FASCISM.

Even in the early twenty-first century, the term fascism remains one of fundamental ambiguity and controversy. Unlike many other "-isms," it still invites competing perceptions of what it is and what it stood (or even stands) for. Originally a word borrowed from the ancient Roman imagery (fasces = bundle of rods surrounding an ax) coined in the Italian post–World War I context to express radical collective action in defense of the nation (Fasci della Difesa Nazionale), it was appropriated by Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) to label his nascent ultranationalist movement that eventually became the National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista, PNF). Already in the early 1920s socialist observers ascribed a generic import to the term, as a historically specific reactionary vehicle for recasting monopoly capitalism and crushing socialist mobilization. At the same time, fellow travelers, disciples, and imitators across the Continent in the 1920s and 1930s invoked the term or alluded to a sort of ideological-political affinity with the Italian model. The alliance between Mussolini's regime and Adolf Hitler's (1889–1945) National Socialist Germany was similarly founded on the premise of such a deep kinship in search of a universal postliberal and postsocialist order. The impressive diffusion of fascism as ideology and type of regime in the interwar period led the controversial German historian Ernst Nolte to declare that the 1918–1945 period was the indisputable "era of fascism" and thus cast the phenomenon as the product of a particular continent-wide set of historical circumstances that manifested itself in a plethora of national permutations.

Yet, fascism remains superlatively hard to define in a way that generates academic consensus. One prominent analyst has described the fray of fascist studies as a "deserted battlefield." Its allegedly generic nature has been fiercely contested by those who still perceive it as either a purely Italian phenomenon or a descriptive term that relates to style rather than substance. Some would deny it any degree of ideological import, thereby reducing it to a set of ad hoc practices that have been inflated into something more by subsequent academic wishful thinking. While historians tend to agree with Nolte that 1945 represented the cataclysmic end of the "fascist era," others discerned an allegedly wider conceptual relevance that goes far beyond historical periods or geographic settings. And the catalog of controversy goes on: irrational and antimodern or an alternative radical modern formula? Antiliberal, antisocialist, or both? Revolutionary or counterrevolutionary/reactionary? Right-wing or syncretic or even a "scavenger"? What about its relation to other concepts, such as authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and dictatorship, with which it shared some crucial but partial similarities? Finally, if "fascism" had any intellectual substance, where did it come from and how did it shape its ideological content?

INTELLECTUAL ORIGINS: THE SEARCH FOR ALTERNATIVES TO LIBERALISM

Even the task of searching for an intellectual origin of fascism before World War I is fraught with controversy. For, unlike other contemporary "-isms," the term was not used specifically by thinkers to designate a specific body of thought in opposition to existing doctrines. A plethora of potential derivations have indeed been suggested: the break with and revision of Marxian socialism by the French theorist Georges Sorel (1847–1922) and subsequently by the National Syndicalism movement; the concept of an all-encompassing ethical state developed by the German philosopher Wilhelm Friedrich Georg Hegel (1770–1831); the mystic conception of the "nation" professed by the Italian liberal nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872); and the fascination with heroic politics conveyed through the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). In fact, the search for fascism's origins has implicated even the critique of the French Revolution and the Enlightenment by the French theorist Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821), articulated as far back as the last years of the eighteenth century.

For some this search for fascism's intellectual derivation appears as a dubious attempt to read history backward. This, however, should not prevent seeking to locate fascism in the context of generic historical conditions in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that subsequently found fertile ground in particularly national contexts. Essentially, the origins of what later came to be identified as fascism lay in a milieu of disillusionment with the condition of civilization and society at a time of a seeming liberal ascendancy and at the dawn of a radical socialist alternative. This meant that fascism was a "latecomer" as a political ideology, attempting to occupy a precarious position in the overcrowded spectrum of visions for the future of civilization. Already in the second half of the nineteenth century certain thinkers across Europe had launched a wholesale attack against the liberal focus on individualism, rights, and pluralism. The function of the liberal state as an agnostic (neutral) agent of promoting freedom had been identified as the primary source of moral decline, social malaise, and cultural degeneration. Parliamentarism and representative government became the soft target of a multiple radical critique that focused on corruption, the cynicism of political elites, the empty rhetoric of social justice accompanied by very limited reforms, the yawning gap between government and people, and the moral relativism of "modern" society. Whereas some of the critics opted for a retreat into antimodern, nostalgic prescriptions in an attempt to reset the clock of history, many had already assumed the advent of modernity and sought to recast it in a decidedly postliberal fashion. In other words, the revision of the course of history sought by disparate observers in the second half of the nineteenth century had a common target (liberalism and modern society) but explored fundamentally divergent paths for a different order.

