Extremist Politics: The recent electoral drubbing of Austria's best-known fascist, Jorg Haider, may be the death knell of his particularly obnoxious form of extremism.
However, Haider's legacy appears to be alive and well in other countries in mainland Europe, where mainstream parties have responded to the rise of such anti-immigration political opponents by adopting elements of their policies.
In Preachers of Hate: The Rise of the Far Right, the BBC's Europe Correspondent Angus Roxburgh charts the progress of eight political parties, generally led by populist leaders, who have "chipped away like an axe at the complacent heart of Europe's democracies and in some cases split them asunder".
He explores the policies and appeal of politicians like France's Jean-Marie Le Pen, who upset the political establishment with his spectacular success in the first round of this year's presidential election, to Pim Fortuyn, dubbed "Holland's Haider", who swept the local elections in Rotterdam last March before being assassinated.
The book combines solid analysis with a pacey journalistic tone and is peppered with interesting first-hand anecdotes from the experienced reporter who has covered elections throughout Europe.
Like any good journalist, Roxburgh sets the scene in which the far right parties have gained strength. He points out how rising national sentiment in a post Cold-War world coincided with resentment over the arrival of refugees and economic immigrants from wars in the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan as well as from Iraq and Turkey.
He illustrates how the far right capitalised on these developments as well as seizing upon growing moves towards "ever closer union" at European level, with faceless and bureaucratic Brussels becoming a "hate word, the symbol of lost national powers".
Other common trends are exploitation of contemporary anxieties over crime and unemployment and remote, corrupt or insensitive governments. In 21st-century Europe, anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiment has replaced anti-Jewish or anti-communist sentiment.
Roxburgh says that, by mid-2001, far-right parties thrived in such climates of uncertainty, with the Freedom Party sharing power in Austria; the Flemish nationalist Vlaams Blok garnering more than 30 per cent of the vote at city level in Belgium; and the inclusion of two extreme-right politicians, Umberto Bossi and Gianfranco Fini, in the Italian government led by Silvio Berlusconi.
Far-right politics has largely moved on from the days of the thuggish skinhead; the new proponents of illiberality are well-dressed and sophisticated men and women.
While drawing on common strands between different countries, Roxburgh is careful to state that the far right comes in many diverse manifestations. What its leaders all share is a contempt for humanity in their search for cheap and easy scapegoats for the nation's ills. Its populist leaders are "sugar-coated preachers of hate, and their influence is spreading," says Roxburgh.
While anxious to make it clear that none of leaders he writes about is a new Hitler, he asks whether the recent trend is a historic blip or the beginning of a new Dark Age.
He concludes that the threat today is more of a descent into illiberality than a return to 1930s-style fascism, while warning that Europe must remain on its guard, not against populists and demagogues themselves but against "those who now masquerade in their clothes while pretending to be liberal".
Nuala Haughey is Social and Racial Affairs Correspondent of The Irish Times
Preachers of Hate. By Angus Roxburgh. Gibson Square Books, 320 pp. £18.99