by Eric Robert Terzuolo “

«Talk To Russia buT keep sancTions»

Italy, the Allies and Balkan Security 1947-1955

by Eric Robert Terzuolo

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Give up “Adriatic romanticisms” was the curmudgeonly Italian ambassador to France Pietro Quaroni’s message to the Foreign Ministry in July 1954.1 He had in mind Italy’s ineffective efforts to derail a Balkan security pact linking Greece and Turkey (NATO allies) to communist Yugoslavia, Italy’s rival for possession of Trieste, but also, more broadly, Italy’s chronic difficulty in defining an effective policy vis-à-vis the Balkans. In truth, Italy’s effort to project itself as de facto successor to the Venetian Empire in the Adriatic and broader Mediterranean region had some success, e.g. in the 1911-1912 war against the declining Ottoman Empire. Italy also acquired Trieste in the First World War, but broad dissatisfaction with the postwar settlement would fuel Fascist aggression in the Adriatic region, including the 1939 occupation of Albania, the unsuccessful invasion of Greece in the winter of 19401941, and the subsequent occupation of part of Yugoslavia. The February 1947 peace treaty practically speaking deprived Italy of any claim to be a major Balkan or Eastern Mediterranean power. Trieste and the surrounding territory were incorporated into a nominally independent entity, the Free Territory of Trieste (FTT), divided into two occupation zones. Zone A, largely the city itself, was under Allied occupation. Zone B, along the coast south of the city, remained under Yugoslav control. Italy and Yugoslavia both claimed the entire territory. This unresolved border question did not stop Italy from becoming a founding member of NATO in April 1949,2 although, in the exploratory talks that began

1 Quoted in Giuliano Caroli, L’Italia e il patto balcanico, 1951-1955: una sfida diplomatica tra Nato e Mediterraneo, Milan, 2011, p. 227-228. This is an extremely detailed study, based on in-depth research in the Italian Foreign Ministry historical archives. Because publication of the official Italian diplomatic documents series covers the period only through June 1952, i.e. before most of the diplomatic activity discussed here, I have relied heavily on Caroli’s quotations from and summaries of key diplomatic documents. 2 In NATO’s post-Cold War enlargement, on the other hand, unresolved border issues could become impediments to membership invitations. Border issues with Croatia, for example, were thought to justify a delay in tendering an invitation to Slovenia.

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in Washington in July 1948, some delegations questioned whether Italy was geographically part of the Atlantic region, and floated the idea of a separate Mediterranean security pact.3 In NATO’s initial organizational phase, the establishment of regional planning groups in autumn 1949, Italy was assigned to the Southern Europe-Western Mediterranean group. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, as of 1951 deputy commander of NATO forces in Europe, did propose putting Italy into the Alliance’s Central Group4, i.e. explicitly connecting it to the main presumed area of NATO-Soviet military confrontation on the inner German border. But Italy’s position was settled with the creation of Allied Forces Southern Europe (AFSOUTH), the NATO regional command for the Mediterranean area, based in Naples, in June 1951.5

On the whole, Italy would take a “big fish, small pond” approach, assuming a high profile and leadership role in the Southern Region. But the region was not a coherent entity, especially after February 1952, when Greece and Turkey came in. This enlargement “imported” the historic tensions between those two countries into NATO.6

At the same time, Greece and Turkey were geographically more connected to each other than they were to Italy. In November 1951 and again in February 1952, Italy proposed a NATO command structure with Italian, Greek, and Turkish land forces all under the command of an Italian general at the Southern Region land forces command in Verona (LANDSOUTH), which had been established in 1951. But the Greeks and Turks were unwilling to place their land forces

3 Mario Del Pero, L’alleato scomodo: gli USA e la DC negli anni del centrismo (19481955), Rome, 2001, pp. 65-66, has an excellent chart of the pro’s and con’s regarding Italian membership that emerged in the discussions. On Italy’s admission to NATO, see also James E. Miller, The United States and Italy: The Politics and Diplomacy of Stabilization, Chapel Hill, NC, 1986 and E. Timothy Smith, «US Security and Italy: The Extension of NATO to the Mediterranean, 1945-49», in Lawrence S. Kaplan, Robert W. Clawson, and Raimondo Luraghi (Eds), NATO and the Mediterranean, Wilmington, DE, 1985 4 Dionysios K. Chourchoulis, The Southern Flank of NATO, 1951-1959: Military Strategy or Political Stabilization, Lanham, MD, 2015, p. 40. The 2010 doctoral dissertation that forms the basis for this book is available online. 5 Leopoldo Nuti and Maurizio Cremasco, «Linchpin of the Southern Flank: A General Survey of Italy in NATO, 1949-1999», in Gustav Schmidt (Ed.), A History of NATO: The First

