Download Imagined Proximities: The Use of History and

Imagined Proximities: The Use of History and
Geography as Rhetorical Justifications for Italian
Colonial Conquest in Tripolitania
Charlotte Volpe
Barnard College, Department of History
Thesis Advisor: Professor Jose Moya
April 23, 2014
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La palma è la sorella dell'alloro
The palm is the sister of the laurel
Gabriele D’Annunzio
Le canzoni della gesta d'oltremare
1912
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
MAPS: 1. Geographic Vicinity of Italy and Libya..........................................................................4
2. Relative geographic vicinity of Libya to Italy, as compared with Italy’s other colonies
(circa 1931).........................................................................................................................4
3. Libya’s Three Administrative Provinces.........................................................................5
Introduction: Imagined Proximities between Italy and Libya in the Early-Twentieth
Century.............................................................................................................................................6
Chapter I: The Italian Conquest of Libya as an Expression of a “New Nationalism”
1.1 1900–1911: Imperialist Nationalism Formation..........................................................10
1.2 The Intersection between Nationalism and Imperialism.............................................12
1.3 Italian Self-Consciousness as a Nation........................................................................14
1.4 Italian Self-Consciousness as Colonizers....................................................................16
Chapter II: Emigration, Italian Nationalism, and Colonialism in North Africa
2.1 Italy in the World: Emigration & Rhetorical Imperialism...........................................21
2.2 Enrico Corradini and Emigration as Demographic Imperialism.................................24
2.3 Libya and the Italian Emigrant Worker.......................................................................27
Chapter III: The Narratives and Practices of Italian Colonialism in Libya
3.1 Oltremare: Construction of Space and History...........................................................30
3.2 Italy, Libya, and the Historical Mediterranean............................................................32
3.3 Demographics, Racialization, and Italian National Identity........................................37
Conclusion: The Mediterranean Today.........................................................................................40
Bibliography..................................................................................................................................43
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MAPS
Map 1: Geographic Vicinity of Italy and
Libya
Map 2: Relative geographic vicinity of
Libya to Italy, as compared to Italy’s other
colonies (circa 1931)
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Map 3: Libya’s Three Administrative
Provinces: Tripolitania, Cyrenaica, and
Fezzan; Tripolitania was the Italians’
initial conquest point
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INTRODUCTION
Imagined Proximities between Italy and Libya in the Early-Twentieth Century
Colonial rationalizations most often emphasize differences between colonizer and
colonized in order to make acts of racial, cultural, social, and economic violence tolerable and
justified. Italian nationalist political rhetoric regarding a colonial possession of Libya did not
follow this typical imperial construction. Instead, the political discourse that preceded Italy’s
1911 invasion of Tripolitania––the northwestern coast region of present-day Libya and at the
time, a province of the Ottoman Empire––emphasized affinities between the two in a way that
contrasted other forms of European colonialisms.
Throughout this thesis, I will use the word “rhetoric” to refer to political discourse that
aims for a specific end using misleading or hyperbolic speech. I argue that this pro-war speech
justified Italian imperial possession of Tripolitania by using a new form of aggressive
nationalism, Italian emigration patterns, and historical and geographic narratives to shape an
imagined closeness between Libya and Italy. This closeness was then interpreted to imply a
natural colonial relationship between the two.
***
Following formal unification in 1871, Italy came to resemble territorially the Italy that we
know today. The majority of the Italian people, however, did not know yet what it meant to be
“Italian,” nor what their new responsibilities would be as members of a greater national body.
Italy was still regionalized: people spoke dialects that were unintelligible outside of their own
family paesi (small towns); across the Peninsula people grew up in varied economic situations,
and made their livelihoods in different ways according to the region in which they lived. Thus
the concept of unified nationhood was foreign to the majority of Italians in 1871. Massimo
D’Azeglio’s quote “We have made Italy, now we must make Italians” is famous because it
resonated following a unification that was political and geographical but not yet cultural. His
statement speaks directly to the idea of a national identity having to be built, shaped, and
molded.
Nationalist, elite Italian intellectuals in the first decade of the twentieth century were
some of the initial critics of united Italy’s first political system. They condemned the liberal
parliamentary government for failing to instill a national consciousness among Italians. These
elites saw nationalism as the necessary force to make Italy a viable competitor in a modernizing
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world. In literary publications, they put forth new conceptions of an aggressive Italianità,1 based
in imperial expansion and colonization. In the early 1900s, Libya became the territory which
they sought to put under Italian domain.
Imperial nationalists saw certain social phenomena occurring within Italy as disruptive to
the nationalizing process. During the end of the nineteenth century and the first fifteen years of
the twentieth century, Italians were emigrating en mass. This was largely occurring among the
lower classes. Italian elites with nationalist sentiment saw this exodus as detrimental to forming a
cohesive, nationally-minded Italian population. Such mass emigration following unification
prompted them to question the effectiveness of united Italy’s ability to provide for its people. As
a high immigrant-sending country and a weak colonizing power, Italy occupied a transitional,
liminal space as a nation within the European great power milieu. The tension between Italy as a
new nation, a desirous colonial power, and a high immigrant-sending country complicated its
international position between 1900 and 1912.
The Italian rhetoric for war in Tripolitania drew strength from the geographic and
historical proximity of Italy and Libya. The focus was on closeness rather than utter difference
between the colonial power and the colonized subject. Tripolitania derived its name from Tripoli,
the Libyan port city which many inhabitants and conquerors have occupied since the seventh
century BC. Throughout this period, Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Muslims,
Ottoman Turks, and, in 1912, Italians rooted themselves within Libyan territory. The ancient
Romans, modern Italians’ forebears, had established their empire along the coast of North Africa
in the second century AD. Italian nationalists in the early 1900s weaved this Roman presence
into a discourse of ancient connection between Libya and of the Italian Peninsula. This rhetoric
attempted to justify another Italianate colonization of Libya, combining Italian nationalist
ideology, historical connections, and political expediency.
By drawing connections through the ancient relationships of North African and Italianate
peoples, Italian advocates for colonies in Tripolitania excited a war-weary Italian populace for
another colonial war. Menelik II’s triumph over the invading Italian army at Adwa, Ethiopia in
1896 was the most significant European colonial defeat in the nineteenth century, and
embarrassed Italian nationalist elites. They perceived this loss as demonstrative of Italy’s
1
Italianità is the set of cultural and historical features that characterize the psychology of Italians. It is thus also
related to the cultural aspect of national identity. Corriere della Sera, “Dizionario di Italiano,”
http://dizionari.corriere.it/dizionario_italiano/I/italianita.shtml.
8
national incompetence. Losing to an African army in a colonial campaign flipped the narrative of
European conquest in African territories. Italian nationalists believed that a victory in
Tripolitania would redeem this earlier colonial loss. Italy’s desire for Libya as a colony thus
reflected its dual intentions and dual project formations––at home and abroad––with the 1911
declaration of war against the Ottoman rulers of Libya.
Imperial nationalists sought to “make Italians” by bringing together the divided Italian
population spiritually through the common event of colonial war. A war outside of Italian
borders would provide the opportunity for a coalesced, national consciousness across domestic
cultural divides to form. Nation-state identity formation through imperial endeavors was not
unique to Italy. In the case of England, ‘English’ identity derived from the ideological forces that
were prominent in the sixteenth to twentieth centuries, one of which was imperialism.2 The
English defined themselves through the presence of their empire, demonstrating how the
formation of colonies abroad cements an identity at home. Empire and nationalism converge by
way of imperial morality, the ‘civilizing mission,’ that defines an imperial actor’s values. Shared
morals and imperial purpose contribute to consolidating an idea of shared national identity.3
Nations themselves emerge as a result of a dominant power’s conquest over nearby
territories. As Krishan Kumar writes: “‘France’ and ‘Spain’ were the product of the more or less
forcible integration by these monarchs of neighboring lands and peoples, many of them differing
considerably from the institutions and culture of the dominant groups.”4 Italy as a modern nation,
too, came about from the aggression of the Piedmontese state over neighboring states on the
Italian peninsula that had been previously independent.
The nation-state’s highly defined geographic boundaries imply the existence of extranational territory. This territory can then be subjugated under or incorporated into the imperially
ambitious nation state. Italian unification enabled this bounded geographic entity to occur, and
thus, for colonial ambitions to spread outward from Italy’s new national boundaries. Libya, and
what it could provide as a colony, became significant to Italian identity itself. The multiple
aspects that particularized Libya as an Italian colony had direct connections and effects on the
Italian nation.
2
Krishan Kumar, "Empire and English nationalism*," Nations and Nationalism 12, no.1 (2006): 10.
Kumar, "Empire and English nationalism*," 4.
4
Kumar, "Empire and English nationalism*," 4.
3
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Through its effort to colonize Libya, unified Italy attempted to reach over to foreign soil
in order to solidify its nationhood. The political rhetoric supporting a potential Italian-Libyan
colonial relationship put forth a span of geographic space (the space between Italy and Libya)
and time (using themes of antiquity to justify modern events). The dichotomies of conquerorsettler, colonizer-colonized (and who occupied each role), metropole-colony were played off
each other across the geographic space of the Mediterranean. The language of connectedness
between Italy and Libya was a defining feature in how Italy understood what would eventually
become its colonial project in Libya.
This thesis examines the multiple factors that allowed for the emergence of a particular
nationalist political rhetoric in Italy. The discourse rallied for an imperial invasion of Tripolitania
in 1911 using the logic that conquering Libya was beneficial to the national needs of Italian
society. Thus, Libya became a major part of Italy’s increasingly robust national campaign based
in war and strength. This approach created a connection between Libya and Italy that derived
from their geographic and historical similarities. Such rhetoric was only applicable to Libya,
revealing how this particular colonial relationship was unique among others.
