John,
It more and more looks like my Orwellian pastiche(*) is all you need to know the score....
(*) Subject 33609
Here's one more clue:
EUROPE FOR THE EUROPEANS
Fascist Myths of The European New Order 1922-1992
Roger Griffin Professor in History, Oxford Brookes University
Department of History, Oxford OX3 0BP
<rdgriffin@brookes.ac.uk>
This paper is based on ones given to the conferences The Radical Right in Western Europe held by the Western European Area Studies Centre, Minneapolis University (7-9 November 1991), and Images of the New Europe held at the University of Bari (4-6 May 1992). It was first published as Occasional Paper (No. 1) by the Humanities Research Centre (Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, OX3 0BP) in 1993.
This paper is not to be cited without the written permission of the author.
UNITED EUROPE
Every time we try to give the notion of `European culture' concrete significance, we seem to run up against innumerable `interpretations' which leave us with nothing conclusive at all. Everyone has their own idea about what European culture is and many Europeans feel guilty or even reticent about championing it, and so the parvenus can speculate to their hearts content in the reviews and colour supplements about all the latest developments in this or that field of art in such a way that `culture' becomes entirely divorced from the `serious world', from what matters. Ironically, much of what the defenders of culture admire plays a major role in helping to bring about a spiritual crisis and lack of confidence in European culture. The `Westernization' of the world has meant that this decomposition extends across the world --thus Europe, from the Enlightenment to communism, has become the breeding ground of the very forces which work to destroy everything which is specifically European. A united Europe will only be created when the problems relating to its spiritual nature are faced and resolved. No material unity will progress beyond a certain point without this, unless `Europe' is made a travesty of Europe, an anti-Europe. We must be `pro-European' not only in public affairs, but in all aspects of life in order to defeat the `enemy within'. The temptation to succumb to non-European attitudes and lifestyles in seemingly trivial but crucial aspects must be resisted. This is more important than precise ideological cohesion: no activist in the pro-European struggle should collaborate in any extra-European influence against Europe. We must create a `unity of fighters'. That is a prerequisite. To set a vision of the world and of Europe aside as `irrelevant' would be to sink into the morass of political partisan politics, a cynical affair without identity, without spiritual meaning. A united Europe, without a communal spiritual identity and sense of direction would become just one more power bloc.
In what way would such a United States of Europe be spiritually distinct from the United States of America or China or be anything nobler than the organization of African Unity? Europe must not be a stage towards the Westernization of the world, but a move against it, in fact a revolt against the modern world in favour of what is nobler, higher, more truly human.
The conclusion of an English translation of part three of the booklet Europa Una: Forma e Presupposti containing three essays on European unity written by Julius Evola (undated). It appeared in issue 9 of the English neo-fascist New Right magazine The Scorpion, Spring 1986, whose front cover is opposite.
CONTENTS
Introduction: The `New Europe' as a Mythic Construct
Part One: Eurofascism before 1945
1 Pan-European Currents of thought within Italian fascism
2 Pre-1945 Eurofascism outside Italy
Part Two: Eurofascism after 1945
1 The Europeanization of Post-war fascism
2 The Europeanism of the New Right
3 The call for a `return to Europe' in the former East bloc
Conclusion: Eurofascism and the `End of History'
References
Introduction: The `New Europe' as a mythic construct
`The century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started.' These words are taken from the now famous article (subsequently turned into a best-selling book) in which Francis Fukuyama outlined his vision of the imminent victory of the West, or rather what he calls the `Western idea', over all rival ideologies, and coined a phrase which has since become a catch-phrase of liberal capitalist triumphalism, `the End of History.' Intimately bound up with this vision is that of a Europe and a North America way out in front of the pack of other cultural systems `in the vanguard of civilization' (Fukuyama, 1989, p. 5), thus fulfilling (against all the odds when the upheavals of the 20th century are considered) what Hegelians reason to be history's hidden agenda, namely the inexorable progress of liberal freedom. Little wonder, then, that a section of his article pays homage to the neo-Hegelian Kojève, who managed to convince himself that the creation of the European Economic Community gave concrete form to the dream of forging Europe into an example of the universal homogenous state which alone is capable of resolving `all the contradictions of earlier stages of history' and of satisfying `all human needs'. True to his beliefs, Kojève spent his later years working tirelessly as an EC bureaucrat.
Since the summer of 1989, when Fukuyama's article appeared, `world-historical' events with an impact on Europe have flowed thick and fast: the independence of the Baltic states, Czechoslovakia's Velvet Revolution, the bloody overthrow of Ceaucescu, the unification of the two Germanies, the Gulf War, the comprehensive collapse of European state communism in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Empire, the outbreak of a horrific civil war in Yugoslavia, and the division of Czechoslovakia to mention only the most spectacular. In a less spectacular way another major process in the history of nation-building has been taking place, one profoundly influenced by the end of the Cold War: the movement towards the `European Superstate'. The implications of this phrase obviously vary enormously according to how the EC project of alignment between member states and its eventual relationship with non-EC states is conceived, and there is an important distinction to be drawn between the European Community and Europe. Nevertheless, such issues as the economic and political integration of Western and Northern Europe with the former East bloc countries, the inclusion within the EC of Turkey, an Islamic state beyond the Bosporus, and the real possibility of Europe becoming one of three super-power blocs of economic and military power in the new world order, all point to changes which may not be as dramatic as those which followed in the wake of the Napoleonic or the two world wars, but in their own way are just as profound.
