Fascism Beyond Germany and Italy
- NOTOC**
Fascism Beyond Germany and Italy
Fascism is most commonly associated with Benito Mussolini’s Italy and Adolf Hitler’s Germany. These two regimes were central to the development, radicalization, and destructive consequences of fascist politics, but they did not represent the full geographical or ideological range of the phenomenon. Fascist movements, authoritarian experiments, political networks, and related forms of ultranationalism emerged across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, North America, and Australia.
The global history of fascism reveals a political phenomenon that crossed national borders while adapting itself to local circumstances. Fascist activists exchanged propaganda, organizational models, racial theories, corporatist policies, paramilitary practices, religious ideas, and visions of national rebirth. Yet fascism was never reproduced identically from one country to another. Its development depended on local political institutions, religious traditions, colonial relationships, ethnic conflicts, class structures, military cultures, and experiences of war.
Studying fascism beyond Germany and Italy therefore requires both comparison and caution. Some movements closely resembled Italian Fascism or German National Socialism. Others incorporated selected fascist ideas into conservative dictatorships, military governments, religious-nationalist movements, colonial systems, or authoritarian coalitions. Scholars consequently distinguish among fully fascist movements, fascistized regimes, para-fascist organizations, radical-right parties, military dictatorships, collaborationist governments, and later neo-fascist or postfascist movements.
Fascism as a Transnational Movement
Fascism presented itself as intensely nationalist, but its supporters frequently cooperated across borders. Activists attended international conferences, translated ideological texts, exchanged propaganda, observed foreign dictatorships, and attempted to create alliances against liberalism, socialism, communism, and parliamentary democracy. Governments also sponsored cultural missions, youth exchanges, exhibitions, publications, and political organizations intended to spread fascist influence.
This international cooperation created a fundamental contradiction. Fascists proclaimed the superiority and independence of their own nations while simultaneously promoting a shared struggle for authoritarian renewal. International anticommunism helped bridge this contradiction by providing movements with a common enemy. Fascist organizations portrayed communism as a threat to religion, property, civilization, racial hierarchy, national unity, and traditional social authority.
The First World War and its aftermath supplied many of the conditions that encouraged fascist mobilization. Political instability, economic crisis, territorial disputes, fear of revolution, mass unemployment, and the social reintegration of military veterans weakened confidence in existing institutions. Paramilitary organizations transformed wartime identities into political activism, while fascist leaders promised discipline, national rebirth, social unity, and decisive leadership.
The international spread of fascist ideas did not automatically produce identical regimes. In some countries, established conservatives cooperated with fascists to weaken democracy but later restricted or absorbed them. Elsewhere, military officers, monarchists, religious authorities, and fascist activists competed for control of authoritarian governments. These relationships produced hybrid regimes in which fascist institutions coexisted with traditional elites and conservative forms of rule.
Spain, Portugal, Greece, and the Mediterranean
Spain’s Falange became one of the most influential fascist movements outside Italy and Germany. It promoted national syndicalism, political violence, masculine sacrifice, imperial nostalgia, Catholic identity, and the creation of a spiritually unified national community. During the Spanish Civil War, the Falange became part of Francisco Franco’s larger nationalist coalition.
Franco’s dictatorship incorporated fascist symbols, organizations, labor institutions, propaganda, and methods of political mobilization. Nevertheless, Franco subordinated the Falange to a broader coalition that included monarchists, military officers, conservative Catholics, landowners, and traditional elites. The regime gradually moved away from revolutionary fascist mobilization toward bureaucratic authoritarianism, economic developmentalism, and conservative Catholic rule.
Women’s organizations played an important role in Falangist attempts to transform everyday life. They promoted motherhood, domestic service, political loyalty, religious morality, and gendered forms of national duty. Spanish fascist women also maintained international contacts, although their ideological commitments were frequently constrained by Franco’s diplomatic priorities.
Portugal’s Estado Novo similarly combined corporatism, Catholic conservatism, nationalism, censorship, political policing, and authoritarian labor discipline. Debate continues over whether the entire Portuguese system should be classified as fascist or as a conservative authoritarian regime influenced by fascism. Its institutions nevertheless became models for political movements and governments in Spain, Brazil, and other parts of the Portuguese-speaking and Latin American worlds.
In Greece, the dictatorship established by Ioannis Metaxas in 1936 borrowed elements from European fascism, including youth mobilization, the cult of leadership, censorship, corporatist ambitions, anticommunism, gender regulation, and the promise of a new civilization. The regime promoted a “Third Hellenic Civilization” intended to connect ancient Greece, Byzantium, and modern authoritarian nationalism. However, its dependence on the monarchy and established conservative institutions complicates its classification as a fully fascist regime.
Malta and other smaller Mediterranean societies also developed fascist sympathies and organizations. These movements generally remained politically limited, demonstrating that cultural influence and ideological imitation did not necessarily produce successful mass parties or dictatorships.
Northern and Western Europe
Fascist and fascist-influenced movements appeared throughout Britain, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Their relative weakness compared with the German and Italian movements did not make them politically insignificant. They contributed to street violence, antisemitism, political polarization, authoritarian propaganda, and attacks on democratic institutions.
Britain’s most prominent organization was the British Union of Fascists. It combined nationalism, corporatism, antisemitism, uniforms, mass rallies, and confrontational street politics. Its efforts were restricted by electoral weakness, public opposition, internal divisions, and government intervention. British socialists, communists, trade unionists, Jewish organizations, and local community groups developed diverse forms of resistance.
Ireland’s Blueshirts used uniforms, marches, nationalist symbolism, Catholic corporatism, and disciplined public performance. Scholars continue to debate whether the movement was fully fascist, para-fascist, or an authoritarian conservative response to republican and socialist politics. Its women’s auxiliary promoted activism while rejecting feminist challenges to conventional gender roles.
France contained numerous leagues, intellectual circles, veterans’ organizations, and radical-nationalist movements. Some adopted unmistakably fascist ideas, while others remained attached to monarchism, Catholic traditionalism, or conservative authoritarianism. Similar disputes surround Belgium’s Rexist movement and the Dutch National Socialist Movement, both of which later became associated with collaboration under German occupation.
Nordic fascist movements participated in international networks despite their emphasis on national and racial distinctiveness. Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish, and Dutch activists discussed a shared Nordic or European destiny and promoted military sacrifice, anticommunism, racial nationalism, and cultural regeneration. Finnish conservatives at times cooperated with radical nationalists but also resisted attempts to dismantle parliamentary government.
The survival of Scandinavian democracies illustrates the importance of political institutions and coalition-building. Agreements among democratic parties helped reduce polarization, address economic grievances, and isolate authoritarian forces. Fascism did not succeed merely because a society experienced crisis; its growth also depended on whether established elites and institutions enabled, resisted, or absorbed radical movements.
Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe
Central and Eastern Europe produced some of the most radical fascist and fascist-influenced movements outside Germany. The collapse of empires, contested borders, ethnic conflict, antisemitism, agrarian inequality, political violence, and fears of communism created conditions favorable to ultranationalist mobilization.
Romania’s Iron Guard combined fascism with Orthodox Christian mysticism, antisemitism, martyrdom, paramilitary discipline, charismatic leadership, and revolutionary nationalism. Legionary activists treated political violence as a sacred act and celebrated fallen members as religious martyrs. The organization promoted a spiritually regenerated Romanian nation purified of alleged internal enemies.
The Iron Guard’s treatment of women revealed the contradictions within fascist gender politics. Women could be praised as militants, soldiers, organizers, and sacrificial members of the national community. At the same time, the movement insisted that their ultimate social role remained motherhood, domestic service, and obedience within a patriarchal order.
Croatia’s Ustaša developed from an exile-based terrorist organization into the ruling movement of the Independent State of Croatia during the Second World War. It combined revolutionary violence, ethnic nationalism, authoritarian state-building, and genocidal persecution. The movement borrowed from Italian and German examples but adapted fascism to Croatian territorial ambitions and conflicts within Yugoslavia.
Slovakia’s wartime regime fused Catholic nationalism, authoritarian state-building, antisemitic persecution, and cooperation with the Axis. Religious language and political authority became closely connected, demonstrating how fascistization could operate through local clerical and nationalist institutions rather than simply reproducing German National Socialism.
