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Copyright of Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft (Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG) is the property of Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH & Co. KG and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In many parts of the world, journalists tend to see themselves as playing an important role for the betterment of democracy. But what happens when newsmakers are faced with the question of whether to report, and how to report, on ultra-right actors? Whereas on one side, journalists are supposed to report on anything that is relevant, on the other, by reporting on it, they risk amplifying its significance. This dilemma becomes more complex when journalists deal with players who inhabit a grey zone in between legitimacy and deviance, as the ultra-right actors studied here. Although the kind of questions that newsmakers face might be similar to those they encounter when covering far-right populists or even terrorists, the fact that the ultra-right (at least in a country like Italy) has been historically tolerated as part of the normal political dialectic, raises additional concerns. Thus, the fundamental question is how reporters approach those who are known for their fascistic ideologies, yet who at the same time may be organized in political parties or cultural organizations, thus recognized by the state and somehow normalized in the public sphere. The empirical contribution is based upon data from in-depth interviews with 23 Italian journalists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the empirical literature on militant democracy and successor party bans by comparing post-1945 West Germany and Italy. These countries shared a right-authoritarian past but their tolerance of right-authoritarian parties differed. Looking for reasons behind the ban of the Sozialistische Reichspartei Deutschlands and the survival of the Movimento sociale italiano, this study tests five conditions: (1) ambiguity towards – if not open approval of – violence; (2) absence of effective alternatives to proscription; (3) securitization; (4) veto player agreement; (5) veto player incentives. We find that securitization is a necessary condition for proscription, whereas approval of violence is not. While neither the presence of effective alternatives nor veto player incentives relate to ban outcomes in a consistent pattern, veto player support remains crucial. Given the findings from this comparative study, we conclude that successor party bans should not belong to a separate category of militant democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais is the property of Centro de Estudos Sociais and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

New political groups directly or indirectly related to the European fascist past are gaining strength and significance in the political arena of the new millennium. Starting from an analysis of CasaPound in Italy, a movement and party whose activists define themselves as ‘third millennium fascists’, this article explores the legacy of fascism in current Italian politics. Analysing CasaPound’s history, political programme and some of the main features of its organization as a community, the article examines the prominent role the fascist legacy plays in structuring this movement, for which history constitutes a source of legitimization and identity formation. Fascism is not traced as something isolated in history, but instead its history is presented as a legitimate legacy with a significant place in Italy’s political landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neo-fascism played a crucial role in the Italian political panorama of the second half of the twentieth century. However, despite its importance, this political movement has been significantly underrepresented in contemporary Italian cinema. Italian cinema has been traditionally characterized by a strong political commitment and left-wing film-makers have often attempted to examine issues emerging from within groups close to their own political position. While Italian cinema is characterized by a proliferation of films that focus on left wing or communist heroes, neo-fascists have been systematically excluded from screen representation or confined to the roles of one-dimensional villains: either dangerous, anti-social thugs like in Teste rasate/Skinheads (Fragasso, 1993); leaders of coup d'état associated with the military like in La polizia ringrazia/Execution Squad (Vanzina, 1972) and Vogliamo i Colonnelli/We Want the Colonels (Monicelli, 1973) or vicious psycho-killers like in San Babila ore 20: Delitto inutile/San Babila 8pm (Lizzani, 1976). However, today, twenty years after 1989 and the collapse of ideologies, Italian film-makers have started a process of historical revision that goes beyond the simplistic opposition good versus evil. This tendency is particularly apparent in recent productions such as Romanzo Criminale/Crime Novel (Placido, 2005) and particularly Mio fratello è figlio unico/My Brother Is an Only Child (Luchetti, 2007) which, while avoiding to justify or celebrate neo-fascist ideology, attempt to explore the sociocultural motivations that lie behind the political choice of Italian neo-fascists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the evolution of the Italian extreme right after the Second World War, with an emphasis on its leading political party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement), its successor, Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance -- 1995-2009), and the latest strategies arising from its merger with the party of Silvio Berlusconi (2009). An outline of the Party's history is coupled with an analysis of the changes in its political culture. We seek to account for how and why an anti-establishment party -- the longest-lived party in Italian politics -- renounced its radicalism in favor of popular liberalism values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article Mammone explores a still relatively neglected story in the history of post-war neo-fascism, notably the attempts by some French and Italian right-wing extremists to revitalize fascist ideology after the war by means of two interconnected strategies, namely, radicalization (rejection of the democratic system) and 'de-territorialization' (in the sense of converting narrow fascist nationalism into pan-European nationalism). Mammone describes these project(s), as well as the influence of thinkers such as Julius Evola and Maurice Bardeche, and their location in the wider ideological context of the extreme right in the 1950s. The immediate outcome of this 'de-territorialized fascism' was the creation of an extreme-right international association, the Mouvement Social Europeen, in which French and Italian activists played a central role. Mammone breaks new ground regarding the non-national dimension of extreme-right thought, a topic too often studied within the boundaries of a given geographical territory and nationalist ideological landscape. By utilizing a transnational framework, he also shows the continuous connections and interactions between the Italian and the French extreme rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of the Far Right in Europe over the past decade has attracted the attention of both academics and police. Popular sports tend to reflect societal trends so it is not bizarre that a popular European cultural practice such as football has seen a rise in supporters with neo-fascist sympathies. Football (soccer in the USA), specifically in Italy, has been linked since the beginning to politics and its stadiums have always been one of the most efficient public Agora for the socialization of the Italian youth. In recent years, together with an ideologization of the football terraces, there has been a noticeable increase in conflict between hardcore football supporters and the Italian police at and around the stadium. These conflicts often involve the UltraS as the main participants. The final capital S identifies neo-fascist-oriented fans, distinguishing them from mainstream hardcore football supporters, known as ultra. This paper is the result of ethnographic research lasting six years (2003-2009). The research aimed to investigate the world of the UltraS by using two notorious national and international UltraS as case study. The groups, the Boys and the Irriducibili, support AS Roma and SS Lazio, respectively. Both are located in the Italian capital city of Rome. The present paper aims to investigate the relationship between the neo-fascist UltraS and the institutions that they identify as their enemies, namely, the Italian State and the police. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article raises some doubts as to whether the contemporary extreme right in France, Italy and the UK should be perceived as something particularly novel, and instead the image of a Janus-faced party family and a contemporarized neo-fascism is proposed as a more realistic conceptual model. This article challenges the assumption of the existence of a specific national-populist party family in France as well as the idea that populism should be perceived as the main and foremost feature of certain extremist parties. It is also suggested that the use of labels such as populism as a political category may serve as an indirect, and unintended, form of democratic legitimization for such parties that still manifest neo-fascist, xenophobic and undemocratic tendencies. The article also calls for the use of other methodologies—including a long-term historical enquiry—to complement pure political science in the study of modern extremism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]