Journal of Modern Italian Studies 9(4) 2004: 428 449

The Italian political system and detente (1963 1981)

Roberto Gualtieri University of Rome La Sapienza

Abstract
This article examines the impact of detente on the Italian political system, linking together internal and international dynamics in both the political and the economic spheres. Relying on various new archival sources, it analyzes the conicting effects on Italy of both the relaxing of Cold War tension and bipolarism, and the bipolar strategy to reassert US hegemony: the failure of the reformist design of the center left of the 1960s; the strategy of attention in 1969 71 and its sudden halt; the building of a devaluation model after the end of Bretton Woods, and the consequent shift from Kissingers neo-centrism to national solidarity. Detente favoured a crisis of the centrist pattern of Italian politics but at the same time the bipolar features of both the US and the Soviet strategies of detente led to a decline in US hegemony, relaunching the DCs centrality and its ability to manage external constraints. Reaganism was to recast US hegemony on a new basis.

Keywords
Italy, detente, international economy, communism, Moro, Kissinger, Cold War.

In this article, I examine the impact of detente on Italy. I will use the expression detente to refer to two distinct although interwoven phenomena: on the one hand, the progressive relaxing of Cold War political and ideological tensions and of the international systems rigid bipolar structure; and on the other, the foreign policy strategy, based on dialogue with the Soviet Union, by which the US attempted to protect bipolarism and their international hegemonic role. I will focus on the effects of detente on the Italian political system, strictly in relation to the economy, society and ideology. In continuity with the traditional permeability of Italian domestic politics to foreign inuence,1 since 1947 the Cold War had substantially contributed to shaping the countrys political system. The anticommunism of the Atlantic community and the link between the PCI and the USSR granted the centrist coalition (i.e. the alliance between the Christian Democrats and the small social democrats, Republicans and liberals) full US support, and excluded the communists from power, making them subordinate to the DC hegemony and to the developments of the international situation. At the same time, the capital-intensive model of

Journal of Modern Italian Studies ISSN 1354-571X print/ISSN 1469-9583 online 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/1354571042000296399

The Italian political system and detente

economic development created in Italy in the 1950s, its territorial and sectoral dualism, low wages and the hypertrophy of the middle class reinforced both the centrality of the DC and the primacy of the PCI on the left. The two parties strength was also a consequence of their ability in containing the Cold War and in managing its international constraints. Politically, the DC conated anticommunism with the antifascism of the 1948 Italian Constitution, which legitimized the PCI while excluding the far-right from inuence in public policy making. Economically, the constraints generated by the Marshall Plan and European integration were used by De Gasperis cabinets to redirect the pattern of development of the 1930s, and pave the way for the consequent economic miracle of 1958 63. On the Communist side, Togliatti skillfully used the iron tie with the Soviet Union as leverage to reinforce his leadership and at the same time to follow a reformist line on internal matters, which deeply rooted the party in Italian society and made it the instrument for integrating the masses into the State. But although contained, the Cold War was the unifying principle of the postwar Italian political system that brought together the different dimensions of the national international nexus, and acted as a catalyst that kept politics, economics and ideology together.2 International detente would impose growing tensions upon that pattern. 1 From nuclear sharing to burden sharing: center left and growth without development (1963 68) Starting in the mid-1950s, as the receding specter of a new world war lessened the ideological contrasts in the country, impetuous economic growth gave rise in Italy as well as in the other European countries to demands for greater state management of the economy. This lay behind the initiatives to co-opt PSI (which since 1956 had begun to distance itself from the PCI) into the government, and in December 1963 the socialists nally entered the rst center left cabinet headed by Aldo Moro. The shift in US policy from the doctrine of massive retaliation (and the nuclear sharing practice) of the Eisenhower years to the linked principles of exible response and nonproliferation, decisively favored this outcome, as well as the new understanding of the Kennedy administration that modernization offered a more effective form of containment.3 After the solution of the Berlin and Cuba crises and the test ban treaty of 1963, a center left coalition became more consistent with the new American line than the nationalistic and pro-Gaullist stance of Italys traditional rightwing Christian Democrat US allies (particularly Andreotti, Scelba and Segni), who had strongly opposed both the center left and detente.4 This convinced the Kennedy administration that the time had come to speed up a change in US policy towards Italy, moving from a wait and see attitude towards the open political and economic support of Nennis faction within the PSI and the center left coalition.5 But notwithstanding the rhetoric of the new frontier, that echoed widely in center left Italy, US

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support for that formula was more the outcome of the center lefts greater usefulness for reassessing containment in Europe, which promised to reduce the burden on the American budget, than the result of a coherent strategy of modernization of Italy. As a consequence, while international detente favored the new center left coalition, the concrete US strategy of detente contributed to scaling down its ambitions and its results. Historians agree that at least two different strategic designs were present in the opening to the left in Italy. The rst aimed at reforming the pattern of development by means of economic planning, in order to overcome once and for all the dualistic features of the Italian economy and to make the accumulation process less dependent upon exports and low salaries. In the political eld, this meant undermining the strength of the PCI, and promoting the emergence of a pro-Western, democratic left, which would pave the way for a bipolar political system. By contrast, the second design aimed at cushioning the impact of the economic miracle which had reduced unemployment and brought about increased wages on the economy, in order to prevent a reform of its underlying traits. In political terms, this meant keeping the socialists in a subordinate role and preserving the declining centrality of the DC, thus transforming the center left into a sort of widened centrism. The PSIs electoral weakness and the need to maintain the unity of the DC facilitated the success of the moderate line, whose main representative was the governor of the Bank of Italy, Guido Carli. As he saw it, the basic problem facing the Italian economy was the wage increase of 1960 62 and its impact on prots, investments and current accounts.6 Carlis prevailing line led to a postponement of economic intervention and a strict credit restriction in the rst half of 1964.7 The result was a decline in economic growth and a consequent rise in unemployment levels. This produced a reduction in the level of prices and wages, a substitution of internal with external demand and a dramatic decrease of investments.8 From 1966 onward, economic growth resumed, but on the basis of what some historians have dened as growth with no development: an export-led model based on a labor-intensive increase in productivity, wage restraint, and an equilibrium in the balance of payments based on a surplus on current accounts and a decit on capital movements, which rendered Italy one of the main suppliers of resources to the rest of the world.9 Economically, this pattern of development would weaken the Italian industrial apparatus when faced by the economic crisis of the 1970s; socially it would contribute to the particular strength which characterized the global wave of social conict in Italy of the late 1960s (which reached its climax in the student protests of 1968 and in the so-called hot autumn of 1969); politically, this was reected in the further marginalization of the socialists (who in 1966 had united with the social democrats, creating a new party, the PSU, which aimed at becoming the second Italian party), to both the DCs and the PCIs advantage.

