Peace Talks and Imperial Stocks: What Bound Fascist Italy’s Early Diplomacy to Postwar Europe

Italian foreign policy during the interwar years is often reduced to the ‘road to war’ that characterised relations between Italy and its former wartime allies after the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. It is surprising how little scholarly attention has been dedicated to examining Italian foreign policy prior to this point of rupture. This article aims to explain how and why Fascist Italy cooperated in the post-war order for as long as it did by situating early Fascist diplomacy within the context of the Greater War. Benito Mussolini rose to power preoccupied with rectifying the so-called ‘mutilated victory’ while the post-war order was still deeply in flux. The ‘unfinished peace’ resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (1919) offered significant opportunity for the young Fascist regime to pursue further negotiations with the British to bring to fruition the unfulfilled programme of its Liberal predecessors. This article narrows in on negotiations over one outstanding item on the agenda – the Jubaland transfer – to demonstrate that it was precisely these discussions with the British about Italy’s unresolved imperial claims that drew the intrinsically revisionist regime into a range of diplomatic exchanges and gave the young Fascist regime a stake in the future post-war order. In practice, Fascist Italy’s determination to secure the transfer of Jubaland from British Kenya to Italian Somaliland deeply entangled the new revisionist regime in broader multilateral initiatives concerned with European security, economic reconstruction, and the nature the post-war order as a whole.