Any visitor to the picturesque Umbrian town of Spoleto, elegantly tossed against the Apennine foothills, will eventually find him or herself in front of the Cathedral of Saint Mary Assumption. Before entering, it is impossible not to contemplate the façade. The most striking feature of the upper façade is certainly the portrait of Christ giving a Benediction, signed by a certain Solsternus. But what is really striking is not only the portrait itself, but evenly so the inscription below, which is very easy to miss, but which reads as follows:
Hæc est picture quam fecit fat placituraDoctor Solfernus hac fummus in arte modernusAnnis inventis cum feptem mille duecentis
This picture which will please well
Was made by Doctor Solfernus, the ablest of the Moderns in this Art
In the year 1207.
In other words, in the early thirteenth century, there lived in Umbria a certain doctor Solfernus who thought of himself as a modern person. It is not easy to know what exactly he meant by this; a thorough discussion of this nontrivial question is much beyond what we can or will discuss in the present book. The point we want to make is a more general one. Discourses of modernity as applied to Italy in the ‘modern period’ have mostly missed the mark, cataloging Italy as a ‘latecomer to modernity’, running behind the more ‘advanced’ European countries, the true homelands of political and economic revolutions. Italy was rarely a latecomer to modernity, but quite often a ‘first-comer’. This was not only the case for the Renaissance period. If modernity is not simply understood as a predefined ‘cultural program’, but approached instead as a specific kind of historical self-understanding, we need to realize that Italy represents a privileged entry point into the comparative analysis of ideas, ideologies, and experiences of modernity, especially as these developed from the French Revolution onwards.
This book revisits modern Italian political history from the late nineteenth century until the present. Our aim is to analyze the multitude of historical narratives that took shape during crucial junctures in the country’s political history, narratives that in different periods came to underpin cultural identity and political legitimacy. In particular, we analyze how thinkers belonging to four main ideological ‘clusters’—Catholics, liberals, communists, fascists—have formulated multiple and often antagonistic visions of modernity. In these competing narratives of the modern, epics of historical events that grounded modern nationhood were continuously shaped by changing figurations of the political present.
The more specific Italian debate will serve to cast new light on two central questions in contemporary historical and social theoretical debates: in what ways exactly are modernities pluralized within concrete historical and sociopolitical contexts? And what is the active role of memory politics in the formulation of alternative modernities? Let us, before we briefly outline the contents of the chapters to follow, provide a rationale and a general analytical framework for each of these questions.
Italy and the Modern: Reassessing Analytical Paradigms
As a nation, Italy has ritually been described, in popular, academic, and political discourse, as ‘backwards’, a country struggling to catch up with modernity.1 The most well-known figure symbolizing this position is no doubt Pinocchio.2 Pinocchio is the funny, charming but also unreliable puppet always aspiring to but never quite reaching maturity. Carlo Collodi’s Pinocchio stories were written in the post-unification period, and first appeared in an Italian children’s magazine from 1880. Collodi was a disenchanted supporter of the original Risorgimento. He had served as a volunteer with Tuscany during the wars of liberation, 1848–1860. Before turning to children stories, Collodi mostly wrote bitingly about politics. The story of Pinocchio captures in allegorical form the fate of backward Italy, always awaiting its true liberation and coming to maturity. The mischievous puppet aspires to true childhood, but his bad, immature behavior seems to condemn him to perpetual puppet-hood. Only after demonstrating human virtue does he become a real boy and human. His path of metamorphosis follows the track of Italian history, from a puppet forced to move at the control of others, to a donkey (a symbol for blind adherence to Church doctrine much favored by nineteenth-century Italian caricaturists), and, finally, after much struggling, fatigue, and symbolic death, to an autonomous personality, arguably a figurative emblem of a completed Risorgimento.3
The vocabulary of backwardness or lack of modernity applied to Italy is everywhere to be found—as John Agnew has correctly noted4—and it is not our aim here to provide an overview of the debates.5 By way of illustration let us simply invoke discussions of Italy’s economy, so thoroughly dominated by the theme of the country’s ‘lagging behind’ and ‘catching up’ relative to the economies of northern Europe. Economic historians Nicola Rossi and Gianni Toniolo write that ‘given Italy’s relative backwardness around the turn of the century, a higher long-term growth rate might have been expected’.6 The authors here refer to the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. However, the timeless nature of the statement is underscored when the authors in a later work discuss the immediate post–World War II period with terms that should already by now ring familiar: ‘It might be argued that, given Italy’s relative backwardness around 1950, a higher long-term growth rate could have been expected, such as to allow a full catch up with Germany.’7 Need we remark that it is this very language that European economists employ in the context of today’s European economic crisis?
