North and south in the current crisis

The Italian Minister for Territorial Cohesion, Carlo Trigilia, reviews the current condition of the Italian south (the Mezzogiorno) and sets out the policies that the present government is seeking to implement. Underlining the need for long-term strategies and for close cooperation with European Union funding agencies, the Minister emphasizes the need to remove the political and institutional obstacles to development and promote human capital through measures designed to improve training, education and welfare programmes. He concludes the lack of economic growth in the southern regions poses serious dangers to the growth prospects of the national economy.     

Man of faith and political commitment: Alcide De Gasperi in the history of Europe

Since the early 1980s historians and others have been radically revising established understandings of the Italian south. New research has undermined the notion of a dichotomy between north and south and has begun to challenge the parameters of the Southern Question itself. The books reviewed here reflect, comment upon and drive forward this process of revision. One suggestion is that representations of the south as 'backward', 'picturesque' or fundamentally 'different' are the product of ideological and political elaboration rather than the reflection of any fundamental reality, and should be seen as part of a neo-Orientalist discourse which justified southern subordination. While acknowledging the strengths of this new history of the Mezzogiorno, this article argues that the neo-Orientalist explanation risks simply restating southern difference and subordination in another form. What is needed instead is a new, and less dichotomized, approach to southern Italian cultures and a recognition of the complexities - and hence the importance - of southern identities.     

Legitimism,liberalism and nationalism: the nature of the relationship between North and South in Italian unification

During the years following national unification, the Mezzogiorno became one of the greatest problems for the Italian government. On the one hand, because of its social and economic backwardness and the loyalty of some sections of the population to the previous illiberal government, it was devalued by the national political and military elite as a part of the large and undeveloped ‘South’ of the world, which was at that time affected by the criticism of ‘orientalistic’ Western discourse. On the other hand, it was also the place where the democratic and progressive opposition to the moderate liberal national rulers was stronger. A transnational and transregional perspective shows how the Mezzogiorno contained two different coexisting nations, a reactionary and a progressive one, which were in mutual conflict and, at the same time, on different grounds, in conflict with the central State. Building the state in the South meant, for the Italian liberal elites, discovering an ambiguous and dangerous periphery of the Nation.     

Rethinking the value of unpaid care work: lessons from participatory visual research in central Tanzania

Abstract

The contemporary international development agenda addresses several important gender issues, including the contribution of unpaid care work (UCW) to human well-being. The inclusion of UCW into the mainstream policy debate is undoubtedly a major milestone in the history of feminist scholarship and activism. However, we argue that the universalistic and capitalocentric assumptions laden in the dominant policy discourse belie the diversity of the lived experiences and subjective meanings of UCW often performed by women and girls in different cultural and geographical contexts, particularly in the predominantly agrarian global South. We draw on participatory and visual ethnographic fieldwork to show that rural women in Tanzania perceive UCW as an experience that entails not only physical toil and drudgery, but also positive emotions of joy, satisfaction, and fulfilment, which are integral to affirming their self-perceived identities and roles as farmers and mothers in their communities. These material, affective, and symbolic dimensions of UCW emerge from agrarian women’s situated knowledges and experiences of ensuring household social reproduction on and with the land, as well as the gender relations and seasonal dynamics that shape the organization of work tasks in agrarian landscapes. To achieve transnational gender justice, we suggest that a more fine-tuned and nuanced approach to understanding the variability and complexity of care work as practiced and perceived by heterogeneous groups of women (and men) in particular places and times is needed.     

New and old in the southern question

The southern question has been posed at the key moments in the history of the Italian state. Today we face a moment of comparable importance which urges that the southern question be re‐thought. It is not an unchanging question, yet it concerns issues fundamental to the state and has been treated by the country's greatest intellectuals as a national issue. The meridionalisti have been Italy's critical conscience yet, at the same time, stereotypes of a uniformly backward South have taken hold. The post‐war intervention in the Mezzogiorno should not be seen through such stereotypes as a wholly negative experience. Its successes and failures fit into an Italian pattern of state‐led modernization and it cannot be understood in isolation from the Italian state's weaknesses. Today, a new pact between the weakest and strongest sectors is essential. The South's economic and political leadership will be a central object of study if intellectuals are to help inform new policy.     

