A Fascist Country

This chapter questions the projects and results of fascism's economic and territorial transformation and its social consequences. The term “modernization” has been employed across multiple fields, from society to economics, to question the nature of fascism and its effects on Italian history. Modernization has been considered as “contradictory” or as “conservative” by those who have argued that there were historical limits to the transformational power of fascist and social and economic policies. In economics, the question has been raised as to whether fascist intervention caused a long stagnation between the two wars or whether it represented a model of capitalist development that lasted even after World War II. Fascist attitudes, however, presented some glaring contradictions between programs and results, and its attempt at modernizing the country was precisely marked by this gap between conservative forces and men who often sincerely wanted change. The former realized was largely realized by agrarians, by some parts of powerful financial circles, and by some reluctant sectors of the state that fascism needed to compromise with in order to consolidate power. In sum, fascism was innovative in its intentions but conservative in its policies and outcomes. In the first decade technicians and the professions would play an increasingly important role in determining the direction of the country, before being replaced by a class of public and party officials in the second decade. The chapter discusses some fundamental policies put in place by fascism: policies to prevent new emigration abroad, limited urbanization brought about by major public works, reclamation and inland colonization, increase in rural works and rural society, investments in selected infrastructures. To justify these policy the regime espoused the mirage of a new “terre al sole” (lands in the sun) in the colonial territories, while also attempting to redistribute the population across the metropolitan peninsula and islands A wide gap persisted between the language of the reclamation program and its reality. The regime and its officials were ultimately incapable of actualizing the ambitious project of regenerating the landless peasants into a population of autonomous small-scale landowners. Once consolidated in power, fascism took up this legacy of reclamation, placing it at the ideological center of its rural policy. On a concrete level, the Fascist state transformed the reclamation project from an intervention that was essentially directed at land drainage to an “integral reclamation.” Land reclamation became a “national redemption” with the reclaimed areas seen as “redeemed lands.” This land was then mainly settled by veterans, who received the land as compensation for their sacrifice during the war and above all to create outposts of the new civilization. The reclamation was also accompanied by the creation of “news towns” in the Roman countryside. By the end of the 1930s, the regime had indeed maintained the agricultural configuration of the country, but it failed to guarantee social and labor stability, failed to improve living conditions, and failed to spread a common sense of improvement among the population. Over the years, Fascism's intervention had become more precise. Its aims in the countryside transformed into a program of political control and alliance with agrarians, which was rolled into its larger intention of planning and subjecting the national territory as a whole to central control. The economic reorganization of national territory and the expansion of the building sector also supported fascism’s reorganization of the production economy. Yet beyond political or moral judgments of the regime, the major public works remain, in the memory of many Italians, among the most successful works of the two decades. The fascist alliance with the auto industry ensured that the regime preferentially invested in the road network over the railroad network. Although Italy ranked fourth in Europe in terms of motor vehicle circulation, it was still considered a country with low motorization and, above all, with a strong imbalance between the sustained circulation of motor vehicles in the North and their near absence in the South. In the 1930s fascism provided to launch a mass tourism based on popular trains promoted by the leisure national agency, addressed to workers and their families, mostly from northern cities. However, until the late 1950s, Italian tourism remained largely the preserve of the urban middle classes and to foreign tourists. The last part of the chapter plays on the ambivalence of the Italian term terre di confine (borderlands), where new towns and mining activities were built, with confine referring to places of compulsory confinement for undesirable people: anti-fascists, homeless, and criminal individuals.