Country and Minority Flags of Europe
EU Country Profiles & Immigration Info
Minority Languages & Identities in Europe

About the EHL/The Staff/Contact Us
Submit Articles & Content
Online Language Translation
Join our Mailing List
Donate to the EHL
Bookmark the EHL to Favourites!

     
      
     
Click a Flag to Translate

• Ethnic/religious groups of Habsburg Empire
• Historical breakup of Yugoslavia ('91-'09)
• Muslim populations in European countries
• History of Christianization of Europe
• Soviet Union, Communist influence
• Map of European ethnic groups
• Map of Fascism in Europe (1922-75)
• History of Islamic conquest in Europe
• Religions & ethnic groups in Russia
• Detailed map of French colonization
• Detailed map of British colonization
• Napoleon's conquests & legacy
• Ethnic & religious map of pre-Nazi Poland

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• Pecs, Hungary: collision point between
Muslim and Christian empires
• Auschwitz and Birkenau
• Poland's resistance to Nazis in pictures
• Muhammad cartoon crisis in pictures
• Stalin's private summer home
• Ravenna: capital of Gothic empire
• Czar Nicholas II's Ukrainian palace
• European traditional cultural costumes
• Inside the Vatican, house of all wealth
• Banknotes/currencies of Europe
• Croatia's Dubrovnik, untarnished gem

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• Islamic Mujahidin vs. Christian Spain
• Poland-Lithuania vs. Teutonic Order
• Nevskiy's Russia vs. German Crusaders
• Prussia vs. France (Nazi Propaganda)
• Libya: Europe will soon be Islamic
• Ivan the Terrible vs. Muslim Tatars
• Soviet Propaganda: Defeat of Germany  

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

• An analysis of Mussolini's 1938 racialist legislation
• The disastrous effects of Soviet collectivization on Kazakhstan
• Changing meaning of Italian identity under Fascist rule
• Yugoslavia's independent break from East and West
• The Galicians: the Celts of Spain
• The modern Macedonian Slavs and Alexander the Great
• An argument for the Romanians' links to ancient Dacians
• Mussolini's Italian death camp for Jews, Slovenes, and Marxists
• The disappeared Jews of Hungary and the Arrow Cross regime
• The Gypsies in history and today, Europe's public enemy
• History of Jihad in Chechnya vs. Russians
• History of the Muslim Tatars in Eastern Europe
• Post-WWII expulsion of 10 million ethnic German civilians
• Ethnic & religious history of Serbs, Croats, & Bosnians
• Breakaway states and independence movements in Europe
• The ancient Germanic Runic alphabet and Runestones
• Teutonic Order and their 800-year legacy in Eastern Europe
• 460-year struggle for Albanian homeland, and 540 for Kosovo
• 2,800-year-old white mummies of China, bringers of Buddhism?
• Alexander the Great's Greek descendents in Pakistan?
• Visual History of Yugoslavia and its breakup (1918-2008)

--MORE & NON-ENGLISH--

Changing and dictated meanings of Italian identity under Mussolinian Fascism
by James Mayfield (Chairman, European Heritage Library)

Print this Article    •    About the Author    •    Citations    •    Bibliography/Sources

This is one of my graduate dissertations, which argues that the very conceptual framework of "Italianness" and Italian identity shifted in reaction to Italy's changing historical experience, and that this meaning was "dictated" to the Italian nation by the Fascist hegemonic state and its intellectuals. It traces how Italianness progressively evolved from being a collective nationalist movement open to minority racial and religious groups (including Jews), to becoming a chauvinistic "Roman" spiritual awareness that placed Italian culture as supreme, to becoming a racially-exclusive framework whereby one could only be Italian if he or she was of totally pure Italian racial blood. Italianness progressively changed from nationality, to culture, and finally to a so-called "Aryan-Roman race." I n the last phase at the end, it traces how this new worldview facilitated Italy's participation in genocide against Slovenes and Jews on racial grounds. It also shows that this path towards racialism and Antisemitism was not simply due to German Nazi pressure, but evolved under a specifically Italian historical context.

This essay may NOT under ANY circumstances be redistributed without my expressed permission.

Historians and academics have indefatigably debated the nature and formative process of national and ethnic identities. One major school of thought contends that these concepts of self-understanding are largely organic, “essentialist,” and natural frameworks that are only “reawakened” by the modern state, literary grandees, and nationalist freedom fighters. The other asserts that identities are vastly imagined, abstract communities concocted by these same movers of modern state formation. Although it is highly problematic for historians to universalize, few historical cases verify the theory that ethno-national identities are invented phenomena like the era of Italian Fascism under Benito Mussolini from 1922 until 1945. The very conceptualization of “Italianness” and the very meaning of the nation itself shifted dramatically, completely reconfigured by the high modern Fascist state. In only twenty-three years, Italian identity was redefined by the state and dictated to the Italian nation: firstly from an open national identity that transcended lines of ethnic and racial division; then to an early Fascist regime that accepted all racial and religious communities so long as they obeyed the state and adopted Italian culture; then to a high Fascist identity guided by an exclusive integral state that was now legally exclusive to the “Aryan-Roman” master race; and lastly to a ultra-racialist community complicit in the Holocaust and genocidal murder against identities it considered to be universally parasitic. The meaning of Italian nationality went from a Fascist movement of universal renewal to a Roman master race whose innate creativity would act as a beacon of civilization to the inferior races on the imperial periphery. Categorically, this shifting framework of Italianness was not essentialist or innate to the Italian people. Rather, it was progressively invented and defined by the Fascist intelligentsia of a pernicious modernity. In response to Italians' changing historical experience and an increasingly bellicose Neo-Roman empire, the markers of Italian identity were reconfigured and subsequently taught by the modern hegemonic state to the Italian nation.

Prior to and during the early phase of Mussolinian Fascism after 1922, Italian conceptualizations of nationality, race, and “Italianness” were highly nebulous, undefined, and abstract. With the benefit of retrospect, the historian is inclined to wonder how what was initially one of Europe's most liberal and progressive kingdoms could so rapidly degenerate into such an exclusive, racialized empire based upon blood and soil. This young nation – unified for the first time only in 1870 – contained a plethora of divergent loyalties, regional affiliations, political aspirations, and interpretations of identity. Consequently, the country that the growing Fascist movement encountered understood the meaning of Italianness in vastly different and conflicting ways, either as being Roman Catholics, Europeans, citizens of the Italian nation, residents of a local province, as northern or southern Italians, speakers of the Italian language, or multiple combinations thereof. By no means was Italian identity uniformly articulated, nor did the pre-Fascist state assert a normative framework of Italian identity that excluded distinct minority groups. Post-unification programs of assimilation were catalyzed by the desire to forge a centralized and unified nation by diminishing subversive regional affiliations, rather than the aspiration to build a purified or homogeneous space.

Even during the cultural assimilation directives of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Italian identity was not determined by blood, but by adopted language and allegiance to the pan-Italian national consciousness. Italianness was not rooted in an essentialist or innate ethos that clearly discerned those of Italic genetic origin from the Jewish, Slovene, Croat, Albanian, and Tiroler German communities also populating the Italian national territory. Jews and other minorities, later to be directly targeted with discriminatory legislation and excluded from the classification of pure Italianness, had long supported the unification effort and the young Italian nation since it presented itself as the guarantor of constitutional patronage and cooperative cosmopolitan industry.1 Albanian Muslims and Sephardic Jews exploited the new nation's secular character as a counterbalance against longstanding discrimination from conservative clerics, and therefore merged their existing cultural identities with those of general Italian nationality without impediment from the state. Slovenes and Croats, straddling the Yugoslav-Italian border, suffered more direct assimilation measures both before and during Fascism due to the state’s suspicion of perfidy and alternative loyalties on the borderlands. Nonetheless, after their topical assimilation and adoption of Italian language and consciousness through state schooling, these targeted minorities were equally able to possess multiple identities and were fully recognized as constituents of the Italian national community. Their Semitic, Slavic, or Illyrian blood – later the qualifiers for their total exclusion after 1938 – did not separate them from Italian identity. Their distinct languages, cultures, and historical memory were not broadly threatened by the centralizing pre-Fascist state; assimilation efforts only achieved the acceptance of the Italian language and culture alongside the autochthonous traditions of ethnic minorities.

Even under state Fascism after 1922, Italian identity was still quite nascent. In contrast to the later phase of Fascist exclusion, when one was only permitted to claim legitimate Italian identity if one were biologically “Aryan” and “Roman,” Italian national identity in the early phases of Fascism also passively accepted multiple identities. In contrast to typical presumptions of Fascism and nationalism in twentieth-century Europe, Fascism did not set out to create a strictly homogeneous state along chauvinistic, Antisemitic, or racialized parameters like Germany and Romania. Italian identity did not simply become exclusionary upon the seizure of power by Mussolini's far-right regime in 1922. Conversely, Fascism transformed itself and the Italian national consciousness from a collective project into an exclusive one in reaction to Italy's changing historical experience and the increasingly belligerent geopolitical position of the Italian Empire. The early regime permitted the limited combination of Italian consciousness with other ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities in a collective drive to serve the national renewal under the banner of Fascist populism. Racial delineations were neither defined nor influential in ascertaining Italianness. Even among Italy's rather undeveloped eugenics circles, genetic hygiene often did not take race into consideration, whilst a few proponents even encouraged racial miscegenation in order to create a “hybrid vigor” of social creativity.2 Instead, a shared historical experience towards the formation of a modern Fascist nation with a highly mobilized and nationalistic community abstractly unified these diverse identities under a collective pan-Italian consciousness.

The polar dichotomy between early Italy's loose interpretation of Italian identity and its eventual degeneration into exclusive racialism is equally perceptible in the writings of Benito Mussolini and other grandees of the increasingly popular Fascist movement. Mussolini, as the central driving force in the Fascist regime and the prime executor of its policies, began his career as a non-sectarian revolutionary socialist with a highly ambivalent perspective on Jews, Antisemitism, and race. In his early writings and speeches, Mussolini asserted the Fascist mission as a struggle for national renaissance, a reversal of the humiliation of Italy's failed irredentist ambitions over the port city of Fiume in 1920 and its failed imperial conquest of Ethiopia in 1895-6, and the attainment of economic prosperity via the synthesis of centralized authoritarianism and socialized corporatism.3 The nation was understood as the spiritual emanation of a highly cultured, industrious, modern society united under one collective ethos of national renewal. As the Fascists perceived the world, Italy's ancient Roman and Renaissance glory was merely waiting for a populist movement like Fascism to reawaken its creative radiance. Under this framework of Italian nationality, Italianness was interpreted as a psychic enchantment with Italian national culture and the collective nationalist mission that transcended markers of biological and racial division. “The Italians,” Mussolini argued in 1928 in the context of castigating Nazi chauvinist militarism, “...have never known racial intolerance...,”4 and should therefore transcend such lines of exclusion on their path towards Fascism. As late as 1932, he officiated that Italians and Fascism should be viewed as “not a race, nor a geographically defined region, but a people, historically perpetuating itself; a multitude unified by an idea and imbued with the will to live, the will to power, self-consciousness, personality”5 (emphasis added).

