Saull, 2017: 711; Fekete, 2004, 2018). In this way the issue of immigration, though primarily centred on the nature of the economy, is also jumbled up with a range of other concerns such as security, criminality and terrorism, thereby ensuring that its ability to influence political debate extends well beyond the workings of labour markets and welfare states. Indeed, in a context of the framing of

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terrorist attacks as ‘Islamist terrorism,’ the issue of immigration for far-​right parties shifts into a focus on the supposed threat posed by Muslim citizens and the Muslim community. The securitization of immigration –​a primary objective and outcome of far-​right campaigning over the neoliberal era –​problematizes an important dimension of neoliberal capitalism and, specifically, the workings of labour markets. Though this has not worked to seriously undermine the flow of immigrant labour into advanced capitalist economies in the form of legislation in general, it clearly had a bearing –​as we shall see in the following ­chapter –​ on the politics behind Trump’s election victory and the Brexit vote in 2016. Framing immigrant labour in a securitized and racialized vernacular means that labour is, in some ways, de-​commodified, or subject to extra-​economic (over) determination. This can be through the super-​exploitation of immigrants that comes from being ‘illegal’ and not able to access basic legal rights and support, or through the threat of legislation to outlaw certain types of labour. And in the latter, as we shall see in the next chapter, the securitization of immigrant labour communities –​that results in stopping them from working –​can disrupt and undermine the capital-​labour relationship for those capitals dependent on immigrant labour for their reproduction as in parts of the agricultural, construction and hospitality sectors. 3.5 The Framing of the International in the Neoliberal Far-​Right Opposition to immigration as a key part of the far-​right’s posture of anti-​ globalization highlights how the post-​Cold War social fabric and geopolitical structure of the international political system has come to exercise such a significant role in the politics of the far-​right and in its strategies of social mobilization. Following the generalized social ontology of the far-​right from its moment of origin in the mid-​nineteenth century, the evolution of the social and political character of the international system and the crises that have emerged within it have been defining moments in shaping the specific and conjunctural forms of the far-​right. Indeed, the transformed nature of capitalist geopolitics after 1945 –​that the end of the Cold War further reinforced –​was key to weakening the cultural and ideological influence of militarism within Western and especially West European liberal democracies. This has been a defining development in shaping the nature of the far-​right and, to a significant degree, not only differentiating it from its pre-​1945 antecedents, but also seriously undermining the potential for a revival of fascism within these states. What has come to replace the international politics of imperial rivalry and great power military antagonism and conflict has been the development of the political and institutional apparatuses and governance structures connected

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to both neoliberal globalization and European integration. Thus, in the case of far-​right parties across Europe, European integration and the expanding reach of EU-​wide legal and technocratic frameworks and forms of political authority and institutional innovation and decision-​making have become the lightening-​rod of far-​right mobilizations. As the legal and technocratic apparatuses of European integration have expanded since the 1980s and after the implementation of the 1987 Single European Act in particular, European integration has become a central motif of the far-​right. The significance of this is not just about the way in which the changing character of international relations has shifted the focus of the far-​right’s political campaigning81 but also, and equally as significant, how it has helped facilitate the mainstreaming and normalization of the far-​right. Thus, as European integration has intensified to become an increasingly central, if not dominant, thematic framing of political debate within member states, the Euroscepticism that has defined the neoliberal far-​right has helped legitimate and de-​toxify it as this issue has become a legitimate issue of political debate. Thus for Mabel Berezin (Berezin, 2009: 124) the fn’s Euroscepticism has become a ‘French issue’ such that, for as long as France is a member of the EU and the processes of integration continue, the fn (and its equivalents) will continue to have a legitimate entry point and source of mobilization in French politics that equally applies to other far-​right parties in other member states.82 Hostility towards the expansion of the legal authority of the EU and the scope of its areas of juridical competences, together with the dilution of legal and political authority of national parliaments and more significantly national executives, has been a driving element of the far-​right since the late 1980s.83 81

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As scholars (Berezin, 2009: 74; Shields, 2007: 234, 242) have noted in the case of the fn in France, while in the early 1980s the party campaigned on a platform almost exclusively focused on domestic issues, by the early 1990s a focus on opposing increased European integration had become the primary emphasis of its campaigns. Berezin (2009: 130) refers to Jean-​Marie Le Pen’s campaign in the 2002 Presidential election where –​invoking the German invasion of France in 1940 –​he said, ‘It will be 2002 or never! … [it is time to engage in the battle of] France for France [and to] break up the plot against France.’ Interestingly, and as noted by J. G. Shields (Shields, 2007: 243) such a position highlights a contradiction in the racial ontology of the far-​right in that, while the far-​right frames its politics according to an idea of Europeans as a distinct historical racial and cultural group that is indicative of a sense of shared and common Europeanness, at the same time these parties also articulate a politics that is implacably opposed to the construction of a political framework that seeks to unify Europeans. Further, and as we shall see in the following chapter that examines the political consequences on the Eurozone crisis of 2010, this idea of a common Europeanness also contains within itself a set of cultural and

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Such a position has aligned the far-​right with elements of the radical left who have also chafed at the increasing power of EU institutions and technocratic arrangements84 –​the European Central Bank being the most egregious –​that have been part and parcel of the neoliberalization of European integration and the hollowing out of the institutions and spaces of democratic deliberation as European integration has proceeded. Consequently, the far-​right’s hostility towards European integration has permitted it to seize the mantle of ‘defender of democracy (against EU technocracy)’ and of ‘parliamentary sovereignty’ by reflecting a genuine and legitimate problem, or deficit, in the project of European integration and the negotiations and development of a global institutional governance structure to manage globalization more generally. But it has also been a key element in its populist framing of ‘the people’ against the (cosmopolitan) ‘elite.’ The assertion that the project of European integration is elitist is highly plausible but, rather than this depiction of an elite being associated with a set of specific social and class interests (see Apeldoorn, 2002; Cafruny and Ryner, 2007), the attachment of ‘cosmopolitan’ by the far-​right ensures that the elite is depicted as part of a globalized conspiracy –​echoing the fascist one of the ‘red and gold internationals’ of Bolshevism and finance capital –​that has enabled a whole set of processes, and notably immigration and multiculturalism, that are deemed as both a ‘betrayal’ and a threat to the well-​being of the nation. In this framing the elite is racialized either in the sense that it is foreign, or in the pay or under the influence of foreign actors (read Jews in some far-​right articulations), or that the elite is so far removed from ‘the people’ that they have committed a betrayal by allowing such transformations to take place. The politics of European integration has, then, become the dominant international and geopolitical framing of the European far-​right over most of the post-​Cold War period. In this respect, the neoliberal far-​right has been associated with attempts to frustrate and roll-​back the processes of European integration that have accelerated and intensified since the mid-​1980s and which reflect what might be seen as the neoliberal turn in European integration

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racial stereotypes between ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ Europeans that reveal the shifting and amorphous character of whiteness. The referendums in France and the Netherlands in 2005 –​on approving the draft EU Constitutional Treaty (that was designed to introduce a further increase in EU integration) –​that produced ‘no’ results in both countries revealed a combined opposition from the (radical) left and far-​right when there was some level of cross-​over regarding the potential impact of the treaty on the authority and workings of national democratic and representative institutions.

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(Apeldoorn, 2002; Carchedi, 2001). Calling for the re-​establishment of the supremacy of national law, legal authority and political decision-​making, which extends to national preference in terms of citizenship rights (Betz and Johnson, 2004: 322), the far-​right has become the primary political opponent of European integration and the wider forces of globalization. And while this Euroscepticism does not extend –​in all parties of the far-​right –​to demands to leave the EU,85 the ability to continually refer to and identity the institutions and workings of the EU as the key source of domestic problems has provided the neoliberal far-​right with a casus belli that is likely to ensure its permanency in the political fabric of European liberal democracies for the foreseeable future. And, as we shall see in the following chapter in a context of the North Atlantic financial crisis and the Eurozone crisis, the institutional structure and workings of the EU’s neoliberal technocracy has come to provide a powerful source of far-​right mobilization. 3.6 Post-​Fascism and Commitment to Liberal Democracy Much of the contemporary discussion of the far-​right, at least within Europe, rests on a sense that it can be differentiated from its historical forbears, and fascism in particular, by its acceptance of the political-​institutional setting of liberal democracy. In consequence, the neoliberal far-​right has come to be defined as ‘post-​fascist’ (Griffin, 1995; Ignazi, 2003: 2; Prowe, 1994; Traverso, 2019: 3–​7) based on its apparent willingness to operate within and be a part of the wider liberal constitutional order alongside its public pronouncements as to its commitment to liberal democracy and the disavowing of fascism. The marginalization of the fascist strand of the far-​right as an important element within the neoliberal far-​right reflects the consolidation and stabilization of both sides of the liberal framework: the stable and regular workings of the politics of liberal democracy and that of the capitalist economy –​at least with regard to the limits on the geopolitical effects of economic crises. Further, this post-​revolutionary context with respect to both the spectre of socialist revolution and, its correlate, the revolutionary possibilities of capitalist crises provide an important distinction between the far-​right in general and fascism in particular. Thus, as Davidson and Saull (2017: 709; see also Griffin, 1993; Rydgren, 2007: 246) note, fascism is committed to a project of transformation –​at the level of individual, state, and geopolitics –​through revolutionary means with the object of creating new men and women. 85

This has been associated with a small number of far-​right parties: ukip and the bnp in Britain and the Danish People’s Party (see Mudde, 2007: 162–​3).

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In contrast, the neoliberal far-​right tends to be concerned less with transformation –​and its associated upheaval and violence –​and more with restoration based on an assumption that ‘the people’, or at least those social groups that the far-​right speaks to, are already ‘the repositories of homogeneity and virtue’ (connected to a time in the early post-​war past when traditional social and cultural hierarchies remained intact and before decolonization had radically altered the complexion of international relations), if they can only be rescued from the combined threats of corrupt elites from above and the list of ‘outsiders from below’ –​consisting of immigrants, ethnic and sexual minorities and criminals (Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008: 5). It is the de-​stabilizing and revolutionary –​in the eyes of the far-​right –​dimensions of neoliberalism that they see as particularly pronounced or manifest in the social and cultural spheres (e.g., concerning immigration, gender roles and patriarchy) alongside the increasing embeddedness and influence of international institutional arrangements on governance that provide its defining pre-​occupations. The principal achievement of the far-​right in the neoliberal era has been its normalization as part of the political fabric of European and Western liberal democracies. As Roger Griffin (2000: 173) has suggested, the neoliberal far-​right ‘enthusiastically embraces the liberal system’ and makes ‘a conscious effort to abide by the democratic rules of the game and respect the rights of others to hold conflicting opinions and live out contrasting value systems’. In many respects this normalization has been connected to the changing character or the far-​right since the fascist era. The disappearance of two of its key social and ideological bases since 1945 with respect to the aristocracy and peasantry has served to effectively extinguish the legacies and culture of the ancien régime that continued to influence the historical far-​right. In a broader and more general sense, however, the decline of a politics organized around the mass party and the restructuring of the terrain of the political –​notably through trends associated with ‘post-​democracy’ and ‘anti-​ politics’ over the last thirty-​years or so (Crouch, 2004; Hay, 2007; Mair, 2013; Streeck, 2014) has also come to weaken the cultural and institutional possibilities of contemporary fascism as a mass party and street movement, or at least for anything that approximates historical fascism. As Dylan Riley (Riley, 2012) has posited, fascism emerged in a context of extremely politicized societies where individuals were connected and socialized into politics via mass parties that also permeated wider social and cultural milieu beyond the formal discussions of politics. In contrast, the ascendancy of neoliberalism has seen the contrary: the diminution and discrediting of politics in a cultural as much

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as practical sense and especially revealed in the hollowing out of democratic institutions as evidenced in: (a) the denial of direct public/​democratic supervision of increasing areas of social life from education to healthcare and housing; and (b) more and more core economic decisions being decided within international institutional arrangements effectively free from democratic oversight at the national level. The result is that the possibilities of realizing substantive political change via political involvement through mass parties organized within a nation-​state demos has diminished. In these respects, we can see how and why a mass politics akin to historical fascism has not come to be the dominant articulation of the far-​right in the contemporary era, as it once was across much of Europe. Further, the declining cultural and ideological pull of militarism and the disappearance of geopolitical conflict among the major capitalist powers has also reduced the para-​militarism of the neoliberal far-​right (Mann, 2004: 16–​17). However, it has been the far-​right’s apparent reconciliation with liberal democracy and the workings of representative government that appear to have been the most significant. Thus, far-​right parties have adapted to the altered social and political contexts of stable, functioning and legitimate liberal democracies as the only viable means through which to secure access to political power (Mair, 2013: 45) and this has had the supposed consequence of moderating their policies and political methods as a way of winning votes and appearing as a respectable partner for government. However, while the neoliberal far-​right does appear to have shifted somewhat from the attitude and position of its historical predecessors regarding liberal democracy, this normalization belies a more complex and troubling relationship between ‘constitutional’ far-​right parties and those far-​right forces –​street movements and terrorists –​who see violence and extra-​parliamentary mobilizations as the primary route to realizing their political objectives, which in some cases is aimed at provoking race war. Thus the absence of organized and violent fascist street movements connected to political parties and the marginalization of far-​right or neo-​fascist inspired terrorism to groups such as ‘Combat 18’ in Britain or the National Socialist Underground (nsu) in Germany is significant, but this does not mean that the far-​right species of party has become normalized like any other mainstream political party. The fact that the far-​right no longer looks or sounds fascist does not mean that these non-​fascist far-​right currents operate like any other political party in civil society. They do not. Indeed, where and when some of these parties have been active has also tended to result in an increasing activity of racist street movements –​and the violence and intimidation associated with them –​such as the English Defence

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League in England and other similar groups86 that are officially separate from these far-​right parties but who take advantage of the political context provided by what some regard as the ‘suited fascists’ in mainstreaming racist and xenophobic positions. While this period –​the post-​Cold War era of the 1990s and early 2000s –​did not reveal the emergence of the kind of political context within which the fascist street politics of the past flourished, the continuing role of violence and its approximation with the activities and rhetoric of ‘democratic’ far-​right parties is suggestive of the role played by non-​fascist far-​right currents in legitimizing and sustaining the possibility of the revival of a fascist politics in spite of their official pronouncements otherwise disassociating themselves from fascism. After all, this is exactly what both the other strands of the far-​right and mainstream right did in Germany and Italy prior to inviting fascist parties into government. Indeed, the increased electoral popularity of far-​right parties and the accompanying legitimacy of their positions in public discourse, for example on immigration and the status of Muslims, has also tended to provide a context where violent far-​right extremists feel emboldened to carry out acts of violence and intimidation. Further, nominally independent street movements such as the English Defence League (edl) and their anti-​Muslim racism have been embraced by far-​right parties such as the British National Party (bnp) and elements within ukip and endorsed by the leading Dutch far-​right politician, Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party (see Goodwin, 2012; Lambert, 2012). This suggests that the post-​fascist character of the neoliberal far-​right is less clear-​cut than some scholars tend to assume. The normalization or socialization of the far-​right into the institutions and workings of liberal democracy do not mean that a violent, extreme and terroristic-​element no longer exists. Rather, such strands tend to be very much on the margins with little political appeal and significance. Thus in the UK the neo-​Nazi ‘Combat 18’ carried out several terrorist attacks and murders in 1999 for example, and in the US in particular several far-​right militia groups exist, some of which have been connected to terrorist attacks such as the bombing of a federal government building in Oklahoma city in 1995.87 In addition to 86

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In the German case, the fire-​bombings of hostels housing asylum-​seekers in 2015 took place in a context of growing anti-​Muslim sentiment fostered by so-​called ‘respectable’ parties such as the Alternative for Germany party and the Pegida street movement. See Der Speigel (2015). One of the most notorious cases of far-​right terrorism in recent years is that of the Norwegian, Anders Breivik who murdered 77 people in July 2011 targeting a left-​wing youth camp.

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these violent expressions of the far-​right, a number of street movements have emerged in the neoliberal era, mainly focused on promoting anti-​Muslim racism such as the edl. None of these groups have been formally or organizationally connected to far-​right political parties in the sense of formal institutional connections, but individuals involved in violence have had connections –​in some case they have been members or former members of far-​right parties. To a significant degree, this normalization of the far-​right and the de-​ coupling of the revolutionary para-​militarism and embrace of violence (and inter-​state war) from its politics is a conjunctural development associated with the domestic and international stabilization of both the institutions and workings of liberal democracy and capitalist economy over the last forty years or so. This is significant in that, while ruling classes and political elites in the past may not have been directly responsible for the creation of fascist movements and their para-​military organizations and ideologies of violence, they not only permitted fascist violence to flourish and go unsanctioned, legally and politically, but they also ended-​up embracing it as a means to help resolve the systemic crises that their societies confronted. Consequently, the relative stability of liberal democracies and the absence of structural crises akin to the inter-​war period and the Weimar Republic, as the classic example, has shifted the political and institutional terrain in a way that has, in effect, forced the far-​ right to adapt and made the fascist modality of politics, to a significant extent, redundant. Simply put, the neoliberal political context is much less conducive to a fascist-​like politics in terms of parties based on para-​militarism, street violence taking advantage of existential crisis and where political elites and a wider public seriously consider extra-​parliamentary means of gaining power. However, it is also the case that the neoliberal far-​right has tended to prosper the most when voters have developed a popular disillusionment with other/​mainstream parties (and especially those on the left) providing a key populist entry point for the far-​right that bares some parallels with the fluctuations of support for fascist parties during the inter-​war era. Far-​right parties may be considered part of the party family of liberal democracies but they are its most challenging members who aim to push the institutional workings of existing liberal democracy to breaking point. In this respect the neoliberal far-​right’s normalization or reconciliation and acceptance of the legitimacy and political-​institutional norms of liberal democracy can be seen to be highly conditional. Consequently, they are not like other political parties –​on the left and right –​who regard political pluralism and the constitutional workings of liberal democracy as values in themselves to be upheld as part of their political dna. Rather, the far-​right’s commitment is conditional on the continuation of

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the pre-​existing political context that has all but eliminated the possibilities of extra-​constitutional means of securing power. Indeed, the rhetoric and behaviour of far-​right parties demonstrates as much. These parties have been the most vocal critics of the defining liberal constitutional features of liberal democracies, from their attacks on human rights legislation, minority rights –​ethnic and religious –​to the constitutional limits on executive (and police) powers re: the war on terror, and the rule of law. Consequently, what tends to define them is their rejection of ‘fundamental human equality’ (Carter, 2005: 17). As Paul Hainsworth (2008: 11; see also Ignazi, 2003: 2) has noted, the far-​right are a set of parties that, despite their professed faith in representative democracy, are prone to extremist discourses and positions, that diverge from the values of the political order in which they operate. The espousal of narrow, ethnically based, exclusionary representations of the nation, combined with authoritarian political perspectives serves to render such parties as extremist. The far-​right’s embrace of democracy is closely associated with its anti-​elitist populism. This is based on its invoking a myth of a ‘people’ or nation unmediated by social cleavages and associated political subjectivities. Thus, democratic politics is viewed as a struggle between the people and the elite that requires either the destruction or significant weakening of pre-​existing liberal constitutional norms and rules to enable the realization of an authoritarian politics. In this rendering, democracy is not a value in itself based on the acceptance of a legitimate plurality of political views and interests and limits on the ‘popular will’. Instead, democracy is seen as co-​terminous of the majority will of ‘the people’ –​that the far-​right reserves for itself the right to identify via a set of racialized exclusions –​and through which sovereign (rather than governmental) power is enacted and authorized (Anievas and Saull, 2022: 10). This position aims to gut the intermediate structures and institutions of liberal democracy: the workings of representative and parliamentary democracy, the politics of negotiation and compromise and the role of civil society as representative of social and cultural plurality. Based on a direct and ‘Caesarist’ notion of sovereign power, the bestowing of democratic power by majority vote (according to the whims of the electoral system) authorizes and justifies an expansion of executive power –​as reflecting the direct sanction of the people –​and freed of any constitutional, legal or other limit. And what this amounts to in substance, as Jens Rydgren (2007: 243) has recognized, is that ‘despite the radical right’s acceptance of procedural democracy, its ideal society is ethnocracy, which in many ways runs counter to the pluralistic values

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of liberal democracy.’ Thus, the neoliberal far-​right can be seen as radical in the way that they frame and articulate their political positions and challenge the political mainstream and in terms of the ultimate ends that they seek to promote and realize (Betz and Johnson, 2004: 312). So, while embracing democratic procedures, they do so in a way that fundamentally challenges some of the key values and institutions of liberal democracy. Viewing the neoliberal far-​right from this vantage point demonstrates the connections between it and classical fascist positions. Thus its commitment to a democratic system based on ethnic purity or racial and cultural homogeneity overlaps with fascist ideas about the nation or ‘volk’ as the fundamental political reference point and to which (liberal) individualism should be subordinated. Similarly, the reference to decadence and decay in the existing social and political system that peppers far-​right rhetoric and propaganda, and how such an idea of decay is connected to racialized categories regarding ‘foreign influence’ or ‘elite betrayal,’ also connects the far-​right with classic fascist techniques and propaganda. In many ways, what has come to characterize the neoliberal far-​right is its populism. Populism tends to refer to a framing and form or method of politics that aims to mobilize ‘the people’ against ‘the elite’ and the existing political-​ institutional framework and the values associated with it (Kazin, 1995: 3; Canovan, 1999: 3). In this respect, populism can be seen to reflect a response to a genuine and real disconnect and break-​down between significant parts of the population with political elites and the working of the electoral-​representative system (see Finchelstein, 2017). The fact that this can and has been connected to left-​wing as well as right-​wing ideological positions does not mean that it has no analytical value in making sense of the neoliberal far-​right. By appealing to ‘the people,’ the far-​right aims to racialize the demos through de-​legitimizing and excluding ethnic minority and immigrant citizens from political citizenship and, in general, diluting democracy into a populist mechanism for reducing the scope and level of democratic citizenship in contrast to left-​wing forms of populism (Laclau, 2005; Mouffe, 2019). The goal of far-​right populism is to disenfranchise sections of the electorate. In doing so, the far-​right aims to not only radically alter the terms of political debate but also question the legitimacy and workings of the liberal-​constitutional system. In this respect, the impact of the far-​right and its electoral success has been closely connected to the behaviour of other political parties, and especially those on the left who have traditionally based themselves on appeals to and support from the working and lower-​middle classes (see Bale et al., 2009; Cahill and Humphrys, 2017). In short, the success of the neoliberal far-​right has been intimately connected to the slow-​burning crisis of European social democracy

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and the fractures within its demographic base that neoliberal political economy has been directly responsible for. This is something that I will discuss in more detail in the following chapter in the context of the consequences of the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis. The far-​right’s populist appeal to ‘the people,’ however, also works against basic democratic principles because it specifies a particular section of the population –​the ‘silent majority,’ the ‘left-​ behinds,’ the ‘hard-​working taxpayers’ and so forth –​as ‘genuine’ or ‘legitimate’ citizens, against those ‘minority interests,’ suggesting that the equal right of all citizens to participate in politics may not be the case. The aim, at least in their rhetoric, is to return –​so an implicit reactionary imaginary operates concerning an idealized past –​the political system and power and authority back to the people based on the assumption that what they say out loud is what most ordinary people secretly think.88 Far-​right populism constructs politics as a fundamental divide between ‘the people’ and the elite –​who are rendered as ‘out of touch’ and ‘corrupt’. Indeed, they tend to go further, invoking a conspiratorial politics where the elite –​across all parties of government, left and right –​are condemned as having ‘sold out’ the nation by allowing a usurpation of democratic authority by international institutional bodies (the EU being the prime example) and being dominated by ‘multiculturalist’ and ‘minority’ ideological-​thinking that threatens the fundamental cultural existence of the majority or ‘host’ nation. The far-​right response is to counter this with reference to the ‘common sense’ of ‘the people’ as the antidote to the elite and the means by which the political system can be restored to legitimacy and the cultural foundations of the nation and society protected.89 However, this idea of a common sense not only provides a convenient mask of homogeneity for an increasingly diverse society –​which in many respects is the source of far-​right grievances –​but it also, implicitly, suggests a differentiation as to those who are included as legitimate citizens and, thus, who can exercise political rights, and those excluded who cannot. Within far-​right populism there is, then, a demand for radical changes to the political system that pose major threats to the liberal basis and existing

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As Betz and Johnson (2004: 314–​5) posit, ‘[t]‌he radical populist right not only claims for itself to say out loud what the majority of the population secretly thinks (one of the main Vlaams Blok slogans has been ‘zeggen wat u denkt’ [say what you think]), but, as Jean-​ Marie Le Pen has famously put it, also “to return the word to the people” (render la parole au people)’. Thus, the neoliberal far-​right has been adept as marketing themselves as champions of ‘true’ democracy and defenders of the values and interests of ordinary people too often ignored if not dismissed by the political establishment, (Betz and Johnson, 2004: 312).

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constitutional frameworks of liberal democracies.90 Be it through the increasing role of binding referenda as a means to settle (sometimes highly complex) policy debates to increasing executive power over representative institutions and the judicial system –​both of which via deliberation, consensus-​building and compromise and the rule of law are seen as diluting or subverting the realization of common sense and direct democracy. In a context of neoliberal consensus on the fundamental policy issues of political economy, this can operate as a powerful means of mobilizion for an anti-​system politics. A significant upshot of the normalization of the far-​right over the neoliberal era is that a small number of these parties have participated in governments as junior partners in coalitions with the centre-​right in Italy (1994–​95, 2001–​6 and 2008–​11) and Austria (2000–​7). Such developments appear to demonstrate that the far-​right can be trusted with having access to the levers of power as a responsible element within the broader family of parties in Western liberal democracies. Consequently, because of this, the suggestion that follows is that the radical and insurgent rhetoric and campaigning of the far-​right does not amount to a serious challenge to the culture and workings of liberal democracy. Indeed, engaging in national government and subjecting themselves to the increased levels of scrutiny –​that comes with holding political office –​and also their acceptance of both a commitment to the discipline of governing in a coalition and signing up to a common programme, all threaten to undermine the defining characteristics that these parties like to present themselves as offering the electorate: as ‘anti-​establishment’ and implacably hostile to the political mainstream. Moreover, being junior partners in these coalitions tends to involve access to the less powerful ministerial offices and also requires a significant amount of compromise in terms of how much of their policy goals ­feature in government legislation and policy (Minkenberg, 2001). And this obviously increases the likelihood that many of their voters will quickly come to see them as ‘sell-​outs’. The record of far-​right parties in government in Western Europe91 over this period does appear to indicate how access to power –​at least as a junior member of a coalition –​has not resulted in significant or fundamental changes in the fundamental workings and political culture of liberal democracies, and 90

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Indeed, in 1995 Jean-​Marie Le Pen called for a radically new constitutional order based on a new Sixth Republic that would be structured much more as ‘a more authoritarian and top-​down regime –​with inter alia restricted rights for public-​sector workers to go on strike in order to pursue grievances’ (cited in Hainsworth, 2008: 12; see also Shields, 2007: 311). The situation in Central Europe and in Hungary in particular has been very different (see Fabry, 2019; Magyar, 2016).

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certainly nothing that compares with the historical experience of fascism. Whether or not this means that these parties are just like any other party is, however, highly arguable. Thus, in spite of having had little impact in terms of institutional structures and major policy areas while in government, the experience of the Orbán/​Fidesz government in Hungary –​where the far-​right has held power on its own since 2010 –​perhaps provides a more realistic sense of what kind of legal, institutional, political, and cultural consequences follow from the far-​right gaining power. In this case, although the Orbán government has not replaced the institutions and workings of liberal democracy with a full-​ blown dictatorship, it has significantly altered the workings of Hungarian liberal democracy and in a way that reflects the policy preferences and objectives associated with the generic far-​right. This is evident in the way in which the Orbán governments have been associated with the increasing centralization of political power in the executive and the increased marginalization of the legislature, the weakening the independence of some of the key institutions of the state and of the judiciary in particular. Further, it has pushed through changes to the constitution to give the governing party advantages over the opposition and used its power to influence wider civil society to close off and narrow the spaces and opportunities for alternative and dissenting views to its racist and authoritarian ideas to be heard (Fabry, 2019; Magyar, 2016). In terms of the structure and workings of the economy, while Hungary’s membership of the EU’s Single Market has limited the scope for any radical restructuring away from prevailing neoliberal norms, what does appear to reflect a distinct far-​right characteristic of the neoliberal era is the development and prevalence of forms of cronyism associated with capitalists who are friends of Orbán (or who have become friends) and a wider enrichment of those with personal connections to the Fidesz leadership through the awarding of state contracts thereby fostering the development of a more ‘state-​dependent bourgeoisie’ (Magyar, 2016; Szelenyi, 2015). In this way the Orbán regime could be seen to reflect a deeper politicization of capitalism linked to political favouritism and corruption and the increasing role of political connections in the reproduction of significant fractions of the capitalist class which may be described as a form of ‘state capitalism’ (Cooper, 2021: 136). Overall, then, what we can take from developments in Hungary is that the experience of far-​ right government has resulted in a significant corrosion and corruption of the political culture of liberal democracy, as well as a personalization and politicization of the economy connected to the political hegemony of the Fidesz regime –​if far from establishing anything that could be seen to approximate an alternative to neoliberalism –​and, consequently, a better sense of what kind of politics may develop in other liberal democracies should the far-​right come to power and govern on its own.

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Assessing the political impact of the neoliberal far-​right through examining their record in government, however, risks overlooking a broader assessment of the significance of far-​right parties over the neoliberal era. Here, their hostility to immigration and their associated attacks on the welfare state and wider obligations of these states as liberal democracies vis-​a-​vis refugees and asylum seekers suggests that they have been very successful in altering the terms of political debate and redrawing the parameters of liberalism within these states. With respect to debate and policy on immigration and the legal commitments of governments to refugees and asylum seekers as part of the 1951 United Nations Convention on Refugees, the influence of far-​right parties on political debate and the rhetoric and policies of other, including social democratic parties (see Bale et al., 2009), on these matters has been significant and deleterious (Yilmaz, 2012; see also Zaslove, 2004b). Such developments should not be seen in isolation in the sense that, historically, parties of the mainstream right and left have shown themselves all too willing to adopt policy positions and use rhetoric that came very close to mimicking far-​right positions on policy towards immigration and refugees. And in the neoliberal context –​in part fuelled by the military interventions of liberal states –​larger flows of refugees towards the relative stability and safety of Western democracies have become a major political issue that the far-​right has taken advantage of and which social democratic parties, in particular, have tended to struggle with. What we can take from this is that not only have far-​right parties, arguably, had a disproportionate impact in specific policy areas –​such as law and order as much as immigration –​but that this impact has had the effect of undermining the liberal principles and commitments that liberal democracies are supposedly associated with. It further reflects if not the ‘strategic selectivity’ (Jessop, 1990) of the para-​political dimensions of the bourgeois state vis-​à-​vis the far-​right but, rather, the organic characteristics of liberal democracies as regards citizenship and universal human rights and the embedded role of racialized imaginaries (Balibar, 1991, 1999) within such framings that, obviously, advantage the far-​right. 4

Conclusions

Over the course of the neoliberal era and prior to the outbreak and consequences of the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2007–​8 –​which is the subject of the following c­ hapter –​far-​right parties developed into a significant part of the political fabric of most Western liberal democracies. Such a development is unprecedented in the post-​war history of these states as such parties

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were largely at the margins of electoral significance throughout the post-​war period. The rise of the far-​right in the neoliberal era has not been a coincidence. Indeed, the influence of neoliberalism on the new far-​right is as significant, if not more so, than its supposedly post-​fascist characteristics. In this sense, the idea of a ‘neoliberal far-​right’ as a generic descriptor of these parties carries some analytical and political merit as these parties have imbued and reflect much of the neoliberal critique of the post-​war social democratic state and welfare consensus. Neoliberalism shares with the far-​right a hostility to the universalist and collectivist orientation of the welfare state, as well as an implicit understanding of humanity as organized around ‘natural’ inequality and resulting hierarchies. Further, both are committed to forms of authoritarianism based on opposition to the social power and politics of organized labour and the associated possibilities of a working class politics realized through the democratic and collectivist possibilities of liberal democracy. In this respect, the politics of the neoliberal far-​right –​like that of its historical predecessors over the longue durée –​overlap with and correspond to the ideology and social interests of the capitalist ruling class and existing political elites to a significant degree. What is distinct in the neoliberal context, however, as regards the affinities and connections between the ruling class and the ‘subaltern’ or ‘insurgent’ neoliberal far-​right, is that this is a far-​right that operates in a context where both the challenge from the radical and revolutionary socialist-​left in geopolitical and domestic terms is all but absent. It is this absence of the ‘revolutionary spectre’ and a revolutionary subject that has exerted a paradoxical influence on the neoliberal far-​right. Thus, on one hand, it has reduced both the material possibilities of a revolutionary far-​ right and, on the other hand –​and at the same time –​augmented the far-​right’s radical and insurgent character as an anti-​systemic force, given the specifically spatialized and institutional forms of late capitalism. It is the far-​right’s anti-​systemic quality that has provided it with its most useful and advantageous political characteristic and even more so as the influence of neoliberal common-​sense has permeated beyond its original ideo-​political bedfellows on the right to the labourist and social democratic lefts. And while I have demonstrated, above, that the far-​right’s anti-​systemic orientation is questionable, it has exerted an influence over political debate and policy-​making that has challenged and subverted important dimensions of the neoliberal consensus even if it has –​at the same time –​helped contribute to the consolidation and embedding of neoliberal shibboleths. Indeed, in acting as a permanent echo-​ chamber of racial invective and populist scaremongering and conspiracies, the far-​right provided an important back-​drop onto which, in the context of the

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2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis, important aspects of political debate have re-​emerged. Consequently, politics within Western liberal democracies in the wake of the crisis has been conditioned by these legacies and, especially so in the absence of a revival of the left. This is something that the final chapter that follows addresses and what the politics of the neoliberal crisis rather than neoliberalism per se reveals about the far-​right, as exemplified by the election of Donald Trump in the United States and the British referendum vote to leave the EU among other developments involving the far-​right.

­c hapter 3

Crisis Neoliberalism and the Far-​Right Far-​right forms of politics have tended to thrive in contexts of crisis and particularly when a crisis cuts across the realms of socioeconomic well-​being and faith in the existing political system and is sourced in international or global structures and relationships. The 2007–​8 North Atlantic economic crisis triggered by the collapse of the US housing market and then the wider Western banking system produced such a conjuncture. Indeed, the crisis and its political effects –​as revealed in the advances made by far-​right parties across several western states –​were seen by some commentators as providing a disturbing and dangerous echo of the period after World War One that produced fascism (Albright, 2018; Snyder, 2017). The kind of political and geopolitical outcomes associated with the inter-​war era did not come to pass. However, and as most clearly revealed in the Brexit vote in June 2016 –​with a majority of voters opting for the UK to leave the European Union (EU) –​and then, in November, the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency on a platform of white nationalism and foreign policy revisionism, talk of a ‘crisis in’ and ‘collapse of’ the post-​war liberal international order (Babic, 2020; Ikenberry, 2018; Peterson, 2018) did not seem to be hyperbolic. The Brexit vote and election of Trump set in motion major geopolitical shifts –​in Europe with a fracturing of the EU and globally with the Trump administration abandoning trade and other forms of multilateralism, attacking the post-​war liberal institutional architecture, and embarking on a trade war with China –​that appeared to demonstrate the role of far-​right ideo-​political currents in the politics of these states and in conditioning the character of international relations in an unprecedented way. However in terms of political economy, the crisis of neoliberal financialization did not result in a fundamental shift away from the hegemony of neoliberalism across most western states. Instead, a crisis of the private financial sector quickly morphed into a public debt crisis, as government debt levels skyrocketed through borrowing to rescue and recapitalize the banking sector. And this reassertion of neoliberal ideological shibboleths (see Blyth, 2013; Crouch, 2011; Kiely, 2018a; Mirowski, 2014) by mainstream parties of the right and, especially the left, was to provide an ideal opportunity for the advance of the far-​right. With austerity quickly setting in after 2009 as the generalized response –​ after the financial sector had been stabilized –​the scene was set for a political context ideally suited for the far-​right. Thus, many of the ideological tropes

© Richard Saull, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004539549_004

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and propagandistic motifs that came to permeate and distort political debate after 2008, as discussed in the previous chapter with respect to a ‘bloated welfare state’ and the ‘economic burden imposed by immigrants’ (be it through accessing welfare and ‘stealing jobs’) were already hard-​wired into mainstream politics prior to the crisis. That the far-​right’s relationship to the operationalization of neoliberalism was highly ambiguous –​on the one hand deeply hostile to its spatial and institutional dimensions and, on the other, endorsing of entrepreneurialism, self-​reliance, economic freedom, and attacks on ‘welfare profligacy’ –​didn’t undermine its status as populist outsider. Accordingly, those parties that had been parroting such claims for years and could claim (in most cases) no governmental responsibility for the crisis and the responses to it, and who had also pointed to globalization and globalized finance as the primary threats to both socioeconomic well-​being and democratic processes, appeared to be vindicated. Never a paid up member of the neoliberal intellectual or policy elite given its political operations outside of, or on the margins of government, the politics of the far-​right have tended to reflect a current of anti-​systemic populism within political debate that reveals a contradictory and ambivalent posture towards neoliberalism while, at the same time, articulating a constant and permanent racialized politics of grievance, mistrust and nostalgia that targets immigrants, political elites and international institutions and processes as the cause of social, economic and political ailments prevailing within the neoliberal order. Rooted in the workings of transnational financial circuits, dominated by global financial behemoths and apparently –​until the crisis hit –​uncoupled from their national domiciles, the banking sector appeared to demonstrate all of the moral failings and corruption of an elitist cosmopolitan neoliberalism that the far-​right had been vilifying for decades. And in the over-​sized nature of a financialized capitalism as the driver of accumulation it also appeared to demonstrate a vindication of their organic ‘producerism’ and fetishization of capitalism as de-​territorialized finance. That the growth of financialized capitalism had, since the early 1990s, been connected to and constructed through a legal and regulatory architecture based upon a neoliberal centrist policy consensus across the mainstream right and left was also pertinent to the both the far-​right’s ability to disassociate itself from this aspect of neoliberalism and in reinforcing the political significance of its populist and nationalist critique. The crisis period and the political openings that it offered for the far-​right can be seen to reflect a distinct political conjuncture that replicate those previous historical moments that this book and Volume One have concentrated on. Thus in such moments –​and for our purposes between 2008 and 2016 –​ we can see political developments as flowing from a situation built on several

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longer term trends (discussed in the previous chapter) fusing together into a ‘ruptural unity’ (MacLeod and Jones, 2018: 113). Consequently, while an attention to the temporal specificity of the crisis period is necessary to understand the political effects generated by it, these need to be contextualized and connected to longer-​term structural trends involving larger-​scale social and political forces and ideological assumptions that are key to accounting for the scope and depth of the political rupture. In this respect, the crisis politics that played out and the far-​right advances were products of longer-​term and embedded trends with respect to democratic accountability, political divides and cultural conflict and social inequality and geopolitical tensions. Reference to a crisis conjuncture is also suggestive of Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an ‘organic crisis’ (Gramsci, 1973: 210–​11; see also Keucheyan and Durand, 2015). For Gramsci, the distinct quality of an organic crisis as opposed to the recurring series of conjunctural ones that are endemic to capitalism, is that it creates conditions whereby the traditional ways of ensuring bourgeois hegemony collapse and, more specifically, where the long-​standing connections and loyalties of different social layers with their traditional political representatives breaks down affording an opportunity for alternative political forces. This is arguably what has been unique about this crisis from others over the course of the history of the postwar liberal international order: in this case where a systemic economic crisis mutates into a systemic political one even after the former has been stabilized. Consequently, while the economic impact of the 2007–​8 crisis –​in terms of falls in economic growth, trade flows, capital liquidation and unemployment –​was serious, causing widespread, if internationally uneven, social misery the challenge to the existing forms of political rule within some of the major capitalist states and the international/​geopolitical underpinnings of liberal order can only be explained through a focus on the co-​constitutive political roots of the organic crisis. Further, the evidence of an organic crisis is also found in the scope of debate that invokes moral, social, and cultural concerns as much as political questions (Hall, 1988) that provides space for marginalized voices to become more widely heard and for challenges to appear against a hegemonic common sense. That the ‘morbid symptoms’ of a dyeing social order (Gramsci, 1971: 276) that Gramsci referred to and which appeared to be evident over 2007–​8, have not yet produced such a political and geopolitical transformation –​though the rise of China suggests that some kind of geopolitical transformation is already in process –​does not mean that the social bases of politics within western liberal democracies and the dominant ideo-​political cleavages therein have not been altered. The successful implanting or normalization of far-​right parties as, in some cases, parties of government (Trump, in the US, the Brexit

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Conservatives in 2019, the League in Italy) or the main party of opposition (the Rassemblement National (rn) in France and the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany) are, perhaps, sufficient evidence of an organic crisis according to Gramsci’s definition. This, what might be called a form of ‘re-​enchantment’ of politics following Max Weber, reflects the re-​centring of the nation-​state and the re-​assertion of a national demos through various forms of nationalist backlash. Such an outcome is not surprising given the centrality of the nation-​state in the management and resolution of the crisis and especially in how the crisis exposed the myths as to the efficiencies and benefits of de-​regulation and the universal goodss delivered by globalization that have characterized the neoliberal era. This political realignment towards the nationalist right as backlash suggested a break with the pre-​2008 political momentum across the major liberal states, in which governments –​of both left and right –​had ceded authority and policy competences to international institutional, governance and legal structures and mechanisms that also saw the construction of legal firewalls that circumscribed the influence and power of democratic accountability that remained within the confines of a national demos. So even while the financial crisis was managed through US-​led co-​operation (Tooze, 2019a) the re-​imagining of nation-​states as moral as much as economic entities, that emerged out of the crisis, suggested that the domestic/​international divide was to be reconfigured in the spatial and institutional framings of capitalist accumulation and in the moral and political imaginaries upon which hegemonic orders are founded. Yet despite these important shifts –​that are indicative of the working through of a distinct and new political logic associated with the advances made by the far-​right –​the core ideological assumptions and policy operations of neoliberal political economy have largely remained in place. The capacity of neoliberalism –​both as a mode of capital accumulation and as a set of ideological assumptions or common sense pervading much of society (and not just political elites) reveals the ambiguous relationship between it and the far-​right discussed in the previous chapter. This is not to suggest that the political economy of the far-​right is a form of neoliberalism only that: (i) the ideological and cultural heavy lifting that consolidated neoliberal hegemony was partly done by far-​right ideological invective associated with culture and race; and (ii) that much, if not all, of the far-​right’s political economy aligns with some key neoliberal assumptions and notably its attack on the vestiges and any enlargement of the social democratic and welfare states. This alignment obviously contrasts with its nationalist and protectionist sentiments directed at weakening the material and, especially, political-​legal-​institutional connections, structures and processes that have characterized neoliberal globalization through its

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spatialized framing of the economy that is hostile to both the idea and practices of free trade. Further, its hostility to immigration also works against neoliberal assumptions as to the workings of labour markets, individualism, and the efficiencies of markets. And it this ambivalence that has continued in the post-​2008 period and one that exposes geopolitical limits to the far-​right at least in terms of its political economy. Thus as we shall see in more detail in what follows, both the ideo-​ political content of the neoliberal far-​right and the scope of its radicalism is significantly limited by the structural context of neoliberal capital accumulation and how this relates to employment and the economic interests and social well-​being of large sections of the electorate, as well as the dominant fractions of the capitalist class. The far-​right, then, destabilizes the reproduction of neoliberal hegemony and the legal-​institutional and geopolitical framings of neoliberal capital accumulation, but it does not offer an alternative. Thus, while far-​right ideology problematizes the universalization of a ‘market logic’ it also remains trapped in neoliberalism’s ‘iron cage’ where the material bases of its national project is inextricably interwoven and embedded in the geopolitical structures and the transnational relations that flow from these arrangements, including in the form of legal and governance structures. In what follows I begin by proving a broad outline of the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis and its consequences to capture the geopolitical and international political economy that each national expression of the neoliberal far-​right operated within. I then move on to a more focused account of post-​2008 developments in the main western countries of Britain, the US, Germany, France and Italy and I also discuss the situation in Greece given its singularity based on the rise of a neo-​Nazi movement, Golden Dawn. 1

The Neoliberal Crisis and Its Consequences

Crises, in ever increasing frequency and intensity, have characterized the neoliberal era. The unprecedented insertion of China –​in terms of scale and speed (see Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019; Klein and Pettis, 2020) –​into the global capitalist economy1 alongside the intensification of competition and de-​regulation and the opening up of national economies and the establishment of transnational structures of production and accumulation, have injected a new set 1 As Chris Boyle and Justin Rosenberg highlight, China’s rapid industrialization in demographic terms, was equivalent to the simultaneous rise of eleven new Japans or even four new USAs (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019: 35).

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of contradictions and pressures into uneven and combined development. The significance of the 2007–​8 crisis in contrast to those that preceded it was that it was the first of the neoliberal era to originate within the capitalist core and, specifically, that of the US hegemon. Consequently, not only were the impact and consequences of the crisis likely to have significant political effects within the United States; such outcomes were also likely to trigger geo-​economic and geopolitical instabilities across the wider capitalist order. Such shocks and their interconnected political, economic, and spatial effects have provided the principle ideo-​political resources that have helped sustain and reinvigorate the far-​right as they have, invariably, brought existing domestic political arrangements into question alongside those of international and geopolitics.. Although the neoliberal global order has not been plunged into geopolitical conflict reminiscent of the 1930s, the political turn marked by the election of Donald Trump in November 2016 –​one of the most significant political outcomes of the crisis –​opened up unprecedented, ideological, political and geopolitical fissures within it, that reflected the most significant far-​right inflection of international politics since the early 1980s and arguably since the inter-​war period (see Anievas and Saull, 2022: 1–​2). The crisis was a product of a financialized mode of accumulation that has defined the neoliberal era demonstrating the embedded transnational financial structures and connections –​transforming time and space –​and how such arrangements have helped to produce distinct spatial and class relations within the major capitalist economies. The crisis revealed in bold and stark relief not only the gross inequalities across and within many of the advanced capitalist economies between the financialized rentier layer and wage earners (see Martin and Gardiner, 2018: 25; oecd, 2008; Piketty, 2014; Saez, 2016; Saez and Zucman, 2015; Tcherneva, 2015), but also how political systems were in play and complicit in the reproduction of such inequality. As we shall see, below, these aspects of the crisis have been central to the far-​right surge since 2008. The crisis was triggered by the collapse of the US housing market as millions of households entered into significant mortgage arrears throughout 2007–​8 that quickly exposed the entangled vulnerabilities of the US and global –​given the immersion of international firms and governments in US housing finance –​ financial systems.2 Why the financing of household mortgages would provide the source of a global economic meltdown was a consequence of the way 2 Many commentators identity August 9, 2007 as the tipping point, reflecting a kind of ‘before and after’ moment when the French bank bnp Paribus decided to freeze its funds because of the drying up of liquidity in the US securitization market based on the ripple effect of household defaults on mortgage debt. The result of this decision was a sudden spike in the costs of

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in which American housing finance had been transformed over the neoliberal era into a highly valued, if deeply unstable, global financial asset (Piketty, 2014: 116; Langley, 2007). Adam Tooze, in his definitive account of the crisis, identifies a fourfold transformation from the 1970s as responsible for the ­accumulation model out of which the crisis originated involving: (i) the securitization of mortgages; (ii) the way in which mortgage finance became incorporated into expansive and increasingly risky strategies for accumulation; (iii) the mobilization of new funding based on the expansion of financial markets and credit flows; and (iv) the internationalization of these processes bringing international banks and some governments (Tooze, 2019a: 43) onto the doorsteps of American households. The crisis revealed a distinct pathology within neoliberalism –​the privatization of social assets (housing) and the shift away from collective forms of housing provision as a basis of social security, to housing, as both a moral and social object aligned with the production of a neoliberal rationality (Brown, 2019; Cooper, 2017; Dardot and Lavel, 2014) and social sensibility connected to individual families responsible to themselves and, as the primary social and moral pillar for the maintenance of market freedom. If this was not a universal development across all of the major capitalist societies, its concentrations in Britain and especially the United States were enough to ensure its global significance in terms of financialization and capital accumulation. Most pronounced within the US and the UK, the privatization of housing was also key –​as a consequence if not one of conscious political design –​in the fragmentation and recomposition of the working class as social collectivities based on democratically accountable provision that helped nourish and reproduce a collectivized and solidarized working class culture was replaced by one centred on individualism, aspiration and freedom rooted in private property rights.3 As well as providing an important plank in the social armoury of neoliberalism that contributed to a culture and common sense of de-​collectivization and individual responsibility (for ensuring a ‘roof over the family’s head’) the privatization of housing realized the transformation of a collective and social asset into a private and commodified one. Here, financial actors came to play a key role as intermediaries in housing (Ansell, 2014; Harmes, 2001). Indeed, the expansion of a significant part of the financial system itself was now connected interbank borrowing that forced the ecb to offer emergency credit lines to Eurozone banks (see Tooze,2019a: 144–​5). 3 And as Adam Hanieh and Jeff Webber (2017: 34–​5; see also Ansell and Adler, 2019) perceptively note, home ownership also provided an important dimension incorporating class and space in the 2016 Brexit vote.

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to housing finance as a major source of capital accumulation. Housing became a highly valued and copper-​bottomed asset –​until 20074 –​in producing a profitable return for investors, and it was this that made the American housing market (the biggest and most valued in the world) such an attraction to global finance. The financialization of housing was not just revealed in the sense of investors and corporations developing accumulation strategies around it, but also, to a significant degree, individual homeowners, as mortgage equity came to play an important role as collateral for credit-​card and other loans to fuel consumption and compensate for the falling level of wages in these economies. The privatization of housing provision was central to absorbing millions of home-​owners into the tentacles –​and the associated instabilities and risks –​ of the financial system. Consequently, the privatization of housing not only helped realize an increasing petty bourgeois sensibility among wage earners based on introducing them to a culture based on private property, but also made them dependent on the continued appreciation of their property as the primary means for improving their life chances and standard of living, rather than collectivised provision and collectivised labour and class struggles in the work-​place. Thus when the crisis hit, the social catastrophe that it delivered reflected the deep intertwining of individual and family hopes and well-​being in the (in)security of the house. Such an arrangement reflected, on the one hand, an ideology of market opportunity and ‘freedom’ and social mobility through home ownership vested in private property and, on the other, a more coercive and disciplinary emphasis in welfare reform/​social insecurity (Ansell, 2014) and its accompanying ideology of ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ –​that drew on pre-​existing and re-​worked racialized tropes –​well-​suited to a petty bourgeois cultural sensibility aligned with the far-​right. Indeed, the financialization of housing revealed a new dimension of uneven and combined development through: (i) the intensification of spatial and economic unevenness within societies through the relative performance of local housing markets based on the variations in price and asset-​inflation; and (ii) a reinforcement of combined development based on how the financialization of such arrangements within particular states was rooted in globalized financial structures that, as we shall see in a moment, incorporated a form of Chinese ‘primitive accumulation’ 4 US house prices nearly doubled in the period 1996–​2006 raising overall household wealth by a staggering us$6.5 trillion (Tooze, 2109a: 42). The UK market was even hotter with average house prices more than tripling from just under £56,000 at the start of 1997 to over £194,000 by December 2007 (Land Registry, nd).

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(Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019). For Boyle and Rosenberg, the place of China in this global neoliberal structure also reflected a ‘dual unevenness –​of demographic scale and historical temporality’ (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019: 36) as the process of global accumulation was driven by an economy at such a low developmental starting point that was connected to the most advanced capitalist powers. Further, it was a process that was bound to produce a profound shock in the advanced economies (see Autor et al., 2016a, 206b; Colantone and Stanig, 2018a) given the unprecedented demographic scale of China’s incorporation into the global economy. If housing finance was the source or tinderbox of the 2007–​8 crisis the structural context of the capitalist economy that fuelled it revealed the deeper legacies of the crisis of the 1970s. The privatization and financialization of housing –​like other collective or welfare provisions that have characterized the neoliberal era –​provided one major new source of accumulation after the crisis of profitability in the 1970s (Armstrong et al., 1984: 323–​401; Brenner, 2006). This structural shift –​the commodification of increasing areas of social life and the penetration of capital into new social domains –​reflected a fundamental reshaping of the capitalist economy as the social democratic state was cut-​back and parts of it –​in this case housing –​were incorporated into the global market. However, this neoliberal transformation was also connected to the spatial transformation in the world economy that was equally driven by the compulsion of increasing the rate of profit after the profitability crisis of the 1970s. So while housing was financialized and commodified from within, in a vertical sense –​transforming the social and cultural make up of societies –​ the opening and integration of China into the capitalist world economy after 1978 reflected a horizontal form for new profit streams and as an engine of global growth. The significance of China’s integration into the capitalist world economy was that although it provided new opportunities for investment and capital accumulation for western capital –​taking advantage of the huge reservoir of cheap labour and the untapped potential of its domestic market –​it also served to weaken the collective power of the concentrations of organized labour in the west’s industrial heartlands. Thus, falls in secure and well remunerated manufacturing employment in the US, Britain and Western Europe were all connected to the off-​shoring of production to China from the 1980s onwards (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019; Feenstra and Sasahara Feenstra, 2018; Klein and Pettis, 2020). Moreover, in reflecting a new configuration of uneven and combined development at the global level, China’s incorporation helped lay the foundations for some important contradictions in the workings of the

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neoliberal global order and the nature of American hegemony that were to detonate through the after the 2007–​8 crisis. Thus in helping to fuel a new phase of capital accumulation, China’s integration provided a welcome boost to the overall health of capitalism and its production of cheap consumer goods that flooded into western markets that helped keep inflation low and maintain levels of consumption in spite of relative falls in wages (Amiti et al., 2017: 3). Further, its huge savings rate was channelled into the purchase of American debt, rising to US $1.2 trillion by 2008 (Morrison and Labonte, 2013: 6) that helped the US maintain low interest rates and a massive injection of liquidity into its financial system. However, at the same time, these processes also helped to carve out a socioeconomic terrain –​ especially pronounced in the United States and Britain –​that was to provide fertile ground for the nurturing of a far-​right politics. Specifically, these vulnerabilities were located in the following. First, the off-​ shoring of manufacturing production to China and elsewhere and the broader spatial reorganization of production through global commodity chains accelerated and intensified a process of deindustrialization that had begun in the late 1970s and early 1980s at the dawn of the neoliberal era. Such trends were particularly pronounced in those sectors subject to competition from low-​cost imports that became increasingly significant after 1994 under the global liberalized trade regime overseen by the the newly formed World Trade Organization (wto) that resuled in plant closures and the laying-​off of workers (Oldenski, 2014). Thus, employment in manufacturing fell, and between 2000 and 2007 shrank by 20 percent with the loss of over 3.5 million jobs in the US and by over 25 percent and almost one million jobs in the UK (Berger and Martin, 2011: 14; Rhodes, 2017: 7). And while not all of these job losses were directly connected to China’s export surge there is evidence to suggest that it was responsible for around 25 percent of job losses in American manufacturing between 1990 and 20075 and between 20 and 33 percent in the UK between 2000 and 2015 (Acemoglu et al., 2016; Autor et al., 2013; Foliano and Riley, 2017: R11). Secondly, such changes in manufacturing production and employment revealed distinct spatial effects contributing to uneven development (see Autor et al., 2016b; Colantone and Stanig, 2018a, 2018c, 2019). These developments were doubly significant as they contrasted with a countervailing 5 According to figures from the Economic Cycle Research Institute, the US trade deficit with China was the primary factor in the loss of 3.4 million jobs between 2001 and 2015 that also included 1.3 million jobs lost after 2008. Further, almost 75 percent of the jobs lost between 2001 and 2015 were in manufacturing amounting to 2.6 million jobs (Scott, 2017; see also Economic Cycle Research Institute, 2016).