Fifty Years, Volume 3, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2001, p. 326. 6 John O. Iatrides, «Failed Rampart: NATO’s Balkan Front»>, in Mary Ann Heiss and S. Victor Papacosma (Eds), NATO and the Warsaw Pact: Intrabloc Conflicts, Kent, OH, 2008, pp. 58-74, is an admirably clear and succinct analysis of the political tensions and other factors that made NATO’s Balkan front the scene of “periodic planning sessions and impressive-sounding allied headquarters commanding mostly inadequate and unintegrated national forces” (p. 59).

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under Italian command, perhaps expecting that Italian leadership would imply a focus on the potential Soviet Bloc threat via the Ljubljana Gap, the passage in the Alps between Ljubljana and Trieste. This was distant from and fundamentally unconnected to Thrace, on the northern shores of Aegean, which Athens and Ankara assumed would be objective of a Soviet Bloc offensive launched from Bulgaria.7 The Italians actually withdrew their proposal, which clearly was not going anywhere.

US Army General Matthew Ridgway, who took over from Dwight Eisenhower as Supreme Allied Commander for Europe (SACEUR) in May 1952, proposed two separate land forces commands, one for Italy and one for Greece and Turkey, both under the NATO Commander-in-Chief for the Southern Region (CINCSOUTH). These were respectively the aforementioned LANDSOUTH and Allied Land Forces Southeastern Europe (LANDSOUTHEAST) in Izmir, with an advance post in Thessaloniki. The August 1952 decision establishing LANDSOUTHEAST placed it under the command of a US Army general, as a means of tempering Greek/Turkish rivalry.8

In fact, the separation of land forces commands within a regional NATO command was not unique. Already before Greece and Turkey had entered NATO, Allied Forces Northern Europe, headquartered in Oslo, had separate land forces commands for Denmark and Norway. As Lord Ismay, the first Secretary General of NATO, put it, the land forces of these two countries “because of their geographical separation, could not be mutually self-supporting.”9

A more public demonstration of differences within the Southern Region was Italy’s response to the efforts of Greece, Turkey, and Yugoslavia to create a collective security system. The Balkan Pact of 1953-195410 had its genesis in Titoist Yugoslavia’s split with the Soviet Union in 1948 and in shared security concerns regarding Soviet-controlled Bulgaria, which bordered on all three countries.

Both Greece and Turkey sought to advance cooperation with Yugoslavia as

7 Chourchoulis, Southern Flank of NATO, p. 37; Lord Ismay, NATO: The First Five Years, 1949-1954, Paris?, 1954?, p. 73. 8 Chourchoulis, p. 44; Ismay, p. 73. 9 Ismay, p. 72. 10 A good brief treatment in English, focused on US perspectives and actions, is David R.

Stone, «The Balkan Pact and American Policy», East European Quarterly, 28 (3), Fall 1994, pp. 393ff. The foundational work is Balkan Triangle: Birth and Decline of an Alliance Across Ideological Boundaries, The Hague, 1968 by John O. Iatrides, whose more recent writings regarding the Balkan Pact include also «NATO and Aegean Disputes: The Cold War and After», in Aldo Chircop, André Gerolymatos, and John O. Iatrides (Eds),

The Aegean Sea After the Cold War: Security and Law of the Sea Issues, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK, 2000, pp. 32-46.

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they also were progressing toward admission to NATO,11 and as new NATO members, they successfully negotiated a political accord with Yugoslavia, the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation or Treaty of Ankara, signed on February 28, 1953. To enhance their military cooperation, the three parties signed the Treaty of Bled on August 9, 1954.

