Indeed, fascist regimes tried to redraw so radically the boundaries between private and public that the private sphere almost disappeared. Robert Ley, head of the Nazi Labor Office, said that in the Nazi state the only private individual was someone asleep.119 For some observers, this effort to have the public sphere swallow up the private sphere entirely is indeed the very essence of fascism.120 It is certainly a fundamental point on which fascist regimes differed most profoundly from authoritarian conservatism, and even more profoundly from classical liberalism.
There was no room in this vision of obligatory national unity for either free-thinking persons or for independent, autonomous subcommunities. Churches, Freemasonry, class-based unions or syndicates, political parties— all were suspect as subtracting something from the national will.121 Here were grounds for infinite conflict with conservatives as well as the Left.
In pursuit of their mission to unify the community within an all-consuming public sphere, fascist regimes dissolved unions and socialist parties. This radical amputation of what had been normal worker representation, encased as it was in a project of national fulfillment and managed economy, alienated public opinion less than pure military or police repression, as in traditional dictatorships. And indeed the fascists had some success in reconciling some workers to a world without unions or socialist parties, those for whom proletarian solidarity against capitalist bosses was willingly replaced by national identity against other peoples.
Brooding about cultural degeneracy was so important a fascist issue that some authors have put it at the center. Every fascist regime sought to control the national culture from the top, to purify it of foreign influences, and make it help carry the message of national unity and revival. Decoding the cultural messages of fascist ceremonies, films, performances, and visual arts has today become the most active field of research on fascism. 122 The “reading" of fascist stagecraft, however ingenious, should not mislead us into thinking that fascist regimes succeeded in establishing monolithic cultural homogeneity. Cultural life in fascist regimes remained a complex patchwork of official activities, spontaneous activities that the regimes tolerated, and even some illicit ones. Ninety percent of the films produced under the Nazi regime were light entertainment without overt propaganda content (not that it was innocent, of course). 123 A few protected Jewish artists hung on remarkably late in Nazi Germany, and the openly homosexual actor and director Gustav Gründgens remained active to the end.124
In no domain did the proposals of early fascism differ more from what fascist regimes did in practice than in economic policy. This was the area where both fascist leaders conceded the most to their conservative allies. Indeed, most fascists—above all after they were in power—considered economic policy as only a means to achieving the more important fascist ends of unifying, energizing, and expanding the community.125 Economic policy tended to be driven by the need to prepare and wage war. Politics trumped economics.126
Much ink has been spilled over whether fascism represented an emergency form of capitalism, a mechanism devised by capitalists by which the fascist state—their agent—disciplined the workforce in a way no traditional dictatorship could do. Today it is quite clear that businessmen often objected to specific aspects of fascist economic policies, sometimes with success. But fascist economic policy responded to political priorities, and not to economic rationale. Both Mussolini and Hitler tended to think that economics was amenable to a ruler’s will. Mussolini returned to the gold standard and revalued the lira at 90 to the British pound in December 1927 for reasons of national prestige, and over the objections of his own finance minister. 127
Fascism was not the first choice of most businessmen, but most of them preferred it to the alternatives that seemed likely in the special conditions of 1922 and 1933—socialism or a dysfunctional market system. So they mostly acquiesced in the formation of a fascist regime and accommodated to its requirements of removing Jews from management and accepting onerous economic controls. In time, most German and Italian businessmen adapted well to working with fascist regimes, at least those gratified by the fruits of rearmament and labor discipline and the considerable role given to them in economic management. Mussolini’s famous corporatist economic organization, in particular, was run in practice by leading businessmen.
Peter Hayes puts it succinctly: the Nazi regime and business had “converging but not identical interests."128 Areas of agreement included disciplining workers, lucrative armaments contracts, and job-creation stimuli. Important areas of conflict involved government economic controls, limits on trade, and the high cost of autarky—the economic selfsufficiency by which the Nazis hoped to overcome the shortages that had lost Germany World War I. Autarky required costly substitutes— Ersatz— for such previously imported products as oil and rubber.
Economic controls damaged smaller companies and those not involved in rearmament. Limits on trade created problems for companies that had formerly derived important profits from exports. The great chemical combine I. G. Farben is an excellent example: before 1933, Farben had prospered in international trade. After 1933, the company’s directors adapted to the regime’s autarky and learned to prosper mightily as the suppliers of German rearmament. 129
The best example of the expense of import substitution was the Hermann Goering Werke, set up to make steel from the inferior ores and brown coal of Silesia. The steel manufacturers were forced to help finance this operation, to which they raised vigorous objections.130
The businessmen may not have gotten everything they wanted from the Nazi command economy, but they got far more than the Nazi Party radicals did. In June 1933, Otto Wagener, an “old fighter" who had become head of the economic policy branch of the party and who took his National Socialism seriously enough to want to replace the “egoistic spirit of profit of the individual person with common striving in the interest of the community," seemed likely to become minister of the economy. Hermann Goering, the Nazi leader closest to business, skillfully eliminated Wagener by showing Hitler that Wagener had been campaigning within the Nazi leadership for this appointment. Hitler, enraged at the slightest encroachment on his authority to name ministers, expelled Wagener from the party and named to the post Dr. Kurt Schmitt, head of Allianz, Germany’s biggest insurance company.
