This section includes book notes of 150-300 words as well as some book reviews of 600-900 words on books of particular interest to the members of our group. If you have either suggestions for books you would like to review or see reviewed (including recent books of your own), please contact Nigel Copsey of the University of Teesside (UK).

Book Notes

Geoff Andrews, Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British Communism 1964-1991, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2004, 256 pp., GBP 15.99, ISBN 0-85315-991-2 (pbk).

Reviewed by Gidon Cohen (University of Durham, UK)

Endgames and New Times, the sixth and final volume in the ‘official’ history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, traces the last years of the CPGB from its attempted engagement with the popular culture of the 1960s to its disintegration in 1991. Although written by a (former) party member, there are few other similarities with the early volumes. Where these more or less reverentially discussed the high politics of the organisation focussing on the party line and top down politics from the centre, this work begins with the bottom up challenges to central authority posed by intellectuals, the Young Communist League, students and feminists. The explanation of eventual decline is couched primarily in ideological terms, focussing on divisions within the party. On one side the text outlines the importance of a militant labourist perspective, closely associated with the party’s continuing even, in the early 1970s, growing influence within the Trade Union movement. On the other, it details socialist humanist and Gramscian perspectives and their by no means straightforward relationship to Eurocommunist arguments.

The author’s Gramscian sympathies are evident in the deeper engagement with activists from this side, enhanced by extensive primary research. Perhaps more fundamentally the text is couched in terms which make this project most plausible. The problematic relationship of the party to the Soviet Union, and the residual but emphatic loyalty of so many party members to the regime are discussed, but the ‘Soviet mantra’ is consciously downplayed with the consequence that the text only briefly addresses the impact of this on our understanding of decline. Given this is the first detailed examination of the decline of British communism such issues are of perhaps minor significance. Eric Hobsbawm, reviewing James Klugmann’s first volume in the series in 1969 commented that it was primarily a textbook for ‘forgotten militants’ in ‘party schools’, but was of little value beyond. This, the last volume in the series is much different. Well-researched and engaging with a range of academic debates it will be of interest to scholars well beyond those primarily concerned with the details of British communist history. Perhaps more importantly it is well-written enough to be recommended to interested non-academics.

Stefan Breuer, Nationalismus und Faschismus: Frankreich, Italien und Deutschland im Vergleich, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005, 202pp., EUR 44.90, ISBN 3-534-17994-3.

Reviewed by Andreas Umland (National Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv, Ukraine)

Breuer’s study seems to be designed as a response to, or revision of, Ernst Nolte’s 1963 classic Three Faces of Fascism which also focused on France, Italy and Germany within approximately the same time period. Breuer’s book contains nothing less than a new interpretation of classic fascism introducing, apart from much empirical evidence and a comprehensive typology of the varieties of nationalism, a novel definition of fascism. As always in Breuer’s research, this study is an exceptionally dense and well-informed text full of revealing details, pertinent observations, and thought-provoking interpretations – a pleasure to read.

The study starts with in-depth discussion of the concept of nationalism and, on this basis, develops a comprehensive and informative typology of the different permutations of this ideology. This is by itself a valuable addition to the existing literature on nationalism in as far as Breuer’s distinctions between various types and sub-types of nationalism (liberal nationalism, left-wing nationalism, right-wing nationalism etc.) have much to contribute in terms of the various roles that nationalist ideologies played in different periods of recent world history. The larger part of the study contains well-structured narratives on the development and nature of fascism in pre-World War I and inter-war France, Italy and Germany. Breuer succeeds, by way of bringing together a large amount of primary and secondary sources, in providing excellent surveys of these movements.
While most of his study consists of useful observations and stimulating interpretations, its major idea – a new conceptualization of generic fascism – will presumably find few supporters. Such a contradiction reminds one of another classic of Breuer, The Anatomy of the Conservative Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993, 1995), which too makes excellent reading, but eventually did little to contribute to debunking the notion of a “conservative revolution,” as Breuer had clearly intended. Here, Breuer decides against seeing generic fascism as an ideology; he instead identifies the “fascist minimum” as the “combination of [Verbindung von] violence, charisma and patronage in the framework of one party” (p. 59). This is a formula that seems almost too eccentric to discuss at length. It raises more questions than it answers, and would immediately multiply the number of those parties that can labelled “fascist” within the context of both inter- and post-war history. What may be consoling to Breuer is merely that other idiosyncratic definitions of generic fascism have also found few, if any application in empirical research – the most prominent examples being perhaps Ernst Nolte’s “resistance to transcendence” or A. James Gregor’s “developmental dictatorship.”

