THAT diamond-shaped wedge of land on the Italo-Yugoslav
frontier known as Venezia Giulia or the Julian March, with
its mingled Italian and Slovene populations, was inevitably
an area of dispute following World War II. History and
circumstance decreed that both Italy and Yugoslavia should
claim it at the first opportunity presented for once more
redrawing European frontiers. But it was postwar history
that changed the "Trieste problem" from a localized land
dispute to a major struggle between the East and the West,
between "Russian expansion" and "capitalistic encircle-
ment."

Any government that controlled Yugoslavia at the end of
the recent war would have pressed claims for a rectification
of the country's northern frontier with Italy. The extent of
the demands--for the whole area that Italy had won from
the dismembered Austro-Hungarian empire in the peace
settlement of 1919--would have been substantially the same
whether from Yugoslav monarchy, democracy, or com-
munism. The settlement of 1919, taken against the advice
of President Woodrow Wilson and ignoring some of his
main points for permanent peace, has rankled in Yugoslav
souls ever since.

Desire for this important strategic area and the key port
of Trieste was no sudden impulse of Yugoslavia's com-
munist dictator, Marshal Josip Broz-Tito. Far from it; it

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