Although fascism was largely discredited in Europe at the end of World War II, fascist-inspired movements were founded in several European countries beginning in the late 1940s. Similar groups were created outside Europe as well, primarily in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Africa. Like their fascist predecessors, the “neofascists” advocated militant nationalism and authoritarian values, opposed the liberal individualism of the Enlightenment, attacked Marxist and other left-wing ideologies, indulged in racist and xenophobic scapegoating, portrayed themselves as protectors of traditional national culture and religion, glorified violence and military heroism, and promoted populist right-wing economic programs.

Despite these similarities, however, neofascism was not simply a revival of fascism. Neofascist parties differed from earlier fascist movements in several significant respects, many of them having to do with the profound political, economic, and social changes that took place in Europe in the first decades after the end of the war. For example, whereas fascists assigned much of the blame for their countries’ economic problems to the machinations of bolsheviks, liberals, and Jews, neofascists tended to focus on non-European immigrants—such as Turks, Pakistanis, and Algerians—who arrived in increasing numbers beginning in the 1970s. After decades of postwar decolonization, neofascists in western Europe lost interest in taking Lebensraum through military conquest of other states. Instead, they fought battles for “urban space,” which in Germany involved conflicts over government-subsidized housing for immigrants. With increasing urbanization also came a shift in the electoral bases of fascist-oriented movements and a consequent decline in the importance of rural romanticism (“blood and soil”) in neofascist political rhetoric. Finally, the gradual acceptance of democratic norms by the vast majority of western Europeans reduced the appeal of authoritarian ideologies and required that neofascist parties make a concerted effort to portray themselves as democratic and “mainstream.” Some neofascists even included words like “democratic” and “liberal” in the titles of their movements. Most neofascists abandoned the outward trappings of earlier fascist parties, such as paramilitary uniforms and Roman salutes, and many explicitly denounced fascist policies or denied that their parties were fascist. Noting this transformation, in 1996 Roger Eatwell cautioned: “Beware of men—and women—wearing smart Italian suits: the colour is now gray, the material is cut to fit the times, but the aim is still power.…Fascism is on the move once more, even if its most sophisticated forms have learned to dress to suit the times.” Similarly, historian Richard Wolin described these movements as “designer fascism.”

As with fascist movements of the interwar period, neofascist movements differed from one another in various respects. The rhetoric of neofascists in Russia and the Balkans, for example, tended to be more openly brutal and militaristic than that of the majority of their Western counterparts. Most neofascist movements in Europe pandered to anti-Semitism, though neofascists in Italy and Spain generally did not. Spanish neofascists also differed from most other neofascists in Europe in that they did not make a major issue of immigration. Portuguese, British, and (for a time) Italian neofascists advocated corporatism, in contrast to French and many other Western neofascists, who promoted free-market capitalism and lower taxes. In the 1990s in Russia and eastern Europe, neofascist movements were generally more leftist than their counterparts in western Europe, emphasizing the interests of workers and peasants over those of the urban middle class and calling for “mixed” socialist and capitalist economies.


One of the largest neofascist movements in western Europe in the 1990s was the Italian Social Movement (Movimento Sociale Italiano [MSI]; renamed the National Alliance [Alleanza Nazionale] in 1994). Founded in 1946, it was led at various times by Giorgio Almirante, Augusto De Marsanich, Arturo Michelini, and Gianfranco Fini. As an official in Mussolini’s Italian Social Republic, a puppet state established by the Germans in northern Italy in 1944, Almirante oversaw the regime’s propaganda machinery. When the MSI was launched in 1946, Almirante sought to give it a modern image, urging its members to “beware of representing fascism in a grotesque way, or at any rate, in an outdated, anachronistic, and stupidly nostalgic way.”

Although Italy’s postwar constitution forbade the reorganization of a fascist party, and although Almirante discouraged MSI members from wearing paramilitary black shirts and performing the Roman salute, the propaganda of the MSI echoed a number of themes dear to interwar fascism. First and foremost was its call for the “vital forces” of the nation to resist the communist menace. The MSI contended that not only were communists gaining footholds in the press, in the schools, among intellectuals, and in the trade unions but they were behind the breakdown of law and order and left-wing terrorism. In the 1950s MSI members entered schools to assault leftists and provoked violent confrontations with socialist and communist activists during election campaigns and strikes.

