Italian Fascism



Italian Fascism also known in Italian as Fascism is an Italian radical, authoritarian nationalist political ideology. It is the original manifestation of fascism. This ideology is associated with the National Fascist Party which under Benito Mussolini ruled the Kingdom of Italy from 1922 until 1943, the Republican Fascist Party which ruled the Italian Social Republic from 1943 to 1945 and subsequent Italian neo-fascist movements.

Italian Fascism supports the restoration of "Italia Irredenta" (claimed unredeemed Italian territories) to Italy and territorial expansionism. Italian Fascists claim that modern Italy is the heir to the Roman Empire and its territorial legacy, and support the creation of "vital space" for colonization by Italian settlers and establishing control over the Mediterranean Sea as Italy's Mare Nostrum.

Italian Fascism promotes a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in a corporative associations to collectively represent the nation's economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy. Italian Fascists claim that this economic system resolves and ends class conflict by creating class collaboration.

Etymologically, Fascismo (Fascism) derives from the Italian fascio (league), derived from the Latin fasces (bundles); the ancient Roman Symbol of Authority. It dates from Mussolini’s January 1915 and the 1919 establishment of the Fascist Revolutionary Party begun as the fasci di combattimento (combat leagues) popular movement. The English fascism denotes the league connotation of the Italian fascio (fagot); in the Italian language, in denoting the political philosophy, the proper noun Fascismo (faʃˈʃizmo) is upper-case, and the generic, common noun fascismo (fascism) is lower-case.

In political science, Italian Fascism is the syncretic model of government from which derive other varieties of fascism — yet they share no common politico-philosophic core, a “fascist minimum” of tactical, cultural, and ideological tenets. During the twenty-one-year intermarium of the First (1914–18) and Second (1939–45) world wars, similarly authoritarian–nationalist movements appeared worldwide: Adolf Hitler’s Nazism in Germany, Peronism in Argentina under General Juan Domingo Perón, Falangism in Spain under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, the Iron Guard in Romania, Integralism in Brazil, Action Française and the Croix-de-Feu in France, the Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, Austrofascism in the Austria of Engelbert Dollfuss, Statism in Shōwa Japan, Rexism in Belgium, the Ustaše in Croatia, et alii.

After the Second World War, fascists considered they shared common philosophic tenets — the Leader, Single-party State, Social Darwinism, élitism, yet each government espoused a discrete variety of national fascism, e.g. the Portuguese clerico–corporativist Estado Novo (New State) of the António de Oliveira Salazar régime; and the Spanish alliance among Falangists, Clerical Fascists, and Generalissimo Franco. In 1945, at War’s end, upon the Allied vanquishing of Nazi Germany (1933–45) most fascist governments dissociated themselves from Nazism — lest their national variety be equated with the Hitlerian (1933–45) variety of fascism.