Abstract
Arising from a 2021 early career workshop on practices and notions of fascist internationalism, this special issue contributes to the evolving focus on transnational and international dimensions within the field of fascism studies. It emphasizes the interconnectedness of fascist governments, movements, and individuals across borders during the interwar period and during the Second World War, as well as the conflictual aspects of such cooperation. Rather than promoting a specific methodological or theoretical approach, the issue presents different perspectives on transnational fascism and fascist internationalisms. This introduction highlights five aspects on which the contributions make interventions: actors, women, organizations, geography, and hybridity.
Despite the extreme nationalist character of fascism, research in fascism studies in the last decade has foregrounded the transnational and international dimensions of fascist regimes, movements, and individuals in the interwar period, the Second World War, and beyond. Following with some delay what has been described as the ‘transnational turn’ in the humanities and social sciences,1 broadly speaking denoting increased attention to ‘movements and forces that cut across national boundaries’ in Akira Iriye’s definition,2 fascism studies has gone through a transnational turn on its own.3 Revealingly, Ángel Alcalde entitled a 2020 review of the current state of affairs in fascism and Nazism research ‘the transnational consensus’,4 while Shelley Baranowski opened her recent review of current approaches to European interwar authoritarianism and fascism with a discussion on transnational fascism.5 Relatedly, scholars have in the last decade turned their attention to National Socialist and fascist institutions and ideas of internationalism. Again, this has happened in confluence with wider disciplinary trends. Historians of internationalism have approached attempts at creating or shaping an international order through various concepts, practices, and institutions from the late nineteenth century onwards with renewed interest, a reassessment of the history of the League of Nations initially providing a particularly important impetus.6 Increasingly, this field of scholarship has showcased the multi-faceted nature of internationalist thought and practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making clear the benefits of conceiving of internationalisms in the plural rather than as a notion describing one (or two) particular set(s) of practices, institutions, and intellectual outlooks largely associated with actors located at the left-center parts of the political spectrum, whether liberals or socialists.7 Also conservatives and nationalists sought to organize the international realm and entertained particular visions for doing so,8 as did fascists in domains ranging from movement politics, governance, and law to cultural cooperation, colonial administration, and postal services.9
Given the renewed scholarly interest in transnational and international fascism, it is not surprising that a wealth of path-breaking research on those subjects is currently emerging from early career researchers. In this thematic issue, we showcase some of that research. The special issue is an outgrowth of a workshop convened in Berlin in October 2021 that showed the breadth of topics and approaches taken by emerging historians on the border-crossing aspects of fascism during the interwar years and the Second World War.10 Rather than pursuing or promoting one specific approach to studies of fascist internationalism or transnationalism, this special issue therefore aims to showcase a range of approaches that offer new, clarifying, or complicating perspectives on the multiplicity of transnational fascism and fascist internationalisms and possible ways to study these phenomena.
Taken together, this special issue’s four contributions by Daniele Toro, Flavia Citrigno, Simone Muraca, and Jonas Bressler and our editorial introduction contribute to the historiography of fascism studies by making at least five interventions on how to approach transnational and international fascism, concerning actors, women in fascist internationalism, organizations, geography, and hybridity. Those interventions and how they are discussed by the individual contributors will be addressed in the following discussion.
Agents
Studying individual agents and mediators between different regimes, movements, milieus, and networks is an effective method to investigate transnational and international fascism. Studies of international relations outlined various types of ‘agents of internationalism’, ranging from representatives of governmental, ministerial, and state organizations to more informal non-state think tanks, networks, and milieus in the twentieth century.11 Inspired by transcultural brokerage studies, fascism studies also increasingly recognize the historical importance of ‘go-betweens’ and intermediaries beyond classic diplomatic channels.12 Focusing on the trajectory of such ‘fascist brokers’ enables scholars to trace empirically and grasp analytically transnational entanglement processes.13 This special issue provides new case studies to rethink individual agents’ partly limited room for maneuver within broader historical dynamics, to revisit the grey zones between state and non-state activities, as well as between fascism and the broader political right, and to emphasize the role of the individual’s experiences and relationships.