Hungary, Austria, Latvia, Ukraine, Serbia, and other parts of the region developed their own radical-right and fascist currents. These included the Hungarian Arrow Cross, Austrian National Socialism, Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts, veterans’ movements, paramilitary patrols, separatist organizations, and post-Yugoslav neo-fascist groups. Their histories show the importance of ethnic nationalism, territorial revisionism, political symbolism, and the public performance of violence.
Fascism in this region frequently overlapped with conservative dictatorship, monarchy, military rule, religious nationalism, and collaboration with foreign occupation. The boundaries between movements and regimes were often unstable. Fascist activists could move from marginal opposition into state power, while governments could selectively employ fascist organizations without surrendering authority to them.
Fascism, Empire, and Asia
The classification of Japan’s prewar political order remains one of the major debates in comparative fascism studies. Japan developed militarism, emperor-centered nationalism, mass mobilization, political repression, imperial expansion, economic coordination, and visions of a spiritually unified national community. These characteristics resembled European fascism, but Japan lacked a single successful fascist party equivalent to those led by Mussolini or Hitler.
Some scholars therefore describe Japan as fascist, while others emphasize its distinctive monarchy, bureaucracy, military institutions, and imperial traditions. The debate demonstrates the difficulty of applying concepts created from European cases to political systems with different historical foundations.
Japanese imperial expansion connected fascism with colonial rule in Manchuria and other occupied territories. State planners promoted industrial development, racial hierarchy, disciplined labor, settlement, military authority, and claims of Asian unity. The Italian Blackshirt mission to Japan’s empire revealed both the symbolism of Axis cooperation and the rival imperial ambitions that limited genuine unity.
Public exhibitions, architecture, sport, education, and mass culture helped present Japanese imperialism as modern, disciplined, and historically inevitable. These cultural institutions encouraged obedience and normalized expansionist ideas without relying solely on formal party organization.
Fascist influence also appeared in late-colonial Indonesia, where some nationalist and collaborationist circles selectively adopted authoritarian organization, mass spectacle, and corporatist ideas. Such borrowing did not mean that anti-colonial nationalism was inherently fascist. It instead demonstrates how political actors facing colonial rule experimented with competing international models.
Asian intellectuals and activists also contributed to global anti-fascism. Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and other anti-colonial writers interpreted fascism through the experiences of empire, racism, and foreign occupation. For many, European fascism represented the extension into Europe of violence and racial hierarchy already practiced in colonial territories.
Fascism and the Latin American Right
Latin America became an important region for the circulation and adaptation of fascist ideas. European immigrant communities, Catholic nationalist intellectuals, military officers, anticommunist organizations, and local mass movements participated in transatlantic ideological networks.
Brazilian Integralism became the largest organized fascist movement in Latin America. Led by Plínio Salgado, it used uniforms, mass rallies, corporatist proposals, religious symbolism, anticommunism, nationalism, and a hierarchical understanding of social unity. Integralists borrowed from European fascism while presenting their movement as an expression of Brazilian history, Christianity, racial identity, and national conditions.
Relations between the Integralists and Getúlio Vargas’s Estado Novo shifted between cooperation and conflict. Both opposed liberal democracy and promoted centralized national authority, but Vargas ultimately suppressed the movement when it threatened his control. This illustrates how authoritarian governments could adopt fascist methods while eliminating independent fascist organizations.
Argentina developed Catholic nationalist, antisemitic, corporatist, military-authoritarian, and explicitly fascist currents. Argentine activists maintained connections with Spain, Italy, and other European movements. After the Second World War, networks of European fascists and collaborators found refuge or support in parts of Argentine society.
Chile also produced a National Socialist movement that combined European influences with local nationalism, generational revolt, social reform, and anti-oligarchic rhetoric. Its political direction changed over time, revealing that fascist movements were not always ideologically static and could compete for working-class and middle-class support.
Contemporary debates over Bolsonarism and other radical-right movements raise questions about the relationship between historical fascism, authoritarian populism, military nostalgia, religious nationalism, gender resentment, and neo-fascist organization. Similarities should be examined carefully without assuming that every modern authoritarian movement is identical to interwar fascism.
Africa, Colonialism, and Anti-Fascism
African perspectives challenge histories that treat fascism as an exclusively European development. Colonial regimes had already employed racial classification, forced labor, collective punishment, territorial conquest, political exclusion, and claims of civilizational superiority. Black intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois connected the rise of European fascism to imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, and the global color line.
South Africa became a significant site of fascist sympathy, Afrikaner nationalism, wartime authoritarianism, and anti-fascist organization. Groups such as the Ossewabrandwag mobilized resentment against British power, supported forms of authoritarian nationalism, and drew inspiration from European fascist movements.
Rural violence, local strongmen, racial segregation, and nationalist mass organization contributed to political developments that preceded apartheid. These connections do not mean that apartheid can simply be reduced to European fascism. They demonstrate the interaction of settler colonialism, white supremacy, authoritarian nationalism, and international radical-right ideas.
South African anti-fascism drew from liberal, socialist, communist, labor, Jewish, Black internationalist, and African nationalist traditions. Anti-fascist activism was complicated by the fact that the South African state opposed Nazi Germany while continuing to enforce racial domination at home. Wartime security policies directed against fascist sympathizers could also be used to strengthen state repression more broadly.
Anti-colonial movements elsewhere faced difficult strategic choices during the Second World War. Some viewed the Axis powers as potential allies against European empires, while others recognized fascism as another expression of imperial domination. These dilemmas reveal the global complexity of resistance during an era in which colonial and fascist powers competed for influence.
Fascism in North America and Australia
The United States developed numerous fascist, fascist-influenced, and authoritarian movements during the interwar period. These included the Silver Shirts, antisemitic organizations, racial-nationalist groups, Christian extremists, and movements influenced by European dictatorships.
American fascism remained fragmented and did not establish a successful national party. Nevertheless, its supporters drew on domestic traditions of white supremacy, nativism, conspiracy theories, antisemitism, settler colonialism, and political violence. Fascist ideas were therefore not merely foreign imports; they could be adapted to existing American racial and political traditions.
Reactions to European fascism varied regionally. Some American observers admired its defense of hierarchy, segregation, anticommunism, and authoritarian leadership. Others viewed it as a direct threat to constitutional government. Public exhibitions such as the 1939 New York World’s Fair became arenas in which fascist and democratic states promoted competing visions of technology, society, and modernity.
Canada produced fascist leaders and organizations, including movements associated with Adrien Arcand. Canadian fascism drew from antisemitism, Catholic nationalism, racial hierarchy, and transnational political connections. Toronto and other cities also witnessed organized anti-fascist resistance.
German-Canadian and other radical-right networks demonstrate how fascist memory, historical misinformation, and extremist political cultures can persist across generations. Contemporary scholarship examines these continuities without treating every form of illiberalism or right-wing populism as fascist.
Australia’s New Guard combined anticommunism, nationalism, authoritarian leadership, paramilitary organization, and hostility toward parliamentary politics. Historians disagree about whether it should be classified as fully fascist, but its ideology contained significant similarities to international fascist movements. Jewish, labor, socialist, and other organizations participated in Australian anti-fascist campaigns.
Political Religion, Gender, Race, and the “New Nation”
Despite their differences, fascist movements shared recurring ideological patterns. One was the promise of national rebirth following an alleged period of humiliation, decadence, division, or decline. Fascists presented the nation as an organic community whose survival required discipline, sacrifice, unity, and the removal of enemies.
Fascist politics frequently took on the characteristics of a political religion. Movements created sacred myths, rituals, martyrs, symbols, uniforms, songs, marches, and cults of leadership. Political struggle became a moral battle between national salvation and total destruction.
Gender was central to these projects. Fascist movements celebrated militarized masculinity, physical strength, obedience, fatherhood, and the willingness to commit violence. Women were generally assigned responsibility for reproduction, motherhood, domestic order, racial continuity, and the moral education of children. Some women gained public roles as organizers and activists, but these opportunities remained constrained by patriarchal ideology.
Racial and ethnic exclusion varied among movements but remained a common element of fascist politics. Antisemitism, colonial racism, white supremacy, ethnic purification, and conspiracy theories transformed minorities into alleged threats to national unity. Fascist movements often portrayed persecution as a defensive necessity rather than an act of aggression.
