Ethnicity and Nationalism in Italian Politics

Inventing the Padania: Lega Nord and the Northern Question

Margarita Gómez-Reino Cachafeiro

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351938891
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Studi sull'etnia

Employing primary sources and interviews with protagonists of the rebellion of the Italian North, this book explores the invention of the Padanian nation and the construction of identity politics in Northern Italy. It reveals for the first time the connection between the ethnic wave in European party politics in the 1970s and the rise of a new radical right nationalism in the 1990s. The author highlights the way in which the discourse of national minorities was instrumental in the rise of a new political agenda that links territory, identity and cultural rights to create new boundaries of exclusion. In addition to clarifying the connection between the new nationalism and racism by demonstrating how cultural distinctiveness is constructed in contemporary European politics, this unique book also explores the dynamics of new party mobilization and the symbolic resources of nationalist rhetoric. This book presents for the first time data on political participation - both party elites and members - and the real dimension of the party organization.

1 Perspectives on Peripheral Nationalism in Europe

Introduction

The erosion of the traditional cleavages that structured West European party systems (class, religion) has become an uncontroversial fact in the study of political change in Europe. Over the past two decades, scholars have studied electoral de-alignment and provided new analytical frameworks to explain the sources of political change and the creation of new cleavages. In the 1970s the main novelty in European politics was the rise of Green parties and ecological issues. In the past decade, a new family of parties, the alternatively labeled new radical right, new extreme right or populist right, with an agenda based on anti-migrant rhetoric and tax issues, became politically visible. Yet during the 1990s political change in Europe went far beyond the question of new party mobilisation and the emergence of new cleavages. This past decade brought economic and political changes that today reinforce new images of disintegration of nation-states and national political economies. The end of Cold War alignments and the relaunching of European integration have accelerated socio-economic transformation of the European continent at a major scale. A revival of nationalism in a variety of forms dominated political debates in Eastern Europe and the ex Soviet Union, but also in the pluralist democracies of Western Europe. At stake are the redefinition of categories of belonging and solidarity, and the politics of inclusion and exclusion in the construction of a European polity.

This book examines an unexpected political development: the rise of new parties in Northern Italy claiming self-government upon the basis of a national and cultural distinctive North. By all accounts peripheral nationalism is an old political conflict (the center-periphery or ethno-territorial cleavage in European party systems) but also it is, as this book shows, a political breakthrough, a new product of recent trends.¹ The Italian North had been without political parties advancing claims of national political autonomy and self-determination in the past. Party mobilisation was limited to those cultural and linguistic communities in the ‘special’ regions of the North, the Trentino-Alto Adige, Val d’Aosta and Friuli-Venezia Giulia.² However, in the 1980s and early 1990s political mobilisation diffused to most of the Northern ‘ordinary’ regions of Italy. In short, this book investigates the rise of Lega Nord and the political revolt of the Italian North.

The study of new party mobilisation in Northern Italy allows us to address current debates on the direction and scope of political change in European politics. Scholars writing on political change in European party systems associate new political mobilisation in Northern Italy with three related issues. First, Lega Nord’ s claims of nationhood and demands of self-determination and secession from the Italian state are linked to a global revival of nationalism after 1989. During the 1990s nationalism became again a major driving force in politics worldwide. The breaking-up of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia provided closer images of the destructive powers of the national idea in contemporary politics. Today, some scholars even argue, as Seyla Benhabib writes: ‘the negotiation of identity and difference is the political problem facing democracies on a global scale’ (Benhabib, 1996, p. 3). Second, the rise of Lega Nord is tied with a political backlash in European societies manifested by the success of new radical right-wing parties and the spread of xenophobic, ethnocentric and racist sentiments against new migrants. Le Pen’s Front National, the Flemish Vlaams Blok, and Haider’s FPÖ are today well-known examples of the political successes of anti-migrant mobilisation. Third, Lega Nord’s demands for political autonomy are also analysed within a new institutional scenario in the European Union that undermines both the political and economic unity of nation-states. European integration allegedly strengthens the viability of national sub-units in their pursuit of economic and political autonomy from central governments. Thus, the rise of Lega Nord is at the center of crucial debates not only about the creation of new cleavages in European party systems, but also, and more broadly, about the very sustainability of traditional nation-state boundaries as we know them.

