Fascism
파시즘
Fascism is the far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist ideology and movement founded in Italy by Benito Mussolini in 1919, and by extension the movements and regimes in other countries that imitated or resembled it. The name comes from the Fasci italiani di combattimento of 1919, the fascio recalling the Roman fasces carried as a symbol of legitimate power. It is broadly characterised by dictatorial leadership, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy and the subordination of individual interests to those of the nation, and opposed democracy, liberalism, communism and Marxist socialism. What counts as fascism remains disputed; the Comintern defined it in 1933–1935 as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary elements of finance capital.
In depth
Name and concept
The name comes from the Fasci italiani di combattimento that Mussolini founded in 1919; the word fascio goes back to the fasces, the bundle of rods carried by the lictors of ancient Rome as a symbol of legitimate power. The Italian encyclopedia defines fascism as the far-right, authoritarian and ultranationalist ideology and political movement founded in Italy by Mussolini, which inspired movements such as Hitler's National Socialism and Franco's regime, and lists dictatorial leadership, centralised autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy and the subordination of individual interests to those of the nation or race as its characteristics. The ideology did not precede the movement: Mussolini said that fascism "was born of a need for action and was action", and the doctrinal synthesis was drawn up by Giovanni Gentile and Mussolini in 1932. In Italian historiography the word refers mainly to the regime and ideology of Mussolini between 23 March 1919 and 28 April 1945; comparative research also uses it as a general concept for similar movements in other countries.
Italian Fascism, 1919–1945
After the First World War, economic crisis, unemployment, inflation and the Socialist Party's first place in the elections of 1919 coincided with the workers' and peasants' struggles of the "red two years", which culminated in the occupation of the factories, and with growing fear among agrarian and industrial classes of a communist revolution on the model of October 1917. Mussolini, a former editor of Avanti! expelled from the Socialist Party in 1914, founded the Fasci di combattimento in Milan on 23 March 1919 with about three hundred people, mostly socialists, syndicalists, veterans and Futurist intellectuals. The movement won no seats in its first election but 35 deputies in 1921. Fascist squads attacked trade unions and socialist parties; Gaetano Salvemini estimated some three thousand victims in 1921–1922 alone. After the March on Rome in 1922, King Victor Emmanuel III declined to sign a decree of martial law and entrusted the government to Mussolini. After the murder of the Socialist deputy Giacomo Matteotti, who had denounced electoral fraud in 1924, Mussolini's speech of 3 January 1925 in effect proclaimed the dictatorship, the National Fascist Party merged with the state, and the Fascist Grand Council became a constitutional organ in 1928. On 25 July 1943 a motion in the Grand Council asking the king to resume power led to Mussolini's arrest. Fascism briefly revived in the Italian Social Republic in the north and ended when Mussolini was captured and shot by partisans at the end of April 1945.
Spread in Europe and beyond
The Great Depression brought fascist movements to many countries; Latin America was the continent where fascism was most prominent outside Europe. According to the English encyclopedia, Gyula Gömbös, prime minister of Hungary from 1932, advanced a fascism rooted in the "Szeged Idea" of the kingdom's counter-revolutionary foundation. Romania's Iron Guard, after overthrowing the king with General Ion Antonescu in 1940, became the only fascist movement outside Germany and Italy to take power without foreign help, but was repressed after its revolt the following year. In Spain the Franco regime arose from the Civil War as a compromise between Falangism and authoritarian clerical tendencies; in Austria the uprising of February 1934 led to the regime called "Austrofascist". In France far-right leagues rioted in Paris on 6 February 1934. The Italian encyclopedia notes that most of these movements resembled Italian Fascism only superficially, in the Roman salute, dark shirts, mass rallies, the cult of the leader and of violence, and fierce anti-communism. Some historians consider it improper to call German National Socialism or the authoritarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s fascist.
Marxist and Comintern theories
Marxist scholars saw fascism as part of an international wave of capitalist reaction. The Comintern's definition, prepared by a similar formula at the Fifth Congress of 1924, was fixed by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee in December 1933; at the Seventh Congress in August 1935 Georgi Dimitrov cited this definition, formulated with the help of Clara Zetkin: fascism is "the open, terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic, and most imperialist elements of finance capital". Fascism, Dimitrov said, was neither a state power above the classes, as Otto Bauer claimed, nor a revolt of the petty bourgeoisie, but "the power of finance capital itself". On this reading not only Italy and Germany but also Poland's Sanacja regime, the Austrian corporative state and Chiang Kai-shek's supporters counted as fascist. From 1928 to 1934 the Comintern's official doctrine treated social democracy as "social fascism"; the Dimitrov thesis replaced it in 1935. Other Marxists offered other explanations. Leon Trotsky saw fascism as the organised movement of a petty bourgeoisie in crisis and urged the German Communist Party in 1929–1933 to form a common front with the Social Democrats. August Thalheimer drew on Marx's analysis of Bonapartism, arguing that fascism came to power with relative independence from the bourgeoisie in a stalemate of class forces. Palmiro Togliatti called fascism a "reactionary mass regime".
Non-Marxist research and the definitional debate
There has been no consensus on a definition since the 1920s. In Italy Benedetto Croce saw fascism as a "parenthesis" in Italian history and a "moral illness" following the war, Gaetano Salvemini and the Action Party as the logical product of Italy's old ills, while Renzo De Felice stressed the consent the regime won, especially in 1929–1936. In Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963) Ernst Nolte defined fascism as the anti-Marxism characteristic of the epoch from 1917 to 1945. Roger Griffin in 1991 defined it as a populist ultranationalism whose core myth is national rebirth (palingenesis); Robert Paxton in 2004 centred his definition on obsession with communal decline and humiliation, compensatory cults of unity, strength and purity, and a mass nationalist party working with traditional elites. Emilio Gentile described fascism as a revolutionary, anti-liberal and anti-Marxist phenomenon sacralised as a secular religion. More recent research tends to treat Franco's Spain and Salazar's Estado Novo as authoritarian regimes distinct from fascism, though other historians disagree.
After 1945 and related entries
The defeat of the Axis in the Second World War largely ended fascism as a state ideology, and few parties have since openly called themselves fascist. The Italian Republic's constitution forbade re-founding the dissolved National Fascist Party, but neo-fascist movements such as the Italian Social Movement (MSI) continued. "Fascist" is also widely used as a term of abuse against political opponents. The National Fascist Party was the party of Italian Fascism and the Fascist Grand Council its supreme organ; social fascism was the Comintern's label for social democracy. The German variant is treated under National Socialism.