As Online Hate Turns Violent, Europe Still Lacks a Far-Right Strategy

William Burns is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

In October, once again, a right-wing mob spilled onto a European street, incited by social media to intimidate migrants and refugees. The location was Dublin, for the second time in the last two years. Opinion held that the response of the Irish gardaí had improved since they last faced such a mob in November 2023; The Irish Times attributed success to “well-drilled lines of gardaí” who used “pepper sprays, some as big as fire extinguishers” and “angrily barking dogs” striking “palpable fear into some in the crowd” backed up by “horse-mounted colleagues, the Garda water cannon and a huge convoy of vehicles.” Nevertheless, migrants and refugees were still left frightened; the official action remained imperfect.

The first point is that Europe has not done enough to combat the far right that already represents a direct physical threat to millions of individuals from migrant backgrounds. Yet, the “unassailable” power of the American tech platforms and Trump’s belligerence often appear like a convenient excuse to avoid taking action. Combined with an inability to learn from previous EU mistakes over weeding out neo-Nazis, European governments are at risk of becoming little more than pawns in the far-right project to destabilize the liberal order. The latest European Commission communication on its so-called “democracy shield” refers only vaguely to “rising extremism and polarization” without spelling out the actual problem – white supremacy and racism.

The second point is that the tech policy community needs to understand violent words as part of an intentional continuum with physical violence. While social media is an important means of incitement, content moderation and platform ownership should not be left off the hook – technology is no less pernicious on the streets. By taking too narrow a view dominated by online narratives, progressives are misreading as almost accidental what are, in reality, interlinked far-right behaviors. The result is that they only see half the picture and therefore wrongly conclude that few realistic policy solutions exist.

To the contrary, this is the moment for a complete overhaul of strategy with the goal of stopping the far right in ways that are most likely to be effective, but also harder for the Trump administration to detect. If you take this perspective, there are in reality, a range of relatively low-key but effective steps available.

The Dublin riot was unfortunately only one example of far-right street violence over the last two years. The latest Irish response appeared to show evidence of institutional learning. But in Spain and the UK, the security forces seemed less prepared. In Torre Pacheco, Spain, last July, the Guardia Civil appeared to fire impact munitions but struggled to control the unrest in the early days. A year before, in Liverpool, their British counterparts were passive even when pelted with masonry, while in Rotherham, the police cowered while hooligans hurled office chairs and wooden planks at them.

Besides the malign influence of social media, inadequate preparation by the police was a major strand in the discussion of recent far-right mobs. In the aftermath of the Spanish riots, for example, labor unions of the Guardia Civil argued that they lacked equipment and were understaffed; hence, they were unable to react vigorously to “the serious incidents.” An Irish government review of “public order policing” in the aftermath of the 2023 riots in Dublin drew similar conclusions (as did an official UK report on the 2024 British riots). While years of enforced austerity probably cut police numbers, it is difficult to disentangle where lack of resources meets political priorities when it comes to deployment of force.

However, as raised by a small but growing number of activists and academics such as Joan Braune and Mario Peucker, the bigger problem is that without an overall framework to combat the far right, discussion of social media as well as riot control float in isolation without a sense of how to coordinate tactics for maximum effect. It is not just a matter of selecting options as if they are already available on a menu: solutions instead lie with a multi-pronged approach that acknowledges the wider failures of the security state over the last decades, as well as the misogyny, homophobia, and white supremacism that have been left to fester.

Breaking free of the neocon model

In the twentieth century, the idea of fascism as a distinct political spectacle, comprising both words and deeds, was widely grasped by intellectuals. Comments by sociologists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno are still quoted (and reviled by the far right) even though more than 80 years old: “crowds and their leaders have become powerless functions of power” and are therefore manifestations of the "invisible logic” of the “propaganda machine” that underlies “the enigmatic readiness of the technologically educated masses to fall under the sway of any despotism.” These ideas are as valid today as ever and, while famous, perhaps have not been internalized as much as they could have been at the progressive end of the tech policy scene. The reasons are various, including a suspicion among some on the left that they were not Marxist enough.

But of all the explanations for our current predicament, it is probably the neocons’ “War on Terror” after 2001 that most shaped bureaucratic thinking. Its core achievement was a NATO doctrine based on the keyword of “counter-terrorism” that posited equivalence between “neo-Nazi supremacist,” “radical left” and “ethno-religious nationalist” violence on little causal basis; equivalence was also sought due to “the widespread use of a totalitarian paradigm since the 1990s” that cast fascism as a “mirror-image” of Communism.

These agendas were hugely influential across the political center; the tendency to lump together movements with different political histories under the banner of “extremism” and “populism” became the dominant mode of thought. It underpinned an initiative by Google Ideas called “Against Violent Extremism” (AVE) that was launched in 2011 and attracted support from the US State Department, Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. As late as 2019, AVE was still promoting the same framework, which it now termed “an imprecise science” (an unacknowledged recognition, perhaps, of limited success).

However, more than a decade ago, an important European expert on racism and fascism, Liz Fekete, had raised the alarm over these ideas when she referred to “the myopia of anti-extremism” that was failing to stop what she saw as “the cultural revolution of the Right…advancing like an invasion of weeds in the European garden.” Her prescient viewpoint grew from having documented “the past controversies and failures” of flagship EU “de-radicalization” doctrines such as “Exit.” Despite supposedly originating the ideas enshrined in the “Exit” doctrine, Sweden had also become known as “one of the world’s largest providers of race hate merchandise and White Power music.” But these criticisms were shrugged off because they came from the left.