With the ascension of the Fascist regime, the state acquired new forms of power to reshape the very foundations of Italian society, and truly became a hegemonic force. Whereas in the liberal period, political process were especially driven by the elite few – the monarch, royal nobility, and elected officials – Fascism presented itself as a populist mass movement that directly involved every member of the Italian national community. Through the formation of squadrist militias, local Fascist sports clubs and fraternities, and mass mobilization through propaganda and party rallies, the Fascist regime under Mussolini was newly able to inculcate the masses with its changing worldview of Italian identity and Italy’s national mission. Benito Mussolini’s pervasive cult of personality as the prophet of the national renewal further allowed his changing interpretations of race and Italianness to become widespread doctrine via the imposition of new legislation and state propaganda. The regime’s intensifying destruction of all alternative loyalties and the virtual abolition of all competing political factions further reinforced the ability of the Duce to dictate and teach their new understandings of Italian identity to a public that was massively mobilized behind collective Fascist populism. With the establishment of the Fascist dictatorship and its increasing centralization throughout the 1930s, Mussolini, the Fascist leaders, and the Fascist intelligentsia effectively became the hegemonic state itself. Local Fascist governors, provincial administrators, university rectors, and squad commanders delivered the changing beliefs of the state to all corners of the empire. As Fascism transformed itself into an exclusive racialized framework in response to Italy’s evolving historical conditions, the hegemonic state was therefore able to teach the very meaning of race and Italianness to the nation.

In the early phases of the 1920s, the Fascist state sought to homogenize the nation through collective inclusion and assimilation, rather than through expulsion, murder, or proscription. Although Mussolini frequently used the term “race” (razza), its conceptual meaning was never defined in the early stage of Italian Fascism. He was recorded in private as having responded disparagingly to German racialists in several conversations, and insisted that “race...is a feeling and not a reality; 95%, a feeling.”6 Mussolini's early primary sources further reveal that he directly eschewed state-sponsored racism and racial science, and objurgated the racialist policies of the Third Reich as counterproductive, divisive, fanatical, and improvident.7 He even often described state racism as “hysterical.” As most racial theories predominating in Europe classified Germanic peoples as the prime race and Mediterraneans to be inferior, Mussolini was greatly discouraged from bringing divisive racial science to the foreground of Fascist policy. He therefore described racism in general as “more or less explicitly [intended] to underline the superiority of the German race with respect to all other races – including the Italian.”8 Similarly, Mussolini responded to the growing racialized Antisemitism in Europe in his early journalism by writing in 1920, “Antisemitism is unknown [in Italy] and we believe will never be known.” Interestingly, he continued by adjuring Jews to “continue to be smart enough not to encourage Antisemitism in the only country where it has never existed,” implying that Italian culture had no proclivity to Judæophobia unless the Jews themselves inspire it.9 Italian royals and nobility seldom bothered to hide their disgust for visiting German statesmen, considering them to be fanatical and chauvinistic.10 Nearly all of the most prominent Fascist intellectuals (excluding Julius Evola), especially in the early stages of Mussolini's reign, continued to condemn the Germans and their destabilizing approach towards heterogeneous elements, and advocated Italian cultural chauvinism instead of the ethnic victimization of Germany, Hungary, and Romania.11 Even further, Mussolini privately considered the mystical and theosophical racialism of Italian radicals like Julius Evola to be detrimental to national unity.12

Historians do not agree to what extent Mussolini actually believed his positive rhetoric towards the Jews, or whether it was solely pragmatic. The recently discovered diaries of Claretta Petacci, Mussolini’s long-time mistress, reveal that the Duce was far more chauvinistic, racialist, and Antisemitic than previously known. Entries from 1932 to 1938 record private statements by the dictator that vastly contradict his public depictions of race as being a nonsensical construction and Antisemitism as being unproductive. It seems that Mussolini long held a strong, yet undefined distaste for Jews as politically unreliable, and long felt a basic chauvinism for the Italian people as naturally superior. Petacci’s diaries record him as reflecting, “I have been a racist since 1921…I don’t know how they can think I’m imitating Hitler.” 13 He even went so far as to exclaim, “these disgusting Jews…I must destroy them all!” 14 Despite the severity of such a statement, we must carefully infer several conclusions from the Petacci diaries in the context of Italy’s evolving history. The diaries date from after 1932, a timeframe when Fascism had noticeably changed from the largely open, socialistic, and collective movement of the 1920s into a bellicose vehicle for ultranationalistic Italian glory. Mussolini, like the rest of the Italians, changed a great deal over the course of the twenty-three years of Fascism. The diaries therefore do not contradict Mussolini’s remarkably tolerant statements from his early career in the 1920s, nor do they imply that Fascism was inherently racist from the beginning and merely “hid” its true form until the historical conditions were appropriate to unveil the new racist worldview. Even further, there is no indication whether Mussolini’s early private racism or Antisemitism was framed on biological grounds or were merely incendiary statements with his mistress in the context of the supposed international Jewish conspiracy against Fascism. The diaries do not reveal that Fascism was racist or exclusionary by design, nor that Mussolini planned to design the new Italian nation along racially homogeneous markers. Mussolini’s policies, as well as Fascism itself, did not become strictly chauvinistic or racialized until the Italians themselves adapted to new historical conditions and interacted with other peoples on the imperial periphery that they increasingly deemed to be genetically inferior. That Mussolini would, by 1943, actually pursue his earlier calling to destroy all the Jews derived not from hidden beliefs he held since the 1920s, but the specific historical crises of 1943.

In the early phases, Mussolini and prominent Fascist intellectuals like Giovanni Preziosi and Roberto Farinacci15 understood nation, race (razza), and stock (stirpe) as being a mystical, cultural, and spiritual identity rather than a bio-political categorization.16 Italianità (Italianness) was now defined by language, loyalty, collective nationalism, and culture, rather than blood or any German-style ancestral membership in a master race. This openness was evident in the fact that more Jews initially joined the Fascist Party than Italians by proportion to their total population.17 Even Albanian Muslims were granted full civil rights by the Fascist movement, were allowed to actively join Fascist organizations, emigrate to Italy, and buy property abroad.18 Libyan Arabs were also given the right to join the Fascist activist squads.19 The collective nature of the new Italo-Fascist identity was further evident in the fact that Margherita Sarfatti, Mussolini's longtime mistress, was Jewish, as was Aldo Finzi, Undersecretary of the Interior, and Guido Jung, the Minister of Finance of 1935. Unlike in Germany, in this phase of Fascist historical development human worth and membership in the Italian national community were not determined by biology, but nationalistic loyalty and spiritual connection with the Fascist mission.

The foremost minorities in Italy who suffered direct measures of forced assimilation and inter-ethnic tension under Fascism were the Croats and especially the Slovenes on the Yugoslav-Italian borderlands. The region was a source of bitter irredentist competition between Italy and Yugoslavia after World War I, causing intense diplomatic and political conflict over the Italian-majority port cities of Fiume (Rijeka) and Trieste. The sizable Slavic minority, as well as the crucial economic importance of the two wealthy trade cities, caused both states to claim the ethnically mixed borderlands. After obstreperous arguments after World War I over the political status of the region, an Allied delegation finally agreed to the incorporation of Trieste into Italy by 1921, but incensed Italian and Yugoslav nationalists alike by placing the Italian-majority Fiume under international administration as the Free State of Trieste in 1920. To reify the Italian national character of Trieste and deprecate the independence of the Slovene minority, the state instated programs of linguistic and cultural assimilation far more vigorously than its relatively open approach to the rest of Italy. Independent Slovene-language schools were closed, and irredentist and nationalist organs were shut down. It became compulsory for all Slovenes and Croats to learn Italian and publish documents, give sermons, and print newspapers in both Italian and Slavic languages.20 Many distinctly Slavic names were forcibly Italianized. In Trieste, some hard-line Italian nationalists and Fascists engaged in inter-ethnic violence and mob attacks on local Slavs, allegedly with marked apathy by the Italian police. Radicals even incinerated the Balkan Hotel, the symbol of Slavic culture and arts in Trieste, thereby demonstrating popular exclusion of Slovenes from the framework of Italian national identity.21

In Fiume, not incorporated into Italy before the Fascist period, the situation was far more belligerent and nationalistic. Italians in the free city irascibly derided the Slavic minority as a subversive Fifth Column who stole the Italian majority from their rightful homeland.22 An independent Fascist militia under Gabriele d'Annunzio, the “Father of Fascism,” seized control of a politically-undetermined Fiume in 1919, three years before Mussolini assumed power. Installing a Fascist junta, d’Annunzio instated more pervasive measures of assimilation than occurred in Trieste, making Slovenian illegal in public and requiring Italian translations alongside all church sermons and newspaper publications.23 Signor Gayda, a significant commentator during this period, noted a pervasive “violent anti-Italian feeling” among the embittered Slavic minority.24 A foreign traveler described a sordid “atmosphere of war” in the borderlands as a result of these tensions over assimilation.25 D’Annunzio viewed the “return” of Fiume as the “city of the Holocaust,” a sacrifice of spiritual fire that would incinerate the deadwood of the outmoded Italian reactionaries and set the country on a course of national rebirth.26 Many contemporary and Fascist scholars saw the seizure of Fiume as the genesis of Fascism in general because of its association with Italian nationalism and militarism.27 Ultimately, the Fascist junta in Fiume was destroyed by the pre-Fascist Italian army, and Fiume was placed into international trusteeship.

Despite the measures of assimilation towards the borderland Slavs in pre- and early Fascist Italy, it must be emphasized that the motivations revolved around political and nationalistic factors, rather than exclusionary biological markers. Whereas Jews and Albanians in Italy proper enjoyed largely open membership in the Fascist collective with little impediment by the state, the Slovenes and Croats occupied regions of bitter geopolitical tension. The potentially alternate loyalties of the Slavs undermined the primacy of the Fascist movement and its cardinal imperative of nationalistic commitment to the state. The uncertain legal status of the region encouraged the regime to ensure the undeniably Italian national character of the borderlands through direct assimilation measures. During early Fascism, the state only disrupted the distinct identities of those minorities it deemed to be a geopolitical or ideological threat. It did not universally exclude Slovenes and Croats from the framework of Italian identity along lines of racial or genetic difference. Rather, there were to be absolutely no alternate loyalties than to Rome and Mussolini. To be Italian was to serve the state and obey the Duce as its conductor. This was exemplified by Mussolini’s demand as early as 1922 that all Freemasons' lodges be closed with the allegation of their service to non-Fascist authorities.28 To the same end, the state increasingly moved against Zionist organizations and Jewish yeshiva organizations. Here, too, the motivations for forced assimilation and the abolition of alternate allegiances were strictly political, rather than deriving from racialized motivations of exclusion that inspired Hungary, Austria, Romania, Poland, and Germany.29 The Fascist assimilation programs revolved around cementing Italian language and national loyalty among the “suspicious” borderland minorities, rather than erasing their distinct identities, physical presence, or historical memory altogether. So long as they learned Italian and demonstrated their complete obeisance to the collective Fascist movement, Italianness was still relatively open to the multiple identities of Italy’s ethnic minorities.

A number of significant factors contributed to the multi-ethnic character of early Fascist identity and encouraged the new hegemonic dictatorship to present Italianness under relatively open parameters. The evolution of Italian self-understanding must be observed in relation to Italy's distinct historical and demographic context. One must not presume that the establishment of a hyper-nationalist or Fascist state had any automatic relation to racialism or Antisemitism. Italy was not teleologically ordained to develop an identity defined along exclusive biological or racial lines of discrimination. Italy lacked Germany's ethnic and linguistic homogeneity, its relatively more centralized national character, and its widespread incendiary racialism and pan-Germanism among intellectuals that had accelerated Germany's path towards extreme nationalist chauvinism. Italian literati had long perceived Italy as culturally or even genetically divided between a more dolicocephalic (or Germanic) north and a more Mediterranean south. This obstructed the articulation of a unified, universal Italianness with the presupposition of racial homogeneity.30 Hitler himself lionized the Tirol Germans and the “Lombard north,” and considered the southern Italians so racially worthless that he hoped Mussolini would have let the “Reds” exterminate them for Italy's own good.31 Mussolini himself reflected this public concern and guided his Fascist movement accordingly, and even occasionally argued that southern Neopolitans were culturally inferior and northern Lombards and Romagnoles were naturally gifted.32 It was difficult to create a new Italian identity of a pure Italian race with so many regional and cultural divisions. Further, as analyzed above, most dominant racial science classified Alpine and Mediterranean stock to be biologically inferior to the Germanic/Scandinavian peoples. The Mediterranean groups were also derided by intellectual circles in the Germanic world as being racially muddled and miscegerated beyond reproach. These factors further discouraged the new Fascist state from imposing a racialized doctrine of Italian superiority. In the beginning, Mussolini's platform easily deflected this by claiming “of course, there are no pure races left...successful crossings have often promoted the energy and beauty of a nation...Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today. No such doctrine will ever find wide acceptance here in Italy...”33 Mussolini again concluded firmly that Italo-Latin culture – not Italian blood – was superior, and that moral and civilized worth can be cultivated through Fascist discipline, rather than being naturally bound to the blood.34 That Italy and Mussolini would make such a volte face and soon publicly insist on Italians' Aryan racial purity is shocking to the retrospective historian.

