Geopolitical Amnesia: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory 9780228003137

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GEOPOLITICAL AMNESIA

GEOPOLITICAL AMNESIA The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory

EDITED BY V I B E K E S C H O U T J A LV E

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020 ISB N ISB N ISB N ISB N

978-0-2280-0179-9 978-0-2280-0180-5 978-0-2280-0313-7 978-0-2280-0314-4

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Legal deposit second quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Geopolitical amnesia : the rise of the right and the crisis of liberal memory / edited by Vibeke Schou Tjalve. Names: Tjalve, Vibeke Schou, editor. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020017665X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200176668 | isbn 9780228001799 (cloth) | is bn 9780228001805 (paper) | i sb n 9780228003137 (eP DF) | is bn 9780228003144 (eP U B ) Subjects: l cs h: Geopolitics. | l cs h: Collective memory. | l c sh : Conservatism. | lcsh : Liberalism. | l cs h: Nationalism. Classification: l cc j c 319 .g46 2020 | ddc 320.1/2—dc23

This book was typeset in 10.5/13 Sabon.

Contents

Foreword | vii Michael C. Williams Acknowledgments | ix Introduction: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory | 3 Vibeke Schou Tjalve part one | anglo-american amnesia 1 After Empire: The “Geopolitical Mind” of the Anglo-American Right | 23 Matthew Fallon Hinds 2 After Liberalism? The Paleoconservative Roots of the New American Nationalism | 35 Jean-François Drolet 3 “A Test of Character”: The Positive Psychology of War | 48 Johannes Lang

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Contents

part two | continental memory wars 4 Post-Liberal Visions: Memory, Virility, and Geopolitics on the French New Right | 69 Manni Crone 5 What Liberalism? Russia’s Conservative Turn and the Liberal Order | 82 Minda Holm 6 German Memory Culture between the Right and the Mainstream | 100 Jesper Vind 7 “The Long Night of the Second Republic”: Geopolitical Amnesia in Italy | 118 Lisa Ginsborg and Fabrizio Tassinari part three | the new geopolitics 8 The Forgotten Pragmatism of the United Nations: A Halfway House between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism | 135 Louise Riis Andersen 9 The New Geopolitics: Towards a More Virulent World? | 148 Vibeke Schou Tjalve Contributors | 159 Index | 163

Foreword Michael C. Williams

The rise of the global Right is often met with incomprehension or vague condemnation. Charges of populism, or accusations of resurgent fascism, spring easily to the lips. Sometimes these are appropriate. Despite their protestations to the contrary, parts of the contemporary radical Right do worryingly echo some of history’s darkest moments. Similarly, careful assessments of populism provide important insights into the complex dynamics at work. But too often these descriptions descend into easy clichés. To understand, not to mention to counter, today’s radical conservative politics requires deeper analysis. What is needed, as Andrew Sullivan nicely (although perhaps a little hyperbolically) puts it, is “an open-minded inquiry into the close-minded ideology that is the most dominant political force of our time – and can no longer be ignored.” Central to this inquiry is a critical examination of the prime targets of most radical conservative ideas: liberalism and progressivism. It is worth stressing in this context that while the new Right sees twentieth-century liberalism as a disaster, it does not see it as a failure. On the contrary, for them the success of global liberalism – from ideas of universal human rights to transnational managerial organizations – means that progressive liberalism is a powerful adversary. Attacks on these positions have become key weapons in the arsenal of neo-reaction, and too often liberals and progressives have been weak in responding, preferring the politics of condemnation to the more uncomfortable process of self-examination. This collection represents a vitally important move in developing such an awareness and a response. Focusing on a “crisis of liberal memory” and the dynamics of “liberal amnesia,” the authors provide vital insights

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into the weaknesses and the potential of the liberal ideas and politics to respond to the challenge presented by the radical Right. Amongst the most important of these insights are those concerning the oft declared (and decried) culture wars that continue to convulse many contemporary societies and are increasingly “going global.” The essays here show just how deep and complex these culture wars really are, and the multiple fronts on which they are fought. From rhetorics of decline, to class and race, gender and sexuality, trauma and virtue, the issues explored span the contemporary landscape – both public and private. These struggles are important parts of the new geopolitics, providing radical conservative movements with crucial ammunition. Despite the deep fissures between them, not least in their attitudes toward the US, radical conservative movements have common causes (or at least common targets and rhetoric). Appeals to save Western civilization certainly serve as a grand narrative, but visions of the nature of that civilization and threats to it vary, often radically, when discussions move beyond generalities, as many of these essays very effectively do. As these contributions also indicate, it is important not to accept at face value radical conservative critiques of liberalism. To do so is already to cede much of the ground that it is crucial to contest. But engaging effectively in these debates requires both a deep understanding of radical conservatism’s claims and the resources available to engage them effectively. Which brings back the question of liberalism. The “liberalism of fear,” the prudential, or what Nicholas Rengger once called “dystopic” liberalism that forms the backdrop to many of the essays in this book, is ignored by the Right almost as much as it has been forgotten by today’s liberals. Instead, today’s liberals show a continuing commitment to “ideal” theory or rationalist visions of progress, despite the setbacks and opposition they have encountered and indeed, in part, generated. Whether liberal thought and politics are capable of a response as potent as that of “dystopic” liberalism in the mid-twentieth century is one of the key questions of our time. As this collection shows, it is a challenge that cannot be ignored.

Acknowledgments

This book is part of a larger research project on the World of the Right (w or ), sponsored by the Danish Velux Foundation and conducted in conjunction with Michael C. Williams and Srdjan Vucetic at the Graduate School for Politics, University of Ottawa. I want to thank Velux for making this research possible. The framing chapters of this book were written during a 2018 research stay at the Berkeley Center for Right Wing Studies (crws ). A very special thanks to Lawrence Rosenthal and Christine Trost at the crws for their input to this book and for making my stay at Berkeley such a warm and inspiring one. Thanks are also due to my research assistant and now PhD student, Alberte Bové Rud, for her help at various editorial stages of the book. Finally, I want to thank Minda Holm, Halvard Leira, and Benjamin Cavalho for hosting a highly useful seminar at the Norwegian Institute for International Studies (nupi ) in Oslo, where the themes and framing of the book were discussed.

GEOPOLITICAL AMNESIA

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The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory Vibeke Schou Tjalve

When German foreign minister Sigmar Gabriel, just a few days into 2018, gave an interview to Der Spiegel on the future of German foreign policy, he invoked a remarkable metaphor. “In a world full of meat-eaters,” he said, “vegetarians have a tough time” (Gabriel 2018). The statement was meant to explain why a future Germany shall have to put interest over values, and as such it was hardly surprising: across the capitols of Europe, many nations have used the post-Brexit, post-Trump moment to say much the same thing. These particular words, however, came from the mouth of a German foreign minister – from a country whose unequivocal role in post-1945 Europe has been to staunchly disavow a narrow politics of nation or interest and, as such, to defend the “Never Again” discourse. Was Gabriel suggesting that, in a world turned into a raw and savage zoo, even Germany would have to take on the role of predator? Probably not: after seventy years of attempting to undo the destructive legacy of Nazi militarism, a world of pillaging meat-eaters remains, to most Germans, a vision to be fought. Yet Gabriel’s striking choice of rhetoric reflects an unmistakable and wide-reaching change in the colour of Western foreign-policy discourse – a slide from the grey semantics of global governance to the red and black of blustering, weaponry, and confrontation. Words that roused publics and armies to the brink of disaster in the early decades of the twentieth century – sovereignty, soil, tribe, race, victory, conquest – are once again gaining traction, while the deliberately less flamboyant terminology adopted in the ruins of post-war Europe – stability, legality,

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restraint – seems increasingly out of touch. In a present defined by political profiles such as Russia’s Putin, Hungary’s Orban, Italy’s Salvini, and America’s Trump, who speaks the subdued language of post-sovereign institutionalism? Whether fiercely abetted by those who long to reclaim power from the hands of legalists and bureaucrats, or more grudgingly endorsed as necessity by those who seek simply to “adapt,” much suggests that international politics is now talked and thought about within a very altered emotional landscape. This volume explores the ideas and attitudes which define that emerging emotional landscape: a landscape which we seek to capture with the admittedly polemical label of “geopolitical amnesia.” With this label, we seek to address not simply the changing foreign policies of contemporary Western countries but also the rhetoric and registers of affect that support and inform them. While the concept of “geopolitics” grew out of specific nineteenth- and twentieth-century European practices of territorial strategizing, and while it can be developed as a strategy of balance in global affairs (Dodds and Atkinson 2000), this book shall apply the term in a broader and less benign way. To begin with, geopolitics refers here to something more than a foreign policy stratagem. In the context of this book, geopolitics is a semantics – a practice which pervades the dynamics of public space and national identity (Guzzini 2013). Key to this practice is a distinct understanding and explicit celebration of power. This is not to purport that power was ever absent from the foreign policies of the US or Europe. As all but the most blue-eyed observer will agree – and as both Russian and Chinese observers would insist – Western foreign policies during those seventy years now routinely referred to as the post-45 Liberal World Order exercised their own form of power politics, pursuing profit and privilege for their territories too. Yet they did so under such labels as “moral universalism” or “capitalism as a system of mutual gain and growth.” Academics have ascribed to this kind of “power practice” many names, perhaps most fittingly that of neo-liberal governance. Geopolitics, however, is something else. The geopolitics which the chapters of this volume unpack as “re-emerging” actively seeks out a very different register of feeling, one long considered illegitimate in Western political discourse. Unlike the paradigm of liberal governance, geopolitics is about the explicit parade of power and pride and exclusion: of the deliberate cultivation of nationalist particularism and ethnic exclusion. As such, the emerging geopolitics tries not to evade or circumscribe the

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realities of power – to speak of mutual gains or collective peace – but to embrace or even fetichize the language of antagonism and domination. Hence an Italian minister of the interior, Matteo Salvini, appropriates the anniversary of Mussolini to tweet a slight revision of a Mussolini quote: “Many enemies, much honour.” Hence an American president, Trump, says he “loves war,” is “really good at war,” even enjoys it “in a certain way, but only when we win” (at an Iowa rally in 2015). And hence the rise of a revived Western Right, whose nostalgia for a past of national, cultural, or ethnic greatness is mimicked far across the political spectrum. With chapters that in each their own way unpack the historical roots or geographical variations of this geopolitical landscape, the subject of investigation here is that explored in many other current books: the crisis of what is now routinely refered to as the Liberal World Order. Our distinctive inroad to that crisis, though, is neither the growing competition from autocratic or anti-liberal powers and regimes outside of Western parameters, nor the unravelling of formal liberal institutions within (Diamond, Plattner, and Walker 2016). It is the crisis of a specific form of liberalism or of a specific set of liberal sensitivities: skepticism, hesitation, guilt, trauma, self-inspection, and in a certain sense, self-suspicion. These sensitivities arguably informed the founding moment of the post-45 liberal order. At the heart of the current Western crisis, we therefore suggest, is a crisis of liberal memory: an amnesia about the tragedies that once led Western powers to constitute themselves as an order of tamed and bounded sovereignty. It is not simply that the defenders of Liberal World Order are in crisis over what liberalism has become or where to take it from here. More profoundly, they have forgotten what it once was, and why it developed as it did in the first place. This is not to say that liberalism was ever one singular tradition or idea: as with all labels, “liberalism” refers to a myriad of discursive trajectories and variations (Bell 2014). Arguably though, a distinctive kind of “skeptical” or “self-restrained” liberal sentiment flared up and had a moment of influence in the immediate post-45 period (Katznelson 2003; Tjalve 2011; Williams 2013). It is this distinctive liberalism – a liberalism sobered by the experiences and memory of two world wars – which we now find increasingly lost or forgotten. What unites the chapters here is that they approach the return of Western geopolitics through the prism of amnesia. This means unpacking the contemporary Western crisis as a radical and

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extensive struggle over how to recollect and narrate the transition from romantic nationalism to liberal institutionalism which characterized the mid-twentieth century. Arc of achievement or decline? Symbol of maturation or degradation? For the past seven decades, defenders of Liberal World Order have paid an almost knee-jerk obeisance to the view that the twentieth century described a move from madness to prudence. In this undoubtedly mythical and often self-serving account, the order built after 1945 marked a crucial historical turn because of which the nations of Europe and North America managed to shed the follies of crude authority (segregation, imperialism, colonialism, patriarchy, unilateralism) and achieve their potential for rule-bound, enlightened, and self-restrained rule. Yet to the growing if composite choir of national conservative critics across the US and Europe, the story is very different. From their perspective, the West of the post-45 period has come to signify loss, confusion, humiliation, and castration: the development of an apologetic, “feminized,” and multi-cultural civilization, whose incessant guilt, moral relativism, gray technocracy, and naïve faith in compromise have slowly but surely spiralled Europe, the US, and what they often refer to as “Judeo-Christian culture” into decadence and decay. This is the narrative of long-established far-right thinkers and figures: Alexander Dugin in Russia, Alain de Benoist in France, Pat Buchanan or Paul Gottfried in the US. From Donald Trump and Steve Bannon, to European movements and parties like the French Generation Identity or Polish Law and Order, it is also an increasingly influential narrative in more popular political debates and discourse. Taking us from Washington to Warsaw, from the Anglosphere to Southern and Eastern Europe, or from contested issues of race and soil to warring visions of weaponry and soldiering, the chapters of this book explore these new Western memory wars. To varying degrees, they also explore the changing nature of memory as such. That social turmoil and historical revisionism go hand in hand is as old as civilization. Yet our twenty-first-century context adds novel layers of complexity and cunning. It matters that the new geopolitics takes place in a digitized world of accelerated, fragmented, or “fake” social media. It matters that it pairs enmities of the past with technologies of the future. It matters that it takes place against the backdrop of a history where raw stratagems of nation or interest have largely been rejected as crude, uncivilized, or illegitimate just as

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it matters that it takes place in a nuclear world. No mere “return” to the kind of nineteenth-century realpolitik idolized by Liberal World Order’s newfound critics is possible. Whatever a potential post-liberal or New Right geopolitics might grow to be, it shall be nothing like the past which it hopes to resurrect. In the remainder of this introduction, I present these framing ideas of memory war and “amnesia” in more detail.

m o m e n t o f s o b r ie t y: 1945 and the f o u n dat io n s o f l iberal memory There is no way to gauge how profoundly the colours of Western foreign-policy discourse have changed in recent years but by returning to the grey and cautious shades of its immediate post-war years. The intellectual light of the mid-twentieth century was, as a leading political scientist of the period put it, “clear, cold and hard”: a moment of sobriety after the experience of total war (Laslett quoted from Müller 2008). Europe had stood on the brink of absolute destruction; its cities were in ruins, its population and youth radically reduced. Even more shockingly, the West – not some external enemy – had brought these calamities on itself. Surely Nazi Germany and fascist Italy had taken the ideas of Western realpolitik to an extreme? But Europe well knew that these ideas – nationalism, martial honour, social and racial hierarchy – had been part of a nationalist and geopolitical romanticism to which all Western states, constitutional democracies included, had subscribed. Even the United States, a country founded on the myth of having escaped, as John Quincy Adams famously put it, the entangling alliances of the Old World, with all its wars of “interest and intrigue” (1821), had for a moment been forced to confront its imperfections and capacity for destruction. Had not this New World Empire developed and applied a weapon capable of total human annihilation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Post-war America remained in a state of amnesia about many of the sins involved in its own past – including, as scholars have recently reminded us, the ways in which American models of legally codified racial segregation had inspired Nazi law (Katznelson 2017; Whitman 2017). But the magnitude of World War II, and of the destructiveness of its own use of nuclear weapons, did make way for a uniquely sober moment: a sobriety further cultivated by the extensive inter- and post-war influx of European and Jewish thinkers into US academic and intellectual life.

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Arguably then, the experience of catastrophe was crucial to the initial design and legitimization of a Liberal World Order. It laid the foundations, so to speak, for a liberal memory that would recall and re-evoke the experience of past traumas when explaining and defending international structures of restraint. Despite a sense of Western “victory,” the immediate post-45 moment was not one of jubilation or happy-go-lucky liberalism. Rather, the air of postruin Europe and America was laden with a profound realism about the shockingly destructive potential of humans, nations, and states (Katznelson 2003; Van Munster and Sylvest 2016). Whatever expansive or self-celebratory adventures the idea of Liberal World Order have since been highjacked to endorse – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq – the post-45 moment was far removed from the triumphalism of more recent decades. Infused by the spirit of what the influential American political theorist Judith Shklar (1989) has coined the liberalism of fear – a saddened, sobered, and in some ways self-doubting liberalism – the concern of the time was not to save “the rest,” but to bind and check the West: to save Europe from itself, to reign in the prospect of a nuclear-military-industrial American superpower, and to tame the age-old patterns of Western rivalry, envy, and machismo. The aim was avoiding the worst: cruelty, atrocity, catastrophe. Not lofty hopes of achieving the best (Müller 2008). Though often remembered and conceptualized as a Western balancing act against external foes – most prominently, Soviet Russia – the idea of a Liberal World Order was, at least partly, aimed at restraining the evil within. Sovereignty as such was to be bounded. Interest as such was to be transcended from the particular to the collective. That endeavour, some of its early theorists, diplomats, and politicians knew, could not simply pick up grand Enlightenment ideals of reason, law, and peace as if two world wars had not just taken place. A more realistic, more pragmatic take on the nature and limits of reason had to be erected. In the words of American intellectual historian Ira Katznelson, the early builders of the post45 Western order had seen reason sleep for four decades, with a “cruel and hideous monster on the loose.” Inevitably, their faith in Enlightenment ideals was, as he puts it, shaped by “desolation” (Katznelson 2003, ix). No longer could reason simply be expected to prevail as a natural consequence of progress or modernity. Rather, reason, human rights, and the rule of law were to be approached as social constructions, perpetually in need of stern attention and

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pragmatic cultivation. Institutions had to be erected. Structures of checks, restraints, and balances needed to be forged. And if coolness, not madness was to prevail, economic growth, not martial glory, had to be turned into the foundation of all nation-state ambitions (Tjalve and Williams 2016). Obviously, all was not humility and repentance. The impulses and motivations that drove the establishment of that string of institutions now defined as the Liberal World Order were many, contradictory, and often riddled with hypocrisy. To begin with, post-war Europe and the US were by no definition or standard simply “liberal”; many varieties of what liberalism means made space for extensive inequalities. The social hierarchies attached to monarchy and nobility remained a prominent if receding feature of political life. So too did colonialism, and its deep ties to Western culture and economy. In Southern Europe, countries like Greece, Spain, Italy, and France continued to host regimes of an authoritarian bent or to have a substantial popular constituency for strongmen. And in the US – the main victor in a war which had been cast as a fight against tyranny – racial segregation and white supremacy remained facts of life. All of this was both context to, and in part the political drive behind, the building and hegemony of a Liberal World Order, which is now in crisis. And yet: if liberal institutionalism was to a large degree an extension of interest-driven, nationalist power politics, it was also something else. It was also an attempt to curb potentially destructive impulses: to restrain them and reign them in. It was also tied to a liberal memory of trauma, to liberal introspection and self-discipline, and a view of Europe’s geopolitical past as something to be avoided. Most prominently, of course, those memories were voiced around the establishment of the European Steel and Coal Union and the process of willing subservience which it involved. War-weary diplomats from France, Italy, Luxembourg, West Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands hoped that by sacrificing autonomy to institutional and economic interdependence, the flames of revivalist nationalism might be cooled. This hope was admittedly partial and fragile, but it was also present at the birth of trade organizations, war tribunals, and the global fora of rule-based disagreement in Paris, Geneva, and New York. Fueled by traumas admittedly more vivid to Europeans than to Americans, it was nonetheless orchestrated, and in large part financed, by a rising US, whose own constitutional order was founded on suspicion of despotic power, seeking to divide

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and restrain it. For one brief moment, older ideas about a world in which law would act as a “gentle civilizer of nations” were revived and embraced (Koskenniemi 2001).

af t e r s o b r ie t y: t h e new geopoli ti cs a n d t h e c r is is o f l i beral memory Zap forward to 2020 and a rising choir of critics who interpret restraint as weakness, guilt as confusion, and hesitation as decadence. Zap forward to a US whose newly elected president gave an inaugural address on the ways in which Liberal World Order is but a name for the exploitation of American goodwill. To a Britain that views the EU not as a gentle civilizer but as a despot and a parasite. To a growing number of transatlantic blogs and books that speak of pending American and European doom, and dream of strongmen who will break free from inflexible international rules, adopting a more assertive political posture. Zap forward, in other words, to a widespread sense that liberalism, universalism, and institutionalism have come to mean elitism, relativism, and bureaucracy. And to a West which – ironically and paradoxically – seems to find Vladimir Putin, Russia’s thoroughly anti-liberal strongman, the epitome of masculine resolve and “Judeo-Christian” leadership (Foer 2017, 3). Not so long ago, “war” was a term that made Western foreign-policy makers deeply uncomfortable (in both the Clinton, Bush Jr. and Obama years, labels like “preventive peacekeeping” or “armed intervention” were prefered). Now, the White House is nostalgic for “the Old Days”: a time without “the politically correct military” when soldiering was an enterprise for the “robust” and “the spoils of war belonged to the victor” (Trump 2017). Why? What happened? Many things did. Most obviously and straightforwardly, of course, the sheer passing of time happened. It is hardly surprising that fear fades faster than the post-war period assumed. As the wounds of war were replaced by a sense of prosperity and progress, a rising North America and its Western European allies forgot many things. They forgot about the temptations of power and interest. About the darkness that all too quickly flows from these. And about the logic of an international system of mutual restraint. By the time of the late 1980s, even Germany – home of the strongest “Never Again” sentiments – was caught in a historikerstreit (historians’ controversy) about the continued relevance of Nazism and the Holocaust

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(Stürmer 1986). Germany had its wirthschaftwunder – its miraculous post-war economic growth. The European Common Market had an unbroken row of increasing annual-living standards. And the North Atlantic Treaty Organization had enjoyed decades of peace and stability. Why, then, should they remain in the doom and gloom of liberal skepticism? This natural process of forgetting went hand in hand with another source of amnesia: a sort of intellectual or ideological neglect. Cultivating the liberalism of fear as public philosophy, making sure that both the people and those who served in their institutions understood the fragile nature of reason and law, simply wasn’t on the agenda anymore. The economy was. The transformation of post-war Europe into a collection of constitutional liberal democracies was, as Mark Lilla writes, a “velvet revolution”: a process of incremental, institutional, political, and economic liberalization, but crucially, “without ideas” (Lilla 1994, 133). Post-war Europe, according to this account, found itself in the odd situation of having built liberalism – an order of liberal societies – without liberals. No one to write the billboards. No one to sound the slogans. No one to defend and remember the original ideas: that nationalism is potentially dangerous and that sovereignty is a privilege best kept in check. “Does this matter?” Lilla’s study – written in the early postCold War period – asks. If we are to explain the fate of Liberal World Order today, the absence of strong intellectual or cultural environments that could rekindle the fire of humility and self-doubt may well have played a role. It matters, at least, that the key instrument through which the liberalism of fear sought to achieve its goal of binding national power – cool, detached bureaucracy – had no one to interpret or defend its purpose, but would increasingly degenerate into rigid rationalism, gray technocracy, and a façade covering up growing economic inequalities. It is important to grasp that to many in the immediate post-45 period, dullness was the vision, bureaucracy was the politics. To survivors of fascist mass democracy and charisma – of wars and terrors driven by the hysteria of too much emotion – grey seemed good; boring even better. In a very real sense then, theirs was a deliberate project of making Liberal World Order post-political. Did that project fail? Or did it succeed too well? Could leaders capable of communicating post-politics as a project have prevented that sense of estrangement and distance which the bureaucracies of

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institutionalism acquired over time? Perhaps. The fact remains that in the current re-infatuation with nation, distinction, and charisma, it is the perception of a certain “staleness” or “greyness” in liberal politics that makes many reject it. More than anything, it is the notion that a timid weakness is inherent to liberal bureaucracy that inspires a growing number of politicians in France, Italy, and the US to sign on to Vladimir Putin’s indictment of a “frigid” or “genderless and infertile” Euro-Atlantic (Foer 2017). Above all, the new geopolitics, and its resentment of what it considers the weakness and hypocrisy of the liberal mind, cannot be grasped without acknowledging the profound effects of American unipolarity, the neoconservative moment, and the triumphalist waging of what Charles Krauthammer unabashedly called “democratic war” (2004). Twenty years ago, notions not just of Liberal World Order, but of a totally victorious Liberal Empire were everywhere. Ten years later, titles about liberal or Western hubris, disappointment, and decay start to become commonplace. Twenty years later, that sense of profound humiliation or failure, combined with an experience of unfair rules (why should the West restrain its own behaviour in war when none of its enemies do?) would seem to have eroded whatever liberal stamina there once was. It is an easy fall from megalomania to despair (a theme which Matthew Hinds’s chapter on Anglo-American defeatism explores more carefully in this volume). Add to this mix increased immigration and the changing composition of the transatlantic religious map. Add the explosion of apocalyptic concerns about “the replacement” of Judeo-Christian culture by Islamic autocracy and the perception that Liberal World Order offers nothing but feeble responses to that prospect. Add polarized Western publics caught in the dynamics of identity politics. And add a new Right that considers all the postures which a liberalism of fear saw as virtues – hesitancy, caution, self-suspicion – simply as signs of a feminized, flagellant, and weak Western world (Gottfried 2002). What happened to the Liberal World Order, in other words, and what drives those geopolitical sentiments that increasingly threaten to explode it, is not just the rise of anti-liberal sentiments among a growing number of American and European critics. The current crisis stems at least as much from the transformation of fearful or hesitant liberalism itself: its slide from caution to triumphalism, and then a further descent into cynicism, chauvinism, and disillusion. It

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is a long stretch from the liberalism of fear that defined the post45 period to the liberal triumphalism at the end of the twentieth century. It is an even further stretch – indeed, a near reversal – from the “Never Again” liberalism of fear to the embrace of the nationalist, geopolitical, or even post-liberal West now endorsed by a growing number of pundits and politicians. Europe and the US currently rummage through the drawers of twentieth-century memory, re-arranging reasons, meanings, and lessons. Much of the trauma associated with the passions and catastrophes of the first part of that century is gone, and much of the pride associated with the taming of those passions has vanished as well.

s e c t io n s a n d themes The chapters of this volume all unpack aspects of this overarching analysis: that the memory of twentieth-century wars as catastrophes – once foundational to liberal ideas of world order – have increasingly given way to other, different, or even opposite narratives. Memories of the pre-45 period as one of colour and glory: less ambiguous, stauncher, more virile, heroic, true. And memories of the post-45 period as one of Western weakness, greyness, dullness, decadence, castration, and overregulation. The chapters are organized into two main sections and a shorter concluding section. In Part One: Amnesia in the Anglosphere, authors Hinds, Drolet, and Lang each explore current critiques or outright rejections of “liberal memory” in the US and the UK. The opening chapter of the section is spurred by a pressing question: how is it that some of the most ardent critics of the post-45 liberal order have emerged from the two Western nations most crucial to its original formation? In a broad exploration of the nationalism currently manifest in the US and Great Britain, Matthew Hinds argues that the Anglo-American Right is inherently different from the blood-and-soil trajectories of Continental Europe precisely because of its once-ownership of Liberal Empire and the humiliations of “vanished supremacies” now suffered. In the section’s second chapter, Jean-François Drolet takes a deeper dive into that which is arguably the new Right’s most substantive intellectual formulation: the paleo-conservative critique of the “feminized” liberal state and “managerial” global capitalism. In the section’s final chapter, Johannes Lang turns from contemporary revolts against liberal governance to emerging critiques of liberal war, and then to the

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recent rise of positive psychology in the field of modern soldiering and its overlap with a growing conservative wish to replace post-Vietnam narratives of war as trauma with vocabularies that view combat as the maker of strength, virtue, and resilience. Uniting all three chapters is the overarching story of a contemporary Anglo-American world in profound disarray over what to make of the events of the twentieth century, and an analysis of how emerging forms of anti-liberal critique renegotiate the meaning of such terms as “sovereignty,” “character,” and “power.” Part Two: Continental Memory Wars takes us to the European continent. While “Brexit” and “Trump” have become symbols of the new geopolitics, the continent is, in some ways, an even richer place to look for the crisis of liberal memory. We see that crisis in how contemporary European elections, EU-relations, and foreign-policy positions relate to more subtle political battles over monuments, museums, and narratives of the past. Manni Crone’s opening chapter begins in France, a country whose often sophisticated and articulate Right has set both the tone and themes for anti-liberal critics across Europe: fear of “ethnic fracture” and rejection of liberal “totalitarianism,” protest against “anti-white racism,” and – above all – a sense that Western civilization is threatened not only by immigration from without but by a decadent culture of liberal indifference from within. Against that backdrop, Minda Holm unfolds a nuanced analysis of contemporary Russia and its distinctly orthodox-conservative articulation of itself as saviour of, not opponent to, Western civilization: of sovereignty, borders, and geopolitics as moral (not cynical) instruments aimed at re-erecting a Europe of strength not apathy, fertility not frigidity, organic cohesion rather than fragmented materialism. The critique, defence, and memory of post-war liberalism features centrally in this analysis. Jesper Vind’s “guided tour” through the landscape of contemporary Berlin explores the struggle over European civilization in the very different context of Angela Merkel’s Germany: a nation “forever in the shadow of Hitler” and yet also in the midst of a heated war over the “Never Again” discourse at the heart of both domestic and foreign policy for more than seventy years. Finally, the section’s closing chapter explores Italy, that key European country in which a disruptive and new Right nationalism has gained power over government and considers the return in Italian political discourse of what the authors call apologia, nostalgia, machismo, and “revanchism.”

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Finally, Part Three: The New Geopolitics lifts its gaze to the global institutional level, zooming in on how the dual dynamics of liberal amnesia and rising nationalism described in the previous chapters combine to challenge and erode the founding logic of the United Nations: an institutional framework which Louise Riis Andersen’s chapter argues was built exactly in the spirit of a skeptical, pragmatist, and in many ways deeply realistic post-45 liberal creed. A closing epilogue returns to the questions raised in this introductory chapter: How and why did Western democracies arrive at their current state of crisis, in what way is liberalism itself implicated in that crisis, and how is the current liberal crisis likely to unfold from here? Do these chapters ultimately make up a unitary narrative? No. In a complex reality, insight begins with accepting the limits of cohesion. As already stressed, there never was a liberal consensus. Nor did its recent re-articulation (or outright contestation) emerge from thin air. Visions of what liberal order means or implies have consistently been frail, contested, embattled, just as the nature of their opposition and defence have varied deeply with region, context, and setting (Bell 2010). Ultimately, the chapters that follow have been collected and arranged to provide readers with such variation and in that spirit of nuance, no fixed or shared cross-chapter-terminology is possible. By nature, periods of political turmoil are moments of semantic disruption. This is why terms like “nationalism,” “liberalism,” or “the Right” cannot be applied a priori. What does unite the chapters of this book is their study of how such terms are currently being contested and redefined in various national or institutional contexts – and in an important interplay with liberal memories and accounts of the recent Western past. Themes that run through those contestations include

· · · · · ·

Loss, decline, and humiliation Sovereignty, authority, and borders War, vitality, and masculinity Nation, civilization, and identity Ethnicity, religion, and race Affect, rationality, and bureaucracy

All the chapters speak to some or even most of these themes. All address their links to new geopolitical reasoning and its agendas of historical revisionism and political disruption. And all display a keen

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sensitivity to the strategic, staged, and at often deliberately stylized nature of their “return.”

im p o s s ib l e in nocence Finally, a note on the vantage point from which the contributions here are written. Implicit to the story told above is the obvious point that no historical account can make claims to innocence. It seems fair to ask, then: does not the present volume enlist history in the service of political instruction? Well – yes. Obviously. Almost all the contributors have had inter- and post-war Europe as a central object of their research. Vind and Lang have addressed the Holocaust; Tjalve, Hinds, and Drolet the rise of fascism and the ramifications of total war. Others, like Andersen, have worked on the origins of the UN and its role in global regions largely without bulwarks, very much in the hands of crude power politics. Probably their shared experience leads them to err on the side of caution: suspicious of the capacity for evil in both humans and states alike, inclined to support the binding, taming, and checking of power. It also makes the authors likely to forgive the many flaws of liberal structures of regulation, even if much of our scholarship has been dedicated to confronting their obvious imperfections. One way or another, most of this book’s contributors would probably sympathize with Shklar’s liberalism of fear and its limited, pragmatic ambition to avoid the worst. Partly in recognition of such bias, the format chosen here is closer to that of the engaged essay than it is to the detached and often more sterile article. Yet the overall purpose of this volume is to illuminate, not to choose sides. Paradoxically, ours is a time of both amnesia and hyper-remembrance – of what scholars describe as a simultaneously oblivious and fragmented relationship with the past and a cynical, strategic, and disruptive appropriation of it (Doss 2010; Levi and Rothberg 2018). This is due, in part, to the nature of the new technologies through which we “remember”: technologies that accelerate fragmentation and polarization, and whose capacity for misconstruction or “fake news” has turned us all into cynics. “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible” reads the title of Peter Pomerantsev’s poignant new work about what he calls “the surreal heart of New Russia” (2017). Does not that surrealism extend and apply, at some level, to Western politics and Western publics too? In our digitalized, visualized, online democracy, fragments of historical rhetoric, drama, trauma, or

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triumph are circulated and applied for political ends: all accuse all of demagogy, populism, elitism, fascism, and totalitarianism. Pasts are invented only to be instantly replaced and forgotten. Facts are provided, confirmed, and then leaked as failures and frauds. The result is an exhaustion of meaning – a state of tired resignation in which everything is indeed possible, because warnings of “catastrophe” or “trauma” seem but fabricated, outworn, and inconsequential. It is, in the words of American sociologist Chris Hedges, a culture of spectacle, incapable of distinguishing between reality and illusion, and increasingly undisturbed by the difference (Hedges 2009). That exhaustion of meaning is closely tied to where we are at in the cycle of liberal civilization: a place of exhausted utopias. For decades, the defence of a Liberal World Order was critiqued for its self-aggrandizing faith in the perfection of Western civilization and its ability to deliver us all at some envisioned End of History. Just fifteen years ago, books like this one pointed to historical experience as a vaccine against too much optimism (Bacevitch 2008; Purdue 2003). Those tables have turned: cynicism, not optimism, is what ails our present. The problem then was a dangerous utopianism. Now – after Iraq, after Afghanistan, after a destructive financial crisis – the problem is a dangerous dystopianism. The hard-learned lessons of hubris and failed empire have resulted in postures of resigned nostalgia. The twenty-first century, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, may be an era of “retrotopias”: a geopolitical battle between visions of a simpler, shinier, more worthy, and more virile past (Bauman 2017). Confused and disappointed by the future, Bauman’s dark prophesy warns, we may turn to orders of old, and in return for their promise of grandeur and glory, embrace their violence or inequalities as inherent necessities. To the extent that this book has an agenda, it is to provide discussions about if, how, and why we want those pasts to become the future with the seriousness they deserve. r e f e r e n ce s Bacevitch, Andrew. 2008. The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism. New York: Henry Holt. Bauman, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity. Bell, Duncan. 2014. “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42 (6): 682-715.

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Diamond, Larry, Marc Plattner, and Christopher Walker. 2016. Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dodds, Klaus and David Atkinson. 2000. Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought. London: Routledge. Doss, Erika. 2010. Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Foer, Franklin. 2017. “It’s Putin’s World: How the Russian President Became the Ideological Hero of Nationalists Everywhere.” The Atlantic (March). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/03/ its-putins-world/513848/. Gabriel, Sigmar. 2018. “We Are Seeing What Happens When the US Pulls Back.” Interview in Der Spiegel, 8 January. Gottfried, Paul. 2002. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Guzzini, Stefano. 2013. The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy Identity Crisis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hedges, Chris. 2009. Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. New York: Nation Books. Judis, John B. 2004. “Imperial Amnesia.” Foreign Policy 143 (Jul-Aug): 50-9. Katznelson, Ira. 2003. Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press. – 2017. “What America Taught the Nazis,” The Atlantic (Nov). https:// www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/what-america-taughtthe-nazis/540630/. Koskenniemi, Martti. 2001. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law 1870-1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krauthammer, Charles. 2004. Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar Moment. An Irving Kristol Lecture. Washington dc: American Enterprise Institute. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2002. Memory and Power in Post-War Europe: Studies in the Presence of the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. – 2008. “Fear and Freedom: On Cold War Liberalism.” European Journal of Political Theory 7 (1): 45-64. Pomerantsev, Peter. 2017. Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia. New York: PublicAffairs.

