Solving the Nation’s Ills through War: Italy, the Great War, and Nation-Building

The effect of the First World War on Italy was deep and long lasting.  It divided the Italian political and cultural class in the years leading up to the global conflagration.  It divided the same groups during the interventionist crisis that finally resulted in Italy joining the war on the Allied side.  It fractured Italian society beyond repair in the postwar Red Biennium.  And the legacy of the war – the creation of a society of patriots and rinunciatori (those that had not supported the war, or the defense of Italian territorial interests afterwards) – was integral to the success of Mussolini’s Fascism.  My presentation will trace Italian intellectuals’ varied contributions to these debates and highlight the common thread to the pro-war arguments: the thesis that Italy required war to forge the national consciousness that had yet to be achieved in spite of Italian unification during the Risorgimento.  This uniformity of purpose across the years over the value of war to Italian national development was central to the pro-war groups’ success in putting their ideas into practice, whether it was in forcing the Italian Liberal government into the war or in undermining the same government after the war and helping the Fascists come to power.