The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe

THE IDENTITARIANS

THE IDENTITARIANS

THE MOVEMENT AGAINST GLOBALISM

AND ISLAM IN EUROPE

JOSÉ PEDRO ZÚQUETE

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

undpress.nd.edu

Copyright © 2018 by the University of Notre Dame

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018036112

ISBN-13: 978-0-268-10421-4 (hardback)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10423-8 (WebPDF)

ISBN: 978-0-268-10424-5 (epub)

∞This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu

This book is dedicated to my father and to the memory of my mother.

Europe is lying propped upon her elbows:

From East to West she lies, staring

Out, reminiscent—Greek eyes from the shelter

Of romantic hair.

—Fernando Pessoa

If the price of freedom is heavy, that of identity is doubly so.

The first can be given us by decree; the other is always up to us.

—Miguel Torga

CONTENTS

Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

ONE Intellectual Foundations, Practices, and Networks

TWO Identity against Globalism

THREE Identity against Islam

FOUR For a New Geopolitics of Europe

FIVE Of Race and Identity

SIX The Coming War?

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 1. Cover of Terre et Peuple magazine honoring Dominique Venner four years after his death (Summer 2017).

FIGURE 2. Poster for Polémia’s second Forum of Dissidence (November 19, 2016). It reads, Decrypt, Disobey, Act.

FIGURE 3. The logo of Génération Identitaire.

FIGURE 4. The logo of CasaPound Italia.

FIGURE 5. Image from the campaign Visages de la Reconquête (Faces of the Reconquest, launched in September 2016).

FIGURE 6. Logo, with the Spartan helmet in the middle, of the Identitarian boxing club/self-defense gym, The Agoge (founded in January 2017).

FIGURE 7. Logo of the Identitarian and Patriotic house La Citadelle in the city of Lille (open since 2016).

FIGURE 8. Image from the campaign Show Your Face showing Edwin, an Identitarian activist from Vienna.

FIGURE 9. Image from the campaign Show Your Face portraying Melanie, an Identitarian activist from Germany. It says, Fights for our right to identity.

FIGURE 10. The logo of Arktos, a publishing house currently headquartered in Budapest, Hungary (founded in 2009).

FIGURE 11. Right On podcast dedicated to the European Generation Identity, and featuring Austria’s Alexander Markovics as a guest (March 8, 2016).

FIGURE 12. T-shirt declaring Eat the universalists, from Austria’s Identitarian label Phalanx Europa.

FIGURE 13. Poster for CasaPound’s campaign of incentives to raise the birth rate of Italians of native stock (launched in January 2017) with the slogan Fill the cradles, empty the welcoming centers [for refugees and migrants].

FIGURE 14. Cover of the French Identitarians’ magazine depicting their defense of Calais against the invasion of immigrants (May–June 2016).

FIGURE 15. Meme from the Austrian Identitarians depicting the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek and a quote from him: The greatest hypocrites are those who call for open borders.

FIGURE 16. Identitarian propaganda material for the joint mission Defend Europe (June 2017).

FIGURE 17. Meme of the French writer Jean Raspail created by Martin Lichtmesz for a 2010 Sezession campaign showcasing its Hall of Heroes.

FIGURE 18. Cover of an issue of Réfléchir & Agir dedicated to the crusade against the modern world and including an interview with Renaud Camus.

FIGURE 19. Photo of a demonstration by the Austrian Identitarians in Vienna against the Great Replacement (June 6, 2015). Courtesy of IBÖ.

FIGURE 20. Poster of the German-speaking Identitarian movement alerting the people about the Great Replacement.

FIGURE 21. Cover of Terre et Peuple magazine with the title Crusade, Resistance, Reconquest (Autumn 2005).

FIGURE 22. Poster/meme of Génération Identitaire: Stop Islamization—We Are at Home!

FIGURE 23. Meme created by the Austrian Identitarians depicting their stunt at the Turkish embassy in Vienna on March 22, 2017. Courtesy of IBÖ.

FIGURE 24. Meme created by the French Identitarians in support of their campaign to dissolve the Islamist organization UOIF (now French Muslims). It shows the words of the organization’s former president, the Sheikh Ahmed Jaballah: The UOIF consists of a two-stage process. The first one is democratic, the second will put in orbit an Islamic society.

FIGURE 25. Poster publicizing a Génération Identitaire demonstration in Paris (November 25, 2017) protesting the terror in Europe. Against the Islamists let’s defend Europe, it says. This demonstration was subsequently forbidden by the authorities, to the outrage of the group.

FIGURE 26. Poster from CasaPound’s NGO Sol.Id. advertising a food drive for Syria.

FIGURE 27. Advertisement for the Academia Christiana annual summer conference held with the theme Identity against the New Tower of Babel (Summer 2016).

FIGURE 28. Meme or propaganda material from the German Identitarian movement. It reads, Europe, Youth, Reconquista!

FIGURE 29. Cover of the Terre et Peuple magazine with the title Russia Is Back (Autumn 2008).

FIGURE 30. T-shirt bearing the words Europa Nostra, from Austria’s Identitarian label Phalanx Europa.

