Abstract
In 1934, the Italian diplomat and scholar Giuseppe de Michelis (1872−1951) published a programmatic book that in English was called ‘World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines’. In this study, de Michelis suggested transferring the socio-economic model of fascist Italy to the global level. He thus envisaged global economic governance by a powerful international organisation and a strict limitation of national sovereignty over the factors of production. My purpose in this article is to explore these largely forgotten proposals as well as the ideological context from which they emerged. The fascist internationalism of de Michelis was technocratic and dirigist, enthusiastic about the possibilities of public planning and the virtues of bureaucratic organisation. This is why his suggestions resembled, in some important respects, world order proposals made by liberal internationalists during the same period. The lesson for International Relations theory is that blueprints for international institutions can be connected to a wide variety of political ideologies. There is no reason to believe that any tradition of political thought is necessarily and eternally committed to internationalism, while others are principally hostile to it.
Like many academic disciplines, International Relations (IR) tells stylised stories about its origins. The conventional narrative is that at the beginning of academic IR there was an Anglo-Saxon conversation between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’ that revolved around the perils of anarchy and the prospects for international organisation. 1 The idealist side in that debate has been associated strongly with ‘liberal internationalism’, insinuating an intimate, almost natural, connection between liberalism and proposals for peaceful international cooperation. 2 IR textbooks still construct liberal internationalism as a rather straight line of political thought that takes us from Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith and Richard Cobden to present-day IR scholarship. 3 Self-restraint and a cooperative attitude (towards states that reciprocate it) are said to characterise liberal foreign policy in theory and practice, forming a ‘coherent legacy’ within the bewildering variety of liberal political thought. 4 According to Michael Doyle, liberal internationalism also has an ‘other’, incarnated in historical figures as diverse as Napoleon, Mussolini, Hitler, or Stalin. 5
Not all internationalism was liberal, however, if by internationalism we mean a political doctrine that promotes economic and political collaboration across borders. Socialist internationalism constitutes a long and well-documented tradition of political thought. 6 Fred Halliday has drawn attention to other revolutionary forms of internationalism, which tend to occur when new and expanding political ideologies try to export their vision, developed in a national context, to the globe. 7 Iranian theocracy after the 1979 revolution was Halliday’s favourite example of such a revolutionary ideology. 8 And not least, internationalism may also be an aspect of an imperial project.
In this article, I draw attention to another type of non-liberal internationalist thought, of which IR seems to be completely unaware: fascist internationalism. In the early 1930s, a group of Italian fascists related in some way or other to the Scuola di Scienze Corporative in Pisa suggested exporting Italy’s socio-economic model of ‘corporativism’ to the rest of the world. They belonged to a modernist camp within Italy’s fascist movement that Paolo Ungari called ‘rationalizing fascism’ [fascismo rationalizzatore], as opposed to the rivalling ‘adventurous fascism’ [fascismo avventuriero]. 9 In this context, the Geneva-based diplomat Giuseppe de Michelis projected the Italian fascist state to the globe, envisaging a powerful international organisation that would have allocated raw materials, capital and labour. My purpose in this article is not only to introduce this unusual type of internationalism to the discipline of IR but I also aim to further de-stabilise the common presumption that internationalism is intimately linked to political liberalism.
Fascist internationalism, I contend, is a particularly powerful piece of historical evidence to make this point. First of all, fascism is not normally associated with internationalist utopias but with expansionism and power politics. 10 The default assumption is that fascist ideology must have inspired or legitimated imperialism and aggression, but not multilateralism and peaceful coexistence. With a view to Mussolini’s neo-Roman fantasies and the doctrine of the Mediterranean Sea as Italy’s mare nostrum such a connection is plausible. However, I will show that there was more to fascist thought about International Relations. Within the ambit of Italian fascist ideology there was also an internationalist strand of thinking, a ‘road not taken’ by Mussolini in the end. Second, the vision of global cooperation developed by some Italian fascists and explicitly connected to fascist ideology, resembled some world order proposals developed by liberals during the same historical period. It rests on many of the same building blocks that liberals of that day used in their theorising, and it strongly draws (like liberal internationalism) on a domestic analogy. 11 What distinguishes Italian fascist world order proposals from the ‘revolutionary internationalism’ of Halliday’s typology is that the resulting institutional design is not (like a global theocracy or caliphate) radically different from liberal visions of world order. It is actually quite similar. My explanation for this similarity is that both fascists and liberals were influenced by modernist utopias, optimistic about the possibilities of economic planning and societal engineering. In fact, many world order proposals of the interwar years were animated by a spirit of progress, public planning and ‘rational organization’ of social forces. The writings of de Michelis and some other Italian fascists document how such modernist building blocks were incorporated into a distinctively non-liberal variety of internationalism.
This article is organised as follows: in the first section I briefly introduce the history and ideology of Italian fascism. In the second section I focus on the world order proposals of Giuseppe de Michelis. I am particularly interested in the puzzling question of how it was possible for a diplomat serving Mussolini’s regime to promote the foundation of international organisations that would have undermined Italy’s national sovereignty. In the third section I therefore contextualise the proposals made by de Michelis; in a first step within the universe of Italian fascism, in particular corporativism; secondly, within the cultural and political modernism of the interwar years. In a brief conclusion I draw some lessons for IR theory from the historical evidence cited.
Italian Fascism
As a political movement Italian fascism emerged at the end of World War I and rapidly rose to power. The fascist period spanned roughly 20 years, from 1922 when Benito Mussolini seized power after his largely symbolic ‘march on Rome’ to the collapse of his regime in World War II. 12 Even if fascist squads, the fasci di combattimento, had resorted to political violence from the very beginning, the character of Italian fascism shifted significantly over time. The years of the coalition government from 1922 until 1924 are usually considered the ‘legalistic’ phase, with opposition forces in parliament and a relatively free press. This changed markedly in 1925 after public outrage over the assassination of a socialist parliamentarian by fascist militants (the so-called ‘delitto Matteotti’). 13 In the wake of this crisis the duce declared the beginning of the totalitarian phase of his regime. 14 Political dissenters were increasingly persecuted and exiled, trade unions dissolved and the press put under state control. The penetration of all realms of society by fascist organisations began, as also suggested by the socio-economic doctrine of corporativism, to which I will turn below. Italian fascism changed its character again in the mid-1930s when Italian foreign policy became increasingly aggressive, starting with the invasion of the independent African kingdom of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in October 1935. In the aftermath of the attack, Italy left the League of Nations and Mussolini began to seek a rapprochement with the Nazis in Germany. The turn towards Germany led to further shifts in the ideology and rhetoric of Italian fascism, marked by an increasing racism and anti-Semitism that led to the adoption of race laws in 1938.
