Conceptualising Europe from the far right: The mobilisation of intellectual heritage in Germany

Introduction

A typical pre-pandemic Monday evening in the historical centre of Dresden in eastern Germany: Around 1000 people march behind a banner displaying the letters ‘PEGIDA’. Once the crowd halts on one of Dresden’s picturesque squares, speakers agitate against immigrants, the government, the Greens – and declare their determination to save the ‘Christian-Occidental’ culture of Germany and Europe. The acronym ‘PEGIDA’ designates the small-scale organisation ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident’ that forms part of a larger far-right movement in Europe (Castelli Gattinara and Pirro, 2019; Vorländer et al., 2018). The organisation’s name, especially in its German original Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, allows us to make somewhat unexpected observations regarding the activists’ politics. First, a certain idea of ‘Europe’ seems to be a core feature of their ideology; and second, the notion of Abendland, literally ‘Evening Land’ and typically translated as ‘Occident’ or ‘Christian West’, forms part of their rhetoric.

PEGIDA is exemplary of the broader phenomenon of the politicisation of ‘Europe’ by the contemporary far right – not only in Germany, but across the continent. ¹ Instead of solely relying on national networks and nationalist discursive frames, and despite their ‘Euroscepticism’, that is opposition to current forms of political integration within the European Union (EU) framework (Leruth et al., 2018), far-right actors in parliaments and on the streets draw on ‘Europe’ in organisational and ideational terms. For instance, party actors collaborate in European Parliament coalitions (Almeida, 2010; McDonnell and Werner, 2019) and organise international conventions such as the ‘counter-summit’ in Koblenz in January 2017 following the inauguration of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States (De Cesari et al., 2020: 29–30). Also at the level of civil society, transnational cooperation takes place, for example, in the context of PEGIDA’s mobilisation beyond Germany, the related Fortress Europe alliance, as well as the Identitarians, a European youth movement with branches in several countries (Berntzen and Weisskircher, 2016; Caiani and Weisskircher, 2021; Nissen, 2020; Volk, 2019). Ideologically, far-right actors typically imagine Europe as a specific civilisation (Brubaker, 2017) that is defined by its common cultural heritage (Blokker, this issue; De Cesari et al., 2020). Based on the antagonistic articulation of ‘Us vs Them’ distinctions constitutive for populist discourse (Palonen and Sunnercrantz, 2021), they define ‘European civilisation’ via its alleged opposition to Islamic culture (Betz, 2007; Betz and Meret, 2009; Hafez, 2014).

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany, conservative and right-wing ideas of a European civilisation and culture were associated with the Romanticist notion of the (Christian) Abendland – until the secular term ‘Europe’ became hegemonic in the era of post-war European integration (Conze, 2005; Faber, 2002; Schildt, 1999). As the example of PEGIDA indicates, in the twenty-first century it is far-right actors who hark back to the hard-to-translate concept of Abendland, mainly in the context of debates on immigration and integration (Faber, 2018; Rehberg, 2018; Rucht, 2016; Weiß, 2017). The Abendland thus forms part of larger cultural and historical repertoires (Aronoff and Kubik, 2013; Swidler, 1986) that the German far right deploys in its exclusionary and populist discourse (Blokker, this issue; Göpffarth, 2021; Kaya, 2021; Volk, 2022). Mobilised by contemporary political actors who pursue current political goals, it can be conceptualised as an intangible intellectual heritage in Germany and Europe (Lowenthal, 1985; Smith, 2006; Waterton et al., 2017).

In line with recent scholarship explaining the right-wing and populist shift in European politics from a cultural perspective (Aslanidis, 2020; Kotwas and Kubik, 2019; Rensmann, 2017; Wodak and Forchtner, 2014), in this article I explore the meaning(s) and use(s) of the historical concept of Abendland as intellectual heritage in contemporary German-language far-right discourse. My interpretive approach (Schwartz-Shea and Yanow, 2012) to the meaning-making processes that constitute far-right political culture promises that

by concentrating on the symbols and figural language that refer to cultural memory as it is seen by the radical right, we may understand better the hidden logic behind its ideology, as well as the emotional and aesthetic appeal that it obviously has for many people. (Korhonen, 2020: 309)

Specifically, my analysis sheds new light on how far-right actors engage in struggles over the meaning of contested notions such as ‘Europe’ and ‘European civilisation’ by mobilising intellectual history and cultural heritage.

