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Insurgent Temporalities: Fascism as a Global Anti-Universalist Project

Project description

A global history of fascism through the lens of its temporal worldview

The rise of fascism in the early 20th century challenged liberal internationalism and sought to reshape the global order. Fascist ideology was grounded in a specific temporal worldview: fascists everywhere repurposed the historical past, saw their present as a watershed moment and aimed to accelerate it towards a redemptive future when time would stand still. The compatibility of this world view enabled transnational cooperation among fascist movements and regimes, despite their significant national variations. The ERC-funded INTEMPO project offers an innovative global history of fascism, approached through the lens of temporality. Fascist temporalities are 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.

Objective

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.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

Keywords

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Funding Scheme

HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants

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Call for proposal

(opens in new window) ERC-2024-COG

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Host institution

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH
Net EU contribution
€ 1 999 698,00
Address
CO KILDARE
W23 Maynooth
Ireland
Region
Ireland Eastern and Midland Mid-East
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost
€ 1 999 698,00

Beneficiaries (1)