We are grateful to announce that the Swedish Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation, has in December 2022 awarded funding for a three-year NORFAS-research project, Inception: The Birth of Nordic Fascism. The aim of the project, covering the period from late 19th century up to the interwar years, is to analyse the intellectual underpinnings of what would later bloom into the Nordic far right. The project will be run by members of our research team (Nicola Karcher, Markus Lundström, Heléne Lööw, Oula Silvennoinen), and based at Uppsala University.
European fascism is by now a century-old intellectual, political and cultural tradition. Instead of being consigned to the past, the body of fascist thought and fascist history continues to grow and inspire modern far right movements. Efforts aimed at producing useful appraisals of the dynamics of these ideas and movements in the present cannot ignore history.
This research project is designed by members of NORFAS to investigate the prehistory, beginnings, and key background experiences of fascist thought and early organisation within the Nordic region, as well as the emergence of specifically Nordic interpretations of fascism. The interconnectedness of the actors of pre- and early Nordic fascism mandates a transnational, entangled research approach.
We will produce a comprehensive history of how the intellectual and ideological themes of fascism were adopted and cultivated within the Nordic region, as well as how the concept of Nordicness was utilised and finally incorporated into the corpus of fascist ideology by the Nordic proponents of nascent fascist thought.