‘Classic’ Fascism and the New Radical Right in Western Europe: Comparisons and Contrasts

Abstract

Ever since the end of the Second World War, the connection between the horrors of the ‘classic’ fascism of the interwar years and contemporary movements of the European radical right has seemed obvious. In the later 1940s and 1950s any extreme nationalist groups were naturally identified as neo-fascist or proto-Nazi, not least because they harboured so many old henchmen of the fascist regimes. But even today, news of violent acts or electoral successes of radical right organisations in Europe raise the spectre of fascism in the minds of observers everywhere. There is hardly a popular or scholarly article that does not refer to this link at least indirectly, above all in analyses of German politics. Thus one German weekly, in a report on nationalist activities in the new easternLänder, asked forebodingly: ‘Is the ex-GDR sinking into a brown [Nazi] morass? Is the SA marching again, is the Fourth Reich imminent?’2A recent scholarly article on the GermanRepublikanermade the same obligatory references in a more veiled manner: ‘Against the background of the course of twentieth-century European history, right-wing radical tendencies any where in Europe warrant special attention.’3No doubt, this will hold true for decades to come. The link of all present-day right-wing movements with the interwar years remains inescapable. The catastrophes associated with fascism are the kind of historical experience that shapes the political consciousness of several generations. Both for the adherents of extreme nationalism and for their enemies, interwar fascism thus provides a basic paradigm through which contemporary rightist groups are defined or define themselves.