The Ideology of Greater Italy: Absolving the Guilt of Empire^*

The Italian context still appears characterised by a puzzling gulf between an excellent, growing scholarship on the history of Italian colonialism in Northern and Eastern Africa, on the one hand, and a collective consciousness which promotes crypto-negationist ideas of Italians as humane colonisers and of the Italian Empire in Africa as a benevolent domination, on the other. In view of such problematic public memory, which is impervious to the results of specialist literature, the new book by Emanuele Ertola – which reconstructs the origins of that memory in the ideology supporting the process of Italian empire-building – is a much needed one. The work sheds light on the fil rouge which, amid historical ruptures and major changes, connected the colonialist aspirations in the aftermath of the unification of Italy in the early 1860s with the rampant imperialism of the fascist regime, as well as the first colonial conquests of the pre-fascist Kingdom of Italy with the post-fascist imperial nostalgia of the Italian Republic. From their very beginnings, Italian imperialist ambitions and achievements have been informed by an incredibly long-lasting notion. This notion has not |only managed to survive major transitions – from the pre- to the post-unification era, from the monarchical to the republican phase, and from liberalism to authoritarianism to democracy – but was also not shaken by the ideological challenges potentially represented by catastrophic military defeats during both colonial campaigns and two world wars, as well as freedom movements such as the 19th-century Risorgimento and the Italian Resistance during World War II.

This notion is, as Ertola convincingly demonstrates, the distinctively Italian version of the ideology of settler colonialism, a European-born and globally employed intellectual pattern which predicates the neo-Malthusian link between the internal social problems of a superabundant population and resulting pauperism, unemployment and social tensions, and the external solution to these issues, identified in mass emigration and the systematic settlement of colonial territories (10). On the one hand, this Italian colonialist ideology adopted some of the notions already part of the »myth« of settlerism invented by other nations, first and foremost imperial Britain. These include the impulse to establish new societies, at once ›daughters‹ and ›sisters‹ of the mother-country; the concealment of violent conquest under the guise of a seemingly peaceful colonising process; and the representation of conquered territories as de facto vacant, to the detriment of the non-white and non-European colonised. Italian imperialists appropriated this transnational ideology and translated it into a peculiarly national jargon, whose ebbs and flows throughout a century of imperial history are tracked by Ertola.

The originality of Italy’s take on settlerism coincided with a powerfully justificationist narrative. Whereas, as Ertola remarks, the settler colonial ideology, in its standard formulation, sought to optimistically present the phenomenon of emigration as an act of hope rather than despair (16), its Italian variant stressed the urgent, almost desperate necessity of the nation to find an outlet for its emigrant and labouring population. As early as the 1860s, the newly-Italian political and intellectual elites began to present emigration as a response to class struggle and an alternative to social reform, and the settlement of a colonial empire as its inescapable outcome. If relocated to the territories of the Italian Empire, in fact, emigrants would no longer be lost to the nation, and the country’s population drain would be turned from a factor of weakness into a means of expansion and therefore a resource. Moreover, by stressing the poverty and industry of Italian emigrants, the conquest and colonisation of the empire represented not a »safety valve« to an overcrowded and criminal population but rather a well-deserved opportunity of relocation to an honest and hard-working proletariat (21). From this perspective, the empire was presented as conquered for the people, and imperialism as the natural consequence of an unavoidable process of settlement. Whereas the British Empire, this colonial myth went, entailed rapine and exploitation, the Italian one, being motivated not by thirst for riches but by an almost humanitarian necessity, was socially plebeian and morally benevolent (145). In addition, the entire country was to be described as a »proletarian nation«, and its colonial possessions the stakes of its successful class struggle against other European capitalist powers (90). What Ertola reconstructs is, therefore, a self-absolving, passive-aggressive colonial ideology, that, from its very beginnings, managed to successfully erase the violence of conquest and domination from its narrative.

The book begins at the second half of the 19th century, when, »as ›colonial‹ was the feature characterising all modern European powers«, the new country was also expected to rush into the conquest of the »Oltremare« as part of its own process of unification (19). Although the first imperial outposts in Eritrea were acquired in the early 1880s in light of commercial and political considerations, the enterprise appears to have already been informed by the rhetoric of settlerism (34). The continuity between nation-building and empire-building was emphasised during the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911, which coincided with the 50th anniversary of unification (86). The settler colonial ideology was then powerfully exploited by the fascist regime, which conceived of the African colonies, on the one hand, as a spur to demographic increase (101–104) and, on the other, as a laboratory of experimentation of their desired totalitarian society, peopled by a socially selected and »racially pure« population and subject to a pervasive, centralised and bureaucratic government (118–119). The anti-fascist Italian Republic appears, in turn, to have been affected by a surprising continuity with the colonialist aspirations of the regime. Having been deprived of its African Empire in the aftermath of World War II, Italy unsuccessfully demanded the restitution of its pre-|fascist colonies (Eritrea, Somalia and Libya, whereas the fascist conquest of Ethiopia was significantly not reclaimed), once again stressing the old myth of a »labouring people’s empire« (118, 128–133). The early 1950s witnessed the attempt to forge the ultimate and official narrative of Italy’s colonial past via the establishment of the »Committee for the documentation of Italy’s work in Africa« (153). The Committee can be considered the swansong of the Italian settler ideology, prior to the emergence of a new historiography which, in the following couple of decades, finally solicited a profound rethinking of this myth.

Ertola discusses the internal inconsistencies in the long-term sameness of the idea of »Greater Italy« (69) by analysing a wide array of sources produced by an extremely diverse group of historical actors across the political spectrum. These include adventurers, statesmen, lobbyists, economists, journalists and geographers belonging to liberal, Catholic, conservative, socialist, nationalist, royalist or republican, fascist or anti-fascist fronts. This book demonstrates that a rhetorical and ideological superstructure always supports colonial rule, even when, like the Italian one in Africa, this rule is characterised by an intrinsically fragile, poorly funded and – despite the colonial myth – scarcely settled imperial structure (72, 120). Intellectual histories of imperial ideologies are a useful complement to the research of legal historians, as the analysis of legal developments in imperial frameworks cannot disregard the study of underlying colonial cultures and their interplay with metropolitan ideas. More particularly, Ertola’s book promises to become a useful instrument for those scholars investigating the legal histories of the Italian Empire. Moreover, the book represents a timely contribution to not only the scholarly but also the public debate by demonstrating how the post-fascist national identity of »Italiani brava gente« is the ultimate development of an intrinsically justificationist colonial culture, one which deceitfully emphasises a self-indulgent myth of humanity, hard labour and proletarian settlement over a reality of violence, conquest and racism (13, 128). For almost a century, Italy’s colonial history of military occupation, massive deployment of bombs and chemical warfare, segregationist legislation and concentration camps was removed from its imperial self-narrative. In the 1960s, after the Empire was no more, the country’s colonial past was wiped away from its national consciousness altogether (141).