No reasonable person can claim that Italy plays an original and exemplary role in international affairs, even if it is not infrequent for statesmen and writers from our country to take seriously the most trite commonplaces of Risorgimento-style rhetoric and to give Italy just this task. The cultural, political, economic and military weight of the country is not such as to permit us to take a very different path from those of the countries with which we are in close contact. From the birth of the Italian state until today the basic decisions of its foreign policy have substantially conformed with the major trends at work in this or that period. But since such trends have not and never have had exactly the same implications and consequences, it has always – and it is possible to insert here, acting reasonably or unreasonably, near-sightedly or far-sightedly, constructively or destructively – contributed thus to the strengthening or weakening of the trend in which it operates. In judging the past policies of Italy and in speaking of future prospects, we must not, therefore, judge as wise or unwise those who made the basic decision as much as the manner in which, the choice once made, they have then acted within its scope.

If the Italy of the Liberal reign and of the Fascist dictatorship followed with pursued continuity a policy of national power, it was merely adopting an attitude that was then considered in all Europe not only natural, but even an obligation for any self-respecting state. The particular feature that the country’s leaders added to this general picture was the growing ambition to be one of the great European powers and, above all, to appear to be one. Since Italy was not in reality a great power, the country thus was dragged for eighty years through the development of alliances and reversals of alliances, military expenses, protectionism, colonial enterprises and intervention in the two world wars, which always corresponded not with its real possibilities as a medium-sized European power, but with its imaginary ones as a great power.

The painful outcome of this policy is well known, but it is worth meditating on the fact that the immediate successors to Fascism greatly regretted the disastrous consequences of Mussolini’s senseless adventure but, believing that the basic values of international politics would remain the same after the Second World War as they had remained the same after the First, they prepared themselves, albeit beginning from rock bottom, to try still another time to restore Italy to the ranks of power. Italy’s participation in the war against Germany was not considered by Badoglio’s government as an elementary duty, but at a skillful calculation aimed at transferring the Italian state from the ranks of the conquered into the ranks of the conquerors; without knowing it, Badoglio was an emulator of De Gaulle.

When Prunas obtained Soviet recognition, his aim was to play on rivalries among the Allies to regain a little national prestige; Sforza felt himself committed to defend the “honored” colonies; De Gasperi wanted to save the “sacred” Brenner border.

The two poles of the new international policy

But the policy of power and national independence completely destroyed by the war and by its aftermath, in reality had departed from Europe. The new European system developed along two lines that for a certain time proceeded on parallel planes, almost without disturbing each other, and only later did they impose, as they are now imposing, the necessity for the various nations to make a further choice.

On the one hand there is, in fact, the systematic reconstruction of the national states of the pre-war period. The sole exceptions are the three Baltic Republics of the twenties and thirties that are now reabsorbed into the Soviet Union, and Germany, which is divided into two countries. The borders among the European nations are only marginally altered, with the single important exception of Poland, whose borders are all shifted westward, to the Soviet Union’s advantage and to Germany’s disadvantage. All the nations, even those which in the beginning were faced with disastrous domestic situations, rather quickly succeeded in re-establishing order in their territory and in rebuilding their economies, and sooner or later formal sovereignty was restored to all of them.

In a parallel fashion, there is nevertheless an opposite process of devaluation of the effective sovereignty of the states, who are regrouped into structures that establish new solidarities and interdependencies, much stronger than those which constituted the traditional military, commercial or any other type of alliance, truly limiting their sovereignty. To avoid terms that have already acquired very specific meanings, I will here call these new formations multinational ones, independently of their greater or lesser substance.

Initially this included two ideological-military groupings based on the predominant presence of American troops in Western Europe and Soviet troops in Eastern Europe, on their great reciprocal fear and on the strong missionary spirit, respectively democratic and Communist, that animates the United States as it does the Soviet Union. The influence of the two great powers is so strong that all of Europe occupied by the Americans re-established itself on the basis of democratic values; all of Europe occupied by the Soviet Union re-established itself on the basis of the values of Communism; almost all the governments of both zones cluster around the two respective dominating powers and recognize the hegemony of the latter without much difficulty; and Germany, from which the quality of nationhood had initially been taken away, and which had been divided into a territory with various military occupations, is no longer able to become a single state because the new principle of ideological blocs reveals itself as stronger than the traditional principle of national unity.

Other, more institutionalized multinational structures were added or attempted to be added to the former, sometimes to strengthen it, sometimes to modify its terms, at least in part. In the West we have had: OEEC with its task of coordinating American economic aid; NATO with its partially-integrated military commands in anticipation of a system of common defense; the various initiatives for European unity which, beginning with the rather weak Council of Europe, rapidly reached the threshold of an almost federal military and political integration, fell short of this objective and ended up in the form of the Economic Communities with their partially-integrated administration of the economic policy of six nations. In East Europe we have: the Cominform’s ideological league, which is formally a league of parties, but of parties that hold absolute power in their respective countries, with the exception of the French and Italian parties, which are there in the secondary position of parties in partibus infidelium; the bilateral military and economic treaties that bind each country to the Soviet Union; and the Warsaw Pact and Comecon, which try to transform the bilateral ties into multilateral ties, respectively of a military and economic nature.

It should be emphasized that this dual process of building formally sovereign states and of creating or trying to create multinational structures which began in Europe, with the participation of the two world powers, and has had its most original manifestations in western Europe, is not at all peculiar to Europe. Upon the liquidation of Hitler’s ephemeral empire followed the liquidation of the equally ephemeral Japanese empire, and immediately afterward, first in Asia and then in Africa, came the liquidation of the European colonial empires. Wherever we look we find the parallel installation of new countries, whether immense or miniscule, and of political, military, economic, continental, intercontinental, short-lived, multinational structures. Even the Latin American countries have undertaken the construction of multinational organisms, both political and economic.

