The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  The inoculation of most Europeans against the original fascism by its public shaming in 1945 is inherently temporary. The taboos of 1945 have inevitably faded with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation. In any event, a fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols. Some future movement that would “give up free institutions"11 in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.

  For example, while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and eastern Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile, and anti-Western. New fascisms would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time to alien swastikas or fasces. The British moralist George Orwell noted in the 1930s that an authentic British fascism would come reassuringly clad in sober English dress.12 There is no sartorial litmus test for fascism.

  The stages around which I have structured this book can offer further help with deciding whether fascism is still possible. It is relatively easy to admit the widespread continuation of Stage One—the founding stage— of radical Right movements with some explicit or implicit link to fascism. Examples have existed since World War II in every industrial, urbanized society with mass politics. Stage Two, however, where such movements become rooted in political systems as significant players and the bearers of important interests, imposes a much more stringent historical test. The test does not require us, however, to find exact replicas of the rhetoric, the programs, or the aesthetic preferences of the first fascist movements of the 1920s. The historic fascisms were shaped by the political space into which they grew, and by the alliances that were essential for growth into Stages Two or Three, and new versions will be similarly affected. Carbon copies of classical fascism have usually seemed too exotic or too shocking since 1945 to win allies. The skinheads, for example, would become functional equivalents of Hitler’s SA and Mussolini’s squadristi only if they aroused support instead of revulsion. If important elements of the conservative elite begin to cultivate or even tolerate them as weapons against some internal enemy, such as immigrants, we are approaching Stage Two.

  By every evidence, Stage Two has been reached since 1945, if at all, at least outside the areas once controlled by the Soviet Union, only by radical Right movements and parties that have taken pains to “normalize" themselves into outwardly moderate parties distinguishable from the center Right only by their tolerance for some awkward friends and occasional verbal excesses. In the unstable new world created by the demise of Soviet communism, however, movements abound that sound all too much like fascism. If we understand the revival of an updated fascism as the appearance of some functional equivalent and not as an exact repetition, recurrence is possible. But we must understand it by an intelligent comparison of how it works and not by superficial attention to external symbols.

  Western Europe is the area with the strongest fascist legacy since 1945.

  Western Europe since 1945

  Even after Nazism and Fascism had been humiliated and exposed as odious in 1945, some of their followers kept the faith. Unreconstructed former Nazis and fascists created legacy movements in every European country for a generation after World War II.

  Germany naturally raised the most concern.13 Soon after the Allied occupation began, a survey of opinion in the American zone reported that 15–18 percent of the population remained committed to Nazism. Those figures dropped sharply, however, to about 3 percent in the early 1950s. 14 The ranks of potential neo-Nazis were swollen by over ten million refugees of German national origin expelled in 1945 from central Europe into what would become the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany). Under those conditions, it was remarkable how weak the radical Right remained after political life revived in the Federal Republic in the late 1940s.

  The West German radical Right was further weakened by division. The largest radical Right party of the founding years of the Federal Republic, the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei, SRP), gained 11 percent of the popular vote in Lower Saxony, one of the ten federal states, in 1951, but was banned in 1952 for being too overtly neo-Nazi. Its main surviving rival, the German Reich Party (Deutsche Reichspartei, DRP), received only about 1 percent of the vote for most of the 1950s as West Germany prospered under conservative chancellor Konrad Adenauer. The DRP’s one momentary success came in provincial elections in Rhineland Palatinate in 1959 when it just passed the 5 percent minimum needed to enter a German provincial (Land) parliament for the first and only time.

  When DRP leaders and other radical Right groups combined to form the National Democratic Party (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutsch-lands, NPD) in 1964, this new formation was soon buoyed by the backlash to student radicalism, to West Germany’s first serious economic downturn, in 1966–67, and to the wider space opened up on the right when the Christian Democrats brought the Social Democrats into a “Great Coalition" government in 1966. But although the NPD attained the necessary threshold of 5 percent in some local elections and entered seven of the ten state parliaments during the troubled years of 1966–68, it never reached the 5 percent minimum in federal elections required to form a national parliamentary group. It came closest in 1969, with 4.3 percent. Following a low ebb in the 1970s, radical Right activity increased again in the 1980s for reasons that will be discussed below. A new far Right formation, the Republican Party, reached 7.5 percent in a municipal election in Berlin in 1989, but thereafter slipped to 2 percent and below in national elections.

  The Italian Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI) had a more substantial existence as Mussolini’s sole direct heir. It was founded in 1946 by Giorgio Almirante, who had been editorial secretary of the anti-Semitic review La difesa della razza after 1938 and chief of staff to the minister of propaganda in Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic at Salò in 1943–45. After a feeble 1.9 percent of the vote in 1948, the MSI averaged 4–5 percent in national elections thereafter and reached a peak of 8.7 percent in 1972, benefitting from a merger with monarchists and a backlash against the “hot autumn" of 1969. Most of the time it was a distant fourth among Italian parties.

