1954-2004: fifty years after the death of the statesman De Gasperi and Europe
An interview with Sergio Romano. The background that De Gasperi brought to Europeanism came from his experience as a parliamentarian of the Hapsburg Empire. And that history, those political experiences became, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the coagulating element of the various Italian Europeanisms
by Paolo Mattei
Ambassador Sergio Romano has recently published Europe
Robert Schuman, De Gasperi and Konrad Adenauer
Ambassador Sergio Romano has recently published Europe.
History of an idea (Longanesi
& C., Milano 2004). In it, Romano reinterprets the history of the Old
Continent, drawing a geographical and cultural profile, looking at events from
the fall of the Roman Empire to the process of integration begun at the end of
the Second World War. In those first years of the aftermath of the Second World
War the leading actor was Alcide De Gasperi, not only in the reconstruction of
his own country prostrated by the war but also in the first steps in the
process of European unification. They were steps that the Christian Democrat
politician took along with other important figures in Italy and abroad. We
talked with Sergio Romano about this important stage in the political work of
De Gasperi, the last of his life. You maintain that the De Gasperi’s
experience as a parliamentarian in Vienna is a passage of prime importance for
an understanding of his successive political work for Europe. It’s a historical
perspective which is not often taken into account when dealing with the
Europeanism of the statesman from Trent. SERGIO ROMANO: The reason why we’ve missed the
importance the Vienna Parliament had for the shaping of De Gasperi as
politician and of his European commitment can probably be identified in the way
which the Great War acted as “filter” for the understanding of that historical
period. We perceived the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a sick and decadent Empire,
police-ridden and authoritarian. We didn’t understand that within it there were
considerable forces laboring to make a multi-ethnic system work, seeking to
give a response to the problem of the different nationalities by creating the
conditions for peaceful and civil coexistence among various religious and
linguistic groups. De Gasperi as a parliamentarian in Vienna during the years
in which the Diet of the Hapsburg Empire represented a great constellation of
ethnic and national groups, went through that experience, he knew from within
the Parliament that attempt to make a multi-ethnic Empire function. All of this
was to be most useful to him subsequently when he worked for Europe. The great multinational project of the Hapsburg
empire failed definitively with the Great War… ROMANO: Yes, but that does not cancel the fact that
in the Parliament of Vienna – in which there were Hungarian, Galatian, Czech,
Slovenian, Croatian, Romanian, Italian representatives and other peoples still
– many important and interesting things were done to keep together that mosaic
of nations. There, it was from that experience, - which we, I repeat, have
forgotten, ignored, censored – that De Gasperi learned and took with him the
ideas with which he was to work profitably afterwards.
Sergio Romano
De Gasperi found himself working for Europe with
intellectuals of a human and cultural background profoundly different from his
own, people like Einaudi, for instance. ROMANO: The visions came from completely different
moulds and cultural trends, that’s true. But this does not mean that they
couldn’t converge on a common objective, or in any case go a long stretch of
the way together. Something which did in fact happen. The advantage of De
Gasperi’s Europeanism was, as I’ve attempted to explain, the European and
democratic version of a multinational Empire of which he had had experience.
Einaudi started out from other premises. He had seen of the crisis of the
Risorgimento State and the failure of Italian nationalism. He, a liberal, an
heir of the Risorgimento, was particularly aware of it. Between 1918 and 1920
he wrote some letters to the Corriere della Sera under the pseudonym “Junius” in which he shows his
conviction that in order to create Europe there was need of a mesh of economic
collaboration between the nations, set out in treaties that would, so to speak,
“imprison” – in the most positive sense of the word – Europe in a true and
proper federal structure. Along with Einaudi, other illustrious Italian
figures such as Altiero Spinelli, Ernesto Rossi, Carlo Sforza, gave life to the
debate on Europe. These intellectuals also had origins and training very
different from that of De Gasperi. ROMANO: Altiero Spinelli, who became a communist at
the end of the First World War, believed that he would find in Communism an
answer to the nationalism of the European states. He was convinced that the
Communist Party would put an end to the disputes among nationalist states.
Then, when he realized that Communism had become the ideology of a
super-nationalistic state like the USSR, he was very quickly disappointed, and
from there began to work out a different form of internationalism which, to be
precise, was Europeanism. That change of perspective was due to Spinelli’s
acquaintance with a left-wing intellectual of liberal origins, a Whig who had
studied with Einaudi, Ernesto Rossi, in fact. Both of them drafted the
“Manifesto of Ventotene” – from the name of the Pontine island where they were
confined together -, which was read and approved by Einaudi. One sees therefore
that the cultural origins of these intellectuals were heterogeneous; not merely
a distance in terms of the personality of De Gasperi. He came from the
Mazzini-Republican movement, had believed, between 1919 and 1920, that the
League of Nations represented a response to the problems bequeathed by the war,
and therefore thought of a form of Europeanism modeled on an updated and better
thought-out version of the League of Nations … Thus, even though they were
people of profoundly dissimilar personal experience and cultural provenance
they were at the same time men of great practicality, capable of adapting their
political project to the circumstances. And above all they were sufficiently
intelligent to understand that when you want to achieve a great idea, you must
do so with allies, even those distant in political and cultural background,
going with them along the necessary stretch of road.They worked together and they worked very well. Einaudi,
Sforza and De Gasperi were the faces of an Italian Europeanism which is not univocal,
which does not have one sole characteristic. What was the European project of De Gasperi? ROMANO: De Gasperi did not produce an intellectual,
theoretical model of Europeanism. When, in the first years after the Second
World War, he was to be the leading figure in concrete initiatives aimed at
giving body to the first European institutions, he was to put his rich
political experience in the service of those projects, as I said. Which has its
antecedents in Trento and Vienna. In Trento, between 1905 and 1915, he took on
the editorship of the newspaper Il Trentino, founded the local Popular Party, set up
cooperatives and institutes of credit that improved the life conditions of the
peasants, was elected municipal councilor… In Vienna he became a
parliamentarian and acquainted with the Christian-Social ideas of the
burgomaster Karl Lueger, much admired by him. Then, after the Great War, he
joined the Popular Party and was elected to the Italian parliament … it’s a
story we know, but that very story and those political experiences were what De
Gasperi brought to Europeanism. And which were to become, in the aftermath of
the Second World War, the coagulating element of the various Italian
Europeanisms.