Brian Jenkins (ed), France in the Era of Fascism. Essays on the French Authoritarian Right, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2005, 232pp., GBP 45.00, ISBN 1-57181-537-6 (hbk).

Reviewed by Jim Wolfreys (King’s College, London)

In a prickly exchange in the New York Review of Books following the publication of Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, Adrian Lyttelton detected in Zeev Sternhell’s defensiveness ‘the shrill tones of an orthodoxy under threat’ (NYRB, May 12 2005). While Lyttelton was at pains to stress the value of Sternhell’s contribution to the study of fascism, the limitations of a methodology which places disproportionate emphasis on ideology are becoming increasingly clear. Paxton’s analysis, underpinned by the argument that what fascists do is at least as important as what they say, offers a way out of the confining idealism which has held the study of fascism back over the past two decades. His book may well be seen in years to come as the point at which the tide of fascist studies turned. But Paxton’s is not a lone contribution to this process, as the collection of essays put together here by Brian Jenkins demonstrates.
The volume is made up of five chapters along with an introduction and a conclusion by the editor. Three of the essays, by Sternhell, Robert Soucy and Michel Dobry, deal with the longstanding debate over the existence or otherwise of fascism in France, with Soucy and Dobry sharing Paxton’s concern to emphasise the context of fascism’s emergence and its relationship to political rivals and potential allies, as opposed to any defining ‘essence’. Each author also provides their own interrogation of the methodological assumptions of Paxton’s analysis, while Paxton’s essay resumes the principal themes of his book. A fifth piece, by Kevin Passmore, is a lengthy examination of the inter-war crisis in France whose theoretical concerns are less with the debate over fascism than with the ‘stalemate society thesis’, held to be a key paradigm in shaping perceptions of social power among historians and political actors alike.
The book offers both a detailed examination of the social and political assumptions that prevailed among French elites in the 1930s and a lively engagement with the question of how to understand fascism. Does this mean it runs the risk of falling between two stools? There is perhaps a weary or apologetic note in the editor’s conclusion, which commends Passmore for moving away from the ‘increasingly stale debate’ over French fascism, and its ‘constant reformulation of entrenched positions’ (p.214). But this issue is not kept alive simply by the insatiable appetite of academics for arcane controversies. If the study of inter-war fascism has any genuine purpose it is surely to help us identify and understand modern variants of the phenomenon. In this sense the book provides a useful antidote to contemporary versions of the stalemate society thesis found in analyses which separate ‘national-populism’ from ‘generic’ inter-war fascism, identifying it as a familiar response to crisis in France and implicitly reviving the myth of France’s ‘allergy’ to fascism. The fluid analytical perspectives outlined here, in particular by Paxton and Dobry, present a nuanced counterpoint to the teleology of historical analyses shaped more by outcomes than the indeterminacy of messy reality. So while many of the concerns outlined take us back into a well-worn and sometimes sterile methodological debate, they also point us away from it, towards a world where alliances are forged not just through ideological affiliation but also by circumstance and expedience, and where the divisions between fascists and authoritarian conservatives, for example, are rather more blurred than they appear in analyses dominated by abstract definitions and the search for a ‘fascist minimum’.
 

Robert M. Press, Peaceful Resistance: Advancing Human Rights and Democratic Freedoms, Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006, 227pp., USD 99.95, ISBN: 0-7546-4713-7 (hbk).

Reviewed by Macharia Munene (United States International University, Kenya)

This book uses Kenya to advance an argument that individuals can force repressive regimes to change politically. Its focus is on the activities of selected Kenyan political activists that, for an assortment of reasons, were opposed to the regime of Daniel arap Moi who represented a negation of African aspirations at the time of independence in the 1960s. Press makes distinctions between resistance in the colonial days and resistance in post colonial days.

In the post-colonial days, individuals such as Wanyiri Kihoro tried to right a perceived wrong and started resistance to Moi’s repressive rule. The international media publicized torture in Kenya and the timing of the publicity, Press notes, was crucial. Individual actions broke Moi’s aura of invisibility as a result of informal networks of activists who met in ‘war rooms’ to strategise and develop new tactics that included using courts as political battlegrounds. Success by individuals attracted ‘professional’ activists who organized NGOs and political parties and were dependent on Western ‘donors’. Press observes that ‘donors’ were not always honest.

