The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  That Quisling or Szálasi were brought into power in extremis depended relatively little on indigenous support, and was really a sign that Hitler had failed in his preferred policy of persuading traditional leaders of occupied countries to collaborate with Nazi authorities. Occupation fascisms are certainly interesting—defeat and collaboration brought forth all the losers of the previous governing system and exposed all the fault lines and antagonisms of the polity being occupied—but it is doubtful that we can call them authentic fascisms, if only because they are not free to pursue national grandeur and expansionism.57

  We learn much more about fascism from other kinds of failure, such as the French radical Right movements that became quite conspicuous but remained outsiders before 1940. Here comparison puts us in a position to see real differences in the character of the setting and in the possibilities of alliances that distinguish the countries of fascist success from the others. What separated Germany and Italy, where fascism took power, from France and Britain, where fascist movements were highly visible but failed even to approach power?

  We considered France in chapter 3. Radical rightist movements— some of them authentically fascist—prospered there, but most conservatives did not feel sufficiently threatened in the 1930s to call on them for help, nor did they root themselves powerfully enough to impose themselves as partners. 58 The British Union of Fascists had in Sir Oswald Mosley an articulate, energetic, and—exceptionally—socially prominent leader who won important press support at the beginning, but offended conservatives by street violence against Jews and eventually found little space available as long as the Conservative Party maintained its comfortable majority from 1931 to 1945.

  In Scandinavia, social democratic parties managed to include family farmers and lower-middle-class interests in their governing coalition, denying a major constituency to the fascist parties, which remained minuscule. 59

  A comparative look at fascist access to power helps us to identify some of the approaches to fascism that seem less helpful. Agency theories, for instance, have more than one shortcoming. They reduce the story of the arrival to power of fascism to the acts of a single interest group, the capitalists. They also deny any autonomous popular backing to fascism, assuming that it is an artificial creation.

  Comparison suggests that fascist success in reaching power varies less with the brilliance of fascist intellectuals and the qualities of fascist chiefs than with the depth of crisis and the desperation of potential allies. While intellectual history was indispensable for explaining the old system’s loss of legitimacy in cases where fascism first managed to take root, it is of limited help to us at this stage. It offers little to explain what kinds of political space opened up in prefascist crises of deadlock, advancing Left, and conservative anxiety, and why fascism filled the opening instead of something else.

  Under what conditions has the political space available for fascist growth yawned wide enough for access to power? In the previous chapter, I discussed some of the more general settings. In this chapter, I focus on more specific conditions of breakdown of democratic legitimacy and deadlock of parliamentary regimes. But why, under these circumstances, did the conservatives not simply crush the Left by armed force and install an autocracy, leaving no space for fascism’s promise to attract parts of the Left as well as intimidate it?

  That was indeed the way some proceeded. That is the more normal way, especially outside Europe. In Europe, Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss of Austria set up a Catholic authoritarian regime and crushed socialist resistance by shelling a worker neighborhood of Vienna in February 1934, while holding the Austrian Nazis at bay. General Francisco Franco crushed the Spanish Left and the republic by armed insurrection and civil war, and left little room after taking power for the small Spanish Fascist party, the Falange. But that violent option amounts to giving the street and the working class and the enlightened intelligentsia back to the Left, and requires rule by overt force. German and Italian conservatives wanted to harness the fascists’ power in public opinion, in the street, and in the nationalist and antisocialist sectors of the middle and working classes to their own leadership. They seem to have believed that it was too late to demobilize the public politically. It must be won over to the national and antisocialist cause, for it was too late to reduce it once more to nineteenth-century deference.

  That Hitler and Mussolini reached office in alliance with powerful traditional elites was no mere quirk of German or Italian history. It is hard to believe that fascist parties could come to power any other way. It is possible to imagine other scenarios for a fascist arrival in power, but they are implausible. The Kornilov scenario—already alluded to in chapter 3—is worth considering. General Lavr Georgyevich Kornilov, appointed commander-in-chief of the Russian armies in August 1917, found the parliamentary regime of Alexander Kerensky ineffective in the face of rising revolutionary pressure—a classic setting for a fascist or authoritarian response. Kornilov sent troops marching on the capital, only to be stopped by Bolshevik forces before reaching Petrograd. If General Kornilov had succeeded in his mission, the most likely outcome would have been simple military dictatorship, for democracy was still too new in Russia to furnish the mass counterrevolutionary mobilization characteristic of a fascist response to a weak social democracy about to be overwhelmed by Bolshevism.

  We are not required to believe that fascist movements can only come to power in an exact replay of the scenario of Mussolini and Hitler. All that is required to fit our model is polarization, deadlock, mass mobilization against internal and external enemies, and complicity by existing elites. In the Balkans in the 1990s something that looks very much like fascism was produced by a very different scenario, a change of course by leaders already in power. Postcommunist dictators learned to play the card of expansionist nationalism as a substitute for discredited communism. When the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic mobilized the patriotism of his people first against Serbia’s neighbors and next against Allied air attack, with dancing and singing and slogans, he was successfully rallying a population against enemies internal and external and in favor of a policy of ethnic cleansing of a ruthlessness that Europe had not seen since 1945.

