Fascism

Mussolini's regime provided the model for fascism in the 1920s and 1930s. The Great Depression, and the failure of democratic governments to tackle the consequent economic hardship and mass unemployment, fuelled fascist movements worldwide. However, fascism in other countries differed from the Italian variety in certain respects. German National Socialism was more racist; in Romania, fascism was allied with the Orthodox Church rather than the Roman Catholic Church. In Spain, the radical fascist Falange was originally hostile to the Roman Catholic Church, although later, on the direction of the dictator Francisco Franco, it merged with reactionary and pro-Catholic elements. Authoritarian military rule in Japan was closely akin to that of Nazi Germany. Led by the military, it emphasized the traditional warrior virtues and an absolute dedication to the divine emperor. Like their German counterparts, the Japanese launched a fanatic drive for expansion by military conquest. In France fascism was divided into several movements. Whereas fascism in most cases flourished in countries that were economically backward or marked by strong authoritarian political traditions, French fascism made headway in one of Europe's best-established democracies. In 1934 an estimated 370,000 people belonged to the various French fascist organizations, such as the Jeunesses Patriotes, the Solidarité Française, the Croix de Feu, the Action Française, and the Francistes. More than 100,000 of these were concentrated in Paris.

In Great Britain, the British Union of Fascists under Oswald Mosley enjoyed a brief heyday of publicity from its formation in 1932 to its effective collapse in 1936 when paramilitary uniforms were banned, but had little public support. Belgian fascism likewise saw its highpoint in the early to mid-1930s, and was only briefly reanimated during World War II under the German occupation. Fascism in Norway attracted a few notorious sympathizers, notably Vidkun Quisling and the Nobel Prize-winning writer Knut Hamsun, but likewise needed German occupation to bring it any political power.

Fascism enjoyed greater inter-war success in eastern and southern Europe. In Austria, Engelbert Dollfuss, Chancellor from 1932, dissolved the Austrian Republic and led a proto-fascist regime in alliance with Mussolini until his assassination in 1934 by National Socialists seeking union with Nazi Germany. The personal rule which Miklós Horthy de Nagybánya established in Hungary in 1920 actually preceded Mussolini's Italy as the first inter-war nationalist dictatorship, but Horthy himself was not a thoroughgoing fascist, and Hungary's fascists only held power briefly under the German occupation from 1944 to 1945. In Romania, strong native anti-Semitism inspired a violent movement called the Iron Guard, which convulsed Romanian politics from the 1920s until its annihilation by the Romanian army under Ion Antonescu in the civil strife which followed the abdication of King Carol II in 1940. Intense religious and cultural antagonisms in Croatia and Bosnia fuelled the Ustaše, a Catholic fascist group which, under Axis auspices, carried out terrible pogroms of Jews and Orthodox Serbs from 1941 to 1945. The dictatorial regime established by António de Oliveira Salazar in Portugal in 1932 had strongly fascist characteristics, without exhibiting the extreme totalitarianism of Nazism or other movements elsewhere.

The defeat of Germany and Italy in World War II essentially discredited fascism in Europe in the post-war period. The only remotely fascist government to take power in the post-war period, that of Juan Domingo Perón, who was elected president of Argentina in 1946, had a broadly popular working-class base and little in common with pre-war European fascism. Countries like Spain and Portugal whose fascist governments remained in power after the war went from totalitarianism to authoritarianism, their fascist traits diffusing. Post-war economic recovery removed the social discontent which had helped fuel pre-war fascism, and in most democratic countries fascism seemed destined to permanent exile on a despised political fringe.

The 1980s and 1990s brought an unexpected revival of fascism in some Western democracies, usually dubbed neo-fascism. This had various forms and fortunes in different countries, but exhibited a general racist antipathy towards immigrants from the developing world, and a general disillusionment with established political parties. This disenchantment increased with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the post-war political order, when the ruling establishments in many European countries crumbled and many voters sought populist alternatives. The result was a growth of the extreme right.

Western European neo-fascism seems more a negative reaction to failures in the mainstream political establishment than a purposeful programme with any particular chances of success. However, overall, there has been an increase in support for strongly nationalist and sometimes overtly racist groups, whether or not labelled specifically as fascist or neo-Nazi, across the world. It appears that, despite its bloody and disastrous record, fascism is by no means dead as a political force, and at the beginning of the 21st century is taking new forms and adapting to new conditions.