Daniele Toro uses the German paramilitary Waldemar Pabst, a ‘paramount example of a fascist broker’ between German, Austrian, and Italian radical nationalist milieus, to highlight broader social and relational dimensions of mediation across borders. Thus, he emphasizes the informal, situational, adaptive, and ephemeral structures and ‘grey zones’ in which fascist agents operated in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Flavia Citrigno scrutinizes the more institutionalized forms of cross-border experiences of fascist female youth organizations in Italy and Germany in the late 1930s and during the Second World War. Her example of Elisa Lombardi, the Comandante of the Accademia fascista di educazione fisica femminile in Orvieto, points to the limited agency of such mediators. Their travels abroad were mainly designed by fascist regimes for representative purposes, using the girls ‘as pawns on a chess board’.
Simone Muraca analyzes the rise and fall of another fascist ‘courier’ across borders, Ernesto Giménez Caballero, at one point ‘the most influential intellectual on Spanish affairs in Italy’ in the 1930s. His study foregrounds how personal relationships and encounters could fundamentally shape ideas about international fascism. Giménez Caballero’s future wife introduced the writer to an array of fascist intellectuals in Italy, notably Guiseppe Bottai, and subsequently, the Spaniard turned gradually into a proponent of Italian fascist universalism. Giménez Caballero’s pro-Italian outlook led to his increasing political insignificance in Franco’s Spain, illustrating that fascist transnational activities could hamper careers domestically and pointing to limits and unintended effects of fascist internationalism.
Women
The examination of fascist movements has been marked by a historiographical blind spot for gender. Based on the patriarchal and misogynistic ideology of these movements, the male-dominance of post-Second World War historiography, and the assessments shared in left-wing (feminists) circles that women only joined far-right movements on the basis of deception,14 women have been portrayed as ‘victims, losers and lunatics’ with little agency of their own within fascist society,15 or as Claudia Koonz described these women: ‘unclaimed by feminists and unnoticed by men’.16 Consequently, women were not treated as perpetrators at first. This was due to a hesitance to examine the ‘evil women’ and due to a focus on main political leaders rather than on ordinary individuals.17 Yet, as research shows, the paradox between the traditional role of women inherent to fascist movements and the aspirations of the women’s movements was overcome by women who joined and were active within fascist structures. Similarly, research on the practice of fascist ideology towards gender roles underlines the gap between slogans and reality and the need for differentiation. In recent years, this political, theoretical, and methodological invisibility has been addressed with increased frequency,18 especially within a national framework.19
Against this backdrop, Flavia Citrignos’s article takes an innovative approach in two ways: on the one hand, it deals with women in leadership positions and does so by analyzing inter- and transnational connections between them. Addressing the possibilities and limitations of transnational networks between fascist girls’ organizations, Citrigno retraces the history of the Accademia fascista di educazione fisica femminile in Orvieto and its transnational ties to the Bund Deutscher Mädels (BDM) on the German side. Interactions between these organizations were mostly short and ritualized with no exchange of pedagogical concepts, and while the resulting diplomatic exchange network that the Orvieto Academy’s female leaders came to possess could be seen as an independent female network, Citrigno concludes that the women in fact had little influence on these exchanges as they were all initiated and organized by men.
Transnationalism is thus limited in terms of content and gender, a limitation that is also visible in the fact that women play almost no role in the exchanges analyzed in the other articles of this special issue. This lack of female presence does in many ways reflect historical reality, as female actors were largely absent in fascist internationalism, especially when it comes to formal ties. Yet, women could play a decisive role in other, more informal ways, as Simone Muraca demonstrates in his article: Without the connection of his wife, Edith Sironi Negri, Ernesto Caballero would most likely not have had access to the Italian network that was the foundation for his temporary success. Hence, future research might consider different gendered forms of fascist internationalism, acknowledging that women could still shape processes of transnational interaction in places that are traditionally overlooked.
