This section includes book notes of 150-300 words as well as some book reviews of 600-900 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If you have either suggestions for books you would like to review or see reviewed (including recent books of your own), please contact Nigel Copsey of the University of Teesside (UK).
Book Notes Christopher Hewitt, Political Violence and Terrorism in Modern America: A Chronology, Westport, CT: Praeger, 2005, 224 pp., USD 75.00, ISBN: 0-31333418-8 (hbk). Reviewed by Erica Chenoweth (University of Colorado at Boulder) Professor Hewitt makes a contribution to terrorism studies through his chronology of over 3,000 terrorist events in the United States and Puerto Rico from 1954 through early 2004. He derived this chronology while pursuing a simultaneous research project, which culminated in his book Understanding Terrorism in America: From the Klan to Al Qaeda (2003). Hewitt has compiled the list of terrorist incidents in the U.S. by consulting a number of published sources, ranging from conflict databases to newspaper headlines. Hewitt claims that there are three types of terrorism in the United States: international terrorism, émigré terrorism, and domestic terrorism. The most active groups in the United States have been right-wing groups, which have been responsible for 26.7% of the events described in his chronology. Leftist revolutionary groups follow close behind, claiming 24.3% of attacks, whereas Islamic terrorist groups account for only 1.6% of the events between 1954 and 2004. Hewitt describes each terrorist event in detail, identifying the group, type of group, method of attack, date of attack, casualties, and known damage. Some descriptions are more informative than others simply due to the nature of data availability – a dilemma that all terrorism researchers face. Hewitt’s chronology deserves a space on reference shelves next to other encyclopedias of terrorism. However, it is definitely a chronology, and therefore it does not contain much substantive information on the origins of terrorist groups and their strategies. In order to understand the broad patterns and themes emerging within terrorist groups in the United States, readers will have to reference the more substantive Understanding Terrorism in America in which Hewitt subjects his data to scrutiny and derives some inferences and conclusions. Moreover, the chronology itself will be even more useful when the data has been compiled into a statistical software package and becomes
available for widespread use in research. For more information, contact Christopher Hewitt at mailto:hewittc@umbc.edu.
Bert Klandermans and Nonna Mayer (eds) Extreme Right Activists in Europe: Through the Magnifying Glass, London and New York: Routledge, 2005, 328 pp., GBP 65.00, ISBN: 0-415-35827-2 (hbk). Reviewed by Paul Hainsworth (University of Ulster) This is the one of the latest volumes to come out of the excellent Routledge Studies in Extremism and Democracy series. Edited by two of the world’s leading authorities in the field, the book seeks to break new ground as the first cross-national study of activists of extreme right organisations. Part 1 (five chapters, mostly written by the editors) focuses on the environment or the big picture: setting the scene from a definitional perspective; examining links with the past; exploring the context of extreme right presence; and assessing demand and supply aspects. For instance, the first chapter here – after noting traditional approaches to the study of right-wing extremism – opts for approaching the phenomenon as a social movement. Thus adherents join up as a consequence of rational choice, often seeking solidarity, identity confirmation or ‘to change the world’. The last chapter here explains the methodology: essentially 157 life-history interviews, conducted between 1995-99 across France, Italy, Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. Part 2 mainly focuses on the case studies (across seven chapters) although there are also useful chapters comparing right and left-wing activists and summing up the findings. The editors are keen to explore the socialisation processes and life-experiences that open up the potential for extreme right-wing membership and translate into actual commitment to the movements under discussion. The interviews cover organisations that were not committed to violence and individuals who were largely low level militants (but not leaders nor simply supporters/voters). Some of the interviewees were re-visited after important events such as the split in the French National Front in the late 1990s and the seismic election of 2002 in the Netherlands, that was dominated by Pim Fortuyn. Sampling strategies included snowball techniques, approaching individuals at events, accessing web-sites, telephone contacting and making links with local organisations. Readers may be surprised at the relative absence of blue-collar workers or unemployed persons amongst the sample, given the prominence of these categories among the voters for extreme right wing movements. Moreover, the sample does not include activists within Bruno Megret’s MNR breakaway from the French National Front, nor activists for Pim Fortuyn. Nonetheless, within the limitations of the sample, the editors
point to a reliable picture of extreme right-wing activism in the countries under the microscope. All in all, the editors achieve their aim of providing a path-breaking cross-national comparative study. The interviews are genuinely comparative and a lot of painstaking care and thought has gone into constructing, conducting and transcribing the interviews. The data is rich and we learn much detail about the motives, the self-perceptions and the trajectories of the interviewees. In this respect, the book’s sub-title is well-chosen. The editors impression of their subject matter – ‘on the whole they appear as perfectly normal people, socially integrated, connected in one way or another to mainstream groups and ideas’ – will provide much food for thought and discussion too.