To investigate the Abendland as an instance of German and European intellectual history and heritage across time, I draw from the methodological toolboxes of conceptual history and ethnography. In the next section, I elaborate on this research strategy and provide an overview of my corpus that includes both primary and secondary sources, namely original empirical data generated in ethnographic fieldwork as well as historiographies. Subsequently, I develop a brief conceptual history of the Abendland in twentieth- and twenty-first-century far-right discourses, spelling out the semiotic shifts and continuities across time. Focusing on contemporary actors and debates, I then examine the role of Abendland in the conceptual struggle over the meaning of ‘Europe’. Finally, I reflect on what my analysis of the Abendland entails for the understanding of contemporary far-right politics.

Beyond original insights into the political culture of the German-speaking far right, this article’s key contribution relates to its effort to bridge the rather segregated debates in political science, social movement studies and cultural studies (Brubaker, 2017; Caiani and Weisskircher, 2021; Castelli Gattinara and Pirro, 2019; De Cesari and Kaya, 2020; Druxes and Simpson, 2016). Overall, this article offers the first historical analysis of the concept of Abendland in English, aiming to enable international and cross-linguistic debate on national thought traditions on Europe and European heritage.

Researching heritage through the lens of conceptual history and ethnography

As a strategic construction of the past, the meaning of heritage is determined not in the past, but in the present (Lowenthal, 1985; Smith, 2006; Waterton et al., 2017). Its meaning is shaped in discursive processes in which concrete social and political actors negotiate the value of the past in and for the present. Approaching the Abendland as an instance of intellectual heritage whose meaning is deeply embedded in specific social and political contexts, I draw on the method of conceptual history, that is the study of concepts and their shifting meaning(s) across time (Koselleck, 2006; Palonen, 2000; Skinner, 1999). Assuming a dynamic relationship between language use and politics, this approach highlights the benefits of a ‘reflexive usage of and constructivist view on concepts’ (Wiesner, 2019: 44) to understand politics and power. Conceptual historians view concepts both as theoretical categories to analyse the political world and as historically rooted ‘factors and indicators’ of political change (Koselleck, 1996; Wiesner, 2019: 45). In this twofold role, concepts typically constitute the nodal points of discourses around which controversial debates unfold (Palonen, 2002).

In line with Faber’s definition of Abendland as an antagonistic ‘political battle cry [politischer Kampfbegriff]’ in the sense of political theorist Carl Schmitt (Faber, 2002), I understand Abendland as a controversial term that far-right actors purposefully adapt from the broader cultural repertoire of German intellectual history to engage in contemporary debates around the nodal point of a contested ‘Europe’ as ‘European civilisation’. Following Koselleck, I argue that the two terms, Abendland and Europe, serve both as theoretical categories to analyse far-right discourse and as indicators of changing far-right ideologies in the context of post-war democratisation, European integration and German ‘reunification’.

Out of the methodological toolkit of conceptual history, I combine two distinct analytical perspectives to research the changing meaning of Abendland, namely the temporal and rhetorical strands of thought (Wiesner, 2019). Together these two perspectives promise to give a nuanced picture of both structural and agency-related factors of conceptual change. The temporal approach after Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte sheds light on conceptual change by analysing conceptual development over long periods of time against broader structural changes in politics and society (Koselleck, 2006). This approach lends itself to analyses of the macro-politics of long-term conceptual evolvement. In turn, the rhetorical approach after Quentin Skinner and the ‘Cambridge School’ focuses on concrete struggles over meanings and the actors involved in them (Skinner, 1999). Highlighting agency, it suits analyses of the micro-politics of concrete conceptual debates, in this case of the far-right mobilisation of German intellectual history and heritage.

Specifically, my analysis employs the temporal lens to trace the conceptual development of Abendland from its roots in German Romanticism to its recent resurgence. In addition, it applies the rhetorical perspective to examine the conceptual struggle over the meaning of ‘Europe’, indicated by the new prominence of Abendland in contemporary far-right politics. To do so, I draw on various sources: Offering insights into (some of) the concept’s past meanings, the review of the major historiographies of Abendland by Vanessa Conze (2005) and Axel Schildt (1999) forms the core of the temporal analysis. Second, original ethnographic data generated over several months of both conventional and virtual fieldwork (Hine, 2017) in Germany in 2019–2020 provide access to how Germany’s key far-right actors mobilise the concept in contemporary debates, and therefore inform the rhetorical analysis.

