THIS IS THE FIRST PART OF A THREE PART BLOG POST
Introduction
Hello all - I hope you are keeping well in these uncertain times. First of all, some important clarity – the plan is that I will be trying to write one to two posts a week on this blog. It is worth noting, however, I will prioritise quality over regularity and quantity. I will keep you updated.
Now, some context to this interesting – and potentially politically charged – blog post. It is worth stating that I am a Europhile, but a Europhile for very specific reasons. I think that the only way to ensure geopolitical relevance and global influence in a world dominated by superpowers is, quite logically, becoming a superpower – and that it is frankly unrealistic to believe that you can have significant influence in other ways. I will set out why I think that it may be important to be geopolitically influential at a later date, but the important point is that I am coming from this from a particular angle. Despite this, my Europhilia is complex. It cannot be reduced down simply to a position statement, and I do have criticisms of the European Union. Again, this will be set out in a later post – although my dissatisfaction will become obvious throughout this post.
Over the past few months – as different and novel ideas have been allowed to stew with one another inside my head – two strands of personal focus have become increasingly complementary in character. This is the numerous and repeated political failures of Italy during and after the Risorgiomento, and the current political malaise of the European Union.
This is going to be a long post. I wrote it in one, but the structure lends itself to three natural breaks, so I will be posting it in three. The first section is the political problems in post-Risorgiomento Italy, and why they have come about. The second deals with the consequences of this failure in Italy. The final post will deal with the parallels between the European Union and post-Risorgiomento Italy. Although these posts are made to be accessible, some level of familiarity with Italian history will some elements much easier to understand. I hope you all enjoy!
The Problems of Post-Risoriomento Italy
Let me set out the problems with Italy first – they are contentious in themselves, so need a relatively deep level of understanding.
Italy. It is odd how a single word can bring to one’s mind so much. Like every nation, to the outsider, the name of that nation gives a sense of a national ‘essence’ – even if this ‘essence’ is hard to translate into words. What you perceive to be the key elements of this ‘essence’ often are roughly reflective of a shared ‘commonality’ between members of this national community. For example, in France, the liberal ideals that emanated from the French revolution are to most something that binds the French people as citizens into a national community. In the UK there is a different, more subtle and traditional form of liberty – the paradoxical conservative liberty that values individuals but also tradition, restraint and a recognition of the organic nature of society. This ‘commonality’ is essential, as a political community necessitates this shared vision of past and purpose. Political citizens need to feel ‘commonality’ with and care for others within this political community in order to justify taking a general and abstract stance on how society should be governed.
Now here is where it gets interesting, for Italy has a discernible problem in its ability to do this after the Risorgiomento. The core problem was this – there was very little ‘commonality’ between citizens. ‘Italians’ did not conceive of themselves as ‘Italians’, and therefore had very little loyalty towards the nation or state .
This first blog post will therefore show how and why this is the case. Although dealing with this would be a significant project in itself – I have limited myself to what I think are the three core aspects of it. These are the strength of localism, the lack of a convincing historical narrative and deep structural problems unique to Italy.
Localism
Any narrative of Italian unification is also a story of localism. Seems odd? Yes, very odd indeed considering that this is meant to be a story of overcoming local ties. However, the narrative of both the Risorgiomento and the politics after it are in many respects defined by their limitations – and the essential limitation is localism.
In 19th Century Italy, local loyalties were first. They were not just predominant but also preeminent. This meant in practise that most had sole loyalty to and identification with the ancient city states, villages and regions that dotted the Italian peninsula. That ‘commonality’ I talked about earlier was shared between members of local communities, rather than ‘Italy’. What makes this even more toxic to identification with Italy is that identities were defined against the perceived characteristics of other Italian city states. Citizens from some small Italian village, city or region would routinely denounce other Italians as having fundamental vices. The virtue opposed to this vice was reflective of the basic ‘commonality’ that those within the city state thought they had with other members of the local community. One, but by no means the only, reason that this mindset took hold is Italy’s massive diversity. Dialects and cultural influences varied wildly across the Peninsula - with Greek and Albanian influenced dialects dominant in the South, whereas in Piedmont the culture and language was practically French in character. In fact, it is estimated, that before 1860 Italian was comprehensible to only 2.5% of Italy’s population – and in the majority of cases one dialect of Italian could not be understood at all in other regions. The bottom line is that there was very little common ground between the people who would become ‘Italians’. This made it very easy for those within ‘Italy’ to conceive of their primary loyalty as local rather than national. Maybe an example would make things a bit clearer.
There is much that could be used to evidence this, but one of the most convincing and painful episodes is the 1831 central Italian revolution. This was plagued by antipathy between the Modenese and Bolognian revolutionaries. The Modenese Revolutionaries were worried about any form of political domination by the Bolognians. This mistrust led to failure as coordinated action between the two city states failed to materialise, leading to Austria’s successful repression of the rather lacklustre ‘revolution’.
In this case, those claiming to act within the interest of ‘Italy’ failed to trust members of the political community to which they nominally subscribed. If this was how the Italian revolutionaries felt, those with no sense of ‘Italy’ quickly accumulated a long list of agonising grievances once the Italian state formally came into being.
History
A second reason for the failure of a sense of ‘commonality’ within the Italian nation is the lack of guiding national myths. The peninsula had been in disunity for a long time – the last time there was a semblance of formal overarching control it had been with the Ostrogoths in the 6th Century. As a result, it was hard for those within Italy to forge a convincing historical narrative that explains why Italians have some sense of unique common ground, what the key characteristics of this are, and why the common people of Italy should care. This peculiar situation created great unease for early 19th Century Italian nationalists who – out of a position of deep insecurity – picked bits of Italian history that fitted an artificial narrative of an Italy that saw itself as a political community with an intangible essence. Patriots like Alessandro Manzoni and Sismonde Sismodi desperately scrabbled around in medieval archives for this narrative. The fact that no single narrative was reached – due to considerable divergence in emphases of different authors - indicates how Sisyphean and hopeless this task ultimately was.
