Marco Bresciani is a researcher on anti-fascism and the author of the book Learning from the Enemy (2024), which examines the history of the Italian anti-fascist organization founded by Carlo Rosselli, a “socialist heretic” and the coiner of the term “liberal socialism” Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom, Hereafter GL). GL brought together a broad spectrum of republican figures—from liberal revolutionaries to Christian Democrats, conservatives, anarchists, and socialists—who were prepared to oppose fascism, including through violence and armed resistance, both in Italy and, with the outbreak of the civil war, in Spain. The group developed a number of innovative approaches and was known for its criticism of orthodox Marxism, its emphasis on voluntarism (action), and a program that combined various elements of anarchism, liberalism, and socialism. However, its main innovation was its way of understanding fascism—its causes and the problems it raises. “Learning from the enemy” became the organization’s guiding principle. The organization called for embracing the problems that fascism addressed, while rejecting fascist solutions.
Learning from the Enemy
Understanding Fascism’s Appeal
1. Tell the readers what your recent book Learning from the Enemy is about. Why is that discussion important today?
This book grew out of research that I have been conducting for over two decades on antifascism and antitotalitarianism, socialism and liberalism in interwar Europe. My starting point were the post-1989 debates on the meanings and implications of the ending twentieth century, with special attention to the critical role that political cultures and ideas had played within it. Of course, the sense of an ending didn’t necessarily mean to believe in the “end of History,” as understood and boosted by the American philosopher Francis Fukuyama. Quite the contrary, it meant to try to put the ongoing legacies of the twentieth century in historical perspective.
I subsequently focused on the problem of the relationship between antifascism and Soviet communism, and devoted particular attention to the experience of Italian antifascists in exile in France and to their connection with, and interest in, the European culture of the 1930s. I first researched the fascinating trajectory of Russian-born Andrea Caffi (1887-1955), who took part in the Russian revolutionary movement and in the Great War, sympathised and then criticised Lenin’s and Stalin experiment, and finally went to exile in Paris as an opponent of Mussolini’s regime. Although quite unknown so far, his political writings are still exceptionally insightful.
Then the revolutionary antifascist group Giustizia e Libertà (Justice and Freedom), founded in Paris in 1929 by the Florentine economist Carlo Rosselli, became the focus of my work. What is interesting is that this group aimed not only to fight Fascism in Italy through revolutionary conspiracy, but also to radically renew Europe’s political, social, and economic order. It brought together militants from different generations, all of them intellectuals of a high calibre. They were critical of the Communists and the Soviet Union and sought to combine socialism and liberalism in a path-breaking synthesis that would reshape Italian and European society along federal lines. Perhaps even more interestingly, this ideological perspective arose from an intensely critical engagement with their own age, reshaped by the Great War and the Russian Revolutions, and above all by the rise and spread of fascism.
As my focus broadened from the history of Giustizia e Libertà to the political networks and cultures of the 1930s, the context shaped by the collapse of Western globalization in 2008 and its destabilizing geopolitical consequences prompted new questions in my research. At this point I realised that the most original feature of the group of Giustizia e Libertà—its true distinguishing trait—lay in this strategy of “learning from the enemy.” It is an approach worth recovering today as well, in the context of debates about illiberal populisms and authoritarian nationalisms which, in the wake of the Western financial and economic crisis of 2008 and Russia’s assault on Ukraine since 2014, have questioned the “liberal” understanding of the legacies of 1989.
2. The victory of 1945 casts a teleological shadow over the interwar years, making antifascism appear more coherent and inevitable than it was. If we set aside that retrospective narrative, when and how did Fascism actually become “the enemy”? Which attractions and ambiguities disappeared from postwar memory of antifascism?
The Second World War was an exceptionally complex event, emerging from interconnected processes on both European and global scales and following a course whose outcome was by no means predetermined. Its memory was inevitably shaped by simplification, repression, and forgetting. In the first decades after 1945, public memory of the war was generally constructed around a dichotomy between fascism and antifascism—a dualistic representation of a struggle between the forces of Good and Evil that sustained the heroic myth of national resistance movements against the Axis powers. On this basis, public memory tended—and still tends—to treat the antifascist and democratic outcome of the war as inevitable.
