The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  These new opportunities permitted a new generation27 of extreme Right movements to emerge in Europe in the 1980s, and then, in the 1990s, to move “from the margins to the mainstream."28 Jean-Marie Le Pen’s Front National was the first extreme Right party in Europe to find the appropriate formula for post-1970s conditions. The FN reached 11 percent of the vote in French municipal elections in 1983 and European elections in 1984, unprecedented for any extreme Right party in Europe since 1945. It climbed even further, to 14.4 percent, in the presidential elections of 1988.29 And unlike some “flash" movements that surge and then quickly decline, the FN maintained or exceeded these levels for the next decade.

  Le Pen’s recipe for success was closely watched by fearful French democrats as well as by his emulators abroad. The FN focused intensely on the immigrant issue, and its ramifying related issues of employment, law and order, and cultural defense. It managed to bundle together a variety of constituencies and positioned itself to become a broad catch-all party of protest.30 It refrained from appearing to threaten democracy directly. 31 When it won control of three important cities in southern France in 1995 and another in 1997, as well as 273 seats in regional legislatures in 1998,32 it acquired a capacity to reward its militants with office and force mainstream parties to treat with it. While there seemed little likelihood of its winning a national majority, the FN forced mainstream conservative parties to adopt some of its positions in order to hold on to crucial voters. The FN’s strategic leverage became so important in some southern and eastern localities that some conservatives with narrow margins allied with it in the local elections of 1995 and 2001 as the only way to defeat the Left.

  These successes at bundling constituencies, gratifying the ambitious, and forcing mainstream politicians into alliances moved the FN firmly into the process of taking root—Stage Two. In December 1998, however, a quarrel between Le Pen and his heir apparent, Bruno Mégret, divided the movement and drove its vote back down below 10 percent. Despite this setback, Le Pen rode a groundswell of resentment against immigrants, street crime, and globalization back to a shocking second-place 17 percent in the first round of the presidential elections of April 2002. In the runoff with incumbent president Jacques Chirac, however, Le Pen was held to 19 percent by a groundswell of French revulsion.

  Two other extreme Right parties—the Italian MSI and the Austrian Freedom Party—put Le Pen’s lessons to such good use in the 1990s that they actually participated in national governments. The major element in their success was an available space opened up not only by the disrepute into which governing parties had fallen, but also by the absence in both Italy and Austria of a credible mainstream political opposition.

  In Italy, the Christian Democrats (CD) had enjoyed uninterrupted rule since 1948. For forty years no serious alternative had presented itself to the Italian electorate. The communist-socialist split had so weakened the Left that all noncommunist opposition parties preferred to seek a share in CD hegemony rather than pursue the hopeless task of forming an alternate majority.

  When the Christian Democrats and some of their smaller coalition partners became tarnished by scandal in the 1990s, no alternate majority existed among the disparate opposition parties. New personalities filled the void, claiming to be “nonparty outsiders." The most successful of these was the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in Italy, who quickly mounted a new party named after a soccer cheer, Forza Italia. 33 Berlusconi put together a coalition with two other outsider movements: Umberto Bossi’s separatist Northern League and the MSI (now calling itself the Alleanza Nazionale and proclaiming itself “postfascist"). Together they won the parliamentary election of 1994, having successfully filled the unoccupied niche of plausible alternative to the discredited Christian Democrats. The ex-MSI, with 13 percent of the vote, was rewarded with five ministerial portfolios. It was the first time that a party descended directly from fascism had participated in a European government since 1945. Berlusconi’s Forza Italia won elections again in 2001, and this time the head of the Alleanza Nazionale, Gianfranco Fini, was vice-premier.

  A similar opportunity opened up in Austria after twenty years in which the socialists and the People’s Party (moderate centrist Catholics) parceled out offices and favors in a power-sharing arrangement that came to be known as the Proporz. Electors fed up with an immovable political monopoly had no place to turn except to Haider’s Freedom Party, which succeeded brilliantly under its photogenic leader in offering the only noncommunist alternative to the Proporz. In elections on October 3, 1999, the Freedom Party won 27 percent of the national vote, second only to the Socialists’ 33 percent, and received six out of twelve ministerial portfolios in a coalition government with the People’s Party in February 2000.