In the four decades before World War I socialism provided the main modern alternative to liberalism, organizing and channeling radical energies across the Continent into a supranational movement in search of a postliberal society. However, by the turn of the century the ambitious prediction of collective revolutionary action predicated on socialist ideology appeared further than ever before. Thinkers initially steeped in revolutionary socialism vented their frustration through seeking a new type of modern alternative that, while still seeking a postliberal order, also antagonized Marxism's stress on materialism and class struggle. Fusing revolution, modernity, and irrational myth, they sought to identify a different vehicle for historical change. At a time of growing populist mobilization and participation in the political arena the "nation" appeared a far more potent conduit for collective action than did social "class"—the focus of socialism. This new alternative grew not only in opposition to liberalism but also as an absolute antithesis of the socialist formula in search for a "third way." It was not about simple reform or retreat into a premodern golden age; instead, it capitalized on the drive of both liberal empowerment of the masses and socialist revolutionary dynamics but sought to redirect the course of modernity in a predominantly ultranationalist direction.

The devastating experiences of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia provided crucial ammunition for an urgent synthesis of previously disparate strands of radical thought. They also further alienated large sectors of the European societies from the liberal experiment while turning the socialist alternative into a tangible—and therefore threatening—reality that could spread from Russia across the Continent on the basis of the professed "world revolution." As a chauvinistic version of nationalism was continuously being nurtured in the decades leading to the Great War and received a further boost in its aftermath (the Versailles Treaty of 1919 and the complications of redrawing the boundaries of post-1918 Europe), the appeal of radical nationalism intensified. The impression that liberal Europe had entered a phase of terminal decline at a time that the socialist experiment in Russia threatened to engulf the Continent with its internationalist revolutionary creed had two crucial effects: first, it robbed parliamentary democracy of its last vestiges of legitimacy; and, second, it afforded a sense of historic urgency to nationalist populist politics as the only effective antisocialist radical alternative.

Thus fascism emerged from the ashes of World War I as a revolutionary, radical nationalist ideology, based on the glorification of an idealized "nation" and on collective activism. It was populist in terms of its political conduct, obsessed with reversing the process of alleged national decline, and offering instead a vision of wholesale regeneration ("rebirth") for the members of the "national community"—and only them. Fascism was a particularly historical articulation of nationalism—of an extreme, radical, exclusive, and holistic nationalism that rejected violently any form of dissidence and nonconformity to its vision. Although France had been the intellectual incubator of protofascist ideologies, Italy became the testing ground for its first political articulation. Within the course of five years (1914–1919) Mussolini completed an astounding ideological transformation from renegade revolutionary socialist leader into the Duce of an ultranationalist populist movement that preached wholesale national collective action as the only meaningful path to regeneration. The synthesis that Mussolini spearheaded in Italy between 1917 and 1921 was rooted in exactly this sense of liberalism's political impasse and socialism's allegedly impending onslaught. But, rather than harking back to premodern ideals, it sought to involve the nation in a history-making collective struggle for a revolutionary break with a recent historical course dominated by liberalism and socialism. Such a synthesis was essentially negative: disparate forces ranging from conservative radical nationalists to the (ultramodern and antitraditionalist) futurists came together in an open-ended struggle for a postliberal order that ought to be spared from the socialist experiment—a struggle in which the nation as an organic, culturally homogenous, and indivisible unity would be the uncontested protagonist.

THE "FASCIST EPOCH": 1922–1945

The period between the political formation of the fascist movement and the appointment of Mussolini as head of a coalition government in October 1922 was too brief to allow the resolution of ideological ambiguities or even tensions. By 1925, when the Duce ushered Italy into the era of the Fascist dictatorship, fascism had already been arbitrarily associated with disparate trends: a generic reactionary offspring of monopoly capitalism for the Communist International; a new, highly promising system of rule for antiparliamentary elites across the Continent; and a source of inspiration for a novel style of politics that could be appropriated by radical movements beyond Italy in search of the same goal of a postliberal transformation. It took Mussolini himself a bit longer to declare a wider relevance for his Italian experiment: in 1929 he spoke of fascism as an "export product" and a few years later (1932) went so far as to claim that the twentieth century would be a truly fascist epoch, just like the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries belonged to liberalism and socialism respectively.

But what did it mean to be a fascist? Unlike socialism in the Bolshevik Soviet Union, there was no Marxian gospel or Leninist scripture from which to draw dogmatic inspiration. Even Mussolini's attempt to codify the fascist doctrine in 1932 in cooperation with the prominent philosopher Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944) came too late to have a real impact on the formation of the fascist experiment in Italy. What the doctrine emphasized, however, was fascism's emphasis on open-ended, heroic collective action for the spiritual regeneration of the nation. This goal was the necessary condition for the realization of Fascist Italy's historic mission: as a "third Rome" (heir to the universalist legacies of the Roman Empire and of Catholicism) the rekindled national spirit would be the harbinger of a global political, socioeconomic, and cultural revolution. The absence of a sacrosanct doctrine was regarded as a blessing, for a fixed ideology could curtail the spontaneity of collective action. Instead, fascism promised an openended, "holistic" radical utopia-in-the-making of which the whole nation would be the primary agent and the beneficiary.

