The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right'
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H-Nationalism Cârstocea on Traverso, 'The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right' Review published on Tuesday, October 8, 2019 Enzo Traverso. The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. London: Verso, 2019. viii + 200 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78873-046-4. Reviewed by Raul Cârstocea (University of Leicester) Published on H-Nationalism (October, 2019) Commissioned by Cristian Cercel (Ruhr University Bochum) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54462 Historicizing the Present: A Conceptual Reading of Postfascism Previously relegated to the dustbin of history, a specialist subject of seemingly antiquarian interest and otherwise popular only as a term of abuse meant to delegitimize one’s opponents, the last decade has seen “fascism” come back in fashion, in the tow of the other two terms making up the subtitle of Enzo Traverso’s book: populism and the Far Right. The increasing importance of the latter on the political spectrum, part and parcel of a resurgence of authoritarianism that is presently experienced globally, from the “Old” to the “New” Europe and from China, Russia, and Turkey to the United States and Brazil, has conjured up the specter of “fascism,” even for (the majority of) authors who find the association misleading. As such, despite the deluge of publications trading in the subject with more or less insight, a book that explicitly aims to link the two phenomena and analyze its contemporary iterations as “new faces of fascism” could not be more timely. From the outset however, we are introduced to another term, “postfascism,” according to the familiar and (still?) fashionable tendency to assign a “post” to everything, from “human” to “truth.” The “concept emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation,” underlining “the reality of change” (p. 4). The Koselleckian framework of interpretation that Traverso proposes, aware of the “tension between historical facts and their linguistic transcription” (p. 4), as well as of the importance of regimes of historicity—defined (oddly without any reference to François Hartog) as societies’ “perception of and relationship with the past” (p. 132)—is permanently present in the background. This serves to account for the “post,” as well as allowing the author to move seamlessly between events and their (re)coding, between history and historiography, in what is one of the great strengths of the book. Traverso makes it clear from the outset that the stakes of such analysis are never exclusively academic but political. Moreover, this is not only because they involve highly salient debates—from neoliberalism to “the politics of the veil,” from (post)colonialism to governance, from “totalitarianism” to the future of the Left—but, as he insistently reminds the reader, because the political structures the very academic space in which such utterances are made. Consequently, this is not dispassionate, liberal, allegedly “value-neutral” scholarship—the very existence of which he deconstructs as an “old myth” (p. 139) entailing nothing else than “anti-communist history” (p. 141)—but a politically engaged text that aims to explain with the purpose of intervening. Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cârstocea on Traverso, 'The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right'. H-Nationalism. 10-08-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/reviews/4979213/c%C3%A2rstocea-traverso-new-faces-fascism-populism-and-far-right Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Nationalism The first part of the book deals with the present (as history), while the second is concerned with history (in the present), following a structure that first expounds on the “new,” only to account for it by providing a subsequent historical background. The first chapter, “From Fascism to Postfascism,” tackles directly the main subject of the book, employing the aforementioned concept of “postfascism” to suggest both the continuities (and in most cases filiations) with interwar fascism and the novelties of the contemporary Far Right. The author distinguishes this concept from “neofascism,” a term he uses to denote those unreformed parties and movements that directly reclaim the legacy of interwar fascism; while briefly mentioned, “neofascism” and its exponents are not the subject of the investigation and are consequently ignored in the rest of the text. This is a strange choice, for one of the major debates concerning the applicability of the term “fascism” to the contemporary radical and extreme Right hinges precisely on their existence. While no one would object to applying the label “fascist” to extremist organizations such as Combat 18 and National Action in Britain, or the American Nazi Party, the difference between such groups and the more “mainstream” radical Right is one of the main reasons why authors are generally wary of using the term “fascism” for the latter. However, Traverso does not even mention this extremist fringe of the right-wing spectrum, his examples of “neofascism” being limited to Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, and the National Party in Slovakia, all of them traditional political parties despite their ideology. The Italian CasaPound, an interesting organization that could be seen perhaps as straddling these two types, is likewise never mentioned. One can guess that this omission is justified by Traverso’s exclusive focus on parties that take part in elections and can thus potentially lay claim to political power, but from a conceptual perspective the inclusion of extremist, sometimes terrorist neofascist organizations in the discussion would certainly render it more complex. This is all the more so since there are certainly meeting grounds between all these manifestations of the contemporary radical and extreme Right—one need only think of the “great replacement” theory, espoused not only by intellectuals such as Renaud Camus, but also by white supremacists on the extremist fringe, for example the Christchurch killer.[1] The chapter otherwise covers at length the contemporary (Western) Far Right, with a particular focus on France, although examples are brought up from other contexts and there is a subsection on Donald Trump, discussing the applicability of the concept of “postfascism” to his case—with an answer in the affirmative, highlighting, however, the differences from “classical” fascism. Traverso provides a compelling account for the recent rise of the Far Right by linking it to neoliberalism, the “financialization of politics” (p. 11), and the decline of the latter as an arena of ideological contestation in favor of technocratic governance, in an argument familiar at least since Peter Mair’s article on “the hollowing of Western democracy.”[2] This is epitomized for Traverso by Emmanuel Macron, whom he describes in a dedicated subsection as “the zero degree of ideology” (p. 38). This changed context also accounts for the differences between “postfascism” and the original interwar ideology, indebted as the contemporary forms are to what Traverso, following Roberto Esposito, calls the “impolitical” (p. 26). While the conceptual exposition of “postfascism” is persuasive, one is struck by the absence of any references to previous uses of the term.[3] The remaining two chapters in the first part of the book, dealing respectively with “Right-Wing Identitarianism” and the “Spectres of Islam,” zoom in on one of the preferred battlegrounds of the contemporary Far Right: identity politics. The second chapter delves briefly into the topic of intersectionality, highlighting the differences between the “enemies” of interwar fascists and those of the contemporary Far Right, while also addressing the difficulties of the Marxist Left in “connecting Citation: H-Net Reviews. Cârstocea on Traverso, 'The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right'. H-Nationalism. 10-08-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/3911/reviews/4979213/c%C3%A2rstocea-traverso-new-faces-fascism-populism-and-far-right Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Nationalism class, gender, race, and religion” (p. 56). Another subsection offers keen insights into the implicit racism of secularism la( ïcité), projecting it back to France’s history of colonialism and the civilizational hierarchies woven into the fabric of the allegedly “universal” Enlightenment values. The result is an acute and nuanced reading of some recent media controversies, fromCharlie Hebdo to the “burkini affair,” as well as a critique of certain strands of progressive politics, in particular “an Islamophobic kind of feminism” (p. 47). The importance of the colonial legacy (in France, but the argument could be extended to other western European countries) is also followed up in the chapter dealing with Islam, perhaps the best original contribution in the book (since the second part comprises three previously published articles). Analyzed in conjunction with anti-Semitism and Judeophobia, where Enzo Traverso can weigh in with his vast expertise on the topic, Islamophobia and contemporary references to “Islamic fascism” (appropriately followed by a question mark in the title of the respective subsection) are treated through a subtle postcolonial lens informed by a relevant historical background. The main thesis, which will be familiar to readers of Traverso from his previous publications,[4] is that