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American soldiers in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge.
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The MSI extolled the virtues of virility, courage, action, and patriotism. Like the National Fascist Party before it, the MSI also called for a corporatist solution to class conflict and the subordination of individual interests to the good of the nation. As a defender of “Christian civilization,” it supported the Lateran Treaty, which made Roman Catholicism the state religion of Italy (Catholicism ceased to be the official religion with the signing of the concordat of 1984), and the legal prohibition of divorce.

Although at times the MSI cultivated a benign image and obscured its fascist imagery, at other times it called attention to its continuity with the fascist past. The practice of avoiding direct references to fascism virtually disappeared from MSI propaganda in the 1980s and ’90s, as illustrated by the declaration of Fini, elected party secretary in 1987: “Fascism was part of the history of Italy and the expression of permanent values.” At a campaign rally in October 1992, Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of the duce, stood in the balcony of the 15th-century Palazzo Venezia (Venice Palace) shouting, “Grazie nonno!” (“Thanks, Granddad!”) as thousands of MSI supporters, many wearing black shirts and giving the fascist salute, marched below her and chanted, “Duce! Duce!”

MSI electoral fortunes varied greatly according to circumstances, ranging from about 2 percent of the vote in 1948 to 13.5 percent in 1994. In local elections in 1993, Fini and Mussolini were nearly elected mayor of Rome and mayor of Naples, respectively, and the party won almost a third of the vote in both cities.

Immediately after these elections, Fini subsumed the MSI into a new and allegedly more respectable party, the National Alliance (AN). Officially rejecting “any form of dictatorship or totalitarianism,” he replaced the old slogan of a “third way” between capitalism and communism with praise for the free market and individual initiative. In March 1995 the AN won about 14 percent of the vote and five ministerial posts in a coalition government led by Silvio Berlusconi. Later that year the AN led an attempt to repeal the clause in the Italian constitution forbidding the reorganization of a fascist party, but the effort failed. Although Fini described the AN as “postfascist,” following the 1994 elections, he declared that Mussolini was the greatest Italian statesman of the 20th century and that fascism before 1938—i.e., before Mussolini formed a military alliance with Hitler—was “mostly good.”


In 1949 Fritz Dorls and Otto Ernst Remer, a former army general who had helped to crush an attempted military coup against Hitler in July 1944, founded the Socialist Reich Party (Sozialistische Reichspartei; SRP), one of the earliest neofascist parties in Germany. Openly sympathetic to Nazism, the SRP made considerable gains in former Nazi strongholds, and in 1951 it won 11 percent of the vote in regional elections in Lower Saxony. The party was banned as a neo-Nazi organization in 1952.

Among legal neofascist parties in Germany, the most important were the National Democratic Party of Germany (Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands; NPD), founded in 1964 by Waldemar Schütz, a former member of the Nazi Party and the Waffen-SS (the elite military wing of the Nazi Party, which served in combat alongside the regular German army); the German People’s Union (Deutsche Volksunion; DVU), founded in 1971; and the Republicans (Die Republikaner; REP), founded in 1983 by another former Waffen-SS member, Franz Schönhuber. Like Almirante in Italy, Schönhuber strove to give his party a more respectable image, and his efforts extended to denying his own previous connection with the Waffen-SS. “I have no Nazi past,” he said. “I regard the National Socialist state as absolutely incompatible with the rule of law. Racism and fascism led us into the most horrible catastrophe in our national history.”

Neofascist parties in Germany focused much of their energies on campaigns against immigrants, and they were most successful in areas where immigrant communities were large. Running on slogans such as “Germany for the Germans, the boat is full,” the REP gained 7.5 percent of the vote in West German elections in 1989 and more than 7 percent of the vote in elections for the European Parliament in the same year. Neofascist parties also won significant support among disaffected youth in parts of the former East Germany, where there were high levels of unemployment, poor housing, and severe environmental problems in the years immediately following unification.

In 1992–93 gangs of neo-Nazi youth in eastern Germany, most of whom did not belong to political parties, staged attacks on Turkish and other immigrants and desecrated Jewish cemeteries. Public revulsion at the attacks contributed to a temporary dip in the far-right vote in 1993. At the end of the 1990s, the REP was torn by personal, generational, and tactical divisions, with some members favouring a blatantly pro-Nazi platform and others urging more moderate and mainstream positions.


