MARIA ANTONIA DI CASOLA

Tra fascismo e kemalismo: per una verifica delle relazioni italo-turche dal 1928 al 1934

N. 156

 

Summary —Between October 1922 and October 1923 two countries of the Mediterranean area, Italy and Turkey, started an autoritative experiment aiming at an institutional transformation of great importance. Origins and motivations were different, but the ideology at the basis of the refoundation of the two States showed characteristics under certain aspects similar and in any case externally resembling, much as to think of an imitation of one phenomenon by the other. This happened in fact, at the beginning, in Italy, where it was claimed to Fascism a "primogeniture" not only chronological, but mainly political. The denial came from the intellectuals collaborating to Kadro, the review that drawing inspiration from Ziya Gökalp, had its origin in Turkey with the purpose of establishing the ideological principles of Kemalism; proud differentiations of a theorical character thus gave evidence to the difference of the two movements and their peculiarities. On one point, however, a complete agreement was reached: Fascism and Kemalism had brought both in Italy and in Turkey the "new faith". On the basis of this ideal parallel tension, it was meant to verify the existence of a particular cooperation in the Italian-Turkish relations during the years when in both countries was developing the so-called "consensus". But, though in the presence of similar authoritative systems in the management of home politics and of a substantial harmony by which the two countries had already characterized their relations at the Conference of Lausanne, the mutual international projects, corresponding to a different interest, have revealed a tendency to an increasing differentiation. The Italian-Turkish agreement of May 1928 will not therefore be the realization of the Mussolinian plan aiming at the creation of a Triple Alliance of the eastern Mediterranean in which Italy were in a leading position in respect of Greece and Turkey; on the contrary, it will represent one of the numerous agreements of good neighbourhood which Kemalist Turkey undersigned in the first decade of its existence. Nor will Rome succeed in obtaining a particular advantage from that economic expansion towards Anatolia which had substituted other much more worrying forms of expansion that Ankara, also through the Treaty, deeply wanted to avoid: this notwithstanding the supposed ideological affinities.