The fascist “new nation” was therefore not simply a patriotic community. It was a hierarchical political project that defined belonging through obedience, ethnicity, race, religion, gender, and willingness to sacrifice for the state or movement.
Propaganda, Culture, and Everyday Life
Fascism operated through more than political parties and police institutions. It attempted to transform culture, architecture, education, leisure, family life, sport, work, sexuality, and public space.
Architecture and urban planning projected authority, permanence, hierarchy, and collective unity. Monumental buildings and carefully organized public spaces made dictatorship appear modern, orderly, and historically destined. Debates surrounding architects such as Le Corbusier demonstrate the complicated relationship between modernist design and authoritarian politics.
Mass rallies, uniforms, collective singing, films, photographs, exhibitions, newspapers, radio programs, and youth organizations created emotional communities. These activities made political belonging visible and encouraged participants to experience themselves as members of a disciplined national movement.
Corporatist labor systems promised cooperation between workers and employers while suppressing independent unions and class conflict. Fascist rhetoric praised labor as service to the nation, but workers were denied the freedom to organize against state and employer authority.
Intellectuals also contributed to fascist normalization. Writers, academics, journalists, lawyers, clergy, artists, and cultural critics translated radical ideas into respectable language. By presenting exclusion, dictatorship, and political violence as solutions to social crisis, they helped move fascist concepts from the political margins toward mainstream debate.
Anti-Fascism as a Global Movement
Fascism generated diverse forms of resistance wherever it appeared. Anti-fascism included parliamentary opposition, labor organizing, community defense, journalism, underground networks, military resistance, cultural production, and international solidarity.
Socialists and communists played major roles in early transnational anti-fascist campaigns, but they were not the only participants. Liberals, conservatives, religious organizations, minority communities, feminists, artists, athletes, intellectuals, and anti-colonial activists also opposed fascist movements.
Jewish communities were especially important in organizing resistance to antisemitic movements in Europe, North America, Australia, and elsewhere. Their activism challenged both organized fascism and the broader social prejudices that allowed extremist movements to gain legitimacy.
Anti-fascist coalitions often faced internal disagreements. Participants differed over capitalism, colonialism, communism, democracy, religion, nationalism, and the use of political violence. These conflicts sometimes weakened resistance, but they also demonstrate that anti-fascism was a broad and contested political culture rather than a single unified ideology.
Global anti-fascist history also reveals the limitations of governments that opposed the Axis while maintaining colonial rule, racial segregation, or authoritarian practices. Defeating fascist states did not automatically dismantle the political and social hierarchies that had helped make fascism possible.
Fascism after 1945
The military defeat of the Axis did not eliminate fascist ideology. Former activists created exile networks, entered other political organizations, preserved propaganda, revised their public identities, and transmitted ideas to later generations.
Some postwar groups continued to identify openly with fascism or National Socialism. Others adopted new labels and emphasized anticommunism, white power, cultural nationalism, religious traditionalism, immigration, or opposition to multiculturalism. This process contributed to the development of neo-fascist, postfascist, and broader radical-right movements.
Historical memory became an important political battleground. Monuments, graves, public ceremonies, museums, school curricula, and commemorations could condemn fascist violence, minimize collaboration, rehabilitate former leaders, or transform perpetrators into national heroes.
Digital media have expanded the circulation of fascist symbols, conspiracy theories, historical misinformation, and extremist subcultures. At the same time, digital archives and new research methods have made it easier for scholars and the public to examine international networks that were previously difficult to reconstruct.
The concept of fascism must therefore be applied carefully to contemporary politics. Overuse can obscure important distinctions among conservatism, populism, authoritarianism, military rule, religious nationalism, and revolutionary fascism. Excessively narrow definitions, however, can make it difficult to recognize the survival or adaptation of fascist ideas.
Conclusion
Fascism was neither an exclusively German and Italian phenomenon nor a political model that spread unchanged across the world. It was a transnational family of movements, ideas, practices, and regimes shaped by local histories and international exchanges.
Across different societies, fascists promised national rebirth, unity, discipline, hierarchy, and liberation from alleged internal and external enemies. They used propaganda, political religion, paramilitary organization, gender regulation, racial exclusion, corporatism, imperialism, and violence to challenge democratic institutions and redefine citizenship.
The global record also demonstrates that fascism’s success was never inevitable. Its growth depended on political crises, institutional weakness, elite cooperation, social prejudice, and the willingness of conservative authorities to normalize or employ extremist movements. Where democratic parties, labor organizations, minority communities, journalists, intellectuals, and civil-society groups built effective coalitions, fascist movements could be restricted or defeated.
Examining fascism beyond Germany and Italy provides a fuller understanding of how authoritarian ideas travel, how they are adapted to different political cultures, and how movements centered on exclusion can present themselves as projects of national renewal. It also reveals the international history of those who resisted fascism and defended pluralism, equality, democratic government, and human dignity.
- TOC**
Comparative and Transnational Fascism
The Fascist Zenith
| António Costa Pinto | Cambridge Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism | 2025
Maps the worldwide high point of fascist movements and dictatorships, emphasizing diffusion, adaptation, and regime diversity across continents.
Whither Fascism? Fascist Studies in the Digital Age
| Helen Roche and Paul Jackson | Fascism | 2025
Reviews the development of comparative fascism studies and considers how digital archives, online extremism, and new research methods are changing the field.
Three Reflections on New Directions in Comparative Fascism Studies
| Roger Griffin, Aristotle Kallis, and Constantin Iordachi | Fascism | 2025
Presents three scholarly perspectives on the geographic expansion, conceptual boundaries, and future direction of comparative fascism research.
Fascist Transnationalism
| Daniele Toro | Fascism | 2024
Examines how fascists constructed international networks while attempting to reconcile cooperation across borders with exclusionary nationalism.
The ‘New Catholicity’ of Fascism
| Simone Muraca | Fascism | 2024
Investigates fascist efforts to portray their ideology as a universal political faith capable of transcending individual national movements.
The Duce’s Cheerleaders and the Führer’s Vanguard
| Flavia Citrigno | Fascism | 2024
Compares the organizations, rhetoric, and public activities that promoted Italian Fascism and German National Socialism beyond their home countries.
Crusade against Bolshevism
| Jonas Bressler | Fascism | 2024
Explores how international anticommunism provided fascist movements with a common language of religious warfare, civilization, and European solidarity.
Was There a Resistance Fascism?
| Javier Rodrigo and Joan Pubill | Fascism | 2024
Investigates fascist activists who adopted resistance rhetoric and revolutionary identities during the decline and defeat of the Axis.
Building the European ‘New Order’
| António Costa Pinto | Fascism | 2023
Analyzes competing fascist and authoritarian proposals for restructuring Europe through corporatism, dictatorship, imperial hierarchy, and Axis leadership.
Latinism and Hispanism in the Hispano-American Right in Interwar Spain and Argentina
| Maximiliano Fuentes Codera | Fascism | 2023
Traces ideological exchanges between Spanish and Argentine nationalists who used Latin and Hispanic identity to support authoritarian internationalism.
Ghostbusting Fascism?
| Roger Griffin | Fascism | 2022
Challenges interpretations that treat fascism only as a dead historical phenomenon and examines its ideological survival after 1945.
The Pan-Fascist Paradox
| Aron Brouwer | Fascism | 2022
Explains the contradiction between fascism’s radical nationalism and repeated attempts to organize international fascist cooperation.
The Transnational Co-production of Interwar ‘Fascism’
| Aristotle Kallis | European History Quarterly | 2021
Explains how activists, observers, and political rivals collectively produced fascism as a transnational category rather than a purely national phenomenon.
The Spread of Fascist Movements – Yet of Authoritarian Regimes
| Kurt Weyland | Assault on Democracy | 2021
Distinguishes the international spread of fascist movements from the broader proliferation of conservative and military authoritarian regimes.
Conservative–Fascist Relations and the Autocratic Reverse Wave
| Kurt Weyland | Assault on Democracy | 2021
Analyzes how cooperation and conflict between traditional conservatives and fascists shaped interwar democratic breakdowns.
