Recent historical and cultural scholarship on Italian Fascism has demonstrated how anxieties over hybridity informed anti-miscegenation policies in the East African colonies, as well as anti-Semitism in both the metropole and Italy Overseas (Italia Oltremare). Ironically, as Roberta Pergher's pioneering monograph Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922–1943, evidences, the very state formation in which such policies and fears flourished was itself a hybrid: what Pergher deems a ‘nation-empire’. Building on the insights of work on new imperial histories, settler colonialism, and the interwar international legal order, Pergher argues persuasively that ‘Fascism was not an outlier in the history of European imperialism’ (p. 252) even as she highlights its distinctive features. She does so through an innovative comparison of Fascist settlement policies in two ‘borderlands’: Libya and South Tyrol (Alto Adige/Südtirol). Despite the seeming incommensurability of these two territories – the first a colony that, after 1938, was directly incorporated into Italy and the second a territory ‘redeemed’ and joined to Italy after the First World War – Pergher convincingly details how shared logics of legitimacy and sovereignty united these lands. Both regions had long histories as (other) imperial borderlands: Libya as the edge of the Ottomans’ North African territories and South Tyrol as part of the Habsburg Empire. In deeming both areas key ‘borderlands’ within Fascist Italy, Pergher contends, ‘[t]he concept of borderlands thus denotes a zone of “indeterminacy” in the ways that sovereignty is perceived, experienced, and enacted’ (p. 16).

By focusing on Italy's need to shore up sovereignty in contested or tenuous spaces, Pergher rightly refuses to take Fascist Italy's rhetorical justifications of ‘demographic colonisation’ at face value. In urging territorial expansion, both liberal and Fascist proponents of colonialism had loudly called for the need for a ‘safety valve’ to staunch emigration abroad (and left-wing politics at home). Yet, Pergher maintains, ‘the notion of “demographic colonialism” camouflaged the national claim that the regime was staking through population transfer’ (p. 111). In both Libya and South Tyrol, then, what was at stake was securing Italianness and the settlement of Italians on agricultural projects became the favoured solution for ethnic engineering. With a deft hand and drawing upon extensive oral historical and archival research (including the rich materials of the Istituto Nazionale della Previdenza Sociale), Pergher explores the realisation of these projects at both the macro and micro levels. Not surprisingly, in both geographic settings Fascist officials worried about upholding Italian ‘prestige’ and sought to police the behaviours and activities of settlers. In contrast to many other authors, however, Pergher does not see this primarily as a project to create perfect Fascist and Italian subjects. ‘Sovereignty, more than social policy; reinforcing Italianness, more than molding the settler’, she writes, were ‘the prime objectives in the borderlands’ (p. 75). Nonetheless, and in contradistinction to Pergher's argument, reinforcing Italianness through reclamation and agricultural settlements was also a project of forging Italian identity on the ground. Italian migrants from diverse regions and linguistic traditions who arrived to inhabit these borderlands were set apart from and privileged over locals (whether German-speaking South Tyroleans or native Libyans), often acquiring a sense of national identity previously absent.

Pointing out that what Pergher calls ‘sovereignty games’ (following Adler-Nissen and Gammeltoft-Hansen) could also equally entail ‘ideological games’ to create Italian Fascist subject-citizens, however, is a mere quibble that does not detract from the path-breaking nature of her study. While of undeniable significance for scholars of modern Italy, Mussolini's Nation-Empire also makes a critical contribution to ongoing rethinking of sovereignty in fields such as political science, philosophy, and anthropology, as well as history. As Yarimar Bonilla argued in a 2017 forum on the topic in Cultural Anthropology, ‘sovereignty has recently become a central analytic’. Bonilla adds that although ‘the turn to sovereignty speaks to a particular political and intellectual conjuncture both within and beyond the academy … insufficient attention has been given to the sign of sovereignty itself as a category of Western political thought’. Bonilla and others thus argue that the notion of sovereignty itself developed out of the ‘ontological orders of empire’ (Bonilla Reference Bonilla2017). Pergher illustrates concretely the consequences in practice of a national-imperial ontology. For the specific Italian case, the empire ‘with its notion of coexistence and its ordered sense of multiple hierarchies, was being translated into and subverting nation and its ideal of equal rights’ (p. 247). This was nowhere truer than in the realm of citizenship.

As is common to empires, Italian colonialism introduced a hierarchy of citizenship rights and degrees of belonging – with full citizenship for metropolitan Italians at its apex. Together with those in Trentino and Venezia Giulia, South Tyrol's allogeni and alloglotti (ethnic non-Italians and non-Italian speakers, respectively) all became citizens of Italy after 1919, in contrast to Libya's indigenous peoples whose opportunities for Italian naturalisation narrowed over time. Yet, as Pergher shows, a subtle gradation of citizenship also developed in the metropole after a 1926 law created the possibility to rescind the citizenship of residents in the post-First World War provinces. This introduction of imperial logics, as Pergher puts it, ‘directly “frayed” the nation’ (p. 22). Competition with Nazi Germany for South Tyroleans didn't help, resulting in a large majority of allogeni exercising the 1939 citizenship option for Austria/Germany (the subject of Chapter Five).

The postwar Italian state inherited these quandaries, as seen in the complex debates over how to interpret the citizenship option for residents of the territories ceded by the 1947 Peace Treaty. Ultimately, a democratic Italy would recognise the particularity of Italy's ‘redeemed’ regions with autonomy, although it would take separatist violence for South Tyrol to attain meaningful autonomy in 1972 within the broader Trentino-Alto Adige. The Italian Republic also recognised linguistic rights for a range of autochthonous minorities, including South Tyrol's German speakers and (partitioned) Venezia Giulia's Slovene speakers. Yet the inclusivity of Italian citizenship remains a politically fraught issue, as evidenced by the contemporary ius soli movement. As these comments suggest, although Mussolini's Nation-Empire analyses a superseded state formation, the dilemmas of sovereignty, citizenship and belonging that it highlights continue to preoccupy Italy.