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Concept
Italian imperialism under fascism
Summary
Imperialism, colonialism and irredentism played an important role in the foreign policy of Fascist Italy. Among the regime's goals were the acquisition of territory considered historically Italian in France (e.g. Nice) and Yugoslavia (e.g. Dalmatia), the expansion of Italy's sphere of influence into the Balkans (e.g. Greece) and the acquisition of more colonies in Africa. The pacification of Libya (1923–32), the invasion of Ethiopia (1935–36), the invasion of Albania (1939), the invasion of France (1940), the invasion of Greece (1940–41) and the invasion of Yugoslavia (1941) were all undertaken in part to add to Italy's national space. According to historian Patrick Bernhard, Fascist Italian imperialism under Benito Mussolini, particularly in Africa, served as a model for the much more famous expansionism of Nazi Germany in Eastern Europe.
After his appointment as Governor of the Dodecanese in 1936, the fascist leader Cesare Maria De Vecchi started to promote within Benito Mussolini's National Fascist Party an idea of a new "Imperial Italy" (Italia imperiale), one that, like a recreation of the Roman Empire, went beyond Europe and included northern Africa (the Fourth Shore or "Quarta Sponda" in Italian).
De Vecchi's dream was an Imperial Italy that included not only all the European territories wanted by the Italian irredentists (Nice, Savoy, Ticino, Dalmatia, Corfu, Malta and Corsica) and populated by Italian communities for many centuries, but even the north African territories (Libya and Tunisia), where Italian emigrants had created "colonies" in the late nineteenth century.
After 1936 and during World War II, the Greek Dodecanese islands were also included in the project (with the Ionian islands of Zante, Ithaca, etc.) and the fascist regime soon promoted a process of forced Italianization of these Greek islands.
Italy annexed the coastal provinces of its colony of Libya in 1938 and made them national provinces of Italy that were to be Italianized.
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