I'm on a bit of a hiatus from my coursework, having finished my first class with the University of Edinburgh about a month ago, the term paper for which is here. Now, I'm waiting to hear about admission to a different Master's program, which would save me a significant amount of money on tuition. I'm superstitious enough not to mention which school that is.
In the meantime, I'm reading a few things that are relevant to my research line and a couple that aren't. In the former category is Dylan Riley's The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe. Riley, who teaches political sociology at UC Berkeley, deploys an argument to counter the convention wisdom that a major contributor to the rise of fascism in interwar Europe was the lack of strong civil societies and related institutions. Actually, he maintains, the countries in which fascism emerged were characterized by strong civil societies with fairly lengthy histories. The cases he cites are Italy, Spain, and Romania; he then considers the cases of Hungary (which Riley identifies as authoritarian but not fascist) and Nazi Germany, showing that Germany shared aspects of his model, whereas Hungary did not.
At the core of Riley's work is a theory of societal conflict based on the work of Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist theoretician and political prisoner. Riley deploys Gramsci's concept of hegemony to explain the rise of fascism and its relationship to the existence and strength of civil society. The hegemonic project, particularly as regards social reform, requires that hegemony begin with the hegemonic group establishing intraclass hegemony with other groups within the same social class. E.g., the military might be the initial locus of power, and in the process of intra-class hegemony, it extends its power toward the church. The second stage involves the transfer of hegemony to other classes. Here, for instance, an example would be a national political party attracting voters from a workers' union. Finally, there is counterhegemony, where the class or social group that will arise to lead revolutionary change emerges in conflict against the hegemonic class or group.
Riley does a reasonably good job of making his case. He's well versed in most of the history of the countries he analyzes. I think where I part ways with him is in his characterization of fascism (or the lack thereof) in Spain and Romania. First, it's an open question regarding whether fascism was actually established to any significant extent in Spain. Certainly there were fascist strains within the Falange, and Riley is careful to note this point, but he seems overly eager to politicize Franco, who with the exceptions of being anti-democracy and anti-socialism, seems to have been relatively apolitical. The case of Romania is more complex and less well studied. He makes the argument that Codreanu's Iron Guard moved away from anti-Semitism and it acquired political power, which is a theory I'd not seen floated before.
Finally, I'm also not sure of how Riley uses the term "democracy." As part of his central thesis, he sees fascism as the result of failed hegemony in combination with a strong civil society presence. As a democratizing force, without strong political institutions, Riley theorizes, a society with failed hegemonic institutions will realize the democratic aspirations of civil society not through political democracy with elections (liberal democracy) but rather through the political expression of a more organic (ethnic?) sort of democracy. Where I think Riley might have been more accurate would have been to say that democratization with a lack of hegemonic political institutions gives rise to populism rather than to fascism. Whether populism is a core aspect of fascism is itself an open question, but I don't see a strong enough definition of fascism in Riley's book to bear out his model a hundred percent.
Anyway, I nevertheless enjoyed the book and found its ideas interesting. Whether it will play a significant role in my thinking about fascism as an historical movement remains to be seen. Next up, I'm reading Eric Cline's 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed, which while not on the topic of 20th century history nevertheless engages another interest of mine -- textual criticism of ancient cultures and history of the Near East.
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