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Purdu, Jedidah. 2003. Being America: Liberty, Commerce and Violence in American World. New York: Knopf. Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg. 2018. “Memory Studies in a Moment of Danger: Fascism, Postfascism and the Contemporary Political Imagination.” Memory Studies 11 (3): 355-67. Lilla, Mark. 1994. “The Other Velvet Revolution: Continental Liberalism and Its Discontents.” Daedalus 123 (2): 129-57. Stürmer, Michael. 1986. “History in a Land Without History.” Forever in the Shadow of Hitler: Original Documents of the Historikerstreit: The Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust. 1996, trans. James Knowlton and Truett Cates. London: Humanities Press International. Shklar, Judith. 1989. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Liberalism and the Moral Life, ed. Nancy L. Rosenblum, 21-38. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Tjalve Vibeke Schou. 2011. “Designing (de)security: European Exceptionalism, Atlantic Republicanism and the ‘Public Sphere.’” Security Dialogue 42 (4/5): 441-52. Tjalve, Vibeke Schou and Michael C. Williams. 2016. “Realist Exceptionalism: Philosophy, Politics and Foreign Policy in America’s Second Modernity.” In American Foreign Policy: Studies in Intellectual History, eds. Jean-François Drolet and James Dunkerley, 96-116. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Van Munster, Rens and Casper Sylvest. 2016. Nuclear Realism: Global Political Thought during the Thermonuclear Revolution. New York: Routledge. Whitman, James. 2017. Hitler’s American Model. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Williams, Michael C. 2013. “In the Beginning: The International Relations Enlightenment and the End of International Relations Theory.” European Journal of International Relations 19 (3): 647-65.

pa r t o n e

A N G L O - A ME R IC A N A M NE S I A

This section explores current critiques or outright rejections of “liberal memory” in the US and Great Britain. Spurred by a pressing question – how is it that some of the most ardent critics of the post-45 liberal order have emerged from the two nations possibly most crucial to its original formation? – its opening chapter explores the idea of a “transatlantic” or “Anglo-American” Right and its inherent difference from the blood and soil nationalism of Continental Europe. The chapter explains this marked difference, including the Anglo-American Right’s domination of Liberal Empire and the resulting paradoxes of its relationship with liberal legacies and memory. Against this backdrop, Chapter Two takes a deeper dive into that which is arguably the Anglo-American Right’s most substantive intellectual formulation: paleoconservatism and its critique of both the “feminized” liberal state and the “managerialism” of global capitalism. Echoing this nostalgia for a bygone era of organicism, character, and masculinity, the section’s final chapter explores emerging critiques of contemporary liberal approaches to war and military intervention. More specifically, Chapter Three unpacks the recent rise of positive psychology in the field of American soldiering and its intersection with contemporary conservative critiques of the post-Vietnam views of war as “trauma.”

1

After Empire: The “Geopolitical Mind” of the Anglo-American Right Matthew Fallon Hinds

How is it that Winston Churchill, embodiment of Anglo-American liberty, the guardian of liberal democracy who stood up to fascism, comes to be venerated as an entirely different icon – the whiskey-swilling apologist of Empire, a “disrupter-in-Chief” at war with the culture of political correctness? The short answer is that in today’s political climate, historical appropriations can happen in the blink of an eye, none more telling than when Donald Trump, as president, retrieves a bust of Churchill that had been allegedly removed from the Oval Office by Barack Obama (Milward 2017). While there is not enough space here to detail Trump’s rivalry with his predecessor, the permutation of Churchill’s legacy, on the other hand, points to broader questions addressed by this chapter. Most importantly, it encircles what remains to many a still almost unfathomable puzzle: How did the US and Britain – once the staunchest defenders of not just liberal order but of liberal norms of civility, continuity, and stability – come to ignite a revolt against those very idioms and institutions? What historical and intellectual processes have led the Right in these two countries to embrace atavism so brazenly? To pursue these questions, this chapter argues that the election of Trump and the outcome of the Brexit referendum must be viewed not as two separate events occurring an ocean apart. Rather, their source is the same “Anglo-American declinism” within which lurk notions of virility and ethnicity every bit as observable as the altogether different kind of conservatism which we tend to associate with Burkean

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maxims of “limits and place.” The hegemonies enjoyed by the United States and Britain over geopolitics this past century have been a palpable force in deciding the trajectory of this virile, ethnocentric, and disruptive Anglo-American Right: whenever this predominance has been perceived to be under threat, the result has been reaction. Time and again, overcome by aggressive nostalgia, a distinctive part of the Anglo-American Right has had a singular obsession: to restore past privileges believed to have been lost. The quest, in short, for what the historian Lewis Namier long ago termed “Vanished Supremacies” (Namier 1958). This quest, I contend, arguably unites, defines, and explains important features of a particular, cross-Atlantic, AngloAmerican Right – a Right distinct from its counterparts in Europe insofar as it relies less on their conventional narratives of “blood and soil” and yet no less prone to impulses of nativism or exclusion. If anything, the imperial mindset that both Great Britain and the United States still cling to would seem to further harden such attitudes.

t h e t r a d it io n o f di s rupti on Just as Anglo-American relations are historically entwined, so too are the Right in Britain and the Right in America, which have forged a special relationship of their own. Though not always in lockstep, national rivalry, one of the traditional signposts of the Right, hasn’t caused much of a rift between the two. For this reason, Russell Kirk’s landmark work, The Conservative Mind, is a transnational study, grafting together British and American political thought and heritage (Kirk 1991, 3-10). The “kith and kin” bond of “AngloSaxon origins,” however, has found less commonality in defining its parameters, in part because mass immigration in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century transformed the US’s dna to something more heterogeneous and more uniquely American. Even in a canonical work like The History of English-Speaking Peoples, a product of its time with its scarcely hidden ethno-nationalist overtures, its author, Winston Churchill, spurns the glorification of the volk for its own sui generic sake. Rather, the book’s teleological arguments focus squarely on a shared political culture, the theory holding that what makes the Anglo-Saxon element unique is its genius for pluralistic democracy (Churchill 1958). Intellectually, the Anglo-American Right, therefore, has lived with a marked duality as guarantors of conservative thought who nonetheless

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retain trusteeship over a parallel liberal tradition. The Magna Carta, the “Glorious Revolution,” the Declaration of Independence, and the US Constitution all fit inside the pages of the Anglo-American Right’s playbook, which think tanks like the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation in Washington dc pour over with liturgic reverence (Gardner and Thompson 2013). A testament to greatness commentators like Niall Ferguson rely on when they sermonize about “the West … and the rest” (Ferguson 2012). The danger always with triumph, though, lies in the speed it can slip into triumphalism, thus opening new avenues to tyranny. This is precisely what John Adams, America’s Burke, warned of over two centuries ago: the “dictates of our passions.” Which brings us back to the messy business of Brexit and the 2016 US election, where one sees repeatedly on the Right the destructive gene being lauded on both sides of the Atlantic. Where, for instance, Alt-Right Svengali Steve Bannon can gleefully cite Lenin as one of his personal heroes, a man “who wanted to destroy the state,” and receive nodding approval in return (Sebestyen 2017). An utterance not too distant from Ronald Reagan’s mantra: “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” alongside Thatcher’s own shibboleth that “there is no such thing as society.” Dogmas that exude little of what Russell Kirk himself referred to as “those permanent things,” let alone the “creative destruction” arguments of Joseph Schumpeter that those on the Right sometimes employ to rationalize frenzy. Indeed, insurrection long ago furrowed its way into rightwing consciousness, but retains a revolutionary spirit, insofar as the intent is to be transgressive. Signs of such insurgency – described in the introductory chapter of this volume a sort of Western “geopolitical amnesia” – can now be found across the spectrum of the Right (and beyond). The reentry of “America First” into the Republican Party’s lexicon stands out as one of the most conspicuous examples, given that this slogan was once loaded with anti-Semitic and crypto fascist connotations, and goes back to the isolationist America First Committee at the start of the Second World War. The fugue state shrouding historical memory in the UK is just as thick. The use of “Brit Kitsch,” as the late Christopher Hitchens once jokingly called it, is what happens when Tory “Leavers” attempt to sell Brexit as the future coming of “Empire 2.0” (Hitchens 2004, 38-62). While incredible to some, imperial nostalgia on this scale is predictable when viewed as part of the larger mindset of declinism.

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“ va n is h e d s u p remaci es ” As a form of political instrumentalism, gauzy ignorance, as Ibram X. Kendi contends, can be elevated to the rank of strategy, thus concealing its primary aim: the pursuance of power (Kendi 2017a).1 Which takes us to the Anglo-American Right’s own complex relationship with the liberal international order. For some, including many on the Right, the latter is another way of indicating a type of geopolitical supremacy, a rephrasing of the historical continuum of Pax Britannica transitioning into Pax Americana. Even though the Atlantic Charter, Bretton Woods, the founding of the United Nations – the institutional foundations of our postwar world order – rose out of the New Deal and the Labour Party’s egalitarian ethos, because they originated from American and British sources, they appealed equally to a large segment of the Anglo-American Right as ensuring national advantage (Borgwardt 2005, 14-169). In the words of Susan Brewer, these institutions had all the makings of a system which “assumed American leadership” (Brewer 2011, 87). Although Britain did not foresee the prospect of returning to its pre-war hegemonic status, this situation allowed the country a degree of preeminence on the world stage far outweighing its power. The Allied victory in the Second World War, after all, was a Pyrrhic victory for Britain. Still, the raft of UN multilateral institutions encircling the globe, from security apparatuses like nato to interdependent financial agencies like the World Bank, plus the weighty prominence accorded to human rights, together encouraged the creation of what Geir Lundestad coins an “Empire by Invitation” (Lundestad 1986). This was a form of supremacy held not by the bayonet but through the authority of consent, and secured via principles of mutual interdependence according to which the rest of the world saw themselves not as vassals but as shareholders in a socio-economic security network. It was overseen by Washington, with London serving in the role of loyal adjutant: an arrangement undoubtably not always to the liking of the European Right, the most notable case being the French Right and Charles De Gaulle, who remained averse to all things Anglo-Saxon. Indeed, “An Empire of Liberty,” to borrow Jefferson’s well-known phrase, still stands to be an empire. It is this geostrategic paradox which – beyond any political or economic doctrine – integrates, but also highlights, the internal contradiction which fragments

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the Anglo-American Right into two camps divided between those who champion what Robert Divine calls this “Triumph of Internationalism” and those who consider the strategic reasoning above to be entirely faulty (Divine 1971). The universalist framework of that system created conditions that would eventually not only preclude geopolitical dominance abroad but also racial dominance at home, leading to the move away from segregation and the endgame of empire. It is amazing to think that at the height of the Cold War, in the same instant that the Soviets launched Sputnik, thereby puncturing the myth of American exceptionalism, the Kremlin won a second major propaganda victory. Contemporaneous to the Space Race, President Eisenhower was forced to attend to another “national emergency” and use his executive power to forcibly desegregate the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas. In doing so, Eisenhower ostracized those within his own political constituency for whom the maintenance of racial superiority was the central value, outweighing any Cold War calculation. A similar division took place a few short years later in the UK, with the Tory Government’s pro-decolonization policies in the wake of Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech (Rich, 1990). As a counterstrike against the party’s establishment, grassroot Tories aiming to grow solidarity in Britain for White Minority rule in Southern Africa formed the controversial Monday Club. This was not the fringe organization of popular imagination, but prominent enough on the British Right to be judged, as Camilla Schofield puts it, “establishment politics” (Schofield 2013, 185). Fast forward to Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the two biggest postwar icons of the Anglo-American Right. An exaggerated depiction manufactured by their hagiographers exists of the two of them armed only with a copy of Hayek’s Road to Serfdom in one hand and a sledgehammer ready to knock down the Berlin Wall in the other (Wapshott, 2007). What’s relegated in the historical record are the elements that rose in conjunction with their political stardom: decolonization and the Civil Rights movement, a parallelism as profound as it is telling. It is worth recalling that Thatcher made her way by slithering into the slipstream of racial anxiety opened by Enoch Powell’s “River of Blood” jeremiad against non-white immigration in 1968. This speech led to Powell’s expulsion from the Tory shadow cabinet but also gave a jolt to his national popularity, a swing of opinion Thatcher noted.

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When she became the leader of the Conservative Party in 1975, she strove to bring Powell’s supporters back into the Tory fold. On live TV in 1978, when asked how she would cut immigration numbers if she were to become prime minister, Thatcher avowed that Britain was being “swamped” by immigrants from the New Commonwealth. Many interpreted this as a kind of signal to the right wing in Britain that she alone could be entrusted with carrying Enoch’s torch. Once making it to Downing Street, even at her most unpopular, what cemented her status was her noticeably hawkish, Powellite stance on the Brixton and Toxteth riots in 1981, which occurred in predominately Afro-Caribbean neighbourhoods (Moore 2013, 335-65). Questions of race and white identity politics also informed the rise of Ronald Reagan in the United States. In America, while much of the mainstream Right – Rockefeller Republicans in particular – were instrumental in delivering the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the racial tensions of the 1960s meant a segment lurched farther Right. This included “gatekeepers” like William F. Buckley, who once described a conservative as someone who stands “athwart history, yelling stop,” and opposed desegregation as editor of the influential National Review. Reagan (championed by Buckley early in his political career) followed the “Southern Strategy” of Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon who, as presidential candidates in 1964 and 1968 respectively, went out of their way to lure white voters from the Democratic Party, forever reconfiguring the Republican Party into the party of the American South. Reagan declared his 1980 presidential candidacy in Philadelphia, not the “City of Brotherly Love” one might expect but rather Philadelphia, Mississippi – a not so subtle demonstration of his favour for “States’ Rights.” A nod and a wink to Southern whites that, unlike the federal government in Washington, “the Gipper” was sympathetic to their hardship in losing their Apartheid-like racial privilege (Perlstein 2008). In comparison to Trump’s behaviour in the wake of Charlottesville, shielding the memory of Jefferson Davis, struggling to condemn the Ku Klux Klan, Reagan’s actions back then may seem quaint, but with the benefit of hindsight they ring no less alarmingly. These historical lineages show that although the Anglo-American Right relies less on narratives of “blood and soil” than its European counterparts, it is no less prone to intolerance. Britain and the United States owning a privileged position on the international stage

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breeds exclusivity and entitlement. Simply mull over the catchphrase of “Make America Great Again.” When this moment of prelapsarian bliss existed is tough to pinpoint, but in the Right’s estimation, it likely took place somewhere between the splendour of the US’s triumph in the Second World War and the maelstrom of the “Sixties.” What tends to be forgotten is that this epoch of perceived national greatness still carried with it a potent sense of malaise, well before the “Vietnam Syndrome” or the “Crisis of Confidence” of the 1970s took hold of the American psyche. McCarthyism, which infected the American Right in 1950s, arose from the humiliation of US foreign policy between 1949-50. When the Soviets detonated “the Bomb,” China “went Red,” and the Korean War stalemated, McCarthyism transformed frustrations portending national decline into a votes for the Republican Party – which explains its staying power to this very day (though neither “mainstream” Republicans such as the late Senator John McCain would care to admit this, nor would President Eisenhower have done so back then). Similarly, the ache for a former golden age, a time when “the sun never set on the British Empire,” infused Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech. The string of imperial humiliations Britain had suffered since the end of the Second World War – the Partition of India, the retreat from Palestine, the Abadan Crisis in Iran, descent into the Suez Crisis, the violence of the Iraqi Revolution, and later the expulsion from Aden – all led up to the Annus Horribilus of 1968. Not only had Britain recently failed to join the eec , blocked (again) by De Gaulle, intensifying this sense of loss, the pound was devalued to stave off an economic crisis while the country unceremoniously abandoned its last vestige of imperial power – its East of Suez defence policy extending from Mombasa to Singapore. Philip Larkin was provoked by this reversal of national fortune as much as Powell, and composed a sardonic poem in its wake. Next year we shall be living in a country That brought its soldiers home for lack of money. The statues will be standing in the same Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same. Our children will not know it’s a different country. All we can hope to leave them now is money. Larkin, “Homage to a Government,” 1989

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t h e p ow e rs o f “ d ecli ni sm” One can clearly see how Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” streams into the bitterness of Trump’s “American Carnage” inaugural address. Blinkered nostalgia leads to reaction at home, although this has as much to do with the perception of the US’s diminishing standing from its muddled interventions in the Middle East. Operation Enduring Freedom remains … enduring, the most prolonged military engagement in US history. It was mobilized, in large part, by neoconservatives, whose commitment to the American-constructed international order ran so deep that, from their vantage, unilateral action was the only way to save it. Likewise, though British operations annexed to the American mission have wound down, they have not done so out of choice. In fact, hmg ’s armed forces have been at a breaking point for so long that they lack the logistic capability to continue lengthy, far-flung campaigns. Examples include their humiliating ejection from Basra and the Chinook Helicopter Scandal on the Afghan frontier. Continued conflict in this theatre of the world, alongside the fallout from the Arab Spring and ensuing refugee flows from the Middle East precipitating terror attacks across Europe and the US, have only exacerbated the Anglo-American Right’s feeling that it is cornered and losing control. The gravity of this feeling helps to us understand how world-weariness can quickly metastasize into a “Clash of Civilizations” worldview, planting the seeds for Trumpism and Brexit. In America, the proof resides in the proposal of policies concerning both the “Border Wall” and the “Muslim Ban.” Not the political fiascos they seem to be, but a savvy political strategy designed to appeal to the base that carried Trump to the White House in 2016 and may do the same again in 2020. In corresponding fashion, “Keep Calm and Carry On,” the modern-day battle hymn of the UK, no longer matched the mood of the British people by the summer of 2016. Given the skittish political landscape, the architects of the successful “Leave Campaign,” Nigel Farage, Michael Gove, and Boris Johnson, quickly dropped abstract talking-points about sovereignty, the ones that Eurosceptics had put to the test in the 1975 eec referendum and during the run-up to the Maastricht Treaty in 1992. Instead, they turned their attentions to red meat issues that their constituents on the Right could lap up, hedging on the primacy of immigration and identity as the key Brexit issues. A vital change in tactics that ultimately won the day.

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And as a minor, yet important aside, why did Donald Trump himself back Brexit so fervently? Before we give too much importance to Trump’s sense of kinship to right-wing forces in the UK, it is essential to realize that multilateral institutions such as the EU, an arm of the liberal world order by definition, are interdependent and reciprocal holdings with the prospect of mutual advantage. This kind of set-up hems in Trump, who is not the dealmaker he pretends to be but rather a unilateralist (and therefore completely at odds with the global economy). This goes a long way in explaining the Anglo-American Right’s withering devotion to the free market since the 2008 global financial crisis, a reckoning which was in many respects caused by the very neoliberal policies that Reagan and Thatcher helped to trigger. Since the 1970s, “new ideas” based on nineteenth-century laissez-faire principles have furnished the Right with a certain amount of “radical chic” against the status quo of state intervention. But in America the situation has now been turned on its head, and those same statist policies are being appropriated by the Right to encourage economic nationalism. These are not the Keynesian policies associated with the postwar economic and technological boom following two global wars of total annihilation. Instead, the American Right has a new-found infatuation with the autarchic economic policies favoured by the slate of authoritarian countries that dominated the interwar period of the 1930s. In the US, this became apparent in the Trump administration’s hasty plan to bail out an air-conditioning plant deep in the heart of “Trump Country.” Speaking at a press conference in Indiana shortly after the 2016 election, Vice President elect Mike Pence turned heads when discussing the Right’s new enthusiasm for dirigisme: “The free market has been sorting it out,” Pence complained, and “America’s been losing,” with President elect Donald Trump interjecting, “every time, every time!” (Schwartz 2016) Critiques of market-led globalization were heard in abundance from ukip ’s Nigel Farage, but for the majority of Tories who backed Brexit, Euroscepticism is the most authentic demonstration of their passion for free-market Thatcherism.

c o n c l u s i on This chapter has argued that an enduring fixation with “declinism” ties the American and British Rights together, making it meaningful to speak of a distinctive, insurgent, and disruptive “Anglo-American

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Right.” Elements of the Right that is currently on the rise both in the US and in Britain, in other words, are not new but inherent to older trajectories of Anglo-American conservatism – even if they are further intensified by the spinning of the twenty-first-century, 24-hour news cycle (Krieger, 1986). The intensification of this Right goes hand in hand with broader, more global trends. What we are currently witnessing is a renewed acceptance of authoritarianism as the norm of international relations – not as the outlier. The confident rise of Xi Jinping’s China or the geopolitical resurgence of Putin’s Russia stand out as examples. Each flexing their muscles, be it in the South China Sea, the Crimea, or Syria, these postures of aggression align well with the gut reactions of a disruptive Anglo-American Right. “Might makes right,” and to combat transgressions, one must emulate transgressors. Looking at the Trump effect and Brexit through the prism of Anglo-American declinism helps one to grasp some of the new, disruptive Right’s character traits – and to recognize why it narrates twentieth-century history as it does. It is also a useful way to understand the differences between Anglo-American and Continental European critiques of liberal order. While tropes of “blood and soil” are thought to be the preserve of the Right in Continental Europe, the Anglo-American Right, as I have argued here, has its own tradition of using racially coded language to construct broader ethno-nationalist identities – a tradition heightened in periods of weakened influence and status. We must not be fooled by the disruptive, anti-internationalist rhetoric now voiced in the US and the UK. British Prime Minister Theresa May declares, “If you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” and President Trump would be hard pressed to match a sound bite so pithy. Rather than defiance, what shines through in these “fightin’” words is the undertone of despair (Adler 2016). May, herself no populist, emerged long ago as a national figure after criticizing her own Tory Party, which she notoriously labeled the “Nasty Party.” Regardless, the once “Remainer” who oversaw Article 50  but failed at delivering Brexit knew her base well, and recognized the types of grievances that animate it. Both are, foremost, descendants of empire, and the beneficiaries of the privilege that comes with hegemony. As British and American power on the world stage continues to erode, some react childishly, taking their balls home when winning the game looks doubtful. The Anglo-American Right finds

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itself in the unfamiliar position of inhabiting a world it can no longer master. Ironically – and paradoxically – wishing to unchain the liberal international order can thus be read as a final act of anguish on the part of its very own founders. no t e 1 Also see Kendi (2017b).

r e f e r e n ce s Adler, Jeremy. 2016. “Theresa May’s Rejection of Enlightenment Values.” The Guardian, 9 October. Borgwardt, Elizabeth. 2005. A New Deal for the World: America’s Vision for Human Rights. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brewer, Susan. 2011. Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the Philippines to Iraq. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Churchill, Winston. 1958. The History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Volume III. The Great Democracies. London: Cassell and Company. Divine, Robert. 1971. Second Chance: The Triumph of Internationalism in America during World War Two. Cambridge: Athenaeum Press. Ferguson, Niall. 2012. Civilization: The West and the Rest. London: Penguin. Gardiner, Nile and Stephen Thompson. 2013. Margaret Thatcher on Leadership: Lessons for American Conservatives. Washington dc : Regnery. Hitchens, Christopher. 2004. Blood, Class and Empire: The Enduring Anglo-American Relationship. New York: Nation Books. Kendi, Ibram. X. 2017a. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. New York: Nation Books. – 2017b. “Trump Sounds Ignorant of History but Racist Ideas Often Masquerade as Ignorance.” Washington Post, 13 November. Kirk, Russell. 1991. The Conservative Mind. Hawthorne: BN Publishing. Krieger, Joel. 1986. Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Decline. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Larkin, Philip. 1989. Collected Poems. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Lundestad, Geir. 1986. “Empire by Invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952.” Journal of Peace Research 23 (3): 263-77. Milward, David. 2017. “Donald Trump Returns Winston Churchill’s Bust to the Oval Office.” Daily Telegraph, 21 January.

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Moore, Charles. 2013. Margaret Thatcher, The Authorized Biography: Volume I. London: Penguin. Namier, Sir Lewis. 1958. Vanished Supremacies: Essays on European History 1812-1918. New York: Harper Torchbooks. Perlstein, Rick. 2008. Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. New York: Scribner. Rich, Paul B. 1990. Race and Empire in British Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schwartz, Nelson D. 2016. “Trump Sealed Carrier Deal with Mix of Threats and Incentive.” New York Times, 1 December. Sebestyen, Victor. 2017. “Bannon Says He’s a Leninist: That Could Explain the White House’s New Tactics.” The Guardian, 6 February. Schofield, Camilla. 2013. Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wapshott, Nicholas. 2007. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: A Political Marriage. New York: Sentinel.

2

After Liberalism? The Paleoconservative Roots of the New American Nationalism Jean-François Drolet

The rise of a radical and increasingly transnational Right has been one of the most significant developments in the politics and international relations of the West since the end of the Cold War.1 In the broadest sense, this emerging “New Right” is defined by strong commitments to  ethno-nationalist and anti-establishment ideologies, with grievances aimed at immigrants and minority populations. Its protagonists emphasize images of cultural loss and memories of betrayal, and position themselves as the legitimate heirs to national culture, traditions, and values against the debilitating consequences of various liberal ideologies that mainstream conservative forces are said to have either collaborated with or failed to oppose with sufficient conviction. For years, the United States was thought to be immune from this sort of disruptive and nativist conservative politics. According to the mainstream Cold War narrative, America was the quintessentially liberal society, the “first new nation” of the modern era to practice a nationalism based on the constitutional identity of the country rather than on its ethno-cultural or religious background (Hartz 1955; Lipset 1963; Walzer 1996). But the election of Donald J. Trump in November 2016 on the promise to reverse the ravages of neoliberal globalization and restore traditional boundaries of race, gender, and sexuality was a sobering reminder of the isolationist and ethno-racist nationalism which has been lying dormant on the margins of the American political culture since the ideological re-alignments of the

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1960s and 1970s. As historians will remind us, the tensions and contradictions expressed by these conflicting nationalisms are as old as the idea of America itself, a nation-state founded by slaveholders on the back of an anti-colonial revolution guided by the principle that all men are created equal (Lieven 2004). Yet the particular characteristics and popular appeal of “Trumpism” today cannot be understood without acknowledging the profound impact of the collective trauma induced by the failures of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq in the aftermath of 9/11. Already during the 1980s, leading paleoconservative intellectual Samuel Francis had predicted a populist revolt that would put an end to the “proletarianized” conditions of Middle America by putting a stop to immigration and revoking US commitments to internationalist foreign policies. Francis detected the beginnings of this uprising in Pat Buchanan’s challenge to the incumbent, George H.W. Bush, in the presidential primaries of 1992. As he wrote in Chronicles at the time: the themes of ‘America First’ and the ‘Middle American Revolution’ that Mr. Buchanan articulated, appealed to a particular identity, embodied in the concepts of America as a nation with discrete national, political and economic interests and of the Middle American stratum as the political, economic, and cultural core of the nation. In adopting such themes, Mr. Buchanan decisively broke with the universalist and cosmopolitan ideology that has been masquerading as conservatism and which has marched up and down the land armed with a variety of universalist slogans and standards: natural rights; equality as a conservative principle; the export of global democracy as the primary goal of American foreign policy; unqualified support for much of the civil rights agenda, unlimited immigration, and free trade; the defense of one version or another of ‘one-worldism’; enthusiastic worship of an abstract ‘opportunity’ and unrestricted economic growth through acquisitive individualism; and the adulation of the purported patron saints of all these causes in the persons of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Francis 1992a, 11) The “Buchanan Revolution” never really took off. But paleoconservatives in the following decades have continued to provide intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internation-

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ally, positions that have at different times resonated with political movements including the Tea Party, the Alt-Right, and Trumpism. This chapter explores the paleoconservative critique of contemporary liberal democracy and global liberal governance in the context of that transformation of the American Right – not least the recent rise of “Trumpism” – and it does so partly through the comparative prism of showing how profoundly paleoconservatism differs from the neoconservatism, which informed the Bush administration and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. With its dramatic revision of the long-established liberal narratives of the twentieth century, paleoconservatism represents not only a set of philosophical dispositions and claims, but a strategic take on how to plug into and mobilize contemporary social and political aspirations. If we are to engage effectively with this increasingly potent and deeply discomforting form of reaction in American and world politics, we need first and foremost to unpack and understand it.

t h e n e w c l as s a n d t h e transformati on o f t h e c o n s e rvat ive movement The term “paleoconservatism” was coined by Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming during the mid-1980s to designate a relatively eclectic group of who felt increasingly alienated by the growing influence of so-called “neo” conservatives within the Republican establishment since the late 1970s (Scotchie 1999). Paleoconservatives saw themselves as the defenders of the legacy of the Old Right associated with politicians and thinkers such as Russell Kirk, Richard Weaver, and James Burnham. They derived their worldview and policy prescriptions from the canons of conservative political philosophy and the study of (Christian) religious texts and Western history, emphasizing the importance of place and the role of traditions and ethnicity in shaping both individual and collective identity. In their view, “neoconservatives” were really a group of cosmopolitan liberals who had been driven to the right by the radical offensives of the 1960s and 1970s, and whose transformative ideological vision, social scientific statistical methods, and universalist foreign policy aspirations were completely antithetical to the interests and core beliefs of “authentic conservatism.” As Gottfried and Fleming wrote in 1988, although they liked to praise Christian poetry and the tragic wisdom of the Ancients, neoconserva-

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tives ultimately remained agents of what Michael Oakshott called “rationalism in politics”: “They may cry out in despair about the intractability of anti-Semitism, terrorism, and the Soviet empire […] Yet, their position is not entirely incompatible with modern state planning. Almost all neoconservatives remain qualified defenders of the welfare state […] All of them believe that social problems can be properly managed if the state acts on the basis of knowledge” (Gottfried and Fleming 1988, 66). As Reagan kept moving American politics to the Right, conservatives were getting embroiled in dispute over the meaning of the label and the future direction of the movement. Key conservative institutions like William Buckley’s National Review and the American Enterprise Institute, paleoconservatives complained, had accommodated and capitulated to doctrines of progressive humanism and cosmopolitan liberalism on every front in the culture wars. They held neoconservatives responsible for this political neutering and moral debasement of the conservative movement.2 This was increasingly evident in the movement’s proclivity to embrace the debauched commercial culture of neoliberal capitalism while simultaneously preaching traditional family values on cnn , Fox News, and other corporate media outlets. It was also apparent in the zeal with which anti-communism within the discourse of the Republican Party and wider conservative movement was being transmuted into democracy promotion and a universalist doctrine of American exceptionalism that demanded global emulation. The problem was, therefore, not only that the conservative establishment seemed to have abandoned the fight for the protection of traditions, local self-government, and regional socio-economic independence against the centralizing and deracinating forces of globalization, but also that it was actively participating in the deconstruction of these socio-cultural goods. Against all odds, the conservative movement had itself become part of the so-called “New Class” that the Right had been criticizing in previous decades (Francis 1994; Gottfried and Spencer 2015). The paleoconservative account of the New Class thesis takes its inspiration from the work of the political theorist James Burnham (1905-87), who broke with Trotskyism in 1940 to become one of the leading public intellectuals of the Cold War American Right. In The Managerial Revolution (1941), Burnham analyzed the new mass societies which he saw emerging with the ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power around the world, and perceived

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important similarities between the political-economic formations of Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, and the United States under Roosevelt and New Deal liberalism. He argued that a trend of economic organization had been developing in industrialized countries since 1914 in which a new social group or new class of technically skilled managers, administrators, engineers, and bureaucrats of all sorts were engaged in a “drive for social dominance, for power and privilege, for the position of ruling class” (Burnham 1941, 71). According to Burnham, these new elites could usurp the power of the old ones simply because the old elites lacked the skills required to govern and lead in a world that was being reconfigured rapidly by new technological developments. In this emerging order, the distinction between the ruling managerial elite and the masses no longer hinged on the actual ownership of the means of production, but rather on the control of the means of production and the ability of the elite to manipulate cultural symbols and state-authorized mechanisms of mass organization and economic redistribution. Generally, the interests of these new managerial elites consist in maintaining and extending the institutions they control, and in ensuring that both the need and rewards for the technical skills they possess are steadily increased. According to paleoconservatives, the cultural hegemony of New Class ideology today has become so complete and effective that its domination is rarely ever recognized. Since the New Deal, the dissemination of New Class ideology has been driven by capitalist crises and the need to regulate and intervene to guarantee basic safeguards for those who are worst affected by economic dislocations. This means that, at the systemic level, the New Class functions as a rationalizing agent for the reproduction of severe economic inequalities, legitimating itself on the pretence of defending the poor and underprivileged against the same capitalist forces their intervention is furthering (Francis 1999; Gottfried 2001). Paleoconservatives see these developments as the culmination of a long historical process by which the traditional institutions of the Western bourgeoisie were deprived of any historical specificity by being simultaneously linked to the interests of the underclass, middle-income earners, multinational corporations, and latte-drinking yuppies. If classical liberalism emphasized the virtues of self-government and a civil society free from state interference, managerial liberalism aims primarily at subverting traditions and fighting social prejudices that interfere with lifestyle liberties. As Francis puts it:

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The managerial ruling class, lodged primarily in the state and the other massive bureaucratic structures that dominate the economy and mass culture, must undermine such institutions of traditional social life if its power and interests are to prevail. Disparities between races – rebaptized as ‘prejudice,’ ‘discrimination,’ ‘white supremacy,’ and ‘hate’ to which state and local governments and private institutions are indifferent or in which they are allegedly complicit – provide constant targets of convenience for managerial attack on local, private, and social relationships. Seen in this perspective, as a means of subverting traditional society and enhancing the dominance of a new elite and its own social forms, the crusade for racial ‘liberation’ is not distinctly different from other phases of the same conflict that involve attacks on the family, community, class, and religion. (Francis 2000, 10)

g l o ba l l ib e r a l m anageri ali sm Following Burnham, paleoconservatives argue that managerialism as a form of socio-political power is not restricted to the domestic realm but is intrinsically international. As Gottfried explains, this is both because of its close association with American power during the twentieth century, and because the administrative rationality of managerialism transcends cultural specificity: “It is the rules of bureaucratic organization that seek, or are alleged, to provide the moral substance of a society thus governed, and those rules, as Weber notes, are seen to be coextensive with a universal science of management” (Gottfried 2001, 74). Thus what experts in the domestic realm call “administration” has its counterpart in world politics as democratization, pacification, international cooperation, legalization, and the implementation and policing of human rights. In his essays for Chronicles and in his Leviathan and Its Enemies (published posthumously by the Alt-Right in 2015), Francis accounts for the global expansionist logic of managerialism in ways that resonate strongly with neo-Gramscian theories of globalization and American hegemony. Against classical Marxist and Leninist theories of imperialism, Francis insists that managerial globalism is not a question of expanding the control of a given state or political-cultural unit over new territories, nor is it driven primarily by the need to find new markets and cheap labour and material resources to counter potential crises of over-production and over-accumulation.