Fascism and Transnational Social Movements
| Tomislav Dulić | Fascism | 2021
Places fascist organizations within the wider study of transnational social movements, political diffusion, and cross-border activism.
Debate: Decolonising Fascist Studies
| Liam Liburd and Paul Jackson | Fascism | 2021
Argues for greater attention to empire, colonial violence, race, and non-European political experiences within fascism studies.
Nationalist Internationalism in the Modern Age
| David Motadel | Contemporary European History | 2019
Explores how intensely nationalist movements participated in international alliances, congresses, ideological exchanges, and shared campaigns.
Comparative Fascist Studies and the Transnational Turn
| Nick Warmuth | Fascism | 2019
Evaluates how transnational history has altered conventional comparisons of fascist parties, regimes, and political cultures.
The Imperial Nexus: The Second World War and the Axis in Global Perspective
| Daniel Hedinger | Journal of Global History | 2017
Reinterprets the Axis as an interconnected imperial project linking European and Asian expansionism.
Global Fascism: Geography, Timing, Support, and Strategy
| Michael Mann | Journal of Global History | 2017
Compares where fascism gained traction, when it peaked, which groups supported it, and how its strategies varied.
The Fascist New–Old Order
| Reto Hofmann | Journal of Global History | 2017
Examines fascist visions of a supposedly revolutionary international order built from hierarchy, empire, and civilizational blocs.
Fascism’s Missionary Ideology and the Autocratic Wave of the Interwar Years
| Kurt Weyland | Democratization | 2017
Argues that fascism spread through ideological emulation and active promotion while producing varied authoritarian outcomes.
Editorial Introduction: War Veterans and Fascism
| Kristian Mennen and Wim van Meurs | Fascism | 2017
Introduces comparative research on how veterans’ grievances, combat identities, and paramilitary cultures contributed to fascist mobilization.
Fascism’s Modernist Revolution
| Roger Griffin | Fascism | 2016
Interprets fascism as a revolutionary form of modernism seeking national rebirth rather than simply restoring a traditional social order.
Fascism and the Right in Interwar Europe: Interaction, Entanglement, Hybridity
| Aristotle Kallis | The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914–1945 | 2015
Shows how fascist and conservative-right movements borrowed from, competed with, and transformed one another across Europe.
Decentering Comparative Fascist Studies
| Roger Griffin | Fascism | 2015
Calls for comparative fascism research that moves beyond an exclusive focus on Italy, Germany, and Western European political development.
When Fascism Became Mainstream
| Aristotle Kallis | Fascism | 2015
Examines how fascist ideas entered mainstream political culture through normalization, imitation, coalition-building, and collaboration with established elites.
‘Fascism … but with an Open Mind’
| Nigel Copsey | Fascism | 2013
Examines debates over flexible definitions of fascism and the danger of either stretching or narrowing the concept excessively.
Comparisons and Definitions
| Robert O. Paxton | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Reviews comparative definitions and explains why fascism must be studied through political behavior, development, and national variation.
Studying Fascism in a Postfascist Age
| Roger Griffin | Fascism | 2012
Discusses how scholars can distinguish historical fascism from later radical-right, neo-fascist, and postfascist movements.
Refining the Concept of Generic Fascism
| Andreas Umland | European History Quarterly | 2009
Assesses competing theories of generic fascism and proposes clearer boundaries for cross-national comparison.
The ‘Regime-Model’ of Fascism: A Typology
| Aristotle A. Kallis | European History Quarterly | 2000
Develops a typology for distinguishing fascist regimes from movements, authoritarian dictatorships, and hybrid political systems.
Spain and Portugal
‘Joy at Work’, or the Portuguese Fascism
| Raquel Varela and Roberto della Santa | Critique | 2025
Examines labor ideology and corporatist discipline under Portugal’s Estado Novo as features of a fascist social project.
‘The Falange Changed Our Way of Being Completely’: Women and Gender Identity in Spanish Fascism
| Ángela Cenarro | European History Quarterly | 2023
Uses women’s experiences to show how Falangism reshaped gender identity, political belonging, and everyday conduct.
Cultural Intervention in the Spanish Civil War: A Comparative Analysis of Nazi and Fascist Propaganda
| Mercedes Peñalba-Sotorrío | Journal of Contemporary History | 2023
Compares German and Italian cultural propaganda in Spain and the competing goals behind Axis intervention.
Francisco Franco Is Back: The Contested Reemergence of a Fascist Moral Exemplar
| Francisco Ferrándiz | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 2022
Explores how Franco’s remains, memory, and symbolic afterlife became sites of renewed political conflict.
Extreme-Right Violence in the Portuguese Transition to Democracy
| Riccardo Marchi and Raquel da Silva | Fascism | 2022
Examines bombings, clandestine organizations, and counterrevolutionary violence during Portugal’s turbulent transition from dictatorship to democracy.
Pluralism at the Twilight of Franco’s Spain
| Louie Dean Valencia-García | Fascism | 2020
Examines political, cultural, and generational divisions that emerged within Spain as the Franco dictatorship approached its end.
Late Spanish Fascists in a Changing World: Latin American Communists and East European Reformism, 1956–1975
| Miguel Ángel Ruiz Carnicer | Contemporary European History | 2019
Shows how late Francoist fascists interpreted decolonization, communism, and reform while trying to preserve ideological relevance.
Spanish Fascist Women’s Transnational Relations during the Second World War: Between Ideology and Realpolitik
| Toni Morant i Ariño | Journal of Contemporary History | 2019
Traces Falangist women’s international networks and the tension between fascist solidarity and Spanish diplomatic interests.
‘The Founders of a European Era’? The Fascist and Falangist Plans for Italy and Spain in the New Nazi Order
| Giorgia Priorelli | Modern Italy | 2019
Reconstructs competing Italian Fascist and Spanish Falangist plans for status and influence in an Axis-dominated Europe.
Before the Altar of the Fatherland: Catholicism, the Politics of Modernization, and Nationalization during the Spanish Civil War
| Miguel Ángel del Arco Blanco | European History Quarterly | 2018
Examines how Catholic ritual and nationalist mobilization helped construct Francoist political community during the Civil War.
On Fascistization: Mussolini’s Political Project for Franco’s Spain
| Javier Rodrigo | Modern Italy | 2017
Analyzes Italian attempts to fascistize Francoist Spain and the limits imposed by Spanish political realities.
The Contact between Fascist Elements in Spain and Italy, 1945–1968
| Matteo Albanese | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2014
Documents postwar networks that connected Spanish and Italian fascists after the defeat of the Axis.
Spain
| Mary Vincent | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Surveys Spanish fascist organizations, the Civil War, Franco’s coalition, and the contested fascist character of the dictatorship.
Spanish Fascism as a Political Religion (1931–1941)
| Zira Box and Ismael Saz | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2011
Interprets Falangism through myths, rituals, sacrifice, and sacred national community.
Fascism, Fascistization and Developmentalism in Franco’s Dictatorship
| Ismael Saz Campos | Social History | 2004
Explains shifts from fascist mobilization toward authoritarian developmentalism without erasing fascism’s institutional legacy.
Route Maps and Landscapes: Historians, ‘Fascist Studies’ and the Spanish Case
| Martin Blinkhorn | Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions | 2004
Reviews debates over whether and how Francoism and the Falange fit comparative models of fascism.
Falange Española and the Creation of the Francoist ‘New State’
| Sheelagh M. Ellwood | European History Quarterly | 1990
Explains the Falange’s role in constructing Franco’s state and its subordination within the victorious authoritarian coalition.
Greece and Malta
Greece under Crown and Swastika
| Hagen Fleischer | The Oxford Handbook of Modern Greek History | 2025
Surveys dictatorship, Axis occupation, collaboration, resistance, and civil conflict in wartime Greece.
Editorial Introduction: Re-assessing the Metaxas Dictatorship
| Aristotle Kallis and George Souvlis | Fascism | 2022
Introduces new scholarship reconsidering the ideology, institutions, social policies, and fascist influences of the Greek Metaxas regime.
Ideological Forerunners of Metaxas’s Regime
| Aikaterini Papari | Fascism | 2022
Identifies intellectual and political traditions that prepared the ground for the authoritarian Fourth of August regime in Greece.
