Dr. Roger Griffin, a renowned expert on fascism and a British professor of modern history and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University in the U.K., and Jean-Yves Camus, a political scientist and expert in the extreme right at IRIS (Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques) in France explain that we should be cautious when using the word.
John Harrison: What is fascism?
Professor Griffin: I’ve spent a long time thinking about this word and I have realized that there is no objective definition of fascism. The way I’ve defined it, and which has become quite widely used is that it is a very special sort of nationalism. That is, the nation is defined as a sort of organic entity: you are part of this super organization called the nation, which has a history, which allows you to live. It is not a liberal nation, but an organic nation. The organic nation is in crisis, it is ill, decadent, and is being undermined by various forces but it can be re-born with a political movement probably led by some special saviour figure. And he, normally is a ‘he’, will lead the country into a new era, so, fascism in the inter-war period is a rebirth form of ultra-nationalism, which therefore is anti-communist, is anti-liberal, is anti-parliament, and it ends to have stereotypic enemies such as Jews, communists, homosexuals, and various other forces that are regards as decadent, so that’s how I see fascism.
John Harrison: So then the National-Socialist Party in the 1930s in Germany, would that have fallen in your category of a party which is formed out of an organic nation in crisis if you like?
Professor Griffin: Yes, but I don’t think Germany was an organic nation. Of course the Nazis presented Germany not as a normal liberal democratic state, but as an entity that exists in culture, blood, and history, and in the authentic art of Arians, etcetera. Their task was to create a new type of state which embraced technology but which was routed in this Arian purity. All of these things are mythical but they were seen for millions of Germans in the 1930s as a sort of solution to the crisis of Weimar, the economy, and the threat of communism.
John Harrison: Right, the threat of communism is a good one, a big no-no, a big spooky guy in the corner who threatens everyone.
Professor Griffin: Yes, but it is not only going to destroy your nation, is also going to destroy your identity, to destroy everything that makes you, if you are Germany for example. Is an existential threat to you, if you are an extreme-nationalist, then communism is the ultimate dissolver of your nationhood because communists want a world, a State based in Socialism.
John Harrison: Is ethnicity connected to fascism?
Jean-Yves Camus: In the 1920s and 1930s, immigration did exist, but it was very small. In France, for example, we have had a North-African Muslim community since the beginning of the 20th Century, but they were only a few thousand people involved. Now we have between four and six millions Africans. So the problem is that today Europe is a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural, the home of a very large state. And there are many people and political parties, not only the extreme-right, which still think of an ethnic definition of their nation and of Europe and who do not accept that people from other continents, most of them with a Muslim background, who have been fleeing from war-zone countries now want to escape to Europe. So I would say that ethnicity has become a problem and multi-culturalism has become a problem not only for extreme-right militants but also for many mainstream conservatives. You probably remember that those days when Cameron and the French President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel in Germany said repeatedly that a multi-cultural society is a problem.
John Harrison: So again, it makes one wonder. We are a long way from being fascist societies in Western Europe. But the element of ethnicity is with us already. I vote in the UK and I don’t consider myself to be a fascist in any way, but I’m a little be concerned that almost all the parties, apart from perhaps the SNP (Scottish National Party) are supporters of this new fortress Europe idea.
Professor Griffin: We need to be very careful because we are talking about fascism today and one of the problems with the word is that it is not only used by political scientists and historians, but is also used as a way of denigrating somebody; for example: fashion or any form of authoritarianism can now be called fascist. An important book recently come out which is a disgusting piece of propaganda, which calls Obama a fascist, because he wants to introduce a National Health Service. If we keep this word we should use it in an intelligent way. To be concerned about your nation and your national identity does not make you fascist. In fact, I would go further. Parties which are specifically Islamophobic and neo-populist parties that want to keep say France for the French, etcetera, are not, in my opinion, fascist, because fascists want a new nation, which is not liberal and not democratic, and which is dedicated to some sort of big program of rebirth. Now, Le-Pen’s party does not want to destroy democracy and create a New France. It wants France for the French. It is at the extreme end of liberal politics but it is not fascist. And I’ve even heard Putin’s Russia being called fascist, so that’s just a form of denigration, just as when the Ukraine government is called fascist. It is just slandering people. The fact is that the Ukraine is technically a liberal democracy, so is Putin’s Russia. And if both of them have big elements of nationalism at work in their politics, that doesn’t constitute fascism.
