1.1 Research Subject and Methodologies
This book brings together contributions from historians coming from different cultural and methodological backgrounds, gathered around a common idea: understanding how Italian intellectuals interpreted, discussed and influenced international politics between the end of the Second World War and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, the most politically demanding act of a united Europe after the collapse of the Soviet system. The period between the end of the Second World War and the signing of the Maastricht Treaty is a historical period full of change, marked by the inclusion of Italy in the open and multilateral context of the alliance between Europe and the United States, the alliance destined to become a structural component of Italian democracy and its political and institutional dynamics for almost 50 years.1 This volume answers the following questions: in the years dealt with, years during which the world was going through a major transformation, what was the contribution of Italian intellectuals to the main issues of international politics? Did the bipolar logic imposed by the Cold War, and the idea of belonging or being close to a party, have a significant influence on the intellectuals’ way of thinking or was, for the examined period of time, their vision autonomous from politics?
The presence of loyalty ties with political parties has deeply affected the life of the country, generating a permanent conflict of ideas, feelings and passions about the role of Italy in the global scenario, but also and above all about the major issues of international politics, after the severe trauma of a military defeat, the bloody epilogue of the civil war and the start of a constituent phase on which the shadow of the Cold War would soon be cast.2 Intellectuals were important protagonists in that conflict in the history of the so-called First Republic and had roles that reflected their different positions in the national alignments and their different levels of involvement in the forms of civil commitment and political militancy of the time.
The most innovative element of this volume is the attempt to highlight, through some case studies, a theme—that of the relationship between intellectuals and foreign policy—long ignored by international studies as an autonomous subject for reflection.3 This situation has likewise not been helped by the renewed interest of specialists—especially Cold War scholars—for the cultural aspects of diplomacy or international policy making.4 Even in this limited field of study, the role of intellectuals has mostly been treated as a side effect of the broader context of the Total Cold War and of the birth of transnational intellectual networks operating in a more or less direct link with national government institutions.5 Although a considerable amount of work has been produced on the leading figures of the world of culture and international political debate,6 on the whole this effort has been directed more toward the individuals or certain political cultures than toward intellectuals as a social group. The visions of the world that they produced, the roles they had, their ability to influence public opinion and their ability to shape collective speech, in agreement or in disagreement with politics and with those in power,7 have been underestimated.
The authors of the chapters collected here, aware of the fact that problems of this magnitude cannot be solved in the context of a single piece of research, however wide-ranging and extensive, are still convinced that the investigation that the reader will have the patience to follow through the chapters of this book is beneficial. This conviction is based on a methodological and historiographical consideration, which concerns the importance of the Italian case for a more general reflection on the political role of intellectuals.
1.2 The Importance of the Italian Case
Italy is a clear example of the crucial function that intellectuals, and in particular intellectuals working in the field of humanities, have held in public discourse since the beginning of the twentieth century. Since then, the purpose of the ruling class to build a modern nation, the so-called “nationalization of the masses” (one of George Mosse’s concepts that has now entered the vocabulary of social scientists), had been based on the celebration of myths, rituals and symbols capable of manifesting the reasons for a new relationship and had become an expression of a nationalism that combined the idea of country with the principle of freedom. This idea takes its origins during the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and represents pride in belonging to a great nation, the certainty that legitimacy of the self-determination of peoples is based on popular sovereignty. And indeed, in Italy as well, among intellectuals engaged in the reflection on national identity, an idea of nation had prevailed, as a consequence of the intellectual and moral emancipation of citizens fighting for freedom.8
In the early years of the twentieth century, this project was criticized by new political subjects, artistic avant-gardes and numerous intellectuals who joined the traditional opponents of the liberal elite because they considered it an illegitimate and corrupt power system.9 Politicians and intellectuals believed that the Italian ruling class was not capable of managing the new issues posed by industrialization and mass society and were convinced that it was necessary to give life to a radical transformation of the country in order to develop its national consciousness and a new role in the world. For this reason, they presented themselves to public opinion as the true representatives of the nation, the only guardians of the national myth, and from then on participated with enthusiasm in a discussion concerning foreign policy, the present and the future of the country. A sense of angry indignation spread among them along with harsh criticism of a policy judged incapable of keeping faith with the hopes and ideals of Risorgimento patriotism, increasingly withdrawn into a patronizing management of power, devoid of the impulses and ambitions of a strong and respected country.
From this point of view, the 1911 Italo-Turkish War spread “a flare of enthusiasm and nationalist rhetoric that was added to the rhetoric of the fiftieth anniversary [of the Italian Republic], but what proved to be even more effective was popularization of the myth of a Great Italy through journalism, literature, academic culture, and theatrical performances”.10 In those months, artists, scholars, men and women of culture, from literature to philosophy, from cinema to historiography, were willing to show their presence by introducing themes that would define the debate of the decade from 1912 to 1922; and for the first time they presented themselves to Italian society “in the dual function of suppliers of ideas and propagandists of the same” taking on a new role.11 They were not alone: far from the tones and literary representations of the country, even jurists, social scientists and politicians, economists—intellectuals in the broadest sense of the term—were cultivating the idea of a profound osmosis between culture and politics.
It is clear, however, that the substantial change in the relations between the two spheres occurred during fascism. By subordinating culture to politics, the Mussolini regime also helped define a specific function of intellectuals in the era of the primacy of politics. From 1922 to 1945, men of culture and science took on an organic role in politics, both as officials and professionals of propaganda and indoctrination in organizational structures and in the media system of the totalitarian state, and as theorists and planners of the new political regime and its lines of institutional, administrative, economic and social development. The fascists celebrated the primacy of politics over all the other manifestations of modern life and considered culture an instrument for creating the new civilization which was born with the seizure of power in October 1922. We can observe that in the first lines of the volume La cultura fascista (The fascist culture), published in 1936 by the National Fascist Party for courses of political preparation for young people. What we read in that volume is that “a culture is a conception of life”, “a manifestation of social, spiritual and historical action” and not an “individual way of being”, “an embellishment of the intellect or a private contemplation”. Culture, in essence, is an activity that “forms a people”.12 The majority of intellectuals, artists and technicians worked in accordance with these assumptions and contributed to the construction of the totalitarian regime that guaranteed them an unprecedented space and role.13
Republican Italy inherited this tradition by revamping some aspects and adapting them to a deeply transformed context. In fact, the leading mass parties—the Christian democrats, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party, but also the smaller formations—even though their political and cultural identities were quite different, all demonstrated significant attention to intellectuals from the early years of reconstruction. And in turn intellectuals contributed to the symbolic construction of the new world that emerged after the war. Clearly, in a republican and democratic country, men of culture do not have the same kind of relationship with politics and with institutions as in a totalitarian regime, in which political dissent is persecuted and the actual confrontation between the opposing politics and visions are not possible. By forbidding pluralism and building a single-party dictatorship, Mussolini’s regime allowed the confrontation between intellectuals only within the institutions and mostly on such topics as politics, myths and the ideology of fascism. Nevertheless, during the years of the Cold War, an era of definitive and absolute choices, intellectuals lived literally immersed in politics, in an all-encompassing relationship with the parties, and with the deployment to which they claimed to belong, showing they still believe...