Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c47g7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-19T10:31:06.963Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Global fascism: geography, timing, support, and strategy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2016

Tim Jacoby
Tim Jacoby*
Affiliation:
Global Development Institute, University of Manchester, Arthur Lewis Building, Oxford Road, Manchester, M13 9PL, UK E-mail: tim.jacoby@manchester.ac.uk
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This article considers four aspects for understanding the greatly over-used term ‘fascism’: its place in space and also in time, the basis of its social support, and its modus operandi. While agreement exists on where and when fascism reached its apogee, there is little concurrence of opinion over the extent to which the world wars were determinative in its birth and death, and how far beyond European boundaries it has ventured. There are also wide-ranging discussions concerning the identity and extent of its backers, with some writers pointing to the formative role of the lumpen body politic, or various class fractions, and others to that of an elite vanguard, or even individual alienation. A similar spectrum of opinion over the basis of fascism’s appeal extends from studies emphasizing, and elucidating, its ideational content to those that focus on the pragmatic value of action. Such a great diversity of analyses brings both considerable empirical richness and the challenge of fragmentation. This article responds by reflecting on fascism as both a social phenomenon and a field of study, in the hope of bringing some analytical structure to what remains a vast, and continuously developing, literature.

Keywords

fascismhistoriographynationalismNazismrightism
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Global History , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , November 2016 , pp. 451 - 472
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Woolf, Stuart, ‘Introduction’, in Stuart Woolf, ed., Fascism in Europe, London: Methuen, 1968, p. 1 Google Scholar.

2 Allardyce, Gilbert, ‘What fascism is not: thoughts on the deflation of a concept’, American Historical Review, 84, 2, 1979, p. 365 Google Scholar. For some context to Allardyce’s seminal piece, see Lichtenstein’s, Alex recent review of writing on fascism in the American Historical Review: ‘In back issues’, American Historical Review, 121, 2, 2016, pp. xvi–xixGoogle Scholar.

3 Allardyce, ‘What fascism is not’, p. 370.

4 Eatwell, Roger, ‘New styles of dictatorship and leadership in interwar Europe’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions, 7, 2, 2006, p. 127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Payne, Stanley, ‘Spanish fascism in comparative perspective’, Iberian Studies, 2, 1973, p. 4 Google Scholar.

6 Thomas, Hugh, The Spanish civil war, Harmondsworth: Pelican, 1973, p. 101 Google Scholar.

7 Archer, Bernadette, ‘Revolutionary charlatanism’, in Roger Griffin, ed., International fascism: theories, causes and the new consensus, London: Arnold, 1998, p. 282 Google Scholar.

8 Carsten, Francis, The rise of fascism, London: Methuen, 1967, p. 203 Google Scholar.

9 Eatwell, Roger, ‘Universal fascism? Approaches and definitions’, in Stein Ugelvik Larsen, ed., Fascism outside Europe: the European impulse against domestic conditions in the diffusion of global fascism, New York: Columbia University Press, 2001, p. 19 Google Scholar.

10 Pinto, António Costa and Kallis, Aristotle, eds., Rethinking fascism and dictatorship in Europe, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Eatwell, Roger, ‘Explaining fascism and ethnic cleansing: the three dimensions of charisma and the four dark sides of nationalism’, Political Studies Review, 4, 2, 2006, p. 266 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Levy, Carl, ‘Fascism, National Socialism and conservatives in Europe, 1914–1945: issues for comparativists’, Contemporary European History, 8, 1, 1999, p. 119 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Michaelis, Meir, ‘Fascism, totalitarianism and the holocaust: reflections on current interpretations of National Socialist anti-Semitism’, European History Quarterly, 19, 1, 1989, p. 94 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Payne, Stanley, A history of fascism, 1914–1945, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995, p. 353 Google Scholar.

