Special Issue: Architectural Projections of a ‘New Order’ in Interwar Dictatorships, 2018.
▻http://booksandjournals.brillonline.com/content/journals/22116257/7/1
The genesis of this special issue lies in the initiative of Rita Almeida de Carvalho, post doctoral research fellow in cultural history under Salazar at the Institute of Social Sciences of the University of Lisbon (ics) to visit Roger Griffin (History, Oxford Brookes University) in May 2013 after reading his Modernism and Fascism. Though that volume was concerned predominantly with making an elaborate case for seeing the totalitarian experiments of Fascism and Nazism within the wider context of socio-political and aesthetic ‘modernism’, as a specialist in the inter-war period of her own country, Rita immediately grasped its potential relevance to a radical reappraisal of the nature of cultural production under Salazar’s dictatorship. His regime was assumed by many scholars in Portugal and beyond (often working with Marxist premises) to be fascist and by the same token reactionary, and hence hostile to the ethos of modernity and any sort of ‘progressiveness’. Almeida de Carvalho, on the other hand, saw Salazarism as too rooted in traditional social and Catholic visions of society to be fascist, and yet at the same to be attempting in its own way to institute an alternative modernity, and secure the institutional bases for a stable, productive and uniquely Portuguese future.
this project will encourage other scholars working in fascist studies to turn their minds to work collaboratively on fruitful case studies in the significant areas of overlap, continuity, and communication that existed between fascisms, conservative revolutions, modernizing parafascisms, and reactionary conservatisms that arose before 1945 in diverse political, social, and cultural spheres. As more students of fascism adopt this approach, there is bound to be a growing appreciation of the histoires croisées and dynamic transnational borrowings, interactions and influences which characterize the relationship between individual fascisms and other radical right-wing and left-wing policies of the time generated as responses to the deepening structural problems of liberal democracy as a viable form of economic system and political governance, an apparently global crisis which caused so many at every level of society to look for a way out of the cul-de-sac and even postulate the dawning of a ‘new era of humanity’. 4
The final rationale, which became particularly evident when the first drafts of all six articles were read together, is that they demonstrate the potential value to comparative studies in fascism, modernity, and cultural innovation of the concept ‘rooted modernism’. Certainly, it is a concept that seems to apply to the hybrids between tradition and modern architecture that proliferated under all six regimes. Much time is devoted to making the case for this concept in Griffin’s article on the architecture of the Third Reich, so space does not need to be devoted to its exposition here, except to suggest that a deep psychological significance and a distinctive cultural statement can be read into the frequent recourse of fascist and parafascist regimes to stripped classicism or to other, more idiosyncratic attempts to blend allusions to icon building-styles, designs, or techniques from the nation’s real or mythic past with ultra-modern elements. They epitomize an age collectively disoriented and traumatized by war, social-economic collapse, the spectre of global civilizational decline, and the threat of Bolshevism, and in need of affective reference points and cultural bearings. While throughout the ‘West’ elites in every sphere of creativity and reform did their best to point to a path along which their nation could move forwards into what Winston Churchill called ‘broad, sunlit uplands’, many among them, along with their public, were anxious to keep in sight the reassuring panorama of the lowland valley of the past that stretched beneath, even if its sight was now partially blocked by ominous clouds.
