History of Alto Adige/South Tyrol

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Contents 1 The end of World War I 2 Annexation to Italy 3 Fascist rule 4 World War II 5 After World War II 6 Terrorism 7 Today 8 Independence controversy 9 References

[edit] The end of World War I

In the final days of World War I, the troops of the already disintegrating Austrian-Hungarian Empire were defeated on 29 October 1918 in the Battle of Vittorio Veneto in Italy^[1]. The Italian victory determined the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Army, which led to the end of the First World War on the Italian Front. The subsequent armistice of villa Giusti was signed on November 3 but was set into force only a day later on November 4, with the Austrian command having ordered its troops to cease hostilities one day too early. This allowed the Italian troops, which had already advanced into Veneto, Friuli and Cadore, to overrun the now undefended Austrian positions, penetrate deep into Tyrol and occupy its capital Innsbruck. In the process some 356,000 soldiers of the Austrian army where taken prisoner^[2].

[edit] Annexation to Italy

The Treaty of Saint-Germain then ruled that, according to the London Pact, the southern part of Tyrol had to be ceded to Italy. The region included not only the largely Italian speaking area today known as Trentino (then often called Welschtirol in German), but also the territory now known as Südtirol/Alto Adige which, according to the census of 1910, was inhabited by over 88% German speakers, and a small part of today's province of Belluno.

The northern part, consisting of the geographically separate regions of Northern Tyrol and Eastern Tyrol, is today one of nine federal states of the Federal Republic of Austria called Tyrol.

According to the London Pact Italy had been granted the right to push its border northward to the Alpine water divide (up to the Brenner pass). The territory was consequently annexed with the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919. The areas around Trento formed Italian-speaking Trentino. In the north the region around Bolzano was inhabited by mother language Germans and Ladins (today Ladin is the third official language of South Tyrol, alongside German and Italian), although under the Austrian rule Ladin was considered as an Italian dialect.

The Italian annexation, however, went against the principle of self-determination propagated by US-president Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points, specifically against point nine where Wilson explicitly stated that "readjustment of the frontiers of Italy should be effected along clearly recognizable lines of nationality"^[3]. Consequently, Austrians had hoped that the United States - which did not sign the London Pact - would enforce Wilson's Fourteen Points, respecting the ethnic principle.

In fact, according to the census of 1910 the area was inhabited by approximately 88% German speakers, 8% Ladin language and Italian language speakers and 4% speakers of other languages of the Austrian empire. Tyrol tried to maintain its unity suggesting a secession from Austria and the formation of a neutral (but unified) Free State, with extensive economic and military concessions to Italy.^{[citations needed]}

In 1923, the town of Cortina d'Ampezzo and other areas were incorporated into the Province of Belluno.

[edit] Fascist rule

After the rise of Fascism, starting from 1926 a policy of Italianisation was implemented. All the toponyms, even the minor ones, were given in the Italian version. Even many family names were translated. The process intensified in the 1930s, when the government of Benito Mussolini encouraged thousands of ethnic Italians to relocate to the region. The proportion of the Italian-speaking population thus grew significantly up to over 34% in 1961^{[citation needed]}. Adolf Hitler never claimed back the German-speaking South Tyrol for his Third Reich, because Benito Mussolini was too important an ally. In 1939, both dictators agreed to give the German-speaking population a choice (the Alto Adige Option Agreement): they could emigrate to neighbouring Germany (or its new territories, annexed Austria) or stay in Italy and accept their complete Italianisation. It was a difficult choice for the people of South Tyrol: between their language or the landscape where their ancestors had lived for centuries. Both solutions meant the breakdown of their distinct culture. As a consequence, South Tyrolean society was deeply divided. Those who wanted to stay (Dableiber), were condemned as traitors, those who left (Optanten), the majority, were defamed as Nazis. Because of the outbreak of World War II, this agreement between Mussolini and Hitler was never fully consumated, but the emigration of the Optanten (who settled in German annexed Western Poland, only to be massacred or expelled after the war) further weakened the ethnic-German element.

