Fascists and Conservatives

The Radical Right and the Establishment in Twentieth-Century Europe

Martin Blinkhorn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781134997114
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

What has between the `radical' and the `conservative' right in twentieth-century Europe? In Fascists and Conservatives thirteen distinguished authorities on the European right explore this major theme within Italy, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Britain, Austria, Romania, Greece adn the Nordic countries.

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Introduction Allies, rivals, or antagonists? Fascists and conservatives in modern Europe

Martin Blinkhorn

During the last twenty years, prodigious scholarly effort has gone into the study of fascism and the right in twentieth-century Europe. Quite apart from the study of particular fascist and national socialist movements and of individual right-wing regimes (Fascist Italy, the Third Reich, Franco’s Spain, etc.), scholars have striven to locate the essential nature of fascism; to determine what is distinctive about its ideas, programmes, policies and support; to identify what, if anything, differentiates it from other forms of rightism; and to decide whether a satisfactory definition of ‘fascism’ can be arrived at—or whether, indeed, the term has any descriptive or analytical value at all.¹

This volume is intended to assist the further consideration of these and related problems. Whilst paying due attention to ‘theories of fascism’, the approach of its thirteen contributors is in the main empirical. Its startingpoint is the recognition that there existed, in interwar Europe, at the very least a subjective distinction between the radical right, as represented in the main by fascism and national socialism, and the conservative right, as represented by constitutional conservatism and various strands of conservative authoritarianism closely or loosely linked to it. Our task has been to examine the relationship between these various strands of the right in a range of European settings, our purpose to analyse the correspondence, or lack of it, between this subjective distinction and objective reality. The settings in question include not only those where fascism or national socialism achieved, or at least shared, power (Italy, Germany, Spain, Austria, Romania) but also others (Portugal, France, Greece, the Nordic countries and Britain) in which the experience of radical fascism, and the fascist-conservative relationship, were in a variety of ways different.

First, it is necessary to go a little further in defining, or at least clarifying, our terms. This is neither an easy nor a satisfying task, since in cases such as those examined here, the definitions, typologies and taxonomies beloved of social scientists tend to fit uncomfortably the intractable realities which are the raw material of the historian. The more closely the data relating to the European right are scrutinized, the more lines stubbornly refuse to be drawn or, when drawn, to remain straight and motionless; exceptions disprove more rules than they prove; and all too rarely do the subjective and the objective coincide.

At the very least, however, we need a point of departure. Let us take fascism first, and begin with what is (almost) incontrovertible: namely, that Italian fascism provides us with models of both a fascist movement and a fascist regime. More or less simultaneously with the emergence of fascism in Italy, there also emerged in other European countries, especially those, like Italy, affected by war, demobilization and revolution or left-wing militancy—Germany, Austria, Finland, parts of the Balkans—significant popular movements with sufficient in common with Italian fascism quickly to be bracketed with it. Then, as time passed and as fascism in Italy ceased to be a mere movement and became a securely established regime, the term ‘fascism’, and the values, goals etc. associated with it, began to be deliberately adopted by new, imitative movements, from London to Athens and from Lisbon to Helsinki.

So far, so good. The picture soon becomes blurred, however, by a number of additional and related factors. It is necessary to recognize, first, that on the interwar European right there existed a plethora of organizations with authoritarian goals, some actually founded before 1914, others newly emerging, some working through parliamentary machinery, others extraparliamentary and paramilitary in character; and that within the political world of the right, the increasingly modish labels ‘fascism’ and ‘fascist’ were employed with little consistency. Secondly, during the course of the interwar period the whole of central, southern and eastern Europe succumbed to rightist, authoritarian regimes of one sort or another, of which few actually called themselves ‘fascist’ or ‘national socialist’ but most praised aspects of Italian fascism and Nazism and borrowed selectively from the examples they provided. Third, liberals and leftists, fearful of a general authoritarian trend of which Italian fascism was reckoned to be the standard-bearer, themselves began to apply the term ‘fascism’ loosely (but understandably) to a variety of right-wing movements, parties and regimes, by no means all of which saw themselves as ‘fascist’.

To produce a rigorous and consistent definition of ‘fascism’ against such a background is difficult, perhaps impossible—if only because no single definition will satisfactorily embrace both movements and regimes. Since no definition of ‘fascism’ can ever be universally accepted or objectively ‘correct’, what is needed is rather a valid and useful working approach which will assist our understanding of the right in general, and of the complex relationships within it. For our purpose it would probably be wisest to suggest (1) that movements and (much more rarely) regimes adopting the labels ‘fascist’, ‘national socialist’ and ‘national syndicalist’, or associating themselves with these causes, present no taxonomic problem; (2) that other movements of the authoritarian right—those, for example, with Catholic origins which claimed not to be ‘fascist’—must be considered empirically, in terms of both their subjective and their objective relationship to the radical right; and (3) that ostensibly ‘non-fascist’ regimes of the right present the most difficulty, since many rightist regimes, not excepting those of Mussolini and Hitler, represented a compromise between self-confessed fascism/national socialism and other forces.

‘Fascism’ has at least been the object of analytical scrutiny; conservatism much less so.² The contributors to this volume have, for the most part, approached this part of their task empirically. The ‘conservatives’ discussed here are, in the main, those who in the period concerned organized politically or otherwise in order to achieve two principal goals. The first of these was the defence of established social and economic interests, elites, hierarchies, etc., whether within a political system dominated by themselves (Britain, the Nordic countries); within one in which their political grip was shaky and their socioeconomic position threatened (Italy after 1919, Austria under the First Republic, perhaps France in the 1930s); or within one in which sudden political change had handed power—or at least office— to the left (Germany under Weimar, the Spain of the Second Republic). The second goal was the pursuit of modernizing, developmental policies within a ‘system of order’ in which their own control could be guaranteed and perpetuated. In some cases, ‘conservatism’ was a largely pragmatic affair; in others, notably that of Germany, it was associated with considerable ideological paraphernalia.

To state what is admittedly obvious, the early twentieth century was an unprecedentedly volatile and turbulent period in the history of Europe. Between the later nineteenth century and the Second World War, although the details and the pace of the process differed considerably from country to country, the dominant classes throughout much of the continent—and those who represented them politically—found themselves facing the arrival of mass politics, political democracy, popular pressure for social reform, and the possibility, at the very least, of left-wing revolution. Two major historical events, the First World War and the Russian Revolution, massively influenced both the sociopolitical realities of Europe and the individual and collective political consciousness of its inhabitants. In the response of Europe’s established elites to these and related challenges, fascism—that is, fascist movements and fascist ideas—sometimes played an important and complex part. Complex, since fascism, where it appeared, was at one and the same time a symptom and a product of contemporary change; a possible weapon whereby conservatives might deal with some of the other, unappealing aspects of change, notably the challenge of the left; and a possible threat in itself.

Already before 1914, the confident control of Europe’s incumbent elites, variously aristocratic and haut bourgeois, ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’, was wavering. Industrialization and urbanization, the capitalist transformation of agriculture, population migration, cultural modernization and secularization: these and related contemporary phenomena were breaking down existing forms of hierarchical and clientelist politics, confronting the politically dominant with the uncertainties of popular politics, the often unwelcome prospect of more genuine democracy, and the fast-advancing threat of socialism. Under these pressures, confidence in existing, mainly liberalparliamentary, principles and practices was liable to falter.

