Few words in history or political science
have had definitions as intensely debated as fascism. An enormous volume
of ink has been spilled attempting to define the term since 1945, with a
consensus remaining elusive beyond general agreement about ultranationalism and
anti-Marxism. The controversy only increases when attempting to subcategorize
the field: one such subcategory, clerical fascism, has been applied to
cases as disparate as the Croatian Ustashi, on the one hand, and the German
Christian movement in Nazi Germany, on the other. One of the states commonly
identified with clerical fascism is Austria between 1934 and 1938, during which
it adopted an authoritarian constitution modeled on Catholic corporatist
ideology. However, when so-called Austrofascism is compared with Romania’s
League of the Archangel Michael (LAM), which combined hypernationalist
anti-Semitism, Orthodox Christian mysticism, and a totalitarian form of
monarchism, little resemblance can be seen. Nevertheless, such a comparison
might help to elucidate what both fascism and its clerical variant are.
According to John Pollard, the concept of
clerical fascism dates to 1922, when Luigi Sturzo, an Italian priest and
founder of the Italian People’s Party, used the term “clerico-fascism” to
describe former members of his own party who left for Benito Mussolini’s
fascists.[1]
Much of the usage of the term, however, was applied to Austria under the rule
first of Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss and then his successor Kurt Schuschnigg,
as well as their political party, the Fatherland Front (VF). Discussion of the
topic of fascism picked up in the 1960s, with extension of the term from
Austria to Spain under Francisco Franco and Portugal under Antonio Salazar[2] and then to
Slovakia under Josef Tiso.[3]
The significant expansion of the study of fascism beginning in the 1990s found
most major figures in the field at least commenting on clerical fascism, if not
dedicating studies to the topic. Many of these scholars focused on Romania,
including Stanley Payne, who famously wrote that “[t]he Legion was arguably the
most unusual mass movement of interwar Europe.”[4]
One current controversy regards whether clerical fascism is best understood as
fascism with religious tendencies or as a fundamentally religious movement with
fascist tendencies. In addition to Pollard’s study and a 2008 collection of
essays,[5]
recent work by Eliot Assoudeh has sought to fully taxonomize the term.[6]
If we choose to tentatively view clerical
fascism as the infusion of fascism with religious qualities, we can begin by
assessing the cases of Romania and Austria for their religious aspects. Austria
was more than 90% Catholic in 1934, with the remainder of the country’s 6.75
million people in 1934 divided among Protestant and Orthodox Christians and
200,000 Jews concentrated in Vienna. With the Catholic faith so closely tied to
Austrian national identity, it is unsurprising that political Catholicism lay
at the heart of the ideology of the VF and the philosophy of the corporate
state. In a speech in Vienna in September 1933, after the dissolution of the
legislature but before the declaration of the new constitution, Dollfuss said,
“We intend to take as the foundation of our constitutional life the corporative
principle [...] as proclaimed in the Encyclical Quadragesimo Anno. It is
our ambition to be the first country to give a practical response in political
life to the appeal of this noble Encyclical.”[7]
The aforementioned encyclical had been issued by Pius XI on the 40th
anniversary of Leo XIII’s encyclical on the rights and duties of capital and
labor, Rerum Novarum. Quadragesimo Anno explicitly counseled the
creation of a corporative society to accomplish class collaboration.
Dollfuss’s pledge was honored when the
constitution was promulgated the following spring. Beyond the addition of a Basmala-style
incipit (“In the name of God the Almighty, from whom all right emanates, the
Austrian people receives this constitution for its Christian, German federal
state on a corporative basis” [8]),
perhaps surprisingly, the constitution only explicitly mentions the Catholic
Church twice: first, identifying it specifically along with the “other legally
recognized churches and religious societies”[9];
and second, stipulating that religious organizations’ relationships with the
state, while regulated by the state in all other cases, are to be “made in principle
by agreement between the federation and the Holy See.”[10] This clause
is significant in that it indicates the specific role to be played in the
corporate state by the Catholic Church.
