Italy remains persistently self-effacing in international
affairs. The Italian people have with relief
turned their back on the ‘glorious’ years of the
bombastic duce. Two decades of fascist rule and
two bloody European wars brought Italy to a
point in its history in 1945 where it seemed
unlikely again to exert a major influence.
Italy emerged with Britain, France, the Federal
Republic of Germany and Spain as one of the
big five democracies in Western Europe, with a
population comparable in size and a large
economy to match, which in 1987 generated
about one-fifth of the gross national product
of the European Community. The Italians have
concentrated their talents on their own welfare.
The post-war years were in many respects decades
of achievement and success, of rising standards
of living, though they were also years beset by
problems.
The fortunes of war decided Italy’s future in
the first place. It was the Allied armies of the West
that liberated the Italian peninsula in 1944 and
1945. Italy thus found itself on the Western ‘free
nation’ side of the great post-war divide of
Europe. This determined not only its international
position after the conclusion of the peace
treaty on to February 1947, but also its internal
politics and social developments. Italy’s relations
with the East (and its markets there) were cut off;
economically its future lay in close relations with
the West. Liberal economics, the abandonment of
fascist autarchy or self-sufficiency, the Italian
version of a more socially responsible capitalism,
all set Italy on a fundamentally Western path of
political and economic development. The politics
of post-war Italy were dominated by the Christian
Democratic Party, firmly committed to a parliamentary
system. In the post-war world Italy
moreover occupied a crucial strategic position in
the Mediterranean and Adriatic, and was seen as
a bulwark against communist south-east Europe.
Yet impoverished Italy in the early post-war
years, in the aftermath of the destruction and dislocation
of the war, facing dire poverty in many
regions and with an industrial proletariat in the
north, did not appear secure against a communist
takeover from within. The resistance had attracted
the working masses to communism, especially in
the north. The Italian Communist Party now
numbered 2 million, the largest in the Western
world. According to Cold War ideology, a communist
anywhere had but one purpose, to subvert
democracy and to seize power violently when
the moment was ripe, following the successful
model Lenin had created in 1917; it was believed,
moreover, that all communists were totally subservient
to Stalin and followed the dictates of the
Kremlin. In 1945 the partisans in the north of
Italy were strong and there were many communists
among them who believed that the hour of
revolution had indeed struck, but, disciplined and
obedient to their leadership, they took care to
avoid any direct challenge to the anti-communist
Anglo-American forces.
The Italian Communist Party after 1945
behaved in a way that was contrary to communist
tradition, deliberately seeking general acceptance
by shedding its violent revolutionary image. The
party was led by the astute veteran Palmiro
Togliatti, who had returned from Moscow as
recently as 1944. The communists would prevail,
he believed, only by following a democratic
course, winning mass support among the Italian
people first and then dominating society from this
position of strength. It would take time. This was
a rejection of Lenin’s revolutionary line and
Togliatti had to assert himself against the more
ardent traditional communists. Stalin probably
approved this strategy for communist parties in
Western Europe, where the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had
taken firm control, because he hoped to be left in
peace to consolidate Soviet power in central and
Eastern Europe. Togliatti’s avowal of the constitutional,
non-violent path to socialism prepared
the way for a close electoral alliance, virtually a
fusion, with the Socialist Party, which was led by
another veteran and Togliatti’s companion in
arms during the Spanish Civil War, Pietro Nenni.
One pivotal question for the future would be
whether a democratic left, including the communists
but not necessarily dominated by them,
would emerge in post-war Italy. The year 1947
was crucial for the future of Italian politics. The
US and Britain had identified a critical Soviet
challenge in Europe: Turkey was under pressure
and in Greece civil war was raging: they were, in
Truman’s words, ‘still free countries being challenged
by communist threats both from within
and without’ – while in Poland and the rest of
Eastern Europe the Soviet Union and the indigenous
communists were tightening their grip.
Truman’s response was to offer the democratic
Western European states US support – diplomatic,
economic and military. The outcome was
the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan and the
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation. The effect of
this support on Italian politics was that the
Christian Democratic leader Alcide De Gasperi,
after a visit to Washington, forced his communist–
Socialist partners out of the governing coalition
in May 1947.