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trend that saw increasing concentrations of economic activity and associated employment opportunities and accelerations of economic growth in other spatial locales connected to globalizing structures, as in finance and new information technologies, thus pulling apart –​at different ends and through different economic dynamics –​the overall coherence of national social and e­ conomic structures. As we shall see in the cases of Britain and the United States, the spatial concentrations of far-​right support in terms of the Brexit vote and the election of Trump in 2016 revealed a geographical correspondence with areas of de-​industrialization and structural declines in relatively secure and well-​ paid manufacturing employment (Autor et al., 2016a, 2017; Carreras et al., 2019; Colantone and Stanig, 2018b, 2018c). Further, that this hollowing out was connected to or perceived as directly associated with corporate off-​shoring, trade liberalization and the industrial rise of China and East Asia in general, provided a propitious context for the construction of far-​right narratives of what had happened and why. The transformation in the spatial and productive properties of these economies also contributed to the third vulnerability, in that the jobs that replaced those that had disappeared during the 1990s and 2000s in the lead up to the crisis were less-​skilled, less secure and lower-​waged contributing to rising levels of inequality (Autor, 2010: 3).6 Such developments also played out in Britain with the labour market being increasingly defined by the proliferation of low-​skilled and lower-​waged jobs between 1996 and 2008 (Carreras et al., 2019: Colantone and Stanig, 2018b; Holmes, 2014: 2). Intensifying a socioeconomic polarization between university-​educated workers based in the big globally connected cities employed in competitive hi-​tech or service sectors and workers with lower levels of educational attainment. And falling wages also contributed to increases in levels of personal and household debt in the decade or so leading up to the crisis. In the US personal debt rose from 93.4 per cent of disposable income to almost 140 per cent, and in Britain it jumped from 102 per cent to 173 per cent; the highest across the major capitalist economies (Turner, 2008: 26–​7). As we shall see below, such developments –​and the spatial and class relations that they helped produce –​were far from marginal to the socioeconomic contexts that have fuelled the surge in far-​right populism in recent years and they became especially so in the context of the crisis. The pathologies described above and the new, neoliberal configuration of uneven and combined development that they were associated with, help us 6 In the US over the period between 1979 and 2007, real earnings for those without high school diplomas fell by 16 per cent, while for those men with postgraduate degrees incomes rose 26 per cent (Autor, 2010: 26).

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to understand why far-​right forces have made major political gains since 2008 across several western liberal democracies. However, the far-​right surge cannot and should not be simply read-​off the socioeconomic pathologies that generated the crisis, nor the material effects of the crisis itself. Crises are intensely political moments whereby an economic breakdown opens up the possibility of a corresponding political (and geopolitical) rupture –​even if not played out synchronously. And with respect to the 2007–​2008 North Atlantic financial crisis, it quickly metamorphosed into a political crisis of liberal democracy itself and the post-​war international and geopolitical order that underpinned it. Gramsci’s terminology is highly apposite in this case, ‘[t]‌he crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’ (Gramsci, 1971: 276). What was key in terms of how the crisis mutated, becoming an opportunity for the far-​right (rather than the left), was in large part due to the political responses to it. That is, how the form and focus of state intervention helped engineer a crisis of the North Atlantic financial system quickly into both an economic and political one of public/​sovereign debt. In politicizing the crisis and giving it state ownership –​even if this was the most effective, necessary, and pragmatic response to it –​governments opened up the crisis to political contestation and conflict as the political response meant that a crisis of finance capital was transformed into one of government balance sheets as states ‘socialized’ the debts of the banking sector and capitalized insolvent banks creating a massive increase in public debt and budget deficits. Quickly then –​by 2009–​10 –​ governments confronted the issue of a massive increase in public debt and the challenge of how to manage and pay off the debt as a way of reassuring financial markets and restoring the global financial system to some kind of stability and normality upon which a new cycle of economic growth could be initiated. Hence the reassertion of monetary orthodoxy. However, this was a deeply political issue given the prevailing ideological mindset that understood economies as approximating households, and also with respect to the question of who was to carry the social cost of restoring the public finances, as well as what to do with the over-​leveraged financial sector that had caused the crisis. With a recession quickly setting in, that in some respects looked more like a depression approximating the 1930s in terms of the rises in unemployment,7 7 oecd data in 2010 indicated that 47 million people were out of work in the rich world and with the inclusion of other categories of underemployed and ‘discouraged’ workers it was closer to 80 million (Tooze, 2019a: 354). In the US, payroll numbers shrank by almost nine million over the course of the recession, two million in the manufacturing sector alone (Atkinson et al., 2013:11). In Britain, gdp contracted by over 4 per cent, its worst performance

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the collapse of economic growth and falls in world trade,8 the political decisions as to how the crisis was managed and who would bear the cost of its resolution, became key to the type of politics that was to emerge from it. And, in the absence of a collectivist political response based on the cultivation of international working class solidarities, a political space opened up for a different kind of collectivist response rooted in space, nationhood and race. Indeed, as Wendy Brown aptly posits, [i]‌nchoately, until right wing nationalist party platforms made it choate, many dethroned working-​and middle-​class whites in Europe and North America sensed a connection between the decline of nation-​state sovereignty, their own declining economic well-​being, and declining white male supremacy. And they are right: undone by offshored union factory jobs, disappearing affordable housing, and unprecedented global movements of labor and capital, the age of the secure white male provider and nation-​state sovereignty in the Global North is finished. This condition cannot be reversed but can be politically instrumentalized. brown, 2019: 69

Yet while such developments have been politically weaponized by the far-​right and do point to clear socioeconomic shifts over the era of neoliberal globalization –​that were accelerated and intensified by the 2007–​8 crash and accompanying ‘Great Recession’ –​the material effects of the crisis are insufficient in fully accounting for the far-​right political advances that quickly followed. Indeed, the white male experience of the neoliberal era more broadly –​at least in relation to support for the far-​right –​tends to reflect less the singular experience of economic decline but, rather, a much broader sense of the loss of social, economic, cultural, moral, and political entitlement that is based on a longer term sense of privilege and racial hierarchy. And as the far-​right has been the most singular and effective transmitter of these combined grievances –​with its attacks on immigrants, cosmopolitan elites, ‘political correctness’, women’s rights and advocates of ‘social justice’ in general (Brown, 2019: 69) –​even if it is implicated in the causes of economic loss, it is not difficult to see why it has been the primary political beneficiary.

since wwii (Reuters 2014), while nearly one million full‐time jobs were lost between 2008 and 2010 (Campos et al., 2010:28). 8 According to Tooze (2019a: 159), wto figures revealed falls in imports and exports for every country that provided data between the second half of 2008 and first half of 2009.

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It was the political decisions that were taken in response to the crisis over 2008–​9 and thereafter at multilateral –​as typified by the G20 summits in Washington D.C. and London in November 2008 and April 2009 –​regional and national levels that were to provide the dynamic that propelled the far-​ right surge after the opportunity opened up by the crisis itself. Consequently, a crisis of neoliberal financial capitalism ‘resolved’ through co-​ordinated and US-​orchestrated forms of state intervention that rescued most of the North Atlantic financial sector –​and the social layers that were and are reproduced through and who benefit most from it –​was politically framed by the far-​right (and some left populists as well) as one set of cosmopolitan (political) elites saving another set of (financial) cosmopolitan elites. And as the salvage operation quickly shifted gear towards austerity as neoliberalism reasserted itself –​ through the spectre of public debt –​and the opportunity of rupture from it passed, the crisis of the political legitimacy of elites only deepened. The political crisis of elites was also compounded by the corresponding deployment of, what was at the time, considered an unorthodox monetary policy, that of Quantitative Easing (qe). This policy was based on central banks buying government debt/​bonds and other financial assets as a means to inject liquidity into financial markets and, consequently, help stimulate private sector investment and in a way that did not deepen the fiscal deficit. The result was rather anaemic economic growth alongside an increase in asset-​price inflation (see Balatti et al., 2018; Hartley, 2015; Montecino and Epstein, 2017) which served to increase the structural inequality produced in the neoliberal era with the financial and rentier layers –​who were most responsible for causing the crisis –​benefiting most from qe rather than the wider economy and the general population. Thus, stock indices –​especially in the US –​grew at a much faster rate than wages. So although qe did help stabilize employment this was at a significant cost. And its downsides on accentuating inequality were stark considering that other/​fiscal options could have been activated. qe’s impact on inequality concentrated on ‘financial vultures,’9 consequently, added fuel to the fire of the far-​right’s populist ire. And the fact that such policies were based on decisions taken by unelected expert and technocratic monetary authorities also added to far-​right bromides. In many respects, the political decisions taken by elites perpetuated the inner logic of the preceding decades’ neoliberalism. So, even though the tax-​payer bailout of the financial sector and qe were not part of the orthodox neoliberal 9 In Britain, in contrast to the stagnation that afflicted manufacturing and construction between 2010 and 2014, financial services grew by 12.4 percent and house prices in London and the south-​east rose by 50 percent over 2013–​16 (Tooze, 2019a: 544).

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economic tool-​kit, the aversion to a counter-​cyclical (or neo-​Keynesian) fiscal policy to stimulate growth through investment and public spending and directing fiscal and monetary resources to labour rather than capital certainly were. Further, the way in which the crisis was used as a means to pursue labour market reforms within the Eurozone and elsewhere, and cut back on welfare spending (Tooze, 2019a: 398–​9) also reflected a distinctly neoliberal response to the crisis. Market failure was not to be addressed through a fundamental restructuring of the economy but, rather, a continuing emphasis on promoting competition, ‘smart regulation’ and a flexible labour market. Consequently, the response to the crisis reflected the deeply embedded neoliberal attitude of suspicion and hostility towards the democratic state as an institution of economic intervention and growth connected to democratic public deliberation and a set of collectivized needs. Instead, the state was deployed as a form of market police, qua ordo-​liberalism to rescue the financial system and then to set out the framework for the renewal of competition and entrepreneurialism as the basis for a new cycle of growth. The public were passive participants as tax-​payers funding the bail-​out and were then offered a set of political choices at the first round of elections after the crisis that, to all intents and purposes, amounted to the same kinds of political choices across the right/​left-​centre as had defined politics before the crisis. The atrophy of the political centre –​especially pronounced in Europe –​in terms of the mainstream political parties of the left and right that had dominated the politics of the neoliberal era and the conventions of governing up to that time, was the most significant political outcome. New far-​right parties emerged or those that existed were provided with a political context that appeared to reveal the corruption, inequities, and worries that these parties had been voicing since the 1990s. For the two parties of the right in Britain and the United States –​reflecting the blurred boundaries of where the far-​ right begins and ends –​both moved to redefine themselves through adopting populist mantras and appropriating the language and techniques of the far-​right. This was a strategy that had served these parties well in the past, as the previous chapter demonstrated and, in this case, it reflected an element of political opportunism, mixed with the enduring far-​right currents that had always circulated within them, as well as a tactical reading of the transformed political context. And for large sections of the public across the liberal democratic world, such views increasingly accorded with them. The crisis also revealed a distinct set of contours relating to globalization that also contributed to the growth of far-​right narratives surrounding it. First, concerned the geopolitical relations and the distinct geo-​economic structure that world economic growth –​integral to socioeconomic and political

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developments within the main liberal democracies –​over the neoliberal era had been organized around. The incorporation of China into the capitalist economy and, with it, its unprecedented rise as a global manufacturing hub was the backbone of this arrangement and, specifically, the ‘coupling’ of the American economy with that of China. Such an arrangement had provided the basis of inflation-​proof growth, as the low-​cost production of manufactured goods in China were exported back to the US and the wider West. Providing a location for new lines of accumulation for western capital after the crisis of the 1970s, the era from China’s opening in 1978 to 2008 saw a massive shift of capital and manufacturing power from western economies to China and East Asia more broadly.10 And while this resulted in cheap consumer goods being exported back to the West –​that were affordable to large sections of the wage-​earning class, helping to suture the growing socioeconomic inequality and class polarization within western societies (Klein and Pettis, 2020; see also Blustein, 2019) –​it also established a crisis of overproduction in the world economy (Brenner, 2005, 2006; European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, 2016; Wuttke, 2017). Thus, in spite of the strictures associated with its accession to the wto in 2001, China’s insertion into the world economy produced a surge in overcapacity in key sectors that, while helping to sustain employment and living standards for millions of migrant workers and, consequently, political stability and the security of the communist party dictatorship, has also exercised deflationary pressure and undercut production in the west’s industrial heartlands. Such developments simmered below the political surface up until 2007–​8 but rapidly developed into something of geopolitical significance thereafter. Consequently, the crisis revealed in bold relief the geopolitical fissures –​in spite of the cooperation associated with the G20 meetings that helped manage the crisis in 2008–​9 –​within the geo-​economic configuration of globalization that had been centred on China and, in some respects, the wider brics (Kiely, 2015) and especially in relation to the ideological and material underpinnings of American global hegemony. Thus, while China was affected by the crisis it was not at its centre. Further, the actions of the Chinese state –​through a massive fiscal stimulus in 2009 –​played a key role in stabilizing the world economy. Such developments, alongside a cascade of diplomatic and other interventions 10

Between 1990 and 2007, the share of world manufacturing value added by developing countries more than doubled from 14.4 per cent to 31.9 per cent (current prices) and their share of world manufacturing exports rose from 20.5 to 30.9 per cent between 1993 and 2005 (Szirmai et al., 2013:15–​6) with China by far the taking the biggest share of these figures.

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suggesting that ‘Western’ or ‘neoliberal’ methods and policies were the cause of the crisis (Hatoyama, 2009; Hu, 2009; Zhou, 2009) helped produce a sense of American decline and the weakening of its global hegemony. That the crisis took place within a pre-​existing context of a crisis in US grand strategy and geopolitics following the instabilities and difficulties that the US confronted soon into its occupation of Iraq after the invasion of 2003 –​an invasion that had also produced a major rupture in the Western alliance and a broader diplomatic opposition within the United Nations –​also contributed to a sense of breakdown and the ending of an era (Arrighi, 2007; Saull, 2012). Such a backdrop was central to the narrative of Trump’s election campaign and the nationalist political economy that was central to it. Thus in obscuring the real material and class causes of the 2007–​8 crisis, Trump blamed the ‘beltway’ elites or the ‘swamp’ for undermining American power and prestige, as well as for making ‘concessions’ to China which he also blamed as directly responsible for America’s social and economic ills.11 That China –​and the manner of its integration into the capitalist world economy over the preceding d­ ecades –​was implicated in the causes of the crisis and in the origins and reproduction of the socioeconomic pathologies that characterized many western societies over this period was not inaccurate, but this was a process that had much more mixed consequences and revealed the organic and constitutive contradictions of capitalist uneven and combined development rather than either the singular duplicity and corruption of the American political elite or the machinations and dishonesty of the Chinese party-​state. However, that China and Chinese people had massively benefited from the workings of the world economy over the three decades prior to 2008 and beyond12 in 11

12

As Trump (2017) made clear in his inaugural address, ‘[f]‌or too long, a small group in our nation’s capital has reaped the rewards of government, while the people have borne the cost. Washington flourished, but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left, and the factories closed. The establishment protected itself, but not the citizens of our country … [w]e’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own. And spent trillions and trillions of dollars overseas, while America’s infrastructure has fallen into disrepair and decay. We’ve made other countries rich while the wealth, strength and confidence of our country has dissipated over the horizon. One by one, the factories shuddered and left our shores, with not even a thought about the millions and millions of American workers that were left behind. The wealth of our middle class has been ripped from their homes and then redistributed all across the world.’ Since opening up its economy in the late 1970s China averaged 10 per cent annual growth up until the global financial crisis. Benefiting from inward fdi it became a global manufacturing powerhouse and after joining the wto in 2001 became the world’s biggest goods exporter as well as the as the world’s second largest economy. The economic transformation has powered an accompanying epochal social transformation of urbanization as China moved from being an overwhelmingly rural-​populated country to an urbanized

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contrast to significant parts of American society and sections of the working and middle classes in particular helped Trump frame the crisis and its resolution in such racialized and geopolitical terms. Consequently, as Boyle and Rosenberg (2019) emphasize, the uniqueness of China’s integration into the capitalist world economy produced a distinct form of global uneven and combined development constituted by a set of contradictions specifically focused on the closeness of the Sino-​US relationship. This was a relationship that had established deep socioeconomic connections that hinted at a high level of political intimacy yet, at the same time, also reflected stark differences as sources of antagonism. Thus the relationship was between the most advanced and richest capitalist state and one much poorer, but where the rapid absorption of new production technologies within the space of a couple of decades and the development of ‘home grown’ Chinese ones appeared to indicate a challenge to US industrial-​technological leadership. Further, that China was both culturally and politically distinct meant that the social, political, and institutional mechanisms of American hegemony were much less effective in both integrating China into the institutional matrix of American hegemony and as a means for the US to assert its influence and get its way. Prior to the crisis, then, the logic of the relationship between two very different societies and political systems revealed the brewing up of tensions in the economic and political dimensions of the relationship. In the former as China’s rapid and unprecedented economic growth, industrialization and technological advancement appeared to chip away at traditional American leadership. And, in the latter, in the inability to exert political influence over the Chinese state and as China’s geopolitical ambitions began to reveal themselves. The crisis and the contrasting fortunes of the two economies in the immediate period after it brought out into the open these contradictions that revealed political tension and geopolitical friction conducive to a nationalist politics. What we can take from this discussion of the (geo)political-​economy of the 2007–​8 global financial crisis and the political economy that emerged from it is that the far-​right political surge after 2008 across several western liberal democracies was a product of a political-​economic context uniquely advantageous to its kind of politics. Indeed, such a context and its enabling dynamics is comparable to those earlier conjunctures that have provided good fortune for the far-​right. The context of the 2007–​8 conjuncture was determined by three inter-​connected dimensions. First, was the product of the longer-​term political one, which also resulted in a massive uplift in living standards and poverty reduction if at a cost of China also becoming one of the world’s most unequal societies (Kiely, 2015: 69–​ 70, 76–​85, 132–​9).

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economy of neoliberalism and the specific form of uneven and combined development that it established. The geopolitical and wider spatial character of capital accumulation, the political-​institutional structures bequeathed by it and its impact on class formation in the advanced capitalist countries and especially those where neoliberalism had advanced furthest. All contributed to a political economy defined by the fragmentation and weakening of organized labour and the re-​introduction of more widespread socioeconomic insecurities connected to the globalization of production. Further, within this longer-​ term reproduction of neoliberalism, the far-​right had well established itself as the primary oppositional force to its globalizing and spatial aspects. Secondly, the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis detonated the contradictions established within the neoliberal era as the combination of the drive for capital accumulation, the weakening of public and democratic-​collectivized oversight of the economy and the disruptions associated with the integration and rise of China exploded through 2007–​8. Bringing out into the open and exposing the limits and bankruptcy of neoliberal centrism the political ground shifted towards an anti-​elitist populism. This brings us to the third and final element in the political-​economic brew that produced the far-​right surge. While this populist turn involved significant forces on the left that, in some places, were momentarily ascendant if structurally weak, such as syriza in Greece, the more generalized trend has been its far-​right inflection. Here, the implementation of a set of policies in response to the crisis –​if not universally characterized by austerity –​that only served to reinforce the socioeconomic pathologies of uneven development and inequality while the elite bargain that had been party to the crisis remained in place. Thus, the dismantling of collectivised welfare provision and the socioeconomic costs disproportionately falling on the non-​metropolitan poor facilitated a re-​booting of a socially embedded anti-​immigrant racism –​itself spatially specific –​that further revealed the nationalist and territorialized dimensions that rippled through large sections of society across the West. In what follows I discuss how these general dynamics played out in favour of the far-​right after 2008 in the United States, Britain, and Western Europe; specifically, Germany, France, Italy, and Greece. 2

Crisis Neoliberalism and the Onward March of the Far-​Right

In what follows I provide a more focused political economy of the crisis and its consequences, elaborating on the discussion above before examining the politics of each manifestation of far-​right within each specific national context.

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Thus, while the structural/​conjunctural dimension provides the contextual framing conducive or enabling of the far-​right, an explanation for its advances since 2008 also needs to address the precise political dynamics of country-​ specific inflections and the agencies of each far-​right party, as well as the shifts and decisions of other parties. I dedicate more space to the key developments of the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote because of their greater international significance. 2.1 Trump and the American Far-​Right The election of the property magnate and television personality, Donald Trump, to the American presidency in November 2016 is, perhaps, the watershed moment in the upswelling of support for far-​right politics since the 2007–​ 8 North Atlantic financial crisis. In an election campaign dominated by racist and anti-​immigrant outbursts and the articulation of a white nationalist platform that attacked the preceding decades of neoliberal globalization –​or what Trump described as ‘globalism’ –​and framed around the slogan ‘Make America Great Again,’ Trump appeared as a radical anti-​establishment insurgent outside of the traditional political class and well-​tuned into a distinct far-​right ideo-​political current present within American politics since the late 1960s. A mixture of white grievance, opposition to the federal-​‘managerialist’ state, liberal internationalism and a self-​help individualism based on privileging private-​property holders through de-​regulation and low taxation. Trump’s self-​depiction as a populist anti-​elitist outsider was, in part, due to the initial hesitancy of the Republican party ‘country club’ establishment to embrace him, as they originally favoured Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and the son and brother of two former Bush presidents (George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush). But, in spite of his singular personality traits, Trump’s politics aligned well with significant sections of the Republican base as polling began to demonstrate throughout 2016. And this alignment was also revealed in a deeper sense with respect to the racialized politics that had come to define the gop since the early-​1980s and especially the paleo-​conservative wing associated with figures such as the former candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Pat Buchanan (see Kiely, 2020: 125–​9; Drolet and Williams, 2020), and in the context of the populist Tea-​Party insurgency that had made some significant inroads into the Republican mainstream from early 2009 (Langman et al., 2012; Parker, 2013; Rosenthal and Trost, 2012; Skocpol and Williamson, 2012). The embrace of Trump by the Republican party in 2016 continued throughout his presidency. The assumption or, in some respects, excuse for choosing Trump was that the office of president would moderate him and his

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behaviour –​a time honoured canard deployed by ‘respectable conservatives’ for their embrace of authoritarian demagogues. It did not. Trump ended-​up being impeached by the House of Representatives twice –​the only president to have been so –​but with 60 votes required to confirm conviction, not enough Republican senators were willing to break ranks to secure impeachment. Both impeachments reflected the scandals associated with corruption, abuse of power and the breaching of constitutional norms that defined the Trump presidency from day one and, in the second case13 –​after the mob attack on the US Capitol building on 6 January 2021 in an attempt to prevent the formal Congressional certification of the transition of power after Trump had lost the 2020 presidential election –​a deliberate attempt to overturn the democratic process through a combination of intimidation and violence. That Trump’s racism, demagoguery, maleficence, authoritarianism, and incitement of violence (see Seymour, 2019)14 did not result in either impeachment being confirmed or the disowning of him by the Republican party establishment reveals that, for all intents and purposes, Trump, and his brand of white nationalist conspiracism, authoritarianism and demagoguery has, in effect, taken over the gop. Indeed, the rhetoric and actions of Trump from the night of the 2020 presidential election on November 3 –​in declaring victory, then denouncing the election as ‘rigged’ (after major news channels began to report a Biden victory), refusing to recognize Biden’s victory, trying to overturn the electorate’s decision through interference in certification procedures in several key states and then encouraging the mob attack on January 6 –​all failed to break Trump’s hold on the party. Thus in spite of the condemnation of the mob attack on the Capitol building on January 6 by Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, and other instances of apparent distancing from and condemnation of Trump,15 the party establishment quickly 13

14 15

The first impeachment in December 2019 centred on the Trump’s solicitation of Russian support for his election campaign and the use of official US foreign aid to press the Ukrainian government to find evidence to discredit his likely Democrat opponent –​Joe Biden –​in the 2020 presidential election. In the days immediately after Trump’s election victory there was a major spike in racist incidents –​over 400 cases of racial harassment and intimidation were reported by the Southern Poverty Law Centre (2016). Just before Biden’s inauguration McConnell blamed Trump for the mob attack on the Capitol, ‘[t]‌he mob was fed lies. They were provoked by the president and other powerful people,’ (cited in Fedor, 2021). Soon after, however, McConnell voted against the second impeachment precisely on the issue of Trump’s responsibility for whipping up the mob violence on 6 January and stepped back from public criticisms of Trump thereafter. More significantly, Liz Cheney –​part of the Republican House of Representatives leadership team –​condemned Trump’s behaviour and characterized his dominance over the party as

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realigned itself with its Trumpian base that has parroted Trump’s conspiracy theory about the ‘stolen’ election and that Joe Biden is an ‘illegitimate president.’ Indeed, opinion polls quickly revealed the communicative and demagogic power of Trump over the vast majority of Republican voters in the weeks and months after the election and this continues to be the case.16 That Trump –​as a Republican incumbent –​lost the election17 would, in more normal circumstances, not only have been accepted by the gop establishment and most Republican voters leading to a straightforward and peaceful transition of power, but would have also marked a turning-​point for the party to discuss its future direction. That this did not happen revealed that the state of American democracy –​after a one term Trump presidency –​had moved into a perilous and unprecedented situation. Thus, while Trump and the gop have lost national power, where the party continues to hold power –​in state legislatures and governorships –​it has moved to do Trump’s bidding and reinforce the ‘election steel’ conspiracy (see Levine, 2021) through initiating legislation to not only suppress voter turn-​out explicitly focused on demographics that have traditionally voted Democrat (and African-​American voters in p ­ articular), but also to allow much greater partisan oversight of electoral procedures and to give greater powers to allow state-​legislatures to overturn electoral results; precisely the tactics that Trump employed in his bid to overturn the 2020 presidential election. It seems clear, then, that leading Republicans have made a Faustian pact with Trump based on an amoral calculus that their own electoral future18 requires embracing Trump and implementing a range of legal measures that will make it extremely difficult –​if unchallenged –​for not only a a form of ‘personality cult’ (cnbc, 2021). For this she was stripped of her party leadership role by Trump loyalists and censored by her local state Republican party. 16 There have been a number of polls surveying the views of Republican voters on the 2020 election and Trump’s claims of fraud, and they have provided a deeply disturbing set of results for the future of American democracy. A Politico survey (Politico, 2020) conducted soon after the election found that 70 percent of Republican voters thought that the election was neither ‘free nor fair’ –​echoing the position of Trump, and in spite of no credible evidence to support such position. More recently polls by cnn (cnn 2021), Ipsos/​Reuters (2021) and the American Survey Center (2021) have also found that Trump’s conspiratorial account of the election is shared by a majority of Republican voters and that they do not believe that Biden is the legitimate president. 17 The gop then lost its Senate majority in January 2021 after the Democrats won the two special election Senate races in Georgia, defeating Republican incumbents. 18 The fact that Trump –​while losing the popular vote by a wide margin –​managed to increase his vote count on 2016 by over eleven million votes after a massive jump in the overall turnout (to almost 67 percent) appears to provide an electoral logic to such a decision.

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future Democrat candidate to win the presidency, but also to secure majorities in the House and Senate. Trump’s rhetoric during and after the 2016 election campaign –​and his deliberate courting of a far-​right constituency19 around gun rights and anti-​ immigrant positions and the idea of ‘America first’ –​helped produce an avalanche of writing (academic and journalistic) that described him and his politics as an unprecedented threat to America’s liberal democratic order (Ashbee, 2017; Davies, 2016; Fraser, 2017b; Frum, 2018; Stokes, 2018), and with some commentators describing Trump as a fascist (see Devega, 2018; Kagan, 2016; Bellamy Foster, 2017a, 2017b; Butler, 2016). That democracy, ultimately, prevailed, with the peaceful transfer of power in January 2020 and, with it, a radical shift in the style and focus of the federal government under a new Democrat administration, demonstrated that Trump’s election victory and presidency did not usher in a fundamental rupture in the nature and workings of American democracy nor the establishment of the basic co-​ordinates of fascism. However, as many of these writers (and others) correctly highlighted, Trump’s period in office and some of the core attributes of Trumpism as an ideo-​political current –​that now dominates the Republican party –​provide powerful evidence that Trumpism reveals the most likely form that a contemporary American fascism will assume. As both volumes have emphasized in their accounting of the different historical manifestations of a far-​right politics and, specifically, in the case of inter-​war fascism, fascism –​first as movement and then as state form –​does not emerge, grow, and capture power solely through the means of its own, autonomous political agency, nor does it develop as a singular expression of a far-​right. Looked at this way, Trump’s period in office and Trumpism as a wider political phenomenon appears to demonstrate the real possibilities of a contemporary form of fascism ascendant in the United States. Though some of the most important hallmarks of classical fascism are not, yet, evident –​in the form 19

One of the most notorious examples of Trump’s ambivalence towards white supremacists and racist violence came early into his presidency with his refusal to condemn, unequivocally, the violence by an assortment of white supremacists and neo-​Nazis who had gathered for a ‘Unite the Right’ rally in the city of Charlottesville, Virginia in August 2017. On the first night the rally mimicked the torch-​light rallies of the Nazi era, and this was underlain with the chants of ‘Jews will not replace us’. There was widespread violence the following day as an anti-​racist counter-​demonstration gathered in the city which resulted in the murder of an anti-​racist protestor, Heather Heyer, by a white supremacist. Trump’s infamous response to the events was summed up in the following in whichn he ‘condemned hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides’ and referred to ‘very fine people on both sides’ (emphasis added, Trump cited in Jacobs and Murray, 2017).

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of an independent mass party connected to an organized para-​military organization nor an ideological focus on the construction of a ‘new man’ –​others are. And, consequently –​and as Geoff Eley has most cogently remarked –​the Rubicon may have already been crossed with regard to the traditional workings and normal functioning of democracy in America, if and when the next crisis –​be it economic or a major mass casualty terrorist attack or a closely fought presidential election –​comes (Eley, 2021). Thus under Trump (and as increasingly evident in the behaviour of significant parts of the Republican party in recent months) manifestations of normal and legitimate democratic processes of opposition to Trump and/​or gop policies –​be it the mainstream Democratic party gaining the presidency, the actions of Democrat Governors such as the Governor of Michigan in insisting on public health measures in response to the COVID-​19 pandemic, or the mass (and largely peaceful) protests of the Black Lives Matter movement during the spring and summer of 2020 in the wake of the murder of the African-​American, George Floyd, by a white police officer –​have been framed by Trump and his supporters as illegitimate and dangerous forms of politics. It is this distinction –​between who or what viewpoint is ‘legitimate’ –​and thus where the basic and fundamental standards of democratic politics play out in argument and contestation and challenge via peaceful means between opponents who recognize each other as legitimate, that is now at stake in the US. Indeed, the fanning of violent grievance in relation to the ‘stolen’ 2020 presidential election, the endorsing of the intimidation of elected representatives by militia groups opposed to public health restrictions during the pandemic (as was the case in Michigan during the summer of 2020 that also saw a far-​right terrorist conspiracy to kidnap the Democratic Governor), and the attempt to proscribe anti-​racist protestors including blm (what Trump and his allies label as ‘antifa’) as a form of domestic terrorism –​reveal the very close proximity of Trumpism and much of the gop with fascism. The clear contextual differences between the eras of Trumpism and that of classical inter-​war fascism –​as so eloquently laid out by Dylan Riley (Riley, 2018) –​and the very different social forms of Trumpism compared to classical fascism should not blind us to what clearly appear to be fascist currents and techniques in the politics of Trumpism. That Trump and Trumpism may not reflect a quintessential fascism is no cause for comfort. Fascism grows and enters the political bloodstream of democracies through the gradual erosion of constitutional norms and democratic processes and, not least, the delegitimization and demonization of democratic opposition that Trumpism represents, par excellence. Further, fascism triumphs in contexts where a non-​fascist form of far-​right politics has laid the groundwork for its coming to power. And while

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Trump did not secure a second term, his election victory and presidency will make it much easier for a fascist to gain power should circumstances permit. And such circumstances seem all the more likely given: (i) the way in which the workings of voting procedures have been contested by the Republican party since November 2020 serving to discredit and de-​legitimize basic and fundamental democratic processes across large swathes of the electorate; and (ii) should gop local state initiatives of voter suppression and partisan oversight of voting become law. Indeed, it seems very likely that the next presidential election will produce a constitutional crisis surpassing that of 2020 and especially so if the margins of victory by the Democrat candidate in key battle-​ground states are much more borderline than in 2020. It is such a scenario that makes either far-​right/​fascist mob violence more of a certainty to seek to –​in a more co-​ordinated fashion than the mob attack of January 6, 2021 –​overturn the election result and/​or judicial intervention from the conservative-​dominated Supreme Court helping to usher in a form of coup d’état permitting a Republican (and possibly Trump) presidency. The caution as to whether or not Trump and Trumpism are best understood as a form of fascism is also closely connected to the wider hegemonic context of neoliberal political economy and its ideological common sense that continues to pervade much of Trump’s and the gop’s populist base –​something that became deep-​rooted within it from the early 1980s. And as Wendy Brown has most persuasively argued, neoliberalism’s distorted idea of freedom and individualism that is connected to its hostility to democratic norms based on equality and due process suggests that Trumpism is a natural outcome of the constitutive and enduring connections between it and the far-​right, [t]‌he neoliberal attack on the social … is key to generating an antidemocratic culture from below while building and legitimating antidemocratic forms of state power from above. The synergy between the two is profound: an increasingly undemocratic and antidemocratic citizenry is ever more willing to authorize an increasing antidemocratic state. brown, 2019: 28

This neoliberal far-​right –​for that is what it is –​and, in spite of, the fascist paraphernalia found within parts of it and the valorization of a hyper-​masculinity and violence that are the sine qua non of fascism, reflects a form of far-​right that is deeply suspicious of the state and the practices of government. This is not the same as saying that they are anti-​state in a classic libertarian framing given their willingness to use the Supreme Court to mark out the terrain of

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moral and legal authority over reproductive rights and other freedoms, but this is a form of far-​right –​of which Trumpism is an echo of –​that seems hostile to government in the sense of the provision of core public goods and the disassembling rather than construction of anything like a ‘total state.’ Such an orientation offers a contradictory internal dynamic within Trumpism and the current conjuncture in which it thrives and, consequently, some qualification as to the ideological content of Trumpism as a quasi-​fascist form of politics. Trump reflects a radical articulation of a white nationalist politics of the far-​ right that has long been part of American politics –​and, to some extent, its mainstream –​occupying an important ideo-​political strand within the Republican party and especially so in the case of members of militia groups (see Crothers, 2019) and gun rights advocates; these have long been a Republican party constituency. In many respects his political economy shares much in common with Pat Buchanan’s paleo-​conservatism (Kiely, 2018: 129, 2020: 125–​9) combined with the racist demagoguery of the segregationist former Governor of Alabama and American Independent Party presidential candidate in the 1968 election, George Wallace. While it is correct to assume that every fascist in the United States was encouraged by Trump’s candidacy and likely voted for him and that Trump has been ambivalent at best and, in some respects, openly embracing of fascists, the context that produced Trump, his election victory, the nature of support that propelled him into office and his mode of governing (see Robin, 2018a: 239–​72, 2018b) suggests that Trump is a far-​right demagogue and authoritarian whose politics is also intimately connected to his narcistic and ego-​maniacal personality traits (Sluga, 2018; Zaretsky, 2018) and his personal financial interests and those of his family. Indeed, and referring back to Dylan Riley’s (Riley, 2018) assessment of Trumpism, his mode of governing appeared to reflect an attempt to replicate the structure and workings –​alongside forms of personal loyalty that come with family and blood-​ties –​of Trump Inc., with Trump acting as pater familias and ceo as much as president. Accordingly, this was no take-​over of the state apparatus by far-​right or fascist ideologues tout court, but, instead a much more incoherent and incompetent capture and use of state power by people –​ appointed by Trump –​whose primary quality was not an attachment to a clear set of common (quasi-​fascist) ideological positions, but rather, personal fealty and obsequiousness to Trump. Where Trump –​as candidate and president –​was singular is that he drew vocal support from the so-​called ‘Alt-​Right,’ an online far-​right community that draws inspiration from a mix of paleo-​conservative, fascist ideology, and conspiracy theories. Associated with websites such as the Daily Stormer, The Right Stuff and Breitbart and platforms such as Reddit and 4chan, as well as individuals such as Richard Spenser and Jared Taylor and Trump’s former policy advisor,

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Steve Bannon, the Alt-​Right is less an organized political movement than clusters of supporters who have used social media and online platforms to proliferate propaganda, conspiracies and agitation in support of a white nationalist project (Hawley, 2017; Main, 2018; Neiwert, 2017; Wendling, 2018). Such a phenomenon may not reflect a mass base in the sense of a centrally organized and mobilized movement but in a political context increasingly influenced and shaped by online platforms such support and the kind of politics associated with it does appear to reflect a distinct and radicalizing dimension to Trump’s politics and, specifically, with respect to the empowering and facilitating of extremist and fascist ideo-​political currents. And these facilitators of Trumpism –​both as forums and spaces and textual content and memes –​have played a key role in the growth of the conspiratorial politics associated with the COVID-​19 pandemic and the mobilizations behind the 2020 ‘election steel.’ Trump governed –​in terms of his policies –​as a mainstream tax-​cutting, pro-​corporate, de-​regulator and while his rhetoric has been singularly authoritarian in its orientation, he did not reconfigure the state in a way that suggests its ‘fascistization’ in terms of the structure, capabilities, and operations of its coercive apparatuses (see Robin, 2018b, 2019; and also, Seymour, 2020). On the contrary, though he has maintained the Republican trend of securing social and cultural conservatives to the bench of the Supreme Court, his management of the administration of the state –​and, hence, the ability and possibility of constructing a more effective authoritarian politics –​was characterized by a combination of incompetence, chaos, and a paranoia about loyalty beyond his immediate family circle. Further, his battles with parts of the intelligence bureaucracy, including the Federal Bureau of Investigations (fbi) –​what some of his supporters call the ‘deep state’ –​over conspiracy theories and the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election have also demonstrated an important dimension of incoherence and chaos in his management of the state and ability to deploy its coercive resources effectively. Such antipathy overlaps with parts of the libertarian and militarist American far-​right and their longstanding suspicion and hostility towards the federal and managerialist state as reflected in the idea of a ‘globalist conspiracy’ of a ‘New World Order’ that emerged after the end of the Cold War (Drolet and Williams, 2019, 2020). In summary, Trump’s emergence and the forces that he represents do not constitute a fundamental rupture in American politics, a watershed moment of before and after. However, as evidenced by his response to the pandemic with respect to his encouragement of heavily armed ‘anti-​lockdown’ protests that took place in several states in May 2020 and in his demands for the crushing of the nation-​wide mass protest against police violence towards African-​ Americans through the use of extreme force, Trump’s authoritarianism and

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indulgence of armed white nationalists is unprecedented and dangerous. Such positions give licence to not only radical and violent far-​right forces to intimidate elected politicians and their political opponents, something akin to what Hannah Arendt described in relation to the rise of Nazism as ‘the temporary alliance of the elite and the mob’ (Arendt, 1968: 333; see also Mason, 2020), but to also use violence against them –​a defining and singular characteristic of a fascist politics. Further, his willingness to deploy the most violent aspects of the state apparatus to deal with what were, in the main, peaceful demonstrations alongside his indulgence of white gun owners is indicative of the kind of politics associated with fascism and far-​right dictatorships. However, that the organization and workings of the American state did not –​at least in a co-​ordinated and unified fashion –​act in accordance with Trump’s wishes demonstrates that the structure of the US state and constitutional order and the vibrancy and strength of the liberal and democratic dimensions of its civil society continue to provide significant checks on any fascist temptation. In what follows I chart the rise of Trumpism out of the context of the 2007–​8 financial crisis covering the political economy of the post-​crisis period, the initial far-​right upsurge that preceded Trump, a discussion of who and where are Trump’s supporters before ending with a summary of his presidency. 2.1.1

Trumpism and the Post-​2007–​8 Political Economy of the United States If the crisis in the American housing market and financial system opened the doors to Trumpism it was the political management of the crisis and the character of the post-​crisis economy that was crucial in helping to propel Trumpism to power. However, political agency including the role of individual politicians and their campaign messaging are always determining in the final instance even if, as in this case, the crisis context was the most propitious for an outsider candidate like Trump who, more than anyone else, articulated a radically different interpretation of the crisis and what to do about it compared to others, including Obama before him. The crisis and its consequence, then, ripened the longer-​term conditions that meant that a candidate like Trump and his politics were much more likely to succeed than in the past. After the immediate emergency responses of the Bush administration to the crisis throughout 2008 with the tax-​payer rescues of the two government-​ sponsored mortgage enterprises (gse s) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the wider bailouts of the financial sector engineered via the Troubled Asset Relief Programme (tarp), the stabilization of the financial sector and the limited fiscal stimulus introduced by the new Obama administration in early 2009 did not propel the American economy into a robust and wide-​ranging recovery.

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Instead, the upturn accentuated the constitutive and structural pathologies that had plagued the American economy and social formation since the 1990s and, arguably –​in relation to the declining share of US wealth going towards wage earners in general –​since the late 1960s (Brenner, 2006; McNally, 2009). Indeed, the wealth inequalities across class, race and space were accentuated (Sawhill and Pulliam, 2019; Dettling et al., 2018; Shubber, 2018; Fleming and Leatherby, 2017).20 What then characterized the post-​crisis political economy of the United States? I will discuss the political dimension in the section that follows this one with respect to the far-​right mobilization of the Tea Party that was established in response to the stimulus and other –​notably health care –​policies of the Obama administration. The economy formally came out of recession in the final months of 2009 as economic growth began to pick up, as well as job hiring from an official unemployment peak of ten percent in November 2009. However, growth was relatively anaemic from 2010 onwards in relation to exits from previous recessions and averaged around two percent over the duration of the Obama administration (fred Economic Data, n.d.; Leatherby, 2016). While it was to take until May 2016 for official figures to reveal a return to a pre-​crisis official unemployment rate of 4.7 percent, what was most significant about the recovery was its spatial, social, and racial effects. Indeed, and as highlighted above, the upturn was also highly uneven spatially but also in class terms with the income from stock indices growing much higher than wage rises thus reinforcing the staggering levels of inequality within the US.21 Consequently, the increased hiring after late 2009 did not involve a generalized or cross-​country pattern and this was especially the case in terms of a revival of manufacturing employment and secure and well-​paid jobs. Thus, the employment rate in rural and non-​metropolitan areas was between 2.4 and almost three percent lower in mid-​2016 than it was prior to the crisis, in contrast to the larger metropolitan areas which had a level of employment almost five percent above their pre-​crisis level by mid-​2016 (Edsall, 2017; Lowrey, 2016; Porter, 2016a, 2016b). In addition to this, the type of jobs created during the

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21

As Adam Tooze (2019a: 352–​3) notes, after the 2009 fiscal stimulus and bail-​outs of the auto-​giants in the mid-​west, the last major piece of economic legislation passed by Obama was in 2010, and this stimulus was skewed towards tax cuts that served to the reinforce structural inequalities inherited from the Bush era. Drawing on data-​sets gathered by Emmanuel Saez, Burtless (2016; see also Saez, 2016; Tooze, 2019a: 455–​63) notes that after the start of the recovery in 2009 until 2015, the income of the top one percent saw real gains of 24 percent compared to just an average of four percent across 90 percent of the US population.

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recovery tended to disproportionately benefit more educated workers –​with a university degree. And this class dimension –​as a higher level of education tends to be associated with the middle class –​also had a spatial aspect in that fewer graduates tend to be based in rural and non-​metropolitan areas as graduate-​level employment is most concentrated in more urbanized locales (Lowrey, 2016; US Department of Agriculture, n.d.). With regard to manufacturing jobs in particular –​which tend to be located in smaller cities and more rural areas –​ by 2016 only a third or so of the 2.3 million jobs lost during the great recession returned to the sector (Congressional Research Service, 2018, 2019; Levinson, 2017: 2). The significance of this in relation to the structural trends within the US economy discussed above was that in the years leading up to the crisis over three million manufacturing jobs had been lost before the crisis struck between 2001 and 2007 (Panitch and Gindin, 2018: 6). In contrast to the limited benefits befalling labour, corporate profits quickly returned, and productivity also improved (Panitch and Gindin, 2018: 8, 11)22 to perpetuate the pattern set in by the neoliberal and spatial restructuring of American capitalism and the uneven and combined development that defined it. In geographical terms the recovery continued the pre-​existing trend but made it even more pronounced as the depth of the great recession and the skewed spatial and economic character of it meant that those areas and regions defined by traditional manufacturing production saw an accelerated decline and little or no alternative investment to restore job opportunities and maintain, let alone increase, the living standards of workers. As McQuarrie (2017: s127) opines, the longer-​term consequences of neoliberal restructuring and the outcomes of the 2007–​8 crisis reveal ‘policy-​driven outcomes [that] have resulted in a massive transfer of capital from the heartland to the coasts.’ Thus, there was little sign of a recovery across the mid-​west and outside of the big coastal cities (and especially New York and the Bay Area of California) defined by the new knowledge industries and the high-​end service sector connected to global networks (Lowrey, 2016). While employment growth was spatially uneven, reinforcing existing trends and socioeconomic divides –​with the major cities capturing most of the new 22

By 2011 around 28 per cent of all workers earned less than the official poverty level wage of $11.06, and around 30 per cent of the workforce relied on public assistance (Moody 2017: 30). According to the New York Times, in 2014 corporate profits were at their highest level for at least 85 years, employee compensation was at its lowest for 65 years (Norris, 2014). And the ratio of ceo pay to average wages in the US increased from 20:1 in 1965 to 270:1 in 2017 (Coates 2018: 118).

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jobs –​many of the jobs that were created in the non-​metropolitan areas and across the so-​called ‘rustbelt’ tended to be low-​wage and concentrated in hospitality and healthcare thus deepening the polarization of the labour market that had characterised the preceding period (Plunkett and Pessoa, 2013; see also Jaimovich and Siu, 2018). Such pronounced geographical unevenness is captured by data that indicated that only 20 counties out of a total of 3,000 altogether were responsible for over half of the net increase in new business start-​ups between 2010 and 2014: a quite astonishing level of concentration of economic dynamism, investment, and wealth creation. These developments were not solely of economic significance but need to be understood within the wider socio-​cultural context that has been a defining feature of US politics since the early 1980s in terms of how the spatialized concentrations revealed after 2008 related to the pre-​existing cultural and racial divides within the United States based on that between large cosmopolitan-​ oriented cities with ethnically mixed and culturally diverse populations, that are economically dynamic (if highly unequal and segregated), and also where white elites –​corporate and political –​tend to be located. This contrasts with the white suburbs surrounding many of those cities and, more widely, the whiter regional interiors and smaller cities and towns based on much lower levels of ethnic diversity23 and cultural plurality and distance –​both spatial and metaphorical –​from those cosmopolitan hubs. The consequence of this is that the spatialized nature of the recovery was also racialized or perceived as producing benefits to some –​urban based and non-​white communities –​at the expense of traditional working and middle-​ class white males (see Autor et al., 2016a: 41).24 After 2010 white workers tended to be over-​represented in areas of economic decline and less present in those areas that benefited most from the recovery in terms of both job opportunities and the proportion of secure and well-​paid jobs; what Eduardo Porter posits as a ‘lopsided racial sorting of jobs’ (Porter, 2016a, 2016b). Thus, of the nine million new jobs created between 2007 and 2015, most went to non-​whites 23

24

Whites make up approximately 62 percent of the total population; in non‐metropolitan areas this rises to 78 percent and falls to 56 percent in the hundred largest urban areas where ethnic minorities and recent immigrants are concentrated (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019: 50). And as David Autor and his colleagues show, there was a correlation between increased voter support for more conservative Republicans in Congress and the exposure of a local manufacturing economy to import competition from China. Particularly in majority‐ white communities, increased trade exposure over the 2000s catalysed support for Tea Party Republicans –​right‐wing populists opposed to immigration and multilateral trade agreements (Autor et al., 2016a: 41).