Throughout much of Europe, ‘constitutional’ conservatism was already, before fascism became a reality, subject to varying degrees of subversion by ideas and organizations of an authoritarian or corporatist character. The contributions in this volume illustrate, for example, how in the decade before the birth of fascism much of the German right was ideologically ‘Pan-Germanized’; how strong was the influence of the Italian Nationalist Association, elitist social theory and the ‘Return to the Statute’ school in Italy; how Maurassian ideas extended beyond France— where, indeed, their practical importance may if anything have been overstated by historians—to influence conservatives in, for example, Greece and more particularly Portugal. In Austria, the conservative Christian Socials took with them into the 1920s a populist, corporatist, chauvinist tradition, effectively mobilized by Karl Lueger, whilst in Spain the ‘alternative conservatism’ of Catholic traditionalism continuously beckoned any conservatives whose loyalty to the liberal system was at all shaky.

Of course, it is important not to exaggerate the seriousness of the authoritarian infection before 1918. The process was uneven, going furthest in Germany but in several other countries, notably Britain, affecting only the fringes of the established right. Even so, the question as to how much the attachment of conservatives to constitutional, parliamentary systems was a matter of conviction as distinct from self-interest is a very real one. The point is not so much that European conservatism was riddled with authoritarianism before fascism itself came along, as that by then there existed within the broad church of conservatism an authoritarian ingredient which, in various ways, was to inform the conservative-fascist relationship from the early 1920s onward. In almost every case these illiberal, usually authoritarian ideas, and those who held them, envisaged little in the way of any surrender of effective power by established elites; rather they represented a variety of notions as to how change might be restrained, negotiated or even directed in such a way as to obviate any loss of real power.

Any authoritarian tendencies, whether ideological or merely pragmatic, already present among European conservatives were both intensified and, in some cases, popularized by the complex crisis which hit Europe from 1917 onwards. The scale of that crisis is impossible to exaggerate, involving as it did the Russian Revolution and its impact; the convulsive effects of war, peace and demobilization; the agony of defeat or disappointment with the fruits of victory; radically shifting frontiers and populations; and the advent of new regimes and transformed political circumstances.

In much of postwar Europe, conservatives found themselves operating within a suddenly altered political world in which the control of established elites was overturned or at least seriously threatened. The advent of the Weimar Republic may not have brought down Germany’s social and institutional elites, but it deprived them of political dominance and seemed thereby to threaten their total destruction. Austrian conservatives found themselves left with a rump state of questionable national identity, in which socialism was ominously powerful. In Italy, the advent of virtually universal male suffrage and proportional representation thrust the country’s ‘liberal’ and Catholic elites into a mass-political arena for which they were illprepared. Greece and Romania, as David Close and Irina Livezeanu respectively tell us, found their polities transformed, the former by the arrival of several hundred thousand refugees from Asia Minor, the latter through the country’s doubling in size and population, and its loss of ethnic homogeneity. In both Romania and the newly independent state of Finland conservative anti-socialism was rendered all the more intense by the proximity of the Soviet Union. In situations such as these, in which liberal parliamentarism no longer offered a guarantee of lasting social hegemony, established elites and elements within conservative and sometimes even ‘liberal’ political parties were liable to find their devotion to parliamentarism wavering.

Nourished by the new climate, authoritarian ideas, groups, even movements and parties, operating on the margins of the ‘established’ right, proliferated during the 1920s and into the 1930s. The German ‘conservative revolutionaries’ discussed, from different angles, by Geoff Eley and Jeremy Noakes; the Austrian adherents of Othmar Spann and the assorted Spanish neo-traditionalists; the Portuguese Integralists and, later, the Acción Española intellectuals in Spain: these and other such groups built on existing intellectual and political traditions and stepped up their activities.