Aware of the ‘electoralist’ bias in much of contemporary political science scholarship on the far right (Castelli Gattinara, 2020), my rhetorical analysis focuses not only on the party arena, but also on street activism and subcultural milieus. In particular, I examine three players that at the beginning of the 2020s constitute the core of the German populist far-right scene: the country’s chief far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD, Alternative für Deutschland); the leading far-right think tank, that is, the Institute for State Politics (IfS, Institut für Staatspolitik); and the street movement PEGIDA.

Mobilising in Dresden since 2014, including the Covid-19 pandemic and successive periods of ‘lockdown’, PEGIDA has become Germany’s most sustained far-right protest group (Volk, 2021). Since its inception, it claimed to represent not only German but also European citizens (Volk, 2020; Vorländer et al., 2018), attempted to reach beyond its geographical heartland in Saxony (Berntzen and Weisskircher, 2016) and headed a short-lived transnational alliance of anti-Islamic groups and parties entitled ‘Fortress Europe’ in 2016–2018 (Volk, 2019). PEGIDA’s regular street demonstrations constituted favourable discursive opportunity structures for the rise of the AfD which transformed itself from a primarily Eurosceptic and economically liberal into an ethno-nationalist party in 2015 (Arzheimer and Berning, 2019). In the 2021 parliamentary elections, the AfD confirmed its strength as a far-right opposition player particularly in the eastern German regions of Saxony and Thuringia (Weisskircher, 2020; Yoder, 2020). The AfD collaborates with far-right and populist parties from across Europe, for instance, in the European Parliament’s Eurosceptic ‘Identity and Democracy’ group (Brack, 2020) and participated in the much mediatised ‘counter-summit’ of European far-right players in the German city of Koblenz in 2017, featuring France’s Marine Le Pen, Italy’s Matteo Salvini and the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders (De Cesari et al., 2020: 29–30). Both PEGIDA and the AfD have ties to the IfS, a far-right think tank established in the eastern German province in 2000, following the intellectual model of the French New Right (Kellershohn, 2016; Pfahl-Traughber, 2019; Postert, 2020). As a ‘knowledge producer’, the IfS runs the associated publishing house Antaios and magazine Sezession, and regularly hosts weekend seminars as well as public events.

In line with the focus on official documents and manifestoes characteristic of the method of conceptual history, my empirical corpus includes some of the most important written accounts published by these three players. Among the core texts are, first, the AfD’s 2016 ‘Basic Programme [Grundsatzprogramm]’ and 2019 ‘Programme for the Elections to the European Parliament [Europaprogramm]’, each one hundred pages in length, second, the entries ‘Abendland’ and ‘Europa’ in the ‘State political handbook [Staatspolitisches Handbuch]’ (in the following: IfS Handbook) which are each around one page, and third, PEGIDA’s ‘Dresden Theses [Dresdner Thesen]’, a sort of one-page manifesto including 10 points, first published in early 2015 and regularly read out at anniversary demonstrations, including PEGIDA’s 5-year anniversary celebrations in 2019.

In addition, my corpus is enriched by field protocols, jottings, photographs and videos that stem from my ethnographic observations at far-right events in 2019–2020. Among these are PEGIDA’s street demonstrations in Dresden as well as public events taking place in the context of a so-called winter school on ‘Reading’ at the IfS in the eastern German village of Schnellroda in January 2020. Using ethnographic data to write the history of a concept is a rather rare practice in political science; however, I argue that the combination of both approaches is particularly productive: At times considered an essentially ‘elitist’ method that attempts to consolidate conservative meanings across time and space, conceptual history benefits from ethnographic data to study ‘how concepts travel and are reworked under very different circumstances of “real history”’ (Müller, 2014: 76). As such, conceptual history becomes a method of ‘writing a “history of losers”, which means the recovery of unnoticed or unappreciated conceptualisations of politics [. . .]’ (Palonen, 2000: 8). The dated notion of Abendland can be understood as exactly this kind of ‘loser’, that is a term that failed to become hegemonic.

