Revolution from the Right: Fascism - School of Arts and Humanities ...

turn out on closer inspection to have pursued no radical plan to create a new ruling elite, but
exercised power on behalf of conservative forces despite the fascist facade they created by
adopting the external trappings of fascism (leader cult, mass rallies, shirted youth movements
etc.). These ‘parafascist’ regimes include Franco’s Spain (1939-1975), Dollfuss’ and
Schuschnigg’s Austria (1933-8), Antonescu’s Romania (1940-44), and Pétain’s Vichy France
(1940-2). These were indeed ‘counter-revolutionary’, and tried to absorb, marginalize or eliminate
not just communism, but ‘real’ fascism as well as a revolutionary threat to their ascendancy. 11
In Spain, for example, Franco, whose basic concern was to crush the Republican forces and
restore the power of landed elites, the Monarchy, and the Church, was careful to absorb the
genuinely fascist Falange to give his regime an aura of dynamism and appeal to the young it
would otherwise have lacked. In Romania, King Carol II first tried to crush the country’s
extremely violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard, but its popularity led him to change tack and
bring some of its leaders into government. After his abdication he was succeeded by General
Antonescu who pretended to be prepared to share power with the Iron Guard, but then seized
the first opportunity to liquidate it by force. These episodes reveal the fundamental antagonism
between conservatism and fascism however much practical considerations force them into
partnership.
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A third implication which follows from our ideal types is that only two inter-war right-
wing regimes were actually revolutionary and hence fascist: Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. 12
It is important to stress, however, that while they share an identical core myth of national
rebirth, profound differences divide the concrete ways in the circumstances which brought them
to power and the ways in which this myth was manifested. For one thing, the situations which