During the interwar period, authoritarian movements and regimes of the right embraced nationalist values but at the same time saw themselves as transnational agents of a global intellectual and political wave.
Intellectuals were central to these transnational processes of ideological diffusion and cross-fertilisation, whether by formulating ideas, popularising them across borders or translating and re-contextualising them for different national contexts and audiences.
The main goal of the panel is to discuss some new methodological perspectives that have shown that the creation of networks and the delineation of political projects were more complex and multifaceted than has been commonly assumed. If the historiography until now has been focused on analysing the role and activities of cultural institutions, and the biographical paths of individual intellectuals in a national cultural framework, we think that it is more significant to stress the relevance of informal intellectual networks and the importance of the transnational approach.
In particular this panel aims to expand this approach by:
a) Highlighting the roles and trajectories of those intellectuals who perceived themselves as transnational agents.
b) Enlarging the category of intellectuals in order to encompass also minor or marginal figures, such as mid-level civil servants and propagandists, engaged journalists, writers and artists.
c) Focusing the attention on a particular special viewpoint and theoretical framework – the “Latin space” – so as to profitably conduct an analysis of right-wing intellectuals, networks and political systems that have been populated both Latin America and Southern Europe.