Roots of Europeanism and Anti-Westernism

Owen Billo

The Biess article provides an interesting start to the others as it covers the New Left but also hints at what appears to be a pipeline between New Left and New Right. Some things to note in the Biess article: the New Left was generally anti-Western as we see their opposition to the United States and Israel, they were utopian and wanted emotion to play a stronger role in society, and they accepted Marx’s Historical Materialism. These three points are how I understand the defection of some of the New Left’s members to the New Right.

Jumping to the Tobin and Griffin articles, some similar traits in the New Right are pointed out. Griffin says that the Nouvell Droite was anti-Western because it viewed Western liberalism and post-Westphalian nationalism as degenerate. Theirs and Julius Evola’s solutions to these problems were certainly utopian, and Evola mourns the death of tradition in terms of secularism overcoming emotion and feeling. Additionally, Tobin notes that Evola was anti-liberal because he viewed it as the step before socialism, which in turn was the step before communism. The ‘inevitable’ transformation of liberal capitalism into socialism and then into communism is very similar to what Marx described as Historical Materialism. Finally, as the Bar-On article says, the Nouvelle Droite used ‘right wing Gramscianism,’ which can be understood as a perversion of Gramscianism, but one that was able to win some support in the left because of its communist roots. With this view, it appears that New Left and New Right identified the same societal issues but came to different conclusions, allowing for crossover and defections between the two. This makes what we read in the Biess article possible.