Conclusions: Eurofascism and the 'End of History'
Despite its chronic weaknesses at the level of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary movements, the vitality of fascism as an ideological force and the fomenter of racial hatred shows no sign of ebbing. Clearly, the notion that it could ever seize power by emulating the NSDAP, let alone achieve sufficient `cultural hegemony' to overthrow liberal democracy in its own version of velvet revolution is a chimera. Yet the insistence of fascists on the decadence of modern society and their nebulous promises of an ultra-nationalist New Order have nonetheless established themselves as thriving components, and presumably permanent ones, of Western political sub-culture. Nowhere is the potential impact of contemporary fascism more dramatic than on the issue of `Europe'. This is partly because the call for a `Europe of nationalities' is one of the most persistent topoi of post-war fascist thought and the main basis for cooperation and ecumenicalism between the myriad groups and grouplets pursuing national rebirth. It not only represents a major element of continuity between the countless dialects of pre-war and post-war fascisms but provides common ground between party-political organizers and paramilitary activists, between skinhead racists and 'educated' ideologues, between thugs and (pseudo-)intellectuals, between neo-Nazis and neo-fascists, between fascists and those conservatives on the cusp between liberalism and the radical right. To a non-believer the ultra-nationalist myth of the new Europe has the glaring weakness of failing to offer any realistic blue-prints to explain what the new order would be like and any practical strategy for how it would be achieved. But it is precisely in this nebulousness that much of its mythic strength lies.
The reason for this paradox is to be sought in the weak mythic force emanating from the dominant liberal myth of Europe. Despite the visionary humanistic fervour which may have inspired the initial impulses to create the EC, for the vast majority of Europe's citizens the notion of its future unity is associated with bureaucracy and butter-mountains. The greatest passions it can arouse are the negative ones arising from the fear of losing sovereignty or seeing national traditions and cultural identity eroded. To this extent Europe qua the EC is generally a source of apathy or resentment, the diametric opposite of a real `community'. Who would rally to the star-spangled banner of the EC and be prepared to lay down his or her life for it in a fit of heroic self-sacrifice? As for a United Europe embracing all the nations which politically comprise it, for most this is an even greater abstraction, a mere 'geographical expression' more than 19th century Italy ever was. In this respect the collapse of communism and the `liberation' of the East bloc has simply made a vague, disquieting concept even more so, for it tends to conjure up shadowy images of Western Europe having to be expanded to include a vast terra incognita, its populations either draining 'our' resources already overtaxed by the 'Third World' or, even more disturbingly, 'infiltrating' 'our' societies in a new 'tide' of immigration.
By contrast the fascist myth of Europe plugs directly into such half-expressed fears. It simultaneously celebrates nationalism at its most local level of regional culture and dialect, appealing to and fomenting separatist sentiments, while replacing the luke-warm liberal Europeanism of political, legal and economic union with one based on the myth of common historical roots and unique cultural heritage: e pluribus unum. Thus there is no contradiction in the fact that in the 1980s some activists associated with the British National Front were forging links with Welsh nationalists at the same time that others
were cultivating contacts with groups all over Europe. What enhances Eurofascism's mythic pull is that it not only capitalizes on the illiberal nationalism which has become a permanent feature of all societies affected by 'modernization', but also keys into four areas of latent phobia already rife in Europe without its ministrations: i) anti-socialism, and in particularly anti-Marxism and anti-communism; ii) anti-Americanism; iii) xenophobia and 'cultural' (sometimes even biological) racism, especially in the form of anti-immigration and anti-Semitism; iv) a vague sense of Europe's marginalization as the centre of world power and more generally of the decay and chaos of the 'modern world'. These elements are welded together into the fascist myth of Europe's hegemony and cultural integrity being under threat from America, the Far East (especially Japan), communism, immigration, the demographic explosion of the Third World, and all putative sources of cultural levelling and homogenization. Having established the vision of Europe's decadence, the need for its rebirth through a coordinated movement of national 'reawakenings' then acquires a terrible self-evidence and inner logic. Despair is transformed into hope, narrow nationalist sentiments into visionary supranational ones, reactionary pessimism into revolutionary optimism.