15 Eatwell, ‘Universal fascism?’, p. 21.

16 Lyons, Matthew, ‘Two ways of looking at fascism’, Socialism and Democracy, 22, 2, 2008, p. 123 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Hentschke, Jens R., ed., Vargas and Brazil: new perspectives, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

18 Aliano, David, Mussolini’s national project in Argentina, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012 Google Scholar.

19 Finchelstein, Frederico, Transatlantic fascism: ideology, violence, and the sacred in Argentina and Italy, 1919–1945, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010 Google Scholar.

20 Fletcher, Miles, The search for a new order: intellectuals and fascism in prewar Japan, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982 Google Scholar.

21 Chan, Maria Hsia, The Chinese Blue Shirt Society: fascism and developmental nationalism, China Research Monograph 30, Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, 1985 Google Scholar.

22 Ferrara, Federico, The political development of modern Thailand, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Hayes, Romain, Subhas Chandra Bose in Nazi Germany: politics, intelligence and propaganda 1941–1943, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011 Google Scholar.

24 Casolari, Marzia, ‘Hindutva’s foreign tie-up in the 1930s: archival evidence’, Economic and Political Weekly, 22 January 2000, pp. 218–228 Google Scholar.

25 Marx, Christoph, Oxwagon sentinel: radical Afrikaner nationalism and the history of the Ossewabrandwag, Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2011 Google Scholar.

26 Griffin, Roger, ‘The holy storm: “clerical fascism” through the lens of modernism’, in Mathew Feldman, Marius Turda, and Tudor Georgescu, eds., Clerical fascism in interwar Europe, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, p. 11 Google Scholar.

27 Pedahzur, Ami, The triumph of Israel’s radical right, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28 Gershoni, Israel and Jankowski, James, Confronting fascism in Egypt: dictatorship versus democracy in the 1930s, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010 Google Scholar.

29 Moore, Michaela Hönicke, Know your enemy: the American debate on Nazism, 1933–1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010 Google Scholar.

30 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, ‘The phenomenon of fascism’, in Woolf, Fascism in Europe, p. 19 Google Scholar.

31 Allardyce, ‘What fascism is not’, pp. 378, 388.

32 Neocleous, Mark, Fascism, Buckingham: Open University Press, 1997, p. ixGoogle Scholar.

33 Eatwell, ‘Explaining fascism’, p. 265.

34 Sternhell, Zeev, with Mario Snaijder and Maia Asheri, The birth of fascist ideology: from cultural rebellion to political revolution, trans. David Maisel, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994, p. 32 Google Scholar.

35 Mosse, George, The fascist revolution: toward a general theory of fascism, New York: Howard Fertig, 2000, p. 4 Google Scholar.

36 Neocleous, Fascism, p. ix.

37 Ibid., p. x.

38 Sternhell, Birth of fascist ideology, p. 32.

39 Mosse, George, Toward the final solution: a history of European racism, New York: Howard Fertig, 1997 Google Scholar.

40 Rabinbach, Anson G., ‘Toward a Marxist theory of fascism: a report on developments in West Germany’, New German Critique, 3, 1974, p. 131 Google Scholar.

41 Whiteside, Andrew, The socialism of fools: Georg Ritter von Schönerer and Austrian Pan-Germanism, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1975 Google Scholar.

42 Drake, Richard, ‘The theory and practice of Italian nationalism, 1900–1906’, Journal of Modern History, 53, 2, 1981, pp. 213–241 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43 Paxton, Robert, ‘The five stages of fascism’, Journal of Modern History, 70, 1, 1998, p. 12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44 Wade, Wyn, The fiery cross: the Ku Klux Klan in America, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987, pp. 109–110 Google Scholar.

45 Franklin, John, Race and history: selected essays 1938–1988, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1992 Google Scholar.

46 McWhorter, Diane, Carry me home: Birmingham, Alabama, the climactic battle of the civil rights revolution, New York: Touchstone Book, 2002, p. 75 Google Scholar.

47 Kaplan, Jeffrey, Encyclopedia of white power: a sourcebook on the radical racist right, Walnut Creek, CA: Alta Mira, 2000 Google Scholar.

