Etudes balkaniques is a quarterly peer-review journal, which has been publishing research since 1964. Research papers related to the Balkan countries in French, English, German, Russian and Italian have appeared in it, thus making them available to a wide scientific community across borders.
Alberto Basciani
Italian Diplomacy and the Iron Courtain in South-estern Europe. Comments and reactions
on a unknown situation between sovietization and Tito-Stalin Split (1944-1948)
Etudes balkaniques (Sofia) 2016 N 4
Abstract: The aim of the paper is to analyze the decisive years of the second post-war in the Balkans through some of the most significant reports written by Italian diplomats and preserved in the collection of the Italian Diplomatic Documents. In those years, with the exception of Yugoslavia, which Italy was divided from, by the territorial dispute on Trieste, the Italian diplomacy had no particular ambitions in Southeast Europe. At that time, Italy was a Country who had been defeated nonetheless its diplomacy had great knowledge in the Balkan issues. Therefore, their analysis, sufficiently objective and well informed, provides an interesting standpoint of those decisive years for the contemporary history of the Balkan Countries and the Cold War in Europe. The establishment of communist-Stalinist regimes, the conflict between Tito and Stalin, and the bloody age of purges inside the different Communist parties deeply marked those crucial years.
Keywords: Italian Diplomacy, Communism, Cold War, Tito-Stalin Split