  The MSI earned its best scores following “red scares": in 1972 it tied neck and neck with the socialists for third place among national parties with 2.8 million votes, and in 1983 its total vote reached nearly as high again after the Christian Democrats accepted communist votes in 1979 in an “opening to the left" that they hoped would bolster their increasingly slender majorities. It remained in political isolation, however. When the weak government of Fernando Tambroni counted MSI votes to complete its majority in 1960, veterans of the anti-Fascist Resistance demonstrated until Tambroni resigned. No mainstream Italian politician dared for thirty years after that to break the MSI’s quarantine.

  The MSI drew best in the south, where memories of fascist public works were positive and where the population had not experienced the civil war of 1944–45 in the north between the Resistance and the Salò republic. Alessandra Mussolini, the Duce’s granddaughter as well as a medical school graduate, sometime film actress, and pornography pinup star, represented Naples in parliament after 1992 as an MSI deputy. As a candidate for mayor of Naples in 1993 she won 43 percent of the vote. Outside the south, the MSI did well among alienated young males everywhere except in the north, where a regional separatist movement— Umberto Bossi’s Lega Nord15—occupied the far Right terrain. MSI leader Gianfranco Fini won 47 percent of the vote for mayor of Rome in 1993.16

  Legacy neofascism was not limited to Germany and Italy. B
ritain and France, victorious but exhausted after World War II, endured the humiliation of losing their empires and their status as Great Powers. To make matters worse, their final efforts to win more time for their empires entailed accepting massive immigration from Africa, south Asia, and the Caribbean. Although the radical Right had little electoral success in these two countries for thirty years after the war, it kept the racial issue before the public and succeeded in influencing national policy.

  France emerged from World War II bitterly divided. The purged collaborators of Vichy France joined virulent anticommunists and those disillusioned by the weakness of the Fourth Republic (1945–58) to form a ready clientele for antisystem nationalist movements. The principal impetus for the radical Right in postwar France was seventeen years of unsuccessful colonial war, first in Indochina (1945–54) and especially in Algeria (1954–62). As the French republic floundered in its attempt to hold on to its colonies, the Jeune Nation movement (JN) called for its replacement by a corporatist and plebiscitary state freed of “stateless" (i.e., Jewish) elements and capable of all-out military effort. In the later phases of the Algerian War, the JN kept Paris on edge by setting off plastic bombs at the doors of leaders of the Left and by daubing city walls with its Celtic Cross symbol.

  A second impetus was the bitterness of small shopkeepers and peasants who were losing out in the industrial and urban modernization of France in the 1950s. A southern stationery shop owner, Pierre Poujade, set up a mass movement in 1955 calling for tax cuts, the protection of small business against chain stores, and a cleanup of public life. Poujadism had more than a whiff of antiparliamentarism and xenophobia about it. In the parliamentary election of January 1956, the movement won about 2.5 million votes (12 percent) 17 and helped shake the Fourth Republic, which ended unmourned two years later with an army officers’ revolt in Algeria.

  The French loss of Algeria provoked the creation of an underground terrorist movement, the Secret Army (L’Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, OAS), devoted to destroying the “internal enemies" on the Left whom they accused of stabbing the French army in the back while it was defending the French empire from the communists. Following the suppression of the OAS, the far Right regrouped in a series of movements such as Occident and Ordre Nouveau that fought with communists and students in the streets. Backlash from the student rising of May 1968 gave them a second wind.

  A million European settlers were hastily uprooted from Algeria and repatriated to France, even though not all were of French ancestry, plus many thousands of Algerians who had collaborated with the French and had to be rescued, such as supplementary policemen (harkis). The former threatened to fuel a powerful antidemocratic movement in France. The harkis’s children, plus later immigrants, formed the core of a settled but only partially assimilated Muslim population in France that provoked the anti-immigrant feelings later exploited by the most successful French radical Right party, the Front National (FN). The FN, formed in 1972 in an effort to assemble under a single umbrella all the various components of the French far Right, electoral parties as well as street-fighting activists, began to win local elections in the 1980s.18

  The British extreme Right also mobilized resentment against colonial immigration, starting in the 1950s with the White Defence League. Veterans of interwar fascism played leading roles in this and the National Socialist Movement, dissolved for paramilitary activity in the 1960s. They were supplanted in 1967 by the National Front, a blatantly racialist anti-immigrant formation. The British radical Right was much more openly extreme than most continental parties, and consequently had almost no electoral success. But it forced the traditional parties to take the immigrant issue seriously, and restrict entry into Britain for the populations of the former colonies. 19

  It could be expected that legacy neofascisms would diminish as Hitler’s and Mussolini’s generation, mostly born in the 1880s, and the generation formed by them, mostly born in the 1900s, died off. Unexpectedly, however, radical Right movements and parties entered a new period of growth in the 1980s and 1990s. While some children carried on their parents’ cause, 20 new recruits voicing new grievances gave the European radical Right a renewed impetus. Something akin to fascism was far from dead in Europe as the twenty-first century opened.