48 See Bridges, Tyler, The rise of David Duke, Jackson, MS: University of Mississippi Press, 1995 Google Scholar.

49 Leonard Zeskind, quoted in Roger Griffin, ‘Caught in its own net: post-war fascism outside Europe’, in Larsen, Fascism outside Europe, p. 57.

50 Gregor, A. James, The ideology of fascism: the rationale of totalitarianism, New York: The Free Press, 1969 Google Scholar.

51 Griffin, ‘Caught in its own net’, p. 52.

52 Schulte-Bockholt, Alfredo, ‘A neo-Marxist explanation of organized crime’, Critical Criminology, 10, 3, 2001, p. 233 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 Rein, Raanan, ‘Francoist Spain and Latin America, 1936–1953’, in Larsen, Fascism outside Europe, p. 148 Google Scholar.

54 Feitlowitz, Marguerite, A lexicon of terror: Argentina and the legacies of torture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002 Google Scholar; Bernstein, Michele, ‘Argentina’, American Jewish Yearbook, 57, 1956, p. 522 Google Scholar.

55 Plotkin, Mariano, ‘The changing perceptions of Peronism: a review essay’, in James P. Brennan, ed., Peronism and Argentina, Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1998, p. 31 Google Scholar.

56 Fenby, Jonathan, Chiang Kai-shek: China’s Generalissimo and the nation he lost, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005 Google Scholar.

57 Ghassem-Fachandi, Parvis, Pogrom in Gujarat: Hindu nationalism and anti-Muslim violence in India, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012 Google Scholar.

58 Nisan, Mordechai, Politics and war in Lebanon: unraveling the enigma, New York: Transaction, 2015 Google Scholar.

59 Cited in Wesserle, Andreas R., ‘Yalta: fact or fate? A brief characterization’, Journal of Historical Review, 3, 4, 1982, p. 369 Google Scholar.

60 Ganser, Daniele, NATO’s secret armies: Operation Gladio and terrorism in western Europe, London: Frank Cass, 2005, p. 190 Google Scholar.

61 Ascoli, Max, ‘Political reconstruction in Italy’, Journal of Politics, 8, 3, 1946, p. 320 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

62 Goode, Stephen, The CIA, New York: Franklin Watts, 1982, p. 45 Google Scholar.

63 Simpson, Christopher, Blowback: America’s recruitment of Nazis and its effects on the Cold War, New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988, pp. 81–82 Google Scholar.

64 Rein, ‘Francoist Spain’, p. 151.

65 Backes, Uwe, ‘The electoral victory of the NPD in Saxony and the prospects for future extreme-right success in German elections’, Patterns of Prejudice, 40, 2, 2006, pp. 129–141 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 Lee, Martin, The beast reawakens: fascism’s resurgence from Hitler’s spymasters to today’s neo-Nazi groups and right-wing extremists, London: Routledge, 2000 Google Scholar.

67 Marcus, Jonathan, The National Front and French politics, New York: New York University Press, 1995 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68 Renton, Dave, Fascism: theory and practice, London: Pluto, 1999, pp. 7–8 Google Scholar.

69 Quirico, Roberto di, Italy, Europe and the European presidency of 2003, Brussels: Notre Europe, 2003, p. 19 Google Scholar.

70 Wodak, Ruth and Richardson, John E., ‘European fascism in talk and text’, in Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson, eds., Analysing fascist discourse: European fascism in talk and text, Abingdon: Routledge, 2015, p. 3 Google Scholar, emphasis in original.

