Imperialism,colonialism andirredentism played an important role in the foreign policy ofFascist Italy. These included both ethnic-nationalist irredentist claims and frivolous foreign adventures intended to artificially raise the regime’s prestige. Among the regime's goals were the acquisition of territory considered historically Italian inFrance (e.g.Nice) andYugoslavia (e.g.Dalmatia), the expansion of Italy'ssphere of influence into theBalkans (e.g.Greece) and the acquisition of more colonies inAfrica. Thepacification of Libya (1923–32), theinvasion of Ethiopia (1935–36), theinvasion of Albania (1939), theinvasion of France (1940), theinvasion of Greece (1940–41) and theinvasion of Yugoslavia (1941) were all undertaken in part to add to Italy's national space. According to historian Patrick Bernhard, Fascist Italian imperialism underBenito Mussolini, particularly in Africa, served as a model for the much more famous expansionism of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe.[1][2][3]
Italy had colonial interests ever since 1869 when an Italian trading firm founded an outpost atMassawa in what is nowEritrea. The Italian colonial possessions ofEritrea andSomaliland came to be recognised during theScramble for Africa, but expansion into the interior of the Horn of Africa was blocked by theEthiopian Empire ofMenelik II at theBattle of Adwa in 1896, where he resoundingly defeated Italian forces sent to enforce a deliberate mistranslation of acceptance of effective protectorate status by Ethiopia, that Italy had maliciously included only in the Italian draft of the treaty in an attempt to unilaterally determine Ethiopia’s status. The resulting fallout in Italy removed prime ministerFrancesco Crispi from power and resulted in riots.
Since the defeat, Italy had accepted Ethiopian sovereignty and the regional status quo. However, it remained a sore spot that rankled Italian militarists andjingoistic demagogues in particular, of which there was no shortage following the political crisis atthe end of theFirst World War. The fascist regime initially respected the status quo, as set forth in a 1928 treaty with Ethiopia, but from the early 1930s began to challenge it.
A series of border posts were established by the Italians well inside Ethiopian territory, and an Ethiopian contingent with British observers was fired upon by Italians atWal Wal in December 1934, beginning a series of military preparations that escalated intofull scale invasion in October 1935.
The war initially stalemated despite the might of the modernised Italian army and resorting to gas bombing of civilians and medical facilities, turning it into a matter of pride for the fascist regime, whose rapidly draining coffers obliged the request to Italian women to donate their gold wedding bands to fund the invasion, as Italian obtuseness defied international opinion to transgress against a fellow sovereign state. A renewed offensive of Spring 1936 led to the fall ofAddis Ababa and the fusion of the Italian colonies with Ethiopia asAfrica Orientale Italiana (AOI). KingVictor Emmanuele III was proclaimedEmperor of Ethiopia in a lacklustre imitation of the British monarch’s title ofEmperor of India.
Unlike inBritish India, however, rule of law was almost entirely fiction in Italian East Africa, where Italian-native relations were governed in the context of a soon to be established racial hierarchy, and institutionalised terror like theYekatit 12 massacre in 1937 after an assassination attempt on the viceroy, an enthusiastic proponent of ethnic cleansing in Libya,Rodolfo Graziani. Italian international isolation after Anglo-French attempts toappease Italy with a portion of Ethiopia before Ethiopia’s total conquest were leaked to the press and withdrawn after public outcry, were compensated by the Italian government falling voluntarily into the arms ofNazi Germany with theRome-Berlin Axis of 1936, signed by a new pro-German foreign ministerGaleazzo Ciano that would ultimately bind the fascist regime to its belligerent neighbour and destroy it.
The so called “pearl of the fascist empire” lasted only five years as following Italy’s declaration of war on theAllies of the 10th of June 1940, despite initial successes in occupyingBritish Somaliland, Italian East Africa was conquered in a highly successful Allied campaign led byBritish Commonwealth forces, withFree French and Ethiopian resistance forces playing major supporting roles, which led to the Duca d’Aosta’s surrender of the territory in May 1941. Similar Italian underperformances inGreece,North Africa and later metropolitanItaly itself would lead toWinston Churchill quipping that Italy was the “soft underbelly” of the Axis.