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The US administration frequently signaled its support for the liberal/ progressive program of the center left. Meeting the social-democratic leader (and future president of the republic) Giuseppe Saragat in February 1963, Kennedy went so far as to dene the center left as a model for the new course he wanted to implement in Latin America, and talked openly of the socialists and the social democrats as a potential alternative to the excessively conservative DC.10 The US also protected the center left against its enemies on the right. For instance, the Johnson administration discretely worked to discourage the moves of the Italian president, the conservative DC Segni, against the coalition.11 Moreover, the US granted a $733 million loan to alleviate the Italian decit of payments in 1964, and assured directly or indirectly a large amount of covert aid to the parties of the coalition.12 But at the same time, the Italian center left offers a perfect case study to measure the vagueness and ambiguity of Kennedys Grand Design and Rostows ideology of modernization. In the late 1940s, the strategy and the ideology of an economic containment of communism had rested on various suppositions: the unprecedented surplus of the American balance of payments, the constraints generated by the Marshall Plan, and the resolution of the ECA apparatus to stabilize Western Europe. The ability of Europeans to control and manage those constraints did not prevent the rst stage of containment in Europe from having a transformative impact on the continent. In the 1960s, on the other hand, the growing decit in the American balance of payments and the globalization of containment (leading to the Vietnam war) gave the US much weaker leverage, reducing its hegemonic strength, while its political priorities were signicantly reoriented. The European policy of the Johnson administration, therefore, had two main goals: the consolidation of bipolar detente in the name of non-proliferation, which led to the Treaty of 1968;13 and the policy of burden sharing, through which American military presence in the German Federal Republic was exchanged for the growing German subsidy of the US balance of payments decit.14 In this context Italys role seemed to become even more marginal than in the previous years. The most attractive aspect of the center left was probably its broad parliamentary majority, which seemed to guarantee a less expensive and more self-sustaining way of containing Italian communism. Hence, the growing discontent within the National Security Council for the burden represented by the annual covert operation program for strengthening the center left government;15 the enthusiastic response to the decision to reduce it and nally bring it to an end;16 and the absence of any further American effort to promote reforms in Italy. Moreover, the orthodox economic approach of Dillon and Roosa was far more powerful than the alleged reformist line of Rostow and Schlesinger Jr. Carlis position, therefore, found crucial support when a new loan for Italy was negotiated.17 If US policy towards Italy did not help the progressive project of the center left, the indirect impact of American foreign policy went in the same direction. On the one hand, the crisis of the

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European Economic Community and of NATO undermined the cohesion of the Euro-Atlantic community, on which the Grand Design rhetoric relied: the main international reference of the center left consequently disappeared. On the other hand, the Vietnam war seriously impaired the image of America, and gave new impetus to the communists capacity to dominate the leftist electorate.18 The elections of 1968, which resulted in a sharp decrease for the PSU and a parallel increase for the DC and the PCI, sanctioned the defeat of the bipolar and reformist design of the center left. The success of the communists reinforced the centrality of the DC. But a moderate center left was inadequate in the face of a society in turmoil and a slowing economic growth. 2 Kissinger and Connelly: from the strategy of attention to the devaluation model (1969 76) 2.1 The last days of Bretton Woods: dialogue for planning and its enemies (1969 72) Starting in 1968, Italy was particularly seized by the double movement caused by economic development and the transformation of Western societies into consumer societies: the aring up of intense bursts of conict (between classes, generations, and genders) on the one hand, and the progressive overcoming of the social-cultural and political cleavages typical of industrial societies and of the Cold War era on the other. In 1968, the student protests anticipated the political radicalization of signicant sectors of the younger generation as well as the crisis of traditional parties. In 1969, the outbreak of a cycle of strikes of unprecedented intensity, breadth, and length revealed the explosive nature of the mixture between the spread of consumption aspirations and models among the young workers immigrating from the countryside, and the social tensions accumulated in the years of growth without development and non-reforms of the center left. At the same time, the development in broader sectors of the population of an acquisitive model of citizenship based on the central role of consumption gradually eroded the barriers which separated the communist sub-culture from the rest of society, making reference to the Soviet myth increasingly more abstract.19 In this context, international detente (in 1968 the Non-Proliferation Treaty was signed and the following year German chancellor Willy Brandt launched its Ostpolitik) and the crisis of the international communist movement (in 1968 the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was criticized by the PCI, in 1969 the USSR and China clashed on the Ussuri River) magnied the political systems brillation, reducing the effectiveness of the opposition against any parliamentary compromise between a weakened center left and the communists. In the DC, the main consequence was a split in the partys main faction (the so-called dorotei) and the emergence of two lines. The rst, promoted by

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Rumor and Piccoli, aimed at continuing the path of the moderate center left and emphasized the limits of detente by recalling the Soviet invasion of Prague and underplaying the relevance of the PCIs opposition to it.20 The second line had many nuances and advocates, but its main representative was Moro, who stressed the new opportunities of detente and launched the so-called strategy of attention: that is, a new dialogue with the communist opposition in parliament and with trade unions in society at large. In order to give effective and careful consideration to the protests Moro believed it was necessary to pay non formal attention to the opposition and to overcome the equilibrium of terror and a peace based on power confrontation.21 But this had nothing to do with opening the majority to the communists nor with discussing NATOs role in the detente process.22 On the contrary, the strategy of attention can be considered as a way of containing the political effects of the social turmoil and reinforcing the DCs political centrality. In the PSU, a parallel division emerged in Nennis faction and led to a split in the party. Gradually, two lines emerged. The rst was that of the social democrats and Nennis minority faction of the PSI, which aimed at rebuilding the center left of the 1960s (although with a more marked progressive program). In this context, the social democrats emphasized the anticommunist rationale, the link with the US and the risks of detente. The second line was summarized by De Martinos formula of the more advanced balances, which stressed the need to prepare for a future broadening of the center left coalition to include the communists.23 In 1969, in both the DC and the PSI, the leftist option prevailed.24 The strategy of dialogue with the communists supported by Moro and De Martino had a precise economic implication. It aimed at overcoming the strong resistance against any increase in public spending as a way to boost investments and stimulate growth, at the same time containing social tensions and their negative economic and political consequences. In the November meeting of the DCs National Council where he was elected secretary, Arnaldo Forlani openly challenged not only the orthodox analysis of Carli (according to whom the decreased investments and the deterioration in the balance of payments decit had been caused primarily by the increase in wages that followed the strikes of 1969), but also the entire economic policy of the previous years. At the same time, he explicitly connected the new economic policy to the dialogue with the PCI and detente.25 As a consequence of this strategy, the years between 1969 and 1971 saw a new season of the center left. The cabinets were based again on an alliance between the DC and the PSI, but the de facto parliamentary majority was often broader, and included the votes of PCI representatives. Under the skillful direction of the president of the Christian Democrat parliamentary group, Giulio Andreotti (paradoxically a former conservative), a large number of public expenditures and reforms that had been blocked during the center left years were now approved with the votes of the communists (among them, increased pensions, the workers statute with its