HISTORICAL LEGACY AND POLICY EFFECTIVENESS: THE LONG‐TERM INFLUENCE OF PREUNIFICATION BORDERS IN ITALY

This paper investigates the interplay between cultural traditions and policy effectiveness. It explores the differential impact of a large development program (Cassa per il Mezzogiorno), implemented for four decades, starting in the 1950s, to stimulate convergence between Italy's south and the more developed north, on municipalities with different histories. Namely, we consider a sample of municipalities located on either side of the historical border of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, whose legacy is considered, from Putnam onwards, to be a prime‐facie cause of Southern Italy's underdevelopment. Having been part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies is associated with a negative impact of development policies, but only when the allocation of development funds through the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno suffered from low quality of governance and was driven by political considerations rather than by efficiency ones.     

Green,red, yellow and purple: gendering the Kurdish Question in south-east Turkey

This article discusses the role of women in the contemporary ethno-territorial struggle of Kurdish Question in Turkey. I argue that gendered development has become the primary terrain where Turkish and pro-Kurdish political groups articulate their nationalist interests. The Kürt Sorunu (Kurdish Question) – the enduring debate over the political status and rights of Turkey's Kurdish population – is Turkey's largest geopolitical challenge to date. In the last decade, Turkish government policy towards the predominantly Kurdish south-east region has shifted from military intervention to gendered and socio-economic development. Simultaneously, the popularity and growth of a formal pro-Kurdish political movement has given the campaign for Kurdish rights an institutionalized voice and stronger role in regional affairs. The primary work of both the Turkish national government and local pro-Kurdish municipality of late has focused on women. Drawing on historical analysis and participant observation of development activities, I describe the symbolic and physical role women play in the contemporary Kurdish Question. Geographically, this pointed focus on women marks a territorialization of political power upon gendered spaces of the home and neighbourhood. I describe this process of territorialization through an examination of education curriculum, neighbourhood mapping and nationalist landscapes.     

Weapons,words, politics: the three seasons of the post-unification exile of the Bourbon Monarchy (1860–1866)

ABSTRACT

This article reconstructs the ‘three seasons’ of the exile of the Bourbon rulers of southern Italy after 1860. Unlike the previous periods of exile suffered by the dynasty (in 1799 and between 1806 and 1815), the Bourbon exile after Unification took the form of a ‘hierarchical’ emigration government, ruler and diplomatic corps, and numerous foreign volunteers ready to fight for the monarchy. Between 1860 and 1866 this ‘control centre’ organized armed expeditions against the Kingdom of Italy, while deploying a variety of political strategies that through propaganda offered the promise of modernization in the shape of the concession of a constitution for the Mezzogiorno and the ‘nationalization’ of southern Italy. This propaganda campaign was combined with diplomatic pressures on the European powers. Sicily played a crucial role in these projects and became the principal Mediterranean platform for the attempts to restore the Bourbon monarchy. But although the war of 1866 between Italy and Austria brought these strategies to an end, many of the arguments set out by the Bourbons in exile would later be absorbed into the debates on the ‘Southern Question’.     

A neglected chapter in Italy's transition from Fascism to the Republic: The Kingdom of the South (1943–1944)

Gallerano's paper examines the reasons why Italian historians have paid little attention to the political events that followed the liberation of the Italian Mezzogiorno and the brief life of the government established under the auspices of the monarchy during the period of what was termed the Kingdom of the South. He argues that this neglect derives in part from the brevity of the period of civil government in the south, but mainly from the fact that historians have been attracted above all by the history of the Resistance which has led them to consider events in the south to be of secondary importance. Gallerano argues that such a view is quite unjustified and shows how some historians ‐ from Chabod in the early 1950s ‐ have understood that events in the south bore very directly on the broader transition from Fascism to the Republic. Challenging Renzo De Felice's recent claims that Italy's defeat on 8 September 1943 marked the beginning of a crisis of national identity, Gallerano argues that the circumstances that obtained in the months that followed made the south an exceptionally rich terrain for exploring the very contradictory feelings and expectations that were aroused in Italy by the experience of military defeat and political reconstruction.     

Italy and Africa: how to forget colonialism

Abstract

The debate on colonialism places great emphasis on the composite set of transformations put in motion by colonialism fully to give birth to what became the post-colonial state in independent Africa. Many authors suggest that Italian colonialism in the Horn of Africa was too weak to perform this task. The present article intends to review the influence and effects of the Italian colonial experience for state making in the Horn of Africa. This also brings about one of the main anomalies of the Horn of Africa, where colonialism ended without a process of true decolonization, in the sense of a confrontation between colonized and colonizers in the transfer of power from metropolitan rule to African representatives. The present Italian foreign policy in Africa is similarly conditioned by its colonial history: besides its focus on the Horn of Africa, which was the centre of Italy's colonial expansion as well as the only post-Second WorldWar administration (Italian Trust Administration of Somalia – AFIS), the relations between Italy and Africa reflect the many inconsistencies and uncertainties of the colonial experience.     

