Fascist Warfare 1922 1945

This groundbreaking book explores the interpretative potential and analytical capacity of the concept ‘fascist warfare’. Was there a specific type of war waged by fascist states? The concept encompasses not only the practice of violence at the front, but also war culture, the relationship between war and the fascist project, and the construction of the national community. Starting with the legacy of the First World War and using a transnational approach, this collection presents case studies of fascist regimes at war, spanning Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Francoist Spain, Croatia, and Imperial Japan. Themes include the idea of rapid warfare as a symbol of fascism, total war, the role of modern technology, the transfer of war cultures between regimes, anti-partisan warfare as a key feature, and the contingent nature and limits of fascist warfare.

From the invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 through to the waning months of the World War II in 1945, Fascist Italy was at war. This Fascist decade of war comprised an uninterrupted stretch of military and political engagements in which Italian military forces were involved in Abyssinia, Spain, Albania, France, Greece, the Soviet Union, North Africa and the Middle East. As a junior partner to Nazi Germany, only entering the war in June 1940, Italy is often seen as a relatively minor player in World War II. However, this book challenges much of the existing scholarship by arguing that Fascist Italy played a significant and distinct role in shaping international relations between 1935 and 1945, creating a Fascist decade of war.

Kallis provides a comparative investigation of fascist expansionism by focusing on the close relations between ideology and action under Mussolini and Hitler. With an overview of the ideological motivations behind fascist expansionism and their impact on fascist policies, this book explores the two main issues which have dominated the historiographical debates on the nature of fascist expressionism: whether Italy's and Germany's particular expansionist tendencies can be attributed to aset of generic fascist values, or were shaped by the long-term, uniquely national ambitions and developments since unification; whether the pursuit of expansionism was opportunistic or followed a grand design in each case. This book is a fascinating study of the expansionist visions of Hitler and Mussolini and it enlightens our understanding of the dynamics and evolution of the fascist policies of Italy and Germany to the end of the Second World War.

Fascism in Europe, 1919-1945 surveys the phenomenon which is still the object of interest and debate over fifty years after its defeat in the Second World War. It introduces the recent scholarship and continuing debates on the nature of fascism as well as the often contentious contributions by foreign historians and political scientists. From the pre-First World War intellectual origins of Fascism to its demise in 1945, this book examines: * the two 'waves' of fascism - in the immediate post-war period and in the late 1920s and early 1930s * whether the European crisis created by the Treaty of Versailles allowed fascism to take root * why fascism came to power in Italy and Germany, but not anywhere else in Europe * fascism's own claim to be an international and internationalist movement * the idea of 'totalitarianism' as the most useful and appropriate way of analyzing the fascist regimes.

This book charts the evolution of Italian Fascism from its inconspicuous beginnings as an anti-party movement in 1919 to its equally inauspicious ending as a Nazi German satellite in 1945. It shows how and why Fascism came to power in 1922 as a mass movement of middle class reaction against socialism and parliamentary liberal policies in a period of serious postwar political and social crisis, and how the attempt to implant a totalitarian new order culminated in a Fascist war which exposed the pretensions and inadequacies of 'fascistization' and dissolved the Fascist consensus.

This book explores, from a transnational viewpoint, the historical relationship between war veterans and fascism in interwar Europe. Until now, historians have been roughly divided between those who assume that 'brutalization' (George L. Mosse) led veterans to join fascist movements and those who stress that most ex-soldiers of the Great War became committed pacifists and internationalists. Transcending the debates of the brutalization thesis and drawing upon a wide range of archival and published sources, this work focuses on the interrelated processes of transnationalization and the fascist permeation of veterans' politics in interwar Europe to offer a wider perspective on the history of both fascism and veterans' movements. A combination of mythical constructs, transfers, political communication, encounters and networks within a transnational space explain the relationship between veterans and fascism. Thus, this book offers new insights into the essential ties between fascism and war, and contributes to the theorization of transnational fascism.

This book takes up the stimuli of new international historiography, albeit focusing mainly on the two regimes that undoubtedly provided the model for Fascist movements in Europe, namely the Italian and the German. Starting with a historiographical assessment of the international situation, vis-à-vis studies on Fascism and National Socialism, and then concentrate on certain aspects that are essential to any study of the two dictatorships, namely the complex relationships with their respective societies, the figures of the two dictators and the role of violence. This volume reaches beyond the time-frame encompassing Fascism and National Socialism experiences, directing the attention also toward the period subsequent to their demise. This is done in two ways. On the one hand, examining the uncomfortable architectural legacy left by dictatorships to the democratic societies that came after the war. On the other hand, the book addresses an issue that is very much alive both in the strictly historiographical and political science debate, that is to say, to what extent can the label of Fascism be used to identify political phenomena of these current times, such as movements and parties of the so-called populist and souverainist right.