ITALIA IRREDENTA
Irredentism grew inevitably out of the decisions of the Congress of
Vienna, whose members were subjected to two influences in making a new
map of Europe. The first consideration, so common and so necessary in
all diplomatic arrangements, was that of expediency. The second
consideration was to prevent the rise of liberalism and democracy. The
decisions on the ground of the first consideration were made under the
pressure and the play and the skill of give and take by the
representatives of the nations who fondly believed that they were
making a lasting peace for Europe. The decisions on the ground of the
second consideration were guided by the idea that the checking of
national aspirations was the best means of preventing the growth of
democracy.
The decisions of Vienna, like the later modifications of Paris and
Berlin, could not prevent the development of the national movements
which have changed the map as it was rearranged after the collapse of
the Napoleonic _régime_.
During the past hundred years, ten new states have appeared on the map
of Europe: Greece, {120} Belgium, Servia, Italy, the German
Confederation, Rumania, Montenegro, Norway, Bulgaria,
and--possibly--Albania. With the exception of Albania (and is this the
reason why we have to qualify its viability by the word _possibly?_),
_all of these states have appeared upon the map against the will of,
and in defiance of, the concert of the European Powers_. They have
all, again with the exception of Albania, been born through a rise of
national consciousness preceded and inspired by a literary and
educational revival. The goal has been democracy. None of them, in
achieving independence, has succeeded in including within its frontiers
all the territory occupied by people of the same race and the same
language. _Irredentism is the movement to secure the union with a
nation of contiguous territories inhabited by the same race and
speaking the same language_. It is the call of the redeemed to the
unredeemed, and of the unredeemed to the redeemed.
If we were to regard the present unrest in Europe and the antagonism of
nations from the standpoint of nationalism, we could attribute the
breaking out of contemporary wars to five causes: the desire of nations
to get back what they have lost, illustrated by France in relationship
to Alsace-Lorraine; the desire of nations to expand according to their
legitimate racial aspirations, illustrated by the Balkan States in
relationship to Turkey and Austria-Hungary, and Italy in relationship
to Austria-Hungary; the desire of nations to expand commercially and
politically because of possession of surplus population and energy,
illustrated by Germany in her {121} _Weltpolitik_; the desire of
nations to prevent the commercial and political expansion of their
rivals, illustrated by Great Britain and Russia; and the desire of
nations to stamp out the rise of national movements which threaten
their territorial integrity, illustrated by Austria-Hungary and Turkey.
The irredentism of the Balkan States led, first, to their war with
Turkey; second, to their war with each other; and third, to Servia
becoming the direct cause of the European war. The aspirations of none
have been satisfied. Rumanian irredentism has stood between Rumania
and the Triple Alliance. The irredentism of Italy has not yet led to
anything, but it is so full of significance as a possible factor in
bearing upon and changing the whole destinies of Europe during the
winter of 1914-1915, that it cannot be overlooked in a study of
contemporary national movements and wars.
The entrance of Italy into an alliance with the Teutonic Powers of
Central Europe was believed by her statesmen to be an act of
self-preservation.
The opposition of the French clerical party to the completion of the
unification of Italy during the last decade of the Third Empire
destroyed whatever gratitude the Italian people may have felt for the
decisive aid rendered to the cause of Italian unity at Solferino. On
the part of the moving spirits of Young Italy, indeed, this gratitude
was not very great. For the first great step in the unification of
Italy had been accompanied by a dismemberment of the territories from
which the royal house of Piedmont took its name. Young Italy felt that
the French {122} had been paid for their help against Austria, and paid
dearly. The cession of his birthplace, at the moment when the nation
for which he had suffered so terribly and struggled so successfully
came into being, hurt Garibaldi more than the French bullets lodged in
his body eight years later at Mentana. When the French look to-day
with joy upon Italian irredentism as the hopeless barrier between Italy
and Austria-Hungary, they should not forget that, even though fifty
years have passed, Italian irredentism includes also Savoy and Nice.
After the Franco-German War, there were two tendencies in the policy of
the Third Republic to prevent an understanding between France and
Italy. The first of these was the recurrence in France of the old
bitter clericalism of the Empire. Italy feared that French soldiers
might again come to Rome. The second was the antagonism of France to
the budding colonial aspirations of Italy. When France occupied Tunis,
Italy felt that she had been robbed of the realization of a dream,
which was hers by right of history, geography, and necessity.
So Italy joined the Triple Alliance. It is argued with reason in
France that the alliance of Teuton and Latin was unnatural. Since
Italy had become wholly Guelph to realize its unity, why this sudden
return to Ghibellinism? The alliance of Italy with Germany and
Austria-Hungary, however, was not more paradoxical than the alliance of
increasingly democratic and socialistic and anti-clerical France with
mediæval Russia. The reasons dictating the alliance were practically
the same.
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But there was this difference. Italy entered into an alliance with a
former enemy and oppressor, who was still holding certain unredeemed
territories of the united Italy as it had existed in the minds of the
enthusiasts of the middle of the nineteenth century.