Chapter 1 argues that the mobilization for an invasion of Tripolitania in 1911 was an
important platform for Italian intellectuals who wanted to create a new, vigorous Italian
nationalism. Chapter 2 examines how Italian nationalists attempted to construct Libya as a settler
colony for Italian emigrants. Chapter 3 argues that the political language of imagined closeness
between Libya and Italy––deriving from past Roman conquest in North Africa––was
nationalists’ justification for rightful Italian interference in Libya. These aspects demonstrate the
place that Libya held within the Italian program to redefine and fortify Italy’s own national
identity.
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CHAPTER I
The Italian Conquest of Libya as an Expression of a “New Nationalism”
1900–1911: Imperial Nationalism Formation
An understanding of the changing Italian nationalism in the decade preceding Italy’s
1911 invasion of Tripolitania helps clarify the place that Libya held within the new roadmap for
Italian national greatness. Between 1900 and 1911, a transition in the narratives and practices of
Italian nationalism emerged. The Italian state was still in its infancy in 1900. It had been unified
politically during the Risorgimento, which began with the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815
and concluded, at least formally, with the capture of Rome and the Papal States in 1871. This
was the first political movement of the modern era that sought to unify the Peninsula.5
Prior to the Risorgimento, Italy had functioned as a cluster of small city-states that
interacted with each other as separate polities. Italy developed as highly regionalized, and this
geographic segmentation also translated to cultural, linguistic, and attitudinal differences. Thus,
the nineteenth-century unification also had to find a way for individuals to subordinate their
regional affiliations to an all-encompassing national one.
As Italy entered the new century, it drew increasingly from the general European zeitgeist
of nationalism. Looking to this political ideology, Italy tried to confront its domestic concerns
and define its place in a changing international structure. In the period between 1900 and 1911,
intellectuals fashioned new, modern narratives of Italian national identity, rather than drawing on
past narratives of Italian greatness. This reflected an intrinsic contradiction in national identities:
that they are objectively modern constructions and subjectively conceived as if nations existed
since time immemorial.6 Nationalism propagates a series of unifying ideas that make a group of
people feel a part of the same geographical entity, sectioned off from other nations by borders.
Italy’s nationalist thought in the years from 1900 to 1911 revealed how nationalism was
both a tool and a consequence of the political realities of the day. Italian nationalism served as a
means for the Italian state and intellectuals to galvanize Italians into seeing themselves as a more
united whole. This would in turn make Italy more comparable to the other powerful, modern
states of the day. Modernization and industrialization created heavy uncertainty in the early
5
Emilio Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity: Nationalism, Futurism, and Fascism, (Westpoint, CT: Praeger
Publishers, 2003), ix.
6
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, (London: Verso, 1983), 5.
11
1900s, and Italy, too, felt the need to change according to a new world standard. Italian
nationalism in the first eleven years of the twentieth century was closely related to the
modernizations that were occurring in Italy, and around the world.7
Vigorous Italian industrialization in the years leading up to World War I gave Italy a
sense of prowess that contributed to its national spirit. Industry was based in northern Italy, with
Milano, Torino, and Genova forming the “industrial triangle.” Therefore, an Italian national
consciousness largely based on industrialization was an idea that excluded vast portions of
Italy’s agricultural economy, located predominantly in the South.8 Many of the national
movement’s thinkers worked in the north of Italy. Florence was a hub of the changing,
increasingly imperialist-leaning Italian nationalist thought. Nationalists looked to northern-based
industrialization as the modern fix to making Italy’s economy and national strength comparable
to those of nearby European nations.
In the early 1900s, these Florence-based Italian intellectuals experimented in new ways to
bring the Italian population as a nation together psychologically and culturally. They sought to
shape their country’s international presence in an aggressive, imperialist way. These nationalist
elites founded literary publications in the first decade of the twentieth century that encouraged
new visions of Italian nationalist identity.
Italy’s first nationalist literary publication, Il Regno (“The Kingdom”), founded in
Florence in 1903 by Enrico Corradini, put forth more militant visions of nationalism to Italian
elite audiences. Corradini was a right-wing, upper-class, Italian nationalist active at the turn of
the century and even into the Fascist period. His ideas were influential in shifting elite opinion to
more bellicose forms of Italian national political ideology. Corradini had initially tried to use
classical, medieval, and renaissance Italian achievements as a common factor to mentally unite
Italians, but soon realized that these historical currents had little relevance to modern Italians.9
Thus, modernity and industrialization became tantamount to the construction of Italian
nationalism between 1900 and 1911 with Corradini and Il Regno at its fore.
The idea of new nationalism put forth by the weekly publication called for a divergence
from liberalism. Il Regno’s proponents wanted to create an Italian nationalism as their first
7
Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, 1.
Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, ix.
9
Alexander J. De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association and the Rise of Fascism in Italy (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1978), 5.
8
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objective, rather than as a consequence of other political goals.10 Intellectuals advocating for this
new nationalism believed that liberalism had not effectively consolidated Italy as a nation. It
lacked the force to compel Italians to relinquish their old regional identities for a national one. Il
Regno advocated dynamism, vigor, and vitality as central to establishing an Italian nationalism
suitable to the modern era.11
The Intersection between Nationalism and Imperialism
In the early-twentieth century, Italy’s national myth shifted from one centered on
nationality and liberty to one that centered on a myth of expansion and power.12 Corradini, while
writing with Il Regno, wrote, “We are not particularly expansionist, our glory would be to create
in the country [Italy] a strong expansionist current.”13 Colonial expansionist projects required
national cooperation, so through imperialism, nationalists hoped to establish a stronger Italian
identity. In this way, nationalism and imperialism are related. Minority nations can use
imperialism as a means to bolster their national mission.14 Using imperialist aims to strengthen
nationalist articulation is what Italy practiced with its colonial endeavor in Libya.
Modernization of European nations was also associated with a pursuit of overseas
colonies. This made Libya––an extra-national entity––a central part to how Italian nationalists
wanted to mold popular identity. Giuseppe Prezzolini, the founder and editor of the earlytwentieth century publication La Voce, noted that the war in Tripolitania gave Italians a new
national conscience, and showed other European nations this change in Italian mentality.15
Giovanni Papini, another elite essayist who worked with Corradini on Il Regno and with
Prezzolini on La Voce wrote: “For nationalist and political reasons it can be worth waging a
war...In the Europe of 1911, if Italy wanted to continue to be, the undertaking of Tripoli was
10
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 2.
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 4.
12
Emilio Gentile, La Grande Italia: The Myth of the Nation in the Twentieth Century, Translated by Suzanne
Dingee and Jennifer Pudney, (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2009), 69.
13
Enrico Corradini, cited in Francesco Perfetti, Il movimento nazionalista in Italia (1903-1914) (Rome: Bonacci
Editore,1984), 38. All translations of primary sources from the Italian to English are my own, unless otherwise
noted.
14
Kevin Colclough, “Imperial Nationalism: Nationalism and the Empire in late nineteenth century Scotland and
British Canada” (PhD diss., The University of Edinburgh, 2006), 1.
15
Gentile, La Grande Italia, 67.
11
13
necessary.”16 Thus, Italy’s fate became imagined as intimately connected to a campaign in
Tripolitania.
The concept of national identity based in imperial expansion also emerges in Alfredo
Oriani’s writings in the first decade of the twentieth century. Oriani17 was a political writer,
journalist, poet, and admirer of the Risorgimento’s liberal values and political heroes. After his
death, Italian fascists in the 1920s credited him with establishing proto-fascist thought in Italy.
They misinterpreted his intentions, however, and radicalized his writings to fit their ideological
plans. In his 1908 work, La rivolta ideale, Oriani described the mentality of the twentieth century
that Italy confronted: “The value of a people has to measure itself not from the domestic, but
from the external.”18 Thus, the ‘nation’ was defined by what was outside of it, and where it
exerted power beyond its own national borders.
The period from 1903 to 1912, bookended by the publication of the first issue of Il Regno
and the acquisition of Tripolitania from the Ottomans, Italian nationalism emerged as a newly
profound political force. It assumed a central position in Italian political life rather than on the
fringes in intellectual circles alone. In 1910, national sentiment led to the creation of the first
nationalist political organization, the Italian Nationalist Association (Associazione Nazionalista
Italiana). Envisioned by Italian intellectual nationalists such as Corradini, the Nationalist
Association was composed of different ideological groups with similar aims of bolstering Italian
national expression. Most sought a departure from the current liberal, parliamentary political
system.19
The Nationalist Association existed to encourage Italian political parties to take up more
imperial nationalist platforms. Irredentists (advocates of the annexation of Italian-speaking
territories within Austria), patriots, nationalists, and imperialists were all represented in the
Association. The Italian Nationalist Association’s formation one year before Italy’s 1911
invasion of Libya is significant. It highlights how the increased formalization of militant national
sentiment in Italy helped to galvanize enough support for another colonial war, even after the
Adwa embarrassment.
16
Giovanni Papini, “La guerra vittoriosa,” cited in Antonio Schiavulli, ed., La guerra lirica: il dibattito dei letterari
italiani sull’impresa di Libia (1911-1912), (Ravenna: Giorgio Pozzi Editore, 2009), 104.
17
Alfredo Oriani was born in 1852 and died in 1909.
18
Alfredo Oriani, La Rivolta Ideale, (Bologna: A. Gherardi, 1912),
http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b266360;view=1up;seq=268 (accessed March 30, 2014), 254.
19
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 23.
14
With its imperialist invasion of Tripolitania in 1911, Italy carried out the actions of a
great power often without having the resources to support its great-power policies.20 Italian
nationalist thought in the first eleven years of the twentieth century was sometimes liberal and
sometimes authoritarian.21 The invasion of Tripolitania in 1911 is an example of a foreign policy
that that contradicted to the liberal constitutional values that the Italian nation-state was founded
upon. Italy’s invasion of Tripolitania was the transformation of Nationalists’ political rhetoric of
expansion into military action.
