Political Radicalism and War Volunteerism: Garibaldinism’s Mediterranean Projection

Between the 19^th and 20^th centuries, several experiences of transnational war volunteering took place within the Euro-Mediterranean space (e.g. the struggles for the Independence of Greece, Italy and Albania; the international intervention supporting the two Spanish republics, and the transnational dimension of the antifascist resistances during WWII). Many of those volunteers were left-wing activists (republicans, anarchists, socialists and, later, communists) influenced by the myth of Giuseppe Garibaldi. This paper aims both at drawing the connection between transnational war volunteering and political radicalism in southern Europe over almost one hundred years, and at analysing how Garibaldinism survived and evolved. This can help in better understanding the capacity of traditions of transnational war volunteering to persist across time and to emerge when a new conflict starts. Therefore, my paper will reflect on the utility of a long durée approach in the study of war volunteering focussing on the more transnational Garibaldinian expeditions (the ones between the Paris Commune and WWI). I will linger on the 1897 Greek expedition. On that occasion, the expedition was mostly composed of socialists and anarchists; in Greece Garibaldinism proved not to be a rather static movement. Indeed, this example will demonstrate how traditions of transnational war volunteering must evolve continuously to survive. What many 1897 volunteers had in common is the belief that by participating in an armed struggle abroad they were not only assisting the cause of those fighting against the Ottoman Empire, but also laying the foundations for a broader social movement. These volunteers, or at least some of them, were part of a peculiar generation, they arose from a passage of national struggles to internationalist ideals and lived up to this change in perspectives; they spread an alternative version of the Garibaldinian tradition, a radical and revolutionary one far away from the ‘classical’ one.