How do European far-right parties reconcile their long-standing nationalism with their allegiance to European “civilization”? Although they are certainly not contradictory, simultaneously adopting national and supranational identities requires considerable discursive maneuvering to articulate clearly. In this article, I argue that the European Far Right negotiates the boundaries between its national and supranational identities through two discursive mechanisms, abstraction and embedding, which present civilizationism as nonthreatening to and partially constituted by nationalism. Specifically, abstraction links European civilization to general features of a shared heritage, whereas embedding connects civilization to elements of the nationalist repertoire. I demonstrate the Far Right’s monopolization of civilizational discourse and use of these twin mechanisms through quantitative and qualitative analyses of more than 1,000 party manifestos and more than 650,000 tweets. These findings contribute to the growing scholarly literature that treats civilizations as supranational “imagined communities” and has implications for the study of nationalism, civilizationism, and the Far Right.

Philosemitism – the idealization of Jews and Israel – and Chinese-Jewish history function as a platform of soft power for growing China–Israel relations and as a means to bolster Chinese nationalism. Given the Chinese Communist Party's current positioning of China as a globally dominant power as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, this article re-examines the contemporary incarnation of philosemitism in China as part of a civilizationist narrative designed to position China as globally central and superior. This not only places heavy emphasis upon Jewish racial stereotypes and erases genuine historical Jewish voices but it also ignores evidence of anti-Semitic beliefs in China.