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Chapter XIV: Birth of the Fascist Bloc, 1952-1956.
Update 
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After Italian oil started flowing from Libyan wells the goal of a “fascist bloc” came within reach since Italy became the Mediterranean’s dominant economy by far, besides being the dominant naval power. In fact, Italy decided to finish the incomplete Littorio-class battleships Roma and Impero, which were commissioned in 1947 as the last battleships to ever be commissioned worldwide. In 1946, as a stopgap solution, the Regia Marina acquired British aircraft carrier HMS Colossus, a cheaply built carrier without armour, with few anti-aircraft guns and with a 25 knot (46 km/h) top speed. She was renamed Sparviero and in 1950 the Aquila, Italy’s first purpose designed aircraft carrier, was laid down: she was a 32 knot 31.000 tonne carrier that could carry 90 turboprop planes (which would be replaced by A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft) and had 120 mm, 37 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. She was commissioned in 1953 and her sister ship Falco entered service in 1955.
Francoist Spain’s policy of economic autarky, adopted on the urging of domestic economic pressure groups, hadn’t produced any serious growth. Rather, with war devastation and trade isolation, Spain was much more economically backward in the 1940s than it had been a decade earlier. Inflation soared, economic reconstruction faltered, food was scarce, and, in some years, Spain registered negative growth rates. In 1950, Italy and Spain signed the Pact of Madrid, which was in fact three agreements: 1) firstly, Spain and Italy formed a defensive military alliance by which they pledged support if the other was attacked. 2) Italy agreed to supply Spain with military equipment, which initially boiled down to Italy selling a lot of its surplus equipment from WW II at bottom prices. 3) In 1951, Italy gave Spain a $300 million dollar low interest loan (the equivalent of $2.8 billion in 2015 dollars) to invest in economic development. Spain, though more of a conservative authoritarian regime, adopted fascist economic views as explained in “The Doctrine of Fascism” essay attributed to Mussolini but largely written by Giovanni Gentile: in short the means of production were nominally left in the hands of the civil sector, but directed and controlled by the state. Spain experienced its own economic miracle from the early 1950s, in part because of large numbers of tourists.
After Spain, others were drawn to Italian success as well. The Portuguese Estado Novo regime headed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was corporatist and nationalist, like Fascist Italy, but also conservative and Catholic like Spain. Portugal and Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship in 1948 in which they agreed to economic cooperation. Turkey had become a democracy but it was dominated by the military and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) created by Ataturk became increasingly attracted to fascism. The CHP’s Kemalist core principles of republicanism, nationalism, statism, populism, laïcité and revolutionism proved remarkably adaptable to fascist ideas. Rejecting communism as well as reactionary conservatism, the CHP from the late 1940s strived to follow a “third path”: even though it was once opposed to Islamism it now incorporated a few elements of it into its politics; they also adopted the Italian corporatist economic model, linking together employer and employee syndicates in associations that would work alongside the state to set national economic policy. The CHP assimilated both moderate Islamists as well as moderate socialists. In 1950, the short-lived multiparty period that had begun in 1946 ended when the military staged a coup d’état and reinstalled the CHP as the only legal political party. Turkish general and statesman Ismet Inönü was reinstated as “National Chief.”
In October-November 1952, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the March on Rome, representatives of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Greece and Turkey met in the Italian Riviera town of San Remo. At this conference hosted by Mussolini these seven powers, who shared such ideological similarities, tried to merge their myriad of existing bilateral treaties with Italy into one multilateral treaty concerning defence and economic cooperation. During breaks in talks these representatives were invited as guests to the bombastic choreographed events, the enthusiastic celebrations and the endless military parades in Rome in honour of three decades of fascist rule. They were impressed, even intimidated, by demonstrations of Italian organization and military strength and it was all topped off by an awe inspiring fleet review in the Gulf of Naples. None of the attending delegations could claim to have a navy as powerful as the Regia Marina, which was the prime navy of the Mediterranean and had distinguished itself in WW II. Besides that it was the world’s fourth navy behind the US Navy, the Royal Navy and the French Navy. The seven powers formed the San Remo Pact, which in fact was two agreements: 1) a defensive military alliance and 2) a common market shielded from the world by protectionist measures. The Rome Manifesto was signed which explained that the San Remo Pact strived to be an alternative to democratic bourgeois capitalism as well as totalitarian communism, both of which were considered equally exploitative and materialistic in different ways. A joint decision making body was established in the shape of summits held once every two years, which alternated between the capitals of its members. Of course room was left for emergency meetings.
