Fascism Then and Now

FASCISM THEN AND NOW
GEOFF ELEY
H ow might a history of fascism in interwar Europe help us with an

understanding of the right today? Despite the optimistic triumphalism
accompanying the formal extensions to democracy of the past 25 years,
whether in the post-Communist parts of the world, South Africa after
apartheid or the drama of the Arab Spring, it is far more the distressing fragility
of those gains that now impresses the most. If for the most part, country
by country, the enhancements to citizenship survive and constitutional
democracy as such has yet to be rolled back, then the instances of secure
and dynamic success remain few and far between. From Libya to Syria and
Iraq, no less than Central Asia and most of the former Soviet Union, the
self-serving emptiness of the current rhetorics of democratization seems
clear to behold. Meanwhile, in its longer-established locations Western
Europe, India, North America, and the rest of the English-speaking world
democracy is severely weakened, whether via the ever-diminishing turnout
in elections, the atrophy of proceduralism or the media-driven emphasis
on packaging, personality and performance. As a practice of citizenship
and participatory identification with a system of governance, democracy is
becoming danger-ously hollowed out.
The links between parliaments and people are now seriously broken. If,
since the mid-1970s, direction of the national economy has been effectively
removed from significant democratic debate a process intensifying since
the 1990s under neoliberal imperatives of globalization then since 9/11
the war against terror and international security have added their own
powerful logic. The enlistment of popular sentiments to a dangerous and
fearful ground of national-state patriotism has been joined to a ruthlessly
compelling insistence by governments in power that the demands of policy
and the severity of the crises each require their own non-accountability.
In justifying this immunity from constitutional oversight, whether
economically or militarily, governments rely consistently on the exigencies
92 SOCIALIST REGISTER 2016
of a state of emergency presented explicitly in global terms. Thus freedom

is to be defended internationally in a sphere beyond the reach of citizenship
as normally understood. The sovereignty of decision making is removed
from earlier constitutional frameworks of referral. Further, governments
declare their need for emphatic non-accountability at a time when the
historic infrastructures of democratic citizenship in capitalist societies from
mass membership parties and associational solidarities to community-based
structures of national political affiliation and the very exercise of citizenship in
the vote have fallen into advanced decay. For ordinary citizens, developing
and exercising a relation to politics becomes disabled by a powerful layering
of crisis, involving the brokenness of polities and the collapse of civility; the
neoliberal transformations of capitalism and the transnationalizing of labour
markets; widening extremes of social inequality and the recomposition
of class; social calamities and political disorders resulting from global
environmental catastrophe; a climate of fear where security trumps any
other consideration; and international rivalries for fuels, food, water and other
resources. The combination of non-accountability and popular disablement
under these extremes of crisis becomes a very threatening conjunction.1
While the political fallout from these developments had long been
apparent, the financial crisis of 2008 immediately upped the ante. The
international Occupy movement during September-December 2011
gave dramatic impetus to a revival of militancy and creative thinking on
the left, along with the beginnings in Europe of organized re-coalescence
quite outside the existing socialist and social democratic parties, notably in
Greece, Spain, Germany and elsewhere.2 But the right has been undergoing
recrudescence too, most evidently in the electoral breakthrough of far-right
parties in much of Europe, but also in an unsettling ability to capture the
languages and momentum of significant parts of the current discontents.
Under these circumstances, public commentary, no less than the common
sense of ordinary political exchange, can reach easily for the available and
well-tried references of history, and neither the ease nor the appeal of the
fascist analogy has diminished with time. Nor have the actually existing worlds
of political conflict, social and political injustice and collectively exercised
political violence that call them into use. So our present circumstances make
it urgently desirable to clarify the possible guidance a concept of fascism
might provide.3
Fascist is presently invoked in two principal ways, each with its problems.
The more dubious is the contemporary coinage of Islamo-fascism, with
all of its tendentious and simplifying conflations.4 But voices on the left
use the terminology of fascism more persuasively for the current crop of
FASCISM THEN AND NOW 93
adversaries on the far right, from xenophobic and anti-migrant movements

in Europe, Australia and North America to more particular instances like
the Golden Dawn in Greece or the Minutemen, wider militia movement,
neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups and possibly the Tea Party in the
US. In each case we need to sort through the appropriate distinctions in
historically grounded analysis that can avert tendentious conflations, merely
formal or surface similarities and chains of equivalence that seem outwardly
plausible but stop short of analysis that shows how fascism actually builds
its appeal. In those terms I want to examine not just the particular ideas
and practices that distinguish fascists from their rivals, but also the particular
contexts that give them popularity and a credible claim to power. What
are the circumstances that enable fascists to offer themselves as an effective
and desirable extra-systemic solution, an alternative to the given practices
of pluralism, negotiation and coalition building associated with democratic
constitutionalism? What kind of crisis brings fascism onto the agenda? What
is the character of the fascism-producing crisis?5
Here, I prefer to begin from the material ground of the divisiveness in
the social worlds of contemporary capitalist restructuring from the new
politics of class formation and associated institutional machineries of law,
property, employment, residence, consumption and mobility, whose effects
institutionalize and secure the now-prevailing patterns in the distribution
of social inequality. Under conditions of neoliberalism and its impact on
the polities of the late capitalist countries above all by the eviscerating of
democratic citizenship in its historically realized forms new extremes of
social polarization are acquiring an ever-more dangerous anti-democratic
edge. These contemporary sources of conflict inside societies become
powerfully overdetermined by the consequences of intrusive globality and
its transnational effects, including the militarizing of the security of markets
and access to materials and goods; rivalry for resources; huge-scale migrancy
of people and ideas; a new international currency of violence; and the
general disordering of national-state sovereignties. As the new conditions
of globality assert themselves, the appeal of a politics seeking to reconstitute
boundaries and restore the wholeness of society acquires palpable and
growing purchase. As Wendy Brown puts this, the resulting forms of politics
address human desires for sovereign order, for containment and protection
in a world increasingly without these provisions and [where] national
identity is diluted in an ever more globally integrated and miscegenated
world.6 Under circumstances of national emergency on the scale of 9/11,
these political dynamics threaten the kind of crisis where a politics that begins
to look like fascism can coalesce. How might histories and theories of fascism
bring these dangers into focus?
If we can once historicize fascism by isolating its earlier twentieth-century

dynamics of emergence, I want to argue, we stand a far better chance of
understanding its possible manifestations in the present.7 By studying its
earlier forms, we not only give it a past, but enable a general concept to be
abstracted to become usable for other settings and other times, including
today. Knowledge of the early twentieth-century context can help with
the work of theorizing the character of differing but comparable crises in
the present. Whether spatially or metaphorically, in the United States, parts
of Europe and elsewhere, there exist zones of exception already actualizing
a politics that comes ominously close to what happened before. In making
those dangers legible, a portable concept of fascism performs vital service.
In what follows, I will proceed in two steps. Having first distinguished
the specificities of the German conjuncture of the 1920s as the basis for a
working definition, I will then bring this to the circumstances of our own
time.
FASCISM THEN
Let us begin with what fascists do best.
During the night of Monday, March 20th-Tuesday, March 21st [1933],

the [SPD] woman councillor, Marie Jankowski, was attacked in her flat.
. . Frau Jankowski was taken in the van, with two Communist officials
who were already in it, to the Transport Headquarters of the Nazis in
Kpernick. In a shed in the courtyard she was forced to take off her
clothes and lie on a wooden bench which was covered with a black-red-
gold flag. Four men held her down, one pressing her face into a bundle
of old rags. For two hours this woman, forty-six years old, was beaten
mercilessly with truncheons, steel rods, and whips. . . forced to sing
Deutschland, Deutschland ber Alles. I was compelled to sign a declaration
that I would leave the Social Democratic Party, that I would never take
part in politics again, and that I would report every Thursday to the Nazi
office.8
The Communist worker Friedrich Schlotterbeck, arrested in 1933,

reported later how he was interrogated at police headquarters by a group of
SS men. They punched him in the face, beat him with rubber truncheons,
tied him up, hit him over the head with a wooden bar, kicked him when
he fell to the floor, and threw water over him when he lost consciousness.
A police officer fired questions at him in the quieter moments, and
intervened only when one of the SS men, enraged at Schlotterbecks
vigorous physical resistance, pulled a revolver and threatened to shoot the

prisoner. Having failed to confess, he was taken back to his cell He was
to spend the next decade and more in penitentiaries and concentration
camps.9
The former Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes

Stelling, a Social Democrat, was taken to a brownshirt barracks, beaten
up, and thrown semi-conscious out onto the street, where he was picked
up by another gang of stormtroopers, taken off in a car, and tortured to
death. His body was sewn into a sack, weighted down with stones, and
thrown into a river. It was later fished out with the bodies of twelve
other Social Democratic and Reichsbanner functionaries who had been
murdered that same night.10
The arbitrary raids of SA troops on workers homes were gradually

replaced by systematic sweeps that lasted into the autumn of 1933. . . such
sweeps followed the pattern established relatively early in an operation
on 5 May 1933 in Dsseldorf-Gerresheim . . . Step by step the squads
combed through dwelling after dwelling, searching the cellars and attics,
sheds and outhouses. In this way, they rooted out the illegal hideouts of
fugitive Communists, together with hidden Communist literature and all
manner of things brought into safety during January and February 1933,
including office materials, filing cabinets, typewriters, printing presses,
and last but not least the equipment of workers sporting clubs and the
instruments of workers music societies. . . The sweep would also be
accompanied by arrests and physical violence.11
The recourse to political violence to repressive and coercive forms

of rule, to guns rather than words, to beating up ones opponents rather
than denouncing them from the speakers platform was what decisively
distinguished fascism in Germany and elsewhere from earlier forms of right-
wing politics. The coercive resources of the state had always been used
against certain kinds of opposition, whether by routine application of the law
for the protection of persons and property or maintenance of law and order,
or by curtailment of civil liberties under pressure of national emergency,
as during wartime or a general strike. Under conditions of constitutional
government between the 1860s and 1914, European governance embraced
a wide spectrum of restrictive and authoritarian systems of public policing.
Coercion in that sense was an entirely normal dimension of legally constituted
governing authority, whether more liberal or more authoritarian. The use of
force provided predictable sanction against actions transgressing the allowable

boundaries of social and political dissent. Privately organized coercion was
likewise a common feature of the polity in societies undergoing capitalist
economic development in the later nineteenth century: strike-breaking,
vigilantism, economic paternalism and servile labour, especially in the
countryside, could all be plentifully found.12 Yet precisely when measured
against such precedents, fascist violence was shockingly new. In Germany
this contrast was clear. The Bismarckian Anti-Socialist Law between 1878
and 1890, the harassment, deporting and imprisonment of left-wing activists,
the unleashing of police or troops against strikers and demonstrators all
these were one thing. But terror, first by means of a militarist and violently
confrontationist style of politics, then as a principle of state organization, was
quite another.
The years 1914-23 marked a crucial watershed in the politics of the
German right. The disaster befalling the latter in 1918 the doubled trauma
of military defeat and revolution viciously radicalized its ideological temper.
During the civil-war-like disorders that prevailed for most of the period
between 1918 and 1923, there was ample scope for the resentful activism of
the returning front soldiers and their civilian compatriots, simultaneously
elevated and brutalized by the wartime, morally enraged by the dissolution
of familiar values that seemed to accompany the revolutionary turbulence
of the new Republics foundation. The burgeoning paramilitary formations
coalescing across Germany from the end of 1918 were the practical medium
of this counterrevolutionary anger, together with the vlkisch and anti-
Semitic associations mushrooming during the same time.
Much of the same momentum carried over into the Weimar Republics
years of so-called relative stability between 1923-24 and 1928-29. Its
institutional forms then contributed vitally to the take-off of the Nazi Party
between the national elections of 1928 and 1930. The full complexities
of this passage from the counterrevolutionary confusion of Weimars early
years to the growing concentration of popular right-wing energies around
the NSDAP (National-Socialist German Workers Party) in the years of
the Republics demise would require far more detailed explication than my
purposes here can allow. Instead I want to highlight the importance of the
years 1918-23 as a dramatic founding experience, from which the rights
lasting orientations and defining patterns of activity were then to descend.
A new willingness to use political violence against ones opponents was the
most salient of the resulting new features. Moreover, it was hatred of the left,
meaning above all the Communists (KPD) and Social Democrats (SPD), but
certainly including pacifists, feminists, left liberals and any other defenders
of democracy, that supplied the main drive behind that right-wing political
violence, whose motivations and targets were also to a great extent anti-
working class.13
To put it bluntly: killing socialists rather than just arguing with them, or
at most legally and practically restricting their rights, amounted to the most
radical of departures. The brutality of this break can hardly be exaggerated.
Before 1914 anti-socialism as such had certainly already been one of the
German rights defining preoccupations. That earlier history of anti-socialist
practice embraced not only the extreme recourse to exceptional legislation
on the model of the 1878 Anti-Socialist Law and more flexible forms of legal
harassment, but also a much wider range of strategies aimed at suppressing
socialism and other forms of popular radicalism, while neutralizing the rise of
the labour movement and generally resisting the spread of democracy, or at
least regulating its encroachments and containing its effects. Those strategies
encompassed many normal phenomena endemic to the Wilhelmine
polity after the 1890s, including policing and use of the judiciary; routine
discrimination via the state apparatuses; strategically conceived welfare
legislation and other social reforms aimed at dividing some categories of
workers from others; private systems of company-based paternalism;
ambitious schemes of social discipline targeting young people; and systematic
propaganda offensives among the working class. Insofar, the German record
was entirely typical of responses to the rise of socialism elsewhere, although
the more advanced forms of Germanys capitalist industry made them far
more ambitious and effective than elsewhere.14
But by the 1890s and early 1900s this kind of anti-socialist politics was
available only within normative legal and political contexts that were
gradually bringing its exercise under significant constraint: namely, the
liberal-constitutionalist polities that became generalized all over Europe as a
result of the 1860s, which made arbitrary authority increasingly accountable
to representative government, parliamentary oversight and liberal systems
of the rule of law. Moreover, as the European socialist parties gained in
electoral strength and parliamentary influence from the 1890s they brought
the older systems of repressive policing under further review and restraint.
Although during the 1900s a fresh process of polarized contention could be
seen gathering pace, this incremental strengthening of constitutional politics
made it possible in much of Europe for political life to stabilize significantly
on the given parliamentary terrain.15 And it was this political culture of
relative civility that the massive disruption of the First World War so badly
disordered.
In Germany, for example, precisely such a parliamentary stabilization
had begun to set in by the turn of the century. During the 1890s, some
parts of the German right had continued hankering after the chimera of a
coup dtat against the 1871 Constitution, a so-called Staatsstreich, involving
confrontation with the Reichstag, abolition of the democratic franchise, a
return to monarchical authority and if necessary the imposition of martial
law. In fact, the government did attempt a number of initiatives seeking
in that way to replicate the effects of the former Anti-Socialist Law by
severely restricting civil liberties, most notably by means of the Revolution
Bill or Umsturzvorlage in 1895 and a proposal to revise the Prussian Law of
Association (the so-called Little Anti-Socialist Law) in 1896-97. But the key
thing about each of those initiatives was that in each case they failed, defeated
by a parliamentary majority. While discussions of a possible Staatsstreich
continued, moreover, coming to a head during the spring and summer of
1897, a decisive stabilizing of the government in the event led to such plans
being effectively shelved. It was only after the rights disastrous electoral
showing in 1912 and its resulting parliamentary isolation that significant
voices began returning to the idea of revising the Constitution, this time by
replacing the democratic franchise with some version of a freshly devised
system of anti-democratic corporative representation.16
But between the later 1890s and the eve of the First World War, until this
fresh resurgence of speculative right-wing designs against the Constitution,
there occurred a definite settling of the political process onto the available
ground of Wilhelmine constitutionalism. That is, politics now had to be
conducted according to rules and procedures, by argument and persuasion,
and by observing the practical norms of pluralist competition and orderly
exchange. Socialists had to be fought on their own terms namely, by
leaflets and speeches, by agitation and propaganda and by the organized
patriotic mobilization of ones own supporters, rather than by straightforward
repression in the manner of the old Bismarckian Anti-Socialist Law. Within
this earlier and newly stabilizing repertoire of anti-socialist practice, in other
words, the coming political violence of the post-1918 variety had no place.
Wilhelmine anti-socialism had always stopped well short of the terroristic
interventions that became so commonplace in the years 1918-23 and 1928-
34. Reeling from the shock of defeat and revolution, refusing to accept
the democratized republican Constitution of 1918-19, and enraged by the
apparent disrespect for property and privilege, the opponents of the left in
this later context took recourse to a new kind of extreme response. But
before 1914 the constitutionalist norms had remained solidly intact. It was
this practical ground of political civility that the German right now deserted.
So it was the abrupt dissolution of an earlier consensual framework in the
autumn of 1918, amid the polarized public climate of collapsing authority

