What if Italy joined the Central Powers in World War I?

A break from actual news

Slow Boring is off today for Veterans Day because we support the troops and, as usual, we want to bring a paid article out from behind the paywall for your reading pleasure. In Europe, of course, the November 11 holiday is called Armistice Day and it celebrates the conclusion of World War I. Personally, I’m moderately obsessed with this war because I see it as the tremendous hinge point of all modern history, a major — and profoundly consequential — event that very much could have turned out differently. In this post I looked at a kind of obscure corner of the war, the Italian Front, where nothing all that earth-shattering happened but one that I argue could have been decisive if the leaders of the Austro-Hungarian Empire had taken their own assessment of the stakes more seriously.

---

On the eve of World War I, Europe was divided into two major blocs.

One was the Triple Entente linking France, Russia, and the United Kingdom — three major powers who’d settled their colonial disputes and were determined to contain the rising power of Germany. The other was the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. War broke out, famously, because Austria went to war with the small nation of Serbia, which was allied with Russia, and that set the dominoes tumbling.

Except for Italy, which initially opted out of the war, only to join later on the Allied side.

Once they entered, Italy’s wartime performance has generally been viewed as dismal. Half a million Italian soldiers died and, even more so than on the Western Front, the battle lines of the Italian Front barely moved at all until the Central Powers’ sudden collapse at the end of the war.

Notably, Italy ended up requiring the assistance of a number of British, French, American, and even Czechoslovak divisions, though they only had to fight on a narrow front against an Austro-Hungarian Empire that was also battling Serbia and Russia.

The more important Allies were so unimpressed with Italian military performance that in the postwar treaty making, they erred on the side of being nice to the then-new country of Yugoslavia, and Italy wound up gaining less territory than they’d hoped from joining the Allied war effort. Disappointment with the fruits of war became part of the grist for Benito Mussolini’s mill and contributed to the rise of Fascism. But of course, Italy’s military performance in World War II as an Axis power was also incredibly weak and disappointing, requiring multiple bailouts from Germany and arguably leaving Hitler worse off than he’d have been without their “help.”

The overall poor reputation of the Italian military performance means they tend to be neglected in accounts of the war. But I think there’s a good case to be made that had Italy stuck with the Triple Alliance and fought as one of the Central Powers in World War I, they would have won the war. Italy was not a particularly effective fighting force against Austria and there’s no reason to believe they would have been a particularly effective fighting force against France. But even a modest amount of additional pressure on France would have been a big deal. Austria would have had more troops free to fight Serbia and Russia. The naval balance of power in the Mediterranean would have shifted, with the Allied blockade dramatically less effective.

So why didn’t Italy join the Central Powers?

Well, they wanted a higher price for their support than Austria-Hungary was willing to pay. But the Habsburgs were both the proximate instigator of the war and had their empire completely erased from the map as a result of losing it. So I think it’s not just an interesting historical counterfactual, but a case in point of the importance of setting priorities and thinking clearly and pragmatically about what you’re doing.

The guns of August

In case you’re not totally up to speed, the run-up to World War I basically went like this:

• Austria-Hungary ruled the present-day countries of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Serbian nationalists thought all that territory should be amalgamated with Serbia into a new country called Yugoslavia.

• Some of present-day Slovenia and Croatia had large Italian-speaking populations, as did South Tyrol which was part of German-speaking Austria.

• Serbian terrorists, aligned with an organization that had received some support from the Serbian government, assassinated Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand while he was visiting Sarajevo.

• Austria responded by making onerous demands on the Serbian state, hoping to bring them to heel and end the long-term threat to their power in the Balkans.

• Russia committed to backing its Orthodox ally and defending its own power in the Balkans.

• Germany committed to backing its ally, Austria, and prepared to also go to war with Russia’s ally France.

• France had spent years itching for a chance to team up with Russia to fight Germany and retake the Alsace and Lorraine, which they lost in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, so they were excited about this, even though they had almost no concrete interest at stake in Serbia.

• German war planners believed they could not win a long two-front war and also could not quickly defeat Russia because the logistics of invading Russia are infamously bad. So they aimed for a lightning strike on Paris, and thought the easiest way to do this was to plow through Belgium.

• Britain objected to the German violation of Belgian neutrality and, more broadly, wanted to uphold the balance of power in Europe, so they came to France’s assistance.