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new rules for the labor market, the creation of administrative regions). Meanwhile, public industries increased the level of their investments and trade unions gave birth to a joint confederation and negotiated signicant wage increase.26 The search by the PCI for a more autonomous role within the international communist movement and the development of detente facilitated this new course, but at the same time dened its structural limits. In 1968, the decision to condemn the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia was approved unanimously with the exception of the small pro-Soviet faction, and the party started the search for the unication and hegemony of the communist parties of Western Europe over the whole international communist movement, that can be considered as a rst proto-phase of eurocommunism.27 Afterwards, and especially after the Sino-Soviet clash on the Ussuri River in 1969, a rupture in the connection with the Soviet Union was advocated primarily by the representatives of the partys left wing, for whom autonomy from Moscow implied the adoption of a more radical, anti-American stance. In contrast, Giorgio Amendola and Bufalini, who were urging a more moderate course that could facilitate the opening of the center left to the PCI, maintained that the link with Moscow was a contribution to detente and provided protection against radicalism within the party (this was in many ways the approach Togliatti had once embraced).28 In January 1971, before the Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the contradictions of the PCIs strategy reached their climax. To a representative of the internal left, Terracini, according to whom the Soviet system could no more be dened a socialist system, Amendola replied that the PCI could not avoid an international connection, both for political and nancial reasons. Then, he added, there were only two realistic options: either move tout court to the Western social democratic eld, or look for a more autonomous position within the communist movement preserving the tie with the Soviet Union.29 At that time, the rst option appeared simply unrealistic. The Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was then the place where a sort of reconciliation between the two parties along the pattern of unity in diversity took place. The rapprochement was testied to by the words of Berlinguer after his return from Moscow and by the sudden increase in Soviet covert aid destined for the PCI, which had signicantly dropped in the previous years.30 A few days later, after the publication of an interview in which he called upon the party to speed up the road to government, Amendola found himself isolated in the PCIs direction and was criticized by Berlinguer.31 Domestic and international considerations thus induced both Moro and Berlinguer not to consider the strategy of attention as a prelude to a new majority open to the communists; yet Italys political developments generated growing concerns at the White House all the same. While according to Secretary of State Rogers even after the PSU split of July 1969 and the De Martino proposal for more advanced balances there were no reasonable

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alternatives to the center left coalition,32 Nixon called a NSC meeting on Italy (and Greece) to reassess the US position, and expressed a totally different point of view saying that the neo-fascists could be the lesser of two evils.33 In February, the President decided to extend the scope of the reassessment to the whole Mediterranean and Middle East,34 where in the previous weeks the escalation of the war of attrition between Israel and Egypt was causing an increased Soviet military presence in Egypt. Basically, two views emerged, both on the Mediterranean as a whole and on Italy: according to the rst, the growing Soviet political and military threat required a major effort on the part of the US to exercise control of the region and protect our vital interests; the second view considered unnecessary and counterproductive a stronger US presence in the Mediterranean and relied on a multilateral equilibrium in the region and on a greater role of the Europeans. With regard to Italy, the choice was between (a) to adopt an interventionist role to stem the drift to the left by providing covert assistance to organizations and individuals working for political stability, and (b) to adopt a modest prole.35 The only explicit decision that emerged from the NSC meeting held in June was about Greece. The option to resume military shipments to the Greek military junta that is to say, to choose for the interventionist option was decided upon,36 but there are many indications that the same view was adopted on Italy. In 1974 former US ambassador in Italy Graham Martin reminded the White House that never has an ambassador had such a simple instruction: halt the drift to the left in Italy and nudge it back to the center if you can, and the existence of a largescale US covert operation in Italy between 1970 and 1972 is conrmed by various sources, among them the 1976 report by the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Intelligence chaired by Otis Pike.37 Kissingers aim was to favor a return to the centrist formula, but it seems that the means chosen to reach that outcome also included indirect support to men and forces (among them the MSIs neo-fascists) involved in the so-called strategy of tension: a series of rightwing terrorist attacks and, on December 1970, an aborted coup detat which started in December 1969 and went on until 1974 with the proven connivance of sectors of the Italian secret services.38 According to the Pike Report, Ambassador Graham Martin gave over $800,000 (the total budget for the operation amounted to $11.8 million) to a high local intelligence ofcial (the SID chief Vito Miceli, later accused of connivance in many episodes of the strategy of tension), despite CIA warnings that the man was clearly linked to antidemocratic elements of the right. Other sources reports far greater US nancing to Miceli.39 That does not mean that Kissinger and Graham Martin (who were closely linked and had a direct channel of communication which bypassed the State Department) developed designs for a coup, but it is likely that they intended to exercise some pressure on the DC, in order to convince it to return to the centrist formula (at the same time warning the Italian government against pursuing the more independent Mediterranean policy which Moro was implementing during these years, and which was

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closely linked to the strategy of attention).40 Those warnings became explicit in February 1971, when Nixon and Rogers cautioned Colombo and Moro that Italy must not follow the example of Chile (where a leftist and not anticommunist government led by the socialist Allende had come to power), because it would have severe repercussions on the world situation, and urged the DC to be more united.41 DC leaders knew that in Italy the opposition to the new center left was very strong. Its three main ingredients were the disorientation that detente was causing within signicant sectors of the Italian intelligence and among the military, the strong hostility of large sectors of the business community and of the Italian middle class to the growing strength of the trade unions and to the new economic policy of the government, and the smaller parties fears of being marginalized. The sensation that, for the rst time since the beginning of the Cold War, the US may be loosening their preferential link with the Catholic party made the opposition within the country to the strategy of attention more threatening to the DC leaders eyes. Two months after Colombos trip to the White House, DC secretary Forlani publicly expressed the growing feeling in the party of being under attack by heterogeneous forces and groups that were trying to play the card of a possible reactionary and conservative regression.42 When the balance of payments started to show the dramatic decrease in private investments (which Carli would dene as a strike of capital),43 and the DC lost more than 4 per cent of its votes while the neofascists gained 5.7 per cent in the administrative elections of June 1971, it became clear that the time had come for a change both in the political and in the economic strategy of the party. In December 1971, a new President of the Republic (the DC moderate Giovanni Leone) was elected with the votes of a center right majority. Colombo was replaced by Andreotti as Prime Minister of a single-party cabinet that, after the political election of 1972 (where the DC obtained nearly the same votes as in 1968 and the gains of the extreme-right were limited), became an old-style centrist tripartite, which included the liberals and the social democrats. The US effort to halt the drift to the left had succeeded, which seemed to show that the relaunching of detente, symbolized by Nixons Moscow trip in May and by the SALT agreement, could be reconciled with a stronger US inuence in a strategic Euro-Mediterranean country like Italy. 2.2 Floating rates: in search of solidarity for stabilization (1973 76) On the 15th of August 1971, Nixon and his new Treasury Secretary John Connelly had suspended the convertibility of the dollar in order to boost an economic recovery before the presidential elections, and redress the present competitive disadvantage of the United States vis-a-vis Europe and Japan: it ` was the beginning of an era of international monetary troubles and of open transatlantic economic conict that became dramatic in 1973 when the dollar

