G. Bruce Strang. On the Fiery March: Mussolini Prepares for War.  International History.  Edited by Erik Goldstein, William R. Keylor, and Cathal J. Nolan. Westport Conn.: Praeger, 2003.

In his Preface, Professor Strang clearly sets out his themes and purposes and how he wants to achieve them.  He is seeking in Benito Mussolini’s foreign policies, he writes, a “coherent thread and paradoxical consistency amid his seemingly opportunistic maneuvers and occasionally wavering policies” (p. x).  Insisting that “structuralist causation” cannot explain “the decisions of a fundamentally irrational thinker,” Strang focuses on Mussolini’s mentalité, the mental lenses through which he saw the world and its possibilities (p. x).

Mussolini’s mentalité was an intellectual construct of extreme nationalism.  It included anti-Bolshevism, opposition to the Masonic Order, contempt for democracies, anti-Semitism, white supremacy, and a Social Darwinism that simplistically equated the growth or decline of national populations and their vitality with national power, war worship, and imperialism.  Strang effectively weaves these themes throughout his work.  He concludes that Mussolini’s ultranationalism, based on “racism, militarism, and social Darwinism,” led him to cast his lot with Nazi Germany “to expand Italy’s power, influence, and territory at the expense of . . . France and Great Britain” (p. x).

Strang centers his discussion on the Duce’s foreign policy from June 1936 to September 1939, because after Italy’s conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini could have chosen to reorient his foreign policy.  Britain and France were then trying to restore the Stresa Front established in early 1935 with Italy against German expansionism.  A year later, Mussolini had three options, Strang writes.  He could have drawn closer to the western democracies, which would have protected Italy against German moves into Austria.  The downside was that this cooperation would have limited his ability to expand Italy’s territory, because London and Paris wished to preserve the status quo.  The second choice was to balance Italy between Britain and France on the one hand and Germany on the other to extract concessions from both sides.  The final possibility was to link Fascist Italy to the dynamism of Nazi Germany, thus setting Italy on course to expand in Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Balkans—and to confrontation with Britain and France.  Choosing the last option, by early 1939 Mussolini had redirected Italy’s foreign policy to pursue an Italo-German-Japanese alliance against Britain.

Beyond his mentalité, what was it about Mussolini’s character that drove him to this disastrous alliance?  While reading Dr. Strang’s monograph, I stumbled across a review of an executive management text (Sydney Finkelstein, Why Smart Executives Fail and What You Can Learn from their Mistakes [New York, 2003], reviewed by Sharon Reier, “When chief executives hit the slippery slope,” International Herald Tribune, Apr. 3-4, 2004).  The reviewer wrote that executives who make it to the top are genuinely smart and talented, and their confidence and leadership impress directors and analysts.  But success can go to their heads, and they forget their weaknesses and punish criticism.  These executives fail, because they fail to face reality and are unwilling to learn.  They “tilt full-speed toward recklessness,” because they underestimate obstacles and identify so thoroughly with the company that they treat it like a personal fiefdom.  They become obsessed with image and blatantly seek attention.  These characteristics lead chief executives to blunder in merger and acquisitions, innovation, and crisis management.  Substitute “Duce” for “executive,” “foreign statesmen” for “directors” and “national state” for “company,” and we have captured perfectly Strang’s critique of Mussolini.

In the Series Foreword, the editors proclaim their wish to further historical writing, “international in scope and multiarchival in methodology” (p. xiii).  They want to promote the traditional subfields of international history including political, military, diplomatic, and economic relations among states.  Seeking a “humanistic” approach, the series editors want to encourage works examining “the historical antecedents of international conflict and cooperation” to understand contemporary affairs (p. xiv).  They reject “abstract, and abstruse, theoretical models that have little relation to historical reality and possess no explanatory power for contemporary affairs.” Further, they reject historical relativity.  They insist that their series promote scholarly investigation told “with clarity and precision to a more general audience, in jargon-free, unpretentious language that any intelligent reader may readily understand (pp. xiv-xv). Professor Strang has fulfilled these objectives.

Several weaknesses only slightly mar Strang’s work.  The first is purely technical—his paragraph structure could be tighter.  The next is merely the flip side of the book’s strength.  Tightly tied to his documentation—as one would expect from a work that grew out of his dissertation—sometimes Strang clutters his story with too much detail.  A large part of this is unavoidable.  He has chosen a complex story, and he does regularly and lucidly summarize the intricately woven events he has threaded together.

The next problem is more tenuous, because it asks Strang to have written an even longer, more detailed, more complex book.  As it is, he tightly focuses on Mussolini’s relations with Britain, France, and Germany while also attending to his intricate diplomacy in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, and Japan.  Strang, however, all but ignores the significant role the Soviet Union played in these events—strange given Mussolini’s anti-Bolshevism.  Also, Strang essentially ends his story in September 1939.  This is unfortunate.  As Mussolini machinated beyond Italy’s capacities, some of the most interesting diplomacy of the twentieth century centers around Rome between September 1939 and June 1940 when Italy attacked an already-beaten France.  During those nine months, London, Paris, Moscow, and others acted as if they believed that Mussolini’s three foreign policy choices remained viable.  Witness, for example, the proposed Bloc of Balkan Neutrals in late 1939.  To the Duce’s contemporaries including his own son-in-law and foreign minister, Galeazzo Ciano, it did not necessarily seem sure that Mussolini would continue to hitch Italy’s fate to Nazi dynamism.  Ironically, by expanding his discussion to these two areas, Strang could have substantially reinforced his themes.  As it is, however, the book Professor Strang chose to write remains a fine work.

J. Calvitt Clarke III

Jacksonville University