Martel Gordon. A Companion to Europe 1900-1945

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308 william j. chase

Alec Nove, Economic History of the USSR (New York: Penguin, 1989). The most balanced

textbook on the topic.

Matthew Payne, Stalin’s Railroad: Turksib and the Building of Socialism (Pittsburgh: University

of Pittsburgh Press, 2001). A fascinating study of labor and nationality issues during the

Five-Year Plan.

Chapter Twenty

The Fascist Challenge

Martin Blinkhorn

If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: “To ﬁght

against Fascism,” and if you had asked me what I was ﬁghting for, I should have

answered: “Common decency.” (George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, 1938)

The English writer George Orwell was just one of thousands of foreigners who vol-

unteered to “ﬁght against Fascism” in the Spain of 1936. In the course of the Spanish

Civil War of 1936–9, over 40,000 non-Spaniards made the difﬁcult journey to what

for most of them was an unfamiliar country in order to resist a right-wing rebellion

backed by Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Most enlisted in the legendary International

Brigades; a few, like Orwell, joined one of Republican Spain’s left-wing party militias;

and several thousand served as doctors, nurses, or ambulance drivers.

Many never

returned. Those who did survive left Spain only to become embroiled within months

in the deﬁnitive “ﬁght against fascism”: World War II. In Spain, the victory of

“fascism” gave birth to the 36-year dictatorship of the rebellion’s eventual leader,

General Francisco Franco.

The epic of the foreign anti-fascist volunteers in the Spanish Civil War was unique

in the twentieth century. Other “local” conﬂicts, from the South African War of

1899–1902, through Vietnam, down to the Balkan struggles of the 1990s, aroused

strong feelings among non-combatants of many nationalities, without tempting sig-

niﬁcant numbers to change and risk their lives by voluntarily taking part. That

“Spain” could do this testiﬁes to the conviction, widely held in Europe and beyond

by 1936, that the continent was being crushed by an evil, oppressive force to which

the term “fascism” was commonly applied. Whatever the appropriateness of the label,

the conviction itself had very real substance. By 1936, the liberal-democratic Europe

of 1920 was a mere memory. Throughout most of the south, center, and east of the

continent, dictatorships and authoritarian regimes now prevailed. Within the previous

three years, the ﬁnal vestiges of Germany’s Weimar democracy had succumbed to

Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, a “clerical-fascist” regime had installed itself in Austria, and

authoritarian regimes of one kind or another had been imposed in Bulgaria, Estonia,

310 martin blinkhorn

Latvia, and (soon after the outbreak of war in Spain) Greece. Even where democracy

lived on, in the continent’s northwestern quadrant (Britain and Ireland, France, the

Benelux countries, and the Nordic countries) and in Czechoslovakia, “fascism”

appeared to be on the march. For sincere devotees of democracy and for adherents

of socialism – especially the latter – who had witnessed parliamentary democracy, free

trade unionism, and the organized left crushed or politically castrated throughout so

much of Europe, it was time for ordinary people to do in Spain what democratic

governments elsewhere had proved unwilling or impotent to do – confront and defeat

a fascist challenge that was coming to seem irresistible.

The “fascism” that its enemies in the 1930s saw as devouring Europe took its

name from the political force founded in Italy in 1919 and the Fascist dictatorship

ﬁnally established there in 1925.

Especially following Hitler’s achievement of power

in 1933, the term’s analytical and emotive power was reinforced by widespread rec-

ognition of the family resemblance linking Italian Fascism with Nazism. Fascist Italy

and the Nazi Third Reich indisputably constituted a new kind of political regime:

new in appearance, style, language, and a powerful drive towards totalitarian control.

Nevertheless the continent-wide and potentially worldwide threat identiﬁed by Orwell

and so many others was actually a broader and looser phenomenon than this might

suggest. It involved the demolition or undermining of parliamentary democracy, and

the disempowering or downright crushing of the left, by an assortment of authoritar-

ian, right-wing forces. Many of these were essentially conservative in outlook and

keen to deny that they were fascist at all, a denial readily accepted by self-proclaimed

fascists or National Socialists who saw themselves as authentic revolutionaries.

