Abstract
In his late April 1937 meeting with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, Mussolini freely admitted that the European continent was cleanly split along ideological lines. ‘The European situation is today characterised by the existence in practice of two blocs which have automatically come to be formed on an ideological basis’, the dictator grandly announced. These divisions had been accelerated and accentuated by events in Spain. The Bolshevik threat was a very real one, he added, and the European situation would become even more serious if the Comintern were to emerge victorious from the Spanish war. If this were to happen, Mussolini fully expected it to divide his democratic opponents. France, fascist Italy’s Latin sibling, would invariably lurch ever more to the Left and this, in turn, would eventually generate a change in the policy of its traditional ally, Great Britain, who had a history of opposing French political radicalism.1
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Notes
E. Wiskemann, The Rome-Berlin Axis. A Study of the Relations Between Mussolini and Hitler (Fontana, London, 1966), p. 110.
ASMAE, AP: Germania, busta 41, fascicolo 3, ‘Visita von Neurath a Londra (Colloquio Grandi-Ribbentrop)’, Grandi to Mussolini/Ciano, 17/6/1937; on Ribbentrop see J. Noakes and G. Pridham (eds), Nazism, 1919–1945. Vol. 3: Foreign Policy, War and Racial Extermination (University of Exeter Press, Exeter, 1995), pp. 672–3.
E. Wiskemann cited in D. Dutton, Neville Chamberlain (Arnold, London and New York, 2001), p. 90.
DDI, 8, VI, 663, 665 and 673; on the attack on Italian naval vessels see F. Bargoni, L impegno navale italiano durante la guerra civile spagnola (USMM, Rome, 1992), pp. 256–61.
ASMAE, US, busta 2, fascicolo 1, ‘Processo verbale (riunione a Palazzo Venezia)’, 5/8/1937 and attached letter, Franco to Mussolini, 3/8/1937; P. Gretton, ‘The Nyon Conference — The Naval Aspect’, English Historical Review, 90, 1 (1975), p. 104.
Documents Diplomatiques Francais (DDF), 2e serie (1936–1939), tome VI, 391; Gretton, ‘The Nyon Conference’, p. 105; W. C. Mills, ‘TheNyon Conference: Neville Chamberlain, Anthony Eden and the Appeasement of Italy in 1937’, International History Review, 15, 1 (1993), pp. 12–13.
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© 2003 Robert Mallett
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Mallett, R. (2003). ‘Not a Diaphragm, but an Axis’. In: Mussolini and the Origins of the Second World War, 1933–1940. The Making of the 20th Century. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3774-2_8
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