The Phenomenon of Fascism

The public appearance of fascism as a dominant force in Europe is the phenomenon of a few years only. The great age of fascism, the period when it seemed an international movement, capable — however violently — of solving the problems of the world, was a brief and distinctive period in European history. Fascism is the exact opposite: a series of non-intellectual, even anti-intellectual, national reactions artificially united and transformed into an international doctrine by the facts of power. The nineteenth-century prophets of fascism, or those who seem to be their prophets, were often phantom figures. European fascism, then, is the political response of the European bourgeoisie to the economic recession after 1918 — or rather, more directly, to the political fear caused by that recession. Before all else, it was anti-communist. To the end, Italian fascism was unable to dominate Italian society as German nazism dominated German society.