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concentrated in larger cities rather than to whites based in suburbs and non-​ metropolitan areas with whites experiencing a net loss of 700,000 jobs over this period (Lowrey, 2016). Although overall whites remained the primary beneficiaries of the workings of the American economy during the recovery and, further, minorities and African-​Americans in particular were hit hardest by mortgage foreclosures (White, 2016; Akee et al., 2017), the economic recovery in terms of jobs was racially segmented. Moreover, that this took place under an African-​American president and a Democratic party associated with minorities, alongside the ‘China factor’ helped to ensure that a nativist and far-​right framing of the recovery was open for political weaponizing through its embedding into the pre-​existing cultural divide (see Brownstein, 2016). As Porter (2016b) suggests, ‘[g]‌iven such clear divisions –​less-​educated whites living in depressed rural areas, on one side, and minorities living in more vigorous big-​city economies on the other –​the social and racial animosity manifest during the election campaign is hardly a surprise’ (Porter, 2016b). On top of this health outcomes have also significantly diverged over this period. Thus, there was a surge in the mortality rate for less educated white men in some of the key electoral battleground states across the mid-​west and elsewhere. As documented in the work of Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Case and Deaton 2015, 2020) middle-​aged white men died from suicide, and drug and alcohol-​related causes in much higher numbers compared to the past and in relation to other racial groups (and African-​Americans and Latinos in particular) who tended to be poorer and economically less well-​off, overall. What Case and Deaton label as an epidemic of anxiety and despair may not be directly causal in terms of support for Trump but it is suggestive of a wider and prevailing socioeconomic context that appeared to vindicate parts of Trump’s campaign messaging. Seen from this demographic Trump’s description of US social ills as ‘American carnage’ seemed highly plausible. Looking at developments across the states of the upper-​mid-​west, the so-​ called ‘rustbelt’ –​which has been a major focus in explanations of who voted for Trump and why –​these trends were mediated by a regionally specific and spatially determined set of developments. Thus, regional industrial decline and the physical dismantling and plundering of much of these states’ social and material infrastructure was also associated with the rise of China that had a particular impact on workers in the manufacturing sector. As Michael McQuarrie (2017: s134–​5) documents, through the mid-​2000s venture capitalists –​with an eye on the opportunities for money-​making –​took advantage of the rusting and mothballed factories and empty houses (that massively increased with the mortgage foreclosures over 2007–​8) across parts of the mid-​west to source the

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demand for scrap metal and other materials for China in its rapid process of urbanization and industrialization. In McQuarrie’s (2017: s135) words, [h]‌ouses were being stripped naked, literally, as their aluminium siding was peeled off, exposing the wood structure underneath to the elements. Older factories were being stripped of usable metal. Urban infrastructure from manhole covers, to guardrails, to street lighting was being dismantled. From scrapyards in the upper Midwest, material was loaded on ­otherwise empty trains and ships for the return trip to China. Chinese industry needed the material and, as one scrap dealer told me anecdotally, it is a lot cheaper to process the material in China. What this revealed was that the rust-​belt cities were not just a reflection of an increasingly post-​industrial and economically marginalized landscape, but they had also become –​by the mid-​2000s –​‘resource mines for new manufacturing agglomerations on the other side of the Pacific’ (McQuarrie, 2017: s135). Placed in the context of the extraction and loss of wealth before and after the financial crisis through the financialization of the US economy, and the depreciation of their financial wealth due to the housing crisis (house prices appreciated much more slowly here after 2008 than in other regions –​see Zonta and Edelman, 2015 Zonta et al., 2016) combined with the industrial stripping of its urban and industrial fabric to the benefit of a rising economic power, it is not hard to understand the sense of terminal decline and existential angst about the future that gripped large sections of the working class population across the rust-​belt and how such despondency could be weaponized as part of a far-​ right populist politics. The developments discussed above addressing the impact of the crisis and post-​crisis policy-​making on the economic structure and socioeconomic inequalities in the US reveal a set of general patterns that were highly racialized. For as much as the crisis and the uneven and partial recovery had an impact on those white and working class social layers that would come to vote for Trump in November 2016, the relative suffering and inequities that afflicted this group did not amount to a temporal rupture or reversal in the historical trend that minorities and African-​Americans, in particular, have been least well-​served by the structure and workings of the American economy. African-​Americans suffered more during the crisis and continue to be disproportionately worse off than their white counterparts. The racial disparities of American capitalism that are constitutive of it; they are its ‘normal setting’ and they have tended to provide the general socioeconomic backdrop upon which American politics has operated. Yet the spectre of such spatial unevenness and its revelation of

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relative opportunity about the future direction of the economy –​that was also connected to a set of racial distinctions that revealed relative white decline and spatial disadvantage –​provided a potentially powerful context for a political campaign centred on race. This is something that I will pick-​up on in a following section, below, when I focus on who voted for Trump. And while this is about space and place, it is also about political agency, contingency, and campaigning. And in many respects, it was about the centrism and establishment credentials (and long-​standing, if unproven claims of corruption) and ineptitude of the Democratic Party and its candidate, Hilary Clinton, as it was about the acumen of Trump’s campaign. Before I do that, I discuss the nature and evolution of the far-​right in the context of the 2007–​8 crisis and its aftermath. 2.1.2 The Post-​Crisis Far-​Right Far-​right currents have been a mainstay of American politics primarily through the centrality of race and the defence of white supremacy, and have dominated American politics since the Civil War. However, since the early 1980s, as discussed in the previous chapter, such currents have been connected to the particular articulation and operationalization of neoliberalism introduced by and associated with the Reagan presidency. Consequently, while nationalist in outlook and suspicious if not hostile to liberal internationalism –​which was especially evident in the support that Pat Buchanan secured in his campaigns to be the gop’s Presidential candidate in 1992 and 1996 –​these far-​right currents have also tended to be aligned with the corporatist and big business wing of the party based around a strong defence of private property rights, low taxes, and de-​regulation. Committed to over-​turning the legacy of the New Deal, defunding welfare and ‘restoring’ law and order, these two wings of the gop provided both the ideological messaging and the social basis –​small business owners and largely non-​unionized white workers in small town and non-​metropolitan areas and corporate capital –​that dominated Republican politics and political campaigning up until the 2007–​8 crisis. The financial crisis broke this arrangement as the two wings –​the corporate, big business elite and the mass petty bourgeois and blue-​collar base –​parted company as the Republican administration of George W. Bush responded to the crisis in its final year in office. The breakdown between the party’s non-​ metropolitan and small business base and the corporate wings was demonstrated in the opposition of Republicans in the House of Representatives to two of the key legislative packages that the administration tried to pass in 2008 –​ the tax-​payer rescue of the two gse s in July 2008 and tarp in September. Both packages were only passed with the support of House Democrats with three-​ quarters of Republicans voting against the gse rescues (Tooze, 2019a: 174,

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182–​4). Such a development, a situation that many within the Republican leadership and corporate-​supporters regarded as an act of self-​harm, laid the basis for a kind of ideological and cultural civil war within the party for control of its future direction, based on a new centre of ideological gravity and social basis. The results of this struggle and the growing disconnect between its two wings were particularly evident after the 2010 mid-​term elections when the Republicans won 63 seats –​the largest swing since 1948 –​winning back control of the House (Tooze, 2019a: 352) and shifting the direction of US politics further to the right. The new gop House caucus was increasingly characterized by far-​right currents as evidenced by its intransigent opposition towards the way in which both the Bush and Obama administrations had responded to the crisis, which –​after 2010 –​was reflecting in an increasingly hostile and oppositional attitude towards Obama’s legislative and policy initiatives. This was especially notable in Republican opposition to immigration and reform of the immigration system relating to the millions of undocumented workers as well as an indulgence towards the ‘birther conspiracy’ fostered by, among others, Donald Trump, that tried to undermine and de-​legitimize the Obama presidency (Kessler, 2011; McGreal, 2009; Mondon and Winter, 2020: 125) based on the claim that Obama was not a US citizen and/​or a Muslim. By the 2014 mid-​ terms the breakdown had got to a point where some of the main representatives of the American capitalist class –​such as the Chamber of Commerce –​ campaigned against this new incarnation of a neoliberal far-​right within the gop based on its slogan of ‘No fools on our ticket’ (Tooze, 2019a: 469). This radicalization of the gop brought out into the open the simmering tensions and contradictions within the neoliberal far-​right between a corporate and elite-​championed neoliberal orientation towards trade liberalization, corporate off-​shoring and globalization and a flexible and open labour market based on immigration and a populist and subaltern far-​right current that was increasingly pre-​occupied with worries about immigration, gun rights, the federal reserve system, the expansion of the social state and that also sat alongside a deep mistrust of the workings of Congress (Berlet, 2012). Immigration and, specifically, what to do about undocumented or ‘illegal’ immigrants was one aspect that provoked a clear split within the neoliberal right. Thus, in June 2011 in Alabama, the Republican-​controlled state legislature passed the Beason-​Hammon Alabama Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act (or hb56 as it is usually known) that made it illegal for immigrants not to carry immigration papers and preventing anyone without documents from receiving any provisions from the state, including water supply. Intended to create a hostile environment for immigrants, the legislation caused a mass departure of workers from the many agricultural businesses which relied on them. However, its

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impact went even further as the exit of these workers from the labour market created a us$130.3 million loss in state and local taxes that these workers had been paying that threatened to reduce the size of the local economy by $40 million (Davidson and Saull, 2017: 713). The legislation caused uproar among local employers and demonstrated a localized variant of this wider breakdown between the two wings of the party. Indeed, throughout this period the question of immigration and the rights of the millions of undocumented workers was a major source of division between the gop and significant sections of the capitalist class and business opinion (Kuchler, 2013; Jopson, 2014a, 2014b; Kirchgaessner, 2013; Tooze, 2019a: 571) that also played out with other anti-​immigrant initiatives in other states under Republican control such as Arizona (McGregor, 2012). Much of the impetus and pressure for far-​right populist insurgency within the gop since the crisis was driven by the Tea Party movement that emerged in the months after Obama’s November 2008 election victory (Worth, 2019: 120). Taking organizational form soon after the January inauguration, the Tea Party was galvanized by Obama’s pledge to continue and extend the stabilization of the economy using fiscal resources to both assist those who had been most affected by the crisis,25 and to help try and stimulate the economy and working with the Fed’s qe programme, alongside his wider commitment to a major overhaul of health care. Indeed, it was health care reform and the passing of the signature piece of legislation that defined his two terms –​the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act otherwise known as ‘Obamacare’ –​in 2010 that was to the lightening rod of the Tea Party mobilization (Parker, 2013; Perlstein, 2009). Tea-​Party mobilizations against Obama’s health-​care reform –​that was focused on extending health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans rather than the creation of a publicly-​funded and administered health service or social insurance scheme –​is suggestive of the wider ‘libertarian’ or small-​ state and low taxation mantra of the American far-​right. And this hostility to the federal ‘managerial state’ and ‘liberal social-​engineering’ was one of the most significant ideo-​political currents within it (see Francis, 2016). However,

25

What some commentators regard as one of the earliest ‘Tea Party moments’ was a diatribe by the cnbc financial commentator, Rick Santelli, on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in February 2009 where he denounced the Homeowners Affordability and Stability Plan –​one of the signature policies of the newly inaugurated Obama administration to help homeowners in distress refinance mortgages and avoid foreclosures –​as a tax-​payer subsidy that encouraged stupid behaviour in individuals taking on mortgage debt (see Etheridge, 2009; Santelli, 2009).

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many, if not most, Tea Party supporters were also supportive of one of the key pillars of the New Deal settlement –​Medicare. As others have recognized (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012: 45–​82; Disch, 2010) this was no contradiction from their generalized hostility to any extension of the liberal-​managerial state, be it in the form of health-​care or federal debt levels. Thus, this existing social security entitlement was viewed as an earned property right but one that is intimately connected to the long-​standing and constitutive racialized features of the American welfare state that have tended to rest on privileges for whites and resistance, by whites, to the extension of those privileges to other racial groups (Katznelson, 2005, 2013). In a context of economic crisis and widespread socioeconomic distress that combined with ballooning federal debt, such a position reflected a form of racial social protectionism even if it was not always articulated in an explicitly racialized vernacular. This social protectionism and, with it, a fear of how existing and earned entitlements might be lost or diluted if extended to those perceived as ‘undeserving’ –​be they minorities considered as already too dependent on welfare and/​or personally irresponsible –​provided an important hook for the social protectionist rhetoric that defined much of Trump’s campaign.26 The Tea-​Party reflected the embodiment of a reconstituted neoliberal far-​ right in a context of crisis. Further, though very much reflective of a grass-​roots movement (Skocpol and Williamson, 2012; Skocpol, 2016) its rapid growth and increasing influence within the gop throughout 200927 was also assisted by the media-​fanning of Fox News and the financial support provided by the big right-​wing corporate donors of Freedom Works and the Koch brothers-​financed Americans for Prosperity (see DiMaggio, 2011; Mayer, 2016). Reflecting a generalized trend defining of the far-​right –​across time and space –​of connections between, and an enabling of, by socio-​political forces within the ruling class, the Tea-​Party’s populism and radicalism was very much limited by the existing economic norms and the class privileges of private property. This was a populist defence of economic liberalism and much of actually-​existing American neoliberalism and where neoliberalism’s cultural attack on the democratic and egalitarian dimensions of the social state were well-​aligned with the Tea-​Party far-​right (Brown, 2019).

26 27

By early 2016 polls suggested that the majority of Tea-​Party supporters favoured Trump as the gop’s presidential candidate and well ahead of former favourites such as Ted Cruz (see Aronoff, 2016). In the 2010 Congressional mid-​term elections, Tea Party–​associated gop candidates won 39 of 129 House races and five of the nine Senate races they contested.

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Nevertheless the Tea Party was much more a set of localized and de-​centred initiatives that, while assisted by corporate and media support and aligned with much of the agenda and interests of the corporate neoliberal right, were far from being the pawns of corporate capital, nor that of the gop establishment (Parker, 2013; Skocpol and Williamson, 2012; Worth, 2019: 123). Consequently, though it exerted significant pressure on local Republican parties and candidates after 2009 –​shifting the party and its Congressional delegation further to the right –​its de-​centralized and distinct social character, and with its hostility to both big government and corporations and its social and cultural conservatism, meant that it was not able to reconstitute the gop as its own. However, its activism and campaigning against some of Obama’s signature policies did provide a major entry point for Trump’s candidature. Further, Trump’s campaign rhetoric of nationalism, social (or racial) protectionism and commitment to deregulation, tax cuts and the dismantling of the administrative and liberal managerial state, was to prove highly appealing to Tea Party activists who quickly became part of his base. What was also significant about the cultural and political milieu associated with the Tea-​Party and which presaged that of Trumpism is the way in which this milieu revealed a contradictory fusion of a sense of maximizing an idea of freedom and personal liberty grounded in private property rights and social and cultural protectionism linked to traditional social values and structures organized around white, male hetero-​normativity. Both defensive and radical –​ in terms of its attack on pre-​existing social and collective rights –​this reflects a politics pre-​occupied with destroying collectivized provision and egalitarian norms and institutions and processes of democratic deliberation, as a means to preserve traditional social values and institutions. This, as Wendy Brown (2019) has so eloquently and persuasively posited, is a project of privatizing the public and democratic sphere –​a sine qua non of neoliberal doctrine –​as a means to eliminate the possibility of democratic challenges to both private corporate power and entrenched social and cultural values and practices that perpetuate social hierarchies in racial, gendered, class and sexual terms. As Brown (2019: 74) summarizes, as the expansion of markets and morals displaces discourses of society and democracy, the nation itself comes to be figured as owned rather than constituted by democratic citizenship. This ownership has a double face –​that of a business aimed solely at making savvy deals and avoiding giveaways, and that of a home in need of securitization in a dangerous world. Together these legitimate internal and external illiberalism, nativist nationalism, even authoritarianism. Freedom becomes a weapon

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against the needful or historically excluded and paradoxically solicits the growth of statist power in the form of paternal protectionism, both economic and securitarian. This is the milieu that produced Trump and which Trumpism is concerned with promoting. It captures the paradoxical manner or political re-​enchantment that has characterized Trumpism; a re-​enchantment (Kiely, 2018b: 135–​6, 2020: 158) that reflects both the logic and crisis of neoliberalism. A revolt against its crisis consequences that remains trapped within its ethical universal and social structures. A turn towards an authoritarian outsider who deals in the business of both fear and scapegoating, but who also offers salvation in the form of a de-​politicized corporate deal-​maker, and neo-​Randian John Galt who embodies the combination of personal liberty and nihilism (Brown, 2019; Sluga, 2018). While the Tea-​Party reflected a set of de-​centred and localized mobilizations to the policies of the Obama administration that involved individuals and groups circulating within and around the fringes of the Republican party and coming to constitute a major part of Trump’s base in 2016, the so-​called ‘Alt-​Right’ was also a significant dimension to the reconstituted neoliberal far-​ right over this period. Coming to prominence in 2016–​17, the Alt-​Right reflected a combination of a new ideo-​political articulation of white nationalism and, in some cases, fascism, with a distinct online and social media presence and advocacy. The term was originally coined by Richard Spenser in 2008 and was closely connected to the writings of Paul Gottfried and Sam Francis (see Drolet and Williams, 2019, 2020). And although the online ideological presence of the Alt-​Right overlaps with many of the issues that motivated and helped mobilize the Tea Party, what has been distinct about it is the way in which it has provided a context and means to both rehabilitate neo-​Nazism and holocaust denial in the US (Hawley, 2017; Marantz, 2019; Nagle, 2017; Neiwert, 2017) –​the extreme and, in some respects, violent wing of the far-​right –​and also to connect it to Trump’s election campaign that Trump never disavowed. Indeed, in his outspoken and unprecedented public racism, Trump’s politics and campaigning appeared to have been lifted, directly, from the Alt-​Right’s web-​platforms. In this sense the Alt-​Right has acted as both an echo-​chamber and online platform for Trump, both echoing him and goading him and reflecting –​for the first time in recent memory –​a rhetorical and aesthetic connection between white supremacist racism, neo-​Nazism, and a US president.

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2.1.3 Sources and Spaces of Trumpism Trump’s election victory in 2016 was greeted across the political spectrum –​ including in parts of the Republican establishment (see Frum, 2018; Revesz, 2016) –​with a mixture of alarm and disbelief. This was amplified in the media reporting of the election and the Trump presidency reinforcing the initial impression of both shock and rupture –​as if what Trump represented and who voted for him signalled a watershed moment in American politics. In particular, the dominant framing of Trump’s victory was based on a white working class ‘revolt’ (Brooks, 2016; Crampton, 2016; Farage, 2016b; Williams, 2017) that was concentrated in the rust-​belt states of the post-​industrial upper mid-​west. This rendering of Trump’s victory does contain an element of truth; he secured the presidency through gaining more electoral college votes than Clinton (by 306 to Clinton’s 232 that equated to winning 30 states compared to Clinton’s 20) and secured some key states in the upper-​mid-​west on the basis of a political shift by –​relatively small numbers –​of white working class voters (Cohen, 2016; Davis, 2017; Silver, 2017). However, Trump’s victory and, specifically, how he won and who supported him and where, suggest less of a rupture and more a confluence of longer-​term trends that combined with the contingencies of the Trump campaign and that of his opponent. So whereas Trump’s outsider profile and his populist and racist rhetoric were not insignificant, it was his hostility to the economic consensus concerning the origins of the 2007–​8 crisis and how to respond to it –​that stood in sharp relief with that of his opponent, Hilary Clinton28 –​that was determining in his winning over white workers in the rustbelt that was key to his victory (McQuarrie, 2017). What then are the contextual issues that need to be considered in accounting for Trump’s victory? First concerns the political economy of ‘Trumpland’ and the connection between the impact of the crisis and the pathologies revealed in the post-​crisis economy discussed above. Here, the relationship is stark and tends to problematise those methodological approaches that seek to base an explanation for Trump’s victory through differentiating cultural and economic factors (see Inglehart and Norris, 2017, 2019), as if the rational actor models of political science based on methodological individualism actually reflect how people think and feel in making their political choices. Trump won in the poorest and least economically dynamic parts of the country. Clinton 28

Polling in the Democratic primary race between Clinton and Bernie Saunders, who, like Trump –​but in different ways –​challenged the economic consensus on the crisis and its aftermath, indicated that Saunders may well have performed better across many rust-​belt counties in the election than Clinton had he been the candidate (Davis and Hilsenrath, 2016).

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won in counties that accounted for two-​thirds of overall economic output in contrast to Trump’s third (Muro and Liu, 2016). Viewed or understood in a different way, a ‘close analysis of county voting behaviour indicates that the Democratic vote was relatively stable in New Economy territories while it collapsed in Old Economy ones’ (McQuarrie, 2017: 123) which is suggestive of a binary between new/​young and dynamic and old, decaying, and desperate –​a core part of Trump’s constituency. Indeed, taken further, it was not only the case that Trump polled much better in those places ‘where the economy is in worse shape’ (Kolko, 2016); that is, where growth was slower and wages lower. Further, there was also a connection between support for Trump in areas where the economy and employment were must vulnerable to offshoring and/​or automation (Autor et al., 2016a, 2017; Kolko, 2016; Casselman, 2017), such as those in routine roles, as in some types of manufacturing, sales, clerical work, and associated occupations. But the ‘China shock’ goes further than this in that there is also evidence to suggest that those counties most exposed to the impact of exogenous trade competition in the manufacturing sector were also those that had higher rates of suicide and alcohol or drug-​related deaths that were particularly pronounced among white men (Pierce and Schott, 2016). Overall what we can take from this is that not only was spatially uneven relative economic distress a key indicator of who supported Trump and where, but that the impact of trade liberalization and the ‘China shock’ on white male workers in non-​metropolitan c­ ontexts contributed to a number of social pathologies around depression, anxiety (Case and Deaton, 2015, 2020; Kiely, 2020: 135–​7) and higher rates of morbidity and mortality affecting this particular social group and which appeared to reflect the kind of world that Trump was talking about in his campaign (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019: 51). This spatial framing that speaks to the uneven and combined substance of the American political economy and how it enabled Trump’s dissenting political messaging, provides a crucial way of understanding and explaining the sources of support for Trump. And even though, overall, Trump voters tended to have higher-​than-​average incomes and may not have been directly experiencing the economic distress that characterized many of these post-​industrial counties, they also lived in the spatial contexts blighted by the impact of these developments and with little indication that things were likely to improve anytime soon.29

29 A cnn Exit Poll in November 2016 indicated that Trump won the support of the two thirds of voters who felt that life for the next generation would be worse than it is for the current

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However, we need to go beyond a purely spatial account to capture the class and racial dimensions of Trump voters. Accordingly, an important and long-​ standing corrective as to the level of working-​class support for the gop (as well as the Democratic Party) in Presidential elections is the low levels of voter turn-​out going back decades. Turn-​out has hovered around 50–​55 percent of registered voters –​and this figure overstates actual voters given voter registration issues –​since the early 1970s with a of high of 58.23 percent in 2008. The point here is that a large portion of these non-​voters are from the working class. The spatial and racial character of non-​voting is also important in that it also in some instances relates to techniques of voter-​suppression –​implemented by Republican-​controlled local state legislatures and which was assisted by the Supreme Court decision of 2013 that weakened some key provisions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (Sullivan, 2013; Newkirk, 2018). But the general trend has been for relatively higher levels of turn-​out in richer and non-​metropolitan areas which also qualifies the issue of class participation. Going back to the 2016 presidential election and the level of working class support for Trump, most of Trump’s votes came from richer Americans (Henley, 2016; Kilibarda and Roithmayr, 2016; Manza and Crowley, 2017; Tooze, 2019a: 576) even if the distribution of these class layers did not consistently align with the spatial distribution outlined above. Further, viewed from a longer-​term perspective with respect to turn-​out and voter loyalty to either party, the election was hardly a watershed (Bartel, 2016; McQuarrie, 2016). Thus, people who tend to vote Republican voted for Trump and likewise those who voted for the Democratic candidate. We can also extend this further with respect to Trump’s racialized political messaging and appeal to racist voters as this strategy has been a long-​standing part of the gop electoral tool kit since Nixon. Even though Trump was much more publicly open about his racialized world view, he was consistent with previous Republican campaigns that have focused on playing on white racial fears and the preservation of white racial political, social, cultural, and economic privileges (Omi and Winant, 2015). Thus, the gop racialized vote share held up but, interestingly, although Trump outperformed McCain –​gaining 58 percent over McCain’s 55 percent –​he got fewer white votes overall than Romney (59 percent), doing better with men than women and the same as George W. Bush in 2004 (New York Times/​Edison Research, 2016), which suggests that the whiteness factor is much more endemic than a singular focus on

one, and something similar among those who said that their financial situation had got worse since 2012 (cnn 2016).

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2016 would allow us to recognize in terms of voting in presidential elections and the racial appeals of the two main parties. The continuing racial voting trend revealed by Trump’s victory contrasts with that of Clinton even though she gained 2.86 million more votes than Trump. Thus, Clinton lost the votes of seven million Americans who had previously voted for Obama (Tooze, 2019a: 577) across all racial groups, but which was slightly higher for whites. This was particularly significant in the rust-​belt states where Clinton lost 13 percent of Democrat voters compared to 2012. Drilling down further Clinton won more working class votes overall than Trump (53 percent of voters earning under us$30,00 and 51 percent of those earning between us$30–​49,999 –​see New York Times/​Edison Research, 2016) –​an important corrective to the way in which ‘class analyses’ have been framed in relation to Trump (see Bhambra, 2017; Mondon and Winter, 2019, 2020: 164–​79; Sayer, 2017). However, there was a significant national shift of 16 percent of poorer voters from the Democrats towards Trump and many of these voters were concentrated in those rust-​belt counties that Trump won, and which secured him the presidency. In this respect the outcome of the election –​in Trump winning these ‘blue states’ that had previously voted Democrat –​was decided by very small numbers of voters.30 It was these white working class voters that were determining (McQuarrie, 2016) but most, if not all, of these had previously voted for Obama (Levitz, 2016) suggesting that while race, or a predisposition towards social conservatism, may have played a role in this shift, it would be difficult to write these voters off as racist given their previous support for an African-​American president, as compared to traditional Republican voters. Indeed, a significant portion of Trump’s white working class votes in these states –​that bettered Romney’s 2012 performance –​came from former Obama voters (Morgan and Lee, 2018). The importance of white workers in Trump’s victory is also qualified by the fact that the 10.6 per cent swing to Trump in the Rustbelt five (Iowa, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Wisconsin) was less than half of the fall in the 2012 Democrat vote in these same states (Kilibarda and Roithmayr 2016); as most these voters stayed at home or voted for a third-​party candidate. And even if we account for the class and racial plurality in this group of voters some of them were white workers who did not vote for Trump. The sources and spaces of Trumpism did not, then, represent a rupture in trends within US electoral politics. So although Trump was carried over the 30

Trump’s margin of victory over Clinton in the three key rust-​belt states that delivered him the presidency was tiny amounting to 77,774 votes in total (Michigan –​10,704 votes; Pennsylvania –​44,292; Wisconsin –​22,748).

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line by the increased support that he got from white workers in the key battleground states of the upper mid-​west –​which appears to reflect the appeal of his racially-​targeted social protectionist message –​it would be precipitous to claim that this is a trend or a fundamental shift in the electoral map of American politics. Indeed, such a class shift among white workers tends to reflect a longer-​term development that begun under Bill Clinton’s presidency with the ‘third way’ embrace of the ‘new economy’ and the abandoning of organized labour. The voting pattern –​both spatial and social (class, race, and gender) –​of the Trump’s 2016 victory was also revealed (with some minor exceptions) in the votes that Trump secured in the 2020 election –​where Trump gained over eleven million votes on 2016. Thus, in 2020 Trump continued to appeal to working class whites (at least as defined by proximate criterion of whites without a college degree) capturing around two-​thirds of this cohort, with Biden (a very different candidate in cultural terms compared to Hilary Clinton) only managing to pick up a few extra percentage points from these voters on Clinton’s 2016 performance. Poorer voters –​made up of a greater density of people of colour –​again tended to vote Democrat with wealthier voters –​repeating the 2016 and longer-​term pattern of –​voting Republican, though some suburban (middle-​class) whites in some key battleground states in the mid-​west shifted away from Trump in 2020. In terms of gender, there was a bit of a shift on 2016 with Biden winning more female voters but by a slightly lower margin than Clinton, whereas he increased his vote share among men, reducing Trump’s margin of victory within this demographic to just two percent. Rural and small town voters continued to favour Trump by a wide margin (around a third more than Biden) with large cities remaining bastions of Democrat dominance, though Trump’s vote-​share (likely from conservative Hispanic voters) in urban centres increased a little. Indeed, the one observable shift on 2016 was Trump securing more Hispanic voters which increased by ten percent to 38 percent overall (see Brownstein, 2021; Edwards-​Levy, 2021; Galston, 2021; see also Levitz, 2021). Turn-​out was key to Biden’s victory –​with Biden gaining a massive 15 million more votes on Clinton’s 2016 performance –​alongside the broad voter coalition that his campaign mobilized. It was these additional votes, and in spite of the significant growth in support for Trump, that ensured Biden crept over the line in the key states that determined his electoral college victory in Arizona, Georgia and the rust-​belt. Consequently, with turn-​out key and the Trump/​Republican voter bloc resting on a declining demographic in one of its core pillars (2020 saw a small drop-​off in the overall vote share made up of

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non-​college educated whites), it is clear where the political logic of the gop’s voter suppression strategy is coming from. The sources and spaces of Trumpism reflect the playing out of the uneven and combined development of American capitalism in a way that benefited the geographically framed racialized social coalition of Trump supporters. Thus, the longer-​term trends in American political economy since the 1990s, and especially so in relation to China’s integration into the world economy, reveal stark divides and contradictions across class, race and space that have been driven by the rise of China and its spatial and class effects on the American economy. Thus, it has accelerated and caused manufacturing decline and a weakening of organized labour contributing to the hollowing out of the middle class and accentuating the racially-​charged social anxieties of whites. In contrast to this, the flows of credit that China has pumped into the American financial system has helped the ascendancy of the financial-​rentier class that has further polarized class relations and spatial inequalities. These spatial and class divisions have had further racial effects in deepening the divide –​that is cultural as much as economic –​between larger cosmopolitan cities on the coasts looking outwards and non-​metropolitan and rural interiors that are less diverse more socially conservative, more inward looking and poorer. And for the Democrats, their electoral strategy of embracing the ‘new economy’ and winning support in the large cities makes the maintenance of their traditional sources of support among white workers ever harder to sustain. For the gop, such pathologies have provided opportunities for racialized campaigns that smooth over the coalition of ruling class forces and the non-​ metropolitan white poor. And such messaging with its appeal to an idealized past rooted in distinct racial imaginaries of class speak to the ideas articulated by Ernst Bloch. For Bloch –​as outlined in Volume One –​myths have a distinct temporal significance within the moments that they are articulated within and in periods of crisis where a normal, synchronous and ‘progressing’ sense of time is disrupted, the salience of reactionary appeals that are linked to concrete memories of the past in terms of employment, status and culture gain wider appeal. This then, for Trump’s 2016 campaign, was about the end of the American dream –​the greatest of American political myths –​but which, nevertheless, had real and concrete meanings and symbols and its appeal was to (white) middle-​class as much as working class voters (Kiely, 2020: 135). 2.1.4 The Trump Presidency If Trump’s election triggered warnings as to the possibility of fascism in the United States (see Albright, 2018; Stanley, 2018) the way in which Trump governed and what his administration did suggests something else. No doubt

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Trump’s authoritarian rhetoric and, specifically, his singling out of Second Amendment (gun) rights as needing special protections and the daily attacks on much of the press have been both unprecedented and dangerous. Indeed, his presidency was defined by a significant undermining of the basic constitutional and democratic norms with respect to the way in which the personal, political, and financial interests of Trump and his family dominated decision-​ making in an unprecedented way. Trump’s politics appear to reflect Trump Inc., a transactional politics where the office and powers of the presidency are manipulated and abused, not for the establishment of a far-​right regime, but rather the pater familias.31 In many respects, Trumpism reflects a continuity with Trump the property magnate and private citizen. What has also marked Trumpism –​providing some kind of coherence to its ‘strategic objectives’ –​was a commitment to over-​turning some of the key policy decisions and legislative achievements of the Obama administrations (be it in health-​care, financial and environmental regulation and in foreign policy, not least the nuclear accord with Iran). In addition, Trumpism is defined by a more restrictive and authoritarian attitude towards immigration, as reflected in the introduction of travel bans focused on Muslim-​majority states and the intensification and speeding up of deportations of undocumented migrants and the militarization of the US southern border, if not the full construction of a wall as Trump had promised in his election campaign. Trump’s authoritarianism was also revealed in the choreography with and indulgence of autocrats and dictators –​even those that pose a significant military threat to US forces and the United States, as in the case of the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-​un. Such characteristics along with the narcissistic personality traits and the lies and exaggerations that Trump spouted on a daily basis via his Twitter feed (until it was suspended in early 2021) make Trump a singular politician even if one cultivated by and reflective of the neoliberal age. They also reveal the contradictions of Trump –​an authoritarian narcissist who revels in such bromances and which sometimes rub up in a contradictory way with those nationalistic or ‘America first’ elements of his politics. Consequently, while his indulging of racists and the far-​right –​from militias to neo-​Nazis –​are disturbing and dangerous, as evidenced in the acts of far-​right terrorism that took place after 2016, the organization and workings of the American state were not fundamentally changed and his authoritarian impulses and diatribes did not result in a fundamental rupture in the 31

In Trump’s language, ‘[f]‌ar from public and democratic, the nation is figured as privately owned and familial, and the president is the paterfamilias’ (Brown, 2019: 116; see also Riley, 2018).

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manner of governing nor the character of American politics, and especially with respect to the neoliberal dimensions of its political economy. While a singular commitment to unravelling Obama’s legacy –​with mixed results –​animated his presidency, its impact and effectiveness was also undermined by the administrative chaos and incompetence within it, as reflected in both the frequency of turn-​over in key posts within it32 and the failure to fill posts, or only very late into his presidency. The Trump presidency did not, then, serve-​up its darkest and most disturbing possibilities even if it gave much greater licence to the far-​right and its violent and terrorist off-​shoots than previous Republican administrations. However, we do need to recognize some of the key aspects of domestic policy and international relations that do reveal the defining characteristics of the politics of the Trump administration. Here, it is possible to identify some important shifts in relation to the pre-​existing architecture of the hegemonic form of neoliberalism with respect to its international institutional governance and its transnational characteristics. Further, in giving vent to collectivist forms of white grievance and anger, Trump tapped into an important pathology within neoliberalism –​that of its reproduction of systemic social inequality and insecurity –​which though it obscures the socioeconomic causes, has opened up an ideo-​political terrain that has broken with parts of the consensus and provided possibilities for carving out a different, more exclusive, social, and democratic alternative to it. Simply put, in radicalizing the racial bargain of American neoliberalism and empowering its far-​right pillar, Trump undermined the delicate political balance that has sustained its social hegemony and reproduction since the 1980s, and also promoted the revival of opposition currents to it on the left. Let us look at the policies of the Trump presidency in a little more detail beginning with key areas of domestic policy. Here, under Trump the structure and workings of the American political economy, did not –​with some important caveats –​shift from the policy prospectus that has defined Republican administrations since Reagan. One of the legislative landmarks early in the administration was the passing of a massive corporate tax give-​away in the first year. The legislation did incorporate the populist sweetener of cuts to income tax for low paid workers, but these were time-​limited, while the raising of the threshold on estate taxes to us$11 million 32

Trump went through four White House Chiefs of Staff (Reince Priebus, January -​July, 2017; John Kelly, July 2017 -​January 2019; Mike Mulvaney, January 2019 -​March 2020; Mark Meadows, March 2020–​January 2021) and countless other officials while several key administrative posts were never filled (see https://​www​.theg​uard​ian​.com​/us​-news​/ng​ -inte​ract​ive​/2018​/jul​/05​/don​ald​-trump​-firi​ngs​-resig​nati​ons​-white​-house​-full​-list​-lat​est)​.

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and the 40 percent cut to corporate tax (Tooze, 2019a: 583) served to further entrench the wealth inequality that has scarred American society for the last four decades or so. Such tax cuts –​their scope and class benefits –​follow that of previous Republican administrations, which have also reflected an inconsistent logic of ‘deficit denial’ whereupon such unfunded cuts have led to increases in the federal deficit. Consequently, it has allowed Republicans to continue to erode the fiscal outlays and economic foundations of what are considered discretionary spending items such as housing, education, research and so forth. And although the growth of government debt liabilities is far from a neoliberal mantra, the other aspects of Trumpist economics tended to be aligned with mainstream Republican positions and neoliberal assumptions about empowering privatized spending through tax cuts and eroding the fiscal basis of public provision even if this did not extend to the dismantling of Medicare.33 In addition to the way in which Trump’s fiscal policy did not break with long-​standing gop positions, Trump also rolled back regulations introduced during the Obama administration that reinforced the long-​standing position of the neoliberal right (Bessner and Sparke, 2018). Thus, environmental and health and safety legislation were gutted and the key piece of legislation that was passed in response to the 2007–​8 financial crisis –​the Dodd-​Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 –​was also subject to significant dilution in terms of its regulatory oversight with the passing of the Financial Choice Bill by the House of Representatives in June 2017. That this did not end up as legislation, it, nevertheless, demonstrated the ideological thrust of the Trump administration and the lobbying efforts of Wall Street. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act that was implemented into law in May 2018 does not go as far as the earlier House-​ authored bill, but it also significantly weakened the consumer and other protections introduced by Dodd-​Frank. These types of policies were part of Trump’s campaign, and they were one of the reasons why parts of corporate America came around to Trump (Waldmeir, 2017), as well as the support that he secured from mainstream Republican voters. None of this should surprise us even if it rubs up against his 33

As well as corporate-​focused tax cuts, de-​regulation and the undermining of the fiscal bases of some key government-​funded programmes, Republican administrations have also tended to implement significant spending increases for the military. Trump also followed this trend with a massive splurge based on plans to increase the size of the army and the navy and modernize US nuclear forces which would amount to us$683 billion, or 12 percent of discretionary spending, by the decade to 2027 (Tooze, 2019a: 584).

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campaign rhetoric against the ‘swamp’ and traditional ways of doing things. These policies indicate that the Trump presidency reflected the mainstream of gop thinking and, with it, the imbuing of neoliberal ideological assumptions that have dominated the policy consensus for decades. Indeed, given Trump’s background as a property developer and his reputation as a ‘deal-​maker’ these policies helped to reinforce this profile of Trump ‘being good for American business’ and as someone helping to ‘free up’ the conditions for Americans to make money and grow the economy after the rather anaemic period of growth under the Obama administration. These aspects of Trumpism and his daily worship of rising stock indexes as evidence of economic success and his entrepreneurial and business acumen reveal an important dimension of Trumpism –​the businessman/​­entrepreneur as chief executive of America Inc. Trump’s politics –​and a significant dimension of his political appeal –​could be seen to reflect the extension of the neoliberalisation of politics as the culture of business and its normative associations, at least in the figure of Trump, replacing those of the politician and politics as a distinct sphere of social life and, accordingly, the distinct moral values and institutional processes that are associated with it (see Robin, 2018a: 260). That there is more to Trumpism than his and that his ‘business instincts’ are also contradicted by his racism and embrace of white nationalism do not undermine the significance of this: that American politics –​in the form of the presidency at least –​became a branch of corporate America and where political values and considerations were reduced to a set of economic data sets suggestive of the triumph of neoliberal reason (Brown, 2019). Trumpism as reflecting a continuity of the neoliberal-​right and the realization of the fulfilment of neoliberal hegemony contrasted, however, with his nationalistic and racial-​protectionist rhetoric and policies that broke with the neoliberal consensus –​‘progressive’ (see Fraser, 2017a) or otherwise –​that have underpinned not only the centre of ideo-​political gravity within the United States since the 1980s, but also its global governance arrangements that have supported the accumulation strategies of dominant fractions of the American capitalist class and its global hegemony (Panitch and Gindin, 2018). Racial and populist invective has been a consistent part of Trumpism via his Twitter feed and in terms of policies, this far-​right infused racial protectionism was especially pronounced in immigration and trade policy. And in the latter, it has, arguably, contributed to a fundamental re-​thinking of the US relationship with China more generally. Thus, while Obama had implemented the so-​called ‘Asia pivot’ in recognition of the increasing geopolitical –​as much as economic significance –​of East Asia in US strategy, Trump moved further in identifying

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China as a strategic rival and threat to the US. And the Biden presidency has not deviated from this shift. Immigration and, in particular, the future status of the approximately eleven million undocumented migrants working in the US, has been a major dividing line in US politics for several years. More recently, attempts to address the issue, such as Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (or daca) in 2012 that drew on an earlier piece of legislation that was never signed into law –​the so-​called dream Act (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act) –​that deferred the deportation of the children of undocumented migrants and provided a path to citizenship, was overturned by Trump on assuming office (Donnan, 2017). Deportations continued and increased in some respects under Obama (Jopson, 2016) but on entering office Trump implemented a much more draconian set of policies. Centred on increasing deportations, militarizing the southern border, and seeking Congressional funding (unsuccessfully) for the construction of a wall, Trump reinforced his racist campaign rhetoric targeting Muslims with travel bans34 and Latinx migrants. Indeed, after his election victory –​and replicating what happened in Britain after the Brexit referendum result was announced –​there was a spike in racist incidents across the US that were suggestive of a white-​nationalist terrorism that has risen to prominence more broadly in recent years (Hook, 2016). The travel bans played to fears over Islamist-​inspired terrorism since 2001 and a broader anti-​Muslim racism while increasing deportations of ‘illegal migrants’ alongside a much more authoritarian approach to the southern border –​in terms of the deployment of troops (Manson, 2018; Weaver and Manson, 2018) and incarcerating asylum-​seekers and separating children from parents. That the full realization of Trump’s immigration policies was thwarted by a combination of judicial intervention, opposition from some governors and splits within the Congressional gop and the loss of its House majority in November 2018 should not detract from the significance of Trumpism in this area of policy. Indeed, reflecting an important division and contradiction within the social constellation of the neoliberal right, major fractions of America’s corporate class –​that have otherwise embraced the tax-​cutting and

34

One of the first acts of the new administration was an Executive Order that barred refugees from entering the United States for 120 days (and indefinitely Syrian refugees) and prohibited citizens from seven Muslim-​majority states (Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen) from entering the US for 90 days. Struck down in the courts soon after the policy was revised in subsequent Executive Orders in March and September of 2017 that were enforced.

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de-​regulatory dimensions of Trumpism –​opposed these policies (Bradshaw et al., 2017; Jopson, 2018; Kuchler and Fortado, 2017). The place of immigration in Trumpism is partly associated with security and racialized fears, but also a racialized social protectionism connected to access to welfare benefits and social security assistance and the workings of the labour market to benefit American workers –​replicating the wider far-​ right. Indeed, the clamping down on immigration is aligned with some aspects of neoliberal thinking (see Chapter 2) in relation to the provisions of a welfare state, but it has also undermined actually existing neoliberalism in the US, as regards the role of immigrants in ensuring labour market flexibility in the provisioning of low-​wage jobs and the reproduction of the ruling class layers that are linked to those areas where immigrant labour is concentrated –​in agriculture, construction, services and hospitality. Immigrants, then, are seen in the Trumpian universe as not only threats to white security, but also to the traditional roles of male bread-​winners as the backbone of the traditional social order. Consequently, the Trumpian challenge to American neoliberalism extended to its international dimensions and, specifically, how trade policy was regarded as having contributed to undermining the traditional bastions of white male hegemony in the workplace and home. Trump’s policies did not fully realize the claims made in his campaign over trade but he up-​ended the traditional and cross-​party consensus on it. One of his first and most important acts was the decision to withdraw the US from the Trans-​Pacific Partnership (tpp) free-​trade agreement that the Obama administration had signed-​up to alongside several other key regional economies (including Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Japan, and Vietnam). In many respects a challenge to China’s increasing geopolitical sway across the Pacific region, the agreement was also about consolidating America’s increasing strategic orientation towards Asia given its growing centrality in the world economy. Trump’s decision –​which had been preceded by Congressional votes of opposition –​reflected an assertation of the new international-​diplomatic dispensation of suspicion and hostility towards multilateral diplomacy (Beattie, 2019; Rachman, 2019) and agreements and a shift towards bilateral diplomacy where the US could, in Trump’s view, exert more leverage and economic and geopolitical gain by pressuring its partners into concessions. Trump’s announcement reflected ‘America first’ in action as the decision was motivated by an assumption that the US engagement with neoliberal globalization and multilateral trade agreements had been at the cost of American jobs and wealth (see Trump, 2017). Far from the case in terms of wealth and capital accumulation (see Kiely, 2020: 184–​8; Panitch and Gindin, 2012; Starrs, 2013, 2014) there was an element of truth with regard to the costs borne by

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sections of the working class (see above). From early on, then, the Trump administration revealed a hostility to multilateral fora and diplomacy35 and shifted to rolling bouts of trade protectionism targeting China but also some of its key and allied trading partners in Japan, South Korea, and the EU. Further, Trump imposed tariffs in early 2018 initially on certain types of washing machine and solar panels and then steel imports (25 percent) and aluminium (10 percent) from particular countries (Bown, 2018; Milman, 2018). Trade friction persisted throughout Trump’s presidency and while most of the animus was directed at China, Trump’s protectionism was also focused on the EU in terms of the car industry and other manufacturing sectors (Politi, 2019b Politi and Brunsden, 2019). This also played out in Trump’s threat to abandon the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta) with Canada and Mexico. This resulted in a renegotiation of the treaty throughout 2017 and 2018 and a new agreement –​the United States –​Mexico –​Canada Agreement (usmca) that was eventually signed in late 2019. Less comprehensive in scope than nafta the agreement preserves integrated supply chains but introduced some new elements on rules of origin and wages aimed at making the US a more attractive site for investment (Kiely, 2020: 193) and, consequently, re-​ shoring manufacturing jobs, but falls short on the promises that Trump made in his election campaign. What these developments in US trade policy suggest is that Trump is no full-​blown protectionist and certainly not someone committed to autarchy. Rather, the Trump presidency demonstrated a partial engagement with globalization understood as capital flows and investment into the United States and as reflected in Trump’s obsession with the trade deficit. Further, the use of protectionist measures –​be it over intellectual property rights or strategic sectors of the economy –​reflect a long-​standing American position going back to Nixon and which also characterized the Reagan administration. Consequently, the pattern of Trump’s attacks on free-​trade and globalization revealed less a consistent hostility towards them and the crafting of something different, and more as an attack on ‘the outward movement of capital rather than an attack on neoliberalism, let alone capital per se’ (Kiely, 2018b: 142). Trump’s trade policies like his immigration policy were focused on realizing his campaign slogans of ‘America first’ and ‘Make America Great Again’ through re-​shoring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Trump made many claims about his success in re-​shoring manufacturing jobs to the American 35

In one of the first major international meetings –​the G20 in Germany in March 2017 –​ Trump’s Treasury Secretary (the Wall Street insider, Stephen Mnuchin) refused to sign on to a communique endorsing ‘free trade’ (Panitch and Gindin, 2018: 15).

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(post-​) industrial heartland, but many of these concerned investment decisions that pre-​dated his presidency as in the cases of Ford, General Motors, Wal-​Mart, Intel, Sprint, and Lockheed Martin, all of which date back to the Obama era (Greenhouse, 2017). So, while the Trump administration made some moves in policy terms (as in the case of the renegotiation of nafta) and in his rhetoric to press American firms to ‘buy and hire American’ (Waldmeir and Donnan, 2017), there was no major shift in relation to the re-​shoring of manufacturing employment during his presidency nor in the behaviour of American capital. Instead, most American firms not only lobbied against his immigration and trade policies but continued to take advantage of the opportunities of the structures and processes of neoliberal globalization –​a structure that they largely wrote (see Panitch and Gindin, 2012). Further, the ‘corporate gifts’ bequeathed by Trump in the form of the December 2017 tax cuts were not used to stimulate industrial investment and manufacturing job creation in the US, but rather to encourage share buy backs to boost company share prices (Edgecliffe-​Johnson and Crooks, 2018; Reich, 2019). Perhaps the most significant shift in US policy under Trump that aligned with his campaign promises (McCarthy, 2015; Trump, 2012, 2018) was in relation to China. Thus although he engaged in a short-​lived bromance with the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, at the start of his term (Phillips, 2017) thereafter relations were dominated by the brewing trade war between them with on/​off trade negotiations punctured by threats to and the imposition of tariffs, alongside other protectionist measures (Farrer, 2019; Politi, 2019a; Yuk, 2019). From a classically nationalist and producerist perspective that defines a significant dimension of the far-​right’s political economy, Trump views trade in ‘zero-​sum’ terms and through a geopolitical prism marked by an obsession with ‘made in America’. Bilateral trade deficits are viewed as equating to ‘winners and losers’ and, in Trump’s racialized world view, are only explicable through Chinese cheating and American weakness. Consequently, they need to be addressed through robust political intervention to redesign the legal and economic parameters of trade that more neatly align with geopolitical boundaries based on the leverage of US power. The economic merits of such a position are highly problematic (see Starrs, 2014), as reflected in the concerns expressed by major fractions of American capital (Shane and Sevastopulo, 2019) and the trade war generated significant economic disruption and growing geopolitical tension. Increasingly through his presidency Trump viewed China as a strategic competitor and geopolitical threat, and this marked a significant shift from previous administrations –​ including Republican. Thus, even though the Obama administration effected a shift that highlighted concerns about the impact of China’s growth on the

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US economy and its wider strategic interests (Kiely, 2020: 211) this was to be addressed through extending multilateral rules and governance to reduce China’s domestic policy autonomy. While the exaggerated worries about a rising China replicating the historical experience of a rising Germany prior to 1914 (Wolf, 2019) appear to wide of the mark –​the prospect of armed conflict seems unlikely in the short-​term –​ Trump’s policy towards China appears to have forced a more fundamental and general shift in thinking across the US political class (as evidenced in the initial policy positions of the Biden administration) with potentially significant economic and geopolitical ramifications and for the geopolitical bases of global neoliberalism and the accumulation strategies for major fractions of US capital. The extent to which this shift will produce major material and geopolitical changes and/​or whether it will result in large numbers of manufacturing jobs returning to the United States seems fanciful. Yet for the first time since World War Two there seems to be an emerging inter-​capitalist geopolitical rivalry involving the two dominant capitalist powers and the likely political effects are helping to shape political developments within each country to a significant degree (see Cooper, 2021). Consequently, although Trump did not manage to secure a return to the kind of manufacturing sector his campaign promised to realise, the imprint of a far-​right (or paleo-​conservative) trade policy is likely to be a lasting legacy with the laying of the foundations for growing geopolitical tensions and for the development of a form of inter-​capitalist geopolitical rivalry for the first time since 1945. 2.2 Britain: Brexit and Crisis Neoliberalism In a similar way that Trump’s election was framed as a revolt of the so-​ called ‘left-​binds’ or (white) working class, so the decision by a majority of British (and, strictly speaking, English and Welsh people) to vote to leave the European Union in June 2016 was greeted as such (Crampton, 2016; Farage, 2016b; McKenzie, 2016). As we shall see below, this accounting of the Brexit vote only reveals a partial truth about Brexit but in its class, racial and spatial dimensions the Brexit vote does share something in common with the context and forces that elected Trump. Thus the long-​term developmental trend within Britain’s neoliberal political economy, the impact of the 2007–​ 8 North Atlantic financial crisis and that what followed were also crucial in shaping the politics of Brexit and the referendum outcome. Brexit revealed the strength of far-​right ideo-​political currents –​that had been a constituent if contradictory part of neoliberal hegemony since 1979 –​but in a way that did not see the successful breakthrough of a far-​right party but, rather, the playing out of the contradictions within the principal political representative of the British capitalist class –​the Conservative Party. It was also greeted –​across

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the liberal commentariat –​like that of Trump’s election, as a unique crisis of post-​war liberal internationalism.36 And replicating developments after Trump was elected, authorities recorded a significant spike in racist incidents and attacks.37 The Brexit vote was also, like that of Trump’s electoral victory, an outcome decades in the making.38 However, in contrast to the election of Trump –​a far-​right demagogue to the highest electoral office in the United States –​the significance of the far-​right in Britain in a context of neoliberal crisis was centred on its membership of the European Union, its most important international economic, trading, and geopolitical relationship. Further, given the political fracturing revealed by the Brexit vote –​with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting by large majorities to stay in the EU –​the outcome and Britain’s departure from the bloc has set-​in process political-​constitutional developments that could, in the near future, see the break-​up of the UK. Britain’s EU membership had become a major source of division within the Conservative party from the early 1990s and was a major factor in the deposing of Thatcher in 1990 and then dogged the premiership of John Major until 1997. This Eurosceptic-​wing of the Tory party reflected a combined hyper-​neoliberal and nationalist current within it; an ideo-​political orientation at loggerheads with the dominant fractions of the British capitalist class. Most pronounced in the United Kingdom Independence Party (ukip) that was founded in the early 1990s as a single-​issue anti-​European federalist party, it quickly morphed into a more openly nationalist party by the mid-​2000s and especially so after Nigel Farrage became leader in 2006. Benefiting from the collapse in support for the extreme-​right British National Party, ukip became the most significant political force opposing Britain’s EU membership and the flow of migrants into the 36

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In the Financial Times, Philip Stephens (Stephens, 2016) described Brexit as ‘a vote that changed everything [with] economic and foreign policies crafted over nearly half a century overturned in the course of a single night,’ while the paper’s Chief Economics ­commentator, Martin Wolf (Wolf, 2016b), pronounced it as ‘probably the most disastrous single event in British history since the second world war’. The Guardian columnist, Timothy Garton Ash (Garton Ash, 2016), mourned ‘[t]‌he unhappy English have delivered a body blow to the west, and to the ideals of international cooperation, liberal order and open societies’. For further detail on the number and type of attacks see Home Office (2017); Komaromi and Singh (2016); and Virdee and McGeever (2018). This is also the argument of the widely claimed book on Brexit by Maria Sobolewska and Rob Ford (2020), but where I differ from them is that I give a much greater prominence to the structure and workings of Britain’s political economy and the centrality of neoliberalism in both shaping the socio-​economic geography of Brexit and the ideological jeremiads that helped propel it.

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UK after the citizens of the new EU members from Central-​Eastern European countries were allowed to enter the UK labour market from 2004. Under Farage’s leadership it became a major source of pressure on the Conservative Party, as many of its policy positions overlapped with a significant part of the Conservative party’s membership and social base and some of its mp s in terms of social authoritarianism (i.e., support for the restoration of the death penalty) alongside a super-​charged neoliberalism and which also rested on seeing the EU, like Thatcher –​as articulated in her ‘Bruges Speech’ of 1988 (Thatcher, 1988) –​as a form of centralized and bureaucratic state-​like entity. Consequently, ukip –​alongside its allies within the Tory party –​was the dominant articulation of the neoliberal-​far-​right in Britain from the mid-​ 2000s up until the 2016 referendum. And even though its primary focus was on Britain’s membership of the EU and, especially in relation to immigration, by the time of the referendum its ideological influence was much broader in shaping the rearticulation of British Conservatism. In what follows I first survey the post-​crisis political economy in Britain to map out the spatial and socioeconomic contexts that Brexitism developed within and took advantage of. I then provide a brief survey of the far-​right ideo-​political currents operating across British politics in the lead-​up to the referendum. I then examine the question of who voted for Brexit, why they did so and where they were from before ending this section with a discussion of post-​Brexit politics and political economy and what this suggests for the future of the British far-​right. 2.2.1 Britain’s Post-​Crisis Political Economy Britain’s crisis was ushered in by the collapse of the highly leveraged Northern Rock bank. Unable to fund its operations after the ceasing up of the capital markets in late 2007 due to the exposure of the North Atlantic financial sector to the collapsing US housing market, it was nationalized in February 2008. This was the first of several government-​led interventions throughout 2008 –​ the most significant being the nationalization of the Royal Bank of Scotland, at the time one of the largest banks in the world –​that, along with the support of the US Treasury (see Tooze, 2019a: 166–​219) rescued most of the British banking sector from collapse. The significance of Northern Rock’s demise went beyond its heralding of systemic crisis. Based in Newcastle in the north-​east of England, the experience of Northern Rock revealed the distinct workings of uneven and combined development in a British context. The bank was only one of two ftse 100 companies based in the region (Hazeldine, 2017: 60) and this reflection of spatial unevenness was amplified by the uneven spatial reach of city financiers and carpet-​baggers in the otherwise marginalized and post-​ industrial region of the north-​east. An island of financialization locked into

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globalizing circuits of technologically-​wired high-​finance that, in Marx’s phrasing reflected ‘the annihilation of space by time’ (Marx, 1973: 524), Northern Rock was surrounded by a post-​industrial wilderness culturally located in its nineteenth and mid-​twentieth century hey-​days of labourism. Locked into global circuits, the north-​east –​like much of non-​metropolitan and a wider Britain outside of London and the south-​east of England –​was politically marginal to the functioning and priorities of the British state and ruling class. Fed off scraps of public spending during the new Labour years (1997–​2010) it was a stark embodiment of the contradictions and divisions of Britain’s neoliberal political economy –​globally connected and, at the same time, stuck in the past –​materially and culturally. Like its American cousin, Britain’s neoliberal economy was defined by both its geographical unevenness and class inequality. A development model over-​ dependent on credit-​induced growth based on a vibrant housing sector as a driver of consumption, Britain’s economy was anchored in London and the south-​east’s property market, a shrinking manufacturing sector,39 and the cosmopolitan financial entrepot of the City of London now an off-​shore location of America’s financial empire (Panitch and Gindin, 2012; Norfield, 2017).40 To this spatial unevenness was matched growing class inequality as increasing sectors of the economy were low wage and low-​skilled; and this was before the crisis hit. Indeed, under New Labour while public funding41 tried to plug the gap produced by the dearth of private investment in the north and Midlands after the decimation of the manufacturing heartlands in the first Thatcher government of 1979–​83 (Martin, 1989), the fundamental problems of Britain’s lopsided and unbalanced economy –​in spatial and sectoral terms intensified (Barnet, 2017; Dorling, 2006).

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Under New Labour, the output of the financial sector increased at double the overall growth rate and manufacturing’s contribution to gross value dropped from 19 percent to 10 percent (Hazeldine, 2017: 57). In the early days of the New Labour administration in an unguarded comment to journalists, the Governor of the Bank of England (Eddie George) stated that ‘unemployment in the north-​east is an acceptable price to pay to curb inflation in the South’ (see bbc, 1998). George complained that his comment had been taken out of context but it perfectly illustrated the primary focus of UK monetary policy at the time and its deleterious consequences for manufacturing investment and jobs elsewhere in the UK because of the highly uneven character of Britain’s economy. According to Tom Hazeldine (Hazeldine, 207: 58) publicly-​funded employment (including state-​funded jobs formally in the private sector) accounted for 73 per cent of employment growth in the north-​east over the pre-​recession decade, 67 per cent in Yorkshire and the Humber and 62 per cent in the north -​west.

