Fifteen Eighty Four

When Donald Trump moves back into the White House in January 2025, he will have many more international friends than when he first became President. The last couple of years have been good for the radical Right: In Austria, the hard-right Freedom Party won the most recent general election. A few weeks earlier, Alternative for Germany celebrated its historic successes in the East. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (NR) achieved its best ever results in the European elections and came close to the Presidency in the first round of the national elections. In the Netherlands, another Freedom Party is part of the coalition government, while Georgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy is entering its fourth year in power. Add to this two of Trump’s greatest fans, India’s Narendra Modi and Hungary’s Victor Orbán, and it is clear that Trump will be far from lonely on the international political stage.

This prompts the question of the relationship between these various radical Right movements. To what extent are they interlinked? Does it make sense to speak of a global Right, and if so, what are the consequences for international politics? This is the key question we explore in World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order.

The answer is not straightforward. The movements and parties that make up the radical Right are far from unified and uniform. Disagreements and policy differences are common, and sometimes profound. But that does not mean that their success in various countries is simply a series of unconnected nationalist reactions that can be fully explained with reference to domestic factors such as the populists’ appeal to the economically ‘left behind’ or the renewal of long-standing racist fringes. Although these popular explanations have some validity, we argue that today’s radical Right has identifiably transnational underpinnings and that any understanding of its appeal must take account of this global interconnectedness. Contrary to common assumptions, we show that the contemporary radical Right takes ideas very seriously and has a well-developed ideological critique of liberal globalisation. Today’s radical Right, we argue, is not only networked through personal friendships and international conferences, but it is also in important ways constituted in relation to the global.

World of the Right has a rather unusual, and perhaps for many, a surprising starting point: Antonio Gramsci, the iconic figure of the Left. Turning Gramsci on his head, radical Right forces from France to Brazil and India have explicitly adopted ‘Gramscian’ ideas in their effort to overturn left-wing cultural hegemony, create new historic blocs, and mobilize counter-hegemonic movements. This strategy has been decades in the making, and its roots can be traced to western Europe, and particularly to the Parisian Nouvelle Droite of the 1960s. Today, however, radical Right forces around the globe routinely invoke Gramsci as their strategic inspiration. The chief intellectual behind the former President Jair Bolsonaro, for example, was often referred to as the Gramsci of Brazil.

At the heart of this Gramscian strategy is the idea of ‘metapolitics’ – the view that all influential political movements begin first with a process of intellectual and cultural revolution. A core component of the radical Right’s metapolitical strategy centers on the idea of global managerialism. According to this view, the modern world is characterised by the rise to power of a global liberal managerial elite, the so-called New Class of experts and bureaucrats. Detached and unmoored from their national identities and cultures, the interests of this elite lie in yet further globalisation and liberalisation, often resulting in the erosion of local communities and national cultures and values.

Seen through the lens of this managerialist sociology, the unequal experiences of globalisation and late modern politics are not the unavoidable consequences of anonymous market dynamics, economic modernisation, or globalisation. Instead, specific, identifiable agents and institutions – the New Class – are to blame. This provides the radical Right with a common enemy – the global liberal elite. While elite has different faces in different geographical locations, they all are part of the liberal managerial class that is generating economic and cultural dislocation in societies around the globe. In this way, managerialist sociology provides the Right with an identifiable enemy that can be used to mobilise diverse groups in very different settings, convincing them to see themselves as part of the same global struggle against the destructive forces of liberalism.

Against liberalism’s destruction of cultures and identities, the radical Right holds that the true beauty of the world resides in the difference of ethic or national groups. This appeal to difference and respect for cultures, alongside the attack on the New Class, facilitate powerful equivalences or shared understandings between disparate national groups. It seeks to mobilise social forces produced and marginalised by liberalism and globalisation by bringing them to self-consciousness, turning them in Marxist parlance from analytically identifiable but political inchoate classes in themselves to politically aware and active classes for themselves, providing the basis for transversal alliances than span nations and regions.

The global Right is thus not a unified political and ideological movement in the traditional sense. It does not have a universal ideology or singular objective that all adherents must subscribe to. Nor does it have centralised controlling institutions. Instead, its counter-hegemonic ideologies enable a range of actors and agendas to find common cause despite their different contexts and concerns. Radical conservative actors and ideas seek to construct transnational chains of equivalence between different movements – and at the most basic level, the global Right consists of powerful articulations and equivalences between political subjects that help generate significant political movements.

In a further appropriation of Gramscian strategies, the radical Right has embarked on something akin to a classic ‘war of position’ – a patient, long-term counter-hegemonic struggle to produce ‘organic intellectuals’ who can critique the existing order and provide alternatives to it. While far from coordinated or centralised, the massive expansion of radical right-wing publishing houses in recent years, as well as their foray into universities, policy institutes and think tanks, is an outcome of this ‘war of position’. Well aware that ‘ideas do not float freely’, such institutional initiatives aim to create a new legitimacy and acceptability for radical Right ideas, explicitly re-writing intellectual history from a radical conservative perspective and reclaiming it from the academic and cultural mainstream. Through new universities and think tanks, their ultimate objective is to replace the liberal, ‘woke’, managerial, globalist elite with a Right elite, schooled in the critique of managerialism and critical of the over-reach of international institutions and liberal powers and think tanks. This Right elite will then be able to reshape the world in its image.

What exactly this world would look like is impossible to say. There is not one coherent or uniform vision of international politics or world order among the radical Right. Instead, we are confronted with different ideas and geopolitical imaginaries, some more realistic than others. That said, we do have some clues. Earlier this year, looking forward to the US election and praying for a Trump victory, Prime Minister Victor Orbán declared 2024 ‘a year of practice’ for the radical Right. The year 2024, he suggested, is ‘an unrepeatable opportunity to replace the declining progressive liberal world spirit with another world spirit: a sovereigntist world order.’ Progressive liberals, he continued, ‘sense the danger. The expiry of this era means their expiry: the end of the progressive world spirit.’

Orbán’s predicted end of the liberal ‘world spirit’ might be classic rhetorical hyperbole, but there is no doubt the radial Right already has had significant impact on world politics and that their impact is likely to continue and become ever more disruptive of what we have come to call the liberal word order. The radical Right’s ability to build powerful transversal, global alliances based on a logic and discourse of difference and diversity rather than claims to Western superiority is for example being acutely felt in the area of family policy and LGBTQ+ rights.

The world of the radical Right, should such a thing ever come to fruition, would be decidedly less liberal and more sovereigntist. As we show in World of the Right, the radical Right’s civilizationalism and calls for multipolarity enable complex entanglements with illiberal states like China and Russia, as well as with states and people in the Global South. While the agendas of these actors frequently vary, they are unified in their opposition to Western dominance of the liberal world order and their desire for recognition within a more multipolar world order. The multi-polar, civilizational world order envisioned by these alliances and the radical Right, however, is not anti-hierarchical and inclusive. It legitimises new differences and new forms of exclusion through its claims to cultural diversity. It can both contain and conceal forms of racism, antisemitism, and hatred, while supporting new forms of essentialism and exclusionary identities. Should this more sovereigntist vision of the world come into being, exclusionary illiberal forces would be able to operate with fewer international constraints, be it in the Global North or the Global South.