A rnd B auerkämper and G rzegorz R ossoliński -L iebe , editors. Fascism without Borders

Young scholars should be commended for participating in the newest and most exciting international debates in their field. This is the case with Arnd Bauerkämper and Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945, which has brought together fourteen emerging, high-quality specialists on the history of fascism and anti-fascism. These scholars should be commended, too, for their collective approach to the often repetitive, at times even boring, search for a standard narrative of fascism and its development. This is presented here in a refreshing way that addresses the international connections and cooperation between various fascist regimes and movements. As several authors, starting with the volume’s editors themselves, remind us, this transnational perspective has been largely neglected by historians who have been blinded in part by the fascists’ intrinsic ultranationalism, which supposedly inoculated them from foreign interaction or (even worse, in the fascists’ eyes), influence. This observation is correct. In a sense, historians have taken too seriously what the fascists—who were nothing if not conscious of their own self-image—wanted people to think of them. For example, a group of Spanish fascists physically assaulted the Irish historian Ian Gibson in the late 1970s after he declared on television that Benito Mussolini had funded the Spanish Falange Party and its much-mythologized leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera. Gibson’s claim was indisputable, and yet for these offenders, the association with Italian money corrupted the immaculate image of the official martyr of Francisco Franco’s Spain. Indeed, they even went so far as to pretend that Falangism had nothing to with fascism.

Art · Epistemology · Field (mathematics) · Irish · Literature · Media studies · Narrative · Nothing · Order (exchange) · Political science · Sociology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Italian Fascism and Post-war Society · Philosophy