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With the UK moving into recession in 2008 the economy experienced its deepest recession since the 1930s. Data from the UK’s Office of National Statistics detailed that the UK economy shrunk by 5.1 percent in December 2009 –​ year-​on-​year –​ with gdp falling by six percent since early 2008 (Elliott, 2009). However, unlike other recessions and considering the length and depth of the economic contraction, unemployment did not rise by significant levels. Official unemployment peaked at 2.68 million (about 8.3 percent of the labour force) in October 2011 after rapidly increasing in the twelve months after May 2008 from 1.67 million to 2.47 million in June 2009 (bbc, 2015). Instead, the crisis played out in a dramatic fall in wages, with median real wages falling by 8–​10 percent between 2008 and 2014 (Machin, 2015) –​one of the highest falls across the major capitalist economies. Stagnant wages –​real earnings had barely increased from their pre-​crisis level ten years after the crisis (ons, 2018)42–​that combined with a credit squeeze after the consumer-​credit fuelled boom of the preceding years, contributed to a further drag on growth after 200843 and falls in living standards and an increase in widespread economic hardship (ifs, 2015a; O’Hara, 2014; Resolution Foundation, 2014; Toynbee and Walker, 2017). While the crisis caused major damage to the economy the actions of the Conservative-​led coalition government that was elected in May 2010 compounded the situation through introducing a set of austerity policies based on ‘repairing’ the public finances after the massive tax-​payer funded interventions44 that saved the banking sector. Indeed, all main parties including the outgoing Labour party –​that had campaigned on a manifesto pledging to make significant public spending cuts –​were committed to a version of austerity as the primary response to the crisis. Aided by a note left by a Labour Treasury minister (Liam Byrne) stating that ‘I’m afraid there is no money’ (Helm, 2015), a narrative was quickly imposed on the causes of the crisis and what needed to be done in response to it: that Britain –​government and individuals –​had spent beyond their means, that the state had to shrink, debts had to be paid and that cutting back on public expenditure was the means to do so. Taken 42 43 44

Between 2007 and the Brexit referendum wage inequality in the UK grew more than any other country in the EU while real wages fell more than anywhere except Greece (Le Galès, 2016). gdp did not return to its pre-​crisis level until the summer of 2013 (see ons 2018). Based on figures produced by the UK’s spending watchdog, the National Audit Office, between 2007 and 2010 UK tax-​payers provided £1,162bn of support based on guarantee commitments of £1,029bn and cash outlays of £133bn (nao n.d.). This was the equivalent of 69.1 percent of gdp in 2009–​10 (rising almost a fifth in one year) rising to peak at 85.7 percent in 2014–​15 (see ons, 2019).

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up by most sections of the press and media this framing of the crisis became dominant after 2010.45 Thus the leaders of the new coalition government parroted that the UK had ‘become far too dependent on the public sector’ and that ‘[y]‌ou can’t revive the regions just through handouts from Whitehall’ (David Cameron and Nick Clegg cited in Hazeldine, 2017: 62). A crisis of neoliberalism was quickly transformed into a crisis within neoliberalism but one that turned towards a set of ideological assumptions that further reinforced neoliberal hegemony (Blyth, 2013; Crouch, 2011; Mirowski, 2014). Consequently, the policies of the Con-​Dems after 2010 would further entrench neoliberalism in the coming years. Thus the public-​sector pay-​roll was slashed46 and local government suffered cuts that had an unprecedented and catastrophic impact on the provision of public services.47 Justified as a needing to repair the public finances –​as if government equates to a single household –​ the Coalition used the cover of the crisis to fundamentally reshape the state and Britain’s wider political economy in a neoliberal direction (Gamble, 2015; Hall, Massey, and Rustin, 2013; Krugman, 2012; Watt, 2013) as the public socioeconomic realm was gutted. On top of this –​reflecting a further reinforcement of neoliberal thinking –​the Coalition imposed major cuts in (non-​pensions) welfare provision after 2010 (see ifs, 2015b; Lupton et al., 2015) that, in effect, dismantled the mechanism through which the return of growth to London and the south-​east could feed through public spending to the rest of the country (Hay, 2013; Hopkin, 2017: 470).48 And then, after the Conservatives were re-​ elected in May 2015, the government introduced new legislation to impose further restrictions on trade unions in 2016. The vision was to re-​cast the economy 45 46

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As indicated by reports such as this, ‘[t]‌he state now looms far larger in many parts of Britain than it did in former Soviet satellite states such as Hungary and Slovakia as they emerged from communism in the 1990s’ (Taher, 2009). The public-​sector pay-​roll was cut and/​or transferred to the private sector by almost one million between 2010 and 2015. Public sector pay was frozen for two years (three years for local government employees) and from 2012 pay increases have been limited to one percent (epsu, 2016: 41–​2). The coalition government introduced a series of escalating cuts in support for local government services from 2010 that amounted to just under £15bn by 2018–​19 equivalent to a staggering 60p out of every £1 the Government had provided to spend on local services over this period (Local Government Association, 2018). Thus, as Martin et al. note (2016: 344), based on a UK average =​100, gdp per capita in Greater London rose from 152 in 1998 to 172 in 2013 while the equivalent in Wales was 101 in 1998 tumbling to 72 by 2013 and the north-​east falling from 85 to 74. This was also felt in the unevenness in the pick-​up in average household incomes which stood at 60 percent of those in Greater London in Wales, Northern Ireland, and the north of England and with London at a higher level in 2016 than before the crisis (Elliott, 2017).

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as a space for foreign investment and entrepreneurial zeal –​encouraged by corporation tax cuts –​and Cameron’s idea of a ‘Big Society’ made up of charities, the voluntary sector, and other private providers to plug the gaps created by the public-​spending cuts. Socially liberal –​legislation permitting same-​sex marriage had been passed in 2013 –​the Coalition eviscerated the public realm yet, at the same time, turned a blind-​eye to the return of corporate excess. Indeed, it was the impact of austerity that was to do the most damage to Britain’s social fabric after 2008 and which accentuated its highly uneven and lop-​sided political economy as the divides –​spatial and class –​between London and the south-​east and the rest of the country expanded. The public spending cuts had a disproportionate impact on traditional Labour voting areas in the north (as well as London), in part because of the higher proportion of public-​sector workers employed in these areas. As Tom Hazeldine (2017: 62) posits, by early 2015 net public service spending per person by local authorities had dropped by 27 per cent in both the north-​east and London in contrast to 16 per cent in the south-​east. The regional and north-​south polarization of the post-​crisis economy was also caused by the Bank of England’s Quantitative Easing (qe) policy that was introduced in March 2009. Focused on pumping liquidity into the financial sector after the credit squeeze caused by the crisis, qe helped stabilize the financial sector –​and thus the political economy that had, in effect, caused the crisis –​but also created asset-​price inflation and especially of those richer households clustered in and around London by as much as £322,000 per household (Hazeldine, 2017: 64; see also Gagnon et al., 2019). Government policy after 2008 ended-​up re-​producing very uneven and iniquitous consequences that –​intentional or not –​punished the poorest people and the poorer regions of the UK; people and places that would exercise an important role in the Brexit referendum of 2016. Whether or not the people in these places were best described and understood as ‘left behinds’ (Goodwin and Heath, 2016; Pettifor, 2017), a perception emerged that these areas –​where votes for the Labour party in what were largely Labour constituencies had been declining since 2001 (Hazeldine, 2017: p.60–​61) –​were being neglected by the government in London despite the visible socioeconomic distress afflicting them, which made such a view, in many respects, quite plausible. When the economy began to pick-​up again in late 2009 the confluence of the longer-​term structural pathologies that had defined it prior to 2008 were now reinforced by the consequences of the Con-​Dems austerity policies. Perversely, given the cause of the crisis, manufacturing employment had taken a greater hit than financial services in the recession, shedding twice as many jobs (Hazeldine, 2017: 65). Growing faster than the rest of the country

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and at an increasing pace post-​crisis, this was also reflected in employment. Thus between 2009 and 2015 employment rose by 18 per cent in London compared to increases of between 4 and 6 per cent in the northern regions (Hazeldine, 2017: 66). Further, levels of unemployment were also higher in the post-​industrial north with some particularly severe pockets of deprivation ‘in a quintet of northern boroughs: Middlesbrough, Knowsley, Hull, Liverpool and Manchester’ (Hazeldine, 2017: 68). The recovery restored the polarizing trend of previous decades. Although employment levels improved, new jobs were at either end of the labour market and thus, spatially concentrated. Jobs were centred on the low wage economy with an increasing proportion of the hyper-​insecure and low-​paid ‘zero-​hours’ concentrated in non-​metropolitan areas in the Midlands and the north, in contrast to higher wage business and professional services concentrated in and around London (Coulter, 2016: 213). Indeed, the scars left by the recession in the UK manufacturing sector were deep and permanent: less than a quarter of the 400,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the recession had returned by 2015 (Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019 49). The significance of these trends in relation to a political context of Brexit was that while they reflected the continuation of a longer-​term developmental pattern, the post-​crisis conjuncture was crucial. As we shall see below, it took political agency and a referendum campaign to make these trends politically significant and causal but understood as a conjuncture, the 2008–​16 period could be seen to reflect a period where the antagonisms and contradictions that had been brewing within Britain for decades fused into a ‘ruptural unity’ (MacLeod and Jones, 2018: 113). The years preceding the Brexit referendum brought these contradictions into much greater public focus and political debate. They reflected economic concerns centred on extreme spatialized wealth inequality and a disparity of opportunities, social concerns focused on the collapse of the public realm and the weakening of the social contract of citizenship based on the uneven regional impacts of austerity and they were also political in that the political classes, and elite –​based in its Whitehall bubble –​were complicit in such arrangements. It was a context ripe for political and populist intervention –​as happened in the referendum campaign. And even though, as we shall see below, that the spatialized character of the post-​crisis economy does not completely map onto the electoral demography of Brexit, it does provide us with clear causal links that connect to a political logic of socioeconomic pain and political alienation focused on a spatially framed political elite responsible for it. That the EU was not to blame for the socioeconomic woes and political dysfunctionality described above is beside the point, as the social and political forces that

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were –​metropolitan, elite cosmopolitan (neo)liberals –​were also seen, correctly, as most closely associated with the EU. They were also the principal supporters of the remain campaign. 2.2.2 The Brexit Far-​Right The social and political forces associated with Brexit were not confined to but were mainly associated with significant sections of the Conservative Party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (ukip) and the British National Party. Though Brexit or more precisely hostility to the institutions and workings of the EU, was also found across parts of the radical left and ‘Bennite’ currents within the Labour Party, the dominant ideological articulation and more substantial political base for anti-​EU sentiments were very much on the right and far-​right fringes of British politics. Within the Conservative Party the Eurosceptic faction that had weakened and frustrated the Major governments (1990–​97) had, by the 2000s, become a mainstay of the parliamentary party and its wider membership (Bale, 2016). This current, associated with figures such as Bill Cash, Ian Duncan Smith, John Redwood and Owen Patterson among others, reflected an ideo-​political position that combined neoliberal assumptions about privatization, de-​regulation, and welfare reform with aspects of social authoritarianism –​the classic ‘new right’ formula associated with Thatcherism. Combined with concerns about immigration, this current was to become the dominant ideological articulation of Brexit in the run-​up to the referendum and in the campaign itself. Outside of the Conservative Party and up until the mid-​2000s the bnp –​with its new electoral strategy –​was the dominant far-​right political force (Copsey, 2008; Goodwin, 2011b; Rhodes, 2009, 2011; Stocker, 2017: 68–​72, 85–​109; Trilling, 2012). In May 2002 the party won three council seats in Burnley in Lancashire and by 2010 its electoral significance peaked with two mep s, a seat in the London Assembly and councillors in east London, parts of the Midlands and the north (Worth, 2019: 142–​3). Based on a more statist and nationalist political economy hostile to free trade, multi-​national companies, and globalization more broadly (Griffin, 2002), the bnp also tried to dilute its unvarnished racism that had defined its predecessor, the National Front, through dropping the nf’s call for the compulsory repatriation of non-​white British citizens. In spite of this, the party’s ‘anti-​globalism’ continued to be defined by a conspiracism with strong hints of anti-​Semitism (Griffin, 2007; Stocker, 2017: 68–​72). While its electoral successes at this time were notable –​to some degree taking advantage of the disappearance of the Labour party and its associated culture and institutions in parts of the post-​industrial north and Midlands (see Copsey, 2008; Goodwin, 2011b, Rhodes, 2009) –​if failing to herald a significant

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breakthrough, some of the ideas spun by Nick Griffin, its leader, permeated ‘more respectable’ political commentary. Thus, terms such as ‘cultural Marxism’ and ‘political correctness’ frequently appeared in newspapers such as the Sun, Daily Mail and Daily Express to attack the institutions and workings of British multiculturalism and forms of anti-​elitism targeted at so-​called ‘cosmopolitan liberals’ (Copsey, 2008; Fekete, 2018: 53–​74; Stocker, 2017: 91–​102; Worth, 2019: 146–​7). This wider permeation of far-​right ideas assisted the emergence of ukip in the mid-​2000s as a less toxic and ‘acceptable’ form of far-​right politics. With no organizational links to neo-​fascism, unlike the bnp, and drawing on disaffected ‘shire Tories’ –​many of whom were alienated by what they saw as Cameron’s social liberalism (Mondon and Winter, 2020: 45–​8) –​ukip quickly emerged under Nigel Farage’s two bouts of leadership (2006–​9 and 2010–​16) as the respectable face of the British far-​right and a major headache for the electoral strategy of the Conservative Party and, in particular its internal management of the significant Eurosceptic currents within it. It was this issue that was pivotal to David Cameron’s decision in early 2013 to promise a referendum on Britain’s EU membership should the Conservatives win the next election. More successful electorally than the bnp –​if mainly due to the defection of sitting Tory mp s (Webb and Bale, 2014; Webb, Bale and Poletti, 2017) into its arms (Farage stood in seven parliamentary elections failing to win any of them) –​and benefiting from financial support from some rich donors,49 its main impact, unsurprisingly, was in the European Parliamentary elections: in 2004 it won twelve seats, in 2009, thirteen seats and 24 in 2014. Even though turn-​outs for these elections were always considerably lower –​averaging around 37 percent over this period –​than General Elections, ukip’s results, and especially its victory in 2014 capturing over 26 percent of the vote (just under 4.5 million votes on a 10.6 percent swing) put it into the mainstream of British politics in a manner that the bnp had never managed to achieve. ukip shared many of the bnp’s ideas over the EU, immigration, multiculturalism (and ‘cultural Marxism’) and fulminated against the ‘cosmopolitan elite’ that were ‘selling Britain out,’ but it was also much closer to the Conservative party through its neoliberal orientation regarding free-​trade, de-​regulation, privatization, cutting back on public spending and tax-​cuts (ukip 2010, 2015). Indeed, such ideological convergence was evident in the publication of Britannia Unchained (Kwarteng et al., 2012) –​co-​authored by several newly-​elected Conservative mp s that advocated traditional neoliberal 49

The key donors were Stuart Wheeler (financier), Aron Banks (insurance and mining) and Richard Desmond (at the time a pornographer and newspaper owner).

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nostrums concerning hyper de-​regulation and globalized free trade but framed within an idea of a re-​launched Anglosphere (see Kiely, 2020: 92); views that were also shared by the mep, Daniel Hannan (2013, 2014) –​another Tory figure closely aligned to ukip thinking. In the context of the referendum campaign and ideas as to what a post-​Brexit Britain might look like, this current reflected a radical neoliberal position associated with ‘Economists for Brexit’ (2016; see also Minford, 2020) that aimed for low taxes, more public spending cuts, further labour market flexibility and limited social, and environmental protections and which was happy with a so-​called ‘no deal’ exit from the EU, in spite of the likely catastrophic consequences on the UK manufacturing sector (Kiely, 2020: 96; Blitz, 2019; Campbell, 2019). A ‘vision’ summed up in the phrasing as Britain turning into a ‘Singapore of the North Atlantic’ (Patterson, 2017). After the crisis the neoliberal/​far-​right connection drew closer and, with it, the relations and tensions between ukip and within the Tory party. In spite of these growing connections the Tory leader, David Cameron, described ukip as a bunch of ‘fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists’ (bbc, 2006), apparently oblivious to the fact that significant numbers of Tory mp s and party members shared many, if not most, ukip policy positions. Accordingly, two sitting Conservative mp s –​Douglas Carswell and Mark Reckless –​defected to ukip in 2014. Further, the Cameron-​led government’s austerity policies were not far from ukip s own understanding and response to the crisis,50 yet ukip’s persistent attacks on the government’s immigration policies and its relationship with the EU meant that ukip exercised considerable pressure on the Conservatives creating major worries about the stability of its vote come the next/​2015 election (Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Stocker, 2017: 126–​33). The rise of the ukip far-​right reflected the inter-​connections of structural economic forces, the conjuncture of the global financial crisis and the contingencies associated with struggles within, and decisions taken by the leaders of the Conservative Party. With regard to the former, Eurosceptic ideological currents and political forces were assisted by the structural economic developments propelling EU integration and especially after the launch of the the Euro in 1999/​2002 (Thompson, 2017: 436–​9) that posed a major problem for both the structure of Britain’s political economy centred, as it was, on the institutions and workings of the City of London, and the monetary sovereignty 50

Which understood the cause(s) of the 2007–​8 crisis as less about the perils of de-​ regulation, corporate greed, and the contradictions of neoliberal financialization and, in a classical neoliberal framing, as a consequence of the failings of statist intervention in the workings of financial markets which should be left to self-​adjusting markets (see Worth, 2019: 121, 150).

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that this framework relied upon. These tensions became even more serious and, arguably, insurmountable, after the crisis, as the EU, under German leadership, moved to protect and consolidate the Euro-​area at the expense of the City (Thompson, 2017: 439–​42). Indeed, as Helen Thompson (Thompson, 2017: 436–​42) posits, such developments would have posed serious challenges to any governing party –​not just the Conservatives. In addition to this the decision by the Labour government to allow citizens from the new member states in Central and Eastern Europe to enter the UK labour market –​the only large and highly open EU economy to do so –​from May 2004 resulted in significant numbers of migrants coming to Britain.51 Significantly exceeding the numbers expected by the government, migration and EU-​specific migration (strictly speaking ‘free movement’ within the EU) became a central political issue within UK politics after 2004 and especially after the crisis in a context characterized by rising unemployment, stagnant wages and increasing pressures on public services and the welfare state undermined by austerity. Consequently, in this context, migration, and the apparent inability of UK governments to control inflows of EU migrants because of its EU membership became a lightning rod for Euroscepticism (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017). Migration had begun to emerge as an important political issue through the 2000s (see Commission for Racial Equality 2006, 5; Duffy and Frere-​Smith, 2014: 8) as the Labour government sought to fend off attacks from the right-​ wing press over ‘asylum seekers’ with a particular focus on enacting changes to the benefits system to make Britain a less attractive destination (Consterdine and Hampshire, 2014; Mulvey and Davidson, 2019: 28; Stocker, 2017: 72–​84). Throughout this period Labour ministers talked of ‘being tough’ on ‘bogus asylum-​seekers’ (see Phil Woolas cited in Glendenning, 2008) yet at the same time, Labour also encouraged economic migration/​EU freedom of movement to fill skills gaps and to service the labour market (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020: 123). In servicing the needs of British capital and particularly in the context of a low-​wage economy with significant skills shortages the problem was that inconsistent and contradictory messaging appeared to suggest that Labour was either deceiving the public or had lost control of UK borders (Consterdine and Hampshire, 2014). And for ukip –​ever eager to explain policy issues via 51

Prior to 2004 net migration had been slowly creeping up year on year to around 185,000 people. In 2004 it jumped by almost a third to 268,000 and, thereafter, remained around this level until falls in 2011 and 2012 brought it back to pre-​2004 levels. It then massively increased by almost 50 per cent in 2014 and peaked at a figure of 332, 000 in the year before the referendum (Migration Observatory, 2019).

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conspiracy theory –​Labour’s migration policy was, in fact a deliberate plan, but hidden from the public to ‘open up the UK to mass migration’ (see Watt and Winter, 2015). After May 2004 when large numbers of EU citizens –​mainly from Central-​ Eastern-​Eastern European countries –​began to move to the UK and enter its labour market the question of how to control migration numbers moved up the political agenda where it was to stay until the referendum. A shift in Labour thinking was evident by 2007 as reflected in comments made by Gordon Brown –​who had just succeeded Tony Blair as Prime Minister –​at the Labour Party Conference in September, when he referred to ‘British jobs for British workers’ (cited in Parkinson, 2007). And although Labour refused to endorse the idea of an immigration target, Brown’s shift was significant as it appeared to implicitly accept the right’s position on the problems within the labour market as a consequence of immigrants, as well as appearing to contravene a fundamental principle of EU membership. Consequently, whether or not Labour endorsed migration targets was moot, and the fact that the Conservative General Election Manifesto of 2010 did –​committing any future Conservative government to not only bringing down the net migration figure but within a specific numerical threshold (Conservative Party, 2010; The Guardian, 2010) –​ was a logical political calculation given Labour’s apparent shift to the right on this issue. That the policy did not make it into the Coalition agreement signed with the Liberal Democrats was less significant than it might have been. Accordingly, Theresa May’s tenure at the Home Office and the introduction of the so-​called ‘hostile environment’ policy towards undocumented immigrants over the course of the Coalition ensured that the Conservatives had done as much as they could to ‘UKIPize’ British immigration policy, which illustrated how far the ideas of the far-​right had made inroads into government policy and the Conservative Party (Bale, 2018; Mondon and Winter, 2020; Virdee and McGeever, 2018). In the immediate years prior to the referendum, then, the Conservatives had first committed themselves to cutting migration numbers to tens of thousands (see Prince, 2010) and towards the end of the Coalition government in November 2014 to imposing curbs on the free movement of EU citizens into the UK (Cameron, 2014). Not only were these positions opposed by the leading fractions of British capital, legally, they would be impossible to carry out while remaining a member of the EU. However, this attempt to appease a significant part of the Tory base and cut off support for ukip merely reinforced a ukip-​fuelled ‘populist common sense’ that the migrant inflows had resulted in downward pressures on wages and the under-​cutting of British

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workers52 alongside the claim that more immigrants equalled fewer welfare benefits for British citizens and increased demands on public services. In this way Cameron’s rhetoric on cutting immigration numbers was read as blaming immigrants for problems in the funding and provisioning of public services53 rather than as a consequence of his government’s decisions; a position that was at one with ukip and the far-​right. Thus, as Hopkin (2017: 472) affirms, [b]‌y accepting the fiscal case for cutting migration, Cameron opened the door for Leave campaigners to exploit popular anger at austerity to mobilise support for Brexit, by tying the failures of the government’s deficit reduction plan to EU membership. That the evidence on these issues contradicted most of the claims in regard to the impact of EU migrants on wage levels, employability and their fiscal impact in terms of contributions to, rather than dependence on, the public purse (see Dustmann et al., 2008; Dustmann and Frattini, 2014; Nickell and Salaheen, 2015; Portes, 2016; Inman, 2017)54 did not seem to matter given that the right-​wing press, as well as most of the Conservative Party were providing an echo chamber for them. Consequently, by the time that the Conservatives were elected in May 2015 the discussion of migration and EU membership were more or less regarded as inseparable and Conservative policy appeared as an echo of that of ukip (Sobolewska and Ford, 2020: 159; 175–​86; Stocker, 2017: 126–​33). On this issue ‘the tail appeared to be wagging the dog.’ By the time of the referendum a far-​right framed understanding of immigration and the EU occupied a significant part of the electoral terrain across Britain. And this widespread perception consisted of: (i) immigration levels were too high such that in many areas of England in particular –​most of which 52

53

54

Farage made the EU primarily responsible for this through its policy of free-​movement, ‘[o]‌pen-​door migration has suppressed wages in the unskilled labour market, meant that living standards have failed and that life has become a lot tougher for so many in our country’ (Farage, 2016a). Further, Farage claimed, openly, that ‘the white working class was in danger of becoming an underclass’ because of immigration’ (Farage, 2014). Soon after returning to office in May 2015 Cameron asserted that ‘under the free movement rules, national welfare systems can provide an unintended additional incentive for large migratory movements …. Changes to welfare to cut EU migration will be an absolute requirement in the renegotiation’ (Cameron, 2015). The impact of immigrants on access to public services was not insignificant after 2010 but this was more to do with the savage cuts to those services that the government had implemented. Further, the overwhelming evidence was that migrants contributed more in taxes than they received in terms of benefits and use of public services.

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voted Leave in the referendum –​there was a widespread (mis)perception that the proportion of immigrants in the local population was far higher than it actually was, reflecting the years of exaggerations and falsehoods spouted by the right-​wing press (Berry et al., 2016; Mondon and Winter, 2020: 137–​44; Stocker, 2017: 158–​65); (ii) that the UK government could not control migrant numbers because of its EU membership; and (iii) that governments had not been honest about migration policy. Given that migration/​free movement numbers had ballooned after 201255 peaking in 2015 in the context of austerity and the absence of a convincing alternative framing of the migration/​EU nexus, and an explanation of the causes of the crisis and a different way of dealing with its consequences –​the 2015 Labour manifesto under Ed Miliband’s leadership largely equivocated on this (see Bale, 2015) –​it is not difficult to see why a major part of British political debate was taking place on ukip territory. Obviously, this did not mean that the majority of British people were now ukip supporters –​as we shall see below –​nor that the referendum result was a certainty, but the combination of structural economic forces, policy miscalculations, the intervention of the global financial crisis and austerity, and the complicities of both Labour and Conservatives and, finally, the short-​ sighted calculations and mistakes of David Cameron, all brought Britain to the precipice of June 2016. By then controlling immigration and ensuring that the UK parliament could do so meant leaving the EU. Thus, two of the major, if not, the primary goals of the far-​right, were now in sight without the British far-​ right coming close to being a significant electoral force let alone getting a sniff of gaining political power (see Sobolewska and Ford, 2020: 186–​8). The inter-​connections and ‘UKIPization’ of the Conservative Party –​or at least those parts of it that campaigned for Leave in the referendum –​became even more pronounced during the referendum campaign. Thus, although the Leave campaign was divided between an official organization associated with leading Conservative mp s and Cabinet Ministers such as Boris Johnson, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Gove, and a ukip organized one –​‘Leave.EU’ –​ led by Nigel Farage, as the campaign proceeded through 2016 it became difficult to differentiate the two in terms of their messaging and campaign slogans. Both referred to the ‘undemocratic EU’ and the objective of ‘taking back control’. Both also made misleading claims about how the UK’s EU budgetary contributions would allow an extra £350 million a week of spending on the nhs. Further, one of the leading Tory campaigners, Michael Gove –​parroted a prominent ukip populist trope referring to how ‘Britain has had enough of experts’ (Mance, 2016). 55

See foot note #51.

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What both campaigns also shared was a tendency to blame migrants for shortcomings in the provision of public services. This was a long-​standing ukip argument that had been taken-​up by Conservative politicians (including the Prime Minister) prior to the referendum –​and so was a major burden on the Remain campaign given that one of its leaders had, himself, articulated the same argument –​as a way of deflecting from the public spending cuts carried out by the Conservatives. However, it was also weaponized in the referendum campaign as leading Tories continued to mimic ukip. Thus, Priti Patel, the Conservative mp for Whitham in Essex blamed migrants for the lack of local school places (Patel, 2016) and Michael Gove made the same claim in relation to the nhs (Gove, 2016). The ukip campaign was, however, much more oriented towards promoting fear and scaremongering. The misleading and unfounded claims over Turkey’s imminent membership of the EU (and thus the prospect of tens of millions of Turkish Muslims having rights to come to the UK) and Farage’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster of June 16, 2016 that implied that Britain would have to accept thousands of Syrian refugees, all contributed to and reinforced the long-​standing fear-​mongering over ‘uncontrolled immigration’ and its connection to the security/​terrorist threat from Muslims (see Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1812–​14). In this respect, the ukip-​led campaign pumped out propaganda that suggested that Muslims were not only culturally ‘Other’ to ‘British values,’ but that they were also a community designated as a security threat. Farage, then, connected stories that associated Muslims with recent terrorist attacks in France and Belgium and the accusations that Muslim refugees had been responsible for multiple sexual assaults in Cologne in Germany on New Year’s Eve 2015 –​trying to trigger a moral panic –​as, in some way, the responsibility of the EU (Virdee and McGeever, 2018: 1806). In this framing, leaving the EU was less about an economic opportunity –​which was a key feature of the official campaign –​and more about making Britain safer through being able to control its borders. The significance of the anti-​immigrant and, specifically, anti-​Muslim racism that characterized much of the leave campaign and the fact the official Tory-​ led leave campaign was far from robust or consistent in distancing itself and condemning this propaganda, all contributed to not only a highly toxic and polarizing campaign but one where such public racism was unprecedented in recent times. In the same way that racists, neo-​fascists, and white supremacists of all stripes were supportive and joyful of Trump’s candidature, so it was in the UK that such people were enthused by, supportive of, and more publicly visible than at any other time in recent history. Such an atmosphere was also conducive to provoking racist violence –​a defining characteristic of the kind of

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politics usually associated with fascism. Thus, the assassination of the Labour mp, and campaigner for refugee rights, Jo Cox, by a white supremacist on June 16 2016 suggested that fear-​mongering and public racism had contributed to the murder. And although this was a single event the fact that reports of racist incidents including violence spiked in the weeks after the referendum result was announced56 provides added weight to such a conclusion. This nationalist, anti-​Muslim and anti-​immigrant racist current was a main feature of the leave campaign indicative of a traditional far-​right politics, and it sat –​not always comfortably and certainly not consistently –​with the economic dimension of the campaign that talked of ‘liberating’ Britain from EU regulations and bureaucratic rules and thus unleashing the potential of a ‘Global Britain’. The far-​right tinged campaign that focused on controlling and securing borders and vilifying immigrants –​and the economic, social, and cultural changes that they were associated with –​deployed the spectre of the world outside Britain as a threat, that contrasted with a super-​charged neoliberal current that spoke of global opportunities, further de-​regulation and an embrace of instability, rupture, and dynamism. Associated with the likes of Daniel Hannan (Hannan, 2012, 2014), Liam Fox, Economists for Brexit (Economists for Brexit, 2016) and also Farage himself, this current within the leave campaign also talked about how leaving the EU would facilitate Commonwealth immigration (Pickard, 2016) that was, apparently not possible because of Britain’s EU membership. Such a position was, clearly, a cynical ploy, an attempt to smooth over the otherwise racist messaging in much of its campaign but nevertheless the references to ‘free trade,’ extending Britain’s global connections and deepening and expanding markets through further de-​regulation initiatives and cutting taxes were all directly at odds with the racialized social protectionism that Farage and others had deployed as a way of winning working class and Labour votes in the Midlands and north. In a campaign dominated by falsehoods, exaggerations and silences, such a significant contradiction did not, evidently, matter –​as workers and Labour voters and people who had suffered the most from the years of austerity (and a longer-​term socioeconomic neglect) voted in their tens of thousands for leave. What leave meant in a concrete sense was left rather vague, which contrasted with the remain campaign that was fronted by the same government ministers that had presided over and justified austerity and who’s strategy –​based on the economic argument for staying in the EU –​rested on a basic assumption of ‘more of the same’. Dubbed ‘project fear’ by leave campaigners and ridiculed 56

See the sources listed in footnote #37.

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as the claims of a ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘out of touch elite,’ the suggestion by Osborne, Cameron and others that remain meant the status quo –​a socioeconomic situation of ongoing misery and political marginalization for large parts of the UK, one can only agree with MacLeod and Jones (2018: 126) that ‘it was difficult to imagine the Britain Stronger In Europe message being anything other than ridiculed among Jaywick57 residents’. The contrasts between the two campaigns –​one inflected with far-​right tropes and anti-​immigrant racism but also of the prospect of a rupture with the politics and economics that had defined Britain since the early 1980s and, in the process, humiliating the elites that had presided over and justified such misery, and the other, that could only articulate a case for remain as, in effect, ‘more of the same,’ –​suggests that the framing of the leave vote as a far-​right watershed misses important aspects of the political context and motivations of a sizeable portion of the leave constituency. Thus, voting leave could also be seen as a ‘way of voting against the effects of uneven development driven through an economic and political system focused on London and the needs of its elites’ (Cochrane, 2018: 195). Indeed, as Anthony Barnett (2017: 65) notes, in some parts of the post-​industrial north that voted leave, the risk that it might trigger economic disruption and a fall in house prices was seen as a ‘positive attraction.’ Consequently, while the toxic and racist nature of much of the leave campaign and the violence that was associated with it –​in terms of the murder of Jo Cox and the rise in reports of racist attacks in the days and weeks after it –​cannot be under-​estimated (and especially on non-​white British citizens), the vote itself should not be read as singularly representing an endorsement of a far-​right vision for Britain’s future. Thus, as Jeremy Gilbert’s nuanced and thoughtful accounting of the 2015 General Election and the place of ukip support in it suggests, the very real sense of democratic and political disenfranchisement that is experienced in [many] constituencies … that finds expression in one of two ways: as simple apathy and nonparticipation; or as organised opposition to UK membership of the EU and support for the virtual ending of mass immigration. This combination of policies propelled ukip into third place in the national vote and represents a complex set of implicit and explicit demands, which are not solely motivated by old-​fashioned racism, xenophobia, and conservative authoritarianism. Hostility to the EU, and to patterns of migration which appear to transform their 57

A run-​down and poor Essex coastal town and a signature location of leave support.

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communities and localities without any consultation with them, can also be understood as, in part, expressions of frustration with the lack of meaningful democratic participation. gilbert, 2015: 39–​40

In essence the leave vote, like much of the support for Trump, reflected a profound disillusionment associated with a neoliberal form of post-​democratic sensibility that was, ultimately, a verdict on the left as much as it was a vindication of the far-​right. Far-​right ideology and politics were a significant part of the current that brought about leave. Yet, within the social forces that produced it, there lies not only the basis for a politics deeply at odds with Brexit’s neoliberal cheerleaders, but also a kind of politics that reimagines class and community in a different way. 2.2.3 Sources and Spaces of Brexit As mentioned above, the Brexit vote of June 2016 was greeted –​like the election of Trump a few months later –​as another example of the ‘revolt of the left-​behinds.’ Indeed, there were a number of significant cross-​overs in terms of class, race, and the spatial dimensions of the leave vote. Significant numbers of workers and, especially older ones without a university education, provided a core constituency of the overall Brexit coalition. Most ethnic minority voters opted for remain and the spatial unevenness –​especially pronounced in England –​replicated the metropolitan/​non-​metropolitan divide in the US, and also in terms of poorer areas tending to vote leave. Thus, the richest parts of the UK, London and the south-​east delivered the best remain returns of 60 and 48 percent respectively with the exception of the three devolved nations, whereas the rest of England voted leave with percentages in the high fifties other than the north-​west (54 percent) and south-​west (53 percent) (see Hazeldine, 2017: 52; Sayer, 2017). These regional variations reflected the longer-​term pathologies of uneven and combined development that the crisis and austerity had only accentuated. Moreover, there was also a connection between those areas that had suffered most from the Coalition’s austerity policies and the likelihood of voting leave (Becker et al., 2017; Harrop, 2016). Non-​metropolitan areas in general, and especially those towns and cities without a university –​areas defined by populations that were older, less educated, poorer (Goodwin and Heath, 2016; Flinders, 2018: 187; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020: 24–​56) and less racially and culturally mixed (i.e., whiter) –​were the spaces of Brexit. These were also the places of ‘the past’ –​either in the sense of an imagined one as identified by the far-​right, and/​or in terms of their

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industrial and manufacturing heritage (Becker et al., 2017).58 Such geographic concentrations –​and their relationship to working class support for Brexit (especially among retired workers) –​was also connected to the impact of the ‘China shock’: the surge in manufacturing imports from China since the late 1990s into the UK and their localized impact in older manufacturing areas in the north of England and the Midlands revealed in job losses and fewer secure and well-​paid jobs (Carreras et al., 2019; Colantone and Stanig, 2018b). Even in those places that continued to have a significant manufacturing base –​such as the north-​east –​the fact that much if not all of this industrial base served as production sites for multi-​nationals, appeared to underline the sense of loss as compared to a distinct cultural past and social identity linked to national forms of industrial production. In general, Brexit-​land tended to be characterized by a generalized lack of material and social connections with the present and future with respect to circuits of the globalized neoliberal economy and an over-​dependence of public sector investment and employment. These were places and people that had been unable to make a political intervention into how the country was governed, the structure of its political economy, and what governments prioritized for decades and the disconnect –​socially, culturally, and politically –​from remain voting areas and London (Jennings and Stoker, 2016) in particular were stark examples of the deeply divisive and contradictory consequences of neoliberal uneven and combined development. Moreover, viewed from a global perspective that locates Britain’s neoliberal political economy within a wider structure of uneven and combined development, while the micro-​connections may not always be directly causal, the drivers of de-​industrialization and the loss of manufacturing production –​and its associated employment and strong traditions of labourism (see Edgar, 2021; Hazeldine, 2021) –​consequent from the China shock, as Boyle and Rosenberg (2019: 50) emphasize, further reinforces the structural dynamics pushing down on and transforming the socioeconomic landscapes across parts of England that helped to produce localized political cultures defined by loss and resentment and anxiety about the future. The spatialized class and racial sources of Brexit provide important causal connections between the structure and pathology of Britain’s neoliberal political economy and support for Brexit. Such connections are generic –​in time and space –​for the enabling of the far-​right, if not always determining. Indeed, the discussion of the sources and spaces of Brexit requires a more

58

In the 2015 General Election ukip also gained its highest levels of support in these –​ deprived areas –​of the UK/​England (Hawkins et al., 2015).

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detailed examination of the Brexit vote and the referendum campaign itself. Consequently, caution is needed in extrapolating the extent of a far-​right surge as the primary reason for Brexit. Brexit was not a vote for a political party or movement that articulated a clear far-​right agenda; and even if racist, anti-​ immigrant and nationalist sentiments and tropes were clearly part of the rhetoric of much of the leave campaign, some scepticism is needed in response to the suggestion that the Brexit vote heralds a new and dominant far-​right socio-​ political axis in Britain akin to a new historical bloc (see Cooper, 2021). Again, such sentiments of loss and a clinging to a real –​if also imagined –​sense of past à la Bloch’s idea of ‘nonsynchronous synchronicity’ (Bloc, 1977) reveal the way in which past myths can exercise a powerful political force in moments of crisis. As suggested at the start of this section, one –​if not the prevailing –​framings of the Brexit vote was that it was a ‘revolt by the left-​behinds’ or the working class (see Crampton, 2016; Farage, 2016b; Lapavitsas, 2019: 138–​9; McKenzie, 2016). In many respects this explanation parroted the long-​standing position of ukip as a party representing workers (Curtice, 2016; Ford and Goodwin, 2014; Whyte, 2015) and the way in which it had been targeting and, to some degree, eating into traditional sources of support for Labour in parts of the north of England and the Midlands in the years preceding the referendum. While such claims were an exaggeration and far from the case –​ukip’s party officers, membership and main bastions of support were drawn from the middle-​classes and petty bourgeois social layers in particular (see Evans and Mellon, 2016; Seymour, 2015)59–​not only had ukip managed to carve out sources of support from workers in England’s old manufacturing heartlands, but these voters also supported Brexit in large numbers. To what degree, then, can Brexit be viewed as a ‘revolt of the working class’? First, as others have commented (Bhambra, 2017; Hanieh and Webber, 2021; Roediger, 2017; Sayer, 2017; Virdee and McGeever, 2018) –​in relation to both accounts of Trump’s election as much as Brexit –​while the working class is racialized (i.e., divided on racial grounds and through its distinct racial experiences), the idea of a white working class is problematic on analytical and political grounds. In the former, it obscures and denies the multi-​racial reality of 59

If overall voter turn-​out is factored in, levels of working-​class support for ukip prior to the Brexit vote look much less impressive. Thus, as Mondon and Winter (2020: 185–​6; see also Seymour, 2015) note in regard to ukip’s performance in the 2015 General Election, if abstentions or non-​voters are included it was less than 10 percent of de layers (semi and unskilled manual workers and unemployed and casualized workers) and 12 percent of skilled manual workers.

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the working class in countries such as Britain and the United States. Further, it tends to place race as determining of class or that the history, culture, and experiences of certain, that is, older white (male) workers are assumed as the exemplar of working-​class life in general, denying the history, agency and pluriverse of cultural expressions of the full spectrum of working-​class lived experiences. Looked at this way the votes of the British working class, as posited by Adam Hanieh and Jeff Weber (2021: 34–​8) were far from homogenous, not least the votes by Northern Irish and Scottish workers for remain, as well as those of younger (white) and ethnic minority workers living in English cities. This is an important distinction regarding who can be accurately described as working class given that these younger workers (who either did not vote or voted remain) were actually selling their labour power at the time of the referendum rather than the large numbers of retired workers –​many of whom were property owners and mortgage free –​who were not, in a material sense, workers, who voted leave in parts of the north and Midlands. Further, privileging a white working class and particular areas (in England), in this case, the idea that these workers have been particularly adversely affected by the crisis and austerity, serves to overlook and neglect the reality of the more severe and damaging impact that afflicted black and minority communities, as well as those poorer spaces across the UK including in England that did not vote leave (see Bhambra, 2017; Hanieh and Webber, 2021: 35–​8), thus reinforcing the racialized hierarchies within society in general. And, finally, it serves to reinforce a racialized political narrative that subsumes class into race that, ultimately, serves to deny the core class relation and antagonism that structures working class life, including that of white men, with respect to the exploitative relationship between capital and labour. However, that explanations that reduce the (English) working class to white workers are problematic does not mean that working class agency and political concerns were not central to the Brexit outcome; they were (Clarke et al., 2017; Goodwin and Heath, 2016; see also Carreras et al., 2019; Colantone and Stanig, 2018b). Further, some of these working-​class expressions –​as has been the case in the past (see Gilroy, 1987; Hall, 1988; Virdee, 2014) were racist. However, while workers and especially older, less educated white male workers living in non-​ metropolitan areas defined by a recent history of economic neglect and political marginalization did vote in large numbers, Michael Ashcroft’s (Ashcroft, 2016) exit poll surveys indicated that although over 60 per cent of voters from social classes D and E (from the British social attitudes classifications) opted for leave, their overall contribution to the leave votes was closer to a quarter (Dorling, 2016).

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In the same way, then, that traditional Republican voters made up the bulk of Trump’s support, so leave was less a working class revolt but rather a decision made mainly on the whim of traditional Conservative voters –​located across the elite and middle classes –​as these provided the bigger proportion (three out of five leave votes from social classes A, B and C1) of the overall leave constituency (Barnet, 2017: 100–​13; Dorling 2016). The significance of white working class agency in delivering Brexit is also further qualified when considered from the perspective of comparing each group among the national population: ab (9.49 per cent) and C1 (11.2 per cent) which were the biggest portions of the leave vote compared to both C2 (9.02 per cent) and de (9.14 per cent; see Mondon 2017: 361; see also Dorling and Tomlinson, 2019: 28). What we can take from this is that accepting that Brexit was delivered by the white working class, let alone the working class –​in its actual ethnic plurality –​ is wide of the mark and serves the propaganda of the far-​right. Brexit was a right-​wing project, and it was ultimately delivered by a cross-​class and largely racially homogenous coalition that was much more dependent on middle-​ and-​upper class social layers and traditional Conservative supporters than workers –​white or otherwise. Most white workers actually did not support Brexit if one includes non-​voting registered voters and the working class as whole by an even bigger margin.60 Indeed, in a more general pattern since the early 2000s increasing numbers of workers –​and most of them former Labour voters –​no longer vote; a demographic that may well be equal to the numbers that have either voted for ukip (or the Tories) and for leave (see Evans and Tilley, 2017; Sobolewska and Ford, 2020: 135–​41). Where the vote of white workers is most significant politically in relation to the Brexit referendum is in spatial terms. Thus, the deep regional divisions across England between London61 and its surroundings with the rest of the country –​with the exception of some university towns and cities such as ‘Oxbridge’ Bristol, Manchester, Newcastle and, very marginally Leeds –​appears to be indicative of both a longer-​term trend of Labour haemorrhaging support from workers in some traditional Labour-​held constituencies in the Midlands and the north since 2001, and an increasing geographical fragmentation of the cultural and political subjectivities across the working class. Moreover, it is far from clear that the decline of support for Labour is tantamount to the 60 61

Thirteen million registered voters did not vote in the referendum and an additional seven million eligible adults were not registered to vote (Dorling, 2016). That one commentator accurately describes as Britain’s ‘most proletarian city’ based on the basic Marxist criteria of the proportion of people dependent on selling their labour power and who do not own their own homes (see Hatherley, 2020: 112).

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emergence of far-​right based on the support of white workers. Such scepticism is reinforced, I think, if one looks at the referendum campaign itself and the arguments that the leave campaign made. 2.2.4 Post-​Referendum Politics and Political Economy If the economy did not ‘fall off a cliff’ soon after the referendum result was announced nor has it shifted direction or altered in its enduring pathologies of unevenness and inequality –​across space, class, and race –​since 2016 either. Indeed, as the wrangling over what form Brexit would ultimately take –​that was only confirmed late in 2020 –​dragged on major long-​term economic and investment decisions were largely put on hold over this period. However, initial evidence, if limited given the time-​frame, indicates that the vote itself and the likelihood of the UK departing on ‘hard Brexit’ terms, (i.e., outside of regulatory alignment with the EU and approximating wto rules) resulted in significant falls in foreign direct investment; a mainstay of the UK economy in terms of productivity and employment since the 1980s (see Romei, 2019; Ward, 2020). Instead, the economy has ticked along at a rather anaemic pace since the end of the crisis-​induced recession in late 2009.62 Unemployment has trended downwards in general and the housing market has continued to pick up, if unevenly. And while some decisions, such as those involving state aid and regional policy –​key to addressing the concerns of the non-​metropolitan ‘left-​ behinds’ –​and negotiating new trade deals (e.g., with the US) will not materialize immediately or evidence impact for some time, it is difficult to see the outlines of any major rupture, yet, from neoliberal conventional wisdom and, consequently, the structure and pathologies of the pre-​referendum political economy. Interest rates remain low, and the Bank of England continues with its qe programme. Hence monetary policy continues to help widen inequality as fiscal policy has remained trapped within the constrictions of neoliberal orthodoxy. If the structure and dynamics of Britain’s political economy have not been altered by the Brexit referendum result nor has there been a decisive intervention by global financial markets –​although the value of Sterling has fluctuated and depreciated –​and government policy has not changed significantly (at least prior to the massive fiscal outlays in response to the impact of the covid-​19 pandemic after March 2020), post-​referendum politics has tended to maintain the populist and far-​right tinged momentum that was evident in

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Since the deep recession of 2009 and until 2019 it largely remained at under two percent per annum (see Giles, 2019).

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the lead-​up to and during the referendum. The margin of leave’s victory and its regional and national unevenness –​with Scotland and Northern Ireland voting to remain –​revealed a deeply divided country on multiple levels. That the leave prospectus was vague on what Brexit would mean in concrete terms and how it would be negotiated –​instead, relying on unfounded claims that German car-​ makers and French wine-​producers would insist on a quick, smooth and painless exit and thus the realization of the leave campaign’s ‘boosterism’ –​also meant that the kind of political settlement within the UK and in its relations with the EU after the referendum were to be far from straightforward. Further, that the referendum had, in effect, settled the crisis and conflict within the Conservative Party that had been brewing since the early 1990s in favour of its right-​wing Euro-​sceptic faction –​‘UKIPizing’ it in the process. This was the maelstrom that Theresa May –​elected unopposed as the new Tory leader after Cameron’s resignation the morning after the Brexit vote –​ confronted and which was to destroy her short-​lived premiership. May was a reluctant and low-​key remain campaigner,63 but in her first major speech outlining how she interpreted the referendum result and what she aimed to achieve by Brexit –​at the Conservative Party Annual Conference in October 2016 –​she made clear that she endorsed the nationalist and social protectionist version of Brexit (Barnett, 2017: 216–​30; Tooze, 2019a: 557–​8) as summed up in her expression ‘[i]‌f you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere’ (May, 2016). Pitched at the so-​called ‘Jams’ or ‘just about managing’ low and middle-​income voters, May took aim at big capital, the city and London in a way that echoed much of the resentment of leave voters (Hazeldine, 2017: 71). Further, trying to distance herself from the austerity policies –​that had caused so much economic pain and anxiety –​of the Cameron government, through delaying the end date for returning the public finances to surplus and promising to rule out further cuts to welfare that Osborne had planned, May positioned the Tories as the friend of the non-​metropolitan ‘left behinds’ and the scourge of cosmopolitan liberals. However, such promises were not to be fulfilled as her Chancellor, Philip Hammond, implemented Osborne’s planned spending cuts in his November budget (Hazeldine, 2017: 73). But this was a relatively minor issue given that May had gained the premiership because of the referendum, and it would be defined –​along with her commitments to respond to the voters that had 63

But her tenure at the Home Office over 2010–​16 was marked by a hard-​line attitude towards migration based on cutting numbers and the notorious ‘hostile environment’ policy towards illegal immigrants. So a politician who seemed well in-​tune with ukip on this issue.

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delivered it –​by the Brexit settlement that she aimed to secure. It was in this context that the political momentum that had produced the referendum and the leave victory intensified within the majority of the Conservative party, and its MPs alongside its right-​wing media cheerleaders to demand a Brexit that delivered on the objective of UK government controls on migration –​including those from the EU (Bale, 2018; Kiely, 2020: 96–​7). May’s positioning of her new government as committed to a decisive break with the EU gained plaudits from the Tory base and ukip supporters that was articulated through the standard populist trope of ‘implementing the will of the people.’ The fact that almost half of voters had opted to remain and that the vagueness and contradictory promises and falsehoods that defined the leave campaign meant that it was difficult to identify exactly what departing the EU would look like, only served to inflame the opposition parties, as well as the majority of people in Scotland and Northern Ireland. The divisive nature of post-​referendum politics and the way in which it was increasingly infused with a far-​right permeated populism was evident in the claims made by Conservative ministers and politicians, as well as their media allies, that any questioning of what Brexit meant in practice (and, in particular, the demand that parliament should be its final arbiter), was greeted with populist bile. Thus, the decision by the High Court in November 2016 that the government would have to gain the consent of parliament before it could leave the EU rather than via an executive decision based on royal prerogative was condemned in a Daily Mail headline with the judges labelled as ‘Enemies of the People.’ The same paper followed this up in April 2017 –​after May had announced a General Election –​with the headline ‘Crush the Saboteurs.’ Known as the voice of the English middle-​classes and ‘middle England’ the Mail’s headlines reflected a more widely charged and polarized political atmosphere whereby the referendum vote was understood as a revealing the singular and homogenous intentions of ‘the people’ as a whole rather than that of a slight majority of those who had voted in the referendum (turn-​out was 72.2 percent of registered voters) and where the actual detail of what Brexit meant was rather vague. In April, conscious of her rather slim majority and recognizing the need to win parliamentary consent to secure Brexit and facing a Labour opposition led by Jeremy Corbyn –​that opinion polling suggested was deeply unpopular –​May called an election for June. After a lacklustre campaign May managed to improve the Tory vote by six percentage points taking it to 42.4 percent but this was not enough to stop a surge to Labour. Thus in spite of the Tories benefiting from winning the support of most of the more than three million former ukip voters as support for ukip collapsed, Corbyn’s Labour

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party –​that also campaigned on delivering Brexit and, importantly, a number of key economic policies focused on addressing regional inequalities, investment, and the underfunding of public services –​also increased its vote share enough to deny May a majority. In defying the pollsters, Labour’s shift to the left –​with its most radical manifesto since 1983 –​suggested that there was a popular and democratic basis for a fundamental rupture with neoliberalism even if the left remained split on what the Brexit settlement would look like. The consequences of May’s election gamble meant that her government was forced to rely on the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party, which added a further layer of difficulty and problems to the Brexit negotiations, as the status of the Irish border was to become one of the most intractable issues in the negotiations with Brussels. Further, May’s negotiating strategy with Brussels was also hamstrung by constant attacks from Brexit hardliners in the newly formed ‘European Research Group’ (erg) or the ukip wing of the Conservative party. Treaty negotiations became an almost daily feature of UK domestic politics and debates in the House of Commons, which helped sustain the kind of far-​right mobilization that had characterized the referendum campaign itself. Over the next two years the wider legislative agenda ground to a standstill as parliamentary time and political energy were devoted to Brexit negotiations. And when May presented her proposed Brexit deal64 to the House of Commons in December 2018 it had already been sabotaged by the resignations of key ministers in the summer (including Boris Johnson the Foreign Secretary and the Brexit Secretary, David Davis) who refused to endorse it. A growing number of Tory mp s were also calling for her to step down and on December 12 May won a vote of no confidence triggered by supporters of the erg opposed to her proposed deal and in particular the so-​called ‘back stop’ on the future of the Irish border. May also survived a Labour-​backed parliamentary vote of no-​confidence but her Brexit bill was defeated by over 200 votes on January 15, 2019. May lost a subsequent vote in March after minor revisions to the agreement with the EU and was forced to request an extension to delay Britain’s departure date to the end of October 2019 rather than the expected departure date of March 29, thus further fuelling talk of ‘betrayal’ and ‘back-​sliding’ by Farage and his media echo-​chamber. Because of the extension, Britain was 64

May’s deal was a kind of half-​way house that was based on Britain leaving the Single Market but staying aligned with the EUs Customs Area and so subject to EU rules and, most controversially, permitting different customs arrangements between Britain and Northern Ireland –​the so-​called ‘backstop’ –​that, theoretically at least, allowed a potential EU veto on any future changes to Northern Ireland’s status.

