When we think about the idea of a “united Europe,” we usually picture the European Union: treaties, elections to the European Parliament, the euro, endless debates over regulations and borders. It sounds like a technocratic project, grounded in liberal values and the rejection of war. But fascists also dreamed of a united Europe. Since Roger Griffin’s A Fascist Century, historians have known that fascist movements did not just want strong nation-states; they also imagined Europe as a larger cultural, spiritual, and racial community. In their eyes, Europe was more than a map. It was a kind of myth: a “civilization” that had fallen into decadence because of liberal democracy, socialism, and the messy compromises of postwar politics. In my book, I look at this uncomfortable, often forgotten tradition: fascist projects of European unity, from Mussolini’s Italy to postwar neofascists like Jean Thiriart and Adriano Romualdi. This blog post is a short introduction to that story.
A key word in this story is “organic.” Fascists loved it. They inherited the term from Romantic thinkers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who contrasted “organic” forms—natural, rooted, authentic—to “mechanical” ones—artificial, assembled from the outside. Fascists adapted this vocabulary to argue that modern societies based on individual rights, parliaments, and markets were “mechanical” and therefore inauthentic. They claimed to defend an “organic community”: rooted in history, hierarchy, and shared destiny. World War I, with its industrial slaughter, reinforced this opposition. For many on the radical right, the new mass democracies and socialist movements that emerged after the war seemed abstract, artificial, and soulless. Against this, they imagined a lost Heimat: a true community supposedly destroyed by capitalism, urbanization, and liberal norms. But this language created a problem. If a society is truly organic, can it be engineered at all? Can you “build” an organic Europe by design? Or must it already exist in some deeper sense? Here fascist Europeanism ran into its core contradiction: was a united Europe something old that needed to be restored—or something new that needed to be created?
The thinkers I discuss in the book offered very different answers. Julius Evola and Adriano Romualdi had no doubt: a united Europe was older than modern nations. For them, the real political form of Europe was empire, not nation-state. Nations were seen as degenerate products of modernity—Enlightenment, revolution, and bourgeois ideology. The task, then, was to abolish the nation and restore a transnational, hierarchical imperial order. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle and Jean Thiriart were more hesitant but just as radical in their conclusions. They accepted that European unity would be historically new, but argued that it was necessary if nations wanted to survive in a world of giant powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, later China. For them, small nations had become too weak to shape their own future. The solution was not to abandon nationalism, but to scale it up: a “grand nationalism” at the European level. Mussolini and mainstream Italian Fascism took a more cautious stance. Forced to respond to liberal projects like the Briand Plan, they did not rule out European unity in principle. But they insisted that any true unity would have to grow “organically” out of the nations themselves. To act now, they argued, would be premature and “mechanical.” Italy’s priority, in their view, was to complete its own national project: empire, parity with Britain and France, and a central role in the Mediterranean. Behind these positions stood different national histories. Italian nationalism had grown out of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, through figures like Mazzini and Garibaldi. That genealogy made it suspect to radical traditionalists like Evola and Romualdi, who preferred counter-revolutionary thinkers such as Joseph de Maistre and idealized German Romanticism and Nazism. Mainstream Fascists, by contrast, still revered Mazzini and saw his dream of a “Young Europe” as compatible with their own—provided Italy first became a great power.
If Europe was to be one community, what counted as the common bond? For the fascists I study, the answer was almost always racial or civilizational. Here, Theodor Adorno’s remark is helpful: ruling groups love to present themselves as the “oldest settlers,” the autochthonous people, the ones who got there first and therefore deserve to rule. Fascist Europeanism did this on a continental scale. Evola and Romualdi built their story on Aryans and Indo-Europeans. Drieuobsessed over demographic “substitution,” imagining that French identity would be displaced by migration and colonized subjects. Mussolini leaned on the myth of Rome as the original colonizer of the Mediterranean. Thiriart framed Europeans as the only true “civilization-makers,” uniquely capable of intellectual creation. The details differ, but the structure is similar: Europeans are presented as the original, authentic inhabitants of history; others appear as latecomers or intruders. Jews, migrants, Africans, Russians, Americans—all can be inserted into this narrative as threats to an organic community defined by race, culture, or “civilization.”
These ideas did not remain abstract. During the years of Nazi victories, the fascists I study embraced collaboration not just as national defeat or compromise, but as participation in a continental project. They accepted German hegemony as the price of building a Fascist Europe. For many, the war was not a tragedy but an opportunity: a violent process of unification that seemed more “authentic” than anything decided at a conference table. Even after defeat, most of them did not renounce this vision. Adriano Romualdi, born in 1940, went so far as to present the years of Nazi–Fascist collaboration as the true ideological peak of Italian Fascism, implicitly challenging his own father’s more conventional nationalism. For him, collaboration was not an embarrassment but a founding myth. This is one reason why collaboration plays such a central role in the book. Experiencing occupation and collaboration—directly or through family and movement memory—was often the crucible in which ideas of a Fascist Europe were forged, tested, and reimagined.
You might ask: why revisit these marginal, often unpleasant figures today? One answer is methodological: good history has to correct distortions, including the ones produced by fascists themselves and, sometimes, repeated by their critics. Jean Thiriart, for instance, is still frequently presented as a former leftist who moved to the far right. This image suited him, and he cultivated it, but the evidence points to a very early and consistent involvement with the extreme right. Adriano Romualdi is often treated as a respectable neo-fascist intellectual; his very explicit neo-Nazism is quietly downplayed. Evola is regularly invoked as a political thinker while his deeply magical and esoteric worldview is quietly ignored. These are not harmless simplifications. They sanitize fascist traditions and make them easier to appropriate today. But there is also a more urgent answer. As Mark Sedgwick has argued, we cannot understand the contemporary extreme Right if we focus only on skinheads or street movements. There is also an “intellectual radical Right”: a world of publishers, theorists, bloggers, online influencers, and self-styled philosophers. Many of them still read, cite, or recycle the authors I discuss. Their books are reprinted. Their ideas circulate in coded or updated form. In that sense, the book is not an exercise in antiquarianism. It is an attempt to map a specific tradition of fascist thought on Europe: how it imagines unity, how it deals with nationalism, how it uses myths of race and civilization, and how it copes with defeat.
The book proceeds chronologically. It starts with Mussolini and the Italian regime, showing how “official” fascism responded when confronted with concrete plans for European integration. It then turns to more marginal but influential figures—Drieu, Evola, Romualdi, Thiriart—whose ideas travelled across borders and became part of a transnational ideological toolkit. Throughout, I try to keep two commitments in balance: intellectual honesty—to reconstruct and paraphrase these ideas accurately, even when they are abhorrent or irrational—and ethical clarity—to avoid normalizing or romanticizing them, and to show how they are tied to projects of domination, exclusion, and violence. The result is a book about a Europe that did not come into being—but whose imaginary continues to haunt parts of the far Right. Understanding that imaginary is, I believe, one small way of immunizing ourselves against its return.
Emanuel Rota is the Director of the European Union Center, an Associate Professor in the Department of French and Italian, and an affiliate of the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, the Unite for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, and the Department of History at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