Nevertheless, the government of Austria
and the Catholic Church were to remain distinct. However, even within civil
society, the role of the Vatican would remain limited. Instead, as Laura
Gellott has detailed, the role of the Church was largely played by Catholic
Action -- one of several similarly named lay organizations emerging in response
to increased secularization in Europe. Having deemed the Christian Social Party
(CSP) of the post-World War I years as deploying Catholicism overly politically,
Catholic Action sought to place religious jurisdiction “squarely in the hands
of the bishops, and one which would work on behalf of confessional, not
partisan, interests.”[11]
Thus, the Austrian corporate state sought to maintain a prominent role for the
Catholic Church within society, albeit one separate from the state.
The relationship of the LAM with the
Romanian Orthodox Church was, in contrast, far more complicated. For the LAM
itself, Orthodox Christianity was essential to Romanian national identity, and
this principle was repeatedly enunciated by the LAM’s founder, C.Z. Codreanu.
The very name of the organization aside, Codreanu’s biography often positions
the Orthodox Church as under attack by non-Romanians, chiefly Jews. Recalling a
meeting in September 1923 of the National Christian Defense League (LANC), from
which Codreanu broke off the LAM in 1927, Codreanu recalls viewing the newly
acquired territory of Bukovina, in which “all those mountains laden with first
belonging to the Orthodox Church, which was now infused with politics” had
fallen “under the Jewish axe.”[12]
This passage is significant both for its positioning of Orthodoxy against Jewry
but also because of the implication that the official Orthodox Church had been
compromised by politics.
Years later, while visiting Bessarabia as
leader of the LAM, Codreanu recalls hearing of trouble in yet another newly
acquired territory, the Carpathian region of Maramures. The news is brought to
Codreanu by two priests, one Greek Catholic and one Romanian Orthodox.[13] Notably when
the Romanian Orthodox seek help in defending themselves against the Jewish
enemy, they call on the LAM and not the official church, which is seen as
wrapped up in political matters, if not already infiltrated by Jews.
The intertwining of Orthodox Christianity
into Legionnaire ideology ran deeper than merely providing an alternative to
government intervention where the Orthodox Church could not act, however. The
foremost scholar of the LAM, Radu Ioanid, writes, “The Legionary movement
willingly inserted strong elements of the Orthodox Christianity into its
political doctrine. Thus the Legionary movement is one of the rare modern
European political movements with a religious structure.”[14] According to
Ioanid, the LAM syncretized Orthodox mysticism with Romanian peasant
superstition[15];
in this way, the LAM deviated from the lower-case orthodoxy of the state
church.
Nevertheless, many Orthodox priests joined
the LAM and preached its philosophy of violence and anti-Semitic hatred. That
there was already deep-seated hatred of Jews within the ranks of the Romanian
Orthodox Church is attested at length in accounts of the Patriarch Miron
Cristea, who led the church during the Legionary period. Despite Cristea being
a man who “saw the Jews as a threat to the very existence of Romanian people,
as parasites, as promoters of decadence, as invaders,”[16] he officially
forbade clergy from joining the LAM in 1937, and the following year, when he
was named prime minister by King Carol II, Cristea formed a government that
specifically excluded Codreanu and the LAM.
Therefore, while the relationships of
Austrofascism and the LAM with their respective churches were different, there
is no denying that both movements were deeply infused with aspects of
clericalism. Regarding whether both were fascist is more complex. Roger Griffin
established four preconditions for fascism to emerge and take over a country.
Regarding the first, native currents of ultranationalism or fascist role
models,[17]
Austria was largely lacking. Although some rabid nationalism could be found
within pan-German circles, the majority of the political mainstream was
nationalistic but not jingoistic or expansionist. Nor were the right-wing
political leaders, favoring national conservatism, inspiring as fascist role
models; only Hitler offered that type of inspiration after 1932. As a result,
Austria lacked the “adequate political space”[18]
of which Griffin speaks as a second precondition.