[edit] World War II

In 1943, Mussolini was deposed and Italy surrendered to the Allies, who had invaded southern Italy via Sicily. German troops promptly invaded northern Italy and South Tyrol became part of the Operation Zone of the Alpine Foothills, annexed to the Greater Germany. Many German-speaking South Tyroleans, after years of linguistic oppression and discrimination by Fascist Italy, wanted revenge upon ethnic Italians living in the area (particularly in the larger cities) but were mostly prevented from doing so by the occupying (northern) German Nazis, who still considered Mussolini head of the Italian Social Republic and wanted to preserve good relations with the Italian Fascists still supporting Mussolini and his combat against the Allies. Although the Nazis were able to recruit amongst South Tyrolean youth, and to capture the local Hebrews, they prevented anti-Italian feelings from getting out of hand. Mussolini, who wanted to set up his new pro-German Italian Social Republic in Bolzano, was still a Nazi ally.

The region largely escaped fighting during the war, and its mountainous remoteness proved useful to the Nazis as a refuge for items looted from across Europe. When the 88th Infantry Division occupied South Tyrol from May 2 to May 8, 1945, and after the total unconditional surrender of Germany (May 9, 1945), it found vast amounts of precious items and looted treasures of art. Among the items reportedly found were railway wagons filled with gold bars, hundreds of thousands of metres of silk, the Italian crown jewels, King Victor Emmanuel's personal collection of rare coins, and scores of works of art looted from art galleries such as the Uffizi in Florence. It was feared that the Germans might use the region as a last-ditch stronghold to fight to the bitter end and from there direct Werwolf activities in Allied-controlled territories, but this possibility was rendered moot by the suicide of Hitler, the disintegration and chaos of the Nazi apparatus and the rapid Nazi German surrender thereafter. (The Times, London, 25 May 1945)

[edit] After World War II

In 1945 the South Tyrolean People's Party (Südtiroler Volkspartei) was founded, above all by Dableiber – people who had chosen to stay in Italy after the agreement between Hitler and Mussolini. A party founded by the Optanten would not have been acceptable for the occupying Americans, owing to the Optants' apparently close relationship to the Nazis and their ideology. The support of the Dableiber also proved useful as a means of deflecting renewed future Austrian claims for the return of South Tyrol into the Austrian state.
Renewed Austrian attempts to regain South Tyrol after World War II again came to nothing. In 1946, Italy and Austria accepted a compromise solution, the De Gasperi-Gruber agreement so named after the Austrian minister for foreign affairs and the Italian prime minister (and former member of the Austro-Hungarian parliament before WWI). The German-speaking people were granted special rights. However, instead of setting up a separate province for the German- and Ladin-speaking population, De Gasperi diluted minority self-government by granting an "Autonomy Statute" to a single Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol region (originally called in German Trentino-Tiroler Etschland) in which Italian speakers were in the majority. Real self-government for the South Tyroleans was thus made impossible. Even what little was granted was not fully and quickly implemented, and the implementation of this "First statutory order" was delayed repeatedly, while more and more Italians were encouraged to relocate to South Tyrol, with the aim of creating an Italian majority.

Many South Tyroleans began to suspect that the democratic Italian Republic was trying to do in more peaceful ways what Italian Fascists had failed to do by force, namely Italianise the province. In fact, completion of local infrastructural development (hydro power and steel plants) saw more and more Italians moving to the South Tyrol to live in state-built housing and employed in state bureaucracy and state-encouraged businesses. No wonder many saw this as a policy whose aim was to create an irreversible Italian majority. Some went so far as to believe that indigenous South Tyroleans were on a "Todesmarsch", a death march into oblivion.

As a consequence of delaying implementation of the statutory order, the late 1950s saw the rise of anti-Italian insurgency in South Tyrol. Until December 1960 among the organizers there were reputed Austrian conservatives with an active anti-Nazi resistance record, such as the journalists Fritz Molden (who went on to become an important publisher) and Gerd Bacher (later to become head of the Austrian state television, ORF). Following the withdrawal of these moderate personalities, the insurgency soon resorted to acts of terrorism which at the beginning was targeted only against Italian infrastructure.

