THE AXIS WITH GERMANY

Foreign policy decisions were the most important and revealing of the regime’s nature and intentions, and must be harmonised with any view of domestic and economic policy between 1936 and 1940. The Ethiop-ian invasion could be regarded as a successful exercise in ‘determining weight’ diplomacy. Exploiting the threat of Germany to Anglo-French hegemony in Europe, Mussolini had won what he thought was a free run in East Africa in return for restraint on Germany in Europe, specifi-cally resistance to Anschluss. The question is, what options were still open to Mussolini during and after Ethiopia? Could he maintain a position of ‘equidistance’ in international relations, and did he actually want to?

Except for De Felice and his ‘school’, most historians see the working out of a kind of ‘logic’ in the sequence of events leading from League of Nations sanctions against Italy over Ethiopia, through the Axis and then alliance between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, to the decision to enter the war on Germany’s side in 1940. The ‘logic’ lay in the force of changing international circumstances apparent even during the Ethiopian campaign and in the nature of the Fascist regime as an impe-rialistic totalitarian dictatorship. To support his view of Mussolini still pursuing makeweight diplomacy, manoeuvring between Germany, Britain and France, De Felice focuses on Italo–British relations.

Mussolini’s intention and priority, he argues, was to achieve a general Mediterranean settlement involving British recognition of Italy as a Mediterranean power, which more or less revived Mussolini’s idea of a four-power directorate of European affairs. The more conventional view sees Italo–German relations as central to Mussolini’s foreign policy in the late 1930s.

There is something in the force of circumstances argument, since the so-called Axis of the two fascist powers had its immediate origins in the Ethiopian crisis. In early 1936, League of Nations sanctions confronted Italy with a degree of international isolation, which left Italy in bad need of friends. Germany obliged. Hitler refused to apply sanctions against Italy and became a major supplier of materials and energy crucial to the Italian siege economy. He simultaneously armed the Ethiopians in secret, presumably to keep the war on the boil and increase Italy’s alienation from France and Britain. In return, Mussolini wavered on the Austrian question, the very issue which allowed Italy to straddle Germany and the Western democracies. In 1934–35, Mussolini had propped up the Dollfuss-Schuschnigg regime as the guarantee of an independent nationalist Austria. Now, he indicated to Germany that Austria and Germany should reach agreement on the status of Austria, and later leaned on Kurt Von Schuschnigg to make concessions to Germany and the Austrian Nazis.

The mutual benefits of synchronised action by Italy and Germany were demonstrated by the German reoccupation of the remainder of the Rhineland in March 1935, deliberately timed by Hitler to catch France and Britain with their attention diverted to the Ethiopian affair.

Hitler’s action broke the terms of Versailles and of the 1925 Locarno treaty, which made Italy and Britain the guarantors of France’s frontiers with Germany. But Mussolini, who knew of Hitler’s intended coup, declared he would not support any possible League of Nations retribu-tion against Germany. Hitler’s move increased the attractiveness of hitching Italy to German revisionism. A German Rhineland pinned France down in the west, made her more worried about her own security and her ability to stand by her treaties with the East European ‘successor’

states. Co-operation with a dynamic Germany was clearly the best way of hammering concessions for Italy out of a more vulnerable France.

These connections and perceptions of mutual advantage persisted after the Ethiopian invasion. The autumn 1936 talks between the newly appointed Foreign Minister, Ciano, his German counterpart, Konstantin Von Neurath, and Hitler, discussed a range of issues where collabor-ation was possible and forthcoming. These included Italy’s endorsement of the July 1936 Austro–German agreement, set in train by Mussolini himself, which effectively made Austria a ‘German’ state and eased the way to actual Anschluss in early 1938. This surrender of Austrian independence was traded off against German recognition of Italy’s new African empire. The two sides agreed on military aid to Franco’s

rebellion against the Spanish republic, and more broadly, on a common front against communism. These meetings also apparently affirmed respective and parallel spheres of interest, Germany in Northern and Eastern-Central Europe and Italy in the Mediterranean and Balkans, as the basis for collaboration in foreign policy. Italy tried ritually to extract German recognition of this division of labour in subsequent meetings, though it was never formally written into the agreements between the two countries.

These productive meetings enabled Mussolini to declare in November 1936 the emergence of the Rome–Berlin alignment, which was not only a relation between two states but ‘an axis around which all the European states animated by the will to collaboration and peace can also collabor-ate’.¹ The ‘peace’ aspired to was clearly not meant to be that prevailing at the moment. Mussolini’s appeal for collaboration was at face value multilateral and inclusive, but would turn on the two linked and dom-inant poles of Italy and Germany.

It is just possible to argue that couching Italo–German co-operation in the form of an Axis rather than an alliance still bound Mussolini to no one and did not mark any definitive break with France and Britain.

