Based on the case of Libyan colonization, this article analyzes the different ways in which colonial subjects were integrated into or excluded from the Italian national community. While the evolution of nationality laws has been well studied, highlighting the shift towards an ethnic-racial and religious conception of citizenship in the colony long before the racial laws of the late 1930s, the categorization of populations was also based on more informal forms of integration or segregation. Italianization, policies towards local elites, the use of the idea of a Mediterranean community, or efforts to fascistize the elites and young Muslims all demonstrate the variety of intermediate spaces that claimed assimilation into defined forms of community, beyond the legal boundaries between colonists and colonized. From this perspective, it is a matter of seeing, as far as possible, how notions such as «Italianness», «Mediterraneanism» and «Fascist civilization» were mobilized both by colonial authorities and by the colonized.
