Mythologising the ultra-nation, theorising the international: fascist international thought and the study of international relations in Britain, 1922-1945

Thesis

While revisionist scholarship has redressed many of the fallacies once plaguing disciplinary histories of interwar International Relations (IR), there remains scant research concerned with the place of fascists and other fellow travellers of the extreme right within the nascent academic discipline or the wider intellectual field of ‘expertise’ in which it was situated. It thus remains unclear the degree to which or how fascists and sympathisers engaged with the fledgling field in order to propound alternative projects of worldmaking or offer diverging (and perhaps similar) responses to salient international questions. By discerning the international thought of key extremists operating within Britain, and how they were situated with respect to, and engaged with, prevailing ideas percolating interwar discourse on world politics and sites of scholarly or ‘expert’ knowledge on the international, I aim to offer a corrective to this historiographical gap. Focusing on select thinkers orbiting around the British Union of Fascists and the Chatham House-linked London Group for the Study of the Corporate State, this dissertation contends that several of the more intellectually astute adherents of fascism were not simply contemplating the international in an obscure abyss of extremism. Rather, they variously engaged with prevailing debates, thinkers, and institutions associated with IR’s formative evolution. Indeed, some thinkers of the extreme right even had a direct impact on this intellectual landscape, whether by virtue of their contribution to the practical debates occupying mainstream thinkers and journals, or via their professional roles and ‘intellectual labour’. In turn, this dissertation complicates prevailing conceptions of what was then an emergent field of study centred on international politics and fascism’s relationship thereto, presents an immeasurably more complex image of fascist international thought relative to those commonly typifying historical IR, and carries interpretive implications for understanding IR’s contemporary extra-disciplinary reception amongst far-right figures.

Authors: Allen, KJ

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-eoxax6mgk
• Type of award: DPhil
• Level of award: Doctoral
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English
• Keywords: Royal Institute of International Affairs; methodological empathy; Chatham House; British Union of Fascists; extreme right; High Tory; disciplinary history; far right; British Institute of International Affairs; Mosley; international relations; fascism; international thought
• Subjects: International relations; History