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Fascism
comprises a political attitude and a mass movement that tended to dominate
political life in central, southern, and eastern-central Europe between 1919 and
1944. Common to all fascist movements was an emphasis on the nation (race or
state) as the centre and regulator of all history and life, and on the
indisputable authority of the leader behind whom the people were expected to
form an unbreakable unity. The word fascism itself was first used in 1919 by Benito
Mussolini in Italy; in the following
years the influence of fascism made itself felt in countries as far away as
Japan, Argentina, Brazil, and the Union of South Africa, its specific aspects
varying according to the country's political traditions, its social structure,
and the personality of the leader. The Italian word fascio
(derived from the Latin fasces, a
bundle of rods with an ax in it) symbolized both aspects: the power of many
united and obeying one will and the authority of the state,
which was the supreme source of law and order and all national life. (see also nationalism,
authoritarianism, political
power)
Fascism rejected the main philosophical
trends of the 18th and 19th centuries, the "spirit" of the American
and French revolutions with their emphasis on individual liberty and on the
equality of men and races. The message of the Enlightenment had served to
enhance the dignity of the individual and had emphasized openness in a
secularized society. In contrast, fascism extolled the supreme sovereignty
of the nation as an absolute. It demanded the revival of the spirit of the
ancient polis (city-state), above all
of Sparta with its discipline and total devotion to duty, and of the complete
coordination of all intellectual and political thought and activities against
modern individualism and scientific skepticism.
The Italian slogan "to believe, to obey, to combat" was fascism's
antithesis to "liberty, equality, fraternity," and to the prophetic
and Christian messages of peace. The combination of an unquestioning faith and
of a virile combativeness was to transform the nation into a permanently
mobilized armed force to conquer, maintain, and expand power.
In its beginnings fascism was not a
doctrine and had no clearly elaborated program. It was a technique for gaining
and retaining power by violence, and with astonishing flexibility it
subordinated all questions of program to this one aim. From the beginning it was
dominated by a definite attitude of mind that exalted the fighting spirit,
military discipline, ruthlessness, and action and rejected all ethical motives
as weakening the resoluteness of will. Stressing the irrational and instincts
and activism, fascism insisted that the strong will always prevail over the
weak, the more resolute over the irresolute. Ultimately everything depended upon
the decisions of the leader, decisions to be blindly obeyed and immediately
executed. Fascism returned to an authoritarian order, based upon the
subordination of the individual and the inequality of caste and rank.
Power is, of course, an element present
in all political life. The first major writer to abandon the moral and normative
approach to politics in favour of pure power was the Florentine man of letters Niccolò
Machiavelli (1469-1527). A man of the Renaissance, he looked to the
people of pre-Christian antiquity as the original possessors of virtú,
the civic virtue necessary to the modern ruler; he believed that
Christianity was, unfortunately, "true," but that its stress on
meekness and humility would damage political man, weakening and at the same time
fanaticizing him. Machiavelli's methodology involved the empirical observation
of human nature and behaviour, which he believed to be changeless. His deep
feelings about the degradation and corruption of Italy at his time led him to
put his hope into the daring and the violence of a great man who would exercise
power ruthlessly but with prudence. Power, Machiavelli apparently believed,
legitimized the state, if rationally applied, as raison
d'état, by a man able to manipulate the people and use the army for
his own purposes. In his quest for a "new prince" and a new principle
of policy he knew that he was opening "a road as yet untrodden by
man." The road led to the absolute sovereign state. (see also political
power)
In the bitter and protracted religious
conflict of 16th-century France, the French jurist Jean Bodin (1530-96) stressed
the importance of the sovereign, but by no means unlimited, power of the state
in effective government. During the constitutional crisis of 17th-century
England the philosopher Thomas Hobbes
(1588-1679) saw sovereign power as more absolute, unlimited by the subjects who
have authorized it and responsible only to God. For Machiavelli the state was a
work of art, created by the skill of the prince whom Machiavelli wished to teach
the rules of conduct; for Bodin and Hobbes the state was a rational contrivance
to lift central authority above religious and civil disputes. The peace treaty
of Westphalia in 1648, in an attempt to end over a century of religious warfare,
gave the secular sovereign, generally a hereditary absolutist monarch, the right
to determine the religious beliefs of his subjects. The maintenance of law and
order became the highest guiding principle, but even at this stage the state had
not yet become the object of awe or emotional veneration.
The state became such only after the
French Revolution, and above all in the emotional teaching of German Romantic
philosophers, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762-1814) and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1831). For these men the national collectivity assumed, morally and
politically, an absolute rank. Fichte's utopian "closed state" was
authoritarian, anti-individualistic, and economically self-sufficient.
But Fichte did not endow the state with
the sacral aura that Hegel gave it. For a century German historiography was to
accept the Hegelian concept of the absolute-power state that acts in its own
self-interest without consideration for humanitarian principle or for the rights
of individuals or of other states. Hegel's followers, like those of Fichte,
overlooked the complexity and ambiguity of his philosophy and concentrated on
his exaltation of the state as an end in itself, as the "actuality of the
ethical idea," as "absolutely rational," and as the source of all
"concrete freedom." Only as a subject of the state (specifically, for
Hegel, the Prussian monarchy) does the individual gain objective reality and an
ethical life. The state's unconditional sovereignty reveals its nature above all
in war.
In the first part of the 19th century
Hegel was, then, the philosopher of a militaristic monarchy opposed to the
growing strength of 19th-century middle-class liberalism.
