International Fascism and the Allure of the ‘Third Way’ in Interwar Greece

What is it about?

The rise and victory of Italian Fascism in the first half of the 1920s passed Greece by. Yet soon afterwards the international experience of ‘fascism’ found more receptive audiences within the prodigious dissident ‘third spaces’ where more and more mainstream Greek political actors chose to operate in the interwar period. In this article I explore the dynamics of the ideological and political formation of ‘third ways’ in interwar Greece, paying attention to the interplay between international stimuli and local contextual singularities. In these thirding spaces ‘fascism’ was understood and operationalised in very different, subjective, and ever-shifting ways by each of these actors. It was regarded mostly as a potential component of diverse thirding processes/solutions and rarely as the desired outcome thereof. This also explains why fascism came to inform a range of very different thirding projects in interwar Greece – from pursuing rupture and renewal to aspiring to status quo-affirmation; from liberal to conservative to authoritarian visions; from searching for a short-term ‘remedy’ to envisioning a long-term radical transformation.

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