Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [182]
When the war broke out, Italy was allied to its old enemy Austria-Hungary and to Germany. Under the terms of the Triple Alliance, however, Italy was only obliged to defend its allies if they were attacked first. The Italians used the fact that Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia as reason to remain neutral. There was little enthusiasm in Italy at that stage for entering a conflict that seemed to have little to do with Italy’s interests. Sonnino, along with a small minority of his compatriots, inclined toward the Central Powers. He assumed that they would win, a reasonable enough assumption and, in any case, he preferred a Europe dominated by conservative powers. Most Italians, however, were for neutrality. It was only as the war dragged on that the great division opened up between those who kept to neutrality, mostly conservatives but also part of the radical left, and the increasing numbers who argued for intervention on the Allied side. The second group was a strange mix—liberals and republicans, but also socialists and rabid nationalists—and it was going to fall apart over Italy’s war aims. After much deliberation, Sonnino decided that intervention on the Allied side was Italy’s best option.
He changed his mind because it was the sensible thing to do. In 1915, when he started negotiations, the Allies appeared to be doing quite well. Moreover, they were prepared to offer Italy a better deal than the Central Powers, mainly because what Italy wanted was Austro-Hungarian territory. The Allies, for their part, were anxious to break the deadlock of the Western Front by attacking the enemy elsewhere. Italy’s entry would shift the naval balance in the Mediterranean decisively in their favor and an attack by the Italian army against Austria-Hungary promised to inflict severe damage on the weaker partner in the Central Powers.
Sonnino did not want to see Austria-Hungary utterly defeated; indeed, he never imagined that it might disappear altogether. He felt no particular animosity to the Central Powers; he joined the Allies because that seemed the best way to get the territory that Italy needed. Sonnino always took care to distinguish Italy’s war from the more general one. As he said in 1917: “If a lasting peace is to be assured, it is necessary that Italy obtain secure national frontiers—an indispensable condition for her full independence.” In 1918, shortly after Wilson had announced his Fourteen Points, Sonnino said pointedly that “an underhand campaign of foreign propaganda has attempted to insinuate that Italian aspirations are inspired by conceptions of imperialism, of anti-democracy, of anti-nationalism, etc. This is all absolutely false.” On the contrary, Italy’s claims on Austrian territory were solidly based on “ethnography and legitimate defence by land and sea.” Italians, he said, looked forward to good relations with their neighbors.7
During the war the European Allies, always willing to give away territory that was not theirs, promised the completion of Italy’s national dream, as the popular slogan in Italy had it, from Trento to Trieste, across the vulnerable northeastern border that Austria-Hungary had menaced since Italy’s birth. But in 1915, when the Treaty of London was drawn up, the British and the French threw in more: islands and a stretch of Dalmatia along Austria-Hungary’s Adriatic coast; the port of Vlorë in Albania (Italian: Valona) as well as a protectorate over central Albania; the Dodecanese islands along the coast of Asia Minor; and shares of the Ottoman empire if it disappeared. (This caused a certain amount of difficulty at the Peace Conference, because Lloyd George had also promised part of the same territory, around Smyrna, to Greece.) Italy would have the same rights as Britain and France in the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea. To Sonnino the Treaty of London represented a solemn agreement; for Britain and France by 1919 it had become an embarrassment.
The British and the French felt, rightly or wrongly, that Italy had not contributed much to