Letter: Euro-fascism? (2002)

Letter to the Editors from the June 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Euro-fascism?

Dear Editors

The views expressed in your reply (Socialist Standard, April) to my letter regarding a possible fascist European nation state developing at a later stage reveal an error in assessment.

Fascism is not just a military dictatorship capitalist state, seeking “a place in the sun” for markets and raw materials, but is primarily a counter-revolutionary force, created to crush within its own borders, serious trends developing for “social” change that could lead to “socialism”, by large sections of workers.

Whatever our view of the 1917 Russian revolution, the event put “the fear of God” into the ruling élite of Europe. Hitler’s Germany was called “a barrier against Bolshevism” by the then Governor of the Bank of England. “A bastion to prevent the spread of ‘Communism’”. After 1917, revolutionary movements abounded throughout Europe.

Your detailed summary of the present European Union is irrelevant to the case on a future European Nation State, the one-government assembly containing delegates form Europe’s regions of national councils. To assume, as you do, that in a revolutionary situation the delegates would never be legislated by majority to vote for fascists’ policies by the regions is politically naïve. The fact that some Tories are opposed to a European state, preferring closer economic links to the USA, does not diminish the view of genuine dangers for the workers of Europe.

Lionel Rich, 

London NW6

Reply: 

There are at least two things wrong with your nightmare scenario about a European Super-State somehow coming into existence and then going fascist.

First, your revival of the old “Communist” Party line that fascism is “primarily a counter-revolutionary force”. This implied that Bolshevism was some sort of revolutionary force. In fact, by the 1930s Bolshevism was a rival totalitarian ideology and movement to fascism which shared many of the latter’s features (one-party state, mass rallies, leader worship, concentration camps, etc). We repeat that, in our view, both Fascism and Bolshevism are to be explained from the concrete historical circumstances facing the ruling class in Italy, Germany and Russia in the first part of the 20th century and which are not being repeated at the present time (and are not likely to be). In fact, fascism today is related to opposition to immigration rather than open support for dictatorship. Of course as long as capitalism lasts what limited democratic procedures exist will not be 100 percent secure, but we would have thought that the growth of a genuine socialist movement would make them more secure, not less as in your nightmare scenario.

Second, there is the uncomfortable fact for you that most fascists today – the BNP, Le Pen, National Front, etc – are, as you urge us to be, against the Common Market. Apparently, they think they have a better chance of making progress if Europe is divided into separate, competing states with each having its own distinct nationalist ideology that they can latch onto. Which is one reason why, although we are against the Common Market as we are against any capitalist arrangement, we don’t want to touch the nationalist opposition to it with a barge pole. It is why we advocated constructive abstention (by writing “World Socialism” across the ballot paper) in the 1975 referendum on the issue and why we will be advocating the same thing in the referendum next year or the year after on the euro—Editors.