122 Caccamo

Chapter 6 Italy, the Adriatic and the Balkans: From the Great War to the Eve of the Peace Conference

Francesco Caccamo

Background

At the end of August 1914, one month after the Austrian attack on Serbia which began the Great War, the Italian foreign minister Marquis Antonino di Sangiuliano felt the need to explain to a German politician of his acquaintance the reasons why Antonio Salandra’s government had stepped back from the Triple Alliance and proclaimed neutrality. He relied on a sole argument, name- ly the fears and suspicions generated in Italy by Vienna’s policies towards South-Eastern Europe:

[Italian public opinion] has always viewed ’s territorial ambitions in the Balkans and the Adriatic with mistrust; it has always sympathized with the weak who are threatened by the strong; it has always profoundly believed in the principles of liberalism and of nationality. It considered the real independence and territorial integrity of Serbia as a bulwark and an element of balance essential to Italy’s interests. It is against all of this that Austria’s aggression against Serbia has been directed, and it is this aggression which has led to the war.1

This explanation should be viewed cautiously, or at least in its context. An acute if casual observer, and Machiavellian on occasion, Sangiuliano hit the target when he highlighted the importance to Italy of the near regions of the eastern Adriatic and the Balkans, where the cultural networks of the Venetian Republic lived on and where the slow but inexorable decline of the Ottoman Empire had been the home of opportunities and dangers for many years.2 It was also

1 Sangiuliano to Bülow, 31 August 1914, Archivio Sonnino di Montespertoli, here used in the microfilm version preserved at the Archivio Centrale di Stato di Roma (hereafter ACS), bobina 47. 2 On Sangiuliano, see Giampaolo Ferrajoli, Politica e diplomazia in Italia tra XIX e XX secolo. Vita di Antonino di San Giuliano (1852-1914) (Soveria Mannelli, 2007).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004363724_008 From the Great War to the Eve of the Peace Conference 123 undeniable that since the Risorgimento many Italians sympathised with the Balkan nationalities and their efforts to free themselves from what were rather inaccurately described as the ‘prisons of peoples’, in other words the multi- ethnic dynastic empires of the Habsburgs and the Ottomans. Above all on the left, many argued that in line with the principles of , Italy had a duty to support the creation of a new European order based on the prin- ciple of nationality. It was argued that such a change would bring about several advantages: not only would it lead to privileged ties with the young Balkan states but it would also allow for the liberation of the ‘unredeemed’ lands of Trento and Trieste, the predominantly Italian regions still ruled by Vienna.3 As Sangiuliano well knew, however, Italian public opinion was far from unanimous nor was it impermeable to oscillations and changes. At least until the outbreak of the conflict, the idea of war with the Habsburg Empire was regarded with considerable perplexity in moderate circles, which saw Vienna as a source of stability in central Europe and which rather hoped to compro- mise with Austria. There were even Risorgimento-era precedents for this approach, as the examples of Cesare Balbo or illustrate; they proposed a negotiated agreement which would lead Austria to shift its focus eastward at the expense of Turkey while leaving the Apennine peninsula to Italy. This option appeared to have prevailed after the creation of the Triple Alliance in 1882, tying Italy to both Germany and Austria-Hungary, and espe- cially when five years later an agreement was reached for south-eastern Europe (later article 7 of the Triple Alliance). In this agreement, and Vienna expressed a common interest in maintaining the status quo in the Balkans and the Ottoman lands of the Adriatic and Aegean; they also added that should this prove unsustainable, and one or other party were to occupy parts of the region, its gains should be matched by adequate compensation for the other party. The Italian interpretation of this ‘compensation clause’ was that in case of Austrian expansion in the Balkans, it would have been obliged to cede some portion of the ‘unredeemed’ lands to Italy.4

3 On the role played by the principle of nationality in Liberal Italy’s foreign policy, see the vari- ous analyses offered by Federico Chabod, Storia della politica estera italiana dal 1870 al 1896, 2 vols (Bari, 1961); Angelo Tamborra, “L’idea di nazionalità e la guerra 1914-1918”, in Atti del XLI Congresso di storia del Risorgimento italiano (Rome, 1963); Pietro Pastorelli, “Il principio di nazionalità nella politica estera italiana”, in Giovanni Spadolini (ed. ), Nazione e nazionalità in Italia (Bari, 1994), pp. 185-208; Luciano Monzali, “Riflessioni sulla cultura della diplomazia italiana in epoca liberale e fascista”, in Giorgio Petracchi (ed. ), Uomini e nazioni. Cultura e politica estera nell’Italia del Novecento (Udine, 2005), pp. 24-43. 4 Luigi Salvatorelli, La Triplice Alleanza. Storia diplomatica 1877-1912 (Milan, 1939); Rinaldo Petrignani, Neutralità e alleanza. Le scelte di politica estera dell’Italia dopo l’Unità (Bologna,