FIGURE 31. Demonstration of CasaPound in Rome, in honor of Dominique Venner (May 23, 2016). The banner reads Europe revolts against fatalism!, with the words surrounded by CasaPound flags, as well as Italian, French, and Spanish flags. Photo by Antonio Mele.

FIGURE 32. Meme created by the German Identitarian movement in January of 2017 in support of Donald Trump. The quote from Trump reads: A nation without borders is not a nation.

FIGURE 33. White nationalism goes populist. Meme advertising the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, with Richard Spencer center front (August 2017).

FIGURE 34. German Identitarian street campaign in the northern state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, with an activist dressed as Pepe the Frog distributing propaganda leaflets.

FIGURE 35. Meme in support of the summer 2017 Identitarian Defend Europe mission depicting Pepe the Frog as the C-Star ship.

FIGURE 36. Meme from the German Identitarian movement advertising the need to rekindle the fighting spirit of Europeans. It reads: Identity needs defense.

FIGURE 37. Meme from the early incarnation of Génération Identitaire (Une Autre Jeunesse) depicting an ancient Spartan warrior with the message We are the youth that chooses Thermopylae rather than softening and renunciation.

FIGURE 38. T-shirt reading Europa calling and I must go sold by the German Identitarian movement shop. The bubble reads, Oh my God, he is in love with his homeland.

FIGURE 39. T-shirt reading Defender of Europe from the French Génération Identitaire online shop. It shows the Lambda sign and the image of the Spartan King Leonidas.

FIGURE 40. Antifa sticker against Generation Identity. This is the German version. It reads Hunt Nazi Hipsters—Smash the Identitarian Movement.

FIGURE 41. Covers of (left) Philippe Randa’s book Poitiers Demain (orig. pub. 1986) and (right) Fenek Solère’s The Partisan (orig. pub. 2014).

FIGURE 42. Cover of Modeste Lakrite’s L’Édit de Mantes, originally published in 2016.

FIGURE 43. Poster by the French Identitarians of Lyon advertising a book talk by Guerrilla’s author, Laurent Obertone, at their Identitarian house, La Traboule (November 2016).

PREFACE

My purpose in writing The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe is to inform readers of exactly what Identitarians have to say and how they imagine and present themselves. To accomplish this, it is vital to look at movements like this one from the inside out and not make hasty and uninformed assumptions about them. The type of knowledge that can be gained this way is necessary in order to gain a full understanding of the nature and appeal of Identitarian propaganda and social movements. With this premise in mind, it is crucial to bring home the point that the book is academic and ethnographic, not polemic, in nature. The attempt to understand and describe the Identitarian movement does not indicate approval or validation.

In today’s world, it is vital for scholars, politicians, and media figures, right and left and in between, not to simplistically dismiss the Identitarian phenomenon—whose social media and activist youthful base have been growing in Europe since the turn of the millennium, although its theoretical foundations were laid much earlier—as a marginal movement. Many of the sociocultural trends that feed it—above all, the perception of an ongoing multicultural and multiethnic transformation of traditional European societies and the related sense of threat to traditional European values and identities that it provokes—are likely to continue in the coming decades. So, too, will the Identitarian ethnocultural backlash.

In the end, my intent was to employ an ethnographical and phenomenological methodology in presenting this multifaceted movement on its own terms as much as possible. As the reader will verify in the pages of the book, I undertook this inside look as exhaustively as possible, delving deep into the Identitarian literature and social media production, covering different geographic contexts, and drawing from a plethora of primary sources in different languages while simultaneously including many firsthand accounts, testimonies, and interviews with theorists, sympathizers, and activists. All of this was done in the hope that scholars and other readers can at least be well enough informed before drawing their own conclusions about the structure, history, beliefs, and moral perspectives of a movement that has made Defend Europe not just a distinctive hashtag but an overriding existential purpose.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The making of The Identitarians: The Movement against Globalism and Islam in Europe took roughly three years, with intensive periods of research and writing that I engaged in mostly in the southernmost part of Portugal, in the village of Vilamoura. The whole time I’ve had the support of my institution, the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon, as well as the financial support of the Foundation for Science and Technology. I want to thank, too, my colleagues and friends António Costa Pinto, Marina Costa Lobo, Bruno Cardoso Reis, Riccardo Marchi, and Filipe Nobre Faria for their overall support during this enterprise. The editor and poet Matt Stefon I thank for his help with the manuscript and for his continuous friendship and support. My friends Charles and Cherry Lindholm, Jeff Bristol, and George Michael offered, at different points, words of reassurance and wisdom. It was a privilege to have such an encouraging and diligent editor as Eli Bortz—I’ve greatly benefited from his tireless support. Also at Notre Dame Press I want to thank the managing editor, Matthew Dowd, as well as Wendy McMillen, the design and production manager. Marilyn Martin was a careful and judicious copyeditor, and I’m extremely pleased with her work. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who took time to read the manuscript. I believe that they have helped me to make the book more solid in terms of scholarship. Throughout, Still in a Dream: 1988–1995—A Story of Shoegaze, as well as the incredible discography of the Greek music label sound in silence—and its limited-edition releases—provided many, many hours of soundtrack for the writing of this book.