International Fascism and the Allure of the ‘Third Way’ in Interwar Greece
| Aristotle Kallis | Fascism | 2022
Explores Greek interest in fascism as an alternative to parliamentary liberalism, communism, and conventional conservative government.
Genuine Fascist Theory or Non-Systematic Conceptualisations of the New Authoritarian Order?
| George Souvlis | Fascism | 2022
Evaluates whether the Metaxas dictatorship developed a coherent fascist ideology or assembled a looser collection of authoritarian ideas.
Women and Femininity under the Metaxas Regime in Greece
| Rosa Vasilaki | Fascism | 2022
Analyzes state ideals of motherhood, femininity, domestic service, youth mobilization, and women’s national responsibilities.
What’s in a Name? The Third Hellenic Civilisation
| Yannis Stamos | Fascism | 2022
Examines the Metaxas regime’s claim to create a Third Hellenic Civilization uniting ancient Greece, Byzantium, and modern authoritarian nationalism.
Libido, Psychic Eugenics and Abnormality
| Demetra Tzanaki | Fascism | 2022
Investigates Greek authoritarian ideas about sexuality, psychological normality, biological improvement, and the disciplined national body.
From the ‘Nobleman’s Sword’ to the ‘Flag of the Fascist Ideals’
| Vassilios A. Bogiatzis | Fascism | 2022
Traces the transformation of Greek conservative and aristocratic imagery into explicitly fascist political symbolism.
A Root Which Never Grew
| Mark Camilleri | Fascism | 2021
Examines the limited but significant fascist sympathies and organizations that appeared in Malta before the Second World War.
The Political and Diplomatic Background to the Metaxas Dictatorship, 1935–36
| Harry Cliadakis | Journal of Contemporary History | 1979
Reconstructs the domestic and diplomatic conditions that enabled Ioannis Metaxas to establish dictatorship in Greece.
Northern and Western Europe
Style over Substance? The Blueshirts and Transnational Fascist Culture
| Tim Ellis-Dale and Séan Donnelly | Irish Studies Review | 2024
Reassesses Ireland’s Blueshirts through uniforms, performance, symbolism, and participation in transnational fascist culture.
Finland and Military Volunteers in the Swedish Fascist Imaginary, 1809–1944
| Celestine S. Kunkeler | The Historical Journal | 2023
Shows how Swedish fascists used Finland and military volunteerism to imagine race, masculinity, and Nordic destiny.
Conceptions and Practices of International Fascism in Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands, 1930–40
| Celestine S. Kunkeler and Martin Kristoffer Hamre | Journal of Contemporary History | 2022
Compares how activists in three countries imagined international fascist cooperation before the Second World War.
When the Medium Is Not the Message
| Fredrik Wilhelmsen | Fascism | 2022
Studies the circulation of Norwegian fascist ideology across print, organizations, and digital media while distinguishing content from communication technology.
From New Order to the Millennium of White Power: Norwegian Fascism Between Party Politics and Lone-Actor Terrorism
| Fredrik Wilhelmsen | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2021
Traces continuities and transformations in Norwegian fascism from organized parties to postwar white-power terrorism.
From Allies to Opponents: Conservatives Facing Fascism in Finland
| Vesa Vares | Scandinavian Journal of History | 2021
Explores how Finnish conservatives initially cooperated with radical nationalists and later resisted fascist pressure.
The End of the Affair: The International Dispute over the Expulsion of Léon Degrelle from Spain, 1945–1946
| Pablo del Hierro | The International History Review | 2021
Examines the diplomatic struggle over Belgian collaborationist leader Léon Degrelle’s refuge in Francoist Spain.
Michael Tierney and the Intellectual Origins of Blueshirtism, 1920–1938
| Seán Donnelly | Fascism | 2021
Explores the Catholic, corporatist, nationalist, and European influences that shaped Irish Blueshirt political thought.
Federalist Fascism: The New Right and the French Revolution
| Nicolai von Eggers | Fascism | 2021
Analyzes French New Right attempts to reconcile ethnic regionalism, European federalism, hierarchy, and fascist political traditions.
‘Mediterraneo Baltico’: Italian Fascist Propaganda in Finland (1933–9)
| Fabio Ferrarini | Modern Italy | 2020
Analyzes Italian propaganda efforts to present fascism as compatible with Finnish nationalism and Baltic geopolitical concerns.
Reconsidering the Crisis Agreements of the 1930s
| Kristoffer Krake | Contemporary European History | 2020
Compares Scandinavian political agreements that reduced polarization and helped democratic governments resist fascist and authoritarian challenges.
Looking for a Dream, Surviving a Time of Nightmares
| Iker Itoiz Ciáurriz | Fascism | 2020
Examines how Eric Hobsbawm and Marxism Today reinterpreted anti-fascism amid Thatcherism, political defeat, and the transformation of the British left.
The Fascist Who Fought for World Peace
| Johan Stenfeldt | Fascism | 2019
Examines a Scandinavian fascist whose advocacy of international peace illustrates the ideological contradictions within fascist internationalism.
Making Anti-Fascism Transnational
| Kasper Braskén | Contemporary European History | 2016
Traces the early development of cross-border socialist and communist campaigns against Italian Fascism during the 1920s.
‘Home, Religion, Fatherland’
| Oula Silvennoinen | Fascism | 2015
Studies Finnish radical nationalism and the interaction of religion, anticommunism, paramilitary activism, and ideas of national rebirth.
Ikea Fascism
| Henrik Arnstad | Fascism | 2015
Discusses the normalization and commercialization of radical nationalist imagery within Swedish historical memory and popular culture.
‘No Suggestion of Suffragettism’: The Blue Blouses in Ireland, 1933–1936
| Dale Montgomery | Women’s History Review | 2014
Studies the women’s auxiliary of the Blueshirts and its conservative approach to gender, activism, and national service.
Fascism for the British Audience
| Lewis Young | Fascism | 2014
Examines how fascist ideas were translated, moderated, and marketed to British readers and political audiences.
Debunking the ‘Myth of the Volunteers’
| Martin R. Gutmann | Contemporary European History | 2013
Challenges romanticized accounts of foreign Waffen-SS volunteers by examining recruitment, coercion, professional ambition, and military bureaucracy.
France
| Joan Tumblety | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Surveys French leagues, collaboration, political culture, and the enduring debate over the strength of indigenous French fascism.
Belgium
| Bruno De Wever | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Examines Rexism, Flemish nationalism, occupation collaboration, and the social bases of Belgian fascist politics.
The Netherlands
| Bob Moore | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Explores the Dutch National Socialist Movement, collaboration, occupation, and the constraints on fascist growth.
Britain and Its Empire
| Martin Pugh | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Assesses the British Union of Fascists, imperial ideology, political violence, and the movement’s limited electoral appeal.
Fascism in France? (1934–1940)
| Kevin Passmore | The Right in France from the Third Republic to Vichy | 2012
Evaluates whether French right-wing leagues and mass movements crossed the boundary into fascism.
Introduction: Fighting Fascism—the British Left and the Rise of Fascism, 1919–39
| Keith Hodgson | Fighting Fascism | 2011
Introduces the varied ways British socialists, communists, trade unionists, and local activists confronted fascism.
The Left and Fascism in Britain, 1919–32
| Keith Hodgson | Fighting Fascism | 2011
Explores early British left-wing interpretations of fascism before the British Union of Fascists reached national prominence.
The Rise and Fall of Fascism
| A. W. Brian Simpson | The Struggle for Civil Liberties | 2001
Examines British fascism and the legal, administrative, and civil-liberties controversies surrounding state responses.
The Blueshirts in the Irish Free State, 1932–1935: The Nature of Socialist, Republican and Governmental Opposition
| Mike Cronin | Opposing Fascism | 1999
Analyzes how Irish republicans, socialists, and the state responded to the Blueshirt movement.
Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe
“At the Dangerous Crossroads of Europe”: Fascistization of Wartime Slovakia (1939–1945) as Inward Colonialism
| Nina Paulovicova | Journal of Genocide Research | 2026
Interprets Slovak fascistization, persecution, and state-building through the framework of inward colonialism.
