Abstract
The article seeks to cast doubt on the prevailing notion that regards the Allied occupation of (Southern) Italy as a harbinger of democracy by examining it from a local, decidedly bottom-up analytical perspective. I argue that the Allies disfavored the formation of political parties and the expression of political thought, even though ‘you can't have a democracy without political parties’, as the Italian-American Charles Poletti, one of the principal American civil affairs officers (CAO) organizing the occupation on-site, phrased it. This was particularly true during the first phase of the occupation, when military priorities reigned supreme. However, even at a later point, after the CAOs had theoretically assumed the role of an external supervising authority, a deep distrust of the country's political parties informed much of the Allies’ attitudes. Rather than serving as a foundational layer for democracy, the Allies perceived the country's political parties as a threat to democratization insofar as these were believed to obstruct the former's political and economic agendas. Such antagonisms between occupier and occupied, of course, especially applied to Italy's largest and most well-organized party during the period of the Allied occupation – the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).
Two layers need to be distinguished when the issue of democratization during the Allied occupation of Italy in the Second World War is considered. The implementation of a new form of nation-building project – that is, the endowment of a constitution following an allegedly benevolent occupation that would effect the shift to a democratic postwar republic – is one part. 1 It was a consequence of the toppling of Italy's fascist government in July 1943 for which the Allied invasion of Sicily and the loss of popular support were principal reasons. 2 The second part concerns the inner workings of the Italian state. Allied administrators sought to reshuffle the Italian Ministry of the Interior's and the prefect's clout in local affairs.
The differentiation laid out here is, in other words, the dichotomy of public memory (transforming fascist Italy into a republic) and the historical study of democratization efforts understood as practices of British and American civil affairs officers (CAOs) at the local level during the Allied occupation of Italy. This occupation, in different phases and different regions, lasted from 1943 to 1947. It started with the invasion of Sicily in July 1943 and officially ended with the dissolution of the Allied Control Commission (ACC) in January 1947. While many Southern Italian provinces were already returned to Italian jurisdiction by February and July 1944, any Italian administration in statu nascendi was dependent on Allied resources, be it logistically, financially, or personally. Irrespective of whether the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT, later shortened to AMG) initially enforced a direct occupation or whether the ACC took over and acted as a supervising and consulting institution for Italian governmental actors ever since its establishment in November 1943, many Allied officials continued to exude an occupier's attitude.
Historical research has increasingly shown that the Allied occupations during and after the Second World War were much more strained than the memory of noble occupations would allow room for. 3 Accordingly, historiography has begun to investigate the rather uncritical acceptance of occupations as a vehicle for democratization. Studies highlighting endemic developments in occupied societies and breaking down changes in political culture rather than assessing the foreign influence of an occupying army, have also gained traction in this context. 4
Much of the immediate postwar historiography had lauded the efforts connected with the Allied military governments, in particular those directed at democratizing states and societies. This assessment had its good reasons, on the one hand given the Cold War context, and on the other hand if juxtaposed to the brutal German occupations during the Second World War which aimed to economically exploit occupied territories and realize the inhuman policy of extermination in these areas. Yet a look at the local level, for instance in Southern Italy, contributes to the revision of the image of the Allies as simply noble occupiers and nuances their efforts in implementing ‘democracy’. 5 It is at this local level where democratization practices can foster our understanding so that the history of the Allied occupation of Italy and the role which democratization assumed in this setting is not merely written while being cognizant of its outcome, that is, the birth of the Italian Republic in 1946 as a ‘republic of the parties’, to cite a seminal interpretation that emphasizes the parties’ influence for Italian postwar history. 6 The years before had actually witnessed a newfound appreciation for democracy as an act of consciousness so that, in the words of Rosario Forlenza, a ‘liminal democracy’. 7 While Forlenza's political anthropological perspective narrates the history between 1943 and 1946 without much consideration for the emerging party system, his approach points to the idiosyncrasies of this threshold period of Italian history.
This article, with a specific emphasis on the local scenery in Southern Italy, inquiries into the modes of how the Allies went about democratizing the occupied society and the role Italian parties played in this process. I argue that the Allies disfavored the formation of political parties and the expression of political thought, even though ‘you can't have a democracy without political parties’, as Charles Poletti, one of the principal American CAOs organizing the occupation on-site, phrased it. 8 Rather than serving as a foundational layer for democracy, the Allies perceived Italian political parties as a threat to democratization insofar as these were believed to obstruct the former's political and economic agenda. Such antagonisms between the occupiers and the occupied especially applied to Italy's best-organized party during the period of the Allied occupation – the Partito Comunista Italiano (PCI).
