The Re-emergence of Fascism and Its Impact on European Democracies in the Immediate Postwar Period

The crimes perpetrated by the Nazis and Fascists and their collaborators during the Second World War had entrenched a feeling of repulsion towards the fascist ideology throughout the whole of Europe, but this did not stop some fascist groups from trying to re-emerge and influence the new political stage. In Austria and Germany, for example, the local authorities and the Allies had to deal with the Werwolf terrorist groups. ¹ In France, similar concerns were caused by the fascist-like Parti Républicain d’Union Populaire, which had come into being in 1946 at the initiative of René Binet, a convinced supporter of the fascist ideology who in the war had fought alongside German troops in the Charlemagne division. ² In Sweden, the Nysvenska Rörelsen – a pro-Nazi party led by Per Engdahl and constituted in 1941 – had managed to stay alive. ³

Postwar fascism was also able to build a new transnational network. ⁴ Initially, this was little more than an arrangement intended to provide escape routes to the many who were wanted by the judicial authorities of their home countries or by the Allies, ⁵ but in the early 1950s fascists launched themselves into the constitution of two different organizations: the European Social Movement (1951), chaired by the aforementioned Engdahl ⁶ and the New European Order (1951), led by the Swiss Gaston-Armand Amaudruz. ⁷

The aim of this article is that of shedding new light on how the re-emergence of fascism impacted Western European democracies in the postwar period by focusing on two case studies, those of Italy and the UK. More particularly, the essay will compare the actions of the two Labour governments in office in Britain between 1945 and October 1951 with those of the Italian executives, all controlled by a Christian Democracy (DC) majority, which quickly followed one another from the conclusion of the Second World War to the end of the first legislature in June 1953.

It is important to make one preliminary remark concerning the decision to use the category of ‘fascism’ to label the groups and movements which came into being after 1945. It is clear that such a choice might be questionable, but with reference to the chronological period covered here, ‘fascism’ (or ‘postwar fascism’) turns out to be a more effective category than ‘extreme right’ or ‘neo-fascism’. The former, in my opinion, suggests a broader political domain, while the groups investigated here – such as the Union Movement (UM) and the Movimento sociale italiano (MSI) – took direct inspiration from the ideology shaped, among others, by Mussolini and the Italian National Fascist Party. ⁸ On the other hand ‘neo-fascism’ – which was adopted especially in the Italian context – is a term that takes for granted a rupture with the past that has not yet been fully established. ⁹ Expressions like ‘Nazi groups’ and ‘Nazism’ could be good alternatives, and to describe certain postwar far-right movements they seem more appropriate than ‘fascism’ and ‘fascist groups’ since those movements took direct inspiration from the NSDAP. Nevertheless, the term ‘fascism’ has prevailed among scholars ¹⁰ as a kind of broader category ¹¹ to define – sometimes very generically ¹² – all the far-rights groups that came into being since the 1920s. ¹³

Having clarified this point, the general aim of the article is neither to measure the true extent of the re-emergence of fascist movements, nor to evaluate whether the various European governments, and more specifically those of Italy and the UK, were able to deal with them successfully. Rather, the essay wishes to shed light on the fact that the re-emergence and revival of the fascist ideology as a whole represented an important element in the process of redefining democracies that took place in the postwar period, and one that until now has been much underestimated by historians. This was first of all a public order issue, not only because the fascists had already demonstrated their aptitude for violence, but also because their return to the scene had the potential to trigger clashes, or at least tensions, with other political parties. It was also not of secondary importance as governments were committed to ensuring ‘stability’, a key concept in postwar democracies. ¹⁴ Such a goal was already difficult to achieve since the war had made fragile the state monopoly of the administration of justice and the use of force, and the resurgence of fascist groups could have complicated the scenario further. ¹⁵

But the fascist revival was also a sign that the democratic culture was not yet fully accepted in the aftermath of 1945. In recent years, many works have focused on the fact that the process of the affirmation (in the case of Italy, for example) or consolidation of a democratic culture in a large part of the European continent was unpredictable, complicated, gradual and highly selective (where, for example, obstacles were placed in the way of communist parties so as to deny them political legitimacy, as in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, or exclude them from government, as in the case of Belgium, France and Italy). ¹⁶ Most of these works, however, have devoted little space to the reactions of the various governments to the reconstitution of fascist organizations, clearly not considering this a crucial issue. On the contrary, this article wants to demonstrate how those reactions played a role in the redefinition of democratic culture and to show how the re-emergence of fascist groups challenged the democratic projects conceived by the various Western European executives in the immediate postwar period, which was a crucial turning point due to the fact that it was marked by the first phase of the Cold War. The resurgence of fascism took place in a political context in which communism was identified as the main threat, ¹⁷ but exactly for this reason it is even more urgent to scrutinize the attitude assumed by the various democracies towards the reorganization of fascist movements. In fact, the presence of a dual threat obliged each government to make choices, to consider whether to deal with both in the same way or, for example, to take advantage of the revival of fascism to enact laws that could also affect communism.

