The Anatomy of Fascism

by Robert O. Paxton

  All the eastern European successor states have contained radical Right movements since 1989, but most of these have remained gratifyingly weak.47 Messy democracy and economic strains, along with the persistence of contested frontiers and discontented ethnic minorities, offer them fertile soil. For the moment, however, the appeal of joining the European Union is such that most eastern Europeans accept imperfect democracy and market economics as its necessary precondition, while the integral nationalist alternative (whose horrors are clearly revealed in the former territories of Yugoslavia) appeals only to a marginal fringe.

  It was in postcommunist Yugoslavia that Europe’s nearest postwar equivalent to Nazi extermination policies appeared. After Tito’s death in 1980, faced with the problem of distributing a declining economic product among fractious competing regions, the Yugoslav federal state gradually lost its legitimacy. Serbia, which once had been the federation’s dominant member, now led in its destruction. Serbia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic, a heretofore colorless communist bureaucrat, discovered on April 24, 1987, that he had a talent for exciting crowds while addressing the Serbs of Kosovo on the six hundredth anniversary of the Serbian defeat by the Muslims in the battle of Kosovo Polje, a day rich in meaning for Serbs. The Serbs were by then massively outnumbered by Albanians in the Kosovo region, and Milosevic aroused a frenzy of excitement by playing on the themes of victimhood and justified revenge. He had discovered in Serbian nationalism a substitute for the dwindling faith in communism as a source of legitimacy and discipline. At the end of 1988, he increased central control within Serbia by abolishing local autonomy in two regions, Kosovo with its Albanians, and the Voivodina with its Hungarians.

  Milosevic’s efforts to increase Serbian power within the Yugoslav federation provoked separatism among other nationalities. When Slovenia and Croatia declared their independence from the federation in 1991, the Serb-dominated districts (15 percent of the population) seceded from Croatia, with the support of the federal Yugoslav army (mainly Serb). The war in Croatia involved efforts by both Croats and Serbs to expel each other from the territories they controlled by the tactics of arson, murder, and gang rape that the West came to call “ethnic cleansing" (though the differences were historical, cultural, and religious rather than ethnic).

  When Bosnia declared its independence in 1992, its Serb areas likewise broke away and called in the federal Yugoslav army. Ethnic cleansing was even more gruesome in Bosnia, which had been the most integrated region of Yugoslavia, with mingled neighborhoods and frequent intermarriages. Milosevic aimed to enfold the Serb areas of Croatia and Bosnia into a Greater Serbia. He failed. Croatian armies, backed by the West, brutally expelled most Serbs from the Krajina, the main Serbian region of Croatia. In Bosnia, NATO military intervention forced Milosevic to accept a bargain (the Dayton Agreement of November 1995) in which he remained in power in Serbia but abandoned his Serbian cousins in Bosnia, who were fobbed off with a separate region within a Bosnian federal state. When Milosevic tried to expel Albanians from the province of Kosovo in 1999, NATO air strikes forced him to withdraw. His rule ended in September 2000 after the Serbs themselves chose the opposition candidate in federal elections. The new Serbian government eventually turned him over to the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.

  It must be admitted that Serbian nationalism displayed none of the outward trappings of fascism except brutality, and that Serbia permitted relatively free electoral competition by multiple parties. Milosevic’s regime did not come to power by the rooting of a militant party that then allied with the establishment to reach office. Instead, a sitting president adopted expansionist nationalism as a device to consolidate an already existing personal rule, and was supported by a passionately enthusiastic public. On that improvised basis, Milosevic’s Serbia was able to present the world with a spectacle not seen in Europe since 1945: a de facto dictatorship with fervent mass support engaged in the killing of men, women, and children in order to avenge alleged historic national humiliations and to create an ethnically pure and expanded nation-state. While pinning the epithet of fascist upon the odious Milosevic adds nothing to an explanation of how his rule was established and maintained, it seems appropriate to recognize a functional equivalent when it appears.