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forced to participate in the elections to the European Parliament scheduled for May 2019. The result was catastrophic for the Tories; a clear indication as to where the Brexit demographic might go in a future General Election. The party lost 15 seats coming fifth and well behind the winners, Farage’s newly formed Brexit party that was dedicated to ensuring that a ‘hard Brexit’ was realized. Soon after this May announced her intention to resign as Prime Minister and party leader on June 7, 2019. The delay in securing a Brexit deal and the struggles within Parliament and the splits within the Conservative Party had produced an unprecedented political context within Britain. A constitutional crisis was brewing, and especially with regard to the relations between Northern Ireland and Scotland and the UK government over the Brexit negotiations and the kind of Brexit deal that the Conservative government was committed to. Political debate was reduced in many quarters to a catch-​all that Brexit was the ‘people’s will’ and any opposition to it or challenge to the prospect of a ‘hard Brexit’ based on minimal future legal alignment and trading connections with the EU was condemned as evidence of ‘treachery’. Consequently, political debate and the polarized nature of it with Conservatives (alongside ukip and Brexit party politicians) claiming that politics was about ‘getting Brexit done for the people’ who were opposed by the ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘establishment’ elite all reflected a framing of politics that was at once conspiratorial and authoritarian, as well as populist and nationalist with invocations of Britain ‘standing alone’ in World War Two, and the workings of parliamentary democracy as a conspiratorial clique committed to denying the people’s will. It was in this context that Boris Johnson was elected as the new leader and Prime Minister in July 2019. An opportunist leader of Eurosceptic Tories, Johnson is a pantomime character and highly ambitious and unscrupulous politician. With a record of casual racism and a populist touch, he was elected on the basis of delivering a hard-​edged Brexit and ensuring a Conservative majority at the next election after the 2017 debacle. In spite of his populist bluster, when it came down to negotiating the departure deal (rather than the post-​EU political and economic relationship which was only concluded at the end of December 2020) with the EU, Johnson ended up reaching a new agreement with the EU that was almost a blueprint of what his predecessor had negotiated with the principal difference being the changes to the treatment of Northern Ireland and, consequently, removing the problem of the ‘back-​ stop’ (Parker, 2019). That this involved keeping Northern Ireland within the EU Customs Union (to prevent a hard border on the island of Ireland) to the fury of his dup allies was, alongside the longer-​term impact of such arrangement

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on Northern Ireland’s place within the UK, obviously, a price or ‘fudge’ that Johnson thought worth paying. However, without the parliamentary numbers and having hardened the Party’s Brexit position by withdrawing the whip from 21 Tory mp s in September 2019 –​who had defied the government by supporting an opposition motion –​Johnson focused on the classical populist method of making extra-​ parliamentary appeals to ‘the people’ as a way as of pressuring opposition parties into an election, effectively, on the issue of Brexit. This was conceded by the opposition parties at the end of October with the election taking place on December 12. With the election, in effect, another referendum on Brexit –​ based on a choice between Labour’s offer of more negotiations and another referendum and the Conservatives pledge to leave by the end of 2020 based on the deal that they had agreed in October 2019 (and Farage’s Brexit party standing down in all of the Tory marginals and, instead, focusing on Labour seats in the north and Midlands), the election was Johnson’s to lose. The Conservatives won with their biggest majority since 1987 as far-​right and Eurosceptic voters that had previously voted for of ukip and/​or the Brexit Party were snapped up by the Tories. One of the signal outcomes of the 2019 General Election was that the Tory majority now rested on a large number of seats in the north and Midlands that were traditional Labour heartlands –​the so-​called ‘red wall’ epitomized in the defeat of the former miner, parliamentary firebrand and ‘old’ Labour stalwart, Dennis Skinner, in the constituency of Bolsover in Derbyshire. This was one of several seats in former mining areas that fell to Johnson’s Tories. That former mining communities still scarred by the impact of the 1984–​5 miners’ strike –​based on the Thatcher government’s policy of pit closures –​could elect Conservative mp s was, rightly, seen as a shocking and unprecedented development indicating a political earthquake. In many respects, then, the Brexit political impasse-​crisis had been resolved through the votes of white working-​class voters in post-​industrial and non-​metropolitan spaces that the Brexit narrative of the left behinds had spoken to. These were people and spaces that, as discussed above, suffered both economic neglect under neoliberalism and political marginalization, and an election framed around Brexit with the Labour party forced into a policy of equivocation linked to a second referendum and further negotiations with the EU, provided an opportune context for Johnson, the Brexit populist, to win these votes. Whether or not this shift in party loyalty proves to be a watershed given both the unique circumstances that the election took place within after over two years of parliamentary stalemate and political stasis over Brexit, and the polarizing and binary nature of the debate about it and the way in which the

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Labour leader alienated large sections of Labour’s traditional voter base, is too early to say. What does seem clear, however, is that while the Conservatives may have, finally, lanced the ‘EU boil’ that has dogged their politics and parliamentary effectiveness for decades –​casting out pro-​European ‘moderates’ and bringing to a conclusion the UKIPization of the party –​it now confronts a different problem of squaring the contradictory and, in some respects, antagonist social bases that its governing majority and political future rests upon. So although both the traditional Tory shires of middle-​aged and retired home-​owners alongside the hedge-​fund spivs (Davies, 2018) and the working class voters in the towns and villages of the north and Midlands are all at one with leaving the EU and ending free movement, the demands and promises of addressing the structural pathologies of Britain’s neoliberal uneven and combined development are far from clear. Indeed, though Johnson and others talked of not being responsible for austerity and have committed to ending it, this would only amount to a return to the pre-​2008 status quo ante. This is hardly sufficient to address the structural and deeply engrained problems that the communities that Conservative mp s now represent are afflicted by and need to deal with. Unless there is a structural change in Britain’s political economy as would be evidenced by a fundamental re-​orientation of the personnel and culture of the Treasury and massive fiscal intervention associated with a developed regional policy that clipped the powers of private finance and the City of London, then little more than tokenistic gestures are likely. And that the Johnson government’s policy to address this fundamental structural divide of uneven and combined development appears to be both under-​financed and limited in its objectives –​amounting to little more than a rather vague slogan of ‘levelling up’ –​only serves to reinforce this point. Consequently, this may portend a short-​lived relationship between the Tory party and the ‘red wall’ or, on the other hand, an intensification of a racialized politics of grievance and scapegoating as a form of ideological compensation for the lack of socioeconomic transformation. Either way the neoliberal settlement has been up-​ended on international-​spatial terms and, possibly, on domestic class terms as well. Europe: The Contradictions of the EU’s Neoliberal Order and the Refugee Crisis As illustrated in the previous chapter far-​right parties had, by the early 2000s, become a mainstay of most West European party systems gaining a significant and growing level of the vote share and, in some cases (Austria, Italy, Denmark and the Netherlands), had actually participated in or offered parliamentary support for governments. And the two crises that have dominated 2.3

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the international politics of the EU and Eurozone countries in particular –​the morphing of the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis into a Eurozone/​sovereign debt crisis after 2009 and the crisis that emerged over 2014–​15 concerning the way that the EU tried to deal with large numbers of refugees fleeing the Syrian civil war –​have certainly reinforced this trend in strengthening the ideo-​political forces of the far-​right, even if they did not produce the kind of major rupture or far-​right breakthrough that compares in significance to what happened in Britain and the United States. Thus, and in spite of the acute tensions that developed between several member states of the Eurozone –​much of which reflected an upsurge of far-​right infused nationalist and racist invective –​a form of unity and geopolitical stability ultimately held. Notwithstanding such a verdict, this is no resounding vote of confidence in either the long-​term health of Europe’s liberal democracies nor the working of the EU’s neoliberal centrism as regards the workings and culture of the EU Commission or ecb in their management of the EU’s political economy. The impact and management of these two crises within several countries and the undermining of democratic voices, procedures, and representation over these years by the actions of EU institutions and some leading member states has been deeply disturbing and, to a significant degree, has worked to further reinforce the anti-​EU, populist and nationalist and anti-​migrant politics associated with far-​right political currents. Consequently, even in recognizing the success of the EU and its leading member states and, especially Germany, in managing these crises, there have been some noteworthy developments and, in some respects, advances, for the European far-​right over this period that reveal the constitutive contradictions within the EU neoliberal project rooted in its uneven and combined character. This is revealed in the following: (i) a spatialized geopolitical unevenness in its working and reproduction in socioeconomic and political terms given the uneven levels of growth across the Eurozone, its deleterious consequences in increasing levels of inequality between and within its member states and the dominance of Berlin in its overall political leadership and material well-​being; and (ii) the combined character of its political institutionalization as reflected in the ‘pooled sovereignty’ across the Commission, the ecb and member states (in ecofin –​the Council of Economic and Finance Ministers) and decision making that contrasts with both the political and juridical limits of the democratic sovereignty of the citizens within its individual member states and how political legitimacy continues to be spatially and institutionally limited. Combination reveals itself, then, not only in the disarticulation of Eurozone economic relations from democratic politics, but actively reifies national and spatial framings of such contradictions that have been especially acute in the

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context of the evolving Eurozone crisis since 2009. Thus, the absence of systemic rupture is hardly a cause of celebration or a vindication of the political and economic underpinnings of the Eurozone. In this respect, the economic structure and the political institutionalization of the Eurozone and the way in which it has affected the workings of European capitalism over the last two decades have served to enable far-​right ideo-​political currents. This has been particularly evident in the ‘centrist-​authoritarian turn’ that characterized the responses of the principal sources of power within the EU/​ Eurozone to the crisis (see Bruff, 2014; Keucheyan and Durand, 2015: 32–​45; Wilkinson, 2013, 2015). In exposing the fundamental contradiction between its universal monetary space and its political-​democratic fragmentation and –​ during the crisis –​widespread democratic opposition to the workings and policies of EU authorities as evidenced in elections over this period, the crisis was resolved through a deepening of EU monetary and fiscal sovereignty and the side-​lining of national parliaments and democratic processes. Consequently, a crisis that offered an opportunity for a fundamental and necessary rethinking of European integration, instead, resulted in the consolidation and strengthening of the rule of financial capital and the supranational and inter-​governmental legal and technocratic procedures that had helped produce the conditions that caused the crisis. This deepening of the authoritarian tendencies within the EU project that the crisis helped propel also revealed the distinct class interests that the Eurozone ultimately realizes (Keucheyan and Durand, 2015: 36–​7; Streeck, 2012, 2016). Thus, the surveillance and intervention on national budgets ensures that democratic possibilities for altering or reshaping the social relations between capital and labour are, effectively, vetoed. Further, the content of the EU’s ‘austerity therapy’ –​at least as it concerns the rights of workers –​appears to trounce their rights as guaranteed by the Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights (see Vassalos, 2018: 102–​3). And that it has not been possible for organized labour organizations to challenge and overturn such policies by appeals to the European Court of Justice, merely evidences the closing down of any way of defending these rights in practice. Furthermore, the gutting of democratic power within the EU as reflected in its authoritarian-​neoliberal turn –​ something that has been a gift to the ideology of the far-​right based, as it is, on both targeting the EU as the source of blame and through the resultant marginalization and weakening of elected national parliaments; just what the far-​right wants to do –​also saw the EU authorities fulfil the ambitions of transnational capital (Corporate European Observatory, 2012; etuc, 2014; Vassalos, 2018: 99–​100).

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Such developments and the revival and strengthening of the far-​right have been most evident in France, Italy, and Greece, and also within Germany itself. In France Marine Le Pen of what was then the Front national –​and since June 2018, the Rassemblement national (rn) –​got through to the final round of the 2017 presidential election. And with the collapse in support for both of the two traditional parties of the Fifth Republic –​on the right and left –​the rn has come to occupy a position as the unofficial opposition and second party to the government of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche. In Italy a similar process has played out since 2009–​10 as seen in the evaporation of support for centrist currents on the left and right resulting, first, in the rise of the populist Five-​Star movement (M5S) in 2013, and then Matteo Salvini’s far-​right League party that produced the M5S-​League coalition government in 2018 which helped cement the League’s status as the dominant force on the Italian right. Over this time Salvini’s personal popularity has shot up such that by 2019 some opinion polls indicated that he was the most popular politician in Italy (Johnson, 2019). In Greece where the impact of the Eurozone crisis and, specifically, the consequences of the fiscal and monetary conditions imposed on it after 2010 –​in exchange for a series of financial bail-​outs to prevent a sovereign default and Greece’s exit from the Eurozone –​have had catastrophic social consequences that resulted in an upsurge of support over 2012–​3 for an explicitly neo-​fascist party that was implicated in anti-​immigrant violence and murder. And, finally, in Germany itself –​the most successful and powerful economy within the Eurozone –​the political tensions involved in its management of and exposure to the crisis has helped revive, for the first time since the war, a major far-​right party in national politics, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). And after the 2017 general election with the Social Democrats opting to continue in a ‘grand coalition’ with the Christian Democrats, the AfD became the country’s main party of opposition in the Bundestag. What I do in the rest of this section is, first, provide an international political economy of the Eurozone crisis and its effects across the four countries to substantiate the way in which the specific reproduction of uneven and combined development within it has helped improve the fortunes of the far-​right. In doing so, as well as emphasizing the disarticulations of democratic politics and neoliberal financialized capitalism I also draw attention to the anti-​democratic technocratic political authoritarianism within the workings of the key institutions of the Eurozone’s crisis management that not only demonstrates its inherent centrist authoritarianism but also an implicit embrace of the extra-​ parliamentary forces of the right as popular bulwarks against the radical left and its alternative social prescriptions for crisis resolution. Consequently, as well as enabling the far-​right through its own contradictory dynamics and

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institutionalization, the actions of the institutions of the Eurozone themselves could be seen to reflect the realization of an ordo-​liberal sourced far-​right imaginary through facilitating an ‘emergency politics’ that is based on the marginalization of democratic institutions and the upholding of private property rights and market freedom as the fundamental objectives of politics and state action. I then assess the politics of these four far-​right movements through the 2009–​19 period in light of the Eurozone crisis and the impact of the large flows of refugees towards Europe in 2015 fleeing the civil war in Syria. 2.3.1

Europe’s Post-​Crisis Political Economy and the Fault-​Lines of the Sovereign Debt Crisis In many respects the origins and playing out of the Eurozone crisis after 2009 reveals the constitutive geographical contradiction that defines capitalism: a social dynamic and imperative to incorporate and transform spaces into its disciplinary field that is indicative of both its universalizing and flattening dynamics that rubs up against the enduring spatial institutionalizations of politics and democratic imaginaries that are historically and culturally rooted in particular national locales. Indeed, the project of European integration and the construction of the Eurozone provide the most ambitious and developed attempt to manage and dissolve such contradictions (Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014: 861). This attempt –​one that, fundamentally, seeks to reconstitute the nature and meaning of long-​standing political communities and their sources of democratic legitimacy –​has provoked localized political backlashes that have become even more pronounced since 2009. Thus, as European and Eurozone integration has advanced since the 1990s it has, increasingly, inserted issues centred on EU/​Eurozone governance, political accountability, and the economic consequences of EU authored/​directed policies, into the daily doses of national politics within each of its member states. Yet in doing so, it has not created a transnational political community even while requiring increased levels of political co-​ordination and centralized supranational institutional mechanisms for its functioning. And as most scholars and commentators have recognized, the management of the Eurozone crisis has required increasing levels of national policy co-​ordination and EU-​level supranational supervision, decision-​making, power, and resources. However, this has only served to reveal the stark socioeconomic and political contradictions at the heart of the project: there is little or no democratic political appetite or support for what is functionally or economically necessary in resolving the crisis and securing the longer-​term stabilization of the Eurozone. Consequently, a form of crisis is now a permanent reality of the Eurozone given

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the unevenness of its economy and the disarticulation of politics, economics, and space within it. What the Eurozone crisis revealed and why it has been so significant for the fortunes of the far-​right is that it inserted a crisis of uneven and combined development into the domestic political systems of each member state. The impact of this in enabling a political context favourable to the far-​right has been variable. Nevertheless an international trend is visible. Further, even where the far-​right has not prospered the framing and content of politics centred on the economic drives towards further political integration rests on technocratic and economic imperatives that are detached from any democratic mandate or legitimacy. And in the absence of a transnational class-​ based politics ( Apeldorn, 2012) that can unite the democratic/​political bases of European/​Eurozone integration with the economic –​in a way that subordinates financialized capitalism to both spatial limits and democratic control –​ nationalist-​framed populist mobilizations offer a powerful alternative to both technocratic (and authoritarian) elites and financialized capital (see Streeck, 2011; 2012). And as I will demonstrate below, in all four cases such dynamics have been evident with the political autonomy and democratic basis for a national politics responsive to local democratic processes and demands coming up against an economy and legal-​institutional matrix that either limits or supersedes the will of voters. In addition to this, the handling of the crisis with its preoccupation of maintaining the fundamentals of the Eurozone financial regime based on monetary rigour and budgetary discipline –​that is presided over by the ecb, ecofin and the Commission –​has supercharged it by closing off local initiatives for growth other than those that rest on reducing the social power of labour and, in the short-​to-​medium term at least, intensifying social insecurity and economic instability. While the 2007–​8 North Atlantic crisis originated in the American housing market, as Adam Tooze’s definitive history of the crisis demonstrates, the wider European –​not just the British –​banking sector was directly implicated in contributing to it. Thus European financial institutions held nearly a third of the riskiest mortgage assets with German Länder banks being some of the biggest investors (Tooze, 2019a: 73–​4; see also Ryner, 2015: 275–​5). Indeed, one of the earliest warning signs of the impending disaster came on August 9, 2007, when the French bank, bnp Paribus, announced the freezing of its funds after a collapse of liquidity in sections of the US securitization market, which caused a spike in interbank borrowing that forced the ecb to pump liquidity into the European financial system to the tune of nearly 95 billion Euros by the end of the day (Tooze, 2019a: 144–​5). So the causes of the Eurozone crisis lay in the exposure of European banks to the financial contagion of the crash in the

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American housing market and the resulting liquidation of capital, as well as the global downturn and falls in world trade that quickly followed in late 2008 through to 2009.65 Like their Anglo-​American counterparts European states were also compelled to prop up their domestic banking sectors implicated in and exposed to the crisis through injecting funds into the system –​resolving the private sector debt crisis66 through creating a public one.67 This massive injection of tax-​payer support managed to stabilize their individual financial sectors in the short-​term but did not prevent a severe recession that proceeded through the latter half of 2008 and 2009. Most European economies went into recession from mid-​2008 peaking in early 2009, which then tapered off after mid-​2009 with the exception of Greece. A further recession played out across many European economies (but not Germany) over 2011–​13. Even though some of the falls in output and trade where dramatic –​even by 2016 the Eurozone, collectively, was still operating at levels below that prior to the crisis (Copelovitch et al., 2016: 811–​2) –​the impact on unemployment levels was uneven and, in some cases, especially Germany, rather limited.68

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According to Tooze (2019a: 159), wto figures revealed falls in imports and exports for every country that provided data between the second half of 2008 and first half of 2009, and that Germany suffered its biggest economic shock since 1949 as highlighted by a 34 percent fall in its exports over this period. Interestingly, as Tooze (2019a: 100, 102) posits, in the lead-​up to the crisis borrowing by Eurozone governments had not increased, including among the poorer southern European states and the ratio of public debt to gdp across the Eurozone actually fell by seven percent. Instead, private sector debt skyrocketed after 2001 reaching over 1,200 bn Euros by early 2008. Overall Eurozone public debt increased –​mainly though not completely down to the bail-​ outs of the banking sector –​from just below 70 percent of gdp peaking at 92.8 percent in 2014 and in France from 68.8 percent to a peak of 98.3 percent in 2017; in Germany from 65.5 percent to 81.1 percent in 2012; in Italy from 106.2 percent to a peak of 135.4 percent in 2014; and in Greece from 109.4 percent in 2008 to 181.2 percent in 2018 (Eurostat, n.d). Averaging 7.2 percent throughout the EU 27 in 2008 it rose very unevenly across the Eurozone. Thus, it shot up in Greece and Spain: in the former going from 7.8 percent in 2008 to 17.9 percent in 2011 reaching a peak of 27.5 percent in 2013; and in the latter going from 11.3 percent in 2008 to 19.9 percent in 2010 reaching a peak of 26.1 percent in 2013. In contrast, in France it rose from 7.1 percent in 2008 to 8.7 percent in 2009 and continued to rise, peaking at 10.1 percent in 2015 before slowly falling thereafter. In Italy, it went from 6.7 percent in 2008 to 8.4 percent in 2011 peaking at 12.7 percent in 2014 before then beginning to fall. Finally, in Germany, there was a slight increase across 2008 and 2009 –​from 7.5 to 7.8 percent before reverting to a continuing trend of falling unemployment down to 5 percent in 2014 and then to 3.4 percent by 2018 (see Eurostat, 2020a).

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In many respects the impact of the crisis –​as revealed in what happened in Britain and the United States –​was replicated across Europe to a significant degree, even if many of these economies had very different housing sectors than their Anglo-​American counter-​parts (Spain being an important exception here) and, in relation to the UK, a less over-​sized and over-​leveraged financial sector. What they also had in common was that policy responses reflected a generalized political consensus based on a commitment to bring down public debt levels as quickly as possible through introducing forms of austerity. Indeed, this mantra on reducing levels of debt and budget deficits was a key ideological and policy pillar of the Eurozone through the workings of the Stability and Growth Pact69 with the fiscal policies of Eurozone members being monitored by the Commission. This is something I will come back to in a moment. However, the impact and dynamic of the crisis after 2009 was to be dominated by the uniquely European form of political economy –​centred on the Eurozone and the specific pathology of uneven and combined development that defines it –​that the crisis played out within and which, to a significant extent, determined the responses and the options available to governments. The crisis brought into bold relief the underlying weaknesses and contradictions within the Eurozone that had been observable since it was established in 1999. Consequently, because of the problems in its creation through the way in which it locked in both uneven development within it, and decoupled monetary and fiscal policy –​institutionalizing the former within the supranational and technocratic ecb and constraining national level fiscal policy through the Stability and Growth Pact –​it was based on a fundamental political-​economic contradiction between who was politically responsible for and democratically answerable (see Scharpf, 2013; Streeck, 2011, 2012) for dealing with any crisis that emerged, and those institutions and agents who actually had the legal means to do so. And this provided a highly propitious context for a far-​right political intervention when the Eurozone crisis broke out in 2009–​10 (Guiso et al., 2019; Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014) when the possibilities of democratically-​ authorized and deliberated solutions were, effectively, thwarted.

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Member states are obliged to ensure that annual budget deficits do not exceed three percent of gdp and debt stays below 60 percent of gdp. Breaches of these rules can trigger intervention from the Commission and sanctions –​that need to be approved by a qualified majority in ecofin –​to ensure that governments take action such that they return fiscal policy to within these limits (European Commission, n.d.; Baerg and Hallerberg, 2016: 972–​4; Ryner, 2015).

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The Eurozone or ‘sovereign debt crisis’ –​as it came to be termed –​was triggered at the end of 2009 when the newly elected Greek (pasok) government reported that the country’s budget deficit was significantly larger than had previously been estimated and well above the budgetary rules of the Stability and Growth Pact of 1997/​2005 (Bastasin, 2012: 145; Featherstone, 2011: 199) that Greece and all other Eurozone members had signed up to. With credit-​rating agencies downgrading Greek debt the cost of borrowing for the Greek government skyrocketed shutting Greece out of capital markets (Featherstone, 2011: 199; Tooze, 2019a: 325; Verney et al., 2013: 402). Forced to make drastic cuts to public spending and as a condition of receiving budgetary support from the Eurozone countries, the imf, and the ecb, (the ‘Troika’) Greece entered into a deep and catastrophic depression that it would take years to come out of.70 Developments in Greece reflected the most extreme example of a wider trend as borrowing costs soared for several Eurozone economies with high levels of debt, and especially in the southern and ‘periphery’ countries of the Eurozone. While Greece’s situation was the most serious in terms of the socioeconomic costs suffered by the Greek people (Theodoropoulou, 2016) and the possibility –​that came very close to being realized in 2011 and 2015 –​that Greece would be forced out of the Eurozone, it also revealed a more generalized pattern of uneven and combined development through the introduction of fractious relations increasingly framed in nationalist vernaculars and tropes between ‘southern’ debtor states and ‘northern’ creditors centred on Germany in particular. What the Greek crisis reflected, then, was a wider and deeper pathology within the workings of the Eurozone and, specifically the inter-​connections between governments and the Eurozone’s banking system that saw surplus economies (mainly northern and typified by Germany) exporting credit to deficit economies (mainly in the south) and typified by Spain and Greece. While the former were associated with deflationary pressures connected to wage suppression and credit flows, this helped generate consumption and inflationary pressures in the latter alongside large increases in private debt-​levels that provided the ticking time-​bomb that exploded in 2009–​10. Consequently, in the lead-​up to the North Atlantic financial crisis the Eurozone operated and helped reproduce a highly uneven form of development based on contradictory dynamics that had significant social effects and which harboured a major political reckoning sooner or later.

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The Greek economy shrunk by a staggering 26 percent –​the most severe and protracted depression of any post-​war liberal democracy –​between 2007 and 2015 (Romei, 2015).

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German and other banks pumped credit into the southern economies and because of the low –​which in some Eurozone economies actually meant negative rates (see Stockhammer, 2011) –​interest rates, the single monetary policy of the ecb ended up encouraging high levels of corporate and consumer borrowing (Becker and Jäger, 2012; Copelovitch et al., 2016; Ryner, 2015; Stockhammer et al., 2009; Simonazzi et al., 2013). And looking for outlets to lend –​based on the high savings rates and limited opportunities for increasing profitability in their home economies –​northern banks were happy to do so (Copelovitch et al., 2016: 816; Dooley, 2019). Consequently, when the banking system hit the buffers in 2008 and governments intervened to bail them out, the north/​south, surplus/​deficit structural dynamics that had served to widen and deepen uneven development within the Eurozone now confronted a crisis as the credit flows that had helped sustain growth in southern economies suddenly dried-​up and the means to service the accumulated debts within these economies also disappeared as economic growth collapsed and the costs of borrowing sky-​rocketed creating a vicious circle. Northern banks –​many already exposed to the collapse and losses from the American housing market –​now confronted further potential losses, as their consumer and corporate borrowers scrambled for a way of paying-​off their debts. It was this conflict between creditors and debtors funnelled through their respective national governments that played out over the coming years as the EU and its member states tried to respond to the crisis. The Eurozone crisis involved a political clash between member governments as (northern) creditors looked to protect their exposed banks from insolvency due to debt defaults and (southern) debtors looked for ways of reducing their borrowing costs and minimizing the fall-​out of the crisis. On top of this each side worked through and against the key EU institutions and the ecb in particular. Publics on both sides pressed their governments to ensure minimal exposure to further economic damage and risk. However, governments were severely limited in what they could do and the principal economic levers that they could use to deal with the crisis. Fiscal expansion to stimulate demand was not possible because of the strictures of the sgp and even though revisions were made to it in response to the crisis these served to further embed ordo-​ liberal fiscal conservatism rather than breaking free from its ‘iron cage’ (Ryner, 2015: 282; see also Grahl and Teague, 2013; Radice, 2014; Schmidt and Thatcher, 2014). As Adam Tooze (2019a: 356) posits, in the summer of 2010, as far as the German government was concerned the crisis could only be resolved through introducing copper-​bottomed legal guarantees on public debt levels across all Eurozone members, replicating the constitutional brake that Germany had implemented as a legal mechanism to ensure ‘sound money’ and financial

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rectitude to reassure financial markets and promote monetary stability (see Bastasin, 2012: 23–​34). Although such measures were not realized, Germany’s position reflected the ideological hold of such ordo-​liberal strictures on the Eurozone’s most important economy and, consequently, the difficulties of overcoming the crisis in a way that responded to the economic pain that was afflicting millions of Europeans over this period and the acute political difficulties that deficit governments were having to deal with. However, what was also key in explaining the lack of consensus among key decision-​makers, was the very uneven cyclical growth dynamics of the different Eurozone economies and Germany’s in particular. Thus, as Julian Germann has argued, the Eurozone’s spatial unevenness –​and hence the difficulty of its geopolitical management –​is not just a product of its ‘north/​south creditor/​ debtor’ structure, but also the uneven temporality of its growth cycles, what he describes as ‘the difference between divergent but conjoined growth cycles’ (Germann, 2018: 605, original emphasis). Thus, precisely at the time when German exports began to recover (after a major fall between October 2008 and May 2009) to pre-​crisis levels in early 2010, the economies of the Eurozone ‘periphery’ were struck down by the debt crisis (Germann, 2018: 604–​5) that hammered their prospects of growth. Such temporal inconsistency in the disjointed growth cycles of its constituent parts added a further layer of unevenness undermining the economic bases of a coherent and universal response to the crisis as well as the possibilities for its legitimate and harmonious political management. The response to the crisis with respect to the policy decisions of the main executive organs of the EU –​the Commission, the ecb and ecofin –​further reinforced this neoliberal logic that reflected a myopic obsession with reducing levels of national debt, reassuring financial markets, limiting collective exposure to individual national debt levels (i.e., avoiding ‘moral hazard’) and insisting on supply-​side economic reforms as the primary means of dealing with the structural problems exposed by the crisis. In addition, and which compounded these problems, the series of emergency responses agreed by Eurozone members after 2010 to manage the crisis –​through revisions to the sgp and the conditions attached to the monetary and fiscal support by the ecb (and northern creditors to southern debtor countries) –​were based on the institutionalization of austerity through EU-​level budgetary surveillance and enforcement with the threat of financial sanctions that, in effect, terminated the workings of democratic forms of political economy within debtor states. Indeed, as Andrew Glencross (Glencross, 2018: 121–​5) notes, the crisis response amounted to the realization of neoliberal ‘post-​democracy,’ that is, a usurpation of macroeconomic policy deliberation and decision-​making from

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electorates by unelected EU-​level decision-​makers and technocrats, which –​in the context of ongoing economic problems –​provided a major opening for the far-​right. Such developments were most manifest in the treatment of Greece after 2009 but were also visible in the cases of Italy and France. In Greece –​where the fiscal situation was most acute after the identification of the increased levels of debt and borrowing –​this played out in a series of tortuous and increasingly (and public) rancorous rounds of negotiations between different Greek governments and the Troika. The seriousness of the situation in Greece not only concerned the possibility that Greece might crash out of the Eurozone –​ and the wider economic and geopolitical consequences of such a development –​but also, how what was playing out in Greece could be replicated in other larger Eurozone economies such as Italy and Spain that were also highly indebted and exposed to market volatility and spasms of concern in financial markets about buying their sovereign debt (Notermans and Piattoni, 2020: 355). The possibility that Greece might be the first ‘domino to fall’ raised the prospect of a catastrophic unravelling of the Eurozone and the domestic political and wider geopolitical fall-​out that would inevitably follow. The stakes, then, were incredibly high and not just for Greece: the prospect of a severe rupture in the workings of the Eurozone political economy and the return of a politics super-​charged by nationalistic and protectionist impulses. As it was, while the ‘centre did hold’ and Greece remained within the Eurozone –​as we shall see below –​the politics that emerged from ‘saving’ Greece and the Euro produced a set of highly polarized and nationalist debates and positions that played out across mainstream political parties and leaders through a language that was embedded with nationalist tropes and populist clichés (Clements et al., 2014). And the conditions attached to the series of financial support packages provided by the Troika to Greece from 2010 resulted in not only the direct involvement of the Troika in key government functions –​ concerning taxation, public services and wider macro-​economic policies (that were seen by the Troika as central to reforming the Greek economy to make it more competitive and to reassure financial markets) –​but also had a devastating effect on Greek society (Perez and Matsaganis, 2018: 195; Tooze, 2019a: 321–​ 45, 357, 388, 407–​29, 515–​32). The impact was both political as revealed in the side-​lining of Greek democracy and the public humiliation of Greece –​that was reinforced by politicians in northern/​creditor states and media outlets who described the Greeks as ‘lazy’ and ‘corrupt’ (Adler-​Nissen, 2017; Dooley, 2019: 78; Heinrich and Stahl, 2017; Tzogopoulos, 2013) suggesting that Greece should be forced out of the Eurozone and demanding that the Greeks ‘sell their islands’ (Featherstone, 2011: 201) –​and socioeconomic in that the fiscal medicine imposed by the

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Troika destroyed the social contract that lay at the heart of Greek society after the restoration of democracy in the late 1970s. Adam Tooze (2019a: 428) accurately describes the situation at this time in Greece as one where ‘the Greek parliament had been reduced to a factory for decrees demanded by the troika’ in a society ‘where a quarter of a million people were fed daily at church-​run food banks and soup kitchens’.71 The Greek crisis revealed the most extreme manifestation of the contradictions of the Eurozone and its management by the Troika and, specifically, the roles played by the ecb and Germany –​as the most important creditor and dominant political actor within the Eurozone –​that created a highly toxic atmosphere that was played out through forms of megaphone diplomacy as much as it was in newspaper headlines. For all intents and purposes, Greece was a vassal of the Troika and though the Greek government tried to use the leverage of a sovereign default and exit from the Eurozone to improve the terms of the conditions imposed on it, Angela Merkel’s government had to contend with a domestic political context –​sometimes involving members of her own party –​demanding harsh conditions and no liability for German tax payers (Tooze, 2019a: 321–​446, 510–​3) and whipped up by populist and mainstream newspapers alike. Indeed, the intractability of the negotiations that produced the series of bail-​outs for Greece revealed the political challenges involved and the difficulties of securing crisis resolution and some level of political legitimacy within the key states involved. The fact that far-​right tendencies could take advantage of this in both Greece and Germany highlighted the combined character of the politics of the crisis and the inter-​societal connections and causalities that played out in multiple ways. In Italy similar structural tendencies revealed themselves even if much of the rancour was concealed and the mechanisms enforcing fiscal tightening and austerity were less pronounced and consequential for the fabric of Italian society.72 Italy entered the crisis with high levels of 71

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The cuts in spending and raising of taxes that were key elements in each of the Troika’s ‘rescue packages’ resulted in massive rises in unemployment –​that reached over a quarter of the workforce in 2014 and over half of young people. By 2015 over half of the population were dependent on basic pension income to live which, in many cases, meant an income below the poverty level. Consequently, real wages fell by 25 percent from 2009 and homelessness was widespread. And by 2015 400,000 young people (out of an overall population of ten million) had migrated. There was nothing comparable to such social devastation since the immediate period after wwii (Tooze, 2019a: 515–​6). Between 2008 and 2018 growth was anaemic and one of the lowest across the EU punctuated by recessions: in 2009, 2012 and 2013 the economy shrunk and other than hitting growth peaks of 1.7 percent in 2010 and 2017, it barely managed to grow more than one percent (Eurostat, 2020b). Industrial activity did not reach pre-​crisis levels even by 2018

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debt73 and also suffered from the loss of market confidence after 2009 with the downgrading of its credit rating (Bull, 2018: 14; Notermans and Piattoni, 2020: 355) that resulted in higher yields on its bonds (Afonso, 2019: 953; Constantini, 2018). With the onset of the crisis, on most indices the Italian economy was one of the worst performing in terms of growth, productivity, employment, real wages74 and living standards. Thus, like other southern European economies, Italy has undergone an ‘internal devaluation’ –​the adjustment mechanism within the Eurozone for improving competitiveness and productivity –​with regard to its labour costs and real wage levels, yet this has not had the desired effects in terms of stimulating growth or addressing the structural (north-​south) economic problems within it, nor in addressing the pre-​crisis contradictions of uneven development within the Eurozone. With the Italian government, the ecb and creditor states viewing developments in Greece as a potential harbinger of what might follow in Italy, (see Verney et al., 2013) pressure was exerted through the ecb and Berlin for fiscal retrenchment and the rapid consolidation and reduction of debt levels. As it was, and in spite of some of the rhetoric circulating about ‘Italian profligacy’75 Italy had run an annual budgetary surplus for most of the years since the 1990s and it continued to do this throughout the Eurozone crisis with the exception of 2009 (Cozzolino, 2020: 584–​5). Italy’s economic woes after 2010 were directly connected to its membership of the Eurozone and way in which the debt crisis was managed through the EU institutions informed by the influence of Berlin and other northern states. And while this did not replicate what played out in Greece regarding the role of the Troika or the widespread level of populist invective as reflected in the German government being described as ‘behaving like Nazi,’ as was the case in Greece, nevertheless the external pressure and interventions into Italian

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(Notermans and Piattoni, 2020: 349) and unemployment rose from a pre-​crisis level of just over six percent to 8.4 percent in 2010 and 12.4 percent by 2013 coming down slightly to around 11 percent in 2018 (Meloni and Stirati, 2018). The debt to gdp ratio in 2008 was 106.2 per cent and it rose thereafter to 119.7 percent in 2011, peaking at 135.4 percent in 2014 after which it has dropped, marginally, to 134.8 percent in 2019 (Eurostat, n.d). According to oecd data as of 2018 real wages were almost one percent below their level in 2008 and only 3 percent above what they were in 1990 and, in purchasing power terms, were one of the lowest in the Eurozone and well behind that of Germany and France (Meloni and Stirati, 2018). In the run-​up to the 2018 Italian elections the well-​regarded weekly, Der Spiegel, featured a piece that described ‘Italy as a country of children who vote for clowns’ (see Zingales, 2018).

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politics revealed a structural similarity with the Greek experience in relation to prolonging and deepening the economic crisis and subverting key dimensions of Italian democracy. Indeed, the collapse of the Berlusconi government in November 2011, which some commentators have described as a ‘constitutional coup,’76 was directly connected to the inter-​play of financial market stress and instability –​as evidenced in the spike on Italian debt yields –​and the pressure coming from the ecb, the Commission (Notermans and Piattoni, 2020: 356) and Berlin, for Italy to restore market confidence through a robust programme of debt reduction, which the Berlusconi government was resisting. Berlusconi was forced to resign on November 12, 2011 after failing to get his budget passed in the Chamber of Deputies. The fall of Berlusconi took place in the midst of an escalation in the Eurozone crisis as the cost of Italian debt rose on the prospect that the government was not prepared to enact the kind of radical tax and spending, pension, and labour market reforms that the EU institutions,77 Berlin and financial markets were demanding. As Perez and Rhodes, (2015) note, it was the dispute between the Berlusconi government and the ecb over the need for wage cuts in the public sector and addressing pension costs that provided the source of the impasse and in which the ecb made clear that it would not provide monetary support to the government –​ thus bringing down the spike in the costs of Italian bonds –​until such reforms were implemented. While the crisis over the costs of Italy servicing its rising debt had triggered splits within the governing coalition in Rome that ended up with the government losing its majority, the forces driving these developments –​that were filtered through the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano –​were external to Italy and centred on the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the ecb. It was their manoeuvrings and threats through October that had both intensified the pressure on the Italian government to implement radical reform as a way to reassure markets and stabilize the Eurozone and, in the process, prevent the exposure of German and French banks to any Italian exit from the Eurozone. Thus the ecb refused to intervene to help reduce the yields on Italian bonds as

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As Adriano Cozzolino (Cozzolino, 2019: 336) notes, Berlusconi’s demise was not only undemocratic but unconstitutional: Berlusconi resigned in spite of the government not losing a formal confidence vote alongside the nomination of the new Prime Minister, Mario Monti, by the president without the formal declaration of crisis, that such an act required according to the constitution. 77 The ecb Chief Jean-​Claude Trichet sent a private letter (that was subsequently leaked) to Berlusconi in August 2011 that expressed concerns about the increases on Italian bond yields and demanded major labour market reforms (Afonso, 2019: 953).

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it feared that reducing market pressure would weaken Italian political resolve to implement ‘necessary’ reforms (Zingales, 2018), and Merkel’s back-​channel interventions made clear that the reassurance that she needed for German support was the fall of Berlusconi (Tooze, 2019a: 411). And all of this played out in the full view of the buyers and holders of Italian debt thus demonstrating clear evidence of the intention that these external political interventions would direct the behaviour of the capital markets that might best be described as a form of financial intimidation. The fall of Berlusconi was, then, engineered through external intervention in Italian politics and the workings of its democratic processes. Indeed, this was made all the more glaring with the appointment of Mario Monti (the former EU Commissioner) to head a new government of unelected technocrats immediately after Berlusconi’s resignation. Orchestrated by the Italian president and with the blessings of Frankfurt, Brussels and Berlin, Monti was appointed a Senator for life and allowed to assemble a new government without any consultation or involvement of the Italian public. Securing support from the centre-​left Monti governed until the end of 2012, but he stayed on as care-​taker prime minister after the February 2013 elections before a new centre-​left government came into office in April. In office Monti did the bidding of his Eurozone enablers pushing through fiscal and labour market reforms and with the support of the ecb, Italy’s debt worries –​and thus the wider financial security of the Eurozone –​were eased. Its most significant ‘achievement’ –​to the satisfaction of Frankfurt and Berlin –​was the passing of a constitutional amendment requiring governments to pass balanced budgets (Cozzolino, 2019: 337, 2020: 592), the so-​called ‘constitutional debt break,’ which had been a key objective of the German government and the ecb since the establishment of the Euro. After Monti left office the centre-​left governments that came to power in 2013, and especially that of Matteo Renzi (between February 2014 and December 2016), continued to do the bidding of Italy’s Eurozone supporters. Thus Renzi managed to pass a change to the 1970 worker’s statute removing the protection against unfair dismissal (that Monti had failed to pass in 2012 after widespread trade union opposition) in December 2014 in the face of further trade union opposition (Afonso, 2019: 954; Perez and Matsaganis, 2018: 200), and with the so-​called ‘Jobs Act’ in 2015, workers were deprived of any legal protections from unfair dismissal (Perez and Matsaganis, 2018: 200; see also Meloni, and Stirati, 2018). The upshot of these reforms to the labour market were falls in real wages resulting in higher levels of poverty –​just behind Spain and Greece –​and a growing number of short-​term and insecure jobs with unemployment remaining high and especially so among under-​25s (Meloni

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and Stirati, 2018). Hence a structural pathology that featured across most of the Eurozone including Germany. In spite of its fiscal discipline –​Italy produced a primary budget surplus (with the exception of 2009) for every year of the Eurozone crisis and well above the Eurozone average (Cozzolino, 2020: 584) –​or, more accurately, because of it, a greater number of Italians were worse off and poorer than they were prior to 2008 and more and more of them had low paid, short-​term and insecure jobs that failed to break the back of structural unemployment that remained regionally concentrated. Italy’s membership of the Eurozone –​its lack of control over its monetary policy and exchange rate and the strict limits on its ability to deploy fiscal policy –​compounded its uneven and combined development, as evidenced in the long-​standing regional differences across Italy and especially between the industrialized and financialized north and the more agrarian and under-​developed south. Yet its economic difficulties have been directly connected to and caused by the political and geopolitical framework of the Eurozone. Increasingly, political decisions were taken without adequate parliamentary debate or scrutiny –​something that deepened under Monti’s premiership (Cozzolino, 2019: 348) –​and the locus of sovereign authority appeared to be shared between Frankfurt and Brussels and, to some extent, Berlin during the course of the crisis. And while the logic of European/​Eurozone integration calls for greater integration including in terms of the financial sector and fiscal policies, the demos that needs to authorize and support this continues to be fragmented and disarticulated from such economic imperatives. Thus, the political and spatial disarticulation of the Eurozone as evidenced in Italy saw publics alienated from the institutional spaces and deliberative processes of democratic governance. The result –​as we shall see below –​in Italy and ­elsewhere, was a severe undermining of the existing structures of liberal democracy and the party systems that function within them. And because this political and democratic disarticulation was fundamentally spatial, it made for a highly propitious environment for political currents that prioritized –​and are primarily associated with –​a spatialized rendering of politics, citizenship, and the workings of democratic government. France provides an important example of where the contradictions of the Eurozone –​in terms of its combined nationalizing and trans-​nationalizing dynamics and forms of governance (see Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014) and as a spatial zone of accumulation –​played out in a way that helped prolong the structural weaknesses within the French economy and which threatened the political legitimacy of France’s membership of the Eurozone. After the initial impact of the global crisis –​which saw growth plummet by almost three

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percent in 2009 –​from 2010 the French economy operated at a mid-​way point between the better and worse performing Eurozone economies. Growth fluctuated around one percent between 2010 and 2019 with lows 0.3 and 0.6 over 2012 and 2013 and highs of 2.2 and 2.3 percent in 2011 and 2017 respectively (Eurostat, 2020b). However, if not replicating the kind of spatial unevenness that characterizes ‘Anglo-​America,’ economic growth has become increasingly uneven since the dawn of the Euro with growth (and labour productivity) ever more concentrated in the greater Paris region of Île-​de-​France, in contrast to a number of non-​metropolitan regions that have falling levels of growth (oecd 2018). While growth was steady if rather anaemic, unemployment continued to plague the French economy and society. When the North Atlantic financial crisis hit France in 2008 unemployment was already high at eight percent and with the onset of recession throughout 2009 it increased, reaching a peak of 10.4 percent in mid-​2013. It declined thereafter but by the end of 2018 had only barely dipped below nine percent and remained above the Eurozone average. Youth unemployment was more than double the national average throughout this period reaching 24.2 percent of under-​25s at the end of 2009 and 26.2 percent at the end of 2012. It fell thereafter but was still over double the national average at 20.1 percent at the end of 2019 (see Eurostat, 2020c). Again, the national picture hid significant regional pathologies of uneven development. Prior to the crisis France had quite a high debt to gdp ratio of 68.8 percent that put it above the EU average, and it had also breached the rules of the initial iteration of the sgp in 2005. Consequently, even prior to the crisis the costs of servicing its debt and access to financial markets were far from smooth or straightforward. The bail-​out of its banking sector and the fiscal stimulus of 2009 to mitigate the impact of the global downturn increased it further to 83 percent of gdp in 2009 and it steadily increased thereafter reaching 98.3 percent in 2017 (Eurostat, n.d.). It was the outbreak of the Eurozone/​ sovereign debt crisis in 2010, however, that fundamentally altered the structural context determining the fortunes of the French economy and the policy autonomy of the French government. Although not part of the group of more vulnerable and exposed ‘peripheral economies,’ France’s high level of debt, sluggish growth, and the longstanding suspicions of the capital markets (and Berlin and Frankfurt) as to its commitment to reining in public spending and implementing structural reforms in the labour market, combined to create panic in Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential cabinet (Clift, 2014: 2; Schoeller, 2018: 1028). Having to enter the sgp’s ‘excessive deficit procedure’ in 2009 and concerned about the possibility of having to deal with borrowing costs that Greece, Spain, and Italy were faced with, the Sarkozy administration moved

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towards fiscal tightening and spending cuts (Clift and Ryner, 2014) with the inevitable result of undercutting any shoots of recovery and bringing down unemployment levels. It was this context –​defined by a combination of the spectre of market pressure on French borrowing costs and calls from the ecb, the Commission and Berlin for fiscal retrenchment –​which determined the scope and possibilities as to what the French government could do to address the crisis and remain within the Eurozone. Thus the promises that Francois Hollande made in his presidential election campaign of 2012 against the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy, to boost growth and bring down unemployment and youth unemployment, in particular, (Milner, 2017: 432; Clift and McDaniel, 2017) were contingent on what France could secure from its membership of the Eurozone. Hollande came into office soon after one of the leading credit-​rating agencies, Standard and Poor, had downgraded France’s ‘aaa’ sovereign bond credit rating raising the spectre of a major spike in its borrowing costs (Clift and McDaniel, 2017: 406; Wiesmann et al., 2012) and so the delivery of many of his manifesto promises would be increasingly dependent on support from and co-​ operation with the Eurozone institutions. Consequently, Hollande’s Eurozone strategy was, in effect, determining of much of his domestic policy agenda and so he followed his predecessor in pressing for as much domestic autonomy to allow him to fulfil his electoral promises (see Vial, 2015: 146, 154–​5) through the collectivization of debt risk and the funding of rescue packages for the debtor economies (Howarth and Schild, 2017: 185). Unsurprisingly, such objectives were not realized and though Hollande managed to delay and limit the kind of fiscal consolidation that the fiscal hawks in Brussels, Berlin and Frankfurt wanted, he was unable to fulfil his election promises on growth and employment and he was also soon forced into spending cuts (Clift and Ryner, 2014; Glencross, 2018: 126–​31; Milner, 2017: 430). In effect, the policy space available to France after 2010 was severely limited by its membership of the Eurozone. And while it was not subject to the kind of political interference that Italy and other debtor economies were, nor the savage level of austerity that Greece was, its domestic political autonomy and ability to address both the immediate impact of the crisis and its longer-​term structural problems as concerning unemployment and rising inequality were significantly circumscribed. It also meant that the key Eurozone institutions were directly implicated in French politics and, to an important extent, the spectre if not the reality of the ‘Berlin veto’. The consequences of this for the Hollande presidency and the wider Parti Socialiste (ps) were to be dire. Thus in spite of the nature of the left’s sweeping and comprehensive victory in 2012 –​winning both chambers of the legislature as well as the

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presidency –​the expectations of party members and voters were to be quickly disappointed and major splits soon emerged within the government. That Hollande’s election indicated such a strong popular endorsement for reflating the French economy and promoting employment meant that when such policies were, effectively, vetoed by France’s membership of the Eurozone it made the political crisis in France all the more profound and opportune for the far-​right. Accordingly the contrast between the ps’s fortunes in 2012 and 2017 could not have been starker with its crushing defeat in the first round of the 2017 presidential election (after Hollande had ruled himself out) and its near wipe-​out in the parliamentary elections. The reasons behind Hollande’s and the ps’s crushing defeats in 2017 were not solely due to the contradictions of France’s membership of the Eurozone and the limits this imposed on domestic policy. However, in terms of Hollande’s electoral commitments, any chances of implementing his promised social-​ democratic reform agenda soon faded as the presidency continued with an emphasis on supply-​side reforms and liberalizing trends becoming ever more prominent in the latter part of the presidency (Milner, 2017: 437) stoking splits and factionalism within the ps and its voter base. Increasingly, then, French politics and the democratic sovereignty of French citizens could only operate within a political field determined by unelected supranational technocrats and the structure and workings of its political economy was to a considerable degree beyond democratic supervision and determination (Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014: 852; Scharpf, 2013; Woodruff, 2016). And, as we shall see below, such developments, and their geopolitical character in particular, provided the most propitious political context for the advance of the French far-​right since the foundation of the Fifth Republic. What the EU response realized was the Europeanization or, more accurately –​given its distinct ideological currency of moral hazard and commitment to copper-​bottomed legal guarantees to enforce fiscal rectitude –​the ‘ordo-​liberalization’ of national budgetary policies (see Streeck, 2016; Woodruff, 2016: 94–​98). As the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, made clear after most EU member states (with the exception of Britain and the Czech Republic) finalized a new treaty –​the so-​called ‘fiscal compact’ (formally –​Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance in the Economic and Monetary Union) –​in early 2012, ‘the debt brakes will be binding and valid forever,’ and ‘[n]‌ever will you be able to change them through a parliamentary majority’ (cited in Traynor, 2012). The upshot of these ordo-​liberal inspired EU-​level responses not only resulted in unnecessary economic pain –​Adam Tooze (2019a: 15; see also Scharpf, 2010: 243) describes it as ‘an unnecessary political and economic disaster’ –​but a significant restriction of the national autonomy of member

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states that narrowed and limited the possibility of democratic alternatives (see Stockhammer, 2016). Indeed, the responses come close to a politics or government by ‘exception’ as described by the German political theorist (and Nazi party member), Carl Schmitt (see White, 2015). The crisis and the responses to it reflected the continuation of the side-​lining of organized labour as a political constituency of European integration and monetary union and its economic suppression as a source of demand. Thus, as Engelbert Stockhammer and others (Stockhammer and Köhler, 2015: 34; Schulten and Müller, 2013) have argued, since its inception the architecture of the Eurozone has been based on a preference for downward pressure on wages as the means to adjust the economic imbalances across its constituent parts; what Costas Lapavitsas (Lapavitsas, 2012: 30) has called a ‘beggar-​thy-​neighbour’ policy. Such an arrangement is a consequence of the structural changes in the German economy since unification in 1989 which meant that when the Eurozone was established it was connected to a German political economy constituted by wage deflation which has been the guiding principle of both government policy and the strategy of the dominant fractions of German capital ever since (Kinderman, 2005). Focused on realizing export competitiveness German labour costs have been slashed since the early 2000s (Jones, 2016; Tooze, 2019b) –​most notably through the series of Hartz reform packages (introduced by the Schröder/​s pd-​led government) enacted after 2002, that sought to introduce greater labour market flexibility centred on reducing unemployment benefits through means-​testing recipients (Krebs and Scheffel, 2013; Streeck, 2009; 62–​3). Alongside this, some of the new former Soviet bloc Central-​Eastern European members have been integrated into the supply chains of German MnCs, facilitating the expansion of German manufacturing capital based on increasing levels of exports focused on China as much as the EU market (Dauth et al., 2014; Gross, 2013; see also Simonazzi et al., 2013).78 Thus by 2013 German wages in real terms (inflation adjusted) were barely higher than they were just before the Euro was launched in 1999 (Simonazzi et al., 2013: 655, 667; see also Jones, 2016). Based on what some writers regard as a form of mercantilism (see Cafruny, 2015: 64; Overbeek, 2012), German wage deflation within a context of the Eurozone has meant that other Eurozone economies are denied the possibility of managing uneven development and making economic adjustments through competitive exchange rate 78

In the immediate post-​unification period (1987–​98) trade tripled from approximately 20 billion Euros (for both China and cee countries) to 60 billion Euros and then tripled again between 1998 and 2008 to around 180 billion Euros (see Dippel et al., 2015).

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depreciations. The only option left to them is ‘labour austerity’ (Stockhammer, 2011; Stockhammer and Sotiropoulos, 2012). As the core of the Eurozone economy the structure of German capitalism and the decisions taken by the German government were pivotal to both the origins and development of the Eurozone crisis (Cafruny, 2015; Clift and Ryner, 2014; Weeks, 2014: 171–​5). Indeed, such decisions and the structure of Germany’s uneven economic development were also connected to the ‘China shock’ in that the health of the leading fractions of German capital from the early 2000s onwards reflected what David Harvey described as a ‘spatio-​temporal fix’ (Harvey, 2005: 43–​4) to the challenges of capital accumulation after the incorporation of East Germany into the Federal Republic after 1989. Consequently, the pressing down on labour costs was directly associated with the launch of the Euro to price in a competitive exchange rate for German exports across the wider EU as well as globally. And the spatial dimension was connected to both investment and production by German MnCs into Central-​Eastern Europe for exports to East Asia and China in particular (Becker and Weissenbacher, 2014; Germann, 2021: 175–​85). Exports took off after 2001 when China joined the wto going from us$17.4 billion in 2003 to us$71.5 billion in 2010 and reached us$109.8 billion in 201979 making China Germany’s second largest export market and Germany by far the biggest EU exporter to China. The consequences –​ intended or not –​of such shifts were highly beneficial to German capital but much less so for the German working class (Germann, 2021: 190–​3; Krebs and Scheffel, 2013; oecd, 2008; Ryner, 2015: 287; Tooze, 2019b) and the wider possibilities for expanding demand in other Eurozone economies (Simonazzi et al., 2013: 659–​62). Indeed, Germany is ‘structurally reliant on foreign demand for its growth’ (Carfruny, 2015; Tilford 2010: 6). In effect, then, the construction of the Eurozone imposed an ‘iron-​cage’ on its constituent members. And while the overall growth of the Eurozone has been rather anaemic since it exited the initial recession in late 2009, Germany has tended to perform better (see Dustman et al., 2014) in part because of its partial decoupling from a dependence on the Eurozone market through its success in exporting to China. This reveals a further layer of combination in that German capital accumulation has been increasingly connected to its entanglement with the Chinese economy (see Boyle and Rosenberg, 2019) while, at the same time, holding, in effect, social and political sway over the Eurozone as its largest economy and controlling the means by which to address its structural

79

Exports grew by 11 percent between 2014 and 2019 (see oec, 2020).

