Myths, Mythology and Classical Imagery: Legitimation in the Transnational Far Right

This panel examines how European far-right actors (including parties, youth movements, and in some cases EU-level personnel) draw on myths, mythology, and classical imagery to legitimise their agendas, construct collective identities, and frame political struggles. Myths are understood here as sacred narratives and discourses that relate to nativist conceptualisations of a given people; mythology as the broader web of traditions, symbols and narrative systems from which they are drawn, spanning Greco-Roman, Norse, Celtic, Slavic and other repertoires; whilst classical imagery is considered the aesthetic and textual vocabulary of European antiquity more specifically. While the far-right is increasingly studied as a transnational phenomenon, the specific role of the cross-border circulation of these ‘myths’ and ‘mythologies’ within the contemporary far-right remains underexplored.
The panel asks how these registers – whether regional, national or pan-European in origin, including cases of shared traditions across nations – are used by far-right actors as part of the organisational and epistemic infrastructure through which they translate transnational cooperation into domestic and international influence. It further considers how these dynamics circulate through digital platforms and shared far-right discourses.
Contributions are invited to examine how myths, mythology, and classical imagery are mobilised to frame in-group identity and belonging among far-right actors, and/or to communicate ideology to broader publics. The panel is particularly interested in whether a shared far-right mythological register is emerging across national contexts or remains regionally and nationally specific.
We welcome papers that combine discourse analysis, visual and aesthetic analysis, and party or movement case studies, and encourage both comparative and single-case contributions from across Europe and beyond.