Such reflections had already interested Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In that period, the entire continent experienced the threat of both communism (regardless of its real substance) and, later, of fascism. The few democracies able to resist such revolutionary and counter-revolutionary waves wondered whether fascism could be opposed by using the same approach as that taken towards communism, whether any countermeasures might undermine the freedom of opinion and expression, and the overall effectiveness of repressive measures. All these themes came back to the fore in the immediate postwar period and were strongly influenced by those earlier experiences. ¹⁸

In comparing the British and Italian scenarios, it is worth noting first of all the dissimilar nature, extent and impact of both the fascist movements and the fascist ideologies in the two countries. Italy had of course invented fascism (setting aside the French influences that have been mentioned by Zev Sternhell) ¹⁹ and experienced it in power. ²⁰ In the UK, on the other hand, fascism was largely tackled and, in the end, defeated. ²¹ This does not mean that it did not affect the political and cultural fabric of the country, but the threat was reduced by the firm reaction of the anti-fascist flank (as exhibited in particular by the events of Olympia in 1934 and Cable Street in 1936), by the progressive distancing from it by even the most conservative sector of the electorate (or at least a part of it) and, above all, by the measures taken by the third Baldwin government, which culminated in the Public Order Act of 1936 that banned any type of paramilitary organization. ²² Finally, at the outbreak of the war, the resolution of Churchill's government to intern the fascists on the basis that they represented a potential danger to the security of the country foiled any attempt to rekindle fascism in that delicate period.

The size and strength of fascist groups after the Second World War were also different in the two countries. For British fascists the postwar period was a real minefield: Mosley tried to launch a new adventure, the UM but, while it would remain active for over 20 years (1948–73), this was never able to establish itself as a real political alternative or, due to its exaggerated emphasis on European issues, even to propose itself as a reference point for anyone who felt nostalgia for the fascist ideology. ²³ The groupusculaire dimension thus became the distinctive feature of British fascism. By contrast, while in Italy the fascists had emerged defeated from a conflict that had also turned into a civil war, and had thus had to cope with a series of retributive measures typical of periods of transition, ²⁴ they were still able to reorganize themselves in different groups – first of all, the Partito Fascista Democratico (PFD), which came into being in April 1946 ²⁵ – and to do so only few months after the end of the conflict. Naturally, the presence of the national governments, whose political rulers were avowedly anti-fascist, but also that of the Allies (at least until the signing of the 1947 Peace Treaty), who guarded against the reactivation of fascist cells primarily for security reasons (the maintenance of public order), placed some obstacle in the way of this process, but ultimately the fascists got the upper hand and were even able to go further by merging their various organizations into a new political party, the MSI. ²⁶ This came into being in December 1946 and was legally recognized by the Italian authorities due to its – at least formal – commitment to democratic norms. The MSI immediately took advantage of a generous amnesty law that freed many fascists in June 1946, as well as of a more general relaxation of the retributive measures. ²⁷ Finally, an electoral system that, at least at first, had no form of entry barriers gave the party the opportunity to enter Parliament and thus influence the course of the Italian republic's history from the very beginning all the way through to the 1990s. ²⁸

The democracies and political contexts of the two countries were also different. The UK had come out of the war with the image of a country that had stable parliamentary institutions and was fiercely opposed to fascism, despite its initial policy of appeasement towards Hitler. The Labour Party won the 1945 election, held 10 years after the previous one, in a victory that Attlee's party could hardly have predicted but which was in part aided by its lack of association with that appeasement. ²⁹ The party confirmed itself as the main political force in the following election of 1950, but only for a little more than a year due to its small majority, after which the Conservative Party returned to power. Italy, on the other hand, after a period of limited sovereignty during the British and US occupation, ³⁰ undertook a process of democratization and a redefinition of its legitimacy. This passed through a number of crucial moments: the referendum of 1946 through which Italy became a republic, the elections of 1948, marked by the loss of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), the decision to join the Atlantic Pact in 1949 and, more generally, the alternation of numerous executives.

For these reasons, the very act of comparing the two countries may be open to question. However, as Maier pointed out, a comparison cannot be a priori valid or invalid. The task is not to group together even different objects under a single label, but rather to understand whether such an operation might suggest relations that would otherwise remain obscure. ³¹ In this regard, by comparing the British case to the Italian one, I want to challenge some of the conclusions that the historiographies of each country have reached on the attitude of governments towards the re-emergence of fascist movements: judgments that are not unequivocal, but frequently clear-cut. ³² Furthermore, the comparison can foster the placement of the two case studies within the broader panorama of research devoted to the reconstruction of a democratic culture, and in this way avoid the tendency to view them as isolated cases: the Italian one because of the strong existing legacy of the fascist decades and because it existed in the context of a particularly sensitive stage in the Cold War; and the British one because it was not particularly threatened, either in the 1920s and 1930s or in the following decades, by radical political groups and because, in contrast with other European countries, it was not characterized by the ascent, in the immediate postwar period, of a Christian-Conservative party. ³³

But the comparison helps, above all, to show how the resurgence of fascist activities raised important questions within democracies. It is not in fact necessarily obvious that two countries that were so different from each other would have been subject to similar dilemmas (which does not mean, however, that they reached the same answers) about the meaning of democracy and the potential influence on this of the activities of fascist groups, nor how measures aimed at banning fascists groups could have affected the very pillars of democratic culture, such as freedom of expression and assembly. Equally, we cannot take for granted that both the British and Italian governments struggled to properly define fascism in the aftermath of 1945: a difficulty that illustrates how the fascist ideology was in a state of great flux, ³⁴ even, and perhaps especially, after the war, and which also reveals a certain unease on the part of the two countries in confronting an ideology that paraded a subversive side as well as an ambiguous willingness to accept the rules of democracy. By recounting the story of this confrontation between two national governments and the re-emergence of fascist groups, this article aims to offer a privileged perspective of how Western Europe in the postwar period returned – after the inter-war debate – to rethink the potential and the pitfalls of establishing a so-called ‘militant democracy’, a political model formulated by the German émigré scholar Karl Loewenstein in 1937 as a reaction to Hitler's rise to power. ³⁵

