[Freerk Huisken's presentation to panel discussion “Different League Same Sport: On democratic nationalism and fascist ideology,” April 30, 2009, Hannover, Germany]
1. Fascists, old and new, are not the product of tradition nor the result of spontaneous, individual ideas. Fascists – those in the post-Weimar period and the current German Republic, as well as French, Italian, Danish and Romanian fascists – are disappointed nationalists; nationalists who are disappointed by the politics of the leadership of the state they live under. That is to say, they are recruited – here and in other European states – from supporters of the democratic-capitalist rule, are invested in the citizenship of their nation state, are proud of it and share the key objectives of the democratic-capitalist leadership. They are first – like democratic politicians such as Brandt, Kohl, Schroeder, Merkel, Lafontaine or Fischer – for the maintenance and expansion of their state's power, both internally and against external state competitors; secondly, they are supporters of the capitalist economic growth on which the wealth of the state is based, and which the political leaders of the nation want to increase in power, influence, and size; and thirdly, they put heavy emphasis on the unity of the people of the nation because they are central to its productive power in the global struggle for the strengthening of state sovereignty, and represent its economic basis and the security of its hegemony. Fascists begin their political careers as good, well-behaved (democratic) nationalists, where pride in the homeland and service to the fatherland are already worth some private sacrifices.
2. From their principled support of the aims of the democratic state, such nationalists become disappointed in democracy, if or because they are of the view that the ruling politicians across all the parties have betrayed the highest goals of the nation. From the diagnosis of betrayal, they conclude that their sitting rulers, if not condemn to decline, at least ruin their nation state, which is appointed to greatness.
Their diagnosis of betrayal makes the following points:
– They discover elements foreign to the people which undermine the people's unity and weaken the productive strength of the “national people.” Among them, these one were primarily Bolsheviks/communists and Jews or the “Jew Bolshevism” (Hitler) which, although non-German, had nestled into the German people's body; today, these are primarily “immigrants.”
– They complain that the state is too submissive to capital, which does not put its powers at the service of the nation, thus does not calculate nationally but increases its profits according to private calculations: when, with who and wherever.
– And they regard it as a particularly despicable form of betrayal of the fatherland that their home country, by entering alliances with competitors or former enemies (the EU, NATO …), forgoes its highest task, namely national sovereignty, instead of pursuing global assertion as its most important and purely national mission.
3. This diagnosis of decline by disappointed nationalists does not touch the state cause of democratic capitalism and its implementation. Because this is subject to negotiation by no democratic party. Certainly, the leaders of the nation implement quite a few concessions that are calculations in principle, but which are measured by their benefit to the nation:
– In this country, the goal of “the unity of the people” still stands at the highest level of the political agenda of all the people's parties and those which would like to become one – the Greens/ The Left Party. Public enemies and elements foreign to the people have nothing to laugh about under democratic rule: communism has to be eliminated as a subversive force; something the post-war democrats have implemented – here they have successfully taken up the legacy of German National Socialism – for example, the laws forbidding the KPD and anti-totalitarianism as state doctrine. Foreigners have nothing to search for here in principle, so holds the central political line on foreigners, just because they are foreigners. And when exceptions are made to the principle of the policy on foreigners – “guest workers,” Green cards, etc. – then it is only about using the typically poor people with foreign passports only as temporarily as possible for national purposes. They then must do the dirty work, function as scabs and represent an additional, even cheaper and forcibly still willing reserve army.
– Certainly, the democratic state, on whose power capitalist private property is based, makes its politics the servant of capital and its growth – something the state intervention in the current crisis demonstrates all too clearly. But in no case unselfishly: It knows itself rather as the second beneficiary of the success of global capitalist exploitation; since its state wealth depends on nothing other than the profits of its favorite citizens. It participates in the private success of its capital through taxes and the national debt.
– The policy of alliances, in the end, which the European states and the USA have committed to, indeed qualifies the nation's sovereignty – note well: qualifies it, but by no means abandons it. The nation states of the European Union open their internal borders, conversely strengthen control of all their external borders against unwanted foreign border crossers, together endow large corporations (Airbus) and position their military resources together in order to be unbeatable in their combined military power. In all cases, each nation state involved wants to profit for itself from the pooling of political, economic and military forces.
