Is Russia Fascist?: Unraveling Propaganda East and West

By Marlene Laruelle

In Is Russia Fascist?, Marlene Laruelle argues that the charge of "fascism" has become a strategic narrative of the current world order. Vladimir Putin's regime has increasingly been accused of embracing fascism, supposedly evidenced by Russia's annexation of Crimea, its historical revisionism, attacks on liberal democratic values, and its support for far-right movements in Europe. But at the same time Russia has branded itself as the world's preeminent antifascist power because of its sacrifices during the Second World War while it has also emphasized how opponents to the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe collaborated with Nazi Germany.

Laruelle closely analyzes accusations of fascism toward Russia, soberly assessing both their origins and their accuracy. By labeling ideological opponents as fascist, regardless of their actual values or actions, geopolitical rivals are able to frame their own vision of the world and claim the moral high ground. Through a detailed examination of the Russian domestic scene and the Kremlin's foreign policy rationales, Laruelle disentangles the foundation for, meaning, and validity of accusations of fascism in and around Russia. Is Russia Fascist? shows that the efforts to label opponents as fascist is ultimately an attempt to determine the role of Russia in Europe's future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Mar 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781501754142

Marlene Laruelle

Marlene Laruelle is Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. Dr Laruelle is also Director of GW’s Central Asia Program. She received her Ph.D. in history at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Cultures (INALCO) and her post-doctoral degree in political science at Sciences-Po in Paris. She has published widely on ideology, nationalism, and identity and their impact on domestic and foreign policies in the post-Soviet space.

Book preview

IS RUSSIA FASCIST?

Unraveling Propaganda East and West

Marlene Laruelle

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  Russia’s Fascism or Illiberalism?

2.  The Soviet Legacy in Thinking about Fascism

3.  Antifascism as the Renewed Social Consensus under Putin

4.  International Memory Wars

5.  The Putin Regime’s Ideological Plurality

6.  Russia’s Fascist Thinkers and Doers

7.  Russia’s Honeymoon with the European Far Right

8.  Why the Russian Regime Is Not Fascist

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

I owe a special debt of gratitude to the former director of George Washington University’s Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Peter Rollberg, who was the first to push me to look at fascism as a semantic space, and to the whole institute for being such a collegial place in supporting its scholars’ research interests.

I could not have completed this book without the incredible intellectual input I received on a first draft of the manuscript during an IERES/PONARS book incubator workshop and from presenting a summarizing chapter at the DC Area Postcommunist Politics Social Science Workshop. Paul Goode, Henry Hale, Stephen Hanson, Charles King, Maria Mälksoo, Robert Otto, Peter Rollberg, Anton Shekhovtsov, Kathleen Smith, Gerard Toal, Nina Tumarkin, Andreas Umland, Aleksandr Verkhovsky, and Sufian Zhemukhov all helped me to reconsider and reshape the entire manuscript, including the main argument.

I also extend my gratitude to Roger M. Haydon at Cornell University Press and the two reviewers who provided substantive guidance on the manuscript. Dylan Royce and John Chrobak assisted me in finalizing this research and polished the bibliography, and Ellen Powell, Emily Herring, Ann Robertson, and Caleb Crawford provided much-needed editing assistance.

Last but not least, my sincerest gratitude and tribute go to my husband, who offered me emotional and intellectual sustenance during the writing process, showing unwavering faith in the project and guiding me through many of the book’s conclusions.

Introduction

RUSSIA AND THE SYMBOLIC LANDSCAPE OF FASCISM

In January 2020, the commemoration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp was unexpectedly overshadowed by memory wars between Russia, Poland, and Ukraine over the interpretation of the Second World War. President Zelensky sided with the Polish interpretation of the war’s origins and supported the parallel between Nazism and communism, stating, Poland and the Polish people were the first to feel the collusion of totalitarian regimes. This resulted in the outbreak of the Second World War and allowed the Nazis to launch the deadly Holocaust.¹ This declaration deeply shocked the Russian public; Putin and the whole political establishment virulently denounced not only the idea of paralleling communism with Nazism under the totalitarianism label but also the attempt to make Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, responsible—even indirectly—for the Holocaust.

