Oh great. What definition of fascism do we have to meet beyond combined rule of the financial elites and security forces with the option of “patriotic”|racial|religious control of the underclass?
What you’re describing is a plutocracy, which the UK and the U.S. both effectively are. Fascism usually throws in additional nasty elements, and has an end goal of replacing the existing plutocrats with right-wing populist leaders and their cronies (at that point making them more feudal lords than capitalist oligarchs).
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What additional “nastiness” would royalist England need to quality? Does it have to involve anti-Semitism?
Also since fascism requires “replacing the existing plutocrats”, does that mean that the Nazis failed to be fascists?
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Not necessarily. There are plenty of other nasty characteristics of fascism that could exist without it (although anti-Semitism is always a fellow traveller of right-wing populism).
You could roughly equate a medieval absolute monarchy with modern fascism, certainly in terms of policies, but there are reasons why political scientists and historians make these distinctions. If you’re looking for a modern analogue to Edward I’s England, the KSA would be the more accurate choice than modern England.
Not at all. They failed to remain fascists (or at least breathing ones) because the Allies stepped in. During the period of the Reich, though, the SS and its senior officers controlled an industrial empire of their own, often usurping business that existing plutocrats once controlled. The slave labour that the SS provided to the plutocrats wasn’t offered gratis, either.
For an individual example, Julius Streicher is a standout in this regard. Before he had his falling out with Goering, and to a certain extent afterward, he was the wealthiest and most powerful man in Nuremberg, wetting his beak in numerous local businesses.
12 years wasn’t long enough for the Nazis to fully succeed, but personal wealth is always a goal of fascists along with political power. Hitler and most of the Nazi leadership were effectively billionaires and multi-millionaires. Fascists are gangster capitalists, just as Putin and his cronies are today.
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This. I have some friends who are college professors in a poor province in India. On their professors’ salaries (very modest by US standards), they have no trouble affording two full-time servants and a part-time handyman. Despite this apparent extreme affluence, people across the street from them are living in hovels, there’s no infrastructure (power is expensive and unreliable, internet shuts down regularly, roads and transport are utter shit, streets are full of garbage and excrement, there’s no food safety laws, so you have to be very careful where you eat out, etc. ), there’s regular civil unrest and communal violence, including a local tradition of shutting down all transport as a form of protest. That’s just off the top of my head. I would far rather be middle-class in the US than be extremely affluent there, and it’s not just because I’m from here; my friends’ daughter lives in Canada, even though she could do very well back home if she wanted to.
Except for a few extremely shitty people, being well-off in a stable, peaceful, prosperous society is a way better deal than being top dog on a dungheap.
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There’s really nothing wrong, and nothing inherently right wing, about loving one’s country and the cultural traditions of one’s country. Most European parties of the left seem to have stopped working at that stand some time ago, to their loss, and to the militant right’s gain. This is not a good thing.
The abstraction that is the EU will never command that sort of loyalty. I’ve only spent about five months of my life in Europe, but I never met a German or an Italian or a Dane or a Hungarian who when asked, “What’s your nationality?” said “I’m a European.”.
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There is something wrong when it’s based in racism or religious hatred or when the cultural traditions are a cover for “traditional values” that promote sexism or anti-LGBTQ actions. In general, the Know-Nothing 27% tend to support one or more aspects of that problematic kind of nationalism.
The parties of the left anywhere should not be wasting time pandering to or hearing out the Know-Nothings’ bigoted views. Betraying their liberal-democratic values of tolerance would be a bad thing, for very little gain.
It was never intended to, and I didn’t imply otherwise. The EU is primarily about economic benefits: free movement of goods, capital, labour, and people. The Know-Nothing objection is mainly to the last two, and right-wing grifters know what a useful hook that is.
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If legislators ever decide that “European” is a “nationality” then it will be a nationality. If the EU raises its own army then its soldiers and veterans will be “loyal” to it. Once again, these are public policy choices, not natural laws.
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Are they wandering cosmopolitans too? You’re about two and a half steps away from saying the Rothschilds are orchestrating this.
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Already looking forward to the election results here in Austria, but still have to dash off to vote myself (not for the FPÖ, rest assured).
