The Axis Moment
The Axis Alliance in Global Perspective:
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This project, directed by Sven Reichhardt (University of Konstanz) and Victoria de Grazia (Columbia University), arising out of the collaboration of the Department of History of Konstanz with the Department of History and European Institute at Columbia, proposes to mobilize thinking and research to address the “Axis Moment,” roughly 1936 to 1945, in the course of which Germany, Italy, and Japan forged their military alliance to overthrow the Western international order and establish a new kind of global hegemony based on shared models of mercantilism resting on the domination of large, closed market areas, authoritarian mass politics, and racist and hierarchal social, family, and gender relations.
TheJune 7-10, 2017 Workshop, organized thanks to the generous support of the:Gastwissenschaftlerprogramm of the Federal State Baden-Württemberg and the Excellence Cluster “Cultural Foundations of Integration and Disintegration” of Universität Konstanz offers the occasion to familiarize one another with new currents in the regional research on the subject, as well as with literatures coming from geopolitics, political economy, and post-colonial studies such as to conceptualize the nature of the rising Axis hegemony and the challenge it posed to the Western-dominated international system.
The larger intellectual rationale is to frame the alliances arising out of the fascist experience within the wider geo-political shifts consequent upon the mercantilist reactions to the Great Depression, antagonism toward Soviet ascendancy, and fear of rising U.S. hegemony, to understand how economic, cultural and military projects arising out of the three countries tried to establish their international leadership in arenas as different as economic development, race theory and racist cleansing practices, settler colonialism, social engineering, laboratories of total war and agriculture and ecology, to understand the impact of war with its inner dynamics upon these projects (fascist warfare), to examine the impact on fascist militancy, its soldiers and on civilian populations (occupation and displacement policies), and to grasp the longer term effects of the alliance on the international system coming out of World War II.
By the Axis moment, we mean, broadly, the period from 1935 to 1945, signaled by formation of the bi-partite, then tripartite accords between Germany, Italy, and Japan, the informal and formal connections causing their interests and identities to concretize in the Axis, the presuppositions and concrete proposals about the nature of international competition, prescriptions for economic and military security, and the future of the global order inhering in their coalition to overturn the Western-led international system in the name of a new Eurasian world order under their leadership
By Internationalizing we mean broadly to bring the methods and scope of recent international history to bear to a history that has largely been considered from national and diplomatic perspectives and from a western vantage point.
The ultimate goal to frame the alliances arising out of the fascist experience within the wider geo-political shifts consequent upon the mercantilist reactions to the Great Depression, antagonism toward Soviet ascendancy, and fear of rising U.S. hegemony, to understand how economic, cultural and other projects arising out of the three countries tried to establish their international leadership in arenas as different as economic development, cinema, race science, settler colonialism, social engineering and agriculture and ecology, to understand the impact of war making upon these projects, to examine the impact on civilian populations, and to grasp the longer term effects of the alliance on the international system coming out of World War II.
This first gathering takes the form of a two day workshop at Konstanz and focuses on two dimensions: One is theoretical, to bring geopolitical, IR, and other concepts of the international system to bear to the history of the Axis, specifically to understand the relations of these states with their respective regions, with transnational ideological movements and religious communities, and with respect to the Western-ordained post-Versailles Settlement and the global economic crisis. The other is to build case studies of cross-regional, cross-Axis projects related to the formation of shared paradigms and interests on the cusp of and in the course of the alliance.
