The conference report has been published on H-Soz-Kult

by Bettina Blatter, Departement für Zeitgeschichte, Fribourg / Haute école fédérale en formation professionelle, Renens; Pascal Gadient, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Universität St. Gallen

The international conference on the transnational Extreme Right after 1945 examined the post-war evolution of far-right actors, including organizational revivals and ideological shifts, focusing on transnational networks, generational change, and the interaction of older and newer extreme-right circles. It highlighted how cross-border contacts, media circulation, and the exchange of ideas, aesthetics, and lifestyles shaped mobilization and organizational strategies. In his opening remarks, DAMIR SKENDEROVIC (Fribourg) and STEFAN RINDLISBACHER (Fribourg) emphasized the centrality of transnationalism to the post-1945 extreme right, highlighting Switzerland’s role as a key hub for neo-fascists, conservatives, and the New Right. Switzerland, they argued, provided a refuge for activists facing bans and prosecution, enabling them to adapt, build alliances, and reorganize their ideology. Through publishers, meetings, and forums, the country became a platform for propagandists and intermediaries who exchanged ideas, sustained networks, and advanced currents such as negationism, antisemitism, and revisionism. The conference underscored that, rather than disappearing, far-right actors reactivated, reconstructed, and adapted after 1945, developing strong international cooperation and transferring ideas across borders. Post-fascist movements did not operate in isolation but sought strategic alliances enabling them to survive, mutate, and maintain influence in the post-war era.

VALERIE DUBSLAFF (Rennes) explored how old and new Nazi networks, such as the European Social Movement and the Nouvel Ordre Européen, were reactivated in Western Europe in the early 1950s. Mostly intellectuals formed a network in which they invited one another and published each other’s works – often as a continuation of their previous involvement with Nazism. This transnational and multilingual media space involved protagonists from West Germany, Belgium, Sweden, France, and Switzerland, serving as a vehicle for propaganda and ideology. However, finding a coherent ideological foundation proved difficult, as some promoted a moderate anticommunist view rather than emphasizing racist theories. Despite internal dissent, it revealed the enduring potential of Nazism after 1945. NICOLA KRISTIN KARCHER (Østfold) and OULA SILVENNOINEN (Helsinki) examined the re-emergence of the Nordic far right after 1945. They showed how far-right actors revived organizations and adapted their ideas to post-war conditions, laying the groundwork for renewed transnational networks. Post-war activities included völkisch movements, Sweden’s Neo-Nazi party Nordiska rikspartiet, and publications such as the newspaper “Folk og Land” for Norwegian Nazi collaborators or the Finnish Waffen-SS journal “Achtung”. Much of this activity crossed national borders within a distinct Nordic milieu, with Sweden serving as a refuge, transit hub, and base for rebuilding transnational networks. JOHANNES DAFINGER (Salzburg) revealed how transnational far-right groups in the post-war period engaged with and defended apartheid in South Africa and Namibia. They maintained ties with like-minded activists and state officials, exchanged ideas on apartheid ideology, and sought to influence international opinion through visits, publications, and events. Anticommunism drove much of this activism, particularly among economic elites. While the South African government did not officially support Far-Right groups, it maintained contacts and gave interviews to sympathetic media. Visits to South Africa by prominent figures, including Oswald Mosley, facilitated the circulation of ideas and served as models for Far-Right actors in other countries.

Approaching the topic from a methodological perspective, DOMINIK RIGOLL (Potsdam) examined the 1967 study by political scientist Kurt P. Tauber on post-war German nationalism. Rigoll focused on Tauber’s chapters on the transnational activities of the German far right. In these chapters, Tauber traces West German nationalist connections to Central and Eastern Europe – continuities rooted in the close ties some German nationalists had cultivated with the Tsarist Empire. Tauber demonstrates how these actors pursued projects such as a “Nation Europa,” “Eurafrika,” and even a global propaganda agency called “Natinform.” According to Rigoll, Tauber was the first to stress the importance of examining transcontinental dimensions when studying the history of organized nationalism in post-war Europe.

From antifeminist ideology to subcultural music and youth movements, as well as regional initiatives and public events, it becomes evident that political mobilization and transnational networking occurred through multiple channels. Based on abortion debates in the 1970s, AURELIA ROHRMANN (Fribourg) explored how antifeminism served as a unifying element among far-right actors in the post-war period. Opposition to abortion was not only driven by moral or religious convictions but also shaped by concerns and imagined threats about population decline and national survival. Anti-emancipatory, fascist, and nationalist ideologies often permeated debates over abortion in Switzerland and West Germany. FABIO FERRARINI (Milan) provided insight of how far-right “alternative” music emerged in early-1960s Italy as an anticommunist and anti-Soviet cultural counter-project. Musicians adopted the label “alternative” to mark a distinct milieu. He highlighted the blending of music, symbols, and literature—for example, politically infused fantasy inspired by “The Lord of the Rings”, as seen in the 1977 “Hobbit Camp” in Benevento. By the 1970s, punk music was adopted by far-right bands to spread their ideas and mobilize supporters. ANNELOTTE JANSE (Potsdam) addressed how the Yzer Pilgrimage in Belgium, originally a World War I commemoration, became a transnational mass event in the 1970s. Extreme-right groups from across Europe used it as a site for ideological performance, the ritualization of collective identity, and milieu-building – expressed through flag parades, marching, and singing.

Media, ranging from traditional magazines and books to digital platforms, play a crucial role in maintaining ideological continuity, fostering the transnationalization of networks, and mobilizing new actors. MARIE MÜLLER-ZETZSCHE (Potsdam) delved into the role of far-right “political writers” and their media after 1945, pointing out how they functioned as bridges for fascist and Nazi ideologies into the post-war era. Far-right magazines such as “Nation Europa” and “Défense de l’Occident”, which reached a significant readership abroad, served as platforms for political writers, right-wing extremists, neo-fascists or Nazi propagandists, SS veterans, and fascist intellectuals like Maurice Bardèche or Oswald Mosley. They functioned as ideological archives, preserving and republishing historical narratives while encouraging reader participation, thereby solidifying a far-right political culture across generations. Using Swiss entrepreneur and publisher Emil Rahm as an example, FRANCA SCHAAD (Bern) showed how from the 1960s to the 2000s, a political activist successfully popularized far-right ideas among a wider public. In his bulletin “Memopress”, he warned of moral decline by distributing conservative, evangelical, conspiratorial, and antisemitic ideologies. Moreover, he presided over the Committee against women’s suffrage in 1971 and actively opposed the anti-racism penal norm during the 1994 referendum. ANNA KARAKATSOULI (Athens) discussed far-right, often family-run publishers in Greece that produced extremist literature with antisemitic, anticommunist, and revisionist topics. While Hellenocentric publishers usually focus on nativism and Greek supremacy since Antiquity, extremist neo-Nazi publishers demonstrate strong ties to groups and organizations outside Greece. As she convincingly argued, translations play an important role. There are translations of Nazi and revisionist anti-Semitic literature, but also magazines such as “Zentromag” or “Blood & Honour” have been available in various languages, including Greek. As the final speaker of the panel, KATARINA RISTIĆ (Leipzig) showed how anonymous digital activism connects far-right communities and helps transform the far right into a global phenomenon. Digital platforms enable bottom-up mobilization of the masses, especially in the Western Balkans – a region that, as a site of radical mobilization during the 1990s wars, has since become a hub for far-right ideologies and activism. Social media proliferates far-right content by allowing individuals to offer their interpretations of narratives to a larger audience, translate far-right messages, and adapt them to local cultural contexts.

In his keynote lecture, ANDREA MAMMONE (Rome) called for ongoing research on the Extreme Right and urged historians to engage more actively in public debate. Drawing parallels between the present and the interwar period, such as disputes over migration and austerity, he stressed that media discussions rarely address the transnational dimension. He also raised questions that resonate amid current developments, arguing that key issues include how Europe interacts with Trumpism and how the European Extreme Right connects to it. Challenging the prevailing tendency to study fascism and the extreme right as isolated phenomena within national frameworks, Mammone advocated a transnational approach to the history of the post-war Extreme Right, focusing on cross-border flows, exchanges, actors, and historical continuities that persisted beyond 1945.

On the second day, panelists approached the post-1945 extreme right from a purely actor-centred angle, asking how specific individuals and their platforms weave together transnational worlds. Rather than focusing solely on parties, the panels traced cross-border networks and contacts (brokers, clubs, institutes), the circulation of media products (journals, translations, publishing houses), and the exchange of ideas (metapolitics, “right to difference,” protochronism) as they move across languages and publics. Speakers also highlighted the role of aesthetics and lifestyles (rituals, camps, elite salons, music circuits) as mobilizing repertoires and showed how organisational forms – from invitation-only institutes to Euro-level alliances—emerged from these personal linkages. In short, the focus was on the specific actors who transferred doctrines, formats, and affects across borders – and on the strategies they used to turn these into durable forms of mobilisation.