At the same time I want to express my gratitude to the various people who gave me interviews and/or assisted in other ways with the book project. In alphabetical order by first name, they are Adam Berčík, Adriano Scianca, Alex Kurtagic, Alexander Markovics, Antonio Mele, Bo De Geyndt, Brittany Pettibone, Colin Liddell, Daniel Friberg, David Engels, Duarte Branquinho, Eli Mosley, Ernesto Milà Rodríguez, Fabrice Robert, Fenek Solère, Ferenc Almássy, Flávio Gonçalves, Georges Feltin-Tracol, Georges Hupin, Gergely Kőrössy, Götz Kubitschek, Greg Johnson, Jared Taylor, Jiri (Délský potápěč), Joachim Veliocas, João Franco, João Martins, John Lambton, John Morgan, Julian Langness, Julien Langella, Jurij Kofner, Kai Murros, Lucian Tudor, Manuel Ochsenreiter, Martin Lichtmesz, Martin Sellner, Martin van Creveld, Michael Francis Walker, Michael O’Meara, Patrick Casey, Pavel Tulaev, Philippe Randa, Piero San Giorgio, Pierre Krebs, Pierre Vial, Raivis Zeltīts, Rémi Tremblay, Richard Spencer, Robert Steuckers, Ruuben Kaalep, Tom Dupré, Tom Sunić, Tore Rasmussen, and Umberto Actis Perino.

Finally, and it couldn’t be otherwise, I am grateful to my family, whose support never wavers; to my soccer team, Benfica, for the many moments of celebration they have given me; and to Ché, a pug like no other.

ABBREVIATIONS

Introduction

This book is the chronicle of a rebellion. Against the backdrop of a once great civilization ravaged by a modern liberal capitalist world and under assault by a conquering foreign people, the writer and historian Dominique Venner preached a return to the sources of European identity, rediscovering the beauty, creativity, heroism, and uniqueness of its culture. He thought that, amid a world falling apart, Europeans loyal to the historical and cultural integrity of their civilization must engage in the struggle for Europe and resist, reconquering what has been lost. And much has been lost, because, for the first time in their multi-millennial history, the European peoples do not prevail over their own space, neither spiritually, politically, nor ethnically.¹ It is, quite simply, a matter of survival. Either this Identitarian resistance succeeds or it fails, but it vows never to succumb to fatalism or to mindless indifference in the middle of the ruins.

A myth of identity lies at the root of this twenty-first century intellectual and activist rebellion: a myth not in the sense of truth or falsity but in that of a call to action, a vision that mobilizes, fueling the willingness to fight back and overturn, against all odds, a system of domination and an identity not thought out as an abstraction or a simple social construction but felt as something more profound, primordial, tied to space, territory, memory, and ethnicity, that must be revitalized today. At a regional, national—but, above all, continental, European—level this identity of flesh and blood has been defaced and disfigured, and the situation has deteriorated past the point at which only a radical change—political, economic, cultural, and spiritual—is conceivable. Europe has gone so far along the path of destruction that radicalism is the only available method and tool to save her.

The Identitarian indictment is a dark account of contemporary European life. Europe has been torn apart by the Western model of civilization that it helped to create, which today is synonymous with Americanization, and this dominant ideology—which in this new century bears the name of globalism—has diluted its distinctive character. Its communities, peoples, and cultures have suffered the onslaught of an abstract model that homogenizes all differences, and combats all natural attachments (to nations, regions, cultures, ethnicities), in an attempt to destroy all barriers to the free flow of markets, reducing human beings to a sorrowful condition in which the only identity that is allowed, and celebrated, is that of individual materialism and consumerism. At the same time, so goes the Identitarian accusation, European elites allowed the opening of the gates, the decades-long policies of mass immigration, which softened and corrupted the relatively coherent and homogenous collective identity of European peoples, constituting a major dimension of the self-immolation of the continent. The more recent surge of immigration or invasion—whose participants the official line of thinking and its zealots labeled migrants—added extra fuel to this ongoing Great Replacement of peoples in European lands. Amid the degradation of its identity, the abjuration of its ancient Indo-European and Hellenic roots, feeling guilty about its own history, and awash in relativism, self-doubt, and self-loathing, Europe is on the verge of being conquered by Islam, a young, rooted, and spiritually strong civilization that is superior to an aging and frail Europe whose treacherous elites are behaving in a manner that is the greatest expression of a civilization in free fall.