  The same mix of anti-immigrant feeling and frustration with conventional politics propelled the meteoric rise of a total outsider, the flamboyantly wealthy and openly gay Pym Fortuyn, to political prominence in the Netherlands in 2002. Fortuyn’s views were really libertarian, though his vilification of European bureaucracy and Islamic immigrants (a mullah had called him lower than a pig for his homosexuality) tended to align him with the far Right. After he was assassinated by an animal-rights activist on May 6, 2002, his new party—the Pym Fortuyn List—still drew 17 percent of the votes from across the political spectrum in parliamentary elections a week later, and held ministries for three months in the new government.

  By themselves, these raw electoral statistics tell us little about the second generation of far Right movements in Europe after 1980. We need to know what kind of movements and parties these were, and how they related to the European societies in which they operated. In other words, we need to ask about them the kinds of questions raised by Stage Two: Did any of them become bearers of important interests and grievances? Did significant spaces become available to them in the political system, and were any of them able to acquire the kinds of alliances and complicities among frightened elites that would make Stage Three, an approach to power, conceivable? A final question governs all the others: Does anything justify our calling these second-generation movements fascist or even neofascist, in the face of their vehement denials? An inverse relationship exists in contemporary western Europe between an overtly fascist “look" and succeeding at the ballot box.34 So the leaders of the most successful extreme Right movements and parties have labored to distance themselves from the language and images of fascism.

  The successful efforts of the Italian MSI to “normalize" itself make this point most eloquently. Until the death of Giorgio Almirante in 1988, the MSI proclaimed its loyalty to Mussolini’s legacy. Almirante’s successor, Gianfranco Fini, willing as late as 1994 to praise Mussolini as the greatest statesman of the century,35 began to move his party toward the center space opened up by the collapse of Christian Democratic rule in the elections of 1992. In January 1994 the MSI changed its name to Alleanza Nazionale (AN). The AN’s founding congress in 1995 proclaimed that Europe had entered a “postfascist" era in which the party members’ unabashed Mussolinian nostalgia36 had become simply irrelevant. Thus Fini could participate in the Berlusconi government after the elections of 1994 had ended nearly fifty years of Christian Democratic rule, and again in the second Berlusconi government (2001–). The die-hard Mussolinians followed the unreconstructed neofascist Pino Rauti into a splinter movement, the MSI–Fiamma Tricolore, a secession that helped substantiate Fini’s new moderate credentials.

  Not all western European far Right movements followed the normalization strategy. Colin Jordan’s National Socialist Movement in Britain, preferring doctrinal purity to a probably unattainable growth, made no effort to conceal its overt fascism. The later National Front in Britain was among the most overtly racialist and violently antisystem of any European radical Right party. The potential space for a normalized British far Right, always small, was further reduced in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher turned the Conservative Party rightward. Even so, following episodes of racial violen
ce in some Midlands cities in summer 2001, a successor party, the British National Party (BNP), drew up to 20 percent of the vote in Oldham and won three city council seats in Burnley, two depressed Lancashire industrial towns, in municipal elections in May 2002.

  The temptations of normalization were greater in France, Italy, and Austria than in Britain and Belgium because there was more chance of success. Le Pen and Haider, the two most successful extreme Right leaders in western Europe, had more to gain than many others from professing “normalcy." They also had less distance to travel than Fini to become “normal," never having openly admitted any links with fascism.