The animosity towards political parties was motivated, however, by the logic of occupations and did not display ideological presuppositions, at least not from early on. What complicated matters, though, was the circumstance that specific ideas of American democracy were prevalent whereas local Italian forms of democratic participation were not considered as such but rather perceived to thwart the efforts of CAOs as those agents effecting political and social change. 9 This was mainly the American position. After all, the British – at least in the imagination of their ally – would have a conservative outlook that was simply interested in restoring the prefascist elite of liberal Italy. The British side of the occupational structure was conceived as a force versus ‘democracy and liberal government’, insofar as the American CAO Maurice Neufeld is to be believed. 10 His superior Charles Poletti agreed with this bitter assessment and lambasted the chief of the military government, Lord Rennell of Rodd, as he would seem ‘to carry a heavier load, than most people do, of preconceptions. Incidentally, they are of the kind that do not promote liberal democratic government’. 11
The temporal and spatial dimensions of the Allied occupation loomed large. When Allied soldiers arrived in Milan in April 1945, they encountered a city in which Italian partisans had already undertaken the task of choosing new public officials. Parties also had – compared to the summer of 1943 in Southern Italy – almost two years to reconstitute and organize themselves so that the Allied scope of action could be undercut by an Italian drive to politically set the course. 12 This was why Allied labor officer Thomas R. Fisher criticized the entire conception of the military government for its lack of consideration for parties and unions. The vacuum would be filled above all by the Communist Party, which would thus gain more and more influence. 13
It is not the concern of my argumentation to dispute the influence the AMG had as the institutional body organizing the occupation. The fact that former war enemies became stable partners in the configuration of the Cold War needs to be acknowledged. But the goal of implementing democracy was a struggle between various actors in the United States, as well as among the Allies themselves, and, of course, not least between the occupiers and the occupied. It only gained in importance as the Allies wanted their occupation to be perceived as a liberation, an interpretation which became also powerful for Italian efforts to distance themselves from the fascist regime. 14 The politics of war were, hence, also intertwined with the politics of liberation, to pick up on David Ellwood's seminal study of the Allied presence in Italy. 15
I argue that the sum of the conceptions and practices surrounding the ‘import of democracy’ is at the same time the story of how the occupation unfolded, failed (at least if judged by its lofty goals), and ultimately re-affirmed Italy's social structure. In this way, the contribution also adds to our understanding of the complex phenomenon of occupation and likewise sheds light on the social stratification of local Southern Italian settings. 16
The tense relationship between military and political goals marks a fundamental characteristic of any given occupation. In the case of the Second World War, this dichotomy revealed that the logic of total war with its pervasive threat of mortal peril necessitated that military governments could not stop at the mere administration of occupied territories. The immediate reinstatement work upon entering towns and cities served the purpose of providing a working infrastructure, which was conducive to the furthering of the war. The prevention of not only diseases but also social disorder was paramount. Under these terms, stable, steadied occupied societies would allow the Allied militaries to focus on defeating the enemy in the field of battle, rather than having to devote resources to the maintenance of order in the rear of the military front, or so the Allied logic went. Since ‘burying the dead became the first duty of the CAO’ and ‘food, transport and sanitation were of immediate and urgent importance’, any politicization of the occupation, meaning the democratization of local or regional administrations, had to take a backseat to these more pressing needs. 17
Many protagonists felt uneasy at best, if not outright enraged by the prospect of bringing democracy to defeated war enemies anyway. A lecturer at the School of Military Government in Charlottesville, Virginia remarked that the text of Field Manual (FM) 27-5 on military government issued by the Department of War in July 1940 would wrongly convey the ‘impression […] that our principal objective in invading a foreign country is to bring light to the heathen’. The same lecturer underlined the occupation's functional role when he elaborated that ‘[e]verything you do in military government has to be tested in the light of whether it will aid or retard the campaign’. 18 Testimonies like these speak to the military logic informing occupations, which was self-explanatory given the causal relationship to warfare.
Balancing out political and military interests drew criticism, especially once a gradual shift was noticeable. From a narrowly conceived military government, the occupation, the longer it lasted, morphed more and more into a military government. Any talk about the implementation of military governments alone was subject to fierce discussions. American Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes saw no less than an imperialistic notion inscribed in those occupations that went beyond a narrow military logic, surmising that they often were a mere first step towards eventual annexation. 19 Similarly, Herbert L. Matthews had written in the New York Times that the US looked at international conflicts as ‘something purely and narrowly military – to win the war and then go home’. 20
Proponents of far-reaching political goals connected with occupations argued instead that processes of democratization would make any future American involvements abroad superfluous. Instead of relying on the internal dynamics of (former) war enemies as had been the case during and after the First World War, the corollary was the import of democracy imposed upon defeated states and people. This was obviously a deeply idealistic notion, yet it has to be taken at face value. According to Charles Poletti, one of the worst sins of fascism had been the destruction of a sense of public morality and civic responsibility. In no humble terms, the invading Allies were out to restore this, as Poletti argued in an internal Army paper: A.M.G. is one of our political and social contributions to the advance of civilization. It is laying the foundations by which a free Italy rises to take her place in the family of nations […]. If these foundations are placed firmly on the rock of liberty and freedom, the chances will be good that our children will not find it necessary to come to Europe with guns in their hands and anger in their hearts.
