Читать книгу Fascism - David Renton - Страница 8

Even before Mussolini became prime minister of Italy on 29 October 1922, there were people outside Italy who wanted to copy his movement. In summer 1925, Mussolini was said to be considering the launch of a fascist international, which would combine up to 40 foreign parties ‘that call themselves fascist or are declared to be such’. Among groups considered for this alliance were the British Fascisti, founded on 6 May 1923 by former wartime ambulance driver Rotha Lintorn-Orman during a moment of epiphany as she dug the weeds in her Somerset vegetable garden. British fascism’s dependence on the Italian model could be seen in the name of the new party and the location of its headquarters on Great Russell Street, shared with the London offices of Mussolini’s Partito Nazionale Fascista (PNF). That sense of indebtedness to a foreign originator did not end with the decline of the British Fascisti after 1926. Between 1933 and 1935, Lintorn-Orman’s eventual successor, the double-turncoat former-Conservative former-Labour politician Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists accepted nearly a quarter of a million pounds in donations from Mussolini’s government.¹

For the interwar Marxists, fascism was a single form of politics which was replicated in country after country. So, in November 1920, Antonio Gramsci, a young Italian supporter of the Russian Revolution and of the workers’ movement in Turin,² characterised fascism as ‘an international phenomenon … the illegal aspect of capitalist violence … a universal development’.³ In June 1923, in a speech to the Executive Committee of the Communist International veteran German socialist feminist Clara Zetkin called for a struggle against fascism to be waged in Germany, Hungary and the United States, arguing that fascism was already a global phenomenon, ‘a question of survival for every ordinary worker’.⁴

Yet for many years after 1922, people rejected this idea of the international and unitary nature of fascism. On the centre and the right of politics, there was a reluctance to treat fascism as more than a transitory phenomenon, or to acknowledge that fascism was a single force. ‘The only people who seem to have perceived fascism as an international one (and a dangerous one) were the far Left’, writes the historian of the British right, Richard Griffiths. ‘Marxists’, notes the biographer of Hitler, Ian Kershaw, produced ‘the first serious attempt to explain fascism in theoretical terms’.⁵ Roger Griffin, the most influential theorist behind today’s ‘New Consensus’ theory of fascism, concurs: ‘Initially … “fascism” referred specifically to Mussolini’s new movement, and it was left-wing Italian intellectuals, convinced of its repressive and reactionary nature as a violent assault on the working-class movement, who made the first attempt to interpret it as a more substantive and general political phenomenon.’⁶

Many at the centre and on the right of politics refused to see fascism in this way. They had all sorts of reasons, both bad and good, for their reluctance. They saw the Communists as the dynamic force in global politics and hoped to entice some of the fascists into an anti-Communist alliance. To such mainstream politicians and to those who took a lead from them, it made sense to stress the competing interests beneath fascism and its incoherent nature. Britain’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill is celebrated in popular memory for the determination with which he warned against the rise of Adolf Hitler, and for his principled ant-fascism which was unusual among Conservatives before 1940. Yet even in his anti-Nazi period, Churchill was effusive in his praise for Mussolini, urging one British audience in February 1933 to distinguish between Hitler’s pernicious intentions and the statesmanlike and anti-Bolshevik instincts of Mussolini, ‘the Roman genius … the greatest lawgiver among living men’.⁷ In the United States, the likes of Wilbur Carr, undersecretary of state to Roosevelt, and Breckinridge Long, ambassador to Italy, praised Mussolini in glowing terms and recommended the acceptance of his occupation of Ethiopia. Italy was a valuable ally and Mussolini her country’s ‘only one first-class mind’. It was better, it followed, to focus on the country’s geopolitical significance than the destructive ideology of its rulers.⁸

More generous explanations can also be given other than mere anti-Communist realpolitik. There is a long-standing controversy, discussed below, as to the extent to which racism played an equal role within Italian and German fascism. There were indeed other differences between the fascist parties. The Iron Guard in Romania (founded by Corneliu Codreanu after he claimed to have been visited by the Archangel Michael while in prison) portrayed the clergy as an essential force in the transformation of society, so much so that in that country’s 1937 elections, some 33 of its 103 candidates were Orthodox priests.⁹ Mussolini depended on the Vatican for support, which was reciprocated. Hitler, meanwhile, despised both the Protestant and Catholic churches.¹⁰

