The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research

Abstract

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.