Italian Self-Consciousness as a Nation
The Italian state was self-conscious of its relative backwardness compared to its fellow
European states. In 1911, Italy’s governmental expenditure on education per capita was low
compared to the relative GDP spent on education in other developed countries in Europe.22
Italy’s disorganization was another source of embarrassment. One million out of 26 million
hectares of agricultural land were swamplands at the time of unification.23 By 1900, continuing
even until the 1920s, most Italians were peasant laborers.24 Also in 1900, the rate of illiteracy in
southern Italy was 70 percent, which was ten times the rate of England, France, or Germany.25
Italian bourgeoisie and government officials felt this self-consciousness of their country’s slow
development compared to those of other European nations in particular. The stratified sentiment
within Italian society demonstrated the complexity of conceptions of Italian national identity at
the time.
National consciousness was not a subject that crossed the minds of the majority of the
Italian population. In L’intellegenza della folla (1903), Scipio Sighele, an Italian sociologist who
studied crowd psychology, commented that Italy’s inferiority to Germany lay in the fact that
Germans possessed a nationalist spirit, a “pride of race,” that trumped the pride of individuals.
Sighele was a nationalist and irredentist, and thus deeply aware of political events occurring in
Italy related to national identity and Italian national expression on a global stage. He wrote:
20
Adrian Lyttelton, Liberal and Fascist Italy 1900-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 83.
Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, x.
22
Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy 1860-1990 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 169.
23
Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, 49.
24
Zygmunt G. Baranski and Rebecca J. West, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22.
25
Digital History, “Italian Immigration,” http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/historyonline/italian_immigration.cfm.
21
15
If, for example, all Italians felt towards the nation that affection,
that responsibility, that pride that milanesi [people of Milan] feel
for their city, Italy would be prosperous and strong like Milan is
prosperous and strong. The campanilistic26 pride of milanesi can be
at times perhaps hostile...but without doubt it is admirable and
useful...Transform and sublimate, if I may say so, this regional
sentiment into a national sentiment, make sure that all Italians are
psychologically milanesi, not only towards their city or their
region, but especially towards the nation––that, is the basis of the
nationalist program.27
Sighele is not calling for an elimination of Italian regional sentiment, rather, he is seeking to
harness these competitive, almost hostile, regionalistic spirits into an equally intense, but
encompassing national spirit. A collective national spirit was the sign of a modern, powerful
nation-state, and until Italy also felt this national identity, the country would remain embarrassed
about its nominal inclusion within the group of European nation-states, without actual internal
cooperation.
Italy’s nationalist movement functioned similarly to the identity formation movements of
other countries in that it was a product of the intelligentsia elite class.28 Thus, though the intent
of the nationalist movement was to instill a sense of Italianità into the Italian people––rich and
poor––the movement was fueled by bourgeois Italians. The nationalist movement’s drive by the
bourgeoisie, based in the wealthier northern region of Tuscany, also widened the gap between
the North and the South of Italy itself. The Italian elite saw many of their fellow countrymen as
boorish, indicative of the vast divides that still existed in the Italian population in the earlytwentieth century.29
These divides, not only economic in nature, also stemmed from the completely different
lifestyles that urban Italian elite and rural farmers experienced. Upon a political unification
driven by the idea of the nation-state, Italy still remained a predominantly agrarian society, with
60 per cent of the Italian population deriving their wealth from the land in 1871.30 It was these
agricultural societies, located predominantly in the South, that were most tied to tradition and
26
Campanilismo is a specifically Italian phenomenon that describes the pride for one’s own city. The word derives
from campanile, which means “bell tower.” Campanilismo is a devotion to one’s immediate region and place of
birth. Campanilistic pride is demarcated by the boundaries of where the town’s bell is heard from its tower, and is a
hindrance to forming a larger, national identity because it promotes competition between individual Italian cities.
27
Scipio Sighele, cited in Perfetti, Il movimento nazionalista in Italia, 68.
28
Gentile, The Struggle for Modernity, 3.
29
Ruth Ben-Ghiat and Mia Fuller, Italian Colonialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3.
30
Martin Clark, Modern Italy 1871-1995 (New York: Addison Wesley Longman Limited, 1984), 15.
16
most regionalistic, the very qualities that made the formation of an Italian national identity so
difficult. Francesco Crispi, a major Risorgimento player, commented on the difficulties of Italian
nationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the Risorgimento, Crispi helped
put Sicily under Piedmontese leadership in 1860. He served as unified Italy’s prime minister
from 1887 to 1891, and then from 1893 to 1886. Crispi oversaw the Italian invasion of Adwa,
Ethiopia, and bore massive popular outrage after Italy’s ultimate defeat. In 1901, he wrote:
Italian unity was the result of a mere aggression of seven states,
and not of a revolution. Apart from the wars of 1859 and 1866,
fought to drive out the enemy princes, there was no violence, no
change. The people remained as they were prior to the constitution
of the new kingdom, with their former practices and their faults,
tenaciously holding on to their local traditions, with no fusion or
mingling of races...without any hope of nationalizing those
characteristics that act to keep the peoples of the peninsula
divided.31
Crispi’s statement encapsulates how Italy’s top-down unification process made it all the more
difficult, if not inconceivable, for Italians to see themselves as part of one nation. Crispi implies
that the formation of a national identity requires a degree of relinquishing past traditions, and
being open to assuming new national customs. The idea that a nation is a created entity appears
in his writing. The forced placement of Piedmontese institutions onto the previously separate
kingdoms of the South gave way to southern in-fighting as each formerly independent polity
grappled with its own subordinated status and new structures.32 The new vision of nationalism
initiated by bourgeoisie seeking to solidify Italian national identity and unity through war in
Libya in the early-twentieth century was a response to this perceived shortcoming of Italian
national unification.
Italian Self-Consciousness as Colonizers
This sense of national inferiority also emerged within conversations surrounding Italian
colonialism. Italians’ embarrassment regarding their nation’s defeat in Ethiopia in 1896 situated
Libya as a means to redeem the Liberal government’s past imperial failure. Italian nationalists of
31
Christopher Duggan, The Force of Destiny (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2008), 345. Translation from the
Italian to English by Christopher Duggan.
32
Mark Choate, "Tunisia, Contested: Italian Nationalism, French Imperial Rule, and Migration in the Mediterranean
Basin," California Italian Studies 1, no.1 (2010): 3.
17
the early 1900s characterized their ideology as capable of securing a colonial victory for Italy in
an African territory. Thus, the idea of ‘Libya’ held potential that directly related to bolstering
Italy’s international prestige. By securing Libya as part of an Italian colonial empire, Italy sought
both to prove to the rest of the world, and to itself, its specifically national might. Through this
act of purposeful exhibition, however, Italians in political and social spheres constantly
questioned whether this Italian strength even existed. The work of exhibition was trifold: Italy’s
desire to demonstrate its colonial dominance to the indigenous inhabitants in Libya, to project an
image of power to European countries––still new to the idea of a unified Italian nation––and to
Italians themselves, fraught with internal prejudices and persistent regionalisms.
In the last three decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth
century, Italian elites’ self-consciousness of their country also extended to an embarrassment of
Italians themselves. The civilizing mission that Italy used to justify its colonial expansion into
Libya, for example, was as much directed towards Italian colonizers as it was towards colonized
Libyans.33 The concept of the civilizing mission for Italy itself was also employed by foreign
commentators. The Nation, a British newspaper, wrote in 1911, “a nation which numbers
Calabria and Apulia amongst its provinces need not go abroad for a civilizing mission. Italy has
an Africa at home.”34 This comment not only disparages all of Italy from the British perspective,
but also brings out the idea of an internal “civilization divide” between northern and southern
Italy. It is also denigrating to Africa, and is a slur that suggests that Africans are not civilized.
By stating that Italy need not wage wars abroad to carry out a European civilizing
mission, The Nation configured Italy as a space that could potentially be colonized. This kind of
thinking among European imperial states in the early-twentieth century was usually directed
towards non-European territories, and following the Berlin Conference in 1885, towards African
territories in particular. Thus in this excerpt of the British imagination, Italy––in particular
southern Italy––drew an increased likeness and similarity to African territory. It demonstrates
that even non-Italian audiences viewed Italy as divided based in the relative industrial
development across geographical lines.
The geographic proximity between Italy and North Africa created further contradictions
in Italy’s relationship with Africa, in particular, Libya. From a geographic standpoint, Italy’s
33
34
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 3.
Choate, "Tunisia, Contested," 3.
18
position––not in the center of Western Europe, but jutting straight down into the Mediterranean–
–was another subject of self-consciousness for the Italians conceptualizing Italian national
identity.35 Italy’s proximity to North Africa was a source of self-consciousness because it
diminished the European character that Italy sought to live up to: the geographic gap between the
dichotomized “us” and “them” was very small. Arguments for Italian supremacy over its North
African neighbors to the south was more difficult to stand by using geographic ideology because
parts of Italy were closer to Tunisia than to France. This brought up the question of where
exactly Italy belonged geographically.
Italy’s geography was, however, also strategically close to Africa. This facilitated the
colonizing aims of Italy and other European colonizing powers by providing an entrance into the
African continent.36 Even earlier, at the time of Italian unification, Britain helped maneuver
Italian politics to favor a unified Italian peninsula. A unified Italy would enable British interests
in Italy’s favorable geographic position, and would foster a potential check to French power.37
Italians did not perceive the affinity between Italy and Libya as unilaterally negative.