At the end of the century another antiliberal, anti-individualistic, and
authoritarian movement made its influence felt, this time in the middle-class
democracy of the French Republic. Its leader was Charles
Maurras (1868-1952), who repudiated the disunity and verbosity of
parliamentarianism. He admired the Roman Catholic Church (but not Christianity,
which in his opinion glorified universalism, social unrest, and pacifism), but
for the virtues of hierarchic discipline and traditionalist order. The supreme
norm of political life was to Maurras the absolute primacy of France and this
meant action in France's interest instead of hesitation, parliamentary
discussion, and consideration of world opinion. (see also Dreyfus, Alfred)
In 1894 a military tribunal convicted
Capt. Alfred Dreyfus, the only Jewish officer in the French general staff, of
pro-German espionage. Dreyfus insisted on his innocence, and his case became the
centre of a bitter dispute involving questions of the precedence of national
interest over objective justice. If Dreyfus were innocent, then the French army
command on which France depended was dishonoured and stood accused of intrigue
and worse. Antiliberal forces saw in the dispute an opportunity to overthrow the
parliamentary republic, in which many high army officers and the church saw
something fundamentally un-French, the work of Freemasons and Protestants,
Anglo-Saxons and Jews. Whereas Maurras, in his struggle against democracy,
pleaded for a return to the ancient monarchy, his compatriot, Maurice
Barrès (1862-1923), saw the remedy in a leader who, being in close
touch with the masses, would be the embodiment and the effective will of their
thought and feeling. Against the rational cosmopolitanism of the
"uprooted" intellectuals (a term that he made the title of his most
famous novel in 1897), Barrès extolled the close community of a nation
with its deep roots in past generations and in the ancestral soil (the
"blood" and "soil"--Blut
and Boden of Hitler). To Barrès the individual was merely a link
in the chain of generations, inevitably determined by the blood of common
forefathers.
The beginning of the 20th century felt
the influence of Friedrich Nietzsche's
(1844-1900) contradictory and often misunderstood work. Not a forerunner of
fascism, Nietzsche despised German nationalism, anti-Semitism, and the authority
of the state. He was, in fact, an extreme individualist, in revolt against all
uncritical obedience by believers or followers and against the traditional
values of church and fatherland. But he also despised the common man and
democracy; he believed in great personalities and their exclusive rights. He
found his time lacking in greatness and heroism, and he glorified the courage of
warriors, though he meant first of all warriors of the mind, strong enough to
overcome their own pettiness and their acceptance of faith or belief that came
to them from second or third hand. (see also elite, social
class)
Oswald Spengler
(1880-1936) shared Nietzsche's feeling of the decadence of Western civilization,
brought about by Christianity and democracy, and his faith in the need for an
aristocratic elite. Writing during World War I, Spengler insisted that all
history is struggle among nations and that each nation's future will be decided
by its power relationships to other peoples. Each people must be "in
condition" for inevitable struggle and must trust its leaders; what is
significant is not the victory of truth but the triumph of the will-to-power.
The French radical antiliberal Socialist
Georges Sorel in his revolutionary syndicalism
emphasized the dynamism and new vitality of a heroic proletariat against an
effete bourgeoisie. In his Reflections
on Violence (1908) Sorel claimed that the working-class movement
needed irrational myths to carry out its role in history. This idea influenced
many Socialists in Latin countries, especially in north-central Italy, at the
time Benito Mussolini was growing up. Violence, Sorel declared, was
"sublime" when it was exercised by a movement with a historical
mission. In Sorel, radical socialist theory of the left fused with a radical
conservatism of the right in common rejection of bourgeois
"mediocrity."
Among Italian pre-1914 social
philosophers, other more conservative forerunners preached an elitist doctrine
of vitality and the competitive power struggle. They turned from Count Cavour's
liberal faith in parliamentarianism, which had established the unified Italian
kingdom of 1861, to a quest for new elites and new rationales. Among them was Gaetano
Mosca (1858-1941). Mosca's Elimenti
di scienza politica (1896; Eng. trans. The
Ruling Class, 1939) owed much to the Austrian professor of public law
Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838-1909), whose fundamental
work Der Rassenkampf ("Racial
Struggle") in 1883 established the "group" as the fundamental
unit of sociology, which he interpreted as the science of the interaction of
groups. Material need was to Mosca the prime motive of human conduct; conquest
and the satisfaction of the conqueror's need by the labour of the conquered, the
fundamental essence of history.
Mosca and Vilfredo
Pareto (1848-1923) argued that there had always been a ruling class of a
few men who held power over the majority; that society is, thus, hierarchically
organized, though the elites may change and, in fact, the change of elites is as
much the essence of history as are wars between ethnic groups. The new elites
carry with them their own values, expressed in social myths that can neither be
proved nor disproved and that serve as a call and inspiration to action. The
collective psychology of Scipio Sighele (1868-1913) and Gustave Le Bon
(1841-1931) hypothesized that crowds obey
collective subconscious emotions rather than the rational individuality of their
single members, and, therefore, that crowds are highly susceptible to
manipulation by leadership that can arouse in them heroism or savagery of which
the individual alone would be incapable. Endlessly reiterated statements rather
than rational thought influence public morality.
The troubled state of Europe in the
years before 1914 was greatly intensified by the pressures that World
War I put on societies that were not yet socially and politically
modernized. This was true in varying degrees of Germany, Italy, and Japan, all
of whom had entered the war in the expectation of great gains in territory and
status, and of acquiring full equality with the older societies of the West. The
deep moral depression and confusion which the defeat of 1918 produced in Germany
was due to the apparently inexplicable difference between expectations and final
failure.
The discrepancy between Germany's
advanced industry and her semifeudal-state structure, with its traditional
authoritarian basis, had weakened her war effort. The failure on the battlefield
led to a deeply emotional nationalism which ascribed the shortcomings not to
Germany's backward political structure but to enemy plots and domestic
"enemies." Thus the authoritarian militarist elite was not discredited
by the defeat of 1918; on the contrary, the fear of Bolshevism brought support
for the defense of the traditional structure.