It is worth noting as well that Griffin’s
“fascist minimum” of palingenetic ultranationalism, i.e., nationalism that
seeks to recover a glorious past, is absent from Austria. Whereas Nazi Germany
could evoke a Third Reich based on the First (Holy Roman Empire) and Second
(Wilhelmine Empire), and Fascist Italy recalled the Roman Empire, Austrian
interwar politics did not seek to reconstitute the imperial past. With the end
of WWI and the dissolution of its empire via the Treaty of Saint Germain,
Austria was a rump state that was highly ethnically homogenous, giving rise to
an Austrian identity of German ethnicity and Catholic faith that would have
been diluted by expansion.
Griffin’s third precondition of “an
inadequate consensus on liberal values”[19]
certainly obtained in interwar Austria as well as in most of Europe but seems
insufficient alone to justify a fascist takeover. Finally, regarding the fourth
precondition of “favorable contingency,”[20]
Austria under Dollfuss instead presents a case where authoritarian rule was
largely used to ward off fascist takeover (here by the Austrian Nazis). Whereas
weak liberal democracies like Weimar Germany and Italy in the early 1920s were
too weak to oppose the Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists, respectively, Dollfuss’s
construction of an authoritarian corporate state was well equipped to ward off
the attempted Nazi coup of July 1934.
Only when the geopolitical situation in
Europe and the wages of the economic crisis -- not to mention Dollfuss’s assassination
-- had eroded confidence in the corporate state could the Nazis successfully
absorb Austria, reversing their fortunes from four years earlier. However, even
here, the triumph of fascism in Austria meant its extinction as a separate
state, rather than the abolition of Dollfuss’s corporative model in favor of fascist
totalitarianism.
In contrast, Romania had among the ripest
environments in Europe for fascism to emerge, which is perhaps why so many
fascist parties and movements proliferated there, among which the LAM was only
the most historically important. First was the rabid ultranationalism within
Romanian society, evoked in part by the country finding itself, with the end of
WWI, vastly increased in both territory and numbers of ethnic minorities, most
of whom were more economically prominent than the Romanians, who remained a
largely peasant population. With ultranationalism, palingenesis appeared in the
form of the identification of Romanians with the ancient Dacians. Dmitry
Tartakovsky writes, “the established Romanian national mythology of the
connection to the ancient Romans through the Dacians, became translated into
new language based on blood superiority: only an inherently superior nation
could survive for centuries of foreign domination as the Romanians had.”[21]
Beyond Griffin’s fascist minimum,
Griffin’s preconditions were also present in interwar Romania. Specifically,
A.C. Cuza, the firebrand anti-Semite who inspired Codreanu, offered a concrete
example of a fascist role model. The weakness of the postwar Romanian state,
which struggled to manage the country’s poor development compared to the
remainder of Europe and its deep-seated ethnic tensions, provided a fertile
ground on which extremism could flourish. The subsequent erosion of the liberal
political system, with the regency of King Michael overthrown in 1930 by his
uncle Carol II in the wake of the global financial crisis, and the failing
consensus on liberalism were favorable contingencies that culminated in
accession to power by the LAM in 1937.
Thus, the LAM seems more qualified as
fascist, at least according to Griffin’s paradigm If we further consider the
nature of fascism as a mass movement, we find further evidence of this
contrast. In Austria, the VF emerged from the CSP from which Dollfuss emerged.
According to the so-called Lager theory of Austrian politics, introduced
in the 1950s by Adam Wandruszka, three parties dominated the political scene in
Austria: the Social-democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ); the pan-German Greater
German People’s Party (GDVP); and the CSP.[22]
The Marxist roots of the SPÖ and its working-class base contributed to its
emergence as a mass movement; the ethnic populism of the GDVP had the same
mobilizing quality, and its co-optation by the Nazis upon their emergence in
Austria capitalized on this quality.
