| The far right is the most extensively studied political party family in academic literature. Yet for the past thirty years, attention has been almost exclusively focused on the Western European radical right parties, which have been associated with post-industrial societal changes and exposure to increasing international competition that have reshaped socialization in the working environment. For this reason, the new radical or far right parties in the west have been regarded to favour free-market and authoritarian policies. Meanwhile, their eastern counterparts (wherever they existed) have been utterly ignored and brushed aside as Parties of the Communist Past---that is, mere offsprings of former communist party elites in search for new constituencies. Consequently, with the exception of Cas Mudde's book on a pan-European extreme right phenomenon, scholarly literature rarely treats the two together due to the perceived intrinsic differences between them. With the advent of European Union integration, however, the eastern radical right deserve a deeper study. This thesis, with a focus on Romania and Bulgaria, will explore whether rapid reforms and "catching up" as well as EU integration have transformed Eastern European societies to such a degree that the supply and demand for the radical right start to resemble more and more the western European scenario, thus resulting in new neo-western radical right parties in Eastern Europe competing with the old-eastern far right. |