The heightening tensions of the Cold War also
created enormous strains within the communist–
Socialist pact. Could the communists continue
to be trusted? A minority among the Socialists led
by Giuseppe Saragat demanded that their party
break off their close relationship with the communists;
when they failed to persuade their colleagues,
they left the party in 1947 and eventually
formed the Italian Social Democratic Party
(PSDI). By giving up the struggle within the
party and splitting the socialists, the PSDI left the
communists in a position from which they were
able for the next three decades to dominate the
left. Thus the communists opposed the Marshall
Plan, though earlier the communist–Socialist
alignment had accepted American economic aid.
But the communist and Nenni Socialists were
never strong enough to form an alternative government
on their own, nor could they find any
other small parties to join them to provide a
majority in parliament. Domestically the Communist
Party tried to make itself acceptable by
espousing democracy and a multi-party system,
an Italian road to socialism. But the autocratic
organisation and leadership principle which the
Communist Party itself strictly adhered to undermined
confidence in the authenticity of their
democratic avowals. Their unwavering support of
Moscow in international affairs had a similar
effect: they defended the Soviet invasion of
Czechoslovakia in February 1948, opposed Italy’s
membership of NATO and military links with the
US, were against Italy’s membership of the
European Economic Community and failed to
denounce the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956.
Not until nearly two decades later did Italian
communism openly take a lead in the formation of
what became known as Eurocommunism, a policy
of independence from Moscow and the US, and
the declared pursuit of national interests. In fact,
Togliatti had been critical of Moscow long before
this, and a change of attitude had been evident,
for example, with the acceptance by the communists
of membership of the European Economic
Community in 1962. But it was the Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia in 1968, the brutal assertion
of Soviet dominance over a supposedly
sovereign country, albeit a Soviet ally, that provoked
the broad Eurocommunist movement of
Western Europe. By the mid-1970s, the Italian
communists were even sanctioning NATO.
The acceptable face of communism, with its
enhanced appeal to the electorate, caused even
more apprehension in Washington than did traditional
communism. In this respect little had
changed in Washington’s assessment over forty
years. In the immediate post-war years, communism
was believed to be deriving its support
mainly from conditions of poverty and misery,
and there were plenty of those in Italy and
Europe. Opponents of communism were given
financial aid and sustained by whatever means
were possible. But, since former enemies were
being taught the arts of democracy, interference
could not be too obvious. To safeguard the
Western alliance from a communist takeover in
Italy, a very secret organisation called Operation
Gladio, named after the double-edged Roman
sword, was set up. It was to play a sinister and
corrupt role in Italian politics, though its existence
was not uncovered until a judicial investigation
in 1990.
The threat of communism had a beneficial
effect for Western Europe and Italy too. Extensive,
predominantly American, aid was sent to Italy
through the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation
Administration (UNRRA), then the US
provided direct economic aid, because (in the sombre
words of a State Department Policy Planning
Staff report) the margin of safety politically and
economically in Western Europe had become
extremely thin. These stop-gap forms of aid were
followed after 1948 by the planned approach of
Marshall Aid.
Between 1948 and 1952, Italy received more
than $1,400 million in US grants and loans. So
once the Italian economy had taken off in the
1950s, state, private and foreign capital ensured
an investment rate in industry that fuelled rapid
expansion. The millions of Italian immigrants
who lived in the US made this largesse easier to
justify. But in general it was appeals to America’s
own self-interest and above all the need to
contain communism that persuaded Congress and
the American public to provide such a huge transfer
of resources to Italy and Western Europe.
One of the more important objectives of the
Marshall Plan was to bring the non-communist
European nations into closer collaboration. The
means was the European recovery programme,
which was to be planned jointly by the European
participants. In April 1948, sixteen countries
signed a treaty which, for this purpose, set up
the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation
(OEEC) with headquarters in Paris.
The sixteen countries were Austria, Belgium,
Denmark, France, Britain, Greece, Iceland, the
Irish Republic, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands,
Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland
and Turkey, together with the three Western
zones of Germany. Italy was one of the full members,
but its adherence to this block of noncommunist
nations still seemed problematical to
Washington, even after the resounding victory of
the Christian Democratic Party in the elections of
1948. Contrary to the experience in the Western
zones of Germany, the Cold War had not discredited
the Italian Communist Party in the eyes of the
Italian electorate. American hopes that Marshall
Aid would weaken the communist left remained
unfulfilled.
In its relations with other countries, Italy has
not sought a leading role. In the aftermath of the
war, the dispute over the Trieste territory created
some agitation until it was resolved in the
mid-1950s. An agreement with Austria in 1969
settled the only other problem affecting its own
territory, the Alto Adige region or South Tyrol,
with its predominantly German-speaking population,
though irredentist terrorism still upsets
internal law and order in this region from time to
time. Post-war Italy has not aggressively sought
any special areas of influence in the Mediterranean.
