Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe

Marco Bresciani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000332575
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia mondiale

This book features a broad range of thematic and national case studies which explore the interrelations and confrontations between conservatives and the radical Right in the European and global contexts of the interwar years.

It investigates the political, social, cultural, and economic issues that conservatives and radicals tried to address and solve in the aftermaths of the Great War. Conservative forces ended up prevailing over far-right forces in the 1920s, with the notable exception of the Fascist regime in Italy. But over the course of the 1930s, and the ascent of the Nazi regime in Germany, political radicalisation triggered both competition and hybridisation between conservative and right-wing radical forces, with increased power for far-right and fascist movements.

The book will be of great interest to students and scholars of politics, history, fascism, and Nazism.

1
“Laboratory for world destruction”
The Habsburg Monarchy and fascism

Steven Beller

The Habsburg Monarchy before 1918, and its successor states afterwards, played a central role in the origins and development of fascism. Normally, fascism is seen as a phenomenon that emerged in 1919, when the Habsburg Monarchy no longer existed. Italy and Germany, quite understandably, are at the centre of most studies of fascism. Yet the Habsburg Monarchy was never far from the action.

A precursor of Mussolini’s Fascism, Gabriele d’Annunzio’s occupation of Fiume in 1919, took place on formerly Habsburg territory. The whole history of Italian nationalism was tied to much of Northern Italy being part of the Monarchy until 1860, Venetia until 1866 and “Italia irredenta” until 1918. The links with German National Socialism were even stronger. Arguably National Socialism originated among German nationalist ideologues and politicians in the Habsburg Monarchy. Many might regard it as hackneyed, yet there are good reasons for thinking that A.J.P. Taylor’s notorious assertion that Hitler was “Austria’s revenge for the defeat of 1866” has much merit to it, broadly understood.¹ More generally, if we define fascism as “palingenetic ultranationalism,” then some of the strongest and most successful examples of this phenomenon, outside of Italy and Germany, were to be found in the Habsburg Monarchy’s successor states.² The Monarchy had been a breeding ground for radical-right nationalisms before 1918. In the interwar period almost the entire region – with the partial exception of Czechoslovakia – fell under the rule of authoritarian, right-wing nationalist governments. This occurred in several cases long before the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, and the situation only darkened, and radicalised thereafter. The ground for Nazism’s expansion into East Central Europe was well prepared long before German troops and the SS arrived.

It once seemed fairly obvious how this could have happened. With an older interpretation of the Habsburg Monarchy as a reactionary, atavistic regime, a “prison of the nations” with a retrograde, feudal and dynastic political culture, the right-wing, reactionary nature of the interwar regimes appears simply an extension of what went before. Yet more recent historiography on the Monarchy has revealed a much more optimistic picture of Habsburg Central Europe before 1914.³ Premodern in some respects perhaps, but in others quite modern, it represented a multinational and supranational alternative to the standard formula for modernisation through the nation-state, and as such is now seen as almost a precursor of the European Union. Why then did this supranational polity become such a nest for radical, exclusionary nationalisms? After 1918: why did the apparent dawn of democracy prove delusional; what role did the Habsburg legacy play in the fateful turn of the successor states toward right-wing, reactionary, nationalist regimes, and their openness to fascism and Nazism? Obversely, was the absence of the Monarchy after 1918 also a major factor in enabling the social and political situation to become more reactionary and more extreme; was the failure to replace it with a similar transnational polity not key in creating the space for German Nazi expansionism from 1938 on?

Hitler’s hero: Georg von Schönerer

The most direct contribution to the development of fascism in the Habsburg Monarchy was the development of radical pan-German nationalism in the western half of the Monarchy after 1866, which has often been personified in the career and ideology of Georg von Schönerer, one of Hitler’s great heroes, according to Mein Kampf. Schönerer was far from being alone in his extreme German nationalist and racially antisemitic politics, and his career cannot be properly understood without the source of so much of his political inspiration, which was the radical German nationalist student movement in Austria’s universities, especially Vienna and Graz.⁴ This movement had many precursors, and a long, complex history. In the first half of the nineteenth century Austria had been both a vast Central European empire and the leading German power (and indeed the leading power in Italy). Once emperor of the “Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation,” the Habsburg ruler still presided over the German Confederation until 1866. While much of the Habsburg Monarchy was outside the German Confederation, its western half was within it. Most Austrian German-speakers thought of themselves as in some way nationally “German.” When revolution came to Vienna in March 1848, the initial impetus of the revolutionaries was German nationalist. Austrians took part in the elections to the German Frankfurt Parliament in the summer of 1848. A Habsburg, Archduke Johann, was chosen at Frankfurt as “imperial regent.” Yet most subjects of the Monarchy were not German-speakers, and many of those non-German-speakers also lived in the provinces within the German Confederation. Failure to reach an accommodation between German and Habsburg interests vitiated the attempt to establish a German nation-state in 1848–1849. Over the next two decades, Austrian German-speakers continued to think of themselves as Germans, and the Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph, continued to think of himself as a “German prince.” Yet diplomatic and military defeats led to Austria’s expulsion from both Northern Italy and Germany, a process capped by the creation of the (Prussocentric) German Empire in 1871.