From the very beginning, the political ideology of Italian fascism thrived on a critique of other ideologies, manifest in its anti-liberalism, anti-parliamentarism, and anti-bolshevism. 15 Italian fascism was critical of modern individualism but at the same time promoted a programme of socio-economic modernisation. The ideology of fascism also had many different historical roots. Leading exponents of the fascist movement had a socialist past, and a legacy of Sorelian syndicalism animated in particular its socio-economic theorising. 16 At the same time, Italian fascists glorified the national community, in which the individual was to dissolve. Mussolini famously insisted that there was to be ‘tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato’ [everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state]. 17
The oscillation of fascist ideology was also related to the personality of Benito Mussolini. For most of his compatriots the duce remained the ultimate reference in deciding what Italian fascism actually was. As a man who valued action over contemplation, Mussolini proved to be opportunistic when it came to adjusting his rhetoric to the necessities of the time, visible in the compromises he made with the Catholic Church and the Nazis. Some historians contend that fascist ideology nevertheless formed a coherent whole. 18 I have serious doubts about that claim and this brings me back to the initial distinction between a rationalising and adventurous fascism. Both varieties had their own theoretical legitimation that was developed and promoted by a particular school of authors. In what follows I concentrate on the rationalising variety, which is of interest here.
Although Italian fascism was in many respects a nationalistic and particularistic ideology it harboured a number of theorists who elaborated on its universal implications. 19 Giuseppe Bottai, Ugo Spirito and Arnaldo Volpicelli are among the more well-known figures. Only the diplomat Giuseppe de Michelis, however, developed a veritable fascist theory of international organisation. De Michelis was born on 6 April 1872 in Pistoia, Tuscany. 20 He studied medicine at the University of Lausanne and worked for a couple of years as an assistant at the University of Geneva. In 1904 he joined the Swiss branch of the Italian Commissariato Generale dell’Emigrazione (CGE), a body set up by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to protect the interests of Italian migrants abroad. De Michelis embarked on a remarkable career in the CGE and by 1919 was appointed its Commissioner General. In this function he negotiated a number of international agreements with European and extra-European countries to which Italians had migrated. As of 1920, de Michelis also represented the Italian government in the Administrative Council of the International Labour Organization (ILO).
Giuseppe de Michelis never was a central figure of the Italian fascist regime but what the French would call a grand commis de l’État – a high-ranking civil servant with a number of prominent functions. His career began before the fascist period but he remained in office as Commissioner General of the CGE after the fascist seizure of power and joined the National Fascist Party in February 1926. 21 Until 1936 he served as head of the Italian delegation to the International Labour Conference and for a short period also as delegate to the Assembly of the League of Nations (1930 to 1931). The focus of his work was more technical than political, however. Throughout the 1920s he represented Italy at a number of international conferences and commissions in his fields of expertise, labour and migration. As of 1925 he also directed the International Institute of Agriculture in Rome, which in 1931 he nominated for the Nobel Prize in Peace. 22 In 1929, de Michelis was appointed Senator. When Mussolini’s regime in Rome collapsed in 1943 and allied troops occupied southern and central Italy de Michelis was cited before the ‘High Court of Justice for Sanctions against Fascism’, but was absolved. After World War II he briefly served as the first president of the newly founded Italian state airline, Alitalia (1946−1948). Giuseppe de Michelis died in Rome on 12 October 1951.
Next to his diplomatic engagements, de Michelis wrote scholarly studies and pamphlets, mostly published by the institutions he was affiliated with. His early writings tackled questions of labour and migration, but in the 1930s he turned to more general problems of IR and political economy. 23 It was in this phase of his life that de Michelis published a book-length proposal for the global application of Italy’s corporativist model, La corporazione nel mondo, which is in the focus of this article. 24 There is not much academic literature to date on the life and work of Giuseppe de Michelis. Historians have been interested chiefly in his extensive work on migration and labour issues. 25 His proposals for global corporativism and European integration received less attention and are mentioned mainly in studies with a different focus. 26
Fascist Internationalism
La corporazione nel mondo was published in Italian in 1934, but a French and English translation followed suit. 27 Like other works in economics and political science of the 1930s, World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines, as it was called in English (henceforth WRCL), took the Great Depression as its point of departure. De Michelis presented the book as a programmatic proposal to overcome the crisis by ‘establishing a form of organised economy on the international plane’. 28 For de Michelis Italians were in a privileged position to advise the world on economic reconstruction due to ‘(…) the luminous Fascist experience recommended by eleven years of economic progress and of civil order’. 29 His interest in global corporativism, however, was not triggered directly by the Great Depression. He had already made proposals for international economic ‘triangulation’, as he preferred to call it, in the 1920s. 30
The argument made in WRCL starts with a theoretical exposition of the need for coordinating economic activity within and beyond the state. The terms he uses to describe authoritative intervention into economic life vary: co-ordination, regulation, rationalisation, triangulation. Triangulation does not refer to tripartite structures of governance (as in the ILO) but to the coordinated use of three basic factors of economic production: ‘labour, nature and capital’. 31 De Michelis’s notion of nature includes arable land and forests, as well as mineral resources. If the coordination of the three factors fails, an economy faces what he calls ‘maladjustments’, and countering them is the task of politics. The massive distortions brought about by World War I and the Great Depression could not be addressed by one state alone, he argues, even if many nations had tried. The interdependencies in the global market required international cooperation to address the uneven distribution of labour, natural resources and capital across the globe. Only sustained international efforts at triangulation could bring these three resources fruitfully together. 32
The perceived need for intervention was also based on a theory of market failure. The free market, in which liberal economists had placed high hopes, had ceased to function as a mechanism of allocation in the 20th century, as public and private monopolies hampered coordination via the price mechanism. 33 Fully in line with dominant fascist doctrine de Michelis also criticises capitalism on moral grounds for the social inequality it produced and for creating a ‘plutocracy’ of bankers and industrialists, a common theme in the fascist literature. Communists, on the other hand, adopted a too extreme remedy to such problems when handing over all means of production to the working class. 34 Private property and individual economic initiative were to be respected, to safeguard the productivity of human labour and the accumulation of savings. 35 The protection of private property, however, was neither tantamount to a capitalist form of production, nor an ‘absolute right’. ‘The collective interest (…) is what determines the substance and form of property. Private property is the institution which at this moment in the history of modern progressive industrial societies can best subserve the general economic interest’. 36
This intermediate position between free market and collectivisation was of course fascist orthodoxy and the basis of corporativism. It enabled Italian fascists to claim that their corporativism was an alternative way of organising the economy, even if what it actually meant in practice remained nebulous for many years. The corporativist ‘third way’ is guided by a vision of the common good as defined and defended by the state, but the state would not, like in communism, usurp the place of private business. 37 According to de Michelis, the principal aim of the fascist state in economic affairs ‘is to preserve and to enlarge the purchasing power of the consuming population’. 38 Since consumers are much worse organised than both industry and labour, the tutelage of consumer interests was a task for the fascist state. Citing Mussolini extensively, de Michelis argues that fascist intervention would at last bring order to the economy. Conflicts were to be addressed by the ‘self-discipline’ of the classes involved, rather than strikes and lock-outs. If the parties concerned fail to reach agreement, the interests of workers and employers are harmonised by ‘the consciously exercised authority of the State which in this act transcends the corporative system itself and rises to the totalitarian care of the interests of the community’. 39 This almost metaphysical moment – when the state merges the interests of employers, workers, and consumers – is key to the understanding of Italian fascist doctrine and the paramount role of corporativism within it.
