Ukraine as South Tyrol, or the Red Herring That Ensures European Vassalage
“We paid in blood
We paid in blood
For those who repent
We wait there too
For a free Europe
We drive East...
We drive East...”
The 2020s have been a decade of tumultuous change. The relics of the 1990s, a rules based international order and the promised omni-hegemony of demo-liberalism, feel like a fever dream. History has returned with fury and vengeance.
Covid exposed the pretensions of liberal democracy; politicians betrayed themselves as the lackies of technocratic diktat. The Russo-Ukraine war punctuated 70 years of peace on the European mainland, and October 7th engendered a nigh-irreparable cleavage between the Israeli lobby and the left wing of the Democratic party - not to mention the increased bellicosity and effectiveness of non-state actors, such as the Houthis.
One need not be a political prognosticator to deduce that the abovementioned portend greater happenings in the years to come. And the grand actors of our planet have responded accordingly - well, except for one: Europe. If it be apt to liken geopolitics to a grand chessboard, then Europe is playing checkers.
Demographically the oldest continent in the world, Europe’s “strategy” bespeaks its senility. This is evinced by the Russophobia and concomitant Atlanticism characteristic of Europe’s disposition, with a few exceptions, since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in March 2022.
Europe is mired in an ossified geostrategic paradigm inherited from the Cold War: America, its benefactor; Russia, a looming leviathan. But life is organic, possessing its own rhythm; its vital logic defies entrapment by the rigid latencies of a retrograde epoch.
The conceptual illiteracy plaguing discourse surrounding the Russo-Ukrainian war evinces the insufficiency of articulating the conflict in terms native to a bygone Cold War context. European elites, cognisant of the untenability of slandering Russia as communist, are forced to connote the image of a red spectre via the empty signifier ‘authoritarian’, the antonym of which is purportedly ‘democracy’.
Notwithstanding the a-historicity of using these terms in an inimical fashion, Western Liberal Democracies, whose legitimacy derives from their constitutional restraint on power, bore onerous, prolonged lockdowns that severely delimited the freedom of its citizenry and induced mass conformity, the by-product of which was paranoid scapegoating of dissenters. To quote a famous adage: “those in glass houses…”.
The reduction of Europe to satrapy status has germinated over the last century; a non-exhaustive list of the key events must include: the Russo-Japanese war, World War 1, Lend-Lease, World War 2, Dien Bien Phu, and the Suez Crisis. The latest instance of this protracted process was the destruction of the Nord stream in 2022.
Despite the decline of its global power and influence, not all is lost. Europeans must take stock of the Middle East’s rebound over the last century; from the nadir of the post-Ottoman 20s to Erdogan and a Geopolitically potent Iran - not bad for a region that was once a despoiled and conquered tribute of Europe.
To resurge, a requisite factor among a sea of others - some material, some intellectual - is consciousness of ourselves as European; it is the mortar necessary for acting cohesively as a civilisational bloc.
Via this lens, it is transparent that the conflict betwixt Russia and Ukraine spells doom. It is the comical third act, preceded by the first and second world wars - the true tragedies that cast our die for the following century. Marx was right: “first as tragedy, then as farce”.
Despite the weight of regional irridentism, this war - which may spell the death knell for Ukraine as a nation - was not inevitable. Europe must learn from an analogous locus that had the potential to catalyse war between two powers on the European mainland: South-Tyrol.
South Tyrol, the northern-most province of Italy, had been an area of dispute since the period of German Unification and the Italian Risorgimento. Stalwarts of the latter, Giuseppe Mazzini and Ettore Tolomei, claimed, contra the facts, that the denizens of South Tyrol, then within the remit of the Austro-Hungarian empire, were ethnic Italians afflicted by a contrived racial consciousness.
South Tyrol only properly became an affair, however, during the fallout of the Great War. The clandestine ‘Treaty of London’ (1915) stipulated that Italy:
"shall obtain the Trentino, Cisalpine Tyrol with its geographical and natural frontier (the Brenner frontier)"
Following the ‘Armstice of Villa Giusti’, which officially ended war on the Austro-Italian frontier, Italian troops marched as far as North Tyrol.
During negotiations between the Entente powers and the Austrian Republic, a petition was sent to Woodrow Wilson by the mayors of South Tyrol, requesting that their land be incorporated into the Austrian Republic.
They cited point 9 of Wilson’s infamous ‘14 Point Programme’:
"A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality."
Notwithstanding their protest, Article 27, section 2 of the Treaty of Saint-Germain-en-Laye stipulated that South Tyrol would be ceded to the Italian state - one of the few territorial gains that Italy accrued following the war.
According to Ray Stannard Baker, Wilson deeply regretted the outcome:
"Already the president had, unfortunately, promised the Brenner Pass boundary to Orlando, which gave to Italy some 150,000 Tyrolese Germans-an action which he subsequently regarded as a big mistake and deeply regretted. It had been before he had made a careful study of the subject...."
Even prior to the March on Rome, the actions of Mussolini’s Fascists augured the treatment that South Tyrolese would face from 29 October 1922 onwards. In 1921, an event celebrating the opening of a Spring trade fair was attacked due to its participants donning traditional Germanic clobber.
