1 Introduction
In March 1882, Italy's ambitions to possess a colony became official. Historians have discussed the origins of the purchase of Assab – a bay on the southern Red Sea coast, at a short distance from the Bab al-Mandab Strait that opens the way to the Gulf of Aden – from the Rubattino navigation company. The law on Assab submitted to Parliament turned the property of Assab, which the Rubattino company transferred to Italy, into sovereignty. While there had been a discussion – among intellectuals more than in the public opinion – on the necessity for Italy to acquire a colony and on its possible uses (such as deportation or settlement place or commercial hub) – what imposing national sovereignty on a colony meant from a legal standpoint was scarcely investigated. Would the colony become part of the national territory? Would provinces be established there and then prefects? Must the government extend Italian law to the colonial territory or draw up special laws? And what legal status would its people have?
Perhaps surprisingly for today's readers, this last question was not considered very relevant. Indeed, one should not be misled by the current thinking of citizenship in terms of civil, political, and social rights, following the seminal theory by T.H. Marshall. From the legal standpoint, in 19th-century discourse, the term “citizen” (cittadino) overlapped with that of “subject” (suddito), as both served to define the fundamental nexus between the individual and the body politics (this is the general definition of citizenship used in Costa 2009).
True, the revolutionary ideals had built up an idea of citizenship that implied the liberation of every man – while the question of women was rather more complicated – from the shackles of oppression and the recognition of rights inherent to the human being (Hunt 1984; Brubaker 1997, 21–27; Fahrmeir 2007, 27–42; Gauthier, 1992). But when King Carlo Alberto of Savoy, in March 1848, conceded a constitution to the Piedmontese State, this fundamental law (art. 24) attributed formal equality before the law to all the regnicoli, namely the subjects of the reign, rather than to the Italian “citizens.” Nonetheless, according to the statute, “all enjoy[ed] civil and political rights equally, and [we]re eligible for civilian and military posts,” the article provided that the law could establish exceptions. When this statute became the constitution of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, these rules did not change. In the “mono-class” Italian State, which the moderate establishment of the first liberal age erected (Giannini 1986, 35), the concept of citizenship implied membership to the nation-state but did not correspond to the revolutionary idea of citizenship, which would have called on all individuals to participate in the construction of the general will regardless of their condition. The two terms, citizen and subject, continued to interchange and overlap in the political and legal sources of the time, with no necessary implication with democracy and rights.1
The use of “citizens” and “citizenship,” which was growing in public and political discourse, was not preferred solely by those progressive intellectuals who aimed at building a society of equals. Indeed, it was used particularly to stress the need to build a cohesive society out of the serious regional imbalances that affected the newborn state (Grew 2000). For example, in 1864, in view of legislative unification (as after the Italian Unity, the different regions still maintained codes and norms on citizenship deriving from the pre-unification states), Minister Giuseppe Vacca stressed:
one can barely have unity of the kingdom when the title of Italian citizen is acquired in a different manner in the various parts in which Italy was divided in the past; when the status of person is governed by a diversity of laws.
Senator Giovanni de Foresta pointed out that the introduction of a statewide code would make all Italians citizens of the same fatherland (Donati 2013, 25). The new civil code issued in 1865 used the term “citizenship,” whose acquisition was regulated by various articles, and specified from the beginning that “the citizen is allowed to enjoy civil rights,” not political ones.2
In Italy and elsewhere, the term “citizenship,” far from being the secular god that unchains human beings' universality, did not create a group of equal individuals entitled with the same rights but served to indicate the bond between the people and the nation-state. For these reasons, being a “subject” did not imply the condition of “colonial subject” as the Italians were deemed subjects too, particularly from the standpoint of international law and in view of their legal protection abroad. Therefore, the dichotomy citizen/subject was not at all defined, remarkably not even at the dawn of Italian colonization.
This chapter deals with the construction of the legal category of colonial subjecthood as it emerged between the late 19th-century and early 20th-century Italy. It does not aim to provide an analytic examination of the various disciplines regarding the concession and the loss of Italian citizenship in the colonial context, on which historiography has shed light with reference to the different periods of the Italian colonization (Barrera 2002; De Napoli 2009; Donati 2013; Camilleri 2020). On the contrary, this essay deals with the birth of colonial subjecthood as part of the general problem of colonial law. It explores what the citizenship regulation's meaning was from a legal and political viewpoint, considering both the general legal theories and the actual demands that arose in the colonial context. In this way, it questions to what extent the birth of the colonial subjecthood was part of a “colonial governmentality” (Scott 1995). It argues that the introduction of the “colonial subjecthood” was not the product of a well-laid plan imposed from above according to the idea of establishing western governmentality on colonial society. Instead, the dichotomy citizen/colonial subject was for a long time all-but-obvious and the distinction between the Italians and the indigenous people in the colony was not based at its dawn upon a divide in matters of political rights. The birth of a distinct colonial subjecthood was not the fruit of a coherent application of legal theories conceived in the metropole.
