[6] Critics have called the project a form of "global apartheid" and "separate but equal" doctrine,[6][7] and many specialists have described the idea as a strategic attempt to legitimise racial supremacist views in public opinion by imitating egalitarian, anti-totalitarian, antiracist, or environmental discourses of the progressive movement.
[10][11][7] The concept, formulated in its modern form by French political theorist and Nouvelle Droite founding member Alain de Benoist,[7] is closely associated with the European New Right and the Identitarian movement.
"[15] In the 1960s, the euro-nationalist magazine Europe-Action, in which Alain de Benoist then worked as a journalist, drew influence from the so-called "Message of Uppsala",[11] a text likely written in 1958 by French far-right activists related to the New European Order, a neo-fascist movement led by Binet.
[3][17] De Benoist claims that indigenous cultures in Europe are being threatened by the liberal worldview promoted by the United States, and that pan-European nationalism founded on the idea of ethnopluralism would stop this process.
Inspired by Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Ich und Du concept, de Benoist defined "identity" as a "dialogical" phenomenon in We and the Others ("Nous et les autres", 2006).
[25] If ethnopluralists use the concept of "cultural differentialism" to assert a "right to difference" and propose regional policies of ethnic and racial separatism, there is no agreement among them upon the definition of group membership, nor where these hypothetical borders would lie.
[9] Left-wing historian Rasmus Fleischer has speculated that Jews and Roma are implicitly absent from the ethnopluralist world map because, in the vision of "multi-fascists", both minorities should be "eliminated in order to make room for a peaceful utopia.