and working-class insurgency, that called the fascist option onto the stage.
When that happened, it was initially the strength of the left that drove the
process. The unaccustomed fragility of the rights access to government, its
parliamentary ineffectuality, opened a space for the appeal of more violent
alternatives. Yet for a while before 1914 in the imperfect but democratically
elected parliamentary arena of the Empire, and after 1918 in the full-scale
parliamentary democracy of the new Republic the polarizing of political
options still worked potentially to the lefts advantage, so long as the political
process remained ordered along electoral and constitutionalist lines. Thus
when the original Republican consensus began eroding and an emergent
centre-right promised to secure a significant if unstable parliamentary
majority between 1924 and 1928, the Weimar Constitutions pluralist logic
continued to hold good, imposing a practical scenario of compromise and
negotiation. If only very equivocally and at the cost of serious internal
divisiveness, the DNVP (German-National Peoples Party, the principal
party of the established right after 1918) was also drawn briefly into that
process, joining the coalition governments in 1924-25 and then again in
1927-28, much to the anger of its intransigent anti-Republican extreme
wing.
Under circumstances of severe crisis this syndrome right-wing disaffection
from a polity tilted structurally toward the left could turn into an extreme
source of danger. Indeed, it was exactly this dynamic that repeatedly gave
the push into right-wing political violence. That occurred initially during
1918-23, when working-class insurgency threatened to break through the
parliamentary-democratic limitations of the given revolutionary changes. It
happened still more dangerously during 1930-33, when the welfare state,
the defensive recalcitrance of the trade unions and the mobilized popular
resources of the Social Democrats and Communists seemed to be impeding
progress towards Germanys economic and political recovery as the right had
now come to conceive it. That is, the right turned its back on democracy and
embraced extreme extra-parliamentary solutions when the existing political
process had reached a particular kind of impasse: liberal-constitutionalist
governance seemed to have exhausted any remaining capacity for stabilizing
a protracted societal crisis that appeared to be deteriorating toward endless
stalemate. As the most extreme version of an authoritarianism demanding to
cut through the entanglements and immobilities of democracy, fascism could
then present itself as a credible and appealing alternative. It signified both
a particular type of extremism and the kind of crisis that allowed it to gain
purchase.
In the first of these respects, fascists were simply more extreme in every
way. Their politics entailed a qualitative departure from earlier conservative
practice, replacing traditional notions of hierarchy with corporatist notions
of social organization, combined with fresh ideas of a highly centralist
authoritarian state and a new kind of regulated, multi-class, integrated
national-economic structure. Above all, fascism stood for an ideal of
national concentration, in which national loyalties were celebrated as the
supreme public good. Allegiance to the nation was deemed to liquidate
any form of sectional or subsidiary identification. Older models of clerical,
aristocratic or bureaucratic authority subsided before the new ideal of the
racial community, whose integrity could be guaranteed only by means
of a biologically determined struggle for existence against the corruptive
danger of foreign influences. That conception of struggle had both a
foreign and a domestic dimension: on the one hand fascism required an
aggressive programme of imperialist expansionism, legitimized in racist and
national-Darwinist terms; on the other hand it offered itself as the solvent of
socioeconomic discontents. Fascism was also self-consciously and blusteringly
plebeian, rhetorically clothing itself in a crude and resentful egalitarianism
appropriate to its broadly based popular appeal. Fascism stood for activism
and popular mobilization in a distinctive political style. This included
an aesthetic structure of meetings, symbols, and political choreography:
militarized forms of mass display; celebration of violence, masculinity and
youth; and a tendency towards an authoritarian, charismatic, personal style
of command. Negatively speaking, fascism defined itself against liberalism,
social democracy and communism, or any creed which seemed to tolerate
difference, division and conflict, as opposed to the essential unity of the
race-people as the organizing principle of social and political life.17
But secondly, this type of politics only materialized under a definite
set of conditions. A concatenation of immediate circumstances defined
the conjunctural specificity of the fascist phenomenon why it happened
when it did. In the most summary and grandest of terms these included: the
impact and outcome of the First World War; the European revolutionary
conjuncture of 1917-23; the unprecedented political gains of the left, in
both revolutionary and reformist terms; and the breakdown or paralysis of
parliamentary institutions. The crushing German military disappointment of
1918, coming as it did immediately in the wake of the extraordinary success
of the drive to the east following Bolshevik withdrawal from the war and
the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, but in a deepening crisis of
popular war-weariness, provoked in the autumn of that year a fundamental
collapse of the cohesion and popular credibility of the dominant classes. That
opened a gaping space for a wide spectrum of radical political solutions. In