Mussolini did not take up German approaches in 1937–38 to transform the Axis into a full military alliance, which in the nature of a treaty of alliance would be exclusive in its obligations and commitments. It was also the case that despite Italian anger and hostility over the part played by Britain in sanctions, diplomatic contact was resumed in the context of Italy’s intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The nebulous ‘Gentle-man’s Agreement’ of January 1937 acknowledged the status quo in the Mediterranean. It was followed by the rather more concrete ‘Easter Accords’ in April 1938, which won British recognition of the empire in return for an Italian promise to disengage from Spain.

But these agreements did not lead to a comprehensive settlement of Mediterranean issues between Italy and Britain, let alone France. If such a settlement was Mussolini’s intention, as De Felice says, then one wonders why it was not achieved. Perhaps the fact that it never came about indicates that it was never actually what Mussolini intended to happen. Britain’s eventual endorsement of the ‘Easter Accords’, even when it was clear that Mussolini was not getting out of Spain, was a sign of its hope that if Mussolini was not antagonised, Italy would act as a kind of go-between between the Western democracies and Nazi Germany.

The role of middle man was the one which Britain wanted to give to Mussolini. In looking at this post-Ethiopia diplomacy, the De Felician

‘revisionists’ transfer these British hopes onto Mussolini and rather assume that Mussolini claimed the role of mediator for himself. But a study of Mussolini’s actions indicates that a general agreement with Britain and France was neither intended nor possible and that the declar-ation of the Axis marked a new point of departure in Fascist foreign policy.

The Axis could be seen as the blackmailer’s card and the continu-ation of a kind of balancing act, which is how De Felice interprets both the Axis and, incredibly, the alliance between Italy and Germany in May 1939. Closeness to Germany might well be the lever to extract concessions from France and Britain. Yet allowing a de facto Anschluss can hardly be construed as using the threat of Germany to win some-thing from the West. It is difficult to see how Mussolini’s public declaration of a new international alignment in the Axis could ever, in fact, lead to or make possible Italy’s independence of both sides as the ‘determining weight’. The Axis, after all, became an alliance of the fascist countries and was not dissolved in the wake of some peaceable and conciliatory accommodation among the European powers. In both timing and content, the Axis indicated that Mussolini had made a choice. It was a statement of a perceived division in Europe between the dictatorships and the democracies, which was accentuated by Mussolini’s actions in both foreign and internal policy thereafter.

The Ethiopian conquest was, then, a watershed in war inter-national relations. It was the occasion which brought out a basic conver-gence of interests between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. They were both expansionist and revisionist of the 1919 settlement, and united in their hostility to France and Britain, the beneficiaries and defenders of that settlement which stood in the way of achieving their expansionist goals. Certainly from Mein Kampf onwards, Hitler had always regarded an alliance with Italy as central to German revision of Versailles and the attainment of a German racial empire in Europe. The Italian ally would tie down the French on the Alps and in North Africa, and the British in the Eastern Mediterranean, which was exactly the role allotted to Italy in the period of Italian so-called ‘non-belligerency’ between September 1939 and June 1940.

For his part, Mussolini recognised that only a revanchist Germany would back the Italian challenge to Anglo-French hegemony in the Mediterranean and help Italy become a Great Power. For Mussolini was not really interested in security in the Mediterranean, which could have been achieved by some accommodation and balance between

Italy, France and Britain. It was clear from Mussolini’s summary of the international situation and Fascist Italy’s aims for a secret meeting of the Grand Council in February 1939 that he aspired to control and dominance of the Mediterranean. Mussolini spoke of war with the Western democracies as inevitable if Italy was to break out of the

‘prison’ of the Mediterranean and remove the ‘bars’ and ‘guards’ of French and British possessions and colonies in its ‘march to the oceans’.² Mussolini’s pacing of this Italian Mediterranean stage-by-stage plan did not anticipate war in 1939, and such a qualification was important. But his keynote address, consistent with earlier and later public and private pronouncements, ruled out any compromise with France and Britain.

This was unlikely, anyway, after the Gallophobic war-scare propa-ganda campaign deliberately mounted in November 1938, which had Fascist deputies in the Chamber screaming for Corsica, Tunisia, Nice and Savoy, students rampaging outside the French embassy and vicious anti-French articles in the press. The campaign was staged shortly after Mussolini’s ‘mediation’ of German claims on Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference in September 1938. Here, Mussolini had appeared to be the peacemaker, as broker of a deal between Germany and the Western democracies to dismember the country. Was the public airing of Italian grievances and claims against France, Mussolini’s reminder to the democracies of the price Italy would exact for ‘restraining’ Germany in the interests of general peace? If so, it was a clumsy piece of blackmail and led nowhere except to a hardening of the Axis relationship. Vigorous French remonstrations at the campaign, and Britain’s support of the French position, showed Mussolini that threats would not extract con-cessions out of the French and that more pressure needed to be applied, in the shape of an actual alliance with Germany. The events of November 1938 were probably the immediate backdrop, even the immediate incentive, for Mussolini’s decision in January 1939, communicated to the German Foreign Minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, through Ciano, to proceed to an alliance. Even if we apply here the logic of De Felice’s line about Mussolini trying to extract advantage for Italy by straddling the two camps, we are still left with a non-existent ‘equidistance’.