On 20 December 1946, a Labour MP of Jewish origin, Herschel Lewis Austin, addressed the Home Office asking ‘whether there is not something that can be done with regard to this fascist menace that affects the lives of a minority of His Majesty's subjects’. ³⁶ Austin was anxious that antisemitism was gaining a new foothold in the country by taking advantage of terrorist attacks carried out by armed Zionist organizations in Palestine territory at the time of the British mandate, ³⁷ in particular the Irgun's action against the British military headquarters in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem. ³⁸ But Austin was especially concerned by the return of fascist groups to the scene demonstrated by the events of 15 December 1945. ³⁹ On that evening, the former leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), Oswald Mosley, had met with hundreds of his followers at the Royal Hotel in London, following the withdrawal from the political scene imposed on him by his internment from spring 1940 to autumn 1943. ⁴⁰ The initiative had been organized by an association named the 18B Detainees British Aid Fund, which had been formed to provide assistance to interned fascists and their families but which, after the war, concentrated all its efforts on reactivating a fascist network. Although the meeting had been a private event, it had had immediate consequences in the political sphere. ⁴¹ The government, led by the Labour Party, had convened an urgent cabinet meeting that had established an ad hoc committee – the Committee on Fascism – to deal with this issue and propose potential countermeasures. ⁴² The latter, however, in April 1946 – eight months before Austin's parliamentary question – had concluded ‘that there is no immediate threat of the re-emergence of a significant fascist movement in this country’. ⁴³

Austin's parliamentary question was answered by the Undersecretary of the Home Office (and fellow member of the Labour Party), George Oliver:

I have listened to the hon. Member for Stretford […] with great interest. It would appear that wherever he looks he can find a Fascist – in this House, in industry, in the Services, and I have no doubt, if he looked under the bed tonight, he would discover one there. ⁴⁴

Oliver seemed to suggest that the tendency to see fascism everywhere was a distortion of reality and that the use of the term ‘fascist’ had become a kind of weapon with which to discredit any political opponent. It is difficult to measure to what extent this view was shared by the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, but it was certainly endorsed by a number of government officials, as attested by a Foreign Office memo a few months earlier, which stressed that the communists were used to labelling ‘the whole population of this Island, with a few odd exceptions’ as fascists. ⁴⁵

Mr. Austin, however, was not the only person concerned about the resurgence of fascist groups. The trade unions also confessed their fears by flooding the Home Office mailbox with petitions asking the government to take appropriate action, ⁴⁶ a request also made by ordinary citizens. Two veterans of the Royal Air Force addressed a particularly heartfelt letter to the Home Office:

… having served Great Britain and the allied nations for the past four years, in two theatres of war, in order that we, along with other such men should destroy from its very foundations the fascist creed which threatened to spread throughout the world like a filthy disease, we would very much like to be informed exactly what is the Government's policy with regard to this scourge.

Urging the government to act, the two veterans recalled the death toll the country had suffered to fight the fascists and concluded by pointing out that if Britain were to underestimate the effects of a renewed ‘fascist spirit’ (a term probably used to indicate that, rather than the political movements themselves, it was the renewed circulation of fascist ideas that was truly frightening), it would surrender the leading role in the international fight against the ideology that it had gained during the conflict. The location from which the letter was sent, Melbourne, also indicated that news of Mosley's return to the public arena had spread beyond the British Isles. ⁴⁷

The Jewish community also spoke out, but while the Board of Deputies condemned all forms of violence, whether physical or verbal, as well as the circulation of pamphlets containing clear antisemitic rhetoric, such as Arnold Leese's The Jewish War of Survival, it did not consider it appropriate to introduce new measures. ⁴⁸ On the contrary, the Board thought it more urgent to take specific actions to arrest the spread of antisemitism in the cultural fabric of the island. ⁴⁹

However, not everyone shared the Board of Deputies’ position. The first to dissociate from it was the 43 Group formed at the beginning of 1946 by war veterans with the aim of fighting, with all available means, the new fascist movement. It worked to sabotage fascist rallies, to prevent criminal actions, but also to infiltrate the various extreme-right groups and to distribute leaflets aimed at making the public aware of the fascist threat and at denouncing the government's supposedly inadequate response. ⁵⁰

For its part, the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen (AJEX) committed itself to providing an accurate account of the activities of Mosley and his comrades to show the political parties just how serious the threat was. However, it maintained a more nuanced attitude to the adoption of new legislative measures. In the pamphlet Fascist and Anti-Semitic Activities (1948), Lionel Rose, the leader of the Association, considered it more than legitimate for the government to show caution in legislating on the matter, on the basis that doing so would ‘curtail the right of free expression’ and trigger a ‘boomerang’ effect to the detriment of the entire British democracy, ⁵¹ but he also stressed that the priority of any executive had to be the maintenance of peace, and that this was compromised by the presence of fascists on the public scene. ⁵²