De Michelis makes the case for a transnational approach to ‘triangulation’ with reference to all sorts of statistical data, 40 illustrating the massive concentration of the world’s population in some areas of Europe and Asia while other inhabitable lands remain almost void of human activity. International political intervention hence is required to re-distribute populations, so as to make more efficient use of natural resources and provide work for the unemployed masses. A major problem in this respect was the mobility of the labour force. De Michelis, now on his home turf, documents that international migration flows between overpopulated and sparsely populated areas had been blocked by World War I, and never recovered. This trend affected temporary labour migration as well as permanent re-settlement. 41 He therefore argued for international agreements and organisations to facilitate labour mobility.
Raw materials were also unevenly distributed across the globe, and that they were subject to national jurisdiction led to misallocation and shortage problems. Countries were abusing scarce resources as political levers and provided foreign access to them selectively. De Michelis hence suggests that national sovereignty over natural resources should be limited and free access guaranteed. Yet the idea is not pursued consistently. He also cites international agreements concluded between France and Italy during World War I that established some form of bilateral barter trade, rather than free access to resources. Under these agreements (that he had in fact negotiated) France employed Italian workers in phosphate and coal mines, and Italy received certain guaranteed amounts of the materials produced in return. Such agreements ‘might form the basis of an organization aiming at the redistribution of population and of raw materials’. 42
World War I and the subsequent years of political turmoil had also interrupted flows of foreign direct investment. In particular Africa, de Michelis argues, suffered from a lack of foreign capital to develop its productive capacities and to serve as a market for goods produced in the industrialised world. Again, his diagnosis is one of misallocation brought about by economic nationalism and protectionism (which of course was a key theme of liberal internationalism). As a remedy, de Michelis suggested the international cooperation of institutions that facilitated access to credit for small enterprises and farmers. 43
As a first practical step, triangulation was supposed to start between the colonies and the centres of industrial production in Europe. To that end, existing colonial empires were to be dismantled. Treating colonies as an annex of the mother country and not opening them to exchange relations with others (including neighbouring colonies) diminished both the welfare of the colonies and of the colonial powers. This called for a ‘more methodical and orderly revival of that colonising activity’. 44 De Michelis suggested transferring unemployed European workers to the colonies, in particular to Africa, where he found sparsely inhabited areas suitable for European settlement. At the same time, he criticised established colonial practices that led to the displacement and expropriation of native populations, and forced labour. De Michelis probably already perceived the menace of de-colonialisation movements when he insisted that the colonisers should respect and guarantee the land rights of native populations. 45
His concern for the fate of native populations and his technocratic optimism met when he advanced administrative strategies to protect the claim to land by native groups. One could, he argued, scientifically determine the number of persons to be employed in colonial projects without putting the sustainability of the native communities and their agriculture at risk. 46 Working on such scientific, statistical and administrative tasks was an ideal field for international cooperation and the work of international agencies. De Michelis thus came to promote functional-scientific cooperation in the field of agriculture and an international supervision of colonial administration inspired by the mandate system that the League had established after World War I. 47 Colonial territories in Africa were pivotal to de Michelis’s vision of international ‘triangulation’ because they provided raw materials needed for industrial economies, and space for settlers. He approvingly refers to similar ideas of the German economist and long-time president of the Reichsbank, Hjalmar Schacht, who had also foreseen the colonies as an outlet for European surplus population. 48
The project of international integration along corporative lines was to unfold gradually, starting in Europe and Africa. ‘We believe that a well-constructed and well-equipped European union – or better, as we shall see, Eurafrican union – will be the best example and preparation for the future forms of world economic and political collaboration’. 49 The Eurafrican union was a neo-colonial idea so widely discussed during the interwar years that de Michelis did not bother introducing it in detail to the readership of WRCL. 50 The core of the different versions of this concept was the joint socio-economic development of the African continent through concerted efforts of European powers. 51 De Michelis credits the prominent internationalist Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi with the idea. 52
For de Michelis, Europe’s neo-colonial enlargement was to take place under the supervision of a public international organisation derived from the Four-Power Pact of 1933. The four European great powers (Italy, France, Germany and the UK) should take the lead and organise a multilateral colonial conference to work out details of the colonial programme and its organisational form. The system of mandates of the League was to be included into this new system of colonial administration, and the mandates administered jointly. To re-start the economy in Europe, de Michelis also envisaged major public works with a transnational dimension. These projects should help integrating the continent via its transport infrastructure and to relieve mass-unemployment. In this context he approvingly cites proposals made by John Maynard Keynes. 53 An international investment fund could further facilitate such tasks but de Michelis does not stipulate the need for new international organisations. The League’s ‘Commission of Enquiry for European Union’ could take over the task of coordinating the work and include – in a corporativist spirit – representatives of National Economic Councils. 54
European union, de Michelis argued, should (and could only) be built around a common market while ‘the legal framework of the greater European society should not precede but spring out of the economic formation’. 55 The choice for an economic core of cooperation also determines that the integration project cannot be confined to Europe, or Eurafrica, but needs to gradually include more and more parts of the world. Economic interdependence did not stop short at the boundaries of the European continent and the greatest challenges of triangulation, as conceived by de Michelis, were intercontinental in scope. Therefore, Eurafrica was only the beginning; the true aspiration was ‘world corporativism’, to be developed by global institutions. According to de Michelis, the League of Nations, the ILO and the International Institute of Agriculture (that de Michelis presided at the time) were destined to take the lead in realising this project. 56 With regard to precedence or coordination among these three institutions, WRCL remains much more vague than an earlier version of his proposal published in 1931, which had put the League clearly on top. 57 He now stresses that concerted action is what matters most, the institutional centre being secondary. It was perfectly clear to de Michelis that international governance of that sort would infringe upon the principle of national sovereignty. He openly approved of this tendency and found the League and other international organisations already making some inroads. 58
To summarise, what de Michelis developed in La corporazione nel mondo was a quite original melange of internationalism, neo-colonialism and corporativism. To what extent were such proposals compatible with official fascist doctrine? In the Italian press, the book received mixed reviews. In Bottai’s Critica fascista, Alberto Donini labelled the approach taken by de Michelis to international economic governance ‘intimately Mussolinian’, thus putting it explicitly into the realm of fascist orthodoxy.
