Aspetti dell’antimilitarismo socialista in Italia dagli anni ’80 del XIX secolo alla Prima Guerra Mondiale

In the 1960s and 1970s, scholarship on socialism in the age of the Second International was mostly rooted in militant leftist parties and movements. Since the 1980s, however, with the crisis and the collapse of the communist experience, the interest of scholars in this topic has decreased. Only recently the focus on the transnational dimension of socialism has revived this field of studies. This dissertation is part of such a revival. The analysis of a case study (the Italian socialism’s foreign policy between the 1880s and Italy’s entry into World War I in 1915) shows the relations of the PSI (Italian Socialist Party) with the “Estrema Sinistra” (democrats, republicans, radicals, “bourgeois” pacifists) and the International and its main parties (mostly SPD and SFIO). A long-period analysis of socialist antimilitarism in Italy which does not only focus on the Italo-Turkish War and World War I (two topics that have already been largely explored by scholars) clearly shows the limits of the validity of two main historiographic paradigms: “betrayal” and “failure”. On the one hand, the Leninist analysis insisted on the incompatibility between nation and proletariat. Consequently, the choices of 1914-1915 (“né aderire né sabotare”, which expressed both the impossibility to prevent war and the refusal to start a Revolution) were considered a “betrayal”. However, during the considered period, the opposite position prevailed within the PSI: the workers were an integral part of the nation and a war (limited to the scope of national defense) was considered legitimate. On the other hand, according to the paradigm of “failure”, Summer 1914 is seen as the final goal of a multi-decennial path and, a posteriori, the benchmark to interpret the whole history of the International. This dissertation constitutes a paradigm shift and offers a different interpretation of socialist antimilitarism in Italy. In the three decades that it considers, the PSI and the “Estrema” campaigned to increase the parliamentary control on every aspect of the decision-making process of the Kingdom, whose institutions reserved only to the Crown and the executive branch the duty (and responsibility) to lead foreign and military policies. Additionally, Italian socialism was able to elaborate original theories on these topics and implement anti-war campaigns with increasing popular consent, from the anti-colonial battles of Andrea Costa to the general strikes against the Italo-Turkish War and the “Cassa del soldo al soldato”. Within this context, the neutrality choice in 1914-1915 no longer appears to be a mere ethical opposition, as it is commonly interpreted by scholars, but an effective political proposition.