However, despite what the Under-Secretary's response, the Committee on Fascism's statement and the criticism raised by some MPs might suggest, ⁵³ the Attlee government did not consider the issue irrelevant. First and foremost, it took action against individual fascists (e.g. delaying the issuance of Mosley's passport until 1949 because it feared that he might – as indeed he would – attempt to reactivate an international fascist network). ⁵⁴ The decision not to adopt new measures beyond those already put in place back in the 1930s was in itself the result of long deliberation rather than simple inertia or, worse, indifference. This is attested by the conclusions expressed in the report produced by the Committee on Fascism which, in the end, had refused to take further action for three main reasons: that passing new laws would set a dangerous precedent for the country since suppressing a movement was itself a ‘fascist’ (i.e. anti-democratic) measure; that focusing on fascist political parties or groups without taking similar measures against the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) would have upset a part of public opinion and the country's political forces, and would have been discriminatory and finally, that passing new laws against fascist organizations would have allowed them to play the victim and thus give them an opportunity to gain further support. The existing laws were more than sufficient, ⁵⁵ in particular the aforementioned 1936 Public Order Act, which had shown its effectiveness in countering the BUF. ⁵⁶

However, the decision not to take any further measures against fascism was never considered definitive but implied a constant examination of the domestic and international scenarios. ⁵⁷ After all, as early as July 1946, fascism was once again being discussed in the ranks of the executive.

In that month, Abbey Supplies Limited, a modest publishing house acting on Mosley's behalf, asked for a print quota in line with what it had been granted before the war. Were its application granted, the reconstituted fascist movement would have another tool with which to put its agenda back into circulation. However, preventing the company from printing would be considered an act of censorship, at least in the view of the Home Office, which pointed out that such a measure would also force the government to explain to Parliament why it was targeting fascists and not other political groupings, such as the anarchists, whose ideas were equally ‘repugnant to the majority of the people’. ⁵⁸ The Home Secretary's statement on the subject reveals a certain embarrassment, presumably shared by a many members of the executive dealing with the issue, as well as a desire to avoid giving voters and the international public the impression that he was too left-wing. However, it can also be read as the result of a genuine conviction that enacting certain measures against fascists without extending them to other radicals would end up benefiting the latter, in particular the communists, who the government considered the main threat.

The Foreign Office too, when asked to express an opinion on the matter, considered that focusing on fascist publications, besides being technically impractical (what criteria should be adopted to define what was a fascist publication?), would be viewed with suspicion by the US and many European governments at a time when communism was the main opponent. ⁵⁹ As a result, the government decided not to intervene, although it delayed its response to the publishing house so as to impede its activities.

In the months to come, however, the stubbornness shown by fascist groups in mobilizing and circulating their political agenda would raise new questions about the appropriateness of Attlee's decision and the approach of the Labour government as a whole in tolerating the situation and insisting on the need to take an equidistant position in relation to all of the more radical political cultures.

In Italy, the first actions carried out by groups claiming adherence to the fascist cause – acts of common delinquency such as painting walls with graffiti, distributing posters glorifying Mussolini, writing threatening letters against former partisans ⁶⁰ and, more importantly, the formation of the first postwar fascist party, the PFD, ⁶¹ and its subsequent move to dig up Mussolini's remains from the Musocco Cemetery in Milan in April 1946 ⁶² – were firmly opposed by Italian authorities. The Minister of the Interior, the socialist Giuseppe Romita, at the time of the first Alcide De Gasperi government (December 1945–July 1946) led by a DC premier but a coalition of all the antifascist parties, told the press that he would do everything possible to oppose what politicians and newspapers were then calling ‘neo-fascism’. ⁶³ Nonetheless, the government was struggling to understand the real extent of the threat and the situation would not change in the following months. Reports produced by numerous fiduciaries of the Special Intelligence Service demonstrated the tendency to overestimate the phenomenon: for example, a report of 15 November 1946 concerning the activities of the aforementioned FDP stated that the number of affiliates was around 500,000 – a completely unlikely figure. ⁶⁴ However, fascism represented a danger that the political parties that had come into being in the previous few years were determined to curb, not only because they largely rejected its ideology, but also to improve the international credibility of the Italian state. Not accidentally, minister Romita had clearly underlined the damage that subversive fascist activities could cause in that sense. ⁶⁵

At least in theory, two decrees-laws – no. 149 and 195, both passed on 26 April 1945 – prevented fascists from setting up any form of political association similar to those of the recent past. Decree 149 threatened with confinement or internment not only those who had engaged in ‘conduct inspired by the methods and behaviour of fascism’ in the past, but also those who continued to do so. The same measures could also be extended to those who committed ‘acts aimed at encouraging the resurgence […] of the dissolved fascist party or publicly exalting its persons, institutions and ideologies with any written or verbal manifestation’. ⁶⁶ Decree 195, on the other hand, threatened with imprisonment anyone who attempted or encouraged the re-establishment of the fascist party (art. 1) and anyone who promoted, directed and/or subsidized (but also was simply a member of) an armed group (art. 3). ⁶⁷

While the government's attentiveness shows how Italy had no intention of underestimating the subversive actions carried out by fascist groups, the legal measures prove that the resurgence of fascism on a legal basis between the second half of 1945 and the beginning of the following year was not very easy to predict. It is therefore worth asking how the birth of the MSI, in December 1946, had not been opposed by the institutions.

