On Vital Crossroads

From my perspective, Salerno has a pretty obvious argument: the Mediterranean was central to the European foreign policy debates in the 1930s, and discord over the balance of power in the Mediterranean set European powers on course for the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. I suppose most historians have emphasized the northern European or Pacific nature of the war, but there’s plenty of other scholarship on the Mediterranean during the years at hand.

In making his argument, Salerno looks at the webs, connections, and tensions that bound Britain, France, Italy, and Germany together—and the networks that pushed them apart. To do so, he primarily examines the role of high politics, especially with Italy as the centerpiece. There’s a lot here on Benito Mussolini and Galeazzo Ciano. The other powers are generally framed in relation to Italy, but Hitler and Ribbentrop show up a lot, as do Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax, Anthony Eden, Edouard Daladier, Pierre Laval, and François Darlan. However, there is little mention here of the societal context in which these figures existed, making this a much more old fashioned sort of diplomatic history. Had Salerno taken the time to reframe, his argument would have been much more compelling. The lack of sustained attention on Tunisia and Palestine, in particular, are massive blindspots. Palestinians were in revolt against the British Empire and Jewish settlement, while there were enormous numbers of politically active Italians living in Tunisia who had close connections with those living in Libya. This is easily missed when an author looks exclusively at diplomacy, but they are events and processes that are essential to making sense of the history at hand.

Nevertheless, this is an acceptable primer of politics in the Mediterranean during the late 1930s.