Above all these multinational constructions that link the formally independent and sovereign states of the world with varying degrees of interdependence reigns the United Nations, which enjoys the same mixture of reverence and impotence that surrounded the Holy Roman Empire in the Middle Ages – one as symbolic as the other of an unrealized but unrenounceable desire for universal political unity in peace and for peace.

The only states that are not only formally sovereign but are truly powers in their own right – capable, that is, of really putting their own military power at the disposition of their own foreign policy – are, since the end of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union, and they will remain so for a long time because they are both equipped with a mighty arsenal of nuclear arms. The apocalyptic nature of these arms nevertheless obliges both these powers to have increasingly less faith in the security offered by armaments and to discover that coexistence, as Khrushchev called it, or interdependence, as Kennedy put it, are values superior to absolute power and absolute independence even for superpowers.

It is within this dual process, first European, and then gradually global, of national restorations and multinational constructions, that the foreign policy of the Italian Republic has functioned from its birth and continues to function today.

Italy’s basic decisions

The fundamental decisions which have had a determining influence, not only on the country’s international position but also on its domestic development, were those made during the forties and fifties to incorporate the nation’s reconstruction in the two Atlantic and European multinational establishments. Then Italy’s entire foreign policy (and for that matter, not only Italy’s) was reduced to these two Atlantic and European spheres. Successively, other problems, sometimes economic, sometimes political, sometimes military, sometimes colonial or post-colonial, have widened the horizon: the relaxation of tensions, disarmament, Latin America, oil, the East European markets, the Mediterranean, scientific research, technological development and so on. Each of these themes has often appeared initially as something new and radically different from the Atlantic and European framework, and has been greeted with a light or a heavy heart, depending upon the adventuresome or Misoneistic temperament of whoever ran up against them. Nevertheless, as a rule it has sooner or later become apparent that the horizon was indeed new, but that the perspective from which it had to be seen almost always remained Atlantic and European. The decision had really been a basic one.

The Italian Government was not among the initiators of either the Atlantic or the European policy although there have been some Italians among the initiators in the creation of European instruments for encouraging federalism. Since both the Atlantic and European organizations concerned all of West Europe, in whose very heart lies Italy, and since the border between West and East Europe proved to be considerably more solid than initially could have been believed, it is rather probable that in the long run Italy could not at any rate have been able to exclude itself from the force of attraction of these two structures. It lacked the near-perfection of national life of Switzerland or Sweden that has allowed these two countries to remain neutral up to the present – expensive and perhaps sterile, but satisfying. When one thinks how England, Spain, Denmark, Greece and Turkey, initially left outside the Common Market, are increasingly feeling its attraction, and how Spain, left outside the Atlantic Pact, has since become a sort of second-class member, it is today rather difficult in retrospect to imagine an Italy extraneous to the Atlantic and European enterprise. Nevertheless, at that time things did not appear quite so inevitable. There were possible alternatives. And in fact they were considered. Italy’s adherence to the Atlantic and European structures was the result of lively political debate – perhaps the only great foreign policy debate in our country in the sense of the importance of what was at stake.

It is interesting to note how evanescent in this debate was the pressure for a policy with an exclusively national outlook. That a resentful and aggressive nationalism should remain silent was understandable such a short time after the ruin it had brought upon the country. But even neutralism, that other form of nationalism by whose tenets Italy was to refrain from international commitments and occupy itself only with its own innumerable defects, had a rather weak voice. It showed up primarily in the counsels for caution and non-commitment in Atlantic questions that came from certain diplomatic and church circles, in European questions from certain economic circles. On the journalistic plane, authentic neutralism was almost entirely submerged beneath the noisy but apparent neutralism of those who in reality desired not so much neutralism as the alternative of a different multinational commitment.

The contest about the Atlantic commitment was in rather conscious terms a contest to decide if Italy should remain in the Western bloc and proceed within it with the democratic experiment or pass into the Eastern bloc to commit itself to the Communist experiment. All other political-military consequences of the Alliance that went beyond the choice between democratic West and Communist East Europe – that is, the devaluation of the very concept of national defense, the partial integration of the commands, American military hegemony, especially in questions of nuclear strategy, the excessive weight given within the Alliance to military motivations in respect to those more specifically political – did not constitute objects of particular consideration either at the time of Italy’s entry into NATO or for a considerable period thereafter.

The Communists, and for a certain time also the Socialists, were also against the European alternative for the same reasons that they were opposed to the Atlantic commitment. Europe, too, would become in fact a force for the strengthening of democracy and Western bonds. But in the case of European policy there was a debate with greater political significance. In the realm of the European alternative, the Italian Government had several possibilities for action which were anything but without significance for the fate of the new organizations. Our Government could contribute to the existence within the European system of a maximum of protection for national autonomies or a maximum of federal power. The first to become aware of the possibility for action and of the duty to involve themselves in it were neither the Government nor its diplomats, but the Federalists.

The debate about the exploitation of these possibilities was thus essentially a debate between the Federalist Movement and the Foreign Minister (first Sforza and then De Gasperi), who were initially reluctant, and then little by little attracted to the prospects of a real Federalist commitment. Most of the politicians at that time followed this discussion without much attention, but De Gasperi ended up by understanding and adopting the line of action proposed by the Federalists. Moving from the idea of a defense Community to that of a political Community and putting into action an original procedure for its creation were not exclusively but in large measure the fruit of the federalist initiative of the Italian Government. Even if the undertaking did not then meet with final success, it constitutes a precedent upon which, as we shall see later, those that make and will make Italian foreign policy may reflect.