A conceptual history of the Abendland

A review of the literature reveals that the term originates in the early Modern period, when it was coined as the German equivalent of the Latin ‘Occident’ together with the term’s opposite, the ‘Morning Land [Morgenland]’, in Latin ‘Orient’ (Barudio, 1994). Beyond the geographical reference to the western part of the European continent, from its inception the Abendland had cultural and religious connotations, namely designating western Christianity. Crucially, it symbolised an antagonism between western Europe, on one hand, and, on the other, eastern Europe and Asia, including eastern Christianity as well as the ‘Muslim’ Orient.

As postulated by the Koselleckian approach to analysing the long-term development of a concept in relation to broader processes of political and social change (Koselleck, 2006; Wiesner, 2019), over the centuries the dynamics of liberalisation, nationalisation, industrialisation and later democratisation and European integration shaped the meaning of Abendland. The concept acquired political meaning in the aftermath of the European Enlightenment and French Revolution, when conservative Romanticists constructed it as a reactionary ideology of illiberal and non-democratic state and social organisation (Schildt, 2005: 19). Opposed to the modern nation state, it symbolised the desired return to an alleged cultural unity of western Europe based on western Christianity, the legacy of Antiquity and the union of Germanic and Roman peoples (Schildt, 1999: 24). With regard to questions of internal state and social organisation, its supporters rejected modern liberal principles such as social equality and secularism as articulated in the context of the French Revolution, in turn glorifying the medieval Christian state and social structures (Schildt, 1999: 24). In the light of rapid social change related to liberalisation and growing nationalism, the notions of ‘preserving’ and ‘saving’ the medieval ideal were dominant. Regarding foreign relations within (western) Europe, the concept attributed a leading political position to the German states, pointing to their alleged position at the ‘geographical heart of Europe’ (Kämper, 2001: 89).

The meaning of Abendland shifted slightly in the early twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War (Conze, 2005: 27–55). Against the backdrop of the abolition of the monarchy and the introduction of constitutional democracy in defeated Germany, the rise of communism in the newly founded Soviet Union and efforts at pan-European integration, the term then stood for the strict opposition to popular democracy, Prussian dominance over the historically Catholic regions within Germany, Bolshevism and the pan-European movement which was regarded as ‘non-Christian’ (Schildt, 1999). As such, it continued to provide disillusioned Catholic elites with the hope for the reorganisation of Germany and Europe according to a medieval ideal of Christianity. These elites also institutionalised and popularised their ideology: The loose organisational structures of the ‘Abendland-circle [Abendland-Kreis]’ and the newspaper Abendland pinned down its meaning as a ‘cultural movement of national elites’ (Conze, 2005: 32), and Oswald Spengler’s dystopian publication ‘The Decline of the Abendland [Der Untergang des Abendlandes]’ from 1922 contributed to its currency in public debates.

The status of the concept decreased during the National-Socialist regime, giving way to other concepts relating to German political and intellectual hegemony within Europe such as ‘Empire [Reich]’ and ‘Central Europe [Mitteleuropa]’. It nevertheless survived among mystic circles in literature and philosophy of Catholic opponents to Nazism who employed it as a reference point for ‘inner emigration’ (Conze, 2005; Schildt, 1999). Suggesting that the state ideology was the result of secularisation, the concept then acquired another layer of meaning, namely of (intellectual) resistance against the Nazi dictatorship.

In the years following the Second World War, conservatives in the western regions of then divided Germany revived the Abendland as part of a pre-1933 intellectual heritage. In the context of defeat, occupation and the onset of the Cold War, the concept was used to express the opposition to both eastern communism and western, particularly American-style liberalism, including the new democratic state institutions and nascent supranational organisation in Europe. During the late 1940s and 1950s, it gained new popularity: Whereas notions of a German nation and empire had lost legitimacy in post-war Europe, conservative forces used it as a tool to boost western German Christian democracy (Forlenza, 2017). In the 1950s, the ideology thus institutionalised yet again, with two associations, namely the ‘Abendland Action [Abendländische Aktion]’ and ‘Abendland Academy [Abendländische Akademie]’, and the associated journal ‘New Abendland [Neues Abendland]’, seeking to establish their conservative political visions in the debates on the reorganisation of the German state and the western part of the European continent.