Some scholars have underlined how the establishment of a new fascist party was made possible by the US intelligence service, which would have considered it useful to have a right-wing political formation to turn to if needed, given the evolution of the geopolitical context. ⁶⁸ Nevertheless, the consent of the US only partially explains the rise of the MSI. ⁶⁹ The most decisive element was instead the approval given to it by the DC and the broader conservative front. It would be a mistake to interpret that endorsement of the MSI exclusively as proof of the fragility of the antifascist spirit within the ranks of the DC and the other conservative parties. The majority of these politicians inevitably grew up in the fascist era but the great majority of them had distanced themselves from its ideology and had begun to nurture sincere anti-fascist values. The real explanation for accepting the MSI was the idea that the emergence of a party that could obtain the consensus of those who had supported the fascist cause would bring into play forces that might be used against the PCI and might make it more difficult for the latter's Secretary, Palmiro Togliatti, to pursue his plan to bring veterans of that experience, especially those who had shown attention to issues like socialization, into the party. ⁷⁰ In other words, the anti-communism that had developed in the aftermath of the war but had deep roots back to the early 1920s was the real reason for the support given to the MSI from the DC and the conservative milieu. On the other hand, the left-wing parties, although concerned about the formation of the MSI, at least initially did not make it a real object of political contention. Furthermore, the path that led to the establishment of the MSI was also characterized by informal efforts, which began on the eve of the institutional referendum of June 1946, to reach out to socialist and communist representatives and ensure their consent or, more likely, their passivity. ⁷¹ The left-wing parties were also convinced, or at least hoped, that the new political entity could undermine another movement that was causing great concern, namely L’Uomo qualunque (UQ), a populist formation that managed to have thirty of its candidates elected to the Constituent Assembly with a campaign based on its opposition to the established political system. ⁷² In Mammone's opinion, from the perspective of the left leaving space for an explicitly fascist party could reduce the UQ's popularity and shine a light back on those who, while supporting the fascist cause, had initially preferred the camouflage of the UQ. The birth of the MSI, thus, would make the fascists easier to monitor. ⁷³ While this thesis might appear doubtful, and, at the very least, is one for which Mammone did not provide much evidence, it is nevertheless undeniable that in the early months after the MSI's constitution, the parties of the left did not see the move as a significant and threatening political development.

Not even the Unione delle Comunità ebraiche italiane (Union of Italian Jewish Communities – UCEI) spoke out against the foundation of the MSI. In fact, with the exception of its support for the republic on the occasion of the institutional referendum of 2 June 1946 (a stance that was the result of the conniving attitude of the royal family during the introduction of the racial laws by the Fascist dictatorship in 1938), the UCEI had generally opted for a relatively neutral attitude towards Italian politics. This is explained by the Jewish community's need to re-integrate into society as soon as possible, even at the cost of ignoring the already clear responsibilities of the Italians in relation to Jewish persecution. ⁷⁴

More generally, the consent given to the constitution of the MSI by a large part of the political sphere was based on a particular starting position: that the core of the party's founder members – made up of second-rate fascist figures, starting with the first secretary of the Social Movement, Giacinto Trevisonno – demonstrated a willingness to respect the rules of democracy. As such, in the eyes of the authorities, the party could not be regarded as genuinely fascist, unlike the PFD. It follows that such a label could only apply, in their opinion, to subversive organizations intent on overthrowing the democratic order with political violence, an idea that indicates a controversial as well as confusing view of what fascism was and would become in the following years.

Nevertheless, after a few months, the tension around the MSI began to grow. A series of statements from partisan associations and left-wing trade unions were addressed to the public authorities calling for the dissolution of a party that was unequivocally seen as a revival of the National Fascist Party. ⁷⁵ The Ministry of the Interior also reported a significant number of clashes, indicating that not all the political stakeholders were willing to tolerate the presence of the MSI. ⁷⁶ For all that, within the Ministry, as attested by an internal report, there was an impression that the MSI was not directly responsible for such a confrontational atmosphere which, on the contrary, it believed was caused by the grassroots forces of the left. ⁷⁷ Such movements were hindering the MSI's propaganda activities as they were convinced, much more than the leaders of the various parties of the period, that they were facing a new fascist movement. However, by specifying this last point, the Ministry's note seemed to suggest what has already been mentioned above, namely that the idea that the MSI represented the re-emergence of fascism was not taken for granted inside the government.

Therefore, as was the case in Britain, the analysis of these reports reveals the difficulty in establishing what was or was not a fascist movement, but also how naive, if not even ambiguous, the Italian government's attitude towards the MSI was. The latter, in fact, was undoubtedly linked to the past fascist experience, starting with its name and the identities of its main representatives, but its political agenda was also very close to the fascist ideology of the previous decades. In other words, although the MSI was careful, especially in its early stages, to adhere to the rules of democracy, this did not mean that it did not take inspiration from the past. Naivety can certainly help to explain the posture adopted by Italian democracy, as after all Italy aspired to become a fully fledged democracy following an era in which ideas and political movements were routinely repressed: tolerating the intolerant may well have represented an idealistic choice for a relatively new democracy. Nonetheless, emphasizing this attitude risks obfuscating the crucial point that helps to explain the leniency shown towards the MSI, which was related to a broader indulgence towards the revival of the fascist ideology, namely the so-called ‘continuity’ between fascism and democracy. The many police officers called to make pronouncements on the re-emergence of fascism, along with the many public prosecutors and judges called to carry out investigations, had themselves embraced fascism for at least a part of their lives and thus, with some important exceptions, were not keen to see the activities of fascist groups and the persistent circulation of fascist ideas as a genuine menace. ⁷⁸