  A decade of transition began around 1973. Many first-generation postwar far Right parties, such as the NPD in Germany and the British National Front, declined during the 1970s, and the French Ordre Nouveau was dissolved in 1973. Fundamental social, economic, and cultural changes were underway, however, further exacerbated by the oil crisis and economic contraction that began in 1973. These changes were raising new issues and preparing a new public for fresh radical Right movements and parties that would enjoy greater success in the 1980s and 1990s than the legacy neofascisms had achieved in the three decades following the war.

  One set of changes was an economic shift with profound social consequences. The decline of traditional smokestack industries was a long process, but it assumed crisis proportions after the first and second “oil shocks" of 1973 and 1979. Faced with competition from Asian “tigers" with cheaper labor costs, burdened with expensive welfare systems and short of increasingly costly energy supplies, Europe faced long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the 1930s.

  This was no ordinary cyclical downturn. In what was now called “postindustrial society," the conditions for finding work had changed. More education was required for the service, communication, high technology, and entertainment industries that emerged as the most remunerative forms of work for high-cost economies in a global marketplace. This seismic shift in the job market tended to produce two-tier societies: the better-educated part of the population succeeded very well in the new economy, while those without the necessary training—including once-proud skilled artisans and industrial craftsmen—appeared doomed to permanent underclass status. To make matters worse, the traditional communities that had once supported these skilled artisans and industrial craftsmen—trade unions, Marxist parties, and proletarian neighborhoods— lost much of their power to defend and console after the 1970s. Some orphans of the new economy who might earlier have turned to communism rallied to the radical Right instead after the collapse of the Soviet Union completed the discredit of communism.21

  The collapse of solidarity and security for many western European working people after the 1970s was compounded by the postwar flood of Third World immigrants into western Europe. When times were good, the immigrants were welcome to do the dirty jobs that the national labor force now spurned. When Europeans began to face long-term structural unemployment for the first time since the Great Depression, however, immigrants became unwelcome.

  Moreover, European immigration had changed. Whereas earlier immigrants had come from southern or eastern Europe and differed only slightly from their new hosts (with the notable and significant exception of Jews from eastern Europe in the 1880s and the 1930s), the new immigrants came from former colonial territories: North and sub-Saharan Africa, the Caribbean, India, Pakistan, and Turkey. And whereas earlier immigrants (some Jews again excepted) had tended to assimilate quickly and disappear, the new immigrants often clung to visibly different customs and religions. Europeans had to learn to coexist with permanent African, Indian, and Islamic communities that flaunted their separate identities.

  The immigrant threat was not only economic and social. The immigrants were seen increasingly as undermining national identity with their alien customs, languages, and religions. A global youth culture, mostly marketed by Americans and often associated with black performers, did to local cultural traditions what the global economy had done to local smokestack industry.

  Anti-immigrant resentment was pay dirt for radical Right movements in western Europe after the 1970s. It was the main force behind the British National Front. The most successful of them—Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National in France and Jörg Haider’s Freiheitspartei in Austria—were almost entirely devoted to explo
iting anti-immigrant fears, fighting multiculturalism and an alleged immigrant criminal propensity, and proposing the expulsion of the alien poor.

  The most disturbing new component of the radical Right after the 1980s was the “skinhead" phenomenon. Disaffected, idle, and resentful youths developed a cult of action and violence expressed by shaved skulls, Nazi insignia, aggressive “oi" music,22 and murderous assaults upon immigrants—especially Muslims and Africans—and gays. While the more mainstream elements of the new Right carefully avoided open reference to the symbols and paraphernalia of fascism, the skinheads reveled in them. Nazi emblems triumphed even in Italy, where homegrown Fascist precursors like the Salò militias were forgotten. In Germany a surge of arson, beatings, and murders peaked at 2,639 incidents in 1992.23 The violence declined a bit in the following years, but in March 1994 the Lübeck synagogue was firebombed, and the Dresden synagogue in October 2000.24

  Governments and mainstream parties coped badly with the new problems faced by western Europe after the 1970s. They could not solve unemployment, because the Keynesian job-creation measures that had worked during the postwar boom now triggered dangerous levels of inflation, and because governments felt unable to opt out of the emerging European and global marketplaces with their powerful competitive pressures. The state, the traditional source of support in difficult times, was losing part of its authority, whether to the European Union or to the global marketplace, forces beyond the control of ordinary European citizens. Welfare programs now came under serious strain, for tax revenues were falling just as the need was growing to pay increased benefits to the new unemployed. And should the welfare state also take care of foreigners?25 An interlocking set of new enemies was emerging: globalization, foreigners, multiculturalism, environmental regulation, high taxes, and the incompetent politicians who could not cope with these challenges. A widening public disaffection for the political Establishment opened the way for an “antipolitics" that the extreme Right could satisfy better than the far Left after 1989. After the Marxist Left lost credibility as a plausible protest vehicle when the Soviet Union collapsed, the radical Right had no serious rivals as the mouthpiece for the angry “losers" of the new postindustrial, globalized, multiethnic Europe.26