On the Recurrence of Fascistic Temptations and the Duty of Europe to Resist Them

It is a recurring sorrow of European letters that history seldom moves linearly. She rotates, often with a grinding inevitability. Observers like to imagine that the barbarities of the past are fixed in sepia; that the moral disasters of the 1930s were products of unique circumstances, unrepeatable in an age enriched by technology, prosperity and supranational institutions. Yet history’s wheel turns, and her spokes return to familiar positions. The tragedy of Europe, and perhaps her salvation, lies in accepting that temptations recur even when the protagonists change. In the twentieth century it was the Germans who surrendered themselves to a doctrine of power worship, racial myth, and contempt for representative institutions. In the twenty-first, an unsettling proportion of the American political discourse appears vulnerable to its own form of authoritarian populism, shrouded in the rhetoric of national regeneration and grievance. It is not peoples who become fascists; it is intellectual climates, networks of incentives, and opportunistic elites.

The fear expressed by many European policymakers in private is that the United States is no longer immune from the centrifugal forces that once pulled Weimar Germany apart. The details differ, but the emotional palette is disquietingly similar: the cult of strength; the elevation of a charismatic political figure as the singular interpreter of national destiny; a narrative of humiliation at the hands of foreigners; a willingness to depict parliamentary compromise as weakness; a search for internal enemies to blame for external decline. These are the components of fascistic movement, even if they are wrapped in the symbols of an old democracy. One need not assert that America is fascist in order to notice that she is flirting with ideas that Europe knows too well.

For Europe, the strategic danger arises not only from the ideological contagion of such movements but from their practical consequences. When a great power is consumed by the politics of resentment, she may cast aside alliances, withdraw from collective obligations, and reinterpret her international responsibilities as burdens to be shed rather than projects to be nurtured. The emergence of ultranationalist currents in American politics has already led to threats of abandoning European security commitments, undermining Ukraine’s defence in the midst of war, and encouraging far-right parties within Europe that are hostile to the European Union’s constitutional settlement. Europe understood in the 1930s that the foreign state which encourages extremist factions on the continent is not a benign actor. The instruments may differ from those of the interwar years, but the intention to fracture Europe’s unity is no less potent.

Some European commentators have whispered that this moment resembles the late 1930s, with one difference: the ideological aggression then emanated from within Europe. Today it arrives from across the Atlantic, from a country whose political discourse had long been thought a bulwark against authoritarian romance. Yet the forms of disruption remain recognisable. It is the method of fascistic politics to exploit democratic anxieties for the purpose of hollowing out democracy itself. And it is the habit of fascistic ideology to cloak itself in the language of freedom whilst undertaking the work of dismantling freedoms. Those who wield such ideas are not always fully conscious of the tradition they inherit. That makes them no less dangerous.

Europe’s response must be sober, collective, and rooted in the memory of her own near-disintegration. To perceive fascistic tendencies abroad is not to indulge in hysteria. It is to recall that the defence of democracy requires continual exertion. Europe must strengthen her own institutions, deepen the cohesion of her Union, and accelerate the development of autonomous security capabilities. She must learn to withstand periods in which American support waxes and wanes, for history’s wheel may leave her exposed for seasons at a time. Above all, she must reaffirm her commitment to pluralism, moderation, and the slow labour of diplomacy, for these are the qualities that defeated fascism before and will defeat it again.

This does not require an abandonment of the Atlantic alliance. It requires recognition that alliances depend upon shared values, and that these values may come under strain when one party is seduced by an authoritarian temptation. Europe’s task is neither to castigate America nor to imitate her. It is to cultivate resilience so that, should the United States falter in her democratic vocation, Europe does not falter with her. The continent has navigated crises of unity before. She must do so again with composure, memory, and an understanding that history is not a staircase but a wheel.

If the 1930s taught Europe anything, it was that fascism flourishes when democracies grow complacent. The tragedy of the present moment is that a nation long regarded as a guardian of liberty may be entering her own season of democratic peril. The duty of Europe is both defensive and moral: to resist the transatlantic spectre of authoritarian grievance, to preserve the institutions that safeguard her peace, and to act with the confidence that, however history turns, Europe can choose not to repeat her own darkest hours.