The appearance, out of the same postwar crisis—of which they were indeed the creatures—of fascism, Nazism and kindred radical-rightist movements complicated this situation immeasurably. It would be absurd to suggest that Italian fascism, the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei: NSDAP), the Austrian Heimwehr, the Romanian student nationalists and other ‘new’ movements of the 1920s owed nothing to previous right-wing, authoritarian ideas and organizations; on the contrary, in almost every instance a common ideological base is visible. Nevertheless in important respects—both ideological and social—they were different. For one thing, they were, in Geoff Eley’s words, ‘more extreme in every way’: shriller in their nationalism, more plebeian in composition and style, less respectful of tradition and of established hierarchies, more violent in their behaviour and, specifically and crucially, their anti-leftism. In some, though admittedly not all, cases, they possessed something of a leftist ancestry themselves, and employed as one weapon in their mixed armoury a quasi- or pseudo-leftist rhetoric. This was certainly true of the two movements which must inevitably shape our perceptions of ‘fascism’, namely, Italian fascism and the NSDAP. At the very least what we may now classify as ‘fascist’ movements tended to differentiate themselves from what Mosley, in the next decade, was to label the ‘old gang’ of conservative and liberal politicians and notables. Whatever may have happened later, these were genuine differences, both subjectively and objectively speaking.

The more or less spontaneous emergence of radical-rightist movements in the 1920s—spontaneous in the sense of being autochthonous and nonimitative— was later, mainly after the onset of economic depression in 1929, followed by the much more deliberate, even calculated, foundation of fascist, national socialist, or clearly fascisant movements inspired by the example and supposed success, first of Italian fascism and later of Nazism. The British Union of Fascists, the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista (JONS) and Falange Española in Spain, Norway’s Nasjonal Samling, Portuguese National Syndicalism, the Parti Populaire Français: these are just a few examples of the imitative fascism of the 1930s. It is important to stress the obvious, but all too often ignored, distinction between organizations such as these, and their predecessors which grew, so to speak, organically out of the postwar environment.

Discussion of the radical and the conservative right from the start of the 1920s must take account of divisions within the latter among convinced authoritarians, convinced constitutionalists and those who oscillated somewhere between. As John Stevenson makes clear, the vast majority of British Conservatives never seriously faltered in their attachment to a parliamentary system which was long-established, had evolved gradually and was dominated for much of the interwar period by a powerful Conservative Party. Save on the most uninfluential fringes, Britain lacked an ‘authoritarian’ tradition, and its interwar social order was considerably less convulsed than was the case in much of continental Europe; politically and constitutionally speaking, interwar Britain appears to have been almost in its entirety ‘conservative’. Although authoritarianism clearly exercised a greater influence among Conservatives in the four Nordic countries examined by Stein Larsen, ultimately constitutionalism appears to have held firm there also, even in Finland where it was seriously threatened in the early 1930s. In France, too, as Roger Austin shows, the weight of influential conservative opinion seems to have remained somewhat unenthusiastically loyal to the Third Republic. And it would be unjust to deny that significant numbers of political conservatives, and ‘establishment’ figures generally, in other European states retained a genuine, and not merely contingent, attachment to liberal freedoms, whatever the alternative temptations or punishments.

The fact remains that in many of the countries examined in this volume, conservative parties and the interests they represented shifted perceptibly rightwards after 1919. Quite apart from the radicalization of the German conservative right, we may observe the shift of Austrian Christian Socials towards ‘Austrofascism’ from the late 1920s on; the welcoming of dictatorship in Spain (1923) and Portugal (1926); the Clerico-Moderates’ embrace of authoritarianism in Italy; the Greek Populists’ drift towards authoritarianism in the early and mid-1930s; and the failure of conservative republicanism in the face of Catholic corporatism in the Spanish Second Republic.