Another major cause for the open character of Fascist identity was the fact that Italy had a small, highly integrated Jewish minority of only less than 50,00035 that was not widely perceived as the source of Italy's calamities during and after World War I, as was the case in a far more devastated Germany. Italians were less inclined to point the fingers of proscription on the Jewish minority than the Germans, where Jews were already an issue of social tension. Italy lacked the religious fanaticism and racialist-romantic extremity sweeping Romania, and the rampant irredentism and internal revolution enveloping Hungary and Austria. Additionally, Italy before World War II did not suffer from the prolific Marxist and anarchistic movements that were perceived in Germany and Hungary to be a source of internal schism orchestrated by an alien racial minority of Ashkenazim Jews. Responding to this common concern in both Italy and the rest of Europe of a subversive conspiracy by a Judæo-Bolshevik movement, Mussolini insisted early on that internal revolutionary movements were by no means a strictly Jewish project. He therefore concluded that Jews should not be equated with criminal perfidy or excluded from the Italian identity. Instead, he excoriated Zionism for its alternative loyalties rather than its ethnic connotations.36 All of these salient factors discouraged early Italian Fascism – believing itself to be the bulwark of the collective Italian renewal – from strictly excluding or targeting those with multiple identities. As a result, Italian identity was to be invented and cultivated by the early Fascist state under a vastly different framework. Gradually, as Italy's historical experience evolved, the increasingly nationalistic Fascist worldview would grow to be far more exclusive and radicalized.

As the Fascist state began to reconfigure every aspect of Italian society towards authoritarian streamlining and the regeneration of Italian glory throughout the 1930s, Benito Mussolini cultivated an increasingly chauvinistic state doctrine that he and Fascist intellectuals loosely coined Romanità (“Romanness”). This ideology laid the foundations for the exclusionary framework of Italianness that would dominate towards the end of Fascism. The markers of Italianness were shifting, framed and taught to the phlegmatic Italian public by the increasingly hegemonic regime. Through the maelstrom of party parades and nationalistic propaganda, the Italian nation was inculcated with a newly-invented identity, a product of the modern state. With growing intensity, Italianness was less defined by a shared residence in the Kingdom of Italy, and more a spiritual membership in an esoteric, uniquely creative Roman heritage with an innate proclivity for civilization building. Ancient Rome provided Mussolini with the roots of a newly-defined national identity.37 Through strict adherence to the collective mission of Fascismo (Fascism, or “bundle”), the previously effete and humiliated Italian nation could reawaken its majestic Roman inheritance. The Fascist civic religion would repair the effeminate and weak democratic state and liberate Italians from slavery to the universalist Vatican. Fascism set out to return Italy to the supposed Roman masculinity and creative strength necessary for an aggressive high modern state. As Mussolini presented it, these Augustan and Caesarian roots equipped the self-strengthening Fascist regime with a raison d'etre for expansionism, order, modernizing development, and sovereignty in the face of the predatory Allied governments and the impending threat of subversive revolt.

Mussolini extolled the Fascist revolution as a resurrection, describing it in a speech in 1941 as “not only a victory of a war...it was a victory for the whole Italian race. After a thousand years we, awakened, were again giving a tangible proof of our moral and spiritual valour. We were living again on warlike traditions. Our love of country had bloomed again. We felt our formidable weight in the future of a new Europe.”38 At this phase, despite the casual use of the term “race” (razza), it was not defined whether this common expression referred to innate biological characteristics or national descent. The growing pan-Roman consciousness still did not derive from divisive identity markers of race, genetics, or physiognomy. So long as they assimilated and swore obeisance to the Fascist state and Mussolini as its Duce, Fascismo and enchantment with Romanità were still open to Jews, Albanians, Slovenes, and other multiple identities on the spatial periphery.

Although this new self-understanding of Romanità clearly espoused chauvinism, the reasons revolved around the belief in the cultural superiority of Mediterranean, Roman, Renaissance, and Latin civilization, rather than a notion of Italian, Aryan, or Alpine racial superiority. Only as the Italian historical experience began its large-scale interaction with non-Italian racial identities in its expanding empire would Italianness reach its most exclusive fruition. This changing framework of identity markers was detected by German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels, who derided Italian Fascism for its lionization of the state rather than the blood, writing “one might almost say that [Italian] fascism has reacted upon the creative life of the Italian people somewhat like sterilization. It is, after all, nothing like National Socialism. While the latter goes deep to the roots, fascism is only a superficial thing...”39 (emphasis added).

As the hegemonic state increasingly cemented itself into daily life throughout the 1930s, the new worldview of Italianness became more clearly defined. Through an apocryphal synthesis of Romanità, Italianità, and Fascismo, a new normative Italian identity was invented and dictated to the public. Italianness was not an essential or innate modus of self-understanding, but a product of the modern state. Fascism reinterpreted history itself for the supposedly reborn Neo-Roman imagined community, depicting the young nation of Italy as the successor of ancient Rome.40 Mussolini reified Italianness as a collective family – a Roman patria – with Mussolini as the father and teacher and the people as sons and daughters working together for collective renewal. He drew a parallel to Italians’ Roman “predecessors” and their bond between emperor and citizenry.41 Sardinian intellectual and Fascist sychophant Edgardo Sulis described il Duce as the “bearer of a new civilisation” and an immaculate model for Italians to emulate daily anew, a guide for all on how to attain the victory of the Fascist mission for a reborn Rome.42 Viewing the people as a “malleable clay” (in Mussolini's own words),43 a new identity had to be concocted by the state for a new civilization and taught to them.

As Romanità asserted, to be Italian was to be a part of a teleological, linear heritage that encompassed the luminous state-building of the Roman Empire, the maritime prosperity of Venice and the city-states, the creativity of the Renaissance, and the inexhaustible struggle for freedom and modernity by the new Fascist collective. The word “Fascism” itself derived from the Latin fasces, referring to the bundle of rods coupled with an ax that was hoisted by imperial Roman militarist lictors. This symbology exemplified the Fascist state's desire to forge a new imagined community of Italo-Romans who only needed the guidance of Fascism to be “reawakened” to their supposedly eclipsed natural identity. The state and its intelligentsia then invented a pantheon of “Italian” heroes to verify the glory of Italian identity, one that included historical figures who preceded the founding of Italy altogether. Men like Julius Caesar, Octavian Augustus, Dante Alighieri, Leonardo Da Vinci, Niccolò Machiavelli, King Vittorio Emmanuel III, and of course Benito Mussolini were all portrayed by the state and its intellectuals as proof that the Italo-Roman state had a right to exist. Because of this vivid heritage, it also possessed the duty to re-establish its primacy through militarism, empire, and nationalism. One propaganda poster used especially in 1937 and 1938 portrayed a line of teleological succession for the Fascist nation stretching over thousands of years, with the faces of Julius Caesar, King Emmanuel III, and Mussolini all in alignment proudly facing toward the Neo-Roman people's radiant future. Just as the Germans invoked their analogous salute to announce the resurrection of Otto the Great's First Reich of the eleventh century, so too the Italian Fascists adopted the Roman salute to signify the rebirth of the eclipsed Roman nation. The invented nature of this teleological destiny of the Italian imagined community was most evident in Mussolini's claim that the nation of Italy, founded firstly in 1870, had essentialist “natural borders which Dante had prophesied and defined in the fourteenth century.”44 The Florentine identity to which Dante belonged, literally overnight, became consciously Italian, an eternal bulwark of the illusory dream for a reborn Italian nation.

Even aspects of the Italian language that were abstractly associated with foreign identities were purified by state orchestration and the influence of the high modern intelligentsia. The names of cigarette brands, food products, clothing, street signs, and buildings were “Italianized” in the fashion that the hegemonic state considered to qualify for the invented Italian identity. The overwhelmingly German province of South Tirol, seized from Austria after World War I, was forcibly renamed to the Italian “Alto Adige,” and all references to German influence were obfuscated.45 It was argued by Fascist intellectuals that “the 200,000 Germans who are polluting South Tirol must shoulder the biblical blame for the sins of their fathers [during World War I],”46 and therefore all remnants of alternative loyalty on Italian national space had to be Italianized. Similarly, after returning the Italian-majority port cities of Fiume and Trieste on the border of Yugoslavia, Italian state irredentism erased all reference to the Croat name Rijeka for Fiume and the Slovene Trst for Trieste.47 The Fascist concept of the nation gradually became much more exclusive, as the state and its nationalists perceived that all territory of the supposed Italian national homeland must be kept purely within the Italian cultural orbit. To the same end, Fascist academics, rectors, and education administrators even rewrote the Italian language overnight, “Italianizing” those words, expressions, and grammars deemed to be polluted by foreign etymological influences.48 The Fascist state even reformed the face of Italian artwork in order to fully cultivate the Romanità identity that it sought to reawaken. The regime purged foreign and “decadent” influences on Italian sculptures and paintings and replaced them with nationalistic, heroic, and romantic art that brought the glory of the Roman past to the present Fascist order.49

Due to their volatile geopolitical position, the borderland Slavic minorities in Trieste and Fiume endured disproportionate chauvinism from the newly Romanized Fascist state compared with other minorities. As under the pre-Fascist period, Mussolini was concerned with the perpetual disloyalty and uncertain nationality of the Slovenes. This tension was exacerbated by the partisan activities of several resistance groups disgruntled by the assimilation programs. Cross-border terrorism and the dissemination of subversive pamphlets by Communists and the irredentist group TIGR (Trieste-Istria-Gorizia-Rijeka) stimulated a firm response by the hegemonic regime. With his increasingly chauvinistic vocabulary, Mussolini ordered Fascist administrators on the borderlands to fully bring the Slavs “into the Italian cultural patrimony,” and to ensure that they were introduced “into the sphere of an Italian aesthetic sensibility.” He framed this assimilation as an effort to “penetrate the soul, the life, the history, of various Slav races.”50 The concept of racial distinction was gradually entering general Fascist grammar, albeit still undeveloped and undefined. This phase of state assimilation in the borderlands was noticeably more pervasive than under early Fascism and the liberal period. Rather than merely cultivating the Italian language, Italo-Roman culture and complete adherence to the Neo-Roman mission were the new Leitmotif.51 Now, the peripheral minorities needed to be taught civilità by the chauvinistic state and certify their abandonment of their independent Slavic past. Mussolini pressured this process of acculturation based upon the fact that Yugoslavia, by not directly assimilating its regional identities, was rapidly falling into decay.52 The state leadership increasingly applied this logic to the Italian nation in general: those of Jewish, Slavic, or Albanian blood can still enjoy active membership in the Italo-Roman nation, but they must increasingly abandon all traces of alternative commitments and nationalities, lest Italy incur decline.

