Focusing on the ruling elites of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, Franco's Spain, and Salazar's Portugal, this volume explains the relationships and power dynamics that support a dictator's rule.

Many of the foremost experts in the study of European fascism unite to provide a contemporary analysis of the theories and historiography of fascism. Essays discuss the most recent debates on the subject and how changes in the social sciences over the past forty years have impacted on the study of fascism from various perspectives.

In recent years the agenda of how to 'deal with the past' has become a central dimension of the quality of contemporary democracies. Many years after the process of authoritarian breakdown, consolidated democracies revisit the past either symbolically or to punish the elites associated with the previous authoritarian regimes. New factors, like international environment, conditionality, party cleavages, memory cycles and commemorations or politics of apologies, do sometimes bring the past back into the political arena. This book addresses such themes by dealing with two dimensions of...

The present volume, International Dimensions of Portuguese Late Colonialism and Decolonization, offers a multifaceted approach to the role played by inter-national factors and processes in Portuguese late colonialism. In identifying and assessing some of its main manifestations, it explores their relation with metropolitan and colonial historical events and dynamics. Its six original articles examine the ways in which Portugal (and its authoritarian regime) interacted with the fundamental transformations that characterized the international arena after World War II, especially those impacting...

Fascism exerted a crucial ideological and political influence across Europe and beyond. Its appeal reached much further than the expanding transnational circle of 'fascists', crossing into the territory of the mainstream, authoritarian, and traditional right. Meanwhile, fascism's seemingly inexorable rise unfolded against the backdrop of a dramatic shift towards dictatorship in large parts of Europe during the 1920s and especially 1930s. These dictatorships shared a growing conviction that 'fascism' was the driving force of a new, post-liberal, fiercely nationalist and anti-communist order....

This volume provides a multidimensional assessment of the diverse ends of the European colonial empires, addressing different geographies, taking into account diverse chronologies of decolonization, and evaluating the specificities of each imperial configuration under appreciation (Portuguese, Belgian, French, British, Dutch).

This book is the first conceptual and comparative empirical work on the relation between corporatism and dictatorships, bringing both fields under a joint conceptual umbrella. It operationalizes the concepts of social and political corporatism, diffusion and critical junctures and their particular application to the study of Fascist-Era dictatorships. The book s carefully constructed balance between theory and case studies offers an important contribution to the study of dictatorships and corporatism.

Through the development of specific indicators in critical junctures of regime...

This book provides an in-depth analysis of the `technocratic shift' in ministerial recruitment, measuring its extent and variations over time in fourteen European countries.