This chapter examines how the Axis powers envisioned—and briefly implemented—a “new European order” grounded in the idea of a permanent non-democratic regime. It compares a set of collaborationist experiments across Europe and Asia, arguing that military occupation opened a contingent “window of opportunity” in which local authoritarian, conservative, and fascist elites competed to redesign institutions under German, Italian, or Japanese oversight. The analysis traces successive waves of forced transitions (from Czechoslovakia to Western Europe, the Balkans, and late-war cases such as Italy’s RSI and Hungary), highlighting the variability of leadership recruitment, degrees of autonomy, and patterns of constitutional rupture. While corporatist-organic blueprints recurrently surfaced, they were often incomplete and shaped by pragmatic constraints: labor extraction, industrial output, security needs, and intra-Axis rivalries. The chapter concludes that there was no single exportable “Nazi model”; instead, occupation governance evolved into a polycratic fabric of overlapping authorities, producing heterogeneous regimes rather than a coherent authoritarian template.

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Fascism