Fascism - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2021

Prior to the Second World War, Malta appeared vulnerable to fascist influence due to the connections between the Italian Fascist regime and Malta’s irredentist political movement, then led by Nerik Mizzi. In part this Fascist influence was present in cultural propaganda promoting irredentist ideas such as the ‘Mare Nostrum’, which Mizzi and his conservative political party, the Partito Nazionalista, helped propagate. However, previously unseen British documents also reveal significant financial support by the Italian government to Mizzi and his political activities. Mizzi never disclosed this, including the financial support he was granted by Mussolini after having met him personally in Rome on 30 November 1936. Mizzi never openly expounded fascist views, although he consistently supported an irredentist vision of Malta and openly campaigned for Malta to fall under Italy’s jurisdiction. Meanwhile, support for domestic fascist organisations was negligible. At the onset of the War, the Imperial Government started to clamp down on the irredentists, eventually exiling Mizzi and most of his collaborators. The author argues that Mizzi’s dalliance with fascism was not just a convenient relationship for a greater cause, but also a direct acceptance of fascist politics given that making Malta part of Italy’s jurisdiction would also have meant accepting fascist rule.

Despite its official Catholic nature, Jozef Tiso’s Slovak State apparatus adopted not only the teachings of the eugenic movement but also the racial-hygiene ideology of National Socialist Germany, which it gradually implemented into its political culture. This study presents how eugenic and racial-hygiene thinking was introduced into the structures of Hlinkova slovenská ľudová strana (HSĽS; Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party), the self-governing party of independent Slovakia during the Second World War, against the backdrop of developmental trends in Europe. What is emphasized here is the gradual formation of the racial paradigm in the spirit of a eugenic and racial-hygiene framework, as well as the formation of a ‘pure Aryan Slovak nation’ cult, physically and mentally contrasting with racially-hygienically ‘unclean and degenerate’ Jews and Roma.

This article analyses the New Right’s understanding of the French Revolution. Since the most prominent intellectual of the New Right, Alain de Benoist, frames ‘Jacobinism’ as the New Right’s main enemy, the New Right may be understood as a counter-tradition to what it understands as Jacobinism. De Benoist defines Jacobinism as an ideology that makes people essentially equal and identical by means of the state. Against this, he posits what he calls ‘federalism’—a project which aims at promoting and defending ethnic, cultural and other differences. In this article, the author shows how the New Right creates a mythical counter-tradition of federalism. We should understand this as a ‘federalist fascism’: instead of mass parties and an authoritarian nation-state, the New Right seeks the mythical rebirth of an Indo-European community consisting of various regional peoples who will supposedly realise their authentic nature through ethnically purified societies governed by a federal European-wide system.

The drive to decolonise is of central importance to the study of fascism, which after all was and remains a politics rooted in specific conceptions of colonialism and race. In this article, we have invited both leading academics and early career scholars to reflect on how we might ‘decolonise’ fascist studies. Their comments approach fascism in a range of contexts, and offer reflections on how to frame future research questions, approach methodological issues, and consider how fascism studies might develop a more overt and clear stance on the problems posed by decolonising the subject area more broadly. It is hoped that these commentaries will enrich the field of fascist studies and, in turn, do more to relate it to the work of scholars in other relevant areas of study, particularly those working on critical theories of race and racism. Contributors to this debate are: Leslie James, Raul Carstocea, Daniel Hedinger, Liam J. Liburd, Cathy Bergin, Benjamin Bland, Evan Smith, Jonathan Hyslop, Benjamin Zachariah, and Caroline Campbell.