Review Article

Stanley G. Payne

Historic Fascism and Neofascism

Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London, Pinter Press, 1991; x +

245 pp.; £32.00.
Paul Brooker, The Faces of Fraternalism: Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy,
and Imperial Japan, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991; ix + 397 pp.; £40.00.
Stein Ugelvik Larsen and Beatrice Sandberg, eds, Fascism and European
Literature, Bern, Peter Lang, 1991: 459 pp.; £33.00.
Jill Lewis, Fascism and the Working Class in Austria, 1918-1934, Oxford,
Berg, 1991; xii + 236 pp.; £32.50.
Luciano Cheles et al., eds, Neo-Fascism in Europe, London, Longman,
1991; xii + 299 pp.; £22.00 hardback, £11.99 paperback.

Fascist studies have been a major area of contemporary European history

for half a century and will doubtless remain so for some time to come.
Scholarly attention not only shows little sign of abating but has in fact
been stimulated by the revival of nationalism in the eastern part of
Europe and the growth of racial and ethnic antagonism in the west.
Monographic research continues to appear in considerable volume, aug-
mented by occasional studies of broader range.
The only aspect of fascist studies that might be said to be in some
decline consists of general works of theory and interpretation, whose
number have considerably diminished since the ’fascism debate’ of the
1960s and 1970s. Roger Griffin’s new book is thus the more welcome as
the first significant attempt at broad new analysis to have appeared in a
number of years. He argues that the time is especially propitious in view
of the momentous changes that have recently occurred, which sharpen
our perspective and throw fascism into clearer relief than might have
been the case two decades earlier.
Griffin is concerned first of all to define generic fascism as an ideal
type, which he proposes to do in the classic Weberian sense as a social

69-

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

70

science construct, without supposing that such a specific model ever fully
existed completely and without alteration in any particular historical
form, each empirical manifestation of an ideal type being unique. In
addition, he seeks to add to taxonomic analysis of fascism, presenting
certain analytic adjustments, to incorporate the neofascist groups into a
taxonomic framework, construct a psychological and historical theory of
fascism, and to attempt answers to some of the major questions concern-
ing fascism.
In his definition, Griffin shifts much of the emphasis to the level of
ideology, answering in the affirmative the oft-repeated query as to
whether fascism in general can be said to have had a definable ideology.
For Griffin. fascism offered one of the fundamental revolutionary Utop-
ian ideologies of the century, its undeniable irrationality simply being
inherent in the process, for ’an ideology is intrinsically irrational’. The
core of fascist doctrine he finds in ’palingenetic myth’, reviving a little-
used Greek term to describe the doctrine of a Utopian rebirth of the
nation or the people, which lay at the very root of fascism.
A basic goal is then to present a simplified and concise definition,
without any pretension that such a generalized abstraction would reveal
an absolute ’essence’ of so pluriform a set of phenomena. Griffin’s defi-
nition is that ’fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core
in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranational-
ism.’ The three key points are thus ’palingenetic ideology’, ’populist’
appeal and mobilization, and ’ultranationalism’, each requiring eluci-
dation. ’Populist’ refers to broad cross-class appeal and the attempt at
mass mobilization, and ’ultranationalism’ to a radically anti-liberal cele-
bration of the national community as a source of value and meaning.
How useful and accurate is this brief description? It certainly represents
an advance on all previous one-sentence definitions, and no aspect of it
would appear to be inaccurate or inappropriate. Thus the main question
would have to do not with inaccuracy but with possible incompleteness.
Should even a concise definition also refer to such aspects as economic
goals and policy, charismatic leadership, the idealist and non-rationalist,
antimaterialist character of fascism’s palingenetic myth, or the possibly
unique character of the fascist philosophy and practice of violence?
From a different angle, is the definition too concise to permit boundary
distinctions between generically fascist movements and the most powerful
populist movements of South America, such as APRA or the MNR (the
latter ignored by Griffin but the former rejected as non-fascistic)? The
keenest taxonomists will usually agree that these latter movements were
not inherently fascist, yet did they not project a palingenetic myth and
were they not both populist and ultranationalist? (It should be mentioned
that Griffin argues, no doubt correctly, that APRA soon became too
moderate and non-violent to be genuinely ultranationalist.) Does the

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

 71

basic definition include or exclude the dictatorships in Libya and Iraq?

In Griffin’s analysis, both Qaddafi and Saddam Hussein are (barely)
excluded, the former coming to power through the military rather than
through populist mobilization and the latter taking over on the basis of a
Baathi cadre movement also lacking a true cross-class populist dimension.
Subsequent chapters lucidly analyse Italian Fascism and German
National Socialism, conduct a perspicacious taxonomical tOllr d’horizoll
of the other European movements and also extend the investigation to
political movements beyond Europe. The latter exercise reveals genuinely
fascist phenomena of any significance perhaps only in the cases of South
Africa and Brazil. The analysis is based throughout on a careful reading
of the appropriate secondary literature, whether theoretical or empirical,
and sustains a uniformly high level with which this reviewer might quibble
at only a few minor points.

