Review Article: Historical Fascism and the Radical Right The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the

Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism by R. J. B. Bosworth; La tentacion neofascista en Espana by Xavier Casals i Meseguer; International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus by Roger Griffin; Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-40 by Richard Griffiths; Il profilo escluso: Profilo storico del movimento S ... Review by: Stanley G. Payne Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 35, No. 1, Special Issue: Shell-Shock (Jan., 2000), pp. 109-118 Published by: Sage Publications, Ltd. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/261185 . Accessed: 07/10/2013 18:56
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Sage Publications, Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of Contemporary History.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Journal London,Thousand Oaks, CA and of Contemporary Copyrght ? 2000 SAGEPublications, History New Delhi, Vol 35(1), 109-1 18.

109-118;0 1 190] 1; [0022-0094(200001)35:

StanleyG. Payne

Review Article Historical Fascism and the Radical Right

R.J.B. Bosworth, The Italian Dictatorship: Problems and Perspectives in the Interpretation of Mussolini and Fascism, London, Arnold, 1998; 269 pp.; ISBN 0-340-67728-7 (hbk); 0-340-67727-9 (pbk). Xavier Casals i Meseguer, La tentaci6n neofascista en Espana, Barcelona, Plaza & Janes, 1998; 342 pp.; ISBN 84-01-53031-8 Roger Griffin (ed.), International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, London, Arnold, 1998; 334 pp.; ISBN 0-340-70614-7 (hbk); 0-340-70613-9(pbk) Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and British Anti-Semitism 1939-40, London, Constable, 1998; 372 pp.; ISBN 0-09-467920-7 Piero Ignazi, Il profilo escluso: Profilo storico del Movimento Sociale Italiano, Bologna, Il Mulino, 1998; 452 pp.; ISBN 88-15-05234-8 Jeffrey Kaplan and Leonard Weinberg, The Emergence of a Euro-American Radical Right, New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1998; 239 pp.; ISBN 0-8135-2563-2 (hbk); 0-8135-2564 (pbk) Stein Ugelvik Larsen (ed.), with Bernt Hagvet, Modern Europe After Fascism 1943-1980s, Boulder, Social Science Monographs, 1998; 2 vols., 1932 pp.; ISBN 0-88033-973-X George L. Mosse, The Fascist Revolution: Toward a General Theory of Fascism, New York, Howard Fertig, 1999; 230 pp.; ISBN 0-86527-432-0 Jose Luis Rodriguez Jimenez, ,Nuevos fascismos? Extrema derecha y neofascismo en Europa y Estados Unidos, Barcelona, Ediciones Peninsula, 1998; 365 pp.; ISBN 84-8307-130-4 Michel Winock, Nationalism, Anti-Semitism and Fascism in France, trans. Jane Marie Todd, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998; 351 pp.; ISBN 0-8047-3286-8 (hbk); 0-8047-3287-6 (pbk)

The first generation of research on fascist movements and the Axis states following the second world war concentrated on Germany and, to a much lesser degree, on Italy and on individual case studies. Only with the second generation of scholarship in the 1960s was there initiated the broader 'fascism debate' on the general historical problem of comparative and generic fascism, begun by such pioneering works as Eugen Weber's Varieties of Fascism (1964)

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

110

of Contemporary Journal HistoryVol 35 No I

and Ernst Nolte's Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (1963), which appeared two years later in English under the somewhat misleading title Three Faces of Fascism. The first number of the Journal of Contemporary History, dedicated to the topic of 'International Fascism' (1966), was itself one of the early milestones in this discussion. Yet fascism proved notoriously slippery and resistant to interpretation, and even to basic definition. For years the 'fascism debate' produced no consensus and, though there developed a convergence of certain ideas among leading specialists by the mid-1970s, interest in the problem subsequently dwindled. Monographic research proceeded apace, and even expanded, but usually eschewed the comparative dimension, so that by 1991 Tim Mason could entitle an article 'Whatever Happened to Fascism?'. By the 1990s the new interest was neo-fascism, stimulated by the break-up of the Soviet Union and the revival of nationalism in eastern Europe and other parts of the world. This has been accompanied by a certain renewal of interest in the general analysis of historical fascism, as well, and during the past decade the most important new scholar to enter the field has been Roger Griffin. His first book, The Nature of Fascism (1991), presented an incisive new analysis and interpretation of generic fascism, and was followed by an outstanding collection of original fascist texts, entitled Fascism (1995), each one firmly set in a clear interpretive context. Griffin's latest book, International Fascism: Theories, Causes and the New Consensus, provides the best and most up-to-date collection of the variant interpretations of fascism, and indeed the only such collection ever made available in English. His discussions of each interpretation will be very valuable to both professional scholars and students, for he places them within the evolving concepts about fascism from the 1920s to the present. He also includes several interpretations by fascist writers themselves as well as a brief concluding section on the interpretive problem of neo-fascism. An underlying theme is that, building on the interpretive conclusions largely reached by the mid-1970s, by the 1990s most of the leading specialists had finally arrived at a basic consensus, which Griffin summarizes as follows:
Fascism is a genus of modern, revolutionary, 'mass' politics which, while extremely heterogeneous in its social support and in the specific ideology promoted by its many permutations, draws its internal cohesion and driving force from a core myth that a period of perceived national decline and decadence is giving way to one of rebirth and renewal in a post-liberal new order. (p. 14)