The New Man and Legionary Woman in Romania’s Christofascist Iron Guard, 1927–1940
| Josh Block | UC Irvine Electronic Theses and Dissertations | 2025
Analyzes gender ideals, religious militancy, and revolutionary identity in Romania’s Iron Guard.
In the Name of ‘Civic Duty’
| Martina Bitunjac | Fascism | 2025
Examines how women participating in fascist and collaborationist organizations framed activism, surveillance, and persecution as civic responsibility.
Making Austria German Again
Studies Austrian National Socialists who promoted annexation, German racial unity, and the destruction of an independent Austrian identity.
Fascist-Axis Slovakia’s Spiritual Polis Politicus
| Anton Hruboň | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2024
Examines the transformation of Ružomberok into a symbolic religious and political capital of the fascist Slovak state.
‘In This Country, Women Are Also Soldiers’
| Anca Diana Axinia | European Review of History | 2023
Examines the gendered militarization of Romanian women and the political ideal of female sacrifice within the Legionary movement.
Battling over the Balkans: Historiographical Questions and Controversies
| Augusta Dimou | Slavic Review | 2022
Reviews major scholarly controversies surrounding nationalism, authoritarianism, fascism, violence, and memory in the Balkans.
“Why We Have Become Revolutionaries and Murderers”: Radicalization, Terrorism, and Fascism in the Ustaša–Croatian Revolutionary Organization
| Constantin Iordachi and Goran Miljan | Terrorism and Political Violence | 2022
Explains how the Ustaša combined exile politics, revolutionary terrorism, and fascist ideology.
Recontextualizing the Fascist Precedent: The Ustasha Movement and the Transnational Dynamics of Interwar Fascism
| Aristotle Kallis | The Utopia of Terror | 2021
Places the Croatian Ustaša within transnational fascist networks, showing selective borrowing rather than simple imitation.
Cultural Texts, Enemies, and Taboos: Autocommunicative Meaning-Making Surrounding the ‘Ready for the Homeland’ Ustaša Salute in Croatia
| Katarina Damčević | Social Semiotics | 2021
Studies how Croatia’s Ustaša salute is normalized, contested, and recoded through public discourse and memory politics.
Creating the Paradigm of ‘New Nation’
| Anton Hruboň | Fascism | 2021
Examines eugenic thought, racial hygiene, biological nationalism, and population policy within the wartime Slovak state.
Fascism and Terrorism: The Iron Guard in Interwar Romania
| Constantin Iordachi | The Oxford Handbook of the History of Terrorism | 2020
Examines the Iron Guard’s assassinations, martyr cult, paramilitary methods, and fusion of fascism with religious nationalism.
The Iron Guard as Part of the Fascist Network
| Traian Sandu | Annals of the University of Bucharest, Political Science Series | 2017
Places Romania’s Iron Guard within European fascist exchanges while highlighting its distinctive religious and national features.
Building a Fascist Romania
| Raul Cârstocea | Fascism | 2017
Examines the Iron Guard’s plans for revolutionary transformation, ethnic purification, social discipline, and a spiritually regenerated Romanian state.
War Veterans, Fascism, and Para-Fascist Departures in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, 1918–1941
| John Paul Newman | Fascism | 2017
Analyzes veterans’ organizations that moved between conservative nationalism, royal dictatorship, paramilitary activism, and explicitly fascist politics.
Domesticating Viragos
| Mihai Stelian Rusu | Fascism | 2016
Explores how Romanian fascism celebrated militant women while simultaneously attempting to confine them within patriarchal domestic roles.
The Sacralization of Martyric Death in the Romanian Legionary Movement
| Mihai Stelian Rusu | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2016
Analyzes how the Iron Guard transformed political deaths into sacred martyrdom, religious ritual, and incentives for further violence.
From Obscure Beginnings to State ‘Resurrection’
| Goran Miljan | Fascism | 2016
Traces the development of the Croatian Ustaša from a marginal terrorist organization to the ruling movement of a violent wartime state.
The Cult of Roman Shukhevych in Ukraine
| Per Anders Rudling | Fascism | 2016
Investigates the postwar commemoration of Ukrainian nationalist commander Roman Shukhevych and controversies surrounding collaboration, violence, and memory.
Introduction
| Roland Clark | Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania | 2015
Introduces the social practices, youth activism, violence, and everyday commitments that sustained Romanian Legionary fascism.
Favorites or Pariahs? The Fate of the Right-Wing Militia Men in Interwar Hungary
| Béla Bodó | Austrian History Yearbook | 2015
Traces how Hungarian paramilitaries moved between official patronage, marginalization, violence, and radical-right politics.
Ideological Transfers and Bureaucratic Entanglements
| Constantin Iordachi and Ottmar Traşcă | Fascism | 2015
Examines ideological exchange and administrative cooperation among Romanian, German, and other Axis institutions during the Second World War.
Latvia’s Pērkonkrusts
| Matthew Kott | Fascism | 2015
Examines the ideology, antisemitism, political organization, and transnational fascist connections of Latvia’s Thunder Cross movement.
Ordinary Women and Men: Superintendents and Jews in the Budapest Yellow-Star Houses in 1944–1945
| Mária Máthé Rigó | Urban History | 2013
Examines everyday authority, accommodation, hostility, and survival under Hungary’s antisemitic wartime order.
Russian Fascism in Exile: A Historical and Phenomenological Perspective on Transnational Fascism
| Sonja Hohler | Fascism | 2013
Examines Russian émigré fascists as a dispersed movement shaped by exile, anticommunism, and transnational political exchange.
Renewed Latvia
| Jordan Kuck | Fascism | 2013
Analyzes Latvian authoritarian visions of national regeneration, ethnic unity, political discipline, and the creation of a new society.
The ‘Right’ Side of the Law
| Cosmin Sebastian Cercel | Fascism | 2013
Explores the relationship between fascist ideology, legal institutions, emergency powers, and authoritarian transformations of constitutional order.
Separatist Currents in Moravian Fascism and National Socialism
| Miroslav Mareš | Fascism | 2013
Examines Moravian fascists and National Socialists who combined regional separatism with ethnic nationalism and authoritarian politics.
The Spectacle of Security in the Case of Hungarian Far-Right Paramilitary Groups
| Manuel Mireanu | Fascism | 2013
Analyzes how Hungarian radical-right organizations used patrols, uniforms, marches, and staged intimidation to perform state-like authority.
On the ‘Right’ Side? The Radical Right in the Post-Yugoslav Area and the Serbian Case
| Đorđe Tomić | Fascism | 2013
Surveys radical-right and neo-fascist organizations that emerged in Serbia and other post-Yugoslav societies after the 1990s wars.
The Iron Guard and the ‘Modern State’
| Mircea Platon | Fascism | 2013
Examines the Romanian Iron Guard’s relationship to modernization, state authority, revolutionary nationalism, and opposition to liberal institutions.
Collective Singing in Romanian Fascism
| Roland Clark | Cultural and Social History | 2013
Shows how songs, marches, and collective performance created emotional solidarity and disciplined community among Romanian fascist activists.
Austria
| Corinna Peniston-Bird | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Surveys Austrian fascist currents, clerical authoritarianism, paramilitary conflict, and competing German-national and Austrian identities.
Hungary
| Mark Pittaway | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Surveys Hungarian radical nationalism, the Arrow Cross, social constituencies, and the path from authoritarian rule to fascist power.
Romania
| Radu Ioanid | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Examines the Iron Guard, antisemitism, Orthodox mysticism, political violence, and Romania’s wartime dictatorship.
Yugoslavia and Its Successor States
| Marko Attila Hoare | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Compares fascist and collaborationist movements across Yugoslavia and the wartime successor regimes.
The Balkans
| Manus I. Midlarsky | Origins of Political Extremism | 2012
Explains how war, borders, agrarian inequality, and ethnic conflict encouraged extremist mobilization across the Balkans.
Fascism under Pressure: Influence of Marxist Discourse on Ideological Redefinition of the Croatian Fascist Movement, 1941–1944
| Ana Antić | East European Politics and Societies | 2010
Shows how the Ustaša adapted its rhetoric under wartime pressure by appropriating elements of socialist and revolutionary language.
The Sacralised Politics of the Romanian Iron Guard
| Radu Ioanid | Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions | 2004
Analyzes the Iron Guard’s fusion of Orthodox spirituality, martyrdom, charismatic leadership, and genocidal politics.
