Fascism and the Right in Europe 1919-1945

Martin Blinkhorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138172357
• eBook ISBN: 9781317898030
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This new text places interwar European fascism squarely in its historical context and analyses its relationship with other right wing, authoritarian movements and regimes. Beginning with the ideological roots of fascism in pre-1914 Europe, Martin Blinkhorn turns to the problem-torn Europe of 1919 to 1939 in order to explain why fascism emerged and why, in some settings, it flourished while in others it did not. In doing so he considers not just the 'major' fascist movements and regimes of Italy and Germany but the entire range of fascist and authoritarian ideas, movements and regimes present in the Europe of 1919-1945.

PART ONE

BACKGROUND

CHAPTER ONE

PROBLEMS OF STUDYING FASCISM

Let us begin by imagining three political maps of Europe. The first bears the caption ‘January 1920’, immediately following the promulgation of the Versailles Treaty and some months after the overthrow of short-lived Soviet regimes in Hungary and Bavaria. The second is dated ‘Summer 1939’, a few weeks before the outbreak of the Second World War in Europe. The third is labelled ‘Winter 1941–42’, showing the continent at the peak of Nazi Germany’s European hegemony. On all three maps, each country is coloured according to its official constitutional status: communist states red, constitutional democracies white, and right-wing dictatorships black. Looking at the first map, we immediately see that west of the red of Soviet Russia, and perhaps with the exception of a decidedly grey Hungary, Europe is completely white. The second map, however, presents a very different picture: the Soviet Union is still of course red, but the white area has retreated to roughly the northwestern quadrant: France, Switzerland, the Benelux countries, the Nordic countries (including Finland and Iceland), Britain and Ireland. The rest of Europe stands out as black. Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, dismembered Czechoslovakia, Poland, the three Baltic states, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Greece are all now subject to one or another form of right-wing authoritarian regime. Moving our gaze finally to the third map, we see that now only Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland remain as white islands in a vast blackness whose eastern boundaries, furthermore, have been pushed hundreds of miles into the otherwise still stubbornly red Soviet Union.

Clearly, Europe between 1919 and the middle of the Second World War witnessed a broad historical process whereby the liberal democracies of the immediate post-1919 period were challenged, and in many cases overturned, by what for the moment we may loosely call right-wing forces. Moreover, and as the second of our three maps showed us, most of this process occurred before the outbreak of war in 1939, even if German arms then carried it further. In part because the first truly dramatic example of this tendency (though not actually the very first) called itself ‘fascism’, and because Fascist Italy then attracted enormous interest and publicity throughout Europe and the wider world, that term came at the time to be loosely applied to many other right-wing movements and regimes, and indeed has sometimes been applied to the whole interwar period: the so-called ‘era of fascism’. Contemporary observers of left-wing or liberal persuasion can scarcely be condemned for seeing all or most of the right-wing ideas, movements and regimes of their day, however they might differ in detail, as members of one family; all appeared hostile to representative democracy, free trade unionism, and the essential liberal freedoms of speech, publication, movement and assembly, while under all such ‘fascist’ regimes, not only were free institutions suppressed but also those who upheld them were liable to be persecuted.

It would be wrong to lose sight of these common features, or too readily to accuse of over-generalization or inaccuracy those who viewed them as variant manifestations of a single – and malign – phenomenon. Such a view of ‘fascism’ conveys the spirit of its time, possesses its own quite genuine validity, and transmits to our own age at least as much contemporary ‘reality’ as any other. Nevertheless even the most casual glance at interwar Europe ought to be enough to convince the student of history that beneath the hastily applied label of ‘fascism’ lay a very broad range of ideas, individuals, organizations and regimes, the diversity of which historians are obliged to recognize. Some of these embraced the name ‘fascist’ with enthusiasm, while others rejected it. Some preferred the label ‘national socialist’, raising questions concerning the relationship between these two forces. Some took ‘fascism’ very seriously, stressing those features which they believed distinguished it from other elements of the far right; others used it selectively and even cynically, to disguise conservative realities with a usually thin veneer of something more radical.

Given this diversity, some Europeans during the interwar years, at first chiefly on the conservative right but, mostly rather later, also on the liberal centre and the socialist left, preferred to stress the differences rather than the common characteristics within the contemporary right. For conservatives, the aim in doing so was to distance themselves from something with which, fairly or not, they were often linked, but which they distrusted; for liberals and socialists, the goal was to achieve a subtler understanding of the right’s complexities, the better to resist the threat it posed them. Either way, such observers insisted that fascism, chiefly by virtue of its radicalism, was intrinsically different from other forms of right-wing expression, organization and government, however authoritarian these might be. With this, of course, albeit for their own reasons, self-confessed fascists were in full agreement: their cause, in their eyes, was above all revolutionary.

