LA TRUMPISME:

Our new research shows that the nationalist far right arises from a deeper history. New Right ideas are clearly not a revival of 1930s fascism. Despite some similarities, today's nationalists are more directly inspired by a late 19th-century French line of thinking.

We spent the last two years analysing hundreds of documents written by New Right thinkers and their forebears to explain how and why these ideas take root. This ideological history is important if today's nationalists are to be understood, and if there is to be any hope of overcoming the racism and sexism inherent to their ideas.

What our research shows is that we are living through the latest battle in a 300-year long ideological war over the meaning of humanity itself. On one side is the belief in a universal idea of humanity, which produced notions of equal rights, humanism and liberalism. Opposing it is the belief that marks all forms of nationalism: that humanity is not a single entity but rather, one divided by nature into national identities.

Nationalism is the dark cousin of liberalism. Both seek to establish freedoms and rights. If the French Revolution gave rise to the "rights of man", Napoleon's subsequent coup and his idea of the "nation" argued that only the French, not all men, should enjoy those rights. Half a century later, nationalism was being regularly used by politicians like Otto von Bismarck to confront expanding claims to political rights with the argument that the national necessity of a vaguely defined identity trumped granting certain rights to citizens.

These ideas drew heavily on ethno-nationalist geopolitics, which treated each nation as a distinct species struggling for survival. International relations was viewed as a zero-sum game where the survival of a nation sometimes necessitates the destruction of others.

Then Maurice Barrès came along 1897. He was the thinker behind a very specific set of nationalist ideas that developed more restrictive definitions of national identity than those of the previous nationalist pioneers. His idea of nationalism was focused on birth and culture, rather than civil belonging (as for Napoleon) or loyalty (as for Bismarck). Our research has found that key ideas in today's New Right find their roots in Barrès and especially retain his ideas about culture and racial birth.

Barrès theorised that the culture and integrity of a nation was "eternal", and that any change to it, whether brought about by foreign influence or progressive politics, would bring about its demise. Any cultural change, be it to the arts, to the role of women, or to racial assumptions, was seen to erode the spirit of the nation and its way of life. Ideas about the state, belonging and politics, which emerged from Barrès and like-minded thinkers like Charles Maurrastended to advocate racial and cultural exclusion as necessary to national survival.

The key idea introduced by Barrès was the link between race and culture. It meant that culture needed to remain unchanged if it was to survive, as did the race that produced it. Even more importantly, it introduced the notion that any progressive, modern or culture-changing idea endangered the nation's survival. This idea has found its way to the heart of New Right nationalism today, which is why they attack liberals, socialists, feminists, progressives, and their institutions as much as foreigners.

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