Rather, EU officials doubled down on the agenda, for example, by continuing support of legacy programs such as “RAN” which stuck to the idea that the “War on Terror" and “prevention of radicalization” were models for controlling the far right. The conflation was also key to a 2022 initiative from the EU police agency Europol on “radicalization” promoted by French President Emmanuel Macron and the British and Dutch prime ministers, while in 2023 Europol used the phrase “extremists, be they right-wing, left-wing or jihadists” interchangeably with “extremist and terrorist groups.”

Stepping back, the one-dimensional agenda that legitimized Western failures in Iraq and Afghanistan should have been dropped long ago. To the contrary, we ought to think of far-right rhetoric, Islamophobia and racist violence as aspects of the same corrosive political phenomenon. It was therefore always disingenuous to claim, as officials have done, that a model tainted by the “War on Terror” could be repurposed as a means to combat the far right. In reality, more sophisticated and explanatory frameworks were readily available.

Revaluation of our understanding of mobs

Unlike today, the earlier generation of European intellectuals knew how to distinguish a fascist mob from other kinds of street violence and anchored its features in political thought. This led them to the insight that right-wing rhetoric and violence were two aspects of the same phenomenon that propelled fascism forwards. Hannah Arendt is the best known among these scholars; a handful of academics such as Lars Rensmann, are now using her ideas to diagnose the present. “The [far right] mob Arendt analyzes can be contrasted with both democratic rallies calling for inclusion or better policies and extraordinary politics to which crowds genuinely need to resort under conditions of dictatorship,” Rensmann wrote.

The mob is driven by “tribal nationalism” and “antisemitism,” which “excludes, suppresses, intimidates, and violently threatens voices not in line with the mob and its leader.” Arendt’s disdain for “sovereignty,” which she saw as anti-democratic also resonates today. The mob is obsessed with a supposed "unified sovereign will of the people,” which denies the need for “organized systemic dispersion of power in a constitutional democracy.”

“Even if the mob initially appears politically marginal, it can easily turn into something bigger; if societal and political conditions are favorable, a violent mob can move from the margins to the center of politics.”

Another famous scholar of the older period, Elio Canetti, harbored a vision of mobs that is more enigmatic than Arendt’s, but demonstrates the imagination needed to grasp them as complex social phenomena. David Roberts, who wrote on the Global Minority’s cultural undercurrents from a leftist perspective, highlighted Canetti’s contention that crowds were biological phenomena like wolfpacks, fundamentally driven by the urge to eat. “The biology of power and the biology of the crowd are the same: each lives its urge to grow through seizing and incorporating…the crowd feeds on people, the demagogue and despot feeds on crowds.” The image that springs to my mind is Goya’s "Saturn Devouring His Son."

At the turn of the millennium, a major but now forgotten EU research program concluded that “general discontent among the workforce” due to rising job insecurity and social inequality “could explain the rise of right-wing populism.” Poverty was indeed a catalyst for many types of rage but it was white supremacy, not poverty, that explained why rage was directed at migrants. Needless to say, the recommendations of that program such as granting migrants the same civic rights as European citizens, toning down xenophobic political rhetoric and funding traditionally segregated groups such as chambers of commerce and farmers’ associations to undertake antiracism initiatives, were never implemented. The landmark “Project Europe 2030” strategy published in 2010 by social democratic dignitaries including Felipe González, Joschka Fischer and Lech Wałęsa, contained statements such as “all forms of discrimination against immigrant workers and their families should be removed” but was disregarded.

While there has been pushback against neo-Nazi groups like the Greek “Golden Dawn,” the far right still draws on unaddressed reserves of bigotry present in European society. The only serious political challenge, albeit a brief one, came across the Atlantic after the murder of George Floyd from European offshoots of Black Lives Matter.

A potential new framework

Just as not all mobs are the same, neither are all police forces; deciphering the doctrines of Europe’s numerous security forces is not easy, but central to any anti-fascist policy.

The police have historically had a specific political role – as shock troops against the left, anarchists, ethnic minorities and other groups that officials hated. This held true both in ostensibly liberal states and dictatorships. In recent times, studies have also revealed security forces infiltrated by Nazis and police staff associations acting as a "transmission belt” for far-right ideas. This has made the police and indeed the wider state unreliable allies against the far right and, evidently, unprepared for what is now playing out.

Many excellent proposals for progressive reform of the security forces exist across Europe. Rarely has the enormous political energy needed to deliver them been available; if we could orchestrate a new push for implementation across Europe, the police could become reliable allies against the far right. There are also plenty of models for organizing communities and officials alike such as the “Partnerschaft für Demokratie” program in Germany. Such varied initiatives ought to be looked at with fresh eyes and the most useful expanded.

But, if any of this were to be truly effective, we will also need an explicit policy focus on anti-fascism built on renewed intellectual foundations. The issue cannot be delegated to the secretive officials of the “security” state compromised by the “War on Terror” nor a patchwork of lackluster schemes like the “democracy shield.” The fight against fascists gets not one mention in the EU’s foundational treaty despite the fact that they held sway somewhere in Europe for about half of the last 100 years (starting in 1923 with Mussolini’s coup and ending in 1975 with Franco’s death).

Indeed, anti-fascism now survives in the public sphere only marginally, such as in the popular song “Bella Ciao.” Pushback will have to be woven back into the core of the European project — a clearer official strategy would help.