Description
Discourses of decolonisation are mutating. In France, far-right thinkers like Guillaume Faye cast white Europe as indigenous victim of an ‘immigrant colonisation’ orchestrated by ‘globalist’ elites; Hindu supremacist writers have taken up the framework of decoloniality to market their ethnonationalist ideology as a form of radical indigenous critique; and Putin’s foreign minister Sergei Lavrov makes promises to stand ‘in solidarity with the African demands to complete the process of decolonisation’. While it is easy to dismiss these examples as cynical appropriations of a decolonial politics they bear little real relation to, I suggest here that they in fact draw on a longer history of far-right anti-imperial thought. This finds its roots in the international thought of Carl Schmitt and is developed in the contemporary writings of the neo-fascist theorist Alexander Dugin. A closer look at Schmitt and Dugin’s ideas about the 'Grossraum', the 'nomos of the earth' and the ‘pluriverse’ allows us to excavate a distinctive concept of imperialism at work among far-right thinkers today - enabling us, in turn, to better dismantle their dubious claims to decoloniality.
