A leader shows his true mettle in difficult circumstances. On August 10, 1946, Alcide De Gasperi, the Prime Minister of a defeated Italy, faced the victorious Allied Powers who were offering a peace treaty that would end the Second Great War.
He personally had no blame for the war of aggression declared, waged and lost by the Fascist regime.
He had opposed the policies of that regime from within Italy, consequently being imprisoned in 1926 and having to take shelter from the ensuing persecution within the Vatican Libraries.
In 1946, he was the Prime Minister of a government formed by the anti-fascist parties, namely the Communists, Socialists, Liberals, Republicans and his own Democrazia Cristiana.
The country was still in turmoil. The infrastructure, as well as the industry sector, 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 extensive 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 between 1921 and 1924.
He stood up to the Allies’ claim for territorial concessions beyond the ill-gotten acquisitions of the Fascist period. He also resisted Communist claims in internal policy and maintained his Cabinet’s neutrality on the monarchy issue, even though he was personally a republican.
Alcide De Gasperi was responsible for guiding his country towards signing the Peace Treaty along with the formidable task of post-war reconstruction
He asked for and accepted United States assistance without succumbing to pressures on the loss of Italian territory and he put Italy firmly in the Western Democratic camp.
His speech to the Peace Conference in August 1946 began with the words: “When I rise to speak as the Prime Minister of a defeated nation, I feel that everything and every one of you is against me, except for your personal, individual courtesy.” (“Tutto è contro di me tranne la vostra personale cortesia”).
His courage and determination won the day – the Allies’ claims were contained as both the American and British Governments were convinced that Italy should not be humiliated into embracing Communism.
He also mitigated the onslaught of Communist and neo-Fascist propaganda and, in the first great test of the April 1948 General Elections, his Democrazia Cristiana 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 guiding his country towards signing the Peace Treaty along with the formidable task of post-war reconstruction.
In the early years after the referendum that abolished the monarchy, the Constituent Assembly elected in 1946 drafted, debated and passed the new democratic Constitution, which came into force on January 1, 1948.
The reconstruction of Italy involved not only buildings, bridges, roads, rail network, factories and housing estates, but it also meant recreating the democratic attitude of the masses that was 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 pivotal in conducting a policy that aligned Italy with the democratic West and who ensconced the country within the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance – notwithstanding the opposition of the Italian Communist Party which was the largest and most influential such party outside the then Soviet Russia – was, however, not very popular in the West. Even today, on the 65th 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.
His courage and determination, his undoubted loyalty to principle, his humanity, as also his deft hand in political manoeuvre – demonstrated in keeping Communists, Socialists, Social Democrats, Liberals and Republicans ‘on board’ while 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.
Apart from that, his collaboration with his fellow Christian Democrats, namely Konrad Adenauer in Germany and Robert Schuman in France, paved the way for a Union of democratic European nations.
The event that took place on August 10, 1946 is always worth remembering. De Gasperi’s assumption of the burden of representing a defeated and humiliated country and resuming friendly, peaceful relations with the democracies – albeit with an onerous Peace Treaty – along with taking full responsibility for the whole general and radical reconstruction of his country, was an exemplary act of political courage.