Fascism: A History.

• Author: Greenfeld, Liah

Three secular political creeds have claimed the souls and loyalties of men in the twentieth century: liberalism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism has been identified with capitalism, which communism rejected, while fascism could be and has been characterized as both capitalist and anti-capitalist. Communism equated capitalism (and therefore liberalism) with fascism; fascism defined itself in opposition to both liberalism and communism; and liberalism fought each of the other two in turn, sharing its victory over fascism with the Soviet communists in 1945, and forty-five years later watching Soviet communism expire of natural causes, perhaps aided somewhat by the exertions of the Cold War. But just as the collapse of the Soviet empire has not meant that communism is dead and buried, neither did the defeat and partition of Nazi Germany spell the end of fascism.

At the end of the twentieth century, liberalism again faces a hostile and frightening world. It is frightening, among other things, because we (those who uphold the virtues of liberalism, that is) are unsure of the nature of the enemy. The enemy we knew so well is disabled, and so we feel that the threat must come from another direction. Feeling secure on the Left flank, we naturally turn our attention to the Right. This explains the renewed interest in fascism.

Walter Laqueur's Fascism: Past, Present, Future and Roger Eatwell's Fascism: A History are two recent additions to the growing literature that testifies to this interest. Both books make fascinating reading. Laqueur's Fascism is a sweeping overview of the two paradigmatic cases of "historical fascism", fascist Italy and Nazi Germany; of movements that identify themselves as neo-fascist around Western Europe; of extreme Right movements and recent Right-Left "post-fascist" alliances in Russia and Eastern Europe; and of "clerical fascism" - Islamic fundamentalism in particular in the Third World. Eatwell's Fascism tells the story of fascism in four countries: Italy, Germany, France, and Britain. It traces Italian fascism from its birth in the wake of the First World War to near-death experience in the Second World War to mature respectability today, and it follows Nazism and its posterity from Hitler's Munich days to post-reunification, French "Third Way" movements from Action francaise to Le Pen, and British "fascist" eccentrics on the "one-man-and-his-dog" fringe of British politics from Oswald Mosley in the 1930s to the present.

While both books are histories, the authors are preoccupied with the present and worry about the future. "Fascism . . . is making a comeback", asserts Laqueur. "There ought to be awareness that a threat still exists and that it might be premature to dispose with the injunction in the Bible calling for sobriety and vigilance." Eatwell insists that "Fascism is on the move once more." The central concern of both authors, clearly, is the ongoing ideological conflict, that between liberalism and its enemies. But is the focus on fascism really the best way to get to the heart of this conflict?

Both Laqueur and Eatwell recognize that the danger presented by contemporary anti-liberalism is not exactly like "historical fascism", though it is strikingly similar to it in many respects. It is questionable whether this late twentieth-century reincarnation may properly be called "fascism" at all. Raising this question, however, presupposes that the term "fascism" corresponds to a certain, clearly demarcated phenomenon lending itself to rigorous definition. But neither author makes that assumption. Both concede, in Laqueur's words, "the impossibility of defining fascism precisely" and struggle with the problem this creates for meaningful analysis.

Laqueur proposes a "fascist minimum" that includes "the common belief in nationalism, hierarchical structures, and the 'leader principle.'" In itself such a minimum is not objectionable: but it is difficult to see, for example, how it translates into such obviously odious (from the liberal point of view) qualities as contempt for the values of liberal democracy and aggressive hostility toward societies identified with it; resentment of the West, with anti-Americanism as today's concrete expression; and, most importantly, widespread use of violence and ethnic intolerance, or "biological racialism", often but not always expressed most dramatically as anti-Semitism. For his part, Eatwell stresses the elusive quality of an ideology that in its first incarnations "drew from both the right and the left, seeking to create a radical 'Third Way' which was neither capitalist nor communist." In his view, the core of this ideology was the "attempt to create a holistic-national radical Third Way" [emphasis in original here and throughout].

The impossibility of clearly distinguishing fascism, commonly identified with the extreme Right, from its sworn communist enemy on the extreme Left, presents a major obstacle to definition, and therefore to understanding. Throughout his discussion of "historical fascisms" in Italy and Germany, Laqueur draws comparisons between them and the Stalinist Soviet Union, suggesting that for every characteristic of Nazi...