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Rather, managerial globalism is motivated by the desire and capability of the managerial elite located in state, economic, and mass cultural institutions to increase its power by developing managerial infrastructures in societies where these do not yet exist. Over time, the functional imperatives of these instruments of organization, along with the interests of those who control them, tend to outgrow the political constraints of the national state: “By integrating such infrastructures into a transnational order, managerialism actually contributes to the erosion of national, racial and cultural particularisms and to their replacement by a global cosmopolitan identity within the framework of mass organizations under the direction of a transnational managerial elite” (Francis 2016, 533). Francis attributes a key role to Cold War liberalism and the perceived geostrategic imperatives of America’s containment doctrine in facilitating the proliferation of the managerial structure of interests. For containment involved preventing communist expansion and keeping allies aligned by putting in place regional security pacts and laying the foundations of world government in the form of the UN, the International Court of Justice, the imf , the World Bank, and a whole swath of treaties and executive agreements sponsored by a transatlantic national security and foreign policy bureaucracy with deep connections to universities, corporations, and banking and legal institutions (1991, 9). In its commitment to engineer healthy, prosperous societies in the Third World in order to erode support for communism, containment also incorporated the rationalist premises of New Deal liberalism in ways that legitimized “the enhancement of the power and rewards of the elite through the application on a global scale of its specialized skills” (2016, 482). The result was not the developmental miracle anticipated by the advocates of those initiatives, but the botched modernization of traditional political structures into new hybrid types of authoritarian regimes completely estranged from their own cultures and societies. Paleoconservatives see the destruction of the natural environment, the creation of vast slums and urban jungles, and the rise of violent ethnic nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism in the Middle East and the Global South since the 1970s as direct consequences of these developments (ibid, 473-4; Gottfried 2002). After the Cold War, those “new” developmental problems and security became part of the rationale for a major refunctioning of the managerial complex through nato and EU expansion, and the articulation of various formulae

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such as “the New World Order,” “democratic enlargement,” “human security,” and the management of the “global economy” and the “global environment.” This re-legitimation of the Cold War institutional structure of interests was also effected through the articulation of a new paradigm of liberal governance that seeks to subordinate the national decision-making process of all states in all substantive fields – human rights, labour laws, the environment, health, and political-military affairs – to the authority of global managerial networks and institutions. For the paleos, the problem is not just that these ever-expanding networks suffer from a severe democratic deficit and are opened to capture by a wide variety of interests groups with often-conflicting agendas, but also that they vehicle a range of cosmopolitan human-rights claims that empower ethnic and cultural minorities vis-à-vis national majority cultures. Paleoconservatives attribute the consolidation of this state of affairs to the propagation of multicultural ideologies, and the hegemonization of a regime of abstract individual rights which demands that we think of individual identity and liberties as being conceptually prior to political association and all spatio-temporal denominations. They see this as an existential challenge to the modernist interpretation of the American experience, in which the legitimacy of the law does not stem from the fact that the constitution expresses a set of universal values but rather from the fact that Americans have elected to govern themselves according to an account of liberal rights and principles derived from the Protestant religious tradition (Gottfried 2002, 151). Evidently amnesiac about the role of African Americans in American history, their account of the long history of immigration and assimilation that liberals like to celebrate as a core feature of the American experience is essentially a history of European migration. In their estimation, this only began to change during the cultural revolutions of the 1960s when, under the banner of humanitarianism and inclusion, the incumbent regime began to let in millions of malleable refugee and economic migrant populations who now function as a fifth column of the resentful Global South (Fleming 1995). To be sure, neoconservatives also often express strong reservations about the ways in which the constitutionalization of the global order encroaches on American culture and policy. But for the paleos, this is precisely the point. Neoconservatives are more than happy to support forms of policy coordination that bind others

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through economic integration and liberal institutionalization – as long as America is granted “special prerogatives and exemptions” from this process wherever it sees fit. The strategy is fundamentally misguided and deeply hypocritical, insofar as it laments the erosion of American traditions and culture while eliding the deracinating role of economic neoliberal globalization in this process. Because it is so deeply embedded in the monetization of the socio-political order pursued by economic institutions, neoconservative nationalism cannot but contribute to the centralization and consolidation of state power against its own society, alienating itself from the set of norms and cultural practices by which the large majority of Americans experience the everyday (Francis 1992b, 19-22; Gottfried 2001).

towa r d s a n e w n at io nali s t revolt? Paleoconservative hopes for a populist revolt during the early 1990s rested on the opportunities that Buchanan’s political campaigns created for the exploitation of these tensions vested in the politics of the managerial state. Drawing on Gramsci, the lessons of cultural Marxism, and the legacy of the Old Right, they insisted that efforts to build political coalitions against the incumbent regime would have to be supported by a patient, Gramscian-style “cultural war” to take control of civil society institutions, including schools, universities, the media, the arts, religious organizations, trade unions, and corporations. To this end, they argued for the construction of new “America First” nationalist synthesis that would fuse the Left’s focus on material interests with the Right’s emphasis on culture and collective identity. As Francis argued at the time, the long-term aim of this strategy was to erase the old myth of America as an abstract universalist proposition from collective memory and replace it with “a new myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and discipline and excludes those who do not or cannot assimilate to its norms and interests” (1992b, 22). This counter-hegemonic mythology, Francis argued, was necessary to break the dependency of Middle America on the cultural power of the incumbent elites, and thus enable it to formulate goals and adopt tactics which do not simply mirror and help furthering those of the managerial regime:

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‘America first’ ought to inform the total cultural life of the nation and be the foundation of our cultural and social identity no less than our politics and national policies. But the ethic of America first would be a thin one if it were something that only politicians and administrators should respect. If a new nationalism is to flourish and endure it will have to look to the historic norms of the American people and their culture to discover and articulate what America is and what it should be. If it fails to do so America will be no more secure, no more prosperous, and no more first than it is today in the custody of its self-serving and self-appointed globalist masters. (Francis 1991, 11) Buchanan’s failure to win the nomination was a huge disappointment for Francis and his colleagues. His insurrectionary candidacy nevertheless garnered over two million votes and deepened existing divisions within the Republican Party, which contributed to electoral defeat. During the Clinton presidencies, paleoconservatives sought to mobilize the Republicans in Congress against nato expansion and the proliferation of international “policing operations” in Somalia, Haiti, and the Balkans. They also campaigned relentlessly for trade protectionism against nafta and led the charge against immigration, demanding that “immigration from countries and cultures that are incompatible with and indigestible to the Euro-American cultural core of the United States should be generally prohibited” (Francis 1991, 11). Despite their best efforts, economic prosperity and their controversial positions on race, gender, and sexuality severely limited their ability to reach a wider audience, and by the beginning of the next decade, paleoconservatives had more or less been excommunicated from both the Republican Party and the mainstream conservative movement. But the failures of neoconservative foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with the financial crisis of 2008 and the election of a Black president whose “multicultural leadership” inspired a new racial consciousness among whites breathed new life into the paleoconservative project. In 2008, Gottfried and his then protégé Richard Spencer established the H.L. Mencken Club and co-invented the term “Alternative Right” in this context to help galvanizing support for a new anti-establishment offensive. A few months later, in February 2009, the growing sense of alienation

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that accompanied the deepening of the economic crises under the leadership of America’s first Black president also gave birth to the Tea Party movement, which repackaged many paleoconservative themes in slightly more libertarian garb. Key media platforms affiliated with this twenty-first century offensive include The American Conservative, Breitbart, VDare, Taki’s Magazine, Chronicles, Occidental Quarterly, and Occidental Observer. Trump’s electoral campaign provided impetus and relative cohesion to this otherwise eclectic group of anti-liberal forces. Although many paleoconservatives would have had strong reservations about the man himself, Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, free trade, and global liberal governance clearly resonated with much of what Buchanan had fought for two decades earlier. As Buchanan wrote during the presidential primaries: Whatever one may think of Trump’s talk of building a wall, does anyone think the United States is not going to have to build a security fence to defend our bleeding 2,000-mile border? Given the huge trade deficits with China, Japan, Mexico and the EU, the hemorrhaging of manufacturing, the stagnation of wages and the decline of the middle class, does anyone think that if Trump is turned back, the gop can continue on being a free-trade party financed by the Beltway agents of transnational corporations? Trump is winning because, on immigration, amnesty, securing our border and staying out of any new crusades for democracy, he has tapped into the most powerful currents in politics: economic populism and ‘America First’ nationalism. (Buchanan 2016)

c o n c l u si on This chapter has zoomed in the intellectual and ideological sources of the New American Nationalism, arguing that the “neoconservatism” which informed much of the mainstream American Right for decades, is giving way to a very different – radical, disruptive, and fiercely anti-liberal – kind of reactionism, often labelled “paleoconservatism.” Until Trump’s electoral victory in 2016, the recent political and intellectual history of the American Right had received very little attention in the media and mainstream political science. Two years into his presidency, Trump is still often portrayed as a charismatic lone wolf who caught the conservative establishment off

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guard. As I have tried to show in this very short analysis, “Trumpism” did not emerge out of an ideological vacuum but as the outcome of decades of self-conscious efforts by the political Right to articulate and generate such a contest. Contrary to what is often suggested in contemporary foreign-policy literature, the aim of this challenge to the managerial state and its globalist appendages is not simply to revert to an idealized account of nineteenth-century nationalism. For unlike support for neoliberal economics, multiculturalism, and welfarism, participation in globalization in the twenty-first century is not a policy choice that can be reversed on principled ground. What the anti-establishment Right wants, in reality, is to harness globalization to build an alternative order in which capitalism thrives but is firmly anchored in notions of shared civilizational heritage, myths of inherited communities and their traditional sources of authority, and in which the West is redefined accordingly against the cultural and demographic threats from Global Islam and the Global South. Whether the Trump insurgency will manage to overcome the deep structures of interests and path dependencies of powerful sectors of transatlantic business and elite opinion remains to be seen. But the challenge can no longer be ignored or be resisted with mere contempt. For what is at stake in these “memory wars” is not only the substantive gains achieved since the 1950s on questions of race, gender, human rights, and welfare, but also the discursive field within which conventional conceptions of Left and Right are being disarticulated and rearticulated into new relationships of friendship and enmity over the meaning and future of human coexistence. not e s 1 This essay draws on research conducted for a broader collaborative project with Professor Michael C. Williams on radical conservatism and global order: www.globalright.ca. I am grateful to Michael for allowing me to use and develop on various aspects of this research here. 2 See Wolfe (1986).

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r e f e r e n ce s Buchanan, Patrick. 2016. “Trump: Middle America’s Messenger.” American Conservative (23 February) https://www.theamericanconservative.com/buchanan/trump-middle-americas-messenger/ [3 May 2019]. Burnham, James. 1941. The Managerial Revolution: What Is Happening in the World. New York: John Day. Fleming, Thomas, ed. 1995. Immigration and the American Identity: Selection from Chronicles. A Magazine of American Culture 1985-1995. Rockford IL: Rockford Institute. Francis, Samuel T. 1991 “Principalities and Power.” Chronicles, December. – 1992a. “The Buchanan Revolution, Part I.” Chronicles, July. – 1992b. “Nationalism Old and New.” Chronicles, June. – 1994. Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. – 1999. James Burnham: Thinkers of Our Time. London: Claridge Press. – 2000. “Paleoconservatism and Race,” Chronicles, December. – 2016. Leviathan and its Enemies. Washington dc : Washington Summit Publisher. Gottfried, Paul and Thomas Fleming. 1988. The Conservative Movement. Boston: Twayne. Gottfried, Paul. 2001. After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial States. Princeton: Princeton University Press. – 2002. “America and the West: The Multiculturalist International.” Orbis 46 (1): 145-58. Gottfried, Paul and Richard Spencer, eds. 2015. The Great Purge: The Deformation of the Conservative Movement. Washington dc : Washington Summit. Hartz, Louis. 1955. The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lieven, Anatol. 2004. America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lipset, Seymour Martin. 1963. The First New Nation. The United States in Historical and Comparative Perspective. New York: Basic Books. Scotchie, Joseph. 1999. The Paleoconservatives: New Voices of the Old Right. New York: Routledge. Walzer, Michael. 1996. What It Means To Be an American: Essays on the American Experience. New York: Marsilio. Wolfe, Gregory. 1986. “The State of Conservatism: A Symposium.” The Intercollegiate Review 21 (3): 3-27.

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“A Test of Character”: The Positive Psychology of War Johannes Lang

“You’ve been told that you’re broken,” retired four-star US general James Mattis pointed out to a gathering of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans in 2014, “that you’re damaged goods and should be labelled victims of two unjust and poorly executed wars” (Owens 2014). This misperception about veterans is rooted in a culture that exalts victimhood, he claimed. Even the commander-in-chief at the time, President Obama, was more likely to visit military hospitals than military bases. This eagerness to honour the wounded, coupled with a reluctance to celebrate the cause for which they had fought, Mattis later wrote, amounted to nothing less than an “encouragement of victimization” (Schake and Mattis 2016, 311). But there is no room for military people to see themselves as psychological casualties of war, he insisted. “Close combat is tough,” but not “mentally crippling”; it is a “test of character,” making “bad men worse and good men better.” Ultimately, Mattis proclaimed, “We are masters of our character,” and soldiers should strive to take “responsibility for their own reaction to adversity” (Mattis 2015). Three years later, Mattis would become Secretary of Defense. Often described as a well-read, thoughtful, utterly dedicated military officer, he is familiar with the realities of war. And the veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan “endured nothing more, and often less,” Mattis said, “than vets of past wars.” They “need to ‘come home’ like veterans of all America’s wars” – to come home “stronger and more compassionate, not characterized as damaged, or with disorders, or with syndromes or other disease labels.” Posttraumatic stress disorder, or ptsd , is not

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an inevitable consequence of war, the retired general emphasized; “There is also something called posttraumatic growth.” This is the language of positive psychology, a language of resilience, responsibility, and growth. It is a language well-suited for Mattis’s purpose: to confront a medicalized, psychiatric conception of war with a more wholesome narrative of personal strength and the value of hardship. And it was no coincidence that Mattis employed the vocabulary of positive psychology: over the past decade, positive psychologists have played a central role in shaping how the US military thinks about the psychology of war and prepares its soldiers mentally for combat. The current chapter explores this collaboration. What does a positive psychology of war look like? How could a science of the “good life” protect soldiers from the horrors of combat, and how do the ideas of positive psychology affect established psychological assumptions about war and violence? What is at stake – morally, politically, intellectually – in the military’s embrace of positive psychology? In the pages that follow, I will argue that the militarization of positive psychology grew out of a larger conservative critique of “victimhood” – not least in the American context. Parallel to this conservative critique, the positive psychology of war has sought to challenge prevailing assumptions about human vulnerability and the aversion to suffering that has characterized liberal perceptions of war since the second half of the twentieth century. As such, it echoes many of the themes of victimhood, resilience, and masculinity that have become re-politicized in the West over the past decade. This chapter explores the role of positive psychology within the US military and its quest to rediscover the regenerative potential in suffering and sacrifice.

p o s it iv e p sychology Positive psychology began as a critique of psychology’s traditional focus on mental illness. Martin Seligman officially launched the new field in 1998, when he was president of the American Psychological Association. What we lack, Seligman argued, is a psychological science of strengths and virtues, able to explain how human beings can withstand adversity and flourish. What we need, he announced, is a psychology that strives to prevent, rather than merely treat, mental illness. In December 2008, as Barack Obama prepared to assume the

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presidency and the “War on Terror” raged on in its eighth year, the commanders of the United States Army invited Seligman to develop a training program to improve psychological resilience throughout the Army. “I want to create an army that is just as psychologically fit as it is physically fit,” the chief of staff, General George Casey, reportedly told Seligman at their initial meeting, “a fighting force that can bounce back and cope with the persistent warfare that this next decade promises” (Seligman 2011, 127-8). The military was in the middle of a mental health crisis. Researchers were estimating that thirty-one percent of the troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq had a diagnosable mental health condition, including fourteen percent who would screen positive for ptsd , and this could prove to be only the tip of the iceberg (Tanielian and Jaycox 2008). At the same time, more active-duty soldiers were committing suicide than were being killed in action in Iraq, and the media was beginning to talk of a “suicide epidemic” in the armed forces. Highly publicized stories about emotionally disturbed soldiers and veterans going on violent rampages, killing civilians and fellow soldiers, intensified public debate about military mental health. In 2006, the Department of Defense had established a Task Force on Mental Health to address the shortcomings of psychological services for active service members, and the following year the Pentagon asked Congress for a massive increase in funding for mental health research and treatment. Meanwhile, the Washington Post exposed the insufficient care being offered to veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the Army’s flagship medical research and treatment facility. The ensuing scandal led Congress to designate nearly one billion dollars in 2007 for the improvement of the military’s psychological treatment capacities as well as for research on ptsd and traumatic brain injury, the so-called “signature injuries” of the ongoing wars. Now the preventive powers of positive psychology would be put to the test. Could the new science stem the tide of mental illness that was weakening the military after seven years of continuous warfare? Yes, Seligman told the generals. In fact, human beings are remarkably resilient in the face of adversity, he claimed, and such resilience can be trained. Positive psychology would help prevent mental breakdowns by increasing the number of soldiers who would “bounce back readily from adversity.” Even more importantly, Seligman said, positive psychology would increase the number of soldiers who

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would “grow psychologically from the crucible of combat.” The idea was to harness the individual strengths of each soldier and turn war and suffering into a source of positive personal transformation. “That is a big idea, Dr. Seligman,” replied General David Petraeus (Seligman 2011, 152). In many ways, it was also a very old idea. Seligman’s vocabulary of strength and virtue and his vision of the good life drew heavily on ancient Greek philosophy, while his critique of psychological science was anchored in a nineteenth-century conception of moral character. It is the strength or weakness of an individual’s character, Seligman told the generals, that predicts whether someone will become mentally ill after a traumatic event. By strengthening soldiers’ character, positive psychology would be able to prevent many cases of posttraumatic breakdown. In making this argument, Seligman was implicitly challenging the established conception of psychological trauma enshrined in today’s ptsd diagnosis. “Posttraumatic stress disorder” entered the official psychiatric nomenclature in 1980. Its essential feature was the development of characteristic symptoms following an event “outside the range of usual human experience” – an event that would evoke significant distress in “almost everyone” (American Psychiatric Association 1980). Paradigmatic examples were concentration camp imprisonment, natural disasters, rape, and combat. The symptoms included reexperiencing the traumatic event; numbing of responsiveness to, or reduced involvement with, the external world; and various autonomic, dysphoric, or cognitive symptoms, such as debilitating anxiety, guilt, anger, and/or sadness. The basic idea behind the new diagnosis was that violent events like war could cause (rather than merely trigger) psychiatric disorder, even in perfectly healthy individuals with no prior history of mental problems. Anyone could break. This idea would rapidly catch on, and by the time the United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and then Iraq in 2003, military commanders had learned to anticipate that up to a third of the troops would develop ptsd . When cadets at the U.S. Military Academy were asked whether they expected to return from combat with some form of ptsd , roughly four out of five said yes (Matthews 2014). Robert Gates, who served as Secretary of Defense under Bush and Obama, reflects in his memoirs that he had come to believe that no one could walk away from combat without some measure of posttraumatic stress (Gates 2014).

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This official recognition of war’s traumatizing effects grew out of the moral and political reckoning with the Vietnam War. Seligman, however, was offering the generals an older view of trauma as an “exacerbation of preexisting symptoms of anxiety and depression” rather than as a “first cause” of mental disorder. And this is part of what is at stake in the militarization of positive psychology: the very idea of trauma as first and foremost an event (or a series of events) with psychological effects, rather than the failure of individual character. With the militarization of positive psychology, a more traditional psychological approach to war reemerged that foregrounded the resilience rather than the vulnerability of human beings, and that accentuated the ennobling rather than the traumatic effects of violence. This positive psychology of war, we shall see, rests on a rejection of what we might call the “liberal memory” of modern warfare: the perception of war as something deeply and inherently traumatic. Positive psychology challenges twentieth-century morality tales about the horrors of war and seeks instead to rediscover the regenerative potential in the violence.

pat h o l o g iz ing war: t h e c o n s e rvat iv e c ri ti que of pts d Seligman launched positive psychology the same year that a book titled Stolen Valor appeared. In that book, Vietnam veteran B.G. Burkett and investigative journalist Glenna Whitley go to great lengths to show that the ptsd diagnosis was the brain child of leftwing antiwar activists, who had deliberately deceived policymakers and the public into believing that Vietnam veterans were mentally-disturbed victims of an atrocious war rather than proud, upright men and women getting on with their lives. The goal of the Left, Burkett and Whitley write, had been “to show that the Vietnam conflict was so immoral it permanently damaged the psyches of those who fought it” (Burkett and Whitley 1998, 233). This “antimilitary attitude,” Burkett and Whitley argue, permeates the ptsd literature. The Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman, for instance, writes that, “The study of war trauma becomes legitimate only in a context that challenges the sacrifice of young men in war,” and that it was “the moral legitimacy of the antiwar movement and the national experience of defeat in a discredited war” that had “made it possible to recognize psychological trauma as a lasting and inevitable legacy of

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war.” The antiwar psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton, one of the intellectual fathers of the ptsd diagnosis, had openly acknowledged that almost all the veterans who had participated in what he described as his “advocacy research” had belonged to “the minority of Vietnam veterans” who had expressed “an articulate antiwar position,” and that he had “made no attempt to gather data from a ‘representative’ group of veterans” (ibid., 145, 151). Being in a war zone, Burkett and Whitley write, changes all soldiers. Veterans may feel anxious, they may grieve the loss of fellow soldiers, they may feel guilty for having killed or for having survived when their friends did not – these are normal reactions to painful experiences. But such feelings do not debilitate you for the rest of your life, Burkett and Whitley insist. Combat also “builds character,” making you more confident and self-disciplined. Unfortunately, Burkett and Whitley remark, the fact that veterans with a service-related ptsd diagnosis can now claim disability and receive financial support has created an economic incentive to interpret their current problems as symptoms of the disorder. Stolen Valor documents several examples of individuals going so far as to lie about their military record to obtain financial support. The result of such fraud and self-deception, Burkett and Whitley conclude, has been a politically created “ptsd epidemic” which has degraded the public image of Vietnam veterans and deprived them of their proud history and honour. Military historians have similarly argued that the politics surrounding the ptsd diagnosis has distorted the historical realities of war and its psychological effects. In the eyes of the British historian Ben Shephard, the original sin of the ptsd diagnosis was that it replaced the old view that certain individuals are vulnerable and predisposed to psychological breakdown with the idea that everyone is vulnerable. “Despite considerable evidence that those who went to Vietnam were not very well selected,” Shephard writes, “the issue of [individual] ‘vulnerability’ was never seriously addressed” by the proponents of ptsd because that would have been interpreted as “blaming the soldier rather than the war,” which was “politically impossible in the climate of the times” (Shephard 2000, 396). Besides, Shephard notes, the makers of the ptsd diagnosis were clinicians who drew more on the pathological literature than on the overall historical record, thereby overlooking the central fact that not everyone does suffer in the wake of trauma.

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The cultural ascendance of the ptsd diagnosis, Shephard argues, reflects the enormous shift in values that has occurred in the Anglo-American world since World War II. A new “therapy culture” has arisen, redefining the role of emotion and stress in Anglo-Saxon public culture. Where American society used to organize itself around widely shared values of self-discipline and personal responsibility, Shephard points out, it is now dominated by a more “permissive ethos,” emphasizing personal fulfillment, desire, and identity. What was once the dissenting subculture of the countercultural Left has become mainstream, displacing a set of “bourgeois” standards, rules, and truths. The most obvious shift in values, Shephard observes with regret, has been a “feminization of public life,” where a masculine ideal of stoic self-composure has given way to a feminine ideal of emotional sensitivity and vulnerability. This “seismic cultural shift,” Shephard concludes, has led to a situation where psychiatrists now believe that men cannot go to war without incurring psychological damage. Shephard’s critique is familiar. Social critics of all political hues have long argued that American society is in a state of moral and political decay and, like Shephard, they have typically traced the cultural malaise to the 1960s and 70s. Seen from the Left, these decades were a time of civil unrest and an unjust, expensive, and politically divisive war, followed by the resurgence of big business, the gradual dismantling of Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” dramatically increasing income inequality, deregulation of the financial system, new wars, financial crises, and ultimately the unravelling of American society itself (Packer 2013). Seen from the Right, the social movements of the 60s and 70s weakened American resolve in Vietnam, undermined traditional values, and eroded the moral and religious foundations of a shared sense of identity and community. The antiwar movement, the youth movement, and the women’s movement, conservative critics charge, not only questioned traditional authorities like state and church, but also fostered what the historian Christopher Lasch called a “culture of narcissism,” in which the pursuit of personal wellbeing, health, and a sense of security got priority over previous moral and spiritual commitments (Lasch 1978). In this new cultural climate, critics complain, the old civic virtues of courage, honour, restraint, and self-sacrifice were replaced by an obsession with individual freedom and self-expression. Moreover, the social movements of the 60s and 70s, including the civil rights movement, derived much of their

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force from a sense of grievance, from a perception of oneself as having been a victim. Critics argue that this form of politics gave rise to a “culture of victimhood” emphasizing the vulnerability of human beings (Nolan 1998; Furedi 2004). It was in this culture of victimhood, critics like Shephard suggest, that the idea of ptsd could take hold and gain such widespread acceptance. And it was this culture of victimhood that Seligman’s positive psychology was explicitly intended to overcome.

a q u e s t io n o f c h a racter: pos i ti ve p sych o l o g y a n d t h e c r it i que of vi cti mhood Seligman used his 1998 presidential address to argue that psychological science had become overly focused on mental illness, thereby neglecting the “most positive qualities of an individual: optimism, courage, work ethic, future-mindedness, interpersonal skill, the capacity for pleasure and insight, and social responsibility” (Horowitz 2018, 15). It was time, he announced, for a positive psychology dedicated to studying what makes life worth living, what makes individuals and communities resilient, as well as what makes them thrive and excel. Positive psychology would be a science of strength and growth and happiness rather than weakness and repair; its mode of intervention would be proactive prevention rather than reactive treatment. The question would be how to enhance human lives rather than merely how to help people function. In January 2000, the American Psychologist dedicated an issue to positive psychology. Seligman and his colleague, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, wrote the introduction. They began with the observation that the United States was now alone at the pinnacle of economic and political power. Having won the Cold War, Americans were faced with a choice: should their country continue to increase its material wealth while ignoring the human needs of its citizens and people around the world, or should the United States assume global leadership as the sole superpower, while taking steps to improve the quality of life of ordinary Americans? Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi warned that a narrowminded pursuit of wealth and power would lead to increasing selfishness, to alienation between the more and the less fortunate, and finally to chaos and despair. But how to turn an affluent, powerful America into a resilient, flourishing nation and a global force for good? This was the pressing question.

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It was a question that would take on a new sense of urgency after the attacks on September 11, 2001. Seligman immediately began to ponder the relevance of positive psychology in an age of terror, and in December 2001 he convened a meeting at his home with professors and national-security officials to discuss how academics could help counter jihadi violence.1 Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi’s introductory essay on positive psychology had already contained an interventionist vision of American power; now, as the “War on Terror” was getting underway, Seligman was seeking a role for positive psychology. “In times of trouble,” he wrote in 2002, “understanding and building the strengths and virtues – among them, valor, perspective, integrity, equity, loyalty – may become more urgent than in good times” (Seligman 2002, xiii). Seligman’s own work on “strength” and “virtue” would come to focus on the concept of “character,” a concept with roots in ancient Greek philosophy. Aristotle had famously argued that there are two kinds of human excellences: excellences of thought and excellences of character. The excellences of character, called “virtues,” are the moral qualities that make someone a good, ethically admirable person. Such virtues have traditionally included wisdom and knowledge, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence. An individual, said Seligman, must demonstrate possession of most of these virtues to be deemed of good character. This requires certain “character strengths”: personal capacities like curiosity, bravery, persistence, self-control, and so on (Peterson and Seligman 2004). Most people possess the capacity to acquire such strengths, according to Seligman, but to do so requires a willful effort to cultivate one’s own potential. Those who have chosen to cultivate their capacities for love and kindness, for instance, have the strengths required to show the concern for others that make up the virtue of “humanity.” These old ideas about virtue and character had been central to politics, morality, and psychology up until the end of the nineteenth century. “Bad character caused bad behavior,” Seligman writes, “and each person was responsible for his or her actions” (Seligman 2002, 126). But with the emergence of modern science, other explanations of behaviour began to displace the earlier moral and religious emphasis on character. Now social and biological factors, rather than individual character, were said to explain behaviour. Soon the biological and social sciences could dispense with the idea of character altogether, Seligman observes, since character itself – good or

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bad – was thought to be merely a product of environmental forces or inherited traits. In this way, Seligman points out, modern science let us “escape from the value-laden, blame-accruing, religiously inspired, class-oppressing notion of character.” This scientific rejection of characterological explanations is a big mistake, in Seligman’s opinion. He blames mostly the social sciences, which he associates with all the evils of poststructuralism and relativism and the denial of human nature. These anti-individualist, personless sciences undermine any robust notion of free will or individual agency, Seligman complains, and thereby shift responsibility for any given problem from the individual to his or her external circumstances. In Seligman’s view, “Psychology-as-usual” – the “psychology of the victims and negative emotions and alienation and pathology and tragedy” – had made the same mistake. It is always someone’s childhood or relationships or socio-economic conditions that are to blame for their problems – not their own choices, and certainly not their own character. Even the study of individual psychology dropped the morally laden concepts of “character” and “virtue” and replaced them with the more neutral-sounding language of “personality.” Yet moral notions of good and bad character remained “firmly entrenched in our laws, our politics, the way we raised our children, and the way we talked and thought about why people do what they do,” Seligman writes. In 2002, he proclaimed that the moment had come to “resurrect character as a central concept” in the scientific study of human behaviour (ibid., 128). The good life is lived over time and across situations, Seligman points out, and the concept of character provides the needed explanation for the stability of a life well lived. In 2004, he and his colleague, Christopher Peterson, went so far as to argue that “character strengths are the bedrock of the human condition” (Peterson and Seligman 2004, 12). Strength and virtue, they claim, is human nature. Humans are social animals, and so actions that connect us to our larger community naturally make us feel good. Well-being, in other words, is not a consequence of virtuous action but an inherent aspect of such action. This means that the realization of the good life is not something we can achieve on our own, since we can only enact our strengths and virtues within communities or institutions that share certain basic ideals and a common purpose. In this sense, Seligman’s revival of character and virtue is an attempt to transcend the self-centeredness of today’s pop psychology and self-help literature.

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Yet Seligman’s approach to character and virtue remains tethered to a conservative self-help individualism. He defines character strengths as stable individual traits that people bring to the situation, and that determine how they cope with adversity. People can obviously be victims of circumstances beyond their control, Seligman concedes, but most of the time they are responsible for their actions, and their suffering is usually a consequence of their “untoward choices,” which in turn “stem from their character.” But where, then, does character come from? According to Seligman, “it does not come about solely from the environment, and perhaps hardly at all from the environment” (Seligman 2002, 129). Instead, the development of character is a matter of making choices and taking responsibility for those choices. Seligman’s theory of the good life is, in his own words, “essentially a theory of uncoerced choice,” concerned with “what free people will choose for their own sake” (Seligman 2011, 16). Rather than seeing human beings as shaped primarily by their past and present circumstances, Seligman emphasizes that we are future-oriented creatures who look ahead and make decisions based on what we want our future to be. This future-oriented perspective is a basic premise of his positive psychology; it sets individuals free to decide who they want to become. And we all have it in us to become virtuous human beings: the necessary strengths and virtues are available to us, if only we will make the effort to look inside and cultivate them. Building character, in this view, is “not about learning, training, or conditioning, but about discovery, creation, and ownership” (Seligman 2002, 136). The task is to identify and embrace our own “signature strengths” and become the best version of ourselves that we can be.

s t r e n g t h t h ro u g h advers i ty: t he m il ita r iz at io n o f p o s i ti ve psychology The identification and cultivation of “signature strengths” would become a central component of the military resilience training. But the US Army was also interested in another aspect of Seligman’s science. “We have read your work on positive emotion,” the chief of staff, George Casey, told Seligman. “We know that you teach teachers the skills of resilience and positive psychology and that you have found that young people who learn your material from their teachers have less depression and more well-being” (Seligman 2018, 312). Casey

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was alluding to the Penn Resilience Program, which Seligman and his colleagues had developed at the University of Pennsylvania. “We have 40,000 teachers in the army,” he told Seligman, referring to the drill sergeants. “I want the drill sergeants taught the skills of resilience and positive psychology,” Casey said, “and the drill sergeants will then teach 1.3 million soldiers. From this day forward, resilience and positive psychology will be taught and measured throughout the entire United States Army.” A little more than a year later, in 2010, the “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness” program saw the light of day. Every month, approximately 150 sergeants would come and spend eight days at the University of Pennsylvania, undergoing the military version of the Penn Resilience Program. These sergeants, now “Master Resilience Trainers,” would then go back and teach their new skills to the soldiers in their units. Ideally, each company would have its own trainer, bringing their skills with them into the field. The program assumed that character strengths and positive emotions underpinned four dimensions of psychosocial strength, labelled emotional fitness, social fitness, family fitness, and spiritual fitness. But what ultimately distinguishes the resilient from those who break down, according to Seligman, is their basic outlook. Do they believe that the causes of their suffering are permanent and that they can do little to improve their situation? Or do they believe that setbacks are temporary and that they have the power to change things for the better? In other words, are they pessimists or optimists? For Seligman, the difference between breakdown and resilience boils down to the difference between these two basic ways of thinking. And the message of positive psychology is that these ways of thinking can be changed. You can learn to be optimistic. “Learn to argue with yourself,” Seligman says; gather evidence that runs counter to your negative beliefs, construct alternative interpretations, reconsider your harsh assessments of yourself and your actions. It is crucial to maintain a positive mindset, soldiers were told, because negative emotions are highly contagious. A few sad or angry individuals can spoil the morale of an entire unit. The good news, Seligman reports, is that positive emotions are even more contagious than negative ones, and that “positive morale” is even more powerful than negative morale is disruptive. This fact, Seligman argues, “makes the cultivation of happiness […] important, perhaps crucial” to the cohesiveness, morale, and resilience of a military unit. Soldiers were therefore taught mental techniques to control their thoughts and

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produce positive emotions, in the hope that their optimism and wellbeing would boost the wellbeing and performance of the entire unit. A questionnaire regularly assessed the soldiers’ strengths in the four domains of psycho-social fitness. Were soldiers in touch with their emotions? Did they react in an optimistic way when bad things happened? Did they have strong relationships? Did they trust their superiors? Were they close to their families? Did they feel that their life had a larger purpose? Soldiers would complete the questionnaire at least once a year and receive a score in each domain of strength. Every soldier also got a character profile. “He is a cheerful and optimistic individual,” one such profile reads, “and he is strongly oriented to friends and family. These are his signal assets, but when compared with other soldiers, he is not strongly engaged in his work, and he seems to lack a strong sense of purpose. He is not active in his coping, and he is not a flexible thinker. These characteristics may limit his ability to handle stress and adversity effectively” (Seligman 2011, 138). Based on their results, soldiers were encouraged to choose between various online courses designed to enhance their strengths in the domains where they appeared to be falling short. The training increasingly came to emphasize the importance of strong relationships. This was key to resilience. The revised version of the program, named “Comprehensive Soldier and Family Fitness,” expanded the scope of the training beyond the military to include a stronger focus on the soldiers’ families. This new emphasis on the family reflected the fact that almost all soldiers had cell phones, internet access, and webcams. They could be in constant contact with their loved ones. This connectedness could be a source of comfort and strength, but it could also be a major source of vulnerability. Most suicides by soldiers in Iraq, Seligman points out, involved a failed relationship with a spouse or partner. The training therefore taught soldiers to foster positive relationships both inside and outside the military. They learned to reach out for support from friends and family in order to convert posttraumatic stress disorder into posttraumatic growth through the relationship. This was the highest ambition of the resilience training, to turn the experience with violence into a source of strength: to use combat to build character, to discover virtue through suffering. Seligman approvingly cites Nietzsche’s dictum, “What does not kill me makes me stronger.” Model yourselves on the ancient Greek hero, soldiers were told, “who returns from Hades to tell the world an important truth about how to live” (ibid., 162-3).

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c o n c l u s i on It is easy to see why Seligman’s positive psychology, with its emphasis on strength and character, would be attractive to military leaders and policymakers in a period of Western politics when themes of victimhood, resilience, and masculinity are becoming re-politicized. Seligman offers a seductive mix of ancient wisdom and modern science, affirming the power of the mind and the freedom of the will. Look inside, work on yourself, change the way you think, and you shall discover a previously unimagined potential within. Seligman portrays positive psychology as a value-neutral guide to the good life, but it is important to remember that his version of positive psychology was a political project from the very beginning. The inception of this field went hand in hand with a conservative critique of American society and a perceived need to recover the strengths and virtues that had been lost since World War II. Seligman’s implicit assumption, like Shephard’s and Mattis’s, was that the “Great Generation” that fought World War II had been more resilient than today’s Americans. This assumption is part of the mythology that surrounds World War II, but it is an assumption that derives from a highly selective reading of history. A study of more than half a million soldiers during World War II, conducted by a team of distinguished social scientists working for the War Department, observed that “the fear and anxiety implicit in combat brought forth psychosomatic manifestations in so many men that these served less and less to distinguish between men who were labeled psychiatric casualties and those who were not” (Stouffer et al. 1949, 455). After World War II, the mantra of liberal memory culture has been that we should not be allowed to forget such facts, that we should nourish the traumatic memory of war because it makes us cautious. In contrast, Seligman and other conservatives like Shephard and Mattis seem to think that an emphasis on the traumatic past engenders a culture of victimhood that prevents us from moving confidently and forcefully into the future. From their perspective, the notion of war as something inherently traumatic must be exposed for what it is: a mere idea, spawned by the defeat in Vietnam and the triumph of an emasculating, therapeutic culture with an aversion to pain and suffering. History, in Seligman’s reading, does not support the idea. He claims to have “combed the Civil War writings,” for instance, and found “almost no ptsd or anything

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much like it from that horrific epoch” (Seligman 2011, 159). He fails to note the massive rates of “straggling” and desertion during the Civil War, with thousands upon thousands of soldiers simply disappearing from the army, either returning home or wandering around aimlessly. He also overlooks the writings on “soldier’s heart” and the long-term psychological effects of the war vividly described in recent historical work on Union veterans and their “unending Civil War” (Jordan 2014). By distorting the history of war and trauma in this fashion, Seligman is free to celebrate the transformative potential in the crucible of combat. The effect of his argument is to strip the traumatic past of much of its power and deny its hold on us in the present. The past is no longer a moral force that drives or restrains human action, but merely “a resource” from which human beings can “selectively extract information about the prospects they face” (Seligman et al. 2013, 119). It is the selective memory of heroic resilience that enables optimistic talk of posttraumatic growth. The ptsd construct depends on a very different reading of history, one that emphasizes that anyone, regardless of personal background, is vulnerable to the traumas of war, and that the causes of mental breakdown are primarily social rather than individual. If people turn out to be resilient, as history shows that they often are, then this has more to do with the quality of their relationships than with the strength of their characters: it is the love and support of others that enables individuals to endure almost anything. Seligman recognizes this when he emphasizes the importance of positive relationships or when he writes that “the master strength is the ability to be loved” (Seligman 2011, 21). What he does not acknowledge is that if you love someone, if you depend on someone, if what sustains you is other people, then your resilience is no longer in your own hands. This insight was available long before the Vietnam War. An American psychiatric commission sent to Europe to observe mental breakdowns in the final months of World War II noted that soldiers had been resilient, able to fight on, for as long as they had been part of a close-knit combat unit. But when an event disrupted the structure of the soldier’s unit, “he lost the strengths and comforts that had sustained him” (Bartemeier et al. 1946, 370). Indeed, no meaningful distinction could be made between the life of the unit and the psychology of the soldier, the psychiatrists concluded: when the individual had “his emotional bonds of group integration seriously disrupted, then he, as a person,” was “thereby disorganized.”

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Seligman would have trouble accepting this conclusion. To do so would be to abandon the basic premise of his positive psychology: to reject its conservative self-help individualism and accept that the sources of psychological strength and resilience lie primarily in between people, not within them. Ultimately, resilience is about morale, about having a clear sense of purpose: a sense that one’s own sacrifice and the suffering of others is justified. This requires moral judgments, but most of all it requires hope: the hope that the war is winnable and that it will have been worth the price. The loss of such hope leads to cynicism or moral anguish, which was precisely what the military resilience training was intended to prevent. Optimism to counter cynicism and despair. The fundamental problem with this approach was that it left out genuine moral reflection. Even the spiritual fitness module, as the scholars of “moral injury” Rita Nakashima Brock and Gabriella Lettini have noted, “is strikingly unconcerned about the deep moral questions posed by war, and it seems to glorify soldiers as spiritually fit who can remain unaffected in any deep moral or emotional way” (Nakashima Brock and Lettini 2012, 101). Rather than reflect on the moral and political justifications for a long and painful war with no victory in sight, soldiers should “hunt the good stuff” and find meaning in their suffering. This, then, would be the role of positive psychology in the “War on Terror”: to find the silver lining to what increasingly looked like unjustified, senseless, traumatic violence. Positive psychology would be the extension of politics by other means. It would seek to craft a new narrative about war: a hopeful and inspiring story of resilience that would instill confidence in America’s ability to fight on and prevail – and in the end, flourish. no t e 1 Two psychologists working for the Central Intelligence Agency, James Mitchell and Kirk Hubbard, participated in the meeting, and both men would go on to play a role in the cia ’s “enhanced interrogation program,” inspired in part by Seligman’s work on learned helplessness. Seligman has denied any connection with the so-called “torture program.”

