CPAC and NatCon: Uniting a Transnational Radical Right
Rita Abrahamsen and Michael C. Williams
Museum in Hungary by Jules Verne (CC BY 3.0)
This article is part of our series on Transnational Christian Nationalism, and its impact on politics, the rule of law, and religious freedom. If you’d like to explore other articles in this series, click here.
“An international coalition of national forces has been established.” This triumphant statement issued at the end of the Hungarian Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) conference in April 2024 may seem contradictory – why would nationalists form an international alliance? The CPAC conference is one of several international venues where nationalists from all over the world meet and share ideas on how to counter liberal globalization, their common enemy. As CPAC Hungary put it, this is a “coalition of pro-peace, anti-globalist forces [and] now the international right from Europe to America is joining forces for the elections.”
This year’s CPAC Hungary was the third time the conference was held in Budapest. According to the conference’s own website, its attendees included 3,000 participants with nearly 500 foreign guests from six continents. The main attraction was Prime Minister Victor Orbán, but the list of speakers could serve as a ‘who’s who’ of the contemporary radical Right. Party leaders like Santiago Abascal of Spain’s Vox and Geert Wilders from the Dutch Party of Freedom rubbed shoulders with US politicians and activists like Senator Markwayne Mullin, Congressman Andy Harris, and author Vivek Ramaswamy. Former President Trump joined by video link, announcing his readiness to renew a conservative alliance with Orbán. From Australia, former Prime Minister Tony Abbot was given a hero’s welcome for having stopped illegal immigration, while others joined from Brazil and South Africa.
Many CPAC speakers and attendees had traveled directly from the National Conservatism (NatCon) conference in Brussels, another major radical Right jamboree that took place a few days earlier. NatCon Brussels gained widespread media attention when a local mayor tried to close it down, arguing that the far Right was not welcome in the European capital. The decision was quickly overturned, but NatCon had been handed a major propaganda victory. Speaker after speaker, including Brexit firebrand and now MP Nigel Farage, the British politician Suella Braverman, controversial French author and presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, as well as Prime Minister Orbán reveled in the failed attempt by the Brussels authorities to ‘cancel’ them.
Indeed, ‘cancelling’ CPAC and NatCon, or stopping the spread of far Right’s ideas, seems increasingly like a liberal pipedream. In the span of a few years, the two conferences have grown in size and prominence to become major international events. When CPAC was established in 1974 by the American Conservative Union (ACU) it was an annual meeting for US conservatives. Ronald Reagan, then a presidential hopeful, gave the inaugural address. Since then, CPAC has become increasingly more radical, frequently including activists and media personalities like Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson. It has also gone global. The first European meeting was in Budapest in 2022. Brazil has hosted an annual CPAC since 2019, while Mexico, Australia, Japan, and South Korea also have their CPACs, all bringing together conservatives of an increasingly more radical bent.
The National Conservatism (NatCon) Conference is of more recent vintage. It is the creation of the Edmund Burke Foundation, which was founded in 2019 by Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political thinker,activist, and author of The Virtues of Nationalism. So far, NatCons have been held in London, Washington D.C., Rome, Brussels and Orlando, bringing together hundreds of delegates from around the world and attracting ever more high-profile politicians from the right of mainstream conservatism.
The most recent NatCon Washington in July 2024 featured Senator J.D. Vance, alongside right-wing intellectuals and activists like Kevin Roberts, President of the Heritage Foundation, Oren Cass, Executive Director of American Compass, and Paul Gottfried, author and editor of Chronicles Magazine. From the UK, Suella Braverman again took to the stage, as did James Orr, the UK Chairman of the Edmund Burke Foundation and Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Divinity at the University of Cambridge. Orr has been described as J.D. Vance’s ‘philosopher king’ and ‘mentor’, bonding in particular on issues of religion and family.
