Fascist Interactions
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Fascist Interactions

Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919-1945

David D. Roberts

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eBook - ePub

Fascist Interactions

Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919-1945

David D. Roberts

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Although studies of fascism have constituted one of the most fertile areas of historical inquiry in recent decades, more and more scholars have called for a new agenda with more research beyond Italy and Germany, less preoccupation with definition and classification, and more sustained focus on the relationships among different fascist formations before 1945. Starting from a critical assessment of these imperatives, this rigorous volume charts a historiographical path that transcends rigid distinctions while still developing meaningful criteria of differentiation. Even as we take fascism seriously as a political phenomenon, such an approach allows us to better understand its distinctive contradictions and historical variations.

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PART I
PROBLEMS AND PROSPECTS

Chapter 1
NEW RESTIVENESS, NEW POSSIBILITIES, AND UNFINISHED BUSINESS IN FASCIST STUDIES

The New Restiveness against a Backdrop of Uncertainty and Contest

Among students of fascism we find evidence of renewed restiveness, even calls for a new agenda. Some propose that we are entering nothing less than a new age of fascist studies.1 More specifically, there is talk of a “transnational turn,” based on all that might be learned from a deeper focus on supranational interaction within the new Right in Europe during the era of the two world wars.2 That interaction certainly involved regimes and movements generally considered fascist, but it extended to wider reaches of the political Right and even beyond, raising questions about the significance of the embeddedness of fascism in a network of relationships.
The restiveness and assertiveness reflect new concerns, though these are interwoven with others that have been evident for decades. Indeed, before considering examples of the new restiveness, we must note that the new thinking has emerged against a backdrop of ongoing disagreement and contest that must be kept in mind. And whereas the proposed new directions surely promise to deepen the discussion, it is not clear that they adequately address all the unfinished business. Moreover, some seem to carry the potential for new modes of waywardness or overreaction. Considering together several instances of the new thinking reveals tensions that seem symptomatic and instructive.
In the present study I seek to draw out the implications of these adumbrations of a new agenda in an effort to clarify the possibilities and priorities. To some extent this is to draw out the implications for research priorities, but at this point we may need reconceptualization, even some tweaking in our sense of history, more than we need further research. Indeed, progress seems to require that we back up, rethink, shift angles, slice and dice differently.