Given this persistent tendency to bespeak Italy as lacking in modernity in what seems like an irreducible time lag, it would obviously be wrong to entirely dismiss this discourse. The metaphor has become the preferred way of dealing with Italian differences relative to an idealized European modernity. The idea of Italy running behind modernity has evidently also become part of a self-ascribed identity, an identity that has imploded also due to continuous attempts of classification and definition reproduced by foreign scholars, often working within an Anglo-Saxon tradition. This is therefore not to say that the metaphor of backward Italy is necessarily false in all its usage. However, as analysts we need to go behind and beyond it. As a widespread view of Italy and its history, the discourse has three interrelated shortcomings that need to be pointed out:
First, to describe and catalog societies as more or less modern remains a descriptive attempt tied to, and often dependent upon, a value judgment. This remains so even if the ‘hierarchy of values’ behind the judgment often remains implicit and unarticulated. As John Agnew has pointed out, the image and the metaphor of backward Italy has become an idealized myth where a metaphor has substituted real analysis.8 The intrinsically normative character of the terms ‘backward’ and ‘modern’ is systematically obscured. Herein lies their discursive power which we should scrutinize, not adopt as our uncritical starting point of analysis. While such forms of classification of the ‘other’ as less modern (and less ‘rational’) have been rightly denuded via decades of reflexivity and disciplinary critique within anthropology9 and history—especially with regard to representing and doing research in colonial and postcolonial settings10—it is remarkable just how untouched the ‘lack of modernity discourse’ has remained with respect to social and historical research on Italy. If an imaginary Edward Banfield today had republished a study of, say, South Africa, insisting to narrate a local society as backwards and amoral (as Banfield did in his original 1958 publication devoted to a small community/town in the south of Italy11), it would be—rightly so—countered by screaming hordes of critique. We really need to start asking ourselves why this is not the case for Italy.
Second, when insisting to define Italy as running behind modernity, we are, wittingly or not, matching Italy against a prototype model. Which model? Well, this of course depends on the person speaking and making the judgment. But as a general picture, the implicit models have tended to be England, France, or, sometimes (especially in the economic literature), Germany. Italy is seen as an ‘exception’ to a norm which celebrates a linear account of state and nation building, based on the experiences of single countries—and often analyzed within academic discourse that flow from those same countries. Scholars have been able to label Italy as a unique case only by ignoring the experiences of numerous southern and eastern European nations, whose paths to modernity differed considerably from the (much idealized!) histories of the Great Powers. By expanding one’s sample to include other nations—such as Turkey or Poland or other eastern European countries also combining religion and Communism into their social texture—Italy suddenly starts to look more ‘typical’ (while Whiggish England might slowly start to look peculiar indeed!). Comparison with Balkan nations, particularly in the last turbulent decade of the twentieth century, may well help to mute statements about Italy’s inherently fractured nature, while also encouraging a more careful search for the sources of nationalist violence and separatism in post-Cold War Europe. Following here the suggestion of Iain Chambers, instead of measuring Italy against unrealistic ideal-types, Italy can be meaningfully placed in a wider Mediterranean map, a region whose fundamental fluid, hybrid nature has long been obscured by the categories and structures imposed by European discourse and government.12
Third, the vocabulary of ‘backwardness’ leads to an imposition of conceptual uniformity and unreflexive adaptation of terms that may be alien to concrete persons and the wider communities which actively seek to shape the modern. As a discourse, it may say little or nothing about the meaning actors themselves search for in their present. Here the task of analysis, we argue, is not to arrive at some correct and exhaustive definition of what modernity really ‘is’ and then deductively apply the definition to a specific research area or historical period as means of ‘measurement’. The result of such an operation will remain not only problematically ethnocentric, but also, and more seriously, teleological and analytically flawed. The analytical task remains to see how, in given historical periods, and in the thought and political projects of concrete persons and movements, modernity became elaborated from within.
In sum, the ‘running behind modernity’ approach to Italy is normatively problematic, analytically obfuscating, and theoretically disabling. In this sense, our larger aim is to recognize attempts to articulate an Italian political and cultural identity that do not simply accept the (fairy) tale of unilineal modernization, and that do not simply use English liberal democracy, French nation-state centralization, and German economic organization as mirror images to imitate. Italian thinkers have for centuries been engaged in ways to understand Italy’s particular European identity, going to depths with the question of how models of modernization from elsewhere could be adopted, or not, to Italy. This has also involved attempts to formulate visions of modernity where Italy had something positive or unique to put on offer.
In fact, quests for ‘modernity’ have often begun and ended on the Italian peninsula. Italy badly needs to be pushed into the heartland of contemporary social theory, as the frictions of modernity have been played out more visibly and dramatically here than possible anywhere else in the world. It was here (let us not forget!) that the very concepts of the ‘modern’ and the ‘secular’ first emerged. Italy is the homeland of a series of modern ‘firsts’, including Fascism, Eurocommunism, and modern, institutionalized Christian Democracy. From different angles and in different periods, alternatives to the singular narrative of an Enlightenment ‘French Revolution’ version of modernity, based on pure reason and autonomy, were articulated; alternatives that, in Catholic versions, reincorporated transcendence as a legitimate perspective of truth and reason, and reanchored democracy, justice, and freedom in a religiously argued ethos; alternatives that in the fascist experience fatally sought to position Italy as...