The growing idea that Mussolini alone incarnated the fascist doctrine bred an overreliance on the "cult of the duce" and a consequent monopolization of the movement by him. Mussolini made a series of fundamental choices in the second half of the 1920s that established the broad parameters of the fascist political experiment and provided a more tangible definition of what fascism stood for. The institutional-judicial reforms of Alfredo Rocco (1875–1935)—a prominent nationalist with far more conservative leanings than many early fascists (fascisti della prima ora) would have desired—set the foundations for an all-encompassing state that would function as the primary vehicle for national mobilization. As a result, the party was formally placed under the institutional tutelage of the state and of the Duce. Furthermore, calls from more radical members for a "continuous revolution" and a wholesale break with the past were crushed under the institutional rigidity of Rocco's reforms and the doctrine of "all within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." The signing of the Lateran Pacts with the Vatican in 1929 also sent mixed signals: on the one hand, the agreement settled the only remaining obstacle to the full legitimation of the Italian state by resolving the "Roman Question" (the schism between church and state that had beset the Italian state ever since the completion of its national unification in 1870); on the other, it appeared as a crucial step further away from revolution and in the direction of "normalization," that is accommodation with the establishment forces that fascism was meant to fight.

The emerging blending of order and change that fascism came to encapsulate involved a careful balancing act, as exemplified in the case of the experiment with "corporatism" in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Corporatism professed a fundamental socioeconomic transformation of societal relations, promising new, radical modes of collective action as well as a total framework for negotiating differences in a truly organic manner. Yet, its eventual failure and abandonment in the 1930s signified the impasse of fascism's formula of a controlled revolution "from above." By the early 1930s Italian fascism appeared to manage what the Italian historian Renzo De Felice (1929–1996) termed a totalitarian state but appeared to have lost a large part of its earlier radical edge.

By that time a pan-European trend away from liberal-parliamentary democracy had already been in motion. The majority of this generation of dictators did not hide their admiration for—or even imitation of—Mussolini's experiment in Italy. Even conservative observers across the Continent recognized the developmental utility of fascism, even if some of them acknowledged that this sort of political system was not perhaps suited for all countries. Winston Churchill (1874–1963), who visited Rome in 1927 as Chancellor of the Exchequer, remarked "If I were an Italian, I am sure that I would have been with you entirely from the beginning of your victorious struggle against the bestial appetites and the passions of Leninism." Even in the United States the fascist experiment found admirers, with the New York Congressman Sol Bloom (1870–1949) going so far as to state that fascism "will be a great thing not only for Italy but for all of us if he [Mussolini] succeeds." An array of antiliberal and anticommunist regimes that started to replace unstable parliamentary systems embarked on partial borrowing, appropriating fascist ideas such as the single mass-party, the emphasis on parades and ritual celebrations, the cult of the leader, and the myth of national renewal. Within less than a decade from Mussolini's appointment in 1922, Italian fascism had been established in the eyes of contemporary observers as a genuine political alternative to both liberalism and socialism; for many in the right, it was indeed the most effective and modern political solution. Mussolini cherished his role as the public face of a new political creed that had been pioneered in Italy: Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) visited; so did the renegade British member of Parliament Oswald Mosley (1896–1980), who immediately afterward experienced a deep ideological conversion that turned him into the purveyor of fascism in Britain.

NATIONAL SOCIALISM: FASCIST, TOTALITARIAN, OR UNIQUE?

The second crucial watershed in the history of interwar fascism came in 1933. On 30 January, Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nationalsozialistisches Deutsches Arbeiterpartei, NSDAP), was appointed chancellor of the German Republic, in a form of power-sharing with Paul von Hindenburg (1847–1934), the veteran nationalist and World War I hero who had held the office of president since 1925. The political arrangement was strikingly reminiscent of the coalition government over which Mussolini had presided between October 1922 and January 1925. Hitler's subsequent measures against the more radical segments of his party (for instance, the leadership of the SA [Sturm Abteilung], purged during the "Night of the Long Knives" in June 1934) echoed Mussolini's less violent but comparably determined suppression of the fascist squads and militia (squadri, MVSN) in the 1920s. For many contemporary observers (particularly on the left) the assumption of power by Hitler constituted further evidence of the wider pan-European shift away from liberalism, in fundamental opposition to socialism and in search of a new type of populist politics.