Italian political rhetoric that called for war in Tripolitania implied an increased psychological
closeness between Italy and Libya. As explained by imperial nationalists, the close association
derived from both geographic and historical proximities. The geographic vicinity between the
two territories was a means to explain Italy’s inherent need to intervene in the North African
region, and more intimately, for Libya’s spiritual subsumption into the peninsula through
nationalist rhetoric. In his article “The First Shared Endeavor of the New Italy” in the journal
For and Against the War of Tripoli, Arturo Labriola, syndicalist and socialist politician, evinced
in 1912 the contemporary vision of the connectedness between Italy and North Africa:
120 years back the abbot Galiani [eighteenth-century Italian
economic thinker] said that the reign of the Two Sicilies would not
have been able to exist without Tunisians. The Beylicato is lost;
but Tripoli, at least militarily, can compensate for it in certain
ways. A port of Tripolitania transformed into a well-equipped
35
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 3.
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 2.
37
Manilo Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood: The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity, trans. Brian
Knowlton (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 23.
36
19
military port; a dense Italian colony established on the northern
coast of Africa.38
Labriola utilizes a historical connection between Italy and North Africa as proof of the potential
for rebirth in relations, and with Libya at the core of this relationship. Trying to revive a past
Italian greatness that owed much of its success to its contact with its Tunisian neighbors to the
south, Labriola implies that contemporary Italy of the twentieth century can also be great if it
establishes another relationship with North Africa. In addition, by championing an Italian settler
colony in Tripolitania, he pushed Italy’s national boundaries past the natural boundaries of the
European peninsula to encompassing Libya as well. The characteristic closeness between North
Africa and Italy of the past would continue into the twentieth century, this time through Italian
imperialism and settlement in the region.
This fascination with the geographic vicinity between Italy and Libya also extended into
the Fascist period. The children’s book, Le Colonie Italiane: Libro per i Ragazzi, published in
1931 by l’Instituto Coloniale Fascista, is a manual and a piece of fascist propaganda that
explains Italy’s colonies abroad to Italian children. The book reads: “The fastest airplane services
connect Tripolitania to our peninsula, and, leaving from Ostia, near Rome, in the morning,
allows the arrival at Tripoli the same day, after about nine hours of flight!”39 The vicinity is a
source of eager surprise and excitement; the physicalities of two different spaces, one European,
one African, are nonetheless tied by their immovable locations.
Thus, the geographic closeness between Italy and Libya became helpful for Italians to
conceptualize Libya because Libya was portrayed in relation to Italy. Close geography made a
familiar reference point for Italians to imagine Libya. A description of the geographic proximity
appears again in Le Colonie Italiane: “From Siracusa Tuesday evening one arrives at Tripoli
Thursday morning: that is, it takes less than a day and a half.”40 Italian rhetoric emphasized the
vicinity and ease by which to arrive in Tripolitania in order to imply that Libya was naturally
situated as a territory for Italian expansion.
Even as a piece of colonial propaganda literature, an Italian uncertainty of their own
colonial practices is evident in Le Colonie Italiane. It reads: “Certain people today still believe
38
Arturo Labriola, “La prima impresa collettiva della nuova Italia” (28 September 1911), in Pro e contro la guerra
di Tripoli, discussioni nel campo rivoluzionario (Napoli: Società editrice Partenopea, 1912), 52.
39
Le Colonie Italiane: Libro per i Ragazzi (Rome: Instituto Coloniale Fascista, 1931), 16.
40
Le Colonie Italiane, 16.
20
that there is a lot of sand in our colonies, that much of the land is infertile, but they are
mistaken.”41 A self-conscious sentiment and an assertive effort to debunk the popular conception
that Italy’s colonies were resource-poor emerges. With this statement, l’Instituto Coloniale
Fascista reveals the complex insecurities about Italy’s colonies that the national organization
grappled with. This particular piece of Italian colonial propaganda falls short of embodying the
central device of propaganda: the exposition of the most desirable aspects of a political ideology,
regime, or event. There is a double action to both impress and explain, which ultimately reveals
the self-consciousness of fascist Italian colonizers.
41
Le Colonie Italiane, 4.
21
CHAPTER II
Emigration, Italian Nationalism, and Colonialism in North Africa
Italy in the World: Emigration and Rhetorical Imperialism
Italy’s status as a major source of worldwide emigration in the earliest years of the
twentieth century complicated its desire to become a colonial power in Libya. High levels of
emigration that resulted from a booming population surge in the early 1900s, as well as
administrative changes following unification, signaled that Italians found it more feasible to
support themselves abroad rather than within their own country. Nationalists found the inability
of the Italian state to retain its citizens to be a sign of its incompetence. Libya became a central
focus in nationalists’ vision to amend national failure by demonstrating Italian military strength,
and using the colony of Libya as a settlement site for working-class Italian migrants. Others,
however, saw mass Italian emigration as a means by which to exert Italian influence globally
through the migrations of Italians beyond their national borders. These multiple interpretations of
the relationship between Italian national identity, emigration, and colonialism influenced the
discourses that urged for a war in Tripolitania in 1911.
Between 1880 and 1915, thirteen million Italians emigrated for North and South
America, other European countries, and countries along the Mediterranean, both in southern
Europe and in the coastal areas of Africa.42 Indeed, the 1911 Italian census indicated that more
than one-sixth of the Italian population was living abroad as emigrants, indicating the vast
exodus of Italians from their nation-state.43 Emigration levels remained high as late as 1930.44
The increasing rates of unemployment and declining living standards propelled post-unification
emigration.45 Emigration was enabled by the modern technologies that allowed people to become
more mobile. Thus, it was a consequence of its time, and a flowing of ideas across borders
through people.
Italian nationalist intellectuals wanted to conceive of ways to redirect such high levels of
emigration in a way that put the state in charge of migration patterns. This was a way to exert
national authority over an already existent social phenomenon. As early as the 1880s, elites in
42
Mark Choate, Emigrant Nation: The Making of Italy Abroad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008),
1.
43
Choate, Emigrant Nation, 4.
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 3-4.
45
Duggan, Force of Destiny, 264.
44
22
Naples were encouraging the Società Geografia Italiana to make colonies in North and East
Africa as markets for both Italian commerce and as destination points for the particularly high
emigrant-sending South.46 European colonial advocates such as the economist Pierre Paul LeroyBeaulieu had also already distinguished between different types of colonialisms. He made the
categories of “population colonies,” those with white settlers, “exploitation colonies,” and
“mixed colonies,” such as French Algeria.47 These potential Italian colonies in North and East
Africa would fall along the lines of “mixed colonies,” where Italian settlers would interact and
produce with indigenous populations.
Italian nationalists who sympathized with new visions of increasingly militant, antiliberal nationalism interpreted regular emigration from Italy as a disruptive reality when
attempting to form a sense of national cohesiveness. They also viewed it as harmful to Italy’s
nation building process. Enrico Corradini, too, perceived Italy as weaker than other European
nations because of such high levels of Italian emigration.48 In his view, emigration resulted from
the state’s inability to provide enough support and livelihood to its citizens.
Emigration was, however, also a positive means for Italy to contain its domestic social
problems. It served as a “safety valve,” allowing tensions between peasant and landlord classes
within Italy to diffuse. When poor Italians, especially laborers and farmers in the South, had the
ability to emigrate, potential social unrest between wealthy landowners and poor laborers abated,
and kept the social order at home with the wealthy classes at top.49
Emigration was also a way for Italy to extend its national influence abroad through the
establishment of Italian communities outside of Italy. In 1908, the political writer and poet,
Alfredo Oriani, offered the idea that Italy could “expand and spiritually conquer through
emigration...and war.”50 There were already large and established Italian ethnic communities
living outside of Italy. In the French colony of Tunisia, for example, the largest European
immigrant population was Italian by the late 1870s. Because of the already significant population
of Italians living there and its vicinity to Italy, Tunisia was seen as Italy’s stolen colony within
the Italian nationalist imagination. At the fiftieth anniversary of unification, nationalists wanted
46
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 18.
Mark I. Choate, “New Dynamics and New Imperial Powers, 1876-1905,” in The Routledge History of Western
Empires, ed. Robert Aldrich et al. (Abington: Routledge, 2014), 123.
48
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 17-18.
49
Ronald S. Cunsolo, "Italian Emigration and Its Effect on the Rise of Nationalism," Italian Americana 12, no.1
(1993): 62.
50
Gentile, La Grande Italia, 62. Translation from the Italian to English by Suzanne Dingee and Jennifer Pudney.
47
23
to claim Libya before France invaded another North African territory that was ‘rightfully’ Italian
based on close geographies and historic communications.
The elite Italian Tunisian community provided a push to officials within the Italian
government for Italy to expand into the Mediterranean through traditional, land-appropriating
colonialism, as opposed to “colonization” through Italian settler communities globally.51 These
wealthy Italian Tunisians wanted to encourage Italian migration specifically to Italian colonies in
North Africa, by way of Libya. Both potential plans––of emigration or expropriative
colonialism––sought to bolster Italian international presence. Colonization of Libya was seen as
the plan that would exert Italian national authority in a more effective and visible way. In
addition, the expansion in North Africa was a means for Italians to continue influencing the
region, but this time as a colonial power. Italian emigrant communities exerted a strong social
influence in Tunisia that the French eventually limited through laws that restricted Italian-only
schools.52 This kind of discrimination that Italians faced under foreign laws that did not protect
their interests was what Corradini abhorred most about Italian emigration. Thus he advocated the
establishment of Italian colonial rule in Libya so that Italians could live and work under their
own nation’s administration.
Once Italy did begin sending migrants to Italian colonies, foreign commentators noticed
this expansion of Italy abroad through settler communities. H. R. Tate, a British colonial official
who worked as the District Commissioner of Kiambu in 1909 and later, as the Provincial
Commissioner of the Kenya Province during the interwar period,53 wrote about Italian migration
to colonial Libya: “The diversion of Italian emigration from foreign countries to the Italian
colonies...was that of a determined attempt to preserve the national character of Italian
communities abroad.”54 His perspective reveals both the Italian desire to begin vigorous
population of their new colonies (including Libya) and also demonstrates the idea of replicating
national sentiment in tightly knit Italian communities outside of Italy’s national borders.
