Children of an adolescent state : an ethnography of the local radical right-wing

Abstract

The far right has been living a renaissance in the past decade or so with movements and parties sprouting across Europe, in Russia, Australia and also here in Malta. Their successes, electoral or otherwise have been mixed, however, the phenomenon has generally been received with trepidation within the ranks of those supporting liberal democracy, igniting recurring warnings of a fascist resurgence. The following dissertation does not contradict this perception of right-wing radicalism as a threat to democracy and pluralism, however, it presents an analysis which removes the local movement from this niche as a spectre of a dark chapter in human history placing it instead in the wider and more mundane socio-political context. The contemporary far right, it is argued, revolves around a diffuse protest against the status quo and a search for a new cultural authenticity with which to confront the challenges of the historic moment it believes Maltese society to be going through. Despite its invertebrate character, however, its protest, in its different forms coheres around an antagonistic disposition to the egalitarian principle of solidarity underpinning secular humanism and Christian philosophy, thus linking it to its notorious historic antecedents. Being a prominent idiom of Maltese collective identity, however, Christian solidarity is the point on which the local movement finds itself confronting the nation it claims to defend; a situation which is leading to the watering down of its protest but also, consequently, increasing its potential to influence debate and public policy into a more restrictive approach to the modem political question of social difference.