A rentier class? Milanese nobility and the economy in post-unification Italy

ABSTRACT

The Lombard nobility’s loss of political power after the Napoleonic Wars has led economic historians to overlook the persisting role of traditional elites in social and economic life. The aim of the paper is to reassess the contribution of the Milanese aristocracy to Italian economic development, providing new insights into the business behaviour of the nobility in northern Italian areas. The article presents some new findings on noblemen’s investments and enterprises related to agriculture, manufacturing, trade and banking. The research focuses on the decades following Italian political unification, a period in which noblemen increased their interest in the financial sector and joint-stock companies (transport, banking, new sectors and industries) as a result of the transformations induced by the Industrial Revolution and the agrarian crisis of the 1870s and 1880s. Both quantitative and qualitative data will be used to assess not only the number of individuals involved and the capital they invested in new ventures, but also their role in orienting, stimulating, managing or supporting entrepreneurial activities and their openness to collaboration with the members of the middle class. The analysis combines the deeds produced by four notaries, chosen on the basis of their contiguity to the Milanese aristocracy, the foundation’s deeds of the main companies established in the city, conserved in the House of Trade, and the information provided by other local and national institutions. The cross-referencing of this data suggests that the Milanese nobility maintained a prominent economic role well beyond Italian political unification, contributing to the modernization of the national economy despite the weaknesses and contradictions that marked this process.     

Gender and geography in Italy

Abstract

This article attempts to provide a picture of Italian gender geography in order to better understand the discipline’s key achievements and development. Rooted in a lively tradition of feminism stretching back to the 1970s, Italian gender geography has faced cultural and academic resistance while achieving a number of milestones. There is still much to be done if the multifaceted theme of gender is to be fully engaged by Italian geography. However, seminars, national and international congresses on gender geography themes, and the dialectic encounter with international gender geography have stimulated the domestic debate since the new millenium. Italian gender geographic voices may be self-perceived as limited and isolated but are continuously engaged in the struggle to overcome the many structural and cultural constraints imposed by Italian society and academia. This article tries to review Italian gender geography’s history to look forward and encourage new agendas and projects within a larger academic audience.     

French businessmen in the nineteenth-century Mezzogiorno: technical innovation,sociability, networks and negotiation of identities

Abstract

This research examines a group of French entrepreneurs who settled in Naples during the sixty years before the Unification of Italy. It compares the marriage strategies, the professional behaviour, and the relations with the public authorities (the Bourbon government, their own consulate, the local courts, etc.) of these French businessmen with the experience and the life-style of other ethnic-national élites also present in the same period in the Mezzogiorno (Swiss, English, etc.). It highlights the considerable capacity for adaptation shown by the French, their integration in the host society, their collaboration with the indigenous population on a professional level, and their particular capacity to negotiate with the locals even their own status as foreigners. These are the elements that not only make the French case unique in the panorama of entrepreneurial minorities active in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, but also enabled many French entrepreneurs to make an important contribution to the business world in pre-Unification Southern Italy.     

Securitizing Development Assistance: India’s Nuclear Program and Canadian Societal Views on Nuclear Reactor Exports, 1974–1978

This article examines an often overlooked but nevertheless important element of Canada’s Cold War-era development assistance policies—the export of nuclear reactors to the developing world. In particular, the focus is on societal responses to India’s explosion of an underground nuclear device in May 1974, an accomplishment made possible in part through the export of Canada’s nuclear expertise, technology, and material. India’s entrance into the nuclear club sparked an intense and wide-ranging debate in Canadian society concerning the nature of Canada’s development and foreign policies, and more specifically, the types of policies that would enable the country to fulfill its main international purpose as a middle power—contributing to conditions of international peace and security. The protracted debate which involved not only politicians but many civil society actors revealed stark divisions among Canadians centered on the extent to which nuclear reactor exports served Canadian national interests.     

Italy's Postcolonial ‘Question’: Views from the Southern Frontier of Europe

In Italy, like in many other European countries, cultural roots and national identity are currently shifting as the result of contemporary transnational migrations and globalization. This essay analyses how the paradigm emerging from the Italian national case contributes to a redefinition of the postcolonial canon centered on British history and culture and to the notion of a “European” postcolonial as a whole. To this aim, the authors identify in colonial history and contemporary immigration the threads that connect the postcoloniality of Italy to that of other European countries. At the same time, they locate the specificity of the Italian postcolonial in the intersection between these factors and other events in Italian history that have strongly influenced the process of shaping an Italian national identity: the Southern question, intranational and international mass emigrations, new mobilities, the subaltern position of Italy within the European Union, and the geopolitical dislocation of Italy as the Southern frontier of Europe. The authors close their essay by presenting a Mediterranean Southern perspective grounded in new forms of knowledge and aesthetic sensibilities that counteract Europe's sense of encroaching and its politics of border protection.     

