Italy and the Mediterranean
an overall view

With the birth, on the 17th March 1861, of the new unified State, the first phase of the Renaissance was finally accomplished, understood not only as an extraordinary political-territorial project, but also as the interior resurrection of Italy for which, with enthusiasm, spiritual purity and absolute dedication, a glorious generation of young “prepared to die” patriots courageously sacrificed themselves.
Following the Unification – together with great domestic and International problems yet to be resolved (from the economic-social consolidation of the fragile National structure, to the Roman question), which had to be faced with solicitude – the new Italy born from the Renaissance, as it were, also “inherited” all of what, over the course of the centuries, had slowly been deposited in the collective memory of its finally united people. And thus, next to the never appeased aspiration for national unity, cultivated also in the darkest and most difficult years (if only by a few farsighted free spirits), in the historical collective memory of the Italian people, along the thread of the revered memory of the glorious ancient Maritime Republics, a natural Mediterranean vocation was likewise perpetuated, destined to regain force and grow with the new unified State. Moreover, the new State, immersed in the sea was, due to its own geographical location, projected towards the Mediterranean which, with the opening of the Suez Canal (1869) rediscovered centrality in the broader geopolitical and social order of the international system of the last part of the 19^th Century.
The opening of the Suez Canal marks an extraordinary and impressive development of the commercial interchange between the Countries of the Mediterranean Europe and the Countries with shores washed by the Indian Ocean, obviously with more profits to the advantage of the European Countries.
According to data published in that epoch, in the first year of operation the Suez Canal, approximately five hundred ships with an overall load of four hundred thousand tons transited the Canal. Thirty years later, double the number of ships passed through the Canal and the overall amount of goods was far superior of twenty million tons.
Parallel to the growing increase of maritime traffic through the Canal, destined to become, more and more, a crucial junction for the geopolitical structure of the Mediterranean East, the greed of the European Great Powers rose in geometric progression, constantly employed, as they were, in the last part of the 19^th Century, in a frantic race to acquire new possessions overseas, to increase their already conspicuous colonial empires in India and South-East Asia.
In May 1881, France forcefully imposed its protectorate in Tunisia (which was added to Algeria, conquered already years before) and began its penetration into Central Africa, consequently acquiring vast territories. Finally, after a bitter conflict with Germany, in 1911, France succeeded in imposing its protectorate in Morocco, thus consolidating its dominion on the South-Eastern coast of the Mediterranean.
On her part, England, already in possession of Malta and Cyprus, in the Summer of 1882 occupied Egypt, on which was immediately forced a sort of de facto protectorate, and authorized the stable presence of substantial armed forces to defend the security of the Suez Canal and the important British interests in the East Mediterranean.
Also Italy, at the close of the 19th Century, had begun, though limitedly, its colonial policy in the direction of the Red Sea. The matter was, unfortunately, destined to become complicated with the coming to power of Francesco Crispi, who ventured into a disastrous military operation in Abyssinia, tragically culminating in the defeat of Aduwa on March 1^st 1896, which considerably perturbed Italian public opinion, also provoking heated polemics in the press and Parliament. There followed a shared “policy of contemplation”, which marked a long pause of reflection and afterthought on the Italian colonial aspirations. The question again returned to the center of political attention in the first decade of the 20^th Century.
In a Mediterranean scenario already troubled by a heated inter-imperialist conflict, the Great European Powers reopened the hunt for new markets to conquer, to stabilize the respective spheres of political and economic influence, above all, at the expense of the “old”, but still territorially oversized Turkish Empire, already, for some time, going towards a slow, inexorable decline. The President of the Italian Council, Giovanni Giolitti, submitting to strong pressures, both on the part of the great industrial and financial groups, and by the new (but already widespread) Nationalist Movement, in October of 1911, sent an expeditionary Corps to Tripoli, which soon pushed to occupy all the Mediterranean Coast up to Tobruk.
The Libyan war, opposed by minority positions such as the socialist party and the democratic components of the catholic movement, concluded with the Treaty of Lausanne of 1912, which acknowledged Italy the possession of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica. The Italian control was limited, however, only to the coastal zone. The occupation of the entire territory was slowed down by the new military priorities imposed by the subsequent outbreak of the 1^st World War and, later, was much hampered and opposed by the insidious guerrilla warfare carried out by the Libyan resistance, the hard Italian repression of which (lasting until the 30’s) profoundly hurt the local populations, generating resentment and rancor that was difficult to forget. All this, a long time after, was to have weighed heavily on the Italo-Libyan relations, giving rise to prolonged disputes, not without dramatic moments of tension with the Tripoli Government, especially after the coming to power (1969) of Colonel Gheddafi.
