The fascist new–old order Reto Hofmann Waseda University, Building 22, 1-104 Totsukamachi, Shinjuku-ku, Tokyo, 169-8050, Japan E-mail: w.iac16117@kurenai.waseda.jp Abstract Contemporaries and historians alike have explained the imperialism of interwar Japan, Italy, and Germany through the paradigm of a ‘new world order’ . This article critically revisits this received assumption by analysing the place of the Axis in the longer history of imperialism from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. If we cast Axis empires – a blend of fascism and imperialism – in the larger framework constituted by the relationship between the nation and capital, it becomes clear that they were not so much the result of the peculiar national histories of Japan, Italy, and Germany, but products of larger, global forces. Through an examination of recent scholarship, this article offers a new conceptual interpretation of the link between imperialism and fascism. In so doing, it adds to our understanding of the interwar period by breaking down the neat boundaries between liberal and fascist world orders. Keywords Axis powers, capitalism, fascism, imperialism, new world order, Second World War Axis politicians, bureaucrats, and intellectuals talked a language of ‘newness’ to designate both their domestic reorganization and their ambitions to reshape the way in which the world was governed. The Japanese ‘New Order in East Asia’, the Italian ‘Nuovo Ordine’ in the Mediterranean, and the Nazi ‘Neuordnung’ signalled, in the words of their spokesmen, a move beyond the world built on nineteenth-century liberal internationalism, individualism, and parliamentary democracy. Contemporaries agreed. The economist Karl Polanyi wrote in 1944 that the world’s fascist regimes led an upheaval against the old order. 1 Historians have reinforced the narrative that pitched the fascist empires against liberal democracy. They have argued that Japanese emperor-worship and militarism, Italian state-driven corporatism, and Nazi racism, all coupled with the goal to build self-sufficient polities in their respective spheres of interest, jarred with the principles espoused by Western liberalism. But the professed newness of the Axis was tempered by much that was old. Most impor- tantly, it is often forgotten that the world envisioned by the Axis was, just as the one they claimed to supersede, a world of nations and capitalism. Fascists prepared to destroy nations on racial grounds (as the Nazis did) or pledged to rescue them from Western colonialism (as the Japanese claimed), but they elevated the nation as one basic element of social and global organization. The second element was capital. Despite the fascists’ stock invective against 1 Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001, pp. 24–30. Journal of Global History (2017), 12, pp. 166–183 © Cambridge University Press 2017 doi:10.1017/S1740022817000031 166 at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022817000031 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 153.150.176.19, on 10 Jun 2017 at 11:16:04, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available