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PLACE and POLITICS 
in MODERN ITALY 



University of Chicago Geography Research Paper no. 243 

Series Editors 
Michael P. Conzen 
Chauncy D. Harris 
Neil Harris 
Marvin W. Mikesell 
Gerald D. Suttles 

Titles published in the Geography Research Papers series prior to 1992 and 
still in print are now distributed by the University of Chicago Press. For a 
list of available titles, see the end of the book. The University of Chicago 
Press commenced publication of the Geography Research Papers series in 
1992 with no. 233. 



PLACE and POLITICS 

"""in modern Italy 



John A. Agnew 



THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS 
CHICAGO AND LONDON 



J O H N A. AG N E W is professor of geography at the University of California, Los 
Angeles. He is the author or coauthor of a number of books, most recently Geo- 
politics: Re-visioning World Politics and The Geography of the World Economy, third 
edition. 



The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London 
© 2002 by The University of Chicago 
All rights reserved. Published 2002 
Printed in the United States of America 

1110 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 12345 

ISBN: 0-226-01053-8 (cloth) 
ISNB: 0-226-01051-1 (paper) 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Agnew, John A. 

Place and politics in modern Italy /John A. Agnew. 
p. cm. — (University of Chicago geography research paper ; no. 243) 
Includes bibliographical references and index. 

ISBN 0-226-01053-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-226-01051-1 (paper : alk. 
paper) 

1. Italy — Politics and government — 20th century. 2. Political geography. 
I. Title. II. Series. 

JN5451 .A63 2002 
320.945— dc21 

2002017355 

© The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the 
American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for 
Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39. 48-1992. 



CONTENTS 



TAJ 



List of Figures vii 
List of Tables xi 
Acknowledgments xiii 
Abbreviations for Names xv 

1 Introduction 1 

2 Mapping Politics Theoretically 13 
(3f> Landscape Ideals and National Identity 

in Italy 36 

4 Modernization and Italian Political 

Development 59 

5 The Geographical Dynamics of Italian 

Electoral Politics, 1948-87 77 

6 Red, White, and Beyond: Place and 

Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 111 

7 The Geography of Party Replacement in 

Northern Italy, 1987-96 140 

8 The Northern League and Political 

Identity in Northern Italy 167 

9 Reimagining Italy after the Collapse of 

the Party System in 1992 188 

1 Place and Understanding Italian Politics 216 

Notes 221 
Bibliography 259 
Index 287 



FIGURES 



2.1 The correlation between class and vote for an imaginary 

political party in a country of four regions 19 

3.1 The political geography of Italian unification, 1859-70 43 

3.2 Silvestro Lega, Paese con contadini (Landscape with 

peasants), c. 1871 46 

3.3 Rafaello Sernesi, Radura ml bosco (Forest glade), c. 1862-63 48 

3.4 Telemaco Signorini, Sul greto d'Arno (On the bed of the 

Arno), c. 1863-65 49 

3.$ Rome in 1951 with major sites mentioned in the text 51 

3.6 Excavations of the Roman Forum at the turn of the 

twentieth century 53 

3.7 The Via deH'Impero (now the Via dei Fori Imperiali) 

shortly after its opening in 1933 54 

s.i Groups of provinces ranked by per capita income, 1951 85 

5.2 The Italian urban system and the spheres of influence 

of major cities 86 

5.3 Decomposition of geographical variance in votes cast 

for the DC, 1953-87 94 

5.4 Map of Italian provinces and the voting regions used by 

Galli and Prandi 97 

5.5 DC vote as a percentage of total vote by province, 1953 
national election (Chamber of Deputies); PCI vote as a 

percentage of total vote by province, 1953 national 

election (Chamber of Deputies) 98 

5.6 Localization of high levels of support for parties, 1979 

national election (Chamber of Deputies) 102 

5.7 Economic localization in Italy in 1981: three types of 

provincial economy 104 



viii Figures 

6. i Map of northern Tuscany showing the provinces of Lucca 

and Pistoia, the six communes referred to in the text, and 

the communes of Florence and Pisa 122 

6.2 An aerial panorama of the city of Lucca looking east to 

west, the famous walls clearly demarcating the old city 135 

6.3 A new Communist Manifesto? "The firm as labor" 136 

7. i Map of communes in the Veneto using election results 

for the DC in national elections (Chamber of Deputies), 

1946-87 147 

7.2 Map of communes in the Veneto showing where the 
Liga Veneta was more and less rooted over the period 

1983-87, national elections (Chamber of Deputies) 148 

7.3 Variation in the vote for the DC by commune in the 

Veneto, national elections (Chamber of Deputies), 1987-92 148 

7.4 Variation in the vote for the Northern League-Liga Veneta 
by commune in the Veneto, national elections (Chamber of 
Deputies), 1987-92 149 

7.5 The flow of interparty votes between the national election 
(Chamber of Deputies) of April 1992 and the commune 

election of December 1992, Varese (Lombardy) 151 

7.6 Box-and-whisker plots of Northern League support in 
the main provinces of the Milan metropolitan region, 

1992-96 156 

7.7 Scatterplots of the number of voters (logged) against 
Northern League support for all communes in the Milan 
metropolitan region, 1992-96 158 

7.8 Scatterplots of the number of voters (logged) against 
Northern League support in the Milan metropolitan 
region (pooled 1992-96) and in the provinces of Milan, 
Bergamo, and Como (1996) 159 

8.i Percentage of the total vote for the Northern League by 

province, national election (Chamber of Deputies), 1994 169 

8.2 Percentage of the total vote for the Northern League by 
province, national election (Chamber of Deputies), 1996 169 

8.3 Northern League propaganda cartoon: a disunited but 
productive North lays the golden eggs for a united South, 

a corrupted Church, and a smiling Berlusconi 172 

8.4 Northern League propaganda cartoon: a noble Bossi, 
held aloft by the balloons of fewer taxes, Europe, 
federalism, liberty, and more growth, wields a sword to 

cut the rope grasped by the Roman bosses 173 



Figures ix 

9. i Percentage of the vote cast for the six parties in table 9. 1 
in the proportional part of the national election (Chamber 
of Deputies), 27 March 1994 200 

9.2 Italy's new parties and Italy's regions: the cartoonist 

Giannelli's political cartography 203 



T A B L E S 



5.1 Estimates of electoral mobility in selected Italian cities 79 
s.i National elections, 1946-2001, Constituent Assembly 

(1946) and Chamber of Deputies, percentage of total votes 

by parties 89 

5.3 Predicting the loss of PCI votes, 1976-79, at national and 

regional levels 108 

6.i The territorial subculture model: a comparison of the main 

features of the white and red zones 119 

6.2 Results of national elections, Constituent Assembly (1946) 
and Chamber of Deputies (1948-2001) in the provinces of 

Lucca and Pistoia and in three communes in each 123 

7.1 Moran's I Statistics for the DC and the Liga Veneta-Northern 
League in the Veneto, national elections (Chamber of 

Deputies), 1987-96 149 

7.2 The Veneto, 1996 national election (Chamber of Deputies): 
the political and socioeconomic characteristics of communes 

in which different parties performed best 152 

7.3 Provincial average percentage of support for the Northern 
League, national elections (Chamber of Deputies), 1992-96, 
Bergamo, Como, Lecco, Milan, and Varese 155 

7.4 Summary measures of the Northern League and logged 

voter densities in the Milan metropolitan region, 1992-96 157 

8. i "To which of the following units do you have the 

strongest attachment?" 185 

9. i Percentage of total votes cast for major parties on party 

lists (proportional component) in regional constituencies 

for the Italian Chamber of Deputies, 27 March 1994 201 



ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 



In the 1980s I lived for several long periods in Florence and elsewhere 
in Italy. This experience introduced me to the politics of Italy from the 
perspective of different places in the country. At the same time, I was 
working on developing a geographical approach to understanding politi- 
cal identities and interests that challenged more dominant conceptions 
based on political science and sociology. After I attended a 1985 confer- 
ence on the electoral geography of Italy organized in Parma by Carlo 
Brusa, my new friendship with him led me to his hometown of Varese. My 
interest in the Northern League blossomed out of that encounter and out 
of my travels in northern Italy in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The ma- 
jor parties of the Italian government at that time — the Christian Demo- 
crats and Socialists — collapsed while I was visiting Milan and Varese in 
1992. That was an intriguing time, dashing with Carlo from one party head- 
quarters to another to see which local politicians had been indicted for 
corruption and to find out what response the local activists were contem- 
plating. The confluence of these experiences over several years brought 
about the work this book is based on. 

The book itself has taken a long time to reach fruition. In 1992, when I 
was teaching at the University of Chicago, I spoke to Michael Conzen of 
the University of Chicago and Penelope Kaiserlian of the University of 
Chicago Press about writing on this topic, but I was diverted by other proj- 
ects and by a move from from Syracuse University to UCLA in 1996. Dur- 
ing the delay, however, my commitment to the idea of a place-based in- 
terpretation of politics was reinforced. Long advertised as a placeless realm 
par excellence, Los Angeles has proved to be anything but. Instead, it is in- 
credibly differentiated and diverse with respect to persistent daily paths, 
residential segregation by class and ethnicity, and associated political out- 
looks and interests. Not only Italy, therefore, can benefit from thinking 
about its politics in place-based terms. 

That the book has finally reached the light of day is due in no small part 



xiv Acknowledgments 

to the interest, support, and encouragement of a large number of people: in 
Italy, Carlo Brusa, Roberto Cartocci, Renato Mannheimer, Mario Caciagli, 
Marco Antonsich, Luca Muscara, Calogero Muscara, Berardo Cori, Mauro 
Palumbo, Giuseppe Bettoni, and Giovanna Zincone; and in the United 
States, Michael Shin, Ferruccio Trabalzi, Beverly Allen, Naeem Inayatullah, 
Mabel Berezin, Michael Barkun, the late John Nagle, Kristi Andersen, Fred 
Frohock, Stephen Webb, David Bennett, Deborah Pellow, Louis Kriesberg, 
and Manfred Stanley. Carlo Brusa and I worked together on the research for 
what is now chapter 8. Michael Shin helped out with the data analysis in 
chapter 7. The friendship of Carlo and Carla Brusa, Danilo and Vittoria 
Croce, Benito Giordano, Pierguido Baj, Celia Gould, Stuart Corbridge, Jim 
Duncan, and Zoran Roca has made the research and writing more pleasur- 
able. Michael Conzen and Penelope Kaiserlian were instrumental in arrang- 
ing publication by the University of Chicago Press. Christie Henry took over 
as editor at a crucial stage in production. My copyeditor, Alice Bennett, im- 
proved the English. Chase Langford prepared the maps. Without the emo- 
tional support, spirited intellectual optimism, and editorial help of Felicity 
Nussbaum, I fear the book would never have been completed. Of course, I 
am solely responsible for what I have made of the advice offered by them all. 

Several libraries provided sources I could not otherwise have found. The 
Biblioteca Marucelliana and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale in Florence, 
the Biblioteca Comunale Forteguerriana in Pistoia, and the Biblioteca dello 
Stato in Lucca have been particularly important. I also thank the Interli- 
brary Loan Department of Bird Library at Syracuse University. The mar- 
velous collection of Italy-related books and serials in the Young Research 
Library at UCLA has been nothing short of inspirational. Numerous people 
in Lucca, Pistoia, Florence, Sicily, Milan, and Varese consented to inter- 
views at various times between 1989 and 1997. 1 am particularly grateful to 
Pierluigi Bartolini in Pistoia and the On. Sergio Dardini in Lucca for help 
during my fieldwork in their provinces in 1989, 1992, and 1994. 

The book's chapters have been composed in one form or another 
largely since 1995, although I wrote a draft of what is now chapter 5 in the 
late 1980s, and all of them are substantially different from their earlier 
manifestations. Earlier versions of chapter 3 appeared in Brian Graham, 
ed., Modern Europe (London: Arnold, 1998); chapter 4 in Beverly Allen and 
Mary Russo, eds., Revisioning Italy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 
Press, 1997); chapter 8 in National Identities (1999); and chapter 9 in Polit- 
ical Geography (1997). 

The research for this book was funded by a grant from the Appleby 
Mosher Fund of the Maxwell School at Syracuse University, a Faculty 
Travel Grant from the Division of International Studies and Overseas Pro- 
grams at UCLA, and funding from the Committee on Research of the Aca- 
demic Senate of the University of California (Los Angeles Division). 



ABBREVIATIONS FOR NAMES 



AN Alleanza Nazionale (National Alliance) 

CGIL Confederazione Generate Italiana del Lavoro (Italian General 
Confederation of Labor) 

CISL Confederazione Italiana Sindacati Lavoratori (Italian Confedera- 
tion of Labor Syndicates) 

DC Democrazia Cristiana (Christian Democratic Party) 

DP Democrazia Proletaria (Proletarian Democracy) 

DS Democratici Sinistra (Left Democrats) 

FDP Fronte Democratico Popolare (Popular Democratic Front) 

FI Forza Italia (Go Italy!) 

LN Lega Nord (Northern League) 

Liga Veneta (Venetian League) 
Liste Verde (Green Lists/Ecology Party/Greens) 
Lega Lombarda (Lombard League) 

M La Margherita (The Daisy) 

MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement [neo- 
Fascists]) 

PCI Partito Comunista Italiano (Italian Communist Party) 

PDS Partito Democratico della Sinistra (Democratic Party of the Left) 

PdUP Partito di Unita Proletaria per il Comunismo (Proletarian Unity 
Party for Communism) 

PLI Partito Liberale Italiano (Italian Liberal Party) 

PNM Partito Nazionale Monarchico (Monarchist Party) 

PPI/PP Partito Popolare Italiano (Italian People's Party [pre-Fascist 
Catholic party, reestablished after the collapse of the DC in 
1992]) 

PR Partito Radicale (Radical Party) 

PRI Partito Repubblicano Italiano (Italian Republican Party) 

PSA Partito Sardo d'Azione (Sardinian Action Party) 



xvi Abbreviations 

PSDI Partito Socialista Democratico Italiano (Italian Social Democra- 
tic Party) 
PSI Partito Socialista Italiano (Italian Socialist Party) 

PSUIP Partito Socialista Italiano di Unita Proletaria (Italian Socialist 
Party of Proletarian Unity) 
La Rete (Network) 
RC Rifondazione Comunista (Refounded Communism) 

SVP Siidtiroler Volkspartei (South Tyrol People's Party [Bolzano]) 
UV Union Valdotaine (Valdotaine Union [Valle d'Aosta]) 



CHAPTER I 



Introduction 



Space is not the vague and undetermined medium which Kant 
imagined. Spatial coordination consists essentially in a pri- 
mary coordination of the data of sensuous experience. To dis- 
pose things spatially there must be the possibility of placing 
them differently. This is to say space could not be what it was 
if it were not divided and differentiated. But whence come 
these divisions? . . . evidently from the fact that different sym- 
pathetic values have been attributed to different regions 
— Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life 



MAPPING POLITICS 

Mapping politics involves showing how political identities and interests 
are structured geographically as the result of human agency in the places 
where people live. Human agency and the changing conditions under 
which that agency takes place, however, mean that mapping is never com- 
plete. Just as a map comes into focus, it is transformed into another one. In 
recent years the pace of geographical change in Europe and North Amer- 
ica seems to have increased after a long period following World War II 
when the geographies of political identity and political interests looked 
fairly stable. This book provides a theoretical framework for addressing 
the conception of "mapping politics" and a set of historical-geographical 
case studies of modern Italy — since 1870, but with a more specific focus 
on the years since World War II — to illustrate the efficacy of the approach 
and to offer a distinctive perspective on the course of modern Italian pol- 
itics. In so doing it also engages some of the major debates in contempo- 
rary political studies. 

Perhaps the most important debate in contemporary political studies is 
over interpretations of the trend toward a world organized increasingly in 
terms of the flow of goods, messages, capital, and people across widely dis- 



2 Chapter One 

persed networks and, on the other hand, the continuing division of the 
world into national states that provide the main regulatory framework for 
these networks and the primary source of political identity for much of 
the world's population. There is something of an intellectual standoff be- 
tween two sides in a debate over this tension: between those perhaps over- 
stating the novelty and overall impact of networks and those who may 
remain too committed to the enduring significance of national territories. 
Part of the problem is the way the debate is posed, as if networks invari- 
ably stand in opposition to territories. This is the case only if networks are 
seen as a completely new phenomenon without geographical anchors in 
particular places and if all territories are seen as national ones. 1 

Yet there is another way of looking at politics without ending up in the 
current impasse of "networks versus territories." This approach is to see 
politics as organized in terms of the places where most people live their 
lives; settings that are linked together and across geographical scales by 
networks of political and economic influence that have been, and still are, 
bounded by but decreasingly limited to the territories of national states. 2 
The novelty of globalization can be exaggerated, however. From one point 
of view, the social world has been global in various ways since the six- 
teenth century, when European imperialism began its global march. But 
social science in the twentieth century has resolutely privileged the na- 
tional as a singular scale of analysis when actual domestic and interna- 
tional politics presuppose the coeval importance of other geographical 
scales (such as the local and the global). 

Beyond the debate over networks versus territories and the national 
versus the global, current Anglo-American debates over the nature of pol- 
itics are dominated by three schools of thought. These are called the._ta- 
tional actor, political culture, and multiculturalist schools, although there 
are"dTfferent emphases~within each grouping. I'o rational actor theorists, 
politics simply reflects and amplifies individual preferences. People are 
seen as perpetually engaged in maximizing their welfare whatever the 
context of life. The only "real" actors are individuals, who act politically 
by matching their preferences to this or that political ideology or to the 
promises made by this or that politician. Politics always reduces to the 
pursuit of individual self-interest. For political culture theorists, politics is 
more about the clash of values than the clash of interests. The "best" pol- 
itics involves pursuing values that emerge from reasoned deliberation 
within social groups dependent on habits of mutual trust. Community 
and dialogue more than preferences and interests are the catchwords of 
this persuasion. But all politics is ultimately about the way groups associ- 
ate to establish and articulate different values and then attempt to realize 
them through political action. Finally, multiculturalists see the groups we 
are cast into by virtue of race, ethnicity, language, or culture as funda- 



Introduction 3 

mental to political mobilization and action. Such groups are ascriptive 
rather than voluntary. The identities groups provide precede both prefer- 
ences and association. Politics is about gaining recognition for one's iden- 
tity and then using it as a resource in struggles over material and symbolic 
interests. 

A central claim of this book is not that these accounts are wrong but 
that they are radically incomplete in their understanding of how prefer- 
ences, interests, values, identities, and thus politics come about. They ab- 
stract preferences, values, and so on from the spatial settings or places 
where they are realized. Politics is always part, but only part, of the com- 
plex lives of people who interact in a variety of groups that they co- 
operate with daily (families, associations, political organizations, fellow 
workers, businesses, churches) and that help socialize them into certain 
political dispositions rather than others. 

The ties sustained by groups can be relatively strong if everyday life is 
dominated by a single group or by groups that have cross-memberships. 
But a feature of modernity is that most group memberships are extraordi- 
narily fluid and crosscutting, with relatively weak ties between any one 
group and its members. Typically, therefore, values and preferences emerge 
from fractionated and differentiated group experiences in which identities 
are forged and remade through shifting voluntary self-affiliations. From 
day to day, the seemingly abstract processes of political disposition and 
mobilization are concretely grounded in the practical routines and institu- 
tional channels of the workaday world. For most people these are typically 
concentrated around definite geographical sites, though these are invari- 
ably linked into wider webs or networks through which groups and indi- 
viduals are organized over larger areas such as regions, states, and the 
world. The identities, values, and preferences that inspire particular kinds 
of political action therefore are embedded in the places or geographical 
contexts where people live their lives. 

The book develops this theory of "mapping politics" in relation to the 
empirical exploration of the politics of modern Italy. Italian politics is of- 
ten seen as expressing either the timeless features of political culture (na- 
tional or regional) whose origins lie in the primordial mists of the distant 
past or else the slow and agonized achievement of a national politics of 
individual preferences in the face of entrenched institutions and political 
practices committed to sustaining social and regional identities that work 
against national unity and common political purpose. Such perspectives 
are readily comparable to the political culture and rational actor theories 
mentioned previously. In their stead, and throughout this book, I propose 
a perspective that sees Italy's national space as being in historical flux, 
without presuming either fixed regional cultures or an emerging national 
politics of individual preferences. 



4 Chapter One 

Previous accounts have tended to see local geographical differences as 
representing the past either as inscribed in the contemporary political 
landscape or as residual to a present that is increasingly homogenized and 
nationalized. Alternatively, however, group membership is realized, iden- 
tities are formed, and preferences are defined in shifting geographical set- 
tings, or places, that have different local and long-distance linkages over 
time. From this point of view geography is dynamic rather than static. It 
refers to the ways life processes impinge on politics as their local and long- 
distance components change over time rather than operating within 
fixed, permanent geographical parameters such as those set down by cur- 
rent national-state boundaries or historical regional designations. 3 Much 
contemporary social science depends implicitly on the prior and unex- 
amined valorization of geographical units of account (the state, the city, 
administrative regions) and thereby occludes the possibility of seeing pol- 
itics (or other phenomena) as geographically dynamic. 4 

WHY ITALY! 

The focus on Italian politics might be seen as biasing the case in favor of 
the perspective of geographical dynamics. After all, Italy is usually seen as 
very unlike the rest of Europe or the industrial-capitalist world in general. 
It is notoriously divided geographically, socially, and politically. Conse- 
quently: 

1. Only Italy has had an incomplete political integration with a weak 
sense of national identity and an overbearing national government that 
has failed to acquire a matching popular legitimacy. Other national states, 
of course, somehow have avoided these problems! Perhaps what sets the 
country apart is rather the lack of confidence in a national mission on the 
part of Italy's intellectual elites and Italy's subordinate position within in- 
ternational politics since the disaster of Fascism (1922-43). 

2. Only in Italy did a blockage for over fifty years between 1947 and 
1992 prevent alternation between the main progressive (the Communist) 
and center-right (Christian Democrat) political parties. Elsewhere, natu- 
rally, alternation has always been a matter of course! The Cold War geopo- 
litical division of Europe ran through Italy in the sense that the main party 
of the left was Communist and thus potentially threatened the position 
of Italy within the west-east division of the continent if it ever acquired 
national office. This made Italy distinctive, but hardly unique. Other 
countries had powerful communist parties (if only for a time), such as the 
Parti Communiste Francais in France, and other leftist parties in Italy and 
elsewhere in Western Europe were often skeptical of the benefits derived 
from continuous geopolitical alignment with the United States. 

3. Only in Italy was there systematic corruption of society by political 
parties dividing up the spoils of government. The degree of corruption in 



Introduction 5 

Italy has been truly remarkable, but it has reflected the country's domi- 
nance for so long by a set of "parties of government" rather than some- 
thing simply inherent in the country itself. Italy is at most, then, an ex- 
treme case among industrial democracies rather than the total anomaly it 
is often made out to be. 

Notwithstanding the limited appropriateness of a charge of bias, Italy 
does have a number of advantages as a focus for the general argument of 
the book. One is that Italian scholars have been intrigued by the differ- 
ences between regions and localities within the country, from the merid- 
ionalisti (students of the South) of the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries and the great Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci (1892-1936) (on 
city/countryside and north/south development gaps) to contemporary po- 
litical scientists, geographers, and sociologists addressing rural/urban, re- 
gional, and local differences. There is thus a vast storehouse of information 
available about Italy's internal geography and how scholars have tried to 
explain it. Another advantage is that Italy does contrast with other Euro- 
pean countries (and the United States) in popular and intellectual self- 
consciousness about its political-geographical difficulties. In this respect, 
the only other example that immediately comes to mind is Canada, a 
country so perpetually on the verge of coming apart that the mystery of its 
continuing unity is the central question for Canadian social scientists. The 
question of political identity is more openly available for public discussion 
in Italy than elsewhere because of both the relative recency of Italian na- 
tional identity (Italy unified only in the 1860s) and its problematic char- 
acter. Finally, Italy has adapted to recent changes in the world economy, as- 
sociated with the coming of the European Union and the explosion of 
economic transactions between businesses across national boundaries, in 
ways that seem to have increased geographical differentiation within the 
country. Local external economies of scale (associated with skilled labor 
pools, training schemes, artisan traditions, and supplier contacts) and lo- 
cal social interdependence have been important in producing specialized 
economies in many parts of the country. But other areas have lagged be- 
hind or have been left out of this trend, thus stimulating even more local 
and regional economic differences with potential political impact. 

THEMES OF PLACE AND POLITICS 

Four themes can be identified that cut across all chapters to provide the 
links between the empirical material on Italian politics and understandings 
of it (in chapters 3-9) and the theory of mapping politics (in chapter 2). 

Place and Scale 

The first theme concerns the way geographical differences are understood 

and interpreted. Rather than a "metric" space, divided into compact areas, 



6 Chapter One 

place involves a conception of topological space in which diverse geo- 
graphical scales are brought together through networks of internal (locale) 
and external (location) ties in denning geographical variation in social 
characteristics. People also invest meaning in the places they inhabit. The 
scales by which they identify themselves and their group memberships 
(national, local, international) vary both from country to country and 
over time. Since the nineteenth century in Europe the national scale has 
often been presumed as the scale for establishing primary political iden- 
tity. But sense of place at the national scale can coexist with or be replaced 
by alternative ones. Existing geographical variation in a given phenome- 
non — party vote, geographical sense of political identity, and so forth — 
responds to changes in the interaction of networks that interweave the in- 
ternal and the external to produce new geographical variation in the same 
phenomenon over time. 

In other words, geographical variation cannot simply be read off one ge- 
ographical scale, and it changes over time as the balance of influences 
across scales changes. Place differences therefore are a necessary concomi- 
tant to the interrelation of social, economic, and political processes across 
scales that come together or are mediated through the cultural practices of 
existing settings. In this way geography is inherent in or constitutive of so- 
cial processes rather than merely a backdrop on which they are inscribed. 5 

Why has this sort of perspective rarely achieved much emphasis among 
social scientists or historians? For one thing, the concept of place became 
fatefully identified with that of community at the turn of the twentieth 
century when the current intellectual division of labor among social sci- 
ence disciplines was largely established. When community was viewed as 
in decline under the impact of industrialization and urbanization (and 
more recently the effects of new communication technologies such as cell 
phones and the Internet), place was eclipsed too. At the same time "soci- 
ety," rather than remaining solely an abstraction or ideal type, was defined 
in practical terms as coterminous with the national state. A single geo- 
graphical scale — that of the national state — thus became the geographi- 
cal base on which much social science was founded. 6 

In addition, dominant representations of terrestrial space have fol- 
lowed the identity that grew up in the nineteenth century between ab- 
straction and scientific validity. Geographical variation, multicausal 
explanations, local specificity, and vernacular understandings are all anti- 
thetical to the concept of space either as national chunks or as the result 
of structural relations (for example, in the core/periphery relations of sub- 
ordination and incorporation of world systems and dependency theories). 
"Science" is about finding causal relations that either are independent of 
time and space or vary predictably across area types or between time peri- 



Introduction 7 

ods. In fact what often happens is that uniformity is imposed by select- 
ing taken-for-granted geographic units and holding numerous potential 
causal variables ceteris paribus (as if their effects were not present) so that 
universality can then be discovered. 

The distinction between different geographical scales or levels has also 
been a problem because they have served to distinguish various areas of 
study (such as international relations versus domestic politics or micro- 
versus macroeconomics) and levels of generalization and causality (eco- 
logical versus individual inference) rather than complexly related dimen- 
sions of the contexts in which actual social and political processes occur. 
Integrating scales is difficult or even heretical when different fields deter- 
mine their specialty by basing their uniqueness on different scales and 
when analysis (reducing explanation to the simplest level) has tended to 
win out over synthesis (putting together elements of explanation that 
emerge across a range of scales). 

Finally, representations of space and how we think they figure in un- 
derstanding politics or other social phenomena are not merely epis- 
temic — functions of how we just happen to think. They are closely related 
to the dominant political and material conditions of the eras when they 
are articulated. But they often live on after those eras have closed because 
of intellectual inertia and the closed character of the intellectual tribes 
that dominate different fields. Much contemporary social science is still 
steeped in the theories and representations of space of such nineteenth- 
century founding fathers as Marx, Durkheim, and Weber. Notwithstand- 
ing the legitimating quotation from Durkheim I offer at the beginning of 
the chapter, none of these luminaries had much to say to the enterprise of 
integrating scales of analysis into the concept of place. Yet the complexi- 
ties of social life in a globalizing world require nothing less. 

Historical Contingency 

Since the late nineteenth century, Anglo-American political science has 
been trying to escape from the twin constraints of time and space by 
searching for empirical regularities that are independent of both. The goal 
has been to imitate an image of physics or mathematics as fields that made 
abstractions beyond the confines of the everyday and that were widely ad- 
mired among academics for the causal simplicity, mathematical elegance, 
and aesthetic brilliance of their discoveries. Associated with this has been 
the drive to construct a state-centered applied social science that would 
better manage the various problems encountered during state formation. 7 
These goals have largely failed, however, because of the need to engage 
with a social world that has resisted ready incorporation into schemes that 
insist on radical reduction of historical and geographical complexity to 



8 Chapter One 

highly synoptic statements. In practice, history has been reduced to 
worldwide linear evolution toward a model represented by an idealized 
version of a particular geographical entity, typically England, France, or, 
latterly, the United States. This geopolitics of knowledge, reflecting what- 
ever national group of social scientists or national experience was in the 
ascendancy, thus conditioned the understanding of time. As I discussed in 
the previous section, space was likewise reduced to the effect of the con- 
tainers provided by the world's territorial states but taken for granted as 
the obvious units of social accounting. 

This elimination of time and space as active components of social sci- 
ence analysis has recently undergone considerable criticism. 8 One impor- 
tant response has tried to return to historical narratives about states or lo- 
calities in place of the "scientific" model. Such an idiographic response is 
limited, however, because it fails to address how space should figure in 
analysis. It is how time and space covary that matters in the constitution 
of social life, not privileging one over the other. What this book proposes 
is a social science that tries to use time-space variation as its basic point of 
departure rather than pretending to remove either from consideration or 
proposing that one is superior. This approach involves a dynamic map- 
ping of shifts in political identities and actions, presuming as much 
change as stability in their substance over time and space. 9 A focus on 
place requires taking both space and time equally seriously. 

Contexts of Political Action 

The dominant conception of political action is that of individual actors 
belonging to groups (in practice, usually national census categories) that 
influence how they do or do not act. In this understanding, the purpose 
of political research is to find out what drives individual choices across 
enough individuals that we no longer need to rely on aggregate or geo- 
graphically based evidence. Generalizing about individuals will then ex- 
plain them. But explanation and generalization are not the same. Ex- 
planation is about the possible mixes of causes and reasons operating 
differentially across time and space rather than about generalizing across 
individuals independent of time and space, because individuals never ex- 
ist independent of the historical-geographical contexts of their lives. The 
causes of political beliefs and actions are organized differentially across 
such contexts and are not deducible from frequency counts of the attri- 
butes of individuals abstracted from the contexts of political action. 

Even recognition as an individual presupposes a social-geographical 
context in which that is possible. The affirmation of ordinary life as the 
source of the intersubjective understandings modern selfhood is based on 
is the centerpiece of the social philosophy of Charles Taylor. 10 From this 
perspective the individual self is irremediably social in origin: 



J 



Introduction 9 

[The] crucial feature of human life is its fundamental dialogical 
character. We become full human agents, capable of understand- 
ing ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our ac- 
quisition of rich human languages of expression. For my purposes 
here, I want to take language in a broad sense, covering not only 
the words we speak, but also other modes of expression whereby 
we define ourselves, including the "languages" of art, of gesture, of 
love, and the like. But we learn these modes of expression through 
exchanges with others. People do not acquire languages needed 
for self-definition on their own. Rather, we are introduced to them 
through interaction with others who matter to us — what G. H. Mead 
called "significant others." The genesis of the human mind is in this 
sense not monological, not something each person accomplishes on 
their own, but dialogical. 11 

Even without geographic variation in voting patterns or other political 
activity, therefore, this understanding presumes geographic variation in 
the causes and reasons of political activity as they come together in differ- 
ent places. If everyday life differs from place to place, then so too does the 
language of politics. One of the themes of this book is the need to replace 
the individualist account of political action with an adequate contextual 
one. The typical form that contextual approaches to political studies take, 
however — focusing on local deviations from a national average (as in the 
so-called neighborhood effect) that are then put down to local particulari- 
ties — is not pursued here. Rather, I offer an approach that breaks com- 
pletely with the individualist ontology and methodology, proposing that 
the national and the local are themselves always elements of a wider mul- 
tiscalar context framing social causation and political agency. 12 

The Search for Normative Political Space 

The world has not always been divided into territorial states. Indeed, all 
kinds of polities with distinctive geographies have existed at one time or 
another. It is only over the past few hundred years, and more especially 
since the American and French Revolutions, that the territorial state (after 
the English, French, or American model) has come to monopolize politi- 
cal debate and discussion of political action. This intellectual hegemony 
is now in doubt. There is an increasing disjuncture between the politi- 
cal spaces that are relevant to contemporary practical needs, often now 
at subnational or supranational scales, and the state-based ones on of- 
fer. In Europe in particular, the coemergence of regionalist movements 
and Europewide supranationalism suggest the limitation of totally state- 
centric accounts. 

As Plato and Aristotle long ago recognized, politics is not just about 



10 Chapter One 

who holds office and how it was acquired but also about the nature of of- 
fice and the spatial arrangements under which government should oper- 
ate. Scholars of politics have been slow to acknowledge the development 
of new conceptions of political spatiality (as in regionalist, trading bloc, 
and global-oriented movements) and also have remained largely tied to 
the national state as the locus par excellence of political life. This is be- 
cause of a conception of political space as a fixed hierarchical grid, divided 
among states (suitably colored on a map) in a pecking order from least to 
most (the superpowers). Not only is this challenged by formal organiza- 
tions operating at other geographical scales, it is also apparent in the fail- 
ures of states around the world, from Colombia and Haiti to Sierra Leone, 
Rwanda, and Somalia. 

To raise an alternative conception of political space is not to suggest 
that states are in imminent danger of disappearance, at least in the dem- 
ocratic capitalist parts of the world. On the contrary, it is to claim that the 
either/or of state centrism is extremely misleading. States have never ac- 
tually monopolized politics in the way they have monopolized political 
theory. Now they do so even less. But if we allow political understanding 
to be dominated by a particular territorial form, then we remain oblivious 
to the emergence and the possibilities of other geographical entities such 
as politically reinvigorated cities, stronger municipalities, and suprana- 
tional modes of political organization. 13 

OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS 

Chapter 2 lays out the theoretical perspective of the book, linking it to 
contemporary debates over the nature of politics and identifying the 
sources of the perspective in recent literature in political theory. The main 
elements of the position are drawn out in relation to major strands of con- 
temporary Anglo-American thinking about the nature of politics as re- 
flected in discussion about agency, difference, association, and active so- 
cialization. 

The weakness of Italian national identity as compared with other Euro- 
pean national states is examined in chapter 3 in relation to the difficulty of ; 
acquiring and imposing a common "landscape ideal" or physical image for 
the country. A singular landscape ideal is viewed as a crucial component 
erecting and communicating a sense of common nationhoo d. The rural 
Tuscan and ancient Roman idealized landscapes that came to the fore in 
the aftermath of Italian unification in the nineteenth century have not 
been able to provide the sense of national communality found in certain 
"exemplary" European states. Why has this been so, and to what effect? 

By providing a critique of the common understanding of Italy and its 
north/south division in terms of the language of modern and backward, 



in/ 



Introduction 1 1 

chapter 4 adopts a skeptical attitude toward the modernization approach 
that has dominated much thinking about Italian politics yet that has seri- 
ous deficiencies. Why this approach has been so pervasive in the Italian 
case is the subject of close attention. 

The focus changes in chapter 5 from the popular images and intellec- 
tual history of the previous two chapters to the dynamics of Italian elec- 
toral politics during the long postwar period in which the Christian De- 
mocratic Party and the Italian Communist Party had central roles in 
national politics. I identify three "geographical regimes" in which politics 
tended to be regionalizing (1948-63), nationalizing (1963-76), and local- 
izing (1976-92). The key claim is that the different geographies resulted 
from changing group affiliations, shifting political and economic condi- 
tions, and the evolving external relations of Italy and its localities. 

The important distinction between two territorial subcultures — the 
"red" or Communist of much of central Italy and the "white" or Catholic 
of the Northeast and pockets elsewhere — is examined in chapter 6 first in 
general terms and then in relation to two provinces of central Italy, Pistoia 
and Lucca, that represent the two traditions. A rather more complex pic- 
ture of historical-geographical contingency emerges from the local stud- 
ies rather than the somewhat simple one that has usually prevailed in 
Italian political studies. This chapter reinforces the idea of a dynamic 
place-based politics as opposed to fixed regional political subcultures. 

Beginning in 1992 the Italian system of parties and elections under- 
went a dramatic change. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 examine aspects of the 
transformations still under way. Chapter 7 looks at the geography of how 
the Northern League, a regionalist party, emerged to replace the Chris- V 
tian Democrats in many parts of northern Italy. This chapter illustrates 
the more general question of how parties are replaced geographically dur- 
ing periods of intense political change. Chapter 8 returns more specifi- 
cally to the Northern League to investigate the specific impact it has had 
on the political identities of northern Italians. The success of this region- 
alist party is examined with respect to what it says about the contempo- 
rary geography of political identity in northern Italy. Chapter 9 is con- 
cerned with the ways the new parties operating since 1992 have come to 
"imagine" Italy in terms of the geographical scales at which they operate 
and how they think it should be governed. In other words, my concern 
is to explore the reimagining of political space going on in Italy since the 
mid-1990s on the part of the main new political parties. Finally, chapter 
10 draws together points from the other chapters in terms of the themes 
identified earlier in the introduction: place and scale, historical contin- 
gency, contexts of political action, and the search for a normative polit- 
ical space. 



12 Chapter One 
CONCLUSION 

The overall purpose of the book is to use modern Italy, from its unification 
in the mid-nineteenth century to the present, as a laboratory for showing 
a geographical way of looking at politics that goes beyond the individual- 
ist and state-centered accounts that currently dominate. The idea is both 
to offer detailed critiques of conventional wisdom and to provide an al- 
ternative theoretical perspective that incorporates some of the main fea- 
tures of contemporary political theory. The book moves from the geo- 
graphically more general to the more specific, from Italy as a whole to 
some of its parts, particularly in the Center and the North, and it is or- 
ganized chronologically from a more macrohistorical frame of reference 
to more detailed studies of the recent past. 

Versions of some of the chapters have been published previously, but 
they appear here in considerably revised form as parts of a sustained ar- 
gument. Certain themes run across the chapters: a focus on places as con- 
stituted out of the workings of agents across multiple geographical scales, 
historical-geographical contingency, contexts of political action, and the 
search for normative political space. If the case of modern Italy is any 
guide, the division and differentiation of space are indeed as important as 
Durkheim suggested they are. It is a pity that he and his successors did so 
little to show how. 



CHAPTER 2 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 



The first step in providing a coherent geographical perspective on Italian 
politics is to lay out a theoretical framework to which more specific em- 
pirical studies can be related. Recent history offers an opportunity to 
reevaluate the importance of geography — or the role of place-to-place dif- 
ferences within countries — in politics in Europe and North America. In 
many countries, established ideas about politics, based on assumptions 
about the high intensity and historical fixity of political party identifica- 
tion, the ideological range (left/right) and organizational characteristics 
of parties (mass/clientelistic), social class divisions and voting patterns, 
and common commitment to a national state and its territorial organiza- 
tion, are in question to a degree not seen since the 1920s and 1930s. In 
particular, the idea that any place within the boundaries of a specific 
country may well be more or less substitutable for any other place in terms 
of the main attributes of its politics (which parties are active, who votes 
for whom, and how local institutions mediate for national parties and 
their political messages), widely held at one time by many Anglo- 
American students of politics, is now much more questionable than it was 
ten or twenty years ago. 1 

Views have always differed, however, as to the extent of locational sub- 
stitutability and how it came about. In respect to the first, my view is that 
the geographical homogeneity of any given nation or country was always 
exaggerated — more a normative commitment than an empirical fact. 2 
The mass of people everywhere have always been locked into daily prac- 
tices and routines that produce more limited perceptual horizons, locally 
focused interests, and limited political opportunities than those of the 
scholars who study them. In relation to the second, the much noted glob- 
alization of economic and, to a more limited extent, cultural life has not 
undermined the importance of the local and regional so much as it has be- 
gun reorienting them away from a primary focus on the local and the na- 
tional to perceptions of and reactions to the supranational (e.g., the Euro- 

13 



14 Chapter Two 

pean Union) and the global (the situation of a region or locality in global 
trading and investment networks). So, though certainly not the creation 
of the recent intensification of globalization, regional and local mediation 
of politics in the presence of globalization has increasingly given rise to a 
greater variety of political forms (such as regional political parties), the 
erosion of national social cleavages and associated political affiliations, 
the breakdown of long-established regional voting patterns, and popular 
questioning of the limitations of current national political institutions in 
a globalizing world. 3 

These recent trends suggest a need to rethink the currently dominant 
model of national politics premised on a median national voter pursuing 
individual preferences or interests within a purely national space (the ra- 
tional actor model), if only because the national space no longer entirely 
defines the limits of interest formation and hence a singular context for 
defining individual preferences. But more especially, this is necessary be- 
cause the question of the political identity (national, class, ethnic, re- 
gional) around which preferences are decided can no longer be associated 
purely with the national or national-social class identities hitherto pre- 
sumed to be crucial. 

Of course, alternatives to this model are available that apparently do 
take the geographical basis of politics more seriously. These would include 
the idea of a set of socially constructed or primordial ethnic or social iden- 
tities associated with different places determining political outlooks and 
action (multiculturalism) and that of geographically sedimented political 
cultures ranged along a continuum from the civic (or participatory) at one 
end to the passive or authoritarian at the other (political culture model). 
These two models have been widely accepted in Italy to account, respec- 
tively, for the distinction between regions long dominated by Catholic 
and socialist political affiliations (the northeast-white and central-red 
zones) and the North/South difference in the prevalence of political clien- 
telism and active political participation. 4 Because both the alternative 
models see geographical variation in politics as derivative of either largely 
unchanging social identities or fixed political cultures, however, they of- 
fer no improvement over the rational voter model in accounting for con- 
temporary changes in political outlooks and behavior. 

What all three models (rational actor, multicultural, political culture) 
are missing is sustained focus on the mediating role performed for na- 
tional politics, historically and today, by place-based processes of identity 
and preference formation. In other words, they all fail to consider the 
ways the spatial siting of people in relation to the uneven distribution of 
social, economic, and political opportunities and influences affects their 
political outlooks and activities. 5 To provide such a theoretical focus is my 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 1 5 

purpose in this chapter. I do so in two ways: by proposing a theoretical per- 
spective on how places figure in national politics and by relating an im- 
portant aspect of this perspective — active place-based socialization — to 
the major conceptual innovations of the three others identified previ- 
ously (agency, difference, and association) to show how the place per- 
spective can bring them together. 

I use this theorizing about place and politics as the basis for examining 
the course of modern Italian politics. I understand theorizing as a form of 
praxis rather than logos. It is not a reified set of general propositions that 
fit all empirical cases but a set of general orientations and expectations 
drawn from past and contemporary thinking on which empirical analysis 
can be based and without which it would be impossible. 6 Though the ar- 
guments are general and can be applied elsewhere, in this book the em- 
pirical case in question is that of "Italy." Finally unified as a state only in 
1870, Italy has been both an intellectual and a practical laboratory for nu- 
merous ideas about the best ways to organize politics in the absence of a 
strong existing national identity, from the interregional vote exchanges of 
early legislatures through Fascism to the competing visions of the postwar 
Communists, Christian Democrats, and other political movements. The 
lack of an existing nation on which to map the state has meant that proj- 
ects for an Italian politics have always had to come to terms with a large 
number of social differences, political traditions, and distinctive eco- 
nomic interests that are not readily represented in simple national terms. 

THE PLACE PERSPECTIVE 

Place and Space 

Terrestrial space, the earth's surface or some portion thereof, is often un- 
derstood in the social sciences as the plane on which events take place at 
particular locations. It offers a concept of the general as opposed to the par- 
ticularity of places. Space is also understood as commanded or controlled 
by powerful agents and institutions (such as states), whereas place is lived 
or experienced space. Space is the abstraction of places onto a grid or coor- 
dinate system as if an observer is outside it or looking down at the world 
from above. Sometimes space and place are not distinguished at all but are 
viewed as synonymous. Place can also be dismissed as an obfuscating term 
without analytic merit. In this usage one can write of particular spaces and 
general ones, thus reintroducing place but refusing to name it. 

As a pair of terms, place and space reflect a tension that signifies their 
distinctiveness. Space represents a field of practice or an area in which an 
organization or set of organizations (such as states) operates, held together 
in popular consciousness by a map image or narrative story that makes the 
space whole and meaningful. Place represents the encounter of people 



1 6 Chapter Two 

with space. It refers to how everyday life is inscribed in space and takes on 
meaning for specified groups of people and organizations. Space can be 
considered as "top down," defined by powerful actors imposing their con- 
trol and stories on others. Place can be considered as "bottom up," repre- 
senting the outlooks and actions of ordinary people. Typically places are 
more localized, given that they are associated with the familiar, with be- 
ing at home. But they can also be larger areas, depending on geographical 
patterns of activities, social network connections, and the projection of 
feelings of attachment, comfort, and belonging. 

A place can be seen as having three necessary geographical elements. 
These combine both the particular qualities of a place and its situatedness 
in terrestrial space. The first is a locale or setting in which everyday life is 
most concentrated for a group of people. The second is a location or node 
that links the place to both wider networks and the territorial ambit it is 
embedded in. The third is a sense of place or symbolic identification with a 
place as distinctive and constitutive of a personal identity and a set of per- 
sonal interests. 

These three elements show up repeatedly, if unevenly, both in popular 
understandings of the word and in academic rumination about its con- 
tent. Locale privileges the local, but location draws a place into a wider 
spatial field of reference. Sense of place brings in the symbolic significance 
of a place for those who live in and identify with it. This is not the same 
as community in the sense of a way of life based on personal intimacy and 
positive involvement with a localized moral order. If that is present it will 
reinforce the sense of place, but it is not necessary for a sense of place to 
exist and flourish. 

The language of geographical scale is crucial in making the distinction 
between place and space. Geographical scale refers to the level of geo- 
graphical resolution at which a given phenomenon is thought of, acted 
on, or studied. Conventionally, terms such as local, regional, national, 
and global are used to convey the various levels. Geographical scale is not 
the amount of information on a map, as with cartographic scale, but the 
focal setting at which spatial boundaries are defined for a specific social 
claim, activity, or behavior. Yet there is nothing very determinate about 
the terms typically used. The term local, for example, can in different cases 
refer to areas of vastly different size. For this reason, one scale makes sense 
only in relation to others. The terms are also inherently areal; they refer to 
territorial units of varying size and cannot adequately describe the char- 
acter of networks and the spatial relationships they involve. As yet, how- 
ever, even as the world globalizes, local and national scales of resolution 
remain dominant with respect both to institutional opportunities and to 
the sources of political action. Places are wedged between the local, the re- 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 1 7 

gional, the national, and the global, but with a continuing tendency to 
privilege the relations between the local and the national. 7 

Political power is the sum of all resources and strategies involved in 
conflicts over collective goods in which parties act with and on one an- 
other to achieve legitimate outcomes. It is never exercised equally every- 
where. This is the basic law of political geography, for two reasons. First, 
power pools up in centers as a result of the concentration of coercive re- 
sources (instrumental power) and the ascription and seconding of power 
to higher levels in power hierarchies by groups at lower levels (associa- 
tional power). Second, the transmission of political power across space in- 
volves practices by intervening others who transform it as it moves from 
place to place. Not only is the flow of power potentially disrupted in its ac- 
tual spatial deployment, it is also subject to negotiation and redirection. 

Geographical scale is constructed politically in three ways. One way is 
that political power is exercised from centers that vary in their geographical 
reach, defining global, national, regional, and local sites of power of differ- 
ing geographical scope and political intensity. Often power flows hierarchi- 
cally from one scale to another, but it can short-circuit one scale or more. 
Today, for example, regions and localities are thought of as interacting di- 
rectly with globally effective seats of power with reduced national scale me- 
diation. Another way is through the deployment of the language of scale it- 
self. Geographical scales are intellectual constructs that are used to order the 
world in a meaningful way. In different political ideologies, different scales 
are given preference, reflecting their premises about the best or most ap- 
propriate level at which to think and organize politically. Thus nationalists 
privilege the national, regionalists the regional, non-Stalinist socialists the 
international, and so on. Finally, it is not so much the separate scales as the 
material and discursive balance between them that determines the consti- 
tution and effects of political power in a particular case or in relation to a 
particular issue. The balance between material and discursive processes op- 
erating from sites over different geographical ranges determines the way po- 
litical power works. Historical shifts in the balance produce different polit- 
ical maps or place-based patterns of politics. 8 

The most typical modern European-American perspective on space, 
however, has been to ignore the question of scale. The preference is to di- 
vide space up into blocks of national spaces or territories. This approach ex- 
presses the central material and ideological significance for our time of 
nation-states, at least ideally, as the primary units of political, economic, 
and cultural organization. It is what the sociologist Herminio Martins has 
called "the rule of methodological nationalism." 9 Of course there is noth- 
ing necessary or inevitable about this. Today, in fact, the territorial division 
of the world into states is under increasing challenge from networks of 



18 Chapter Two 

power (associated with transnational business) emanating from and link- 
ing major world cities. In the past, centralized empires, territorial states, 
nomadic groups, and other distinctive types of political-geographical or- 
ganization prevailed over large parts of the world or coexisted in close 
proximity. There is no good reason such geographical pluralism might not 
flower once again, if in distinctive ways, and collective action might be or- 
ganized across geographical scales rather than confined within rigid terri- 
torial boundaries. 10 

The actual spatial organization of the world is of course already more 
complex than the simple assimilation of all social and political cleavages 
into a superordinate state-territorial spatial form assumed by most social 
science thinking. In particular, the spatial practices of everyday life have 
always maintained a local place specificity that defies sweeping up into 
national territorial containers. But today these are as much nodes in wider 
space-spanning networks as areal niches within national territorial spaces. 
Places, then, are at the same time territorial niches and network locations. 

Some types of sociological theory have taken the spatial basis of so- 
cial life very seriously, but usually without invoking the concept of 
place. From Simmel to Sorokin to Giddens, with a definite hiatus during 
the heyday of functionalist sociology in the 1950s and 1960s, spatial 
concepts and metaphors have been important. 11 Particularly during the 
past decade, spatial language and concepts have had increasing currency 
among sociologists. Pierre Bourdieu, Harrison White, and Anthony Gid- 
dens have been advocates of "spatially strong" theoretical discourses. All 
are involved, if in very different ways, in using the relational mapping of 
social onto biophysical space to transcend the major dichotomies (sub- 
ject/object, material/ideal, etc.) that have long bedeviled sociology. 12 

Two other sociologists, Luciano Gallino and Arnaldo Bagnasco, have 
come closest to the concept of place proposed here with their idea of "ter- 
ritorial social formations." 13 By this they mean geographical areas with 
overlapping economic, social, and institutional assets integrated by means 
of local political hegemonies. In this understanding, the local-territorial 
provides the means of structuring the complex interactions between vari- 
ous influences that produce distinctive local economies and political 
modes of managing them. What is absent from this and other sociological 
literature, however, is an analysis of the precise elements of "place" and of 
how place can serve as a sociological as much as a geographical concept. 