Hitler's movement shared many crucial ideological themes and priorities with Mussolini's regime: the emphasis on national regeneration; the vision of an organic, indivisible nation; the belief in the need for a different, postliberal and antisocialist, modernity; the fetishization of spectacle; the cult of leadership; and the stress on spontaneous collective action as the vehicle for history-making. Unlike fascism in Italy, however, it featured an obsession with racial engineering and anti-Semitism—both notoriously absent or even derided in the Italian case. Furthermore, the geopolitical interests of the two countries, although broadly concordant with regard to revising the Versailles settlement, collided over the issue of Austria. Nazi Germany wished to absorb Austria into a new pan-German Reich while Italy, fearing secessionist demands from its own German-speaking minority in the newly acquired province of South Tyrol, preferred it to remain independent as a bulwark against further German expansion southward. Thus, in spite of Hitler's intense admiration for Mussolini and the latter's funding of German radical nationalist parties (including the NSDAP) in the pre-1933 era, the two regimes found themselves at loggerheads until 1935–1936. In fact, an abortive coup in July 1934 in Vienna against the Austrian fascist-like government of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss (1892–1934) brought the two countries to the verge of a military confrontation that was avoided only after Hitler backed down.

Although relations between the two regimes improved in the aftermath of Italy's military campaign against Ethiopia (1935–1936) and generated a dynamism that led to their eventual military alliance in 1939 (the "Pact of Steel"), their fundamental ideological divergence could not be easily glossed over. The majority of the fascist leaders in Italy viewed the rapprochement with Nazi Germany as not only unjustified but also harmful to the spirit of fascism. The Nazi obsession with race and anti-Semitism found very few disciples in the ranks of the PNF and the seeming fascination of the NSDAP with the rigid volkisch tradition appalled many fascists who had been steeped in modernism and a more eclectic attitude to culture. Equally, many of Hitler's colleagues did not share their leader's loyalty to Mussolini, seeing in the Fascist regime a half-baked experiment compromised by an overreliance on the state, power-sharing with the monarchy, and concessions to the church. Even after the introduction of anti-Semitic legislation in Italy (1938, Manifesto for the Defense of the Race), such misgivings did not abate. Apparently, the Italian racial laws had nothing to do with any form of German pressure; in fact, they could have been partly derived from the racial legislation that Italy had introduced in occupied Ethiopia in 1936. However, the perceived emulation of Nazi Germany left unconvinced Fascists even more disgruntled, whereas the milder, watered-down version of Italian racial politics and its less fanatical pursuit by the fascist authorities failed to allay the doubts of Nazi observers about the overall radical dynamics of Italian fascism.

The issue of "race"—and the subsequent anti-Semitic terror that was unleashed in the context of the Nazi "new order"—raises reasonable doubts about the aptness of the term fascism for the case of National Socialist Germany. Even if fascism is recognized as a generic phenomenon with relevance to the whole of European—or even global—history, race remained fundamental to the Nazis in a way that found no parallel in any other movement or regime. In fact, National Socialism can be viewed as the political vehicle for a genuine racial revolution with an open-ended scope that went far beyond the boundaries of even the most extreme version of a pan-German (Gesamtdeutsch) Reich. As a result, National Socialism appeared to diverge from the Italian model in both degree and kind.

Differences, however, do not mean that comparison is futile. Broadly speaking, fascism acquired its particular ideological and political shape in the circumstances of a particular generic "crisis" situation that affected different European societies in ways that could not possibly be identical. The rise of interwar fascism was rooted in the ambiguous combination of generic (supranational) and specific (national) historical factors. Its emphasis was on action, radical experiment, and self-generating dynamism. This did not mean that fascism did not possess a vision in itself; but it meant that its particular manifestations in each case were far more contingent on national specificities than in the cases of either liberalism or socialism. Racism, anti-Semitism, religious mysticism, Catholic-inspired corporatism, and imperialism were not related to fascism per se; they became part of the fascist prescription only to the extent that the latter found such trends in national traditions and then radicalized them in the search for a new framework for collective action for the whole (regenerated) nation.

It is therefore essential to distinguish between three potential understandings of fascism. The first, located in the pre–World War I crisis of liberal modernity, revolved around the search for a radical alternative model for national collective action but was far too open-ended and diverse to constitute a defined ideology. The second—what may be called "generic fascism"—captured this trend at a particular historical moment in the immediate post–World War I period, establishing a more concrete ideological framework (negations, expectations, prescriptions) for a radical modern alternative to the existing triptych of conservatism-liberalism-socialism. The third understanding involved the plurality of national manifestations of fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, their devices of collective action, experiments, limitations, successes, and failures; in other words, fascism's aggregate political record of the interwar period. While the first two perceptions of fascism had to do with ideas and intentions, the latter notion involved the result of political agency so diverse and particular that it requires an acute awareness of each context in order to separate the specific from the generic.

