Abstract

The international workshop organized by Daniel Hedinger and Reto Hofmann and financed by the Center for Advanced Studies at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich brought scholars working on Axis countries together in order to explore viable approaches for a global history of fascist imperialism. The major questions addressed the colony–metropole relationship and its role in the radicalization process as well as the ways in which fascist empires learned from the imperial strategies used both by their allies and by their liberal-empire counterparts. In two days, the participants discussed how, when, and where these empires intersected, thereby investigating ideology, culture, empire-building processes and (self) perception.

Highlights

  • More than seventy years after the Axis powers were defeated, recent imperial and transnational trends in historiography offer us the opportunity to revise our understanding of fascism and, of the Second World War as just via free access

  • The first panel on ‘Comparative Perspectives’ investigated how to ­operationalize and understand fascism and imperialism as analytical categories. louise young (Madison) demonstrated the different logics underlying both of these as they pertain to the Japanese case

  • Japan’s imperialism pushed towards fascism once the former revealed itself to be insufficient to solve the crisis, while the opposite happened in Germany and Italy

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Summary

Introduction

More than seventy years after the Axis powers were defeated, recent imperial and transnational trends in historiography offer us the opportunity to revise our understanding of fascism and, of the Second World War as just via free access. In 2008 Mark Mazower published the book Hitler’s Empire in which he presented the Nazis’ vision of German hegemony as an empire-building process.[1] More recently, Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s book on Italian Fascism’s Empire Cinema breaks with previous studies by focusing on ­imperial visions and themes.[2] While imperial concepts have become established as valuable categories with which to harmonize the discrepancies between the ideological visions and realization, scholars have focused mainly on single cases. The space ‘in-between’ fascist empires remains largely unexplored, and the workshop was able to elaborate innovative strategies to fill this gap.

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