Fascism: Comparison and Definition

1. What Do We Mean by Fascism?

1 What Do We Mean by Fascism? The unprecedented disaster that was World War I swept away much of the basis of nineteenth-century liberalism and opened an era of revolution and political conflict more intense than any seen before or after. One of the major new revolutionary forces, Russian Communism, was a direct development of nineteenth-century European Marxist and Russian revolutionary theory. The other major new radical force unleashed by World War I-fascism-was newer and more original, for it was a direct product of the war itself. Neither a fascist party nor a fascist doctrine existed as such before 1919. Communism, however, was by and large rejected by the European left and for the next generation confined as a regime to Russia. Italian Fascism,l founded in 1919, was followed by imitations and parallel or somewhat analogous movements in many other European lands. Fascism largely 1. In this study the names of the Italian Fascist Party and its immediate antecedents, members, and components will be capitalized, while the tenns fascism and fascist used in a broader and more generic sense will not. 3 4 I WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FASCISM? seized control in Italy after 1922, to be followed a decade later by Gennan Nazism. Powerful forces apparently similar in character gained strength in east-central Europe and in Spain by the 1930s, so that many historians refer to the entire generation before World War II as the fascist era in Europe. Yet the extension of the adjective to describe an entire period in European history has led to confusion as much as to clarity or understanding, for what the concept gained in scope was quickly lost in precision. Fascism is probably the vaguest of contemporary political tenns. This may be because the word itself has no implicit political reference, however vague, as do democracy, liberalism , socialism, and communism. To say that the Italianfascio (Lat. fasces, Fr. faisceau, Sp. haz) means "bundle" or "union" cannot tell us much. Some of the most common infonnal definitions of the term seem to be "violent," "brutal," and "dictatorial ," but if those were the primary points of reference communist regimes would probably have to be categorized as the most fascist. Definition bedeviled the original Italian Fascists from the beginning, since they developed a formal codified set of doctrines only ex post facto, some years after Mussolini came to power, and then only in part. The problem is compounded by the fact that whereas nearly all communist parties and regimes prefer to call themselves communist , most of the political movements in interwar Europe commonly tenned fascist did not in fact use that name for themselves. The problems of definition and categorization that arise are so severe it is not surprising that some scholars prefer to call putative fascist movements by their specific individual names alone without applying the categorical adjective . Still others deny that any such general phenomenon as fascism or European fascism-as distinct from Mussolini's Italian Fascism-ever existed. If fascism is to be studied, it has first to be identified, and it is doubtful that can be done without some sort of working definition. Such a definition, or better, description, must be derived from empirical study of the interwar European movements. It must be of course to a certain extent a theoret- WHAT DO WE MEAN BY FASCISM? 15 ical construct or abstraction, since no single movement of the group under observation would necessarily be found to have announced a program or self-description couched in the exact terms of this definition. Nor would such a hypothetical definition be intended at all to imply that the individual goals and characteristics identified were necessarily in every item unique to fascist movements, for most items might be found in one or more other species of political movement. The contention would be rather that taken as a whole the definition would describe what all fascist movements had in common without trying to describe the unique characteristics of each group. Finally, for reasons to be discussed later, the definition might refer only to interwar European fascist movements and not to a presumed category of fascist regimes or systems. Any definition of common characteristics of fascist movements must be used with great care, for fascist movements differed from each other as significantly as they held notable new features in common. A general inventory of their distinctive characteristics is therefore...