A little bit more FBU political craziness for y'all - this time, I really tried to capture some of the sheer wackiness and lunacy of what I think Post-War European Fascist movements might look like, though whether I succeeded is another question. I do have something a bit more wholesome cooking up on the 1970s UASR and internal debates that were going on there about American foreign policy and American "Empire" (for some reason, I feel like those questions won't entirely go away in this TL, even if the UASR is a significantly less imperial power than the United States is today). But that is taking a lot more time and thought to write than this little snippet...
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Entry from The Comintern Joint Encyclopaedia of 20th Century Political Movements, 2002
Pan-Europeanism (Benoist)
Pan-Europeanism, or the "European Movement" is a far-right political ideology which emerged in the early 1980s, primarily inside the French portion of the FBU but eventually gaining a significant number of adherents in the Imperial Deutsch Federation, the Kingdom of Spain, and the Kingdom of Portugal. Europeanism is distinguished from other movements of the post-war European Far-Right by its advocacy of Pan-European cooperation and the eventual formation of a unitary European state, as well as its populist critique of the FBU's quasi-"imperial" relationship to other West European States.
Most scholars date the beginning of the Europeanist movement to the 1978 publication of Alain de Benoist's "The European Spirit", though others point to the 1979 Marseille conference, in which his ideas were more formally institutionalized in the founding principles of the Pan-European League. "The European Spirit" was not widely read when it was published, owing largely, perhaps, to the academic discussion of different theories of racial difference which opened the text. A series of pieces written with more propagandistic intent in mind eventually were published in a number of newspapers and as pamphlets, though the ideas of Benoist and the growing entourage of right-wing intellectuals around him were most clearly expressed in the platform emerging from the 1979 conference:
"...One may define the European people as a cultural, biological, or ethnic unity, yet it remains a unity all the same. It is the Europeans' predisposition for the orderly and harmonious which distinguishes him from the other peoples of the world. There are individual variations here, of course, for when we move east toward the Rhine and Oder, we find a peoples who are more inclined toward the creative and irrational, yet by their desire to subject it to the rules of good order, they remain true Europeans nonetheless, unlike the Slavs to their East.
If we do not wish to define the European as a single species, we may at least say it is one genus, with seven great peoples belonging to it. The Scandinavians to the North embody the simple frugality and purity of the European spirit, the Germans to their south its ponderous, contemplative side. To their West, the French show us its romance with the universal and rational, admittedly at the risk of sometimes attempting to banish that darker, more irrational side of life. The Iberians to the south provide a helpful complement, for they show demonstrate the passion and zeal of the European Spirit, and the Italians to their east its creative potency. The Dutch and English, both trading and sea-faring peoples, represent that more analytical, dissecting part of the European mind.
The genius of the European race lies precisely in the close proximity in which these great peoples have been forced to live, thus mixing those qualities most representative of each race until an ideal blend has been reached. This is indeed why we may speak of not just a French, or Italian, or German spirit, but a European one. The English race, living afar from the rest on a solitary island, has been least subject to this process of mixing, and this is why they are the European race most defective in true spirituality, despite undoubtedly still being a European people. It is no coincidence that it was England which gave birth to the most parasitic elements of contemporary liberalism, and whose colonial offspring fell prey to the disease of Bolshevism. Now it is this same English race that, forsaking the familial bonds that tie the peoples of Europe together, strives to turn the proud peoples of Europe into its colonies, ruling them in the same manner it did to the primitive people of the earth, who undoubtedly did require some degree of tutelage.
The European, in the final instance a single and unitary people, is the progenitor of all that is righteous and beautiful in our modern civilization. If they are to meet their historical vocation and carry out the sacred civilizational task of eradicating bolshevism from this earth, a true solidarity between the different races of Europe is required. The only real, decisive way of making actual this solidarity is the creation of a European state, where all the races of Europe may live in true brotherhood and fraternity. A European state will ensure that it is Europe, not some distant former colony, which leads the world-wide struggle against the bolshevist menace. A European state will guarantee that the European races, naturally given to imperious assertions of dominance, maintain amiable relations with each other. A European state will have the strength, the power, the fortitude to ensure that those true European peoples who have had the degeneracy of Slavic communism imposed upon them will be liberated..."
Following the publication of the platform, "Pan-European Parties" were founded throughout the states of Western Europe, though (for fairly obvious reasons) none ever emerged in England, and they possessed no real popular support in Scandinavia and the United Kingdom of the Netherlands and Flanders. Right-wing Pan-Europeanism only constituted a significant national electoral force in the Iberian Peninsula, where the parties have cultivated a loyal, albeit small constituency of around 4-7% of the vote, prompting more mainstream political parties to raise the threshold required for representation in parliament. In Southern France and the Kingdom of Italy, the occasional Pan-Europeanist is still elected to a provincial assembly, but they do not receive substantive amounts of support in national elections. In the Imperial Deutsch Federation, though a significant Pan-European militia movement and network of social clubs eventually coalesced, electoral laws stymied any attempts at the formation of a Pan-European Party.
More recently, a number of scholars have grown interested in the potential relations between de Benoist's right Pan-Europeanism and the more centrist, liberal variety which emerged in the late 1990s. For more on this, see the entry on "Pan-European (General)".
For more on Iberian Pan-Europeanism, see "Iberian Right-wing Pan-Europeanism".