These differing perceptions of “fascism” need to be borne in mind when we con-

sider the “fascist challenge” presented to the Europe of the 1920s and early 1930s –

the period with which this chapter is chieﬂy concerned. Since the end of World War

II, historians and political scientists have grappled with the problems of deﬁnition

and understanding arising from the discrepancy between, on the one hand, fascism

and National Socialism as their self-conscious devotees saw them, and, on the other,

a wider “objective” fascism as chieﬂy understood by committed liberals, democrats

and, especially, socialists.

For Orwell and his contemporaries, such problems barely

registered; they knew fascism when they saw it, knew it was inimical to “human

decency,” and – certainly by 1936 – knew it must be fought. Differences between

manifestations of self-proclaimed “fascism” and more conventional forms of authori-

tarianism were matters of degree and theoretical nuance, not of essence or practical

urgency. While demanding more of the intellect, present-day scholarly study of

fascism asks little of the character and spirit. Comfortable, early twenty-ﬁrst-century

academics, while legitimately anxious in discussing fascism to exercise analytical rigor

and achieve terminological precision, accordingly owe it to their forebears of the

1920s and 1930s never to forget or diminish the less neatly deﬁned realities they

faced.

For the purposes of this chapter, “fascism” and “fascist” will refer “generically”

to the Italian example and to those ideas, movements, and regimes that consciously

took inspiration from it – and later from its German National Socialist variant. Then,

as the chapter progresses, it will become necessary to confront the implications of a

broader use of the term such as that much employed at the time. First, however, we

need to consider what it was that the “fascist challenge” was actually challenging.

the fascist challenge 311

The New Europe

Although as we have just seen, and as we shall see again later, it was during the 1930s

that Europe truly faced a full-blown threat from fascism, it was certainly in the 1920s

that this challenge was born and took shape. Whether we view fascism as a genuinely

novel and even revolutionary phenomenon, or as an essentially counter-revolutionary

one, it was – at least in what might be called its “ﬁrst phase” – a product of World

War I and the postwar environment. It is true that many of fascism’s ideas and atti-

tudes had prewar origins. Nor was there any shortage in pre-1914 Europe of political

organizations seeking to mobilize, for instance, ultranationalism, authoritarianism,

racism and antisemitism, anti-Marxism, “national” variants of socialism, and various

forms of cultural revolt.

Movements such as Action Française, the Italian Nationalist

Association, Portuguese Integralism, and numerous German political leagues are only

a few examples of what, in the generation before 1914, was a general phenomenon.

Yet while historically signiﬁcant, these were mostly symptoms of stirring political

dissatisfaction rather than serious threats to the privileged liberal and conservative

political elites of Europe’s nations and empires. The 1914–18 war, the 1917 Bolshevik

revolution, the 1919 peace settlement, and the convulsive conditions of the postwar

years generated new issues and released new social forces. This transformed setting

helped give birth to fascism in its original “Italian” sense, nurtured it and propelled

it to power, and then made it relevant and attractive to individuals and interests well

beyond Italy. In addition, the postwar climate encouraged the growth and articula-

tion of other, less outwardly “revolutionary” expressions of authoritarianism which,

thanks to the attention lavished upon developments in Italy, became associated in

many minds with fascism. It is accordingly vital to consider more closely the relation-

ship between the emergence of fascism and the setting from which it emerged.

During its closing stages, the extensive conﬂict that was unprecedented in its

destructiveness had assumed the character of a crusade on behalf of liberal values and

political democracy. With the entry into the war of the United States in 1917 and

the withdrawal in early 1918 of a recently tsarist and now Bolshevik Russia, the Allies

– led by Britain and its Dominions, France, the United States and Italy, but also

embracing other European states such as Greece, Portugal, and Romania – were able

to proclaim their victory as that of liberal democracy over the alleged authoritarianism

of the losers: Germany, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, and Bulgaria.

