A Dire Warning to All Ethnic Minorities of Europe?

It has been argued recently that “Fascism was not a common enemy for ethnic minorities and nationalities all over Europe.” ² The relation between ethnic minorities, fascism and anti-fascism during the interwar period was indeed highly ambiguous, including both fascist and anti-fascist responses and sympathies. The complex relation between minorities and anti-fascism still remains under-explored and especially the analysis of the ways in which minority anti-fascism was articulated needs more scholarly attention. This chapter will contribute to the analysis of instances in which ethnic minorities in interwar Europe had a particular concern to criticize fascism and the Italian Fascist dictatorship during the 1920s. The history of anti-fascism has been dominated by accounts dealing with the international political left, including militant and direct responses from anarchist, communist, and social democratic parties and groups. ³ These important histories have been complemented with new research on liberal and conservative forms of anti-fascism that have broadened the field and challenged the understandings of anti-fascism as a more variable phenomenon. ⁴ An additional way to deepen the understanding of the varieties of anti-fascism in interwar Europe is to include the perspectives of ethnic minorities. After all, all fascist movements were extremely nationalist and ethnicist and claimed an “inherent collective superiority for their nations,” which could trigger anti-fascist responses from ethnic minorities. ⁵ Such minorities could thus be identified as crucial ‘others’ that were directly confronted by Fascist Italy and by fascist-inspired movements across the continent. Efforts to homogenize and nationalize the state were naturally not restricted to fascist states or movements, but they constituted nevertheless a sustained predicament for radical nationalists as the ideal of the nation-state did not correspond to the social reality within their state borders. This was particularly true in the successor states created after the fall of the Romanov, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires after World War One, when the founding idea of national self-determination nonetheless left the new independent state formations with complex nationalities problems. ⁶ It is important to note early on that national minorities were neither sharply bounded nor internally unified groups. They constituted complex and fluid constellations of groups, identities and political and economic interests that intersected class and ethnic boundaries in various and changing ways. ⁷ In Italy, this presence of ethnic others was publicly acknowledged by Benito Mussolini already in September 1920 when he underlined that Italianità (Italianness) was the “first fundamental pillar of Fascist action.” This also meant in the Italian northern borderlands, from Julia Venezia to South Tyrol, that the non-Italians needed to become Italians through processes of Italianization, which caused distinct counterreactions from the minorities living in the borderlands. ⁸