ABSTRACT

Eastern Europe has long been associated with nationalism, more specifically nasty "ethnic" or "racial" types of civil wars and pogroms. Early scholarship on the far right in Eastern Europe took a very broad approach, focusing on an amorphous phenomenon captured by the vague and ominous term "ultranationalism," which was believed to be dominating the region. M. Minkenberg's theoretical framework is an updated version of modernisation theory. While Minkenberg developed this framework initially for the far right in Western Europe, his application to Eastern Europe has been much more influential. Ideologically, three types of far-right groups are distinguished: fascist-authoritarian, racist-ethnocentrist, and religious-fundamentalist. Given the limited scholarship on the far right in Eastern Europe, much of the criticism is aimed at what is not done rather than what is done. Like most literatures, including on the far right in Western Europe, there is much too much focus on only a small group of countries.