21
This was easier said than done with an eye towards the Italian case. The term occupation itself was a quandary for the Allies. While at the onset of the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, Italy had been a war enemy, some weeks later the situation became blurry. Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was replaced by General Pietro Badoglio and, with the former's downfall, fascism was toppled. By late September 1943, Italy had agreed to an armistice in which it conceded unconditional surrender. Likewise, it had declared war on the former German ally in October 1943. The Allied occupation of Italy, therefore, assumed a special place in American politics. The country was not only seen as the weakest link of the Axis but was also perceived to be its most reluctant member which made it most likely that it would sway towards an Allied line of democracy, especially if an ancient sense of democracy could be reactivated, something the Allies romanticized in their descriptions of Italy and Italians. This corresponded well to the war propaganda, which had celebrated the occupation as ‘American Democracy in Action’ and deemed Italians in need of guidance. 23 The feminization of a country that needed salvation through the hands of the American occupier was a theme permeating much of the propaganda and literature alike. 24 At the same time, this Allied policy could draw on the potent topos of ‘America’, a topos that became even stronger in postwar Italy. 25
Three obstacles conditioned the implementation of democracy in Italy. The first was an alleged political apathy, according to occupation officers. 26 While the South would have never had much political consciousness, as the Allied handbooks repeated over and over again, Italians, in general, needed support since fascism had eradicated all sense of community spirit and democratic practices. Against this backdrop, the Americans offered guidance by reverting to their own idea of a type of Jeffersonian democracy in which local societies would largely organize themselves. It was also why the outreaching influence of the Italian prefects and the state bureaucracy was so warily regarded. Building democracy up from the bottom was needed in the American mind as otherwise, any democratization would have to remain superficial. 27
The second obstacle concerns the British ally. Any American endeavor to impose democracy upon Italians needed to be shared by their main partner. Yet the British government drew a harsh line, preferring to treat Italy as a defeated war enemy. 28 On the scene in Italy, Chief Civil Affairs Officer Lord Rennell of Rodd not only echoed this sentiment but put forward a counter plan to the idea of strengthening local institutions. He was suspicious of ‘the disintegration of central authority and the growth of local potentates who won’t agree with their fellow potentates’. 29
Thirdly, Italians expected the Allies to liberate them from the Nazi occupation and economic hardship but could not come to terms with the idea of being occupied by the invading Allies, neither for military nor for political purposes. The lines between liberators and occupiers became more and more blurred. 30 While the Allies conformed to Italian expectations and imagined themselves as liberators, they often behaved as proper occupiers with sinister corollaries such as boundless requisitioning practices, acts of sexual violence or with regard to the creation of black-market empires. 31
Once the Italian campaign was progressing north from Naples, policymakers in Washington saw reason to broadly define the occupation and to emancipate it from its military logic. Instead of ‘going home’ as Matthews put it, Franklin D. Roosevelt emphasized that winning the war entailed a political dimension and required staying power, quite literally with an eye towards the presence of soldiers. The President corroborated the redemptive quality of the occupation when he asked for further war support from the American people after the liberation of Rome in June 1944. While the fall of Italy's capital marked a caesura, it would not mean that the Americans would cut back their commitment to Italians, ‘who are only now learning to walk in a new atmosphere of freedom’. 32 The occupation would serve as a vehicle to guarantee future peace by sowing the seeds of democracy in Italy. In other words, building up local institutions, instilling a sense of public consciousness and civic life, in short: filling democracy with meaning would, to paraphrase Rosario Forlenza once more, only gain in relevance after the Allied arrival in Rome. 33 In Southern Italy, this process had already begun before because of the protracted Allied military advance until Rome was reached.
Proclamation No. 1 established the occupation. While it promised to respect Italian interests, it also – compliant with international law – vested the Military Governor with full authority and emphasized the role of AMGOT to exercise the occupant's powers. It forbade ‘any act calculated to disturb public order in any way’. 34 That societies under occupation were not allowed to engage in political activity at that point seems obvious, even though political preferences immediately came to the fore. Posters calling for Sicilian separatism provided an early example of how social unrest could affect the military government. It likewise foreshadowed regional separatism as an issue that the Allies would be forced to reckon with. 35 The instant emergence of such posters – the Communists would likewise put up posters in the streets – also suggested that these movements could rely on existing organizing structures that had survived the fascist phase. But calls for Sicilian independence or Communist Party activities in this particular moment all but threatened to undermine the Allied desire to create a stable, manageable society in subjection. The expression of political thought, and especially large gatherings of people where utterance to this thought was given, was clearly identified as potential disturbances. In this regard, Edgar E. Hume, Senior CAO of the Fifth Army, had warned the National Liberation Committee in Naples in late 1943 that political activity in front-line areas ‘could not be permitted at all’. 36 This warning came three months after Naples was liberated. With the Allied arrival, neither the ‘reign of plenty’ nor the immediate free expression of political thought set in. 37 It did little to endear the ‘liberators’ to the ‘liberated’ and triggered resentment by Italian citizens.