Before 1941, however, geopolitical and ideological relations among the different forces in the field were anything but clearly defined and stable. The nineteenth-century traditions of liberalism, the ideas of representative democracy and the rule of law seemed on the verge to completely disappear in the context dominated by the Hitler’s New Europe Order. Of course, for some opposition networks, such as Giustizia e Libertà, whether in exile or operating under dictatorship, the need to understand and fight fascism as “the enemy” was self-evident and logically consistent. Accordingly, there were some uncompromising examples of heroic opposition to death against fascism: the founder and leader of Giustizia e Libertà, Carlo Rosselli born in Rome in 1899 and killed by a French terrorist pro-fascist group in Normandie in 1937, is one of them; Leone Ginzburg, born in Odesa under the Tsarist Empire in 1909, and killed in a fascist prison of Rome in 1944, is another one.
Liberals, democrats, and socialists, however, adopted shifting and sometimes contradictory attitudes toward one another, as well as toward Fascists and Nazis. They hardly represented a credible and coherent alternative at a time of economic crisis and geopolitical conflict, while Communists competed with fascists to establish an entirely new, albeit in some respects comparable, order. At the same time, the liberal-democratic governments of France, Britain, and the United States, Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union maintained diplomatic relations that were often ambiguous and, in any event, shifting over time. Examples included the Western governments’ appeasement of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s regimes, epitomised by the Munich Agreement of September 1938, as well as the outright partition of Eastern Europe agreed upon by Stalin and Hitler in the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.
In short, the relations and oppositions between ideological forces, political parties and geopolitical powers were far more ambivalent—and the boundaries separating them far more porous—than people were led to believe after 1945, following the victory of the Grand Alliance and, above all, that of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. This was particularly true of the role played by Soviet communism within the antifascist camp. After 1945, efforts were made to construct a public memory and a historical narrative that glorified the wars of national liberation against fascism. As a result, the connections and convergences between forces that came to be regarded in the postwar period as belonging to the opposing camps of “fascism” and “antifascism” were downplayed, if not entirely concealed—as were those that developed within each of the two camps.
3. Emilio Lussu briefly considered a merger between the Sardinian Action Party and the Fascist Party before becoming a committed antifascist, while other future opponents were also slow to grasp Fascism’s novel threat. What do these crossings tell us about the initially unstable border between Fascism and antifascism?
To understand these difficult and tortuous paths between fascism and antifascism, we must imaginatively return to the world that had just emerged from the Great War—or, more precisely, to a world struggling to leave the state of war behind, only to plunge back into it almost immediately through a new sequence of civil wars, class conflict, and political violence. Many future members of GL—including not only Lussu but also Ernesto Rossi, Silvio Trentin, and Nicola Chiaromonte—lived through this virtually uninterrupted experience of war and violence, which fuelled radical expectations of political and social renewal. For a very short period during the post-war crisis, the early Fasci di combattimento appealed to them, as they did to many other war veterans. Yet they soon realised that the “Fascist revolution” was not the kind of revolution for which they were striving.
More generally, it is possible to say that by 1919, a broad spectrum of currents and orientations was seeking to meet those expectations, opening up a competition that contributed to radicalisation. In some respects, the Fascists could appear more consistent than the Socialists and, later, the Communists—at least outside the former Russian Empire and the former Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary. They were prepared to use violence to reshape the world, and in this mental disposition, even before it became a coherent ideology, quite a few workers and peasants, as well as many youngsters especially students, could find something fascinating. It was only after Mussolini’s seizure of power in October 1922 and the ensuing gradual construction of the dictatorship that the relationship between fascism and the admittedly heterogeneous front of its enemies began to become clearer.
Antifascism, however, continued—at least until the Popular Front period (1934–1938)—to be riven by divisions over how fascism should be opposed and over the future prospects of European society. This, of course, by no means denies that a genuine aversion to fascism existed within the workers’ and peasants’ movement—an antifascism rooted in a long-standing popular sense of justice. This sentiment undoubtedly helped sustain the antifascist currents that emerged during the Popular Front period and within the national resistance movements of the Second World War.
4. What was appealing in early Fascism, and what did Fascism get “right” that the Socialist Party and other democratic forces got “wrong,” allowing the former to take power and the latter to be destroyed?
Early Fascism was able to draw together the most heterogeneous fragments of social and national radicalism—from imperialist nationalism and veterans’ activism to revolutionary socialism—and recombine them into an incandescent core of organised, violent activism. Within it, Mussolini’s charismatic personality and his ability to combine tactical flexibility with ideological intransigence played a decisive role. As I mentioned earlier, fascism succeeded in capitalising on its original radicalism—the sense of disorienting novelty accompanied by the brutal exercise of political violence—to mobilise growing segments of society and broaden its support.