A few weeks before these clashes, in an hour-long history lecture, the Russian president, blaming the Polish minister of foreign affairs in 1939, Józef Lipski (describing him as a scumbag and an anti-Semitic pig), accused Poland of having colluded with Hitler, supported the deportation of Jews, and therefore contributed to the outbreak of the Second World War.² At the Victory Parade of May 9, 2019, Putin has already warned: Today, we see how a number of countries are deliberately distorting war events, and how those who, forgetting honor and human dignity, served the Nazis, are now being glorified, and how shamelessly they lie to their children and betray their ancestors. Our sacred duty is to protect the real heroes.³ In June 2020, a lengthy article was published in National Interest whereby Putin formalized his own vision of the reasons behind the beginning of the Second World War, denouncing Western policy of appeasement toward Nazi Germany, and reiterating Russia’s position on the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and the supposed consented annexation of the three Baltic states.⁴

These memory battles, which began fifteen years ago in the mid-2000s, have not only affected the relations of Central and Eastern European countries with Russia but have also penetrated international institutions—especially European ones. In fall 2019, at the initiative of the Central European countries, the European Parliament voted on a new resolution, On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe, condemning all totalitarianisms and associating Nazism with communism.⁵ Putin felt obliged to denounce this unpardonable lie about the parallel between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany and expressed his disapproval: Attempts to distort history do not stop. Not only by the heirs of Nazi accomplices, but now even by some totally respectable international institutions and European structures.⁶

What is at stake here is the role of the Soviet Union in the Second World War: Did Moscow win the war in 1945, and thus should be celebrated for the huge human cost of this victory? Or did it contribute to the start of the war by signing the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact of 1939 that allowed it to occupy parts of Poland and Finland and annex the Baltic states? Could the Soviet Union be responsible for both taking advantage of an agreement with Hitler in 1939 and being victorious against Nazi Germany in 1945? These memory wars all have at their core the notion of fascism and a desire, first, to identify who the fascists were during the war—the Soviet Union, which cooperated with Berlin in 1939–1941, or the collaborationists on all occupied territories? Second, who are the new fascists advancing a revisionist interpretation of the Second World War today: Putin’s Russia or the Central and Eastern European countries?

For the majority of the Russian population, fascism represents the ultimate evil. The fight against Nazi Germany was a struggle for Russia’s own survival: official statistics record some twenty-seven million dead, most of them civilians, and over twenty million combatants wounded. Even today, seventy years after the end of the war, the consensus around the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism in Europe remains a pivotal component of Russia’s social and cultural cohesion. The mere suggestion that some Soviet or Russian citizens might take a positive view of fascism is offensive to the majority of the public. Fascism is considered a uniquely Western-produced phenomenon, totally foreign to any Russian traditions, and one that can only appear on Russian soil as an import from the West. In 2010, Dmitry Medvedev, then the president of Russia, gave a long interview on the meaning of the war and the current ideological fights around its memory, explaining:

For the people of my generation, for mature people and for those slightly younger, the terms fascist and Nazi have an unambiguously negative character. But, unfortunately, this is not so obvious to everyone. In Europe, in many countries, there is a rehabilitation of fascists. Even in our country, some misfits try to use Nazi symbols and bring all sorts of people together under those types of slogans.… They question who started the war and who is guilty for it. This, too, is obvious. [The truth] is substantiated not only in the Nuremberg trials documents, but also in the memory of a large number of people.⁷

Although both Putin and Medvedev have defended the memory of Russia’s critical role in the 1945 victory and see their country as leading the fight against the revival of fascism in Europe, another narrative has developed: one that accuses the Russian state, the Russian people, and/or the Russian leadership of fascism. In 2004, the former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski was the first to compare Putin to Benito Mussolini: The fascist regime evoked national greatness, discipline, and exalted myths of an allegedly glorious past. Similarly, Putin is trying to blend the traditions of the Cheka (Lenin’s Gestapo, where his own grandfather started his career), with Stalin’s wartime leadership, with Russian Orthodoxy’s claims to the status of the Third Rome, with Slavophile dreams of a single large Slavic state ruled from the Kremlin.⁸

Brzezinski’s argument was soon taken up by the former CIA director James Woolsey, who remarked that the Russian administration under Putin was generally behaving more and more like a fascist government.⁹ With the annexation of Crimea, the analogy between Putin and Hitler began to overshadow the comparison with Mussolini. In March 2014, at the peak of the crisis, the former U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton compared Putin’s actions in Ukraine with those of Hitler in Europe just before the Second World War, declaring, Now if this sounds familiar, it’s what Hitler did back in the ’30s.¹⁰ Several scholars, such as Timothy Snyder, Alexander Motyl, and Vladislav Inozemtsev, have followed that trend and likewise accused Russia of being a fascist country.

