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

2015, "Prispevki za novejšo zgodovino", n. 1/2015

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.

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Simonetta Soldani on "Dopo la Serenissima: Balbettare la nazione", in "Modern Italy" (2022)

This outstanding piece of research once again demonstrates that, with the necessary methodological awareness, a focus on outlying and border areas can help leave behind cemented stereotypes and conformisms. By casting light on what would seem to be marginal situations and dynamics, it can add to and even alter the interpretation of the general historical framework. Zanou's careful, detailed investigation, based on an extensive bibliography and a vast spectrum of printed and handwritten primary sources found in the archives and libraries of various European countries, achieves both goals. The lens is pointed at the traumatic events in the Ionian islands and on the Dalmatian coast, a traditionally multi-ethnic and multicultural area, in the half century between Napoleon's demolition of the Republic of Venice (1797) and the Crimean War (1853-6). Marked by the crisis of the Ottoman Empire and the growing British rule in the Mediterranean, it was also a period of overwhelming success for various kinds of liberalism and nationalism, and of tensions triggered by the advancement of the 'natural' and superior nation-state ideology. This is precisely what was happening in the Greek area and all over Europe. The bookdevised by the author as a 'historical drama in four acts' (p. 47), opened by a Prelude and rounded off by an Epiloguespecifies right from the start its intention to read the events of the transformation of the southeastern Adriatic from a 'Venetian lake' to a 'battlefield between old and new imperial powers' (Napoleonic, Russian, British and Habsburgian) and 'emerging nationalisms and nation-states' (p. 21) using biographies and writings from the group of intellectuals and persons of Veneto-Italian language and culture. For the main part also active in politics, these people were driven by the tempestuous times they lived in to play a particularly important role, while reinventing themselves and remoulding their identity as well as their political, cultural and ideological opinions. There is good reason that the book hinges around the widespread difficulty of these politicians and intellectuals to express a single national idea and language, in line with the new semantic and political significance that the word/concept was gaining. This difficulty is clearly conveyed in both the original (Transnational Patriotism in the Mediterranean, 1800-1850: Stammering the Nation, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press) and the Italian title by the expression 'Stammering the Nation' and the emphasis on the

Trieste from the Empire to the Eastern border. A case of transition in modern European history (XVIII-XXth century)

"These two lectures will illustrate some important issues of contemporary European history, through the Trieste ‘case study’. The peculiar history of the city and its geopolitical location allow to analyze the transition processes occurring in Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Trieste is a sort of small laboratory where it is in fact possible to find, on a local scale, the events that affected an entire continent. Supranational empires. The city belongs to the Austrian Empire from the fourteenth century and flourishes in the nineteenth century as the Empire only seaport, becoming a busy “emporium” in the northern Mediterranean. National rivalries. The end of the nineteenth century century marks the beginning of tension between Italians and Slavs: the Italians are the majority in the city and hold the political power, the Slavs are numerically dominant in the rural hinterland around Trieste. Irredentism. Trieste becomes a symbol in Italy: part of the public opinion firmly believes that the conquest of the city would have concluded the unfinished unification of the Italian State. War. The primary Italian objective in World War I against Austria is the conquest of the Italian-speaking territories, still administered by the Empire. Several citizens from Trieste refuse to fight for the Empire: they desert and recruit volunteers in the Italian army. Collapse of empires. The outcome of the war leads to the fall of great empires and to the emergence of new nation states, based on self-determination. New Boundaries. Trieste passes from Austria to Italy. It is the decline of the so-called “Mitteleuropa”. Trieste becomes a city on the border of the Italian State. Nationalism. After the war, the Italian government suppresses in several ways the rights of the Slav population living in the border areas of the new state. Peaceful co-existence is a memory of the past. Totalitarianism. A few years after the war, the fragile Italian democracy is replaced by fascism. The regime has particularly harsh traits on the eastern border. Political violence. In 1943 the city is occupied by the Nazis. The Germans build a concentration camp with a crematorium: Jews are imprisoned and taken to Germany; the captured partisans are killed in so-called “Risiera di San Sabba”. In 1945, the Nazis withdraw and the city is occupied by the Yugoslav army. The new communist Yugoslavia, allied with USA, UK and USSR, wants to annex Trieste. Several thousand people are killed or deported from Trieste as fascists or simply anticommunist. Return to democracy and reconstruction. After two decades of dictatorship and the lost World War II, Italy loses Trieste for ten years. The city is governed until 1954 by Anglo-Americans. A slow reconstruction begins: material, political and civil. Cold War. Trieste is located a few kilometers from the “Iron Curtain”. The city borders the Communist Yugoslavia and becomes one of the several places of the Cold War. Population displacement. About 300 thousand Italians, resident in the hinterland of Trieste (transferred to Yugoslavia after the peace treaty), leave their homes and shelter in Italy. It’s the so-called Exodus. European integration. Trieste returns Italian in 1954, ten years after the end of the war. The tension on the border, however, lasts up to very recent times. The main problem is the never appeased mistrust between Italians and Slavs. Only recently, the opportunities offered by the European Community and the fall of the last borders prefigure a new era of mutual understanding, coexistence and cooperation."

The Italian Historical Compromise: A New Pathway to Power?

The Political Quarterly, 1978

FOR a phenomenon which many claim is a mask or an illusion, " Eurocommunism " has attracted a remarkable amount of attention. One of the main reasons for this has been the steady growth in electoral appeal and political influence of the Party most closely identified with it-the Italian Communist Party (PCI). In the spring of this year, the PCI officially became a part of the " programmatic majority "-one of the five political forces supporting, in Parliament, the minority Christian Democratic Government. Having won the backing of over 34 per cent. of the Italian electorate, and narrowed the gap between it and the dominant Christian Democratic Party (DC) to 4 percentage points, the PCI has underlined its status as by far the most important Communist movement in the Western world. Many aspects of the PCI have stimulated debate in the West-its policies, attitude to democracy, internal structure and so on. Here we shall deal with only one-but perhaps the most vital, and certainly the most novel: its strategy of the " Historical Com-* The author is a research assistant in the International Department of the Labour Party. This article is written, however, in a purely personal capacity. [See also, on this subject, Donald Sassoon, " The Italian Communist Party's European Strategy ", THE

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Martin J. Bull, Contemporary Italy. A Research Guide, Bibliographies and Indexes in World History, 43, Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut and London, 1996, 141 pp., ISBN 0-313-29137-3 hbk, £51.95

Modern Italy, 1998