Though this specific formulation is Griffin's, he convincingly presents it as an epitome of the comparative approach to fascism as practised by such diverse scholars as Nolte, Weber, Linz, Mosse, Gregor, Laqueur, Sternhell, Payne, Eatwell and others. This consensus views generic fascism as a phenomenon primarily of interwar Europe which constituted a particular genus of revolutionary mass politics, one of the most extreme forms of nationalism with an ideology of its own, developing a relatively unique public style which empha-

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

and the Radical Historical Fascism Right Payne:

IIIl

sized mass emotion and symbolic action, championing hierarchy and authoritarian politics, with a distinctive doctrine of political violence and war. Griffin is on firm ground in delineating the consensus which has developed among a good many of the specialists, so long as it is understood that this is a somewhat limited consensus which, like many other scholarly conclusions of the late twentieth century, does not necessarily dominate scholarly literature as a whole. Fascism remains the most protean and ubiquitous of pejoratives, and not merely because some supporters of NATO call Slobodan Milosevic a nazi, while many Serbs term Bill Clinton a fascist. General usage among ordinary scholars still varies considerably, and the ease with which any radical new nationalism or dictator is termed fascist indicates that the definitional vagueness will long persist. No scholar of the past generation made a greater contribution to the study of fascism than did George Mosse, and now all his principal articles on the topic have been collected in his first posthumous book-length publication, The Fascist Revolution. Mosse's contribution to the understanding of National Socialism and of fascism in general lay in three particular areas: ideology, cultural style and mass mobilization. He played a major role in laying bare the origins of national socialist doctrine in such works as The Crisis of German Ideology (1964), Nazi Culture (1966) and Toward the Final Solution (1978). He also helped to delineate the characteristics of fascist style in Italy, Germany and France in a series of articles, and, more significantly yet, presented one of the first convincing accounts of the revolutionary character of fascism which gave its participants a sense of liberation and a democracy of symbolic status, if not of social function - in The Nationalization of the Masses (1975) and Masses and Man (1980). The new book reprints all the key articles as they originally appeared, with the exception of 'Toward a General Theory of Fascism', which was revised for this presentation. The article does not provide a succinct definition of or thesis about fascism as does Griffin's work, but clearly delineates the features of fascism which made it distinctive and which must be confronted in order to analyse it accurately. Equally important is the article on 'Fascism and the French Revolution', which challenged the common conclusion that fascism was merely the antithesis of the latter. Though fascism negated the rationalism, liberalism and egalitarianism associated with core sectors of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Mosse argued convincingly that it inherited and employed key features of revolutionary Jacobinism. These included the emphasis on violent and authoritarian tactics, unified mass mobilization, the formation of new secular civic religion, a stress on symbolic action and the development of political festival, as well as 'the fascination with death and the use of martyrs, or the preoccupation with youth, beauty and war' (p. 72). In both revolutions the people learned to worship themselves as the nation. Though there were important differences between the two revolutions in attitudes toward race, history and equality, similarities would be found

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1 12

of Contemporary Journal HistoryVol 35 No I

... in more general principles. The political liturgy, the aesthetic of politics, forms the core of continuity between the two revolutions, together with the quest for totality and the either/or mentality as the spur to decisiveness in politics. Basic to all these links was the democratization of politics, the rule of the general will. ... (p. 83)