Some favourite convenient pieces history cited by these early 19th Century Italian nationalists included the Battle of Legnano – where North Italian city-states defended their liberties against the German Emperor Frederick Barbarossa – as well as the rebellion of the Sicilian Vespers. This latter event was a brutal and bloody episode approximating genocide – for the Sicilians killed nearly Frenchman on the island in order to reclaim sovereignty from the French Angevins. The fact that both of these were seen as primary examples of Italian consciousness is quite telling given the fact that both were largely the result of local and specific historical pressures. Sicily most notably had a particularly strong political consciousness and desire for self-rule, and the revolt of the Sicilian Vespers was another episode in Sicily’s history of attempts at achieving this. Ironically and typically, therefore, what was perceived as the most ‘Italian’ episode of history on the Italian peninsula was not only embarrassing in its uniqueness, but also specifically running counter to the concept of Italy as the primary motor for political action and identification.
The desire to create this national narrative did not die here – in fact it would have an extraordinarily long and painful journey. The tendency for Italian nationalists to try and fail to create a sense of common national myth gives Italian history unfortunate and often comedic undertones. But the point is clear – Italians did not belong to a national community, because there was no clear historical narrative that explained what ‘Italians’ were.
Structural Problems
There is one final important point that I believe is worth drawing out. This is a structural one, specifically regarding the socio-economic and political conditions under which most Italians lived. Economically and socially, post-Risorgiomento Italy was agrarian and poor. Two thirds of the labour force were rurally based in the 1870s and 1880s, the vast majority of Italians were illiterate, and again most communication occurred impenetrable dialect. What’s more, poverty coexisted with ancient social traditions that were strongly engrained. It goes without saying that these conditions did not lend themselves to change. Those seeking to ‘make Italians’ for a new Italy were greeted with a mass of conservative and uncooperative peasants. The problems were vast - how do you reason with people who didn’t buy into the primacy of rationality over tradition? How could you convince someone could not speak the language you spoke? How can you influence people without them being able to read? What do you say to peasants who have no interest in abstract principles? These are just a few of the problems, but outline the basic concerns of the structural inadequacies of the state in ‘making Italians’.
There were many potential answers to this litany of problems – but in post-Risorgiomento Italy, the emphasis of reformers was in maximising literacy and uniformity. Through the medium of local institutions like schools, reformers were able to slowly chip away at the basic problem. Education provides a great example - history courses emphasised ‘Italian’ history, linguistic barriers were brought down through teaching Italian and pupils were mandated to attend primary school. It is hard to claim that these were not steps in the right direction. However, like so many episodes of Italian history, the chasm between what Christopher Duggan calls the ‘real’ effect and ‘ideal’ was significant enough to make this marginal. In this case, Italy was hindered by the reliance on local implementation to solve structural problems. The problems the state was aiming to tackle therefore limited the capacity for success in reform. It is worth spelling this out in greater detail to enable depth in understanding.
Local institutions were few, low in funds and if they did exist relied heavily on the church. This dominance by the church was strengthened because the catholic church made attempts to control localities, deepening and strengthening their dominant position in local governance. In doing so, Catholics were aided by counter-productive attempts at reconciliation with the church made by the state – most notably in the 1871 ‘Law of Guarantees’. This law allowed the Pope to appoint all higher clergy and removed the obligation of bishops and priests to swear loyalty to the king. The priests generally followed the orders of the Pope and the wishes of the local community – and therefore tended to emphasise local traditions that strengthened the traditional role of the Catholic church and of local patron saints, which deepened particularistic loyalties at the expense of the nation state. If it was not controlled by the church, education and other local institutions were usually controlled by individuals representing local interests. This was not helpful to the cause. Local men had local concerns – and often had to satisfy local interests to retain local dominance. This localism necessarily came at the expense of the state – for the funds and political will dedicated to short-termist community projects precluded a focus on national uniformity. Even worse, these local mayors and officials usually had very little sense of ‘Italy’ anyway – as they embraced the same local traditions that ‘Italy’ was trying to eradicate.
In the end, the impact of this focus on education and uniformity was therefore mostly unsuccessful. This shows us a few things. One – that the lack of Italian ‘commonality’ was difficult to combat. Two – that it definitely existed, as people prioritised local concerns over the interests of Italy generally. Three – that the fact of the existence of this problem hurt prevented an easy fix. A conception of ‘Italy’ could percolate down to the peasantry, but only slowly. The maxim that ‘these things take time’ has never been truer. Patience, nevertheless, was something that Italians were short on. The perceived failure of the liberal reforms to live up to expectations would lead to them being somewhat discredited. Italian nationalists started to change tactics – emphasising the need to create new national myths through action rather than education. The emphasis on the Mazzinian tradition of performative history therefore grew – which, as we will see created tragic yet comedic political failures.
Conclusion Part 1
So what to conclude from this first part of this discussion on the similarities between the European Union and post-Risorgiomento Italy? Well, the core thrust of the argument is that Italy is a country that did not have a national political community. Italians had no sense of what being ‘Italian’ meant. The reasons are diverse and innumerable including localism, lack of unified history and structural factors. This summation may seem far removed from a comparison with the European Union – this is true – but it is important that we get a sense of the problem before we explore it in detail.
Please, feel free to contact me with any feedback on the email on the bottom of the page,
I will be posting soon,
Stay safe,
WFF