Though Italy was to be among the victors
in World War I, the relative backwardness of its political, social, and economic
structure in 1914 put an immense strain on all aspects of Italian society and
life. The failure of expected gains from the war to materialize led to a
weakening of the country's insecure liberal foundations. Those who, like Benito
Mussolini, had agitated for Italy's entrance into the war in 1915 tried to
direct the discontent and fear of the population against the victorious
democracies who, unlike Italy, had emerged strengthened from the war. Social
unrest frightened the propertied classes, the major landowners, and the church.
Instead of carrying through long overdue reforms, they sought for a strong man
who could sway part of the masses, war veterans, and lower middle class and turn
them against the threat of Bolshevism. Fascism
was thus regarded as a bulwark against the modernization of Italy. Though this
was an underestimation of the syndicalist and radical aspects of Mussolini's
original position, he was able to achieve, more than Hitler did later, an
accommodation with the old ruling class, the monarchy, the army, and the church.
Fascist movements, wherever they have
arisen, have frequently been inspired by national feelings of disappointment and
by the assumed need to close ranks in order to reach often fantastic goals (e.g.,
the revival of Roman glory). Japan's fascist movement was linked to its
attempt in World War I to establish a protectorate over China, which was
frustrated, largely, as Japan felt, by the United States. Similarly, the
strength of the fascists in Hungary owed much to the bitter national resentment
at the loss of its non-Magyar subjects to new or enlarged nation-states created
at the end of the war. These new states were not politically strong, and, as in
Spain or Latin America, traditional right-wing conservatism, backed by the
church and the pre-1914 oligarchy, found itself in conflict with the dynamism of
fascism and its contempt for traditional ideas. Later, both were to enter into
uneasy alliances in their fear of Bolshevism.
Politically and socially the modern,
industrial middle-class societies that developed in Britain, Scandinavia,
Switzerland, the Low Countries, and France in the 19th century showed a great
power of resistance to fascism, which was, on the whole, confined to fringe
movements. Even in Germany, with her bitter resentments accumulated from her
failure in World War I, which Hitler masterfully
manipulated and fused with older resentments, fascism would probably not have
come to power had it not been for the inflation crisis of 1923 and the
widespread unemployment of the early 1930s. Finally, the rise of fascism in
Germany owed much to the weakness of civilian democracy in that country. Germany
had originated as a nation-state in 1871, thanks almost entirely to the
military-authoritarian tradition of Prussia and the victories achieved by its
army without the aid of any other power. The new Reich
was proclaimed at the gates of Paris, the capital of the defeated enemy, and
the German middle classes and German scholarship all willingly accepted the
traditional values of the efficient ruling class, though by 1900 these values
were insufficient to support an expanding modern industrial society.
Neither a capable semimilitary
bureaucracy nor a scientific technology existed in Italy, Spain, Portugal,
Greece, or Romania, where low urban and rural productivity during the early 20th
century constantly widened the gap between these countries and the modern West
and provided a basis for the growth of fascism.
In Italy, the farthest advanced of these
countries, it was estimated in 1900 that half the population could neither write
nor read. Though the north of Italy made great progress in the first 15 years of
the present century, the fact is that even in 1914 the per capita income of the
country, measured in standard gold units, was only 105 compared with 237 for
Britain and 182 for France. Southern Italy's peasant population lived, according
to one account, "in conditions of utmost destitution, illiteracy was the
rule. Afflicted with gross dietary deficiency, accustomed to deprivation, and
mulled by ceaseless toil, whole regions were innocent of the most elementary
education and were consequently not equipped to participate in the
challenge" offered by modern civilization. Archaic traditions and
authoritarian religion preserved in Italy and Spain, in Romania, Greece, and
Hungary a social system that was outside the modern world.
Fascism was an effort to employ
anti-individualism and authoritarianism in modernizing economically backward
societies. Arturo Labriola (1873-1959), an early syndicalist, spoke of Italy as
a colony of "plutocratic Europe." The leader of an aggressive Italian
nationalism, Enrico Corradini (1865-1931), influenced by Nietzsche and Maurras,
saw the future as a conflict not between workers and capitalists but between
proletarian and plutocratic nations. It was in that sense that fascism may have
influenced the new African nations as they tried to organize themselves in the
1950s and 1960s. Despite its reactionary view of man, fascism regarded itself as
representing youth against senility, the wave of the future against the effete
heritage of the 19th century, biological vitality against the craving for peace
and comfort.
It has been shown that fascist movements
arose where traditions and social structures favoured them. Unlike democracy,
fascism demands a charismatic leader, a "new prince" as Machiavelli
called him, who can gather all the prefascist emotional and social strains into
one persuasive philosophy and will appeal to the masses. In Italy
Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) was such a leader.
From 1902 to 1914 Mussolini wrote many articles in the spirit of a radical
Marxist. In this Marxist period of his life he became in 1912 editor of Italy's
leading socialist daily, Avanti!, in Milan, a position of great influence for such a young
man. He was then an extremist in his Marxist views, stressing revolutionary
idealism and militant antimilitarism but deprecating dogmatism. (see also Marxism)
Whereas Marx's conception of history was
based on 19th-century humanism and rationalism, Mussolini's was influenced by an
early 20th-century emphasis on vitality and biological vital force, on a
synthesis of Nietzsche and Sorel with Marx. This inclination to a heroic and
active life-force made him, together with Gabriele
D'Annunzio (1862-1938), the poet and glorifier of action, the chief
propagandist of Italy's entrance into the war on the side of the Allies. It was
over this issue that he broke with the Socialist Party, resigned from his
editorship, and founded his own paper, Il
Popolo d'Italia.
