Italian Leader Urges Global Cooperation

In a day of speeches that ranged from the world of 1948 to the world of the 21st Century, Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita on Tuesday said that Europe and the United States must apply their historical closeness to developing a “joint venture” of cooperative thinking in dealing with the Soviet Bloc, Third World nations and transcendent problems like pollution, drugs and AIDS.

At a daylong seminar on the legacy of the Marshall Plan, the postwar U.S. aid program to help a bankrupt and demoralized Europe revive itself, De Mita said the plan “gave the Europeans the confidence of a continental identity, which two successive suicidal wars seemed to have destroyed forever.”

As the Marshall Plan demonstrated to Europe a “unifying thrust beyond rivalry and hatred,” said De Mita, it also made evident “the interdependence of the problems of all countries” and presaged Europe’s present internal economic linkages.

And four decades later, when “Europe, too, has become an economic giant,” the Marshall Plan--which British statesman Winston Churchill described as “the most unsordid act in all history”--still provides a frame of reference for tackling the problems of a world at uneasy rest, he said.

It is the “capacity to indicate new frontiers,” said De Mita, whose country is a strong NATO ally.

De Mita capped off his two-day visit to Los Angeles with a speech to a dinner meeting of the World Affairs Council.

In his speech, De Mita noted that, in 1948, many countries--like the Soviet Union and developing nations--”were either still excluded from international politics or had chosen to isolate themselves.”

Now these countries are being counted in, too, he said.

And “America and Europe must continue to represent hope to the world as it opens to detente and disarmament and confronts new inequalities and poverty. . . .” They must do that without falling into the “twin dangers of European neutralism and American isolationism,” he pointed out.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s reform efforts must be met with “general improvement of relations,” both commercial and cultural, but “we cannot have ‘separate peaces,’ ” said De Mita, who recently visited the Soviet Union.

There must also be an understanding that “the West will not go on vacation only because the U.S.S.R., with a courageous unilateral gesture, is preparing to reduce the disparity in military powers between the Warsaw Pact and the Atlantic alliance.”

It would, he noted, “seem truly strange, however, if the West should miss the opportunity it is offered today to favor the evolution, positive for us, of the socialist countries.”

Looking to the southern hemisphere, he called for “a combination between economic generosity, reinforced international instruments and a greater north-south cooperation.”

It is, he said, “clearly futile to hope to be able to control and to extinguish the hotbeds of conflict, unless we can provide those areas with the means to integrate into the system of international peaceful coexistence.”

During the Marshall Plan seminar, De Mita presented the Italian Order of Merit to several U.S. notables, among them Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), who as a young journalist covered dictator Benito Mussolini’s rise in Italy and briefly helped to run Italian aid programs linked to the Marshall Plan.

De Mita will fly to Washington today to meet with President Reagan and President-elect George Bush.