In Europe

factor: Italy was always missing the boat. In the second half of the nineteenth century, while all the major nations of Europe were concentrating on the expansion of their industries, the conquering of new colonies and the building of armies and fleets, the Italians were still battling for their own unity. By the time Italy had finally become a single entity on the map, it lacked the military and economic power to achieve its great aspirations. ‘The Italians have such a great appetite, and such bad teeth,’ Bismarck said, and so it was.
    In 1914, Italy's share in the world's industrial production was 2.4 per cent, as compared to Britain with 13.6 per cent and Germany with 14.8 per cent. (Today those figures are 3.4, 4.4 and 5.9 per cent respectively.) Large landowners and speculators had bought up the estates belonging to monastic orders, and hundreds of thousands of hungry farmers had moved to the cities or emigrated. The traditional social structure had been destroyed for good. Those were years of ambition, poverty and frustration.
    Was Fascism, then, simply a phase in the development of the Italian nation state, a growing pain that went away half a century ago? Predappio indicates the contrary. This same Fascism is still alive, it can be given vent to here with a form of innocent pride. Certain elements of it still resonate in Italian politics, and within Europe as well it still constitutes an important undercurrent. Fascism was, and is, more than a historical fluke.
    In the 1930s the
Münchener Post
was already using the terms ‘Fascists’ and ‘Nazis’ interchangeably, and today the two movements are usually seen as one and the same. Yet, in the beginning, Mussolini had little use for Hitler. He considered him ‘sexually degenerate’, and his hatred of the Jews completely insane. When the Nazis tried to seize power in Austriain July 1934, following the murder of Chancellor Dollfuss, he assembled his troops threateningly at the Brenner Pass. What is more, he actually had a personal bond with Dollfuss: on the day of the murder, the Austrian chancellor's wife and children were visiting the Mussolini family, and Il Duce himself had to deliver to them the sorrowful news. One year later he decided to invade Ethiopia – earlier than planned – for he believed that within two or three years he would be at war with Germany.
    The conquest of Ethiopia was the first step in Mussolini's drive to establish an empire of his own, just like the British and the French. It was to have been a fast and easy victory, and the Italians used every means – fair or foul – at their disposal: gas attacks, chemical weapons, random bombardments of the civilian population. The Ethiopians were virtually defenceless, and were slaughtered by the tens of thousands. In the end, the expedition was Mussolini's greatest diplomatic blunder. The whole world saw it as a cowardly, villainous undertaking, and to his dismay his putative ally Britain turned against him as well. After that he had no choice but to join forces with Hitler, in an unholy embrace.
    Hitler, on the other hand, had been a great admirer of Mussolini from the start. The Braunes Haus in Munich contained a life-sized bust of Il Duce. To the Nazis, he was the prime example of a dynamic leader saving his divided fatherland. Less than a week after Mussolini's famous ‘March on Rome’, the crowd in Munich's packed Hofbräuhaus was shouting: ‘Germany's Mussolini is called Adolf Hitler!’ From that moment on Hitler was referred to as ‘Führer’, in imitation of Mussolini. And a year later in Munich, at the time of his first attempted coup, he spoke of it as the ‘March on Berlin’.
    But didn't they bear a striking resemblance, National Socialism and Fascism? Didn't both movements spring from the same soil? After all, Germany and Italy were both young nations in search of their own structures, and both had been formed as confederacies of small states. In both countries, stymied nationalism played a major role as well: Versailles had been a humiliating experience for the Italians too. The Germans mourned publicly for Saarland and Alsace-Lorraine, the Italians had their own ‘oppressed’ minorities in Austria and along the Dalmatian coast.
    Another important similarity was the culture of violence. Italian has more words for ‘gang’ than any other language. As early as 1887 therehad been a major uprising by federations of peasant farm workers, in associations known