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People don’t set small businesses on fire because they love their country

For all the rhetoric about opposing globalist elites, the far right clearly follows a form of globalism

A scene from an anti-immigration protest outside Belfast City Hall last Saturday. Photograph: Peter Morrison/PA Wire
A scene from an anti-immigration protest outside Belfast City Hall last Saturday. Photograph: Peter Morrison/PA Wire
Mark O'Connell's picture
Mark O'Connell
Sun Aug 11 2024 - 06:00

One of the most striking images to emerge from the recent mobilisation of far-right nationalists in this country was the sight, last week, of self-styled Irish “patriots” from the Republic rioting in Belfast alongside loyalists. Amid the scenes of violence and chaos––of arson attacks on immigrant-owned businesses, of physical assaults of Muslims on the streets––there was, on the face of it, a palpable irony to these bigots flying the Tricolour alongside their Union Jack-waving counterparts in the name of a common anti-immigrant (and virulently Islamophobic) cause.

Surely there could be no clearer illustration of the incoherence of a movement that claims to draw on the tradition of Ireland’s struggle for self-definition while joining ranks with the very people who have always stood most forcefully against it?

Well, yes and no.

Such a spectacle is a contradictory one only if you take at face value the claims of these so-called “patriots” to be motivated by a love for their country and a desire to protect it. Because if that were true, what could they possibly have in common with a group whose political identity is predicated to such a degree on a distrust and hatred of that country ––its people, its language and its culture?

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But the far right in Ireland, as with similar reactionary movements elsewhere, is not really motivated by an authentic patriotism. It hardly needs to be said that people do not set hotels and small businesses on fire because they love their country. They do these things because they are motivated by the fear and hatred of people perceived as outsiders. And in this sense, the awkward alliance between racists from both sides of the Border––between “Coolock Says No” and “Ulster Says No”––is only superficially contradictory.

A glance at the history of European fascism, with its cross-pollinating movements in various countries, is evidence enough that the extreme right has always had a strong internationalist dimension. In 1934, the Mussolini government convened the Fascist International Conference in Montreux, Switzerland, with participants from 13 European countries (Eoin O’Duffy, who had recently resigned as leader of Fine Gael, attended on behalf of Irish Blueshirts). In the Spanish civil war, just as leftists of many nations made their way to fight with the republicans, fascists of many nations fought alongside the nationalists. The fascists of pre-war Europe understood their fight against socialism as a necessarily international one.

[ Without the Blueshirts, there would have been no Fine Gael ]

In recent years, far-right anti-immigration parties from Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and Hungary have formed a strengthening alliance in the European Parliament. Leaders of ethnonationalist movements continue to understand that it helps their cause to support their counterparts elsewhere in undermining multiculturalism and pluralism in their own countries. And so at one end of the scale, you have something such as The Movement, a Brussels-based non-profit founded by former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, which aims to foment and support right-wing populism in Europe. And at a grassroots level, you have the former KKK “grand dragon” Frank Silva mentoring Irish far-right activists on how to effectively leverage anti-immigrant sentiment to build their movement.

For all their rhetoric about opposing globalist elites, there is clearly a form of globalism at work here, and one that serves its own particular elite agenda. This is not to say, of course, that the people setting Muslim-owned businesses on fire in Belfast, and burning asylum seekers’ tents in Dublin, could ever be conceived as being part of any elite, or even consciously serving one.

But despite their anti-establishment posturing, the leaders of the populist anti-immigration right, where they have gained power, have wielded it in service of the wealthy. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni’s government has made massive cuts to welfare programs and has actively been courting the super-rich with flat taxes on foreign income. Before the defeat of the far-right National Rally party in the recent French election, its leader Marine Le Pen had gathered support from an impressive array of wealthy entrepreneurs, and founders of private equity funds and hedge funds. The Reform Party, the major electoral force of right-wing populism in the UK, is presided over by Nigel Farage, a privately educated former investment banker; his deputy leader, Richard Tice, was the head of CLS Holdings, a major commercial property investment group.

[ Tommy Robinson and Tristan Tate are among overseas supporters of Irish anti-immigration activists ]

And in the US, the tech billionaires of Silicon Valley––Marc Andreessen, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, among a growing cluster of others––are certainly not backing Trump’s presidential campaign out of a commitment to anti-elitism. Thiel, who is among the most influential venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, has long been more famous for his openly anti-democratic political views than for his business dealings. (JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential candidate, worked for Thiel at his company Mithril Capital; when he ran for the senate in 2022, Thiel was his largest donor.)

And then there’s Musk, his fellow former PayPal cofounder, whose role in the continuing erosion of liberal democracy can hardly be overstated. Since buying Twitter in 2022 and reshaping it in his own image, he has, under the flimsy pretext of a commitment to “free speech”, consistently facilitated the platforming of far-right racists and conspiracy theorists. Last week, he responded to the race riots in the UK, a situation already defined by startling levels of violent Islamophobia, by posting that “Civil war is inevitable”.

[ ‘It’s going to be a power struggle’: the Irish right-wing extremists preparing for violence ]

The irony of far-right nationalism is that it is a thoroughly internationalist movement, committed to the enforcement of borders for minorities while demonstrating their increasing irrelevance to elites. These so-called nationalists are, in fact, far more invested in the broad abstraction of “western civilisation”–– which is to say, the idea of a white European culture, defined and enforced by violence against non-whites–– than they are in any actual nation-state. What unites and impels them is not a commitment to their country, or a love of its culture, but a hatred of perceived outsiders. And in this they will always have more in common with racists elsewhere than they ever will with their fellow citizens.