Places and National Politics 

An empirical puzzle provides a simple way of starting to describe the im- 
portance of geographical context for national politics. National (or other 
aggregate) averages are more or less representative of specific observations 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 1 9 

depending on the degree of dispersion of all observations. National aver- 
ages disguise a variety of local or regional differences that better represent 
the action of specific persons. In figure 2.1, for example, the relationships 
between different social classes and the vote for an imaginary political 
party are shown for an imaginary country's four regions. In each region 
the correlation between class and vote is perfect, but for the country as a 
whole there is no direct relation whatever. This extreme example illus- 
trates the simple point the role of geographical context rests on: a national 
norm is constituted out of local situations. 

Robert Putnam's much lauded 1993 study of the implementation of re- 
gional government in Italy rests largely on a series of quantitative com- 
parisons at the national scale that are used to make interpretations about 
the political-cultural differences between northern and southern Italy but 
that do not hold up within the two parts of the country. 14 What appear to 
be relationships at the national scale (e.g., an inverse relation between 
"clericalism" and "civicness") turn out not to be so or are related differ- 
entially in the two parts of the country because the distribution of scores 
on the related variables within each region differs so much. In other 
words, within-group variation is so great that one cannot say much about 
between-group differences. The actual relations between the variables 
therefore differ between the two parts of Italy and cannot be bundled into 
a single relation for the whole without violating this fact. 15 

This is neither simply a statistical problem nor solely an Italian one but 
one that is theoretically and globally substantive. As social beings, people 



LU 4 

o 

> 



CLASS 



Figure 2.1 The correlation between class and vote for an imaginary political party 
in a country of four regions. Source: D. Derivry and M. Dogan, "Religion, classe et 
politique en France: Six types des relations causales," Revue Francaise de Science 
Politique 36 (1986): 158. 



20 Chapter Two 

respond to the stimuli of their surroundings and thereby acquire the prac- 
tical reasons that lead them to act in some ways rather than others. These 
social contexts are formed geographically. Social relations are made in 
physical settings or locales (everything from homes, schools, and shops to 
churches, workplaces, and places of recreation) that people constantly 
cross into and out of in the course of their everyday lives. Such locales are 
embedded in a wider territorial society according to locational constraints 
imposed by states and other institutions organized territorially and in 
node and network arrangements imposed by spatially extensive divisions 
of labor. Common experiences and identities create emotional attach- 
ments and self-definitions that are projected onto space to produce dis- 
tinctive geographical identities or sense of place. This involves making dis- 
tinctions between insiders and outsiders and often leads to exclusionary 
practices. Place thus cannot be valorized as inherently either "democratic" 
or "progressive" in its structuring of political practices. 16 

In a contextual view, therefore, human action is seen as threading out 
from the here and now of face-to-face social interaction into more exten- 
sive fields of mediated interaction managed by institutions and organiza- 
tions with extended spatial reach. Social relations can be thought of as 
stretching out over space but linked tightly to the concrete interactions 
and intersubjective ties of persons rooted in the rounds of everyday life. 
So rather than adding together the categorical traits of individuals derived 
from national censuses or positing a set of group traits associated with a 
place from time immemorial to explain an action (such as voting), my 
purpose is to identify the mix or juxtaposition of a set of stimuli to action 
within a relevant space-time matrix or place. 

People do not passively follow local rules and roles mandated by a set 
of social causes. They actively manipulate them, thus making them 
unique to the particular context. This inherently limits the possibility of 
explaining action by a set of determinate causes, a "social capital" or a 
"culture" unproblematically inherited from the past. At the same time, 
however, actors are never autonomous in the sense of being totally self- 
determining. Their very personhood (and what it means to them) de- 
pends on rules and roles established socially. What they make of them is 
a function of their agency — their ability to imagine action based on eval- 
uation of how they live and how they came to live that way. 17 

This is a type of configurational explanation combining a focus on the 
action of human agents with accounts of the geographical settings in 
which the stimuli and reasons for action are grounded. 18 From this point 
of view, geographical context or place refers to funneling stimuli across 
space to produce specific types of action that are similar or different de- 
pending on the spatial covariation of the various stimuli. In other words, 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 21 

places are the cultural settings where localized and geographically wide- 
ranging socioeconomic processes that condition actions of one sort or an- 
other are jointly mediated. Although there must be places, therefore, there 
need not be this particular place. 

By way of example, recent years have seen a dramatic reduction in elec- 
toral participation in Italy. Close analysis reveals, however, that the high- 
est rates of abstention are among older voters (particularly women) in 
southern Italian cities and young voters in the metropolitan areas of the 
North. Different sets of reasons are at work in creating this geographical 
pattern, associated in the urban South with alienation from politics in gen- 
eral for the people in question and in the urban North with a protest 
against the existing political parties for the least-affiliated younger voters. 19 
Not only are demographic differences in play, so are divergent experiences 
and understandings of politics for specific sets of actors in different places. 
Among the factors involved in the urban South are the decline of the "per- 
sonal" character of politics with the removal of preference voting in elec- 
tions and the overall decrease in clientelistic politics since the late 1980s 
and in the urban North the vilification and subsequent disappearance of 
such major political parties as the Christian Democrats and Socialists in the 
aftermath of the political corruption scandals of the early 1990s. 

We might consider three important distinctions between the concep- 
tion of context illustrated by this example and those predominant in the 
social sciences. For one thing, contextual effects are often seen as external 
effects on individual behavior arising from social interaction in a local en- 
vironment. Typically, it is local neighborhood or group effects that are the 
object of analysis. Individuals are radically separated from the contexts 
around them, only to be related as if they have an existence independent 
of one another. For another, political movements and parties are usually 
exogenous to the enterprise. Emphasis falls on individual voters and their 
behavior while other actors are ignored or taken for granted. There is a bias 
against seeing institutions as involved in structuring contexts. Finally, 
there is a tendency to accept the claim that many social traits are really in- 
dividual characteristics that we simply cannot yet methodologically deal 
with except as aggregate measures. Contextual effects are marks of our ig- 
norance about real individuals and how they make decisions. This reduc- 
tive psychologism can have no time for geographical context. 20 

Causes and Contexts 

As the foregoing account should suggest, no single cause can be invoked 
to explain the interrelation between places and their politics. Grand 
theories based on single-factor explanations (technology, capital, class 
struggle, ethnic identity) not only are largely discredited as partial and 



22 Chapter Two 

overdetermined but also have no constitutive role for place. A potential 
causal matrix can be drawn from the existing literature on spatial varia- 
tion in politics to explain the contextual scaffolding out of which places 
are made. As a result, I argue that places in contemporary European and 
North American politics can be configured in terms of six sets of causes. 21 
Together these causes can be viewed as potentially producing the cultural 
contexts for the range of possible actions directed toward national politics 
by human agents in particular places. But they engage with the three di- 
mensions of place (locale, location, and sense of place) in distinctive ways, 
as shown below. 

The relative weight and mix of each type of cause varies, of course, from 
country to country and from place to place within countries. The order- 
ing reflects a working outward from the pathways and barriers of everyday 
life into the wider spatial worlds they are embedded in. But their relative 
importance shifts as geopolitical, cultural, economic, and technological 
conditions change over time. They thus draw together the conventional 
wisdom from a wide range of the contemporary geographical literature on 
the multiple ways human actors make places. To reiterate, my listing of 
significant causes reflects my preference for multicausal analysis within a 
common ontological framework that privileges the concrete settings of 
everyday life. In these particular quotidian instances, however, causes do 
not determine but condition the choices made and the actions under- 
taken by active human agents. 

First of all, the microgeography of everyday life (work, residence, 
school, leisure) defines the more-or-less localized settings where patterns 
of social interaction and personal socialization are realized. Even indi- 
viduals without strong social associations must navigate the constricted 
and directed pathways of daily life. A sense of local distinctiveness or of 
wider territorial affiliation (including adhering to somewhere as large as a 
nation-state) can be a feature of an emotional attachment to a particular 
place. This is especially true when a place is seen as a "community of fate" 
in which a person's material life chances and emotional well-being are 
caught up with the condition and prospects of a local area. 22 Social groups 
also form through local ties and by extralocal linkages to similar groups 
elsewhere. Not everyone in a given place is socialized in exactly the same 
way with the same outcome. Class, gender, and ethnic differences are cre- 
ated and also have specific political effects through the particular local 
and extralocal ties they reflect. 23 Sociologist Georg Simmel argued that so- 
cialization into group membership through instilling norms of conduct 
usually took place spatially because social boundaries had to be spatialized 
to be effective: "The proximity or distance, the uniqueness or the plural- 
ity that characterize the relations of social groups to territory are therefore 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 23 

often the root and symbol of their structure." 24 Socialization does not hap- 
pen once and for all, as in accounts that emphasize childhood to the ex- 
clusion of all other phases of life; it occurs repeatedly over the course of a 
lifetime with the possibility of new memberships and intersubjective re- 
lations as people move around or groups (in particular, the differences the 
groups define and the associations they give rise to) are reformulated in 
and across places. 25 

Second is the influence of the wider social division of labor in estab- 
lishing the character of different places and identification with them. The 
social division of labor takes a spatially differentiated form and evolves in 
rhythm with changes in the world economy. There is unevenness in the 
spatial distribution of investment, labor skills, input sources, and markets. 
Places develop relatively specialized economic bases because of their ac- 
cessibility, labor force, and production assets. Some localities and regions 
are branch plant economies, dependent on flows of capital and decisions 
from elsewhere. Others are the headquarters of transnational businesses 
or engaged in the specialized production for a range of national and in- 
ternational markets but largely dependent on their endogenous capaci- 
ties. All places also have economic sectors that depend largely on local 
markets, a point emphasized in so-called community power research. A 
large part of local politics is concerned either with conflicts over the in- 
terests of parochial capital or with the need to make the local area attrac- 
tive to footloose business investment. These spatial-economic character- 
istics have important effects on the social structures of specific areas and 
the nature of local politics. In particular, class and community affiliations 
take on meaning in relation to the geographical contexts defined by the 
social-spatial division of labor. National economies came into existence in 
Europe and North America in the nineteenth and early twentieth cen- 
turies, setting geographical limits to investment and business organiza- 
tion. Since then, nationwide wage agreements, increased labor force par- 
ticipation by women, common rates of taxation, and the provision of 
similar levels of public services have helped diminish local and regional 
differences in conditions of employment and human welfare. Economic 
globalization, however, in emphasizing competition for mobile capital be- 
tween states and localities, has introduced a wider geographical framing 
into the workings of spatial divisions of labor. 26 

Third, and of increased importance in recent years, is the nature of com- 
munications technologies and access to them. Transportation and infor- 
mation technologies create geographies of isolation and accessibility that 
draw places differentially into wider networks of communication. Such 
networks are frequently hierarchical across settlement systems and sharply 
limited by linguistic boundaries and customs barriers. The relative pres- 



24 Chapter Two 

ence or absence of communication network ties, then, provides another 
contextual dimension to national politics by limiting or enhancing inter- 
action across space. Today, social groups and political affiliations rely more 
on flows of information and images over space than on immediate spatial 
propinquity. 27 Powerful media of communication, especially television, 
exert a particularly important political influence. The messages of the me- 
dia in many countries are strongly defined by the territorial boundaries of 
the national state because of language constraints and either state owner- 
ship or concentrated corporate control (Italy's Silvio Berlusconi, media 
baron and leader of his own political party, Forza Italia, is an obvious ex- 
ample). The arrival of global media enterprises, such as MTV and CNN, has 
the capacity to disrupt this established relationship between mass media 
and national territory, but except for those who understand English, this 
has so far had a limited direct effect on the conduct of politics. 

Fourth, all places today are embedded in territorial states. States are 
congeries of localities and regions held together in central-local tension. 
Though most obvious in federations, this tension is implicit in all states. 
When popular legitimacy counts, as it does in all but the most repressive 
states, governments must pursue policies and redistribute resources in 
ways that maintain or enhance the legitimacy of the state or current 
regime. In the presence of economic and political inequality between 
places, this will involve conflict over which places get what. To challenge 
or change the institutions of government requires becoming involved in 
their operation. De facto, this legitimizes governments by producing 
repertoires of collective action that are directed toward them, such as or- 
ganizing and supporting political parties that run in national elections 
rather than simply engaging in local protests and rebellions. In this way 
local and regional politics are drawn toward the center. At the same time, 
however, the center remains dependent on the periphery, to causally re- 
verse the terminology typically adopted by those who see the central gov- 
ernment successfully homogenizing localities around a national standard 
or norm for culture and politics. 28 Local politicians must be recruited for 
national office and must satisfy local constituencies with what they 
achieve. In other words, local populations negotiate their own terms of 
engagement with the center. National politicians must speak their lan- 
guage, both literally and in terms of issues and policies that concern dif- 
ferent local constituencies. Peasants (and others), therefore, have never 
been entirely turned into Frenchmen in the sense of a typical or average 
French (Parisian) person with the exact same interests and preferences dis- 
tributed by class, gender, age, and so forth. Local governments can also 
strike out in various directions, even while constrained by national-level 
policies. 29 For example, they can enter into coalition with international or 



Mapping, Politics Theoretically 25 

local business interests to foster place-specific economic growth and pro- 
vide different packages of public goods and services than those character- 
istic of the country as a whole. 

Fifth, ethnic, class, and gender divisions and antagonisms have na- 
tional (and international) histories as promulgated by political move- 
ments and influential commentators and leaders. Such divisions become 
reified in political discourses that then serve to anchor political ideologies 
(nationalist, socialist, liberal, etc.). The relative weight and various mean- 
ings attached to the social divisions, however, and hence the appeal of dif- 
ferent ideologies, are not the same everywhere. They vary from place to 
place in patterns of external economic dependence, work authority struc- 
tures, local cultural forms, and the history of local experience with respect 
to the use of social divisions by political movements. 30 Popular collective 
memories are common, in which regional and local identities combine 
with national ones. The national story is seen through local eyes. Various 
geographical scales of political identity, and connections to social ones, 
therefore are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The imagination of the 
nation does not contradict the local image of "homeland." Indeed, the lat- 
ter can flow into the former, as has long been the case with the German 
Heimat or integral national political community made up of local com- 
munities. 31 In recent times, however, identity politics has become both 
more complex and more important to national politics across a range of 
countries. This is a result of the breakdown of totalistic and unreflexive 
identity schemes, such as the purely national or the familial, in which 
people always know their place. New movements for racial civil rights, 
ecology, feminism, and gay rights are not simply about material interests 
but are "struggles over signification; they are attempts simultaneously to 
make a nonstandard identity acceptable and to make that identity liv- 
able." 32 These identity struggles are often pursued by associating them 
with places where potential supporters are concentrated and where his- 
toric battles took place or with images of places (such as a distant home- 
land or a Utopia) that can serve as a common point of reference. But older 
movements too, such as trade unions, also rely on places as a focus of col- 
lective identity. This is illustrated clearly by the geographical pattern of 
support for the coal miners' strike in Britain in 1984-85, which depended 
critically on the extent to which mining settlements were geographically 
isolated, on local histories of work organization, and on the character of 
local labor relations. 33 

Sixth, political movements make claims about nation, region, and lo- 
cality as well as ethnicity, class, and gender in their manifestos and rhetor- 
ical pronouncements. These claims generate different responses in differ- 
ent places and can tie movements, and political parties as formal types of 



26 Chapter Two 

movement, to particular representations of the national space and how it 
is internally differentiated. 34 Even putative nationwide parties, for ex- 
ample, declare themselves for states' rights or municipal interests in addi- 
tion to the identity or interests of particular regions and localities. Just as 
the Republican Party in the United States has become the party of the 
South and devolution to the states, the British Labour Party, run by politi- 
cians from its electoral fortresses in Scotland and the north of England, 
has become the party of devolution and local solutions to global prob- 
lems. Of course, historically the Republicans were the party of the Union 
and the United States business establishment, with its main electoral base 
in the Northeast, and Labour was a working-class party supportive of state- 
centered solutions to a wide range of social problems. Shifts in the identi- 
ties of parties reflect shifts in the ideological divisions around which they 
compete for popular support and the match of new political divisions 
with the places where parties can hope to achieve success and capture na- 
tional office. 

By way of summary, the geographical context of place channels the 
flow of interests, influence, and identities out of which emanate politi- 
cal activities such as organizing movements, joining parties, and voting. 
This understanding assumes that political action is structured by the 
geographical configuration at any moment of a complex set of social- 
geographical causes. Rather than a static or fixed geography constraining 
action, geography is the dynamic constellation of causal stimuli and rea- 
soned action. Even when causal stimuli are similar in mix across places, 
the impact, mediated by the historical experience of particular places, can 
be quite different. 35 So whether outcomes are the same or different, the 
way they are produced varies from place to place. One of the tasks of con- 
temporary political geography is to show empirically how this works. 

This theoretical perspective requires operating simultaneously with 
several modes of analysis with an eye to overall synthesis. There is simply 
no adequate justification for a "one size fits all" methodology. The typical 
opposition drawn between qualitative and quantitative approaches is par- 
ticularly problematic. The idea that any one methodology can answer all 
types of question is one of the most bizarre features of modern Anglo- 
American social science. To meld the production and pattern of political 
outcomes necessary for mapping politics requires a number of different 
empirical approaches. In the first place, large-scale quantitative analysis is 
most appropriate for detecting trends over time at various geographical 
scales in relation, for example, to electoral stability and change. Second, 
available accounts of popular and elite political interests and identities 
must be subjected to critical historical scrutiny. Third, local studies in- 
volving interviews and local written sources anchor understanding of the 
intersubjective worlds of daily life out of which politics is finally mapped. 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 27 
BRINGING TOGETHER KEY CONCEPTS 

Each of the theoretical perspectives noted at the beginning of this chapter 
(rational actor, political culture, and multiculturalist) offers an area of 
strength as an analytical approach to politics. But each tends to privilege 
a specific facet of national politics at the expense of others, and all neglect 
something that the place perspective takes particularly seriously. They 
tend to argue past one another, therefore, yet each can be seen as offering 
something important to a more complete account. Through reconstitut- 
ing what the others offer, the place perspective is capable of incorporating 
the others' main areas of strength. In this section I take each of the main 
conceptual contributions in turn, beginning with the rationalist agency of 
the rational actor model, moving on to the focus on difference of multi- 
culturalism and on the association of the political culture model, and end- 
ing with a conception of socialization as the specific contribution of the 
place perspective in bringing the others together. Along with a discussion 
of each one's conceptual contribution, I attempt to show how each can 
also be brought under the rubric of the place perspective. 

Agency 

The rational actor model of politics rests on two major premises: that in- 
dividuals engage in a reasoned calculation of the costs and benefits of 
adopting positions on different political issues, and that they match their 
positions to those of organizations and parties so as to decide which to 
support. This approach has a number of advantages over those that pre- 
sume identification with either a party (the Michigan model, named after 
the university where national surveys linking party identification to vot- 
ing behavior were pioneered) or a class position (as measured by national 
census variables such as occupation or income). The most celebrated ad- 
vantages are that it claims universal applicability, focuses on persons as 
knowing agents rather than automatons, lends itself to modeling behav- 
ior based on a few assumptions about how preferences are formed, privi- 
leges recent experiences more than long-term normative commitments, 
and is not tied to a particular substantive theory of political action (such 
as class or ethnicity), although the census characteristics of individuals 
may be used as surrogates for patterns of preferences and interests. Two 
versions of the model are identifiable: the wide and narrow versions differ 
in terms of whether individuals are restricted to egoistic preferences, have 
limits on their cognitive capacities to process information, and face only 
obvious objective constraints or also are limited by perceived ones. 36 

Even if one adopts the wide version, however, aspects of the rational ac- 
tor model are still questionable. Two critical deficiencies concern the treat- 
ment of preferences and the notion of rationality. Preferences are deduced 



28 Chapter Two 

from what is defined as material self-interest. Reasoning therefore is re- 
stricted to optimizing individually ranked preferences. That such prefer- 
ence rankings might arise socially and as the result of moral reasoning 
raises little or no concern. This can lead to interpretive trouble when iden- 
tity commitments and social influences interfere with a simple translation 
of presumed preferences into political interests. 37 The cautionary tale of 
Japanese consumers, supportive of restrictive government trade policies 
seemingly opposed to their interests, suggests that ideological commit- 
ments and moral reflection can interfere with the simple formula of pref- 
erences equal interests. 38 Rationality is seen in narrow utilitarian terms 
such as the maximization of utility or profit rather than as a process of ef- 
ficiently applying means to any number of ends. 39 For example, strivings 
for status, power, and the approval of others may be important motiva- 
tions of political action, but they do not make that action irrational. That 
term should be reserved for the inefficient matching of means to ends, not 
for the character of the ends themselves. 40 

What, then, is the main conceptual contribution of the rational actor 
model, broadly construed? It is the focus on active agency responding to 
lived experiences and situational characteristics, including institutional 
opportunities, political capacities, and responses to recent events, that 
sets the approach apart from more deterministic ones such as social class 
or political culture or multicultural models. There is an expectation of 
change and volatility in political outlooks and action rather than stasis 
and tranquillity. This certainly fits recent political experience in Europe 
and North America. It also opens the approach to the role of different con- 
texts in providing different menus of choice for political agents by means 
of the specific mix of institutional opportunities, current socioeconomic 
circumstances, and recent political histories found in different places. 41 

Difference 

Multiculturalists and some feminists privilege the invention and perpetu- 
ation of differences or distinctions between groups and their effect on ori- 
entations to and participation in political activities such as organizing 
movements, pressuring institutions, and supporting political parties. 
Since the 1960s, and in response to civil rights struggles by minorities and 
women's groups and the growth of "unmeltable" immigrant groups re- 
sistant to conventional cultural assimilation, a range of perspectives has 
arisen that calls into question both the stability of established political 
identities (particularly national ones) and their relative significance. 
Group identity is seen as depending on drawing radical social distinctions 
between your group and an external other by means of stereotyped images 
and sweeping generalizations about the profound differences that exist 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 29 

between you and all the others. Common to the various viewpoints on 
group definition by "othering" is the position that, since the Enlighten- 
ment, Western political thought has associated political order with cul- 
tural homogeneity and political chaos with cultural diversity. 42 Though 
understandable in the aftermath of Europe's vicious religious wars in the 
sixteenth century, such an orientation does not vindicate what James 
Tully calls "an empire of uniformity" within states. 43 Rather, Tully argues 
that the modern ideal of a uniform national constitutionalism impedes 
the recognition and accommodation of cultural diversity. Addressing dif- 
ference has been deferred by associating political community with states 
and viewing political community as underpinned by cultural uniformity. 
Only between states is cultural difference theoretically possible. 

Notwithstanding the virtues of this historical account of the rise of 
state-centered politics, within this framing other group identities simply 
push national identity out of its dominant place. Individuals become 
mere carriers of their cultural heritage, not true actors in their own right. 
Though the degree of essentialism as opposed to social construction as- 
cribed to group membership is controversial, the hostility to the idea of 
personal agency is pervasive. This has at least three consequences: a ten- 
dency to totalize identities (ethnic, racial, gender, sexual orientation, etc.) 
other than national ones in a way remarkably similar to the way national 
identities have been conventionally treated, a dismissiveness toward na- 
tional identities, as if they are at least incipiently authoritarian whereas 
the ones championed are not, and a tendency in practice to purify pre- 
ferred identities by downplaying or disallowing their hybridity and com- 
plexity. 44 

What is most useful about this way of thinking is its clear focus on what 
has been called the labor of division, or the importance of the parallels be- 
tween social distinctions made by intellectuals, political practices, and di- 
visions of political space. 45 The effects of difference can be understood as 
invariably taking place, always involving a drawing of social boundaries and 
either a territorialization or a networking of cultural differences. The dom- 
inance of the national as the geographical level or unit par excellence for 
making and bounding distinctions is thus historical rather than natural. 
The surveillance power of states (through census taking and taxation as 
much as through violent coercion) has subordinated cultural-geographical 
differences within states. But incorporated places have never been entirely 
removed from political agendas, and they have recently experienced some- 
thing of a revival in response to new pressures from the world economy 
and increased immigration. Today, therefore, the making of difference is 
taking place in ways that transgress the equation of political community 
with established nation-states and groups with singular identities, linking 



30 Chapter Two 

groups across national boundaries and partitioning the internal space of 
states into a mosaic of places associated with different groups and their 
(mixed) identities. 46 

Association 

Advocates of political culture models typically explain political action not 
by reference to individual actors or social groups (primordial or socially 
constructed) but with respect to normative orientations learned largely, 
but not entirely, in childhood from families and other primary groups and 
as members of secondary organizations. These approaches emphasize 
shared values, beliefs, and preferences shaped by common historical ex- 
perience that are reproduced through membership in primary groups. The 
so-called subjectivist approach tends to focus on the long-term continu- 
ity of political dispositions and the values that underpin them. Civic re- 
publicans tend to privilege the role of group memberships or association 
for encouraging active political involvement. They differ, however, in 
how far they prefer organized groups or more informal types of associa- 
tion and how much they identify historical path dependency as vital to 
the emergence of civic and noncivic cultures. 

I argue here that the general approach has serious problems, not least 
its sociological vacuity and its tendency to reproduce old ideas about na- 
tional character in more neutral-sounding language. A commitment to 
national-level analysis is not inevitable. Indeed, any geographical unit 
with a high degree of presumed cultural uniformity fits the bill. Irrespec- 
tive of the geographical scale of analysis, however, reasonably rigorous 
empirical research shows how problematic political culture studies tend to 
be, demonstrating that indicators of short-term experiences have more 
power in explaining political attitudes than does evidence of long-term 
dispositions 47 and that path dependency introduces a "geographical lock- 
in" that obscures the role of recent as opposed to historically distant in- 
stitutional and cultural factors in accounting for contemporary political 
activity. 48 When linked to the idea of social capital, association in groups 
often takes on an even more questionable role in explaining political in- 
volvement. 49 For one thing, group associations are frequently identified as 
individual traits when they are in fact contextual in nature. For another, 
social capital cannot be reduced solely to associationism, given its prove- 
nance as a concept designed to incorporate a range of noneconomic fac- 
tors into models of political and economic behavior. 50 

Among American political theorists, the civic republican (or commu- 
nitarian) version of the political culture model has undergone a signifi- 
cant expansion in recent years, related particularly to a revival of inter- 
est in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.* 1 As is well known, 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 31 

Tocqueville was sensitive to differences in spaces of association. The con- 
trast between Europe and America was judged to result from the more 
open horizon in America, the opportunity to make places from scratch, 
whereas in Europe established systems of land tenure, settlement, and in- 
heritance restricted the circulation of the population. Tocqueville invoked 
this American pattern to explain the greater social egalitarianism of Euro- 
Americans and their greater propensity to involve themselves in social 
groupings and civic life than found among contemporary Europeans. 

Those currently invoking Tocqueville either decry the loss of the world 
of civic engagement and political efficacy Americans once enjoyed or, fail- 
ing to learn from Tocqueville's own sensitivity to the political conse- 
quences of different spatialities of communication and movement, try to 
expropriate the Great Traveler for projects of rehomogenizing the nation's 
map of social solidarities and civic-mindedness. 52 They also miss the ex- 
tent to which early American civic culture depended on "the representa- 
tive institutions and centrally directed activity of a very distinctive na- 
tional state." 53 In particular, the high levels of extralocal information that 
Tocqueville thought characterized the inhabitants of rural Michigan came 
from letters and newspapers delivered by the United States Post Office. Lo- 
cal association did not occur in a national geographical vacuum. 

What is compelling about this revival is the renewed attention to social 
mediation in political life. The focus on association, however, needs closer 
integration with the spatial structures of the present day. Not only are 
places now more closely integrated economically and bureaucratically, 
they are also more segmented culturally and ethnically than was the case 
historically. 54 Partly this is a function of differential surveillance and sub- 
ordination, indicated, for example, by the military-style policing and high 
levels of incarceration in inner-city black neighborhoods in the United 
States, but it is also a result of the growth of more fleeting and partial forms 
of association such as support groups and other forms of social suste- 
nance. What is clear, however, is that politics in the United States and else- 
where involves individual self-transformation (increased sense of efficacy, 
etc.) as well as organizing for collective action, and that this is invariably 
promoted by association with others, not necessarily just in evidently po- 
litical groups. 55 

Socialization 

What brings agency, difference, and association together? As defined 
above, each seems pretty much exclusive of the others. Agency implies in- 
dividual action, difference emphasizes group identity as the overriding 
determinant of behavior, and association suggests group membership as 
the crucial parameter of political activity. What glues them together is the 



32 Chapter Two 

possibility of active socialization of persons through identification with 
various social groups and chosen membership in various associations and 
the places connected with them. Agency therefore does not necessitate 
the total autonomy or rigid separation of individuals. 56 Rather, through 
social contexts individuals learn agency and acquire the resources to prac- 
tice it: the ways and means of associating with and dissociating from oth- 
ers in pursuit of diverse and shared ends, which is what politics is all 
about. 57 

This understanding of socialization differs profoundly from the sense 
of "cultural zapping" that the term often signifies, implying an external 
effect from the cultural environment internalized by individuals. The 
meaning here is closer to Georg Simmel's idea of sociability, suggestive of 
the concrete social networks in which people are born, raised, and live 
their lives and from which they acquire primary orientations to both their 
own "life world" (selfhood) and the larger world. 58 The densest informal 
and spontaneous network ties are intensely localized even today. They are 
traced by the most geographically concentrated circuits of everyday life. 
Older and younger people are particularly dependent on such localized 
ties. Families and friendships are especially important sources of sociabil- 
ity at the beginning of life and toward the end. But as sociologist Eviatar 
Zerubavel argues in his analysis of how social distinctions are learned and 
practiced in everyday life, the spatial content of sociability remains high 
throughout the life course: 

We . . . associate selfhood with a psychological "distance" from oth- 
ers, and experience privacy (including its non-spatial aspects, such 
as secrecy) as having some "space" for ourselves or as a "territory" of 
inaccessibility surrounding us. We experience others as being 
"close" to or "distant" from us and portray our willingness or un- 
willingness to make contact with them using topological images 
such as "opening up" (or "reaching out") and being "closed" (or "re- 
moved"). We also use the image of "penetration" to depict the 
essence of the process of becoming intimate. 59 

This spatial language is deeply revealing not only of practices of exclusion, 
separation, and bounding personal and group space but also of how we 
continue to talk about and experience selfhood, always in relation to both 
alien others and the groups we belong to. Overall, "we basically experi- 
ence reality as a 'space' made up of discrete mental fields delineated by 
'fences' that define and separate them one from another." 60 

Even in the age of the Internet, most electronic communication still 
falls away rapidly with distance, implying that such potentially anony- 
mous network linkages depend on prior face-to-face relations. Most chil- 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 33 

dren who have access to a computer, for example, e-mail their school and 
neighborhood friends more often than they tap into bulletin boards with 
unknown persons. Likewise, most workplace electronic message distribu- 
tion is local. 61 Formal organizational and group memberships are also 
heavily oriented to the physical nodes and routes followed day to day, 
even if they are less localized and more diffuse than more informal and 
spontaneous ties. 62 More generally, "entry to hyper-space necessitates ac- 
cess to the technology and nomads require passports if they are not to be 
sent back whence they came." 63 

When the globalization associated with a shrinking world of com- 
munication is neither uncritically embraced without adequate empirical 
support nor uncritically excoriated without attending to its positive 
consequences (not least the prospect of a more open world with less 
socioeconomic exclusion), it can be understood as potentially transform- 
ing the sense of place. 64 If the local is still the primary site for human co- 
presence, phenomenologically based in bodily activities, the spatial ex- 
tension of communication actively works to undermine a clear sense of 
social isolation and self-sufficiency as it also enhances the importance of 
interactions across space. Such spatial stretching is by no means new; it 
can be thought of as an essential feature of modernity. 65 But its intensity 
and pervasiveness across a wide range of places are new and can be seen as 
depleting the sense of place as localized and subverting the apparent dis- 
tinctiveness of different places to a greater extent than in the past. 66 

However intense and disintegrative the disembedding of places may 
be, it is invariably held in check by what the anthropologist Ulf Hannerz 
calls "the glass of milk syndrome." 67 Bodily needs and everyday physical 
routines anchor the otherwise unbounded imagination to place. Indeed, 
the rush of new stimuli from distant points may encourage an enhanced 
identification with local place amid what can be perceived as a corrosive 
flow of media and money. Such identification is both physical and dis- 
cursive, framing social action on both practical and ideological grounds. 
The word grounds signifies precisely the place-based character of active so- 
cialization into political and other dispositions. 

"Embodiment" is the key to how engaged agency remains embedded 
in places. The world is shaped by how people engage with it from where 
they sit or stand. The locatedness of human bodies provides the immedi- 
ate locus for any action that is undertaken. Consequently, people are never 
disengaged thinkers (as a narrow rational actor model would have it) but 
are agents whose experiences can be understood (by them and others) 
only in relation to the contexts or backgrounds in which their lives are 
embedded. This is not just a question of general dispositions or "lan- 
guages" (in Charles Taylor's sense of "modes of expression") that are 



34 Chapter Two 

learned once, presumably early in life, and can be ignored later. The con- 
tribution of significant others throughout the life course, from parents 
and family to teachers, friends, and influential acquaintances, is crucial 
simply because humans are social animals. Identities and interests are 
worked out through dialogical relations with others, not alone as calcu- 
lating agents. 68 

People actively choose where to concentrate their social energies and 
in turn receive different stimuli from the settings they invest in. They are 
not simply passive recipients or carriers of social messages but are active 
participants in their own social lives. Individuals do not come before or 
stand outside society. As actors, individuals are creative beings, capable of 
engaging in moral agency based on compelling reasons acquired from 
their surroundings. But their creativity occurs only in social contexts that 
influence the possible courses it can take. These are the product of reac- 
tions to and influences on material flows, ideas, and practices emanating 
from sources with a variety of geographical ranges, from the local to the 
global, that vary in their relative intermixing over time and from place to 
place. 

The word culture can be used to represent the structure or system of sig- 
nification (set of symbols, understandings, and commitments) that de- 
fines the common sense of a particular place. It is in this context of inter- 
subjective understandings and meanings that political action is realized. 
Of course, the danger of the word culture lies in its frequent use to repre- 
sent a set of eternally fixed traits in which groups and individuals alike are 
trapped. Its advantage lies in the way it draws attention to the complex 
flow of social, economic, and political influences and how these are al- 
ways engaged concurrently by strategies of action drawn from stories, 
symbols, rituals, and worldviews that people both learn from and con- 
tribute to. 69 

A focus on active socialization in place allows a potential escape from 
the "murky world ... of social determination in which practices are em- 
bedded and which sustain them" to one in which "practices is a word not 
for some sort of mysterious hidden collective object, but for the individ- 
ual formations of habit that are the condition for the performances and 
emulations that make up life." 70 It does so by allowing a clear focus on the 
ways distinctive sets of causal influences bring about different outcomes 
in terms of individual behavior in different place contexts. 

Two very different ideal types of socialization can be identified. The 
first, the collective, is constructed between a strong singular group identity 
tied to a focused image of place, a powerful attachment to certain volun- 
tary associations, and an intense pattern of sociability. The second, the 
conjunctural, is characterized by relatively "light," multiple group identi- 



Mapping Politics Theoretically 35 

ties without a strong sense of place, weak or no attachments to voluntary 
associations, and limited day-to-day engagement with others. There is 
therefore no need to posit a single one size fits all conception of socializa- 
tion. The first usually implies a strongly territorial pattern of socialization, 
in which agency, difference, and association reinforce one another 
through dense and interconnected ties of sociability that bind people to 
places. Contemporary Italy still seems to have a high degree of this type 
of socialization, in spite of the pressures to fit in with a world of increas- 
ingly ephemeral affiliations. The second implies a much weaker pattern of 
socialization with looser connections to place. This is the model of Amer- 
ican socialization that many scholars seem to have, notwithstanding evi- 
dence for the persisting importance of local and regional social and polit- 
ical ties and differences in the United States. In any actual case, of course, 
the character of socialization and the connection to place may well be 
somewhere in between the two ideal types. 

CONCLUSION 

I propose, then, two tracks to establish a place perspective as an approach 
to understanding politics in a wide range of countries, though Italy is 
given prime consideration in this book. The first is a straightforward state- 
ment of the theoretical position and its varied assumptions about space 
and place, the nature of geographical context, and the causes that condi- 
tion place-to-place differences in political activities. The second is a draw- 
ing together of concepts from various currents of contemporary Anglo- 
American political thought to show how they can be made compatible 
with the place perspective, both enriching it and suggesting that it is pos- 
sible to overcome seemingly insuperable theoretical differences if a suit- 
able vehicle is available. The point is to show that while there is much of 
value in contemporary political thought, the conceptual contributions 
can sometimes be placed in a fresh light if they are reformulated and re- 
lated to one another. In this case the geography of socialization is seen as 
providing an overarching framework in which to place conceptions of 
agency, difference, and association that are at the center of contemporary 
disputes about the roots and course of political action. 



CHAPTER 3 



Landscape Ideals and 
National Identity in Italy 



A world divided up into national territories that people identify with is 
not a natural given. National identities are based on the creation of "imag- 
ined communities" among people who do not know most of their cona- 
tionals or much of the national territory beyond what they encounter in 
the course of their lives. Although some national identities have old roots 
in places within present-day national territories, national identities as 
they are known in Europe today are usually traced to the period in the late 
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when political elites invented 
traditions of group occupancy of a given national territory and began to 
associate this with popular rather than purely monarchical sovereignty. 1 

Based on the creation of national communication networks and ver- 
nacular literatures in national idioms, the circulation of common stories 
about national origins and tribulations, the casting of national definitions 
of taste and opinion, and commemoration of the heroic and tragic sides 
of a common past, by the close of the nineteenth century national iden- 
tities became basic components of self-identities for the burgeoning 
middle classes and segments of the working classes across the whole of Eu- 
rope. Everything from the orientation of railway networks around capital 
cities to military conscription and mass elementary education conspired 
to produce political identities in which the national was increasingly 
dominant in relation both to other geographical scales and to social iden- 
tities such as class or religion. 

None of this happened, however, without intensive political struggle 
and rhetorical dispute. In his classic book The Country and the City, Ray- 
mond Williams showed that literary and cultural production, in the form 
of anthems, political pamphlets, and novels, derived much of its aesthetic 
appeal from conflicts arising from the changing geography of the times. 2 
New classes, interests, and ideas about national identity contended with 
existing ones in a struggle for control over territory. There was nothing in- 
evitable about the outcome of this process. It took quite different paths in 

36 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 37 

different countries. We err when we insist on making all cases conform to 
the history of a particular ideal type, whether that is England, France, or 
even the United States. 

Identifying the means of producing national identities is one thing; the 
content of those identities is another thing entirely. Much of the recent 
understanding of national identities rests on the spread, by mass edu- 
cation, of nationalist versions of history and the commemoration of na- 
tionhood associated with periodic rituals and "sites of memory," places 
where the past of the nation is represented in the present, thus preserving 
in concrete form the collective achievements and sufferings of people un- 
known to one another who have served and sacrificed for the nation. ' 
These sites range from monuments to national heroes and uprisings 
against foreign rule to war cemeteries and the built form of capital cities 
(Whitehall and Trafalgar Square in London, the Arc de Triomphe and the 
Champs Elysees in Paris). Emotional investment in the visual map image 
of the national territory and an idealized three-dimensional physical 
landscape of the national state have attracted much less interest. 4 In par- 
ticular, limited attention has been given to the images of the national 
territory (the national landscape) that people might carry around with 
them — what can be called national landscape ideals. These are not neces- 
sarily designed for popular consumption, although competing groups 
may well endorse particular landscape ideals as part of the struggle over 
the expropriation of the national territory. It is more that they emerge into 
popular consciousness by means of both propaganda and that "common 
sense" that the famous Italian Marxist theorist-activist Antonio Gramsci 
saw as the social glue of an emerging nationalist hegemony. In the Italian 
case, as we shall see, Gramsci's overall indictment of the failure of the 
country's nationalizing intellectuals (and political leaders) is also true of 
its failure to construct a hegemonic consensus about a national landscape 
ideal. 5 

STORIES OF LANDSCAPE AND IDENTITY, 
SIMPLE AND COMPLEX 

Since the nineteenth century dominant images of landscapes in Europe 
for outsiders and nationalizing intellectuals alike seem to have been na- 
tional ones. Often these are quite specific vistas turned into typifications 
of a national landscape as a whole. Quaint thatched cottages in pasto- 
ral settings (England), cypress trees topping a hill that has been grazed 
and plowed for an eternity (Italy), dense village settlements surrounded 
by equally dense forests (Germany), and high-hedged fields with occa- 
sional stone villages (France) constitute some of the stock images of Euro- 
pean rural landscapes conveyed in landscape painting, tourist brochures, 



38 Chapter Three 

school textbooks, and music. Ideas of distinctive national pasts are con- 
jured up for both natives and foreigners by these landscape images. They 
are representative landscapes, visual encapsulations of a group's occupa- 
tion of a particular territory and the memory of a shared past it conveys. 6 
They can also be thought of as one way the social history and distinctive- 
ness of a group are objectified through reference (however idealized) to 
the physical settings of the everyday lives of people to whom we "belong, " 
but most of whom we never meet. Yet these landscape images are both 
partial and recent. Not only do they come from particular localities within 
the boundaries of their nation-states (respectively, southern England, Tus- 
cany, Brandenburg, and Normandy) their visualization as somehow rep- 
resentative of a national heritage is a modern invention, dating at most to 
the nineteenth century. The history of these landscape images therefore 
parallels the history of the imprinting of certain national identities onto 
the states of modern Europe. 

The agents of every modern national state aspire to have their state rep- 
resented materially in the everyday lives of their subjects and citizens. The 
persisting power of the state depends on it. 7 Everywhere anyone might 
look would then reinforce the identity between state and citizen by asso- 
ciating the iconic inheritance of a national past with the present state and 
its objectives. Yet this association is harder to achieve than it might first 
appear. Where the past can be readily portrayed as monolithic and uni- 
form, as with the English case, consensus about a national past with un- 
broken continuity to "time immemorial" suggesting a comfortable, even 
casual, association is easily accomplished. But nowhere else in Europe is 
landscape "so freighted as legacy. Nowhere else does the very term suggest 
not simply scenery and genres de vie, but quintessential national virtues." 8 
Even in England, however, not all is as it seems. The visual cliche of sheep 
grazing in a meadow, with hedgerows separating the fields and neat vil- 
lages nestling in tidy valleys, dates from the time in the nineteenth cen- 
tury when the landscape paintings of Constable and others gained popu- 
larity among the taste-making elite. 9 Nevertheless, though invented, the 
ideal of a created and ordered landscape with deep roots in a past when 
people all knew their places within the landscape (and the ordered society 
it represents) has become an important element in English national iden- 
tity, irrespective of its fabulous roots in the 1800s. 10 

Elsewhere in Europe, capturing popular landscape images to associate 
with national identities or inventing new ones has been much more diffi- 
cult. The apparently straightforward English case therefore is potentially 
misleading, one good reason for turning to other examples. 11 It suggests a 
simple historical correlation between the rise of a national state and a sin- 
gular landscape imagery, however insecure this may now be in the face of 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 39 

economic decline, North/South political differences, the revival of Celtic 
nationalisms challenging the English hubris to represent something they 
alone now call "British," the immigration of culturally distinctive groups 
unwilling to abandon their own separate identities, and the devastation 
wrought on the rural landscape by agribusiness. 12 Nation-state formation 
elsewhere in Europe took a very different direction than in England — not 
to say that everywhere else it was the same. Two aspects of the difference 
are vital. 

One aspect was the complex history of local and urban loyalties in 
many parts of Europe, particularly those later unified as Italy and Ger- 
many. 13 In these contexts there was often a long history of city independ- 
ence and local patriotism with little or none of the early commercializa- 
tion of agriculture and industrialization that swept English rural dwellers 
into national labor markets and national-social class identities at the very 
same time a state-building elite was strengthening and extending national 
institutions. The image of a bucolic past tapped the nostalgia of those ex- 
periencing the disruptions of industrialization, reminding them that not 
everything had changed. Such landscapes could still be found, even if 
no longer experienced daily. Later industrialization often also involved 
less disruption of ties to place. In particular, as electricity replaced steam 
power, industries moved to areas of existing population concentration 
rather than, as in the case of the English coalfields, requiring that people 
move to where the industry was. 

Another aspect was the external orientation of the English state and 
economy. Not only were English merchants, industrialists, and travelers 
increasingly dominant within the evolving world economy of the nine- 
teenth century, they were often nostalgic for what they had left behind 
when they traveled abroad and needed to compare what they saw with a 
datum or steady point of view. This led many of them to idealize in their 
mind's eye an England that was largely the product of a merging of their 
own experience and the renderings of England in paintings and other vi- 
sual representations. This produced a unified vision that was much harder 
to achieve in those contexts where influential people had less empire, 
traveled less, and thus had less need of a single, stable vision. 14 

Not only the idea of a national landscape but also that of national iden- 
tity is also more complex than the simple English story might make it ap- 
pear. A national identity involves a widely shared memory of a common 
past for people who have never seen or talked to one another in the flesh. 
This sense of belonging depends as much on forgetting as on remember- 
ing, reconstructing the past as a path to the national present in order to 
guarantee a common future. 15 National histories, monuments (war me- 
morials, heroic statues), commemorations (anniversaries and parades), 



40 Chapter Three 

sites of institutionalized memories (museums, libraries, and other ar- 
chives), and representative landscapes are among the important instru- 
ments for ordering the national past. They give national identity a mate- 
riality it would otherwise lack. But such milieus of memory must coexist 
with other memories and their identities. National identity does not 
sweep away all others. Some local identities, such as the German attach- 
ment to Heimat (homeplace), while remaining distinct, also feed into a 
wider national identity. 16 Some diasporic groups, however, such as Scot- 
tish Hebrideans in North America or recent immigrants to Europe, retain 
local or religious identities rather than adopting the national ones they 
are usually associated with by outsiders. 17 

The "sacralization" of the nation-state has never been total: even 
within totalitarian states, sites of religious and local celebration have had 
their place, even as states try to exploit them. 18 The totalization of na- 
tional identities has faced a number of barriers. One difficulty is what to 
select from the past to identify and emphasize as distinctive and peculiar. 
National pasts are fraught with conflicts over dynastic claims, boundary 
disputes, religious pogroms, and the meaning of historical events and per- 
sonalities. What to emphasize, therefore, is also fraught with potential 
conflict. Whose national past is it, anyway? As a result, national identities 
can have multiple definitions and are constantly in flux. Allied to what to 
select from the past must be the self-conscious conviction that a bounded 
national space with considerable internal cultural homogeneity actually 
exists. Attaining this conviction requires a readily available other against 
whom to define one's national identity. 19 Without this widely shared be- 
lief there is little that is "national" for the identity to express. Another bar- 
rier to the totalization of national identities is the existence of alternative 
identities (such as class, region, ethnicity, and religion) that do not always 
flow into or easily coexist with clear and coherent national ones. As the 
world economy has become more integrated and political boundaries 
have lost some of their force in regulating economic and cultural flows, 
these alternative identities have become increasingly potent. 20 A third ob- 
stacle has been the reemergence of powerful transnational identities, usu- 
ally associated with religious beliefs and transculturated migrants, but also 
related to groups adhering to dominant ideologies such as neoliberalism 
and its agents, namely international banks, multinational firms, and 
large-scale regulatory organizations (the European Commission and the 
International Monetary Fund, to name just two). Finally, the idea of iden- 
tity is itself an intellectual imposition, implying that there are singular, 
stable, and essential divisions that people identify with. 21 Yet there are so- 
cieties in which conceptions of the self or person do not require the spa- 
tially bounded reference groups and physically bounded individuals that 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 41 

much academic discussion of identity presupposes. Identifying with a par- 
ticular group is not a necessity of life. Nor, therefore, is national identity. 
At the same time, identity can also be analytically problematic, obscuring 
the varied social processes of categorization, group identification, and 
self-understanding that the term is meant to capture. 22 

ITALIAN UNIFICATION AND THE PROBLEM OF A 
NATIONAL LANDSCAPE IDEAL 

Italy provides a good case for examining the connection between land- 
scape and identity. Italy was at the center of the visual revolution of the Re- 
naissance, in which visual representation became a vital part of the mod- 
ern means of communicating the meanings and significance of religious 
and political messages. And it has also been a country where state forma- 
tion was long delayed by the existence of alternative foci of material life 
(in particular, city-based economies), the home base of the papacy and the 
Roman Catholic Church, and local cultural identities alternative to "Ital- 
ian." It may be at the opposite pole from England, in that creating a match 
between a representative landscape and an Italian national identity was a 
difficult and obviously artificial process from the start. It thus draws at- 
tention to the process of linkage between identity and landscape in more 
complex ways. Also, much has already been written about the English 
case, 23 so looking at the other extreme of European experience as a whole 
(a late-unifying state with much internal cultural heterogeneity) has much 
to recommend it. 

An Italian state formed only in the second half of the nineteenth cen- 
tury. Although this tardiness in establishing a single state for the penin- 
sula and islands had numerous causes, the strong municipal, city-state, 
and regional-state governments (particularly in the North) held off the 
forces pushing the country toward unification. Most important, in the 
late Middle Ages and during the Renaissance, at the same time that 
the great Western monarchies were consolidating territorial states in En- 
gland, Spain, and France, the politics of northern and central Italy was 
characterized by a fragmented mosaic of city-states and localized juris- 
dictions of a variety of types, from principalities to republics. It was the 
"extraordinary energy and growing capacity of urban centers [that] led 
paradoxically to the early elimination from central and northern Italy's 
political firmament of any superior — king, emperor, or prince. The cities 
transformed themselves precociously into city-states with corresponding 
territorial dimensions and political functions." 24 This is not to say that 
they did not try to turn themselves into territorial states — but they failed 
to do so. As their economic strength faded in the eighteenth century, with 
Europe's center of political-economic gravity moving northwestward, the 



42 Chapter Three 

Italian ministates proved easy prey to the expansionist ambitions of Aus- 
tria and Spain. Even with foreign domination, however (and this was a 
major stimulus to the development of Italian nationalism before unifica- 
tion), the capacity of Italian cities to penetrate adjacent territories but 
with no one city winning control over the others was relatively undimin- 
ished. When European politics in the nineteenth century opened up the 
possibility of a national state for Italy, the initiative came from a regional 
state, Savoy-Piedmont, "whose social and political structure was different, 
and of less glorious tradition, from that of the city-based states. Inversely, 
the rapid fall of the city-based states signals the absence of effective power 
to sustain them, even though their long survival testified for centuries to 
the vitality of medieval urban civilization." 25 

It was from northern Italy and, initially at least, by northern Italians 
that Italy was made. The traditions of the city-states and the Europeanness 
of the Savoyard regime gave unified Italy the monarchy that provided the 
"new" Italy with its mythic resources. The South, and the zones the Aus- 
trians had controlled in the North, had been won from foreign domina- 
tion, but foreign domination, particularly in the South, was seen as hav- 
ing created a society that was now doubly disadvantaged: geographically 
marginal to Europe and politically marginal to the "high" Italy of Renais- 
sance city-states from which the new territorial state could be seen as hav- 
ing descended. 