The country in the new international framework

The Atlantic and European commitments were essentially decisions made by the Government, which had realized the new terms in which international affairs were now developing and decided to frame the Republic’s foreign policy in these terms. The country as a whole and even those sectors which would be most profoundly affected by these commitments were not fully aware of the possibilities and did not, therefore, exert any meaningful influence either on the basic decisions themselves or on the Government’s behavior after the decisions were made. The military were all occupied in trying to rebuild from nothing a minimum of armed forces and did not ask themselves what membership in NATO would mean. The economic powers were beginning to pick themselves up from the war’s ruin and did not give too much consideration to the consequences of belonging to a Common Market. The universities had always been outside the problems of international affairs. With the exception of the Federalist writers, the political commentators almost completely ignored problems of international affairs and limited themselves generally to furnishing summary information. They, therefore, were incapable of either counseling or evaluating Italian foreign policy. Diplomacy adapted itself with remarkable docility to the new foreign policy of the Republic, but original ideas could certainly not be expected from men whose political culture and political experience had been founded on the imperative of giving absolute priority to national independence, sacred egotism and national power, and who now found themselves having to carry out ideas so different from those for which they had been prepared.

Finally, the parties, although they all held onto and brandished the shining arms of their political ideologies, in reality were all already heading toward the pattern of the political party in mass society; that is, of the electoral machine-type party, in which ideologies are no longer the matrixes of political action, but only electoral slogans. They approved or deplored, depending upon their position on the political chessboard, the international commitments that the Government made, but they were not in a position to enter into the details with demands or precise criticisms. No political action, whether foreign or domestic, lasts very long in any country if it is not nourished by ideas, needs, pressures and interests that come from the country. Had this absence of continuing stimuli for a coherent and creative foreign policy, on the part of important and various centers of society, remained a permanent given factor in Italian political life, it would explain the unforeseen sterility that hit Italian foreign policy after the loss first of Sforza and then of De Gasperi, who had been the authors of the basic decisions: the passive and half-way execution of what had been decided at the level of the Atlantic and European organizations and the pretentious improvisations, quickly invented and quickly forgotten.

In reality, this relative indifference on the part of society lasted only a rather short while. It is true – for Italy as for other countries – that the multinational structures had basically been political initiatives by governments in anticipation of the effective opening up of the various societies toward larger and growing international relationships and visions. But this did not take long in coming. Our societies, including the Italian, exploited to the maximum the possibilities this policy offered them. International relations – scientific, economic, administrative, political, military, tourist and so on – were multiplied in all the areas of the country, and there was a parallel development of the knowledge of the existence of problems of continental, intercontinental and worldwide dimensions. The Atlantic and European frameworks are now accepted not only by those who had wanted them from the beginning, but also by those who had been hostile to them initially. The Socialists now definitely base their political action and their prospects on them. The Communists, as yet unable to decide between the realm of their dreams and that of reality, oscillate continuously in their evaluations of NATO and the European communities, but have practically given up fighting for withdrawal. Our military officers have begun to study the problems of nuclear strategy, and our diplomacy, of disarmament policy. Many offices in our public administration, which would never have dreamed of having to conduct international relations, are now directly involved in them. Our economic forces have become ever increasingly committed to the Common Market and have become involved even in new and often huge fields of activity beyond it. Great centers of economic power – public and private – have now reached such dimensions as to be obliged to conduct international activities that have real and true foreign policy characteristics because they in fact involve not only themselves, but the country in its entirety. The broadening of these manifold international relations often makes the Atlantic and European frameworks seem not too vast, but perhaps even too small.

The foreign ministry and foreign policy

The stimuli of the country or, to be more exact, the stimuli of many powerful centers with a permanent interest in international relations are therefore no longer something whose absence can be lamented, even if various limitations and defects can be analyzed. At any rate these stimuli paradoxically seem to have contributed up to now to accentuating not the activity and the efficiency, but the inertia and pretentiousness of our Government in matters of foreign policy.

First of all, in fact, the multinational structures, created to permit several countries together to face groups of problems that traditionally were within the nation’s competence, involved as a rule not only the Foreign Ministries of the participant countries, but also various other elements of the national administration more directly competent to deal with the problems in question. In this way the traditional monopoly of the Foreign Ministry and of diplomacy in the management of international relations was broken. Let us limit ourselves to giving two examples that could be multiplied many times over. From the moment in which defense became a theme of common interest in NATO, it was natural that the center that works out defense plans for our country, the General Staff of the armed forces, should become a center for specific international action that is directly connected with the Atlantic center for working out the common strategy – thus taking a part of the foreign relations of our country out of the hands of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Or when agriculture became a common undertaking of the European Economic Community, it was obvious that the traditional center of national agricultural policy, the Ministry of Agriculture, with the numerous pressure groups that surround it, should become a center for international policy in this field and substract a whole sector of commercial policy from the hands of the Foreign Affairs Ministry.

In the second place, the open climate of society created and maintained by the multinational structures encourages and promotes what could be called transnational interests and initiatives in every country, which are often not governmental interests and initiatives, and frequently are not even covered by the already existing multinational structures. Since as a rule not only beneficial effects, but also new errors and tensions are in this way created, the tendency to extend either the number or the competences of the multinational structures is accentuated; and as a result there is also an increase in the number of official and unofficial, and public and private centers, that in every country carry out some form of foreign policy autonomously in respect to the Foreign Ministry.

In the third place, the complexity and novelty of the problems as well as of the instruments with which they must be dealt, demand a much greater and much more systematic cognitive effort than that to which we are accustomed in questions of foreign policy. In order to keep control of this new situation in which the country is increasingly, and in an ever more systematic manner, involved in international relations, the Foreign Ministry thus would have to face up to a twofold reform. On the one hand it would have to increasingly transform itself from an center for exclusive action in the field of foreign relations into a center for the coordination and promotion of the foreign policies carried out in part by the Ministry itself and in part by other centers. On the other hand it would have to be equipped in such a way as not to have to be limited, as it is today, to facing the problems as they come up one by one in the immediately pre-executive phase. The Ministry should have an office for long-range planning for in-depth study of possible policies for tomorrow, developments, integration, and alternatives to what is now being carried out. If such an office were to have a highly-qualified staff, it would conduct a continuous exchange of information and consultations with private and academic study centers of foreign policy; the Foreign Ministry would thus have the possibility of making decisions without having to improvise.

