ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a significant rise of the extreme right in some counties. European extreme right of the 1990s has cultural and even family links to the 1930s, but after half a century it is certainly no revival of Hitler's legions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s the most generally familiar face of the extreme right was its criminal element. Reports of assaults, arson, desecrations, and murders brought the skinheads and neo-Nazis to public and official attention. The criminal phase of the modern extreme right, which extended even into some still communist East European states, was primarily nonpolitical, scattered, and at best loosely organized. It was Germany, because of its unfortunate past, that first drew world attention to criminal extremism. A new, meaner, more chauvinistic, often intolerant Western Europe has emerged with the rise of the extreme right. Canada has no party of the extreme right; its moderately right Reform Party has resisted the infiltration efforts of radical elements.
