Post-war Italian Nationalism (original) (raw)
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Having a strong regional identity and sense of loyalty is a millennia-old tradition in Italy, referred to as Campanilismo. Campanilismo comes from the Italian word for bell tower and is used as an expression indicating that one belongs to the community in earshot of the bell tower. Even as Italians migrated to different parts of the world, this idea of campanilismo remained strong: Scholar Stefano Luconi explains that regional identities were so strong that “most [Italian] immigrants [in the United States] hardly thought of themselves as members of the same nationality group between the late nineteenth century and the outbreak of World War I… Intraregional rivalries, along with disparate dialects and traditions, estranged Italian immigrants.” However, various occurrences throughout the twentieth century has led to the creation of a common national Italian identity in the United States, while Italy still faces these strong regional identities as opposed to a unified nation-state. Michael Dunford explains that “although Italy is a single nation state and a national community, any examination of its internal social characteristics reveals that… there are many Italies, with some internal difference sufficiently large to generate pressures for political fragmentation.” Benito Mussolini’s fascist rule and the World Wars helped create a sense of nationalism and national pride among Italians in both Italy and the United States. The Italian-Americans adopted these ideals out of pride of their roots, while Italian in Italy were encouraged by the fascist propaganda to abandon their regional prejudices. However, this sense of an Italian national identity was short lived in Italy and has been overridden by the various anti-fascist political parties that promote campanilismo ideals. This paper addresses the question that if both Italian-Americans and Italians in Italy faced a sensed of nationalism through the World Wars and interwar years, then why is there an Italian national identity present among Italian immigrant descendants in the United States today, but regionally based identities among Italians in Italy? This paper analyzes the effects between ethnicity, the immigrant experience in shaping identity, and the influence war can have on national identities in order to answer why Italian-Americans generally have a strong national Italian identity while Italians more often have dominant regional identities. I argue that by examining 1) the immigrant experience of Italians in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century, especially the shared sense of discrimination, 2) WWI and II and the sensations they brought to the immigrant community, and 3) Benito Mussolini’s Fascist rule and accompanying propaganda, one can see that for the case of Italians in Italy and the United States, ethnic nationalism is stronger than civic nationalism. Moreover, I argue that it is specially the defensive stance Italian-Americans took in regards to the World Wars, Fascism, and within the immigrant community during the twentieth century in the United States that has facilitated this strong Italian national identity in the United States. This paper will engage with theories and definitions of nationalism, identity, ethnicity, and immigration in order to analyze how such events and conditions assisted the creation of the Italian national identity in the United States in the twentieth century. This paper addresses the significant roles discrimination, conflict, and struggle can have in developing a strong national identity. In order to understand these concepts and how the case of Italians and Italian-Americans fit into the conversation, it is first necessary to understand Italy’s unification in 1861, the major waves of Italian immigration to the United States, and Mussolini’s Fascist rule. These factors are important to understand as they give context to the different conditions Italians in the United States and Italians in Italy faced.
The three founding Myths of Italy's new Nationalism
Lse Euro Crisis in the Press Blog, 2018
The aftermath of 2018 Italian elections has turned into a political reality show powered by the media system. Centre stage stands Matteo Salvini, leader of the Northern League, who became deputy prime minister, Interior minister and the de facto head of government. At his side is the other deputy prime minister, Luigi Di Maio, leader of the Five Stars Movement and Welfare minister. Anything that Salvini and Di Maio say instantly becomes the object of analysis, comment and outrage amongst an increasingly crowded audience. In Italy, whether you are sipping coffee at the bar or driving your car listening to any radio station you will inevitably hear the latest statements of the two leaders treated as the most important news of the hour. The same goes for national and local televisions, whose schedules are full of shows focused on the core issues of the two government parties: immigration, crime and the privileges of politicians. Now this reality show is proving to be a critical turning point for the European Union as a whole, in view of the May 2019 vote. It would be wrong to think that the 2018 elections outcome represents an accident. It is similarly risky to assume that the strategy of Italy’s current government is oriented only to provocation, because it seems to remain so in tune with popular feeling. What has inflated this bubble of brash words and mixed feelings, that is transforming Italy’s political landscape in a nationalist direction? There are three founding myths that have changed the attitude of many Italian citizens towards politics, the European integration process and the role of national identity during the last decade. They are the anti-political wave (2007), the advent of a pro-EU technocratic government (2011) and the refugee crisis (2015-2016).
Immigrants, Roma and Sinti unveil the “National” in Italian Identity
Cultural Encounters Conflicts and Resolutions, 2014
This essay picks up a few threads in the ongoing debate on national identity in Italy. Immigration and the intertwining of cultures locally have stretched the contours of the nation state to a breaking point. As a result, the social self has become a sharply contested terrain between those who want to install a symbolic electronic fence around an imagined fatherland and those who want a more inclusive nation at home in a global world. After discussing the views of Amin Maalouf , Alessandro Dal Lago (2009), Abdelmalek Sayad (1999) and Patrick Manning (2005) on national identity and migration in the first half, the essay goes on in the second half to examine the powerful contribution to the debate by leading Italian Romaní intellectual, Santino Spinelli (2012), and Romanologist Lorenzo Monasta (2008). The depth of the current identity crisis in Italy makes this country an ideal laboratory to probe new approaches on the subject.
