The New Faces of Fascism

Populism and the Far Right

Enzo Traverso

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788730488
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Faschismus & Totalitarismus

What does Fascism mean at the beginning of the twenty-first century? When we pronounce this word, our memory goes back to the years between the two world wars and envisions a dark landscape of violence, dictatorships, and genocide. These images spontaneously surface in the face of the rise of radical right, racism, xenophobia, islamophobia and terrorism, the last of which is often depicted as a form of "Islamic fascism." Beyond some superficial analogies, however, all these contemporary tendencies reveal many differences from historical fascism, probably greater than their affinities. Paradoxically, the fear of terrorism nourishes the populist and racist rights, with Marine Le Pen in France or Donald Trump in the US claiming to be the most effective ramparts against "Jihadist fascism". But since fascism was a product of imperialism, can we define as fascist a terrorist movement whose main target is Western domination? Disentangling these contradictory threads, Enzo Traverso's historical gaze helps to decipher the enigmas of the present. He suggests the concept of post-fascism -a hybrid phenomenon, neither the reproduction of old fascism nor something completely different-to define a set of heterogeneous and transitional movements, suspended between an accomplished past still haunting our memories and an unknown future.

Part I

The Present as History

1

FROM FASCISM TO POSTFASCISM

Definitions

The rise of the radical right is one of the most remarkable features of our current historical moment. In 2018, the governments of eight countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) are led by far-right, nationalist, and xenophobic parties. These parties also have polarized the political terrain in three major EU countries: in France, the National Front lost the presidential election run-off in 2017, having reached the extraordinary high of 33.9 percent of the vote; in Italy, the Lega Nord has become the hegemonic force of the right-wing front and created a new government, thus marginalising Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia; and in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland entered the Bundestag in 2017 with almost 13 percent of the vote, a result that significantly weakened the position of Chancellor Angela Merkel and compelled the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to renew its coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The frequently praised ‘German exception’ has vanished, and Merkel has announced her intention to rethink her ‘generous’ policies toward immigrants and refugees. Outside the EU, Putin’s Russia and some of its satellites are far from being the only bastions of nationalism. With the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, the rise of a new nationalist, populist, racist, and xenophobic right has become a global phenomenon. The world had not experienced a similar growth of the radical right since the 1930s, a development which inevitably awakens the memory of fascism. Its ghost has reappeared in contemporary debates and reopens the old question of the relationship between historiography and the public use of the past. As Reinhart Koselleck reminded us, there is a tension between historical facts and their linguistic transcription¹: concepts are indispensable for thinking about historical experience, but they can also be used to grasp new experiences, which are connected to the past through a web of temporal continuity. Historical comparison, which tries to establish analogies and differences rather than homologies and repetitions, arises from this tension between history and language.

Today, the rise of the radical right displays a semantic ambiguity: on the one hand, almost no one openly speaks of fascism—with the notable exceptions of the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, or the National Party in Slovakia—and most observers recognize the differences between these new movements and their 1930s ancestors. On the other hand, any attempt to define this new phenomenon does imply a comparison with the interwar years. In short, the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality. Therefore, I will call the present moment a period of postfascism. This concept emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation; it certainly does not answer all the questions that have been opened up, but it does emphasize the reality of change.

First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that ‘the survival of National Socialism within democracy’ was potentially more dangerous than ‘the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy’.² In 1974, Pier Paolo Pasolini depicted the anthropological models of neoliberal capitalism as a ‘new fascism’ compared to which the regime of Mussolini appeared irremediably archaic, as a kind of ‘paleofascism’.³ And in even more recent decades, many historians seeking to provide interpretations of Berlusconi’s Italy recognized its intimacy—if not its filiation—with classical fascism. Of course, there were enormous differences between this regime and historical fascism—the cult of the market instead of the state, television advertisements instead of ‘oceanic parades’, and so on—but Berlusconi’s plebiscitary conception of democracy and charismatic leadership strongly evoked the fascist archetype.⁴

This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic,⁵ but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it. To say that the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are democracies does not mean to posit the identity of their political systems or to pretend that they correspond to the Athenian democracy of Pericles’s age. In the twenty-first century, fascism will not take the face of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco; nor (we might hope) will it take the form of totalitarian terror. Yet it is also clear that there are many different ways to destroy democracy. Ritual references to the threats to democracy—and in particular Islamic terrorism—usually depict the enemy as external, but they forget a fundamental lesson from the history of fascism: that democracy can be destroyed from within.