Mussolini’s attitude toward the South Tyrolese was vociferous:
"If the Germans on both sides of the Brenner don't toe the line, then the fascists will teach them a thing or two about obedience. Alto Adige is Italian and bilingual, and no one would even dream of trying forcibly to Italianize these German immigrants. But neither may Germans imagine that they might push Italy back to Salorno and from there to the Lago di Garda. Perhaps the Germans believe that all Italians are like Credaro. If they do, they’re sorely mistaken. In Italy, there are hundreds of thousands of Fascists who would rather lay waste to Alto Adige than to permit the tricolore that flies above the Vetta d’Italia to be lowered. If the Germans have to be beaten and stomped to bring them to reason, then so be it, we’re ready. A lot of Italians have been trained in this business."
Following the ascension of Mussolini to power, an intentional and oppressive effort to Italianise South Tyrol was undertaken; this manifested in numerous ways, ranging from suppression of the German language in pedagogical facilities, to incentivisation schemes that encouraged ethnic Italians to move to the province. The principle architects of this effort were Achille Starace and Ettore Tolomei.
Not to stray from the essay’s object, but it is worth noting that critics of nationalism aren’t incorrect when they accuse it of possessing a propensity to homogenise the body-politic.
But if this tendency owes as much to governmental scheming as it does to a quality of the blood, - not biological race, per se, but rather a matrix of factors that manifest in contextually contingent forms i.e the tribe, in primitive societies, or the nation, in modern societies - then the proposed re-shaping of hitherto homogenous nations into multi-cultural melting pots will lead to international enmity being re-territorialised on a domestic, national plane.
The onerous policies of the Fascists vis-à-vis the province incited revanchist sentiment amongst foreign Pan-Germans; domestically, it engendered resistance movements, most notably, Peter Hofer’s Völkischer Kampfring Südtirols. Hofer, it should be noted, was a Nazi party member; many in the province supported the party. South Tyrol was the only theatre in which Nazis and Fascists found themselves as enemy combatants.
However, the pro-nazi attitude of the South Tyrolese was not reciprocated. Hitler consistently opposed the re-incorporation of South Tyrol into a Greater German Reich, to the chagrin of his competitors on the Pan-German scene; he was accused of being a Habsburg patsy, and his erstwhile comrade General Erich Ludendorff, in his 1931 work ‘The Coming War’, suggested that Hitler was a puppet of the Vatican’s collectivist agenda.
Following the disastrous Munich Putsch, Hermann Goering, stationed in Italy, acted in a plenipotentiary capacity on Hitler’s behalf; the object of his mission being the establishment of cordial relations with the nascent Fascist regime, the securement of a loan for the Nazi party, and establishing an agreement concerning the thorny issue of South Tyrol.
In a proposed agreement to the Italians, Goering stipulated the following:
“To make unmistakably clear that it [the Nazi party] does not recognize that there is any Alto Adige [South Tyrol] question and that it recognizes absolutely and without hesitation the status quo, i.e., Italian possession. . . . The NSDAP [Nazi party] will do everything possible, starting right now, to discourage the German people from revisionist thoughts in regard to Alto Adige.”
Furthermore, acting on poor advice from Goering, Hitler issued a public statement on the party’s behalf, declaring a lack of interest in the province; the German Press and Pan-Germanist parties united in their criticism of this declaration. As the 20s progressed, Hitler re-affirmed his dearth of interest in the region - most notably in his unpublished work on foreign policy, ‘Zweites Buch’.
Despite the many overtures, Italy and Germany did not arrive at a consensus until the precipice of the Second World War - this is reflective of Italy’s position as, from a British point of view, an ambiguous, not necessarily hostile power.
Italy’s equivocal position in the international arena was quashed due to their stance on the Spanish Civil War and their actions in Abyssinia. Moreover, the Anschluss, the outcome of which was a land-border with Nazi Germany, called into question the tactfulness of continuing to pursue Italianisation policies in the region.
On 21 October 1939, consensus was reached regarding the South Tyrolese populace. The German minority was provided with the option of staying put in the province, and in so doing, losing their language rights. Alternatively, they were offered the option of emigrating to Nazi Germany. 70% of Germans in South Tyrol opted for the latter course of action.
Whilst the agreement stymied the economy and social life of South Tyrol for generations thereafter, and despite low-level terrorism persisting into the post-war period, the agreement was, in retrospect, a success. It quashed an area of contention, thereby strengthening the alliance betwixt both powers.
The parallels between eastern Ukraine and South Tyrol are transparent. Yet Atlanticist European powers and Russia continue to vie with each other for what is, relative to their primary interests, small pickings. The only powers that gain from such squabbling are those who seek to retard Europe’s ability to project power in the world.
Today, despite Nazi Germany ceding South Tyrol to the Italianising-prone Fascists, 70% of the South Tyrolese populace speaks German. Given the Fascists couldn’t achieve their aim, how can the cries that Putin or Zelensky aim at homogenisation be received with credulity?
Europe, a continent of 400 million, must be saved. Saved from provincial quibbling, petty ethnic disputes, and parochial bloodletting. Europe, the continent that once held the world in its palms, now seems content to be a junior actor in American geopolitical endeavours.
If there is anything to be gained from the case study of South Tyrol, it is this: don’t sacrifice your primary aims for the sake of tertiary benefits.