ABSTRACT
This chapter is a political biography of R. Erik Serlachius (1901–1980), a Swedish-speaking Finnish paper, pulp and timber industrialist, influencer, and politician on the political right. My aim is to sketch out the contours of his political development and thinking to illuminate the many reasons that the interwar authoritarian or fascist movements and their revolutionary visions of society might have been found appealing. The central argument is that Serlachius was never committed to fascism as such. He was never a member of any discernibly fascist organisation, and his correspondence betrays no recognisably fascist terminology or ideas. Yet he, like many of his contemporary captains of industry, particularly during the interwar era, went demonstrably further in their practical policies – cooperating with fascist and authoritarian movements – mainly in an attempt to solve longstanding problems arising from employer-employee relations and job market conflicts. The chapter analyses the phenomenon of the fellow traveller by exploring the trajectory of a single individual. It is a detailed look into the mechanisms that produced the vital wider support for interwar fascist movements – and into the intellectual and political fantasies that gave such movements their verve.
