The New Map of Europe (1911-1914) / The Story of the Recent European Diplomatic Crises and Wars and of Europe's Present Catastrophe

by Herbert Adams Gibbons

The irredentism of the Balkan States led, first, to their war with Turkey; second, to their war with each other; and third, to Servia becoming the direct cause of the European war. The aspirations of none have been satisfied. Rumanian irredentism has stood between Rumania and the Triple Alliance. The irredentism of Italy has not yet led to anything, but it is so full of significance as a possible factor in bearing upon and changing the whole destinies of Europe during the winter of 1914-1915, that it cannot be overlooked in a study of contemporary national movements and wars.

The entrance of Italy into an alliance with the Teutonic Powers of Central Europe was believed by her statesmen to be an act of self-preservation.

The opposition of the French clerical party to the completion of the unification of Italy during the last decade of the Third Empire destroyed whatever gratitude the Italian people may have felt for the decisive aid rendered to the cause of Italian unity at Solferino. On the part of the moving spirits of Young Italy, indeed, this gratitude was not very great. For the first great step in the unification of Italy had been accompanied by a dismemberment of the territories from which the royal house of Piedmont took its name. Young Italy felt that the French had been paid for their help against Austria, and paid dearly. The cession of his birthplace, at the moment when the nation for which he had suffered so terribly and struggled so successfully came into being, hurt Garibaldi more than the French bullets lodged in his body eight years later at Mentana. When the French look to-day with joy upon Italian irredentism as the hopeless barrier between Italy and Austria-Hungary, they should not forget that, even though fifty years have passed, Italian irredentism includes also Savoy and Nice.

After the Franco-German War, there were two tendencies in the policy of the Third Republic to prevent an understanding between France and Italy. The first of these was the recurrence in France of the old bitter clericalism of the Empire. Italy feared that French soldiers might again come to Rome. The second was the antagonism of France to the budding colonial aspirations of Italy. When France occupied Tunis, Italy felt that she had been robbed of the realization of a dream, which was hers by right of history, geography, and necessity.

So Italy joined the Triple Alliance. It is argued with reason in France that the alliance of Teuton and Latin was unnatural. Since Italy had become wholly Guelph to realize its unity, why this sudden return to Ghibellinism? The alliance of Italy with Germany and Austria-Hungary, however, was not more paradoxical than the alliance of increasingly democratic and socialistic and anti-clerical France with mediæval Russia. The reasons dictating the alliance were practically the same.

But there was this difference. Italy entered into an alliance with a former enemy and oppressor, who was still holding certain unredeemed territories of the united Italy as it had existed in the minds of the enthusiasts of the middle of the nineteenth century.

Too many books have been written about the distribution of populations in the Austro-Hungarian Empire to make necessary going into the details here of the Italian populations of the Austrian Tyrol and of the Austrian provinces at the north of the Adriatic Sea. The Tyrolese Italians are undoubtedly Italian in sympathies and characteristics. But is their union with Italy demanded by either internal Italian or external European political and economic considerations more than would be the union with Italy of the Italian cantons of the Swiss confederation?

Italian irredentism in regard to the Adriatic littoral is a far more serious and complicated problem. One is struck everywhere in the Adriatic, even as far south as Corfu, by the Italian character of the cities. Cattaro, Ragusa, Spalato, Zara, Fiume, Pola, and Trieste, all have an indefinable Italian atmosphere. It has never left them since the Middle Ages. It is in the buildings, however, rather than in the people. One hesitates to attribute even to the people of Fiume and Trieste Italian characteristics in the narrower sense of the word. On the Dalmatian coast, the Slavic element has won all the cities. In Fiume and Trieste, it is strong enough to rob these two cities of their distinctive Italian character. One's misgivings concerning the claims of Italian irredentists grow when he leaves the cities. There are undoubtedly several hundred thousands of Italians in this region. Italian is the language of commerce, and on the Austrian-Lloyd and Hungaro-Croatian steamship lines, Italian is the language of the crews. But the people who speak Italian are not Italians, in every other case you meet, nor do they resemble Italians. Why is this?

Nationality, in the twentieth century, has a mental and civic, rather than a physical and hereditary basis. We are the product of our education and of the political atmosphere in which we live. This is why assimilation is so strikingly easy in America, where we place the immigrant in touch with the public school, the newspaper, and the ballot. Just as the Italians and Germans and French of Switzerland are Swiss, despite their differences of language, so the Italians of the Adriatic littoral are the product of the dispensation under which they have lived. Unlike the Alsatians, they have never known political freedom and cultural advantages in common with their kin across a frontier forcibly raised to cut them off; unlike the Poles, they have not been compelled to revive the nationalism of an historic past as a means of getting rid of oppression; unlike the Slavs of the Balkans, their national spirit has not been called into being by the tyranny of a race alien in civilization and ideals, because alien in religion.