The relationship of this process to fascism is far from straightforward. Fascism’s achievement of power in Italy probably could not have occurred without the complaisance of a variety of elite groups, conservative-liberal politicians, etc. While regarding Mussolini’s movement with considerable suspicion, these elements were nevertheless impressed by its patriotism, youthful energy, mass base and strike-breaking capacity, and convinced that, even if given a taste of power, it could be manipulated in the establishment’s interests. In this, as John Pollard writes of the Italian Catholic right, they suffered from an ‘erroneous perception’ of fascism. Something of a pattern was established in Italy in 1921/2 that was to be repeated elsewhere, though not always with the same outcome. A decade later in Germany, Conservative politicians and elite groups were just as confident that they could ‘tame’ Nazism, and even more mistaken. Other instances, however, were more favourable to the conservative right. The Austrian Christian Socials and sections of the fascist Heimwehr existed from the outset in a state of symbiosis. In the case of France, Austin shows how conservative manipulation of Doriot’s Parti Populaire Français (PPF) seems to have fulfilled most of the aims which lay behind it, while more serious problems for the Fédération Républicaine and the Radicals arose when La Rocque’s Parti Social Français (PSF) moved away from its earlier ‘street’ fascism towards a more orthodox position. The attractiveness of fascism as the hard edge of conservatism was even briefly apparent in Britain, though it is doubtful if Lord Rothermere’s ephemeral enthusiasm for the British Union of Fascists (BUF) really reflected a much broader Conservative position; this is not, of course, to suggest that in conditions of political instability and a deteriorating economy—the reverse of those which obtained in the Britain of the mid-1930s—the situation might not have been different.

It is not, however, simply a matter of what attitude conservative parties, their supporters and the interests they represented took towards autonomous fascist parties. The installation of the Fascist regime in Italy, especially after the erection of a dictatorship in January 1925, created a model which served not merely for would-be imitators such as Mosley or Quisling but also, albeit usually in a more selective way, for elements within the conservative right itself. This operated in a variety of contexts, affecting conservative parties within parliamentary systems as well as authoritarian regimes with non-fascist, essentially conservative, origins. Larsen shows the extent to which fascism and national socialism ate into Nordic conservatism, inspiring a rash of fascisant splinter-groups and interest associations, and in particular infecting conservative youth movements. He also shows, however, that constitutional conservatives successfully beat off the radical-rightist challenge. In Spain, the Confederación Española de Derechas Autonomas (CEDA), on behalf of policies which its leaders insisted were not fascist, employed a ‘style’ which certainly was; here too the party’s youth movement, the Juventud de Acción Popular (JAP), suffered at the very least what Stanley Payne has called ‘the vertigo of fascism’—and arguably more. Explicitly authoritarian movements of the conservative right were naturally even more prey to fascist influence, in terms of both style and acceptance of extreme solutions; just as Italian Nationalism and conservative Catholicism quickly found a home in the Fascist regime, so in Spain the monarchist right under the Second Republic developed its own brand of ‘monarcho-fascism’ and leaders such as Calvo Sotelo happily donned the ‘fascist’ label. The Austrian Heimwehr, while implicitly fascist in style and operation throughout its existence, adopted an explicitly fascist programme in 1930.

‘Non-fascist’ regimes, too, were affected, though by no means all in the same way. Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship, in the Spain of the 1920s, may have originated in a ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Introduction Allies, rivals, or antagonists? Fascists and conservatives in modern Europe
• 2 Italian fascism: radical politics and conservative goals
• 3 Conservative Catholics and Italian fascism: the Clerico-Fascists
• 4 Conservatives and radical nationalists in Germany: the production of fascist potentials, 1912–28
• 5 German Conservatives and the Third Reich: an ambiguous relationship
• 6 Conservatives and fascists in Austria, 1918–34
• 7 Conservatism, traditionalism and fascism in Spain, 1898–1937
• 8 Populism and parasitism: the Falange and the Spanish establishment 1939–75
• 9 Conservatism, dictatorship and fascism in Portugal, 1914–45
• 10 The conservative right and the far right in France: the search for power, 1934–44
• 11 Conservatism, authoritarianism and fascism in Greece, 1915–45
• 12 Fascists and conservatives in Romania: two generations of nationalists
• 13 Conservatives and fascists in the Nordic countries: Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland, 1918–45
• 14 Conservatism and the failure of fascism in interwar Britain
• List of contributors