The Allies kept the existing local government structure in place, something which was in line with both international law and the British preference for indirect rule practiced in the colonial field. Administrative and political personnel at the intermediate level were called to resume their posts in order to guarantee a working infrastructure. Fascist officials had often anticipated their ouster, though, and had fled into the mountains before the Allies arrived. Communists, in particular, could now fill many of the free posts as they were considered among the few who ‘have really fought fascism and have a claim to moral ascendancy’, as CAO Maurice Neufeld conveyed the opinion of some of his fellow officers. 38 The common notion of antifascism and assistance to the war effort trumped any ideological motive that would permeate American postwar confrontations with communism in later years. While the top positions were usually filled with liberal-conservative people such as the wealthy landowner Lucio Tasca, who was appointed mayor of Palermo, Communists or Socialists could also at times rise to positions of Prefects, as happened in Calabria, for instance.
Notable politicians were, however, of even more value as contact persons for the Allies. Benedetto Croce received William J. Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), in his villa after the liberation of Naples. The famous philosopher was one of the main protagonists of the Italian liberals. 39 Edgar E. Hume likewise met, on the first day after the Allied arrival in Naples, with Filippo Caracciolo, an antifascist and descendant of a Neapolitan noble family who would by April 1944 serve as state secretary in the Italian government. 40 The term local notable perhaps best identifies the role these people assumed and the place they held in the social structure of a certain place. Politicians were of interest as providers of information and as mediators for future interactions with the occupied society. 41 They were key to the Allied objective to rule over the occupied society. Later on, and often with the backing of the CAOs, these local potentates would manage to attract a following and turn their social capital into the formation of movements, committees and associations (the word party was less often used in the sources). Still, in late 1945, a report by the Carabinieri informed about the tendency that Italian parties organized themselves around personalities rather than around ideological presuppositions. 42 The ‘republic of the parties’ as a collective action was still far away. Rather, an individualistic endeavor, which was not least geared to maintain social status, informed the political action of local notables. Party politics, in general, were inhibited as there was no profound degree of organization. The lone exception would be the Communist Party which could draw upon the (underground) structure it had maintained during fascism's years in power. Parties like the Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democracy, DC) had to gain a solid footing first. 43 While the DC was established in December 1943 and could go back to antecedents like the Partito Popolare (People's Party), it was only over time that the party would find its voice in the thicket of the occupation. Their main protagonists would be present, however, just not as party representatives but rather as local notables.
Salvatore Aldisio, who would head the Ministry of the Interior in April 1944 and be of crucial importance to the Christian-Democratic assertion of power in Southern Italy, lived in Gela when the Allies landed in Sicily. Charles Poletti considered himself lucky to make Aldisio's acquaintance as it was often after conversations with him that the CAO chose people of antifascist sentiment who would be assigned to significant posts in the Allied and Italian administrative apparatus. 44 Again, this was typical with regard to the individual sway Italian notables could wield during the occupation. When political parties became more prominent in the Allied reasoning by 1945, those parties in which notables with whom they had collaborated before assumed prominent roles often found the Allied backing. That was true for Aldisio and the DC but also, to cite another example, to a lesser degree for Italian liberals around Carlo Sforza and Benedetto Croce.
While the ban on political activity implied that politics were put aside during the first months of the occupation, the described approach, in fact, entailed a deeply political dimension on the Allied side. The affirmation of local notables’ standing was an unparalleled political issue. This is especially true for the early stages of the occupation, where the need ‘to keep the machine going as far as it can and not to be too ambitious in thinking about what it would like to do in reorganizing the future of the country in which it is situated’ required to politically set the course. 45 In the midst of fighting and ensuring a stable rear area, impromptu action was usually required. The selection of mayors by a show of hands was not uncommon. By this procedure, many mavericks came into office. In the Calabrian town of Nicastro, a physician who ventured into local politics got elected in this way, for example. Perhaps not surprisingly, an Allied officer soon described him as incompetent and uncooperative. His town would be ‘notable for bomb throwing’ and would still be ‘disorderly’. 46 The Allied maxim of order trumping everything else shone clearly through here as did the violent character that would describe Italian gatherings.
The reference to bomb throwing was emblematic. Military equipment was widespread during the occupation, be it as remains of retracting German or Italian soldiers or because it found its way onto the black market due to Allied soldiers who sought to derive a profit. 47 An event that took place in April 1944 in Laureana di Borrello in Calabria marks a case in point. The local trade union office had organized a gathering to celebrate the imminent International Workers’ Day. 48 The event resulted in a violent outburst. Italian soldiers present in the crowd took offense at the decision by the Socialist mayor who had ordered to hang the flags of the Communist and Socialist parties, but not the Italian one. The uproar culminated in the mayor pulling the pin of a hand grenade and throwing it into the crowd.
