Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: War and revolution in Europe, 1789–1945
- Part I Origins and dynamics
- 1 Italy and Germany from unification to militant dictatorship, 1860–1933
- 2 Conquest, foreign and domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
- Part II Foreign policies and military instruments
- Conclusion
- Frequently Cited Works
- Index
2 - Conquest, foreign and domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: War and revolution in Europe, 1789–1945
- Part I Origins and dynamics
- 1 Italy and Germany from unification to militant dictatorship, 1860–1933
- 2 Conquest, foreign and domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany
- Part II Foreign policies and military instruments
- Conclusion
- Frequently Cited Works
- Index
Summary
… between Germany and Italy there exists a community of destiny… [Germany and Italy] are congruent cases.
– Benito Mussolini, 1936The brown shirt might perhaps not have arisen without the black shirt.
– Adolf Hitler, 1942FASCISM, GENERIC AND HISTORIC
Mussolini and Hitler were not alone in emphasizing the common origins, features, and destinies of Fascism and National Socialism. Theories of “fascism” – that elusive generic phenomenon with a small “f” – have proliferated with abandon ever since the 1920s. Definitions have ranged from the Third International's “open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic, and imperialistic elements of finance capital” through Ernst Nolte's militant anti-Marxism, to the modernization theorists' “mass-mobilizing developmental dictatorships under single-party auspices.” And a historian of ideas has recently described fascism as a “genus of political ideology whose mythic core … is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism.”
Voices of caution have occasionally sounded, urging the “deflation” of a concept that “exists in faith and is pursued by reason,” or suggesting that fascism fails to encompass adequately the ultimate evil of National Socialist Germany. Yet the notion is still with us, even if no two theories of fascism coincide. Marxists have normally equated fascism and capitalism “in the final analysis,” but have divided over fascism's precise degree of subservience to capital.
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- Common DestinyDictatorship, Foreign Policy, and War in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, pp. 53 - 110Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2000