Foreign political-constitutional models, particularly those provided by 
England, France, and the new Germany, were also important to the na- 
tionalizing intellectuals who set up shop in Rome after the final annexa- 
tion of that city to the new state in 1870. 26 Acceptance by other Europeans 
as a rising great power became a particularly important element in na- 
tional policy that was to last until 1945. This meant taking very seriously 
what foreigners found exceptional in Italy. The new state could then build 
on foundations that would lead to respect from the others. It was to an- 
cient Rome, both republican and imperial, and to certain Renaissance 
landscape ideals articulated by foreign visitors to Italy as well as by local 
savants, that the visionaries of the new state turned. Both of these repre- 
sented powerful images that would serve double duty: to mobilize the dis- 
parate populations of the new state behind it and to impress outsiders 
with the revival of a glorious past, only now in an Italian rather than a Ro- 
man or a Renaissance form. 

FLORENCE AND THE TUSCAN LANDSCAPE IDEAL 

Turning first to the Renaissance inspiration, the Italian Risorgimento (re- 
vival through unification) of the mid-nineteenth century was largely con- 
cerned with reestablishing Italy as a center of European civilization, as "it" 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 43 






~ 



\ 



\ 



/SWITZERLAND / 

/SAVOY ,\^--' f7\j / - X 

^ ' (F ifi R N m E \ P/ ^0, \LOMBARDY 
J 860) ^ ^//-j 



] Kingdom of Sardinia, 1859 

] Acquired in 1859-60 

] Acquired in 1866 

7^ | Acquired in 1870 

I 1 00 km 



AUSTRIAN EMPIRE 




Figure 3. 1 The political geography of Italian unification, 1859-70. Source: Author. 



had been during the Renaissance. Florence was, of course, the preeminent 
center of the Renaissance, long since consigned to the role of citta d'arte or 
storehouse for all that Italy had been. It was in Florence in the 1850s that 
a group of landscape painters set about putting their talents into the ser- 
vice of the new state. The Macchiaioli painters (from the various meanings 
of macchia: spot, sketch, dense underbrush) set about defining a represen- 
tative landscape for Italy. Not surprisingly, they saw Tuscany as the proto- 
typical Italian setting. This was what they were most familiar with. Of 



44 Chapter Three 

course, it had great Renaissance connotations. It also fit the foreign (par- 
ticularly English) romantic attachment to Tuscany and other locales in 
northern and central Italy, as expressed by the early nineteenth-century 
generation of poets and writers. 27 The city of Dante, Michelangelo, and 
Machiavelli was the appropriate center for a national revival. The Mac- 
chiaioli used their Renaissance forebears and European contemporaries 
(particularly English painters) as their guides. They expressed their na- 
tionalism through a search for images that could be used to tie the noble 
past to the developing present. Art historian Albert Boime writes that 

they searched the riverflats along the Arno, the orchards and farms 
of the suburbs of Florence, the hill pastures around Pistoia, and the 
wild Maremma region (with its thick macchie of scrub pine and un- 
derbrush) for motifs appropriate to their fresh viewpoint. Their top- 
ographical specificity and personal response were totally integrated 
in what might be called a macchia-scape — the landscape that re- 
tained the sincerity of vision they admired in the Tuscan artists of 
the Quattrocento, but that also conveyed the modernity and na- 
tionalism of contemporary Italian life. 28 

Like the Risorgimento itself, the Macchiaioli idea had both Italian and 
European dimensions. For all their other differences, leaders of the move- 
ments for Italian unification such as Giuseppe Mazzini and Count Camillo 
Cavour of Piedmont wanted to bring Italy up to date and to a social and 
political equality with the rest of Europe. The Macchiaioli were also both 
nationally and internationally oriented. In Boime's words, "By asserting 
Italian individuality they hoped to contribute to a release of energies 
needed to make Italy a great nation, able to assume a role in the affairs of 
Europe." 29 Their "sketch tradition" drew directly on Renaissance proto- 
types but also was linked by the Macchiaioli to the French Barbizon school, 
just as the Risorgimento appealed for legitimacy to the French Revolution 
and the two Napoleons. But the self-attached label of the school also had 
subversive overtones, if Boime's analysis has merit. Some of the painters 
were notorious punsters and self-defined "outlaws." The word macchia can 
mean hiding out in the woods (farsi alia macchia), living as an outlaw (vi- 
vere alia macchia), or publishing illegally (stampare alia macchia). In Floren- 
tine dialect macchia has the additional meaning of a "child of the woods," 
signifying someone without parents, marginal and disinherited. The wild 
and wooded Maremma region of southern Tuscany fit this aspect of the 
Macchiaioli vision; associating the painters with the secret societies (such 
as the Carbonari) that had stimulated the first efforts at Risorgimento. The 
Carbonari took their name from the charcoal burners of the forest who la- 
bored in secret away from the gaze of the authorities. 30 

The bible of the Macchiaioli movement, Telemaco Signorini's Carica- 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 45 

hiristi e caricaturati al Caffe Michelangiolo (Caricaturists and the caricatured 
at the Michelangiolo Cafe), first published in 1893 but based on articles 
written in 1866-67, recreates the atmosphere of the popular cafe in Flo- 
rence where the Macchiaioli congregated. 51 There were ten core members: 
Giuseppe Abbati, Cristiano Banti, Odoardo Borrani, Adriano Cecioni, Vin- 
cenzo Cabianca, Vito D'Ancona, Giovanni Fattori, Silvestro Lega, Raffaelo 
Sernesi, and Telemaco Signorini himself. Underlying the book's gossip 
about who said what to whom is a narrative linking the history of the 
Macchiaioli to that of the Risorgimento. One connecting influence was ro- 
manticism, even though the Macchiaioli were relentlessly realist in their 
artistic representations. As early as 1813 Laurence Sterne's preromantic 
masterpiece A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy was translated 
into Italian (Tuscan) by Ugo Foscolo, himself a famous poet and writer. 
Walter Scott's novels were also translated and widely read by literati in 
mid-nineteenth-century Italy. The great Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi 
was later often compared to Scott's hero Rob Roy, from the 1817 novel of 
that name. In 1827 Alessandro Manzoni came to Florence to purge his al- 
legorical novel of Italian unification (Ipromessi sposi [The betrothed]) of its 
Lombard expressions and rewrite it in the Tuscan (Italian) dialect. 32 All 
these works marked a break with the formal and pedantic writing that pre- 
ceded them. They all accept nations as natural forms whose literary 
canons should reflect this status. They also appeal to a certain naturalism 
that finds in physical landscapes an important source of the "spirit" of par- 
ticular nations. Manzoni, for example, was fond of saying that he came to 
Florence to bathe his masterpiece "in the waters of the river Arno," as if 
the rewriting required his own presence in the physical surroundings, 
sounds, and smells of Florence. Incidentally, this also gave a tremendous 
boost to the cause of the "Tuscanizers," those who wanted to establish the 
Tuscan dialect (because of its historical connection to such great Italian 
writers as Dante) as the national language of the new state. 33 

Another element in Signorini's story of the Macchiaioli is a critique of 
previous landscape painters, who are seen as preferring foreign (particu- 
larly French) scenes to Italian ones. In particular, Signorini praises the au- 
tobiography of Massimo D'Azeglio (/ mid ricordi [Things I remember]), an 
older historical novelist and painter, which was published in 1867. Though 
a social conservative, D'Azeglio (famous for his aphorism after unification: 
"We have made Italy, now we must make the Italians") argued strongly for 
a patriotic landscape ideal. This is what attracted the Macchiaioli to him. 
He celebrated the indigenous (Tuscan) landscape and shared their cultural 
aims. He was heavily critical of his own generation of painters: 

We love independence and nationalism, we love Italy; further, the 
landscape painters all chant together "Rome or death," but when 



46 Chapter Three 




Figure 3.2 Silvestro Lega, Paese con contadini (Landscape with peasants), c. 1871. 
Private collection, Montecatini. 



they take up their brushes the only thing they don't paint is Italy. 
The magnificent Italian landscape, the glorious light, the rich hues 
of the sky over our heads and the earth we tread; no one considers 
these things worthy of being painted. Go to exhibitions and what do 
we see? A scene from the north of France, imitation of so and so; a 
seascape at Etretat or Honfleur, imitation of someone else; a heath in 
Flanders; a wood at Fontainebleau, copied from God knows who! . . . 
They prefer a nature without a soul, without character, weak and 
tempered like a muted violin. For this they renounce Italy, her sky 
and the beauty which once brought so many enemies into our land, 
but today, thank God, brings only friends who never tire of ac- 
claiming it. 34 

Much of Signorini's story, however, is taken up with relating the history 
of the cafe and its patrons to the ups and downs of the campaign to unify 
Italy. Even the recollections of friends killed in the wars or the ideals of the 
Risorgimento conjure up landscape images when at certain moments he 
recalls them. Especially 

during a beautiful autumn morning, or on a balmy spring day, or in 
a winter mist, or amid the sultry passions and strident song of the 
harvest-time crickets, when it happens that I climb alone the smil- 
ing hills of memories which crown our city [Florence]; or stroll along 
the fields and gardens populated with farmhouses and villas, along 
the banks of the Mugnone or the Arno, the Mensola or the Affrico, 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 47 




Figure 3.3 Rafaello Sernesi, Radura nel bosco (Forest glade), c. 1862-63. Private 
collection, Montecatini. 



and come upon a small grassy area, off to the side and in the shade; 
then, having put down my old paint box, the faithful custodian of 
my personal impressions, inseparable companion of my distant voy- 
ages and nearby excursions, I lie down on my back next to it, and 
gazing intently at the profound blue of the heavens, I return with 
my thoughts to the past, now having become more significant to me 
than the future! . . . And my entire past unfolds, not only its mad 
joys and its daring undertakings, but also its profound sadnesses and 
its infinite vexations. 35 



48 Chapter Three 




Figure 3.4 Telemaco Signorini, Sul greto d'Arno (On the bed of the Arno), 
c. 1863-65. Gallery of Modern Art, Florence. 



What Signorini finally reveals, therefore, is the deep relationship that ex- 
isted for the Macchiaioli between landscape and the development of the 
Risorgimento. But it is not just any landscape. The landscape impressions 
are those of Signorini's native Tuscany; of the river Arno, the hills sur- 
rounding Florence, the sharecropping peasants who are part of the land- 
scapes where they appear. The outstanding memories of his life return to 
him when he recalls the sites depicted by the Macchiaioli. The passage 
ends on the sad note with which many Italian patriots greeted the way 
Italian unification evolved: dependent more on conquest and external 
(non)intervention than on popular uprising and revolt. Compensation is 
found in the private moments when art merged with life in the depiction 
of landscapes that expressed one's ideals and aspirations (figs. 3.2 to 3.4). 36 
This culture of the Risorgimento associated closely with Florence and 
Tuscany was not to outlast it. Even as Florence became (temporarily) the 
capital of the new Italy in 1865 and was beginning to assert its position as 
a national cultural center, the Macchiaioli started to lose their social co- 
hesiveness and their common political commitments. 37 Tuscany was not 
a smaller version of the whole of Italy. Tuscan history was not national his- 
tory. Florence was not to be the permanent capital of the country. Their 
images did not stick, much like the promise of the Risorgimento itself. 
Quickly the Macchiaioli were redefined as precursors of Impressionism or 
simply another school of provincial Italian painters. Only during Fascism 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 49 

were they once again raised as proponents of an idealized Italy, this time, 
of course, as precursors of the chauvinistic and ultranationalist vision of 
an older rural Italy beloved of the most reactionary Fascists.â„¢ With such 
unfortunate friends, rehabilitation has been a long time in coming. 

ROME AND THE ROMAN LANDSCAPE IDEAL 

A better-known attempt at creating a representative landscape for Italian 
national identity than that of the Macchiaioli came to fruition after uni- 
fication was achieved. This involved looking to the ancient past of Rome 
as the seat of empire to find inspiration for a new Rome around which the 
new Italy could be built. The selection of Rome as the capital certainly 
suggests that the Roman past was in the minds of Italy's unifiers even 
before unification was finally achieved. "For me Rome is Italy," wrote 
Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great hero of unification, in his memoirs. 39 As 
early as 1861, although not yet part of the new state, Rome was declared 
the capital. The annexation of Rome and its surrounding region provided 
not only the last chunk of the national territory claimed by Italian patri- 
ots but also a "neutral" city not associated, as were Turin, Milan, and Flo- 
rence, with the local elites who had taken hold of the process of Italian 
unification. 40 In other words, as Massimo Birindelli puts it, Rome "became 
the capital not for the qualities that it had but for the ones it was miss- 
ing." 41 This political advantage plus the obvious associations with a glori- 
ous past gave Rome crucial points over its competitors. Rome's interna- 
tional visibility also counted. Italian unification was more the result of 
international diplomacy than of nationalist revolt. Consequently, attract- 
ing outside support was critical. By way of contrast, German unification 
during the same period (1850-70) was much more internally oriented. 
The choice of Berlin reflected both the Prussian dominance of the new 
state and the Prussian state's prior commitment to economic and military 
growth as manifested in the growth of Berlin itself. Rome was very differ- 
ent. Rather than a center of national prestige or strength, Rome was widely 
viewed in the new state as a parasitic city that consumed but did not pro- 
duce. 42 It was an ecclesiastical city without either manufacturing industry 
or modern bureaucracy. 

But the choice of Rome was vital to the architects of a new Italian iden- 
tity. First, across all the movements for unification the city of Rome was it- 
self a unifying force. 45 If there was a single tradition that the population of 
the peninsula and islands held in common, it was that of ancient Rome. 
The myth of a unified past, however different from the present, under- 
wrote the unified future that the Savoyard monarchy and its aristocratic 
allies who had taken control of the Risorgimento saw for the new state. 
Rome at least presented a strong image for a group concerned that the new 



50 Chapter Three 

Italy might turn out to be too decentralized for their political and eco- 
nomic interests. It also represented a vision at odds with the more 
parochial ones emanating from local elites in Turin, Milan, and Florence. 
Rome represented a central link in a country in which local and munici- 
pal attachments were strong. It was, in Bruno Tobia's words, "the meeting 
point through which it became possible for municipalism to be projected 
directly towards a national dimension." 44 Locating the capital in Rome 
also took on directly the pope's claim to be a temporal as well as a spiritual 
ruler. The pope remained the one local ruler of preunification Italy to re- 
ject the spirit and purpose of Italian independence and unification. As the 
capital, therefore, Rome symbolically embodied various aspects of the Ja- 
cobinism and centralism that were hallmarks of Italian unification: the 
myth of Rome as a strong center to counteract the centrifugal pressures 
emanating from the real political divisions of the country represented by 
other places such as Florence and powerful institutions such as the papacy. 
From the outset, the new rulers tried to make Rome a symbolic center 
for their regime. Initially there was an attempt, under the patronage of the 
Piedmontese politician Quintano Sella, to establish a new center of grav- 
ity for the city to the northeast, beyond its 1870 core. This largely failed. 
It was easier and more profitable to local interests to concentrate govern- 
ment offices in the historical core. In this they largely succeeded, expro- 
priating convents, monasteries, palaces, and other buildings from the pre- 
vious papal regime. Another and more important symbolic method was 
"patriotic building." This involved locating monuments and public build- 
ings to celebrate the new regime, recall its historical connections, and 
challenge the singular association of the Roman Catholic Church with the 
most sacred sites in the city. From one point of view, however, these ef- 
forts at securing a new monumental Rome in the years 1870 to 1922 
largely came to nothing. 45 As Tobia has argued in some detail, impressive 
ideological-rhetorical debate produced little physical change in the city's 
landscape. 46 Within the historical center only the subversive placement of 
the Vittoriano (the monument to King Victor Emmanuel II, the first king 
of the new Italy) on the edge of the Capitoline Hill (the historical core of 
the city, next to the seat of the commune and the Roman Forum) and mid- 
way between the pope's two seats — at the Vatican and, as bishop of Rome, 
at San Giovanni in Laterano — provided a powerful symbol of the new na- 
tional identity in the new Rome (fig. 3.5). Even then the monument was 
to a person rather than to some abstract ideal of the nation, though dur- 
ing Fascism attempts were made to turn the monument into something 
more representative. The identification with the person of the monarch 
was particularly questionable, since many of the proponents of unifica- 
tion had been republicans or opponents of the Savoyard monarchy. 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 51 




.*-?J 



i EUR 







Figure 3.5 Rome in 1951 with major sites mentioned in the text. Source: Author. 



Though the Vittoriano may well have been the "only true national mon- 
ument" that "aroused a common national feeling," 47 its symbolic power 
drew attention to the lack of commemoration of the real heroes of the 
Risorgimento: Giuseppe Garibaldi and Camillo Cavour. 

From another point of view, however, less focused on individual mon- 
uments, the changes in the fabric of the city representing the arrival of a 



52 Chapter Three 

new nation can be seen as more considerable. The reorientation of the axis 
of the city and the placing of monuments did create a new secular image 
for the city at odds with the ecclesiastical one that had hitherto predomi- 
nated. In particular, the placement of the Vittoriano and its construction 
in white Brescian marble, at odds with the brown tones of surrounding 
buildings, provided a new visual anchor for the city. Via Nazionale and its 
western extension, Corso Vittorio, plowed a new east-west axis through 
the historical center, making Piazza Venezia, in front of the Vittoriano, the 
central hub for traffic as well as the new symbolic center of the city. Other 
changes, such as the embankment of the river Tiber, the straightening of 
streets and "regularizing" of piazzas into Euclidean shapes, and the clear- 
ing of archaeological sites to set them off monumentally (e.g., fig. 3.6), 
also represented successful attempts at both remaking the city and associ- 
ating the changes with the glories of the angular and rational city built by 
the ancient Romans before the "decadence" of later times. 48 

Fascism continued what had begun under the liberal regime (fig. 3.7). 
Two new anchors to the city as a whole emerged over time: the Foro Mus- 
solini to the northwest of the historical core (where the Olympic Stadium 
now stands) and the EUR complex to the southeast (built beginning in 
1937 for an exposition that was never held, finished in the 1950s). Possi- 
bly Benito Mussolini's most important manipulation of urban space for 
political purposes was transferring his office from the Palazzo Chigi to the 
Palazzo Venezia in Piazza Venezia in 1929. Thereafter, Piazza Venezia be- 
came the key space in Rome for performing the ceremonies and the ritual 
speechmaking that were the hallmark of Italian Fascism. Broadcast to cen- 
tral piazzas in towns and cities throughout Italy, Mussolini's speeches 
from the balcony of the Palazzo Venezia created a sense of national "to- 
getherness" that Italy had never had previously and, apart from when the 
national football team takes the field, has not enjoyed since. 49 

Mussolini, more and more the personification of Fascism as the years 
wore on, increasingly turned to ancient Rome to provide a pedigree for his 
otherwise modernist movement. Reconstructing Rome according to an 
imperial image became a vital part of the agenda of Fascism. Plans were of- 
ten compromises between different factions and architectural viewpoints. 
As a result, the outcome in terms of real changes was not always coherent. 
Segments of roads were built, but they never went all the way to where 
they were intended to go. For example, a road was punched through the 
Roman Forum between Piazza Venezia and the Colosseum (today called 
the Via dei Fori Imperiali), but the extension of this road, intended to lead 
inland and to the Adriatic, was never completed. Drawing the city toward 
the sea, to celebrate a renewal of an outward, imperial orientation and 
claim the Mediterranean for Italy as mare nostrum, was perhaps the most 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy S3 




Figure 3.6 Excavations of the Roman Forum at the turn of the twentieth century. 
Source: M. Sanfilippo, Le tre citta di Roma: Lo sviluppo urbano dalle origini a oggi 
(Rome: Laterza, 1993), 181. 



successfully realized goal, once it was denned. The autostrada linking the 
outskirts of Rome to Ostia, opened in 1928, was the earliest manifestation 
of this strategy. This was followed by the Via del Mare, linking Piazza 
Venezia to the southern outskirts, and the EUR project to pull the growth 
of the city seaward. 

However successful they were as architectural projects, the impact of 
both Liberal and Fascist attempts at making over Rome as a representative 
landscape for the new Italy was severely limited. 50 For one thing, Rome 
was naturally polycentric. The city in 1870 had a complex structure from 
its variegated past of eras of expansion and contraction. One consequence 
was that it lacked a single monumental center that could be captured for 
the new national identity. The city was still the seat of the pope, who, un- 
til 1929, refused to recognize the new state. As the headquarters of the Ro- 
man Catholic Church, Rome was still symbolically connected to the world 
"in between" ancient Rome and modern Italy that the architects of the 



54 Chapter Three 




Figure 3.7 The Via dell'Impero (now the Via dei Fori Imperiali) shortly after its 
opening in 1933. Mussolini could now see the Colosseum from his balcony in the 
Palazzo Venezia, just to the right of the Vittoriano (right rear). This new road best 
symbolizes Mussolini's choice of associating his regime (and Italy) with the Roman 
past. Source: M. Sanfilippo, Le tre citta di Roma: Lo sviluppo urbano dalle origini a oggi 
(Rome: Laterza, 1993), 389. 



new Italy had wanted to erase from popular memory in order to celebrate 
the arrival of the new state. Another problem with Rome as the setting for 
a representative landscape for Italy as whole was that there was too much 
past present in the city to offer singular interpretations of what was there. 
Consisting of layers of ruins built up over the centuries, Rome lends itself 
to the image of Eternal City, but this image is at odds with that of a new 



Landscape Ideals and National Identity in Italy 55 

national identity. The eclectic mixture of epochs and influences in the 
physical fabric of the city leads more toward universalistic than national- 
istic interpretations. Rome is a city for the ages and for all (at least Chris- 
tian) peoples. 51 

THE DIFFICULTY OF REALIZING A SINGULAR NATIONAL 
LANDSCAPE IDEAL IN MODERN ITALY 

Italy's very Europeanness worked against achieving a long-lasting associa- 
tion between a particular landscape ideal and an Italian national identity. 
It remained forever associated with the glories of ancient Rome and the Re- 
naissance, which the whole of Europe (or even more expansively, the 
whole of Western civilization) claimed as part of its heritage. Italianizing 
these also suffered from a number of features of Italian geography and so- 
ciety that point up the difficulties of realizing singular landscape ideals. 

The first feature is the obvious one that Italy does not have an integra- 
tive physical geography. Its geographical identity as a singular unit is un- 
dermined by strong separations between the Po basin in the north and the 
mountainous spine-coastal plain pattern and islands to the south. As a re- 
sult the physical landscapes available for expropriation are remarkably 
varied, reflecting the terrain, the climate, and the vegetation of a penin- 
sula stretching from the heart of continental Europe almost to the shores 
of Africa. This range, working against the effective integration of a mod- 
ern state, also produced a widely accepted continental/Mediterranean di- 
chotomizing of Italian population and society that made a singular land- 
scape image difficult to accept. 52 By way of example, Simon Schama points 
out the importance of the ancient metaphor of rivers as the "arterial 
bloodstream of a people" in bringing together facts of physical geography 
and national landscape images. 53 Unlike England with the Thames, France 
with the Seine and Rhone, the Austro-Hungarian Empire with the Dan- 
ube, and so on, in Italy rivers divide the country rather than bring it to- 
gether. The Po and the Tiber, the two principal rivers, never fit the bill. 
Sharing Italy with the Po, the Tiber had lost its imperial reputation. The 
mountainous spine of the country also works to disrupt west-east con- 
nections, making communication across the peninsula particularly diffi- 
cult. A strong localism has been the result. As Enrico Castelnuovo and 
Carlo Ginzburg note for the history of Italian art, "Italian polycentrism 
[has shown] itself to be far stronger than all attempts at centralization." 54 

Certain features of Italy's historical geography also worked against the 
successful creation of a national landscape ideal. One of these is the ab- 
sence of a dominant city, such as London or Paris, to subordinate the 
country to a singular vision. Rome was only the fifth largest city of the 
new state in 1871, exceeded in population by Naples, Milan, Genoa, and 



56 Chapter Three 

Palermo. As the capital city it grew vigorously, but it still is politically and 
culturally predominant only in its immediate hinterland and in parts of 
the South. Indeed, it suffers from a very negative reputation in other parts 
of the country, particularly in the North, where it is associated with cor- 
rupt politics and inefficient bureaucracy. Related to this is the continuing 
importance of local and regional identities in Italian culture and society. 
Dialect differences, local economic interests, and attachment to local cus- 
toms and traditions remain very strong in Italy. Unlike England, Scotland, 
France, and Germany, and more like Spain, in Italy class and status dis- 
tinctions are expressed in local as much as in national terms of reference. 
"Folk" religious beliefs with strong localist connotations have remained 
strong — and resilient — in some regions even in the face of massive ur- 
banization and social change. 55 A powerful campanilismo or localism has 
persisted, therefore, rather than fading away in the face of pressures for na- 
tionalization. 56 It has also proved impervious to ready co-optation, as in 
the German case, into reinforcing a larger national identity. At the mo- 
ment in northern Italy a political movement (the Northern League) is at- 
tempting to use local identities as the basis for a program of either radical 
federalism or secession from Italy. 57 

Yet at the same time, an Italian mass culture has developed that ties to- 
gether what would otherwise be a disparate set of places. Two types of in- 
fluence have been particularly important. One was the system of political 
parties that Italy acquired at the end of World War II. With strong regional 
and local constituencies, the parties enabled the creation of strong local- 
national connections by means of both the allocation of government jobs 
and contracts and the division of national-level resources (such as the 
state television channels) between the various parties and their support- 
ing groups. This system of partitocrazia is now waning with the collapse of 
the main parties after the corruption scandals of the early 1990s. 58 The 
other is an Italian culture industry that markets films, television, art, and 
music in the country as a whole. Certain ideas of Italianness, associated 
with taste, design, style, and beauty, emerged in the aftermath of World 
War II and have substituted for both the country's defeat and the contin- 
uing absence of other unifying symbols. National obsessions with televi- 
sion, football (soccer), and a cult of feminine beauty have been identified 
as particularly crucial components of this Italywide mass culture. 59 

The two words for "country" in standard Italian, paese and patria — the 
first used easily and frequently, the second self-consciously and infre- 
quently — offer an interesting perspective on the balance between these 
polarized local and national identities. The first is typically used to refer to 
the local area you come from and identify with. Paese can be used to rep- 
resent Italy as a whole (as in Bel Paese), and then it represents a fusion of 



Landscape Ideals and National lilcntitj' in Italy 57 

the local with the national. The second use refers to Italy as a whole and 
is a formal term that would rarely come up in everyday conversation. In 
neither usage does it translate as "countryside" — which is the alternative 
meaning to that of country as patria in English — and strongly associated 
with the English national landscape ideal. 

Part of the problem for an Italian national ideal of any kind has been 
that the national institutions created at the time of unification have been 
seen by significant minorities as foreign impositions. Not only were the 
Savoyard monarchy and its affiliated institutions carried to Rome, the 
state brought novel practices to regions where the writ of any sovereign 
was historically weak (Sicily, for example) and many groups (such as seri- 
ous Catholics and anarchosyndicalists) regarded the state itself as illegiti- 
mate. The absence of a widely accepted civic nationalism or patriotism 
made inventing a singular vision of the state next to impossible. Fascism 
was, among other things, a way of trying to force unification, of bringing 
about the national uniformity and autarky that the dominant royalist 
strand of the Risorgimento had promised. Its failure, then, is revealed by 
the ready reversion to localism and particularistic identities that followed 
its wartime defeat. 60 

Perhaps most significant in accounting for the absence of a singular) 
landscape ideal, however, is that Italy has lacked the dominant heroid 
event or experience on which many singular landscape ideals are based. i 
In England the shock of industrialization produced a romantic attach- 
ment to a rural-pastoral ideal that has outlasted the original historical con- 
text. In the United States the myth of the frontier and the subjugation of; 
wilderness has likewise focused national identity around themes of sur- 
vival, cornucopia, and escape from the confines of city life. 61 In Italy only 
the recycling of the idea of the Risorgimento serves a similar purpose. 62 
The problem is that the Risorgimento has multiple messages that have 
varied from the start, depending on which side of the unification process 
one chooses to emphasize. Its landscape legacy is likewise divided: Flo- 
rence versus Rome. When allied to disputes over later mythic episodes 
such as the impact of Fascism, the Resistance to Fascism (1943-45), and 
the political unrest of the period 1968-85, the net effect is to produce mul- 
tiple interpretations of Italianness and its essential landscape that persist 
but mutate over time following dramatic events rather than a stable, sin- 
gular interpretation that knits all Italians together. 63 

Finally, Italian unification was never able to successfully capture the re- 
ligious beliefs and practices of the Italian population. From 1870 until 
1929 the state remained alienated from the Church, denied access to its 
spiritual authority. Fascism tried to sacralize the state by building an al- 
ternative civic religion, but this had to coexist with existing religious af- 



58 Chapter Three 

filiations and the physical presence of the pope. 64 As a result the ritual 
power of the Italian state remained compromised, never able to obtain 
that symbolic investment in its attempts at designating certain sites as sa- 
cred to the nation and landscapes as representative of the spirit of the 
people that seem to arise so effortlessly in, say, the English or German case. 

CONCLUSION 

As a new, more politically integrated Europe seems set to arise, Italians are 
its most fervent supporters. They have long been ready to operate at the 
geographical scale of Europe. Their most important myths — ancient 
Rome and the Renaissance — are broadly European more than narrowly 
Italian. The difficulty in achieving what some other European nation- 
states have so easily acquired — a singular landscape ideal — suggests that 
such ideals are historically contingent and not without their own prob- 
lems. When British "Eurosceptics" lament the loss of sovereignty in the 
"new" European Union, they point almost intuitively to a material or 
physical England that is also under threat. In this view, therefore, the 
strong visual image of an unchanging rural England has become a major 
political resource and liability, encouraging intransigence over further 
moves toward European unification yet undermining rational discussion 
about the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized governance at 
the level of Europe as a whole. Italy, whose small-firm manufacturing in- 
dustry was also always seen (particularly by English commentators) as a 
symptom of backwardness before it became the engine of Italy's economic 
renaissance, has no such singular landscape (or other) ideal of "how it is" 
and "what it is like" to hold it back. This not only fits better the evolving 
world economy as it is reorganized around localities and city/hinterlands 
more than national economies, 65 it also undermines the simple story 
about national identities and representative landscapes that many geog- 
raphers (and others) tell themselves. History does not end with a repre- 
sentative landscape for a secure national identity. This modernist story is 
one we have been telling ourselves for so long that we have forgotten it is 
only one story. 66 Italy tells another one, which may have much more to 
say to the Europe of today and tomorrow. 



CHAPTER 4 



Modernization and 
Italian Political Development 



Italy now has by most accounts the third or fourth largest economy in Eu- 
rope and is one of the world's most developed societies in terms of levels 
of consumption, life expectancy, and possibilities for individual expres- 
sion. But it is not unusual to read in the Italian press with respect to some 
feature or another of Italian life that Italy is "lontani dal continente" (dis- 
tant from the Continent) or "fuori dall'Europa" (outside Europe). 1 With 
the bribery and corruption scandals in 1991-92 enveloping many of the 
politicians and the political parties that ruled Italy after World War II, the 
sense of geographical alienation from political conditions elsewhere has 
deepened further. Nor is it rare to find in scholarly writing on Italy re- 
course to the metaphor of backwardness as an appropriate description of 
the social and political character of the peninsula (and islands) and its 
population. Indeed, the struggle against backwardness, both national and 
specific to certain regions (particularly in the South), has become a leit- 
motif of Italian politics, a rallying cry of all efforts to forge a singular na- 
tional territory and associated identity out of the disparate places inher- 
ited from the past. 

In much contemporary social science either time and space are opposed 
to one another as alternative templates or, more typically, time is translated 
into space. That is, blocks of space (countries or regions) are labeled with 
the essential attributes of different periods relative to the idealized histori- 
cal experience of one of the blocks. Hence territories are named as primi- 
tive or advanced and backward or modern. Progress occurs when the back- 
ward start to become like the modern. The terms are always applied at a 
single geographical scale (usually world regions, national states, or regions 
within states) while "bracketing" (assuming away) the others. An implicit 
comparison with an ideal type unit (at the same scale) is then used to make 
generalizations about the condition of the backward one. 

Of course the critique of modernization theory has made note of the 
labeling before, but usually at a global scale with reference to East/West 

59 



60 Chapter Four 

and North/South differences in culture and economic development. 2 My 
point is to extend the critique in three ways. First, I argue that the con- 
version of time into space usually produces a timeless space in which ge- 
ographical differences are traced to time immemorial. Denying a dy- 
namism to geography also renders history inert. Second, I mean to show 
how this understanding is applied both to the question of national polit- 
ical development and to the question of regional and local political dif- 
ferences within a European state as well. Third, I claim that the conversion 
of time into space derives from a European geopolitical imagination that 
denies place — as an intermingling of the effects of multiple geographical 
scales in the practices of everyday life — an active role in explaining poli- 
tics. Places are only spaces on a map drawn by those with the power to do 
so, slotted into a worldwide schema of places that are either backward or 
modern. 3 

The Italian case also touches on a more general question in historiog- 
raphy: how to deal with the particular experiences of different national 
territories in relation to a standard account of national development. This 
is often referred to as the issue of geographical exceptionalism and takes 
its meaning in relation to the dominance of English, French, American, 
German, and (until recently) Soviet experience as norms against which 
the historical evolution of other national spaces should be compared. This 
chapter can be seen as an exploration in the genealogy of the metaphor 
of backwardness and its metamorphosis into a myth about Italy and its 
internal geography. The metaphor fuses a set of understandings about 
people and their places that are at the same moment both analytic and 
normative. Historically, however, the normative component or moral 
judgment has faded from view and the analytic claim of the metaphor, to 
explain difference, has become paramount. 

Projecting qualities drawn from a rendering of a specific historical ex- 
perience of one place (England, the West, or the United States for Italy; 
northern Italy for the Italian South) onto terrestrial space in general pro- 
motes three dominant tendencies in social science. One is the tendency to 
essentialize, or identify one trait as characterizing a particular spatial unit 
(e.g., caste in India; Mafia in Sicily; political instability in Italy as a whole). 
A second is a temptation to exoticize, or focus on differences as the single 
criterion for comparison between areas. Similarities or universal conun- 
drums (e.g., barriers to political participation, difficulties of social mobil- 
ity) are thereby ignored. The third is the tendency to totalize comparisons, 
or turn relative differences into absolute ones. The whole of a society is 
thereby made recognizable by any one of its parts. The whole block of 
space occupied by the society is suffused with a character that is defined 
by the social totality (usually a culture understood as a spatially indivis- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 61 

ible unity at a national or civilizational scale that has been around more 
or less forever). 4 

METAPHORS OF BACKWARD ITALY 

How widespread is the invocation of backwardness and the backward/ 
modern metaphor in relation to Italy? As Tim Mason has pointed out, 
discussion of modernity and modernization has been central to much 
contemporary Italian history and social science, but without self- 
consciousness as to terminological precision or explicit attention to the 
implication that Italy is somehow behind other countries and needs to 
modernize. 5 Adopting the vocabulary of backward and modern is not re- 
stricted to a particular school or political grouping. Across the political 
spectrum there is common recourse to the language of the modern and 
modernization even though there may be differences over the substantive 
components of modernity. For example, debate over Fascism from both 
left and right has been dominated by claims and counterclaims as to its 
modern and traditional qualities. In other countries this vocabulary has 
been much more contestable and contested than it appears to be in rela- 
tion to Italy. In Italy it has become central to conceptions of the country and 
to Italy's place in the world of nation-states. 

The vocabulary of backwardness and modernity can be found every- 
where, though there is no consistency in the concrete particulars used to 
exemplify it. Some arbitrary examples can be drawn from both academic 
and political sources. Discussion of Italy's economy is dominated by the 
theme of the country's lagging behind and catching up relative to the 
economies of northern Europe. To economic historians Nicola Rossi and 
Gianni Tonioli, for example, "given Italy's relative backwardness around 
the turn of the century, a higher long-term growth rate might have been 
expected." 6 A one-volume history of postwar Italy published to rave re- 
views in Italy and England, is portrayed by its author, historian Paul Gins- 
borg, as "charting the country's dramatic passage to modernity." 7 Al- 
though he writes from a standpoint sympathetic to the problems of the 
growing working class in postwar Italy, the author has frequent recourse 
to the language of modernization and backwardness in characterizing 
Italy (and particularly the Italian South) by its lack of "civic trust" and the 
"precariousness" of its modernization. A book by historian Domenico Set- 
tembrini traces Italy's political backwardness to a prevalent "antibour- 
geois" ideology that the author finds in both Fascism and anti-Fascism. 8 
Italy is treated as an anomaly to Europe's destiny with liberal democracy 
when, as Roberto Vivarelli points out in a devastatingly stinging review, 
Italy precisely symptomatizes the universal dilemmas and difficulties in- 
volved in gaining and deepening democratic practices. 9 



62 Chapter Four 

A 1986 "cultural anthropology" of Italy by Carlo Tullio-Altan provides 
an extreme example of the use of the metaphor of backwardness. Indeed, 
from this point of view Italy represents a case study in the total failure of 
modernization. 10 Tullio-Altan presents Italian national history as a con- 
tinuous unfolding of "sociocultural backwardness" as clientelism, anar- 
chistic rebelliousness, organized crime, and lack of civic consciousness 
have conquered ever larger public spaces. Everything that is distinctively 
Italian about Italy is backward when compared with the successful coun- 
tries to the north. What is more, the struggle for modernity is hopeless in 
the face of the strengthening forces of backwardness. Finally, in 1987 the 
sociologist Luciano Gallino sees in Italy the absence of a "fundamental in- 
gredient of modernity . . . the interest of the individual in public action. " : ' 
This is seen as a product of the peculiar mix of traditional and modern el- 
ements in Italian society rather than the singular victory of backwardness. 

In many political circles in the 1970s and 1980s the language of mod- 
ernization completely replaced older terminologies privileging social class 
and religion. This was especially obvious with the Socialists after Bettino 
Craxi became their leader in 1976. But elements in the Christian Demo- 
cratic Party, particularly activists close to the former prime minister Ciri- 
aco De Mita, also adopted this language as a substitute for older pastoral 
and Catholic themes. On the political left there was an appearance of not 
wanting to be left behind. Alberto Asor Rosa, an intellectual affiliated with 
the then Communist Party, was quoted as saying that "altogether the Left 
has never had as a value at the core of its project, control over innovation 
and modernization," implying that it now should have such a value. 12 Re- 
nato Curcio, one of the founders of the left-wing terrorist group the Red 
Brigades, reported in an interview from prison in 1987 that "if Italy has 
changed and modernized itself in so radical a way, this is due to the social 
conflict of the 1970s of which the Red Brigades were a component." 13 

Some political scientists had already hailed the victory of modernity 
based on some empirical evidence for a nationalization of Italian electoral 
politics beginning in the 1960s. A trend toward more homogeneous lev- 
els of support across the country for the two major political parties, the 
Christian Democrats and the Communists, and increased volatility be- 
tween elections were interpreted as signaling the appearance of the mod- 
ern "opinion" voter, rationally weighing the options between candidates 
and parties rather than voting because of identification with a political 
subculture (such as the white-Catholic or red-socialist) or in an exchange 
of favors (clientelism or patronage voting). 14 Borrowing from American 
electoral studies such methodological innovations as national opinion 
polling and the idea of the median national voter, Italy was seen as po- 
tentially on course from its anomalous past toward a future indistin- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 63 

guishable from that of other advanced democracies. Beginning in the 
1980s, however, the emergence of new parties organized around local and 
regional issues, from the Leagues in the North to La Rete (Network) in 
Palermo and Milan, and the revelations of systemic political corruption in 
the early 1990s tended to undermine optimism about the permanence of 
electoral nationalization according to an English or an American model. 

The idea of backwardness had not disappeared, only now it was in- 
creasingly applied to regional differences within the country. This was not 
new. The Italian South had long been the subject of Italian politicians and 
intellectuals who, from the earliest days of unification, had seen it as a 
drag on the modernization of the country as a whole. An intellectual tra- 
dition of meridionalismo, or studying the South, had grown up to account 
for the economic underdevelopment and cultural distinctiveness of "the 
South." An influential 1993 book by Robert Putnam, referred to previ- 
ously, putatively about the relative administrative success of the regional 
tier of government introduced to Italy as a whole in 1970, revived atten- 
tion to backwardness, only now the focus was on why the South remained 
mired in stasis, as indicated by the failure of regional governments in that 
region compared with the relative success of the regional reform in much 
of the North. Notwithstanding the tendency of Putnam's book to invoke 
the distant past, particularly the medieval political differences between 
North and South, rather than more recent history to account for pres- 
ent political differences, its largely positive reception suggests that the 
political-cultural logic of backwardness could still be applied within Italy 
even in the face of evidence for the nationalization of electoral politics. 15 

Based on such a wide range of sources, I therefore propose that the im- 
age of a backward Italy struggling (somehow) with modernity is a domi- 
nant representation of the country in the eyes of both Italian and foreign 
commentators. Before turning to the origins of this understanding of 
Italy, both generally and in relation to Italian intellectual history, I want 
to give closer attention to two of the sources mentioned previously, the 
books of Paul Ginsborg and Carlo Tullio-Altan. I do not claim that these 
books provide a true sample in a statistical sense of all writing about con- 
temporary Italy. My argument is that they represent two leading genres of 
writing about Italy. One, largely English in origin in its reliance on an un- 
folding narrative of a precise historical period, implicitly (through the 
concepts it uses) compares Italy to a reading of English experience; the 
other, more typically Italian in origin, expresses an exasperation with 
the failure of Italian institutions to match the perceived success of similar 
institutions elsewhere. 

Ginsborg's detailed narrative account of Italian history from 1943 to 
1988 works around a series of oppositions through which he interprets 



64 Chapter Four 

movement from backwardness to modernity. In order of degree of ab- 
straction, these are weak state/strong society; familism/collective action; 
class and regional dualism: workers/bourgeoisie, north/south; correc- 
tive/structural reform; and militance/ny/^sso (retreat into private life). 
Ginsborg operates from a standpoint sympathetic to the condition of 
workers and peasants in the early postwar period. He sees 1943-48 as a 
time when opportunities to redistribute wealth and power were lost, and 
he reads subsequent history in terms of the consequences of this fateful 
failure. A reader cannot but see an implicit comparison between this di- 
agnosis and the typical British reading of what happened in Britain dur- 
ing the same period and its consequences for postwar Britain; the "cor- 
rective" reforms of the first postwar Labour government marked a clear 
watershed with the past and the beginnings of the modern welfare state. 
Yet in spite of the mistaken road taken in the 1940s, by the 1980s the na- 
tionalization of values taken for granted in the case of postwar Britain has 
finally captured even the most recalcitrant of Italians, though Ginsborg 
is doubtful about its permanence. This is because Italy's modernity is 
uniquely fragile, threatened by the persisting possibility of reversal of the 
current balance of oppositions. The path to modernity chosen in the im- 
mediate postwar years therefore is still subject to unpredictable shifts and 
pathological turns. Consequently, as Ginsborg concludes on "Italy in the 
1980s," Italy remains a country with a "deformed relationship between 
citizen and state," where "neither from civil society nor from the state has 
there emerged a new and less destructive formulation of the relationship 
between family and collectivity" and more particularly, "the lack of fede 
pubblica (civic trust) continues to bedevil southern society." 16 True moder- 
nity, in this naturalized discourse of a country changing in spite of its es- 
sential self, is always around the corner or elsewhere, not in Italy. 

"The cult of modernity," Mason suggests, "may grow out of a concern 
with its opposite." 17 Rather than the drive toward modernity, even if it is 
precarious, it is the persistence of backwardness that then takes center 
stage. Tullio-Altan sees Italy as condemned to perpetual repetition of a pri- 
mordial condition of civic immaturity. He attributes this to the temporal 
persistence and geographical spread into the rest of Italy from the South 
of the syndrome of "amoral familism" first diagnosed by the American po- 
litical scientist Edward Banfield in The Moral Basis of a Backward Society. 18 
Banfield was later to gain notoriety for his claim that the riots in Ameri- 
can cities in 1965-68 were mainly for "fun and profit." 19 Banfield's 1958 
book is still widely used in introductory university courses on Italian pol- 
itics and society in the United States and serves as a basic source for Put- 
nam's more recent writing about regional differences in Italy. 

To Tullio-Altan the roots of Italy's backwardness lie in the initial failure 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 65 

at the moment of unification in the nineteenth century to overcome the 
"national dualism" between a developing North and a backward South. He 
makes much of Giuseppe Mazzini's prophecy that "Italy will be that which 
the Mezzogiorno will be." 20 Even though Italy as a whole is backward, 
therefore, the origins of this condition lie in the South. Two influences in 
particular are identified as responsible for the diffusion of backwardness 
within Italy: clientelism (votes exchanged for favors) and trasfonnismo (col- 
laboration among politicians by the exchange of favors). Because these 
practices were so pervasive, a bourgeoisie with a national orientation ca- 
pable of overcoming local and regional outlooks failed to develop, perpet- 
uating the cultural backwardness of Italy as a whole. 21 It is a strange inver- 
sion of Antonio Gramsci's argument about la qitestione meridionale that 
unification failed to produce a true revolution because northern workers 
and southern (and other) peasants did not make common cause against 
the unifying northern bourgeoisie. But it parallels arguments common to 
historians of Germany that compared (implicitly) with England or France, 
Germany failed to have a proper bourgeois revolution. The specificity and 
tragedy of German history are thereby explained by comparing what Ger- 
man history was nor with idealized English and French national histories. 22 

Tullio-Altan thus reduces the fusion of what may be old and new in any 
particular epoch and nation-state to a straightforward manifestation of 
absence put in temporal terms as backwardness. The Italian political class, 
in particular, is seen as embodying both a culture that is particularistic and 
a parallel political practice that is clientelistic and transformist. But what 
if this is not to any extent a heritage of the past? What if these elements 
are part of a "modern and effective system of power designed to integrate 
into the national society masses of people who are dangerously inclined 
to claim democratic participation and their own emancipation" — in other 
words, "a modern political culture"? 23 Both Tim Mason and Rosario 
Lembo offer arguments for this reversal of Tullio-Altan's thesis. 24 As Ma- 
son suggests, the "civic maturity" of Tullio-Altan's (absent) modernity 
would not be popular with the dominant groups in most modern poli- 
ties. 25 Encouraging withdrawal from active participation in politics and 
the widespread subversion of political institutions for personal gain are 
not unique to contemporary (and backward) Italy. 

The attribution of backwardness makes sense, therefore, only if the 
backward features of Italian politics and society are implicitly compared 
with some ideal of modernity. For Tullio-Altan this appears to be defined 
largely by the absence of those features that identify Italy as backward 
(clientelism, trasfonnismo). But there are some more positive clues to the 
essence of modernity. The social conscience based on individual respon- 
sibility produced by the Calvinist branch of the Protestant Reformation — 



66 Chapter Four 

and, of course, missing from Italian historical experience — is a concept in- 
troduced early in Tullio-Altan's analysis to frame later discussion of the 
specific features of Italian cultural stasis. In fundamental opposition, a 
concept drawn from Banfield's report of his fieldwork in one southern Ital- 
ian village in the mid-1950s (Italian "amoral familism," the inability to act 
collectively for a common good beyond the bounds of a nuclear family) is 
identified as the conceptual key to understanding Italian difference from 
the Calvinist's modern conscience. Yet as numerous commentators have 
pointed out, Banfield misrepresents the social order of the village he stud- 
ied, and one village does not a nation make, even when it appeals to prej- 
udices widespread within that nation itself. 26 More pertinent, given that 
Italy is the seat of a powerful church with universal claims, might be the 
role of the Catholic Church in denying legitimacy to the new Italian state 
and its long-standing hostility to democratic politics. It is not so much an 
absence, again, such as having missed out on Calvinism, as a significant 
presence, the location of the Vatican in Italy, that has helped turn Italian 
political development along the path taken. 27 

FROM METAPHOR TO MYTH 

This criticism is all very well, one might say, but surely the vocabulary 
of backward and modern is nothing more than a stock of evocative 
metaphors that helps to communicate the differences between Italy and 
two ideal types of society — the backward and the modern? I would argue 
that the vocabulary is now much more than this; that it organizes and di- 
rects thinking about the nature of Italy. From this perspective backward 
Italy has become a myth, the idealization involved forgotten as the 
metaphor has substituted for analysis. This is not to say that the metaphor 
is necessarily false in all its usages, only that it functions more as a fable 
than as a mere communicative device. 

The literary scholar Frank Kermode makes a distinction between myth 
and fiction that may be helpful here. In his view, a fiction is "a symbolic 
construct ironically aware of its own fictionality, whereas myths have mis- 
taken their symbolic worlds for literal ones and so come to naturalize their 
own status." 28 The line between the two is fuzzy rather than hard and fast, 
since all fictions can become myths once established and widely dissemi- 
nated. This is what has happened to the metaphor of backward Italy. 

It is conventional wisdom among European and American intellectuals 
that modernized societies (Europe, particularly England, and the United 
States are the paradigms at a global scale) are rational and secular to the 
exclusion of traditional-metaphysical myths about their founding and na- 
ture. As I argue later in the chapter, this position has become a central el- 
ement in the backward/modern metaphor itself. Modernity is by defini- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 67 

tion life without myth. As sensitive a commentator on contemporary 
American society as political theorist Sheldon Wolin appears to endorse 
this position. Modernization is seen as destroying the mythology that is 
necessary for political community. 29 But perhaps it is more that our most 
cherished European myths, such as backward/modern, are simply ones 
without eschatological hope of a better world in its entirety, merely natu- 
ralized fictions that give meaning to historical and political speculation 
about the trajectory of particular societies contained by the boundaries of 
territorial states. 

But how has mythmaking been possible in the case of backward/mod- 
ern? What is it about this particular metaphor that has turned it into 
myth? My response falls into two parts: first sketching out the origins in 
European thought of the metaphor of backwardness (and its polar oppo- 
site, modernity), then offering an understanding of why the metaphor has 
acquired the status of myth specifically in relation to Italy. 

SPACES OF BACKWARDNESS 

One consequence of Columbus's famous voyage of 1492 was a heightened 
sense among European intellectuals of a hierarchy of human societies 
from primitive to modern. It is surely no coincidence that in conventional 
historiographies modern history begins with the era of Columbus. How- 
ever, the simple juxtaposition of newly discovered and primitive worlds 
against a familiar and modern "old world" that the discoverers came from 
is an altogether too simplistic if currently popular view of what hap- 
pened. 30 All societies define geographical boundaries between themselves 
and others. 31 Sometimes the world beyond the horizon is threatening, 
sometimes it is enticing. But not all portray the others as backward. 

In fact, little has been written on exactly how early modern Europeans 
assimilated exotic peoples into their understanding of historical geo- 
graphy. In a major review of scholarship covering the sixteenth and sev- 
enteenth centuries, however, Michael Ryan suggests that the major means 
was assimilating the exotic into Europe's own pagan and savage past: "In 
the triangular relationship among Europe, its own pagan past, and the ex- 
otic, the principal linkage was between Europe and antiquity." 32 The cat- 
egories of pagan and barbarian, discovered as an inheritance from the Eu- 
ropean ancients, were deployed to differentiate the new worlds from the 
old. 33 Thus a conception of the temporal transition through which the Eu- 
ropean social order had been transformed was imposed on the spatial re- 
lationship between the new worlds and Europe in its entirety. The reli- 
gious dimension was especially important in reading the new pagan 
worlds as standing in a relation to the (European) Christian world the way 
that world stood in relation to its own pagan past. 



