The Pursuit of Neofascist Empire: Italy and Latin America, 1945-1956

Traditionally, the foreign policy of Italian fascism has been an important field of study that has highlighted from very early on the imperialism and expansionism of Mussolini's regime. This work of thesis is concerned with the continuation of this imperial mission in Latin America in the post-war, a region that was considered strategically important for the survival of the fascist project after the twilight of classical fascism in Europe. The neofascists, through their newspapers and journals, crafted and devised a recharged version of a worldwide fascist empire in order to contrast the global hegemony of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This aspect of the intellectual output of Italian neofascism has not been studied before, yet it sheds new light on our understanding of the dialectics of fascist ideology and its racist, imperial core, as well as its ambiguous and contextual relationship with other ideologies born out of the Cold War, such as populism.