Latin American Dictatorships in the Era of Fascism focuses on the reverse-wave of dictatorships that emerged in Latin America during the 1930s and the transnational dissemination of authoritarian institutions in the era of fascism. António Costa Pinto revisits the study of authoritarian alternatives to liberal democracy in 1930s Latin America from the perspective of the diffusion of corporatism in the world of inter-war dictatorships. The book explores what drove the horizontal spread of corporatism in Latin America, the processes and direction of transnational diffusion, and how social and political corporatism became a central set of new institutions utilized by dictatorships during this era. These issues are studied through a transnational and comparative research design to reveal the extent of Latin America’s participation during the corporatist wave which by 1942 had significantly reduced the number of democratic regimes in the world. This book is essential reading for students studying Latin American history, 1930s dictatorships and authoritarianism, and the spread of corporatism.

This book takes a transnational and comparative approach that analyses the process of diffusion of a third way​ in selected transitions to authoritarianism in Europe and Latin America. When looking at the authoritarian wave of the 1930s, it is not difficult to see how some regimes appeared to offer an authoritarian third way somewhere between democracy and fascism. It is in this context that some Iberian dictatorships, such as those of Primo de Rivera in Spain, Salazar’s New State in Portugal and the short-lived Dollfuss regime in Austria are mentioned frequently. Especially during the 1930s, and in those parts of Europe under Axis control, these models were discussed and often adopted by several dictatorships. This book considers how and why these dictatorships on the periphery of Europe, especially Salazar’s New State in Portugal, inspired some of these regimes’ new political institutions particularly within Europe and Latin America. It pays special attention to how, as they proposed and pursued these authoritarian reforms, these domestic political actors also looked at these institutional models as suitable for their own countries. The volume is ideal for students and scholars of comparative fascism, authoritarian regimes, and European and Latin American modern history and politics.

This thoughtful text describes how Latin America's authoritarian culture has been and continues to be reflected in a variety of governments, from the near-anarchy of the early regional bosses (caudillos), to all-powerful personalistic dictators or oligarchic machines, to contemporary mass-movement regimes like Castro's Cuba or Peron's Argentina. Taking a student-friendly chronological approach, Paul Lewis also analyzes how the internal dynamics of each historical phase of the region's development led to the next. He describes how dominant ideologies of the period were used to shape, and justify, each regime's power structure. Balanced yet cautious about the future of democracy in the region, this accessible book will be invaluable for courses on contemporary Latin America.

This book presents a new theory for why political regimes emerge, and why they subsequently survive or break down. It then analyzes the emergence, survival and fall of democracies and dictatorships in Latin America since 1900. Scott Mainwaring and Aníbal Pérez-Liñán argue for a theoretical approach situated between long-term structural and cultural explanations and short-term explanations that look at the decisions of specific leaders. They focus on the political preferences of powerful actors - the degree to which they embrace democracy as an intrinsically desirable end and their policy radicalism - to explain regime outcomes. They also demonstrate that transnational forces and influences are crucial to understand regional waves of democratization. Based on extensive research into the political histories of all twenty Latin American countries, this book offers the first extended analysis of regime emergence, survival and failure for all of Latin America over a long period of time.

Studies of the right and radical right have proliferated since the rise of European nationalist and populist parties in the 1980s. Yet, the literature on the right and the radical right has a largely Euro-American bias and has been limited by partisan academics that focus on the left. The Right and Radical Right in the Americas hopes to be a pioneering work that examines the history and contemporary manifestations of the right and radical right throughout the Americas. From interwar Canada to contemporary Chile, the right and radical right have come in diverse ideological currents. Those ideological currents have undergone historical changes and the strategies of the right and radical right need to be contextualized in respect of country and region. The right and radical right also have distinctive meanings throughout the Americas and in different epochs.

