A Fascist Century Also by Roger Griffin MODERNISM AND FASCISM: The Sense of a Beginning Under Mussolini and Hitler THE NATURE OFFASCISM FASCISM, TOTALITARIANISM AND POLITICAL RELIGION (ed.) INTERNATIONAL FASCISM: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus (ed.) FASCISM: Critical Concepts in Political Science (edited with Mathew Feldman) FASCISM PAST AND PRESENT, EAST AND WEST (edited with Werner Lohand Andreas Umlandd) Also by Matthew Feldman BECKETT’S BOOKS: A Cultural History of Samuel Beckett’s ‘Interwar Notes’ BECKETT’S LITERARY LEGACIES (edited with Mark Nixon) THE INTERNATIONAL RECEPTION OF SAMUEL BECKETT (edited with Mark Nixon) BECKETT AND PHENOMENOLOGY (edited with Ulrika Maude) ‘CLERICAL FASCISM’ IN INTERWAR EUROPE (edited with Marius Turda, with Tudor Georgescu) Also by Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman FASCISM: Critical Concepts, Five Volumes (eds.) A Fascist Century Essays by Roger Griffin Editedby MatthewFeldman with Preface by Stanley G. Payne Editorial matter, selection and introduction © Matthew Feldman 2008. Preface © Stanley Payne 2008. All remaining chapters © Roger Griffin 2008. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2008 978-0-230-20518-5 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 978-0-230-22089-8 ISBN 978-0-230-59413-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230594135 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Griffin, Roger. A fascist century / essays by Roger Griffin ; edited by Matthew Feldman ; with preface by Stanley Payne. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Fascism. I. Feldman, Matthew. II. Title. JC481.G695 2008 320.533—dc22 2008020981 10987 6 5 4321 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 For Mariella and Vincent withalove that outlasts the centuries We have every reason to believe that this is the century of authority, a century tending to the ‘right’, a fascist century. Benito Mussolini The Doctrine of Fascism (1932) Contents Editorial Acknowledgements viii Preface ix Editorial Introduction xii Part I Fascism’s Temporal Revolution 1 ‘Iamnolonger human. I am a Titan. A god!’:The Fascist Quest to Regenerate Time 3 2 Modernity Under the New Order: The Fascist Project for Managing the Future 24 3Exploding the Continuum of History: A Non-Marxist’s Marxist Model of Fascism’s Revolutionary Dynamics 46 Part II Nazism as a Manifestation of Generic Fascism 4 Fatal Attraction: Why Nazism Appealed to Voters 71 5 Hooked Crosses and Forking Paths: The Fascist Dynamics of the Third Reich 83 Part III Fascism’s Evolution Since 1945 6 ‘No racism, thanks, we’re British’: How Right-Wing Populism Manifests Itself in Contemporary Britain 117 7 Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the European New Order 1922–1992 132 8 Fascism’s New Faces (and New Facelessness) in the ‘post-fascist’ Epoch 181 The Fascination of Fascism: A Concluding Interview with Roger Griffin 203 Notes 217 Bibliography 248 Index 264 vii Editorial Acknowledgements Manyhands have touched,improved,and then totally overhauled A Fascist Century. Moreover, the collaborative nature of such an undertaking as this one makes it impossible to properlythank all those helping to prepare this volume – ranging from helpful anonymous readers to publishers of journals around the world. In the first place, publisher, author, and editor gratefully acknowledge permission to reproduce several of Roger Griffin’s essays; the initial place of publication is cited in the first footnote in each of the eight chapters presented here. Above and beyond the help received from various library, publishing, editing, and academic quarters, however, five names stand out. Nicolle Robinson was of great assistance in earlier stages of this project, as was Tudor Georgescu’s incal- culable insight and help in later preparation of the manuscript for publication; the latter also helpfully compiled the extensive bibliography. Gracious thanks are also due to Paula Bowles for her magnificent help with proofs; to Professor Stanley Payne for his support of this project; and to the excellent Michael Strang at Palgrave Macmillan. Yet were Roger Griffin not a groundbreaking scholar, not insatiable in his curiosity about dynamics of ‘extreme’ ideologies in the modern world,and not an inspirational teacher, this volume would never have seen the light of day. Finally, this book is also intended as a tribute