Fascism - Special Issue: Fascism in Interwar Greece, Nov 2022

There are few more challenging tests of fascist core-periphery topographies than the case of interwar Greece. Greece can claim no significant fascist movement in the interwar years; no significant fascist political party; and no dictatorial regime inspired by a genuinely revolutionary ultranationalist vision. In the last category, the only possible candidate, the 4th of August dictatorial regime headed by the retired general Ioannis Metaxas, was established late (1936) and lasted only for a few short years until the death of the dictator (January 1941). The contributions to this special issue on interwar Greece feature not only diverse aspects of the Metaxas regime but also offer broader perspectives on the ideological and political dynamics of fascism across the 1920s and 1930s. This special issue intends to build bridges between historical and sociological approaches; between the study of ideas and the analysis of policies; between contextual specificities and international trends; and, in the end, between recent historiographies of generic fascism and of modern Greek history. Collectively, the contributions also evince a plea to take the fascist experience and the potential for radical ruptures in interwar Greece more seriously.

Constitutional change in interwar Greece was prepared for by political figures who, overwhelmed by ongoing political and social crisis and strongly involved in intense political debates on the crisis of parliamentarianism, endorsed the disestablishment of the Second Hellenic Republic. This article focuses on conservative intellectuals influenced by German sociologists, such as Max and Alfred Weber, Italian and Spanish scholars such as Vilfredo Pareto and José Ortega Y Gasset, and neo-Kantian and neo-Hegelian philosophers and constitutional lawyers. Claiming to stand above politics, they argued restored nationalism was the only doctrine that could promote the fulfilment of the nation’s ‘mission’. These intellectuals argued democracy and class-based parties, especially the left, undermined the concept of parliamentarianism, weakened the ideal of democracy, and would lead the country to chaos. As a counterbalance, they promoted political ideas that supposedly benefited the state and Hellenism in general. They advocated for charismatic leadership, discussed implementation of ‘controlled democracy’, and proclaimed an idealistic millennialism, a modern Platonic republic of the ‘prime’, led by the ‘philosopher-king’.

The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where more and more mainstream Greek political actors chose to operate in the interwar period. This article explores the dynamics of the ideological and political formation of ‘third ways’ in interwar Greece, paying attention to the interplay between international stimuli and local contextual singularities. In these thirding spaces ‘fascism’ was understood and operationalised in very different, subjective, and ever-shifting ways by each of these actors. It was regarded mostly as a potential component of diverse thirding processes/solutions and rarely as the desired outcome thereof. This explains why fascism came to inform a range of very different thirding projects in interwar Greece—from pursuing rupture and renewal to aspiring to status quo-affirmation; from liberal to conservative to authoritarian visions; from searching for a short-term ‘remedy’ to envisioning a long-term radical transformation.

This article analyses legal texts written by Nikolaos Koumaros that were foundational to the 4th of August regime in Greece. It demonstrates the regime possessed an ideology that did not differ substantially from other authoritarian regimes of the period. In particular, the choice of Koumaros as the central legal theorist of the regime can be explained by his familiarity with anti-liberal theories of the time. His engagement with these theories was linked with his studies in France and Italy during the interwar period, exposing him to fascist ideals. A detailed examination of the conceptual transfers that informed the main legal texts of the regime demonstrated their reasoning followed closely the theoretical developments of the time. Mussolini’s doctrine of fascism and a specific reading of Rousseau functioned as the basis for the legitimisation of a new, anti-liberal political order. These ideas became key analytical pillars of the legal texts that gave shape to the regime’s normative and political foundation, demonstrating that explicit fascist theories informed the political physiognomy of the regime.

Authoritarian regimes place significant emphasis on gender roles as part of their ‘imagined communities’, where everyone has their place attributed through evocation of the nation’s ‘history’ and ‘mission’. By placing gender at the core of historical analysis, this article examines the antinomies related to the role of women, and the shifting perceptions of femininity, under the Metaxas regime. It examines the female branch of the National Youth Organisation (EON), a laboratory of a ‘new femininity’, analyses the regime’s discourses and idealised representations of femininity and masculinity, and offers critical exploration of affinities between the Metaxist understanding of womanhood and pre-existing aspects of Greek interwar feminism. The article interprets from these fields the oscillations and contradictions marking Metaxist ideology and practices via-à-vis the role of women, and in doing so sheds new light upon the character of the regime itself.

The ‘Third Hellenic Civilisation’ was the principal propaganda innovation of the 4th of August regime and the core myth underpinning its ideological hegemony. Though regularly referred to as the central ideological slogan of the regime, there are no extensive discussions of its meaning and uses. This article attempts a comprehensive analysis of the term and the ways this futural discourse was employed as an instrument of legitimacy. By declaring the connection of the Third Hellenic Civilisation to art, literature, and culture in general, and granting the cultural field relative independence, Metaxas enabled intellectuals to assay their own interpretations of its meaning and proposals for its attainment. The article approaches the Third Hellenic Civilisation as a compound construct that was intended to act as a new ‘sacred canopy’, presenting the dialogue between official and intellectual discourses on its central aspects.

This article attempts to resituate the Greek regime of 4th of August 1936 within the wider context of interwar fascism in Europe and address it as fascist ideology and practice. It does so by pointing to the ways in which the biomedical discourse on gender and sexuality was pivotal in Ioannis Metaxas’s project in terms of playing a crucial role in normalising ideas of racial, class, sexual and gender hierarchy. The article has two areas of focus. The first approaches the eugenic discourse developed in Greece and Europe under liberal governments. This relied on the premise that the mental or psychic disorders it accounted for, identified mainly among the lower classes, were diagnosed as diseases of the ‘libidinous libido’ when it came to criminality, poverty, strikes, psychic diseases and brutal deaths. The second area of focus reveals how, once trained to detect biological and psychical anomalies, Metaxas’s regime managed to perform something that now gives the impression of a magic trick: by waving the wand of psychiatric technocracy over a scene of profound economic inequality, it cultivated an authoritarian, patriarchal, biomedical discourse on psychic normality.

This article examines the ideological trajectory of Ioannis Metaxas and his intellectual Weltanschauung. It argues that he was strongly influenced by several German developments, including the Kultur vs. Zivilisation debate. Furthermore, from the 1920s he explicitly transformed key fascist ideas and drew on those of the ‘Conservative Revolution’. It shows that Metaxas addressed all key historical developments, from the turn of the century, to the establishment of his dictatorship, to the Second World War, through his ideological and intellectual prism: national reconstruction and palingenesis and a new cultural orientation for the Greek nation. Metaxas’s thinking is examined from its formative period in Germany (1899–1903) to his dictatorship (1936–1941). The methodological framework draws on the work of Peter Wagner, who conceives the period from 1870 to 1940 as the heyday of the ‘first crisis of modernity’; the work of Roger Griffin, Aristotle Kallis, and António Costa Pinto centred around the palingenetic, modernist dynamic of fascism; and finally, the notion of ‘intellectual appropriation of technology’ developed by Mikael Hård and Andrew Jamison.