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started to uctuate openly.44 The end of the xed rate regime rendered economically untenable the balance of payments constraint over both Carlis old economic pattern and the new course of 1969 71,45 but at the same time it allowed the centrist coalition to undertake a new economic policy able to keep together public spending and exports, to gain the support of trade unions and manufacturers, and to re-establish the DCs centrality on a new basis. The main features of this policy were: (a) the devaluation of the lira, which in 1973 left the European monetary snake and started to uctuate; (b) high ination, nourished by an expansive monetary policy and by wage increases; (c) below-ination interest rates (i.e., real interest rates went into negative territory); (d) growing administrative restrictions to capitals movements (Carli spoke of a return to the autarchy of the mid1930s); and (e) willingness on the part of the Bank of Italy to sustain the State decit by buying unsold public bonds.46 In that way, the burden of higher wages was eased by devaluation, which allowed prices to rise; the burden of very high ination was also eased by linking wage increases to ination; nally, negative interest rates, restrictions to capitals, and help from the Bank of Italy allowed the government to sustain the burden of high public spending on the states debt. This pattern relaunched growth, and promoted a sort of second industrial revolution whose protagonists were small industries and the so-called third Italy; at the same time, it contributed to grounding Italian industrial specialization to mature technologies.47 Yet, the devaluation model also had a second negative aspect: its extreme vulnerability to external shocks and political instability. The oil crisis of 1973 led to a dramatic worsening of the balance of payments in 1974, which forced the government to contain demand. The following year, the global recession hit Italy, whose GNP decreased by 3.7 per cent; the subsequent reduction of interest rates in 1976 caused new pressures on the lira, to which political instability also contributed. In January 1976, the convertibility of the lira was temporarily suspended. These developments made clear the need for a social and political compromise with trade unions and the communists to curb ination gradually and to promote stabilization, which was now openly invoked by the new Governor of the Bank of Italy, Paolo Baf.48 Notwithstanding the efforts of the Nixon administration, the indirect consequences of its unilateral economic policy and of globalization (which were both a manifestation of the crisis of American hegemony) were resuscitating the drift to the left in Italian politics. In July 1973, once the Andreotti neo-centrist government had recovered the moderates support and dened the new economic pattern, the DC reembraced the center left option, and Rumor was chosen as Prime Minister while Fanfani replaced Forlani at the partys leadership. Fanfani aimed at relaunching his leadership (against his rival Moro) on the basis of a return to an old-style center left. But in 1974 the debacle on the referendum against divorce (which showed the deep impact of the social and cultural

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transformations of the 1960s, and the climate of detente) and the outbreak of the balance of payments crisis, encouraged the DCs leadership to abandon Fanfanis line. Aldo Moro, who was the main advocate of the dialogue with the PCI, once again became the head of the cabinet (December 1974) and then elected his right-hand man Benigno Zaccagnini to the Partys Secretariat (July 1975). What had been a dialogue to promote economic planning during the last years of Bretton Woods, now, in the new era of oating currencies, turned into a search for solidarity to achieve stabilization. Moro coined the new slogan at the partys National Council meeting of July 1974, calling for an effort for salvation, that only can be an effort of national solidarity, and gravely drew attention to the fact that what was at stake is the exclusion of Italy from the leading countries of world economy and politics, and its retreat toward an anachronistic and feeble form of autarchy. Moro was not looking for a coalition with the communists. His understanding of the rigidly bipolar nature of the process of detente is beyond doubt. In the long term he said detente releases energies destined to bring populations near to what were once unthinkable limits. But in the short and medium term it requires, to be carried on, a certain stiffness, a certain delimitation of boundaries, a balance which on the other hand is messenger of peace that keeps at a distance the shores that we would meanwhile like to reach.49 Yet the USs concerns grew sharply. As Mario Del Pero has written, the analytical and historical rigidity of the categories used by Kissinger [. . .] tended to lead local and national dynamics back to his bipolar reading and, in Europe, to his bipolarizing purposes. In a critical conjuncture characterized by the split between Western Europe and the US over the Yom Kippur War, the Portuguese revolution, and the crisis of Francos regime, communist participation in the government or even a simple PCI-DC dialogue was doomed to trigger a domino effect along NATOs entire southern ank. Hence the need for Kissinger to avoid any development in the Italian political situation that could point to weakened US control over Europe and undermine their credibility as interlocutor of the Soviet Union in the detente process.50 In his analysis, the possibility that the Italian communists would achieve real autonomy or even break with Moscow was totally irrelevant. As the conclusion went, it was necessary for the United States to play great power politics to prevent an outcome that would totally reorient the map of the postwar world, and to ignore those who decry this as immoral.51 Meeting Ford and Kissinger on August 1975, Moro tried to explain the reasons for the PCIs strength in Italian society and for his respect for it: not everyone who votes communist is in fact a communist. Most of them are also in favor of freedom and liberty. And moreover the DC leader said the Italian communist leadership is trying to become part of the regular political process and to adjust their policies, as in the case of their professed support for NATO, while their ties with the Soviets do not seem to be very close at the moment. But Kissinger refused his arguments and replied bluntly: there is no way that we can be persuaded to be in an Alliance with

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governments including communists which are supposed to be against communism, no matter what you say. And when Moro added that with detente the people ask why [. . .] we keep these rigid barriers when you can see that the American President is talking to the Soviet leaders, Nixons reply that the fact that I shake hands with Brezhnev does not mean that I wish to have him as my Vice President was the best example of what the bipolar approach on detente meant.52 Some recently declassied documents seem to show the existence of a new covert operation in Italy run by Kissinger in 1973 74 without the knowledge of the new US ambassador John Volpe, in which both Graham Martin (now Ambassador in Saigon) and his former military attache James Clavio took part.53 It is impossible to say whether this operation was indirectly connected with the aborted liberal coup organized in 1974 by Edgardo Sogno with the proven connivance of large sectors of the Italian military to promote a presidential reform of the institutions.54 What is certain is that between June and July the new Defense Minister Andreotti removed Miceli from the head of the SID, partially dismantled the rightwing terrorist network, denounced the activity of an international terrorist headquarters in Paris, and planned with the secret service and military leadership the prevention of possible coup for 15 August.55 In the new economical and social situation of mid-1974 Italy, the time of the strategy of tension appeared nished. At the same time, the paucity of political and nancial resources the US could (or intended to) devote to promoting stabilization of Italy,56 the countrys position in the EEC, and the proclaimed necessity to improve solidarity between the US and Western Europe, further reduced the margins for Kissingers great power politics, and induced the US to confront the Italian problem within a multilateral EuroAtlantic framework. The meetings with France, Great Britain and Germany held in 1974 6 on the southern ank question showed a general consensus on the dangers of a communist entry into the Italian government. At the same time, some nonmarginal differences emerged on the means and the limits of any external interference in the Italian situation, and the EEC proved to be an additional protective web for Italy57 (the British foreign secretary Callaghan, for example, stated that the Russians would accept a Western Breznev doctrine, but to do this would be repugnant to us and to one of the principles of democracy58). In the end according to what we know the big power politics resulted in the so-called Porto Rico Declaration, which is to say, in the threat (made public by German Chancellor Schmidt two weeks after the international conference of June 1976) to deny nancial aid to Italy if communists would enter the government.59 But at the same time, the conferences communique could not help stating that Italy, before requesting any aid, should rst stabilize its economy by reaching a compromise with trade unions to curb ination. Despite Kissingers ineffective maneuvering, the DC once more would face the issue its own way.