the course of the German Revolution in 1918-19 the radical right then
formed itself against the double experience of thwarted imperialist ambitions
and ignominious domestic retreat, as each bundle of resentments relentlessly
stoked the other.
To right-wing perceptions, the postwar disasters originated in the
public accommodation of organized labour, whose political and trade
union aspirations now appeared so triumphantly in command: the national
leadership of the SPD controlled the levers of government and generally
occupied the centre of the political stage, while considerable movements
further to the left, increasingly dominated after the spring of 1920 by the
Communist Party, sustained a frightening level of popular insurgency.
Under the pressure of such circumstances, from the perspective of the right,
pluralist and parliamentary methods of political negotiation and containment
had demonstrably exhausted their efficacy, guaranteeing neither the political
representation of the dominant classes nor the mobilizing of adequate
popular support. In those circumstances, fascism offered itself as a violent,
extra-systemic solution.18
Fascism prospered from a paralysis of the states capacity for dispatching its
key organizing functions, whether in relation to the economy or to the larger
tasks of maintaining cohesion in society. At the worst points of the crisis
between 1930 and 1933 that paralysis encompassed the entire institutional
machinery of politics, including the parliamentary and party-political
frameworks of representation. This was so in two ways. On the one hand,
sufficient cooperation could no longer be organized among the dominant
classes and their major economic fractions using the given mechanics of
parliamentary representation and party-based government. The usual
forms of parliamentary coalition building consequently became unbearably
complicated, so that politics became increasingly factionalized into a series
of manoeuvres for influence over the high governmental executive.19 In
the process the gap widened between an increasingly unrepresentative
governmental practice, disastrously divorced from any stable relationship to
popular legitimacy, and a febrile popular electorate, increasingly mobilized
for action but to diminishing practical effect. On the other hand, accordingly,
the popular legitimacy of the same institutional framework simultaneously
passed into disarray. Amid the convergence and complex entanglement of
these interrelated crises more radical solutions beyond the bounds of the
system consequently became more and more appealing.20
Two points arise from this way of understanding fascism. The first concerns
the sociology of fascist support. An older historiography commonly defined
fascism by its purported social functions and the sociology of its mass appeal,
assigning decisive centrality to the petty bourgeoisie and its discontents.21
However, the intervening scholarly research has now vitally qualified this
view: Nazi sociology was entirely heterogeneous, it becomes clear, with all
social categories strongly represented, including workers, whether before
or after 1933. The salience of the lower middle-class or petty bourgeois
political appeal remains broadly confirmed, to be sure.22 Both the small-scale
owners, traders and shopkeepers of the so-called old Mittelstand and the
new Mittelstand of white-collar personnel and salaried employees remained
disproportionately present among the Nazis more activist supporters.23 Yet
the issue here is less the petty bourgeoisies evident susceptibilities than
the larger explanatory work these are often asked to perform. By defining
fascism primarily by the lower middle class thesis we all too easily occlude
the presence of other social groups, whether as the actual supporters of
fascist movements or their intended addressees. Special explanations for why
workers backed the Nazis then easily follow, making them anomalous or
implicitly more contingent and less defining than the movements purported
sociological core. Fixation on the petty bourgeoisie can also obscure the
complexities and efficacies of the fascist ideological appeal, reducing it to
the reactionary protest potential of traditional social strata damaged by
the process of modernization.24 The petty bourgeoisie was always already
disposed towards the radical right, this view implies, comprising the essential
constituency for any emergent fascist movement. But that simplifies and
diminishes the power of fascisms appeal.
The second point concerns the pertinence of the Weimar period overall,
as against 1930-33: fascist potentials were already being generated during
the turbulence of 1918-23. The descent into counterrevolutionary violence
already occurred via the Free Corps during the suppression of the Spartacist
Uprising and the related insurgency of January-March 1919. The proliferat-
ing vlkisch and anti-Semitic activism of the socially respectable opponents
of democracy further radicalized the public climate, spearheaded by the Pan-
German launch of the Deutschvlkischer Schutz- und Trutz-Bund in February
1919. In both regards an anti-systemic politics was already being mooted,
displaying all the ideological specificities noted above.25 That new drive
aimed to concentrate right-wing hopes on the prospect of a showdown with
the new Republic, marshalled behind a double programme of nationalist
resurgence and anti-Marxist repression. It was directed as much against the
liberal and Social Democratic architects of the new Republican order as
against the insurrectionary utopianism of the Communists and the neo-
syndicalist ultra-left. In the event, this renascent right drastically overplayed
its hand in the ill-fated Kapp Putsch of March 1920 by trying to seize power
prematurely. After initial success, the Putsch was defeated by a general strike
in defence of the Republic, thereby recording virtually the only concerted
example in Weimars history of a united front of the left.26
Here the comparison with Italy can be instructive. There, it was the
revolutionary left that brought events to a climax in the factory occupations
of September 1920. But this left-wing insurgency affected only the northern
industrial triangle of Turin-Genoa-Milan. The left failed to carry either
the national trade union federation or the Socialist Party (PSI) as a whole
behind a full-blooded revolutionary strategy, so that the factory councils
fell short of genuine national-political momentum. Having sown the storm,
though, the Socialist leadership then reaped the whirlwind of a brutal Fascist
counter-mobilization. Italian Socialists achieved the worst of either world
an imposing regional dominance of the north, whose maximalist rhetoric
evoked the extremes of anti-socialist anxiety among the propertied classes,
and an actual reformism of the movements national leadership and majority
support, who never covered themselves by coalition building with potential
democratic allies, whether among the peasantry of the countrys central
regions and south or the acutely threatened middle strata in the north.
As the insurrectionary wave broke in late 1920, it was the Fascists who
capitalized on the left-wing demoralization, breaking the strength of the
unions, cooperatives and Socialist local government bastions in the northern
countryside, and eroding the wider resonance of Socialist political ideals.
The culmination of that process was Benito Mussolinis infamous March on
Rome in October 1922, followed by the consolidating of the new Fascist
regime.
In Germany, the outcome of the revolutionary conjuncture was quite
different. In contrast to the PSI, the SPD functioned as a factor of order,
permitting far broader cooperation around the emergent Weimar Republican
polity while the rights ideological direction and organizational cohesion,
precisely at its vlkisch extremes, remained the opposite of clear. As a party,
the PSI stood much further to the left, provoking a correspondingly more
determined right-wing backlash in response. Italian enmities became all the
more extreme, inspiring much speedier right-wing concentration around
the redemptive promise of a radical-nationalist, anti-Bolshevik terror. The
collapse of the established Liberal politics around Giovanni Giolitti in face
of the working-class insurgency made the Fascist armed squadrons into
a magnet for larger circles of the dominant classes and others whom the
reigning social turbulence placed under threat.
The closer analogue to Italy in 1917-22 is the Germany of 1930-33, when
the SPDs predicament mirrored the PSIs ten years before. It provoked
the right to anger and anxiety with the same immobilizing political traits:
entrenched reformism, obstinately bunkered into the defensive institutional
machinery of social legislation, labour law and local government influence,
which blocked a course of ruthless capitalist stabilization; yet continuing
militancy, articulated via the visionary Marxist-reformist strategies of the
party intelligentsia and the anti-fascist militancy of the Reichsbanner militia.
Any resoluteness of the embattled defenders of the liberal-constitutional state
crumbled toward similar paralysis. Social fear around the post-1928 gains of
the KPD replicated the Italian anti-socialist panic of 1918-22. So if in 1920
the Italian September had reversed the signs of the German March, then the
German 1933 offered the delayed equivalent of Italys 1922.
In that case, the more interesting question concerns not the immediate rise
to power of the Nazis themselves, which has been exhaustively researched
and analyzed over the past four decades, but the larger preceding process
of transition from a more conventional to a more radicalized form of the
right from a conservative politics pragmatically observing the protocols
of constitutionalist legality (that is, the old Wilhelmine right before 1914)
to a radical authoritarianism aspiring entirely to overturn that framework.27
In other words, we should concern ourselves with the production of fascist
potentials. By considering the overall period between the 1890s and the end
phase of the Weimar Republic, we might focus fruitfully on the questions
to which Nazism proved ultimately to be the answer.
AND FASCISM NOW
My preferred approach to fascism since the early 1980s has been a strongly
contextual one, focused on what was distinctive about the interwar years
in Europe.28 But how might this help in the present? First and foremost,
fascism is a type of politics, or a set of relations to politics. This is what allows
us to decontextualize, in the historians sense of freeing the term from its
immediate crucible of time and place (those particular crisis conjunctures
of interwar Europe) so that the process of abstraction can give us the really
useful knowledge we need for today. In that case, it becomes possible to
argue the fundamentally generative consequences of the big violence and
state/economy and state/society transformations of the First World War
without making those huge contingencies into something essential, not least
because the equivalent impact of the war worked rather differently in another
primary case, that of Japan. Likewise, if we limit fascism to a type of politics
the coercively nationalist recourse to political violence and exclusionary
authoritarianism under worsening circumstances of governmental paralysis
and democratic impasse then we can explore how this distinctive fascist
relation to politics might work for contemporary circumstances too. If we
accept that fascism should be theorized in terms of the crisis that produces it,
then we have another promising ground of comparison.
In the political climate capable of sustaining fascism, however, there
is a striking difference separating our present-day circumstances from the
earlier conjuncture after 1918. For despite the apocalyptic strains of thought
connected to the Great Wars traumatic violence, the public discourse of the
1920s remained structured around social and political optimisms. These were
inspired by the territorial reordering of Europe and the progressive logics
of revolutionary state-making then under way; by the enabling potentials
of science and technology; by the freshly revealed capacities of capitalist
industry; by the excitements of metropolitan modernity; by the prospects
for international understanding and a world without war; or simply by the
needs and possibilities of reconstruction, of making a world fit for heroes
now that the killing was done. If patently driven by negativities, the right
shared in these optimisms too. For fascist intellectuals, the deliriously future-
obsessed collapsing of past and present into the untrammelled and affirmative
violence of a drive for national renewal made futurity per se into one of the
main drivers organizing a fascist political imaginary between the wars.29 But
in our own present, in contrast, the main registers of the rights ideological
outlook have now become quite jarringly different. The rights new registers
of futurity of how the future can be imagined have become those of
paranoid and apocalyptic fear.
This relation to the future has many dimensions, whose terms are outlined in
the opening paragraphs of this essay above. They include above all the anxiety
about boundaries globally, nationally, socially, personally including the
borders between states; socioeconomic protectionisms around jobs, markets,
livelihoods, ways of life; rivalries over resources and goods; identity fears;
racialized demarcations; security-related policing; socially regulated gatedness;
climate change denialism and rejection of science; radical-right patriotisms
sutured to the geopolitics of privilege. This ever-intensifying inventory is
linked further to widening disbelief in the workability of existing political
arrangements a default presumption among broad sections of the citizenry
that government is defined irremediably by burdensomeness, corruption,
incompetence and the persistently willful refusal to be accountable. Power
has become non-intelligible in these terms: it is widely accepted that power
unfolds, and is exercised, in a distant place, behind closed doors and opaque
glass, by conspiracies of elites who are beholden to no one and simply do
not care. In right-wing political discourse this becomes a key reflex, aimed
against national governments, the supranational regulative structures of the

