Sidney Sonnino

Sidney Costantino, Baron Sonnino (11 March 1847 – 24 November 1922) was an Italian statesman, 19th

Early life

Sonnino was born in Pisa to an Italian Jewish father, Isacco Saul Sonnino, who converted to Anglicanism, and a Welsh mother, Georgina Sophia Arnaud Dudley Menhennet. He was raised as an Anglican by his family.^[4][5] His grandfather had emigrated from Livorno to Egypt, where he had built up an enormous fortune as a banker.^[6] As a young man, Sonnino suffered from a severe case of unrequited love, which badly damaged his self-esteem.^[7] In a typical entry in his diary, Sonnino wrote: "Who can and should love this nonentity lacking all physical and moral attraction?"^[8] To make up for his distress when the object of his affection married someone else, Sonnino took to long solitary walks and threw himself obsessively into work as he sought career success as a sort of consolation prize for his broken heart.^[8]

After graduating in law in Pisa in 1865, Sonnino became a diplomat and an official at the Italian embassies in Madrid, Vienna, Berlin, Paris and Saint Petersburg from 1866 to 1873.^[4] His family lived at the Castello Sonnino in Quercianella, near Livorno. He retired from the diplomatic service in 1873.

In 1876, Sonnino travelled to Sicily with Leopoldo Franchetti to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. In 1877, the two men published their research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report for the Italian Parliament. In the first part, Sonnino analysed the lives of the island's landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti's half of the report, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily, was an analysis of the Mafia in the 19th century that is still considered authoritative today. Franchetti would ultimately influence public opinion about the Mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone, over 100 years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the Mafia came to be.^[9]

In 1878, Sonnino and Franchetti started a newspaper, La Rassegna Settimanale, which changed from weekly economic reviews to daily political issues.^[4]

Early political career

Sonnino was elected in the

As Minister of the Treasury, Sonnino restructured public finances, imposed new taxes[15] and cut public spending. The budget deficit was sharply reduced from 174 million lire in 1893–94 to 36 million in 1896–97.^[16] After the fall of the Crispi government as a result of the lost Battle of Adwa in March 1896, he served as the leader of the opposition conservatives against the liberal Giovanni Giolitti. In January 1897, Sonnino published an article, Torniamo allo Statuto (Let's go back to the Statute), in which he sounded the alarm about the threats that the clergy, the republicans and the socialists posed to liberalism. He called for the abolition of the parliamentary government and the return of the royal prerogative to appoint and to dismiss the prime minister without consulting parliament, which he considered to be the only possible way to avert the danger.^[4][11][17] In 1901, he founded a new major newspaper, Il Giornale d'Italia.^[4]

Opposition and Prime Minister

In response to the social reforms presented by Prime Minister Giuseppe Zanardelli in November 1902,^[18] Sonnino introduced a reform bill to alleviate poverty in southern Italy that provided for a reduction of the land tax in Sicily, Calabria and Sardinia; the facilitation of agricultural credit; the re-establishment of the system of perpetual lease for smallholdings (emphyteusis) and the dissemination and the enhancement of agrarian contracts to combine the interests of farmers with those of the landowners.^[19] Sonnino criticised the usual approach to solve the crisis through public works: "to construct railways where there is no trade is like giving a spoon to a man who has nothing to eat."^[20]

Sonnino's uncompromising severity towards others long proved to be an obstacle to forming his own government.^[6] Nevertheless, Sonnino served twice briefly as prime minister. On 8 February 1906, Sonnino formed his first government,^[21] which lasted only three months. On 18 May 1906,^[22] after a mere 100 days, he was forced to resign.^[4] He proposed major changes to transform Southern Italy, which provoked opposition from the ruling groups. Land taxes were to be reduced by one third except for the largest landowners. He also proposed the establishment of provincial banks and subsidies to schools.^[23] His reforms provoked opposition from the ruling groups, and he was succeeded by Giovanni Giolitti.