Indeed, to this analysis might be added still other features, such as the belief that the leadership did not represent the people but embodied them, and must be ever-vigilant to repress treason. Language was made an instrument of power with the introduction of modern revolutionary Newspeak, and a complete new network of signs came to dominate political life. Mosse's conclusion thus is not that the Jacobin and fascist revolutions were similar - they were in fundamental respects quite different - but that fascism derived much of its form and style, as well as certain of its values, from the French experience. Though in several studies he referred to fascism as a 'revolution of the right', it is clear that Mosse did not consider fascism merely part of 'the right' in the conventional sense. Rather, he viewed it as a revolutionary phenomenon of its own, warning a number of times against the fairly common tendency on the part of commentators to deny that fascism constituted a revolutionary force because of the prejudice that anything genuinely revolutionary must be 'of the left', or somehow 'progressive' in a left-liberal sense, or that a revolution must be conceived, at least in the abstract, as a 'good' revolution. None of these qualifications held for fascism, but Mosse insisted that fascism must be subjected to analysis that is initially value-free in the Weberian sense. There is no a priori reason why revolutions need be considered creative instead of destructive. The Mossean analysis thus fits fully within the parameters of the consensus as defined by Griffin. The new study by R.J.B. Bosworth, in contrast, focuses exclusively on Italy. It is the first full volume devoted to problems in the interpretation of Italian fascism to have appeared in any language other than Italian. Its structure is thematic, devoting chapters to the early interpretations down to 1959 and then to the ways in which major problems in the history of the Italian dictatorship have been treated by scholars. The leadership of Mussolini, foreign policy and racism, economic policy, Italian society and culture, and finally the Resistance and the Salo regime all receive attention. A final chapter discusses the ways in which Italian fascism has been treated in the general models of fascism. This yields a rich historiographic exercise which helps to illumine some of the principal disputes and intrepretive problems in the study of Italian fascism. Bosworth is generally sceptical of revisionist tendencies that have become prominent since the 1970s, which he judges to have been inadequately critical. He begins the book with a chapter which emphasizes the darkest aspects of the Italian dictatorship - the quasi-genocide in Libya, the extreme repression in Ethiopia and in Yugoslavia, and the eventual antisemitic programme, which finally led the Salo regime to assist actively in the Holocaust.

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Historical Fascism and the Radical Right Payne:

1 13

Bosworth's biggest target is Renzo De Felice, the dean of Italian fascistology and the most prolific historian of the dictatorship, whose multi-volume biography of Mussolini alone ran to nearly 6500 pages. While recognizing De Felice's enormous scholarly accomplishment and dedication, he faults the latter's work for an increasing tendency to give Mussolini the benefit of the doubt, which he suggests resulted in a sort of 'anti-antifascist' historiography. As befits a specialist in diplomatic history, Bosworth presents an adept discussion of fascist foreign relations, and criticizes revisionist historians for focusing overmuch on the second world war as the primary failure of the dictatorship. Similarly, while recognizing the limitations of the Italian resistance, he believes that the revisionists tend to exaggerate the character and extent of the civil war of 1943-5. Bosworth points out the manifold lacunae which remain in the copious bibliography on fascism, such as the limited number of case studies in key areas of politics and the absence of in-depth investigation of decision-making processes. He also notes the numerous gaps in social history, despite new studies that have appeared since the 1960s, and the absence of any attempt to provide a one-volume general social history of the period. Bosworth is not greatly impressed with the currently fashionable 'culturalist' approach, which he sees as overly concerned with aesthetics and artistic development. He credits Mosse, probably correctly, with being the father of the 'culturalist school', but it is important to keep in mind that the Mossean approach is rather different from that of many of the current practitioners. The latter often tend simply to study culture under fascist regimes, while Mosse used the study of culture to understand fascism. Bosworth offers no major new interpretation of his own but probes sometimes skilfully the models found in the existing literature. Like many critics, in some cases he does not seem to make a very vigorous effort to understand fully all the material which he criticizes. His most disconcerting quality is a tendency to attach political labels - 'anti-communist' is not so dire as 'anti-antifascist' - which result in an oversimplification of highly complex issues in terms of a misconstrued either/or. Withal, this is both a very useful guide to and a stimulating analysis of the principal literature on the Italian dictatorship, which can be read with profit not merely by students but by more specialized scholars as well. By comparison, the appearance in English of Michel Winock's collection of miscellaneous writings on personalities and themes in the history of French nationalism, antisemitism and fascism from Boulanger and the antiDreyfusards to de Gaulle, seems somewhat dated. The 24 different pieces in the book, ranging from full-length articles to very brief notes, first appeared during the 1970s and 1980s, and during the past two decades have in some cases been overtaken by the newest literature in French and English. These short studies are elegantly written and sometimes deal with significant problems. Though a good many of them can still be read with profit, they comprise a miscellany rather than an integrated study, and produce a certain

