Emmanuel Godin

No Enemies on the Right? Competition and Collusion between Conservatives, Moderates and Extreme Right Parties in Europe

We are used to putting parties of the Right into tidy boxes. On the one hand stands the established family of the mainstream right. Its parties have various names—moderates, centre-right, conservatives—but their origins and profile are easily recognisable. They derive from what Rokkan identified as the owner/non-owner cleavage and their main raison d’être is to cater for the interests of those with some kind of asset. Adepts of the market economy and electoral democracy they may show some variation in the importance which they assign to certain themes (religion, nationalism) but these are subordinate to the task of winning office in order to protect the interests of their core groups and any others whom they have persuaded to ally with them. They have long occupied the major share of space on the right wing of politics in all developed states. Yet they have also long been subject to challenges from a different subset of the Right. Political science has found numerous concepts to classify this angrier sort of Right, ranging from fairly neutral terms like ‘far right’ or ‘extreme right’ to more explicit and emotive ‘fascism’. The current favourite ‘populism’ is an attempt to stretch a longestablished term so as to encompass as wide a variety as possible of this sort of party, for it is true that this family also shows considerable variation within its ranks. While extremeright parties invariably carry a strong current of nationalism and are generally authoritarian by instinct, they do show considerable variation on issues such as market regulation, lifestyle issues, high policy or the role of religion. Their following is also quite distinct. In the 1930s such movements tended to attract victims of the depression; today their appeal—clearly growing—is to the victims of globalisation. Traditional right-wing parties knew that in normal times economic prosperity would mean that their extreme-right competitors would enjoy a limited audience. They had no incentive to encourage such forces, which were bidding for their share of the political market. In the past two decades, however, the terms of trade have changed somewhat. As it becomes clear that globalisation produces a substantial number of losers and that

Wine Drinking Culture in France: A National Myth or a Modern Passion?

Marion Demossier, Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2010, 236 pp, £75.00, 978 07083 23322 As a French researcher working in Britain and conducting ‘anthropology back home’, Demossier demonstrates...

French Exceptionalism and the Sarkozy Presidency

In this volume the notion of French exception has been defined both as a set of politically loaded discourses as well as an analytical tool that can be used to decipher specific socio-economic, political and cultural issues that form what is now commonly referred to as the French model. That some political and electoral rewards can be gained in presenting the French model as exceptional, either because of its virtues or its archaism is clear enough. That this ‘French model’ actually remains transfixed into a parody of its dirigiste, Jacobin or republican self as if it were immune to global, European and domestic pressures, has amply been questioned in this volume. In some respect, France may have changed more rapidly than the discourses about France. Whether such cumulative changes amount to a rupture with the French model and whether such a rupture lead to the normalisation of France — the end of the French exception — are two questions that this concluding chapter seeks to address.

Introduction: the extreme right in contemporary Europe: history, interpretation, performance

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Mammone on extreme-right parties, one by Ernesto Gallo on social and political evolution in Italy and Spain, and one by Michael Baun and colleagues on the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) on the Czech Republic.

The extreme right in contemporary Europe: cultural and spatial perspectives

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one by Mike Redgrave on the evolution of New Labours programme to Europeanise British politics and government after 1997, one by Nitzan Shoshan on young activists and the extreme right, and another one by Michael J. Goodwin on the development of the British National Party (BNP).