Nevertheless, it must be remembered that neither Mussolini nor, later, Hitler would ever have reached the pinnacle of power without the open solidarity and complicity of conservative—and at times liberal—elites; without the support of important sections of the state apparatus, including judges, generals, and senior law-enforcement officials, who sympathised with their demands for order and were prepared to abandon the rule of law in the name of a supposed “anti-Bolshevism.”
5. Why was the Left unable to recognise Fascism’s popular roots among workers and peasants as well as its elite support? What strategic mistakes in countering Fascism arose from this failure?
This is a complex question that points to the problem of understanding Italian Fascism in general and, in particular, to the way it was understood by left-wing cultures, both socialist and communist. The schema of class war that permeated Marxist cultures certainly did not help them bring Italian Fascism’s radical novelty and its specific forms of struggle and rule into focus. Those who subscribed to this schema, imagining a more or less imminent socialist or communist revolution, regarded fascism as a relic of reaction, an archaic remnant of the old bourgeois order or a violent but belated resurgence of it.
Yet fascism could not be reduced to an advanced stage of bourgeois capitalism. It was instead the product of a particular context forged by war. It had therefore developed an autonomous political and ideological identity, which enabled it to seize power and wield it in increasingly totalitarian forms. Socialists and Communists often underestimated or even ignored its capacity for mass mobilisation. This was compounded by a further analytical difficulty within left-wing cultures, especially pro-Soviet ones: their failure to recognise the traits fascism shared with other one-party totalitarian systems. Instead, they emphasised the distinction between progressive and reactionary dictatorships. In this sense, the rejection of antitotalitarianism was inherent to the Communist version of antifascism.
6. Vittorio Foa’s “anti-moralism,” described in the book, meant accepting that Fascism had identified real questions while rejecting its answers. Why was even admitting that the enemy had posed a valid question so scandalous? Did that type of “anti-moralism” make antifascism more intellectually honest and politically effective, or did it risk blurring the moral boundary between understanding Fascism and accommodating it (as in the cases of Hendrik de Man and Marcel Déat, who in many respects followed the same idea but ended up collaborating with the National Socialists)?
Vittorio Foa, a leading Turin figure in Giustizia e Libertà and a close friend of Leone Ginzburg, certainly embodied a way of articulating moralism and anti-moralism that, in different forms, characterised the whole group. He emphasised his anti-moralism in a dialogue with the well-known historian Carlo Ginzburg, Leone Ginzburg’s son. It was precisely in this context that the reflection on “learning from the enemy,” which formed the basis of my book, emerged.
This strategy seeks to formulate a vision of politics by recognising the novel features that define it, however brutal or repellent they may be. These novelties demand a twofold attitude: on the one hand, acknowledging that they constitute an answer—however unacceptable—to the problems of the present; on the other, seeking alternative solutions designed to address those same problems. Put differently, the strategy of “learning from the enemy” rules out identifying fascism as mere irrationality and violence, outdated reaction that represent an old order doom to die. Instead, it entails admitting that fascism may be an unacceptable answer to legitimate questions belonging to the present. Recognising the enemy as such should prevent or preclude any slide toward positions that accept not only the enemy’s questions but also its answers—as happened with de Man and Déat. It is a strategy that presupposes an ethical conception of politics.
In the late 1930s, de Man and Déat, both deeply affected by their experience at the front during the First World War, embraced a pacifism that ultimately led them to pro-Nazi collaborationism. Foa, by contrast, remained consistently critical of abstract and ideological pacifism, which he regarded as incompatible with uncompromising antifascism. This position took shape during the 1930s and resurfaced in his thinking in the 1990s, beginning with the Gulf War of 1990-1991 and continuing through the Yugoslav wars of 1991-1999. A willingness to fight—in extreme circumstances, by force of arms—against the enemies of freedom and justice, both national and international, was inseparable from his determination to devise instruments of political and social renewal.
7. If you had to name the things GL learned correctly from the enemy, what would they be? And, conversely, how might we assess its “wrong” lessons and mistakes?
In the briefest terms, one could say that Giustizia e Libertà—unlike most other political parties—understood that fascism was an irreversible product of the Great War, and that the element of dynamic, radical modernity it had imposed on Italian and European society ruled out any return to the time before fascism. In short, GL understood that Fascism represented a new normality in post-1914 Europe, as well as the starting point for any political alternative, which would have to be not merely antifascist but also post-fascist.