Why didn’t Italy join the war?

As a technical matter of treaties, their position was that the Triple Alliance committed them to come to the defense of their partners, but this was basically a war that Austria-Hungary had started, so the terms didn’t apply. But more broadly, the war was essentially about the Habsburgs trying to bolster their power in the Balkans. This held no particular appeal for Italy, which was structurally aligned with Germany in having colonial ambitions that clashed with France and England, but mostly wanted to get Italian-speaking land out of Habsburg rule and into the Kingdom of Italy.

Austria-Hungary consulted extensively with Berlin before making their demands to Serbia — they did not want to fight a war unless they had German backing. And they got that backing. Germany didn’t want Habsburg power to collapse in the face of Serbian nationalism, and they were in some respects eager to fight Russia sooner rather than later since they feared Russian industrialization. But the Habsburgs did not consult with Rome, whose military power they didn’t really respect. Beyond that, any consultation would inevitably consist of Italy asking Austria to give them territory in exchange for their help and they didn’t want to do that. And yet, Austria felt that Serbian terrorism was an existential threat to their empire that had to be crushed at all costs. The alternative to giving up Tyrol and some Dalmatian islands turned out to be the destruction of the state.

The Italian difference

Imagine, though, a world in which Austria takes the prospect of an Italian ally a bit more seriously. They tell them that instead of fighting Austria to take Tyrol, they can have it for free. They can also have some Italian-speaking portions of Dalmatia and Istria — but the crucial Istrian city of Trieste will continue to be Austrian, because it’s the empire’s most important seaport. Even Trieste’s Italian-speaking middle classes can see that the city would become more or less a backwater as a peripheral part of Italy (which has many coastal cities) rather than an important commercial center as the main port of a large multi-national empire.

If the Central Powers win the war, Italy is also free to take Corsica and Nice from France, and perhaps expand their colonial holdings in Northern and Eastern Africa.

The war still opens with Germany sweeping into France and Belgium in the northeast, but now with Italy attacking southeastern France. The terrain is extremely unfavorable to attackers and the Italian army is bad, so they don’t make much headway, but they are pinning down some French troops. Theoretically (and boringly), this could make enough of a difference for Germany to score an early win and capture Paris. But to be more interesting, let’s say the French are too smart to let that happen and ultimately throw all the troops they need at the Battle of the Marne and the Race to the Sea, leaving only the lightest possible force to fight the Italians until the front is stabilized. The Western Front settles down for a long war just like in the real world, but now France has lost even more territory thanks to the initial barely-opposed Italian advance.

Having begun by seizing a swathe of French territory, Italy shifts into the defensive with a relatively small force opposed by a similarly small French force that nonetheless leaves them stretched thinner against the Germans than in our actual timeline. The bigger difference is that Austria-Hungary no longer has to worry about fighting Italy. They’re able to send more troops against Serbia sooner, which also brings Bulgaria into the war sooner. With the Italian navy active in the Mediterranean and the Habsburg navy not confined to port, the French and British are unable to land at Salonica or evacuate retreating Serb forces to Corfu — they’re simply knocked out of the war.

The real world Italian Front featured up to 58 Italian divisions and up to 61 Austrian divisions facing off against each other. For context, Germany had 146 divisions on the Western Front until Russia’s withdrawal from the war let them boost that figure to 192. Without fighting against each other, Italy and Austria could have each sent 26 divisions to the Western Front, and the Central Powers would have been at full strength there all along. That would still leave plenty of troops to spare for Italy to pressure France on the Alpine front, while Austria and Bulgaria move fast against Serbia. With Serbia collapsing faster, Romania never joins the Allies, and the Central Powers don’t lose access to Romanian wheat. Russia collapses faster. With Italy’s long seacoast and Navy in play, imports to Spain are then re-exported to Italy and Austria and become a loophole in the Allied blockade system. The British need to respond to that by being more obnoxious at sea, while a less-pressed Germany can be a bit more restrained with its U-Boats. With the freedom of the seas issue less clear and Italian-Americans against US participation in the war, Wilson is more reluctant to get involved. The Ottomans aren’t pressed at Gallipoli and are in stronger shape fighting in the Middle East.

