The Néo-Réactionnaires Of France Challenge The Old Consensus ...... |
..... the right wing of politics is rising.
To those observers on the Left, the events seem to be almost isolated ones ... a Golden Dawn party in Greece, or a Neo-Nazi party in some former communist state in the eastern Europe. But each explainable as a 'local phenomena', caused by local conditions. 'Austerity' in Greece, or the post communist reactionary swing in eastern Europe, but not as one general movement.
However if you are able to understand more, what the native Europeans are feeling about the perceived betrayal of their culture and religion by those political elites who have opened the floodgates, then you can see that, far from being isolated and explainable little eruptions, there is in fact a more general movement, centred around an acceptance of the idea, that there is a need to roll back immigration into Europe, before there is no 'Europe' left to defend.
That in fact, these right leaning parties are increasingly voicing a real movement, albeit in a non coherent, pan European way .... in Germany there was a mass movement called PEGIDA, which is/was ostensibly against 'islamification', and which still holds regular rallies. While in the UK, the far less extreme but still anti-immigration and anti-EU party UKIP, did become mainstream for over a decade. It may not survive until the next general election, but its very existence influenced the Brexit debate ... in France, the Front National (FN) have long been able to garner a large percentage of voters, and it may even carry the French Presidency at some time in the future (President Macron is struggling). How would the EU elite, or the Labour party in the UK deal with an elected FN French president?
So perhaps its not a strange thing, that you have to look to France to see how this may all develop elsewhere in the near future, where it seems that there is a movement that may point to either the salvation or ruination of the continent, depending of course upon your point of view, or politics. Strangely what would be reported as Right Wing in any other country and 'far right' in the UK, is reported as 'a new intellectual force' in France by the BBC.
This is in the form of a philosophical school, the Néo-Réactionnaires (new reactionaries) - a loose group of writers and thinkers, who want to shake up debate on issues like immigration, Islam and national identity. They have broken firstly with the Sartre school, and then with the general de-constructionist philosophers, or socialist trend of recent philosophy, and are now espousing the idea that Europe has to defend itself, or be forever lost, to become as one put it 'another people's history, and another people's civilisation' ....
To achieve this 'salvation', some of these new French thinkers, are saying that the nation state is the only vehicle that can achieve that defence. In fact they are saying that outside of the nation, and the tribal racial collective that the states represent, there is no democratic way of voting for and seeing changes enacted.
Neo-Reactionary Renaud Camus, Forced To Print Books From A Castle |
This movement has attracted criticism, as you might expect, however as one of the philosophers who espouse the new message put it .... look at France. "No longer able to control its budget, no money of its own, and its army directed by Washington" ... as it stands, a 'superfluous entity', no longer able to enact the views of its voters. Of course this could be said for all the EU members, even the now departed UK, which kept its currency, but who equally has fallen foul of the mass immigration problem which threatens the national cohesion to such a large degree.
The general message of this French movement is clear enough .... that as long as power keeps leeching to a central and unaccountable super state (the EU), then the more the local voters will vote for extreme parties, that promise to extricate voters from mass immigration, or return powers back to the national state. That voters doing so are actually saying to the EU elite 'Stop!!' We don't want you ignoring us anymore' .... whether those elites are listening is another matter entirely.
However I was much struck by the way one of the arguments was put ....'France (or Europe) has been very good at integrating individuals. But you cannot integrate whole peoples. If immigrants come from a different civilisation, which they have no particular interest in abandoning, then they will be representative of that civilisation' .... we face this same reality across Europe.
Whether its the mainstream parties who have ruled Europe since 1945, who acknowledge this truth and tackle this properly, or whether its darker and less predictable forces who do this, is down to whether the political elites finally listen to what the native inhabitants really want, or not.
It may be that democracy itself has become broken, with mainstream parties effectively ignoring the national interests, and following their own agendas that they have not got any real mandates for ... the next decade may prove to be another watershed moment in Europe's long history.
In fact much like the 1930's were ...
We are living through strange times. It's hard to predict how they are going to end.
ReplyDeleteWe have yet to feel the economic blows that Covid-19 has dealt us. There will be turmoil in many countries as austerity bites yet again when the bills come in. Whether that ushers in more Right-wing than Left-wing governments we shall see.
DeleteThanks for the comment. Always appreciated.