Although the Identitarian network of resistance is diverse—it comprises a variety of figures and groups that may emphasize different aspects of this civilizational crisis, to the detriment of others—all of its participants share a calamitous diagnosis and a radical critique of the current state of Europe. They also share an avowed nonconformist ethos, abhor defeatism, and radiate, in their words and actions, a disposition of being the watchmen on the wall in a zero-sum struggle to keep alive what they perceive to be the real European identity. In this book Identitarians are viewed broadly, writ large. Since the late twentieth century they have been responsible for a vast literary production that has strengthened the depth of their philosophical and cultural critique of the status quo. This intellectual or cultural dimension—which supporters brand a true war of ideas in defense of Identitarianism—is, of course, important. But what has characterized the Identitarian struggle in the most recent times is the emergence of an activist, street-based, and Internet-savvy young militancy that has widened the repertoires of Identitarian combat beyond publications and conferences, emblematic of the Identitarian old guard, to include disruptive street protests, flash mobs, occupations, media campaigns and stunts, vlogs, podcasts, livestreams, meme-making, and an intensified targeting of the perceived enemies of the collective identity—in this case, all those who conspire to bring about, or even actively work for, its destruction, from deracinated elites to sociocultural subversive groups and forces. This phenomenon has its epicenter in France and Italy, but it has spread, in different rhythms, to other European countries—particularly those of Germanic Central Europe—and it is viewed as an example of activism that is clean-shaven, appealing, with impact on the media and public opinion, and therefore worthy of imitation. Although not without rivalries and personal disputes, these two wings of combat—one more theoretical, the other galvanized by direct action—form the face of the Identitarian surge to regain the control of the destinies of European communities.

The Identitarians: The Movement Against Globalism and Islam in Europe charts and explores this territory of struggle. It begins with an excursion into its intellectual foundations, figures and groups of reference, dynamics of militancy, activism, and networking before proceeding with the movement’s critique of globalization and its damning consequences, such as immigration-colonization. It then analyzes the contemporary Identitarian battle against Islam, as well as the search for a new European geopolitics that safeguards its independence, shuns American tutelage, and looks in hope toward the East. Next it focuses on the ethnic-racial implications of this struggle for identity, which may imply formal or informal alliances with a wider, mostly US-based, white nationalist movement, and finally on the looming war (which for many Identitarians is already raging), along ethnic lines, that they believe will revitalize and awaken a wider European resistance. Throughout the book, and whenever necessary, other non-Identitarian groups, initiatives, and dynamics are described as a way of contextualizing the scenario in which Identitarians operate and in which they interact; this study always keeps in mind that Identitarians do not act in isolation and that they are also a mirror of the age and of its troubles.

In the most recent decades, political radicalism, particularly in its right-wing dimension, has become an important topic of study among scholars, law enforcement practitioners, and national security analysts. Although the aim of this book is not to go over familiar arguments and debates about ideological classification, it should be said that academia—and in this it has been followed by journalism and the activism of watchdog groups—conceptualizes most of the writers, activists, and groups present throughout this book as belonging to the radical—or even extreme—right. Generally, that is not how Identitarians see themselves. Within their vast and heterogeneous family, other self-descriptions are favored: from patriots to the true Right, adherents to the beyond Left and Right line of thinking, or, simply, Identitarians. However, as will be shown in the pages and chapters that follow, at the heart of Identitarianism, in both its theoretical and activist dimensions, is the cleavage between Identity and globalism with all its ramifications and implications. This split is voiced and articulated in different ways, with some groups emphasizing more combating mass immigration or Islamization (as the most urgent thing to do), while others prioritize the consequences of an out-of-control capitalism that they conceive of as speculative and with no respect for any sort of boundaries and limits. Also, the gamut of defenses of ethnoidentity, within the broader arch of Europeism, fluctuates between regionalist leanings and more nationalist attachments. In all its expressions, it must be emphasized, it is not a strict attachment to rigid Left and Right categories that defines Identitarians. If there is an ideological Other, it is what they denounce as the left or liberal establishment. They do not represent a radicalization of the mainstream liberal right—on the contrary, to a steady degree, they are its opposite, and they see that liberal right as their anathema—while the activism of their youth uses many ideas or tactics traditionally associated with left-wing groups or movements. They are not simply conservatives either. If they are conservatives, they are radically so; they want a reset of the system, ultimately a change of the current globalist or liberal paradigm toward a rebooting of Europe’s ethnocultural tradition for the twenty-first century.

Even though Identitarians give primacy to the noninstitutional dimension of politics, they also engage, directly or indirectly, in electoral and party politics, particularly with political parties viewed as sharing a like-minded disposition. These connections and bridges are of course part of this book’s narrative. Yet its main focus is on the anti-systemic nature of Identitarians. The fact of the matter is that Identitarians of all stripes and in all locations are also much more far-reaching and sweeping—in their diagnosis of the evils that afflict Europe and in the solutions proposed—than are the right-wing populist political parties that they often defend. More than a simple attachment to the ideological spectrum, what defines Identitarians and invests them with both a sense of existential angst and an equal sense of existential purpose is the rejection of the system to which they impute the calamities that afflict Europe. They reject with the same fierce intensity the progressive Left and the neoliberal Right, guilty as both are in the process of defiling rooted European identities, as well as effectively complicit in advancing the marginalization and disempowerment of Europe’s peoples. At the end of the day, it is this refusal to comply with a system charged with destroying cultures and killing peoples that fuels the European Identitarian uprising.

