some extent the theory is not only true, but not particularly new, surprising or
radical. It has always been the case that governments have relied on interest
groups for the information they needed to construct policy. In the United
Kingdom, for example, assistance from the National Farmers’ Union has long
been vital to the ministry responsible for agriculture in working out the yearly
agricultural subsidy plans. But in this case there are many who feel that the
power actually lies with the ministry, and the Union is forced to co-operate. A
better example might be the variousregulatory agenciesin the USA, such
as, for example, the Federal Communications Commission, or the Food and
Drug Administration, where interchange between staff in the regulated
industry and the agencies has tended to make the regulation organized more
around the interests of the regulated than some notion of the public interest.
The implication for those who use the idea as a criticism of modern political
systems is that the spirit of Italian fascism, where industry was directly
represented in a legislative chamber, is rising again, with the state becoming
no more than a servant to sectional industrial interests. The trend to deregulate
industry in North America and Western Europe has, to some extent, reduced
the applicability of the theory, as has the collapse of organized trade union
power in many countries, especially the UK.
Neo-Fascism
The increased popularity of far-right parties in a number of European
countries in the late 1990s and early 2000s has caused many observers to
contemplate a return to real political influence offascismon the continent.
One reason that it is very difficult to define ‘neo-fascism’ is thatfascismitself
never had much intellectual coherence or ideological core. Furthermore, some
of the policies that were originally central, notablyracismandanti-Semit-
ism, are now much harder to express legally than in the past, so much of the
common identity of current movements with those of the 1930s has to be
made oblique. However, there is a neo-fascist current in most European
countries, and it does focus on the traditional fascist values of racial purity,
national identity, social discipline,militarismandauthoritarianism.
The defeats ofHitlerandMussoliniduring the Second World War reduced
fascism to a negligible political force across most of Europe, and the death of
Francoin 1975 definitively removed it from power. However, by this time a
number of small fascist parties had emerged.
The only overtly neo-fascist party which was of real importance in the 1970s
and 1980s was the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI—which effectively
became the Alleanza Nationale in 1995, and dropped virtually all of its actual
fascist doctrine). Some parties in Germany, particularly Die Republikaner
(REP) are, in fact, neo-fascist, but local political culture prevents them from
Neo-Fascism