ABSTRACT
Many movements on the radical right in interwar Europe were hesitant about calling themselves fascists because they worried that it would make them look like agents of foreign powers. Fascists were easily recognisable even when they avoided the label, however. Patterns of rhetoric, uniforms, their use of violence, and other aesthetic features set them apart from other political parties and their love of corporatism, discipline, and action combined with their hostility towards parliamentary democracy, communism, humanitarianism, and Jews to place them together with other like-minded groups on the far right of the political spectrum. Fascists were famous for their lack of ideological precision. They did not write many programmatic documents and, by and large, lacked the sort of core manifestos that provided the intellectual basis for other political movements. One of the clearest ways that contemporaries could have known what fascists stood for was by looking at how they wrote about other movements and regimes that called themselves fascists. Far-right newspapers in Romania frequently reported on events in Italy, Germany, Japan, and Portugal. Doing so allowed them to identify obliquely with those regimes, implicitly promising that if they came to power, they would implement similar reforms in Romania. This chapter analyses reporting on right-wing movements and regimes in a variety of newspapers to show how Romanian fascists presented international fascism and authoritarianism to their readers.