On 11 December 1909, Sonnino formed his second government with a strong connotation to the centre-right, but it did not last much longer and fell on 21 March 1910.^[4]

First World War

After the July Crisis, Sonnino initially supported maintaining the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary in 1914. He firmly believed that Italian self-interest entailed participation in the war, with its prospect of Italian territorial gains as a completion of Italian unification.^[24] However, after becoming Foreign Minister in November 1914 in the conservative government of Antonio Salandra and realising that it was unlikely to secure Austro-Hungarian agreement to concede territories to Italy, he sided with the Triple Entente of United Kingdom, France and Russia, and he sanctioned the secret Treaty of London in April 1915 to fulfill Italian irredentist claims. Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary on 23 May 1915.^[24][25] During the talks, Sonnino omitted to include the largely Italian-speaking Austrian city of Fiume (modern Rijeka, Croatia) into the lands that were to go to Italy, an omission that he later would regret in 1919.^[26]

Sonnino followed what he called a "Bismarckian" foreign policy under which all that mattered was sacro egoismo ("sacred egoism").^[8] The term sacro egoismo as the guiding principle of his foreign policy was Sonnino's way of saying that the interests of the Italian state were to be pursued via a ruthless policy of realpolitik.^[8] Sonnino felt no great animosity towards the Austrian empire and no great love for the Allies, and only favored intervening on the Allied side because the French, British and Russian diplomats he was talking with were willing to promise Italy more than the Austrian and German diplomats.^[8] Sonnino admitted in private that he would have favored having Italy enter the war on the side of the Central Powers if only their diplomats had promised more than the Allied diplomats.^[8]

Paris Peace Conference, 1919

He remained Foreign Minister in three consecutive governments and represented Italy at the 1919

Wilson had stated that national self-determination was to be the basis of the peace. However, Wilson supported per the Treaty of London the Italian claim to have the Brenner Pass as the new Italian-Austrian frontier and for Italy to annex the Austrian province of South Tyrol despite the fact that South Tyrol had a German majority.^[26] Sonnino often argued to Wilson that because Italy lost half-million killed in the war that felt the Allies had an obligation to fulfill all of the terms of the Treaty of London.^[29] Sonnino's cold and aloof personality made him few friends at the conference, and his unwillingness to lobby the other delegates, which he considered to be beneath him, won him no allies at the conference.^[30]

Orlando's inability to speak English and his weak political position at home allowed Sonnino to play a dominant role. Their differences proved to be disastrous during the negotiations. Orlando was prepared to renounce territorial claims for

According to the historian R. J. B. Bosworth, "Sidney Sonnino, who was Foreign Minister from 1914 to 1919, and with a personal reputation, perhaps deserved, for honesty in all his dealings, has strong claims to have conducted Italy's least successful foreign policy."^[35]

Trivia

On 16 April 1909

Books

• Bosworth, R.J.B. (2013). Italy and the Wider World: 1860–1960, New York: Routledge,
  ISBN 0-415-13477-3
• Burgwyn, H. James (1997). Italian Foreign Policy in the Interwar Period, 1918–1940, Greenwood Publishing Group,
  ISBN 0-275-94877-3
• Clark, Martin (2008). Modern Italy: 1871 to the present, Harlow: Pearson Education,
  ISBN 1-4058-2352-6
• Dickie, John (2004). Cosa Nostra. A history of the Sicilian Mafia, London: Coronet
  ISBN 0-340-82435-2
• ISBN 0-375-76052-0
  .
• Mack Smith, Denis (1989). Italy and Its Monarchy. New Haven: Yale University Press.
  ISBN 9780300051322
  .
• Morley Sachar, Howard (2006). A History of the Jews in the Modern World, Vintage Books,
  ISBN 9781400030972
• Rossini, Daniela (2008). Woodrow Wilson and the American Myth in Italy: Culture, Diplomacy, and War Propaganda, Cambridge (MA)/London: Harvard University Press,
  ISBN 978-0-674-02824-1
• Sarti, Roland (2004). Italy: a reference guide from the Renaissance to the present, New York: Facts on File Inc.,
  ISBN 0-81607-474-7
• Seton-Watson, Christopher (1967). Italy from liberalism to fascism, 1870–1925, New York: Taylor & Francis, 1967
  ISBN 0-416-18940-7

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Sidney Sonnino.

• (in Italian) Centro Studi Sidney Sonnino
• Newspaper clippings about Sidney Sonnino in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW