Olivier Burtin is an associate professor of History at the Université of Picardie Jules Verne in Amiens, France, and associate editor of the journal Politique Américaine. His research explores the history of the modern United States, with a focus on state and society, war and peace, and the U.S. in the world. He is currently working on a survey of the far right in U.S. history.
- Olivier Burtin (ed.), "The Far Right in U.S. History," special issue of the Journal for Right-Wing Studies (forthcoming 2025).
- Olivier Burtin, A Nation of Veterans: War, Citizenship, and the Welfare State in Modern America, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022.
- Olivier Burtin, "Fascism Has an American History, Too," Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 494-520.
Nationalism and Internationalism: The Ambivalent Relationship of the U.S. Far Right with the World after 1918
Scholars have long documented the connections between the far right in the United States and its counterparts abroad. In Revolutionaries for the Right (2018), Kyle Burke for example traced the emergence of a transnational anticommunist crusade spearheaded by U.S. activists in the 1950s, which reached its zenith in the 1980s amid the conflicts in Central America. Similarly, Michael Barkun’s research on Christian Identity revealed how this religion, which originated in Great Britain, crossed the Atlantic at the dawn of the 20th century to later become a cornerstone of the “white power” movement—a trajectory that mirrored that of the skinhead subculture from the 1970s onward. Frederick Simonelli’s 1999 biography of George Lincoln Rockwell, founder of the American Nazi Party in the 1950s, likewise illustrated how the man known to his followers as the “Commander” was deeply engaged in the ultimately futile attempt to establish a World Union of National Socialists. In short, historians of the U.S. far right have long moved past what once seemed a central irony: that this intensely nationalist tradition was not only shaped by foreign influences but also consistently engaged in building transnational alliances.
This paper seeks to synthesize these case studies by addressing a gap in the existing scholarship: a comprehensive overview of the U.S. far right’s entanglement with global forces since the interwar period. It explores not only the international ties that connected this movement to the wider world but also the (lesser-known) countervailing forces within it that prioritized a focus on the United States. Such tensions surfaced repeatedly throughout U.S. history, for instance with Rockwell’s decision in the mid-1960s to abandon Nazi imagery to form the National Socialist White People’s Party, or with David Duke’s embrace of the Ku Klux Klan after his years in the Nazi Party, motivated by his view that the former was more resonant with American audiences. By examining these dynamics, the paper provides a more nuanced account of the U.S. far right’s ambivalent relationship with global forces—one characterized not only by attempts to build international alliances but also by the need to forge a politically viable coalition that could resonate with a deeply nationalistic U.S. public. Spanning most of the twentieth century, from the end of World War I to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the paper draws primarily on secondary sources, supplemented by original research in several archives.