Modern Italy, 1871 to the Present

Martin Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317866022
• Edition: 3
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This classic textbook covers the social, economic and political history of Italy from unification in 1870 to the present time. This new edition brings students right up to date, with increased coverage of the the 1980's and 90's and a new section on the turbulent reign of Silvio Berlusconi. Other changes include updating the coverage of Liberal Italy and Fascism in the light of recent scholarship and changes in historiographical approach, additional material on Italian popular culture and a new chronology.

CHAPTER 1
Introduction

1.1 Themes and problems

In 1910 Vincenzo Morello looked back on fifty years of united Italy, and commented:

In Italy a really extraordinary thing has happened. There is no religious sentiment, yet a clerical party has been set up; there is no class hatred, yet a large Socialist party has been organized; but although there is a mature State, equipped with Army, Navy, Civil Service and Foreign Office, nobody has ever been able to create even the glimmering of a State party. In the struggle for existence, only the State has no membership, no ideology, no strategy, no tactics. Contemporary history is all about the State’s enemies; but the State itself does not exist.¹

Admittedly Morello was a Nationalist, and that was why he wanted a stronger State; but his views have been echoed, even in our own day, by many other people – Socialist novelists and Liberal historians, Communist critics and Fascist apologists, Italian sociologists and American anthropologists. They all deplore the weakness of the State. Some of them portray a Hobbesian scene: Italians, distrusting both official institutions and each other, are shown competing irresponsibly for wealth, status and power. Their loyalties are not national but local, to kin, to friends, to village; or to supra-national entities like the Catholic Church or Communism. The law is ignored whenever possible, evaded whenever necessary. Rulers, including party officials and deputies, are there to be bribed; they attract no respect, enjoy no legitimacy.

Here are the grand themes of post-Unification history. After 1861 the State existed at last, as a set of unified institutions; but this ‘legal Italy’ failed to secure the support of the Italian people. Indeed, since 1861 Italy has experienced a series of uprisings and quasi-civil wars – Southern ‘brigandage’ in the 1860s, the Fascists’ ‘seizure of power’ in 1919–22, the anti-Fascist ‘Resistance’ in 1943–45 and widespread terrorism in the 1970s. She has also seen successive political ‘regimes’ – Liberal, Fascist, Christian Democrat – collapse ignominiously in turn. In Gramsci’s famous term, ‘Italy’ has lacked ‘hegemony’ – an automatic acceptance by most people of the élite’s title to rule, and a general sharing of the élite’s values and beliefs. Indeed, Italy lacked an élite at all, at least in the British or French sense of an ‘Establishment’ with common values. Most analyses of the ‘Liberal’ regime (1861–1922) discuss why those Italians who took part in politics were so few, and so unpopular. Why did Italy have such a centralized, legalistic civil service, and so little local democracy? Why was parliament ineffective in defusing popular resentments? Why was there never a conservative party – but, instead, several mass parties calling themselves revolutionary, all hostile to the political order? Do these weaknesses account for the collapse of the Liberal State and the rise of Fascism in the 1920s? How did the Fascists, in turn, seek to strengthen the State they had conquered, and to win some popular support? Did they succeed? Was the anti-Fascist ‘Resistance’ a glorious national rising against tyranny, one that managed to set up a new kind of democratic State after the Second World War? Or was it rather a ‘civil war’ between Italians, restricted to a few regions, and furthermore one that simply restored the old system? Was the ‘regime of the parties’ after 1948 simply ineffective and corrupt? And what, in any case, was meant by ‘the State’? What was the relationship between the ‘permanent’ institutions – army, police, civil service, judiciary, etc. – and the ‘democratic’ ones – parliament, parties? How could the ‘permanent’ institutions be transformed, or even reformed?

If the ‘State’ – ‘legal Italy’ – was weak, the reason perhaps lay in ‘society’, in the complex, incoherent diversity of the ‘real Italy’. In d’Azeglio’s famous phrase, the Risorgimento had ‘made Italy’, but it had not ‘made Italians’. Italian politics always had to be about reconciling, or containing, deeply ingrained social loyalties and conflicts – of class, of faith, of ideology, of ethnic or linguistic group, of regional culture and municipal interest. Political institutions evolved a ‘politics of accommodation’, defusing overt conflict, reconciling incompatible views. Hence historians of modern Italy, even old-fashioned political historians, can hardly ignore social and economic issues. Southern Italy, for example, was and still is the largest backward region in Western Europe. For over a century the ‘Southern question’ has affected every aspect of national politics – the nature of parties and parliamentary majorities, the degree of tariff protection, the pursuit of imperial glory, the recruitment of public officials. After 1871 Southern landowners were placated by being allowed a fairly free hand in local government and by Corn Laws (a high tariff on wheat); the peasants had little option but to emigrate. A century later landowners were no longer so important but the wheat tariff was still there, thanks to the European Community; and emigration was still an essential safety valve. The main difference was that in 1971 more people had the vote. So there were more people to accommodate, and the costs of doing so had gone up. There were huge State-financed industrial plants over much of the South; education and welfare services prevented too much trouble from the plebs, and provided jobs for surplus graduates. By the 1990s this whole expensive arrangement was being bitterly criticized in the North, and soon it faced virtual collapse.