Organizations
Given the fact that fascist movements were based on an ideology that fought against international organizations such as the League of Nations, it might seem counter-intuitive for fascists to cooperate within international organizations, whether governmental or non-governmental. They nevertheless did so, often on the basis of different (personal) networks.20 Research shows that fascists had strategies for dealing with existing international organizations, recognizing their value as a platform for the spread of ideas and standards. Madeleine Herren summarizes these strategies as ‘close . . . , undercut . . . transform and/or create’.21 Fascist movements often used these strategies with a view to the territories that they wished to dominate, leading to a very specific focus on a ‘New Europe’ by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and a focus on Asia by Imperial Japan for example.22
Research on these organizations is often focused on the European continent and the relationship between Italy and Germany. On the one hand, this is surely due to a Eurocentric and even Germany-centric approach to research on international and transnational fascism. On the other hand, it is also a consequence of the involvement of Italy and Germany in heavily Europe-dominated organizations and the founding of new organizations with a focus on Europe such as the European Youth Organization, the European Postal and Telecommunications Union, and the European Writers’ Union.23 The ‘European’ character of these organizations is mostly in the name and the membership of countries within them: As research shows, the reality of the Axis was that both Germany and Italy wanted to promote and extend their national standards or values—in a sense Germanizing or Italianizing Europe—with regular conflict between the two as a consequence. This makes the analysis of international and transnational networks—formal and informal—as well as fascist international organizations important when it comes to understanding the possibilities but also the limits of the realities of fascist cooperation. While the nationalism of most fascist movements might have been partially overcome by thought and necessity, research on the organizations underlines that nationalism nevertheless was the factor that made cooperation conflictual.
Simone Muraca, Jonas Bressler, and Flavia Citrigno address personal and institutional ties and their importance for international and transnational fascism. Jonas Bressler’s article highlights a very important phase as Franco’s victory made the significance and possibilities of international cooperation all the more visible. Flavia Citrigno’s article describes an almost typical German-Italian exchange, except that it is one that takes place between women. The article by Simone Muraca underlines other possible alliances within European fascism as discussed in the following subsection, especially before the official Axis agreement between Germany and Italy and the beginning of the Second World War.
Geography
This special issue addresses two facets of geography as potential approaches to transnational and international fascism. First, it emphasizes cross-border connections between various geographical regions and countries in Europe. This contributes to a broader scholarly response to calls for a ‘decentering of fascism studies’ beyond typical geographical ‘centers’, such as Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and Francoist Spain.24 Instead of diffusionist models of a one-way, asymmetrical transfer of ideas and practices from an original ‘center’ to a peripheral ‘copy’, recent research has explored how agents from other parts of Europe became active nodes of fascist internationalism,25 examining the complex web of interaction between minor groups and major fascist and authoritarian regimes.26 Jonas Bressler’s paper exemplifies such an approach by analyzing transnational lobbying networks in Western Europe during the Spanish Civil War. He highlights the focal role, incentives, and activities of smaller groups in Britain, France, and Belgium, such as the Amitiés Belgo-Espagnoles, who cooperated with Francoist ambassadors to support Franco’s insurrection propagandistically while pursuing their own domestic ends.
Second, the special issue explores geographical and spatial imaginaries of certain regions, in accordance with the recent ‘regional turn’ in transnational history.27 It argues that regional ideas and activities, such as pan-Slavism, pan-Scandinavianism, or pan-Latinism, could be a fruitful alternative lens to Europeanism or universalism regarding fascist internationalism. Simone Muraca, for instance, discusses how the Spanish intellectual Ernesto Giménez Caballero envisioned a Mediterranean ‘Latin bloc’ of nations and an alliance between Spain and Italy. In a speech at the Volta Congress on Europe in 1932, Giménez Caballero differentiated between three geographical, competitive typologies of what he called ‘genio’: the ‘Moscow-Communism-Eastern genius, Geneve-Democracy-Western genius, and Rome-Fascism-Christian genius’. The case study illustrates, on the one hand, how regional visions profoundly shaped fascist international thought. On the other, it shows how fascists conceived and constructed Europe differently depending on their national localization, reassessing Pan-Europe as a coherent entity.28
Hybridity
Finally, the intricacies and impact of transnational and international fascism in the interwar period and through the Second World War call for researchers to acknowledge the hybridity of the contemporary political landscape and allow for fluid boundaries between categories that have at times been regarded as too static. Instead of being preoccupied with categorizing the agents and organizations of international and transnational fascism, important insights might be gained from closely analyzing the brokers, networks, and organizations that operated at the fluid boundaries of such categories. Likewise, scholars such as David Roberts have argued that rather than delineating some kind of autonomous fascist universe across national boundaries, fascism from 1919 to 1945 ought to be analyzed as part of its era. Fascist interactions took place not just across national borders but also in hybrid spaces between political and ideological divides, whether within individual nation-states or in supranational settings.29
