Old Fascisms in New Settings: The Romanian Legionary Movement During the Cold War Exile

CBEES Advanced Seminar with Francesco Zavatti, researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies and the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University.

Old Fascisms in New Settings: The Romanian Legionary Movement During the Cold War Exile

Presenter: Francesco Zavatti, researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies and the School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University.

Discussant: TBA

Abstract:
This presentation analyses the strategies of adaptation of interwar fascisms after WWII. With the demise of the Axis, the Nazi-collaborationist movements ceased to exist as totalitarian powers, but fascist instances continued to be present in the European space. In the Western hemisphere, the interwar and wartime veterans attempted to provide continuity to these political instances. They did so by reorganising themselves and by normalising their discourse. Their comrades in East European countries also refused to renounce giving continuity to their interwar political instances – but in order to do so, some of them chose the path of exile. Relying on studies focused on the long-distance nationalism of diaspora communities, but seeking to integrate an agent-centred perspective focused on the exiled veterans, this paper asks: How did the exiled fascists fulfill their existential necessities and their political aims of continuity in the alien settings of the host countries? The presentation focuses on the attempts of the exiled Romanian fascists to provide continuity to the Legionary Movement in post-WWII Western Europe. The presentation will discuss: the fragmentation of the Legionary Movement into networks that aimed to provide its competing factions with stability and access to economic resources; the veterans’ relationships with patrons in the new settings; and the attempts to rule the diaspora and its identity discourse through memory work.

Bio:
Francesco Zavatti, PhD in History, is a researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies and at the Institute of Contemporary History, School of Historical and Contemporary Studies, Södertörn University. He has been a post-doctoral researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History, Södertörn University, within the project “Memory Politics in Far Right Europe: Celebrating Nazi Collaborationists in Post-1989 Belarus, Romania, Flanders and Denmark”, financed by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies. He is a historian of contemporary European history, specialised in the history of East-Central Europe and of Romania in particular, and interested in transnational history and memory studies. His research articles have appeared in Memory Studies, European Review of History / Revue Europeénne d’Historie, History of Communism in Europe, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Quellen und Forschungen aus italienischen Archiven und Biblioteken, and other journals.