There were, however, benefits to Italian emigration to non-Italian territories. In contrast
to military colonialism, Italian emigrant communities abroad provided a cheaper and less violent
51
Choate, "Tunisia, Contested," 9.
Choate, "Tunisia, Contested," 8-9.
53
James Karanja, The Missionary Movement in Colonial Kenya: The Foundation of Africa Inland Church,
(Göttingen: Cuvillier Verlag, 2009), 47.
54
H.R. Tate, "The Italian Colonial Empire," Journal of the Royal African Society 40, no.159 (1941): 147.
52
24
mode of exerting unified Italy’s position within the international structure.55 Indeed, in 1915, The
New York Times described Italian immigrants in New York City as “intensely patriotic Latins.”56
This characterization of Italians as “patriotic” signifies that, at least from an American
perspective, Italian communities in the United States seemed to organize around a clear-cut
national identity. The article was written after Italy entered World War I on the side of the Allies.
The ‘Italian patriotism’ of Italian communities abroad that were not necessarily settler colonies,
stimulated by their country of origin’s involvement in warfare, also evinced the power that war
had in strengthening Italian national identity. This was a conscious objective of war-hungry
nationalists in Italy, and they supported Italy’s entrance into World War I for the reason of
having another opportunity to demonstrate Italian military bravado after the 1911 victory over
the Ottomans in Tripolitania.
Italians who immigrated to other countries around the world also felt a more potent
national identity while abroad. Those who returned to Italy came back with an intensified sense
of Italian nationalism.57 Risorgimento enthusiasts in the mid-nineteenth century encouraged
countries in North Africa, the Americas, and France that received many immigrants from the
Italian Peninsula to categorize these migrants in national terms.58 Census identity listings
included the category “Italian,” which prompted migrants to privilege their national identity to
their regional ones. This phenomenon of national identity realization through emigration
provides evidence for the converse of what Italian nationalists were arguing in Italy. Rather than
adulterating the Italian nation-building project, emigration prompted Italians to see themselves as
Italian nationals.
Enrico Corradini and Emigration as Demographic Imperialism
Though Corradini viewed emigration from Italy to foreign countries as a form of national
dilution and Italian state weakness, he approved of migration to a foreign territory under Italian
colonial jurisdiction. By incorporating emigration into his statements of support for an Italian
invasion of Tripolitania, he was able to justify Italian imperial ambitions. His comments are
biased because he spoke seeking the specific result of war in Tripolitania. The rhetoric that he
55
Choate, "Tunisia, Contested," 6.
"Italians Here Talk Nothing But War," The New York Times, May 24, 1915.
57
Choate, Emigrant Nation, 105.
58
Donna R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas, (Abingdon: UCL Press, 2000), 45.
56
25
used, however, revealed interesting aspects about the Italian colonial preparations to enter
Tripolitania. In Il nazionalismo italiano, published in 1910, he wrote:
Our Tripoli endeavor is one of the best kinds of all the endeavors
of conquest and of colonization. It is an undertaking that while is
useful to the national motives of a people [the Italian people], also
has the good fortune of being able to serve more general motives.
We have found in Africa a territory that was res nullius, as the
[Libyan] populace possesses and does not produce...We will
cultivate that territory, we will populate it, we will render it similar
to other African colonies and to regions of Europe; and in this way
our undertaking, benefitting us, will also benefit Europe.59
Corradini uses the idea of demographic colonialism––enhancing national stature through the
migration of the colonial power’s people to its colony––as a means of galvanizing rhetoric, even
though he was against Italian emigration to countries that were not under Italian command. His
contradictory appeal can be explained by his desire to see Italy exert specifically national force,
and propel this nationalism through the language of colonization through migration. The idea of
migration and emigration were phenomena that many Italians were already familiar with, and
Corradini used this migratory appeal to downplay the violent nature of colonial warfare. He also
sought to convince the Italian population that a conquest of Libya would create a space that they
too could occupy. This rhetoric attempted to make a bourgeois imperial mission relevant to poor
Italians, the segment of society most likely to emigrate and most steadfast in retaining
regionalistic affiliations.
Corradini’s idea of proletarian imperialism differentiated Italy as a potential colonial
power from existing European ones by asserting Italy did not only want to dominate Libya, but
wanted to provide an immigration outlet in which poor Italians could settle.60 This was solely to
generate support for the war on a mass level; Corradini himself was an elitist. Through this
political rhetoric, however, Italy’s domestic social weaknesses––reflected in the poor living
standards of many Italians––was incorporated into a grand imperial image. This marriage of
seeming opposites within political rhetoric reflects the particularity of the Italian desire for
Libya, as well as Italy’s specific colonial vision for Libya during this period.
59
60
Enrico Corradini, Il nazionalismo italiano, (Milan: Fratelli Traves, Editori, 1914), 177.
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 18.
26
Even before Corradini, earlier Italian colonial advocates justified their imperial ambitions
with the idea of securing territory for rising levels of Italian emigration. In 1885, the Italian
Parliament gave its approval for an invasion of Massawa, Eritrea because the expedition would
have demographic benefits to the Italian people: Italians would have the opportunity to settle
there.61 In his statement from Il nazionalismo italiano, Corradini explicitly connects the fate of
Italian nationalism with the multi-functionality of an Italian conquest of Tripolitania. His desire
for Italians to “populate” Libyan territory is significant. He draws upon a specific kind of
language that would connect Italy to its potential colony through settlement. He sees an invasion
of Tripolitania as being productive in terms of the Italian nationalist cause, demonstrating how
the nationalist motives for a war in North Africa in this period held explicit hopes in creating a
more nationally-minded Italian populace.
Corradini asserts that an Italian invasion of Libya is not only beneficial to Italy, but to
Europe as a whole as well. This statement reveals his secondary motive of proving Italy’s
importance to the European cohort. He purposefully includes Italy within Europe, underscoring a
relationship that was important to Italian nationalists of the first decade of the twentieth century.
They sought to bolster Italy’s national identity as Italian, and as a specifically European nation.
In this way, Corradini catered to the two groups that mattered most to his political agenda: his
fellow Italian nationals, and Europeans beyond the borders of Italy itself.
This preoccupancy with “what Europe thinks” directly correlated with Italy’s 1911 war
with the Ottomans for Libya as being an Italian nationalistic project. Corradini intended for the
war to fully push Italy into the ranks of a European country, making it on-par with the more
powerful states of Britain and France. Corradini’s phrase, “European civilization develops the
life of the world,”62 revealed his belief in a hierarchy of cultures with Europe at its apex. By
placing Italy within this highest subset of culture, he asserts a nationalistic thought of Italian
superiority. He thus envisioned the Italian state as part of grand series of European conquests in
North Africa and the Middle East.
61
Claudio G. Segrè, Fourth Shore: The Italian Colonization of Libya (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1974), 11.
62
Corradini, Il nazionalismo italiano, 183.
27
Libya and the Italian Emigrant Worker
The idea of Italian imperialism as driven by an overflowing of proletariats fueled the
rhetoric of Italians as “good”63 and “just” colonizers.64 Italy’s place as a weaker European power
and its poor social conditions at home also influenced the way Italians saw themselves as
colonizers. This self-characterization of Italians as kind colonizers was another means by which
they brought themselves rhetorically closer to Libyan populations. Another contradiction of the
justifications surrounding Italian colonial intervention in Libya was this message of Italian
weakness at the hands of more powerful European nations––France especially65––and the
subsequent self-absolving of violent colonial advancement into Libya.
Connected to the idea of proletarian imperialism, Corradini and Italian bourgeois
nationalists imagined Libya as a place of potential through Italian labor. They viewed Libya as a
site for the patient, industrious work of Italian peasantry, rather than for industrial technology
such as railways and steamships.66 This romantic thought also conveniently offset the reality that
Italy lacked enough funds to construct such technological infrastructure in Libya. Nationalists
thus relied on Italy’s abundance of workers to make Libya a productive investment.
Tunisia’s agricultural productivity for the French was a result of the Sicilian farmers that
migrated there for work, and Italians hoped that Libya would have similarly high production
levels from the Italian colonists who would till Libyan soil. In 1911, a writer for La Stampa
documented the contributions that Italians made to the Tunisian economy: “The workers [in
Tunisia] for urban industries and for public works came from Sicily and from the Mezzogiorno
[the Italian South]. The mining workers are almost exclusively Sardinian.”67 It is evident that
Italians dominated certain labor sectors in French Tunisia.
Following the Italian possession of Tripolitania from the Ottomans in 1912, the conquest
continued to be discussed in terms of settlement in publications even beyond the reaches of
Italian nationalists. A New York Times article from 1913 discussing Italian immigration to the
United States read, “The United States is not precisely a garden for Italian emigrants, and one
63
Nicola Labanca, Oltremare: Storia dell'espansione coloniale italiana (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 2002),
7.
64
Choate, “Tunisia, Contested,” 11-12.
Choate, “Tunisia, Contested,” 12.
66
Segrè, Fourth Shore, 25.
67
"La Stampa in Tunisia: L'opera degli Italiani," La Stampa, October 5, 1911.
65
28
object of the [Italian] conquest of Libya was to divert thither the stream of Sicilian and Calabrian
emigration instead of allowing it to flow across the Atlantic.”68 Presumably frustrating to Italian
emigration engineers and imperialists seeking success in the Italian possession of Libya, the
article continues, “But...so far comparatively few Sicilian peasant workmen have gone to Tripoli,
because they can earn more in the United States.”69 Thus, the Italian government’s promise of
the benefits that Italian immigrant settlers would have in Libya as an Italian colony was a
tenuous claim from the beginning because emigrants preferred settling in domains that did not
necessarily fall under Italian jurisdiction.