  It is of course also conceivable that a fascist party could be elected to power in free, competitive elections, though, as we saw at the beginning of this chapter, even the Nazi Party, by far the most successful electorally of all fascist parties, never exceeded 37 percent in a free election. The Italian Fascist Party received far fewer votes than the Nazis. Most fascist parties won little or no electoral success, and consequently had no bargaining power in the parliamentary game. What they could try to do was to discredit the parliamentary system by making orderly government impossible. But that could backfire. If the fascists seemed to be more evidently making disorder than blocking communism, they lost the support of conservatives. Most fascist movements were thus reduced to propaganda and symbolic gestures. That is how most of them remained at the margins when no space opened up.

  On closer inspection, of course, electoral success was not the most important precondition of fascist arrival in power. The deadlock or collapse of an existing liberal state was more crucial. It is vital to remember that in both Germany and Italy, the constitutional state had ceased to function normally well before the fascists were brought into power. It was not the fascist parties that had overthrown it, though they had helped bring it to deadlock. It had ceased to function because it had been unable to deal with the problems at hand—including, to be sure, the problem of an aggressive fascist opposition. The collapse of the liberal state is to some degree a separate issue from the rise of fascism. Fascism exploits the opening, but it is not the sole cause of it.

  At the stage of attaining power, when the elites chose to coopt fascism, the functions of mature fascism became even clearer: in immediate terms, its role was to break a logjam in national politics by a solution that excluded socialists. In a longer term, it was to enlist mass support behind
national, social defense, to unify, regenerate and rejuvenate, “moralize," and purify the nation that many saw as weak, decadent, and unclean.

  The transformation that we glimpsed in stage 2 as fascist parties mutated to fit the available space was now further developed and completed in the shift from the local level to the national stage. The fascists and the allies negotiated a common ground—the Herrschaftskompromiss that Wolfgang Schieder refers to.60 At this stage, as in the stage of rooting, purges and secessions thrust aside the party purists from the early days who wanted to retain some of the old social radicalism.

  It is a worthwhile exercise of the historical imagination to recall the other options open to the fascists’ principal allies and accomplices. In that way, we can do what historians are supposed to do: restore the openness of the historical moment with all its uncertainties. What else could the political elite of Germany and Italy do? In Italy, a coalition of the social-Catholic Popolari and the reformist socialists would have assured a parliamentary majority. It would have taken a lot of persuasion and cajolery, since issues of Church-state relations and religious education separated the two. We know that it was not tried, and it was not wanted. In Germany, a parliamentary government with the social democrats and the centrist parties was an arithmetic possibility, but a real possibility only with strong presidential leadership. A workable alternative in both countries might have been a government of technicians and nonparty experts, to deal in a nonpartisan way with the crisis of government authority and of institutions. This, too, was never tried. If constitutional government had to be abandoned, we know today that we would prefer a military authoritarian government to Hitler. But the army did not want to do that (unlike in Spain), and chose to support the fascist alternative. The Italian army would not oppose fascism in Italy because its leaders feared the Left more.

  In each case, it helps to see that political elites make choices that might not be their first preferences. They proceed, from choice to choice, along a path of narrowing options. At each fork in the road, they choose the antisocialist solution.

  It works better to see the fascist seizure of power as a process: alliances are formed, choices made, alternatives closed off.61 High officials, possessing some freedom of maneuver, choose the fascist option over others. Neither Hitler’s nor Mussolini’s arrival in power was inevitable. 62 Our explanatory model must also leave room for luck—good or bad, depending on one’s point of view. Mussolini could have been turned back in October 1922 or removed in June 1924 if the king, Establishment political leaders, and the army had resolutely taken actions within their legal competence. Mussolini’s luck was that the king exercised a choice in his favor. Hitler also had some lucky breaks. The Führer benefitted from the rivalry for office of von Papen and Schleicher, and the refusal of German conservatives to accept reformist socialists as fellow citizens. It was von Papen who took the decision to make Hitler chancellor, as the best way to form a majority that would exclude both his rival Schleicher and the moderate Left. Crises of the political and economic system made a space available to fascism, but it was the unfortunate choices by a few powerful Establishment leaders that actually put the fascists into that space.

  CHAPTER 5

  Exercising Power

  The Nature of Fascist Rule: “Dual State” and Dynamic Shapelessness

  Fascist propagandists wanted us to see the leader alone on his pinnacle, and they had remarkable success. Their image of monolithic power was later reinforced by the Allies’ wartime awe of the Nazi juggernaut, as well as by postwar claims by German and Italian conservative elites that they had been the fascists’ victims rather than their accomplices. It lingers on today in most people’s idea of fascist rule.

  Perspicacious observers soon perceived, however, that fascist dictatorships were neither monolithic nor static. No dictator rules by himself. He must obtain the cooperation, or at least the acquiescence, of the decisive agencies of rule—the military, the police, the judiciary, senior civil servants—and of powerful social and economic forces. In the special case of fascism, having depended upon conservative elites to open the gates to him, the new leaders could not shunt them casually aside. Some degree, at least, of obligatory power sharing with the preexisting conservative establishment made fascist dictatorships fundamentally different in their origins, development, and practice from that of Stalin.

