INTRODUCTION

The 1990s saw a dramatic movement of the European far right towards the centre of national politics, through a series of attempts to establish ‘respectable’ electoral parties. Right-wing parties with policies based primarily on nationalism and immigration (such as Joerg Haider's Austrian Freedom Party and Jean-Marie Le Pen's Front National in France) resonated with publics increasingly disillusioned with what they saw as centralist policies of the European Union, of a liberalism that to them appeared to favour the rights of ‘aliens’ above native-born citizens, and a globalisation that seemed to ignore domestic issues such as law and order, housing and employment. Such parties sought, with some success, to normalise a racial nationalism based on ‘whiteness as an essentialised social identity which they say is under threat’ (Back 2002b), a strategy also followed by the British National Party.

We might think of these developments in mainstream political culture as the penetration into a dominant, Habermasian public sphere of debate and opinion-formation (assisted in no small way by the mass media's coverage of these popular right-wing parties) of hitherto marginalised political groups. Parallel to this normalisation of right-wing discourse in the public sphere we find an increasing use of the Internet by fractions of the far right which essay more extremist versions of the populist rhetoric of such as Haider and Le Pen, which resonated so deeply with significant sections of their respective countries' electorates.