Description
International relations during the interwar years are often reduced to one long ‘road to war’ between the western democracies and the revisionist fascist powers. My paper problematises this approach by examining how and why Fascist Italy cooperated within the postwar order for more than a decade before a definitive rupture in relations with its former wartime allies. The ‘unfinished peace’ after the First World War offered significant opportunity for the young Fascist regime to pursue further negotiations with the British to bring to fruition the unfulfilled imperial programme of its Liberal predecessors. This paper 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 postwar 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 postwar order as a whole.
