Pact of Rome

On 10 April 1918, on the Capitol in Rome, the three-day Congress of the Oppressed Nationalities of Austria-Hungary came to an end. The delegates of the Italians, Czechs and Slovaks, Poles, Romanians and Yugoslavs, who had been meeting since 8 April, adopted a joint declaration in which each of these nations proclaimed its right to unite in a national state and to full political and economic independence. They declared the Habsburg monarchy an instrument of German domination and the chief obstacle to the realisation of their rights, and accordingly pledged themselves to a common struggle against their common oppressor. The congress also endorsed the Italian–Yugoslav agreement, which was thereafter called the Pact of Rome.

The road to an understanding between the Italians and the Yugoslavs was a hard one. The Treaty of London of 1915 had promised Italy Istria, part of Dalmatia and the islands, lands inhabited largely by Croats and Slovenes, while the émigré Yugoslav Committee regarded them as part of the future common state announced in the Corfu Declaration. After the defeat at Caporetto, however, some Italian politicians and publicists came to the conclusion that Italy would win the war against Austria-Hungary more easily in alliance with the nations of the monarchy than against them. Their decision was also influenced by Lloyd George’s speech of 5 January, in which he gave assurances that the break-up of the Habsburg monarchy was not a war aim. Through British experts on Central Europe, the Times journalist Henry Wickham Steed and the historian Robert Seton-Watson, the envoy of an Italian parliamentary committee, the deputy and journalist Andrea Torre, negotiated in London for several weeks with the president of the Yugoslav Committee, Ante Trumbić. On 7 March the two men signed an agreement. It recognised the unity and independence of the nation of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes as a vital interest of Italy, and the completion of Italian unity as a vital interest of the Yugoslavs. The parties undertook to defend the freedom of the Adriatic together, to settle territorial disputes amicably on the basis of the principle of nationality and the right of peoples to self-determination, and to guarantee linguistic and cultural rights to the minorities that would find themselves within the borders of the neighbour.

The most important leaders of the emigration came to Rome. The Czechoslovak National Council was represented by Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik, the Yugoslavs by Trumbić and the sculptor Ivan Meštrović, along with twelve deputies of the Serbian Skupština and officers of the Yugoslav division from the Salonika front. Romanians came from Transylvania and from the Romanian parliament. The Italian delegation consisted of deputies, senators and publicists, among them the historian Gaetano Salvemini and the writer Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. French politicians took part as guests, among them Henry Franklin-Bouillon and Albert Thomas, as did Steed and Seton-Watson.

The Poles were represented by the Polish National Committee. Its small delegation included Konstanty Skirmunt, since the autumn of 1917 the Committee’s representative in Rome, Marian Seyda from Poznań and the Galician National Democrat activist Jan Zamorski (PL), men from all three partitions. For the Committee, taking part in the congress was an opportunity to present the Polish question as part of the programme of breaking up the Habsburg monarchy, although the Poles also claimed the lands of the Prussian and Russian partitions. According to some accounts, representatives of the Ukrainians and Ruthenians were not invited to the congress precisely because of the Polish delegation’s opposition. Poles and Ukrainians were already at odds over eastern Galicia.

The Italian government took no official part in the congress. The foreign minister, Sidney Sonnino, did not want to undermine the Treaty of London and declined to come to the Capitol, but he authorised Steed to state at the final session that all Italian statesmen in office favoured the aims of the congress. The next day, 11 April, the prime minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, received the leaders of the delegations and associated himself with their resolutions. The Pact of Rome was not an agreement between states and did not annul the Treaty of London, and the dispute over the eastern shore of the Adriatic returned in full force at the peace conference. For Allied propaganda, however, the congress was a breakthrough. On the Italian front leaflets with its resolutions in their own languages began to be scattered among Austro-Hungarian soldiers, and the Entente moved ever more clearly away from the idea of a separate peace with Vienna towards support for the independence of the nations of the monarchy.