EU, the banks or just Europe. It scorns the basic elements of the conduct
of politics. The polity is seemingly broken and its politicians have ceased
to show any effective concern; popular cynicism opens a gulf between the
citizenry and the practice of politics; governments non-accountability and
popular disablement feed each other relentlessly. Conducing to the fascist
temptation, in other words, is a contemporary collapse of publicness, civility
and the pluralist generosity in a common culture, a steadily encroaching
paralysis of any trustworthy relationship to a normative set of practices
whose older habituations and guiding intuition used to be far more reliably
democratic. This syndrome of popular disaffection is an important part of
what distinguishes the present.
So what is the nature of the present crisis? In the circumstances of
contemporary Europe, where should fascist potentials be found? If
characteristic elements of the years after 1918 are patently not present fascist
parties and associated popular mobilizations of comparable scale, reaction
against a popular-democratic upsurge of the left, the use of paramilitary
violence against opponents then how else might fascism be detected?
What follows is the first sketch of some answers.
Self-styled neo-fascist groups and parties certainly exist, country by
country, whether by indigenous descent or vicarious attachment to
Nazism or Italian Fascism.30 But these may not be the best place to begin:
invariably quite small, they rarely achieve more than occasional local success
in elections or notoriety by some activist excess. Further, a condition of
public legitimacy for any of these groupings has been precisely not to call
themselves fascist, but rather to insist on their own democratic credentials.
They typically tread the line between observing the liberal-constitutionalist
rules and giving militant activists their head. Even Golden Dawn in
Greece, presently an exception to the fringe status of such overtly neo-
fascist formations, exemplifies the syndrome. From its political stylistics and
types of organization to the formal ideological affiliations and propensity for
physical violence, Golden Dawn shows the hallmarks of fascism in its classic,
early twentieth-century guise. In the cumulative record of its outlook, there
is no dearth of explicitly programmatic statements celebrating Nazi ideals
and Hitlers accomplishments. Yet at the same time, the movement professes
official adherence to the democratic system. In that case, how might the
balancing act between physical-force militancy and formal democratic
legality begin to break down? And: how might the forms of coalescence
with parts of the non-fascist, more conservative right start to occur? As
the Greek crisis continues to unfold, for example, with all the potentials
for polarized adversarial escalation, Golden Dawn might well break out of
any self-restraining democratic formalism, simultaneously feeding on wider
popular anxieties while converging with the more conservative sector and
its desires for order, aided not least by the demonstrable sympathies existing
inside the police and state security apparatuses.31
In another category of parties and movements, that broader convergence
across the right is already under way. The most dramatically visible instance
is in Hungary, where Jobbik (Movement for a Better Hungary, founded
2003) shot to prominence in the European and national elections of 2009
and 2010 behind an outwardly radical-nationalist and racialist programme,
becoming in 2014 Hungarys third largest parliamentary party. At a time
of hardening political differences and dangerously authoritarian contraction
of democracy under Viktor Orbns governing Fidesz (Hungarian Civic
Alliance, in power since 2010), Jobbiks success shifts the public climate
sharply toward the far right.32 A similar effect may be observed across a
number of national formations, where right-wing populisms attain large
and loud enough resonance to begin reshaping their surrounding political
fields. Italys Lega Nord (founded 1989-91) would be one example, especially
during its governing stints with Silvio Berlusconi (1994-95, 2001-06, 2008-
11). But by far the strongest case is the French National Front (FN), founded
in 1972 by Jean-Marie Le Pen (born 1928), which between the mid-1980s
and Le Pens shock success in the 2002 Presidency elections broke through
to lasting national significance. Since 2011, under the new leadership of
Marine Le Pen, its support continues edging significantly upwards: 13.6 per
cent for the National Assembly first ballot in 2012, but 17.9 per cent in the
first ballot for the Presidency; then 24.9 per cent for the 2014 European
elections, in the strongest showing of any French party.33
While calling at inception on a clear set of older far-right influences (Vichy,
Poujadism, Algrie Franaise), along with more recent initiatives of the 1960s
(Occident, Group Union Dfense, Ordre Nouveau), the FN drew its impetus
during the 1980s and 1990s from a newly emergent constellation of factors:
the French lefts ambiguous political ascendancy under the Presidency of
Franois Mitterand (1981-95), combined with the long fallout from 1968;
the dividedness of mainstream conservative politics and the associated
erosion of popular credibility; and above all, the growth of increasingly
violent societal tensions around questions of immigration and race.34 As such,
its trajectory became paradigmatic for a cluster of other right-wing parties
emerging concurrently elsewhere in central and northern Europe, whose
success presumed similar opportunity structures: the Austrian Freedom Party
(FP, founded originally in 1956); the Belgian Flemish Block (VB: 1978);
the Danish Peoples Party (DF: 1973, 1995); the Norwegian Progress Party
(FrP: 1973, 1977); the Swiss Peoples Party (SVP: 1971); and with greater
volatility, the Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV: 2006), preceded by the List
Pim Fortuyn (LPF: 2002-08, named after charismatic political columnist Pim
Fortuyn). Broadly following the French pattern, they each built strength by
the turn of the 1990s before taking off dramatically over the next decade.35
The Belgian VBs programme in 2003, bringing it 11.6 per cent of the
national vote and 17.9 per cent at home in Flanders, may stand in:
[It] had campaigned under the slogan Our people first!, demanding
that Belgium close its borders to immigrants and prohibit multicultural
education, as well as under a radical platform advocating regional
independence. Although these are [its] defining issues, the party also
stands for a broader range of right-wing positions, by defending traditional
moral values, evoking hard-line anticrime measures, and fostering free
market economic policies.36
This is the political field of right-wing contention of the present, for which
contemporary understandings of race function so patently as a primary
ordering principle framed by the far rights political imaginary of noxious
immigrants and unwelcome foreigners, where racialized versions of social
entitlements and cultural belonging crudely delimit the terms of citizenship
and the grounds for legitimate and permissible political claims. In the widest
landscape of racist violence and anti-foreigner enmities, moreover, the high-
speed efficacy of the new media technologies enables an event in one place
to be carried immediately to perceptions in another, so that the high-impact
visibility of an election campaign and the spectacle of an assassination or a
cartoon scandal can become sutured to the everydayness of insults and abuse
in neighbourhoods, in the subways and on the streets. We know from the
Eurobarometer and other survey data that since the 1980s Western European
attitudes have grown consistently averse to foreigners, especially but not
only those from outside the EU. By 1997, two thirds of all Europeans
surveyed described themselves as being in some degree racist.37 In its noisy
vociferousness the very presence of an anti-immigrant movement eventually
realigns the overall climate of public policy apparently unstoppably toward
its own ground. In the three decades separating Enoch Powells 1968 speech
from the public stigmatizing of asylum seekers in the 1990s, for instance,
the boundaries of acceptable public discourse on matters of nationality,
citizenship and immigration lastingly shifted in the UK. In 2005, likewise,
the French National Human Rights Commission found that 55 per cent of
French people thought there were too many foreigners in the country, and
one in three described themselves as racist, a rise of eight per cent from the
previous year. The next year, 51 per cent in Le Figaros survey felt foreigners
who did not love France should get out a longstanding Le Pen slogan that
became paraphrased by Nicolas Sarkozy in his 2007 Presidential campaign,
thereby burying the memory of the united 2002 anti-Le Pen front. Race
talk once confined to the margins finds its way to the centre.38
This is one continuity with the 1920s and 1930s that seems powerfully
secured namely, the integral nationalism of the Volksgemeinschaft.39 Far-
right advocacy has increasingly regrouped around the programmatic defense
of the distinctiveness of national culture and its threatened integrity. In the
language deployed by right-wing populists, cultural identity has become
key to how the alienness of immigrants can be publicly rationalized: such
intruders are people who share neither a national heritage nor European
civilization as historically transmitted, who do not belong, who are
foreign to the way we live, who lack our cultural and moral values.
This emergent ideology of race eschews older arguments from biological
inferiority in favour of a new stress on rootedness (enracinement) that exalts
the absolute, irreducible difference of the self and the incommensurability
of different cultural identities.40 The nations cultural identity then becomes
the endangered possession, whose integrity needs to be preserved and if
necessary bitterly defended. Its key referents become heritage, tradition,
collective memory, geography and an elaborate representational repertoire
of differences in culture, rather than blood or even race in formal linguistic
or referential terms per se.41
Country by country, this new culturalized racism is blurring the
boundaries between previously isolable groupings of the far right and
mainstream conservatisms that remain strongly oriented around a collectively
memorialized and ritually celebrated cultural patriotism based on national
heritage. Here Europe signifies in complex ways. Since the shelving of
social Europe and the more generous projections encouraged by 1992,
the EU has ceased for any foreseeable future to be a feasible project of
manageable sociopolitical and cultural integration, careening instead toward
a narrowly understood market-defined geopolitical drive for the purposes
of competitive globalization. The new giganticism of the EUs current
process of enlargement then exacerbates the culturalizing of racism in a
doubled way: it stokes the country-based anxieties already clustering around
the territories of a vulnerable national identity; it simultaneously translates
those resentments onto the meta-European plane of the defence of besieged
civilizational values. This potent dialectic of simultaneously maintaining
boundaries both national and European of defending the nation from

