ABSTRACT
Between the two world wars, there emerged in most European countries political movements embracing a distinctive combination of ideas, myths and goals to which we may conveniently apply the label ‘fascist’: a term invented in Italy and widely adopted over the years that followed. Those ideas were self-consciously ‘revolutionary’ in a sense very different from that understood by the revolutionary left, involving variable combinations of ultra-nationalism, authoritarianism or even totalitarianism, corporativism, belief in a new, ‘purified’ political and cultural order, and acceptance of a ‘leadership principle’. In a few countries – Italy, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania – such movements achieved genuine mass support and political potency, yet only in the first two did they actually win political power in what might be termed ‘normal’, that is to say peacetime, conditions. Even in these cases they did so with the collusion of conservative elites at a time when their success was anything but inevitable. Elsewhere, the Austro-Nazis achieved what little power they were permitted only in the wake of what amounted to German annexation; the Hungarian national-socialist Arrow Cross and the Romanian Iron Guard grasped power only in wartime conditions, as did the much weaker Croatian Ustaša and the assorted fascists and nazis of France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Norway. Even the Spanish Falange, which in some senses might be considered the third most successful European fascist movement, blossomed only amid the peculiar conditions of civil war, won a share of power only as the lackey of Franco's military-conservative dictatorship, and never in the course of thirty-eight years came close to exercising that power independently.