However shaky and/or dubious prewar parliamentary liberalism may have been in

some places, superﬁcially at least it emerged from the struggle as Europe’s dominant

system of politics, economics, and general values. Ideological and cultural pluralism,

religious and ethnic toleration, national self-determination, free-market economics,

representative and responsible government, free trade unionism, and the peaceful

settlement of international disputes through a new body, the League of Nations – all

of these liberal precepts were embraced, west of the USSR and admittedly (as we

shall soon see) with widely varying degrees of enthusiasm and sincerity, by the elites

of Europe’s old and new nations.

As the last phrase indicates, fundamental to the new Europe was the redrawing of

the territorial and political map in the peace settlements of 1919–22.

Out of the

defeat of the old German, Habsburg, and Ottoman empires arose a number of new

or reborn independent states: Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Austria,

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Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Albania. Some of these conformed more

or less closely to the principle of national self-determination beloved of President

Woodrow Wilson, though most nevertheless contained substantial minority popula-

tions. Two, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were born as problematical multinational

states with serious ethnic and cultural tensions. Austria and Hungary, previously

dominant and competing partners within the Habsburg Empire, found themselves

separated and independent but territorially and demographically truncated. Austria’s

very viability as a small German-speaking state overshadowed by a new Germany was

questionable, while Hungary saw substantial Magyar-speaking regions attached to

Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and, most importantly, Romania. Romania’s new situa-

tion, vastly expanded in both area and population and facing difﬁcult problems of

assimilation and national identity, indicates that being on the winning side in the war

was no guarantee of future stability. If generous territorial gains promised difﬁculties

for Romania, rewards widely considered inadequate provoked a sharp sense of national

grievance in Italy, where disappointed patriots and especially war veterans bemoaned

a so-called “mutilated victory.” Literally central to the settlement and to the conti-

nent’s future was of course Germany: stripped of German-speaking populations on

the Baltic coast and in Bohemia, its sovereignty undermined along the Rhine, and

thrust into a problematical relationship with Austria. Thus, across much of the con-

tinent, issues of unredeemed national territories and peoples, contested borders, and

internal minorities provided fuel for international and ethnic tensions. The opportu-

nity for ultranationalist elements to exploit this situation was enhanced by the pres-

ence of numerous demobilized ex-combatants, infected by military values and habits

and uncomfortable with a sudden adjustment to civilian life.

Not only were many territorial boundaries shifted by the war and the 1919 settle-

ment, but Europe’s overall political complexion changed too. Before the war, while

most European countries had acquired constitutional governing systems of some

kind, many of these were actually far from being true democracies. With real power

held by wealthy conservative and liberal oligarchies, the popular will was obstructed

by a variety of constitutional limitations (Germany, Austria-Hungary), narrow suf-

frage (Italy to 1912), or institutionalized corruption (Italy, Spain, Portugal). It is

impossible to know whether, had there been no World War I, most of the European

countries that existed in 1914 might have evolved more or less peacefully into viable

parliamentary democracies. What we can say is that the demands of war on govern-

ments and peoples encouraged two potentially conﬂicting tendencies relevant to the

story of European democracy. The ﬁrst was a pronounced strengthening of state

machinery, notably bureaucracies and the military, which entrenched authoritarian

habits and sentiments among their personnel. The second was a pronounced accelera-

tion in a shift, already apparent before 1914, towards truly “mass politics” involving

modern political parties, organized interest and pressure groups, and large, powerful

labor movements.

This “massiﬁcation” of politics, especially evident from the mid-point of the war,

merged after its conclusion with a heady and illusory “vogue for democracy” fed by

the Allied victory and America’s newly arrived inﬂuence. The result was a continent

containing several new states that were also young democracies, many born in settings

and circumstances that were far from conducive to their chances of achieving matu-

rity. All of the newly created countries began their lives as constitutional democracies,

the fascist challenge 313

though some like Hungary and Albania began to show signs of reverting to authori-

tarianism from an early date.