The former Ras TafariHaile Selassie I was restored to his throne by the British, who occupied the former Italian colonies until the end of the war, when Eritrea was granted to Ethiopia in 1952 and Somaliland was permitted to become aTrust Territory of Italy under condition of a ten year limit for independence in 1949, whichSomalia became on the 1st of January 1960, uniting with British Somaliland. Thus ended the indecorous comportment of Italian imperial rule in East Africa, overextended by a belligerent fascist regime in a vainglorious quest for parity with the empires of Britain and France.
After his appointment as Governor of theDodecanese in 1936, the fascist leaderCesare Maria De Vecchi started to promote withinBenito Mussolini'sNational Fascist Party an idea[4] of a new "Imperial Italy" (Italian:Italia imperiale), one that, like a recreation of theRoman Empire, went beyond Europe and included northern Africa (theFourth Shore or "Quarta Sponda" in Italian).
De Vecchi's dream was an Imperial Italy that included not only all the European territories wanted by the Italianirredentists (Nice,Savoy,Ticino,Dalmatia,Corfu,Malta andCorsica) and populated by Italian communities for many centuries, but even the north African territories (Libya andTunisia), where Italian emigrants had created "colonies" in the late nineteenth century.
After 1936 and duringWorld War II, the GreekDodecanese islands were also included in the project (with theIonian islands ofZante,Ithaca, etc.) and the fascist regime soon promoted a process of forcedItalianization of these Greek islands.[5]
Italy annexed the coastal provinces of its colony of Libya in 1938 and made them national provinces of Italy that were to be Italianized.
In preparation for war with France in 1940, the Fascist regime intended to gain Corsica, Nice, Savoy, and the colonies of Tunisia and Djibouti from France.[6] Foreign Minister Count Ciano on 10 June 1940 issued support for the partition ofSwitzerland between Germany and Italy, with Italy annexingTicino,Grisons, andValais.[7]
The opinions of De Vecchi were partially accepted[8] by Mussolini in the 1940s, when Italy enteredWorld War II, but found opposition (and scepticism) in the King of Italy,Victor Emmanuel III. In November 1942, with the Italian occupation of more of southern France following the occupation of the free zone under rule of the Vichy regime, and Corsica, as well as enlargements of Italy proper in Slovenia and forItalian Albania in 1941 in what is now Montenegro, Kosovo and North Macedonia with the partition of Yugoslavia between the Axis powers, the territories of the "Imperial Italy" dreamed of by the fascist De Vecchi were fully in Italian hands, with the exception of Malta, but the project was not politically implemented because the war was turning against theAxis powers.[9] In July 1943, Mussolini was deposed by a vote of no confidence in his ownGrand Fascist Council and that September, Germany invaded Italy (code named ironicallyOperation Axis) and annexed South Tyrol, Slovenia, Venezia and Istria while setting up a puppet regime, theSalo Republic, and taking over the former Italian occupations in France and Albania.
De Vecchi effected the first step towards anItalia Imperiale (orGrande Italia) when in 1936, as Italian Governor of the Dodecanese islands, he imposed official use of theItalian language and created a colony of 7,000 Italians inRhodes and surrounding islands.[10] In 1940 he was appointed to theGrand Council of Fascism where later, during the Italian occupation ofGreece, he proposed that theKingdom of Italy annex the Dodecanese and Ionian islands, with the island ofChios, which had once belonged to theRepublic of Genoa. Italy had taken advantage of the weakness of the Ottoman Empire to occupy the islands which were in the hands of the Turks in 1912. The islands were given to Greece in the 1947 Treaty of Peace.
Italy had occupied Tripolitania and Cyrenaica during theItalo-Turkish War of 1911-12, along with the Dodecanese. It had been a target of Italian expansionists since French occupation of Tunisia in 1881 caused indignant expostulating from Italians who considered Tunisia rightfully in Italy’s sphere of influence. Since then, the interior had never been under Italian rule, and the opposition of theSenussi and other Libyan tribes underOmar Mukhtar led toperpetual clashes, with four military leaders being cycled through in a decade, and any Italian rule being fiction outside of the littoral cities and non-existent inKufra until 1931, when Mukhtar was captured and executed.