These were the types of situations that the Allies had feared, with people being ‘pulled along by the crowd’ and turning the gatherings into uncontrollable ‘mobs’. 49 It was also why conservative CAOs mistrusted any policies that heavily involved Italian actors for which the actions of Poletti and like-minded Allied officials served as prime examples. In this sense, historian Roy Domenico has argued that people like Poletti ‘viewed Italy as their own laboratory where goodly doses of American-style democracy could be applied’. 50 As technocrats of the progressive era and shaped by the New Deal reforming zeal, these occupation officers encouraged the creation of organizations to put Italians in a position to actively advocate their interests. Amongst other measures, Poletti's staff had helped establish local trade unions and also strengthened the Department of Welfare. Not only was this understood by other CAOs to be an intrusion that interfered too much with the occupied country's affairs, but it also seemed to grant too much leeway to a former war enemy. In the words of Winston Churchill, Italians had no say in political matters at all. In February 1944, he had warned of ‘surrendering to the threats of violence by the Italian parties’. He leveled strong criticism at the Allied policy as it would ‘plunge into […] petty political affairs in a country which has just surrendered unconditionally’. 51 For Churchill, any measure that would involve Italian actors was ill-advised, if not downright counterproductive.
It has already been hinted at another reason why parties did not play a big role at the onset of the Allied occupation. Civilians simply had other issues to worry about. The ‘only universal party in the Country is the “Partito del Mercato Nero”’, as the Allied Commissioner for Naples aptly summarized. 52 What this led to was an affirmative confirmation of the Allied preconception that especially Southern Italians would not care about politics. Maurice Neufeld wrote that in ‘Sicily and South Italy, fascism never took hold, simply because nothing could take hold […]’. 53 While the fascists seemingly had abolished any plan to interpose their authority as long as the consensual veneer of fascism could be asserted, it now seemed the Allies' turn to leave their mark. 54 (Southern) Italians’ alleged backwardness and apathy fit well with the idea of an American mission to educate occupied people. Political agency, that is, the capacity to think and act politically, was denied at least to Southern Italians. While on the British side, this perceived apathy led to supporting the King as a known commodity and competent political institution, Americans advocated for a redemptive quality of the occupation. This was understood as a mission to democratize the state, society, and its people, or in less idealistic terms, as a necessary step to create a stable and peaceful nation well-integrated into the economic system of the postwar envisioned by the US. 55
These imaginations conditioned interactions between the occupiers and the occupied to a large extent. A Sicilian woman who wrote to Allied authorities because her daughter had been arrested for being an alleged fascist put forward the argument that her family would not be political but merely be attached to the Italian fatherland. They would have ‘served it with liberal Government, with fascist Government, and […] shall serve it with Allied Government. My unhappy daughter […] has never developped a political activity’. 56 While perhaps a correct portrayal in terms of the remoteness of political affairs in small villages, the Allies read such statements as either a confirmation of the ascribed apathy or as cynical opportunism. That it could likewise speak to a missing framework in which to act politically – understood as party politics – when most Italian governments had distanced themselves from mingling too deeply with Southern Italian affairs was cast aside. Political tendencies often went with the leanings of local notables, and here most prominently landowners who established dependent interpersonal relationships in agro-towns. 57 These land owners, in particular, would become preferred contact persons for the Allies and often held the office of local mayor after the Allied arrival. Northern Italians by contrast reached some absolution from the charge of political apathy due to their partisan fight which was acknowledged as strongly aiding the Allied cause. Poletti identified the partisans as ‘ripe elements for the restoration of democracy’. 58
At any rate, Maurice Neufeld was hopeful about the prospects of democracy in Italy: ‘[I]t is really thrilling to watch the liberals who were silent for twenty-five years blossoming out and taking hold’, he proclaimed, continuing: ‘And it's damned encouraging to know that there are really fine people even after all those years who are able and who speak your language and believe in the principles of democracy’. 59 CAOs like Neufeld were convinced that they were successful in their quest to ‘bring light to the heathen’. And different from the instructor in Charlottesville, they believed this to be a good thing. After all, so Neufeld seemed to insinuate, the ventennio was a mere interregnum, and it was on the occupiers to kiss the idly lying Italians awake after more than twenty years of a fascist deep slumber. Democratic practices needed to be brought into being again. More often than not, however, Italians would find themselves confronted with an idea of democracy that did not simply eye a return to conditions before fascism but denoted a decidedly American version of it. Italian political parties, eager to return to the local scene and help restore Italy as a free nation, were put in a backwater.