The label has also permeated the Ukraine-Russia relationship. Entangled in a complex mirror game since the beginning of the 2014 war, both Moscow and Kyiv have been accusing each other of fascism. Aleksei Pushkov, then chair of the Russian State Duma Committee on International Affairs, declared bluntly that Ukraine has formed a nationalist dictatorship with an obvious Nazi coloring.¹¹ On the other side, the Ukrainian press coined the nickname Putler (Putin plus Hitler) and the term Rashizm, which blends Russia and fascism. Anatoliy Hrytsenko, Ukraine’s former minister of defense, called Putin a fascist of the third millennium.¹² In 2017, the pro-Ukrainian media project UaPosition released a twenty-minute video, Hitler’s Germany vs. Putin’s Russia: The Comparison of Two Nazi Countries, which, as the title suggests, draws parallels between the social life in Germany of the 1930s and Russia in [the] 2010s and shows the striking similarity between Hitler’s Nazi Germany right before the Second World War and present-day Putin’s Russia.¹³

In Russia, political opponents have also used the label fascist to denounce the current regime. In 2006, a few months before her assassination, the journalist Anna Politkovskaya warned, Society is moving toward fascism.¹⁴ Lev Shlosberg, a representative of the liberal Yabloko Party, stated that Russia today is a country ideally ready for fascism since the population was primed for war and hatred and the regime was pursuing its own Nuremberg process of infusing the whole society with this war-minded ideology.¹⁵ The opposition journalist Aleksandr Sotnik even called for an anti-fascist coalition of Western countries to overthrow the Putin regime.¹⁶ In 2014, the dissident human rights activist Yevgenii Ikhlov published several texts warning that the Russian government closely resembled pre-Poland Germany, that is, prewar Hitlerism, and that fascism is for the most part already built (s osnovnom fashizm postroen) in Russia.¹⁷ Two years later, he declared that it was not only the regime but also Russian society that was thirsty for fascism (fashizma zhazhdet obshchestvo).¹⁸

One of the leading opposition figures, the former chess champion Garry Kasparov, has also been very vocal in promoting the label of fascism. In 2013, he proclaimed, The mask is off—fascism has come to Russia.… It came from the Kremlin.¹⁹ Two years later, he wrote, We’ve watched in horror in recent years as Vladimir Putin has turned Russia in a genuinely fascist direction.²⁰ For him, the annexation of Crimea is no less than a repetition of the Anschluss of Austria in 1938. In his book Winter Is Coming, Kasparov, while recognizing the danger of trivialization that comes with overuse of the parallel with Nazism, deploys the comparison on multiple occasions, declaring that some of these [Kremlin] speeches, including a few of Putin’s own, so closely resemble those of Nazi leaders in the 1930s that they seem only to change the word ‘fatherland’ to ‘motherland,’ that the refusal of Western leaders to boycott the Sochi Olympics Games was like the world’s embrace of the 1936 Berlin Games [that] gave Adolf Hitler a huge boost of confidence, and that Putin’s arrogance and language remind us more and more of Hitler, as do the rewards he’s reaped from them. For this he can thank the overabundance of Chamberlains in the halls of power today—and there is no Churchill in sight.²¹

What all the examples cited here have in common is their use of the term fascism. But in these examples, two narratives collide directly: one asserts that Russia is a fascist country—or that its leaders are fascist—whereas the other defines Russia as a country that defeated fascism. Could Russia be simultaneously a country that defeated historical fascism and one that allowed a new homegrown fascism to emerge? On what criteria are these two irreconcilable perceptions based? Do they use fascism as an inflammatory label to disqualify political enemies, or do they rely on some points of reference in sound scholarship? Not only is an academic debate at stake: labeling has direct policy implications. Accusing Russia of being fascist implies that the country has exited the international community and cannot be considered a legitimate partner. If Putin is Hitler, as some profess, who would want to negotiate with him and try to rebuild a constructive dialogue with Russia?

