Fascist Internationalism

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.