Fascist Italy and the Middle East, 1933-40, by Nir Arielli

Abstract

This book meticulously puts flesh and blood on Mussolini's pretensions to make Fascist Italy the dominant Mediterranean imperial power, concentrating on the usually underestimated attempts to make an impression on the Middle East, where British and French interests ruled supreme. It inserts itself carefully into the continuing historiographical debate, largely conducted between British and American historians of Fascism and the conservative nationalist De Felician school of Italian historians, about Mussolini's real intentions in the Mediterranean. It partly validates the De Felician view that Mussolini's Middle Eastern policies were largely dictated by the vicissitudes of the relationship between Britain and Fascist Italy. Italian foreign policy was very anti-British after the Italian conquest of Ethiopia in 1935–6, less so after the so-called Easter Accords of 1938, which appeared to settle a range of contested issues between the two powers in the Mediterranean, from the Spanish Civil War to Arabia, and secured for Mussolini British recognition of Italy's East African empire. But the book ultimately parts company with the De Felician viewpoint that Mussolini's policies were only ever intended to bring about a recognition of imperial parity with Britain in the Mediterranean. De Felice's interpretation makes Britain's reluctance to accept the offer of Mediterranean parity the real cause of the breakdown of Anglo-Italian relations and Fascist Italy's entry into the Second World War on the side of its Axis partner, Nazi Germany. Instead, the book makes clear that Mussolini was serious about achieving Mediterranean hegemony, rather than parity in agreement with Britain; thus, when the Middle East became a major theatre of war for Fascist Italy and the Axis, this was in fact the culmination, or extension into war, of inter-war policies which aimed to bring the region into the Italian Fascist sphere of influence.