Fascism

Focusing on two peripheral – and therefore often overlooked – fascist movements (the Swedish National Socialist Workers' Party and the Dutch National Socialist Movement), this sophisticated study de-centres contemporary fascism studies by showing how smaller movements gained political foothold in liberal, democratic regimes. From charismatic leaders and the rallies they held to propaganda apparatus and mythopoeic props seized by ordinary people, Making Fascism in Sweden and the Netherlands analyses the constructs and perceptions of fascism to highlight the variegated nature of the movement in Europe and shine a spotlight on its performative process.

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

The essays in The Utopia of Terror provide new perspectives on the relationship between the politics of construction and destruction in the wartime Independent State of Croatia (1941-1945) ruled by the fascist Ustasha movement. Bringing together established historians of the Ustasha regime and an emerging generation of younger historians, The Utopia of Terror explores various aspects of everyday life and death in the Ustasha state that until now have received peripheral attention from historians. The contributors argue for a more complex consideration of the relationship of mass terror and utopianism in which the two are seen as part of the same process rather than as discrete phenomena. They aim to bring new perspectives, generate original thinking, and provide enhanced understanding of both the Ustasha regime's attempts to remake Croatian society and its campaign to destroy unwanted populations.

On 27 June 2004, Serbian voters went to the polls for the third time in a year to choose a president. The winner of the first two rounds of voting, Tomislav Nikolić, Deputy to the President of the extreme right Serbian Radical Party (SRS), lost the third round of voting to the more liberal Borisav Tadić by just under 8 percentage points (53.2 to 45.4), and the Radicals failed to form a ruling coalition in government. Nevertheless, more than five years after the last war in the disintegration of the Yugoslav state, the largest political party in the largest of the successor states has been characterized as the most extreme right party in the Balkans today. Indeed, the Radicals have been an enduring force in Serbian politics for the past decade and a half, sometimes ruling in coalition with Slobodan Milošević's Socialist Party of Serbia (SPS). SRS founder Vojislav Šešelj, a flamboyant, obstreperous, highly influential figure, and his fellow Radicals have sought and in many ways su...

Leicht's historiographical production in the first decade of the twentieth century includes some studies relating to the history of Friuli in the early modern age, where a particular attention is paid to social history and especially to the contrasts between commoners,  bourgeois, feudal lords and peasants. In this context (which reflects the political suggestions of the period of Giolitti's government and the new impact of democracy) the Republic of Venice appears as a strong state, which is able to restore order after the revolts, while satisfying the most elementary peasants' requests with courageous reforms. However, at the time of the First World War, the interpretation of the role of Venice in Friulian history is increasingly conditioned by the irredentist inspiration: Venice is therefore considered as the maker of Friuli's Italian character. In 1923 Leicht joined the fascist party together with other liberal conservatives and published a Short History of Friuli, which reflects his political ideology in the phase of transition from irredentism to fascism.

This article aims to further problematize the relationship between patterns of demobilization, fascism and veterans’ activism, on several inter-related counts. We argue that the relationship between fascism and war veterans was not a fixed nexus, but the outcome of a complex political constellation of socio-economic and political factors that necessitates a case-by-case in-depth discussion. Also, we argue that these factors were both national and transnational in nature. Finally, we contend that researchers need to employ a synchronic as well as a diachronic perspective, thus accounting for various stages and forms of mobilization of war veterans over time. To substantiate these claims, the current article focuses on a relevant but largely neglected case study: the demobilization of soldiers and war veterans’ political activism in interwar Romania. It is argued that, contrary to assumptions in historiography, demobilization in Romania was initially successful. Veterans’ mobilization...

L’obiettivo di questo articolo è valutare, anche con strumenti quantitativi, se e quanta parte abbia avuto il regime fascista – notoriamente avverso alle banche cooperative – nel marcato declino che le banche cooperative subirono nel quindicennio tra metà degli anni Venti e fine degli anni Trenta del secolo scorso. Al fine di porre il nostro contributo nel suo contesto, è tuttavia necessario inquadrare il fenomeno in uno scenario più ampio, che riguarda l’interazione tra politica ed economia sotto il regime fascista e a questo si dedica il prossimo paragrafo. Il resto del lavoro è così organizzato. Nel paragrafo 3 si fornisce un quadro delle caratteristiche del sistema bancario e finanziario italiano nel periodo tra le due guerre mondiali. Nel paragrafo 4 sono esaminate le ragioni alla base della tensione tra fascismo e cooperative di credito: segnatamente come le élites locali cercarono di salvaguardare i propri margini di autonomia dall’intrusione di “fedelissimi” del regime più f...

The 1990s have seen remarkable changes in the Western and Russian study of fascism, understood as a generic concept. On the one side, Western compara-tive fascist studies went through a process of consolidation: a number of tendencies in the study of inter-war Europe have ...