to Kathy and Craig Orange, an honourableandloving pair. Matthew Feldman Oxford, January 2008 viii Roger Griffin, Fascistologist: A Preface by Stanley G. Payne In the17years since The Nature of Fascism was published in 1991, Roger Griffin has moved to the very forefront of contemporary ‘fascistologists’. His achieve- ments have rivalled those of Ernst Nolte’s original decade of specialisation in the history offascism, and at the present time he stands unequalled among his currently active peers. His Oxford reader Fascism (1995) gave us the best single collection of fascist texts available in a single volume in any language, while the subsequent InternationalFascism (1998) provided the most sophisti- cated and up-to-date collection of studies and arguments on the interpretation of fascism. Subsequently the monumental five-volume Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science (2004), co-edited with Matthew Feldman, simply lapped the field, in its sweeping and inclusive presentation of the widest possible range of studies and interpretations from the 1920s to the present. More recently his magnum opus, Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler (2007), promises to be the most important book to appear on the his- tory of fascism in a decade or more, accomplishing a sort of ‘paradigm shift’ in Fascist Studies which fully integrates fascism not just within cultural and polit- ical modernity, but within modernism itself. In short, Roger Griffin has given us a commitment otherwise shown only by A. James Gregor at the Univer- sity of California-Berkeley: a scholar in his prime who has devoted many years unremittingly to the study and analysis offascism, both in its classic historic manifestations and in its sequelae,aswell. Some of Griffin’s best work has appeared in his scattered shorter pieces, so that the publication of the present volume constitutes another important contribu- tion for scholars and students. These articles range widely from considering the temporal dimension offascism’s revolutionary assault on the status quo, to the analysis of Nazism, the exploration of the post-war evolution fascism (a topic traditionally neglected by historians of interwar Europe), and the theory of fascism as a twentieth-century phenomenon and a fully fledged revolutionary ideology in its own right. None of them have been printed in Anglophone aca- demic publications till now, and several have only been available in translation (Chapters 3, 5, and 6), so keen collectors of Griffinalia are in for a treat. A number of these pieces touch on the central issue of fascism’s relationship to modernity. This question has been one of the major battlegrounds in the evolution of the interpretation offascism, and has required a long struggle. The interpretation offascism as a product not merely of a modern crisis or set of problems, but as the bearer of its own kind of modernity was generally long ix x Preface rejected.Asthe tendency towardsalimited‘new consensus’developed among specialists during the 1990s, it eventually began to make headway.Symptomatic was the changeofposition by George Mosse. Since 1991 Griffin has been in the forefront of this specific controversy, and in this volume several of the chapters, but most especially ‘Modernity under the New Order’, deal convincingly with the problem, defining well the technocratic tendencies in fascism. Another important dimension is the millennial – the cultural revolution and the creation of the new man. This theme is taken up in a number of the articles in quite an original way,approaching the problem from the concept of time and beginning anew, a feature common to all the fully revolutionary movements, and to both transcendent and political religions. In terms of the appeal of fascism, ‘Fatal Attraction’ is a useful corrective to rational-choice approaches. The latter are useful up to a point, but are inadequate to lay bare the broader appeal to true believers. The fertility of Griffin’s mind is alwaysexpressed by new analytical approaches, and none of the chapters in this volume brings more of the crucial themes together in a new analytical framework than ‘Exploding the Continuum of History’. This is a most instructive study, for, to my mind, it does a better job than any of the preceding literature in analysing the fascist revolutionary thrust from the frame of the major modern revolutionary paradigm, Marxism.