However, this ambiguous attitude did not equate to complete tolerance. In the following years, for example, the government – always led by the Christian Democratic De Gasperi and with Mario Scelba (also a Christian Democrat) as Minister of the Interior – reacted whenever an MSI member or anyone close to the party made statements or speeches apologizing for Mussolini. The arrest of the philosopher Edmondo Cione is emblematic of this. Having been particularly close to fascist circles since the time of Mussolini, Cione had been invited to speak at the MSI's second national congress, held in Naples in June 1948, where he defined fascism as ‘the highest peak of European doctrine’, a statement that, in the opinion of the police, represented a justification of the past. His arrest by the local authorities was therefore immediate. ⁷⁹ Ezio Maria Gray, a leading member of the MSI, was also accused of apologizing for fascism, and unlike Cione, who was quickly acquitted of all charges, was eventually sentenced to confinement. ⁸⁰ The capital's questore (Police Chief), Saverio Polito, was decisive in punishing all those who made statements or speeches apologizing for Mussolini in the province of Rome, to the point that between 1948 and 1951 he lodged 179 complaints on this issue. ⁸¹ Even Polito himself had had a role in the fascist regime (he had been a member of the OVRA, the secret police during the Mussolini dictatorship), but this was overridden by the fact that he was a man of order and was very anxious to demonstrate fully his zeal to his superiors and to adapt himself to the new political order. ⁸²

Furthermore, the Italian government, had another weapon against fascism and, potentially, against the MSI, namely the Disposizione transitoria e finale no. 12 (a temporary and final regulation) of the Italian Constitution which would come into force on 1 January 1948 and go on to challenge any possible resurgence of fascism. ⁸³ The article had been approved by representatives of all parties on 19 November 1946 (thus before the birth of MSI), having been conceived by the leader of the Communist Party, Togliatti. Instead of enacting a regulation that would have granted the right to exist to any political party that followed democratic principles – as initially proposed by a member of the Partito socialista di unità proletaria, Lelio Basso – Togliatti argued for the importance of excluding the fascist party specifically, on the basis that it had already revealed its anti-democratic convictions, while acknowledging that all other political parties, of the present and the future, had the right to exist. ⁸⁴ As a result, it would be sufficient to demonstrate the fascist nature of the MSI to justify dismantling it, thus the activation of the Constitution on 1 January 1948 represented another threat to the party: if it decided to refer the past fascist experience more explicitly, its fate would be sealed.

A further change in government policy towards the MSI occurred in 1950. On the news that, on 28 January, the party had assaulted the local communist headquarters of the working class and pro-communist district of Garbatella in Rome, the Minister of the Interior, Mario Scelba, issued the police with an order to occupy the Roman and national section of the extreme right-wing party, and to ‘prepare elements in order to denounce the entire movement’. In the following days, a series of arrests were made and a decision was even taken to cancel the MSI's third National Congress. ⁸⁵

All these actions attested to the extent to which the government, starting from the Christian Democrat Prime Minister began to be genuinely concerned that the MSI could jeopardize the country's ongoing process of democratic stabilization. On the other hand, its tendency to leave, at least, ‘a half-open door’ to the party persisted. ⁸⁶ It is pertinent, in this sense, to recall the informal, but still politically important, meeting held in April 1950 between the Prime Minister and leading members of the MSI, including Arturo Michelini and Giovanni Roberti, which came a few days after a similar conversation between them and the President of the Republic, Luigi Einaudi. ⁸⁷ Moreover, in 1952 the government decided not to extend the ruling regarding the ineligibility of some former fascist leaders, which was a consequence of the retributive measures put in place after the war. In the same year, the Parliament decided that membership of the Voluntary Militia for National Security created by Mussolini at the beginning of his dictatorship would be taken into consideration in the calculation of military retirement benefits. This decision was met with widespread criticism from the anti-fascist movement and former members of the Resistance, but was inevitably greeted with enthusiasm by the MSI, which had fought for it over the course of the previous years. ⁸⁸ Furthermore, the MSI's annual congress, after the cancellation of 1950, could henceforth be held regularly, starting in the summer of 1952.

In some cases, the government was even sympathetic to elements of the fascist front operating underground, which the authorities continued to distinguish from the MSI by labelling them ‘fascist groups’. The situation along the eastern border between Italy and Yugoslavia was paradigmatic. In this region, one of the most crucial in the new geopolitical context, the Ufficio per le zone di confine (Office for the Border Zone), which had come into being in 1946 and was directly linked to the Prime Minister's Office, gave financial support to a series of paramilitary units – 17 according to the British Foreign Office ⁸⁹ – comprised mostly of people with a background in fascism. This was justified by the perceived need to tackle the threat of a communist armed offensive, a scenario that was considered realistic at the time. ⁹⁰

Behind the Italian government's ambiguous attitude to fascism was a certain idea of democracy held by the main political party, the DC, and in particular, its leader, De Gasperi, who was Prime Minister for the 8 years prior to the summer of 1953. Strengthened by his May 1947 decision to form a governing coalition without the Communist Party – a choice welcomed both by the UK and the USA – he developed his attitude towards radical political cultures in light of concepts that he held dear, such as those of a ‘protected’ and ‘militant’ democracy and a ‘strong state’. ⁹¹ Naturally, his measures were also influenced both by the positions of the other coalition parties and by the more conservative wing of his own party. The latter, for example, conceived of the fascist front exclusively as a resource to use in the fight against communism, and never as a threat to democratic stability. ⁹² This combination of different political actors helps explain the – at times even contradictory – approach taken in Italy in the immediate postwar period towards fascism and the MSI specifically, although this ambiguity is more understandable if it is seen in light of the threefold view of the political arena held by De Gasperi and his wing of the DC. ⁹³ This perspective did not place fascists and communists on the same footing. The communists were the main threat – ‘But did not you understand that we must guard our back against communism?’, De Gasperi openly stated in a political speech on 21 August 1952 ⁹⁴ – while the fascists, including members of the MSI, could potentially be used as a tool against the communists, although unlike in the view of the conservative wing, they could also be a potential danger to democracy. ⁹⁵ The subversive nature of fascism meant that it could undermine the democratic system considerably, by opening the door to communism. As De Gasperi wrote: ‘Do the MSI's leaders really believe that if we returned to dictatorship and parliament and democratic freedom were smashed, the result would be a fascist dictatorship? Not at all, it would be a communist dictatorship …’. ⁹⁶