Too many books have been written about the distribution of populations
in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to make necessary going into the details
here of the Italian populations of the Austrian Tyrol and of the
Austrian provinces at the north of the Adriatic Sea. The Tyrolese
Italians are undoubtedly Italian in sympathies and characteristics.
But is their union with Italy demanded by either internal Italian or
external European political and economic considerations more than would
be the union with Italy of the Italian cantons of the Swiss
confederation?
Italian irredentism in regard to the Adriatic littoral is a far more
serious and complicated problem. One is struck everywhere in the
Adriatic, even as far south as Corfu, by the Italian character of the
cities. Cattaro, Ragusa, Spalato, Zara, Fiume, Pola, and Trieste, all
have an indefinable Italian atmosphere. It has never left them since
the Middle Ages. It is in the buildings, however, rather than in the
people. One hesitates to attribute even to the people of Fiume and
Trieste Italian characteristics in the narrower sense of the word. On
the Dalmatian coast, the Slavic element has won all the cities. In
Fiume and Trieste, it is strong enough to rob these two cities of their
distinctive Italian character. One's misgivings concerning the claims
of Italian irredentists grow when he leaves the cities. {124} There
are undoubtedly several hundred thousands of Italians in this region.
Italian is the language of commerce, and on the Austrian-Lloyd and
Hungaro-Croatian steamship lines, Italian is the language of the crews.
But the people who speak Italian are not Italians, in every other case
you meet, nor do they resemble Italians. Why is this?
Nationality, in the twentieth century, has a mental and civic, rather
than a physical and hereditary basis. _We are the product of our
education and of the political atmosphere in which we live_. This is
why assimilation is so strikingly easy in America, where we place the
immigrant in touch with the public school, the newspaper, and the
ballot. Just as the Italians and Germans and French of Switzerland are
Swiss, despite their differences of language, so the Italians of the
Adriatic littoral are the product of the dispensation under which they
have lived. Unlike the Alsatians, they have never known political
freedom and cultural advantages in common with their kin across a
frontier forcibly raised to cut them off; unlike the Poles, they have
not been compelled to revive the nationalism of an historic past as a
means of getting rid of oppression; unlike the Slavs of the Balkans,
their national spirit has not been called into being by the tyranny of
a race alien in civilization and ideals, because alien in religion.
I have among my clippings from French newspapers during the past five
years a legion of quotations from Vienna and Rome correspondents,
concerning the friction between Austria-Hungary and Italy, and between
the Italian-speaking population {125} of Austria and the Viennese
Government, over the question of distinct Italian nationality of
Austro-Hungarian subjects. There have been frontier incidents; there
have been demonstrations of Austrian societies visiting Italian cities
and Italian societies visiting Trieste; there has been much discussion
over the creation of an Italian Faculty of Law at the University of
Vienna, and the establishment of an Italian University at Trieste or
Vienna; and there have been occasional causes of friction between the
Austrian Governor of Istria and the Italian residents of the province.
But the general impression gained from a study of the incidents in
question, and the effort to trace out their aftermath, leads to the
conclusion that these irredentist incidents have been magnified in
importance. A clever campaign of the French press has endeavoured to
detach Italian public opinion from the Triple Alliance by publishing in
detail, on every possible occasion, any incident that might show
Austrian hostility to the Italian "nation."
In 1844, Cesare Balbo, in his _Speranze d'Italia_, a book that is as
important to students of contemporary politics as to those of the
Risorgimento, set forth clearly that the hope of Italy to the exclusion
of Austria from Lombardy and Venetia was most reasonably based _upon
the extension of the Austrian Empire eastward through the approaching
fall of the Ottoman Empire_. Balbo was a man of great vision. He
looked beyond the accidental factors in the making of a nation to the
great and durable considerations of national existence. He grasped the
fact {126} that the insistence of the Teutonic race upon holding in
subjection purely Italian territories, and its hostility to the
unification of the Italian people, was based upon economic
considerations. Lombardy and Venetia had been for a thousand years the
pathway of German commerce to the Mediterranean. If Austria, Balbo
argued, should fall heir to a portion of the European territories of
the Ottoman Empire, she would have her outlet to the Mediterranean more
advantageously than through the possession of Lombardy and Venetia.
Once these Ottoman territories were secured, Austria would be ready to
cede Lombardy and Venetia to a future united Italy.
After the unity of Italy had been achieved, and Austria had been driven
out of Lombardy and Venetia, she did receive compensation in Bosnia and
Herzegovina, and, just as Balbo predicted, there was born the Austrian
ambition to the succession of Macedonia. _That this ambition has not
been realized, and that Russia was determined to prevent the attempt to
revive it, explains the Austro-Hungarian willingness to fight Russia in
the summer of 1914_.
Austria and Hungary, from the very beginning of existence as a Dual
Monarchy, have been caught in the vise between Italian irredentism and
Servian irredentism. They have not been able to secure their outlet
through Macedonia to the Ægean Sea. They have been constantly
threatened by their neighbours on the south-east and south-west with
exclusion altogether from the Adriatic, their only outlet to the
Mediterranean.