Attending these conferences, as we did in London in 2023, reveals a great deal of diversity and disagreement. Be it economic policy, religion or foreign affairs, there are considerable differences of opinion among individuals, parties and countries. Yet these disagreements should not blind us to the crucial fact that both CPAC and NatCon are deliberate vehicles for building transnational alliances among conservatives with a mission to overturn liberal progressivism both domestically and internationally.
At the first European CPAC in Budapest in 2022, Prime Minister Orbán urged conservatives to “make friends.” In his words, “the progressive liberals and the neo-Marxists have unlimited unity”, whereas conservatives squabble over the smallest issues. This makes it vital, he argued, that conservatives “coordinate the movement of our troops” to counter the threat progressives pose to “the whole of Western civilisation.” The second Budapest CPAC met under the slogan ‘United We Stand’, warning that “soon we will make the liberals’ nightmare come true, the international alliance of national forces!” Hazony made a similar statement on behalf of NatCon. The goal, he said, is to “build a coalition [of] anti-Marxist liberals, Christians and nationalists.”
What unites these diverse nationalist forces is their shared disdain for progressive liberalism and globalisation. As we show in our book World of the Right, the contemporary radical Right is underpinned by an ideology that blames a global managerial elite – what they call the New Class – for the disruptions and dislocations of our times. In this way, they share the populists’ distinction between ‘the elite’ and ‘the people’; but for them, the enemy elite is not merely national, it is also global.
According to this vision, globalisation has detached New Class elites from their respective national identities and cultures. Their interests lie in yet further globalisation and liberalisation – and by implication the destruction of traditional national values and local communities. Typified by the economic aristocracy of the Davos World Economic Forum, the experts in international organisations like the UN, and the political and bureaucratic establishment in national capitals, this New Class is held responsible for the baleful impacts of globalisation: the loss of working-class jobs, the erasure of national and religious traditions, and the erosion of sovereignty which are no longer the result of inevitable, faceless processes of economic integration. Instead, the blame can be laid squarely at the door of the global elite. From this perspective, it is not sufficient to defeat the liberal elite at home. It must also be defeated internationally – hence the need for unity and transnational alliances.
Against liberal globalisation, radical conservatives seek a more sovereigntist world order. While they have a well-articulated ideological critique of globalisation, the year 2024, according to Orbán, “is not a year of theory, but of practice.” Pointing to a number of important elections, and especially the US presidential election in November, Orbán suggests that 2024 is “an unrepeatable opportunity to replace the declining progressive liberal world spirit with another world spirit: a sovereigntist world order.” Progressive liberals, he continues, “sense the danger. The expiry of this era means their expiry: the end of the progressive world spirit.”
In this understanding of the world, “the progressive world spirit” is a threat to Western civilization, which they present as a fusion of history, culture, and Judeo-Christian faith. This is not Christian universalism. It is a sovereigntist and civilizational understanding of the modern West as a unique, culturally limited, political-religious synthesis. As such, it reverses the post-World War II use of the concept, where “Judeo-Christian” signified a liberal-inflected commitment to universal human rights.
By contrast, much (though not all) of today’s radical right has reconfigured Western civilization as a specific and limited inheritance – a geopolitically-bound entity. The precise nature and boundaries of this entity are often obscure. Some cast it as ‘Atlanticist’; others stress its ‘European’ dimensions, while debating whether or not Russia is a part of Europe, or conversely whether the true West today resides primarily in Central Europe and only marginally in the now largely decadent Western reaches of the continent; while others maintain it extends to Christian-dominated countries in Africa; still others extend it explicitly to include Israel – or at least a specific vision of that country.