As a result, all the measures taken against the MSI from 1947 onwards were aimed at strengthening the democratic system as conceived by De Gasperi and his party wing, that is to say, a unique, protected system that considered it a priority to diminish the political viability of the communists as much as possible but without going so far – as Forlenza has accurately pointed out – as suppressing them. ⁹⁷ In this regard, it is worth remarking that while the government was strengthening its measures against the fascist movement as a whole, it also decided to remove Resistance forces from the apparatus of state (from the prefectures to the police). Such an attitude is not proof of De Gasperi's anti-antifascism, but rather of his anti-communism. The removal of Resistance forces from the state apparatus was aimed above all at damaging the left since the majority of the Resistance figures who moved within the state came from that political front (after all, most partisans belonged to the left, and specifically the Socialist and Communist parties). Further evidence of it is the fact that in the meantime the government hardened its attitude towards political demonstrations linked more or less explicitly to the left. ⁹⁸ This policy was adopted well before the outbreak of the Korean War, which ended up making the communist threat even more substantial. It was neither an exogenous product – the result of pressure from the US – nor even less a shift in De Gasperi's policy, but rather was the relatively coherent and long-standing approach of an Italian government that sought in this way to respond to the desire of a good number of its citizens for a restoration of social and public order. ⁹⁹

Even the proposal to strengthen the aforementioned twelfth transitory and final regulation of the Constitution to tackle once and for all any efforts to re-constitute a fascist movement was part of this process of consolidating an a-fascist and anti-communist democratic culture pursued by the Christian Democratic government (which it is possible to conceive as a kind of Italian effort to put in place a peculiar model of ‘militant democracy’). ¹⁰⁰ The measure was put forward in 1950 by Interior Minister Scelba with support from the Prime Minister, and was finally approved in June 1952 (becoming law no. 645). De Gasperi talked openly about its aims to the American ambassador Ellsworth Bunker in July 1952: the law, he said, was part of a bigger mosaic that included ‘the labour law, the law for the regulation of the press, and the Polivalente law’, ¹⁰¹ in other words, the so-called exceptional laws if passed have would limited the freedom of political expression and strengthened the repressive component of the state apparatus. ¹⁰² Scelba too, during a dinner in December 1950 with British and American representatives, showed how those measures needed to be considered a part of a broader project. ¹⁰³ The secretary of the DC and minister of Public Education, Guido Gonella, had also invited citizens to see Scelba's proposal as part of a wider plan. In doing so, Gonella was indirectly attempting to reassure both Italian and foreign moderate and conservative circles (even those that thought that only a much softer line towards the MSI and the fascists in general would make it possible to oppose communism effectively) by reminding them that the defence of democratic institutions was a government priority. ¹⁰⁴

Although the importance of such statements should not be exaggerated, they speak to the government's inclination to insert the fascist issue within a broader plan concerning the concept of democracy itself. In the British embassy in Rome, the Italian measures against fascists groups were also imagined to be part of a broader project whose final aim was to tackle the threat of communism. As pointed out by a despatch written in May 1949 by the British ambassador, Victor Mallet, the possibility – which, in that period, was only supposed but not real yet – of banning the MSI did not respond so much to the concerns of foreign countries about the presence of a fascist party in Italy, but, on the contrary, was the first step to be followed by broader restrictions also aimed at communist groups, since communism ‘is and will remain a formidable and ruthless enemy whom the [Italian] Government are determined to curb’. ¹⁰⁵

Mallet's statement was probably influenced by the British government's own approach to the same issue. In fact, despite the political tradition that dated all the way back to the 1930s and, at least in theory, put the two different political extremes on the same level, Attlee's government was increasingly inclined to see communism as the main threat. A series of measures put in place between the end of 1947 and the beginning of 1948 and concerning both home and international affairs proved this, ¹⁰⁶ including the constitution of the Information Research Department (IRD) that ‘for three decades poured out a stream of anti-communist propaganda for both domestic and (primarily) foreign consumption’, ¹⁰⁷ and a purge of the trade unions and the public sector aimed at punishing members of the CPGB. ¹⁰⁸

The Jewish Defence Committee's press officer, Sydney Salomon, also indicated that communism was regarded as the main threat by the Labour government. In a pamphlet, Salomon pointed out that in the end the government had aligned itself with the predominant sentiment of a public that conceived the CPGB ‘as more dangerous to the welfare state than the fascist[s]’. ¹⁰⁹ However, he argued that the executive needed to be aware that a clear line separated the fascists from other extreme parties: only the UM and the other fascist groups were antisemitic.