By contrast with Griffin’s broad comparative analysis, the goal of Paul

Brooker’s study of ’fraternalism’ is more limited. He endeavours to com-
pare, contrast and evaluate the various mechanisms and organizations to
promote political and social solidarity in the Tripartite allies of the Second
World War as forms of achieving what Durkheim termed ’mechanical
solidarity’. The result is a solid survey and analysis based on thorough
reading of the most important secondary literature on the three regimes.
It will produce few surprises for scholars already well versed in the
pertinent literature, but it is none the less a useful work, first of all
because it is perhaps the most systematic analysis yet done of certain
major comparative aspects of the three regimes. Moreover, the analysis
is careful and accurate, and yields interesting and helpful, if not totally
original, results.
Brooker’s conclusion that Japan during the Second World War was the
most successful of the three regimes ’in both inculcating mechanical
solidarity in its society and strengthening its society to face the rigours
of total war’ will not be startling to scholars but none the less constitutes
a useful reminder that the European fascist regimes’ achievement in this

regard was inferior, even in the case of Nazi Germany. This may seem
striking in view of the absence of a major fascist movement or any other
sort of powerful nationalist political party in Japan, but stems from the
fact that Japan had not yet totally outgrown the more traditional bonds
of solidarity-compared with the more modernized countries of central
Europe-while conversely almost the entire course of development since
the Meiji Restoration had been dominated by paternalism and the attempt
to build fraternalist religion and organizational bonds into civil society.
The new volume edited by Stein Larsen and Beatrice Lindberg ranges
over even broader terrain in surveying the impact of fascism on literature.
Its twenty-six uneven chapters seek to examine fascist literature (mainly
in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Hungary) as well as the depiction

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

72

of fascism by non- and anti-fascist writers all over Europe. The book is
bilingual, with fourteen pieces in English and twelve in German, an
abstract in the other language provided for each, headed by an introduc-
tion in German and ended by a longer conclusion in English. Most of
the work falls into the survey category, and a few of the contributions
have nothing to offer, but several achieve a more useful analytic dimen-
sion. Inevitably in so eclectic a collection, the term ’fascist’ undergoes
considerable inflation. Even the Chetniks-among the more restrained
actors in the bloody Yugoslav civil war of 1941-5-are included in the
category (even by one of the co-editors, who should know better). The
result is to tell us more about literature than about fascism, but the final
product is none the less unique. There is no other single volume of this
nature, and despite its great unevenness it remains a good place to learn
more about the relationship between fascism and literature.
In contrast to the preceding works, Jill Lewis presents a case study of
the political and economic problems of Austrian labour under the First
Republic, focused primarily on the dispersed industry of Upper Styria.
The ’fascism’ of her title refers to the Heimwehr movement, more
extreme in Styria than in other parts of Austria, and also to the corporatist
Dollfuss regime. In this view the fascism of the Heimwehr stemmed from
extreme nationalism, corporate doctrine and violent tactics, a functional

concept yet more succinct than Griffin’s, but one which some taxonomists
would find overly elastic and inclusive.
The work tells us little about the Heimwehr, the Dollfuss regime or
Austrian ’fascism’, but a great deal concerning the problems of labour
and the Social Democrats in Upper Styria. The author’s concern is to
correct what she perceives as the customary approach to inter-war Aus-
trian affairs that is overly concentrated on Vienna, and in this she suc-
ceeds admirably. Though at the highest level this book fits into the
standard literature criticizing the ambiguities of Austrian Socialist policy,
it effectively broadens the perspective beyond Vienna to show that Social-
ist success among workers in the capital was not parallelled by equivalent
success among workers in other regions. Thus in Styria. where up to 40

per cent of the population might have been categorized as working class,
Socialist labour organizations had already begun to decline before the
end of the 1920s, so that in 1928 the workers in the region’s largest
industrial firm were successfully encouraged/pressured into switching to
a Heimwehr-associated trade union, in Lewis’s lexicon a ’fascist union’
tout court.
While Lewis labels the Heimwehr ’fascist’ and the Dollfuss regime
’Austro-fascism’, Griffin argues
a different hyphenization. He categorizes

the Heimwehr as ’proto-fascist’, only tending to fascism from the right

but generally not achieving full fascism in the generic sense, and the
Dollfuss regime a system of ’para-fascism’, a partial simulation or alter-

