ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how the origins and interests of the Alternative Right are, properly understood, truly global. Whilst the USA would play a pivotal role in its development and was the object of initial media focus, its ideology was shaped by a transatlantic conversation. The Alternative Right would marry an America First-style nationalism to the postwar European fascist ideology developed by the European New Right to produce a paradoxically global ideological outlook, that tied the “struggles” of each Western nation to that of all people of white, European descent. Their enemies were to be not just the religious and racial groups that they perceived to fall outside of this group, but also the “globalist” elites who propagated an economic system and openness to liberal values which they saw as posing an existential risk to this white, Western cohort. Drawn together at an unprecedented scale by the globalising technologies of the digital age and spurred on by events which exemplified this connected world – from the “Global War on Terror” and the 2008 Financial Crash, to the rise of ISIS and the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis – our modern era set the stage for a thoroughly internationalist far right that propounds a racist and illiberal alternative to the vision of globalisation a generation grew up with.