The present absence of coordination and planning in a situation of increasing involvement of the entire country in international relations explains in part the inertia and pretentiousness of Italian foreign policy. But even so it is only partially explained. A closer examination of our foreign policy shows that beyond the uncertainty due to the inadequacy of the instruments for knowledge and for action which it has at its disposal, there is another, deeper uncertainty, one that would not be eliminated by the mere fact of eliminating technical deficiencies. We share this basic uncertainty with practically all other countries, and we cannot eliminate it alone. But since our actions can contribute to overcoming or to heightening it, it is worth the trouble of trying to understand its nature.

Sovereignty and supranational organisms

What is questioned today is the possibility for simultaneously pursuing the two principles which have been sought as the basis for international order from 1945 until the present: the principle of the several national sovereignties which were to be restored in Europe, created in Africa and Asia and safeguarded in Latin America; and the principle of the many supranational organizations for the common conduct of affairs considered of common interest by groups of countries, organizations that can assert themselves only to the measure in which national sovereignty is somewhat limited.

At most it can be said that in the world as it is today it is not possible to eliminate completely either of these two principles. The maximum of state unity which can reasonably be achieved among the various nations today is not a new or unitary state that could replace the old ones, but a federal-type tie in which certain competencies are transferred to a common authority, but nevertheless in which the nations conserve their personality and residual sovereignty just the same. The Indian federation, which reunited the various principalities into which Great Britain let its empire dissolve, is up to now the most important of these two extreme cases. On the other hand the maximum of sovereignty which a nation can achieve today is not complete political, economic and military autarchy, but the fabric of a network of commercial treaties, and military alliances based on either friendship or enmity and from which one can always withdraw if the so-called highest interest of the state makes it necessary, but which as long as they last, limit national independence. The test ban treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union is the most important of these minimal relationships. Between these outer limits there is an intermediate zone in which the two principles can be pursued and applied simultaneously without the seeming necessity to choose between them. It is, for example, possible to have national armies and unified commands that plan the possibility of a common defense; national economic policy and supranational customs unions; national scientific-technological research programs and specific scientific-technological research projects carried out in common by several countries; national investment policies and common policies of aid to underdeveloped countries; national Communist planning and ideological Communist international solidarity; and so on. It is in this zone of reciprocal tolerance that the construction of international order has up until now functioned, and the conviction that an almost unlimited possibility exists for the undisturbed parallel development of these two principles has long prevailed.

In reality, no matter how wide the zone of tolerance is, critical moments come up in which either the logical development of the common multinational undertaking demands a further limitation on the independence of the member states, or national logic calls for the limitation of the autonomy of the multinational enterprise. It is worth emphasizing that the reply given from time to time in response to these needs is not, as is often said, inevitable, not based on the nature of the problem. Things can always be adapted to various situations; problems are always amenable to various solutions; and in every situation and for every solution there is both a price to be paid and some advantage to be gained. The answer depends on the values to which those who must decide assign priority in their conduct since only such a scale of priorities indicates what one is willing to sacrifice and what one wishes to safeguard. Naturally, once priorities and guidelines for conduct are established, one is no longer completely in control of the consequences, and it can easily happen that certain unpleasant consequences must be accepted not because they were desired or even merely taken for granted, but because they were not foreseen and can now no longer be eliminated.

The international order created after the Second World War has begun to become fluid precisely because the problem of the priority of the national or multinational point of view arose for the multinational systems of the West (Western European and European-American) and the East (Eastern European-Soviet-Chinese). It is frequently said that because détente has followed the Cold War, because nuclear protection is no longer certain of functioning, and because the intolerance of the European nations toward their respectively too-powerful American and Soviet allies has become more acute, and so on, the multinational structures are for certain facets breaking up and nationalism is everywhere raising its head. But in saying this, which political action is conditioned; the reasons for one type or another of political action are confused. There is both a national answer and a multinational answer to the détente and to the Cold War, to nuclear strategy, to American technological preponderance, to the Soviet presence in East Europe, to the division of Germany, and so on. The answer that is provided for each concrete problem depends, therefore, on whether priority is given to national independence or to multinational interdependence.

Since the consequences of the decision to give precedence to one value rather than another are rather relevant, we find ourselves facing a typical case in which the decision should be preceded by a rather accurate analysis of the probable consequences.

Priority to sovereignty?

Let us first begin with the hypothesis that the sovereign state is the supreme form of political organization that man is capable of achieving. The sovereign state – that is, this well-known complex of institutions that makes laws and is obeyed by the citizens within a well-defined territory, and which does not tolerate that other powers may exercise part of its rights over its citizens in its territory. It is completely unimportant here whether this idea is accepted because of profound passionate conviction, because of cold Machiavellian calculation with the aim of increasing one’s own power, or for mental laziness, because all the categories of thought and the rules for action are by now well known as soon as we enter into the realm of the idea of the state and its sovereignty. Let us therefore suppose that this idea is predominant in the minds of the foreign policy decisionmakers of the various countries that make up a multinational structure or that work to create a new one.