Mussolini's philosophy, which developed
slowly as his struggle for power and for a powerful state progressed, was
officially presented in his article on the Dottrina
del fascismo ("Doctrine of Fascism") in the Enciclopedia Italiana (1932). It reveals the pragmatic beginnings of
the movement with complete frankness: "Our program is simple. We wish to
govern Italy. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many. It is
not programs that are wanting for the salvation of Italy but men and will
power." By 1932 he had found a traditional philosophical garb for his
vitalistic doctrine in the neo-Hegelian idealism of Giovanni Gentile
(1875-1944), which saw the state as the source of all ethics and all individual
life.
For Mussolini, all theoretical
considerations were subservient to the "inexorable dynamics" of the
factual situation. It is, he insisted, the role of the leader to master this
dynamic process: he knows that the "iron logic of nature" will make
the strong prevail over the weak. In contrast to Marxism, which asserts a
rational logic of history that it claims will bring about the final triumph of
the weak in an act of universal salvation, there is no fulfillment of history in
Fascism. Instead, all history is incessant struggle, and the struggle itself is
welcomed for its own ethical value. For
war alone brings up to their highest
tension all human energies and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who
have the courage to meet it. Fascism carries this antipacifist struggle into the
lives of individuals. It is education for combat. . . . War is to the man what
maternity is to the woman. I do not believe in perpetual peace; not only do I
not believe in it but I find it depressing and a negation of all the fundamental
virtues of man.
From 1922, when he first seized control
of the Italian government in Rome, until 1927, Mussolini progressively
consolidated his dictatorship, and the Fascist state took form. State and party
became monolithic instruments in the hands of Mussolini, the capo
di governo (head of the government) of the state, the duce
(leader) of the party. The legge
fascistissime (most Fascist laws), drafted by the leading Fascist jurist
Alfredo Rocco, turned Parliament into a party congress, practically fused
legislative and executive power, and made the Grand Council of Fascism an
instrument of the duce, who alone could summon it and determine its agenda.
With this success Mussolini began to
look farther into the future. Until 1930 he had emphasized the long overdue
modernization of a backward country by a strong and efficient government and a
new dedicated elite that could communicate a sense of vitality, virility, and
energy to the whole people. But on October 25, 1932, Mussolini assured a Milan
audience of the world leadership of fascist Italy. "Today, with a fully
tranquil conscience, I say to you, that the twentieth century will be a century
of fascism, the century of Italian power, the century during which Italy will
become for the third time the leader of mankind." In 1934 Mussolini claimed
that Fascism, an Italian movement in 1922, had "since 1929 become not
merely an Italian phenomenon but a world phenomenon." To achieve his ends,
Mussolini demanded the transformation of Italy into a nazione
militarista and guerriera. In this
goal he succeeded even less than in that of Italy's modernization.
In his earlier stages Mussolini regarded
Fascism as a development within Western civilization and looked with distrust
generally upon Germany and specifically upon Hitler's National Socialism, which
he recognized as "one hundred percent racism:
Against everything and everyone: Yesterday against Christian civilization, today
against Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of the
whole world." But his imperialism and his overestimation of the power of
Fascism drove him into the arms of National-Socialist Germany.
The conquest of Ethiopia (1935) opposed
Italy to the West and the League of Nations. In the following year, dazzled by
German success, Mussolini began to speak of a Rome-Berlin Axis and celebrated it
during his visit in Berlin in 1936 and Hitler's return visit in May 1938.
Hitler's sincere admiration for him as "the leading statesman in the world,
to whom none may even remotely compare himself" increased Mussolini's
self-delusion. The intervention for Fascism in Spain's Civil War and the Munich
accord with England in September 1938 seemed a crowning success in Mussolini's
policy; in reality they masked, with Italy's acceptance of German anti-Semitic
laws, the fall of Italy to the position of Germany's satellite. As such, but
also out of desire for glory and booty, Italy in June 1940 entered the war
started by Germany in September 1939. The war revealed Italy's backwardness and
inefficiency, until three years of warfare brought the fall of Mussolini and his
party. (see also World
War II)
Hitler
found a much better prepared soil in the anti-democratic traditions of the
German Reich than Mussolini did in the
tradition of the Italian Risorgimento, the 19th-century movement for Italian
unity. Like Maurras and unlike Mussolini, Hitler had never been a Socialist or a
man of the left. He was entirely unknown even in 1919 when as an agitator for
the Reichswehr (army) he attacked the
Western and German democrats, moderate Socialism, and Russian Bolshevism. He
was, unlike Mussolini, the man of the one idea, which in him assumed demonic or
maniac dimensions, but he was in tune with older currents of German thought and
emotionalism.
Hitler grew up as a subject of the
multi-ethnic Catholic Habsburg monarchy. He shared with the Austrian Georg von
Schönerer (1842-1921) a virulent hatred for the Habsburgs, the
"inferior" Slavs, for Catholicism as un-German, and above all for Jews
and Judaism as non-Aryan. Hitler's propaganda methods were influenced by another
Austrian, Karl Lueger (1844-1910) who, though a supporter of the dynasty and
church, became a popular mayor of Vienna by opposing capitalistic liberalism and
Marxian Socialism and appealing to the emotions of a lower middle class that
felt threatened by both. In the restless years after 1918 Hitler took up this
appeal. His anti-Semitism went far beyond
Lueger's, becoming an obsession with him; the Jewish problem was no longer
political, religious, or economic but the all-explaining theme of history.
Hitler regarded the Nordic Aryans as the only
creative race on earth, the only source of human greatness and progress. He
believed that its end would mean the end of all civilization. Since he saw the
German Reich as the highest expression
of Aryanism, he proclaimed that it was necessary, not only for Germany but for
the salvation of mankind, to secure the victorious survival of Germany by
maintaining the purity of German "blood" against contamination by
inferior races.
