What is the relationship between civil society and regime type? Dylan Riley begins his ambitious book with the observation that a vibrant civil society does not always lead to liberal democracy. In fact, fascists attempting to topple the liberal order in interwar Europe benefited from a preexisting associational network of agricultural cooperatives and urban self-help associations in Italy, Spain, and Romania. Drawing on organized and widespread dissatisfaction with corrupt and inefficient elites, fascists, Riley maintains, sought to mobilize the masses for a new kind of antipolitics, in which decisions about the public good would no longer be the product of representative, deliberating parliaments but, instead, be guided by a new elite who legitimated their power with the claim to be more representative of the popular will than the parties of the liberal order.
Specifying the conditions under which people transfer their support from liberal democratic to antiliberal parties has long been a staple of comparative politics. Riley brings a sociologist's sensibility to the task. His main theoretical foils are 1) the Tocquevillian approach, which looks for fascism where citizens are atomized and associational life is weak; 2) Barrington Moore's model that finds fascism where an agricultural elite practices labor-repressive agriculture in alliance with a moderately strong urban bourgeoisie; and 3) Weberian-inspired theories, which consider fascism to be a last-ditch attempt by the ancien regime elites to retain power in the face of a mobilized (and frequently socialist) citizenry. None of these approaches really accounts for the fascist outcomes in Italy, Spain, or Romania: In each country, fascists attracted most followers where associational life was strongest. Labor-repressive agriculture was not really practiced after 1900 in any of these cases, and the bourgeoisie was either weak or foreign. And in none of the cases was there an old regime to support; in fact, all entered the twentieth century with established parliamentary institutions.
Riley proposes an alternative, Gramscian model. The key to liberal democratic stability, he argues, is the presence, first, of a dominant and organized class that, in a second stage, spreads its appeal beyond its initial constituency to encompass new classes entering politics. These twin processes are labeled by Riley, following Antonio Gramsci, intraclass hegemony and interclass hegemony. Operationally, what he is really talking about is a strong, programmatic liberal or liberal-conservative party with a compelling vision of the national interest that attracts a broad group of voters. In Italy, Spain, and Romania, despite fairly robust liberal parliaments and constitutions, this did not occur. Politics always remained highly clientelistic and parties the playthings of political strongmen or cliques. At the same time, however, basic liberal freedoms ensured the development of civic associations that had their own political demands. Where associational development preceded the establishment of a strong liberal party (intraclass hegemony), political dissatisfaction overwhelmed even nascent socialist, Catholic, and agrarian populist opposition parties, which themselves were weakened by the corrupt context in which they operated. In the absence of a well-structured party system, politics came to be seen as ineffective, government formation was viewed as disconnected from elections, and leaders were perceived as unaccountable. Fascists stepped into the void with programmatic elements from both the Left and the Right.
Although pitched in the Gramscian idiom, the theory can be restated in terms familiar to comparative politics in a line that runs back to Samuel P. Huntington: Where parties precede associational mobilization, liberal democracy takes root; where associations precede parties, politics is corrupted, opening the door for fascism. Riley's version of the proposition raises a number of questions: Why do elites succeed in creating intraclass and interclass hegemony in some places and not in others? What is the source of programmatic political parties? The author's case selection is sensible for establishing the causes of different kinds of fascism, but he would have been well served by considering a case where liberal democracy prevailed (Martin Shefter's account of U.S. party development comes to mind). The reader would then understand how exactly a well-structured party system develops (intra- and interclass hegemony and counterhegemony, in Riley's terms) and why this is crucial for preserving liberal democracy.
Put differently, the cases selected are good for establishing the causes of different kinds of fascism—the type of fascism that results depends upon the nature of civil society: In Italy, a fascist party could draw on an independently organized civil society; in Spain, fascists drew on traditional and Catholic associations; in Romania, civic life was always guided by the state, and therefore fascist rulers drew on state institutions and state-created associations for their support. But this case selection is less useful for distinguishing between fascist and nonfascist outcomes. Riley does include a short discussion of Hungary as a nonfascist outcome, but this case better illustrates the immunizing effects of a stable traditionalist order than it does the virtues of a well-structured party system.
The author's most controversial claim may in fact not be empirical but, rather, conceptual: his departure from a procedural definition of democracy. The link between civil society and fascism, he maintains, is only to be understood by distinguishing between democracy and liberalism. Democracy, for Riley, is a principle of legitimacy through which the modern state claims “to rule the people or nation” (p. 4). Liberalism, by contrast, is an institutional order in which laws result from parliamentary deliberation: “The fundamental problem with liberalism, from the fascist perspective, was not that it was democratic, but precisely the opposite. Elections and parliaments, from the fascist perspective, were intrinsically incapable of representing the interests of the nation.” Not all liberal orders are democratic (many have restricted the franchise, for example, by class, ethnic group, or gender) and not all democracies are liberal: “The basic problem of liberal states, from the fascist perspective, was their inability to represent the complex associational structure of contemporary society” (p. 201). Fascists promised to do a better job.
For this reason, on Riley's account, fascist states were “authoritarian democracies” rather than dictatorships, which leads him to the conclusion that associationalism may lead to democracy but not necessarily to liberal democracy. Space prevents more than a cursory comment on this challenging and fascinating assertion. I am not sure how far to accept it. After all, almost every dictatorship claims to represent the people better than liberal democracies do. Does this claim make them democratic or their leaders democrats? It is true that fascist movements were willing to use liberal democratic rules to destabilize liberal democracies. They spoke of “the people,” “the race,” or “the nation.” They exploited liberal associationalism to come to power. But labeling them democratic may confuse as much as clarify the origins of the fascist regime type.
Riley is correct that liberalism is an institutional order and democracy is a claim to legitimacy based on rule in the name of the people, but liberalism and democracy are more than this, and there is something crucial that his definition misses. Democracy is about equality—political equality encompassed in the idea of citizenship–and liberalism is also about freedom, a freedom encompassed in individual rights, legal proceduralism, and the toleration of different religious and ethnic groups. As much as they despised liberal individual rights, procedures, and toleration, fascists also rejected democracy's equality. Riley's analysis says very little about the fascists's deeply hierarchical view of the world and how this could possibly be squared with calling this regime type democracy. Fascists, as he correctly claims, violently rejected the liberal “political class,” but this populism did not make them democrats.
This is a book to be taken seriously, and my criticisms and reservations reflect a deep respect for the enterprise and the theoretical ambition of the author. We still know far too little about where fascist regimes come from, and Riley is to be commended for drawing important generalizations from cases across Europe, both Eastern and Western. Political scientists would be well served by taking up his challenge and focusing their own powerful theoretical and methodological lenses, yet again, on one of the most puzzling regime types of the twentieth century.
