Anxiety about losing power combined with a desire to shore up (or reclaim) elite status has often led people on the reactionary right to want to keep their distance from their lessers due to a fear that those they have historically kept down might assert themselves and take power.

Starting in the nineteenth century, this manifested in a fear of racial “contamination,” which was codified with the development of modern “race science.” The first important text in that regard is Count Arthur Joseph de Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines (Essay on the Inequality of Human Races), published in two volumes between 1853-55. Gobineau’s Essai is a rather blunt (and not exactly scientifically rigorous) assertion of the overall superiority of “Aryan” blood and a warning against the dangers of mixing it with the blood of other “races.”

After Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species in 1859, his half-cousin Francis Galton became fascinated by the idea of applying Darwin’s theory of evolution not just to different species of animals but to different categories of humans as well. He developed an elaborate theory about “genius” and its tendency to run in families (his analysis happened to place his own upper-class family at the top of a global intelligence hierarchy), and in 1883 he coined the term “eugenics” to describe his concept of using artificial means to engineer a particular vision of human evolution. His schema clearly involved a racial component that included encouraging people to make breeding choices that would result in traits suitable for particular geographical settings.

In 1909, German biologist Jakob von Uexküll began using the term Umwelt (meaning surroundings or environment, literally “around-world”) to describe what he thought of as the holistic totality of a living organism, including the particular conditions in which it existed. Like Galton, he made the scientifically dubious choice to use biological and environmental science as a way of theorizing human difference. He concluded that the best thing would be for everyone to stay in their proper location and for each group to remain permanently isolated from one another. In the early 1930s (just as Hitler was rising to power), this led Uexküll to conclude that, for instance, Jews did not belong in the German Umwelt and should be expelled to live somewhere else. His ideas never really became official policy, however they did mesh quite neatly with Nazi “blood and soil” ideology.

The language of white supremacy and the associated fear of racial “contamination” have never gone away, but they do continually shift: “anti-miscegenation” laws have been invalidated in the US, yet it is possible to launch a successful presidential campaign by describing immigrants as “rapists,” which still invokes the same threat that brown-skinned men allegedly pose to the purity of white women; most French politicians would stop short of saying that Muslims don’t belong in France, yet the language of laïcité is invoked over and over to make it clear that expressions of Islamic culture should be hidden from public view or eliminated altogether; etc.

One of the more sophisticated innovations on the part of global segregationists has been the invention of the term “ethnopluralism” (or its French counterpart différentialisme). It’s an awkward bit of jargon that was concocted by members of the French and German New Right in the 1960s–70s as part of an ongoing effort to reframe old ideas for a new context. The following will be an examination of the term’s meaning, origins, and spread as well as its rhetorical value for a global movement of racial domination.

What Does It Mean?

As a concept, “ethnopluralism” has a progressive veneer; at first blush, it might even sound like something that liberals or leftists would want to support. That is not an accident (more on that later).

The idea behind it goes something like this: each ethnic group has its own culture, its own way of doing things, its own [*ahem*] appearance and, importantly, its own historical territory, so when people from one “culture” occupy the same space as members of another, the heritage of at least one of those groups is necessarily endangered. The best way to ensure the preservation of each distinct culture is therefore to make sure that people from different backgrounds are just kept separate – in adjacent communities, if necessary, but ideally in bounded, ethnically homogeneous national states.

In case it isn’t immediately clear, “culture” here is used as a substitute for “race,” a word that the post-World War II European right was trying hard to avoid given its own recent history at the time. However, ethnopluralism breaks with older ideas about racial categorization in that it asserts, in theory, a basically egalitarian understanding of race: we may belong to different “cultures,” but those cultures do not have a hierarchical relationship with one another. In all cases, it is a zero-sum concept that rests on an underlying assumption that everyone belongs to a specific cultural community and that every member of a given “culture” has something in common with every other member that they do not share with members of other communities.

Far-right actors have therefore used “ethnopluralism” to argue for what amounts to a kind of “separate, but equal” policy on a global scale, combined with a significant dose of old-school “blood and soil” ideology and repackaged to sound more socially acceptable. At the same time, they invoke it to assert that the real racists are the liberals and leftists, the internationalists and “multi-culturalists” who don’t actually care about diversity but rather want to destroy “difference” (by which they particularly mean whiteness) by creating a single, uniform, beige-colored race with no culture of its own and no particular identity.

