‘Not a Diaphragm, but an Axis’

Abstract

In his late April 1937 meeting with Austrian Chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg, Mussolini freely admitted that the European continent was cleanly split along ideological lines. ‘The European situation is today characterised by the existence in practice of two blocs which have automatically come to be formed on an ideological basis’, the dictator grandly announced. These divisions had been accelerated and accentuated by events in Spain. The Bolshevik threat was a very real one, he added, and the European situation would become even more serious if the Comintern were to emerge victorious from the Spanish war. If this were to happen, Mussolini fully expected it to divide his democratic opponents. France, fascist Italy’s Latin sibling, would invariably lurch ever more to the Left and this, in turn, would eventually generate a change in the policy of its traditional ally, Great Britain, who had a history of opposing French political radicalism.¹