In 1999–2000 a series of electoral successes by the far-right Freedom Party of Austria (Freiheitlichen Partei Österreichs; FPÖ), founded in 1956 and led from 1986 by Jörg Haider, created a storm of controversy and produced widespread protests in Austria and abroad, largely because of perceptions that the leadership of the party, including Haider himself, was sympathetic to Nazism. Haider, whose father had been a leading member of the Austrian Nazi Party before and during World War II, became notorious for his praise of Hitler’s employment policies and his remark, made to a group of Austrian veterans of World War II, that the Waffen-SS deserved “honour and respect.” Arguing for stricter controls on immigration, he warned against the “over-foreignization” of Austrian society, pointedly borrowing a term—Überfremdung—used by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda.

Haider became governor of Carinthia, his home province, in March 1999, when the FPÖ won regional elections there with 42 percent of the vote. In general elections in October, the FPÖ narrowly outpolled the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Österreichische Volkspartei; ÖVP) with 27 percent of the vote and thereby became the second largest party in Austria (the Social-Democratic Party of Austria [Sozialdemokratische Partei Österreichs; SPÖ] finished first, with more than 33 percent). The prospect that the FPÖ would be included in a new Austrian government prompted a threat by the other member states of the European Union (EU) to suspend all bilateral political contacts with Austria. Despite the warning, the ÖVP, with considerable reluctance, formed a government with the FPÖ in February 2000, granting the party five cabinet ministries (Haider himself was not given a cabinet post).

The new government was greeted by widespread demonstrations, diplomatic protests, and calls for boycotts on travel to Austrian tourist destinations. Facing intense international pressure, Haider resigned his leadership of the FPÖ at the end of February, only three weeks after his party had entered the government. His final split with the FPÖ occurred when he announced that he was forming a new party, the Alliance for the Future of Austria (Bündnis Zukunft Österreich; BZÖ), in 2005. In 2008 the new party showed strong gains, and Haider seemed poised for a comeback on the national stage. On Oct. 11, 2008, however, he died from injuries sustained in a car accident.


In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, neofascism in France was dominated by the National Front (Front National; FN), founded in 1972 by François Duprat and François Brigneau and led beginning later that year by Jean-Marie Le Pen. After 10 years on the margins of French politics, the FN began a period of spectacular growth in 1981. Campaigning on the slogan “France for the French” (as had French fascists in the 1930s) and linking high unemployment and increased crime to the presence of immigrants, the FN increased its support from 1 percent of the vote in 1981 to 14 percent in 1988. In 1984 the FN gained 11 percent of the vote in elections for the European Parliament and thereby became the largest extreme-right group within that body. In municipal elections in 1989 the FN won city council seats in more than one third of cities exceeding 20,000 inhabitants, and in 1995–97 it gained control of four southern cities—Marignane, Orange, Toulon, and Vitrolles. Le Pen won 15 percent of the vote in presidential elections in 1995, and the FN also took 15 percent in legislative elections in May–June 1997. In areas of its greatest strength—southern and eastern France—the FN won more than 20 percent.

  • Beneath a huge sign that makes quite clear his far-right party’s views in the referendum on ratifying the EU constitution, National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen addresses supporters in Paris on May 1. The voters’ “no” on May 29 was an embarrassment for Pres. Jacques Chirac and French foreign policy.

The FN’s rapid increase in popularity occurred despite Le Pen’s previous association with extreme right-wing causes, his cavalier remarks about the Holocaust (in 1987 he told a television interviewer that the Holocaust was only “a detail of history”), the presence of former fascists in his organization, and other neofascist aspects of his movement.

The FN’s popular anti-immigrant themes included the claim that non-French immigrants, especially Muslims, threatened French national identity and culture—a threat that had been compounded, according to the FN, by the huge influx of films, music, and television programs from the United States. The FN also called for a return to traditional values—family, law and order, hard work, and patriotism—and claimed that these values had been eroded by liberal permissiveness and multiculturalism.