A third bloc in the Cold War was a fact and it had major influence on non-member states as well: Fulgencio Batista’s regime in Cuba, the military dictatorship in Venezuela, the Peronist regime in Argentina and later Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguayan regime took notes from Fascist Italy to varying degrees, with especially the latter being extremely successful in creating a long-lasting cult of personality. All of them adopted nationalist rhetoric and a mixed, corporatist economic model. Buenos Aires and Asuncion maintained cordial relations with Rome while Havana remained more oriented to the US due to its geographic proximity. Paraguay and Argentina became observer countries of the San Remo Pact, and were later joined by Bolivia after Italy had mediated a border dispute dating back to the Chaco War in the 1930s. This observant status meant they engaged in military and economic cooperation with the Pact, but didn’t have a say in its summits. The reeling Argentine economy of the mid 1950s was revitalized due to economic cooperation with Italy and Peron decided to become a full member in 1956, followed by Paraguay in 1959. In the meantime budding (pseudo)-fascist movements spread across the South American continent in the 1950s: the military juntas in Columbia and Bolivia established in 1958 and 1964 respectively were inspired by fascism. The popularity of fascism wasn’t limited to South America: several Asian regimes, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s in South China and Syngman Rhee’s in South Korea, modelled themselves along fascist lines, as did Apartheid South Africa. The regime of the Shah Mohammad Pahlavi of Iran also drew inspiration from fascism. In 1953 the Shah joined the San Remo Pact after he had alienated the British by siding with leftist Prime Minister Mossadegh after the latter had nationalized Iran’s oil.
In the meantime, countries across Western Europe saw the establishment of fascist parties and they enjoyed electoral success during the 1950s. In 1951, the British Union of Fascists headed by Oswald Mosley won 13% of the vote, becoming the second largest opposition party after Labour. Winston Churchill’s Tories had to form a coalition with the Liberals to have a majority. It was the greatest success of the BUF, with coalition governments being rare in British political history, but the Liberals rose against them. The Liberals would remain an influential force in British politics, but the BUF was destined to wane from the late 1960s throughout the 70s and 80s and finally lost its one remaining seat in parliament in the 1992 UK general election. Other “democratic fascist” parties followed similar paths.
A major fascist subculture also existed in Western countries during the 1950s and 60s as an alternative to the rather pessimistic beatniks and the leftwing hippie subculture. During the Vietnam War fascist groups attracted many who were proponents of the war against communism in Vietnam, in contrast to the anti-war hippies. The hippies were accused of being communist by the fascists, while hippies began using the word “fascist” as a slur against all their opponents. Fascists responded by wearing the term as a badge of honour even more than they already did. Fascist movements in the Western world declined from the mid 1970s. The exception was the US: until the 1990s the “National Fascist Party of the United States of America” (NFPUSA) founded in 1953 persisted as an alternative to the Mob for Italian Americans as well as a non-racist radical right alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, growing to 500.000 members nationwide during its peak in the early 1960s. While the Communist Party of the United States and its sympathizers suffered under the Red Scare and McCarthyism, there was no corresponding “Black Scare” toward fascism. These days the fascist party is a shadow of its former self, with 70.000 members and some city council seats (mostly in areas with sizeable Italian American communities, such as New York and Chicago). Besides the Greens the NFPUSA is the only party to run for the Presidency and gain some votes on a national level.
Due to being anti-communist Mussolini maintained a pro-Western stance. Despite taking a separate course he therefore enjoyed the support of the United States, which needed the Italian vote in the United Nations Security Council. Italy was one of its six permanent members alongside the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and the Republic of China (South China). Italy was one of the proponents of intervention in Korea when North Korea invaded the south in 1950, contributing a sizeable force: an infantry brigade, a tank battalion and a fighter squadron. Mussolini portrayed himself as a champion of anti-communism and that necessitated a sizeable Italian contribution.