Indeed, fascism is a key part of our historical consciousness and our political imaginary, but many aspects of today’s context complicate this historical reference. Prominent among these new circumstances is the rise of Islamist terrorism, which commentators and political actors often define as ‘Islamic fascism’. Since the new radical right portrays itself precisely as a bastion opposed to this ‘Islamic fascism’, the word ‘fascism’ appears more like an obstacle to our understanding than a useful category of interpretation. This is why the notion of ‘postfascism’ seems more appropriate. Notwithstanding its evident limits, it helps us to describe a phenomenon in transition, a movement that is still in transformation and has not yet crystallised. For this very reason, ‘postfascism’ does not have the same status as the concept of ‘fascism’. The historiographical debate on fascism is still open, but it defines a phenomenon whose chronological and political boundaries are clear enough. When we speak of fascism, there is no ambiguity as to what we are talking about, but the new forces of the radical right are a heterogeneous and composite phenomenon. They do not exhibit the same traits in every country, even in Europe: from France to Italy, from Greece to Austria, from Hungary to Poland and Ukraine, they have certain points in common but are also very different from one another.

Postfascism should also be distinguished from neofascism, that is, the attempt to perpetuate and regenerate an old fascism. That is particularly true of the various parties and movements that have emerged in central Europe over the last two decades (Jobbik in Hungary, for instance) that openly assert their ideological continuity with historical fascism. Postfascism is something else: in most cases, it does indeed come from a classical fascist background, but it has now changed its forms. Many movements belonging to this constellation no longer claim such origins and clearly distinguish themselves from neofascism. In any case, they no longer exhibit an ideological continuity with classical fascism. In trying to define them, we cannot ignore the fascist womb from which they emerged, insofar as these are their historical roots, but we should also consider their metamorphoses. They have transformed themselves, and they are moving in a direction whose ultimate outcome remains unpredictable. When they have settled as something else, with precise and stable political and ideological features, we will have to coin some new definition. Postfascism belongs to a particular regime of historicity—the beginning of the twenty-first century—which explains its erratic, unstable, and often contradictory ideological content, in which antinomic political philosophies mix together.

The National Front, a French movement with a well-known history, epitomizes these transformations. It is in many regards an emblematic force, given its recent success and its presence today in the European political spotlight. When the National Front was founded in 1972, it was obvious that it had sprung from the womb of French fascism. Then over the next decades it managed to bring together various currents of the far right, from nationalists to Catholic-fundamentalists, Poujadists and colonialists (in particular, nostalgists for Algérie française). The key of this successful operation possibly was the relatively short historical distance that separated it from Vichy and France’s colonial wars. The fascist component was able to bring the others together and served as the driving force of the party at the moment of its foundation.

The National Front had begun to evolve already in the 1990s, but it was only when Marine Le Pen became its leader in 2011 that the party really started to shed its skin.⁶ Its discourse changed, and it no longer claimed its old ideological and political principles; it even significantly repositioned itself on the French political stage. Concerned for its respectability, the National Front sought to join the Fifth Republic system, putting itself forward as a ‘normal’, painless alternative choice. Of course, it opposed the European Union and the traditional establishment, but it no longer wished to appear as a subversive force. Unlike classical fascism, which wanted to change everything, the National Front’s ambition is now to transform the system from within. One might object that even Mussolini and Hitler conquered power through legal channels, but the objection doesn’t hold; their will to overthrow the rule of law and wipe out democracy was clearly affirmed.

Far more than a political legacy, Marine Le Pen’s line of descent from the early National Front takes the form of biological filiation: it was the father who handed power to the daughter, thus giving the movement clear dynastic traits. But this nationalist party is now led by a woman, which is something wholly unprecedented for a fascist movement. The National Front is also marked by tensions which are most obviously apparent in the ideological conflict between father and daughter, and indeed between those currents attached to the early National Front and those that want to transform it into something else. The National Front has begun a metamorphosis, a change of line, which has not yet crystallised; the transformation is still ongoing.

Europe

In the face of this new far-right ascension, it would be a dangerous illusion to look at the EU as the ‘remedy’. Despite a huge rhetoric about the European idea, the outcome of several decades of EU policies is institutional failure. The contrast between contemporary EU elites and their ancestors is compelling. It is so strong that, by reaction, one would be tempted to admire its founding fathers. I am not speaking of the intellectuals that, like Altiero Spinelli, imagined a federal Europe in the middle of a terrible war. I am thinking of the architects of the EU: Konrad Adenauer, Alcide de Gasperi, and Robert Schuman. As Susan Watkins recently reminded us, all of these figures were born in the 1880s, at the apogee of nationalism, and grew up in a time in which people travelled in horse-drawn carriages.⁷ They probably shared a certain European conception of Germany: Adenauer had been mayor of Cologne, De Gasperi had represented the Italian minority in the Hapsburg Parliament, and Schuman grew up in Strasburg, in German Alsace before 1914. When they met, they spoke German, but they defended a cosmopolitan and multicultural vision of Germany, far from the tradition of Prussian nationalism and Pan-Germanism.⁸ They had a vision of Europe, which they sketched as a common destiny in a bipolar world, and they had courage, insofar as they proposed this project to peoples that had just come out from a continental civil war. Their plan of economic integration—coal and steel—rested on political will. They conceived a common market as the first step toward political unification, not as an act of submission to financial interests. For better and for worse, Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand were the last to act like statesmen. They did not have the same stature as their predecessors, but neither were they simple executives of banks and international financial institutions.