The 1^st World War radically changed the geopolitical structure of the Mediterranean. Ancient empires disappeared for ever. The Czarist one was overwhelmed by the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917; the Germanic, Austrian and Turkish empires were defeated by the Great Western Powers, which with greed, divided up the rich spoils of war. It was, however, an unequal share-out to the advantage of Great Britain and France, which among other things, through the system of the “mandates” – a sort of well disguised protectorate - seized respectively: France, Syria and Lebanon; Great Britain, Iraq and Palestine, where the immigration of the Hebrews was allowed. Later the forced cohabitation between the Arabs and the immigrated Jews was to give long and dramatic episodes of reciprocal intolerance and hostility.
Within the various International Conferences in which the post-war structures were defined, Great Britain and France reserved a very unjust treatment for Italy (although, in fact, it had given a large contribution to the war against the common enemy), and this created the conditions for the evil legend of the “mutilated victory”, destined to further poison the national political climate of the epoch.
Exacerbated by the post-war economic crisis, a deep malaise spread throughout the Country, mixed with an ever growing distrust of the liberal elites, which were in fact, immobilized, held in a terrible grip: on the one side by the workers’ struggle, culminating in the occupation of the factories (which so alarmed the big employers); on the other, the frantic and violent activism of the subversive movements of the antagonist, nationalist and fascist right wing. Furthermore, these last insisted strongly on the Mediterranean policy, accusing the liberal Governments of having maintained an ignoble “defeatist” attitude in the various international meetings, which had penalized the national interests and clipped the wings of the legitimate Italian aspiration to a natural expansion.
And so, after the March on Rome and of the consolidation of the regime, The Fascist Government imposed strong activism on the Mediterranean policy, strengthening the role of the Navy as instrument of such policy, in the attempt to rebalance the geostrategic order of the region, too unbalanced in favour of England which, through a network of highly armed naval bases (Cyprus, Egypt, Malta and Gibraltar, controlled the entire theatre and was able to neutralize any possible threat.
In extreme synthesis, therefore, it can be said that the Italian Mediterranean vocation, decline in all the aggressive variants, became the fundamental fulcrum of the new policy of prestige and power of the Fascist Government, to reaffirm and relaunch the national interests in that which was, by then, the propaganda of the regime, ably played on strongly emotional tones, called Mare Nostrum.
The policy of prestige and power culminated – after the Ethiopian conquest and the founding (May 1936) of the Empire – in the important Italo-British Agreements of 16^th 1938, known as the Agreements of Easter. It concerned a wide range of interests, which settled not only a long series of still outstanding questions, but above all, laid the political foundations for the rebalance of the strategic order of the Mediterranean, finally recognizing, as Palazzo Chigi had hoped for a long time, the role, the prestige and the rights of Fascist Italy.
Illustrating to the House the extent of the Italo-British Act, which contained the declaration of the entry into force of the Easter Agreements, the Foreign Minister, Ciano, on the 30th November 1938, stated: “The Italo-British Agreements are a set of agreements which, taking into account the new European, Mediterranean and African realities, regulate, on the basis of the most absolute moral, political and military equality, the relations between the two Empires”.
It was undoubtedly a success also on the level of consensus within the regime and, in the collective imagination excited by the able and persuasive propaganda, the Mediterranean appeared, as it never would again, the Mare Nostrum, over which an imposing armed Navy kept watch; composed, to a large extent, of modern units and of over 100 submarines, almost all of recent construction. It was a great fleet which, according to the strategic setup of the epoch, only for its existence, would have exercised a strong dissuasive power over any enemy.
Unfortunately, during the course of the 2nd World War, things went very differently. Apart from the extraordinary individual acts of bravery and courage of the Italian crews, the fate of the war in the Mediterranean, also due to a series of errors made by upper echelons of the Navy, were not favourable. And the much celebrated Mare Nostrum, in the years of the conflict, was transformed into a Mare Enemy.
In 1946, with the birth of the Republic, Italy, after the dramatic experience of the 2^nd World War, returned by degrees to “normality” which, at the international level, imposed the passage through the narrow door of the Peace Treaty with the victorious Countries (signed on the 10^th February 1947), which among the other obligations, established the loss of all our overseas possessions.
In the meantime, over the Mediterranean, the first winds of the Cold War had begun to blow, originating from the ever increasing powerful contra- position between the two Blocs, respectively guided by the United States and the Soviet Union.
In those same years, notwithstanding the French and British resistance, disgruntled custodians of what remained of their colonial empires, the drive for independence of the Arab people of the South Shore and of the East Mediterranean became increasingly stronger. For some of these Countries, the path to liberty was relatively simple; for other, such as Morocco, Tunisia and especially Algeria it was, instead, very complex.
More dramatic was the matter of Palestine. After the failure of the plan to divide the territory into two States (one Jewish and the other Palestinian) conceived by UNO and the hasty withdrawal of the British, on the 14^th May 1948, the State of Israel was unilaterally proclaimed on all of the territory of the former mandate, thus giving rise to the first (of a long series) of Arab-Israeli wars. Even more emblematic was the case of Egypt to which the English had granted independence as far back as 1922. But it was a “sham” independence because Great Britain maintained the control of the Suez Canal and continued to exercise a strong and invasive conditioning on the Egyptian politics, which was more and more intolerable to the “Free officers”, a group of young military, among whom Nasser and Sadat were conspicuous, which at dawn on the 23^rd July 1952, overthrew the weak and compromised King Farouk, creating a new page in Mediterranean history.
In fact, the Nasser revolution centered on a few simple watchwords (social reform, brotherhood, fight against all forms of colonialism), released a strong liberatory feeling in the Arab world, which galvanized the enthusiasm of the nationalist movements in various Countries of the South Shore of the Mediterranean. From this viewpoint, ample space opened to the new Mediterranean policy of the Italian Republic.
With the foundation of the Republic, in fact, we return to the true original spirit of the “Mediterranean vocation”, this time, correctly declined and placed under the sign of peace and respect for the self-determination of the people. But, above all, placed under the sign of the diplomacy of friendship, understood as an Italian model of Mediterranean relations conceived to privilege the search for dialogue and bilateral and multilateral cooperation; a flexible model, open to equal confrontation and always firmly hostile to any idea of the clash of civilizations.
At the time of the Cold War, even in a framework of substantial loyalty to the Atlantic Alliance and of constructive European commitment, Italy sought to etch for itself autonomous leeway in the Mediterranean, pursuing a policy inspired by the universalist and third world culture (which enthused large sectors of the Christian Democrat Party as well as the parties of the left wing) and, at the same time, with an end to establish (with the valid support of the Eni - the National Hydrocarbon Corporation), at that time guided by Enrico Mattei), direct agreements with the oil producing Countries of new independence and desirous of freeing themselves from the control of the great Companies of the cartel.
A convinced supporter of a far-reaching autonomous Mediterranean policy was Aldo Moro, President of the Council in the 70’s and then Foreign Minister. Notwithstanding the limits imposed by rigid schemes of the contraposition between the two Blocs, Moro dedicated a constant commitment in support of dialogue and cooperation which he considered the fundamental requirements for a true policy of peace and stability of the East Mediterranean.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union introduced significant upheavals also in the Mediterranean, where, certain delicate geopolitical and geo-economic balances – also due to the action of certain State Protagonists of the region, able professionals of destabilization – started to waver dangerously, and were also put under severe strain by the thrusts of various Islamic fundamentalist movements, which were ever on the rise not only in the “areas of risk”, but also in the moderate Countries.
The terrible massacre of the 11th September 2001, reopened the season of war, infesting the first decade of the new Century, first in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, provoking devastating collateral effects far superior to anything which could have been foreseen. And the vertiginous increase of tension put also the promising Euro-Mediterranean partnership inaugurated at Barcelona to a very hard test, rendering relations more complicated between the North and South Shores of a Mediterranean which had suddenly become wider.
Also in the again disrupted scenario, Italy – always loyally anchored to the UNO and to the European Union – has been able, however, in the course of this decade, to remain faithful to its traditional Mediterranean policy, basically autonomous and permanently inspired by the diplomacy of friendship.
But, above all, Italy has always been able to maintain open its multiple channels of communication of dialogue with all the Arab Countries of the South Shore, also with the more problematic ones, always entertaining bilateral relations on a shared basis of equality, respect and a mutual non-interference policy, devoid of any prejudice of an ideological or religious character. Relationships maintained not only with State protagonists, but also with non-State actors and with the various movements present in the composite Arab societies.
Arab societies, for a long time, represented (in certain superficial Western analyses) as static societies, fatally tightened in the grip of religious fundamentalism, on the one side, and by worn-out despotic regimes, on the other. But as very recent events in the daily news show, those societies – only apparently immobile – traversed, instead, by strong tensions and by hopes of freedom and change, have suddenly raised the wind, impetuous, of the popular revolts.

Revolts which have gradually broken out in various Arab Countries and, finally, in a much more violent and dramatic manner in Libya, where the enraged reaction of a dying regime struck, in a deliberately cruel and brutal manner, its own civil population.
In the face of this new dangerous and disquieting Mediterranean crisis, Italy, which constantly professes respect for the freedom and self-determination of the peoples of the world, and supports the necessity (exclusively under the indispensable and legitimate aegis of the UNO) of the humanitarian missions, cannot remain “indifferent”, as the President of the Republic, Giorgio Napolitano, justly declared in his address of the 18^th March 2011, adding: “Let us not allow that the hopes of a Renaissance in the Arab World be destroyed”.