As part of the project to construct a more centralized Fascist-Roman domain, Mussolini acted as what Catholic historian Richard Drake called “a power broker...between the Fascist party and the Monarchy, the Army, and the Church.”53 Il Duce even reinvented the role of Catholicism for the new Roman identity. The universalism and alternate loyalties of the Vatican were reprehensible for the totalitarian hegemonic state. It deemed traditional Catholicism effeminate and weak, a source of Italy's habitual inferiority complex as Europe's only failed colonial power. Unable to purge the new imagined community of its strong Catholic roots, the state under the new Caesar instructed the newly-invented Roman patria to revere traditionalism and conservatism in general. Mussolini's historiography argued that Christendom only became universalized upon becoming Romanized.54 Therefore, the new identity must focus not on outmoded Christian lore or the outside influences of papal infallibility, but on what the state considered to be the traditional heritage and family values of the Italo-Roman people.

Despite this strengthening cultivation of a new identity that was emphatically Italian, its framework still remained relatively open to the multiple identities of diverse races and religions throughout the 1920s and early 1930s so long as they outwardly assimilated. State chauvinism still revolved around the superiority of Roman civilization and Italian culture, rather than biology at this phase. Upon topical assimilation, Slovenes, Albanians, and Jews were able to consider themselves Italian and participate in the Fascist collective. But with the forging of a far larger empire in 1936, Italy's historical and imperial constitution changed dramatically. Increasingly, the markers of Italian identity become more and more exclusive to the traits of native Italian culture in contrast to those of other identities. Imperialism and modernization forced Italians to question how they understood themselves. The state chauvinism that insisted that the Italo-Romans were naturally superior was gradually taken quite literally, especially when Italy began to exert its full hegemonic rule over “foreign” identities that it soon classified to be categorically inferior. Rapidly, Italians and Fascist intellectuals turned the lens of racial distinction on themselves and concluded to be of a higher biological order of Roman civilization.

Before the ascension of the Fascist state in 1922, Italy was among the weakest and least developed of the European imperial actors. Fully subjugating only the coastal peripheries of Italian Somaliland (since 1880), Libya (1912), and Eritrea (1886), Italy's will to power and modernization was unimpressive. Humiliatingly, Europe's perception that Italy was an agrarian, backward, and underdeveloped “empire” was verified by the fact that Italy was among the only imperial powers to ever fail to colonize a nation with its defeat by “inferior” black Africans in the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1885-6. Although Italy was legally in control of Libya, Eritrea, and central Somalia before Mussolini's ascent, their authority was only partial and very little settlement by Italians occurred. As a result, pre-Fascist Italian society was less exposed to the non-Italian, non-Europoid peoples (especially black Africans) that are typically derided in Europe as inferior docile bodies waiting to be taught civilization. Further, barely in control of the few colonies it de jure possessed, the pre-Fascist Italian state could hardly claim to be a beneficent beacon of higher civilization to the supposedly barbaric peoples of the uncharted world. These factors further discouraged the Italian worldview and self-understanding at the turn of the century from defining Italianness along markers of biology, racial stratification, or even the inequality of civilizations.

After the Fascist order had firmly entrenched its spiritual ethos of militarism, ultra-nationalism, expansionism, and the reborn glory of the lost Romanità by the mid-1930s, Fascist intellectuals increasingly viewed the quest for empire to be a natural process towards Neo-Roman modernization and national renaissance. Since Fascist Italy identified itself as a mere extension of the old Roman Empire, Mussolini was automatically endowed with a casus belli to subjugate and rule the entire Mediterranean or the ancient Roman Mare Nostrum (Our Sea).55 He also insisted that the Balkans were irrevocably Italian in character, identity, and territory.56 In this, the modern state has not only reinvented history but also geography by abstractly categorizing the world into romanticized historical spheres. Since ancient Rome and its consciousness of Romanità brought civilization and economic, political, and cultural modernization to the imperial periphery, it was presumed that the new subjugated colonies would benefit from Roman “conquest” just as their ancestors had. Fascist intellectuals, particularly Dino Grandi, described the Italian expansion into Africa as its natural “mission to civilize the black continent.”57 The civilizing identity marker of Fascismo was therefore perceived as a means to lift less civilized peoples towards modernity. In reaction to these changing historical processes, the high modern state reframed its conceptualization of Italianness and its relation with the world accordingly. As it was taught to its people by the hegemonic state, Italianness was now quite literally synonymous with Romanness. To be Italian was to be a locus of global development and civilization, a beneficent agent of modernity and national renewal. Their imagined community was no longer merely Italian, but Roman. By forging a massive Neo-Roman Empire, reversing the humiliation in Ethiopia, and masculinizing the effeminate liberal state, the Italian identity was now seizing its teleological place in the sun and attaining the destined rebirth of the Augustan empire. Mussolini himself directly paralleled the 1922 Fascist Revolution with the revolution that converted a weakened Roman Republic into a Caesarian empire.58 The belief in the flourish that Fascism would bring to the world was enumerated by Mussolini's plans to establish a “Fascist International” to counter the Communist International, with himself as its metaphorical Caesar and Italy as the transmitter of this global modernizing innovation.59 This strengthening emphasis on a greater Roman imperial civilization paved the way for the nation to increasingly draw conclusions about the superiority and inferiority of cultures – and now races – under the influence of a higher Italian civilization.

On a larger historiographical and global level, we can infer several conclusions about the nature of the high modern nationalist state and its effects on identity formation. In Italy's case, to be modern and developed meant to be highly centralized, collective, extremely aggressive, and above all a chauvinistic force that saw itself as a fountainhead of both national and global improvement. Although not all nationalist or modern nations were naturally on a collision course with racialism or genocide, all high modern far-right states interpreted the world in terms of a chauvinistic hierarchy of civilizations that instructed their political behavior. Because of its self-identification as a superior force of civilization and higher essential worth, the modern state assumed the right to overrun those identities it perceived to be inferior. Paradoxically perhaps, as the hegemonic modern state worked to solidify its modernity, it justified its right to exist from a completely skewed understanding of a lapsed glory from a historical past. Only by looking back to the vivid, imagined Roman past could Italians move forward. Above all, the new historical exposure to imperial expansionism, hyper-nationalism, and other “un-modern” identities provided the national identity with new markers of contrast and scientific categorization.60 As the nation's historical experience and interaction with other identities evolved, the state apparatus reconfigured its imagination of itself in contrast with other identities with whom it interacted. Given these evolving historical processes, the hegemonic modern state now found new vocabulary by which to teach and dictate the new framework of “Italianness” to the public. As this phenomenon exemplifies, the self-understanding of imagined communities is not innate or essentialist, but invented by the state and the intelligentsia which defines and explains these new perceptions of the world around them.

In Fascist Italy's historical project to germinate the higher civilization of imperial Romanness, the first victim was the Kingdom of Ethiopia, conquered with great fanfare, illegal mustard gas, and scorched earth tactics by the end of 1936. German Minister of Armaments Albert Speer described the increasing Italian chauvinism bluntly, writing in his diaries that “the Negus [Emperor Haile Salassie] fled and a new Roman Empire was proclaimed.”61 Hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians were killed in the Italian invasion, and equally as many thereafter in concentration camps and armed reprisals for the deaths of Italian occupying soldiers. Fascist squadrists – believing themselves to be the agents of a Roman modernity in a wild African land – killed over a thousand civilians in one instance after the victory, including several hundred Orthodox monks.62 In response to condemnation from the United States and England, Italian Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano reported boldly to the League of Nations that the Roman conquest and the illegal use of poison gas was merely a “sacred mission of civilization,” and that Italians “consider it an honor to inform the League of the progress achieved in its works of civilizing Ethiopia.”63 Mussolini responded to the question of Italians' violence with little concern, noting in a speech of 1941 that “this [brutality] happens in all wars, in all times. Think of the Punic Wars when the Battle of Cannae threatened to crush Rome. But at Zama, Rome destroyed Carthage and wiped it out from geography and history forever. Our capacity to recuperate in moral and material fields is really formidable and constitutes one of the peculiar characteristics of our race.”64 Drawing from their imagined continuation of ancient Rome, the Fascists were willing to inflict such brutality as a means to an end to reach their historically-ordained national mission, as it was now part of their imagined identity as framed by the state. This marks the prime turning point that the previously nascent word “race” increasingly dominates Mussolini's vocabulary for understanding the Italians and the world around them.

Roman civilization then proceeded to subjugate the entirety of the old Roman province of Cyrenaica (now called Libya) by 1940. The whole of Italian Somaliland was then colonized, and even expanded into British Somaliland by 1940. Albania and Dalmatia – long under quasi-protectorate status since 1928 – were fully annexed by 1939. During World War II, Slovenia, Macedonia, and western Greece were incorporated into the Neo-Roman imperial periphery by 1941. It was said among Italian war hawks that Greece was “ready to drop into Mussolini's hand like a ripe fruit,” a victim of the Italian destiny.65 Dismissing the League's fears of yet another expansionist far-right regime, Italian government documents instead portrayed Neo-Roman rule as the key to the development of these inferior peoples. They noted that in 1935, Italy devoted 33.89% of its exports to develop the colonial markets. By the end of 1936, that number had risen to 45%. Whereas the pre-Fascist liberal regime only spent 248 million lira on its smaller colonies, Fascism was devoting over 2.5 billion lira by 1937 in its supposedly beneficent civilizing mission.66

Through the militarism and nationalism of Roman Fascismo, as it was framed by the state, the Roman Empire had been undeniably reborn. The true glory of Italianness and Romanità were now re-established in the hearts of the Italian community. The Fascist state had reclaimed what was considered to be its teleological property as the ancient Roman Mediterranean. Mussolini's hegemonic state reinforced this new framework of the Italian collective mission by the use of propaganda and cartography. Most blatantly, Mussolini ordered the display of huge maps of Roman imperial expansionism on the main path towards the ancient Roman Coliseum at the same time that he was expanding into Africa and the Balkans.67 Through the mediums of nationalism, artwork, and propaganda, the hegemonic state has again taught the nation how to understand itself and its role under the sun. To prove that Italian identity was truly Roman, Mussolini proudly reflected in a speech that “the Italian people have [re]created the [Roman] Empire with their blood, will make it fertile with their labour...In this certain hope...after fifteen centuries, the re-appearance of the empire on the predestined hills of Rome!”68 (emphasis added). An imagined history was being inculcated and dictated to the public for a newly imagined community.

With the eclipsed Italo-Roman nation reborn and the long-lost imperial periphery restored, the Italians now found themselves stratified over large ethnic minorities. The Roman hegemon was now in firm domination over millions of Albanians, Slavs, Arabs, black Africans, Muslims, Greeks, and Jews. The Italians were a small minority in the large empire, but were the driving force behind its prosperity and operation. This facilitated Italian ethnic chauvinism. Since these very distinct non-Italian identities were not bearers of the higher Roman civilizing orbit, they were deemed to be inferior, mere recipients of European modernity. Whereas before the Italians only directly interacted with minorities that were at least outwardly assimilated into general Italian nationality – particularly the Arbëreshë Albanians, Slovenes, and Jews – now they were in direct control of incredibly distinct ethno-racial identities. Although the early collective Fascist movement had been quite open to its domestic minorities, it increasingly noticed that Italians now ruled over highly alien peoples with no awareness of Fascismo, no loyalty to the Duce or the Roman national mission, and no participation in the grander civilizing ethos of Romanità. Coupled with the Fascist state's growing insistence on the superior nature of Italo-Romans and their duty to teach civilization to the uncivilized peoples, Italy began to frame the world in terms of racial difference and stratification. The entire markers of Italian identity were shifting dramatically in the course of less than two decades. As ethnic Italians dominated both ancient Rome and the new Rome, Fascist chauvinism grew from classifying nations in terms of their levels of development to the very human worth inherent in their blood. As the Fascist intelligentsia increasingly agreed, an essential, spiritual, or biological quality must be the proper explanation for the timeless creativity and civilization-building of the Italo-Roman identity through the ages. In reaction to Italy's changing historical experience and strengthening centralization, Italian intellectual circles became swept by debates over the meaning of Razza (race) and Stirpe (stock). The racial thinkers provided the state with the new vocabulary to explain its superiority and right to empire. Was Italianness merely a cultural identity that borrowed from the industry of so many Mediterranean identities, as it was argued by Mussolini himself in early Fascism?69 Or was Italianness to be conceived as an innate, organic community firmly rooted in blood and soil?