The total rejection of all miscegenation
was one of the two fundamental pillars in Hitler's two-volume Mein
Kampf, which he wrote in 1924 and 1926, and which became the bible of
the new faith. The other was the absolute necessity of conquering a vast land
base in eastern Europe, which was to become German by the ejection and
enslavement of the "inferior" though white Slavic peoples. Germans
would settle the immense and fertile plains and thus create a geopolitically
unassailable Reich. The existing (and
any future) Slav leadership class was to be exterminated to secure German
domination. To these two fundamental ideas Hitler remained faithful from the
very beginning of his agitation until his death. They had no parallel in
Mussolini's writings, which glorified war and its spirit but presented no plan
of a great aggressive war or any racial fanaticism. When Hitler dictated his
last will shortly before his suicide, he repeated once more his fundamental
interpretation of history: "Above all, I demand of the nation's leaders and
followers scrupulous adherence to the race laws and to ruthless resistance
against the world poisoners of all peoples, international Jewry," which he
identified with the despised liberalism of Western capitalism and the socialism
of Russian Marxism. His last words in 1945 expressed the same ideas that had
guided him in 1919.
From the beginning, Hitler served the
fascist movement by his understanding of the potential of the spoken word and
the psychology of the masses. His appeal to the Germans as the most exalted race
in the world counteracted the disillusionment and inferiority complex of a
people believing itself surrounded by a hostile world. Hitler wrote in Mein
Kampf that all propaganda must hold its
intellectual level at the capacity of the least intelligent of those at whom it
is directed and that its truth is less important than its success. "The
slighter its scientific ballast, and the more exclusively it considers mass
emotions, the more complete will be its success." In 1937, moreover, at the
ninth party congress in Nürnberg, Hitler declared that "Germany has
experienced the greatest revolution in the national and racial hygiene which was
undertaken for the first time on an organized basis in the country. The
consequences of this German race policy will be more decisive for the future of
our people than the effects of any other laws. For they are creating the new
man."
Many Germans believed in the reality and
the superiority of this new man. Thus the racial interpretation of history and
the fascist contempt for democracy lured Germany into war against Communism and
democracy at the same time. By 1942 Germany had challenged the whole world and
seemed at that point to have a good chance of emerging victorious from this
total ideological war. Three years later it collapsed.
The defeat of German fascism sealed the
future of many other fascist movements that had come to power or grown in
importance in many European countries partly with Germany's help or protection.
In some of them, radical revolutionary fascism, eager for the modernization of
the country, found itself in conflict with the authoritarian, semifeudal
structure with which it often made common cause against Western liberalism,
represented by a generally weak domestic middle class, and against an often
exaggerated threat of Bolshevism from the outside. Yet reactionary
authoritarianism and fascism fused in different ways in different countries, and
with Italy's and Germany's defeat, the merely authoritarian reactionary regimes
survived more easily than did the outright fascist ones.
In most European countries there were a
number of competing small fascist parties with no strong leader. Some of these
came to power by National Socialist military success. In other cases (Britain,
Switzerland, Sweden, or Denmark) the liberal parliamentary forces proved to be
strong enough to keep the fascist movements within narrow bounds, and in others
reactionary elements were able to use fascist movements as their support. The
only one of these movements that could claim world attention on the
international scene was the originally very radical Falange
Española under the leadership of José Antonio Primo de Rivera
(1903-36). The Spanish republican regime was established in April 1931, and
Rivera was elected a deputy of the right in 1933. But in the next year he broke
with it and united the Falange with the Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional
Sindicalistas (Committees of Nationalist Syndicalist Offensive), "a
movement steeped in true Spanish frenzy, launched by the young and dedicated to
combatting . . . the irresponsible hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie" (Eugen
Weber, Varieties of Fascism, D. Van
Nostrand Co., Inc., Princeton, New Jersey, 1964, p. 117). The Falange was
ultranationalist and eager for a thorough reform of Spain's antiquated social
order. But in the election of 1936, won by the popular front of leftist moderate
and radical parties, the Falange was unable to elect even a single deputy.
When civil war broke out in Spain
in 1936, the republican government outlawed the Falange, which sided with
General Francisco Franco; and in 1937 Franco
united it with the military formations of the deeply reactionary Catholic
Carlists, the Requetés, and made it an instrument of his personal
leadership. But whereas in Italy and Germany fascism had absorbed the state, in
Spain the victorious conservative oligarchy absorbed fascism.
In a similar way, the authoritarian and
traditionalist oligarchy in António de Oliveira Salazar's Portugal kept
fascist movements within very narrow limits, while using some of Mussolini's
conservative slogans, as did the clerical semifascism in Austria under the two
chancellors Engelbert Dollfuss (assassinated by the National Socialists in 1934)
and Kurt von Schuschnigg and the Slovakian independence movement under Father
Josef Tiso.
Radical fascist movements developed in
some Balkan countries--most prominently in Croatia,
Hungary, and Romania. They shared with the
conservatives the bitter hostility to Marxism and the Soviet Union, but they
were obsessed by an extremist spirit of terroristic violence in a strange union
with religious fanaticism. As a result of German victory the Croatian Ustase,
a party under the leadership of Ante Pavelic (1889-1959), turned Croatia
into a state on the model of the most extremist National Socialist Party
formation, the SS, or Schutzstaffel, into which only the most dedicated and
racially pure Germans were admitted. The Ustase
persecuted and killed hundreds of thousands of Orthodox Serbs and Jews. Catholic
monks and other priests are alleged to have taken an active part in this
struggle for the "purity" of the Croatian land and faith, and the Ustase
envisaged the revival of the Great Croatian kingdom as it had existed under
Peter Kresimir (1058-74) and Zvonimir (1076-89). The dream was destroyed
first by Fascist Italy's occupation of Croatian Dalmatia and of Slovenia and
finally by the collapse of Italy and Germany.
