From its inception, Fascism was imperialist. Mussolini had cynically abandoned D’Annunzio in Fiume in 1920, calculating correctly that Fascism’s opportunity lay in combatting ‘the enemy within’. But the movement consistently had as its declared aim a general commitment to realising the grandeur of Italy, specifically through the foundation of an empire. Self-consciously drawing on the legacy of interventionism and the war experience, Fascism claimed that under its rule Italy would at last be recognised as a major power and achieve hegemony in the
‘Italian’ sea, the Mediterranean.
Recognition as a Great Power and Mediterranean expansion should, of course, have been the natural outcome of Italy’s participation on the winning side of the war. But in the Fascist view Italy’s ‘mutilated vic-tory’ was plain to see in the peace treaties of 1919, which had not deliv-ered the anticipated gains in the Adriatic, the Near East and Africa.
Responsibility rested with the pusillanimous liberal governments, both cause and victims of the country’s deep post-war internal divisions, which were unable to defend the country’s national interests. Blame was shared with the ungrateful ex-Allies and already well-established imperialist powers, France and Britain.
This reading of the war and its outcome was hardly original. It regur-gitated wholesale the Nationalist position, whose war aims Mussolini had practically adopted as his own during 1918. From the Nationalists too, Mussolini and Fascism took the notion of the struggle between rival imperialisms as an inescapable fact of international relations, and of war as the inevitable and even desirable test of a nation’s will to power and expansion. There existed a ready-made Nationalist rhetoric about international ‘class war’ between up and coming ‘proletarian’
nations and satiated ‘plutocratic’ ones, for the redistribution of territory and resources. It was employed regularly by Mussolini in the late 1920s, even if the realisation was delayed until the 1930s. From the very start then, Fascism was tendentiously bound to be ‘revisionist’ of the Versailles settlement, anti-pacifist and anti-internationalist. It had little time for the principles of parity and respect between countries which purportedly inspired the new international order enshrined in the League of Nations, even though Italy was a member.
Revisionism seemed to put Italy at odds with France in particular, since France regarded the retention of the post-war territorial settlements as a guarantee of security against Germany. France had built up in the early 1920s a network of alliances and agreements with Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia, the beneficiaries of the treaties and of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire in Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The lands bordering the Adriatic were not only the focus of Italian irredentism, but a bridgehead for the spread of Italian influence in the Balkan and Danubian regions now that the Habsburg empire was gone. Control of the Adriatic was also seen geopolitically as crucial to the wider goal of Mediterranean hegemony, the realisation of which was again hindered by French and British colonial possessions and mandates in North and East Africa and the Middle East.
It is obviously dangerous to divine the actual diplomatic and military alignments of 1940 in the grandiose pretensions of early Fascism, as if one was the logical and inevitable outcome of the other. There was much ground to cover before the outbreak of a general war of the fascist powers against the ‘plutocracies’, and some historians, notably De Felice, try to argue that Italy’s choice of allies and enemies was still open as late as spring 1940. But whether it was expressed in political and economic influence or military conquest and direct control, Fascist foreign policy always went in two directions, towards the Balkans and Danubia, and to Africa. Both prongs potentially cut across France’s European and imperial interests. This was not so much Fascist as Italian foreign policy, or at least that of conservative liberals and Nationalists both before, during and after the 1915–18 war. Fascist foreign policy could be seen as conventional or the extension of a certain tradition. The continuity with much of what had gone before helps to explain why the Fascist government’s policy was for a long while broadly supported by Italy’s establishment, including the monarchy and the top career diplomats in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
Italy was a small power in European and world terms, lacking the kind of economic and military muscle which would allow the country to be an independent player in international power politics. Italy’s attempted economic penetration of the Balkan and Danubian countries, one of the arms of its diplomacy in the area, always met superior competition on the same ground from richer nations. This came from France in the 1920s and early 1930s, and then later from Germany during the late 1930s and into the period of war and occupation. Such inescapable and objective weakness meant that it was difficult for Italy to contemplate going it alone. She always needed the help of other major powers, or the opportunity to exploit to her own advantage the balance, tensions and rivalries among these more powerful countries.
Italy’s entry into the First World War was a classic demonstration of this kind of makeweight diplomacy. Although formally allied to Germany and Austro-Hungary in the Triple Alliance, the Italian declar-ation of neutrality in 1914 indicated that she was open to offers from both sides at war. Even continuing neutrality would have a price. Italian irredentism might well have been pushing the country towards inter-vention against Austro-Hungary. But the decision to fight alongside France and Britain in 1915 was clinched by the secret Treaty of London, where the Western Allies were able to offer the better territorial deal.
Mussolini’s first dramatic foreign policy coup in government was his provocative escalation of a dispute with Greece over the delimitation of the Greek–Albanian border. The bombardment and occupation of the Greek Adriatic island of Corfu in the late summer of 1923, the prelude to its expected annexation, was not only an example of Mussolini’s exhibitionist, bullying and bellicose style. It showed the extent of the Fascist government’s aspirations to dominate the Adriatic and its Balkan coast, and the then insuperable barrier to their achievement.
Although Mussolini managed to avoid mediation by the League of Nations, to which Greece had referred the dispute, the island was evacuated under the implied threat of British naval action in the Mediterranean.
This was a demonstration of where real power lay, and an increasingly forward policy in the Balkan and Danubian regions in the late 1920s could not really shift the reality of Anglo-French domination of European affairs. The resort to largely secret and ‘dirty tricks’ political activity in the area was both a recognition of the situation and a sign that Mussolini was prepared to use undiplomatic and unconventional methods in foreign policy. As Secretary-General of the Foreign Ministry, the top
position in the career service, Salvatore Contarini has been credited with both restraining Mussolini’s natural mischief-making in foreign affairs during his first years of government and in rallying the career diplomats to Fascism. His resignation in March 1926 was basically in protest at Mussolini’s conduct of foreign policy, which barely respected the norms of diplomatic activity.