[edit] Terrorism

The late 1960s brought some formal progress towards the establishment of self-government for the South Tyroleans. In consequence, only the most fanatical of the insurgents wanted to continue their fight for an Austrian South Tyrol by violent means. Moreover, the resistance movement was increasingly infiltrated by far-right activists from Austria and Germany. Insurgents carried out 361 attacks with explosives, guns and land mines, between 1956 and 1988. Acts were mainly against infrastructures, so human casualties were very few considered the time span involved. However, some of the acts were cowardly aimed at killing police officers in the line of duty. On June 25, 1967, four police officers dispatched to inspect a power line were killed by explosive booby traps in what is remembered as the "slaughter of Cima Vallona". Three months later, on September 30, two policemen were blown to bits while inspecting a suspicious suitcase abandoned in the railway station of Trento. In total 21 people were killed, among which 15 military and law enforcement personnel, two civilians and four terrorists, who died when their own explosive devices blew up. The wounded were 57 (24 military and law enforcement officers and 33 civilians). The terrorists were eventually discredited by their association with neo-Nazi circles in Austria and Germany, and the investigations pursued by the Italian law enforcement bodies led to many arrests and a total of 17 court cases that brought prison terms on 157 defendants, among which 103 South Tyroleans, 40 Austrian citizens and 14 German citizens.

Eventually, international (especially Austrian) public opinion and domestic consideration led the Italian central government to consider a "Second statutory order" and to negotiate a "package" of reforms that produced the "Autonomy Statute", that virtually delinked the mostly German speaking province of Bolzano from the Trentino. The new agreement was signed in 1969 by Kurt Waldheim for Austria and by Aldo Moro for Italy. Even then, it still took another 20 years for the reforms to be fully implemented.

[edit] Today

Today, South Tyrol enjoys a high degree of autonomy, and relations with North and East Tyrol — the two portions of the old state retained by Austria — are lively, especially since Austria's 1995 entry into the European Union, which led to a common currency and a de facto disappearance of the borders. Today, the whole historic region Tyrol, consisting of the Austrian state Tyrol (North and East Tyrol), South Tyrol and the province of Trento forms a Euroregion, a region of intensified cross-border cooperation within the EU, called "Tirol-Südtirol/Alto Adige-Trentino" which, albeit having only limited competences, led to a joint Tyrolean parliament . The South Tyrolean People's Party, or Südtiroler Volkspartei, has been consistently in power in South Tyrol since its founding in 1945.

However, South Tyrolean society is still to some extent segmented across ethnic lines: each resident must declare his or her language group at the census (choosing amongst Italian, German or Ladin). According to the 2001 census more than two-thirds of the population is German-speaking (69%); the second most used language is Italian (26,5%), followed by Ladin (4%). Places today have two (Italian and German) or even three (with Ladin) names on the road signs. German is the majority language of 103 of 116 municipalities, with the remaining 13 divided between Ladin (8) and Italian (5). However, the two largest cities, Bolzano and Merano, both have sizable Italian-speaking populations (73% and 48.01% respectively).

Public jobs are assigned by language-group quotas, and require proficiency in both Italian and German, with the effect of protecting the local labour market from immigration. Notwithstanding this imperfect cohabitation, since the 1980s there has been an increased call, especially amongst the youth, for superseding ethnic divisions. One famous advocate of this novel movement was Alexander Langer (1946–1995), MEP for the Greens group.

Furthermore, the increased permeability of European borders (e.g., with Austria) following the Schengen Treaty has further undermined the rationale of the special autonomy of the region. As a result, the future of the cultural preservation policies that served the region during the past 40 years is not clear.

[edit] Independence controversy

Austria does still see itself as the protecting power of the German-speaking population of this region. For example, South Tyroleans are granted certain privileges regarding access to Austrian universities. Many young South Tyroleans as a result choose to study in universities such as Innsbruck or Vienna. In the academic year 2005/2006, 5251 South Tyroleans were studying at an Austrian, 6064 at an Italian University. The latter number includes 1956 students of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano^[4].

Currently there is an ongoing discussion in the Parliament of Austria to make its role as a protecting power official by including it into the preamble of a planned reformed constitution.

In May 2006, former Italian president Francesco Cossiga, and senator for life in the Italian Senate, brought in a bill that would allow the region to hold a referendum, where voters could decide whether to stay with Italy, return to Austria, or become fully independent.^[5] The proposed bill was immediately rejected in the Italian parliament. The South Tyrolean People's Party (SVP) rejected the proposal as well, maintaining the initiative would revive ethnic tensions.

Language 1991 2001 German 67.99 % 69.15 % Italian 27.65 % 26.47 % Ladin 4.36 % 4.37 %

[edit] References