Jeff Lewis, Language Wars: The Role of Media and Culture in Global Terror and Political Violence, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2005, 296 pp., USD 27.95, ISBN: 074532484-3 (pbk). Reviewed by Cassady Craft (Center for International Trade and Security, Washington D.C.) Jeff Lewis posits that the global war on terror is essentially a contest over language, and in particular the competition between the Bush regime and the Salafist/Islamist insurgency over meaning-making via the global mediascape. For the Republican government of the US, the key is to shape the message (via careful use of language) so that its audience, both in political and consumer terms, is reassured that the technological, economic, military, and moral-ideological supremacy of the western liberal-democratic state remains supreme. In so doing, and because of its overwhelming power (which Lewis equates to totalitarianism), ‘slippage’ occurs in the coherence of the message, and ‘other’ voices are heard, especially as they attempt to make sense of the divergence in US policy under conditions of changing circumstance. The difficulty for the US is squaring the circle of global and too-often militaristic power with the ideological niceties of a liberal-democratic state. The Salafist/Islamist insurgency against US hegemony (military, cultural, and ideological) also contends for message cohesion in the global mediasphere. While much less powerful than the US in military and economic terms, the insurgency has much less ideological space to control – mainly focusing on ‘moral values’ and religious precepts within the Islamic world. The drive for ideological purity which leads to what many view as excesses, such as the ritualistic beheadings of kidnapped foreigners, also leads to a backlash whereby the insurgents cannot control the entirety of the message coming from the Islamic world due to the ‘slippage’ as other voices are called upon to interpret events.
Lewis points to an interesting political phenomenon of our day, a time when (some would say pseudo) religious radicalism seems to govern both the global hegemon and those in violent rebellion against its dominance. Increasingly using the global media sphere, and especially the visual media, both wage the most important aspects of their contest: winning the hearts and minds of those less convinced of the righteousness of either cause while at the same time rallying the faithful to the cause itself by demonifying the enemy/other.
Jean-Guy Prévost, L’extrême droite en Europe. France, Autriche, Italie, Montréal: Fides, Points Chauds, 2004, 134 pp., EUR 17.10, ISBN 2-7621-2599-5 (pbk). Reviewed by Gilles Ivaldi (University of Nice) This book by J.-G. Prévost offers an accessible and mostly historical perspective on the emergence and institutionalisation of extreme-right parties in Austria, France and Italy, thereby contributing to the already extensive academic literature on right-wing populism in Western Europe. In line with most previous attempts to characterise the far right, Prevost emphasises the difference between what is generally referred to as the ‘third wave’ of extreme right actors in the 1980s and traditional fascism, whilst moving away simultaneously from the classical analysis of party ideology to suggest a classification based upon the spatial positioning of parties within their respective political systems. Despite the comparative framework inherent in the book’s title, the author focuses predominantly on the national level and the specific dynamics of first order party politics to account for the electoral success of the FPÖ, Front national and the new right in Italy. The overview of party system change, the increasing gap between party elites and the citizens, or the impact of growing political dissatisfaction amongst voters in the countries covered by the book doesn’t, however, provide the conceptual tools necessary to understand how and why such discontent emerges and why a lack of political alternative among mainstream parties mostly benefits the anti-system actors on the right end of the political spectrum. Overall, this is a book well worth reading for those interested in a general introduction to the far right phenomenon in Western Europe. Scholars with more previous knowledge of the existing paradigms of right-wing populism will find a number of stimulating themes in the book introduction, which concern the (non)democratic nature of parties such as the FN, FPÖ or MSI/AN, the complex theoretical articulation of anti-systemness, and those parties’ general - perhaps more profound - attitudes towards the basic principles of representative democracy.
