James Strachey Barnes, To Each Country Its Own Fascism

Abstract In all this Europe is no disinterested onlooker. Since the end of the war Bolshevism and fascism have been fighting for its soul. The chaos which followed the world conflict promoted communist experiments in parts of Central and Southern Europe which were of brief duration because they were in contradiction with the social structure in those areas. Since 1922 awave of nationalism has rippled across the continent taking over Spain, Hungary, Poland, and Lithuania, not to mention the fascist parties which sprang up everywhere. The peculiar revolutionary force of Bolshevism lay in the destruction of the bourgeois and feudal means of production, and it was in the nature of things that within Europe this was only possible in Russia. As long as Fascism represented a purely political system without intervening in the social system, it could be adopted despite its specifically Italian traits, especially since its neo-absolutism inevitably found a deep resonance in powerful parties accustomed to hold the reins of power. How will things develop now? Apart from the fact that the increasing concentration of economic and political power in the hands of the few means the disintegration of an ideology based on majority rule, the constitution of the state is, as history shows, dependent on the economic and political situation. It is significant in this respect that in a tense situation Italy was the first to return to an absolutist form of State. If, as is to be assumed, the economic and political tensions which Europe is subject to in the twentieth century continue to deepen, it is probable that the authoritarian state will regain lost ground in the Western world in conjunction with a restructuring of political ideology.