Mussolini’s Mediterranean dreams only actually required France and Britain to give something up, and the ‘logic’ of this situation impelled Mussolini to an ever greater reliance on Germany, a choosing of sides in other words.

It is important to realise that the Axis, in Mussolini’s view, met the interests of both countries in the ways outlined above, since historians

have been keen to emphasise their differing and conflictual interests, as well as their apparent ideological divergence. The differences were real enough and persisted into the war years in the uneasy and unequal con-dominium of the Balkans area. But the conflicts of national interest were never insuperable or a cause of rupture in the relationship. They were, to some extent, resolved by the tacit understanding on the Italian side, at least, of separate and parallel German and Italian ‘living space’.

Austrian independence, apparently so crucial to the security of Italy’s land frontier in 1933–35, ceased to be an issue between the two countries once Mussolini had effectively withdrawn his support for it during the Ethiopian campaign. The attempted ‘Italianisation’ of Italy’s German-speaking alpine border provinces rankled with both Weimar statesmen like Gustav Streseman and Nazi pan-Germans as much as German com-plaints offended Mussolini, whose concern was to secure the nation on a contested frontier. But again, Hitler had decided very early on, in the 1920s, that making the South Tyrol German was not going to endanger an Italian alliance, a commitment he maintained until the later stages of the war.

If the Axis was sustained by a sense of common interests being served by action against common enemies, then it was also sustained by ideol-ogy. This was another factor eroding Italy’s ‘equidistance’ from the two sides. There has always been some debate over the impact of ideology on foreign policy. If foreign policy is that function of government which defends national independence and the national interest, however defined, then ideological differences in the political systems of countries should be irrelevant to the conduct of foreign policy. Parliamentary and republican France allied itself to tsarist Russia in the 1890s and to com-munist Russia in the 1930s, because both countries saw their national interest in taking precautions against a common German threat. From this perspective, the fact that Britain was a democracy and Italy a Fascist dictatorship was no barrier to diplomatic relations between them. So, for all his talk about Mussolini being inspired by the Ethiopian success with a sense of historical mission to realise the grandeur of the Italian nation, De Felice schizophrenically portrays the dictator as a normal player on the international stage in the late 1930s. This approach is comparable to A.J.P. Taylor’s view of Hitler as a normal German states-man in his Origins of the Second World War, which misses the peculiar and essential dynamic of the foreign policy of a totalitarian state.

Such a simple separation of ideology and interest is difficult to main-tain in inter-war Europe, even for the example of the Franco–Russian

alliance of 1935, which was the cause of serious political division in France, enough to render it inoperative. Sections of the French right were not convinced that the real danger to the nation came from Nazi Germany. They rather feared that the Soviet alliance would strengthen the position of the French Communist Party internally, fears apparently borne out by the formation of the centre-left Popular Front government which rested on the PCF’s parliamentary backing.

The separation is even less justifiable in the case of the fascist powers.

The hostility to France and Britain was compounded by the dictators’

constantly expressed conviction, confirmed as they saw it by events, that the democracies were on the slope of irreversible decline. Ultimately, they were victims of their own social Darwinist assumptions and propa-ganda that these enfeebled countries would inevitably give way to the rising, aggressive fascist powers. That the Axis was not open to all, despite its apparent multilateralism, was evident from the sense of ideo-logical affinity which the dictators gave to the relationship from the start. As Mussolini put it in March 1939, the Axis was the ‘meeting of two Revolutions which declare themselves in direct antithesis to all other conceptions of contemporary civilization. Here is the strength of the Axis, and here are conditions for it lasting.’³ This meaning was carried over into the formal alliance, ‘the Pact of Steel’, which was signed shortly after in May 1939. The text spoke of the basis of the alliance being ‘the close relations of friendship and solidarity which exist between National Socialist Germany and Fascist Italy . . . closely bound together through the complete affinity of ideologies and through com-prehensive solidarity of interests’.⁴

The meshing of interest and ideology can be seen in Italian involve-ment in the Spanish Civil War between 1936 and 1939. Franco’s military rising against the Popular Front government in Spain would not have survived at all without the early logistical and transport support from Italy. Intervention extended to the commitment of about 60 000 Italian troops alongside Franco’s forces, some of them camouflaged as Militia

‘volunteers’. The deception itself was significant. Mussolini could dis-claim any ‘official’ involvement, and at the same time the sending of the armed guard of the Fascist revolution would show that the struggle against anti-Fascism was now indivisible and Europe-wide. There is no evidence that Mussolini deliberately used the lever of Italian aid to install a Falangist regime in Spain, when the Soviet Union was certainly manipulating its aid to the Republic in order to increase Spanish Com-munist Party influence on the Popular Front government. But Mussolini