A similar emphasis upon the differentiation between ‘fascism’ and the rest of the right has also come to dominate the scholarly study of fascism since the Second World War. This has been especially true since the 1960s, when ‘fascist studies’ truly began to take shape as the academic heavy industry which it remains today, more than half a century after the destruction of the Third Reich. Over the past thirty years, armies of political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and historians of various kinds have sought to isolate the essential, distinguishing features of fascism, their goal being a generally acceptable definition of an elusive phenomenon nowadays usually termed ‘generic fascism’.

The quest for the Holy Grail of ‘generic fascism’ has seldom been less than intellectually stimulating. Central to it, nevertheless, are problems which – notwithstanding recent claims that a ‘new consensus’ on the subject may be emerging [2 p. 14] – stubbornly refuse to go away. Most serious scholars studying fascism agree that the term must be used with some attempt at precision – though one, Gilbert Allardyce, did suggest some years ago that since this was impossible, it should be abandoned altogether as an analytic category [1]. (Since inviting the luminaries of ‘fascist studies’ to do this was on a par with asking turkeys to vote for Christmas, it is unsurprising that Allardyce’s suggestion fell on unreceptive ears.) Yet for all the effort expended, no agreement or consensus has yet emerged on how the term ‘fascism’ should be used, or indeed on exactly what it is that so many have been attempting to define. Is ‘fascism’ a set of ideas and goals? Is it a particular type of political movement embodying a distinctive political ‘style’? Is it, rather, a type of regime, irrespective of the kind of movement or movements which may have helped to create it, or of how it came into existence at all? Is it possible to produce a single definition which will encompass all of these things (and more)? And what about the relationship of fascism with nazism? Are ‘fascism’ and ‘national socialism’ essentially synonymous as analytic categories, variations on a single theme, or actually quite different? Is ‘fascism’ historically defined by its period, and post-1945 ‘neo-fascism’ something quite distinct, or – a very real question today – is fascism, once having been created, an enduring phenomenon? These and other difficult questions remain to taunt us.

This is a work of history, written by a historian, which sets out to investigate these issues in as down-to-earth a manner as their complexity permits. It aims to explore the intellectual and cultural origins of fascism, its emergence and development between the two world wars, the reasons for its successes and failures in pursuing power, and its relationship – as a body of ideas, as a species of political movement, and as a system of power – with other forms of right-wing authoritarianism and radicalism. Little attempt will be made here to force fluid historical phenomena into the kind of rigid, or perhaps it would be better to say static, analytic categories that a quest for ‘generic fascism’ too often seems to require. Indeed, the book’s central theme or argument may be said to be precisely that fascism needs to be understood in terms of its metamorphosis as it moves (sometimes) from theory to movement and then (more rarely) from movement to regime. It is this process and its implications which have largely dictated the book’s structure, and which inform the modest attempt to end it, not so much with a definition of fascism, as with a template against which fascism, and its relationship with the right as a whole, may be examined.

Nevertheless, whatever we may ultimately conclude, it is necessary to establish some terminological points of departure. As is implicit in much of what has already been said, my starting point is that it is possible to identify a collection of ideas and goals, many with their origins in pre-1914 Europe, but maturing after 1919, which we may broadly call ‘fascist’. Very broadly speaking, these ideas were, in their various settings, ultra-nationalist and sometimes, though not always, racist; their exponents viewed their respective nations, and in all probability Western civilization as a whole, as ‘decadent’ and in need of cultural revitalization; they sought to replace liberal, parliamentary, democratic institutions, seen as epitomizing decadence in the political sphere, with some kind of authoritarian system manned by a new ruling elite; and all, bitterly anti-Marxist, sought a ‘national’ revolution that would bind society together within a new social order. Fascists thus claimed to stand well apart from other, even extreme rightists in wanting far more than the deployment of authoritarian means to defend the existing social order.

Identifying ideas and goals as ‘fascist’ is all very well, but we also need to consider the relationship, in a variety of national contexts, of these ideas to the movements that espoused them, to the individuals who joined or otherwise supported those movements, to other political organizations who shared some but not all of their outlook, and to the various right-wing dictatorships which fastened upon Europe between the early 1920s and the end of the Second World War. It is here that the clear distinctions perceptible in the ideological sphere start to become problematical. Some political movements wholeheartedly embraced ‘fascist’ ideas and pursued most or all of the goals implied by them. Others, spontaneously or by calculation, operated more selectively, adopting only some unambiguously fascist ideas and goals, and tempering them with powerful elements of a more conventional conservatism. Yet others shared with out-and-out fascists little more than a common hostility towards democracy and the left, viewing fascism as scarcely less suspect and threatening.