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

114

of Contemporary Journal HistoryVol 35 No I

amount of repetition. Compared with Mosse's probing of some of the classic themes and problems of fascism, their scope is inevitably more limited. The two essays 'Outlines of a French Fascism' and 'French-Style Fascism, or Fascism Nowhere to be Found' are both lucid and interesting, but no longer on the cutting edge. Winock does not clearly define his concept of fascism, which seems to be elastic. He does not distinguish between core fascist groups and the rightist leagues, but generally agrees with the older generation of sceptics like Rene Remond that fascism ultimately remained weak in France. Writing prior to the more recent works by William Irvine and Robert Soucy which have posited much greater substance to the fascist menace in France, Winock sharply criticizes such a parallel approach in Zeev Sternhell's Ni droite ni gauche for its tendency to reify and artificially systematize fascist cultural tendencies in France during the 1930s. Richard Griffiths's new book is quite a different exercise: one systematic case study based on exhaustive primary research, though the topic is a narrow one. Clearly and convincingly done, it makes a completely original contribution to the extensive bibliography on fascism and the radical right in interwar Britain, or at least the final phase thereof, focusing chronologically on the last months of peace and the first phase of the war. Its theme is not so much fascism as the extreme anti-antifascism of basically pro-German British rightists (people who in fact did take the position of which Bosworth somewhat hyperbolically accuses certain historians of adopting). Griffiths details how Captain Archibald Ramsay, first world war hero and respectable Conservative MP, became radicalized by the spectre of the Spanish Civil War and the increasing international tensions, which he blamed on the machinations of communists and Jews. Together with a small coterie of other rightists, he embraced a virulent and vociferous antisemitism and a strong stance of pro-German pacifism, even after war was declared. At that point most members of the newly-founded Right Club dropped out, but not Captain Ramsay, with the consequence that a sitting member of parliament spent nearly four years in detention without formal prosecution, until finally restored to his seat late in the war. This constitutes a nicely-told cautionary tale about a certain political tendency that was rather stronger in Britain in 1939 and the first months of 1940 than is usually remembered, and stronger yet in a good many other countries, France included. All the foregoing studies in varying ways demonstrate the continuing expansion of work on the fascist era, but since the Journal of Contemporary History published its founding number exactly a third of a century ago, the scope of contemporary history in general has broadened greatly. Perhaps the most important expansion has been the emergence of the entire postwar period as a major historical era in its own right. For this period there has developed an extensive new literature on what is called neo-fascism, though a great many of the publications are journalistic in character. Within this burgeoning bibliography the massive new two-volume work edited by Stein Ugelvik Larsen, totalling nearly 2000 pages, constitutes the most important contribution to the

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Historical Fascism and the Radical Payne: Right

