Empire and Counterrevolutionary Internationalism in a Post-Imperial World, 1945–1991

Aron Brouwer

Aron Brouwer’s current project examines counterrevolutionary internationalism in imperial, post-imperial, and settler-colonial settings from 1945 to 1991. Across South Africa, Taiwan, Portugal, Argentina, and Paraguay, it reconstructs how political institutions, firms, and migrant communities built cross-border cooperation against enemies they understood as revolutionary. Counterrevolutionary rhetoric often grouped communist states and organizations, anticolonial movements, campaigns for labor rights, demands for racial equality and civil rights, democratization, and religious dissent as parts of one imagined worldwide offensive.

The project asks when counterrevolutionary unity remained rhetorical and ceremonial and how cross-border coordination – such as Taiwanese investments in South Africa, military coordination between South Africa and Portugal, institutions that connected Taiwan to Paraguay through the World Anti-Communist League, and South Atlantic security discussions between South Africa and Argentina – had material consequences and defended settler and imperial hierarchies.

The project’s protagonists – including former fascists and neo-fascists in European émigré communities, Christian nationalists, officials of anti-communist party-states and military governments, and those defending business interests – were strange bedfellows who often pursued incompatible political futures. Recontextualization helped sustain their cooperation by presenting former fascists as anti-communist allies, colonial wars as defenses against subversion, and investments as development and modernization, while redirecting earlier practices and institutions toward new enemies and national purposes.

Building on Brouwer’s dissertation, the project follows some of the same actors, institutions, and communities into the postwar period while extending its geographical and linguistic range into Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking contexts.