Week 100

 

And we are back – one last time, I hope – to the infamous incidents of July 6^th 1919 in Fiume. To examine the general lines of the Italian diplomatic action starting with the events that brought about the revision of the “inter-Allied” occupation regime in town and ending with those which eventually prevented this revision to be carried out, that is D'Annunzio's coup and subsequent fifteen months of occupation of his Legionari.

These general lines, after the fall of Prime Minister V.E. Orlando and of long tenured Foreign Minister S. Sonnino on June 19^th 1919, were cautiously, and “conservatively”, developed (mostly from Paris, where he had assumed the functions of Head of the Italian Delegation) by the new Minister of Foreign Affairs, the moderate liberal-conservative Tommaso Tittoni, in – broadly speaking – good agreement with Prime Minister F.S. Nitti.

Due to the difficult state of the Italian relations with France and Great Britain, and to the explicit hostility of US President Wilson to the Italian Adriatic claims, the character of the new Ministerial policy was strongly constrained by the need to repair at least the relations with Italy's former Allies, in order to make it possible to pursue a common persuasion action with the Associate. At the same time, the coalition character of the new Government, which relied for its parliamentary stability (and would be forced to do so even more strongly after the elections of November 1919) on a form of tolerant opposition of the national and conservative “constitutional” groups, at least in the name of national unity and limitedly to foreign matters, bound it to pursue a foreign policy that didn't appear entirely disagreeable to the “national” forces and was therefore still mindful of the Italian aspirations – and these taking the consolidated form they had taken during the main stage of negotiations. This form – “the Treaty of London plus Fiume” – while suitable of various revisions and adjustments (and in fairness, Orlando himself, and Sonnino to a lesser degree, had both opened the door to a composition exchanging parts of the Dalmatian coast and islands for Fiume), was almost impossible to straight up abandon, given its importance for the “national” public, its significance as a “point of honor” for the Italian Nation, and the immediate suspicions cast by the nationalist press over the new Prime Minister being appointed as a “trustee in bankruptcy” to liquidate the “Italian war” and sell out the Italian credits under pressure from Italy's “former Allies”.

For these reasons, both Nitti and Tittoni were forced to dance around the issue of the Adriatic, attempting on one hand to repair Italy's relations with the Allies, and therefore being to some degree more conciliatory than the previous delegation had been, and on the other maintaining the value of the Italian position on the internal front. Tittoni's appointment – besides bringing an experienced career diplomat to the Foreign Office – also served to reassure the “national” groups that the Italian foreign policy was to remain somewhat consistent in its general lines; for similar reasons, Nitti had negotiated the inclusion of Vittorio Scialoja, a distinguished member of the Fascio Parlamentare di Difesa Nazionale, within the delegation (and Scialoja would eventually replace Tittoni as Foreign Minister, ensuring again this continuity of the “national” presence within the Ministry), as well as keeping the competent but certainly unsympathetic industrialist S. Crespi (also member of the Fascio) as financial expert of the delegation.

In the meantime, Tittoni pursued a solution of Italy's diplomatic troubles that – given the extreme difficulty of a “satisfactory” resolution for Fiume, or the unlikelihood of such a positive resolution materializing in a timely fashion – provided some “equitable compensation” (to use the wording of the Treaty of London) for the Italian aspirations, at least once one took into account the general picture.

It is this general picture which is somewhat more interesting than the practical results of Tittoni's action – that he himself summarized in a private communication with Nitti as “a complete failure” - since it represented, with good approximation, what in scientific terms would be called an “abstract model” of Italy's traditional-democratic tendencies in foreign matters. That is, given the principally defensive nature of Italy's action and the abandonment of the most fantastic, or “aspirational” designs conceived or entertained by the Foreign Office during the conflict, what's left in the picture is the core substance of Italy's diplomatic relations – which can be contrasted with the more “democratically proactive” approach of Count Sforza under Giolitti during 1920-21 – and which nonetheless continued to represent the core foundation of the more expansive, but still quite conservative, foreign policy of the first two Mussolini Ministries.

The essence of this “toy model” was in its – thoroughly examined by observers of every different persuasion (but see Albrecht-Carrié for a general overview - Italian Foreign Policy, 1914-22) – Mediterranean character. Which was determined first and foremost by Italy's objective geographical collocation, and by her dependence on mostly seaborne (especially at the time) foreign trade (a dependence caused by a systemic scarcity of resources, affecting both industrial and consumption wares). The centrality of the Mediterranean was therefore strategic not only from an economical point of view, but carried over to the military need to ensure and protect the principal lifeline of the Italian nation. From this point, it was natural for Italy to pursue an expansion (or consolidation) of her sphere of influence – either of her own intitiative or to contain and contrast the other Mediterranean powers – in those directions of more significant weakness. That is, after the “slap of Tunis” had shut the door of Western Mediterranean, towards Eastern Mediterranean, pursuing (more or less affirmatively) the establishment of “cordial” relations with the great galaxy of the Balkan states and of the declining Ottoman power, attempting at the same time not to encroach the more substantial interests of France and Great Britain in the region, and from a more strategical point of view, to prevent at all costs the establishment of any major power on the two sides of Italy.

These elements will be recognizable in Italy's central focus on her Anatolian claims – or at least on their economical portion – (perhaps) to the expense of her more remote colonial aspirations, in her attention for the more or less stable new states which had inherited the Austro-Hungarian lands, in her ambivalent attitude towards Greece, a potential obstacle for Italy's claims in Turkey but a possible ally in her efforts to contain the new Yugoslav power, in the attempts to secure (at least) the strategic value of her Albanian informal protectorate with the neutralization of the Corfu Channel and with the proposed neutralization of the new Serbian coastline (especially telling is the recurrent concern over the establishment of a French naval base in Kotor, after the threat of a Russo-French alliance surrounding Italy had temporarily vanished). Contemporaneously, the Italian diplomatic action with the great powers was aimed at the protection of the aforementioned “natural” sphere of influence (especially with a concerned outlook on the French aspirations in the Balkans and Middle East) and at the definition of much needed financial agreements concerning the stabilization of her war debt and the more urgent matters of credit and supplies.

The reliance on a certain measure of foreign benevolence in order to stabilize the financial matters – more so accounting for the fact that the internal political instability and the perspective of a substantial adjustment of the industrial and banking systems increased the reluctance of American and British finance to invest in Italy and to support the Italian Treasury – made it obviously more difficult for Italy to pursue an affirmative policy, which was simultaneously limited by the need to return to a peacetime regime of expenditure, and to complete a program of military and social demobilization.