Fascism was a project for nationalist rule. Accordingly, many of its leaders called for independence or the expansion of the borders of their own nation, potentially at the expense of other fascist states. At one point in 1942 a concentration camp in Germany held the leading personalities of each of Austrian, Romanian and Ukrainian fascism (Kurt Schuschnigg, Horia Sima and Stepan Bandera).¹¹ In Romania, Hitler preferred to negotiate with authoritarian conservatives rather than his own ideological admirers. Meanwhile Bandera’s mistake was to demand an independent Ukrainian state when Hitler preferred to keep the country under direct German rule. The more successful fascism was in Italy and Germany, the more that fascists outside were faced with a choice: were they accountable to their own aggrieved middle classes, or to the leaders of the two main fascist states? To characterise fascism as a single international tradition is not to deny the possibility of conflict between fascists.

This book has already referred, in passing, to the New Consensus school. This is now the most influential approach in political science for understanding fascism. It is a series of arguments associated with the British writers Roger Griffin and Roger Eatwell, the American historian of Spanish fascism Stanley Payne and the Israeli historian of French fascism Ze’ev Sternhell. Eatwell argues that fascism must be seen primarily as a set of ideas: ‘fascism is best defined as an ideology’. Fascism, he adds, cannot be viewed as a form of regime, because ‘there were only two’; moreover, fascism cannot be defined as a species of political movement, because such movements ‘exhibit time and context-specific features’ which draw attention away from the decisive heart of fascist ideas. Fascism was: ‘An ideology that strives to forge rebirth on a holistic-national radical Third Way, though in practice fascism has tended to stress style, especially action and the charismatic leader, more than detailed programme and to engage in a manichean demonisation of its enemies.’¹²

In numerous books and articles, Sternhell has argued that fascism emerged first in France in the 1880s and 1890s. It was born in the minds of writers and artists. Fascism began as a rejection of the idea that reason could be used to understand society. It resulted, Sternhell argues, in the formation of a ‘new generation of intellectuals [which] rose violently against the rationalist individualism of liberal society’. Various French intellectuals absorbed and then synthesised socialism and nationalism and thus created a new ideology, ‘a socialism without the proletariat’, which became fascism.¹³

One of the small ironies of this approach is that, while it is a main way in which politics students are taught to understand fascism, several of its advocates express a deep uncertainty as to whether the various fascist parties can usefully be treated as belonging to the same tradition at all. For Sternhell, ‘Fascism can in no way be identified with Nazism’, ‘Nazism cannot ... be treated as a mere variant of fascism, its emphasis on biological determinism rules out all efforts to deal with it as such.’ According to Payne, Hitler’s Germany was ‘a non-Communist National Socialist equivalent’ to Stalin’s Russia: ‘Mussolini’s Italy bore little resemblance to either one’.¹⁴ Griffin accepts that Hitler’s Germany was a fascist state,¹⁵ although he shares with Sternhell and Payne the idea that Mussolini’s Italy was closer to the core of the fascist experience:

It is a particularly grotesque and tragic example of the operation of ‘Murphy’s law’ in the historical process that of the only two forms of fascism that managed, against the odds, to seize state power, one of them was informed by an ideology of unparalleled destructive potential. The Mazzinian squadrista or Roman Empire myths invoked by fascist Italy, [or] Mosley’s vision of a Greater Britain ... cannot compare with the sheer scale of military aggression and racial persecution implied by the Nazi dream of a Jew-free racial empire.¹⁶

The interwar Marxist theorists of fascism saw the matter differently. As long ago as the early 1920s they insisted on seeing fascism in Italy, Germany and Hungary as local variations on the same theme. One advantage of seeing fascism as a single form of politics is that it enables you to explain the common politics which persisted despite these groups’ undoubted differences. When fascists took power, their systems of government were highly similar: in the way they curtailed the liberty of their subjects and attacked their racial and political enemies. They promoted the same groups of people while subordinating the same enemies. Ian Kershaw lists the similarities between German and Italian fascist rule:

• Extreme chauvinistic nationalism with pronounced imperialistic expansionist tendencies;

• an anti-socialist, anti-Marxist thrust aimed at the destruction of working-class organisations and their Marxist political philosophy;

