Fascism - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2012

Historians and literary scholars still working in a Cold War paradigm cast Romanian Fascism as a form of reactionary resistance to liberal modernity, and not as a competing modernizing discourse and drive. Nevertheless, in a 1933 programmatic article, the Legionnaire leader, ideologue, and ‘martyr’ Vasile Marin wrote that political concepts such as ‘the Right,’ ‘the Left,’ and ‘extremism’ lost their relevance in Romania, as well as in Europe. They had been replaced by a ‘totalitarian view of the national life,’ which was common to Fascism, National-Socialism, and the Legion. This new ‘concept’ would allow Romania to ‘overcome, by absorbing them, the democratic and socialist experiences and would create the modern state,’ – a ‘totalitarian’ state. The present article aims to consolidate the conceptual gains of ‘new consensus’ historiography, which views the Iron Guard as part of a global revolutionary movement that was spurred by the practice of a political religion promising a ‘national rebirth’ or a ‘complete cultural’ and anthropological ‘renewal.’ Far from militating for national autarchy and populist-agrarian conservatism, the two Legionnaire leaders discussed in my article sought to align Romania with the modernizing, industrializing drive of Western European Fascism.

This article explores a new dimension in fascist studies, eugenic studies, and the more mainstream history of Italy, Europe, and modernity. It asks scholars to reconsider the centrality of race and biology to the political programme of Italian fascism in power. Fascism’s ‘binomial theorem’ of optimum population change was characterized as a commitment both to increase the ‘quantity’ (number) and improve the ‘quality’ (biology) of the Italian ‘race’. These twin objectives came to fruition in the new scientific and political paradigm known to contemporaries as ‘biological politics’ and to scholars today as ‘biopolitics’. Fascism, this article contends, attempted to utilize the full force of the new ‘biopower’ of reproductive and biogenetic medicine and science in order to realize the aims of its biopolitical agenda for racial betterment through fertility increase. In Italy, fascism encouraged science to tamper with the processes of human reproduction and to extend genetic understanding of diseases which were seen as ‘conquerable’ without sterilization and euthanasia. It began a biotechnological ‘revolution’ that historians often attribute to twenty-first-century science. By exploring the technical innovations in assisted conception which Italian fascism promoted, this article challenges the assumption in much of the scholarship that there was a huge divide between the ‘old’ eugenics of the interwar period and the ‘new’ genetics of recent decades.

This conference report comprises the contributions of European and American specialists in Fascism on the topic of networks, promises for the future and cultures of violence in Europe, 1922–1945. It was concluded that a much more in-depth examination of fascist networks, as well as their learning and acquisition processes is required, especially after 1939 and in the currently under-researched regions of Eastern and Southern-Eastern Europe. Secondly, the concept of a ‘New Man’ should be applied in more detailed studies on population and educational policies. Thirdly, there is a need to counter the frequently lamented asymmetrical state of research between Italian fascism and National Socialism.