In a revulsion against wartime experience
and imperial vainglory, the Italian people wish
to be left in peace and to leave others in peace.
Italy’s policy has been to maintain good relations
with all its neighbours and to keep out of
conflicts in the region, whether in the Middle East
or over Cyprus. There is, indeed, a strong neutralist
tendency noticeable in the attitudes of the
major political parties. But successive Christian
Democratic-led coalitions have remained firm in
the Atlantic orientation, the alliance with the US,
the membership of NATO and the European
Economic Community. For four decades Italian
foreign policy has been strikingly consistent.
Consistent would not be an appropriate description
of Italy’s policies at home. Italian democracy’s
unique feature is that government has not
alternated between a party in power and a party
in opposition. The communists and their allies,
the Nenni Socialists, polled between 31 and 36
per cent of the votes at general elections. Even
after the Socialists had broken away from the
communists in 1963, the communists polled
more than 30 per cent of the vote on their own.
Only the Christian Democrats could also claim to
be a mass party, attracting some 38 per cent of
the votes. None of the many other parties even
reached 10 per cent.
Since neither the Christian Democrats nor the
various small parties from the centre to the fascist
right would accept communists in the national
government, the communists formed a virtually
continuous opposition, while the Christian
Democrats remained permanently in power, forming
various opportunistic alliances with smaller
parties in order to carry the necessary vote of confidence
in parliament. But there were constant
conflicts between the coalition partners, as frequently
over personal differences as over questions
of policy, the distribution of ministerial posts
being an especially rich source of animosity. Party
discipline hardly exists outside the Communist
Party; indeed, because voting in parliament is
secret, party members can vote with impunity
against their own ministers in office. Personal
ambition became a major cause of instability.
Between 1944 and 1988 forty-seven Italian governments
came and went. After a short-lived
period of stability from 1983 to 1986, the pattern
of frequent change resumed. Another important
feature of Italian politics is the strength of grassroots
organisations and dependent interest
groups. Decades of uninterrupted power have
enabled the Christian Democrats to look after
their clients through patronage, from high civil
service appointments to postmasterships.
Italian Christian Democracy, which contains
elements of both left and right, has no distinct
ideology of its own and represents no single interest
group. It is not the party of industry and big
business, but industry and big business have no
other mass party to turn to. Moderate conservatives
also support the Christian Democrats. At the
same time state intervention in industry has been
a consistent feature of Christian Democratic government,
coexisting with private enterprise and,
of course, private property in the mixed Italian
economy. In its early years particularly, the party
had the advantage of the support of the Vatican.
Through the parish priests, especially in the
south, the support of the peasants was won for
Christian Democracy, to set against the support
of the urban workers for the communist–Socialist
alliance. But the conservative landlord also votes
Christian Democrat. Yet Christian Democracy,
though avowedly dedicated to Catholic values, is
not simply a confessional party. Its unifying spirit
is a virulent anti-communism, and since the
1950s it has sedulously contrasted communist
policies with its own pro-Western European and
Atlantic ties.
Alcide De Gasperi, prime minister from
December 1947 to August 1953, headed eight
successive governments. His anti-fascist credentials
were impeccable. One of the founders of the
People’s Party, a newspaper editor and a member
of parliament in 1921, he opposed Mussolini and
was imprisoned for his pains. On the intervention
of the Pope, he was released in 1929 and spent
the next few years quietly employed in the
Vatican as a librarian, stealthily making contact
with Catholic anti-fascists in Milan, Florence and
Rome. Already in his sixties, he joined the active
resistance and earned wide respect, though he
lacked the charisma of a really popular leader. A
practising Catholic, his relations with the Vatican
remained close, but during the last years of his
political life he was careful not to let the Church
dominate the Christian Democratic Party. After
leading governments of national unity until May
1947 he thereafter headed coalitions with small
centrist parties, though the 1948 elections had
given the Christian Democrats – as it turned out
for the only time – an absolute majority. By the
time of De Gasperi’s sudden death from a heart
attack in 1954 (he had resigned the premiership
a year earlier) Italy was set on a course embodying
moderate, conservative policies and featuring
an economic boom, increasing integration with
the Western alliance and West European economic
union.
For four decades the Italian electorate has
shown extraordinary stability in its political preferences.
This seems to indicate that the associations
and benefits the party could confer on
individuals were at least as important as considerations
of national policy. Shifts in voting patterns
were small, though sometimes crucial when it
came to bargaining to secure parliamentary
majorities for legislation.
De Gasperi resisted Vatican pressures to ally
with the right; instead, the Christian Democrats
established centrist coalitions with a reforming
programme. In the south, land reform divided up
large estates and gave land to the peasants to
farm. The government also wanted to lessen the
divisions between the poorest regions and the
industrial north. The Southern Italy Fund was
created to finance the building of infrastructures,
roads, aqueducts and irrigation schemes. The
hope was that tax concessions and various inducements
would tempt private industry south. Later
in the 1950s the government established factories
in the south, but few succeeded. The results of all
these reforming efforts fell far short of their aims.
The Christian Democratic share of the votes
declined after the high point of 1948 throughout
the 1950s and early 1960s and with this loss the
centrist coalitions became increasingly vulnerable,
finding themselves in a minority in overall parliamentary
votes. This, together with the tensions
within Christian Democracy as the reformists
looked left and the conservatives sought to move
to the right, was the main cause of government
unsteadiness. The Christian Democrats attempted
to bolster their parliamentary position by copying
a fascist device: they changed the electoral law so
that an electoral alliance gaining just over half of
the popular vote would obtain an almost twothirds
majority of the seats in parliament. The
communist and Socialists bitterly attacked the
‘swindle law’.
But the new electoral law did not help the
Christian Democrat centrist coalition in the elections
of June 1953, because they just failed to gain
50 per cent of the popular vote. Since they therefore
had to rely on the votes of the right, the governments
from 1953 to 1958 had difficulty in
maintaining their reforming policies, though some
progress was made, particularly the adoption of a
ten-year development plan designed to reduce
unemployment in the more backward regions of
Italy through increasing investment. But for most
of the decade the centrist coalitions were locked in
a domestic stalemate, concerned with keeping
their clients happy. Thus the Christian Democrats
in the south worked with the Mafia and the landlords
and also tried to assist the peasants; while in
the north-east, the Christian Democrats appealed
to workers and industrial leaders. The main political
principle was not to represent a cohesive ideology
but to amass as much support as possible from
whatever source.
There was movement politically on the left
too. The communist and Nenni Socialist alliance
fell slowly apart under the impact of events in the
Soviet empire following Stalin’s death in 1953.
Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s crimes in
February 1956 shocked the Socialists, but the
invasion of Hungary in November of the same
year was even worse for the image of communism.
Though Togliatti declared the Italian
Communist Party independent of the Kremlin
leadership, he could not hold the Socialists, who
now accepted NATO as well as the need for a
multi-party state, as a necessary safeguard against
dictatorships of the Stalin variety. The Nenni
Socialists nevertheless moved slowly; not until
January 1959 did the Socialist Party Congress formally
approve the break with the communists.
Meanwhile, Amintore Fanfani, who was the
dominant politician of the Christian Democrats in
the late 1950s and 1960s, led the party away from
the right-centre support which could no longer
command a majority in parliament. The political
crisis reached its climax in 1960, when for months
no government capable of winning acceptance by
the Chamber of Deputies could be formed. The
choice for the Christian Democrats was between
the fascists and the Socialists, the latter alignment
bitterly opposed by the Vatican and the right
wing of the Christian Democratic Party itself. But
the Vatican’s Italian politics were also changing
under the influence of a reforming pope, John
XXIII. Even so, not until December 1963, after
further government crises, did Aldo Moro,
Fanfani’s successor, manage to form a coalition
government that included Nenni’s Socialists.
The change to a Christian Democratic alignment
with the small Socialist Party did not,
however, lead to any lasting stability. The relationship
was an uneasy one in the 1960s. The
Socialists feared that they would lose votes to
parties standing to their left, especially the communists,
if socialism was watered down too far
and the new coalition did not pursue vigorous
reform and economic planning. Fanfani had
nationalised the electricity industry in 1962, as
the price for Socialist cooperation, but as far as
planning and social reforms were concerned,
Moro, his successor, was cautious. He had in his
own party, after all, a suspicious right wing to
contend with. The key feature of the political
landscape was the health of the economy. The
extraordinary period of economic expansion had
not come to an end, but it was certainly decelerating
just at a time when trade unions and
workers had become far more strident in pressing
their demands. During the previous fifteen years
the industrial north had been transformed, and
contributing to this transformation was the low
cost of labour, the Italian worker having failed to
gain any but small rises.