Nazi economic radicalism did not disappear, however. Private insurance executives never stopped fighting attempts by Nazi radicals to replace them with nonprofit mutual funds organized within each economic sector— “völkisch” insurance. While the radicals found some niches for public insurance companies in SS enterprises in the conquered territories and in the Labor Front, the private insurers maneuvered so skillfully within a regime for which some of them felt distaste that they ended up with 85 percent of the business, including policies on Hitler’s Berghof, Göring’s Karinhall, and slave-labor factories in Auschwitz and elsewhere.131 Generally, economic radicals in the Nazi movement resigned (like Otto Strasser) or lost influence (like Wagener) or were murdered (like Gregor Strasser). Italian “integral syndicalists" either lost their influence (like Rossoni) or left the party (like Alceste De Ambris).
In the short term, as liberal economies floundered in the early 1930s, fascist economies could look more capable than democracies of performing the harsh task of reconciling populations to diminished personal consumption in order to permit a higher rate of savings and investment, particularly in the military. But we know now that they never achieved the growth rates of postwar Europe, or even of pre-1914 Europe, or even the total mobilization for war achieved voluntarily and belatedly by some of the democracies. This makes it difficult to accept the definition of fascism as a “developmental dictatorship" appropriate for latecomer industrial nations.132 Fascists did not wish to develop the economy but to prepare for war, even though they needed accelerated arms production for that.
Fascists had to do something about the welfare state. In Germany, the welfare experiments of the Weimar Republic had proved too e
xpensive after the Depression struck in 1929. The Nazis trimmed them and perverted them by racial forms of exclusion. But neither fascist regime tried to dismantle the welfare state (as mere reactionaries might have done).
Fascism was revolutionary in its radically new conceptions of citizenship, of the way individuals participated in the life of the community. It was counterrevolutionary, however, with respect to such traditional projects of the Left as individual liberties, human rights, due process, and international peace.
In sum, the fascist exercise of power involved a coalition composed of the same elements in Mussolini’s Italy as in Nazi Germany. It was the relative weight among leader, party, and traditional institutions that distinguished one case from the other. In Italy, the traditional state wound up with supremacy over the party, largely because Mussolini feared his own most militant followers, the local ras and their squadristi. In Nazi Germany, the party came to dominate the state and civil society, especially after war began.
Fascist regimes functioned like an epoxy: an amalgam of two very different agents, fascist dynamism and conservative order, bonded by shared enmity toward liberalism and the Left, and a shared willingness to stop at nothing to destroy their common enemies.
CHAPTER 6
The Long Term: Radicalization or Entropy?
Fascist regimes could not settle down into a comfortable enjoyment of power. The charismatic leader had made dramatic promises: to unify, purify, and energize his community; to save it from the flabbiness of bourgeois materialism, the confusion and corruption of democratic politics, and the contamination of alien people and cultures; to head off the threatened revolution of property with a revolution of values; to rescue the community from decadence and decline. He had offered sweeping solutions to these menaces: violence against enemies, both inside and out; the individual’s total immersion in the community; the purification of blood and culture; the galvanizing enterprises of rearmament and expansionist war. He had assured his people a “privileged relation with history."1
Fascist regimes had to produce an impression of driving momentum— “permanent revolution"2—in order to fulfill these promises. They could not survive without that headlong, inebriating rush forward. Without an ever-mounting spiral of ever more daring challenges, fascist regimes risked decaying into something resembling a tepid authoritarianism. 3 With it, they drove toward a final paroxysm of self-destruction.
Fascist or partly fascist regimes do not inevitably succeed in maintaining momentum. Several regimes sometimes considered fascist deliberately took the opposite tack of damping down excitement. They “normalized" themselves—and thereby became more authoritarian than fascist.
The Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco, for example, is often considered fascist because of his armed conquest of power in the Spanish Civil War with the overt aid of Mussolini and Hitler. Indeed, helping the Spanish Republicans defend themselves against Franco’s rebellion after July 1936 was the first and most emblematic antifascist crusade. After his victory in March 1939, Franco unleashed a bloody repression that may have killed as many as two hundred thousand people, and attempted to seal off his regime from both economic exchange and cultural contamination from the democratic world.4 Virulently hostile to democracy, liberalism, secularism, Marxism, and especially Freemasonry, Franco joined Hitler and Mussolini in April 1939 as a signatory of the Anti-Comintern Pact. During the battle for France in 1940, he seized Tangiers. He seemed eager to expand further at the expense of Britain and France, and to become a “full-scale military partner of the Axis."5
Whenever Hitler pressed him to act, however, the cautious Caudillo always set his price for full belligerency on the Axis side unattainably high. A few days after meeting Franco at Hendaye, on the French-Spanish border, on October 23, 1940, Hitler told Mussolini that he would rather have three or four teeth pulled than spend another nine hours bargaining with that “Jesuit swine."6 After the terrible bloodletting of 1936–39, Franco wanted order and quiet; fascist dynamism fit badly with his reserved temperament.
