D_02 Transnational Ideological Transfer of the Populist and Extreme Right

This work package (WP) seeks to contribute to an understanding of the worldviews, images of others, and identity-based self-interpretations of the populist and extreme right. It undertakes a transnational analysis of the circulation of values, ideologies, and policies that are grounded in an undemocratic concept of social cohesion.

Right-wing movements increasingly intensify conflictual cultural struggles over worldviews, value orders, and identities—central concerns of Research Area D—and promote an alternative concept of social cohesion based on exclusionary nativism and antipluralism. Their global success is advanced by ideological transfers and international cooperation and further strengthened by far-right parties. In recent years, the global rise of the extreme and populist right has attracted growing interest in comparative research, producing both country-specific case studies and broader overviews. This global perspective reveals variation across cases but also—despite the rejection of global interconnections often labeled “antiglobalism”—a shared vision of the world’s future. Far-right movements also intervene in global processes and seek to control them on their own terms.

Engaging with debates that define right-wing populism as a “thin ideology,” as well as a rhetorical and discursive style, we conceptualize right-wing populism as an authoritarian political milieu that rejects equality and advances a counter-narrative grounded in extreme nationalism and ethnocentrism. Despite the distinctions developed in this WP, it is ideologically and personally closely connected to the “New Right” and to right-wing extremism. Shared features include strategies of othering and strengthening the cohesion of the in-group through identity-based rejection of out-groups. Antisemitism and racism are central resentments; Islamophobia and antiglobalism constitute additional characteristic tendencies. A third analytical line concerns the tension between nationalism and “civilizationism,” understood as emerging from the interplay of Christianity, secularism, and identity.

The digital sphere is of particular importance to transnationalization: social media have contributed enormously to the global circulation of right-wing discourses. As a result, right-wing populist and far-right interpretations of the world and of the self have gained influence and are reshaping cultural self-understandings. A transnational analysis of right-wing resentments therefore makes a substantial contribution to analyzing the cultural dynamics of social cohesion.

The WP addresses these themes through three case studies that focus on specific actors and discourses while simultaneously examining their transnational connections and ideological transfers. A fourth module situates these cases within a broader global perspective through a handbook.

Module 1: Transnational Identity Politics—Antisemitism and Racism in the Extreme Right in Germany and the United States

The perpetrator of the 2019 Halle attack wrote a multi-page manifesto in which he promoted the conspiracy narrative of the “Great Replacement”—as several right-wing terrorists before him had done, including in the United States. The fact that the German perpetrator wrote his theses in English illustrates the global circulation of right-wing worldviews. Module 1 takes this as a point of departure to analyze, in a comparative and historically informed perspective, the specific significance and relationship of antisemitism and racisms in the identity and cohesion imaginaries propagated by German and U.S. right-wing extremists since the early 2000s. In addition to an increasing convergence facilitated by social media, the module examines differences and similarities in the relevance of these ideological elements in light of national specificities. This analysis is also inseparable from attention to antifeminism as a guiding motif of far-right politics and to trans hostility as an increasingly central—partly “imported” from the U.S. right—accompanying ideology.

Module 2: Far-Right Digital Activism—Transnational Connections and Memory in Southeast Europe

Concepts and practices of social cohesion draw on the narrative construction of a shared past. Far-right and populist “illiberal memory” remains an under-researched topic. Module 2 addresses this gap by focusing on far-right memory activism in Southeast Europe and its global dissemination through digital media.

Transnational far-right movements emerging through social media have developed a revisionist history of various periods into a loosely connected narrative of civilizational threats. Within this narrative, revisionist memory of the Yugoslav wars—according to accounts advanced by far-right terrorists in the 2010s—plays a central role. These wars functioned as catalysts for the formation of the extreme right and as a rich source for revisionist memory. This case study reconstructs a region-specific debate on social cohesion over the past three decades and examines its global networking through far-right discursive elements in transnational memory activism.

Module 3: Foreign Policy of the Extreme Right—The Transnational Connections of the Rassemblement National

This case study responds to the literature on the foreign policy of the French populist right as well as work on challenges to the liberal international order. Building on LEI_F_10, Module 3 continues research on the foreign policy orientations of the Rassemblement National (RN) and its engagement with globalization. It examines RN narratives and its influence on knowledge production regarding how liberal democracies respond to global trends. This research aligns with Research Area D’s focus on variations of social cohesion. To this end, the WP investigates the challenge the extreme right poses to the liberal world order and examines how it seeks to create competing international norms and diplomatic structures. The analysis focuses on the period from 1990 to 2024. Of particular interest are alliances of the French extreme right within the European Union and its connections to Russian and North American actors.

Module 4: Handbook—Populism’s Globalization Projects in Worldwide Comparison

Building on the other modules, Module 4 develops a handbook on the order and value imaginaries of right-wing populist actors, with particular attention to their concepts of cohesion—national and global. In this way, the handbook contributes both to theoretical foundations and to a comparative systematization of empirically observable conceptions of cohesion understood as dynamic knowledge processes. Individual chapters will begin from national or regional case studies while also examining the networking of these cases to produce a panorama of entanglements. Of particular interest are case studies that are often overlooked in discussions of populist actors—for example in Africa or Asia. In addition to literature on globalization and populism and narratives about globalization, the handbook will also engage research on far-right efforts to influence collective processes and cultures of memory.