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problems. Hence, determining the social and economic wellbeing and, to a considerable extent, the political legitimacy of other Eurozone members.80 Yet because of the combined nature of the economic structure of the Eurozone and, specifically, the decoupling of democratic oversight and accountability from its decision-​ making, the crisis revealed the deeper authoritarian-​ technocratic tendencies (see Bruff, 2014; Bieling, 2015: 102; Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014; Wilkinson, 2013, 2015) of its executive functioning as evidenced through both the secretive and untransparent mode of decision-​making, the marginalization of democratic deliberation and authorization and the pressures to subvert democratic decisions and procedures across several member states. That such authoritarian tendencies have been at the service of ordo-​liberal forces within the Eurozone rather than the far-​right as such, nevertheless these developments do also reflect the embedding of the institutionalization of an elite form of far-​right ‘decisionism’ at the expense of democratic accountability and deliberation. Yet paradoxically, they have also been central to the political advance of the populist far-​right through its defence of existing –​nation-​state –​democratic structures in opposition to the manoeuvrings of a transnational elite. Moreover, such combination is also revealed in the way in which the governance arrangements played out, politically, within Germany. Thus the rise of the AfD in the midst of the Eurozone crisis revealed the workings of combined development as an expression of the disarticulation of both the German social formation and its ordo-​liberal political currents (Dullien and Guérot, 2012) from other parts of the Eurozone and the ecb. So even though Germany exited quickly from the 2008–​9 recession and was not a victim of the post-​2010 sovereign/​public debt crisis, and benefited from its closer trade relationship with China, politically, a significant strand of German political opinion was hostile to the decisions of the ecb under Mario Draghi’s leadership. In particular, the ecb decision to assist Eurozone debtor countries through, first, the introduction of Long-​Term Refinancing Operations (ltro) in December 2011 –​that provided cheap liquidity to struggling European banks backed by government bonds –​and, then, later, and more controversially, in September 2012 with the introduction of the Outright Monetary Transactions programme (omt), whereby the ecb purchased the bonds of Eurozone member states that had agreed to implement reform packages (Stockhammer and Köhler, 2015: 43). 80

For an excellent analysis of how such geoeconomic contradictions have played out and informed the decision-​making of the German policy elite calling for austerity –​and thus depressing demand for German exports in one of its key export markets –​see Germann (2018).

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It was the omt decision –​that was opposed by the ecb’s German board member and Bundesbank head, Jens Weidmann –​and its implementation by the ecb that triggered the petition to the German constitutional court by leading AfD and other right-​wing figures in Germany as to its legality in terms of Germany’s constitution. Thus ordoliberal tropes of German ‘thriftiness,’ ‘hard-​ work’ and ‘virtue’ –​that have provided an ideological justification for restructuring of German class relations and the marginalization of organized labour as a social partner –​have been deployed to account for Germany’s labour austerity and the necessity of its application across the Eurozone as the solution to the crises in the ‘peripheries.’ And as we shall see below, such essentialisms that try to obscure a more complex set of political and economic dynamics as well as the operations of transnational forms of class power have provided important institutional and ideological entry points for far-​right interventions in the crisis. Germany’s economic success and social stability has come at a wider cost for many other members of the Eurozone, even if its spatial embeddedness is much less dependent on the common domain of the Eurozone as a source of capital accumulation compared to other member states (Sandbeck and Schneider, 2014). Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that the 2009 uptick in the Germany economy was directly linked to China’s fiscal stimulus in helping to source demand for German exports (Kundnani and Parello-​Plesner, 2012; see also Wolf, 2016a). And yet, that Germany did not emerge from the crisis unscathed, politically –​both externally in its diplomatic relations with several debtor states and its popular reception across the publics within them, and internally with the rise of the AfD’s Euroscepticism –​points to the constitutive contradictions of the Eurozone and the openings that such contradictions have provided for the far-​right. 2.3.2 The Advances –​and Limits –​of the Post-​Crisis Far-​Right As we saw in the previous chapter far-​right parties in Western Europe had become increasingly mainstreamed by the early 2000s as demonstrated in their consolidation of vote share and, in some cases, participation in coalition governments. Further, their anti-​immigration stances and especially in relation to the integration of Muslim communities had –​assisted by the context of Islamist terrorism and the ‘civilizational’ dimensions of the post-​2001 war on terror –​become, to a significant extent, part of liberal-​communitarian and mainstream conservative political discourse, as much as it was associated with the far-​right (Mondon and Winter, 2020). However, as we shall see, the fall-​ out of the North Atlantic financial and then sovereign debt crises across the Eurozone after 2010 were to provide the most fortuitous socioeconomic and

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political context stimulant to the far-​right since the inter-​war era. Obviously, the post-​2008 crisis context did not replicate the political and geopolitical outcomes of the 1930s and the far-​right –​including those that have gone furthest in trying to disavow any connection with fascism –​have not managed to move into the full embrace of dominant social interests or come close to governing as the main party of power. These caveats notwithstanding the far-​right advanced over this period and increasingly came to occupy and be framed as the main opposition to the political and economic status quo. Indeed, the advances of the far-​right and especially in France and Italy at this time –​a process that, arguably, has yet to reach its conclusion (see concluding chapter) –​comes close to reflecting Antonio Gramsci’s idea of an ‘organic crisis’ in the political rule of capital. Thus the breakdown of the relationship between the traditional and class-​based voting blocs and their traditional political representatives –​on the left and right –​ who have serviced the social rule of neoliberal capital since the 1980s, opened up the possibility of a major rupture in the existing political management and geopolitical structure of capitalist accumulation, as well as in the ideo-​political currency associated with and necessary for the continuing social legitimacy of the neoliberal capitalist order. Such a context has not been exclusively defined by the rise of the advances of the far-​right, as the rise of radical left movements such as Podemos in Spain and syriza –​albeit briefly –​in Greece demonstrated the potential for a left-​ populism that runs both counter to the prevailing neoliberal centrism of existing political elites and the EU mainstream, as well as the anti-​immigrant and nationalism of the far-​right. However, these currents reflected more locally-​ specific developments rather than a generalized phenomenon in a crisis context and either –​as in the case of syriza in 2015 –​quickly buckled under a combination of domestic and external class pressure to the whims of financial markets and the ‘Troika axis’ –​or failed to secure a new social coalition for a radical restructuring of the EU’s political economy. Consequently, such limitations as evidence of and prospects for the advance of a radical leftist alternative to the prevailing neoliberal order in the midst of the crisis, revealed a very different picture to that which fuelled the crisis-​ridden politics of the inter-​war era and especially the political agency of ruling class forces. The crisis context within the geo-​economy of the Eurozone crisis and its accompanying toxic nationalist blame game and the authoritarian machinations of the Troika were not the only gifts fuelling the advance of the far-​ right. The influx of large numbers of refugees from the war in Syria in 2015 and the spectre of ‘uncontrolled’ racialized migrant flows also provided a perfect spectacle for far-​right weaponization with which it took full advantage of, and

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especially within a pre-​existing context of widespread social misery and alienation from existing political elites. Indeed, the way in which the limits of EU legal and political competence operated in relation to the mass inflow of refugees through southern and south-​eastern Europe revealed the EU as a unique uneven and combined geopolitical space. On the one hand, the EU exerted supranational authority through its monetary sovereignty approximate to a single monetary space, yet this universal supranational legal power was suspended over a highly uneven socioeconomic terrain that worked to reproduce spatialized unevenness at the inter-​national and sub-​national levels. On the other hand, the EU’s formal commitment to solidarity in dealing with refugees through the so-​called ‘Dublin Convention’ broke down with the unprecedented numbers entering EU territory and especially as two of the main receiving states –​Italy and Greece –​were severely challenged in accommodating and dealing with refugees given the social crisis engulfing them consequent on the Eurozone’s austerity medicine. The refugee crisis saw a reassertion of both power dynamics –​in the decisions taken by the Merkel government in the summer of 2015 to welcome Syrian refugees into Germany that reinforced wider nationalist narratives about the EU as beholden to German power –​and, at the same time, nationalist backlashes against the EU and those northern/​wealthier states, in particular, for not taking in more refugees and/​or providing humanitarian aid to countries like Italy and Greece. The refugee crisis demonstrated combined development in the fractured sovereignty and legal obligations and powers of nation-​states vis-​à-​ vis the EU centre alongside the nationalist responses that torpedoed any possibility for EU-​wide burden-​sharing and resolution that, politically, was inseparable from the supra-​nationalist arrangements that governed the economic crisis that many EU states were dealing with. The political context within many EU/​Eurozone states around 2015 produced an alignment of circumstances and contradictions that helped fuel further advances for the far-​right. That the centre held through combinations of fudge, compromise, threat and legal innovation is testament to both the political-​institutional flexibility and creativity of its leadership –​in the EU and key national capitals –​and the limits to far-​right advance, even if such limits have now shifted the terrain of many national party systems with the far-​right coming to occupy an increasingly significant hold on the broader right and in making further inroads into the working class. What such developments reveal, then, is the limited nature of the political challenge of the far-​right to the institutions and workings of the EU as a whole, and the neoliberal consensus that has dominated EU policy making since the formation of the Single Market. This is not to say that far-​right parties are not a threat to the core

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norms of liberal-​constitutional government. Nor that they do not cultivate a toxic brew of politics that challenges some of the basic principles that inform the culture and workings of the EU. Yet, they do not, yet –​and this also applies to the far-​right governments in Poland and Hungary involved in ongoing legal disputes with EU institutions –​pose a fundamental challenge to the EU itself as an institutional setting and geopolitical venture. Nor do they offer a geopolitical or institutional alternative to the existing capitalist economy that characterizes the EU. Such realities reflect the broader and deeply embedded transnational material and class structures of European capitalist accumulation such that an alternative –​be it a radical break towards autarchy or a shift further towards radical neoliberalism outside of the EU –​is highly unlikely, as such a project would struggle to secure an increase in the vote share for far-​right parties. The two elements required for a fundamental rupture with the EU –​and its associated form of accumulation and governance –​first, the structural and spatial concentrations of the ruling class and, secondly, the mass (or democratic) basis for circumventing such material barriers, do not exist. The result is, for the moment and the likely medium and possibly longer-​term, the existence and fluctuating power and influence of a permanent far-​right oppositional current that exerts pressure on the EU and national governments and which serves to undermine and weaken the ambitions for further and deeper integration, but which is not able to provide a break with it. That such a situation is obviously connected to wider global geopolitical developments –​not least the emergence of non-​European and non-​Western geopolitical powers and centres of accumulation such as China, India and others, merely serves to underline the geopolitical limits on the possibilities for the far-​right to break out of the EU’s iron cage. What follows is an assessment of the advances and limits of far-​right parties in Germany, France, Italy, and Greece since the outbreak of the Eurozone crisis. 2.3.3 Germany As sketched above the singular position of Germany within –​and as the primary beneficiary of –​the Eurozone was not enough to spare it from the advance of the far-​right. And while the impact of the continuing role of the historical memory of Nazism has worked to limit the openings for the far-​right –​not just neo-​fascists –​the emergence of the AfD as the articulation of a German far-​right birthed by the Eurozone crisis was an unprecedented development in post-​war German politics (Berbuir et al., 2015). Initially emerging as a ‘soft-​ Eurosceptic’ party –​opposed to the Eurozone rather than the EU itself –​its emergence also reflected a wider sense of disillusionment among social

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conservative currents within the cdu as to the party’s shift to the centre under Merkel on socio-​cultural matters concerning family policy, the recognition of same-​sex civil unions, gender quotas in company boardrooms and support for changes to the immigration law (Decker, 2016: 3; Grimm, 2015). Within the space of five years –​from its founding in September 2012 –​the AfD moved in a meteoric fashion81 from a party of disgruntled ordo-​liberal economists and intellectuals with close links to the conservative establishment who were critical of the legal framework of the Eurozone and Germany’s role within it (Berbuir et al., 2015: 154–​5; Decker, 2016: 2–​3; Grimm, 2015; Havertz, 2019: 389), to a mass populist and xenophobic party. Its support more than doubled between 2013 and 2017 (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019: 11) and after the 2017 Federal Election it became the main of opposition to the cdu-​s pd coalition government in the Bundestag with 94 mp s based on 12.6 percent vote share, alongside delegations in 13 out of 16 state parliaments (Arzheimer, 2019: 90). Further, by 2017 its ordo-​liberal origins and hostility towards the Eurozone were now increasingly over-​determined by an anti-​Muslim racism that was also revealed in its close association with far-​right street movements such as Pegida (Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West) and Identity Europe. Support for the AfD is regionally uneven and mostly concentrated in the former Länder of the German Democratic Republic (gdr). Based on polling data from the 2017 Federal Election AfD support is particularly concentrated in the eastern states and notably in Saxony, where it won more votes than any other party. Although it gained fewer votes in the western Länder it did manage to pass the five percent threshold for representation in these areas reaching over ten percent of the vote in all but four states (Schleswig-​Holstein, North-​Rhine Westphalia, Lower Saxony, and Hamburg). Its spatial character –​replicating other European far-​right parties –​is also demonstrated in its support being located in smaller towns (though see Mullis, 2021 in relation to AfD support in parts of Frankfurt) and rural areas, as well as its voters tending to be male rather than female and with increasing levels of support among middle-​aged men (Arzheimer, 2019: 93; Förtner and Belina, 2021). Such a rapid advance into the centre of German democracy –​and with some of its leading figures echoing views on Nazism and the Second World War that had previously been confined to the neo-​Nazi fringes of German 81

Though as Frank Decker (2016:2) notes, the kinds of ordo-​liberal Euro-​sceptic and socially conservative ideas and political currents had been circulating for some time on the fringes of the cdu and in the Freie Demokratische Partei (fdp). The Eurozone crisis provided the ideal opportunity for such ideas to take on a more concrete political expression.

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political discourse –​shook the confidence of German politics. And while the mainstream parties (and especially the cdu) made clear that they would not work with or co-​operate with the AfD –​thus attempting to frame it as outside the bounds of normal and acceptable politics –​this did not prevent some elements within the cdu co-​operating with the AfD. Thus in February 2020 the cdu branch in the eastern state of Thuringia combined with the AfD in the state parliament to oust the incumbent spd premier and install a new right-​ wing coalition that rested on AfD votes, if not membership of the coalition (Chazan, 2020a). The impact of this was such that the leader of the cdu and Angela Merkel’s anointed successor, Annegret Kramp-​Karrenbauer, decided to resign (Chazan, 2020b) after the widespread uproar caused by the events in Thuringia. Prior to 2015 the AfD had not managed to make a major electoral breakthrough, although it had made some inroads into state parliaments in the east and secured over seven percent of the vote and seven seats in the 2014 European Elections. Consequently, its ordo-​liberal and nationalist infused critique of the Coalition government’s response to the Eurozone crisis and German tax-​payers exposure to the debt of countries such as Greece through bail-​out funds (Lees, 2018) –​which, up to then, had tended to define it (Havertz, 2019: 390) –​failed to shake-​up the political system. It was the decision by the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, in September 2015 to unilaterally suspend the rules of the EU’s Dublin Convention on dealing with refugees –​which gave the green light for almost a million refugees to flow into Germany –​that was key to the shift in the AfD’s political fortunes (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019: 7). Indeed, as Frank Decker (Decker, 2016: 10) suggests, with the Greek and broader Eurozone crisis becoming less prominent in political discussion throughout 2015 and with party infighting over the AfD’s identity and future strategy dominating its news coverage –​causing its poll numbers to plummet –​the AfD’s political momentum seemed to have slowed. Quickly becoming the primary vehicle for opposing Merkel’s decision and the broader welcoming of refugees across much of the political spectrum, the AfD’s pre-​existing momentum prior to the refugee crisis was confirmed after August 2015, as it became a party increasingly defined by an anti-​Muslim racism, xenophobia and more explicit right-​wing populism –​with some of its leaders making openly racist statements and broaching a taboo of Germany’s post-​war political consensus through downplaying the significance of the Holocaust (Art, 2018: 81; Arzheimer and Berning, 2019: 2; Brennetot, 2020: 1; Hansen and Olsen, 2019; Scally, 2018). Such racist tendencies had been evident in the party prior to the summer of 2015, but Merkel’s decision opened up a political space and opportunity that the AfD –​or its more nationalist-​populist

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current –​seized upon and occupied, and, in doing so, completed its transformation as a party of the far-​right, which resulted in an exodus of some its former leading members. The party’s opposition to Merkel’s decision –​which was shared by leading members of the Bavarian Christian Social Union (csu) and some in the cdu leadership (Financial Times, 2015) –​saw it attract increasing support from voters who fit the classic far-​right demographic profile, as well as far-​right activists from pre-​existing networks in the east, including neo-​Nazis (Arzheimer, 2019: 93, 95; Decker, 2016: 9). The AfD’s opportunism in the summer of 2015, which consolidated its popularity and its challenge to the existing party system reflected a more generalized –​across much of Europe –​nationalist and populist politics which had benefited from the triptych of rolling crises since 2008: financial, sovereign debt and refugees. Consequently, the geopolitical context and dynamics of these crises, as they played out across the EU and the Eurozone were crucial in seeding the nationalist sentiments based on grievances connected to political elites ignoring the democratic wishes of the ‘hard working little people’ –​classic tropes of the far-​right. And given the broader political consensus on German policy towards the Eurozone crisis and refugees, the AfD tapped into a pre-​existing and growing hostility to Germany’s direction of travel. Such sentiments had also been evident in 2010–​11 in the controversy and ‘debate’ triggered by the publication of Thilo Sarrazin’s (a former member of the Bundesbank Executive Board) racist polemic, Deutschland schafft sich ab (Germany Abolishes Itself) in 2010, which became a best-​seller and was also championed by the mass-​selling tabloid Bild (Berbuir et al., 2015: 159). Thereafter, AfD communication and propaganda –​which made particular use of social media platforms (Stier, et. al, 2017) –​became less concerned with its traditional ordo-​liberal economic position and opposition to Eurozone bail outs and much more the ‘threat’ posed by Muslim refugees that reflected the shifting political wind of opposition to the elites and the political consensus. And with the November 2015 Islamist terrorist attack in Paris and the reporting of sexual assaults purportedly carried out by North African immigrants in Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015, the AfD’s anti-​immigration posture gained further traction and especially in the hardening of such attitudes in its electorate. In spite of the greater emphasis on immigration and anti-​Muslim racism, the AfD has maintained its ordo-​liberal origins and its commitment to free-​ trade –​upon which a sizeable part of the health and prosperity of the German economy depend (Brennetot, 2020: 2). And while this does not make it unique among other European far-​right parties –​see ukip and the Swiss People’s Party for ­example –​it does reflect an alignment with a sizeable part of mainstream and conservative political opinion in Germany and the limits of the

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AfD’s nationalist radicalism. Further, and as discussed in Chapter 2 this combination of xenophobia and racist attitudes with neoliberal economic assumptions is deeply rooted in neoliberal thinking. Indeed, the articulation of ordo-​ liberal positions within AfD electoral programmes and party propaganda (as ­evidenced by a heavy emphasis on competition in the organization of the economy, fiscal austerity and cuts in public spending and the promotion of individuals as enterprising subjects –​see Salzborn, 2016: 53; Havertz, 2019: 390–​3)82 is couched within a broader geopolitical framing and racialized hierarchy that depicts Germany and Germans as especially hard working, moral, innovative and productive in contrast to Southern Europeans. Thus, in the AfD’s moral universe, some cultures are more ‘hard-​working’ and ‘deserving’ than others. Resting on a mischaracterization of Germany’s economic relations with Southern Europe this articulation plays a key role in the party’s racialized populism and its attempt to construct a discourse around a ‘pure people’ that distinguishes Germans from ‘lazy Greeks’ or ‘corrupt Italians’ and immigrants inside Germany ‘bleeding the welfare state’ (Berbuir et al., 2015: 167), and Germans as especially virtuous (Havertz, 2019: 397). Cultural and racial stereotypes play a key role in this strategy assisted by a wider popular media framing through such outlets as the tabloid Bild with Greeks and others offered as the antithesis of German virtue (Decker, 2016: 5; Heinrich and Stahl, 2017; Tzogopoulos, 2013). Such neoliberal assumptions also play out in the welfare nativism that characterizes the AfD. A comprehensive welfare system at home parallels the supposed generosity and burden of German taxpayers in funding the lifestyles of Southern Europeans. At home it is primarily about migrants and where the combination of a discourse around a ‘pure people’ and German virtue is deployed to single out immigrants as ‘others’ and ‘outsiders’ because of their lack of moral –​as economic –​virtue and their inability to adapt to a free economy. Further, such comprehensive provision of welfare and its accessibility by migrants and refugees is at odds with the moral basis of the AfD’s ordo-​ liberal discourse (Roch, 2021), which rests on a ‘naturalized inequality’ rooted in competition and individualism, that is implicitly racialized and connected

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Ralf Havertz (2019: 392) quotes from the AfD’s 2016 party programme that nicely captures such ordo-​liberal assumptions, ‘[t]‌he best economic results are achieved through market competition. Unsubsidised supply that offers the greatest advantage to market participants … The more competition and the lower the public spending ratio the better for everyone. For competition creates the freedom to grow and decide individually whether to acquire private property in goods and means of production, to conclude contracts in one’s own interest and in the interest of the public good.’

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to both internal (German/​other –​migrant) and external hierarchies. The racist stereotyping as typified in Thilo Sarrazin’s polemic is justified in ‘objective’ and economic terms and where the AfD’s ordo-​liberal discourse supplements its racism. Such connections, as we have seen elsewhere, are common in the positioning and articulation of the far-​right across the neoliberal era. Such ideological commonalities are also revealed in the social layers and spaces supportive of the AfD. We have already mentioned the significance of the support it draws from voters who live in the former East Germany. Here, the operation of uneven and combined development reveals the structural mechanisms generating such political dynamics. The lack of economic opportunities and development alongside population loss and an increasingly ageing population vis-​à-​vis the west, as well as the higher dependence on welfare, have fueled a far-​right inflected form of combination as revealed in a political culture that continues to be defined by the legacies of East Germany’s social and cultural isolation and authoritarianism, and the absence of effective and comprehensive solidarity structures and institutions that formerly characterised East German society. As well as this regional concentration of support –​which does not equate to the AfD being a regional party –​the party’s voters tend to reflect a demographic profile common to the neoliberal far-​right. Less educated middle-​aged men (Arzheimer, 2019: 93; Arzheimer and Berning: 2019: 17) with support also coming from middle-​income voters and some members of the working class. Here, as elsewhere it is the absence of a culture connected to the institutions of organized labour that are central in determining a tendency for some workers to support the AfD, which otherwise seems to fit a profile of those who perceive themselves as ‘left behind’ even if, materially, that is not the case. The rise of the AfD reflects a watershed in post-​war German politics. Benefiting from its establishment origins rather than as a party rooted in the fascist past or association with visible neo-​Nazis or a street movement, it emerged at an opportune moment with respect to the growth of disillusionment among parts of the cdu as the party’s apparent embrace of liberal norms, the controversy and publicity stirred up by Thilo Sarrazin’s book and the toxic politics of the Eurozone crisis. Its hybrid character –​as bastion of ordo-​liberal orthodoxy and anti-​immigrant populism –​has not, however, provided a model of stability for the party’s organization nor ideological or policy coherence. Factional rivalry has continued to characterise it including in its Bundestag delegation with changes of leadership –​that also led to defections of some of its mp s and mep s –​and problems of party discipline (Arzheimer, 2019: 93–​ 5). Further, its association with a racist and violent street politics as revealed in the violent demonstrations in the city of Chemnitz in August 2018 when immigrants (Isenson, 2018) were targeted by thousands of far-​right supporters

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(that included known neo-​Nazis) after news that asylum seekers had killed a local man, suggest that the longer-​term identity and direction of the AfD are far from clear. That factionalism and its ideological representation in having two wings –​ordo-​liberal and nationalist –​may have played to its advantage in recent elections is no guarantee that it is a longer-​term basis for party strategy. Such factionalism benefits a party of opposition, as it extends its sources of support across multiple grievances and cleavages and also means it can draw support from voters who tend to incline towards the right and left on economic issues when its ‘leftist’ wing is complemented by social and political authoritarian and anti-​immigrant currents. Further, as Arnaud Brennetot (2020: 2) notes, its ability to capture votes from those who have not voted before or as a protest vote is also connected to the failure of Die Linke –​on the radical left –​ to maintain its cache as an effective protest party in a context defined by the Eurozone crisis and immigration. As the migration issue has lost political traction after the large influx over 2015–​16 and as the Eurozone stabilized, two of the primary drivers of AfD political relevance and popularity have become less defining of German political debate. In the elections to the EU parliament in May 2019 the AfD only gained 11 percent coming fourth behind the cdu, Greens and spd while remaining strong in the east –​topping the polls in Brandenburg and Saxony (Arzheimer, 2019: 98). And with the change of leadership in the cdu with Merkel standing down in late 2021 the direction of the cdu under new leadership may also play an important role in determining the future of the party. Further, how long it can maintain the support of middle-​class ordo-​ liberals and working-​class supporters who are much more sensitive to attacks on welfare provision and public spending cuts remains to be seen. For now the appearance and consolidation of the AfD has made Germany appear like any other European country in terms of the far-​right becoming mainstreamed within the political system though it is difficult to see how the party could come to play a role in national government in the foreseeable future. 2.3.4 France The advances made by the Front National (fn) –​or what has been known as the Rassemblement National (rn) since 2018 –​after the North Atlantic financial crisis have not been as significant as those of the AfD and this is mainly because of the longer-​term rootedness of the far-​right in French politics. A significant if fluctuating part of the French party system since the 1980s, prior to the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections the party had tended to average around 15 percent in the former (with the exception of 2007 when its candidate Jean-​Marie Le Pen got just over 10 percent of votes in the first round) and an average of 11–​12 percent in the latter (again with the exception of 2007

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when it only got 4.3 percent). And the fact that its parliamentary representation has been so low over this period is mainly down to the distortions of the electoral system. Its significance prior to 2017 was highlighted by the major political upset that it caused in 2002 when its leader (and former Poujadist), Jean-​Marie Le Pen, won through to the second round of the presidential election securing 16.9 percent of the vote share (and 4.8 million votes), and in the process humiliating the Socialist Party’s (and former prime minister) candidate, Lionel Jospin, who failed to make the run-​off. The 2002 presidential vote had been the high point of fn success up until the leadership of Marine Le Pen –​the daughter of the party’s founder, Jean-​Marie –​who took over in 2011. Like her father but arguably performing better, Marine also humiliated the Socialist Party’s candidate in the 2017 presidential election –​though given the very different context of 2017; in this case there was little expectation that the  PS candidate, Benoit Hamon, would actually get through to the second round –​winning 7.6 million votes and 21.3 percent of votes., Again, however, like here father, she lost. While her father had lost to Jacques Chirac of the establishment right in 2002, Marine was defeated by the centrist, political outsider and former banker, Emmanuel Macron. Although the 2017 elections did not take place amidst the economic misery caused by the fall-​out from the North Atlantic financial crisis, nor the highly toxic atmosphere of the Eurozone crisis over 2010–​13, the elections occurred within the most favourable domestic and international –​economic and geopolitical context –​for the French far-​right since the high point of Poujadism in the mid-​late 1950s. Indeed, the combination of the Eurozone crisis, concerns about immigration linked to the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and the deep scars left by the wave of Islamist-​inspired terrorist attacks (and especially the co-​ordinated and mass casualty attacks of November 13–​14, 2015), appeared scripted to the political tune that the fn had been singing for years. This confluence of different forms of crisis –​socioeconomic, cultural, political and security –​helped produce a condition of organic crisis as evidenced by the collapse of support for the ps as the representative of the left and the majority of the French working class, as well as the eclipsing of the mainstream right by the fn and the rapid emergence of the ‘radical-​ centrist populism’ of Macron and En Marche. And in party-​system terms the outcome of the 2017 elections produced a new and much more polarized political constellation for the management of French capitalism; between a neoliberal technocratic dynamism facing off against a far-​right based on statist and nationalist protectionism. Consequently, the advances of Marine Le Pen’s new fn/​r n –​in terms of its economic strategy and its attempt to present itself as a party defined by the values of the Republic –​need to be located in this highly favourable context which

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suggests that 2017 may be the high point of the French far-​right in its current fn/​r n incarnation. In suggesting this, however, it also seems clear that both the consequences of the 2008 crisis and the rn’s longer-​term anti-​immigrant and, especially, anti-​Muslim racism –​that has defined its ideo-​political identity over the leaderships of both Le Pens –​has come to increasingly characterise the mainstream of French politics and not just on the broader right (see Mondon, 2014; Mondon and Winter, 2020; Wolfreys, 2018). The impact and significance of the fn/​r n should not be limited, then, to the outcomes of party and electoral competition but more broadly with respect to the ideological and cultural discourses that shape societal and political debate in France, and how such developments are associated with the recurring instabilities and crises of capitalist development and the problems of establishing a stable ideo-​political order in such a context. Further, with the collapse of the Socialist Party and the splits that have defined it in recent years, while the rn may not have moved beyond the threshold of an anti-​system party of opposition, it appears to be increasingly a party supported by workers (Shields, 2015: 422, 426, 2018: 543, 548; Surel, 2019: 1244). In what follows I discuss the ideo-​political content of the party under Marine Le Pen’s leadership focusing on its political economy and its ‘de-​demonization’ strategy, the geography and sociology of support for it, before examining the 2017 elections and future prospects. After 2011 the fn shifted its ideo-​political focus and electoral strategy (Bastow, 2018; Hutchins and Halikiopoulou, 2019; Ivaldi, 2016; Mayer, 2013, 2015; Shields, 2018; Surel, 2019). Attempting to take full advantage of the economic pain and (geo)political turmoil of the global financial and then the Eurozone crises –​ that made its enduring hostility towards the EU all the more advantageous for it (Ivaldi, 2018: 285) –​it moved to position itself as a party committed to forms of social and economic protectionism and a much more interventionist state in terms of regulations and investment (Bastow, 2018; Ivaldi, 2015; Shields, 2018: 548). Assisted by the disappointments of the Hollande presidency with its failure to fulfil its manifesto commitments and address the longer-​term structural and post-​2008 conjunctural problems in the French economy, and the spectre of EU involvement in the unravelling of the Socialist government, this leftist shift has seen the fn/​r n consolidate and deepen its influence in the post-​industrial north-​east in particular (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018: 1035; Shields, 2015: 417–​8) where both the longer term and conjunctural dimensions of neoliberal globalization and ‘Eurozonization’ have been particularly acute (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018: 1040). Indeed, such spatial concentrations of support also tend to reveal the localized impacts of globalization and exposure to trade competition associated with off-​shoring production and competition in

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the traditional manufacturing areas (Malgouyres, 2017) of the north-​east from lower-​wage zones that have, to some degree, replicated the ‘China shock’ in Britain and the US. After the onset of the Eurozone crisis in 2010–​11 the party double-​downed on its hostility to the EU and the single currency83 taking full advantage of the structural context of combined crises –​economic and political –​as successive French governments were constrained by the rules of Eurozone membership and where bail-​outs to salvage the Euro were agreed in opaque EU negotiations with little or no inputs from publics and taxpayers. Consequently, the fn called for a referendum on France’s membership of the Eurozone and reconstitution of the EU to permit a policy of more national preferences and industrial development (Ivaldi, 2018: 285). However, lest we take this as a posture of rupture –​based on a unilateral exit from the EU à la ‘Frexit’ –​the party’s policies towards the EU and Eurozone were also couched with significant caveats. Thus the fn’s objectives were conditional on treaty renegotiation and, consequently, the co-​operation of other (large) member states. Likewise, and in spite of the party’s fierce anti-​Euro rhetoric, any return to the Franc was based on co-​ordination and reaching agreement with other member-​states. So while the fn’s orientation towards the EU was antagonistic, it was not of an existential kind, and nor did it involve the kind of unilateralism and degree of rupture that defined the British far-​right’s campaign for Brexit. Focusing much more on securing support from workers (Stockemer and Amengay, 2015; Surel, 2019: 1243) was an important part of its relative political success and reflected the longer-​term erosion of the institutions and culture of organized labour across much of France consequent on the contradictions produced from a specifically neoliberal form of uneven and combined development. Thus in recent years many former communist and socialist party voters have moved towards the fn/​r n and the party’s successes –​as in the 2012 and 2017 elections –​were mainly at the expense of left-​wing incumbents (Shields, 2014: 202, 2015: 418, 422). Indeed, given the way that these traditional cultures of organized labour across the socialist and communist lefts were, to varying degrees, tied to the idea of national labour, the nationalist-​ protectionist orientation of the party has fallen on fertile ground. While the shift to the left –​which has also involved collaboration with a number of former groups and activists on the radical left who were once opposed to the 83

Its manifesto for the 2014 European Parliamentary elections included the following policies: the renationalization of the Common Agricultural Policy (cap), stopping France’s contribution to the European budget, introducing taxes at France’s borders, stopping all EU bailout plans and fighting the Posting of Workers Directive (cited in Ivaldi, 2015).

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fn/​r n (Shields, 2014: 502) –​has been significant and has appeared to produce positive results for the party in increasing its vote share among workers (Stockemer and Amengay, 2015), it did not completely break with its more right-​leaning and pro-​capitalist dimensions. Thus at least in those parts of France where the salience of material or class issues associated with industrial decline, globalization and welfare dependence were less significant politically, as in the Mediterranean south-​east of Provence-​Alpes-​Côte-​d’Azur, the party’s economic stance was much more oriented towards its traditional, and long-​ standing petty bourgeois base of small business owners. This was evidenced in policies that prioritized the interests of entrepreneurs, craftsmen [sic] and shopkeepers as well as promises of cuts in public spending (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018: 1045; see also Hewlet, 2017: 387), alongside an orthodox social authoritarianism characteristic of the far-​right. In addition to its shift in political economy, the party also sought to position itself as a force more aligned to the core values of the French Republic (Bastow, 2018; Betz, 2013b Mondon, 2014). Labelled ‘dédiabolisation’ –​the attempt to make the party much less toxic and extreme through the toning down of its rhetoric and reducing references to biological racism, anti-​Semitism and ideological positions and terminology associated with one of the main originators of French fascism, Maurice Barrès and which defined the leadership of Jean-​ Marie Le Pen –​this has also played out, to some extent at least, substantively, in policy terms. Thus Marine Le Pen’s strategy of the positioning the party as supportive of the Republic and its political culture was demonstrated in her first speech as leader in early 2011 when she claimed that the party supported the values of the French Revolution and the ‘rights of man,’ and she also favourably quoted a sage of French Republicanism, Jean Jaures (Shields, 2014: 499). Moreover, in policy terms under Marine Le Pen, the party has moderated its policies on aspects of immigration –​abandoning the demand for the mass deportation of immigrants and on capital punishment. This turn towards Republicanism has been especially focused on the defence and promotion of the core Republican culture of laïcité (see Almeida, 2017: 255–​ 60; Wolfreys, 2018) that rests on a clear separation of religious practice and symbolism from the public sphere, and a shift from the party’s traditional closeness to aspects of Catholic doctrine. It is here where the fn/​r n has marked out a terrain as a militant defender of the Republic (Bastow, 2018) against liberal, multicultural and cosmopolitan elites who have ‘indulged’ Islamic practices. Such positioning has aligned the FN/​RN with a more entrenched set of ideas and political culture of ‘national republicanism’ that extends well beyond the far-​right stretching to parts of the left. Consequently, this ostensible defence of a core Republican principle has provided an important entry point for

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the party’s hostility towards immigration and Muslims in particular. Framed in a cultural-​civilizational language typical of the neoliberal far-​right, it has allowed the party to distance itself from its more explicit and obvious racist past, and to claim a place for itself alongside the political mainstream, through portraying its anti‐Islamism as based on secular principles connected to the security and workings of liberal democracy rather than racist exclusions. And in a context of Islamist terrorism and especially after the trauma of the co-​ ordinated November 2015 mass-​casualty attacks, this has proved to be an insidious and powerful ideological tool for the party (Hutchins and Halikiopoulou, 2019; Wolfreys, 2018). This ideological repositioning has sought to take advantage of widespread misperceptions –​that is indicative of widespread racialized assumptions –​among much of the French public about size of the Muslim population in France (Surel, 2019: 1241) and the series of Islamist terrorist attacks since 2012. Terrorism, as Hutchins and Halikiopoulou (2019) note, is explicitly connected to both immigration and the ‘lax border security’ associated with the EU’s Schengen framework (Ivaldi, 2018: 286). The significance of this move under Marine Le Pen’s leadership goes well beyond the politics of the far-​right as the party’s defence of laïcité and the broader values of the Republic have planted it very much in a reconstituted ideo-​political mainstream of ‘culture war’ where it competes on the same ground as the traditional right. This was most evident in Nicolas Sarkozy’s presidential election campaign in 2007 that was based on an explicit attempt to appeal to fn voters around issues of immigration, law, and order and the ‘Muslim problem’ (Marlière, 2013; Mondon, 2014; Shields, 2014: 498; Wolfreys, 2018). This strategy was an important element in Sarkozy’s victory as evidenced by the significant fall in support for the fn in the 2007 elections (10.4 percent of first round votes compared to 16.9 percent in 2002 and 17.9 percent in 2012) and it was replicated in his 2012 re-​election campaign. Indeed, as Aurelien Mondon (2014: 311) posits, Sarkozy stated that the values of the fn were compatible with the Republic –​a key moment in the normalization of the party and demonstrating the increasingly blurred lines and distinctions between the far-​right and ‘centre-​right’ in France. This embrace of a militant Republicanism and its focus on stigmatizing French Muslims has continued on the right after Sarkozy’s departure. The right’s candidate in the 2017 presidential election, Francois Fillon, a conservative Catholic –​and the most right-​wing choice of the right’s slate of c­ andidates (Hewlet, 2017: 381) –​also carved out a quasi-​Lepenist agenda on immigration, Islam, law and order and social issues such as the rights of same-​sex couples and the broader lgbtq +​community, in another attempt to win over far-​ right voters. Prior to the corruption revelations that ended up undermining

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his campaign, most commentators expected him to win the presidency (Hewlet, 2017: 384). The entrenched ideology and culture of Republicanism in France and, especially the expectation that immigrants must assimilate, provides an important ideological cover for the far-​right and other political currents –​including on parts of the left –​to embrace racialized tropes and rhetoric (Mondon and Winter, 2020; Peace, 2019; Wolfreys, 2018), all of which suggests that the ‘moderation’ of the fn/​r n needs to be more carefully scrutinized in light of the contextual and causal forces driving it (Shields, 2014). As already suggested these shifts in the rhetoric and orientation of the party over the last ten years or so have resulted in its political advance in terms of its mainstreaming and increased levels of support. Much of this rests on the consolidation and expansion of its social basis of support becoming much more centred on the working class and the economically marginalized; though, as elsewhere, not the most marginalized and that significant part of the French working class who are not white. Such a positioning has obviously been helped by both the socioeconomic consequences of the global financial crisis and the difficulties of French governments –​of the left and right –​in effectively responding to both the structural and conjunctural consequences84 of uneven and combined development and the specific geopolitical and institutional dimensions of the Eurozone crisis centred on the foreclosing of traditional nation-​state fiscal and monetary policy options. In such a context the party’s nationalist and sovereignist propaganda messaging –​echoed across parts of the radical left –​has been all the more powerful. There seems to be, then, a causal link between both the structural context of how the specific processes and contradictions of the Eurozone’s uneven and combined development has helped provide a social basis for the rise in support for the party, alongside the failure of the traditional left (in the form of the Socialist Party) to attract new voters and to hold on to its existing working class base in areas such as the north and north-​east. Polling and survey evidence over the last ten years or so and in the lead-​ up to the 2017 elections suggested that support for the party was increasingly regionalized –​the north-​east and south/​south-​east. And while the party draws support from a range of social layers its largest voting group appears to be workers, those on lower incomes (Shields, 2014: 503; Stockemer and Amengay, 84

The decision by the Hollande administration to raise taxes –​an instrument of austerity in a prevailing context of anaemic economic growth –​in 2012 as a way of closing the budget deficit, as demanded by France’s membership of the Eurozone exemplified this. The tax increases also caught middle and lower earners giving rise to a wave of anti-​tax protests in 2013 (Shields, 2014: 507).

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2015) and less educated men. In the 2014 European parliamentary elections the working-​class portion of its vote was even higher and significantly more than across the combined lefts –​both Socialist Party and the radical left (Shields, 2015: 422). In addition, alongside an exposure to socioeconomic insecurity –​ particularly evident in the north-​east (Ivaldi and Dutozia, 2018: 1040; see also Malgouyres, 2017) –​a relatively low-​level of education was also a key driver of support; something shared with far-​right voters’ writ large. The increasing levels of support for the fn were clearly evident in the elections prior to 2017 –​all of which suggested that the party was on an upward trend. In the 2012 presidential election Marine Le Pen won almost 18 percent of the first-​round votes –​outperforming her father in the 2002 election and achieving the best ever national election result since the party’s founding (Stockemer and Amengay, 2015: 370). In March 2014 the party gained control of eleven local councils giving it more political power than at any time in its history (Paxton and Peace, 2021). Later in the year the party topped the poll (with 24.86 percent of the vote) in the May European parliamentary elections with 24 (of 74) seats –​an eightfold increase on the three seats it previously held and, again, winning more votes from workers and those on lower incomes than all of the parties of left (Shields, 2014: 493, 502; Bastow, 2018). It also made advances in the December 2015 regional elections coming first overall with 28 percent of the vote and securing its best results (of more than 40 percent) in the north and south-​east regions of France (Robcis, 2017: 83) and again, largely at the expense of the left –​in terms of the increase in vote share and where, geographically, these votes came from. Consequently, the 2017 presidential and parliamentary elections provided a singular context beneficial to the fn. The party had consolidated its ideological position as a ‘member of the Republican family’ which did much –​ with the help of the electoral campaigns of the centre-​right –​to reduce the traditional stigma that had been associated with voting for the far-​right. Its Euroscepticism that focused on democratic accountability, sovereignty and the ability of a French government to prioritize the needs of French firms and workers through the use of an expansionary fiscal policy, as well as immigration –​taking full advantage of the recent context of large flows of Muslim refugees (Bastow, 2018; Robcis, 2017; Ivaldi, 2018: 285) –​all seemed to resonate, pre-​election poling evidence suggested, with the popular zeitgeist of most French voters at the time. Further, the broader far-​right shift in world affairs as demonstrated by Trump’s election victory in the US the UK vote on Brexit all suggested that this would be the best opportunity for the far-​right to make its political breakthrough at the national level. Indeed, the terrorist attacks that had scarred France since 2015 and the attack that took place only days before

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the election all seemed to suggest that the party would secure its best ever electoral performance. The party concentrated its campaign on its traditional anti-​immigration/​ anti-​Muslim themes with a particular focus on anti-​terrorism in relation to policing powers, immigration controls and the intensification of the securitization of France’s Muslim community and their places of worship (Hewlet, 2017: 386-​7). This combined with social and economic policies focused on national preference in relation to the workings of the welfare state –​a typical form of welfare nativism defining of the neoliberal far-​right –​and taxes on firms employing foreign labour, competitive advantages, and economic protections for French companies (Ivaldi, 2018: 285; Shields, 2018: 546, 8). However, lest we assume that the fn had transformed itself into a socialist or workers party, the manifesto maintained a commitment to its traditional petty bourgeois base particularly located in the south and south-​east with promises of tax reductions on small businesses, no increase in the minimum wage, lower corporation taxes, clamp downs on welfare fraud and constraints on trade union activities (Shields, 2018: 548). Such promises were clearly in tension with its appeal to the ‘left-​behinds’ and its north-​eastern working class voters, and provide evidence of the underlying ambiguity and contradictions in the political economy of the far-​right and especially in terms of its overall class orientation, in spite of where its votes come from and increased levels of support from workers. Marine Le Pen’s performance in the first round where she gained 21.3 percent of the vote just behind the eventual winner –​in the second-​round run-​off –​ Emmanuel Macron (24.01 percent), was the party’s best ever national election result with over 7.5 million votes. As in the previous years Le Pen’s support was concentrated in the north/​north-​east and southern-​Mediterranean coasts (see Burn-​Murdoch et al., 2017; Guardian, 2017) dominated by small towns and rural areas and which also revealed support from workers and those on low incomes (Shields, 2018: 542–​3, 545; Surel, 2019: 1243, 1244, 1249) –​concentrated in the north/​north-​east and a more petty bourgeois and small business electorate across the south but with age (35–​49 years old) and level of education being the key determinants of support, overall. And it was the increases in support from those who had voted left in the 2012 presidential election –​six percent of Hollande voters and four percent of Jean-​Luc Melénchon’s voters respectively –​that secured her victory over Francois Fillon by just under 500,000 votes (Kuhn, 2017; 366; Shields, 2018: 543). Although Le Pen almost doubled the number of votes that she got in the second-​round run-​off compared to her father’s second round performance in 2002 –​she got 10.6 million and he got 5.2 million –​to secure 33.9 percent of

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the overall vote, she ended up far behind Macron who secured 20.7 million votes. The outcome appeared to suggest that the party and Le Pen herself, had reached the threshold of how much support that they could gain and, consequently, the limits of their prospects of winning political power. Indeed, the results for the parliamentary elections that quickly followed on after the presidential vote were disappointing; although the fn gained more mp s –​ eight/​up six –​its vote share in the first round was way behind Macron’s En Marche and the centre-​right at just over 13 percent. While Macron’s combined victory was an upset in itself –​breaking the traditional left/​right domination of French politics –​what was also significant and especially with respect to the fortunes of the fn was the high level of abstentions and spoilt ballots in both sets of elections. Decreasing levels of voter turn-​out in parliamentary elections had characterized previous elections from 2002, but the levels shot up significantly in 2012 and 2017: in the former, 57.2 percent and 55.4 in the first and second rounds and 48.7 percent and 42.6 percent in the latter. Such trends have been evident in local, regional, and European elections and, obviously, suggest greater scrutiny of the extent of support for the fn –​notably in relation to the support it has gained from workers –​and its relative political successes in a growing context over the last ten-​to-​fifteen years or so of widespread alienation from engagement with the democratic political process (see Mondon and Winter, 2020: 179–​82). And while this trend is much less pronounced in presidential elections the turn out in 2017 was the lowest since 1969 in both first and second rounds (Kuhn, 2017: 366). It appears then that more workers or as many workers who used to vote for parties of the left have now disengaged from voting at all, rather than have shifted to the fn/​r n. What this suggests is that the workings of liberal democracy in France and the broader political legitimacy of the Republic are in crisis. It means that governments do not have an unqualified democratic mandate for their policies, and this is especially so in the case of the reformist agenda of Emmanuel Macron. The emergence of the mass protest movement –​the Gilets jaunes –​in the autumn of 2018 appeared to reflect this. A combination of deep alienation with both the political establishment and the party-​system (including the rn), it also drew on a range of social layers both economically struggling and spatially and culturally disconnected from metropolitan France (see Fassin and Defossez, 2019; Kouvelakis, 2019; Royall, 2020). The Gilets jaunes were but further evidence of the longer-​term failure of democratic politics to address existing social and economic problems and the growing sense of a pervasive popular

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cynicism, ‘that they (political parties and politicians)85 are all the same’ or that ‘voting will not change anything,’ that appears to be connected to the diminishing political autonomy and power of national governments within the EU/​ Eurozone, even if this has not, yet, generated a sustained and popular movement in France for exiting the Eurozone. Yet for the rn, this widespread and growing sense of alienation has not been to its benefit in the sense of increasing its sources of support sufficiently to allow it to make the national breakthrough. This growing sense of a post-​political or a post-​democratic condition appears to have worked for and against a party like the rn in equal measure. In some respects, this is clearly connected to a key aspect of its political identity and economic strategy –​leaving the Eurozone. This was an issue in the second round of the 2017 presidential election that played out to its disadvantage, and after the election defeat triggered fresh internal party debate on the issue (Ivaldi, 2018: 287). Appearing to lack economic credibility and with little support from dominant sections of the capitalist class the party was dogged by a pervasive sense that its policies, if implemented, would make most French people poorer. A significant impediment to its aspiration for power. Further, in terms of expanding its vote share the structural dynamic of continuing capitalist globalization –​driven as much by the rise of China and other non-​western centres of accumulation, as it is by the fiscal discipline of the Eurozone –​ the make-​up of the French workforce is unlikely to increase the numbers of workers who might be tempted to vote for the far-​right. As Stockemer and Amengay (2015: 386) note, the type of voter that has tended to support the far-​ right –​working class with lower levels of education –​is dwindling as the economy becomes oriented towards the service sector and the population more educated. This deeper sense of alienation from party politics and engagement in liberal democracy will obviously continue to provide a context potentially beneficial and especially for as long as the left –​that haemorrhaged millions of votes in 2017 –​cannot carve out the ideological basis of a new social contract within the context of the Eurozone. The structure and dynamics of France’s capitalist political economy have, then, provided the material and social context beneficial to the far-​right even if, at the same time, the distinctly neoliberal dimensions of it have come to undermine the kind of political culture and expectations that a party like the rn require to gain access to power.

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And in this respect, the corruption scandal that engulfed Marine Le Pen over the funding of the party merely reinforced such a view (see Stothard, 2017).

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2.3.5 Italy The place and significance of the far-​right in Italy reveals something quite distinct from its counterparts in Germany and France. First, far-​right parties have participated in government throughout the neoliberal era: the regionalist forerunner of Matteo Salvini’s League, the Lega Nord, was a member of the Berlusconi governments of 1994, 2001–​6 and 2008–​11 holding several important cabinet posts.86 Secondly, the overall political context that the far-​ right has operated in since the onset of the North Atlantic financial crisis has been defined by a much greater degree of political flux, shifting political fortunes and, over the last few years, political realignment in the party system. Consequently, the political situation in Italy over this time conformed to an organic crisis (see Fazi, 2018) with the breakdown of the relationship that defined the ‘second republic’ between the main voting blocs and their political representatives on both the left and right, and their replacement by populist parties: the Five-​Star Movement (M5S) and the far-​right League. Indeed, in the case of the League, and evidenced by the last national elections in 2019 (the European Parliamentary election) and polling data, it seems highly likely that a far-​right party/​coalition will come to power in the near future. Thus, based on the workings of the Italian electoral system –​that provides advantages to the winning party in overall parliamentary representation –​a repeat of the 2019 European Parliamentary election results where the combined far-​right vote of the League and the Brothers of Italy (BoI) was over 40 percent would translate to 70 percent of the single-​member constituencies ensuring a majority in the National Assembly. Such an outcome would surpass anything achieved by Berlusconi’s many right-​wing coalitions (Chiaramonte et al., 2020: 148) and would be a watershed and unprecedented rupture in postwar Italian and West European politics; a government made up of two far-​right parties for the first time. Whether or not such events play out and, further, whether such a government would be able to implement a fundamental rupture in Italy’s relationship with the EU and Eurozone in particular, is another matter. That the populist coalition between M5S and the League –​that governed between 2018 and 2019 –​did not manage to effect such a radical break with the Eurozone nor reconstitute Italian politics suggests that such an outcome –​should a far-​right government come to power –​may not be inevitable or even likely, either. 86

Further, under the leadership of Gianfranco Fini, the National Alliance –​the descendent of the post-​war neofascist Italian Social Movement (msi) –​was also a member of the 2001–​6 Berlusconi government. Thereafter the party dissolved in 2009 with one part merging with Berlusconi’s centre-​right Forza Italia and the other part going on to establish another far-​right party, the Brothers of Italy.

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The idiosyncrasies and pathologies that have characterized Italian politics over the neoliberal era and since the emergence of what is commonly called the ‘second republic’ in the early 1990s (after the dissolution of the Communist and Christian Democratic parties) pre-​date the post-​crisis period as evidenced in the populism of Silvio Berlusconi who was, until very recently, the dominant figure of the Italian right. While Berlusconi’s brand of populism was centred more on his showmanship, sexual imbroglios, and the undermining of the Italian judicial system, as well as his casual sexism and racism, he was not a creature of the far-​right even if his political strategy embraced far-​right political currents as a means of winning power and, in doing so, normalizing the prospect of the far-​right in government. Indeed, it was the collapse of the last Berlusconi government in November 2011 and way in which it was engineered –​through the co-​ordination of the Italian president and Brussels and Frankfurt as discussed above –​and the imposition of the technocrat administration of Mario Monti that provides the starting point for the dynamics of realignment that have paralleled Italy’s tortuous path through the Eurozone crisis and beyond. The emergence of the M5S in 2009 and its political breakthrough in the 2013 elections when it gained 25.6 percent of votes –​at the expense of both the centre-​right and centre-​left (Maggini, 2013; Passarelli and Tuorto, 2014: 150) –​ recorded the initial expression of disgust and disillusionment at not only the established political class, but also a blowback against the austerity measures imposed by the Monti government that was linked to the manner in which it came to power.87 That it did not enter government reflected a combination of its own ‘anti-​politics’ and ‘outsider’ orientation as cultivated by its leader Beppe Grillo and the machinations –​and compromises required –​of coalition building (involving the Democratic Party) in the formation of a government. That a centre-​left coalition led by the Democratic Party (pd) –​a reliable interlocutor for the EU and a party that would not seriously challenge the Eurozone consensus –​took the reins of power meant that the problems that were plaguing both the economy and the political system would continue to be unresolved. So in the former, the anaemic and uneven growth, stagnating productivity, unemployment, income inequality and rising levels of poverty remained largely unchanged over the course of the pd administrations. And in case of the latter, largely because of the former, the problem of crafting a politics that was able to properly reflect the will of the Italian people and address 87

The fact that much of the legislation enforcing EU-​sanctioned neoliberal reforms after 2011 was supported by the two main parties on the left and right (Cozzolino, 209: 348; see also Notermans and Piattoni, 2020: 350) implicated them as co-​responsible.

