Fascist Internationalism: From a Vanished Institution to a Failed Concept?

During the early 1930s, a number of fascist international organisations emerged in Europe and East Asia. Italy's ambition to universalise fascism led to the establishment of the Action Committees for the Universality of Rome (Comitati d’Azione per l’Universalità di Roma, CAUR) in mid-1933. Meanwhile, some months earlier, Japan's continental expansion and the founding of Manchukuo brought about the creation of the Greater Asia Association (Dai Ajia Kyōkai). For a moment, it seemed that the time had come for a proper fascist international aimed at an ultranationalist revision of the League of Nations and at fighting the Comintern on a global level. During the 1930s, fascist internationalism was the ideology-driven motor beyond such projects. However, by the latter half of the decade, all of them had failed. In Europe, heightened competition between Germany and Italy left little space for a pan-European fascist organisation. In Asia, the colonial context of the region and Japan's expansion placed almost insurmountable obstacles in the way of an East Asian fascist international, and it turned out that the connection between the two centres of gravitation in Asia and Europe would not be established through any kind of fascist international organisation. This article discusses how and why the fascist internationals of the early 1930s vanished, stressing that, in the end, the rising Axis alliance was much more driven by transimperial radicalisation. In other words, Italy, Germany and Japan did not rely on a proper fascist international institution to plunge the world into a new world war. Nonetheless, as this article shows, the manner of the failure and vanishing of fascist internationalism is essential in understanding the scope and nature of global fascism in the interwar years.