While such interactions also took place in regard to liberal and social democratic democracies, and even to some extent across the left-right divide separating fascism from the Soviet Union,30 recent research has devoted particular attention to the hybridity of fascism and conservatism at the time.31 As a result, Shelley Baranowski has concluded in a recent review article that ‘discussions of fascism can no longer be separated from discussions of conservatism, given the ongoing if rocky relationships between them’.32 Similarly, fascist interactions with conservatism and other contemporary political movements, ideologies, ideas, and forms of trans- and internationalism are also integral to discussions of transnational and international fascism as are the various social, spatial, intellectual, and gendered dynamics shaping the resulting border-crossing hybridization processes.33
These issues come to the fore in Jonas Bressler’s contribution that engages transnational dynamics of the political hybridization of the old and new right in the 1930s by demonstrating how Spanish Ambassadors cooperated with pro-Francoist pressure groups in Great Britain, France, and Belgium during the Spanish Civil War. Doing so, he demonstrates how common anti-liberal, Christian, monarchist, and anti-communist interests and sentiments forged transnational networks while illuminating the fluid boundaries between conservatives and fascists in the 1930s. Among other things, Bressler’s article demonstrates the importance of anti-communism in forging common ground—or at least tolerance—between right-wing and even liberal actors in the international relations of the 1920s and 1930s, a still underexplored topic.34
Hybridity also points to various themes related to transnational, international, and potentially global connections among fascists that have not been addressed within the limits of this special issue, but which should be explored further in future research. More knowledge is needed on the non-European dimensions of international fascism (such as the role of Imperial Japan or various movements in Asia, the Americas, and Northern Africa), intertwined with a broader history of European imperialism, racism, and white supremacism.35 Recent studies on the hybrid and contradictory relationship between anti-colonialism and colonialism in historical fascism serve as particularly fruitful examples.36 Postcolonial theories, critical race theories, and analyses of bodily practices that shaped and constructed race could be a productive lens to examine the role of racism in fascist internationalism, especially because fascists often considered the ‘white’ (Nordic-Aryan) race as an element that legitimized and forged cross-border connections between ‘racially-related’ nations in Europe, but also ‘white’ movements in the US or other former European colonies, such as in South Africa. Finally, more insights from gender studies could facilitate new perspectives on the (missing) role of women as outlined earlier and facets of masculinity and male bonding in transnational fascism. Thus, we conclude this introduction with a call for a hybridization of methodologies and theoretical approaches from other fields of research that will help further open up fascism studies, enable new discussions, and uncover so far understudied elements of the transnational far right.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank all participants and speakers at the workshop ‘Rethinking Practices and Notions of Fascist Internationalism 1919–1945’, held in October 2021, for their intriguing papers and fruitful discussions, as well as the four contributors Daniele Toro, Flavia Citrigno, Simone Muraca, and Jonas Bressler, the anonymous reviewers, and the editors of the journal Fascism for enabling the publication of this special issue.
For some standard references among many, see Akira Iriye, ‘Transnational History,’ Contemporary European History 13, no. 2 (2004): 211–222; Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining Transnationalism,’ Contemporary European History 14, no. 4 (2005): 421–439; Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
Iriye, ‘Transnational History,’ 213.
For pioneering transnational approaches to fascism, see, e.g., Sven Reichardt and Armin Nolzen, Faschismus in Italien und Deutschland: Studien zu Transfer und Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005); Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Ambiguities of Transnationalism: Fascism in Europe between Pan-Europeanism and Ultra-Nationalism 1919–1939,’ Bulletin of the German Historical Institute London 29, no. 2 (2007): 43–67; Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘In Search of a Transnational Historicization: National Socialism and Its Place in History,’ in Conflicted Memories, eds. Konrad H. Jarausch and Thomas Lindenberger (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 96–116; Arnd Bauerkämper, ‘Transnational Fascism: Cross-Border Relations between Regimes and Movements in Europe, 1922–1939,’ East Central Europe 37, no. 2–3 (2010): 214–246; and Constantin Iordachi, ‘Introduction: Fascism in Interwar East Central and Southeastern Europe: Toward a New Transnational Research Agenda,’ East Central Europe 37, no. 2–3 (2010): 161–213. For major, more recent contributions, see for example David D. Roberts, Fascist Interactions: Proposals for a New Approach to Fascism and Its Era, 1919–1945 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016); Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2017); Johannes Dafinger and Dieter Pohl, A New Nationalist Europe under Hitler: Concepts of Europe and Transnational Networks in the National Socialist Sphere of Influence, 1933–1945 (London and New York: Routledge, 2020).