As this example illustrates, the main themes of Italian politics have remained remarkably constant since Unification. Governments and administrators may talk of the need to ‘make Italians’, may even set out to do so, but in practice they have to balance, or rather ‘absorb’, the contending forces in Italian society. The Catholics, initially very hostile to the new Liberal regime that had seized the Papal States, were partly ‘absorbed’ into the system by 1913 (Gentiloni Pact), and officially ‘reconciled’ to it in 1929 (Lateran Pacts). By 1948 they had become the rulers of Italy, although their title to rule was no more widely accepted than was that of their predecessors. The Socialists, ‘subversive’ by definition in the 1890s, were being wooed and placated by governments ten years later; they were finally ‘absorbed’ into the normal political game between 1948 and 1963. In the 1970s the process was repeated for the Communists, and in the 1990s for the Northern League. Normally this system works well enough; but occasionally it all goes wrong. Government attempts to ‘absorb’ Socialist trade unions and peasant leagues sparked off a sharp conservative reaction in 1920–21, a major factor in the rise of the Fascist movement – which governments then tried, unsuccessfully, to ‘absorb’ in its turn. Often the leaders of disaffected groups are perfectly willing to be ‘absorbed’, but the troops remain recalcitrant.

Even so, the pattern is fairly clear. The political history of Italy over the last 150 years has been that of the creation of organized lobbies for disaffected groups (the Church, the South, the industrial workers, the peasant landowners, etc.) and the gradual ‘absorption’ of these lobbies into the official political machinery. It is a history that disturbs many people, particularly recently. Radical historians like Salvemini have often denounced the whole business as corruption, and so it is: groups are bought off. Democratic theorists point out that the system is inherently élitist: the masses do not ‘participate’ in politics, they follow their upper-class leaders. This stricture, too, is valid. Italy has never had a Labour Party; it has had a Socialist Party and a Communist Party, both of them founded and controlled by middle-class intellectuals. The Catholic political movements were even more tightly controlled, not just by lay intellectuals but by the hierarchy. To use political-science jargon, Italy has had a system of ‘corporate’ politics. Each ‘corporation’ controls and represents large groups in society; each contends for money and influence. ‘Corporate’ politics inevitably means ‘corporate’ economics: a protected, State-dominated economy, more concerned with short-term social peace than with productive growth or consumer interests, and always liable to go bankrupt. It is also liable to mean jobs and promotion for political cronies or relatives, and paybacks for politicians. Moreover, patronage is a wasting asset: there is never enough to go round.

‘Corporatism’ became much discredited in the late 1980s, but it had many redeeming features. Each important group won favours; as each was ‘absorbed’, so each became ‘reconciled’, and so the State became more ‘legitimate’ in the eyes of more people. Italy in, say, 1980 was not a peaceful and harmonious society, but she was a good deal more peaceful and harmonious after the Second World War than she had ever been before. There were fairly successful ‘historic compromises’ between Church and State, between Catholics and Communists, between North and South, between ‘State’ and ‘society’. Perhaps ideology helped. After 1945 most political movements were linked by the overriding ‘official’ doctrines of anti-Fascism. These doctrines were, almost certainly, more widely accepted than the ideologies of Fascism or Liberalism had ever been. So the Italian political system had some legitimacy after all.

Yet not everyone was admitted to the feast. Non-union labour remained unprotected and often greatly exploited. Politically, too, several major groups remained outside. The neo-Fascists were excluded by definition after 1945, although they were the fourth largest party in the country; but even they were ‘absorbed’ in the 1990s, after changing their party name and renouncing many of their previous activities. There were also, more significant still, several groups who chose not to join in – Radicals, anarchists, ‘Leftists’, Greens, regionalists, etc. These outsider groups have always been important. They consist of disaffected intellectuals and recalcitrant moralists and they dominate much of the press. They are anticlerical, anti-militarist and anti-Establishment. They are too influential to be ignored, and too high-minded to be bought off – although they, too, were persuaded into ‘Left’ coalitions in the early twenty-first century. Even so, they still provide a constant challenge to ‘legitimacy’, today as over the last 150 years: a constant undermining of ‘hegemony’.

1.2 Historiography

History-writing in Italy since 1945 can only be understood in this ‘cor-porate’ context. Italian historians are rarely shy, retiring scholars, drenched in archival dust. They are far more likely to be busy professional politicians: one of them was Prime Minister in 1981–82. The history they write has often been ‘committed’ history, designed to cheer on their own team. Catholic historians wrote dutifully about the Church; Marxist historians wrote about trade unions and workers’ parties; Liberal historians wrote in praise of pre-1922 Liberal Italy. All of them concentrated on certain periods or issues – the formation of the key institutions in the new kingdom, the origins of Fascism, the nature of the Fascist regime, above all anti-Fascism and the Resistance. Sometimes the result was splendid: one thinks of Gabriele De Rosa’s study of the Catholic political organizations, or Paolo Spriano’s five-volume Storia del Partito Comunista Italiano, for long the only serious, well-documented history of any Communist Party anywhere.

