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In August 2024, during the Paris Olympic Games, the La France insoumise deputy Ersilia Soudais expressed outrage at the ban on headscarves for athletes on the French team, writing on X: “France is an Islamophobic country.” In response, the government spokesperson who would soon resign, Prisca Thevenot, symbolically awarded La France insoumise a gold medal: the “medal of indecency and anti-France.”
The history of this notion runs far deeper than such a viral social-media exchange and its appetite for content that divides. To understand it, one must first broaden the field of vision, both spatially and temporally, toward an extreme imaginary.
In Spain, there is a paradigmatic case in which this notion eventually shaped the doctrine of a party. Since the 2019 electoral campaign, Vox, and especially its leader, Santiago Abascal, have drawn a stark dichotomy between “living Spain,” purportedly represented by this far-right party, and Anti-Spain (Antiespaña) represented by the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) and its left-wing allies, clearly identified as traitors and interior enemies.
The core discourse of the Spanish far right since then has revolved around constructing enemies of the nation and traitors to the true and pure homeland. In October 2025, after Donald Trump mentioned the idea of excluding Spain from NATO due to its refusal to raise military spending to 5% of GDP, Abascal publicly stated that he hopes the American president “knows how to distinguish between Spain and Sánchez,” thereby dissociating a democratically elected head of government from the “true” nation, of which he presented himself as a legitimate interlocutor.
Genealogy of a Concept
This idea of anti-nation is not a new dialectical invention that emerged in the last decade, nor a creation of contemporary far-rights, but a repeated, recycled concept from nineteenth-century reactionaries and twentieth-century fascists, used to designate what these ultra-right groups see as the ultimate political enemies. Enemies who, of course, can be internal (traitors) and external (invaders) who threaten the nation and its essence. All these groups form these antagonistic forces that crystallize into the anti-nation. Charles Maurras had theorized the “Anti-France.” For the brains behind Action Française, monarchist and deeply antisemitic, it lay in the “four confederated states”: Protestants, Jews, Freemasons, and “métèques” who, through the democratic Republic, corrupted the “real country.” Aligned with Vichy while remaining staunchly anti-German, he would be condemned in January 1945 for collaboration with the enemy. A verdict he greeted with the cry: “It is the revenge of Dreyfus!”
This ultra-nationalism, typical of the imperialist phase of European powers, spread across the continent to Italy, where the Associazione Nazionalista Italiana (ANI) was founded in 1910 and integrated into the National Fascist Party in 1923.
In Spain, by contrast, the concept appears as early as the 19th century within academic debates between supporters of the Institución Libre de Enseñanza and reactionary forces. The case of Marcelino Menéndez Pelayo is particularly telling: in his work Historia de los heterodoxos españoles, this traditionalist polymath develops the idea that anti-Spaniards are enemies of the nation and conceives the nation as a living organism. Menéndez Pelayo shows particular critique of Enlightenment values, linking his ideas to a struggle against what he considers anti-Catholic action that would signify the defeat of “Tradition.” In a parallel register, in France, Maurice Barrès also introduces this organicist conception of the nation, summarized in the title of his 1899 conference: “the homeland is the land and the dead.”
It is nevertheless during the 20th century, and especially during the Civil War period, that the notion became popular in Spain: the Francoist camp in revolt repeatedly designated its Republican enemies as “anti-Spain.” These enemies embodied everything that opposed a system of values founded on ultracatholic nationalist principles, crystallizing in the figure of the internal enemy: socialism, communism (or Bolshevism), anticlericalism, Jews, Freemasonry, peripheral nationalisms and class unionism as a whole.
Here one should mention the reactionary thinker Ramiro de Maeztu and his best-known work published in 1931, Defensa de la Hispanidad, which constitutes not only an ideological reference for Francoism but also had a significant influence on Vox’s political thought. Drawing on the ideas of the old guard of Spanish traditionalism, such as Menéndez Pelayo, de Maeztu defended the Spanish national unity under the aegis of an ultra-Catholic Catholicism capable of opening a third way between capitalism and communism, and laying the groundwork for a bloc of Catholic and authoritarian Hispanic states.