They have been making these arguments continuously for fifty years now.

Origins of a Concept

In the wake of the war, the Holocaust, and the delegitimization of certain deeply rooted beliefs that led to both, reactionary politics was in need of new ideas, or at least a new way of presenting itself. As early as 1951, at least one group was suggesting a novel approach to racism – something it literally called “neo-racism.” The New European Order (NEO), an organization whose affinity for Nazism is clear from its very name, broke with the prevailing sentiment in international fascism by arguing that

the hierarchy of the races can be based only on their confrontation and subsequently on the respect for the distinctive characteristics and traditions of each one. The reestablishment of a certain world equilibrium is possible only if a radical break is made with colonialism based solely on the exploitation of the colored races. It is our responsibility: 1) to assert our will to return the races of the countries colonized by Europe to their own traditions; 2) to substitute, for the current colonialist regime, a regime of association that shows respect for the traditions proper to each race, accompanied by a strict racial segregation in the interest of each of the contracting parties; 3) to call for and realize the return of the nonnative groups to their traditional space. (cit. Camus & Lebourg, 73-4)

For all the talk of “respect” and mutual interest, there is fundamentally very little change here from the ideas put forth by Gobineau, Galton, or Uexküll; belief in a “hierarchy of races” is never questioned for a moment. However, there is a quiet acquiescence to Enlightenment-era ideals of universal rights and a warped notion of equality, provided that members of each “race” become (or remain) segregated on a global scale. Even more important is the recognition that colonialism means that the lives of the colonizer and the colonized are inevitably bound together, despite all pretense of superiority or difference.

And yet, to be clear, what NEO was advocating was what would now be called “ethnic cleansing” (“the return of nonnative groups to their traditional space”), just done in the name of “respect for traditions … in the interest of each of the contracting parties.”

NEO was only one of many neo-fascist organizations active during a period of large-scale reorganization within the European far right during the 1950s-60s. As fractious as that era was, one point of agreement that emerged was the idea that no single European country could be accepted as superior to the others anymore. Slavs, for instance, were no longer inferior to “Aryans,” but were instead recast as brothers who needed to be liberated from the Bolshevik menace. “Rule Britannia” and “Deutschland über alles” still held sway with some groups, but even they had to concede that the old imperial era had reached its conclusion and global whiteness could no longer afford quite so much infighting.

Instead of subdividing Europeans into hierarchically arranged sub-groups, as Gobineau and others had done, a doctrine of “pan-Europeanism” emerged among post-war neo-fascists. While fairly large numbers of Turkish guest workers were still in Germany helping with post-war reconstruction, and at a time when France had only recently lost control of Algeria but was still home to a large North African population, Europe’s right-wing nationalists were carving out new rhetorical frameworks for excluding non-white people, most of whom were only in Europe in the first place because of Europeans’ own colonial and genocidal projects.

Enter the French New Right

By the mid-1960s, a generation of European far-right activists was already emerging that had no firsthand memory of the war. They had no particular interest in uniforms or mass rallies, but they also lacked any memory of defeat and had no personal histories of Nazi collaboration to hide. In short, they were eager to jettison old baggage, move on, and build a new movement.

One of the most successful right-wing intellectual outlets was formed in France in early 1969. Known as GRECE (an acronym that can be spelled out in English as the Research and Study Group for European Civilization), it was led primarily by young right-wing radicals with the support of some older mentors. Spearheaded by member Alain de Benoist, it began popularizing what it dubbed “metapolitics,” which basically amounts to utilizing the cultural sphere to make unacceptable ideas more palatable to the general public. (Metapolitics partly overlaps with the idea of “shifting the Overton window,” but they nonetheless have crucial differences in both origin and meaning.) In discussing metapolitics, de Benoist and others were quite open about the fact that they had taken inspiration from Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of “cultural hegemony” and the “war of position.” Part of the “metapolitical” project, of course, meant carving out new language that would recast old, usually racist concepts as reasonable pursuits. Ideas of a “master race” or eugenics disappeared from their public discourse, and in their place were broad concepts like “culture” and “identity,” which were no less rooted in racial antagonism or pseudoscience, yet were harder to define and sounded friendlier and less dangerous.

