The Nature of Fascism by Griffin Roger

Author:Griffin, Roger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136145964
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

The Fate of Fascism under Para-fascism in Austria, Romania and Hungary

The first real threat to Austria's fledgling democracy posed by the right came, not from the populist ultra-right movements which had flourished before 1914, such as Schönerer's völkisch Pan-Germans and Lueger's pro-Catholic Christian-Socials, but from the paramilitary Heimwehren. Often referred to collectively as the Heimwehr, these were regional units of National Guards who, like the squadristi and the Freikorps, were recruited overwhelmingly from war veterans only too eager to fight the nation's alleged enemies, whether external (for example Yugoslavs making incursions over the border in the south) or internal (i.e. Communists and Social Democrats).

In the first decade of their existence the Heimwehr lacked the organizational or ideological cohesion to constitute a fascist force, its only core principles being virulent patriotism and anti-Marxism. What reversed its gradual decline into a negligible paramilitary movement was the uprising of Viennese workers in 1927 supported by the Social Democrats' paramilitary arm, the Schutzbund. The energetic role played by the voluntary National Guard in helping the government restore ‘law and order’ not only established them as a key factor in state politics, but ushered in a phase of internal upheaval from which it would emerge a more united and radical movement, a development which won it the material support of both Mussolini and the Hungarian prime minister, Bethlen, as a possible bridge between their two countries. The openly proto-fascist orientation of its politics was formalized when in May 1930 its leaders took the Korneuburg Oath committing the movement, albeit in nebulous terms, to replacing parliamentary democracy by a Catholic, German and corporatist state.

In 1931 the Styrian Heimwehr units under Pfrimer made a bid to translate revolutionary rhetoric into deeds with a putsch, but the pathetic outcome underlines the continued imperviousness of Austrian liberalism to fascism despite the growing political and economic crisis. That the bulk of the Heimwehr stopped short of full-blown fascism was clear, not just from the way that Pfrimer's units had to go it alone, but from its reaction to Dollfuss's decision of September 1933 to solve the protracted crisis of the liberal state by replacing it from above with a ‘Christian corporative’ one. Instead of rejecting out of hand the new regime as a counterfeit of the new order he had pledged to create, the national leader Starhemberg agreed to become vice-chancellor and to head the Patriotic Front, a pseudo-populist umbrella organization for a wide range of conservative, Christian and nationalist groups. Much of the movement's rank and file tamely followed suit. The scene was thus set for the final stage in the neutralization of the Heimwehr, when, in April 1936, Dollfuss's successor, Schuschnigg, removed Starhemberg from both his offices, disbanded his movement and absorbed its members into the Front-Miliz, the new paramilitary arm of the Patriotic Front. Para-fascism had successfully absorbed proto-fascism (cf. Rath and Schum, 1980 and the contrasting taxonomy used by Lewis, 1990).

If the Heimwehr proved to be a prevalently proto-fascist force in national politics which posed no

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.