Ángel Alcalde, ‘The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research,’ Contemporary European History 29, no. 2 (2020): 243–252.
Shelley Baranowski, ‘Authoritarianism and Fascism in Interwar Europe: Approaches and Legacies,’ The Journal of Modern History 94, no. 3 (2022): 648–672.
For some essential contributions, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History 1919–1933 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Daniel Laqua, ed., Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars, vol. 34 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011); Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).
For this point, see, e.g. Pasi Ihalainen and Antero Holmila, eds., Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined: A European History of Concepts (New York: Berghahn Books, 2022); Haakon A. Ikonomou et al., ‘Introduction: Scandinavian Internationalist Diplomacy,’ Diplomatica 5, no. 2 (2023): 197–199.
Ana Antic, Johanna Conterio, and Dora Vargha, ‘Conclusion: Beyond Liberal Internationalism,’ Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 359–371; David Motadel, ‘Nationalist Internationalism in the Modern Age,’ Contemporary European History 28, no. 1 (2019): 77–81; Philippa Hetherington and Glenda Sluga, ‘Liberal and Illiberal Internationalisms,’ Journal of World History 31, no. 1 (2020): 1–9.
Aspects of fascist internationalism are, among others, discussed in Griffin, Roger, ‘Europe for the Europeans: Fascist Myths of the European New Order 1922–1992,’ in A Fascist Century: Essays by Roger Griffin, ed. Matthew Feldman, 132–181 (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2008), 132–181; Monica Fioravanzo, ‘Die Europakonzeption von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (1939–1943),’ Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 58, no. 4 (2010): 509–541; Jens Steffek, ‘Fascist Internationalism,’ Millennium 44, no. 1 (2015): 3–22; Eric S. Roubinek, ‘A “Fascist” Colonialism? German National Socialist and Italian Fascist Colonial Cooperation, 1936–1943,’ in Nazi Germany and Southern Europe, 1933–1945: Science, Culture and Politics (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2016); Madeleine Herren, ‘Fascist Internationalism,’ in Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History, eds. Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 191–212; Benjamin Martin, ‘International Legal Cooperation in the Nazi-Fascist New Order,’ International Politics 55 (2018): 870–887; Sabrina Proschmann, Creating the ‘New Europe’ through Postal Services: Setting Postal Standards during World War II (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2022); Celestine S. Kunkeler and Martin Kristoffer Hamre, ‘Conceptions and Practices of International Fascism in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, 1930–1940,’ Journal of Contemporary History 57, no. 1 (2022): 45–67; Martin Kristoffer Hamre, ‘ “Nationalists of All Countries, Unite!”: Hans Keller and Nazi Internationalism in the 1930s,’ Contemporary European History (2022): 1–20,
Sabrina Proschmann, Frederik Forrai Ørskov, and Martin Kristoffer Hamre, ‘Conference Report: Rethinking Practices and Notions of Fascist Internationalism 1919–1945,’ H-Soz-Kult, March 26, 2022,
Cf. Jessica Reinisch, ‘Introduction: Agents of Internationalism,’ Contemporary European History 25, no. 2 (2016): 195–205.
Simon Lengemann, ‘Conference Report: Fascist Brokers: Transnational Networking in and beyond Europe,’ H-Soz-Kult, June 29, 2017,
E.g. Wolfgang Schieder, ‘Faschismus im politischen Transfer: Giuseppe Renzetti als faschistischer Propagandist und Geheimagent in Berlin 1922–1941,’ eds. Armin Nolzen and Sven Reichardt, in Faschismus in Italien und Deutschland: Studien zu Transfer und Vergleich (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2012), 28–58; Annarita Gori and Valeria Galimi, ‘Hybridizing Ideas in the Latin Space: Transnational Agents and Polycentric Cross-Border Networks,’ in Intellectuals in the Latin Space during the Era of Fascism: Crossing Borders, eds. Valeria Galimi and Annarita Gori (Abingdon: Routledge, 2020), 1–11.