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r e f e r e nce s American Psychiatric Association. 1980. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 3rd Ed. Washington, dc : American Psychiatric Association. Bartemeier, Leo, et al. 1946. “Combat Exhaustion.” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 104: 358-89. Burkett, Bernard Gary and Glenna Whitley. 1998. Stolen Valor: How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History. Dallas: Verity Press. Furedi, Frank. 2004. Therapy Culture: Cultivating Vulnerability in an Uncertain Age. London: Routledge. Gates, Robert. 2014. Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Horowitz, Daniel. 2018. Happier? The History of a Cultural Movement that Aspired to Transform America. New York: Oxford University Press. Jordan, Brian Matthew. 2014. Marching Home: Union Veterans and Their Unending Civil War. New York: Liveright. Lasch, Christopher. 1978. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W.W. Norton. Matthews, Michael. 2014. Head Strong: How Psychology Is Revolutionizing War. New York: Oxford University Press. Mattis, James. 2015. “The Meaning of Their Service.” The Wall Street Journal, 18 April. Nakashima Brock, Rita and Gabriella Lettini. 2012. Soul Repair: Recovering from Moral Injury after War. Boston: Beacon Press. Nolan, James. 1998. The Therapeutic State: Justifying Government at Century’s End. New York: New York University Press. Owens, Mackubin Thomas. 2014. “Life after Wartime: Combatting the Veteran-as-Victim Narrative.” The Weekly Standard, 2 June. Packer, George. 2013. The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Peterson, Christopher and Martin E.P. Seligman, eds. 2004. Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification. New York: Oxford University Press. Schake, Kori and James Mattis, eds. 2016. Warriors & Citizens: American Views of Our Military. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. Seligman, Martin E.P. 2002. Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment. New York: Atria Books.

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– 2011. Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Wellbeing. New York: Free Press. – 2018. The Hope Circuit: A Psychologist’s Journey from Helplessness to Optimism. New York: Hachette. Seligman, Martin E.P., et al. 2013. “Navigating into the Future or Driven by the Past.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8 (2): 119-41. Shephard, Ben. 2000. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stouffer, Samuel, et al. 1949. The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tanielian, Terri and Lisa H. Jaycox, eds. 2008. The Invisible Wounds of War: Psychological and Cognitive Injuries, Their Consequences, and Services to Assist Recovery. Santa Monica: rand Corporation.

pa r t t wo

C O N T IN E N T A L MEM ORY WA RS

This section takes its point of departure in France – a country whose often sophisticated and articulate national Right has set both tone and themes for critics of liberalism across Europe: fear of “ethnic fracture” and rejection of liberal “totalitarianism,” protest against “anti-white racism”, and – above all – a sense that Western civilization as such is under threat not only by immigration from without, but by a decadent culture of liberal indifference from within. The section then shifts its gaze to Putin’s Russia and its distinctly conservative articulation of Russian geopolitics, as a moral (not cynical) instrument, aimed at re-erecting a Europe of strength not apathy, fertility not frigidity, organic cohesion not shallow materialism. The section then goes on to explore how this struggle over European civilization unfolds in the very different context of Angela Merkel’s Germany: a nation “forever in the shadow of Hitler” and yet also in the midst of a heated memory war over the “Never Again” discourse, which has lived at the heart of German domestic and foreign policy for more than seventy years. In the closing chapter we turn to Italy, where a disruptive New Right nationalism has gained governmental power, and explore the return of what the authors call apologia, nostalgia, and machismo.

4

Post-Liberal Visions: Memory, Virility, and Geopolitics on the French New Right Manni Crone

In 2013, the French far-Right group Génération Identitaire uploaded a YouTube video labeled “A Declaration of War from the Youth of France.” In the video, a dozen young men and women address the camera head on. They claim to be the generation of “ethnic fracture,” “anti-white racism,” and “imposed cultural inter-mixing” – and add: “Don’t think this is a simple manifesto, it’s a declaration of war! The Lambda painted on proud Spartan shields is our symbol.” The group promises not only war but memory war: “We reject your history books and redefine our memory.” Five years down the line, the neo-Spartan warmongers have the wind in their sails, no longer easily dismissed as a bunch of lunatics. Since 2013, Génération Identitaire has morphed into a transnational movement with branches in a host of countries spanning the US, UK, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Scotland, and many more. In that same period, their anti-immigrant slogans have moved from the fringes of national policies to the agendas of presidents, prime ministers, and far-Right luminaries all over EuroAmerica. It is hardly a coincidence that the Identitarian movement took off in France, though. If we sift through the current infatuation with anti-liberal ideas, France appears a vibrant epicenter. Génération Identitaire explicitly refers to the French “New Right” (nr ) or Nouvelle Droite, an intellectual movement that appeared in 1968. Today its leading figures – Alain de Benoist, the late Guillaume

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Faye, and others – stand out as intellectual signposts for a broader transnational trend which I term the “disruptive far-Right.” This disruptive far-Right stands in contrast to more traditional conservative movements. The French nr explicitly brands themselves as “new” in contrast to more traditional French far-Right thinkers – figures like Chateaubriand, Maurras, and Barrès – who advocate Catholicism, monarchism, and the French soil. Against a conservative nostalgia for a prerevolutionary past, Faye and de Benoist hope to embrace a post-liberal future. For that larger agenda of subverting the America-centric world order that was imposed on Europe after 1945, they consider the nostalgia of the traditional far-Right unfit (Baugh 1970). Although the traditional, Catholic Right is regaining ground in France with Marion Maréchal’s establishment of an academic college in 2018, the international influence of this intellectual movement does not yet compare with that of the New Right. The French New Right, and the ethos of subversion which informs it, has substantial transnational ramifications. Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin – whose geopolitical doctrine of “Eurasianism” has supposedly inspired Putin – shares longstanding ties with de Benoist who, as Dugin puts it, is “the foremost intellectual in Europe today” (Williams 2017). nr writings and ideas are increasingly translated and disseminated through militant networks, journals, blogs, and social media, and by way of far-Right publishing houses across the world (Bar-On 2011). Indeed, one observer claims, Faye’s Why We Fight – a call to whites to unite against the “colonization” of Europe by non-whites – is now read so widely as to have “become the literary cri de coeur for right-wing nationalists all over the world” (Kennedy 2016). It is also noteworthy that both Faye and de Benoist pop up regularly in alt-Right and pro-Trump digital forums (Collins 2016) where their work is promoted by American white nationalists; they have even appeared in person at a number of US white nationalist events, including Jared Taylor’s annual American Renaissance conference and Richard Spencer’s National Policy Institute. nr outlooks, in other words, seem increasingly to capture the zeitgeist and, irrespective of any direct influence, to rhyme with broader Western anti-immigration sentiment, praise for strongmen, and yearnings for renewed virility and geopolitics. At the heart of the French nr – and again, in synch with broader transnational trends – sits a profound contempt for the liberal international order. Even if the nr is sometimes at odds with political

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far-Right parties and movements of today (the Rassemblement National in France for instance, is red-hot nationalist while the nr is very critical of the modern nation state), the disruption sought by the nr is first and foremost directed at the project of liberal internationalism and driven by a visceral anti-Americanism. This chapter makes a foray into the nr ’s anti-liberal contempt and to its alternate vision of virile antagonism and imperial geopolitics. In so doing, the chapter explores the ways in which the French nr plugs into broader French and Western lineages of remembering and narrating the twentieth century. The post-1945 world order was sustained by a particular kind of liberal memory – a memory that justified a liberal ethos of self-restraint and binding international cooperation in the post-war period. Not only does the nr , like its far-Right peers, reject that memory in its ambition to subvert the post-1945 liberal order. As we shall see below, it also suggests a very different take on the functions and use of historical memory as such.

m e m o ry wa r a n d the collapse o f t h e l ib e r a l order The thinkers of the French nr are convinced that the liberal age is drawing to a close (Champetier and Benoist 1999). Inspired by theories of catastrophe from René Thom to Ilya Prigogine, Faye claims that the West is currently living a “convergence of catastrophes” – immigration, ecological disaster, and so on – that will lead to an imminent collapse “somewhere between 2010 and 2020” (Faye 2010). To some, the twilight of liberalism sounds like a doom and gloom scenario, but to the nr , it heralds a new and promising beginning. Whether one laments or applauds the imminent cataclysm is intricately linked to one’s conception of the twentieth century: the nr and its sympathizers are at odds with the long-dominant liberal version. World War II and the deep trauma of the Holocaust are crucial moments in liberal memory that was constructed in the aftermath of the two world wars. The experience of war and tyranny in the first half of the twentieth century led to a deep-felt plus jamais ca! a resounding “Never Again.” The specific version of liberalism that materialized after 1945 was a “liberalism of fear” that was first and foremost about avoiding: avoiding war, pain, tyranny,

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and fascism (Skhlar 1989; Tjalve 2019). To the nr , however, the world order that emerged from the ashes of 1945 was not a civilizational peak but a grievous decline: a pacified, depoliticized globe where all diversities and contradictions were overcome. To them, the liberal world order was nothing other than an American world order, giving way to a “totalitarian” (sic), homogeneous, globalized maelstrom of the market: savage capitalism, vulgar consumerism, and political correctness at the level of thought (Champetier and de Benoist 1999). This visceral discomfort with the post-1945 Pax Americana has deep resonance in a French context, where postwar politicians were still preoccupied with the rang de la France. A liberalism of fear, self-restraint, and international governance never had a deep draught in France, where Charles de Gaulle’s “certain idea of France” implied that France was too exceptional to be bound by international institutions that were merely a cover-up for American domination. When Paris was liberated in August 1944, de Gaulle made a speech expressing zero gratitude for the American, Canadian, British or other lives that were lost on the beaches of Normandy: “Paris liberated! Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!” This was memory politics with a vengeance. De Gaulle’s nationalist rhetoric turned out to be merely the harbinger of a thinly veiled anti-Americanism that was to permeate French foreign policy during the Cold War: rapprochement with the Soviet Union, distance from nato , and veto against the UK’s entry into the eec because it was America’s “Trojan horse” in Europe. The nr plugs into this pervasive anti-Americanism and yet their hostility is different. It is not just geopolitical or preoccupied with “eternal France,” but puts forth a broader cultural, social, and philosophical critique of the homogenizing effects of American capitalism and its way of life. Echoing contemporary American neoconservatives and their observation that the liberal project ultimately led to “flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking, weak-willed states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of the Common Market,” the nr views the liberal end state as a world devoid of greatness and heroism (Fukuyama 1989, 3). Yet American neoconservatives still support the liberal order, despite its defects, while the nr wants to do away with it altogether.

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Since 1945, defending anti-liberal opinions anywhere in the West has not been an easy feat: due to the vigour of liberal memory, such far-Right positions are instantly tainted with the memory of “fascism,” ‘‘racism,” “Nazism,” and “anti-Semitism.” In France, however, the post-war “Never Again” slogan was primarily about war and tyranny; not about the Holocaust. “In retrospect, it is the universal character of the neglect that is most striking. The Holocaust of the Jews was put out of mind “[…] one of many things that people wanted to forget” (Judt 2010, 808). Or, according to Enzenberger, “In the fat years after the war […] Europeans took shelter behind a collective amnesia.” In France, that collective amnesia has a name – “the Vichy syndrome” – which refers to the deliberate “forgetting” of the dark years when the Vichy regime collaborated with Nazi Germany and helped deport French Jews (Rousso 1987). But French memory politics has evolved. Since the 1960s, the Holocaust has step by step made its way into liberal memory in France, where it has become the object of debate and controversy (Moyn 2005). To deny or belittle the Holocaust today is, as Judt points out, “to place yourself beyond the pale of civilized public discourse” (Judt 2010, 804). Despite this predicament, de Benoist has to grapple with the Holocaust head on to enable his critique of the liberal world order. De Benoist is by no means a Holocaust denier and disavows the founder of the Front National, Jean-Marie le Pen, who claimed that the gas chambers were merely a “detail in history.” Nevertheless, de Benoist starts his disruption of liberal memory by stressing that it is memory; not history. “Memory” is memory politics; a narrative constructed for political purposes, in this case to uphold the moribund liberal order, in contrast to “history,” which is the outcome of scientific inquiry, critique, and free thinking. Memory “is not about truth but about loyalty” (de Benoist 1994, 6). In line with other revisionist historians, de Benoist relativizes the importance of the Holocaust and suggests that it was not a unique case of metaphysical Evil but a horrendous act on a par with other forms of human suffering. “The entire World War II with its long cortège of disasters and dramas, massacres and deaths of all kinds is boiled down to the horrendous anti-Jewish persecution. This event becomes the key event of contemporary history, if not of human history as such” (de Benoist 1994, 12). Although the Holocaust was horrific, human history is punctuated by pain and evil and it therefore does not make sense to “establish a dreadful hierarchy of suffering” (ibid, 3). The horrors

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that occurred under Stalin were just as bad but did not – according to de Benoist – fit into liberal memory. As the liberal democracies had allied themselves with one totalitarianism to fight another, “the two totalitarianisms cannot be compared since in that case the justification of the world order that emerged out of the 1945 victory would collapse” (ibid.). De Benoist not only debunks the sacrosanct status of the Holocaust but also the liberal interpretation of the twentieth century as an evolution from “madness to prudence” and from tyranny to freedom. In contrast to liberal memory that sets World War II center stage, de Benoist suggests that the most significant event of the twentieth century was World War I. It was World War I that introduced all the elements that came to fruition after 1945: the rule of law in international relations (Wilson’s Fourteen Points), the end of empires (the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian ones), and the moral, ideological war. World War I was a rupture and decline which marked the transition from war as a noble and regulated confrontation between armies, animated by a gentlemanly spirit, to a moral if not metaphysical confrontation between good and evil in which one party can claim to fight a legal war against a barbaric sub-human enemy who is the incarnation of absolute evil. Transposing the historical center of gravity from the second to the first world war, in other words – and presenting the two wars as basically of the same nature – de Benoist destabilizes liberal memory and minimizes the significance of the Holocaust, which he considers to be the responsibility of one crazy lunatic. The Holocaust had nothing to do with racism: the Jews “were not at all killed in the name of biological inequality! They were killed in the name of the crazy dream of a certain Adolf Hitler” (de Benoist 1979).

be yo n d t h e l ib e r a l o r der: revi tali zi ng m as c u l in it y, v ir ili ty, and war The critique of liberal memory was merely a first step in the attack on the liberal world order and liberal societies. In contrast to a peace-loving, security focused, comfort-seeking liberalism, the thinkers of the nr seek to restore “conflict” and “politics.” This does not mean a gung-ho praise of war as such, nor does it mean that they are against peace. What the nr opposes is the liberal idea of perpetual peace, or pacifism. They believe that war and conflict cannot – and

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shall not – be eradicated. Peace is not the original condition of man, but a situation obtained through war. All peaceful polities are the outcome of war, the liberal world order being no exception (de Benoist 2007). This critique of liberal peace is clearly underpinned by Carl Schmitt’s notion of “the political” as a distinction between friends and enemies. Man is a political animal and would “no longer be man, if he was no longer political” (de Benoist 2007, 6). But this recovery of agonism requires a restoration of the Spartan virtues of discipline, heroism, and virility – a trend which resonates well with broader calls for masculinity across the far- and alt-Right political landscape today (Gendron 2017). It is no coincidence that Vladimir Putin has become an icon of hypermasculinity and “macho-politics,” posing bare-chested in several official photos. This call for virility, however, has little to do with intensifying Western military spending or “technological edge.” The nr thinkers are not preoccupied with military strength per se. To them, technological war – ushered in during World War I – is a decline from limited, non-ideological combat in which real men, animated by a chivalresque ethos, fight face to face. Their preoccupation with strength is about (the decline of) masculinity. In their view, the agonistic phenomena of politics, war, and conflict are intimately linked to virility in contrast to the soft, fluid spheres of economy and consumption. The liberal attempt to swallow up agonistic politics in the vortex of international law and the market has gone hand in hand with a broader trend of “feminization.” According to de Benoist, the liberal pacification of “polytheistic” values was enabled by a feminism that has run amok, entailing a loss of male virtues such as virility, discipline, and heroism. In the words of Faye – who finds Western men less manly than Muslims and Africans – “Europe is in a process of devirilization” (Faye 2000, 6). This reading of European history is inspired by the Italian fascist thinker Julius Evola, who has become a luminary for disruptive far-Right intellectuals. To Evola, the process of feminization is not only a feature of post-1945 liberalism but of modernity as such: a modernity that has coincided with the rise of “gynecocratic” values and “increased domination of the feminine pole of being over the masculine one” (de Benoist 2007, 8). In Benoist’s words, modern liberal society is “fatherless” and narcissistic, giving priority to economy over politics, consumption over production, discussion over decision, dialogue over authority – a society of victimization, therapy, and endless psychological debriefing. In late modernity, even war – the male

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domain par excellence – has become feminized: fluid, asymmetrical, and without a clear beginning or end. The current use of drones in Western warfare stands as the epitome of such feminization.

g e o p o l it ic s , e t h n o - p l urali sm, and a “ e u ro p e o f 1 0 0 flags” The post-liberal order not only sounds the death knell of feminized pacifism but also calls for a new nomos of the earth: a new international order. To de Benoist, the liberal world order is first and foremost an American world order: “the main enemy is, on the economic level, capitalism and the market society […] and on the geopolitical front, America” (2009, 28). Seen through nr spectacles, the “unipolar moment” of hegemonic US power was an all-time low where the geopolitical enemy – America – could finally reign supreme over a potentially “depoliticized” world. The main question to de Benoist is therefore whether there is an alternative to US military and cultural hegemony: “Unity or plurality of the world, universe or ‘pluriverse’, homogeneous globalization or globalization according to the diversity of cultures and peoples” (de Benoist, 2007). To pursue that move, de Benoist – once again taking his cue from Schmitt and his distinction between land and sea powers – seeks to bring the “geo” back into geo-politics. In other words: to replace the fluid (and feminized) American world order with the solidity and fixity of the earth. In contrast to the US and Britain, both sea powers and trading nations, continental Europe embodies earth power par excellence. This “earth” though, has nothing to do with the territory of the modern sovereign state. To Schmitt, the partitioning of planetary space will not in the future divide the globe into territorial states but into “Great Spaces,” which he envisions as larger political and geographical units of regional or continental scope. To break free from American hegemony and pave the way for a new plurality of empires and cultures, de Benoist and Faye agree that Europe should pivot to Russia, but they have different notions of what such a pivot might entail. Faye envisions a Euro-Siberian Federation from “Brest to the Bering strait” (Faye, 2010). In his view, Europe must turn to Russia because the major geopolitical fault line today is not the one between East and West but that between North and South, the main security threat to Europe being “colonization” from the South. To erect a bulwark against rampant Muslim immigration, a

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post-liberal Europe must go hand in hand with white Christian Russia (the prominence of the theme of “colonization” in Faye’s thought probably also explains why he recently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to America and Christianity). Confronted with the virility of the South, countries in the North must unite. Faye’s Euro-Siberian utopia is not only a hierarchical polity but also presupposes a return to small, self-sufficient, ethnically pure enclaves. To de Benoist, in contrast, the over-arching aim of a European empire, including Russia, remains to oppose the liberal globalitarisme of the Anglo-American sea powers. The role model for this new European empire is not the German Reich, which was built on a specific nation (or race), but the Roman Empire, with its manifold “multicultural” provinces. The empire is to be not a magnified version of the modern nation-state defined by a territory and a Volk but “a spiritual or politico-legal idea” (de Benoist 1993, 3). Not a material entity defined by a “national interest,” but a polity that is “animated by a spiritual fervor. Without this fervor, it would merely be the outcome of violence – imperialism – a mechanical superstructure without a soul” (de Benoist 1993, 5). Finally, the empire which de Benoist hopes to restore is an “area of civilization.” De Benoist’s civilization is far from homogeneous, and not necessarily based on religion. Indo-European civilization – spanning a territory from the Atlantic to India – is a mosaic of various religions, cultures, languages: a federation of organic communities with large degrees of autonomy. It is not a colonial empire, which would presuppose the conquest or inclusion of people from other “areas of civilization.” This idea of a re-spiritualized Europe is, of course, far from the current EU – an institution deliberately established by its liberal architects as a grey and technocratic construction. It is also something very different from the current French republic, and what de Benoist considers the cultural suicide of its “melting pot” ideal. The Europe of de Benoist’s dreams is a patchwork of local cultures and legal systems: a “Europe of 100 flags” allowing each ethnic, cultural entity to flourish.

c o n c l u s i on In a recent issue, the American journal Telos suggests that “Across the West, the old liberal center is coming apart and the extremes are resurgent” (Pabst 2017). These rumors of liberalism’s imminent col-

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lapse are probably exaggerated, but the tectonic plates of the global political landscape are definitely shifting. This chapter provides a glimpse into some ideas integral to the French nr and elucidates its critique of liberal politics and its vision of an alternate global future. What are the most crucial points to be drawn from that glimpse? First of all, that France and French political thought is key to the development of transnational far-Right, and that this is so for a number of historical reasons. To begin with, the post-war liberal project of self-restraint and deliberate impotency never had deep roots in France. The French founding fathers of the European Coal and Steel Community, Robert Schuman and Jean Monnet, envisioned a supranational institution that was to end centuries of war and power politics in Europe. But the idea of a European cooperation that could stifle French sovereignty met stiff opposition from de Gaulle and the Gaullists who were to define French foreign policy during the Cold War and beyond. De Gaulle was skeptical about post-1945 international institutions. To prevent future wars in Europe, he preferred to conclude a bilateral agreement with a weakened Germany that was divided into two and no longer a military power. The idea of deliberate French impotency was not within de Gaulle’s comprehension, nor was the post-fascist appreciation of uncharismatic leadership. The current French constitution that was tailormade to fit “the general” installs a strong president elected directly by the people, and de Gaulle himself had a predilection for so-called bains de foule – crowd-mingling – that allowed him to reenact his direct relationship with the French people. Secondly, that the new far-Right is not necessarily nationalist. The glimpse into French nr thinking provided in this chapter warns against easy labels and reductive analysis. It is true that the current surge of far-Right movements is often seen as a return to nationalism. For instance, the French political party, le Rassemblement National, is EU-hostile and subscribes to the slogan of “préférence nationale,” which echoes Donald Trump’s “America first” or “make America great again.” But the nr is not in favor of a parochial form of nationalism and has no intention of defending le rang de la France – a stance that is echoed by far-Right thinkers elsewhere. This has to do with the nature of their anti-liberalism, which is ultimately anti-modern. That de Benoist and Faye are “anti-modern” means that they have a pronounced aversion for the nation-state. To them, the artificial construction of the modern nation-states went hand in hand with the oppression of the real multicultural Europe, an ethnic pluriversum

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of vibrant, organic cultures spanning the Mediterranean, the Nordic cult of Odin, the cultures of Basques, Bretons, Laplanders, Siberians, and many more who, despite differences, share a common pagan, Indo-European ethnos, if not a common purpose. This, then, is perhaps the French nr ’s most important contribution to current developments: its clever rephrasing of identity and pluralism in ways which avoid invoking the memory of Holocaust, genocide, and racism. De Benoist’s concept of “identity” performs a rhetorical stunt, elegantly replacing the uncomfortable associations of the term “race.” Insisting that there is no hierarchy between different cultures or identities, de Benoist can claim to equally “respect the destiny of the sometimes afflicted Innuits, Tibetans, Amazonians, Pygmies, Kanaks, Aborigines, Berbers, Saharans, Indians, Nubians, the inevitable Palestinians, and the little green men from outer space,” and simultaneously insist that these “Others” should stay apart and at distance from Europe (cited in Baugh 1970). At a time when the question of migration is high on the political agenda everywhere, he and his French nr peers would seem to have delivered a most crucial piece of intellectual and rhetorical ammunition to nr voices everywhere, struggling to escape the no-goes of their post-45, post-Holocaust, post-segregation past: “racism” and “white supremacism.” Seen from the perspective of the old liberal order, the foreign policy of a Donald Trump may appear unpredictable, dependent upon the whims and tweets of the day. But seen through a nr looking-glass it makes a remarkable amount of sense: the constant, ostentatious disruption of “feminized” if not “feminist” liberal institutions personified by Merkel, Mogherini, Macron, or Trudeau; the EU a “foe”; nato “obsolete”; multilateral agreements and institutions betrayed by the hour. Will this continuous undermining of the old liberal order give way to a new geopolitical arena where might is right, authoritarian men strike deals, and cultures throw off the shackles of binding agreements and institutions? The French nr , sharing de Gaulle’s ambiguous stance towards the liberal world order as well as his preference for strong leadership, stands right in the midst of this revolt. At this historical moment, when liberal memory is waning, the ideas of the nr have become essential to the broader political climate. Beyond a liberalism of fear and restraint, a new confident authoritarianism is rearing its head, giving rise not only to a budding Identitarian movement but to a larger far-Right vision of global order.

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r e f e r e nce s Bar-On, Tamir. 2011. “Transnationalism and the French Nouvelle Droite.” Patterns of Prejudice 45 (3): 199-223. Baugh, Jeff. 1970 “The Guillaume Faye – Alain de Benoist debate on Multiculturalism.” Amerika 2 (August). http://www.amerika.org/ politics/the-guillaume-faye-alain-de-benoist-debate-on-multiculturalismmichael-omeara/ Benoist, Alain de. 1979. “Réflexions Étonnantes du Chef de File de la ‘Nouvelle Droite.’” Playboy (French version), November: 41-2, 44, 46, 160. – 1993. “L’Idée d’Empire.” http://alawata-alaindebenoist.blogspot. com/2014/01/lidee-dempire.html. – 1994. “La ‘Reductio ad Hitlerum.’” http://alawata-alaindebenoist. blogspot.com/2014/01/la-reductio-ad-hitlerum.html. – 2007. “Vers un Nouveau ‘Nomos de la Terre’ – Extrait.” http://data. overblog-kiwi.com/0/55/48/97/20160126/ob_343a5f_vers-un-nouveaunomos-de-la-terre-a-de.pdf. – 2009 “The European New Right: Forty Years Later.” The Occidental Quarterly 9:1 (Spring): 61-74. Champetier, Charles and Alain de Benoist. 1999. “Manifeste: la Nouvelle Droite de l’an 2000.” https://neweuropeanconservative.files.wordpress. com/2012/10/manifeste-la-nouvelle-droite-de-lan-2000.pdf. Collins, Ben. 2016. “Analysis: Woman-Haters and Pickup Artists Love Trump on Reddit.” Daily Beast, 11 August: https://www.thedailybeast. com/analysis-woman-haters-and-pickup-artists-love-trump-on-reddit. Faye, Guillaume. 2000. La Colonisation de l’Europe. Discours Vrai Sur l’Immigration et Sur l’Islam. Paris: Éditions Æncre. – 2010. Archeofuturisme: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age. Budapest: Arktos. Fukuyama, Francis. 1989. “The End of History?” The National Interest 16 (Summer): 3-18. Gendron, Guillaume. 2017. “La Culture Alt-Right: de l’extrême droite française à ‘Fight Club.’’’ Libération, 17 January: https://oeilsurlefront. liberation.fr/les-idees/2017/01/17/la-culture-alt-right-de-l-extremedroite-francaise-a-fight-club_1542075. Judt, Tony. 2010. Postwar. London: Vintage Books. Kennedy, Dana. 2016. “Nouvelle Droite. The French Ideologues Who Inspired the Alt-Right.” The Daily Beast, 12 May.

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Moyn, Samuel. 2005. A Holocaust Controversy: The Treblinka Affair in Postwar France. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Pabst, Adrian. 2017. “On the Retreat of Liberalism and the Renewal of Politics.” Telos 181 (Winter): 223-8. Rousso, Henry. 1987. Le Syndrome de Vichy. Paris: Éditions du Seuil. Skhlar, Judith. 1998. “The Liberalism of Fear.” In Political Thought and Political Thinkers, Stanley Hoffman, ed., 3-20. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Tjalve, Vibeke Schou. 2020. “The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory.” In Geopolitical Amnesia: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory, Tjalve, ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Williams, Thomas Chatterton. 2017. “The French Origins of You Will Not Replace Us.” The New Yorker 4 December https://www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2017/12/04/the-french-origins-of-you-will-not-replace-us.

5

What Liberalism? Russia’s Conservative Turn and the Liberal Order Minda Holm

This volume is organized around a wide-spread phenomenon across the US and Europe: that of growing “geopolitical amnesia” and a related dissatisfaction with liberal narratives or liberal memories of the twentieth century. The post-1945 liberal order is, in a parallel vein, frequently said to be in “crisis.” Russia is a central player in this story. Through a regime that increasingly promotes a conservative domestic agenda and at times portrays the West as decadent and lost, the Russian state has been cast as the front man in a new international conservative revolt.1 Hand in hand with the Orthodox Church, the current Russian regime presents itself as a preserver of traditional values at home and, more indirectly, a preserver of the Christian world in Europe. This revolt is an attack on the liberal West that many hoped Russia would join after 1989. The revolt is also partly a return to the historically reoccurring idea that Russia both represents, and protects, an anti-secular and “true” Europe.2 In Europe and the US, central actors from both the far and national Right sympathize with Russia’s conservative cause. Prominent figures in their ranks view Russia’s politics as a welcome break from the liberal, secular ideology found in large parts of the West. The Russian revolt against political correctness, and its association of religion with politics, are ideologically significant elements of an increasingly interconnected transnational Right. Yet the current Russian regime is also embedded in an international struggle over geopolitical order and here, its views on sovereignty and non-interference put it at odds with

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simple “anti-liberalism.” After all, liberalism has always had multiple meanings. While the current Russian regime clearly challenges central aspects of liberalism at home, it also relies on concepts such as sovereignty and non-interference that historically were part of a more stability-oriented, conservative liberal international vision. This chapter addresses the tensions between what I define as the two post-1945 liberalisms in the Russian conservative turn, exploring first Russia’s role as a leader of conservative revolt and secondly, its calls for a system where international difference is accepted. I argue that the liberal narrative Russia is dissatisfied with is not so much the one that triumphed in 1945 and laid the grounds for the modern-day international community, but that which was always there and gradually became more dominant, culminating in 1989 as a triumphalist liberal era. The Russian state’s rhetoric is, to some extent, a historicizing project, reclaiming the meaning of central concepts for strategic purposes. In order to give cohesion to the Russian state’s story, national memory has to be recast: In its attempt to present itself as the custodian of “traditional values,” the regime erases elements of its own Soviet pasts.3 Asking “what liberalism” it is that Russia increasingly defies opens up an important space to historicize and interrogate what the post-1945 liberal memory is, how that memory is currently being re-negotiated by the national Right in Europe and the US, and what Russia has got to do with it.

a c h r is t ia n e u ro p e v s the li beral wes t The Russian state has undergone a conservative turn during Vladimir Putin’s third presidential term. The new political emphasis is widely regarded by scholars as a response to the mass protests in 2011-12 that followed a controversial election to the Duma. In search of a way to mobilize and unite its citizens, a new narrative was forged about the state as “the guardian of Russia’s traditional values, morals and spirituality” (Sharafutdinova 2014, 616). Though building on topics already present both in history and in the state’s discourse, conservative themes became more far-reaching and pronounced after the protests. This rhetorical shift has affected both civil society and private life. New laws have been introduced, including a law against “gay propaganda” in 2013, a law making it illegal to insult religious believers’ feelings in 2013, and a law making it illegal for same-sex couples to adopt from Russia in 2014. The

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widely broadcasted “Pussy Riot” trial in 2012 also set the political tone, with “morality” and “tradition” figuring extensively in both official and public discourse vis-à-vis the demonized artist collective. The president presents the world as being in distress due to a spiritual void, and promotes Russia’s traditional values as a safeguard. Though the phrase is often (and probably deliberately) left unspecified, “traditional values” is clearly religious in its connotations. During the same period, the state leadership has got closer to the Russian Orthodox Church, which represents an estimated seventy percent of citizens.4 As of 2017, 200 new churches have been planned in Moscow alone. A massive new monument of Vladimir the Great, the Christianizer of Russia, was erected in 2016 next to the Kremlin, unveiled in a grand ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin, Prime Minister Dmitriy Medvedev, and Patriarch Kirill of Moscow. In his opening speech, Putin noted that Vladimir’s Baptism of Rus in the tenth century “laid the  foundations of  our moral standards and value priorities which continue to define our lives to this day […] our duty today is to work together to confront modern challenges and threats,” and “to preserve the continuity of our thousand-year history as we move forward” (Kremlin.ru 2016). Historical lineages are re-framed and spun to give cohesion to this new narrative in which the church, both now and then, is presented as the “main spiritual foundation of [Russian] statehood and people” (Kremlin.ru 2016). This, in the most basic sense, is the construction of a conservative national myth. Whilst the myth builds on history prior to the Soviet period, it also addresses themes unique to the contemporary world such as gay marriage and lgbt adoption rights. The conservative rhetoric seems to be as much about the nature of the rest of the world as it is about Russian society. The image of a righteous Russia has explicitly been used for the purpose of “othering” a secular and liberal West. As President Putin infamously stated in a speech in 2013: “We can see how many of  the  Euro-Atlantic countries are actually rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the  basis of  Western civilisation. They are denying moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious and even sexual. […] I am convinced that this opens a  direct path to  degradation and  primitivism, resulting in  a  profound demographic and  moral crisis” (Kremlin.ru 2013). This is a consequential shift in how Europe is cast as a site of “degradation” in post-Soviet discourse. Since 1991, Russian politicians have

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discussed whether or not the state should be close to the West, but Russia has nevertheless been presented by consecutive governments, including that of President Putin himself, as part of Europe. That is not a given: not only because of the history of the Cold War, but also because a central question in the Russian history of ideas has been which civilization the state should belong to – Western or Eastern, a Slavic or a distinctly Eurasian one. In the current vision, Russia and its Christian values are presented as representative of a “true” Europe, in contrast to a Europe defined by secular, liberal decadence. Although this is new at the state level in the post-Soviet context, it also builds on a historically reoccurring trope that first gained prominence in Russia in the nineteenth century. A “false” Europe is contrasted with a “true” Europe, with Russia again representing, protecting, and reviving the latter.5 Homosexuality is outcast in the state’s conservative vision, sometimes blurred and further stigmatized through parallel denunciations of pedophilia. The heterosexual and heteronormative family is the clear ideal, in accord with what others have defined as a political idea of “heteronationalism” (Lazarus 2011). Russians’ respect for traditional values is also presented in contrast to and as a safeguard against social problems found in an undefined “elsewhere” in the world where, in Putin’s words, “indifference and apathy, and the loss of  moral reference points encourage radicalism, xenophobia and  religiously-motivated conflicts. Self-destructive egoism turns into aggressive nationalism” (Kremlin.ru 2017). Building on old themes present both in Russian history and in the discourses of the Russian and European national and far Right, the president presents an image of Russia as a saviour for a Europe that has become corrupt. As such, the discourse plays into the long tradition of Russian messianism: the idea that Russia has a special redemptive role to play in world.6 The emphasis on “traditions,” often coupled with Orthodox references, is furthermore intended to represent religion itself as the opposite of that which is radical or extreme (Laruelle and Yudina 2018). The phrase “traditional values” thus has a dual edge: one aimed at the secular West, the other at religious practices deemed abnormal. In contrast to the far-reaching critique of capitalism amongst contemporary Russian and European far-Right ideologues, the critique of Western modernity by Putin’s regime is directed at its liberal, secular, political values. A national strategy document from 2015 praises Russia’s priority of the “sacred over

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the material,” but overall, there is little radical critique of capitalism per se found in the rhetoric of the regime. The realm of conservative values is also explicitly presented as an issue of security and foreign policy. The annexation of Crimea in 2014, overwhelmingly popular in Russia, was cast partly in the language of self-determination but also, and more consequentially in terms of public opinion, with reference to the region as the birthplace of Russian Christianity in the year 988 (Holm 2016). This is a nationalism tied less to existing state borders and more to a historical idea of Russian Orthodoxy standing at the center of a broader Eastern Slavic identity – thus also, however indirectly, legitimizing what the international community widely perceives as breaches of international law. This form of justification has deep parallels to conservative conceptions of the Ethnos as the organic, national community standing in contrast to the Western, citizen-based Demos, and – with regards to Russia’s broader interests in Ukraine – of the Schmittian idea of a Großraum, the conservative and still widely read German interwar jurist’s concept of territorial great-spaces, and the right of states to “exert influence in their surrounding territories” (cf. Dahl 1999, 74). The rhetoric emphasizing traditions also has close ties to security policies: in 2012, the Nationalities Strategy defined the “degradation of traditional moral values” as a national threat and in 2015, the Russian National Security Strategy defined “the preservation of traditional values” as its most important strategic goal.7 Speaking of “the degradation of the institution of the family, mutual alienation in society and the depersonalization of  individuals” in 2017, Putin described a “spiritual void” easily filled by “extremists and ideologists of terrorism, enemies of progress and all civilization” (Kremlin.ru 2017). Traditional values are here presented as a bulwark not only against decadence and moral erosion but also against existential threats to state and society. This rhetorical coupling of tradition and security is not very surprising. A preoccupation with security has been Putin’s hallmark since the beginning of his first term in 1999, starting with the intention of “wiping out” terrorists in Chechnya and launching the second full-scale invasion of the republic.8 Presenting both inside and outside factors as threats to Russian security has been consequential in building an image of Putin as a popular “strongman” at home. With the war in Chechnya officially over since 2009 and “Chechens” as separatists thus being less of an existential threat, radical, violent

