Authoritarian Resilience: The Synthesis of Ethno-Nationalist Environmentalism and Climate Obstruction After Sustainability

Agendas of sustainability are increasingly contested. Not only signal consequences of climate change their shortcomings that are increasingly visible and unavoidable also in societies of the Global North, but they are additionally increasingly attacked – most visibly by the ethno-nationalist far right. The relation of sustainability and the far right, however, is not as unambiguous as the prevailing thesis of a libertarian-authoritarian backlash against sustainability suggests. Building on a long tradition of eco-authoritarianism, for example, the honorary chairman of the German far-right party AfD, Alexander Gauland (2020), claims that ‘sustainability is a conservative principle. […] Climate change is left-wing.’ While the far right is indeed characterised by discourses of climate obstruction that seem to be as form of fossil nationalism the antithesis to eco-nationalism, environmentalist ethno-nationalist agendas of eco-bordering and eco-fascism gain in importance for the far right (Benoist et al. 2024). In this conceptual paper on the relation of ethno-nationalist environmentalism and ethno-nationalist fossilism, I argue that their current synthesis can most fruitfully be understood as agenda of authoritarian resilience that finds social resonance far beyond the far right in times of post-sustainability. I unfold my argument in three steps: First, I explore the antithetic relation of ethno-nationalist discourses of nationalist fossilism/unsustainability and environmentalism/sustainability in light of the current state of research within the sustainability paradigm (Daggett 2018; Ekberg et al. 2023; Benoist et al. 2024). Second, introducing a novel distinction between post-apocalyptic (Cassegard/Thörn 2018; Folkers 2022; Swyngedouw 2022; Adloff 2024) and post-emancipatory (Blühdorn/Welsh 2007; Blühdorn 2016, 2024; Sconfienza 2019) theories of post-sustainability, I analyse the current conjuncture of environmental and climate politics in which the categorial basis increasingly dissolves to conceptualise far-right climate politics as denial, delay, or obstruction. Finally, I argue that the contradictions between ethno-nationalist discourses of climate obstruction and environmentalism resolve in a synthesis of authoritarian resilience (see also Moore/Roberts 2022). In times of a disintegration of the modern promises of progress and sustainability facing the increasing unavoidability of environmental loss and damage, this ethno-nationalist agenda of security might resonate well beyond current activists and supporters of the far right.