JOHANNES GROẞMANN (Munich) reconstructed the behind-the-scenes career of the Swede Arvid Fredborg, showing how his work as foreign correspondent, fixer, and convenor connected Christian-conservative, radical-right, and neoliberal milieus across Europe and the Atlantic. At the heart of his network stood the Institut d’Études Politiques de Vaduz (f. 1959), an invitation-only club whose closed meetings and in-house magazine, “International Background”, functioned as brokerage devices: Gaullists, Christian Democrats, and British Conservatives met industry figures and editors, testing a vocabulary that married market liberalism to hard law-and-order and anti-egalitarianism. Großmann argued that this mix helped establish later European party-group alignments and crystallized into a durable program he termed “authoritarian libertarianism.”

THERESE MAGER (Leipzig) examined Alain de Benoist and Groupement de recherche et d’études pour la civilisation européenne (GRECE) as architects of an elite-oriented metapolitics that repackaged far-right doctrine as theory. Early GRECE combined neo-pagan anti-egalitarianism, anti-modernism, with ethno-differentialism, reaching mass conservative audiences through “Le Figaro Magazine” before splintering into militant currents and bridge organizations. De Benoist’s “Vu de droite” and, later, “Krisis” sought left–right dialogue, provoking the well-known “Appel à la vigilance” (1993), in which hundreds of academics warned against the banalization of far-right ideas. Mager traced the Anglophone afterlife of these frames through Paul Piccone’s journal “Telos” and, later, “Arktos Media” (founded by Daniel Friberg), showing how translation chains and editorial gatekeeping carried “right-wing Gramscianism,” anti-egalitarianism, and the “right to difference” into identitarian and alt-right repertoires without simply reproducing French contexts.

LINN SOFIE BØRRESEN (Berlin) presented Henning Eichberg as a “seismograph” who absorbed and redeployed French nationalist theory in West German and Danish contexts. Drawing on diaries and estate papers, she traced Eichberg’s first contacts back to 1963, then followed his importation of a French model of militant metapolitics (“no revolution without doctrine”) into German networks via journals, correspondence, and “Nouvelle École” – the political-philosophical journal founded in 1968 by GRECE. Børresen demonstrated that, through talks, articles, and careful network-building, Eichberg promoted an ethnopluralist vocabulary while tailoring his register to different publics.

OLIVIER BURTIN (Amiens) charted a century of U.S. far-right entanglements as a persistent oscillation between outward-facing coalition-building and domestic rebranding that translated foreign cues into American idioms of 1776 and constitutionalism. From Francis Parker Yockey’s pan-European “Imperium” and the National Renaissance Party’s Nazi links to George Lincoln Rockwell’s global project and his later “white power” turn, actors blended imported models with local myth, toggling between vanguardism and mainstreaming. Burtin argued that the result was a movement at once provincial and international – switching registers to navigate opportunity and stigma in the United States and abroad.

MANUEL MIREANU (Cluj) traced an unbroken continuity of the Romanian far right through the figure of Iosif Constantin Drăgan—an interwar activist turned Italy-based business magnate—who built a cross-border pipeline for “protochronism”, which aligns with claims of Romanian/Thracian civilizational primacy. Via his very own “Nagard” press and a network of foundations, Drăgan circulated ultra-nationalist and at times anti-Semitic narratives from Italian exile across Romania. Under Ceaușescu, these ideas fed a state-sanctioned autarkic differentiation from both West and USSR. After 1989, Drăgan became a key ideologue and funder of the main far-right party Greater Romania, benefiting from his established publishing and heritage infrastructure. By foregrounding a figure such as Drăgan, Mireanu showed how Cold War ambiguities and cultural entrepreneurship sustained the transfer of far-right ideology into the post-communist party field – a dynamic that persists in Romania to this day.

PEDRO PABLO GARCÉS PALACIOS (Zaragoza) mapped the Italo-Hispanic axis between the Movimento Sociale Italiano and Fuerza Nueva under their leaders Giorgio Almirante and Blas Piñar. Early-1970s contacts crystallized into Eurodestra, a far-right European political alliance established in 1978. Mutual media support and campaign appearances followed, with each leader borrowing from the other’s symbolic repertoire – Piñar leaning toward a Christianized “Europe of Fatherlands,” Almirante incorporating Falangist inflections. Using correspondence from the Piñar family archive, Garcés Palacios showed how leader-level trust, shared stages, and youth-wing emulation anchored cooperation despite electoral weakness – an exemplary instance of personal networks converting parallel national projects into a transnational neo-fascist node.