Yet, these coordinated efforts at establishing the idea of the Abendland as a conservative and anti-liberal model for the nascent economic and political European integration process lacked success. In the context of social liberalisation and European integration from the early 1950s onwards, the concept lost out to the more secular and seemingly modern notion of ‘Europe’ (Conze, 2005; Schildt, 1999). In the course of the 1960s, the Abendland largely disappeared from German political discourses. At least temporarily, it could therefore be understood as a ‘loser’ (Palonen, 2000: 8) in the semiotic struggle over the concept of ‘Europe’.

A new chapter in the conceptual history of the Abendland

By the 2020s, a new leaf had been turned in the conceptual history of the Abendland. Again, it was in the context of large-scale political and social change, namely the end of the Cold War and German ‘reunification’, that the concept reappeared in political discourse. Against the backdrop of increased migration flows from Muslim majority countries and the threat of Islamist terrorism, it was occasionally used in the 1990s (Schildt, 2005: 19). But it only acquired new popularity in the course of the rise of the new populist far right since 2014–2015, when PEGIDA emerged as a key social movement player, the AfD consolidated itself as a party on the far right of Germany’s political landscape, and the IfS became the chief ‘knowledge producer’ on the far-right scene (Faber, 2018; Rehberg, 2018; Rucht, 2016; Weiß, 2017).

In contemporary Germany, the Abendland is not as much theorised nor formally institutionalised as it had been in the interwar and early post-war periods. Nevertheless, it is at the heart of far-right discourses: Apart from PEGIDA that uses the term in its name, the AfD also refers to ‘our abendländisch Christian culture’ in the preamble to its 2016 Basic Programme (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 6); the IfS lists the term in its online Handbook and set up an entire lecture about it at the 2020 winter school (Institut für Staatspolitik, 2016; Kanal Schnellroda, 2020); Compact-magazine, Germany’s most prominent alternative media outlet, proclaimed the outbreak of ‘The battle for the Abendland’ in 2018; and the Austrian magazine ‘New Order [Neue Ordnung]’ even renamed itself into ‘Abendland’ in 2020.

In this article’s empirical corpus, Abendland refers to a notion of European culture which is characterised by its religious, namely Christian heritage. In line with the reference to Christian culture in the AfD’s Basic Programme (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 6), Christianity constitutes the key reference point for the IfS think tank: Citing a nostalgic aphorism ascribed to the Romanticist poet Novalis, the entry ‘Abendland’ in the IfS Handbook highlights the Christian meaning (Institut für Staatspolitik, 2016). Felix Dirsch, who lectured on the ‘Thought tradition of the Abendland [Abendländisches Denken]’ at the IfS winter school in January 2020, further narrowed down the concept to its ‘traditional Catholic meaning’ (Kanal Schnellroda, 2020). According to my ethnographic observations in 2019–2020, a rather vague notion of Christian heritage also echoes through organisational and performative aspects of far-right protest events. For instance, PEGIDA’s demonstrations typically take place in front of the reconstructed Frauenkirche which is one of Dresden’s most iconic churches. Activists moreover organise special events during the Christmas season: At the large-scale rally in December 2019, for example, a few thousand demonstrators gathered on Dresden’s famous Theaterplatz not only to listen to the speeches by a handful of international guests but also to sing traditional German Christmas carols. ²

My empirical analysis moreover indicates that the Abendland continuously embraces conservative and anti-liberal cultural values. Specifically, far-right actors view Germany’s and Europe’s increasingly multicultural society as well as political projects to make the German language more gender-sensitive as the most pressing threats to the ‘genuine’ or ‘true’ culture and traditions of the Abendland. They therefore claim to campaign to ‘protect’, ‘preserve’ or even ‘restore’ a certain notion of German and European cultural heritage. For instance, the first position in PEGIDA’s 2015 manifesto claims the ‘protection, preservation, and respectful handling of our culture and language. Stop political and religious fanaticism, radicalism, Islamisation, genderisation, and early sexualisation [. . .]’ (Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, 2015). Also my long-term observations of the protest group reveal that up until 2020, street activists predominantly framed demonstrations as marches ‘for our country, our culture and values’ and ‘against the Islamisation of the Abendland’. Similarly, in the 2016 Basic Programme AfD associates Abendland with the concept of the German ‘leading culture [Leitkultur]’, emphasising that ‘Islam does not belong to Germany’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 47, 49). Both formulations pick up on controversial debates in German mainstream politics in recent years.