VARIETIES OF FASCISM

The impressive spread of fascist ideas and influences across the Continent in interwar Europe generated an array of country-specific manifestations, as fascist movements began to appear in almost all countries. In Romania the League of Archangel Michael (founded in 1927 and later known as the Iron Guard) combined the goal of national rebirth with a strong emphasis on religious Christian mysticism and an extreme cult of self-sacrifice. Fascist variants in many Catholic countries displayed a similar conceptualization of "rebirth" along (dissident) religious lines: in Belgium the main fascist movement glorified Christus Rex as the vehicle for national regeneration (hence the common collective name Rexists for its membership). Equally, corporatism (in itself an idea rooted in Catholic doctrines of self-organization) proved particularly popular in countries with a similar religious background (Italy, Portugal, Belgium) but left fascists in Germany and elsewhere decidedly unenthusiastic. The institution of the state, so instrumental in the process of "fascistizing" society under Italian fascism, was also used by António de Oliveira Salazar (1889–1970) in Portugal (with his model corporatist constitution for the "New State"), General Francisco Franco (1892–1975) in Spain, and Ioannis Metaxas (1871–1941) in Greece, but was rejected by National Socialists in Germany and the Legionaries of the Iron Guard in Romania as an impediment to the spontaneous collective action of the movement.

Biological racism was nowhere as strong as in the case of National Socialism in Germany, but anti-Semitism remained a common focus of many movements; in fact, its cultural roots stretched too far beyond the constituency of fascists for it to be considered a strictly fascist contribution. Again, prescriptions varied greatly: Italian fascism welcomed "Jewish Italians" to the ranks of its movement until the late 1930s; in Hungary the Arrow Cross movement espoused the doctrine of "a-Semitism," which entailed in theory the nonviolent excision of the Jews from the national body; in Greece, Jews fared much better under the fascist regime of General Metaxas in the second half of the 1930s than under its liberal predecessor that had advocated a far more ethno-exclusive notion of nationalism; in Britain, quite like in Italy, anti-Semitism for Mosley's British Union of Fascists started as a nonissue but became a bizarre knee-jerk obsession in the years before the outbreak of World War II that convinced few and galvanized even fewer. Although Italy joined Germany in the Axis alliance in 1939, other fascist movements and regimes refused to join an alleged fascist alliance: in France fear of German expansionism kept many fascists away from declaring an ideological and political loyalty to National Socialism, and those who did so committed political suicide; the Francoist regime that was established in 1939 after a bitter civil war that became a proxy confrontation between the emerging Axis alliance and Soviet Union remained stubbornly neutral during World War II; General Metaxas in Greece saw his policy of "equidistance" (even-handed diplomatic attitude to both western and fascist coalitions) collapse after the Italian attack in 1940 that eventually delivered the country to the western Allies.

Fascist movements and regimes appropriated or adapted the emerging fascist style of politics. Most of them shared the fascist emphasis on leadership: Mosley in Britain, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) in Romania, Léon Degrelle (1906–1994) in Belgium, José Antonio Primo de Rivera (1903–1936, leader of the Falange fascist movement) in Spain, and even such uncharismatic leaders as Franco, Metaxas, Dollfuss in Austria, or the head of the collaborationist regime in Norway, Vidkun Quisling (1887–1945), were charismatized and glorified by propaganda, supported by carefully choreographed rituals of popular adulation. They displayed a striking fascination with militarism, order and discipline, parades and uniforms, spectacle, symbols, and collective rituals. They endeavored to combine ultranationalist ideology with populist mobilization and activism, cultivating the impression of a society in constant flux and unity. They recast particular national traditions as devices for communal action and consensus. The variety of these national traditions and historical circumstances bred variation and specificity. The inherent paradox of fascism as a generic trend rooted in—and articulated by—national agency may explain the failure of Mussolini to establish a sort of Fascist International in 1934 (an initiative that was boycotted by Nazi Germany from the very start). It may also help us understand why Italy and Germany remained locked in mutual suspicion and competition, not only before the rapprochement of 1935–1936 but also as allies in the buildup to, and the conduct of, the war.

FROM MOVEMENT TO REGIME: THE FASCIST RULE

In spite of fascism's ideological diffusion across Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, the number of fascist regimes was relatively small. Apart from Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, other examples of fascist rule may be found in countries of southern, central, and eastern Europe (Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Hungary, Poland), with western Europe proving to be rather resistant to the fascist political challenge. A further wave of regimes that were sympathetic to the Nazi "new order" and appropriated many fascist ideological and political elements were installed in the Axis-occupied countries after 1939, but the circumstances in which the latter climbed to power were determined by military developments and external (German) pressure rather than by the dynamics of the domestic political field.

One of the paradoxes of fascism's transition to political power was that, in spite of its professed "revolutionary" orientation, it never seized power in opposition to established political and economic elites. In fact, even in the cases of Italy and Germany, the fascist movements cast aside many of their original revolutionary demands (e.g., anticapitalist rhetoric) in order to become more acceptable to potential elite sponsors and thus acquire power through seemingly legal means. Both Mussolini and Hitler were finally appointed through constitutional channels (the latter having won a decisive victory in parliamentary elections) as heads of coalition governments and under the supervision of established institutions (monarchy in Italy; presidency in Germany). It was only in January 1925 that Mussolini took the crucial steps toward the establishment of a fascist dictatorship and embarked on the construction of a "totalitarian state" through suppression of freedoms, the establishment of secret police, censorship, and one-party rule. Hitler had to wait until President Paul von Hindenburg's death in August 1934 before abolishing the institution altogether and assuming full control of the German government. From that point he oversaw the gradual transformation of the existing state structures into a "totalitarian" system geared to the needs of racial revolution.

