Principle of National Self-Determination

The Principle of National Self-Determination is presented as a postwar doctrine that Italy’s nationalists could invoke to support territorial claims, especially to Fiume. Its importance in the narrative lies in the gap between the principle’s appeal and its application: Italian leaders argued that it strengthened their case, while Woodrow Wilson refused the claims to both Fiume and Dalmatia. That dispute helped transform a peace settlement into a public experience of rejection and grievance.

The doctrine and Italy’s claims

At the Paris Peace Conference, Italian nationalists joined two different arguments under a single demand. A 1915 treaty had promised Italy Dalmatia in return for entering the war alongside Russia, France, and Great Britain. Fiume, by contrast, had not been included in that agreement. Nationalists argued that the principle of self-determination, promoted by Woodrow Wilson, should nonetheless favor Italy’s claim because Fiume had a large Italian majority. Their slogan combined the two claims: the treaty’s promise of Dalmatia plus Fiume.

The book distinguishes the treaty-based claim from the appeal to self-determination. The principle is not described as having secured Fiume for Italy; it is presented as an argument Italian nationalists used to extend their demands beyond the earlier agreement. Woodrow Wilson’s refusal of both territories exposed the limits of that appeal in the negotiations and made the principle part of a broader contest over who could define a just settlement.

Rejection and public grievance

Woodrow Wilson addressed the Italian people directly in a letter published in a French newspaper, bypassing and humiliating Italy’s representatives. He explained his refusal to concede either Dalmatia or Fiume. The narrative notes that his reasons might have been sound, but emphasizes the effect of the letter’s paternal tone: Italians were treated as junior partners being instructed by a more powerful authority. The dispute over territory thus became a dispute over status as well as borders.

On April 24, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and Sidney Sonnino abruptly left the peace negotiations. Their departure made Italy’s disappointment a public political gesture. In the final week of April, crowds in piazzas across Italy rallied for Fiume and Dalmatia, and the country’s leaders were welcomed amid a surge of national self-pity. The book presents this appeal to shared deprivation as powerful but dangerous: the sense of defeat took hold even though Italy had emerged victorious from the war.

From self-determination to national mobilization

The doctrine’s significance changes as the narrative moves beyond the negotiations. In a speech to his legionnaires at the beginning of 1920, Gabriele D’Annunzio contrasted Fiume with the peace settlement, casting the city as a place of youth, life, and a future carried forward by the dead and the unborn. In this rhetoric, Fiume is no longer only a territorial claim to be judged against a diplomatic principle; it becomes a symbol of renewal set against an exhausted Europe. The book also notes that Italians did not follow D’Annunzio in sustaining this vision, even as he chose to remain in Fiume.

Later fascist rhetoric gives the national question a different emphasis. Benito Mussolini described fascism as seeking to overcome regional identities and make Italians into a single people, while linking national greatness to empire and expansion beyond Italy’s borders. At a commemorative gathering in Piazza Belgioioso, he described a transformation from people to nation and from nation to state, followed by expansion in the world. These scenes do not present self-determination as the explicit basis of each later claim. Instead, they show the changing political language around nationhood: a principle invoked to contest a settlement gives way to a project of internal national consolidation and outward power.

Place in the postwar narrative

The dispute over self-determination unfolds amid a wider crisis of authority. The book depicts Europe as a stage emptied by war and emphasizes the return of five million veterans, whose arrival threatens to overwhelm the old political order. Against that background, the principle’s promise of popular choice is entangled with mass grievance, territorial nationalism, and political mobilization. Its narrative role is therefore double: it supplies nationalists with a language for claiming Fiume, while the rejection of that claim helps turn the peace into a lasting symbol of humiliation.