68 Chapter Four 

This is not entirely surprising if we remember that discovery of the new 
geographical worlds coincided with the rediscovery of Europe's own an- 
cient past. 54 Indeed, as Robert Mandrou recounts, "the new worlds that 
fascinated the intellectuals of the sixteenth century were not so much the 
Indies — West or even East — but those ancient worlds which the study and 
comparison of long-forgotten texts kept revealing as having been richer 
and more complex than had been supposed." 35 Of course Italy was the 
center for this new activity, associated as it was with monastic libraries, 
universities, and the recovery of ancient texts. Ironically, given the chal- 
lenge to ecclesiastical authority that the rediscovery of the ancients could 
entail, it was from within the Church that the "new learning" arose: "Ital- 
ian cities, richer in Churchmen than any others in Europe, and closer to 
the papal authority, constituted the setting that was most apt to stimulate 
the study of ancient texts and pre-Christian thought." 36 

The articulation of spatial differences in temporal terms was reinforced 
by the taxonomic lore that Renaissance-era Europeans learned from the 
ancients. As Edward Said has suggested, much ancient Greek drama in- 
volved demarcating an "imaginative geography" in which Europe and 
Asia are rigidly separated: "Europe is powerful and articulate; Asia is de- 
feated and distant. . . . Rationality is undermined by Eastern excesses, 
those mysteriously attractive opposites to what seem to be normal val- 
ues." 37 An image of essential difference with roots sunk deep in the pri- 
mordial past was used to invent a geography that had no real empirical 
points of reference. 38 In terms of such categories as race, property, oli- 
garchy, etiology, and economy, the Orient (and non-Europe in general) 
was claimed as "the negation of all that was being claimed for the West, 
by polemicists knowing, in fact, very little about it." 39 The "Ottoman 
peril" of the Renaissance gave particular credibility to vulnerable Euro- 
peans' sense of a profound chasm between the familiar world of Europe 
and the exotic world of the Oriental other. In Europe "the Turkish threat 
worked toward reviving a waning loyalty to the Respublica Christiana and 
gave new life to the old cry for peace and unity in a Christendom subject 
to the pope." 40 

As the European states emerged from the dynastic struggles and reli- 
gious wars of the seventeenth century and embarked on their schemes of 
empire building outside Europe, comparing themselves with the ancient 
world, especially the model provided by Rome, proved irresistible. Baron 
Lugard, the British ruler of northern Nigeria, was to maintain that Britain 
stood in a kind of apostolic succession of empire: "As Roman imperial- 
ism ... led the wild barbarians of these islands along the path of progress, 
so in Africa today we are re-paying the debt, and bringing to the dark 
places of the earth ... the torch of culture and progress." 41 Perhaps the 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 69 

peak of this Romanist historiography is found in the writing of Hegel, es- 
pecially in the PJiilosophy of Right, first published in 1821. Based on the rel- 
ative extent of the absolute sovereignty of the state and its "ethical sub- 
stance," the nation, Hegel divided the world into four historical realms 
arranged hierarchically, with the Oriental (India seems to have figured 
prominently in his thinking) as the lowest, the Germanic as the highest 
(surprise!), and the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, as the precursors of 
the Germanic, in between. 42 Effective state sovereignty was a necessary 
condition for achieving personal moral identity. 43 

Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the resort to classical prece- 
dent to understand spatial differences in social order was also put on a sci- 
entific foundation. Pragmatic common sense was backed up by explana- 
tion in terms of natural processes or by analogy to natural processes. It 
became increasingly popular to see social change as a transition from one 
stage or level of development to another. 44 As the nineteenth century wore 
on, and in imitation of discourse within biology, this view was elaborated 
on as an evolutionary movement from a lower to a higher level of organi- 
zation. In terms of economic growth and social and political progress, 
some parts of the world were at levels of development that Europe had pre- 
viously experienced. 45 The idiom of what Ranajit Guha terms "improve- 
ment" came to prevail over that of "order." 46 The distinction no longer lay 
primarily in essential difference that could not be transcended but in the 
possibility of overcoming backwardness through imitation. The future of 
the backward lay in repeating, if they could, what Europe had done. 47 

By the close of the century, modernity was increasingly conceived of as 
the form of society in which social interaction is rationally organized and 
self-regulating. Max Weber's theory of rationalization provided the most 
important account of this modernity within an evolutionary historiogra- 
phy. For Weber the rationalization of social life involved the increasing 
regulation of conduct by instrumental rationality rather than traditional 
norms and values. Weber himself was less than enthusiastic about this 
process of modernization, but many of his sociological disciples have had 
few doubts. The version of Weber's theory disseminated in the English- 
speaking world by Talcott Parsons, as Jiirgen Habermas notes, "dissociates 
'modernity' from its modern European origins and stylizes it into a spatio- 
temporally neutral model for processes of social development in gen- 
eral." 48 This modernity, subsequently often confused with the post- World 
War II United States, then became a social model to which other less de- 
veloped societies, such as Italy, could aspire. 49 

A final boost to the designation of areas as backward or modern came 
from the ideological combat of the Cold War, in which the two modern 
worlds of capitalism and communism struggled for dominion in the back- 



70 Chapter Four 

ward or traditional Third World. 50 Although later adopted as a symbolic 
referent for the solidarity of formerly colonized peoples, the term Third 
World was never a particularly useful empirical designation. Its meaning 
was premised on the prior existence of two competing models of devel- 
opment that would allow for no alternatives. The backwardness of the 
Third World was necessary to define the modernity of the other two. They 
are what we used to be like. Only by having a backward could there be a 
modern. 

WHY BACKWARD ITALY! 

Italy is very much part of the Europe that figures in this outline history of 
the concept of backwardness. But the conceptual grid of which it is a 
component, figuring spatial differences in temporal terms, has become so 
universalized, considered applicable in diverse circumstances, that differ- 
ences within Europe have also come to be thought of in terms of back- 
wardness and modernity. So even while at a global scale Italy is considered 
modern, within Europe it can be seen as backward. Reality may be one 
thing; perception is something else again. A more poverty-stricken vocab- 
ulary for dealing with sameness and difference between places is hard to 
imagine! Yet its attractiveness for treating spatial differences in terms of 
temporal ideal types has been so great that it has spread from its original 
global context of use to other scales without much comment. 

There are a number of reasons Italy has become prone to characteriza- 
tion in terms of backwardness. The first is its alleged failure to live up to 
its earlier promise. The signs of an incipient modernity associated with the 
Renaissance never produced the universal state that Hegel would later see 
as a prerequisite for true modernity. From this point of view Italy has been 
plagued by a persisting disunity based on geoeconomic and linguistic frag- 
mentation. Unlike Germany in the nineteenth century, where identifica- 
tion with a Heimat (homeland) allowed for widening identification with 
territorial state and nation, 51 local identity in Italy has not led easily to- 
ward a wider sense of national identity. 52 The very city-states that are as- 
sociated so intimately with the Renaissance failed to produce the inte- 
grated national state that would have taken Italy to the next level of 
modernity. 53 The variety and density of urban centers in Italy worked 
against the ready creation of a territorial state with a dominant capital 
city. Foreign potentates found in Italy almost unlimited possibilities for a 
strategy of divide and rule. The power of the Universal (but also Roman) 
Church has continually frustrated attempts at creating a national state in 
its homeland. The common identity of Italians as Catholics made the 
achievement of a more circumscribed national identity seem redundant 
for large segments of the population. Not even the pious Alessandro Man- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 71 

zoni could successfully challenge this paradox. Because of its difficulties 
with the papacy, the monarchy of unified Italy was not able to fuse reli- 
gious symbolism with dynastic history in the ways common elsewhere in 
Europe. Recent Christian Democrats did not really try to fuse religious 
with national identity. They looked to locality or to "Europe" for their po- 
litical identity. 54 

The stories told of Sicily in united Italy are instructive for what they say 
about the use of the backward/modern pairing within the country as an 
indicator of failure to live up to promise. 55 One story is usually about the 
Mafia, a word now charged with more than Sicilian application but that 
refers to the historical development of a specific type of criminality based 
on a code of silence and, at least classically, a secret organization and code 
of conduct reflecting both a long history of absentee landownership and 
popular resentment of state police power. 56 In a more nuanced version, 
the story is about the long-term difficulties of creating an integrated Ital- 
ian polity from above, when Italian unification in the mid-nineteenth 
century was essentially imposed by the northern state of Piedmont on the 
rest of the peninsula, Sicily, and Sardinia rather than desired from below 
by a substantial part of the population. These accounts, both stereotypical 
and more historically subtle, lead to similar conclusions. One is that Sicil- 
ians have had little or no history of self-rule, either aristocratic or demo- 
cratic. The second is that this lack of familiarity with self-governance has 
opened them up for exploitation by small, determined groups such as 
those associated with the Mafia, able to promise material favors in return 
for popular social and political support. From this point of view, therefore, 
Sicily is backward politically because it never acquired the cultural traits 
that were necessary for its successful assimilation into the Italian body 
politic. That Sicily was coerced militarily into Italy rather than welcomed 
as an established sociopolitical entity is left without mention, as is the fact 
that Fascism, hardly a manifestation of modern "civic democracy," was 
entirely northern in origin. 57 

In addition to the "special case" of Sicily and the South, the sense of 
Italy's general failure to mature as a political entity has deep roots among 
Italian intellectuals. The major theme of Niccolo Machiavelli in such 
works as The Prince and The History ofPlorence was the civic corruption of 
his epoch compared with the civic excellence of the ancient Romans. Pa- 
pal power along with manipulation and penetration from outside were in- 
dicted as the main culprits. 58 Again, the heroes of the Risorgimento in the 
early nineteenth century blamed the reactionary Austrian and Bourbon 
regimes that governed large parts of the peninsula and islands for the per- 
vasive political and economic stasis they were operating against. The im- 
age of subordination to neighboring states became a fixed element in the 



72 Chapter Four 

national consciousness as conveyed through Manzoni's influential 1827 
novel of the Risorgimento, I promessi sposi. 59 Generations of Italians have 
been exposed to the making of Italy by reading this allegory of inner pu- 
rity and tenacity struggling with external tyranny and exploitation. 

The failure of unification to live up to expectations, because it came 
about through conquest and subterfuge rather than popular insurrection 
and replaced a set of reactionary governments with a single one, has 
added a further blow to the fragile Italian collective identity. A permanent 
feature of Italian historiography became argument over the "failure" of 
unification. Each new failure — the Liberal governments of the late nine- 
teenth century for failing to match the colonial and economic achieve- 
ments of the contemporary great powers, the failure of the Italian military 
in both world wars, the failure of Fascism as a developmental dictatorship 
to help Italy catch up with the rest of Europe — gave rise to new attempts 
at Risorgimento. As these themselves, particularly Fascism, then the anti- 
Fascist Resistance of 1943-45, and finally the student and worker struggles 
of 1968-72, failed to deliver an eschatological promised land, further dis- 
illusionment has been assured. 60 

Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio, first published in 1880, captures in allegorical 
form the fate of backward Italy, always awaiting its true liberation to 
modernity. Collodi was a disenchanted supporter of the original Risorgi- 
mento. The mischievous puppet aspires to true childhood, but his bad 
behavior seems to condemn him to perpetual puppethood. Only after 
demonstrating human virtue does he become a real boy. His path of meta- 
morphosis follows the track of Italian history, from a puppet forced to 
move at the control of others to a donkey (a symbol for adherence to 
Church doctrine favored by nineteenth century anticlericals), to an au- 
tonomous personality (courtesy of a completed Risorgimento). 61 

Comparison with an external standard has been fundamental to the 
image of failure. No longer the seat of modernity after the sixteenth cen- 
tury, lost first to the English, then to the Germans and more recently to 
the Americans, Italy became synonymous for many intellectuals with the 
decadence of a Mediterranean world that had once again turned its back 
on its inheritance. The French defeat by Prussia in 1870, the Italian defeat 
by Ethiopia in 1896, and the Spanish defeats by the Americans at the turn 
of the century conspired to produce the idea of a link between military ef- 
fectiveness, political development, and ethnicity. This was bolstered by 
the growth of a positivist sociology based on environmental and racial de- 
terminism. Southern Italians (as a Mediterranean rather than a continen- 
tal European people) were characterized as particularly primitive — unpre- 
dictable, unreliable, rebellious, and criminal. They were a drag on the 
development of Italy as a whole. The image of a tragic fall from grace rel- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 73 

ative to success elsewhere became rooted in Italian as well as foreign ac- 
i counts of Italy. The historian Silvio Lanaro, in a brilliant book on the self- 
/ images of Italians, notes cynically that "admiration for foreigners has 
1 been the principal ingredient of Italian nationalism." 62 

The late-nineteenth century politician Francesco Crispi has been per- 
haps the only Italian political leader except for Mussolini to create a rhet- 
oric that saw modern Italy in apostolic succession to previous periods of 
national greatness and as a body overcoming its fragmentation. 63 But the 
danger of pointing to the past was that it reminded everyone of the gap 
that now existed between the noble past and the degenerate present. The 
massive emigration from the southern regions, the failure to emulate the 
apparently effortless colonial successes of the British and the French (sym- 
bolized above all by the military defeat at the hands of the barbarian 
Ethiopians at Adua on 1 March 1896), and persistent political and military 
mismanagement were especially galling. When the rhetoric of Roman- 
imperial reincarnation turned out to be hollow, as with both Crispi's colo- 
nial adventures and Fascism's claims as a developmental dictatorship, the 
conception of Italy as a spiritual idea in the process of becoming realized 
in a modern form was also discredited. 64 

There have been some important, more specific classical influences on 
thinking about Italy's place on the backward/modern continuum relative 
to other countries. The important influence of Hegel on Italian historiog- 
raphy has reinforced the idea of Italy's lagging behind the rest of Europe in 
| the development of a modern political identity. This is not an influence in 
the straightforward sense of borrowing Hegel's philosophy of history. 65 
Rather, it is the peculiar Italian rendering of the Hegelian Weltgeist, above 
( all by the influential philosopher Benedetto Croce^as the need to abandon 
sectional material interests for a higher national interest. Increasingly op- 
posed both to historical materialism as a theory of history and to socialism 
as a political ideology, Croce argued for the primacy of political will in cre- 
f ating a sense of national purpose. 66 Croce read German experience as the 
successful pursuit of interests embodied in the idea of a culture, of a com- 
I mon sense that would inspire people to a new way of life. 67 This vision in- 
evitably pictured Italy as a pupil of the more advanced northern Euro- 
peans, to whom Italians should look for inspirational models. 

The late industrialization of Italy and the persistence of traditional 

norms and values (above all, suspicion of the state and its works) have also 

provided prima facie evidence for a Weberian reading of Italian back- 

j wardness. Compared with most other European countries, Italy appears to 

1 have retained a greater element of those nonrational values, associated 

! with ascription rather than achievement, specific loyalties rather than the 

general value commitments that Parsons associated with tradition, espe- 



74 Chapter Four 

I cially in the continuing importance of family ties for the economy and the 
role of clientelism in the national bureaucracy. 68 Gift and redistributive 
transactions do not easily fit into evolutionary schemes based on the pre- 
sumed victory of market exchange and economic rationality, 69 yet these 
have remained of particular importance within the Italian political econ- 
omy. What sociologist Marcel Mauss named "noble expenditures" that 
bind rich to poor in the displacement of class struggle have been an im- 
portant mechanism for maintaining social order but have worked against 
the emergence of an impersonal state based on an abstract equal citizen- 
ship as its operating ideal. 

The three major social groupings of postunification Italy with possible 
roles in creating a breakthrough to a stronger national identity — the cap- 
italists, the workers, and the middle class — elaborated alternative institu- 
tions (e.g., the Case del Popolo for the workers) and regarded the state as 
a client rather than as an object of commitment or affection. 70 Fascism's 
identification of la patria had to work with a mosaic of identities and ex- 
pectations rather than an integral texture based on the prior diffusion of 
a singular cultural vision. 

The absence from the peninsula and islands of the heroic feats and 
sharp historical breaks that have lain behind so much sociological theo- 
rizing, such as that of Weber and Parsons— the Protestant Reformation, 
the French Revolution of 1 789 — have also encouraged a sense of an un- 

i heroic or even cowardly history that has not escaped from a past of tradi- 
tional-local ties and sentiments. The major irony in this hand-wringing is 
that many of the social indicators associated with backwardness have 
deepened as the country has modernized. For example, the welfare state 
has increased the importance of political-family connections as disability 
pensions have increasingly been awarded on a particularistic basis. 71 The 
opposition of backward and modern thus dissolves as "we discover conti- 
nuity in change, tradition in modernity, even custom in commerce. Still, 
not all that was solid now melts into air, as a certain post-modernist re- 
flexive anthropology has prematurely supposed. There remain the dis- 
tinctive differences, the cultural differences." 72 

Finally, the two political cultures that grew in Italy at the turn of the 
century and reappeared after Fascism, the socialist and the Catholic- 
popular, have been largely without sentiments of national identity and 

' solidarity. To them Italy has been the site of struggles over grand ideas that 
transcend any one national space. In the postwar period this has often in- 
volved looking outside Italy for models of social development. On one 
side, at least until the 1960s, the Soviet Union was seen as a paragon of 
modernity. Some of the student revolutionaries of 1968 looked to China 
and Maoism for their model (the Milan newspaper Corriere della Sera re- 



Modernization and Italian Political Development 75 

ferred to the student revolutionaries en masse as i cinesi). On the other 
side, if also with increasing uneasiness during the years of the Vietnam 
War but seemingly without much choice in the context of the Cold War, 
was the United States. All groups used the United States as their measure, 
whether as a challenge or as a threat. Rather as in the Third World, there 
was a struggle over the model of modernity in postwar Italy. The major po- 
litical parties and their associated intellectuals defined their goals largely 
in terms of Italy's backwardness in relation to the two foreign models of 
modernity. 

Within Italian society and among many intellectuals it is evident that 
the American model proved the more enticing. American standards be- 
came the ones that Italian performance was measured by and that defined 
the road to follow. As Silvio Lanaro emphasizes, "an arsenal of symbols 
and objects represented by the United States" came to substitute for the 
absence of an effective center within Italian society. 73 The American per- 
spective on modernization (Americanization) spread widely as the Amer- 
ican social sciences, especially a political science of a particularly Ameri- 
can provenance, expanded within the Italian universities in the early 
1970s. 74 The nationalization of political values relating to the achieve- 
ment of high mass consumption became an indicator of Italy's emulation 
of American modernity. This fits well the imperatives of a political class 
that put its faith in material progress to neutralize concerns about the con- 
temporary moral order of clientelism and insider dealing that they repre- 
sent. The persisting failure of significant groups and regions to experience 
the fruits of material progress and (more significantly given the often ex- 
plicit comparison with the United States) the lack of an American civic 
virtue, the popular celebration and adulation of existing political institu- 
tions without much active participation in them, only reinforced the idea 
that Italy, with its popular contempt for existing institutions yet deeply 
politicized Weltanschauung, not only was different but was still back- 
ward, even after all these years. 

CONCLUSION 

One of Italy's most renowned astrologers, Francesco Waldner, describes to 
the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger his view of Italy's perpet- 
ual political impasse: "The Italian peninsula as a whole may be under the 
dynamic sign of Aries, but the republic's horoscope is dominated by Gem- 
ini. Apart from that, every horoscope consists of four elements: earth, wa- 
ter, fire, and air. But the republic was declared on June 18 1946, and there 
were no planets in earth signs on that date. That's why this state lacks au- 
thority. It's unable to act effectively. Alternatives exist only for the indi- 
vidual. That makes survival possible." 75 For Enzensberger, in comparison 



76 Chapter Four 

with assorted social scientists, journalists, and pundits, the astrologer 
emerges as one of the more sober commentators on the Italian condition. 

One might note that there is little difference between the empirical 
analysis of the astrologer and that provided by the discourse of backward- 
ness and modernity. In neither case is Italy the actual object of analysis. 
For one it is the position of birth signs, for the other it is comparison with 
ideal types that become confused with empirical referents (such as En- 
gland or the United States). Yet we scoff at the astrology as unscientific 
while seeing the backward/modern polarity as unquestionably sound, sci- 
entific, or commonsensical. 

It is precisely the commonsensical quality of the polarity that gives it 
mythic power. Since Columbus first returned, we have become so used to 
characterizing geographical differences in idealized temporal terms that 
we cannot see any problems with this way of thinking. We assimilate em- 
pirical information to the polarities. We read the whole world through 
them. The ultimate irony, given Columbus's own origins in an Italian city- 
state, is that in a European context Italy has been more readily portrayed 
as backward than as modern. A temporal metaphor initially applied to 
make sense of the spatial gap between the new worlds and the old has be- 
come a preferred way of dealing with Italian differences relative to an ide- 
alized European modernity. In so doing, the intrinsically normative char- 
acter of the terms backward and modern has been obscured. 

This has served, however, to underpin the project of designating Italy 
as a self-evident territory with an easily communicated goal: to overcome 
its inherent backwardness relative to more advanced states elsewhere. 
At the same time, designating regions within the country as exhibiting 
different degrees of backwardness — particularly the South and its com- 
ponent parts — highlights internal others who can be portrayed both as 
a drag on the national project as a whole and also as to blame for the 
continuing instability and persisting failures of national political insti- 
tutions. 76 Recognizing differences between places, however, does not ne- 
cessitate turning them into instances of universal modern/backward 
categories whose invocation obscures far more than it illuminates under- 
standing of those very differences. 



CHAPTER 5 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian 
Electoral Politics, 1948-87 



The term geographical usually conveys a misleading sense of permanence, 
of fixity, that is antithetical to concepts such as social change or dynam- 
ics. The usage reflects the widespread image of geography as an encyclo- 
pedic inventory of immutable physical features and social attributes. This 
"common sense" has passed into fields such as political science that see 
geography merely as either a stage on which social and political dynam- 
ics are played out or a map of political outcomes determined by nation- 
ally constituted social forces. In neither case is geography seen as inher- 
ently involved in producing such outcomes. More particularly, as national 
states develop politically they are viewed as increasingly characterized by 
national political processes organized by national political parties appeal- 
ing to and drawing support from individual voters around the national 
territory based on rational weighing of options (opinion voting). 

The focus of this chapter is on how trends in the electoral geography of 
Italy over 1948-87, the period when a specific set of political parties and a 
division of national power between them dominated Italian electoral pol- 
itics, indicate an active or dynamic geographical constitution of electoral 
politics. By this I mean that even nationalization is mediated geographi- 
cally by a meshing of influences on electoral behavior in different places 
within Italy that give rise to geographically differentiated patterns of elec- 
tion results, including nationalization. But nationalization is only one 
among a number of possible options, as this chapter makes clear: region- 
alized and localized patterns are also possible. 

To be sure, aspects of the nationalization thesis are unimpeachable. The 
locus of political activity and the repertoires of collective action, for ex- 
ample, have expanded from the entirely local to the national, from the pa- 
tronized (dependent on local power holders) to the autonomous and 
anonymous. 1 As a result, national political parties and national-scale in- 
stitutions have assumed increased significance as mechanisms of political 
incorporation and expression at regional and local scales. But the nation- 



77 



78 Chapter Five 

alization thesis implies much more than this. It suggests that local politi- 
cal voice is the result of nationally denned social cleavages and commu- 
nication channels that have totally replaced influences emanating from 
other geographical scales. 

After first surveying the typical understanding of nationalization in the 
Italian case, I describe the political consequences of the main ways Italy is 
divided geographically and the political parties and electoral system that 
prevailed from 1948 to 1987. I finally turn to the evidence for three suc- 
cessive electoral-geographical regimes (regionalizing, nationalizing, and 
localizing) rather then a single linear trend toward nationalization over 
the entire period. 

THE NATIONALIZATION THESIS AND ITALIAN POLITICS 

A widely accepted premise of modern political science is that political out- 
looks and alignments are increasingly organized around individual voters 
choosing between parties based on their political preferences to produce 
national patterns of political mobilization. 2 Political differences are in- 
creasingly seen as nationalized as membership in crosscutting national 
census categories, representing sets of preferences, displaces geographical 
location or region as the primary predictor of political behavior. In Italy 
this point of view became popular among political scientists beginning in 
the late 1960s. 3 A major study of Italian political behavior conducted from 
1963 to 1965 argued that a nationalization of Italian politics had occurred 
between 1946 and 1963. 4 The pattern of an electorate divided into two 
parts, left and right, and spread more or less homogeneously throughout 
the country — as in other representative democracies — had come to Italy. 
From this point of view, individual opinion voting had replaced identifi- 
cation with regional subculture, social group, or locality as the main 
source of political identity. Modern voting behavior is seen as an expres- 
sion of individual opinion constrained only by access to information and 
by particular sociodemographic characteristics such as class, age, and ed- 
ucation. Consequently, support for specific political parties is increasingly 
and equally volatile everywhere as voters shift from party to party to sat- 
isfy their political preferences. 5 

Certainly, national and province-level election results in 1963-76 can 
be used to support this perspective. There was a tendency toward homog- 
enization of support for the main Italian political parties of the time: the 
Christian Democrats (DC), the Communists (PCI), and the Socialists (PSI). 
This could be explained partly in terms of the saturation of support for 
parties in some areas and partly in terms of common national processes of 
political mobilization leading to shifting party affiliations. In particular, 
there was a sense of greater electoral instability as voters became more 
volatile in their political affiliations. 6 In fact, homogenization does not 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 79 

seem to have been paralleled by much of an increase in electoral volatil- 
ity. Evidence from Bologna, assumed to be a stronghold of PCI "identity 
voting," shows a degree of shifts in voting over the entire period 1946-83 
that is not that far off the figures for a number of Italian cities in 1976-79 
(table 5.1). 

Neither homogenization nor electoral volatility in itself, however, can 
be taken as a signal of a permanent shift from a geographically fragmented 
process of political mobilization to a nationally homogeneous one. 7 The 
idea of the individual opinion voter was crucial to this logic, suggest- 
ing that opinion voting would give rise to a process of electoral choice 
in which the old social influences associated with regional subcultures 
would retreat. Voters, national media, and national campaigns were seen 
as the three moments around which electoral politics was now organized. 

As the huge literature on local contextual effects in voting suggests, 
however, the opinion voting that is alleged to lie behind the other trends 
is not an isolated individual act but is itself the outcome of social influ- 
ences. Opinions are formed as a result of active socialization from family, 
friends, workplaces, churches, schools, media outlets, and political com- 
munication. 8 Consequently, in the absence of evidence for the isolated 

Table 5. 1 Estimates of Electoral Mobility in Selected Italian Cities 



Bologna 



% 



% 



1946-48 
1948-53 
1953-58 
1 958-63 
1 963-68 



22.8 

n.a. 

21.1 

25.5 

22.0 



1968-72 
1972-76 
1976-79 
1 979-83 



22.9 
23.8 
18.8 
25.8 



Other cities 
(1976-79) 



Turin 

Milan 

Genoa 

Verona 

Padua 

Perugia 

Naples 

Salerno 

Taranto 



28.9 
29.3 
21.2 
22.7 
27.5 
17.8 
32.1 
29.8 
29.1 



SOURCE: Percy A. Allum and Renato Mannheimer. "Italy," in Electoral Change in Western Democracies: 
Patterns and Sources of Electoral Validity, ed. Ivor Crewe and David Denver (New York: St. Martin's 
Press), 1985, 295. Data for Bologna, Turin, Genoa, Padua, Perugia, Salerno, and Taranto supplied 
by P. G. Corbetta and H. M. Schadee of Istituto Cattaneo, Bologna, those for Milan and Naples by 
ADPSS, Milan. 

NOTE: The estimates for the cities in the second list are available only for 1 976-79. 



80 Chapter Five 

opinion voter (as opposed to the opinion voter operating within social 
networks), evidence for homogenization and volatility has been insuffi- 
cient to justify total abandonment of models of political behavior involv- 
ing recourse to geographical social influences. Even proponents of the 
trend toward nationalization based on opinion voting stress the impor- 
tant residual role of identity (belonging) and clientelistic (vote-favor ex- 
change) voting as expressive of local histories and interests. 9 

In fact, considerable empirical evidence now suggests that nationaliza- 
tion of voting patterns was a feature of the years 1963-76 rather than a 
permanent trend over the entire period since the collapse of Fascism and 
the end of World War II. 10 This realization led to something of a revival of 
"geographical" models of political behavior that emphasize regional sub- 
culture and the persistence of regional types of voting: briefly, opinion 
voting in the Northwest, identity voting in the Center and Northeast, and 
exchange voting in the South. 11 Such models identify historical-cultural 
rather than socioeconomic factors as the primary determinants of politi- 
cal cleavages. The rootedness of parties in particular areas through their 
organization and institutional strength is given special weight as a factor 
producing socialization into different political traditions. Key periods in 
the past — medieval communal organization, the years after unification, 
the period of labor organizing early in the twentieth century, and the civil 
war in central and northern Italy during the collapse of Fascism, 1943- 
45 — are viewed as critical in establishing regional political traditions. 
The Catholic subculture of northeastern Italy, the socialist subculture 
of the Center, and the clientelistic subculture of the South and Sicily are 
regarded as the major traditions that have resulted. 

There are three specific models that rely on fixed subculture-regional 
conceptions of political action: regional taxonomies of cultural traditions; 
historical studies of local political cultures; and sociological studies of 
party-government and political-subculture links. The problem is that 
these subcultural models tend to see regionalization as a structural pre- 
condition of Italian electoral politics when the evidence for its perma- 
nence is as limited historically as is that for nationalization as an emerg- 
ing trend across the entire period 1947-87. I examine these models in 
chapter 6 in relation to a classic case of apparent identity voting: the two 
provinces of Lucca and Pistoia in central Italy and their long-term affilia- 
tions, respectively, with Catholic and socialist voting traditions. 

LOCALITIES AND REGIONS IN MODERN ITALY 

Since the end of World War II Italy has been transformed from a relatively 
poor country into one of the world's major industrial powers. The changes 
in economic development there occurred more rapidly and were more ge- 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 81 

ographically widespread than anywhere else in Western Europe during 
the same period. Two inheritances from the past, however, have had im- 
portant effects on this transformation. One is the relatively short history 
of political unification, dating from 1861 and finally realized only in 
1870; the other is persisting geographical disparities in wealth, industrial- 
ization, and social organization. The geographical dynamics of Italian 
electoral politics over the postwar period have been largely the result of 
the interplay between historical inheritance and the recent transforma- 
tion of the Italian economy. 

The short history of unification is important in a number of respects. 12 
First, it was a unity imposed on the Italian peninsula and islands rather 
than one arising from a popular base (see fig. 3.1). Unification lacked 
widespread peasant support, and along with a lack of recognition given 
the new state by the Catholic Church, the legitimacy of the parliamentary 
monarchy established in 1861 was seriously compromised by opposition 
from republican opponents. The legitimacy crisis has persisted down the 
years, partly because major political movements, from the Fascists to the 
Christian Democrats and Communists, have had their own ideas about 
what the state should be and partly because many Italians have come to 
associate the state and its agencies with stultifying bureaucracy, ineptness, 
and corruption. After World War II the state very quickly succumbed to 
domination by a single political party, the Christian Democrats, that ruled 
in coalition with smaller parties, if in different combinations, from 1947 
until 1992. A system of party-dominated government replaced the dic- 
tatorship of Fascism and the older tradition of trasformismo or vote ex- 
change among representatives. Affiliation with the government parties 
was required for access both to government resources and to many jobs. 
Unsurprisingly, the "division of the spoils" (lottizzazione) favored groups 
and places giving persistently strong electoral support to the governing 
parties, particularly the Christian Democrats and, after 1976, the Social- 
ists of Bettino Craxi. Bastions of the PCI or the neo-Fascist Movimento So- 
ciale Italiano (MSI), parties shunned in the process of national coalition 
formation, could hardly expect equal treatment. 

Second, however, regional and local sentiments (sense of place) helped 
forge political identities before unification that national political parties 
and institutions have had difficulty undermining. The differentiation of 
territorial identities has been underwritten by important linguistic and so- 
cial differences between parts of Italy. In the social realm, for example, 
many northern Italians greatly value a wealth of associations aimed at po- 
litical, commercial, recreational, and special interest (e.g., veterans, trade 
unions) activities. Elsewhere, but particularly in the South, kinship and 
clientelistic relationships hold relatively greater sway, both in politics and 



82 Chapter Five 

in daily life. These divergent patterns of social life, based on divergent his- 
tories of settlement patterns, agricultural systems, and degrees of social 
isolation, have adapted and endured rather than faded away under the on- 
slaught of a single national pattern. 13 

Finally, until unification large parts of Italy were ruled either by foreign 
empires or from the Vatican. The Papal States of central Italy, in particu- 
lar, had long been a major barrier to Italian political unification. As secu- 
lar as well as religious rulers, in the nineteenth century the Catholic clergy 
became the subject of an intense anticlericalism that was absent elsewhere 
in Italy. It is therefore little surprise that it is in central Italy, where the 
power of the Church was most associated with the interests of the land- 
holders, that a socialist (after World War II a communist) social and polit- 
ical consciousness took root. In the former Austrian lands of the North- 
east, however, where the Catholic clergy was identified with the interests 
of the peasantry, the Church took on the role as a representative of the 
populace, similar to the one it adopted more recently in Poland. The pros- 
perity and local chauvinism of the city-states of northern and central Italy 
further strengthened the centrifugal tendencies of political organization 
across the peninsula and islands as a whole. 

As a result, the achievement of unification has been unable to mask an 
older political and social fragmentation. It amounted to the incorporation 
under one banner — Italy — of a variety of territorial forms of social orga- 
nization and levels of economic development. In the general terms laid out 
by Antonio Gramsci in his writings on Italian political development, uni- 
fication united a capitalist and industrializing North with a largely feudal 
South into a single political unit under the leadership of the northern 
elite. 14 This blocco storico — historical alliance between northern capital 
and southern land — created an economy in which the industry of the 
South was subjected to vigorous and deadly competition from the more 
efficient businesses of the North. Initial advantage, control over fiscal pol- 
icy, and geographical proximity to other industrialized areas in Europe 
combined to give northern business a permanent edge. Unable to defend 
its assets, industry in the South collapsed, and the region became an agrar- 
ian periphery from which taxes and labor were extracted to support the 
continued industrialization of the North. The social consequences of uni- 
fication reverberate still in Italy. While an industrial bourgeoisie and work- 
ing class emerged in the Northwest, in the South there took root a system 
of patron-client relations amid a social structure dominated by landlords, 
peasants, and a petit bourgeoisie dependent on state employment and 
their role as intermediaries between localities and the state apparatus. 15 

If anything, this bifurcation was reinforced by the way Fascism col- 
lapsed and Italy was liberated from German occupation at the end of 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 83 

World War II. The South was invaded by the Allies and wrested from the 
Fascist regime by military conquest. But the area north of Rome, particu- 
larly around and to the north of a line that represented the front between 
the two sides for much of 1944, was liberated in part by the activities of 
clandestine armed bands and by passive resistance to the German occu- 
piers and their neo-Fascist allies in the so-called Republic of Said. These ex- 
periences meant that after the war totally different memories of the years 
1943-45, and thus of Fascism and its costs, prevailed in North and South. 
This was reflected in the results of the 1946 referendum on the monarchy, 
with the North largely against its continuation and the South largely in its 
favor. As a consequence, the idea of the Resistance against Fascism by Ital- 
ians could take root only in the North, where it became a leitmotif of 
postwar politics, particularly on the part of the Communist Party, which 
had played an important role in opposing the occupying power and its lo- 
cal collaborators. 16 

Notwithstanding recent charges that the role of the Resistance in na- 
tional liberation has been exaggerated and that the part armed bands af- 
filiated with the Communist Party played in eliminating political oppo- 
nents as well as war criminals and protecting selective turncoats has been 
largely unexamined, the new Republican constitution of 1948 was un- 
doubtedly a major achievement for the mix of political forces associated 
with the Resistance. That it was also therefore a victory for the republican 
sympathies of the North is less frequently noted. 17 

The terms the North and the South, however, overgeneralize the geo- 
graphical complexity of Italy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth 
centuries, industrial development was concentrated in the northwestern 
regions of Lombardy, Liguria, and Piedmont and in scattered nodes else- 
where. There was tremendous geographical differentiation and specializa- 
tion. Fascism reinforced the existing pattern of industrial concentration. In 
1939, 30 percent of all industrial employees lived in Lombardy, 12.8 per- 
cent in Piedmont and 4.8 percent in Liguria. Only 12.1 percent resided in 
the South and a net total of 15.9 percent in the Veneto and Tuscany com- 
bined. 18 These patterns underline the fact that Fascism was in its origins a 
northern movement committed to restoring stability in northern indus- 
trial and commercial-agricultural areas that had experienced widespread 
labor unrest and revolutionary agitation in the aftermath of World War I. 19 

Italy in general and the Center and the South in particular suffered enor- 
mous economic losses during the last two years of World War II. Most of 
the worst fighting, and the greatest damage, was concentrated in the areas 
of Rome-Naples and Florence-Bologna. The industries of the Northwest 
emerged relatively unscathed and in a position to reestablish their domi- 
nance. Recovery was rapid. In 1948 the national index of industrial pro- 



84 Chapter Five 

duction stood at 102 (1938 = 100), and it climbed steadily in the ensuing 
years, reaching 164 by 1953. Much of the new and expanded industries 
were in the Northwest, in part as the result of a tight credit policy instituted 
in 1947 that extended credit only to firms that were "good risks." 20 

By 1951 Italy had largely recovered economically from the war and 
stood exactly in the middle of the list of fifty-five countries that supplied 
per capita income figures to the United Nations. 21 This figure, however, 
masked major regional and local variation. Though per capita incomes in 
the major industrial centers of the western Po Valley (such as Milan and 
Turin) resembled those of northern Europe, incomes and living condi- 
tions in the South and in most rural areas were more akin to those in Latin 
America or the Middle East (fig. 5.1). Southern provinces, such as Avellino, 
Potenza, and Agrigento, had average incomes less than 20 percent those 
of Milan. Regional industrial contrasts were especially clear. The South, 
with 42 percent of the land and 38 percent of the population, had only 
19.5 percent of the manufacturing labor force and 20 percent of the na- 
tional income. 22 

Over the postwar period, however, even as the Northwest retained its 
hold on the main industrial sectors, the highest rates of economic growth 
occurred in the Center and Northeast, where small firms clustered in spe- 
cialized industrial districts gave rise to the "Third Italy" that has received 
so much comment in relation to the course of Italian economic develop- 
ment. Italian entry into the European Community, opening up export 
markets for small appliances, clothing, and other consumer goods, and 
the increased economies associated with flexible production by small 
firms were important stimulating factors. The existence of artisanal tradi- 
tions of production, local governments oriented to economic growth poli- 
cies, loosely enforced tax and environmental regulations, and the ability 
to exploit family labor were necessary preconditions. 23 

Although national economic development policies consistently fa- 
vored industrial growth in the South, either through subsidies or through 
infrastructure investment, these largely failed because the industries were 
capital intensive and without much stimulating effect (e.g., petrochemi- 
cals in eastern Sicily) or because, for political reasons, the proceeds were 
channeled into housing and public works projects that had little long- 
term impact on economic development. At the same time, however, na- 
tional government income transfers (pensions, unemployment benefits, 
etc.) have raised southern incomes and improved regional levels of con- 
sumption. By the 1980s parts of the South such as Abruzzi, Lazio, and sec- 
tions of Puglia, Basilicata, and Campania increasingly began to experience 
something of the type of small-scale economic development associated 
with the Third Italy. Interestingly, this coincided with the ending of the 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 85 



Rank of Provinces by 
Per Capita Income, 1951 




Figure 5.1 Groups of provinces ranked by per capita income, 1951. Source: based 
on Guglielmo Tagliacarne, // reddito nelle province italiane nel 1973 e confront! congli 
anni 1951, 1971, e 1972 (Milan: Istituto Tagliacarne, 1975), 72. 



special treatment of the South as a whole by Italian governments through 
the instrument of the Cassa del Mezzogiorno, suggesting that the politi- 
cizing of this agency may well have retarded rather than aided southern 
development. 24 

The geographical complexity of serious regional and local economic 
disparities has been reinforced by a remarkably diffuse settlement structure 
(fig. 5.2). Unlike many European countries, in Italy the distribution of 
population and urbanization are not and have not been centered on a 



86 Chapter Five 





1 


^ \ 




\ 


(MILAN/'' 


1 Verona \ / 


Zones of Influence 
and Urban Systems 


— »^\. / Venice 


Turin 9 
/ \ 


WY^ 




^ Major metropolis 






// 


/Genoa /^V^ 


~^:% Bologna 


Regional capital 
• Secondary 




Florence0^ 53/ 








ROME ^^~~~~/^i 


C^T-^-^_ Bari 






• 


! \P[ 1 ^*V? 




i 


Naples 


^^\^ \ I Taranto 




1 

• 

Cagliari 


Palermo 

• 




/\ 


Catania 


100 km 











Figure 5.2 The Italian urban system and the spheres of influence of major cities. 
Source: redrawn from Jacques Bethemont and Jean Pelletier, Italy: A Geographical 
Introduction (New York: Longman, 1983), 38. 



single city or metropolis with regional capitals gravitating around an un- 
mistakably dominant political-economic center. Rather, the Italian urban 
hierarchy is diverse and complex, with two dominant metropolises (Rome 
and Milan), eight regional capitals (Turin, Genoa, Venice-Padua, Bologna, 
Florence, Naples, Bari, and Palermo), and six secondary regional centers 
(Brescia, Verona, Taranto, Messina, Catania, and Cagliari). 25 This hierarchy 
is geographically asymmetrical — complete in the North but with fewer 
intermediate-sized cities in the Center and South. Moreover, whereas the 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 87 

northern hinterlands or zones of influence are coherent, dense, multi- 
functional, and interlinked, the southern hinterland boundaries are 
weaker and zones are less interconnected. 26 The character of the Italian ur- 
ban hierarchy thus pinpoints the contrast between the North and the 
South and the decentralized nature of urban development throughout the 
country. 

Within the geographical framework of this diffuse urban system, Italy 
has experienced a massive redistribution of population since unification, 
most especially since World War II. There has been a large-scale movement 
of people off the land throughout the country, but especially from the 
mountainous interiors of the South. In the 1950s and 1960s many of these 
migrants moved to the industrial cities of the Northwest, to Switzerland 
and Germany (replacing the older destinations of North America and Ar- 
gentina), and to southern cities. Migration from South to North, a hall- 
mark of postwar Italian society, compensated for underdevelopment in 
the former by movement of population to the latter. 27 

Finally, the social and economic inequalities between localities and re- 
gions in Italy have been reinforced by a system of local government that 
divides the country territorially into communes, provinces, and in 1970, 
after many years of dispute, administrative regions. 28 Though notoriously 
centralized, Italian government does allow, particularly at the regional 
level, for some autonomy in initiating policies. This means that local gov- 
ernments can adopt policies in areas such as urban planning, agriculture, 
and industrial development independent of national government control 
and in response to perceived local economic and social problems. Thus ge- 
ographical differences in economic and social conditions also owe some- 
thing to differences in local political capacity and mobilization. For ex- 
ample, some regions, such as Emilia-Romagna, have invested much more 
successfully in various public services and economic development than 
have regions such as Puglia and Calabria. 29 

In Italy, therefore, a relatively short history of unification within a 
single state has combined with a variety of social and economic forces 
to produce, by European standards, a relatively decentralized and frag- 
mented economy and society. It is within this framework that political 
parties, and associated agencies, have had to create national politics. 

PARTIES AND ELECTIONS, 1948-87 

In the immediate aftermath of World War II three large political parties 
(the Christian Democratic Party, DC; the Communist Party, PCI; and the 
Socialist Party, PSI) and a number of smaller ones emerged to replace the 
single-party system of Fascism. Most of the parties traced their organiza- 
tional and ideological roots to the pre-Fascist period. Episodically new par- 



88 Chapter Five 

ties might appear, but none had the staying power of the big three and a 
number of long-standing ancillary parties that entered into alliance with 
one or other of the big ones, particularly the DC. 

The DC was initially dominant in terms of share of the total vote, and 
it remained so until its demise in 1992 (table 5.2). From 1948, when the 
1946 constitution largely went into effect, until 1981 it always provided 
the prime minister, and between 1947 and 1987 it was the largest partner 
in all governments. But it could never govern alone and frequently aban- 
doned coalitions to favor the interest of internal factions in occupying dif- 
ferent cabinet offices or to discipline relations with Parliament, among 
other factors influencing the longevity of governments. 30 More broadly 
based than the Popular Party, its forebear in the pre-Fascist period, it was 
a religious party but also much more than that. The DC drew support from 
a wide range of social strata, particularly in rural areas and small cities in 
the Northeast and in the South. In ideological terms, the DC was divided 
into a set of factions from left to right, whose influence at any particular 
instant determined the overall position of the party. Initially a party of 
local notables in the South and a mass party in the Northeast, it increas- 
ingly became a "syndicate of political machines" across the country as 
a whole. 31 Increasingly geared toward redistributing the resources of the 
state in return for electoral support, the DC attempted to be both a Cath- 
olic and a national party without becoming nationalistic. 32 With the DC 
a party-based trasformismo replaced the dictatorship of Fascism and the 
classic representative-based trasformismo of the pre-Fascist period. 

The main electoral competition for the DC from the secular and na- 
tionalist right came from the Liberal Party (PLI), the Monarchists (PNM), 
and the neo-Fascists (MSI). The PLI represented a secular, conservative tra- 
dition that was important in late nineteenth-century politics but was in 
decline thereafter. Its appeal in the postwar period was largely to upper- 
class groups. The Monarchist Party, absent after the 1960s as a force in na- 
tional politics, was largely confined to Naples and a few other southern 
cities (such as Lecce in Puglia) where antirepublican sentiments were ex- 
ploited to advantage by local notables. The MSI represented another 
atavistic tradition, that of the Fascists. It appealed to a strange alliance of 
aging Fascist Party members and officials, southern notables, some gov- 
ernment employees, military officers, and, in some places, such as Rome, 
adolescents drawn to the party by its antiforeigner and militaristic image. 

The DCs major competition on the political left came from the PCI, the 
PSI, the Social Democrats (PSDI), and the Republicans (PRI). The Republi- 
cans, the most centrist of the group, assumed a radical position more than 
a socialist one. They espoused a modern Italy of limited but efficient, tech- 
nocratic, and honest government rather than government as an agent of 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1 948-87 89 

Table 5.2 National Elections, 1946-2001, Constituent Assembly (1946) and Chamber of 
Deputies, Percentage of Total Votes by Parties (numbers of seats in parentheses) 



Party 3 


1946 


1948 


1953 


1958 


1963 


1968 


1972 


1976 


1979 


1983 


1987 


DC 


35.1 


48.5 


40.1 


42.4 


38.3 


39.1 


38.8 


38.7 


38.3 


32.9 


34.3 




(207) 


(305) 


(263) 


(273) 


(260) 


(266) 


(267) 


(292) 


(262) 


(225) 


(234) 


PCI 


18.9 


31.0 


22.6 


22.7 


25.3 


26.9 


27.2 


34.4 


30.4 


29.9 


26.6 




(104) 


(I83) b 


(143) 


(140) 


(166) 


(177) 


(177) 


(228) 


(201) 


(198) 


(198) 


PSI 


20.7 


— 


12.8 


14.2 


13.8 


14.5 


9.6 


9.6 


9.8 


11.4 


14.3 




(115) 




(75) 


(84) 


(87) 


(9l) b 


(61) 


(57) 


(62) 


(73) 


(94) 


PSDI 


— 


7.1 


4.5 


4.5 


6.1 


— 


5.1 


3.4 


3.8 


4.1 


3.4 






(33) 


(19) 


(22) 


(33) 




(29) 


(15) 


(20) 


(23) 


(17) 


PRI 


4.4 


2.5 


1.6 


1.4 


1.4 


2.0 


2.9 


3.1 


3.0 


5.1 


3.7 




(23) 


(9) 


(5) 


(6) 


(6) 


(9) 


(14) 


(14) 


(16) 


(29) 


(21) 


PLI 


6.8 


3.8 


3.0 


3.5 


7.0 


5.8 


3.9 


1.3 


1.9 


2.9 


2.1 




(41) 


(19) 


(13) 


(17) 


(39) 


(31) 


(21) 


(5) 


(9) 


(16) 


(N) 


PR 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


I.I 

(4) 


3.5 
(18) 


2.2 

(II) 


2.6 
(13) 


DP 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


— 


1.5 

(6) 


0.8 
(-) 


1.5 
(7) 


1.7 
(8) 


PdUP 


















(6) 






MSI 


— 


2.0 


5.8 


4.8 


5.1 


4.4 


8.7 


6.1 


5.3 


6.8 


5.9 






(6) 


(29) 


(24) 


(21) 


(24) 


(56) 


(35) 


(30) 


(42) 


(35) 


PNM 


2.8 


2.8 


6.9 


4.8 


1.7 


1.3 














(16) 


(14) 


(40) 


(25) 


(8) 


(6) 












Others'* 


9.5 


2.5 


2.7 


1.7 


1.3 


6.0 


4.0 


0.8 


2.7 


3.2 


5.8 




(50) 


(5) 


(3) 


(5) 


(4) 


(26) 


(4) 


(4) 


(6) 


(6) 


(10) 


Party 3 




1992 


Party 




1994= 




I996 e 


Party 


200 r 




DC 




29.7 
(206) 


Fl 




21.0 
(99) 




20.6 
(123) 


Fl 




29.5 




PDS 




16.1 

(107) 


PDS 




20.4 
(109) 




21.1 
(171) 


DS 




16.6 




RC 




5.6 

(35) 


RC 




6.0 
(14) 




8.6 
(35) 


M 




14.5 




PSI 




13.6 
(92) 


Lega 




8.4 
(117) 




10.1 
(59) 


RC 




5.0 




PDSI 




2.7 
(16) 


AN 




13.5 
(109) 




15.2 
(93) 


Leg: 


i 


3.9 




PRI 




4.4 
(27) 


PPI 




II. 1 
(33) 




6.8 
(71) 


AN 




12.0 




PLI 




2.9 


Others 


19.6 




17.1 


Others 


18.5 








(17) 






(139) 




(78) 











(continued) 



90 Chapter Five 

Table 5.2 (continued) 

Party 3 1992 Party 1994' 1 996 e Party 2001' 

MSI 5.4 

(34) 

Lega 8.6 

(55) 

Others" 10.8 

(41) 

SOURCE: Ministero dell'lnterno. 

'DC = Democrazia Cristiana, PCI = Partito Comunista Italiano, PSI = Partito Socialista Italiano, PSDI = Par- 
tito Socialista Democratico Italiano, PRI = Partito Repubblicano Italiano, PLI = Partito Liberale Italiano, 
PR = Partito Radicale, DP = Democrazia Proletaria, PdUP = Partito di Unita Proletaria per il Comunismo, 
MSI = Movimento Sociale Italiano, PNM = Partito Nazionale Monarchico (Monarchists), PDS = Partito 
Democratico della Sinistra, RC = Rifondazione Comunista, Fl = Forza Italia, AN = Alleanza Nazionale, 
Lega = Lega Nord, PPI = Partito Popolare Italiano, DS = Democratici Sinistra, M = La Margherita. 

b Parties presented on joint election lists. 

c Ran on PCI lists. 