Although Le Pen described himself as a “Churchillian democrat,” his commitment to political democracy was similar to that of La Rocque in the 1930s and ’40s—more tactical than principled. “We must be respectful of legality while it exists,” he declared in 1982. Just as La Rocque had admired Mussolini, so Le Pen admired Franco in Spain and Augusto Pinochet in Chile. Le Pen praised Pinochet’s overthrow of socialist president Salvador Allende in 1973, and he declared that the French army should follow Pinochet’s example if a similar leftist government were to arise in France.

The FN attempted to portray Le Pen as a plain-speaking man of the people, and it emphasized his physical strength and virility. Although Le Pen’s bodyguards sometimes wore helmets and battle gear similar to those of France’s national riot police, and although party supporters were sometimes involved in street violence against immigrants and ethnic minorities, the FN had no official party uniforms or paramilitary organizations.

The FN imposed censorship when it had the power to do so. Mayors of cities governed by the FN removed left-wing journals from municipal libraries, forbade librarians to order “internationalist” books, and required the purchase of materials supporting the FN’s views. The mayor of Toulon, Jean-Marie Le Chevallier, canceled the award of a literary prize to a Jewish writer and tried to shut down a well-known performance festival in the city because of its leftist political orientation.

The FN’s positions on economic issues fluctuated during the 1980s and ’90s. In the 1980s it sided with conservatives who stressed individual entrepreneurship and opposed state intervention in the economy. However, in 1993, in an attempt to attract more working-class voters, Le Pen described free-market economics as “harmful” unless balanced with state intervention, and he called for a 39-hour workweek, five weeks of paid vacation, and other social benefits—all measures the FN had previously opposed. In 1996 he reversed himself again, calling for lower taxes and criticizing trade unions for engaging in strikes.

By the 1990s the FN had acquired a broad-based and diverse following, including small-business owners and self-employed artisans, unemployed white-collar and blue-collar workers, socially conservative Catholics, and young people. In 1998 Le Pen’s associate Bruno Mégret split from the FN to form a new party, the National Movement (Mouvement National; MN), taking with him most of the FN’s departmental secretaries and city councillors. Nevertheless, Le Pen’s style and policies continued to attract significant support, and he served as an elected member of the European Parliament well into the 21st century. In 2002 Le Pen defeated Prime Minister Lionel Jospin in the first round of the presidential election, winning 18 percent of the vote. However, with nearly the entire French political establishment—including the Socialist Party and the French Communist Party—endorsing conservative President Jacques Chirac, he was easily defeated in the second round.


After the end of World War II, few Russians needed to be reminded of the evils of German fascism. Nevertheless, several fascist groups emerged in Russia after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Resentment over the loss of the Soviet empire, concern for the fate of ethnic Russians in the successor states, bad economic conditions, the breakdown of law and order, the desire for a strong leader, and the fact that democratic institutions were not deeply rooted in Russia all combined to make fascist ideas appealing to some segments of the Russian population.

Some Russian fascists attempted to revive the reactionary ideology of the Black Hundreds, a loose association of extreme right-wing organizations formed in Russia during the early years of the 20th century. Black Hundred ideology was highly nationalistic, anticosmopolitan, anti-Semitic, anti-Masonic, anti-Western, antidemocratic, antiegalitarian, antiliberal, and anti-“decadence.” The Black Hundreds were strong supporters of the Russian Orthodox Church, the army, and authoritarian government (favouring either monarchy or military dictatorship), and they indulged in conspiracy theories that blamed most of Russia’s troubles on Jews and Freemasons.

In the 1980s the leading group espousing Black Hundred ideology was Pamyat (“Memory”), whose main spokesman after 1984 was Dmitry Vasiliev. During the communist era Pamyat worked for the restoration of churches and national monuments in Moscow, and Vasiliev generally supported the Communist Party and praised Lenin, Stalin, and the KGB for defending national traditions. After 1989, however, Vasiliev increasingly supported the Russian Orthodox Church and began to advocate monarchism. Pamyat writers denounced communists as “godless,” “cosmopolitan,” and “antipatriotic,” and they criticized the neglect of national traditions, anti-Russian sentiment in the Baltic countries, the moral decline of youth, increased crime, the weakening of the family, and alcoholism. Although Pamyat had a near monopoly on the extreme right in 1987–88, by 1991 it had been overtaken by rival movements.