The Rome government devoted considerable effort to opposing or at least hindering the Balkan Pact. From a purely geo-strategic perspective, one could argue, Italy actually had an interest in military cooperation with Yugoslavia, to ensure that any Soviet-led attempt to invade Italy would encounter resistance not along the Isonzo River, i.e. in Italian territory, but rather at the aforementioned Ljubljana Gap.12 But domestic political considerations consistently prevailed, notably the “omnivorous presence” of the Trieste question.13

For Italy, the fate of Trieste truly was the Balkan issue, to the point of «monomania.»14 Italian government leaders viewed Titoist Yugoslavia as a rival both for control of the Free Territory of Trieste and for the favor of the US and UK. Italy resisted/questioned the Balkan Pact largely out of fear that it could give Yugoslavia a stronger hand in the Trieste dispute, by making Yugoslavia an even more important player in support of the Western side in the Cold War.

Successive Italian governments also demonstrated: 1) intense fear that developments regarding Trieste could weaken Italy’s centrist, Christian Democrat-led governments, playing into the hands of the left and/or the right, as in fact occurred in the 1953 parliamentary elections, where the Christian Democrats missed a victory that would have guaranteed them a super-majority in parliament; 2) the conviction that it was up to the US and UK to solve the Trieste question in a fashion favorable to Italy.

In March 1948, for example, to influence the crucial Italian parliamentary elections the following month, the US, UK, and France issued the so-called Tripartite Declaration, supporting the return of the Free Territory of Trieste to Italy.15

11 Caroli, p. 64. 12 Massimo de Leonardis, Guerra fredda e interessi nazionali: l’Italia nella politica internazionale del secondo dopoguerra, Soveria Mannelli, IT, 2014, p. 273. 13 Ennio Di Nolfo, «La ‘politica di potenza’ e le formule della politica di potenza: il caso italiano (1952-1956)», in Ennio Di Nolfo, Romain H. Rainero, and Brunello Vigezzi (Eds),

L’Italia e la politica di potenza in Europa (1950-60), Settimo Milanese, IT, 1992, p. 713. Quoted in de Leonardis, Guerra fredda e interessi nazionali, p. 272. 14 Alessandro Brogi, L’Italia e l’egemonia americana nel Mediterraneo, Florence, 1996, p. 119. 15 See Ambassador in Italy (Dunn) to the Secretary of State, March 22, 1948, Document 529, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Western Europe, Volume III, Washington, DC, 1974.

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Italian leaders would continue to hold this up as the gold standard for an acceptable solution of the Trieste question. Alcide De Gasperi, the Christian Democrat who headed eight successive cabinet governments between the end of the war and June 1953, was convinced that that the US simply had to choose democratic Italy over dictatorial, communist Yugoslavia.16 De Gasperi’s immediate successors – Cesare Pella, Amintore Fanfani, and Mario Scelba – similarly counted on Washington and London.

When it came specifically to Italy opposing/hindering the Balkan Pact, one could identify three distinct phases: 1) between the admission of Greece and Turkey to NATO and signature of their Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Yugoslavia; 2) during negotiations for the tripartite military cooperation treaty; 3) the brief period before the Balkan Pact unraveled. During the first two phases, Italian diplomacy, with very limited success, sought to derail, hinder, or at least shape the treaties. In the third phase, the issue was whether and under what conditions Italy might join the Balkan Pact.

But the arguments Italian politicians and diplomats deployed were broadly similar across all three phases. It was fair for Italy to raise concerns about the implications for NATO of having two member states make security commitments to a non-member state, especially a communist one like Yugoslavia. Such concerns resonated with other NATO allies. On the other hand, Italy’s attempt to make its support for (or acceptance of) the Balkan Pact conditional upon resolution of the Trieste question in Italy’s favor never gained any traction with the other NATO allies, and was frankly counterproductive.

