Identity and International Relations: Italian Foreign Policy for Latin America and the immigrants’ communities

The aim of this chapter is to think, from an historical perspective, about the process of building cooperation between Italy and Latin America, considering the presence of Italian immigrants and their descendants in a double perspective. On the one hand, the presence of a community of Italian descendants in Brazil has facilitated bilateral relations; has created an idea of a communion of shared values; and, therefore, has brought some Latin American realities closer to the Italian one. On the other, this imagined proximity has identified the subcontinent with a strategic reserve, naturally intertwined with western civilization, a resource to draw on in times of ‘need’. By looking across the 20th century, a variety of intensities of Italian attention in relation to the Latin American world is marked by changes in international society and domestic politics, such as the fascist policies of the 1920s and 1930s.