• the basis in a mass party drawing from all sectors of society, though with pronounced support in the middle class and proving attractive to the peasantry and to various uprooted or highly unstable sectors of the population;

• fixation on a charismatic, plebiscitary, legitimised leader;

• extreme intolerance towards all oppositional and presumed oppositional groups, expressed through vicious terror, open violence and ruthless repression;

• glorification of militarism and war, heightened by the backlash to the comprehensive socio-political crisis in Europe arising from the First World War;

• dependence upon an ‘alliance’ with existing elites, industrial, agrarian, military and bureaucratic, for their political breakthrough;

• and, at least an initial function, despite a populist-revolutionary anti-establishment rhetoric, in the stabilisation or restoration of social order and capitalist structures.¹⁷

It would have been possible, in effect, for a traveller in Europe in 1936 or 1939 to trek the 700 miles from Rome to Berlin and feel that for all the differences of language and geography between the two cities they were in the same country, governed by the same people, working to the same ends.

Another advantage of seeing fascism as a single entity is that it allows you to grasp how developments in one country fed into politics elsewhere. In the words of the socialist and anti-fascist Clara Zetkin, ‘neither the Peace Treaties nor the occupation of the Ruhr have given such a fillip to Fascism in Germany as the seizure of power by Mussolini’. In autumn 1922, days after Mussolini’s appointment, Hitler told one supporter, ‘We have in common with the fascists the uncompromising love for the fatherland, the will to rip class from the claws of the International and the fresh, comradely frontline spirit.’¹⁸ The following year, Hitler’s attempted Beer Hall Putsch was modelled on Mussolini’s March on Rome.

Later, Hitler’s release from prison in late 1924 and his re-establishment of the Nazi party in early 1925 coincided with the moves by Mussolini towards the creation of a dictatorship. After Hitler’s succession to power in 1933, German economic policies were modelled on the Italian, albeit without the pretence of a corporate industrial facade. Mussolini’s status as a leader of European significance was an inspiration to Hitler, causing the German leader to seek to emulate Italy’s then influence over Austria.¹⁹ Mussolini and Hitler met at Venice in June 1934, the location reflecting Mussolini’s ascendancy over the German chancellor. It was also an opportunity for differences to emerge. Hitler wanted Mussolini to agree that Nazis should participate in the Austrian government but was rebuffed.²⁰ Afterwards, Hitler ceased to treat Mussolini as his leader.

In December 1934 Mussolini held a congress of his Fascist International at Montreux in Switzerland, with delegates attending from Belgium, Denmark, France, Greece, Holland, Ireland, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and Romania. The event was used to promote an image of Italy as the spiritual and financial centre of fascism, a right-wing counterpart to the Soviet Union with its Communist International. The shared programme of the European fascists was said to be, ‘the reconstitution of the state on a new basis … the organisation of labour, liberties contained within sane and honest limits’. The National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) was a notable absentee, relying on various allies at the congress (including the Norwegian fascist Vidkun Quisling) to put the case for National Socialism on Hitler’s behalf.²¹

The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War again changed the relationship between the two dictators. German planes carried tens of thousands of Franco’s troops. In October 1936, the fascist powers reached an agreement recognising Italian conquests in Africa in return for the German annexation of Austria. Hitler’s warships patrolled the Spanish coast, his planes bombed Guernica. In autumn 1937, Mussolini, now the junior figure in the partnership, visited Hitler. Afterwards, attempts were made to impose on Italian society rules modelled on everyday life under the Nazis. Handshakes in plays and films were banned. Italians were instructed to greet each other, as in Germany, with the fascist salute.

After 1939, the fascist states were able to impose on occupied Europe a variety of systems of rule, ranging from conventional military dictatorship in Vichy France, to puppet fascist regimes, such as in Croatia where a Ustasha Racial State set out to emulate the Nazi example, including by introducing its own ‘Law on Jews’, modelled closely on Germany’s Nuremberg Laws.²²

Understanding the two fascist states together helps to explain some of the processes by which the fascist regimes became more radical in office. There was a reciprocal relationship between the two fascist parties, a dynamic of cooperation and competition as if the fascists were seeking to outbid each other’s victories, so that the gains made in one country had to be surpassed in another.²³