Race, Racism, and Racialisation in The European New Right

This conference aims to develop new insights into the form of racism promoted by the European New Right since 1945. As Étienne Balibar (1991) observes, this period has seen a shift from biological to cultural racism. In seeking greater acceptance within mainstream politics, the New Right has adopted a defensive posture: its rhetoric frames exclusionary politics as the protection of threatened groups rather than aggression towards others.

A prominent example is the so‑called ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory, which casts immigration and demographic change as an existential threat to certain populations. Another is ethnopluralism, a doctrine most famously associated with Alain de Benoist, but widely adopted across far‑right networks in Europe and North America.

Ethnopluralism recasts biological races as ethnic groups imagined to possess fixed, essential qualities central to collective and individual well‑being. Despite abandoning the term ‘race’, it does not break with the process of racialisation: populations remain essentialised, geographically bounded, and often hierarchically ordered. Perceived threats such as migration, globalisation, and capitalism are presented as dangers to group integrity.

Marketed as a defence of diversity and autonomy of ethnic groups – even as a rejection of racism, cultural superiority, and xenophobia – ethnopluralism in practice legitimises cultural separatism, civilisational chauvinism, and what Rueda (2021) calls a non‑biological yet adaptive form of alterophobia and autophilia. By casting exclusion as the preservation of difference, it functions as a strategic form of cultural racism, readily embraced by movements that once endorsed overtly racist views or political violence.

Focusing on ethnopluralism and the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, this conference will explore how the New Right’s defensive racism operates. What processes of racialisation does it involve, and what conception of race emerges from them? Possible questions include, but are not limited to:

·       ⁠What implications for the social ontology or metaphysics of groups do the New Right’s threat‑based conceptions carry? Do these approaches offer the right theoretical tools for understanding what is distinctive about ideologies such as ethnopluralism?

·       How does ethnopluralism compare with other forms of alterophobia or racism, given its claimed rejection of biological race?

·       ⁠In the European context, some groups have been classified as ‘white’, yet racialised nonetheless. Is there any qualitative difference between speaking of ethnicities rather than races?

·       ⁠‘Colour‑blind’ eliminativism – the rejection of race as a legitimate category in public and academic discourse – has been argued to be a distinctive feature of the European context (Bessone 2020; Ludwig 2020; James et al. 2024). Are there continuities between this and the New Right’s replacement of race with ethnicity?

·       ⁠How should we interpret the New Right’s critique of capitalism, given the close historical entanglement between racialisation and capitalist development?

·       ⁠US‑based scholars have explored the role of ‘threat’ in understanding race (e.g. Goldberg 2008; Medovoi 2024). Do their insights apply to the New Right, or does the latter’s ideology demand a different analytical framework?

Confirmed keynote speakers: Urs Lindner (University of Duisburg-Essen)

This graduate conference forms part of a three‑day event on race, racialisation, and racism in the European context. Invited speakers for the subsequent two days include: Leda Berio (University College Dublin), Daniel James (TU Dresden), Steffen Koch (University of Bielefeld), Alex Wiegmann (University of Granada), Magali Bessone (Université Paris 1 Panthéon‑Sorbonne), Lawrence Blum (University of Massachusetts Boston), Esa Díaz León (University of Barcelona), David Ludwig (Wageningen University), Joanna Karolina Malinowska (Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań), Marcello Maneri (University of Milano‑Bicocca), Aleksandra Lewicki (University of Sussex).

Registration is requested but not essential to attend. Please send an email with your name and institutional affiliation (if any) [email protected], with the subject line “Registration”.

Organiser: Mihnea Chiujdea, Freie Universität Berlin

Funding: German Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space and the State of Berlin, as part of the Excellence Strategy of the Federal and State Governments, via the Berlin University Alliance.