In contrast, the CSP drew from an elite,
religious, and conservative base. Thus, when it was created, the VF was not a
mass movement; that it was created by Dollfuss and not “from below” by the
people is proof. Even scholars categorizing the Austrian corporate state as
fascist acknowledge this fact; e.g., Julie Thorpe, an opponent of the Lager
theory, commenting on the lack of consensus on whether regimes other than those
of Italy and Germany were fascist (including Austria), noted that these cases
“lack the mass movement, charismatic leader and popular consent.”[23]
In addition, the CSP was the only major
party, including the SPÖ, specifically opposed to union with Germany. As a
result, it could not draw on feelings of ethnic solidarity, as the other
parties, particularly the GDVP and the Nazis, could. Paradoxically, the CSP
made repeated references to the German identity of the Austrian people. For her
own part, Thorpe maintains that the CSP and subsequent corporate state were
pan-German, but in a sense of civic nationalism rather than ethnic nationalism.
She writes, “pan-German identity was a state-based nationalism that combined
civic features (citizenship, state borders and assimilation of minorities to
the state language) with ethnic features (language, religion and ancestry).”[24] This
description stands in contrast to the racial nationalism of the Nazis.
If there was a national conservative mass
movement in interwar Austria, it was the Heimwehr, which began in much
the same manner as the Freikorps in post-WWI Germany. Beginning with the
1930 election, Heimwehr members participated with the CSP, as well as
maintaining its own parliamentary bloc, the Heimatblock, which was
brought into the government with the appointment of Dollfuss as chancellor.
However, as the Heimwehr was brought into the political establishment, its
status as a mass movement declined until its formal absorption by the VF in
1936 under Schuschnigg. With the formal suppression of the SPÖ in 1934, the
Nazis remained the only mass movement in Austria.
In contrast, the LAM was conceived of and
existed as a mass movement. Codreanu himself describes the LANC, the
predecessor of the LAM, as a mass movement drawing specifically from the
right-wing nationalist student movement emerging across Romania in the 1920s.
Recounting in his autobiography the founding of the LANC, Codreanu describes
Cuza as already characterizing the party as a mass movement, with the LANC
chief saying, “We do not need to organize, our movement is based on a
formidable mass current."[25]
With the splitting off of the LAM, followed by the extension of the appeal of
the movement from the students to the peasantry and Codreanu’s embrace of
Orthodox mysticism, the base of the movement spread even further.
If we consider the characteristics of mass
movements set out by Eric Hoffer in the 1950s, we can identify more of these
traits in the LAM. Hoffer writes, for example, that “religious, revolutionary
and nationalist movements are such generating plants of general enthusiasm”[26]; the LAM
combines all three of the streams. Hoffer also identifies self-sacrifice as a
key characteristic of mass movements. Much of his discussion of self-sacrifice
addresses matters closely related to fascism, including the supremacy of the
group over the individual, dissatisfaction with the present, glorification of
the past, etc., but it is with Hoffer’s discussion of the “readiness to fight
and to die”[27]
that the LAM is more closely evoked.
Valentin Sandulescu’s treatment of a 1937
Legionnaire funeral is instructive in this regard. Like many other
far-rightists during the Spanish Civil War, some LAM members volunteered to
fight with Franco; two of these men, Ion Mota and Vasile Marin, were killed in
action. When the bodies were returned to Romania (via Berlin, where they were
honored by a Nazi color guard), the LAM staged a mass funeral, which included
Legionnaires pronouncing the following oath: “I swear before God, before your
holy sacrifice, for Christ and the Legion, to tear from me the earthly
happiness, to render myself from humanly love and, for the resurrection of my
People, to be ready for death at any time!”[28]
The martyrdom of the fallen men, as well as of Codreanu by assassination a year
later, contributed to the mass movement status that drove the LAM to become
enshrined within the National Legionary State three years later -- until the
LAM’s failed rebellion against Ion Antonescu in early 1941 and subsequent
dissolution of the Legionary State.
