Defining what is right

Discrimination – in its literal sense of drawing distinctions – is at the core of right-wing politics. The demarcation of people along imagined and uneven, hierarchical lines may be its key feature, yet one particular demarcation has so far escaped scholarly attention: The inner right’s self-definition, not as a nation, race, or Volk, but as a political movement and a coherent political thought, and its answer to the question of who is part of it and who is not. This process, though largely overlooked, can be seen as a particularly fraught one – at least for the right-wing movements of post-war Europe, which were not only faced with the tasks of shedding the devastating legacy of fascism, rearranging ideological fragments, and creating new self-attributions, agendas, and alliances. They also did so under the watchful eye of post-war societies and institutional actors, who themselves had strong motivations for defining what is (radically) right.