It is obvious that in such a case the decision-makers can also think that a certain multinational structure is necessary – for example, a military alliance, commercial liberalization, a marketing organization, some common research projects, some legislative uniformities and so on. But in every case they will, for their state, hold onto continued, complete control over the resources, men and laws that are involved in the common undertaking. They will firmly maintain their right to accept each successive joint decision, basing their decision only on an evaluation of benefit deriving therein for their own country. The organization can be baptized with solemn collective names: community, political union, etc., but it will be very clear that it is and must remain an association of states and not an association that in some way has direct powers over the citizens of various states.

No direct taxation, therefore; no common laws directly applicable in the individual countries; no supranational organisms, either executive or parliamentary, which would be autonomous in respect to the states within the association. The multinational organizations must remain purely intergovernmental. The consequences of commitments of this type can be thus summarized:

1) National interest is or again becomes the highest criterion for acceptance or rejection of a common commitment, as no pre-established harmony exists among the national interests of the single states. All international agreements are necessarily risky aleators and short lasting. A weak country, one that is too dependent on others, will perhaps be obliged more than once to accept unpleasant consequences derived from the commitment accepted, but the stronger countries and those more proudly activated by national passions will always stop the entire process each time that it rightly or wrongly thinks that it is in its interest to do so. And such examples will become easily contagious.

2) Common intergovernmental enterprises can be sufficient for the conduct of common policies essentially made up of commitments on the part of the governments to abstain from doing something. The limit of risks remaining fixed, it is possible to have an intergovernmental organism that commits various states, for example, not to collect certain duties or not to vary them, not to explode nuclear mechanisms in the atmosphere, not to carry out certain discriminations against foreigners and the like. Such organisms are also capable of dealing with commitments to fulfill certain determined acts in the case that certain events take place, although in such cases the insecurity is as a rule still greater because the state remains the final arbiter as to whether or not an event falls into the category of those considered as cause foederis. The promise of military intervention in the case of aggression, of financial aid in case of crises in the balance of payments, and the like come under this category.

3) With purely intergovernmental organisms it is possible to speak of common objectives, but it is certainly not possible to conjure them effectively when their achievement calls for continuous joint decisions, not determinable a priori, regarding acts, choices, renunciations, expenses. Into this category of objectives fall some of the most important goals that groups of states and at times all states have established for themselves in this post-war period. Let us recall some of them:

These initiatives have already been planned and experimented with, but an analysis of the problems of modern society and the experiences up to the present lead to the formulation of ever new common objectives, each one of which, to be realized, needs centers of political action, centers which if limited only to the pursuit of that objective are of the appropriate dimensions, which are or must become capable of independent decisions in respect to the member nations, and that are gathering points not of sovereign states but of the parts of that transnational society that is developing everywhere under our eyes.

4) The desire to reduce all multinational organizations created and planned in the postwar period to simple intergovernmental relationships, in the last analysis means considering them as provisory constructions; that were created immediately after the war because they were desired by a hegemonic power that had an advantage in establishing them; that would have been accepted by the other states because and only as long as the latter were in such a condition of political, military and economic weakness as to have to temporarily renounce their own sovereignty; that would have been destined to decline in importance and, finally, probably to disappear in the measure in which the states that composed them reacquire awareness of their own dignity as sovereign states and their own power. This signifies the pure and simple rebirth of power politics as the supreme form of international politics. The defense of one’s national independence if one is small, and the tendency to impose one’s own hegemony on the small ones if one is large, become once again the fundamental rules of the monstres froids et lucides. Some countries, until directly menaced, tend to close themselves in neutrality. A state which feels menaced or dissatisfied will tend to become a stronger power than it is now. The largest powers will tend to let the supranational formulas that today in part veil but in part also effectively limit their hegemony fall by the wayside, and to establish that hegemony openly, without equivocation, showing the motivation of the quia sum leo. The two principal supporters of the return to pure and simple power politics – France and China – have already been able to see the first consequences of their behavior. Japan, India and Germany are already considerably more agitated by the temptation to involve themselves in power politics. The United States and the Soviet Union are already considerably more inclined to conduct a global great power policy without taking their allies into consideration.

5) Finally, to reduce the policy of multinational organizations to pure and simple intergovernmental agreements signifies wanting to bring all international relations back into the hands and under the direct control of the governments, rejecting every supranational political expression, limited but real, of the forces and problems of the society that have in fact surpassed the national framework. A permanent tension is thus established between the political power that wants to obey the logic of national power and the forces of the country that do not believe in it, and that feel themselves more at ease, for example in the West, in a framework of Atlantic nuclear cooperation, of European economic integration, of solidarity with the international policing attempts of the United Nations, of participation in European economic undertakings, and of setting up joint technological research projects, etc. In China such forces and problems fall more easily within a perspective of interdependence with the Soviet Union. The national societies can no longer eradicate these forces and problems without seriously damaging themselves. One can, for example, shudder at industries that bind themselves to American enterprises in order to profit from the latter’s technological superiority and that thus become their pure and simple offspring. But one cannot throw out American capital and know-how without self-harm. One can threaten to break up the Common Market, but one cannot not give in to the national forces that want to continue it. In the framework of a nationalistic foreign policy these forces are only tolerated; they are countryless, cosmopolitan succubuses of the foreigner; they are, potentially, the enemy at home. The nationalism of the thirties and of the Chinese cultural revolution of today show to what excesses a nationalist vision against the enemy at home can go. But even without arriving at similar excesses, the tension between national political power and a modern society that is no longer national is inevitable. In order to make headway against the little consensus that exists in the country, political power is more and more tempted by antidemocratic tendencies. To satisfy at least in part the transnational aspirations of such vast parts of the society, it gives in to the temptation of an expansionist foreign policy.

In other terms, returning to pure and simple power politics signifies creating increasing discord between society and political power, and, as a consequence, increasing international disorder. Some statesmen accept these consequences of power politics with the philosophical conviction that that is human nature. Most other statesmen and their advisors instead let themselves follow this course only because in their provincialism they are capable of thinking only in terms of national sovereignty. They limit themselves to not thinking of the ultimate consequences of their work.