For the German-speaking educated classes of the Monarchy, this produced a deeply alienating and disorienting loss of identity. Even the great, and most Austrian writer, Franz Grillparzer was driven in 1867 to ask of himself: “I was born a German. Am I one still?”⁵ The deepest impact appears, however, to have been on the newest generation of the Austrian German educated classes, the university students, especially in Vienna. The more radically disposed elements among them had continued to look to the 1848 revolution, in terms of both social justice and democratisation, as well as nationalist orientation to a Greater Germany, inclusive of Austria. The events of 1866, confirmed by those of 1870–1871, effectively excluded them from their national land, Germany, and for this exclusion they blamed the moderate liberal regime that took over power in Austria after 1867. The result was that from the late 1860s there developed on the bourgeois Left of student politics a radical, left-wing, irredentist pan-German nationalist movement that sought to undo the national “disaster” of 1866, and return the old “German” lands of the Monarchy to the German Empire. From very early on, there was a strong movement of “palingenetic ultranationalism” among Austria’s radical nationalist students.⁶

This extreme German nationalism was categorised in Austria as being on the extreme Left. The particular arrangements of parties in the multinational parliament meant non-German national representatives opposing the German-liberal bloc were seen as part of the Right, and hence all members of the German-liberal bloc as part of the Left, including the more nationalist fringe.⁷ Beyond this peculiarity, however, the student-led German nationalist movement did indeed advocate left-liberal, radical policies. The emphasis on the inclusion of all members of the German nation, regardless of class, education or wealth, evinced an egalitarianism that went beyond the liberal – exclusive – emphasis on “education and property.” The readiness of the nationalists to use the state to encourage and facilitate greater social justice for the lower classes positioned them as quite close to socialism. Several of the nationalist student leaders would end up leading the Austrian Social Democratic Party, most notably Victor Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer.⁸

Adler was of Jewish descent, as was one of the movement’s main spokesmen in the 1870s, Heinrich Friedjung. Given the emphasis on equality, social justice and inclusion in the national community, the attraction of the movement to young idealistic Jewish students was understandable. Fairly soon in the movement’s development, however, this influential group of Jewish members was excluded by the adoption of a racially antisemitic definition of who was, and was not, a member of the “German people.” The German Romantic influence on the movement had from the beginning meant that a certain “cultural antisemitism” had accompanied it, but Jewish individuals could be seen as having “overcome” their Jewish heritage, spiritually. In the course of the 1870s, however, the influence of the new, “scientific,” biological concepts of race meant that national identity was increasingly defined by “objective,” quasi-biological racial criteria. It is not entirely accidental that it was a medical professor, Theodor Billroth, who in 1875 published an essay decrying the immense gulf that lay between Jewish and German “blood.” On the basis of this insuperable Jewish “difference,” most of the non-Jewish leadership of the nationalist student movement adopted a racially antisemitic approach. Nationalist student fraternities, the Burschenschaften, began expelling their Jewish members, a process largely completed by the early 1880s.⁹

