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Following France's defeat, the Nazis moved forward with plans to reorganize a European continent now largely under Hitler's heel. Some Nazi elites argued for a pan-European cultural empire to crown Hitler's conquests. Benjamin Martin charts the rise and fall of Nazi-fascist soft power and brings into focus a neglected aspect of Axis geopolitics.

During World War II, Nazi-fascist cultural organizations brought writers, filmmakers, and composers together at international conferences where intellectuals celebrated a nationalist and anti-Semitic vision of European culture and pursued the continent-wide reform of the legal and economic bases of European culture. The Nazi-Fascist New Order for European Culture charts the origins, successes, and collapse of the Axis's pan-European cultural institutions. It analyzes their core ideas, charts their internal rivalries, and reveals the complex dynamic of cooperation and competition between the Germans and the Italians that stood at the heart of the project.--

Beginning in the late 1950s, observers noted that states around the world were entering into cultural treaties—bilateral agreements promoting exchange and cooperation in a range of 'cultural' fields—at an accelerating rate. This article combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to offer an international overview of the growth in cultural treaty-making as a means of exploring the role of 'culture' in the conduct of interstate relations during the age of the Cold War and decolonization. The article first reconstructs the international history of how 'cultural agreements' were defined, and on that basis proposes a historically accurate way of categorizing them. Applying this categorization to data from the electronic World Treaty Index, it then presents a descriptive statistical analysis of how often, when, and by which states cultural agreements were signed between 1935 and 1980, identifying six major trends. The article concludes with a discussion of how to account, at the level of the international system, for these trends, suggesting that the mid-century rise of the cultural treaty reflected a distinctive historical conjuncture in which the statist and cultural-nationalist implications of such agreements made them seem a valuable diplomatic tool for certain states—to a degree not seen before or since.

Bilateral treaties are an age-old tool of diplomacy, but before the First World War they were only rarely applied to the world of intellectual and cultural relations. This article explores the process by which diplomatic agreements on intellectual and cultural exchange came instead to be a common feature of interwar European international relations by contrasting two types of agreements identified by period observers: 'intellectual' accords, typified by the agreements France signed in the 1920s, and 'cultural' treaties, advanced by fascist Italy in the 1930s. Comparing France and Italy's use of such agreements in Central-Eastern Europe reveals that Italy's fascist regime responded to the crises and opportunities of the interwar period by developing a distinctive model of 'cultural treaty' that applied state power to international cultural exchange, and mobilised the idea of 'culture' itself, in a new and influential manner.

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that wasdiplomatic– in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that werecultural– in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or 'culture', of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).

Photographs of the German and Soviet pavilions facing off at the Paris International Exposition in 1937 offer an iconic image of the interwar period, and with good reason. This image captures the interwar period's great conflict of ideologies, the international interconnectedness of the age and the aestheticisation of political and ideological conflict in the age of mass media and mass spectacle. [Figure 1] Last but not least, it captures the importance in the 1930s of what we now call cultural diplomacy. Both pavilions – Germany's, in Albert Speer's neo-classical tower bloc crowned with a giant swastika, and the Soviet Union's, housed in Boris Iofan's forward-thrusting structure topped by Vera Mukhina's monumental sculptural group – represented the outcome of a large-scale collaboration between political leaders and architects, artists, intellectuals and graphic and industrial designers seeking to present their country to foreign visitors in a manner designed to advance the country's interests in the international arena. Each pavilion, that is, made an outreach that was diplomatic – in the sense that it sought to mediate between distinct polities – using means that were cultural – in the sense that they deployed refined aesthetic practices (like the arts and architecture) and in the sense that they highlighted the distinctive features, or 'culture', of a particular group (like the German nation or the Soviet state).