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Jihadism abroad and at home (in the North Caucasus) is now the primary “hard” security threat; erosion of traditional values at home a close, but “softer,” second. In terms close to the friend-enemy distinction advanced by Carl Schmitt, the Putin regime pursues a dual construction of the organic national community, on the one hand, and the enemy – the liberal West and violent Islamic Jihadism – on the other. Both the Ethnos and the Enemy serve to underpin the power and inviolability of the Russian state, a state which at the same time stands separate from and above the people.

ru s s ia a n d t h e w e stern far ri ght This Russian conservative turn has proved popular well beyond its borders. In the US, connections between the Evangelical Right and Russian religious, conservative, pro-family organizations have been present since the early 1990’s, with US evangelicals allegedly playing a decisive role in establishing the Russian anti-abortion movement (Stroop 2016). The ideological convergence has grown more extensive in parallel with Russia’s increasing conservativism, with far/alt-Right US figures like Steve Bannon emphasizing the need to stay close to Russia as a Judeo-Christian power: “We the Judeo-Christian West really have to look at what [Putin is] talking about as far as traditionalism goes” (Dreyfuss 2018). The fact that religious expressions were curtailed during Soviet rule is presented as a testimony to the righteousness of their current position. As US evangelical leader Franklin Graham states, “no one knows modern Christian persecution better than the church that suffered under communist rule” (Gledhill 2016). In an opinion piece in 2014, Graham stresses that whilst he doesn’t endorse Putin, he admires his stance on gay and lesbians: “In my opinion, Putin is right on these issues. Obviously, he may be wrong about many things, but he has taken a stand to protect his nation’s children from the damaging effects of any gay and lesbian agenda” (Graham 2014). Others highlight Russian emphasis on “traditions” more broadly, and the anti-secular emphasis in their understanding of morality. As Allan Carlson from the World Congress of Families writes, “While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view, Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values” (Buchanan 2014). Pat Buchanan, prominent US paleoconservative, is perhaps most succinct in his praise of Putin, applauding him for “tapping into the worldwide

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revulsion of and resistance to the sewage of a hedonistic secular and social revolution coming out of the West. In the culture war for the future of mankind, Putin is planting Russia’s flag firmly on the side of traditional Christianity” (ibid). The same tendencies are seen in Europe. Whilst much popular emphasis is given to the anti-immigrant, Muslim- and EU-sceptic stance of the European national and far-Right, they also overwhelmingly share Russia’s position on “traditional values.” Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National in France, says of Putin that “we are defending common values […] the Christian heritage of European civilization” (Vinocur 2014). In Italy, Putin’s Christian emphasis is praised in both traditionalist Catholic and far-Right circles, with a conservative newspaper in 2015 running the headline “The stark reality: Only Putin and Marine Le Pen defend Christian values from Islam.” Matteo Salvini, the Interior Minister from the far-Right Lega, speaks again liberal “gender ideology” and of protecting the family “made up of a mom and dad” (Garbagnoli 2018). Salvini’s party has also signed a cooperation agreement with the pro-Kremlin United Russia, and its leadership views Putin’s rule as an ideal. In Hungary, the conservative governments in power have also played heavily on their role as preservers of a Christian world vis-àvis the EU’s liberal values. The World Congress of Family held their 2017 global summit in Budapest, where their leadership highlighted Hungary’s “defense of family, life, and Christianity” (Montgomery 2017). Hungary recently abolished gender studies, with its minister of Education explaining that it is “ideology, not science.” Of course, this increasing attention to “traditional values” is also wide-spread in deeply Russia-sceptic circles in both the US and Europe. Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki, from the governing Law and Justice Party, has contrasted the EU’s values with Polish ones, stating that his dream is to “re-Christianize Europe” (Dueholm 2017). But for the Polish government, Russia remains a threat, nato and the US their closest allies. Whilst large parts of the national and far-Right in the US and Europe speak in favour of closer cooperation with Russia, the defence of “traditional values” vis-à-vis the liberal West obviously also reaches far beyond those circles – not least in the centrist, Christian Right. The ideological convergence between the Putin administration and elements of the national Right in countries such as the US, Austria, Germany, and France is connected to political themes well beyond

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the family. These themes include a strong defence of physical and cultural borders, a strong aversion to liberal interventions, and an open skepticism to liberal elites. Though not uniformly positive to Putin’s Russia, many on the national and far-Right – such as the leading far-Right parties in Austria, Germany, and France – openly admire Putin’s anti-liberal politics. The depth of this ideological convergence gets downplayed in more alarmist representations of ties between Russia and Europe, wherein European actors’ own agency is seemingly ignored (cf. Holm 2019). At the same time, Russia’s emphasis on “traditional values” also taps into grievances that are not unique to the national Right. In the European and US national Right’s quest to make immigrants, and particularly Muslim ones, into a distinct and abhorrent other, the similarities found in conservative Christian, far-Right, and Muslim circles on issues of “traditions” are glossed over, and more broadly, their widely shared critique of liberal modernity ignored. Anti-immigration is often justified by the far-Right with civilizational reasoning, wherein “Islam” is de facto presented as antithetical to the form of “traditionalism” they themselves advocate. In contrast, the Russian regime is more openly inclusive of Islam. Though often containing Christian undertones, “traditional values” are also cast in broader and more religiously inclusive terms by the regime. For example, Putin claims that “Islam is an outstanding element of Russia’s cultural makeup, an integral, organic part of our history” (Kremlin.ru 2013). As others have highlighted, this is only the type of Islam deemed “moderate” enough by the state, with the emphasis on “traditional values” also being used to delegitimize that which they see as too extreme (Laruelle and Yudina 2018). Overall, though, the Russian state is far more cautious of alienating their Muslim population than is commonly the case with the US and European national and far-Right.

a wor l d o f d if f e r e n c e v s li beral uni formi ty The Russian state has undoubtedly gone through a conservative turn. But in order to understand the international character of this revolt, in which social-conservative values at home are intermixed with a staunch rhetoric against the liberal and decadent West, we also need to look at Russia’s dissatisfaction with the suppression of a central liberal memory: the principles upon which the UN, and thus post-1945 “international society,” was built. Russia joins other states, like China,

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in emphasizing the centrality of sovereignty and non-interference in International Law, putting them increasingly at odds with those states in the UN which believe in breaching non-interference for the sake of protection. More than against humanitarian protection as such, Russia and China have highlighted the role of “non-interference” as an inviolable principle of international law. Whilst out of sync with the dominant liberal narrative about the UN, Russia does not oppose “liberal internationalism” and the 1945 liberal moment per se – depending on what is meant by those terms (Holm and Sending 2018). In the current representation of a liberal world in crisis, the post-1945 period is more often than not presented in linear terms, as a cohesive and distinct whole. The “liberal order” has thus taken on a largely ahistorical meaning, with the contradictions of its principles and development glossed over for the sake of a uniform story. Given this volume’s theme, it is worth dwelling on what that 1945 moment represented in terms of liberal principles, in part because it says a lot about the dissatisfaction Russia and other states express over the current idea of a liberal international order. The principles that were the basis of the United Nations Charter in 1945 laid the foundation for both modern state agency and formal recognition in the international domain. Whilst the term “liberal order” is now commonly used to define both post-1945 institutional architecture connected to the West (UN, nato , EU, etc.) and associated domestic values, there was a more somber and stability-oriented liberalism at play in the establishment of the United Nations. The process of writing the UN Charter was full of friction, most importantly between two starkly different ideals present in modern international law. On the one hand, there were those who wanted a world order where states had rights akin to those of individuals in the liberal rule of law, in which all persons are equal to each other. Prominent legal scholar Gerry Simpson (2001) defines this as “Charter Liberalism,” according to which each nation-state stands sovereign in conducting their domestic dealings, and where non-interference underpins international community. This is, in many ways, an extension of classical liberal thought on the freedom of the individual and the principles of tolerance and compromise (Holm and Sending, 2018). Transferred to the state and the principles laid out in the UN Charter for state membership, a state’s “domestic make-up”- its ideology or governance structures – is not the business of the international community unless it is related to grave crimes against humanity. As stated by the

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drafting subcommittee in 1945, to require democratic institutions for membership “would imply an undue interference with internal arrangements” (Simpson 2001, 553). Standing in opposition to this idea were those who explicitly saw the spread of democratic and humanitarian values as a matter of international concern. Simpson dubs them “liberal anti-pluralists”: liberals who could accept illiberal, anti-tolerant means to make a world in their own image. Simpson’s main point is that it was the image of the Charter liberalists that prevailed in 1945, with universality, non-interference, and equality laid out as the dominant principles of the new, post-1945 international community. The tensions between these two liberalisms have persisted, between a “liberal world order” centered on regulating the relations between states and a liberal world order seeking to regulate the relationship between a state and its citizens (cf. also Nexon and Musgrave 2016). The tensions of the 1945 moment have also produced different visions of what it means to be a sovereign state in the modern world. The liberal “anti-pluralists,” those who see the liberal international order’s political jurisdiction as also related to state-society relations, gained more prominence following the declared end of the Cold War in 1989 and the subsequent “triumph” of liberalism. Whilst the UN Charter emphasized the principle of non-interference and the sovereign right of each state, later developments, most prominently human rights mechanisms and membership criteria for the EU, have pulled in the opposite direction. Within this order, to be a “good” state is to be liberal and democratic, resembling the way states were defined as “civilized” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, the fact that the most significant international institution of the post-1945 era outlined a vision based on sovereign equality and non-interference still matters, as much in present-day politics as then (cf. Holm and Sending 2018). Although human rights instruments were an important element of later developments in international law, the premise of documents such as the Helsinki Act of 1975 is still the principle of non-interference and the inviolability of the sovereignty of the state. What this effectively means is that there are two parallel but contradictory ideas of what is meant by the “sovereignty” of the state, and what the international community is therefore allowed to do. In Russia, the tensions between these liberal internationalisms are tangible. A central theme in the Russian regime’s conservative turn,

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here aimed at world politics, is sovereignty and non-interference. The Russian state strongly opposed both nato ’s Kosovo intervention in 1999 and the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. But in the 2000s, the emphasis on “sovereign democracy,” “cultural sovereignty,” sovereignty, multilateralism, and non-interference in international affairs has grown even stronger. More broadly, the regime is clearly mobilizing the liberalism of diversity and tolerance in the international system, using the UN and “multipolarity” as the anchoring points of the international community that they want. When Vladimir Putin was skeptical of the UN-sanctioned intervention in Libya in 2011, fearing that it would end in regime change, he explained his reasoning in this vein: “The Libyan regime does not meet any of the criteria of a democratic state, but that does not mean that someone is allowed to interfere in internal political conflicts to defend one of the sides” (Bryanski 2011). Whilst many Western liberals see this as a morally repugnant passivity, such reasoning does without doubt echo the preservationist liberalism engrained in the UN Charter. It is also at the center of debates amongst international scholars, who by no means agree on the legality of the intervention in Libya and elsewhere (Teimouri and Subedi 2018). The liberal internationalism that legitimizes interventions into the domestic affairs of states stands in contrast to a more restrained and limited internationalism regulating only the relationship between states, not the relations within them. A speech Putin held in front of the UN General Assembly marking its seventieth anniversary is here worth quoting in some length: Russia is ready to work together with its partners to develop the UN further on the basis of a broad consensus, but we consider any attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. They may result in the collapse of the entire architecture of international relations, and then indeed there will be no rules left except for the rule of force. The world will be dominated by selfishness rather than collective effort, by dictate rather than equality and liberty, and instead of truly independent states we will have protectorates controlled from outside […] What is the meaning of state sovereignty, the term which has been mentioned by our colleagues here? It basically means freedom, every person and every state being free to choose their future. (Kremlin.ru 2015, my emphasis)

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In other words, the UN, and more specifically its founding principles, are made central to the regime’s international vision. Paradoxically, the Russian state presents itself as an ardent supporter of the interstate liberalism that underpins the modern world order, in contrast to those to whom the internal dealings of a state are a legitimate matter of intervention. Whilst Russia’s conservative turn is in part presented as a reaction to the liberalism of state-society relations, the regime also applauds the UN as a pivotal international institution. This is of course frustrating to many, given the power which Russia (like China) has as a permanent member of the UN Security Council. It is also a rhetoric filled with paradoxes, not least because Russia itself undermines those principles of sovereignty and non-interference that it claims to defend – most notably, with the annexation of Crimea in 2014. But it is worth noting that the “liberalism” that the Russian state most ardently opposes is the one which seeks to impose limits on how Russia and other states can govern, and what principles they are to govern by. In some ways, the current regime presents itself as the defender of the more conservative liberalism of 1945, invoking its principles of non-interference, tolerance, and diversity to critique the anti-pluralist, universalist liberalism of the West.

r e a l is m , l iberali s m The Russian state’s conservatism and its critique of liberal ideas elicits the question: Is Russia under Putin “realist”? Perhaps the most clearly defining premise of political realism is its opposition to the universalist claims of liberalism, a stance that realists share with the partly intersecting conservative tradition. When universalism takes over, real politics – messy, contradictory, full of conflict and difference – is left out. Yet in Putin’s case this is only “realism” inasmuch as it is about the state’s standing in the international community, and its resistance against the moral claims of the Liberal West, as the regime also clearly seeks to police both violently and rhetorically that which is to be perceived as “legitimate” behaviour at home. In the realist critique of liberal morality, the construction of good and evil as derived from either God or abstract, secular reasoning needs to be dethroned (cf. Nietzsche’s work). Yet for the current regime, morality is top-down, presented as religious and nearly trans-historical in its nature, with dire consequences for those – such as lgbt minorities – that do not adhere to those values.

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This all speaks to the conservatism of the Russian regime, which though linked both ideologically and intellectually to realism (Schmitt is claimed by both strands), has more specifically domestic consequences. The people are expected to be an Ethnos, an organic community, with the individualism of liberalism seen as a faulty construction. As Göran Dahl notes in a study on radical conservativism, this anti-pluralism is rooted in the desire for pure reflex on part of the national Right; the nation or the state “should be sacred, that is beyond reflection” (1999, 64). Putin’s Russia demands obedience to its vision, using the state apparatus, including its legal system, to sanction that which is legitimate and not. Whilst the regime echoes realist sentiments in their critique of the universalist aspirations of US and EU liberalism, they also clearly have a strongly normative perception of what is “legitimate” behaviour at home. As such, they advocate diversity and tolerance in their quest for a sovereign standing in the international community, yet largely deny that diversity and tolerance for their own citizens.

a c o n c l u d in g n o t e on memory This volume explores how liberal memory is currently being renegotiated by a broad range of increasingly influential right-wing movements and governments across the US and Europe. Here Russia also escapes any easy fit or categorization. As in the dominant, liberal post-World War II narrative, Hitler and Nazism are unquestionably representations of evil in Russian rhetoric. A law passed in 2014 makes rehabilitation of Nazism punishable by a large fine or several years in jail. In contrast, the Russian extreme and far-Right are ambivalent about their ideological debt to fascism and Nazism, terms seldom distinguished by the Russian public (Laruelle 2010). In Italy, Interior Minister Matteo Salvini from the far-Right party Lega recently paraphrased Mussolini on the anniversary of his birth (“so many enemies, so much honour”); in the speeches of US alt-Right’s Richard Spencer, references to Hitler bound. In Russia, however, the memory of the “Great Patriotic War” – World War II – stands central in public consciousness due to the enormous human sacrifices. The war was naturally a pivotal reference point during Soviet times, and in the Post-Soviet 1990s, it remained the only central national myth (cf. Miller 2012). “Never Again” is a common trope with the current regime, used both as a reminder of

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Russia’s sacrifices and as a way of othering those who seemingly disrespect that sacrifice. Radical right-wing groups in Ukraine, for example, are frequently denounced by the Russian state and media as Nazis (cf. Holm 2016). In Putin’s words during a military parade marking the end of the war: “The defeat of the Nazis was a tremendous triumphant Victory (…) All countries, all people back then understood that the outcome of World War II was determined by  the  Soviet Union, that this great sacrificial feat was achieved by our soldiers and our people” (Kremlin.ru 2018). There is thus little sense of the “radical sense of oblivion towards historical tragedies and traumas” that the introductory chapter speaks of with reference to the 1930s and 40s; on the contrary, those collective traumas stand front and center in the regime’s rhetoric concerning the twentieth century. Whilst subsequent Russian governments have been far more ambiguous in dealing with Russia’s own World War II atrocities, including whether and how to honour Stalin, there is no doubt which side the state presents itself as being on when it comes to the memory of Nazi atrocities – albeit again with little discussion of the Soviet regime’s complicity in those atrocities. But there is also something distinctly ahistorical about the regime’s representation of the “true” values of Russia. In their attempt to link the spiritual foundation of Russia directly to the church and its representation of “traditional values” in spheres such as the family, it disregards the long Soviet period during which liberal family laws were introduced to liberate women from patriarchal family structures. Of course, legislation was not enough to change deeply engrained habits, meaning that women often took on the double burden of working full-time outside the house as well as having most of the responsibility at home. Still, the ideology of the Soviet system was radically different from the image that is now cast of Russia as the long-time preserver of traditional values, of a continued story since the Christianization in 988, or, in Putin’s words, traditional values derived from the Church as the “continuity of  our thousand-year history.” Thus, not only does the current regime construct its conservative self through the othering of a secular and liberal Europe, but also through the othering and erasure of elements of its own, historical pasts. This form of erasure is probably inevitable when one national myth is elevated at the expense of others. But clearly Russia’s conservative turn and its relationship to both

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liberal order and liberal memory are more complicated than what first meets the eye. ac k nowl e d g m e n t s I am grateful to my old mentor Pål Kolstø at the University of Oslo, as well as the book’s editor Vibeke Schou Tjalve and the editors at McGill-Queen’s University Press, for excellent feedback on this chapter. Thanks are also due to the reviewers and the other authors involved in this book for helpful feedback at earlier stages.

no t e s 1 Notedly a man, despite the national personification of Mother Russia as female. 2 For a discussion of the historical lineages of the “true” versus “false” Europe trope, see Neumann (2017). 3 Notably plural, as Pål Kolstø so rightly pointed out. 4 See for example Pew Research Center (2014). 5 For more detailed accounts of this trope, see Engström (2014) and Neumann (2017). 6 On Russian messianism and the idea of the Third Rome, see Berdyaev (1979). 7 For an excellent account, see Østbø (2017). 8 For a great study of the discursive construction of Chechens as the enemy, see Wilhelmsen (2017).

r e f e r e nce s Berdyaev, Nikolaj. 1979. The Russian Idea. Westport: Greenwood Press. Bryanski, Gleb. 2011. “Putin Likens U.N. Libya Resolution to Crusades.” Reuters, 21 March. Buchanan, Patrick. 2014. “Whose Side Is God on Now?” Creators, 4 April. Dahl, Göran. 1999. Radical Conservatism and the Future of Politics. London: Sage. Dreyfuss, Bob. 2018. “Is Steve Bannon Trump’s Link to Putin and the European Far Right?” The Nation. 19 March. https://www.thenation. com/article/is-steve-bannon-trumps-link-to-putin-and-the-european-farright/ last accessed 17 August 2019. Dueholm, Natalia. 2017. “New Polish pm Sees Return to Christian Roots

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as Only Way to Stop Europe’s Decline.” Life Site News, 14 December. https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/new-polish-pm-sees-returnto-christian-roots-as-only-way-to-stop-europes-de last accessed 17 August 2019. Engström, Maria. 2014. “Contemporary Russian Messianism and New Russian Foreign Policy.” Contemporary Security Policy 35 (3): 356-79. Garbagnoli, Sara. 2018. “Matteo Salvini, Renaturalizing the Racial and Sexual Boundaries of Democracy.” Open Democracy, 1 October. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/can-europe-make-it/matteosalvini-renaturalizing-racial-and-sexual-boundaries-of-dem/ last accessed 17 August 2019. Gledhill, Ruth. 2016. “Franklin Graham Explains Why He Is Moving Christian Persecution Summit from Russia.” Christian Today, 4 August. https://www.christiantoday.com/article/franklin-graham-explains-whyhe-is-moving-christian-persecution-summit-from-russia/92321.htm last accessed 17 August 2019. Graham, Franklin. 2014. “Putin’s Olympic Controversy.” Decision Magazine, 28 February. https://billygraham.org/decision-magazine/ march-2014/putins-olympic-controversy/ last accessed 17 August 2019. Holm, Minda. 2016. “Legitimering Gjennom (Selektiv) Felles Fortid: Russisk Bruk av Historie i Ukraina-konflikten.” Nordisk Østforum 30 (4): 214-37. – 2019. “Mutual Lack of Introspection and the ‘Russia Factor’ in the Liberal West.” New Perspectives 27 (1): 7-14. Holm, Minda and Ole Jacob Sending. 2018. “States before Relations: On Misrecognition and the Bifurcated Regime of Sovereignty.” Review of International Studies 44 (5): 829-47. Kremlin.ru. 2013. Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club.” President of Russia, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19243. – 2013. “Speech at a Celebratory Event Marking the 225th Anniversary of the Founding of the Central Spiritual Administration of Muslims in Russia.” http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/19473. – 2015. “70th Session of the UN General Assembly.” President of Russia, 28 September. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50385. – 2016. “Monument to Vladimir the Great Opened in Moscow on Unity Day.” President of Russia, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/ news/53211. – 2016. “Visit to Christ the Saviour Cathedral.” President of Russia, http:// en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/53305.

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– 2017. “Meeting of Russian Orthodox Church Bishops’ Council.” President of Russia, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/56255. – 2018. “Military Parade on Red Square.” President of Russia, 8 May, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/57436. Laruelle, Marlène. 2010. “The Ideological Shift on the Russian Radical Right: From Demonizing the West to Fear of Migrants.” Problems of Post-Communism 57 (6): 19-31. Laruelle, Marlène and Natalia Yudina. 2018. “Islamophobia in Russia: Trends and Societal Context.” In Religion and Violence in Russia: Context, Manifestations, and Policy, Olga Oliker, ed., 43-63. csis : Rowman and Littlefield. Lazarus, Latoya. 2011. “Heteronationalism, Human Rights, and the Nation-State: Positioning Sexuality in the Jamaican Constitutional Reform Process.” Canadian Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Studies / Revue canadienne des études latino-américaines et caraïbes 36 (71): 71-108. Miller, Alexei. 2012, “Istoritsjeskaja Politika v Rossii: Novyj Povorot?” In Alexei Miller and Maria Lipman, eds. Istoritsjeskaja Politika v XXI Veke. Moskva: Novoje Literaturnoje Obozrenije, 328-67. Montgomery, Peter. 2017. “World Congress of Families Leaders Embrace Hungary’s Anti-Democratic Strongman.” Right Wing Watch, 23 May. https://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/world-congress-of-familiesleaders-embrace-hungarys-anti-democratic-strongman/ last accessed 17 August 2019. Neumann, Iver B. 2017. Russia and the Idea of Europe: A Study in Identity and International Relations. New York: Routledge. Nexon, Daniel and Paul Musgrave. 2016. “American Liberalism and the Imperial Temptation.” In Empire and International Order, Noel Parker, ed., 131-48. London: Ashgate. Østbø, Jardar. 2017. “Securitizing ‘Spiritual-moral Values’ in Russia.” Post-Soviet Affairs 33 (3): 200-16. Pew Research Center. 2014. “Russians Return to Religion, But Not to Church.” 10 February. Sharafutdinova, Gulnaz. 2014. “The Pussy Riot Affair and Putin’s Démarche from Sovereign Democracy to Sovereign Morality.” Nationalities Papers 42 (4): 615-21. Simpson, Gerry. 2001. “Two Liberalisms.” European Journal of International Law 12 (3): 537-72. Stroop, Christopher. 2016. “A Right-Wing International? Russian Social Conservatism, the World Congress of Families, and the Global Culture

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Wars in Historical Context.” The Public Eye, Winter Issue, 4-22. https://www.uibk.ac.at/projects/postsecular-conflicts/downloads/pe_ winter16_stroop-1.pdf. Teimouri, Heidarali and Surya P. Subedi. 2018. “Responsibility to Protect and the International Military Intervention in Libya in International Law: What Went Wrong and What Lessons Could Be Learnt from It?” Journal of Conflict and Security Law 23 (1): 3-32. Wilhelmsen, Julie. 2017. Russia’s Securitization of Chechnya: How War Became Acceptable. London: Routledge. Vinocur, John. 2014. “Vladimir Putin’s Woman in Paris.” Wall Street Journal, 26 May.

6

German Memory Culture between the Right and the Mainstream Jesper Vind

For obvious reasons, Germany is perhaps the European country in which recent national history has been the most scrutinized, politicized, and discussed. Indeed, it is doubtful that there is any other country in which a malignant history has played such a decisive role in everything from policies on education and culture to foreign and defence policy (Steinbach 2008). This obsession with the past concerns more than just the era or legacy of national socialism, and yet every recollection seems, sooner or later, to return to the period of 1933 to 45. No matter what historical figure or event is celebrated or memorialized – be it Bismarck or the anniversaries of 1968 – the most pressing public issue quickly tends to become the relationship of that figure or event with the years of Nazi rule. Looming large above German conversations over national identity since the end of World War II, in other words, has been a memorial culture centered on that which German historian Friedrich Meinecke in 1946 named “Die deutsche Katastrophe” (Meinecke 1946). This chapter concerns itself with the question of whether this sense of insurmountable “catastrophe” – like the “Never Again” discourse with which it has long gone hand in hand – is now somehow challenged, and in ways that differ markedly from the recurring issue of whether Germany is about to return to “normalcy” (Berger 2009). The most immediate reason to pose that question, of course, is the recent rise of the German New Right populist party, Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany – a f d ) and its call for an end to what it considers a distorted and overblown German “culture of

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remembrance.” This point is explicitly mentioned in the a f d party program and party leader Alexander Gauland has gone so far as to bluster that “Hitler and the Nazis are merely a bird turd in the more than 1000 years of successful German history” (Zeit Online 2018). Instead, the a f d wants to replace the “current narrowing of the German culture of remembrance to the time of National Socialism” with “a broader understanding, encompassing the positive, identity-establishing aspects of German history” (Alternative für Deutschland 2017, 47). The a f d , in other words, is eager to return the narrative of Germany to one of greatness. “Like all other right-wingers,” as the historian Volker Weiss puts it, the party “regards the critical treatment of the German past as a hindrance to returning to the national greatness which is sought after in these circles” (Mass 2017). The recipient of 13% of the votes in the 2017 German federal election, the party is the third largest in the German parliament, and though polls suggest that its most extreme statements regarding German history do not enjoy support even amongst its own voters (Menkens 2018), its wish to rethink the German relationship with history does seem to reflect a broader public and political trend. As I shall argue in this chapter, history – and particularly the traumatic Nazi years – are absolutely central to German identity and politics and have been crucial to the establishment and formation of post-war German foreign policy. As I also want to argue though, not merely the far Right but the mainstream too seems at some sort of new direction. My inroad to this direction moves through the landscape of what is arguably the heartland of German memory culture and the themes of guilt, shame, trauma, responsibility, and anti-militarism which inform it. To truly understand what is at stake in the disruptions taking place within contemporary German memory politics, it is necessary to grasp – even “sense” – the physical and material reality of the Nazi era, very much present throughout the streets of its capital: to take “a stroll” if one will, through the streets of Berlin and the ongoing public, political, and intellectual debate over what monuments to history ought to define them. In these streets – full of buildings still marked by the ravages of war – you get a sense of how history, and the continued if now challenged public policy on using history as an instructive moral “vaccine” against repeating the Nazi era, permeates public space and political conversation.

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v e g e ta r ia n s a n d peaceni ks Before venturing such a “stroll” however, it is useful to get a slightly broader overview of the kind of change currently taking place in how Germany narrates and remembers its historical past and its implications. This change concerns not only a rising far-Right but is manifest in more centrist or mainstream circles too. A telling example comes from former Social Democratic Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel. “In a world full of meat-eaters, vegetarians have a tough time,” he commented in January 2018 to Der Spiegel: a comment that was less about eating habits and more about the role Germany and Europe played in the world, implying how the burdensome German historical legacy must not be allowed to hamper foreign policy to an unreasonable degree (Hoffmann and Brinkbäumer 2018). Gabriel invoked the metaphor to label Germany and the EU as picky eaters, far too focused on values-talk and not concerned enough with the struggle for die-hard national interests. The comment was made during Gabriel’s exit from the Foreign Office, leaving him free to speak his mind. Upon his resignation Gabriel even went as far as to state that, “The danger emanating from Germany isn’t military dominance, but the dominance of inaction” (von Rohr and Sandberg 2018). And while acknowledging co-responsibility for this German passivity, Gabriel ultimately pointed to the enduring impact of the Nazi legacy: For decades, we have been used to the fact that the U.S. was responsible for taking care of the unpleasant things in the world. Now Trump is criticizing us for not spending enough money on our military. Part of the truth, however, is that the U.S. wanted exactly that for a very long time. They were worried that too much military power in Germany could provoke the next world war. I once told Tillerson [US Secretary of State, 2017-18, ed.], I don’t know what you are complaining about, you raised us for 70 years to be peaceniks. Now that’s what we are and you’re surprised. He laughed. Gabriel’s use of the somewhat condescending 1960s slang expression “peaceniks” is here telling: a choice of language which reflects that not only its allies but Gabriel himself now consider Germany a kind of “foreign policy hippie” – an über-moralizing post-45 culture

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that Gabriel clearly wants to do away with. Indeed, reading through the potent rhetoric aired by Gabriel – take a quote like “moral rigorism can be just as wrong as ignoring morals” – it is impossible not to note a certain semblance with parts of the anti-liberal criticism aired by contemporary new Right critics. Not unlike the Right’s diagnosis of contemporary European democracies as trapped in a state of confusion, paralysis, or outright castration – a diagnosis described in more details in the introduction to this book (Tjalve 2020) – Gabriel seems to air a new kind of mainstream frustration with German “apathy.” It would certainly be wrong to equate that frustration squarely with new Right rhetoric. But the question is whether Gabriel’s words suggest that German society as a whole is at a crossroads, reconsidering what “Never Again” can mean in the future. In this same vein, Germany has increased its military spending by 30% from 2014 to 2019 – even if its contribution to nato remains below that of France, the UK, and Poland (measured as a per cent of gnp , Shalal and Siebold, 2018). And though a 2017 poll revealed that a slight majority of Germans would rather abandon Eastern nato countries than go to war with Russia, a rudimentary survey of recent debates amongst German policy elites also reveals that these increasingly push for Germany to become a stronger Gestaltungsmacht (shaping power). It is clear, in other words, that Germany is currently undergoing a profound negotiation of the Holocaust-centered culture of remembrance – also referred to as the Vergangenheitsbewaltingung – which has characterized its national identity and foreign policy since 1945. And so, the stroll begins.

“ n e v e r ag a in ” as german dna We begin our walk in Scheunenviertel, a neighborhood with a very Jewish past and present. Upon nearing the great synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, a gigantic golden dome glistens breathtakingly in the sun, so that you practically forget that it was in ruins for many years. First, the Nazis razed it on Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938. It was then bombed during World War II. It was this fate which inspired a sign written in large, golden letters on the wall: Vergesst es nie (Never forget), a message that has become part of the dna of the modern German state. Since the war, German chancellors and presidents have repeatedly declared that Nazism and

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the war must never be forgotten. They have willingly referred to how the fathers of the German constitution wrote in the preface to the 1949 Constitution that they oblige the country to “respect human rights,” to “serve world peace,” and, as stated in the first paragraphs, that “human dignity is inviolable” and that “politically persecuted persons have the right to asylum” (Deutscher Bundestag 1949). The dna of the modern German state, however, is also marked by a sense of accountability for Hitler, and for Germany’s persecution of the Jewish people. When Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Israel in 2008, she made clear in a speech to the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, that “the Shoah fills us Germans with shame” and that she “most firmly believe[s] that only if Germany accepts its enduring responsibility for the moral disaster in its history will we be able to build a humane future. Or, to put it another way, respect for our common humanity is rooted in our responsibility for the past.” The chancellor also made clear that part of the German “reason of state” is that “Israel’s security will never be open to negotiation” (Merkel 2008). In practical terms, this has also meant that Germany has long been one of Israel’s most important weapons suppliers. Another issue that is not open to negotiation is the security of Jewish and Israeli institutions in Germany. Outside the synagogue on Oranienburger Strasse, a small police-shed made of plexiglass is manned twenty-four hours a day with armed officers. And similar security measures are found when turning off of Oranienburger Strasse and down Tucholskystrasse, where the Central Council of Jews is located. A couple of police officers are standing outside the Council when a car drives past looking like it is preparing to park. One of the police officers yells out loudly: “Hey – what are you doing? No parking here!” Tucholskystrasse is full of Jewish life, boutiques, and cafes. But it is also full of Jewish death. I count ten Stolpersteine (literally: stumbling stones) in the street – small, engraved bronze plaques in the sidewalk. One of the plaques laconically states: “Here lived Salomea Höxter. Born in 1888. Deported 1942. Presumed dead in Majdanek.” There are now more than 8,000 stumbling stones in Berlin. German artist Gunter Demnig, the man originally behind them, explained the concept with a quotation from the Jewish holy book, the Talmud: “A person is only forgotten when their name is forgotten” (Demnig).

