Suchergebnisse

As the Italian anti-fascist exiles reorganised after the establishment of a full dictatorship in 1925, they were confronted by a series of difficult issues that no longer could be dealt with in the national context. The overriding need to heal the divisions within the Italian left now would be conditioned by choices made on the international level. The abdication of the Western democracies at Munich meant to many on the left that the Soviet Union was the essential bulwark against fascism. Within the Italian Socialist Party Pietro Nenni defended the alliance with the Communist Party and support for the Soviet Union. Alternatives offered by Angelo Tasca questioned both the exclusive alliance with the Communists and unquestioning support for the Soviet Union. Tasca also developed a European perspective which tended to marginalise the Soviets both ideologically and diplomatically. These positions put him at odds with Nenni. Tasca's position was complicated by his parallel membership of the French SFIO, his French citizenship and, in 1940, his decision to support Vichy. Tasca's defection and Nenni's triumph made the Italian Socialist Party more hostile after the fall of fascism to new thinking on European unity and alternatives to unity of action with the Communists.

With the outbreak of war in Ethiopia in late 1935 Italian Fascism shifted into a new phase, which can be called imperial-colonialist-racial. Until 1935 Italy had invested little in the colonies and maintained a relatively small presence in Africa beyond a few cities in Libya. Yet from 1935 to 1940 the Fascist regime shifted enormous amounts of money and effort to create a new Fascist colonial society. This article attempts to explain how this happened by linking the shift to imperial politics to a new totalitarian drive to re-educate Italians and to the adoption of official racism.

The idea of an Italian Sonderweg is interesting, but it is not exactly a new interpretation of the Giolittian era. Gaetano Salvemini was very clear in blaming Giolitti for distorting Italy's path to democracy. I agree with Paul Corner's cautionary remark that nothing before the First World War made fascism inevitable. Still, we should look closely at the fifteen years before the Great War, if for no other reason than the fact that the great hopes for reform that marked the period gave rise to little structural reform. Giolitti simply did not bring about the modernisation of the liberal parliamentary system. However, I have my doubts that this adds up to a Sonderweg. Nowhere on the Continent did a modern mass party of the bourgeoisie emerge before 1914. Moreover, in no country did the middle-class movement for reform develop solid links with the growing socialist movement. It is curious in this regard that Corner never mentions France. Certainly the Giolittian era resembles the post-Dreyfus period in French politics more than anything that happened in Germany. It would be interesting for Professor Corner to expand on the viability of the British Lib–Lab pact of 1906; it is implied that this was a model that worked elsewhere on the Continent (p. 286). I also find it surprising that he finds the roots of the Weimar coalition in prewar imperial Germany (p. 294).