The Main Features of Fascist Political Thought - Research Paper Example

Outline and discuss the main features of fascist political thought Ideology provides the basis for political movements and has had an impressive role in the existence of political discourse in modern history. How important is ideology in politics? John Rawls argued that people are atomistic individuals with varying ideas, affiliations and goals. Political theories and ideology help channel people’s perceptions and ideas and provide a conceptual framework for political action. Accordingly, politics cannot genuinely exist with ideology and vice-versa. Seeking to explore the importance that fascist ideology has played in 20th century politics, this essay will address this important political movement by exploring fascism in the Italian context. An astute critic of the fascist political doctrine, renowned political historian Eric Hobsbawn, once asked the question, “Was not the proverbial argument in favor of fascist Italy that 'Mussolini made the trains run on time?”1. Significantly, fascism was a political ideology which was far more complex than this prominent British historian suggests. With the aim of exploring the main features of this political movement though an in-depth case study, this essay aims to be holistic in scope. The following now turns to an analysis of fascism in Italy and will explore the main features of fascist political thought. Fascism in Context: Italy An authoritarian political movement which evolved during the early half of the twentieth century, fascism was the dominant political ideology in Italy for more than two decades. Championed by the ever charismatic torchbearer of this new and increasingly powerful political movement, Benito Mussolini brought fascism to the forefront of Italian politics by tapping into widespread social discontent following World War I. This following will explore the fascist movement and look at the factors which led to its emergence in Italy during the 1920s. The March on Rome was a significant event which effectively legitimized the fascist doctrine with dramatic domestic as well as international ramifications. Once in power, an analysis of transformation of Italian society sought by the fascist government will be followed by an overview of how these changes impacted the lives of regular Italians. Finally, overseas expansion and the geopolitical role of Italy under the regime of Benito Mussolini will be discussed in depth.2 Arguably the most important political movement to grow out of Italy in the twentieth century, fascism arose in response to a variety of domestic and international factors following World War I. Fascism can be defined as a militant political movement which promoted a unique mixture of ideology and organization in an attempt to create a “new type of civilization”3. Italian fascism advanced an ideology of extreme nationalism, secular idealism and national rejuvenation. From a tactical and organizational standpoint, this movement employed the use of violence to achieve its aims and rejected parliamentary democracy. Additionally, it drew upon corporatist ideas of harmony through hierarchy and advocated national efficiency. Revolutionary in nature, it sought to transform and renew Italian society though a rejection of egalitarianism and by embracing rigid hierarchical classifications. Created in opposition to socialism, communism, liberal democracy and the egalitarianism espoused by preceding political movements, fascists found fertile ground for their movement in Italy after World War I.4 Dissatisfaction on a variety of fronts paved the way for the emergence of the fascist political movement in Italy. From a foreign policy standpoint, many Italians were dissatisfied with the results of the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, a peace treaty which ended the Great War and imposed a negotiated solution on the warring parties. Italians were particularly upset with the decision by the Conference to severe the city of Fiume from Italy proper. An irredentist challenged ensued with WWI veteran Gabriele d'Annunzio eventually declaring independence and the Italian Regency of Carnaro. This city now rests within Croatia but the forced annexation of Fiume was seen as an affront to Italian pride following their important contributions to the Allies during World War I.5 Another international impetus for the rise of fascism in Italy was the so-called “Red Menace”, the communist threat to the current political order and the revolutionary appeal of international communism. The fear of communist revolution played into the hands of early fascists who were vocal in their dislike of communism and their rejection of its emphasis on class struggle. Importantly, the Red Menace was also a particular important domestic antecedent for the rise of fascism in Italy.6 As mentioned above, a rejection of class cleavages and the divisive class ideology of communism gave fascism wide appeal among members of the upper strata of Italian society. A heavily patrimonial society with deep social and economic divisions, Italy was beset by strong social cleavages. Fascism was able to appeal to the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie as well as the working classes in its appeal to a strong and unified Italy. 7 Recent Italian unification as well as the existence of regional cleavages – between northern Italy and southern Italy – played an important role in the growth of fascism. As an ideology, fascism promoted a strong and united Italy and nationalism was an inherent component of the movement. Conflict between church and state and divisions between north and south as well as rich and poor were discounted as being less important than the promotion of Italian pride and a return to Italy’s great Roman past. As a result, the fascist doctrine served to unify all peoples of Italy.8 Finally, economic crisis following the end of World War I propelled the fascist movement to the center of the Italian political stage. Following World War I, Italy was beset by massive inflation, large-scale unemployment and the inability to reintegrate its soldiers into society.9 This was coupled with weak political institutions and the inability of the liberal democratic regime to solve economic woes afflicting Italians in the post-War period. Social unrest followed and Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts stepped in during this period to bring law and order to Italy.10 The first fascist government officially came to power in Italy on October 29th, 1922 when King Victor Emmanuel III declared Benito Mussolini the new Prime Minister and asked him to form a government. This followed the March on Rome, a two-day long event featuring Benito Mussolini and his fascist Blackshirts, marching towards the Italian capital of Rome. Technically a coup d’état, this event, which began on October 27th ,1922, culminated a day later when up to 40,000 men marched on Rome as part of a display of fascist force. The day before the fascists officially assumed power in Italy, the government attempted to use force to quell the marchers and suppress the fascist marchers. Although the government at the time sought the power to suppress the march, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to support a decree of martial law and fearing civil war, effectively caved into the impressive show of force put forth by the fascists during their March on Rome. The following day, the King asked Benito Mussolini to form a government and appointed him prime minister. Although fascism later claimed revolutionary credentials, at the time that it came to power, it did so through purely constitutional means following established norms dating back to the Statuto Albertino.11 Italian fascists sought a complete transformation of Italy society. Under the watchful eye of Benito Mussolini, the regime embarked upon a revolutionary overhaul of society. Seeking to “destroy the old Italy of decadent liberalism and democracy”12, fascism fought to transform the country and give birth to a nation which was “young, virile and new”13: a sharp contrast from the society that it set out to replace. Cultural nationalism was an important component of this transformation and culture became an instrument of the state. 14 Actively promoted as an important tenant of the movement, cultural nationalism took many forms and served to give the new revolutionary culture a sense of authenticity. Accordingly, Fascism, like similar movements elsewhere in Europe, sought to give its ideology legitimacy by claiming that its origins lay in an ancient and more glorious national past. The ethos of the Italic race and the traditions of ancient Rome, evoked in the mysticism and ritual surrounding much of fascist public display, provided the regime with the national roots of official culture. It never claimed that history began with fascism, but that fascism was the fulfillment and rebirth of the true spirit and soul of the Italic race, which had found its first and greatest expression in Imperial Rome.15 Importantly, cultural nationalism during the late 1920s also involved the rejection of foreign influences on Italian life. Restrictions were thus placed upon various forms of foreign media. Censorship was enforced while foreign newspapers, films, magazines, and even music were withdrawn from circulation. Popular American culture, in particular aspects of twentieth-century American culture which glorified the liberal democracy tradition of continental Europe as well as the United States, disappeared in Italy during this period. Accordingly, cultural self-sufficiency was promoted while prohibitions were put in place on things like beauty contests, seen as “expressions of foreign decadence” and the removal of foreign words such as “bar” and “soda parlor” from storefronts and shop windows.16 Seeking to impose fascist ideals on Italian society, Mussolini’s cultural revolution sought the complete overhaul of Italy through the rejection of foreign influence and the promotion of national myths to encourage a return to Italy’s once glorious past. The fascist government of Benito Mussolini also enacted important changes to the lives of Italians. Although rejecting the class struggle of Bolshevism, Mussolini maintained the stratified nature of Italian society and actually exacerbated it through the implementation of state-corporatist policies which favored business at the expense of workers. Accordingly, workers suffered as trade unions were progressively abolished and minimum wage protections were lost.17 Women were initially promoted as important actors within the fascist movement but were quickly appropriated and used to further the ideological aims of fascism. Far from emancipating women, fascism actually embodied a sense of conservativism with regards to the role of women and gender in Italian society.18 Public works projects