59
He found the common ground in the idea that any economic system needed coordination and control, and this is what de Michelis prescribed for the international level. This positive appraisal was echoed in a number of articles on the colonial question that referred to the book, or to de Michelis’s ideas more generally.
60
A review by Giulio Colamarino, a journalist and theorist of fascism, was very different in tone and highly critical.
61
Colamarino argued that the concept of corporativism remained so closely tied to the context of the state that its global application was unconceivable. Only the strong institutions of the state apparatus could discipline the social forces and become the ‘motor’ of corporativist development. In the absence of a central and powerful institution at the international level, how could a corporate arrangement unfold? Economic cooperation and international law, he argued, were unlikely to achieve this. The reviewer concluded that de Michelis had abandoned the ideological premises of the fascist project and accused him of liberal individualism (which was a heavy charge among Italian fascists): De Michelis arrives, without recognizing it, at a conception of international life that is based on fine grains of purely economic individuals, without fatherland, without national pride, without ideals, without history, with their only concern being to improve their economic condition.
62
This judgment was based on a somewhat one-sided reading of the text but it does not amount to a complete misunderstanding either. The puzzlingly contradictory assessments of the reviewers direct us further to the thorny problem of what the ideological essence of Italian fascism actually was. If Italian fascism was above all a nationalist and state-centred movement, it appears hard to reconcile with the internationalism of de Michelis, regardless of his vows of allegiance to Mussolini. It is difficult to imagine how the primacy of the nation could be squared with plans for international integration and transfers of sovereignty. Two separate questions emerge here. First, what was the exact purpose of publishing WCLR for de Michelis and, possibly, Italy’s fascist regime as a whole? And second, how exactly was it possible for de Michelis to plausibly claim that fascism and internationalism were, if not identical, then at least highly compatible?
Fascism, Modernity and World Order
Let us begin with the question of why de Michelis launched a fascist version of internationalism. If there is already something like a ‘conventional’ interpretation, it relates the book to the Abyssinian campaign that followed its publication. Ostuni speculates that the book was a form of ‘preventive legitimation’ for the war. 63 Scholz agrees that an Italian book so internationalist in outlook must have been a smokescreen to hide the expansionist intentions of the fascist regime in Africa. 64 Gallo cites similar reactions to the book, but without taking a position himself. 65 Unfortunately, for the lack of personal papers we do not have any clear indication of why and when de Michelis decided to write his book and why he arranged for its immediate translation into English and French. Mussolini knew about the book and the planned translations, but to what extent he approved of its content is unclear. 66
I am not convinced that WRCL was a ‘smokescreen’, nor that its publication was directly related to the planned war in Africa. First of all, none of the internationalist ideas presented by de Michelis in La corporazione nel mondo was published there for the first time, and they would hardly have been news able to deceive anyone at the League of Nations. The text rather systematises a number of political proposals that de Michelis had made in Geneva since the 1920s and that grew out of his work on migration and unemployment. 67 First proposals for international and European cooperation were tabled at the International Labour Conference of 1924. 68 And all major elements of the argument made in WRCL could be found already in a journal article published in English in 1931. 69
My interpretation is that de Michelis was a rather independent mind who used the leeway permitted by the regime to formulate his own synthesis of fascist thought and the internationalism that he had become accustomed to in Geneva. He belonged to a group of experienced diplomats that the regime tried to co-opt in the course of a ‘fascisation’ of Italy’s civil service. 70 Mussolini needed internationally respected diplomats to gain standing and legitimacy in international organisations, a foreign policy priority in the 1920s. 71 After seizing power in Italy, the fascist regime was quite eager to collaborate with the League and the ILO, in particular in technical and scientific matters. 72 De Michelis was a well-known figure in Geneva and personally on good terms with Albert Thomas, the first director of the ILO. 73 At the same time he proved loyal to Mussolini. Throughout the 1920s he fought many battles in Geneva to have the fascist trade unions accepted as representatives of Italian labour at the ILO. 74
Of some help in understanding the particular position of de Michelis in fascist Italy, and the purpose of WRCL, is his defence before the ‘High Court of Justice for Sanctions against Fascism’ in 1944. The line of defence taken by de Michelis was to portray himself as a left-leaning political mind who decided to collaborate with the regime without sharing much of its ideology, in order to advance the cause of the working class. In this context he explicitly cites WRCL as evidence of his internationalist outlook (preparations for war being among the charges that the court investigated).
At times, I also resorted to that well-known tactical means which is attributing to others one’s own thoughts, be it by exploiting the phraseology in fashion, be it by using some cue, proposal or measure with the aim of directing it towards better ends, and to extract from them all the possible immediate advantage for the proletarian class. Such was the title of “La Corporazione nel Mondo” that I gave to my book about the triangular cooperation of the factors of production: a theory social, human, and democratic like hardly any other.
75
Given its strategic purpose, this document is of course a problematic source. But deciding if de Michelis was a convinced fascist or merely an opportunist is not the issue here. The document corroborates the suspicion, however, that he was not simply a mouthpiece of Mussolini’s regime in Geneva, but rather a diplomat with a personal agenda stuck in a game of mutual instrumentalisation. While Mussolini used him to gain international legitimacy for Italian fascism in Geneva, de Michelis ‘highjacked’ official fascist jargon to advance his own internationalist ideas. This relationship ended around 1935 to 1936 with the openly imperialist turn in Italian foreign policy and the retreat from the League, which sidelined de Michelis and other internationalists.
