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The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research

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ArndBauerkämper and GrzegorzRossoliński-Liebe, eds., Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 384 pp, £80.25, ISBN: 978-1-78533-468-9.
ChristianGoeschel, Mussolini and Hitler: The Forging of the Fascist Alliance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), 400 pp, £20, ISBN: 978-0-300-17883-8.
JorgeDagnino, MatthewFeldman and PaulStocker, eds., The ‘New Man’ in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–45 (London: Bloomsbury, 2019), 308 pp, £26.09 ISBN: 978-1-350-12305-2.

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2020

Ángel Alcalde
Ángel Alcalde*
Affiliation:
School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne, VIC3010, Australia
*
[email protected]
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Extract

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.

Type
Review Article
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 29 , Special Issue 2: Religion and Socialism in the Long 1960s: From Antithesis to Dialogue in Eastern and Western Europe , May 2020 , pp. 243 - 252
Copyright
Copyright © The Author, 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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30 Ibid., 182.

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