Preliminary Programme

In order to understand the nature of the Salazar's regime (1932-68), it is crucial to acknowledge the role played by its leader, the law professor António Oliveira Salazar, in the Portuguese political system at that time. It is already known that the decision making process was highly concentrate in Salazar himself. Most of his advisers, those who informed him about all the governmental subjects, were already identified.
Scholarship also considers that Salazar was very a very pragmatic and rational politician. But Salazar was not immune to intellectual influences. Although he never crossed the Portuguese borders, some studies have already discussed his intellectual references during the years of youth. Not surprisingly, Church doctrine and French far right were those who have most influenced the Portuguese leader.
But what were Salazar’s intellectual references in the fascist era? My proposal is to analyse Salazar's intellectual references from 1932 up to 1945. What was he reading in the years of maturity, while he was dealing with the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War? How his readings affected his political decisions? To carry out this task, I will analyse Salazar’s agendas since he wrote down all the books he had read. Simultaneously, this information will be crossed with the decisions he had undertaken during the same period. By doing so, it expected to contribute to better understand the regime's complexity.
(Show less)

This paper explores the life and work of Alexandru Cantacuzino (1901-1939), a promienent fascist intellectual and activist of the Romanian Iron Guard. The scion of an aristocratic family imbued with a militantly nationalist pathos, Alexandru Cantacuzino pleaded in his writings for a new fascist theology of “heroic Christianity,” leading to collective salvation through fascist combat and sacrifice for the national cause. The paper focuses mostly on Cantacuzino's vision of the creation of the Legionary “superhuman” and the Romanian “super-nation” by virtue of divine intervention, which merged the Legion's charismatic nationalism with main Christian themes in a new doctrine of national salvation.
(Show less)

My paper will examine the basic tenets of nationalist and fascist thought in Greece during the inter-war period. For in the period under consideration this ideological and political phenomena were intrinsically intertwined and interconnected. Drawing on Stanley Payne’s ‘typological description’ of fascism (1980), the quintessential goal of the inter-war European fascist movements was the ‘creation of a new nationalist authoritarian state based not merely on traditional principles or models’, while anticonservatism (along with antiliberalism and anticommunism) was one of its principal characteristics (or rather ‘negations’). Payne also underlines the ‘goal of empire’ or ‘a radical change in the national relationship with other powers’ as another main feature of this wide-spectrum description. Most authors lay similarly a particular emphasis on the radical nature of the fascist movements, regimes or systems, and identify a nexus between fascism, authoritarian nationalism and the nation. George Mosse (1975) establishes the rise of nationalism and mass democracy (in the latter’s sense of the nationalized and mobilized masses) as a historical antecedent of the ‘new politics’ of National Socialism. Emilio Gentile (2002), an authority on Mussolini’s Italy, defines fascism, in its ‘cultural dimension’, as a movement that aspires to ‘integrate the man and the masses into an organic and mystified community of the nation’; the fascist movement is founded upon the ‘complete devotion of the individual to the national community’ (and subsequently to the totalitarian State, which represents this community), and the latter’s ‘mission of national revival’.

In inter-war Greece there was not a fully-fledged fascist regime (besides the fascist-like Fourth of August regime in 1936-41), let alone a fascist movement. Hence, I will particularly aim at illustrating the conservative nature or rather timidness of inter-bellum Greek nationalism and foreign policies. For I believe that it was the timidity of nationalist thought and practices that explain the feebleness of the fascist phenomena in Greece in the period under consideration. In fact, after the Asia Minor Catastrophe in 1922 the Greek Great Idea (Megali Idea), i.e. irredentist cum expansionist nationalism in its most maximalist form, was entirely discredited (as an ‘imperialist’ venture) and completely muted. This discredit and muteness was evident on both sides (Left and Right) of the political and intellectual spectrum. Following Greece’s official foreign policies, which after the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne with Turkey (1923) focused on the preservation of the existing borders, the discourse of Greek nationality and identity was cut off active politics, and became the privilege of an elite of introvert intellectuals. What is more, the establishment of the Metaxas dictatorial regime on 4 August 1936 regime did not alter this intellectual and political process. The Metaxist regime remained loyal to the status quo of the peace treaties. The chauvinist discourse of the Third Greek Civilization, the regime’s ideological overcoat, drew on the past glory of Ancient Greece and Byzantium, yet it did not entail a quest for a Modern Greek empire and it was conservative rather than radical in its beliefs. (Show less)

In the second half of the 1930’s, after the consolidation of his Estado Novo, António de Oliveira Salazar ventured in exporting his conservative national revolution and (integral) corporative model to a wide European audience. With the help of the dynamic steering of António Ferro’s National Propaganda Secretariat, the Portuguese State will use different resources to propose the Estado Novo as a sort of 3rd way alternative to both Italian Fascism and German National Socialism, presenting itself as a mild authoritarian catholic-based model against Italian statism and nazi paganism. As such, for political regimes looking for autocratic transitions in the late 30’s, especially for those encouraging a national path outside the direct influence of the two major political powers (Italy and Germany), the Portuguese model was an example to follow. And in this paper we will analyze, using several coeval comparative sources, how Salazar’s personality, and his Estado Novo, were perceived by intellectuals, politicians and public opinion, as a modern blueprint for Hungarian wishful conservative revolution in the late 30’s, namely when Bela Imrédy, first, then Pal Teleki were nominated President of the Council of Ministers.
(Show less)