On the defence of antifascist Italy in Alcide De Gasperi’s 1946 speech to the Paris Peace Conference

Faced with the gradual rise of neofascist parties in Europe, the present paper looks back at the past to analyse a speech delivered by one of the founding fathers of the European Union, namely Alcide De Gasperi. The investigation is part of a broader project on the analysis of Italian antifascist discourse. The speech that De Gasperi delivered at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference is reconstructed with the help of the pragma-dialectical model of a critical discussion, focusing on the passages in which the speaker dealt with Italy’s non-fascist identity and its wrong perception by the audience. Emphasis is laid on the argumentative pattern underlying De Gasperi’s discourse and the argumentative style characterising his address. Moreover, reference is made to the notion of argumentative equivalence to examine the translation of De Gasperi’s speech into English; published in the New York Times the day after he delivered his address, it cast a shadow over the impartiality of the drafters of the English version of the speech, which nevertheless managed to go down to history as an argumentative classic.