Douglas Murray, the conservative English author and commentator—and someone who, although very critical of the contemporary course of European politics and culture, is certainly not a European Identitarian—noted, in a podcast, that the Identity of Europe—it’s a very painful thing . . . people are not very good at talking about it . . . but I think it’s just there underlying everything [the problems that afflict Europe]. What is this thing? What is it to be European? Who can be European? Can anyone be European? Is Europe the home for the peoples who’ve been living in Europe or is it the home for everyone in the world who wants to move and call it home? These are very, very big questions.² European Identitarians, in all their diversity, believe that they have indeed the answers for—and that is the theme of this book—these very, very big questions.

ONE

Intellectual Foundations, Practices, and Networks

He who has grown wise concerning old origins, behold, he will at last seek after the fountains of the future and new origins.

—Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

INTRODUCTION: A EUROPEAN REVIVAL

The current Identitarian intellectual and activist movement that wants to transform Europe was not born in a vacuum. A major foundation has been on the rise since the late 1960s of a Francophone intellectual movement that, with the passage of time, became devoted to a guiding principle: striking down the hegemonic Western liberal-capitalist paradigm through cultural combat. Taking their cue from Marxist Italian Antonio Gramsci—especially his insistence on the power of ideas and the need for an organic intellectual vanguard to change mentalities—adherents to this movement saw a metapolitical drive for the conquest of minds and spirits as a priority in order for a regenerated and yet again powerful Europe to emerge from the ashes of a decadent West.¹ The subsequent labeling of this école de pensée (school of thought) by the French media as Nouvelle Droite (New Right, ND) was not without controversy: Although their original founders started their militancy on the French radical right, there has always been a tendency by many of its members to define their thought transversally, beyond political divisions and rigid dichotomies. In fact, the original aim of this school of thought was to create a new culture. The fact of the matter is that the media label stuck. ND served to designate a wide rebel and heretical (owing to its self-proclaimed anticonformist and antisystemic ethos) network of thinkers, writers, publications, groups, and associations that have expanded well beyond its original borders.

Of course the rejection of this Western or liberal modernity was nothing new in the twentieth century. The ND, in fact, was particularly inspired by—and intellectually indebted to—what the Swiss-born German thinker Armin Mohler called the Conservative Revolution (CR), a movement that indeed aimed at creating a new culture, or a counterculture. Although heterogeneous, and with different thinkers and currents of thoughts, it basically consisted of a radical attempt by a cluster of German intellectuals in the interwar period to pull apart the new liberal foundations of the country (of which the Weimar Republic was a symbol), and it searched to overcome the loss of sacral, ethnic, and communal bonds with a holistic paradigm that—and this was the guiding idea of the CR’s Young Conservative current gathered around Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—although rooted in tradition, would constitute not a restoration but a new revolutionary beginning. Above all, this movement represented a spiritual rejection of the modern world, and this is the reason that adventurous figures such as, especially, Ernst Jünger, but also Ernst von Salomon—the first a veteran and memorialist of World War I and an activist in the National-Revolutionary camp, and the other a member of the Freikorps active after that war, while plotting against the new order by making the rejection of the bourgeois civilization a modus vivendi—were a sort of existential (in heroic life and deeds) personification of the CR worldview.

Back (or forward) to France and to the ND, which for more than forty years, and with Alain de Benoist as its major intellectual reference, has produced a vast bibliographical output, always with the intent of spreading a counterhegemonic discourse, consolidating a cultural counterpower and, eventually, a new paradigm for European societies. The ancient philosophical schools of Greece served as the ideal for the ND, and its own cultural association is called, not coincidentally, Groupement de Recherche et d’Études pour la Civilisation Européenne (GRECE—Research and Study Group for European Civilization). Jean-Claude Valla, one of its founders, noted the importance of the name: What counts is the abbreviation, the reference to Greece. ‘The Greeks,’ Nietzsche said, ‘are for us what the saints are for Christians.’² Indeed, a philosophical denunciation of Western modernity lies at the basis of the ND’s cultural combat. Although the seeds of the evil that afflict human existence are traced back to the egalitarianism and universalism of Judeo-Christian monotheism (imposing the worship of one God on a plural and polytheistic world), modernity secularized this tradition. Its chief ideology, liberalism, and its radical philosophy of individualism, has had the devastating consequence of eradicating collective identities and traditional cultures, and thereby of putting an end to the integrated, organic, and holistic nature of communities across the earth. The advent of a capitalist civilization, on the back of liberalism’s economic and political doctrines—and the submission of the world to the rationale of the markets, which does not recognize borders, limits, or historical and cultural differences—is only a continuation and exacerbation of the evil dynamics set in motion by Western modernity.

In opposition to the eradicating universalism of the West, the ND has for a long time upheld differentialism, or the Right to Difference. Individuals belong to humanity only through the mediation of a particular culture. Communities and cultures must be defended because they express the spirit of a specific context, a unique way of life, personality, and destiny. To reinforce this perspective, ND writings refer to romantic anthropological views, such as eighteenth-century theorist Johann Herder’s assertion that each culture has its own integrity and metaphysical creative genius, as well as evoking more recent theorizations, such as the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s sentiment that the prospect of the rule of one culture and one civilization would be a gateway for something ominous to mankind. The truth of the matter is that although the thematic focus of the ND has been multidimensional, and some of its positions have evolved, this insistence on singularity against sameness, on differentialism against homogenization, and on the defense of the plural against the single—of the group or community against the rootless individual, atomized and without a foundational culture—has remained at the heart of its worldview. Because the world is a pluriversum, wrote Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier in their Manifesto for a European Renaissance, the West’s pretense to make the world over in its own image by imposing its model on all others in the name of progress is an existential threat to all cultures, obstructing their own unique path, has been happening for a long tortuous time in Europe.³

It is within this ideological context, and in the spirit of defense of the cause of peoples (and of preserving their diversity) that the ND—particularly but not exclusively in the writings of de Benoist—worked up its notion of identity. This reflection was gradual. As noted by Robert Steuckers (born in 1956)—a Flemish intellectual, close to the ND in the past but now philosophically closer to the Identitarians, and a specialist in the various currents of the Conservative Revolution, who sees himself as a métapolitologue (a metapolitical political scientist)—this school of thought initially did not directly address the question of Identity. In its early years, the issues that put identity at the center of discussion in France and Europe (mass immigration, the mixing of cultures, and intensified globalization) were still not fully developed.⁴ As they grew deeper, the ND adopted the position of calling for clear and strong identities against indifferentiation and uprooting.⁵ Neither the assimilation of the melting pot (which blends all differences into an undifferentiated whole) nor the exclusion of apartheid was the ideal. The ND focus, according to de Benoist, is on the defense of identity in a positive and open way and not as an excuse to inspire the most aggressive xenophobia, which would only discredit the notion itself.⁶ The French thinker disparages the bad usages of identity and its pathologies, particularly essentialism, or the vision of identity as an intangible essence, as an attribute that does not change, something that is shared identically by all the members of the group. This is a shortcut to perceiving identity as a tool for exclusion, legitimizing ignorance, and keeping others apart. De Benoist is particularly critical of the notion of biological identities, which, although propped up as the example of something that does not change, has only a relative value; the only specific existence of human beings, de Benoist says, is social-historical. Nevertheless, this notion is usually put at the service of ethnocentrism and racism.⁷ What this means is that even though the ND calls for strong identities as an indispensable way out of the atomism and individualism of the modern era—a call that has moved it closer to communitarian thinkers such as the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor (a recurrent reference in de Benoist’s writings about the issue)—it sees identity in a dynamic and dialogical perspective (in interaction with the others) and, as it makes a point of honor in repeating, in a nonethnocentric fashion. In short, for the ND, communities or collective identities are above all dialogical entities, and not ethnic entities.⁸ In a conference given in Washington, DC, de Benoist stated that the biggest threat to collective identities of European and Western countries is not the phenomenon of immigration but planetary homogenization, or the ideology of the Same, which threatens the identity of all peoples.⁹

Actually, in the ND narrative, it is the modern era that has inaugurated and accelerated the destabilizing globalization that is at the root of an Identitarian awakening, because if on one hand it erases identities, on the other hand it stimulates, as a reaction, all sorts of religious, linguistic, sexual, and ethnocultural demands. Above all, these constitute a desire for recognition in a magma of uniformity.¹⁰ Thibault Isabel, the editor in chief of Krisis, the revue of ideas and debates of the ND, sees in the individual and communitarian Identitarian a resurgence—which takes the form of a desperate and aggressive search for authenticity (an out-and-out cult nowadays)—a consequence of the modern era’s reign of anonymity.¹¹

Irrespective of the ND’s excoriation of the excesses of Identitarianism—what de Benoist calls Identitarian tribalism¹²—the reality is that the ND has laid the theoretical ground for Identitarians, exercising a great influence on their preference for cultural combat, rejection of universalism, embrace of differentialism, and overall critique of a system captured by a disintegrating liberal capitalism. Many of the ND views are woven into the Identitarian narrative about the contemporary desolate condition of Europe. It could be argued that Identitarians—in both intellectual and more activist dimensions—pick and choose à la carte what serves them the best in the ND cultural production in order to carry on their combat for Europe.

THE IDENTITARIAN TURN

Although the ND, in truth, provided many of the intellectual munitions that are part of the Identitarian firepower, it is nevertheless distinct from Identitarianism. Because the driving force of the Identitarian Weltanschauung is ethnoculturalism—which has been largely abandoned by today’s ND—Identitarianism has departed from the mother house, constituting today a new ideological breed. The prologue to the twenty-first-century European Identitarian current of thought is the overriding emphasis on the group’s ethnocultural worth, the urgency to preserve it, and the setting of boundaries between the in-group, those who belong to the people (ultimately ethnic Europeans), and those who do not belong to the people, the out-group (non-Europeans). Within Identitarianism this emphasis on ethnicity is not equal among all Identitarian thinkers and groups, existing on a continuum ranging from moderate to high-intensity, but nevertheless constitutes a distinguishing feature shared by today’s European defenders of identity. What follows is a short description of the emergence of Identitarianism in France and its metapolitical strongholds.

