PCE Seminar: ‘Transnational Fascism. Italy and Spain after the World War II’
Speakers: Pablo Del Hierro (FASoS, UM) and Matteo Antonio Albanese (ICS, Lisbon)
When: Wednesday 22 March, 15.30
Where: Spiegelzaal
You are all warmly invited to attend.
Is it fascism and alive ideology? While so many Western countries are suffering the radical right turn answering this simple question is becoming crucial. My today intervention is based on a case study we develop together with Prof. Pablo Del Hierro in our last book. Studying the relations between the Francoist regime and the extreme right wing Italian galaxy gave us the chance to look into that complex series of political and cultural connections. Looking at how these connections developed and changed across different contexts and moments allowed us to better understand how some features evolved and reached the nowadays societies.
Nationalism, spiritual revolution, construction of political and social identity, fight against democracy in the name of tradition and “nature”; those are some of the most important aspect of the fascist culture which we can easily detect in the political discourse and within the extreme right wing culture as it has been building since the collapse of Communism in 1989. The historiographical issue lies here in answering from where all these issue start from. For what it concerns our work we started since the 1920’ and we tried to show how those categories has been used and in which way they somehow shaped the extreme right wing culture in its trip to internationalization. As we underline in the book introduction we may assume that:
- As with any other totalitarian ideology, fascism seeks for a spiritual, economic and political revolution; and a revolution cannot be embarked upon within national borders. Thus, fascism is by definition not a simple national inclination and even though there are clear cultural roots and national specificities present in it, it also seems evident that, as a totalitarian ideology, it does not respect borders.
- Fascist groups and regimes started to build an international network from the very beginning of their activity in the 1920s and throughout most of the twentieth century; this chronological aspect suggests that its internationalism is a crucial part of the nature of fascism and neo-fascism.
- Fascism is an alive ideology which has existed throughout almost one century of history and travelled across many countries; in order to survive, fascism has had to change and adapted itself to the international context; accordingly, the understanding of structural conditions cannot be separated from the cultural turns.
