Italian Communist Party And Communist example essay topic

Relations Between the US and Italy Between 1952-1954"The Communist Problem " The "cold war" loss of Italy to Communist control would result in profound political, psychological and military damage to the free world (p. 1567) Draft Statement of Policy by The Planning Board of The National Security Council After the end of World War II the United States embarked on years of an uneasy alliance with Italy. The recovering Italian Fascist government was highly unstable and looked as though it could fall into Communist hands at any moment. The United States through mostly financial means chose to support the Christian Democratic Party in hopes of squelching public support for the fairly popular Communist factions within the country. I believe that the United States government's involvement in Italy was a result of US fears that a Communist government could succeed in Italy and the US's refusal to allow that happen.

"The rancor and irritation against the US expressed by many Italian sources spring from an Italian awareness that noncommunist leaders are caught in a tough political dilemma, created by consistent American vis a vis Russia, and Italy's growing desire to coexist with the USSR" (P. 1627) as stated in a memo from Ambassador in Italy Luce to the Department of State in August of 1953. Through an incredible balancing act it would seem as though Italy was a country that sought, and succeeded to an extent, to carry out relations with both The United States and The Soviet Union at the same time walking a delicate tight rope between the two rival superpowers. What follows is a general survey of the foreign relations of the United States and Italy between the years of 1952 and 1954, as Italy attempted to to juggle support from its two largest allies and the US attempted to put an end to the "Red Menace" within the Italian political system. In order to gain a better understanding of the political climate in Italy from 1952 to 1954 one must be equipped with at least a small amount of background information on Italian history in the first years following the conclusion of World War II. As a former enemy of the victorious Allied Forces Italy was heartily punished by a restrictive peace treaty. Amazingly rapidly, Italy was converted into a fully contributing member of the Atlantic anti-Communist community.

An Anti-Communist stance became the crucial issue that defined inclusion and exclusion within the international alliance of which Italy was now a member. This created an extremely volatile political environment Italy which consisted of a virtual plethora of viable political parties including the dominant United States backed and funded Christian Democrats and the Partition Communist Italiano also known as the PCI. There was a strong conflict of interest that arose between the formal antifascist constitution and the material one imposed being imposed on them by the escalating international situation. On one side there was the pro-Western stance of the main Italian governing party, the Christian Democrats and on the other side they were faced with the PCI's dependency on the Soviet Union, these issues were soon to become the major boiling points of the Italian republic. The PCI's alliance with the Soviet Union provided them with resources much need by the PCI and much maligned by the United States as stated in this dispatch from the Director of Western European Affairs in Feb. of 1952, "The Communist Party apparently has unlimited funds to finance its activities and is becoming increasingly active in the South. (p. 1572) " In a way Italy was attempting to be seen as a country bridging the ever widening gap between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The Italian government in 1952 was under the rule of Christian Democrat premier, Al cide De Gasperi. The US had seemed faithful at first that the Christian Democrats would gradually stomp out the PCI, however by 1952 they began to grow tired of waiting for the Italians to take care of matters for themselves and began to attempt to exert a more powerful controlling presence in Italy. The United States as well as much of western Europe viewed the existence of a viable Communist party in Italy as a black eye to the anti-Communist collation they had formed and in direct contradiction with the statements laid out in NSC 1968. "Background of course is unremitting activity of whole Communist party apparatus in complicating difficult enough political, social, moral, and economic reconstruction of Italy after twenty years of destruction and demoralization of war" (p. 1565), thus reads a document sent from the Ambassador in Italy (Dunn) to the Department of State. As previously stated, the main issue the United States was interested in addressing in Italy was the prevalence and continued existence of the Italian Communist Party. After the United States entry into the Korean War, the US magnified its pressures on the Allied Western European countries, trying to gain more active involvement in the common effort against the Soviet Union and the threat of Communism as a whole.

This new pressure was paired with a request that the local governments assume a tougher stance toward potentially domestic "subversive" trade unions and political groups. The United States requested that Italy also take part in these new anti Communist measures, a delicate issue due to the strength of some large Communist controlled trade unions within the country. The Prime Minister of Italy, US backed Christian Democrat De Gasperi refused to oblige American requests to remove Communist organizations from public properties, because of the organizations long running contracts that they held with the government. The United States was met with the same refusal to Bunker's (US Ambassador to Italy) request to prevent the Italian Communist Party from gaining large-scale financial support through the payments that Italian industrialists were forced to pay in order to trade with the Soviet Union and other Soviet Bloc nations. According to the De Gasperi there was little the government could do, and even if they had wanted to comply the trade provided was too important for Italian textile industry. Finally, the United States's intention to use offshore military procurements (OSP) to attempt to persuade Italian entrepreneurs and politicians to adopt a stronger stance against Communist labor met opposition from the omnipresent political factions (because of which Italians would be sent to the polls to to vote three times between 1951 and 1953).

In the months leading up to the pivotal 1953 general elections Italians saw a drastic increase in the distribution of American aid to Italian firms. Interestingly the aid was used not for anti-Communist discriminatory actions, but to inject American money in the Italian balance of payments, the US hoped in vain that it could help the Italian Pro Western parties at the polls during the upcoming elections. By the end of Truman's presidency US - Italian relations were still quite mixed. A rather strained relationship with Italy's Christian Democratic government had been forged, while the PCI, much to the chagrin of the US remained a functioning political unit. Lastly, a rather sizable divergence was exposed between the ultimate goals outlined out in American plans for Italy, and the assets the United States was effectively able to utilize to achieve such grand ambitions.