Concern with the Aggregate

We continue to make good progress in our understanding of the several national cases at issue, and it sometimes seems that parallel histories of those cases, with comparison establishing something like an aggregate account, is all we need—or at least the best we can do. However, many are reluctant to settle for such nominalism. Yet it is especially when we seek to go beyond to address the aggregate that we find ourselves frustrated, dissatisfied. The most basic question is what the aggregate encompasses—some specifically fascist universe to be isolated, or the wider new universe on the Right? Fascism was obviously novel and came to overshadow the new Right at the time. But the circumstances bred lots of nationalist, anti-parliamentary, anti-communist departures, sometimes producing new extremes. So starting with fascism is teleological in one sense, possibly leading us to frame the novelty of the situation in an excessively dualistic way, pitting novel fascism against everything else. In thinking about the aggregate, in other words, we may pay too much attention to what we take to be specifically fascist phenomena and less to wider, more complex “fascistizing” directions. We may thereby miss essential aspects of the universe, including the place of fascism in it.
To consider the possibilities, we need first to recall something of the overall historical framework, obvious though it is in one sense. Fascism emerged from within the uncertain and largely unexpected situation that resulted in Europe from World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the revolutionary wave that followed elsewhere. The territorial settlement established by the Paris Peace Conference was itself destabilizing, though for some countries far more than others. The war had occasioned experiment with new relationships between the political and the economic spheres, but then it also brought a good deal of economic dislocation in its wake. At the same time, the war experience fostered new modes of political consciousness and mobilization. The war’s immediate aftermath saw a widespread increase in trade union membership and activity that, at least for a while, seemed to mesh with the ongoing challenge from the communist Left. Whatever the scope for, or danger of, revolutionary change, new forms of mass politics seemed inevitable. For good or for ill, it was a new world.
That postwar situation was but one phase of our continuing political experiment. Still, it was unusual, extreme, perhaps unprecedented in combining a sense of challenge, risk, and vulnerability with a sense of openness and the scope for experiment and innovation. Especially where the turn to parliamentary government or to new modes of parliamentary government proved disillusioning, the new situation seemed not only to invite but to demand such experiment. Individualistic liberal democracy was not necessarily the privileged goal of history, but neither was Marxist communism, especially as apparently being implemented under unforeseen circumstances in Russia/the Soviet Union, necessarily the privileged alternative.
So there was unanticipated experiment and novelty on what is conventionally called the Right, though the Left-Right axis could itself be challenged, with Vilfredo Pareto and Georges Sorel prominent intellectual antecedents. In the present study I will follow convention and refer to the new Right, but we will encounter reasons to question the Left-Right axis, and we must keep in mind that taking it for granted might impede our ability to grasp the novelty, and thus the energizing excitement, the sense of what was “modern” and progressive, among at least some of the departures at issue. We would thereby miss something important about the aggregate and the whole texture of the era.
In emphasizing the conjuncture growing from World War I, I am agreeing with Geoff Eley, who insists that “rather than any longer-term societal pathologies or deep-historical structures of political backwardness, … it was the contrasting outcomes of the war and the associated political settlements that primarily enabled the opening toward fascism.”3 In the case of Nazism, he notes that the earlier emphasis on a putative longer-term German Sonderweg, or special path, made it hard to grasp the impact of the war and its revolutionary aftermath in Germany as in much of Europe.4 Extending the point, he observes that whereas the comparative developmentalism that long framed thinking about fascism has been superseded to some extent, it remains influential, though, he insists convincingly, it is teleological, based on an ideal of modernization abstracted from the post-1945 liberal democratic West. Everything out of keeping with that abstract ideal is too readily imputed to backwardness, ruling out alternative possibilities within modernity itself.5
Philip Morgan has been especially effective in positing two waves in the emergence of fascism, with a divide in 1929.6 Although the degree of stabilization can be overstated, the uncertainly and volatility of the immediate postwar period seemed to have been overcome in much of Europe by the later 1920s. Then the Depression especially, but also the Stalinist turn in the Soviet Union by 1930, suggested the need and scope for further experiment. Although the effects of the Depression of course varied from country to country, it had some impact everywhere, and the Depression context obviously made parliamentary democracy even more difficult. Thus in Hungary, for example, there was a top-down departure from parliamentary democracy in 1932, though it proved abortive in large part, as we will see.
Then the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany further changed the context. Martin Blinkhorn usefully distinguishes the spontaneous, non-imitative forms of the new Right that characterized the 1920s from those inspired by Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany, in light of their perceived successes, after the onset of the Depression.7 Aristotle Kallis notes that the political gravitational field of fascism grew ever stronger during the late 1930s, producing the “fascistization” of large sections of the European Right.8
Yet even as we no doubt need to distinguish stages and periods, the cases throughout the era of the two world wars were interconnected, forming part of the same new universe. As the era progressed, in fact, further novelty kept adding to the framework, often in contingent, unintended ways. John Pollard notes how the anti-clerical violence on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War led many Catholics even elsewhere in Europe to perceive that war in apocalyptic terms, prompting them to turn toward fascism.9
Any consideration of the aggregate points to the long debated question of temporal limits to fascism. Was fascism confined to the particular era bounded by the two world wars, or has it continued or re-emerged in new forms since 1945? Those who treat fascism as an ongoing possibility may stretch the category in ways that mislead both about “classic” fascism and about new phenomena on the Right since 1945. But those who find fascism confined to its particular epoch tend to leave vague why and in what sense it could have been so historically specific. Any new agenda could be expected to provide some fresh perspective on this set of questions.
Even insofar as we delimit fascism to the era of the two world wars, we face a comparable question about geographical limits, about fascism outside Europe, with the Japanese case no doubt the most salient. Western specialists on Japan have their own reasons for restiveness, often feeling that the Japanese case, despite its significance to the period on other grounds, is too often marginalized on the basis of inappropriate criteria.10 Although my focus is on Europe, even assessing the place of European fascism requires asking about its impact beyond Europe and about the scope for indigenous departures outside Europe that might also be considered part of the fascist universe of the time.

