Over the last two decades we have witnessed a resurgence of extremist right-wing parties and movements across Europe, from Marie le Pen’s bid for the French presidency, PEGIDA in Germany to fascist paramilitary groups hunting migrants on the EU border in Hungary. The growing popularity of  these racist ideologies can in part be explained by the increasing economic precarity, social instability and political polarization resulting from neoliberal austerity measures put in place by many European governments.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought people together through grassroots solidarity initiatives and a renewed awareness of the importance to protect the most vulnerable in our societies for the benefit of us all. But the pandemic also has the potential to further fragment, individualize and polarize our societies by turning migrants, refugees and other marginal groups into scapegoats and non-deserving competitors for increasingly scarce resources.

In this interview with ROAR editor Joris Leverink, Liz Fekete, Director of the Institute of Race Relations and author of Europe’s Fault Lines: Racism and the Rise of the Right (Verso Books, 2019) draws on her decades of experience researching racism and the far right to explain the deep roots of supremacist ideologies in Europe, the far right’s many different manifestations, the infiltration of police and military forces by extreme right militants and the connection between neoliberalism, austerity, authoritarianism and xenophobia, among many other topics.

In response to the rising threat from the right, she makes the call for an anti-fascist movement “to defend cultural pluralism…embracing all that is best in the European humanitarian tradition.”

The last decade has seen a frightening increase in the power, spread and appeal of extreme right-wing parties and movements. From Breivik’s attacks in 2011 to Le Pen’s bid for the French presidency in 2017 and, more recently, the racist attack in Hanua. But this is far from a new phenomenon. You have argued that Europe “has a long history of racism and authoritarianism.” Could you provide a bit of historical context that can help us to understand the rise of the right across Europe?

It is important to point out here that I am not a historian, so what I say has come from what I have learned along the way in my activism and my writing around fascism.

Europe’s dark past is normally just understood in terms of the totalitarian systems of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but colonialism, particularly French and British, as well as dictatorships in southern Europe have cast a long shadow over the continent as well.

The over-emphasis on Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, at the expense of the French and British experience among others, creates a kind of historical myopia which blots out the crimes perpetrated by those who occupied central positions in our societies. Racism was a key organizing mechanism during the colonial and imperial eras, and authoritarianism in southern Europe was nurtured by western European powers during the Cold War. The suppression of regional and national self-determination movements in Ireland, Basque country, Catalonia, among others, has been an important part of European history.

In the post-war period, former colonial subjects who migrated to the continent were brutalized —  do not forget that up to to 300 Algerians protesting the French-Algerian war in Paris in 1961 were killed or drowned when the police threw them in the Seine.

So, what we see with the focus on the two totalitarian systems, which are depicted as extremist anomalies in European history, is that it obscures the support for right-wing anti-communist dictatorships in Franco’s Spain, Greece under the Regime of the Colonels and Salazar’s Portugal by western European powers. And it also obliterates from the record continued enthusiasm in the post-war period for race science and eugenics programs (Sweden, for instance, practiced compulsory sterilization of Romani women until 1976).

I am increasingly interested in the legacy of dictatorship, colonialism, race science and eugenics — I do not see this as just a matter of history — I see that the legacy is still with us, as I write in a recent article on Golden Dawn and as I am also exploring in terms of the COVID-19 pandemic, where the Swedish and the UK governments initially followed a policy of “herd immunity.”

Dictatorship, like empire, is a structure of dominance that does not just belong to the past, but leaves its mark on the structures, policies, processes and political culture that govern us in the present.

The 21st century far-right has many faces, and its representatives can be found anywhere from the corridors of the European parliament in Brussels to patrolling the southern borders of Europe. How would you describe the different manifestations of this trend and what’s the difference between the “extreme,” “far,” “hard,” and “ultra”-right? And why is it important to make these distinctions?

You need to be precise or you will be ineffective — you cannot just say everyone is a Nazi or a fascist; they could easily prove this to be false and discredit you. The different formations have different tactics and strategies and if we are serious about defeating them then we cannot just be moralistic, we need to be strategic and tactical too.

Academics study the right in terms of their different “families.” It is important to understand which right-wing family, tendency, the different groups, parties and organizations emerge from. But academics tend to get hung up by classifications, so they fail to see what is changing. In Europe’s Fault Lines I use the image of a kaleidoscope to argue that: “The forming and re-forming of parties and tendencies are like the movement of the pieces of a glass in a kaleidoscope, which take on new patterns and formations with each swivel of the tube.”