What still needs to be explored is how exactly de Michelis was able to amalgamate ideological elements of fascism and internationalism in a way that could appear plausible to contemporaries both in Rome and Geneva. Points to consider are the modernist and universalist aspirations of fascism. For some of the leading theorists, fascism, and in particular corporativism, was universal in outlook. This strand of fascist political thought reached its apex in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It was represented by Giuseppe Bottai, the ‘bright young man of Fascism’ 76 and militant of the first hour who had joined Mussolini from the futurist movement. In different functions of government, Bottai pushed for a modernisation and rationalisation of Italy’s public administration. 77 Unlike de Michelis, Bottai was an important figure of Italian fascism and a long-term minister, the ‘patron saint of a burgeoning corporativist subculture that encompassed institutes, academic programs, and publications’. 78 It is evident that Bottai was the one from the inner circle of fascist power who backed Giuseppe de Michelis politically. Bottai supported his candidature as Senator in 1928 and put him on the National Council of Corporations (Consiglio Nazionale delle Corporazioni) in 1932. The similarities in their theoretical views are evident. In his writings on corporativism, Bottai argued for the universal applicability of fascism’s socio-economic order. ‘The corporatist state’, he wrote, ‘is the only solution to the problems of contemporary life, the form that the social substance of the modern world tends to’. 79 Since the corporativist state was the final destination of the historical trajectory it could be advertised at home and abroad as an avant-garde model to be applied anywhere in the world. In his address to the 12th International Labour Conference in 1928, Bottai even suggested that corporativist principles should inspire not only other nations but also an international order. 80
Fascism and internationalism combined also in the writings of Arnaldo Volpicelli, a legal theorist influenced by Giovanni Gentile and placed by Bottai at the Scuola di Scienze Corporative in Pisa. 81 In a largely theoretical essay on international order he affirmed that the principles of fascism were universal in scope. Therefore, the proper subject of fascist theorising was not the single state and its domestic order but the ‘juridical organization of international society’. 82 And he asked rhetorically: ‘Hence, an internationalist doctrine after so many assertions and celebrations of ultra-nationalism? Precisely.’ 83
Volpicelli claimed that fascist internationalism was markedly different from the liberal internationalism of the Anglo-Saxon world. The liberal conception of the state, individualist and materialist, had led to the formation of an international arena where states, quite like individuals in the state of nature, were competing. Under such circumstances international order could emerge when nations entered agreements that, for the benefit of the participants, put some limits to this state of nature. In the resulting cooperation, however, nations remained fully distinct and independent, quite like the atomistic individuals of liberal society. Volpicelli’s fascist conception, by contrast, started from an organic, holistic notion of international society, where different nations were distinct ‘organs’ of one single body, interacting with and depending upon each other. For Volpicelli, corporativism was able to overcome the old dualism between national and international order by way of synthesis. A corporativist international order was realised through [attraverso] the domestic social orders of the states, not among them or above them. 84
This organic conception of world order was inspired by Giovanni Gentile’s idealist philosophy of ‘actualism’, which crucially influenced the fascist theorising of Volpicelli, Ugo Spirito and many others. 85 In his attempt at delivering solid philosophical foundations of fascist doctrine, Gentile had suggested that individual freedom found its highest realisation in the collective of the fascist state. 86 Corporativism had the function to overcome the antagonism between workers and capital. This almost metaphysical capacity of fascism to bring into harmony individuals and collectives by way of a new, somewhat obscure synthesis is reflected in Volpicelli’s theorising about states and international society. 87
De Michelis managed to link up his internationalist proposals to the integralist strand of corporativist theorising that Bottai and Volpicelli represented. Fascist internationalism may have seemed an eccentric combination to many Italian contemporaries but in the context of the early 1930s, it found support in the writings of prominent theorists of the regime. Yet the imagined audience of de Michelis was not exclusively Italian. I have shown above that he drew heavily on ideas propagated by such different contemporaries as Coudenhove-Kalergi, Keynes, and Schacht. They constituted the international public that de Michelis probably wanted to address with WRCL, and the fact that his manuscript was translated immediately into English and French testifies to his ambition in reaching out to such peers. In this last section I shall therefore relate the work of de Michelis to contemporary international debates about global economic and political order.
There are several zones of overlap. The first one is in the debate over the colonial question, in which writers abroad echoed ideas about a transfer of European populations to colonies, and a coordinated use of colonial resources. 88 Second, there were the debates about global economic governance to tackle the Great Depression and to bring order to the (world) economy. 89 In fact, the need for state intervention into the economy and forms of social engineering was almost undisputed at the time, even in the US. 90 In a contribution to Foreign Affairs, Bottai in 1935 claimed that Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’ and Italy’s corporativism had fundamentally the same political goals: economic stability and social justice. And even if the means differed, he argued, their political programmes were premised on the principle of state intervention in the economy. 91 Needless to say, such visions of a planned economy were equally prominent among socialists and social-democrats at the time. 92 Also E.H. Carr found ‘the master key to the problem of post-war settlement’ in a ‘European Planning Authority’. 93 Not least, international planning for social and economic purposes was the order of the day in the Geneva circles that de Michelis frequented. 94
This brings me to a more general point. De Michelis, Bottai and Volpicelli wrote at a time of great faith in the possibilities of science, technology and social engineering, sometimes dubbed ‘the machine age’. 95 Modernism was a transnational phenomenon during the Interwar years. 96 As mentioned above, Italian fascism had a discernable modernist strand. 97 This was most apparent in the movement’s early years, when futurists wanted to scrap the antiquated social and political order of the 19th century, using the new possibilities that science and technology offered. 98 But also in the more mundane fields of public works, industrial development and land reclamation, fascist policies were ‘outgrowths of an agenda of social engineering that aimed to refashion Italians and establish a new civilization’. 99 This modernist strand of the movement is what Ungari meant by ‘rationalizing fascism’ (fascismo rationalizzatore), as opposed to Mussolini’s ‘adventurous fascism’ (fascismo avventuriero). 100 In the self-legitimation of the regime, proponents of the rationalising variant drew heavily on motives of socio-economic progress and technocratic problem-solving for the benefit of the Italian people. 101
There are important affinities between modernism and internationalism in the early 20th century, but few political scientists have paid attention to this connection. As science, technology and rationalised administration were universally applicable, reform proposals often attained an international dimension. Jo-Anne Pemberton speaks of ‘global metaphors’ in this respect. 102 In the early 20th century, scholars routinely pointed out the ever-increasing interdependencies between nations which progress in transport and communications technologies had created. 103 Governing this interdependence implied overcoming the territorial fragmentation of the world and, at least for some visionaries, the creation of ‘a World State of capable rational men’. 104 The ‘public international unions’ of the 19th century may count as the first instances of cooperation among states to tackle their interdependencies by means of ‘rational’ international organisation. 105 However, truly programmatic proposals for international technocratic organisations can be found only in the writings of the early 20th century. In the British ambit they are present, for instance, in the work of Leonard Woolf and James Arthur Salter. 106 They delivered an important blueprint for what came to be called ‘functional’ international administration, a theme taken up and developed much further by David Mitrany.
The parallels between the interwar internationalism of de Michelis and Mitrany are striking. Two years before WRCL appeared in English, the same publishing house had printed Mitrany’s Progress of International Government. 107 In that book Mitrany argued that modernisation of government required substituting territorially based governance with functional schemes. While economic and social progress unfolded domestically, the doctrine of national sovereignty prevented the development of effective transnational institutions that served the global common good. National politics and traditional international diplomacy were unable to deal with transnational societal interaction and economic interdependence. ‘Unfortunately, the petty egoism of some of the Powers and the lack of a sense of responsibility among some youthful States prevented the creation of machinery for the communal handling of international issues’. 108
De Michelis and Mitrany not only share a diagnosis but also a common conceptual basis, which is in the physical needs of human beings. These needs were imagined as universal, not tied to any specific culture, civilisation or state. 109 For Mitrany, and for de Michelis, the modern state in practice provided its services mainly through centralised planning and bureaucratic organisation. Yet national plans were bound to fail without appropriate international coordination, especially when one aspired to plan scientifically. Due to the manifold interdependencies, all national plans would inevitably come to interfere with each other. Modern governance therefore required international coordination of resources, transport capacities, investment etc.