In this way, this contribution aims to question both the emphasis on a clear legal distinction between citizens and colonial subjects since the beginning of Italian colonization and the idea that citizenship was an instrument of government necessary to establish a rule of difference in the colony.
2 Colonial People as “Citizens”
Scholars of Italian colonialism during the liberal age have punctually emphasized that the Italian colonial enterprise started late, as Italy “discovered that all the best and most desirable areas had been occupied” (Townsend 1941, 18). This chronological delay has been understood above all from the geopolitical standpoint, or in terms of weak industrialization and lack of significant economic interests in the colonization project, or even in cultural and political terms, given the absence of a real “colonial party” until 1911 (Labanca 2002, 15–56, 61–62; Howard 2009, 39–40; Donati 2013, 119).3 By contrast, it has not been adequately stressed what this chronological element implied in terms of legal ideologies and administrative practices. Indeed, the Italian overseas expansion started when, on an international scale, the theory of assimilation began to decline. As long as we do not consider assimilation as a generic idea underlying all French policies, which has been termed “progressive assimilation” (Belmessous 2013, 140–141), it is apparent that, at least from the 1880s, this theory started to attract more criticism than approval. The new ideas that criticized assimilationism were labeled as the “theory of association” and promoted the institution of protectorate instead of direct domination. “Opposed to the rigidity and universalism of the condemned doctrine of assimilation, the policy of association emphasized the need for variation in colonial practice” (Betts 1961, 106). In a nutshell, this change relied upon the idea that peoples under colonial rule were too different from the civilized ones in cultural, ethnic, and social fields and could not be assimilated in a short time. Paradoxically, it was the French Third Republic, despite its strong republican sentiment – republicanism traditionally implied centralization, universalism, and uniformity, at least in theory (Fahrmeir 2007, 37–42; Couderc-Morandeau 2008) – to promote this different path for colonial domination. Tunisia, under French control since 1881, was established as a protectorate. The 1880s were just when Italian rulers and jurists started to answer the above-mentioned questions on the legal status of colonial territory and its inhabitants. This element proved decisive in characterizing the Italian legal ideologies as eminently anti-assimilation theories. Yet, in 1882, the Minister of Foreign Affairs Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, while announcing to the country the birth of the first Italian colonial possession, the Assab Bay, defined its inhabitants as Italy's “new citizens.” This point deserves further investigation.
Mancini was an eminent progressive politician and was probably also the most distinguished Italian jurist of the time. Undoubtedly, he was one of the most recognized international lawyers at the European level, so that the founders of the Institut de Droit International of Gand, which aimed at representing the voice of the esprit d'internationalité (Koskenniemi 2002), wanted him as the mentor of the Revue de droit international et de législation comparée and first president of the Institute (De Napoli 2014). His fame was particularly tied to the fact that he had theorized from the 1850s “the right of nationality,” which worked as legal justification for the Italian nationalist project. According to Mancini, the nation was the “monad” of international law and had the right to constitute an independent state. As a consequence, Mancini envisaged imperialism as pure oppression. The principle of conquest, which was mere “abuse of power,” had to be banished: the conquest “was a strange illusion for men's minds in so much as it sometimes ended up usurping the name of right and the dignity of a rational principle even amongst well-meaning thinkers” (Mancini 1851, 52).
Much later, in the 1882 parliamentary debate on Assab, some MPs used such argument against the same Mancini. The deputy Cesare Parenzo, who belonged to the radical Left, stated that the proposed law “consecrates methods and principles which are contrary to our national law.” At the time, legitimacy for Italian sovereignty was based on the free will of people expressed through plebiscites. By contrast, Italy was about to deny civil and political rights to those people of the Horn by establishing a sort of dictatorship in the colony. Parenzo condemned the “baleful consequences and terrible adventure” that would derive from this use of the name of Italy (Tivaroni 1903, 17). Mancini replied that plebiscites were only one of the possible sources for sovereignty and that “every other ancient way to acquire territories, recognized by the law of peoples and consecrated by history as well as by mankind's consent” were still valid (Mancini 1896, 152). Parenzo finally accused Mancini of betraying the same legal principles that he himself had been teaching for years. Colonialism – he argued – was the opposite of the principle of nationality (Mancini 1896, 167).
This was the context in which Mancini stated that the inhabitants of the overseas possessions would be “new citizens.” It was not true that the government was about to “impose the dictatorship over these new citizens” by denying them the exercise of “part of civil and political rights” (Ministero degli Affari Esteri 1882, 131; Scovazzi 1996, 89). Further, he explained why he spoke of new citizens: “we are evidently […] assuming before them the task of educators. Our duty is leading them gradually to the plentiful life of a free people and a complete exercise of political rights.” The Minister even envisaged the possibility that the population growing up in Assab would “have the right to elect their representatives in this...