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h o u r z e ro i n 1945 Strolling on past Tucholskystrasse and a kilometer further along the River Spree, you pass a number of buildings marked by World War II bullet holes. Finally, you arrive at the Government District, with the colossal chancellery, postmodern office buildings, and the old Reichstag, which once again houses the German parliament. A couple of Chinese tourists are taking pictures of a powerful symbol of German reunification which stands close to Merkel’s Chancellery. It is a monumental sculpture entitled “Berlin,” created by the Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida and inaugurated together with the new chancellery in the years 2000-01. The sculpture consists of two iron figures with “fingers” almost touching one another, raising associations of something divided that is growing closer and is to be united. Over by the Reichstag, a number of school groups are in line for a guided tour of the “engine room” of German democracy, followed by a visit to the glass dome that has become one of Berlin’s greatest tourist attractions. The Reichstag is associated with major events in world history. It burned down in 1933, the flames symbolizing the downfall of the Weimar Republic. The red Soviet flag came thereafter, which flew over the ruins of the building in 1945 and symbolized the victory over German fascism. In 1999, the building was re-opened with British architect Norman Foster’s futuristic glass dome as the political center of reunited Germany: the Bundestag. The transparent design of the dome symbolizes modern, enlightened democracy and the reckoning with Nazism. And to ensure that the parliamentarians are also confronted with the “dark side of German history,” as former President of the Bundestag, Wolfgang Thierse, wrote in 1999, over 100 items of graffiti written by Soviet soldiers in Cyrillic letters in 1945 have been allowed to remain on the Reichstag walls. There are typical Russian names, such as Ivanov, Pjotr, and Viktor, together with foreboding texts: “The Russians were here and always beat the Germans.” Nevertheless, some of the graffiti was too offensive and was not allowed to remain, such as: “The Russian saber is in the German sheath” (Bornhöft 1999). When standing here, it becomes self-evident that 1945 is regarded as “Hour Zero” in German memorial culture. In Tiergarten Park some 300 meters away, there is a Soviet war monument. Here too, one gets an immediate sense of the winds of

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history. The monument is topped off with an eight-meter tall bronze sculpture of a hyper-masculine, advancing Soviet soldier flanked by two Soviet T-34 tanks from the Battle of Berlin. It was erected in 1945, made from stones from Hitler’s shattered residence, Reich Chancellery, around which lie the graves of more than 2,000 soldiers and a plaque inscribed: “Eternal glory to heroes who fell in battle with the German fascist invaders for the freedom and independence of the Soviet Union.” Until 1994, this memorial was guarded by a Soviet (later Russian) honour guard. Over time, the monument has been vandalized and local protests have arisen. The German state, however, remains committed to maintaining it, guarding it, and providing it with fresh flowers.

ato n e m e n t a n d t h e day of li berati on In the first years following the war, the German authorities attempted simply to ignore the legacy of national socialism. War criminals were rarely convicted. Old Nazis were allowed to occupy top positions, not least in the western part of the divided Germany. The first German Chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, from the Christian Democratic cdu, employed Hans Globke to lead the creation of the chancellor’s office in the West German government city of Bonn; in 1935, Globke had authored the legal commentaries to the Nazi race laws. In the 1950s, Germany did not look back. Thoughts and efforts were invested in reconstruction and new prosperity. While the so-called German Democratic Republic in the east viewed itself as the descendants of “anti-fascist Germany” – and therefore acquitted itself – the so-called Bonn Republic chose to pay three billion D-marks in reparations to Jewish organizations around the world as compensation for persecution, slave labour, and confiscated Jewish property. This agreement was made in 1952 between Israel and Chancellor Adenauer. It fell into place after American pressure on the Chancellor and an intense, emotional Bundestag debate. These were atonements – or more accurately: reparations (Wiedergutmachung) – that 44% of the West German citizens regarded as being “entirely needless,” according to one opinion poll (Bohr 2013). German author Thomas Mann showed greater foresight, articulating a mantra in 1953 that would go on to become part of the official German self-understanding never to strive “for a German Europe, but for a European Germany” (Øhrgaard 2009, 46). Social Democratic

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Chancellor Willy Brandt echoed it when in 1970, he travelled to Poland and repented for the Nazi crimes by kneeling before a memorial for Jewish victims in Warsaw. An opinion poll found that only 41% of all Western Germans supported him, and 48% regarded his kneeling and attempt at reconciliation as “exaggerated.” The gesture resulted in many accusing Brandt of treason (Sontheimer 2010). Nevertheless, the soul-searching continued in Western Germany. On the fortieth anniversary of the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1985, President Richard von Weizsäcker from the cdu gave a speech in the Bundestag. The speech was a landmark in the sense that it was the first time anyone from the highest levels of authority said publicly that the defeat on 8 May 1945 was not a “catastrophe” – which had otherwise long been the common term – but rather a “day of liberation” (von Weizsäcker 1985). To the contrary, von Weizsäcker stressed that the “catastrophe” had occurred in 1933, in connection with Hitler seizing power. He emphasized further that all Germans continued to bear liability for the crimes of Nazi Germany, and not least the Holocaust. The extermination of the Jews was historically unprecedented, and Germany bears a unique responsibility to prevent such events from ever happening again (Øhrgaard 2009).

t he

a n d consti tuti onal pat r io t i sm

historikerstreit

Shortly after the Weizsäcker speech, the so-called Historikerstreit (the Historians’ Controversy) broke out in the highbrow West German newspapers, where scores of German historians and other academics wrote hundreds of passionate op-eds and letters to the editor in the years 1986-87. The dispute flared up when left-leaning liberal philosopher Jürgen Habermas blamed a number of bourgeois, conservative-leaning history professors for arguing that Germany was no worse than the Soviet Union on crucial points during World War II (Habermas 2012). This criticism was directed not least towards Professor Ernst Nolte, who had claimed the Holocaust to be a result of Germany pre-empting a Soviet attack and thus defending Europe against Stalin’s Gulags. The crimes of the Soviet Union were thus used to relativize and partially justify Germany’s own (Nolte 1986). According to Habermas, these “apologies” for Nazi crimes, as he called them, were part of an attempt by those on the German right wing to construct

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a more nationally oriented identity. In contrast, Habermas’ central argument was that the history of the German nation was useless as the basis for German identity, as it had resulted in fascism and genocide. Habermas insisted that German identity should instead be built on a Western “constitutional patriotism,” its faith in universal principles regarding human rights, and its commitment to peace and democracy as expressed in the German constitution (Grundgesetz). Habermas and his allies ultimately achieved victory regarding history policy, as it was established in public opinion – and especially imprinted in the German education system – that the crimes of Nazi Germany cannot be relativized. Period!1 In some sense therefore, the a f d ’s profound resentment of this apologetic view of history can be read as a direct consequence of the historians’ dispute in the 1980s. Habermas’ ideas regarding constitutional patriotism also had a great impact on German social debate, and manifest themselves physically next to the large office branches of the Bundestag along the River Spree in Berlin. Here, on a busy pedestrian promenade, is an installation entitled Grundgesetz 49 created by Israeli artist Dani Karavan consisting of nineteen large glass plates upon which the first nineteen paragraphs from the 1949 constitution have been laser engraved. In green lettering, the first glass plate features the words, “Human dignity shall be inviolable. To respect and protect it shall be the duty of all state authority.” And all the beautiful words light up as darkness falls.

t h e l if e - l ie o f auschwi tz A few minutes’ walk away is the newly restored Brandenburg Gate, which stands as an important symbol of how the Germans have not followed Habermas in terms of skipping their identification with national history. It should be noted that a 2018 poll found that 63% of all German citizens believe that being German is an “important part of my identity,” while 53% demand to “finally again be allowed to be proud of being German” (Rees and Zick 2018). According to Heinrich August Winkler, arguably Germany’s leading historian and one of Habermas’ comrades in the historians’ dispute in the 1980, this proves that Jürgen Habermas and the other liberals on the left were completely wrong in their time. Winkler later pointed out that many of those on the left had actually hoped that “Brandenburg Gate would forever remain a symbol of divided Germany” (Winkler 1998).2

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According to Winkler, the problem was that in the 1980s, West German liberals and those on the left interpreted German history “as an argument against the idea of a German nation.” For it was a history resulting in Auschwitz and the like, and many therefore chose to view the division of Germany as punishment; as “atonement for Auschwitz.” Winkler characterizes their political logic as follows: “The Germans ought to stop feeling like a nation and strive instead, to be good Europeans and citizens of the world” But Winkler insists that this logic was both selfish and narrow-minded: The fact that “only the West Germans, but not the East Germans, had this chance did not disturb the old West German left wing. The thesis that the division was punishment for Auschwitz, had become their “life-lie.” This “life-lie” broke apart on the evening of 9 November 1989, not least at the Brandenburg Gate. Here, it was possible to observe almost biblical scenes in which East Germans and West Germans embraced one another all along the wall, in front of the national symbol. The Brandenburg Gate had been erected some 200 years earlier as a neoclassical city gate. It first became a national symbol after Napoleon’s invading army rode triumphantly through the gate and took its great “Quadriga of Victory” back to Paris as a spoil of war. After invading Paris in 1814, the Prussian army brought the quadriga back. After World War II, the boundary between the Soviet and British occupation zones ran through the gate, which rendered it the very symbol of the division of Germany during the Cold War, which was further emphasized by the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961. It was therefore also the perfect backdrop when US President Ronald Reagan visited Berlin in 1987 and delivered his renowned words of encouragement to his Soviet counterpart, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” When the Wall fell in 1989, many people around the world began asking whether the Germans would again become enthralled by nationalism, demand the revision of borders, and dominate Europe. In the wake of reunification in 1990, however, the Germans had their hands full simply getting East and West to grow together. As historian Timothy Garton Ash has stated, most Germans were more than happy just being “rich and free, in a kind of Greater Switzerland, with high-quality exports and plenty of sunny holidays on the Mediterranean” (Ash 2013). Most Germans didn’t mind, therefore, that the reunification agreements made with the former victors of

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World War II meant that the German military was more than halved in the 1990s. They also went along with giving up their strong currency. For decades, the D-Mark had ruled the European economy so absolutely that the French had started calling it the “German nuclear bomb” (Rödder 2018); nevertheless, the German currency was swallowed up by the euro in the 1990s. This was “against German interests,” as conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl from cdu admitted behind closed doors (Küsters and Hoffman 1998, 638). French President François Mitterand’s intention with the euro had allegedly been to “keep France in the driver’s seat of Europe, and Germany in the passenger seat.” But it “ended up doing the precise opposite. It put Germany in the driver’s seat as never before,” writes Timothy Garton Ash, and points out the dilemma in which this placed the Germans: “As Merkel herself once wryly remarked to me: we’re damned if we don’t lead, and damned if we do” (Ash 2913).

p ru s s ia n g l o ry a n d the culture o f r e m e m b rance Continuing our stroll from the Brandenburg Gate and down along the eastern end of the splendid boulevard Unter den Linden, we arrive at a place signaling further German self-consciousness: a colossal project restoring the old national history now coming to occupy a position of greater honour and dignity (and defying Habermas’ concerns). This concerns the old castle square, where the noise of construction is heard around the clock. Here, the old castle that had housed Prussian kings and German emperors is being rebuilt. The castle was bombed during World War II, and the communist gdr regime blew what was left to bits and pieces in 1950. Next, the grand Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) was constructed – a 1970s-style montage including an array of concrete elements, asbestos, and huge bronze-framed windows. The Republic Palace housed the gdr Volkskammer (People’s Chamber), a pseudo parliament, which was torn down after reunification, presumably because the new, Western-oriented authorities wanted to erase this distinctive item of gdr history from memory. But rather than using this place to proclaim a new monarchy or crown a new emperor, modern research institutions and congress facilities are being built together with magnificent museum

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exhibitions, including the renowned Museum of Asian Art and the Ethnological Museum, now under the same roof. Exhibitions will be arranged that focus on scientific discoveries made in Germany. Nonetheless, as many of the facades are similar to those of the old castle, Prussian glory will also be returning to the center of the German capital. Almost directly opposite the construction of the castle is a neoclassical building, the Neue Wache (New Guardhouse), designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Salamo Sachs and first inaugurated after the Napoleonic Wars. Neue Wache played a major role when Germany was reunited, as the first chancellor for the reunited Germany, Helmut Kohl, wanted to use the building as the official memorial the victims of World War II. The memorial was re-opened in 1993 and is primarily a gloomy, dark room in which the light falls from above on a dramatic sculpture of a mother holding her dead son. In front of the sculpture is an enlarged bronze copy of a Käthe Kollwitz sculpture from 1937, upon which is written that the memorial is dedicated to “the victims of war and tyranny.” Strangely enough, this covers both the victims of the two world wars and the period during the gdr dictatorship. This monument triggered extensive debate about who the memorialized victims actually were. Jewish organizations, for example, were less than enthusiastic about the mother-son sculpture on the grounds that there were not too many Jewish mothers remaining after World War II to mourn their dead sons. There were also protests over the notion that the dead soldiers in the German army were now also heralded as victims equal to the Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and resistance fighters who died in concentration camps. Historian Reinhart Koselleck pointed out that the memorial actually created a kind of bond between victims and perpetrators (Koselleck 1998). Helmut Kohl felt misunderstood, and his spokesperson told the press that “one should not forget that many German soldiers did not participate in the war voluntarily.”

t he h o l o c au s t a n d t h e memori al of shame The bitter disagreement regarding the use of Neue Wache meant that another historical project was pushed forward faster: a distinctive Holocaust memorial in the new and old German capital. It was named the “Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe” at its

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inauguration in 2005. And this is the point to which you return after walking back along Unter den Linden and a little to the south on Hannah-Arendt-Strasse, named after the German Jewish author of the thesis regarding the “banality of evil.” There is a massive area between the American embassy and the dozens of tourist buses, covered by 2,711 large, grey concrete stones, which hundreds of visitors are walking among. Below the ground is an exhibition featuring the names of all of the registered Jewish victims of the Holocaust. This memorial might well be the most sacrosanct place in all of contemporary Germany. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely therefore – it has been subject to criticism or smeared on countless occasions. a f d leader in Thüringen, Björn Höcke, delivered such criticism in a January 2017 speech in Dresden. Höcke had previously created controversy by speaking against the immigration of “the vigorous, African breeding type” (Geyer 2015). Now he attacked the Holocaust memorial, asserting that “We Germans are the only people in the world who have erected a memorial of shame in the heart of our capital.” While the words were slightly ambiguous, the context made it clear that Höcke was criticizing the very existence of the memorial (Höcke 2017). He claimed that the German people continue to find themselves in a “mental state of total defeat,” and he pointed out how the many memorials in Germany commemorating the crimes committed in the Nazi era render the country’s history “miserable and ridiculous.” The leading a f d politician added, in strongly nationalistic undertones, that the Germans “need nothing less than a 180-degree turn” in their approach to history. Yakov Hadas-Handelsman, The Israeli ambassador to Germany, demanded that Höcke recant: “Such declarations do not belong in a democratic Germany, which today stands for diversity, tolerance and freedom. An apology to all of the victims of Nazism would be appropriate, and above all the six million Jews who lost their lives as a result of industrial mass murder” (Jüdische Allgemeine 2017). But even though opinion polls indicated that a majority of Germans disagreed with Björn Höcke’s statements, he was not excluded by the a f d leadership. In January 2017, most political commentators felt that the passivity of the party leadership would harm it significantly – possibly even destroy it. But the a f d rode the storm, and moved into the Bundestag for the first time with a surprisingly good election result in September 2017.

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The rabid Höcke is by no means the only German to criticize the Holocaust memorial in stark terms. The great German author Martin Walser also criticized the memorial in 1998, while it was still under construction. In an acceptance speech for a prestigious award he received in Frankfurt, he warned against using Auschwitz as a “moral club” with which to beat all of those who regarded post-reunified Germans as “normal people” and Germany as a “normal society.” Further to these crass words, he referred to the construction of the coming memorial in Berlin as “a monumentalization of shame.” He said that the project seemed to be the expression of a “negative nationalism” or a “banality of goodness” (Walser 1998). Martin Walser’s words were challenged by many, including the chairman of the Jewish community in Germany, Ignatz Bubis, who called Walser a “spiritual arsonist,” and in the course of the subsequent debate, several referred to Walser as representing a new “intellectual nationalism” in Germany working to suppress the memory of Nazi crimes. Nobel laureate Günter Grass also touched upon this vital issue in his 2002 novel Im Krebsgang (Crabwalk). Here, the author dealt yet again with the Germans’ relationship to World War II, and his protagonist says, “History, or to be more precise, the history we Germans have repeatedly mucked up, is a clogged toilet. We flush and we flush, but the shit keeps rising.” Regardless of what Germans might do to come to amends with their problematic past, Grass implies, “It never ends,” as the final line of the novel declares.

c o n c l u s i on Does that observation continue to apply? Will German political culture, as Heinrich August Winkler asks in the Historikerstreit, “be forever in the shadow of Hitler?” And will it, as leading historian Andreas Rödder puts it, continue to “see itself as a civilian power, a totally damaged nation due to its experiences as a nation-state in the years stretching from Bismarck to Hitler” (Rödder in interview with Vind 2018 (b)). Winkler – with reference to a phrase first coined by German political scientist Jan-Werner Müller – notes that the Germans seem almost to breathe the air of a “Holocaust-centered, anti-nationalist, national civil religion” (Müller 2000). And Rödder portrays this dominant German ideology as expressive of a particular German Sonderweg (Special Path) – an exceptionalism so detrimental to modern German politics that it has, in a sense, though

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unintentionally, invited radical nationalism back in. “All other European countries continue to see the nation as the highest sensible expression of popular sovereignty, and no Brazilian, American, Russian, Chinese, Briton, or Frenchman would ever entertain the thought that the age of the nation-state is over. The German denial of the nation has unfortunately contributed to a political right-wing radicalization in the country, where it is left to a f d to embrace Bismarck in a strongly right-wing nationalistic manner, which is obviously a thing of the distant past.” As this essay has begun to unpack, though, the “Never Again” discourse may not be as dominant, uniform, or unchanging in the realm of mainstream German politics as it once was. Statements such as those quoted from Sigmar Gabriel above indicate that signs of a change are appearing. On the far-Right, political leaders have called the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin “a disgrace,” insisting that Germans “have the right to be proud of the performance of German soldiers in the two world wars,” and that Germany needs to make a “180-degree turn” with respect to its policies on history and memorial culture. And on the mainstream part of the political spectrum, Gabriel is not the only former minister of foreign affairs who is now of the opinion that the peacenik mentality has become too much: “Indeed, defense policy easily makes your hands dirty, so while our cousins on the other side of the Atlantic managed the military, we managed to criticize them,” as Joschka Fischer – who headed the Foreign Office from 1998 to 2005 – commented last year. That criticism was aimed, not least, at the traditional pacifism of his peers in the Green Party3 (Vind 2018a). Ultimately though, the “centrist” call for German action bears little semblance to the kind of nationalism which informed the prewar period. In many ways, it is but a call for rethinking or reshaping the long prevailing “never alone and never again” paradigm (Haftendorn 2006, 1). “Germany doesn’t need nationalism,” Fischer – in tune with much of mainstream Germany – argues, because “nothing has ruined Germany as much. When I hear the a f d ’s slogans, I see the cities in which I grew up. Cities where we played in the ruins. Our toys were the remains from the war. It is a very strong memory for me.” Therefore, Fischer’s recipe for Germany to be able both to retain its historical consciousness and to develop an ability to act is a far more potent Europe: “The Germans have a very heavy history, but also a massive potential. It has always been the case that Germany

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brought money along to EU summit meetings and paid the bills. But this has not hurt Germany. We can be proud of this and we should continue to be so. If Germany joins together with France, we can create a strong Europe together that will enable us to play a role in the new world order. Should that happen, German history will have attained further meaning.” Clearly, that vision is miles away from what you hear far-Right leaders, such as Gauland and Höcke, circulate. But Fischer’s and Gabriel’s thoughts are indicative of the fact that a f d ’s arrival on the scene has catalyzed profound critical reflection in the political center about whether the long-term consequences of “Die deutsche Katastrophe” should be military paralysis and a “vegetarian” or “shameful” foreign policy in the long shadows of Hitler. not e s 1 A point of view often reiterated by contemporary historians. See e.g. Wehler (2008, 287) “The self-critical attitude used to defend the political culture that had been painstakingly established by the Federal Republic.” 2 See also Winkler (2010). 3 Fischer’s words are from the book fair in Leipzig 2018, where he presented his book about the decline of the West (in German: Der Abstieg des Westens: Europa in der neuen Weltordnung des 21. Jahrhunderts). Cited from: Vind 2018 (a).

r e f e r e n ce s Alternative für Deutschland. 2017. “Manifesto for Germany.” The Political Program of the Alternative for Germany. Ash, Timothy Garton. 2013. “The New German Question.” The New York Review of Books, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2013/08/15/ new-german-question/. Berger, Thomas. 2009. “The Power of Memory and Memories of Power: The Cultural Parameters of German Foreign Policy-Making since 1945.” In Memory and Power in Post-War Europe, Jan Werner-Müller, ed., 76-99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bohr, Felix. 2013. “Was Adenauer verschwieg.” Spiegel Online, http://www.spiegel.de/politik/deutschland/adenauerswiedergutmachung-fuer-israel-a-888997.html.

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Bornhöft, Petra. 1999. “Schweinkram mit blauer Kreide.” Der Spiegel. http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-13880476.html. Deutscher Bundestag. 1949. “Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany.” https://www.btg-bestellservice.de/pdf/80201000.pdf. Habermas, Jürgen. 2012. “Eine Art Schadensabwicklung.” Hamburg: Die Zeit. Haftendorn, Helga. 2006. Coming of Age: Germany Foreign Policy since 1945. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Höcke, Björn. 2017. “Gemütszustand eines total besiegten Volkes.” Transcript by Konstantin Nowotny, Der Tagesspiegel. Hoffmann, Christiane and Klaus Brinkbäumer. 2018. “We Are Seeing What Happens When the U.S. Pulls Back.” Der Spiegel Online, 8 January. Koselleck, Reinhardt. 1998. “Wer darf vergessen warden? Das HolocaustMahnmal hierarchisiert die Opfer.” Zeit Online. Küsters, Hanns Jürgen and Daniel Hoffmann. 1998. Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik: Deutsche Einheit. Oldenbourg: Special Edition 1989/90. Mass, Stefan. 2017. “So geht rechte Gescheichtspolitik in Deutschland.” Deutschlandfunk blog. Meinecke, Frederich. 1946. The German Catastrophe: Contemplations and Recollections. Boston: Beacon Press. Menkens, Sabine. 2018. “Von a f d -Politikern behaupteter ‘Schuldkult’ nicht belegbar.” Die Welt, February. Müller, Jan-Werner. 2000. Another Country: German Intellectuals, Unification and National Identity. New Haven: Yale University Press. Nolte, Ernst. 1986. “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will.” Franfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Øhrgaard, Per. 2009. Tyskland: Europas hjerte: et essay. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Rees, Jonas and Andreas Zick. 2018. “Trügerische Erinnerungen: Wie sich Deutschland an die Zeit Nationalsozialismus erinnert.” Stiftung Erinnerung Verantwortung Zukunft: Berlin. Rödder, Andreas. 2018. Wer hat Angst für Deutschland. Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag. Schramm, Moritz. 2005. “Martin Walser.” In Tyske intellektuelle I det 20. århundrede, ed. Morten Dyssel Mortensen and Niklas Olsen, 201-15. Copenhagen: Gyldendal. Sontheimer, Michael. 2010. “Kniefall vor der Geschichte.” Spiegel Online. Steinbach, Peter. 2008. “Politik mit Geschichte – Geschichtspolitik?”

German Memory Culture between the Right and the Mainstream 117 Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung: Bonn. http://www.bpb.de/ themen/OBSIGO,1,0,Politik_mit_Geschichte_Geschichtspolitik Tjalve, Vibeke Schou. 2020. “The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory.” In Geopolitical Amnesia: The Rise of the Right and the Crisis of Liberal Memory. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Vind, Jesper. 2018 (a). “Opråb fra en statsmand.” Weekendavisen, 23 March, https://www.weekendavisen.dk/2018-12/samfund/ opraab-fra-en-statsmand Vind, Jesper. 2018 (b). “Germanofobi.” Weekendavisen, 2 November, https://www.weekendavisen.dk/2018-44/samfund/germanofobi. von Rohr, Mathieu and Britta Sandberg. 2018. “The World Is Changing Dramatically.” Der Spiegel Online. von Weizsäcker, Richard. 1985. “Speech by Richard von Weizsäcker during the Ceremony Commemorating the 40th Anniversary of the End of War in Europe and of National-Socialist on May 1985 at the Bundestag, Bonn.” Bundespräsidialamt. Walser, Martin. 1998. “Reden anlässlich der Verleihung des Friedenspreises des Deutschen Buchhandels 1998 .” “Erfahrungen beim Verfassen einer Sonntagsrede.” Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels e.V., Frankfurt am Main. https://www.friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de/sixcms/media.php/1290/1998_walser_mit_nachtrag_2017.pdf. Wehler, Hans-Ulrich. 2008. Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, Band 5: Bundesrepublik und DDR. München: C.H Beck. Winkler, Heinrich August. 1998. “Leseart der Sühne.” Der Spiegel. – 2010. “Auf ewig in Hitlers Schatten?” Über die Deutschen und ihre Geschichte. München: C.H Beck.

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“The Long Night of the Second Republic”1: Geopolitical Amnesia in Italy Lisa Ginsborg and Fabrizio Tassinari

If the crisis of liberal memory in Europe should be seen more as a process than as a sudden shift, it is probably fair to say that the Italian experience with geopolitical amnesia started rather abruptly with the advent of the so-called “Second Republic,” and in particular with the arrival of Silvio Berlusconi. Up to that point, the devastating effects of the Second World War on the country were still predominant in both Italian discourse and foreign policy practices. This chapter unpacks how, over the past quarter of a century, a geopolitical amnesia, with its corollary of nostalgia for the pre-Republican past, machismo, and revanchism, or the desire to reverse the past, has gradually come to occupy Italian foreign policy discourse, inviting back in policies and postures banned in the immediate post-war era. These policies and postures, we argue, were long discredited in public discourse and amongst the broad coalition of political parties behind the 1948 Constitution – indeed, all talk of “national interest” was, for many years, taboo. And yet, this chapter shows, geopolitical sentiments were never fully abandoned: outside official politics, nostalgia and apologia for the virility and strongmanship of the fascist period survived. Such nostalgia now finds itself reinterpreted by a new Italian populism. Starting from the “First Republic,” this chapter explores the evolution of Italy’s worldview under Berlusconi’s two-decade-long tenure across critical foreign policy dossiers such as the country’s EU membership, and also in relation to the country’s most consequential international alliances. We also unpack how the Northern League – one of Berlusconi’s erstwhile partners in government – has morphed

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from a small secessionist party confined to Italy’s disgruntled North into a national(ist) force championing many of the themes of this volume that, at the time of writing, claims between a quarter and a third of the country’s popular support. Finally, we attempt to decipher the stunning rise of the Five Star Movement, another party claiming about a quarter of the electoral vote and typically labelled “populist,” but with radically distinctive characteristics. We conclude with some observations on the risks of geopolitical amnesia in contemporary Italy.

ita ly ’ s “ f irs t republi c” The prevailing worldview in the “First Republic,” dominated by the catch-all Christian Democratic party, was characterized by a centrist consensus resting on three pillars: internationalism, Atlanticism (in support of nato membership and the alliance with the United States), and Europeanism. “The disastrous experience of the fascist military policy in the Second World War and the 1943-5 civil war,” as observers have put it, generated “long-lasting, extremely negative memories among Italians” – memories replaced in “the prevailing political culture of the post-war years” by a cosmopolitanism “fostered by the Catholic Church and the social-communist ‘anti-imperialist’ left” (Ignazi, Giacomello, and Coticchia 2012, 183). During the four decades that followed the Second World War, the themes of this volume – from virility to race to nationalism – were thus indelibly marked by an association to the country’s fascist past. Public support for these positions was relegated to a discredited parliamentary minority, represented by the post-fascist Italian Social Movement. Any treatment of these issues was met by an instinctive ostracism on the part of the so-called “constitutional arc,” including all the parties that had given birth to Italy’s 1948 Constitution. This chapter sets out to illustrate how, over the past quarter of a century, a geopolitical amnesia has gradually come to re-occupy the center of Italian foreign policy discourse, inviting back in the policies and postures banned in the immediate post-war era. These policies and postures, of course, were never fully abandoned: outside official politics and in some segments of society, it was always more appropriate to associate these themes with nostalgia and apologia (for the fascist period), rather than amnesia. More broadly,

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starting from the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, Italian history is patched with failed attempts to repudiate its fascist past. This was evident in the failure to institute a major trial against the entire military command of the Nazi armies operating in Italy from 1943 to 45, also giving rise to highly selective memories of totalitarianism and the war (Battini 2003). The continued cult of Mussolini was most evident in his birthplace, Predappio, where a tourist and souvenir industry flourished (Gundle 2013); failures to replace the penal code and to ban the neo-fascist party MSI in postwar Italy were some of the most striking manifestations of selective amnesia or even nostalgia. A corollary was the emergence of a vast network of extremist neo-fascist movements, engaged in some of the most heinous episodes of terrorism Italy suffered in the 1970s and 1980s. Today traces of Fascism are still visible in many aspects of Italian public life, as exemplified by the presence of Mussolini’s bon mots on public buildings and the controversial obelisk bearing a “Dux Mussolini” inscription at the Olympic Stadium in Rome. Yet it was not until the post-Cold War “Clean Hands” corruption scandal,2 which effectively wiped out the whole “constitutional arc,” and the advent of Berlusconi, a brash media tycoon with no experience in politics but with close ties to the previous political apparatus, that “the clock of history [turned] back to pre-Republican history” (Ignazi 2004).

b e r l u s c o n i’ s r is e and legacy Taking a cue from the manifesto of then Foreign Minister Franco Frattini, popularized in his book on Italian foreign policy, Cambiamo Rotta (“Changing Course”), the Berlusconi governments’ foreign policy agenda was strongly focused on a rhetoric of change (Watson 2007). In particular, what many have seen as the three main tenets of their foreign policy – Atlanticism, neo-nationalism, and Euroscepticism (Brighi and Petito 2012) – not only represented a radical shift from the First Republic, but also raised questions about the degree of “geopolitical amnesia” during the Second Republic. The literature on the foreign policy of the Berlusconi governments remains divided, some warning against a too exaggerated insistence on their break from the past (Croci 2005). However, a few points are helpful in understanding how the Second Republic preceded the full-blown populist realities of 2018. Two tenets here are important

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– “Atlanticism” and “Europeanism” – which, since the end of the Second World War, have been central to Italian foreign policy. The common perception is that the Berlusconi governments prioritized Atlanticism over Europeanism, while at times adopting an explicitly anti-European stance, also under the influence of its coalition partners. Such a shift is related to many of the themes running through this book, including a revival of nation, civilization, and even war in the context of post 9/11 American interventionism, as well as a potential distancing from European multilateralism, its rationality and bureaucracy. On the Atlanticism side, Berlusconi showed little enthusiasm for multilateralism, and put relations with the US at the top of his priorities. In the aftermath of 9/11, in particular, bilateral relations with the Bush administration and Italian support for armed intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq seem to have taken precedence over, and to some extent undermined, European multilateralism. The strong cultivation of the Italy-US relationship by the Berlusconi government has been seen as going hand in hand with a Eurosceptic stance (Ignazi 2004). But such oscillation between Atlanticism and Europeanism may have been exaggerated, since continuity in foreign policy appears to best fit Berlusconi’s pro-Atlantic stance. In the absence of a real European Common Security and Defence Policy, Italy continued to work towards maintaining the Atlantic Alliance (Croci 2005). Euroscepticism has been seen to manifest itself during the second Berlusconi government not only over Iraq but also in the controversies over the construction of a large EU military transport plane (Airbus), on the one hand, and the European Arrest Warrant, valid through all member states of the European Union, on the other. Further, the Berlusconi government has been seen as positioning Italy in the Eurosceptics’ camp also with regard to many Common Market policies. The role of his arch-rival, Romano Prodi, as president of the European Commission may have contributed to Berlusconi’s attitude to the EU at the time. But with respect to the later period of government (2008-11), several political confrontations related to immigration and environmental issues revealed a broadly uncooperative attitude of the center-Right coalition towards Europe. This was also due to the stronger role of Lega Nord in government and the Christian Democrats no longer being part of the coalition (Matarazzo 2011, 66). However, the shift in the Berlusconi governments’ European stance should also not be overemphasized. In fact, although they may at time have alienated their

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European allies, it appears that continuity has prevailed in Italy’s EU policy, perhaps as a result of the deeply institutionalized arrangements of the EU. Overall, Italy has acted consistently on matters related to the European Security and Defense Policy. One may argue, as Missiroli does, that the politics as opposed to the policy of the Berlusconi governments has been different (Missiroli 2007, 150). In keeping with the imbalance between rhetoric and reality which so characterizes Berlusconi’s style and practice, what is indisputable about his governments’ attitude towards Europe was a shift in rhetoric and tone reflecting a deeper ideological stance, as well as a change in foreign policy style. First, the new emphasis on “national interest” in foreign policy did present a significant break from the past. This phrase was banned from public discourse precisely for reasons of geopolitical memory post-Second World War (Missiroli 2007, 293). Its re-emergence reveals an attempt by the first Berlusconi government to re-nationalize foreign policy (Brighi 2013, 124), or even to start implementing neo-nationalist principles (Cladi and Webber 2010). Whether in opposition to European integration or to raise Italy’s international profile (Brighi 2006, 293), such neo-nationalism, including an emphasis on culture and the projection of the national economy, could be seen as a stepping stone to much of today’s populist discourse and the new governing coalition’s position of “sovranismo.” Second, it is well known that the style of foreign policy changed significantly with Berlusconi, with a preference for bilateral, “personalized,” and friendship-based foreign policy over multilateralism. Hand in hand with his own brand of “anti-political populism,” it could be argued that Berlusconi’s patrimonial approach to institutions and politics was reflected in his foreign policy style. In this context, it is frequently argued that Berlusconi saw not only bilateral diplomacy, but specifically the cultivation of friendly personal relationships as a tool for foreign policy. Among his controversial friendships were those with Vladimir Putin and Muammar Gadhafi. Few leaders better than Putin personify the themes running through this book under the heading of “geopolitical amnesia”: most prominently the theme of nation, but also the three-pronged ensemble of war, vitality, and masculinity. And it is precisely in this context that Berlusconi’s expressions of admiration and friendship for Putin have been candid and explicit (Di Caro 2017). It is clear that Berlusconi shared much of Putin’s ideology as well as style (Van Herpen 2013),

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including Putin’s “self-assertion as a tough, strong, masculine, and above all patriotic leader” (Sperling 2014, 78). Indeed, conceptions of masculinity have played a key part in the construction of Berlusconi’s as well as Putin’s image, although perhaps representing different instances of masculinity (Ginsborg 2005, 124). At the heart of “Berlusconismo” lies not only his patrimonial attitude to politics but also his vision of gender roles. This likely has had a significant impact not only on his domestic politics, but also on Berlusconi’s foreign policy, grounded in personalized male-dominated spheres. The flipside of the coin, of course, lay in his misogynistic comments directed at female foreign leaders. A similar pattern may also be seen in Berlusconi’s cultivation of friendship with Gaddafi. Communicative and personal factors played a strong role in the case of the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership, and Co-operation with Libya and friendship signed by Berlusconi in 2008. Berlusconi’s speeches in this context show “maximum level of direct informal and emotional style” as well as populist attitudes, in their move away from foreign policy considerations to the “personalization” and “deinstitutionalization” of politics (Ferrari and Pejrano 2011, 109). Yet, there is no doubt that Berlusconi’s candid statement “fewer illegal immigrants and more oil,” laid his governments’ interests on the table, not only in terms of economic policy but also with regard to migration. The resulting dubious repatriation policy, which some argue came about under pressure from the Northern League, generated much international criticism. Perhaps the most visible shift in policy in the centre-Right governments, especially as influenced by Lega Nord, one of the main precursors of today’s populist government, has been with respect to immigration. Verbeek and Zaslove argue that the LN failed to have a real impact on most areas of Italian foreign policy except in the area of immigration, particularly in the Bossi-Fini law of 2002 and the 2009 Security Package (Verbeek and Zaslove 2015, 539). Grounded not only in the common theme of nation, but often also in the themes of ethnicity, religion, and race, anti-immigration law and foreign policy has been perhaps the most concrete manifestation of the geopolitical amnesia emerging in Italy since the Second Republic. Anti-immigration, in this context, became a new ideology, cultivated in a very specific period of economic and political tensions. While this cannot be equated with anti-Europeanism, given the changing European – and not always immigration-friendly – stance, what

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is clear is that the Berlusconi governments often focused on race, ethnicity, and religion, to the detriment of human rights policies (Albertazzi 2009, 5).

t h e l e ag ue: f ro m s e c e s s io n is t to nati onali st Few actors have displayed their geopolitical amnesia in such a candid and unrepentant fashion as the Lega Nord, which today continues to base its image on the ideology of national identity and anti-immigration. The Lega has been identified by many observers as the political force responsible for the U-turn in the Italian democratic system, normalizing what previously would have been dismissed as instances of racism (Barcella 2018). The Lega Nord was formed by Umberto Bossi in 1989, and gradually came to include a number of political movements throughout the northeastern regions of Italy which shared a common secessionist platform. Their strong opposition to immigration from the southern parts of Italy was not founded on amnesia about their own migratory past but by contrasting their own experience of emigration to that of the new wave of migration from the South, with its demands for rights and equality. Starting as a protest movement, Lega Nord grew rapidly to achieve remarkable electoral results. Built on notions of territory, to defend Northern Italy from its exploitation from the Italian South, it gradually moved from federalism, to Padanian nationalism, to “devolution,” to “Prima il Nord,” keeping always an anti-elitist populist tone. Or, as Betz puts it: “Mobilizing northern Italian resentment against the partitocratic regime and its clientelism and corruption, which Bossi charged had ruined the country […] His strategy and rhetoric were quintessentially populist. In sharp contrast to mainstream politicians and in order to establish his credentials as a man of the people, Bossi used a coarse incendiary plebeian language interlaced with vulgarities and insults and prone to exaggeration and provocations” (Betz 2018). The Lega saw a renewal and a significant shift in its core targets when the leadership was seized by Matteo Salvini in 2012, moving rapidly from a secessionist focus to an ethno-nationalist and Eurosceptic stance. While keeping and reinforcing its anti-elitist rhetoric and populist style, Salvini has shifted the party’s focus to issues that could also attract voters from the center and the South,

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namely Euroscepticism and anti-immigration sentiment (Brunazzo and Gilbert 2017). This ideological revolution, performed through symbolic gestures such as dropping “North” from the League’s name, together with the more explicit far-Right connotations in its platform, have been seen by some to reflect Lega’s ability to listen to the electorate’s concerns and put them on the political agenda (Brunazzo and Gilbert 2017). Such a shift has no doubt reinforced the link with an ex- or post-fascist electorate looking for stronger representation. In the aftermath of 9/11, a strident anti-Islamic element also appeared, accompanied by a focus on the primacy of Christian civilization (Tarchi 2008, 91). Euroscepticism became much more pronounced in the Lega’s platform following the success of the Five Star movement’s anti-EU stance in the 2013 elections. Salvini’s communication strategy itself is full of geopolitical amnesia, coined in the language of the Other – the Enemy – which, for some, strongly evokes the language of Mussolini propaganda (Belpoliti 2018). By 2018, this rhetorical stance has resulted in the Lega’s move to the extreme Right of the political spectrum.

t he f iv e s ta rs : f ro m f r i nges to mai nstream If the electoral success of the Lega Nord has been surprising, even more astounding has been the rapid rise of the Five Star Movement (m5s ). Mainly classified as a populist party and movement and said to defy the traditional political spectrum between Left and Right, the m5s has captured the attention of many scholars. As noted by some: “The combined effect of this antiparty stance, a (quasi) charismatic leadership and an aggressive electoral campaign have contributed to a labeling of the m5s (perhaps too simply) as a populist party” (Passarelli and Tuorto 2018, 129). Officially established in 2009, its trajectory has been remarkable, becoming in less than ten years the most important political force in the country. In the 2018 general elections, it became the biggest party in Italy by a wide margin. Many questions have attracted scholars to the study of the m5s , which may be introduced but not exhausted here. These have included its populist connotations; its characterization of being beyond the Right/Left political spectrum; its use of the internet; organizational matters; and the role of its leadership. Perhaps the most puzzling has been trying to understand and explain the “most successful electoral breakthrough in a consolidated democracy in the history of

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the whole of post-war Europe” (Tronconi 2015, 4). The movement, inter alia, skillfully mixed old and new features of politics: “a charismatic authoritarian leadership and the bottom-up mobilization of activists; original tools of political marketing (the blog, social networks) and a widespread territorial presence (the local assemblies, Grillo’s rallies in the Piazza; see Tronconi 2018, 177). In what has been termed by some as “techno populism” (Bickerton and Accetti 2017), the internet serves a precise purpose for the movement, including helping it distance itself from traditional political parties. The party’s ideology itself is founded, in the view of some, on ideas of direct democracy through digital technologies. In fact, the party was established as an outgrowth of Beppe Grillo’s popular blog, and through a double organizational path online and offline, Grillo and Gianroberto Casaleggio rapidly transformed the movement into a political party whose manifesto revolved around five key issues (the five “stars”): public water, sustainable transport, sustainable development, Internet access, and the environment (Tronconi 2018, 164). Beyond its populist connotations, scholars have struggled to classify the ideological foundations of the m5s . Tronconi, for instance, notes that the m5s does not fit the same scheme as its European counterparts with rightist leanings, nor does the biography of Grillo himself. However, in its approach to questions of foreign policy, and in particular its attitudes towards immigration and Europe – two of the key questions addressed in this chapter as instances of what we have called “geopolitical amnesia” – the m5s appears to come closer to the Right as opposed to the Left wing of the political spectrum (Musso and Maccaferri 2018, 114). This probably also has to do with a transformation in the movement’s electoral base (Colloca and Corbetta 2015). Although until 2007 Grillo’s blog was critical of the racist law that introduced the crime of illegal migration, today “all fears related to migration are boosted uncritically, from immigrants stealing Italian jobs and resources to crime rates to the spread of diseases. In summary, the position of the 5-Star Movement on migrants is similar to the radical right-wing Northern League, minus the open racist slurs” (Musso and Maccaferri 2018, 112). Further, if the m5s over time has shown some ambiguity with respect to its approach to immigration, ambiguity with respect to the EU and the Euro has been a consistent feature. In fact, the m5s has gone all the way from its initial unconditional support of the EU to advocating leaving the Eurozone altogether.

