The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy

History, politics, society

Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini, Giuseppe Veltri, Andrea Mammone, Ercole Giap Parini, Giuseppe A. Veltri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317487548
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Italy provides a comprehensive account of Italy and Italian politics in the 21st Century. Featuring contributions from many leading scholars in the field, this Handbook is comprised of 28 chapters which are organized to deliver unparalleled analysis of Italian society, politics and culture. A wide range of topics are covered, including:

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• Politics and economy, and their impact on Italian society

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• Parties and new politics

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• Regionalism and migrations

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• Public memories

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• Continuities and transformations in contemporary Italian society.

This is an essential reference work for scholars and students of Italian and Western European society, politics, and history.

Part I
Old and new tensions in contemporary Italian society

1
The ‘Southern Question’ … again

Iain Chambers

Viewed from London, Los Angeles, New York, Berlin, Paris and Milan, the south of the world is invariably considered in terms of lacks and absences. It is not yet modern; it has still to catch up. It remains, as Dipesh Chakrabarty would put it, an inadequate place (Chakrabarty, 2000). The south is spatially and temporally located elsewhere, at the edge of the map. Of course, as we know from Edward Said, and through him from Antonio Gramsci, this is a geography of power. It is about being placed and systematised in a manner not of your own choosing. It is about being rendered subordinate and subaltern to other forces, and being exploited, not only economically, but also politically and culturally, in order for that subalternity to be reproduced and reinforced. The south of the world is framed, not only conceptually enclosed, but also falsely accused of failing to respect a modernity being triumphantly pursued elsewhere. To return to the south as a critical, political and historical problem is, ultimately, to return to the north and its hegemonic management of the planet. The ills, failures and breakdowns that are located down there, across the border, are precisely the products of a northern will to make the world over in its image and interests. This is the political economy of location. Here the south, of Italy, of Europe, of the Mediterranean, of the world, is rendered both marginal but paradoxically central to the reproduction of that economy. If the whole world were equally modern, then modernity as we know it would collapse. The cancellation of the inequalities, property and differences that drive the planetary machinery of capitalist accumulation would render what we today call modernity superfluous. The subversion of linearity and the lateral redistribution of ‘progress’ and development would undo historical time as it is currently understood. The ‘south’ is a political question and also a historical one; in both cases, it is about the power and the exploitation of those held in its definitions.

Brigands, lazy peasants, mafia and corruption

If by the end of the nineteenth century a stereotypical image of southern Italy had already been established as a land inhabited by brigands, lazy peasants and corruption, we need, as a minimum, to understand the historical processes that led to this state of affairs. But then history provides us with an ambiguous archive. Irreducible to simple causality and a transparent rationality, the ‘south’ emerges as a category, a construction, an invention (Petrusewicz, 1998). Its definition reveals the semiotics of power. The ‘south’ is always destined to experience that combination of repression and refusal that is the foreclosure of hegemony seeking to negate the trauma of its violent affirmation (Mellino and Curcio, 2012).

It is within this matrix that we might turn to the unification and the creation of the modern nation of Italy, engineered on the back of the conquest of one sovereign state (the Bourbon kingdom of the Two Sicilies) by another (the Piedmont monarchy of the House of Savoy). Behind the offensive labelling of its inhabitants, and the reduction of rebellion against, resistance to and refusal of that conquest as ‘brigandage’, there existed an altogether more complex social and political world. This was characterised by the brutal exercise of feudal powers, whose representatives willing allied themselves with the new national Parliament and political order in order to continue their rule over the land and its peasantry. In brokering hegemonic interests, agricultural reform was deliberately avoided by the new unitary state. This recycling of change in order to sustain the status quo, what the Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco and Antonio Gramsci referred to as ‘passive revolution’, might be considered one of the central subtexts of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, also well caught in Luchino Visconti’s film of the novel. It is really only after the conclusion of the Second World War that a certain degree of post-feudal land reform occurs in Italy. In the terrible conditions of agricultural life and labour, the fact that the ‘bosses’ live in Naples or Turin, and state authority shifts from Naples to Rome, makes little difference. Reading Carlo Levi’s Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (Christ Stopped at Eboli), published in 1955, and registering the nuanced critique of Italian unification in Mario Martone’s recent film Noi Credevamo (based on Anna Banti’s beautiful novel of 1967), one stumbles across the persistent repression and exclusion of a subaltern peasantry from the national narrative. This, of course, is the key motif in Gramsci’s analysis of the ‘failure’ of Italian unification.