One of these movements was the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia (Liberalno-Demokraticheskaya Partiya Rossi; LDPR), led by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. Founded in 1990, the party grew rapidly, and in presidential elections in 1991 Zhirinovsky won almost 8 percent of the vote, which placed him third after Boris Yeltsin and Nicolay Ryzhkov. In parliamentary elections in 1993, the LDPR gained nearly 23 percent of the vote, more than the Russian Communist Party (12.4 percent) did. However, by 1996 Zhirinovsky’s support had declined precipitously, and in presidential elections that year he managed to win only 6 percent of the vote.

Most neofascists denied that they were “fascists,” and Zhirinovsky was no exception. On various occasions he asserted his adherence to democratic values, the rights of man, a multiparty system, and the rule of law. However, in 1991 he declared: “I say quite plainly, when I come to power there will be a dictatorship. Russia needs a dictator now.” He added: “I’ll be ruthless. I will close down the newspapers one after another. I may have to shoot 100,000 people, but the other 300 million will live peacefully. You want to call it Russian fascism, fine.”

Zhirinovsky also indulged in racism and anti-Semitism, even though his own father was apparently Jewish and he himself had been active in a Russian Jewish group in 1989. When asked about his parents in 1993, he replied, “My mother was Russian, my father a lawyer”—a comment that became a popular joke in Russia about people who try to conceal their origins. Zhirinovsky also claimed that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was mainly the work of “baptized Jews” and that the state of Israel and Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, were engaged in anti-Russian conspiracies. Although he sometimes complained that the United States was becoming a nonwhite society, he declared that only an alliance between the United States, Germany, and Russia could “preserve the white race on the European and American continents.”

Zhirinovsky wanted to ensure Russia’s greatness by retaining control of the constituent republics of the former Soviet Union, and he condemned independence movements in the Baltic states and Chechnya and threatened harsh measures against them. As he told a Lithuanian newspaper in 1991, “I’ll destroy you. I’ll bury nuclear waste…along the border [with the Baltic states].…You Lithuanians will die from diseases and radiation.… Soon there will be no Lithuanians, Estonians, and Latvians in the Baltic. I’ll act the way Hitler did in 1942.” Zhirinovsky made similar threats to Western countries, which he believed were working against Russia’s interests. On a visit to Belgrade in 1994, he warned the West to stay out of the conflict in the Balkans or risk a Russian nuclear attack. After being denied a visa to Germany in the same year, he threatened to completely destroy that country and occupy it with 300,000 Russian troops.

Like many fascists of the interwar period, Zhirinovsky had little regard for women, and he was openly contemptuous of women with education or political power. Following a television debate with a representative of the Women’s Movement of Russia in 1995, he remarked that women such as her enjoyed being beaten and had fantasies about being raped, though they were too ugly for their fantasies to come true. Such comments were consistent with the negative portrayal of women—especially younger women—in Black Hundreds literature.

Zhirinovsky’s economic program favoured a mixed economy. He proposed both that taxes on industry be reduced and that 70 percent of the economy be controlled by the state, including transportation and communication. However, he blamed most of Russia’s economic problems on scapegoats, claiming that Russia was so poor because the country had been robbed of its natural resources by Jews, Freemasons, and Americans.

The Russian National Unity (Russkoe Natsionalnoe Edinstvo; RNE), a paramilitary organization founded in 1990 by Aleksandr Barkashov, claimed to have an extensive network of local branches, but its electoral support was significantly less than that of the LDPR. Barkashov, a former commando in the Russian army, touted his blackshirts as a reserve force for the Russian army and the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He blamed many of Russia’s economic problems on Jews, claimed that two RNE blackshirts had been victims of Jewish ritual murder, insisted that only a “few hundred” Jews had perished in German concentration camps, and said that the Holocaust was a “diversion” created to conceal a Jewish-inspired genocide of 100 million Russians. The RNE’s symbol was a left-pointed swastika together with a four-pointed star. The RNE emphasized the “primary importance” of Russian blood, accused “internationalists-communists” of undermining the “genetic purity” of the nation with a program of racial mixture, and called for a rebirth of “Russian-Aryan traditions.” Although Barkashov denied that he was a fascist, he admired Hitler enormously, once stating that “I consider [Hitler] a great hero of the German nation and of all white races. He succeeded in inspiring the entire nation to fight against degradation and the washing away of national values.”

