TRIESTE: Trouble Spot

From the floor of the new Italian Parliament last week, the United States' undeviating friend in Europe uttered a strong warning to Washington. "May it be clear to our allies," said Premier Alcide de Gasperi, that there can be "repercussions on the solidity of the common alliance itself." He was talking about the West's five-year-old unfulfilled promise to give the Free Territory of Trieste to Italy.

Italians, said the Premier, fully expect the promise to be kept. If it is not, he hinted, Italy may refuse to join EDC, and may even withdraw from NATO—a step that would knock the foundations from under U.S. strategy for a united, anti-Communist Western Europe.

Change in Plans. The Western powers could pretend no longer that the simmering problem of Trieste would simply blow away if no one looked. Trieste (pop. 270,000), once a commercial rival of Venice, was for centuries a semi-autonomous city, giving the landlocked Austro-Hungarian empire an outlet to the sea. The Allies promised it to Italy in World War I as a reward for joining their side. Italy held Trieste until World War II; ethnically, 80% of the city itself is Italian. Since World War II, the port city and 280 square miles of surrounding countryside, coveted by both Italy and Yugoslavia, have been divided into one Western zone (U.S. and British) and one Yugoslav zone of occupation. Their population: roughly 286,000 Italians, 93,000 Slovenes.

The big powers, in a decision written into the Italian peace treaty, agreed to internationalize the territory under a U.N.-selected governor. But Russia blocked more than a dozen Western nominations for a governor, and with agreement plainly impossible, the West's Big Three dramatically renounced the plan on March 20, 1948. Instead, the U.S., Britain, and France flatly came out for "the return of the Free Territory of Trieste to Italian sovereignty as the best solution." That pledge helped De Gasperi beat the Communists in the crucial 1948 elections.

A few months later, when Tito broke with Moscow, the West reneged on its promise. It decided that it would be impolitic to force Tito out of Trieste at a time when he might be won over to the West; it chose the easier course of forgetting its promise to Italy, explaining it away, as a Foreign Office diplomat did only last week: "If a solution were possible, we'd propose it straightaway . . . But ... I honestly don't see a solution in view. They've just got to compromise, the pair of them."

Too weak to face down Marshal Tito by themselves, the embittered Italians have come to regard the West's unredeemed pledge as no more than a cynical campaign trick. That feeling hurt De Gasperi in last month's election. Trieste is a symbol as compelling as reunification to Germans, or 54-40 to Americans of the 1840s. To Italians the word packs an emotional wallop out of all proportion to its economic importance.