Page 573 - Le Operazioni Interforze e Multinazionali nella Storia Militare - ACTA Tomo II

1213
ActA
XXXVIII Congresso Internacional de História Militar
(Sofia - Bulgaria)

Technical innovation and social conservatism

in the narrative of the Turco-Italian war

gianluca Pastori

he Turco-Italian war (1911-12) was maybe one of the greatest ‘ups’ in Giovanni
T Giolitti’s political trajectory. Hailed with uncommon cheers of enthusiasm, the ul-
timatum of September 1911 was the final point of a careful diplomatic preparation, cut-
ting across the watershed of the Adowa defeat and of Francesco Crispi’s political fall
(1896). The twenty-seven years running from the Triple Alliance (1882) to the treaty
of Racconigi (1909) mark the steps of this approach. The ‘Mediterranean agreements’
among Great Britain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, and Spain (1887), and the Franco-Italian
agreements Visconti Venosta-Barrère (1900) and Prinetti-Barrère (1902) are just few of
these steps, becoming faster and faster with the turn of the century. The ‘Libyan adven-
ture’, however, was not only a Cabinet war. In the common feeling of an uncertain age, it
projected Italy into a new dimension and transformed overseas expansion into a popular
issue. Even its difficulties strengthened this process, and fuelled the debate on the right
of the young kingdom to impose its will over the old and declining Ottoman Empire, as a
sign of “her determination to count for something in international affairs, and to prevent
herself from being hemmed in and stifled by other contending Powers” .
1
‘Last of the Great Powers’, Italy entered Libya walking in France’s, Britain’s and
Germany’s footsteps and looking for, in the overseas expansion, a natural complement
to its birth as a unified nation, heir of a long historical traditions and of the moral rights
that this entailed. From this perspective, the Turco-Italian war fits into a wide network of
political myths. The war was, at one time, a myth in itself, a product of myths, and a forge
shaping new myths, such as the one of the ‘Libya Felix’ that was one of the Fascism’s bat-
tle horses during the Thirties. The war helped to work out a new national rhetoric, over-
coming the shame of Dogali and Adowa, but also of Lissa and Custoza. Finally, the war
opened a new phase in the perception of the country’s military identity. The Turco-Italian
war was, in fact, maybe for the first time in the country’s short unitary history, a ‘modern’
war, supported by a massive technological effort and by a pervasive propaganda, aimed
at ‘selling’ it in the eyes of both the domestic and the international public opinion.

1 Gianluca Pastori, Ph.D., is Adjunct Professor, History of political relations between North America and Eu-
rope, Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milano.