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its main social and economic concerns, and break the sense of crisis and doom that pervaded the country. In many respects, then, the context –​economic, political, and geopolitical with respect to the continuing shadow of the EU and the Eurozone –​was highly advantageous to a far-​right political challenge. And with the onset of the ‘migrant crisis’ over 2015–​17 and its European governance and solidarity dimensions, the stage was set for a major far-​right advance. It was in this context that the League –​under the leadership of Matteo Salvini –​repositioned itself from a regionalist populist party that demanded autonomy from Rome for ‘Padania’ in the north of Italy, to a party that, by the 2018 general election, had crafted a propaganda and electoral narrative that blamed Brussels rather than Rome as the source of Italy’s problems, and with a demand for a restoration of national sovereignty rather than regional autonomy. Under its founding leader, Umberto Bossi, the Lega Nord (as it was called until 2017) was a party that drew support from northern petty bourgeois layers –​the traditional social base of the far-​right –​with commitments to low taxes, de-​regulation and a pro-​business focus (Zaslove, 2012), and which emphasized a proto-​welfare nativism that focused its ire on the ‘corruption’ of Rome and the national state and the ‘laziness’ and ‘backwardness’ of southerners (rather than immigrants), which it did not want to ‘subsidize.’ Since the onset of the Eurozone crisis and the resultant economic stagnation in Italy, the party has maintained this pro-​small business and low-​tax orientation but has moved to call for greater state involvement and deficit spending to promote economic activity and investment (Morini, 2018: 3). Thus its 2018 general election campaign was centred on the introduction of a flat-​rate tax, rolling back what it described as ‘EU imposed’ austerity measures and reducing the pension age (Maggini and Chiaramonte, 2019: 82; Morini, 2018: 3). Upon taking over as leader in 2013, Salvini quickly began to shift the party’s orientation to become the primary outlet for Italian Euroscepticism rather than regional autonomy (Albertazzi et al., 2018; Pucciarelli, 2019), and this was sped up by party’s disappointing 2013 general electoral performance (securing only 4.1 percent of the vote –​a fall of almost 50 percent on its previous election performance in 2008). Salvini launched a series of anti-​EU campaigns, including the ‘No Euro Day’ on November 23, 2013, that described the EU as a ‘dictatorship’ and called for revisions to EU treaties and the Schengen framework. In the 2014 EU election campaign, the Euro was described as a ‘crime against humanity’ on which grounds the ‘EU-​criminals, thieves and murderer bureaucrats’ have justified ‘coups d’état’ and ‘genocides of families and entrepreneurs’ across the continent (quoted in Morini, 2018: 13). In short, and as summarized

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by Roberto D’Alimonte (D’Alimonte, 2019: 122), ‘[t]‌he EU and immigrants have taken the place once held by Rome and the southerners as the people’s enemy.’ The success of Salvini’s re-​positioning strategy was cemented in the 2018 general election when the League outperformed Berlusconi’s centre-​right Forza Italia (fi) party within the right-​wing coalition that contested the election, winning 17.35 percent of the vote and 73 deputies in the National Assembly.88 This was its best ever performance. It quadrupled its vote share from 2013 while fi’s vote fell by seven percentage points (Maggini and Chiaramonte, 2019: 82). Its performance also demonstrated that it had become a party with national reach winning in its traditional northern heartlands with over 40 percent of the vote, but also making inroads into the so-​called ‘red belt’ traditionally dominated by the left, with the party getting the most votes in the central regions of Tuscany, Umbria, Marche and Lazio, and making inroads in the islands and in the South (Chiaramonte, et., al, 2020: 144; see also Chiaramomnte, et. al, 2018). The League’s success in 2018 was preceded by a series of positive results in local and regional elections working alongside the centre right. Thus throughout 2016–​17 the right did very well in 2016 in Milan, in spite of losing, and in 2017 won in Sicily and made inroads elsewhere (De Giorgi and Tronconi, 2018: 332). However, this momentum was greatly assisted by the ‘migrant crisis’ in Italy between 2014 and 2017. The impact of the large influx of migrants from North Africa, however, while significant for the rise of the League –​as it appeared to align with the propaganda, scaremongering and moral panic (Gattinara, 2017: 327) that characterized Salvini’s response to the migrant flows –​needs to be located within a broader context of societal and political crises. This was evident in the continuing economic stagnation associated with the austerity imposed in response to the Eurozone crisis, and the growing despair and alienation of large sections of the public with the existing political elites and mainstream parties that were seen as increasingly unable to deal with the mounting problems that Italy was facing (Gattinara, 2017: 320, 326). And which now appeared to be compounded by the large numbers of migrants entering the country. Indeed, by 2018 the dominant political theme had shifted from Italy’s membership of the Eurozone to the migrant crisis (Strazzari and Grandi, 2019: 336) and the lack of support from other EU member states in assisting Italy (Politi, 2017a). 88

Replicating the fortunes of other centre-​left parties in western Europe, the pd –​that had been in government prior to the election –​saw a collapse in its support to record its lowest result in the era of the second republic, winning only 18.9 percent (Chiaramomnte, et. al, 2018: 487; Fazi, 2018).

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Migrant numbers had been increasing significantly from 2014 and peaked in 2016 when about 180,000 reached Italy (Di Mauro and Verzichelli, 2019: 402; Politi, 2017a), which appeared to replicate the political dynamic that had engulfed Greece, earlier –​a country reeling from a severe economic crisis revealed in growing levels of poverty and inequality, and a political system increasingly challenged by populist forces with the influx of large numbers of migrants appearing to threaten the basic capacities of the state and society to deal with them. And while numbers would decline in 2017 and thereafter89 –​ as the effects of Italy’s controversial Memorandum of Understanding with the Libyan Coast Guard to prevent migrant vessels leaving Libya began to work (Geddes and Petrrachin, 2020: 231; Strazzari and Grandi, 2019: 336, 338, 348) –​ the first few months saw around 85,000 new arrivals, which amounted to a ten percent increase year on year (Gattinara, 2017: 322; Politi, 2017b). That numbers were falling and the high point of the crisis had passed, did not matter for the transformation of Italian attitudes towards the threat of similarly large flows of migrants in the near future. Thus polling data in 2017 indicated that over 40 percent of Italians –​up from 25 percent in 2014 –​thought that immigration was the most important challenge facing the country (Eurobarometer data cited in Gattinara, 2017: 322–​3; see also Geddes and Petrrachin, 2020: 234), and which also extended to rising levels of concern as to the perceived threats of immigrants to public order and security. The migration crisis was central to the success of the League in the election. Indeed, the political environment that the election took place within was not only highly favourable to Salvini and his party (Politi, 2017a), it was also a context that the propaganda of the League had largely shaped. Consequently, it was through the spectre of the migration crisis that the League became a national party –​winning votes in the ‘red belt’ of central Italy and also in the South. Further, Salvini emerged as a national figure through his skilful use of social media (Bobbo, 2019; Perri, 2019: 243–​4; Pucciarelli, 2019: 17–​19) where he occupied centre stage in the ‘debate’ over migration. The significance of the League’s rise and success is also illustrated in that it took place at a time when neo-​fascist groups such as Forza Nuovo and Casa Pound became more visible through several violent attacks on immigrants in 2017. That some of the members of these groups had ties to the League did not seem to undermine its electoral performance. In a classic strategy of diplacment and concealment –​which successfully served to downplay any focus on the significant 89

Though some studies indicate that many Italians had a vastly exaggerated view on the numbers in the country –​as high as 25 percent of the overall population rather than the actual eight percent (D’Alimonte, 2019: 122).

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links between neo-​fascists and the League –​Salvini insisted that the ultimate causes of the violence lay in the migration policies of previous governments (De Giorgi and Tronconi, 2018: 339–​41). The League’s electoral advance in 2018 –​which continued in the 2019 in the European parliamentary elections when it topped the poll with 34.3 percent of the votes, doubling its performance in the general election and amounting to nine million votes (Chiaramonte et al., 2020: 145) –​demonstrated that it was able to attract support beyond its regional stronghold and petty bourgeois layers. And in transitioning into a more conventional far-​right populist party centred on hostility to immigration its voters appear to replicate the social and spatial profile of the generic neoliberal far-​right. A sense of economic anxiety and precarity provides part of the social profile and this has, obviously, become more evident in recent years in Italy because of the economic crisis it has been engulfed in since 2011. League voters are also more likely to live in smaller towns and be middle-​aged, but what seems to be the most common feature of its voter profile is their relatively low level of education –​up to the compulsory secondary level only (Maraffi, 2018: 268) –​and this means that some clerical and manual workers have been drawn to the League though less so the unemployed. The degree to which the League will be able to hold on to these voters and increasingly attract M5S voters –​as it did in the 2019 European parliamentary elections –​and especially those in the south, will be key to its longer-​term fortunes. Indeed, its attempts to win support from poorer Italians in the South may well challenge its ability to maintain the support of its traditional northern petty bourgeois base who are hostile to increasing expenditure on welfare and public spending to boost economic opportunities in the South. After a protracted period of negotiations, the League entered into government with the M5S in June 2018 inaugurating Italy’s first populist government. Its populism, however, was somewhat diluted through the role of three technocrats in holding key portfolios that amounted to a form of ‘cohabitation’ (Cotta, 2020: 127). Thus the premiership was held be a lawyer, Giuseppe Conte, and the Ministers of Economy and Finance and Foreign Affairs were held by Giovanni Tria and Enzo Moavero Milanesi respectively –​on the insistence of the president. Further, in the case of the former portfolio, Paolo Savona –​an outspoken critic of the Eurozone –​was originally nominated but he was effectively vetoed by the president. The coalition was to last 14 months with its collapse in August 2019 triggered by Salvini’s decision to introduce a vote of confidence in the prime minister, Giuseppe Conte. Salvini’s move came on the back of growing tensions within the coalition and with the League riding high in the polls after its success in the May 2019 European elections, and with the expectation that

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the collapse of the government would lead to a new general election which would likely see the League overtake M5S and lead a right-​wing government. Other than their outside status the two parties shared a hostility to the EU and were committed to introducing alternative fiscal measures to revive the economy: for the League a flat-​rate tax and for M5S a ‘citizens income’ targeting income inequality. With the economy still in the doldrums –​industrial production levels were still 15 percent down on 2008 and real incomes lower by 5 percent and with real per-​capita gdp in 2017 at the same level as in 1998 (Nannicini et al., 2019: 311; Codogno and Merler, 2019: 296) –​their voters had high expectations that the new government would help to turn the economy around. The ambivalent posture of M5S on immigration also allowed for the League and its leader, Salvini –​who became deputy prime minister and minister of the interior –​to use his positions to implement draconian anti-​ immigration measures. As expected, a confrontation with Brussels quickly emerged over the government’s draft 2019 budget that was submitted to the EU Commission in October 2018. As with all Eurozone members, budgets are agreed through the so-​called ‘European Semester’ involving the surveillance of spending commitments by the Commission to ensure they accord with the provisions of the Eurozone’s Stability and Growth Pact. With its plan for a more expansionary fiscal policy (Johnson, 2018b; Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2019: 2080–​1) the draft budget did not. This triggered a stand-​off between the Commission and the M5S/​League government (Brunsden, 2018) with parts of the Italian financial technocracy in the state apparatus also voicing reservations (D’Alimonte 2019: 125). And with financial markets intervening with the spread on Italian debt increasing over that of the base-​line of German debt costs (Allen, 2018; Codogno and Merler, 2019: 294–​5, 299–​301) and the Commission threatening to implement the Excessive Deficit Procedure (Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2019: 286) the populists –​in spite of Salvini’s defiant response of ‘Europe threatens us? I couldn’t care less’ (cited in Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2019: 286) –​were forced into making concessions. Thus the final budget that was approved in late December saw reductions in the fiscal outlays in the citizen’s income, the reversal of pension reform, and the proposed flat-​rate tax was replaced by a tax rebate for a selected group of tax-​payers and reductions in the scale of public spending (Codogno and Merler, 2019: 302; Cotta, 2020: 130). While the budget and the government’s fiscal orientation were, then, significantly more expansive than the pd’s proposals as presented in their election manifesto, the outcome was no rupture with Brussels and Frankfurt and thus the fiscal and policy straitjacket of the Eurozone continued to constrain the economic ambitions of the government.

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Their moderation was also evident in relation to the key (and controversial) piece of labour market legislation passed by the Renzi government –​the Jobs Act of 2014/​15 –​that aimed to introduce an element of labour market flexibility; that bromide of neoliberal thinking. In their respective campaigns both parties criticized the legislation and called for its repeal (Codogno and Merler, 2019: 298; Nannicini, et. Al, 2019: 310). In government the coalition passed some modest reforms of the Jobs Act, and thus its key provisions in reducing employment protections and pushing through greater labour market flexibility were kept in place (Branco et al., 2019: 219–​21; Nannicini et. al., 2019). Overall, then, the populist government only managed to make rather limited changes to the structure and workings of the Italian economy and failed to reverse the continuing stagnation that plagued it. Indeed, the League has maintained its traditional orientation towards its small-​business voter base in the north and has, consequently, been opposed to measures that might impose costs (including labour) on small firms (Afonso and Bulfone, 2019: 250). However, as recognized by Perri (2019: 245) in government it also went beyond its traditional small-​business orientation and anti-​system rhetoric as it ditched its opposition to bank bail-​outs, embracing the establishment consensus on the need for tax-​payer support of banks in financial distress with the rescue of Banca Carige in the autumn of 2019. In contrast to economic policy, migration was an area that the government, and, especially through Salvini –​in his role of Minister of the Interior –​implemented policies that reflected a far-​right orientation (Fabbrini and Zgaga, 2019: 283). Taking advantage of his platform in the Ministry of the Interior –​ through using its legal, administrative and coercive resources –​Salvini also pumped out a constant flow of scaremongering propaganda through social media as to the security and civilizational threats of immigration and the lack of EU support for Italy (Newell, 2019a: 2, 2019b: 355; Strazzari, Francesco Grandi, 2019: 337, 347). Campaigning as much as governing and using the Trump playbook –​in his use of language (‘Italians first’) and forms of communication using social media and rallies (Perri, 2019) –​Salvini not only made migration a central political issue, even while numbers continued to fall, but also positioned himself –​with one eye firmly fixed on the next election –​as the leading figure in the government. In policy terms the government clamped down on the activities of humanitarian non-​governmental organizations (ngo s) undertaking search and rescue missions through making it difficult for their ships to dock in Italian ports and also refused to accept refugees (Newel, 2019b: 355; Strazzari and Grandi, 2019: 337). This policy was highly controversial and when a German captain was arrested by Italian authorities in July 2019 for trying to bring migrants to

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shore, caused a minor diplomatic spat with the German government and EU authorities (Roberts, 2019). As well as implementing policies that framed refugees as both a security threat and an economic burden, Salvini also promised to introduce mass deportations of ‘illegal’ immigrants, as a fulfilment of his electoral slogan of ‘100,000 illegal migrants to be expelled every year’ (Strazzari and Grandi, 2019: 342). The key piece of legislation that defined this hard-​line stance on immigration was the Security and Immigration Decree drafted by Salvini which caused an outcry in Italy and elsewhere in Europe. Its provisions weakened humanitarian provisions in the granting of residency rights and restricted refugee access to some key support services (Geddes and Pettrachin, 2020: 236–​7; Johnson, 2018a; Newell, 2019b: 35; Strazzari and Grandi, 2019: 342; Tondo, 2019). The impact of these policies did make it considerably harder for refugees to enter Italy, as well as realize their humanitarian rights if they managed to get there and, in this respect, the policies did have a considerable humanitarian cost. However, their objective was as much political and propagandistic for the League as they were about reducing migration flows into Italy. These policies and the controversies that they provoked –​not least among Italy’s EU allies such as France and Germany –​provided a political spectacle guaranteed to make Salvini appear as the defender of Italian interests and national sovereignty (Geddes and Pettrachin 2020: 235); something that significant sections of the Italian public, traumatized by the combined crises that had engulfed Italy since 2011, were deply concerned about. The tensions between the two parties were never far from the surface and Salvini’s ‘government by electioneering’ intensified in the lead-​up to the European parliamentary elections in May 2019. The results which indicated a fundamental shift in each party’s fortunes and with the M5S losing half of its 2018 vote share (Chiaramonte et al., 2020: 140) –​even if the turn-​out was significantly lower –​suggested that the coalition’s days were numbered. Indeed, this was the case. Each saw the other as its main competitor and this was especially the case in the south where the League had made significant advances in the election, and which was also M5S’s main voting reservoir. And while the League’s results in Italy were good, Salvini’s strategy also rested on a broader far-​right/​populist advance across the EU that would shift the balance of political power and, potentially, open up opportunities for claiming back national governing powers. That this did not happen –​the centre held with the help of Liberals and Greens –​meant that the League would not be able to realize some of its objectives in government. With the scandal in July 2019 over apparent Russian funding for the League’s European election campaign (Ghiglione, 2019) and the splits between the two parties on the funding for a rail link between Turin and Lyon –​which the League’s northern electorate

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strongly favoured –​Salvini had his reasons to bring down the government. Further, a new round of budget negotiations and the European semester also threatened to expose the contradictions between the two electorates of each party (Cotta, 2020: 133) about their spending promises. That Salvini’s punt did not work did not harm the League’s electoral prospects, at least based on polling data. Reverting to the main opposition against a new coalition government made up of the pd and M5S was seen as advantageous, and especially as the policy ambitions of M5S would be diluted governing with an establishment and pro-​European party and where the League’s ultimate path to power lay in the South through eating into the M5S’s vote share. The political instability and flux connected to the economic crisis that provided the impetus for the rise of the far-​right in Italy have not gone away, and while it is far from inevitable that Salvini’s League will emerge as the largest party in the next general election it does seem clear that a far-​right form of politics has become the dominant force on the right and this does not look like changing anytime soon. 2.3.6 Greece Greece stands out for both the severity of the social and economic impact of the Eurozone crisis and for producing its most extreme political response as revealed in the rise of the neo-​Nazi political party, Golden Dawn. Although Golden Dawn came nowhere near to gaining access to the levers of executive power like the League in Italy, nor close to winning as many votes as Marine Le Pen’s fn –​its high points were wining 6.97 percent of the vote in the May 2012 general election and 9.38 percent in the 2014 European Elections –​the fact that a party espousing such extreme views and its association with street violence and murder could win so many votes was both shocking and demonstrated the severity of the depth and intensity of the social and political crisis that had engulfed Greece after 2009. The rise of Golden Dawn in 2012 was not the only or most significant political development brought about by the crisis. The accompanying rapid advances made by the radical leftist syriza and its coming to power in 2015 revealed the broader breakdown in the relations of political representation that had constituted Greek democracy since the early 1980s. Momentarily, then, and over 2011–​15, Greece resembled a society in organic crisis. The impact of the austerity measures imposed by the Troika, as well as the manner in which they were imposed –​with little or no Greek input –​created an unprecedented social crisis within Greece that saw the breakdown of the clientelist political networks that had characterized the Greek state and, prior to the crisis, provided a key source of its political legitimacy. The collapse of welfare support and the rise

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of poverty and destitution created a social crisis not seen since the war. Such a social context –​and its close association with the traditional political class and the two main parties of the right and left –​opened up the political system for a significant realignment of the connections between different social layers and their traditional political representatives. And with the mass mobilizations against austerity and the rise of syriza, Greece’s organic crisis opened up the possibility for the construction of a radically different socioeconomic and political model in the country. That this did not play out –​the syriza government ended-​up complying with the terms and conditions of the third bail-​out agreement with the Troika and oversaw the same kind of economic medicine that previous governments had implemented –​reflected both the political strategy of syriza in its negotiations with the Troika and, significantly, the continuing popular support for Greece to remain within the Eurozone. Thus the iron cage of the Eurozone and the structural socioeconomic and geopolitical forces that Greek democracy operated within imposed tight limits on the political autonomy of Greek democracy, that provided a political lock on popular ambitions for any break with the Eurozone. Indeed, while there were currents within syriza calling for Greece to exit the Eurozone, and thus open up the potential for a radical reconstitution of Greece’s social and political model, the overwhelmingly dominant orientation throughout the crisis was for Greece to remain within it, and this position –​and in spite of its extreme Europhobic rhetoric –​was also shared by Golden Dawn (Vassalos, 2018: 108). Unlike nearly all far-​right parties in the neoliberal era –​that have made efforts to distance themselves from both the historical memory and ideas associated with fascism –​Golden Dawn explicitly embraced such affinities (Ellinas, 2013: 548, 549–​50, 560, 2014: 1; Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou, 2015: 2–​3; 50–​63). Golden Dawn is a political party that had its own paramilitary component –​members of which murdered the anti-​racist rapper Pavlos Fyssas (Killah P) in Athens in April 2013 as part of a ‘race war’ against immigrants and leftists that it waged between 2012 and 2013. In Golden Dawn’s framing citizenship was limited to those of Greek blood and democracy was to be replaced by a national dictatorship. And as Daphne Halikiopoulou and Sofia Vasilopoulou (2015: 50–​63, 68–​76) posit, such fascist ideas were connected to various classical fascist tropes: that Greece was a society engulfed by ‘social decadence’ and, secondly, that the ‘Greek race’ required a ‘national rebirth’ through a form of violent ‘racial cleansing’ to produce a new and anti-​democratic political system. The party’s political radicalism as evidenced in its use and justification of violence and disdain for the institutions and workings of liberal democracy contrasted with its ambivalence on economic matters. Though committed to

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a ‘national economy’ it did not commit to leaving the Eurozone or breaking with the EU –​at least as core objectives. Where it was even more aligned with ruling class interests and neoliberal instincts was in its attitude to the institutions and culture of organized labour and the internationalist left –​the socio-​ political force most at odds with both the rule of capital and its transnational legal-​institutional form. Here Golden Dawn –​like that of classical fascism –​ was implacably hostile to the left; and whereas the neoliberal right aimed to crush and silence the left opposition through a mixture of legal instruments combined with financial intimidation, Golden Dawn did the bidding of capital through street violence. Support for Golden Dawn was located in both urban and semi-​urban locales including Athens and especially so in Attica. Its support was also concentrated in areas of far-​right and anti-​communist politics going back to the civil war and the Colonels’ dictatorship (Paraskeva-​Veloudogianni, 2018: 191), as well in the northern border regions where far-​right and nationalist mobilizations had been organized to oppose the renaming of the neighbouring state of Macedonia in the immediate period before the crisis. Its voter demographic shares some commonalities with the generic neoliberal far-​right, though with some differences. Thus younger voters were over-​represented, and these voters tended to have a lower level of educational attainment. They were also more likely to be men with a lower economic status working in the secondary industrial sector or self-​employed and economically anxious if not necessarily poor (Ellinas, 2015: 7; Halikiopoulou and Vasilopoulou, 2015: 40–​5). Golden Dawn’s emergence in 2012 as a national political force was, then, closely associated with the socioeconomic catastrophe that the Greek people suffered after 2009 and the disintegration of the party system that came in its wake. Accordingly, the two main parties that had dominated post-​dictatorship Greek politics (pasok and New Democracy) saw their respective vote shares collapse in the the legislative elections that took place at the height of the crisis in May and June in 2012: they secured a combined total of only 32 and then 41.9 per cent of the votes after averaging nearly 84 percent of total votes in such elections between 1981 and 2009 (Verney and Bosco, 2018: 417–​8). While the demise of pasok and the rise of syriza were the most important political developments from the crisis, the uniqueness of the form of far-​right that advanced in Greece –​in contrast to other European states –​evidenced not only the severity of the social emergency and the crisis in the political legitimacy of the Greek state and democracy, but also the distinctiveness of Greece’s political culture associated with the legacies of the military dictatorship and the spectre of the neo-​fascist right that had been a central part of the Greek Cold War as discussed in Chapter 1. Further, it was also fuelled –​as in all of

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those other cases of far-​right advance both contemporary and historical –​by the role played by other currents on the right in facilitating it (see Xenakis, 2013b; Paraskeva-​Veloudogianni, 2018: 188–​90), and not least the participation of the racist and nationalist far-​right party, laos (Greek Orthodox Rally) in the 2011–​12 coalition government. Thus Golden Dawn emerged within a pre-​existing authoritarian context that was connected to: (i) the dismembering of democratic processes within Greece through the Troika diktaks and in its manoeuvrings in the resignation of the Prime Minister, George Papandreou, in late 2011 after he suggested a referendum on the second bail-​out agreement (Vassalos, 2018: 93); and (ii) through the moves to tighten rules on acquiring Greek citizenship and the scapegoating of immigrants as in some way ‘responsible’ for the consequences of the austerity measures. Such scapegoating was revealed in rhetoric from centre-​right New Democracy politicians saying Greeks must ‘recapture our cities’ –​a line taken from Golden Dawn publications –​as well as ‘making their [immigrants] lives as difficult as possible,’ and a Health Minister referring to migrant sex workers as a ‘health bomb’ that ‘infects the Greek family’ (cited in Paraskeva-​Veloudogianni, 2018: 188). Such rhetoric –​and the political context that it helped to create –​was such that anti-​immigrant violence could also be associated with the centre-​right as much as the far-​right as demonstrated by the attack on an immigrant hostel in November 2015 by a gun-​wielding member of New Democracy (see Ovenden, 2015). In addition to this, Golden Dawn’s violence and criminality –​it was part party, part street militia and part criminal network (see Banteka, 2019) –​had long been tolerated since its founding (Ellinas, 2013: 548; Halikiopoulou, Daphne and Vasilopoulou, 2015: 4) most notably after the murder of a left-​wing student activist in 1998 by a party member. And such tolerance continued during 2012 and early 2013 (Ellinas, 2015: 5; Ovenden, 2015). With the collapse of the clientelist networks that had characterized Greek democracy (and which appeared to have contributed to the crisis) and its radical outsider status, Golden Dawn was well-​positioned to take advantage of voters looking for a political alternative to the established parties. Further, espousing views that attacked the EU, the Greek elite, and immigrants –​all of which to varying degrees were blamed by large sections of the Greek public for Greece’s ills –​it reflected a significant current within the crisis-​induced political zeitgeist. It was its outsider status that allowed it to advance at the expense of the other vehicle of the Greek far-​right –​laos. Indeed, laos had gained 5.6 percent of votes in the 2009 election just before the onset of the crisis but with its support for the 2010 Memorandum of Understanding –​the first package of severe austerity measures –​with the Troika and then its participation

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in the national unity government of 2011–​12 (led by the technocrat and former head of the Bank of Greece, Lucas Papademos) that negotiated the second bail-​out package (Ellinas, 2013: 546), it had lost any claim to offer much of an alternative. The rise of Golden Dawn occurred within the most serious social and political crisis in Greece since the civil war. And it was a crisis that took on a particularly nationalistic dimension that was not confined to the far-​right. Thus the combination of external intervention determining the future prospects of Greece evoked long-​standing national sentiments and myths associated with Greece’s modern history of occupation. That the sense of occupation and humiliation was also associated with Germany provided a particular intensity to the nationalist response such that references to the war and reparations for the Nazi occupation were voiced, and as suggestion for the funding of the bail-​out. It also saw the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, depicted as a Nazi (Adler-​Nissen, 2017) due to her insistence on stringent measures that accompanied the bail-​outs. And while such reference to history of the trauma of the Nazi occupation and humiliation may have undermined support for a party so closely associated with Nazi ideology, it was Golden Dawn’s outsider status and militant nationalism as a defender of ‘Greek honour’ that seemed to resonate with many Greeks. The elections of 2012 and 2015 took place in a highly polarized atmosphere with the mainstream parties –​what was left of pasok and New Democracy (which had picked up members and support from laos –​Vasilopoulou and Halikiopoulou, 2013: 530) –​pitted against syriza and Golden Dawn with the former grudgingly accepting of the Troika’s medicine and the latter opposed. Consequently, in this binary political divide Golden Dawn represented itself not only as an outsider that could claim no culpability for the situation that had engulfed Greece, but also as part of a wider ‘national opposition’ to the EU/​bail-​out. However, what was of equal, if not more significance in regard to the mass demonstrations against the Troika –​and, by association, the Greek elites and ruling class forces that endorsed it –​was that the mass-​popular opposition ignited waves of class-​based forms of mobilization and protest involving the trade unions, youth movements and the radical left. And, in some respects, the political atmosphere within Greece over 2010 and 2012 and then 2015 approximated moments of revolutionary crisis when the possibility of a combination of state collapse and revolutionary rupture looked possible with Greece crashing out of the Eurozone resulting in a fundamental re-​ordering of Greece’s social relations and society antagonistic to the social interests of international and financial capital. As Stathis Kouvelakis (2011: 24) wrote at the time, after

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having been on ‘the receiving end of the most punishing austerity programme ever implemented in post-​war Europe,’ Greece was engulfed by a mass mobilization ‘with huge demonstrations, general strikes and the occupation of Syntagma Square’ involving ‘workers from the public and private sectors, the unemployed, young people, small business owners and entrepreneurs, retired people’ and with such a ‘scale, spread and diverse social composition’ that ‘indicated the support of the majority of society.’ The significance of the mass mobilizations that defined this period in the lead up to syriza’s 2015 election victory was that they provided a clear view for EU capitals and the Troika as to where Greece stood and the strength and depth of opposition to its medicine and, in particular, the possibility of a radical rupture with the Eurozone and EU consensus. And while this was to happen in Britain in 2016 through a constitutional and formal process of departure, at the time in Greece, it looked like the means of exit would be very different, politically, and much more consequential, socially and geopolitically for the Eurozone and the EU. So while only a tiny element within the overall Eurozone economy, a Greek default and exit from the Eurozone would have shattered the political consensus within the EU and highlighted the role of EU institutions –​not least the ecb –​and leading capitals in Greece’s exit. Moreover, such an outcome in all likelihood would have unleashed a firestorm of panic, worry and political instability across other vulnerable Eurozone economies with high debt levels such as Italy and Spain. The point here is not to speculate on what might have happened but to provide a context within which Golden Dawn advanced and where the significance of a fascist movement can be more accurately examined beyond its electoral performance. Indeed, some of the writing was already on the wall (Xenakis, 2013a; Zenakos, 2020) prior to the murder of Pavlos Fyssos in the autumn of 2013, with the tolerance of Golden Dawn’s fascist violence –​that was targeted at the left as much as it was immigrants –​by the police and state authorities. In a pattern that tends to reveal itself in moments of acute social and political crises within liberal states, the coercive apparatus of the state –​ that is otherwise well equipped to deal with outbreaks of far-​right street violence –​tends to be inconsistent and one-​sided in the deployment of its legal and coercive resources in responding to social disorder and violence. And in the case of Greece both the articulation of who or what the threat was and the decisions by political elites in responding to social disorder was overwhelmingly targeted at the radical left: it was the left and the possibility of a left-​nationalist rupture with the Eurozone and the existing rule of capital within Greece that was depicted as the primary threat to both Greece and the Eurozone and not the violence of an emerging fascist movement. Accordingly,

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up until the murder of Pavlos Fyssos, the administrative and coercive resources of the state were largely focused on dealing with the radical left. But it also went further than this –​highlighting the strategic selectivity of the state apparatuses (Jessop, 1990: 260) –​as there was evidence of collusion between elements within the police and the fascists carrying out the violence (Chatzistefanou, 2012; Hope, 2013; Margaronis, 2012; Zenakos, 2020). Thus at a time of intense social crisis and with Greece on the precipice, the coercive arms of the state are able to engage with and utilize fascist paramilitary violence drawing on those institutional spaces and shared authoritarian ideological sentiments within the state –​that in the case of Greece were never properly cleansed of the historical legacies of the far-​right state from the civil war and the Colonels’ dictatorship. Further, it was only after a series of mass demonstrations against Golden Dawn violence after the murder of Pavlos Fyssos that the legal apparatus of the state finally responded by arresting leading members of the party (Xenakis, 2013b) and clamping down on its activities. The violence of Golden Dawn had not been only tolerated by conservative Greek opinion and the state for years –​and especially in relation to the recurring violence towards immigrants –​it was also singled out as an opportunity to impose greater legal and coercive restrictions on the mobilizations of the left (Chatzistefanou, 2013). The political calculations involved in this targeting of the left relate to the idea of the ‘twin extremes’ of the radical left and far-​right (Anastasakis, 2013) and the assumption that both are equally threatening to social order and the functioning of liberal democracy. This is a classic trope of Cold War liberalism associated with the idea of totalitarianism and its application in the context of Greece during the Eurozone crisis –​by both centre-​ right politicians in Greece and the EU authorities –​equally obscures the key differences in the radicalism (or ‘extremism’ in liberal-​conservative framing) of the left with that of the far-​right. Thus an equivalence is made between the social disorder that resulted from some of the mass demonstrations against the austerity measures –​that were universally unpopular in Greece –​and the government implementing them at the behest of the Troika, and the racist and politically motivated violence carried out by paramilitaries connected to a fascist party. Such blurring of quite distinct forms of politics in terms of the causes and focus of violence and the democratic or mass basis of each, serves to both limit and sanitize the specific form of fascist violence and the distinct political ends it serves. It also serves to undermine any popular resistance to fascist street violence which for much of this period was –​with the combination of complicity and passivity by the police and legal authorities –​the only defence against it. This is not only a highly dangerous tactic –​as evidenced in

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what played out in Greece over 2012–​15 –​but also, ultimately, implicates conservative and liberal forces in the politics of fascism. That the fascist episode in Greece did not mutate into something more serious demonstrates that liberal and conservative elites are only willing to tolerate fascist violence so far. Indeed, the international spectacle of fascist violence –​not lost on the German political establishment at this time –​was also important in forcing the Greek authorities to act against Golden Dawn. However, both the emergence of and the advances made by Golden Dawn can only be explained within the context of a crisis that implicated both the socioeconomic and political-​institutional pillars of Greek liberal democracy. Further, that fascism did not come to play a more significant role was also a consequence of the decision by the newly elected syriza government in 2015 to accept the third Troika bail-​out and its attached conditions, thus reneging on its manifesto commitment but stabilizing the Greek state and its ruling class. It was the agency of the left and its decision to maintain the geopolitical and economic status quo –​and the social costs associated with it –​that averted the kind of rupture and deepening of the Greek crisis that might have produced a very different political outcome and for the broader forces of the far-​right. 3

Conclusions

The period between 2008 and 2019 saw the most significant advances for far-​ right forms of politics across the liberal democratic heartlands since World War ii. These advances were directly connected to the 2007–​8 North Atlantic financial crisis and how its socioeconomic, political, and geopolitical effects played out thereafter and, in particular, how such effects super-​charged the contradictions and pathologies that decades of neoliberalism had engrained in these societies. That these advances were uneven –​in most cases the far-​ right did not manage to enter government and the strength and significance of its oppositional posture has been variable and, in a small number of cases, negligible –​obviously demonstrates the importance and explanatory significance of each country’s domestic socioeconomic make-​up and politics. However, such a set of generalized political responses are also indicative of a common set of socioeconomic, political, and geopolitical causes connected to the rise of the far-​right. This conjunctural moment, then, reflects the latest historical iteration of the longue durée of the far-​right and, as with those earlier moments, it was the confluence of developments centred on the global and international that reshaped the social and political landscape within nation-​states opening up the greater possibilities for far-​right advance.

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The far-​right did not suddenly emerge after 2008; it was already deeply embedded in most western liberal democracies even if not as a separate party, as in US. Further, the dog-​whistle, if not always outright racist tropes that have animated much of the political debate over the neoliberal era –​be it on the ‘bloated nature’ of the welfare state, the ‘economic drain’ and ‘cultural threat’ from immigrants and the ‘problems’ posed by Muslim communities in particular –​were also hard-​wired into wide-​swathes of the popular consciousness prior to the crisis. Such racial and cultural assumptions were also never very far away from neoliberalism –​both as an intellectual and ideological framework and as state practice. The period preceding the crisis, and which had characterized much of its politics was based on this paradoxical neoliberal ‘embrace’ of the far-​right (Davidson and Saull, 2017; Saull, 2018). That this did not weaken the far-​right after 2008 was partly to do with the specific geopolitical dimensions of the crisis and the absence of an alternative narrative of the crisis –​why it happened, who was to blame and what needed to be done –​sourced in a left-​internationalist counter-​narrative. Indeed, because of the way in which the socioeconomic fabric of EU and Eurozone member-​state societies were geopolitically connected in such an uneven and combined fashion, it was difficult for an alternative left narrative and counter-​hegemonic current to emerge and gain political traction. In the US case the enduring weaknesses of counter-​hegemonic forces on the left and the Democratic Party’s craven embrace of neoliberal centrism opened-​up a space for a politics of grievance and anger and, in Britain, a similar pattern played out. Brexit was both the fulfilment of a radicalized neoliberalism combined with a nativist sovereigntism that re-​booted a politics infused with the spectre of Thatcherism and ultimately fulfilled by a white working class detached from an out-​dated culture of organized labour that permitted the racialized weaponizing of class. The crisis, then, foregrounded spatialized narratives that were infused with a racialized invective centred on the scapegoated spectre of immigrants. That immigrants were not responsible for the crisis nor the subsequent austerity imposed by cosmopolitan elites and, further, that they and ethnic-​minority citizens were afflicted by the most severe socioeconomic consequences of it did not matter. Hence, the permanent if temporally varied racialized common-​ sense that is never far-​away from the surface in liberal democracies reasserted itself and where too much of the left and liberal alternatives were either complicit in such framings or unable to effect alternatives. Indeed, given the arrangement of social forces within and between national spaces and the dominant one between capital and labour across these societies, the democratic means to effect a change was not only limited to the nation-​state formula but

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even here –​and because of the spatial diffusion of capital and its transnational legal-​political architecture –​such nation-​based democratic solutions were also inadequate. Nationalist responses are neither meaningless for capital nor labour, yet since 2008 they have only served to reinforce the spectre ignited by the far-​right. That the far-​right does not offer a solution to these contradictions or that it is, in some regards, also partly responsible for their causes does not matter until a sufficiently powerful counter-​narrative emerges on the left. The far-​right benefited from the mutating neoliberal crisis –​first of the banking and financial sectors and then in public and sovereign debt –​that produced the austerity policies, and which saw the prioritizing of reducing government debt levels rather than economic expansion and reducing structural inequalities that ended up reinforcing the pathologies of neoliberalism. That this was a global crisis rooted in transnational finance that had been facilitated by government policies for decades and rooted in an elite-​centrist or establishment consensus tone deaf to the mounting social carnage that it produced, it was perfectly aligned with the propaganda and scapegoating of the neoliberal far-​right. And while the far-​right’s antagonism towards neoliberalism was and is partial, its concentration on the connection between the local and transnational in terms of institutional governance made an effective narrative of causation, responsibility and blame. The limits of the far-​right in terms of its constitutive contradictions in its political economy and in its deformed democratic imaginary were also evident in the shortcomings of its advances. In particular its collective failure to capture more votes and representatives in the 2014 and 2019 European Parliamentary elections not only demonstrate the political limits of its appeal and re-​enchantment of the wider citizenry, but also, in practical terms, its ability to affect a major shift in the EU and Eurozone’s direction of travel. Consequently, unless it can create a major obstacle of itself in the European Parliament through its role in legislation, treaty ratification and appointments to the leadership of the European Commission, it will have to operate in a structural context that closes off most of its policy options that might address the promises that it makes to its voters. Its continuing embrace of neoliberalism and constitutive inability to challenge the social rule of capital and private property rights means that it offers no effective social mediation to both the consequences of the crisis and, more importantly, its causes. The societies it seeks to reenchant and transform are overwhelmingly more plural and liberal than in the past, and the combination of this with the pervasiveness of the ‘post-​political condition’ provide structural limits as to the enduring quality and permanence of recent successes.

­c hapter 4

Conclusions At the dawn of the 2020s far-​right parties and ideo-​political currents are embedded and, to a significant degree, increasingly mainstreamed across most of Europe and the United States. This revival of the far-​right is an unprecedented development in the post-​war era in terms of not only in their respective levels of electoral support and political representation, but also their wider legitimation and normalization as part of the political mainstream. This revival reveals the very particular characteristics of the present conjuncture that –​as in the past –​has come to determine the precise ideological character of the contemporary far-​right. Consequently, this revival does not amount to a return of fascism, even if recent developments within the United States associated with Donald Trump and the Trump presidency might suggest otherwise (Paxton, 2021). This revival as argued in chapters two and three of this volume, is closely connected to the way in which neoliberalism has come to structure the economy and condition the nature of politics and the workings of political institutions over the last two-​to-​three decades. Further, this process has also reconfigured the precise form of interaction between the spheres of the domestic and the international –​in some respects obliterating the distinction between them –​ and, accordingly, how the ‘spectre of the international’ is imagined within the ideology of the far-​right. The 2007–​8 neoliberal crisis provided a further set of enabling conditions and the ongoing covid-​19 global pandemic is but the latest international development –​in both material and imagined forms –​that has and will come to exercise influence on its fortunes. And in this latter case, given that the pandemic is ongoing as I write, the precise consequences –​positive or negative –​for the political fate of the far-​right are not yet clear. Indeed, how the future plays out for the far-​right will depend on what type of economy emerges from the pandemic in terms of the impact of lock-​downs on particular economic sectors (i.e., whether they are able to return to anything like their pre-​c ovid level of activity), and the extent to which key supply-​chains are re-​shored (curtailing the dynamic of economic globalization). Further, it will also depend on whether or not unemployment significantly rises and, most importantly, how far the radical fiscal measures utilized by Britain, the USA and the EU and its member states in dealing with the pandemic –​massively increasing levels of public debt –​triggers a cycle of fiscal tightening and public spending cutbacks in the coming years, or the basis for a systematic turning

© Richard Saull, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004539549_005

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away from neoliberalism and the development of a very different form of political economy. What seems clear is that while the far-​right’s hostility to aspects of the public health measures and cultivation of ‘anti-​vax’ and ‘anti-​expert/​science’ tendencies (Rachman, 2021) has not worked to their political advantage in the short-​term,1 other issues associated with the pandemic –​not least border controls, immigration and the racialized character of aspects of the political discourse that have emerged in response to it (e.g., the promotion of the idea of ‘the Chinese virus’ by Trump and other far-​right demagogues) –​have ensured that the far-​right is well-​placed to benefit from the exit out of the pandemic. Indeed, the pandemic has brought out into further bold relief not only the continuing consequences of China rising as a major geopolitical power, but also a deepening of logics of competition and rivalry. In addition to the pandemic the current political conjuncture has also been shaped by the mass mobilization triggered by the Black Lives Movement following the murder of George Floyd, an African-​American in Minneapolis, Minnesota in May 2020, by a white police officer, and how broader issues around racial (in)justice (not just police violence towards people of colour), have reasserted themselves as a central part of public debate. The demands for racial justice as expressed in calls for reform of the police, and addressing the public legacies of empire and colonialism –​be it in the form of statutes and displays in museums to educational curricula, to the ‘taking of the knee’ as a public gesture towards the issue of continuing racial injustice –​all provide openings for the far-​right through what has been termed ‘culture war’ with the push-​back from conservative and far-​right social and political forces in response to the popular mobilizations around different dimensions of racial justice. However, such developments also reveal something paradoxical in the evolution of liberal democracy in terms of the broader cultural sensibilities of large numbers and, in many respects, majorities of people within them. Thus while what some have termed as a ‘war on woke’ may galvanize some voters, 1 In France and Germany in particular the momentum that saw major electoral advances in recent years for the rN and the AfD, respectively, appears to have stalled on the basis of their failure to win regional elections that took place within the context of the pandemic. In France, Marine Le Pen’s rn aimed to capture a region to govern in the June 2021 regional elections on the back of her performance in the 2017 presidential election and recent polling. Instead, with a very low turn-​out, the traditional parties of the centre-​right and left were the winners. In Germany the regional election in the AfD stronghold of Saxony-​Anhalt in June 2021 saw a victory for the Christian Democrats and the AfD’s vote falling on its 2016 performance by over three percent.

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it is far from clear that it provides an effective means of pushing back against calls for addressing issues of racial (in)justice or a means to strengthen the far-​ right. Thus notions of and commitments to sexual, gender and racial equality –​ even if in most cases they are far from being realized in a substantive sense –​ suggest that these parties either have to make their peace with such cultural trends through diluting some of their key ideological positions, or, if they don’t, they are unlikely to expand their sources of electoral support. What all this amounts to is that as much as the far-​right has shaped and shapes the ideo-​political content of liberal democracy, so the evolving political consensus or ‘centre ground’ of politics necessarily permeates the ideo-​ political content of the far-​right and, to some extent, liberalizes it. This is not unusual as much as the ideological content of conservatism and socialism have evolved and absorbed the social and cultural transformations of an always evolving liberal modernity, so it is the case with the far-​right. This does not mean that the far-​right will disappear as a distinct ideo-​political current, but it does mean that its longer-​term prospects of maintaining its recent political momentum and/​or securing political power through increasing its vote-​share look challenging given the dominant liberalizing trends evident within liberal democratic societies. In recognizing this there are important exceptions to how such trends are playing out politically. In France and other parts of Europe a widespread hostility towards public displays of Islamic faith –​most notably the wearing of the niqab by women –​and governmental campaigns against what is labelled ‘Islamic separatism’ indicates that an engrained suspicion towards forms of cultural pluralism in general and by Muslims in particular, suggest that some forms of racial prejudice remained entrenched. Further, in the United States the social and cultural legacies of its racist past as a colonial-​settler state, and the continuing shadow of slavery on the racial present continue to scar its social fabric offer sustenance for the far-right. And with its politics trapped within an eighteenth century constitutional framework –​that provides legal bulwarks through the organization and workings of Congress and the power of the Supreme Court against progressive social and cultural change anchored in democratic majorities –​the forces of the reactionary right are constitutionally advantaged and continue to work against liberalizing social and cultural trends. This has ensured that cultural and social minorities –​reflected in the form of social conservatives and corporate power –​can use such constitutional arrangements to prevent progressive and liberalizing tendencies from being fully realized through legislation and constitutional change. However, while this may be the case at a federal level the delegated constitutional authority across individual states means that significant parts of the country –​from

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California to Oregon on the west coast to New York and New England in the north-​east, as well as in its major cities –​have all seen progressive and liberalizing policies on drug reform and gender and sexual rights enacted, that reflect such trends; even if they further reinforce social and political divides between big cities and rural areas and the coasts with the interior. The longer-​term social and cultural trends that appear to be working against the ideas and politics of the far-​right are also evident in the structure and workings of the economies within liberal democracies. This relates to both the structure of labour markets and the reproduction of those social layers who are most likely to support the far-​right and the continuing role and need for immigrants. Thus both the role of migrants in the workings of these economies –​even if the post-​pandemic world reveals a curtailing of the drivers of globalization –​and the types of jobs within them through the changing character of labour markets and the recomposition of class, reveal limits on both the future sources of support for far-​right parties and the type of policies that these parties can propose and likely implement. This seems to be most evident in the case of far-​right parties within the Eurozone that are limited in what they can propose (if they wish to secure wider levels of support that is required if they are going to enter government) in terms of macro-​economic policy and their overall radicalism, by the structure and discipline associated with their countries’ membership of the Eurozone. Indeed, those major parties of the far-​right –​including the League in Italy, the rn in France and the AfD in Germany –​have all moved away from such radicalism with regard to calling for the dissolution or exit from the Eurozone.2 Further, the wider geopolitical context within which these parties compete to govern is increasingly shaped by developments and power outside of Europe and the broader North Atlantic area, which further weakens political projects that require an exit from or dismemberment of the EU. Simply put, a project of nationalist protectionism is not only not possible within the context of the EU/​Eurozone but its political appeal is also significantly limited given the structure of member-​state economies and how publics tend to view their own socioeconomic wellbeing as inextricably linked to the stability and success of the Eurozone. The progressive and liberalizing currents present within those liberal democracies that this book has concentrated on however contrast with the hollowing out of democratic engagement, in terms of turn-​out at elections 2 Salvini and the League’s support for the current government –​led by the former head of the ecb, the technocrat Mario Draghi –​tasked with dealing with the pandemic is suggestive of another dimension of moderation by the Italian far-​right even if it opens up more space on the League’s right flank for the Brothers of Italy to tap into disaffected League supporters.

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and faith in existing representative institutions, and the inequalities –​both social and spatial –​consequent from existing socioeconomic structures. Thus the crisis management within the Eurozone and its undemocratic, top-​down, and authoritarian character reveal the possibilities of an elite or ‘technocratic far-​right politics’ within the formal trappings of liberal-​constitutional democracy, and the continuing openings within and the fragilities of, existing liberal democratic forms of governance to a far-​right temptation in contexts of socioeconomic crisis. And that these crises are recurring phenomena within the politics of liberal democracies suggests that opportunities for the far-​right will remain, and especially so in circumstances where a deep-​seated apathy and, in some respects, hostility, towards the institutions of political representation and mainstream political parties remains the case. This disenchantment of liberal democracy provides a dangerous environment ripe for demagoguery and authoritarianism as we have seen in recent years and especially so through the increasing significance of social media platforms on political debate and election campaigns. This is not going to change anytime soon. Further, developments within the United States –​as revealed in the continuing hold of Trumpist demagoguery over the Republican party including the open embrace of the fascist-​like tactics of the ‘January 6 mob’ and the concerted legal moves by the gop at state level to make it much harder for voters who traditionally vote Democrat to cast their ballots (Pilkington, 2021) –​ alongside the kind of atmosphere that the mid-​term Congressional elections (November 2022) are likely to take place within, suggest that a far-​right or ‘fascist moment’ (Eley, 2021) is not just possible but quite likely in the near future. Existing trends within the workings of the liberal democracies that this book has focused on suggest that even if broader liberalizing trends that run counter to the politics of the far-​right are maintained, there is no guarantee that such social trends will play out politically. That this is most evident in the US does not mean that it is absent in other liberal democracies. Accordingly, it is this issue that focuses our attention on the far-​right’s reconciliation with and self-​proclaimed ‘embrace of democracy.’ This now appears not to be the case in the United States, and such a path –​backed by a not insignificant, if far from a majority of citizens –​may well develop in other liberal democracies3 should the possibilities of the right continuing to access political power via 3 The letter co-​signed by former senior military officers in France stating that ‘France was in peril’ from disorder caused by a lack of discipline focused on immigrants and Islamism in particular (which also appeared to endorse the need for a coup d’état) and which was praised by the rn leader, Marine Le Pen (see Mallet, 2021), has raised –​highly unlikely though it may be –​such a prospect in France and reveals a deep disquiet about the future of the country among a significant number of French voters.

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democratic means become much less likely and/​or the progressive and liberalizing trends mentioned above become actualized in political terms. Indeed, within the context of the EU and its supposed commitment to upholding the institutions and values of liberal democracy, the tolerance of and challenges from the authoritarian and far-​right governments of Poland and Hungary to some of these core values and institutions (such as the supremacy of EU law, the jurisdiction of the ecj and the rights of minorities) demonstrate that while such regimes do not pose a threat to the geoeconomic character of the EU nor offer an alternative model of political economy, they do threaten the liberal foundations of the EU. And that the EU has not managed to deal with these kinds of challenges, effectively, indicates that the possibilities of a more generalized far-​right turn in this particular form is not beyond the realm of possibility. This brings us back to where we started and the centrality of the international and its evolving character in conditioning the possibilities of the far-​ right. The multiple dimensions of the international –​socioeconomic, legal-​ institutional, political, and geopolitical –​have, and will continue to condition both the openings and limits for the politics of the far-​right. Accordingly, much of what is driving (and working against) the politics and openings for the contemporary far-​right –​as suggested above –​is sourced in the particular form of the evolving inter-​active relationship between the domestic and international. Thus uneven development and its iniquitous consequences –​both spatial and social –​is a product of the way in which the international economy is organized and permeates the interiors of liberal democracies. That this is a constitutive and organic feature of capitalism and not just neoliberalism indicates that such a pathology will continue to generate future spatial and social resources for the far-​right. Further, and as suggested above, the type of post-​ pandemic recovery and the structure of the economy that emerges over the coming months and years may well reinforce such unevenness and inequality. The causal significance of the international in shaping the contours of the future far-​right will also be evident in the workings of liberal democratic politics. And as evidenced in developments in post-​Brexit Britain, transforming the legal-​political relationship through leaving the EU does not mean that the kind of toxic ideo-​political currents that plagued Britain’s membership of the EU and fuelled the far-​right have disappeared. So while Britain’s relationship is no longer institutionalized and legally-​framed in the way that it was prior to its departure from the EU, the connections that Britain continues to have with its most important trading partner alongside how issues of security and immigration are managed, mean that the spectre of the EU and the opportunities for its weaponization by far-​right currents, remain. Further, the ongoing

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difficulties and disagreements over the nature and working of the Northern Ireland protocol –​with Northern Ireland having a distinct legal status within the UK because of its continuing membership of the EU Single Market and Customs Union –​mean that opportunities for continued EU-​phobia remain hard-​wired in the departure treaty with the EU, and Britain’s post-​EU trading relationship. There are two other areas anchored in the evolving dynamics of the international system that are also likely to play a key role in shaping the fortunes of the far-​right in the western liberal democracies in the coming years: the playing out of the environmental catastrophe and the rise of China. In the former, the politics of the environmental crisis already provide a fillip to the far-​right as governments attempt to de-​carbonise through restructuring their economies and use fiscal measures to promote a greener future. Such developments carry uneven spatial and social burdens that have already triggered populist, and, in some cases, far-​right inspired mobilizations –​be it from how elements of the neoliberal far-​right promote forms of ‘climate denial’ and/​or claim to defend ‘traditional’ and ‘hard-​working communities’ associated with fossil fuels or polluting-​industries from the policies of cosmopolitan elites agreed in multilateral fora. However, it is likely to be the human consequences of environmental change with large, and possibly huge population movements triggered in parts of the southern hemisphere to more habitable zones over the coming years that will massively increase the flow of refugees northwards to the southern borders of the EU and USA. Here, the politics of borders and border security will be reinforced with the potential to become a dominant element within political debate in response to the humanitarian crisis unleashed by the environmental catastrophe. Whereas immigration within a prevailing context of a ‘war on terror mindset’ saw the far-​right occupy a ‘legitimate’ position the scenario sketched above is likely to push the humanitarian values of liberal democracies to potential breaking point. The rise of China has already become an issue associated with the revival of the far-​right as noted in the previous chapter with the political effects registered in Brexit and votes for Trump from the so-​called ‘China shock’. The connection between the spatialized socioeconomic disruptions of China’s economic rise became a key element in the foreign policy of the Trump presidency with China being labelled as a competitor, and with the racialization of the covid-​ 19 pandemic. That this shift in US grand strategy –​in terms of the former –​ has not changed under the Biden presidency suggests that geopolitical rivalry between the US and, though to a lesser extent, the EU, and China is now a part of the fixed architecture of international relations. Though perhaps not –​at least not yet –​approximating a cold war, China’s geopolitical ascendancy offers

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the far-​right an important opening, as not only does it introduce, for the first time since the 1940s, major geopolitical rivalry between capitalist great powers and, consequently, a dynamic of inter-​imperial competition and rivalry, but also a racialized animus, largely unprecedented in the modern era. While this needs some qualification with regard to the place of the declining Ottoman Empire in the racialized imaginary of European imperialists (and publics) in the nineteenth century and through –​as we saw in Chapter 1 in this volume and Chapter 4 in Volume 1 –​the way in which the ussr and the ideology of Bolshevism were racialized as a form of hostile Other to that of the white, Christian, bourgeois of the United States after 1917, the Othering of China suggests something else. Indeed, China’s economic power and global significance vastly exceeds that of what the ussr ever managed to achieve, and which not only failed to offer much of a global challenge to US power and influence after 1945, but also was never more than a fraction of the size of the US economy. But it is, obviously, not just the potential for the introduction of inter-​imperial rivalry that assists the politics of the far-​right, but that China can be and is presented and framed as a racialized Other. Further, China has the potential to realize not just an existential challenge to the idea of white supremacy but its eclipse. Such a transformation in world politics would be unprecedented in the modern era and which is also likely to involve the rise of other non-​white/​Christian powers such as India. The possibility of the rise of China being framed as the rise of a racial Other and the surpassing of the West offers, then, the possibility of a re-​coupling of geopolitics with capitalist accumulation that was largely broken by World War ii and thus, the basis for a new ‘alliance’ between the far-​right and capital and political elites. For now this is speculation and appears unlikely, but even if this kind of geopolitical arrangement does not come to pass, the rise of a racial Other playing out within social and political contexts characterized by deep levels of socioeconomic inequality and polarization and the continuing appeal of populist forms of politics –​as is the case across the western liberal democracies –​it is clear that the fortunes of the far-​right are likely to benefit in spite of the countervailing trends present within these societies. Of course, and as evident in the kinds of politics that prospered after 2008, how these developments play out and the extent to which the far-​right maintains or extends its level of influence will also depend on the left: how it rebuilds and reconstructs its posture in the coming years. The seriousness of the climate emergency and what kinds of response are required suggest that the left is well-​placed for a revival though it will need to develop a kind of politics that remains committed to its traditional values of internationalism and egalitarianism while, at the same time, centring a sense of place and space with it.

