Antifascism,anticommunism, antipolitics: delegitimation in Berlusconi’s Italy

Abstract

Post-1994 delegitimizing discourses borrowed a lot from antifascism and anticommunism, which they updated to fit the new historical circumstances. Yet, with the events of 1992–94, the role, credibility, autonomy, and boundaries of the Italian political sphere entered a crisis, and this turned arguments about politics and antipolitics into new instruments of delegitimation. This article analyzes how delegitimizing traditions survived the end of the Cold War, and how they interacted with the new issues generated by Tangentopoli. Section 2 describes Berlusconi’s anticommunism, nurtured by the persistence of pre-1989 memories, but also by three present-oriented arguments: the fact that the communists had been able to survive the end of communism; their being professional politicians; and their statism. Section 3 deals with antiberlusconism, which is also composed of three threads: antifascism; the refusal of the ‘spirit of the Eighties’; and moralism. The final section of the article connects post-1994 delegitimizing discourses with the conflict between two opposed solutions to the crisis of the political, both fraught with contradictions: Berlusconi’s offer of less politics; and the conviction of the left that the correct answer was not less, but good politics.     

The misadventures of socialist anticommunism from the end of the war to the collapse of the Berlin Wall

Abstract

The article aims to highlight the features of socialist anticommunism in Italy from 1945 to 1991, with particular reference to Giuseppe Saragat and Bettino Craxi, and with regard to the intellectual activity of Ignazio Silone. Anticommunist socialists aimed at delegitimizing the communists, but they themselves were also delegitimized by the communist party of Palmiro Togliatti and Enrico Berlinguer. Naturally, the form of delegitimation changed over the years, from Saragat’s stance in the 1940s and early 1950s to his position later on. The kind of delegitimation carried on by Bettino Craxi’s socialist party was more successful, however, compared to the one implemented by Saragat’s small party. For this reason, it was fiercely opposed by Berlinguer and the communist party.