It is difficult to determine how and why racial identity markers became dominant so rapidly in Italy. Even after racist legislation was instituted formally throughout the empire in 1938, racial scientists and intellectuals still could not agree on the meaning of race and the true biological constitution of Italianness. Italy's enforcement of its legal racialism was passive at best until the fall of the first Fascist state in 1943. The Germans were often irritated by how intransigently Mussolini behaved towards the Jews and the role of race in Italian society. Adolf Hitler was highly distrustful of Italians and Italian policy.70 Joseph Goebbels concluded from Italy's lax policies that “this shows once again that Fascism does not really dare to get down to fundamentals, but is very superficial regarding most important problems.”71

Regardless of the extent to which the Fascist state prosecuted its new racial policies, it is more important that the previously open Italo-Fascist identity independently developed its own methods of categorizing the world in terms of divisive markers of racial identity. Although many scholars insist that Mussolini adopted Antisemitic policies only due to pressure from their Axis allies, this does not explain the Italian antipathy towards other races or the increasingly widespread Italian enchantment with racial classification. Italian racialism was particularly Italian. The turn towards racial chauvinism and Antisemitism derived from both indigenous and imported elements,72 a native emanation of a specifically Italian Fascism.73 In reaction to Italy's evolving historical exposure to other “inferior” identities, Fascism now reframed the qualifiers of Italian identity along lines of innate qualities rooted in the blood. With the Italians’ new global superiority complex, Mussolini now had a public mandate to assert his early private beliefs in race and Antisemitism. As before, it was the modern hegemonic state that taught, invented, and dictated these parameters of Italianness to the nation.

Small fringes of more radical Fascists and ultra-nationalists had long been referring to race and the genetic criminality of other races since the founding of the Fascist state in 1922. Even before 1920, the so-called “father of Fascism” Gabriele D'Annunzio had universally castigated the Slavs on Italy's northeastern border as naturally inferior, dangerous crooks who stole Italians' natural right to the Adriatic Sea.74 This fringe school of thought interpreted Italian soil as being the natural property of Italian blood and naturally forbidden to the Slavs. The leading eugenicist Giuseppe Sergi similarly argued that Italy and European empires were in dangerous peril because of their low birthrates and the savage nature of non-European races, and demanded as early as 1916 that the state pass anti-miscegenation laws to protect Italians' racial purity.75 Others like Julius Evola, who quickly became one of the great spearheads of Italian racialism, had argued as early as the 1920s that Catholicism altogether was an “infection” strictly because it was an “import” from the foreign Semitic race.76 These beliefs were far from widespread until Italians achieved their Roman imperial mission and official sponsorship.77 Even then, debates on the Italian racial identity were eclectic and uncertain.

Throughout the 1930s, dozens of magazines and scientific journals were founded by Italian intellectuals to stoke the fires of the growing discourse on biological hierarchy that was already sweeping mainstream newspapers and academia. The most prominent unofficial organs were La Difesa della Razza (“The Defense of the Race”), Critica Fascista (“Fascist Criticism”), Il Popolo di Trieste (“The People of Trieste”), Razza e Civilità (“Race and Civilization”), and many others. The most salient proponents of the new racialized ethos were Julius Evola, Roberto Farinacci, Lidio Cipriani, Giovanni Preziosi, Giergio Almirante, Giuseppe Sergi, and eventually Benito Mussolini himself. The leaders of the Fascist regime all at least passively accepted the reality of the new racial markers of the Italian identity, including Mussolini, Achille Starace, Galeazzo Ciano, Dino Grandi, and Libyan governor Italo Balbo. The scholarly discourse on race primarily fell between two schools of thought: the more collectivist “Mediterraneanists” and the radical “Aryanists.” Both bitterly conflicted with each other on the conceptual meaning of race and stock. The Mediterraneanists espoused that the Italian people were indeed a superior biological race of their own, but one that pragmatically borrowed from the best traits, values, and knowledge of other Mediterranean peoples within the Roman Empire. Whilst not demoting the Italians to the status of mixed race, this school emphasized the cooperative, multi-ethnic industry of ancient Rome that facilitated such a magnificent civilization.78 This school was also a direct reaction to the widespread belief among intellectuals in the Germanic world that the Italian, Alpine, and Mediterranean races were biologically inferior. The Mediterraneanists specifically attacked this notion, insisting that popular racial science was falsely skewed towards the Germanic peoples. They also proudly noted that when the Italic race was forging a global civilization, the “superior” Germans were still living in tribal confederacies. They often depicted the German National Socialists as delusional fanatics whose racialism derived from paranoia rather than history or science like the Italians.79 Critica Fascista implored the state and racial scientists to teach racial identities to the public with the emphatic caveat that they were by no means an import from the Third Reich, but rooted in “three thousand years of Italian history, thought, and art.”80 Mediterraneanists even emphasized the non-German, Italian roots of this indigenous racialism by describing the Ashkenazi Jewish race as being related to Germans.81 Fascist scholars were now clearly making the invention of identities and the distortion of history into a science.

By contrast, the “Aryanist” school of racialist science was more in line with the academic circles of the Germanic nations, Japan, Romania, and Hungary. Its leading voice was La Difesa della Razza, soon to gain official state sponsorship by 1938. This school was heavily influenced by the ideological and epistemological trends in Germany and Austria. With marked variation, the Italian Aryanists argued that the Italians were a part of a far higher, god-like race of Aryans with the natural charge of establishing global civilizations. As a culture-creating race, the Aryan Italians were innately gifted with a right to expand, conquer, and educate inferior races. Fascismo would unlock this lost Aryan mystical creativity and summon a Roman utopia. The journal's most famous conceptual image of natural racial hierarchy was published in 1938, and displays a pale Augustus standing proudly, a hideously deformed Jew, and a tribal black African with a protruding jaw all in lines of descending height and worth (see below image).82

The main proponent of this radical school was Julius Evola, a virulent Antisemite and racialist who studied extensively in Nazi Germany. Writing in both German and Italian, Evola and the Aryanists evoked many of the mystical and transcendental ideas of race popular in Austria and Germany, including theozoology, “Indo-Aryan” Tantric meditation, esoteric worship of ancestors and the blood, and theosophy. He lionized the pre-Christian and racially-pure past in his book Pagan Imperialism, vilified the Jewish race in his “Three Aspects of the Jewish Problem,” and extolled the glory of the Aryan warrior in his “The Aryan Theory of War and Victory.” He effectively Italianized the Germanocentric works of Germany's chief party philosopher Alfred Rosenberg. Evola and the Aryanist school outlined a “racial spirit” or a mystical “race soul” that is both organic and innate. He described a “celestial race” that must be preserved through eugenics and protected against racial bastardy.83 The Aryanists referred to the Italian master race as the northerly members of a “primordial Hyperborean Aryanism.”84 But even the Aryanists, especially Evola himself, insisted that this Aryan majesty was not epitomized by the German race, but by the Romans. He even went so far as to describe the Germans as having mixed, diminished blood and even some Jewish genetic dilution.85

As the abstract debates between these two racialist schools illustrate, the meaning of race and identity is not innate or essentialist, but often a highly manipulable invention. Ultimately, the Aryanist school became predominate and was officially accepted as proper Fascist doctrine by Mussolini himself in 1938. Mussolini admired the Aryanist myth because it elucidated the image of a phalanx of Roman god-men, perfect for the militarized Fascist state.86 A new worldview of an indivisibly united Italian blood fit nicely with the Fascist insistence on centralized ultra-nationalism. Mussolini then proceeded to publicly refer to himself and the Italians as “Nordic,” and formally sponsored the term “Aryan” as a synonym for the Italo-Roman identity.87

The exact impetus for this drastic shift towards esoteric racialism (as opposed to the more benign Mediterraneanist racialism) is uncertain in historiography. Since Italy was soon the inferior partner in the Axis, it is possible that Mussolini pragmatically emulated Hitler in hopes of gaining his economic and military subsidy.88 It is also possible that the visible military dominance of the German “Aryan” race over Europe verified the postulation of a higher Aryan creativity. The concept of an Aryan racial ethos was by no means a German import, but was widespread throughout Europe. It is most likely that the Aryanist writers were more accepted because they elevated the Italian race to a far higher level of innate sublimity and imperial sovereignty than the more lax, mixed, and nebulous Mediterraneanist school. Mussolini seems to have believed in race and blood from early on, but had dismissed it as a modus of state policy for pragmatic reasons.89 As early as 1928, he had written that “race and soil are strong influences on us all.”90 As Italy became the new Rome, he began to interpret such a claim quite literally. Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat has argued that Mussolini adopted normative racialism as an expression of state policy in order to overcome Italy's “national inferiority complex” and to collectivize the Italians under one immutable racial order.91 She argues, with some veracity, that Mussolini finally made the decision to radicalize the racial framework of Italian identity in response to German insistence that southern Italians were of “Negro blood.” Thus, the new Italian colonial exposure to black Africans it categorically considered inferior was a major catalyst to the racialist framework of Italian self-conceptualization.92 Italy’s new position in the world paved the way for Mussolini to publicly express his early beliefs in race and Antisemitism.

Mussolini also seems to have perceived racialism as a basic aspect of the modern community, and thus modernization of the Fascist empire “required” racial legislation and its benefits upon Italian solidarity. He detected this parallel between racism and modernity by looking at ultra-right Romania, Vichy France, Hungary, Austria, and Germany. He even justified his need to adopt racial laws by deriding the far more tolerant and liberal United States, and portrayed his new legal policy for the protection of the Italian race as a defensive measure. In a speech to the Fasci and Corporations board in 1942, he yelled angrily “who was the first to introduce racial discrimination into legislation?...The United States was the first to create discriminations between Europeans and Italians...If Columbus were to land in America today, he would be rejected, would be sent to quarantine.”93 His longstanding acceptance of racism can be seen in his insistence to Adolf Hitler in 1940 that he “cannot abandon the anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevist banner...You cannot renounce your gospel, in which the German people have blindly believed.” He then justified the German invasion of Poland because it “liberated [the Poles] from the Jews,” and praised the Germans for deporting Jews to the ghettos of Lublin.94 Ultimately, Mussolini himself personally adopted the Aryanist interpretation of Italian racial identity by 1938, and proceeded to instate race-based laws along the Aryanist model throughout the Neo-Roman Empire. The Fascist intelligentsia and the growing race consciousness in Italian society finally allowed Mussolini to publicly assert his early private notions of intensifying racism and Antimsemitism as modes of state policy. Razza (race) and Stirpe (stock) were now clearly defined by the Fascist regime. The hegemonic modern state had once again reconfigured the framework of Italian identity and began teaching this abstract doctrine to the public. To be Italian was now no longer to be a part of a collective Italian nation or a Roman cultural heritage, but to be born into a holy caste upheld by pure Italo-Aryan blood. A synthesis of Fascismo, Romanità, and now Razza formed the conceptual trinity that defined the new Italian imagined community.