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Index Adenauer, Konrad 20–​21, 29, 35 AfD. See Alternative für Deutschland affirmative action 97, 99, 109–​10, 112 Affordable Care Act 232 African-​Americans 59, 61, 64–​66, 88, 101, 107–​13, 117, 220, 223, 228–​29, 342 civil Rights 61–​62 employment 113 voters 218 Aginter Press 54 Albright, Madeleine 197, 241 Algerian conflict 39–​42, 53, 54, 55 Alien Minors Act 246 allies 10, 12, 19, 21, 25–​28, 56, 79, 85, 88, 120, 252 Al-​Qaeda 128, 158 Alternative für Deutschland xiv, 187, 200, 282, 301, 305–​11, 342, 344 anti-​immigration posture 308 Euroscepticism 302 ordoliberal discourse 309 support 306 voters 307, 342 Alt-​Right movement 98 web-​platforms 235 amendment, second 242 America first 219, 242, 247–​48 American Empire 158 American Independent Party 222 ancien régime 185 Anglosphere 77, 89, 105, 116, 128 Anievas, Alexander xii, 1, 6, 21, 24, 58–​61, 63, 69, 70, 75 anti-​capitalism 85, 129, 142, 162, 165, 173–​ 74, 176–​77 far-​right 174 anti-​collectivist 86, 105 anti-​colonial 60 anti-​communism 4, 6, 11, 21–​22, 28, 31, 23, 31–​32, 34, 35–​38, 40, 43, 48, 50, 53, 58–​ 62, 64, 70, 105, 128, 156–​57, 159 anti-​elitism 114, 259 anti-​establishment 154, 192 antifa 19, 220 anti-​fascism 19, 145, 158

purges 19, 26, 28, 31 anti-​racism 69, 92, 123, 127 anti-​Semitism 39–​41, 59–​60, 102, 176, 180, 258, 315 anti-​statism 97, 107, 116 anti-​system xiii, 158, 173–​74, 176, 195 Apartheid 102 appeasement 128 Arendt, Hannah 84, 93, 224 Arrighi, Giovanni 213 Asian Financial Crisis 139 asylum seekers 177, 194, 246, 261, 311 Atlantic slavery 58 austerity 210, 254, 256–​57, 261, 263–​64, 266, 268, 271, 274, 286, 289, 291, 297, 301, 309, 323, 331, 334, 337, 340 Austrian School 86, 98 authoritarianism 5, 10, 12, 18, 19, 20, 24, 33, 39, 48, 54, 56, 89, 91–​95, 127, 167, 189, 192, 195, 217, 222–​23, 234, 267, 277, 282, 284, 310–​11, 345 liberalism 75 populism 107, 121, 125 state 12, 80, 89, 91, 116, 121–​22 violence 128 Autor, David 205–​7, 227, 237 Avanguardia Nazionale 37, 45, 47 Bad Godesberg 22 Badoglio, Pietro 25, 26 bailouts 224–​25, 282, 285, 291, 314, 329, 335 Balibar, Étienne 145, 153, 168–​69, 194 Banca Carige 329 Bank of England 253, 273 Bank of Greece 335 Banks, Aron 259 Bannon, Steve 223 Barile, Baron Carlo 36 Barrès, Maurice 164, 315 Beason-​Hammon Alabama Taxpayer Act 231 Becker, Gary 92, 97 Berlin veto 297 Berlusconi, Silvio 293–​94, 322–​23, 325 resignation 294

415

Index Biden, Joe 217–​18, 240, 246, 250, 347 Bild 308–​9 Black Monday 139 Black Wednesday 139 Bloch, Ernst 241, 270 Blum, Leon 38 bnp. See British National Party bnp Paribus 202, 284 Boettke, Peter 98 Bonapartism xiii Bonefeld, Werner 94–​96, 116, 140, 150 Bonomi, Ivanoe 27 Borghese, Prince Junio Valerio 47–​48 Borghese coup plot 47–​48 Bossi, Umberto 169, 324 Boulangsim 41 Breitbart 222 Breivik, Anders 187 Bretton Woods 17, 77, 79–​80, 104, 144 Brexit xii, xiv, 250–​52, 257–​58, 263, 266, 268–​70, 272, 274–​78, 314, 318 bill 276 campaign 118 deal 276–​77 negotiations 276–​77 referendum 120, 129, 246, 256–​57, 272–​73 support for 163, 263, 269 vote 181, 203, 207, 216, 250–​51, 270, 274 Brexit Party 277–​78 Brigate Rosso 49 Britain xiii, 4, 57, 76–​78, 80–​82, 88–​90, 107, 118–​23, 125–​27, 129–​31, 133, 159–​60, 205–​8, 210–​11, 250–​57, 259–​61, 263–​67, 270–​73, 276–​77, 279–​80 British Nationality Act 127 British National Party 161, 174–​75, 184, 187, 251, 258–​59 Brittan, Samuel 80, 96, 119 Brothers of Italy 322, 344 Brown, Gordon 262 Brown, Wendy 209, 221, 234 Bruges Speech 126, 252 Buchanan, James 93, 99–​100 Buchanan, Pat 157, 216, 222, 230 Buckley, William F. 99 Bundesbank 302, 308 Bundesrepublik 21, 23–​25 Bundestag 282, 306, 310

Burnley 137, 258 Bush, George H. W. 110 Bush, George W. 216, 230, 238 Bush, Jeb 216 Bush administration 224, 231 Byrne, Liam 254 Caesarism 44, 54, 189 Caldwell, Christopher 170 Cameron, David 255–​56, 259, 260, 262–​64, 267, 274 capitalism 2–​3, 12, 14, 91, 93, 129–​30, 134–​35, 138, 142–​44, 150, 154, 175–​77, 198–​99 American 64, 226, 229, 241, 249 cosmopolitan 135 financialized 140, 198, 210, 282, 284 globalizing 2, 176 neoliberal 82, 91, 132 racial 7, 57, 63–​64 capitalist imperialism xii–​x iii, 3, 84, 91 hyper-​militarized xiii Capitol building 217 Capitol Hill 68 Carabinieri 46 Carswell, Douglas 260 Carter, Dan 105, 108, 110–​11 Carter, administration 128 Casa Pound 326 Cash, Bill 258 cd. See Christian Democrats cdu. See Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands Centre Union (Greek) 50–​51 cgt. See Confédération Générale du Travail Challe, Maurice 54 Charlottesville 219 Charonne massacre 55 Charter of Fundamental Rights (EU) 281 Cheney, Liz 217 Chile 76, 94 China 82, 133–​34, 159, 197, 199, 201, 205–​6, 212–​15, 227–​29, 241, 245–​50, 299–​302, 305, 347–​48 Chirac, Jacques 312 Christian Democracy 19, 36 Christian Democrats 27, 29, 35–​37, 45, 48, 147, 176, 282, 323, 342 Christian Right 110

416 Index Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands 21–​22, 29, 35, 306–​ 8, 310–​11 Christian Social Union (Bavarian) 308 Churchill, Winston 34 cia 29, 44, 46–​48 cio. See Congress of Industrial Organizations Citizen Protection Act 231 City of London 136, 253, 260, 279 civil rights 58–​59, 61–​63, 69–​70, 72, 99–​ 100, 107–​11 legislation 57, 88, 100, 107, 109–​10, 115, 127 clash of civilizations 159 class 165, 225, 234, 238–​41, 250, 256, 268, 271, 273, 339, 344 corporate 246 dominant 65 financial-​rentier 241 lower-​middle 190 middle-​and-​upper 272 national 144 planter 72 rentier 140 spatialized 269 subaltern 14, 152 white working 143, 162, 180, 236, 263, 271–​72, 339 working 93, 95, 142–​44, 146, 162–​63, 166, 175, 179, 248, 250, 266, 270–​72, 317 Clegg, Nick 255 Clinton, Bill 114, 118, 172 Clinton, Hilary 230, 236, 240 Clinton administration 124, 157 cnbc 218, 232 cnn 218, 237–​38 Cold War 2–​5, 10–​12, 27, 29, 31, 41, 43–​44, 49, 53, 60–​62, 70–​73, 75–​76, 85, 92, 156–​60 Colloque Walter Lippmann 90 Colonel’s coup 50 Colonels’ dictatorship 333, 337 colour-​blind 68, 100, 111–​12, 179 Commission for Racial Equality 261 Common Agricultural Policy 314 common sense 21, 123, 191–​92, 199, 203 neoliberal hegemonic 151 popular 121, 123 right-​wing 118

Commonwealth immigration 118, 122, 266 Con-​Dems 255–​56 Confédération Générale du Travail 55 Confindustria 46–​47 Congress of Industrial Organizations 69–​70 Conservative government 126, 262, 277 Conservative Party 104, 125, 161, 250–​52, 258–​60, 262–​64, 274–​77 Conservatives 19, 161, 200, 255, 259–​ 65, 277–​79 cultural 223 social 343 conspiracies 46, 48, 54, 195, 223 birther 231 election steel 218 globalist 183, 223 globalized 183 cosmopolitan 167 conspiracism 258 white nationalist 217 conspiracy theory 262 Constitutional Treaty 183 Consumer Protection Act 244 Conte, Giuseppe 327 contradictions xii–​x iv, 73, 125–​26, 139–​41, 214–​15, 231, 233, 241–​42, 257, 279–​80, 302, 304, 317, 319, 338 Corbyn, Jeremy 275 cosmopolitan 85, 136, 142, 177, 183, 210, 253, 267, 277 elites 164, 173, 209–​10, 259, 315, 339, 347 liberals 259, 274 coup 45–​46, 48, 50–​52, 54, 94, 221, 324, 345 constitutional 293 coup plots 42, 45–​49, 50–​52, 54–​55 covid-​19 pandemic 220, 223, 273, 347 Cox, Jo 266–​67 Cox, Robert 9, 16–​18 credit squeeze 254, 256 Criminal Evidence Act 124 criminality 28, 103, 110–​12, 115, 122, 124, 127, 171, 180, 185, 334 Criminal Justice Act 124 crisis 44–​45, 66–​67, 78–​80, 95–​96, 138–​40, 180–​81, 196–​215, 224–​26, 229–​33, 236, 253–​56, 260–​61, 279–​86, 288–​89, 291–​93, 295–​97, 301–​3, 312–​13, 331–​35, 338–​40 foreign-​exchange 126

Index migrant 324–​25 organic 199–​200, 303, 312, 322, 331–​32 refugee 279, 304, 307, 312 Crow, Jim 59, 61–​62, 64–​65, 67–​70, 72, 75, 99–​100, 107, 114–​15 Cruz, Ted 233 Cultural Marxism 259 Customs Union 277, 347 Daily Express 259 Daily Mail 120, 259, 275 Daily Stormer 222 Danish People’s Party 76, 160, 184 Davidson, Neil xii, 6, 91, 129, 137, 156, 163, 173, 261 Davis, David 276 debt 141, 208, 254, 286, 288, 290, 292, 296, 307 brakes 298 crisis 289, 292 sovereign 290, 308, 340 debtor states 289, 302 decisionism 301 dédiabolisation 315 de-​fascistization 26–​27, 35 Defence Union of Shopkeepers and Artisans 41 deficit 79, 183 federal 244 fiscal 210 deficit denial 244 de Gaulle, Charles 36, 38–​39, 52–​54 Delors, Jacques 132, 154–​55 democracy 8, 10, 12, 43–​44, 93–​95, 97, 99, 120, 122, 189–​91, 194, 219–​20, 332–​33 social 91, 93, 95–​96, 116, 144, 154, 162 Democratic Unionist Party 276 Democrats 72, 105, 113, 218, 239, 241 Democrat voters 239 de-​Nazification 20, 22–​23, 25 Deng Xiaoping 134 de-​regulation 125, 137, 166, 173, 200–​201, 216, 230, 244, 258–​59, 266, 324 financial 130 hyper 260 Desmond, Richard 259 Dewinter, Filip 168 dictators 94, 242

417 totalitarian 93 dictatorship 32, 94, 324 commissarial 44, 94 far-​right 224 Die Linke 311 Dien Bien Phu 38, 41, 53 Dixiecrats 67, 72 Dockworkers march (London 1968), 119 Dodd-​Frank Act 244 Dorling, Danny 136, 253, 271–​72 Dot-​Com crisis 139 Draghi. Mario 301, 344 dream (Development, Relief, and Education for Alien) Act 246 Drolet, Jean-​Francois 5, 168, 216, 223, 235 Dublin Convention 304, 307 du Bois, W. E. B. 65 Dulles, John Foster 29 Duncan Smith, Ian 258, 264 Dukakis, Michael 110, 117–​18 Duke, David 160 East Asia 131, 136, 142, 207, 212, 245 Eastern Europe 21, 34, 261 East Germany 21, 83, 300, 306, 310 Eatwell, Roger 24, 35, 37, 40, 46, 122, 143, 162 ecb. See European Central Bank ecj. See European Court of Justice ecofin 280, 284, 286, 289 Economists for Brexit 266 Edgar, David 102, 104, 119, 180, 269 edl. See English Defence League eec. See European Economic Community  Eisenhower, Dwight D. 72 elas (Greek People’s Liberation Army) 31–​33 Eley, Geoff 1, 15, 17, 19, 74, 144, 220, 345 elites 55, 59, 93, 105, 151, 183, 189, 191, 210, 257, 267, 272 beltway 213 conservative 7, 10, 338 corrupt 185 cosmopolitan/​liberal 169 economic 23 oligarchic 164 social-​democratic 172 white 227

418 Index Emmanuel, Victor 26 Employment Acts (Thatcher government) 121 enemy within 120, 123 enemy without 120 England xiii, 118, 134, 136, 187, 252–​53, 255, 263, 268–​73 Cities 271 middle 275 northern 137 English Defence League 186–​88 English Midlands 83, 134 enslavement 97 entrepreneurialism 173–​74, 198, 211 environmental catastrophe 347 ert. See European Roundtable of Industrialists erm. See European Exchange Rate Mechanism EU. See European Union EU-​phobia 347 Euro 82, 131, 138–​39, 149, 261, 284, 290, 294, 296, 299–​300, 314, 324 excessive deficit procedure 296, 328 Europe 11, 20–​21, 131, 133, 135, 147–​49, 182, 184, 186, 209, 211, 279–​80, 328, 330, 343–​44 European banks 284, 301 European Central Bank 139, 150, 183, 203, 280, 284, 287–​89, 291–​94, 297, 301–​2, 336, 344 European Commission 125, 150, 286, 340 European Court of Justice 151, 153, 281, 346 European Economic Community 21, 77–​78, 81, 119, 125–​26, 131–​33, 137–​38, 153–​54 European Exchange Rate Mechanism 126, 139 European financialization 139 European financial system 284 European integration 17, 126, 131, 147, 157, 182–​84, 281, 299 neoliberalization of 154, 183 project of 125, 157, 183, 283 European Parliament 153, 277, 340 European Parliamentary elections 259, 314, 318, 322, 327, 330, 340 European Research Group 276

European Roundtable of Industrialists 149, 153–​54 European Semester 328, 331 European single currency 126 European Single Market 131 European Union 120, 126, 155, 197, 250–​51, 283, 324 European Union Chamber of Commerce in China 212 Euroscepticism 125, 154, 182, 184, 260–​ 61, 318 Eurozone 148–​52, 280–​302, 305–​6, 308, 311, 314, 317, 321–​22, 324–​25, 327–​28, 332–​33, 335–​36, 344–​45 bail outs 308 governance 283 crisis 182, 184, 281–​84, 286, 288, 292–​93, 295, 300–​301, 303, 305–​6, 310, 312–​14, 317, 323–​25 debtor countries 301 members 286–​89, 301, 328 Stability and Growth Pact 149, 286–​87, 288–​89, 296, 328 Evian Agreement 54 Exxon-​Mobil 29 Falklands War 123 Farage, Nigel 236, 250–​52, 259, 263, 264, 265–​66, 270, 276–​78 far-​right  militia groups 187 parties 76–​77, 87–​88, 160–​63, 166, 173–​ 75, 182, 186–​89, 192, 194, 197, 199, 302, 304–​5, 322, 344 street movements 306 street violence 336 terrorism 7, 55 fascism xii–​x iii, 1–​2, 4–​5, 10–​11, 13–​18, 26–​ 28, 33–​34, 40, 42–​43, 55, 67, 84–​86, 161, 184–​85, 219–​21, 338 fascist international 36 fascist regimes 1, 25 fascists 1, 7, 9, 11, 18–​19, 24–​27, 32, 36, 38, 219, 221–​23 former 10–​11, 16, 19–​20, 24, 26, 28, 34–​ 36, 45 fascist street politics 187 fascist street violence 337–​38

Index Faure, General Jacques 41 fdi. See foreign direct investment  fdp. See Freie Demokratische Partei federal air-​traffic controllers 113 Federal Civil Service Law 24 Federal Election (German) 306 Ferraresi, Franco 35 Fidesz party 193 Fifth Republic (French) 39–​40, 282, 298 Fillon, Francois 316, 319 finance 85, 138, 143, 207, 327 de-​territorialized 198 globalized 198 finance capital 138–​39, 141–​42, 164, 183, 208, 281, 335 Financial Choice Bill 244 financial crisis 128–​29, 134, 138–​40, 148, 152, 159–​60, 164, 191, 194, 196, 200–​201, 215–​16, 311–​12 financialization 138–​40, 142, 154, 177, 203–​4, 229, 252 housing 204–​5 financial markets 142, 152, 203, 208, 210, 260, 289–​90, 293, 296, 303, 328  globalized, 204, 273 Fini, Gianfranco 322 fiscal policy 90, 166, 174, 211, 244, 273, 286, 295, 318, 328 fiscal stimulus 212, 224–​25, 296, 302 Five-​Star Movement 282, 322 Flick, Friedrich 23 fln. See National Liberation Front (Algerian)  Floyd, George 220, 342 fn. See Front National  Fordism 64, 84 foreign direct investment 82, 136, 141, 213 Forza Italia 322, 325–​26 Foucault, Michel 96 4chan 222 Fourth Republic (French) 38–​41, 53–​54 Fox, Liam 266 Fox News 233 fpö. See Freedom Party (Austria) France 15, 38–​41, 52–​55, 57, 76, 81–​82, 149, 160–​61, 182–​83, 200–​201, 285, 295–​98, 315–​18, 320–​22, 342–​45 Francis, Sam 112, 232, 235 Freda, Franco 47

419 Freedom Party (Austria) 1, 76, 160, 169, 175 Freedom Party (Netherlands) 166, 187 Freedom Works 233 Freiburg 94 Freie Demokratische Partei 306 French Communist Party 53 French Republicanism 315 French Revolution 315 French settlers 39 Frexit 314 Friedman, Milton 92, 94, 96–​97, 100, 102–​ 03, 130, 132 Front National xiv, 40–​41, 54, 76, 160–​61, 169, 174–​75, 178, 182, 282, 311–​14, 316, 318–​20 militant Republicanism 316 Frum, David 219, 236 Fyssas, Pavlos 332 Galbraith, John Kenneth 64 Gamble, Andrew 78, 81, 96, 104, 116, 119–​21, 123–​24, 127, 129, 142, 255 Ganser, Daniela 30, 36, 44–​47 Gasperi, Alcide de 27–​28, 30 gatt. See General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Gaullism 38–​40, 53 Gaullists 39–​40, 53 Gehlen, General Reinhard 20 gender 84, 97, 115, 161, 166–​67, 170, 185, 240, 306, 343–​44 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 17, 80, 144 General Motors 249 Genoa 36, 45 geopolitics xii, 2, 130, 133, 157–​59, 162, 184, 202, 213, 348 imperialist 156 far-​right’s 157 geopolitical rivalry 59, 73, 347 inter–​capitalist 250 militarized 73 geopolitical structures 2, 141, 156, 181, 201, 303 geopolitical tensions 199 geopolitical transformation 199 George, Eddie 253

420 Index German Communist Party 21, 25, 35 German Democratic Republic. See East Germany German government 288, 292, 294, 300, 330 German MnCs 299–​300 German Social Democratic Party 18, 21–​22, 29, 147, 299, 306–​07, 311 Germann, Julian 289, 300–​301 Germany 19, 22–​23, 25, 35, 147–​48, 186–​87, 200–​201, 282, 285, 287–​89, 291–​92, 300–​302, 304–​5, 307–​9, 342 labour austerity 302 Gestapo 20 Gilbert, Jeremy 267 Gilets jaunes 320 Gladio 44 Glencross, Andrew 289, 297 Global Britain 266 global commodity chains 135, 206 globalism 216 globalization 130–​32, 145–​46, 152, 154, 173, 175–​80, 183–​84, 198, 200, 211–​12, 215, 248, 313, 315 Globke, Hans 20 Goldberg, David Theo 72, 108, 111 Golden Dawn 201, 331–​38 Goldwater, Barry 72, 108 Goodhart, David 143, 170 gop. See Republican Party Gottfried, Paul 235 Gove, Michael 264–​65 governmentality 90, 96 government overload 80, 119 Gramsci, Antonio 199–​200, 208, 303 Grand Alliance 11 Graziani, General Rodolfo 25 Great Depression 58, 64–​67 Great Recession 209 Great Society 88, 109, 112 Greece 29, 31–​34, 43, 46, 49–​52, 215, 282, 285, 287, 290–​92, 294, 296–​97, 303–​5, 307, 331–​38 Greek Orthodox Rally 334 Greenspan, Alan 152 Griffin, Nick 258 Griffin, Roger 185 Grillo, Beppe 323 Grossraum 148

Haider, Jörg 169, 175 Haldeman, H. R. 108 Hall, Stuart 96, 105, 119–​21, 123, 255, 271 Hammond, Philip 274 Hamon, Benoit 312 Hanieh, Adam 203, 270–​71 Hannan, Daniel 260, 266 Hartz reforms 299 Harvey, David 84, 96, 104, 120, 129, 130, 133, 139, 300 Hayek, Friedrich 87, 90, 92–​94, 96–​98, 102–​ 03, 128, 140, 150–​51 Hazeldine, Tom 136–​37, 163, 252–​53, 255–​57, 268–​69, 274 Heath, Edward 119 hegemony 11–​12, 56, 75, 106, 197 American xiii, 2, 7–​8, 24, 60, 157, 206, 212, 214 neoliberal 172 Hellenic League 50 Heller, Hermann 94 hetero-​normativity 234 Heyer, Heather 219 historical bloc 9, 15, 18, 34, 37, 58–​60, 62, 64–​65, 71, 75, 121 liberal 59, 73–​74 new 34, 270 Hitler, Adolf 21, 61, 67, 80, 92–​93 Hobsbawm, Eric 15, 78, 123, 133 Hohle, Randolph 73, 88, 108, 114 Hollande, François 297–​98 presidency 297, 313, 317 Eurozone 297 voters 319 Holocaust 20, 75, 307 Holocaust deniers 24 Hoppe, Has-​Hermann 86, 98 Horton, Willie 110 Hot Autumn 45, 47 House Democrats 230 house prices 210, 229, 267 housing crisis 229 housing finance 204–​5 American 203 housing market 273 American 204, 224, 252, 284–​85, 288 financialized 139 Hugenberg, Alfred 35

421

Index Hull 257 Humberside 253 Hungary 192–​93, 255, 305, 346 Huntington, Samuel 80, 159 hyper-​masculinity 221 Identity Europe 306 Ikenberry, G. John 6, 8–​10, 15–​16, 18, 197 imf. See International Monetary Fund  immigrants 167–​73, 177–​81, 198, 231, 247, 262–​64, 309–​10, 315, 317, 324–​26, 332, 334, 336–​37, 339, 344–​45 immigration 101–​5, 122–​23, 137, 145–​46, 168, 171, 173–​74, 177–​81, 194, 231–​32, 245–​47, 258–​59, 263–​64, 311–​12, 315–​16, 326–​ 30, 346–​47 Immigration Decree 330 impeachments 217 first 217 second 217 incarceration 116–​17 income inequality 142, 323, 328 India 305, 348 Indochina 38, 40, 53 Institute of Economic Affairs 119 internationalism 348 International Monetary Fund 77, 141, 287 Iran 242, 246 Iranian hostage crisis 115 Iraq 158–​59, 213, 246 Ireland 82, 277 Irish border 276 iron cage 201, 288, 300, 305, 332 Islamist terrorism 128, 181, 246, 302, 308, 316 Italy 17–​19, 25–​26, 28–​30, 32–​33, 35–​37, 43–​ 46, 49–​52, 76, 81–​82, 160–​61, 200–​201, 282, 285, 290–​93, 295–​97, 303–​5, 322, 324–​27, 329–​31, 344 debt 293–​94, 328 elections 30, 292 secret state 44–​45, 46 Italian Communist Party 7, 26–​31, 35, 45, 48–​50 Italian Democratic Party 323, 325, 331 Italian Socialist Party 27–​29, 31, 37, 46 January 6 mob attack 217, 221

Jaywick 267 Jessop, Bob 5, 30, 150, 194, 337 Jim Crow 62 Jobs Act 294, 329 Johnson, Boris 264, 276–​79 Johnson, Lyndon Baines 66, 88 Jospin, Lionel 312 Jouhard, General Edmond 54 Karamessines, Thomas 46 Katznelson, Ira 58, 66–​68, 112, 233 Kaufmann, Erik 170 Kelly, John 243 Kennan, George 29–​30 Keynes, John Maynard 93 Keynesianism 92 Kiely, Ray 90, 92–​94, 96, 99, 103, 106, 119, 212, 214, 216, 235, 237, 247–​48, 250, 260 Kilgore commission 23 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne 52, 96, 128 kke (Greek Communist Party) 31, 50 Koch brothers 233 Kouvelakis, Stathis 335 kpd. See German Communist Party Kramp-​Karrenbauer, Annegret 307 Kremlin 92, 120 Kristol, Irving 96, 115 Krugman, Paul 255 Krupp, Alfried 23 Ku Klux Klan 62–​63, 160 Kundnani, Arun 77, 86, 98, 107, 167, 302 Kwarteng, Kwasi 259 labour  free movement of 101, 103 immigrant 181, 247 migrant 146 monopoly of 122, 165 labourism 253, 269 labour market reforms 154, 211, 293–​94 labour markets 84, 88, 101, 103–​4, 142, 146, 171, 177, 179–​81, 261–​62, 294, 296, 344 labour migration 69, 146 labour militancy 66, 96, 118, 129, 133, 148 labour movement 78, 103 Lacoste, Robert 54 Lagaillarde, Pierre 53 laïcité 315–​16

422 Index Lapavitsas, Costas 138, 270, 299 League (Italian) xiv, 187, 200, 282, 322, 325–​31, 344 European election campaign 330 northern electorate 330 support 344 voters 327 leave campaign (Brexit) 263, 264–​67, 270, 272, 273–​75 Leave EU 264 left behinds 256, 274, 278, 310 Lega Nord 160, 169, 322 Le Pen, Jean-​Marie 39, 164, 175, 182, 191–​92, 311, 312, 315 Le Pen, Marine 169, 282, 312–​13, 315–​16, 318–​ 320, 321, 331, 342, 345 liberal communitarian 159, 166 liberal constitutional order 34, 92 liberal democracies 5, 8–​12, 32–​34, 42–​44, 49, 51–​52, 57, 67, 74–​75, 96, 105–​6, 160–​62, 184, 186–​90, 192–​95, 320–​21, 337–​39, 342–​47 Liberal Democrats 262 liberal historical bloc 5, 7, 11, 59–​60, 62, 68 liberal-​institutional approach 8 liberal internationalism 6, 12, 17, 60, 71, 216, 230, 251 liberal international order 4–​6, 8–​9, 11–​13, 16–​18, 21, 23–​25, 28, 34, 41–​42, 44, 55–​ 56, 129, 197, 199 liberalism 12–​13, 16, 57, 62, 75, 94, 99, 108–​9, 127, 157, 170 liberal managerial state 234 liberal militarist humanitarianism 158 liberal order 3–​9, 11–​15, 22, 28, 31–​32, 34, 36, 40, 42, 56–​58, 62, 74, 80 libertarian 103, 223, 232 libertarianism 97 Ligue des Patriotes 41 Local Government Association 255 London 32–​33, 118, 126, 136, 210, 253, 255–​57, 260, 267–​69, 274, 279 Long-​Term Refinancing Operations 301 longue durée xii, 3, 6, 12–​13, 73, 91, 138, 166, 195, 338 looney left 120 Lorenzo, General, Giovanni de 46 Lynn, Richard 98

Maastricht Treaty 132, 146, 175 MacLean, Nancy 99, 113, 114 Macron, Emmanuel 282, 312, 319–​20 Major, John 126, 251, 258 Make America Great Again 216, 248 Marable, Manning 60, 63, 70 market police 95, 211 Marshall Plan 18 Martin, Graham 29, 31, 48 Marx, Karl 253 Marxism 60, 80 massacre  of Ethiopians 25 in Athens 32 Massive Resistance 63, 100 Massu, General Jacques 53 Maurras, Charles 164 May, Theresa 262, 274 McCain, John 238 McCarthyism 60 McConnell, Mitch 217 McNally, David 133, 138–​39, 141, 142, 225 McQuarrie, Michael 226, 228–​29, 236–​39 Meadows, Mark 243 Meese, Edwin 110 Melénchon, Jean-​Luc 319 Merkel, Angela 291, 293–​94, 304, 306–​08, 311, 335 Metaxas dictatorship 32 Mexican Peso Crisis 139 migrants 103, 164, 172–​73, 179, 251, 261, 263, 265, 309–​10, 325–​26, 329 undocumented 242, 246, 330 migration 84, 103, 146, 173, 178–​79, 261, 263, 267, 274–​75, 326, 329 migration crisis 326 migration policies 264, 327 Milanesi, Enzo Moavero 327 Miliband, Ed 264 militarism 4, 86, 123, 156–​57, 181, 186 militarists 20, 223 militarization 59, 71, 123, 242, 246 military coup 46, 53, 76 military intervention 5, 30, 46–​47, 52, 194 militias 128, 242 Minford, Patrick 260 Mises, Ludwig von 93, 94, 98 Mitterrand, François 148

Index MnCs. See multi-​national corporations Mnuchin, Stephen 248 modernization 38, 71–​72 modernization theory 99 Monday Club 104, 122 mondialization 149 monetary policy 133, 147, 150, 152, 273, 295 unorthodox 210 monetary sovereignty 260, 304 monetary union 298–​99 Monti, Mario 293–​94, 295, 323 Mont Pelerin Society 90, 94, 99 morbid symptoms 199, 208 Moro, Aldo 37, 46 mortgage equity 204 mortgages 203, 271 distressed 232 household 202 Moscow 10, 33–​34, 44 Moseley, Oswald 36 mosques 178 Mouffe, Chantal 190 Mouzelis, Nicos 32–​33, 50–​51 Movimento Sociale Italiano. See msi Moynihan, Danial Patrick 101 msi 25, 29, 30–​31, 35–​38, 40, 44–​45, 47, 322 violence 36 multiculturalism 167–​68, 170, 183, 191, 259, 315 multi-​national corporations 82, 135 Mulvaney, Mike 243 Murray, Charles 115, 123 Murray, Douglas 170 Muslim communities 170, 181, 302, 339 Muslim immigration 180 Muslim populations 76, 316 Muslim refugees 265, 308, 318 Muslims 159, 167, 169–​70, 177, 187, 231, 246, 265, 316, 343 Muslim women 178 Mussolini, Benito 25, 30, 67, 93 nafta. See North American Free Trade Agreement Nagle, Angela 235 Napolitano, Giorgio 293 National Alliance (Italian) 1, 76, 160–​61, 322 National Democratic Party 35, 161

423 National Front 104, 119, 122, 160, 258 National Union of Mine-​workers (British) 119–​20 nationalism 38, 234, 303 economic 79 militarized 4 white 197, 235, 245 nationalist 79, 85, 200, 213, 215, 249, 251, 258, 274, 277, 280, 307–​8, 311 armed white 222, 224 far-​right infused 280 populist 307 nationalist protectionism 73, 312, 344 nationalization 165, 252 National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act 66 national labour 133, 137, 143–​46, 149–​50, 155, 314 National Liberation Front (Algerian) 39, 52–​54 National Radical Union 50 National Recovery Act 66, 68 National Socialist Underground 186 nation-​states 105, 135–​36, 140–​41, 155, 168–​ 69, 200, 301, 304 nativism 88, 130, 155, 171, 173, 228, 234, 339 nato. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization Nazis 19–​21, 25, 35, 37, 93, 335 Nazism 19, 21–​22, 24, 25, 32, 89–​90, 92–​93, 95, 160, 224, 305–​6 neo-​Conservativism 115 neo-​fascism 21, 30, 36, 38, 259, 326 neo-​fascists 4, 29, 34, 37, 45, 47, 74, 166, 186, 265, 305, 327, 333 neo-​Gramscian 6, 9, 17–​18, 28, 60 neo-​Keynesian 211 neoliberal 75–​76, 81–​83, 88–​91, 94, 103, 116, 118–​19, 121, 125–​26, 128, 132–​34, 145–​47, 157–​58, 161–​69, 172–​77, 182–​88, 190–​91, 194–​95, 200–​202, 231, 242 capitalism 84, 129, 130, 133, 137, 139–​40, 143, 148, 152–​53, 156, 181, 201, 303 centrism 215, 280, 303, 339 common sense 151 consensus 173–​74, 192, 195, 245, 304 cosmopolitan elites 154 crisis 196, 201, 251, 341 critique 91, 93, 195 doctrine 89, 106, 110, 112, 114, 125, 151, 234

424 Index neoliberal (cont.) dogma 117 financialization 138, 197, 260 freedom 88 globalization 76–​195, 209, 216, 247, 249, 313 governance 158 hegemony 140, 166, 200–​01, 245, 250 ideologues 101, 129, 152 racism 98 technocracy 184 thinking 77, 89–​90, 97–​99, 101, 104, 116, 123, 165, 247, 255, 309 welfare policies 86 neoliberalism 77, 79–​83, 86–​92, 96–​98, 100, 105–​7, 109–​12, 114–​16, 122–​23, 125–​26, 128–​29, 131, 136–​38, 143–​44, 154–​56, 172–​ 73, 179–​80, 200–​201, 215, 338–​42 crisis of 76, 235, 255 elitist cosmopolitan 198 financial 152 globalizing 126, 250 hegemonic xiii racialized 63 radical 305, 339 neo-​Marxist 9 neo-​Nazis 35, 187, 219, 242, 306, 308, 310–​ 11, 331 Newcastle 252, 272 New Cold War 106, 123, 130, 157 New Deal 58, 64–​70, 87, 90, 92, 111–​12, 230, 233 New Democracy (Greece) 333–​35 New International Economic Order 80 new Jim Crow 10, 117 New Labour 118, 125, 253 New Right 104 night of fires 51 niqab 170, 178, 343 Nixon, Richard 79, 105, 108–​9, 115, 238, 248 nonsynchronous synchronicity 270 North American Free Trade Agreement 248–​49 North Atlantic Treaty Organization 7, 17, 22–​23, 51–​52 Northern Rock 252–​53 nsc 31, 60 nuclear accord 242

oas. See Organisation Armée Secrète Obama, Barak 224–​25, 231–​32, 239, 244–​46, 247, 249 Obamacare 232 Omi, Michael 87, 97, 108, 111–​12, 114, 238 Operation Dixie 69–​70 Orbán, Viktor 193 Ordine Nuevo 37, 45, 47 ordo-​liberalism 94–​95, 116, 147, 211, 298, 306, 310 Organisation Armée Secrète 53–​55 organized labour 23, 59, 69, 72, 95–​97, 113, 116, 119, 121–​22, 130–​31, 142, 144–​45, 147–​ 50, 162–​64, 166, 179–​80, 240–​41, 281, 314 Ortiz, Joseph 54 Osborne, George 267, 274 Outright Monetary Transactions programme 301 Padania 324 paleo-​conservativism 216 pandemic 220, 223, 341–​42, 344 Papademos, Lucas 335 Papadopolous, Colonel George 46 Papandreou, Andreas 51–​52 Papandreou, George 50, 334 Papon, Maurice 55 para-​politics 5, 14, 30, 34, 38, 44, 48, 56, 58–​ 59, 61–​63, 65, 74, 109, 119 violence 39, 43 partisans 28, 32, 36 Parti Socialiste 297–​98, 312 pasok 287, 333, 335 passive revolution 16, 30, 34, 74 pater familias 222, 242 Patel, Priti 265 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act 232 patriarchy 81, 127, 166, 185 Patterson, Owen 258 Paxton, Robert 318, 341 pcf. See French Communist Party pci. See Italian Communist Party pd. See Italian Democratic Party Peck, Jamie 106, 150 Pegida street movement 187, 306 Piano Solo 45, 47 pieds-​noirs 39, 41, 53, 55

425

Index Piketty, Thomas 139, 202, 203 Pinochet dictatorship 76, 94, 96 Plehwe, Dieter 90, 150 Podemos 303 Podhoretz, Norman 115, 128 Polanyi, Karl 94 police powers 116, 123, 124 police repression 33 Pollio Conference 47 populism xii, xiv, 115, 50, 105–​6, 118, 165, 169, 173, 190, 231, 236, 273, 277, 280, 291, 301, 323, 327 anti-​elitist 171, 189, 215 anti-​immigrant 310 anti-​systemic 198 common-​sense, 262  far-​right 190–​91, 207, 217, 227, 275, 307 left-​wing 169, 210 racialized 309 radical 191 radical-​centrist 312 post-​Cold War era 86, 130, 156 158, 160, 165, 183, 187 post-​fascism xiii, 3–​4, 15, 25–​27, 34, 162, 184, 187, 195 post-​w wii settlement 2 Potsdam Agreement 22 Poujade, Pierre 39–​40 Poujadism 39–​41, 53–​54, 160, 164, 312 Poulantzas, Nicos 44, 80 Powell, Enoch 118–​19 Priebus, Reince 243 prison-​industrial complex 116 privatization 125, 130, 137, 166, 173–​74, 203–​ 5, 258–​59 producerism 198, 249 Progress Party 76 Prometheus Plan 46, 52 protectionism 90, 146, 174, 234, 248 cultural 234 economic 313 national, 165  racial 245 Protestant churches 63 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 61 psi. See Italian Socialist Party 27–​29, 31, 37, 46 psych-​ops 48

Public Choice 99 Public Order Act 124 public racism 235, 265–​66 Public Security Law 27 qe. See Quantitative Easing qmv. See qualified majority voting qualified majority voting 125 Quantitative Easing 210, 232, 256, 273 Questori 26 race 4, 6, 56–​58, 81, 89, 91–​92, 97, 99–​101, 107–​8, 127–​28, 166, 169, 230, 239–​41, 271 race politics 6, 118, 168 Race Relations Act 127 race war 113, 186, 332 racial discrimination 69, 72, 103, 110 racial equality 62, 261, 343 racial harassment 217 racialization xiii, 58–​59, 64, 67–​68, 104, 122, 190, 342, 347 racialized  exclusions 57, 107, 189 hierarchies 101, 107, 271, 309 political messaging 113, 115, 238 politics 105, 110, 122, 128, 137, 216, 279 social conservativism 125 social protectionism 171, 247, 266 tropes 87, 98–​99, 107–​8, 113, 127, 317 racial prejudice 343 racial segregation 107, 114 racism xii, 6, 57–​58, 60, 65–​66, 70, 72–​73, 75, 97, 102, 115–​16, 127, 168–​69 anti-​Muslim 159, 187–​88, 246, 265–​66, 306–​8, 313 biological 98, 315 differentialist 168 dog-​whistle 105, 112 far-​right 57, 159, 167 liberal 57 privatized 72, 108 reverse 109, 112 scientific 86 state-​sanctioned 127 structural 72, 123 white 118 white supremacist 235

426 Index racist 57–​59, 61–​62, 65–​67, 70–​71, 167–​69, 239, 242, 265, 270–​71, 334, 337 anti-​immigrant 266 attacks 267 mainstreaming 187 policing 118, 123 street movements 186 violence 62, 219 voters 238 Rassemblement National 200, 282, 311, 313–​ 15, 317, 320–​21, 344–​45 rational actor models 236 reactionary 22, 24, 26, 31, 60, 343 Reagan, Ronald 52, 76, 80–​81, 89, 104, 106, 109–​11, 113–​14, 116, 118, 124, 127–​28, 130, 156, 230, 243, 248 Reaganism 156 Reaganomics 114 recession 79, 208, 225–​26, 254, 256–​57, 273, 285, 291, 296, 301 Reckless, Mark 260 Rector, Ricky Ray 118 Red Army 44 red-​baiting 60, 70 Reddit 222 Red Summer 61 Red wall 278–​79, 326 Redwood, John 258 re-​enchantment 200, 235, 340 referendum 183, 250, 252, 258–​59, 261–​65, 270–​72, 274–​75, 278, 314, 334 referendum campaign (Brexit) 257, 260, 264–​65, 270, 273, 276, 278 refugees 19, 177, 180, 194, 283, 303–​4, 307–​ 9, 329–​30 Renzi, Matteo 294, 329 Republican Party 72, 104, 108, 114, 157, 161, 216–​18, 220–​21, 230–​34, 238, 241, 345 Republican administrations 230, 243–​44 Republican base 216 Republican campaigns 238 Republican-​controlled local state legislatures 231, 238 Republican establishment 236 Republic of Salò 25, 26–​28, 32, 36 Republican Right 108 Republicans 109, 117–​18, 216, 218, 221, 227, 230–​31, 244, 249 Republican voters 218, 230, 239–​40, 244

resistance 36, 118, 120, 122, 233 anti-​fascist 14, 29 partisan 45 popular 337 Revisionists (Cold War) 5 revolt of the left-​behinds 268, 270 revolutionary para-​militarism 188 Reynolds, William Bradford 110 rights 16, 43, 116, 145, 169–​70, 185, 232, 242, 265, 281, 316 minority 189 post-​civil 105 racial 115 refugee 266 sexual 344 women’s 167, 209 right-​wing authoritarianism 52, 96, 120 right-​wing coalitions 307, 322, 325 right-​wing corporate donors 233 right-​wing dictatorships 5, 33, 52 right-​wing media allies 124, 275 right-​wing press 261, 263–​64 Riley, Dylan 1, 185, 206, 220, 222, 242 Rivers of Blood speech 118–​19 rn. See Rassemblement National Rocco Penal Code 27 rollback 59 Roman Catholic 26, 29 Romney, Mitt 238–​39 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 64, 67, 90, 92 Röpke, Wilhelm 93–​94, 99 Rosenberg, Justin xii, 24, 134, 201, 205, 214, 227, 237, 257, 269, 300 Rostow, Walt Whitman 99 rsi. See Republic of Salò Ruggie, John Gerard 3 ruling classes 13, 15, 17–​18, 28, 37, 43, 48, 67, 85, 188, 195 capitalist-​imperialist 60 imperial 84 neoliberal capitalist 137 Rupert, Mark 4, 9, 16–​18, 62, 64, 157 Russian funding 330 Russian meddling 223 Russian support 217 rust-​belt 227–​29, 236, 239–​40 Ryner, Magnus 131–​32, 147, 183, 284, 286, 288, 297, 300

Index Saez, Emmanuel 139, 202, 225 Salan, Raoul, General 54 Salvini, Matteo 282, 322, 324–​31, 344 Santelli, Rick 232 Sarrazin, Thilo 308, 310 Sarkozy, Nicolas 296–​7, 316 Saull, Richard xii, 1, 74–​75, 76, 77, 81, 90–​91, 97, 100, 106–​7, 128, 137, 157, 160, 166, 197, 339, 341 Saunders, Bernie 236 Savings and Loans crisis 139 Savona, Paolo 327 Schengen framework 316, 324 Schmitt, Carl 44, 93–​95, 97, 120, 299 Schmittian Liberalism 170 Schumacher, Kurt 21, 22 securitization 181, 203, 234, 319 security 14, 40, 180, 204, 212, 247, 312, 316, 326, 329, 346 Security and Immigration Decree 330 segregation 63, 65, 68–​69, 73, 99, 110, 222 sexual assaults 265, 308 sexual freedom 170 sexuality 115, 123, 161, 166–​67, 185, 234, 343–​44 Shenfield, Arthur 99 Shilliam, Robbie 6, 77, 86, 88, 97, 118–​ 19, 171–​72 Single European Act 77, 125, 132, 139, 182 Single Market 77, 82, 125–​26, 132, 147, 193, 276, 304, 347 Sino-​US relationship 214 Skinner, Dennis 278 Slobidian, Quinn 77, 84, 86, 94, 98–​99, 102 social conservatism 161–​62, 166, 167, 239 social democracy 86, 88, 96, 143–​44, 195, 205 social democrats 18–​19, 282 socialism 60–​61, 85, 343 national road to 154 socialist revolution 46, 61, 85, 184 socialists 18, 28, 40, 101, 145, 314, 319 solidarity 105, 107, 112, 304 international working class 209 racial 175 social-​collective 101 Soros, George 143 Southern Dixiecrats 67 Southern elites 70 Southern Poverty Law Centre 217

427 Southern racism 60, 100 Southern States Industrial Council 63 sovereign debt crisis 283, 287, 296, 302 Soviet Union xiii, 10–​12, 15, 21, 85, 90, 92, 115–​16, 120–​21, 128, 156–​58, 348 spatio-​temporal fix 134, 139, 300 spd. See German Social Democratic Party Spenser, Richard 222, 235 Stalin, Josef 34, 93 Stalinism 90, 92 Stalinization 11 statism 90, 92–​93, 174 Stoddard, Lothrop 60 strategic selectivity 5, 30, 74, 157, 165, 194, 337 Streeck, Wolfgang 105–​6, 131, 139–​40, 142, 151–​52, 185, 281, 284, 286, 298–​99 street movements 185–​86, 188, 310 subaltern xiii, 16, 65, 195, 231 subaltern layers 72, 74 Sun 120, 259 supply chains 248, 299 supranational 131, 150–​51, 154, 281, 283, 286, 304 supranationalism 126, 149 Supreme Court 63, 70, 120, 221, 223, 238, 343 svp. See Swiss People’s Party Swedish Democrats 1, 160 Swiss People’s Party 175, 308 Syrian refugees 246, 265, 304 syriza 215, 303, 331–​33, 335–​36, 338 Taguieff, Pierre 168 Tambroni, Fernando 36, 45 tariffs 80, 144, 248–​49 tarp. See Troubled Asset Relief Program tax-​payer bailouts 210, 224, 230 tax protest 39 Taylor, Jared 222 Tea Party 161, 225, 227, 232–​35 technocracy 105, 140, 150–​51, 182–​83, 281–​82, 284, 286 technocrats 149–​50, 153, 290, 294, 298, 327, 335 terrorism 29, 33, 36, 42, 44, 49, 52–​53, 62–​ 63, 65, 128, 159, 166, 180, 186, 189, 220, 302, 316 far-​right 7, 37, 44, 161, 187, 242

428 Index terrorism (cont.) left-​wing 49 racial 63 white-​nationalist 246 Thatcher, Margaret 76, 80–​81, 87, 89, 102, 104, 106, 118, 120–​21, 123–​26, 127, 156, 122–​28, 130, 251–​52, 278, 288 Thatcherism 81, 118, 121–​23, 125–​27, 156, 258, 339 Third Way 105, 240 Tocqueville, Alexis de 94 Tooze, Adam 200, 203–​4, 208–​11, 225, 230–​ 32, 238–​39, 244, 284–​85, 287–​88, 290–​ 91, 294, 298–​300 Tories 122, 259–​60, 265, 272, 274–​75, 277–​78 Tory party 251–​52, 260, 279 totalitarian 92, 96, 337 trade 80, 82, 133, 144, 151, 197, 247, 249, 285, 299 international 84, 150 trade agreements 12 multilateral 227, 247 trade flows 199 trade liberalization 125, 173, 175, 179, 207, 231, 237 trade policy 245, 247, 249–​50 trade protectionism 64, 248 trade unions 54, 120–​21, 123, 143, 179, 255, 319, 335 trade war 197, 249 transnational xii, 9, 135, 151–​52, 198, 202, 283–​84, 333, 340 capital 150, 154, 166, 281 class forces 141, 154, 157 elite 83, 301 finance 340 governance structures 175 Trans-​Pacific Partnership 247 Tria, Giovanni 327 Triadfilopoulos, Triadafilos 170 Trichet, Jean-​Claude 293 Troika 287, 290–​92, 303, 331–​32, 334–​38 Trotsky, Leon xii Troubled Asset Relief Programme 224, 230 Truman Doctrine 33, 60 Trump, Donald xii, xiv, 1, 129, 163, 196–​97, 199, 202, 207, 213, 216–​24, 228–​31, 235–​ 51, 268, 341–​42, 347

authoritarianism 223, 242 campaign 228, 230, 233–​35, 244 immigration policies 246 protectionism 248 racism 217 support 272 trade policies 248 voters 224, 237–​38, 240–​41 Trumpism xiii, 219–​24, 234–​35, 239, 241–​42, 245–​47, 345 Trumpland 236 Twitter 242, 245 UK 126–​27, 140–​41, 147, 149, 203, 206, 251–​ 56, 262, 264–​65, 267–​69, 271, 273–​74, 276, 278 economy 254, 273 labour market 252, 261 manufacturing sector 257, 260 monetary policy 253 ukip. See United Kingdom Independence Party UKIPization 262, 264, 274, 279 Ukrainian government 217 unemployment 121, 124, 164, 167, 172, 176, 253–​54, 257, 285, 291–​92, 294, 296–​97 structural 295 youth 296–​97 unemployment benefits 124, 299 uneven development 51, 134, 136, 206, 215, 267, 286, 288, 292, 296, 346 unevenness 80, 130, 136, 147, 255, 273, 284, 289, 346 economic 204 national 274 regional 136 spatialized 280, 304 Unified Socialist Party 48 United Kingdom Independence Party 125–​ 26, 161, 184, 187, 251–​52, 258–​65, 270, 272, 274–​75, 277–​78, 308 support 264, 267, 275 United Left 50 United Nations 80, 157, 213 United Nations Convention on Refugees 194 United States of America 4–​7, 16–​18, 22–​23, 28–​30, 31–​32, 37–​38, 42–​44, 51–​52, 56–​59, 61–​62, 64, 66–​68, 75–​76, 78–​81,

429

Index 103–​05, 107, 127–​29, 138, 140–​41, 157–​59, 202–​3, 206–​7, 212–​14, 224–​25, 241–​42, 245–​46, 248, 250–​51, 341, 345 economy 70, 79, 226, 229, 249, 348 Federal Reserve 152 hegemony 9, 58, 60, 73, 132, 144, 156 house prices 204 housing market 197, 202 securitization market 202, 284 trade deficit 206 trade policy 248 Treasury 71, 252 unipolarity 158 universalism 86, 172–​73 social 172 social-​welfare 86 universalist 195 universalization 155, 201 universalizing 13, 131, 283 ussr. See Soviet Union values 7, 18, 106, 135, 138, 170–​71, 175, 188–​91, 312, 315–​16 Varkazia Agreement 33 Vatican 35 Venizelos, Eleftherios 32 Vichy 4, 38–​39, 41, 53, 55 Viet Minh 53 Vietnam 247 Viña del Mar 94 violence 1, 36, 42–​43, 48–​49, 51, 62, 65, 68, 111, 159, 185–​88, 217, 219, 221, 224, 243, 266–​67, 332, 336–​37 anti-​immigrant 282, 334 far-​right 42, 52 fascist paramilitary 337 police 27, 117, 223, 342 political 42, 49 racialized 118 street 161, 188, 310, 331, 333 terrorist 48 white supremacist 123 Virginia school 99 Vlaams Blok 76, 168, 191 voters 105–​6, 237–​40, 270–​71, 274–​75, 306, 308, 310–​11, 321, 327–​28, 333–​34, 340, 342, 345 ethnic minority 268

far-​right 316, 318 female 240 middle-​income 274, 310 small town 240 white 108–​9 white working-​class 278 younger 333 voter suppression 221, 238 Voting Rights Act 238 wage deflation 299 wages 66, 69, 142, 146, 204, 206–​7, 210, 248, 254, 293, 299 minimum 319 real 142, 254, 291–​92, 294 rising 143 social 84, 142, 179 stagnant 143, 254, 261 wage suppression 287 Wagner (Act). See National Labor Relations Act Wallace, George 108, 222 Wall Street 143, 244, 248 Wall Street Crash 64 Wall Street Journal 135 Wal-​Mart 249 Walters, General Vernon 46 war 1–​2, 10–​16, 18–​20, 22, 26, 28–​29, 34–​40, 57–​58, 60, 62, 66, 69–​70, 78, 90, 118 racial 55 war crimes 26 war crimes tribunals 20 war on drugs 115 war on poverty 66 war on terror 166, 189, 302, 347 war on woke 342 Webber, Jeff 203, 270–​71 Weber, Max 200 Weidmann, Jens 302 Weimar crisis 119 Weimar Democracy 94 Weimar Republic 21, 24, 80, 95–​96, 119, 188 welfare 86, 88, 109–​14, 116, 124, 143, 171–​72, 179–​80, 233, 263, 309–​10 defunding 230 social 88 welfare chauvinism 173 welfare consensus 195

430 Index welfare nativism 137, 145, 146, 161, 171, 309, 319 welfare provision 113–​14, 146, 167, 171–​73, 205, 255, 311 collectivist 88, 215 welfare queens 111 welfare reform 87–​88, 101, 118, 125, 172, 258 welfare-​scroungers 171 welfare spending 124, 137, 211 welfare state 64, 66, 102–​4, 106, 112, 114, 124, 142, 144, 147, 171–​73, 179–​80, 194–​95 welfare support 331 West German Socialist Reich Party 35 West Germany 18, 20, 23–​25, 28–​29, 33, 35 Wheeler, Stuart 259 whiteness 88, 100, 127, 179, 183, 238 white supremacy 3, 57, 61, 70–​73, 99–​101, 107, 168, 209, 219, 230, 265–​66, 346, 348 white workers 66, 68, 114, 145, 180, 227, 230, 236, 239–​41, 271–​73 white working class identity 180 Wilders, Geert 187 Winant, Howard 87, 97, 108, 111–​12, 114, 238

Woodward, C. Vann 63 Woolas, Phil 261 workers  migrant 212 migrant sex 334 native 177 undocumented 231–​32 university-​educated 207 Workers Directive 314 worker’s statute 294 working class parties 162–​63 working class politics 144–​45, 163, 195 working class revolt 272 working class solidarity 155 working class support 134, 163–​64, 238, 269 working class support for Brexit 269 working class votes 239 white 239, 240 World Bank 77 World Trade Organization 77, 150, 175, 206, 212–​13, 300 Xi Jinping 249