Republicans and Socialists and the Origins of Italian Political Parties

A central debate in political science centres on the origins of political parties and specifically on the question as to whether they emerged as a result of the rise of parliamentary institutions. Regarding the Italian party system, the commonly held view is that Italian parties emerged as a consequence of national unification and the establishment of parliament. This article contributes to the debate on the origins of Italian parties by presenting empirical evidence on the timing of their initial formation, analysing data regarding the social base, membership, organisational articulation and policy-making accomplishments of the two major political movements active before and after the establishment of the national parliament. The article argues that, at least in the Italian case, parties did not originate in the legislature; rather, similar to countries such as Germany and Spain, Italian parties developed as a result of a major national crisis.     

The European Union in the media coverage of the 2019 European election campaign in Italy: towards the Europeanization of the Italian public sphere

ABSTRACT

This article investigates the patterns of Europeanization of the Italian public sphere during the 2019 European Elections campaign. Europeanization is meant as a multifaceted process. The visibility and salience of the European Union (E.U.) within the public debate is realized by dynamics involving different actors, in terms of interactions, connections and contaminations between different public spheres. The aim of the article is to clarify whether and to what extent the Italian media covered the E.U. during the European Parliament (E.P.) elections campaign and more precisely to assess through which dynamics of Europeanization the E.U. entered the domestic public debate. We relied on data from a human content analysis carried out on 10 Italian media outlets during the seven weeks before election day. Our findings suggest that, compared to 2014, the visibility of E.U. and E.U. related issues is increasing within Italian media coverage. Italian media still maintain a neutral approach to the issue, resisting to Eurosceptic claims from political parties and public opinion. With regard to the Europeanization, we found that media tend to focus on the vertical dimension especially, providing visibility to domestic actors addressing the E.U. and its political actors. Elements of horizontal Europeanization, instead, are mainly referred to events from other E.U. member states, with few connections among political actors. All in all, our results confirm the idea of a growing centrality of the E.U. within national public debate combined with signals of more structured and substantial Europeanization.     

International Harvester,the U.S. South,and the makings of international development in the early 20th century

This article draws on insights into the making of an American empire and the formative nature of the early 20th century in order to interrogate the international imaginations and national practices of International Harvester Corporation, one of the United States' largest international corporations. Based on archival research, it documents how International Harvester imagined its new international markets as the inevitable extension of their national expansion, and the transformations that their products would bring to their new consumers similar to the transformations that those products were bringing to farmers living in the United States, particularly African-Americans in the American South. In addition, this article explores how International Harvester's interventions in the American South deployed tactics of governance that contributed to what became a dominant set of practices of postwar international development, in particular, the problematizing of a space/region, and the rendering of its solution as a technical one. This case study suggests that some of the practices that characterize American international development have their roots in the early 20th century, particularly in the American South.     

The Risiera di San Sabba: Fascism,anti‐Fascism and Italian nationalism

This essay examines the postwar debates surrounding the Risiera di San Sabba, the site of a Nazi death‐camp near Trieste, and explores the deeper conflicts and contradictions in the formation of an Italian national identity in the period since the Second World War.     

Unmaking the fascist man: masculinity,film and the transition from dictatorship

This essay examines the recasting and renegotiation of Italian masculinity during the war and during the transition from dictatorship to democracy. Film is my privileged source for understanding the complexities of male experience during this period of dramatic change, but I also rely on war crimes charges, diaries and memoirs. While not explicitly comparative in nature, the essay considers whether we can speak of a ‘crisis of masculinity’ in postwar Italy akin to that diagnosed by historians of postwar Germany and France. Within this broad frame, the essay focuses the experiences and representations of one category of men who evoked particular anxieties about the legacies of defeat and the redemption of Italian men for democratic models of fatherhood and citizenship: veterans, in particular returned prisoners of war. The 1946 film Il bandito (The Bandit, Alberto Lattuada), which I analyze in the last section of the essay, dramatizes the situation of these returned prisoners and the problem of a generation of men raised according to fascist norms that linked masculinity to the performance of aggressive acts.