Both theorists acknowledged that international planning implied limits to national sovereignty. De Michelis was certainly more cautious in this respect than Mitrany, for whom the nation-state was the source of much evil and nationalism a ‘perverse creed’. 110 As a liberal political theorist, Mitrany feared excessive concentrations of state power. To free individuals from it, he suggested a two-pronged process of ‘devolution’, downward to the local and upward to the international level. 111 Thus, his internationalism claimed to serve both the efficacy of governance and the freedom of individuals. De Michelis, by contrast, desired ‘progress towards a further stage of evolution in which a new form of State, more vast and complex, will comprise within itself a number of unitary national States, autonomous but disciplined by compulsion for the defence of the common interest’. 112 The dispersal of public power is not the goal here but its consolidation. Like the Italian fascist state that ‘disciplined’ individuals and societal groups, the nascent world state was to ‘discipline’ existing nations to serve an imagined global public interest.
Conclusion
The purpose of this article was to challenge the still widespread presumption that the history of world order proposals is, by and large, a history of ‘liberal internationalism’. As I have shown, in the early 1930s it was perfectly possible to couch proposals for ‘functional’ international organisation in the terminology of fascist political theory. Fascism, at least in its Italian variant and at least for some thinkers, was compatible with international organisation and cooperation on the basis of state equality. Giuseppe de Michelis, whose writings were in the focus here, used the fascist doctrine of corporativism as a blueprint for international organisation. This ‘domestic analogy’ provided simultaneously a rationale for integrating the European continent; a justification for European colonialism in Africa; and a new mission for the League of Nations and the ILO. In the Italian context, the promise of corporativism was to overcome conflicting class interests by means of a new synthesis, guided and supervised by a strong state. For de Michelis, corporativism had the potential to do the same globally, with powerful international organisations overcoming territorial fragmentation and parochial self-interest of states.
The fascist internationalism of de Michelis was technocratic and dirigist, enthusiastic about the possibilities of public planning and the virtues of bureaucratic organisation in safeguarding the ‘common good’ of (international) society. His suggestions resemble, in many important respects, world order proposals made by contemporaries who emanated from liberal ideological premises, such as David Mitrany; or from socialist ones, as in the case of Francis Delaisi. 113 In the interwar years, a strong current of technocratic modernism crossed ideological camps that in retrospect we have come to imagine as neatly distinct. This technocratic modernism was based on the assumption that human needs are universal and objective; and that they may be satisfied by international organisations better than by the state.
Functionalist world order proposals of the early 20th century did not grow out of any specific political ideology but from a fascination with new technologies of governing. Partisans of functionalism praised the rationalisation of governance by de-politicised administration, imagined as efficient, predictable and perfectly tailored to the function it served. As vehicles of universal progress, international organisations were designed to transcend the parochial interests of states and the secret deals of diplomatic horse-trading. Such visions of de-politicised, administrative governance continued to inspire theorists and practitioners of international organisation for decades. 114 They influenced regional integration theory of the 1950s and 1960s as well as the American ‘neoliberal institutionalism’ of the 1970s and 1980s. However, and as I have shown in this article, as a project of technocratic modernity ‘international organization’ found supporters in many quarters. Liberals were certainly among them, but the project in and of itself was not tied to the liberal tradition of political thought.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to Christof Dipper, Leonie Holthaus, Ned Lebow and Katharina Rietzler for helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors of Millennium for their constructive criticism. Francesca Antonini provided excellent research assistance.
Declaration of Conflicting Interest
The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.
Funding
Research for this article was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through its Cluster of Excellence ‘The Formation of Normative Orders’ (EXC 243).
1.
For a critical reappraisal of that narrative see Andreas Osiander, ‘Rereading Early Twentieth-Century IR Theory: Idealism Revisited’, International Studies Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1998): 409–32; Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Where Are the Idealists in Interwar International Relations?’, Review of International Studies 32, no. 2 (2006): 291–308; Peter Wilson, ‘Where We Are Now in the Debate about the First Great Debate’, in International Relations and the First Great Debate, ed. Brian Schmidt (London: Routledge, 2012), 133–51.
2.
Michael Banks, ‘The Evolution of International Relations Theory’, in Conflict in World Society: A New Perspective on International Relations, ed. Michael Banks (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984), 3–21, at 6.
3.
Tim Dunne, ‘Liberalism’, in The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, eds. John Baylis and Steve Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 186–201, at 187.
4.
Michael W. Doyle, ‘Liberalism and World Politics’, American Political Science Review 80, no. 4 (1986): 1151–69, at 1151. On the various strands of liberalism see James L. Richardson, ‘Contending Liberalisms: Past and Present’, European Journal of International Relations 3, no. 1 (1997): 5–33; Duncan Bell, ‘What Is Liberalism?’, Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715.
5.
Doyle, ‘Liberalism’, 1157.
6.
Alejandro Colás, ‘Putting Cosmopolitanism into Practice: The Case of Socialist Internationalism’, Millennium – Journal of International Studies 23, no. 3 (1994): 513–34.
7.
Fred Halliday, ‘Three Concepts of Internationalism’, International Affairs 64, no. 2 (1988): 187–98.
8.
Fred Halliday, ‘Iranian Foreign Policy since 1979: Internationalism and Nationalism in the Islamic Revolution’, in Shi’ism and Social Protest, eds. Juan R.I. Cole and Nikki R. Keddie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 88–107.
9.
Paolo Ungari, ‘Ideologie giuridiche e strategie istituzionali del fascismo’, in Il problema storico del fascismo, eds. Mario Abrate et al. (Florence: Vallecchi, 1970), 61–79, at 77.
10.
On the debate about ideology and foreign policy in fascist Italy, see Aristotle A. Kallis, Fascist Ideology. Territory and Expansionism in Italy and Germany, 1922–1945 (London: Routledge, 2000); Elisabetta Brighi, Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics and International Relations: The Case of Italy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
11.
For domestic analogies in international theory see Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
12.
A. James Gregor, Interpretations of Fascism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1997); Alberto de Bernardi, Una dittatura moderna. Il fascismo come problema storico (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2nd ed, 2006); Roberto Vivarelli, Storia delle origini del fascismo. L’Italia dalla grande guerra alla marcia su Roma (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012).
13.
Mauro Canali, ‘The Matteotti Murder and the Origins of Mussolini’s Totalitarian Fascist Regime in Italy’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 14, no 2 (2009): 143–67.
14.
