Against the new neoliberal order: The disconcerting rise of Europe’s far right

[pampango]

http://mondediplo.com/2011/02/12farright

Radical rightwing groups are pitting themselves against the new neoliberal order in eastern Europe as they did against the state socialism that preceded it. Their existence is not surprising, and some specialists consider it a normal pathology that affects all societies that are modernising rapidly. What is really interesting is the regional specifics of the phenomenon.

Another particularity is openly pre- or anti-democratic ideology: unlike their western equivalents, the groups proclaim their nostalgia for the old despotic regimes, and the ethnic and territorial conception of national “identity” that prevailed under them. This sweeping nationalism allows some variation. There is a fascist autocratic right, inspired by the dictatorships of the interwar period, which persists in Russia, Romania and, more recently, Bulgaria, and is linked to the “national-communists” created by the collapse of the Soviet empire. There is also a more ethnocentric, racist right, which enthusiastically supports territorial revisionism, particularly in Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The distinctive characteristics of recent members of the European Union can be explained by regime changes, and by the region’s very specific history, which is layered over the democracy. The first layer is a compound – the immediate consequences of the dismantling of the USSR that began in 1989, plus the improvisation that shaped the transition towards democracy and the market economy, and the huge efforts made to enable the former members of the Warsaw Pact to join the EU. This severely tested the social fabric, creating a previously unknown gap between rich and poor, and a brutal discrepancy between people’s needs and a lack of available capital (including a lack of trust). Rightwing extremists knew how to exploit the popular discontent caused by this.

Then come the legacies of former communist regimes: a badly equipped bureaucracy; a political culture not given to tolerance; elites that have not been educated in the new system; parties that are weakly rooted in society; and an economy weighed down by a half-century of authoritarian centralism. This balance sheet has provoked resentment, which benefited the extreme right in a poorly structured political space. There are no immigrants (western Europe’s scapegoats) in eastern Europe. This role falls to local minorities and neighbouring countries, and will have a lasting impact on relations between states.