In addition to Italian migrants’ preference to immigrate to other places above Libya,
Italian intellectuals more outwardly criticized government-sanctioned sponsorship of war for the
demographic settlement of Italians. In a criticism of Italian colonial ambitions, Come siamo
andati in Libia, Gaetano Salvemini, an antifascist university professor who studied the social and
economic problems of southern Italy, wrote about how Italian capitalists would not be able to
successfully invest in Libya because they lacked the entrepreneurial knowledge and financial
backing to do so.70 His statement attests to the performative aspect of Italy’s frenetic desire to
carve a territory in Libya for Italian financial benefit.
Salvemini also saw a war in Tripolitania as ridiculous considering Italy’s own need for
domestic reform. He viewed the potential war as a dangerous marriage between business
interests and unrealistic nationalist impulses. He made the critique: “That we should intensify the
Italian agricultural unemployment so that our peasants, so forced to emigrate in great numbers,
are forced to go search in Tripoli for the work that the Nationalist rhetoric forbids them to get in
Italy.”71 Salvemini’s comment reflects the contradictory nature of the Italian imperial nationalist
plan. Imperial nationalists sought, impractically, to provide peasants with work in Libya, instead
of improving peasants’ situations in Italy. His critique reveals the fact that Nationalists did not
care about the proletariat’s situations; they only wanted to carry out their imperialistic goals.
Imperial nationalists drew upon the high levels of Italian emigration between 1900 and
1911 in their rhetoric that pushed for an invasion of Tripolitania. The mass exodus of Italians
68
"Praises Immigration Veto: Roman Paper Says Taft Has Avoided Friction With Italy," The New York Times,
February 21, 1913.
69
"Praises Immigration Veto," The New York Times, 1913.
70
Segrè, Fourth Shore, 28.
71
Gaetano Salvemini, Come siamo andati in Libia e altri scritti dal 1900 al 1915, (Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli
Editore, 1963), 114.
29
from their own national borders was a justification for Italian imperial expansion. Colonial
expansion in Libya would create colonies abroad as destinations for Italian emigrants, rather than
having Italian migrants settle in non-Italian territories.
Debates about how emigration from Italy tied to Italian nationalism were twofold.
Nationalist war-advocates such as Corradini viewed emigration as a dilution of Italian national
character. They wanted to transform this perceived weakness into national strength through
aggressive, imperial foreign policy. Italians in emigrant communities abroad, however,
developed an increased Italian national consciousness while living and working outside of Italy.
Nationalists incorporated the possibility for emigration to Libya into their political rhetoric in
order to demonstrate that the war in Tripolitania would have results that would benefit the Italian
population itself. This worked to make colonial war relevant for Italians at home, and drew
connections between Italy and Libya.
30
CHAPTER III
The Narratives and Practices of Italian Colonialism in Libya
Oltremare: Geographical and Historical Narratives
New ways to understand geography and history played a role in the Italian ferments for
an invasion of Tripolitania. The rhetoric of renewing a historic relationship between Italy and
Libya was successful in garnering support for war in Tripolitania. Geography is a force that
propels history, and ideas of physical place change according to how people imagine themselves
within the geographical space that they occupy.72 Italy’s geographic vicinity to North Africa was
a significant reason why Italy was interested in pursuing colonies in North African territories.73
The colonial rapport with Libya both contributed to Italy’s new expressions of national identity,
and also to the construction of a new space which modern Italy held claim over.
War proponents used the rhetoric of modern Italy’s legacy to ancient imperial Rome to
explain Italy’s need to expand into Libya. The dialogue of oltremare, literally, “overseas,”
imagined Libya as a rightful Italian territory because the Romans ruled Libyan lands from the
second century BC to the seventh century AD.74 Modern Italy, too, would continue Rome’s
tradition by exerting political influence that expanded beyond the boundaries of Italy itself. As
such, unified Italy became configured as a “Third Rome,” a powerful Italian nation that was the
successor state to both the ancient Roman and Holy Roman empires.75 As the “Third Rome,”
united Italy would exert power through its nationhood and potential empire in Africa. This
imagination of a historical space created a geopolitical narrative that Italy used to justify its
invasion of Tripolitania.
Libya’s adjacency to the Mediterranean and its physical proximity to Italy gave Libya a
rhetorical distinction that other Italian colonies did not possess in the Italian colonial lexicon.
Also known as the “Fourth Shore” (La quarta sponda), this imagery of Libya as another shore of
Italy itself exemplifies the physical and psychological closeness that Libya held within the Italian
imagination. Indeed, Libya was seen as part of Italian geography itself. Giovanni Pascoli, poet
72
Baranski and West, The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture, 19.
Choate, “Tunisia, Contested,” 10.
74
"North Africa During the Classical Period," Ancient History Encyclopedia, last modified December 15, 2011,
http://www.ancient.eu.com/article/293/.
75
Graziano, The Failure of Italian Nationhood, 30.
73
31
and classicist of the mid-1800s to early-1900s,76 spoke of the Mediterranean sea as “il nostro
mare” in direct emulation of the Latin mare nostrum.77 This designation incorporated both
geographic features and historical references to continue a tradition of the Mediterranean
controlled by an Italian people.78
Italy’s vicinity to Libya, and greater North Africa, invited understandings of the two
regions’ relationship through geography. Tunisia’s large Italian emigrant population drew
comparisons between the shared nature of Italy and Tunisia’s places on the geographic
peripheries of their respective continents. Italy was on the margins of Europe, Tunisia on the
margins of Africa.79 The framework of geographic liminality that was applied to Tunisia can also
be extended to understanding Libya within the geopolitical imagination. Libya was situated at
the heart of the Mediterranean, like Italy, and at the geographic fringes of the African continent.
The use of geographic explanations through maps was one means by which European
colonialism in foreign territories sought supposed scientific means of justification. Geography as
an interest in Europe coincided with the later wave of European colonialisms of the 1860s to
1880s. Maps were representations by which the colonizing power could portray its colonial
territories in ways that glorified European involvement as pragmatic and scientific, always
presenting these ideas according to European schemas. Italy, too, used this mode of geographic
justification through the myth of a second imperial Rome, this time with the nation of Italy as the
expanding and dominating power.
After the 1911 invasion of Tripolitania, Italian academic geographers created maps that
served as symbolic legitimizations of Italy’s presence in Tripolitania, and in its East African
colonies. These biased efforts to map Italian and North African geographies projected specific
geographic knowledge about Tripolitania to Italian audiences. They were also a part of the
Italian intellectual justifications for colonial expansion in Tripolitania.80 People understood the
maps to be factual, as opposed to the narrative representations that they were, making geography
a malleable tool for the Italian colonial project in Libya.
76
Pascoli died in 1912, the same year as the Italian conquest of Tripolitania.
The English translation of il nostro mare and mare nostrum is “our sea.”
78
Adriana M. Baranello,"Giovanni Pascoli's 'La grande proletaria si e' mossa': A Translation and Critical
Introduction," California Italian Studies 2, no.1 (2011): 3.
79
Choate, “Tunisia, Contested,” 2.
80
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 16-21.
77
32
Italy, Libya, and the Historical Mediterranean
Geography played a formative role in how Italian national worth was communicated.
Modern Italy used the image of the Italian peninsula at the center of the Mediterranean, the sea
that cradled great civilizations of antiquity, to aggrandize Italian national identity.81 In the earlytwentieth century––the years between the Liberal and Fascist eras in Italy––Libya was positioned
by Italian nationalists as having the potential to reroute Italy’s trajectory domestically and
internationally. Italian intellectuals saw a colonization of Libya as having the ability to unite the
Italian North and South, and finish the process that the Risorgimento did not fully solidify. This
connection between aggressive Italian foreign policy and decreasing the development gap
between northern and southern Italy was in the interest of the industrial North.82 Southern Italy’s
largely agrarian economy pulled down the more industrial-based economy in the north, so
Northerners wanted to alleviate this unbalance.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, in the early 1900s, Italy’s geography was seen as a
characteristic which distanced itself from the predominant European colonial powers of the day,
and also provided these European powers with an entrance into the African continent. European
nations incorporated Italy into Europe’s geography in multiple ways. Italy became a major
European power after its unification despite its internal divisiveness, and also possessed strategic
importance to European imperial states as a gateway to Africa. Within the peninsula itself, Italian
imperial nationalists reworked the inclusion of southern Italy into their imaginations as the
geographical link between Italy and Libya.
This linkage of Italy and Libya by way of the Italian south, especially its islands, made
Italian colonization of Libya an intuitive and justifiable action, within pro-war rhetoric. Giovanni
Pascoli, nationalist poet and author of “La grande proletaria si è mossa,” exalted a military
campaign in Tripolitania. He wrote, “The great Proletariat has found a place for them [Italian
emigrant workers]: a vast region washed by our sea, toward which our little islands look, like
advanced sentinels; toward which our great island impatiently stretches.”83 Pascoli paints a
picture of the great Italian island––Sicily––itching to become one with Libyan shores. He implies
81
Gentile, La Grande Italia, 41.
Valentina Nocentini, "Il palcoscenico della guerra di Libia. Protagonisti, retorica, nazione, 1911-1912." (PhD
diss., Columbia University, 2013), Academic Commons, 28.
83
Giovanni Pascoli, La grande proletaria si è mossa, cited in Nicola Labanca, "The Embarrassment of Libya.
History, Memory, and Politics in Contemporary Italy," California Italian Studies 1, no.1 (2010): 2. Translation of
Pascoli’s poem by Nicola Labanca.