This is not to suggest that the GL experience offers a perfect example of uncompromising politics: throughout the 1930s, as the fascist challenge rose and became more radical, there was no shortage of contradictions, and internal divisions that dramatically tore Rosselli’s group out. Andrea Caffi in particular pointed to these contradictions and addressed moral and historical questions to Carlo Rosselli’s political revolutionary stance.
I cannot go too much into detail here. However, I can call attention to a couple of aspects of the vibrant debate within the group. GL certainly tried to wrest away from fascism the national-patriotic tradition that it had sought to appropriate. At the same time, it learned to operate on the European terrain on which fascism had established itself after 1933, with the rise of Nazism in Germany, opposing fascist ideas of Europe with its own antifascist ideas of Europe. Furthermore, through its intense critical engagement with fascism, GL understood that it needed to develop a perspective that was both political and social, capable of drawing the middle classes away from the temptation of a fascist solution and orienting them toward a non-Marxist, liberal-socialist alternative.
Accepting the Questions, Refusing the Answers
8. Which questions raised by today’s far-right populists does the democratic Left ignore at its peril? Where is the underlying grievance real, and what would it mean to accept the problems while explicitly refusing the authoritarian, racist, conspiratorial, or exclusionary answers?
This is an extremely difficult question, and needless to say I do not have a precise or fully convincing answer. To begin with, one could say that the strategy of “learning from the enemy” entails not so much a set of specific contents as a disposition toward understanding and openness to the phenomena of contemporary politics and society. More clearly or concretely, the strategy of “learning from the enemy” can be translated into a Brechtian maxim, as reported in a conversation with Walter Benjamin: “Don’t start from the good old things, but the bad new ones.”
At the turn of the millennium, the democratic Left certainly ended up being dazzled by the potential and opportunities of globalisation, neglecting an increasing accumulation of tensions and distortions that ultimately tore apart its integrative dynamic. On the other hand, this does not necessarily mean that the globalising drive has ended, but the Western-led configuration of global relations has unquestionably entered a convulsive phase of transition. The future is terra incognita, but it is not unreasonable to predict that—as has already been the case for several years—it will be marked by conflicts over the renegotiation of relations among different regions and over control of resources.
At a more regional level, I would add that Europe’s democratic or reform-minded Left undoubtedly missed the opportunity, during the ascendant phase of recent globalisation, to supplement the European project with a genuine political dimension, beginning with a common foreign and military policy. The European Union remains extraordinarily attractive to those outside it, yet lacks the instruments needed to preserve this attractive model over time and to present itself as a credible interlocutor of the major global powers. As a project intended to preserve peace and stability, Europe inevitably struggles, and always risks fading away, in a conflict-ridden and unstable international environment.
One must also add, however, that the Russo-Ukrainian war has revealed an unexpected resilience among pro-European forces, which have understood that Putin’s “special military operation” is directed against them as well. At the same time, however, pressure from forces critical of, or openly hostile to, the democratic European project remains constant, even though its results fluctuate. In a global geopolitical context as chaotic and volatile as this—fuelled not only by the Russo-Ukrainian war but also by the conflict in the Middle East and of tensions all over the world—anything is truly possible, and terribly unpredictable.
9. Your account emphasises Fascism’s appeal to action, risk, sacrifice, camaraderie, and revolt as felt by that generation. How can democratic movements offer young people an equally powerful sense of agency and belonging? Should the Left speak about the nation, virtues, patriotism, and sacrifice?
Much of the struggle between fascists and antifascists took place on terrain forged by the Great War and its enduring brutal and violent legacies. Their relationships to that experience, however, were asymmetrical. By appropriating the nationalist tradition, the Fascists sought to become the interpreters or apologists of the war’s legacy, defending the sacrifice of soldiers at the front and arguing the case for symbolic and territorial compensation. The Socialist International, by contrast, had wrapped itself in the slogans of pacifism and internationalism, but from 1914 onward the individual socialist parties took part in the wartime effort and often embraced nationalism. However, the Russian revolutionary myth, whether in its Bolshevik variant or otherwise, acted as a catalyst for socialist protest against the war. Thus, after the end of the conflict—which, through its legacies of violence, civil wars, and regional crises, effectively extended into the early 1920s—socialists, even when anti-Bolshevik, continued to be regarded as potential traitors to the nation because of their commitment to international working-class solidarity. This is a complex history that can only be briefly sketched here. It was only in response to the challenge of fascism, which had succeeded in appropriating patriotic traditions, that various socialist movements, and later at least some communist ones, sought to reclaim national and patriotic symbols and languages.
