Educating the Volksgemeinschaft: authoritarian ideals and school reforms in Europe’s fascist era

In recent years, the scholarly treatment of fascism has changed. Older studies tended to focus on single regimes (generally, Italy, Germany, or Spain), treating each of them as a self-contained unit whose programme and politics depended entirely on national historical developments. In the last few years, however, several studies have not only disclosed similarities between different fascist regimes and movements across Europe, but have also shown how their mutual relationships and exchanges shaped their ideology and practices.¹ These literatures demonstrate that a “‘fascist wind’ blew across interwar European state borders”, rendering fascism “a genuine global-transnational doctrine with diverse reformulations, ramifications, and permutations”.² Fascist movements all over Europe founded their political preferences and policies on the principles of the (racial) superiority of the native monistically conceived Volksgemeinschaft, as well as the superiority of authoritarianism and a strong charismatic leadership over liberal democracy. In general, educational institutions, from the family, to youth organisations, to schools, were considered crucial, as they provided a theatre in which a strong, healthy national community could be moulded. Motivated by these insights, this Special Issue represents a first attempt to integrate this novel conception of interwar and wartime fascism into the history of education.

Axel Honneth calls education the “twin-sister of democratic theory”.³ Indeed the political philosopher argues that without appropriately designed educational organisations, democratic structures would be virtually impossible. In the light of today’s growing concerns about the increasing appeal of alt-, radical-, and new-right movements and their positions, the relationship between political ideology and education acquires renewed relevance. The question arises, does authoritarianism also have a twin sister?

This question formed the basis of a conference panel we convened at the 2017 European Conference on Educational Research in Copenhagen. The panel triggered a discussion among several scholars interested in the educational ideas and practices of authoritarian regimes and movements across Europe. It also revealed that the relationship between the education sector and authoritarianism in the occupied regions, or the regions that found themselves surrounded by fascist regimes, remains almost virgin territory. Therefore, this Special Issue aims to bring together studies that shed light on developments in countries outside of the traditional cradles of fascism. More specifically, the papers collected here discuss the importance authoritarian movements attributed to education and schooling in view of the construction of a Volksgemeinschaft, in Belgium, Switzerland, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, France, and Ukraine.

We ask: did interwar fascist and extreme-right organisations espouse distinctive education reforms, and what role did education play in achieving their political aims? This collection of perspectives from different countries at fascism’s “periphery” uncovers the heterogeneous nature of authoritarian educational discourses and reforms in interwar and wartime Europe. The articles vividly demonstrate how, in the 1920s and 1930s, the proliferation of fascism stirred new dynamics in education circles across Europe and forced them to take a stance. The positions that were chosen, by sympathisers and opponents alike, are much more multifaceted and interwoven than the traditional dichotomy between authoritarianism and democracy might suggest. Even if education was indeed an inherent part of fascists’ common struggle for a new authoritarian and nativist Volksgemeinschaft, corresponding conceptions of schooling, not to mention the specific reforms, varied greatly.

The articles grouped in this Special Issue evidence that this variance cannot be explained solely by referring to local conditions and specificities, as has often been suggested in the literature. Instead, the basic idea of an authoritarian or nativist reform of schooling in itself is ambiguous, and its boundaries with the concepts and methods deployed to sustain other forms of politics remain fuzzy. While the (planned) interventions in the field of education traced in the following contributions are indisputably intrusive, their ambiguities as well as their controversial and changing nature show how educational institutions are a delicate issue in the definition and enforcement of authoritarian regimes. This renders the topic even more enlightening for discussing and theorising the political nature of education, and the relationship between democracy and schooling in particular.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anja Giudici

Anja Giudici is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Department for Politics and International Relations. She obtained her PhD in Education from the University of Zurich, in 2019, on a a thesis about the political and educational determinants of Swiss language education policy (https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/166199). She currently works on the European Research Council (ERC) Project “The Transformation of Post-War Education: Causes and Effects (SCHOOLPOL), which compares the development of educational structures in selected democracies during the post-war period. Additionally, her project  “Education Against (Liberal) Democracy”, explores the educational views, policies, and politics of the European postwar and current radical right. Anja’s research revolves around the history and politics of education, with a focus on how cultural, ideological, class, and gender diversities are dealt with in educational policy and politics.

Thomas Ruoss

Thomas Ruoss is a historian and educational scientist. As a holder of an Early Postdoc-Mobility Fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) he is a Visiting Scholar at KU Leuven (Belgium) and at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC (USA). He wrote his PhD thesis in 2016 on local statistics as political practice on the example of Swiss city schools between 1890 und 1930 and is actually working on the history of economic education and the role of financial associations for the global transfer of economic knowledge in the twentieth century. He is a member of the Study Group “History of Education” in Switzerland and member of the board of www.hist-edu.ch.

Sarah van Ruyskensvelde

Sarah Van Ruyskensvelde graduated as a Master in History at the University of Ghent in 2007. In 2014, she obtained her joint PhD degree in Educational Sciences (KU Leuven) and History (University of Antwerp), on a dissertation about Catholic, private schooling during the Second World War in Belgium. Her PhD was published in 2016 by Palgrave Macmillan. Currently, she is affiliated to the Research Unit Education, Culture and Society of the KU Leuven, where she teaches various History of Education courses. Her latest research project deals with the scientification of Belgian residential youth care in the 19th and 20th centuries. Her research interests include the history of education, the history of child protection and youth care, the history of the world wars, nationalism, citizenship and migration.

Notes

¹ See e.g., Federico Finchelstein, Transatlantic Fascism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Andrea Mammone, Transnational Neofascism in France and Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

² Mammone, Transnational Neofascism, 15.

³ Axel Honneth, “Erziehung und demokratische Öffentlichkeit,” Zeitschrift für Erziehungswissenschaft 15, no. 3 (2012): 429–442.