CHAPTER VII

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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