This book provides a comparative study of fascisms and reactionary nationalisms. It presents these as transnational political cultures and examines the dictatorships and regimes in which these cultures played significant roles. The book is organised into three main sections, focusing on nationalists, fascists and dictatorships in turn. The chapters range across French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and German experiences, and include a broader overview of the political cultures in Central and Eastern Europe as well as Latin America. The chapters consider the identities, organizations and evolution of the various cultures and specific political movements, alongside the intersections between these movements and how they adapted to changing contexts. By doing so, the book offers a global view of fascisms and reactionary nationalisms, and promotes debate around these political cultures.

The Right in the Americas discusses the origins, development, and current state of conservative and right-wing movements in ten countries in the Americas. The growth of the right is one of the most important issues of the moment in global politics. Within the context of democracy erosion, rejection of traditional politics, and economic uncertainty, right and extreme-right actors are capable of offering misguided answers and hope to a significant part of a country’s population, who will trust their promises and bring them to power with their vote. This dynamic has repeated itself in an astonishingly consistent pattern across the Americas. This book analyses eight Latin American countries - Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Uruguay, and Venezuela - along with Canada and the United States, two G7 countries. It demonstrates that conservatism is in fact a hemispheric phenomenon, promoted and invigorated by the regional hegemon—the United States of America—both as government and as civil society. Beyond this regional scope, the peculiarities of each case study are explored in detail, providing solid historical background, while at the same time uncovering their commonalities and cross-pollination. This study will be of great interest to scholars of conservatism, right-wing politics, comparative politics, and North American and Latin American politics.

Why did democratization suffer reversal during the interwar years, while fascism and authoritarianism spread across many European countries?

The period spanning the two World Wars was unquestionably the most catastrophic in Europe's history. Despite such undeniably progressive developments as the radical expansion of women's suffrage and rising health standards, the era was dominated by political violence and chronic instability. Its symbols were Verdun, Guernica, and Auschwitz. By the end of this dark period, tens of millions of Europeans had been killed and more still had been displaced and permanently traumatized. If the nineteenth century gave Europeans cause to regard the future with a sense of optimism, the early twentieth century had them anticipating the destruction of civilization. The fact that so many revolutions, regime changes, dictatorships, mass killings, and civil wars took place within such a compressed time frame suggests that Europe experienced a general crisis. The Oxford Handbook of European History, 1914-1945 reconsiders the most significant features of this calamitous age from a transnational perspective. It demonstrates the degree to which national experiences were intertwined with those of other nations, and how each crisis was implicated in wider regional, continental, and global developments. Readers will find innovative and stimulating chapters on various political, social, and economic subjects by some of the leading scholars working on modern European history today.

"A transnational history of corporatism-a "third path" between capitalism and communism-centered on mid-twentieth century Brazil. Following the First World War, there was a widespread feeling that the unchecked free-market competition had given rise to financial crisis, social unrest, and chronic underdevelopment. With people and governments across the world looking for an alternative to laissez-faire capitalism, Brazil took a central role in experimenting with a "third path" between capitalism and communism: corporatism. Remaking Capitalism: A Global History of Corporatism in Brazil, 1920s-1960s argues that corporatism transformed the Brazilian state into an agent of economic development, and it explains why it matters that this transformation was engineered under an authoritarian regime. Melissa Teixeira incorporates wide-ranging legal, economic, and cultural sources to document the process of state-building from the perspective of government ministries and grocery markets alike from 1917 to the 1950s. During the Getulio Vargas regime (1930-45), especially, the state took an unprecedented role in controlling social pressures and economic growth via wage and price agencies, labor tribunals and technical councils. Teixeira looks beyond categorical authoritarianism to explain how corporatism constituted an early experiment with the mixed economy as a path to development, combining state planning with a market economy. Corporatism, she shows, generated a model of development dependent on uneven and unequal citizenship, in which economic interests-and not individuals-organized and petitioned through the state. With Brazil at the center of this story of economic experimentation, Remaking Capitalism centers the Global South in the longer history of the production of economic thought. Drawing comparisons with the United States, Italy, and Portugal, Teixeira offers a transnational history of this important interwar attempt to create a third way between capitalism and communism"--