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3 From Carter to Reagan: national solidarity and the dilemmas of stabilization (1976 81) In the elections of June 1976, the Italian political system reached the zenith of its bipolarization: the PCI grew to 34.4 per cent, the DC held steady at 38.7 per cent, while the PSI dropped to below 10 per cent. The socialists refused to enter a government without the communists: the burden of the economic stabilization should be shared equally among all the parties. The consequence was the formation of a single-party cabinet based on the PCIs benevolent abstention in Parliament. A communist, Pietro Ingrao, was elected President of the Chamber of Deputies. To reassure the moderate electorate and the US, Andreotti replaced Moro as Prime Minister (forming his third cabinet) and Moro became President of the DC, continuing behind the scene as political director of the national solidarity. On July 1977 all the parties signed a common program, and between October and December the two bodies of Parliament approved a document which expressed support for NATO and the EEC, as well as for detente. In March 1978, the parties (now without the liberals) reached an agreement for a new Andreotti one-party cabinet (his fourth) openly based on a coalition which included the communists. The third Andreotti cabinet endorsed a tough stabilization program based on sharp tax increases. The trade unions agreed to help the increase in productivity and partially renounced salary indexation. This permitted Italy to avoid squeezing credit, while the devaluation of the dollar against the mark enabled the Bank of Italy to keep the lira on an intermediate course between the two currencies, and therefore to buy raw materials in dollars and sell goods to the area of the mark. The result was reduced ination, a surplus in the balance of payments, and at the same time a very high rate of economic growth and investments. In January 1978, the trade unions announced a new course based on wage restraint and action against ination. Then the fourth Andreotti cabinet promoted some important social reforms, among them the creation of the free National Health Service, and attempted some forms of economic planning which proved not very effective.60 In March 1978, Moro was kidnapped by the Red Brigade, and was killed two months later. In January 1979, the communists abandoned the pro-government majority: they would never return to power. Despite much speculation, the death of Moro did not accelerate the end of national solidarity: rather it delayed its crisis, forcing the new compromise that allowed the formation of the fourth Andreotti cabinet. Yet, Moros death changed the balance of power within the DC and rendered more difcult the return to that formula between 1979 and 1981, when it became denitively impossible after the relaunching of anticommunism endorsed by Ronald Reagan and the beginning of Reaganomics. The Carter administration appeared more inclined than the its predecessor to accept and trust the DCs strategy of containing the growing electoral strength of the PCI by co-opting it in a subordinate role in order to stabilize the

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economy.61 In March 1977, a joint Vance Blumenthal memorandum limited the scope of the USs initiative to taking pains not to push the Italian government into a signicantly greater governing role for the PCI, and recognized that the kind of austerity measures which the Italian economy need[ed] probably require[d] a larger role (although not necessarily cabinet seats) for the PCI as the price for absorbing the brunt of worker discontent.62 But in a few months the rst signs of the crisis of detente prevented the development of a new foreign policy and induced the Carter administration to retreat to the traditional ground of geopolitical bipolarism.63 As a consequence, in January 1978, when the negotiations for nally including the PCI in the cabinet were under way, the State Department reafrmed (to Andreottis disappointment) US hostility toward any greater communist role in Italian politics.64 National solidaritys blockade against a communist entry into the cabinet, dened by the bipolar dimension of detente, was reinforced by the growing tensions between the two superpowers, contributing to the crisis of that formula. As a matter of fact, the PCI found itself entrapped by the contradictions of its strategy, launched by Berlinguer in 1973, which aimed at a historical compromise that is, an alliance between the PCI, the PSI and the DC. The historical compromise formula was launched after Pinochets coup detat, when the dangers of a leftist government in the American sphere of inuence appeared clear. It was a way to avoid the pressing issue of the social democratization of the party rst posed by Amendola in 1971. It provided the party with a seemingly realistic way to achieve power, avoiding a denite rupture with the Soviet Union and communist ideology that, it was feared, would produce a crisis of identity among the militants (to reconcile the Europeanization of his policy and the reafrmation of a communist identity Berlinguer launched at the same time the concept of Eurocommunism). The realism of the historical compromise lay in a conception of detente based on the further strengthening of the international leadership of the two superpowers.65 This allowed the PCI leadership to accept unconditionally Italys membership in NATO, reinforcing its political credibility, in a conceptual and political framework that was consistent both with the Breznev doctrine and Kissingers bipolar strategy of detente. But the higher realism of the historical compromise was also its main limitation. It was in fact based on the awareness (and the acceptance) of that very bipolar framework which structurally prevented the communist party from fully entering the government. The strategy of the historical compromise therefore became a function of (and subordinate to) Moros strategy of national solidarity, giving a new shape to the historical subordination of the PCI to the DCs hegemony and political centrality. But now with the crisis of detente, the basis of national solidarity also imploded. On the one hand, the PCI leadership realized the unpopularity of the harsh economic policy adopted by the government, which was not compensated with any cabinet seat: hence the new formula either in the

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cabinet or in the opposition. On the other hand, while the US reafrmed its opposition to the partys entry into the cabinet, from 1977 onwards the Soviets expressed a growing discontent for the PCIs international stance, particularly on European matters.66 It was the demonstration that Moscows previous silence (and consent) on the PCIs acceptance of NATO was strictly linked to the process of detente and to the rigid delimitation of the spheres of inuence, which the Soviets now considered threatened both by the new line adopted by Washington (especially on the issue of human rights) and by the PCIs growing participation in the government (which could endanger the stability of Eastern Europe by providing an alternative model for the communist parties). The ofcial reason for the PCIs return to the opposition in January 1979 was its hostility to the new European Monetary System adopted that month, but the reality was that Berlinguer knew that had national solidarity continued longer, he would have been forced to face fully the contradiction between communist identity and a governmental role. From the DCs point of view, national solidarity was a success. It stopped the upward electoral trend of the PCI (as the 1979 election would show), reinforced the DCs centrality in the political system, and started an economic stabilization that allowed Italy to overcome a severe nancial crisis. Most of all, the unity of the antifascist parties faced the terrorist challenge successfully, preventing political radicalism and violence from spreading among workers and strengthening democratic institutions. There is speculation on whether Moro conceived national solidarity as a premise to a Grobekoalition and to a subsequent bipolarism based on mutual legitimization and recognition between the two main Italian parties (and on the eventual transformation of the PCI), or as a convenient way to face the political and nancial emergency, preserving at the same time DCs centrality.67 What is certain is that after his death, opposition grew within the party against a dynamic conception of national solidarity open to the possibility of a communist presence in the cabinet. The birth of the European Monetary System helped bring the political situation to a dramatic stalemate. In fact, the EMS set a limit to the liras uctuations, putting an end to the devaluation model of the 1970s and making economic stabilization more urgent and more difcult. Between 1979 and 1981 this contributed to keeping open, in the DC, the possibility of a return to national solidarity, but at the same time induced the PCI to raise the price for collaboration. The impasse was traumatically solved in 1981 by Ronald Reagan, whose international impact is difcult to overestimate. On the political eld, the growing aggressiveness and militarization of foreign policy with which the Soviet Union tried to react against the decline of the communist system and of its foreign inuence enabled Reagan to launch the so-called second Cold War. Anticommunism and confrontation with the USSR recovered a central role in restructuring transatlantic relationships and European political balances, while anti-totalitarian rhetoric spread among