The More It Changes, the More Hungarian Nationalism Remains the Same
| Peter F. Sugar | Austrian History Yearbook | 2000
Traces recurring themes in Hungarian nationalism that shaped authoritarian and radical-right politics.
Asia and Transnational Anti-Fascism
The Spanish Civil War as a Spatial Allegory for Japanese Anti-Fascism
| Ferran de Vargas | Fascism | 2025
Shows how Japanese anti-fascists interpreted the Spanish Civil War as a symbolic map of global resistance to militarism and dictatorship.
Intertextuality as Method in a Time of Technologised Misinformation: The Case of Hindutva Fascism in India
| Sahana Udupa | Javnost – The Public | 2025
Analyzes the visual culture, myths, memes, and disinformation practices through which Hindutva politics constructs a specifically Indian fascist imaginary.
Saumyendranath Tagore and the Nazi Seizure of Power
| Michael Ortiz | Fascism | 2024
Examines the Indian revolutionary’s response to Nazism and his efforts to connect anti-fascism with anticolonial and socialist politics.
Fighting Fascism with ‘Verbal Bullets’
| Edwin Michielsen | Fascism | 2020
Studies Japanese anti-fascist writing and the use of literature, journalism, and political language as weapons against militarism.
Staged Glory: The Impact of Fascism on ‘Cooperative’ Nationalist Circles in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1935–1942
| Yuma Lengkeek | Fascism | 2018
Explores how Indonesian nationalist collaborators selectively adopted fascist aesthetics and organizational models under colonial rule.
When Fascism Met Empire in Japanese-Occupied Manchuria
| Louise Young | Journal of Global History | 2017
Shows how imperial rule in Manchuria generated institutions and ideas comparable to fascist state-building.
The Spectacle of Global Fascism: The Italian Blackshirt Mission to Japan’s Asian Empire
| Daniel Hedinger | Modern Asian Studies | 2017
Uses an Italian Blackshirt mission to reveal the performances, tensions, and imperial ambitions of Axis solidarity in Asia.
Displaying the Worldview of Japanese Fascism: The Tokyo 1940 Exhibition
| Michael Ward | Critical Asian Studies | 2015
Interprets a major exhibition as a visual program for Japanese imperialism, autarky, mobilization, and fascist modernity.
Imperial Links
| Reto Hofmann | Journal of Contemporary History | 2015
Examines ideological and diplomatic connections between Japanese imperial nationalism and European fascist movements during the interwar period.
Japan
| Rikki Kersten | The Oxford Handbook of Fascism | 2012
Reviews debates over Japanese fascism, militarism, emperor ideology, mass mobilization, and imperial expansion.
Fascism, Sport and Society in Japan
| Ikuo Abe | The International Journal of the History of Sport | 1992
Analyzes sport as a vehicle for discipline, nationalism, imperial identity, and mass mobilization in wartime Japan.
Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?
| Gavan McCormack | Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars | 1982
Reconsiders whether Japan’s 1930s political order should be classified as fascist and what the label clarifies.
Concerning Japanese Fascism
| Hilary Conroy | The Journal of Asian Studies | 1981
Intervenes in the controversy over applying European-derived fascism concepts to modern Japanese history.
Comment: Fascism and the History of Pre-War Japan—the Failure of a Concept
| Peter Duus | The Journal of Asian Studies | 1979
Argues that the fascism label can obscure the institutions, coalitions, and historical dynamics specific to prewar Japan.
Intellectuals and Fascism in Early Shōwa Japan
| Miles Fletcher | The Journal of Asian Studies | 1979
Studies intellectual participation in authoritarian nationalism and ideological mobilization during early Shōwa Japan.
A New Look at the Problem of ‘Japanese Fascism’
| George Macklin Wilson | Comparative Studies in Society and History | 1968
Offers an influential comparative reassessment of Japanese fascism and the country’s distinctive path to authoritarian empire.
Latin America
Fascists and Gentlemen? The Last Dictatorship’s Vexed Relationship with Argentinian Fascism (‘Nacionalismo’)
| Daniel Gunnar Kressel | Journal of Contemporary History | 2026
Examines the uneasy relationship between Argentina’s final military dictatorship and older fascist-nationalist traditions.
‘I Am Your Voice’: The Populist Temptation in Trumpism and Bolsonarism
| Cesar A. Zanin | Discourse & Society | 2026
Compares Trumpist and Bolsonarist rhetoric as populist political religion carrying authoritarian and fascist echoes.
Integralismo e Fascismos: Perspectivas Transnacionais
| Aizack Bastos, Guilherme Defina, and Heloisa Mota Cardoso | Estudos Históricos | 2026
Reassesses Brazilian Integralism through comparative and transnational connections with fascist movements elsewhere in Latin America and Europe.
Neo-Fascism and the Far Right in Brazil
| Odilon Caldeira Neto | Cambridge Elements in the History and Politics of Fascism | 2025
Traces Brazilian neo-fascist organizations, networks, symbols, and their relationship to the contemporary radical right.
Christian Political Hypermasculinity: Brazilian Fascism in the 1930s
| Daniela Moraes Traldi | Gender & History | 2024
Examines how Brazilian Integralism linked Christian morality, racial hierarchy, militant masculinity, and patriarchal ideals of femininity.
Transnational Fascism: Portugal and the Brazilian Integralism of Plínio Salgado
| Leandro Pereira Gonçalves | Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies | 2023
Explores ideological and organizational exchanges between Portugal’s dictatorship and Brazil’s Integralist movement.
The Rise of Fascism in Brazil
| Armando Boito | Latin American Perspectives | 2023
Interprets Bolsonarism through class alliances, political crisis, authoritarian mobilization, and the resurgence of fascist politics.
Shifting Patterns of Antisemitism in Latin America: Xenophobia, Exclusion, and Inclusion
| Luis Roniger | Latin American Research Review | 2023
Surveys changing antisemitic currents and their connections to nationalism, exclusion, authoritarianism, and political realignment.
Integralismo Brasileiro e a Circulação de Ideias Fascistas
Traces intellectual exchanges concerning nationalism, corporatism, state organization, and fascism within Brazilian Integralist networks.
The Portuguese ‘New State’ and the Diffusion of Authoritarian Models in Interwar Latin America
| António Costa Pinto | Journal of Contemporary History | 2022
Shows how Portugal’s corporatist dictatorship supplied institutions and ideas to Latin American authoritarian projects.
Samba with Fascism: Ação Integralista Brasileira and Its Relations with the New State of Getúlio Vargas
| Gabriela de Lima Grecco | Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies | 2021
Examines conflict, cooperation, and cultural politics between Brazilian Integralists and Vargas’s Estado Novo.
The Italian Fascist Community in Argentina, 1946–1978
| Matteo Albanese | European History Quarterly | 2021
Traces the survival and reorganization of Italian fascist networks in postwar Argentina.
Argentine Franco: The Regime of Juan Carlos Onganía and Its Ideological Dialogue with Francoist Spain, 1966–1970
| Daniel Gunnar Kressel | The Americas | 2021
Explores ideological exchange between Onganía’s military regime and Francoist Spain.
O Integralismo na Cidade da Selva
Studies the interaction of Brazilian Integralism, regional identity, and nativist politics in the Amazonian state of Amazonas.
Argentine Intellectual Circles and the European Crisis of the 1930s
| Jorge Nállim | Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History | 2016
Explains how Argentine intellectuals responded to fascism, communism, liberal crisis, the Spanish Civil War, and European ideological conflict.
Identidad, Ideología y Política en el Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile, 1932–1938
| Luis Corvalán Marquez | Izquierdas | 2015
Examines the identity, ideological development, social composition, and political strategy of Chile’s National Socialist Movement.
Joseph de Maistre, Donoso Cortés and Argentina’s Catholic Right: The Integralist Rebellion against Modernity
| Alberto Spektorowski | Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions | 2008
Connects Argentina’s Catholic nationalist right to European counterrevolutionary thought, integralism, and hostility to liberal modernity.
A Movement from Right to Left in Argentine Nationalism?
| Michael Goebel | Bulletin of Latin American Research | 2007
Examines ideological shifts within Argentine nationalism and the movement of activists between fascist, populist, and anti-imperialist positions.