It is important to note that, while the French New Right is not a single, unified entity or organization, one thing that unified its early participants was a steadfast elitism and a general rejection of Enlightenment-era ideals like equality, human rights, or any sort of universal commonality linking all of humanity together. De Benoist, for one, had started his career as a journalist and an ardent defender of South Africa’s apartheid regime, white-minority rule in Rhodesia, and racial segregation in the United States, but by the time GRECE was founded, he had more or less ceased overt political activity and consigned himself to life of an intellectual. Nonetheless, he has never given up his core belief in a “need” for racial segregation on a global scale. For instance, in his three-volume tome titled View from the Right (1977), he argues that

It is no longer a matter of passing from one excess to another by privileging what differs to the point of neglecting what is common. The difference alone is more important. It is more important firstly because it is that which specifies, which defines the identity, which makes of each person or each nation an irreplaceable being. It is more important secondly because belonging to humanity is never immediate, but on the contrary always mediated: one exists only by virtue of the fact that one belongs to one of the cultures or constituent collectives of humanity. (de Benoist; emphasis added)

There is no longer any talk of “colored races” with their “distinctive characteristics and traditions.” Now there are “cultures” and “constituent collectives of humanity” with a heavy emphasis on the importance of “difference,” another term borrowed from left-wing discourse.

However, there is no escaping the arbitrariness of the “difference” that de Benoist finds so important – the difference that gave rise to his use of the term différentialisme. As “pan-Europeanists,” de Benoist and his colleagues had come to assume that Europeans necessarily had something in common with one another that they did not share with the rest of humanity. In the passage cited here, he applies that to “cultures” generally, but if he had been born a generation earlier, he might just as well have argued that the “culture” that allows one to exist is the particular nation to which one belongs. In other words, there is no particular justification for the shift from prioritizing “Europeanness” over, for instance, “Frenchness.” The rhetoric of race is different, but the content of the arguments really isn’t. De Benoist is a complicated figure whose long career has seen many shifts in perspective, however he has never entirely given up on a perceived belief in the need for a certain kind of “apartheid” – that is, separateness or apart-hood.

In any event, he doesn’t have to specify the precise boundaries of what “culture” means in a passage like this. The people who read Alain de Benoist usually know how to interpret his meaning. [Watch this space for future posts about constitutive rhetoric. -Ed.]

Meanwhile, In Germany…

If the post-war West German right was constrained by the widespread revulsion that the Nazi past triggered, its was simultaneously able to fortify its nationalist rhetoric with arguments that Germany was not only a country divided, but also occupied by the world’s two rival superpowers – a condition that nationalists increasingly emphasized throughout the Cold War and helped lay the groundwork for today’s Reichsbürger movement. This in turn justified their generally anti-Communist sentiment, but it also gave rise to a rhetoric of “national identity” as well as rampant anti-Americanism: if the US clearly shared the West German right’s anti-Communist outlook, it was also a major force in the defeat of Nazism. More importantly, it represented “modernity” at its glossiest and most superficial, and worst of all, its self-image as a “melting pot” was diametrically opposed to neo-fascist ideas of folkish “national identity” (Heni, 24-5).

The resulting nationalist rhetoric of “Germany for the Germans” (which still allowed room, for instance, for “China for the Chinese, Turkey for the Turks” (Pfeiffer, 56), as though either of those countries has ever been ethnically homogeneous) was therefore easy enough for radical nationalists to pass off as an understandable rejection of both US and Soviet domination. However, it was also a shot at, for instance, the growing population of Turkish guest workers and their families who had migrated to Germany after the war as part of the reconstruction effort, as well as other, more familiar targets like Jews and Roma.

One rising star on the West German radical nationalist scene in the mid-1960s was a young intellectual named Henning Eichberg. Born in 1943, Eichberg’s family had fled what is now part of Poland in 1945 as the Red Army approached. They subsequently also fled East Germany in 1950 by crossing the border illegally. These early experiences led Eichberg to adopt anti-Communism as a default position, although that did not rule out support for other flavors of socialism (see: Endstation Rechts). In 1956, for example, he joined the German Social Union (DSU), a microparty that advocated “nationalism and socialism” led by Otto Strasser, a former leader of the “left” wing of the Nazi Party (Assheuer & Sarkowicz, 180). In an environment steeped in fascist nostalgia, his ideological path seemed fairly clear.