Priority to the supranational organization?

Now let us begin with the opposite hypothesis that the sovereign state is a political structure with contingent value, which merits being maintained when it promotes the good of its citizens and of being limited and even more or less disintegrated in the opposite case. It was this sober and limiting conception of sovereignty that led the reaction at the end of the war to the spectacle of the ruin nationalism had caused to the initiatives of European unity, and to the danger of the spreading of the Communist dictatorships with the Atlantic initiatives.

Today the recollection of Europe’s great misery grows dimmer, and the fear of Soviet aggression diminishes. But other problems that can be but poorly dealt with by the single states and by intergovernmental organisms emerge. Let us pause here for an example of only two or three of these new problems in which our country is directly involved.

An economic system capable of exploiting to the utmost the possibilities offered by modern technology and of promoting further technological research in adequate measure is possible only if there exists a center for the formulation and execution of an authentic economic policy of continental dimensions. The urgency which the problem of the technological gap presents in Europe means that there is a strong tendency to look for a solution to it in the creation of single joint undertakings financed by various governments who group together with the aim of achieving a specific objective – supersonic airplanes, huge calculating machines, rockets for space launchings, etc.

All this can be interesting, but intergovernmental agreements for limited objectives are the maximum attainable by the attitude of protecting one’s sovereignty while in reality that which is needed is not the promotion of one or two or ten common research projects, but the creation of a continuous and increasing flow of scientific and technological research programs. The intensity and the dimensions of such research programs are not goals achievable in and for themselves by the present European nations, but are in a manner of speaking a collateral product of two other things. In the first place there must be the full and vigorous development of modern industry unhindered by legal and political obstacles that today impede the achievement of the continental dimensions without which commitment to many large technological research programs is not worthwhile. In the second place, there must be control and encouragement by a political power which has the same supranational dimensions as the industry to be controlled and promoted.

In such a case, but only in such a case, technological research becomes the normal component of a modern economic policy and can assume the dimensions that permit other nations to compete and cooperate with American research and narrow the present gap. This at any rate means that it is necessary to give precise priority thinking to the conditions to be achieved for establishing a common economic policy; that is, it is necessary to think of how to reinforce and not how to weaken the supranational powers, at present completely insufficient, of the European Community.

A second problem to think about is the peaceful order that must be introduced in Europe, taking advantage of the necessity of the two blocs, and in particular the necessity of the two largest nuclear powers, to develop a policy of coexistence and relaxation of tensions. The national response is that which, having considered the two alliances as simple military machines for offense and defense, today proposes their progressive dismantlement, and the return to a system of completely sovereign nations. There is no doubt that the disintegration of the Atlantic and Warsaw blocs would make the very possibility of tensions and conflicts between the two disappear. But it is a pure and simple tautology that does not in any way exclude the possibility that other conflicts should arise. The two alliances, in fact, have never been only two defense machines; they have also always been two factors of order against possible temptations of the European states by nationalistic policies.

It is not difficult to grasp that a Europe which, between the Atlantic and the Soviet borders, would again become a system of sovereign states, would be the most worried and worrisome focal point of political and military tensions in the entire world. In particular, the unresolved problem of national unity of the largest European nation – the Germans – in a European system founded on the principle of national unity of all the other nations would, with mathematic certainty, detonate a chain reaction of fears and nationalistic ambitions in all the other states. The fact is that the organization of peace in Europe demands not the dissolution of the two blocs, but a shift in accent within them, which would put their military aspect in second place and their role as factors for order in first place in such a way as to be able to set moving among the two organizations the necessary agreements for coexistence and for increasing reciprocal openness. However, such a prospect demands that the Atlantic Alliance in the first place have an organization for joint foreign policy-making that can be added to the organization for joint military policy; and in the second place a general reorganization that would progressively attenuate the presently predominating hegemonic element and reinforce what has been called partnership; that is, a progressive European unification tied to a progressing interdependent limitation of both European and American sovereignty. Something analogous would have to be proposed for the Warsaw Pact.

A third example can be drawn from Latin American politics. All of Latin America strongly feels the need for closer relations, especially economic relations, with Western Europe, and instinctively understands that this would be the best way to take away some of the excessive weight now possessed by the United States. Up to now the European answer has consisted in trips by French and Italian chiefs of state and ministers, along with speeches, promises and salutations. It must be recognized that Italy and France as sovereign states can do little more for Latin America than make speeches. Only Western Europe as a unitary organism can confront the complex problems of the commercial and aid arrangements to be established with that continent. But an effective commercial policy demands an increase in the present community-type ties and not a decrease.

Other problems, too, among them a peaceful nuclear policy, European-African relations, progressive and controlled disarmament, creating a United Nations policy and so on, if closely examined, always bring us to the same conclusions, which we can summarize as follows:

1) The number of political, economic, military and cultural problems that must be dealt with by centers for political action, larger than those of the present states, is increasing. Some of them need worldwide dimensions, others, intercontinental, and still others, continental or subcontinental.

2) These problems can nevertheless be lived with (speaking and worrying about them without resolving them), in the system of the present sovereign states; but it must be recognized that doing so can lead toward ever more dangerous, more difficult to control, and more explosive situations.