  The horror aroused by Milosevic was such that the Greater Croatia project of President Franjo Tudjman (1991–99) received less notice outside. Tudjman, a retired army officer and history professor, built his own regime of personal rule upon the no less cruel expulsions of Serbs from Croatia, and he reached more of his goals than did Milosevic. While Serbian patriotic themes included its anti-Nazi role in World War II, Croatian patriotic themes included Ante Paveli’s Ustaša, the terrorist nationalist sect that had governed Hitler’s puppet state of Croatia during 1941–44 and had carried out mass murders of Serbs and Jews there. Tudjman’s newly independent Croatia resurrected Ustaša emblems and honored the memory of one of the most sanguinary fascist regimes in Nazi-occupied Europe.

  Fascism Outside Europe

  Some observers doubt that fascism can exist outside Europe. They contend that specific historic fascism required the specific European preconditions of the fin de siècle cultural revolution, intense rivalry among newly formed claimants to Great Power status, mass nationalism, and contentions over the control of new democratic institutions.48 Those who relate fascism more closely to replicable social or political crises are readier to entertain the possibility of a fascist equivalent in a non-European culture. If we hold firmly to Gaetano Salvemini’s position that fascism means “giving up free institutions," and hence is a malady of sick democracies,49 then of course our field is limited to countries outside Europe that have functioned as democracies or at least have attempted to install representative government. This essential criterion excludes all sorts of Third World dictatorships. Simply being murderous is not enough in itself to make Idi Amin Dada, for example, the bloodthirsty tyrant of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, a fascist.

  European colonies of settlement constituted the most likely setting for fascism outside Europe, at least during the period of fascist ascendancy in Europe. During the 1930s, South African white-protection movements powerfully influenced by Nazism grew strong among Boer planters. The most unabashedly fascist were Louis Weichardt’s South African Gentile National Socialist Movement, with its Greyshirt militia, and J. S. von Moltke’s South African Fascists, whose Junior Nationalists wore orange shirts. The most successful far Right movement in pre-war South Africa was the Ossebrandwag (OB, Ox-Wagon Sentinel) of 1939.50 It adopted Boer folklore about their “great trek" inland to the Transvaal in covered wagons in 1835–37, to protect their way of life from the contamination of British liberalism. The OB’s authentic local garb and its ties to the Calvinist Church appealed to the Boer elite more than borrowed imitations of European fascisms, though its Nazi sympathies were unconcealed. Even today one can see the movement’s covered-wagon symbols on South African hillsides.

  After 1945, fascist references became more discreet in white South Africa, but an appeal to white Anglo-Boer racial unity against the black majority offered what seemed an almost chemically pure potential setting for fascism. Many observers of South Africa expected the apartheid (segregation) system installed in 1948 to harden under pressure into something close to fascism. Its eventual dismantling under the inspired leadership of Nelson Mandela and the grudging acquiescence of President F. W. de Klerk turned out to be one of the most breathtaking happy endings of history (at least for the moment), to the relief of even many Boers. Things could still turn sour, of course. The black majority’s frustrated yearning for faster improvement in living standards, especially if accompanied by violence, could produce defensive white protective associations eager to “give up free institutions" that threatened not only their way of life but their lives.

  Latin America came closest of any continent outside Europe to establishing something approaching genuine fascist regimes between the 1930s and the early 1950s
. We must tread warily here, however, for a high degree of mimicry was involved during the period of fascist ascendancy in Europe. Local dictators tended to adopt the fascist decor that was the fashion of the 1930s, while drawing Depression remedies as much from Roosevelt’s New Deal as from Mussolini’s corporatism.

  The closest thing to an indigenous mass fascist party in Latin America was the Ação Integralista Brasileira (AIB), founded by the writer Plinio Salgado after he returned from a trip to Europe where, upon meeting Mussolini, “a sacred fire had entered his existence." 51 The Integralists were much more solidly implanted in Brazilian society than the Nazi and Fascist clubs that spread among German and Italian immigrants there, and Salgado successfully merged indigenous Brazilian historical imagery (including the Tupi Indian culture) with the more overtly fascist aspects of his program, such as dictatorship, nationalism, protectionism, corporatism, anti-Semitism, goose steps, a proposed Secretariat for Moral and Physical Education, green shirts and black armbands with the Greek letter sigma (the symbol of integralism), to form an authentically homegrown overtly fascist movement. Integralismo peaked in 1934 with 180,000 members, some of them prominent in the professions, business, and the military. 52