What is easy to lose sight of while so many `real' events stream forth is that `Europe' becomes a utopian and mythic concept whenever it is used by liberals or their enemies to connote anything more than a specific geographically or politically delimited area whose boundaries are agreed upon by cartographers. Once it evokes the vehicle of progress or the agent of destiny, let alone a homogeneous cultural entity or primordial racial community, then mythopoeia is at work no less strongly than it was for the Greeks who identified Europe with the woman whom, Jupiter, disguised as a bull, kidnapped to Crete. This point emerges powerfully from two scholarly reflections on the elusive nature of Europe written on either side of the annus mirabilis/terribilis of 1989, Stanley Hoffmann's `Floating in the Here and Now. Is there a Europe, Was there a Past, and Will there be a Future? or the Lament of a Transplanted European' (1981) and Mia Rodriguez-Salgado's `In Search of Europe' (1992). It emerges in perhaps an even more telling way from two books devoted to disseminating the EC vision of Europe, J. Duroselle's Europe. A History of its Peoples (1990) and [former European Commission President Jacques] Delors' Our Europe, (1992). The first, gloriously illustrated, opens with a section entitled `The Myth of Europe' underscoring the extreme heterogeneity of European cultures and climates. Nevertheless, it still contrives to present Europe's destiny as ever closer integration, managing on the way to devote 25% of the text to the glories of French history and a mere two lines to one major European enterprise, slavery. The second volume is a remarkably bland and anaemic outline of what is involved in European integration in a number of areas, written this time with little sense of historical perspective or the obstacles to genuine unity, and with a constant emphasis on the key role to be played by France. In both cases nationalist self-interest and selective vision have prevailed over historiographical rigour.
Such books are only the latest exercises in a pan-European project which some might trace back to the attempts of the Holy Roman Empire to unite Europe into a single system in the late Middle Ages within the framework of feudal Christendom (or even the Roman Empire itself). Modern initiatives in this direction have their theoretical roots in the thought of Herder and Kant. As for practical experiments in Europeanization, Napoleon I might even be presented as pioneer in a very qualified sense. An even stronger case can be made for beginning with the scheme for Young Europe, a republican brotherhood of nations emancipated from their oppressors, conceived in the 1830s by Mazzini in exile. The formation of Young Italy and its kindred movements in several other countries was part of what was conceived as a pan-European initiative for an alliance of free nation states. Given the profoundly fragmented state of Europe in Mazzini's day, his passion for Europe is an outstanding example of mythopoiea at work, and it is significant that Sorel cites his contribution to the risorgimento as a case-study in the power of myth to change history (Sorel, 1961, pp. 125-7). The cataclysm of the First World War naturally engendered a wave of visionary idealism among some politicians and political thinkers concerning the possibility that the defeat of Germany and her allies might be seized upon as an opportunity to recast the whole of Europe on liberal principles. This idealism is epitomized in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and their supporters at the ensuing peace conference at Paris. A symptom of the new vision within the ranks of reformist socialists are two books published in 1924, Fimmen's Labour's Alternative: The United States of Europe or Europe Limited, and Kranold's Vereinigte Staaten von Europa: eine Aufgabe
proletarischer Politik (United States of Europe: a Task for Proletarian Power).
More well-known, but in the short term equally doomed to failure, was the liberal Pan-Europa founded in 1922 by the Viennese count Coudenhove-Kalergi in the pursuit of pacifism and egalitarianism. By 1924 the movement was drawing up its own scheme for a United States of Europe, and two years later it held an international congress was held in Vienna. One of the delegates at that conference and Pan-Europa's honorary president in 1927 was Artistide Briand, eleven times Prime Minister of France and the dominant voice in its foreign policy between 1925 and 1932. In 1929 he attempted to move Pan-Europa's vision one step closer to reality by putting to the League of Nations what became known as the Briand Plan, which proposed the idea of a federal European Union based on close economic and political ties, an entitity which by 1930 he was referring to as a European Community or a Union of United States. The essential idea behind the plan was that Europe would not only move decisivly out of the age of international conflict, but become a major power bloc to rank alongside the USSR and the USA. However, of the 26 countries which responded to the proposal only 5 were positive, the position of a number of nations (e.g. Britain) being that the proper channel for integration should be the League of Nations. The onset of the Depression and Briand's death in 1932, not to mention the Nazi seizure of power a year later, ensured that the plan remained a dead letter.
