ABSTRACT
This chapter does two things. First, it defends the argument that the term ‘fascism’ retains its value for understanding contemporary political life in Europe. Second, it provides a historical reading of post–Cold War Europe in order to explain why we need to start using the term ‘fascism’ again. With respect to the first point, I argue that the forces that drove fascism in the 1930s are in some measure visible again today and that the parties and movements which are usually referred to as ‘populist’ share an intellectual space with ‘classic’ fascism. And with respect to the second, I offer an explanation of how we arrived at this situation, one that would have shocked Europeans a generation ago. Drawing on arguments I have set out elsewhere, to the effect that the end of the Cold War accelerated the abandonment of the postwar consensus, which had already been in demise since the 1970s, I show that from the point of view of European security, democracy and neoliberal capitalism, the effects of the end of the Cold War have been no less profound in Western than in Eastern Europe.
