Abstract
Between the two world wars, anticolonial nationalist politics came to the fore in the Middle East. Yet, the international politics of the movements and actors involved displayed a seemingly contradictory trajectory, moving from engagement with global communism to an alliance with rising fascism. In addition to shaping the course of Middle Eastern politics in the interwar years, this complex transformation left a legacy into the Cold War years. This project argues that the origin of this intricate dynamic is to be found in the transregional and trans-ideological connections established in the activist worlds of European metropolises in the interwar years, such as Paris, Berlin, Rome, Geneva, Brussels, and Moscow. Studying the collective biography of a generation of Middle Eastern anticolonialists and their urban networks in Europe, the research will explore: Q1) How did the political formations of anticolonial movements in the Middle East contribute to the interwar crisis of the European order, and vice versa? Q2) What was the role of urban activism in European
metropolises in the making of transregional networks? Q3) Why did anticolonial activists initially engage with, and later
become disillusioned by communist and fascist worldmaking projects? Q4) How did the alignments of anticolonial internationalists with communism and fascism during the interwar period influence the political movements of the Cold War era in the Middle East? The hypothesis is that a generation of Middle Eastern anticolonialists aligned with communism and fascism, not out of mere ideological affinity but also, and perhaps more importantly, to find allies for their own global political projects. By focusing on transregional ideological interactions as the origin of modern Middle Eastern anticolonial politics, this project contributes to a finer understanding of Europe-Middle
East entanglements and underlines the blurriness of what has often been conceived as two disparate sets of history.
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