After 1917–1923, Europe’s polities varied across democracy and dictatorship. The agrarian east and south passed under dictatorship: Iberia, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, then Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, and Greece. Liberal constitutionalism lasted in France, Britain, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Scandinavia. In Austria, Germany, and Czechoslovakia democratic republics faced polarized political cultures. Italy was fascist; the USSR socialist. Corporatism – government-brokered convergence of organized interests – shaped constitutional states, above all in Scandinavia, with its strong labor movements. Corporatism in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia was inflected by social democracy, but in societies riven by liberal-conservative enmities and religious, regional or ethno-cultural cleavage. Fascism beckoned as an extreme remedy for chronic parliamentary instability, where leftist defense impeded capitalist stabilization. Nazism and its state mapped onto this topography. Via the Belgian Plan de Man, the French Popular Front, and the Spanish Civil War, the polarizing fallout from rightwing radicalization cast western Europe into crisis.

The Second World War posed an existential crisis for the League of Red Cross Societies. This chapter explores how the League attempted to fulfill its primary task of coordinating the work of National Societies when the movement was at war with itself, and when the Red Cross principles were flouted by the belligerent militaries and ignored by their National Societies. By focusing on the League, rather than the ICRC, the chapter broadens our understanding of the Red Cross movement during the conflict. The war illuminated some of the strengths as a network but also exposed some of its latent weaknesses. The chapter shows how, far from being a hiatus in the League’s history, the war years were critical in shaping the wider development of Red Cross humanitarianism. They accentuated the importance of American leadership for the League but also accelerated thinking over the League’s involvement in international relief efforts and sharpened its ambitions to leadership over matters relating to civilian populations in times of war. Both these factors were vital to the way the League legitimised its place within the Red Cross movement and the trans-Atlantic approach taken to articulating the role of the Red Cross in the post-war world.

Recent threats to democracy have induced scholars to sound the alarm by employing dramatic terms more broadly, for instance by associating right-wing populism with fascism. From the pragmatic perspective advocated by David Collier and Robert Adcock in their article “Democracy and Dichotomies: A Pragmatic Approach to Choices about Concepts” (1999), this chapter criticizes this attenuation of qualitative differences and pleads for maintaining and reaffirming strict conceptual boundaries. After all, fascism constitutes a syndrome of interlocking components (“bounded whole”) that is distinct from lesser dangers such as right-wing populism and conservative authoritarianism; hybrids are rare and unviable. Careful, circumspect concept usage is crucial for accurately diagnosing democracy’s current predicament and for designing promising, effective remedies.

This chapter begins by sketching Déat’s last days in occupied France before fleeing to Germany with the retreating Nazis. It then highlights Déat’s opportunism and his search for intellectual distinction as significant factors in his trajectory and eventual radicalization as a collaborationist fascist fully aligned with Nazism. Déat’s path from democratic socialism to fascism is summarized in terms of the practical logic of his political conversion, with the conclusion that his ultimate conversion to fascism was the culmination of his repeatedly unsuccessful attempts at political reinvention. The chapter ends by reaffirming the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion, which is best understood in terms of what Bourdieu calls “trajectory.” Political conversions are not just individual biographical facts, nor are they passive mental processes; they are actively made by political actors within changing political fields.

Part III covers the period from the end of the Popular Front in 1938 through the German occupation of France. The Popular Front had led to the marginalization and disarticulation of neo-socialism as a distinct position in the political field. Déat and the neo-socialists became unmoored from the left and thus “available” for political conversion in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Popular Front. The vector through which this happened was the reclassification of the political field around the question of war and peace. As a leading pacifist, Déat took up an anti-anti-fascist position and rallied to the politics of collaboration after the 1940 armistice. Initially seeking his place within Vichy’s “national revolution,” his failure to impose himself there led him to occupied Paris, where he came to adopt an increasingly radicalized form of collaborationist fascism modeled on Nazism through his leadership of the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP).

Part II covers the period from the emergence of neo-socialism as an independent political force in late 1933 with the formation of the Parti Socialiste de France (PSdF) to its incorporation into, and marginalization by, the anti-fascist Popular Front in 1936. The period immediately following the 1933 schism is often taken to be one in which neo-socialism, unburdened by the doctrinal shackles of the SFIO, could express itself freely and reveal its true colors. Moreover, the fact that the neo-socialists embraced “order, authority, nation” as their watchwords and the fact of their experimentation with a fascisant discourse during a period of political crisis in 1934 appear to lend credence to the notion that neo-socialism was always-already a proto-fascist ideology and thus at the root of Déat’s collaborationist fascism during the occupation. A closer look at this period, however, suggests a more complex and crooked path for the neo-socialists.

This chapter introduces the case of Marcel Déat, a leader of the French Socialist Party who founded one of the main collaborationist parties during the German occupation of France. I define political conversion and argue that accounts of it tend to be marked by a continuity bias. This is true of extant accounts of Déat’s conversion, which emphasize the significance of neo-socialism in determining his trajectory. I argue that this explanatory emphasis on ideological continuity is theoretically and empirically unsound. As an alternative approach, I introduce what I call the practical logic of political conversion, drawing on anti-essentialist and relational theories of political ideologies that treat these as articulated products of classification struggles within political fields. I argue further that the fundamentally discontinuous and relational character of political conversion means that it should be analyzed in terms of what Bourdieu calls “trajectory.” I end with an overview of the book.