Fascism as a Strategic Narrative

To disentangle that puzzle in which so many actors accuse each other of the same evil, and in which insulting labels and academic terminology interact with intentional semantic obfuscation, I take my cue from semiotics, that is, the understanding of words as communicative tools, or signs, that are both embedded in and shape our everyday meaning-making. Having been trained in political philosophy and intellectual history, I also presume that ideas intersect intimately with politics and that the wording of our perceptions constitutes a critical part of the way we situate ourselves.

As one can glean from the above quotations, fascism can be deployed for name-calling as part of a political strategy for delegitimizing the enemy; it can be used as an academic definition by scholars who apply it to a phenomenon based on their own characterization of the term; and it can be an emic definition used by people who attribute the term to themselves and claim it proudly. In each of these three cases, the speaker speaks from a different space and to a different audience: one word, multiple contexts, and divergent meanings. This multiplicity of meanings is attributable to several elements: first, the difficulty of defining the content of the term; second, the overlapping levels of discourse involved (political, media, academic, and popular); and third, their belonging to different repertoires, depending on the positioning of each speaker. Like any other word, fascism is a communicative tool based on implicit cultural backgrounds that make it possible for the audience to interpret the term; it is a constructed notion expressing a relational situation.

As early as 1946, George Orwell observed in Politics and the English Language that fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’ ²² Labeling Russia as fascist thus often performs the simple role of reducing the country to being the other of the West, embodying everything that is not desirable for us. Here I do not conceptualize Russia as another that is fundamentally and radically different, but on the contrary as part of a continuum with the West. To borrow a metaphor from Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the sins are reported not on the sinner but on his portrait, Soviet and post-Soviet Russia have in many ways served as the West’s mirror. Russia has amplified many aspects of the West’s own development, excesses, mistakes, and failures over the course of the century by testing, on its own soil, socialism, totalitarianism, democracy, neoliberalism, and now illiberalism. Russia is thus not an exception: what is happening in Russia today is deeply inscribed into broader global trends that can also be observed, sometimes on a different scale, in the West.

The exercise of assessing the nature of the Russian political regime is difficult because it is largely based on value judgments and has a very pronounced normative character. Indeed, the Western view of Russia depends mainly on the way each observer looks at his or her own society. The most vocal critics of Russia are often convinced of the absolute correctness of the Western liberal system and its status as an indisputable international yardstick, whereas those with some reservations about it adopt a form of relativism that may be more favorable to some of Russia’s arguments. The study of Russia has long been molded by outdated binaries—democracy/authoritarianism, West/non-West, Europe/Asia, and others. The new line of divide on Western liberalism versus Russia’s fascism (and, on the Russian side, on Russia’s antifascism against Western renewed fascism) only contributes another black-and-white pair with very limited heuristic value. Propaganda, defined as arousing an active and mythical belief without critical distance, can be found on both sides, in Russia as well as in the West.²³

To defy this sterile binary and offer an alternative framework, this book draws on social constructionism, which asserts that social reality is created by human beings whose identity is a permanent, ongoing, and dynamic process of interacting with others and reacting to situations.²⁴ A critical element of this situated identity is the fact that social identities are "produced and reproduced, as well as transformed and dismantled, discursively."²⁵

Language encodes culture, including shared understandings of identity, power, history, and values. Narratives operate in the world, serve as a rationale for action, and offer a self-portrait of the speaker. Even if, in theory, an infinite range of narrative possibilities exists, narrative positions are limited by the given context. As identity is situated, each storyline builds itself in interaction with others; it may sometimes counter another narrative by trying to change the plot, the characters, or the implied moral values.²⁶ Occupying the moral ground in order to position oneself constitutes an important part of this meaning-making process. Discursive practices therefore constitute a central element of identity—identity being something that people do in their everyday social practices more than something they are in an essential way.