The Eurofascist permutation of palingenetic myth can thus be seen as direct mythic counterparts to Gorbachev's vision of Russia's perestroika and Bush's vision of the New World Order in the sense that all three are in part reactions to a brooding sense of national decline. All three envisage the resurrection of the nation in the context of the emergence of a new supra-national order. What sets the neo-fascist myth of Europe apart from both, however, is that it is openly anti-liberal, and appeals to deep well-springs of elitism and ethno-centrism even more explicitly than its American and Russian counterparts.
Moreover, in its Nouvelle Droite permutations this myth draws on a longer and wider intellectual tradition than either, connecting up fin-de-siŠcle and classical fascist thought with the writings of contemporary science and cultural criticism. The danger which it poses may not be to challenge state power, or to replace liberal values, but to subtly undermine or contaminate them from within enough to help shift the centre of gravity towards the right.
Since 1989 this threat has deepened. The prevailing conditions of economic deprivation, social chaos and ideological disorientation in former communist societies are hardly conducive to the spread of humanism, tolerance and global compassion. Rather the wave of integral nationalism and racism we have observed flooding through several of these countries is a predictable response to the feeling of cultural crisis and anomie which have followed in the wake of their dramatic liberation from the Soviet system. The intensification of separatist nationalism, ethnic hatreds and anti-Semitism in the Soviet republics is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. So is the formation in Moscow and St. Petersburg of a new fascist group, Pamyat (Memory), which has already forged links with ecologist groups and with sister organizations in the West. The rapid spread of international skinhead racism and fascism to Eastern Europe in the last few years, the growth of support for anti-immigration parties in several solidly liberal countries such as Norway and Denmark, the emergence of the Lombard League in Italy playing on resentments of the State, the South and terzomondiali (`third worlders'), the unabated strength of Le Pen's Front National in France, the rise of support for the neo-fascist Republican Party in Germany, the parades of racists in full neo-Nazi and neo-fascist regalia celebrating the anniversary of Germany's unification, the burning down of the hostels of asylum-seekers and Turks in previously peaceful German towns: all are signs of the times.
Contemporaneously with the resurgence of the extra-parliamentary radical right, Eurofascism at Strasbourg also extended its influence in the early 1990s. As a result of 1989 elections the Technical Group of the European Right (as it has called itself since that year) lost its Ulster Unionist and also its MSI members (over the South Tyrol issue), but was joined by 6 representatives members of Schoenhuber's Republican Party and for a time by a member of the Vlaams Blok which had successfully manipulated the issue of Flemish separatism. The group established links with various anti-immigrant parties and the Spanish far right, as well as with J”rg Haider, leader of the extreme right Freiheitliche Partei âsterreichs. The Eurofascist penetration of the Strasbourg Parliament enjoyed its fleeting moment of triumph when a procedural anomaly allowed 88 year old Claude Autant-Lara, former film director and member of the Front National, to preside over the newly elected parliament in July 1989. More than half the members walked out on principle as he set about using the occasion to deliver a blistering attack on the Europe which the EC intends to create (but which as he gleefully pointed out nearly half the electorate could not even be bothered to vote for). He warned his listeners that 'the threat to our culture, our cultures, dear fellow Europeans, is coming not from the Soviet Union but from the United States, alas! And it is a terrifying threat'. Having cited various examples of the erosion of cultural uniqueness he declared:
All the dangers I have listed would not be fatal if they fell upon solid national tissue that was still able to generate antibodies and gain victory over death. This language shows just how much fear and disgust I feel at the mondialist, internationalist and egalitarian theories.