"Includes South Tyrol People's Party (SVP), Sardinian Action party (PSA), Valdotaine Union (UV), and So- 
cialist Party of Proletarian Unity (PSUIP). The SVP generally accounts for 3 seats; the PSUIP won 23 seats 
in 1 968. The Greens won I 3 seats, with 2.5 percent in 1 987. After 1 992 various center-right factions and 
the anti-Mafia (Rete) vote are important 

e New electoral system. Percentages are from proportional contests, seats are total seats from majoritar- 
ian and proportional contests 

'Percentages are from proportional contests. Fl and its allies, AN and Lega, won 368 seats (86 in propor- 
tional seats, of which 62 for Fl and 24 for AN). DS and its ally, M, won 250 seats (58 in proportional seats, 
of which 3 I for DS and 27 for M). RC won I I seats and others I. 

social change or revolution. The latter, of course, are the espoused goals of 
the Italian socialist tradition going back to the late nineteenth century. 
Though committed to such goals, these parties have been chronically di- 
vided over political priorities and organizational strategies. All had roots 
in Marxism, but for most of the postwar period none was an orthodox 
Marxist-Leninist party. All were "revisionist," but rarely did they agree on 
foreign policy, party organization, and parliamentary democracy. It is 
probably accurate to say, however, that the PCI's positions edged toward 
the others' from the 1960s on. 33 

Of the four parties, the PCI had the strongest organizational base and 
increasingly the most electoral strength. Although always appealing to 
workers, it also enjoyed substantial peasant and lower-middle-class sup- 
port in some localities and regions (particularly some of the regions of the 
former Papal States — Romagna, Marche, and Umbria — and in Emilia and 
Tuscany). Over time its base of voters diversified through appeals to em- 
ployees in general and to some sectors of small business in particular (re- 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 91 

tailers and small-scale manufacturers). The PSI and PSDI came to have 
weaker working-class support. As they lost votes to the PCI they drifted to 
the center and came to rely increasingly on the patronage politics used so 
effectively by the DC. 34 This required access to government office. After 
the early 1960s they became, along with the PLI and PRI, the most im- 
portant potential national coalition partners for the DC. 

The late 1960s and the 1970s were a period of reaction against party 
politics in Italy, as elsewhere. 35 But even as extraparliamentary politics ex- 
ploded onto the streets with revolts from the left and counterrevolution 
from the far right and its Mafia allies, new political parties attempting to 
straddle the gap between the cultures of revolt and electoral politics came 
into the political marketplace. Most of these were on the left and gained 
most of their support in northern cities, notably Proletarian Democracy 
(DP), critical of the compromises of the PCI with the "system"; the Liste 
Verde (or Green Lists/Ecology Party); and for the 1979 and 1987 elections, 
the Radical Party (PR), mobilized around the inequities of the Italian crim- 
inal justice system, social issues such as divorce and abortion law reform, 
and state involvement in the terrorism of the 1970s and early 1980s. 36 

One reason there were so many small parties is that, unlike the United 
States and other countries with simple majority voting in single-member 
constituencies, Italy presented few barriers to entry into electoral compe- 
tition. Under a system of proportional representation with multimember 
districts, a vote for a small party need not be a wasted vote. At the same 
time, parties also served important mediating functions in such a highly 
differentiated society. This encouraged coalition formation to balance ide- 
ological representation against political effectiveness. It also eventually 
produced the systemic corruption of the so-called partitocrazia, or party- 
based political economy, around which many other features of Italian life 
increasingly revolved. Particularly from the mid-1970s, as the DC and PSI 
shared the key positions in national government and formed coalitions 
with one another and smaller parties at other levels of government, the 
parties colonized Italian society by exchanging government contracts and 
public sector employment for financial contributions and electoral sup- 
port. 37 Local-national political links were increasingly oiled nationwide by 
an exchange of favors that was no longer as localized or regionalized, or 
based on conflict between factions in the DC, as corruption had tended to 
be before the 1970s. 38 Judicial exposure of this system finally brought it 
tumbling down in 1992, along with the two parties most implicated in 
it— the DC and the PSI. 

What were the electoral rules whereby the parties competed with one 
another for popular support before the collapse of the First Republic in 
1992 and the imposition of a new electoral system for the national elec- 



92 Chapter Five 

tion of 1994? 39 The electoral system was one of proportional representa- 
tion. Without any threshold of votes needed to qualify for a seat and 
thereby open to the representation of minority interests, this system en- 
couraged the proliferation of political parties and the need to negotiate 
cross-party coalitions after elections in order to form national govern- 
ments. National political elections (elezioni politiche) involved selecting a 
number of members to the Chamber of Deputies and a single senator. Vot- 
ing was by party list and until 1987, if desired, by expressing preferences 
for particular candidates. Election to the Chamber of Deputies was by 
party list in districts ranging from four to forty-seven members. These dis- 
tricts generally group all the provinces of a small region or segments of a 
large region. They closely follow the administrative divisions of the coun- 
try, so it was fairly easy to see the support for specific party lists by com- 
mune, province, and region. Counting votes involved distributing prefer- 
ence votes among parties and candidates. In districts electing fewer than 
sixteen members, up to three names could be marked; in those with more 
members, up to four. Preference voting was always indulged in on a much 
larger scale in the South than in the North (a northern maximum 19.5 per- 
cent rate of preference voting in 1972 compared with a southern mini- 
mum of 44.3 percent in 1976) and by DC voters in Italy as whole and DC, 
PSI, PSDI, and right-wing voters in the South. Preference voting correlated 
highly with clientelistic politics. 40 

Turnout in national elections was exceptionally high, ranging as high 
as 93.8 percent in 1958. After 1979 turnouts dropped, but they remained 
above 80 percent until 1992. 41 Indeed, true rates of participation may have 
been higher because official figures were based on electoral rolls that in- 
cluded people who had moved or died. Registration was and still is auto- 
matic. Geographical differences in turnout were always small (5 to 10 
percent) and probably reflect dated electoral rolls more than systematic 
differences in attitudes to electoral participation. Rates were lower in areas 
of heavy emigration and in the South. Turnouts in all elections (local, na- 
tional, and European) have been much the same. Relatively high rates of 
participation thus were characteristic of all Italian elections and all parts 
of Italy across the period 1947-87. The main parties competed every- 
where, though their claims and strategies often varied significantly across 
constituencies. 42 

THE GEOGRAPHICAL DYNAMICS OF ITALIAN ELECTORAL 
POLITICS, 1947-87 

Italian electoral politics from 1947 to 1987 has been viewed either in 
terms of nationalization and the rise of the individual opinion voter or in 
terms of regional cultures with static political profiles. Alternatively, how- 



Tlte Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 93 

ever, it can be interpreted in terms of three political-geographical "re- 
gimes" in which the places Italy is made from have had different degrees 
of political similarity and difference at different times. This periodization 
of the dominant geographical scale at which electoral politics is expressed 
draws on a number of studies that more or less explicitly adopt the same 
approach but that are largely silent about the idea of a dominant geo- 
graphical dimension for a given period. 43 

It is important to note that throughout 1947-87 changes in the levels of 
support for Italian political parties from one national election to the next 
were small compared with those in such countries as France and Britain. 
But certain realigning elections can be identified when changes were 
greater than usual and involved flows of votes beyond the confines of par- 
ties grouped into the left, right, and center "families" within which votes 
were more typically exchanged. 44 The major shifts occurred in 1948 and 
1953, when the PCI emerged as the main party of the left and the DC as the 
main party of the center; 1963, when the DC lost votes to the right and be- 
gan its collaboration with the PSI and the PCI began its long march toward 
the center; and 1976, when the PCI increased its vote from new voters and 
voters from the center and the DC received votes from the right. 

No previous study has tied these frequently noted national shifts to 
changes in the political geography of electoral choice. Yet these dates seem 
to be critical in the geographical composition of votes as well as to signal 
important realignments at the national scale. Indeed, the general stability 
in votes cast for the main parties at the national level seems to mask im- 
portant shifts at other scales in the overall geographical makeup of voting 
blocs. This best explains what can be called "Mair's paradox" in the Ital- 
ian case, the tendency for many commentators to note changes in the 
overall fortunes of parties without much demonstrable change in the na- 
tional shares of votes cast. 45 

One way of seeing if realigning elections correlate with changes in elec- 
toral geography is to decompose the variance of votes for a major party 
(the DC) in all national elections to the Chamber of Deputies from 1953 
to 1987. 46 Doing this shows that provincial standard deviations around 
national means go up from 1953 to 1968 but drop substantially from 1968 
to 1976, with an ensuing increase from 1979 to 1987 (fig. 5.3). The drop 
is an indicator of nationalization. Before 1963 the regional standard devi- 
ations (regional means around the national means) of the DC vote are 
higher than those within regions (provinces around regional means), 
which, with the exception of 1972-79 when they show a parallel drop, be- 
come ever larger than the regional ones over time. This is an indicator of 
localization after 1979 rather than a reestablishment of the regionaliza- 
tion characteristic of the period before 1963. 



94 Chapter Five 



g 

cc 

> 

a) 
Q 



cc 

c 

C/D 



u — 




9 - 




8 - 






< 
♦ 


7 - 


• *♦ ^ V ^^**""-- 


6 - 
5 - 


\ 

♦ 


A 




H 


1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 



National 



Within- 
Regional 



Regional 



1953 1958 1963 1968 



1972 1976 
Year 



1979 1983 



1987 



Figure 5.3 Decomposition of geographical variance in votes cast for the DC, 
1953-87, at national, regional, and within-regional levels. Source: Author. 



The trend for the PCI is similar except that the regional standard devi- 
ations are consistently larger than those for the DC, particularly after 
1979. This more powerful regionalization effect is not surprising, given 
the well-known retreat of the PCI back into its central Italian heartland af- 
ter the big national success of 1976. 47 

I interpret these findings as follows: a period of high national variance 
for both the DC and the PCI from 1953 to 1963, with regional clustering 
accounting for a significant but declining share of total national variance; 
a period of nationalization from 1968 to 1976 in which the standard de- 
viations at all scales went down; a period of increased national variance af- 
ter 1976 largely accounted for by increased within-region variance, par- 
ticularly for the DC. 

The approach is based on a behavioral notion of degrees of homogene- 
ity in vote percentages at different geographical scales. A more abstract 
view, more in keeping with the discussion in chapter 2, would involve 
how places differ in the ways politics is structured cognitively and emo- 
tionally by the people who live in them. In this view, place directly struc- 
tures the domain of discourse (and choice) and only indirectly structures 
the domain of behavior. Thus there can be a different structuring of choice 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1 948-87 95 

with similarity in behavior. Detailed discussion focusing on what went on 
in different places during the different periods attempts to deal with this 
criticism. 

The Three Geographical Regimes 

Whatever its empirical limitations, the periodizing does help fit together 
elements of the conventional wisdom about the course of Italian electoral 
politics over the postwar period that have remained fragmented and in- 
choate rather than joined together within a larger narrative drama. 48 The 
geography of Italian politics since 1947 can be characterized in terms of 
three distinctive geographical regimes that have dominated in different 
periods. The first regime, dominant from 1947 until 1963, involved a re- 
gional pattern of support for the major political parties based on place 
similarities that clustered regionally. The second, in effect from 1963 un- 
til 1976, witnessed the expansion of the Communist Party out of its re- 
gional strongholds into a nationally competitive position with the Chris- 
tian Democratic Party. This had different causes in different places, but the 
net effect was to suggest a nationalization of the two major parties. The 
third, characteristic of the period since 1976, has seen increased support 
for minor parties, including regional parties such as the Northern League 
(Lega Nord), the geographical "retreat" and political disintegration of the 
PCI and DC, and a more localized pattern of political expression in gen- 
eral, reflecting the increased patchiness of Italian economic growth and 
social change and the crisis of the system of parties after 1992. 

The Regionalizing Regime 

The period 1947-63 is that of the classical electoral geography of Italy es- 
tablished most definitively by Galli and his colleagues. 49 They divided the 
country into six zones based on levels of support for the three major par- 
ties, the PCI, the DC, and the Socialists (PSI), and on the regional-local 
strength of the major political subcultures, the socialist and the Catholic: 

Zone 1, the "industrial triangle," covered northwestern Italy and in- 
cluded Piedmont, Liguria, and Lombardy. This was the region where in- 
dustrial production was concentrated before World War II and where most 
new industrial investment was concentrated in the 1950s. Socialists, Chris- 
tian Democrats, and Communists were all competitive in this region. 

Zone 2, la zona bianca (the white zone) covered northeastern Italy and 
included the provinces of Bergamo and Brescia in Lombardy, the province 
of Trento, the province of Udine, and all of the Veneto except the province 
of Rovigo. The Christian Democrats were most strongly entrenched in this 
region, and opposition was divided among a number of parties. 

Zone 3, la zona rossa (the red zone) covered central Italy and included 



96 Chapter Five 

the provinces of Mantova, Rovigo, and Viterbo; the whole of Emilia- 
Romagna except the province of Piacenza; Tuscany except for Lucca (an 
isola bianco); Umbria; and the Marche except the province of Ascoli Pi- 
ceno. In this region the PCI was most strongly established, especially in 
the countryside but increasingly in the cities. 

Zone 4, the South, included the province of Ascoli Piceno and the re- 
gions of Lazio (except Viterbo), Campania, Abruzzo e Molise, Puglia, Basil- 
icata, and Calabria. This zone was historically the poorest and the most 
marked by clientelistic politics. In the 1950s the Christian Democrats and 
the right-wing parties dominated the zone, but they were faced with in- 
creasingly strong challenges from the PCI and the PSI. 

The final two zones, zone 5, Sicily, and zone 6, Sardinia, had more com- 
plex political alignments than the peninsular South. Though the DC was 
dominant, other parties also had a presence. For example, the PCI was well 
established in the southern provinces of Sicily (especially the sulfur min- 
ing areas), while Sardinia had a strong regionalist party (fig. 5.4). 

There were strongly rooted cultural "hegemonies" (party-based con- 
sensus building) in only two of these zones, la zona bianca and la zona rossa 
(fig. 5.5). However, in electoral terms, support for specific political parties 
was remarkably clustered regionally in 1953: the PCI in the Center, the 
PNM (Monarchists) and MSI (neo-Fascists) in the South and Sicily, the DC 
in the Northeast and the South. In the 1950s Italian politics followed a re- 
gional regime reflecting a similarity at the regional scale of place-based so- 
cial, economic, and political relationships. 50 

But a true regionalism, in the sense of a majority dominance within a 
region by a single party, applied only to the Northeast (for the DC) and the 
Center (for the PCI). This was the result of a true cultural hegemony in 
these regions in which the respective parties stimulated support for them- 
selves and colonized local society through the organization of affiliated 
farm cooperatives, banks, artisanal associations, and recreational facili- 
ties. This helped stimulate economic development in these regions (what 
was later to flower as the Third Italy), but it also made the basis of the par- 
ties' electoral support much more one of identity or belonging that ex- 
tended beyond the act of voting into other spheres of life. 51 

Elsewhere, parties might experience local dominance, perhaps based 
on the charisma or favors of a local politician or notable, but this was not 
akin to the cultural links between party and place in the Northeast and the 
Center. Only in the Northwest were major parties competitors that could 
hope to unseat their opponents. A set of subcultures therefore could plau- 
sibly be seen as structuring and limiting political choices in different re- 
gions but were hegemonic only in the two regions identified as la zona 
bianca and la zona rossa (see chapter 6). 



The Geograpliical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1 948-87 97 



f Zone II - 




Milan. *-M Verona . frieste 
Milan. -v j-i • Venice 
Turin ^^ v» 




Zone 1 - Northwest y^ 




„ * W • Ravenna 
Genoa >» 

) Zone III - Center 




Pisa * Flo'rence 




\f » Perugia /~ 

f 




Rome 

Zone IV - South 


Ban 


Naples 


Taranto 


Zone VI - Sardinia 




Palermo 




Zone V- Sicily 

C' • Catania 




100 km 







Figure 5.4 Map of Italian provinces and the voting regions used by Galli and 
Prandi. Source: redrawn from Giorgio Galli and Alfonso Prandi, Patterns of Political 
Participation in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), 114. 



The Nationalizing Regime 

The second period, 1963-76, marks a break with the regional pattern char- 
acteristic of the 1950s. Two electoral shifts were especially clear: the ex- 
pansion of support for the PCI outside la zona rossa (along with its con- 
solidation inside), particularly in the industrial Northwest and parts of the 
South, and the breakdown of la zona bianca as a number of small parties 
made inroads in the previously hegemonic support for the DC in parts of 



98 Chapter Five 



DC vote 

B> 59.9% 
50 - 59.9 
40 - 49.9 
<26.6 




PCI vote 

40 - 49.9 
30 - 39.9 
26.6 -29.9 
<26.6 




Figure 5.5 DC vote as a percentage of total vote by province, 1953 national 
election (Chamber of Deputies); PCI vote as a percentage of total vote by province, 
1953 national election (Chamber of Deputies). Source: Author. 



the Northeast. The net effect of these changes was a seeming nationaliza- 
tion of the major parties, even though they still maintained traditional ar- 
eas of strength. 

These political changes were the fruit of the major economic and social 
changes Italy underwent in the late 1950s and early 1960s. A major ex- 
pansion occurred in manufacturing and industrial employment, espe- 
cially in the Northwest, as an extraordinary boom or "economic miracle" 
drew the Italian economy away from its predominantly agrarian base. At 
the same time that the industrial centers of the Northwest were experi- 
encing such dramatic economic and social change as a result of the eco- 
nomic boom and massive immigration, the rest of the country was expe- 
riencing shock waves emanating from the Northwest. The extreme south 
of the peninsula (Puglia, Basilicata, and Calabria), with the exception of 
Taranto, the site of a major steelworks built under government auspices, 
had little industry and was a major zone of emigration to the Northwest. 
Where industry was established it created pockets of new social and eco- 
nomic relationships in the midst of a rapidly depopulating rural society. 
In all these places and among immigrants from the South now living in 
the North, the PCI expanded its support in the late 1960s and early 1970s. 52 

The boom of 1959-63 was led by exports, which had accounted for the 
greatest share of growing production from 1955 on. The major products 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 99 

were cars, domestic appliances, and office equipment — mass-produced 
goods not requiring particularly sophisticated technology. Although ex- 
ports surged, the domestic market remained depressed until 1965, when 
the growth of private consumption finally began to run ahead of GNP. By 
the late 1960s, the material quality of life of many Italians, particularly 
in the Northwest, had improved significantly. An Italian consumer soci- 
ety based on nationwide advertising and consumption norms was born. 53 

The economic boom of the early 1960s initially reinforced the histori- 
cal concentration of industry in the Northwest. Some investment went 
into new technologically innovative sectors, but much new employment 
was in older factories that had expanded production without much tech- 
nological change. These industries provided many unskilled jobs with low 
wages and poor working conditions. By the late 1960s workers in these 
factories, many of them recent immigrants from elsewhere in Italy, be- 
came important participants in the strikes and social unrest that en- 
veloped the industrial centers of the Northwest. These protests marked 
the onset of a long period of social conflict that lasted until the early 1980s 
and involved terrorism and counterterrorism as well as strikes and street 
protests. 54 

The cities of the Northwest were completely unprepared for the immi- 
grants who arrived at a dizzying rate in the 1960s. There were not enough 
jobs, schools, housing, or public services. Immigrant ghettos proliferated, 
sometimes in decaying quarters on the fringes of city centers, more fre- 
quently in shantytowns on the outskirts. Their inhabitants faced un- 
pleasant living conditions, unfamiliar and exacting work discipline, and 
persistent hostility from local populations. Not only did they participate 
in strikes and other forms of protest, they also became recruits for the PCI 
and other parties that promised social change. The expansion of the PCI 
in the Northwest in 1963-76 can be traced in large part to these new im- 
migrants. 

The PCI probably also benefited, at least initially, from the explosion of 
new political issues, particularly those associated with the ecological and 
women's movements. These peaked in their national political impact in 
19 75-76. 55 Though relatively open to the questions of environmental 
degradation and women's social inequality raised by these movements, 
the PCI also had to square its newfound enthusiasm for these issues with 
old constituencies more concerned with economic growth and income 
distribution or with maintaining the environmental status quo, particu- 
larly in relation to pollution by small firms in PCI-dominated areas such 
as along the river Arno in Tuscany, and to hunting birds and other wildlife 
in its rural strongholds in central Italy. On many social issues, such as di- 
vorce and abortion, the PCI was also very conservative, compared in par- 



100 Chapter Five 

ticular with the new Radical Party, for fear of alienating the Church and 
possible Catholic voters. Because the larger parties, particularly the PCI, 
had trouble overcoming these divisions, the demands of the more activist 
ecologists led to the growth of new specialized Green parties and moti- 
vated some women activists to create such groups as the Federcasalinghe 
(Housewives Association). An initial boost to the PCI in the early 1970s 
therefore was followed by disenchantment and political fragmentation by 
the end of the decade. 

In addition to the geographical expansion of the PCI, the other major 
feature of 1963-76 was the so-called breakdown of the Catholic subculture 
or dominant position in la zona bianca or Northeast and the subsequent 
loss of DC voters. The argument is that the DC, being largely an electoral 
party rather than a mass party with a large membership, had relied heav- 
ily on affiliated organizations, many of a religious nature, to mobilize its 
support. In the late 1960s, however, as a result of heavy out-migration 
from rural areas in the Veneto, Trento, and Friuli, the constituent subre- 
gions of la zona bianca, and the growing industrialization of some areas 
such as Venice, Treviso, Trento, and Pordenone, the traditional social net- 
works and communal institutions DC hegemony was based on began to 
collapse. Other parties could now make inroads into what had hitherto 
been a region totally dominated electorally by the DC. 56 

The nationalizing political-geographical regime peaked in 1976, when 
the DC and PCI together accounted for 73 percent of the national vote. Al- 
though this trend had distinctive causes relating to the geographically dif- 
ferentiated social and economic effects of the economic miracle and their 
interplay with political and organizational traditions, it was widely inter- 
preted as a permanent nationalization of political life. To be sure, the DC 
and the PCI were now national political parties. The 1976 election seemed 
to seal once and for all the PCI's penetration of constituencies where it had 
previously been weak or where support had stagnated (but not much in 
the former DC strongholds in the Northeast). The party registered gains 
over 1972 of 10.6 percent in Naples-Caserta, 10.9 percent in Cagliari- 
Nuoro (Sardinia), 9.6 percent in Rome-Viterbo-Frosinone, and 9.2 percent 
in Turin-No vara- Vercelli. By the standard of Italian national elections 
since World War II, where swings of 1 to 2 percent were regarded as "vic- 
tories" or "defeats," these were immense swings indeed. S7 

The Localizing Regime 

The 1979 election indicated a much more complex geography of political 
strength and variation than had previously been characteristic. The PCI in 
particular lost ground nationally relative to the most recent elections. But 
since then all parties have been less nationalized than in 1963-76. The 



TJw Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 101 

1983 and 1987 elections suggested a trend toward a localization or in- 
creased differentiation of political expression that continued until the 
even greater political and electoral changes of the early 1990s. In 1983 the 
DC lost 5.4 percent nationally, but the PCI was not the beneficiary. Rather, 
it was smaller parties such as the Republicans (PRI) in the North and the 
PSI and MSI in the South that gained the most. The PSI in particular picked 
up votes and seats in the South from the DC (and in places the PCI), to the 
extent that the PSI's traditional base of support in the Northwest was in- 
creasingly eclipsed by its gains in the South. This "southernization" of the 
PSI had national ramifications in that it turned another party with poten- 
tially national support toward the patronage model of electoral support 
hitherto dominated by the DC as its "southern strategy" of gaining ex- 
change voters affected its nationwide operation. In 1987 the DC recovered 
somewhat from 1983, but without a major geographical expansion. The 
major loser this time was the PCI, which lost ground in the Northeast, the 
Northwest, and some provinces of la zona rossa to the PSI and a variety of 
smaller parties including the Radicals (PR), the Greens, and Democrazia 
Proletaria (DP). 58 

Regional-scale change in this period was modest. Most change was lo- 
calized, with DC and PCI votes, as well as those of smaller parties, experi- 
encing opposing shifts in adjacent districts (for 1979 see fig. 5.6). In addi- 
tion, regionalist parties, such as the Liga Veneta in the Veneto and the 
Partito Sardo d'Azione in Sardinia, and national parties with a reputation 
for honesty, such as the MSI and the PRI, achieved local success but with- 
out much net increase in their total national support. 59 

I examine the localizing regime in two ways. One way is to show how 
increased electoral differentiation followed a restructuring of economic 
and social life during the late 1970s and early 1980s. The second involves 
exploring the failure of the PCI to build on its success in 1976 and linking 
this to locally distinctive social and economic changes. 

One factor in electoral localization was the increasingly differentiated 
pattern of economic change after a previous era of geographical con- 
centration of industry. Although the economic boom of the early 1960s 
concentrated economic growth increasingly in the Northwest, by the 
late 1960s there was considerable decentralization of industrial activity 
out of the Northwest and into the Northeast and the Center. This new pat- 
tern of differentiated economic growth led some commentators to write 
of the emergence of "three Italys" — a Northwest with a concentration 
of older heavy industries and large factory-scale production facilities, a 
Northeast-Center of small, family-based, export-oriented and component- 
producing firms, and a still largely underdeveloped South, reliant on gov- 
ernment employment but with some of the small-scale development (for 




Figure 5.6 Localization of high levels of support for parties, 1979 national election 
(Chamber of Deputies). A, total inhabitants of province; Al = percentage of 
residents in provincial capital; B, if number of inhabitants is more than 1 million; C, 
if number is between 600,000 and 1 million; D, if number is between 350,000 and 
600,000; E, if less than 350,000; F, if a party surpasses a threshold of 50.3 percent of 
the vote; G, if a party surpasses 9.06 but gains less than 18.82 percent; H, if a party 
surpasses 3.85 but gains less than 8.51 percent; I, provincial capitals and dependent 
areas in which no thresholds are passed. Source: Carlo Brusa, Geografia elettorale 
nell'Italia del dopoguerra: Edizione aggiomata ai risultati delle elezioni politiche 1983 
(Milan: Unicopli, 1984), 72. 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1 948-87 1 03 

example, in the vicinity of Bari or Caserta) characteristic of the Third Italy 
(Northeast-Center). 60 This terminology, though useful as a general charac- 
terization of a new economic geography, masks both a much more uneven 
and differentiated pattern at a local scale and the linkages between local- 
ized development and the big firms of the Northwest. High concentrations 
of employment in major growth industries have, in fact, been widely scat- 
tered. Regional patterns are no longer clear-cut. 61 What is apparent is that 
the heavy concentration of industry in the Northwest has diminished at 
the expense of new growth industries in the towns and countryside of the 
Center and Northeast and in scattered locations in the South (fig. 5.7). 

Organizationally, however, the net result has been a reinforcement of 
the national economy's dual structure: the division between relatively few 
giant firms, overwhelmingly headquartered in the Northwest, and myriad 
small workshop businesses in the Northwest and in the Third Italy. The 
big firms that propelled the boom of the early 1960s entered into crisis in 
the 1970s as a result of higher wages prompted by the labor militancy of 
1969-70, the imposition of national cost-of-living increases, and the deep 
world recessions of 1973-74 and 1979-81. They responded by investing in 
automation and laying off main production employees and by decentral- 
izing production away from large factories, where labor unions remained 
strong, to the emerging small-firm sector. The large firms still remain crit- 
ical to important sectors of the Italian economy such as textiles, steel, 
chemicals, automobiles, and electronics, but they no longer have the an- 
tagonistic labor relations they once had. Their factories are no longer cen- 
ters of radical politics or even of necessarily strong support for parties of 
the left. 62 

At the same time, the increasing need for consumer goods industries to 
respond to rapid shifts in product demand led to a massive direct stimu- 
lation of the artisanal and small businesses that were based in industrial 
districts scattered across northern and central Italy, producing clothing, 
shoes, metal goods, musical instruments, and household appliances for 
increasingly global markets. The emergence of long-distance ties, sensi- 
tivity to the failures of the Italian public economy to deliver adequate in- 
frastructure, worries about competitive advantage in global competition, 
and the assertion of local identities against the idea of a southern domi- 
nance over national government and its agencies (such as the post office, 
the railways, and the schools) produced a very different orientation to na- 
tional politics in those places now tied directly into the world economy. 63 

The geographical shifts in manufacturing industries were closely corre- 
lated with growing per capita incomes where they are situated. Those 
provinces that experienced the greatest income growth in the late 1970s 
and early 1980s tend to be in the Center and Northeast (e.g., Pordenone, 



104 Chapter Five 



Economy 

Industrial 

Mixed 

Agriculture 




Figure 5.7 Economic localization in Italy in 1981: three types of provincial 
economy. Source: Brusa, Geografia elettorale nell'Italia del dopoguerra, 75. 



Bologna, Modena, Arezzo) or in the vicinity of Rome (e.g., Latina, Frosi- 
none), precisely the areas where new industrial development has been 
most concentrated (the prealpine belt from Bergamo to Pordenone, the 
Emilian corridor from Milan to Bologna, northern Tuscany from Pistoia to 
Arezzo, and certain provinces of the northern Mezzogiorno). 64 This trend 
has brought greater disposable incomes to hitherto deprived areas and 
changed the basis on which people orient themselves to politics. In some 
places this has involved greater secularization, elsewhere it has meant a re- 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 105 

treat from forms of recreation dependent on organizations affiliated with 
the Communist Party, such as the case del lavoro (local centers for recre- 
ational and political activities), into more private pursuits. Either way, 
opinion voting has opened up for those previously locked into either ex- 
change or identity voting. However, this has produced not nationalization 
but, on the contrary, a more fragmented and localized electoral politics. 65 

Other factors have also contributed to the localizing political- 
geographical trend from the late 1970s to the present. One was the failure 
of the parties to successfully adapt to social and economic change. In 
Trento and Udine (in the Northeast), for example, the DC had problems 
adapting to the new economy. In large parts of the South and the North- 
west, the PCI was unable to capitalize on earlier successes mainly because 
in the South it neither had control over the state resources that lubricate 
the politics of many parts of that region nor was able to build a permanent 
following. In the Northwest its major vanguard of unionized workers was 
much reduced in economic importance at the same time that the other 
parties had become better organized and that the particular problems of 
the southern immigrants, whom the PCI had previously recruited as vot- 
ers, had largely receded from the political agenda. 66 

The emergence of effective regional governments in Italy as whole 
since 1970 also reinforced the localization of interests and sense of place. 
Where parties have achieved some strength and legitimacy through con- 
trol over regional governments, they have been able to build local coali- 
tions for national politics based on the pursuit of local interests. The PCI, 
for example, benefited from its control of or participation in the regional 
governments of Emilia-Romagna, Tuscany, and Umbria, but it suffered 
elsewhere, and other parties such as the DC and the PSI benefited, because 
of its lack of control over patronage jobs and inability to write regional po- 
litical agendas. 67 

The former successes of the DC in la zona bianca and the PCI in la zona 
rossa rested to a degree on the social institutions they were affiliated with 
(unions, cooperatives, clubs, etc.) as well as on social isolation. However, 
the shifting orientations of these institutions and the rise of the consumer 
society opened up possibilities for smaller parties. There is some evidence 
that, after the late 1960s, ties between the DC and the PCI and their sup- 
portive organizations, especially the unions for the PCI, had weakened. 68 
The parties themselves were responsible for some of this. To expand na- 
tionally, they often had to abandon or at least limit the ideological appeal 
that served so well in areas of traditional strength. They also had to re- 
spond in some areas to new movements such as the Greens, which opened 
them up for both factionalism and essentially localized forms of organi- 
zation and ideology. 69 



106 Chapter Five 

More generally, political parties do not always travel well. Thus, in 
comparing northeastern with central Italy, the question of compatibility 
between party style and local style arises. In the mid-1970s, in a compari- 
son of the two regions where the DC and the PCI exerted their greatest in- 
fluence in the 1950s and 1960s, la zona bianca in the Northeast and la zona 
rossa in the Center, Alan Stern noted 

the evolution of two very different forms of political hegemony, 
each with distinct characteristics that necessitate sharply contrast- 
ing forms of maintenance. The Christian Democratic variety that 
flourishes in northeastern Italy is fueled efficiently by stable social 
organization that deemphasizes the place of politics in community 
life. In comparison the communist variant thriving in central Italy 
accents the urgent attention that political matters should command 
among the local citizenry and thereby constantly reaffirms the rela- 
tively recent sense of legitimacy that underlies PCI control. 70 

Of course these hegemonies always had local roots, and in some localities 
their power has been quite visible and persistent, although, as Mario 
Tesini has suggested for Bologna, things could have turned out quite dif- 
ferently if key politicians had made different choices. 71 

Finally, between 1987 and 1992 the system of parties in place since the 
end of World War II unraveled (see chapters 7-9). As a result of the end of 
the Cold War and disputes over the meaning and appropriateness of the 
term communist, the PCI regrouped as two new parties, the larger Partito 
Democratico della Sinistra (PDS) and the smaller hard-line Rifondazione 
Comunista (RC). As a result of investigation of systematic corruption in 
their operations, the PSI collapsed and the DC disintegrated into three 
separate parties, the Partito Popolare to the center-left and two smaller fac- 
tions to the right. The Fascist MSI was reborn as a new "post-Fascist" con- 
servative party, Alleanza Nazionale, and in 1994 a new party organized by 
the media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, Forza Italia, attempted to replace the 
DC on the center-right. The proliferation of smaller parties continued. But 
a new electoral system, in effect for the first time in 1994, forced parties to 
look for coalition partners before elections so as to run more effectively for 
the 75 percent of seats decided by majority votes in single-member dis- 
tricts. The other 25 percent of seats remain under the previously dominant 
system of proportional representation for candidates from party lists in 
multimember districts. By 1996, with the federalist-separatist Northern 
League a potent electoral force in many parts of northern Italy, all parties 
save Forza Italia and the PDS were now largely local or regional in 
strength. 72 Even these two parties must coalesce with some of the others 
to achieve national-government office. In 2001 Forza Italia allied with the 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1 948-87 1 07 

Alleanza Nazionale and the Northern League to achieve a winning coali- 
tion against the Democratici Sinistra (former PDS) and La Margherita, an 
electoral alliance made up of the Partito Popolare and others on the cen- 
ter-left. Even though in 2001 Forza Italia achieved success in large parts of 
Italy in its own right, the local strength of different parties means that sup- 
port for all parties today is more obviously localized than it was in 1976 or 
in the 1950s. 

A second type of exploration of the localizing regime focuses more 
specifically on a major aspect of the period between 1976 and 1987: the 
decline of the national PCI vote in the critical period immediately after its 
success in 1976. This is often put down to the disillusionment of new PCI 
voters with the PCI's historical compromise with the DC (quietly sup- 
porting the government but having no direct role in it) between 1976 and 
1978. After that initial setback, however, the trend of retreat continued in 
the 1980s, with the Center and, somewhat ironically, the Northeast as the 
only regions in which earlier gains were largely retained. But the pattern 
of losses was not a simple reversal of previous geographical expansion. 
The loss pattern was variegated, with 1976-79 losses greater than 1972-76 
gains in Puglia and Sicily and in Trieste, proportionate losses in Lazio and 
a number of southern provinces, and losses smaller than earlier gains in 
Liguria, in parts of the Northeast, and in the Center. 73 

As a guide to what might have been responsible for this variegated pat- 
tern of gains and losses, stepwise multiple regression analysis is of some 
use. 74 A number of variables indicating social and economic conditions by 
province can be used to predict PCI losses: the presence and intensity of 
various economic sectors, unemployment, level of schooling, urbaniza- 
tion, the availability of public assistance, and the number officially un- 
employed but "unavailable" — a measure of those working unofficially or 
off the books. Analysis can be conducted nationally and by region to see 
to what extent results are different at different geographical scales. 

Of nine variables that survive elimination from the original ten, dif- 
ferent combinations of five variables best predict the PCI losses at the 
national and regional scales (table 5.3). Nationally, two occupational 
variables are noteworthy: PCI vote loss varies inversely with working 
unofficially and directly with unemployment rate, indicating lighter 
losses where the underground economy is strongest and heavier losses in 
areas of high unemployment. These results mask a more complex geo- 
graphical picture, however. The precise relationships of the variables to 
losses differ from one region to another, suggesting the limitations of 
national-level analysis in the absence of nationalization. 

Different processes seem to have been at work in bringing about PCI 
losses in different regions. In the Northwest, vote loss was positively asso- 



Northwest 


-0.50 


+0.36 


"Zona bianca" 


+0.73 


+0.18 


"Zona rossa" 


+0.42 


-0.53 


South 


+0.22 


+0.41 


Italy as 






a whole 




+0.45 



108 Chapter Five 

Table 5.3 Predicting the Loss of PCI Votes, 1976-79, at National and Regional Levels 

(I) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) r» 

-0.26 -0.54 +0.66 0.71 

-0. 1 I -0.34 0.96 

+0.22 -0.26 -0.61 -0.57 0.67 

+0.12 -0.26 -0.24 0.46 

-0.10 -0.15 -0.44 -0.09 0.61 

SOURCE: Renato Mannheimer, "Un'analisi territoriale del calo comunista," in Mobilita senzo movimento: Le 
elezioni del 3 giugno 1979, ed. Arturo Parisi (Bologna: II Mulino, 1 980), 88. 

NOTE: Results use nine independent variables by province. 

(1) Rate of urban concentration (population resident in communes with more than 1 00,000/total resident 
population). 

(2) Rate of unemployment (unemployed/resident population, 1977). 

(3) Cost of living increase (percent increase 1976-77) 

(4) Percentage of value added in agriculture. 

(5) Percentage of value added in industry. 

(6) Percent of value added in services. 

(7) Percentage of those listed as "not available" on list of those unemployed (1977). 

(8) Number occupied in industry/resident population (1975) 

(9) Minimum pensions/total pensions, 1976 (a measure of indigence). 



dated with socioeconomic variables such as prevalence of industrial em- 
ployment and higher unemployment rates, signifying greater losses in in- 
dustrial provinces with higher unemployment. Lesser losses occurred in 
urban centers with higher levels of value added in services. In all other re- 
gions, however, urbanization and vote loss are strongly associated, signify- 
ing perhaps greater electoral mobility among those regions' urban voters. 

In the South, the regression model has poorer fit to the pattern of PCI 
vote loss (r 2 = 0.46), though vote loss again correlates positively with un- 
employment and inversely with the underground economy and service 
employment. Other factors not measured in this analysis, such as a de- 
mobilization of 1976 voters as a result of general alienation and the in- 
creased trend toward voter volatility in the South as old exchange net- 
works broke down, may also be important in the region. 

In la zona rossa losses were greatest in provinces that were most urban 
and least where unemployment was higher and more people were em- 
ployed in industry and in the underground economy. In la zona bianca 
losses were greatest in more urbanized areas and in those with high un- 
employment and high value added in agriculture. Interestingly, therefore, 
PCI losses between 1976 and 1979 varied inversely with unemployment 



The Geographical Dynamics of Italian Electoral Politics, 1948-87 109 

in la zona rossa and positively in la zona bianca. Equally curious is the ab- 
sence of much of a relation between the underground economy and loss 
of PCI votes in la zona bianca but a powerful inverse one in la zona rossa 
(indicating lower losses where the number of unofficially employed is 
higher). 

This can be explained in terms of the continuing mediating effects of 
local social networks and community traditions in the two zones. Under 
conditions of dramatic economic restructuring and rapid social change 
such as affected Italy in general and the two zones in particular in the 
1970s, the unemployed and those in irregular employment in la zona rossa 
continued to look to the PCI. In la zona bianca, however, the unemployed 
and those insecurely employed turned away from the PCI after previously 
being drawn to it in 1976. 

The contrasts between provinces captured by the regional-level analysis 
indicate the plurality of processes associated with electoral choice leading 
to the loss of votes for the PCI in 1979. The analysis also reveals that the 
onset of the localizing regime involved the appearance of different bal- 
ances of processes in different places that could not be captured by a single 
Italywide conception of what had happened. A "one size" national model 
could not fit the complex processes governing the emergence of the new 
geographical regime. Rather, the regional differences in paths to the loss of 
votes by the PCI suggest "the existence of distinct logics that, in different 
contexts, govern the process of the formation of the vote." 75 

CONCLUSION 

The nationalization of electoral politics has been a major theme of recent 
political science. It is certainly clear that what happens locally and re- 
gionally cannot be divorced from consideration of forces emanating from 
national-scale institutions and processes. In particular, in Sidney Tarrow's 
words, "penetration, standardization, and incorporation" by national 
states have transformed the nature of what goes on anywhere, however 
imperfectly and unevenly. 76 But this does not mean that processes of 
political socialization and action now are essentially national. To the 
contrary, local socioeconomic settings and long-distance influences (in- 
cluding national-state ones) now create the contexts for continuity and 
change in popular political behavior. Agency and social influences come 
together in place. 

The Italian case illustrates the importance of the geography of political 
behavior. The balance between places and the national state is uneasy and 
unstable. Places can throw up politics that are not functional for the state; 
for example, support for antisystemic, antiregime, separatist, and ethnic 
movements. Italy has often attracted the attention of foreign commenta- 



110 Chapter Five 

tors precisely because of the dysfunctional attributes of its electoral poli- 
tics. But the possibility of a geography to its dysfunctionalism has never 
attracted equivalent attention. It was the inability of the major parties to 
make themselves sufficiently attractive in enough places across the coun- 
try that produced the coalition governments characteristic of Italian elec- 
toral politics. Conversely, smaller parties with specific local or scattered 
constituencies failed to appeal elsewhere. The lack of alternation between 
conservative and progressive governments in Italy over the period 1948- 
87 was symptomatic not simply of an institutional blockage that could 
be resolved by constitutional tinkering 77 or by admission of the PCI into 
coalition government, 78 but rather of enduring and emerging sociogeo- 
graphical differences that have frequently resulted in regional and local 
rather than truly national political parties. 79 

This point has been missed by "nationalizing intellectuals." The na- 
tional state is not a transcendental object that empowers "its" population 
to make political choices. It is dependent on the political patterns that 
places construct. It is as much at their mercy as they are at the national 
state's. Political nationalization therefore is not an immanent force over- 
coming yesterday's local communities in the interest of national moder- 
nity. Rather, it is a historically contingent result of electoral choices made 
under the pressure of distinctive socialization processes in different places. 



CHAPTER 6 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and 
Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 



Intense loyalty to local football (soccer) clubs has become an important 
feature of everyday life for people all over Europe, especially young men. 
Nowhere is this more the case than in Italy, where fanatical adherence to 
"the team" recalls older forms of identification with the local community 
generally referred to in Italian as campanilismo? In the region of Tuscany 
(Toscana) in central Italy, the Florence team, Fiorentina, has the largest 
mass following of any major Italian football team, reflecting the promi- 
nent position that the city of Florence has occupied historically within the 
region. However, in the province of Lucca, to the west of Florence between 
the Apennines and the Ligurian Sea, Juventus of Turin, one of the arch- 
enemies of Fiorentina in contemporary Italian football, has thirteen sup- 
porters' clubs to Fiorentina's five, a figure roughly three times as great as 
for any other Tuscan province. This is because the population of Lucca, a 
separate republic independent of Tuscany until 1847, has a political his- 
tory and identity distinct from the other Tuscan provinces. Even when 
there is no local team capable of challenging Florence's, many lucchesi 
throw in their lot with a successful team in distant Turin rather than con- 
vert to support for Fiorentina. 

Lucca therefore appears to contrast with the rest of Tuscany. This is not 
news. Lucca is famous in Italy in other respects than its football affilia- 
tions. Above all, Lucca has long been seen as an isola bianca, a white island, 
in the sea of la zona rossa. It is the most important geographical outlier of 
a zona bianca largely confined to the Northeast. In the years from World 
War II until its collapse in 1992, the Christian Democratic Party was the 
majority party in both national and local politics in the province of Lucca. 
The province immediately to the east, Pistoia, was for many years seen as 
a stronghold of the Italian Communist Party. They can be considered ad- 
jacent examples of the two territorial subcultures that many commenta- 
tors have seen as dominating Italian politics down the years. In fact, the 
hold of the two political traditions in the two provinces has long been less 

111 



112 Chapter Six 

than total. In particular, the domination of the Christian Democrats in 
Lucca diminished beginning in the 1950s, while Pistoia's Communist 
Party increased in strength from the 1950s to the 1970s. This chapter ex- 
plores the political history of the two provinces to establish an alternative 
to two largely fixed subcultures as a way of thinking about the origins and 
course of political affiliations. 

In recent social science local political difference has been viewed either 
as residual, fading under the onslaught of modernization and its political 
twin national identity (as in the nationalization thesis explored in chapter 
5) or as primordial, related to a cultural drive in which culture is viewed as 
a fixed bundle of traits and beliefs formed in the distant past and repro- 
duced unwittingly by local populations (explored in this chapter). In stud- 
ies of Italian politics these have been the dominant perspectives. The resid- 
ualists, the majority group among students of Italian politics, have stressed 
the slow emergence of the modern individual engaged in opinion voting, 
with a decline in political action based on group identity or clientelism. 
The primordialists have emphasized the impact on political activities and 
voting behavior of relatively fixed regional cultures or subcultures, espe- 
cially the Catholic subculture of northeastern Italy, the socialist subculture 
of central Italy, and the clientelistic subculture of the South and Sicily. 

After a review of these positions, I shall briefly propose an alternative 
perspective drawn from the argument of chapter 2. This approach sees lo- 
cal political difference as an aspect of the working of place in which culture 
is dynamic — a set of practices, interests, and ideas subject to collective re- 
vision, changing or persisting as places and their populations change or 
persist in response to locally and externally generated challenges that are 
never trapped at a single scale of expression but are the result of a histor- 
ical formation and restructuring of processes across a range of geographical 
scales. I then turn to interpreting Italian electoral politics since World War 
II, first in terms of the ideal types of red and white subcultures and then in 
relation to the local histories of the two Tuscan provinces. These two 
provinces are chosen to illustrate the two interrelated themes of this chap- 
ter: that what is possible politically is defined by the evolving cultures of 
specific places, and that these neighboring provinces, representing an ex- 
ample of each of the two territorial subcultures of postwar Italy, the red 
and the white, illustrate the ways distinctive local cultures were established 
and have evolved rather than remained fixed in place as local exemplars 
of white and red territorial-subcultural ideal types. 

MODELS OF TERRITORIAL SUBCULTURES 

There are perhaps three specific models that rely on fixed territorial- 
subcultural conceptions of political action: regional taxonomies of cul- 
tural traditions; historical studies of local political cultures; and sociolog- 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 113 

ical studies of party-government and political-subculture links. For rea- 
sons outlined later, none of these models is satisfactory. 

The first involves identifying the most fundamental geographical divi- 
sions in voting behavior in terms of subcultural homogeneity. A num- 
ber of taxonomies have been proposed, the earliest being that of Mattei 
Dogan in 1967, the most influential that of Vittorio Capecchi et al. in 
1968, and the most recent those of Roberto Cartocci in 1987 and Fausto 
Anderlini in 1987. 2 Over time, the taxonomies have shifted from a tripar- 
tite regional division — Northeast, Center, and South, with the Northwest 
as a "residual" region not easily characterized in subcultural terms — to an 
emphasis on the importance of the North/South division (Cartocci) and 
local functional regions defined partly in cultural terms (Anderlini). 3 

A second primordial model focuses on local areas with a long history of 
political homogeneity, such as red areas with strong support for the Com- 
munists (PCI) in central Italy 4 or white areas with strong support for the 
Christian Democrats (DC) in the Northeast. 5 Emphasis is placed on the 
persistence of political alignments in the face of economic and social 
change, suggesting that political cultures defined in the past continue to 
control later political behavior. 6 Unlike the American literature, there is a 
positive tendency to see political culture as rooted in and emanating from 
local social institutions (especially clubs and associations) rather than as 
directly internalized psychologically by individuals. 7 

The third model focuses on local institutions, particularly the domi- 
nance in them of particular political parties and particular organizational 
cultures. For some commentators local political systems, elsewhere as well 
as in Italy, when dominated by a single political party and political entre- 
preneurs of a particular complexion, use jobs, personal favors, and a dom- 
inant local ideology to produce local populations with commitments to 
that party. 8 The tautological nature of this position (dominance produces 
dominance) has led others to introduce subcultures as a kind of social glue 
or mediating variable for particular parties and their appeal. In examining 
the recent economic success of northeastern and central Italy, for ex- 
ample, Carlo Trigilia and Arnaldo Bagnasco argue for the importance of 
local party dominance and social traditions in jointly creating the condi- 
tions of consensus and mediation of diverse interests necessary for the de- 
velopment of the dynamic small firms that have prospered in these Ital- 
ian regions. 4 Subcultures, party dominance, and economic growth thus 
form a virtuous circle in these regions, whereas by implication they do not 
do so elsewhere, especially in the South. 10 

AN ALTERNATIVE PERSPECTIVE 

All these models share a primordial definition of culture and an orienta- 
tion toward continuity rather than change in political behavior. There are 



114 Chapter Six 

four specific drawbacks. First, they give little if any attention to the re- 
construction of historical-geographical sequences in the development of 
Italian politics. Geography is seen in static rather than dynamic terms. 
Once established at a critical juncture in the past, cultural differences 
simply reproduce themselves through their association with some places 
rather than with others. Second, there is little emphasis on the local area 
as a theater of activities from which emerge social and political commit- 
ments and political change influenced by events and processes emanating 
elsewhere. Rather, the local is seen in terms of isolated cultural emergence 
and persistence, resistance to change, and the overwhelming weight of 
tradition. 

Third, only some regions or localities are viewed as integrated com- 
munities with territorial subcultures. Elsewhere, again especially in the 
South, communities are viewed as without the consensus or bonds of faith 
and trust that are taken as indicative of true subcultures. 11 The problem 
here is that those who cannot have a subculture pinned on them are left 
with no culture at all! David Kertzer has suggested that the term hege- 
mony be reserved for those settings where political parties have acquired 
a certain role in consensus and institution building and that the term sub- 
culture be dropped altogether so that all Italians can be thought of in cul- 
tural terms rather than just those in the Northeast and the Center. 12 

Fourth, culture, especially political culture, is seen in static and deter- 
ministic terms. Opinions, captured in surveys at particular points in time, 
are regarded as constitutive of political culture, which in turn becomes a 
black box of values and beliefs used to explain the selfsame opinions. To 
avoid this tautological dead end, culture is better thought of as a structure 
or system of signification (set of symbols and commitments) defining the 
range of possible actions (political and other) that a group or individual 
can undertake in a given society. 13 More particularly, a political culture can 
be thought of as defining the limits of the possible in political life, the 
intersubjective framework to which individual actors bring their own at- 
titudes, values, interests, and personalities. 14 Percy Allum brilliantly sum- 
marizes this perspective: 

It can be affirmed, by reformulating a noted saying, that, "culture 
proposes, man disposes." Further, however, I would underline that 
political culture is not static, even if it is persistent: it changes over 
time even if slowly, as taught in the 18 Brumaire of Marx, and 
changes above all in the course of political struggles that totally re- 
structure practices and "systems of signification," so that the "sense" 
of yesterday is not always the "sense" of today, and alternative 
politics that were unthinkable yesterday become suddenly possible 
today. 15 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 115 

What is possible politically, therefore, is defined by the evolving cul- 
tures of specific places. Over time these can be more or less distinctive, but 
however similar or different, they are formed from the bottom up, out of 
everyday life. This does not mean that political dispositions are created in 
geographical isolation. That has been the fallacy of so many community 
studies. 16 Different places have different relationships to the national 
state, international economy, and secondary social organizations such as 
churches, labor unions, and political parties. These differences affect the 
nature of local political cultures as local life adjusts to external challenges. 
The outcome of this process of social structuring is the geographically dif- 
ferential appeal of different political parties and movements that changes 
over time as changing local cultures propose and local people dispose. 

RED AND WHITE TERRITORIAL SUBCULTURES 

The so-called red and white subcultures in Italy have been viewed pre- 
dominantly as regional-territorial entities in which voting has been 
largely based on identity or sense of belonging as a result of the political 
and extrapolitical domination exercised in the red and white zones by a 
single political party — the DC in the case of la zona bianca and the PCI in 
the case of la zona rossa. 

The studies of Carlo Trigilia are perhaps the most sophisticated among 
established approaches in formulating a clear definition of the concept of 
territorial political subculture as expressed in the two zones. 17 He identifies 
four fundamental elements to the concept: localism or local identity (a 
center-periphery fracture); a widespread and ideologically oriented net- 
work of associations; a sense of belonging to the territory and the network 
of associations that represents and rules it; and a local political system 
based on consensus around a specific political force capable of aggregat- 
ing and mediating different local interests and representing them at the 
national level. 

The major origins of both subcultures are traced to the agrarian crisis of 
the 1880s, the birth of mass politics in northern and central Italy at that 
time, and subsequent developments in the establishment of political 
movements and affiliated organizations in the years between 1880 and 
the onset of Fascism. Their consolidation as distinctive territorial subcul- 
tures is seen as reflected in the voting patterns that emerged after the col- 
lapse of Fascism (beginning with the 1946 election) and the significant 
differences between the two zones and between both and the rest of the 
country in referenda on political, economic, and social issues. 18 

The following three sets of indicators represent the empirical counter- 
parts of these historical-geographical claims: 

I. The organized presence of Catholic and socialist movements in the 
pre-Fascist period, with particular emphasis on mass participation in local 



116 Chapter Six 

associations (illustrated by the occurrence of and memberships in cham- 
bers of labor, producer and consumer cooperatives, rural banks, unions, 
religious associations) but also involvement in national and local elec- 
tions (shown by the composition of local councils and by election results). 

2. The results obtained by the DC and by the PCI plus the Socialists (PSI) 
in the Constituent Assembly election of 1946. Provinces are considered 
part of the respective territorial subcultures if for the two groupings they 
have votes above a 45 percent threshold. The 1946 election is chosen be- 
cause it was the first free election after Fascism with universal adult suf- 
frage (all men and women over twenty-one) and had a high turnout (89.1 
percent). 

3. The results of referenda by province indicating the substantive ideo- 
logical difference between the territorial subcultures (e.g., on divorce, 
abortion, electoral rules, government wage policy) and their differences 
from elsewhere, particularly their high degree of internal consensus. 19 

Using these criteria, the following provinces can be classified as in la 
zona bianca: in the Veneto and Friuli regions of the Northeast, Padova, Vi- 
cenza, Verona, Treviso, Belluno, Trento, Udine, Pordenone, and Gorizia; 
in northern and eastern Lombardy, Como, Sondrio, Bergamo, and Brescia; 
in Tuscany, Lucca; in Piedmont, Cuneo and Asti; in Liguria, Imperia; and 
in Abruzzi, L'Aquila. Often, however, it is the geographically contiguous 
provinces of the Northeast (from Como in the west to Gorizia in the east) 
that tend to be associated primarily with la zona bianca as a territorial sub- 
culture. But the concept should be extended to cover all the areas the cri- 
teria apply to even if they are not contiguous with the core area in the 
Northeast. 

La zona rossa is more difficult to define definitively because the relative 
weights of the PCI and PSI in the aftermath of World War II indicated 
somewhat divergent strains in the general socialist subculture. Giordano 
Sivini claims there are two subareas to la zona rossa, depending on the dif- 
ferent historical roots of socialism. 20 The first, the Mantova model, cover- 
ing the Po Valley provinces of Rovigo, Mantova, and Parma, is one where 
the PSI share of the vote held up after 1948. The area has a tradition of 
class politics based on agricultural laborers and their unions. The second, 
the Reggio model (covering the provinces in Emilia-Romagna of Reggio 
Emilia, Modena, Bologna, Ferrara, Ravenna, and Forli; La Spezia in Lig- 
uria; Pistoia, Firenze, Pisa, Siena, Livorno, Grosseto, and Arezzo in Tus- 
cany; Perugia and Terni in Umbria; and Pesaro e Urbino in Marche) is one 
where the PCI increasingly dominated from 1948 to 1976 and is charac- 
terized by a long history of sharecropping (mezzadria) and a strong con- 
nection between town and countryside. 

Notwithstanding their obvious differences, the two territorial sub- 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 117 

cultures have also emerged from similar social and economic processes. 
There are perhaps four major historical-geographical similarities, as 
noted by Trigilia and others. 21 First there is the tendency to privilege the 
communal-territorial, particularly city/countryside differences rather than 
class in social mobilization, but also the defense of local society against 
the impact of the market and the state (the periphery against the center). 
Second, there is a powerful territorial institutionalization of social move- 
ments both by means of social control over members and by the exten- 
sion of that control into power within local and regional political institu- 
tions. Third, this locally based cross-class solidarity has been rewarded by 
a polity that functions by mediating between social forces and the state 
administration. The organized representation of particularistic demands 
emanating from the institutions (and parties) of the two territorial sub- 
cultures permits a leverage over the central government that more disor- 
ganized interests and geographically diffuse social groups are unable to 
command. Finally, each of these territorial political subcultures has grown 
in counterpoint to the other. Their mutual ideological antagonism, based 
respectively in Catholic anticommunism and socialist anticlericalism, re- 
ceived a powerful fillip from the international situation after World War 
II, when the Cold War division between a capitalist-Christian West and a 
communist-atheist East actually ran through Italian national politics, 
with the DC claiming the former side and the PCI the latter. 

Typically, however, the stories of the two zones diverge in the details, 
even as each is seen as the outcome of a set of path-dependent conjunc- 
tures and crises reaching back to time immemorial. The characteristic 
story of la zona bianca combines a history of small-scale peasant propri- 
etorship with strong ties to local Catholic institutions (particularly the 
parish and its priests) and the Catholic political party (the Popular Party 
before Fascism, the DC afterward). The agricultural crisis of the 1880s was 
mitigated by the activities of parish priests in developing linked institu- 
tions to provide services to small-scale farmers in the countryside and to 
organize their production. During the years of Fascism the influence of the 
Church led to a decisive break with the oppositional politics of the pre- 
Fascist period. In its place Catholic Action, a direct instrument of the 
Church hierarchy, provided a continuing link between Church and local 
society in the areas previously organized from the bottom up. This activ- 
ity was particularly important in extending the political role of the 
Church from the countryside into the towns. After the collapse of Fascism, 
the Church led a crusade to establish the DC as its primary agent in the 
new republic, using the party as a means for aggregating local interests 
and mediating them before representation in Rome. The towns remained 
rather less integrated into the white subculture than did the countryside, 



118 Chapter Six 

revealing the continuing importance down the years of the agrarian crisis 
of the 1880s. 22 

The typical story of la zona rossa emphasizes the first years of the twen- 
tieth century when socialist organizing on a large scale became legally 
possible; the division between the socialists and the communists after the 
schism of Livorno (1921); the targeted destruction of socialist institutions 
by Fascism; the resistance, active and passive, to Fascism that reemerged 
in the countryside and consolidated in the last years of World War II; and 
the advantage the PCI gained as a result of its role as the primary orga- 
nizer of the defense of localities against the remaining Fascists and their 
German allies during the hostilities in central Italy in 1944-45. 23 These 
events produced quite different political affiliations in different areas. In 
the Po Valley, where capitalist agriculture had created a strong class poli- 
tics based in rural labor unions the PSI inherited this older class-based so- 
cialist tradition. The PCI was the beneficiary in those areas, particularly 
where sharecropping was widespread, in which the intransigence of rural 
wage laborers "was subordinated to the possibility of betterment of the 
working class though the development of a more rational use of produc- 
tive assets." 24 In this latter case, more strictly analogous to the character- 
istics of la zona bianca, after World War II the PCI became the mediator be- 
tween a variety of local interests and attracted support from across social 
classes. A municipal socialism based on efficient and honest local govern- 
ment became the ruling model in these areas and found expression in an 
increasing political hegemony for the PCI. 

La zona rossa therefore has both more variety than la zona bianca and a 
very different institutional history. The differences between the two zones 
on the whole, however, can be identified fairly systematically (table 6.1). 
This has been done at some length by Patrizia Messina. 25 I provide an 
overview of the main points she makes. For la zona bianca, she isolates as 
fundamental the identification with the Church rather than the state, the 
defense of small-scale private property, and the role of the DC as instru- 
mental in helping the local social world rather than as consummatory (an 
end in itself). Two specific aspects of the white political subculture are re- 
garded by Messina, and the writers she draws from, as crucial to the white 
subcultural zone. First is the type of political socialization characteristic of 
the zone. This emphasizes private solutions based on predominantly 
Catholic values in which local government responds to specific demands 
and conflicts left over by private efforts at resolution. The second aspect is 
antistate localism, which refers to the tendency to limit politics to essen- 
tially negative activities such as the defense of property and of local tradi- 
tion against the power of the national state. This creates local politics of 
an aggregative type, exchanging votes for favors across a range of local in- 



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120 Chapter Six 

terests. Apparently based on attachment to Catholic teaching, this system 
is reinforced by the absence of a civil religion or by attachment to a set of 
public values. Without the glue provided by the matrix of Catholic insti- 
tutions, the conception of politics is suited solely to the defense of partic- 
ularistic interests. 

For la zona rossa, on the contrary, it was the centrality of the cleavage 
between capital and labor, united by a social base in a population drawn 
from sharecroppers and agricultural wage laborers and, above all, by the 
historical experience of anti-Fascism, that created the conditions for a lo- 
cal politics favorable to the left and its main agencies, the PSI, the PCI, and 
the unions. In other words, the red zone has a politics based in political 
experience rather than reflecting prior social affiliations. Two features of 
the red subculture stand out. First is the politicization of society. By this is 
meant the predominance of the public and the political over the private 
and the social. Identification with the PCI and the historical left is based 
on their commitment to the public sphere as the arena where inequalities 
will be addressed. The second aspect, municipal socialism, is based on the 
direct intervention of government in local life to favor the unemployed 
and poor but also to provide financial help to cooperatives and public ser- 
vices (such as elementary education). This local politics is of an integrative 
type in which political choices are made locally and intervention follows 
based on a set of priorities. Political participation is highly valued, to the 
extent that protest involves deliberately leaving ballots blank in elections 
rather than abstentionism, or failing to go to vote, as in zona bianca. An 
increase in abstentionism in la zona rossa could be read as an indicator of 
subcultural crisis, showing how far political participation has ceased to 
have the centrality it once had in a highly politicized setting. 

This approach to the two types of political subculture is undoubtedly 
helpful in laying out the main dimensions of similarity and difference be- 
tween two Italys whose political affiliations provided the geographical 
heartlands for the two political parties that dominated Italian national 
politics from 1948 to 1992. But as with all ideal types, this way of think- 
ing encourages a greater sense of historical path dependence than recent 
history suggests is wise. 

Long before the renaming and division of the PCI (1990) and the disap- 
pearance of the DC (late 1992), both parties had begun to lose their hold 
within their territorial subcultures. 26 In its increased ideological drive to 
the political center to succeed nationally, the PCI had to sacrifice both its 
ideological purity (such as its Soviet affiliation) and its Utopian cast. At the 
same time, the changing economy of its strongholds (including the shift 
from agriculture to small-scale industry), consumerism, and the decreasing 
hold of affiliated organizations over leisure time undermined its cultural 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 121 

centrality and decreased the politicizing of society. By the 1980s the DC 
was in even greater trouble in maintaining its central role in a society 
where Catholic values, the traditional way of life, and the network of local 
associations to which it had committed itself were all disintegrating un- 
der pressure from secularization, consumerism, and a Europeanized export 
economy that the local type of politics was not created to respond to. 

LUCCA AND PISTOIA 

Lucca and Pistoia are interesting provinces from the perspective of this 
chapter because in conventional primordialist terms each represents a 
particular territorial subculture: Lucca, the Catholic subculture {la zona 
bianca) and Pistoia, the socialist subculture (la zona rosso). Although each, 
especially Lucca, can be reasonably protrayed as culturally distinctive, it is 
important to stress three points at the outset: 

1. Their political complexion has not remained static over time with a 
simple onset followed by a set pattern, implying a simple historical path 
dependence based on a set of relatively fixed territorial traits 

2. Different communes (comuni) within the provinces have changed 
over time politically in ways different from as well as similar to other com- 
munes, suggesting much more local variation than the model of territo- 
rial subcultures implies 

3. The perspectives of local politicians and locally based writers offer in- 
teresting insights into the dynamic character of political affiliations and 
their basis in changing social, economic, and political realities 

The major purpose of this section is to explore these three points and 
suggest from the "place perspective" how the cultural contexts of Lucca 
and Pistoia have changed to help produce the sequence of regimes at a na- 
tional level described in chapter 5. This is a complement to the approach 
of the previous section and draws from it in offering a more dynamic ac- 
count of red and white Italys in the evolution of Italian electoral politics 
in 1948-92. 

The Provinces 

The provinces of Lucca and Pistoia are in northern Tuscany, north of the 
river Arno to the west-northwest of Florence (fig. 6.1). One of the oldest 
autostrade (four-lane highways) in Italy, dating from the 1930s, the 
Firenze-Mare, runs through the two provinces and connects them to Flo- 
rence. In 1981 Lucca had a population of 388,904 and Pistoia one of 
267,151. The six communes chosen for study, all of which grew in popu- 
lation between 1960 and 1990 and experienced considerable economic 
development, especially small-scale industrial development, had the fol- 
lowing populations in 1981: Lucca, 91,246; Capannori, 44,041; Porcari, 



122 Chapter Six 




Figure 6. 1 Map of northern Tuscany showing the provinces of Lucca and Pistoia, 
the six communes referred to in the text, and the communes of Florence and Pisa. 
Source: Author. 



6,699; Pistoia, 92,274; Quarrata, 20,350; and Monsummano Terme, 
16,511. 

Politically, the two provinces and the six communes are diverse (table 
6.2). In terms of electoral support for the two largest Italian political par- 
ties over the period 1946-92, Lucca and its communes have been more 
dominated by support for the Christian Democrats than have been Pistoia 
and its communes by support for the Communist Party. However, each 
province tended to go through three phases. In Lucca, 1946-58 was a pe- 
riod of consolidation of support for the DC. From 1963 to 1976 the PCI 
emerged as a major competitor as the DC vote initially fell but thereafter 
generally was maintained. After 1976 support for the DC fell, much more 
in communes other than the three selected here, but parties other than 
the PCI, especially the PSI and the Greens, gained in support. In Pistoia 
1946-58 was a time of balance between the two major parties, except in 
Monsummano Terme, where there was an early dominance by the PCI. 
From 1963 to 1976 the PCI moved ahead of the DC, even though the DC 
remained the major opposition party. After 1976 the PCI vote stagnated 
and then declined and the DC vote decreased substantially, with other 



Table 6.2 Results of National Elections, Constituent Assembly (1946) and 
Chamber of Deputies (1948-2001) in the Provinces of Lucca and Pistoia and in 
Three Communes in Each 







1946 






1948 






1953 






1958 






T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 














(FDP)* 












Lucca 


87.6 


48.0 


13.6 


91.3 


61.2 


21.6 


93.1 


51.9 


17.8 


92.4 


54.1 


15.7 


Lucca 


85.4 


49.5 


12.2 


92.5 


63.8 


16.2 


94.8 


54.9 


15.8 


94.8 


56.5 


12.5 


Capannori 


89.3 


48.8 


9.9 


92.9 


63.1 


16.6 


93.1 


55.8 


16.7 


91.7 


61.0 


14.6 


Porcari 


92.6 


46.5 


11.8 


93.7 


60.9 


21.4 


95.3 


55.8 


22.8 


94.0 


56.6 


21.4 


Pistoia 


94.5 


29.8 


34.5 


95.2 


40.1 


47.2 


96.4 


35.0 


37.1 


96.1 


34.5 


37.8 


Pistoia 


93.4 


28.7 


34.4 


97.1 


39.7 


47.2 


96.9 


34.4 


37.3 


97.0 


34.4 


37.5 


Quarrata 


94.0 


24.3 


42.3 


95.7 


50.3 


39.3 


97.4 


46.6 


28.3 


97.5 


46.8 


29.2 


Monsummano 


























Terme 


94.2 


20.8 


46.9 


96.1 


32.5 


55.2 


96.9 


26.4 


49.4 


96.7 


24.0 


50.4 






1963 






1968 






1972 






1976 






T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


Lucca 


93.5 


47.2 


17.7 


94.1 


45.8 


21.0 


94.6 


47.3 


23.0 


95.1 


47.6 


29.9 


Lucca 


95.2 


49.7 


13.3 


95.5 


49.2 


15.6 


95.9 


51.6 


16.8 


96.5 


54.2 


22.8 


Capannori 


94.6 


55.7 


15.7 


94.2 


53.6 


20.6 


94.6 


57.5 


21.4 


94.2 


56.5 


27.0 


Porcari 


94.1 


49.7 


23.4 


94.6 


48.4 


28.8 


96.0 


49.6 


30.2 


96.6 


47.9 


38.3 


Pistoia 


96.6 


30.2 


42.7 


96.3 


30.3 


44.6 


96.5 


30.2 


45.3 


96.5 


30.7 


50.5 


Pistoia 


98.5 


30.1 


41.5 


96.9 


30.1 


43.4 


96.9 


30.2 


44.1 


97.2 


30.4 


49.8 


Quarrata 


97.1 


43.6 


36.5 


97.5 


42.0 


40.9 


97.2 


41.8 


42.0 


96.3 


40.1 


47.3 


Monsummano 


























Terme 


96.0 


20.3 


56.0 


96.2 


21.6 


56.4 


96.3 


20.1 


56.4 


96.5 


22.6 


62.2 






1979 






1983 






1987 






1992 






T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


T 


DC 


PCI 


Lucca 


92.5 


45.1 


27.9 


90.7 


39.0 


28.1 


90.6 


38.7 


26.1 


— 


— 


— 


Lucca 


94.8 


50.3 


21.4 


91.5 


42.9 


21.6 


90.9 


42.1 


19.8 


83.7 


36.6 


1 1.6 


Capannori 


92.2 


54.4 


25.3 


90.4 


49.9 


25.4 


90.6 


48.3 


23.6 


82.7 


45.9 


13.2 


Porcari 


95.4 


45.2 


35.1 


93.4 


42.6 


34.3 


94.0 


41.5 


30.8 


86.0 


41.4 


17.9 


Pistoia 


94.5 


29.8 


48.7 


92.5 


25.4 


48.9 


93.3 


35.7 


45.4 


— 


— 


— 


Pistoia 


94.7 


29.3 


47.2 


91.7 


25.2 


47.6 


94.0 


25.5 


44.2 


85.6 


21.9 


27.9 


Quarrata 


95.2 


39.3 


45.6 


93.2 


34.6 


45.8 


93.5 


34.9 


41.7 


84.3 


30.3 


25.0 


Monsummano 


























Terme 


95.1 


23.6 


58.6 


93.8 


17.8 


57.7 


93.1 


20.1 


54.0 


84.9 


16.9 


36.1 






1994 






1996 






2001 










T 


Fl 


PDS 


T 


Fl 


PDS 


T 


Fl 


DS 


M 




Lucca 



























Lucca — 19.8 15.8 79.3 16.5 16.7 81.2 27.3 15.7 17.7 

(continued) 



124 Chapter Six 

Table 6.2 (continued) 

1994 1996 2001 

T Fl PDS T Fl PDS T Fl DS M 

Capannori — 21.1 17.6 75.7 17.9 18.3 79.8 27.0 17.7 16.5 

Porcari — 21.9 21.1 81.6 16.2 19.8 79.8 27.0 17.7 16.5 

Pistoia — — — — — — — — — — 

Pistoia — 16.7 32.2 83.9 14.4 33.8 86.4 22.4 30.8 12.3 

Quarrata — 19.6 28.9 81.8 16.8 29.2 86.4 22.4 36.8 12.3 

Monsummano 

Terme — 19.5 38.2 82.5 18.3 37.6 85.6 24.5 29.2 10.0 

SOURCES: 1946, 1948: M. Gabelli, "Toscana elettorale 1946 e 1948," Quaderni dell'Osservatorio E/et- 
torale 20 (1988): 199-308; 1953-68: Giunta Regionale, Dalla costituente alia regione: II comporta- 
mento elettorale in Toscana dal 1946 al 1970 (Florence, 1972); Giunta Regionale, // comportamento 
elettorale in Toscana: Una prima interpretazione, Regione Toscana, (Florence, 1 975); 1 976-83: Giunta 
Regionale 1976, 1979, 1983, 1987, Elezioni Senato e Camera 1976, 1979, 1983, 1987, Regione 
Toscana, Florence; 1992, 1994, 1 996: Regione Toscana, Elezioni 1992, 1994, 1 996; 200 1: Ministero 
dell'lnterno. 

NOTE: Table shows turnout (percentage of eligibles voting) and percentages DC, PCI, Fl, PDS/DS, 
and M (see table 5.2). 

a FDP = Fronte Democratico Popolare (including PCI), 1948 



parties such as the PSI acquiring the "lost" votes. However, in one of the 
communes, Quarrata, the DC maintained its position much more than in 
the others. Since 1992 the DC has disappeared in both provinces, replaced 
electorally to a very limited extent by Forza Italia, which now must share 
the former DC vote with the three factions into which the DC disaggre- 
gated, and the PCI has given way to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra 
(PDS) and Rifondazione Comunista (RC). Though PDS (DS in 2001) is by 
far the dominant party on the left, RC has acquired some local strength in 
the province of Pistoia, particularly in more rural areas. The coalition of 
the DS and La Margherita (incorporating the left-of-center of the former 
DC) was a winning one throughout much of Pistoia and Lucca in 2001, 
suggesting that Forza Italia is not the natural successor to the DC in either 
province. 

Overall, these trends are similar to those for Italy as a whole described 
in chapter 5. Save for the general lack of balance between the parties in 
sharing the total vote across the two provinces, there is no total electoral 
domination over the entire period by either party in either province. By 
British and American standards, dominant party majorities are relatively 
modest. In the 1950s, however, DC and PCI hegemonies (ascendancy in 
social and political life based on social consensus) were in formation, al- 
though the DC hegemony in Lucca was much the stronger of the two. In 
the 1960s the DC and the PCI became competitive on what had been each 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 125 

other's turf, even though one-party dominance was maintained or en- 
hanced. After 1976 a greater heterogeneity in patterns of support for all 
political parties is apparent. Today neither the DC nor the PCI exists, 
though each has descendants that vie for popular support. The old hege- 
monies are gone, but differences persist in local politics, if of a much lesser 
subcultural importance. 

What was it about the two provinces that drove them in such opposing 
directions politically from the 1940s to the 1980s? Interviews with local 
politicians in 1989 and again in the early 1990s, some active in the 1950s 
and others in the 1980s, a survey of local party newspapers, and a number 
of local scholarly studies suggest the importance of six themes, although 
the last three are more subject to dispute among the sources than are the 
first three. These themes are the role of the Fascist period and its aftermath 
following from the political organizing efforts of both whites and reds at 
the close of World War I; the local sense of place or identity with histori- 
cal roots; the nature of associationism; the degree of party organization; 
the character of industrial relations; and the history of connectivity to the 
larger Italian and world economies. In approximate order of importance, 
these are the themes that local sources suggest are crucial in understand- 
ing the post-World War II political courses of the two adjacent provinces 
in northern Tuscany. 27 

The themes parallel, if in a different order and with some overlap be- 
tween them, the six sets of causes of place-based variation in political dy- 
namics laid out in chapter 2 (numbers in parentheses refer to ordering of 
causes in the list in chapter 2, pp. 21-26): first (6, 4), the role of political 
movements (socialist, Catholic, and Fascist) in stimulating local political 
and social organization and appealing to local interests at the same time 
that they integrate places into the country (Italy) as a whole; second (1), 
the microgeography of everyday life, sense of place, and the creation of 
communities of fate; third (1), social group formation through place- 
based associational memberships; fourth (6), the post-World War II dy- 
namics of party organization (particularly of the DC and the PCI); fifth (5), 
local labor/capital antagonisms and their reflection in industrial relations; 
and sixth (2, 3), the changing linkages of the places (Pistoia and Lucca) 
within wider spatial divisions of labor and communication networks (par- 
ticularly transportation). Obviously, in each case the three dimensions of 
place as described in chapter 2 — locale, location, and sense of place — are 
implicated in different degrees and to different effect. 

Both Lucca and Pistoia were the scene of major social and political or- 
ganizing in the countryside in the years immediately before and after 
World War I. In the areas where small peasant proprietorship prevailed, 
the Plain of Lucca and between Pistoia and Prato (Quarrata), rural savings 
banks affiliated with the Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI) put down roots un- 



126 Chapter Six 

der the powerful influence of Don Orazio Ceccarelli, an activist Catholic 
priest in Quarrata. 28 But the PPI also addressed itself to the problems of the 
sharecroppers who predominated elsewhere by encouraging membership 
in the leghe bianche or white leagues. Indeed, the dominance within the 
PSI of maximalist socialists, with little interest in local institution build- 
ing and much in the powers of revolution, meant that the PPI was more 
successful because it was more realistic and more concrete in its proposals. 
What is more important here, however, is that it was competitive in Pis- 
toia in the way that socialist organizations were not in Lucca. At least in 
this part of la zona rossa, how red the area would finally be was up for de- 
bate and struggle. 

In the town of Pistoia a strike at the San Giorgio railway works in 1919 
signaled the local arrival of the workplace conflict over wages and work- 
ing conditions then afflicting large parts of industrial Italy. This was fol- 
lowed by layoffs in most of the major industries in both Lucca and Pistoia 
that had been stimulated by wartime demand for their engineering and 
textile products. Invasions of shops by workers and others led shopkeep- 
ers into the arms of local Fascists looking for opportunities to intervene. 
But total industrial employment was still relatively small and situated in 
large factories such as the textile mill of La Cucirini Cantoni Coats, out- 
side Lucca, and the railway carriage factory of San Giorgio (later La Breda) 
in Pistoia. The resistance of rural proprietors to reform of the sharecrop- 
ping system was a much more important source of local Fascism than the 
odd local industrial strike. In 1920-21 Fascist squadrismo, involved in the 
intimidation and destruction of both socialist- and Catholic-affiliated or- 
ganizations, came to Lucca and Pistoia. Fascist recruits came primarily 
from the urban middle class (war veterans, students, public employees, 
shopowners in the city centers), whereas the leaders were usually lawyers, 
pharmacists, and businessmen. August 1921 saw the invasion of Pistoia by 
Fascists from Prato and Florence. By 1922 Catholic as well as socialist and 
communist buildings were attacked and destroyed; for example, // circolo 
comunista in Serravale on 10 January and // circolo cattolico in Spazzavento 
on 13 August. The Valdinievole district of western Pistoia was a particular 
target of Fascist violence, because the local resort town of Montecatini was 
congenial to Fascists and many of the surrounding areas, such as Mon- 
summano Terme, were strongholds of the PSI. 29 

Most of the enterprises founded in the preceding years by both 
Catholic and socialist-communist organizations disappeared under Fas- 
cism. Of the more than sixty rural savings banks in the province of Pistoia 
in 1920, only ten were left by 1945. As one Pistoia DC politician put it in 
the local party newspaper in 1975, "Fascism laid bare the work of the 
Catholic movement in Pistoia." 30 The devastation wrought on socialist- 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 127 

communist organizations was even more complete. These had to start 
from scratch during the resistance period of 1943-45. Catholic Action did 
provide a legitimate outlet for Catholic recruiting activities, which was to 
the advantage of the DC after World War II. But this hardly compensated 
for what had been lost. In particular, Fascism saw the deepening of hostil- 
ity between sharecroppers and proprietors without the possibility of the 
self-help of the rural organizations for the sharecroppers that had briefly 
revealed their promise immediately after World War I. 31 

It was the memory of this resentment and the dreadful events of the 
"civil war" or anti-Fascist struggle in northern Tuscany in 1943-45 that 
figure so prominently in local accounts of the appearance of such differ- 
ent political trajectories in Pistoia and Lucca once peace arrived in late 
1945. 32 Typically, the Resistance is pictured as a Communist myth, a vital 
part of the image that the Communists stood largely alone in their active 
and subversive opposition to the Fascist regime. It is also tied to the idea 
that out of the experience of the Resistance came an affiliation with the 
Soviet Union as the model communist society. Certainly this aspect of af- 
filiation with the PCI seems to have had significance for the postwar gen- 
eration of Communist militants. Places in Tuscany where membership 
rates for the PCI were highest in 1945-46 were also those where PCI votes 
were highest in the 1946 national election, indicating a high degree of 
popular mobilization. This appears to correlate in turn both with a high 
incidence of Resistance activity in 1943-45 and with previous support for 
socialist and PPI candidates before Fascism, the garnering of the newly en- 
franchised female vote, and the successful recruitment of support by the 
Communists from among extended sharecropping families. 33 

But in both Lucca and Pistoia, politicians across the political divide — 
not surprisingly most vociferously those who came of age in the 1940s — 
wished to establish their credentials as resisters of Fascism. So it is not just 
PCI militants who want to claim a heritage in 1943-45 when locals bat- 
tled Fascists and German Nazis in the hills of Pistoia and Lucca. One writer 
in La Provincia di Lucca (a publication of the DC-oriented Lucca Chamber 
of Commerce), for example, argues that the Resistance was not a red phe- 
nomenon at all. Using letters from condemned resistance fighters, he 
shows their idealistic focus on patriotic themes — a sort of second Risorgi- 
mento rather than a precursor to either revolutionary government or lo- 
cal autonomy. 34 The myth of the Resistance, therefore, has been exploited 
to advantage by the two provinces' DC politicians, even if it has been less 
central to them than to the PCI politicians of Pistoia. 

A second theme is that of local sense of place or identity. This is com- 
mon to both written sources and interview subjects. Lucca's social distinc- 
tiveness is particularly addressed in this way. Lucca's long independence as 



128 Chapter Six 

a separate state, the containment of the historic city by splendid walls, the 
preservation of possibly the most numerous Romanesque churches of any 
single Italian city, the physical distinctiveness of the Plain of Lucca with its 
small farms scattered about the generally flat landscape, and the great man- 
sions of Lucca's merchant elite distributed around the countryside define a 
landscape quite different from the small cities, mountains, and intensively 
cultivated valleys and slopes of much of the rest of Tuscany. 35 

This Luccan sense of difference is said to encourage a certain political 
complacency, even among the poor. The clerical presence, rather than be- 
ing hierarchical and alien, is fused into the everyday life of city and coun- 
tryside. According to one informant, a longtime Communist activist in 
Lucca, the city and its environs provide an "absorbent setting" for con- 
flicts: differences are "never brutal," and although by the 1980s local busi- 
ness boosters had taken control of the DC, the spirit of the popolari (the 
pre-Fascist Partito Popolare) and a cautious attitude toward religious 
dogma characterized even the most partisan of the Catholic population. 36 
This understanding helps explain why in the divorce referendum of 1974, 
an issue on which the Church took a hard stand, many DC activists and 
voters in Lucca drifted away from the party opposition to legalizing di- 
vorce and supported maintaining the divorce law in place since 1970. 37 
The creation of a new tier of regional governments in 1970, after years of 
national DC opposition for fear it would further institutionalize PCI 
strength in regions such as Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, further isolated 
Lucca as an isola bianca, at least initially. By the late 1970s, however, in- 
creased support for the Socialist Party in Lucca could be put down to an 
attempt at indirect lucchese rapprochement with the PCI-dominated re- 
gional government (the PCI and the PSI were allies in the regional gov- 
ernment from 1970 on), proving that local identity need not always be al- 
lowed to work against local interests. 

The more characteristically Tuscan landscape of the Valdinievole and 
the Apennine valleys to the north and west of Pistoia, with their associa- 
tions with the case coloniche (characteristic farmhouses) of extended share- 
cropping families, seem to physically represent the collectivism implicit 
in that type of agriculture and the wide range of skills it stimulated and 
that later were harnessed in the growth of small-scale industries. The hard 
life of the sharecroppers (mezzadre) is a recurring theme of the PCI news- 
paper in Pistoia, La Voce, in the 1950s, as is Pistoia's lagging behind other 
Tuscan provinces in its average standard of living. In 1966 Pistoia had the 
lowest per capita income of all Tuscan provinces and was fiftieth out of 
ninety-two in the whole of Italy. 38 It is in this context of a relatively high 
level of poverty among a population with collective work habits that we 
can find at least part of the appeal of the PCI's collaborative approach to 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 129 

economic development. At the same time, however, little or nothing can 
be said about widespread anticlericalism across the province. Relatively 
low levels of church attendance in heavily communist areas do not trans- 
late into an equivalently high level of anticlericalism. Particularly since 
the 1950s, the antagonism between Church and state that supposedly was 
one inspiration for the socialist subculture of central Italy has been largely 
missing from the province of Pistoia. 39 In addition, unlike the province of 
Lucca, whose border has had a long history as a state boundary, Pistoia was 
created as a province only in 1927. As an administrative product of Fas- 
cism, therefore, Pistoia's administrative history has rather run against its 
increasingly PCI political complexion in the postwar years. Subdivisions 
within the province, such as Valdinievole, the area around Montecatini, 
and Quarrata, have a greater salience in popular place identities than do 
small areas in the province of Lucca, where even the residents of the 
mountainous northern Garfagnana seem to identify with the province as 
a whole and the city of Lucca in particular. 40 

The nature of associationism is a third theme that many local politi- 
cians and local studies identify as important to the difference between the 
two provinces. It is not that associationism (a high level of participation 
in locally oriented social groups and voluntary associations) is present in 
one and absent in the other. Both Lucca and Pistoia have relatively exten- 
sive participation in voluntary organizations and such entities as cooper- 
atives. The main difference between the provinces seems to lie in the 
greater importance of cooperatives and work-related associations in Pis- 
toia and of voluntary, often Church-related organizations in Lucca. But 
even this contrast is not absolute, and much recent associationism is 
without either formal Church or PCI sponsorship or linkage. 

The more rural and, traditionally, largely sharecropping parts of the 
province of Pistoia, such as the communes of Monsummano Terme, Lar- 
ciano, and Lamporecchio and the periphery of the commune of Pistoia 
have had the highest rates of membership in cooperatives since the 1950s, 
when they were first formed under PCI auspices. Since 1979 Unicoop, a 
"superco-op," has displaced older consumer cooperatives in response to 
the challenge of new commercial supermarkets. But on the whole Pistoia 
has a lower level of involvement in cooperatives of all kinds than other 
parts of Tuscany (except Lucca) and Emilia-Romagna. 41 

Coldiretti, the organization for Catholic owner-occupier farmers, served 
a role in Lucca similar to that of the cooperatives in Pistoia until the 1970s. 
Other Catholic-affiliated organizations oriented more to leisure and cul- 
tural activities also began to lose public support in the 1970s. But the 
volontariato (charitable organizations) have maintained more of a role 
than have the economic ones. Some of these are officially sanctioned by 



130 Chapter Six 

the Church; others, particularly ones of a cultural nature, such as theatri- 
cal and choral groups, have sprung up from dissenting groups and from 
outside Church influence altogether. At the same time, charitable entities, 
such as the Church-sanctioned ambulance service Misericordia, are active 
in Pistoia as well as in Lucca and, at least in the early 1990s in Pistoia, in- 
volved open Communists as well as DC supporters among their active 
members. Disillusionment with shifts in party policy has also produced 
open breaks between local associations and the parties. A good example of 
this was the defection of local hunting groups in the Valdinievole and 
elsewhere in Pistoia from the PCI in the late 1980s because of the party's 
national stance against hunting, a policy designed to attract largely urban 
Green voters to the party. The new associationism of the years since the 
1970s is therefore intensive, but without the political-sectarian overtones 
of the older variety discussed in models of the territorial subcultures. 42 

Three other themes are more disputed by local interviewees with re- 
spect to their effect on the electoral geography of the two provinces. The 
first is party organization. This is where path dependence or, better, insti- 
tutional inertia plays a role. A fairly common refrain is that those places 
where parties put down roots most successfully at auspicious moments are 
precisely the ones where those parties have maintained a hold. Where par- 
ties did not manage this, electoral politics has been a more competitive af- 
fair, without the built-in bias in favor of one party at the expense of oth- 
ers. The provinces of Lucca and Pistoia each offer good examples of both. 
In the first case, there are communes, such as Monsummano Terme for the 
PCI in Pistoia and Capannori for the DC in Lucca, in which at critical mo- 
ments after World Wars I and II party capacity and local conditions 
formed a virtuous circle. In the second case, as with the seaward com- 
munes of Lucca (La Versilia) and with Quarrata in Pistoia, neither the DC 
nor the PCI achieved a stranglehold on outlooks and votes at critical 
moments. On balance, however, the DC in Lucca managed to establish a 
stronger hold in its province much earlier than did the PCI in Pistoia. 
There are limits, therefore, to seeing the red and white provinces as mirror 
images. If the two provinces are any guide, party organization and local 
electoral strength are much more contingent on very localized historical- 
geographical conditioning than suggested by the causal arrow from social- 
geographical characteristics to electoral outcomes in the models of the 
two territorial subcultures. 43 

It is also reasonably clear that the two parties also began to lose their 
capacity for popular mobilization around singular party images at about 
the time, between 1958 and the early 1970s, they achieved electoral dom- 
ination within their respective provinces. This is indicated by declining 
numbers of party memberships for the PCI as a result of immigration and 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 131 

the slow dissolution of the PCI's link with the Italian General Confedera- 
tion of Labor (CGIL) and increased factionalism within the DC caused by 
local businesses and ideological differences (over, for example, the Viet- 
nam War), challenging Church affiliations as the centerpiece of the DC 
coalition. Even as they peaked electorally, therefore, the PCI and DC or- 
ganizational-ideological foundations were beginning to crack. 44 

Not surprisingly, the character of industrial relations, or more broadly 
capital-labor relations, is emphasized by the PCI interviewees and sources. 
Since many of them had backgrounds as labor organizers for the Com- 
munist-affiliated CGIL unions, they provide considerable knowledge of 
labor relations in the two provinces. Some DC politicians in Pistoia, how- 
ever, also highlight the importance of labor struggles between their affili- 
ated Italian Confederation of Labor Syndicates (CISL) unions and the 
CGIL ones on the fortunes of the party in the province. 45 But they and 
their political opponents agree that it is the memory of labor struggles in 
the past, particularly in the late 1940s and early 1950s, as much as con- 
temporary conditions that drives the impact of labor relations on politi- 
cal affiliations and voting behavior. 

The two most important points made are that conflicts between land- 
owners and sharecroppers took place in Pistoia rather than in Lucca and 
that there was a more successful organizing of industrial workers by PCI- 
affiliated CGIL unions in Pistoia. The first point is seen as obvious because 
except in a few areas (such as the communes of Altopascio, Montecarlo, 
and Porcari) the province of Lucca had a smaller share of its agricultural 
land devoted to sharecropping than did the province of Pistoia. Even 
though sharecropping has faded enormously as an economic fact of life in 
contemporary Pistoia, the memory of its depredations and the PCI role 
in challenging it lives on and helps fuel political attachments to this 
day. Bear in mind, however, that the province of Pistoia was never totally 
dominated by sharecropping as a type of landholding (compared, say, with 
the province of Florence) and that Lucca and Pistoia were similar in hav- 
ing much more fragmented patterns of landholdings than such Tuscan 
provinces as Siena and Florence. 46 

The second point requires more elaboration. Neither province has ever 
had much of an industrial working class in the classic sense. What existed 
before World War II was concentrated in a few large factories in the 
provincial seats: the textile mill of Cantoni Coats and the tobacco factory 
in Lucca and the San Giorgio (later La Breda) works in Pistoia. In Pistoia, 
however, the workers were organized earlier and affiliated with socialist 
unions before Fascism. Union organizers also endeavored to politicize 
sharecroppers and agricultural laborers. In Lucca, where many of the 
factory workers were women, what organizing there was tended to focus 



132 Chapter Six 

on local issues and working conditions rather then the more general 
working-class issues stressed by trade unionists in Pistoia. After World 
War II the San Giorgio works in Pistoia became particularly politicized and 
was the site of bitter struggle between DC- and PCI-affiliated metalwork- 
ers' unions. Until the 1980s the memory of strikes, union elections, and 
layoffs colored political positions in the province. The main division was 
over the nature of unions and their activities. Even politicians on the left 
of the DC who were generally supportive of unions and the interests of 
peasants and workers, such as Gerardo Bianchi in Pistoia, spoke out 
throughout their careers against "political strikes" and "sterile agitation" 
that struck them as going beyond local issues. 47 

Since the 1960s this scenario in the two provinces has been trans- 
formed by the massive growth of small-scale manufacturing industries 
spread around the countryside, using labor formerly employed in agricul- 
ture and, increasingly, immigrants from southern Italy and North Africa. 
Much of the new industry is indigenous, in contrast to the historical situ- 
ation when the main employers were either foreign (the headquarters of 
La Cucirini Cantoni Coats in Lucca was in Glasgow) or from other parts of 
Italy (the headquarters of San Giorgio in Pistoia was in Genoa). In addi- 
tion, the union federations, particularly the CGIL, retreated from a sub- 
sidiary position in their relations to the parties and by the 1980s had be- 
come largely independent of party influence. The net effect has been to 
reduce the amount of conflict around the workplace, particularly in Pis- 
toia, though the memory of such conflict still lived on in the early 1990s. 

Finally, one theme mentioned in chamber of commerce publications 
and in studies of Tuscany's economic geography, and also by several in- 
terviewees, is that the two provinces have had different economic histo- 
ries in terms of their connection to Italy as a whole and beyond. In this 
construction, Lucca has long been more externally oriented than Pistoia, 
going back to the days of merchant capitalism. It is Pistoia that has expe- 
rienced the greatest relative disruption of its economic base, particularly 
since World War II, switching from a largely localized agrarian economy 
with a few large industries to one fueled by the export of manufactured 
consumer goods and other items (such as nursery stock and cut flowers) 
from myriad small-scale producers. The province's economy has had to 
adjust rapidly to the introduction of industrial capitalism, first in the form 
of some limited factory industrialization and more recently in the form of 
small-scale manufacturing production. Lucca has followed a much more 
evolutionary economic course, with a more mixed economy (in the size 
of industrial firms and the range and size of its service sector) and with a 
long tradition of emigration and linkages to other parts of Italy and 
around the world. Not surprisingly, therefore, the pistoiesi have had to deal 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 133 

with greater social disruption and turned to that political movement 
promising an active response to it rather than those standing pat and wait- 
ing for providence to take its course. If this sounds suspiciously like "opin- 
ion voting" all along, then so be it. 48 

The Selected Communes 

Turning from the provinces as a whole, a systematic focus on the com- 
munes selected perhaps help explain in more relevant detail what hap- 
pened electorally in the two provinces over the postwar years. The com- 
munes were chosen to illustrate certain distinctive electoral tracks within 
the provinces. Porcari (province of Lucca) and Quarrata (province of Pis- 
toia) changed the most politically. In 1953 the DC was the majority party 
in each, then it steadily weakened, most clearly in Quarrata, largely to the 
benefit of the PCI. In each case economic transformation and immigra- 
tion played major roles. Before Fascism, Quarrata was a stronghold of the 
Partito Popolare Italiano (PPI), whose activists were founders of the local 
DC after World War II. 49 However, the economy of the area changed from 
agricultural to industrial. Today it contains an important industrial dis- 
trict specializing in household furniture and some textile production as- 
sociated with the neighboring province of Prato. Moreover, the area has 
experienced considerable immigration over the past thirty years, espe- 
cially from other parts of Tuscany and the Italian South. The PCI worked 
to extend its support in the area, partly through ancillary organizations 
such as social clubs. This strategy was successful for a time, but today these 
clubs attract mainly older men and are not major instruments of political 
mobilization. 

Porcari is likewise an area whose economy was transformed and that 
has also had a large immigration from southern Italy. Historically, it was 
one of the areas of the province of Lucca with the highest percentage of 
agricultural land under sharecropping, a typical predictor of PCI orienta- 
tion in the territorial subculture model. In the 1960s it had the highest 
rate of population and new job growth of all communes in Lucca, taking 
advantage of its location adjacent to the Firenze-Mare superhighway to at- 
tract papermaking and other businesses from outside the region. 50 In this 
case, however, the PCI was not particularly well organized to exploit the 
grievances and aspirations of new voters, perhaps because PCI organiza- 
tion in the province of Lucca was much inferior to that in the province of 
Pistoia. But none of the parties are well organized in Porcari, and there is 
a much lower level of politicization of local and national issues than is ap- 
parent in Quarrata. Perhaps this reflects the lack of either PPI or PSI or- 
ganizing in the area at key times early in the twentieth century. 

This degree of political change is less true of the communes that are 



134 Chapter Six 

seats of provincial government. They have relatively more diversified 
economies, although Lucca has a greater preponderance of larger firms 
and a weaker small-firm sector than Pistoia. This reflects Lucca's relatively 
greater dependence on outside capital and its long history of ties with 
northern Italy and overseas. Pistoia's recent economic development has 
been much more endogenous in origin, based on local artisans and share- 
cropping farmers transforming themselves into small entrepreneurs. Also, 
in the communes of Lucca and Pistoia, affiliation with the dominant lo- 
cal party has been an important prerequisite for appointment to a wide 
range of jobs in the public sector. Local industries and local organizations, 
such as chambers of commerce, were strongly tied to the two major par- 
ties. For example, banks and the chambers of commerce in both Lucca and 
Pistoia were strongly DC in orientation. There is also, perhaps, the most 
continuity in local social-spatial identity or sense of place. In both Lucca 
and Pistoia, but especially in Lucca, the historical center of the city pro- 
vides an emotive reference point for identity that is missing from the 
amorphous communes surrounding it. The walls of the city stand as an 
everyday reminder of Lucca's glorious past and its political independ- 
ence. 51 A merging of the civil and religious in a concentration of physical 
symbols such as the walls and churches of the city helps cement the self- 
image of lucchesi as citizens of a separate world with its own distinctive 
politics (fig. 6.2). 52 Given the Tuscan context of PCI dominance, the DC 
was the major beneficiary of this Luccan "separatism." 

In Pistoia the physical damage to the city in the last years of World War 
II, still apparent in places, is a constant reminder of the importance of 
those who resisted Fascism. This has abundantly benefited the PCI, which 
not only played the leading role in local resistance efforts but managed to 
convince voters it had. 53 The PCI has also been successful in politicizing the 
working-class population of Pistoia to its advantage. This was partly due to 
its success among the CGIL-unionized workers of the major local em- 
ployer, Breda Costruzioni Ferroviarie (formerly San Giorgio, a major pro- 
ducer of railway vehicles and buses), but it also reflects the ability of the 
local party organization to adapt to changing economic conditions — for 
instance, through its strong support for expansion of the small-firm sector 
among local artisans and former sharecropping families (fig. 6.3). But it was 
not until 1975 that the PCI gained an outright majority on the commune 
council (twenty-one seats out of forty), suggesting how slow and contested 
the rise of PCI hegemony actually was in this part of red Italy. 

Interestingly, the DC in Lucca was all but invisible between elections, 
suggesting that the population there has lower aptitude for everyday po- 
litical mobilization than that of Pistoia and thus reinforcing at least one 
element of the ideal typical contrast between white and red Italys. Ironi- 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 135 




Figure 6.2 An aerial panorama of the city of Lucca looking east to west, the 
famous walls clearly demarcating the old city. Source: Author. 



cally, there appears to be an overall lower level of activity in voluntary or- 
ganizations (such as social clubs and the volunteer ambulance corps) and 
cooperatives in Lucca than in Pistoia, including DC and PCI activists and 
their replacements, even though Lucca has a long history of involvement 
with Catholic aid societies and is dominated by political language em- 
phasizing mutual aid and an active social life based on parties and neigh- 
borhood. 

In Capannori and Monsummano Terme the hegemony of one or the 
other of the two major parties was long maintained against the trends in 
their respective provinces. Even though these communes have changed 
the least electorally, they have undergone tremendous economic and so- 
cial change. In Monsummano Terme an established agrarian radicalism, 
based on the class conflict inherent in the system of sharecropping domi- 
nant locally, was effectively harnessed by the local PCI, which also suc- 
cessfully recruited southern immigrants into the party. 54 The party was also 
active in promoting and supporting the local shoe industry and improving 
physical infrastructure and housing. Since 1992 the local electoral success 
of Rifondazione Comunista and its successors demonstrates how far a rad- 
ical communism was not only rooted but reinforced in this context. 

In Capannori the industrialization of the local economy has reinforced 



136 Chapter Six 




Figure 6.3 A new Communist Manifesto? "The firm as labor," a meeting of small 
and medium entrepreneurs under PCI sponsorship, Palazzo dei Congressi, Florence, 
4 February 1989. Source: Author. 



the dispersed settlement pattern of a commune that still looks to Lucca as 
its center. Until 1978 the seat of the commune government was Lucca 
rather than within the commune itself. Many workers also still farm small 
family-owned plots even when they work full time at factory or workshop 
jobs. These peasant workers identify closely with the city of Lucca, which 
is the center for most social services. 55 The important social role of the lo- 
cal priest in everyday life reinforces the persistence of a social Catholicism 
that lent itself to support for the DC. Rather than breaking down DC dom- 
inance, therefore, social and economic changes in Capannori long sup- 
ported it. This is somewhat different, however, from the myth of tran- 
scendental subcultures persisting autonomously to constantly recreate 
the politics of the past. 

A different mix of processes, then, operated in different communes 
to produce the range of shifts in support for the two major political par- 
ties that characterize both of the provinces. Rather than the rise of a 
nationalized-individualized opinion voting or the workings of primor- 
dial subcultures, therefore, explanation has been sought in the fluid, con- 
stantly reworked cultural contexts of particular places. 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 137 
CONCLUSION 

My main purpose in this chapter has been to dispute dominant views of 
primordial territorial political subcultures in Italy and describe an alter- 
native perspective that views local politics as socially constructed and 
changing but ever present rather than either residual or primordial. In 
other words, the creation and dissipation of red and white subcultures 
such as those associated with different places in Italy are inherent to the 
structuring of politics in all places rather than totally unique to these par- 
ticular places. 

The major advantages of the perspective informing this chapter are as 
follows: 

1. It can deal with changes in the geography of electoral politics over 
time. 

2. Political culture is not equated with tradition but is seen as the in- 
tersubjective framework of practices, ideas, and symbols in which politi- 
cal choices and activities are embedded and from which opinions and 
votes are drawn. 

