Between Nation and Empire: The Post-Habsburg Adriatic Question and the Fascist Idea of Europe

Italian fascism is conventionally perceived and interpreted as the long-term product of the national history, eventually crystallized by the Great War and the post-war crisis. This chapter reconsiders Italian fascism from two different, but complementary perspectives. On the one hand, the Great War contributed in forging a new liberal world order, based on the global ascent of the American power, and in provoking major uprisings against it in Europe (see A. Tooze, The Deluge, 2014). On the other hand, the imagined unity of nation, state, and territory which had founded the nineteenth-century European political imaginary was shattered during the wars and revolutions of 1914-1922. Therefore the post-1918 “territorialization” of the nationalistic projects in the post-imperial lands brought about a major “crisis of state sovereignty” (see A. Sammartino, The Impossible Borderland, 2010). In this regard, Italian fascism will be understood as a radical insurgent against the post-war liberal world order, searching for a new imperial order in competition with other forces and ideas of order – notably, Bolshevism. At the same time, the fascist projects of a new empire will be seen as a violent solution to the crisis stemming from the collapse of the multinational empires, one that was built on radical anti-Slavism. Particularly, a focus on the Adriatic question allows to analyze the radical widening of the fascist political cultures and imaginers, which cannot be simply identified with nationalism. On the basis of Benito Mussolini's writings and of local fascist newspapers and journals in Upper Adriatic, I aim: 1. to provide a close reading of fascists' violent discourses unleashed against the “internal enemy” - identified as “socialist” (as “Bolshevik”), “pro-Austrian”, “Slav”, “Asiatic” (as “pro-Russian” and thus un-European) and tied to the post-1917 “Eurasian” post-imperial crises. 2. to investigate the fascist conception of the world history in relation to the Upper Adriatic post-imperial crisis, their perception of the postwar crisis of the nation states, of Europe and “Eurasia” as a whole, and their intuition of the global ascent of the American power. Indeed, the interwar period was the “era of revisionism” (H. Case), but the fascist hostility against the Versailles order, far from emerging in the 1930s, was shaped by the immediate postwar crisis between 1919 and 1924.