The final roundtable reached a clear conclusion: In the post-1945 far right, transnationalism is the rule rather than the exception. The scholars emphasized that these extremist ideas, actors, and resources circulated through publishing and event economies, think tanks, summer camps, lecture circuits, and, more recently, digital platform ecologies. Because representatives and collaborations of the far right often recalibrate their public self-descriptions (conservative, right, extreme; “democratic,” “liberal”), the group agreed that network and repertoire analysis offer a more accurate account of circulation than narrow party typologies. On that basis, the discussion turned to normative clarity: Anti-fascism belongs here not as an activist label but as a concise reference to non-negotiable democratic rules. As the post-1945 anti-fascist consensus in Western Europe erodes, articulating and defending those rules becomes more urgent, even as public engagement becomes increasingly challenging.

The conference allowed for a more transnational approach on the Extreme Right but also sought to strengthen the network of historical research on right-wing extremism in Europe. It additionally provided the occasion for the annual meeting of the Zeithistorischer Arbeitskreis Extreme Rechte (ZAER), which for the first time fostered networking beyond the German-speaking world.

Conference overview:

Damir Skenderovic (Fribourg) / Stefan Rindlisbacher (Fribourg): Conference Opening

Panel I: Continuities and Transformations
Chair: Damir Skenderovic (Fribourg)

Valérie Dusblaff (Rennes): National Socialist Continuities in Western Europe: (Re-)activation of Transnational Networks in the Post-War Period (1950s)

Nicola Kristin Karcher (Østfold) / Oula Silvennoinen (Helsinki): The Re-Establishment of Nordic Far-Right Activism after 1945

Johannes Daginer (Salzburg): The Transnational Far Right and Apartheid South Africa in the Post-War Period

Dominik Rigoll (Potsdam): Historicizing Nationalist Internationalism. Kurt P. Tauber's Empirical and Theoretical Legacy for Today's Research on the Transnational Far Right

Panel II: Gender, Space, Culture
Chair: Caroline Rusterholz (Fribourg)

Aurelia Rohrmann (Fribourg): Demographic Anxieties. The Transnational Antifeminism of the Radical Right 1968-1990

Fabio Ferrarini (Milan): “Tomorrow Belongs to Us”. Origins and Developments of Far-right Alternative Music in Italy (1965-1977)

Annelotte Janse (Potsdam): More Than a “Fascist Disneyland”: The Yzer Pilgrimage and a Transnationalizing Western European Extreme Right (1960s-1980s)

Panel III: Media and Communication
Chair: Vêra Stojarová (Brno)

Marie Müller-Zetzsche (Potsdam): Far-Right “Political Writers” and Their Media

Franca Schaad (Bern): Swiss Far-Right Entrepreneur Emil Rahm and His Political PR-Network

Anna Karakatsouli (Athens): Radical Translations: Far-Right Publishing and Extremist Networking in Greece since 1974

Katarina Ristić (Leipzig): Transnational Far-Right in Digital Platforms: Organic Influencers, Digital Archives, and Memetic Activism. Case Study Balkans

Public Keynote
Andrea Mammone (Rome): Transnational History and Right-wing Extremism: An Unfinished Journey

Panel IV: Transnational Networks and Protagonists I
Chair: Gideon Botsch (Potsdam)

Johannes Großmann (Munich): In the Background. The Transnational Career of Arvid Fredborg and the Nordic Roots of Authoritarian Libertarians

Therese Mager (Leipzig): Translating Alain de Benoist: Cultural Brokers and the Recreation of the Far-Right Intellectual in a New Space

Linn Sofie Børresen (Berlin): Nationalists Going Transnational: Henning Eichberg and the Nouvelle Droite

Panel V: Transnational Networks and Protagonists II
Chair: Franziska Zaugg (Fribourg)

Olivier Burtin (Amiens): Nationalism and Internationalism: The Ambivalent Relationship of the U.S. Far Right with the World after 1945

Manuel Mireanu (Cluj): We, the Fascists: Iosif Drăgan and Far Right Ideas in Post-1948 Romania

Pedro Pablo Garcés Palacios (Zaragoza): Transnational Networks and Political Alliances: The Relationship Between the Movimento Sociale Italiano and Fuerza Nueva Through Giorgio Almirante and Blas Piñar

Final Roundtable
Moderator: Damir Skenderovic (Fribourg)

Sebastian Bischoff (Bielefeld) / Nicola Kristin Karcher (Østfold) / Andrea Mammone (Rome) / Věra Stojarová (Brno)