March on the west: Turkish and Italian perceptions of fascism and Kemalism, 1919-1938

This study investigates the various ways in which Italian and Turkish actors perceived Kemalism and fascism in the interwar era. As an intellectual history, it focuses on contemporary sources, including manuscripts, published books and articles, private papers, and Turkish and Italian state archives. For the first time in the literature, it offers a detailed, contextual analysis of Italian perceptions of Kemalism. Studies on Turkish perceptions of fascism have often suffered from reification and limitations of certain research programmes. Focusing on contemporary perceptions rather than abstract comparisons between ideologies construed as agents on their own, the study uses perceptions of fascism and Kemalism as leverage to uncover various contemporary factions. Perceptions of fascism and Kemalism were closely related to individuals' beliefs about Europe, the West, and democracy. In Turkey, figures who saw Westernisation as entailing democratisation tended to perceive fascism as an 'unnatural' anachronism. In Italy, Kemalist authoritarianism attracted the attention of the universalist fascists who sought examples abroad that proved fascism's 'universal' applicability. In contrast, a faction this thesis has dubbed 'the radical Kemalists' saw fascism as the newest iteration of the Western civilization and drew from it. Italian anti-fascists, especially the socialists, instead embraced the goals of Kemalism, such as secularisation and female emancipation. The study focuses on specific cases to investigate how historians can understand contact and influence between agents. It argues that historians have tended to underestimate the importance of the background of the agents and excessively focused on contact itself as a transformative factor.