Particularly since the turn of the century, a strain of thinking that emerged out of the ND developed into a dissident current to GRECE’s metapolitical project. Sharing the same diagnosis regarding the sorrowful state of Europe, although not necessarily agreeing on the cure (or on the issues that should be prioritized), this rival wing has been expanding over time. In the words of the US writer Michael O’Meara, an ethno-nationalist who sees Identitarianism as a kindred movement,¹³ in this day and age a multiform Identitarian resistance,¹⁴ rose to put a stop to the plunge of Europe into a cultural abyss. The Identitarian intellectual uprising is indeed diverse, composed of a variety of writers, activists, and groups all over Europe. There is, however, no unifying center of Identitarianism, nor has there been a defining moment of creation or any sort of before-and-after event. From an intellectual standpoint, what happened was a gradual split from a group of intellectuals, initially belonging to the ND, that developed parallel interpretations in response to a series of emerging issues—primary among them the issue of mass immigration and its impact on the original communities’ identity—and refocused the discourse on the endangered ethnic dimension of European peoples and cultures. In this process of separation and naissance of a new intellectual movement, truly Identitarian entrepreneurs played a foundational role.

Why We Fight

In 2001 a small Paris publisher put out the book Why We Fight: Manifesto of the European Renaissance. Its author was Guillaume Faye (born in 1949), a former intellectual of reference in the ND. As he later wrote, In 1986, I decided to leave because I had said what I had to say. The ND was starting to go around in circles.¹⁵ Faye, who has a PhD in political science and is given to many undertakings (including serving as a radio host and working as a scriptwriter) is a prolific polemicist and essayist, often delivering his thoughts in a provocative style, phrasing, and imagery. Ten years later, in its English-language edition, translated by Michael O’Meara, Why We Fight was praised in the following manner on its back cover: "As it was for the Nineteenth-century Left with Marx’s Communist Manifesto, Why We Fight is destined to become the key work for Twenty-first century Identitarians. Although it was not mentioned, this description replicated that of Pierre Vial—a fellow traveler of Faye in many Identitarian battles—when the book first came out. In the foreword to the German edition, the Franco-German Pierre Krebs expressed his belief that the book was predestined to become the reference work, a veritable war book, all the more urgent in order to counter the global deculturation of our people—the preliminary step towards its systematic genetic and Identitarian destruction.¹⁶ Basically, all through the book, Faye champions ethnocentrism, and the need to stand up for it and shield it, if European civilization is to survive. Ethnocentrism is the mobilizing conviction, distinct to all long-living peoples, that they belong to something superior and that they must conserve their ethnic identity, if they are to endure in history.¹⁷ This is what today’s Europeans lack the most: ethnic consciousness, or the necessity to defend the biological and cultural identity of one’s people, as the indispensable condition for the longevity and autonomy of its civilization. In short, the destruction of the biocultural identity" of European peoples settles the end of European civilization.

This view of identity as ethnic and biological clashes head to head with the ND reflections. De Benoist never misses an opportunity to distance himself and the ND from such views, repeating that Faye left the ND more than thirty years ago.¹⁸ He accuses Identitarians in general of assigning ethnic factors the role that Karl Marx assigned to economic factors,¹⁹ while Michel Marmin, another founder of GRECE, objects when the defense of national identity is in reality a pretext to express the most repugnant racism and the most stupid xenophobia, those old demons of the extreme-right.²⁰ Some Identitarians, above all Faye himself, do not spare any punches against such criticism. Against the ND motto of cause of peoples, Faye posits the "cause of our people, accusing the stargazing ND intellectuals of being cut off from reality, minimizing threats such as mass immigration, and howling with the wolves against racism, because of their obsession with respectability, to ‘correctly protest’ without ever crossing the cordon.²¹ When Steuckers censures de Benoist for his abstract and disembodied view of History,²² he adds force to this stargazing" criticism, or the solipsistic inability to apprehend, and connect with, the real.

Identity is always contextualized, embedded, and rooted. But the Identitarian attachment to ethnocultural Identity is not felt as backward-looking in the sense of a return to a golden age in the past. Faye calls it a vision of the world that is both traditional and Faustian because it wants not to go back in time (like reactionaries) but to re-create the ancestral sources, virtues, and values of Europeans in modern times. It was in this sense that he coined the word archeofuturism—the title of his influential 1998 book—to stress that the sources of the future are already present in ancestral values (from its archaism it is possible to derive new creations). Tradition, therefore, must be continually re-created. This idea is connected to the view that identity is not frozen, but dynamic. It exists in a continuity, linked by a long memory—as if, notes Steuckers, you’re ‘roped together’ like alpinists with your fellow-citizens as the present-day philosopher Robert Redeker says—and therefore tied with the destiny of a people. But it is in a permanent condition of being and becoming, and it can always survive and flourish—giving rise to new forms, new creations, new beginnings—as long as it is willed. This allows for a nonpessimistic, voluntaristic view of History, in which decline is never irreversible and a renaissance or rebirth is always possible (depending on the heroism of personalities and the audacity of peoples). In this Identitarians—and the ND, particularly de Benoist, who has always supported this view of historical time as a transition to new beginnings and dawns—are indebted to the refusal of a deterministic linear temporality, present in Nietzsche’s and Heidegger’s philosophies of history, and to the forward-looking tendency that existed within the German Conservative Revolution, which had Moeller van den Bruck as one of its main interpreters.²³

