Suchergebnisse

Within the general trend of the rise of the radical Right in interwar Europe, the case of francophone Belgium is examined. The relative weakness of fascist movements in Brussels & Wallonia is explored through four interrelated factors. First, the legacies of history & geography suggest that the Right could claim little historical tradition in the region as it remained insulated from right-wing movements growing in other parts of the continent since the 1890s. Second, the failure to build an intergenerational coalition, as happened successfully in Germany, contributed to the failure of the extreme right. Third, the structure of social class in Belgium was such that the Right was deprived of strong bourgeois support; this left them with small shopkeepers & businessmen whose interests could easily be met by the state. Finally, ideological divisions among Catholics, socialists, & liberals, who maintained distinct social & cultural identities, fragmented the Belgian polity. Interwar Belgium does not represent the failure of fascism as much as it does a challenge to the homogeneity of the fascist movement in the interwar European experience. J. Cowie

Social justice has returned to the heart of political debate in present-day Europe. Using a transnational approach, this book provides the first historical account of the evolution of social justice across Europe during the twentieth century, and explores the divergent ways different groups have understood and sought to achieve social justice.

The concept of political legitimacy has hitherto tended to occupy a rather modest place in the historiography of twentieth-century Europe. In contrast to the attention paid by historians of pre-modern and non-European societies to issues of political culture and, more especially, to the ways in which the exercise of power by all rulers, be they sacred or secular, putative or actual, has to be located in a complex matrix of conventional beliefs, rituals and practices, historians of contemporary Europe have tended to regard issues of political legitimacy as of secondary importance compared with other more tangible factors. Political power in Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has been perceived by historians as being the product of an amalgam of ideological projects, forms of state (internal and external) aggrandisement and nationalist struggles for emancipation. Modernity – so it seems to be assumed – transformed the exercise of power, creating both new needs and justifications for active government and massively increased resources to bring these to reality, as well as flattening much of the pre-existing undergrowth of ancien régime convention and pre-industrial tradition. Government became incommensurably stronger, but also simultaneously starker. In the new world that emerged between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries, the powerful forces of ideological or national messianism and the democratic (or assumed) mandate of the people lifted state power to new heights. Consequently, governmental authority flowed remorselessly downwards through the new structures of civilian and military bureaucracy and legal authority, reducing social organisations, local communities and above all the individual citizen to the role of disciplined, though not necessarily powerless, subjects. Legitimacy, in so far as it surfaces in such accounts, is regarded as having been largely constructed by rulers themselves and subsequently conveyed by the modern institutions of social control – notably mass education, conscription and state propaganda – to the population. Thus, French peasants were made into Frenchmen, Russian workers into agents of Bolshevik power and German bureaucrats into functionaries of the Nazi state.