Abstract
This anthology explores transnational fascist cooperation in Nordic countries. Drawing from the collective work of the international Network for Nordic Fascism Studies, the chapters examine collaboration and interactions between fascists in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden with attention to extremists’ ‘racial relationship’ arguments. Editors Nicola Karcher and Markus Lundström explain that the book seeks to help ‘uncover’ the ‘fragments of an entangled history’ by looking at the exchanges of fascists in Nordic countries during the past 100 years (p. 6). The chapters take empirical and analytical approaches in tracing fascism from 1910 to present day by highlighting how this region has a special meaning for fascists. Roger Griffin’s foreword situates the book in the broader field, explaining how his notion of ‘palingenetic ultranationalism’ has helped underpin the field with a common definition that facilitates scholarly collaboration and he describes how the anthology contributes to the study of fascism regarding Northern Europe specifically and the ‘flowering’ of discipline generally. The editors’ introduction provides a brief overview of Nordic fascism history with its ‘springtime of the interwar and war period, as well as its decline after the Second World War, a rupture that marks both discontinuation and continuation, renunciation and regeneration, of fascism’s political ideas’ (p. 6).
The book has eight chapters, not including the introduction, organised chronologically with the first half focused on before and during the Second World War. Beginning with early Nordic fascism, Sofie Lene Bak and Terje Emberland (with contributions from Heléne Lööw and Oula Silvennoinen) show how antisemitic conspiracy was not a Nazi Germany import, but antisemitism and fascism were intertwined when fascism emerged in Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden in the early twentieth century. The authors argue, ‘antisemitic propagandists were [...] among the founders of the first movements, years before the Third Reich was established’ (p. 17). Next, Karcher explores Norwegian National Socialists in interwar Germany by looking at how their activities in Germany enabled cooperation and built networks. She explains Nordic fascists in Germany had an affinity with German National Socialists, but there was disagreement among Nordic fascist groups over who were authentic National Socialist representatives.
Building from this, Oula Silvennoinen examines the political biography of Ralph Erik Serlachius (1901–1980), a Finnish businessman and politician, to show how individuals disassociated themselves and were ‘non-fascist’, but still drew from fascist ideas. The author concludes it was not ‘a philosophical or ideological position’ but ‘was always derived from the economic interest of the family conglomerate he had been raised and educated to manage from the day he was born’ (p. 91). Taking a different approach, Claus Bundgård Christensen and Terje Emberland analyse National Socialist opposition to Nazi Germany in Norway and Denmark, and explore how some fascists sought their own independent version of fascism and were even willing to violently attack fellow fascists. The authors review the criticism and fascists opposed to the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Denmark and Norwegian National Unity by showing how some fascists rejected the ‘imperialism’ of Nazi Germany and their puppet regimes.
The second half of the essay collection analyses the post-war era and esoteric aspects of Nordic fascism. Gustaf Forsell looks at the use of a racialised myth of Atlantis to explain the Nordic race and degeneration during the inter-war period. He writes the myth of Atlantis was ‘intimately linked to the “Nordic” in Nordic fascism’ which stressed ‘the Nordic race originated in a mythical continent in the far north’ and ‘the myth was based on the divine unity of the Nordic race and its racial soul’ (p. 129). Likewise, Mattias Gardell describes occult racist paganism and extreme music by probing the influence of Savitri Devi/Maximiani Julia Portas (1905–1982) and Miguel Serrano (1917–2009). Rather than focusing on the ‘populist’ aspects of fascism, he highlights specific strands of occultism and fascism to show self-perception of elitism and esoteric knowledge.
Moving to the Cold War, Tommi Kotonen reviews the notion of Finnishness through the Nordic Reich Party’s pan-Nordic networks from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. He concludes:
The paths of the Nordic fascist movements and groups in Finland have crossed so often and these interlinkages have had such importance for the movement in Finland that one may argue that the evolution of the Finnish scene cannot be fully understood without simultaneously looking also at the other side of the Bothnian Gulf (p. 182).
Also focusing on Finland, Daniel Sallamaa and Leena Malkki survey ethnocultural ‘ambiguities’ within the Finnish chapter of the Nordic Resistance Movement, originally founded in Sweden during 1997, to promote the group’s idea of a pan-Nordic National Socialist state. They show how it was ideologically challenging to include Finland in the notion of a pan-Nordic state and thus had to emphasise militancy, national rebirth and connect race to the nation along with nature which mirrored wider fascist intellectual history.
This edited collection is an important contribution to fascism studies with its attention to a hundred years of fascism and its related racial–nationalist ideologies in Nordic countries. Largely under researched in the English-language academic literature, the chapters shed light on key moments in Nordic fascism history and take different approaches, including providing intellectual and political histories. The book is largely framed by Roger Griffin’s seminal The Nature of Fascism (1993) and emphasizes ideological exchanges across the borders. Indeed, this provides a useful framework that helps unite the chapters and provides some cohesion between the different authors. Yet, the selection of the topics is not clear to the reader, such as the inclusion of Serlachius or the Finnish branch of the Nordic Resistance Movement, while Anders Behring Breivik or related extremist violence is not analysed. Moreover, the role of Nordic skinheads in the broader Blood and Honour and Combat 18 movements was also not examined despite Sweden and Denmark having an important role in the distribution of music, videos and skinhead literature in the 1990s. Nonetheless, this anthology is a highly recommended study for scholars interested in understanding the Nordic strands of inter-war and post-fascism as well as the broader development of fascism in the last hundred years.