The Illiberal Modernism of National Socialism in Global Perspective

How can a global-history approach alter our understanding of the role of National Socialism in the 20^th century? In addressing this question, this theoretical paper offers a critical appraisal of older and recent scholarship on the relationship of National Socialism to ‘modernity’. Building on modernization theory, German debates have generally determined a negative relationship between modernity and National Socialism. As the epitomy of everything anti-modern and ‘reactionary,’ Nazism has been cast as the negative foil of an optimistic modernization narrative, which is consummated with the social-democratic welfare state and parliamentary democracy. Against these historians, there is a range of thinkers – among them Foucault, Bauman, and Critical Theorists – who have posited a ‘dark side’ of modernity. For these thinkers, National Socialism is utterly modern, marking the historical expression of inherent tensions within Enlightenment thought. Most historians today work somewhere between these paradigms, granting National Socialism a certain ‘reactionary modernism’ (Jeffrey Herf). Global history, the paper argues, could serve to resolve this conundrum. Admirers of National Socialism in the 1930s, especially outside the West, were not concerned with Nazism’s relationship to the Enlightenment. Instead, these commentators found appeal in the claims of National Socialists that they were superseding an apparently unsuccessful capitalist liberalism. Situating Nazism within the context of illiberal modernizing projects of the 20^th century in other parts of the globe, I argue, creates a useful 'distancing effect' on the familiar narratives about Nazism. This serves to unblock new perspectives of research that place 1930s Germany in the global context of a Western-liberal world order that was acutely contested.