In 1966, however, Eichberg attended a camp for European nationalists in Provence, France. He quickly began adopting his French colleagues’ perspective (he later became the “German correspondent” for GRECE’s journal Nouvelle École, which was edited by Alain de Benoist). Eichberg later claimed that it was at that camp that he stopped being a right-wing radical and became a “national revolutionary” instead (Bartsch, 20-1). He turned away from Strasser while encouraging right-wing actors to embrace “the tradition of revolutionary left-fascism and the European Waffen-SS” (Assheuer & Sarkowicz, 180). In articles in Nation Europa and other German right-wing outlets, he started to recast nationalism not as a reactionary idea but rather as a progressive one (Bartsch, 21), and in time he went so far as to advocate for certain anticolonial liberation movements. He eventually became a regular contributor to the German “national revolutionary” magazine wir selbst, a name that is a German translation of “we ourselves,” or the Irish phrase “Sinn Féin.” For the German New Right in the 1960s-80s, continual references to Irish republicanism were crucial: they represented a rhetorical link between Germany’s “colonization” by the US and the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and Britain’s colonization of Ireland on the other. The implication, of course, was that Europeans could be colonized too, which was an invaluable rhetorical asset and a much easier argument to make in the Irish context than the German one.

In 1973, Eichberg published the article in which he, finally, coined the term Ethnopluralismus. The article focused on what he called the crisis in “relations between European culture (in the broadest sense, which includes North American and Eastern European variants) and non-European cultures.” In particular, he takes Western “development aid” to task for the demands it makes on “colored cultures,” going so far as to argue that it can lead to “national death” (Völkertod) through cultural (but not biological) destruction via the imposition of “norms that were to be defined according to Anglo-Saxon categories and monitored by the North American global police officer” (Eichberg, 644).

Eichberg’s apparent anti-imperialist affinity for “third world” liberation was certainly at least partly driven by a desire to woo leftists to the nationalist cause through a strategy known as “entryism.” Anti-colonial movements have a long history of using nationalist rhetoric to build unity against colonial invaders, and the Western international left has often found it difficult to navigate the resulting political complications, often resorting to binary responses: either full support for national liberation with little concern for the chauvinism of nationalist frameworks or unmitigated disdain for movements that attempt any sort of nationalist project, even in the face of murderous colonial domination. For Eichberg and his peers, it became important to target at least the leftists who were open to nationalist arguments, in part by expressing a strong affinity not only for Irish republicanism, but also Palestinian liberation, Basque separatism, or even the Sandinista movement in Nicaragua in the 1980s, all in the name of national self-determination. Each of these were regularly covered in outlets like wir selbst and presented in close comparison with “the German question” of national reunification and liberation from the colonizing superpowers.

Eichberg’s lack of interest in actually undoing the harm done by colonialism and his underlying belief in racial segregation are evident in some of the other language he used. For a time, for instance, he advocated for “nationaler Sozialismus,” an obviously provocative play on the term Nationalsozialismus, the formal German word for “Nazism.” Right in the article in which he coined “ethnopluralism,” he discusses the idea that a people (Volk) has “its own Lebensraum [living space]” (656), which not only picks up on the ideas espoused by Uexküll and “blood and soil” ideology, but also invokes a term that is inextricably linked with Hitler’s frequent usage.

So right from the outset, “ethnopluralism” is a term that was used to invoke the harm done by Western neo-colonialism (through the example of development aid) and to appeal to leftist anti-imperialist sympathies in the interest of centering nationalism as the ideal mode of anti-colonial action (another term Eichberg frequently used was Befreiungsnationalismus, or “liberation nationalism”). And yet its usage has always been linked with the far-right imperative of racial separation and has never been seriously connected with the work of undoing colonial power relations.

It’s Still Fascism

In the intervening decades, the terms “ethnopluralism” and “differentialism” have taken on lives of their own. And if we look at who has applied them and how, their meaning and effect have not been ambiguous.