Taking Seriously and Taking Too Seriously

In recent years we have heard explicitly proclaimed efforts to “take fascism seriously,” which has seemed to most specialists, at least, a positive step beyond the earlier tendency to dismiss fascism, in a moralistic and triumphalist way, as a mere “historical negativity.”11 Adrian Lyttelton recently remarked that the greatest advance in fascist studies over the last forty years has come precisely from taking the fascist self-understanding seriously. Explanations in terms of social base, once de rigueur, have been discredited as we have come to accept that the character of a movement can be explained only with reference to its aims and beliefs.12
By now it is widely held that fascism was not some revolt against modernity but the quest for an alternative modernity.13 This would imply that it was not merely an effort to catch up to the modern democracies through different, more extreme means—most obviously “developmental dictatorship” of some sort. And rather than merely counterrevolutionary or reactionary, fascism was in some sense “revolutionary in its own right,” to paraphrase Stanley Payne.14 Something like belief, as opposed to kleptocracy or even “power for its own sake,” fueled it, no matter how much, in our cynical mood, we might seek to reduce it to various modes of banality. Taking fascism seriously in these ways is not remotely to justify it but simply better to understand it—and the epoch in which it was central.
But even as the effort to take fascism seriously seemed an advance to many, others, continuing to find debunking appropriate, charge that “taking seriously” is merely to take the fascists at face value. R.J.B. Bosworth, concerned especially with Fascist Italy, is perhaps the most prominent example.15 Although the “face-value” accusation is surely overstated, such charges reflect a plausible sense that we may tend to an overblown conception of fascism, even if we know better than simply to accept the fascists’ own overblown claims. Bosworth’s skepticism also reflects his sense of the superficiality of fascism, which meant that its impact in Italy, vis-à-vis what would have been experienced there in any case, was more limited than we tend to recognize as we talk of “Fascist Italy” or “the Fascist period.”16
In principle, fascism can be taken seriously in an overtly negative mode, but some worry that the dominant ways of taking seriously have entailed too much neglect of the dark side, including the centrality of violence or dictatorship.17 Sticking with the Italian example, Paul Corner asks—provocatively—“Whatever happened to dictatorship?” as, taking Fascism seriously, we came to feature culture, style, liturgy, even the sacralization of politics.18
More specifically, connecting the dots for them to some extent, the skeptics plausibly worry that taking seriously means privileging a priori concepts that gloss over the heterogeneity and fissiparousness, the hollowness and even ephemerality, of fascism. Obviously, such ephemerality, or whatever it was, was in no sense incompatible with horrific consequences. But the skeptics plausibly worry that whatever its destructiveness, fascism can be taken too seriously, that perhaps because of its destructive outcomes, we tend to make too much of it in other respects. If we do indeed need to take it seriously yet may tend to take it too seriously, fascism seems to entail a singular combination of substance and hollowness difficult to understand in tandem. And indeed there has long seemed something odd, even anomalous, about the consistency of the novel set of phenomena we designate as “fascism,” making it especially hard to place the aggregate historically.

Questioning Generic Fascism

Even the Italian case, taken on its own, seems to entail an anomalous combination of partially conflicting elements difficult to put in convincing proportion. The problem obviously deepens when we seek to address something like the aggregate, fascism as a multi-national phenomenon, seemingly in some sense characteristic of the era of the two world wars. It is clear that the term “fascism” was coined, and embraced, by a new movement in Italy in 1919, but to what extent is it appropriate to apply the term more widely, generically, to a range of novel phenomena beyond Italy? Disagreement over the issue has been ongoing, coming peri...

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