9/11 at 25: How the ‘War on Terror’ helped mainstream Europe’s far right

Before the September 11 attacks, far-right parties in much of Europe were largely sidelined within multi-party systems, often stigmatized for anti-Semitism and ties to fascist origins rather than treated as credible governing forces. That marginal status began to change after the Cold War as certain parties shifted their focus from other forms of racism toward Islam. Established outfits such as France’s Front National (now Rassemblement National) and Austria’s Freedom Party recast Arabs, Black communities and Turkish immigrants as a singular “Muslim” internal threat. The Dutch VVD warned about Islam’s challenge to liberal democracy as early as 1991, and Pim Fortuyn’s late-1990s book Against the Islamisation of Our Culture introduced more explicit anti-Muslim rhetoric into Dutch politics.

The attacks of September 11 created a global opening for those narratives. With President Bush’s Global War on Terror, official and media framing often treated Muslims collectively as potential threats, despite public claims the fight targeted terrorists rather than the religion itself. Bush’s stark formulation — that countries were either “with us or with the terrorists” — constrained political space in Europe, and the wars and security campaigns that followed amplified suspicion of Muslim communities across the continent.

European governments joined the US-led military campaigns in substantial numbers: more than 13 countries participated in Afghanistan and twelve in Iraq, with the UK and Poland among the most directly involved in Iraq and the UK heavily engaged in Afghanistan. At home, governments enacted counter-extremism measures and cooperated with US intelligence programmes, including rendition flights and hosting CIA 'black sites', while Guantanamo Bay became a focal point for detention without standard legal protections. The UK’s Prevent strategy is an example of domestic deradicalisation programming that grew out of this security paradigm.

Transatlantic networks of anti-Muslim activists and self-styled experts — including figures such as Pamela Geller, Frank Gaffney, Daniel Pipes and Robert Spencer — helped export and mainstream these framings. They formed the Counter-Jihad Movement, which used venues like the OSCE’s Human Dimension Implementation Meeting from 2007 to circulate its ideas in policy circles. From the late 2000s, coordinated campaigns targeted mosque construction and public visibility of Islam; the 2008 Cities Against Islamisation initiative and annual counter-jihad conferences brought far-right leaders and US activists together around shared opposition to mosque building and visible Muslim presence.

That mobilisation produced electoral returns and policy influence. Far-right parties pressured mainstream rivals to adopt tougher rhetoric, then translated that leverage into coalition roles in countries including Austria, Bulgaria, Hungary, the Netherlands, Italy, Norway, Poland and Finland. In Denmark and Sweden, they became kingmakers, shaping policy from outside government. Anti-Muslim legislation and regulations expanded in many places: bans on full-face veils, prohibitions on hijabs for teachers, students or public employees in some states, and growing restrictions — in some areas amounting to outright bans — on mosque construction. Those policy shifts reflect how securitised and Islamophobic narratives that gained traction after 2001 have altered the political landscape across Europe.