  It was little phrases that slipped out between the lines or at the microphone in private meetings, and the lineage of some of their supporters, that a watchful press seized upon to accuse Le Pen, Haider, and Fini of cryptofascism. Le Pen, who knew that his gruff manner formed part of his appeal, often made remarks readily interpreted as anti-Semitic. He was fined for belittling Hitler’s murder of the Jews as a “detail of history" in a September 1987 television interview and again in a speech in Germany in 1996, and lost his eligibility for a year in 1997 for striking a female candidate in an election rally. Haider openly praised the full-employment policies of the Nazis (though no other aspects of Nazism), and he appeared at private rallies of SS veterans and told them that they were models for the young and had nothing to be ashamed of.

  All of these radical Right parties were havens for veterans of Nazism and Fascism. The leader of the German Republikaner after 1983, Franz Schönhuber, was a former SS officer. He and his like did not want to reject potential recruits from among the old fascists and their sympathizers, but at the same time they wanted to extend their reach toward moderate conservatives, the formerly apolitical, or even fed-up socialists. Since the old fascist clientele had nowhere else to go, it could be satisfied by subliminal hints followed by the ritual public disavowals. For in order to move toward Stage Two in the France, Italy, or Austria of the 1990s, one must be firmly recentered on the moderate Right. (This had also been true in 1930s France, as shown by the success of La Rocque’s more centrist tactics after 1936.)37

  In the programs and statements of these parties one hears echoes of classical fascist themes: fears of decadence and decline; assertion of national and cultural identity; a threat by unassimilable foreigners to national identity and good social order; and the need for greater authority to deal with these problems. Even though some of the European radical Right parties have full authoritarian-nationalist programs (such as the Belgian Vlaams Blok’s “seventy points" and Le Pen’s “Three Hundred Measures for French Revival" of 1993), most of them are perceived as single-issue movements devoted to sending unwanted immigrants home and cracking down on immigrant delinquency, and that is why most of their voters chose them.

  Other classical fascist themes, however, are missing from the programmatic statements of the most successful postwar European radical Right parties. The element most totally absent is classical fascism’s attack on the liberty of the market and economic individualism, to be remedied by corporatism and regulated markets. In a continental Europe where state economic intervention is the norm, the radical Right has been largely committed to reducing it and letting the market decide.38

  Another element of classical fascist programs mostly missing from the postwar European radical Right is a fundamental attack on democratic constitutions and the rule of law. None of the more sucessful European far Right parties now proposes to replace democracy by a single-party dictatorship. At most they advocate a stronger executive, less inhibited forces of order, and the replacement of stale traditional parties with a fresh, pure national movement. They leave to the skinheads open expressions of the beauty of violence and murderous racial hatred. The successful radical Right parties wish to avoid public association with them, although they may quietly share overlapping membership with some ultraright action squads and tolerate a certain amount of overheated language praising violent action among their student branches. 39

  No western European radical Right movement or party now proposes national expansion by war—a defining aim for Hitler and Mussolini. Indeed the advocates of border changes in postwar Europe have mostly been secessionist rather than expansionist, such as the Vlaams Blok in Belgium and (for a time) Umberto Bossi’s secessionist Northern League (Lega Nord) in northern Italy. The principal exceptions have been the expansionist Balkan nationalisms that sought to create Greater Serbia, Greater Croatia, and Greater Albania.

  Bilingual Belgium, whose northern Flemish-speaking population has long resented its relative poverty and subordinate status, spawned the most important secessionist far Right movement in continental western Europe. Flemish nationalists had already collaborated with the Nazi occupiers during 1940–44. Their remnants, embittered by a forceful purge in 1945, were ready after the war to support antisystem activism. 40 After a period of dormancy, Flemish nationalism emerged into political activity again in 1977, following the adoption of a federal system for Belgium (the Egmont Agreement) that did not go far enough to satisfy separatists. The Vlaams Blok combined Flemish separatism with violent anti-immigrant feeling and an “antipolitics" for all those alienated by the political establishment. It became in the 1990s one of the most successful radical Right parties in western Europe. In the national elections of 1991, it surpassed 10 percent of the national vote, and won 25.5 percent in Antwerp, the largest Flemish-speaking city in Belgium. In local elections in 1994, it emerged as the largest party in Antwerp, with 28 percent. It was excluded from power only by a coalition of all other parties.41 The Vlaams Blok became “the most blatantly xenophobic (if not overtly racist) among the major radical right-wing populist parties in western Europe" and “attained a level of viciousness that surpassed even that of the [French] Front National."42

