On February 24th, 2026, the UC Berkeley Institute of European Studies, along with the UC Berkeley Departments of History and Italian Studies, hosted Emanuel Rota, Associate Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for a lecture entitled, “Europe Against Liberalism: Fascist Europeanism and Its Contemporary Echoes.” In his hour-long presentation, given to an audience of fourteen attendees, Professor Rota argued that fascist Europeanism is not a contradiction of nationalist ideology, but rather a coherent "political technology" which aims to construct a unified European empire against both liberal democracy and the global dominance of the American and Soviet empires. 
Professor Rota discussed his forthcoming book, Europe Against Liberalism: Fascist Europeanism and Its Contemporary Echoes, which analyzes the reasoning behind why Italian fascists remained aligned with German powers in 1943, even as Italy itself became a battlefield. Within the text, he argues that traditional nationalism fails to account for this collaboration. By challenging Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as "ultra-nationalist," Rota suggests that the nation-state was a modern construct that had become too small to survive the twentieth century political climate, as purely nationalist fascism could not be implemented on a scale large enough to compete with the Western empires. Thus, the appeal of a unified European nationalist empire was a key argument for facism. Mussolini initially rejected this idea, but later came to accept it as an adoption of nationalism, which was necessary in a modernized political environment.
Focusing on figures like the Belgian Jean Thiriart, Rota highlighted how the nation-state is an expression of modernity as much as a European union based on liberalism. This struggle between tradition and modernity is what led many intellectual thinkers to move away from small-scale nationalism towards a "metapolitical" European identity. When questioned by the audience regarding whether fascism is "incomprehensible" without the nation, Rota clarified that while Mussolini used nationalist rhetoric to consolidate power, a more heterodox stream of fascist thought viewed the nation as a modern myth, which should be superseded by an “organic” scale transcending borders.
To conclude his lecture, Rota argued that the European narrative is defined by two keys: where there is revolution, there is reaction; where there is liberalism, there is an anti-liberal Europe. These themes persist today and suggest that the contemporary far-right is not an ideological novelty, but a response to the nation-state’s inability to control modern markets and borders. Rota’s work illustrates that “Europe has never been only for Kant; it has also always been against him.”