It was in 1876 that the leader of the student nationalist movement, Anton Haider, invited the young, left-liberal politician Georg von Schönerer to become a corresponding member of the movement’s core institution, the Reading Association of German Students.¹⁰ The politician and the students came to forge a close alliance. Their German Club became the voice of the German nationalist wing of the German Liberals, and in 1880 was prominent in the establishment of the German School Association, which became a major organ for promoting German national interests in Austria. In September 1882 Schönerer and his student allies agreed on their new policy platform, the Linz Program. This combined a nationalist effort to secure German hegemony within Austria with the quasi-socialist, left-liberal, democratic program of social justice discussed above, and largely drawn up by individuals of Jewish descent, such as Adler, Serafin Bondi, and the still influential Friedjung. They were still just about tolerated within the movement as part of the “moderate” wing, despite their descent. By 1883, however, Schönerer, with the agreement of much of the (non-Jewish) membership, insisted on excluding all Jewish members based on racial definition, to avoid the taint of “Semitic influence.” In a classically fascist manner, Schönerer was to justify his exclusion of Jews from a progressive, egalitarian perspective, as achieving unity through purity: “durch Reinheit zur Einheit.”¹¹

Schönerer then went on in 1884 and 1885 to his most successful campaigns, attacking the government contract with the “Jewish” (Rothschild-controlled) Northern Railway Company. In 1885 he formed his own, extreme nationalist and antisemitic party, the German Nationalist Union. In itself this party only ever had a small presence (three MPs) in the Austrian parliament, but Schönerer’s extremism and his prestige among German nationalists enabled him to break up the more moderate German nationalist party, the German Club, in the wake of the “Chinese bill” of 1887 (a measure that, despite what its name suggests, was aimed at undermining the equal rights of Jews in Austria).

On the cusp of once again becoming the leader of German nationalist politics in Austria, Schönerer then performed an act of political self-harm by attacking the offices of a “Jewish” newspaper, the Neues Wiener Tagblatt, in 1888 when it mistakenly reported the death of Wilhelm I of Prussia-Germany. This exercise in “direct action” resulted in a jail sentence of four months, but also was used by the authorities to exclude the extremist troublemaker Schönerer from political life for five years. Those five years proved crucial in the development of Austrian politics, for Karl Lueger, once a liberal Democrat, seized the opportunity presented by Schönerer’s absence to effect a coalition between anti-capitalist Catholic social reformers and German nationalist radicals, based solidly on their shared antisemitism, that became the Christian Social Party, the dominant political power in Viennese municipal politics from 1895 to 1918, and a major force in Austrian politics generally. Outside of Vienna, Otto Steinwender also used Schönerer’s absence to consolidate a more moderate German nationalist political party, the German People’s Party, founded in 1895.

Yet Schönerer was not done. In 1897 he returned to the Austrian parliament as member for Eger (Cheb), a mainly German-speaking town in Western Bohemia, just in time for the outbreak of the Badeni Crisis, a conflict between Germans and Czechs over language rights. This apparent attack on the Germans’ “national property” was tailor-made for Schönerer’s nationalist paranoia and extreme political style. He immediately initiated a program of violent obstruction against the measure, ironically imitating the Young Czech politicians who had been using obstruction to further Czech rights. What made Schönerer’s protest significant was that he was joined in the resistance to Count Badeni’s compromise policy by most of the more moderate, liberal German parties, and once again he broke up the more moderate constellation of German nationalist politics. When his obstructive tactics were countered within the parliament, he and his followers took their protests to the streets, effectively forcing the more moderate parties to join their crusade. At the end of 1897 Austria appeared on the brink of revolution. Badeni’s policy was abandoned, leading to Czech obstruction and the effective end of functioning parliamentary government in Austria. Schönerer gained ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 “Laboratory for world destruction”: the Habsburg Monarchy and fascism
• 2 Volksdeutsch revisionism: East Central Europe’s ethnic Germans and the order of Paris
• 3 Conservative and radical dynamics of Italian Fascism: an (East) European perspective (1918–1938)
• 4 The crisis of legitimacy and the rise of the radical Right in interwar Yugoslavia (1918–1941)
• 5 Integral nationalism in the absence of a nation-state: the case of Ukraine
• 6 Catholic authoritarians or fascists as such? the Polish rightist subculture turns fascist (1919–1939)
• 7 Faith, family and fatherland: conservatism and right radicalism in interwar Hungary
• 8 The Romanian Right: images of crisis, the press and the rise of fascism
• 9 Nationalism and authoritarianism in interwar Greece (1922–1940)
• 10 Dynamics of division: the French Right (1918–1941)
• 11 Consecrating the fatherland: Catholicism, nationalism and fascism in Spain (1919–1939)
• 12 In the mirror of fascism: Portugal and the Italian experience
• 13 America as alternative to European radicalism? the United States and the transnational rise of the Right
• 14 Fascism after fascism: history and politics
• Index