Although more lax race-based laws had been imposed in African colonies as early as 1933,95 the seminal turning point in the adoption of the new racial markers of Italian identity was the official adoption of the so-called “Manifesto of Racial Scientists” into imperial legislation 1938. Originally published as a mere article in La Difesa della Razza (“The Defense of the Race”), the new law outlined the new meaning of Italianness to the public. The manifesto formalized the official synthesis of Romanness, Aryanness, and race into a new Italian self-understanding as dictated by the Fascist state. It emphasized that race is not a mere “abstraction of our spirit [as believed in early Fascism], but corresponds to a reality that is material and perceptible with our senses...The concept of race is a purely biological concept...”96 It stratified the world into higher and lesser organisms, lionizing the Italic/Aryan race and deriding the Slavic, black African, Semitic, Jewish, and Dinaric races (like Albanians and Slovenes) as uncultured and retrogressive. The habitually disloyal nature of the borderland Slavs to the Roman mission was explained away by the innate inferiority of their civilizations and their genetic stock. The Albanian, Slavic, and Jewish minorities, therefore, were merely weaker guests borrowing from the civilized empire that the higher Italian race built out of its exclusive ingenuity. Geography itself was reframed along bio-political spheres of racial identities, rather than a mere hierarchy of civilizations like before. In this, the Italian racial scientists were directly reacting to their new historical interaction with other “inferior” races on the imperial periphery. The Jews were bitterly excoriated as biologically alien and subversive since they failed to assimilate. It derided the Jewish race “because it is composed of non-European racial elements, absolutely different from the elements from which the Italians have originated.” Concomitant laws defined the Jewish identity for them: a citizen born of ethnically Jewish parents was of the Jewish race regardless of his or her personal identity or adherence to Fascism.97

The law insisted that the Italo-Aryan race is “completely separated from all of the non-European races” and that the Neo-Romans were charged with a global civilizing mission of “superior self-consciousness and of greater responsibility.” The document completely reinvented Italians' collective historical memory and self-understanding, proudly asserting that “the majority of the population of contemporary Italy is Aryan in origin and its civilization is Aryan. This population with its Aryan civilization has lived for several millennia in our peninsula...The origin of the present-day Italians stems essentially from elements of these same races which constitute...the perennially lively fabric of Europe.” The law described the Italian race as “pure,” deriving from “the purist kinship of blood which unites the Italians of today to the generations which have populated Italy for millennia. This ancient purity of blood is the greatest title of nobility to the Italian nation.” The Italo-Aryan blood, which demonstrated its biological primacy by civilizing the world via the Roman Empire, therefore supplied the Fascist state with its right to sovereignty.

Whereas in the early 1920s Mussolini argued that “there are no pure races left...,”98 the conceptualization of Italian nationality and identity had been completely reconfigured by the state and its constituent intelligentsia in response to Italy's evolving historical condition. The law proceeded to insist that this new Italian enchantment with racialism was by no means an import from the Germans, and demands that the hegemonic state inculcate and teach this new racial identity to the public in order to defend the “millennial [Roman] civilization of the Aryans” from the perils of genetic defilement and miscegenation. In this more severe phase of an exclusive framework of Italianness, the state was yet again the driving force behind identity formation. Now, the state universally classified all identities under certain unbreakable characteristics without the possibility for assimilation or multiple identities. The laws banned all race mixing, cohabitation or interaction with Jews, and mixed marriages. The new commission for Laws on Public Safety devoted itself to reversing all racial elements “impending the fecundity of the Italian people,” and imposed a new penal code that punishes “crimes against the integrity and health of the race.”99 The newly-establish Race Office began referring to non-Italian racial identities, especially Jews, as Italy's “moral cancer” that stymied the Roman effort of “renewing the nation...and reconstructing the world.”100 The Roman Patria and identity – previously open to all serving the Fascist collective – was now exclusive to those of pure Aryan and Italian blood.

Although the racial laws were not nearly as enforced as they were in Hungary, Romania, Vichy France, and Germany, intellectuals and state figures proudly justified the Fascist state's turn towards racialist consciousness. Everyday magazines and newspapers agreed that innate racial distinctions were undeniable given Italy's new exposure to supposedly inferior black Africans of such lesser civilization. It was widely believed already that some races were naturally creative whilst others were inherently servile and inferior.101 Others sought to defend these barriers of stratification by demanding that the state prevent race-mixing in the colonies.102 Achille Starace, one of the foremost leaders of the Fascist regime, reflected that “with the creation of the [Roman] Empire...the Italian race came into contact with other races...Hence it had to guard itself against hybridity and contaminations.” He further described the Jewish race as the bulwark of leftist revolt and called them the “General Staff of Anti-Fascism.”103 Lidio Cipriano, one of the most prolific Fascist writers, wrote in his article “Colonial Racism” that after reaching empire “in every race the woman is the most precious depository of the characters of the [racial type]...For no reason, therefore, ought the white woman to destroy the treasure of possibility latent in her...[race mixing] is a disgrace, rather a monstrosity, destined to result in a grave loss for the most civilized peoples.”104 Under this new framework, therefore, Italian identity is a quality that is born, rather than taught or attained. A prominent Italian lawyer similarly justified the racial legislation in 1941 by extolling that:

Italy has the glory and privilege of constituting a race with its own biophysical structure, its own purity passed down by tradition. It has the glory of having its own race chosen by God...It takes pride in being an inextinguishable civilization, in having been the beacon of the Mediterranean, and now, under the aegis of Fascism, is resuming its path and its mission to establish a higher justice among peoples. These are the contents and the significance of the racial legislation, whose necessity Mussolini was again the first to recognize.105

Racial legislation and the classification of the world along divisive identity markers of race were seen as being only fait accompli. As it was understood, the Italians were not the fanatical mystics and mass murderers that the Germans and Romanians were, but were merely instating laws that protected the natural hierarchy of civilizations. Another writer reflected this opinion by asserting that “the Fascist revolution intends to bring back the spirit of our race to its authentic origins, freeing it from any pollution...Let us go back to the use of Rome...”106 Another critic justified the race laws in the context of the total war with the Allies, writing that “we are at war, at war with the universal abstractions of anti-Fascist culture, which lacks the essential characteristics of our race and is spiritually inferior...”107 Another similarly wrote that the Roman-Aryan race was “the most civilized of peoples” and was engaged in cataclysmic war with the “brutal and primitive Bushmen and Australians” who comprised the American and British troops defiling the inviolable Roman soil. Dianelli of the journal Italia e Civilità lauded the Antisemitic legislation by describing them as a race of internal subversives working with the enemy and conspiring to proliferate their world order of global liberalism.108 In a speech in 1941, Mussolini himself similarly justified the campaign against the Jews and the war against the Allies by insisting that America is “a political and financial oligarchy dominated by Jews, through a personal form of dictatorship.”109 Giergio Almirante, one of the most radical and popular of the Fascist thinkers both during and after the war, insisted that the racial laws were necessary because “racism can be the decisive factor clarifying us to ourselves...[the new racialism was] the biggest and most courageous recognition of itself that Italy has ever attempted.”110 This notion reifies that the process of identity formation is often predicated upon contrast: Italianness can only exist when it differentiates itself from other identities that it deems inferior.

The effects of the new racialist worldview of the Italian integral state and its empire were diverse. Firstly, since the new laws elevated the Roman identity to the status of a naturally creative master race, the colonies were now seen as wild territory ripe for the cultivation of superior Italian farmers. Just as in the ancient Roman Empire, Italian settlers would bring civilization, economic, and agricultural development to the dark and untamed periphery. The well-being of the inferior native identities was therefore trivial. To this end, Eritrea's Italian population went from only 5,000 in the 1930s to 73,000 by 1941, and Ethiopia went from having almost none in 1935 to 62,000 by 1940. In Libya, 36% of the capital of Tripoli were of Italian blood in 1940.111 Mussolini hoped that the primitive frontier in Albania could be settled by as many as 2,000,000 superior Roman settlers.112 He also hoped that Somalia could enjoy the civilizing benefits of more than 3,000,000 Italians.113

After the imposition of the race laws, the Fascist regime imposed stricter racial segregation in the colonies. In Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia, where the black African races were considered almost subhuman, the segregation was far more pervasive.114 Local administrators announced, “we must ban natives from any access to our cities unless we can force them to pass through a sort of station of human reclamation.”115 As part of Italians' new racialized worldview, the Fascist state increasingly concluded that the very presence of non-Italian races on Italian national space was equated with being almost sacrilege. New administrative policies maintained through local Fascist governors and councils regulated marital and sexual congress, and those Italians engaging in interracial miscegenation were fined and/or arrested. Injunction No. 880 imposed sentences of one to five years in prison for race mixing.116 Mussolini even personally banned an increasingly popular novel that depicted a beneficent Italian colonist civilizing and eventually falling in love with a tribal Amhara from Ethiopia. Even an Italian taxi driver who accepted a tip from another race was punishable by fine. It was disallowed for a person of the Italian race to shine the shoes of a patron from another identity.117 Such policies were expanded to Somalia. The less than 10,000 mixed-blood children in Italian East Africa (including Arabs mixed with Somalis) suffered intensive legal and social discrimination now that Italianness was framed by the state to be exclusively defined by pure Aryan-Roman blood.118 The situation in Italian Libya was quite different. The Arab Muslims were seen by the Italians and Mussolini himself as valiant holy warriors of an ancient civilization, and were given superior status to Libya's Jews and black Tuaregs.119 Discrimination against the Arabs was thus negligible compared with that of the Jews or the black African races.120 Nonetheless, since they were now universally proscribed by the new racialist order to be identities of lesser civilization, their social station was greatly inferior to that of ethnic Italian settlers. Those of mixed blood, however, were assaulted directly. The prominent rabble-rouser Angelo del Boca justified the legal stratification by proudly noting that “the present bastardized population, the result of the cross-breeding of whatever is filthiest in the human races, should be driven out and destroyed, and replaced with good, Italian blood.”121 The Fascist intellectuals have now defined Roman soil as a space to be purely populated by the Aryan-Roman race, and categorized other identities as beasts.

The situation in Italian-ruled Greece, Slovenia, and Albania was quite different primarily because their European identities were deemed naturally superior to non-European races. Militant legions of Albanian Muslims under the SS-Skanderbeg division were given great Italian sponsorship because of their supposed Islamic valiance and their brutal treatment of Yugoslav Communists and partisans. Croats, despite being classified by the Manifesto of Racial Scientists as an inferior Slavic racial group, were greatly sponsored by both Germany and Italy. The Croats, who committed some of the worst atrocities of the war, were passively supported in their efforts to kill Jews and Communist rebels in Croatian concentration camps by Mussolini himself.122 Even Joseph Goebbels wrote quite fancifully that “the reign of terror [in Croatia] which the Italians have established...baffles all description.”123 Mussolini told French diplomats, “Yugoslavia does not exist. It is a heterogeneous conglomerate which you cobbled together in Paris [in 1918].”124 The well-being of these communities was unimportant for the newly racialized Neo-Roman Empire since their identities were deemed naturally inferior. From Mussolini's assessment of Yugoslavia as dysfunctional because of its multi-ethnic character, this reflects the new belief of the Fascist high modern state that the nation was strictly to be designed on lines of pure ethnic homogeneity.

To this end, the Italian policy towards the Slavic Slovenes on the borderlands was much more brutal because of their residency within Italian territory and their dubious loyalty. The Slovene language, both in public and in publication, was far more aggressively attacked by campaigns of forced Italianization and even forced emigration than in the early 1930s. The Italian Fascists, with their newfound chauvinistic vocabularies of race and civilization, now had newly-invented reasons to hate the perfidious border Slavs. The intensifying role of racialized difference in Italian society was evident in the increasing occurrence of inter-racial mob violence after the late 1930s. Those deemed subversive, nationalist, or Communist were broadly attacked or murdered, the most famous being the anti-Fascist Slovene composer Lojze Bratuž, forced to drink castor oil and tortured to death by Italian nationalists in 1937. With the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, Italy chose to emphatically assert that the borderlands were indivisibly a part of the Italian nation by directly annexing Slovenia itself, naming it “Lubiana” to erase the independent nationality of the inferior Slovenes from memory altogether. The supposedly superior race of the Romano-Aryans meant that they had a natural right to subjugate and civilize the borderlands that the inferior Slavic race left fallow and primitive. The radical newspaper Il Popolo di Trieste reflected the new racialized framework of Italian national space by insisting that, “a Slavia inside Italian borders cannot be allowed to exist,” demanding that the Slavic identity either leave or be forced out.125 Pure Italian identity and pure Italian nation were now synonymous.

