Eighty years on: what did Italy actually liberate?

Posted on: 25 April 2026

The 25th of April marks Italy's Liberation Day, the anniversary of the partisan uprising that drove out the remnants of fascism and German occupation in 1945. The word "liberation" is clean, almost surgical and for that reason it deserves to be examined now that eighty years of distance allow us to see what that date actually inaugurated. This is not revisionism, it is cognitive hygiene, because anniversaries become useless the moment we stop asking what they actually mean.

Let me start with an uncontested fact. In 1945 Italy came out of the war as a defeated country, economically on its knees, politically in ruins, with no third option available. The choice was never between independence and subordination, it was between two blocs of subordination, one Atlantic and one Soviet, because the effective sovereignty of European nations was already being negotiated at Yalta and then at Potsdam while partisans were still fighting in the Apennines. This has to be said plainly because it is the mandatory starting point for any honest analysis: Liberation was not the restoration of Italian sovereignty, since that sovereignty, within the geopolitical frame of 1945, was not reconstructible. Liberation determined within which cornerstone of structural subordination Italy would end up.

Britain understands this dynamic better than it usually admits. The "special relationship" has always been a form of structural subordination dressed up as partnership, from the Lend-Lease conditions of 1941 through to Suez in 1956, when Eisenhower forced Eden to stand down in a humiliation that Anthony Nutting described in his resignation letter as the end of any illusion of independent British power. Suez was Britain's Potsdam moment, the day when the post-war settlement was made visible without ambiguity. Every prime minister since has had to manage that subordination, some well, some badly, but none has ever seriously challenged it.

The Marshall Plan of 1947, Italian accession to NATO in 1949, the American military presence that eighty years on has never been seriously renegotiated: none of this was a betrayal of Liberation, it was the geopolitical price of coming out on the right side of the Iron Curtain. Anyone who today ironises about "Italian subservience" while forgetting that the alternative was Zhivkov's Bulgaria is making a crude analytical error. The genuinely interesting question arises when we stop discussing 1945 and start asking what was done over the following eighty years with the margins of renegotiation that history occasionally offered.

Here the conversation changes completely and the uncomfortable questions begin.

De Gaulle's France withdrew from NATO's integrated military command in March 1966. It remained in the Atlantic Alliance as a political member, but refused military integration, demanded the withdrawal of foreign troops from French soil by April 1967, forced SHAPE to relocate from Rocquencourt to Casteau in Belgium, built an autonomous nuclear arsenal, maintained defence spending consistently above the NATO average, equipped itself with aircraft carriers, foreign legion, autonomous power projection forces. France stayed out for forty-three years. It rejoined the integrated military command only in 2009 under Sarkozy, by which point the Soviet Union no longer existed and France had already demonstrated it could participate in NATO operations in the Balkans and Afghanistan without belonging to the integrated structure.

This means that a path of greater strategic autonomy within the Atlantic framework was technically possible. It was not easy, it was expensive, it required a political class willing to pay the diplomatic and economic costs of differentiation, but it was possible and France did it, while Italy never attempted it, not once, in any moment. And this is not the fault of Liberation, it is the fault of everything that came afterwards.

Consider the moments when the window opened. The years of the economic miracle, when Italy was the fifth industrial power in the world and could have asked for something in return. Instead we had the aborted historic compromise of Aldo Moro, which among many things aimed at a redefinition of Italian international positioning and which ended with the via Fani massacre in a way that to this day awaits a satisfactory structural explanation. The end of the Cold War in 1989, when NATO's existential glue dissolved with the collapse of the opposing bloc and a season of possible rewriting opened. The entry into the euro in 1999, where Italy accepted monetary policy constraints without receiving in exchange a common fiscal policy, and did so, ironically, with enthusiasm. The post 9/11 moment, when adherence to American wars was automatic and without conditionality. The 2008 crisis, when Germany rewrote the terms of European governance and Italy asked only to be left in peace. The Recovery Fund of 2020, hailed as a historic turning point but accepted with conditionalities that nobody genuinely read before signing.

Every time a window, and every time the same answer: better not to pay the political cost of differentiation. Structural subordination was not destiny, it was a choice that kept being reconfirmed systematically, because the Italian ruling class, regardless of colour, has always preferred the comfort of the client to the responsibility of the sovereign. Post-war Germany rebuilt an export economy that gave it contractual leverage within the constraints. France built an autonomous deterrent and an independent diplomacy. Britain played the special relationship card, then pulled itself out through referendum and Brexit, paying enormous costs but reclaiming margins of action that are only now becoming visible, in ways that Remain and Leave camps still refuse to assess honestly. Italy did the one thing that required no choice: it waited.

This is the mechanism worth observing coldly. Each European country managed its own post-war structural subordination differently, and the differences in outcomes eighty years on tell us far more about national ruling classes than about the nature of the Atlantic bond. When Macron today speaks of European strategic autonomy he does so within a Gaullist tradition that has materially paid the price of that autonomy. When an Italian leader pronounces the same words, he does so without any underlying investment in that direction, and indeed the phrase produces only a twenty-four hour media cycle.

A British reader will recognise the pattern in a specific mirror. The special relationship, the Atlanticist reflex of every government from Attlee through Blair to Starmer, has been Britain's own version of structural subordination, with one important difference: London has always received something tangible in return, intelligence sharing through Five Eyes, nuclear cooperation, a permanent seat at the adult table of Western decision-making. Italy has received none of this. Italian subordination has been the purest form, asymmetric without compensatory privileges, subordination without seat.

So what are we celebrating today, the 25th of April 2026? We are legitimately celebrating the resistance of those who chose which side to be on when choosing cost one's life. This is sacred and untouchable, but if we want the date to retain a political function beyond memorial, we must allow ourselves to say that Liberation was a point of departure, not a point of arrival, and that what was built in eighty years with that opportunity is not much. Not the partisans' fault, obviously, but the continued responsibility of subsequent generations who traded comfortable subordination for the reconstruction of sovereignty that never happened.

A verifiable projection, and with this I close. In the next five years we will witness a structural test. American pressure on Europe to increase military spending, the demand for alignment on China, the redefinition of transatlantic trade relations, the Ukrainian question in its post-2025 evolution: all of this will force European countries to choose. France and Germany will choose badly or well, but they will choose. The United Kingdom has already chosen through Brexit and is now paying, though also slowly learning what margins of action it has reclaimed. Italy, based on the eighty-year pattern, will tend not to choose and to absorb the outcome of others' choices. If my analysis is wrong, we will see it by 2030 through Italian decisions that diverge significantly from automatic alignment. If instead we witness yet another replay of the mechanism, we will have empirical confirmation that the problem was never 1945, but everything we did not have the courage to build around it afterwards.

Happy 25th of April, then. Let us honour those who fought, and let us allow ourselves, for once, to hold to account those who have never fought at all.