By 1980, “differentialism” had become conventional wisdom in groups like France’s Fédération d’action nationale et européenne (FANE), which by then had completed a shift from “national revolutionary” ideology to overt nazism (just before the organization disbanded). An article in the group’s monthly journal that July harkens back to the NEO statement about “neo-racism” in 1951. It says that “Our racism is respect for races, respect for others. … As national socialists, we seek … harmony between the races based on the absolute rejection of any mixture and the principle of separate development” (Taguieff 1985, 69-70). In a 1985 interview, Jean-Marie Le Pen explained that “Peoples cannot be summarily qualified as superior or inferior, they are different, and one must keep in mind these physical or cultural differences” (cit. Taguieff 1990, 116). This is the same Jean-Marie Le Pen who co-founded the extreme right-wing party National Front (together with former members of the Waffen-SS and other erstwhile Nazi collaborators), which has since been renamed National Rally by his daughter and perennial presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. He was a man who built his career hyping the danger that French culture might be diluted by “foreigners.” In this sense, he not only embraced the ideas behind “ethnopluralism,” but also “Great Replacement” rhetoric long before that term was even coined.

In Germany, social scientist Thomas Pfeiffer says that the concept of ethnopluralism has had a dual impact: on one hand, it has been a source of overtly neo-nazi racial theorizing. Not that they needed it, but jargon like that – terms that sound “sciency” – are always useful for giving fascists a sense of legitimacy, at least among themselves. On the other hand, it is also a prime example of how the New Right functions as “a bridge from right-wing extremism to the middle of society” insofar as it makes xenophobia appear like a humanitarian gesture (Pfeiffer, 56-7).

It remains in frequent use among New Right and “identitarian” activists. In an essay on “ethnocentrism, ethnopluralism, and universalism” published in 2017 on the blog of the German New Right journal Sezession, “identitarian” leader Martin Sellner argued that

A people [Volk] and a culture have essential value derived from their uniqueness. This ethno-cultural uniqueness is a necessary result of their distinction from other equally unique and authentic living environments [Lebenswelten]. The value of a people [Volk] does not rely on any metaphysical claims; it need not globalize its uniqueness into a universally recognized chosenness [Auserwähltheit]. There always have been and will be expansions, wars, and conflicts and the belief in a national purpose and mission, which is of course something that we identitarians also know. But we take it as a constant and are not looking for a universalist form through which nationalism can express that purpose.

What hasn’t changed from earlier usages of “ethnopluralism” is the claim that different peoples and cultures are different, yet equal, and that both their difference and their equality rely on their separation from others. What is new is an evident desire to avoid the folkish trappings in de Benoist by disavowing “metaphysical claims” to peoplehood (as though the purported unity of a “people” can ever be free of recourse to metaphysical claims) and the provocation of language like “Lebensraum” found in Eichberg. Nonetheless, Sellner retains the Uexküllian framework of placing cultures in their “unique and authentic living environments” (an ungenerous reader might point out that his use of Lebenswelt neatly conjoins the terms Lebensraum and Umwelt). Sellner was once caught affixing a swastika poster to a synagogue near Vienna, and he is very image-conscious, so it would seem to make sense that he would choose a less loaded term like Lebenswelt over Lebensraum. (I admittedly raised an eyebrow at his mention of “chosenness,” given the frequent, sarcastic use of “the chosen people” among neo-nazis as a derogatory reference to Jews. However, I am doubtful that Sellner meant it as a dogwhistle in this context, given both his self-awareness as a public far-right figure who seeks mainstream recognition and the term’s usage in the next quoted passage.)

In his essay, Sellner also refers to Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden,” describing it as “an apt symbol of masochistic pride.” He writes,

No one believes in the cultural or biological superiority of the white man any anymore. But people do believe all the more in the chosenness and superiority of his mission to unite the world, eliminate differences, and “save” humanity from national diversity and all conflict. This change has an interesting consequence for national identity. Pride … has transformed into its opposite. It is an outright self-hatred and a feeling of guilt and indebtedness that is made just as jealously and “proudly” absolute.