inside the larger battlements of a fortress Europe brings together multiple
fields of antagonism drawn with distressing predictability against Muslims,
whether those Muslims are already inside Europe itself, situated around its
borders or perceived to be on their way.42
The Islamic provenance and affiliations of migrant minorities during the
earlier period of the 1960s and 1970s lacked the same kind of salience. Then
during the 1980s multiple sites of conflict coalesced willy nilly towards a
primary contradiction: everyday racism against Pakistanis and Bangladeshis
in Britain; its analogs in the banlieus of France; discrimination against Turks
in West Germany and Austria, against Moroccans and Turks in the Low
Countries; campaigns against Muslims in Bulgaria; the slow descent toward
violence in Bosnia and Kosovo; war between Armenians and Azeris over
Nagorny-Karabagh. In the 1990s these hostilities exploded into sustained
crisis, further articulated with a range of conflicts on the wider global stage.
But the political logics of anti-Islamic concentration were still unevenly
apparent. The main consequence of 9/11 has been exactly this: a further,
disastrous radicalizing of all of the above in ways that simultaneously con-
centrate the representational energy against Islam.
In many of the most dangerously violent of the ensuing controversies
from Salman Rushdie to Geert Wilders a disturbing elision occurs. The
intricate dilemmas of how best to preserve pluralism, tolerance and civil
liberties, or of how to secure the values of individual emancipation and
the freedoms of conscience and speech, become translated discursively into
emblems of ethno-national identity and the broader humanistic heritage
of European civilization. These are values, we hear with authoritative
regularity, which Islam does not share. tienne Balibar describes the slide
of logic very well: from foreigners to aliens (meaning second-class residents
who are deemed to be of a different kind); from protection to discrimination;
and from cultural difference to racial stigmatization.43 Within the global field
of post-9/11 antagonisms, many commentators have crudely aligned this
elaborated system of differences with a differential capacity for democracy:
Islam and democracy are fully incompatible. They will never be compatible
not today, and not in a million years.44 Inevitably, demagogy then fills
much of the resulting political space. We are in an undeclared war, Geert
Wilders repeated after the killing of Theo van Gogh in November 2004.
These people are motivated by one thing: to kill everything we stand for.
Then again:
Islam is something we cant afford any more in the Netherlands. I want

