Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (September 6, 1946)
On the Record…
Free or dominated Europe primary question
By Dorothy Thompson
Back of every secondary issue is always a primary question. The primary question at the Peace Conference is whether Europe, geographically a peninsula of Asia and containing 450 million people in a high state of technological and industrial development, shall come under the domination and within the military and economic sphere of a single great continental power, namely, Soviet Russia; or whether it shall be divided between Russia and Anglo-American interests; or, whether Europe shall be set on its feet in some modern political structure, and thus be able to maintain some equilibrium between east and west.
On the answer to this question hangs war or peace and our own future security and prosperity.
So far, however, the measures taken have been answering in favor of proposition one, although the basic aim of the war was to negate that proposition, when advanced by the Axis.
By permitting Russia’s Polish satellite to annex by default – for the frontiers were never clearly accepted at Potsdam – nearly a quarter of Germany, including the great industrial area of Silesia and most of the grain and potato lands of the Reich, we handed the Soviet Union a hostage with which to barter for adding Germany to its power complex.
But if this German “solution” is now recognized as an error, why have our leaders agreed, in the councils of the Big Four, to repeat the identical mistake in regard to Italy and the province of Venezia Giulia? Here, again, another and even more obvious Russian instrument, Tito’s Yugoslavia, is to have a territorial award incompatible with ethnographic principles, one which removes every defensible Italian frontier in the east, accompanied by the creation of a “free state” incapable of existence economically, an area bound to be a center of continuous Italian and Yugoslav irredentism, and therefore, again, a hostage in Russian hands with which to barter for a Moscow-oriented Italy.
History seldom forgives one fundamental mistake, but it never forgives the obstinate repetition of the same one.
The so-called “free internationalized state” of Venezia Giulia will have to exist as an international WPA project. It is an economic monstrosity. It is cut off from both its historic central European hinterland and from Italy. This is true in respect of communications, agriculture, coal, and hydroelectric power.
Three railroads connect it with the rest of Europe. These are, first, the old Suedbahn – Trieste-Graz-Vienna. As the map is now drawn this passes through Yugoslav territory and is under Yugoslav control. Second, the so-called “Piedicolli Railroad” – Trieste Klangenfurt (Austria) – will also be under Yugoslav control. The only other railroad, “Ponte Bana,” linking Udine with Travisio and, via Villach, with Salzburg and Southern Germany, is a single-gauge, picturesque but very steep line impossible of carrying Central European tonnage to its natural port at Trieste. Before the First World War that transport amounted to three billion tons annually.
The proposed “solution” cuts all the main highways to Middle Europe. They will be under Yugoslav control.
Trieste is supplied by an interlocking hydroelectric system whose two chief sources will be in Yugoslav hands.
The Albona coal mines which furnish fully half of Italy’s entire coal supplies – the rest is in far-off Sardinia – go to Yugoslavia. So does the bauxite which supplies the aluminum factories of Venice and Bolzano.
The food of the area will also be Yugoslav.
Strategically the solution is suicidal, not only for Italy but for the whole of Western Europe. Ignoring even the watershed which determined the place of the “Wilson Line” after World War I, it lays open the whole Po Valley through the Friulian plain, right away to Turin, Italy’s leading industrial city.
The disposition of ports will make Yugoslavia master of the Adriatic, and through the Adriatic gain her entrance to the Mediterranean.
Culturally, it means the entrance of the Balkans, “cockpit” of wars, right into Europe.
It should not be forgotten that Fascism was born in this area. Its true author was D’Annunzio, and its birthplace was Fiume. The next revolution for the next war will hardly be Fascist. This area is already swarming with OZNA agents and agitators. Economic stagnation will fan the flames being carefully set to spread from here to all Italy, so tremblingly hoping to remain within its culture of the west.
After the last war, Yugoslavia, liberated and constructed by the west was oriented toward the west, above all to France. Today’s Yugoslavia is the most unfriendly to the west, and especially to the United States, of all the Russian satellites. Shall we reward Tito for shooting down American transport planes by opening Europe to him as far as the French Alps?
“Whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.”