New Political Ideas in the Aftermath of the Great War

Alessandro Salvador, Anders G. Kjøstvedt, Alessandro Salvador, Anders G. Kjøstvedt

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319389141
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319389158
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This edited collection presents new research on how the Great War and its aftermath shaped political thought in the interwar period across Europe. Assessing the major players of the war as well as more peripheral cases, the contributors challenge previous interpretations of the relationship between veterans and fascism, and provide new perspectives on how veterans tried to promote a new political and social order. Those who had frontline experience of the First World War committed themselves to constructing a new political and social order in war-torn Europe, shaped by their experience of the war and its aftermath. A number of them gave voice to the need for a world order free from political and social conflict, and all over Europe veterans imagined a third way between capitalist liberalism and state-controlled socialism. By doing so, many of them moved towards emerging fascist movements and became, in some case unwillingly, the heralds of totalitarian dictatorships.

Table of contents

• Foreword
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Chapter 1: Rediscovering Democracy and the Nation: Hendrik de Man and the Legacy of the Great War
• Chapter 2: Violence, Vienna, Versailles, and Venezuela: The Effects of World War 1 on the Nationalist Thought of Miloš Crnjanski
• Chapter 3: French Intellectual Fascism and the Third Way: The Case of Bertrand de Jouvenel and Alfred Fabre-Luce
• Chapter 4: The Making of Harold Macmillan’s Third Way in Interwar Britain (1924–1935)
• Chapter 5: The Contradictions of Veterans’ Associations? The Fascist Appropriation of the Legacy of World War I and the Failure of Demobilisation
• Chapter 6: Frontsozialismus der Tat: War Experience as the Foundation of Corporatism in the Stahlhelm Veterans’ League
• Chapter 7: In the Shadow of the Lost War: The Nazi Movement and Labour Conflicts in the Weimar Period
• Chapter 8: “We’re of their blood and spirit of their spirit”: Ex-servicemen and the British Union of Fascists
• Chapter 9: The Legacy of the Front: The Disabled Veterans of the First World War in Germany after 1918
• Chapter 10: Within the Fascist World of Work: Sven Olov Lindholm, Ernst Jünger and the Pursuit of Proletarian Fascism in Sweden, 1933–1945
• Chapter 11: Francoist Veterans and the “New State”: Social Benefits and the Consolidation of the Franco Regime (Spain, 1938–1945)
• Index