Description
On 5 September 1946, as part of the World War II peace negotiations, the foreign ministers of Italy and Austria, Alcide De Gasperi and Karl Gruber, signed an agreement for the protection of the German-speaking minorities in the province of Bolzano. The pact, drafted in English, stipulates that Italy shall adopt measures for the preservation and cultural and economic development of the German-speaking group, grant them the exercise of autonomous legislative and executive power, and undertake to resolve the question of citizenship of the optants for the Reich in a 'spirit of fairness and understanding'.
The agreement laid the foundations for the future granting of autonomy to the people of Trentino-Alto Adige by the Italian Republic with constitutional law no. 5 of 26 February 1948The Constitution, promulgated in 1948, established the creation of special regions that were granted wide-ranging autonomy. One of these is precisely the Trentino-Alto Adige Region with its capital in Trento. Its functions, as well as those of the provinces of Trento and Bolzano, are laid down in the Special Statute for Trentino-Alto Adige.
Internationally bound, regional autonomy was supposed to guarantee protection and democratic rights to the German-speaking minorities by breaking with twenty years of fascism. The policies adopted by the regime, in fact, were characterised by their strong nationalist and discriminatory nature and culminated in the Options Agreement. As happened in other parts of Europe, the territorial question was thus 'resolved' through the transfer of the German-speaking population to the Reich.
Once the Brenner border was recognised within the framework of the peace negotiations as belonging to Italy (in the East, the border question would prove to be much more troublesome), any possibility of self-determination for the German-speaking population was closed. Representing their interests from that moment on was the Südtiroler Volkspartei party, born in May 1945. In Trentino, on the other hand, strong demands for autonomy found shape in the various regional autonomy projects sketched out in the last years of the war.
Once freedom and democracy had been regained, the protagonists of the autonomist claims were the National Liberation Committee, an organisation that brought together all the anti-fascist parties, and the ASAR, the Association for Regional Autonomist Studies, a mass movement transversal in class and political position, which demanded 'complete autonomy' from Brenner and Borghetto. Active between 1945 and 1948, ASAR was dissolved after the entry into force of the Statute of Autonomy.
The creation of a single region with an Italian majority did not extinguish the claims for greater autonomy of the German-speaking group in South Tyrol. From the 1950s onwards, domestic and international political conditions would lead to the reopening of the 'South Tyrolean question', undermining the 'first autonomy' of the 1948 Statute.