In May 1951, as the process leading to Greek and Turkish NATO membership was underway, De Gasperi already had expressed concern to his foreign minister Carlo Sforza that “the inclusion of Yugoslavia in the defensive system”17 was a potential longer-term consequence. At the September 1952 meeting of the North Atlantic Council (NAC), NATO’s governing body, the Italian delegate stressed Italy’s “preeminent interest” with respect to the proposed Balkan Pact. The Coun-

16 On the negative consequences of De Gasperi’s attachment to the Tripartite Declaration and his erroneous assumption that the Allies would base a solution of the Trieste question based on moral principle and ideological affinity, rather than on pragmatic problem solving, see Massimo de Leonardis, La ‘diplomazia atlantica’ e la soluzione del problema di

Trieste (1952-1954), Naples, 1992, pp. 497-502. Although it was not the primary focus of the book, de Leonardis analyzed in detail the connection in Italian diplomacy between the Balkan Pact and the Trieste question, and was an important source for Caroli’s much later work. 17 Doc. 413, Rome, 18 May 1951, in Ministero degli Affari Esteri, I documenti diplomatici italiani. Undicesima serie, 1948-1953, Volume V, 1 novembre 1950 – 25 luglio 1951, Rome, 2011, p. 558. See also Caroli, p. 37.

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cil in fact took the position that negotiations with Yugoslavia were of interest to all the Alliance members and had to be addressed at the NATO level,18 a positive outcome for Italy, though not all the Rome government wanted.

The United States was a strong advocate for Balkan security cooperation. During his visits to Belgrade and Rome in August 1952, for example, Secretary of the Army Frank Pace made it clear the US intended to continue providing significant military aid to Yugoslavia19 and hoped that Italy would collaborate militarily with the three Balkan countries. But Italian defense minister Randolfo Pacciardi, when he received Pace, was critical of the allegedly privileged position the US was according to Yugoslavia.20

A review of the US diplomatic record suggests that the initiative for the Balkan Pact in fact lay with the participating countries themselves, not the US, as some scholars suggest.21 Iatrides characterizes US policy as one of seeking to restrain excesses on the part of the Balkan partners, without wishing to «stop all progress or see other NATO allies interject themselves too forcefully in the tripartite negotiations.» 22

By the beginning of 1953, the failure of Italy’s attempt to derail a Balkan cooperation agreement would be evident to Italian diplomats. But De Gasperi’s ill-considered remarks about keeping a war in the Balkans «localized,» i.e. disconnected from a broader East/West conflict, stirred the pot once more, quite needlessly.23 As was often the case, the politicians and the diplomats were not well in sync. After the Treaty of Ankara was signed in February 1953, Italy focused on derailing, hindering, or at least shaping the military cooperation treaty that its diplomats considered the obvious and likely next step. At NATO, Italian representatives once again raised red flags about possible implications for the Allies of security commitments to non-member states, arguing that NATO should be able to examine and consider, not merely be informed of, any tripartite Balkan security arrangement. The Italian concerns were in fact legitimate, and at the March 18, 1953 meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the Greek and Turkish representatives sought to allay them. But the Italian NATO representative Alberto Rossi Longhi admitted to the difficulty of stopping a vehicle that was already

18 Caroli, pp. 78-79. 19 For a detailed history of US aid to Yugoslavia, see Lorraine M. Lees, Keeping Tito Afloat:

The United States, Yugoslavia, and the Cold War, University Park, PA, 1997. 20 Caroli, pp. 75-76. 21 Stone. 22 «Failed Rampart», p. 63. 23 Caroli, pp. 91-93.

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moving faster than would have been optimal for Italian interests.24

At the April 23, 1954 meeting of the NAC, Attilio Piccioni, the new Italian foreign minister, warned yet again that the Balkan military pact would bring Yugoslavia de facto into NATO. Insisting that NATO would have to approve such a pact unanimously, Piccioni implicitly claimed an Italian veto right. But the July 29, 1954 NAC meeting actually did bless the Balkan military pact that was signed a few days later. The US, UK, and French delegations were overtly enthusiastic, while Italy largely threw in the towel. It avoided a veto and made a statement that was intended to be constructive, but mentioned the continued need to resolve the Trieste dispute,25 presumably a necessary concession to Italian public opinion. Overall, Italian policy had helped ensure a NATO review of the Treaty of Bled’s provisions to avoid overcommitting the Alliance, but had not advanced Italy’s pursuit of the real prize – Trieste.