In conclusion, while both Austria during
Austrofascism and the LAM of interwar Romania have been cited as examples of clerical
fascism, only Romania truly fits the moniker. Although Austria undoubtedly had
strongly clerical aspects specifically contributed by the Catholic Church and
its corporatist ideology, it lacked most of the basic requirements of a fascist
government, and the VF was not a fascist movement. Conversely, the LAM had both
an ideology deeply infused with Orthodox Christian faith and mysticism and a form
of palingenetic ultranationalism characterized by anti-Semitism and
totalitarianism. In some ways, the LAM is the quintessential example of
clerical fascism, emerging sui generis in Romania before Spain’s
Falange, Slovakia’s Hlinka Guard, and Croatia’s Ustasha. Austrofascism, in
contrast, much more closely resembled the other authoritarian regimes of
central and eastern Europe. It was clerical but not fascist.
[1] John Pollard,
“’Clerical Fascism’: Context, Overview and Conclusion,” Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (2007): 433.
[2] Paul Blanshard, Freedom
and Catholic Power in Spain and Portugal: An American Interpretation
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1962.
[3] Yeshayahu Jelínek,
“Slovakia's Internal Policy and the Third Reich, August 1940-February 1941,” Central
European History 4, no. 3 (1971): 242-270.
[4] Stanley Payne, A
History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1996), 279-280.
[5] Clerical
Fascism in Interwar Europe, edited by Matthew Feldman and Marius Turda with
Tudor Georgescu (New York: Routledge, 2008).
[6] Eliot Assoudeh, “Between
Political Religion and Politicized Religion: Interwar Fascism and Religion
Revisited,” Religion Compass 9, no. 1 (2015): 13-33.
[7] Quoted in Johannes
Messner, Dollfuss: An Austrian Patriot (Norfolk, Va.: Gates of Vienna
Books, 2004), 107.
[8] Verfassung Des
Bundesstaates Österreich Vom 24. April / 1. Mai 1934," Verfassungen der
Welt, accessed December 5, 2010,
http://www.verfassungen.at/at34-38/index34.htm, all translations mine.
[9] Ibid, Article 29.1.
[10] Ibid, Article
30.3.
[11] Laura Gellott,
"Defending Catholic Interests in the Christian State: The Role of Catholic
Action in Austria, 1933-1938." The Catholic History Review 74, no.
4 (1988): 575.
[12] Corneliu Zelea
Codreanu, For My Legionaires [sic], translator unknown (Madrid: Editura
“Libertatea,” 1976), 63.
[13] Ibid, 145.
[14] Radu Ioanid,
"The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard,” Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 5, no. 3 (2004): 435.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ion Popa, The
Romanian Orthodox Church and the Holocaust (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana
University Press, 2017), 33.
[17] Roger Griffin, The
Nature of Fascism (Philadelphia: Routledge, 2013), 8.2.
[18] Ibid, 8.7.
[19] Ibid, 8.12.
[20] Ibid, 8.15.
[21] Dmitry
Tartakovsky, “Parallel Ruptures: Jews of Bessarabia and Transnistria between
Romanian Nationalism and Soviet Communism, 1918-1940," Ph.D. diss.
(University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009), 72 footnote 120.
[22] K.R. Luther,
“Dimensions of Party System Change: The Case of Austria” in Understanding
Party System Change in Western Europe, edited by Peter Mair and Gordon
Smith (New York: Routledge, 2013), 26 footnote 3.
[23] Julie Thorpe,
"Population Politics in the Fascist Era: Austria's 1935 Population
Index," Humanities Research 15, no. 1 (2009): 45.
[24] Julie Thorpe,
"Austrofascism: Revisiting the 'Authoritarian State' 40 Years On," Journal
of Contemporary History 45, no. 2 (2010): 319
[25] Codreanu, ibid,
43.
[26] Eric Hoffer, The
True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements (New York:
HarperColllins, 2011), 16.
[27] Ibid, 79.
[28] Quoted in Valentin
Sandulescu, "Sacralised Politics in Action: the February 1937 Burial of
the Romanian Legionary Leaders Ion Mota and Vasile Marin," Totalitarian
Movements and Political Religions 8, no. 2 (2007): 265.
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