3. All people live in cultural worlds that are made and remade through 
their everyday activities, not just those who live in areas where specific po- 
litical parties are said to have created systems of consensus or hegemony. 

4. Cultural worlds are grounded geographically in the experience of 
place. Culture therefore is inherently geographical, defined in places and 
through the geographical sedimentation of practices, and thus is internally 
related to the geographical dynamics of politics. 

The cases of Lucca and Pistoia help to identify some of the specific prob- 
lems with the territorial-subculture model of local politics that are best 
dealt with by the alternative perspective. The first is that the territorial- 
subculture model presupposes that the two zones are "special" in having 
peculiar characteristics that set them totally apart from the rest of Italy 
and from each other. This claim is unsustainable on both counts. If these 
provinces are any guide, certain historical-geographical conjunctures pro- 
duced a bias toward certain political parties that then became institution- 
alized. But even as the parties institutionalized themselves, conditions 
were changing to reduce single-party dominance. These zones differed 
only in the degree of their dominance by single-parties, not in the nature 
of voting or the developments that structure the political process. In par- 
ticular, the widely accepted notion that voting in the two zones illustrates 
the hegemony of a vote of identity or belonging is questionable. Local ac- 
counts of voting across the period 1948-92 (and since) suggest that many 
voters in both Lucca and Pistoia have been weighing their options in tune 
with local patterns of political socialization and associated conceptions of 



138 Chapter Six 

political agency. The idea that there is a systematic set of differences be- 
tween the two zones in the character of local political hegemony is also 
questionable. The case studies show how similar in many respects the 
provinces in the two zones have been, even down to the role of the same 
historical events, similar types of associationism, and other factors in pro- 
ducing single but different party dominance. 

In the second place, identification with the locally dominant of the 
parties never involved more than a slim majority of voters in the two 
provinces. Many people remained either indifferent or opposed to the 
dominance of the single party in their local area. Indeed, a case can be 
made that, particularly in Pistoia, the political complexion of the prov- 
inces could have turned out quite differently. The die was not cast in the 
distant past, as most accounts of the red and white zones tend to assume. 
Rather, extralocal processes relating to the nature of the Italian polity and 
the shifting bases to Italian economic development conspired with local 
characteristics to produce patterns of party hegemony that were much 
more fragile than the logic of table 6.1 makes them seem. 

Finally, there does not seem much basis for claiming, as the territorial- 
subculture model tends to do, that political change is entirely concen- 
trated in certain historical bursts followed by long periods of stability in 
political affiliation and voting behavior. Though it is undoubtedly true 
that periods such as the late nineteenth century and the years after World 
Wars I and II were socially disruptive and gave rise to new movements 
with geographically differentiated patterns of support, the subsequent 
stability of this support can be exaggerated. In both Lucca and Pistoia, 
dominance by the DC and the PCI, respectively, rested on historically 
shifting ground. In particular, how far the parties could tap organizations 
oriented toward them varied historically and thus cannot be read as a per- 
manent feature of party rule. The territorial-subculture model therefore 
merely replaces one territorial trap, nationalization, with another: pri- 
mordial political cultures set in geographical stone. The geography of elec- 
toral politics is simply too historically dynamic to be successfully captured 
by it. 

SOURCES OF INFORMATION 

Interviews (Initial Interviews March-July 1989) 

Vittorio Brachi, DC politician, Quarrata, Pistoia; active in the 1950s and 1960s 
On. Gerardo Bianchi, DC politician, Pistoia; former DC deputy; active in the 
1950s and 1960s 

Vittorio Amadori, DC mayor of Quarrata, Pistoia, 1951-75 
Pierluigi Bartolini, retired rural bank official, DC and Misericordia activist, Pis- 
toia 
Agostino Palazzo, president of the Faculty of Political Science, University of Pisa 



Red, White, and Beyond: Place and Politics in Pistoia and Lucca 139 

(1990-96); specialist on local economic development in Pistoia from the 1940s 

to the 1970s 

Vincenzo Menchise, secretary of DC Provincial Committee, Lucca 

On. Sergio Dardini, former secretary of Lucca PCI Provincial Federation, 

1959-70, former PCI deputy, and sharecropping union official in Altopascio 

(Lucca), 1955-57 

Armando Carnini, secretary of PCI commune committee, Lucca 

Ivo Lucchesi, secretary of PCI Provincial Federation, Pistoia 

Giovanna Lombardi, local PCI activist, Pistoia 

Local Newspapers and Magazines 

La Voce (PCI, Pistoia), vol. 8, nos. 1, 5, 7 (1956); n.s., vol. 4, nos. 1-2 (1968); June 

1976; March 1977. 

La Bandiera del Popolo (DC, Pistoia), vol. 1, nos. 1-6 (1945); vol. 5, nos. 1-9 

(1951); vol. 6, nos. 13-15 (1952-53); n.s., vol. 3, nos. 10, 12, 14-15 (1956); vol. 

4, no. 1 (1958); vol. 8, no. 1 (1962); vol. 9, nos. 1, 3, 5 (1963); vol. 10, nos. 1-3 

(1964); vol. 11, nos. 1-2 (1965); n.s., vol. 1 (1974); vol. 2, nos. 3-5 (1975). 

La Vita Cattolica (Catholic, Pistoia), vol. 53, nos. 42, 45 (1975); vol. 54, nos. 5-9, 

12-17, 19-20, 22, 24-44 (1976). 

La Gazzetta di Quarrata (DC, Quarrata, Pistoia), June 1973-August 1973; vol. 1, 

nos. 1-3(1975). 

La Provincia di Lucca (Provincial Chamber of Commerce, Lucca), vols. 1 (1960) to 

19(1979). 



CHAPTER 7 



The Geography of Party Replacement in 
Northern Italy, 1987-96 



Episodic and periodic realignments in the relative dominance of political 
parties in elections have long been interpreted in geographical terms. In 
electoral democracies it is political parties that knit together the disparate 
identities and interests of different places into national coalitions that 
contest elections and provide the ideologies and personnel for national 
and local governments. New political coalitions weaving together groups 
in different places are said to produce new national electoral alignments. 

The disintegration of the Italian party system in 1992 provides a prime 
example of such a process. What happened in northern Italy is particu- 
larly interesting because one of the new or replacement parties is that of a 
regionalist movement, the Northern League (Lega Nord), committed to a 
radical restructuring of Italian government along federalist lines or pos- 
sible secession of the North ("Padania" to the League) from Italy. 

Walter Dean Burnham's famous study of American party politics over 
time reveals no fewer than five party systems based on different cross- 
regional coalitions. 1 This cyclical pattern of medium-term continuity in- 
terrupted by short periods of dramatic change has also been noted for 
other countries, although none has had either as long a series of elections 
or as limited a number of effective national political parties as the United 
States. In these other cases, such as Britain, France, and Italy, another sce- 
nario has been much more important than American-style realignment 
between regionally based coalitions of interests with two party names per- 
sisting over time. This is the replacement of one party by another, some- 
times following the collapse of an entire system of parties or a long period 
of authoritarian rule. 

Party systems can be expected to have distinctive geographies, given 
the differential appeal of different parties in different places, different 
densities of party organization across places, and the emergence of parties 
based on identification with particular regions and localities. How new 
parties replace old ones geographically, however, is largely unexplored. 

1 40 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 141 

The typical assumption is that there is straightforward substitution of new 
for old. In majoritarian electoral systems with a bias toward two parties 
(such as the United States and Britain) this may well often be the case. 
Elsewhere, however, this is much less likely, particularly when propor- 
tional representation sets the bar fairly low for translating votes for new 
parties into seats. Whatever the electoral system, however, new political 
parties must conquer or colonize places previously occupied by old ones. 
This is a dramatic way political change takes place geographically. 

The replacement of one party by another can take a number of forms. 
In one situation, where several parties are close to a particular point on the 
political spectrum, one takes votes from the other and grows at its expense 
even as the other continues to exist. This is what happened to the Italian 
Socialist Party (PSI) in the 1950s as it lost votes to the Communist Party 
(PCI) and, in reverse, what happened in France in the 1970s when the So- 
cialists came from oblivion, under the leadership of Francois Mitterrand, 
to marginalize the French Communist Party. In each of these cases the ad- 
vancing party used a regional base to reach out into traditionally hostile 
territory. The most famous twentieth-century example in the English- 
speaking world is probably the emergence of the Labour Party in Britain 
in the 1920s at the expense of the Liberals. 2 This involved a march from 
urban-industrial outposts into marginal constituencies previously repre- 
sented by Liberals, helped along by defections of sitting members to the 
insurgent party. In another situation an existing system of parties disinte- 
grates and new ones pop up across the spectrum, defining a new party 
system. This happened in France in 1958 as many of the parties of the 
previous Fourth Republic, above all the Radicals, disappeared and were 
replaced by new ones, above all the party based on the patronage of the 
new president of the Fifth Republic, Charles de Gaulle. This is also what 
happened in Italy between 1987 and 1996 as the Communists split into 
Partito Democratico della Sinistra (PDS) and Rifondazione Comunista 
(RC) and the Christian Democrats and Socialists, which had together 
dominated Italian governments since the 1960s (and the DC even longer), 
disappeared along with many of the smaller parties of the center such as 
the Social Democrats (PSDI) and the Republicans (PRI). 

This chapter concerns the process of party replacement in northern 
Italy, partly because it was different in different regions and should be 
studied so as to reflect this, but also because in the North it has involved 
a party restricted to the North (indeed, seeing itself as representing the 
North) — the Northern League. The geography of party replacement in 
central and southern Italy, though with reformulation and renaming of 
the parties, has left a less distinctive new party menu. Several parties, in- 
cluding offshoots from the Christian Democrats and the Communists, the 



142 Chapter Seven 

new Forza Italia party of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian media tycoon, and 
the reinvented Fascists (post-Fascists) of the National Alliance (Alleanza 
Nazionale), all vie to replace the old parties in a fluid and volatile situation 
in which party identifications are very low except in the areas of central 
Italy historically affiliated with the Communists and in southern strong- 
holds of the old neo-Fascist party, the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). 
In northern Italy the menu has changed: the other parties compete, but in 
a context where they must react to the provocations and ideology of a re- 
gionalist party that attacks existing political institutions and calls for ei- 
ther a dramatic federal reform or secession of the North from Italy. 

After briefly reviewing some theoretical issues related to the geograph- 
ical process of party replacement, I want to examine how the Northern 
League replaced the Christian Democrats as the dominant electoral party 
in many areas of northern Italy after 1992. This involves looking at the 
growth and spread of the Northern League in the North as a whole, par- 
ticularly the Veneto, and in one city where it has had considerable success, 
the Lombard city of Varese. I then turn to how this occurred, suggest- 
ing that party replacement is not the same as either straightforward vote 
switching from the old party to the new one or political replacement, in 
the sense of the new party filling the same political role as the old one. Fi- 
nally, the difficulties the League has faced in capturing the most impor- 
tant city of northern Italy, Milan, are discussed in terms of the distinctive 
place characteristics of that city and its surrounding hinterland. The gen- 
eral theme running across the chapter is the role of place-to-place similar- 
ities and differences in how one party replaced another electorally during 
a period of rapid political change. In other words, the chapter is about 
how the collapse of the Christian Democratic Party and the rise of the 
Northern League were mediated geographically. 

THE GEOGRAPHICAL PROCESS OF PARTY REPLACEMENT 

One party replacing another in electoral competition can be thought of in 
terms of a number of understandings of the term replacement. In one 
meaning replacement is akin to substitution, in which the new party takes 
over all or a large share of the votes of a previous one that has disappeared. 
This is the quantitative electoral sense used by most commentators. The 
electoral success of the Northern League has been viewed largely in terms 
of its replacing the Christian Democrats in this sense. Even Ilvo Diamanti, 
an astute student of the rise of the League, seems to suggest this. 3 In a re- 
lated understanding, however, replacement involves a number of parties 
splitting the votes of an old one among them. This is the consensus posi- 
tion on what has happened to the Christian Democratic vote in central 
and southern Italy. In a third scenario, the collapse or disappearance of\/ 



Tlie Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 143 

one party draws attention to a crisis in the social world that the old party 
had long represented. This allows an existing, opportunistic party to move 
in and colonize that world, not necessarily by taking over the old vote so 
much as by providing a voice for new voters and elements increasingly 
alienated from the old party even before its final disappearance. I would 
argue that this is much more what has happened in northern Italy over 
1987-96 than a simple substitution of the Northern League for the Chris- 
tian Democratic Party. 

This third understanding of the term replacement draws attention to 
three important contingencies when thinking about how new parties 
arise as old ones disappear. One is that electoral choices can be understood 
only in relation to the discrete social-territorial settings or places where 
such choices are exercised. Old parties do not simply disappear without 
reason. They are often no longer in tune with local social mores. Their 
electoral persistence is more a matter of inertia than of persisting enthusi- 
asm from a popular base. The two replacement parties for the Commu- 
nists share much the same proportion of the total vote in central Italy as 
the Communists held before them, and between them they cover much 
the same ideological space as did the old PCI, suggesting a continuing 
match between the new parties and the social-territorial milieu of central 
Italy. Evidence of the erosion of DC support long before the final collapse 
indicates that the nature of replacement depends on local contingencies. 

Second, parties are not simply electoral vehicles, although orthodox 
thinking in Anglo-American political science often regards them as such, 
perhaps because the American parties (as opposed to individual represen- 
tatives) often seem unrelated to particular sectoral or sectional interests. 
Parties can be more or less effective intermediaries between state and so- 1 
ciety, channeling resources from center to periphery and rewarding some 
social and territorial interests at the expense of others. In this sense the 
distinction between mass and patronage parties is a false dichotomy: all 
parties are patronage parties. Judgments are made about how effective the 
party is in delivering the goods and whether we (in our place) are being 
rewarded more or less than they (in their place). Much of the geography 
of party politics is more a result of who gets what, when, and where than 
a reflection of underlying or foundational social cleavages that have a ge- 
ographical bias. Certainly in Italy by the 1970s all the parties were more 
or less parts of a system of partitocrazia, a party-based political economy in 
which large parts of the private sector as well as the huge Italian public sec- 
tor depended on party affiliations for jobs and financial rewards. This in- 
cluded the Communists in the regions they dominated in central Italy. 
Though largely excluded from the fruits of central government, and cer- 
tainly less corrupted than the parties of national government, they were 



144 Chapter Seven 

able to reproduce their own version of party-based political economy 
where they controlled local government. 

Third, new parties can have totally different symbolic, interest, and 
strategy repertoires than the parties they replace. In particular, they can 
appeal to new territorial formulations of the dilemmas that the old party 
dealt with through allocations of public resources (see chapter 9). Ethnic 
and regionalist parties are the most obvious exponents of such a territori- 
alized approach. Typically they focus on regional relative deprivation or a 
sense of resentment at the success of other regions in commanding state 
resources or acquiring more than an average per capita share of national 
revenues. But nationalist parties wanting to expel foreigners and put up 
protectionist barriers and liberal parties desiring to remove all limits on 
trade and investment are also engaged in territorial reframing. In con- 
temporary northern Italy it is indeed a territorial reframing, in this case in- 
volving either large-scale devolution of powers to the North or secession 
by the North, that is the hub of the appeal of the Northern League to a 
northern electorate heretofore integrated into Italy by the mediating role 
of the Christian Democratic Party, the balena bianca (white whale) of the 
Northeast. 

CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATIC DOMINANCE, CRISIS, 
AND REPLACEMENT 

Though the immediate cause of the disappearance of the Christian De- 
mocratic Party from the electoral landscape was the aftermath of the cor- 
ruption scandal that erupted in Milan in 1992, that party had already be- 
gun to suffer a rapid erosion of support to the Socialists and others in the 
South, and it had suffered a slower erosion of its base and affiliated insti- 
tutions in the Northeast and Lombardy beginning in the 1970s. Indeed, 
where the League has achieved its highest and most consistent success 
since 1992, the Christian Democratic Party once reigned supreme. This 
was la zona bianca (the white zone) of the Northeast, in which the Chris- 
tian Democrats tapped into a Catholic subculture that long predated the 
existence of the party (see chapter 6). In addition, as the main party of na- 
tional and local government, the DC increasingly relied on its ability to 
direct state resources to its supporters as the older clerical structures (such 
as co-ops, unions, leisure-time organizations, and parish) faded in signifi- 
cance for social life under the pressures of modern work behavior and 
mass entertainment. In its areas of strength in the North the party had 
been one of the specialized structures of the Catholic movement, oriented 
toward parliamentary government and capture of the state. Elsewhere, 
but particularly in the South, the party had been based on capturing local 
notables and using them to channel state funds in return for votes. Slowly 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 145 

but surely this model spread throughout Italy. As Percy Allum describes 
this, "the DC turned itself into a simple power system founded on a series 
of local machines, controlled by a political boss (for example, the 'Orga- 
nizzazione Bisaglia' in Vicenza)."^ 

If voting for the DC in la zona bianca had represented identification 
with the Church, Catholicism, and a way of life in the 1950s and 1960s, 
by the 1980s the DC was represented by many full-time local bosses con- 
trolling public-sector jobs (and influencing hiring in many private busi- 
nesses) and a self-interested conception of politics in which votes were a 
commodity to be bought and sold. Allum argues that at this stage the only 
differences between North and South were the greater change from ideol- 
ogy to spoils in the North (spoils had always mattered in the South) and 
the nature of political influence networks at work in each, with northern 
machines relying on lieutenants with established social roles (teachers, in- 
fluential businessmen, etc.) and southern ones on the rewards of state pa- 
tronage and in some cases links to organized crime. 5 The DC had become 
a means for a new class of politicians to "impose themselves individually 
and get rich quickly. Political careers depended less and less on party or- 
ganization (which, moreover, was losing its base in civil society) and were 
determined more and more by ability to insert oneself in 'business' cir- 
cuits. " 6 As long as the economy grew and the Cold War allowed the DC to 
present itself as the only alternative to the Communists ("Better thieves 
than reds," mused the ex-Communist philosopher Lucio Colletti in 1985), 
the alliance of local machines oiled by state resources that constituted the 
DC survived the decay of its social supports. But faced with the end of the 
Cold War, serious economic recession in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 
and the revelations of systematic corruption by its Socialist partners and 
many of its own in the Milan scandal of 1992, the party suddenly and un- 
expectedly collapsed in January 1994, some of its unindicted leaders start- 
ing a new Partito Popolare to ensure the continued presence of a Catholic 
party but without the negative associations that the DC now aroused, not 
least among many of its erstwhile supporters. 

Two points from this story are of prime importance. First, the Christian 
Democrats were already beginning to fade in the 1980s before the final 
denouement of 1992." Second, unhappiness with the clientelistic model 
was manifest in the high level of support in the Northeast in a 1991 ref- 
erendum for reducing the number of preference votes for candidates to 
one. This reform was viewed as a blow against the localistic-particularism 
the DC machines depended on. Obviously this model was in trouble in 
the Northeast even as it still had considerable support in DC areas in the 
South. A revolt against the southernization of the DC was under way in its 
onetime heartland in the North. 



146 Chapter Seven 

THE RISE OF THE NORTHERN LEAGUE AND THE 
REPLACEMENT OF THE CHRISTIAN DEMOCRATS 

The Northern League began as a series of regional leagues or autonomist 
parties in the early 1980s. The Lombard League achieved modest success 
in elections, both local and national, during the 1980s, as did its counter- 
part in the Veneto, the Venetian League (Liga Veneta). Emerging as a 
united political party in 1992, the Northern League has established itself 
as the major or second party in large parts of northern Italy. Moving from 
an autonomist to a federalist position in the late 1980s and then to a se- 
cessionist position in the aftermath of its experience of entering into na- 
tional government coalition with the two main right-wing parties, Forza 
Italia and the National Alliance, the party's authoritarian leader, Umberto 
Bossi, put most of his energy from 1996 until 2000 into a project for the 
independence of northern Italy, or Padania as he calls it. In 2000 he 
abruptly returned to a federalist track and reentered into alliance with 
Forza Italia and the National Alliance. Perhaps the most important per- 
sisting themes of his appeal to the North are the interests of northern 
small businesses and artisans in a negative public economy (high taxes, 
poor services, too much northern tax money going to an indolent South) 
and an intense hostility to the old regime of partitocrazia or party-based 
political economy (see chapters 8 and 9). 

Let me briefly draw attention to several elements to the electoral suc- 
cess of the Northern League. In the first place, and at the scale of the North 
as a whole, the League became the main party in a section of the North in 
which it gained most of its early support. In 1987 to 1992 it expanded its 
base by increasing its level of support in adjacent areas of the North, but 
then between 1992 and 1996, as its support deepened in its original 
strongholds, it retreated from a prominent into a secondary position in 
those areas it had moved into. This is analogous to a "swash" effect fol- 
lowed by a "backwash" in levels of support in contiguous areas. 9 

Second, by 1996 the League was strongest at a provincial scale in those 
areas where the DC had been strongest historically. This gave the impres- 
sion that the former could be simply substituting electorally for the latter 
with straightforward vote switching between parties. Two maps Diamanti 
uses in his account of the transition leave this impression. Of the fifteen 
provinces where the Christian Democrats had their best results in 1948, 
twelve are ones where the League was at its strongest and was the major 
party in 1996. 10 

Examining electoral data for the DC and the League at the commune 
level within one of the regions, the Veneto, reveals a somewhat more com- 
plex story. The main local areas in which the League established its 



Tlte Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy 1987-96 147 



strongest roots are not the ones where the DC was at its strongest histori- 
cally. They are, rather, places where the DC had been successfully chal- 
lenged by other parties, particularly the Socialists, to the north and scat- 
tered among the communes where the DC was hegemonic electorally and 
politically (see figs. 7.1 and 7.2). 11 Moreover, the important expansion of 
the League within the Veneto between 1987 and 1992 was somewhat 
weaker in the areas of total DC dominance, where the DC also experienced 
its largest declines (particularly Vicenza, where the DC lost a third of its 
vote) than in the those areas where the DC had been either marginal or 
weaker (e.g., Belluno, Treviso) but the parties of the left were also very 
weak (see figs. 7.3 and 7.4). 12 

This conclusion based on visual inspection of maps is reinforced by 
measures of spatial autocorrelation showing the degree of spatial depend- 
ence between where the old party was strong or weak and where the new 
party is strong or weak. Similar levels of spatial autocorrelation between 
the old and the new parties indicate that the new party inherited the old 
one's constituency, whereas dissimilar levels suggest a colonization of a re- 
gion from areas where the old party was relatively weak. Indicators of spa- 
tial autocorrelation, Moran's I statistics, calculated for the DC and the 
Northern League across all elections from 1987 to 1996 suggest that the 




] unstable 
j marginal 
J weak 



J important 
I rooted 



Figure 7. 1 Map of communes in the Veneto using election results for the DC in 
national elections (Chamber of Deputies) 1946-87, showing where the party was 
more and less rooted. Source: redrawn from Ilvo Diamanti and Gianni Riccamboni, 
La parabola del voto bianco: Elezioni e societa in Veneto (1946-1992) (Vicenza: Neri 
Pozza, 1992), 140. 




] unstable 

y marginal 

weak 



I important 
rooted 



Figure 7.2 Map of communes in the Veneto showing where the Venetian League 
was more and less rooted over the period 1983-87, national elections (Chamber 
of Deputies). Source: redrawn from Diamanti and Riccamboni, Parabola del voto 
bianco, 142. 







negative variance <10% 
negative variance 10 to 15 
negative variance >15 
positive variance 



Figure 7.3 Variation in the vote for the DC by commune in the Veneto, national 
elections (Chamber of Deputies) 1987-92. Source: redrawn from Diamanti and 
Riccamboni, Parabola del voto bianco, 136. 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy 1 987-96 1 49 




1 positive variance <10% 
positive variance 10 to 15 
positive variance >15 
negative variance 



Figure 7.4 Variation in the vote for the Northern League- Venetian League by 
commune in the Veneto, national elections (Chamber of Deputies), 1987-92. 
Source: redrawn from Diamanti and Riccamboni, Parabola del voto bianco, 138. 



Table 7. 1 Moran's I Statistics for the DC and the Northern League- Venetian 
League in the Veneto, National Elections (Chamber of Deputies), 1987-1996 



Election 



DC 



Northern League 



1987 
1992 
1994 
1996 



0.651 
0.524 



0.588 
0.775 
0.837 
0.828 



SOURCE: Michael Shin and author. 

NOTE: A score of 1 .0 equals perfect autocorrelation, meaning that each commune vote for a given 
party can be predicted by the average of surrounding observations. 

support for the League was initially less concentrated in the Veneto than 
was the DC vote and that after the post-1992 disappearance of the DC, the 
League moved into the geographical vacuum left by the DC and its high 
votes clustered much more than they or the DCs had previously done 
(table 7.1). 13 In other words, between 1987 and 1992 the DC lost more of 
its votes in areas where the League had smaller relative gains than it did 
elsewhere in the region. It lost these largely both to the MSI (neo-Fascists) 
and to more localistic groupings and parties than the League, but once the 
DC was gone from the political scene the League began to penetrate the 
DCs former strongholds. 

Third, the League has done well in some areas of the North traditionally 



X 



250 Chapter Seven 

on the margins of la zona bianca. Good examples are such Lombard pro- 
vinces as Como and Varese. These are areas with historical ties to left-wing 
politics, in part reflecting early success in trade union organization in local 
factories, as well as much weaker connections to the Catholic associations 
that once characterized the Veneto and eastern Lombard provinces such as 
Bergamo and Brescia. Home to many of the leading figures in the Lombard 
League and the Northern League (such as Bossi, Leoni, Maroni, Pivetti, and 
Speroni) Varese had elected the first League deputy (Leoni) and senator 
(Bossi) in 1987. In the commune election in Varese in 1992 the League won 
seventeen out of forty seats on the municipal council and, with the sup- 
port of one Republican and the "apology" of three PDS councillors, formed 
the municipal council. Present on the council since 1985, by 1990 the 
League had become the second party of the city after the DC. Arrests of lead- 
ing DC and PSI politicians for corruption led to the premature demise of 
the council elected in 1990. The League's success in the subsequent election 
meant that for the first time the party controlled the main commune of 
a province and was able to appoint a mayor from its ranks (see chapter 8). 
Analysis of the 1992 results reveals that the left did best in areas of the 
city with many workers in large firms, often with southern Italian ori- 
gins, living in large housing projects (eastern sector areas: San Fermo, Bel- 
forte, and Valle Olona); that the League supplanted the DC in many parts 
of the periphery with scattered settlement and in areas with high levels 
of self-employment and pensioners, but the DC maintained its hold, if 
weakened, over the most historically white zones of the city, such as Cas- 
beno, Bizzozero, and Capolago, because of support for its neighborhood 
candidates; and that other parties, particularly the so-called parties of opin- 
ion such as the Republicans and Liberals, shared the city center with the 
League. 14 Only certain sectors of the old DC vote, therefore, can be seen as 
going to the League during the crucial second half of 1992: the ones seem- 
ingly least affiliated with Catholic institutions. In fact, a flow-of-vote study 
using election districts (715 cases) shows that between the national elec- 
tion of April 1992 and the local election of December 1992 the League 
drew votes from a number of parties, above all any of those (including the 
DC) that had been in local government recently. 15 But the movement of 
votes to the League from the DC is not an overwhelming feature of this 
flow of votes between parties and within the electorate (fig. 7.5). 

FROM VOTE SWITCHING TO PARTY REPLACEMENT 

The picture of replacement, therefore, is more complex than one of simple 
substitution. In the critical years 1989 to 1992 the DC maintained a de- 
gree of support at local scales even as the party as a whole suffered erosion 
of its hegemony by the League and other parties. What accounts for this 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 151 




Figure 7.5 The flow of interparty votes between the national election (Chamber 
of Deputies) of April 1992 and the commune election of December 1992, Varese 
(Lombardy); April 1992 percentages are in parentheses. Source: Carlo Brusa, 
"Elezioni e territorio in una citta media e in un momento critico: Varese," Lombardia 
Nord-Ovest 2 (1993): 28. 



seeming disparity between substitution and replacement? One factor is 
that the League became strongest in those areas that have the highest lev- 
els of industrialization based on small firms and the highest percentages 
of workers employed in such firms. 16 This contextual predictor is much 
more important than are individual-level ones in a statistical analysis of 
the 1996 vote in the Veneto, though relative youth (new voters) and em- 
ployment in a small business show up as significant in most studies (table 
7.2). The DC was always strongest in the agricultural areas and the small- 
est towns, providing a link between one and the other. As the economy 
of small industries specializing in customized production of consumer 
and intermediate goods (metalworking, etc.) has taken off in the North- 
east over the past twenty years, it has done so in areas marginal to the 
traditional economy of commercial agriculture in the countryside and 



Table 7.2 The Veneto, 1996 National Election (Chamber of Deputies): The Political and 
Socioeconomic Characteristics of Communes in Which Different Parties Performed Best 



PDS 



RC 



PP 



Dini 



Fl 



CCD/ 
CDU AN 



Veneto 
League Mean 



Veneto mean 


11.8 


5.3 


Threshold 






(>M + a) 


21.5 


9.2 


Number of 






communes 


72 


92 


% in majoritarian 






contests in 






selected 






communes 






Center-left 


43.4 


42.3 


Center-right 


34.3 


34.5 


Center-right 






League 


21.6 


22.6 



8.1 5.2 17.1 5.4 11.7 29.3 

I 1.0 7.6 23.0 9.7 16.2 49.6 

79 75 70 82 94 107 



36.6 36.4 34.0 28.4 35.1 24.4 33.8 

31.8 30.7 39.9 31.8 37.3 23.8 32.3 

30.5 31.2 28.2 37.6 25.3 51.6 32.8 



Indicators 



PDS 



RC 



CCD/ Veneto 

PP Dini Fl CDU AN League Mean 



Mean residents I 1,338 

Population density 254 

Old age index 146.7 

% illiterate 1.2 

% grad. sch./coll. 22. 1 

Unemployment 

rate 9.4 

Youth 

unemployment rate 1 8. 1 

% employed agric. 5.7 

% employed 

industry 37.0 

% employed 

service 57.3 

% owners/profess. 6.4 

% self-employed 16.1 

% self-employed 

agric. 2.9 

% self-employed 
ind. 



% self-employed 
serv. 

% employees 
industry 



4.4 



5.2 



10,075 
236 
126.2 
1.3 
21.5 

8.3 

15.9 
6.0 

37.4 

56.6 

6.3 

16.1 

3.1 

4.4 



8,555 7,526 6,204 3,779 14,334 4,505 7,553 

302 255 187 176 330 217 247 

112.5 125.3 117.0 101.3 125.4 105.5 118.5 

0.7 0.6 1.5 0.8 0.6 0.6 0.8 

24.5 23.4 16.2 13.7 26.9 15.0 21.2 



6.6 6.9 7.6 6.3 



7.9 



5.5 



6.9 



12.2 12.6 13.9 10.8 15.4 
4.5 4.3 10.4 11.3 4.9 



9.7 12.6 

7.1 5.8 



42.5 41.5 42.9 53.3 34.47 58.5 44.0 



53.0 54.2 46.6 35.4 60.J 



8.6 



7.2 7.2 



6.6 



8.5 



5.2 



15.8 14.8 21.7 21.4 16.1 

2.6 2.3 5.2 6.9 2.4 

5.1 4.6 7.2 6.9 4.7 

8.1 7.9 9.3 7.5 9.0 

6.6 6.3 3.8 4.5 6.1 



34.4 


50.2 


6.8 


7.4 


18.9 


19.9 


4.5 


3.8 


7.0 


5.5 


7.3 


8.4 


5.7 


5.8 



% employees 






service 


19.9 


19.4 


% other industry 






wkrs. 


24.7 


25.1 


% other service 






wkrs. 


20.8 


21.1 



Tire Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy 1 987-96 1 53 

Table 7.2 (continued) 

CCD/ Veneto 

Indicators PDS RC PP Dini Fl CDU AN League Mean 

19.7 20.0 11.8 8.9 23.3 8.9 16.8 

27.0 27.3 28.4 37.9 20.1 41.6 29.1 

16.2 18.7 18.2 13.8 18.7 12.6 17.4 

% owned housing 69.5 70.0 70.5 72.1 74.1 80.0 65.2 80.2 72.1 

SOURCE: Gianni Riccamboni, "Ritorno al futuro? La transizione nell'ex subcultura bianca," in Le elezioni della 
transizione: II sistema politico italiano alia prova del voto 1994-1996, ed. Giuseppe Gangemi and Gianni Ric- 
camboni (Turin: UTET, 1997), 293. 

NOTE: Numbers in bold in League column signify particular differences between "League communes" in 
1 996 and others. 

medium-large firms in the cities. It is in these places that the League has 
achieved its greatest strength, reflecting their dominant populations' 
alienation horn the DC model of representation and increasing anger at 
the state's failure to provide what they perceive as necessary services to lo- 
cal industries at a time when international competition in their sectors is 
increasingly intense. 

Of course the League is also a type of party very different from the 
Christian Democrats. Although at a local government level (communes 
and provinces) it offers the prospect of good government in place of the 
corrupt practices of the old regime, the weakness of these tiers relative to 
national government means that little can be accomplished without dra- 
matic reform. The 1996-2000 ideological shift from federalism and in- 
volvement in national politics to secessionism and abandonment of re- 
form within the context of Italy meant that the party was vulnerable to 
other groupings (such as Forza Italia) that offer practical solutions as op- 
posed to the Utopian promise of an enterprise such as an independent 
Padania. But as long as memory of the failure of the DC remains strong, 
there is still political mileage in running against the role of parties as po- 
litical intermediaries. The antipolitical message of the League, however, 
though an understandable reaction against the old regime's politicizing 
everything, presumes that markets can operate independent of the role of 
parties as agents of transmission of values and demands between state and 
society and also contrasts with the call for self-government with adequate 
resources, which is something entirely different from the message of 
antigovernment the League has increasingly identified itself with. 17 

Finally, the League has introduced a geographical reframing of Italian 



154 Chapter Seven 

politics that is much more than a simple substitution of one national 
party for another. If there was always an uneven pattern of support for Ital- 
ian political parties, representing the geography of social cleavages and 
their historical rootedness in different places, there was at least agreement 
on a national focus for politics. The League represents a politicizing of the 
very territorial template Italian politics rests on. The question, How many 
Italys? is no longer a simple academic one; it has become political. 18 The 
politics of resentment that is at the heart of the League's appeal to its elec- 
torate takes an essentially geographical form, identifying the enemy as be- 
ing outside the North but not outside Italy. It is associated closely with the 
old regime of parties and government in Rome. It is a purely territorial as 
opposed to an ethnic appeal, however much Bossi might invoke Mel Gib- 
son and Braveheart to make his case, based on concocting a cultural iden- 
tity for northern Italy to pursue the interests of the small businesses and 
their problems that the League increasingly identifies itself with (see chap- 
ters 8 and 9). 

MILAN AND THE NORTHERN LEAGUE, 1987-96 

In the 1992 national elections the Northern League demonstrated consid- 
erable inroads in Milan as well as in its hinterland. This was further demon- 
strated in the elections for mayor and council in 1993 and, to a much lesser 
extent, in the national elections of 1994. This led to some speculation that 
the League was a movement on behalf of the interests of Milan and its hin- 
terland. The League's rhetoric in the early 1990s, representing itself as the 
agent of the North that produces against an Italian South that consumes at 
the North's expense, seemed to indicate that the erstwhile economic capi- 
tal of Italy might be on its way to becoming a full-fledged capital of some- 
thing else. Politically, Rome was to be exchanged for Milan, at least sym- 
bolically if not substantively, as the title of one book suggested (Milano a 
Roma, edited by Ilvo Diamanti and Renato Mannheimer, a title that also al- 
ludes to the 1994 national election success of both the League and the Mi- 
lan-based Forza Italia of Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian Rupert Murdoch). 19 
The editors of the book expressed the connection between Milan and the 
League thus: "At bottom, the League represents the Italy of producers, 
whose capital is Milan, in counterpoint to Rome, capital of the old party 
system [partitocrazia] and of state centralism." 20 

The Electoral Pattern 

In fact, the connection between Milan and the League proved much more 
tenuous than first reports suggested. To illustrate this point, table 7.3 pro- 
vides the average level of support obtained by the Northern League within 
each of the main provinces of the Milan metropolitan area for the three na- 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 155 

Table 7.3 Provincial Average Percentage of Support for the Northern League, 
National Elections (Chamber of Deputies), 1992-96, Bergamo, Como, Lecco, 
Milan, Varese 





Bergamo 


Como 


Lecco 


Milan 


Varese 


1992 


27.45 


30.57 


28.64 


22.01 


30.55 


1994 


32.45 


26.31 


28.23 


19.32 


32.09 


1996 


47.51 


38.26 

% increase 


37.50 


25.93 


36.11 


1992-94 


5.00 


(4.26) 


(0.41) 


(2.69) 


1.54 


1994-96 


15.06 


11.95 


9.27 


6.61 


4.02 


1992-96 


73.10 


25.10 


30.90 


17.80 


18.20 



SOURCE: Michael Shin and author. 

tional elections of 1992, 1994, and 1996. 21 Though there is a regionwide 
upward trend in support, the province of Milan consistently shows the 
lowest levels relative to the other provinces. The box-and-whisker plots in 
figure 7.6 provide a vivid display of this tendency. Looking more specifi- 
cally at shifts in League support between elections, figure 7.6 reveals a re- 
trenchment across the region in 1994, with a resurgence in 1996. Provinces 
have distinctive profiles: in Bergamo, League support increased on average 
by a remarkable 73.1 percent, whereas in Milan average support by com- 
mune went up by "only" 17.8 percent over the period 1992-96. 

The 1994 election revealed the electoral emergence of "two Norths," as 
Ilvo Diamanti termed them in his chapter on the League; in the same 
book, he and Mannheimer had portrayed "Milan" as taking over Rome, in 
the persons of Bossi (of the League) and Berlusconi (of Forza Italia). 22 In 
1992 the League was one of the few alternatives to the established parties 
as the old system of parties began to disintegrate under twin pressures: the 
end of the Cold War reduced the Communist threat that the Christian De- 
mocrats had always used to advantage and led to a reformulation of the 
old Communist Party into two new formations (PDS and RC); and the 
emerging corruption scandal centered in Milan (which became known in 
Italy as Tangentopoli, or Bribesville). In 1994, however, Berlusconi in- 
vented his Forza Italia party, which drew off a considerable proportion of 
the vote that the League obtained in 1992 and in the 1993 local elections. 
This was much more the case in Milan itself than in the hinterland of the 
city. The more conventional center-right ideology of Berlusconi, based 
primarily on his own celebrity and his reputation as a savvy businessman, 
was more attractive to the average Milanese voter than the localist- 
regionalist message of the League. But there was more to it than that. Us- 
ing referendum turnout data showing that League strongholds tend to 
have more extreme participation rates (i.e., lower and higher) than the 



1 56 Chapter Seven 

% Northern League, 1992 



% Northern League, 1994 



o . 

00 












o _ 
(O 


















BE 







o _ 


m 


B 


B 


r-, 


H 


p . 


—p- 




••fir 


B 






m 


= 











— 












BG CO LC Ml VA 

Province 

% Northern League, 1996 



BG CO LC Ml VA 
Province 




BG CO LC Ml VA 
Province 

Figure 7.6 Box-and-whisker plots of Northern League support in the main 
provinces of the Milan metropolitan region, 1992-96. Source: Michael Shin and 
author. 



"urban North," Luca Ricolfi suggests that the "territory of the League" in 
the "Deep North" is marked by much greater "concrete particularism" in 
political attitudes than the more "civic" and "universalistic" cities. 23 Be 
that as it may, the League has retreated across the board from the areas it 
had penetrated in the early 1990s (Milan and other metropolitan centers 
such as Genoa and Venice, traditionally leftist areas such as Mantua) while 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1 987-96 157 

keeping considerable support in areas of historical strength such as Berg- 
amo, Como, Varese, and some of the communes in the north of the 
province of Milan. The League's problem with Milan in particular, and ur- 
ban centers in general, is evident when the percentage of League voters (y- 
axis) is plotted against the log of the number of voters for each commune 
for the urban region as a whole (x-axis) (fig. 7.7). The number of voters in 
a commune is used as an indicator of urbanization; high numbers of vot- 
ers correspond to more urbanized areas. Because some heavily urban 
communes have far more voters than the average, the numbers of voters 
were converted to logarithms for graphing. Summary measures for pooled 
data, shown in table 7.4, are reported to give greater precision to inter- 
election comparisons. Within each scatterplot, the areas within the dot- 
ted vertical and horizontal lines represent the interquartile range of the 
pooled, logged number of voters and the pooled vote share of the North- 
ern League, respectively, and the solid lines mark the median values for 
each pooled variable. These lines and the scales on the y- and x-axes re- 
main constant across the plots, so each interelection plot can be compared 
with the others and with the pooled plot (1992-96). 

Two items of interest emerge from a visual perusal of the scatterplots 
in figure 7.7. First, there is a strong negative correlation or inverse rela- 
tion between League support and urbanization. This is verified statis- 
tically using a simple correlation between the two variables across the 
Milan metropolitan region as represented by the five provinces of Ber- 
gamo, Como, Lecco, Milan, and Varese: across all elections (1992-96) it 
is -0.382 (p < 0.001). Second, there is significant provincial variation 
in the correlation between support for the League and degree of ur- 
banization across the urban region. Figure 7.8 shows the plots of the re- 
lation with a regression line superimposed for the selected provinces of 



Table 7.4 Summary Measures of the Northern League and Logged Voter Densities 
in the Milan Metropolitan Region, 1992-96 







First 




Third 






Minimum 


Quartile 


Median 


Quartile 


Maximum 


%NL 1992 


10.95 


23.69 


27.55 


31.03 


54.93 


%NL 1994 


9.58 


22.94 


27.70 


32.49 


57.32 


%NL 1996 


19.46 


29.04 


36.15 


44.80 


82.39 


Pooled % 1 992-96 


9.58 


24.67 


29.38 


35.76 


82.39 


Ln (voter dens. 1 992) 


3.18 


6.74 


7.62 


8.36 


13.85 


Ln (voter dens. 1 994) 


3.22 


6.75 


7.66 


8.39 


13.84 


Ln (voter dens. 1 996) 


3.37 


6.73 


7.65 


8.38 


13.77 


Pooled 1992-96 


3.18 


6.74 


7.64 


8.38 


13.85 



SOURCE: Michael Shin and author. 



158 Chapter Seven 



o 
o 

rfwSB 


5 
4r 




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ofej 






o — g>ffw 

o wfsbffl 

o °o^1 
o o 




: is 




w 8 



4 6 8 10 12 

In(voters), Pooled 1992-1996 



14 




4 6 8 10 12 

In(voters), 1992 



14 





6 8 10 12 

In(voters), 1994 



4 6 8 10 12 

In(voters), 1996 



14 



Figure 7.7 Scatterplots of the number of voters (logged) against Northern League 
support for all communes in the Milan metropolitan region, 1992-96. Source: 
Michael Shin and author. 



Bergamo, Como, and Milan in 1996. The negative correlations between 
the two variables in the provinces of Bergamo and Como are -0.54 and 
-0.53, respectively (both statistically significant at the p < 0.001 level). 
Within the province of Milan, however, there is no statistically signi- 
ficant relation between support for the Northern League and the logged 
number of voters (r = 0.007, p = 0.920). Closer analysis suggests that the 
distribution of the data may account for this difference between the 
province of Milan and the others. For most communes in the province 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 159 

Province of Milan 



o . 

CD 


o 



6 * 


D 


DO 




S- 




o . 




|e° 




oftn 




RR 6ft fc n 




o jBhm 




O 


ohkH 

o 


Jw 




BBS! °^ 2 

Pi ^ 




4 6 8 10 12 14 

In(voters), Pooled 1992-1996 

Province of Bergamo 



6 8 10 12 

In(voters), 1996 

Province of Como 



14 





6 8 10 

In(voters), 1996 



6 8 10 12 

In(voters), 1996 



14 



Figure 7.8 Scatterplots of the number of voters (logged) against Northern League 
support in the Milan metropolitan region (pooled 1992-96) and in the provinces of 
Milan, Bergamo, and Como (1996). Source: Michael Shin and author. 



of Milan the logged number of voters is above the pooled regional me- 
dian of 7.64 and League support is below the pooled region medium of 
29.38. By contrast, in Bergamo and Como there are more communes 
with fewer voters (more data points to the left of the pooled median 
line), and League support tends to be above the pooled median. The 
more urbanized province of Milan therefore has a much lower preva- 



i 



1 60 Chapter Seven 

lence of support for the Northern League than the less urbanized hinter- 
land areas of Bergamo and Como. 

Conventional wisdom in social science suggests that this division be- 
tween city and hinterland is an unlikely outcome because the functional 
links between the two are often viewed as influencing, if not determining, 
electoral choice. It is also a major challenge for the League to claim to rep- 
resent the whole of northern Italy rather than only the extreme or Deep 
North. Of course local populations are always split in electoral affiliations. 
Left-wing, center and right-wing parties have all garnered support his- 
torically in Milan and its surrounding area. 24 But not only was there a 
dominant consensus for many years between the two areas expressed in 
majority support for the two major parties of national government in 
postwar Italy — the Christian Democrats and the Socialists — there was, so 
to speak, a common menu of political choices, largely organized in left/ 
right terms and oriented to national political goals. From the 1950s to the 
late 1980s the two parties of government dominated Milan and its envi- 
rons, even though they were faced with effective opposition from the for- 
mer Communists and other groupings, particularly in the areas of heavy 
industry in the inner northern suburbs. In the city, support for the Chris- 
tian Democrats was also largely one of open choice among electoral rivals, 
whereas elsewhere, particularly in parts of the northern hinterland such 
as Bergamo and Brescia, the Christian Democrats were beneficiaries of a 
long-standing Catholic subculture reproduced by a dense network of as- 
sociations and affinity groups. 25 Now there seems to have been a funda- 
mental spatial break between the city and its hinterland in the menu of 
real political choices and the economic-cultural orientations associated 
with it. 

The Difficulty of the Northern League in Milan 

I identify four causes of the emerging political difference between Milan 
and its hinterland, particularly its historically important hinterland to the 
north. The first is the fundamentally different character of the economies 
of Milan and its periphery as they have evolved over the past twenty years. 
The second is the population composition of Milan, particularly the pres- 
ence there of a substantial population of southern Italian immigrants and 
their offspring (plus more recent foreign-born immigrants) who cannot be 
expected to support the explicitly antisouthern, antiforeign, and anti- 
Italian agenda of the League. The third is the new symbolism of the 
League since 1995, which is increasingly oriented to the Venetian element 
in northern history and the heroic role of tiny businesses and artisans in 
economic growth, neither of which can have much positive resonance in 
Milan. Finally, the League has been undercut in Milan since 1994 by the 



The Geography of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 161 

emergence of a conventional national political right associated with the 
various parties of the so-called Pole of Liberty (particularly Forza Italia and 
the National Alliance). 

The New Spatial Economy of a Poly archie City-Region 

Historically, Milan and its hinterland have been thought of as part of the 
famous industrial triangle of northwestern Italy, stretching between Mi- 
lan, Turin, and Genoa, in which large firms led the industrialization of 
Italy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This industrial- 
ization grew out of an older diffuse pattern in which factories emerged in 
the countryside and often employed people who lived nearby and still 
farmed part time. Beginning with Fascism and continuing during the 
1950s and 1960s, agriculture and manufacturing became much more sep- 
arated in the immediate region of Milan. Factory jobs in the cities, partic- 
ularly Milan, grew faster than the urban population, indicating the con- 
centration of manufacturing industry in city settings in relatively large 
units. In the 1950s and 1960s Milan grew in both manufacturing jobs and 
population at the highest rate of all cities in Lombardy as a whole. Since 
the 1970s this pattern has been reversed in that the internal economies of 
scale of large factories have lost much of their advantage and the accessi- 
bility and transportation advantages of large cities in industrial produc- 
tion have weakened considerably. These trends have had a number of de- 
cisive effects in dividing the large city from its hinterland. 

In the first place, small-scale production that adjusts readily to rapid 
shifts in demand has found a new role. It is in the small cities and urban- 
ized countryside to the north of Milan that the small-scale producers have 
come into their own. 26 In such settings, industrial districts have appeared, 
similar to those previously identified in central and northeastern Italy, in 
which local external economies of scale (local banking, labor pool, tech- 
nological support, etc.) substitute for the internal economies enjoyed by 
larger businesses. 27 In other words, the Third Italy of industrial districts 
has invaded the First Italy of large-scale manufacturing industries linked 
functionally in a city-regional complex. Meanwhile, in the second place, 
Milan has gone through a massive restructuring with the destruction of 
many large factories and the emergence of a much shrunken large-firm 
sector. 28 

One important political consequence has been a large decrease in blue- 
collar workers and a significant increase in professional and managerial 
employees. This transformation has been particularly marked in the his- 
torical center of the city and the immediate suburban ring. 29 Business 
owners, professionals, and managers are concentrated there. But perhaps 
more important, a tertiary sector with relatively weak links to existing 



162 Chapter Seven 

manufacturing industries in the region has become the main generator of 
jobs in the city. Involving such expanding markets as advertising, mar- 
keting, show business, computer software, health care, and finance, this 
sector is largely free of the social linkages of manager-worker that charac- 
terize the factory economy; but unlike the local horizons of the small busi- 
nesses in the hinterland, the horizons of these businesses and their em- 
ployees are national and international. 30 They connect to people in other 
cities daily, and in their own lives they partake of a social world that is 
without precise territorial limits. The old urban-industrial model of city- 
hinterland relations therefore is in crisis. 

The Milan metropolitan region can be divided into three segments. 
First is the city itself and its traditional industrial and residential suburbs, 
forming an arc around the city but particularly extensive to the north in 
the direction of Como. In this zone the League is weakly based, challenged 
from both left and right by parties that can appeal to the cosmopolitan 
and traditional industrial interests of its economic sectors. Second is the 
zone in which small and medium manufacturing firms have largely dis- 
placed the large employers of yesterday and expanded production into en- 
tirely new products. The social character of these areas is very different 
from that of the first zone. There are high levels of self-employment and 
intensive local orientations in the supply of both labor and services. This 
zone stretches from Magenta through the southern communes of the 
province of Varese (e.g., Busto Arsizio, Gallarate, Saronno) to southern 
Como (e.g., Cantu), ending south of Bergamo in the vicinity of Treviglio 
and other communes to the west of the river Serio. The third zone is the 
most peripheral, stretching between the second zone and the Swiss border 
or the Trento region. This area has remnants of old industrialization, some 
new small-scale manufacturing, and tourism. Its dependence on regional- 
government expenditures and on infrastructure (road, rail) decisions em- 
anating from Milan set it apart from the second zone in terms of confi- 
dence in its own devices. 31 

The political consequences are distinctive in the different zones. On 
one hand, the intense competitiveness of the small-firm sector in the cen- 
tral hinterland induces a strong identification with work as defining of life 
and a constant worry about next year's bottom line. Survey data suggest 
that in these areas voters typically are extremely provincial yet worry that 
global competition threatens their hard-won standard of living. 32 This 
generally produces support for a party such as the League, which appeals 
to the values and worries of the small business owner. On the other hand 
and in Milan, in place of the class relations of Fordism — large-scale in- 
dustrial production — there is now a much more fragmentary social struc- 
ture. This is already producing a fluid electoral politics in which no party 



The Geography of Part}' Replacement in Northern Italy, 1 987-96 163 

can rely on permanent support and there are dramatic flows of votes be- 
tween elections. Some voters, particularly male workers in traditionally 
working-class areas such as Sesto San Giovanni, remain attached to parties 
of the left, but others, particularly women, exhibit much more pragmatic 
political affiliations even in such areas. 33 Across both zones, however, it is 
women who show the greatest volatility in their political affiliations, sug- 
gesting that the collapse of the old dominant parties (the DC and the PCI) 
has had a greater impact on them than on men, who have shifted to the 
Northern League or remained affiliated with the PDS as the heir to the 
PCI. 34 The third zone has undoubtedly drifted toward the League, but its 
continuing dependence on the regional capital means that its residents 
must still look to Milan rather than seeing themselves in entirely localis- 
tic terms. Political affiliations in this zone remain more oriented to local 
candidates and their entrepreneurial capacities in dealing with the re- 
gional government in Milan than to particular political parties. 