  One new space opened up for the western European radical Right after the 1970s: a taxpayers’ revolt against the welfare state. Most striking were the Scandinavian Progress parties that brought to an end after the 1970s the broad consensus that social benefits had enjoyed there since the 1930s. These movements had no hint of fascist style or language, though they were the place where the handful of extreme Right Scandinavians felt most at home, and where expressions of anti-immigrant feeling and even violence against immigrants became legitimate. These parties also recruited opponents of European integration and economic and cultural globalization.

  While comparing programs and rhetoric may reveal some points of contact with classical fascism, partly disguised because of fascism’s ignominy and the moderation tactics of the post-1970s western European radical Right, programs and rhetoric are not the only thing we should be comparing. Much greater contrast appears when one compares the circumstances of today with those of interwar Europe.43 Except for postcommunist central and eastern Europe since 1989, most Europeans have known peace, prosperity, functioning democracy, and domestic order since 1945. Mass democracy is no longer taking its shaky first steps as in Germany and Italy in 1919. Bolshevik revolution poses not even the ghost of a threat. The global competition and Americanized popular culture that still upset many Europeans seem manageable today within existing constitutional systems, without needing to “give up free institutions."

  To sum up, while western Europe has had “legacy fascisms" since 1945, and while, since 1980, a new generation of normalized but racist extreme Right parties has even entered local and national governments there as minority partners, the circumstances are so vastly different in postwar Europe that no significant opening exists for parties overtly affiliated with classical fascism.

  Post-Soviet Eastern Europe

  No place on earth has harbored a more virulent collection of radical Right movements in recent years than post-Soviet eastern Europe and the Balkans.

  Russia had been insulated from the “magnetic field" of classical fascism during the Soviet years (whatever parallels some have wished to draw), but the Russian Slavophile tradition contained the m
ost powerful currents of antiliberal, anti-Western, anti-individualistic communitarian nationalism in all of Europe before 1914. In the backlash from the Russian defeat by Japan and the ensuing revolutionary rising of 1905, the Union of Russian People (URP) became “the strongest, the best organized, and the largest of the right-wing parties" in imperial Russia.44 The URP was an “all-class" movement of national revival and unification that sought to save Russia from the contamination of Western individualism and democracy, if necessary against the tsar himself and the liberal aristocracy, whom they considered too cosmopolitan and too soft on parliamentarism. Its Black Hundreds killed three hundred Jews in Odessa in October 1905.45 It deserves a prominent place among the precursors I discussed in chapter 2.

  When the post-Soviet experiment in electoral democracy and market economics turned out disastrously for Russia after 1991, movements like Pamyat (“memory") revived this rich Slavophile tradition, now updated by open praise for the Nazi experiment. The most successful of a number of antiliberal, anti-Western, anti-Semitic parties in Russia was Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s badly misnamed Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), founded at the end of 1989, with a program of national revival and unification under strong authority combined with wild-eyed proposals for the reconquest of Russia’s lost territories (including Alaska). Zhirinovsky came in third in the Russian presidential election of June 1991, with more than 6 million votes, and his LDP became the largest party in Russia in parliamentary elections in December 1993, with nearly 23 percent of the total vote. 46 Zhirinovsky’s star faded thereafter, partly because of erratic behavior and bizarre statements (plus the revelation that his father was Jewish), but mainly because President Boris Yeltsin held the reins and ignored parliament. For the moment Russia limped along as a quasi democracy under Yeltsin and his handpicked successor, the former KGB agent Vladimir Putin. If the Russian president were to lose credibility, however, some extreme Right leader more competent than Zhirinovsky would be a much more plausible outcome than any kind of return to Marxist collectivism.