Franco’s regime did have a single party—the Falange—but without “parallel structures" it lacked autonomous power. Although it grew to nearly a million members during the period of German victories in 1941–42, and gave the dictatorship useful support with its ceremonies, the Caudillo allowed it no share in policy-making or administration.
The elimination of the Falange’s charismatic leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera at the beginning in the Civil War, as we recall from chapter 3, helped Franco to establish the preeminence of the established elites and the normative state. Thereafter he was able to exploit the multiplicity of extreme Right parties and the inexperience of José Antonio’s successor, Manuel Hedilla, to reduce fascist influence further. He cleverly submerged the Falange within an amorphous umbrella organization that included both fascists and traditional monarchists, the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista. Its leader was condemned to “impotence as a decorative part of Franco’s entourage."7 When Hedilla tried to reassert independent authority in April 1937, Franco had him arrested. The domestication of the Falange made it easier for Franco to give his dictatorship the traditional form, with a minimum of fascist excitement, that was clearly his preference, certainly after 1942, and probably before.
After 1945 the Falange became a colorless civic solidarity association, normally referred to simply as the Movimiento. In 1970 its very name was abolished. By then Franquist Spain had long become an authoritarian regime dominated by the army, state officials, businessmen, landowners, and the Church, with almost no visible fascist coloration.8
Portugal, whose malfunctioning parliamentary regime had been overthrown by a military coup in 1926, was governed after the early 1930s by a reclusive economics professor of integrist Catholic views, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar. Dr. Salazar leaned even more than Franco toward cautious quietism. Where Franco subjected Spain’s fascist party to his personal control, Salazar abolished outright in July 1934 the nearest thing Portugal had to an authentic fascist movement, Rolão Preto’s blue-shirted National Syndicalists. The Portuguese fascists, Salazar complained, were “always feverish, excited and discontented . . . shouting, faced with the impossible: More! More!"9 Salazar preferred to control his population through such “organic" institutions traditionally powerful in Portugal as the Church.
When civil war broke out in neighboring Spain in 1936, “organic" authority was no longer enough. Dr. Salazar experimented with a “New State" (Estado Novo) fortified with devices borrowed from fascism, including corporatist labor organization, a youth movement (Portuguese Youth, or Mocidade Portuguesa), and a powerless “single party" clad in blue shirts, the Portuguese Legion.10 Rejecting fascist expansionism, Portugal remained neutral in World War II and all subsequent conflicts until it decided to fight the Angolan independence movement in 1961. Hoping to spare Portugal the pains of class conflict, Dr. Salazar even opposed the industrial development of his country until the 1960s. His regime was not only nonfascist, but “voluntarily nontotalitarian," preferring to let those of its citizens who kept out of politics “live by habit."11
At the other extreme, Nazi Germany alone experienced full radicalization. A victorious war of extermination in the east offered almost limitless freedom of action to the “prerogative state" and its “parallel institutions," released from the remaining constraints of the “normative state," such as they were. In a “no-man’s-land" composed of conquered territories in what had been Poland and the western parts of the Soviet Union, Nazi Party radicals felt free to carry out their ultimate fantasies of racial cleansing. Extreme radicalization remains latent in all fascisms, but the circumstances of war, and particularly of victorious wars of conquest, gave it the fullest means of expression.
Radicalizing impulses were not absent from Mussolini’s Italy. Torn between periodic urges to reinvigorate the aging Blackshirts and the normalizing drag of conservative fellow travelers, the Fascist reg
ime followed an irregular trajectory. Mussolini had popularized the term “totalitarianism," and he continued to lace his orations with bombastic appeals to action and promises of revolution. In practice, however, he shifted back and forth, unleashing party radicals on occasion when his power position would benefit, but more often reining them in when his rule needed stable conditions and an unchallenged state.
Having been a daring gambler during the “seizure of power," Mussolini turned out as prime minister to prefer stability to adventure. The penchant for normalization that had first appeared in 1921 with his proposed pact of pacification with the socialists was to grow with age, through the force of circumstances as well as by personal predilection. As we saw in chapter 4, he sought during the first two years after taking office in 1922 to curb the party’s adventurism and the rival power of the ras by asserting the primacy of the state. He declined to challenge the extensive powers held by the monarchy, the Church, and his conservative partners. Mussolini’s economic policy conformed during those early years to the laissez-faire policies of liberal regimes. His first minister of finance (1922–25) was the professor of economics (and party activist) Alberto De Stefani, who reduced state intervention in the economy, cut and simplified taxes, diminished government spending, and balanced the budget. It is true that De Stefani, committed not only to free trade but also to the fascist ideal of stimulating productive energy, made some businessmen angry by cutting such import duties as the one protecting expensive locally produced beet sugar. In general, however, he displayed “an unmistakable pro-business bias."12
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