Allied occupiers could oftentimes not relate to Southern Italian forms of political expression. The issue of the peasant republics (repubbliche contadine) marks a case in point. 60 They were a widespread phenomenon in remote, especially mountainous regions after 1943. Their existence in the Italian South was rather ephemeral, though. As ‘experiments in direct democracy’, the peasant republics symbolized an effort to renounce themselves from the Italian state fabric, set against authorities such as the King but also the Catholic Church. 61 Instead, they emphasized the right to autonomously organize and govern themselves. Town halls, tax offices, or prisons were burned down to dissociate themselves symbolically and practically from central authority. Mushrooming peasant cooperatives were likewise an expression of a perceived notion that societies were now in a state of flux. 62 Correctly understanding these establishments as a way to wield influence over societies, traditional notables such as large landowners and members of the mafia soon founded their own cooperatives too. 63
These conflicts over social and political participation both in the framework of the Italian nation-state and in the attempted overthrow of local relationships of dependency could be characterized as an effort of ‘democratization’. But given that the oftentimes violent manifestations undermined the Allied quest for order, the occupiers could see little else than ‘mob rule’ in such affairs. 64 Any gathering, vocal expression, or debate was therefore perceived as undermining public order even though it meant perhaps only a form of mobilization which was alien to American eyes yet deeply entrenched in Italian history itself. In quite many ways, the downfall of fascism and the ensuing years saw a resumption of the very social conflict that had characterized the years after the First World War already, the so-called biennio rosso. Social structure, land ownership, and the political self-government of local communes had played a big role then and were to be renegotiated once again. 65 That this renegotiation oftentimes came in the form of violent clashes and was usurped – though not instigated as CAOs would usually believe – by communist activists, favored the Allied impression that these were mere communist uprisings. 66 What is more, to keep unruly communities in check required police force, transportation and attention, all resources the Allies preferred to spend on the military front.
A look at a case from Campania can help put the local contests of these quarrels into perspective. 67 In Calitri, a village in the province of Avellino, prominent landowning families had always ruled the rural town. They interchangeably held posts of mayor (podestà), party secretary, and responsible official for the grain ammasso, the fascist collecting and distributing system. When the Allies entered this village in September 1943, they quickly identified these families as outstanding community members. Given that the CAOs had no knowledge about conditions on site, they relied on these notables as intermediators for their occupation. What followed, however, was a popular insurrection, with residents enraged at the fascist turncoats and how they appeased the invading Allies to safeguard their prominent local roles. During these clashes, the ex-mayor was fatally wounded and a republic was proclaimed. After some days, the Carabinieri succeeded in restoring order and arrested 57 peasants with the support of Allied troops.
These protests were largely borne by women who had gained a newfound role already in other protests when they voiced their displeasure with either the fascist or Allied inability to provide sufficient food rations. It would be, as Joshua Arthurs has convincingly argued, deceptive to reduce this form of protest only to the cause of insufficient foodstuffs and general hardship, though. 68 Rather, it was about breaking up long-standing social structures and interpersonal relationships for which the downfall of fascism and the Allied invasion seemed to provide an opening. In this way, the ascribed apolitical stance of Italians was deeply political. 69 It blended with the peasant world of collective values which was set against any, especially central, authority: ‘a refusal of “politics” which was in fact the token of a specific political attitude’, as Roger Absalom has aptly pointed out for the peasant world. 70
Protests and the suppression thereof were one thing. They led to an appreciation of the Carabinieri who, in the Allied eyes, were one of the few Italian institutions to count on during the tumultuous phase of the occupation. 71 The other part was the affirmation of local hierarchies when the Allies chose prominent citizens interwoven already with the fascist regime as pillars of their occupation. Ideally, these citizens would make sure that the ‘sideshow occupation’ happened without much disruption. The protest against these notables, in turn, caused a lot of noise and necessitated Allied involvement detracting them from their focus on defeating the German war enemy. Maurice Lush, Executive Commissioner of the ACC, was on record saying that ‘it does not matter if there are riots among the Italians, as long as they do not affect Allied interests, the Allied war effort, or government’. 72 With such a definition, however, everything affected the Allies and therefore called for their involvement.
Whenever public order proved to be a mirage, the Allies could only see civic unrest, the harbinger of a communist takeover, or full-fledged anarchy that would break loose in Italy. Newspaper coverage in the United States only exacerbated these sentiments. Upon the lynching of Donato Carretta, the fascist director of the Roman prison Regina Coeli, in September 1944, Life Magazine commented that it ‘took the blood cry of a mob to bring into focus the fact that the peoples of Italy and of other European countries are rising to a mood of anarchy and civil war’. Similarly, it was argued that while anarchy would not yet exist in Italy, ‘all the conditions for it do exist’. 73
Maurice Neufeld also provided a dismal prospect at the same time: ‘Either we go back to military government and give the democratic forces a chance to grow under normal conditions, for a year after the war, or we can all face revolution, communism, or another form of fascism all over Europe’. 74 Others, such as his superior Charles Poletti, struck a more optimistic tone and commiserated the alarmist comments. For Poletti, local clashes such as the one described in Calitri were simply a sign of a reawakened sense of democracy in Italians. This would have found its expression in ‘a lot of people who have forgotten democracy and got so accustomed to the so-called infallible dictates of Mussolini that every outburst – which is democracy trying to make itself heard – is construed as a frightful threat’. 75 While Poletti probably got closer to the gist of the revolts’ character, the Allied interpretive lens continued to regard any public voicing of displeasure as a form of mob rule. The irony here of course was that local communities got together behind a common goal for perhaps the first time in years after fascism had depoliticized the discourse. The Allies – as liberators – suppressed these modes of political participation yet sought to teach ‘democracy’ at the same time without taking into account the public communal spirit that characterized Italian rural villages. 76 This made their occupation under the liberation paradigm so tough to digest for Italian civilians.
