Fighting against ‘Apology of Fascism’: Origins and Contradictions of the Italian Approach to Militant Democracy

Abstract

Although Italy was one of the first European countries to tolerate the existence of a fascist party, the democratic governments of its immediate postwar engaged in a genuine and important reflection on the means to counter the re-emergence of fascism. Thus Italy too, like its European counterparts, sought to conceive of itself as a militant democracy. This article aims to illuminate its efforts and its approach, and also to cast light on the evident limits and contradictions. Looking at the Italian case while observing how other European countries tackled the re-emergence of fascism in the same period will make clear the intrinsic difficulties of turning a democracy into a militant one only a short time after the fall of an authoritarian regime and in the aftermath of an inevitably problematic transition.