La politica estera dell’Italia nell’estate del 1948: la scelta atlantica

Abstract

After the World War II, between 1947 and 1949, the government of the Italian Republic took the basic decisions of its foreign policy in order to readmit Italy in the international political system, where the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union pictured the bipolar system of the Cold War. The analysis of the Italian diplomatic documents of the years 1947 and 1948, recently published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, has made it possible to track the evolution of the foreign policy established by the Italian government in the late summer of 1948 and recorded in the "telespresso segreto 1284/C. Segr. Pol." of August 31, 1948, sent from Rome to the embassies in London, Moscow, Paris and Washington. The direction embodied in the document did express the basic choice of the whole Italian foreign policy, the reasons for which lied in the need for both domestic and external security. Italy was already included in the Western bloc, by virtue of the participation in the Marshall Plan and the OEEC, and, while it was keeping the distances from the Brussels Pact, it was trying to get the "American guarantee." Such a choice was taken when the Italian government, by excluding for Italy any policy of neutrality or equidistance within the international framework and the accession to the Western European Union, did authorize military-technical talks with the U.S. government, while waiting for the American strategic area was extended until the Italian peninsula. By so doing, a large Atlantic defense system was envisaged. In this way, a new path was undertaken, the one that would have brought Italy to join the North Atlantic Treaty on April 4, 1949. The Italian "Atlantic choice" would have found its genesis in the summer of 1948