It was thus all the more important to quickly build up a working infrastructure and governmental system at the local level to institutionalize the grip on society. That the development of local government was of utmost importance was something that all Allied officers could agree on, albeit for different reasons. While those having an occupation with the recourse to a sound infrastructure in mind would see the benefit of an unimpaired municipality, progressive CAOs favored the (re)construction of the local administration to implement their ambitious program of engineering political and societal change. Maurice Lush went as far as calling ‘the development of local government, the only basis of sound administration, […] the primary duty of Regional Commissioners’. 77 His call indicated that, by mid-1944, the occupation had entered a new phase in which Regional Commissioners as the top CAOs in Italian regions should spearhead the Allied effort to let Italians shoulder more responsibility.
George C. S. Benson, responsible for the military government of British units during the landings in Calabria in September 1943, was well aware that ‘democracy’ – this was the label he used to describe the setup of a local administration – could not be established while fighting. Yet soon enough, Calabria saw the municipality's emergence. With the creation of local councils, the Allied preference for relying on local notables manifested itself once more. If the selection process in most villages and towns is considered, it comes as little surprise that local notables ended up in the councils. 78 In Sessa in the province of Caserta, the local CAO sought the advice of the city's most prominent citizens. After the mayor and the Segretario Comunale suggested names, the CAO interviewed the respective candidates and asked them to mutually evaluate each other's candidacies. Eventually, he would request the Carabinieri to perform a background check on them. 79 While the British Security Section was involved too, it is not hard to imagine how local elites transferred their rather informal social and political clout into the officially sanctioned functions now delegated to these councils.
The overriding argument for membership in the council was the professional (lawyer, bank director, etc.) or social (landowner) position. Little mention of political parties was made in terms of them being the main platform from which democracy should thrive. References to the Communist Party marked the lone exception. When Poletti pushed for the inclusion of workers in the councils in Sicily, he incurred only the reproach that he would further the communist cause by such a policy. 80 In spontaneous settings, such as the selection of mayors by a show of hands, the inclusion of Communists into the decision-making process was possible. But as soon as the procedure to further institutionalize the local government took root, communist-leaning civilians were left out.
In general, the creation of local councils seemed dominated by the idea of thwarting the influence of prefects. Despite this policy directed against the Italian state bureaucracy, Italian actors actually agreed. The ministerial bureaucracy saw in a process controlled from above, which largely excluded political parties or competition among them, the opportunity to ensure an orderly transition to the postwar period. 81
While New York Times journalist Anne O’Hare McCormick construed the political struggles in October 1944 through the prism of political turmoil – there would be ‘multiplying street fights between Communists and Christian Democrats disturbingly reminiscent of the violence that preceded the advent of fascism’ – the local scene conveyed a different picture. 82 The fall of 1944 marked a time in which Northern Italy still suffered from the brutal German occupation, whereas different parties began to increasingly surface in the South. While the war was, hence, still raging in the North, the provinces in Southern Italy were already returned to the control of the Italian government, pointing to the temporal and spatial dimensions of the Allied occupation of Italy.
Before many of them would dissolve a few years later, old as much as newly-established parties shaped political discourse in the Italian South to a great extent. Parties like the Partito Democratico del Lavoro (PdL) or the Partito d’Azione played a vital role so that by no means was the Italian scene defined only by the dichotomy between the Christian Democrats and the Communists that impregnated so much of the postwar memories and political controversies. As late as October 1945, the Carabinieri would identify the PdL and the Liberals as the two dominating political forces in parts of Campania, to name just one example. 83 The liberal party was particularly present in this region since leading figures such as Benedetto Croce or Carlo Sforza had their main place of activity in and around Naples. The personal dimension of politics was even more pronounced in rural areas where peasant cooperatives emerged in ever greater numbers as has already been pointed out. Even though helping the Allied cause as natural contact persons, the strong influence exerted by individuals was at the same time perceived as deviating, obviously in a negative way, from the American idea of democracy: The Italians ‘tended to form multiple political parties or blocs, led by powerful personalities, rather than to join large and highly organized political parties on the American model’, as a handbook had already cautioned before the Allied invasion of Italy. 84 Years after the war was over, Poletti would come back to this, when the only advice he was willing to give Italians was that ‘democracy would work better with less parties’. 85 The transfer of an American version of democracy naturally found its limit in the dynamics unfolding in the Italian South that rather answered to the logics of social structure and interdependent relationships.
The liberation of Rome and the Normandy invasion in June 1944 then led to a re-configuration of the Allied involvement in Southern Italy. While in Northern Italy, the partisans as single actors and the resistance movement as a political center of gravity helped alleviate the need to devote ample resources to the Italian theater of war, the prevailing opinion on the Allied side was that the withdrawal from Southern Italy would work best if everything was left untouched. This meant consigning local rule to the notables that had entrenched themselves already so deeply into the Allied occupational fabric. What mattered now was to protect these arrangements, that is, to lessen the risk that leftist parties would exploit the land question, for instance, to gain electoral votes. 86 The political hedging of these local constellations was, in other words, needed.
