ANTI-COLONIALISM AND THE ITALIAN LEFT

Abstract

Italy was, for a short period, an empire; and yet unlike other empires, it apparently lacked a vocal anti-colonial element. This article draws attention to the ambivalence of the Italian response to colonialism, by focusing on a specific moment of Italy's engagement with empire: the invasion of Ethiopia by Mussolini in 1935. On the one hand, this colonial war (one of the very last to be fought) consolidated a mass consensus around the regime. However, the Ethiopian war can also be read as the first opportunity that the Italian left had to articulate its anti-fascism on an international scale. The archives documenting the activities of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) between 1935 and 1946 allow us to reconstruct an oppositional narrative to colonialism that developed among the Italian left in the fascist years. The PCI sent an emissary, Ilio Barontini, to Ethiopia, to organize resistance against the Italian occupying forces. This mission, together with other anti-colonial activities of the PCI in those years, can be read as a pre-history of Italian anti-fascist resistance. The men who went to Ethiopia on an anti-colonial mission were there fighting against some of their fellow Italians, foreshadowing the civil war that would mark the Resistenza between 1943 and 1945. While Italian imperialism was among the bloodiest colonial enterprises ever undertaken, it is shown that in the 1930s there did emerge a vibrant critique of it, whose energies flowed into the anti-fascist struggle in the war years.