Search

This article analyzes the character and development of the Swedish Brigade, a small military volunteer unit in the Finnish Civil War of 1918, in the context of the European counter-revolution. Volunteers in the various civil wars following the Russian Revolution have been studied extensively before, but have largely focused on countries that participated in the First World War. This case study of the ‘White’ Swedish Brigade aims to highlight the importance of volunteers from neutral countries, and their specific role in the transnational counter-revolutionary movement. The Brigade was an ostensibly politically neutral unit, with a socially heterogeneous make-up. Heavily supported by the Swedish right-wing media, it was widely romanticized as a heroic effort to restore Sweden's honour by supporting the Finnish fight against the old Russian enemy, and defending the former Swedish province as a bulwark of Swedish culture, law and order against barbarism. While its political culture was steeped in a romanticized Finno-Swedish history and culture, shared by many of the volunteers, the brigadiers were quickly confronted by the realities of poor equipment and organization, political division, and above all an exceptionally brutal civil war and the morally degrading violence it entailed. Brigade archive documents and memoirs show that this quickly changed the character of the actual volunteer unit to contrast heavily with the right-wing press's romantic imagination. Additionally, through contacts with the Finnish and German military, and in the face of a Left Swedish critique of the Brigade as reactionary butchers, many of the volunteers reconceptualized their role in the civil war, not as one of heroic and historical significance for Sweden, but as part of a vicious European struggle against Bolshevism. This seems to some extent confirmed by their post-war history, which raises interesting questions about these volunteers’ roles among the new Right of interwar Europe.

Dutch fascism was marked by an international outlook and character from the outset in the 1920s. Rather than a purely Netherlands affair, it had proponents in multiple countries, particularly Belgium and the East Indies (Indonesia). For many of these, the idea of a Great Netherlands territory uniting all Dutch-speaking nations – Dietsland – was central to their international vision. There were a number of Dutch fascist parties and other organisations spread across the globe which experienced limited success throughout the 1920s, notably Flemish fascists in Belgium, and the reactionary Fatherland Club in the Dutch Indies. The latter was the most important, successfully mobilising the white settler population against perceived weakness in the face of Indonesian nationalism and communism. In the early 1930s they became influenced by fascism. The dominant fascist force of the 1930s however was Anton Mussert’s National Socialist Movement, which became a considerable force in the Netherlands, but proportionally even greater in the East Indies. Permitting mixed-race members in the party, it established integrated branches in the colonies where it became the largest political party. An inclusive culturalist notion of Dietsland was central to the party’s international vision and plans for a future fascist Imperium. It took a broadly positive stance towards the colonial administration, pointing to it as a model of fascist rule. This international Dutch fascism was underpinned by a transnational network of members and colonial administrators and army veterans which moved around the Dutch empire. This had a real impact on the development of party ideology, as leaders had to reckon with the influence of the transnational fascist network. However, ultimately metropolitan chauvinism and white supremacism determined the ultimate failure of Dutch fascism in the Indies and the hollowness of the Dietsland myth.

This article explores conceptions of fascism as an international phenomenon as understood by three political parties of the 1930s: Quisling’s Norwegian Nasjonal Samling (NS), Lindholm’s Swedish Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet (NSAP) and Mussert’s Dutch Nationaal-Socialistische Beweging (NSB). In order to highlight fascist movements’ contributions to fascist internationalism, the article deploys both a comparative and transnational framework, showing up the national differences in their conceptions of international fascism, regional connections and influences, changes over time and the contingencies of transnational contact that affected the practical establishment of international relationships. It is shown that there was an impetus for international cooperation between fascist movements outside of the orbit of fascist regimes, typically sustained by regional affinities as existed among Northern countries and the Low Countries. While often framed by ambitious rhetoric, ultimately the three parties continued to focus on their own national projects rather than deepen international collaboration. Lastly the movements’ different myths of international fascism are compared, constructed for propagandistic ends, all of which broadly fit within the mould of a new European or even global era which saw the rise of fascism and the (hoped for) victory over ideological enemies such as communism and liberalism.

This article compares the party apparatuses of the National Socialist Movement of the Netherlands and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Sweden. These two parties, founded in the 1930s, both to some extent mimicked the organisational model of Hitler's party in Germany. While this has been frequently noted, the deployment of this model in practice has not been analysed in any detail. The article explores the specific characters of the Swedish and Dutch fascist party organisations diachronically vis-à-vis propaganda, member activism and internal cohesion, highlighting their changes, successes and failures. The comparison reveals that the party apparatus was highly dependent on the specifics of national infrastructure, demographic distribution and urbanisation and the physical landscape, with notable consequences for internal party cohesion and morale. In the final analysis the relative appeal and popularity of the parties is shown party be the result of how the Nazi organisational model was deployed in practice within each national context.

Very little research has been done into the leader of the most prominent Swedish fascist party of the interwar period, the leader of the Nationalsocialistiska Arbetarepartiet, Sven Olov Lindholm, in spite of extensive source material in his personal archive. This article explores the literary influences on his politics, which Lindholm cited in his private documents and interviews, both contemporary and post-war. The immediate impact of notable Swedish writers, poets especially, such as Verner von Heidenstam, Viktor Rydberg, Esaias Tegnér, and Bertel Gripenberg, is demonstrated. These authors, largely of the Swedish Romantic tradition, are shown to be parts of one major Scandinavian cultural current in particular, namely Gothicism (göticism), manifested through a centuries-long interest in the Old Nordic heritage. In Sweden, the influence of new far-Right ideas that made their way into the country in the 1920s intersected with Gothicism in unique ways, which gave Swedish fascists a peculiar relationship to both fascism and their national heritage. Ultimately, these literary Gothicist influences allowed a particular naturalizing codification of Swedish fascism in the 1930s. Under the influence of, above all, contemporary Finno-Swedish health specialist Are Waerland, Lindholm is shown to have actively shaped Swedish fascism in line with his literary exemplars.

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.