Fascism, Exceptionalism, and Transnationalism

Maria Sophia Quine

None of the classic definitions of Italian Fascism and generic fascism which have been produced in the last sixty-five-odd years incorporates much of an appreciation of the transnational dimension. The word and the idea are notably absent from the many celebrated short ‘minimalist’ and long ‘maximalist’ definitions of Allardyce, Weber, Linz, Nolte, Payne, Laqueur and others of the 1950s-1980s. The newer, influential theories of fascism of recent years also have little to say on the subject. Roger Griffin, who claims to have ended the debate about fascism and created a ‘new consensus’ amongst political scientists and historians with his notion of fascism as palingenesis, has not suggested any sort of cross national entanglement as a variable to appraise fascism. The other premier theorist of fascism writing today, Emilio Gentile, has also largely left transnationalism out of the equation, despite the fact that his depiction of fascism as a political religion could lend itself quite easily to a transnational approach (though how it would deal with varieties of actual clerical fascism or fascism as religion in inter-war France, Romania, and elsewhere is unclear). Indeed, the contributions of Griffin, Gentile and others to the study of fascism as a universal, ‘generic’ phenomenon, emanating from the well-spring of the European, Western, and non-Western global experience of modernity, could be a fitting starting point for a novel interpretation of fascism and transnationalism. But not much has yet come from this possible avenue of new research and thinking.

Part of the reason, no doubt, are the lingering assumptions and theoretical baggage of past interpretations of fascism, which saw it (both as ideology and praxis) in a rather restrictive way as being exclusively national and nationalist in nature. Because fascism originated in Italy, and differed from one country to the next, some scholars have long voiced doubts that any movement other than the first Italian one founded in 1919 should appropriately be called ‘fascist’. Allardyce declared so boldly that ‘there is no such thing as fascism…the word fascismo has no meaning outside Italy’. Others have contended that Nazism should, because of its extremism in word and in deed and the still widely perceived singularity of the Holocaust, be accorded an exclusive status as either a distant ‘totalitarian’ relation (sharing more in common with communism in this regard) to the more benignly ‘authoritarian’ Italian Fascism or a completely non-generic, alternative species of radical right-wing fundamentalism. Defining Italian Fascism and its many off-shoots remains just as difficult today as it was for contemporaries, who found fascism a bewildering mass of diverse and sometimes dissonant voices. Questions like whether Spanish Falangism, Primoderiverism and Francoism, Brazilian Integralism, and French Francism of the 1920s and 1930s can really be defined as authentically ‘fascist’ will hopefully continue to exercise undergraduates and scholars for decades to come. Problems of definition should not blind us, however, to the real affinities, shared experiences, and profound connections that created fascism in the first place and made it into one of the most successful and enduring political movements of the modern age.

Despite their own bafflement over who should be included and excluded from entry into the fascist ‘family’ of nations, contemporaries certainly recognized the essential universality of fascism. By 1933, Mussolini and his followers in Italy had identified kindred ‘fascist’ movements in some 39 countries outside of Italy, including all European nations, with the exception of Yugoslavia, as well as the United States, Canada, Australia, South Africa, five nations in Asia and six in Latin America. This most hypernationalist of movements, based as it was on the doctrinal core of unmitigated worship of the nation, the race, and the history and culture of its own individual ethnos, wholly embraced the idea of the universal applicability of fascist principles of organization and governance to all societies in the world. The Fascist International that was formally created in 1934, at the Montreux conference in Switzerland, became a victim of ideological in-fighting and soon lost institutional relevance - just like the socialist internationals on which it was based had earlier also encountered difficulty in achieving lasting unity amidst tremendous diversity and difference. But pluralism within fascism, just as within socialism, does not discount the reality that the commonality of experience not just of modernity, but also of war caused the rise of this movement at roughly the same time in many different countries and contexts. The network of movements and parties loosely affiliated to the Fascist International proclaimed the spread of eternal fascism and its perpetual revolution as the prime mission of all kin within the world fascist family. But fascist internationalism was a reality, even without the formal structure of an International. From an essentially Italian phenomenon, born of the trenches of the First World War and the peace treaties and post-war revolutions that followed, fascism rapidly transformed itself after 1919 into a European and then a truly global movement. As George Orwell recognized, fascism was on the ascendancy and was successfully ‘groping towards a world-system’. By the outbreak of the Second World War and beyond 1945, fascists in many different guises, as ex-socialists, veterans, committed communists, refashioned ‘national socialists and Christian crusading knights, amongst others, were marching not just through the ancient capitals of Europe, but also, as green, blue, and grey-shirts, throughout cities and the countryside in much of the world.

The ultra-nationalism of the fascist variety did not preclude sustained and meaningful contact between leaders and movements, the conscious emulation and adaptation of the Italian progenitor and ‘model’, and the spread and intermingling of ideas and tactics. As an outgrowth of the prolonged crisis of European culture, society, and politics, begun in the late nineteenth century, fascism was at its heart a transnational phenomenon from the beginning. An extremely intellectual and ideological movement, without a single constricting text as its ‘bible’, fascism, wherever it appeared, moreover, borrowed freely from many sources and produced a vast and varied definitional, inspirational, and devotional literature as its substantive doctrine. Multiple points of cross-cultural contact and connectivity comprised a key component of the origins and development of fascism. It was (and remains, in another post-1945 form) an organic, dynamic, flexible, transferable, appealing, adaptable and changeable set of ideas and practices that made its integral internationalism so very easy. For this reason, fixation on the frontier of the single nation-state has never made much sense in the study of fascism. Despite much very good comparative work on fascism, however, particularly by political scientists, rather than historians, narrowly defined national histories still predominate in the scholarship. At the very least, further work in fascist studies along transnational lines is a worthwhile enterprise. The transnational model of history should not necessarily be conceived in opposition to the national model of history. The nation-state has been so pervasive a principal for organizing modern societies that it will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, a fixture, even as it has begun to wither away under the unremitting pressures of globalization and as scholars have enlarged the spatial dimension of history. The national and the transnational will continue to co-exist, no doubt. But the important point to emphasize about transnationalism, and the aspect of it which appeals to even die-hard nationalists amongst us, is that, by breaking down national barriers and seeing ‘circulations and connections between, above, and beyond’ nations, as the editors of this volume have written, it can ultimately lead to a deeper understanding of the history of individual nations.

Maria Sophia Quine is formerly Senior Lecturer in Modern European History at Queen Mary, University of London and currently Research Fellow in Modern European History at the University of East Anglia. She is the author of Italy’s Social Revolution: Charity and Welfare from Liberalism to Fascism (2002) and is completing a book on ‘Darwinism and Social Darwinism in Italy in Transnational Perspective’.

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