ABSTRACT
As a starting point, the introduction asks how the ongoing Western transformations and crises, stemming from the 2007–2008 financial collapse and its political and geopolitical backlashes in the following decade, help address new questions concerning the interwar period, crisis of democracy, and fascism. It then focuses on the main axis of the volume, revolving around the complex relations between right-wing radicalism and conservatism in the changing sociopolitical contexts of Europe between 1918 and 1941. A number of case-studies, especially dealing with Central and South-Eastern Europe (but not only), show the variety of possible paths, the spectrum of the alternatives, the complexity of forces, and the multiplicity of the actors at play during the interwar period. Accordingly, a major challenge of the book is the effort at intersecting different historiographical perspectives, in order to give a contribution to the fascist studies in terms of historical contextualisations. A special attention is thus devoted to the violent legacies of the Great War, to the collapse of the multinational empires and their aftershocks, to the circulation of nationalist, illiberal, antidemocratic, and anti-Semitic cultures and practices, to the projects of reconstruction of new European and international orders after 1918 and after the 1929 collapse.
