Description
As right-wing politics undergoes a radical transformation in the context of intensified geopolitical competition, this article illustrates and analyses right-wing opinion-formers’ threat perceptions of external and internal enemies. It focuses on the perceptions of the shared strategic challenges of Europe and the Anglosphere countries from 2020-24 in what Tim Bale calls the ‘party in the media’. This influential part of the right-wing milieu in Britain is an integral and organic part of the Conservative party, playing an active part in promoting right-wing ideas. This was driven by the right of the Conservative party and, increasingly, the insurgent radical-right (UKIP, Brexit Party, Reform UK) whose influence in the party in the media grew. By the start of the 2020s, the challenge from Russia along with Chinese re-assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, pushed the EU, especially France, and the so-called ‘Anglosphere’ into strategic alignment, although tensions over AUKUS expressed an Anglosphere-France cleavage. Yet for the party in the media, France was an undependable ally. But at the same time, French republican nationhood offered a counterpoint to an undermining “woke” auto-critique of the Anglosphere that weakened those countries' resolve at a moment of impending conflict.
