The Contemporary Far Right and Modern Environmentalism

This chapter begins by surveying far right parties’ electoral performance in the 1990s in Europe, paying special attention to the German far right. Presenting several scholarly interpretations for the rise of a populist far right, the chapter shows that one of these theories—the “New Politics” thesis—characterizes the far right as a “materialist backlash” against the postmaterialist politics of the Greens/New Left. Despite much to commend it as an explanatory theory for the rise of the far right, it is argued here that this theory and others outlined here cannot account for the fact that many far right parties and groups articulate distinctly environmental themes—themes identified as belonging to the post-materialist Greens and New Left. To explain this puzzle, the chapter introduces the main thesis of this book: ecologism as an ideology can have both a left-wing and right-wing expression. What will be called here “right-wing ecology”—the particular environmental worldview of the far right—is marked by an exclusivistic ultra-nationalism, one based on a rejection of the Enlightenment’s notion of universalism. Accordingly, within right-wing ecology, human beings are conceptualized as nothing but the expressions of an eco-niche, the places, nations, and cultures to which they supposedly organically belong, and national identity is naturalized, made into a biological-ecological determinant.