It will be interesting to see how much, if at all, the FPÖ’s election results will suffer from the events of the last weekend. In case you haven’t heard of the events in a small country: A clandestinely recorded video surfaced on Friday, May 17th, showing Austria’s vice chancellor and FPÖ party leader H.C. Strache, together with another prominent member of his party, talking to a (fake) niece of a Russian oligarch and making various outrageous offers of what parts of the country to sell out in return for illegal campaign contributions.
So, the video was published on Friday evening, on Saturday, the vice chancellor resigned from all his offices, and it was clear that there will be elections in September. On Monday, the Minister of the interior, Herbert Kickl, considered by many to be the most dangerous among the FPÖ ministers, was ousted from office, and all other ministers from his party resigned in protest.
A lot of people in Austria spent the entire last weekend with a dumb smile that they just couldn’t suppress plastered all over their face.
Naturally, this means that the article linked here is completely outdated as far as Austria is concerned.
I have to read the section about Austria a few more times though - the jist is certainly right - the FPÖ is for sale. But it feels like the Corporate Europe Observatory attempts to explain everything as “being for sale”, even things that are obvious cases of right-wing parties being consistent with right-wing ideologies. Still have to sort it out.
True.
However, I fear that the attitude of “it’s a dog-eat-dog world, every man for himself” that’s part of most right-of-center ideologies makes it slightly more susceptible to corruption. I say slightly, because an old fashioned sense of “honor” and “fair fights” is also part of most right-wing traditions, which counterbalances that a bit.
The experience in Austria shows that it’s impossible in proportional parliamentary systems.
You’ll end up having three big parties, and one or more “small” parties. To form a coalition goverment, two of the big parties have to agree on something. A party that promises to never form a coalition with the third of these parties seriously weakens their negotiating position, and if they repeatedly agree on excluding the third, that increases the popularity of the third party. Sooner or later
Things have moved past “the foreigners are taking our jobs”. You don’t move from “a society with a certain range of values and traditions” to “a multicultural society where you don’t understand the people you meet if you go to a different part of town” without voting on it, and expect everyone to agree. We’re not talking about America which was founded as a society of different immigrant groups that ended up defining themselves along racial and religious lines. Immigration always happened, but always came with (often mutual) cultural assimilation, which only works up to a certain immigration rate. European nations are not “founded on immigration”, and to equate every limitation on immigration with “racism” and “bigotry” is a fallacy.
And I have never met a Texan, Californian, or Minnesotan who when asked, “What state are you from?” said “I’m American.” Europe is not defining itself as one nation, it’s defining itself as a whole continent full of nations with a rich shared history.
You’ve been asking the wrong question.
You’ve been reading the British press too much.
To the people on the continent, the European Union is very much about a shared identity. “Determined to lay the foundations of an ever-closer union among the peoples of Europe” is what it says right at the top of the Treaty of Rome signed in 1957. It’s about 70 years of peace where there used to be regular wars. It’s about shared values, shared traditions, shared history. And yes, we’ve also got that “cradle of civilization” hubris going on, and that’s a title that no single European country can claim. (Most of us know we have to share that title with a few other proud nations around the globe, though).
Most of the tight-wing rejection of the EU here in Austria is mostly about this becoming part of a larger whole. And a small part is legitimate criticism of non-democratic structures at the EU level, usually paired with exactly the wrong suggestions on how to fix it.
I’m pretty sure vague shared feelings of identity are not decided in parliament. And soldiering is just a job, and not even a particularly important one on a peaceful continent, so I’m not sure why you are even bringing it up.
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That right-wing creep made international news, at least for those of us who follow it.
The only way it works is if two of the large parties are left-leaning or centre-left (sometimes just centrist will do) and you also have a couple of small left or centre-left parties for them to form a coalition with against a large conservative party if no party wins a majority. It seldom works out that way.
The real problem remains the Know-Nothing 27%, who will always vote for one right-wing party or another. Establishment conservative parties have shown themselves more than willing to enter into coalitions with odious extreme-right parties in order to ensure that they get as many of the Know-Nothings as possible (at least with the GOP and the Tories, “honour” and “fair fights” were tossed out the window decades ago in their pursuit of power).
I understand the difference. Still, however you look at it, wherever it’s happening, immigrant nation or not, it’s xenophobia and fear of the Other driving the Know-Nothing 27% of any country’s electorate who we’re discussing. In Europe it’s more about nationality and language than it is about race. Religion, of course, poisons things everywhere.