Political commitment ensured that people did not shrink from writing contemporary history, as they so often do in Britain. But it also ensured that much Italian history-writing was hagiographical, or denunciatory, or ‘Whig’, and that unwelcome facts would be ignored. In the early 1970s there were, it seems, fifteen Institutes for the Study of the History of Anti-Fascism; there was none for the study of Fascism itself.² Historians helped to perpetuate politically useful myths, for example by trying to show that during the Second World War the Resistance movement was a wholly Communist affair, or that it was a ‘revolution betrayed’, or that it was a national uprising against Nazi invaders. Or, more simply, that it was a clash between Good and Evil. In short, too many Italian historians wrote in partisan terms. History became a melodrama, full of villains and vendettas. Right always had to triumph over Wrong, the Resistance over Fascism, Labour over Capital, the Church over Sin. Not for them the prosaic, contextual studies of the ‘detached’ outside observer, let alone new-fangled foreign ideas of history as structure.

Of the main schools, until recently the ‘Liberals’ were perhaps dominant. The major influence here has always been Benedetto Croce and his ‘ethico-political’ approach. Most post-war historians and their readers were reared on Croce’s Storia d’Italia dal 1871 al 1915, a commemorative hymn to Liberal Italy. Croce laid much stress on men and (secular) ideas, little on the economy, even less on social structures or conflicts. Yet, strangely, the Liberals were often most impressive when writing economic history. In the 1950s Rosario Romeo opened up a real debate on economic growth in nineteenth-century Italy, a debate that forced even the Marxists to take economics seriously. Even when writing on non-economic topics Liberal historians paid due attention to economic and social themes: the outstanding example was Federico Chabod’s Storia della Politica Estera Italiana dal 1870 al 1896 (English-language edition, 1996), a magnificent work of both scholarship and art. Chabod was a pupil of Gioacchino Volpe, the most influential historian in the early twentieth century apart from Croce, and a man noted for his earthy stress on social and economic matters: his three-volume Italia Moderna has been rightly praised for its acute insight into the Liberals’ defects.³ In recent years the outstanding Liberal, or rather conservative, historian has been Renzo De Felice (died 1996), famous for his extraordinarily detailed eight-volume biography of Mussolini, for his very influential journal Storia Contemporanea and for his robust polemics against the many historians on his Left.

The ‘Radicals’ formed another leading school, looking back to Salvemini and Gobetti as their intellectual precursors. Their best-known exponent today is an Englishman, Denis Mack Smith. These historians were a lively group, perhaps because recent Italian history provides such a lot to be radical about. Firmly anti-Fascist, anti-Catholic and anti-Communist, the Radicals were also anti-Liberal, in the sense that they stressed the weaknesses of the Liberal governments, their lack of popular support and their ready acceptance of Southern corruption. The Fascist regime was, of course, a favourite Radical target, with the post-war Christian Democrat regime challenging it now for top billing. Italian history has always gone wrong; the historian’s task is to analyse why. The Radicals were, and still are, delightfully pessimistic. They may not write ‘total’ history, comprehending all sides, but most of them write engagingly, and they reach a huge audience. Their great antagonists, the Catholics, are, as one might expect, numerous but normally undistinguished by originality of thought: most of them write worthy studies of worthy men. However, the history of religiosity is attracting more young writers, and here perhaps is the nearest approach among respectable Italian historians to the history of popular culture.

Probably the most influential school of historians in Italy after 1945 was that of the ‘mainstream Marxists’, i.e. the official Communist writers – Ragionieri, Procacci, Rosario Villari – grouped around their journal, Studi Storici. The dominant influence on this school was obviously Gramsci, whose reflections on Italian history and culture were published after 1945 and aroused enormous interest. Gramsci’s stress on ‘hegemony’ and consensus, on the role of intellectuals in diffusing values, on the political importance of the peasantry, was evident throughout the work of his Communist followers. Here were intelligent historians at last, willing to think about their work, and anxious to debate with their rivals. Yet they had their limits. For Marxists, they were strangely uninterested in class divisions – a subject eventually tackled by an economist (Sylos Labini) rather than a historian – and ‘working-class history’ all too often meant the history of the working-class leaders. Abstract entities, like proletariats and petty bourgeoisies, filled their pages; real workers and peasants rarely appeared, much less details of factory work, labouring skills or farming implements.

In short, the Marxists were ‘ethico-political’ too. Perhaps for that reason, in the 1970s the Studi Storici group seemed to be overtaken by changes in intellectual fashion. To their Left were the young Marxist hardliners, insisting on a real ‘class-based’, ‘materialist’ approach; to the Right, or rather to the north-west, lay attractive French models, stressing ‘total’ social history and the cult of ‘mentalités’. The Marxists could not hope to beat the Annales school, so they joined them. In 1972 the Turin publisher Giulio Einaudi produced the first volume of an encyclopedic Storia d’Italia, fathered by Gramsci out of Annales. It was a huge success both commercially and ideologically, confirming the Marxists’ reputation for being open-minded and up to date. Yet, like all collective works, it lacked coherence; and as social history it was, initially, distinctly peculiar. It must be the onl...