Far-right demonstration in 2012. Athens,Greece.Steve Jurvetson/Flickr. Some rights reserved.
"Europe needs a cultural counter-revolution," Polish leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski declared in September at a summit in Krynica – home of the so-called Eastern Davos. "This sounds like music to me," replied Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán with undisguised enthusiasm, and he added: "Brexit offers a great opportunity for this counter-revolution. We must assert that national and religious values are important and defend them... Immigrants could get to displace the inhabitants of Europe." This last sentence is a copy-and-paste of the grand remplacement (the great replacement of the French people by the immigrants) conspiracy theory by far-right French writer Renaud Camus, which has become a sort of "structure of feeling" of a new multi-faceted anti-cosmopolitan front which, according to journalist Marc Saint-Upéry, is marked by what he calls "civilizational paranoia".
It is true that in the last decades, cosmopolitanism has been captured by the elites and the markets. The crisis of the Left has weakened the old internationalism to the point of its near disappearance - today it is only partially retained by the alter-globalization movements. And it is precisely the globalization of finance and its capitalist realism that has encouraged the emergence of a kind of anti-cosmopolitan International which plays in a nationalist, antidemocratic and often nativist key.