De Gasperi speaking at the peace conference in Paris in 1946
The “necessity of Europe” that De Gasperi felt,
from where did that derive? ROMANO: After the Second World War he developed the
conviction that no European state was any longer in a position to deal with the
problems of reconstruction and the future of the Old Continent. It was at that
moment that the political practicality of the statesman from Trento took on a
European perspective. A perspective that became particularly efficacious when
he met two figures who, with him, become the real European “directoire” after
the end of the conflict: Robert Schumann and Konrad Adenauer. The first from
Lorraine, the second from the Rhine. All three were Catholics and Christian
Democrats, German speaking, coming from border areas in which nationalisms are
often tempered by the needs and the virtues of living together. What features did the three politicians have in common? ROMANO: Linguistic identity, German, was without
doubt important. But that all three of them belonged to a Christian party was
fundamental. We must not forget, in this regard, that modern Germany, the
Germany of the nineteenth century, after the unification, is the country that
gave life to two parties fundamental to the history of Europe: the Socialist
Party and the Christian Party. The Socialist Party – in Germany it was called
the Social Democrat Party – and the Christian Party – Zentrumspartei, or the Party of the Center – are two
models that Germany was to export to all the European countries. Germany was
the place in which the two most important political formations in the history
of Europe originated, before and after the end of the totalitarianisms.
Therefore, for an Italian Catholic like De Gasperi, a member of the Christian
Democrats, a relationship with an exponent of the German Zentrum, – of which the modern CDU is nothing but
the heir – was a relationship of “kinship”, there was strong solidarity, I’d
say there was “consanguinity”. The same was true for Schuman: the “Christians
in politics” in France were also children of the Zentrum. These three statesmen, meeting each
other, could take for granted knowledge, experiences, values that each one of
them had interiorized and about which it wasn’t even necessary to exchange
ideas, because each of them knew perfectly what the ideas of the others were. The work of De Gasperi, then, in a European sense
became concrete immediately after the end of the Second World War. ROMANO: Yes. De Gasperi was seeking an ubi
consistam, something
around which he could draw up the design for European unity. In the first
instance the occasion seemed offered by the Council of Europe. Promoted at a
large congress in the Hague in 1948, the Council of Europe was an English
invention and, for a certain period, was the object of many hopes. Then De
Gasperi was forced to realize that that institution was understood by the
English as a large club in which Great Britain would have the leading role. A
role through which it would certainly have censored initiatives of a unitary
and federal type.
De Gasperi at the constitutent Assembly in 1946
At that point came the French initiatives… ROMANO: Yes, and it was in fact the French
initiatives which “struck the spark”, which set in motion the machinery in
which De Gasperi “found himself”, that is the possibility of exercising a
determining role. The first great French initiative was headed by Jean Monnet,
a “technocrat” capable of organizing multilateral economic cooperation. Monnet,
realizing that with the reconstruction of German industry under the Marshall
Plan, Germany and France would contest the possession of the coal from the
Ruhr, laid a concrete proposal on the table: the European Community of Coal and
Steel, which was signed in 1951 by six States and of which De Gasperi became
president three years later. Naturally England did not join. Then historical
circumstances, which are very important in determining political programs, gave
the go ahead to the second important French initiative. When the question of
the rearming of Germany was posed, during the Cold War, France had the great
merit of proposing the solution to the problem with European criteria, in a
European perspective: I am speaking of the European Community of Defense, the
CED. The European armies would be integrated and no contingent larger than a
battalion would be exclusively national. De Gasperi truly saw the solution to
many problems in this idea. He saw the moment to step on the gas. In what sense? ROMANO: Perhaps we haven’t sufficiently taken account
of the passion with which De Gasperi devoted himself to the project in the last
three years of his life, a project which became “his” project. It was he who
had a specific article inserted in the Treaty that founded the CED, which
provided for the transformation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the European
Community of Defense into a Constituent Assembly. Keep in mind that De
Gasperi’s project for the transformation of the Parliamentary Assembly of the
CED into a constituting body had behind it a formidable unitary instrument: the
European Army. The making of the constitution could begin with the creation of
the European Army already in place! Had things gone according to the wishes of
De Gasperi, this would have meant starting from a very advanced stage in the
process of the federalization of Europe. Starting out from that moment many
things that we still consider difficult today would have been possible … Things didn’t go according to De Gasperi’s wishes
… ROMANO: Unfortunately no, because the French, who had
conceived the project, buried it in 1954 in the National Assembly by voting
against ratification. French policy toward Europe has always been characterized
by oscillation between European and nationalist feeling: European if the
president is Liberal or Socialist; nationalist if the president is Gaullist.
Let’s not forget, however, that Italy also failed to ratify the treaty setting
up the CED. The last letters of De Gasperi, written shortly before he died from
the small farm in the Trento area to where he had retired in 1954, are
heartfelt letters in which he exhorts his companions in Rome and the government
to speed up the process of ratification. They are anguished letters in which
one sees the premonition of a chance missed. Perhaps, who knows, had Italy
ratified before France, things might have gone differently…