  It was not the Integralistas who ruled Brazil, however, but a canny though uncharismatic dictator, Getulio Vargas. Vargas became president through a military coup in 1930 and was elected president more normally in 1934. When that term approached its end, Vargas took full power in 1937 and set up the Estado Novo, whose name and authoritarian political system were borrowed from Portugal. He ruled as a dictator until 1945, when the military removed him from power.53 Vargas’s Estado Novo of 1937–45 was a modernizing dictatorship with some progressive features (it curtailed the local powers of the old oligarchy and promoted centralized authority, social services, education, and industrialization). Its protectionism and state-authorized cartels for such products as coffee (whose world price had collapsed in the Depression) resembled the Depression remedies of many 1930s governments, not necessarily fascist. Like Salazar in Portugal, far from governing through a fascist party, Vargas closed down the Integralistas and the pro-Nazi and pro-Fascist movements along with all other parties. Vargas, a slight man who disliked public speaking and admitted that riding a horse hurt his backside, 54 failed to rise even to the gaucho image of his home state of Rio Grande do Sul, much less to that of a fascist jefe.

  Colonel Juan Perón matched that image far more closely, both in his personal charisma and in his political predilections. On the eve of World War II, as assistant Argentine military attaché in Rome, he had admired the order, the discipline, the unity, and the enthusiasm, as he perceived them, of Fascist Italy. Indeed Perón claimed Italian ancestry, like many Argentines (Italy and Spain had furnished most European immigrants to Argentina).55

  Argentina’s adoption of manhood suffrage in 1912 allowed the cautiously reformist Radical Hipólito Yrigoyen to govern after 1916 in what looked like the establishment of constitutional democracy. Yrigoyen’s uninspiring patronage-based political machine had no answers, however, to the worldwide decline in agricultural prices that threatened Argentina’s wealth in the late 1920s.56 In September 1930 right-wing army officers overthrew Yrigoyen and ended constitutional rule for what turned out to be an unstable half century of mostly right-wing dictatorships.

  At first General José Uriburu attempted to cope with the Great Depression through a corporatist economic system copied from Mussolini’s Italy. Uriburu’s “fascism from above" failed to win the necessary support among military, party, and economic leaders, however, and gave way to a series of military-conservative dictatorships punctuated by fraudulent elections that Argentines remember as “the infamous decade." When World War II broke out, Argentina remained neutral and its army leaned toward Germany, source of its arms and training.

  When the United States entered the war in December 1941, it subjected Argentina to intense pressure to join the Allied camp along with the rest of Latin America. A new military junta took power in June 1943 determined to resist American pressure and remain neutral. At least some of its members, including Colonel Juan Perón, wanted to continue obtaining arms from Germany to counterbalance U.S. arms and bases in Brazil.57

  An obscure colonel in the military junta that took power in 1943, Juan Perón asked for the apparently trivial post of secretary for labor and social welfare.58 Once in control of labor organizations, Perón eliminated their socialist, communist, or anarcho-syndicalist leaders, merged multiple unions into a single state-sponsored worker organization for each sector of the economy, and expanded their membership to the previously unorganized. These steps turned the Confederación General de Trabajo (CGT, General Confederation of Labor) into his personal fiefdom. Perón won authentic gratitude by substantially improving working conditions and obtaining favorable settlement of labor disputes. He was greatly assisted in this project by the personal flair and the anti-establishment radicalism of his mistress, Eva Duarte, an illegitimate country girl struggling to make good as an actress in radio soap operas.