I use the term “hard right” to denote the new patterns that emerge when various electoral platforms, seemingly discrete, come together and to capture the way former center-right parties — like the Conservative party in the UK — have taken on elements of the program of the extreme right.

The “extreme right” are those parties to the right of traditional conservative parties, especially in terms of willingness to use racist language and rhetoric, that tend to work within the democratic framework, participating in elections and falling short of advocating violence.

Finally, the “far right” are distinguished from the extreme right in that, with few exceptions, they do not reject violence and are more closely associated with a country’s fascist or neo-Nazi past.

Since the 1990s, extremist parties have moved from the periphery to the center of society, consolidating their authority at a local level and establishing power bases in municipal and regional governments across Europe. We are witnessing convergences and affinities between the center and the periphery, and between the extreme right and a newly configured hard right.

In the introduction to your recent book you say that you were motivated to write it by a need “to discover what was new about racism, populism and fascism today, and discover what distinguishes it from the classical fascism of the 1930’s.” Could you explain what is different about racism, populism and fascism today and why understanding this difference matters for our political organizing?

Classical fascism emerged in the 1930s during a period of intense imperial rivalries between nation states. The circumstances today are different as the power of the nation state, which has become an agent for transnational capital, is much diminished. Classical fascism also operated alongside “state terror,” but in today’s world, state repression does not have to be against everyone, because technology allows for selective repression of dissenting and surplus populations.

What we are seeing are police-enforcement-led wars against the sans papiers, the multicultural poor, and the black and increasingly white disenfranchised. It is no longer necessary to put a formal state of exception in place, since a creeping securitization — government through technology — is already taking place behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, this “technological fix” and authoritarian drift has intensified with the pandemic. Lockdown has brought with it heavy policing in multicultural neighborhoods, while Roma and migrant communities have been subjected to targeted quarantine and militarized zones of confinement. States are now exploiting the crisis to create coronavirus data platforms whereby private companies with links to the police industrial complex, particularly in immigration, are getting access to sensitive personal information.

Fascism is not just an ideology or a set of ideas — it is an attitude to human life itself. All these developments provide a threat not just to social, civil and democratic rights, but to human dignity.

Why is this important for organizing? Because we have to identify who is the most oppressed, the most surveiled; we have to recognize that state power affects us all differently, we have to act accordingly and organize around the most oppressed and victimized people in society.

Lastly, we have to cut through the crap of the so-called nationalists. If we understand that the power of the nation state is diminished, we see that this is a faux nationalism. The hard right are posing as nationalists but they are part of a global elite who are benefiting from globalization. Nationalism is just a means to an end, a struggle within the global elite. We are not seeing nationalist wars — we are seeing alternative poles of globalization, competing for influence on the world stage. US hegemony is on the wane and there are new hegemonic axes being formed.

Following on from the last question, in recent years the political center has used the term “populism” to admonish the politics of both the left and right. In the UK, for instance, both Jeremy Corbyn and Nigel Farage have been accused of being populist. But this seems to run the risk of flattening important differences in political perspectives. What is it about the term that you think remains useful today? Do we need a new populism?

I do not like the term populism and rarely use it, for precisely the reasons you describe. It is a powerful tool for elites to basically preserve the status quo. It is ridiculous to call Jeremy Corbyn a populist when his whole program was a social democratic one with elements of international socialism. Nigel Farage is right-wing authoritarian; he uses populism as a means to an end but his politics are firmly situated in a right-wing authoritarian tradition.

I think that there is still some mileage in using the term populism in a right wing context but I do not really see a political family that I would classify as “right wing populist.” Rather, I see populism as a subset of authoritarianism. Populism is the style of politics adopted by the extreme right that wants to break with elements of representative democracy. To that end, they will talk about the people’s will, the volk, or the need for more people’s referendums, because they want to dispense with certain aspects of democracy.

Indeed, the xenophobic populism promoted in the media seems to be designed to appeal to the worst instincts of the nativist imagination — a veritable well of repressed racial feeling and angst that can also be tapped by the extreme right. In that regard, populism is part of an anti-democratic movement. I would never argue for a left wing populism; the left should be expanding democracy not abandoning it.