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c o n c l u s i ons : t h e il l u s io n s o f g e o p oli ti cal amnesi a In this context, the League’s joining forces with the Five Stars Movement after the March 2018 elections may not come as such a surprise. While the experience of these populist movements forming the parliamentary majority is unique for Western Europe, there is no doubt that such convergence testifies the presence of an “ideological common ground,” or at the very least a mutual acceptance of each other’s contentious stances (Pirro 2018). Strong anti-immigration and Eurosceptic stances have also permeated the government coalition, with Salvini as Minister of Interior displaying a high degree of geopolitical amnesia and even flirting with the ghosts of Fascism (Squires 2018). The unprecedented closing of the ports to immigrant ships has allowed him to play both his cards at once, taking a clear anti-immigration stance as well as a strong stand against Europe. The 2018 Security Decree provides the most concrete example to date of Lega’s anti-immigration ideology being translated into government policy. “Sovranismo,” frequently used in Italy to describe the ideology of the current governing coalition of the Five Stars Movement and the League, resembles the idea of “sovereign democracy” coined by Vladimir Putin’s “political strategists” – in effect, another name for nationalist majoritarian rule. That seems apposite: like other populists across the continent, the League and the Five Stars see Putin (or his counterpart, Donald Trump) as the standard-bearer on matters of protectionist, nationalist, and anti-immigrant policies, ideology, and style. All share a disdain for the practices and premises of European integration and appear determined to undermine them from within. What is more, they are eager to engage with Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America as a way to legitimize their own political standing and as a counterweight to what they see as Europe’s weaknesses. That is not an opposition to Europe per se, but to a Europe that is seen as out of touch with modern times. In Salvini’s own words: “I will respect the European rules that help Italians, I will fight those that damage us.” Such a sentence is emblematic of the broader points this chapter has sought to illustrate. Geopolitical amnesia, with its corollary of nostalgia for the pre-Republican past, machismo, and revanchism, has come to pervade Italian public discourse. What used to be fringe

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positions ostracized by the political mainstream have become mainstream and, uniquely in Western Europe, are now official government policy. The world order, however, looks fundamentally different from Washington or Moscow than from Rome or Brussels. For the time being at least, the United States and Russia can muster resources and clout to produce a transformative, albeit reactionary, effect on world affairs. But while Washington and Moscow can arguably claim a high perch in an anarchical world arena inhabited by few competing power centers, can the Italian protagonists of anti-internationalism create a viable narrative of nativism and protectionism as policies from which Italy may reap any benefits? Admittedly, Europe has lost its promise to deliver tangible benefits beyond its borders. Within Europe, a disconnect has emerged between the advocates of a single European foreign policy that promotes liberal values and the growing disaffection of the public with the narrative of openness and integration. In Italy, the League is especially responsible for having disingenuously disrupted the continuity existing between domestic and foreign policies. By ascribing events such as the migrant crisis to the naïvety of liberal elites, the current governing coalition effectively advocates that voters can break the link between what happens inside national borders – managing the integration of migrants – with what happens outside in sectarian conflicts in the Middle East or North Africa. For the past decade, the country’s half-baked response to the migrant crisis reinforced the decoupling of inside and outside security. Italy’s now discredited opposition has no traction with voters because they focused on the costs of interdependence rather than on the advantages. Rather than finding a persuasive agenda to contrast the populist agenda, they are in effect mimicking it. And as Jean Marie Le Pen said many years ago: between the copy and the original, voters will always choose the original. For Italy or elsewhere, anti-globalization backlash does not change the fact that the traditional nation-state has proven inadequate to contain the pervasive reach and depth of technology, trade, corporations, information, and media. Paradoxically, an unwitting recognition of this assumption came from none other than Matteo Salvini, who recently advocated the need for a transnational alliance of populists. Especially in Italy, populism seems to have both taken for granted the accomplishments of a Europe that has become more integrated precisely in order to face the challenges of global interdependence, and discredited the institutions and practices necessary to

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meet that challenge. The League and the Five Stars Movement are European and global citizens in practice, but not in politics; they have adopted a transactional view of Europe and the world. They do not accept the received liberal narrative that developments such as the single market, the Euro, and the free movement of people are in the public interest. In place of that narrative, they propose an alternative which, in many ways, reaches back to the imagery of a pre- and inter-war Italy. not e s 1 The title makes reference to Stefano Guzzini’s seminal essay, “The ‘Long Night of the First Republic’: Years of Clientelistic Implosion in Italy” in Review of International Political Economy 2:1 (January 1995), 27-61. 2 The 1992 “Mani Pulite” (or “Clean Hands”) investigation unveiled a vast network of corruption involving large segments of the Italian political class and of its main political parties.

r e f e r e n ce s Albertazzi, Daniele. 2009. “Reconciling ‘Voice’ and ‘Exit’: Swiss and Italian Populists in Power.” POLITICS 29 (1), 1-10 Barcella, Paolo. 2018. “Percorsi Leghisti. Dall’antimeridionalismo alla xenofobia.” Meridiana 91, 95-119. Battini, Michele. 2003. Peccati di Memoria: La Mancata Norimberga Italiana. Bari: Editori Laterza. Belpoliti, Marco. 2018. “La Neolingua di Salvini.” La Repubblica, 24 June. Betz, Hans-Georg. 2018. “The Radical Right and Populism.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Radical Right, Jens Rydgren, ed., 86-104. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bickerton, Christopher and Carlo Invernizzi Accetti. 2017. “Populism and Technocracy: Opposites or Complements?” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 20 (2), 186-206. Brighi, Elisabetta. 2006. “One Man Alone? A Longue Durée Approach to Italy’s Foreign Policy under Berlusconi.” Government and Opposition 41 (2), 278-97. – 2013. Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy. London: Routledge. Brighi, Elisabetta and Fabio Petito. 2012. “Geopolitics ‘in the Land of the

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Prince’: A Passe-partout to (Global) Power Politics?” In The Return of Geopolitics in Europe? Social Mechanisms and Foreign Policy Identity Crises, Stefano Guzzini, ed., 127-50. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brunazzo, Marco and Mark Gilbert. 2017. “Insurgents against Brussels: Euroscepticism and the Right-wing Populist turn of the Lega Nord since 2013.” Journal of Modern Italian Studies 22 (5), 624-41. Cladi, Lorenzo and Webber, Mark. 2011. “Italian Foreign Policy in the Post-cold War Period: A Neoclassical Realist Approach.” European Security 20 (2), 205-19. Colloca Pasquale and Piergiorgio Corbetta. 2015. “Beyond Protest: Issues and Ideological Inconsistencies in the Voters of the Movimento 5 Stelle.” In Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement: Organisation, Communication and Ideology, Filippo Tronconi, ed., 195-212. London: Routledge. Croci, Osvaldo. 2005. “Much Ado about Little: The Foreign Policy of the Second Berlusconi Government.” Modern Italy 10 (1): 59-74. Di Caro, Paola. 2017. “Berlusconi Vola a Festeggiare Putin: l’Amizia che Resiste a Governi e Amori.” Corriere Della Sera, 7 October. Ginsborg, Paul. 2005. Silvio Berlusconi: Television, Power and Patrimony. Brooklyn: Verso. Gundle, Stephen. 2013. “The Aftermath of the Mussolini Cult: History, Nostalgia and Popular Culture.” In The Cult of the Duce: Mussolini and the Italians, Stephen Gundle, Christopher Duggan, and Giuliana Pieri, eds., 241-56. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ferrari, Federica and Alessandro Pejrano. 2011. “Con Stile: Personality and Leadership Styles in Italy’s Foreign Policy.” In Italy’s Foreign in the Twenty-First Century, Giampiero Giacomello and Bertjan Verbeek, eds., 93-111. Lanham: Lexington Books. Ignazi, Piero. 2004. “Al di là dell’Atlantico, al di qua dell’Europa. Dove Va la Politica Estera Italiana.” Il Mulino 412 (March-April), 267–76. Ignazi, Piero, Giampiero Giacomello, and Fabrizio Coticchia. 2012. Italian Military Operations Abroad: Just Don’t Call It War. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Matarazzo, Raffaello. 2011. “In Search of the North Star: Italy’s PostCold War European Policy.” In Italy’s Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century, Giampiero Giacomello and Bertjan Verbeek, eds., 55-70. Lanham: Lexington Books. Missiroli, Antonio. 2007. “Italy’s Security and Defence Policy: Between EU and US, or Just Prodi and Berlusconi?” Journal of Southern Europe and the Balkans 9 (2), 149-68.

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Musso, Marta and Marzio Maccaferri. 2018. “At the Origins of the Political Discourse of the 5-Star Movement (m5s ): Internet, Direct Democracy and the ‘Future of the Past.’” Internet Histories 2 (2), 98-120. Passarelli, Gianluca and Dario Tuorto. 2018. “The Five Star Movement: Purely a Matter of Protest? The Rise of a New Party between Political Discontent and Reasoned Voting.” Party Politics 24 (2), 129-40. Pirro, Andrea. 2018. “The Polyvalent Populism of the 5 Star Movement.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 26 (4), 443-58. Sperling, Valerie. 2014. Sex, Politics and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Squires, Nick. 2018. “Italy’s Anti-immigration Deputy pm Matteo Salvini under Fire for Citing Mussolini.” The Telegraph, 30 July. Tarchi, Marco. 2008. “Italy: A Country of Many Populisms.” In Daniele Albertazzi and Duncan McDonnell, eds. Twenty-First Century Populism, 84-99. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Tronconi, Filippo. 2015. Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement: Organisation, Communication and Ideology. London: Routledge. – 2018. “The Italian Five Star Movement during the Crisis: Towards Normalisation?” South European Society and Politics 23 (1), 163-80. Van Herpen, Marcel. 2013. Putinism: The Slow Rise of a Radical Right Regime in Russia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Verbeek, Bertjan and Andrej Zaslove. 2015. “Italy: A Case of Mutating Populism?” Democratization 23 (2), 304-23. Walston, James. 2007. “Italian Foreign Policy in the ‘Second Republic’: Changes of Form and Substance,” Modern Italy 12 (2), 91-104.

pa r t t h r e e

T H E N E W G E OPOLI TI CS ?

This section lifts its gaze to the global institutional level, zooming in on how the dual dynamics of liberal amnesia and rising rightwing nationalism, described in the previous essays, combine to challenge and erode the founding logic of the United Nations: an institutional framework built in the spirit of a skeptical, pragmatist, and in many ways deeply realistic post-45 liberal creed. In a concluding epilogue, the section turns its eyes to the future and asks: How does the new geopolitics differ from that of the pre-45 era, what strategies of historical appropriation or “memory” does it deploy, and where is it likely to take us?

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The Forgotten Pragmatism of the United Nations: A Halfway House between Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism Louise Riis Andersen

The pressing question of our time is whether we can manage the globalized world we have created (Hale and Held 2017). Human history has reached a point where much more transnational and international cooperation is needed “if humanity is to solve the problems now arising from the boomerang environmental effects of our supposed mastery of Nature” (Mann 2013, 423). Yet, the political zeitgeist is pulling the world in the opposite direction at an alarming rate. The return of geopolitics and the rise of far-Right populism have reinforced crude and divisive distinctions between “us” and “them” at the expense of universal discourses, shared interests, and collective solutions. As a result, the common “we” of humanity as institutionalized in the UN Charter is increasingly written off as either the relic of an idealistic and naïve past, or a self-serving concept invented by globalist elites that remain indifferent and unaccountable to the demands of ordinary people. Caught up in this maelstrom, “nationally caged politicians trapped by the electoral cycle” (Mann 2013, 396) focus narrowly on the short-term interests of their constituencies, their nation, or, at most, their region: “How can Europe hold its own in a world radicalized by nationalism, populism and chauvinism?” asks German Foreign Minister Heiko Mass, as he grieves that “the world order we once knew and had become accustomed to no longer exists.”

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The Western imagination that once saw itself as the guardian of the world increasingly seeks refuge in national or regional safe zones whose perimeters must be fiercely guarded against infidels, the intolerant, and the impoverished. If this trend continues unchecked, the transnational problems of our time that Kofi Annan successfully placed on the global agenda as “problems without passports” will have to be recast as “problems without owners.” From migration over extreme inequality to climate change, the political space that enables collective action is gradually closing, even as the reality of interdependent human fragilities is growing. This paradox informs the current chapter. Focusing on the United Nations (UN), the world’s largest and arguably only global international organization, the chapter probes the contrasting perceptions of that body held by the New Right and the Globalist Left respectively. More specifically, it asks why the liberal defence of the UN remains so feeble at a time when the conservative attack is more vitriolic than ever. The answer, it suggests, is not so much that the UN after seventy plus years is no longer “fit for purpose,” but rather that its liberal defenders have forgotten that power politics and clashes of interests and values are intrinsic to the functioning of the UN. Born not just from the ashes of World War II but amid the actual fighting, the UN was established to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind.” To fulfil this lofty ambition and its underlying promise of “Never Again,” the UN was designed as a mechanism for peaceful conflict resolution – not as an instrument for dissolving politics and bringing forth some ethereal condition of eternal peace. Accordingly, the UN’s relevance to and role in world politics has always been a reflection of the extent to which political leaders turn to the UN to “fight” for what they believe in. Throughout the history of the UN, this has played out not just in relation to specific crises and issues but also in heated debates over the “true” meaning of the UN Charter and its somewhat incoherent references to state sovereignty and universal human rights. Against this backdrop, it is no coincidence that US president Donald Trump, on several occasions, has used the UN General Assembly to express his commitment to “America First” and vowed to defend US sovereignty against “an unelected, unaccountable, global bureaucracy.” At the same time, however, there is a historical irony – most likely lost on Trump – in the fact that, by using the UN

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pulpit to reject “the ideology of globalism and embrace the doctrine of patriotism,”1 he may actually end up revitalizing the role of the UN as the premier site for peaceful contestations over the shape and content of global politics in the twenty-first century. The basic suggestion underpinning this chapter is, however, that it takes two to tango. The future of the UN and the extent to which it will play a role in the future ordering of the world depends on whether or not those opposing Trump’s worldview will utilize the UN to fight for what they believe is the true meaning of sovereignty in a globalized and interdependent world. Will they recommit to an institution they have come to regard as fundamentally flawed and inefficient? Or will they search for the comfort of like-minded partners in new, less state-centric, forums for global problem-solving? Part of the answer, I argue, rests on the extent to which the liberals of today will remember and take to heart the pragmatic realism of the liberals of yesteryear. The problem, I want to suggest, lies not with the indisputable if understandable shortcomings of the UN. Rather, it relates to the more complex fact that defenders of liberal institutionalism have lost touch with the sober pragmatism with which the UN was established in the first place (Andersen 2019). This chapter thus begins by revisiting that constitutional moment in 1945 as a reminder of the somber settings that helped shape the UN as a halfway house between the national and the cosmopolitan.

l ook in g bac k : t h e c o n sti tuti onal moment Forged in the midst of World War II, the UN embodies the visionary imaginations and pragmatic compromises of shrewd politicians who were no strangers to national interests and the harsh realities of international power politics. Neither Churchill nor Stalin or Roosevelt were starry-eyed idealists or cosmopolitan dreamers. They established the UN because they understood that avoiding another devastating world war was essential to protecting their national interests and furthering their distinct political aims. The multilateral inclination that shaped the UN, firstly as a war-fighting alliance against Nazism and fascism, secondly as a permanent international organization was, in the words of Plesch and Weiss, “a Realist necessity, not optional window-dressing” (2015). Revisiting the constitutional moment serves as a timely reminder that once, “multilateralism was critical to victory by energizing populations,

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combating the war appeasers, ensuring alliance cohesion, and stabilizing the immediate post-war world” (Plesch and Weiss 2015). Credit for seeing this clearly belongs first and foremost to US president Franklin D. Roosevelt. It was he who wanted to act “while the forge of war was still hot enough to fuse nations together” (Mazower 2012, 209). Eager not to repeat the mistakes of the League of Nations, he conceptualized the UN in less idealistic terms. As a result, the UN at its core is a paradoxical creature that draws legitimacy from a mixture of contradictory ideals and principles. The tensions that spring from this have left the organization vulnerable to criticism from all sides of the political spectrum – some of which we will return to below. The inconsistencies are, however, neither a flaw in the design, nor the main source of the UN’s perpetual crisis. On the contrary. The fact that the UN – despite permanent crisis – has endured for more than seventy years is testimony to the longevity of its paradoxical fusion of universal membership, great power control, and international bureaucracy. At a time when the UN in particular and multilateral institutions in general are castigated as undermining state sovereignty, it is worth reminding ourselves that above all, the UN is a state-centric organization. Its membership consists of sovereign states only – all other types of actors are at best observers – and each member state holds one equal vote in the General Assembly, regardless of their size. The sovereign equality of member states is, however, severely and importantly qualified by the special role and responsibility assigned to the great powers as trustees of world peace. The Charter of the UN returned to the principle of concert diplomacy that had been rejected by the League of Nations only a few decades earlier. It did so by granting the great powers of the time – the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, China, and France; from then on known as the P5 – permanent membership in the Security Council and the right to veto any non-procedural decision in this, the UN’s most powerful organ. In 1945, this strong dose of Realpolitik appealed especially to Churchill, the historian, who saw it as evident that a new world organization could be effective only by enabling close, continued cooperation between the great powers. As the Cold War descended, hopes of this collaboration subsided. Yet, even in the worst hours of the Cold War, the mere existence of the UN mattered. The deployment of UN peacekeepers helped keep the that war cold in the Middle East and, behind the scenes, successive

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secretaries general mediated between the rival super-powers. The independence of the UN Secretariat exceeds that of the League of Nations yet is in no way comparable to the supra-national role played by the Commission of the European Union. The UN secretary general has neither the mandate nor the capacity to push member states towards integration in an “ever-closer Union” akin to a world government. He or she is, however, bestowed with a special responsibility to act as the guardian of the Charter. This role is set out in the Charter itself, in particular in Article 99 that authorizes the secretary general to bring to the attention of the Security Council “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” While it may seem trivial, this implies a crucial recognition of the international as a space that should be represented as more than the sum of member states’ interests or their lowest common denominator. At present, this idea and the institutions and individuals embodying it are being undermined by the very nation that was instrumental to the creation of the UN and which remains its most powerful member and biggest financial contributor. To explore the ideational roots of the disdain that the current US administration holds for the world body, the next section looks to the New Right.

l o o k in g to t h e ri ght: t h e s ov e r e ig n ty warri ors The relationship between the US and the UN has long been strained and ambiguous. To most people outside the US, the UN is seen as part of the Pax Americana: a tool for projecting American values, power, and hegemony (Call, Crow, and Ron 2017). Inside the US, however, the UN for years has been viewed as a largely anti-American organization. The rise of the New Right has radicalized this suspicion and revitalized once fringe conspiracy theories of the UN as “the hub of a global network working to submerge the independence of all nations in a world government controlled by the elite,” as the John Birch Society claims on its website. In the 1960s, the John Birch Society was shunned from mainstream conservatism for its ability to see communist agents everywhere, including in President Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. Today, the society’s more than fifty-year-long campaign to “get US out of UN” has moved to the centre of the conservative worldview (Savage

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2017). Feeding directly into the anti-elitism and anti-expertise zeitgeist of our time, Bircher ideas have been picked up by leading political figures within the Republican party, including former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, who argues that it is time for the US to defund and depart the “globalist circus” where “injustice is actually rewarded” and “bad players, including dictators” attack the US for “not bending over backwards enough for their liking.”2 By referring to the UN as a “globalist circus,” Palin conjures an image of something in equal parts ridiculous and dangerous. The “circus” part depicts the UN as irrelevant and impotent – an inefficient, bureaucratic charade without any impact in the real world: “Just a club for people to have a good time,” as Donald Trump once tweeted. The “globalist” part, however, entails the much more sinister depiction of the UN as the epicentre of a vast one-world-government conspiracy aimed at taking away American freedom, guns, religious values, and cultural heritage. While some New Right anti-UN sentiments are openly racist and/ or misogynist – presenting the UN as a “sharia-compliant world body”3 that “promotes global mass migration”4 – others exude a libertarian concern with upholding individual freedom against “Big Government.” The latter argues that the UN Sustainable Development Goals is in fact a “blueprint for the global enslavement of humanity.”5 The unifying theme on the New Right is belief in state sovereignty as the best, last, and only defence against the homogenizing and politically correct managerial liberalism they see in the UN (see the chapter by Jean-François Drolet in this volume). With the announcement of John Bolton as his third national security advisor, President Trump brought one of the most ardent yet astute sovereignty warriors into the innermost circle of the US national security establishment. Bolton’s contempt for the UN’s global-consensus-seeking diplomacy is well known. In contrast to many of his fellow New Right advocates, Bolton has intimate understanding and knowledge of the UN system. In some ways, this makes his critique more damning to the UN than the more openly paranoid accusations that the organization is the virtual “Command and Control Centre” of all things evil. For starters, John Bolton acknowledges that the UN is not heading towards a world-government as such. He rather sees the UN as the axis of a “rule-based international system” of “global governance” built on “responsible” or “shared” sovereignty. This system, he

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argues, works through “norming” – the setting of international standards – that emanates from the UN in substantive field after field: human rights, labour, health, the environment, political-military affairs. For all practical purposes, however, he asserts that the consequences and intentions are the same: to “belittle our popular sovereignty and constitutionalism” (Bolton 2009). He further holds – and this is where his ideational affinity with the far-Right conspiracy theorists becomes manifest – that this process is driven by the usual suspects of “highly educated” people in academia, media, and the “permanent government” who dislike capitalism and individualism and “find comrades all around the world” to move “from unilateral, democratic U.S. decision-making to a multilateral, bureaucratic, and elitist environment” (Bolton 2009). The next section looks to the Left to explore how these “globalist comrades” are currently standing up – or not – to defend their universalist brainchild against the sovereigntists’ attempt to take back control and restore the doctrine of patriotism.

l o o k in g to t h e l e f t : reform or di e In principle, liberals love the idea of the UN. No one, however, loves the actual organization. Seventy plus years after 1945, the UN is perceived as increasingly outdated and unfit for liberal purposes. Fundamental and urgent reforms are needed, especially of the Security Council, if the world body is to regain its effectiveness, legitimacy, and relevance in a rapidly changing world, the argument goes. This includes restricting the veto-right to overcome paralysis and avoid the moral bankruptcy that flows from not acting in the face of extreme human suffering in places such as Syria and Yemen. It also involves ensuring a more equitable geographical representation on the UN Security Council. The composition of the Security Council reflects the world of 1945, not the globalized reality of the twenty-first century. This is widely acknowledged by all member states, including even the P5. Nonetheless, the Security Council reform agenda has been glazed in permafrost, in part due to the veto-right of the existing permanent members, in part to the inability of “revisionist states” to find and push for a shared solution. At the current juncture, talks about reforming the UN to increase its legitimacy and efficiency focus on the UN bureaucracy rather than on its member states.

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The gap between the tasks needed from and the expectations placed upon the UN and the resources that member states make available to the organization is widely recognized. The UN is understaffed and underfunded when its global mandate and responsibilities are considered. Nevertheless, friends and foes alike frequently portray it as a bloated and inefficient bureaucracy. Even Secretary-General Antonio Guterres complains that the “fragmented structures, byzantine procedures, endless red tape” of the UN is the only thing that keeps him awake at night. To overcome this, Guterres has put forward a reform agenda that promises to increase the UN’s ability to “deliver as one” in the field while also cutting costs to satisfy the financial concerns of Western donor governments. Through a triple-legged restructuring of the UN management system, the UN development system, and the UN peace and security architecture, he promises new ways of working within and among the three pillars of the UN system – development, human rights, peace and security – as well as a renewed focus on long-term prevention rather than short-term crisis management. All in all, aims that are neither radical nor new, as they draw upon well-known liberal notions of the security-development nexus that gained prominence in the 1990s. The echo of previous reform efforts reminds us that calling for reform of the UN is a constant in world politics. Over the years, the UN has repeatedly found itself at a crossroads and, more often than not, new tasks and institutional additions to the organization have been introduced as a way of overcoming crises and moving forward. The UN is not quite as change-resistant as it is often portrayed. At the current juncture, however, the old format of addressing a crisis through expansion of the UN agenda and the UN system seems out of touch with the zeitgeist among member states, liberals and non-liberals alike. Whether emphasis is placed on cutting costs, reducing institutional overlaps, or rolling back normative advances, the UN seems to be shrinking on almost a daily basis. The sense that the UN is nearing its expiry date has long been brewing and predates Trump and the rise of the New Right. Against the openly obstructionist behaviour of the Trump administration, however, the once-liberal emphasis on the indispensability of the UN seems to be returning. Speaking at the 2018 Paris Peace Forum (an explicitly anti-Trumpist initiative taken by the French President Emmanuel Macron to bolster support for “the simple idea that

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international cooperation is key to tackling global challenges and ensuring durable peace”) Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel thus remarked: “I often read and feel that many ask themselves: what does the United Nations do? Of course, on a day-to-day level, the organisation does not live up to its ideals. How could it be otherwise? But does this mean we should say that life would be better without the United Nations? To that, I clearly say no. Institutions can easily be destroyed – but building them up is incredibly difficult. We all know that most of the challenges and threats we face today cannot be addressed nationally, but only through joint effort. That is why we must accept this collective responsibility.” Notwithstanding such rhetorical support from leading European politicians behind both the UN and the secretary general’s reform agenda, liberal commitment to the UN seems decidedly half-hearted. Somewhat paradoxically, considering the New Right paranoia outlined above, the UN rarely features in mainstream liberal debates on the crisis of the post-World-War II order (see e.g. Bremmer 2018). Both in theory and in practice, the UN has become a marginal subject rather than a mainstay. This half-heartedness reflects a longer-standing liberal trend towards favouring multi-stakeholderism over multilateralism and preferring private-public partnerships and soft law over binding international regulation and intergovernmentalism (McKeon 2017). To the extent that “globalism” has a twenty-first century hub, it arguably sits in Davos and with the World Economic Forum, not in New York at the UN. For the past decade or more, it has increasingly been in these settings that progressive hopes for a brighter future have been placed. The abovementioned Paris Peace Forum is the most recent example of such an informal gathering “centered on those who seek to develop solutions for today’s transborder challenges.” However, one might ask why Merkel and Macron met in an informal, newly established forum in Paris to bolster support for and demonstrate their commitment to the UN? Why did they not make use of existing institutional structures in New York? The slide from multilateralism towards multi-stakeholderism is illustrative of a wider transformation of the liberal understanding of the role of the UN. From climate change to development, from health to international peace and security, donor governments (and UN officials) are actively seeking to make room in global governance for a variety of private, non-state, localized, or transnational

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actors: philanthropists, private companies, and civil society representatives. The aim is to mobilize resources, implement activities, and raise political awareness and commitment to global problem-solving beyond the member states. To many progressives, public-private partnerships and market-based technological innovations are seen as the wave of the future. The engagement of individual leaders from all sectors in government, business, cities, and civil society is held to promise a more timely, flexible, and agile approach to governing a globalized world than the formalized rituals of intergovernmentalism that derive from what is perceived as an aging and overly state-centric UN. The problem is, however, that an overly strong reliance on the voluntary, the market-based, and the private, echoes and reinforces what Baumann refers to as “the separation and near-divorce of power and politics” (2017, 153). Rather than being a powerful, political response to the pressing problems of our time, the turn to “private-public-partnerships” and “governing through goals” has enabled national governments to acquit themselves of political responsibility and delegate the everyday muddling-through to consortiums whose powers remain unelected and unchecked. Mobilizing the transformative and innovative muscles of the market may be seen as a pragmatic necessity in a globalized, gridlocked world (Held and Hale 2017). Multi-stakeholderism and the search for win-win-solutions are, however, unlikely to address the complex, transnational problems of our time. Political leadership and a willingness to control, regulate, and redistribute is needed if the actions are both to benefit “ordinary people” left behind by hyperglobalization and to effectively address the problems of climate change (Rodrik 2018). While the New Right understands the importance of speaking to the needs and concerns of “ordinary people” as they rally to “take back control” from fragmented and unaccountable global institutions of governance, many liberals seem curiously unwilling to translate their global concerns into a revitalization of the primacy of politics over markets.

l ook in g to t h e f u t u r e : t he halfway hous e In 1945, Roosevelt understood and acted upon two basic insights: Firstly, that sovereignty does not in and of itself enable states to protect themselves and their citizens. Working with other states is a

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fundamental necessity for furthering basic national interests such as security, prosperity, and independence. Secondly, a global collective security system must draw on competing sources of legitimacy in order to be workable. The combination of universal membership, great power control, and international bureaucracy brought different resources and actors to the table and helped balance divergent interests. The value of such pragmatism has been reinforced by the poisonous backlash against everything global at a time when it is abundantly clear that humanity is primarily united by “the community of our threats, the shared risks that make it physically impossible to escape danger on our own” (Innerarity 2016, xii). From the outset, the UN has aimed at changing the behaviour of states to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war” not by forcing leaders to renege on or act against their national interests, but by enabling a broader and longer-term calculus of what constitutes those interests and how best to advance them. The need for such an enlightened pursuit of self-interest is clear, as the dark sides of globalization – from climate change to extreme inequality – manifest themselves in a manner that, paradoxically, underlines the need for more, not less global governance. This, however, only adds to the puzzle of explaining why the liberal defense of the UN remains so feeble at a time when the conservative attack is so vitriolic. At its core, liberalism is based on the possibility of progress. To the liberal mind, that which remains open and incomplete is the ideal. Emphasis is on the evolutionary potential; the ability of humans, institutions, societies, or even systems to advance towards ever higher and better levels of sophistication. Borrowing on Gould’s distinction between “Time’s Arrow and Time’s Cycle,” liberals see history as having a direction – as “an irreversible sequence of unrepeatable events” – while conservatives emphasize the fundamentals, those qualities which are “immanent in time, always present and never changing” (1987, 11). At the current juncture, however, the tables have turned. Liberals find themselves awkwardly fighting to halt the wheels of history and preserve the present order, while conservatives look to the future for a brave, new, and disrupted world. As illustrated in this chapter, this has left many liberals unprepared and thus unable to produce a convincing defence of an institutional status quo that they themselves in many ways find wanting. Their critique of the UN’s state-centrism and the privileged position maintained by the “great irresponsibles” in the Security Council seemingly

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keeps them from remembering that the UN was designed to make the world safe for diversity, not for democracy. At a time when the New Right is determined to backtrack global politics to an era of zero-sum nationalism, such liberal amnesia stands in the way of saving the UN as a progressive half-way house between the national and the cosmopolitan. As the UN is preparing for its 75th anniversary in 2020, if its aspirations are to survive and possibly even thrive in today’s globalized world, its friends and advocates may need to quickly restore and reinvent the particular mix of idealism, pragmatism, and necessity that drove the founding fathers back in 1945. Above all, this includes keeping in mind what Dag Hammerskjold said: that the UN was not established to take mankind to heaven but to keep it from going to hell.6 no t e s 1 Remarks by President Trump to the 73rd Session of the United Nations General Assembly. Full text available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/ briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-73rd-session-unitednations-general-assembly-new-york-ny/. 2 See https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2016/12/29/ palin-trump-call-unshackling-political-bands-tying-us-u-n/. 3 See http://www.tedmontgomery.com/remarks/15.7-12/Obama/Strong. Cities.Network.html. 4 See https://www.jihadwatch.org/2018/01/un-chief-unveils-plan-topromote-global-mass-migration. 5 See https://globalpossibilities.org/the-united-nations-2030-agendadecoded-its-a-blueprint-for-the-global-enslavement-of-humanityunder-the-boot-of-corporate-masters/. 6 Dag Hammerskjold’s remark dates back to his address at the University of California Convocation in Berkeley, on 13 May, 1954 (http://ask. un.org/faq/14623). It has since been inscribed on the wall of the UN headquarters in New York.

r e f e r e nce s Andersen, Louise Riis. 2019. “Curb Your Enthusiasm: Middle-power Liberal Internationalism and the Future of the United Nations.” International Journal 74 (1): 47-64.

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Baumann, Zygmunt. 2017. Retrotopia. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bolton, John. 2009. “The Coming War on Sovereignty.” Commentary, March 2009, https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/ the-coming-war-on-sovereignty/. Bremmer, Ian. 2018. Us vs. Them: The Failure of Globalism. New York: Penguin. Call, Charles T., David Crow, and James Ron. 2017. “Is the UN a Friend or Foe?” Brookings: Order from Chaos, 3 October. https://www. brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2017/10/03/is-the-un-a-friendor-foe/. Gould, Steven J. 1987. Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hale, Thomas and David Held. 2017. Beyond Gridlock, Hoboken: Wiley. Innerarity, Daniel. 2016. Governance in the New Global Disorder: Politics for a Post-Sovereign Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Mann, Michael. 2013. The Sources of Social Power, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKeon, Nora. 2017. “Transforming Global Governance in the Post-2015 Era: Towards an Equitable and Sustainable World.” Globalizations 14 (4): 487-503. Mazower, Mark. 2012. Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 to the Present. New York: Penguin Books. Plesch, Dan and Thomas G. Weiss. 2015. “1945’s Forgotten Insight: Multilateralism as Realist Necessity.” International Studies Perspective 17 (1): 4-16. Rodrik, Dani. 2018. “Populism and the Economics of Globalization.” Journal of International Business Policy 1: 12-33. Savage, John. 2017. “The John Birch Society Is Back.” Politico Magazine, 16 July. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/07/16/ the-john-birch-society-is-alive-and-well-in-the-lone-star-state-215377.