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European intellectuals. On the economic eld, relying upon its military and nancial centrality the US shaped (with the sharp rise of interest rates and the subsequent expansive scal policy) a new world economy based on large inows of capital (through which it was possible to nance imports from Europe and Japan), American leadership in new information technologies and European specialization in mature technologies along a continental export-led pattern (while monetarism became the universal creed among the economists). In Italy, Reaganism forced (and then made sustainable) a monetarist stabilization based on high interest rates and growth of the public debt. At the same time, it supplied the ideal political and ideological environment for the cohesion of the new pentapartito coalition (i.e. the old center left plus the liberals), and contributed to freezing the role of the PCI while culturally weakening the PSIs ability to benet from its crisis. But it was a balance that was unable to address the strictly interwoven structural problems of the political system and of the model of development. When it collapsed after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in the ruins of the rst republic, the successors of the DC and of the PCI devaluated the lira and embarked once again on the path of consensual stabilization that had rst interrupted in 1979.68 4 Conclusion: recasting American hegemony Detente was a double phenomenon. On the one hand, it was a progressive relaxing of Cold War political and ideological tensions, as well as of the rigid bipolar structure of the international system. That relaxing was also the consequence of the deep social and cultural transformations induced by economic development in Western societies; of the appearance of new players on the world scene; and of the partial emergence of a European political subjectivity sustained by the outcomes of a mighty economic growth. In that sense, detente may also be dened as the manifestation of a crisis of American hegemony (in the shape in which it had been exercised since 1947) in the face of an incipient new cycle of globalization. On the other hand, detente was an aspect of US foreign policy strategy an effort to use the dialogue with Soviet Union both to contain its feared expansion in a new way, and to protect bipolarism and shore up American centrality within the developed world. In that sense, the strategy of detente aimed above all at a stabilization of the European front which would make it possible to reconcile an overall reduction of US international presence (made necessary by the internal economic troubles) with its displacement into areas of growing strategic importance, such as the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In this second meaning, detente was among the responses by the US leadership to the crisis of American hegemony. As such, it represented an aspect of a more general strategy (of which the economic and monetary decisions taken between 1971 and 1973 were an essential component), aimed at relaunching that hegemony on a new ground.69

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With its duplicity, detente crucially contributed to the crisis of the centrist model of 1947 63, but at the same time it ended up protecting its two main traits: the central role of the DC and the dualistic and export-led features of the Italian pattern of development. As we have seen, while the relaxing of the Cold War tensions and the crisis of bipolarism favored the emergence of demands for political and economic reforms, the bipolar dimension of both the US and Soviet Unions strategy of detente was decisive in preventing a bipolar evolution of the Italian political system and a reform of the pattern of development. In the 1960s, the fragility of the grand design of the Democratic administrations contributed to the failure of the progressive center left and to the inability of the PSI to give birth to a strong reformist pole around. Then, the economic unilateralism and the cultural roughness of Nixon and Kissinger prevented the US from stopping the Moro policy of dialogue with the communists, but at the same time the persistent bipolar dimension of detente set an insurmountable limit to that dialogue and its outcomes. The two detentes got in each others way, but the overall US hegemony over Italy (and over Europe) seemed to diminish inexorably. What reversed that drift was Reaganism. Relaunching the Cold War (with the solicitous support of a moribund Soviet Union), Reagan repudiated the policy of detente. At the same time, he inherited from Nixon and Kissinger a strictly bipolar approach to the international system (based on an overestimation of the role and the danger of international communism and Soviet Union), an ability to use that representation against Europe, and unilateralism in international economic issues. But unlike the 1970s, some new elements now strengthened the hegemonic force of US policy with respect to the European elites: the new climate of confrontation with the USSR, the building of an economic pattern capable of creating an exportled European recovery, the ability of the neo-conservative conceptual framework to intercept the needs and fears of large sectors of the European society, the crisis of the old state-based political and economic pattern of the Bretton Woods era, and the difculties in substituting it with a new European dimension of democracy and economic policy. The outcome was a relaunching of US hegemony in Italy during the 1980s and, at the same time, an accelerated erosion of the political system of the rst republic, which was to be dramatically revealed in the 1990s.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank Mario del Pero for his invaluable help in conceiving and elaborating this article, and for some important documents that he allowed me to quote. I am also indebted to James Miller, Silvio Pons and Federico Romero for their comments and suggestions.

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Notes
1 D. J. Forsyth (1998) The peculiarities of Italian American relations in historical perspective, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4: 3. 2 M. Del Pero (2003) Containing containment: rethinking Italys experience during the Cold War, Journal of Modern Italian Studies 4: 532 55; R. Gualtieri (1999) Il Pci, la Dc e il vincolo esterno, in R. Gualtieri (ed.) Il Pci nellItalia repubblicana, Roma: Carocci, pp. 47 99. 3 L. Nuti (1999) Gli Stati Uniti e lapertura a sinistra. Importanza e limiti della presenza americana in Italia, Roma Bari: Laterza. After the Cuba crisis, non-proliferation implied, among other things, the removal from Italy of the Jupiter missiles with no nuclear compensation. 4 In 1963, Andreotti remarked that the Kennedy formula gives new chances not only to the socialists, but also to the communists, and Scelba recalled the ght between Christianity and Islam in order to set an absolute anticommunism against the dangers of both center left and detente (see the minutes of DCs National Council sessions of 29 July 1 Agoust 1963 and of 17 May 1963 in Archivio Storico della Democrazia Cristiana, Rome, Consiglio nazionale, b. 40, f. 70, and b. 47, f. 69). 5 L. Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e lapertura a sinistra, pp. 537 665. 6 See Banca dItalia (1964) Assemblea ordinaria generale dei partecipanti, anno 1963 (LXX), Relazione del Governatore sullesercizio 1963, Rome: Tipograa Banca dItalia (hereafter Relazione 1963), pp. 478 520. 7 See Y. Voulgaris (1998) LItalia del centro-sinistra, 1960 1968, Roma: Carocci, pp. 137 54. 8 Banca dItalia, Relazione 1964. 9 Banca dItalia, Relazione 1968, p. 348. 10 See Memorandum of Conversation Kennedy Saragat, 15 February 1963, Foreign Relation of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1961 3, XIII: West Europe and Canada, pp. 869 70. 11 See the Memorandum from Secretary of State Rusk to President Johnson, 9 January 1964, FRUS, 1964 8, XII: Western Europe, pp. 171 7. As Leopoldo Nuti wrote about the cabinet crisis of summer 1964 and the related Piano Solo, it is likely that if the crisis didnt resolve into a force test, it was also because those who had looked for it couldt rely upon the US support. L. Nuti, Gli Stati Uniti e lapertura a sinistra, p. 664. 12 See the letter from the Director of the Ofce of Western European Affairs (Meloy) to the Deputy Chief of Mission in Italy (Williamson), FRUS, 1964 8, XII, p. 180. 13 T. A. Schwartz (1994) Victories and defeats in the long twilight struggle: the United States and Western Europe in the 1960s, in D. B. Kunz (ed.) The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade. American Foreign Relations During the 1960s, New York: Columbia University Press, p. 136. 14 See D. B. Kunz, Cold War dollar diplomacy, in D. B. Kunz (ed.) The Diplomacy of the Crucial Decade, pp. 101 3. 15 Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 28 June 1965, FRUS, 1964 8, XII, p. 236. 16 Minutes of the Meeting of the 303 Committee, 22 August 1967, FRUS, 1964 8, XII, p. 279; see also the memorandum from the Ambassador to Italy (Reinhardt) to the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs (Johnson), 12 September 1966, FRUS, 1964 8, XII, pp. 259 60. 17 See the Memorandum from Secretary of Treasury Dillon to President Johnson, 13 March 1964, FRUS, 1964 8, XII, pp. 183 4.

