It Really Can Happen Here

What the transnational links among fascist movements in the 1930s can tell us about the Far Right today.

By Juliette BretanFebruary 27, 2026

• Politics

• History

THE US NATIONAL SECURITY Strategy, released late last year by the White House, might have been, at heart, a proclamation of “America First” patriotism—in the words of Donald Trump’s introductory note, “a roadmap to ensure that America remains the greatest and most successful nation in human history”—but it was also strangely international too. After sections on strategy at home, the document turns to “The Regions” across the world it considers particularly important for involvement. One is Europe. Yet, as the strategy states, Europe should no longer be considered only through “insufficient military spending and economic stagnation.” Now the focus is on a continental MAGA, with a goal of “promoting European greatness” through reversing perceived “civilizational erasure.”

For this imagined historic crime, the document blames transnational bodies, migration, censorship of free speech, suppression of political opposition, limited birth rates, and loss of national identities, and it sees, as part of the answer, another kind of transnationalism: the need for the United States “to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history.” Specifically, it promotes “patriotic European parties” and their growing influence.

This is not the first example of transnational links between Trump’s MAGA movement and European far-right parties. Most recently, the Financial Times reported that the US State Department is planning to fund MAGA-aligned think tanks and charities in Europe, including Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party. Farage has long been a staunch Trump ally, posting a photo of himself with the president in the Oval Office last September. Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister, meanwhile, has been labeled “Europe’s Trump Whisperer” for her close connections to the president, including being the only European leader invited to his inauguration and visiting Mar-a-Lago. Her Brothers of Italy party is national-conservative and—like the UK’s Reform—aligned with Trump’s conservative “populism.”

Last year, in Munich, J. D. Vance met with the leader of the anti-immigrant, far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), the largest opposition party in the German parliament. (Trump’s ally Elon Musk had previously given a video address at an AfD party summit earlier in the year.) Trump has also recently endorsed far-right Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán in the upcoming April elections, has previously supported the Spanish far-right party Vox, and has spoken in defense of the leader of the French far-right National Rally (RN) party, Marine Le Pen, who was found guilty of embezzlement last year and barred from running for president in 2027. Many of these leaders assembled last year in Madrid at the first summit of the far-right Patriots for Europe group, created in the European Parliament. Their slogan: “Make Europe Great Again.”

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These transnational connections among far-right groups go back further than recent history. In the late 1930s, German postcards began to appear in the United States, bearing a surreal image: they showed the Northeastern United States sliced into fresh territories, with New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts ceded as a “corridor” to Canada, and Boston a free port city caught in the middle. This image might easily come from a work of speculative fiction, from one of those dystopias of a Nazified United States from the last century—The Man in the High Castle (1962), for example. Yet this was very real propaganda, disseminated by Nazi Germany to the West during the Great Depression, appealing for international support for its own revanchism and irredentism. Nazi Germany wanted to regain territory given to Poland after the First World War—called “the Polish corridor” to denote its position severing Germany from East Prussia—and it wanted the West to help. Similar postcards were also produced in Britain, depicting an imaginary corridor from Liverpool to the North Sea.

For all their authoritarianism, nationalism, and racism, the Nazis made considerable efforts to appeal to other countries for support, and kindle fascist thinking, during the interwar era. And there were times when it looked as if this strategy would work. Nazi Germany capitalized on existing dissatisfaction with the Treaty of Versailles, which was almost universally seen as unfair before the ink had even dried. The party promoted an anti-liberal and antidemocratic politics that in fact proved rather popular across national borders. They also flattered international supporters and foisted their ideas on the world at every opportunity. In the US alone, there were numerous fascist hubs. An organization called the Friends of New Germany was established in the 1930s by a German immigrant to the United States; it later became the German American Bund and received support from Hitler’s deputy Rudolf Hess. The American architect Philip Johnson reviewed Mein Kampf (1925) positively and reported from Germany on the “stirring spectacle” of the Nazi invasion of Poland.