Contemporary ‘redescription’ of the Abendland

While continuously referring to Christian heritage and conservative values, the rhetorical lens on conceptual history allows for additional insights into the contemporary processes of ‘redescription’ by far-right actors as ‘innovating ideologists’ (Skinner, 1999). Indeed, the AfD, IfS and PEGIDA employ the term to express quite different meaning(s) compared with previous periods. Crucially, whereas the Abendland traditionally designated elitist and non-democratic state and social structures, the contemporary populist far right has reinvented the Abendland to refer to popular democracy. In fact, my ethnographic lens shows that various players ostentatiously claim to support democracy. Much like ideologically comparable ‘populist radical right’ parties from across Europe (Mudde, 2007), they promote forms of democracy such as electoral and direct democracy as the only viable political model. For instance, both PEGIDA’s Dresden Theses and the AfD Basic Programme call for the introduction of direct democracy such as referenda as well as the direct election of the German President (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 9, 13; Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes, 2015: thesis no. 5). At PEGIDA’s 5-year anniversary celebrations in October 2019, leading activist Wolfgang Taufkirch campaigned for a ‘system change towards direct democracy’ (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2019). Also the IfS, which fashions itself as an intellectual centre, abandons elitist authoritarianism in favour of a form of popular democracy (Postert, 2020). Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, when governments reduced individual freedoms such as the right to free movement or assembly, far-right actors even claimed to be the principal representatives of democracy and constitutionality in Germany (Lehmann and Zehnter, 2022). To this aim, they made historical comparisons with former democratic and emancipatory movements such as the 1989 Peaceful Revolution in East Germany (Volk, 2022).

The second fundamental semiotic shift pushed by far-right actors concerns geography: In the aftermath of formerly communist East Germany’s accession to the Federal Republic in 1990 as well as the integration of eastern European countries into the EU framework in 2004, they symbolically moved the imaginary borders of the Abendland eastwards into post-communist Europe (Volk, 2019; Weiß, 2017: 186). In 2019–2020, the ‘heartland’ of the German far right was thus located in eastern Germany (Weisskircher, 2022). In turn, players were ambiguous about western Europe’s and western Germany’s status, deploring that the ‘wasted west’ had lost the cultural properties and heritage of the Abendland. This geographic shift mainly relates to matters of immigration, especially from Muslim majority countries, and the supposed cultural liberalism of western mainstream politics. Far-right actors consider western Europe to be in ‘cultural decline’ due to higher levels of non-European immigration, while viewing eastern Europe as ‘pure’. Moreover, they mock western Europeans for being too ‘weak’ to resist against the ‘totalitarian tendencies’ of their elected governments, while praising eastern Europeans and their political leaders for defending the ‘last bastion’ of the Abendland.

For instance, in 2019–2020 PEGIDA activists and guest speakers from across the European far-right scene celebrated the eastern German city of Dresden as ‘the capital of resistance’, proposing that the regular street demonstrations would ‘protect’ the Abendland from cultural decline imposed by the elites. In addition, far-right players claimed that the west can still re-establish itself as part of the Abendland – but only with the help of the east. Indeed, the entry on ‘Europe’ in the IfS Handbook postulates that there remains ‘hope for a cultural and religious regeneration through the “unspent” Slavic East’ (Institut für Staatspolitik, 2017). Such claims were also articulated on the streets of Dresden, for example, at a demonstration in May 2020 when Jens Maier, a local AfD politician, proclaimed that ‘The Saxon spirit will regenerate Germany [Am sächsischen Wesen wird Deutschland genesen]’ (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2020a). Drawing from the nineteenth-century charged slogan ‘The German spirit will regenerate the world [Am deutschen Wesen mag die Welt genesen]’ (Hobsbawm, 1995: 30), Maier portrayed the far-right demonstrators in Dresden, the capital of the eastern German region of Saxony, as exemplary for Germany’s population writ-large.

