Neo-Fascism: A Footnote to the Fascist Epoch?
This essay responds to Roger Griffin’s recent call that we should not ‘close the file on neo-fascism or treat it as a footnote to the fascist epoch’. It takes Roger Griffin’s original conceptualisation of neo-fascism in The Nature of Fascism (1991) as ‘of
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Neo-Fascism: A Footnote to the Fascist Epoch? Nigel Copsey
Every fresh act of neo-fascist violence, every event designed to stir up memories of the fascist epoch, every reference to ethnic cultures as organic entities with their own political rights and destinies, is a reminder of the need for the human sciences not to close the file on neo-fascism or treat is as footnote to the fascist epoch. (Roger Griffin, Fascism, 2018: p. 125)
Three Trends in the Evolution of Neo-Fascism When reviewing the 626-page The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (2009), Roger Griffin lamented that the question of ‘how the revolutionary right has metamorphosed itself in the post-war, post-Soviet or “post-fascist” age’, rather than featuring as a principal theme of the book, was ‘tucked away inconspicuously in a concluding section’. While Anna Cento Bull’s chapter on neo-fascism ensured that the book at least ended on ‘a high note’,1 its solitary nature reflected the prevailing tendency among historians of the ‘fascist epoch’ to dismiss post-war articulations as insignificant
N. Copsey (B) Teesside University, Middlesbrough, UK © The Author(s) 2020 C. Iordachi and A. Kallis (eds.), Beyond the Fascist Century, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46831-6_5
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residues or not even instances of ‘fascism’ at all. As I have elaborated elsewhere, those historians who hesitate, or recoil, from embracing the term ‘neo-fascism’ have been joined by presentist political scientists who, eager to draw attention to the ‘novelty’ of contemporary radical-right populism, maintain that today’s radical-right populists are truly distinct from the ‘Old Fascist Right’.2 Cas Mudde, doyen of radical right-wing populist studies, singled out the Marxist tradition for deliberately misusing (or abusing) the term ‘neo-fascism’ in order to ‘prove’ historical continuity when there was none.3 Roger Griffin is no Marxist, of course. Approaching his subject from a place of methodological empathy, Griffin’s claim, which I find impossible to resist, is that fascism exists beyond 1945, that it has experienced mutation, and that ‘neo-fascism’ is an important heuristic tool that helps us conceptualise the myriad of post-war fascism’s outward adaptations while leaving its mythic core of revolutionary ultra-nationalist rebirth intact. Remove this mythic core and fascism becomes something else; retain it, and it remains fascist. This, as Roger Griffin said, ‘is simply an approach to fascism that accommodates radical variations in fascism’s outward organizational form and policies while postulating a constant ideological core’.4 It was in The Nature of Fascism (1991) that Griffin would make his first important intervention into the conceptualisation of post-war fascism. While this early foray into the subject was imperfect in some respects, he was careful to confine neo-fascism’s application only to those phenomena that offered ‘something new with respect to inter-war phenomena’ and not to those ‘attempting to resuscitate an earlier movement’, i.e. neoNazism.5 Neo-fas
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