The Political Cultures of Israel's Radical Right: Commentary on Ehud Sprinzak's The Ascendance of Israel's Radical Right∗

Between 1968 and 1974 Italy was subjected to an unusually virulent campaign of right‐wing terrorism and subversion. An illustrative episode associated with this so‐called ‘strategy of tension’, which was characterized by the systematic use of covert ‘false flag’ operations, was the 17 May 1973 grenade attack outside Milan police headquarters that resulted in four dead and over 40 injured. Although the perpetrator, Gianfranco Bertoli, claimed to be an ‘individualist anarchist’ and had in fact established contacts with certain anarchist and leftist groups, subsequent judicial investigations revealed that he had been an informant and infiltrator for the Italian military intelligence service, that he had long maintained links with various anti‐communist and neo‐fascist organizations, and that he apparently received ‘cover’ and some type of logistical support prior to the attack from one or more ‘international secret services’. Although many aspects of the crime still remain murky, in all probability Bertoli was an agent provocateur acting on behalf of clandestine, quasi‐official intelligence apparatuses rather than a solitary anarchist engaging in violent ‘propaganda of the deed’.     

Killing Nationalism with Liberalism? Austria–Hungary and the Serbian Constitution of 1869

Based on material from the Hungarian archives hitherto unpublished in English, this article examines the contribution Austro–Hungarian diplomacy made to the approval, by the Ottoman government, of a new constitution for its vassal-state Serbia in 1869. The episode reflects the emergence of a Hungarian influence on the Habsburg Monarchy's policy towards Russia, the Ottoman Balkans, and especially Serbia in the years immediately following the Ausgleich of 1867. Hungarian Minister-President Count Gyula Andrássy, through the new Austro–Hungarian consul in Belgrade, Benjámin Kállay, lobbied Vienna to support the new constitution. He did so in the hope that a more liberal political system in Serbia would impede the Serbian government's tendency to foment nationalist unrest within the Habsburg Monarchy and distract Belgrade from its policy of territorial expansion at the expense of the Ottoman Empire.