What Accounts for the Rise of Fascism?
The rise of fascism across Europe, Mann contended, was the outgrowth of an intertwining of two broad trends. The first concerns “the surge of rightist authoritarian movements across Europe in the interwar period. This was very general movement across one-half of Europe. Fascists appeared dominant in only a few of those cases,” and thus one has to explain “both the general rightist authoritarian surge and the particular appearance of fascism as dominant in a few countries.” Geography All the post-Russian empire states and Austro-Hungarian states in Central and East Europe fell to rightist coups in the interwar period. So too did the Southern European states of Italy and Portugal. The states of Sweden, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Britain, Ireland, and Switzerland, however, avoided this fate. A third group of states–France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and some others–constituted “mixed cases, cases where there was a long battle between authoritarian rightists and de