Fascism ruled in Croatia only four
years; an even more violent fascism disturbed the political life of Romania for
almost 25 years. Independent of the rise of Italian or German fascism, the
fascism of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu was rooted in
older traditions of the Romanian Orthodox Church and the Romanian peasantry. As
a student at the University of Iasi, Codreanu organized fellow students,
sons of poor priests and peasants, into a National Christian Anti-Semitic
League, which indulged in murder and a strange fanatical morality. In 1927
Codreanu broke away from the League and founded the Legion of the Archangel
Michael, characterized not by a flag but by an icon and by its members'
dedication to a frugal ascetic life. The Iron Guard, as the Legion called its
armed branch, represented an attempt at a fundamental reform of Romanian life.
But the attempt to build a new life was made on the basis of wild blood
sacrifices, one of whose victims in 1938 was Codreanu himself. In 1940, after
the abdication of the King, a civil war within a coalition of the conservative
Army under Gen. Ion Antonescu and the Legion under Horia Sima, Codreanu's
successor, ended with the Army crushing the Legion in January 1941. Antonescu's
Romania actively participated in Germany's war against Russia, but the Romanian
fascist movement remained, after orgies of death, crushed, and its surviving
leaders found refuge in National Socialist Germany.
In a similar way the fate of fascism and
of reactionary circles was intertwined in Hungary.
The Hungarian government under the regency of Miklós
Horthy (1868-1957), the last commanding admiral of the Austro-Hungarian
Navy, dreamed of the restoration of the former nine-centuries-old Great
Hungarian realm. The suppression of the short-lived communist regime in Budapest
in 1919 combined with the fascist hatred of Bolshevism to produce what was, for
that time, an unprecedented "white" terror. But Horthy himself was a
moderate conservative, and, even when Hungarian extreme nationalism led him to
form a profascist government under Gyula Gömbös in October 1932,
Horthy followed a moderate course. Gömbös died suddenly in October
1936. In September 1940 the Hungarian National Socialist Party merged with the
Arrow Cross Party and found its leader in Ferenc Szálasi, who had been a
capable general staff officer in the army but had developed a fanatical racial
faith in Hungarism that in some ways recalled Hitler and Codreanu. After
Hungary's entry into the war, the Germans in 1944 occupied Hungary and interned
Horthy. Szálasi was finally the head of a state, which he planned as the
"Corporatist Order of the Working Nation." But the war was soon lost
after a bloody winter of massacres of Jews and political opponents. Szálasi
was executed; Horthy found refuge in Portugal.
Fascism outside Italy and Germany
suffered from the lack of charismatic leaders who could embody a nationalist
myth and yet be adroit political tacticians. In Nordic Germanic Europe, which,
according to racial doctrine, should have shown a strong penchant for National
Socialism, except for Norway few sympathized with German fascism--much fewer
than among the eastern and southern Europeans. In Norway
the great writer Knut Hamsun (1859-1952) and Vidkun
Abraham Quisling (1887-1945), former minister of war in the farmers'
party administration and son of a rural clergyman, took a pro-Nazi stand based
on their opposition to Western "plutocracy" and their fascination with
peasant rootedness, the opposition of the "natural" countryside to the
"corruption" of urban civilization. Quisling founded in 1933 the
Nasjonal Samling, with the cross of St. Olaf as a symbol and the restoration of
the greatness of Viking Norway as a goal. Under the German occupation, Quisling
became prime minister, but his following remained insignificant in his native
land.
Stronger than that in northern Europe
was the fascist movement in Belgium. This was
partly due to the fact that the Belgian nation was divided into a dominant
French-speaking minority and a Flemish-speaking majority that struggled for
complete equality. In 1931 Flemish extremists formed the Verbond van Dietsche
Nationalsolidaristen, the Union of Dutch National Solidarists, who dreamed first
of a Great Netherlands, later of a Great Burgundy, both times avoiding a close
cooperation with German National Socialism. A more important fascist group
originated in French-speaking Belgium and found in Léon
Degrelle an energetic demagogue and leader who strove for an agreement
with the Flemish and showed understanding for modern social developments.
Degrelle had grown up as a Catholic and in his young years had been influenced
by Charles Maurras. He called his organization Rex
and virulently attacked the parliamentary system. After a rapid growth, his
party lost its influence, and Degrelle himself was defeated in a by-election in
1937 by a typical representative of the Belgian upper middle class with the
approval of the Catholic primate. Degrelle's Flemish adherents joined the
radical wing of the Flemish nationalists, the Vlaamsche National Verbond, and
Degrelle formed a Walloon legion for the German SS and fought in the war against
Russia. The confused character of the Rexists was symbolized by its red flag
with a crown and a cross on it. In Belgium, as in Switzerland and The
Netherlands, the parliamentary system of the conservative middle class was too
strong to allow the success of a fascist party, and any threat of communism was
too remote and improbable. In these countries terroristic violence so
characteristic of the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Codreanu, or Szálasi
remained unknown.