115

field of what might be called 'post-fascist studies' - the investigation of the legacy and consequences of fascism after 1945, together with the new political movements inspired by fascism. There are seven lengthy sections, dealing with Germany, Austria, Italy, central and eastern Europe, neutral countries, formerly occupied west European countries, and finally a concluding section on Spain, Portugal and Greece, the lands of postwar rightist dictatorships. The contributions total no less than 63, and are heterogeneous and almost inevitably quite uneven. In many ways the best single chapter is the introductory piece by Juan J. Linz, with the burdensome title 'Fascism is dead. What legacy did it leave? Thoughts and questions on a problematic period of European history'. Page for page, it constitutes probably the best single discussion of the consequences and legacies of fascism, and of the profound changes which have discouraged its return. Each section endeavours to take up the same themes of consequences, defascistization and neo-fascism. There is considerable repetition in the larger sections and occasional redundancy, but there are also numerous chapters which present useful case studies of important problems. A few are highly technical and quantitative, such as Jurgen Falter's strong piece on continuities and discontinuities in West German voting behaviour between 1928 and 1953, but the bulk are more broadly interpretive. As is customary in a Larsen project, there is no clear definition of fascism, resulting sometimes in a sort of grab-bag approach, and the collection is sometimes weakened by lack of selectivity. Repetition is greatest in the large sections on Germany and Austria, while the one on Italy is perhaps the strongest overall, including chapters by, among others, Simona Colarizi, Franco Ferraresi, Leonardo Morlino and Leonard Weinberg. Despite the verbosity and repetition, there is much useful material here, even for the specialist. Though its author did not participate in the Larsen project, the best fulllength case study of any neo-fascist or post-fascist movement is Piero Ignazi's excellent account of the Movimento Sociale Italiano, which has been reissued nine years after its original publication in 1989. The main text is unaltered, though there is a new preface and, more importantly, a lengthy new concluding chapter on the transformation of the MSI into the Alleanza Nazionale. This lucid, objective, well-researched and sensitive account of the only semi-successful post-fascist party consists of two parts, a first section of 250 pages on the history of the party, and a second analytical section which deals with morphology, organization, leadership and voter and membership base. The latter contains a few surprises, for, if the general perception that the membership was more southern than northern is correct, Ignazi reveals that it was not merely an aggregation of elderly nostalgists and youthful fanatics but in fact was well represented in the mature active age groups, with 31 per cent of the members in the late 1970s between 36 and 45 years of age. The membership has also had considerable exposure to university studies and counts a large minority of activists (between 26 and 28 per cent) from the pro-

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

116

of Contemporary Journal HistoryVol 35 No I

fessions. Altogether this is a fine history and analysis of a fringe movement which has enjoyed unusual duration. The reader does, however, miss a comparative discussion of why a movement of this sort achieved greater success in Italy than did any other of its type elsewhere in Europe, though Ignazi's highly informative treatment does give us many of the components of the answer. The works by Casals i Meseguer, Kaplan and Weinberg, and Rodriguez Jimenez deal more broadly with fascist and right radical groups in the later twentieth century. Of the three, Rodriguez Jimenez presents the most wideranging treatment, surveying such phenomena in Europe and the USA for the entire postwar era to the 1990s. It is the broadest account to appear in Spanish and one of the most comprehensive in any language. A useful general survey, it does not, however, present much in the way of new data or interpretations. Casals i Meseguer examines neo-fascism and the radical right in Spain during the transition to democracy. He shows that the only serious threat did not come from these groups but from the abortive military revolt of 1981, which in turn had little to do with them. Casals highlights the mimetic and hopelessly nostalgic character of such groups in Spain, beginning with Fuerza Nueva, the would-be Spanish equivalent of the MSI, which, however, virtually collapsed after five years of competitive electioneering. He notes that such organizations had little appeal in a modern, educated, materialist and democratic society. This nonetheless raises the question, given the relative staying power of the MSI, of what factors account for the differences between the movements in two countries which more nearly resemble each other than do any other pair of large European states. Modernization alone does not provide the answer, for it is doubtful that Italy is more retrograde than Spain. Despite the discrediting of Italian nationalism by fascism, there has probably been a greater nationalist residue in Italy than in Spain, and the fact that fascism was overthrown because of foreign war rather than internal decay may also have been a factor. A third may have to do with timing. The MSI sank its roots immediately after the war when indeed Italy had been transformed rather less than the Spain of 1975. Finally, its leadership - whatever the shortcomings - was rather more adroit than that of the post-Franco radical right in creating a post-fascist style and programme that could consistently attract at least a certain number of votes. The strength of the volume by Kaplan and Weinberg lies in analytical and conceptual originality, though it presents some new data as well. It does not attempt the comprehensiveness of Rodriguez Jimenez's book, but is the first scholarly account to focus on transatlantic interconnections and parallels. Though some of the groups with which Kaplan and Weinberg deal are clearly neo-fascists or neo-nazis, they prefer to use the general rubric of the radical right, the term developed in the USA during the 1950s and almost immediately adopted in West Germany, which, together with Italy, hosted the greatest assortment of such phenomena. They argue convincingly that neo-fascist sensu strictu would apply only to minuscule fringe groups lacking significance, while

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Fascism and the Radical Historical Payne: Right

