Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [190]
Orlando and Sonnino were not prepared to push the African claims strongly in Paris and it is unlikely that Britain and France would have paid much attention. They briskly divided up the German colonies without consulting Italy and, as for handing over their own territory to Italy, each country expressed itself perfectly willing to do so as long as the other did. The Italians were left with yet another grievance and yet another frustrated dream. 28 Mussolini subsequently found that useful.
In Europe, the only one of Italy’s claims that was settled easily was for a piece of Austria-Hungary south of the Brenner Pass, the South Tyrol and below that the Trentino. The Trentino, which was largely Italian-speaking, was not a problem, but the Tyrol was overwhelmingly German. The Tyrolese protested at the partition of a province with a long history of self-government. So did the government of the new state of Austria: “It is actually the Tyrol, till now, except Switzerland, the most burning centre of liberty and resistance to all foreign domination, which will be sacrificed to strategic considerations, as an offering on the altar of militarism.” The Italians argued that Italy could be safe only if it held the land sloping up to the Brenner Pass. “Any other boundary to the south would merely be an artificial amputation entailing the upkeep of expensive armaments contrary to the principles by which Peace should be inspired.” Wilson, perhaps to show the Italians that he could be reasonable, let them know before the Peace Conference opened that he would not object to the change in Italy’s northern frontier. His fellow peacemakers acquiesced. Lloyd George briefly worried about the Tyrol, according to House, because he had once been on holiday there and it was one of the few parts of the continent he knew well. Wilson later regretted that he had handed over so many German-speaking Tyrolese—250,000 of them, to Italian rule. So did they, especially after 1922, when the Fascists decided to make them Italian. Suddenly, schools and government offices were run in Italian; children could not be given names that “offended Italian sentiment.” It was only in the vastly changed Italy and Europe of the 1970s that the Tyrol finally regained some of its old autonomy.29
Wilson was prepared to accept an injustice to the Germans of the Tyrol but he would not accept Italy’s claims where they ran up against those of the Yugoslavs. Outside the cities, the population along the eastern side of the Adriatic was almost entirely Slav: about 750,000 Croats, Slovenes, Serbs and Bosnians. Nevertheless, the Italians wanted to move the old border with Austria-Hungary between fifty and one hundred kilometers east into what is today Slovenia and Croatia, and south down the Dalmatian coast toward Split (Italian: Spalato). The result would take in the whole of the Istrian peninsula, including the naval base at Pula and Austria-Hungary’s two major ports of Trieste and Fiume, with their railway links to central Europe; several key islands at the northeast end of the Adriatic; and chunks of Dalmatia around the cities of Zadar (Italian: Zara) and Šibenik (Italian: Sebenico). Italy also wanted Albania’s port of Vlorë in the south. With these gains, Italy would dominate the Adriatic, and the new state of Yugoslavia would be left with a short coast, no decent port and only one railway line between the sea and the interior. This was precisely what Italy intended.
The Italians did not, of course, use that argument in Paris. They talked of strategic needs and they called on history. “The whole of Dalmatia was united to Italy in the centuries of Rome and Venice, for its own good fortune and the world’s peace.” They pointed to the Venetian lions, the Catholic churches, the Roman columns dotting the piazzas along the coast, the persistence of the Italian language despite Austrian oppression. They talked of the fearful injustice if Italians were made