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Entry: Europe's Fascist Future? Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/europes_fascist_future#2619 Post contents: I can't say that I found this article especially enlightening, and the author seems generally ignorant about Europeanism and the interwar Right. Miller notes in his first sentence that a "united Europe has long been an aspiration spanning the political spectrum," but then goes on to make the rather lame argument that while once the European Right was about "national expansion and homogenization of occupied territories," now they are the ones who oppose the Eurocrats’ dreams. Miller then remarks that this is very "ironic" (a word he repeats numerous time). The fact is, groups like the BNP are quite different from fascists and the interwar Right in their orientation, and they exist in a very different historical situation; we shouldn't be so surprised when they have different policies. Here are some aspects of Europeanism Miller seems to have neglected in his exhaustive research and which must be taken into account in considering the challenge of Europeanism in the interwar period and now. The father of the European idea was Richard Nikolaus Coudenhove-Kalergi, a half-Japanese, half-Austrian writer and son of a great diplomat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His plan for "Pan-Europa" was firstly realist in character. Vis-a-vis the U.S., U.S.S.R., and a future "Mongolia" pan-region, he correctly discerned that individual European states would be weak. Only through the establishment of a pan-region with a unified foreign policy could localities (not necessarily nations) retain some cultural autonomy. RCK was philo-Semitic and thus detested the Nazis; however, he was a bit of a fascist, and wrote an open letter to Mussolini asking him to be, as it were, the Duce of Pan-Europa. This was, of course, at a point when Italy was not aligned with Germany and when Italian Fascists were not enthralled with the Nazis. Roger Griffin has done interesting work on Fascist Europeanism, and his essay "Europe for the Europeans" is worth consulting. Anyway, Miller's notions that 1) the far-Right was unified in the interwar period and 2) that they were all about expansion and homogenization seems to me like something he picked up in his grammar school text book. Miller also over-simplifies by seeing the challenge of Europeanism as based on Europe vs. the nation states. Most pan-Europeanist did not see it that way. Take for instance Konrad Adenauer (perhaps the most important pro-Europe politician in postwar history, and yet he goes unmentioned by Miller (?)). Adenauer-- who was a member of RCK's Pan-European League between the wars-- was a German patriot, yet he was far from a German nationalist. He generally hated “the East”—i.e. Protestant Prussia-- and idenitified with the Latin Catholic “West”—i.e. France, Italy, and the German Rhineland. Indeed, he argued that the establishment of an EU would release these regional cultures from the restraints of national cultures. He actually wasn’t so sad to give up the east to the U.S.S.R. after the war, and (in my opinion) viewed the NATO West almost as a kind of precursor to a European Union (not as an instrument of U.S. Hegemony). The relationship between the Right, “Europe,” and the EU is a far more complicated matter than Miller recognizes and deserves a more thoroughgoing inquiry. Sent at: 2008 12 02