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Paper short abstract

In this article, we scrutinise policy proposals from Europe's major 'far‑right' parties, using the concept of colonial modernity - conceived as white supremacy, toxic extraction, and nationalist control - to trace the connections between their anti‑migrant and anti‑sustainability positions.

Paper long abstract

In 21st century Europe, racially and religiously charged xenophobic and nationalist movements have become normalised. This normalisation has involved significant growth in popular support for ‘far-right’ political voices and parties. In this paper, rather than focusing on reasons behind the rise of the ‘far-right’, we scrutinise the policy proposals of dominant ‘far-right’ political parties in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, France and Spain. In particular, we trace connections between anti-migrant and anti-sustainability positions adopted in the parties’ policies. For this analysis, we use the overarching concept of colonial modernity (Arora and Stirling 2023), focusing particularly on its three co-constitutive dimensions of white supremacy, toxic extraction and nationalist control. We find that ‘far-right’ policies across the six focal countries are strongly aligned in militating against the wellbeing of racialised migrants, refugees and asylum seekers, while also opposing ecological flourishing of even the more conservative kinds in relation to wider climates, global biodiversities, and international cooperation for peace. Exceptions to anti-sustainability positions are restricted to nationalist concerns for local soils, waters and lands. Where it pertains to global justice-related concerns of sustainability, for instance in terms of climate justice, European ‘far-right’ parties are near unanimous in their opposition. We conclude that grasping relations between ‘far-right’ policies across different political-ecological contexts, might enable the interweaving of disparate struggles for migrant justice and environmental and climate justice. Interweaving struggles of these kinds may in turn be crucial for confronting, transforming or dismantling deeper colonial foundations of today’s Europe and the wider modern world.