As apparently De Gasperi had some foresight on as seen in this relay of a conversation between Luce and De Gasperi "But particularly he stressed the importance of of the United States government making no policy statements concerning italy that which it could not translate with reasonable speed into concrete action (p. 1616) " In the coming years the struggles of the Eisenhower administration to cope with these realizations would lead to an altering of the United State's Italian policy, "rolling back" (as I am sure Dulles would have put it) Communism from the position of power and influence it had gained became one of the primary goals of the newly implemented containment strategy being touted by Washington. The defeat of the United States government sponsored Christian Democratic Party in the elections of June 1953 signified the end of De Gasperi's political life and brought about a more in-depth reexamination of American policies in Italy. The political instability that gripped the area after the elections of 1953 led policy makers in Washington to opt for a radical change of direction, which consisted of more interventionism in Italian domestic affairs as well as the embracement of a more hard line attitude toward the conventional vehicle of US's policies in Italy, the Christian Democratic Party. In effect the United States was looking to become a much more "hands on" supporter of the Italian nation.

The United States had come to terms with the idea that Italy was very close to possibly falling prey to Communism. It became essential to perform what the new US Ambassador to Italy, Clare Luce called an "agonizing reappraisal" of American policy in Italy. This reappraisal was built upon a more assertive and far less specific use of American aid as a means of political pressure as well as the the deployment of new right wing conservative groups that had yet to make Italy's political scene. These groups were to combat some of the leftist liberal parties within the country such as the PCI not to mention act as a check on the more left leaning factions within the US sponsored Christian Democrats. Based on the preceding reasons the strategy followed by the Eisenhower administration in Italy was a radical departure from United States policies previously undertaken in Italy. However, the departure was not merely just a more developed radical anti-Communist attitude.

As early as 1951 the Americans had been attempting to persuade the Italian government to outlaw the Italian Communist Party. Both President Eisenhower and Ambassador Luce, were convinced that eliminating the Communist weakness from Western Europe should be the first stage in the process of solidifying of the Atlantic Alliance. In order to in a sense "cleanse" the Italian political body, the United States felt that it would be necessary to shift the Christian Democratic Party into a militantly anti-Communist force. For yet another time, the outright radicalism the American project was met with marked opposition form the Christian Democrats. The new Christian Democratic Prime Minister, Mario Scelba, was able approve a group of proposals that consisted of direct attacks on both the Italian Communist Party, and Communist affiliated trade unions near the conclusion of 1954, that was for the most part based on the plans that the United States had drawn up for Italy. This small victory would be short lived as Scelba's government would fall just months later.

Scelba was succeeded by Antonio Segni, who despite Luce's objections moved to revoke Scelba's American influenced anti-Communist policies as one of his first actions as Prime Minister. So what we end with looks remarkable similar to what we began with; a somewhat resistant United States backed Italian Christian Democratic leader with a volatile Communist opposition posing a threat to Italy's governmental structure. The uneasy alliance between Italy and the United States did not seem to improve significantly between 1952 and 1954 and may even be seen as a slight deterioration. The US was now attempting to take a much more front and center role as a kind of financial puppeteer pushing its hands deeper and deeper into Italian domestic policy, forcing the Italian leadership to bend to it's will if it wished to receive US financial support.

It seems to me that this is a bit of a ruse by the United States, as I believe that the US would have been more than willing to contribute by whatever means necessary to keep the Soviet funded Italian Communist Party from assuming control of Italy and upsetting the alliance Western European nations. Cold War era Italy was a political Pandora's box that held enormous political implications for both the United States and the Soviet Union". (Communist victory in Italy) Possibly strike a damaging blow to the national will anti Soviet and so called neutral countries to resist Communism, and to the hope of people of Satellite countries for ultimate liberation from the soviet yoke (p. 1677) " Statement of policy by the National Security Council, April 15, 1954. So perhaps it is better to view Italy in this period as an extension of the US and the Soviet Union with the US ever so slimly holding the edge as the controlling over the country. To close I'd like to go with a Jenga analogy here. Italy was viewed by the United States as one block of the Jenga tower that is Western Europe that if pulled by the Soviets could possibly throw the whole tower (Western Europe) into a state of teetering instability.

The US locked in a Jenga game of epic international consequences would do everything in it's power to stop that Italian block from being pulled. The End Authors Note: For the sake of my closing argument i hope you know what Jenga is. If not, Jenga is a strategy game consisting of a wooden tower about two feet high built of stacked wood blocks. Players take turns in removing the blocks while attempting to not knock over the tower. The loser is the player who pulls the block that cassias the tower to fall. :

Bibliography

Primary and Sighted Source: Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954 Volume VI Western Europe and Canada (in two parts) Part 2.
Editor: William Z. Sl any: United States Government Printing Office 1986 Secondary Sources: Italy in the Cold War: politics, culture and society 1948-1958.
Edited by Christopher Duggan and Christopher Wagstaff Oxford: Berg, 1995 American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953: a study of Cold War politics.
Ronald L. Filippelli: Stanford University Press, 1989.