  Perón came to power quite unlike Mussolini and Hitler, not at the head of a militant party striving to show that democracy was unworkable (democracy had already been stifled), but by the pressure of a mass demonstration of his worker following. In October 1945 Perón’s fellow officers in the junta, alarmed by the young colonel’s ambition and demagoguery, influenced by the American ambassador’s hostility to him, and offended by the openness of his liaison with the lower-class Eva, stripped him of office and arrested him. On October 17, 1945, a date later celebrated as the national holiday of Peronism, hundreds of thousands of striking workers—mobilized by Eva, according to Peronist legend, but more likely by other aides—occupied downtown Buenos Aires. In the sweltering heat some of them took off their shirts and, before the appalled citizenry, cooled themselves in the elegant fountains of the Plaza de Mayo. Los descamisados—the shirtless ones—became the equivalent in Peronist legend of the French Revolution’s sans-culottes.59

  In order to appease the peaceable but overwhelming crowd, the junta released the colonel and set up a new government composed mostly of his friends. Perón was on track for election as president in 1946. Perón’s dictatorship rested thereafter as much on a manipulated CGT as upon the army. It was openly and explicitly directed against “the oligarchy" that had snubbed Evita. Never mind that the dictatorship never threatened property and did its best to support import-substitution industry, and that Perón’s CGT became more the manager of a working-class clientele than an authentic expression of its grievances. Perón’s popular base was always more explicitly proletarian than that of Mussolini or Hitler, and its animus against the old families of Argentina more overt. While Fascism and Nazism used dictatorship to smash an independent labor movement and shrink the worker share of the national product, Perón increased workers’ share of the national income from 40 percent in 1946 to 49 percent by 1949.60

  Perón’s dictatorship (1946–55) was the regime outside Europe most often called fascist, particularly in the United States. Washington officialdom had labeled neutral Argentina firmly as pro-Axis even before Perón came on the scene.61 With its charismatic leader, the Conductor Perón, its single Peronista party and its official doctrine of justicialismo or “organized community," its mania for parades and ceremonies (often star-ring Eva, now his wife), its corporatist economy, its controlled press, its repressive police and periodic violence against the Left,62 its subjugated judiciary and close ties to Franco, it did indeed look fascist to a World War II generation accustomed to dividing the world between fascists and democrats.

  More recent scholars, however, have preferred to stress Peronism’s indigenous roots: a national tradition of salvation by strong leaders; dread of decline, as agricultural exports, the source of Argentina’s great wealth, lost value after World War I; a mammoth “red scare" set off by a bloody general strike in January 1919 (la semana trágica); nationalism easily focused upon regaining econo
mic independence from British investors; the political space offered by a tired oligarchy that rested upon the diminished power of the cattle and wheat barons without giving voice to the new urban middle and working classes (the largest in South America); and a widepread conviction that “politicians" were both feckless and corrupt. 63

  Surface appearances aside, Perón’s dictatorship worked quite unlike those of Hitler and Mussolini. Whereas these two had come to power against chaotic democracies in the disorder following upon a rapidly broadened suffrage, Perón came to power against a narrowly based military-conservative oligarchy and then broadened the franchise (women could vote after 1947) and increased citizen participation.64 He won clear electoral majorities in 1946 and 1951, and again in a comeback in 1973, in Argentina’s cleanest presidential elections up to that point. Although Perón’s dictatorship used police intimidation and controlled the press, it lacked the diabolized internal/external enemy—Jews or others—that seems an essential ingredient of fascism.65 It expressed no interest in expansion by war.

  Finally, Eva Perón filled a role utterly foreign to fascist machismo. “Evita" was the first Latin American leader’s wife to participate actively in government. This complex and shrewd woman knew how to play on multiple registers: as passionate orator for los descamisados and against “the oligarchy"; as organizer of the women’s vote at the head of the Peronist Women’s Party (though never promoting other women to positions of power); as lady bountiful, distributing favors each day from her desk at the Ministry of Labor and through the mysteriously financed Eva Perón Foundation; and as a glamorous dream object who was said to have donned 306 different lavish outfits in one 270-day period.66 Outwardly feminine and submissive to the dictator, she was widely perceived as giving her cautious husband backbone. She established a rapport with the Buenos Aires crowd so intense that after her death—by cancer at thirty-three in 1952—she became the object of multiple cults. For a few, she was a revolutionary leader (an image revived by left-wing Peronists in the 1970s); for many others, she was a quasi saint, for whom altars were built and whose carefully embalmed body had to be hidden by subsequent regimes. In the eyes of many upper-class Argentinians, she was a vengeful upstart and sexual manipulator. At her death she was probably the most powerful woman in the world. 67