The Making of an Unlikely Chilean Fascist
| Marcus Klein | Historia | 2002
Reconstructs the political trajectory of a Chilean fascist activist and the local circumstances that shaped his radicalization.
The New Voices of Chilean Fascism and the Popular Front, 1938–1942
| Marcus Klein | Journal of Latin American Studies | 2001
Studies the reorganization of Chilean fascism after electoral defeat and its response to the Popular Front government.
Military-Authoritarianism in South America: Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina
| George Philip | Political Studies | 1984
Compares South American military dictatorships and clarifies their relationship to fascism, bureaucratic authoritarianism, and conservative rule.
Africa and Anti-Colonial Perspectives
Interrogating the South African Garrison State (1930s–1940s)
| F. F. Kirsten | South African Historical Journal | 2025
Distinguishes anti-fascist security policies from anticommunist repression in South Africa’s wartime garrison state.
W. E. B. Du Bois and European Fascism between the Wars
| Kian Aspinall | Race & Class | 2025
Recovers Du Bois’s analysis linking European fascism to colonialism, white supremacy, capitalism, and the global color line.
South African Anti-Fascism and the Nazi Foreign Office
| Kasper Braskén | South African Historical Journal | 2022
Examines South African anti-fascist activity through German diplomatic surveillance and reporting during the 1930s.
Political and Intellectual Lineages of Southern African Anti-Fascism
| Jonathan Hyslop | South African Historical Journal | 2022
Surveys socialist, liberal, nationalist, labor, and Black internationalist traditions of anti-fascism in Southern Africa.
National Socialism and Nazism in South Africa
| Werner Bouwer | University of the Free State | 2021
Investigates the reception, organization, and influence of National Socialist ideas among South African political movements.
The Global Authoritarian Moment and the Revolt against Empire
| David Motadel | The American Historical Review | 2019
Examines how anti-colonial actors navigated authoritarian powers and global geopolitical upheaval during the Second World War.
‘Die Hand aan die Wieg Regeer die Land’
| Charl Blignaut | South African Historical Journal | 2015
Explores the agency, political work, gender identity, and domestic ideology of women in the Ossewabrandwag between 1939 and 1954.
A Thousand Little Hoofdleiere, 1934–1948
| John Higginson | Collective Violence and the Agrarian Origins of South African Apartheid | 2014
Links rural Afrikaner mobilization, local strongmen, racial violence, and authoritarian nationalist organization before apartheid.
Afrikaner Unrest within South Africa during the Second World War and the Measures Taken to Suppress It
| Andries M. Fokkens | Southern Journal for Contemporary History | 2012
Examines Afrikaner opposition to participation in the Second World War and the government’s surveillance, detention, and security measures.
The Ossewabrandwag as a Mass Movement, 1939–1941
| Christoph Marx | Journal of Southern African Studies | 1994
Examines the rapid growth of the Afrikaner Ossewabrandwag and its combination of republican nationalism, paramilitary organization, and fascist influence.
North America
The US South’s Political Response to European Fascism during the Interwar War Period
| David A. Foti | Fascism | 2025
Investigates how southern American politicians and commentators interpreted European fascism through regional ideas about race, hierarchy, and democracy.
The One Swallow That Makes a Summer?
| Tamas Dezso Ziegler and Anna Unger | Fascism | 2025
Considers whether isolated authoritarian developments should be classified as fascist or understood within a broader process of democratic erosion.
Echoes of Fascism?
| Tahir Abbas and Richard McNeil-Willson | Fascism | 2025
Evaluates the applicability of fascism scholarship to contemporary extremist mobilization, exclusionary nationalism, and political violence.
How Misogyny and Gendered Grievances Fuel Authoritarianism
| Cynthia Miller-Idriss | Fascism | 2025
Explains how misogyny, threatened masculinity, and gender resentment can contribute to radical-right recruitment and authoritarian politics.
Rethinking Adrien Arcand in Historical Context
Reassesses Canadian fascist leader Adrien Arcand through studies of antisemitism, Catholic nationalism, political organization, and transnational connections.
‘Wake Up—John’
| Paul Jackson | Fascism | 2024
Examines British and American fascist propaganda networks that circulated conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and appeals for national awakening.
Settler Colonialism, Illiberal Memory, and German-Canadian Hate Networks in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries
Traces transnational far-right networks and historical misinformation within Canada’s settler-colonial political landscape.
Fascism and Antisemitism in 1930s America: The Genocidal Vision of the Silver Shirts
| Richard Steigmann-Gall | Fascism in America | 2023
Examines the Silver Shirts’ antisemitic worldview and its explicitly eliminationist implications.
Scenes of Berlin: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in Toronto during the Summer of 1938
| Tyler Wentzell | Canadian Jewish Studies | 2023
Reconstructs confrontations between fascist sympathizers and anti-fascist activists in Toronto before the Second World War.
The Classocracy League of Canada
| Bàrbara Molas | Fascism | 2022
Studies a Canadian movement that combined fascist political organization with a hierarchical and exclusionary interpretation of multicultural society.
Debate: Donald Trump and Fascism Studies
| Paul Nicholas Jackson | Fascism | 2021
Reviews disagreements over whether Trumpism should be described as fascist, authoritarian populist, postfascist, or part of another radical-right tradition.
Fascism, National Socialism, and the 1939 New York World’s Fair
| James J. Fortuna | Fascism | 2019
Examines how fascist states used architecture, exhibitions, technology, and national pavilions to promote competing visions of modernity.
Star-Spangled Fascism: American Interwar Political Extremism in Comparative Perspective
| Richard Steigmann-Gall | Social History | 2017
Places American interwar extremism within comparative fascist studies rather than treating it as an isolated national exception.
A ‘Dog in the Nighttime’ Problem: American Fascism in the 1930s
| Peter H. Amann | The History Teacher | 1986
Explains why American fascism remained fragmented while identifying movements, constituencies, and conditions that made it possible.
Australia
Jewish Culture Is Inseparable from the Struggle against Reaction
Studies Jewish anti-fascist culture and political activism in Australia within broader international struggles against reaction and antisemitism.
Australian Fascism? A Revisionist Analysis of the Ideology of the New Guard
| Matthew Cunningham | Politics, Religion & Ideology | 2012
Reassesses Australia’s New Guard and argues that its ideology contained significant fascist elements.
Political Culture, Memory, Architecture, and Anti-Fascist Networks
The Intellectual as Culture Warrior
| Eliah Bures | Fascism | 2023
Explores how radical-right intellectuals transformed cultural criticism into ideological warfare against liberalism, pluralism, and democratic society.
Moving Images, Moving Bodies
| Fiona Macintosh | Fascism | 2023
Explores how film, physical movement, spectacle, and representations of the body communicated fascist and anti-fascist political meanings.
Editorial Introduction: The Global Cultures of Antifascism, 1921–2020
| Mattie Fitch, Michael Ortiz, and Nick Underwood | Fascism | 2020
Introduces a global history of anti-fascism encompassing labor movements, minority communities, intellectual networks, exile groups, and popular culture.
Tales of Antifascism
| Maximilian Becker | Fascism | 2020
Investigates international survivors’ organizations that used memories of persecution and resistance to shape Cold War anti-fascist politics.
Antifascist Athletes? A Reappraisal of the 1936 Berlin Olympics
| Keith Rathbone | Fascism | 2020
Reconsiders athletes’ political choices, protests, compromises, and later memories surrounding participation in the Nazi Olympic Games.
Editorial Introduction: Architectural Projections of a ‘New Order’ in Interwar Dictatorships
| Roger Griffin and Rita Almeida de Carvalho | Fascism | 2018
Introduces studies of architecture, urban planning, monumental design, and spatial control under interwar authoritarian regimes.
The Le Corbusier Scandal, or, Was Le Corbusier a Fascist?
| Simone Brott | Fascism | 2017
Evaluates evidence concerning Le Corbusier’s authoritarian political associations and the relationship between modernist architecture and fascism.
Intellectual Fascism
| Lena Berggren | Fascism | 2014
Investigates intellectuals who adapted fascism into national cultural debates, racial theories, and respectable political discourse.