Of a very different nature was the
short-lived fascist movement in England, where Sir
Oswald Mosley, a member of the aristocracy, formerly a member of the
Conservative Party, and later a member of the Labour government, founded in 1932
under the impact of the economic crisis the British
Union of Fascists. The Union's plan was to replace the "old gang" of
politicians by a new young elite, in tune with the new time. The paramilitary
form of his party meetings and its "defence force" ran so deeply
counter to Britain's centuries-old civilian tradition that in spite of Mosley's
undeniable rhetorical and intellectual gifts the English masses resisted him,
and the strong British Conservative government of the period offered little
foundation for arousing fear of a domestic "Bolshevik" threat. The
Conservative government was intelligent enough to forbid, after some street
fighting in 1936, all paramilitary uniforms. By 1938 Mosley, perhaps the most
intelligent and rational of all fascist leaders, ceased to be a figure of public
importance. (see also British
Union of Fascists)
The picture offered by France
in the critical years was more complex. But there, too, fascist movements were
diffuse and short-lived. One of the followers of Charles Maurras, George Valois,
disappointed with Maurras's lack of active interest in social reforms, founded
in 1925 the Faisceau, composed largely of war veterans; but only the crisis of
the 1930s produced a number of groups, all nationalist, anticapitalist, and
anti-Marxist. The largest of them, the Croix de Feu
(Fiery Cross) of Col. François de La Rocque, rejected dictatorship and
most of the fascist rhetoric. Characteristic for French fascism were the
"proletarian" anti-Communists, led by former Socialists and Communists
like Marcel Déat, the founder of the
Rassemblement National Populaire, and Jacques Doriot,
the former Communist mayor of Saint-Denis, a Parisian "red" suburb,
who founded the Parti Populaire Français. More than in other countries,
these French fascist groups were joined by some intellectuals who were
disenchanted with the apathy of French life and yearned for revolution and
action. The most prominent of them, Pierre Drieu La
Rochelle (1893-1945), summed up the nihilism that is fundamental to all
fascism when he wrote in 1934: "Liberty is exhausted. Man must seek new
strength in his black basic nature. I say it, an intellectual, the eternal
libertarian." (From Socialisme
Fasciste, Gallimard, Paris, 1934, p. 102.)
Like nationalism, socialism, and
Communism, fascism was a European movement. But in the 1930s, when economic
crisis seemed to reveal weaknesses of the liberal tradition, in general, fascism
spread to Asia and Latin America, adapting itself to the social conditions of
the countries there. Only in two cases did it become significant and assume an
official role. The first instance was Japan,
where fascism resembled German National Socialism in its reassertion of ancient
models of life. On February 26, 1936, the army took control of Japan and
supported a national or tribal mysticism that bore a close resemblance to that
of Germany. Young "patriotic" officers tried to assassinate a number
of leading Japanese statesmen, aristocrats, and high officers who seemed to them
to represent the influence of foreign "dangerous thought," of the
West, of liberalism, and of individualism, which threatened the traditional
military spirit and absolute dedication to the cult of the emperor. In a number
of cases the young officers were able to kill their victims. "The massacre
was immensely popular in the army. The army acted as though the revolt was the
work of the whole body and had succeeded. In its new orders the army said that
it could not tolerate liberalism, that internationalism and individualism must
be banished, and nationalism and the Japanese principle be promoted." (A.
Morgan Young, Imperial Japan 1926-1938, William
Morrow and Co., Inc., New York, 1941, p. 34.)
Different from other fascist countries,
Japan saw the embodiment of its national ideal not in a popular leader but in
the emperor. The national destiny was to be fulfilled by observing the duty to
the throne and thus attaining the highest pinnacle of morality. The imperial
will was to fix standards of justice and injustice, of right and wrong.
Philosophy was regarded as good only when it was in conformity with the imperial
will. Except for Germany, Japan was then the only nation that thought itself
strong enough to extend its national ideal over the five continents. In the late
1930s Japanese professors and writers, as did their German colleagues, demanded
the rejection of rational and universal ethics and the return to the ancient
tribal gods in order to make the nation the most perfect instrument for its
mission of conquest. The war in China was "not presented as one of conquest
and exploitation but rather as a holy crusade to rid the land of unjust rulers
[Chiang Kai-shek, red communists] and inaugurate there a regime of peace,
righteousness and prosperity." (Harley F. MacNair, The
Real Conflict Between China and Japan, The University of Chicago Press,
Chicago, 1938, p. 193.) Later Japan spoke of a coprosperity sphere of a new
Japan-led Asia.
Less ambitious were the aspirations of
fascism in Argentina, where the movement resembled that of Italy rather than of
Germany. The initiative in Argentina came, however, not from former socialists
and syndicalists but from officers, the Grupo de Oficiales Unidos (Group of
United Officers), who seized power in 1943. The initials of the group's name
stood for gobierno (authoritarian
government), orden (order), and unidad
(national unity). The officers believed that as a result of its relative
wealth and its ethnically pure Caucasian population, Argentina was to assume the
leadership in the struggle against "Yankee imperialism" and in the
modernization of the continent. Among the officers, Juan
Perón assumed a leading role and turned the movement into one of
national socialism. With the help of his wife, Eva María
(1919-52), he sought the support of the poorer masses, the descamisados, or shirtless ones. His attack on the traditional
ruling oligarchy brought him wide popular support, so that he was twice elected
president of Argentina, in 1946 and 1951. Perón organized the workers
into a Confederación General del Trabajo,
which was devoted to him, and claimed to have replaced
"plutodemocracy." He created a mass party standing for
"justicialism," a middle way between Communism and capitalism. But his
own inconsistent policies and the accusation of widespread graft provoked a
revolt of the armed forces in September 1955, as a result of which Perón
left the country and settled in Spain.