Abendland instead of / as ‘Europe’

Apart from uncovering some of the processes of redescription of the Abendland, the rhetorical lens on conceptual history (Skinner, 1999) allows us to further analyse the conceptual struggle over the meaning and uses of Abendland in relation to the contested notion of ‘Europe’, which has also undergone redescription. Similar to the applications of both terms in the interwar and early post-war periods, my corpus reveals that contemporary far-right players from the party, protest and subcultural arenas imagine Abendland and ‘Europe’ as different and unequally desirable: While Abendland positively connotes a traditionalist reading of European culture, ‘Europe’ is typically conflated with a centralist, overpowering and coercive vision of the EU. For instance, the entry on ‘Europe’ in the IfS Handbook deplores the EU’s ‘factually increasing bureaucratic centralisation’ (Institut für Staatspolitik, 2017). In its 2019 Europe Programme, the AfD refers to the EU as an ‘artificial state’ characterised by ‘de-democratisation and centralisation’ and the ‘perversion of its founding idea’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2019: 7). Warnings of the alleged imperialist ambitions of a centralist EU are frequent also at PEGIDA demonstrations. In the context of the group’s 5-year anniversary celebration in October 2019, guest speaker Christoph Berndt agitated against German establishment politicians who supposedly sought to ‘dissolve our nation state in a coercive EU’ (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2019).

However, far-right actors do not always use the notion of Abendland consistently with their own theoretical presuppositions. Typical for ethnographic research (Brodkin, 2017), my approach sheds light on some of the ambivalences of ideology and language use: While the interwar and early post-war supporters of the Abendland strictly employed the term instead of ‘Europe’, which they negatively associated with liberalism and modernisation, the semiotic boundaries between both terms have become blurred in contemporary far-right discourse. Against the backdrop of EU political integration and social liberalisation, far-right actors embrace the term ‘Europe’ alongside the Abendland, thus using it not only as opposites but also as synonyms. Most pertinently, PEGIDA employs both terms or their derivatives alongside each other, naming themselves ‘Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Abendland’. Also the transnational alliance of anti-Islamic groups and parties, launched by PEGIDA and others in 2016, chose the name ‘Fortress Europe’ rather than ‘Fortress Abendland’ or similar (Volk, 2019). In its election programmes, the AfD speaks of ‘European nations’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 17) and ‘peoples of Europe’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2019: 8) rather than of ‘abendländische nations’ or ‘peoples of the Abendland’.

The conflation of ‘Europe’ with a negative interpretation of the EU notwithstanding, far-right actors also employ ‘Europe’ rather than Abendland to promote their own, positively connoted proposition of integration. Drawing from post-war French President Charles de Gaulle’s rhetoric, they propose the concept of ‘Europe of sovereign nation states [Europa der Vaterländer]’ as an alternative to political integration in the context of the EU. For example, at PEGIDA’s 6-year anniversary event in October 2020 leading activist Lutz Bachmann used the notion of ‘Europe’ to call upon the demonstrators to ‘work together for a just Europe of nation states and cultural pluralism, of individual national states and their peoples’ (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2020b). According to the AfD’s Basic Programme, a Europe of sovereign nation states would entail the coexistence of European countries ‘in friendship and good neighbourly relations’ (Alternative für Deutschland, 2016: 16) due to the reduction of integration efforts to economic cooperation. At his speech at PEGIDA’s 5-year anniversary in 2019, Christoph Berndt metaphorically described such ‘good neighbourly relations’ as a ‘European house’ in which the ‘European peoples’ would like to live, contrasting it to a ‘European flat share’ (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2019) within which relations would be more anonymous and volatile.

Concluding remarks: The far-right struggle for ‘Europe’

In this article, I have set out to explore the past and present uses of the intellectual heritage of the Abendland, focusing on its changing meanings over time, especially in relation to the concept of ‘Europe’. Overall, my interpretive analysis of textual and ethnographic materials confirms that the relationship between the far right and ‘Europe’ is far more complex than what simplified notions of ‘Euroscepticism’ can capture: In contemporary Germany, key far-right actors as structurally different as a party, a street movement, and an intellectual think tank cultivate positive understandings of Europe as European culture, and negative readings of Europe as the EU. They refer to the heritage of the intellectual concept of the Abendland to make exclusionary constructions of Europe as an ethno-culturally defined, geographically fixed space prevail over cosmopolitan concepts of Europe as a political union and form of citizenship. As such, they share important ideational similarities with far-right actors in other European countries and organisational contexts, who have also integrated pro-European stances into their typically exclusivist and sovereignist ideologies (Brubaker, 2017; Caiani and Weisskircher, 2021; Hafez, 2014; Lorimer, 2021; Nissen, 2020).

