On 8 February 2023, NORFAS arranged an international conference on Nordic Fascism – Content, Continuities and Changes at the Norwegian Center for Holocaust and Minority Studies in Oslo. The conference addressed a broad public and was well attended with several hundred interested participants directly or by stream. In our presentations, we explored the 100-year-old history of fascism and the far right in the Nordic countries and discussed threats to liberal democracies of today.
Fascist ideas regarding the supposed existence of a superior white race with a specific mission in the world have shaped – and continue to shape – the Nordic far right of today. Cooperation and joint networks of far-right activists across the Nordic countries have played an important role since the interwar years. However, knowledge about these efforts and their different manifestations through history is still superficial.
With our conference, we addressed some of these fragments of an entangled history of Nordic fascism and made recent research findings accessible for a broader public and other researchers.
Alongside the conference, we launched the new NORFAS volume on Nordic fascism in which we explore its specific history in more detail.