ABSTRACT
Is the extreme right ‘coming in from the cold’? (Eatwell 2000: 424). The revival across Europe over the past twenty-five years of various organizations founded by fascist activists in the post-war period, and the entry of some of these parties into national and local government, has given rise to a bewildering array of terms in search of the formula that best defines this phenomenon, from far right, extreme right and radical right to populist, national-populist, authoritarian and neo-fascist. Some studies have been preoccupied with isolating templates or models while others have underestimated the role of strategy in a different way, by giving too much credence to the pronouncements of party leaders. As Annie Collovald has shown, ‘populism’ has become the dominant prism through which the extreme right is viewed in France, yet the term is used with no sociological foundation, as studies seek ‘an explanation for political phenomena or behavior in proclaimed “political ideas” or “values” and not in social or political practice’ (Collovald 2004: 25). 1 Definitions, as Robert Paxton argues, are static. ‘They succumb all too often to the intellectual’s temptation to take programmatic statements as constitutive.’ In the case of fascism, they identify it ‘more with what it said than what it did’ (Paxton 2004: 14). 2