Here it would be hypocrisy to talk in terms of historical progress directly attributable to the transit to the modern nation. The military occupation and juridical enforcement of unification in southern Italy, in the wake of military operations that witnessed the deployment of 120,000 troops and resulted in at least 30,000 dead, was followed by mass migration from rural poverty to the Americas. Subsequent colonial adventures in east Africa and Libya (home at one time to 150,000 Italians) were also considered a potential safety valve for relieving the pressure of southern destitution. There is no linear progress here but rather a contorted spiral of development in which the resources of southern Italy often fuelled northern interests and advancement. If the feudal regime of the Bourbons was suppressed and forcefully incorporated into the modern Italian state, the latter tended to govern this southern acquisition through the biopolitical grammar of alterity. The Mezzogiorno was inferiorised as the racialised object of anthropological and biological categories. It was considered closer to Africa and the Arab world in its customs and culture than to Europe (Moe, 2002). Forms of social opposition, political resistance and alternative modalities of government were reduced to questions of criminality, public order and corrupt practices inherited from the ancien régime. These were persistently contrasted with the industrious modernity of the north.

The responsibilities that a centralised national government should have exercised in economic and cultural, and not just political, terms were both conceptually and structurally evaded. This inferiorisation of the south affirms that its subordination to northern concerns was not a historical accident but a power relationship. It was justified in the languages of colonialism and racism, and it rendered the south inferior, less European, inherently underdeveloped. This, of course, was a particular instance of the far wider appropriation of the Mediterranean and the south of Europe (Spain, Italy, Greece and the Balkans), not to speak of the extra-European world, when viewed and framed from London, Paris, Berlin, Turin and, later, Rome. The south is relegated to the margins of the national epic; its existing conditions are considered an impediment to the realisation of ‘progress’; its history is yet to come. In this sense, Carlo Levi’s Christ Stopped at Eboli becomes a profoundly instructive political text.

The long national debate on the ‘Southern Question’ that accompanies the history of modern Italy and the incorporation of the ex-kingdom of the two Sicilies into the new nation constantly veers between outcries against an aggressive northern act of deliberate colonisation and the more academic discussion of national and international cycles and rhythms evidencing uneven development. If, on the one hand, the north apparently robbed the south of its financial assets in order to establish its industrial base, and in the process waged a war on the population in order to exercise this right, this was counterbalanced by a liberal paternalism that saw its task of dragging the south out of decadent government and feudal inefficiency in order to make it modern. If the colonising imperative that saw in the south an exotic world of disturbing alterity still remains very much in play today in internal racisms (and the Northern League is symptomatic of that virulent syntax), the liberal insistence on educating the south through a programmed ‘progress’ also continued to dominate the state policy of post-1945 Italy. The clearest manifestation of the latter approach was the creation in 1950 of a national fund – Cassa del Mezzogiorno – for financing the development of southern Italy. This was to launch the era of the notorious ‘cathedrals in the desert’: industrial plant parachuted into rural southern Italy that was supposed to kick-start the local economy. Despite the massive amounts of money involved it was a historical failure; or, rather, its economic and social aims were largely side-tracked into the machinery of sustaining and reproducing political power. In this sense, it was by no means an exclusively ‘Southern Question’, but rather a component in the composition and management of a national mosaic of powers, interests and political groups.

One of the more obvious examples of this mechanism is that of the complex interweaving of national and local powers which witnessed political party machinery and organised crime allied in the creation and reproduction of political and cultural hegemony. This had already been encouraged by the Allied war authorities in their conquest of Sicily and southern Italy from Fascism after 1943. Such an alliance stretched from the maintenance of everyday local consensus through political patronage and organised crime to domestic Cold War containment of political unrest and the subsequent crisis management of national emergencies and disasters (the 1980 earthquake in Campania is here emblematic: massive state funding simultaneously consolidated and extended political power and organised crime, both locally and nationally). The details, of course, are complicated, but I think that it is once again clear that the seemingly separate specificity of the ‘Southern Question’ has consistently played a fundamental role in the political and economic arrangements that compose the national (and international) picture.

