On Mussolini's Nation-Empire

Wow, this is imperial history at its finest. The Italian Empire is a hard egg to crack—the English-language literature on Italy’s colonial empire is small and most discussions of it are short references to the Italian conquest in Ethiopia in 1936. There are some exceptions to this, like Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya and Italian Colonialism, but they are far and few between. Then, Roberta Pergher comes out of left field and gives us an in-depth treatment of Italian imperial ideology and argues that Italian policy inadvertently combines “nation-building” and “empire-building,” producing a distinctive sort of polity, the “nation-empire.”

Pergher’s starting point is an article written by Italian Senator Tolomei, who argued in an article in the 1930s that Italian policy toward Libya (unified as one colony after 1934) and South Tyrol (part of metropolitan Italy after its acquisition at the end of the First World War) had a great deal of similarities. Pergher takes Tolomei’s comments seriously and probes the limits to this comparison. It turns out, this comparison is apt. Few historians before Pergher have even thought to frame South Tyrol in conjunction with Italian colonial territories like Libya. Yet, the Italian response to both was the same. Central to this is the heavily-discussed concept of “borderlands.”

In historical thinking, a “borderland” is a space where state sovereignty is tenuous. The term first emerged out of The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest and has since come to describe a wide variety of other state-relationships. One way that borderlands are produced is when a territory is contested between two states—think Jammu & Kashmir and Nagorno-Karabakh. The other, more relevant, sort of borderlands here is one where a territory is universally recognized to be controlled by a state, but actual state control is tenuous—think Chiapas or much of Somalia. This latter case was true in both Italian Libya and Italy’s northern territories, especially in South Tyrol.

In order to resolve these borderlands, where the people openly contested Italian rule, Mussolini’s government sought to bring about a full demographic transformation. He encouraged Italian peasants to make their way to South Tyrol in order to outnumber the inhabitants there and force them to speak Italian and adopt Italian habits. The same was true of Libya, where Mussolini’s regime shipped 20,000 Italians to coastal Cyrenaica in 1938, and sought to send 20,000 more per year for the next four years. Ultimately, the aim was to bring half a million Italian settlers to Libya, enough to outnumber Arabs in the territory. These are traditional empire-building policies, and there’s no surprise that they took place in Libya, but what is interesting is that Italy pursued them in South Tyrol. Italian policy towards South Tyrol was part of a much larger process of shirking off minority rights as established in the post-Versailles world order. This was an open challenge to the rest of Europe, and Pergher recognizes it as such.

Although South Tyrol was an “integral” part of Italy as early as 1919, Cyrenaica and Tripolitania were two colonies—and were treated as such—before their merger into Libya. However, what is really interesting is the administrative transformations that took place as the Italian regime was settling 20,000 Italians in the territory in 1938. Instead of maintaining it as a colony, Libya was transformed into another metropolitan province. This is symbolic of the massive degree of state intervention that came with Italian colonization (far more than France or Britain, for instance). But, it also takes Libya outside of the jurisdiction of the colonial office and turns it into an integral part of the Italian nation. All of this comes together to transform Italy into a “nation-empire” as a result of its need to shore up its borderlands and to ensure they maintained a sense of “Italianness”—italianità.

Simply astounding. I’d love to pick Pergher’s brain a bit about this work. I know she doesn’t work on the French colonial empire, but I’m really interested in how she would compare French Algeria, which became an integral part of metropolitan France in 1848, and Italian Libya, which did the same 90 years later. I’d also like to ask her some questions about her views of Italian settlement in Tunisia, one of the main subjects of my current project. I’ll be pulling a lot from this work as I continue writing, and I’d recommend it to anyone interested in imperial processes and technologies of imperial rule.