Welcome to a seminar where Mihaela Mihai, Professor of Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, and Camil Ungureanu, Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Barcelona), will present their research.
In dialogue with political geography and the social sciences, this paper illuminates the diversity of European far-right environmental politics by contextually examining a semi-peripheral Eastern European variant—the Alliance for the Union of Romanians (AUR). Based on a discursive thematic analysis, our interpretative case study pursues three objectives. First, we highlight AUR’s challenge to existing, inductively reached theoretical accounts of far-right populism. While most scholars foreground the far right’s culturalized view of religion and their fixation on immigration, AUR outlines a theological vision of politics and advances emigration as a crucial problem. Second, we demonstrate how theology and the concern with the nation’s integrity are essential for understanding AUR’s outlier position within far-right ecologism. AUR places the environment at the very centre of its programme—and not merely as a strategic add-on to attract voters or respond to internal and external pressures—and co-opts the language of anti-colonialism to articulate a socio-ecological critique of global capitalism. Third, to concretise AUR’s ecological vision, we reconstruct three dimensions of its hyper-nationalist, Orthodox geographical imaginary, underscoring their contradictions and ambivalences: 1) its complex, human, and natural resource nationalism, including aesthetic, symbolic and material aspects; 2) its focus on food sovereignty and the Romanian peasant as an exemplar of sustainable agriculture; and 3) the protection of “the last virgin forests in Europe” as central to Romania’s national identity and prosperity. We conclude that AUR effectively mobilizes historical geopolitical resentment at Europe’s margins, addressing it with a promise of recovered plenitude that endangers democratic politics.