Majorityrights Central > Category: European Nationalism

This, the opening speech of Geert Wilders to the Dutch court trying him right now, is three days old now.  But it is interesting:

Of course, the Dutch problem with immigration of Moslems is on a different scale to our experience in England, and the focus upon it is bound to be greater.  But it is difficult to see from Wilders’ plaints against Islam then against the Dutch and EU elites whether he knows who he is really fighting in that courtroom.  What is the point of attacking Islam except as part of the attack on the elites?  Rather strange.

Thanks to Bill for the link.

The vote for the presidency of Front National was run yesterday, and the news is that Marine Le Pen has won with two-thirds of the vote.  The party is convening this weekend in Tours to place her father’s mantle on her shoulders.  A new chapter in the increasingly urgent struggle for a free and nationally-conscious France is beginning.

Marine’s election does two things.  Most obviously, it is a generational change.  It arrests the party’s post-2002 decline under her father, moving it on from the divisiveness of the French past, from all allusions to Vichy and Algiers, and from the sniping at the outrageous official genuflection before Jewry and the Holocaust narrative.  Marine’s unsuccessful opponent, Bruno Gollnisch, represented all that.  Marine is much more presentable and, as a lawyer and a working mother, a woman of modern-day France.  She will never find herself asked in the Cour de cassation whether she agreed:

that the organized extermination of European Jews by the Nazi regime ... constitutes an undeniable crime against humanity, and that it was carried out notably by using gas chambers in extermination camps?

... and have to reply, like Gollnisch, “Absolutely.”

More importantly, perhaps, Marine’s election aligns FN with the anti-Islamicisation strategy which has born electoral fruit elsewhere in Europe.  That, and not merely a desire to modernise, has dictated a break with the pro-Catholic policies of her father on women’s right, particularly with regard to divorce and abortion, and a new tolerance towards homosexuality.

In turn, this new moderation opens up the possibility of a role in a governing coalition with Sarkozy’s UMP, which is looking increasingly likely:

A TNS-Sofres poll released on Wednesday suggested 22 per cent of French people agreed with “the ideas” of the National Front, up from 18 per cent a year ago – while support from sympathisers of Mr Sarkozy’s UMP party has jumped 12 points to 32 per cent.

Equally worrying for the President, some 43 per cent of his UMP sympathisers approve forging electoral alliances with the FN according to the circumstances, the TNS-Sofres poll found.

Half of respondents said they believe France has too many immigrants, and just under half feel that Muslims have too many rights.

The poll suggests a higher number believe Miss Le Pen better represents a “patriotic right of traditional values” than her father.

In response, the Elysée and the UMP are seeking to engineer an anti-FN task-force for the 2012 election.  But, tellingly, it is to be comprised not of rightists, as per the little tough guy’s aggressive strategy of drawing-off FN support in 2007, but of centrists.  He can’t pull that trick twice.  Attack has given way to defence.

The great unknown with Marine’s strategy, of course, is whether nationalism as a revolutionary politics can weather such proximity to, and even participation in, power without losing itself.  It was noisily claimed by the Austrian centre-right that bringing Jorg Haider’s Freedom Party into government between 2000 and 2005 was the fastest way to destroy it.  Having lacked the bargaining power from the outset to obtain worthwhile concessions, the party duly split between populist and nationalist factions.  Both the resultant parties did quite well in the 2008 election, but it’s not a particularly encouraging example for FN.

But Marine has had time to position herself and the party, and may emerge from the 2012 election with a big enough bargaining chip to keep the party united and engaged.  At the very least it would be a fine thing to force the little Hungarian Jew into coalition with the hate object he thought he had destroyed by deception in 2007.

Geert Wilders, having emerged fresh from his triumphs at last month’s Dutch general election, in which the people appear to have succeeded in replacing this mainstream politician:

... with this one:

... so, er yes, Geert is going global:

Controversial anti-Islamic politician Geert Wilders has pledged to form an international ‘freedom alliance’ to spread his gospel of Muslim intolerance across western nations - including the UK.

Wilders, whose Freedom Party made big gains in the Netherlands general election in June, says Britain along with Canada, the U.S., France and Germany are the core states he wants to target.

The politician made a speech outlining his plans today in The Hague.

... He says he has chosen the five western nations to spread his message based on the fact that all have high levels of Muslim immigrants, liberal democratic processes and all face Islamic terror threats.

It is interesting that he chose Britain, USA and Canada to launch Brand Wilders.  None of them suffer from the same concentrations of Moslem immigration as his continental European neighbours.  But what can he say in Flanders, Denmark or Sweden that he can’t in France or Germany?

He is an attention-seeker.  But he is obviously very good at it.  He creates waves and I suppose he might be a nett positive for the nationalist movement on that basis alone.  What do you think?  (Apart from the fact that he doesn’t look like the other two gentlemen.)

From the Telegraph:

Separatists win Flanders region in Belgian elections
Belgium’s future as a unified federal state was in doubt last night after a national election landslide for Flemish separatists in the Dutch-speaking north of the country

Early results put the nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) on an unprecedented 29 per cent of the vote in Flanders, catapulting separatists to the forefront of Belgian politics.

French speaking Socialists on the opposite end of the political spectrum to the right-wing N-VA, both on the question of Belgium and on economic policy, were the largest party, on 36 per cent, in Wallonia, which has a smaller number of voters than Flanders, as well as Brussels, the country’s only officially bilingual area.

Bart De Wever, the N-VA’s leader, may have won a historic number of votes, however he is unlikely to be asked by Belgium’s King Albert II to form a Federal government.
Instead, Elio Di Rupo, the Walloon Socialist leader, is expected to become the first French-speaking Prime Minister since 1974 at the head of an uneasy alliance of five federalist parties.