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

 73

ation of fascist forms and techniques by the authoritarian right. Thus the
Austrian dictatorship would not fall into the same category of regime as
Germany and Italy, but would be more analogous to those in Romania,
Yugoslavia or Spain.
The failure of National Socialism in Austrian domestic politics, as
distinct from the ’para-fascism’ of the Fatherland Front regime, raises
the question as to why generic fascist movements could achieve broad
support and ultimately state power in only a very few countries. Is a
’retrodictive’ general theory or historical interpretation that would
account for the few successes and many failures possible? Griffin attacks
the question by suggesting (208-12) that significant strength for a fascist
movement would have been predictable in countries in which (a) there
already existed or had recently existed ultranationalist or proto-fascist
ideological or political models; (b) a structural crisis had developed:
(c) all potential political space was not yet occupied, permitting new
mobilization; (d) there existed ’an inadequate consensus on liberal
values’: and (e) a ’favorable contingency arose’.
This represents a cogent approach that includes some of the most
important, if not all the most important, elements that might make up
an historical theory of fascist development. The last two points involve
a degree of tautology. A great many things never happen unless there is
a favourable contingency, while ’inadequate consensus’ might be refined
to the empirical requirement that a functional liberal democratic political
system have been in place and governed successfully for a full generation.
An addition might be some stipulation about international circumstances
or the popular perception thereof in terms of status humiliation or severe
national frustration. It might further be postulated that a structural crisis
in the inter-war period was more likely to foster a strong new fascist
movement if there existed a general perception that the economic crisis
was due in considerable measure to exogenous or international factors.
This section, like some other parts of Griffin’s generally admirable work,
is too brief to do the topic full justice.
To some historians, this is merely an interesting ’academic’ problem,
but to more than a few students of comparative politics it constitutes a
continuing concern that may soon become ever more pressing. For at
least thirty years a steady stream of articles and also books have appeared
describing the development in various parts of the world of what is
frequently called neofascism. Most of these publications are written by
journalists and the politically engagé rather than by professional scholars,
though there is also a considerable bibliography by the latter as well.
The collective volume edited by Cheles, Ferguson and Vaughan clearly
falls within the latter category, its component chapters prepared by
specialists well-qualified in the political analysis of the radical right in
individual countries. Thus there are two contributions each on Italy,

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

74

France and West Germany, individual chapters on Britain, Spain, Greece

and Portugal, and brief studies of the Holocaust denial publicists and
of ’Women and the National Front’ in Britain. The result is a fairly
comprehensive survey that is accurate and detailed in description and
convincing in analysis, with a useful bibliography added. It will provide
the informed reader with as much as or perhaps more than he or she
wishes to know about the radical right in contemporary Europe.
The main question emerging from the book is whether the phenomena
studied amount to bizarre curiosities or a noteworthy new threat. Only
in Italy and France has the radical right achieved a national following of
any significance, and even there they have been no threat to the system
except perhaps for a few fleeting moments. Conversely, the reader may
be bewildered by the endless multiplicity of the neofascist grouplets, with
continuous subdivision and the perpetual emergence of new nuclei. The
basic rule of thumb may be that the more of the latter, in fact the more
insignificant, though in earlier years neofascist or neorightist terrorism
certainly had an impact in both Italy and Spain.
It seems fairly clear that in the normal course of things these organiza-
tions can achieve nothing on their own-not enough in the vast majority
of cases to be taken seriously-so that their potential significance must
depend exclusively on the emergence of some new form of crisis for the
greater society in which they live, a new crisis which, because of their
own weakness, by definition cannot be of their
making.
What relationship does neofascism or the new radical right bear to
historical fascism between the wars? All the more significant organizations
have had to downplay any direct mimesis of Nazism or of Italian Fascism
in order to present a more respectable electoral front, though in many
cases it became fairly clear that the official platform was partly a facade.
Here once more Griffin may be of assistance, since his is the only recent
general interpretation of fascism in English that also includes a half
chapter of analysis of the post-war organizations. Though too long and
complicated to present fully, Griffin’s taxonomy may be synthesized in
three general categories approximately as follows:

I Continuationist Groups
1) The MSI in Italy, a unique case of the direct successor of a major
fascist movement becoming a viable parliamentary and political
force
2) The various neo-Nazi grouplets in Germany
3) Repetitive organizations that revive earlier fascist movements in
other countries

II New Mimetic or Neo-Nazi Organizations

1) Neo-Nazi groups formed outside Germany
2) Nazification of other neofascist or right-radical organizations

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016

 75

3) White Supremacist groups that take on neo-Nazi characteristics

4) International linkage groups (CEDADE, etc.)
5) ’Skinhead’ groups or gangs that adopt neo-Nazi characteristics
III Modified Neofascist organizations
1) ’Revolutionary nationalist’ neofascist groups (‘Strasserites’, etc.)
2) Cryptofascist political organizations that nominally accept liberal
democratic, parliamentary norms
3) Historical revisionist publicists or groups (Holocaust denial, etc.)
4) ’Conservative Revolution’ advocates (Alain Benoist and ’Nou-
velle Droite’, etc.) ,

This is a lucid and compelling taxonomy that reduces to some concep-

tual and analytical order the otherwise bewildering variety of hundreds
of individual grouplets of neofascist and right-radical advocacy. While we
may hope that all this amounts to a strictly scholarly exercise faintly
analogous to the classification of obscure Amazonian languages rapidly
undergoing extinction, the late-twentieth-century ’crisis of nationalities’
in Europe may provide unpleasant surprises.

Stanley G. Payne
is Hilldale-Jaime Vicens Vives Professor of
History at the University of Wisconsin. His
most recent book is The Franco Regime
1936-1975 (1988).

Downloaded from ehq.sagepub.com at RYERSON UNIV on June 5, 2016