Already in May 1951, De Gasperi had made it clear to his foreign minister that Yugoslavia’s inclusion in NATO, a possible follow-on to Greek and Turkish membership, «could take place only if Italy’s national postulates regarding the Free Territory of Trieste were satisfied.»26 De Gasperi wanted the other Allies and Italy’s «agents,» along with the press, to be aware that such issues had to be addressed, albeit without blocking NATO admission for Greece and Turkey. 27 The prime minister’s approach might be described as «passive aggressive.»28 The same could be said for his September 1952 declaration to a Turkish journalist that, while Italy was sympathetic to tripartite Balkan security cooperation, it would not be able to collaborate militarily with the three as long as the Trieste dispute was unresolved. 29 In essence, the Italian position was that a Balkan security pact without Italy’s participation made no sense, but such participation was impossible absent a solution of the Trieste dispute that was suitable to Italy. It was a way to avoid saying “no” directly to a Balkan security arrangement,

24 Caroli, pp. 122-123. 25 Caroli, pp. 230-231. 26 See note 17. 27 Caroli, p. 38. Note that early 1951 was also a period of heightened Western concerns regarding Soviet intentions vis-à-vis Yugoslavia. See Evanthis Hatzivassiliou, «The Puzzle of the Heretical: Yugoslavia in NATO Political Analysis, 1951-1972», in Svetozar Rajak, Konstantina E. Botsiou, Eirini Karamouzi, and Evanthis Hatzivassiliou (Eds), The

Balkans in the Cold War, London, 2017, p. 90. 28 Passive aggressive behavior arises among people who are unable to manage their anger in healthy ways, and express it instead through ambiguity, blaming, obstructionism, victimization, and procrastination, among other tactics. See https:/ psychcentral.com encyclopedia passive-aggression/ 29 Caroli, pp. 79.

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while communicating “no” and avoiding making yet another direct demand that the Allies solve Italy’s Trieste problem. But it was transparent, and de Leonardis was perhaps too diplomatic in terming the Italian policy line «not easy and full of nuances.»30 Though Turkey was generally the friendliest to Italy among the three Balkan states, Turkish foreign minister Mehmet Köprülü pulled no punches in a January 1953 conversation with US ambassador to Ankara George McGhee, characterizing Italian tactics as «calculated to exact as their price for their agreement a solution for Trieste favorable to themselves» and «to regain the prestige of their former position as principal outside power in the Balkans.»31

Italian leaders and representatives exaggerated the extent of sympathy in other capitals for their concerns regarding Trieste, and the readiness of NATO allies to see the poor state of Italo-Yugoslav relations and the unresolved Trieste dispute as posing security concerns for the Alliance as a whole. It is frankly surprising that, after the aforementioned September 1952 NAC meeting, Italian representative Alberto Rossi Longhi argued that the need to block Yugoslav opportunities for mischief-making on Trieste had been recognized as an Alliance concern.32 This was never really the case.

Washington and London kept Trieste matters in their own hands. For example, when Italo-Yugoslav tensions over Trieste ratcheted up in the autumn of 1953, to the point of military mobilization on both sides, the US and UK governments decided on a solution – Zone A to Italy, and tacit acceptance of Yugoslav annexation of Zone B – that they did not even share with the French, whom they feared would tip off Rome prematurely and scuttle the deal. Indeed, they avoided any advance consultation at NATO, and also kept the issue out of Alliance councils after informing Belgrade and Rome of their decision.33

It is worth underlining that the Balkan Pact was not the only international security arrangement the Italians tried to hold hostage to a favorable solution of the Trieste dispute. For example, the bilateral agreement governing American use of military facilities in Italy, agreed in January 1952, was not signed until late October 1954.34 The Pella government (1953–1954) and, less explicitly, the

30 Diplomazia atlantica e soluzione del problema di Trieste, p. 213. 31 The Ambassador in Turkey (McGhee) to the Department of State, January 6, 1953, Doc. 316, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952-1954, Eastern Europe; Soviet Union;

Eastern Mediterranean, Volume VIII, Washington, DC, 1988, 32 See note 18. 33 Winfried Heinemann, «’Learning by Doing’: Disintegrating Factors and the Development of Political Cooperation in Early NATO», in Heiss and Papacosma (Eds), NATO and the

Warsaw Pact, pp. 44-45. 34 Nuti and Cremasco, p. 327.