`What's the Big Idea?': Oswald Mosley, the British Union of Fascists and Generic Fascism

Abstract

This article examines the value of Roger Griffin’s concept of ‘palingenetic populist ultra-nationalism’ as a means of defining fascism as an international movement and ideology. Through an analysis of the development of both native and derivative influences on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF), it argues that Griffin’s ‘essentialist’ definition of generic fascism allows scholars to identify distinct common linkages between all interwar fascist movements, including German nazism. Simultaneously, it warns against the danger of relying too heavily on generic definitions to describe individual fascist movements. Operating in the shadow of the Italian and German regimes, the BUF struggled to convince a suspicious British public of the basic vernacular character of its own ideology. While imitating successful fascisms abroad was never an option for the Italians, Mosley could not resist the temptation of foreign ideas, symbols and resources. Such contradictions were further exposed on the eve of war in 1939. In addition, Mosley believed that the West’s rapid descent into permanent decadence could only be arrested by a ‘fascistized’ Europe based on a ‘Four Power Bloc’ of fascist nations — Britain, France, Germany and Italy — a vision not shared by all fascists. Recognition of a fascist willingness to co-operate against Bolshevism and the old ‘plutocracies’ does, however, seem to justify the characterization of fascism as an international movement. This vindicates the heuristic value of Griffin’s definition of fascism, despite the fundamental unviability of a fascist ‘International’.