Another fascist leader, aviatorItalo Balbo, promoted actively the development of Italian communities in coastalLibya, after the country was pacified. Balbo calledTripolitania andCyrenaica, joined in 1934 as a single colony renamed “Libya” in reference to antiquity, theQuarta Sponda (Fourth Shore) of Italy in reference to the other three shores (the western, the Adriatic and the Balkan) of the Italian peninsula.
One of the initial Italian objectives in Libya, indeed, had been the relief of overpopulation and unemployment in Italy through emigration to the undeveloped colony. With security established, systematic "demographic colonization" was encouraged by KingVictor Emmanuel III's government. A project initiated by Libya's governor, Italo Balbo, brought the first 20,000 settlers — the "Ventimila" - to Libya in a single convoy in October 1938. More settlers followed in 1939, and by 1940 there were approximately 110,000 Italians in Libya, constituting about 12 percent of the total population.[11]
Plans envisioned an Italian colony of 500,000 settlers by the 1960s: so, the Italians would be 2/3 of the population in coastal Libya by then. Libya's best land was allocated to the settlers to be brought under productive cultivation, primarily in olive groves. Settlement was directed by a state corporation, the "Libyan Colonization Society", which undertook land reclamation and the building of model villages and offered a grubstake and credit facilities to the settlers it had sponsored.
In November 1942, Tunisia was also included as the "Quarta Sponda" (with nearly 100,000Tunisian Italians) in plans for Greater Italy, but a few months later following the Axis defeat atEl Alamein andRommel’sAfrika Korps’ retreat to Tunisia it was occupied by theAllies. Fezzan was occupied by the Free French, and Cyrenaica and Tripolitania by the British until Libya’s independence as a Kingdom underIdris I, a descendant of theGrand Senussi in 1951.
In spring 1941, Mussolini - with the help of theGerman Army - finally defeated Greece and conquered coastalYugoslavia.
GeneralVittorio Ambrosio, the commander of theItalian Army during the conquest of Yugoslav Dalmatia, created a military line of occupation fromLjubljana to northern Montenegro that successively was to be considered as the future border of the "Imperial Italy" ( the “Third Shore”, formerly occupied by Venetian colonies and claimed by Italy since the Treaty of London in 1915) in theBalkans.[12] Within the borders to the south were includedMontenegro,Greater Albania and Epirus.
De Vecchi promoted the inclusion ofCorfu (with a significant community of theCorfiot Italians), theIonian islands and the southern Aegean islands (once controlled by the Republic of Venice), in order to form an "arch" that stretched toward the Dodecanese,Lesvos andChios (controlled by theRepublic of Genoa).
In the 1940s, De Vecchi contemplated an "Imperial Italy" stretching from Europe to North Africa, made of the "Imperial Italy" (with an enlarged Italian Empire in eastern Africa, from theEgyptian shores on the Mediterranean toSomalia).
He dreamt of a powerful Italy enlarged:
In a hopeful peace negotiation following anAxis victory, Mussolini had planned to acquire for his Imperial Italy the full island ofCrete (that was mostly German occupied) and the surrounding southern Greek islands, connecting the Italian Dodecanese possessions to the already Italian Ionian islands.[13][page needed]
South of theFourth Shore, some fascist leaders dreamt of anItalian Empire that, starting in the Fezzan, would includeEgypt,Sudan and reachItalian East Africa.[14]
The Allied victory in the Second World War ended these projects and terminated all fascist ambitions for the empire.
Finally, in 1947 theItalian Republic formally relinquished sovereignty over all its overseas colonial possessions as a result of theTreaty of Peace with Italy. There were discussions to maintainTripolitania (a province ofItalian Libya) as the last Italian colony, but they were not successful.
In November 1949, the formerItalian Somaliland, then under British military administration, was made aUnited Nations Trust Territory under Italian administration for a period of 10 years. On 1 July 1960, the Trust Territory of Somalia merged withBritish Somaliland to form the independentSomali Republic.