This national-Catholic axis drew its models primarily from the European counter-revolution (Action Française, Italian Fascism, the Catholic corporate autocracies of Dollfuss or Salazar) more than from Nazism, whose biological racism and neo-pagan leanings sometimes clashed with a Hispanidad grounded in Catholicism. Admiration for Hitlerian Germany, however, was embraced by a portion of the Falange and early Francoism, who shared with it the designation of the same internal enemies of the living nation: democracy and Marxism.
It is precisely Nazi Germany that provides one of the most radical examples of constructing these enemies of the nation, notably through propaganda campaigns that stigmatize an inner enemy embodied by Jews, socialists, and Marxists.
Against the Enlightenment — Yesterday and Today
The groups that make up this anti-nation vary according to historical and national contexts, but the structure of the discourse remains remarkably stable. By grouping very different adversaries into a single category, it becomes possible to identify common enemies quickly and present them as a single threat. This plasticity fosters both ideological transfer and transnational circulation of far-right repertoires, which can then be adapted to the specifics of each country. It is precisely thanks to this ability to unite all these groups under a loosely defined central enmity that federating concepts such as “cultural Marxism”—a conspiracy theory forged in the 1990s by the American radical right, heir to the “cultural Bolshevism” (Kulturbolschewismus) that the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) wielded against art and thought deemed “degenerate”—or its version popularized by the Dark Enlightenment and Elon Musk, the “woke mind virus.”
Two particularly telling examples of this circulation are, on the one hand, its use by the wealthiest person in the world during an interview in early 2025 with the AfD leader Alice Weidel on his own social network X; and on the other, the one by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who described progressive values as a “virus” created in a liberal laboratory to destroy the nation, going so far as to draw a parallel between the “woke virus” and “communism.”
This discourse also blends with others that seek to present the nation in an organicist light, a recycled conception from the 19th and 20th centuries. This portrayal profoundly changes the way politics is imagined. Indeed, if the nation is alive, it can also die or, in a notion pervasive in far-right discourse, commit suicide. This is how Santiago Abascal defines it, in a formulation that directly echoes Maurice Barrès: “If the majority of Spaniards today wanted to commit suicide of Spain, we should stop them. The nation is made up of the dead, the living (the people) and those yet to be born.”
This vision is not limited to the Spanish case. Italy offers another striking example of this conception of a “living nation” that must be protected from threats to its very existence. The 2017 Trieste Theses, the main ideological and programmatic text of Fratelli d’Italia (FdI), defined nations as “living organisms” and designated existential enemies (globalization, communism, and progressivism) against which they should be defended.
In international far-right discourses, the groups comprising this anti-nation are presented as a danger capable of threatening the nation’s very survival. This dramatization fuels radicalization of discourse and increasing aggression toward political opponents. They can be dehumanized and described as existential threats, to the point of legitimizing, or even normalizing, the use of political violence in the name of the nation’s salvation.
Javier Milei in Argentina offers a striking illustration. The president identifies an internal enemy embodied by a “caste,” likens democratically elected parliamentarians to “rats” or to “mandrills,” and explicitly designates them as enemies rather than as opponents. This lexical shift breaks with democratic logic, grounded in the legitimacy of pluralism, transforming political competition into an existential clash.
Another revealing example of this logic is the campaign against antifascist movements. On September 22, 2025, Donald Trump designated Antifa by decree as an “internal terrorist organization,” even though it is not a formal organization but a decentralized movement, and that U.S. federal law recognizes no legal category of domestic terrorist organization. The decree’s reach is primarily political: it opens the door to surveillance and criminalization of a current of opinion, marking a new stage in regime change in the United States.