This book, although technical in its approach, is enlightening. Press notes the lasting influence of colonial repression policies on post-colonial governments, the role of individuals, the transformation of human rights activists into government policy makers, the value of informal networks to individuals, and the conducive climate that is necessary for change. His stress on the evolution of the culture of resistance based on the activities of genuine individuals, and the fact that domestic forces were more important than external pressures, gives credit where credit is due. It shows that individuals can make a difference and that ‘donors’ are not reliable.

The book, however, has a number of weaknesses. There are factual errors that could have been avoided. Substantive weakness is in the effort to down play international forces. Press virtually ignores the international changes that made it conducive for media to take interest in human rights issues in Kenya. Individuals who the media used to dismiss as ‘Marxists’ were transformed into human rights workers. A shift had occurred in the international political climate and since the Western media reflect Western interests, that shift accounts for the change in media attitudes. It would explain the proliferation of NGOs many of which, Press notes, became money makers. This contextualization is missing. But despite the short comings, this book is useful and brings back memories of peculiar experiences in Kenya. It is a book that should be read by those who are interested in the value of individual determination to change the course of events in a positive way. He should think of coming up with an updated edition.

David Renton, When We Touched the Sky: The Anti-Nazi League 1977-1981 Cheltenham, UK: New Clarion Press, 2006, 204pp., GBP 13.95, ISBN: 1-873797-48-6 (pbk); GBP 27.50, ISBN 1- 873797-49-4 (hbk).

Reviewed by Nigel Copsey (University of Teesside, UK)

The publication of David Renton’s study of the 1970s Anti-Nazi League (or, ANL for short) is the latest addition to the growing field of anti-fascism studies in Britain. This is the first book-length study of the ANL – a popular anti-fascist movement launched in response to the threat posed by the National Front, Britain’s premier far-right party of the 1970s. This is no dry academic tome. Renton’s narrative is accessible, lively and most engaging, drawing extensively from interviews with some eighty activists involved in the anti-fascist campaigns of that decade.

Renton deftly captures the popular mood of the 1970s with the rise of the National Front attributed to relative economic decline, the end of empire, a deradicalised Labour Party, and popular racism fuelled by the media, police and immigration controls. With the stage set, Renton then moves on to discuss the ANL, his central character. The result is a richly detailed and impressively researched account which covers the origins of the ANL, the connections the ANL forged between anti-racism, anti-fascism and youth culture, especially through Rock Against Racism, and two notorious episodes when anti-fascist mobilisations turned violent, at Lewisham in 1977 and at Southall in 1979.

However, as a former ANL activist, Renton finds it hard not to over-romanticise his subject. In his conclusion, for instance, he argues that by comparing late 1970s Britain with early 1980s France, we can appreciate the true significance of the ANL. According to Renton, the rise of Le Pen was made easy by the absence of militant anti-fascism, whereas in Britain, ‘the ANL gave the NF a defeat from which the successors have not yet recovered’ (p183). Yet the author’s comparison lacks rigour and if we take election to public office as our measure, Britain’s far right has surely more than recovered. In point of fact, militant anti-fascism forced contemporary neo-fascists into a strategic re-think during the 1990s. The British National Party now eschews large-scale marches and demonstrations and usually avoids confrontation with anti-fascists. This has helped normalise the party and in this sense, militant anti-fascism has, over the longer term, contributed (in part) to the growing normalisation of Britain’s far right.

Book Reviews

Ami Pedahzur, Suicide Terrorism, Oxford: Polity Press, 2005, 240pp., GBP 15.99, ISBN 0-7256-3383-8 (pbk).

Reviewed by Anne Speckhard (Free University of Brussels, Belgium)

“Suicide terrorism does not appear out of thin air,” writes Ami Pedahzur an associate professor at the University of Texas, Austin and a senior research fellow at the national Security Studies Center, University of Haifa, Israel. Pedahzur, an Israeli, has lived as the target of suicide bombers and suffered, like all his country men – the resultant losses of liberty, sense of well being and most grievous of all - the loss of loved ones that this type of terrorism claims.

