Steadfast Leadership.

A leader shows his true mettle in difficult circumstances. On the 10 August 1946 Alcide de Gasperi, as the Prime Minister of a defeated Italy was facing the victorious Allied Powers, who were offering a peace treaty ending the Second Great War. He, personally had no blame for a war of aggression declared, waged and lost by the Fascist regime. He had opposed the policies of that regime from within Italy, was imprisoned in 1926 and had to take shelter from the ensuing persecution, within the Vatican Libraries. In 1946 he was a Prime Minister of a Government formed by the anti-fascist parties: Communists, Socialists, Liberals, Republicans and his own Democrazia Christiana.

The country was still in turmoil. The infrastructure, as well as the industry was, by and large destroyed by military action, or blown up by the retreating Nazi armies. He was sustained by his Christian faith and by his courage, as well as by the long experience he had gathered, first as deputy in the Austro-Hungarian Parliament in Vienna before the first World War and then in Don Sturzo’s Partito Popolare in the Italian Parliament[1921-24].

He stood up to the Allies’ claim for territorial concessions beyond the ill-gotten acquisitions of the Fascist period; he resisted Communist claims in internal policy; he maintained his Cabinet’s neutrality on the Monarchy issue, even though personally a republican; he asked for and accepted United States assistance without succumbing to  pressures on the loss of Italian territory; he put Italy firmly in the Western Democratic camp.

His speech to the Peace Conference in August 1946 began with the word: When I rise to speak as the Prime Minister of defeated nation, I feel that everything and everyone of you, is against me, but for your personal individual courtesy. [Tutto e’ contro di me, tranne la vostra personale cortesia]

His courage and determination won the day; the Allies’ claims were contained, as the American and British Governments were convinced Italy should not be humiliated into embracing Communism. He also stemmed the onslaught of Communist and neo-Fascist propaganda, and in the first great test of the April 1948 General Elections his Democrazia Christiana succeeded in ensuring an overall majority of seats in the Chamber of Deputies. 

This victory notwithstanding De Gasperi asked the Social Democrats, the Liberals and the Republicans to join him in the formation of a number of coalition cabinets. The Communists sought to depict him as a Vatican puppet, the neo-fascists as a stooge of the United States. From 1945 to 1953 he was responsible for the guidance of his country in the signing of the Peace Treaty and in the formidable task of post-war reconstruction.

In the early years, after the Referendum which abolished the Monarchy, the Constituent Assembly elected in 1946, drafted, debated and passed the new democratic Constitution, which came into force on the 1st of January 1948.  The reconstruction of Italy involved not only the buildings, the bridges, the roads, the rail network, the factories and the housing estates, it also meant recreating the democratic attitude of the masses interrupted and in part corrupted by more than twenty years of fascism. More immediately and decidedly it also meant building a welfare state as well as an industrial democracy.

This statesman, who was the pivot of the conduct of a policy which aligned Italy with the democratic West and ensconced the country within the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance,  notwithstanding the opposition of the Italian Communist Party which was the largest and most influential outside the then Soviet Russia, was, however not very popular in the West. Even today, on the 65^th anniversary of his demise , his great contribution to democracy, to European Unity, to the renewal of ‘Western values’ is still not really appreciated in Anglo-Saxon countries.

Yet  his courage and determination, his undoubted loyalty to principle, his humanity, as also his deft hand in political manoeuvre, shown in keeping ‘on board’ Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals and Republicans and warding off undue pressures from non-democratic forces internally and externally,  probably laid the firm foundations of  the modern peace loving and democratic Repubblica Italiana, and his collaboration with his fellow Christian Democrats Konrad Adenauer, in Germany  and Robert Schuman, in France,  paved the way for a Union of democratic European nations.

The 10^th August 1946 event is always worth remembering, because De Gasperi’s assumption of the burthen of representing a defeated and humiliated country and resuming friendly peaceful relations with the democracies, albeit with an onerous Peace Treaty, and taking the full responsibility for the whole general and radical reconstruction of his country, was an exemplary act of political courage.

One of his sayings stands to be repeated:un politico guarda alle prossime elezioni, uno statista alle future generazioni. He died on the 19 th. August 1954.