Leaving aside his obviously false assertions about what anyone does or does not believe in, we may in fact be looking at the core motivation for “ethnopluralist” aspirations here. According to this passage, in addition to his other complaints about the “universalism of guilt” among white people generally and the “bio-German collective” in particular, what Sellner and his ilk appear to want is, ultimately, relief from the historical and, yes, cultural complications of colonialism, but without giving up any of the benefits that they continue to accrue from it. He wants a homogeneous “national identity.” He wants to no longer have to see brown-skinned people, smell their foods, or hear their music or languages. He wants the world to be reset to a kind of modified, pre-colonial state, but he explicitly wants to avoid getting there by doing anything to ameliorate the damage. Now, in an era when nineteenth-century-style colonialism is unrecoverable, but when colonial economic relations persist; when global travel and communication are easier than they have ever been in human history, yet migrants regularly die by the dozens in desperate attempts to make their way to wealthier countries; when every item of clothing Sellner wears has most likely been at least partly processed or manufactured in a former European colony by workers toiling under awful conditions for terrible wages so that products can be sold cheaply in Western countries – now he wants everyone to just chill out about the whole colonial responsibility thing and, above all, don’t you dare make him feel guilty about it.

That is the dream of equality for today’s neo-fascists: a global system of apartheid, wherein Western countries effectively become massive gated communities while other “cultures” offer a permanent supply of natural resources and cheap labor. It’s an equality that is no equality at all.

English Usage

The German term Ethnopluralismus has made its way into the far-right English lexicon in a way that the French word différentialisme generally hasn’t. The exact reason escapes me: Alain de Benoist and his GRECE colleagues are generally better known outside France than Henning Eichberg and other German New Right figures of his generation are outside Germany, which may partly explain why both far-right activists and antifascist researchers in the English-speaking world often mistakenly claim that de Benoist coined “ethnopluralism” himself.

But whatever the reason, “ethnopluralism” is well and firmly implanted in the anglophone far-right vocabulary. It has not yet percolated to the level of popular discourse in most countries, but not for lack of effort on the part of white nationalists to make it seem reasonable. They regularly point to historical race-based restrictions on citizenship as well as the words of sitting, pre-Civil Rights-era presidents, such as Lincoln’s advocacy for “colonization” due to his belief that Black and white people simply couldn’t live side-by-side. This is the basic justification for white nationalists’ perennial dream of establishing a white “ethnostate” somewhere in North America.

But even where the term “ethnopluralism” is not explicitly used, the increasing normalization of warehousing migrants outside the borders of would-be host countries is evidence that the idea is increasingly being accepted as a matter of state policy anyway. During the first Trump administration, the US began a policy of detaining Latin American migrants in Mexico; the UK’s various Tory governments in recent years tried to negotiate a similar deal with Rwanda, and Georgia Meloni keeps trying to make the same agreement with Albania (something Keir Starmer has said he would gladly join in on). Not long ago, these were controversial ideas, and it does not take much imagination to envisage conversations in certain government offices concerning the “cultural unity” of all Latin American migrants in the US or all sub-Saharan Africans in the UK or Italy, etc.

During the second Trump administration, of course, the idea of merely keeping incoming migrants just outside the national borders has been blown up entirely: immigrants already in the US (including those with legal documentation) are currently at risk of being deported not only to their countries of origin or regional neighbors, but to whatever country Trump has signed an agreement with, such as the recent shipment of deportees from Latin American and Southeast Asian countries to… South Sudan.

Despite what we were promised, it seems as though state policing apparatuses care little about the national or ethnic identities of people they have deemed undesirable.

Summary

The reactionary desire for racial separation in order to prevent a loss of elite status through mixture has never entirely gone away, despite the well documented horrors it has yielded over the past few hundred years. Starting a generation after the end of World War II and the Holocaust, what had previously been justified through the pseudoscience of race was repackaged and sold using, among other things, the innocuous-sounding concept of “ethnopluralism,” or “differentialism.” It has served a variety of purposes. Primarily, it has a) helped codify the post-World War II far-right consensus on a newly constructed “pan-European” identity (explicitly excluding immigrants in “white countries” or Europeans with an “immigration background”), b) granted right-wing ideologues an intellectual and even a liberal or leftist veneer by co-opting the language of “difference,” and c) served as a tool for far-right entryism into left anti-colonial discourse under the rubric of national liberation. It was developed in the 1960s–70s by young members of the French and German New Right in the context of a larger effort to escape the baggage of the most thoroughly discredited ideas and actions of the prior generations – things like eugenics, genocide, and “Aryan” supremacy. In all cases, however, it has functioned as a rationalization for “ethnic cleansing.”

The term’s usage remains widespread in far-right circles, however it has not yet broken out of the neo-nazi/white nationalist spectrum very much in the English-speaking world. Still, it need not be explicitly invoked for the ideas behind it to be adopted as a matter of public policy.

