Nationalist Internationalism, Then and Now

The revanchist right used to have quiet cosmopolitan coteries but now the alliances are much louder and more public

Otto von Habsburg, 1964 (Photo by Gianni Ferrari/Cover/Getty Images)

In the fall of 1970, Truman Capote, then at the height of his celebrity as the gossipy writer with a gift for hobnobbing with disparate VIPs, invited a bunch of friends, including William Buckley, for a night on the town. The group ended up at a disco where Buckley nervously tried to calculate the sexual orientation of those gyrating around him while soothing himself with thoughts of his dear friends, the Archduke Otto von Habsburg and his wife the Duchess von Habsburg. 

For those who think I’m exaggerating, here is Buckley’s account of the evening, from his memoir Cruising (cough, cough) Speed (1971): 

The coffee is waiting, and we drink it quickly, because Truman desires that we all should go to a place called The Sanctuary, way over on the West Side—a converted church, now a modish, super-hopped-up discotheque, psychedelic lights, blaring music, the dance floor crowded with homosexuals and lesbians and heteros, in ratio about 25-25-50, who dance with detached expression: I conjure up a vision of the Archduke Otto and his Duchess, unsmiling, frugging there, calmly, serenely, doing as the Romans do—Imperial Breeding.

Buckley was being slightly inexact: Otto von Habsburg was an archduke only in the fantasies of a few monarchists. He was the last crown prince of Austria Hungary as well as the sovereign of the Order of the Golden Fleece, but had to publicly forswear his claims in order to enjoy the mundane rights of citizenship. 

Von Habsburg was on Buckley’s mind because the pretend prince had visited the pundit. The two were intense mutual admirers. Von Habsburg said Buckley’s National Review was the only magazine that talked sense to the American people. In (ahem) Cruising Speed, Buckley wrote a veritable ode to the acting archduke.

He lives now in Bavaria with his large family, and makes his living as a journalist, author, scholar, and lecturer (in six languages). He is tall and thin, balding and mustachioed, and there is a trace of sadness in his courtly movements. He is a man of startling good manners, rising even when you re-enter the room, declining to sit down until you have yourself done so, yet accomplishing it all without giving off a drillmasterish pall, or appearing in any way unnatural.

Von Habsburg had visited Buckley with the intent of recruiting him to join “a very small organization that meets two or three times a year, in Europe usually, but sometimes in America, to discuss deeply, and off the record, public policies affecting the future of the West.”

Buckley and von Habsburg practiced the type of right-wing internationalism that was common in the Cold War: an alliance of elites, united mainly by Cold War convictions, meeting in private to strategize. 

I thought about Buckley and his faux-aristo friends when I read Ishaan Tharoor’s recent column in the Washington Post arguing that, “One of the striking transatlantic developments of the past half-decade—marked by the rise and fall and potential re-emergence of President Donald Trump—has been the overt collaboration between right-wing politicians and activists in the United States and counterparts in Europe, particularly those on the far right.”

As example, Tharoor cites former vice president Mike Pence’s recent appearance at a Hungarian conference, also attended by Hungarian president Victor Orbán, on “family values,” Senator Ted Cruz’s participation via video in Madrid for the far right Spanish party Vox, and the plans for the Conservative Political Action conference (a leading organization of the American right) in Budapest next year.

The groups the American far right is gravitating towards are ones that are on the extreme right in Europe, marked by xenophobia, Islamophobia and homophobia. As Tharoor notes, 

The Republican Party of the United States is, in global terms, a far-right party. The V-Dem Institute, a think tank based at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, maintains an index charting hundreds of political parties from 169 countries on a shared political spectrum that has mapped the party’s trajectory. In this view, the Republicans’ ultranationalist turn over the past two decades, crystallized by the rise of Trumpism, has shifted them closer to authoritarian-leaning factions in power in countries like Hungary and Turkey and made them even more illiberal than far-right parties in Western Europe, like France’s National Rally or Spain’s Vox.

In previous posts, I’ve written about this burgeoning international alliance of far right parties and have argued that it has its roots in the older Cold War networking of activists like Buckley and his circle at National Review. 

Which, I think, remains true. But I want to enter an important proviso: Buckley and von Habsburg were elite institutionalists (von Habsburg in particular a strong advocate of the European Union). Their right-wing alliance was a matter of clubby co-ordination largely done behind closed doors.

The new historical juncture has seen a renewal of the ties between the American right and its European counterpart but in much more public facing ways. What we’re seeing now with Pence, Cruz and CPAC is a much more visible and public effort, done by people who are loud and vocal.

Buckley’s palling around with the sovereign of the Golden Fleece had an element of play acting, even though there were real world diplomatic consequences to Otto von Habsburg’s back door schmoozing.  With the current alliance, politicians like Pence are claiming a commonality with authoritarians like Orbán through a shared sense of besiegement. “We see a crisis that brings us here today, a crisis that strikes at the very heart of civilization itself,” Mike Pence said in Budapest. Speaking on Orbán’s turf and using Orbán’s language, Pence was also implicitly endorsing Orbán’s autocratic tactics. 

Pence’s words are a striking confirmation of Tharoor’s claim that the GOP’s counterpart is now the European far right, rather than more mainstream conservative parties like the Christian Democrats. Being a former vice president, Pence is much more a representative figure than Buckley or his circle of pundits. Pence’s trip is one more straw in the wind showing the GOP is heading towards authoritarianism. 

This post is part of a series on the American right’s affinity for foreign autocracy. Previously in this series: Tucker Carlson and Authoritarian Tourism, Right-wing Junketeering: Funding a Cruise through Autocracy, Sarah Posner on the Hidden History of Religious Authoritarianism, and Tilting at Franco.

(Post edited by Emily M. Keeler)

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