In both cases, the same established elites that had been so instrumental in propelling the fascists to power in a seemingly legal/constitutional arrangement did so in the belief that they would be able to control fascism or "normalize" it under the weight of government responsibility. When, however, they realized in the process that their controlling powers were limited (and rapidly shrinking), they did not oppose the fascist regimes; in fact, on many occasions powerful elite interests continued to work relatively smoothly with the fascist regimes until the very end. In Italy, King Victor Emmanuel III (r. 1900–1946) oversaw the dismantling of the liberal system and the pursuit of aggressive foreign-policy goals by the Fascist regime until July 1943, when—in the shadow of the Allied invasion of Sicily and disquiet among leading Fascists—he took the initiative to remove Mussolini from power.

Others proved equally accommodating, with powerful industrial interests working in tandem with the Fascist regime to offset the impact of the 1929 world economic crisis or supplying the Italian armed forces with military equipment in support of the regime's expansionist policies. In Germany, too, powerful industrial giants, such as Krupp and IG Farben, benefited from the National Socialist regime's autarkic policies from 1936 onward, as well as from the drive toward rearmament that Hitler authorized in contravention to the provisions of the Versailles Treaty. The composition of bureaucracy, industry, diplomacy, and the military displayed relative continuity between the prefascist and the fascist period; a process of "fascistization" did take place but it was gradual, often aided by the compliance of the institutions themselves, and never truly "revolutionary." What is instead striking about all fascist regimes was the degree of elite complicity in bringing fascists to power and tolerating their excesses until the very end.

Barely a year after Mussolini's appointment, in September 1923, a military coup d'état in Spain headed by General Miguel Primo de Rivera (1870–1930) ushered in a seven-year dictatorial rule, during which many of the features and ongoing experiments of Italian fascism were adopted. Indeed, coup d'état, whether military or political, proved another popular avenue to fascist rule. In Portugal in May 1926 a similar pronunziamento brought the military to power, with General António Óscar Carmona (1869–1951) becoming president of the republic. Six years later he appointed his former finance minister, António de Oliveira Salazar as head of the executive. Salazar, an economics professor, had been instrumental in creating a single national movement/party (União Nacional, National Union) along the lines of the Italian Fascist mass party. As prime minister, he appropriated the fascist rhetoric of "corporatism" and launched a new constitution heavily influenced by the Italian experience, which was approved in 1933.

Salazar described his political reforms as an attempt to create a "new state" (Estado Novo), promising to regenerate modern Portugal and resolve all socioeconomic tensions on the basis of national unity. His combination of fascist and conservative (for example, religious) elements emerged as an alternative route to the more blatant radicalism of the Italian and German variants of fascism—and an example for many subsequent dictatorships in southern Europe and in Latin America. Interestingly, his "fascism from above" did not have any space for "revolutionary" fascist alternatives: instead of co-opting it, Salazar violently suppressed the more radical Blue Shirt (National Syndicalist) movement, headed by Rolão Preto (1893–1977), and embarked upon building his "new state" in virtual continuity with preexisting sociopolitical structures.

Generally, the 1930s witnessed an overwhelming shift to dictatorial rule across the Continent; and this was a shift, coupled with a fundamental rejection of liberalism and an uncompromising, violent opposition to communism, that had an increasingly fascist flavor. Coups d'état put an end to democratic rule in Poland (1926), where Marshall Józef Pi?sudski (1867–1935) used his popularity and the support of the armed forces to overthrow the elected government and in 1930 eliminated any form of political opposition; in Austria (1933), after the elected chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss suspended the constitution, outlawed political parties, and introduced a corporatist system under the tutelage of Mussolini; and in Greece (1935–1936), where an unstable liberal system faced the concerted opposition of the military, the royalists, and the nationalist Right, eventually succumbing after two coups to the hands of retired General Ioannis Metaxas.

