Forgive me if I point out that these - besides being quite difficult to answer in absolute terms - are two fairly different questions. Furthermore, defining an "ideal-type" in such a way that you can conclusively prove it to be necessarily racist, or non necessarily racist, seems to be rather arbitrary and, frankly, more of a theosophical disputation than an historical investigation.

I'll try to highlight at least the main points of what we can say with a less speculative approach.

Racism - and I hope any expert on racism will correct me if I stray too much away from the truth - Racism, like many other social, cultural and political constructs tends to exist for a reason; which isn't to say that it has to be exclusively structurally determined, because ideological elements certainly play a role in defining its features. But that we need to keep in mind that racism existed in correspondence of specific social structures or to answer specific needs (direct exploitation, social stability, group identity, control of sub-groups perceived as dangerous, etc.).

The latter especially may not be a perfectly accurate definition of "racism in history" but it is at least accurate to how Italian Fascism understood racism during its explicitly "racist" phase, after the occupation of Ethiopia and the establishment of the Italian "Empire" in 1935-36.

It is with the explicit, dual, purpose of enforcing the subordination of the African populations on a "racial" basis, and of establishing a deeper and more profound conscience of the "racial superiority" of the Italian "race" (which in turn served as an "identity-building" element) that the Italian Regime undertook the formulation of a series of "segregationist" and openly afflictive measures directed at the indigenous population of the Italian colonies.

In this sense, the adoption of "racism" - modeled on "Western" racism of the late XIX Century, with its blend of paternalistic and pseudo-anthropologic connotations - by Italian Fascism was an instrumental deliberation.

As Mussolini explained in his private speech to the Grand Council of October 25^th 1938

The racial problem is to me an achievement of the greatest importance and most important is its introduction into the history of Italy. The ancient Romans were unbelievably racist. The great struggle of the Roman Republic was indeed to know whether the Roman race could aggregate with the other races.

[…] here [in Italy] we have become persuaded that we are not a people but a mixture of races.

Now when a people takes conscience of its race, it does so in opposition to every other race – not to one alone. But we did so only in opposition to the Camites, which is to say the Africans. The lack of a racial conscience had severe consequences in the Amara [a region of northern Ethiopia] When they saw that the Italians went more raggedly than themselves, that they lived in tuculs, that they took their women; they said: this is not a race which can bring us civilization!

To preserve the Empire it is necessary that the natives have absolute, undisputed understanding of our superiority.

At the same time, there was no "instrumental" need for "instrumental" racism until the establishment of the Italian colonial empire. Until that point, it would be probably fair to say that the Italian outlook on Africa had reflected an "exoticist" interpretation - a place defined by its imaginary connotations, rather than by its practical traits and by concrete policies - even "positive" at time, as a repository of untamed energies, a cradle of preserved yet-uncivilized civilization, albeit in a rather "unpleasant" manner (the opening chapters of Marinetti's Mafarka are an obvious example of this disturbing attitude).

It's not saying much to point out that these approaches represent an integral feature of colonialism and are - indeed - "racist". But this tells us that a conceit of "inferiority" of the African populations existed in the Italian cultural environment, and to an extent society at large, already before Italian Fascism took power and begun to assert its presence within the nation.

At the same time, the ideological roots of fascism - as well as of Italian Fascism - tend to draw further back in time, from before the Great War and the awakening of new forms of national conscience during the late XIX Century and early XX Century. The first "fascination" with African exoticism occurred during the botched attempts to establish a protectorate over Ethiopia during 1887-96; and it took place within the awakening of a cultural and social context that Italian Fascism continued to identify with in opposition to the meeker liberal tradition going from Cairoli and Mancini to Giolitti and Nitti.

In the late XIX Century, when Pasquale Stanislao Mancini - the proponent of the principle of nationality as foundation of international right - then Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs, had declined the British offer to participate to the suppression of the Egyptian revolt, he had done so largely on practical grounds, but his defense of his action centered also, and sincerely to a degree, on the acknowledgement that the Egyptians' right to self-determination was not much different from that of the Italians themselves. While the attacks against him focused on how the Egyptian nationalists were nothing more than "desert robbers" and bandits, and therefore underserving of any consideration.

Brutal methods of repression had been used in Libya already in the aftermath of the occupation in 1911-12, and continued sparsely during the Great War; but the "pacification" campaign led by Rodolfo Graziani during the late 1920s and early 1930s by far exceeded those early examples, under the renewed urgency to "make room for the new".

Similarly, where social and political tensions existed, cultural, political and racial terminology appeared to merge with a certain continuity already in the late stages of the Great War. It's indeed not uncommon to see the "Slav-Bolshevik" identification surface in the border regions of the Adriatic among the many "national" voices.

Hence, while a more precise, intentional, adoption of racist policies took place only after the proclamation of the Italian Empire, a broader climate of "cultural racism" - not uncommon within the whole of Europe, and in some way expression of an European culture - was already present before and continued to operate during the developing stages of Italian Fascism.

In this sense, I find the approach highlighted by Kallis in his The eliminationist drive (albeit in a different context), to provide a better nuance in understanding the role of "agency-driving" played by the expanding groups more or less directly connected to European fascism. Rather than simply determining, or identifying with, the process of "othering" all the way to physical elmination; fascism, and especially the most "successful" example of Nazi Germany, forged an ideal space where such policies were not only possible, but desirable and to be actively pursued, already before it begun to practically enact them.

Fascism certainly never discouraged racism - even when it proclaimed itself above its crude "biological" formulations - and appeared open to adopting and incorporating racist elements when possible and serviceable. A position which gave further impulse to an already wide network pseudo-scientific discourse grounding social and political conflict in racial or ethnical traits, either to be forcedly assimilated or removed.

This sort of process - even if not specifically identified with one definite form of "racism" - is something that I believe was integral to the evolution of fascism in its more or less complete forms during the 1920s and 1930s. A source of its violent radicalization in the 1940s, but also a root of a potential for radicalization that may integrate, albeit in this sense non always to the same extent and in the same form due to practical circumstances, various forms of racism.

 

Gentile, E. - Le origini dell'ideologia fascista

Gentile, E. - Il mito dello stato nuovo, dall'antigiolittismo al fascismo

Gentile, E. - La grande Italia. Ascesa e declino del mito della nazione nel ventesimo secolo.

Sternhell, Z. et al. - Naissance de l'ideologie fasciste

Paxton, R. - The anatomy of fascism

Payne, S.G. - Fascism

Pupo, R. - Fiume, città di passione

Vivarelli, R. - Storia delle origini del Fascismo

De Felice, R. - Mussolini

Kallis, A. - Fascism, ‘License’ and Genocide: From the Chimera of Rebirth to the Authorization of Mass Murder (in Costa Pinto, A. - Rethinking the nature of Fascism, comparative perspectives)

Kallis, A. - Genocide and Fascism – the Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe