Italian unification ultimately emerges through four wars. This chapter covers the second of these wars (1859–1860). Austria holds sovereignty over territory in northern Italy. Cavour, the prime minister of Piedmont, learns from the first war (1848) that Piedmont cannot defeat Austria – and therefore wrest Italian lands from it – without a powerful ally. He secures an alliance with Napoleon III of France, and at a secret meeting in Plombières, Piedmont and France plot a war. The Italian nationalists argue that the “people” of a nation have a legitimate right to self-rule. The Concert plays no role in this crisis because it does not see the norm of nationalism as a legitimate justification for owning territory. In its view, the norm of dynastic succession (i.e., a king or queen coming to the throne) serves that purpose. The Concert system is therefore biased against the nationalists. The resulting clash of norms increases the probability of war. Nevertheless, territorial issues are generally more war-prone than non-territorial issues, and infusing territorial disagreements with nationalism and identity (or ethnic) claims raises the probability of war further. In the end, the case illustrates well why and how territorial issues lead to war.

Italy shared many similarities with Germany: it was a patchwork of different political entities, economically backward, and divided by the Papal State in the middle. Unification was led by Piedmont, a state that was the Italian counterpart to Prussia. Piedmont’s nation builders were anticlerical liberals. In Italy, the confessional cleavage between state and church was of paramount importance after unification. Rapid liberalization and industrialization brought pauperization, and as in Germany, the religious cleavage added to the capital–labor tensions. Despite these similarities, Italy saw the emergence of a welfare state only half a century after Germany.

In “Mussolini the Dramatist,” the reader will follow the dictator’s collaboration with Giovacchino Forzano – one of Italy’s most despised men of the theatre – on the writing of three historical dramas: Campo di Maggio (about Napoleon’s last hundred days), Villafranca (about Statesman Camillo Cavour and the Italian Unification), and Cesare (about that famed Roman dictator). Probing Mussolini's long-standing belief in history’s ability to educate and inspire the national community, his constant recourse to historical analogy to tell fascism’s story and his own, and the importance that he and his hierarchs placed on cultural authority in the consolidation of fascism’s power at home and abroad, the chapter tells the sometimes entertaining story of the smashing success of three mediocre plays. A final section on this success in the territories of Nazi Germany, where more than 400 performances of the plays were staged, describes the deployment of il Duce’s image and authority in fascist strategies for building soft power.