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The de-legitimisation of the Italian political system that culminated in the upheavals of the late 1980s has permitted a very public re-examination of the meaning and significance of both the Fascist regime and the Resistance to it. Although debates between historians had already begun over these issues, they have been thrust into the media spotlight now that the political consensus surrounding their interpretation has collapsed. The following two articles examine both the content and conduct of these debates, and consider the extent to which they have contributed to a reassessment of the history of these periods. Naturally the opinions expressed in these articles are solely those of the authors themselves: Contemporary European History would welcome further comments and contributions concerning this rethinking of the contemporary Italian experience.

This ground-breaking and innovative book examines the influence of charisma on power, authority and nationalism. The authors both apply and challenge Max Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ and integrate it into a broader discussion of other theoretical models. Using an interdisciplinary approach, leading international scholars draw on a diverse range of cases to analyse charisma in benign and malignant leaderships, as well as the relationship between the cult of the leader, the adulation of the masses and the extension of individual authority beyond sheer power. They discuss idiosyncratic authority and oratory, and they address how political, social and regional variations help explain concepts and policies which helped forge and reformulate nations, national identities and movements. The chapters on particular charismatic leaders cover Abraham Lincoln, Kemal Ataturk, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Gamal Nasser, Jorg Haider and Nelson Mandela.

The early Greek imagination envisaged the past and the present as in front of us – we can see them. The future, invisible, is behind us. … Paradoxical though it may sound to the modern ear, this image of our journey through time may be truer to reality than the medieval and modern feeling that we face the future as we make our way forward into it. The essays in this volume have focused on the transformations in the art of war that have marked the rise of the West. The purpose of this final chapter is entirely different. It is to draw general conclusions about the nature of military revolutions and of revolutions in military affairs, and to explore what that past might suggest about the potential for such revolutions in the future. In view of the claims of the enthusiasts that the United States is riding the crest of an American revolution in military affairs, these are intriguing questions indeed. The pace of technological and social change and the continuing antagonisms between states make it highly probable that war, military revolutions, and revolutions in military affairs will play a central role in the century that has just begun.

The origins of the process that transmuted Prussia–Germany's most hallowed social institution and professional group, the officer corps, into a functional elite of ‘National Socialist Führer-personalities’ remain obscure. Recent studies have argued that the ‘structural pressures of modern war’ – the immense losses of summer 1942 – compelled the abolition of time-honoured educational and social qualifications for officer candidacy and the basing of promotions almost solely on battlefield prowess, and that ‘National Socialist elite manipulation’ was at best a secondary factor. Yet archival evidence makes clear that the pressures of war took second place in the army's official mind to the need to preserve order and tradition, and that it was above all Adolf Hitler who dictated the timing, shape, and extent of changes that the bureaucrats were largely incapable of imagining. ‘Führer-selection through battle’ was simultaneously the most far-reaching and lasting element in the social revolution that Hitler sought, and a decisive step in steeling the German armed forces for their fight to the bitter end. In this as in other areas, it was National Socialism's very modernity that endowed it with demonic force.

Implementing the dictators' visions required foreign policies designed to camouflage aggressive intent while wooing similarly ambitious allies, and armed forces capable of the wide-ranging offensive warfare needed to destroy the international order. Scholars have studied numerous aspects of Italian foreign policy in the Fascist period. But unlike the German case, coherent overviews are rare. Chapter 3 attempts to provide one, organized around an issue that since the 1960s has been thoroughly explored north of the Alps, the nature and extent of the continuities linking the foreign policy of the regime with that of its predecessors. The essay focuses on the restraints under which Mussolini labored, the difficulties encountered in choosing Fascist Italy's first victim, and the search for allies – especially for the vengeful German nationalist ally required to free Italy for Mediterranean domination. The armed forces and industrial establishment that Mussolini inherited received short shrift in the great war that he found at last in 1940. Chapter 4 charts the nature, extent, and impact of their inadequacies through analysis of the wartime career of the largest and most influential service, the Italian army. Chapter 5, although very different in structure and chronological range, seeks to explain why the outcome in the German case was infinitely more bloody.

Fascism and Nazism twisted, or ended, the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Interest in their origins has prospered even in the present era of historical pointillisme . The most disdainful adherents of poststructuralist theory or of the social microhistory of everyday life find it difficult to deny that dictatorship, global war, and genocide can ruin your whole day. The overall structures of the national histories of Italy and Germany from territorial unification in 1860/71 to dictatorship in 1922/33 and defeat in 1943/45 consequently remain subjects of passionate debate. Yet analysts of the origins of the Western interwar “Great Dictatorships” have for the most part avoided systematic comparison as a tool for understanding each country's trajectory. A few scholars have explored resemblances between the processes and consequences of territorial unification in the two cases, or have studied the regimes' structures or particular sectors within them in a comparative way. A vast body of writing linked to the concept of “fascism” (lower-case) has usually assumed a common parentage, sometimes due to shared features of the unification process and aftermath, although always within the framework of a generic concept that embraces other cases with entirely different origins and is itself prior to and independent of the evidence. But most interpretations have followed the well-trodden and exclusive paths of the national historiographical Sonderwege . Heinrich von Treitschke and his successors sanctified Germany's supposed distinctness from the West.

The political genius of the Duce is beyond dispute. Anyone who doubts it has only to look at the depth of the abyss into which he has thrown Italy. Galeazzo Ciano, to his jailors, 1943/44 Ciano, as he faced execution in the winter of 1943–4 for voting against his father-in-law at the Grand Council meeting that provoked the regime's fall, saw a truth of sorts. The very magnitude of Mussolini's aspirations had brought disaster. “One man,” Ciano wrote in his farewell letter to the King in December 1943, “one man alone, Mussolini, through unscrupulous personal ambitions, ‘out of thirst for military glory’ (to use his own actual words) ha[d] deliberately led the nation into the bottomless pit.” While Mussolini had far more help than Ciano's reiteration of Churchill's shrewd propaganda implied, and “thirst for military glory” scarcely did the dictator's motivations justice, Ciano was clearly right in proclaiming Mussolini's preeminent responsibility for what had occurred. Mussolini had a genuine foreign policy program: the creation of an Italian spazio vitale in the Mediterranean and Middle East. Success would have raised Italy at last to the status of a true great power, a goal Mussolini shared with the Italian establishment, although the latter, like the generals and admirals, lacked his taste for risk. Internally, expansion would consolidate Fascist power, eliminate ball competing authorities and unwelcome restraints, and mold the Italians into a people “worthy” of the imperial mission Mussolini claimed for them. Italy's catastrophic defeat in its “parallel war” and the ultimate destruction of Grossdeutschland in the wider conflict fortunately deprived Mussolini of the opportunity to implement his program.