A century ago, two movements rose out of military defeat, economic collapse and wounded national pride to dismantle Europe's democracies from within. The conditions that incubated them were not exotic aberrations — and some are visibly reassembling today.
The Crucible
Neither fascism nor Nazism can be understood without the First World War, which killed 16 to 20 million people and shattered faith in liberal capitalism, parliaments and progress. Robert Gerwarth's The Vanquished (2016) shows how paramilitary violence raged across Europe until 1923, normalizing armed politics — the "brutalization" that Robert O. Paxton, in The Anatomy of Fascism (2004), calls fascism's essential precondition. Karl Polanyi added the economic dimension in The Great Transformation (1944): when the liberal market failed to protect people, they became available to anyone promising protection — at the price of freedom.
Italy: The Laboratory
Fascism was born first in a country that had technically won. Italy emerged from Versailles with a "mutilated victory" and convulsed by the biennio rosso of 1919–20, when workers occupied factories and elites panicked at Bolshevism. Benito Mussolini — a former socialist turned hyper-nationalist — founded the Fasci di Combattimento in Milan in March 1919, fusing nationalism with Sorelian myths of violence and renewal, as Zeev Sternhell documented in The Birth of Fascist Ideology (1994).
What made fascism governable was not ideas but squads: Blackshirt violence, financed by landowners and industrialists to smash socialist unions, while the state looked away. The "March on Rome" of October 1922 was a bluff the army could have dispersed — instead King Victor Emmanuel III handed Mussolini the premiership. Paxton's lesson endures: fascism's first victory was delivered by a frightened establishment convinced it could use the movement and discard it. By 1926, after the murder of deputy Giacomo Matteotti, opposition parties were banned and the prototype dictatorship stood.
Germany: The Racial Core
Nazism grew from the same soil but a darker seed. Where Italian fascism exalted the state, Hitler's movement exalted the race — its genealogy running through völkisch nationalism, "scientific" racism and conspiratorial antisemitism, traced by George Mosse in The Crisis of German Ideology (1964). Defeat without invasion bred the "stab-in-the-back" myth: Germany had been betrayed, not beaten, by Jews, socialists and democrats.
The Nazi Party's trajectory proves Paxton's insight that fascism needs a systemic crisis to reach power. In May 1928 it polled 2.6 percent. The Great Depression — six million jobless by 1932, a third of the workforce — made it a mass movement: 18.3 percent in 1930, a peak of 37.3 percent in July 1932. Without the Depression, Richard J. Evans argues in The Coming of the Third Reich (2003), Hitler would have remained a footnote. On 30 January 1933, conservative elites around President Hindenburg appointed him Chancellor, convinced they had "hired" him. Within months the Reichstag Fire Decree and the Enabling Act dissolved democracy — legally. The endpoint, as Adam Tooze's The Wages of Destruction (2006) shows, was the regime's racial logic itself: war and the Holocaust.
Roger Griffin distilled the shared core as "palingenetic ultranationalism" — the myth of national rebirth from decadence — while Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) identified the deeper precondition: the loneliness of mass society, which made people trade reality for belonging.
Implications for Today
Historians debate the label. Federico Finchelstein (From Fascism to Populism in History, 2017) holds that today's far right attacks democracy through elections rather than abolishing them; Jason Stanley (How Fascism Works, 2018) counters that the tactics — mythic past, "us versus them," assaults on truth, universities and press — travel across eras regardless of name.
The data, however, is undisputed. The V-Dem Institute's Democracy Report 2026 finds global democracy back at 1978 levels: 74 percent of humanity — some six billion people — now lives under autocratic rule, and only 7 percent in liberal democracies . A record 44 countries are autocratizing, for the first time including established Western democracies such as the United States, the United Kingdom and, poignantly, Italy itself . Freedom House records the twentieth consecutive year of global decline, with media freedom and due process hit hardest .
The historical rhymes are audible: economic insecurity, collapsing trust in establishment parties, elites who believe they can ride the tiger, an algorithmic propaganda ecosystem dissolving shared reality, and the scapegoating of minorities. Levitsky and Ziblatt's How Democracies Die (2018) draws the lesson of 1933: democracies are rarely overthrown — they are legalized to death by institutions that fail to defend themselves. Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny (2017) is sharper still: "Do not obey in advance."
Yet fatalism is unwarranted. Unlike 1933, we possess the memory of the catastrophe, and welfare states cushion the shocks that destroyed Weimar. V-Dem itself counts eighteen democratizing countries, including Brazil and Poland . Fascism and Nazism were not bolts from a blue sky but latent possibilities activated by war, ruin, elite cowardice and poisoned public truth. Their warning is not that history repeats — it is that democracies die the same way twice: slowly, then suddenly, and always before witnesses who assumed someone else would stop it.
Geoffrey Hunt
Sources: Arendt (1951); Evans (2003); Finchelstein (2017); Freedom House, Freedom in the World 2026 ; Gerwarth (2016); Griffin (1991); Levitsky & Ziblatt (2018); Mosse (1964); Paxton (2004); Polanyi (1944); Snyder (2017); Stanley (2018); Sternhell (1994); Tooze (2006); V-Dem Institute, Democracy Report 2026, University of Gothenburg .