Globalization, uncertainty, and the far right

Ferdinand Celine was an anti-Semite. This may be a bit surprising, because his estate refuses to reprint his book on facism, Bagatelles pour un massacre. Celine derived his racist and fascist beliefs from the idea that civilization should be founded on the differences between groups or individuals.

I am re-reading Nichlas Fraser's The Voice of Modern Hatred: Encounters with Europe's New Right. I've read it before, but due to what's been on my mind (Other than finals) certain aspects of the book are standing out to me in a new light. The idea that civilization and/or culture is or should be founded on differences between people can be found in many places, not only in the writings of anti-Semites. It can be found in Huntongton's The Clash of Civilizations. And most alarmingly, it can be found in identity formation.

Celine's ideas seem very familiar to me now. Fraser writes, "Celine was sufficiently well educated to understand that the race theories implied by German anti-Semitism were nonsense - indeed he found the seriousness of Germans ridiculous. But culture was important to him, and he believed that a culture could die as easily as any other organism. Looking around him, Celine announced that France was mortally threatened. The last vestiges of Frenchness would be extinguished in the next war. The 'bagatelles' of which he wrote were a form of consolation offered before the imminent prospect of Armageddon, and they consisted of telling fellow Frenchmen that it remained the obligation of every Frenchman to hate Jews. For Jews were the founder members of the international class of capitalists. (...) Jewishness found expression in the English language, which had been annexed and destroyed in much the same way as French shortly would be. Above all Jewishness could be identified in the mass, homogenized multiculturalism of America, which would sooner or later destroy France." (Fraser, p. 26-27)

These opinions, with France substituted for some other country or sub-culture, can be heard a lot, sometimes with Jews substituted for the IMF or the WTO or something similar. In his book, Fraser mentions a study by Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno in the suburbs of southern California on Nazi and fascist sympathisers. Their conclusion was that there was, in fact, such a thing as an 'authoritarian personality.' People who has authoritarian personalities tended to be male, not very well educated, and had patriarchal attitudes to family authority. They found "Conservative embattled" to be their general motto. Most interestingly, they found that "those who felt threatened in their jobs, or who were worried about a world changing too rapidly for them, were particularly affected. The armed forces appeared to provide a testing ground for such types." (Fraser, p. 30)

Again, we've heard this before, not just from fascist sympathisers. These cries of cultural extinction, this distaste for multiculturalism, for change can be heard all around the world. The intense dislike of globalization and mixing of people bordering on hate can be heard from left, right, and center, not to mention the strong feelings that the concept of Americanization evokes. The two are, of course, interwined and one and the same for many people.

All this suggests that there may be a closer link between the foundations of Nazi and fascist ideologies and resistance to globalization than we may care to think. Although it is very clear that only a minority of people who feel this anxiety become members of the far right, the basic premises of the resistance ought to be more strongly questioned. Some far right groups even call on these ideas to evoke sympathy from society and to make their ideas sound like self-defense - the Vlaams Blok is quoted in Fraser's book to say just that: "They defended themselves against charges of bigotry with the assertion that it was the project of 'multiculturalism' - the world was never defined - and not the existence of individual Arabs, Turks, or Africans in Europe, which caused all the trouble." (Fraser, p. 36)

This brings up some very important subtleties. When does cultural preservation stop and a racist, nazi, or fascist systematic erasure of anything 'unauthentic' start? How clear lines can one reasonably expect to draw around a culture to mark off Self and Other? How much cultural change can one expect people to put up with?

I see in all this something unique that the neonazis need to appeal to their volk, to appeal to others' discontent and fears, to attempt to claim legitimacy for merely wanting to 'preserve' their culture - essentialist identity construction. If there is no essence of Europe to be infused with, then there is no volk bound together by bands of pure bloodlines. Then, you cannot kill their culture. If there is no essence of Europe that requires being white, then the Arabs and Turks can't be a threat. You can't threaten something that doesn't exist.

I don't flatter myself with thinking that I have discovered the solution to the problem of what to do with the far right, nor explained the far right. I do not pretend that changing identity construction is a practical solution to anything. However, I do think that this is yet another reason why it is extremely important that we (as in, everyone on Earth) abandon the idea that identities come from some inner "essence" that undeniably makes us who we are, passed down from our ancestors and culture. Reading The Voice of Modern Hatred again, I hear echoes of Amin Maalouf's In the Name of Identity: Violence and the Need to Belong. The far right could have been another interesting chapter in his book.