Amory Starr, Global Revolt, London: Zed Books, 2005, 272 pp., GBP 12.99, ISBN: 1-84277-483-2 (pbk).
Reviewed by Maria Fabbri (University of Trento)
Global Revolt is a beginner’s guide to the movements against globalization. It differs from a ‘grass roots’ activists’ handbook, yet it does more than hold up a mirror in which the movement can see itself. The volume is divided into four different sections: a brief historical introduction and a mapping of the central events; a synthesis of the main mobilization manifestos; an examination of the central issues; and finally a survey of tactics. What marks this book out is its glocal (global and local) approach, giving interesting transnational examples and references. The study starts with a brief historical introduction. As Starr points out, antiglobalization did not start in Seattle and it did not stop on 9/11. She then examines an array of manifestos, covering issues such as global poverty, local autonomy, food sustainability and indigenous rights. Amory Starr raises a large number of questions particularly about the challenge presented by 9/11 for anti-globalization activists and the need to give new analytical meaning to the concept of global security. She resists the temptation to give solutions and she presents alternative forms of resistance for confronting the process of globalization to activist and scholar alike. A key strength of this book is the variegated repertoire of strategies that are studied. The author examines how pressure is directed at many targets (public opinion, the mass media, corporations) and how anti-globalization movements bridge different frames (social justice, environmentalism, anti-capitalism, anti imperialism). But several times she moves too fast between topics and neglects connections to essential macro themes, such as peace. Moreover, in some pages the mixture of activist hope and academic observation gives a double focused picture and she underlines the anticorporate frame too much. Despite these criticisms, this book isan accessible and effective example of the ways research and activism may develop in dynamic relationship to each other.
Book Reviews Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis, New York and London: Routledge, 2006, xii + 212 pp., GBP 16.99, ISBN 0-41529025-2 (pbk); GBP 50.00, ISBN 041529024-4 (hbk).
Reviewed by Roger Griffin (Oxford Brookes University) Karla Poewe fills in yet another corner of the enormous jigsaw constituted by Nazism as an ideological and social phenomenon by exploring the contribution to its genesis of the ‘cultic milieu, which generated a spate of New Religions in German speaking Europe at the turn of the century. This far-ranging investigation is given cohesion and development by focusing on Jakob Hauer’s New German Faith Movement. By locating it within the European-wide ‘revolt against’ positivism and growing crisis of the Enlightenment project rather than in the exclusively German völkisch movement Poewe lets a gust of fresh air into the often stiflingly Germano-centric study of the rise of Nazism. Also, by refusing to treat it teleologically as a proto-Nazi phenomenon, Poewe underscores its linkages not just with the rise of racist anthropology, the Aryan myth, Ariosophy, bündische Youth, and the Conservative Revolution, but occultism, life-reform and back-to-nature, vitalism, and racial hygiene, elements of which were absorbed into aesthetic, communist, and liberal discourses as well. All these originated in the panEuropean search for new spiritual bases for modern life in the fin-de-siècle which assumed particular intensity under Weimar whose collapse after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 triggered deep longings for a renewed spirituality and sense of national identity, both of which were addressed by the movement to establish a German Faith. Apart from encouraging historians of Nazism to give greater weight to its proliferating links with the forces of modernity and modernism rather than treating it as the product of Germany’s largely mythic Sonderweg, this book has several other distinct merits over much traditional scholarship. It underlines the importance of appreciating the role played in the rise of Nazism by the sense of cultural crisis and decadence that was pandemic in the West, particularly after 1918, and of tracing its kinship with wider aesthetic, social, and ideological phenomena that arose spontaneously outside the political sphere in the quest for cultural regeneration. It emphasizes the complex nature of anti-Semitism, which developed anthropological, pagan, and