Now in his late sixties, Faye, for whom the ND abandoned the Identitarian combat, has taken up the torch and is today one of the most blistering Identitarian voices in Europe. Faye is widely admired—even if he is also controversial within the Identitarian camp owing not only to his visceral style but also to his defense of ideological reorientations deemed necessary in view of the gravest threat to Europe, which for him is non-European, mostly Muslim, colonization. What is true is that Faye coined new words, developed concepts, and projected scenarios that are now an intrinsic part of the Identitarian language of combat for the battle of Europe.

The Völkisch Way

The German word völkisch describes perfectly the doctrine of Terre et Peuple,²⁴ notes the French Identitarian thinker Pierre Vial in the magazine Terre et Peuple, stressing in this way the importance given to the embeddedness of the volk, the people, in blood-and-soil ties and the sharing of a common destiny. Since the last decade of the twentieth century, a commanding supply of Identitarian thinking and cross-border interaction has been Pierre Vial’s network. It gravitates around the cultural association Terre et Peuple, established in 1995, its magazine, annual roundtables, and countless appearances by its founder at conferences around France and Europe. Like all the founders of GRECE, Vial initiated his political militancy in the milieu of the French nationalist right, but he left the ND in the 1980s owing to disagreements over the rising issue of immigration and over the question of ethnicity. Vial would later join the Front national and was behind the launch of Identité (Identity), the revue of national studies of the party, before abandoning it also because of Vial’s insistence on the need for a greater focus on the ethnic dimension of identity.²⁵ Vial has been the president of Terre et Peuple since its foundation, and in 1999 the first issue of its magazine was dedicated to the clash of civilizations. In the editorial he announced as its core principle the Identitarian cultural combat. Beyond the petty dichotomy of left and right, Vial claimed that the level of their challenge was much higher, focused on the ongoing civilizational clash, an all-out struggle between two communities whose coexistence in the same land generated unavoidable conflicts. The quotidian accentuates, day after day, one truth: Ethnic conflicts, which have always existed, will always exist, he continued. The Identitarian task was to arm our people for the resistance, and then for the war of liberation which will allow it to survive and take command of its destiny.²⁶ The idea that reality validates and reinforces the Identitarian worldview is recurrent in Vial’s writings: Our great strength lies in the fact that our conception of the world rests in taking account of realities. It is the same with ethnopolitics. Contrary to others, our conception of identity is based on the ethnic factor. The world progresses in such a way that it gives us reason everyday. Against wishy-washy conceptualizations of identity and compromises with political correctness, Vial repeatedly states that the path taken by Terre et Peuple and its devotees is to not compromise with the system, even if the price they must pay is widespread demonization. We are, he wrote, "we have chosen, to be in the camp of the damned. Forever.²⁷ Time, however, is on the side of the Identitarians, and Vial often expresses the belief that the twenty-first century will be the century of the insurrection of the rooted identities against the zealots of the system, an insurrection characterized by the refusal to get run over by the leveling of a uniformizing and cosmopolitan globalism, imposing the miscegenation and the pensée unique [single thought].²⁸ This cultural war, writes Jean-Patrick Arteault, is not a banal conflict of ideas; rather, we need to understand it as a struggle to the death of two fundamentally hostile worldviews. What follows is that what is at stake is, very simply, the existence of true Europeans and the possibility of prolonging in time their biological and cultural being. European Identitarians may dream of being the pioneers of a new era and a true European renaissance" if they rise up to the challenge of our times.²⁹

Terre et Peuple Identitarians, in their mission to defend and boost European identity, insist on a common ethnic root of Europe’s peoples, which they trace back historically to the Indo-Europeans. This is their myth of origins. In this quest they intensify a path opened by the ND, whose metapolitical enterprise had as one of its founding themes the promotion of an Indo-European heritage. According to Jean-Claude Valla, We gave new breath to Indo-European studies. In some validation of Valla’s statement, the anthropologist Georges Dumézil (one of the major specialists in this field of study) collaborated briefly with the ND magazine Nouvelle École.³⁰ This Indo-European focus is still present in the ND, but not in the same intensity and breadth as in the Terre et Peuple network, whose magazine regularly features themes associated with the topic, as well as writings by professor of linguistics Jean Haudry, who also collaborated with Nouvelle École. Against the voices of negationism, which deny the existence of Indo-Europeans as an ethnic group, and following on Dumézil teachings, Haudry affirms the existence of an Indo-European tradition that was characterized not just by language but also by a culture and an oral tradition. In the path of Dumézil’s scholarly work, their communities are believed to have revolved around a specific ideology, a hierarchy of tripartite social functions—the priesthood,