Fascism as a Social Movement in a Transnational Context

Abstract

To treat fascism as a social movement in a transnational context is to buck the trend in studies of so-called ‘generic fascism’. The purpose of the latter is to derive a ‘model’, ‘definition’, or ‘ideal-type’ of fascism from observation of its primary ‘case’, the Fascist movement in Italy, perhaps supplemented with features of German National Socialism. This model would capture the essence of the phenomenon and its dynamic and permit us to recognize ‘cases’ of fascism even where protagonists rejected the label. Theories of generic fascism suffer from general and specific problems. Generally, they exaggerate the explanatory power of models of any type and they take for granted that ‘cases’ of fascism are national variants of the same essence. They also harden concepts that were contested and fluid in practical politics. Specifically, and directly relevant to this essay, models of generic fascism rely unwittingly on understandings of social action derived from late nineteenth-century crowd psychology, from which social movement theory has—in principle—liberated itself.

I should like to thank Holger Nehring and Garthine Walker for their comments on the article and Federica Ferlanti for help with the section on China.

Further Reading

Studies of fascism as a category have not especially emphasized its social movement dimension, because their primary objective is to develop an abstract theory of the origins and development of fascism, and/or because they consider social movements to be primarily left wing. Nevertheless, some of these theories do share certain assumptions with older social movements theory, notably in the assumption that fascism is a response to rapid change, anomie, and the search for a messianic ideology. This theory is present in Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991). Studies of Fascism as a political religion make similar assumptions, notably Emilio Gentile, The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflections on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism (London: Frank Cass, 2000). The most useful empirical work to use political religion theory to study fascism as a social movement is Christopher Duggan, Fascist Voices: An Intimate History of Mussolini’s Italy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Michel Dobry has advanced the most important critique of the strain-breakdown approach to social movements, as applied to fascism, but little of his work is available in English. Some of his ideas may be found in Michel Dobry, ‘France: An Ambiguous Survival’, in Dirk Berg-Schlosser and Jeremy Mitchell (eds), Conditions of Democracy in Europe, 1919–1939. Systematic Case Studies (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 157–183 and in Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2014).

Of studies that have approached Fascism and Nazism from a more explicitly social movement perspective. Peter Fritzsche, Germans into Nazis (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998) remains essential. Alf Lüdkte, The History of Everyday Life: Reconstructing Historical Experiences and Ways of Life (Cambridge, Mass.: Princeton University Press, 1995) presents in English some of key essays considering popular support for Nazism. Benjamin Ziemann, ‘Germany after the First World War—A Violent Society? Results and Implications of Recent Research on Weimar Germany’, Journal of Modern European History 1 (2003), pp. 80–86, takes issue with the view of post-war Germany as ‘brutalized’.

An enormous number of local studies of Fascism and Nazism that had been published since the 1960s, and some of the older examples remain useful. While these studies often treated fascism as reactionary, they rooted it in local conditions and more or less popular mobilizations. The best local studies on Italy are, Paul Corner, Fascism in Ferrara, 1915–1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); Frank M. Snowden, The Fascist Revolution in Tuscany, 1919–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Frank M. Snowden, Violence and Great Estates in the South of Italy: Apulia, 1900–1922 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). On Germany, see the classic, William Sheridan Allen. The Nazi Seizure of Power: The Experience of a Single German Town, 1922–1945 (New York: Echo Point Books & Media, revised edn 2014, first published 1966); Claus-Christian W. Szejnmann, Nazism in Central Germany: The Brownshirts in ‘Red Saxony’ (New York, Oxford: Berghahn, 1999). Local studies inform Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003) and Roderick Stackelberg, The Routledge Companion to Nazi Germany (London: Routledge, 2007), summarizes recent research on Nazism.

For fascism outside Europe, the most interesting book from a social movement perspective is Stein Ugelvik Larsen (ed.), Fascism Outside Europe: The European Impulse Against Domestic Conditions in the Diffusion of Global Fascism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001).

Women’s history provides important insights into fascism as a social movement. Two classics are Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988); Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Kevin Passmore (ed.), Women, Gender and the Extreme Right in Europe (1919–1945) (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), includes chapters on the role of women in far right movements in most European countries.

Some of the most interesting recent works on fascism focus on its culture of violence. The best work is Sven Richardt’s comparing Italy and Germany. The following are available in English: Sven Reichardt, ‘Fascist Marches in Italy and Germany: Squadre and SA before the Seizure of Power’, in Matthias Reiss (ed.), The Street as Stage: Protest Marches and Public Rallies Since the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 169–193; Sven Reichardt, ‘Violence and Community: A Micro-Study on Nazi Storm Troopers’, Central European History 2 (2013), pp. 275–297; Sven Reichardt, ‘Violence, Body, Politics: Paradoxes in Interwar Germany’, in Chris Millington and Kevin Passmore (eds), Political Violence and Democracy in Interwar Europe, 1918–1940 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2015).

Other works are more explicitly transnational in focus. For instance, Robert Gerwarth, ‘The Central European Counter-Revolution: Paramilitary Violence in Germany, Austria and Hungary after the Great War’, Past & Present 1 (2008), pp. 175–209, defines a space of violence in Germany and Hungary; Robert Gerwarth and John Horne, ‘Vectors of Violence: Paramilitarism in Europe after the Great War, 1917–1923’, The Journal of Modern History 3 (2011), pp. 489–512.