The rise of Europe's Right
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It was autumn 1996. Four men were sitting around me in a central London pub. Little distinguished them from the passing commuters. Other than their baseball caps, jailbird tattoos, or talk of white revolution, they might have been just about anyone.
Those four men were the leaders of a notorious neo-nazi gang called Combat 18 - the 1 and 8 in the name signify the position of “A” and “H” ("Adolf Hitler") in the alphabet. The gang was connected to Loyalist paramilitaries in Northern Ireland, a violent “white power” music scene, numerous football hooligan “firms”, and the British National Party (BNP) - the most prominent far-right political movement in modern Britain.
The gang may have crumbled into internecine strife and murder during the 15 months of our encounters - which formed the introduction to my book Homeland - and its dream of an Aryan Homeland in the wilds of Essex was perhaps laughable. But the far Right itself and the tensions which feed it are no longer a joke. Coming of age Last month the BNP leader Nick Griffin welcomed the French far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen to the UK. It was a sort of “coming of age” ceremony for Griffin and the BNP - recognition that they might be on the verge of an electoral breakthrough at forthcoming local, European and London elections this June. Le Pen had recently travelled from his native France where, despite lacking representation at national level, around one in six voters recently supported his Front National (FN) party in regional elections. In 2002 this notorious godfather of the Right – to whom almost all other far-right parties have paid homage at one time or another – took nearly 20 percent of the vote (over 5.5 million people) and beat Socialist prime minister Lionel Jospin into second place. Le Pen’s Front National has links to other extremist and ultra-nationalist parties across Europe. Even where such links are more tenuous, the FN has often had an influence. If you look at fledgling movements such as the BNP, you will see imitations of the FN’s web strategies, its media monitoring units, “influence circles”, even down to taking the same name for its annual festival. Shifting perceptions Yet despite its political rise, the popular perception of the extreme Right remains latched onto the Combat 18 stereotype. Perhaps it is comforting to believe that xenophobes and violent racists represent a tiny minority of our populations; that they are not like “us” – rather, that they inhabit some shadowy world from which they lurch every so often into the pages of tabloid newspapers. Too often I have seen even respected commentators write off the rise of the Right as a mere protest movement. Yet I would argue that the rise of the extreme Right represents the flipside to Al-Qaeda, both physically and metaphorically. As fundamentalism rises in the East, so our own zealots grow here in the West. Aside from the FN and BNP, there are now prominent extreme Right and anti-immigrant parties across Europe today: in Belgium (the Vlaams Blok); in Norway (Progress Party); Denmark (Danish Peoples Party); in Germany (the Republicans, the German Peoples Union and the skinhead National Democratic Party, plus a dangerous alliance of “comradeship” groups); in Austria (Jörg Haider’s Freedom Party); in the Netherlands (Pim Fortuyn List); in Switzerland (Swiss Peoples Party); in Portugal (Popular Party); and in Italy (Northern League, and the National Alliance). But perhaps perceptions are shifting. Mainstream politics and public opinion are affected by fears – some would say hysteria – over immigration, asylum, terrorism and Islam. These phrases are often used interchangeably on the street and in casual conversation.
Immigration and terrorism regularly feature among the top voter concerns in rich Western Europe. Demonisation of the “other” is commonplace. There are widely held beliefs – from the bars of Flanders to the alpine chalets of Bavaria – that someone else must to blame for the breakdown of traditional communities; for the lack of certainty; for the increased pace of change; for job insecurity, higher tax bills, and a loss of belonging and identity in an increasingly globalised world. Harking back to mythical better times is commonplace among the people I encountered, whether neo-nazi thugs or educated professionals. I have listened to voters explain that being swamped by asylum seekers causes them to support the far Right, even when I can prove no such asylum seekers exist within their community. All too often, settled minority communities are tarnished with this same brush, viewed under the label of Allah, as “other”, foreign and alien. Belief is a hard thing to challenge.
The Right also benefits from many first-time voters, as well as from the rise of single-issue politics. Ironically, studies in France showed that the greatest support for parties such as the Front National came from the suburbs, propelled by a fear of “invasion” by the city and its supposed immigrant gangs. Multiculturalism vs integration? Strange times are forging stranger alliances. I have witnessed gatherings of Islamic radicals with western Holocaust deniers, united in mutual anti-Semitism. With anti-Semitic feelings surging across Europe, some Jews have even turned to the far Right as a result of their own fears of attack and intimidation from North African or Turkish youths. Those same youths are being torn apart by an identity crisis, belonging neither in the West nor to their parents’ culture of the East or South. After race riots in northern Britain during the summer of 2001, it was revealed that the white and Asian communities had self-segregated long before any mass outbreak of violence. There was little real communication across the divide. Trevor Phillips, leader of the UK’s Commission for Racial Equality, has recently said that multiculturalism is dead and that integration is the way forward. Rather as with US citizenship rights, European states have begun to emulate the USA and focus on a “greater” embracing identity. Is this the way forward, or closing the stable door after the horse has bolted? The coming decades will be a time of identity politics and identity beliefs. If we are to avoid George Orwell’s future (a place where, he said, “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”) we need to take stock now. Or Orwell’s predictions may be nearer than we think. Nick Ryan is author of Homeland: Into a World of Hate(Mainstream Publishing), a journey into the extreme Right, and creative producer of the recent BBC TV drama “England Expects”. --- OneWorld Guest Editorials represent the viewpoint of the authors and not necessarily that of the OneWorld Network. Read and comment on previous Guest Editorials. If you would like to write or suggest a future OneWorld Guest Editorial, please contact miles.litvinoff@oneworld.net or josie.kirby@oneworld.net. |
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