  Consequently we have never known an ideologically pure fascist regime. Indeed, the thing hardly seems possible. Each generation of scholars of fascism has noted that the regimes rested upon some kind of pact or alliance between the fascist party and powerful conservative forces. In the early 1940s the social democratic refugee Franz Neumann argued in his classic Behemoth that a “cartel" of party, industry, army, and bureaucracy ruled Nazi Germany, held together only by “profit, power, prestige, and especially fear."1 At the end of the 1960s, the moderate liberal Karl Dietrich Bracher found that “National Socialism came into being and into power under conditions that permitted an alliance between conservative-authoritarian and technicistic, nationalistic, and revolutionary-dictatorial forces." 2 Martin Broszat referred to the conservatives and nationalists in Hitler’s cabinet as his “coalition partners."3 In the late 1970s, Hans Mommsen described the National Socialist “governing system" as an “alliance" between “ascending fascist elites and members of traditional leadership groups" “interlocked . . . despite differences" in a common project to set aside parliamentary government, reestablish strong government, and crush “Marxism."4

  The composite nature of Fascist rule in Italy was even more flagrant. The historian Gaetano Salvemini, home from exile, recalled the “dualistic dictatorship" of Duce and king.5 Alberto Aquarone, the preeminent scholar of the Fascist state, emphasized the “centrifugal forces" and “tensions" Mussolini confronted in a regime that still, “fifteen years after the March on Rome," had “many features derived directly from the Liberal State."6 The prominent German scholars of Italian Fascism Wolfgang Schieder and Jens Petersen speak of “opposing forces" and “counterweights" 7 and Massimo Legnani of the “conditions of cohabitation/cooperation" among the regime’s components.8 Even Emilio Gentile, most eager to demonstrate the power and success of the totalitarian impulse in Fascist Italy, concedes that the regime was a “composite" reality in which Mussolini’s “ambition of personal power" struggled in “constant tension" with both “traditional forces" and “Fascist Party intransigents," themselves divided by “muffled conflict" (sorda lotta) among factions. 9

  Composite makeup also means that fascist regimes have not been static. It is a mistake to suppose that once the leader reached power history ended and was replaced by pageantry.10 On the contrary, the history of the fascist regimes we have known has been filled with conflict and tension. The conflicts we have already observed at the stage of taking root sharpen when the moment arrives to distribute the spoils of office and to choose among courses of action. The stakes grow as policy differences play out into tangible gains and losses. Conservatives tend to pull back toward a more cautious traditional authoritarianism, respectful of property and social hierarchy; fascists pull forward toward dynamic, leveling, populist dictatorship, prepared to subordinate every private interest to the imperatives of national aggrandizement and purification. Traditional elites try to retain strategic positions; the parties want to fill them with new men or bypass the conservative power bases with “parallel structures"; the leaders resist challenges from both elites and party zealots.

  These struggles waxed and waned in Italy and Germany, with varying outcomes. While the Italian Fascist regime decayed toward conservative authoritarian rule, Nazi Germany radicalized toward unbridled party license. But fascist regimes have never been static. We must see fascist rule as a never-ending struggle for preeminence within a coalition, exacerbated by the collapse of constitutional restraints and the rule of law, and by a prevailing climate of social Darwinism.

  Some commentators have reduced this struggle to a conflict betwe
en party and state. One of the earliest and most suggestive interpretations of party-state conflict was the refugee scholar Ernst Fraenkel’s portrayal of Nazi Germany as a “dual state." In Hitler’s regime, Fraenkel wrote, a “normative state," composed of the legally constituted authorities and the traditional civil service, jostled for power with a “prerogative state" formed by the party’s parallel organizations.11 Fraenkel’s perception was a fruitful one, and I will draw on it.

  According to Fraenkel’s model of Nazi governance, the “normative" segment of a fascist regime continued to apply the law according to due process, and officials in that sector were recruited and promoted according to bureaucratic norms of competence and seniority. In the “prerogative" sector, by contrast, no rules applied except the whim of the ruler, the gratification of party militants, and the supposed “destiny" of the Volk, the razza, or other “chosen people." The normative state and the prerogative state coexisted in conflict-ridden but more or less workmanlike cooperation, giving the regime its bizarre mixture of legalism12 and arbitrary violence.

  Hitler never formally abolished the constitution drafted in 1919 for the Weimar Republic, and never totally dismantled the normative state in Germany, though he himself refused to be bound by it—refusing, for example, to have a euthanasia law drafted for fear of having his hands tied by rules and bureaucracy.13 After the Reichstag fire, as we saw in the last chapter, Hitler was given the authority to set aside any existing law or right as needed to cope with a perceived national emergency of Marxist “terror." After spring 1933, unlimited police and judicial repression were permissible in Germany if national security seemed to demand it, despite the continued existence of a normative state.