Nationalist, Ethnopluralist, or Imperialist? Far-Right Ideological Struggle During Russia’s War Against Ukraine

The European ‘New Right’ is believed to embrace ethnopluralism and anti-imperialism instead of nationalism. Yet, in 2022, Russia’s full-scale war against Ukraine put the far right’s alleged ethnopluralism into question. As Martin Sellner, leader of the Identitarian Movement, put it in an online essay: ‘Russia or Ukraine, whom does the ethnopluralist support?’ Taking Sellner’s essay at the beginning of Russia’s war as a starting point, this paper investigates change and continuity in far-right geopolitical meaning-making. It asks whether and how the far right (re)negotiates ethnopluralism in times of war and geopolitical polarization, and sheds light on ethnopluralism’s relationship to ‘oldschool’ nationalism, racism, and imperialism on the far right. As a case study, the paper focuses on the online mobilization by the Germanophone far-right network, including the political parties AfD, Heimat/NPD, and III. Weg, the social movement organizations Generation Identity and PEGIDA, and the knowledge producers at the Institute for State Politics and Compact magazine. Carrying out a frame analysis of an original corpus including far-right websites, social media, blogs, and video commentary, this study finds two different approaches to renegotiating ethnopluralism: one that takes recourse to (Russian) imperialism, and one that forwards (Ukrainian) nationalism. The study yields important findings beyond the descriptive analysis and the contextualization of German far-right ideology, revealing how imaginaries about nations and states shape far-right foreign policy positions.