While the establishment of new republics in Germany

and Austria raised wider hopes of a decisive stride towards democracy among the

German-speaking peoples, in both countries powerful anti-democratic forces still

operated. Italy offered a particularly complex picture: although the fundamental

constitutional position remained unchanged, postwar Italy became something like a

true democracy almost overnight, as the full effects of near-universal male suffrage,

introduced in 1912, combined with those of proportional representation, added in

fulﬁllment of a wartime governmental promise to the Italian people. The outcome

was the immediate weakening of Italy’s previously dominant “liberal” political elites,

the emergence of mutually mistrustful socialist and Catholic mass parties, and a state

of political paralysis.

In all of these countries democracy was either an accompani-

ment to the challenges of new nationhood or, at the very least, inextricably inter-

twined with the negative consequences of war and peace. Even in countries less

dramatically affected by the peace settlement, such as Portugal, Spain, and Sweden,

postwar political adjustment was far from easy.

Had the postwar years been years of economic and social stability, even of reason-

ably smooth recovery from the disruption caused by war, the prospects for European

democracy could have been very different. New democracies and a newly democra-

tized Italian polity might have established themselves more securely, weak not-

quite-democracies like those of Spain and Portugal might have had the chance to

mature more or less peacefully into genuine ones, and the fascist challenge might

never have emerged. In the wake of so massive a conﬂict, however, such a scenario

is sheer counterfactual fantasy. The reality was one of dislocated industry and agri-

culture, mass demobilization contributing further to large-scale unemployment, and

waves of nightmarish inﬂation affecting middle-class salaries and savings. Economic

grievances, status insecurities, and heightened social tensions between 1919 and 1924

meant that new – and even more established – democracies, many forced also to

grapple with problems arising from defeat, disappointing victory, ethnic tension, etc.,

also became the victims of social discontents of one kind or another. It is important

to stress here that, because its particular forms were new across so much of Europe,

it was often democracy as system of politics and values – involving, ironically, accep-

tance of free discussion and the right to question those in power – that attracted

criticism and even contempt for the failures of individual governments to solve postwar

problems. To some at least of its attackers, democracy could appear intrinsically weak,

indecisive, shabby, compromising, and inimical to a nation’s interests.

A particular concern of democracy’s critics as they began to express themselves

after 1919 was its relationship with a newly powerful political left, whether the latter

was seeking to work within the system for gradual reform, determined to overthrow

it by revolutionary means, or hovering uncertainly between these two positions. From

the later nineteenth century onward, most European countries had witnessed the

emergence of left-wing political and trade union movements wedded to the redistri-

bution of wealth and the transformation of society, either by parliamentary or by

outright revolutionary means. The 1914–18 war and the demands it placed on the

economies of belligerent and even neutral nations gave an enormous boost to the

European left in three main ways. First, it stimulated a massive growth in the labor

force and concomitant expansion of trade union membership. Secondly, employer

314 martin blinkhorn

and state pressures on labor, together with the excesses of war proﬁteering, provoked

intensiﬁed labor and social conﬂicts. Thirdly, the effects of war and defeat helped

precipitate in Russia a revolution that transformed the hopes, fears, and perceptions

of postwar Europeans. In the short term almost all European leftists, longstanding

and newly recruited, drew inspiration from the Russian example, even if many were

sooner or later alienated by Bolshevism’s increasing authoritarianism and repressive-

ness. Most European socialist parties in the 1920s were theoretically Marxist and

inclined to use revolutionary rhetoric. Some, like the French and Spanish parties,

were revolutionary in theory only; others, like the main body of the Italian Socialist

Party during 1919–20, ﬂirted with revolution sufﬁciently to spread alarm among its

possible victims without ever seriously approaching its achievement. The Austrian

Socialist Party sought revolutionary transformation by peaceful means, while the

powerful German SPD left belief in revolution to the breakaway German Communist

Party, the KPD. The latter, like the new communist parties in Hungary and else-

where, actively engaged in revolutionary activity which generated a “red scare”

mentality in upper- and middle-class circles and played an important part in preparing

the ground for fascism.