The treatment of Jews was more complicated. Historian Maurice Roumani argues that radical, German-style hatred and persecution of Jews was only pervasive in colonial Libya.126 Immediately after 1938, all foreign Jews were ordered expelled in a national purge of all alien identities. It was illegal for Jews to teach or consult in universities, from hiring Christians or Italians, from joining the army, or intermarrying. The prominent Fascist leader Giuseppe Bottai reacted that the purging of Jews from schools was a plan to “liberate us from a treacherous people, rejuvenate the university, and purify the race.”127 Jews were forced into legal discrimination and were demanded to assimilate into the new Italian identity that the state had ironically engineered to be completely exclusive. Nonetheless, Jews were not directly killed or deported to death camps until after the fall of Italy proper in 1943. The Croatian ultra-nationalists even asked if Italy would ship their Jews to Croatia to be exterminated in their camps, and Mussolini seems to have readily accepted until pressure from his generals made him decline the offer.128 Only in occupied southeastern France were Jews directly targeted outside of Africa. Mussolini ordered racial scientists to categorize local Jews and intern them for inspection under the new state organization called the Royal Inspectorate of Racial Police.129 Strictly because of the state's understanding of the Jewish identity, all members of that race were now seen as being prone to criminality.

The last and by far the worst phase of Italian Fascism and shifting identities occurred from 1943-45. After the successful American invasion of Italy, King Vittorio Emmanuel III capitulated to the Allies and ordered Mussolini arrested. Mussolini was deposed by his former Fascist leaders on 24 July, 1943. Fascist Italy had been destroyed. The Third Reich, however, rescued Mussolini from prison and placed him in charge of the portion of northern Italy still under German military control. There, he declared the formation of the Italian Social Republic as the legitimate Italian Fascist nation, and had many of the former Fascist turncoats executed. This phase would mark by far the most extreme form of Italian racialism and exclusion, and would now reach the severity of genocide for the first time. Historians have failed to agree on whether this state's brutal mass murder was the work of Germans or Italians, or to what extent its behavior was stimulated by German pressure. Further research is required to determine to what extent the Italian population popularly supported the state’s radical integralism. Far more important is the fact that il Duce knowingly supported pogrom assaults on Jews and Slovenes by Italian militant squadrists. In early 1943, for example, there were 32,000 Jews in Italy, and almost immediately 8,000 were deported to German death camps alone by Italian soldiers.130 Even more heuristic is the fact that Mussolini not only participated in and sponsored the deportation of northern Italy's Jews and Slavs to the concentration camps in Poland, but to death camps built by Italians in Italy itself. The Italian extermination camp in a small and secluded rice husking plant in urban Trieste – Risiera di San Sabba – was funded and staffed by Italians and Germans alike, as well as volunteers. Equipped with both mobile gas chambers and crematoria, tens of thousands of prisoners passed through the Italian camp, especially Jews, Communists, partisans, and Slovenes. As many as 4,500 were shot, beaten to death, or gassed.131 The Italian government and city planners today have made this history as hidden as possible and intentionally difficult to locate even if searching for it, insisting that Italians have no guilt in such a criminal affair.132

Now that the Germans had removed all potential barriers of consequence and provided the technical means for executing such an extensive plan of mass murder after 1943, Mussolini and many radical Fascists were finally able to prosecute their long-held fantasies of an inherently criminal racial Other. As analyzed above, many extreme racialist Italians had long expressed the will to completely purify Italian national space of mixed-race persons, Jews, and Slavs. Many had decried the Jews as a universal threat to the Roman Fascist renewal, and had demanded their eradication. Now that such aims were finally possible, these voices gravitated into official state policy. Mussolini now endowed tremendous propaganda power and influence to Roberto Farinacci and Giovanni Preziosi, two of Fascism's most racist thinkers.133 The new Italian military leader Marshall Graziani bitterly hated the Germans and made it his personal mission to fulfill the Italians' needs with whatever means necessary, rather than merely obey German dictate.134 The tools were now in place for the long-awaited strike on the enemy identities. Mussolini himself personally wrote it into law for the new state in 1943, “members of the Jewish race are foreigners. During this war they are an enemy nationality.”135 Even Mussolini's own son Romano believes that his father imposed these new genocidal policies on his own and happily did so now that the Reich removed the fear of consequence.136 So too, the hysteria of total war, the collapse of the original Fascist state, and the betrayal of Mussolini by his own monarchy must have contributed to this radicalization of Italian racialism and xenophobia. Worst of all perhaps, Fascist thinkers and administrators naturally looked for a source of Italy's horrendous fate in the war. Since Fascismo was synonymous with the nationalist resurrection of Romanità, the enemy must not have been the Italian race, but the already-vilified Jews and Slavs who continued to lurk around holy Aryan-Roman soil like parasites. Giovanni Preziosi, now in great control of the racialized Fascist state, ordered the total elimination of Jews, Slavs, and “half-breeds,” asserting that anyone with a drop of Jewish blood in his or her veins and all liberal apologists were a Trojan horse undermining the Roman mission and must be exterminated.137 As the dissident Foreign Minister Galeazzo Ciano despondently reflected in his diaries, the new Fascist state was ready to have the hated Slovenes “exterminated,” arguing that their culture is worthless and “may have never existed” as a legitimate sovereign organism.138 Rather than the mere cultural assimilation of the liberal era or the chauvinist acculturation of early Fascism, now only murder could rectify the “Slovene problem” and return the borderlands to their supposed rightful Italian owners.

Because of these historical factors, regardless of Germany's role in prosecuting the genocide, the new radicalization of Italian racism was particularly Italian in character. In reaction to these changing historical conditions, the racialized Fascist hegemonic state taught its final interpretation of identity to the public. Italians were conceptualized as the inviolable Aryan race as defined strictly by pure blood. The Italian national space was purely the natural possession of the Italian race, and all other identities were parasitic threats needing to be removed or liquidated altogether. This newly extreme interpretation of non-Italian identities has once again informed Italians how to see themselves. Although the modern nationalist state was not historically ordained to become genocidal or racialist, Italy's historical experience and extreme chauvinism had progressively guided them down a path toward an increasingly exclusionary framework of identity that demonized all other identities as being of lesser human worth. These processes facilitated the hegemonic state's genocide against those identities it universally excoriated as being prone to a genetic criminality. The Italian Social Republic ultimately came to an end shortly before Mussolini's execution by leftist Italian and Jewish partisans outside Milan on 28 April, 1945. With him, the Fascist integral state and its claim of an exclusive Aryan-Roman master race evaporated into history.

In only twenty-three years, the entire conceptualization of Italian identity had progressively shifted according to Italy's evolving historical experience and its descent into devastating total war. What was once a collective Fascist identity that incorporated multiple identities had degenerated into a cultural chauvinism of superior Romanità, then to a racial hierarchy that lionized the Italo-Aryan race as the builders of civilization, and finally to xenophobic hysteria and genocide against an alien Other. This process of the changing markers of identity was not natural or essentialist. Italians were not born with a mystical enchantment with a higher Roman creativity or a celestial charge as Aryans to civilize the world. The hegemonic state was the guiding force behind this process of identity formation. Rather than Fascism “reawakening” an innate identity esoterically hidden in Italian blood, the modern state and its intelligentsia invented, defined, and taught the very meaning of Italianness to the nation.

________________________________________

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

James Mayfield is a historian and the Chairman of the European Heritage Library. I have a Cum Laude BA in History with a Minor in Germanic Studies (language and history), am presently working for my Masters in History, and plan to immediately progress to my PhD Doctorate. I have a special academic interest in Europe's diverse ethnic identities, languages, and cultures, and the political struggles of native European and immigrant minority identities. See my staff entry for more information.

CITATIONS:

1. Bosworth 2007, 21.
2. Mazower 2000, 101.
3. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 214.
4. Benito Mussolini and Richard Washburn Child, My Rise and Fall: Volume 1 (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1998), 19.
5. World Future Fund, “The Doctrine of Fascism: Benito Mussolini 1932,” http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm.
6. E. Ludwig, Talks with Mussolini (London: Allen and Unwin, 1932), 75.
7. Gregor 2005, 54.
8. Ibid., 214.
9. Benito Mussolini and Duilio Susmel, Opera Omnia, 44 Volumes (Florence: La Fenice, 1962), 269-70.
10. John Weitz, Hitler's Diplomat: The Life and Times of Joachim von Ribbentrop (NY: Tichnor & Fields, 1992), 166-7.
11. Gregor 2005, 56.
12. Richard Drake, “Julis Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol 74, No. 3 (July, 1988): 414.
13. Alessandra Rizzo, “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 1,” ABC International, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161.
14. Alessandra Rizzo, “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 2,” ABC International, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161&page=2.
15. Ibid., 258.
16. Ben-Ghiat 2003, 153.
17. Stanley Payne, A History of Fascism, 1914-1945 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 240.
18. B.J. Fischer, Albania at War 1939-45 (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999), 33-4.
19. Roland Sarti, The Axe Within: Italian Fascism in Action (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 196.
20. Jan Morris, Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002), 115.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., 157.
23. Glenda Sluga, The Problem of Trieste and the Italo-Yugoslav Border: Difference, Identity, and Sovereignty in Twentieth-Century Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2001), 47.
24. Eliakim Littel, The Living Age (Littell, Son and Co., 1915), 776.
25. Sluga 2001, 50.
26. Misha Glenny, The Balkans (New York: Penguin Group, 1999), 375.
27. Ibid., 376.
28. Jasper Godwin Ridley, The Freemasons: A History of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society (New York: Arcade Publishers, 2001), 236.
29. Gregor 2005, 258.
30. Bosworth 2007, 243-4.
31. Hugh Trevor-Roper, Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-44 (New York: Enigma Books, 2007), 266-9.
32. Bosworth 2007, 419.
33. Frank M. Snowden, “Race Propaganda in Italy.” Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 1, No. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1940): 104.
34. Esmonde Robertson, “Race as a Factor in Mussolini's Policy in Africa and Europe,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23,
    No. 1 (January, 1988): 38.
35. Alexandra Rizzo, “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 2,” ABC International, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161&page=2.
36. Mussolini 1962, 269-70.
37. Philip V. Cannistraro, “Mussolini's Cultural Revolution: Fascist or Nationalist?” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 7, No. 3/4
    (July-October, 1972): 126.
38. Mussolini 1998, 55.
39. Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1948), 71.
40. Cannistraro 1972, 126.
41. Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 24.
42. Bosworth 2007, 422.
43. Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History (Hill and Wang, 2001), 268.
44. Mussolini 1998, 55.
45. Bosworth 2007, 245.
46. Rolf Steininger, South Tyrol: A Minority Conflict of the Twentieth Century (Edison, NJ: Transaction Publications, 2003), 51.
47. Misha Glenny, The Balkans (New York: Penguin Group, 1999), 376-7.
48. Falasca-Zamponi 2000, 106.
49. Payne 1998, 222.
50. Sluga 2001, 53.
51. Ibid., 47.
52. Ibid., 50.
53. Richard Drake, “Julis Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords,” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol 74, No. 3 (July, 1988): 404.
54. Payne 1998, 216.
55. Glenny 1999, 418.
56. Ibid.
57. Heather Hyde Minor, “Mapping Mussolini: Ritual and Cartography in Public Art during the Second Roman Empire,” Imago Mundi, Vol. 51 (1999): 149.
58. Payne 1998, 217.
59. Burleigh 2001, 423.
60. Bosworth 2007, 414.
61. Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 84.
62. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 72.
63. Mazower 2002, 72.
64. Historical Speeches, “Benito Mussolini – Speech of February 23, 1941,” Word Press, http://greatspeeches.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/benito-mussolini-speech-of-february-23-1941/
65. Mario Cervi, The Hollow Legions: Mussolini's Blunder in Greece, 1940-1941 (New York: Doubleday, 1972), 7.
66. Alexander De Grand, “Mussolini's Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935-1940,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May, 2004): 133.
67. Hyde Minor 1999, 154.
68. Ibid.
69. Frank M. Snowden, “Race Propaganda in Italy.”Phylon (1940-1956), Vol. 1, No. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1940): 104.
70. Speer 1997, 84.
71. Goebbels 1948, 241.
72. Burleigh 2001, 770.
73. Giovanni Bernardini, “The Origins and development of racial Antisemitism in Fascist Italy,” Journal of Modern History, No. 49
    (September 1977): 431-55.
74. Glenny 1999, 377.
75. C. Pagliano, “Scienza e stirpe: eugenica in Italia (1912-1939),” Passato e Presente (1984): 61-97.
76. Drake 1998, 410.
77. Payne 1998, 240.
78. Aaron Gillette, Racial Theories in Fascist Italy (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2002), 32.
79. Gregor 2005, 56.
80. “Leading articles,” Critica Fascista, August 15-16 and September 1, 1938.
81. Gillette 2002, 98.
82. Snowden 1940, 106.
83. Gregor 2005, 209.
84. Ibid., 202.
85. Gillette 2002, 165.
86. Ibid., 55.
87. Mussolini 1998, 56.
88. Gregor 2005, 54.
89. Ibid.
90. Mussolini 1998, 2.
91. Ben-Ghiat 2004, 125.
92. Ibid., 154.
93. Historical Speeches, “Speech to the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations – December 2, 1942,” Word Press, http://greatspeeches.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/speech-to-the-chamber-of-fasci-and-corporations-december-2-1942
94. Weitz 1992, 233.
95. Robertson 1988, 40.
96. Dickinson College. “Manifesto of Race Scientists,” http://users.dickinson.edu/~rhyne/232/Nine/RacistScientists.html
97. Michelle Sarfatti and Anne C. Tedeschi, The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), 131-2.
98. Snowden 1940, 104.
99. Mazower 2000, 84.
100. Ben-Ghiat 2004, 157.
101. Sertoli Salis, “Sulla sudditanza dell'AOI,” Rivista delle Colonie, October 10, 1936.
102. Ibid.
103. I documenti diplomatici italiani: Eighth Series, IX, Ciano to all representatives (Rome, Italy: Libreria della Stato, 1952-53).
104. Snowden 1940, 108.
105. Patricia Knight, Mussolini and Fascism (Florence, KY: Routledge, 2003).
106. Falasca-Zamponi 2000, 106.
107. Cannistraro 1972, 121.
108. G. Dianelli “Materie prime e guerra,” Italia e Civilità, January 14, 1944.
109. Ibiblio. "Speech Delivered by Premier Mussolini - February 23, 1941," http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1941/410223a.html
110. Giovanni Almirante, “Roma antica e I giudei,” La Difesa della Razza, September 5, 1938.
111. Alexander De Grand, “Mussolini's Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935-1940,” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May, 2004): 134.
112. Miranda Vickers, The Albanians: A Modern History (London: I.B. Taurus, 2001), 136.
113. Bosworth 2007, 378.
114. Ibid., 414.
115. Ibid.
116. Roland Sarti, The Axe Within: Italian Fascism in Action (New York: New Viewpoints, 1974), 190.
117. Robertson 1988, 40.
118. Bosworth 2007, 384.
119. Ibid., 418.
120. Sarti 1974, 96.
121. Angelo Del Boca, Gli Italiani in Africa: Tripoli bel suol d'amoei 1860-1922 (Bari: Laterza, 1986), 751-9.
122. Glenny 2001, 433.
123. Goebbels 1948, 337.
124. Ivan Meštrović, Uspomene na političke ljude I događaje (Buenos Aires: Hrvatske revije, 1961), 223.
125. E. Apih, Italia Fascismo e Antifascismo nella Venezia Giulia (1918-1943) (Bari: Laterza, 1966), 12.
126. Maurice Roumani, The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement (Eastbourne, East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008), 6.
127. Ben-Ghiat 2004, 150.
128. Glenny 2001, 497-8.
129. Sarfatti 2006, 161.
130. Alessandra Rizzo, “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 2,” ABC International, http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161&page=2.
131. Susan Zuccotti and Furio Colombo, The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival
     (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), 185.
132. Personal experiences of historian James Mayfield.
133. Anthony James Gregor, The Search for Neofascism (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006), 168.
134. Weitz 1992, 200.
135. Sarfatti 2006, 88.
136. Romano Mussolini, My Father, il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini's Son. (Carlsbad, CA: Kales Press, 2006), xxii.
137. Meir Michaelis, Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-1945 (Gloucestershire, UK: Clarendon Press 1978), 350.
138. Galeazzo Ciano, The Ciano Diaries, 1937-1943 (New York: Doubleday, 1946), 572.

BIBLIOGRAPHY/SOURCES USED:

Almirante, G. “Roma antica e I giudei.” La Difesa della Razza, September 5, 1938.

Ciano, Galeazzo. The Ciano Diaries, 1937-1943. New York: Doubleday 1946.

Dianelli, G. “Materie prime e guerra.” Italia e Civilità, January 14, 1944

Dickinson College. “Manifesto of Race Scientists.”
http://users.dickinson.edu/~rhyne/232/Nine/RacistScientists.html

Goebbels, Joseph. The Goebbels Diaries. Trans. by Lochner. Garden City, NY: Country Life Press, 1948.

Historical Speeches. “Benito Mussolini – Speech of February 23, 1941.” Word Press. http://greatspeeches.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/benito-mussolini-speech-of-february-23-1941/

Historical Speeches. “Speech to the Chamber of Fasci and Corporations – December 2, 1942.”
Word Press. http://greatspeeches.wordpress.com/2008/09/20/speech-to-the-chamber-of-fasci- and-corporations-december-2-1942

I documenti diplomatici italiani: Eighth Series, IX. Ciano to all representatives. Rome, Italy: Libreria della Stato, 1952-53.

I documenti diplomatici italiani: Seventh Series, XI, 205. Mussolini il Duce: I Gli anni del consenso 1929-1936. Turin, Italy: Libreria della Stato, 1974.

“Leading articles.” Critica Fascista, August 15, August 16, September 1, 1938.

“Leading articles.” La Vetta d'Italia, May 14, 1922.

Meštrović, Ivan. Uspomene na političke ljude I događaje. Buenos Aires: Hrvatske revije, 1961.

Mussolini, Benito and Duilio Susmel, Edoardo, eds. Opera Omnia, 44 Volumes. Florence: La Fenice, 1962.

Mussolini, Benito, Richard Washburn Child, Max Ascoli, and Richard Lamb. My Rise and Fall: Volume 1. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1998.

Rizzo, Alessandra. “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 1.” ABC International. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161

Rizzo, Alessandra. “Mistress' Diary: Mussolini Was Fierce Anti-Semite, Page 2.” ABC International. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9097161&page=2

Salis, Sertoli. “Sulla sudditanza dell'AOI.” Rivista delle Colonie, October 10, 1936.

Speer, Albert. Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997.

World Future Fund. “The Doctrine of Fascism. Benito Mussolini 1932.” http://www.worldfuturefund.org/wffmaster/Reading/Germany/mussolini.htm

Apih, E. Italia Fascismo e Antifascismo nella Venezia Giulia (1918-1943). Bari: Laterza, 1966.

Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922-1945. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004.

Bernardini, G. “The Origins and development of racial Antisemitism in Fascist Italy.” Journal of Modern History, No. 49 (September 1977): 431-455.

Bosworth, R. J. B. Mussolini's Italy: Life Under the Fascist Dictatorship 1915-1945. New York: Penguin Group, 2007.

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. Hill and Wang, 2001.

Cannistraro, Philip V. “Mussolini's Cultural Revolution: Fascist or Nationalist?” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 7, No. 3/4 (July-October, 1972): 115-139

Cervi, Mario. The Hollow Legions: Mussolini's Blunder in Greece, 1940-1941. New York: Doubleday, 1972.

De Grand, Alexander. “Mussolini's Follies: Fascism in Its Imperial and Racist Phase, 1935-1940.” Contemporary European History, Vol. 13, No. 2 (May, 2004): 127-147 .

Del Boca, Angelo. Gli Italiani in Africa: Tripoli bel suol d'amoei 1860-1922. Bari: Laterza, 1986.

Drake, Richard. “Julis Evola, Radical Fascism, and the Lateran Accords.” The Catholic Historical Review, Vol 74, No. 3 (July, 1988): 403-419.

Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta. Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000.

Fischer, B.J. Albania at War 1939-45. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1999.

Gillette, Aaron. Racial Theories in Fascist Italy. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2002.

Glenny, Misha. The Balkans. New York: Penguin Group, 1999.

Gregor, Anthony James. Mussolini's Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Gregor, Anthony James. The Search for Neofascism, New York, Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hyde Minor, Heather. “Mapping Mussolini: Ritual and Cartography in Public Art during the Second Roman Empire.” Imago Mundi, Vol. 51 (1999): 147-162.

Johnson, Paul. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper Collins, 1988.

Knight, Patricia. Mussolini and Fascism. Florence, KY: Routledge, 2003.

Ludwig, E. Talks with Mussolini. London: Allen and Unwin, 1932.

Michaelis, Meir. Mussolini and the Jews: German-Italian Relations and the Jewish Question in Italy, 1922-1945. Gloucestershire, UK: Clarendon Press, 1978.

Michaelis, Meir. “The 'Duce' and the Jews: An Assessment of the Literature on Italian Jewry under Fascism (1922-1945)." Yad Vashem Studies, No. 11 (1976): 7-32.

Mazower, Mark. Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.

Mussolini, Romano. My Father, il Duce: A Memoir by Mussolini's Son. Carlsbad, CA:
Kales Press, 2006.

Pagliano, C. “Scienza e stirpe: eugenica in Italia (1912-1939).” Passato e Presente (1984): 61-97.

Payne, Stanley. A History of Fascism, 1914-1945. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998.

Ridley, Jasper Godwin. The Freemasons: A History of the World's Most Powerful Secret Society.
New York: Arcade Publishers, 2001.

Roberts, Jeremy. Benito Mussolini. Minneapolis, MN: Twenty-First Century Books, 2005.

Robertson, Esmonde. “Race as a Factor in Mussolini's Policy in Africa and Europe.” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 23, No. 1 (January, 1988): 37-58.

Roumani, Maurice M. The Jews of Libya: Coexistence, Persecution, Resettlement. Eastbourne,
East Sussex, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

Sarfatti, Michele and Tedeschi, Anne C. The Jews in Mussolini's Italy: From Equality to Persecution. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006.

Sarti, Roland. The Axe Within: Italian Fascism in Action. New York: New Viewpoints, 1974.

Snowden, Frank M. “Race Propaganda in Italy.”Phylon (1940-1956),
Vol. 1, No. 2 (2nd Quarter, 1940): 103-111

Steininger, Rolf. South Tyrol: A Minority Conflict of the Twentieth Century. Edison, NJ:
Transaction Publications, 2003.

Trevor-Roper, Hugh, eds. Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-44. New York: Enigma Books, 2007.

Vickers, Miranda. The Albanians: A Modern History. London: I.B. Taurus, 2001.

Weitz, John. Hitler's Diplomat: The Life and Times of Joachim von Ribbentrop. New York: Tichnor & Fields, 1992.

Zimmerman, Joshua D. Jews in Italy under Fascist and Nazi rule, 1922-1945. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Zuccotti, Susan and Colombo, Furio. The Italians and the Holocaust: Persecution, Rescue, and Survival. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996.