Despite the aggressive rhetoric, the regime remained ‘authoritarian’ rather than ‘totalitarian’ until the 1930s.
15.
Emilio Gentile, Le origini dell’ideologia fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2nd ed., 1996), 495.
16.
David D. Roberts, The Syndicalist Tradition and Italian Fascism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
17.
Benito Mussolini, ‘Discorso pronunciato ai cittadini milanesi il 28 ottobre 1925’, in Opera Omnia di Benito Mussolini, Vol. 21, eds. E. Susmel and D. Susmel (Florence: La Fenice, 1951–1963), 325.
18.
A. James Gregor, Mussolini’s Intellectuals: Fascist Social and Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 16.
19.
Niccolò Pinto, ‘Universalità del fascismo: internazionale corporativa’, Critica fascista 13, no.15 (1935): 299−303. See Beate Scholz, ‘Italienischer Faschismus als “Export”–Artikel (1927–1935): Ideologische und organisatorische Ansätze zur Verbreitung des Faschismus im Ausland’ (PhD diss., University of Trier, 2001), 95–96.
20.
Biographical information taken from Maria Rosaria Ostuni, ‘De Michelis, Giuseppe’, Dizionario biografico degli italiani (Rome: Treccani, 1990) vol. 38. Available at: http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giuseppe-de-michelis_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/; Anonymous, ed., Chi è? Dizionario degli italiani d’oggi (Rome: Formiggini, 1936); Anonymous, ed., Chi è? Dizionario degli italiani d’oggi (Rome: Filippo Scarano, 1940). Senato della Repubblica, Scheda del senatore del Regno d’Italia Giuseppe De Michelis, fondo: segreteria del regno, serie: fascicoli personali dei Senatori del regno. Available at: 
OpenDocument, henceforth Scheda.
21.
By 1924 he had received ‘honorary membership’ of the Geneva branch of the fascist movement, see Senato della Repubblica, Scheda, 14. On the CGE see Philip V. Cannistraro and Gianfausto Rosoli, Emigrazione, chiesa e fascismo. Lo scioglimento dell’ Opera Bonomelli (1922–28) (Rome: Edizioni Studium, 1979), 28–9, 39–40.
23.
Giuseppe de Michelis, La disoccupazione operaia. Una migliore distribuzione della popolazione, della terra e dei capitali (Rome: Carlo Colombo, 1931); ‘A World Programme of Organic Economic Reconstruction’, International Labour Review 24, no 5 (1931): 495–505; ‘Direttive e prospettive dell’organizzazione internazionale del lavoro’, Gerarchia 11, no 5 (1932): 375-–381; Politica internazionale del lavoro (Rome: Carlo Colombo, 1938).
24.
Giuseppe de Michelis, La corporazione nel mondo (Milan: Bompiani, 1934).
25.
Renata Allio, L’Organizzazione internazionale del lavoro e il sindacalismo fascista (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1973); Cannistraro and Rosoli, Emigrazione; see Stefano Gallo, ‘Governare la mobilità. Il servizio statale delle migrazioni nell’Italia fascista’ (PhD diss., University of Pisa, 2008). Maria Rosaria Ostuni, ‘Il fondo archivistico del Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione’, Studi emigrazione 15, no. 51 (1978): 411–40.
26.
Elisabeth Tamedly, Socialism and International Economic Order (Caldwell: Caxton, 1969); Traute Rafalski, Italienischer Faschismus in der Weltwirtschaftskrise (1925–1936) (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1984); Scholz, Italienischer Faschismus; Maria-Rosa Marrero, ‘Notes sur la Société des Nations, les dictatures et la notion de corporativisme (1922–1939)’, in Korporativismus in den südeuropäischen Diktaturen, eds. Aldo Mazzacane, Alessandro Somma and Michael Stolleis (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2005), 399–412; Daniela Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit: Zur internationalen Freizeit- und Sozialpolitik des faschistischen Italien und des NS-Regimes (Cologne: SH-Verlag, 2009).
27.
Giuseppe de Michelis, World Reorganisation on Corporative Lines (London: Allen & Unwin, 1935); La corporation dans le monde (Paris: Éditions Denoël et Steele, 1935).
28.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 236.
29.
Ibid., 15.
30.
Ibid., 13.
31.
Ibid., 26.
32.
Ibid., 28.
33.
Ibid., 233–5.
34.
Ibid., 29.
35.
Ibid., 207.
36.
Ibid., 208.
37.
On corporativism, see Gianpasquale Santomassimo, La terza via fascista: il mito del corporativismo (Rome: Carocci, 2006); Irene Stolzi, L’ordine corporativo: poteri organizzati e organizzazione del potere nella riflessione giuridica dell’Italia fascista (Milan: Giuffrè, 2007); Alessio Gagliardi, Il corporativismo fascista (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2010).
38.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 210.
39.
Ibid., 30.
40.
In a sizeable technical annex to WRCL (ibid., 248–312), de Michelis presents data on raw material production, merchandise trade and capital flows, and the distribution of population across the globe. The suitability of sparsely inhabited territories for settlement is discussed at particular length.
41.
Ibid., 46.
42.
Ibid., 124.
43.
Ibid., 158.
44.
Ibid., 143.
45.
Ibid., 177.
46.
Ibid., 71–2.
47.
Ibid., 150.
48.
See Hjalmar Schacht, Das Ende der Reparationen (Oldenburg: Stalling, 1931), 229–32.
49.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 166.
50.
On the history of the concept, see Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson, Eurafrica: The Untold History of European Integration and Colonialism (London: Bloomsbury, 2014).
51.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 174.
52.
Richard N. Coudenhove-Kalergi, ‘Afrika’, Paneuropa 5, no. 2 (1929).
53.
Ibid., 202–3.
54.
Ibid., 204.
55.
Ibid., 206.
56.
Ibid., 216.
57.
De Michelis, ‘World Programme’, 504–5.
58.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 213.
59.
Alberto Donini, ‘La corporazione nel mondo’, Critica fascista 12, no. 17 (1934): 338−40, at 340.
60.
Gennaro Mondaini, ‘Colonie e corporativismo’, Rivista delle colonie italiane 8, nos. 11/12 (1934): 919–936, 993–1005; Erberto Casagrandi, ‘L’Africa salverà l’Europa?’, Rivista di studi coloniali 17, nos. 3/4/6 (1943): 205–14, 284–93, 468–77.
61.
G. Colamarino, ‘La corporazione nel mondo’, Nuovi problemi di politica, storia ed economia 5, no. 5 (1934): 662−5.
62.
Ibid., 663, my translation.
63.
Ostuni, ‘De Michelis’.
64.
Scholz, Italienischer Faschismus, 112–3.
65.
Gallo, Governare la mobilità, 326, n. 22.
66.