In return for its support the Italians purchased American equipment cheaply: A-4 Skyhawks for its aircraft carrier Aquila and her sister Falco, F-86 Sabres and F-100 Super Sabres for the Regia Aeronautica’s early jet squadrons, loads of surplus WW II M4 Shermans and M24 Chaffee light tanks, and the new M48 Patton. Of course Italy began to produce its own equivalents once its armaments industry was back on its feet. It developed the Agusta Bell line of helicopters and continued production on the Macchi C.205, considered nearly equal to the P-51 Mustang, after which Fiat developed the G.91 jetfighter that entered production in 1957. Fiat also developed a 47 tonne tank with 50-150 mm armour and a 105 mm rifled gun, the Fiat M47/54. Piaggio, in the meantime, developed a swept wing version of the P.108 heavy bomber known as the P.109, which had upgraded turboprop engines, an upgraded fuselage, radar, sonar buoys, and was mostly built from duralumin like its ancestor. They had a top speed of 800 km/h, a maximum range of 3.700 kilometres and a 3.5 tonne payload.
Another foreign policy move was a failure, namely the initiative to form a cartel of oil exporting states in 1955. Many oil exporting states were Arab or Asian and therefore former colonies or protectorates of the West. With Nasser’s Egypt taking the lead, many of the representatives invited to Rome (some of which also attended the Bandung Conference the same year) heckled continued Italian colonial rule over fellow Arab and Muslim nations – i.e. Libya, Eritrea and Somalia – and the initiative became a near fiasco. Venezuela, Iran, Ecuador and Portugal remained (Ecuador had recently become an oil exporter after Agip prospectors had struck oil in 1952 while the Portuguese had discovered the Benfica oilfield in Angola near Luanda in 1954, which was just becoming operational in 1955). Italy, Ecuador, Iran, Portugal and Venezuela formed the Petroleum Exporting States Association or PESA in 1956. In 1958 Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formed the competing OPEC, which was soon joined by other Arab states.
The aging Mussolini was left with vindictive feelings toward Nasser, who he saw as the culprit for the failure of PESA to become an all-encompassing cartel of oil exporting countries. He wanted to take revenge and above all prove who was boss of the Mediterranean or “Mare Nostrum,” i.e. Italy and not Nasserist Egypt as far as Mussolini was concerned. Nasser provided him with the necessary casus belli in October 1956 when he nationalized the Suez Canal, which until then had been jointly owned by Britain, France and to a lesser extent Italy.
.Chapter XIV: Birth of the Fascist Bloc, 1952-1956.
After Italian oil started flowing from Libyan wells the goal of a “fascist bloc” came within reach since Italy became the Mediterranean’s dominant economy by far, besides being the dominant naval power. In fact, Italy decided to finish the incomplete Littorio-class battleships Roma and Impero, which were commissioned in 1947 as the last battleships to ever be commissioned worldwide. In 1946, as a stopgap solution, the Regia Marina acquired British aircraft carrier HMS Colossus, a cheaply built carrier without armour, with few anti-aircraft guns and with a 25 knot (46 km/h) top speed. She was renamed Sparviero and in 1950 the Aquila, Italy’s first purpose designed aircraft carrier, was laid down: she was a 32 knot 31.000 tonne carrier that could carry 90 turboprop planes (which would be replaced by A-4 Skyhawk attack aircraft) and had 120 mm, 37 mm and 20 mm anti-aircraft guns. She was commissioned in 1953 and her sister ship Falco entered service in 1955.
Francoist Spain’s policy of economic autarky, adopted on the urging of domestic economic pressure groups, hadn’t produced any serious growth. Rather, with war devastation and trade isolation, Spain was much more economically backward in the 1940s than it had been a decade earlier. Inflation soared, economic reconstruction faltered, food was scarce, and, in some years, Spain registered negative growth rates. In 1950, Italy and Spain signed the Pact of Madrid, which was in fact three agreements: 1) firstly, Spain and Italy formed a defensive military alliance by which they pledged support if the other was attacked. 2) Italy agreed to supply Spain with military equipment, which initially boiled down to Italy selling a lot of its surplus equipment from WW II at bottom prices. 3) In 1951, Italy gave Spain a $300 million dollar low interest loan (the equivalent of $2.8 billion in 2015 dollars) to invest in economic development. Spain, though more of a conservative authoritarian regime, adopted fascist economic views as explained in “The Doctrine of Fascism” essay attributed to Mussolini but largely written by Giovanni Gentile: in short the means of production were nominally left in the hands of the civil sector, but directed and controlled by the state. Spain experienced its own economic miracle from the early 1950s, in part because of large numbers of tourists.