82
33
that Italy’s destiny to colonize Libya is proven by the geographic position of the Italian islands,
longing to become one with Libyan shores.
The south of Italy was the section of the Peninsula that geographically led to Libya. The
South provided the crucial geographic path to North Africa that Italian rhetoric hyperbolized as a
symbolic relationship between the two territories. Italy’s southern region and the Mediterranean
have been traditionally disparaged in Europe because of their proximity to Africa, the Muslim
world, and the Orient.84 However, Italian nationalists of the early 1900s––who were based
largely in northern Italy––appropriated the South as a means for them to successfully rally for
war in Tripolitania. Thus, the Mediterranean Sea served as a permeable space between Italy (by
way of southern Italy) and its colonial interest of Tripolitania. In this way, the Mediterranean
demonstrates that borders do not make two adjacent territories separate, but really, bring them
together in close contact.85 The Mediterranean acted as a means and pretense by which Italy
could invade Libya, and as a link that connected Italy and Libya in the Italian imagination.
Italian nationalists drew upon Italy’s historical relationship with ancient Libya is order to
raise the greater Italian population’s desire for the reconquest, as it was described in nationalist
language. In 1911, fifty years following Italian unification, the rhetoric of Roman presence in
Libya complemented the reflective, romanticizing, and nostalgic effect that this national
anniversary had on imperial nationalists. On this anniversary year, they desired a spectacle of
Italian national force through colonial expansion. A twentieth-century Italian conquest of
Tripolitania garnered popular support from mobilizing the idea of securing a Mediterranean that
was once again “Italian,”86 harkening on the idea of the ancient Mediterranean controlled by the
Romans. The central notion that contributed to Italy’s potential expansion lay in Italy’s ability to
cross the body of water between southern Italy and the shore of Tripolitania.
This historicizing discourse described Libya in terms of where Italian settlers resided in
Libya after Italian forces conquered Tripolitania. In the twenty years following 1912, Italy
fought native Libyan resistance after winning nominal sovereignty from Libya’s Ottoman rulers.
During this period, the concentration of Italian colonists settled on the shores of Tripolitania.
Libyan shores were the imaginary gateway from Europe to Africa, and Africa to Europe. This
84
Iain Michael Chambers, "Another Map, another History, another Modernity," California Italian Studies 1, no.1
(2010): 2.
85
Chambers, "Another Map,” 1.
86
De Grand, The Italian Nationalist Association, 18.
34
settlement pattern continued to propagate the myth of Italy as the connecting link between
Europe and Africa, and therefore as the rightful dominator of the Mediterranean.87 This myth of
Italian right supplied further justification for a prolonged and violent war in Libya.
Descriptions of Libya in Italian travel accounts reflect how Italians interpreted the
historicized relationship between Italy and Libya, and how it was used to rationalize Italian
colonial intervention in Tripolitania. Domenico Tumiati was a playwright of the late-nineteenth
and mid-twentieth centuries born to a bourgeois family, and received fame from his historicalthemed plays which aggrandized the actors of the Risorgimento. During a 1904–1905 visit to
Libya, he described Libya as a “promised land” (terra promessa) for Italians.88 His travelogue
was published again in 1911, possibly as a move to bring his thoughts to the fore as Italy was
making preparations to wage war in Libya. Tumiati’s characterization of Libya as a terra
promessa echoed the language of a religious connection between a peoples and their land. This
conception helped give strength to the idea in Italy that Libya was rightfully Italian, based on a
shared, convergent history.
Roman ruins in Libya served as visible proof of past Italianate involvement there. Leptis
Magna, an archaeological site along the Libyan coast in today’s city of Khoms, was where the
Roman emperor Septimus Severus was born. He established his imperial base at Leptis Magna
and sponsored construction within the city in the Roman style.89 Tumiati’s following statements
evidence how Leptis Magna was utilized as justification for the twentieth-century Italian ‘return’
to Libya:
It seems that hundreds of nautical miles do not exist...and that
these lands [Libya] are a natural extension of Italy....The Roman
ruins that one finds from time to time help the allusion that we find
ourselves in Italy...Everywhere the foot taps, it encounters a stone
placed by our forefathers.90
His discussion of Libya as a natural extension––and thus, a natural possession––of Italy
characterizes the rhetoric leading up to Italy’s 1911 invasion of Tripolitania. This is a
87
Ben-Ghiat and Fuller, Italian Colonialism, 24.
Domenico Tumiati, Nell’Africa Romana: Tripolitania, Treves, Milano 1911, cited in Angelo Del Boca, La nostra
Africa, (Vicenza: Neri Pozza Editore, 2003), 187.
89
Encyclopædia Britannica Online, "Leptis Magna," http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/336898/LeptisMagna.
90
Tumiati, Nell’Africa Romana: Tripolitania, cited in Del Boca, La nostra Africa, 187.
88
35
justification that could only be applied to Libya because of the existence of Roman
archaeological features there. The rhetoric of Italy’s “return” and “right” to occupy Libya could
only be utilized because of a past Roman presence in North Africa. Initially, this historical
comparison to justify rightful Italian rule in Tripolitania helped contribute to mobilizing the most
Italian popular support for a colonial campaign in Africa following Italy’s defeat at Adwa.91
In Tumiati’s travel writings, this rhetoric of closeness between Italy and Libya did not
yield complete equality between their respective inhabitants. He wrote that Arabs and Romans
were “antipodes of humanity,” and his description of Libyans disparages them as lazy and
fallen.92 The theme of history permeates Tumiati’s claims on the racial distinctions between
Arabs and Romans/Italians, arguing that the urge to “create for eternity”93 through lasting works
of art was a distinctly Roman one, one that will never have any significance to the Arab race. His
comparison, based in a historicized rhetoric, furthers the justification for Italian presence in
Libya through a reliance on the presence of Roman archaeological remains. These ruins were
evidence for past imperial Roman power in Libya, and were used to explain the naturalness of
future Italian imperial power in Libya.
The Italian literate public also had access to these rhetorical configurations of a grand
return to a terra promessa. Newspapers such as La Stampa and La Tribuna publicized the Italian
campaign in Libya in this light.94 A reporter for La Stampa stationed in Libya wrote in the 1912
article “The Glory and the Statuary”:
As the newspaper brings images of the Roman mosaic discovered
by Bersaglieri [Italian sharpshooters] in the oasis of Ain Zara, the
nationalist speaker said in a surge of enthusiasm: “What a
magnificent theme for a commemorative monument of the
conquest of Tripoli! The new Italy exhumes in Libya the vestiges
of imperial Rome!”95
The nationalist obsession with the reassertion of Roman imperial power in Libya manifests itself
in the on-site reporting of the Italian conquest of Tripolitania in 1912. There is a conscious act of
91
Clark, Modern Italy, 154.
Tumiati, Nell’Africa Romana: Tripolitania, cited in Del Boca, La nostra Africa, 188.
93
Tumiati, Nell’Africa Romana: Tripolitania, cited in Del Boca, La nostra Africa, 188.
94
Clark, Modern Italy, 154.
95
"La gloria e la statuaria," La Stampa, January 18, 1912.
92
36
connecting present events in Tripolitania to past historical narratives of Roman involvement in
the North African region, proven by the presence of ancient Roman art in Libya.
The Italian war enthusiasts that are described in the article “The Glory and the Statuary”
clung particularly to Roman art as proof of what was rightly “Italian” and so, needed protection
and preservation. The idea of Italy as a preserver of antiquities and past masterpieces colored
Italy as a paternalistic figure, overseeing the works of ancient Roman art that the modern Italian
nation proclaimed were its own.96 Thus, art and architecture of Roman origin served as a means
for imperial nationalists to signify how Libya belonged to the Italians, and how it was Italians’
duty to preserve their own Peninsula’s works of art all over the world. This mentality facilitated
both the rightful motive for war and the military occupation of Libya that followed.
This historicization was a consequence of the geographic vicinity of the two territories
and their overlapping ancient histories. Tumiati’s writing characterizes how the “closeness” of
Italy and Libya was both real and imagined. Both forms were utilized as part of the Italian
colonizing process, and worked to elevate Italy’s colonial mission from one that was more than
sole economic extraction to one that was demographic. Nationalists proposed that not only was
this kind of settler-colonization justifiable, it was also deserved as a continuation of past Roman
governance in Libya. Under Roman imperial rule, nationalists argued, Libyan society had
reached its height. Thus the reasoning emerged that another, modern Italian invasion would also
be beneficial to Libya.
The comparison between a modern Italian empire in the image of ancient Rome’s did not
always result in positive rhetorical constructions, especially from non-Italian perspectives.
International observers such as H. R. Tate of Great Britain made this distinction in his 1941
essay “The Italian Colonial Empire.” He wrote:
From the map...showing the Kingdom of Italy with its Colonies in
North and East Africa one is struck by their comparative
insignificance compared with those of the Roman Empire at the
time of the zenith of Julius Caesar’s career when nearly the whole
of the known world had bowed its neck beneath the yoke of
ancient Rome.97
96
97
Gentile, La Grande Italia, 47.
H.R. Tate, The Italian Colonial Empire, 146.
37
Italy was often held is comparison to its past––by both European and Italian commentators––and
this historical comparison was used to both praise and to shame.
Demographics, Racialization, and Italian National Identity
The colonial rapport as one that is clearly bifurcated between “colonizer” and
“colonized” was not necessarily true in the case of Italy and Libya. Italian nationalists succeeded
in their rally for initial war in Tripolitania against the Ottomans under the pretense that Libya
would become a viable territorial outsource for the growing Italian population. The rhetorized
proximity of the two regions based in a shared history coupled the nationalist calls for
demographic colonialism of Tripolitania through settlement. Unlike other European colonists
such as the British, Italians living in Tripolitania would work alongside Libyans in the fields,
helping with production.98
This increased willingness for interaction with indigenous populations reflected the
different intentions that Italians had in their overseas territory. Inevitably, there were more direct
interactions between Italians and Libyans in this settler colony context. This does not
demonstrate, however, that the Italian colonial power and settlers saw themselves as equal to
indigenous Libyan populations. Despite the direct contact between Italian and Libyan workers in
Libya, Italians still held racist notions regarding local populations. There are many different
kinds of racism, even those that permit the direct contact between two different races within a
still strictly hierarchical structure,99 and this was the case in Italian colonial Libya.