This fuzziness makes the concept difficult to pin down, and to some critics renders it fundamentally incoherent. But fuzziness is also productive, providing a shared rhetoric that, in combination with opposition to global liberal managerialism, provides a malleable ideological frame amenable to many positions on the radical right. This malleability is particularly important in the context of conferences like CPAC and NatCon, which are not just meetings for networking and the exchange of ideas. They are also forms of political theatre, where the ideas are deployed in rhetorical performances designed to gain exposure and generate energy and commitment. These events allow the actors to perform unity and thus solidify the image of the radical Right as a movement with power, purpose, and momentum. They help to spread and possibly normalise their ideas, to insert them via media coverage and digital activism into public debate and everyday parlance.
Quite diverse positions can find common ground within these framings. Denominational cleavages can be obscured, and common ground can be found between non-religious and social conservatives, as well as between these and more libertarian actors opposed to progressive liberalism and motivated by the anti-Woke culture wars. These loose ideological constellations can also provide underpinnings for more formal transnational organisations such as the World Congress of Families, which has played an important role supporting social conservative politics and policies around the world. The World Congress of Families and other US religious actors have for example actively supported anti-LGBTQ+ campaigns in many parts of Africa, including Uganda’s Anti-Homosexuality Act which makes certain cases of homosexuality punishable by death.
A crucial implication of the radical Right’s civilizational framing is that it provides these forces a means of insulating themselves against charges of Western superiority and neo-imperial designs. Instead, these actors present themselves as defenders of “difference”. In his 2024 CPAC Hungary address, Orbán put this fusion to rhetorical use. Describing the importance of the Hungarian experience under his leadership, he argued that:
“what is perhaps most interesting is that while the whole of Europe has been submerged in an ocean of progressive liberalism, here—miraculously—a conservative island has survived: an ‘island of difference’ that defies the liberal tide, the Brussels thunderstorm, and the Washington hurricane; and it not only defies all this, but survives, even thrives, even succeeds, even triumphs—and triumphs again and again. Welcome to the land that is the island of difference.”
The multipolar world they advocate for is a civilizational world, one of ‘civilizational states’ that despite their foundational differences share an interest in opposing progressive, universalist forces of all kinds – secular or religious. This stance permits an uneasy but potentially powerful common agenda between secular radical conservatives and their more religiously oriented allies. Both share hostility toward progressive liberalism. Both see ‘the West’ as a specific, culturally defined and limited entity, not a set of universal rights. Each claim to support the right of other cultures and civilizations to defend their differences, intolerantly if necessary. And they stridently assert the right of the West to do the same – stressing the urgent need for it to do so in areas including migration, education,family policies, and beyond.
There is no doubt that the radical Right, in all its diversity, regards the US November presidential election as a pivotal moment for world politics. In this ‘year of practice’, a victory for Donald Trump would be regarded as a significant step towards the triumph of a worldwide anti-globalist alliance. While differences and disagreements persist amongst the diverse forces on today’s radical Right, conferences like CPAC and NatCon have helped craft a more transnational movement aware of its common enemy and thus more willing to overlook their differences and provide rhetorical and even organizational support to each other. At the first CPAC Hungary in 2022, the triad of ‘God, Homeland, Family’ was offered as the civilizational minimum to bind conservatives together. In 2024 CPAC Washington met under the slogan ‘Where Globalism Goes to Die’. That remains a radical conservative dream, but the anti-globalist alliance is stronger and larger today than ever before. Should the Trump-Vance ticket win the November Presidential election, the transnational alliance of radical Right forces will be better poised to remake the world in their image.♦
Rita Abrahamsen is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and Research Fellow at the Centre for International and Comparative Politics, Stellenbosch University. She is co-author of World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Michael C. Williams is Professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and Global Professorial Fellow at the Institute for Humanities and Social sciences at Queen Mary University of London. He is co-author of World of the Right: Radical Conservatism and Global Order (Cambridge University Press, 2024).
Recommended Citation
Abrahamsen, Rita and Michael C. Williams. “CPAC and NatCon: Uniting a Transnational Radical Right.” Canopy Forum, October 25, 2024. https://canopyforum.org/2024/10/25/cpac-and-natcon-uniting-a-transnational-radical-right/.
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