The crisis of the liberal world order has become the most compelling political and theoretical concern in international relations (IR) scholarship over the past decade. As the liberal world order contracts, the body of scholarship on the topic expands with revealing theoretical and empirical accounts of our times. The usual causes of change are familiar, but it is the radical right wing of conservative politics that is, perhaps, the most unexpected challenge to contemporary world order. Indeed, the right-wing reaction against the liberal world order threatens to undermine it from within. As the horror trope has it: the call is coming from inside the house.
In World of the Right, six scholars of IR and political theory assess the challenge that the radical Right has wrought. More than just weirdos, cranks and trolls, the radical Right is actually a global social movement of real consequence and organizational sophistication. It unites a motley assortment of activists, intellectuals and provocateurs from around the world in a common cause—to wage war on liberalism in all its forms. This point was made over a decade ago by Clifford Bob and has been followed by important works by Ayşe Zarakol, Rebecca Adler-Nelson, Alexander Cooley and Dan Nexon, among others. What these works show, and what World of the Right convincingly demonstrates, is that the radical right wing in world politics is an intellectually potent, protean and politically savvy movement seeking nothing less than the overthrow of the existing world order. Understanding where the radical Right is coming from, say the authors, is necessary to counter its influence.
The authors of World of the Right are interested in the intellectual and organizational profile of this global movement. They argue that the radical Right is a loose network of actors and advocates that has created a potent “nationalist international,” unified by a common enemy—liberalism and managerialism. To the radical Right, a global technocratic class has captured the institutions of national and international politics, and from those commanding heights impose a liberal ideological program in the guise of common sense, process and professionalism—which ultimately reproduces its own power and privilege. This, the extreme Right says, has been going on since at least the end of World War II, and was supercharged during the post-Cold War phase of globalization. On the losing end: conservatives, traditionalists, nationalists and related communities “left behind” in the twenty-first century. Of course, figures on the Right have grumbled about liberalism's excesses and hypocrisies for years, but for the most part, they were obscure or comical figures. Nobody is laughing now.
For the authors, there's an important distinction to be made between the extreme Right versus radical Right. To them, the extreme Right is a revolutionary, antidemocratic, antiliberal and often violent set—think of the Proud Boys, Golden Dawn and other purveyors of street violence. The radical Right is different—it accepts democracy but rejects liberalism and has more transformative political ambitions. This is what bridges William F. Buckley and Steven Bannon, and what ties together Viktor Orban, MAGA and the truckers that occupied parts of Ottawa in 2022. Understood this way, the radical Right becomes a major political challenge and a theoretical puzzle for political science.
To address that puzzle, the authors do something counterintuitive—they take neo-Gramscianism as their theoretical framework. Why Gramsci? Because their subjects often do. Many radical right-wing activists—at least, the more intellectual of the lot—self-consciously embrace Gramscian concepts, a point that is neatly documented in the book. The logic goes like this: If liberal managerialism has attained hegemonic influence around the world, then the only path to victory is not a headlong war of movement against the historic bloc, but a war of position, a long-term insurrection against the status quo enacted by a self-conscious class of right-wingers whose counter-hegemonic institutions will parallel and gradually displace the old order. More concretely, this means establishing institutional connections among news media outlets, publishing houses, think tanks and training academies, as well as an online fraternity. Certainly, it is a strange historical twist that an Italian Communist imprisoned by Mussolini would become the lodestar of twenty-first century neo-fascists. But the theoretical framework gives World of the Right a great deal of analytical leverage to show that the radical Right has managed to out Marx the Marxists.
What the radical Right is trying to achieve is less clear. The authors argue that the radical Right's positive agenda is a strange hybrid of modernism, postmodernism and post-postmodernism. The appeal to tradition (modernism), is made in the milieu of thin and fluid ideological commitments (post-modernism), while desiring a return to illiberal modernity (post-postmodern). The specifics of these ideas are frustratingly elusive. What “tradition” or “civilization” or any other of these right-wing shibboleths mean is deliberately unspecified by the movements themselves. But that is part of the plan—the Right's grievance chain of equivalencies and strategic essentialism rallies its disparate adherents around the common enemy without sweating the details. To be sure, there are some identifiable targets—anti-LGBTQ legislation around the world, to name one prominent example. But the absence of a specified agenda may be the movement's limitations. Without a positive agenda it is liable fracture when specific commitments must be made, or when policy victories deprive them of a raison d'etre. World of the Right overlooks this point, which would have enriched the book's concern with countering the radical Right's influence.
Overall, though, World of the Right is a welcome and necessary contribution to scholarship on global social movements in the twenty-first century. Understanding the influence of the radical right wing requires taking it seriously and the author accomplish this objective without prejudice, sympathy or inadvertently legitimizing their subjects.
