Conte Carlo Sforza was an Italian diplomat and statesman living as an exile during the Fascist era. The major figure the Count became in foreign affairs was after the Second World War. Sforza was born on the twenty fourth of September in 1873 of an Italian family first named Attendoli that produced two famous soldiers of fortune and founded a dynasty that ruled Milan for almost a century.
Sforza was a native of Lucca and the second son of Count Giovanni Sforza living between 1846 and 1922 who was an archivist and noted historian from Montignoso in Tuscany and Elisabetta Pierantoni born in a family of rich silk merchants. On the paternal side Carlo was a descendant of the Counts of Castel San Giovanni which was an illegitimate branch of the nobility of Sforza and had ruled the Duchy of Milan in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Caterina Sforza was an Italian noblewoman who ruled the cities of Forlì and Imola now in the Emilia Romagna region of northern Italy during the late fifteenth century becoming known for her cunning and audacity but also brutality as a warrior.
At the death of his older brother in 1936 Carlo inherited the title. Sforza entered the diplomatic service in 1896 and was posted in various capital cities from Cairo to Constantinople, Beijing to Bucharest and Belgrade as well as in London, Madrid and Paris. During the interim between the war years the Count was undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in 1919 to 1920 and was made minister for foreign affairs during the two years from 1920 to 1921. Resigning from the appointment of ambassador to France in February of 1922 nine months later Carlo Sforza was refusing to serve in the fascist regime under Benito Mussolini.
For nearly two decades Sforza lived abroad in Belgium until 1939 and in the Unites States after 1940 as lecturer and political commentator. When Sforza returned to Italy in 1943 the Count held a number of ministerial and other posts until he was elected a member of the constituent assembly in 1946 as a Republican. Joining the third cabinet of Alcide de Gasperi in 1947 as minister of foreign affairs and retaining this position until July of 1951 the minister resigned because of ill health and died on the fourth of September of 1952 in Rome.
After the War Sforza’s influence was a determining factor in the Italian ratification of the peace treaty and in Italy’s joining the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation and in its adherence to the North Atlantic Treaty. The organization set up by a convention signed in Paris in April of 1948 to coordinate efforts to restore Europe’s economy under the European Recovery Program called the Marshall Plan had among its many functions to help abolish quantitative trade restrictions between its member countries.
The OEEC allocated scarce resources among the countries and devised a system for regular consultation on matters of common economic concern. Superseded by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development including but not limited to European members it was abbreviated as OECD in 1961 with its headquarters in Paris.
The European Commission participates in the work of the OECD but does not have the right to vote. The G20 Summit Meeting brings together the member countries and a range of partners to collaborate on key global issues at national, regional and local issues. The OECD has thirty eight member countries that span the globe from North and South America to Europe and Asia Pacific.
A politician and prime minister of post war Italy from 1945 until 1953 Alcide de Gasperi contributed to the material and moral reconstruction of the nation. Born in the region near Pieve Tesino of Trento in the former Austrian Tyrol now in Italy in 1883 Alcide de Gasperi died on the nineteenth of August in 1954 at Sella di Valsugana.
From the age of twenty four years De Gasperi directed the journal Il Nuovo Trentino in which the defence of Italian culture and the economic interests of the own region were prominent. Elected to the Austrian parliament as an Italian representative in 1911 and joining other Italian deputies the Italians sought the annexation of the Trentino by Italy. When the annexation of Trentino was completed in 1919 De Gasperi was elected deputy to the Italian parliament in 1921 as one of the founders of the Italian Popular Party or Partito Populare Italiano representing the Christian Democrat tradition an adversary of the fascist regime.
A Sicilian priest Luigi Sturzo founded in January 1919 the original Italian Popular Party with its tight organization and discipline and won a quick success. Arrested and sentenced to four years imprisonment by the militia de Gasperi was released after serving sixteen months in captivity through the intervention of Pope Pius XI and in 1929 became a librarian in the Vatican.
Active in the resistance during World War II Alcide de Gasperi succeeded in reorganizing the PPI as the Christian Democratic Party. Upon the fall of the fascist regime in 1943 the politician returned to the forefront of Italian politics. He became secretary of the Christian Democratic Party and was appointed minister without portfolio in the first cabinet of Ivanoe Bonomi in June of 1944 and minister of foreign affairs in the two succeeding cabinets. De Gasperi formed his own cabinet on the tenth of December in 1945 remaining in office for more than seven years.
De Gasperi signed the peace treaty with the Allied Forces and made the Italian Parliament ratify it in September of 1947 then enacting a new constitution in January of 1948. The institution of a land reform program over a long term in southern and central Italy by the government had sought to increase utilization of Italy’s natural resources by constructing new power plants fuelled by natural gas or natural steam of volcanic origin.
Many Christian Democrats looked for an opening to the left signifying an alliance with the Italian Socialist Party namely the Partito Socialista Italiano PSI. After years of careful political groundwork Aldo Moro of the Christian Democrats succeeded in forming a government in 1963 that included the PSI. DC and PSI cabinets dominated most of the decade of the 1960s and much of the 1970s. The DC weakened somewhat owing to scandal allegedly involving secret government influence of a Masonic lodge and the DC temporarily surrendered the premiership and presidency in 1981 to its coalition partners.
The party remained strong and was the dominant partner in a series of coalition governments until the early 1990s. The Cold War had ended in non-alignment along with the political climate that had enabled the DC and the PSI with their smaller centrist allies to form coalition governments that excluded the communists but tolerated political corruption. The DC was rocked between 1992 and 1993 by involvement of some of its leading members in financial scandals and political corruption.
The Italian Popular Party was the former centrist Italian political party whose several factions were united by their Roman Catholicism and anticommunism. They advocated programs ranging from social reform to the defence of free enterprise. The DC usually dominated Italian politics from the Second World War until the middle of the decade in the 1990s.
The struggling DC reverted to its original name of the PPI in January of 1994 but in parliamentary elections later that year it fell from power and was reduced to a fairly minor party. Subsequently joined to the centre left Olive Tree coalition from 1996 to 2001 the centrists participated as a junior member of Italy’s coalition government. The PPI merged in 2002 with the centrist Daisy or Margherita party which in 2007 was folded into the Democratic Party on the new centre left as the Partito Democratico.
Footnotes :Also known as Christian Democratic Party, DC, PPI, Partito Della Democrazia Cristiana, Partito Popolare Italiano.
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