FASCISM’S GLOBAL ALLURE
How events in Italy energised Europe’s far right in the 1920s
The ghost that hovers in the background of any discussion of Italian Fascism’s impact on global politics is always Adolf Hitler. War and genocide are automatically assumed to be the hallmarks of Fascism. Indeed, in October 1922, Hitler, an unusual German rightist in admiring Italy, country of artistic glory, watched events in Rome. When, a year later, he tried to seize power in his Beer Hall putsch, he invoked an Italian model and was delighted when fans called him the “German Mussolini”. According to the historian Ian Kershaw, throughout the next decade, Hitler’s workroom in the Brown House at Munich was “adorned with a monumental bust” of the Duce.
Across Europe, Mussolini had plenty of other admirers. When, on 13 September 1923, the aristocratic General Miguel Primo de Rivera mounted a military coup in Spain, claiming he was ending parliamentary corruption and muddle, King Alfonso XIII hailed him as “my Mussolini”. Then and later, plenty of rightists praised the Duce, a number eventually winning subsidies from Rome. Even in the mid-1930s, Italian Fascists could wonder whether Roosevelt’s New Deal was Mussolinian in inspiration.
Young Italian Fascists flirted with adding Stalin to their list of Mussolini imitators, while Kemal Atatürk (who in 1923 became the Republic of Turkey’s first president) was another deemed to be making a nation on his model. Atatürk disdained such parallel and, despite his regime’s having a domestic death toll vastly higher than Mussolini’s until Italy entered the Second World War, far more non-Italian historians are willing to praise him than endorse the Fascist dictatorship.
In our own times, Fascism is a word of ubiquitous usage and unclear meaning, except that it is a label most people pin on those they dislike and oppose. So Donald Trump, a billionaire proponent of the market, a lifetime enemy of state “regulation”, is often deemed to be one, despite scarcely wanting to endorse the Italian formula of 1925 that nothing and no one is against the state.