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Articles 18 See L. Nuti (2003) Le relazioni tra Italia e Stati Uniti agli inizi della distensione, in A. Giovagnoli and S. Pons (eds) LItalia repubblicana nella crisi degli anni settanta, vol. 1, Tra guerra fredda e distensione, Soveria Mannelli: Rubettino, pp. 29 62. 19 See P. Capuzzo (2003) Gli spazi della nuova generazione, in P. Capuzzo (ed.) Genere, generazione e consumi. LItalia degli anni Sessanta, Roma: Carocci, pp. 224 30, 239 40; F. De Felice (1995) Nazione e sviluppo: un nodo non sciolto, in Storia dellItalia repubblicana, Torino: Einaudi, vol. II, t. 1, pp. 837 57, 878 2. On the international context, see A. Marwick (1998) The Sixties. Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, London: Macmillan. 20 See the proceedings of the partys National Council in Il Popolo, 21 November 1968. 21 Il Popolo, 22 November 1968. 22 Ibid. 23 See the De Martinos speeches at the socialist Central Committee, in Avanti!, 8 October 1969 and 13 October 1970. 24 In November 1968 Moro left the dorotei, which had tapped Mariano Rumor as new Prime Minister. On January 1969 Rumors right-hand man, Flaminio Piccoli, was elected secretary by the DC National Council, but with more abstentions than votes. In October 1969, the dorotei split into two factions, one led by Rumor and Piccoli and the other by Colombo and Andreotti. In November, an alliance between the Colombo Andreotti faction, Moro, the left of the party, and Fanfanis faction elected Arnaldo Forlani as secretary. Meanwhile, on the socialist side, in October 1968 Francesco De Martino, Nennis right-hand man, founded a new faction allied with the left of the party, but at the Congress Nenni obtained a slim majority (favoring the rst Rumor government). But in May 1969, Giacomo Mancini left Nennis faction for De Martinos, and in July the party split: the former social democrats, who re-established the PSDI, and the socialists, who reverted to their old name (PSI). The consequence was the fall of the Rumor government and the birth of a single-party government still led by Rumor. After the change of DC leadership, the new majorities of the two parties gave rise to a new center left partially open to dialogue with the communists, which was led by Rumor (March 1970) and then by Colombo, on August 1970. 25 We must Forlani said give new force to economic planning to stimulate growth and investments. It is necessary he added to address in a new way all the economic and social forces of the country and, in an age of changes and revolution both in the East and in the West, to meet this powerful blow of hope that drives towards new internal and international balances with fearless and responsible initiatives(Il Popolo, 7 November 1969). 26 See P. Craveri (1995) La Repubblica dal 1958 al 1992, Torino: Utet, pp. 361 88, 409 53, 567. 27 Archivio del Partito comunista italiano, Rome (hereafter APC), mf. 020, Direzione, Verbali, 23 August 1968. 28 APC, mf. 006, Direzione, Verbali, 16 April, 19 April, 7 May, 19 September 1969. 29 APC, mf. 017, Direzione, Verbali, 8 January 1971. 30 From the Congress, said Berlinguer at the PCIs directorate meeting, Our link results conrmed also for what it gives to us as well as our autonomous role (APC, mf. 017, Direzione, Verbali, 13 April 1971). For the increase in Soviet economic covert aid, see V. Riva (1999) Oro da Mosca. I nanziamenti sovietici al PCI dalla Rivoluzione dOttobre al crollo dellURSS, Milano: Mondadori, p. 292. 31 APC, mf. 017, Direzione, Verbali, 29 April 1971. 32 Rogers to Nixon, 3 September 1969, National Archives Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA), Nixon Presidential Materials (hereafter NPM), National Security Council (hereafter NSC), Italy, b. 694.

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The Italian political system and detente 33 Brown III to Kissinger, 20 January 1970, NARA, NPM, White House Central Files, Subject Files, Countries, Italy, b. 41. In October, Kissinger had proposed to Nixon an NSC ad hoc group on Italy (Kissinger to Nixon, 1 October 1969, NARA, NPM, NSC, Italy, b. 694). 34 Kissinger to Department of State, Department of Defense and CIA, 26 February 1970, NARA, NPM, NSC Institutional Files (hereafter H-NSC), b. H-28, f. 9. 35 Response to NSSM 90. US Interests in and Policy toward the Mediterranean, 12 June 1970, NARA, NPM, H-NSC, b. H-28, f. 8; Response to NSSM 88. US Policy toward Italy, 11 June 1970, NARA, NPM, H-NSC, b. H-169. 36 Memorandum of conversation, NSC meeting on the Mediterranean, Greece and Italy, 17 June 1970, NARA, NPM, H-NSC, b. H-109; NSDM 67, Military Supply Policy toward Greece, 25 June 70, NARA, NPM, H-NSC, b. H-296. 37 Graham Martin to Scowcroft, 28 October 1974, Gerald Ford Library, Ann Arbor, Michigan (hereafter GFL), National Security Adviser (hereafter NSA), Backchannel Messages, 1974 7, b. 3. Graham Martin went on: I did just exactly that. And if it had not been for the leak in Washington, it was done so smoothly, that the American hand never appeared. The Pike Report was partially published in the Village Voice, 20 February 1976. See also the interview of the former US Rome Embassy Political Ofcer Wells Stabler, released in 1992, which conrms the Pike Report (Oral History Interview, Foreign Affairs oral History Collection, Georgetown University Library, 1992). 38 The best reconstruction of these events is in G. Fasanella and C. Sestrieri, with Giovanni Pellegrino (2000) Segreto di Stato. La verita da Gladio al caso Moro, Torino: ` Einaudi. 39 C. Gatti (1991) Rimanga tra noi. LAmerica, lItalia, la questione comunista: i segreti di 50 anni di storia, Milan: Leonardo, pp. 117 8, based on anonymous interviews with many CIA ofcers. 40 Besides, among the cons of an increased European role in the Mediterranean, the NSC clearly included the risk that it might lead to spheres of foreign inuence that would be scarcely more congenial to American military and political, not to mention economic, interests than would be a Soviet sphere of inuence(Osgood to Saunders and Sonnenfeldt, 9 March 1970, NARA, NPM, H-NSC, b. H-169). 41 See E. Ortona (1989) Anni dAmerica. La cooperazione, 1967 1975, Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 282 3. On the repercussions of the episode on the Italian press, see P. Nenni (1983) I conti con la storia. Diari 1967 1971, Milano: SugarCo, p. 567. 42 Il Popolo, 20 April 1971. A year later, he returned to same subject with even more dramatic words (Il Popolo, 19 May 1972). 43 See Banca dItalia, Relazione 1971, p. 388. 44 See D. B. Kunz (1997) Butter and Guns. Americas Cold War Economic Diplomacy, New York, The Free Press, pp. 192 222 (the quotation of Nixons words is on p. 200). 45 Carli explicitly admitted this in 1974; see Banca dItalia, Relazione 1973, p. 428. 46 S. Rossi (1998) La politica economica italiana: 1968 1998, Roma Bari: Laterza, pp. 9 43. 47 M. de Cecco and G. G. Migone (1991) La collocazione internazionale delleconomia italiana, in R. J. B. Bosworth and S. Romano (eds) La politica estera italiana, 1860 1985, Il Mulino: Bologna, pp. 191 2. 48 Banca dItalia, Relazione 1975, pp. 417, 426 7. 49 Il Popolo, 20 July 1974. 50 M. Del Pero, Distensione, bipolarismo e violenza: la politica estera americana nel Mediterraneo durante gli anni 70. Il caso portoghese e le sue implicazioni per lItalia, in A. Giovagnoli and S. Pons (eds) LItalia repubblicana nella crisi degli anni settanta, pp. 4, 14. See also J. L. Gaddis (1982), Strategies of Containment. A Critical