Barkashov insisted in 1994 that he would come to power by “absolutely legal means.” Nevertheless, the RNE’s program stated that conventional democracy was inefficient, and it called for an “ethnic democracy” in which the right to vote would be restricted to those who had demonstrated their loyalty to the nation. As part of Barkashov’s program of racist nationalism, he insisted that the state should protect motherhood to ensure the growth of the ethnic Russian population. Families with many children should be rewarded, and a “cult of the family” should be encouraged on a “traditional patriarchal basis.” Farmers, he said, were the best part of the nation, representing as they did a union of blood and soil. A major plank in the RNE’s platform was its defense of ethnic Russians outside Russia proper. Barkashov denounced the oppression of ethnic Russians in Estonia and Latvia and later supported Russian military intervention in Chechnya to protect Russian citizens “from force and arbitrary rule,” calling for harsh measures—ranging from temporary internment to deportation—against the 80,000 Chechen “criminals” who lived in Russia.


Following the collapse of communism in the former Yugoslavia and the secession of Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Yugoslav federation in 1991–92, units of the Yugoslav army and Serbian paramilitary forces engaged in campaigns of “ethnic cleansing” aimed at driving out non-Serb majorities in northeastern Croatia and parts of northern and eastern Bosnia and establishing nominally independent Serb republics in the vacated territories. The attacks, which were compared in their ferocity and cruelty to the Nazi invasions of eastern Europe and Russia, involved mass executions (mostly of men and boys), forced marches, torture, starvation, and systematic rape. These tactics were aimed at creating irreversible ethnic hatreds that would permanently prevent the development of multiethnic states in the areas under attack. In 1998–99 similar tactics were employed in Kosovo, a province of Serbia in which 90 percent of the population was ethnically Albanian and predominantly Muslim.

Organized and directed by the regime of Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, leader of the Socialist Party of Serbia (Socijalisticka Partija Srbije; SPS), the campaigns in Croatia and Bosnia were undertaken in part to bolster Milošević’s image as a staunch nationalist and to consolidate his power at the expense of Vojislav Seselj’s Serbian Radical Party (Srpska Radikalna Stranka; SRS), then the largest neofascist party in Serbia. Although the SPS had won 65 percent of the vote in elections to the Serbian assembly in 1990, deteriorating economic conditions and perceived threats to Serbian enclaves in Croatia and Bosnia (where Serbs constituted 12 percent and 31 percent of the population, respectively) resulted in a significant loss of support for Milošević’s SPS and a corresponding growth in the SRS and other extreme nationalist and neofascist groups. In 1992 the SPS won only 40 percent of the vote and was forced to enter into an unofficial “red-brown” alliance with the SRS, which finished with 20 percent. To counter the growing threat from the right, Milošević gradually adopted many of the neofascists’ policies, including support for the creation of a “Greater Serbia” that would incorporate Montenegro, Macedonia, and large areas of Croatia and Bosnia.

In May 1993, after a year of severe economic hardship caused by UN-imposed sanctions, Milošević accepted an international agreement for the division of Bosnia into 10 ethnic cantons. The Vance-Owen plan (named after its principal negotiators, former U.S. secretary of state Cyrus Vance and former British foreign minister David Owen) was rejected by the self-styled parliament of the Bosnian Serbs and condemned by Seselj, who attacked Milošević for “selling out” and called for a parliamentary vote of no confidence. Milošević responded by launching an “antifascist” campaign against Seselj and the SRS, charging Seselj with profiteering and committing war crimes in Croatia and Bosnia and arresting several members of the SRS’s paramilitary wing, the “Chetniks” (named after the Serbian nationalist guerrilla movement that battled the Nazis and later the communist Partisans in Yugoslavia during World War II; see Chetnik). Milošević subsequently attempted to weaken nationalist support for the SRS by allying himself with the notorious paramilitary leader Željko Ražnatović (popularly known by his nom de guerre, Arkan) and his new Serbian Unity Party (Srpska Partja Jedinstva; SJP). In elections in December 1993, the SPS increased its representation in the Serbian assembly at the expense of the SRS, taking 49 percent of the vote, compared with the SRS’s 14 percent.