Why did new political mobilisation emerge in Northern Italy? Why do new parties advance claims of nationhood and self-government, and why now? The rise of new political mobilisation in Italy is a puzzle for traditional analysis of the alternatively labeled ethno-territorial, regional or center-periphery cleavage. First, the rise and success of Lega Nord is cast as an anomaly. Theories on ethno-territorial political mobilisation read off the emergence of political parties from a necessary condition: the existence of a bounded collectivity—whether defined in objective or subjective terms—which is characterised by cultural traits. Academic emphasis on the uniqueness of the Italian experience derives from the lack of previously defined ethnic identities in the regions of Northern Italy (Diani and Melucci, 1992; Rusconi, 1993). Scholars stress the absence of both objective and subjective differences—whether in the form of distinctive languages or regional self-identifications in the North of Italy—to sustain the new regional revolt. Thus, for some scholars the nationalism of Lega is a ‘nationalism without a nation’ (Melucci and Diani, 1992, p. 168). Second, in European party systems, the so-called ethno-territorial cleavage was characterised by the specialisation of voters’ appeals: it was a marginal cleavage in light of its limited electoral relevance (constrained by the size of the minority) and it was narrowly defined by ‘cultural’ demands. Yet the electoral success of ^ Lega Nord in the early 1990s made the Northern question in Italy a mass phenomenon. Lega Nord preceded and survived a major upheaval that changed in fundamental ways the Italian party system. Surprisingly, this ongoing electoral persistence has taken place despite arguments about a short-term wave of protest vote, and the emergence of a new party system in Italy. This electoral success is quite shocking. Scholars have brought to the fore major shifts in party elite strategies with the alternation of moderation and radicalisation of party demands, the lack of congruence of elite and voters’ attitudes (party elites exhibiting more radical attitudes about political independence and about migrants), the apparent irrationality of elites and voters in light of the empirical evidence on the absence of subjective self-identifications with a non-existent Padania, and the poor institutional performance of Lega Nord’s representatives at the local and national level.

The political stability of European party systems was built upon the structuring power of traditional cleavages. Lipset and Rokkan’s traditional model of the formation of the European party systems posited that different cleavage configurations developed in each polity as the result of the timing and interaction of conflicts emerging from the national and industrial revolutions (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967).³ The sequential interaction of four cleavages emerging from these revolutions (center-periphery, state-church, land-industry and workers-owners) gave rise in each state to different party systems. The crucial role played by political parties during the early periods of démocratisation shaped the main lines of conflict and stabilised political alignments providing ‘enduring relations between specific social groups, organisational networks and ideologies’ in European party systems (Bartolini and Mair, 1991, p. 217).

Italian politics—structured around class and religious cleavages—was an outstanding example of the power of these conflicts in structuring the political system and stabilising electoral alignments. The formation of the Italian party system made class and religion the main dimensions of conflict before and after the fascist interlude. In the post-war period, Italian politics evolved around the conflict between the Christian Democratic party and the Italian Communist party. The dynamics of a multiparty system produced fragile coalition governments orchestrated by the Christian democrats.

In the classical path-dependency explanations of the formation of the Italian party system, the timing of cleavages prevented the ‘translation’ of the North-South divide as a regional cleavage (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). In the Italian party system, ethnicity was not, as Samuel Barnes writes, a meaningful variable to explain political and electoral alignments (Barnes, 1978). The only recognised ethnic minority within the state boundaries was the German-speaking population of the Bolzano province, which was represented by the SVR In scholarly writing, territory was, at best, an important element to explain the strength of local—but not ethnic—identities. As Barnes put it, ‘Italians have a strong attachment to their city or village (campanilismo). The very particularism of their attachments makes the growth of larger identification difficult’ (Barnes, 1974: 197). The introduction of a state structure that recognised both special and ordinary regions aimed to pre-empt political mobilisation in the ‘special’ regions of Trentino-Alto Adige, Val d’Aosta, Sicily, Sardegna and Friuli-Venezia Giulia, and to decentralise some powers to the remaining fifteen ‘ordinary’ regions—only implemented in the 1970s.