As for the present, I have no ready-made or firm answers. Faced with traumatic and devastating events such as the invasion of a country, the only alternatives are often flight, surrender, or resistance. I believe that the Left must defend the individual right to choose freely even in the face of such existential challenges. At the same time, I believe the Left can also embrace the struggle for a just war insofar as it is defensive, without renouncing a free internal debate. Nationalism may offer an immediate, necessary answer, but it remains an unresolved problem in the long term, ridden with potential conflicts.
In this regard a more general reflection is needed. I think that nationalism is a complex set of political languages, practices, imageries. It can combine with different even opposite projects such as democratic or authoritarian, liberal or socialist, even communist, and of course fascist. In this regard the difference between “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism works on paper, but in fact it is more blurred, even contradictory, and however context-sensitive than it is usually supposed. Wars tend to trigger cycles of radicalisation, fuels political polarisation, and exacerbates social distress and economic hierarchies.
As in the Ukrainian case, state- and nation-building, democracy-building and European integration can be combined, but especially in wartime things become more chaotic and ambiguous. These are all dramatic alternatives with which the Ukrainian Left has had to contend since the Russian full-scale invasion of 2022. I perfectly see that these considerations might sound too abstract, even out-of-focus, if read in Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa in these tragic years, but still, I think that a critical discussion on Ukrainian “civic” and “ethnic” nationalism in the past and present might be critically important for the future of Ukrainian democracy.
Methods, Movements, and Democratic Limits
10. You have cautioned against lazy analogies between the contemporary far right and that of the 1930s. What criteria should distinguish today’s different far-right currents—authoritarians, populists, conservatives, the alt-right, neo-Nazis, Eurasianists, and others—from the far right of the past? Perhaps we need a new language that would free us from constant comparisons that lead to mistaken analysis?
First of all, it is important to emphasize that memories and narratives of WWII, based on antifascism, served different political purposes in Western and Eastern Europe: in the West, they contributed to the establishment of new constitutional democracies, whereas in the East they legitimized the emergence of Soviet-style “people’s democracies.” However, in more open societies like those of Western Europe, different memories and narratives continued to compete, and anticommunism played a critical role in the Cold War polarization.
Then, in the 1980s and 1990s, a broader process of critical reassessment began. This process accelerated after the collapse of Soviet communism, although it was too often accompanied by a wholesale questioning of antifascism itself. The recent erosion of the antifascist foundations of Western constitutional democracies has coincided with the rise of populist and nationalist movements and governments, which have intersected with—and appropriated—various legacies of Cold War and post-Cold War anticommunism. Ironically, in Italy the centenary of the March on Rome in 2022 coincided with the formation of a right-wing government that included political forces notably indulgent toward the country’s fascist past. More generally, these populist and nationalist developments involve East and West of Europe, although they have hitherto taken a more direct illiberal, authoritarian turn especially in Central and South-Eastern regions.
However, I believe that the mechanical application of categories from the 1930s to our contemporary age does not work and cannot help us better understand the specific political problems of the present. Analogy with the past is a shortcut that prevents us from grasping the historical differences between distinct phenomena. In this sense, fascism is a phenomenon profoundly bound up with Europe as it emerged from the Great War and with its legacies of violence. Born out of war, it led to another, still more catastrophic war, and it is primarily within this context that fascism must be situated.
There are, however, at least two points I would like to raise here.
The first concerns fascism’s possible futures. Fascism made headway through its ability to surprise, to strike through organisation and violence, and at the same time to seduce through rhetoric or myth. It was its radical novelty that prevailed. We therefore cannot imagine it today as a simply new version of the dictatorial regimes that convulsed Europe after the Great War and the Great Depression and led the continent to the catastrophe of the Second World War. If anything similar were ever to reappear, it would be in many respects completely different. Of course, fascist ideas and legacies still matter, and somewhat increasingly matter. However, the analogy misses the specificities of the historical phenomena, and the historians should especially focus on those specificities. Why, then, use the same name?
This genuinely open question brings us to the second point. Invoking a historical analogy can be useful in warning against the danger of a “new fascism.” Yet such a warning makes sense and can be effective only where a solid antifascist consensus—such as that constructed in Western European democracies after 1945—still exists. Is this still the case? I doubt it. The risk is that antifascism itself may be reduced to a rhetorical device and regarded as an instrument through which the existing system and its elites defend themselves. If so, continuous recourse to antifascist rhetoric might paradoxically fuel the mobilization of populist, anti-establishment movements of the far right. This is a troubling development, but one that cannot be ignored, let alone addressed through comforting uses of the past.
11. GL failed to become a mass force, and the Partito d’Azione dissolved after a devastating electoral defeat. Yet the movement’s ideas had an enormous influence. How should political success be measured: by elections and organisational survival, or by the ability to change institutions and the vocabulary of later generations? In that regard, how successful and influential was GL’s political legacy?
Exactly. The electoral debacle that led in 1947 to the dissolution of the Action Party—the heir to Giustizia e Libertà—after the fall of the Fascist regime and the end of the war was followed by a long phase of moral and intellectual re-elaboration. Some of the party’s leading figures became highly prominent intellectuals in the new Italian Republic and with their academic and public activities helped legitimising the new republican democracy. Franco Venturi, Norberto Bobbio, Nicola Chiaromonte, and Carlo Levi sought in different ways to rethink the legacies of GL and the Action Party, to bring antifascism and antitotalitarianism together, and to build democratic institutions capable of renewing themselves over time. Of course, these legacies were far from being homogeneous. In the late 1940s and early 1950s there some ambiguous attitudes in their judgement of the Soviet experiment and in the attitude towards the Italian communists, still embedded within the heroic memory of the battle of Stalingrad. Then, from the late 1950s onwards some of ex-GL militant intellectuals contributed to a deep criticism of Soviet communism and circulating in Italy the international debate on totalitarianism.
The memories of the Giustizia e Libertà “martyrs” in the antifascist fight became part of the public memory of the Italian Republic, and provided the new democratic order with a fascinating heroic model of antifascism. As a result, selective “revolutionary” memories of GL and Pd’A were particularly relevant in the collective movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when they aimed to “finish the work of the Resistance”. Some of the older representative of GL and Pd’A (Venturi, Bobbio, Chiaromonte) were quite sceptical toward this appropriation, but this testifies of their persistent vibrant legacy. This experience as a whole offers a remarkable example of the importance of ideas and their circulation in public debate—a lesson that deserves to be reconsidered in the age of social media and instantaneous digital communication.
European Postwar and the Divides between East and West
Tony Judt and the Geography of Postwar
1. Twenty years after Postwar, you asked what remains living and dead in Tony Judt’s synthesis, especially in its treatment of French intellectuals and the transformation of Europe’s multinational territories. If Postwar were written after Russia’s full-scale invasion, what emphases, priorities, and problems would, in your opinion, be central?
This is an excellent and open-ended question. The premature death in 2010 of such a learned and perceptive interpreter of Europe’s twentieth century as Judt was a great loss for liberal-democratic and social-democratic public opinion. We can certainly try to guess some of the possible directions his thinking might have taken.
Broadly speaking, one could argue that the main lines of Postwar – published in 2005 – have not undergone fundamental alteration in the twenty years since its publication: the growing divergence between the two shores of the Atlantic, and thus a more autonomous continental history of Europe, but one that is also more uncertain, at the mercy of ungovernable global forces except through the European Union’s institutional instruments. At the same time, he presciently saw the problems with a Western public memory that since the late 1980s onwards had too much focused on the Shoah, the extermination of the European Jews. It was a necessary backlash of the previous silence and oblivion on this uniquely central catastrophe of the twentieth century, but an overemphasis on memory based on victimhood might have high political toll. And in many respects, as the current war in Gaza and the Middle East shows, he was right indeed.
Of course, when Judt was writing, he was animated by an optimism grounded in the conviction that globalisation was fundamentally progressive and that effective instruments were available to correct its distortions, tensions, contradictions, and possible excesses. Today, that conviction has all but vanished, and the horizon appears far more uncertain.
In his post-1989 vision of the history of Eastern and Western Europe, the two are well integrated, and the histories of the former continental empires’ territories—from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Sea—feature prominently in the pages of Postwar. From the 1990s onward, Judt was aware of the tensions and frictions, actually or potentially lethal, simmering in the post-Soviet world as well as the post-Yugoslav one. In a New York Times op-ed published in December 2004, at the height of the Orange Revolution and on the eve of the publication of his book, Judt explicitly evoked Ukraine as a battleground between different worlds and clearly denounced the temptation to wrench it away from its European destiny and anchor it firmly within a Russian-dominated post-Soviet world. Since then, the fault line that already periodically strained relations between Europe and post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s and the very early 2000s has deepened to such an extent that it has precipitated the largest armed conflict in Europe since 1945. Judt could not have foreseen all this: it was a possible development, but by no means an inevitable one.
