The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe: Italy, Spain, and Romania, 1870–1945

1. Civil Society and Fascism in Interwar Europe

Between 1890 and 1914 an organizational revolution occurred in Europe as mutual aid societies, rural credit organizations, and cooperatives blossomed (Callahan 2000: 142–148; Eidelberg 1974: 98; Lyttelton 2000: 69–78; Tenfeld 2000: 85).1 Indeed , scholars have identified the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century as a period of intensive development of civil society, especially in the countryside (Nord 2000: xvii–xviii; Putnam 1993: 137– 148). Such developments, according to a widely held “Tocquevillian” thesis, should have produced vibrant liberal democracies across the continent (Arato 1981; Cohen and Arato 1992; Gellner 1994; Nord 1995; Putnam 1993, 2000; Varshney 2002). Yet, in roughly half of Europe, fascism followed this intense wave of associational growth. This outcome is especially puzzling in countries such as Italy, Spain, and Romania (the empirical focus of this book), which had well-established liberal institutions by the late nineteenth century. Associational growth should have strengthened their already existing parliamentary regimes but appears instead to have undermined them, for, rather than shifting from liberal oligarchies to mass democracies , Italy, Spain, and Romania developed as fascist regimes in the interwar period. Explaining why this happened is the central goal of this book. Civil Society and Fascism in Interwar Europe 1 2 The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe Investigating the connection between the development of civil society and fascism is by no means of purely academic interest. Contemporary political culture is suffused with civil society romanticism: the term itself is now treated as virtually equivalent to liberal democracy.2 There is, however, a relative absence of comparative and historical research focused on the political consequences of associational development. Instead, most exponents of the Tocquevillian thesis, and their critics, investigate the relationship between associationism and the quality of democracy in already consolidated liberal democratic regimes (Howard 2003; 148–152; Kaufman 2002; Putnam 1993: 3; 2000; Skocpol 1997).3 I believe that investigating the effect of associationism on the emergence of interwar European fascism raises serious issues about the political consequences of civil society development and suggests the need for a rethinking, although by no means rejection , of the Tocquevillian thesis. My argument, in brief, is that the consequences of associational development for regime outcomes, rather than being direct, depend on the presence or absence of hegemonic politics. Civil society development facilitated the emergence of fascism, rather than liberal democracy, in interwar Italy, Spain, and Romania because it preceded, rather than followed, the establishment of strong political organizations (hegemonic politics) among both dominant classes and nonelites. The development of voluntary associations in these countries tended to promote democracy, as it did elsewhere. But in the absence of adequate political institutions , this democratic demand assumed a paradoxically antiliberal and authoritarian form: a technocratic rejection of politics as such. Fascist movements and regimes grew out of this general crisis of politics, a crisis that itself was a product of civil society development. This argument suggests two important conclusions, to which I return more fully below. The first is that the impact of associational or civil society development depends heavily on the preexisting structure of political conflict, or what I call, following Gramsci, the presence or absence of hegemonic politics. The second is that fascism, far from being the opposite of democracy, was a twisted and distorted form of democratization that, paradoxically, embraced authoritarian means. My broader aim in this book is, accordingly, to propose a rethinking of the impact of civil society development on regime forms and a rethinking of the nature of interwar European fascism. The remainder of this introduction accomplishes three main tasks that lay the analytic foundations for the rest of the book. I first develop a definition of fascism as an “authoritarian democracy.” I then present the Tocquevillian approach Civil Society and Fascism in Interwar Europe 3 to interwar fascism and develop some key theoretical and empirical criticisms of it. The chapter then turns to a discussion of Gramsci, explaining how his concepts of civil society and hegemony (and particularly the connection between them) provide a useful corrective and extension of more conventional Tocquevillian approaches to civil society. Finally, I close with a brief consideration of my analytic and case selection strategy and adumbrate the argument to come. Fascism as Authoritarian Democracy What is a fascist regime? Unfortunately there is very little consensus about this question. Some scholars favor a highly restricted definition that refers at most only...