Mussolini sought to extend Italian influence in Southeastern Europe by meddling in the internal politics of countries. He attempted particu-larly to exploit their ethnic and national antagonisms. These had been fuelled rather than dampened by the corrupted form of national self-determination inspiring the 1919 peace treaties, where strategic and economic as well as ethnic criteria had been used to determine national territorial boundaries. Involvement in the dynastic rivalries of the Albanian royal family had reduced Albania to an informal Italian protectorate in 1925–26. A footing in Albania was also a wedge into Yugoslavia, with its own Albanian minority. Destabilisation of the new Yugoslav state was again actively pursued through aid to the separatist and fascistic Croatian Ustasha movement from early 1929, and similar support to Macedonian nationalists from 1927. In defiance of the treaties Italy also secretly armed and supplied Hungary, which had revisionist territorial claims against all its neighbours, including Yugoslavia.
Subverting states from within might not have been new, but both fas-cist regimes made it a regular instrument of policy. Mussolini applied it in North Africa and the Middle East against the British and French empires, as well as in the Balkans. As early as an official visit to the Ital-ian colony of Libya in 1926, Mussolini declared himself the defender of Islam as an incitement to native anti-colonial nationalism in French and British territories bordering on the Mediterranean. At the time the Italians were engaged in their own nasty internal pacification of Libya’s Arab population. Mussolini’s intermittent interest in Zionism was again related to the concern to shake the British hold on its Middle Eastern mandates and its place in the Mediterranean. The abortive destabilisation of Yugoslavia anticipated the highly manipulative Nazi dismember-ment in 1938–39 on the phoney grounds of national self-determination of Czechoslovakia which, as Mussolini liked to say, was not simply
‘Czecho-Slovakia’ but also ‘Czecho-Germano-Polono-Magyaro-Rutheno-Romano-Slovakia’.
As a revisionist country herself, Fascist Italy was in league with the other revisionist countries, specifically Hungary. The regime’s contacts with some sections of the revanchist German right in the 1920s pointed
in the same direction, even though such a revisionist axis created other contradictory tensions, notably over Austrian independence and the German-speaking population of the Italian alpine border region. Revi-sionism also indicated a growing ideological convergence and division in Europe. Antipathy to France, the barrier to Italian influence in the Danube and Balkans, was heightened by Fascist anger at democratic France ‘harbouring’ Italian anti-Fascist emigration. The Fascist govern-ment had dealings with the right-wing opposition in Weimar Germany and sponsored imitative, violently nationalistic groups to undermine the Yugoslav state. It co-operated with a succession of rightist if not fascist governments under Admiral Nicholas Horthy’s regency in Hungary, again to attack the democratic beneficiaries of the peace treaties. With the rise of the Nazis in Germany, Mussolini could see in a ‘fascistising’
Europe the extension of Italian power and influence on the continent.
It seems difficult to describe Fascist foreign policy in the 1920s as basic-ally one of peace and reconciliation. Some historians do see incidents like that of Corfu in 1923 as aberrant interruptions to a decade of calm in Fascist foreign policy, a period of good conduct largely determined by the need to consolidate power in Italy itself, which required a low profile internationally to reassure both foreign and domestic opinion.
Italy, after all, was with Britain the co-guarantor of the 1925 Locarno agreement bringing Germany into the League of Nations and securing the French and Belgian borders with Germany, which contemporaries regarded as cementing peace between former enemies. But we also know that Mussolini was hardly an initiator of Locarno, and tried and failed to link it to a European guarantee of the Italo–Austrian frontier.
He eventually participated with bad grace, seeing it at most as a recogni-tion of Italy as a Great Power arbitrating the fate of Europe in a way which anticipated the abortive four-power scheme of the early 1930s.
He certainly shed no tears over the dispelling of the illusions of peace nourished by Locarno and indeed contributed to this through his revisionist actions in Eastern Europe from 1926.
No Eastern Locarno here; imperialism and revisionism were consist-ently held and publicly declared goals, and both meant changes to the post-war territorial settlement. Such changes could occur peacefully, of course. A 1926 Italo–British agreement slightly modified the border between Somalia and Egypt in Italy’s favour. But Mussolini’s predilec-tion was to make trouble wherever he could and disparage the forms of conventional diplomacy, using methods of internal political subversion as covert, undeclared warfare on countries he regarded as Italy’s enemies.
The point is not that Mussolini could be credited with a decade of good behaviour in foreign policy, but rather that the damage he could do in the 1920s was limited, because of Italy’s intrinsic economic and military weakness, and the lack of any counterbalance to effective Anglo-French dominance in Europe which Italy could exploit.
In the late 1920s this external and objective obstacle to the realisation of Great Power aspirations was reinforced by international political economy. The Fascist government’s revaluation of the lira in 1926–27 was achieved as part of a wider currency and economic stabilisation involving other European countries, and was arranged and funded by the American and British governments and financial markets. Although Fascism had just embarked on the construction of its own system of government in the form of ‘totalitarianism’, Italy was still integrated into and dependent on an international economy dominated by Anglo-Saxon finance and capital. It was difficult to run a foreign policy which ignored these realities of economic and financial dependence, which were only transformed by the impact of the great Depression.
2. THE ‘TOTALITARIAN’ STATE: INTERNAL POLICY