How Far Is Right? Explaining Varieties Of Far-Right Strategies in Security Organizations

The recent electoral success of far-right parties across the world is one of the most pressing challenges to multilateral security cooperation. Existing research suggests that far-right parties tend to criticize, disengage, and obstruct (but not exit) multilateral security initiatives, prioritizing nationalist and sovereigntist programs. Yet rising nationalism has not prevented existing multilateral security arrangements to reinvigorate their activities against a worsening regional security environment. This suggests that far-right parties participate in these transformation processes, which aspects have remained somewhat underexplored. Investigating how far-right parties engage in security organizations, this paper highlights that the multifaceted nature of their disruptive potential for security organizations can also involve organizational innovation. I argue that far-right parties pursue their nationalist programs also when they do not block cooperation. I explore the strategies far-right parties pursue and explain that variation depends on the opportunities and constraints provided by the organizational structures of security organizations. I advance my argument about the variety of far-right strategies by analyzing two cases of far-right parties in government in Italy and their participation in the Common Defence and Security Policy (CSDP) of the EU and in NATO: the Lega in a coalition government in 2018-2019 and the Fratelli d’Italia government led by Giorgia Meloni since 2022. I show that far-right parties' dispositions to act vary across organizations by triangulating over a hundred elite interviews carried out in Rome and Brussels with party manifestos, news coverage, autobiographies, political speeches and policy documents. The findings of this paper indicate that far-right parties can have distinct approaches to multilateral security. In this way, the paper highlights that the disruptive potential of the far right has a multifaceted nature, with implications for the conduct and agreed-upon purposes of existing multilateral arrangements. It thus contributes to discussions about the impact of rising nationalism in domestic politics on multilateral cooperation.