This sequence also illustrates the international circulation of these repertoires of action. A few days after Trump’s decree, Viktor Orbán announced plans to classify Antifa as a terrorist organization in turn. In the Netherlands, the Tweede Kamer adopted a motion to that effect filed by Geert Wilders (PVV), while the Belgian and European lists of terrorist organizations were urged to include Antifa by Tom Vandendriessche, a member of the European Parliament for the Vlaams Belang.
It would be imprudent to claim that the French government spokesperson consciously revived this expression by reactivating its genealogy, but it is striking to note that it resurfaced during the Milan-Cortina 2026 Games in the mouths of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Salvini.
The moment is by no means trivial: major sporting events, and the Olympic Games in particular, forge a powerful national imagination and generate a rallying effect around the flag that governments in power seek to capture; criticism or disruption becomes, by symmetry, an attack on the nation itself.
After the clashes that occurred during the Milanese procession against the Winter Games and a series of sabotages, notably of railway cables, the Prime Minister labelled those who protested as “enemies of Italy,” thereby extending responsibility for the violence to all protesters. Meanwhile Matteo Salvini, Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League, explicitly used the concept of “anti-Italians” to designate the air-transport unions that had kept their strike during the Olympics.
From Words to Deeds
Because it rests on the shared frame of reference that is the nation, this discourse has a singular capacity to seize the political center. The United Kingdom provides a telling example: Reform UK led by Nigel Farage and the Conservative Party have both made the “woke virus” a central rival, turning a deliberately vague signifier into a political category that encompasses all those deemed outsiders to the true British nation.
This convergence testifies to horizontal circulation of discursive repertoires between new far-right formations and traditional conservative parties. It promotes the contamination of political strategies, helping to normalize, then banalize, categories and representations drawn from the far right.
While the far right readily presents itself as the sole “patriotic” force (that is also the name of one of its groups in the European Parliament, Patriots for Europe) and appropriates national symbols, from flags to national holidays, even to the football kit as in Brazil, all those who do not share its reactionary values are cast into the anti-nation.
In the 20th century, this category encompassed unionism, communism, Jews, Freemasonry, and anticlericalism. Today, it has broadened to multiculturalism, to “globalists” accused of dissolving nations, to liberal movements, to feminism, to LGBTIQ+ people, to the UN’s Agenda 2030— the 2015 plan that sets out seventeen sustainable development goals in climate, inequality, health, education, and governance—, or even environmentalists rebranded as “climate fanatics.” All these groups are accused of being responsible for national and Western decline. By casting them as existential threats, the far right can present itself as the only force capable of preserving the integrity and identity of a nation teetering on the edge of suicide.
One of the most striking examples of this designation of the anti-nation is again provided by Vox. In June 2023, during the general elections campaign, the party displayed on a façade on Alcalá Street, Madrid, a giant banner, withdrawn a few days later by order of the Electoral Board. It showed a hand wearing a bracelet in the colors of the Spanish flag tossing into the trash a series of symbols: the Agenda 2030 logo, the feminist symbol, the LGBTIQ+ flag, the hammer and sickle of the communists and, specific to the Spanish context, the Catalan independence estelada, accompanied by a series of words: imposition, insecurity, division, poverty, abandonment and invasion. The whole was topped with an unambiguous slogan: “Decide lo que importa (Decide what matters).”
The dehumanization of political opponents and the transformation of democratic competition into a civilizational war are now recurring traits of far-right discourses. Without revisiting the historical precedents to which they refer, it is important to highlight their link to what literature calls “stochastic terrorism.” This concept designates a form of violence indirectly encouraged by discourses that continuously designate certain groups as enemies, demonize them, and present them as existential threats that would have to be acted upon to save the nation. Without explicitly calling for violence, these discourses can push individuals who have been radicalized by repetition to commit deadly acts.
The assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, the massacre carried out by Anders Breivik, whose manifesto targeted precisely “cultural Marxism,” or the assassination of the German administrator Walter Lübcke by a neo-Nazi, illustrate the potential consequences of this dynamic. They remind us that the construction of the “anti-nation” is not merely a rhetorical strategy: it can also create the conditions for a transition to political violence.