71 Griffin, International fascism, p. 25.

72 Cited in Renton, Fascism, p. 25.

73 Wodak and Richardson, ‘European fascism’, pp. 6–7.

74 Whiteley, Paul, ‘The National Front vote in the 1977 GLC Elections: an aggregative data analysis’, British Journal of Political Science, 9, 3, 1979, p. 371 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

75 Lipset, Seymour, Political man, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981 Google Scholar.

76 Trow, Martin, ‘Small businessmen, political tolerance, and support for McCarthy’, American Journal of Sociology, 64, 3, 1958, p. 279 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Lipset, Political man, p. 103. A similar point is made by Schapiro, J. Salwyn, who concluded his monograph Liberalism and the challenge of fascism, London: McGraw Hill, 1949 Google Scholar, with the assertion that fascism ‘is a revolutionary movement of the middle class, directed, on the one hand, against the great banks and the consolidations of big business and, on the other hand, against the socialist demands of the working class’ (p. 733).

78 Lipset, Political man, p. 109. The anti-capitalism of Strasserist Nazism was, for instance, an important element in national socialism’s appeal within the industrial sector (see Nolte, Ernst, Three faces of fascism: Action Française, Italian fascism, national socialism, New York: Mentor, 1969, pp. 425–426 Google Scholar).

79 Lipset, Seymour and Raab, Earl, The politics of unreason: right-wing extremism in America 1790–1970, London: Heinemann, 1971 Google Scholar.

80 Lipset, Political man.

81 Dimitrov, Georgi, Report to the Seventh Congress Communist International: for the unity of the working class against fascism, London: Red Star Press, 1935, p. 40 Google Scholar.

82 Hobsbawm, Eric, The age of extremes, London: Michael Joseph, 1994 Google Scholar.

83 Mandel, Ernest, The meaning of the Second World War, London: Verso, 1986, pp. 50–52 Google Scholar.

84 Callinicos, Alex, ‘Plumbing the depths: Marxism and the holocaust’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 14, 2, 2001, p. 398 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

85 Trotsky, Leon, The struggle against fascism in Germany, New York: Pathfinder, 1971, p. 405 Google Scholar.

86 Adler, Franklin H., Italian industrialists from liberalism to fascism: the political development of the industrial bourgeoisie, 1906–1934, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 347 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Mason, Timothy, ‘The primacy of politics: politics and economics in national socialist Germany’, in Stuart Woolf, ed., The nature of fascism, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968, p. 191 Google Scholar.

88 Mason, Timothy, Nazism, fascism and the working class, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 71–72 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Thalheimer, August, ‘On fascism’, What Next Journal, 1928, p. 6 Google Scholar.

90 Formative examples of these studies include Childers, Thomas, ‘The social bases of the national socialist vote’, Journal of Contemporary History, 11, 4, 1976, pp. 17–42 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Falter, Jürgen, ‘Radicalization of the middle classes or mobilization of the unpolitical?’, Social Science Information, 20, 2, 1981, pp. 389–430 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Madden, Paul, ‘The social class origins of Nazi Party members as determined by occupations, 1919–1933’, Social Science Quarterly, 68, 1987, pp. 263–280 Google Scholar.

91 Mühlberger, Detlef, The social bases of Nazism, 1919–1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 79–80 Google Scholar.

92 Whiteley, ‘National Front vote’, p. 371.

93 Adorno, Theodor, Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, Levinson, Daniel, and Sanford, Nevitt, The authoritarian personality, New York: Harper and Row, 1950 Google Scholar. See also Altemeyer, Robert, The authoritarians, Manitoba: University of Manitoba, 2006, p. 15 Google Scholar, who develops the F scale into measures of ‘right-wing authoritarianism’.

94 Fromm, Erich, Escape from freedom, New York: Rinehart & Co, 1941, pp. 41–42 Google Scholar.

95 Mills, Charles Wright, The power elite, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956, p. 304 Google Scholar.

96 Horkheimer, Max, The eclipse of reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1947 Google Scholar.

97 Riley, Dylan, ‘Civic associations and authoritarian regimes in interwar Europe: Italy and Spain in comparative perspective’, American Sociological Review, 70, 2, 2005, p. 290 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kornhauser, William, The politics of mass society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960, p. 182 Google Scholar. For an example of contemporary rightist civil society organizations, see Jacoby, Tim, ‘Fascism, civility and the crisis of the Turkish state’, Third World Quarterly, 32, 5, 2011, pp. 905–924 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 For instance, Brustein, William, The logic of evil: the social origins of the Nazi Party, 1925–1933, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 181 Google Scholar, concludes that, before 1933, ‘the Nazi Party alone crafted economic policies that in the perception of many Germans could redress their grievances or provide the means to greater social mobility’.