the fascist Quran banned. We need to stop the Islamization of the
Netherlands. That means no more mosques, no more Islamic schools, no
more imams Not all Muslims are terrorists, but almost all terrorists are
Muslims.45
What gives this new politics of the right traction, of course, is the
underlying disorder of societal dislocation associated with contemporary
economic change less the immediacy of crisis since 2008 than the still-
unfolding consequences of fundamental capitalist restructuring since the
1970s.46 Such change produces exactly the multifarious anxieties about
boundaries whose interconnectedness xenophobia then readily cements.
That logic of articulation brings together the many fields of divisiveness
in Europe centering during the past half-century around ethno-cultural,
religious and national differences. These include the consequences of
the labour migrancy between the later 1950s and early 1970s, with the
accompanying growth of settled residential minority populations across
western European societies; the attendant rise of right-wing movements
against immigration during the 1970s and 1980s, common again to Western
Europe as a whole; a related coalescence of identitarian politics and cultural
self-assertiveness among minority populations themselves; the escalation of
anti-foreigner violence in Central and Eastern Europe accompanying the
transition from Communism and the wars of Yugoslav succession during
the 1990s; the new globalized migrant labour markets and the continuous
traffic of illegal and semi-legal itinerant workers and their dependents; the
associated movements of refugees and asylum-seekers, displaced partly by
the same consequences of global deregulation, partly by ecological disasters,
partly by politically imposed catastrophe; and last but not least, the long-
running effects of decolonization and the smouldering slow burn of the
legacies of colonialism. Each of these phenomena generates a particular
political force field; and they all work insidiously together. The spectacle of
Europes current anti-Islamic anxieties begins with this interconnectedness.
The febrile and hyper-security-conscious political climate of post-9/11
endows the perceived presence of Islam inside and outside Europes borders
with an intensely mobilized logic of racialized meaning.
In my own thinking about fascism, I have always insisted on the specific
features of the immediate fascism-producing crisis as the best place to begin
paradigmatically in relation to the years 1917-23 and 1929-1934 in Italy
and Germany, but now also in relation to the basic currents and coordinates
of social and political life in Europe today. The most obvious difference
between then and now is the historic defeat of an older left, or at least the
loss of the conditions of possibility enabling such a left to sustain a political
presence that for a brief time in history (roughly the first two-thirds of the
twentieth century) brought meaningful political effects. Concretely, there
are no organized collective solidarities of comparable staying power, on that
earlier model, any more. That loss has been produced systemically by each
of the big processes whose impact cumulatively defines the present crisis: the
fiscal dysfunctions of late-capitalist restructuring; the recomposition of class;
the breaking of the polity.
In such light, fascism presents itself not as a mass movement mobilized
for the seizure of power by violent confrontations with an equivalently
mobilized mass-political opponent in the form of a Communist or socialist
party. Rather, it involves types of authoritarian coerciveness deployed
against more isolated and isolable populations, for which the confrontational
politics and physical violence of the streets can act as the tolerated spearhead.
Those coercive dynamics presently evade earlier mechanisms and strategies
of containment, constraint and accountability. They include the new forms
of uncompromising and intrusive policing; the new systems of surveillance
and the centralized gathering of information and intelligence; the slow
dismantlement, overtly and by stealth, of the protections for civil liberties;
the growth and consolidation of the carceral apparatus, which with respect
to incomers, foreigners and migrants becomes often literally an archipelago;
the discursive machinery and institutional practices of fortress Europe. If
earlier in the twentieth century the boundaries of an established European
social order were breached by popular-democratic insurgency, then now
they are being breached from the outside. If during the 1920s and 1930s the
ensuring confrontations polarized society into the camps of right and left,
today they concentrate energies and affiliations more easily around the idea
of the nation per se. Anger against migrants, as Wendy Brown compellingly
argues, summons all of the ensuing political desires.47
This is what distinguishes the present. It contains a profoundly different
order of crisis than the originary ones of the interwar, with a different set of
state/society relations, different categories of political actors, different types
of possible political agency, different forms and processes of publicness (of the
possible ways of becoming public) and a different surrounding environment
of capitalism, all of which have the effect of calling up a different set of
coercively authoritarian political interventions and modalities than before.
But if we theorize fascism as an exceptional set of relations to politics made
feasible and compelling by the intensifying of a particular type of crisis, then
it arguably makes sense to use the same term.
NOTES
1 The possible citations here would be huge in number. Still vital in mapping out the
consequences of 9/11 is Okwui Enwezor, Carlos Basualdo, Ute Meta Bauer, Susanne
Ghez, Sarat Maharaj, Mark Nash, and Octavio Zaya, eds., Democracy Unrealized:
Dokumenta 11_Platform 1, Cassel: Hatje Canz, 2001. Most recently: Wendy Brown,
Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, and Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalisms Stealth
Revolution, Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2014 and 2015.
2 Here see Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, eds., Socialist Register 2013: The
Question of Strategy, London: Merlin, 2012.
3 My argument follows Where Are We Now with Theories of Fascism?, in Geoff Eley,
Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945,
London: Routledge, 2013, pp. 198-225; and What Produces Fascism: Pre-Industrial
Traditions or A Crisis of the Capitalist State?, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism:
Reinterpreting the German Past, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp. 254-82.
4 Most cogently, see Christopher Hitchens, Defending Islamofascism, Slate, 22 October
2007, available at http://www. Slate.com; Walter Laqueur, The Origins of Fascism:
Islamic Fascism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism, OUPblog, available at http://blog.oup.
com. For valuable commentary: A. Dirk Moses, Paranoia and Partisanship: Genocide
Studies, Holocaust Historiography, and the Apocalyptic Conjuncture, Historical
Journal, 54(2), 2011, pp. 553-83, esp. 581-3.
5 Indebtedness of particular parties and networks to an explicitly fascist tradition or
precursor parties remains a separate question. My purpose here is different, concerned
with the circumstances that give such influences strength. To succeed, whether in mass
popularity or plausible access to power, any fascism needs a favorable conjuncture.
Fascism is defined by the type of crisis producing it.
6 Wendy Brown on her book Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, Interview, Rorotoko, 15
September 2011, available at http://rorotoko.com.
7 For anyone working in German history, whether studying Nazism or not, the question
of fascism is never far away. By shifting emphasis from the baleful effects of longstanding
nineteenth-century continuities to more immediate processes of change the
sociopolitical fallout from Germanys capitalist transformation between the 1880s and
1920s my own work historicizes Nazism more exactly to its immediate dynamics of
emergence. Rather than the backwardness of pre-industrial traditions that supposedly
stalled Germanys progress into becoming modern, it was the distinctiveness of
Germanys pre-1914 capitalist modernity that best explains the complicated histories
in question. Conflicts were initiated in the early 1900s that became radicalized later
on, given the intervening events of war and revolution. By rethinking the issue of
continuity in this way, we bring more sharply into focus the immediacies of the extreme
fascism-producing crisis itself, which in Germany straddled the two interconnected
conjunctures of 1929-33 and 1918-23. I first developed these arguments in Reshaping
the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck, London: Yale
University Press, 1980; and (with David Blackbourn), The Peculiarities of German History:
Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany, Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1984. See also Eley, What Produces Fascism?
8 This account is taken from The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror and the Burning of the
Reichstag, prepared by the World Committee for the Victims of German Fascism,
London, 1933, pp. 217-8. Black-Red-Gold was the colour of the Republics flag,
which during the 1920s acquired enormous symbolic significance in left-right polemics.
9 Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, London: Allen Lane, 2003, pp. 346-7
10 Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich, p. 360.
11 Detlev Peukert, Die KPD im Widerstand. Verfolgung und Untergrundarbeit am Rhein und
Ruhr 1933 bis 1945, Wuppertal: Peter Hammer Verlag, 1980, pp. 90-1.
12 Incidence of privately deployed coercion did not correlate with the strength or weakness
of constitutional government or liberal systems of the rule of law. Such violence was far
more prevalent in pre-1914 USA than in Germany, for example. Thus in the Ludlow
Massacre of 20 April 1914, during the southern Colorado Coal Strike of September
1913-December 1914, a combined assault of National Guard and company guards
produced a death toll of some two dozen people, including women and children. The
strike overall cost between 69 and 199 lives. Recourse to confrontational violence
and armed force was common to both sides of the conflict. See Thomas G. Andrews,
Killing for Coal: Americas Deadliest Labor War, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2008. There is nothing remotely comparable in Germany before 1914.
13 Right-wing violence targeted the classical labour movement in all of its party, trade
union and subcultural manifestations. But emphasizing this class-political animus hardly
precludes acknowledging the NSDAPs ability to recruit working-class support, whether
in membership or elections, most notably via its paramilitary wing, the Sturmabteilung
or SA. See here: Conan Fischer, Class Enemies or Class Brothers? Communist-Nazi
Relations in Germany, 1929-1933, European History Quarterly, 15, 1985; and the
ensuing exchange with Dick Geary, pp. 453-71.
14 For greater detail, see Geoff Eley, Capitalism and the Wilhelmine State: Industrial
Growth and Political Backwardness, 1890-1918, in Eley, From Unification to Nazism,
pp. 42-58; and Eley, The British Model and the German Road: Rethinking the Course
of German History before 1914, in Blackbourn and Eley, Peculiarities of German History,
pp. 91-126; David F. Crew, Town in the Ruhr: A Social History of Bochum, 1860-1914,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1979; Dennis Sweeney, Work, Race, and the
Emergence of Radical Right Corporatism in Imperial Germany, Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2009.
15 The strongest socialist parties, polling more than 25 per cent in democratic elections
before 1914, composed a Central and Northern European social democratic core
(German-speaking Europe including the mixed German and Czech lands of Bohemia
and Moravia, together with Scandinavia); in Eastern and Southern Europe, with
poorly developed parliamentary systems and harsh repressive practices they were far
weaker. Under the strike waves and popular mobilizations of 1904-7, these long-term
patterns of parliamentary stabilization threatened to break down. See Geoff Eley, Forging
Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000, New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002, pp. 62-118.
16 See Geoff Eley, The Social Construction of Democracy in Germany, 1871-1933, in
George Reid Andrews and Herrick Chapman, eds., The Social Construction of Democracy,
1870-1990, New York: New York University Press, 1995, pp. 96-106.
17 For the formal coordinates of fascist ideology, see Stanley G. Payne, Fascism: Comparison
and Definition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1980, pp. 10-13 and 195-212.
For the quoted phrases, see Paynes Typological Description of Fascism, pp. 6-8.
18 This way of formulating the problem, as the conjunction of a dual crisis, comes from
Nicos Poulantzas, Fascism and Dictatorship, London: New Left Books, 1979. See above
all David Abraham, The Collapse of the Weimar Republic: Political Economy and Crisis, 2nd
edn., New York: Holmes and Meier, 1986; Jane Caplan, Theories of Fascism: Nicos
Poulantzas as Historian, History Workshop Journal, 3(Spring), 1977, pp. 83-100.
19 See Abraham, Collapse of the Weimar Republic, p. 277: Could no bourgeois political force
organize the political unity of the dominant economic fractions out of the factiousness
and diversity of their economic interests? Was no political unity available and no mass
political support available within the Republic, despite the single-mindedness of the
dominant classes anti-socialism? Was the maintenance of capitalist economic relations

and political democracy so antithetical in this conjuncture that abandonment and
undermining of the Republic were self-evident necessities for the dominant classes?
20 The German and Italian crises were closest to each other, although in Germany fascist
potentials came in two instalments (1918-23, 1929-33), in Italy only one (1917-22).
The Spanish (1917-23, 1931-36) and Austrian cases (1927-34) also came close, as did
France (1934-37). Native fascisms in Hungary and Finland also followed polarized
political breakdown and associated left-wing insurgency after World War I.
21 Here Marxist and non-Marxist accounts converge, although older Marxist versions
saw fascism in overly functionalist terms as an instrument of big capitalist interests.
See David Beetham, ed., Marxists in the Face of Fascism: Writings by Marxists on Fascism
from the Interwar Period, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983. The classic
sociological version of the lower middle class thesis is Seymour Martin Lipset, Political
Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 1st ed., Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1960; 2nd ed.,
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981, esp. Ch. 5: Fascism Left, Right,
and Center, pp. 127-79, and the later afterthoughts, pp. 488-503.
22 Michael Kater, The Nazi Party. A Social Profile of Members and Leaders, 1919-1945,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983; Thomas Childers, The Nazi Voter:
The Social Foundations of Fascism in Germany, 1919-1933, Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1983; Jrgen W. Falter, Hitlers Whler, Munich: Beck, 1991.
For the wider research, see Conan Fischer, ed., The Rise of National Socialism and the
Working Classes in Weimar Germany, Providence: Berghahn Books, 1996; Tim Kirk,
Nazi Germany, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 23-8; Detlef Mhlberger,
The Social Bases of Nazism,1919-1933, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003;
Rudy Koshar, ed., Splintered Classes: Politics and the Lower Middle Classes in Interwar
Europe, New York: Holmes and Meier, 1990.
23 Most comprehensively, see Stein Ugelvik Larsen, Bernt Hagtvet and Jan Petter
Myklebust, eds., Who Were the Fascists? Social Roots of European Fascism, Bergen:
Universitetsforlaget, 1980.
24 For characteristic examples, see Jrgen Kocka, Ursachen des National-sozialismus, Aus
Politik und Zeitgeschichte, B25-80, 21 June 1980, pp. 3-15; Heinrich August Winkler,
German Society, Hitler, and the Illusion of Restoration, in George L. Mosse, ed.,
International Fascism: New Thoughts and New Approaches, London: Sage, 1979, pp. 143-
60; Hans-Ulrich Wehler, The German Empire, 1871-1918, Leamington Spa: Berg,
1985, esp. pp. 230-46.
25 See James M. Diehl, Paramilitary Politics in Weimar Germany, Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1977, pp. 23-198; Uwe Lohalm, Vlkischer Radikalismus: Die Geschichte
des Deutschvlkischen Schutz- und Trutz-Bundes 1919-1923, Hamburg: Leibniz-Verlag,
1970.
26 See Johannes Erger, Der Kapp-Lttwitz Putsch. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Innenpolitik,
1919/20, Dsseldorf: Droste, 1967; Erhard Lucas, Mrzrevolution 1920, 3 vols.,
Frankfurt: Mrz Verlag, 1970, 1973, 1978; Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution
zur Stabilisierung. Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik 1918-1924,
Bonn: Dietz, 1984, pp. 295-342.
27 Hitlers legal strategy following the fiasco of the 1923 Munich Putsch was light years
from the observed civility and practical parliamentarism of pre-1914 Wilhelmine
Conservatives. Casting aside such historic constraints parliamentary legitimacy and
civil freedoms was the very essence of the fascist transition. See the vital comparative
work of Sven Reichardt, Faschistiche Kampfbnde: Gewalt und Gemeinschaft in italienischen
Squadrismus und in der deutschen SA, Cologne: Bhlau, 2002. Also Michael R. Ebner,
Ordinary Violence in Mussolinis Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
28 If I confine myself here to Europe, this precludes neither extra-European comparisons