But it was in 1930s Spain that the most symbolic shift from democracy to dictatorship and fascism occurred. Five months after the electoral victory of the Left and the formation of a Popular Front government in February 1936, the military staged a coup in Spanish Morocco that soon spread into the Spanish mainland under the leadership of General Francisco Franco. The ensuing three years of civil war became a genuine proxy confrontation between fascism and socialism. As Italy and Germany became increasingly involved on the side of the Nationalists, and the Soviet Union did the same for the Republican camp, the conflict became internationalized and highly symbolic of the continent-wide shift toward dictatorship, antiliberal/antisocialist rule, and fascism. By April 1939, with Barcelona and Madrid eventually capitulating to the siege of the Francoist forces, the Nationalists could declare victory and set about constructing a fascist-like state in close cooperation with the indigenous Falange Español movement. Ideologically and socially conservative, affording a new lease of power to traditional elites (particularly the powerful families, including the landowning aristocracy and the Catholic Church), but ruthless toward its political opponents to the point of suppressing freedom, the Francoist regime remained in effect until its figurehead's death in 1975.

The "fascist epoch" reached its peak between 1938 and 1941. By the time the war broke out only the British Isles, France, the Low Countries, and Scandinavia had not succumbed. Austria eventually gave in to Nazi pressure under the threat of military invasion in March 1938, thus paving the way for its incorporation (Anschluss) into the "Greater German" Reich (this time, unlike in 1934, Mussolini did not stand up for Austrian independence). Even Czechoslovakia—for many a model of democratic transition for the "successor states" of the Austro-Hungarian Empire—was first dismembered in September 1938 and finally erased from the map in March 1939. In this case, the assault on the state emerged from a combination of Nazi expansionism intent on incorporating the Czechoslovak lands inhabited by a sizable German-speaking minority (Sudetenland) and internal Slovak designs for independence, spearheaded by the fascist-like Hlinka party headed by Josef Tiso (1887–1947).

In the course of the subsequent two years, most European countries were subjugated to the Axis "new order" in Europe, supervised by installed collaborationist regimes. Vidkun Quisling, erstwhile head of the small Nasjonal Samling (National Union) fascist party, declared himself head of the Norwegian state in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi invasion of the country, thereby setting an example of how domestic collaborators could be deployed by the Axis occupiers as puppet administrators of the occupied states. Marshall Philippe Pétain (1856–1951)—a World War I hero—was installed by the Nazis as head of the dismembered Vichy state of France. After Germany had invaded and occupied the Balkans in spring 1941, collaborationist regimes were installed in all countries under Axis control and borders were shifted in order to reward those who had contributed to the success of the operation. Notorious among them was the "Independent State of Croatia," headed by Ante Paveli? (1899–1959), the leader of the indigenous fascist movement, Ustaše, which immediately embarked upon a genocidal policy of ethnic cleansing against Serbs, Jews, and Sinti/Roma (Gypsies). Even in cases of milder occupation policies that tolerated a degree of civilian self-government (Denmark, the Netherlands), the trend after 1941 was for tighter control by Nazi Germany, more oppressive measures against the populations, and loss of even the last remaining vestiges of independence.

With the launch of Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union in June 1941 the moment of triumph came very close but eluded the fascist alliance: in December 1941, within a few miles from Moscow, the military coalition headed by the German Wehrmacht failed in the end to capture the capital of the Soviet Union—and, through it, to bring about the collapse of international socialism confidently predicted by Hitler. Military defeat proved impossible for interwar fascism to survive: first on the freezing Russian steppe, then on the beaches of Normandy and Sicily, finally inside the territories of the German Reich and of Italy, the fascist epoch came to a shattering end. One by one previous allies and fellow travelers abandoned the sinking boat and sought separate agreements with the advancing western Allies and the Soviet Union. Underground resistance movements became emboldened and fought even more resolutely against the domestic fascist order. The almost simultaneous demise of Mussolini and Hitler, in the last two days of April 1945, proved a fitting epilogue to the disaster that fascism brought upon Europe and eventually upon itself: the former was arrested on his way out of Italy by partisans and executed on the spot along with his mistress, their bodies ending up in a public display of hatred in a Milanese piazza; Hitler at least chose the manner and moment of his death, committing suicide inside the labyrinth of his Berlin bunker.

THE FASCINATION WITH FASCISM

Thus the fascist epoch came to an end, symbolically defeated by a peculiar wartime coalition between its two ideological archenemies, western liberalism and Soviet communism. The postwar endeavors to understand why such a radical ideological phenomenon moved from the intellectual fringes of the late nineteenth century to a position of hegemony during the interwar period have produced a plethora of insights but also of ambiguities. The horrifying evidence from the killing camps of occupied Poland, where millions of Jews, Sinti and Roma, Poles, and other minority groups considered as "nonconformist" by the Nazi authorities perished, the chilling awareness of the so-called euthanasia program against disabled people and the overall brutality of the Nazi occupying forces across the Continent have proved painfully difficult to explain. Although branding fascism as a parenthesis in the otherwise assumed progress of Enlightenment-derived reason has afforded some measure of reassurance for post-1945 humanity, the unnerving hypermodernity of the Nazi genocide and its realization under the auspices of an utterly technological and bureaucratic system are hard to dispel.

