For those of you who even remember my last post (aarggh, where does the time go?), I wanted to elaborate a little more on the pull of nationalism in the early 20th century European milieu in which fascism developed. It was a time when nationalism was the happening thing. World War I was dispiriting to western Europe, but it brought about the fulfillment of many nationalist aspirations. Poland was reconstituted after spending 150 years carved up between the Germans and the Russians; the countries of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were created out of the remains of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Robert O. Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism, explains that liberals of the day — who were sort of cosmopolitan libertarians at that point — “wanted to organize the world by the principle of self-determination of nations. Satisfied nationalities, each within its own state, would coexist in such natural harmony, according to liberal doctrine, that no external force would be needed to keep the peace.” Of course, that’s not how it turned out. The ethnic subgroups within the new countries were unsatisfied, eventually leading to the breakup of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia; in the nearer term, the states that had lost territory wanted to avenge themselves, helping augment the rise of fascist governments in those countries.

What interests me about the liberal view of the time is that, although it sounds hopelessly idealistic when Paxton spells it out like that, the idea that self-determination is a cure for expansionist ambition keeps cropping up everywhere. One of the odder examples of this was Jim Pinkerton’s 2007 essay holding up Tolkien’s hobbits as model citizens: without big dreams, simply defending their own territory and getting on with their lives. What was odd about it was that he posited this as a strategy against a rising radical Islam. He imagines “Christendom” pulling together in a sort of geographic monoculture, drawing a physical border between itself and the Islamic world which it could then militarily defend. As for Israel, he imagines that Christians and Muslims can striked a grand deal. “When all Christians, and all Muslims, are brought to the bargaining table, they all become stakeholders in a pacific outcome.”

It’s funny that this piece appeared in The American Conservative magazine, because it sounds a lot like the Wilsonian liberal international vision Paxton described above, only with religion taking the place of nation. And various libertarians, localists and social democrats have also posited versions of this idea, though usually built around smaller entities: states, communities, families, individuals, or some combination of the above. What they all have in common is a version of the idea that, if you just let people run their own lives, the urge to impose themselves on others will be greatly diminished. The error people make, this line of thinking goes, is believing in universal standards and morals; that keeps tempting people to meddle in others’ affairs.

The rise of fascism offers a serious rebuke to this idea. As I pointed out in my last post, one surprising thing about them was that they didn’t believe in universal ideologies; their doctrines, Paxton points out, were flexible, intermingled with national traits and interests, and therefore unexportable. They did not really aim to make the rest of the world like them, but that didn’t stop them from wanting to rule.

Why the difference? One factor, as I have already noted, is that the defeated imperial powers looked into themselves and their pasts and saw, well, imperial powers. To turn into hobbits wouldn’t have exactly been in character, it would have been imposed on them by losing the war. But also noteworthy is the fact that Paxton says several times that fascists saw themselves as part of a “Darwinian struggle” between peoples. I don’t know how much they literally thought of it in terms of Darwinian selection, but evidently they assumed competition to be the natural state of things. If we don’t conquer, the thinking goes, someone will conquer us.

In thinking that way, the fascists actually had a pretty good point. World history certainly supports the conquer-or-be-conquered thesis. Factors such as population growth, climate change, and resource exhaustion, that have obliged people to keep migrating throughout history, playing havoc with the everybody-stay-within-bounds idea. And it points up a fact that is often ignored, namely, the peace-through-self-determination scheme actually is a universalist ideology. Everyone in it has to be about equally hobbitlike. If just one group breaks out and decides to conquer the world, and they gain anything from it, that will pretty well wreck the general social compact. Localism, in a sense, works best if you think globally: it is best for society as a whole if I stay within my community bounds. If you really look at the world from an entirely local point of view — here are my people, and the rest of the world is alien and much bigger than we are — you can see how that wouldn’t lend itself to peace.

I’ve been reading Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism lately, as it seems relevant to the subjects I’ve been posting about. (Posting very slowly I know — sorry!) The connection to racial identity is obvious, but I actually first thought I should read about fascism when I described my own problems with democratic politics. The ideal of human community as a harmonious hive, the vaguely biological concept of a healthy society — sounds slightly familiar, no? So I thought I should look into it, not so much to break Godwin’s Law on myself, but to see if the similarity means anything, and if so, where the fascists went wrong.

So far, I’ve read about the earliest fascist movements and their philosophical forebears, and they are familiar in some surprising ways. One thing I didn’t quite realize is that one of the philosophical bases for fascism was the impossibility of knowing objective truth. Fascist doctrine, Paxton points out, is rather difficult to make general statements about because it embraced the particularity of every country it appeared in, and so was not really made for export; and because a fixed set of principles wasn’t as important as the mystical unity of nation and leader. Fascism “replaced politics with aesthetics” Paxton quotes someone as saying (I forget who), and in some ways it does sound like fascists movements had the unity of a bunch of fans of the same rock band as activists in a political movement.