Failing to impose himself in Vichy, Déat sought his political fortunes in occupied Paris. This chapter covers Déat’s time in Paris, where he founded the Rassemblement National Populaire (RNP) in 1941. After an inauspicious start during which Déat struggled to maintain control of the organization, the RNP came to represent the collaborationist “left” within the field of collaborationism. However, the heteronomous logic of this field, in which the different collaborationist movements competed for German recognition by emulating Nazism, meant that over time the different movements shed their specificity and converged around a common vision of collaborationist fascism. It was through this spiral of radicalization that Déat came to adopt positions, like antisemitism and support for “totalitarianism,” that had been foreign to him just a few years prior. The collaborationist fascism of the RNP was thus not reducible to the neo-socialist past but was an emergent effect of the field of collaborationism.

This chapter begins with an analysis of the neo-socialists’ infamous watchwords of “order, authority, nation.” Rather than an expression of fascist sympathy, these represented an initial attempt to appropriate and rearticulate these terms in service of a popular-democratic and national-popular socialist politics oriented against the threat of fascism. The chapter then considers neo-socialism’s equivocal turn, in which it briefly adopted a more ambiguous attitude toward fascism during the political crisis inaugurated by the February 6, 1934, anti-parliamentary riots. However, this equivocal turn in neo-socialist discourse did not represent a logical development of neo-socialism, but rather its adaptation to a political field in crisis. The neo-socialists sought to take advantage of their marginal position within the political field and capitalize on widespread anti-parliamentary sentiment by reinventing themselves as the vanguard of a “revolution by the center” and making common cause with elements of the political right.

This chapter analyses the literary, textual, and propaganda work of the two main British fascist organisations in the interwar period: the British Fascisti (1923–1935), founded by Rotha Lintorn-Orman, and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists (BUF, 1932–1940). The evolving styles, structures, and aesthetics in fascist publications reflect shifts in policy and strategy, often influenced by opposing political movements. Fascist literature was a strategic tool in a war of words and ideas, and as such was crucial for promoting fascist ideology. The chapter highlights the dissemination of fascist materials, including newspapers sold at events, manifestos for recruitment, and pamphlets on diverse topics. Songs, short stories, and poems aimed to mobilise and instruct, while public speeches were central to fascist rallies and demonstrations. The BUF trained its members, the Blackshirts, in public speaking, making speeches integral to their propaganda efforts; these speeches were later published, recorded, or filmed. This ‘gestural politics’ is exemplified by the BUF’s newspaper Action!, a title that symbolised the movement’s focus on public performance and outreach. Through these varied forms, the chapter shows how fascist propaganda intertwined literary efforts with political activism to influence British society.

Aristocratic capitalism, based on landowners, pluriactivity and the coercion of labor survived until the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain, the First World War in France and Russia. It helps explaining the central role of empires and labor between the seventeenth century and the First World War. However, the hierarchies between peasants, landowners, cities and the state were different in the Anglo-American, French and Russian empires. Therefore, coercion and resistance also took different forms. The transformations of empires and labor in the twentieth century responded to these roots and provoked the convulsions in the USSR and the different kinds of social tensions in Britain, France and the United States.

This chapter explores fascist urban imaginary – the ways in which European fascists responded to, and sought to reorder, the modern city – and how these visions informed projects in Italy, Germany and Spain. Drawing on Social Darwinist and social hygienic discourses, fascists regarded cities antagonistically, as epicentres of cosmopolitanism, degenerate modernism, racial corruption and sterility. The city, like the nation as whole, was a space to be conquered, purged and regenerated. Yet at the same time, they also embraced the urban environment as a showcase for national greatness, a site of political ritual and a vehicle for the totalitarian transformation of society.

This tension shaped the policies of fascist regimes, especially as directed towards the capitals of Rome, Berlin and Madrid. Through demolition, excavation and construction, they used urban space to invoke past golden ages, attempted to leave an enduring imprint on the built environment, and formulated utopian plans for cities of the future. The chapter also considers the afterlives of fascist urban interventions and their significance for contemporary memory politics.

This chapter analyzes why high hopes in 1933 for expanded trade and strategic cooperation were not fulfilled in the following years. It argues that the failures did not stem solely from Joseph Stalin’s evil actions. Presenting a more complex story, the chapter highlights how conservative Americans exaggerated threats of Soviet-instigated communist revolution, how Ambassador William Bullitt’s intemperate diplomacy hampered relations, and how the US Navy obstructed President Roosevelt’s plans for building warships for the USSR. Despite those problems, the descent of the Soviet Union into the Great Terror, and the signing of the Nazi–Soviet pact in 1939, the United States did not break relations with the USSR. As a result, Roosevelt kept open the possibility of a military partnership as war erupted in Europe. Going beyond the strategic and economic dimensions, the chapter highlights how harsh Soviet anti-American propaganda sought to buttress belief in the superiority of socialism over capitalism while Hollywood films ridiculed ascetic, doctrinaire Soviet communists and suggested that they were susceptible to seduction by the consumer pleasures of capitalist countries.