It was the horrific consequences of the next cataclysmic break-down of European unity, the Second World War, which was to inspire a new wave of liberal palingenetic mythopoeia centring on the post-war order --e.g. C. Dawson, The Renewal of Civilization (1941), H.G. Wells, Phoenix. A Summary of the Inescapable Condition of the World Organization, (1943), Buchman, Remaking the World (1943). In general the Allies' forward planning focused on a post-war world order based on a new arrangement of the super-powers which would put paid to the imperial ambitions of the Axis powers. One remarkable exception is Conditions of Peace by the historian Professor E.H. Carr which was dropped over occupied Europe in the last two years of the war and was read avidly for its vision of the international cooperation which could supersede the disastrous age of nation states.
The document envisaged relief, transport, public works and planning to be dealt with on a pan-European basis, though it did not go so far as suggesting a Federal Europe. Nor were Carr's suggestions alien to the thinking of such eminent British political figures as Winston Churchill, Clement Atlee, Lord Davies and Harold McMillan, who on occasion made visionary pronouncements on the need for European integration. It was occupied Europe, however which produced the most poignant pan-European initiatives, such as the Manifesto of European Resistance written in 1944 which looked forward to a Federal Union of European Nations as the basis of future peace (see Brugmans, 1965, ch. 3).
When Churchill declared in Zurich in September 1946 that `We must build a kind of United States of Europe' (Churchill, 1965) he was articulating ideas which by the end of the war had become the common sense of democrats of many complexions and nations on the continent, no matter how alien they were to the average Briton. It was to be other politicians who were infected by the visionary ideal of democratic Europeanism, men like Schuman and Monnet, who led to the launching of the European Movement and the formation of the Council of Europe. Out of this grew another initiative, the European Coal and Steel Community which became the nucleus of the European Economic Community (see Mowat, 1973). Since the Treaty of Rome the EC has been the main focus for pan-European visions, but not the only one. One of the more original contributions to the theme in the 1980s came from a source which would have been unimaginable in the Stalinist era. It was as part of the scheme for Russia's palingenesis set forth in Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World in 1984 that Gorbachev first outlined his concept of the Common European Home. Though he was careful to stress in a speech two years later that it was a home with different apartments and entrances, he still set his sights on some sort of harmonious cohabitation of the communist and capitalist worlds. An analysis of his concept of a European home soon reveals its essentially utopian and ahistorical nature (e.g. Prins, 1991, Catone, 1992), but in any case his bold policies for the restructuration of superpower politics were overtaken by a series of revolutionary events which perestroika and glasnost had done so much to unleash, while Gorbochev himself was swept away by the tide of change like some latter-day sorcerer's apprentice.
Whether Russia can eventually complete the transition to a free-market economy without relapsing into authoritarianism, and whether the CIS can provide the necessary bulwark against balkanization and social collapse on a vast scale in the former Russian Empire, remains to be seen. Whatever happens, such factors as the instability in the former Communist bloc, the agonizing of some countries over the Maastricht Treaty, the structural problems caused by Germany's unification, global recession and the approach of the mythic year 2000 have all conspired to make Europe the centre of much futurological speculation, both whether frenzied or world-weary, utopian or apocalyptic.
The severe structural problems of alignment associated with the fuller integration and expansion of the EC, not to mention and the current impotence of the international
community to put a stop to the orgy of atrocities and material destruction in the Balkans, underscore the deep gulf which divides official EC rhetoric concerning the future of Europe from the reality.
It is not the purpose of this paper, however, to discuss how far the New Europe envisaged by Eurovisionaries of reformist socialist, liberal or reconstructed communist persuasion is an `imagined community' (see Anderson, 1991). It sets out to examine another way Europe can be mythically created in the mind of the beholder --another example of what might be called `Europoeia' at work-- whose reality principle is
arguably even weaker than theirs: the fascist one. There is, of course, a major debate about what is to be understood by the term fascism (spelt with a lower case to indicate it is being used generically in contradistinction to Fascism, the Italian phenomenon). While the debate over a suitable taxonomic definition of fascism can never be finally resolved, since it is at bottom an ideal type, the one which informs the following analysis assumes it is characterized by a special genus of political myth, namely a palingenetic (rebirth) form of ultra-nationalism. In its many different permutations the thrust of this myth is the attempt to inaugurate the Phoenix-like rebirth of the nation from the terminal cultural and political decay allegedly brought about by liberalism, a decay which is seen as only being accelerated further by the advance of communism (Griffin, 1993).
Though in the interwar period the dominant forms of Fascism and Nazism, both permutations of rebirth nationalism, pursued national interests at the expense of international ones, nothing in fascist ideology ruled out in principle the possibility of alliances with other nations with kindred palingenetic aspirations. In fact, as this paper seeks to show, certain strands of inter-war fascism were actively concerned with the resolving the decadence brought about by the liberal system as a whole, not just in a particular nation, and thus thought of rebirth in pan-European or Western terms. Indeed since the war this ecumenical fascism or `Eurofascism', far from remaining marginalized, has moved to the mainstream of ultra-right thought.
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The whole paper:
brookes.ac.uk
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