In a spirit which echoes Drieu's phrase 'D'abord les films am‚ricains et aprŠs la fin du monde', Autant-Lara then drew on his own life experience of the cinema industry to illustrate what he called `American invasion of Europe and the world'. Nor did he miss the opportunity to allude to the dangers of Europe's 'Islamicization' preached by his hero Le Pen. His final message to the 'young people of Europe' was that 'national cultural identity' is being lost. 'Lose that and there is nothing left to lose' (Debates of the European Parliament, 28.7.89).
In short, the Fukuyamian school of triumphalism is not the only political force that can take heart from recent world events. The palingenetic mythopoeia of Eurofascists too has received an enormous fillip from the collapse of Russian communism and its chaotic aftermath. As far as they are concerned only one of the twin citadels of evil has fallen.
Moreover Japan may well be already constructing another to replace it, thus compounding the residual fear of a 'red' yellow peril (China) with the prospect of being engulfed by a 'blue' one (for the centrality of fear of engulfment to the fascist mentality see Theweleit, 1989). Indeed, the original euphoria about a 'new era' that swept through both the 'freed world' and the 'Free World' (another mythic construct) in 1989-1990 may well turn out to have a negative backlash. As a sense of chaos and disillusionment replaces the utopian expectations which greeted the revolutions at home and abroad, as the relatively prosperous liberal democracies of the North face the prospect of an increasing tide of migration from the 'other' Europe and the 'South', as environmental and demographical scares turn into sombre realities, so more mythic energy is likely to be generated on the margins of official society to feed fascist and radical right movements.
It is said that the 'devil always has the best tunes', and ideologically speaking this has certainly been borne out by the history of western civilization. We are witnessing a
proliferation of conferences attempting to write liberal humanist scores for the future of Europe (for example, the topic of the annual conference of the University Association for Contemporary European Studies held in January 1992 was 'The New Europe'). There is also a deluge of books on the same theme, generating such titles as Decline and Renewal. Europe Ancient and Modern (Mowat, 1991). But fascism has a whole repertoire of its own melodies to play, arrangements of Golden Oldies beloved of ultra-nationalist and historical subculture attuned to the age of drum-machines and rap. In its Eurovision contest with representative democracy it may well be dismissed by classical humanists as a meaningless cacophony, but its refrains and 'hooks' (what the Germans delightfully call 'ear-worms') continue to bore their way into the ideals of multi-culturalism and the One World ethic with a destructive force which the liberal intelligentsia would be advised not to underestimate in assessing Europe's immediate future. Meanwhile ecologists still look for any real sign of light at the end of the biocidal tunnel-vision caused by the Western technocratic tradition of Imperium Hominis. As a spokesperson at the 1992 British Green Party Conference told her audience, without a vision of the world which embraces the concept of the indefinitely sustainable global society then future generations could be facing a horrifically literal 'End of History', one which would put an end to all ideologies, whether liberal or not.
Whatever the immediate future holds, Fukuyama's assertion in the conclusion of his article that it is only 'the prospect of centuries of boredom' which 'will serve to get history started once again' smacks of a complacency which is as culpable as it is arrogant. Contemptuous of evangelism stemming from the 'evil empire', fascism's publicists and activists will continue to preach their own vision of a New World Order. Theirs is an order based not on a restored American hegemony but a restored European one, a 'Fortress Europe' standing firm in the midst of mounting social chaos and cultural decay.
Moreover, they are arguably better placed than most liberal intellectuals to offer the bewildered and the myth-hungry plausible diagnoses and tempting panaceas for the welter of social, ethnic and nationalist tensions being constantly unleashed along the fault-lines of the world's economic and political system as powerful tectonic forces shift it into a new, and as yet unknown, configuration. In the very same month that The National Interest published Fukuyama's article, Nation Europa's leader (year 39, no. 7, July 1989) was telling its subscribers with equal self-assurance that the abstract, individual human rights announced in 1789 are incomplete. The declaration of the 'immortal principles' of the French Revolution contained a glaring omission: the right to a homeland and to a distinctive (national, racial, cultural) identity. The piece closed with words which may well approximate closer to the historical realities of the new Europe than the prognosis of terminal boredom: 'Whoever violates the right to identity is playing with fire'.