My approach to the Abendland as an instance of German-language intellectual heritage draws particular attention to the malleability of the concept over time. Contemporary far-right players construct it quite differently than its supporters in the interwar and early post-war periods, pointing to the ‘presentism’ of heritage as postulated by (critical) heritage theory (Lowenthal, 1985; Smith, 2006; Waterton et al., 2017). Specifically, the construction of the Abendland as a vaguely Christian rather than strictly Catholic, and popular-democratic rather than elitist-authoritarian alternative to ‘Europe’ allows political players to deploy the concept in the semiotic struggle over the meaning of ‘Europe’ and ‘European civilisation’ in a twenty-first-century liberal democratic context. Indeed, contemporary far-right actors typically embrace pro-democratic stances, often subsumed as the populist element of their ideologies (Mudde, 2007).

As Wiesner (2019: 45) explains, concepts such as Abendland and ‘Europe’ can be read as historically rooted ‘factors and indicators’ of political change. In line with this proposition, my analysis uncovers both structural and agency-related factors which account for the semiotic shifts of the two terms. Highlighted by the temporal perspective on conceptual history (Koselleck, 2006), the association of the contemporary Abendland with democratic values indicates broader structural changes such as post-war and post-reunification democratisation, European integration and social liberalisation which shape twenty-first-century far-right ideology. At the same time, the rhetorical lens emphasises that agency remains a crucial factor in public meaning-making processes (Skinner, 1999): It is concrete political actors who consciously ‘redescribe’ the historical term to corroborate the notion of ‘Europe’ for far-right agendas.

This semiotic struggle takes place in the context of multiple European crises, including a crisis of legitimacy of the EU (Valdivia et al., 2019). Far-right and populist players, who are themselves ‘both a factor and a symptom with regards to this crisis and “crisis consciousness”’ (Valdivia et al., 2019: 211–2), also diagnose a crisis of European politics: ‘Europe confronts the most difficult times since the end of the war: illegal immigration from the Orient and Africa, an unstable currency, social inequality and a deeply fractured society in all European countries’, declared leading activist Wolfgang Taufkirch at PEGIDA’s 5-year anniversary celebrations in October 2019 (Lutziges Lutz Bachmann, 2019). In interpretive political science, such crisis-ridden moments can be conceptualised as ‘unsettled cultural periods’ (Swidler, 1986) during which political actors deploy novel cultural tools, or, to reframe the toolkit metaphor with the language of heritage studies and conceptual history, ‘redescribe’ the meaning of heritage. Accordingly, the Abendland can be understood as a cultural resource which is partially redescribed at a moment in time when the ‘liberal consensus’ on European integration is increasingly questioned.

The Abendland constitutes a useful resource in the context of crisis for at least two reasons: First and foremost, it symbolises vague enough notions of cultural Europeanness and patriotic politics that make it suitable for diverse political aims, including unifying the ‘Us’ across ideological and organisational divides by distinguishing ‘Us’ from ‘Them’. In the Weimar Republic, conservatives deployed the concept to unify Protestant Prussia and the Catholic south against the Soviet Union as a common enemy (Schildt, 1999: 27). In the twenty-first century, its users seek to consolidate behind a common concept diverse actors with widely differing organisational structures, including grassroots street movements, extremist think tanks, a party which participates in democratic elections and others.

Finally, more than 30 years after the symbolic rupture instituted by the end of the Cold War, the so-called Fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification, the Abendland-concept serves eastern German far-right actors such as PEGIDA as a discursive tool to reclaim sovereignty over (geo-)political meaning-making. In the aftermath of 1990, eastern Germans largely remained ‘losers of sense’ (Sinnverlierer) who lost sovereignty over political sense-making (Rehberg, 1998, 2018): Western Germany not only introduced western-style capitalist economic and liberal democratic structures in the east (Ther, 2019), but also transferred its official political worldview and symbolism. By weaponising the Abendland, a former ‘loser’ in the semiotic struggle over ‘Europe’, eastern German players re-engage in public meaning-making processes. Specifically, they mark eastern Germany’s ‘return to Europe’ after the demise of the communist system and offer their own interpretation of Europe as a patriotic community based on a common history rather than a modern, liberal and pluralist political entity.

In conclusion, the analysis of the heritage of the Abendland as a cultural resource in far-right discourse draws attention to the increasing politicisation and contestation of ‘Europe’ in times of crisis. While it is beyond the scope of this article to predict if the Abendland will remain part of German far-right cultural repertoires, it seems certain that the semiotic hegemony of liberal readings of ‘Europe’ is being challenged in the long run.