CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Mesquita, Bruno Ricardo Faustino |
|---|---|
| Title | Romania and Portugal: the backwaters of fascism |
| Summary | This MA thesis surveys several models of generic fascism and proposes a synthesis of them. It reflects on the possibilities of a performing research on interwar European fascisms framed by both theory and context, without letting none of the two take primacy. On the one hand one should not write historiography to prove a theory and organize facts in order to prove it; on the other hand, mere collections of facts lead to no knowledge. Secondly, it looks at two peripheral cases of European fascism, Portugal and Romania, to understand the European dimension of fascism, how both cases can be interpreted making use of a generic fascist model, and assess the limitations of the model in face of national specificities derived from political tradition and circumstances of each country. Third, it offers a re-interpretation of Salazar’s regime as a borderline case inside generic fascism, situated between authoritarianism and fascism. For the period of 1933 to 1945, I argue that the fascist element prevailed. As for Romania, I question the classification of non-fascist based merely on its non-secular Christian ideology. Fourth, the comparison between the countries show that they share a core of fascist elements, but each one has a different configuration and the relative value of each element inside its context also changes. That bears consequences for the European wide dimension of fascisms and for the theoretical model engaged to study the phenomenon. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/mesquita_bruno.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University