The continuing twentieth mass migration of the reserve army of labour of southern Italians to northern Italy and northern Europe, on the back of migration to the Americas and North Africa, also alerts us to this structural reality. It touches the essential dimension of alterity and the periphery in composing and reaffirming the ‘centre’. This needs to be consistently borne in mind if we want to avoid being dragged into an endless and fruitless debate overdetermined by stereotypical language, racialising prejudices, and a biopolitics passing for common sense. Migration also reminds us of the shifting conditions of international labour. While migration from the south of the world has serviced the north, the Italian south itself is today clearly destined never to be industrialised – today that nineteenth-century model of ‘progress’ has literally migrated elsewhere, to be charted in the megapolises of China, India and Brazil. The labour pool has been outsourced along global networks that draw upon capital gains and infrastructures that the Mezzogiorno will never have. It is now necessary to change perspective and seek to reformulate the ‘Southern Question’. To do this, I suggest we need to adopt another series of coordinates and maps.

The dead end of localism

I believe that Antonio Gramsci helps us to identify a series of elements that pull the question out of its immediate historical and critical coordinates in post-unification Italy and allows us to better consider its contemporary implications. Here we will discover that it is no longer possible to talk of a ‘Southern Question’ within the boundaries of the Italian nation state, and perhaps, despite all the immediate peculiarities of the ‘Mezzogiorno’, it never was. Without anticipating the argument, there lies here the suggestion that the ‘Southern Question’, identified as a political problem, and as a historical and cultural question, was not external to the modernity that it was presumed could resolve it. It was, and is, internal to modern Europe and the formation of its nation states. In an important sense, seeking to respond to the ‘Southern Question’ ultimately implies replying to the structural inequalities and distribution of power that accompany the formation of nation building and Occidental modernity. I feel, as Gramsci himself once put it, that this ‘thinking globally’ is of significance in casting what seems an almost unresolvable historical, cultural and political dilemma into an altogether more extensive critical space that throws a suggestive critical light back into the specificities of the Italian case.

So, it seems to me imperative to acknowledge wider landmarks when referencing the ‘Southern Question’. To avoid remaining trapped in a tangle of historical and cultural debate that reconstructs and deconstructs the question, it is perhaps time to apply a critical cut. A local inheritance can never be cancelled, but it can be exposed to other questions, examined with new critical coordinates. To step beyond the south’s location in existing knowledge–power relationships, and follow Edward Said’s proposal to de-orientalise the logic that reconfirms subordination in a self-perpetuating discourse, is to adopt a postcolonial approach that insists that the colonisation and construction of the ‘periphery’ is essential for the sustenance and extension of metropolitan power. The rest of the world is not simply an accessory and witness to Occidental progress but is deeply stitched into its fabric of production and reproduction. It does not simply absorb and consume modernity; in its labour power, cultural forces and political antagonisms, it produces modernity. It is not simply where modernity recycles and dumps the refuse of ‘progress’; it provid...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Introduction: Notes on Italy in recent decades and the Handbook
• PART I Old and new tensions in contemporary Italian society
• 1 The ‘Southern Question' … Again
• 2 Fratelli D'italia Differences and similarities in social values between Italian macro-regions
• 3 From Manpower to Brain Drain? Emigration and the Italian state, between past and present
• 4 Racism, Immigration and New Identities in Italy
• 5 Role and Perceptions of Women in Contemporary Italy
• 6 New Generation at a Crossroads: Decline or Change? Young people in Italy and their transformation since the nineties
• 7 Mafias, Italy and Beyond
• PART II Democratic life and institutions
• 8 Institutions and the Political System in Italy A story of failure
• 9 The Missing Renewal of the Ruling Class
• 10 Media and Democracy
• 11 No Longer Pro-European? Politicisation and contestation of Europe in Italy
• 12 Religion and the State
• PART III Politics
• 13 Genius Loci The geography of Italian politics
• 14 The Political Right
• 15 From Communism to Centre-Left Analysis of an unprecedented political trajectory
• 16 From the Democrazia Cristiana to the Archipelago of Catholic and Centrist Parties
• 17 The Fluctuating Fortunes of the Lega Nord
• 18 Magistrates Going Into Politics Antonio Di Pietro and Italy of Values
• 19 Social Movement Campaigns from Global Justice Activism to Movimento Cinque Stelle
• PART IV Italian welfare and economy
• 20 Welfare, Italian Style From Bismarckian beginnings to crisis and reform
• 21 Clientelism
• 22 The Impact of Political Calculus on the Reform of Institutions and Growth Old and new examples
• 23 Italian Firms
• 24 The Banking System and Savings Allocation in Italy
• PART V Memories
• 25 Cinema and Public Memory
• 26 The Risorgimento in Contemporary Italy History, politics and memory during the national jubilees (1911–1961–2011)
• 27 The ‘Spaces' of Anti-Fascism in Italy Today
• 28 Italy's Colonial Past
• Index