Far from "nihilistic" or confined to conditions of "deviant personality" or located in particular national traditions, interwar fascism was popular, even fascinating to many. The disenchantment with the particular management of the transition to the modern world that liberalism had epitomized had led even certain liberals to the path of alternatives from within the modern project. For example, the prominent Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) experienced a short-term conversion to fascism's promise of a new type of democratic alternative to the one that representative democracy had betrayed. Whereas many read fascism as an unacceptable assault on individualism and plurality, others welcomed its emphasis on voluntary mobilization and collective action on the basis of clearly defined and emotive grand schemes.

The agnosticism of the liberal state, unable or unwilling to adjudicate social tensions or anchor individual action in comfortable ideological havens, beset by a fixation with negative freedom even if this entailed paralyzing conflict and division, was a soft target for many—and not just those inhabiting the extreme right-wing fringe of the ideological spectrum. Prominent modernists, such as the French architect Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret, 1887–1965), saw in fascism (in his case, of Mussolini's experiments with corporatism) the design for a more harmonious, creative, and sustainable social arrangement. Others, such as the futurist movement in Italy, embraced fascism as a radical break with the ghost of tradition, offering new, legacy-free alternatives for an ultramodern civilization. Its leader, Filippo Tommasso Marinetti (1876–1944), rejected nationalism, imperialism, and heritage in favor of a wholesale embrace of timeless modernity, succumbing to the exhilarating possibility for new, previously unthinkable modes of action and expression in its pure context.

But fascism's early ideological versatility attracted further admirers from other unlikely backgrounds. It was primarily Italian fascism and the Mussolini of the 1920s that appealed to intellectuals including Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and the American poet Ezra Pound (1885–1972). The latter moved to Italy and remained an unapologetic admirer of the Italian fascist experiment until the end of his days. Pound admired fascism's radical potential and ability to generate a sense of dynamism that was in sharp contrast to the alleged stagnation of liberal democracy. In cooperation with Wyndham Lewis (1884–1957)—with whom he founded vorticism as an avant-garde movement preaching a revolutionary break with obsolete tradition in search of a novel, radical aesthetic and dynamic synthesis—Pound rejected the internationalism of the capitalist system and castigated the absence of humanism in the particular kind of modernity epitomized in western civilization. However, he was vehemently anticommunist and thus a fierce critic of the Soviet experiment, while Lewis saw the desired transgression in a combination of fascist and Soviet methods of power centralization. Similarly, the British playwright George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) identified fascism and communism in tandem as a joint genuine solution to the perceived disintegration of the modern world, praising the two doctrines' emphasis on activism and collective mobilization.

Fascism also recruited admirers from the ranks of the political theorists who sought an alternative to the representative model of liberal democracy and a radical prescription against the alleged decline of western civilization. From the ranks of the "conservative revolution" movement that gathered momentum in the first half of the twentieth century a series of thinkers courted fascism; some, like the prominent sociologist Robert Michels (1876–1936) and the philosophers Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) and Julius Evola (1898–1974), ended up heavily involved in the development of fascist political experiments, lending crucial intellectual support to them. Others, such as the theoretician of "total mobilization" in Germany Ernst Jünger (1895–1998) and the politician and writer Edgar Jung (1894–1934) (who was assassinated during the "Night of the Long Knives" after having assumed an openly critical stance toward the Nazi regime), followed the rather familiar path of initial attraction followed by disillusionment and alienation. What is interesting in all these cases was the promise that fascism appeared to hold in the far-reaching quest for a postliberal order, steeped in fundamental anxiety about the moral collapse of modern civilization and in a deep pessimism about the ability of the masses to effectively control their own fate. Fascism appeared to them for a variety of reasons to offer a viable, ethically and historically superior, pathway to the rebirth of European culture and society.

The variety of backgrounds from which fascism recruited or received ideological support, as well as the diversity of motives that underpinned such support in each case, highlight a central problem in defining the concept and reconstructing its intellectual history. Fascism appeared so flexible and open-ended in the 1920s that it was co-opted by highly disparate parallel projects, from the Left and Right alike. Becoming closely identified with the particular evolution of Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany produced a far narrower and restricted understanding that has obscured its ambiguous intellectual matrix. As a historically specific articulation of anxiety and search for alternatives, the concept of fascism remains tied to the political experiments of the 1920s and 1930s, with 1945 as a definitive watershed. As a particular instance, however, of a wider search for radical alternatives, constantly updated in the light of shifting supranational and national circumstances, fascism remains highly relevant—not necessarily as an ongoing project in itself but as a diachronic reminder of how widespread disaffection with established norms and directions may breed radical alternatives and of how these alternatives may appear dangerously fascinating to many.

See alsoAnticommunism; Antifascism; Anti-Semitism; Communism; Corporatism; Franco, Francisco; Hitler, Adolf; Metaxas, Ioannis; Mussolini, Benito; Nazism; Racial Theories; World War II.

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Aristotle A. Kallis