‘Appunto per il Duce, 22 November 1933’, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Segretaria particolare del Duce, Corrispondenza ordinaria, b. 1006, f. 509.061, cited in Stefano Gallo, ‘Dictatorship and International Organizations: The ILO as a “Test Ground” for Fascism’, in Globalizing Social Rights: The International Labour Organization and Beyond, eds. Sandrine Kott and Joëlle Droux (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 153–71, at 168, n. 30. On Mussolini’s meditations about Italian foreign policy in this period, see Renzo di Felice, Mussolini il duce. Gli anni del consenso 1929–1936 (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 403–14; Luigi Villari, Italian Foreign Policy under Mussolini (New York: Devin-Adair, 1956), 97–109.
67.
Giuseppe De Michelis, La disoccupazione operaia. Una migliore distribuzione della popolazione, della terra e dei capitali (Rome: Carlo Colombo, 1931).
68.
De Michelis, World Reorganisation, 217.
69.
De Michelis, ‘World Programme’.
70.
Jean-Yves Dormagen, Logiques du fascisme: L’État totalitaire en Italie (Paris: Fayard, 2008), 33.
71.
On the situation in Geneva see Gallo, ‘Dictatorship’, 161; more generally Alan Cassels, Mussolini’s Early Diplomacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 377–81.
72.
Silvio Trentin, Le fascisme à Genève (Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1932), 39–46.
73.
Liebscher, Freude und Arbeit, 70.
74.
Ibid., 68–78.
75.
Alta Corte di Giustizia, Esposto a Difesa del Senatore Giuseppe de Michelis, in Senato della Repubblica, Scheda, p. 106. My translation, emphasis in the original.
76.
Roland Sarti, ‘Fascist Modernization in Italy: Traditional or Revolutionary?’ The American Historical Review 75, no. 4 (1971):1029–45, 1038.
77.
Sabino Cassese, La formazione dello Stato amministrativo (Milan: Giuffrè, 1974), 187–210; Giordano Bruno Guerri, Giuseppe Bottai, un fascista critico (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).
78.
Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities: Italy, 1922–1945 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 101.
79.
Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Dalla rivoluzione francese alla rivoluzione fascista’, cited in Giuseppe Bottai, Vent’anni e un giorno, ed. Giordano Bruno Guerri (Milan: BUR Storia, 2008), 92, author’s translation. See also Bottai Esperienza corporativa 1929–1934 (Florence: Vallecchi, 1934), 567.
80.
Reprinted as Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Valore universale dell’ordinamento corporativo’, Critica fascista 6, no. 12 (1928): 225–226.
81.
Vincenzo Suriani, ‘La Scuola di Scienze Corporative di Pisa e lo studio dell’economia programmatica negli anni Trenta’, Il pensiero economico italiano 13, no. 1 (2005): 51–74.
82.
Arnaldo Volpicelli, ‘Corporazione e ordinamento internazionale’ Archivio di studi corporativi 5, no.3 (1934): 329–39, at 329. See also Arnaldo Volpicelli, ‘Società, Stato e società di Stati’, Nuovi Studi di Diritto, Economia e Politica 1, no. 1 (1927): 5–12.
83.
Volpicelli, ‘Corporazione’, 330.
84.
Volpicelli, ‘Corporazione’, 333.
85.
A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001).
86.
Giovanni Gentile, Che cosa é il fascismo? Discorsi e polemiche (Florence: Vallecchi, 1925), 50–2.
87.
See also Arnaldo Volpicelli, ‘La teoria dell’identità di individuo e Stato’, Archivio di studi corporativi 4, no. 3 (1933): 307–33.
88.
Eugène L. Guernier, L’Afrique champ d’expansion de l’Europe (Paris: Armand Colin, 1933); Schacht, Das Ende der Reparationen.
89.
See contributions to Hagen Schulz-Forberg ed., Zero-Hours: Conceptual Insecurities and New Beginnings in the Interwar Period (Brussels: Peter Lang, 2013). For Italy see Rafalski, Italienischer Faschismus.
90.
John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology. Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 207–52.
91.
Giuseppe Bottai, ‘Corporate State and NRA’, Foreign Affairs 13, no. 4 (1935): 612–24.
92.
F.E. Lawley, The Growth of Collective Economy, Volume II (London: King, 1938); Tamedly, Socialism, 68–76.
93.
Edward H. Carr, Conditions of Peace (London: Macmillan, 1942), 259.
94.
G.A. Johnston, ‘Social Economic Planning’, International Labour Review 25, no. 1 (1932): 58–78.
95.
Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology.
96.
H.P. Segal, Technology and Utopia (Washington DC: American Historical Association, 2006).
97.
Rafalski, Italienischer Faschismus, 394–401.
98.
This revolutionary-modernist strand is epitomised by the eccentric figure of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti; see Filippo T. Marinetti, Futurismo e fascismo (Foligno: Campitelli, 1924).
99.
Ben-Ghiat, Fascist Modernities, 3. See also Alberto Aquarone, ‘Aspirazione tecnocratiche del primo fascismo’, Nord e Sud 11, no. 52 (1964): 109–28.
100.
Ungari, ‘Ideologie giuridiche’.
101.
Ibid., 71–2.
102.
Jo-Anne Pemberton, Global Metaphors: Modernity and the Quest for One World (London: Pluto Press, 2001); ‘New Worlds for Old: The League of Nations in the Age of Electricity’, Review of International Studies 28, no. 2 (2002): 311–36.
103.
Paul S. Reinsch, Public International Unions: Their Work and Organization (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1911); Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and Internationalism: the Culmination of Modern History (London: Constable & Company, 1916).
104.
H.G. Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), 279.
105.
Francis Sayre, Experiments in International Administration (New York: Harper, 1919); Craig N. Murphy, International Organization and Industrial Change (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).
106.
Leonard Woolf, International Government (London: Fabian Society and George Allen & Unwin, 1916); James Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921).
107.
David Mitrany, The Progress of International Government (London: Allen & Unwin, 1933).
108.
Ibid., 46.
109.
Lucian Ashworth, Creating International Studies: Angell, Mitrany and the Liberal Tradition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 95.
110.
Mitrany, Progress, 118.
111.
Jens Steffek, ‘The Cosmopolitanism of David Mitrany: Equality, Devolution and Functional Democracy beyond the State’, International Relations 29, no. 1 (2015): 23–44.
112.
De Michelis, World Reorganization, 213.
113.
Francis Delaisi, ‘Proposals of a European Economic Plan’, Annals of Public and Cooperative Economics 8, no. 1(1932): 23–41.
114.
Paul Taylor and A.J.R. Groom, ‘Introduction: Functionalism and International Relations’ in Functionalism, Theory and Practice in International Relations, eds. A.J.R. Groom and Paul Taylor (London: University of London Press, 1975), 1–6.