National-anarchism is a radical right-wing nationalist ideology which advocates racial separatism, racial nationalism, ethnic nationalism, and racial purity. National-anarchists claim to syncretize neotribal ethnic nationalism with philosophical anarchism, mainly in their support for a stateless society, while rejecting anarchist social philosophy. The main ideological innovation of national-anarchism is its anti-state palingenetic ultranationalism. National-anarchists advocate homogeneous communities in place of the nation state. National-anarchists claim that those of different ethnic or racial groups would be free to develop separately in their own tribal communes while striving to be politically horizontal, economically non-capitalist, ecologically sustainable, and socially and culturally traditional.
Although the term national-anarchism dates back as far as the 1920s, the contemporary national-anarchist movement has been put forward since the late 1990s by British neo-Nazi Troy Southgate, who positions it as being "beyond left and right". Scholars who have studied national-anarchism conclude that it represents a further evolution in the thinking of the radical right rather than an entirely new dimension on the political spectrum. National-anarchism is considered by anarchists as being a rebranding of fascism and an oxymoron due to the inherent contradiction of anarchist philosophy of anti-fascism and support for universal equality between different nationalities as being incompatible with the idea of a synthesis between anarchism and fascism.
National-anarchism has elicited skepticism and outright hostility from both left-wing and far-right critics. Critics accuse national-anarchists of being ethnonationalists who promote a communitarian and racialist form of ethnic and racial separatism while "wanting" the militant chic of calling themselves anarchists without historical and philosophical baggage that would be said to have to accompany such a claim, including the anti-racist egalitarian anarchist philosophy and the contributions of Jewish anarchists. Most scholars agree that implementing national-anarchism would not result in an expansion of freedom and describe it as an authoritarian anti-statism that would result in authoritarianism and oppression, only on a smaller scale.
History
Origins and Troy Southgate
The term national-anarchist dates back as far as the 1920s, when Helmut Franke, a German conservative writer, used it to describe his political stance. However, it would be the writings of other members of the conservative revolutionary movement such as Ernst Jünger which would later provide the philosophical foundation of the contemporary national-anarchist movement. Keith Preston, an influence on the American national-anarchist movement, "blends U.S-based influences" such as "libertarian, Christian rightist, neonazi, and Patriot movements in the United States" with ideas drawn from the European tradition of the New Right, a "right-wing decentralist" offshoot of "classical fascism" and from the German conservative revolutionary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, whose figures "influenced but mostly stood outside of the Nazi movement".
In the mid-1990s, Troy Southgate, a former member of the British far-right National Front and founder of the International Third Position, began to move away from Strasserism and Catholic distributism towards post-left anarchy and the primitivist green anarchism articulated in Richard Hunt's 1997 book To End Poverty: The Starvation of the Periphery by the Core. However, Southgate fused his ideology with the radical traditionalist conservatism of Italian esotericist Julius Evola and the ethnopluralism and pan-European nationalism of French Nouvelle Droite philosopher Alain de Benoist to create a newer form of revolutionary nationalism called "national-anarchism".
Graham D. Macklin writes that although "[a]t first glance the 'total insanity’ of this incongruous ideological syncretism might be dismissed as little more than a quixotic attempt to hammer a square peg into a round hole or a mischievous act of fascist Dadaism'", national-anarchism "appears as one of many groupuscular responses to globalization, popular antipathy towards which Southgate sought to harness by aligning the NRF with the resurgence of anarchism whose heroes and slogans it arrogated, and whose sophisticated critiques of global capitalist institutions and state power it absorbed and, in the case of anarchist artist Clifford Harper, whose evocative imagery it misappropriated".