Narrative positioning belongs to the research fields that look at individuals or groups of individuals, but a relatively similar framework can also be applied to states. To legitimize themselves in the eyes of both their domestic and international audiences, states build myths—that is, depoliticized speech that asserts a certain picture of the world without explanation, thereby helping to naturalize particular worldviews and power relations, through which they offer a self-portrayal, a storyline with plot, characters, and morality.²⁷ These strategic narratives work simultaneously at multiple points on a spectrum of persuasion: at the thin end is convincing actors to behave in a particular way, and at the thick end is structuring the experience of the international system and its meaning and making it commonsensical.

The social theory of international affairs invites us to look at a state’s positioning as a product of interaction with other states and domestic determinants.²⁸ For Russia, both contexts are difficult. On the international scene, the country finds itself in the position of a status-seeker—its request to be an agenda-setter of the international community is contested by the United States and Europe, which allocate Moscow a lower status as a rule-taker in the best case scenario, or a spoiler and rogue state in the worst case.²⁹ Domestic determinants also limit the ability of the Russian state to reinvent itself: the authorities rely on deeply entrenched paradigms inherited from Soviet times,³⁰ economic realities that cannot be transformed overnight, and on a longue durée going back to Russia’s imperial past and to the country’s uneasy spatial realities. It is also hampered by domestic debates over the country’s identity and by the need to take Russian public opinion into consideration.³¹ To answer these challenges, Russia’s identity positioning on the international scene and toward its own public opinion has vividly evolved over the past three decades. It moved from a social mobility strategy (aspiring to join nations seen as having higher status, i.e., Western countries) to a mixed strategy of both social competition (acquiring new tools to change the rankings and upgrade itself) and social creativity (refusing comparison and proposing alternative rankings that would position it above Western countries).³²

Fascism as Russia’s Narrative on Europe

In this book, I argue that fascism has become one of Russia’s strategic narratives, operationalized at two levels. At home it is used to generate cultural consensus in favor of the regime status quo. On the international scene it is deployed to upgrade or at least stabilize the country’s status as having a legitimate say in European security, thanks to the 1945 victory. By calling its enemies fascists, the Russian regime describes its own understanding of the international system, offering a storyline that puts the Russian people and its values and goals at the center of the plot. Another strategic narrative, ideologically the reverse but performing exactly the same function, is displayed by all those who denounce Russia as fascist: through it, they frame their own vision of the world, identify adversaries, and position themselves on a moral high ground. Fascism should therefore be studied as a discursive landscape, a mythmaking process that creates order from chaos and justifies power relationships on the international scene.

Hence, this book is not written in a polemical spirit to point a finger at enemies or to celebrate those on the right side of history. It is based on the presupposition that because perceptions are always embedded in the speaker’s own world, the only legitimate path to questioning Russia’s political development is questioning our own—the West’s. Because identities are situational, engaging in a narrative competition takes at least two parties; fascism is a discursive struggle over describing the world and especially the status of Europe and its relationship to both the United States and Russia.

Russia offers a great case study to contribute to the discussion on fascism by refining some of its concepts. First, although fascism studies scholars have been working hard to develop a consensual definition of what types of regime or mindset can be qualified as fascist, hesitations remain in identifying the boundaries of fascism: How many fascist features must a regime accumulate to be labeled fascist? How do we integrate some subtypes that do not enter into the full definition of fascism? What do we do when some criteria considered as fascist can also be found in democratic systems and function in a pluralistic environment? Using paraphrases such as fascistoid or parafascist, or talking about hybridity, does not solve the heuristic issue of classification. The case of Russia thus invites us to discuss the risks of using peripheral and ephemeral characteristics to qualify a regime or a whole society and of being hypnotized by the proverbial fascist tree that hides the broader ideological forest.

Second, Russia allows us to address the apparent paradox of a country whose cultural consensus is founded on being the antifascism power par excellence but, still, is seen by many outsiders and some insiders as fascist, whatever the exact definition of the term. It thus illustrates the tensions existing between fascism as a generic notion and fascism in each historically specific context: For instance, can there exist a culturally Russified fascism that would still be antifascist in the sense of being opposed to European versions of fascism? This line of inquiry paves the way for an examination of the place that fascist doctrinal components occupy on the broader continuum of a conservative repertoire and the difficulties in clearly identifying the ideological boundary that prompts a shift from seeing something as conservative, illiberal, or reactionary to categorizing it as fascist.