In early 1998 Serbian military and police forces began attacks in Kosovo on alleged strongholds of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), an ethnically Albanian guerrilla movement fighting to end Serbian control of the province. The Serbs’ harsh repression of the Albanian civilian population drew international condemnation and resulted in renewed UN sanctions on Yugoslavia. On March 24, 1999, after a Serbian delegation at peace talks in Rambouillet, France, rejected an accord that had been signed by representatives of Kosovar Albanians and the KLA, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began an intensive bombing campaign directed at Yugoslav military targets and later also at civilian infrastructure and government buildings in Serbia. In response, Serbian security forces in Kosovo conducted a massive campaign of ethnic cleansing, including large-scale massacres of civilians, and eventually forced more than 850,000 Kosovars to flee to border areas in Albania, Macedonia, and Montenegro. The bombing came to an end in early June after Milošević agreed to the withdrawal of Serbian forces from Kosovo, the deployment of NATO peacekeeping troops, and the repatriation of Albanian refugees. In the meantime, Milošević and four top officials of his government were indicted for crimes against humanity by the UN International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague. The trial began in February 2002 but experienced numerous delays because of the poor health of Milošević; he was found dead in his prison cell in 2006.


In the early 1990s the main spokesman for neofascism in Croatia was Dobroslav Paraga, founder in 1990 of the Croatian Party of Rights (Hrvatska Stranka Prava; HSP). A former seminary student and dissident under the communist regime in Croatia in the 1980s, Paraga believed that Serbia was a mortal danger to Croatian national survival, and he called for the creation of a “Greater Croatia” that would include much of Serbia and all of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He insisted that war with Serbia was inevitable and had to end in the “total defeat” of the enemy with “nothing left of Serbia except Belgrade and its surroundings.”

Paraga’s followers openly endorsed the pro-Nazi Ustaša regime, which had carried out large-scale exterminations of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies (Roma) in Croatia during World War II. Reflecting the enthusiasm for Ustaša symbolism that swept Croatia after the outbreak of the Bosnian war in 1991, HSP members often wore caps marked with a U and donned black shirts in imitation of the former Ustaša paramilitary; they also gave fascist salutes and repeated the old Ustaša slogan “Ready for the homeland.” The HSP’s paramilitary wing, the Croatian Defense Association (Hrvatska Obrambeni Savez; HOS), was heavily involved in fighting against Serbia.

The economic program of the HSP was vague, maintaining that the principal solution to all social and economic problems was the creation of a Greater Croatia. In elections in 1992, the HSP received only about 7 percent of the parliamentary vote and Paraga only 5 percent of the presidential vote. The party’s electoral impact was reduced by its insistence on continuing the unpopular war against Serbia and by Paraga’s refusal to join forces with other neofascist parties in Croatia, such as the Croatian Party of Pure Rights (Hrvastska Ci sta Stranka Prava; HCSP), the Croatian Democratic Party (Hrvatgska Demokratska Stranka Prava; HDSZP), and the National Democratic League (Nacionalna Demokratska Liga; NDL).

Like the SRS in Serbia, the HSP was opposed by a larger ruling party—the Croatian Democratic Union (Hrvatska Demokratska Zajednica; HDZ), founded in 1989 by Franjo Tudjman—that eventually adopted neofascist policies in order to undercut the appeal of its extreme nationalist and neofascist rivals. Like the HSP, the Tudjman regime employed many Ustaša symbols, and it even rehabilitated many Ustaša leaders and nominated some of them to government posts. The HDZ incorporated into its ranks the Croatian National Committee, a group founded by Ranimir Jelic, a close associate of Ante Pavelić, the founder of the original Ustaša. In 1995 Tudjman’s troops undertook extensive ethnic cleansing campaigns in western Slavonia and the historically Serbian region of Krajina, forcing the evacuation of some 150,000 Croatian Serbs to Serbia and Serb-held areas of Bosnia.

Beginning in 1991, Tudjman took various repressive measures against the HSP, including the arrest of Paraga on charges of having formed an illegal paramilitary group and the formal incorporation of the HOS into the regular Croatian army. In 1993 the government launched a largely successful “antifascist” campaign aimed at curbing the influence of HSP supporters in the military. In the same year, Paraga was brought to trial for having allegedly plotted a coup, though he was later acquitted.

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