Enzo Traverso - The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right

Enzo Traverso

Translated by David Broder

This book is supported by the Institut Franais (Royaume
Uni) as part of the Burgess programme

This English-language edition published by Verso 2019
Originally published in French as Les Nouveaux visages
du fascisme: Conversation avec Rgis Meyran
ditions Textuel 2017
Translation David Broder 2019

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-046-4
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-048-8 (UK EBK)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-049-5 (US EBK)

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A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

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Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

This book has a peculiar background. It began as a long interview recorded in Paris in 2016, in the build-up to a French presidential election that would be dominated by the rise of Marine Le Pens National Front. Rgis Meyran, a friend and journalist who works for the publisher Textuel, prepared a set of questions that framed our conversations. We met again after Donald Trumps unexpected victory in the US presidential election. Starting from a political anxiety grounded in the present, the interview sought a perspective based on greater historical hindsight. The dramatic rise of the far right in almost all the countries of the European Union powerfully awakens the ghosts of the past and again raises the question: what is fascism? Is it still meaningful to speak of fascism in the twenty-first century? I hope to provide some elements for a provisional answer, to enlighten this dark landscape by connecting the present with its historical premises. Sebastian Budgen from Verso asked me to turn this conversation into a single book, which I did with the agreement of Rgis and the help of David Broder, who translated the text from the original French. Thus, I completely reworked the text: reformulating, nuancing, and sometimes updating ideas in light of more recent developments. The genesis of this book explains its French focusin particular with respect to the questions of immigration, colonialism, and Islamophobiain spite of its general, all-encompassing historical scope. But this concerns exclusively was originally included in Rethinking Antifascism, the proceedings of a conference on antifascism edited by Hugo Garcia, Mercedes Yusta, Xavier Tabet, and Cristina Clmaco (New York: Berghahn Books, 2015). This book would not exist without my original conversations with Rgis Mayran, David Broders translation, and Sebastian Budgens suggestion to transform it into a different, English-language text. Many thanks to all of them.

The rise of the radical right is one of the most remarkable features of our current historical moment. In 2018, the governments of eight countries of the European Union (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia) are led by far-right, nationalist, and xenophobic parties. These parties also have polarized the political terrain in three major EU countries: in France, the National Front lost the presidential election run-off in 2017, having reached the extraordinary high of 33.9 percent of the vote; in Italy, the Lega Nord has become the hegemonic force of the right-wing front and created a new government, thus marginalising Silvio Berlusconis Forza Italia; and in Germany, Alternative fr Deutschland entered the Bundestag in 2017 with almost 13 percent of the vote, a result that significantly weakened the position of Chancellor Angela Merkel and compelled the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) to renew its coalition with the Social Democratic Party (SPD). The frequently praised German exception has vanished, and Merkel has announced her intention to rethink her generous policies toward immigrants and refugees. Outside the EU, Putins Russia and some of its satellites are far from being the only bastions of nationalism. With the election of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, the rise of a new nationalist, populist, racist, and xenophobic right has become a global phenomenon. The world had not experienced a similar growth of the radical right since the 1930s, a : concepts are indispensable for thinking about historical experience, but they can also be used to grasp new experiences, which are connected to the past through a web of temporal continuity. Historical comparison, which tries to establish analogies and differences rather than homologies and repetitions, arises from this tension between history and language.

Today, the rise of the radical right displays a semantic ambiguity: on the one hand, almost no one openly speaks of fascismwith the notable exceptions of the Golden Dawn in Greece, Jobbik in Hungary, or the National Party in Slovakiaand most observers recognize the differences between these new movements and their 1930s ancestors. On the other hand, any attempt to define this new phenomenon does imply a comparison with the interwar years. In short, the concept of fascism seems both inappropriate and indispensable for grasping this new reality. Therefore, I will call the present moment a period of postfascism. This concept emphasizes its chronological distinctiveness and locates it in a historical sequence implying both continuity and transformation; it certainly does not answer all the questions that have been opened up, but it does emphasize the reality of change.

First of all, we should not forget that the concept of fascism has frequently been used even after World War II, and not only in order to define the military dictatorships of Latin America. In 1959, Theodor Adorno wrote that the survival of National Socialism within democracy was potentially more dangerous than the survival of fascist tendencies against democracy.

This small digression shows that fascism has not only been transnational or transatlantic, but also transhistorical. Collective memory establishes a link between a concept and its public use, which usually exceeds its purely historiographical dimension. In this perspective, fascism (much like other concepts in our political lexicon) could be seen as a transhistorical concept able to transcend the age that engendered it. To say that the United States, the United Kingdom, and France are democracies does not mean to posit the identity of their political systems or to pretend that they correspond to the Athenian democracy of Pericless age. In the twenty-first century, fascism will not take the face of Mussolini, Hitler, and Franco; nor (we might hope) will it take the form of totalitarian terror. Yet it is also clear that there are many different ways to destroy democracy. Ritual references to the threats to democracyand in particular Islamic terrorismusually depict the enemy as external, but they forget a fundamental lesson from the history of fascism: that democracy can be destroyed from within.