Sidney Sonnino

 ( 1847 Births ) 

Sonnino followed what he called a "Bismarckian" foreign policy under which all that mattered was sacro egoismo ("sacred egoism"). The term sacro egoismo as the guiding principle of his foreign policy was Sonnino's way of saying that the interests of the Italian state were to be pursued via a ruthless policy of realpolitik. Sonnino felt no great animosity towards the Austrian empire and no great love for the Allies, and only favoured intervening on the Allied side because the French, British and Russian diplomats he was talking with were willing to promise Italy more than the Austrian and German diplomats. Sonnino admitted in private that he would have favoured having Italy enter the war on the side of the Central Powers if only their diplomats had promised more than the Allied diplomats. The Australian historian R. J. B. Bosworth wrote it was not true that Italy entered the war in 1915 because of the Italian cabinet was "stumbling over the brink into the boiling cauldron of war", but rather as an act of cold calculation by Salandra and Sonnino to achieve what they viewed as rightful Italian national interests. Bosworth wrote that the only way that Italy's entry in the First World War can be seen as a mistake was the belief by Salandra and Sonnino that Italy would be able to swiftly defeat the Austrian empire as the both prime minister and the foreign minister believed that the war would be over by Christmas 1915.

In October 1917, the Regio Esercito was badly defeated by an Austro-German force in the Battle of Caporetto, and for a moment it appeared possible that Italy was going to be knocked out of the war. In order to encourage the Slovenes, Croats and Serbs serving in the Imperial Austrian and Royal Hungarian Army to desert, Sonnino endorsed the idea of uniting all of the South Slav peoples into a state to be called Yugoslavia ("the land of the South Slavs"). Once the crisis caused by Capretto passed and it became clear that Italy was not going to be defeated after all, Sonnino performed a volte-face on the issue of Yugoslavia and reverted back to demanding all of the lands promised by the Treaty of London should go to Italy. In December 1917, the new Bolshevik government of Vladimir Lenin published all of the secret treaties signed by Imperial Russia and in this way the Treaty of London came to be public knowledge. Sonnino was greatly upset at the Bolsheviks for publishing the Treaty of London, especially as the related diplomatic correspondence to the negotiations made him look petty and selfish as he demanded various parts of the Austrian and Ottoman empires as the reward for entering the war on the Allied side. Sonnino sought to explain away the Treaty of London by arguing that he had demanded too much with the intention of bargaining away the gains made by the Treaty of London in exchange for territory elsewhere. However, once the terms of the Treaty of London came to be public knowledge, Sonnino found himself trapped as Italian nationalists argued that given Italy's staggering heavy losses in the war that it would be a betrayal of the war dead to settle for anything less than what the terms of the Treaty of London had promised.

In March 1918, Germany launched Operation Michael, an offensive that marked the beginning of the Kaiserschlacht ("Emperor's Battle"), the final offensive in France intended to win the war for the Reich. In response to the initial success of the Kaiserschlacht with the British and French hard pressed, the Allied armies were finally unified into a Supreme Command under Marshal Ferdinand Foch. Sonnino objected strenuously to a Supreme Command with the control of all the Allied armies, arguing that it was humiliating that King Victor Emmanuel III who as King of Italy was the Supreme Commander of all the Italian forces should be subjected to the authority of a French Marshal. In response to the Kaiserschlacht with the German Army advancing menacingly close to Paris, Foch ordered the Regio Esercito to go on the offensive again with the hope of distracting the Germans who would have to come to the aid of their Austrian allies. The two most senior commanders of the Regio Esercito, Armando Diaz and Pietro Badoglio, both objected to Foch's orders, saying the Regio Esercito had been badly mauled at Caporetto and to go on the offensive again would risk "another Caporetto". The way that the Italians refused to go on the offensive in the spring of 1918 when the British and French were being hard-pressed on the Western Front greatly alienated the other Allied leaders. In June 1918, the Austrians went on the offensive and were defeated at the Second Battle of the Piave River. The Italian victory at Piave raised the stock of Italy with the Allied leaders, but the refusal of the Italians to follow up their victory with an offensive again strained relations with the Allies. In the fall of 1918 when became clear that Germany was going to lose the war and that the Austrian empire was collapsing, Sonnino pressed very strongly for the Regio Esercito to go on the offensive as he argued that another Italian victory would help Italy achieve what had been promised in the Treaty of London. In October, the offensive that Sonnino had lobbied for was launched and resulted in the Italian victory at the Battle of Vittorio Veneto.

