ABSTRACT
The reactive nationalist regimes that emerged as a response to the real or fancied impostures of foreign penetration gave shape and substance to the history of the twentieth century. National Socialist Germany featured all the overt traits of reactive and developmental nationalism. Its seeming nationalism was aggressive and revanchist, its economic system specifically geared for conflict with the “plutocracies.” In central, eastern, and southern Europe reactive nationalist movements made their appearance. In East Asia, developmental nationalist impulses coalesced around revolutionary intellectuals. A commitment to an imposing military, with all its uniforms and aggressive posturing, became traits common to virtually all “redemptive,” “palingenetic” nationalisms. The consequence has been the emergence of an antidemocratic, nationalistic, developmental, irredentist, militaristic, and redemptive political movement that identifies itself as “communist” but features all the properties of reactive nationalism. For Fascist theoreticians, “reactive and developmental nationalism” constituted a family or a genus of political systems featured in the modern world.