However, the fact that the Labour view of democracy perceived communism as the main threat did not mean that the British government adopted an indulgent approach to the fascists and fascist organizations, as Renton instead suggested. ¹¹⁰ The Labour governments simply maintained that the 1936 Public Order Act would be enough to tackle the threat. Therefore, when in 1948 Mosley chose International Workers’ Day as the date of the UM's first public demonstration in London, the Home Office appealed to the third section of the Act to ban any kind of public meeting in East London on that day. This counter-measure had already been used by the government between 1937 and the beginning of the Second World War. Following Mosley's decision to move the demonstration, the Home Office went further and welcomed the Metropolitan Police Commissioner's proposal to extend the ban to all of London. ¹¹¹ This measure, which would remain in place for the whole of 1949 and cover more limited occasions over the next two years, played a crucial role in ensuring that fascism was unable to regain even the modest degree of consensus that it had enjoyed in the 1930s, while also avoiding demonstrations by left-wing political parties and trade unions and in doing so revealing the Labour government's strategy of taking advantage of anti-fascist measures to combat the communist threat at the same time. In this way, Attlee's government, despite its formal commitment to preserving freedom of expression, pursued a project based on the model of ‘restrained democracy’ ¹¹² or ‘constrained form of democracy’. ¹¹³ Historians like Corduwener and Conway are more inclined to associate this model with states such as France, Italy, West Germany, but also Belgium, Netherlands and Austria, ¹¹⁴ where Christian democratic parties were able to establish themselves as the main political force or at least as parts of broader coalitions, but in my opinion, it can also be re-considered for the British context.

In thinking about the process of redefining the democratic culture that preoccupied Western Europe after the Second World War, Mazower is one of the few historians to deal with the issue of the re-emergence of fascist movements. He points out that some democracies, such as the Federal Republic of Germany, responded to this by banning those groups, but nevertheless the most common tendency was an indulgent approach, in particular towards people who had supported the fascist cause in the past but had decided to move away from the ideology. After all, the fascists would not find fertile terrain for their political ideas, and fascism was no longer a respectable ideology in the European continent. On the other hand Western European governments, in Mazower's opinion, adopted a tougher line against extreme left militants. ¹¹⁵ For his part, the political scientist Müller, when considering the role played by the spirit of ‘militant democracy’, wrote that such a spirit was frequently used to confront the communist menace more than the fascist one, regardless of the real threat presented by the two radical political cultures. ¹¹⁶

Although I agree with these conclusions, this article has challenged and, above all, enhanced the European picture. More specifically, it has attempted to show how the issue of the resurgence of fascism in the process of the consolidation and redefinition of a democratic culture was crucial, since it nourished debates and led to the adoption of laws and acts that, at least in the Italian scenario, went as far as altering the Constitution (it is worth remarking that the twelfth final regulation of the Italian Constitution is still in force). The comparison has also provided the opportunity to challenge the conclusion of British historiography regarding the Labour Party's approach to fascism. It appears that there has been excessive polarization between those who have judged the government's response to Mosley's return to be too lenient and ineffective, and those who argue that it did everything that might reasonably have been expected. The same approach has been taken in relation to the Italian context. In this case, the most common historiographical tendency has been, with some exceptions, to consider the DC's line to have been too tolerant of the new fascist threat, while failing to recognize, or at least underestimating, the efforts to differentiate subversive political groups from the MSI, and neglecting the need to place new measures within a broader plan to establish a democratic culture after a dictatorship that lasted more than 20 years.

One point, however, has been largely underestimated by both historiographies, even by those scholars who have criticized the attitude of governments to the return of fascist groups, but in my opinion needs to be stressed. This is the transnational nature of the phenomenon and, above all, the fact that the national authorities themselves were unable to comprehend such a dimension. The article showed that the British Home Office and the Italian Minister of Interior were aware of their reciprocal policies, attitudes and even worries about the fascist re-emergence, but never attempted to consider the phenomenon as an international rather than purely domestic issue. They thus completely underestimated numerous signals and allowed the fascists to rebuild a network, culminating with the constitution of the European Social Movement. Such signals included the meeting in Rome in March 1950 – when Mosley had a personal meeting with the then secretary of the MSI, Augusto de Marsanich, as well as his predecessor, Giorgio Almirante, and many other fascists from all around Europe ¹¹⁷ – and the first European Congress of National Youth held in October of the same year, again in Rome, which was essentially a fascist event. ¹¹⁸ This article has adopted the perspective of the governments rather than of the fascists, and thus a national and comparative lens instead of a transnational one, but it is nevertheless worth pointing out that the failure of the Italian and British governments to grasp this dimension fully was crucial to the survival of fascism and its ability to influence European politics. ¹¹⁹

On the whole, this article has shown how within the international process of consolidating or constructing a democratic culture the issue of the re-emergence of fascist movements played a significant role. The analysis of the restrictive policies which were imagined and, at least in part, put in place against fascist movements (and communist parties, even with a different intensity in both cases) by the British and Italian governments, has made it possible to cast new light on the willingness of the authorities to call into question certain fundamental freedoms, a trend that apparently not only involved European countries where Christian Democratic parties formed the government or at least played a central role in governing coalitions, but also other states, including the UK. This was a way to think of themselves as militant democracies, which is an approach that deserves to be investigated more fully, particularly if historiography wishes to contribute more than it has done so far to a debate that animates political scientists and sociologists on the capacity and possibility for democracy to contrast and, in a certain way, to deal with intolerant and extremist movements. ¹²⁰