Global History Colloquium: Martin Hamre (Freie Universität Berlin) on “Fascists of the World, Unite? A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s”
12 January 2026, 16:15-17:45 (in person)
FU Berlin, FMI, Room A336, Koserstr. 20, 14195 Berlin
The book Fascists of the World, Unite? analyzes the ideas and forms of international cooperation between Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and fascist movements from Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, Ireland, and Britain. The study examines how fascists attempted to unite across borders by forming international organizations and networks, hosting conferences and exhibitions, disseminating multilingual publications, and exchanging propaganda. Their transnational cooperation was fuelled by shared ideas of ultranationalism, anti-liberalism, anti-communism, antisemitism, racism, white supremacism, and Europeanism. The book argues that fascist internationalism, marked by contradictions, limitations, and an Italo-German rivalry, emerged in the 1930s as a counter-reaction to liberal and communist internationalism. The epilogue discusses reverberations in the Second World War and the postwar period and outlines the relevance of this history for understanding contemporary forms of far-right internationalism.
Martin Kristoffer Hamre is a research associate and lecturer in history at the Freie Universität Berlin and currently coordinator of the Graduate School Global Intellectual History. His research interests include the history of European fascism and the far right, the history of internationalism and Europeanization, and the history of German reunification and transformation. In 2024-2025, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the LUCK Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge at the Department of History, Lund University. He completed the Graduate School of Global Intellectual History at the Freie Universität Berlin, where he received his PhD (Dr. phil) in 2024. His dissertation analyzed “Notions and Activities of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s”, supervised by Margrit Pernau and Sebastian Conrad. During his doctoral studies, he participated in the Younger Fellow Visiting Program at C-REX, Center for Research on Extremism at the University of Oslo and was awarded a post-graduate scholarship at the German Historical Institute London. Prior to joining the FMI, he worked as a project assistant at the Federal Chancellor Willy Brandt Foundation and completed an internship at the German Historical Institute in Washington DC.
Fascists of the World, Unite?
A History of Fascist Internationalism in the 1930s
https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111469799/html