Contemporary European History, 2023
This article employs the recently discovered memoir of Luigi Molinathe superintendent of schools in Italy's multilingual borderland of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol from 1923 to 1944to demonstrate the sizeable and problematic rift between purportedly 'common-sense' understandings of 'Italian-ness' (italianità) as they were manifested in Italy's newly annexed Alpine territory and in Rome. In particular, the author focuses on the state's treatment of the region's Italian speakers (trentini) in its attempts to 'Italianise' their German-speaking neighbours and solidify fascist control of Italy's northern border. Ultimately, Molina's recollections recount how Rome's struggles to articulate and implement clear and consistent criteria for Italianisation led to the weakening of regional officials' moral authority, political support and 'totalitarian' façade. The simultaneously vague and critical project of Italianisation did not simply illuminate fascism's inability to inculcate an 'Italian identity' among Tyroleans, however; it also served to highlight fundamental difficulties in defining national identities in any nation-state. In the aftermath of the First World War, the Italian state faced the challenge of changing the former Habsburg territory of Südtirol into the Italian region of Trentino-Alto Adige. 1 In the first years of Italian administration, between late 1918 and 1922, the Liberal Government primarily focused its efforts on (re)establishing essential bureaucratic and economic infrastructures that had undergone extensive damage during the war. 2 After Benito Mussolini came to power in late 1922, however, Rome determined that a more extensive and intensive campaign of 'Italianisation' was necessary in the multilingual Alpine region. As with many nationalisation efforts of the twentieth century, the education system became a pillar of that project; the man entrusted to supervise the transformation of
Geojournal, 1999
The nineties will go down in Italian history as the decade of great political change. By way of emphasising this change, the media and politicians use the expressions 'Prima Repubblica' and 'Seconda Repubblica' (first and second republics), adopting the terminology used by the French for their 'republics'. During the so-called First Republic (1948Republic ( -1994, the centrist Christian Democrat Party represented the moderate political force in every government. However, the corruption trials of 1992-1993, which involved many of this party's members, led to its collapse at the ballot box. In northern Italy, a consequence of the demise of the Christian Democrats was the resounding success of the Lega Nord at the local government elections of 1993 and the general election of 1994. The Lega Nord based, and continues to base, its success on the use of ethno-nationalist slogans and catchcries. Italy has an ancient tradition -dating at least from the fall of the Roman Empireof political and linguistic splintering. Given today's situation, this factor may have impacts at the level of the structure of the state: federalism, special statutes for regions and/or provinces, the decentralization of the state, and so on. For the first time for perhaps more than a century, in this new period of uncertain political change, Italians are increasingly viewing territory and its characteristics as politically relevant. Justifications for 'national' cohesion are being rediscovered, or invented, at the local level, transforming it into political claims. Italians have begun to talk about relationships with territories and neighbouring groups from a different perspective. At present, traditional political parties and politicians are too slow and insufficiently focused in their response to the rising call for autonomy and decision-making authority at the local level. This factor has provided the time and space for isolationist and culturally self-reliant localist ideologies to propagate. It is impossible to say how long this period of transition will last and what its outcomes will be. The three main choices now facing Italians would be appear to be: (1) reclaim the nationalist sentiment of a united state (abandoned after the Fascist era);
Italy from without: An introduction
Forum Italicum: A Journal of Italian Studies, 2013
There is no doubt that current debates on Italian national identity, and on the meaning of Italian history, are very lively; of late, these discussions have been very effective in questioning the many cliches and established paradigms concerning nationalism and nation-building. But it is equally true that reflections on Italian national identity have, over time, been mired in a narrow internalist perspective that has neglected the larger historical and geopolitical processes which shaped the emergence of the nation before and during the first 150 years of its existence. It is only recently that scholars interested in the many aspects of Italian nationalism have begun to account for the international dimensions of Italy’s creation. Indeed, if our idea of the Italian nation is ‘a cultural artifact of a particular kind,’ as Benedict Anderson defines it (encouraging us to look at the concept of national identity not as an inherited or inevitable happenstance, but as a deliberate and artificial creation linked to the emergence of a new ruling elite), we need to expand our critical field to ask how such a cultural artifact has been created from both inside and outside the geographical and conceptual borders of the nation. However, attention to the European – indeed global – aspects of the Italian nation has not always been central to nationalist expressions, celebrations, histories and historical reconstructions of the Risorgimento, which have generally focused on the fight for unification and the figure of proverbial and quintessentially Italian heroes, Garibaldi above all. This is perhaps hardly surprising, since the process of Italian unification was, in significant part, a battle against attempts by competing external interests to intervene in and control the peninsula. The history of the Italian Risorgimento has consequently been constructed as fundamentally a history from within, one founded on a myth of an essential Italianita, that binds together the diverse communities of the region to produce an integral national whole. This belief in the existence of an ancient Italianita, understood as a historical entity shaped by the native populations of the peninsula through successive generations, was the presupposition shared by all the patriots of the Risorgimento; it served to affirm the right of Italians to a unified state that was independent, sovereign