What and why do human beings become human bombs and what drives them to die in order to kill is the essential question addressed by this author who takes us through the organizational ideology, decision making and political workings of groups as diverse as the Shia Hezbollah who are credited with the first modern day use of suicide bombing (although in fact this method was used by Vietnamese carrying bombs on bicycles to target the French prior to Hezbollah’s use), to the Marxist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eilam (LTTE) and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) and the Palestinian organizations (both Sunni and Marxist) arriving finally at the organization which has become today more of an ideology than an organization – Al Qaeda and its affiliates. Probing deeply into the forces that drive humans to strap on bombs or drive explosive laden vehicles to penetrate into targets heavily populated with civilians – men, women and children – in order not only to kill them but to die in the act of doing so, Pedahzur takes us through the numerous and complex interlay of explanations for human bombs – looking not only at the organizational dynamics that drive the choices to enact suicide terrorism but the social and psychological reasons that drive recruits to agree to become human bombs. Recognizing that motivations may differ from the organization to the individual and that terror sponsoring organizations can be adept at manipulating the vulnerabilities of their recruits, Pedahzur examines the psycho-social forces of revenge, trauma, hopelessness, group identification, economic incentives, and so forth. Constructing a model for understanding suicide terrorism, he looks carefully at the complex interplay between the group’s ideology, group processes and the vulnerabilities and needs of the individuals who become terrorists. He discusses as well the social contract existing between a terror organization and the society that supports and sympathizes with it, noting that “in most cases, organizations considering the options of suicide terrorism will seek the support of their constituency when adopting this tactic.”

Addressing the recent wave of attacks and foiled Al Qaeda affiliate attacks in Europe (as well as those directed at US bound airliners since this writing) Pedahzur notes that we are currently facing a new type of enemy without a clear strata of leadership and that in doing so we must begin to model these new networks. He proposes looking at the hubs in these social networks and paying particular attention to those who instigate attacks.

Examining the target society’s options in responding to suicide terrorism Pedahzur sagely differentiates between purely militaristic and offensive responses which include attempts to cripple terrorist organizations’ finances, terrorists’ ability to travel, communicate and carry out their activities; to the option of attempting to violently annihilate the terror groups; and arrest or assassinate their leaders - comparing these options to truly long-term defensive responses which include addressing on a social and political level the grievances which first brought about the decision to move to terrorism and suicide terrorism in particular as well as the ongoing grievances sustaining social support for terrorism. While this is a viewpoint that is often not heard among Israeli terrorism experts, it’s an important point and should be underlined. Likewise Pedazhur notes perhaps in direct opposition to current Israeli government policies, “The continuous killing of these leaders without trial cannot become an acceptable policy. Democratic countries cannot afford to lapse into this kind of response.” He also notes that in making use of the militaristic approach to fighting terrorism one may harm so many civilians within the supporting society that the solution simply generates an entire new group of grievances and individuals willing to enact suicide terrorism to express their fury, outrage, desire for revenge and group solidarity in the face of these new grievances. Indeed circumstances in Iraq may bear these words out as well.

Pedahzur recommends to the society which wishes to end suicide terrorism a long-term strategy that must not simply be reactive in a militaristic sense but also get to the root causes and begin to address them constructively. He also notes that it may be necessary to accept some level of terrorism, to accept that terrorism cannot be wiped out without furthering support for an ongoing cycle of violence and death.

Pedahzur also understands that terrorist groups may have arisen out of initial grievances but over time take on their own life and the leaders themselves may not want to negotiate their way out of existence, nor give up the power they gain by engaging in suicide terrorism in particular. Likewise he recognizes that initial causes change over time and when one set of grievances is addressed the terror group may shift for various reasons to directing attention to other grievances rather than simply lay down arms. While an obvious believer in getting to root causes and addressing social grievances, Pedahzur recommends attempts to direct and engage terrorists social supporters back into the failed political process as worthwhile and adds that it is better to find and support moderate community leaders rather than imbuing terrorist leaders themselves with negotiating power when addressing root causes. While his point is well taken it may or may not be possible to succeed in getting terrorists to lay down arms without also pulling at least some terrorist group leaders into the political processes and engaging them as real partners.

An appendix of suicide bombings from December 1981 up to June 2005 is included in the book along with a carefully documented notes section to each chapter. A sound read and comprehensive analysis of a complex topic. One can only hope that much of his advice is put to work and we can learn what might succeed in diminishing the utilization of this new form of terror. I highly recommend it.