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.