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24.07.2006 17:20 Cyprian Blamires. Review of “Fascism Past and Present, West and East” Roger Griffin, Werner Loh and Andreas Umland, Eds. Fascism Past and Present, West and East: An international debate on concepts and cases in the comparative study of the extreme right. With an afterword by Walter Laqueur. Stuttgart: Ibidem-Verlag, 2006 (=Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society 35). 510 pp. EUR 34.90, paperback. ISBN: 3-89821-674-8 A most remarkable event: an English scholar, native of an island legendary for its insularity and for its tenacious suspicion of all things Continental and ‘foreign’ dares to issue a challenge to his German counterparts to lay aside their inward-looking preoccupations and enter an ongoing global debate! The English scholar, Roger Griffin, is an Oxford-based specialist in the topic of global (or ‘generic’) fascist studies, and his target is German academia's allegedly insular refusal to take seriously the seething mass of new ideas and new approaches to global fascism which has emerged in the Anglo-American world of scholarship over the last forty years. Werner Loh, editor of ‘Erwägen Wissen Ethik’ (EWE) took up the challenge to move this conflict forward by creating a forum for debate between the two sides, while Russian studies specialist Andreas Umland has now attempted to widen it even further by republishing the material from EWE in a book series directed at an academic audience studying Eastern Europe. The focus of discussion in this book is the particular theory of generic fascism propounded by Griffin, which he expounds in the opening chapter. The rest of the first half of the volume comprises the critical responses of a large number of scholars including his own Anglo-American colleagues as well as quite a number of German specialists. In the second half of the work Griffin is given a chance to respond to the numerous critiques of his approach and then the other contributors also exercise their right of reply to his response. He then rounds the book off with a final response to their critiques. An appendix at the end contains a different but related debate between A. James Gregor and Andreas Umland on the question of whether the Russian nationalist Aleksandr Dugin can be classed as a ‘fascist’. Further contributors to the book are: David Baker, Warwick; Jeffrey M. Bale, Monterey; Tamir Bar-On, Toronto; Alexander De Grand, North Carolina; Martin Durham, Wolverhampton; Roger Eatwell, Bath; Peter Fritzsche, Urbana-Champaign; Siegfried Jäger, Duisburg-Essen; Klaus Holz, Villigst; Aristotle Kallis, Lancaster; Melitta Konopka, Bochum; Bärbel Meurer, Osnabrück; Philip Morgan, Hull; Ernst Nolte, Berlin; Kevin Passmore, Cardiff; Stanley G. Payne, Madison; Friedrich Pohlmann, Freiburg; Karin Priester, Münster; Alfred Schobert, Duisburg; Sven Reichardt, Konstanz; David D. Roberts, Georgia; Robert J. Soucy, Oberlin; Mario Sznajder, Jerusalem; Leonard Weinberg, Nevada; Jan Weyand, Erlangen-Nürnberg; Wolfgang Wippermann, Berlin. This then is quite an unusual book. We are all familiar with conference proceedings in which a large number of contributors look at different aspects of the same theme; we are familiar with Festschrifts in which the colleagues of a particular eminent individual contribute chapters on the basis of their own speciality; but this is something different. A volume in which many contributors home in on a particular theory of one scholar and express their approval or disapproval of it. And it has to be said that the sparks really do fly. What is at stake is the view of generic fascism which Griffin has been promoting tirelessly over the past fifteen years. He advocates - as a heuristic tool, not an absolute truth - a description of fascism as revolutionary palingenetic hypernationalism, i.e. a call for the ‘rebirth’ of a decadent (real or ideal) ‘nation’ through violent revolution. He claims that these core elements of fascism can be found in the regimes of both Mussolini and Hitler, so that Nazism was not to do with some Sonderweg followed by Germany but was simply the German version of an idea that transcended German culture. Griffin does not recognize any other regimes (such as Francoist Spain) as properly fascist, only a limited number of political movements in various countries both before the War and after it. He argues that fascism did not disappear in 1945 but simply mutated into a fragmented and largely leaderless movement competing for propaganda space in far less visible ways than the mass movements of the thirties. The responses in this book to Griffin's ideas range from the adulatory to the vituperative. Some of the Anglophone scholars are very positive about his theory, especially Stanley Payne, one of the grey eminences of postwar fascist studies. Others are not at all convinced, in particular A. James Gregor, a specialist in Italian fascist thought. The ire of Gregor and of several others is aroused by Griffin's rather cheeky claim that ‘a new consensus’ has emerged in anglophone fascist studies which supports some or all of his arguments. This claim is clearly rather propagandistic and the substance behind it seemingly amounts to no more than the coexistence of a number of sympathizers. Gregor's splenetic denial of this consensus does look rather ostrich-like given that several Anglophone contributors to the volume do in actual fact openly express a greater or lesser degree of support for Griffin's theses. There is more than enough material in this volume to satisfy an Anglophone readership, but the German responses are in German so this will deter some. Generally speaking Griffin's arguments seem to make the German scholars angry, and in one case - that of Friedrich Pohlmann - spitting with rage. They seem very tied to the ‘totalitarianism’ thesis according to which the interwar dictatorships of Left and Right were simply different specimens of a new phenomenon of totalising power. Griffin would probably not deny that interwar fascisms can legitimately be studied in this context, but it rather misses his point, which is to consider in what way the far right dictatorships - for all their admitted similarities to those on the Left - were in fact different from them, and then to ask whether, within the far right dictatorships themselves, a particularly ‘fascist’ core of ideas can be identified. Fortunately the calm voice of Sven Reichardt restores some balance, he has clearly grasped the point of the ‘generic fascism’ approach even though he has criticisms of his own. It is greatly to be hoped that this pioneering book will do something to coax German scholars of Nazism out into a more international arena. Cyprian P. Blamires, Ph.D., is a freelance scholar, editor, writer, and translator based in the United Kingdom. He is co-editor, within OUP's series ‘The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham,’ of ‘Political Tactics’ (1999) and ‘Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense Upon Stilts and Other Writings on the French Revolution’ (2002), as well as editor of ‘World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia’ (2 vols., ABC-CLIO 2006). |