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Why did Italy turn to fascism in the years following World War I?
Democracy as an institution was unstable and novel to the Italians, with universal male suffrage only having been granted in 1912. This made it easier for Benito Mussolini to capitalize on the reaction to chaos and bring his party, representing rigid order, to power. Mussolini’s power lay in his ability to harness the anger and disillusionment of the returning soldiers and the lower middle class. Soldiers returned to a broken homeland after World War I, filled with misery and poverty. Moreover, there was a strong belief within Italy that the returning soldiers was being scapegoated for the country’s hard times by liberal left, which was in control of the Chamber of Deputies early in the interwar years. Under their rule, conditions only worsened, and in many instances, it seemed like they were doing nothing as Italy collapsed.
Mussolini’s Fascist party appealed to the frustrations of these soldiers and to the culturally instilled conservatism of the middle class. Rather than advocating for newly emerging liberal values, the Fascists promised a return to traditional politics and traditional values. Further, they pledged to undo the changes made by the liberals and lift poor, incapacitated Italy to a position of glory once more. To many, it didn’t matter what the Fascists did, but only that they acted, and acted within the framework of a stable and strong government.
How did the League of Nations represent a new approach to international relations?
Upon its founding in January 1920, the League of Nations was heralded as the bastion of a new system of international relations in Europe. The League replaced the so-called “old diplomacy,” or Westphalian System, which had been in place since the Treaty of Westphalia, signed by the major European powers in 1648 at the end of the Thirty Year’s War.
Under the old system, the elites of government often met in secret to determine the fate of Europe and the world, a feature that directly contributed to the diplomatic debacle known as the July Crisis that helped usher in the start of World War I in 1914. But the old system was now shattered, along with the empires that had maintained it.
How did the United States fit into the new diplomatic order of the League of Nations?
In the end, the US did not fit into the League of Nation at all. This was despite the fact that the entry of the United States into the war was a major step toward a shift in the balance of world power, and the beginning of the end for European dominance. President Woodrow Wilson, the man who engineered US participation in the war, was heralded among the Allied nations as a rescuer and an enlightened leader. Wilson was in many ways the leading voice among the leaders of the “Big Four” nations (Great Britain, France, and Italy, along with the US) who led the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 that dictated the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, including the establishment of the League of Nations. Many, including Wilson, believed that a more open, all-inclusive system would be more fostering to cooperation, a concept of international justice, and peace. The League was seen as a way to institutionalize these goals and strive for peace as a collective world community.
Unfortunately for Wilson, the United States had strongly veered towards isolationism once the war ended, and the Republican dominated US Senate rejected the Treaty, and the United States expected joining into the League along with it. For the next two decades, the United States would steadfastly reject direct involvement in European affairs, leaving it in many ways as a bystander on the world stage as events in Europe and elsewhere would go from bad to worse to world war (once again).