4. The disillusioned nationalists prove themselves thus as radical idealists of democratic principles and state purposes. They unhappily endure the realism of the ruling democrats who know that their goals today can not be asserted in confrontation with the U.S. and the rest of Europe, hence they have to swallow one or another “bitter pill,” make compromises and concessions, but ultimately always bring their national interests forward in the wake of the US military superpower and the EU. They see the decline of the nation when the democrats in power calculate their racism against foreigners in relative national terms, and consider the growth-oriented economic location policy, which for all ruling administrations in the normal conjunctures of capitalism is the royal road to increasing the wealth and size of the nation, as the submission of the state under the business of “rootless cosmopolitans."
5. And the results of the politics of postwar democracy speak for themselves. According to the imperialist standards by which Germany's leadership has now measured itself for 60 years, the former war loser has written a success story of an impressive kind:
– The national growth has catapulted Germany into the first rank of capitalist nations. It is the world's leading exporter and its currency, the DM, served as the basis of the euro, which is now the second world money.
– Politically, Germany has a say in the club of the powerful – G 7/8 – is trying with the weapon Europe to become more powerful against the USA, with products of national armaments manufacturers in all NATO wars up to the present.
– All revanchist aims of Germany have risen: with the annexation of the GDR, Germany has procured a complete state with a land and people of a new size; and hegemonic access to the Eastern European states, their resources and their strategic importance, is also not half bad.
– And with all this, the national people in the large majority are – unfortunately – completely with the whole thing and can be dissuaded neither by unemployment, welfare dismantlement, forced exploitation, real wage cuts and minimum wages, or by the destruction of the environment, radiating nuclear reactors, ruined food, expectations of pandemics and finally, not even by wars and crises, from their good opinion of Germany and its changing democratic leaders. The elections show that, in recent polls, “60% of all Germans are proud to be German” (FAZ, April 30, 2009). And finally, the German trade unions are not ashamed that Germany is the country with the lowest number of strike days per year in Europe.
6. The new fascists, who lead their love for the fatherland today as a party (NPD, DVU, Reps) against the democratic people's parties, are thus rather implausible in their prophecy of loss for German citizens, whose eyes are firmly on the successes of the nation. Quite in contrast to the Weimar era, when the Nazis could make points by referring to territorial losses, reparations obligations, expulsion from the League of Nations, a rebellious working class, “foreign social elements” and everything that mature nationalists in that time felt as irreparable shame. The imperialist successes of democratic capitalism are now the reason for the failure of the neo-fascists in their striving for power. The political persecution of the NPD, etc., which is unwanted as an unwelcome competitor out of tune with the democratic parties, does the rest, so that the neo-fascists in elections regularly have their problems with the 5% barrier – one of the “lessons of Weimar” for the wearing down of “extremists.” And only where modern fascists in their political program make alliances with the realism of the democratic people's parties – in this country this can be seen in the policy of the NPD in national parliament – they look for participation in power (see Italy, etc.). They thereby become eligible for election for bigger parts of the people: then no wonder, when they then are hardly distinguishable from the democratic competition, which makes its own political program progress.
Incidentally, post-war Germany has for a long time provided for cases of national emergencies when it no longer wants to manage democratically: the big people's parties have unanimously decided on the legal transition to fascist procedures for the state management of crises, civil and other wars, and have fixed these in their emergency acts and only recently have supplemented them with some nice laws against “terrorism, extremism and organized crime.” If they decide on a state of emergency of the nation, democrats themselves allow the transition to fascism, completely without a change of power.
* Left anti-fascists front themselves at the moment as auxiliary troops of the official democratic anti-fascism, ie as a janitorial staff of democracy that wants to clean this form of rule from brown stains. You should therefore not be surprised if at their Antifa demos they honor Prime Ministers and representatives of the people's parties. Fascism can not be fought as a useful idiot for democratic rule. One has to make the subject of protest the swamp from which it arises: nationalism in the leadership and the people. Who wants that has to be different, not as a narrow anti-fascist, who is famous for its national and moral duty, to warn against the possibility of a return of the “most barbaric form of bourgeois rule,” but as a critic of the really existing barbarism of capitalism and the power of really existing democratic rule.