“The purpose of Mussolini’s increasingly expansionist foreign policy during the 1930’s was only to bolster his decaying prestige which had been affected by economic strain due to the impact of the Great Depression.” How far do you agre

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IB History Internal Essay

Roberto Thais U6B3

Research Topic: Italy and Mussolini: The connection between Mussolini’s domestic and foreign policies during the 1930’s.

Research Question:

 “The purpose of Mussolini’s increasingly expansionist foreign policy during the 1930’s was only to bolster his decaying prestige which had been affected by economic strain due to the impact of the Great Depression.” How far do you agree?

It has become common, during the last few decades, for historical writing to show an increasing tendency to point out close links between foreign and domestic policies of the states being treated, thus stressing the fact that any given government will exhibit underlying intricacies in its methods, either unconsciously or having been carefully planned, which any careful analysis should not ignore. Mussolini’s Italy is of course not an exception, however it is the extent in which the leader calculated the workings of his policies in a holistic manner the issue in which most observers disagree. Although it is much clearer that Mussolini’s foreign policy was largely inconsistent and erratic in its action and design, historians differ in whether his actions in the international arena where only the unplanned response to domestic problems of a dictator whose chief concern was always the internal consolidation of his regime or that there was an underlying consistency in his course of action, this is, that it was always expansionist in nature, while not always in practice. Historian D. Mack Smith agrees that with the former opinion, stating that “any history of Mussolini’s foreign policy… has to be a history of propaganda referring to his policy as only a means to bolster his popularity through the use of propaganda. However, M. Knox is convinced of the latter viewpoint asserting  that Mussolini’s foreign policy was not a reaction to “internal social or political pressures but seeing in it an authentic expansionist vision. The arguments of both of these respected contemporary historians shall form  the basis of the discussion following to a considerable extent, and given the specialist nature of their works together with the virtually unbiased nature of a proficient analysis found in such texts, we can take them as both reliable and useful, thus we will concentrate more on the validity of the argument rather than the trustworthiness of the source.

By the beginning of the 1930’s Mussolini had implemented significant reforms on the Italian economical structure which he believed would solve the problems he inherited from the Liberal government that preceded him and which where particularly serious, as he himself declared: “The financial situation was then…desperately serious. I knew what difficult inheritance I had received …Finance, then, was one of the most delicate and urgent problems to be solved, if I wanted to rebuild and elevate our credit abroad and home.. Italy’s system was deeply affected by the war, and by 1922 most of the problems remained unsolved. Not only there was a run-down in industrial growth, high inflation (the lire had only one fifth of its pre-war value), extreme poverty in southern, agricultural Italy (an accentuation in dualist nature of the economy) and a generalized down in living standards and the land hunger of the peasantry, but also huge unemployment due to return of millions of ex-soldiers to Italy and a new U.S immigration law which restricted the entry to immigrants. These issues had repercussions in the social realm: social dualism (the marked social gap between the South and the North) remained strong and stressed by the fact that the Southerners resented the North because many industrial workers did not go to war as they were needed in the factories, riots and strikes due to leftist sprouts encouraged by the success of the Bolshevik revolution, and also poverty, violence and illiteracy.

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The main economical reform introduced to aid in industrial growth was the Corporate State. The key intention of its establishment was “to replace the old sectional interests (such as trade unions and employers’ organizations) which so often produced conflicts between labour and capital with a system which portrayed a solid alternative to trade unions for workers and apparently erased hierarchical differences, as both workers and employers were its members, but that in reality would make the workers lose their right to free collective bargaining, and the use of strike as a weapon for this purpose, and increase state control over ...

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