I think this sounds so familiar because it sounds so much like the broadly postmodern/emergent/anabaptist Christians I’ve been hanging out with the last few years. They also reject the Enlightenment idea of how to know truth, instead turning to a sort of communalism centered around devotion to a person (in this case, Jesus). They also tend to distrust large-scale economies like capitalism and socialism and have an intermittent romance with a more localist agrarian past, which the early fascists also did. They also like the idea of themselves as an entire alternative society, rather than just an actor within a society. Paxton writes that when Mussolini decided to run for office, the purists of the movement saw this as an unacceptable compromise. “Idealistic early fascists saw themselves as offering a new form of public life — an “antiparty” — capable of gathering the entire nation, in opposition to both parliamentary liberalism, with its encouragement of faction, and socialism, with its class struggle,” he writes.

But the differences are equally conspicuous. What really made the fascists what they were was that once they lost faith in universal truth and the global economy, their alternative was nationalism. Indeed, when it came to real-world politics, nationalism got priority over virtually all other fascist precepts. It’s rather difficult for me to relate to that. Probably one reason is that nations in Europe are rather different from America. Although both Germany and Italy are relatively new countries, formed in the 19th century, they could call on broad ethnic identities that were very old. The U.S.A. can’t really escape its origins as a country based on an idea or a philosophy rather than an identification with land and ancestors. Race is about the closest thing Americans have to that pre-rational type of identity, which is doubtless why race is the central fixation of such fascist movements as there are in the U.S. But even that has a problem: the white race is much bigger than America, especially given the broad way Americans construe it. (The German definition of “Aryan” allowed them to rule out all sorts of people we would consider white.) As such, I don’t think America can ever be particular in quite the way European countries are. Even the most fervent patriots around here tend to see it as the apotheosis of universal qualities: it’s the freest country, the most Christian, or whatever.

Another conspicuous difference is that as much as fascists liked unity, they were also obsessed with militarism. Many of them believed that war was good for both individual and social health. Paxton doesn’t elaborate greatly on this line of thinking, but definitely one factor is that fascists drew on a great many veterans of World War I. It’s difficult for Americans to fathom how vast the impact this war had, in terms of what percentage of people fought in it, and were killed in it or otherwise affected by it. Only the Civil War compared in that respect; but whereas the Civil War, for the victors at least, fit well enough into the modern narrative of progressive freedom, the Great War brought on existential doubts even for the victors. This led to some great antiwar artworks, but on the other hand, it also left many veterans feeling that the ungrateful, and now alien, civilian world really owed them something. At the same time, they may have wanted to bring the things they really liked about war to civilian life. In his classic essay Why Men Love War, William Broyles described experiences that fit fascism to a T: the sense of comradeship, the intensity of life on the edge of death, the “eerie clarity” that removes all the gray areas, the escape from mundane realities and responsibilities, the relief from the anxieties of freedom. The fact that so few Americans today have actual war experience may account for how certain fascist-like impulses can actually coexist with pacifism.

But of course the 800-pound gorilla of differences is religion. Like I said, many modern Christians feel a fascist-like devotion to a person, but that person is not on earth (not now, anyway). On the other hand, devotion to an earthly leader, or desire for one to come along, seemed to be the sine qua non of fascism. This is also a bit difficult for me to relate to as an American, perhaps because I don’t come from the European tradition of monarchy. Sure, Americans fall in love with political leaders all the time, but they don’t tend to build a normative politics around the idea of absolute dictatorship. But whatever the reason, fascism’s totalizing politics made religion as much a competitor as anything else. The movement’s attitude toward Christianity seemed to range between ambivalence and indifference. Sure, Christian churches were part of the particular national cultures that fascists purported to defend; but the universalist nature of the faith rather put them at odds with playing such a role.

Still, I have a lot of questions after reading the first fifty-odd pages of the book, which I’m not sure Paxton is going to answer. I wrote the last couple posts asking what the purpose of race is, and am therefore interested in the fact that the idea of “national destiny” was apparently a big part of fascist thinking. But so far Paxton hasn’t explained what these supposed destinies are or where they came from. It would also be interesting to hear more about how Italians conceived of “la razza” in a fascist way without necessarily thinking of it in a biological way — apparently, the obsession with biological purity was really a Germanic thing. But we’ll see what develops, as we get into the era where fascists actually start to hold power.