Professor Dan Stone – The Return of Fascism in Europe (Comments by Beatrice de Graaf)

Invitation for lecture by Professor Dan Stone (Royal Holloway, University of London), The Return of Fascism in Europe Comments by Beatrice de Graaf (Utrecht University)

We are entering a new age of irrationalism. In spite of the serious problems facing the world – climate change, over-population, feeding ten billion people – in Europe whole countries are consumed by problems that on a global level look like local squabbles, often directed against their own interests. This bespeaks a new level of vulnerability to demagoguery. What is happening? First, in this lecture Dan Stone defends the argument that the term “fascism” retains its value for understanding contemporary political life in Europe. He argues that the forces that drove fascism in the 1930s are visible again today. Second, he provides a historical reading of the post-Cold War period in order to explain how we arrived at this pretty pass. We now see an adaptation of fascism that both draws on a store of ideas from the past and takes new energy from current-day issues.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Centre at RHUL. He is a historian of ideas who works primarily on twentieth-century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, history of fascism, the cultural history of the British Right and theory of history. He is the author or editor of sixteen books and some seventy scholarly articles. Dan Stone is co-editor of the Journal of Genocide Research and Patterns of Prejudice and on the editorial boards of Critical Philosophy of Race, Dapim: Studies on the Shoah, Hypothesis and History of Communism in Europe. His most recent publications include Goodbye to All That? The Story of Europe since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Liberation of the Camps: The End of the Holocaust and its Aftermath (Yale University Press, 2015) and Concentration Camps: A Short History (OUP, 2017), which will be published in paperback in OUP’s Very Short Introductions series. Until 2019 he is engaged on a three-year Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship for a project entitled Tracing the Holocaust: European History through the International Tracing Service.

Beatrice de Graaf holds the Chair of History of International Relations & Global Governance at Utrecht University. She has strongly contributed to the emerging research field of security history. In 2013, De Graaf was awarded an EU Consolidator Grant , ‘SECURE’, for a project on the origins and makings of a European security culture in the long 19th century.

Registration:
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