Italy was an anomalous case for modernisation theory. To start with, Italy was not considered a nation-state. One of the common claims by historians and students of Italian politics politics is the ‘lack’ of an Italian nation (Mack Smith, 1990). The often quoted sentence by one of the architects of Italian unification, Massimo D’Azeglio—fatta L’Italia, dobbiamo fare gli Italiani—appears in almost every scholarly work on Italian politics (Putnam, 1993). Italy was not considered a multi-ethnic state either. As mentioned before, other sources of territorial identification—local identities—were, instead, politically salient and resilient (Seggati, 1995).

Territorial dualism between a developed economic North and a backward South was a permanent feature of Italian politics. Socio-economic disparities between North and South in Italy proved historically enduring. Despite the efforts of Italian governments during the post-war period to promote endogenous economic growth in the South, today North and South still exhibit widespread economic differences. In many historical and political accounts of Italian politics, the South has also been the source of most of the pathological characteristics of the Italian political system (clientelism, corruption, Mafia, trasformismo) and the wrongdoing of the political class during the post-war period. Recently, Putnam’s work on Italian regional governments identified historical cultural differences—patterns of civicness—between North and South to explain variation in the institutional performance of the Italian regions and in rates of regional economic development.

In light of all the overwhelming evidence of the structural nature of the North-South divide, the rise and success of Lega Nord, a party mobilising and exploiting the North-South divide, was, as someone put it to me once, ‘rather obvious’. The erosion of traditional cleavages in the Italian party system during the 1980s and the disappearance of Italian political parties in the midst of corruption scandals in the early 1990s allowed the regional cleavage in Italian politics to ‘resurface’. Thus, in these views, the resilience of regional disparities between North and South would explain a cleavage displacement in the Italian party system.

This book, however, presents an explanation of party mobilisation in the North of Italy that focuses on the less obvious aspects of the politicisation of the territorial divide. First, I argue that a ‘translation’ of the traditional North-South divide provides a deterministic explanation of what was a contingent event and the product of political choices. The packaging of a united North was a difficult political process with many constraints attached—and which became visible throughout the past decade. Second, nationalism and claims of territorial autonomy are not an obvious response to the territorial divide between North and South. The gap between North and South had historically been defined on socio-economic, and not on cultural-national terms. Yet the ‘translation’ of territorial differences between North and South in the Italian state did not come in the form of a neo-liberal party or an anti-tax revolt tout court, but in the form of claims of nationhood and self-determination for the North. Third, if anything, history was reversed in that it was not the traditionally considered peripheral South, but the Italian North, the subject of political revolt.

This book explains why and how a new politics of identity emerged in Northern Italy and how a new political party, Lega Nord, constructed the symbolic and political unity of the North. It answers the question of why a territorial identity became the focus of political mobilisation with claims of self-government and cultural distinctiveness. This work explores these questions first, through a historical study of the structure of incentives for political mobilisation and party formation in the Northern Italian regions, and second, through a case study of Lega Nord’s style of mobilisation, symbolic politics and party ideology.

The rise of Lega Nord has been analysed in the context of two alternative analytical frameworks and within the universe of two distinctive families of political parties. On the one hand, explanations of the formation of the ethno-territorial cleavage in European party systems consider that new political mobilisation responds to the presence of ethnic or national minorities that ‘survived’ the period of nation-state formation. The resilience of cultural differences is the basis for political mobilisation. The political parties representing national minorities are characterised by the specialisation of voters’ appeals—cultural recognition within nation-states. This ex...