Third, because the Putin regime took the lead in a new moralist International and very early developed an illiberal ideology, Russia constitutes a unique ground for a better-refined discussion of why today’s illiberalism should not be labeled fascism. Name-calling fascist everything and everyone that expresses criticisms of liberalism squanders the heuristic value of the term. Using the case of Russia, I hope to demonstrate that overstretching the conceptual apparatus of fascism to denounce all adversaries of Western liberalism obscures our understanding of Russian society and its political regime and of the current transformations of Western societies.

This book is based on mixed methods combining political science, political philosophy, intellectual history, sociology, and cultural anthropology. Chapter 1 explores the literature on generic fascism, on a supposed specific Russian fascism, and on the rise of illiberalism to posit the conceptual frames needed for our analysis of Russia. Chapter 2 goes back in time to look at the Soviet construction of the Russian term fashizm and some of the ambiguities that the Soviet society cultivated toward the term and its historical personification, Nazi Germany. Chapters 3 and 4 delve into Russia’s positioning as the antifascism power par excellence, both toward its domestic audience by cultivating the memory of the Great Patriotic War as the cornerstone of social consensus and toward the international community by fighting over memory issues with its Central and Eastern European neighbors. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 investigate where a supposed Russian fascism can be located, looking at the political niches inside state structures that may nurture such a narrative, the grassroots actors trying to promote different components of the fascist repertoire, and Russia’s strategy of bolstering the European and U.S. Far Right. Chapter 8 synthesizes these different segments into a broader discussion deconstructing the main theories of Russia’s alleged fascism. The concluding chapter comes back to fascism as one element of Russia’s key strategic narrative helping the country to achieve its status-seeking policy and to secure its legitimacy as an agenda-setter defining what Europe should be and the place Russia should occupy in it.

1

RUSSIA’S FASCISM OR ILLIBERALISM?

In this chapter, I look at the field of fascism studies to identify the elements of the debate that present questions relevant to addressing the case of Russia. Because even its main critics recognize that the country cannot be qualified as fully fascist, my investigation begins at the periphery of the definition with a challenging but necessary question: Where does fascism begin? How many features considered fascist by scholars should a country accumulate to be labeled as such? A specific part of the discussion involves questions surrounding the existence of a specific Russian fascism. With some exceptions, this subfield of study has been developing outside of any comparative framework, which has contributed to the idea that Russia shows unique features of deviance and a recurring illness of radical nationalism, often explained by certain cultural characteristics. Accusations of Russian fascism intensified not only with the 2014 war with Ukraine but also with a larger trend toward using Reductio ad Hitlerum as a new tool for character assassination in international affairs. This broader context is rooted in the rise of illiberal movements and ideologies, of which Russia is often seen as the vanguard if not the main funder and hidden hand. The tendency to accuse everyone who challenges liberalism of being a new fascist has dramatically obscured our understanding of today’s Russia as well as the current transformations of the world order and Western domestic scenes.

Defining Fascism and Its Boundaries

Fascism constitutes a puzzling ideology for the social sciences. Of all ideologies, it is probably the one that has elicited the greatest number of scholarly controversies; liberalism and communism have generated more consensual definitions.¹ For a long time, several hypotheses shaped the study of fascism. The first theory was that Italian fascism and German Nazism were somehow unique in world history and that comparative studies were therefore useless in explaining the phenomenon.² The second hypothesis was that generic fascism had no real ideological content; it was less an ideology than a reaction, an anti- movement. Different schools colluded to interpret fascism mostly as a social, materialistic phenomenon, or as an ideological one. For example, Marxist schools of thought insisted on understanding fascism as a social action resulting from social struggles rather than just abstract ideas. However, their approach was hampered by perceiving fascism as only a reactionary movement explainable through capitalist contradictions and by marginalizing its ideological components, in particular the role of racism in shaping it.³

Another dividing line has separated historians of fascism: some see fascism as an answer to communism and therefore they tend to study fascism and communism as two products that mirror and influence each other, based on the totalitarianism theory that equates them both.⁴ Others, conversely, root fascism in the longue durée of anti-Enlightenment ideologies, which emerged at the end of the eighteenth century to refute notions of progress, universalism, and humanism.⁵ For them, fascism is more than an ideology that rejects liberalism and Marxism; it is a cultural phenomenon more than a political one, primarily based on the refutation of universalism, rationalism, and materialism. Unlike other conservative or reactionary ideologies, it hopes for a revolutionary tabula rasa to rebuild a new society from scratch.