nor treating fascism globally. Parallel histories of unification, state-making and
imperialist expansion from the 1860s make it sensible to consider Germany, Italy and
Japan together. For a Japanese Sonderweg perspective, see two classic essays by Masao
Maruyama, The Ideology and Dynamics of Japanese Fascism (1947), and Fascism
Some Problems: A Consideration of its Political Dynamics (1952), in Maruyama,
Thought and Behavior in Modern Japanese Politics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969,
pp. 1-24, 157-77. Also Frederick R. Dickinson, War and National Regeneration: Japan
in the Great War, 1914-1919, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999; Mark
Metzler, Letter of Empire: The International Gold Standard and the Crisis of Liberalism
in Prewar Japan, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006; and especially Julia
Adeney Thomas, Reconfiguring Modernity: Concepts of Nature in Japanese Political Ideology,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, pp. 1-31, 209-25. Adam Tooze, The
Deluge: The Great War, America, and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931, New
York: Viking, 2014, is now indispensable.
29 See here Roger Griffins concept of palingenesis, which express[es] the myth of rebirth,
regeneration the aspiration to create a new order following a period of perceived
decline or decadence. Griffin, The Nature of Fascism, London: Routledge, 1993, p. 240.
30 For fascism post-1945, see the comprehensive survey in Stein Ugelvik Larsen and Bernt
Hagtvet, eds., Modern Europe After Fascism 1943-1980s, 2 vols., New York: Social
Science Monographs, Columbia University Press, 1998.
31 Dating from 1980, Popular Association Golden Dawn traces its lineage to the
colonels and Ioannis Metaxas regimes (1967-74, 1936-41), with definite Nazi affinities.
In 2015 it polled 6.3 per cent in national elections. Violence invaded national politics
on 7 June 2012 civility became breached in my sense argued above when Golden
Dawn spokesman Ilias Kasidiaris physically attacked Irini Doura (Syriza) and Liana
Kanelli (CP) during a televised debate. But everyday violence anti-immigrant attacks,
street-fighting, vandalism, miscellaneous hate crimes had long been occurring. See
Sophia Ignatidou, Greeks should see Golden Dawn assault as a warning, Guardian, 8
June 2012. The best introduction is by Alexander Clapp, Diary: I was a Greek Neo-
Fascist, London Review of Books, 4 December 2014, pp. 46-7.
32 In 2014, under the new 2012 Constitution, Fidesz sustained its 2010 primacy, with 44.8
per cent of popular votes and enhanced dominance over a markedly smaller legislature
(117 of 199 seats, as against 227 of 386 in 2010). From a mere 2.2 per cent in 2006, in
alliance with the Hungarian Justice and Life Party (MIEP), Jobbik polled 16.6 per cent
in 2010, 20.3 per cent in 2014. In Euro elections (2009, 2014), it scored 14.8 and 14.7
per cent respectively.
33 The best account of the NFs history, thoroughly contextualized in relation to Vichy
and the intervening years, is J. G. Shields, The Extreme Right in France: From Petain to Le
Pen, Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.
34 Within French conservatism, the RPR (Rally for the Republic), formed by Jacques
Chirac in 1976 carried the Gaullist tradition forward in opposition to the UDF (Union
for French Democracy) launched by Valry Giscard dEstaing in 1978. Effectively the
RPRs junior partner, the UDF collapsed after the 1997 elections. Some constituencies
joined Chiracs newly formed UMP (Union for a Popular Movement) in 2002 and the
rump dissolved in 2007.
35 For these parties in general, see Pippa Norris, Radical Right: Voters and Parties in the
Electoral Market, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; Cas Mudde, Populist
Radical Right Parties in Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007; David
Art, Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011.
36 Norris, Radical Right, p. 62.

37 See the table in Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 170.
38 I have developed this argument in full detail in Geoff Eley, The Trouble with Race:
Migrancy, Cultural Difference, and the Remaking of Europe, in Rita Chin, Heide
Fehrenbach, Geoff Eley and Atina Grossmann, After the Nazi Racial State: Difference and
Democracy in Germany and Europe, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009, pp.
137-81.
39 Alain de Benoist and the Groupement de recherche et dtudes pour une civilization europenne
(GRECE, founded 1968) have been crucial in recuperating interwar fascist philosophy,
along with the influence of Julius Evola (1898-1974). See Richard J. Golsan, ed.,
Fascisms Return: Scandal, Revision, and Ideology since 1980, Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1998; Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007; Douglas R. Holmes, Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism,
Neofascism, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
40 Verena Stolcke, Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion in
Europe, Current Anthropology, 36, 1995, p. 4.
41 The initial coinage in these terms is usually attributed to Martin Barker, The New
Racism, London: Junction Books, 1981; see also Pierre-Andre Taguieff, The Force of
Prejudice: On Racism and its Doubles, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
42 See tienne Balibar, Is There Such a Thing as European Racism?, in Balibar, Politics
and the Other Scene, London: Verso, 2002, pp. 40-55.
43 tienne Balibar, We, The People of Europe? Reflections on Transnational Citizenship,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004, p. 122. For the watershed moment in the
elision from cultural difference to political values, see Talal Asad, Multiculturalism and
British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair, Politics and Society, 18, 1990, pp.
455-80.
44 Geert Wilders, quoted in Keith B. Richburg, In Netherlands, Anti-Islamic Polemic
Comes With a Price, Washington Post, 1 February 2005.
45 Ian Traynor, I Dont Hate Muslims. I Hate Islam, Says Hollands Rising Political
Star, The Observer, 17 February 2008.
46 See Nancy Bermeo and Larry M. Bartels, eds., Mass Politics in Tough Times: Opinions,
Votes, and Protest in the Great Recession, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.
47 Brown, Walled States; and Undoing the Demos.

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FASCISM THEN AND NOW

H ow might a history of fascism in interwar Europe help us with an

of a state of emergency presented explicitly in global terms. Thus freedom

adversaries on the far right, from xenophobic and anti-migrant movements

If we can once historicize fascism by isolating its earlier twentieth-century

During the night of Monday, March 20th-Tuesday, March 21st [1933],

The Communist worker Friedrich Schlotterbeck, arrested in 1933,

vigorous physical resistance, pulled a revolver and threatened to shoot the

The former Minister-President of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Johannes

The arbitrary raids of SA troops on workers homes were gradually

The recourse to political violence to repressive and coercive forms

force provided predictable sanction against actions transgressing the allowable

autumn of 1918, amid the polarized public climate of collapsing authority

opened a gaping space for a wide spectrum of radical political solutions. In

against national governments, the supranational regulative structures of the

boundaries both national and European of defending the nation from

Islam is something we cant afford any more in the Netherlands. I want

dominant classes anti-socialism? Was the maintenance of capitalist economic relations

28 If I confine myself here to Europe, this precludes neither extra-European comparisons

36 Norris, Radical Right, p. 62.

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