The origins of fascism lay in a promise to protect people. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a rush of globalisation destroyed communities, professions and cultural norms while generating a wave of immigration. Right-wing nationalist movements promising to protect people from the pernicious influence of foreigners and markets arose, and frightened, disoriented and displaced people responded. These early fascist movements disrupted political life in some countries, but they percolated along at a relatively low simmer until the Second World War. [...]
These appeals enabled the fascists to garner support from almost all socioeconomic groups. Italy was a young country (formed in the 1860s), plagued by deep regional and social divisions. By claiming to serve the best interests of the entire national community, it was in fact the fascists who became Italy’s first true ‘people’s party’.
After coming to power, the Italian fascists created recreational circles, student and youth groups, sports and excursion activities. These organisations all furthered the fascists’ goals of fostering a truly national community. The desire to strengthen (a fascist) national identity also compelled the regime to extraordinary cultural measures. They promoted striking public architecture, art exhibitions, and film and radio productions. The regime intervened extensively in the economy. As one fascist put it: ‘There cannot be any single economic interests which are above the general economic interests of the state, no individual, economic initiatives which do not fall under the supervision and regulation of the state, no relationships of the various classes of the nation which are not the concern of the state.’ Such policies kept fascism popular until the late 1930s, when Mussolini threw his lot in with Hitler. It was only the country’s involvement in the Second World War, and the Italian regime’s turn to a more overtly ‘racialist’ understanding of fascism, that began to make Italian fascism unpopular. [...]
Nazi Germany remained capitalist. But it had also undertaken state intervention in the economy unprecedented in capitalist societies. The Nazis also supported an extensive welfare state (of course, for ‘ethnically pure’ Germans). It included free higher education, family and child support, pensions, health insurance and an array of publically supported entertainment and vacation options. All spheres of life, economy included, had to be subordinated to the ‘national interest’ (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz), and the fascist commitment to foster social equality and mobility. Radical meritocratic reforms are not usually thought of as signature Nazi measures, but, as Hitler once noted, the Third Reich has ‘opened the way for every qualified individual – whatever his origins – to reach the top if he is qualified, dynamic, industrious and resolute’.
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