Coda

I would feel like this (already very long) essay was incomplete if I failed to mention certain related concepts. In particular, the idea of “human biodiversity” is clearly a close cousin to “ethnopluralism.” The main difference is that “human biodiversity” explicitly seeks to revive old pseudoscientific justifications for categorizing humans and keeping them separate, whereas “ethnopluralism” was coined in the context of an effort to escape that very framework by utilizing nebulous concepts like “culture” and “identity” – the kind of “metaphysics” that Martin Sellner so eagerly disowned. Ultimately, the origins and application of “ethnopluralism” and “human biodiversity” involve notably different contexts.

The “Great Replacement” concept also needs to be mentioned here. It is really the flipside to “ethnopluralism”: if the latter is what “pan-Europeanists” and white nationalists see as the solution, the former is what they see as the problem it is meant to solve.

Both of these will warrant future (probably multiple) posts, and the language of “replacement” (“great” or otherwise) will undoubtedly have to be unpacked from various angles over time. On one hand, it has been around for much longer than the term “the Great Replacement” has, and on the other, it is unfortunately also a widespread idea at this point and has been embraced by public figures in mass media and politics. As such, its usage continues to evolve fairly quickly, even when the term itself isn’t explicitly invoked.

Stay tuned…

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Works cited:

Assheuer, Thomas & Hans Sarkowicz, Rechtsradikale in Deutschland. Die alte und die neue Rechte. Verlag C.H.Beck, Munich, 1992.

Bartsch, Günter, Revolution von rechts? Ideologie und Organisation der Neuen Rechten. Verlag Herder KG, Freiburg im Breisgau. 1975.

de Benoist, Alain, View from the Right: A Critical Anthology of Contemporary Ideas, Volume I: Heritage and Foundations. Translated by Robert A. Lindgren. Arktos, London, 2017.

Camus, Jean-Yves and Nicolas Lebourg, Far-Right Politics in Europe. Translated by Jane Marie Todd. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England. 2017.

Eichberg, Henning, “‘Entwicklungshilfe’ – Verhaltensumformung nach europäischem Modell? Universalismus, Dualismus und Pluralismus im interkulturellen Vergleich,” in: Zeitschrift für Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaften, no. 93, 1973, 641-70.

Endstation Rechts, “Über Habitus, Ideologie und Praxis. Im Gespräch mit Henning Eichberg (Teil 1),” 5 Jun 2010. https://www.endstation-rechts.de/news/uber-habitus-ideologie-und-praxis-im-gesprach-mit-henning-eichberg-teil-1, accessed 18 Aug 2025.

Heni, Clemens, Die Salonfähigkeit der Neuen Rechten. ‘Nationale Identität’, Antisemitismus und Antiamerikanismus in der politischen Kultur der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1970–2005: Henning Eichberg als Exampel. Tectum Verlag Marburg, 2007.

Pfeiffer, Thomas, “Avantgarde und Brücke. Die Neue Rechte aus Sicht des Verfassungsschutzes NRW,” in: Wolfgang Gessenharter & Thomas Pfeiffer, eds., Die Neue Rechte – eine Gefahr für die Demokratie? Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden, 2004, 51-70.

Taguieff, Pierre-André, “Le néo-racisme différentialiste. Sur l’ambiguïté d’une évidence commune et ses effets pervers,” in: Langage & société, no. 34, 1985, 69-98.

Taguieff, Pierre-André, “The New Cultural Racism in France,” translated by Russell Moore, in: Télos, no. 83, 1990, 109-22.

Other relevant texts:

Gillham, Nicholas Wright, A Life of Sir Francis Galton: From African Exploration to the Birth of Eugenics. Oxford University Press, New York, 2001.

Pfahl-Traughber, Armin, “‘Gramscismus von rechts’? Die Entwicklung einer Strategie der Kulturrevolution und die Rezeption Antonio Gramscis durch die Neue Rechte in Frankreich und Deutschland,” in: Am rechten Rand, no. 4, Aug. 1998, 2-13.

Schnödl, Gottfried and Florian Sprenger, Uexküll’s Surroundings: Umwelt Theory and Right-Wing Thought. Translated by Michael Thomas Taylor and Wayne Yung. meson press, Lüneburg, Germany, 2021.