Italy’s Mattei Plan

“Managing geriatrics and pensions”—thus teased employees at the Agenzia Generale Italiana Petroli (Italian General-Agency of Petrol), whose dereliction and acronym lent itself to the alternative Agenzia Gerarchi in Pensione.

And it was to this tired fief of state that the sorting of post-war Italian government positions would relegate a certain Enrico Mattei. His assignment? To act as executioner and undertaker: de-commission the thing, liquidate its assets and sell its parts to the highest bidder. 

Mattei, however, had no intention of presiding over the death of what he rightly understood to be a cornerstone of his country’s future prosperity.

In a rebellious act, he did the opposite of what was expected. The old facilities were brought up to scratch, and workers (still on the payroll) were told to come back.

The Po Valley, which had been surveyed during the fascist era, was once more subjected to exploration and assessment. By March 1946, Mattei, who had forgone his role of undertaker, was harnessing the underworld to fill the well of Caviaga with crude methane. 

It was only the beginning. Soon, under the banner of the six-legged dragon-dog, energy reserves across the length of Italy had been discovered. Mayors were caught off-guard as the new order descended on their towns to install its infrastructure. Vertical pumps met horizontal pipelines and a fleet of trucks began delivering cheap liquefied gas to remote villages where wood and coal stoves quickly gave way. Gas stations and U.S.-style motels serviced the new intercourse, and Mattei succeeded in weaving his energy grid over the face of a stirring country. But it was beyond the country’s borders that this captain of industry had set his sights. 

In 1952, the Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi (National Hydrocarbon Entity, or ENI) was established, with Mattei as its president. 

But before further progress could be made, something had to be done about the intense reactions that his activities had elicited. Public relations needed managing. This took the form of Il Giorno, a newspaper whose creation in April 1956 and rise to prominence would promote Mattei’s vision to the Italian public. Il Giorno engaged in journalistic investigations targeting those business interests that stood to lose from ENI’s modernization of the country (indeed, a fierce campaign was underway, and Mattei himself apparently collected 14,000 pages worth of defamatory articles printed against his person).

In 1957, with a means to communicate its program through a friendly outlet at home, ENI began to extend its reach, entering into agreements with the governments of various North African and Near Eastern countries (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Iran). This occurred in the context of the rising tide of pan-Arabism, whose current’s ethos was in line with Mattei’s desire to offer better arrangements than former colonial powers were willing to concede. In the early years, ENI was particularly close to Nasser’s Egypt, investing in the country’s energy infrastructure. Soon the fruits of this labour would reach the Italian consumer, as ENI repeatedly lowered the price of gas in 1960 until it was the lowest in Europe. 

Crucially, the idea that the pursuit of a developed Italy was on par with, served by, and justified on the same basis as the promotion of development in North Africa was a prominent one. This, however, contributed to putting Mattei’s vision on a collision course with other European interests. If predation wrapped in pretty words is, at least in part, an accurate enough description of the 1st world’s trade relations with poorer countries, the kinds of contracts Mattei purported to sign would be of another sort, entering into direct conflict with established interests, particularly those of France.

Said Mattei during a lecture at the Centre for Foreign Policy Studies in Paris:

Oil is a political resource par excellence … its importance [becoming] more strategic than economic. It is now a matter of using it in the service of good policy, without imperialist and colonialist nostalgia, unto the maintenance of peace together with the well-being of those who, by virtue of nature, are the owners of this resource, and those who use it for their economic development. 

It has been suggested that these few words contain the whole of his program: 1) Oil is political, that is, oil companies serve an irreducibly geopolitical role, for which reason they should have a national and not merely private, commercial perspective, but 2) the watchword governing this sector’s activities should be mutuality, that is, the accrual, as far as possible, of equitable advantage for producer and consumers countries, both.

Given the time at which ENI was pursuing its activities, namely the period of the Algerian war, such sentiments could not but be polarising vis French foreign policy. Indeed, Mattei’s Il Giorno would take a position sympathetic to Algerian independence (despite the Italian government’s official support for Paris). French Ambassador to Rome, Gaston Palewski, wrote in his memoires that Mattei always remained uninterested in the embassy’s overtures and attempts to bring him closer to the French position by suggesting joint exploitation of oil from the Sahara.

On the contrary, the head of ENI apparently cultivated contacts with Algerian National Liberation Front members, earning him a surveillance detail from the French Service de documentation extérieure et de contre-espionnage (SDECE). It was apparently discovered that he was facilitating, or had promised to facilitate, aid to rebels in Algeria. 

But it was not only France (and the UK) that found Italy’s energy-cum-foreign policy destabilising—soon, the U.S. would also have reason to resent Mattei’s activities, as he signed a comprehensive trade deal with the Soviet Union in 1960/1, exchanging Soviet oil for Italian goods (cars, pipes, fertiliser, etc.).

A U.S. National Security Council report described the situation as follows: 

Italian oil policy, headed by Mattei, has launched an attack on the world’s major oil companies, with a price campaign that has had a destructive impact on relations between these companies and governments. 

The reaction included a series of media attacks, with the New York Times claiming Mattei was betraying post-war agreements and acting against the stability of global markets, and the BBC coming out with its Portrait of a Tycoon documentary. 

The situation required diplomacy: Apparently, Mattei put it to President J.F. Kennedy that the so-called “seven sister” big oil companies were breeding resentment abroad. Presumably, such resentment would play into the hands of anti-colonial Soviet propaganda, and therefore ought to have incentivized the U.S. to see ENI’s approach as less prone to eliciting political reactions in North African and Near Eastern countries, and so have more long-term viability than that of France and the UK. With Kennedy on board, Italy’s path to challenging the interests of other countries in North Africa, as well as on the European continent, would not be as fraught.

To this end, Mattei was scheduled to fly to the U.S. and speak with that country’s president directly.

He would never make it. In 1962, October 27th, Mattei died during a plane crash on his way to Milan, just before his trip across the ocean was set to take place. 

There seems to be solid enough evidence that this was an assassination, possibly carried out by the Cosa Nostra, albeit the Mafia’s motivation and the identity of those parties on behalf of whom the murder was done is, to this day, the subject of speculation. 

* * *

Today, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has decided to pick up this dangerous legacy, and is calling her plan for increased ties with North Africa the ‘Mattei Plan.’ To get a sense for the aura this figure commands, channelled by the Prime Minister’s invocation of his name, we may cite the journalistic overview of Mattei’s career I have followed in writing the above, the conclusion of which describes the martyred ENI president as “a mixture of Robin Hood and Che Guevara appearing as Julius Caesar, who dreamed of an Italy at the centre of an empire of peace, founded on labour and social justice.”

It is an irony, perhaps, that the return of the Mattei Plan, specifically focusing on North Africa and the Near East, should be catalysed by the interruption of natural gas imports into Europe from Russia, and the erection of a bitter divide akin to that which existed during the Cold War, when Mattei himself had wanted to bridge the Eurasian and Atlantic empires.

It is not only long-standing tensions between Russia and NATO that should be highlighted, however. Successive German governments have for some time biassed the EU’s energy policy eastward, to the detriment of southern European interests. Had a balance been sought and concessions been made (indeed, had Enrico Mattei not been assassinated, if that is what happened), the regional, geopolitical assertion of Italian interests would not now have to be tied to a stark east-west divide. In any case, conditions being what they are, they pose a clear opportunity to reorient the European balance of power, what I have described as the international division of labour. 

Of course, international political faultlines do not always translate across regional contexts. Concerning North African rivalries, the fact that Russia is generally favourable to Algeria, and the U.S. to Morocco, whereas Italy is at odds with the Kremlin and is precisely (though by no means exclusively) using the war in Ukraine as a springboard to push for alternative energy sources and closer ties with Algeria, among other energy exporters, creates a curious overlap. Indeed, Russia and Italy may also have a common interest in rolling-back French influence in Africa. 

Leaving possible alliances aside, in some regards, the above transcends commercial interest and political power-plays, having clear social importance. If Meloni, whatever compromises she makes, represents a politics that seeks to oppose mass migration, this is precisely served by helping, rather than hindering, the development of poorer countries, reducing the need for people to emigrate. We cannot but intuit that prevailing international institutions and arrangements are perfectly comfortable with exploitation and emigration as part of a general breakdown of any border that might limit the imperatives of oligarchic capital.

The Mattei Plan, then, does not merely compete within, but rather threatens to break from, the dominant consensus. 

The field of action is clear, as a Financial Times piece discussing Meloni’s Mattei Plan observed, 

Africa has abundant energy resources but their development has suffered from under-investment. A sub-Saharan pipeline project from Nigeria to Algeria, for example, has been in the works for decades. Now, European governments have indicated they want to invest in the existing infrastructure to boost flows from the region. ENI and SNAM [an Italian energy infrastructure company], which already operate parts of the Trans-Mediterranean Pipeline from Algeria to northern Italy, have an important role to play, according to industry experts in Italy. 

Adding,

Another space in which Italy could reap opportunities is energy transition. North African countries have enormous renewable energy potential and in the future the region could be a green hydrogen production hub, a project SNAM has been discussing for years.

Technology and infrastructure aside, however, investment requires stability (and, therefore, blocking actors that promote instability) in Africa, including, prominently, the Libyan theatre, whose cohesion is all-important. The challenge is a significant one, involving thorough changes to the region’s strategic architecture. 

Referring to Algeria, Meloni has described the Mattei Plan as constituting a model for non-predatory cooperation, an idea she reiterated to the Prime Minister of Ethiopia during his visit to Italy. This comes as Algerian relations with France continue to fray, with the latter losing clout in its former colonies, a loss Meloni has aligned herself with by describing the CFA as a colonial currency serving to exploit Africans (a position she has held for some time) (my italics):

At a certain point, Macron described us as vomit-inducing because we were closing our ports [to immigrants]. Perfect: This [holding up a billet] is called the CFA franc. It is the colonial currency that France prints for fourteen African nations to which it applies seigniorage, by virtue of which it exploits the resources of these nations. And this [indicating a photograph] is a child who works in a gold mine in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso is one of the poorest nations in the world. France prints colonial currency for Burkina Faso, and in return it demands that they end up in the coffers of the French treasury. 50% of everything that Burkina Faso exports, and that which this child crawls through the earth to pull out ends up, for the most part, in the coffers of the French state. The solution, then, is not to take Africans and move them to Europe; the solution is to liberate Africa from certain Europeans who exploit it.

The last sentence quoted here is precisely the crux of a sensible European social and foreign policy.

During a speech delivered at the close of the 8th edition of the Med Dialogues in December 2022, the Italian Prime Minister prefaced the Plan by maintaining that “our prosperity is not possible without that of our neighbours,” the mutualist premise of Enrico Mattei himself. She then contrasted it to a “predatory posture towards other nations,” and tied the Plan explicitly to the preservation and cultivation of distinct national identities, “collaborative, valuing the identities and specificities of each.”