Volk utopia: Racial futures and ecological politics on the German far-right

Abstract

Focusing on the resurgence of so-called völkisch (ethno-nationalist) settlements in northern Germany over the past three decades, this paper explores the emergent socio-spatial forms through which nativist and xenophobic responses to the ecological crisis are being expressed. It argues that political ecologies of the future cannot be understood, in the present conjuncture, without taking into account those actors which are working to manifest the future in explicitly racialised and immunitary forms. After providing an overview of the development of völkisch movements and ideologies since the 19th century, I introduce contemporary actors and organisations which are attempting to reconfigure the climate crisis as a matter of right-wing concern. These strategies position Nature as a signifier that stitches together far-right concerns about the infiltration of the German Volk and landscape by racialised threats, facilitating a form of ecological praxis through rural settlement projects that is heavily centred around a homogenous and naturalised notion of German identity. Rather than an outright denial of the impending urgency of the climate crisis, I argue that völkisch discourses represent a different, and arguably more dangerous response to the spectre of ecological disorder, and one which works in an immunological and anticipatory register. The affective intensity of these imaginaries and strategies also demonstrate that the terrains of hope, possibility, and even utopia increasingly hold the potential to be claimed by the violent and exclusivist ideologies of the far-right. No mere harbinger of ‘things to come’, völkisch strategies represent a mode of responding to the climate crisis in the present, and of prefiguring an ethno-nationalist ‘solution’ which must be taken seriously by activists and scholars.