Following the election, the Dutch-speaking Flemish and francophone Walloon communities have never been more divided since they were welded together in an unhappy Belgian union in 1830.

The rise of mainstream Flemish nationalism, with the N-VA on course to become the country’s largest party, is unprecedented in Belgium’s 180 year history and will lead to a protracted political deadlock as the divided country tries to form a coalition government.

“It is a true earthquake,” said Mark Eyskens, a former Belgian Prime Minister and a Flemish Christian Democrat.

The N-VA vote will have more than doubled since the 2007 election.  Vlaams Belang, on the other hand, won 11.99% of the Flemish vote in 2007, a performance which dipped to 9.87% in the 2009 European Parliament election.  I cannot find their figure for today’s poll, but it must have been hit by the N-VA’s success.  If so, that would be clear evidence that where an electorate like the Flemish (or the Scots or the Welsh) defines itself through grievances against an ancient neighbour the racial issues which exercise ethno-nationalism cannot come to the fore.  That would beg the perennial question, of course, whether those issues can ever come to the fore.

Perhaps the best that ethno-nationalists in Flanders can hope for is that civicism will deliver separation and facilitate a redefining of the national conversation.  Out of that an opportunity to raise the larger questions may arise.

In any event, tonight the Belgian marriage looks more certain to end in divorce than ever.

The Telegraph reports on the outcome of yesterday’s Dutch general election:

With 88 per cent of the votes counted, published partial results showed the Liberals with 31 and Labour on 30.
But the real victory went to Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom (PVV), which demands an end to immigration from Muslim countries and a ban on new mosques. The PVV took its number of seats from nine in the last parliament to 24, and could hope to enter a coalition government.

The far-right leader with his distinctive shock of fair hair called the result “magnificent”.

“The impossible has happened,” he told a televised party gathering. “We are the biggest winner today. The Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

Wilder’s party has been a beneficiary of the Dutch committment to proportionality (for the delivery of which the list system is employed).  We are about to see whether the resultant coalition-driven politics are kind or unkind to Wilders.  That there is any possibility of kindness at all is testimony to Wilders’ ability to avoid at least some of the wages of dissidence.  But there is a challenge to conventional nationalism contained in that.  Wilder’s Judeophilia, whether it is sincere or simply a stratagem, has worked to his advantage thusfar.  The same can be said for his Islamophobia, which shifts the focus to cultural rather than racial preservation.  It’s about “the Judeo-Christian heritage” and “Western civilisation”.  The focus has shifted from a revolutionary nationalism that sees the challenging of the system in toto, and the deliverance of European Man into his own hands, as the ultimate political good to a civicism that is customised to an electorally proportional representative system and that sees electoral progress as the ultimate good.

Whether anything of actual value can be achieved by this means we may now learn.

Today, Tom Sunic circulated the following article about a conference that took place on Tuesday in Zagreb.  The article appeared at Javno.com, which describes itself as a multi-media news portal.  The day on-line news media in the English-speaking world print material like this the revolution will have been won, and the former media-owners will be kicking their heels in a condo in Eilat.

The conference nods toward the same neo-Gramscian path that de Benoist’s GRECE promulgated during its vigorous, early phase.  It is taken for granted by all three speakers that the problem of intellectual radicalism on the European revolutionary right remains one of numbers rather than talent, and organisation rather than output.  That’s not at all how it is in the Anglo-American world, though.

GW

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“POLITICAL HEGEMONY OR CULTURAL HEGEMONY?”
The Center of Cultural Information

Speakers:
Zlatko Hasanbegovic (author, publisher)
Jure Vujic (author, expert on geopolitics)
Tom Sunic (author, political theorist)

On Tuesday, October 27, 2009, at 7pm, in the packed hall of the Center of Cultural Information (KIC), Zagreb, Croatia, a conference was held with the title “Cultural Hegemony or Political Hegemony.”?

The three speakers were a writer and publisher Zlatko Hasanbegovic, a writer and expert on geopolitics Jure Vujic, and Dr. Tomislav Sunic, author of the book “The European New Right”  (Europska Nova Desnica), which has recently been published in the Croatian translation by the publishing house Hasanbegovic. The three speakers presented a synopsis of the phenomenon known as “cultural hegemony,” which originated and was developed by the former Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci.

Every political system, including the democratic one, is based on a given cultural hegemony, which presupposes the dominance of political ideas of some social elite, or elites, but also implying the consent of social groups at lower strata of the society. In order to win or maintain cultural hegemony, control of the media, education, and public communications, as well as use and abuse of various mechanisms of “soft power”- as is the case today with “fun-making society”-  must be constantly upheld and updated.  All of these conditions shape public opinion.

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One day last month I drove up to a Heathrow hotel to take Tom Sunic off the hands of two gentlemen from the National Front, the cinderella nationalists of British politics.  The previous day Tom had delivered a speech to the NF Party Conference in Bradford (you can find it here), and these gentlemen had driven Tom and another speaker all the way down from the Islamic Republic.

After the pair had taken their leave of us Tom made sure that I knew what good, solid people he had been among in Bradford.  I’ve not paid much attention to the NF for quite some time.  So I made a mental note to check out their website and see what they are up to.

My eye was caught by a statement written by veteran nationalist and poet Eddy Morrison.  It is titled The eight principles of White Nationalism – the foundation stones of NF ideology.  I wondered what you would make of it, and how you might compare it with the culturalist vision that Lee Barnes brought to MR a few days back.

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