Eastern Europe

Abstract

Germany and Austria apart, the influence of Italian Fascism was probably weaker than has often been supposed. In the 1920s Mussolini and Fascist Italy were the novelty of the day. He was a good performer and people at home and abroad enjoyed the show: it even linked up with modern art via futurism and thus seemed attractive to Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound, and, for slightly different reasons, to Bernard Shaw. When democracy broke down in a politically and economically immature society like that of Poland in 1926, people liked to say that Poland had ‘gone Fascist’ and that Pilsudski was another Mussolini. This confused the issues. Under Pilsudski Poland was ruled much as Eastern Europe had traditionally been ruled before 1914. It did not become totalitarian, for oppositional groups could continue to exist, if uncomfortably. Nor did Pilsudski play the national God. The same thing was roughly true of Yugoslavia and of Romania before 1938. Among the Czechs and Slovaks only the odd freak was attracted by Italian Fascism, the clerical Slovaks later feeling some sympathy for the Austria of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg.