Eurafrica: Fascist Italy's New Imperialism

Beginning in the early 1930s the new geopolitical notion of Eurafrica envisioned the fascist project for the creation of a new, integrated, political and economic system across Europe and Africa. The Eurafrica project developed in light of political theories of Italian Living Space, postulating the transformation of fascist Italy from a nation state into the centre of a supra-continental, racially structured, empire. The Fascist Imperial Community would revolve on the Mediterranean, and would incorporate, on the one hand, Italian colonial holdings in Africa, and, on the other hand, a network of politically-annexed, militarily-occupied, or even Italian-controlled territories stretching from Southern Europe and the Balkans, to the Middle East.
 This paper will focus on the fascist conception of revolutionary war and its implications for fascist Italy’s New Imperialism. Italy’s expansion in the Mediterranean was presented as an anthropological alternative to the models of French and British colonialism. Fascist New Imperialism emphasised anti-democratic principles, and incorporated elements of an anti-imperialistic discourse. However, despite the ideological conflict against liberal democracies, fascist New Imperialism appropriated fundamental theoretical models from the British Empire, the French colonial rule in Africa, and the advent of the USA as a global Power. In this perspective, I will concentrate on mirrored, interconnected, and mutually interdependent images of the Fascist Imperial Community, on the one hand, and the British Commonwealth, as well as of the US system of international influence, on the other hand. I will analyse how fascist theorists of the Italian Living Space manipulated an extremely varied mixture of theoretical materials, ranging from the Monroe Doctrine and the early twentieth-century geopolitics to Carl Schmitt’s theories. Then, I will discuss the concepts of nation, state, and race, as well as how these concepts converged in defining ideas of political sovereignty and citizenship within the projected Fascist Imperial Community.