The generation that replaced them at the turn of the twenty-first century has neither vision—it boasts its lack of ideas as a virtue of postideological pragmatism—nor courage, insofar as its choices always depend on opinion polls. Its exemplar is Tony Blair, the artist of the lie, opportunism, and political careerism, today hugely discredited in his own country but still involved in several lucrative activities. A convinced Europeanist—the most pro-European among postwar British leaders—he embodies a mutation: the birth of a neoliberal political elite that transcends the traditional cleavage between right and left. (Tariq Ali calls this the ‘extreme centre’.⁹) Blair has been the model for François Hollande, Matteo Renzi, the leaders of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), and even, to a certain extent, Angela Merkel, who rules in a perfect harmony with the SPD. Today, neoliberalism has absorbed the inheritors of both social democracy and Christian conservative currents.

The result of this change was the impasse of the European project itself. On the one hand, this lack of vision transformed the EU into an agency charged with applying measures demanded by financial powers; on the other hand, this lack of courage impeded any advance in the process of political integration. Obsessed by the opinion polls, EU statesmen are completely lacking in any strategic vision; they are unable to think beyond the next elections. Paralyzed by the impossibility of coming back to old national sovereignties and unwilling to build federal institutions, the EU created a monster as strange as it is awful: the ‘troika’, an entity that has neither a juridical and political existence nor democratic legitimacy, yet nevertheless holds real power and rules the continent. The IMF, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the EU Commission dictate policies to every national government, evaluate their application, and decide on compulsory adjustments. They can change the executive itself, as occurred in Italy at the end of 2011 and in the summer of 2018. In the first case, Mario Monti, the man with the trust of the ECB and Goldman Sachs, replaced Berlusconi; in the second, President Sergio Mattarella refused to nominate the Minister of Economy of a government supported by a parliamentary majority because many newspapers depicted him as ‘eurosceptic’, that is, hostile to the EU currency. Monti was an unelected ‘technical’ leader charged with applying the recipes decided by the ‘troika’. In 2018, Paolo Savona was replaced by Giovanni Tria, an economist whom the troika could consider more reliable, in exchange for a series of concessions to the Lega Nord’s xenophobic and authoritarian demands. The right to decide on human beings’ life and death—the right that distinguishes classical sovereignty—is precisely the right the ‘troika’ imposed during the Greek crisis, when it threatened to asphyxiate and kill an entire country. When the ‘troika’ does not have specific interests to defend, the EU no longer exists and breaks up: for instance, faced with the current refugee crisis, each country wants to close its borders. In these circumstances, xenophobic politicians are no longer incompatible with EU governance.

This overwhelming power does not emanate from any parliament or from popular sovereignty, since the IMF does not belong to the EU, the ‘Eurogroup’ is an informal gathering of EU finance ministries, and the ECB (according to its own statutes) is an independent institution. Thus, as many analysts observed, the ‘troika’ embodies a state of exception. Yet this state of exception does not share many features with the dictatorships of the past that, according to classical political theory, expressed the autonomy of the political. In the EU’s current situation, this state of exception is not transitional; it constitutes its normal mode of functioning—the exception has become the rule—and implies the complete submission of the political to the financial.¹⁰ In short, it is a state of exception that establishes a sort of financial dictatorship, a neoliberal Leviathan. The ‘troika’ fixes its rules, transmits them to the different EU states, and then controls their application. This is, in the final analysis, the ‘ordo-liberalism’ of Wolfgang Schäuble: not capitalism submitted to political rules, but a financial capitalism that dictates its own rules. Statesmen may act as ‘commissars’, in a Schmittian sense, but the Nomos (a kind of existential law) they embody and to which all juridical rules are subdued is economic and financial, not political. Thus, the constitutive contradiction of our modern democracies in which a juridical-political rationality coexists with an economic-managerial rationality has finally found a solution with the erasure of the political body—democracy—by a technique of government.¹¹ In other words, government has been replaced by governance, the result of a financialization of politics that has transformed the state into a tool of both the incorporation and the dissemination of neoliberal reason.¹² Who could better personify such a financial state of exception than politicians like Jean-Claude Juncker? For twenty years he led the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg, which he transformed into the fatherland of tax avoidance capitalism. The definition of the state coined by Marx in the nineteenth century—a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie—has found its almost perfect embodiment in the EU.

If the EU is unable ...