A contested nationhood

Giuseppe Garibaldi

Compared to France’s exuberant fireworks on July 14^th to celebrate Bastille Day, Italy’s 150 year anniversary was a paltry affair. The Northern League opposed the very idea of celebrating an event it regards as a catastrophe; one of its mantras is that it was not so much a unification as a division of Africa. The party believes that the Risorgimento (as the unification process is known) forever glued the parasitical south of the country to the vibrant north, draining the state coffers. However the south also holds its reservations about the benefits of unification; Naples, once the third-largest city in Europe after London and Paris, is now arguably part of Italy’s periphery, making the headlines only for its rampant crime or stagnating piles of rubbish. The central government transfers to the south have done little to ameliorate its dire economy and thus give its inhabitants something to be grateful for.

Despite Italy’s booming growth after the Second World War, the north-south divide has been stubbornly persistent, and today GDP per person in the south is over 40% lower in the south than in the rest of Italy. This has been the case for the past 30 years, demonstrating the poor effort successive governments have invested in bridging the gap. Mario Draghi, the Bank of Italy’s former governor, noted that the south of Italy was the “largest and most populated underdeveloped region in the euro area”, given that a third of the country’s population resides there.

It is no wonder then that the Risorgimento is often pinpointed as the moment in which all of Italy’s travails started. Forget the euro crisis, the 2007 crash or even the advent of Silvio Berlusconi; Italy was doomed from the start. David Gilmour, in his book “The Pursuit of Italy”, argues that the crisis started on the 17^th March 1861, when Italy was unified. He points to Italy’s frail national identity and the lack of consent to the unification which have produced a succession of weak and dysfunctional governments. Had Fascism succeeded, Italians might have had a patriotic ideal to look up to which would have stoked their sense of identity. However governments have merely taken to steering the economy, without guaranteeing political stability, fighting corruption and organised crime or lifting the south from poverty. The latest economic crisis has revealed that the government is not even capable of managing the economy, further denting Italians’ faith in their country.

Moreover, the unification process was largely driven by a political elite in the North, inspired by the Republican ideals of Giuseppe Mazzini and cunningly engineered by Camillo Benso, the Count of Cavour, whose agile execution of realpolitik statecraft ensured foreign help, without which the Risorgimento most probably would not have succeeded. David Gilmour compares the case of Anglosaxon Britain, which required around 400 years to be unified, with that of Italy, which was rushed through in two measly years. Giuseppe Mazzini, Italy’s hero of the Risorgimento, did not so much liberate the south of Italy but conquer it and subject it to the rule of the north.

As The Economist points out however, “inventing nations, along withspurious myths and traditions to anchor them, was a popular recreation amongeducated Europeans in the 19th century”; to claim that Italy’s nationhood is in a parlous state because it was created by a northern elite when the rest of the population spoke forty different languages is perhaps to overstate history. Simply because Italy was unified in a relatively short period of time does not mean that it is fundamentally flawed as a country and that it cannot emerge from the current crisis in its present state. The Northern League is not, unfortunately, a minor aberration on Italy’s political scene. But neither is it about to create a permanent chasm that will rip the country apart. It is precisely in times of economic and political uncertainty that extremist parties seize upon the population’s malaise to stoke a sense of patriotism, however Italy’s experience with Mussolini demonstrates the iniquitous side of nationalism.  Pointing to an historical event to illustrate the roots of Italy’s problems is to recognise their intractability, but to brandish it excessively as the “real” cause of the crisis is to exonerate Italy’s politicians from renovating their rather antiquated country.