That this was a process still largely directed by the Allies, whose ACC by now mirrored the Italian government with over twenty sub-commissions as equivalents to the ministries and their respective portfolios, became obvious whenever the Italian state tried to intervene. 87 When in April 1944 the Italian government wanted to abolish the Sicilian Chamber of Commerce that was founded at the Allied behest, Floyd E. Thomas did not hold back. The Provincial Commissioner emphasized the American efforts to perform political reconstruction work in Italy. He spoke of the fact that a military declaration of war by the current Italian government and its representatives would never be accepted and that neither ‘should they be allowed to do so in a political sense by undermining the very foundations of democracy we built up last year’. 88
The DC gained relevance for the Allies in exactly this respect. It was a party of order in the sense that it responded to the dominant Allied logic: to keep the situation checked and quell the revolutionary potential in the South. That this was only possible by colluding with local notables, above all the owners of huge land estates, and with the backing of the Catholic Church, is a story still largely unexplored for villages in the Italian South. 89 Most Italians returned to long-practiced, allegedly apolitical, attitudes. The Sicilian woman mentioned above, writing to Allied authorities on behalf of her daughter in May 1944, would simply now serve the ‘Italian fatherland with the Christian Democrats’, to pick up on her rhetoric.
In the end, all this led to was the re-affirmation of local notables, albeit under different auspices. For the Italian state, it meant governing Southern Italy according to long-standing political mechanisms in harmony with social and political elites. 90 For the Allies, relying on local notables meant knowing that the South was well looked after in terms of not causing any trouble first for their occupation and later on by not negatively affecting the inner stability of the Italian state which went on to become an important factor in the Cold War.
This was naturally not very ‘democratic’ per se. The pivotal relevance of land ownership or notables forming parties, movements, or cooperatives to advance personal interests rather spoke to century-long mechanisms of ‘doing politics’ instead of the American objective of breathing new democratic life into a post-fascist Italy. The Christian Democrats were the new centralized power and not for nothing would the Ministry of the Interior be in their hands ever since the constitutional referendum in 1946 until well into the 1990s. Soon, the Italian bureaucratic apparatus made its voice heard and protested many of the Allied state appointments by using the argument of lacking administrative qualifications as a pretext. 91 These struggles do not necessarily need to be seen as a reawakened form of democracy. It was now simply about weaving the Italian South into the state fabric in the same ways and to the same extent as was characteristic of Italian liberalism or even fascism in the decades before.
Given that the Allies eventually shunned ‘democratization’ to gain political stability through supporting the DC, parties, despite all their agency developed in the provinces, never served as pillars for the kind of process of democratization the Allies initially had in mind. While at first military logic dominated Allied thinking, by the time a more political occupation could take hold, the wish to withdraw quickly from Southern Italy while knowing that the area was in safe keeping became paramount. For that, the DC presented itself as a viable political option. 92 It was only here, as the positive side of the medal that was hitherto negatively connoted with the Communist Party, that parties appeared as a decisive factor on the Allied horizon.
Creating stable institutions and the foundations for democracy to prosper ideally necessitated a long-distance run, to use the metaphor President Roosevelt employed (‘walk in a new atmosphere of freedom’). However, what rather transpired in the Italian field was a 100-meter dash, if not a full-fledged massed sprint towards democracy. Each participant ran into different directions according to long-held notions of democracy until the American ally lost interest and means to keep devoting resources to Southern Italy and the DC was entrenched enough to organize political relations in the South. 93
The objective of this contribution stressed the interpretative framework ‘democratization’ succumbed to, orientated much more on a pragmatist ‘what can be done with little to no cost’ than an idealistic notion of ‘exporting democracy’. Popular support in Italy was always considered dangerous after fascism so that the Americans eventually threw their support behind one party to quell competition between parties, yet also curbing one decisive element of democracy in the process. Then again, one should also point out, despite all the criticism, especially leveled against the track record of ‘democratization’, that the Allied occupation constituted a huge success in so far as it is ‘politically’ measured by transforming a fascist society into a democratic one.
The phase between 1943 and 1946 and the role the Allies played especially from 1943 to 1944, breaks up an all too linear sense-making which identifies the rebirth of democracy with the Allied arrival in Southern Italy, however. Military logics were initially paramount and once a more politicized version of the occupation set in, notions of democracy answered to an American interpretation of it, whereas Italian forms of expression – most famously the peasant's republics – were met with fierce resistance. Once the DC appeared as the party in (and of) control, the democratic moment, understood as effecting social change and breaking up century-long power structures, had passed or, more specifically, was managed. It was indeed an ‘unfinished revolution’ to employ the phrase Rosarios Forlenza has used to underline that little came out of the revolutionary struggle characterizing much of the processes kick-started by the downfall of fascism and the Allied Invasion in the summer of 1943. 94 In the same vein, this may hold true for the far-reaching American program of democratization, which first saw Italian parties as an obstacle and then counteracted its own mission by zeroing in on one party to reaffirm Southern Italy's social structure.