9

The New Geopolitics: Towards a More Virulent World? Vibeke Schou Tjalve

“In the primitive wars of the 19th and 20th century it was common for just two sides to fight. Two countries. Two groups of allies. Now four coalitions collided. Not two against two, or three against one. No. All against one. A few provinces would join side. A few others a different one. One town or generation or gender another. Then they would switch sides, sometimes mid-battle. Most understood the war to be part of the process. Not necessarily its most important part.” Vladislav Surkov, “Without Sky” (2010)

This collection of essays has aimed to place the resurgence of Western geopolitical postures within the context of what historian Tony Judt astutely calls “the age of forgetting” (Judt 2016). In these years of Trump and Brexit, Bannon and Charlottesville, Salvini and Jobbik, rich analyses of the crucial issues that animate growing rejections of liberal democracy already abound: from anti-elitism (Hays 2012), to anti-immigration (Wodak et al. 2013), or economic inequality, with its resulting patterns of social estrangement (Galston 2018; Hochschild 2016). Our aim though, has been to link the rejection of liberalism with ideological erosions at the heart of its current defence. The analytical prism for that angle has been “memory”: how a very specific narrative of the past has upheld the mental and emotional space that is liberal order. Arguably, the post-45 model of global order is in crisis – a crisis not just social and economic, but also ideological and existential – because its constitutive narrative of the past is exhausted. No longer do the shadows of past self-destructions reach

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us. Or when they do, they seem somehow clichéd, worn out, or self-righteous (Snyder 2016; Snyder 2018). In consequence, we have argued, the “fearful” (Williams 2011), “self-restrained” (Tjalve and Williams 2015) or “bleak” (Anderson 2016) kind of liberalism which – briefly, fleetingly, and yet crucially – informed the founding of post45 Western order, is now wearing thin. To its most radical critics, it has come to mean castration: a feminized West caught in a culture of guilt and self-loathing (Gottfried 2002). And to its would-be defenders, it increasingly means nothing at all. Instead, a substantial choir of liberal “reformers,” assured that adjustments will appease the radical critics, speak with fervour against “legalism” and “rigidity,” proposing (as Riis Andersen shows in her chapter on the UN) a more “flexible,” less “inhibiting” redesign of liberal institutions. Where does that story take us? From a twentieth century in which the Great War served as warning to a twenty-first century in which the prospect of war once again seems “great”? Is the implicit conclusion of this book that Western politics, in recent decades if not in the blink of an eye, has moved from curbing to celebrating sovereignty? And if so, is a more virulent world ahead? With ten different chapters, eleven different authors, and a subject matter of very high complexity, uniform conclusions are impossible. And yet our title for this volume has tried to give complexity a name. In these concluding pages, I want to further explain the meaning of that label by addressing in turn its two components: geopolitics and amnesia.

g e o p o l it i cs ? Can a set of contemporary trends, so clearly anchored in, and arguably bred in reaction to, hybrid twenty-first-century technological and organizational transformations, in any meaningful way be compared to the kind of territorial, geo-strategic, and statesman-driven politics that defined the pre-45 period? In other words: Is what we are witnessing really the return of geopolitics? Or is it something else entirely? Arguably, it is something else, and yet a very willed or deliberate element of “return” is involved. In contrast to more materialist recent works on the decline of American hegemony, the claim of this volume is not that some timeless “jungle” of international anarchy is simply “back.” It is not that Europe and the US are simply about to repeat the very form of state-centered power politics which defined

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the late nineteenth or early twentieth century (Kupchan 2013; Kagan 2018). That specific material reality is gone, as are the social, economic, and political structures which underpinned it. More in line with the growing literature on post-sovereignty, globalization, and its discontents (Innerarity 2016; Sassen 1999; 2006), what the essays in this volume suggest is something more roundabout: that geopolitics as attitude or posture has re-emerged, and that it has done so in response to the hollowing-out of conventional forms of state authority and identity. If approached through this prism, the new geopolitics, and its atavistic machismo, emerge not only as a way of exercising state power but as an intellectual and emotional framework within which to come to terms with – digesting, contesting, or obscuring – the limits of that power. This points to a number of profound differences between the types of “new” nationalism, “new” militarism, or more broadly “new” Right which this volume has tried to address, and the past to which these clearly and often consciously attach themselves. The “old” geopolitics – the social Darwinist scramble for strategic territory and domination that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – derived from an era infused with sentiments of predestination: of erecting or enlarging empires (Crook 1994; Deudney 2000). This was the geopolitics of pride and expansion: a “Mania of Masculinity” as Ernst Nolte says of interwar Germany, “full of provocative self-confidence” (Nolte 1986). Not so with the new geopolitics which, in some ways paradoxically, “situates itself as a victimized group” and yet “simultaneously embraces past projects of domination” (Levi and Rothberg 2018, 357). Born in reaction – not with the wind in its back – the character of this complex identity is not one of self-assurance but rather of loss, uncertainty, and belittlement. As the chapter by Lang explicates, the new geopolitics is concerned that conventional forms of manhood, “character,” or authority have been betrayed (see also Mishra 2018). It is also profoundly aware of the ways in which “the state” – absolute icon and ultimate purpose of the geopolitical creed – has lost control of the forces of finance, habitation, and technology (Innerarity 2016). The old geopolitics too was concerned with the corruption of manhood and the decay of Western grit: Oswald Spengler’s obsession with the Untergang des Abendlandes (the Decline of the West), or Nietzsche’s conviction that weak, depraved, and “shop-keeper”-like nations such as Britain were bound to fail in the stark competition of

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a future Dionysian society (Dombowsky 2014: 63-4). And yet these older narratives of decay had faith in resurrection as their leitmotif: out of the ashes of the old order, a new kind of man and state – expansive, aggressive, superior – was sure to be erected (Giglioni 2013, 32). The new geopolitics, in contrast, is the child of a more profound sense of disillusionment and retreat (Mishra 2017; Hell and Steinmetz 2018). It is also the product of a twenty-first century preoccupied with the symbols of power and the natural audience for that display: the people.

m il ita r i s m? This retreat into the symbolic is visible not least in relation to the distinctive way in which the new geopolitics has re-cast a cornerstone of the old: militarism. From Trump’s nuclear brinkmanship to the language of Italian honour, enemies, and conscription deployed by Matteo Salvini, the most obvious manifestation of the new geopolitics is the increased value put on raw military force: the growing support for bolstering hard, retaliatory power, for arming and fortifying borders, and for replacing the doctrine of “winning hearts and minds” with the all-out tactics of confrontation and eradication. In contrast to the old imperial struggle for Africa and Asia, however, this infatuation with military force is tied to a reactionary, not an expansive view of national borders and culture: one profoundly critical not only of liberal Western interventionism but of “spreading” or “exporting” Western civilization. Instead, a growing choir of anti-liberal critics speak incessantly of “pulling back” or “pulling out” (Holm and Tjalve 2018). While generally devoid of the expansionist, territorial ambitions of the past, then, what the new geopolitics often come down to is a concern with resurrecting the theatrics of an older militarism: the language of supremacy, victory, and conquest; the parade of centralized authority. Putin’s Russia has long set the standards for this kind of staged, rhetorical-symbolic militarism: one willing to apply military means, such as in Syria, yet highly economic with its dosage and ultimately attuned to much subtler understandings of what combat means in a twenty-first-century context (Foxall 2012). The Trump White House, with its militarized rhetoric around such issues as space, migration, nuclear weapons, and borders, as well as its symbolic use of missile strikes in Syria and drones in Africa, has tried to imitate Russia in

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this regard. Signaling just how far this infatuation with the emblems of strength goes, President Trump returned from a visit to France on Bastille Day eager to copy the “grandeur” of French military culture by celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the World War I armistice with an unparalleled set of American military parades (Bender 2008; Gessen 2008). It is not that this concern with the symbolism of military power does not concur with the old geopolitics: indeed, a central part of what those unhappy with the “feminized” liberal approach to power as regulation and legislation find so attractive about the pre-45, geopolitical trajectory is exactly its aestheticization of force, war, and authority. The power politics of the early twentieth century was one spectacularly and perhaps uniquely concerned with aesthetics (Hewitt 1993). At a time when, as Michael Williams aptly puts it, “myth and images seem to have achieved greater prominence than ever in global politics, when political leaders show increasing skill in melding popular culture and political power, and when the connections between the ‘fantastical’ and the potentially catastrophic take on ever greater urgency” (Williams 2018, 10), the highly symbolic language of vitality and strength which defined European foreign-policy postures around the turn of the twentieth century seem once again appealing. Yet where that language was once intended as simply the prelude to real battle – an instrument explaining and legitimizing actual force – it seems now to function as an end in itself. Visuality, as argued by the authors of Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture (2010), has become a deliberate factor in the construction of the new geopolitics.

n at io n a l i s m? This highly choreographed or reflexive approach to military power extends to the practice of nationalism too. As the chapters of this volume testify, there can be no doubt that “the people” and “the nation” are referent objects that sit right at the heart not only of New Right rhetoric, but of movements and parties across the political spectrum. Yet as with the new militarism, the new nationalism is of a different, more fluid, more symbolic nature. The chapters on France, the US, and Russia here illustrate that point: The new nationalism is not always truly “nationalist” at all, but refers instead to ethnic, cultural, or civilizational categories that often transcend nation-state

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boundaries, and are deliberately framed to fit broader strategies with both domestic and global appeal (Williams and Drolet 2018). What the chapters in this volume indicate is that what appear at first to be intuitive or immediate expressions of conservative nostalgia for identity-categories of the past often involve more self-consciously calibrated constructions. These new categories divide global politics not between nations but between ideas – ideas that at once transgress territorial borders and cut fault lines within countries. Between decadence and values. Between relativism and faith. And between individualist materialism and organic, meaningful traditionalism (whether Christian, Confucian, Hindu, or even Muslim; see Holm and Tjalve 2018). Beyond such personal gestures as President Trump supporting Marine Le Pen in the French election or Steve Bannon’s transatlantic initiative, “The Movement,” this transnational dimension to the new geopolitics sets it apart from older trajectories of unilateralism or isolationism (Williams and Drolet 2018). It also reveals a level of reflexivity that treats culture and identity as the objects of political strategizing and construction. Such construction was not foreign to the era of the old geopolitics. Yet it certainly was not as advanced as that of the present.

a m n e s ia? Is this dimension of conscious self-construction in the new geopolitics of significance? Does it matter that nationalism is now a highly reflexive project of mobilization? Arguably yes, as this deliberate construction goes to the heart of what this volume hints at with the term “amnesia.” The kind of forgetting at stake in this book is not a straightforward one. By invoking the term “amnesia,” we do not mean to refer simply to the idea that political forces in the US and Europe are experiencing a sort of generalized “Vichy-syndrome”: repressing or rendering taboo the most uncomfortable aspects of the early-twentieth-century radical conservativism for which they long (Rousso 1987). While the emerging New Right, like the “far” or “neo-fascist” Right of previous decades, clearly seeks to evade or circumvent certain aspects of the pre- and inter-war period (the chapters on France, Italy, and Germany explore these issues), it simultaneously fetishizes that period’s embrace of vitalism, strongmanship, and ethno-hierarchy. The real question, then, is how this blatant worship of attitudes once so profoundly rejected has become

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possible: how the political landscapes of the US and Europe slowly lost bulwarks against or opened themselves up towards them. That question underlies the essays in this book and necessitates a discussion of how “memory” is being transformed. As a wide range of scholars have observed in recent years, our age displays an accelerated, almost manic obsession with the past – an over-exploitation or “hyper-remembrance” of history that ultimately threatens to exhaust, deplete, and annul it (Doss 2010). This hyper-remembrance, Pierre Nora – a co-founder of modern memory studies – explains, reflects the loss of history as lived, organic, and transmitted experience, and the rise of “memory” as a more externalized, strategic, and instrumental practice: “we speak so much of memory,” as Nora puts it, “because we have so little of it” (Nora 1989, 7). In this diagnosis, history understood as the silent passing of organic tradition or custom has receded, and a more deliberate, more self-conscious practice of memory-making – virtual, implanted, prosthetic, mediated, trivial, dubious – has replaced it (ibid; see also Simine 2013). The result is a political culture where historical events and experiences are trivialized and emptied out: laid claim to, re-shaped, and re-circulated to an extent that ultimately threatens to render history itself without meaning. President Putin’s recent appropriation of the language of “preventing genocide” to legitimize the annexation of the Crimea may be one example. The Bush administration’s inauguration of the pompous, self-aggrandizing and Hollywoodized World War II memorial, specifically designed to link “the good war” against Nazism and Fascism to the 2003 toppling of Saddam Hussein and the long “wars for democracy” in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed, might be another (Doss 2010, 30). In both instances, as well as in the broader social and political culture of hyper-remembrance in which they participate, the exploitation of history as vaccine, warning, weapon, accusation, or self-defence ultimately results in a deeper form of amnesia: one which, while obsessed with the use of “memory,” is unable to truly engage with history as a realm of reflection and introspection. To qualify our description of the present political moment as defined by geopolitical postures, then, one might expect a prefix like “aesthetic” or “post-modern” (Schleusener 2018; Tjalve 2018; Wolin 2004). This may seem counter-intuitive insofar as the new Right, in both its primitive and its more sophisticated guises, often

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casts itself in direct opposition to post-modernism: to its relativism, its nihilism, and its celebration of difference and multi-culturalism. Yet much of the New Right is born from anti-essentialist soil. It too begins from the premise that knowledge and identity are historically constructed categories; it simply insists that in a world of collapsing meta-narratives, conservatism becomes a radical project of forging meaning and identity from the laboratory that is history, shape-shiftingly mobilizing and re-mobilizing. This tendency to view the world “not as museum but workshop” was prominent within early-twentieth-century radical conservatism and its vision of the conditions of mass politics (Drolet and Williams 2018, 292). But with a New Right that includes thinkers like Paul Gottfried and Alexander Dugin, advisors and intermediaries like Vladislav Surkov and Steve Bannon, or heads of state like Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and Donald Trump, this dimension of self-conscious creativity or modulation vis-à-vis the appropriation of history has arguably reached a new level. Those who think of conflict escalation in terms of rising military budgets may take the New Right flirtation with history as the workshop of identity and antagonism lightly: if there is nothing but spectacle and theatrics going on, why be alarmed? For all the new bluster, such critics might argue, the ammunition of the New Right is only words, stories, and attitudes – not bombs or bullets – which is why there is little significant increase in Western military spending. These critics might also argue that, despite his initial campaign swagger, President Trump has made only limited use of US military muscle, or that even a policy as blatantly sovereigntist and unilateral as Brexit has no real strategic aim. The “new geopolitics,” they might suggest, has no foreign policy agenda, and therefore no genuine military eruptions are likely to follow. Such critics might be right. The question remains, however, whether the New Right explored in this volume is not correct in insisting on the importance of ideas or “meta-politics.” Is not a world that casts hesitation as castration, that fetichizes and parades force, and that choreographs relations into the binary categories of friend and enemy, one in which violent conflict is more likely to erupt? Such conflict may not take the form of repeating the errors of past world wars. As in the vision laid out by Vladislav Surkov in the epigraph to this chapter, those conflicts may have been too primitive to serve as models for what lies ahead. Surkov, former Russian deputy

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prime minister and assistant to Putin on foreign affairs, imagines a future caught in the permanent friction of a world “Without Sky”: a world utterly devoid of over-arching principles and defined, therefore, by ever-fleeting (and thus easily manipulated) processes of antagonism and shifting alliances. A self-proclaimed conservative, yet a translator of postmodern philosophy, Surkov is not a nobody: many see him as the author or “technologist” of Putinism itself (Pomerantsev 2014). While Surkov, as a political operator, is certainly his own man – blind loyalty has no place in his vision of a world “Without Sky” – he was a key figure behind Russian tactics in Ukraine and Crimea and remains a central strategist behind what Russia likes to refer to as its “political technology” of “asymmetric information warfare.” Is Surkov’s vision of a world challenged not by conventional forms of total war but by subtler, more permanent forms of cultural shape-shifting and political disintegration really that unlikely to result from the trends described in the essays here? Or may what critics describe as his “darkling vision of a globalization, in which instead of everyone rising together, interconnection means multiple contests between movements and corporations and city states” and where “the old alliances, the EU’s and the nato ’s and ‘The West’ have all worn out” actually contain a disturbing element of potential prophecy (Pomerantsev 2014, 12)? On that question, the essays of this book give no unitary answers. Yet the worry that flows from their pages is this: ideas – “meta-politics” – matter. It matters that machismo is back. It matters that restraint is out. Within that cacophony of instrumentalization and deconstruction, analogy and irony, the “darkling vision” of Surkov’s imploded globalization already faces diminishing bulwarks. Are we headed towards a more virulent world? Unless we regain our collective capacity for truly recalling the catastrophe last time: possibly, sadly, so. r e f e r e nc e s Anderson, Amanda. 2016. Bleak Liberalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Dubin, Steven C. 1999. Displays of Power: Memory and Amnesia in the American Museum. New York: New York University Press. Dombowski, Don. 2014. Nietzsche and Napoleon: The Dionysian Conspiracy. Cardiff: The University of Wales.

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Crook, Paul. 1994. Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over the Biology of War from the Origin of Species to the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deudney, Daniel. 2000. “Geopolitics as Theory: Historical Security Materialism.” European Journal of International Relations 6 (1): 77-107. Drolet, Jean-François. 2018. “Radical Conservatism and World Order: International Theory and the New Right.” International Theory 10 (3): 285-313. Foxall, Andrew. 2012. “Photographing Vladimir Putin: Masculinity, Nationalism and Visuality in Russian Political Culture.” Geopolitics 18 (1): 132-56. Gottfried, Paul. 2002. Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Hays, Chris. 2012. Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy. New York: Crown Random House. Hell, Julia and George Steinmetz. 2017. “A Period of ‘Wild and Fierce Fanaticism’: Populism, Theo-political Militarism, and the Crisis of US Hegemony.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 5 (3): 373-91. Hewitt, Andrew. 1993. Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Avantgarde. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2016. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York/London: New Press. Holm, Minda and Vibeke Schou Tjalve. 2018. Visions of an Illiberal World Order: The National Right in the US, Europe and Russia. nupi Policy Note 1/2018. Innerarity, Daniel. 2016. Governance in the Global Disorder: Politics for a Post-Sovereign Society. New York: Columbia University Press. Judt, Tony. 2008. Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century. New York: Penguin. Kagan, Robert. 2018. The Jungle Grows Back. New York: Alfred Knopf. Kupchan, Charles A. 2013. No One’s World: The West, the Rising Rest, and the Coming Global Turn. New York: Council on Foreign Relations. Nolte, Ernst. 1986. “The Past That Will Not Pass: A Speech That Could Be Written but Not Delivered.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986. Translated and republished in Forever in the Shadow of Hitler? Original Documents of the Historikerstreit, the Controversy Concerning the Singularity of the Holocaust, ed. James Knowlton and Truett Cates. New Jersey: Humanities Press International. Nora, Pierre. 1989. “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire.” Representations 26 (spring 1989): 7-24.

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Macdonald, F., R. Hughes, and K. Dodds. 2019. Observant States: Geopolitics and Visual Culture. London: I.B. Tauris. Mishra, Pankaj. 2017. Age of Anger: A History of the Present. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. – 2018. “The Crisis in Modern Masculinity.” The Guardian, 17 March. Pomerantsev, Peter. 2014. “The Hidden Author of Putinism: How Vladimir Surkov Invented the New Russia.” The Atlantic, 7 November. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/ hidden-author-putinism-russia-vladislav-surkov/382489/. Sassen, Saskia. 1999. Globalization and Its Discontents. New York: New Press. – 2006. Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Schleusener, Simon. 2018. “Post-Truth Politics: The New Right and the Legacy of Post-Modernism.” In Modernities and Modernization in North America, Ilka Brasch and Ruth Mayer, eds., 353-70. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Simine, S.A. 2013. Memory Boom, Memory Wars and Memory Crises: Mediating Memory in the Museum. London: Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Snyder, Timothy. 2016. Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning. New York: Penguin Random House. – 2018. The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America. London: The Bodley Head. Surkov, Vladislav. 2010. Empty Sky. Downloaded from www.bewilderingstories.com. Tjalve, Vibeke Schou. 2018. “Revisiting Hochschild, Trump and American Apocalyptic Feeling.” Contemporary Sociology 47 (2): 150-1. Tjalve, Vibeke Schou and Michael C. Williams. 2015. “Rethinking the Logic of Security: Liberal Realism and the Recovery of American Political Thought.” Telos 170: 46-66. Wodak et al. 2013. Right-Wing Populism in Europe: Politics and Discourse. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Michael C. “Securitization and the Liberalism of Fear.” Security Dialogue 42: 4-5.

Contributors

louise riis andersen is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (diis ). Her research has long focused on liberal peacebuilding and its critics – topics about which she has published numerous articles and book chapters (most recently in International Affairs). She was the author of the official Danish report on “lessons learned” in Afghanistan 2010-14 and serves as a regular advisor and commentator on issues pertaining to peacebuilding and the UN. Her current research addresses the crisis of liberal multilateralism and the various sources of Western anti-globalist sentiment – a theme on which she co-edited a special 2019 issue of International Journal (with Rita Abrahamsen and Ole Jacob Sending).  manni crone  is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (diis ). She spent ten years of her academic career in France and is an expert on French political thought, colonial history, and foreign policy. Dr Crone has also published on various sub-topics of terrorism studies, including French counter-terrorism interventions and the aesthetic and material dimensions of violent jihadism. Her work has appeared in such journals as Millennium and International Affairs. She is the editor of a book on jihadism, radicalization, and European counter-terrorism discourse and the co-editor of a Millennium special issue on religion and political violence. jean-françois drolet is a senior lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the Queen Mary University in London. He has published extensively on ideology, political theory, and the American Right in leading peer-reviewed journals. Moreover, he is the author

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Contributors

of American Neoconservatism: The Politics and Culture of a Reactionary Idealism (Columbia University Press, 2011) and American Foreign Policy: Studies in Intellectual History, co-edited with James Dunkerley (Manchester University Press, 2017). He has a book on Nietzsche and political theory forthcoming (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019).

lisa ginsborg is a teaching associate at the eui School of Transnational Governance, and a lecturer in International Human Rights at nyu Florence. Her research interests include international liberal order, Italian politics and media, and international human rights law. She has previously worked at the European Inter-University Centre for Human Rights and Democratisation (eiuc ) in Venice and has been a Visiting Researcher at both the nyu School of Law and the Sydney Centre for International Law, University of Sydney. matthew fallon hinds  is a postdoctoral candidate at The Danish Institute for International Studies (diis ) and holds a PhD from the London School of economics. He has a background in history and has published on Anglo-American relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He is the author of The US, the UK and Saudi Arabia in World War II: The Middle East and the Origins of a Special Relationship. (I.B. Tauris, 2016). minda holm  is a researcher at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (nupi ) currently pursuing a PhD on Russian foreign policy and far-Right ideology at the University of Copenhagen. Minda holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics (lse ) and another from the George Washington University, dc . She spent part of her childhood in Russia and has worked at the Norwegian Embassy in Kasakhstan and the osse in Tadjikistan. Despite her early career stage, she has published in such journals as Review of International Studies and is currently one of two co-editors of the largest Scandinavian IR-journal, Internasjonal Politikk. Minda is a member of the steering committee for the Human Rights House Committee, Norway. johannes lang   is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (diis ) and a program coordinator of the research project The New Psychology of War: Trauma, Subjectivity,

Contributors

161

and the Militarization of Positive Psychology funded by the Danish Research Council. He has a background in psychology and political theory (not least the work of Hannah Arendt) and has published numerous articles that fall within the overlapping topics of war, memory, cruelty, trauma, and emotions. He is the author and editor of several books and articles, including Emotions and Mass Atrocity: Philosophical and Theoretical Explorations, co-edited with Thomas Brudholm (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

fabrizio tassinari is an executive coordinator for the School of Transnational Governance at the European University in Florence and a senior non-resident Transatlantic Fellow at the German Marshall Foundation. His research speaks broadly to themes of political culture and security in Europe, with a particular focus on populism and re-nationalisation – issues which he most recently addressed in a chapter of Rethinking European Futures, published by the European Council on Foreign Relations (2017). He is the author of Why Europe Fears Its Neighbors (Praeger, 2009) as well as numerous articles and edited volumes.  Fabrizio regularly contributes to such newspapers, weeklies, and magazines as Huffington Post, International Spectator, and Foreign Affairs. vibeke schou tjalve is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for International Studies (diis ) where she heads the Velux-funded research program World of the Right (w or ). She is also an affiliated researcher with the Center for Right Wing Studies, Berkeley. She has published widely on the ideological and religious lineages of American identity and security – in particular, the links between early twentieth-century European thought, including “the Weimar experience” and its formative role in shaping postwar American debates over war, power, and mass democracy. Outlets include such journals as Telos, International Security, Security Dialogue, and International Politics. In her most current research, Vibeke explores the origins and overlaps between new Right and new Tech ideological assemblages. She is the author of Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (Palgrave, 2008). michael c. williams is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa. His

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Contributors

research spans the academic disciplines of intellectual history, political theory, and security studies, with a current focus on the historical trajectories and contemporary rise of the American national Right. He has published widely in such journals as European Journal of International Relations, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, and the Review of International Studies. He is the author of several books, including (with Rita Abrahamsen) Security Beyond the State (Cambridge University Press, 2011) and Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (Routledge, 2007).

jesper vind is an academic author and a writer of historical journalism at the biggest Danish weekly, Weekendavisen, where he covers European culture and politics with a special emphasis on Germany. In essays, book chapters, and most recently a monograph, he has covered German history, culture, and politics for close to two decades. He is the author of Det Nye Tyske Højre: Politik, Rødder, Idéer (The New German Right: Politics, Roots, Ideas; Gyldendal 2017).

Index

Adenauer, Konrad, 106 Africa, 27, 42, 75, 112, 151 Afghanistan, 8, 17, 36–7, 44, 48, 51, 121, 154, 159; North, 128 Alternative Right, 25, 37, 40, 44, 70, 75, 87, 94 America First, 25, 36, 43–5, 78, 136 American Republican Party, 25, 28–9, 37–8, 44, 118, 120, 140 amnesia, 5–7, 11, 13, 16, 42, 118–20, 122–3, 149, 153–4; collective, 73; geopolitical, 4, 25, 82, 124–7; liberal, 7, 15, 133, 146; Anglo-American, 12–14, 23–4, 32, 54, 77, 160; conservative, 32; Right, 21, 24–8, 30–3 Anglo-Saxon, 24, 26, 54 Annan, Kofi, 136 Anti-Americanism, 71–2 anti-elitism, 124, 140, 148 Anti-Europeanism, 121, 123 anti-globalization, 128 anti-individualism, 57 anti-internationalism, 32, 128 anti-military, 101 Anti-Semitism, 25, 38, 73 Anti-UN, 140 antiwar movement, the, 52–4 Anti-White racism, 14, 67, 69 Arab Spring, the, 30 Asia, 151 asymmetric information warfare, 156 Atlanticism, 119–21 Bannon, Steve, 6, 25, 87, 148, 153, 155 Bastille Day, 152

Berlusconi, Silvio, 118, 120–4 Berlusconismo, 123. See also masculinity Bismarck, Otto von, 100, 113–14 Bolton, John, 140 Bossi, Umberto, 123–4. See also Lega Nord Brexit, 14, 23, 25, 30–2, 140. See also Farage, Nigel and ukip Brit Kitsch, 25 Buchanan, Pat, 6, 36, 43–5, 87; Buchanan Revolution, the, 36 Bush, George H.W., 36 Bush, George W., 10, 37, 51; administration, 121, 154 Charlottesville rally, 28, 148 Christian Democratic Party, 106, 119. See also Atlanticism Churchill, Winston, 23–4, 137–8 climate change, 136, 143–5 Clinton, Bill, 10, 44 Cold War, the, 11, 27, 35, 38, 41–2, 55, 72, 78, 85, 91, 109, 120, 138; and Liberalism, 41 conservatism, 23, 32, 36–7, 93–4, 139, 155; neo, 37, 45 cosmopolitanism, 36–7, 42, 119, 135, 137, 146; cosmopolitan liberalism, 38 Crimea, Annexation of, 32, 86, 93, 154, 156 culture war, 43 Darwinism, 150

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Index

de Benoist, Alain, 6, 69–70, 73–9 de Gaulle, Charles, 26, 29, 72, 78–9 declinism, 25, 30–1; Anglo-American, 23, 32 Dionysian society, 151 Dugin, Aleksandr, 6, 70, 155 economic inequality, 11, 39, 148 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 27, 29, 139 elitism, 10, 17, 140, 148 empire, 17, 23, 25–7, 32, 74, 76–7, 150; British, 29; European, 77; Liberal, 12–13, 21; New World, 7; Roman, 77; Soviet, 38 end of history, the, 17 Eternal France, 72, 106, 136 ethnic fracture, 14, 67, 69 Eurasianism, 70, 85 European Steel and Coal Union, 9, 78 European Union, 10, 14, 31, 41, 45, 77–9, 88, 91, 94, 102, 115, 118, 121–2, 125–6, 139, 156; Commission of the European Union, 139; euroscepticism, 30–1, 88, 120–1, 124–5 Farage, Nigel, 30–1. See also ukip and Brexit Far-Right, 6, 69–71, 73, 75, 78–9, 85, 88–9, 94, 101–2, 114–15, 125, 141, 160; European, 85; French, 69–70; populism, 135; Russian, 85 fascism, 11, 16–17, 23, 25, 72–3, 78, 94, 105, 108, 118–20, 127, 137, 154; Germany, 106; Italy, 7, 75, 119; neo, 120, 153 feminism, 75–6, 79; feminization, 6, 12–13, 21, 54, 75–6, 152; feminized West, 149 First Republic, 118–20 Five Star Movement, the, 119, 125, 127, 129. See also Beppe Grillo Front National, le, 73. See also le Pen, Jean-Marie Gabriel, Sigmar, 3, 102–3, 114–15 gender, 35, 44, 46, 88, 123, 148 Generation Identity (also Generation Identitatire), 6, 69 genocide, 79, 108, 154

geopolitical, 4–7, 9–10, 12–15, 17, 24–5, 27, 31, 67, 69–72, 76, 79, 82, 118–20, 122, 133, 135, 148–55; amnesia, 4, 25, 82, 118, 122–7 globalism, 3–4, 9, 15–16, 31–2, 36, 38, 41, 44, 55, 72, 78–9, 88, 133, 135–7, 139–41, 143–6, 152–3; anti-globalization, 31, 35, 38, 40, 43, 46, 76, 128, 145, 150, 156; and economy, 31, 42; and governance, 3, 140, 143, 145; hyperglobalization, 144; and interdependence, 128; and Islam, 46; Left, 136; and liberalism, 37, 40, 45, 77; and order, 42, 46, 79, 148; South, 41–2, 46; and wars, 31; and capitalism, 13, 21 Globke, Hans, 106 Glorious Revolution, the, 25 Gottfried, Paul, 6, 37, 40, 44, 155 greatest generation, the, 61 great replacement, the, 12 Great War, the, 149 Grillo, Beppe, 126. See also Five Star Movement guilt, 5–6, 10, 51, 53, 101, 149 Habermas, Jürgen, 107–8, 110 Hammerskjold, Dag, 146 Hedges, Chris, 17 hegemony, 9, 32, 39, 76, 139; American, 40, 149 heteronationalism, 85 Hitler, Adolf, 14, 67, 74, 94, 101, 104, 107, 113, 115 Holocaust, the, 10, 16, 71, 73–4, 79, 103, 107, 111–14 human rights, 8, 26, 40, 42, 46, 91, 104, 108, 124, 136, 141–2, 160 hyper-remembrance, 16, 154 identity, 15, 30, 35–7, 41–4, 54, 79, 101, 150, 153, 155; American, 161; cosmopolitan, 41; Eastern Slavic, 85–6; German, 101, 108; national, 4, 100, 124; politics, 12, 28, 103 immigration, 12, 14, 24, 27–8, 30, 36, 42, 44–5, 67, 112, 121, 123, 126; anti, 69–71, 88–9, 123–5, 127, 148; Muslim, 76 institutionalism, 4, 10–12

Index interdependence, 9, 26, 31, 128, 136–7 intergovernmentalism, 143–4 international anarchy, 149 international community, 83, 86, 90–4 international law, 75, 86, 90–1 intervention, 10, 21, 30–1, 39, 55–6, 89, 93, 121; in Kosovo, 92; in Libya, 92, 123; in Iraq, 8, 17, 36–7, 44, 48, 50–1, 60, 92, 121, 154; and revolution, 29 Islamic Autocracy, 12 isolationism, 25, 35, 153

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Liberal World Order, the, 4–12, 15, 17, 23, 26, 31–3, 36, 70, 72–6, 79, 90–1, 96, 148

Kirk, Russell, 24–5, 37 Kremlin, the, 27, 84, 88 Kristallnacht, 103

machismo, 8, 14, 67, 118, 127, 150 Macron, Emmanuel, 79, 142–3 managerial revolution, the, 38 Maréchal, Marion, 70 masculinity, 15, 21, 49, 61, 74–5, 122–3, 150. See also Berlusconismo McCain, John, 29 Meinecke, Freidrich, 100 memory, 110, 112–14, 133, 148, 154; culture, 61, 100–1; and politics, 72–3, 101; and wars, 6, 14, 46, 67. See also liberal memory memory studies, 154 Merkel, Angela, 14, 67, 79, 104–5, 110, 114 Middle East, the, 30, 41, 128, 138 misogyny, 123, 140 Monday Club, the, 27 Movement, the, 126, 153 multiculturalism, 42, 44, 46, 77–8 multipolarity, 92

Le Pen, Jean Marie, 73, 128. See also Front National Le Pen, Marine, 88, 153 League of Nations, the, 138–9 Leave Campaign, the, 30 Lega Nord, 88, 94, 121, 123–5, 127 Lenin, Vladimir, 25, 40 lgbt, 83–4, 87, 93; gay marriage, 84; homosexuality, 85, 111 liberalism, 5, 8–9, 11–16, 35, 39, 67, 71–2, 77, 83, 90–2, 143, 145, 148–9; liberal amnesia, 7, 15, 133; and democracy, 11, 23, 37, 74, 148; and governance, 4, 13, 37, 42, 45; and institutionalism, 6, 9, 43, 79, 137; and internationalism, 71, 90–2; and interventionism, 89, 151; and managerialism, 40, 140; liberal memory, 3, 5, 7–10, 13–14, 21, 52, 61, 71, 73–4, 79, 82–3, 89, 94–6, 118; liberal norms, 23; liberal sensitivities, 5; and skepticism, 11; and war, 13 Liberalism of Fear, 71, 79. See also Shklar, Judith

nafta (The North American Free Trade Agreement), 44 nationalism, 6–7, 9, 11, 13–15, 21, 24, 31–2, 35–6, 41, 43–6, 67, 70–2, 78, 85, 86, 109, 112–14, 119–20, 124, 127, 133, 135, 146, 150, 152–3; neo, 120, 122; right wing, 70; white, 70 Nazism, 3, 7, 10, 73, 94–5, 100–3, 105–6, 112, 120, 137, 154 Nazi Germany, 7, 39, 73, 107–8 Never Again, 3, 10, 13–14, 67, 71, 73, 94, 100, 103, 114, 136 New Class, 37–9 New Deal, 26, 39, 41, 54 New Right, (vii), 7, 12–13, 35, 69, 70–2, 74–6, 79, 103, 136, 139–40, 142–4, 146, 152–5, 161; French, 69–72, 78–9; German, 100 Nixon, Richard, 28, 139 non-interference, 82–3, 90–3 Nora, Pierre, 154 North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 11, 26, 41, 44, 72, 79, 88, 90, 92, 103, 119, 156

Jew(s), 7, 73–4, 103–4, 106–7, 111–13; anti-Jewish persecution, 73 jihadism, 56, 87 Jinping, Xi, 32 Jobbik, 148 John Birch Society, the, 139 Johnson, Boris, 30 Judeo-Christian, 6, 10, 12, 30, 87 Judt, Tony, 73, 148

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Index

nostalgia, 5, 14, 17, 21, 24–5, 30, 67, 70, 118–20, 127, 153 Obama, Barack, 10, 23, 48–9, 54 Old Right, 37, 43 One-Worldism, 36, 140 Orban, Victor, 4, 155 organicism, 14, 21, 67, 79, 86–7, 153–4; organic community, 77, 94 paleo-conservative, 21, 35–45, 87 Palin, Sarah, 140 patriotism, 94, 123, 137, 141, 161; constitutional, 107–8 Paris Peace Forum, 142–3 particularism, 4, 41 Pax Americana, 26, 72, 139 Pax Britannica, 26 Polish Law and Order, 6 populism, 17, 32, 36, 43, 45, 100, 128, 135; Italian, 118–20, 122–8; techno, 126 positive psychology, 14, 21, 48–52, 55–6, 58–9, 61, 63 Pussy Riot, 84 Putin, Vladimir, 4, 10, 12, 32, 67, 70, 75, 83–9, 92–5, 122–3, 127, 151, 154–6 Putinism, 156 racism, 14, 73–4, 79, 124, 126, 140; anti-white, 67, 69; ethno-racist, 35 Reagan, Ronald, 25, 27–8, 31, 38, 109 realism, 93–4, 137 realpolitik, 7, 138 Reichstag, 105 relativism, 6, 10, 57, 153, 155 revanchism, 14, 118, 127 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 39, 54, 137–8, 144 Russia, 4, 6, 10, 14, 16, 32, 39, 67, 76, 77, 82–95, 103, 106, 109, 114, 127–8, 151–2, 156; Christian Russia, 77, 86; Russian Orthodox Church, 84, 86; Soviet Russia, 8, 27, 29, 84, 94–5 Salvini, Matteo, 4–5, 88, 94, 124–5, 127–8, 148, 151 Schmitt, Carl, 75–6, 86–7, 94 Schumpeter, Joseph, 25 Second Republic, 118, 120, 123 Shklar, Judith, 8, 16. See also Liberalism of Fear

sovereignty, 3, 5, 8, 11, 14–15, 30, 78, 82–3, 90–3, 114, 136–41, 144, 149; post-sovereignty, 150 Spartan, 69, 75 Spengler, Oswald, 150 Stalin, Josef, 39, 74, 95, 107, 137 Surkov, Vladislav, 9, 155–6 Syria, 32, 141, 151 technological, 16, 31, 39, 75–6, 128, 144, 149–50, 156; war, 75 technocracy, 6, 11, 77 terrorism, 38, 86, 120, 159; Chechnya, 86; counter, 159 totalitarianism, 14, 17, 67, 72, 74, 120 tragedy, 5, 57, 95 trauma, 5, 8–9, 13–14, 16–17, 21, 51–3, 61–3, 71, 95, 101; collective, 36; Post-Vietnam, 14, 21 Treaty of Friendship, 123 Trudeau, Justin, 79 Trump, Donald, 4–6, 14, 23, 28, 30–2, 35, 45–6, 70, 78–9, 102, 127, 136–7, 140, 142, 148, 151–3, 155; Trumpism, 30, 36–7; Muslim Ban, 30 twentieth century, 3–4, 6–7, 13–14, 24, 32, 37, 40, 49, 52, 71, 74, 82, 91, 95, 149–50, 152–3, 155 ukip (UK Independent Party), 31. See also Farage, Nigel Ukraine, 86, 95, 156 unilateralism, 6, 30–1, 141, 153, 155 United Nations, 15, 26, 90, 92, 133, 135–6, 143; charter of, 90–2, 135–6, 138–9 universalism, 10, 27, 36–8, 43, 93–4, 141 victimhood, 48–9, 55, 61 War on Terror, the US, 50, 56, 63 White supremacism, 9, 40, 79 World War I, 74–5, 152, World War II, 7, 25–6, 29, 54, 61–2, 71, 73–4, 94–5, 100, 103, 105, 107, 109–11, 113, 118–22, 136–7, 143, 154 Xenophobia, 85