Federico Finchelstein's book constitutes a welcome contribution to a historiography engaged with the emergence and development of transnational fascism between 1919 and 1945. This study, a continuation of his previous book Fascismo, liturgia e imaginario: el mito del General Uriburu y la Argentina nacionalista (2004), goes one step further and analyses the role that ‘transatlantic fascism’ played in the emergence of a distinctive Argentine right-wing ideology, which the author considers a fascist one. As the author explains, unravelling the different historical paths of fascism might help us not only to understand this particular historical period but, equally importantly, to trace the origins of an ideology that for Finchelstein had a strong influence on the emergence of political violence in Argentina in the 1970s.

This well-researched book has two interrelated goals. First, it seeks to demonstrate the unique characteristics of Argentine fascism by differentiating it from European and especially Italian fascisms. The author accomplishes this by analysing Argentine nacionalismo as a form of ‘Christianized fascism’, a ‘conflation’ of fascism and Catholicism that ‘made the Argentine variant different from other forms of fascism’ (p. 158). This conflation, together with what the author calls ‘the myth of Uriburu’ and clerical-fascist anti-Semitism, became the nacionalista doctrine (p. 116). Through this conceptualisation of nacionalismo, Finchelstein challenges not only a well-established scholarship that argues that Argentine nacionalismo was not a fascist ideology, but also a historiography that considers that the nacionalistas were ‘using’ the Church to accomplish their own agenda.

Second, Finchelstein's aim is to analyse the relations between Argentine nacionalistas and Italian fascism. In order to accomplish this, the author chooses to compare these two national ideologies while at the same time analysing their transnational relations with each other. As Argentina was important to Italian fascist rule, this leads the author to study how Italian fascism portrayed Argentina, as well as the policies that the regime adopted toward this country, and to explore unresearched topics such as Italian fascist propaganda towards Argentina in one of the most interesting chapters of the book. The strategies that this propaganda put forward are presented in a very precise way. It comprised transatlantic flights, the use of mass media and the idea of ‘revisioning’ Argentine history in Italian terms. The author argues that Italian fascists portrayed Argentina as a place to carry out imperialistic objectives, given its important Italian community and given the fact that for the Italians, Argentina was in the end an inferior and half-civilised country where Italian fascism could and should be sold. This vision of Argentina ultimately complicated relations between Italian fascists and nacionalistas.

One of the key contributions of Finchelstein's book is its attempt to analyse Argentine nacionalismo not only in domestic terms but also from a transnational approach. This attempt is also one of the most problematic aspects of the book, however. One of Finchelstein's main points is that Italian fascism had a great ‘influence’ on the nacionalistas' universe. The author argues that transatlantic and particularly Italian fascism ‘played no small role’ in explaining ‘how a political minority created a full-fledged ideology that displaced mighty Argentine secularism to the margins of political society’ (p. 63). Yet the Italian fascists' attempts to deliver their ideology failed because nacionalistas, the author argues, were interested neither in adopting a model nor in being perceived as a copy of an ‘original’ fascism. ‘Nacionalista fascist ideology, in a narrow sense, was blocked from receiving fascist ideology as Mussolini delivered it’ (p. 78). But if Italian propaganda in Argentina failed, the question of the ‘influence’ that Italian fascism had on nacionalismo remains unanswered. This fact is linked to the other main question presented in the book, that of how to explain the originality of Argentine fascism. If the Italian ‘influences’ not only failed to permeate Argentine nacionalismo but were moreover rejected, as the author's argument regarding fascist propaganda proves, in the end the success of the nacionalista movement is explained more in terms of internal Argentine developments (p. 65).

To be sure, Finchelstein depicts accurately nacionalismo's resistance to becoming a satellite of Italian fascism. This compels him to show how nacionalistas did not copy Italian fascism but appropriated it in such creative ways that the connections between the two ideologies are hard to trace. If nacionalistas indeed ‘considered fascism an example of a broader nacionalista trend and not a prefabricated model waiting to be assembled’ (p. 97), then the specific connections with Italian fascism appear to have been tenuous and there seem to have been more differences than similarities between the two ideologies, as the author highlights in his conclusions, leaving the reader quite puzzled. There is also the problematic fact that there was not an exchange of ideas between the two countries, as the transnational approach that the author chooses as his methodology would imply, but more the projection of Italian preconceptions about what Argentina was like and should be like. It seems that Argentina and the nacionalistas were important for Mussolini's imperial purposes but did not have a special role in shaping the Italian fascist universe.

This broader nacionalista trend that Finchelstein refers to encompassed other European versions of fascism, especially the Spanish one, with which nacionalistas were also in dialogue, as the author points out. Yet as a reader one keeps wondering why Italy is the central focus of the book, when the author himself also recognises the influences that other countries had in shaping Argentine nacionalismo. Moreover, fascism is ultimately explained as a very lax bond that unified several right-wing nationalist movements across the Atlantic under one umbrella, leaving one with the sensation that fascism was a fuzzy ideology that could be filled with what each nationalist movement, and particularly the nacionalistas, thought fascism could be.

In sum, with regard to its comparative approach, the book is very successful in assessing the differences between Italian fascism and nacionalismo and, therefore, the originality of the Argentine version of fascism, yet the transnational dimension regarding connections between Italian fascism and Argentine nacionalismo is less clearly addressed. The author conceives transnationalism more as an unsuccessful ‘Italian monologue with respect to Argentina’ (p. 107) than as a mutual exchange of ideas across national borders. That being said, the book is a very welcome attempt to study Argentine nationalism from a comparative and transnational perspective, an important task given the relative lack of this type of approach in Latin American historiography.