The most trenchant critiques of Western international law are framed around the legacy of its historic complicity in the imperial project of governing non-European peoples. International law organized Europe and its ‘others’ into a hierarchy of civilizational difference that was only ever reconfigured but never overturned. But when analysing the complex relationship between international law and imperialism the differences within Europe – as opposed to a dyadic opposition of Europe versus the ‘rest’ – also matter. Within the historical and political constellations of the early and mid twentieth century, German difference produced a set of arguments that challenged dominant discourses of international law by posturing as anti-imperialist critique. This article focuses on the global career of Friedrich Berber (1898–1984), who, as a legal adviser in Nazi Germany and Nehru’s India, was at the forefront of state-led challenges to liberal international law. Berber fused notions of German civilizational superiority with an appropriation of Indian colonial victimhood, and pursued a shared politics of opposition. He embodied a version of German–Indian entanglement which did not abate after the Second World War, emphasizing the long continuities of empire, power differentials, civilizational hierarchies, and developmental logics under the umbrella of international law.

This article considers four aspects for understanding the greatly over-used term ‘fascism’: its place in space and also in time, the basis of its social support, and its modus operandi. While agreement exists on where and when fascism reached its apogee, there is little concurrence of opinion over the extent to which the world wars were determinative in its birth and death, and how far beyond European boundaries it has ventured. There are also wide-ranging discussions concerning the identity and extent of its backers, with some writers pointing to the formative role of the lumpen body politic, or various class fractions, and others to that of an elite vanguard, or even individual alienation. A similar spectrum of opinion over the basis of fascism’s appeal extends from studies emphasizing, and elucidating, its ideational content to those that focus on the pragmatic value of action. Such a great diversity of analyses brings both considerable empirical richness and the challenge of fragmentation. This article responds by reflecting on fascism as both a social phenomenon and a field of study, in the hope of bringing some analytical structure to what remains a vast, and continuously developing, literature.