For many Europeans during the early 1920s, the essence of the postwar European

left was revolutionary whatever its militants said or did; socialism in power, whether

at the national level as in Weimar Germany or, more brieﬂy, the Austrian republic,

or at the local level as happened in many parts of northern Italy after 1919, was

believed to mean a “Bolshevik” assault upon property, capital, and middle-class status.

Postwar democracy, by tolerating left-wing trade unionism and political socialism,

seemed to such terriﬁed bourgeois to represent – like the Kerensky government in

post-tsarist, pre-Bolshevik Russia – a mere stage within a descent into “Bolshevism”

that must therefore be resisted or forestalled by any available means. In several coun-

tries – most notably Finland, Poland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Spain – the

end of the war and/or the immediate postwar months had witnessed either actual

revolutionary attempts or at the very least mass left-wing militancy with revolutionary

overtones, and the employment of the army or paramilitary armed bands to suppress

them. The legacy was to prove a powerful one.

Italy and the First Fascist Challenge

During the revolutionary and counter-revolutionary conﬂicts of 1918–20, Europe

witnessed numerous foretastes of what would come to be called “fascism.” Paramilitary

squads such as the German Freikorps and Austrian Heimwehr, made up of war veterans

and, in the latter case, sympathetic peasant farmers and members of the urban middle

class, exempliﬁed a direct and violent response, either to real or exaggerated threats

of communist revolution or to territorial and ethnic rivals.

Frustrated nationalism

was also a factor: in Italy the nationalist poet and war hero, Gabriele D’Annunzio,

led a private army of war veterans in seizing the Adriatic city of Fiume, disputed

between Italy and Yugoslavia, holding it for a year until ﬁnally ejected by the Italian

authorities. D’Annunzio’s theatrical style and his experiments with a new kind of

state were not lost on an admirer, Benito Mussolini.

Related, but more unambiguously “institutional” reactions to the “Bolshevik

menace,” came from conservative military cliques and their well-heeled civilian

the fascist challenge 315

supporters. Such forces were involved in defeating left-wing movements in

Finland and Poland, and in 1920 promoted the unsuccessful Kapp Putsch against

Weimar. By this time authoritarian conservatives were already in control of Hungary,

where in 1919 they overturned the unpopular Soviet Republic of Béla Kun and

destroyed the power of the Hungarian left for a generation. Brushing aside their

country’s genuine liberals and democrats, the triumphant Hungarian counter-

revolutionaries installed, behind a transparent veneer of so-called “liberalism,”

a reactionary semi-dictatorship under their leader Admiral Miklós Horthy.

The Horthy regime, which was to last until 1944, was the ﬁrst of Europe’s many

interwar dictatorships. Its rapid emergence, together with stirrings elsewhere, sig-

naled how fragile and conditional, if it existed at all, was the support of many estab-

lishment forces for newly created liberal democracies – especially when these appeared

vulnerable to the left.

While counter-revolutionary, anti-democratic activity of an essentially conservative

character may have been widespread in postwar Europe, and might well have con-

tinued regardless of developments in Italy, it was these that ensured the label “fascism”

would gain worldwide and lasting currency. Fascism’s rise was dramatic. In March

1919 Benito Mussolini, a leading socialist militant until late 1914, led a mixed bag

of around a hundred political malcontents in forming a new organization, the Fascio

di Combattimento (Combat Group). After failing to attract support as a kind of

“alternative socialism,” Fascism changed course and quickly became a mass move-

ment of a kind unprecedented in Italy or anywhere else, contemptuous of liberal

democracy and devoted to the use of violence against socialists, communists, and

Catholic peasant leagues. In late October 1922 Fascism’s fast-increasing numbers,

its power to intimidate, and the political establishment’s desperate ineptitude enabled

Mussolini to become premier in a Fascist-led government. Finally, in January 1925,

Mussolini inaugurated a Fascist dictatorship advertised, and widely accepted, as a

wholly new way of organizing the state.

