Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project

Deploying a complex methodological apparatus drawing on transnational history, this project breaks new ground by providing an original global history of fascism (1919-1945).

INTEMPO argues that the fascist national revolutions were part of a global project of overhauling the liberal international order and replacing it with a fascist one.

It does so by approaching transnational fascism through the lens of temporality, showing the centrality of a specific temporal structure to fascist ideology.

Fascists everywhere repurposed a historical or mythical past, saw their present as a watershed moment in world history, and aimed to accelerate it toward a redemptive future of eternal plenitude when time would stand still.

Despite significant variation related to the different national contexts in which fascist movements and regimes emerged, the compatibility of this temporal structure – translating spatially into distinct but similarly compatible projections of a ‘New Order’ – allowed mutual recognition and enabled international cooperation that transcended fascism’s ultra-nationalism.

The project further shows how fascism’s temporal imagination resolutely opposed the universal time regime associated with the spread of capitalism, liberalism, and colonial expansion.

Fascist temporalities and their revolutionary potential are consequently used as an entry point for elucidating fascism’s restructuring of space – social space internally and geopolitical space internationally – and its complex engagement with capitalism and colonialism, respectively.

The focus on temporality, underpinning analysis of the diverse forms that interactions between fascist movements and regimes took, allows us to operate across different spatial scales of analysis, from the local through the national to the global.

INTEMPO inaugurates a new research agenda in four distinct fields: fascism studies, global history, the history of empire and colonialism, and the interdisciplinary study of temporality.