Racism was a crucial factor that mobilized popular support for war and subsequent
colonial jurisdiction in Tripolitania. One means was through the rhetoric of the ancient Roman
Empire; the Romans were, as Olindo De Napoli writes, “the colonizing people par
excellence.”100 The idea of the Romans as a colonizing people served early-twentieth-century
Italian colonial supporters with a connection to an ethnic Italian people who had successfully
carried our imperial conquests in North Africa.
The creation of a racial dichotomy between Italians and Libyans contributed to more
fully cohering Italian national identity. Since Italy’s national unification occurred later than the
98
Segrè, Fourth Shore, 4.
Olindo De Napoli, "Race and Empire: The Legitimization of Italian Colonialism in Juridical Thought," Journal of
Modern History 85, no.4 (2013): 2.
100
De Napoli, "Race and Empire,” 11.
99
38
nation-building processes of many other European states, racism directed towards people outside
of Italy’s national borders helped psychologically homogenize Italian society along racial, and
by consequence, national lines.101 Lucia Re writes, “The Libyan War thus represented a turning
point and an important, racially-oriented shift in the process of ‘making Italians.’”102 This
turning point is part of the narrative of Italian national identity formation which had begun fifty
years earlier after territorial unification in 1861.
Earlier European colonial trajectories that exploited African peoples and lands––such as
the eighteenth-century British, Dutch, and French slave trades––used racism to justify slavery
after they had already begun to enslave Africans as labor in Caribbean sugar plantations.
Africans’ enslavement was not predicated upon racism, rather, racism emerged, and its
proponents exonerated, as a justification for the enslavement of Africans.103 In Italy’s case with
Libya, racism was not a consequence post facto to justify colonial violence that had already been
inflicted, but rather a necessity to even begin the colonial campaign in Libya. In order to coalesce
enough Italian manpower to carry out a colonial war, the war rhetoric had to create a unifying
force among Italians. The Libyan racial “other” allowed Italians to see themselves as racially,
and thus nationally, the same.
A unified racial group of Italians also emerged in comparison to other European ethnic
identities. Race, geography, and destiny merge in the writer Alfredo Oriani’s following
statement: “Yet the superiority of our [Italian] race to those of France and Spain...assign
Mediterranean Italy a function and a superiority: never were there Italians like there are now. We
must look up and afar.”104 He designates the Italian race as superior to other ‘racial’ groups
within Europe as well. The imagery of Mediterranean Italy’s duty to “look up and afar” for
success implies Italian colonial enterprises beyond Italy’s borders. Oriani also puts forth Italy’s
adjacency to the Mediterranean as a source of superiority, as opposed to degradation. Italy’s
Mediterranean identity was conveniently refashioned often in order to best suit national
objectives.
101
Lucia Re, "Italians and the Invention of Race: The Poetics and Politics of Difference in the Struggle over Libya,
1890-1913," California Italian Studies 1, no.1 (2010): 6.
102
Lucia Re, "Italians and the Invention of Race,” 6.
103
Rich Cohen, "Sugar Love (a not so sweet story),"National Geographic, August 2013,
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/08/sugar/cohen-text (accessed March 1, 2014); Eric Williams, Capitalism
and Slavery, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 7.
104
Oriani, La Rivolta Ideale, 258.
39
The historical parallels between Italy and Libya that Italian commentators drew on
affected the way in which Libya became important to Italian national identity. Because of their
intersecting histories, Italy reasoned that Libya belonged to the Italian nation. This justification
was one that could only be used for a colonial endeavor in Libya because of the archaeological
remains that showed prior ancient Roman presence in Libya. Political discourses that pushed for
war in Tripolitania included this historicizing plea, which revealed an unusual, but ultimately
successful, explanation for the necessity of Italian involvement in Libya. The historical
justifications put forth supported modern Italy’s national myth of expansion, and integrated a
colonial Libya into Italy’s national image.
40
CONCLUSION
The Mediterranean Today
This thesis has argued that Italy’s 1911 colonial project in Libya was unique because of
the imagined proximities that Italian nationalists created between the two regions. Social
phenomena occurring at the time, as well as the distinctive political rhetoric that Italian imperial
nationalists used to justify this colonial war, particularized Italy’s invasion of Tripolitania.
Colonization of Tripolitania became significant to furthering an increasingly aggressive and
imperialistic strand of Italian nationalism. The idea of ‘Libya’ played a large part in nationalizing
the Italian population in the first decade of the 1900s.
The geographic and historical closeness between Italy and Libya was both a source of
Italian self-consciousness and of justification for colonial war in Tripolitania. A language of
similarity, rather than pure difference, was used to garner support for an Italian war abroad.
Overlapping histories of ancient Roman and North African populations, as well as the
geographic vicinity of Italy and Libya became powerful symbols of Italy’s right to colonize
Libya. For Italy, the source of connection with Libya was also a source of distancing from
European powers. In geographic and rhetorical spaces, Italy was in a liminal space between both
Europe and Africa, which further complicated its nation-building and colonization objectives.
Italian emigration was a concern for Italian imperial nationalists in the late-nineteenth
and early-twentieth centuries. They viewed this mass exodus as a sign of Italy’s weaknesses.
Their inclusion of the Italian social phenomenon of emigration in their pro-war rhetoric was
solely to suit their imperial desires. An invasion of Libya with colonial intents satisfied
demographic and imperial concerns in this nationalist view. Nationalist political rhetoric
incorporated high levels of Italian emigration served as evidence that a colony in Libya was
necessary to absorb Italian emigrants. The plan for Italian settlers to populate Libya was another
way that Italy and Libya’s relationship relied on mutual contact between the two regional groups.
The legacy of Italy’s “poor people’s colonialism” through emigrant colonists is to this day still
seen as demonstrative of Italy’s ‘kind’ colonizing efforts in Libya, which is a complete myth.
A century after Italy’s invasion of Libya, the geographic proximity between the two
regions is still relevant. Migrants from North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia use Libya as
a gateway point for a further journey to Italy. Libya’s vicinity to Italy allows for a shorter trip
from Tripoli to Italy’s southernmost islands––Lampedusa and Sicily––than from another
41
departure point in Africa or Asia. Traveling from Libya to Italy by boat, this kind of risky
migration is enabled by the very geographical proximities that facilitated Italian colonization of
Libya in 1911-1912. Once in Italy, many continue their journey north to other European Union
countries. Both Italy and Libya serve as transitional spaces for migrants, as neither is often their
primary origin or destination.
The migratory crossing of the Mediterranean has ignited new forms of exclusionary
narratives of “otherness” based in race and non-whiteness. Through the creation of the European
Union, European borders have shifted from ones that were once intra-continental, to ones that are
on the peripheries of the European continent itself. Italy’s southern borders are now the
southernmost borders of the European Union. People from the Southern Mediterranean regions
(extra-European regions) are increasingly seen in racialized terms, and considered outsiders
breaking into a buttressed, European space. This thinking has been supported by European media
accounts that sensationalize the quantity of boat migrations to Italy from the Mediterranean.
Media disproportionately represent this migratory journey to Italy’s southern entrance, as
opposed to the northern Italian land entrance that most of Italy’s migrants, who come from
Eastern Europe, utilize.105 Thus, in 2014 the Mediterranean is again a rallying point regarding the
relationship between Italy and Libya. This time it is not imagined as a source of closeness, but
one of difference.
In recent years, Italian diplomatic strategies with Libya have centered on controlling
migration from Libya to Italy. In the period between 2008 and 2011, Silvio Berlusconi, then
Prime Minister of Italy, and Muammar Qaddafi, the Libyan head of state deposed and killed in
2011, struck a deal. Berlusconi committed $5 billion in infrastructure development aid to Libya.
In return, Qaddafi pledged to restrain migrants bound for Italy from Libyan shores.106 Many
migrants and refugees leaving from Libya are not necessarily Libyan themselves. However, in
the three years following the Libyan revolution, political instability in the country increasingly
draws Libyan refugees to Italy. General unrest in North Africa and the Middle East following the
Arab Spring has significantly increased migration from these regions to Europe by way of Italy.
105
"Italy and Libya, a tale of money, oil and colonial scars," last modified July 17, 2009,
http://temi.repubblica.it/limes-heartland/italy-and-libya-a-tale-of-money-oil-and-colonial-scars/1437.
106
"Italy's Bad Romance: How Berlusconi Went Gaga for Gaddafi," last modified February 22, 2011,
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2045328_2045333_2053363,00.html.
42
Instead of defining Italian national identity through an outward-looking imperialist
approach, Italianità of the twenty-first century is focused on keeping non-Italian nationals out of
Italian borders. Even residents who live in Italy legally, but are not ethnically Italian, have
difficulty attaining Italian citizenship and the privileges that come with it. Italy is turning
inwards, rather than outwards, assuming a different path from the one it tried to forge at the
beginning of the twentieth century with its colonial project in Tripolitania. The rhetoric of
closeness between Italy and Libya is no longer present in right-wing Italian political spheres, but
the countries’ geographic vicinity still remains. Indeed, migration to Italy from its Mediterranean
basin is an example of how geography influences the current of history. As was the case in 1911,
Italy and Libya’s geographic vicinity continues to shape the interactions between the two
countries today.
43
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