Vinta la guerra, persa la pace? Idee e politica di pace nel pensiero di Francesco Saverio Nitti

In June 1919, the government of Francesco Saverio Nitti in Italy found himself at the same time embodying the return to liberalism and the delicate transition between imagined peace and real peace after the Great War, being in fact the first government of the time of peace proper. Against the drift of a policy increasingly centered on the principle of sacred selfishness and the myth of mutilated victory, Nitti had started working on a project for new peace in the wake of a profound renewal of liberalism in a democratic sense and we could say “Atlantic” if one considers Wilson’s commitment to cooperation and confrontation with the United States. The years between 1918 and 1921 were decisive with respect to the relationship and metabolization of the war experience in Italy, the only one among the powers to have won the war but to behave as if it had lost it and its government found itself operating in the most delicate moment of this process by offering alternative solutions and policies to those notoriously known of nationalist expansionism. The political attempt to attribute a new international role to Italy with the fall of his government in June 1920, torn between the regret for “a peace that was not made” and the new needs of the nation, failed. Nitti opted for a real self-exile by retreating to the deep south of Italy, “in front of the sea”, to observe the post-war results on Europe with the right distance. It will be these fruitful years of writing that, in an organic and systematic set of works, leave us one of the most lucid and elaborate architectures (fruitful was also the comparison with Keynes) on European and world peace after the war.