. . .
‘Restoring the natural order’
Until very recently, far-right nationalist or nativist parties in Europe rarely worked together. Unlike European social democrats, who always shared a general outlook on the world, or even the center-right European Christian democrats, who from the 1950s onward were the true engine behind the creation of the European Union, the nationalist parties, rooted in their own particular histories, are often in conflict with one another almost by definition. The French far right was born from arguments about Vichy and Algeria. The Italian far right long featured the intellectual descendants of dictator Benito Mussolini, not to mention his actual daughter. Attempts to fraternize still founder on old arguments. Relations between the Italian far right and the Austrian far right, for example, recently came unstuck after they started arguing, amusingly, over the national identity of South Tyrol, a German-speaking province in northern Italy.
But recently, that has begun to change. The European far right has now found a set of issues it can unite around. Opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is one of them; promotion of a socially conservative worldview is another. To put it differently, dislike of same-sex civil unions or African taxi drivers is something that even Austrians and Italians who disagree about the location of their border can share.