were highly publicized and were implemented in an attempt to promote Italian self-sufficiency and economic growth. Many of these initiatives though favored the north, the traditional home of the fascist movement. Arguably Mussolini’s most popular achievement was the Lateran Treaty between the Catholic Church and the government of Italy, effectively granting the Vatican statehood and formal political independence. A popular initiative in heavily Catholic Italy, this treaty was welcome by Italians of all stripes.19 Demographics played an important role in Italy’s decision to turn to overseas expansion in an effort to increase its power. Seeing demographic decline as a threat to his state-building project, Benito Mussolini argued that “democratic potency”20 was the key ingredient to national pride and Italy’s return to great power status. Threatened by the French and British global colonial empires, Mussolini saw the 40 million strong Italian nation as inherently vulnerable if it did not grow exponentially. Along this line of thought he emphatically stated, “If we diminish in numbers, gentlemen, we will not found an empire, we will [instead] become a colony."21 Italy was a latecomer in the so-called “scramble for Africa” and was not particularly adept as an imperial power. Seeking to avenge its loss in the Battle of Adowa, Ethiopia many years ago, Italian possessions included Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea and Libya, a territory both geographically and politically important for the fascist government. Albania was also annexed as a protectorate and King Victor Emmanuel was made King of Albania in 1939. Massive immigration to these new territories was promoted and Italy entered World War II with the expectation that it would acquire new lands and compete with the French and British as an imperial power. Unfortunately for Italian imperialists, their loss in World War II lend to the dissolution of the Italian colonial experiment, which ended in 1949.22 Concluding Remarks Fascism was the dominant political movement and ideology of Italy for more than two decades. This authoritarian political movement evolved during a period of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo following the end of World War I. Imbued with a sense of intense nationalism and inherently militaristic, fascism became a force to be reckoned with following Benito Mussolini’s March on Rome. His coup d’état allowed the movement to engage in a complete and revolutionary transformation of Italian society along national and cultural lines. Furthermore, fascist Italy sought a greater geopolitical role for the country and secured overseas colonies in an attempt to recreate the great Roman past which formed an important part of its nationalist myth. Finally, World War II spelled the end of Fascism in Italy as well as its colonial enterprise. The main features of fascist political thought were the subservient status of the individual to the state, a strong sense of cultural nationalism, which turned to xenophobia at times, and a desire to transform Italian society through state-corporatism. Accordingly, this fascist experiment in Italy remains one of the most important attempts of implementing fascism in practice in the twentieth-century.23 Bibliography Berezin, Mabel, “The Organization of Political Ideology: Culture, State, and Theater in Fascist Italy”, American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 5, 1991, pp. 639-651. Brustein, William, “The "Red Menace" and the Rise of Italian Fascism, American Sociological Review, Vol. 56, No. 5,1991, pp. 652-664. Cannistraro, Philip V., “Mussolini's Cultural Revolution: Fascist or Nationalist?”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 7, No.3/4, 1972; 7; pp. 115-139. Cirillo, Nancy R., “D'annunzio's poem of aggression: The constitution of the regency at Fiume”, The European Legacy, 1997, pp. 1185-1207. Hobsbawm, Eric, Nations and Nationalism Since 1789, Cambridge: Canto, 1990. de Grazia, Victoria, How Fascism Ruled Women in Italy, 1922-1945, Berkley, University of California Press, 1992. Griffin, Roger, Fascism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Keserich, Charles, “The Fiftieth Year of the "March on Rome": Recent Interpretations of Fascism”, The History Teacher, Vol. 6, No. 1, 1972, pp. 135-142. Labanca, Nicola, “Colonial rule, colonial repression and war crimes in the Italian colonies”, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, Vol. 9, No. 3, 2002, pp. 300 — 313. MacGregor, Knox, “Conquest, Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany”, The Journal of Modern History, Vol. 56, No. 1, 1984, pp. 2-57. Neocleous, Mark, Fascism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997. Schmidt, Carl T, The Corporate State in Action: Italy Under Fascism, New York, Read Books, 2007. Strang, Bruce, “Imperial Dreams: The Mussolini-Laval Accords of January 1935”, The Historical Journal, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2001, pp. 799-809. Szymanski, Albert, “Fascism, Industrialism and Socialism: The Case of Italy”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1973, pp. 395-404. Wellhofer, E. Spencer, “Democracy and Fascism: Class, Civil Society, and Rational Choice in Italy”, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 97, No. 1, 2003, pp. 91-106. Woolf, S. J., “Mussolini as Revolutionary”, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1966, pp. 187-196. Read More