![]() ![]() ![]() 3 The situation today seems altogether different. This, according to Dutch political scientist Cas Mudde, led ‘largely to opinionated, speculative, emotional and highly politicised studies’, that is to say, studies (‘left’) skewed by a ‘fascist’ or ‘neo-fascist’ perspective. So at the outset, to borrow some wise words from the French political scientist Gilles Ivaldi, let us ‘dispel the myth of an ineluctable electoral growth of extreme right forces on the right of the European political spectrum.’ 1Īt first, the study of the contemporary far right in its so-called post-1980 ‘third wave’ 2 was largely dominated by the literature of left-wing opponents. Yet notwithstanding obvious cross-national variations, we should bear in mind that, as a transnational political force, the far right has only averaged around six per cent of the vote in all European parliamentary elections since 1979. The expansion in this literature reflects the growth in the far-right phenomenon, above all, the growth, since the 1980s, of a thicket of far-right organizations across numerous European party systems. The student (not based at Teesside University) declared himself a ‘fascist but one with an open mind.’ You might well ask: how can fascism, a demonized ideology, a by-word for genocide driven by fanaticism, possess anything approaching an open-mind? When it comes to understanding developments on the contemporary far right in (Western) Europe, have we really witnessed the emergence of a ‘new’ breed of fascists - a ‘neo-fascism’ that has adapted itself to the norms of multi-ethnic, liberal-democratic society? A ‘designer fascism’ that is fit for the twenty-first century?Įurope’s contemporary far right has attracted a vast scholarly literature Western Europe, in particular, occupies a central focus. ![]() First let me explain the origins of the title for this lecture: ‘Fascism… but with an open mind.’ I recently received this apparent oxymoron in an email from a university student responding to news that Teesside University was establishing a new research centre for the study of past and present forms of fascism. ![]()
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