occultist rationales alongside traditional Christian ones. It throws into relief the futural thrust of what would now be called a ‘New Ageist’ obsession with uncovering primordial roots and natural sources of purity that would supposedly combat the decadence fostered by the Weimar Republic and form the basis of a new, spiritually regenerated, and modern national community. It emphasizes the importance of the German ‘revolt against decadence’ in the emergence of a biopolitical vision of the state and society, and the extraordinary confluence of myth with academic knowledge and science to generate a plethora of scientistic legitimations for the national reawakening sought by the Third Reich. It also uncovers significant strands of largely subterranean continuity between the sub-culture that prepared the ground for the Third Reich and the sustained critique of liberal democracy’s secular, multi-cultural individualism by the contemporary German New Right, which sixty years after the death of Hitler still seeks neo-pagan, ethnocratic solutions to the problems of modernity in ways which produce a distinct sense of déjà vu after reading this book. Yet in other respects this work fails to fulfil its considerable potential. Poewe misses the opportunity created by her own research to nail the fallacies that inform scholarly arguments that the Nazis’ claim to represent ‘positive Christianity’ should be taken at
face value, especially in respect of the German Christians who, as she shows so effectively, sought to create a cult of the mythic ‘organic’ nation purged both of Christ and of authentic Christian values, a deliberate perversion of Christianity even by the standards of the Church. The book betrays deep terminological confusions when it talks of the ‘fashion’ in the 1920s to reject ‘modernism’ by harking back to authentic elements in the pre-modern and pre-historical so as to adapt them to the ‘post-modern’ (p. 84). What Poewe seems to be trying to convey is the penetrating thesis that Nazism rejected actually existing modernity in the name of an alternative modernity. In doing so its ideologues developed a totalizing discourse which frequently (but not always) followed the archetypal revolutionary principle of invoking the past in order to regenerate the future, a fundamental principle of aesthetic, social, and political modernism systematically attacked by postmodernists for its utopian grand narratives which became so lethal when implemented as praxis. A more sophisticated use of the terminology of modernism would have made this book an even more powerful contribution to the appreciation of Nazism’s essentially future-directed modernist bid to create an alternative modernity, and the need to rethink the category of ‘anti-modern’ and ‘reaction’ with which it continues to be identified in Pavlovian fashion by so many scholars, particularly on the left. Finally, Poewe shows a poor grasp of essential pluralism involved in Nazism’s drive to ‘coordinate’ all the belief systems and cultural movements that it did not deem as intrinsically hostile or decadent. Overestimating the relevance of her own case-study to the origins of Nazism ‘as a whole’, she unwittingly confirms stereotypes about its antimodern, irrationalist ethos — which so incensed Hitler himself — and plays down the significance of its powerful technocratic, urbanizing, and scientific components which in practice triumphed over the ruralizing, occultist, back-to-nature element, even though these were retained as important elements in the regime’s self-image and propaganda. Instead, the book would have been considerably improved had it treated its topic as one of many originally apolitical modernist movements for renewal incorporated into Nazism’s variant of the ‘hegemonic pluralism’ operated in a considerably more laissezfaire spirit in Fascist Italy. It was a process that ultimately turned all the protagonists of the German Faith movements and their allies in the search for a renewed source of German spirituality willy-nilly into precursors, accomplices, and legimitizers of genocide. Despite its weakness, New Religions and the Nazis is a welcome addition to the new wave of scholarship that reveals key components in the peculiar constitution of Nazism’s alternative modernity. It also has the unusual merit of encouraging political scientists to scrutinize the barely hidden political agenda lurking with the ‘metapolitics’ of the European New Right, and pay more attention to the racial persecution and ethnic cleansing that would result were they ever translated into policies and social praxis.
