From ‘Wokeism’ to ‘Le Wokeisme’: Diffusion of Anti-Wokeness as a Far-Right Master Frame From the United States to France

The transnationalization of the far right is a noteworthy and evolving phenomenon, characterized by extensive networks of actors, their collaborative activities and the exchange of novel ideas and frames. The emergence and cross-national spread of ‘anti-wokeness’ is a recent trend in the ongoing transnationalization process. As a concept to criticize the woke ideas while promoting the illiberal and conservative ones, anti-wokeness emerged in the United States during the 2010s, yet it has also been rapidly adopted by the political, social and intellectual actors in many European countries—among which France represents a paradigmatic case. This research note, which is a pilot study under a broader research project, investigates this cross-national spread of anti-wokeness and addresses the questions of why and how anti-wokeness as a popular frame of far-right politics has diffused from the United States to France recently. Drawing on the analysis of social media content and in-depth interviews with far-right/conservative figures, we propose an analytical framework that frames the spread of anti-wokeness as a phenomenon of the transnationalization of the far right through the cross-national diffusion of a master frame.