Authors

Iona Ramsay¹;  ¹ University of Exeter, UK

Discussion

This paper draws attention to the role of Romanian anti-communist exiles in the development of the French nouvelle droite, one of the intellectual driving forces behind right-wing politics today globally. In doing so, and by spanning Cold War and post-Cold War histories, it seeks to make sense of Romania’s place in the ‘spiritual geography’ of the transnational nouvelle droite. Building on work exploring the connections between French, Russian and other European new right thinkers, this paper examines collaborations between a number of Romanian anti-communist exiles (including Paul Barbăneagră, Vintilă Horia, Basarab Nicolescu) and French nouvelle droite thinkers and artists from the 1970s to the 1990s. Highlighting points of both convergence and tension, the paper shows how in the 1980s ideas of transdisciplinarity and ‘spiritual geography’ were promoted through a series of collaborative films on ‘sacred architecture and geography’ made for the French TV station FR3, and through several nouvelle droite journals. Such cultural productions combined anti-communism, spirituality and calls for a ‘re-spiritualization’ of the West, yet also diverged over the role of Christianity in the renewal of European civilization. The paper concludes by tracing how these ideas were developed within Romania after 1989, and helped influence the growth of a new religious right-wing politics. This history, the paper argues, sheds important light on the ways in which a number of Romanian actors and Cold War imaginaries of Eastern Europe have been deeply embedded in new forms of transnational nouvelle droite 'metapolitics'.