An underlying thread running through the entire volume concerns the symbolic, emotional, cultural, and ideological legacy of the Second World War and the public memory constructed around the opposition between Fascism and antifascism. According to Judt, after 1945 Europe lived in various ways under the war’s very long shadow, thereby creating the conditions for a more or less stable and relative peace—although one cannot forget the wars and violence that shook the former Yugoslav space in the 1990s, as well as certain post-Soviet regions. Has this period ended? Has the “postwar” as Judt understood it come to an end? Several answers to these complex questions are possible. It is not unreasonable to suggest that it ended on a precise date: 24 February 2022, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Yet this ending is ambiguous. It inaugurated a new, protracted phase of war, but did so by invoking a slogan—“denazification”—that refers once again to the Second World War and its contested, divisive legacies.
2. In comparing Eric Hobsbawm and Judt after the 2008 crisis, you contrast Hobsbawm’s Marxist determinism and enduring attachment to the Russian Revolution with Judt’s moralistic social democracy, shaped by East-Central European dissidents. Does that contrast help explain the views of parts of the Western Left on Ukraine?
I do not know, and cannot say, what Hobsbawm would have said or even thought about the current Russo-Ukrainian conflict. However, I can point to certain aspects of Hobsbawm’s later intellectual trajectory that may offer some guidance. First, from the late 1980s onward, he became convinced that nationalism had become a residual historical phenomenon destined to disappear—a conviction that prevented him from fully grasping the causes of the Yugoslav wars. At the same time, he came to believe that, with the disappearance of the Soviet Union, history had been left at the mercy of capitalist chaos, reinforcing his enduring allegiance to the ideals of the Russian Revolution. Compared to Hobsbawm, Judt had undoubtedly much more attention to the historical experiences of Central and Eastern Europe and a more critical judgement of the Soviet communist project and its legacy. And, differently from Postwar, it is difficult to find in The Age of Extremes (1994) the conceptual tools needed to understand the historical roots of the Russo-Ukrainian War.
However, I believe that other factors help explain the position adopted by much of the European and global radical Left toward the current war—first and foremost, its deeply critical stance toward the “West”, and especially the “neoliberal” globalisation. Moreover, rather than the Russian revolutionary tradition itself, it is the legacy of the Second World War—and, more specifically, certain understandings and practices of antifascism organically bound up with the Stalinist experience—that accounts for its failure to recognize the tyrannical nature of Vladimir Putin’s regime and its imperial ambitions. Many currents of the radical Left remain steeped in an interpretation of the “Great Patriotic War” of 1941–1945 forged under Stalin and subsequently appropriated by Putin. Accordingly, they have failed to come to terms with the significance and consequences of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and the two years of cooperation between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that followed (1939–1941). Within this worldview, antifascism and anti-imperialism are regarded as perfectly coterminous, allowing the front lines in the Donbas to be imagined as the site of a struggle against the capitalist and imperialist “West.”
Russia–Ukraine and Europe’s Identity
3. The Kremlin justifies aggression by denying Ukraine’s historical agency and appropriating the language of antifascism through “denazification.” How can we deal with a reality in which the founding language of postwar Europe becomes an instrument for justifying imperial war?
This is an important question, one that points toward a possible research project that remains entirely to be undertaken. I believe that the global history of antifascism, starting from the interwar period, has yet to be written. Anyone attempting it would have to engage with the noble ideas and heroic examples of antifascists who fought fascism and were quite often killed by it. The Rosselli brothers and Leone Ginzburg have been already mentioned, but many other antifascist intellectuals like Marc Bloch or ordinary rank-and-file antifascists should be mentioned. Additionally, one should consider the mass experiences against the Right, whatever was understood as “fascism” in the context of the 1920s and 1930s, including popular mobilisation for social progress, political unification of the Left, for the emancipation of the colonies. And one should explore the extraordinary richness of the political, sociological, philosophical, and legal cultures inspired directly or indirectly by the imperatives of the struggle against fascism and Nazism and by the comparison with other totalitarian experiments like the Stalinist one. Such a history, however, would also have to confront the grey areas, contradictions, political and moral dilemmas, and choices in favour of violence that characterised certain currents of antifascism. In particular, Soviet communism in its Stalinist variant combined an appeal to the masses to fight fascism with the use of mass terror to eliminate its enemies, not only within the antifascist camp but also within the communist movement itself. For precisely this reason, the mass crimes of the Stalinist regime were long silenced, downplayed, or justified in the name of the supposedly higher cause of antifascism, if not of communism itself.
