History of far right movement examined at Trinity public lecture

Posted on: 02 October 2017

The deep historic links between white nationalist movements in Europe and the US and how they have led to remarkable political changes in the UK and US was examined at a public lecture in Trinity College Dublin on Friday, September 29, 2017.

Far right nationalists have and have always been connected across borders, pursuing transnational racist solidarities, exchanges, and legitimacy, according to Paul Kramer, Associate Professor of US History, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, who delivered the public lecture entitled “Cosmopolitan Fascisms: The Right’s Global Cartographies in the 20th Century”.

In his lecture Dr Kramer traced the history of the far right movement with particular focus on three key historical moments – the early-to-mid twentieth-century eugenics movement; post-World War II struggles to defend colonial empire; and the recent populist and separatist anti-immigrant campaigns as seen in the US and the UK.  

Dr Kramer said: "The contemporary far right in the US, UK and elsewhere depicts our moment's politics as involving a struggle between predatory, cosmopolitan globalists and virtuous, patriotic localists. But both historically and at present, far right nationalists have been connected across borders, pursuing transnational racist solidarities, intellectual and policy exchanges, and international leverage and legitimacy.”

“Recovering and analyzing what I'll call these ‘cosmopolitan fascisms’ can help us reframe our time as characterized not by globalist/localist conflict, but by rival visions of world order, one of which defends itself in the language purity, separation and isolation, even as it reaches out to the world."

Organiser of the event, Dr Daniel Geary, the Mark Pigott Associate Professor in American History, at Trinity's School of Histories and Humanities, added: "White nationalists formed a key element in the surprise successes of both the Brexit referendum and the election of Donald Trump. Each campaign drew substantially on rhetoric about protecting the nation’s ethnoracial character against perceived threats of immigration and multiculturalism. Nigel Farage was a leading adviser to the Trump campaign; Trump’s campaign manager, Steve Bannon, has long-standing connections with right-wing British nationalists.”

The lecture marked the launch of a new International History Seminar Series at the School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity (see below for more information). The talk is sponsored by the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts & Humanities Research Institute, the Faculty of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences, and the Department of History.

Programme for International History Seminar Series, School of Histories and Humanities, Trinity

• 29 September, 6pm: Paul Kramer, Vanderbilt University, “Cosmopolitan Fascisms: The Right’s Global Cartographies in the 20th Century,” Robert Emmett Theatre, Arts Building
• 16 October, 12: Carl Bon Tempo, University at Albany, “Human Rights At Home and Abroad: U.S. Labor and Human Rights in the 1980s,” Galbraith Seminar Room, Trinity Long Room Hub
• 15 November, 6pm: Robert Bickers, University of Bristol, “World in Motion: Professional Circuits through 19th Century China,” Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
• 16 November, 6pm: Norman Naimark, Stanford University, “Stalin and Europe,” Neill Lecture Theatre, Trinity Long Room Hub
• 6 December, 6pm: Stephen Smith, All Soul’s College, Oxford, “The Russian Revolution in a Global Perspective, 1917-1928” Neill Lecture Theatre

About Dr Paul Kramer:

Paul A. Kramer is an historian of the modern United States whose scholarship centers on questions of racialized, gendered and class inequality, immigration, and US empire. He received his PhD from Princeton University, and is Associate Professor of History at Vanderbilt University.  He is author of the prize-winning book The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines (UNC Press, 2006), as well as numerous academic articles, including “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” in the American Historical Review.  His scholarship has been awarded SHAFR’s 2007 Bernath Book Prize, its 2002 Bernath Article Prize, and the Bernath Lecture Prize for 2008, and the Organization of American Historians’ 2007 James A. Rawley Prize.

Prof. Kramer is co-founder and co-editor of Cornell University Press’ “The United States in the World” series, and has received fellowships from Harvard University’s Warren Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright, the Smithsonian Institution and the American Council of Learned Societies.  He has served as Program Chair for the 2009 annual meeting of SHAFR, on the editorial boards of Diplomatic History, Labor: Working-Class History of the Americas, and Philippine Studies. Alongside his academic work, he writes for the New Yorker and Slate on themes relating to the United States’ role in the world, including investigative essays on the US-Mexican border, Hurricane Katrina, and the origins of water-boarding, and a forthcoming piece on how Los Angeles became a sanctuary city. He is currently at work on two books: a methodological guide to the transnationalizing of US history, and a geopolitical history of US immigration policy in the long 20th century.

Photo: Bund leader Fritz Kuhn