From the economic point of view, one cannot {127} but have sympathy
with the determination of the Austrians and Hungarians to prevent the
disaster which would certainly come to them, if the aspirations of
Italian and Servian irredentism were realized. The severity of Hungary
against Croatia and the oppression of the Servians in
Bosnia-Herzegovina and Dalmatia by Austria have been dictated by the
same reasons which led England and Scotland to attempt to destroy the
national spirit of Ireland for so many centuries after they had robbed
her of her independence. They could not afford to have their
communications by sea threatened by the presence and growth of an
independent nation, especially since this nation was believed to be
susceptible to the influence of hereditary enemies.
It has been fortunate for Austria-Hungary that the claims of the
irredentists at the head of the Adriatic have overlapped and come into
conflict in almost the same way that the claims of Greece and Bulgaria
have come into conflict in Macedonia. From time immemorial, the
Italian and Greek peoples, owing to their position on peninsulas, have
been seafaring. Consequently, it is they who have developed the
commercial life of ports in the eastern Mediterranean. Everywhere
along the littoral of the Ægean and the Adriatic, Greeks and Italians
have founded and inhabited, up to the present day, the chief ports.
But, by the same token, those engaged in commercial and maritime
occupations have never been excellent farmers, shepherds, or woodsmen.
So, while the Italians and Greeks have held the predominance in the
cities of the littoral, the {128} _hinterland_ has been occupied by
other races. Just as the _hinterland_ of Macedonia is very largely
Bulgarian, the _hinterland_ of the upper end of the Adriatic is very
largely Slavic. Just as the realization of the dreams of Hellenic
irredentists would give Greece a narrow strip of coast line along
European Turkey to Constantinople, with one or two of the larger inland
commercial cities, while the Slavs would be cut off entirely from the
sea, the realization of the dreams of Italian irredentists would give
to Italy the ports and coast line of the northern end of the Adriatic,
with no _hinterland_, and the Slavs, Hungarians, and Germans an
enormous _hinterland_ with no ports.
Italian irredentism, in so far as the Tyrol goes, is not unreasonable.
But its realization in Istria and the Adriatic littoral is
impracticable. Our modern idea of a state is of people living together
in a political union that is to their economic advantage. Only the
thoughtless enthusiasts could advocate a change in the map of Europe by
which fifty million people would be cut off from the sea to satisfy the
national aspirations of a few hundred thousand Italians.
The Italian Society _Dante Alighieri_ has gotten into the hands of the
irredentists, and, before the Tripolitan conquest, was successful in
influencing members of Parliament to embarrass the Government by
interpellations concerning the troubles of Italians who are Austrian
subjects. This society has advocated for Italy the adoption of a law
so modifying the legislation on naturalization that Italians who
emigrate can preserve their nationality even if they acquire that of
the countries to which they have gone. {129} It was a curious
anticipation of the famous Article XXV, of the German Citizenship Law
of 1914. In 1911, a Lombard deputy tried to raise the old cry of alarm
concerning German penetration into Italy, and emphasized the necessity
of the return to the policy of the Ghibelline motto, "_Fuori i
Tedeschi_"--"Expel the Germans."
Italian statesmen, however, have never given serious attention to the
claims of the irredentists. The late Marquis di San Giuliano deplored
their senseless and harmful manifestations. In trying for the
impossible, and keeping up an agitation that tended to make friction
between Italy and Austria-Hungary, he pointed out that they harmed what
were the real and _attainable_ Italian interests.
The antagonism between Italy and Austria-Hungary has had deeper and
more logical and justifiable foundation than irredentism. The two
nations have been apprehensive each about allowing the other to gain
control of the Adriatic. Up to 1903, Spezzia was the naval base for
the whole of Italy. Since that time, Tarento has become one of the
first military ports, important fortifications have been placed at
Brindisi, Bari, and Ancona, and an elaborate scheme has been drawn up
for the defence of Venice. The Venetians have been demanding that
Venice become a naval base.
Italian naval and maritime activity having increased in the Adriatic,
there has naturally been more intense opposition and rivalry between
the two Adriatic Powers over Albania. The spread of Austro-Hungarian
influence has been bitterly fought {130} by the Italian propaganda.
This problem was becoming a serious one for the statesmen of the two
nations while Albania was still under Turkish rule. Since, at the
joint wish of Italy and Austria-Hungary, Albania has been brought into
the family of European nations, the question of the equilibrium of the
Adriatic has only become more unsettled. For free Albania turned out
to be a fiasco.
If the relations between Austria-Hungary, fighting for life, and her
passive ally of the Triple Alliance have become more strained since the
European war began, let it be hoped for the future stability of Europe
that it has not been because Italian irredentism has gained the upper
hand at Rome. For if Italy were to intervene in the war for the
purpose of taking away from Austria-Hungary the Adriatic littoral
inhabited by Italians, she would be menacing her own future, and that
of Switzerland as well. To entertain the hope of taking and keeping
Trieste would be folly.
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