Unlike Hungary, now something of a European backwater, Italy was a leading

European country whose public affairs attracted enormous outside interest. This,

coupled with Fascism’s sheer differentness, guaranteed the new regime continent-

wide publicity and, in many quarters, sympathy. For many Europeans Italian Fascism,

for all its rough edges, radiated youthfulness, energy, excitement, and novelty. First

as a movement and then as a regime it appeared to combine a counter-revolutionary,

anti-democratic role with a distinctive and completely original revolutionary posture.

The former it demonstrated by ruthlessly crushing the Italian left and freeing Italy

from what was actually a largely illusory revolutionary threat. The latter’s emergence

was more piecemeal. Between 1922 and the end of 1924, even without an outright

dictatorship and still facing elements of criticism and opposition, Fascism began to

project a sense of national renewal and reborn pride. With the establishment of

Mussolini’s dictatorship in January 1925, what was now an unambiguously Fascist

regime managed to persuade sympathetically inclined Europeans that it was utterly

transforming Italian politics, society, and culture; perhaps, it was also possible to

believe, Fascism was even altering the character of the Italians themselves. Crucial to

all this was Fascism’s unprecedented presentational skills and carefully constructed

image of discipline. Here, historical perspective is vital to our understanding. As yet,

in the 1920s, the uniforms and parades, the stiff-armed salutes, the symbols and

316 martin blinkhorn

sloganizing, in fact many of those external features which excited and attracted many

observers, had not acquired the associations – chieﬂy with Nazism and the Holocaust

– that were later to discredit them. Fascism in its ﬁrst decade was above all new.

This may help us to understand why by no means all those non-Italians who found

themselves attracted to, and even inspired by, Italian Fascism during the 1920s were

instinctive reactionaries or even conservatives. Many Europeans, while rejecting the

recipes of the orthodox left, nevertheless did dream of radical solutions to postwar

problems: solutions perhaps impossible within the framework of pluralistic politics.

In Fascism, especially as the new Italian state developed after 1925, sympathizers saw

an alternative, patriotic radicalism, apparently capable of cutting through the chatter,

delays, and compromises of parliamentary democracy. Fascism appeared to promise

the restoration of economic health; the elimination of market uncertainties in favor

of planning through a “corporate” state; the replacement of class conﬂict and the

Bolshevik threat by social cohesion and collaboration; and the mobilization of a

people’s energies and enthusiasm in a collective patriotic mission. Fascism’s desire

and seeming intention to transform individual and collective mentalities through

education, propaganda, and mass participation in its public displays also appealed to

intellectual minorities in other countries who found the postwar world drab and

“decadent.”

The challenge with which Italian Fascism confronted the Europe of the 1920s

thus had, or seemed to have, much more to it than the mere replacement of democ-

racy with a defensively minded, destructive authoritarianism. Present-day historians,

both inside and outside Italy, disagree sharply among themselves regarding the sincer-

ity, consistency, and success of Fascism’s social and cultural purpose,

but few deny

the effectiveness of Fascist propaganda in persuading substantial numbers of non-

Italian contemporaries that Fascism had something constructive with which to chal-

lenge liberal democracy. Even so, many other Europeans were less bewitched by

militaristic display, punctual trains, triumphalist rhetoric, and the strutting machismo

of Mussolini and his henchmen. For its critics and enemies, Fascism, behind the

superﬁcial glitter, was ﬁrst and foremost an oppressive, reactionary force. Unconditional

supporters of liberal democracy were appalled by Fascism’s increasing authoritarian-

ism, its proclaimed “totalitarian” goals, and what all this meant for individual and

collective freedom. For socialists of all kinds, Fascism was the armed guard of capital-

ism and the enemy of the working class.

However Italian Fascism was viewed, its impact was such that from 1922 onward,

“fascism” assumed a salient position within European political discourse. From the

very start, though, it was – as it remains – a slippery term, with important implica-

tions when it comes to assessing the true character and seriousness of any “fascist

challenge” to liberal democracy and its socialist alternatives. Broadly speaking, we

can discern three main positions in relation to the term as it emerged in the 1920s.

Two have just been touched on. For some in every European country (save the

USSR) “fascism” meant a political revolution of nationalist, populist, authoritarian

character, forged and developed in Italy but capable and worthy of imitation any-

where in Europe. Critics saw its essential character as demagogic and oppressive, its

function that of propping up capitalism and broader conservative forces. The third

position grew out of the second, holding that behind its facade Fascism’s essential

character and role were sufﬁciently similar to those of other, less experimental authori-

the fascist challenge 317

tarian regimes to justify applying the now fashionable term to all of them. It is now

time to explore these matters further.

Between 1922 and the end of the decade many of Europe’s parliamentary democ-

racies, together with the socialist, communist, and anarchist left, found themselves

confronted by organized challenges from the political right which fell into three

broad categories. The most straightforward consisted of newly formed organizations

which, appearing in most European countries, took direct inspiration from the

supposedly revolutionary character of Italian Fascism and proposed something similar

for their own national communities. The second comprised new or ongoing

organizations which borrowed something from Fascism, or in some respects resem-

bled it, without attempting to disguise their own essentially non- or counter-

revolutionary character. The third category embraced a range of elite elements such

as conservative parties, army and naval ofﬁcer corps, bureaucratic cliques, organiza-

tions of industrialists and landowners, ecclesiastical hierarchies, and royal courts.

From beneath the sometimes disturbing revolutionary surface of Fascism, their

members drew a generalized inspiration and comfort from its defeat of the left and

its essential authoritarianism as a system of power. It was precisely this aspect of

Fascism, of course, that made it acceptable to so many conservative Italians, whatever

their reservations and however little they may have shared its more ambitious social,

cultural, and institutional goals. But conservative groups outside Italy often con-

cluded that the “best” of Fascism was achievable without recourse to those of its

features they mistrusted.

During the 1920s a deﬁnite vogue for “fascism” seduced signiﬁcant numbers of

individuals throughout Europe and stimulated the formation of countless self-

consciously fascist organizations. Examples are the French Faisceau, the creation of

Georges Valois, a former militant of Action Française; the British Fascisti (later British

Fascists); the Spanish (though predominantly Catalonian) group “La Traza”; the

Academic Karelia Society in Finland; and the largely military Iron Wolf movement

in Lithuania – but others can be identiﬁed in virtually every European country west

of the Soviet frontier. While it would be simple to produce an impressive list of such

parties and movements, a sense of proportion is called for. The majority of such

imitative movements, like those just mentioned, in reality presented little or no threat

to their country’s political establishment. Some, it is true, did lay down an intellectual

or ideological template which they or other movements were able to employ with

greater proﬁt during the 1930s. Viewed overall, however, the experience of outright

fascist parties in much of Europe in the 1920s did much to conﬁrm Mussolini’s early

assertion (he was later to change his mind) that Fascism was “not for export.” Fascism

in Italy was an extraordinary, highly distinctive political phenomenon, the product

of a unique combination of circumstances at a speciﬁc historical moment. Artiﬁcially

replicating elsewhere a movement that had formed and developed organically out of

Italian conditions, and which achieved power in the midst of a distinctively Italian

political crisis, was never likely to be easy.

In only two settings can a species of “fascism,” formed in the 1920s, be said

eventually to have ﬂourished, and in both cases it ﬂourished because it possessed

highly particular roots of its own. Here, the “fascism” of the Romanian Legionary

movement and German National Socialism, although similar to the Italian model,

did not imitate it.