04/09/2024
White? Southern European white? Mixed?: The struggles upon race and ethnicity within the Portuguese non-partisan far-right?
Article by Gabriel Fernandes Rocha Guimarães.
The far-right has been one of the most debated issues in the social sciences during the last years. It is also highly connected to other “kin issues” such as race and racism. The Portuguese case is particular, since its non-partisan, Metapolitical sphere presents a rare kind of dispute. There are two axes struggling to define Portuguese identity. One states that Portugal is an all-white, ethno-European country. Its “whiteness” and European traits could even be tracked by genetic studies. The main ideological and theoretical inspiration from this axis comes from the Identitarian Movement in Europe and the Alt-right in the USA. It aims for a European Portugal within a European Europe. The competing axis, on the other hand, states that Portugal is an exception amidst European peoples. It is allegedly more prone to amalgamate with non-European peoples from the tropical zones. This axis aims for a Portuguese commonwealth with countries coming from its former Empire, and has as main inspiration Lusotropicalism, a worldview elaborated by Brazilian intellectual Gilberto Freyre. This last aspect is even more striking, given that a conservative ideology such as Freyre’s - once ideological pillar of a colonial empire - does not fit in an ethno-European far-right worldview.
Keywords: Metapolitics, far-right, groupuscularity, portugalidade [portugality], identitarianism, white identity politics.
Available in the second edition of volume 17 of Dilemas - Revista de Estudos de Conflito e Controle Social.
https://doi.org/10.4322/dilemas.v17.n.2.57693