W. E. B. Du Bois and European fascism between the wars

This article examines W. E. B. Du Bois’s writings on European inter-war fascism. He left a wealth of commentary on Italian fascism and German Nazism which has yet to be explored. As an anti-racist scholar, Du Bois brought to his writings on fascism a sharp and incisive understanding of race and racism, as well as global imperialism. As the author demonstrates, Du Bois saw both racism and imperialism as social facts of a historical formation: the West. Du Bois articulated a particularly historical vision of fascism − not seeing the two world wars of the twentieth century to be an ideological break from the nineteenth. Slavery, he argued, was still conditioning global history and white-supremacist racial nationalism was the necessary social force for European fascist organisation.