Towards a History of Fascist Entanglement. International workshop at the British School at Rome.

Funded by the Leverhulme Trust and hosted by The British School at Rome.

For some time, historians have been concerned with comparative approaches towards fascism. However, such work often remains largely theoretical and focused on fascist ideology. Moreover, most existing comparative accounts do not probe into the extent to which fascist regimes were connected and entangled with each other. This workshop’s theme is the history of fascist entanglement which is more than a comparative history, but rather a dynamic analysis of crossovers, transfers and exchanges. More recently, some scholars have taken up this approach under the impact of transnational history. However, this approach has not had much resonance amongst Italian historians. Many historians of Italy deny any serious parallels between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, and some even describe Fascist Italy as a ‘soft’ dictatorship. The entanglement approach has also had a limited impact amongst historians of the Third Reich as most historians of Nazi Germany insist that the Third Reich was a unique racial state that cannot be compared with Fascist Italy or indeed any other regime.

This workshop aims to initiate a conversation amongst American, Australian, British, Italian and German historians on the usefulness of the entanglement approach for a better understanding of European fascism. Since the entanglements between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were most profound and had fatal consequences for Europe and the world during the Second World War, the workshop’s main focus will be on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, Europe’s first and most powerful fascist dictatorships, though other countries will also be considered.

There will be three papers by historians working on concrete manifestations of fascist entanglements, followed by a roundtable conversation which hopes to be controversial.