ABSTRACT
An unquestioned assumption of mainstream historiography is the view that fascism is a militant form of nationalism based on an authoritarian rejection of liberal democracy in favour of ‘nationalist socialism’. Representative of this view is Sternhell (1986), who highlights the combination of nationalist and collectivist themes in the development of fascism in France where, despite the failure of the movement, regenerative nationalism was seen as a means to address the negative impact of liberal individualism on the political culture of French society. Also representative is Griffin, who defines fascism as an ‘ideology whose mythic core in various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultra-nationalism’ (1991: 26). Both writers locate the appeal of fascism in a populist definition of citizenship based on the glorification and regeneration of the ‘in-group’, whether this group is defined in political, cultural or racial terms. Yet as we saw in Chapter 1, the equation of fascism and nationalism is less straightforward than some commentators suggest. While fascism is oriented towards the re-enchantment of collective identities in an attempt to unify the nation behind a new state project, there are reasons to question the premises of the new consensus approach. The reduction of fascism to populist ultra-nationalism undermines efforts to define the phenomenon: nationalism has its origins in the intellectual field, and while fascism develops to an extent from intellectual sources, it is more closely tied to the field of politics (Breuer 2005), specifically the acquisition of power, the targeted use of violence, and the articulation of modern forms of propaganda and behavioural control.
