A TWENTY-YEAR FEUD

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 138, 8 December 1938, Page 9

A TWENTY-YEAR FEUD

POINTS OF DISAGREEMENT

A JFRUITLESS TREATY

(By "Senex.")

The sudden flaring up of feeling in Italy and France in the last few days has revealed the existence of tension along another European frontier, with all the threats to peace which that implies.

But while an unpleasant situation has been shown to exist in Southern Europe, it is by no means a new development. Franco-Italian relations have been bad, more often than not, for the past twenty years. It was Franco-Italian tension, with the subsequent squabbles about naval parity, which was a major factor in wrecking the Naval Limitation Conference of 1930, held in London after Mr. Ramsay Mac Donald's visit to President Hoover and the decision of Britain and the United States to come together on the question of naval building. And the tension of that time was the result, curiously enough, of incidents also involving Nice, Corsica, and Tunis. In fact, the French found it necessary to dispatch troops to the border to meet any possibility of a coup de main by Signor Mussolini. About that time a vigorous plan of fortification was in process of execution on both sides of the border, and French attempts to assimilate Italians in Tunis, where they formed more than half the population, were in a fair way to create a second Alsace in the view of the Fascists, who resented the cancellation of the treaty rights their countrymen had enjoyed there up to 1918, and it appeared that rival alliances led by the two Powers might come to blows. France and Yugoslavia, Italy and Albania, confronted one another in the pre-war style. CAUSES OF FRICTION. Yet at that time, in the words of Mussolini, the causes of friction between Italy and France were "neither serious nor insoluble, but only delicate." But the efforts to remove these causes of friction had never been accompanied by any spirit of good will, or of determination to reach an agreement. The Italians resented the role played by France at the making of the peace treaties, and repeatedly pointed out that they had not received their "just claims" (a fact which is somewhat comic when it is remembered that latterly the Duce has emerged as a champion of the claims of people adversely affected by the peace treaties —as long as they are outside Italian territory). This feeling that the sacrifices which Italy made in order to achieve a common victory for the Allies were not appreciated beyond the frontier, and that the Caporetto affair remained too strongly in French memory, with all its humiliating implications, coloured Italian feeling for a decade after the war. There was, in addition, jealousy of the French colonial empire, and there was the resentment which resulted from French distrust being returned for the Italian guarantee of the French frontier contained .in the later (unhonoured) Treaty of Locarno. CHANGE AFTER HITLER. Some European upheaval was needed to send the two. countries into the one camp, and that change came with the rise of Herr Hitler. The first results of this change in Germany were a growing sensitiveness about her northern frontier on the part of Italy and a willingness to compromise in the interests of common safety. This bore fruit early in 1935,.when an agreement was reached covering many outstanding questions, a monument to the desire of the French for a new buttress to the peace they saw one:r j ."■• 'm threatened by the colossus to i\v There was to be frontier rectifi ;i between Libya and French West Africa, and between Eritrea and French Somaliland. Italian nationality for all Italians in Tunis up to 1965,

recognition of Austrian independence, and a promise of help to her if that independence were menaced. But across the scene came the shadow of Abyssinia, in which the French first made it clear to Italy, through the mouth of M. Laval, that there was no substantial objection to her receiving a free hand in North-east Africa, and later joined the block of nations which imposed sanctions in the effort to cheat Rome of her intended empire. THE ROME-BERLIN AXIS. And since the effect of Abyssinia was to create the Rome-Berlin axis, France and Italy cannot be said to have been close together since then. But this year there has been a definite worsening of relations, due to events in a different quarter—Spain. The policy of France towards Spain appears to have been largely influenced by British desire to establish a system of what is generally termed "non-inter-vention," and might more realistically be called "limited intervention." The British Government, as Lord Halifax recently admitted, having known from the first that Signor Mussolini was not prepared to see Franco defeated in Spain "for reasons which we all understand," persuaded France to align herself with the Non-intervention Committee. But Italy has had doubts about the conduct of France towards the loyalists, and France herself has doubts about the desirability of a Fascist Spain just across the Pyrenees, even as the price of a friendly Britain across the Channel. Consequently, it is declared in weljl-informed quarters that munitions have been crossing the border into Spain, though what has gone there has been a mere trickle compared to the shipments which Franco has received, even since the Anglo-Italian agreement was first concluded.

So even though France has recently recognised the conquest of Abyssinia, has sent an Ambassador to Rome again, and embarked on a campaign of pacific settlement, a hitch has developed. This, in fact, is just what happened last April, when, after a good beginning, discussions were broken off and the Duce stated fairly, plainly that they would not be renewed until the French closed the Spanish frontier and kept it closed. And now the ghost of Tunis walks again, and Europe demonstrates once more the force of a historical grievance.