At the dawn of the Second World War, the successes of the Axis seemed to herald the realisation of a new anti-Bolshevik and anti-democratic European order dominated by Nazi-fascist powers. Italian Fascists and Spanish Falangists enthusiastically welcomed plans for the ‘new civilisation’ in which they were determined to participate as protagonists. This article sheds light on the roles projected for the respective countries in the New European Order in the postwar period, according to the black and the blue shirts. It also investigates the ideological and cultural foundations of the Fascist and Falangist projects related to the new continental configuration, identifying similarities and differences between them. Considering the scarcity of comparative writings about fascist movements in the Mediterranean area, the present research fills a historiographic gap.

This article reveals the influence of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9) on both the reformers of Guatemala's ‘Revolutionary Spring’ (1944–54) and the reactionaries who overthrew Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. It shows how officials in the Arévalo and Arbenz administrations looked to the defeated Second Spanish Republic as a moral and political example, while local opponents of those administrations treated Spain's Nationalist insurgency and Francisco Franco's dictatorship as models for how to exterminate communism. In so doing, the article argues for the importance of multi-sited transnational Cold War histories that complement existing studies of US intervention.