What can upholders of the Western humanist tradition, whether left or right, do to combat visions of Europe which deny plurality and tolerance, and hence the basis of a sustainable liberal democracy integrated not just internally, but with the rest of human society? As Brecht made clear when he wrote his Life of Galileo, it is indefensible only to labour away at modern discorsi within the cocoon of our own disciplines when the citadels of knowledge and power are being attacked from various quarters by the advocates of a Europe based on a vision of humanity akin to the very apartheid which De Klerk is in the process of dismantling in South Africa. Nor can the liberal intelligentsia afford to pin its hopes on the possibility that the age of satellite TV and virtual reality graphics might eventually so anaesthetize and depoliticize 'the masses' that the energy will drain away from ethnic tensions and nationalist hatreds. Kreb's collaborators in The Right to have an Identity have a point: there is an ideological war on, a war for the survival and propagation of genuinely humane societies and for the preservation of the ecosystem on which they are all based. On the issue of Europe illiberal mythopoeia must be actively fought with a genuinely liberal mythopoeia. Significantly, it is a poet statesman, not a political scientist, who has arguably done most to blaze a trail towards such a future both in word and in deed: Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia.
Havel's use of poetry and drama to appeal for basic freedoms had already made him the country's most famous dissident under Soviet rule, and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989 he set about becoming the ambassador of national self-determination in a spirit of universal humanism. He formulated the axioms of his vision when in 1991 he received an honourary degree at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At its core lies the powerfully charged mythic concept of 'home' formulated in the way which tears down curtains of dulled imagination and crippled capacity for love to reveal a breathtaking vista. It is the prospect of a genuinely global and ecologically aware humanism which does not suppress national identity or ethnic passions, but rather subsumes them within a concept which is anathema to all ultra-nationalists. The timely principle which he reaffirms is that civic rights and citizenship provide a framework within which all can celebrate our uniqueness in a way which does not conflict with their common humanity.
It is thus with Havel's words that I would like to conclude, quoted less as a primary source of contemporary Europoeia than as a passionate plea that a sane version of it might eventually prevail. If it does not, Europe, exposed to mounting demographic and ecological pressures from outside, might well degenerate into a Fortress without any help from those who would consciously turn it into one.
What a person perceives as his home can be compared to a set of concentric circles, with his 'I' at the centre. My home is the room I live in, the room I've grown accustomed to, and which, in a manner of speaking, I have covered with my own invisible lining. I recall, for instance, that even my prison cell was, in a sense, my home, and I felt very put out whenever I was suddenly required to move to another... My home is the house I live in, the village or town where I spend most of my time. My home is my family, the world of my friends, the social and intellectual milieu in which I live, my profession, my company, my work place. My home, obviously, is also the country I live in, the language I speak, and the intellectual and spiritual climate of my country expressed in the language spoken there. The Czech language, the Czech way of perceiving the world, Czech historical experience, the Czech modes of courage and cowardice, Czech humour --all these are inseparable from that circle of my home. My home is therefore my Czechness, my nationality, and I see no reason at all why I shouldn't embrace it since it is as an essential part of me as, for instance, my masculinity, another aspect of my home. My home, of course, is not only my Czechness, it is also my Czecholsovakness, which means my citizenship. Ultimately my home is Europe and my Europeanness --finally-- it is this planet and its present civilization, and, understandably, the whole world....
...I certainly do not want, therefore, to suppress the national dimension of a person's identity, or to deny it, or to refuse to acknowledge its legitimacy and its right to full self-realization. I merely reject the kind of political notions that attempt, in the name of nationality, to suppress other aspects of the human home, other aspects of humanity and human rights (Havel, 1991).
Excerpted from:
brookes.ac.uk |
