The new Latin American neo-patriotic far-right: reactionary internationalism and its challenge to the international liberal order

Abstract

This work argues that the new far-right, which we characterise as neo-patriotic, emerges through a combination of agency and structural factors amid a crisis of globalisation, understanding it as a crisis in the hegemonic order. The crisis of globalisation opens opportunities for the rise of a new far-right which redefines the popular, the national, and the international based on Schmittian friend-enemy distinctions, as an autonomous categorisation, which gives political meaning to their identity as a political actor.  A key element of this identity is a reactionary internationalism based on the defence of tradition against cosmopolitan globalism. Thus, the reinstatement of a traditionalist “Arcadia” gives meaning to the process of re-politization and challenges to the liberal international order, its national, regional, and global dimensions, universalist and globalist discourse, and its teleologies of progress. In sum, these actors do not merely question globalisation as an established order but fight for the construction of an alternative international order of a reactionary type.