The Italian economy from 1945 to 1963 had
been built on the back of low wages. The profits
made by successful industrial expansion tended to
be ploughed back, rather than distributed to
shareholders or to the workers. This was made
possible by two features of the Italian economy:
there was a large labour pool from the south,
which kept unemployment high and so weakened
trade union bargaining power, though it is true
that between 1946 and 1973 there was a net
migration loss of 3 million people (7.1 million
emigrated, 4.1 million immigrated); and there
was no large group of shareholders to satisfy.
Since the fascist years, the Italian state had indirectly
controlled a large variety of industries
through the IRI, a holding company for industrial
reconstruction dating from the depression.
The IRI controlled the banks which, in turn,
owned large holdings in engineering, steel, shipyards
and armaments. After 1945, it also inaugurated
public works programmes in the south, but
its most important contribution between 1945
and 1955 was the modernisation of the steel
industry, basic to the success of private industry,
which was complemented and supported by the
public sector. After a period of great inflation up
to 1947, the Italian governments’ fiscal policies
produced price stability until the 1960s, which
helped to create the right conditions for industrial
growth. State investment in housebuilding,
transport, railways and motorways, television and
telephones and agriculture fuelled that growth in
the 1950s. Through another holding company
the state also developed the huge gasfield in the
Po valley, and a petrochemical industry grew up.
Entry into the Common Market in 1957 as a
founding member was good for exports, Italy’s
most efficient industrial sectors in private hands
having been poised to take full advantage of the
removal of tariffs. The most successful of Italy’s
industrial giants was Fiat. Other Italian manufacturers
became household names throughout
Western Europe: Olivetti, Pirelli, Snia Viscosa
and, in chemicals, Montecatini; their dynamic
managers made Italian cars, office machines,
domestic appliances, rubber products, textiles and
chemicals fully competitive with those of the rest
of the world. The increase in Italian production
from 1958 to 1963 reached a peak that came to
be called the ‘economic miracle’. But the growing
prosperity of the north contrasted with continued
stagnation in the south. The gulf of wealth and
poverty between Italy’s regions widened.
Industry’s easy years of expansion, profits and
high investments based on low wages came to an
end in 1963. For the ordinary people, however,
living standards continued rising in the 1960s;
with low unemployment rates the unions recovered
in strength. Wage rises now regularly outstripped
productivity and the country began
to suffer again from a high rate of inflation.
Economic growth became erratic, the kind of
stop–go policies familiar in Britain as balance-ofpayment
difficulties forced successive governments
to tighten the economic reins in the
mid-1960s. Nevertheless, the 1960s, when judged
as a whole, still showed outstanding economic
growth when compared with the rest of Western
Europe. Italy held its own in the Common Market
and in world competition, with substantial exports
of cars, washing machines, refrigerators, typewriters,
textiles, chemicals and consumer goods. A
flair for design, good marketing and managerial
skills kept the best of Italian industries abreast
with the best in Europe. Where Italy began to lose
out was in the new, less labour-intensive technological
industries of the third industrial revolution.
Italians were in danger of being overtaken unless a
programme of modernisation was instituted. Like
Britain, Italy fell behind the world competition in
the 1970s. The south remained backward, with
employment and wages much worse than the
north, although successive governments made
large-scale investments. Public development funds
and regional reforms consistently failed to produce
the hoped-for results.
The years 1968 and 1969 mark a watershed
between two decades of stability and steady
growth and a period of social, economic and
political impasse, conflicts and crises. In 1968, the
year of student revolt, youth challenged attitudes
and authority all over Western Europe. The new
generation in their twenties and thirties were no
longer content with what had been achieved since
the end of the war: their standard of comparison
was not with the depression of the 1930s or the
miseries of war and defeat. They had grown up
during the steady but not stirring days of reconstruction,
when for the ordinary people life was
unexciting. Their expectations went far beyond
what was being provided. The political leadership
from left to right had followed the road of compromise
and bargain, while the young activists
had utopian visions of social revolution and
regeneration. The shining example of democracy
and prosperity, the US, was cast in the role of barbaric
aggressor in Vietnam. The disillusionment
was as exaggerated as the earlier admiration had
been, and riots broke out in the cities. While the
froth on the surface of these exciting events soon
blew away, in Italy the year 1968 had a long-term
impact on industrial relations and economic
growth.
World History