99 Greene, Douglas, ‘The bourgeois origins of fascist repression: on Robert Paxton’s The anatomy of fascism ’, Socialism and Democracy, 22, 2, 2008, p. 110 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

100 Quoted in Ebenstein, William, Great political thinkers, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1965, p. 617 Google Scholar.

101 Hitler, Adolf, Mein Kampf, trans. J. Murphy, London: Hurst and Blackett, 1939, p. 197 Google Scholar.

102 Mosse, Fascist revolution, p. 117.

103 Quoted in Linehan, Thomas, British fascism 1918–1939: parties, ideology and culture, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000, p. 129 Google Scholar.

104 Barnes, James Strachey, Fascism, London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931, p. 45 Google Scholar, emphases in original.

105 Griffin, ‘Holy storm’, p. 5.

106 Schneider, Herbert and Clough, Shepard, Making fascists, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1929, p. 73 Google Scholar; Payne, Stanley, ‘A form of revolutionary ultra-nationalism’, in Griffin, International fascism, p. 150 Google Scholar.

107 Gentile, Emilio, ‘Fascism as a political religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 2/3, 1990, p. 229 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

108 Barnes, Fascism, p. 81.

109 Dahrendorf, Ralf, Society and democracy in Germany, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967, p. 418 Google Scholar.

110 Gregor, A. James, ‘A modernizing dictatorship’, in Griffin, International fascism, p. 133 Google Scholar.

111 Ibid., p. 133; Levy, ‘Fascism’, pp. 104–5.

112 Neocleous, Fascism, p. 114.

113 Eatwell, Roger, ‘Towards a new model of generic fascism’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 4, 2, 1992, pp. 176–177 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

114 Mosse, Fascist revolution, p. 60.

115 Quoted in Gregor, Ideology of fascism, pp. 246, 249, 150.

116 Lyons, ‘Two ways’, p. 142.

117 Neocleous, Fascism, p. 60, emphases in original.

118 Paxton, Robert, The anatomy of fascism, New York: Vintage Books, 2005, p. 40 Google Scholar.

119 Paxton, ‘Five stages of fascism’, pp. 3–4.

120 Valois, quoted in Sternhell, Zeev, Neither right nor left: fascist ideology in France, trans. David Maisel, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986, p. 9 Google Scholar.

121 Neocleous, Fascism, p. 8.

122 Quoted in Sternhell, Neither right nor left, p. 22.

123 George Mosse quoted in Plessini, Karel, The perils of normalcy: George L. Mosse and the remaking of cultural history, Maddison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014, p. 66 Google Scholar.

124 Eatwell, ‘New styles of dictatorship’, p. 134.

125 Eatwell, ‘Explaining fascism’, p. 267.

126 Eatwell, ‘New styles of dictatorship’. p. 134.

127 Eatwell, ‘Towards a new model’, pp. 186–7.

128 Paxton ‘Five stages of fascism’, p. 5.

129 Ibid.

130 Brustein, Logic of evil, pp. 181–2.

131 Wolfreys, Jim, ‘What is fascism?’, International Socialism, 112, 2006, p. 5 Google Scholar.

132 Griffin, ‘Caught in its own net’, p. 47.

133 Ibid.

134 Rydgren, Jens, ‘The sociology of the radical right’, Annual Review of Sociology, 33, 2007, p. 257 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

135 Griffin, ‘Caught in its own net’, p. 47.

136 Payne, History of fascism, p. 455.

137 Mann, Michael, Fascists, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

138 Jackson, George, Blood in my eye, Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press, 1990, p. 118 Google Scholar.

139 Mann, Fascists, pp. 12–13.