One of my favourite stories about the European version of this provincialism and nationalism came from someone whose family was from a French village. One of her ancestors had been a Bavarian mercenary who’d settled there in the medieval period. Cut to the 20th century after generations of marriage to other French folk and the people in her village still called the family “the Germans”.
Mutual peace between member nation-states after centuries of stupid and petty nationalist wars definitely underlies the EU, but the basis for achieving that was mainly focused on reducing trade barriers rather than a single identity per se. As I recall, the EU had its origins in a coal and steel customs union that pre-dated the Treaty of Rome.
The amusing thing about that is the contrast between American Identitarians like the Proud Boys who go on and on about their “European identity” (“European” standing in for “white”) and their counterparts in Europe who would reject being called generic Europeans due to their obsession with their national or provincial identity.
That’s where there’s room to negotiate. The Know-Nothing opponents of the EU aren’t sophisticated or educated enough to have a serious discussion of that issue, but other opponents can be engaged and reasonably debated with on issues like non-democratic structures, central bank structure, and neoliberal austerity. In contrast to the xenophobic Know-Nothings, they are worth engaging and debating.
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Every country is an abstraction. The US is “united states” - people identified more with the colony they originated from. Some still do think of themselves more in those terms - as a Texan or Californian first.
The UK is of course a union of what we’re countries. All countries have regions.
I guess you can keep subdividing until you get to my apartment- but my not liking my kind makes me ungovernable.
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Billionaires funded Hitler
The German translates as ‘Hitler the superman swallows gold & spouts junk.’
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Not entirely.
27% happens to be pretty much exactly the best result the FPÖ has ever achieved
(26.91% in 1999). They entered a coalition government, which collapsed after not quite three years. At the next election, they had 10%. That time, their disappointed voters went mostly to the people’s party, but if you look at the long-time trends, you’ll see that the increase from 10% to 27% came to a large part from former Social Democrat voters. It’s not a homogeneous group of idiots, and there is in fact a large portion (20%?) of the population that will sometimes support a right-wing populist party, and sometimes not. So I don’t think it’s pointless to try to convince them, or to have political parties made up of decent people provide a platform for what they want.
It’s amusing indeed, and also why Bannon’s attempt at meddling in European politics has gone nowhere so far.
The ways of thinking about race and identity between Europe and America (or is it Continental Europe and the Anglosphere?) is so different that there are also plenty of misunderstandings on the left (see Trevor Noah vs. France).
Actually, when did it happen that “America” became the informal name of the country? I’m guessing that “of America” originally referred to the individual states being “of America”, i.e., being on the American continent, rather than to the union being called “America”.
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I’m not sure what you’re getting at here.
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In some languages, not in English, “America” is used to refer to the American Continent (it’s sometimes counted as one continent in two parts, rather than two separate continents with a shared name, as it usually is in English-speaking countries).
In most languages, “America” is also another name for the country that is more formally called the USA. In English, “America” definitely means “USA”.
I’m just guessing that it wasn’t always this way, but developed over time, as America was becoming a nation rather than just a collection of states.
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I’m not sure how this is germane to the discussion- how other countries came to refer to the United States of America? The discussion here is how groups of regions self identified.
Of course- you can google some articles about theories of how the word America came about to refer to the New World.
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That’s exactly what I am talking about, too. You’re confusing me (or rather, we seem to be confusing each other).
I’m using the other languages only as a way to look in the past - often, old usages are preserved that way.
My question was quite simply, “when did the citizens of the United States of America start identifying as Americans”?
From what point in time forward did a New Yorker and a Virginian agree that they both are Americans, but someone from Ontario is not?
Was there a time when they still felt that the word “America” refers to the continent and therefore includes people that aren’t citizens of the USA?
That’s relevant to any prognosis about how things will develop in Europe, or in the EU, or both, in the future.
ETA: thanks for the link, an interesting read, even though it’s not on a topic either of us intended to discuss 
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No - it’s not. How other areas came to refer to the US as “America” rather than the continents other countries in the Americas had nothing to do with it being a country.
If it did - other countries in the America’s wouldn’t exist.
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There is, if one happens to think that “loving one’s country and traditions” means hating everyone and everywhere else.
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