By the latter years of the 20th century
fascism seemed to have lost the attractions it had exercised in the 1920s and
1930s. After the fall of fascism in Germany and Japan both nations experienced a
wave of great prosperity, which weakened, especially in the young generation,
the formerly strong appeal of a militant nationalism. The conquest of a
"living space," which Germany, Japan and Italy before World War II
thought indispensable for the growth of their national economy, not only
revealed itself as unachievable even to a broad anticommunist coalition, such as
the three leading fascist powers established in 1937, but as a superfluous
fancy, for the loss of empire brought misery neither to Britain nor Germany, The
Netherlands or Italy, France or Japan. An unexpected industrial and agrarian
productivity raised the living standards of the masses in the democracies, which
could now concentrate upon necessary domestic reforms and abandon the lure of
military glory. By the late 20th century fascism seemed a trend characteristic
of the recent and yet faraway past. Except for small marginal movements, most
elements were seeking to secure what fascism had denied, the cooperation of
peoples of various civilizations and ideologies and the condemnation of war.
(H.K.)
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파시즘 (Fascism). 정치운동의 일종.
이 운동은 1922 ~43년 이탈리아, 1933~45년 독일, 1939~75년
스페인 정계를 지배했으며, 그밖에도 여러 시대에 다른 몇몇
나라들을 지배했다. 일반적으로 모든 국가주의적 전체주의
운동이나 그런 정부를 가리킬 때 이 용어를 사용한다.
이탈리아어 '파시스모'(fascismo)는 라틴어 '파스케스'(fasces)에서
유래한 것으로서 이 말은 고대 로마에서 권위의 상징이었던
도끼를 포함하여 느릅나무나 자작나무 가지의 묶음을
의미했다. 베니토 무솔리니는 1919년에
이탈리아 파시즘 운동의 표상으로 이 상징을 채택했다.
파시즘은 모든 형태에 있어서 주요한 특징들을 보여 주고
있다. 가장 중요한 특징은 국가의 절대
우위이고, 다른 특징들은 모두 여기에서 유래한다. 개인의
뜻을 굽혀 국가가 명시한 대로 국민의 통합된 뜻에 따르고
국가를 상징하는 보통 카리스마적인 지도자에게 완전히
복종하는 것이 파시즘의 특징이다. 또한 군사적 가치관과
전투 및 정복을 찬양하고, 자유주의적 민주주의와 합리주의
및 부르주아적 가치관은 낮게 평가한다. 무솔리니가 로마
제국의 '부활'을 예언한 것에서도 볼 수 있듯이 국가나
민족을 신성한 것으로 받들고 그 운명을 선언하는 파시즘의
표현에는 대개 신비주의의 요소가 짙게 배어 있다.
이탈리아
파시즘은 무능한 정부와 희망을 주지 못하는 지도자,
그리고 제1차 세계대전이 끝난 뒤 이탈리아를 괴롭힌 혼란한
경제상황에 대한 많은 국민의 환멸 속에서 자라났다. 이런
상황은 권위주의, 특히 군사적 덕목을 찬미하는 정치적
분위기를 만들어냈다. 시인인 가브리엘레 단눈치오는
이 시기에 모험과 갈등 및 전쟁을 높이 찬양한 수많은
지식인들 가운데 한 사람이었다. 1919년에 단눈치오는 피우메
시(지금의 크로아티아 리예카)를 점령하고 16개월간 그곳을
통치했다. 같은 해 무솔리니는 밀라노에서 파시즘 조직을
만들고, 자신의 추종자들을 '파시 데 콤바티멘토'라고
불렀다. 이 정당이 정권을 장악하는 과정에서 맨 처음
일어난 획기적인 사건은 1922년 10월 28일의 로마
행진이었다. 무솔리니와 검은 셔츠를 입은 추종자들은
무솔리니를 총리로 임명하라고 요구하는 한편, 이 요구를
들어주지 않으면 무력으로 정부를 무너뜨리겠다고
협박하면서 로마로 행진하기 시작했다. 이탈리아 국왕은
이에 굴복했고, 이튿날 무솔리니에게 정부 구성을 요청했다.
곧 무장한 파시스트 집단은 좌익정당들의 본부를 습격하여
당원들을 폭행하기 시작했고, 살인까지도 서슴지 않았다.
무솔리니는 이듬해 1월에 파시스트당을 제외한 모든 정당을
불법화하고, 그때부터 이탈리아를 전체주의 국가로
다스렸다.
독일에서 일어난 아돌프 히틀러의
국가사회주의(나치) 운동은
이탈리아보다 훨씬 가혹한 제1차 세계대전의 여파 속에서
싹텄고, 보다 강력한 반자유주의적 국가주의의 분위기
속에서 자라났다. 히틀러의 계획은 많은 점에서 무솔리니와
달랐고, 특히 국가적·인종적 힘과 안전을 확보하기 위해
훨씬 더 구체적인 계획을 세웠다는 점에서 큰 차이를 보였다.
그러나 특정한 정치적 견해에 대한 표현은 기본적으로
비슷했다. 스페인에서는 급진적
공화당 정권에 대항하는 내란이 끝난 뒤 팔랑헤당이 정권을
장악하게 되었다. 스페인에서 이 파시스트 세력이 계속
권력을 유지할 수 있었던 것은 제2차 세계대전 때 중립을
유지함으로써 가능했고, 그에 따라 독일과 이탈리아의
파시즘이 맛보았던 의회 의석 확보의 실패를 면할 수 있었기
때문이었다. 일본에서는 국민의 뜻과
주체성의 화신인 천황의 존재와 강한 군국주의 전통이 1930년대
파시즘 운동이 발전하는 데 필요한 요소를 제공해주었다.
1930년대 일본의 많은 지식인들은 서구화의 영향을 거부하고
예로부터 내려오는 고유한 종교와 윤리 및 무사적 전통의
가치관으로 돌아가자고 주장하기 시작했다. 독일과
마찬가지로 일본도 특별한 가치관의 전형으로서 뿐만
아니라 미개한 민족을 정복하여 그 가치관의 정당성을
입증하는 비준자로서의 임무가 세계 내에서 자신이 맡고
있는 역할이라고 생각했다.
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