Opposition to globalism, immigration, and ‘wokeism’, alongside support for the traditional family should form the basis of a nationalist ideology across Europe and North America, according to speakers at a summit on national conservatism in London this week.
Developing common strands that could form the basis of common nationalist politics, following a surge in support for nationalist parties across Europe in recent years, was one of the priorities for delegates at this week’s conference on ‘National Conservatism’ at the Emmanuel Centre in Westminster, a short walk from the Houses of Parliament.
The conference has marketed itself as the most important political gathering in the UK outside of party conferences in 50 years – though the few hundred attendees, most of them seasoned political activists, at the three-day gathering was testament to its significance.
“If you’re worried by Big Tech, Big Business and Big State, high taxes and regulation, the effects of hyper-liberalism and globalisation – you’re a National Conservative,” James Orr, a philosophy professor at Cambridge University told the gathering.
Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation, one of the leading conservative think tanks in Washington DC, pointed to what he described as “the leftist control of globalist corporations and entities”.
“The new left, greedy, elitist, woke and globalist, has foresworn every principle their ideological predecessors once espoused: democracy, equality, diversity, justice,” said Roberts.
Unsurprisingly, the European Union was not spared from criticism.
“Today, the EU embodies the cultural chauvinism, spiritual decadence, and strategic incompetence, and tyrannical ambition that have hurried the continent into chaos for millennia,” said Roberts.
Meanwhile, Frank Furedi, the executive director of MCC Brussels, a think-tank with close links to Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, argued that the EU institutions had embraced ‘identity politics’ but that “the identity of the nation” was the only one not celebrated in Brussels.
Nationalist beliefs were “somehow off the radar of identity politics”, said Furedi, adding that those who identified themselves as “nationalist” were “regarded as unacceptable company”.
The conference was the second in less than a week to bring together the right of the UK Conservative Party.
It came on the heels of last weekend’s gathering of the Conservative Democratic Organisation, founded following the ousting of former Prime Minister Boris Johnson last year, which also focused on the party being more socially conservative in the so-called ‘war on woke’.
Unsurprisingly, its speakers had an anglocentric focus, including UK cabinet ministers Suella Braverman and Michael Gove, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni, and former US President Donald Trump were among those name-checked as examples to follow.
On Monday, a handful of activists from Extinction Rebellion, an environmental campaign group, disrupted speeches by Home Secretary Suella Braverman and former minister Jacob Rees Mogg.
Emerging themes
A handful of nationalist and populist parties across Europe have made major advances in the last year, with Meloni’s Brothers of Italy leading the Italian government and the Sweden Democrats emerging as the second-largest party in parliament.
Although there is no serious talk about a new political platform in Brussels to unite nationalist parties across Europe, there is an embryonic ideology.
Common themes discussed at ‘NatCon’ include opposition to the evils of ‘hyper globalisation’, mass immigration, cultural Marxism and the ‘hollowing out’ of national democracy and sovereignty, alongside support for traditional family values.
Several speakers focused on the need for married couples to have more children, while Michael Gove’s description of himself as “socially liberal” on Tuesday went down poorly with delegates.
Michael Anton, meanwhile, a former advisor to Donald Trump, came close to outright conspiracy theory when discussing the factors that “threaten to consume the entire West”.
“Is it “wokeism”? Is it the media? Is it the administrative state? Is it the university-NGO-international busybody complex? I would say that it’s all of the above,” he said.
The critiques of big business, globalism and ‘late capitalism’ by several speakers also point to a conflict between economic nationalism and free marketeers on the right.
“This new left is not in competition. It is at war with the West, with the moral, intellectual and social foundations on which our entire civilisation rests. Which is why it reserves a singular hatred for the kind of conservatism represented by Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis, by Brexit, by Viktor Orbán and, yes, by this conference,” concluded Roberts.
[Edited by Nathalie Weatherald/Zoran Radosavljevic]
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