Spazio vitale was the territorial expansionist concept of Italian fascism. It was defined in universal terms as "that part of the globe over which extends either the vital requirements or expansionary
According to the Italian Fascist ideologist Giuseppe Bottai (pictured), spazio vitale justified Italian colonialism in Europe and Africa.
Lebensraum is a German concept of expansionism and Völkisch nationalism, the philosophy and policies of which were common to German politics from the 1890s to the 1940s. First popularized around 1901,
Spazio vitale
…organization which seeks to satisfy its needs by expanding beyond its national boundaries". Spazio vitale was analogous to Nazi Germany's concept of Lebensraum. The territorial extent of the Italian spazio vitale was to cover the Mediterranean as a whole (Mare Nostrum) and Northern Africa from the Atlantic…
The German geographer and ethnographer Friedrich Ratzel (1844–1904) coined the word Lebensraum (1901) as a term of human geography, which the Nazis adopted as a by-word for the aggressive territorial expansion of Germany into the Greater Germanic Reich.
The Swedish political scientist Johan Rudolf Kjellén (1864–1922) interpreted Friedrich Ratzel's ethnogeographic term, Lebensraum, as a geopolitical term, which the Nazis applied to justify German warfare.
Poster from the Wochenspruch der NSDAP series, 17 December 1939. Hitler's quote reads: "We are fighting for the security of our people and for our living space."
Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Chancellor of Germany from 1909 until 1917, was a proponent of German Lebensraum as a natural right of Imperial Germany.