This history certainly did not end in 1945 and involved not only Europe but the world at large, including Europe’s colonial empires. Paradoxically, antifascism—relatively marginal at least until 1933 and only intermittently influential thereafter—acquired greater prominence, scale, and global reach precisely through and after the defeat of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes. As it expanded, it displayed extraordinary plasticity and an ability to adapt to very different enemies, each of which could in turn be identified as “fascist.” In this long and complex history, which I can evoke here only in greatly simplified terms, post-1945 antifascism—understood as a heterogeneous constellation of political cultures, representations, and memories—helped fuel movements for emancipation and struggles against oppression, and at the same time it contributed to legitimizing some dictatorial systems.
Within this post-1945 constellation, the Soviet Communist tradition played a central role. Communist antifascism capitalized on memories and narratives of the Second World War, maintained an ambivalent relationship with “democracy,” and ambiguously intertwined with anti-imperialism and anticapitalism at the age of decolonisation. Particularly across the former Soviet lands, the post-1991 legacies of Soviet antifascism remain largely unexplored. In certain respects, Putin’s justification of the “special military operation” in terms of the “denazification” of Ukraine belongs to this “antifascist” vocabulary and its ambiguous contemporary mutations. This is just a part of the ideological mindset of Putin’s Russia and of his ruling class – imbued also with openly fascist ideas –, but it is a significant one to understand his recent radicalisation and current war of aggression.
4. In many ways, how we perceive history says more about who we are now and the experiences and biases through which we analyse the past. In my opinion, the Second World War was a nation-defining moment for many peoples, providing answers and narratives to questions such as who we are and what unites us. Yet the orthodox retelling of the war, and the identities built around it, increasingly appear to be fracturing. Eastern European scholars and politicians increasingly challenge the neglect of the Soviet and Russian totalitarian dimension. The formerly taboo subject of collaboration receives more nuanced discussion on one side—with books such as Brzydkie słowo na „k”. Rzecz o kolaboracji (2024) and Piotr M. Majewski’s Niech sobie nie myślą, że jesteśmy kolaborantami. Protektorat Czech i Moraw 1939–1945 (2021)—and is treated by populists such as Zemmour on the other. At the same time, the heroic representation of antifascist resistance is increasingly challenged by honest discussion of the scale of war crimes and violence committed by resistance forces. With battles taking place in at least one part of the continent on a scale comparable to those of the Second World War, do you think we will face a reality in which the old postwar or antifascist national identities and narratives simply cease to fit, while new ones are still taking shape?
It is difficult to say. As a historian, I feel more comfortable moving from the present toward the past than from the past toward the future. Moreover, I do not think that memory should be conceived as a container in which different, mutually exclusive contents succeed one another—in which antifascism is replaced by antitotalitarianism, the Resistance by the Holocaust or the Holodomor, or the Second World War by the Russo-Ukrainian war, and so forth.
Fragments of different and conflicting memories, shaped by collective experiences as well as by public manipulation, tend to overlap, intertwine, and accumulate in layers over time. The same memories—those rooted in antifascism, for example—can acquire different meanings, referents, and implications depending on changing circumstances. The intertwining of antifascism and nationalism constituted, and continues to constitute, a powerful political combination, even though it was not always clearly visible, especially in Western Europe, where fascist and pro-fascist forms of nationalism had fallen into public disrepute after the defeat of fascism and Nazism. Yet different forms of nationalism—democratic or authoritarian, inclusive or exclusive, civic or ethnic, however blurred these distinctions may sometimes be—have continued to provide tools of state-building, while their political and social implications have changed over time. For instance, growing migration from Asia and Africa, as well as from Eastern to Western Europe, is transforming the demographic composition of European societies and, consequently, their relationship to both the past and the future.
Memories and narratives of the first half of the twentieth century—including antifascism, antitotalitarianism, and the Shoah—continue to serve as important moral and political reference points in contemporary public debate. To return to Judt, we might conclude that we still live in the shadow of the Second World War. Yet an increasingly wide gap has opened between contemporary experiences of instability, crisis, and war and the persistent memories, symbols, and myths of that conflict. In this respect, the future appears more open than at any time since 1945.