Simply put, even in the absence of signature Italian victories, the Central Powers are in a stronger position on every front — in the Balkans, at sea, in global diplomacy, in the Middle East, and on the Eastern Front where Germany is winning faster, while the balance of power on the critical Western Front is more favorable. France cracks, especially because the ostensible point of the war (Serbian sovereignty and Russian assistance in recovering Alsace-Lorraine) is over.

The iron curtain

Germany emerges from the war dramatically stronger, with satellite regimes set up in the Baltics, Finland, and Ukraine, while the governments of Greece (which is forced to give up some land to Bulgaria) and Romania are committed to a pro-German orientation. Germany also picks up Belgium’s colonies in Africa. Bulgaria expands at the expense of Serbia, as does Austria-Hungary, which gains more land by square mile than it passes over to Italy. The Ottomans secure Kuwait and the Sinai peninsula from the British, who otherwise suffer no real losses in their defeat. Italy pockets Austrian territory, re-annexes Nice and begins to reverse the de-Italianization of the city, and also takes over Tunisia. A somewhat oddly shaped Poland is created out of formerly Russian territory with Archduke Maximilian of Austria installed as king.

There’s a view in some Habsburg circles that this was all a terrible mistake.

The war was won, but the basic mismatch between the dynastic logic of the empire and the emerging national logic of Europe persists. Yugoslavia is now essentially a political reality within the empire, a third force balancing the Austrian and Hungarian elements. Romania is an independent state, but across the border from it are Romanian-speaking Habsburg lands. The same is true of Poland and Ukraine. Nothing has actually been resolved.

Except it turns out that the rise of Bolshevik Russia actually resolves a great deal.

National elites of Eastern Europe are keen to keep the Communists out, and that means accepting German leadership one way or another — you can do it as a member of a linguistic minority in a Habsburg-ruled empire or you can do it as a citizen of an independent state embedded in a Germany-dominated system of trade and security. But either way, German is the elite language of commerce, diplomacy, and science.

By the same token, there is considerable worry among German liberals that the fairly harsh peace imposed on France would simply lead to the emergence of hard-right revanchist anti-German politics there. In practice, though, the economic hardship and inflation induced by postwar reparations mostly lead to a surge of Communist activity in France. That does provoke a countervailing set of right-wing politics, but it’s mostly pro-German — or at least anti-anti-German — in pursuit of the larger goal of keeping the reds down. As a gesture of good faith and recompense to the Belgians, Germany eventually agrees to establish the official headquarters of the German-dominated European Union in Brussels.

Thinking things through

What does this all matter?

Well, it doesn’t, really. I just like alternate history, and especially World War I. On the various videos and message boards about this, one common counterargument is that Italy couldn’t have survived economically as a Central Power due to its dependence on British coal. I don’t think I buy that since there was a rail link from Vienna to Venice via Trieste, so German coal could have made it down. More broadly, my view of the situation is that active Italian contributions to the war effort were not particularly crucial. They were a valuable recruit to the Allied side primarily because they were a massive distraction to Austria.

The other objection, which speaks to the larger lessons here, is that Austria would “never” have agreed to make these kinds of territorial concessions to Italy.

But here comes the part where in politics you need to make smart decisions. If you’re Germany or France or Bulgaria, you can fight a world war, lose, and live to fight another day. For Austria, losing the war was genuinely existential in a fairly clear-cut way. South Tyrol and parts of Dalmatia are a small price to pay to prevent your empire from vanishing entirely. And notably, it was Austria’s decision to initiate the war. They felt it was extremely important to make tough demands of Serbia, that the Serbian threat was existential. Well, if the Serbian threat is so dire that it’s worth rolling the dice on a general great power war, then it’s surely worth sacrificing a couple of provinces to keep Italy, secure your southwestern frontier, and win the war.

I often hear moderate-minded people say that if Democrats really believed the threat of Trump was as dire as they say, they’d be more compromising about X, Y, or Z and maximize their odds of beating him. I agree that’s what they ought to do, just like the Habsburgs should have been more compromising. And the Germans should have insisted on it. But I think if you look at these kind of historical incidents, whatever level of misjudgment was at work isn’t properly characterized as insincerity. Everyone involved in the terrible slaughter of the Great War was painfully sincere in their concerns and hopes and dreams and fears. What they did was miscalculate, badly, over and over again, in multiple directions and on multiple sides.