De Benoist had agreed to meet Dugin after hearing rave reviews of the man from a mutual acquaintance. And so, sporting a Lenin-style goatee, the 28-year-old Russian appeared one day in de Benoist’s office in Paris, which overflowed with the paraphernalia of France’s uniquely intellectual public life – including over 20,000 books. Dugin, de Benoist said, reminded him of ‘a young Solzhenitsyn’.
Just off the plane from Moscow for his first ever trip abroad, Dugin surprised de Benoist with his erudition and his fluent French. His higher education had consisted of two years at the Moscow Civil Aviation Academy, which de Benoist could not at first believe. He recalls being struck by how remarkably well informed the Russian was about what was being published in the West. He liked the same authors as de Benoist, held similar views on the big political questions of the day, and seemed to have read almost everything de Benoist had ever written.
Dugin was a dissident, and like many others he had developed a network of contacts in the West over the years, smuggling out books and letters to those with sympathetic views. But now, after years of democratic reforms under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Communist Party general secretary, the restrictions had eased. Dugin, like many other Russians previously forbidden to go abroad, now had a zagran passport allowing him to travel to an outside world that until then he had only read about. But Dugin was no ordinary dissident. He had been hounded by the KGB and persecuted for his political views, had repeatedly been fired from jobs, and had been reduced to sweeping streets to earn a living. But he was no Western-oriented liberal who had cheered the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the march of democracy across Europe. From de Benoist and other New Right intellectuals he met on his European travels, Dugin would learn a new set of principles and vocabulary.
De Benoist is a figure who resists easy categorization: he himself admits to having belonged to extreme right-wing political circles in his youth. Following the political upheavals in 1968 he helped found a grouping of intellectuals known as the Nouvelle Droite – distinguishing it from the ‘old’ right, which was tinged by association with mid-century European fascism. ‘The old right is dead and well deserves to be’, he wrote in a characteristic 1979 essay.1 The traditional Catholic, monarchist and nationalist European conservatives were increasingly challenged by a movement which sometimes espoused pagan or traditionalist beliefs, did not recognize the distinction between the political left and right, and believed that nationalism was a dead end which was to be gradually replaced by a heterogeneity of identities and political models. As de Benoist wrote in 1986:
Already on the international level the major contradiction is no longer between right and left, liberalism and socialism, fascism and communism, ‘totalitarianism’ and ‘democracy’, it is between those who want the world to be one dimensional and those who support a plural world grounded in the diversity of cultures.2
The New Right never managed to shake its reputation for extremism, however. It ‘let its hair grow long and hid its tyre irons in the attic’, according to French historian Henry Rousso, giving intellectual lustre and respectability to right-wing views which a few decades before had been anathema to the public.3
The New Right has been described by some scholars as a movement devoted to ‘conserving the fascist vision in the interregnum’.4 But it has been defended by other scholars as a genuinely original and complex philosophy which combined right- and left-wing views in an anti-liberal, anti-capitalist ideology that is hard to pigeonhole. De Benoist, for his part, insists that he is not a member of the extreme right, has argued strongly against any form of racism, and calls himself ‘an anti-capitalist communitarian socialist’.
While the old right was anti-Soviet, the New Right felt an equal – if not greater – antipathy for Atlantic domination by the United States. While the old right saw European integration as a threat to traditional national identities, the New Right saw ‘Jacobin’ nationalism as a passing, 200-year fad driven by the industrial revolution and the global market. ‘What characterizes the national realm is its irresistible tendency to centralization and homogenization’, wrote de Benoist in 1993 in the journal Telos. They believed mankind would eventually find its feet again in the millennia-old form of human organization – the empire.
In such conditions, how can the idea of empire be ignored? Today it is the only model Europe has produced as an alternative to the nation-state. Nations are both threatened and exhausted. They must go beyond themselves if they do not want to end up as dominions of the American superpower. They can only do so by attempting to reconcile the one and the many, seeking a unity that does not lead to their impoverishment… Europe can only create itself in terms of a federal model, but a federal model which is the vehicle for an idea, a project, a principle, i.e. in the final analysis, an imperial model.5
De Benoist’s soul-searching echoed that of Dugin and the rest of the Russian right wing at the time, and the two men found an easy consensus around something that Dugin described as the ‘radical centre’: while both men had once been profoundly anti-Soviet, the New Right ideas of both men were more anti-American. Dugin’s unformed thinking eagerly devoured many of his older counterpart’s views, and de Benoist remains the thinker most footnoted and most referenced by Dugin; he would serve as a kind of intellectual model for the young Russian thinker.
Both men have been identified with nationalism throughout their careers and been linked to far-right groups; but both were highly original thinkers who argued extensively against narrow ethnic definitions of nationalism and cultural imperialism. The Frenchman, however, insists that he is not responsible for some liberties that Dugin may have taken in interpreting his works.
Dugin has accentuated the similarities of his thought with that of de Benoist by ascribing many of his own views to his mentor. However, de Benoist makes it clear that this is something he is profoundly uncomfortable with, pointing out that he cannot take responsibility for the representation of his work in a language that he cannot read. As Argentine surrealist Jorge Luis Borges put it, ‘all writers invent their precursors’, and in practice it is difficult to separate de Benoist’s real ideas from Dugin’s interpretation of them. For example, in Dugin’s most influential work, The Foundations of Geopolitics, published in 1997, he attributes to de Benoist the central argument of the book – that ‘the nation state is exhausted and the future only belonged to large spaces… strategically unified and ethnically differentiated’; however, ‘this strategic unity must be supported by the unity of the original culture’. Indeed, the European unity would be based, according to Dugin’s version of de Benoist, ‘on a common Indo-European origin’.6 De Benoist, however, insists that he has never formulated any theory of large spaces, and disagrees with any attribution of these ideas to him.7 De Benoist is a highly original thinker who has melded the right and the left, celebrating Europe’s diversity on the one hand, but also defending the need to protect European civilization from foreign influences.
The Frenchman has spent much of his life defending himself against accusations that he is a closet fascist, which may have much to do with his previous 1968-era political activities. His opponents point to his cultural theories, arguing that contact between cultures must always be limited, otherwise the very integrity of a culture is undermined,8 as evidence that he has simply retooled 1930s-era arguments for new times, substituting culture for race: ‘A “high culture” version of fascist arguments’, according to French scholar Brigitte Beauzamy.9 De Benoist, however, calls this interpretation ‘ridiculous’, noting that he has argued extensively against racism.