Martin Pugh, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars, London: Jonathan Cape, 2005, 387 pp., GBP 20.00, ISBN: 0224-06439-8 (hbk). Reviewed by Graham Macklin (University of Southampton) Taking its title from the bravura headline of the Daily Mail which momentarily enabled Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists to gain mass support in 1934, Martin Pugh’s Hurrah for the Blackshirts is an erudite and extremely engaging (though frequently infuriating) attempt to set British fascism within its wider context, unearthing its wider roots within British society, particularly its links to sections of the Conservative Party in order to show that Britain was not immune to the clarion call of Fascism after all. It is, asserts Pugh, ‘a part of the national story’ and ‘that fascism was much more central to British inter-war history than has traditionally been appreciated.’ This is by no means a new thesis but Pugh’s panoramic survey of inter-war British fascism, which can be read almost as a history of inter-war Britain itself, consciously sets out to prove that British fascism was no marginal phenomenon. His contention that British fascists were ‘centrally involved’ in almost all of the controversies of the inter-war period from the General Strike in 1926 to the debates about appeasement and a general European settlement, whilst important, leaves the reader with the impression that he has over egged the pudding somewhat. Whilst Pugh has done sterling work in numerous local archives and repositories, examining the private papers of a plethora of Conservative MPs in order reveal that far from being repudiated and marginalized by conventional body politic there was in fact a ‘flourishing traffic in ideas and personnel between fascism and the Conservative Right throughout the inter-war period.’ Pugh’s rigorous contextualization of the British fascism and his examination of its responses to issues such as hostility to the rise of Labour and the debate over imperial defence enable him to argue persuasively that there was a far larger common ground between the BUF and the Conservative Party than has previously been supposed. Again this is not ‘news’ but something that was charted contemporaneously from the 1920s onwards by the trade union movement, journalists and other observers. However, the fact that Pugh has been able to articulate the extent of this mutual exchange in ideas to a far wider audience than that capable of the academic press has to be welcomed, particularly given the evident astonishment with which the reviewer from The Timesgreeted these revelations, leading him to conclude, as if it had occurred to no one else, ‘that had Hitler invaded in 1940 he would have found several figures on the right of the Conservative party ready to welcome him.’ Pugh is at pains to point out that the appeal of British fascism extended far beyond the anti-Semitism of its East End citadel attracting support from Britain’s agrarian market towns where its followers in East Anglia exploited rural resentment by intervening in the so-called ‘Tithe War’ in East Anglia, clashing with Church of England bailiffs rather than Jews, though this limited intervention failed to gain support anything like on the scale of Henry Dorgères’s Comités de Défense Paysanne(Committees of Peasant Defence) in neighbouring France, let alone the brutal agrarian fascism of Eastern Europe. With this
and his assimilation of the pioneering research by Julie Gottlieb on feminine fascism Pugh has gone a long way to show that British fascism was by no means the masculine, urban phenomenon it is often supposed. However, in concentrating upon these less well-known but still comparatively marginal spheres of British fascist activity one of the greatest flaws in Pugh’s work is inadvertently highlighted. His desire to draw attention to the breadth of support for British fascism has led Pugh to shy away from recent releases at The National Archives, Kew, London, in the belief that these documents compound ‘an already biased view’ of British fascism as a violent, anti-Semitic urban movement which highlight unrepresentative villains like William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’). Although there is certainly an element of truth in this view (though contrary to Pugh’s assertion official sources do indeed chart the extent of agrarian support for the BUF) what ultimately prevents Hurrah for the Blackshirts! from being a truly groundbreaking study is the author’s reluctance to engage to any great measure with the wealth of comparatively new and untapped sources, both in Britain and abroad, relating to Mosley and the political history of the BUF itself. Ultimately, this seriously prohibits Hurrah for the Blackshirts! from presenting a more rounded picture of British fascism. Indeed those seeking fresh insights into the nature of British fascism would be best off reading Hurrah for the Blackshirts! in conjunction with Stephen Dorril’s meticulously documented Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and the Rise of British Fascism (London: Penguin, 2006). Nevertheless, for all its limitations, which probably irk the specialist rather than the general reader, Hurrah for the Blackshirts! remains an important contribution to the increasing cannon of British fascist historiography by highlighting that whatever else, British fascism did not operate in a political vacuum.