Most problematical of all is the question of what constitutes a fascist regime. On the one hand, some regimes with little in the way of a prior ‘fascist’ ideological or organizational input adopted much of the appearance, ‘style’ and even substance of fascism. On the other hand, it might be suggested that beneath the glossy surface of the Italian Fascist regime there lurked an essentially conservative reality so marked as to define its very character: thus Italian Fascism, the prototypical model by which ‘fascism’ must surely be measured, paradoxically may have been less ‘fascist’ than it claimed and even appeared. Especially to the extent that this last point possesses validity, the question arises: where, then, does the National Socialist Third Reich fit in any general analysis of fascism? What, more particularly, was the relationship of Nazi excesses and above all the Holocaust to ‘fascism’? The purpose of this short book is to make some sense of this complex and bewildering collection of conundrums.

European fascism is, and always will be, inextricably associated with the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second. Yet while very much the product of its age, and unimaginable as a potent force without the combined impact of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, many if not most of its intellectual and ideological genes are traceable back to the Europe of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is to this very different Europe that we must now therefore turn.

CHAPTER TWO

FORETASTES OF FASCISM IN PRE-1914 EUROPE

It is essential to be cautious when speaking of ‘foretastes of fascism’ before the First World War, in an age when the word ‘fascism’ had yet to be coined and most of the conditions which enabled fascism to flourish had yet to come about. There must be no suggestion that any discernible prewar ‘roots’ of fascism were roots only of fascism, or on the other hand that their existence in any way rendered inevitable either the appearance of fascism or, where relevant, its success. Like any important historical phenomenon, fascism was the product of both long-term and more immediate factors, without either of which it could never have existed in recognizable form. This section considers some of the former. And since the beginnings of fascism – whatever else it may have become – lay in the realm of culture and ideas, it is with these that we shall begin.

EUROPEAN LIBERALISM AT THE CROSSROADS

The century before 1914 in Europe has often been labelled the ‘liberal century’, or something along those lines. By the turn of the century, almost the whole of Europe west of the Russian Empire was governed by political systems containing at least some degree of parliamentary representation; with the introduction of the Duma following the 1905 revolution, even Russia might have been thought to be moving, however uncertainly, in a similar direction. Most of urban Europe, at least, may also be said to have enjoyed a liberal culture, boosted by rising literacy and revolutionized communications, and characterized by ideological pluralism, a varied press, a vigorous literary, artistic, musical and theatrical life, and so on. Economically speaking, both urban/industrial and rural/agrarian Europe by this time were integrated into a capitalist economy wherein property could be freely bought and sold, while both employers and, increasingly, labour were permitted to organize in furtherance of their interests. Although traditional landed aristocracies still carried considerable social and indeed political weight, both their ranks and their power were subject to more or less continuous erosion and challenge from members of the financial, commercial, industrial and professional middle class [19].

Closer scrutiny nevertheless reveals a more complex picture. For all the proliferation of parliaments and widening of suffrage, most European countries in the years immediately before the First World War were still some way from being fully developed democracies and many could not yet claim to possess genuinely representative or responsible government. For example, in the German Empire, founded in 1871, while the (all-male) suffrage was broad and elections more or less honestly run, governments were answerable to the emperor rather than to the national parliament, the Reichstag, and through it the electorate. Much the same was true in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In Italy, a self-consciously ‘liberal’ state, anything approaching universal male suffrage arrived only in 1912. As Italy entered the war in 1915 it was still unclear whether the country would be able to negotiate a difficult political transition, namely from the ‘oligarchic’ liberal system introduced following Unification in 1861 to a modern, mass democracy. Spain possessed universal male suffrage from 1890, but elections were manipulated by the ministry of the interior and political bosses known as caciques – practices which, naturally with important national and local variations, operated throughout southern and southeastern Europe: in Italy, Portugal, Greece, Romania and the other young Balkan nations. Women were still disenfranchised throughout the whole of Europe except, after 1906, in Norway and Finland, the latter an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. Generalizing, one might suggest that much of Europe in the years before 1914 remained under the political control of elites – part aristocratic, part wealthy bourgeois – who accepted parliamentary liberalism because they could control it, while still resisting outright democracy for fear that that control would be lost.

At least two major challenges to this elite dominance were emerging, both reflections of a rapidly urbanizing, more complex, faster changing, and less e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Note on Referencing System
• Author’s Acknowledgements
• Publisher’s Acknowledgements
• Maps
• PART ONE: BACKGROUND
• PART TWO: ANALYSIS
• PART THREE: CONCLUSIONS
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Who’s Who
• Bibliography
• Index