Over the years, almost all social science disciplines have been involved in the study of fascism. Weberian theorists explain fascism as the response of victims of modernization when social changes are too rapid and not equally beneficial to all, which creates a new utopia that restores lost certainties and identifies scapegoats.⁶ Inspired by Frankfurt school thinkers such as Theodor W. Adorno or Max Horkheimer, scholars have expanded their Marxist–Hegelian approach by including psychoanalytic insights and sociological findings.⁷ Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality also gave birth to a new generation of scholars who looked at fascism as an extreme, totalitarian case of governmentality that takes control over all aspects of social, private, and public life.⁸ Psychoanalysis and social psychology have investigated the libidinal pattern of the masses, which are prone to violence and easily manipulated by a leader perceived as the all-powerful primal father.⁹ In Lacanian vocabulary, fascist exultation taps into people’s narcissist selves and helps diagnose a collective psychosis.¹⁰

Although history, political philosophy, and political science have remained at the forefront, economics has brought new insights by looking at structural economic dimensions: fascist regimes extended government control over the economy, nationalized key industries, made massive state investments, and introduced several measures of economic planning and price controls.¹¹ Last but not least, cultural studies has helped revive the study of fascism by exploring the importance of visual propaganda, aesthetics, and theatrical staging. This has led to an understanding of fascism as a secular religion that compensates for its doctrinal eclecticism and lack of internal coherence with a powerful visuality.¹²

In the 1990s, a more consensual definition of fascism began to take shape, mostly inspired by the work of Roger Griffin. In his International Fascism: Theories, Causes, and the New Consensus (1998), Griffin offers the following definition as a product of majority agreement among scholars: Like conservatism, anarchism, liberalism, or ecologism, fascism is definable as an ideology with a specific ‘positive,’ utopian vision of the ideal state of society, a vision which can assume a number of distinctive forms determined by local circumstances while retaining a core matrix of axioms.¹³ Since then, fascism has been understood not as an anti- movement, but rather as a genuine ideology, with its own philosophical coherence and identifiable content. For Griffin, fascism can be summarized and subsumed as a palingenetic ultranationalism: the feeling of a rapid cultural decline does not inspire cultural pessimism but instead prompts a call for a revolutionary understanding of the nation’s revival. In an authoritative 2012 article, he proposes a less jargon-laden and more explicit definition of fascism as a revolutionary form of nationalism which assumes unique ideological, cultural, political, and organizational expressions according to the circumstances and national context where it takes shape.¹⁴

Having established some consensus on a minimal definition of fascism, Griffin called for the development of a new trend in scholarship, one based on comparative studies over time and space, in order to decenter fascism by recognizing the critical role that the study of so-called peripheral fascisms has played in our understanding of the phenomenon. The notion that Italy and Germany are the core models for defining fascism has now been overtaken by the knowledge we have accumulated about fascist movements and ideologies in France, the United Kingdom, the United States, South Africa, Spain, Portugal, Latin America, and many countries in Central and Eastern Europe.¹⁵ Griffin also invited the academic community studying fascism to enter into dialogue with those working on subjects such as political religion and terrorism. As he concluded in his 2012 article, fascism finds ways to adapt to the unfolding conditions of modernity, thereby assuming new guises practically unrecognizable from its inter-war manifestations.¹⁶

In this book I take issue with the placement of fascism within the more general phenomenon of nationalism.¹⁷ I do not believe that defining fascism as something quantitatively more—read: more radical—than a putatively normal nationalism is heuristic. I see the primacy of a myth of regeneration, termed by Griffin as the palingenetic nature of fascism, as the driving engine that makes a vision of the world and society fascist. This perspective allows us to take into account the metapolitical dimension of fascism, which is critical for recognizing the phenomenon and dissociating it from other ideologies. In this book, I define fascism as a metapolitical ideology that calls for the total