3) It seemed at the beginning that overcoming national sovereignty would have to be achieved in Western Europe via the pure and simple creation of a European federation. Even if the only effective achievements were the Communities, they were felt to be the first steps toward a new state with a federal structure, which at any rate would have had to have the same full degree of sovereignty as all the other states. In reality, the creation of the European institutions is fitted in and linked in various ways with other multinational structures that limit or can limit sovereignty in different ways. To develop an efficient economy, capable of exploiting to the maximum the possibilities offered by modern technology and to commit oneself to raising at the same time one’s own standard of living and that of the underdeveloped countries, it is today necessary to have a Western European economic system under the control of a real Western European public power. From this it does not at all follow that the European dimension is the best one for facing the problem of control over nuclear arms, the exclusively peaceful use of nuclear energy, or the best organization for world commerce. It is therefore necessary to be open to the possibility of creating various types of multinational organisms with dimensions, composition and responsibilities that differ from case to case, not only juxtaposed, but often superimposed upon each other in various ways. Sovereignty has become an anachronistic concept in a rather more radical way than we would have believed twenty years ago.

4) Each time that one must deal with the development or creation of a multilateral organism, it is therefore useful to act in such a way as to encourage the development within it of centers for initiative, for decision, for execution, for control and for forming a consensus distinct from those of the member states, and not in such a way as to provoke the jealous defense of the sovereign prerogatives of the states. It is not always possible to create structures that establish precisely what is being taken away from the states and transferred to the new organism; however, rather more frequently than it would seem at first glance, it is possible to defend or to achieve structures which are centers of supranational action, albeit little more than in embryo form. They then will tend to evolve in a federal sense since, as opposed to national conservatism; they have on their side the logic of the supranational problem, which can always be resolved more easily in their framework.

5) When a multinational structure that goes beyond a simple intergovernmental organization is set up, the center for joint autonomous action in respect to the single states can be an expressly created center, distinct from all the single member states, and acting in the name of the whole community, as is for example the case with the Commission of the Common Market. But it can also be the strongest government acting in the name of all the others, as in fact takes place in NATO in matters of nuclear strategy, and therefore in matters of general defense strategy. In the first instance, there is the beginning of a federal structure; in the second, there is the beginning of a hegemonic or imperial structure, call it what you will.

The federal-type or -tending structure is always rather weak at the beginning, and must be watched over jealously so that it does not degenerate into an institution lacking any serious content. But if it survives and begins to develop, it tends to become stronger and irreversible with the passing of time because increasing sectors of the national society begin to shift their loyalty from the national state toward the supranational authority that opens better horizons for their interests.

The hegemonic-type structures are instead as a rule rather strong at the beginning since they arise only if one state truly has the power and the interest to act even for the sake of the others. But with the passing of time centrifugal forces tend to develop because the preponderance of another state is always viewed as domination by the foreigner and awakens national resistance which encourages the vassal state to become quarrelsome. This phenomenon is nevertheless not sufficient to permit one to conclude that a hegemonic-type structure should always be dissolved. If in the international system it has fulfilled a useful function, the best policy to be followed is one which tries to save the organization and its duties and progressively transforms it from a hegemonic to a federal type; that is, giving it centers for action which progressively limit the independence not only of the smaller members, but also of the larger.

The practical execution of the policy favoring the multinational structures of the federal type or tendency instead demands a heightened awareness of the problem for whose resolution the organization was proposed; that is, a grand political imagination since we are always moving onto new ground wherein one must create; and an extraordinary tenacity because the resistance of vested interests and conditioned reflexes produced by the long habit of living in sovereign states is always rather strong, and it often arises from its own cinders in unexpected and unimagined forms.

These are, therefore, the great alternatives of international policy indicated by the nature of the situation and the nature of the ideas applied to deal with it. The cultural and administrative tradition that lies behind the sovereign state and the supplementary emotional charge deriving from the fact that the idea of the state has for so long been mixed with that of the nation, are so strong, that the battle to overcome national sovereignties is long and difficult and riddled with power and defeats. It is nevertheless ever more evident that the progressive rationalization of today’s joint action which is the basis of modern civilization increasingly calls for the bypassing of national sovereign states in favor of various supranational structures integrated in various ways into the longest-term prospect for an authentic world government.

The success of this battle will not depend upon the action of a single country or a single government; but the initiative and the tenacity of even a single government can become the catalyst of consensus in other countries and draw in even those who were initially reluctant.

The search for a compass

If we now try to evaluate our country’s foreign policy after the initial basic Atlantic and European decisions, we must note that it quickly lost its supranational bearings without acquiring national ones. This intellectual insecurity explains, in the final analysis, its inertia and pretentiousness.

The most immediate responsibility for this insecurity falls on the ensemble of political forces that govern the country, which are rather sensitive to problems of their reciprocal balance and to the pressures of economic interests, but are so busy in the day to day administration of the country and their own power that they can find little time for reflection on the fundamental values at work today in international affairs; and when they have nevertheless achieved a more or less vague inkling of it, they cannot find any more time for reflection on the path to take, the political strategy to adopt, to assert these values in the actual situation.

Since Italian society, now remarkably open to international relations, instinctively feels that it has almost everything to gain and almost nothing to lose by extending and strengthening them, and since the ideology that can be found in the Italian political world is Catholic or Socialist or Liberal, but at any rate not nationalistic, the men that govern our country find themselves substantially at ease in the system of multinational organizations and, especially on Sundays and during trips outside Italy, frequently speak of the necessity to develop and complete what already exists, sometimes to the point of wanting to create new organizations to deal with the new problems of peace and progress.