Julie V. Gottlieb, Feminine Fascism: Women in Britain’s Fascist Movement 1923–1945 (London: I.B. Tauris, 2021), 4.
Andrea Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party: Invisible Hungarian Perpetrators in the Second World War (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 6.
Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (London: St Martin’s Press, 1987), 3.
Pető, The Women of the Arrow Cross Party, 7.
Ibid, 7–13.
E.g. Kye J. Allen, ‘ “A Pro-Fascist English Lady”: The International Thought of Muriel Innes Currey,’ Global Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1 (2023): 1–13.
Nils Fehlhaber, ‘Netzwerke der Achse Berlin-Rom’: Die Zusammenarbeit faschistischer und nationalsozialistischer Führungseliten 1933–1943 (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2019); Daniel Hedinger, Die Achse Berlin-Rom-Tokio 1919–1946 (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2021).
Herren, ‘Fascist Internationalism,’ 208.
Ibid.
Christoph Kühberger, ‘Europa als “Strahlenbündel nationaler Kräfte”: Zur Konzeption und Legitimation einer europäischen Zusammenarbeit auf der Gründungsfeierlichkeit des “Europäischen Jugendverbandes” 1942,’ Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Europäischen Integration 15, no. 2, (2009): 11–28; Benjamin G. Martin, The Nazi Fascist New Order for European Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2026); Valentine Aldebert, et al., Conflict in Cooperation: Crossborder Infrastructures in Europe Facing the Second World War (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 2022).
Roger Griffin, ‘Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies,’ Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 4, no. 1 (2015): 103–118,
E.g. Raul Cârstocea, ‘Native Fascists, Transnational Anti-Semites: The International Activity of Legionary Leader Ion I. Moţa,’ in Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945, eds. Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 216–242; Kunkeler and Hamre, ‘Conceptions and Practices of International Fascism.’; Allen, ‘ “A Pro-Fascist English Lady”.’
Cf. Aristotle Kallis, ‘Transnational Fascism: The Fascist New Order, Violence and Creative Destruction,’ in Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945, eds. Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 50; Roberts, Fascist Interactions.
On the ‘regional turn’, see T. Davies et al., ‘Rethinking Transnational Activism through Regional Perspectives: Reflections, Literatures and Cases,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (2024): 1–27.
For a recent critique of the ‘narrow pan-Europe paradigm’ in transnational fascism studies, see Aron Brouwer, ‘The Pan-Fascist Paradox: How Does a Nationalist-Minded Fascist Think Transnationally?,’ Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies 11, no. 1 (2022): 1–30,
Roberts, Fascist Interactions.
Roberts, Fascist Interactions, 188–219; Ørskov, ‘Three Settings for Nordic-German Cultural Relations.’
See, e.g., Roberts, Fascist Interactions; Marco Bresciani, ed., Conservatives and Right Radicals in Interwar Europe (London: Routledge, 2020); Dafinger and Pohl, A New Nationalist Europe under Hitler.
Cf. Baranowski, ‘Authoritarianism and Fascism in Interwar Europe,’ 655–659.
See also Gori and Galimi, ‘Hybridizing Ideas in the Latin Space.’
For one recent study skilfully addressing the effect of often unstated anti-communist sentiments in the era’s diplomatic relations, see Jonathan Haslam, The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2021).
E.g. Benjamin Zachariah, ‘A Voluntary Gleichschaltung? Indian Perspectives towards a non-Eurocentric Understanding of Fascism,’ The Journal of Transcultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2014): 63–100; Hedinger, Die Achse; Celestine S. Kunkeler, ‘A Dietsland Empire? The International and Transnational Dimensions of Dutch Fascism and the NSB, 1922–1942,’ Locus: Revista de História 28, no. 2 (2022): 124–145.
E.g. David Motadel, ‘The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire,’ The American Historical Review 124, no. 3 (2019): 843–877; Marin Ortiz, Anti-Colonialism and the Crises of Interwar Fascism (London: Bloomsbury, 2021); Tamir Bar-On and Miguel Paradela-López, ‘Antiimperialismo y anticolonialismo de la derecha radical: Una propuesta de categorización,’ Revista CIDOB d’afers internacionals 132 (2022): 93–121.