This linked an already tense maritime standoff in the eastern Mediterranean to a new escalation in the Libyan civil war. This tendency gathered steam following the World Trade Center attacks in 2001 and the subsequent coalitions to invade Afghanistan and Iraq. The perspective I take in this book … eschews a boxed-in, academic study of fascism, which almost invariably divorces the study of the far right from a simultaneous study of the state, and the study of fascism itself from popular and state racism. These range from Iceland in the northwest of Europe, situated on the Mid-Atlantic-Ridge, to the North Anatolian Fault zone in Turkey in the southeast. Given this book attempts to understand the far right in Europe, there is a surprising lack of analysis about the role of Islam in Europe - with no attempt to explore the ideology of Islamism, Salafism or Islamic concepts such as Jihad.

She makes the point that ‘the transition from a command economy to a market economy failed by any criteria’ (p.Exit and other private-sector networks such as Against Violent Extremism (AVE) attempt to push skinheads into fun activities and see them as simply street gangs – a social problem, not a political one – with grievances that need to be addressed and understood. The convergence of French and Italian policy around Cyprus has placed the EU’s eastern Mediterranean policy solidly behind the regional alignment of Cyprus, Greece, Egypt, and Israel, as well as the UAE in Libya. The point is made that fascism was seen as an exception in both mainstream and academic discourse, a ‘problem at the margins of society’ (31); essentially, unconnected to mainstream politics and its increasing convergence with the extreme right on a variety of issues from the 1990s onwards. Polemical and ranting in tone it is sadly representative of the offerings from the publisher Verso of late.

One particularly striking example given is that of Tino Brandt, a fascist in Thuringia in Germany, who was recruited by the security services and later given a prison sentence for over sixty cases of sexual abuse of minors, including rape. This has meant that any duty of care previously recognised by governments regarding an equality agenda has been replaced by one that privileges the ‘values’ of the country concerned, and attempts ‘a subsumption of the minority under the majority’ (Ambalavaner Sivanandan, cited in Fekete, p. For twenty-five years, Fekete relentlessly monitored Europe’s far right while the continent’s leaders preferred to look away. This is a somewhat ironic belief given that ‘Germany’s attempt to impose its model on the whole of Europe has been a major cause of the fractures that threaten the EU’ in the first place (p.This has been heightened by ‘the German perception that it foots the bills and assumes the burden of leadership’ (p.