But such developments and creations demand a continuity of intellectual effort aimed at founding new rules, institutions and relations as well as a tenacious commitment not to forget the objective to be achieved during the long, inevitably static period or periods of regression because of the opposition of this or that country. Instead of burdening themselves with such an effort, the foreign policy decisionmakers in our country limit themselves in fact to applying the outlines of the purely national foreign policy that, being habitual and well known, does not demand the application of great effort. It can readily be seen, if one takes the trouble to look closely, that this or that minister (whether or not of foreign affairs, but one among those that make foreign policy) has a greater or lesser sensitivity toward Europe, Atlanticism, disarmament, rearmament, the West, the East and so on; but we are always dealing with relatively unimportant distinctions. The fundamental traits of our foreign policy have become fairly fixed and can be summarized as follows:

a) Our national interests – intending for these as a rule the interests of those groups within the society and the state administration whose requests carry more weight – are defended inside and outside the supranational organizations, often with delay (because the mechanisms for forming and transmitting a decision are rather rusty and slow in Italy), but always firmly. The organisms of which Italy is a member are in such a case ignored, or there is an attempt to use them as instruments to further our own interests. This happened when Pella, for example, tried to insert the Trieste question into the European policy as a real and proper blackmail attempt; or, more recently in the case of the defense of our agricultural protectionism in the framework of the Common Market; or when we requested the multinational nuclear armament of one of our ships in the midst of the debate over the Multilateral Force.

b) To the problem of development, or to crises or reform of the organizations to which we belong, we do not as a rule bring any contribution of ideas but accept their growth or deterioration with indifferent equanimity. The absence for years of regular Italian representation in the European parliaments, the long gaps between the occupation of places reserved for Italians in the European executive bodies, the deterioration of the Italian presence in the Community bureaucracy, our indifference about the proposals for supranational development by the Community when they were proposed, our silence about the method and the moment for British membership in the Common Market, our total absence from the debate on the Multilateral Force, in which we were to participate, and, more generally, from all the discussions on the possible reforms of NATO are also examples of our passivity in the organisms to which we belong.

c) When one of the organisms to which we belong enters into a crisis due to the re-emergence of the nationalistic tendencies of one of its members – for example, today in France – we do not even try to promote or facilitate the creation with the others states of a front for containing it, nor to search for friendly political forces in the country itself that is carrying out a nationalistic policy. We are instead inclined to think immediately that the old world which does not want to die is stronger than the one which is being newly created and that to fall back again on the old ideas is easier than to create new ones; and there is the immediate tendency to concede victory to the nationalistic country and adapt ourselves to the purely intergovernmental role of the organizations and concern ourselves with our own interests alone.

d) The desire to veil our political inexistence in the organizations in which we should and could act, with gestures that emphasize Italy’s “presence” on the international scene in the eyes of foreigners but most of all in Italian eyes is a constant one. Sometimes it is a matter of making offers of formal mediation in moments of international crisis, but in general, it is a question of proposals for postponing decisions that are too tough, of offers of Italian cities with gentle climates and sumptuous receptions as places for solemn meetings in which it is obviously impossible to accomplish anything, but where one evidently hopes to create an atmosphere. Sometimes there are formally audacious new proposals, as, for example, a couple of years ago the request for a community policy of the associations to the Common Market, the direct election of the European parliament, and, recently, the project of technological cooperation. Still others are the spectacular contacts by the Italian state as such with, for example, the Arab world, the USSR and Latin America. These proposals, like these contacts, are at most acts which are given importance only for the momentary national prestige that one hopes to gain from them. They are therefore expressions of a tacit return to the forms of the national policy, even if they often function in the sphere of multinational organizations.

That things are really like this is demonstrated above all by the improvisation with such initiatives are taken and by the ease with which they are forgotten. If they were initiatives aimed at putting into action undertakings for supranational integration, necessarily a job requiring a sustained effort, both the improvisation and the short memory of it would be serious defects. Instead, the search for prestige can be neither premeditated for long, nor for long exploited; it is necessary to know how to seize the occasion when it is offered and not dwell on the occasion that has passed. De Gaulle calls this le jeu divin du héros, but the passion for this theatrical style of acting is rather strong here, too.

It has been said that since the prospects on which we have heretofore based our policies are closing up, our country ought to begin to think of political alternatives. I have, however, tried to show that in reality the weakness of our foreign policy lies in the fact that in facing every obstacle we do nothing more than stand immobile waiting for what will happen and in the meantime dream up alternatives, which could be only the alternatives of a more or less moderate, more or less arrogant nationalism in a country which is irremediably a secondary power.

If, as it seems, the logic of the complex development of modern human society for the better goes, not in the direction of closed societies, but in that of societies which are ever more profoundly cosmopolitan and interdependent, it is necessary to consider policies of the defense of sovereignty and of nationalism not as symptoms of the future, but as the last tremors of something that is on its way to disappearing. These policies can still cause considerable damage, but since it is reasonable to calculate that they are doomed to disappear, they should be contained and isolated when they appear. To take them as possible alternatives would be a crude error. In reality it is very possible that these specific experiments – the European Communities, NATO and the United Nations – might fail; but, as MacMillan said after De Gaulle’s veto to British entry into the Common Market – and he was right – there was no alternative to England in the Common Market, in the same way it should be said today that there is no alternative (in the sense of a reasonable alternative) to the policy of European unity, Atlantic partnership, the strengthening of the authority of the Secretary General of the United Nations and so on. We need to know how to carry out this policy in the periods of regression or pause, as well as when things move forward. And this is one of the possibilities for our foreign policy on condition that it is understood that one must not merely know how to make gestures, but considered, continued operations which are thought of as the Italian contribution to the supranational undertaking, and not as the Italian exploitation of an intergovernmental undertaking.

If the immediate responsibility for the deficiencies of our country’s foreign policy falls on the politicians that make it, the ultimate responsibility weighs nevertheless on those who should produce the ideas; that is, the visions of what is worth being achieved and of the rational method to follow for achieving it. This because, as Keynes said, the things of the world are networks of little more than ideas, and the politicians who claim to be pragmatists and free thinkers are as a rule only slaves of some defunct creator of ideas of another generation. If we ask ourselves what the contribution has been of the Italian intellectuals to the knowledge of international problems in the midst of which our country exists, and to the study of their possible solutions, we hear only a few weak and isolated voices. How can we be surprised if the politicians in the din of the arena in which they fight have only rarely heard these voices?