Sonnino defended the literal application of the Treaty of London and opposed a policy of self-determination for the peoples in the former Austro-Hungarian territories.Burgwyn, Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1940, p. 12-14 King Victor Emmanuel III chose not to impose clear guidelines on the Italian delegation out of the fear that either Orlando or Sonnino might resign in protest, which would leave the king with the responsibility of overseeing the formation of a new government, a duty that king wished to avoid. Victor Emmanuel was close to the generals of the Regio Esercito, who advised against annexing Dalamatia under the grounds that garrisoning it would represent an intolerable financial burden on the Italian state. The Chief of the General Staff, Armando Diaz, was more interested in African expansion. In a memo, he called for bringing the interior of Libya under Italian control (something not finally achieved until 1932), the expansion of the colony of Italian Somaliland likewise into the interior; for Britain and France to cede their colonies of British Somaliland and French Somaliland to Italy; and for the peacemakers in Paris to accept " our unique influence in Ethiopia" (emphasis in the original). However, the king did not wish to appear "unpatriotic" by dismissing Sonnino and instead ordered the Italian delegation to secure as much of Italy's "just aspirations" as possible in Paris. The vague nature of the king's mandate with the orders to secure Italy's "just aspirations" allowed Sonnino and Orlando to pursue different policies at the Paris peace conference as Orlando was more open to compromises with Wilson than Sonnino.

Wilson had stated that national self-determination was to be the basis of the peace. However, Wilson supported per the Treaty of London the Italian claim to have the Brenner Pass as the new Italian-Austrian frontier and for Italy to annex the Austrian province of South Tyrol despite the fact that South Tyrol had a German majority. Sonnino often argued to Wilson that because Italy lost half-million killed in the war that felt the Allies had an obligation to fulfil all of the terms of the Treaty of London. Sonnino's cold and aloof personality made him few friends at the conference, and his unwillingness to lobby the other delegates, which he considered to be beneath him, won him no allies at the conference. Sonnino's arguments were described as contradictory and inept. On one hand, he claimed Fiume under the grounds of national self-determination, arguing the majority of the people in Fiume were Italian even through the Treaty of London did not assign Fiume to Italy while on the other hand he claimed Dalmatia and Istria under the grounds that the Treaty of London had assigned those areas to Italy despite the fact that the majority of the people in Dalmatia and Istria were Croats and Slovenes respectively who did not want to join Italy.

Orlando's inability to speak English and his weak political position at home allowed Sonnino to play a dominant role. Their differences proved to be disastrous during the negotiations. Orlando was prepared to renounce territorial claims for Dalmatia to annex Rijeka (or Fiume, as the Italians called the town), a major seaport on the Adriatic Sea, but Sonnino was not prepared to give up Dalmatia. Italy ended up claiming both but got none because of strong opposition to the Italian demands by US President Woodrow Wilson, who had a policy of national self-determination. In point IX of Wilson's 14 Points, he promised that the post-war frontiers of Italy "should be effected along clearly recognisable lines of nationality", and Wilson intended to apply that point in regards to Italian-Yugoslav frontier. On 24 April 1919, Orlando and Sonnino along with the rest of the Italian delegation walked out of the Paris peace conference in protest over the unwillingness of Wilson to support applying the Treaty of London plus adding Fiume. The Italian delegation were welcomed as heroes in Rome, but were soon forced to return to Paris when it became clear that the peace conference would continue without them and that Italy would have even less chance of achieving its ambitions out of the peace conference. Sonnino stubbornly maintained that Italy was entitled to a larger share of Asia Minor than it was promised under the Treaty of London, and received a promise that Italy would have a larger occupation zone in what is now southwestern Turkey. The belief that Sonnino was seeking to add the city of Smyrna (modern Izmir, Turkey) where slightly less than one-half of the population was Greek-speaking, to the Italian occupation zone led directly to the Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos ordering the Greek army to occupy Smyrna in May 1919, which set off the Greek-Turkish war. Bosworth argued that given the antipathy of Wilson that Sonnino did in fact do fairly well at the Paris peace conference as he won for Italy the Austrian province of South Tyrol (modern Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol), the ethnically mixed city of Trieste and parts of Istria where Slovenes were in the majority.