117

the new rightist nationalist parties in Europe have adjusted to the parliamentary milieu. They do not echo fascist principles per se nor in some cases do they give any evidence of seeking to establish new authoritarian regimes, as distinct from enacting strongly nationalist policies within the present system. Thus they draw the distinction between ERPs (extreme right parties) and ERGs (extreme right groups), the former having become much more moderate in order to compete in an electoral milieu. Some of the tiny American ERGs, furthermore, go to the opposite extreme from historical fascism in an archaically American pattern of seeking to limit radically or negate the power of the central government in favour of local communalism - a sort of libertarian anarchism of the right. They also point out that the use by the Anti-Defamation League and Klanwatch of the term 'hate group' is not very helpful, since the latter surveys universally ignore leftist hate groups. Thus the authors opted for radical right as the most accurate and inclusive term for a wide variety of nationalist and/or racist extremist groups, some of which, for that matter, do not bear comparison with the most radical extremists historically or some of those in contemporary eastern Europe and the underdeveloped world. Kaplan and Weinberg survey what there was of imitative American fascism during the 1930s, but are concerned primarily with the development of partially interconnected transatlantic doctrines and groups in recent decades. This has been made possible, they argue, by tendencies toward convergence and interdependence in the later twentieth century, by the expansion of communications, the appeal of broader racial and cultural identities in reaction to common trends, and also to the emergence of a new style of ideological and partially commercial entrepreneur capable of exploiting late twentieth-century opportunities and techniques in a manner different from a classic fiihrer or duce. They note that ERGs in the USA face fewer legal barriersthan is the case in western Europe, that the role of religion is much more important (non-Christian American ERGs even develop novel religions of their own, such as Odinism, Cosmotheism and the Church of the Creator), and that the most extreme are virtually at war with their own government, to an extent even greater than that of their west European counterparts. A common feature of extreme-right groups, and to a lesser extent of parties, on both sides of the Atlantic is extreme opposition, often amounting to condign hatred, directed against the USA as presently constituted. Virtually all of the most virulent ERGs are, in one form or another, veritable nazi-worshippers, with intense racism a common denominator. Surveying the electorally competitive ERPs, Kaplan and Weinberg find that their average cumulative vote in individual west European countries has been generally about the same in the later twentieth century as during the 1920s and 1930s - a general average of about 5 per cent. The big difference has been the absence of a broad systemic crisis such as the Great Depression. During the later twentieth century, the ERP vote has been distinctly greater in more advanced countries like France, Italy and Austria as compared with the

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

118

of Contemporary Journal HistoryVol 35 No I

newer, less-developed democracies of Spain, Greece and Portugal, while the largest total number of fringe ERGs will be found in Germany and Italy (and also at times in Belgium). They draw on the research of Herbert Kitschelt which indicates that the strongest voting support has been provided by small businessmen and blue-collar workers. Overall, neo-fascism and the radical right present a difficult challenge to any precise taxonomy because of what Roger Griffin termed in 1991 their 'organizational complexity and ideological heterogeneity'. A possible taxonomy might distinguish between 1) the less radical of the ERPs, which generally accept the parliamentary system; 2) more authoritarian or radical ERPs, such as the old MSI, which originally sought a new system, even if more post-fascist than neo-fascist; 3) the distinctly neo-fascist or neo-nazi ERGs; 4) politically primitive ERGs that rely primarily on racial supremacy and/or bizarre religious ideas, mainly but not exclusively in the USA; 5) other equally primitive ERGs which in a few cases are not intensely racist or nazi-worshipping; and 6) populist reform groups which are misclassified as ERPs, though often indiscriminately lumped together with the latter. Though they may resemble the less radical parliamentary ERPs, they advocate individualist reforms which would lower taxes and limit the state, and are identified with the radical right primarily because of their novelty and certain basic policy challenges to the system. Whatever the appropriate distinctions, neo-fascist doctrine and radical-right political mobilization have constituted a permanent fringe sector of politics throughout the later twentieth century, as specialists in this area always remind us. There is every indication that they will continue to draw the attention of journalists and scholars during the early twenty-first century. A future focus for comparative research, however, may wish to concentrate more on eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia for the most important functional analogues, even though the latter will not be likely to possess all the distinguishing characteristics of historical fascism.

Stanley Payne is Hilldale-Jaume Vicens Vives Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madision. His latest book is Fascism in Spain: Falange Espahola, 1923-1977 (1999).

This content downloaded from 129.93.16.3 on Mon, 7 Oct 2013 18:56:09 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions