‘Peace in Security’ and the ‘Bridge Border’. The Italian Centre-Left and Yugoslavia in resolving the Question of Trieste (original) (raw)

The essay presents several ideas regarding the management of the «Adriatic Question» in the period following World War II, focusing particular attention on the strategies of the political centre-left, of «Moroteism» and of «border Catholicism» aimed at getting beyond the legacy of the conflict and achieving a normalisation of Italo-Yugoslav relations after the return of Trieste to Italy in 1954. The analysis reconstructs the conciliatory path of two bordering states, formerly divided by a heated national, political and ideological rivalry. Drawing a parallel between the choices made centrally and those made locally, the work furthermore examines the connection between Aldo Moro’s Ostpolitik and the line taken by Trieste’s Christian Democrats, both of which aimed to put an end to controversy on the eastern front – the «Adriatic normalisation», following the «defence of Italianness» – in a situation characterised by a lowering of tensions between the blocks, by the reorganisation of international Communism and by the multilateralism of the Helsinki Conference. The aim of this paper is therefore to shed light upon how and with what consequences Moro’s «Peace in the Security» and Triestine Moroteism’s «bridge border» strategy – leading principle of the Giulian Christian Democrats throughout the Sixties and Seventies – established on the one hand a relationship of collaboration with Tito’s Yugoslavia (culminating in the Treaty of Osimo in 1975) and on the other designed a new political, economic and national function for the eccentric region of Venezia Giulia, whose sovereignty had been long contested and had been severely penalised in the wake of the second world war. The paper will be based on new documentation from: Archivio Democrazia cristiana di Trieste, Fondo segreteria Democrazia cristiana nazionale, Fondo Giulio Andreotti, Fondo Aldo Moro, Fondo Sergio Coloni, Christian Democrats newspapers.