Similar links existed in the case of Italian fascism. The Order Sons of Italy in America supported the first United States fascist convention in Philadelphia in 1925. The American modernist maverick and fascist collaborator Ezra Pound had moved to Italy the year before, from which perch he criticized his home country and spread antisemitic views on the radio. In some cases, the influence flowed in the other direction, with European fascists deriving inspiration and justification for their racist policies from US eugenics doctrines and Jim Crow laws. James Q. Whitman’s 2017 book Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law explores how the notorious Nuremberg Laws—which established an antisemitic regime in Germany, revoking Jewish citizenship and preventing Jews from marrying Germans—were inspired by American racial policies. Much of Nazi ideology—the emphasis on athletic competition and territorial expansion, for example—was deeply influenced by a kind of fascistic Americana. Fascism had gone global.

Even Poland, the country that would be brutalized by the Nazi blitzkrieg in 1939, saw a homegrown fascism proliferate during the interwar period. A new edited collection, Transnational and Transatlantic Fascism, 1918–2018: The Far Right in East Central and Southeastern Europe (2025), explores the often overlooked yet significant development of far-right ideas in East-Central and Southeast Europe, as well as their legacies today. The editors, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and Per Anders Rudling, argue that the heterogeneous character of the areas led to different movements, inspired by while also opposing one another. Some, like the Croatian Ustaše, which rebelled against the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and supported efforts to create a Greater Croatia that stretched to Belgrade, were ultranationalist and antisemitic (and were inspired by Nazism, although they were ultimately spurned by the Nazis); others, like Hlinka’s Slovak People’s Party, which was created under the Austro-Hungarian Empire and promoted anti-liberalism and Slovak independence, and the Camp of Great Poland (OWP), created in 1926 in the newly independent state and led by Polish right-wing figurehead Roman Dmowski, were conservative, authoritarian, and Catholic.

Fascism was also an inspiration indirectly. Although many nations in the region were not ruled by fascists, their authoritarian leaders were influenced by fascism in their politics. This was partly in self-defense, since interwar politicians in the region needed to avoid the mobilization of fascist movements in their own countries. But they also shared values, such as anticommunism and hostility to liberalism. Fascist ideas were an international phenomenon.

Fascism was also multidirectional. Both Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany learned from the region’s movements. The Italian fascist Alessandro Pavolini praised Latvian dictator Kārlis Ulmanis, while the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was supported not only by Ukrainian émigrés but also by Hitler and Mussolini, although they later clashed with the Nazis, who did not back an independent Ukraine. These links point to tensions between national and international aspects of far-right thought, which fomented a dangerous volatility in interwar politics. But there were regional collaborations too, which sparked further dangers.

As fascism in Europe became an adaptable concept—at once rooted in ethnic nationalism yet also multicultural and influenced by a range of right-wing ideas—it became tied up with international events. Romanian fascists fought in Spain alongside Francisco Franco’s forces, with commemorations for the fallen uniting right-wing groups across the continent, as historian Francesco Zavatti has noted. Zavatti traces other examples of transnational fascist martyrdom in the interwar period, such as the funeral of Nicola Bonservizi, an Italian fascist leader assassinated in Paris in 1924. Both Mussolini and Hitler supported the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War, militarily and financially, although there were differences between their various movements (the Italian fascists, for example, viewed themselves as more socially progressive than the clerical Francoists).

This fascist transnationalism continued after the war, becoming in many ways more considerable than ever. With East-Central European populations now strewn across the globe due to border changes, deportations, migration, and asylum claims, many former fascists set up movements in their new nations, paradoxically creating stronger international ties. The Ustaše had ruled a German-occupied Yugoslavia as the Independent State of Croatia, and had committed genocide against Jews, Serbs, and Romani during the war, but many prominent members of the organization were allowed to resettle in Australia, the United States, and Canada—where they created new movements, campaigning against the Tito regime in communist Yugoslavia. In the United States, the clandestine Operation Paperclip recruited Nazi scientists for government employment after the war, with over 1,000 finding new homes in the country. It was not until the 1970s that an Office of Special Investigations was established by the Department of Justice to track down and deport Nazi collaborators.

At the same time, the United States saw the rise of a native neofascism, including the American Nazi Party, founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell, and the National Alliance, founded in 1974 by William Luther Pierce. Far-right political ideas became popular in Europe too, emerging in opposition to global communism. The New European Order was established in 1951 to champion nationalism across Europe. Similarly, Operation Condor—a collaboration among right-wing dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay—championed political repression of left-wing sympathizers in South America and was funded by the United States. Fascist ideas were hiding in plain sight.

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For all its global tendrils, fascism has only in recent years been researched as a transnational movement by historians. Some comparative analyses emerged in the 1950s and ’60s, including Hannah Arendt’s monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)—though its titular focus emphasized dictatorial tactics such as propaganda and mass repression, as opposed to fascist ideology per se. Scholarship during this period also focused on definitions of fascism, exploring similarities and differences within various contexts. The rise of research into ideologies and sociopolitical structures in the 1970s and ’80s led to more nuanced treatments of the global dimensions of fascist movements. Transnational approaches took off in the 1980s and ’90s, with studies of the complexity of fascist groups and parties in previously underexplored areas, such as East-Central Europe.

These approaches have led to several new understandings of the transnational nature of fascism. In a 2021 essay, Aristotle Kallis notes the development of fascism within the context of “regime transition and democratic breakdown” after World War I, arguing that interwar fascism was not generated at “a geographic and political centre” and exported to “obliging audiences in the peripheries”; rather, these ideas emerged from “a much broader, dynamic, unpredictable, and decentred field of ideational mobility and diffusion.” Similarly, a recent special issue of the Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies explores fascism “in the plural rather than as a notion describing one (or two) particular set(s) of practices, institutions, and intellectual outlooks”; the pieces in the issue focus on five categories—“actors, women, organizations, geography, and hybridity”—as sites where transnational fascism coalesced.

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As fascism grew more historically complex and intellectually diffuse, it also became arguably more difficult to identify and combat. Tomislav Dulić proposes a new approach that considers the different ways transnational movements act. Some may “have access to governments and polities” within specific nations while others focus on “interaction with international organisations” and “coordinate and provide legitimacy for national movements” around the globe.

These distinctions matter because contemporary fascist ideas operate far more democratically than in the past, existing within political systems in a way that makes collaboration with fascism more ubiquitous and insidious. Today, far-right politicians have become skillful at disavowing interwar models in favor of more palatable populist approaches, or at least of performing plausible deniability. Trump’s comment during a 2020 presidential debate that the neofascist Proud Boys group should “stand back and stand by” was met with outrage, yet he later condemned white supremacist groups, including the Proud Boys, claiming he did not “know much about” them. Similarly, in Europe, radical far-right groups have been both a bolster and a threat to right-wing parties, which have supported and legitimized their politics while reluctantly cracking down on their extremism. As Nikolina Židek notes in Transnational and Transatlantic Fascism, 1918–2018, right-wing parties “toned down” their rhetoric before certain countries (such as Croatia) joined the European Union, “only to relapse” following their accession.

While neofascist parties have focused on immigration, the creation of nationalist bulwarks to counter perceived invasions, this has also taken place on a transnational level. In Europe, right-wing movements in different countries have collaborated to protect what they perceive to be the sovereignty of their traditional worldviews against the cosmopolitanism of the European Union. Yet tensions are still evident. While the European Far Right has welcomed Trump almost fanatically, some right-wing groups have condemned his designs on Greenland and disparagement of NATO. Even as fascism is becoming more transatlantic, the importance of national and regional ideals remains.

That Nazi propaganda postcard from the 1930s questions whether “the United States [would] be willing to agree to such frontiers” of Canadian conquest. The transnational fascism at work in this message involves not merely the specific Nazi connections to American ideals but also the more general implication that fascism is able to take root and grow anywhere, as Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 dystopian novel It Can’t Happen Here acknowledged. Fascism’s blood-and-soil ideology is paradoxically capable of appealing across national borders, manipulated to evoke universal aspirations and local traditions. Reposition the map in that postcard slightly further north and we perceive Trump’s greed for Greenland. Fascism doesn’t just cross borders—it’s been everywhere all along. It can happen here.

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Featured image: Carl Langhorst, Tag von Potsdam, 1933, is in the public domain. Image has been cropped.