Week 112

 

The matter is as follows: either we accept this Clemenceau-Balfour-Tardieu proposal, which has a probability but not a certainty of being well received by Wilson, or we postpone the resolution of the Adriatic question, leaving up to the events to make it better or worse for us.

This the Italian situation, as seen from Paris, where the Italian Head of Delegation and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tommaso Tittoni, had spent the last two months pursuing an acceptable resolution of the Adriatic question; and with that a chance to provide new impulse to the whole machinery of Italy's international politics, the main threads of which had become entangled and, indeed, appeared impossible to disentangle from the issue of Fiume. With the consequence that the perspective annexation of the Adriatic port town – from one relatively small portion of the Italian revendications, and nothing more than a side note in her pre war international politics – was now threatening to strangle not only the Atlantic lifeline of Allied credit, but the “natural”direction of Italian projection into Eastern Mediterranean, a projection which Italy had certainly expected to be able to resume after the war, and in better shape than before.

The core of Tittoni's efforts had been placed, on one hand, on the restoration of Italy's relations with the Allies, British and French, for the purpose of earning their assistance in drawing a project of resolution such as to ensure, at least, the consideration of the US President; on the other, on the establishment of functional relations with the new “lesser” powers, which aspired to fill the void left by the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, in order to exert indirect pressure on the reluctant Yugoslav governments (notable steps, the recognition of the Greek policy in Anatolia, the attempt to prevent a French hegemony over Romania and the new Hungarian government, a policy of relative support of the Austrians in their dispute with the Yugoslavs, an attempt to involve the Bulgarians in the drawing of the new Turkish borders within the context of Italy's official role in the definition of the Bulgarian-Greek-Turkish frontier).

The strategy, as the moderate conservative – maybe a bit caught in one of his not infrequent dark moods – explained to Prime Minister F.S. Nitti (August 29^th 1919), was far from assured to produce the desired outcome. Indeed, not only the Italian concessions on the issue – reasonable or not – had been piling up until they represented a substantial enough departure from the original claims that the Government's ability to sustain them in the face of the “national” public opinion and political opposition was rather dubious, and would have rested in substance on the weariness and reluctance of the Italian masses to entertain talks of new conflicts rather than on a sentiment of genuine satisfaction; but, even with the progressive dilution of the Italian claims, most informed observers cast serious doubts on the willingness of Woodrow Wilson to reconsider his previous deliberations on the matter.

As Tittoni himself had summed up already on August 6^th 1919, after remarking his achievements in restoring Italy's relations with the Allies:

As for America, I can't say anything for sure. Rather, my impressions, despite the great cordiality of my personal relations with the American delegates, are pessimistic.

Furthermore, the entire Italian design – concessions, laborious negotiations, and all – was predicated on an attempt to “solve” the Adriatic question in such a way as to prevent the Yugoslav annexation of Fiume (immediate or postponed, as the US plebiscite design assumed), and leave room for, in a more or less remote future, and under more favorable circumstances, the partition of the Free State between the Italian portion with Fiume proper and the Yugoslav one with Sussak (which is more or less what eventually occurred a few years later). A result which – more than a few voices, and from within the Italian delegation as well, argued – could be achieved by means of mere delay expedients, without the need of making any further express sacrifice of the Italian diplomatic goals, regardless of whether these could ultimately be achieved or not.

Of course, the perspective of pursuing a tactic of repeated delays – based on the maintenance of the Italian occupation forces in place under the formal justification of an inter-Allied occupation, not entirely unlike the method adopted during the previous years for the Italian occupation of Dodecanese – had been substantially compromised by the recent incidents (between Italian and French troops) in Fiume, which had made the establishment of an inter-Allied inquest committee inevitable, and therefore created a direct instrument of pressure to compel the Italians to withdraw their troops. In principle, a tactic of recurrent delays, albeit quite transparent and assured to cause some friction with the British and (especially) with the French (who held a direct present within the region with their Army of East), could have been pursued without the risk of a further true escalation, as long as major incidents were avoided, since both the British and the French had – in substance – distanced themselves from the matter, accepting the Italian claims, as long as the Italians made no belated and inconvenient appeal to the Treaty of London. They were in fact rather busy themselves with sorting out their own international matters, where a degree of amicable cooperation (and more so a policy of modesty) from the Italians was certainly desirable in order to prevent unforeseeable troubles. In this sense, and given their complex international position and internal troubles, there is little doubt that both the British and French could recognize in the adoption of an amicable attitude towards the Italian revendications a convenient and inexpensive mean to appease Italy and prevent the danger of a prosecution of the inconvenient unruliness of the last weeks of Orlando and Sonnino. The particular diplomatic situation of Italy, with her main claims towards the Allies either poorly defined or anyways subordinated to the agreement of the US, and where Italy was furthermore sensitive to all sorts of indirect financial pressure, limited the ability of the Italian Foreign Office to ask for a short term conversion of this supposed Allied sympathy into concrete advantages and concessions, either in Anatolia (where the Allies were also awaiting Wilson's deliberations) or in Africa (where the British and French had to wait for each other, in order to establish what the equitable compensations promised to Italy amounted to) and forced the Italians to settle for promises of amicable cooperation while the Allies could justify the limited impact of their assistance with Wilson's well known obstinacy and with the bureaucratic lengths of peacemaking.

Keeping this in mind, one should be cautious not to overestimate the positive impact of Nitti and Tittoni's action with the Allies. It is certainly true that, given the extreme isolation suffered by Italy at the end of June, even a modest improvement could represent a substantial achievement, but one could hardly expect such an improvement to translate into a complete transformation of Italy's diplomatic situation and to produce those concrete results which the material circumstances didn't warrant. Nonetheless, both Nitti and Tittoni appeared at times overly confident in the practical effectiveness of this improved atmosphere, highlighting for instance the perspective of securing alternative compensations in order to diminish the impact of the “sacrifice” of Fiume, while in reality these compensations were either of very limited value or extremely remote and uncertain.

On August 5^th for instance, there had been an inconclusive meeting between the French Minister of Colonies, Henry Simon, and the new Italian Undersecretary Alberto Theodoli – or rather a quite "conclusive" meeting, where Simon had shut down (starting with the matter of Djibouti, on which the French appeared immovable) every other Italian proposal on colonial matters, eventually promising (Simon was the Minister of Colonies though) French assistance in Asia Minor.

"There are many matters to solve" – the Italian summary concluded citing Simon – "and the world is a big place. Why can't we seek a compensation for Italy somewhere else? France will certainly assist you there." […]