After Spain, others were drawn to Italian success as well. The Portuguese Estado Novo regime headed by Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was corporatist and nationalist, like Fascist Italy, but also conservative and Catholic like Spain. Portugal and Italy signed a Treaty of Friendship in 1948 in which they agreed to economic cooperation. Turkey had become a democracy but it was dominated by the military and the Republican People’s Party (CHP) created by Ataturk became increasingly attracted to fascism. The CHP’s Kemalist core principles of republicanism, nationalism, statism, populism, laïcité and revolutionism proved remarkably adaptable to fascist ideas. Rejecting communism as well as reactionary conservatism, the CHP from the late 1940s strived to follow a “third path”: even though it was once opposed to Islamism it now incorporated a few elements of it into its politics; they also adopted the Italian corporatist economic model, linking together employer and employee syndicates in associations that would work alongside the state to set national economic policy. The CHP assimilated both moderate Islamists as well as moderate socialists. In 1950, the short-lived multiparty period that had begun in 1946 ended when the military staged a coup d’état and reinstalled the CHP as the only legal political party. Turkish general and statesman Ismet Inönü was reinstated as “National Chief.”
In October-November 1952, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the March on Rome, representatives of Portugal, Spain, Italy, Austria, Croatia, Greece and Turkey met in the Italian Riviera town of San Remo. At this conference hosted by Mussolini these seven powers, who shared such ideological similarities, tried to merge their myriad of existing bilateral treaties with Italy into one multilateral treaty concerning defence and economic cooperation. During breaks in talks these representatives were invited as guests to the bombastic choreographed events, the enthusiastic celebrations and the endless military parades in Rome in honour of three decades of fascist rule. They were impressed, even intimidated, by demonstrations of Italian organization and military strength and it was all topped off by an awe inspiring fleet review in the Gulf of Naples. None of the attending delegations could claim to have a navy as powerful as the Regia Marina, which was the prime navy of the Mediterranean and had distinguished itself in WW II. Besides that it was the world’s fourth navy behind the US Navy, the Royal Navy and the French Navy. The seven powers formed the San Remo Pact, which in fact was two agreements: 1) a defensive military alliance and 2) a common market shielded from the world by protectionist measures. The Rome Manifesto was signed which explained that the San Remo Pact strived to be an alternative to democratic bourgeois capitalism as well as totalitarian communism, both of which were considered equally exploitative and materialistic in different ways. A joint decision making body was established in the shape of summits held once every two years, which alternated between the capitals of its members. Of course room was left for emergency meetings.
A third bloc in the Cold War was a fact and it had major influence on non-member states as well: Fulgencio Batista’s regime in Cuba, the military dictatorship in Venezuela, the Peronist regime in Argentina and later Alfredo Stroessner’s Paraguayan regime took notes from Fascist Italy to varying degrees, with especially the latter being extremely successful in creating a long-lasting cult of personality. All of them adopted nationalist rhetoric and a mixed, corporatist economic model. Buenos Aires and Asuncion maintained cordial relations with Rome while Havana remained more oriented to the US due to its geographic proximity. Paraguay and Argentina became observer countries of the San Remo Pact, and were later joined by Bolivia after Italy had mediated a border dispute dating back to the Chaco War in the 1930s. This observant status meant they engaged in military and economic cooperation with the Pact, but didn’t have a say in its summits. The reeling Argentine economy of the mid 1950s was revitalized due to economic cooperation with Italy and Peron decided to become a full member in 1956, followed by Paraguay in 1959. In the meantime budding (pseudo)-fascist movements spread across the South American continent in the 1950s: the military juntas in Columbia and Bolivia established in 1958 and 1964 respectively were inspired by fascism. The popularity of fascism wasn’t limited to South America: several Asian regimes, such as Chiang Kai-shek’s in South China and Syngman Rhee’s in South Korea, modelled themselves along fascist lines, as did Apartheid South Africa. The regime of the Shah Mohammad Pahlavi of Iran also drew inspiration from fascism. In 1953 the Shah joined the San Remo Pact after he had alienated the British by siding with leftist Prime Minister Mossadegh after the latter had nationalized Iran’s oil.
In the meantime, countries across Western Europe saw the establishment of fascist parties and they enjoyed electoral success during the 1950s. In 1951, the British Union of Fascists headed by Oswald Mosley won 13% of the vote, becoming the second largest opposition party after Labour. Winston Churchill’s Tories had to form a coalition with the Liberals to have a majority. It was the greatest success of the BUF, with coalition governments being rare in British political history, but the Liberals rose against them. The Liberals would remain an influential force in British politics, but the BUF was destined to wane from the late 1960s throughout the 70s and 80s and finally lost its one remaining seat in parliament in the 1992 UK general election. Other “democratic fascist” parties followed similar paths.
A major fascist subculture also existed in Western countries during the 1950s and 60s as an alternative to the rather pessimistic beatniks and the leftwing hippie subculture. During the Vietnam War fascist groups attracted many who were proponents of the war against communism in Vietnam, in contrast to the anti-war hippies. The hippies were accused of being communist by the fascists, while hippies began using the word “fascist” as a slur against all their opponents. Fascists responded by wearing the term as a badge of honour even more than they already did. Fascist movements in the Western world declined from the mid 1970s. The exception was the US: until the 1990s the “National Fascist Party of the United States of America” (NFPUSA) founded in 1953 persisted as an alternative to the Mob for Italian Americans as well as a non-racist radical right alternative to the Ku Klux Klan, growing to 500.000 members nationwide during its peak in the early 1960s. While the Communist Party of the United States and its sympathizers suffered under the Red Scare and McCarthyism, there was no corresponding “Black Scare” toward fascism. These days the fascist party is a shadow of its former self, with 70.000 members and some city council seats (mostly in areas with sizeable Italian American communities, such as New York and Chicago). Besides the Greens the NFPUSA is the only party to run for the Presidency and gain some votes on a national level.
Due to being anti-communist Mussolini maintained a pro-Western stance. Despite taking a separate course he therefore enjoyed the support of the United States, which needed the Italian vote in the United Nations Security Council. Italy was one of its six permanent members alongside the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France and the Republic of China (South China). Italy was one of the proponents of intervention in Korea when North Korea invaded the south in 1950, contributing a sizeable force: an infantry brigade, a tank battalion and a fighter squadron. Mussolini portrayed himself as a champion of anti-communism and that necessitated a sizeable Italian contribution.
In return for its support the Italians purchased American equipment cheaply: A-4 Skyhawks for its aircraft carrier Aquila and her sister Falco, F-86 Sabres and F-100 Super Sabres for the Regia Aeronautica’s early jet squadrons, loads of surplus WW II M4 Shermans and M24 Chaffee light tanks, and the new M48 Patton. Of course Italy began to produce its own equivalents once its armaments industry was back on its feet. It developed the Agusta Bell line of helicopters and continued production on the Macchi C.205, considered nearly equal to the P-51 Mustang, after which Fiat developed the G.91 jetfighter that entered production in 1957. Fiat also developed a 47 tonne tank with 50-150 mm armour and a 105 mm rifled gun, the Fiat M47/54. Piaggio, in the meantime, developed a swept wing version of the P.108 heavy bomber known as the P.109, which had upgraded turboprop engines, an upgraded fuselage, radar, sonar buoys, and was mostly built from duralumin like its ancestor. They had a top speed of 800 km/h, a maximum range of 3.700 kilometres and a 3.5 tonne payload.
Another foreign policy move was a failure, namely the initiative to form a cartel of oil exporting states in 1955. Many oil exporting states were Arab or Asian and therefore former colonies or protectorates of the West. With Nasser’s Egypt taking the lead, many of the representatives invited to Rome (some of which also attended the Bandung Conference the same year) heckled continued Italian colonial rule over fellow Arab and Muslim nations – i.e. Libya, Eritrea and Somalia – and the initiative became a near fiasco. Venezuela, Iran, Ecuador and Portugal remained (Ecuador had recently become an oil exporter after Agip prospectors had struck oil in 1952 while the Portuguese had discovered the Benfica oilfield in Angola near Luanda in 1954, which was just becoming operational in 1955). Italy, Ecuador, Iran, Portugal and Venezuela formed the Petroleum Exporting States Association or PESA in 1956. In 1958 Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia formed the competing OPEC, which was soon joined by other Arab states.
The aging Mussolini was left with vindictive feelings toward Nasser, who he saw as the culprit for the failure of PESA to become an all-encompassing cartel of oil exporting countries. He wanted to take revenge and above all prove who was boss of the Mediterranean or “Mare Nostrum,” i.e. Italy and not Nasserist Egypt as far as Mussolini was concerned. Nasser provided him with the necessary casus belli in October 1956 when he nationalized the Suez Canal, which until then had been jointly owned by Britain, France and to a lesser extent Italy.
- Onkel Willie
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