Page 114 - Mellinato, Giulio, and Aleksander Panjek. Eds. 2022. Complex Gateways. Labour and Urban History of Maritime Port Cities: The Northern Adriaticin a Comparative Perspective. Koper: University of Primorska Press.
P. 114
plex Gateways
the territory, starting from Trieste and reaching the occupied zones in
Austria and Southern Germany. The city, if anything, benefited indirectly
from the flow of supplies passing through it, and, in such times, this was
indeed an essential benefit for the local economy.
The famous historian Arnold Toynbee was active as an expert at the
Foreign Office study centre during the war years. He drew up a memoran-
dum on the future economic role of Trieste, focusing his attention on its
port. The central assumption of Toynbee’s memorandum was the propos-
al to maintain the free port institution in Trieste, and to entrust its man-
agement to an international commission made up of representatives of
the countries that would use the equipment of the port itself, in addition,
of course, to the representatives of the winning powers. Such an inter-
nationalization would have had a whole series of consequences: firstly, it
would have allowed the Allies to control the best lines of communication
to central Europe that existed at the time (taking into account the heavy
damage suffered by German infrastructures and the uncertain political
situation of postwar Germany). Secondly, a ground of exchange would
have formed with the Soviet Union and its allies in the difficult post-war
planning. Finally, a medium-long term Anglo-American intervention in
Trieste would have given substantial help to Italy in an attempt to resist
the foreseeable Yugoslav pressures (with the ‘formidable support of the
Soviet Union’, said the document) aimed at controlling the area of the
Northern Adriatic.6
In the following years, once the emergency was over, the restoration
of the international function of the port became one of the main aspects
of the search for a self-sustaining economic system in Trieste. As time
passed, this search proved more and more difficult, but above all increas-
ingly politically dangerous, because it would have endangered that fragile
consensus structure that the Trieste AMG had managed to build.
6 ‘It has become clear that if, for ethnographic and political reasons, we mean to re-
sist Yugoslavia’s claim to annex Trieste, we must have up our sleeve a plan for ad-
ministering the port, and the roads and railways connecting it with its non-Ital-
ian economic hinterland, which will safeguard the legitimate economic interests,
in Trieste, of Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, as well as
the sovereign rights and legitimate economic interests of Italy.’: Administration of
ports serving a Soviet or partly Soviet-controlled hinterland, memo annexed to a letter
by Arnold Toynbee, 22 May 1945 (but the protocol date was 24 July 1945), in the
Public Record Office, Foreign Office (from now on Pro-Fo), 371/50791 (copy at Isti-
tuto regionale per la storia della Resistenza e dell'Etá contemporanea (Trieste), b.
73, f. VII).
114
the territory, starting from Trieste and reaching the occupied zones in
Austria and Southern Germany. The city, if anything, benefited indirectly
from the flow of supplies passing through it, and, in such times, this was
indeed an essential benefit for the local economy.
The famous historian Arnold Toynbee was active as an expert at the
Foreign Office study centre during the war years. He drew up a memoran-
dum on the future economic role of Trieste, focusing his attention on its
port. The central assumption of Toynbee’s memorandum was the propos-
al to maintain the free port institution in Trieste, and to entrust its man-
agement to an international commission made up of representatives of
the countries that would use the equipment of the port itself, in addition,
of course, to the representatives of the winning powers. Such an inter-
nationalization would have had a whole series of consequences: firstly, it
would have allowed the Allies to control the best lines of communication
to central Europe that existed at the time (taking into account the heavy
damage suffered by German infrastructures and the uncertain political
situation of postwar Germany). Secondly, a ground of exchange would
have formed with the Soviet Union and its allies in the difficult post-war
planning. Finally, a medium-long term Anglo-American intervention in
Trieste would have given substantial help to Italy in an attempt to resist
the foreseeable Yugoslav pressures (with the ‘formidable support of the
Soviet Union’, said the document) aimed at controlling the area of the
Northern Adriatic.6
In the following years, once the emergency was over, the restoration
of the international function of the port became one of the main aspects
of the search for a self-sustaining economic system in Trieste. As time
passed, this search proved more and more difficult, but above all increas-
ingly politically dangerous, because it would have endangered that fragile
consensus structure that the Trieste AMG had managed to build.
6 ‘It has become clear that if, for ethnographic and political reasons, we mean to re-
sist Yugoslavia’s claim to annex Trieste, we must have up our sleeve a plan for ad-
ministering the port, and the roads and railways connecting it with its non-Ital-
ian economic hinterland, which will safeguard the legitimate economic interests,
in Trieste, of Yugoslavia, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Hungary, as well as
the sovereign rights and legitimate economic interests of Italy.’: Administration of
ports serving a Soviet or partly Soviet-controlled hinterland, memo annexed to a letter
by Arnold Toynbee, 22 May 1945 (but the protocol date was 24 July 1945), in the
Public Record Office, Foreign Office (from now on Pro-Fo), 371/50791 (copy at Isti-
tuto regionale per la storia della Resistenza e dell'Etá contemporanea (Trieste), b.
73, f. VII).
114
