Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative published research tracing how the Global War on Terror helped far-right parties in Europe gain political prominence they had long been denied.
Before September 11, far-right parties in Europe had been largely marginalised within the continent’s multi-party systems. Many remained politically stigmatised or excluded from power.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, far-right racism began to sharpen its focus on Islam. The French Front National, now the Rassemblement National, and the Austrian Freedom Party cast Arab, Black and Turkish communities as “Muslims” and an “enemy within.” The VVD argued as early as 1991 that Islam posed a threat to liberal democracy. By the late 1990s, Pim Fortuyn had published Against the Islamisation of Our Culture.
September 11 handed the far right an opening. Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers crashed four planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing 2,977 people. President George W. Bush declared a Global War on Terror. Political speeches, media coverage and wars waged across Muslim-majority countries mainstreamed anti-Muslim sentiment.
Bush stated the fight targeted “terrorists” who had perverted the message of Islam, not Islam itself. The rhetoric and policy that followed routinely treated Muslims as suspects and cast the religion as inherently violent.
Bush’s declaration that “either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” left European governments little room. More than 13 European countries joined the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, with British forces most directly engaged in combat. Twelve joined the invasion and occupation of Iraq. The United Kingdom and Poland took major combat roles, while France and Germany opposed that war.
Attacks by al-Qaeda affiliates in Madrid and London deepened the sense that the enemy was within. European governments enacted counter-radicalisation programmes, including the UK’s Prevent strategy. Several cooperated in hosting secret CIA black sites and facilitating rendition flights to Guantanamo Bay. These programmes rested on the premise that Muslim religious belief was a dormant threat. Guantanamo Bay became the era’s symbol of this logic.
Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer built careers around this framework in the United States and connected with Europe’s far-right movements. Together they formed the Counter-Jihad Movement, a transatlantic network of parties, writers and activists. Beginning in 2007, the movement used the OSCE’s annual Human Dimension Implementation Meeting to spread its ideas in policy circles. Far-right leaders from Austria, Belgium, England, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland and Norway met at annual counter-jihad conferences.
European counterparts organised transnationally against mosque construction. In 2010, Geller mobilised against the “Ground Zero Mosque” in New York.