John Harrison: Thank you very much and I would like to go back to the beginning of the program, Doctor Griffin, that fascist States usually have elements of ideology: in Germany it was the admiration of the Aryan race, in Italy it was, I think, the Romans. And they have this sort of idealized fantasy world, that people take trips into to imagine the perfect way to live, and they want their country to be like that and they believe their leader would lead them to the Promised Land. But we do not see that happening yet, do we, in any of the countries that we’ve just been talking about?
Professor Griffin: No, I think fascism is dead as a major political force in Europe and I also think is very misleading to associate Islamism or Jihadism with fascism, because it confuses two very different sources of political discourse. Fascism is essentially secular; it might get into bed with Catholicism or Romanian Orthodoxy to legitimize itself, but it is essentially a historical phenomenon: it wants the nation to achieve some sort of great place in history based on this super-organism of all Romanians or all Italians, or all Hungarians, but it has nothing to do with traditional religions. So let’s try to keep the word limited in its usage and not let it seep into the way we talk about parties and states, which are really very different from inter-war fascism.
John Harrison: Yes, I totally and utterly agree with you. I’m just a little concerned that there is a possibility of a transfer from nationalism to fascism. What do you think, Jean Camus?
Jean-Yves Camus: Of course, there is a link between nationalism and fascism. But all nationalists do not become fascists, and you can be concerned with the fate of your own country, and you can be concerned with the future of your nation without ever becoming a fascist. Even on the left of the political spectrum today, we see across Europe parties, in France for example, but there is also one in Greece of course, which are both concerned with the security of the nation and who have a social agenda. They are not fascist in the sense that they belong to a tradition of opposing the extreme right, they do not want the nation to be defined according to ethnicity, and they don’t want to build a new kind of man. There is nothing wrong once again with saying for example, that your country should have the possibility to enact the registration [of a party] without being subjected to what Brussels or the European Union wants to impose. This is not fascism!
Professor Griffin: I think if we get too fixated with fascism we miss the fact that liberal democracy with its wonderful humanistic ideals can be undermined and poisoned and corrupted by many other forces other than fascism. It can be corrupted by excessive materialism and it can be corrupted by all sort of forms of government corruption and can also be corrupted by creating a fortress Europe which carries on with this agenda of creating an economic paradise and distancing itself from the real human misery and suffering which is going on in the outside world. Now I don’t know how you are going to call that, I call it ethnocentric or ethnocratic liberalism, in other words, a liberalism which wants to keep the power for your home country and not worry about other human beings. But I think the discussion of fascism which, and there are some very small fascist parties, should not distract us from real dangers of the corruption of liberalism by all sorts of illiberal elements, which are not fascists but they are still very dangerous.
John Harrison: Yes, so what do we do? I mean, do we say OK, fascism is gone, the weird boogie man that they put out from the corner from time to time has gone away again, or do we still accept the possibility that we could still get back to that?
Professor Griffin: I think this is not the right question. We are not going to go back to the 1930s. There are lots and lots of virtual fascists looking at horrible pornographic political websites about Arians and anti-Semitic, etcetera. But what I’m saying is that that’s not going to take over. What could take over is a corrupt form of capitalism: liberalism, which creates pockets of prosperity around the world with big divisions between rich and poor, and lets millions of millions of people have terrible lives. And that is far more frightening to me than the age of fascism, because the age of fascism only lasted probably 12 years, 20 years maximum. Whereas the age of corrupt liberalism with the world destroying itself with ecological destruction and the widening gap between rich and poor, that could go on for decades. And I actually think we should concentrate on that.
John Harrison: So we should have a good look to neo-liberalism perhaps?
Professor Griffin: We could, we should look at what I call ethnocratic liberalism. You see, Le Pen’s party is not fascist, but by trying to make ordinary French people focus on France, and be blind to the huge pressures, which are building up in what is essentially born an oasis of prosperity is very egocentric. And I think that that is a much more dangerous force, populism or neo-populism than fascism. I don’t know if Yves agrees with me.
Jean-Yves Camus: Yes, it is a major problem today in Europe. And it deprives foreigners, especially the immigrants, from benefits, and creates a divide between nationalist and foreigners on the one end, and segmental socialists. There are hundreds of millions of African people living in countries outside Europe which want to have a say in international relations and which also want to have better living conditions and Europe is now isolating itself, I would say, from those countries, and in fact is losing sight of what’s going on elsewhere.