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Articles Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 333; A. G. Andrianopoulos (1988) Western Europe in Kissingers Global Strategy, New York: St. Martins Press. On the links between Portugal, Italy and NATOs southern ank, see the meeting between Nixon, Kissinger and Gensher, 26 July 1974, NARA, Record Group 59 (General Records of the Department of State, hereafter RG 59), Records of Henry A. Kissinger 1973 7 (hereafter RHAK), b. 9. Kissingers staff meeting, 12 January 1975, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, b. 6. Memorandum of conversation Ford Kissinger Moro Rumor, 1 August 1975, NARA, RG 59, RHAK, b. 12. See the back channel telegram sent by Graham Martin from Saigon to Brent Scowcroft, in which he stresses the importance that a commitment I was duly authorized to make, on the basis of which great and true friends of the US made certain commitments of their own in trust of our commitment, be fullled without any further delay. 28 November 1973, GFL, NSA, Saigon Embassy Files kept by Ambassador Graham Martin (hereafter SEF), b. 6. See also Scowcroft to Graham Martin, 31 December 1973, GFL, NSA, SEF, b. 6 (I wish to thank Mario Del Pero who found these documents and kindly allowed me to quote them). It must be remembered that according the Pike Report, out of a total of $11.8 million approved for the covert operation in 1970 2, only $9.9 million was actually spent. The reserve was set aside to be spent in the following years (Village Voice, 20 February 1976). See E. Sogno, with A. Cazzullo (2000) Testamento di un anticomunista. Dalla resistenza al golpe bianco, Milano: Mondadori, pp. 125 49. See his interview to Il Mondo, 20 June 1974. For the preemptive meeting of 14 July, see the judicial inquiry proceedings quoted in G. Flamini (1983) Il partito del golpe, Bologna: Italo Bovolenta editore, vol. III, t. 2, p. 602. On the FEDs resistance to US participation in the international package to help Italy (a complete waste of US resources), see Kissingers staff meeting, 25 June 1974, NARA, RG 59, Lot File 78D443, b. 4. M. Del Pero, Distensione, bipolarismo e violenza, p. 144. Memorandum of conversation, Kissinger Callaghan Sauvagnargues Gensher, 23 January 1976, NARA, RG 59, RHAK, b. 16. See M. Margiocco (1981) Stati Uniti e PCI, Roma Bari: Laterza, pp. 228 30. On the limits of the sectoral planning law n. 675 (1977), see G. Vacca (1987) Tra compromesso e solidarieta. La politica del PCI negli anni 70, Roma: Editori Riuniti, pp. ` 106 19. See O. Njlstad (1995) Peacekeeper and Troublemaker. The Containment policy of Jimmy Carter, 1977 78, Oslo: Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies, p. 92. Sending the memorandum to Carter, Brzezinski proposed even greater nancial support than suggested in the Vance Blumenthal document; the memorandum is in Wollemborg (1983) Stelle strisce e tricolore. Trentanni di vicende politiche fra Roma e Washington, Milano: Mondadori, pp. 589 96. A detailed account of the making and the implementation of the new US policy of no-interference and noindifference is now available in R. N. Gardner (2004) Mission: Italy. Gli anni di piombo raccontati dallambasciatore americano a Roma, 1977 1981, Milano: Mondadori, esp. pp. 58 68, 87 96, 127 42. According to Gardner, in 1977 Vances willingness not to interfere with Mitterands new alliance with the French communists made the US attitudes to PCIs role in Italian politics seem to be even more open than they really were (see pp. 65 6, 87 91). On the turning point represented by 1978 in the crisis of detente, see R. L. Garthoff (1985) Detente and Confrontation. American Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, pp. 591 621.

51 52 53

54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

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The Italian political system and detente 64 See G. Andreotti (1981) Diari 1976 1979, Milano: Rizzoli, pp. 173 4. According to Gardner the opportunity to take a rmer stand against PCIs role in Italian politics was suggested by him to the administration in November of 1977, during a NSC meeting on Italy. Paradoxically, he explains his tougher position with the signing in October in the Italian Senate of the document in which support for the Italian role in NATO and the EEC was expressed. In his opinion, the text of the document was not particularly worrying but the problem was that it extended the common program to foreign policy matters. At the end of October, at a meeting of the Trilateral in Bonn, Gardner and Kissinger agreed in judging the PCIs international policy still too anti-American. Nevertheless, Gardner denes the communist entry into the majority in 1978 as the maximum we could have wished (R. N. Gardner (2004) Mission: Italy, pp. 170 1, 157 60, 221). 65 As Bufalini said at a partys meeting, there are two ways to get out from bipolarism. One that does not consider the agreement between the two superpowers, and another which recognizes a decisive role for them for the time being. 5 December 1974, APC, mf 083, Direzione, Verbali. 66 See S. Pons, LItalia e il PCI nella politica estera dellURSS di Breznev, in A. Giovagnoli and S. Pons (eds) Tra guerra fredda e distensione, pp. 82 7. 67 Meeting Tonino Tato (Berlinguers right-hand man) in 1979, Francesco Cossiga ` (later Prime Minister and then President of the Republic) gave off-the-record credit to the bipolar design. T. Tato (2003) Caro Berlinguer. Note e appunti inediti, ` Torino: Einaudi, pp. 90 1. 68 I have analyzed more in detail the impact of Reaganism on Italy in R. Gualtieri (forthcoming, 2004) Limpatto di Reagan. Politica ed economia nella crisi della Prima repubblica, 1979 1992, in P. Craveri et al., Gli anni Ottanta come storia, Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino. 69 For a partially similar point of view, see J. Suri (2003) Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Detente, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 256 and passim, although the author underplays in his analysis the economic dimension.

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