ABSTRACT

In Chapter 5 we examined the impact of colonialism and militarism on European political culture, noting how the violence of imperial conquest and colonial rule created a ‘boomerang effect’ which contributed to the unprecedented destruction of the First World War and the growth of political violence in the 1920s and 1930s. This historical development was juxtaposed with the internalized violence of the civilizing process itself in industrial societies – the ordering practices embedded in the institutional and transactional framework of civil society which take the form of administratively and economically sanctioned violence. In Chapter 7 this argument was taken one stage further, highlighting the ‘racialization’ of politics and society in the established nation-states of Europe (integral nationalism), and the totalitarian implications of fascist nationalism as a radical form of biopolitics grounded in the state of exception. It was suggested that revisionist attempts to define fascism purely on its own terms – as an intellectual/cultural phenomenon divorced from objective historical conditions – are inherently limited because they overlook the link between fascism and capitalist modernization. Without this contextualization, the ‘sudden’ appearance of fascist regenerationist movements in the 1920s cannot adequately be explained: fascism is reduced to a violent nationalist outburst or social pathology, an inexplicable descent into racial violence and unreason. It is also impossible to explain the racialization of the nation form in fascism unless we acknowledge the reciprocal determination of racialized representations created by the experience of colonialism in the period 1870-1914, which brought into being a ‘world racial system’ based on white supremacism (Winant 2004; Füredi 1998), and which encouraged European elites to redeploy racist classifications to ‘renaturalize antagonism’, ordering women, workers and non-whites or other minority groups within the hierarchical structure of European capitalist society itself (cf. Magubane 2004; De Groot 1989).