Recasting the birth of fascism nationalism and the fall of empire after World War I
Dominique Kirchner Reill recounts how the people of Fiume tried to recreate empire in the guise
of the nation. The Fiume Crisis recasts what we know about the birth of fascism the rise of
nationalism and the fall of empire after World War I by telling the story of the three-year
period when the Adriatic city of Fiume (today Rijeka in Croatia) generated an international
crisis. In 1919 the multicultural former Habsburg city was occupied by the paramilitary forces
of the flamboyant poet-soldier Gabriele D'Annunzio who aimed to annex the territory to Italy
and became an inspiration to Mussolini. Many local Italians supported the effort nurturing a
standard tale of nationalist fanaticism. However Dominique Kirchner Reill shows that practical
realities not nationalist ideals were in the driver's seat. Support for annexation was
largely a result of the daily frustrations of life in a ghost state set adrift by the fall of
the empire. D'Annunzio's ideology and proto-fascist charisma notwithstanding what the people
of Fiume wanted was prosperity which they associated with the autonomy they had enjoyed under
Habsburg sovereignty. In these twilight years between the world that was and the world that
would be many across the former empire sought to restore the familiar forms of governance that
once supported them. To the extent that they turned to nation-states it was not out of zeal
for nationalist self-determination but in the hope that these states would restore the benefits
of cosmopolitan empire. Against the too-smooth narrative of postwar nationalism The Fiume
Crisis demonstrates the endurance of the imperial imagination and carves out an essential place
for history from below.
