Ángel Alcalde

The author has a number of agendas with this monograph, some of which seem more successfully accomplished than others.

One is to examine the supposition (put forward by George Mosse) that the individuals who were the cutting edge of fascist politics were a product of the crucible of brutality that was the First World War. In a close examination of events, Alcalde essentially concludes that individuals exited the Great War with the politics that they entered the war, and in the case of the initial generation of Fascist and fascistic leaders, they were ultra-nationalists before the war, and said war only confirmed them in their radicalism.

Moving from there, Alcalde is essentially examining how the trope of the fascist as dissatisfied war veteran became a trope, and has plowed through a lot of period related literature to follow its fabrication and dissemination. A particular point here is to reemphasize that it took a lot of selling to convince many veterans that fascistic politics would serve their interests and deserved their allegiance.

Apart from the failure of the war to deliver on its promise, as seen by the men who were inclined to be fascists, the real radicalizing issue is the threat of Bolshevik revolution in polities damage by the war. I know that my theory of what is fascism is to basically see it as romantic nationalism filtered through the politics of total war and the mobilization of largely apolitical populations, and deployed in defense of state and society against internal enemies. Mussolini certainly would not have gotten far is he not been seen in Italian corridors of power as a patriot who managed to win the support of the crown, army, and police in the effort to buttress a tottering social order.

It's when one gets to the notion of there being a Fascist International that I find this work to be a little less convincing, and in trying to hunt down other writers' reactions (particularly Scandinavian academic Matthew Kott), I do get the sense that I'm justified in this feeling. What it boils down to is the sense that Alcalde privileges the Italian experience a little too much, as being the seed crystal in a supersaturated solution in terms of providing inspiration. Looking at the German, Scandinavian and East European experience, I don't have the sense from my own reading that they really needed Italian inspiration, however much they tracked Mussolini's adventure in state building, seeing as they all started with the same issue of creating mass movements to forestall hard-left social revolution. I also would observe that I personally found the portions of this work dealing with the French and Spanish experiences to be a little less convincing, but I've done less reading there.

Still, assuming you've done a fair amount of reading in regards to European society between the world wars, you'll probably get a lot out of this book.… (más)