The Southern and Foreign-Bom Populations in Milan 

A second, and less noted, feature of Milan when compared with its hin- 
terland is its more heterogeneous population. Not only is the population 
made up of migrants and their offspring from all over Italy, particularly 
the North, there is also a significant southern-origin population that ar- 
rived in large numbers in the late 1950s and early 1960s to work in the 
Fordist factories that were expanding at that time and, more recently, a 
mass immigration from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. 35 This is not to say 
that there is no southern or foreign-born population in the hinterland, 
only that there are sizable southern and foreign-born blocs in the popula- 
tion of Milan and its immediate vicinity, setting it apart from the outer 
hinterland where the League is so strong. The southern population was 
never as segregated residentially as the focus in the 1960s on certain inner 
suburbs tended to suggest. 36 So it is difficult to identify distinctive south- 
ern enclaves in which voters might vote alike. Furthermore, the increased 
number of foreign-born immigrants in recent years makes southerners 
even less obvious socially as a bloc. Since its arrival, the southern popula- 
tion, particularly the dominant working-class segment, has tended to sup- 
port the parties of the left, in particular the Communists and their suc- 
cessor parties, even if other segments, especially those employed by the 
state, have tended to support the parties of government or the far right. 
Though hardly voluble in its criticisms of the League for demonizing the 
Italian South and southerners as the source of all that ails the North or 
speaking in one monolithic voice, this population does provide a core of 
support for the labor unions and the parties most critical of the League 
(from Rifondazione Comunista on the left through the Partito Popolare in 



164 Chapter Seven 

the center-left to the National Alliance on the right). Leaders of the League 
sometimes claim that southerners are among the supporters of the party. 
But apart from Bossi's Sicilian-born wife, who is one of the founders, no 
leading figures are southern, and the rhetoric and policies of the League 
are certainly not designed to attract the votes of southerners or foreign- 
born citizens, however long they and their offspring have lived in the 
region. 

The Northern League's Post- I 994 Symbolism 

After the failure in 1994 of its strategy of entering into alliance with other 
parties to pursue federal reform of the Italian state, the Northern League 
has tended to emphasize some new issues in which the identity and in- 
terests of contemporary Milan take on little if any significance in the ide- 
ology of the party (see chapter 9). One of these is the increasing role of the 
position and problems of small businesses, particularly the small busi- 
nesses typical of the Veneto. The League has long seen itself as the voice 
of the small-business sector in the industrial districts of northern Italy. But 
as this sector has become increasingly differentiated between the organ- 
ized networks of firms in the large and medium-sized cities of Lombardy 
and Piedmont and the much more localized and independent businesses 
of the Veneto and rural Lombardy, the League has identified more and 
more with the interests and problems of the latter. These businesses are 
particularly angry about the state's failure to provide needed services at 
the same time that they have lost the intermediary agent that once acted, 
if unreliably and intermittently, to represent them against Roman bu- 
reaucracy: the locally hegemonic Christian Democratic Party. 

As if to reinforce this identification, the League has also turned toward 
a representation of northern history that resonates more with the past of 
the Veneto than with that of Lombardy. Much of the rhetoric about the 
new region of "Padania" invented since 1995 relies on symbols from the 
Venetian past, largely because Venice had a distinguished independent 
past when large sections of northern Italy were under foreign rule or were 
fragmented among small principalities of one type or another. The 
League's actions in setting up its shadow parliament in Mantua, organiz- 
ing demonstrations along the river Po and in Venice itself, and returning 
to a logic of cultural separatism after flirting with macroregional federal- 
ism point to its symbolic withdrawal from the metropolitan North repre- 
sented by Milan. 

The Rise of the National New Right 

Finally, since 1994 the Northern League has been challenged on such is- 
sues as foreign immigration, the need to liberate the economy from the 



Tlie Geograpliy of Party Replacement in Northern Italy, 1987-96 165 

shackles of state regulation, and the virtues of small business by the emer- 
gence of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party and the makeover of the neo- 
Fascist MSI into the post-Fascist National Alliance both of which have 
taken votes from the League in Milan and elsewhere in the North. In both 
the 1996 national election and the 1997 local elections these parties in al- 
liance took over a significant proportion of the League's previous vote in 
Milan. In Milan, therefore, there is still support for a right-wing politics 
that frames issues in national more than in regional terms. As of early 
2001, this new right was the main antagonist of the government. After the 
2001 national election, the League's best hope for national political sur- 
vival is to be its unwilling and sullen partner. The League's cultural re- 
sponses to political dilemmas appear too simplistic to achieve a positive 
response in large cities such as Milan, where the everyday reality is too 
complex for a convinced reaction from a sufficiently large segment of the 
electorate. 37 

CONCLUSION 

The Catholic Church may have represented a degree of universalism or 
commitment to universal values in an Italian context, but the form that 
its relation to the Italian state took after World War II — mediation by the 
Christian Democratic Party — led to a heavy emphasis on localism and 
particularistic attachments in the areas of that party's strength in north- 
ern Italy. The decay of the Church's ancillary organizations, under the 
pressures of secularization, the growth of a consumer society, and the de- 
velopment of an industrial sector heavily dependent on family labor and 
vulnerable to international markets, have allied with the powerful local- 
ism released into public view by the political scandals of the early 1990s 
to produce a new political regime in northern Italy in which a new party 
with regionalist, not national, ambitions has replaced the old perennial 
party of Italian national government. 

The Northern League, therefore, though it has grown in ground long 
tilled by the Christian Democrats, is not a direct substitute for that party 
in any sense of the term. It grew separately as the DC declined, benefiting 
from this decline but hardly entirely dependent on it, as some maps and 
statistics demonstrate. But it is also a very different kind of party, oriented 
primarily toward a particular set of sectoral interests (that of small manu- 
facturing firms and artisans) and a very different geographical imagina- 
tion of an Italian North no longer dependent on power emanating from 
Rome, the demonized capital of a state whose dominance by a cabal of 
parties ( partitocrazia) has now come back to haunt it. The League's expo- 
nents believe that the "small virtues" (honesty, efficiency, and merit) were 
shortchanged by the old system. Whether an independent North could 



166 Chapter Seven 

develop them better alone than as part of Italy is a different matter en- 
tirely. The North has, after all, been part of Italy for a long time. The his- 
tory of the DC and its association with corrupt practices are part of the 
North's history too. 

Without Milan, however, the League would not have a geographically 
coherent North to govern. Yet without a more cosmopolitan or nationally 
oriented message, the League cannot expect to prosper there. Trapped be- 
tween the heritage of the Christian Democrats and the contemporary spa- 
tial economy of northern Italy, the Northern League is hardly a suitable 
vehicle to replace the DC as a governing party even in the part of Italy it 
claims. Place differences set stringent limits on the geographical claims of 
a party that bases its appeal entirely on its identification with a specific re- 
gion of Italy. The DC may have been localistic in its practices in northern 
Italy, but its national orientation and connection to the Catholic Church 
allowed it the possibility of putting together a wide range of group coali- 
tions across a wide range of places at election time. The League does not 
have this option. Its localism does not travel well beyond a narrow geo- 
graphical segment of northern Italy. Fulfilling its ambition is limited, 
therefore, by its place-based appeal. The next chapter attempts to explain 
more about why the League had the success it did in the 1990s and what 
its experience tells us about the geographical construction of political 
identities. 



CHAPTER 8 



The Northern League and Political 
Identity in Northern Italy 



The Northern League is not just another political party oriented to ob- 
taining national office and delivering the goods to its electorate in the 
fashion of the departed Christian Democrats. This is the source of both its 
appeal and its dilemma, as I argued in chapter 7. Originating in several lo- 
calistic movements in the early 1980s, the League took on its present or- 
ganizational form in 1992. Its leader, Umberto Bossi, has shifted back and 
forth between demanding a new federal Italy and proclaiming outright se- 
cession. 1 The second or first party in both national and local elections in 
many places in northern Lombardy and the Veneto region of the North- 
east for most of the 1990s, the League currently stands for a federal Italy. 
From 1996 until 2000 the party followed a secessionist strategy based 
on an independent "Padania," a new state variously defined but usually 
claiming Italy from its northern alpine boundary as far south as a line 
running along the southern borders of the administrative regions of Tus- 
cany, Umbria, and Marche. In 2001 the League reentered a national elec- 
toral alliance with two parties, Forza Italia and the National Alliance (Al- 
leanza Nazionale), that it had abandoned in 1994 and whose visions of a 
future Italy differ significantly from its own (see chapter 9). 

The League, as an explicitly northern-regional party, represents a novel 
departure from the nationally oriented, if rarely nationally successful, 
character of the two major postwar Italian political movements, with the 
ideologically universalistic Communists dominating central Italy and the 
equally (if distinctively) universalistic Catholics (in the Christian Democ- 
ratic Party) dominating the Northeast and parts of the South. Variously ex- 
plained as a protest movement or an antisystem party whose future sur- 
vival was seen as unlikely by most orthodox political scientists, the League 
has had a remarkable staying power over the past ten years. 2 Part of this 
relates to the fertile period when it was planted and grew as the collapse 
of the old system of parties in 1992 in reaction to the great corruption 
scandal of Tangentopoli provided an opening to new parties running 

167 



168 Chapter Eight 

against the old system, its politicians, and their model of national inte- 
gration. 3 But part of it also relates to the appeal of a regional party in con- 
ditions of economic globalization and increased European integration. 
The success of the League in changing the terms of Italian political debate 
says something meaningful about the current status of Italian national 
identity: the sense of place associated with Italy as a whole. So the North- 
ern League is important in contemporary Italian politics not simply as the 
main electoral successor to the Christian Democratic Party in much of 
northern Italy in the 1990s, but also as the prime mover in creating a 
public debate about the geography of Italian political identity. This may 
be its most lasting contribution to Italian politics. 

THE NORTHERN LEAGUE AND POLITICAL IDENTITY 

National identities are often seen as the polar opposite of identities asso- 
ciated with other geographical scales of political identity, such as the local 
and the regional. In contemporary circumstances, however, including the 
globalization of economies and the questioning of the efficacy of existing 
states, national identity may no longer be best thought of as opposed to 
political identities at other geographical scales. Using the case of the 
Northern League in Italy, this chapter identifies three rules of political 
identity formation — the self-conscious invention of political units, the 
malleability of identities, and the multiplicity of identities — that suggest 
the mutual contingency of different geographical scales in the crafting of 
political identities, including national ones. 

These rules are by no means unique to Italy. The success of the League 
in changing the terms of debate about the geography of political identity 
in Italy illustrates in focused form three developing aspects of the politics 
of identity in Europe and North America more generally: first, the explicit 
and self-conscious design of new territorial entities — in this case, known as 
Padania — where none had much more than the slightest existence before; 
second, the malleability of political identities after a period when these had 
seemed to take on a permanent cast, particularly in terms of the priority of 
established national identities over those associated with other geograph- 
ical scales and the emergence of geographically differentiated class, gender, 
and religious identities that were supposedly invariant within existing na- 
tional territories; and third, the coexistence of multiple political identities 
without one's necessarily replacing all others. It is these three aspects of 
place and political identity as manifested in the Northern League that I ad- 
dress in this chapter. First, however, I want to say a few words about the 
geography of support for the League and its territorial claim to a region 
called Padania and to briefly examine a general subtext running across the 
three aspects of the geography of political identity: the place and identity 
question in contemporary social science. 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 169 













less than 5 
5 to 10 
10 to 20 
20 to 30 
Over 30 















Figure 8. 1 Percentage of the total vote for the Northern League by province, 
national election (Chamber of Deputies), 1994. Source: Author. 











less than 5 
5 to 10 
10 to 20 
20 to 30 
Over 30 












Figure 8.2 Percentage of the total vote for the Northern League by province, 
national election (Chamber of Deputies), 1996. Source: Author. 



THE ELECTORAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE NORTHERN LEAGUE 

From 1987 to 2001 the Northern League was the major or second party 
throughout large parts of northern Italy. Its main areas of support have 
been in the Veneto and Friuli in the Northeast, northern Lombardy, and 
Piedmont (figs. 8.1 and 8.2). Typically these are rural areas where small- 
scale manufacturing industries have become strongly rooted but where 
typical supporters are attached to certain traditional values relating to in- 
dividual effort, strict gender roles, the unreliability of government, and 
the unfairness of taxes not returned in the form of superior public services 
and infrastructure for economic development. 4 The core supporters of the 



170 Chapter Eight 

League are younger male voters engaged in small-scale manufacturing as 
self-employed entrepreneurs. But in areas where the League is strongly 
rooted it also appeals to many others, including women and employees. 
So it is a mistake to reduce it solely to a movement of the lower-middle 
class, akin to old-style explanations of Fascist and shopkeeper movements 
(such as Poujadism in 1950s France). Its strongest roots have lain in areas 
or zones where the local economy is export driven and volatile and where 
the political props to local economic development provided by the Chris- 
tian Democrats and Socialists before 1992 have collapsed. 5 It is a move- 
ment of such areas rather than of such-and-such a social group. It has had 
limited success elsewhere, with a retrenchment since 1994 in Liguria 
(around Genoa in particular), a substantial retreat in the largest cities such 
as Milan, Venice, and Turin, and trivial levels of support to the south of 
the river Po, in Emilia- Romagna and Tuscany. At the same time that its ge- 
ographical reach has been contained, its level of support in its electoral 
fortresses such as Varese, Vicenza, and Treviso initially increased, although 
the October 1998 defection of leaders of the League in the Veneto to a new 
Venetian League (Liga Veneta) and everywhere to Forza Italia boded ill for 
the League's performance in the 2001 national election. Still, a so-called 
Deep North running along the southern edge of the Italian Alps has be- 
come the stronghold of the League in national and local elections in the 
way another famous region, the American Deep South, acquired a high 
degree of political consensus in its day. 

Yet the geographical claim that the League's leaders put increasingly at 
the heart of their rhetoric in the 1990s — the claim of Padania — extends 
well beyond its areas of electoral strength into localities long dominated 
politically by support for the Italian Communist Party and its heirs. This 
is, of course, only the latest in a long series of federalist and other territo- 
rial plans put forward by the League. 6 Indeed, until 1996, when Umberto 
Bossi unveiled the concept of Padania, the League had been committed 
first, before 1990, to a loose sense of the North with Lombardy and the 
Veneto as the two main constitutive units; second, in the early 1990s, to 
a division of Italy into three macroregions; and third, from 1994 to 1996, 
to a federal plan with much smaller units. 7 Since 2000, federalism has 
been the chosen strategy once more. 

One dilemma for the League, therefore, is its lack of much electoral sup- 
port in large tracts of the "promised Padania." Another is whether its ter- 
ritorial designs can be expected to elicit much explicit commitment from 
its activists and supporters when they and associated political strategies 
have changed so often. In an interview given at Marina di Pietrasanta (Tus- 
cany) on 2 August 1998, Bossi began to back away from secession by 
claiming that Padania could be created within existing institutions. He 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 1 71 

identified the presidents of the northern administrative regions as the 
agents for launching autonomy in the year 2000. 8 Finally, the term Pada- 
nia itself is potentially a problem, referring conventionally to the region 
of the Po Valley rather than to the more expansive superregion Bossi now 
has in mind. This has encouraged him to work at creating a sense of the 
larger region by reorganizing his rhetoric and the policy goals of the 
League around Padania through symbolic acts such as a pilgrimage to 
the banks of the Po (on 13-15 September 1996), repeated visits to Venice 
to capture its history as an independent polity, and continuing use of 
provocative language and phrases to distinguish a "continental" or "Eu- 
ropean" Italy north of Rome from a "Mediterranean" or even "African" 
Italy to the south — represented, for example, by slogans such as "Africa 
begins at Rome" and repeated association of the South with Mafia crimi- 
nality and the "Roman" political parties, particularly Berlusconi's Forza 
Italia, the League's main electoral competitor (see figs. 8.3 and 8.4). 9 This 
effectively racializes the territorial design of Padania as well as situating it 
in the familiar modern/backward pairing of, respectively, northern and 
southern Italy. It also ensures that a possibly separate Padania will be large 
enough economically to support the plans for a separate northern cur- 
rency and an independent set of macroeconomic policies that Bossi has 
also proposed. Unfortunately for Bossi and the League, the mythology of 
Venice and its historical political independence are more readily appro- 
priated by a local Venetian movement (such as the Venetian League), 
which can use them to present itself both as more culturally authentic and 
as true to the tolerant political heritage of the Venetian republic than the 
Lombard dictatorial style and extremist rhetoric of Bossi (a point made 
brilliantly in Michael Dibdin's 1994 detective novel Dead Lagoon). 10 Even 
more of a problem for the future of the idea of Padania, the admission of 
Italy into the European monetary system on 1 January 1999 makes the 
proposal of a new currency and associated monetary and fiscal policies, 
symbolically important as they would be for establishing northern "na- 
tionhood," totally redundant economically. 11 

MYTHS OF PLACE AND IDENTITY 

Turning to the place and identity question, I would identify several di- 
mensions of how considerations of political identity have been related ex- 
plicitly and implicitly to understandings of place and territory. One of the 
commonplaces of mid-twentieth century social science has been that 
places (or the spaces of various sizes that people occupy and live in) have 
no independent role in political identity in the modern world. Class, reli- 
gion, ideology, and gender are variously seen as primary. Even national- 
ism is deterritorialized as an ideological projection of the imagination of 



Italia loro - la Vitellona 

II Regno delle Due Sicilie ha vinto. 



Del domanc'e gran certezza: 

Roma sempre, Napoli ora, doman Palermo. 

Se Padania nonsara, 

Addio Giustizia, Economia e Liberia. 




PALERMO-POLO 



Figure 8.3 Northern League propaganda cartoon. A disunited but productive 
North lays the golden eggs for a united South, a corrupted Church, and a smiling 
Berlusconi. "Their Italy — the good-for-nothing," it commences: "The Kingdom of 
the Two Sicilies [the South] has won." Underneath it continues: "For tomorrow 
there is a great certainty: Rome always, Naples today, tomorrow Palermo. If Padania 
doesn't come about, goodbye to justice, economy [thrift, management] and liberty." 
Source: Lega Nord per L'Independenza della Padania (Northern League), September 
1998, 1. 




Figure 8.4 Northern League propaganda cartoon. A noble Bossi, held aloft by the 
balloons of fewer taxes, Europe, federalism, liberty, and more growth, wields a 
sword to cut the rope grasped by the Roman bosses, Berlusconi, D'Alema, and Fini. 
Source: Northern League, 1994. 



174 Chapter Eight 

groups that make no essential claims to specific bits of territory, only to 
"imagined communities." 12 Taking the existing boundaries between states 
as defining something akin to a territorial state of nature (as is common in 
political theory) allows discussion of political identity to ignore the geo- 
graphical parameters of who is inside and who is outside a particular polit- 
ical project. 13 Social scientists simply presume that debate about political 
identities and actual contestation of them takes place within the territorial 
parameters of the existing state structure. This is not to say that this pre- 
sumption is invariably false. Indeed, a case can be made that in Europe 
from the nineteenth century until the 1960s, the primary context of polit- 
ical identity formation was largely that of the established nation-states. In 
recent years this has changed, however, largely as a result of increased in- 
ternational communication, the development of the idea of an integrated 
Europe, the strengthening of regional economic disparities, and the flow- 
ering of regional movements. Today a hierarchy of territorial affiliations 
presents itself to the average citizen from Europe (or the world as a whole) 
through existing nation-states to regional nations (such as Catalonia, Scot- 
land, and Corsica) and localisms. Social cleavages and economic depend- 
encies cut across these place differences in complex ways to create multiple 
identities that include a range of intrinsic geographical definitions. For ex- 
ample, with respect to language a whole new cultural configuration is un- 
der construction in Europe, one more like that of India since 1947 than 
that of France after 1870. The emergence of regional languages and lan- 
guages of wider currency, particularly English, portends a normalization of 
multicultural identities (perhaps even a Europewide one) rather than the 
establishment of mutually exclusive linguistic realms in which a single lin- 
guistic identity and associated political identity will prevail. 14 

A second dimension of conventional wisdom about place and identity 
is that acknowledgeable cultural and political differences that are local or 
on less than a national scale are seen as products of the long distant past 
rather than as constituted over time and potentially invented in the pres- 
ent. One of the dominant stories told about Italy, for example, by schol- 
ars as well as politicians, is that the North and South are politically differ- 
ent today either because of the forms of government they had in the 
Middle Ages or because of historical amoral familism (ethics that extend 
only to family members) in the South as opposed to the North. The other 
is that there is continuing powerful localism because Italy unified late (in 
the 1860s) or has experienced a peculiar kind of industrialization de- 
pendent on a family capitalism of a few large firms and millions of very 
small ones established in the distant past. 15 There is little or no place for 
considering the role of the contemporary institutional framework, the na- 
tional economic structure as constituted since the 1960s, and the opera- 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 1 75 

tions of political parties since World War II in not so much reproducing as 
creating the geographical differences that are so much a feature of con- 
temporary Italy. 16 To the extent that generalizing about "Italy" remains 
questionable, therefore, commentators have available a stock of stories 
that put present-day geographical differences down to past social and po- 
litical ones. 17 

Finally, insofar as one geographical scale is seen as emergent and threat- 
ening to the hegemony of the national scale, it is the local one. This is very 
much the sense one derives from the burgeoning literature on globaliza- 
tion, particularly in cultural studies and political sociology. Though rarely 
defined in other than the vaguest terms, the "local" is often sited at one 
end of a global-local dialectic to define a world where the national scale, 
as well as geographical scales other than the local and global, is in eclipse. 
Under conditions of globalization, as localities are inserted directly into 
the networks of global capitalism with diminished national state regula- 
tion, the local is seen as replacing or substituting for the national in the 
reproduction of uneven development. A spatial dialectic like this has 
room for only two geographical scales. 18 To the extent that a political iden- 
tity is in crisis, therefore, it is seen as the national; and to the extent that 
a new scale is in the ascendancy it is the local (which usually seems to sub- 
sume the regional). In this view, political identities are invariably substi- 
tute rather than complementary "goods," and the local-regional is seen as 
increasingly substituting for the national. Yet as Alon Confino shows per- 
suasively for Wurttemberg, Germany, in 1871-1918, national identity 
does not necessarily exclude other identities. Rather, it is constructed be- 
tween the "intimate, immediate, and real local place and the distant, ab- 
stract, and not-less-real national world." 19 In the contemporary context of 
globalization, however — the unmediated insertion of localities and re- 
gions into world markets and the emergence of higher-tier governments 
such as the European Union — it is not simply the local and the existing 
national that are involved. The current trend is for a renegotiation of the 
relationships between various scales of political identity, including the na- 
tional. As a result, a multiplicity of crosscutting territorial identities — 
local, regional, national, and so on — are available for stimulus and mobi- 
lization by political movements and populist politicians. 

THE NORTHERN LEAGUE AND THE CONTEMPORARY 
POLITICS OF POLITICAL IDENTITY 

It is in this theoretical context that the case of the Italian Northern League 
is interesting and important. From the League's recent experience, as in- 
terpreted by means of my fieldwork in Varese and elsewhere in northern 
Italy and the results of recent Italywide and northern opinion polls, I want 



176 Chapter Eight 

to emphasize three rules relating to political identity formation that have 
consequences for theoretical debates about place and political identity. I 
chose Varese as the setting for interviewing League politicians because 
most of the important leaders of the League, including Bossi, come from 
the province, the League has become the main electoral force in the 
province since 1992, and the League has been strongly established in lo- 
cal government in Varese since the early 1990s. 

Designing Padania 

The first of the three rules involves the self-conscious invention of a new 
political entity, the Italian North or Padania, complete with its own 
myths, symbols, and rendering of history. Even though the League's lead- 
ers largely accept the view of pollsters that local, not regional, identities 
have lain behind much support for the movement, they nevertheless have 
come to believe that to achieve success in decentralizing power from 
Rome they must create a new territorial entity on which they can focus 
their aspirations. Having failed in a previous strategy of wresting power 
from Rome by participating in Roman (national) government (after the 
1994 election) to promote some type of federalism, by 1996 they were in- 
vesting their hopes in welding together an imagined community for 
northern Italy as an alternative to Italy as a whole. 

The deliberate nature of this process shows how much has changed 
from the last great round of creating national units in the late nineteenth 
century, when nations were not so much designed or customized as off- 
the-shelf products of at least minimal ethnic distinctions. All nations may 
have founding moments, but these are usually the outcome of long peri- 
ods of excitement, enthusiasm, and mobilization in which the symbols of 
nationhood, not least the claimed national boundaries, arise from wide- 
spread acceptance of their naturalness and rootedness in a common past, 
however mythic that past might be. The Northern League may be the first 
authentic European postmodernist territorial political movement in its 
self-conscious manipulation of territorial imagery to create a sense of 
cultural-economic difference within an existing state. Italy, of course, as 
League activists never tire of telling interviewers, was always the least nat- 
ural of cultural units for European nationhood. Ironically, the nineteenth- 
and early twentieth-century attempts at unifying Italy under Liberal and 
Fascist regimes faced a continuing dilemma of creating Italians out of a 
disparate populace, not dissimilar to the task facing the League with Pada- 
nia. The difference, however, is that there was a geographic entity called 
Italy that did have some prior history of political and economic unity, and 
there was no sudden, deliberate concoction of a territorial entity on which 
political hopes could be projected, such as has occurred with Bossi's in- 



The Northern League and Political Identity' in Northern Italy 1 77 

vention of Padania. Italy may have been only a geographical expression 
in 1860, but it was at least that. 

The League has had few if any primordial ethnic elements to play with 
except a set of dialects, many of them mutually unintelligible. The region 
and its history have had to be made from scratch, largely in terms of giv- 
ing cultural dressing to resentments about the mismatch between the 
contemporary institutional structure of Italy and the economic trajectory 
of its northern part. 20 A geographical entity thus provides the basis for 
making a set of historical claims rather than historical claims' providing 
the basis for a geographical claim. This is a powerful example of how space 
is perhaps becoming the "everything" that Edward Soja has claimed for 
it. 21 First of all, Padania has had to be given a territorial definition. The 
League has felt the need to reify its cultural claims about northern cultural 
distinctiveness by giving the region definite borders, even when these 
seem to go well beyond the geographical limits of mass support or the un- 
derstanding of militants who have tended to have a more geographically 
constrained definition of northern Italy than does Bossi. From the League's 
perspective, these borders do not involve a claim for a separate state so 
much as the secession of a cultural-economic region from an existing state 
in the context of an integrating Europe. Indeed, it is not always clear that 
the precise boundaries in themselves really matter that much to Bossi or 
the party militants. 

The approach seems to be that the boundaries are better left somewhat 
fuzzy so as to keep one's opponents off guard. After all, in Bossi's world the 
territory of Padania works outward from the leghistas' (League supporters') 
local base as a phenomenological construct, with the South — sometimes 
beginning around Rome, sometimes farther north, but with Calabria and 
Sicily as its essential moments — defining what Padania is not. Rather 
more positively, when delegates to the February 1997 Congress of the 
League were asked how they would define Padania, it was the "moral val- 
ues," "productive system," "customs," and "respect for rules" that distin- 
guished Padania from the rest of Italy. 22 The radical "particularism" 23 of 
Bossi and the League's core supporters betrays itself in their lack of inter- 
est in articulating a rational geographical basis — a common past or natu- 
ral boundaries — to the secession or the increased institutional autonomy 
they propose. What is more critical is the rigid differentiation drawn be- 
tween a northern approach to politics based on efficiency and trans- 
parency and a southern (and Roman) approach based on clientelism and 
corruption. Territory matters crucially to the political imagination of the 
League, but from this point of view territory defines a culture associated 
with myriad northern localities rather than a homogeneous Padanian cul- 
ture defining a Padanian territory. Padania has been invented first, and the 



178 Chapter Eight 

cultural strands giving it expression are being selected and interwoven af- 
terward to bring the disparate "Norths" together into one functional unit. 
Corresponding to the invention of Padania in 1995-96, the League has 
also discovered a commitment to "Europe" as a component of its political 
project. Roberto Maroni, one of the League's leaders and the highest- 
ranking League minister in the Berlusconi coalition government of 1994, 
interviewed on 19 September 1997, sees a connection between the design 
of Padania and the new attitude toward European integration. He sees 
Padania as the 

packaging of everything the League stands for into one word. Pada- 
nia is a region in Europe that does not aim for the same kind of in- 
dependence as in the Czech, Yugoslav, and Baltic cases. It would be 
sufficient for Rome to allow autonomy to the northern regions un- 
der the umbrella of the EU. Padania is too big for a single identity. It 
is the objective conditions that the regions within Padania share 
that is the source of the idea. There is no historical or cultural iden- 
tity to Padania in the sense that Catalonia or Scotland has. This is 
our weak point. But if an identity of Padania does not exist, then nei- 
ther does that of Italy. Each is an invention, except that of Padania 
reflects the needs of northerners for self-government against the 
power of Rome. 

Second, in the creation of Padania preexisting elements from the past 
have been put together in a pastiche of deliberate, explicit invention. 
Bossi has never claimed that he is simply recovering something that once 
existed but that faded away or was destroyed. His is a rather brazen at- 
tempt to invent a territorial entity as a vehicle for a set of local identities 
with little in common save a common hostility to the political institu- 
tions of contemporary Italy, represented by the single word Rome. Criti- 
cal elements in the invention of Padania include the use of the unfamiliar 
word Padania itself (derived from imperial Rome's name for its province 
in the Po basin), around which more familiar cultural threads can be wo- 
ven. These include reference to the political traditions of the Venetian re- 
public as a precursor for the present enterprise, reminding potential Pada- 
nians of a past in which they were not subjugated either by foreign powers 
such as Austria or by more Italian forces such as the popes, Mussolini, and 
modern governments dominated by "southerners," as well as repeated ref- 
erence to "northern values" of hard work, honesty, and responsibility that 
distinguish the citizens of Padania from other Italians. 

Third, long before the invocation of Padania, Bossi had broken with the 
typical language and rhetorical style of the Italian political class. Partly 
this involved adopting a populist vocabulary associated with demoniza- 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 179 

tion of politicians and national political institutions — what Mino Marti- 
nazzoli, a leading politician in the old Christian Democratic Party, dubbed 
"the politics of the bar." This appealed to those who saw themselves on 
the margins of organized politics, alienated from the established parties 
and angry at the seeming indifference to local demands of the national 
bureaucracy and its local agents. 24 But it also involved restructuring po- 
litical discourse around a new type of political polarization. Since World 
War II, Italian politics had been structured around such oppositions as 
left/right, Catholic/lay, workers/bosses, democratic/fascist, and a few oth- 
ers. The League has created a strong sense of "us" for its militants and sup- 
porters by breaking with the past and organizing a new political discourse 
against the other of Rome, southerners, and immigrants. 

Roberto Biorcio, a political scientist, identifies two dimensions to this 
discourse. 25 One distinguishes populations and their territories, basically 
the North and the South, based on very strong normative distinctions be- 
tween the two. In its strongest form this opposition is that of Europe (the 
North) versus Africa (the South), but it also includes the ordinary folk (of 
the North or Padania) versus the southerners and non-European foreign- 
ers. Along the other dimension is an opposition between the high and the 
low in a hierarchy of social groups, with southern elites identified with the 
power of Rome, the old political parties of government, and the Mafia but 
with northern big business, finance, and media conglomerates also con- 
niving with Roman political power. In Bossi's rhetoric after 1994, the me- 
dia baron and leader of Forza Italia, Silvio Berlusconi, became the main 
symbol of the system or the oppressor against which the League must mo- 
bilize the people of Padania. Thus the League has combined a set of clas- 
sic populist themes about the small person exploited by the system with 
a strong sense of the homogeneously small-fry population of Padania em- 
battled against entrenched interests within Italian political institutions. 
Padania therefore becomes a territorial means of "ignoring the religious 
fracture and trying to overcome in a populist key the fractures of class be- 
tween workers, small businessmen, artisans, and shopkeepers so as to re- 
discover unity against big business and a colonizing state that dissipates 
the resources of northern regions in favor of the South." 26 

Finally, the leader of the party, Umberto Bossi, has been the key propo- 
nent of the secessionist strategy, in the face of considerable initial (and in 
some cases continuing) skepticism from other leading figures. The more 
sober and conventionally liberal of them often seem disturbed by Bossi's 
verbal extravagance, use of sexual innuendo about his opponents, and 
deliberate provocations such as his declarations of independence and cre- 
ation of parallel institutions for Padania, such as a parliament and a na- 
tional guard. But it is Bossi's style that propels the party into the daily 



180 Chapter Eight 

newspapers and has led to public debate among his opponents about the 
prospects for secession. He even welcomes prosecution as a mechanism 
not only for publicity but also for "martyrdom." 27 His skinny, unkempt 
physical appearance and outrageous rhetoric convey an image of victim- 
ization by the powers that be that reinforces the idea of a northern Italy 
similarly victimized. 28 Padania has provided a powerful vehicle for Bossi's 
creativity, allowing him to bring together in one relatively concrete terri- 
torial concept all his favorite themes concerning the deficiencies of the 
present Italian state: in other words, a positive counterpoint to the relent- 
less negativity that previously tended to be his stock-in-trade. Even as he 
has retreated from secession — partly, it seems, to respond to internal crit- 
ics but also to find allies to prevent damaging changes in the electoral sys- 
tem, such as a shift to a completely majoritarian one — Bossi has main- 
tained a focus on Padania as the alternative to Italy as it is. 

Malleable Political Identities 

The idea of Padania and its prospective autonomy-independence seems to 
have grown rapidly in acceptability among both the militants of the 
League and significant sections of its electorate. In a mere year and a half 
after Bossi's original declaration of independence on 15 September 1996, 
he carried most of his party with him on the secessionist path. Even such 
a moderate as Raimondo Fassa, the League mayor of the commune of 
Varese from 1992 to 1997, acknowledges (in an interview of 8 September 
1997) that the "secession idea has met with success. An ignored North has 
discovered its political destiny because other political currents have not 
had specific responses to the fiscal and other problems of the region. Na- 
tional unification obviously has no real meaning." He goes on to add, 
though, that there is "limited possibility of independence" and "no cul- 
tural unity to Padania." Neither is there "a strong sense of being part of Eu- 
rope. For example, Bossi is localistic, not European in outlook." Fassa ex- 
pressed these views just ten days before he announced he would not be a 
candidate for mayor of Varese in the November 1997 election. He had ob- 
viously broken with Bossi. His relatively pure libertarianism allied to a 
strong sense of Europe acquired during his term as a member of the Euro- 
pean Parliament was no longer compatible with the new secessionist strat- 
egy even as he could recognize its propaganda success. 29 

Where Fassa seems to underestimate the Padanian strategy is in assum- 
ing that cultural identities are strictly inherited from a distant past and 
that in the absence of such primordial roots new political identities are in- 
variably inauthentic. 30 This, of course, is the "common sense" of much 
contemporary social science. What is remarkable in the case of northern 
Italy today is that we can see before our eyes the attempted invention of 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 181 

an identity that has had no previous existence. What the latest turn in the 
League's manipulation of territorial symbolism suggests, therefore, is that 
political identities are much more malleable or subject to revision than 
most social scientists and historians have tended to think, particularly 
when combined with powerful aversions to existing institutions and fear 
that these institutions no longer defend or further local interests. 31 The 
difficulty, as put by Gianfranco Miglio, a former adviser to Bossi, has been 
in turning such local interests into an identity that can effectively mobi- 
lize people politically. 32 In his detailed examination of opinion polls 
among League activists and northern voters, Roberto Biorcio claims that 
by 1997 "the invention of the nation of Padania, considered by many to 
be without any foundation whatever, has started to put down roots, if still 
among a minority, in the electoral sphere of the League, and in general in 
public opinion in the regions of northern Italy." 33 

How did this happen? It started as recently as the mid-1980s when 
Bossi and the Lombard League (as the League was then called) publicly 
challenged the Italian territorial status quo. In a 1984 study of political 
participation in Lombardy, sentiments of local and regional belonging or 
identity were much less important than other types of identity based on 
class, occupation, status, religion, and demographic characteristics such 
as age, generation, and marital status. 34 Only 18.3 percent of the respon- 
dents to a survey reported that any kind of territorial identity (national, 
regional, or local) was more important than others, whereas over half 
(53.1 percent) said that social positions of one sort or another were most 
important. Among the territorial identifiers the most widespread attach- 
ment was to the national level. The local and regional identifiers were 
widely seen at the time as exemplifying the localistic type in Robert Mer- 
ton's famous distinction between locals and cosmopolitans: locals were 
people without much interest in politics, churchgoing, interested in local 
gossip, with the regionalists somewhat more sophisticated politically 
than the average localist. 35 In other words, they were the remnants of 
gemeinschaft, or community, in a world that was increasingly that of 
gesellschaft, or geographically wider-ranging society. 

To track shifts in territorial identities, there is evidence from two Italy- 
wide surveys of young people aged fifteen to twenty-nine conducted in 
1986 and 1991 and three general population surveys conducted in 1992, 
1994, and 1996. From these surveys it is not possible to weigh territorial 
against social identities, only to see how much change has occurred in the 
nature of territorial attachments. In 1986, young people throughout Italy 
tended to privilege local attachments. Regional attachments were much 
lower. Somewhat ironic in the context of later changes, northern respon- 
dents were more likely to report an identity with Italy than were those in 



182 Chapter Eight 

the Center and the South. By 1991 local identities had weakened consid- 
erably, with a commensurate rise in the importance of all others (nation, 
Europe, the world, region), with region having the largest increase in the 
North, going from 11.4 percent in 1986 to 15.1 percent in 1991. This trend 
was particularly noticeable among young people voting or intending to 
vote for the League. Close to one-third of them reported a priority attach- 
ment to region, with a similar number expressing local attachments and 
about 24 percent an attachment to Italy. 

In a 1992 survey of northern residents fully 46.1 percent favored large- 
scale fiscal decentralization to the northern administrative regions, with 
shopkeepers, artisans, and workers giving it the strongest support. For 
these social groups a regional identity seemed to increasingly capture their 
social identities. This trend deepened in two more recent surveys in 1994 
and 1996, in which a net majority of all residents expressed support for 
northern autonomy, far more than actually vote for the League. Although 
local attachments remain the most common, realizing these is seen as re- 
quiring regional autonomy. Among League supporters, however, the ter- 
ritorial sphere to which they feel most linked has shifted from the local to 
northern Italy as a whole. In 1996, 46.9 percent of League sympathizers 
reported a primary identification with northern Italy compared with 47.6 
percent identifying with their local commune. Indeed, close to a quarter 
of the voters for the two main right-wing parties, Forza Italia and the Na- 
tional Alliance, also expressed this preference. A sizable proportion of the 
northern population, about 50 percent, picked a primary northern Italian 
or northern regional identity (Lombard, Venetian, etc.) as a first or second 
choice. This comes very close to challenging the dominance of local iden- 
tities and is greater than the primary or secondary preference for an Ital- 
ian political identity (44.1 percent). 

The growing sense of attachment to northern Italy or Padania is re- 
flected also in the changing levels of support for different institutional 
arrangements. In 1996, about 11 percent of the residents of northern Italy 
were in favor of a strong autonomy for Padania as part of confederation or 
as a macroregion within a federal state; 39.8 percent of the League's sym- 
pathizers and 29 percent of its voters expressed the same opinions; 36.4 
percent of all respondents would have liked an Italian federation of ad- 
ministrative regions (34.6 percent of the League's sympathizers and 41.8 
percent of its voters). Very few League supporters wanted enhanced pow- 
ers for local entities, whereas among other political groupings this option 
tended to be much more popular. This conclusion is reinforced by com- 
paring the findings of a survey of participants in the March to the Po in 
September 1996 with that of delegates to the League's Congress of Febru- 
ary 1997. Not only did sentiments in favor of independence increase from 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 183 

65.9 to 74.9 percent over the six months, the attachment was more 
strongly to Padania than to the other levels on offer, such as city, region, 
or Italy. There is a danger, however, in projecting such findings from ac- 
tivists onto the population of northern Italy at large. Most poll respon- 
dents in northern Italy neither wanted nor expected secession. At the 
same time, those respondents with the strongest identification with the 
North or Padania did see secession as a threat that could empower regional 
and local levels of government. 36 

At the very least, therefore, the proposal for Padania has pushed the 
general population and the other political parties toward favoring more 
powers for local government. For example, only 27.4 percent of respon- 
dents to the 1996 survey expressed support for the present system of gov- 
ernment. Among many League supporters and an increasing number of 
other northerners without strong affiliations to the League, the substitu- 
tion of the North for such administrative regions as Lombardy and the 
Veneto and the invention of Padania seem to have produced a veritable 
shift in dominant political identity from the local area to that of Padania. 
It remains to be seen, however, whether such sentiments will ever trans- 
late into the kind of vote that will be required for secession to achieve suc- 
cess, given that they seem largely confined to localities within the North 
that are already both strongly localistic and pro-League. Bossi's equivoca- 
tion about secession beginning in August 1998 and the defection of many 
of the League's local leaders in the Veneto to the Venetian League and 
everywhere in the North to Forza Italia suggest that such a choice may 
never have to be made. 37 

Multiplicity of Identities 

It is misleading, however, to give the impression that a new Padanian 
identity is simply replacing older ones in a parade or serial progression of 
political identities. In fact, each of the surveys I have referred to presents 
evidence that people have relatively complex political identities in which 
a number of territorial and social dimensions intersect. Of course this is 
not news to students of postcolonial societies, where national identities 
have been implanted into existing local identities and have had to coex- 
ist with long-standing religious and pan-national identities (e.g., pan- 
Arab). But in modern Europe the overriding political significance of na- 
tional identities has long gone unquestioned. 38 

With respect to multiple identities, two aspects of the Padanian case are 
worth identifying. The first is the ease with which people maintain a num- 
ber of political identities even as they shift the order of priority. In con- 
temporary northern Italy (and Italy as a whole) local and national identi- 
ties have long coexisted without any sense of mutual exclusion. Each of 



184 Chapter Eight 

the surveys of Italian youth from 1986 through 1991 to that of 1997 de- 
monstrates this. When people are asked to name in order of importance 
their two most important geographical units, there always arise not only 
a hierarchy of levels but also combinations of attachments. Although the 
local appears consistently in these surveys as the most important territo- 
rial identity everywhere in Italy, two-thirds of those who rank it so also 
consider "Italy" a complement to it rather than a competitor. In the words 
of Ilvo Diamanti, one of the most careful students of the League and its 
impact on Italian identities, this mixing of territorial identities is "a sort 
of frame that permits a country of localisms and localists like Italy to stay 
together, even if with conflicts and particularisms." 39 

In such a core area of the League as the Northeast, for example, in 1997 
attachment to Italy did not register support above the national average as 
a primary affiliation, but it did have the highest affiliation of any major re- 
gional division of Italy as a secondary attachment. Indeed, it is among 
higher-status social groups and supporters of left-wing parties that there is 
the least "pride in being Italian" and higher commitment to the "world" 
or "Europe" or both. Most young Italians, including supporters of the 
League, manage to combine a high degree of municipalism-localism and 
regionalism with a significant sentiment of national pride (table 8.1). A 
preference for the League and for Padania can readily coexist with a sig- 
nificant, if hardly dominant, sense of national identity and other identi- 
ties such as European. At least for younger Italians, therefore, the local and 
the cosmopolitan are not necessarily in opposition, as conventional soci- 
ological thinking might lead us to expect. Rather, "Italy continues to sug- 
gest," as Paolo Segatti has proposed, "a nation of compaesani, or fellow lo- 
cal dwellers, who look to Europe and the world with great attention, but 
with limited passion." 40 Passion is now far closer to home. 41 

The second aspect of the Padanian case in relation to a multiplicity of 
political-territorial identities is that the League's leaders appear conflicted 
about its primary territorial orientation. Its very success in local elections 
in northern Italy means that the League is institutionalizing itself. Many 
communes and not a few provinces are now dominated by League politi- 
cians. They tend to see the electoral future of the League, and their own 
retention of office, as lying in delivering "good government" at the local 
level or building a new northern Italy "from below." This inevitably seems 
to privilege the existing local government units at the expense of the vi- 
sion of a northern macroregion such as Padania. 42 But rather like the Com- 
munists in central Italy in the 1970s, when exclusion from national gov- 
ernments led them to invest heavily in creating efficient and honest local 
government so as to advertise their qualifications for national office, the 
League can use its control over local administrations to tout the possibili- 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 185 

Table 8. 1 "To Which of the Following Units do You Have the Strongest 
Attachment? And In Second Place?" 





First Choice 


Second Choice 


Total 


The city you live in 


40.2 


19.2 


59.4 


The region or province 


10.5 


23.2 


35.7 


Italy 


32.2 


31.8 


64.0 


Europe 


3.1 


13.1 


16.2 


The world in general 


12.6 


10.6 


23.2 


No reply 


1.4 


2.2 


3.6 


Total 


100.0 


100.0 





SOURCE: La Luce 7 December 1997, 4. 

NOTE: Italian national survey of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds, December 1997, percentage re- 
sponses. Totals of first and second choices do not add up to 100 percent. 



ties for government throughout the North when the evils of Roman rule 
are finally removed. This is the point of view encountered most frequently 
in formal interviews with local politicians in Varese, in both September 
and December 1997. 4? Massimo Ferrario, at the time president of the 
province of Varese (interviewed on 1 1 September 1997), for example, is an 
important League politician who sees the local and the macroregional as 
complementary: "The institutionalization of the League in local agen- 
cies," he says, "allows for an active growth of federalism because it is im- 
possible that the Italian state will reform itself to allow for a true federal- 
ism. Provincial autonomy is a goal shared by all presidents of provinces, 
but it can happen only under the threat of leaving Italy behind." In other 
words, Padania and increased autonomy for local institutions are seen as 
going hand in hand. The local and the regional therefore are comple- 
mentary more than competing. This can lead to a technocratic or good- 
government ethos that actively undermines Bossi's confrontational strat- 
egy. This could happen through an absence of zeal for Bossi's latest 
example of political "performance art." It is more likely to happen, how- 
ever, through the need to build local political coalitions. In the commune 
of Varese in 1992-97, for example, the shortage of qualified League repre- 
sentatives to serve as administrators led to the appointment of former 
Communists and others in an anomalous municipal government that 
aroused much comment and not a little ridicule among the League's op- 
ponents. 

CONCLUSION 

The Italian Northern League has a postmodern cast. It is not well orga- 
nized as a political party, and it focuses on the experience of ordinary 
people more on than the thoughts or theories of famous intellectuals. It 



186 Chapter Eight 

presents itself as economically liberal and beyond ideology (in the sense 
of left versus right). It represents areas with specific economic characteris- 
tics, in particular export-oriented small-scale manufacturing, formerly 
supported by the local political dominance of the now-defunct Christian 
Democrats and Socialists, more than it represents the interests of particu- 
lar social strata. Its leader, Umberto Bossi, has created not so much an in- 
ternally coherent political ideology as a series of powerful and evocative 
metaphors against centralized power that have focused on the idea of 
Padania, an independent or autonomous northern Italy, and increasingly 
autonomous local government. 

The League's electoral success is a monument to the power of words in 
the service of localized interests. It has harnessed a long-standing local- 
ism, no more entrenched in the North than elsewhere in Italy, for a proj- 
ect of radical political devolution. In bringing this project into Italian 
politics, the League's strategy of inventing a new political discourse con- 
structed around the geographical claim to "Padania" illustrates in extreme 
form three of the key rules now governing the relations between place and 
political identity: the willingness and ability to design a new political ter- 
ritoriality, the malleability of political identities, and the coexistence of 
multiple political identities. The idea of Padania has allowed the League 
to replace an Italian language of politics largely based on social divisions 
with a new language based on geographical ones. This in turn has required 
a manipulation of existing political identities that can prove remarkably 
plastic. In taking on a new or radically reworked identity, however, no one 
has had to sacrifice existing ones. New identities can be taken on without 
jettisoning the old. The three rules of political identity formation illus- 
trated by the Northern League may well define the emerging realities of 
political identity at the outset of the twenty-first century elsewhere in 
Europe. 

Gilles Ceron's satirical parable on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the 
declaration of the Italian Republic in 1946 provides an appropriate con- 
clusion: 

Bad News from Italy 
Rome, late April 2021. As a result of the tragic events that have been 
occurring here, the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Italian Republic 
has been very soberly celebrated. It will be recalled that the Italians 
have never had a sense of the State, because of their long history of 
invasions and divisions, and that, in the climate of institutional dis- 
integration, the days of the Italian Republic are numbered. On this 
occasion, the President of the Italian Republic received numerous 
messages of sympathy, notably from the Prime Minister of the XII 



The Northern League and Political Identity in Northern Italy 187 

French Republic, the Presidents of California, Wyoming, and forty 
other American republics, from the Kings of Mercia and of Wales, 
and from the Grand Duke of Schleswig-Holstein. 44 

Formal Interviews with Politicians in Varese (September and December 1997) 
Fabio Binelli, League councillor, commune of Varese, 8 September and 18 De- 
cember 1997 

Mauro Carabelli, secretary to League mayor Aldo Fumagalli, commune of Varese, 
16 December 1997 

Raimondo Fassa, League mayor of commune of Varese, 8 September 1997 
Massimo Ferrario, League president of the province of Varese, 11 September 
1997 

Aldo Fumagalli, League mayor of commune of Varese (effective 2 December 
1997), 17 December 1997 

Sergio Ghiringelli, League councillor, commune of Varese, 8 September 1997 
On. Giuseppe Leoni, League councillor, commune of Varese, 8 September 1997; 
one of the founders (with Umberto Bossi and two others) of the Lombard League, 
first League deputy and first League councillor in Varese 

On. Roberto Maroni, deputy leader, Northern League, minister of the interior in 
the 1994 Berlusconi government, 19 September 1997 

Cesare Montalberti, Popular Party councillor, commune of Varese, 17 December 
1997 

Paolo Sassi, secretary to Robert Maroni in 1994 when Maroni was Italian minis- 
ter of the interior, 3 September 1997 



CHAPTER 9 



Reimagining Italy after the Collapse of 
the Old Party System in 1992 



The four major political parties in contemporary Italy after the collapse of 
the old party system in 1992 (Forza Italia, the Northern League, the De- 
mocratic Party of the Left, and the National Alliance) were brand new in 
name and ideology. The central claim of this chapter is that they have ge- 
ographically structured their conceptions of "Italy" in ways that vary from 
the largely agreed-on geographical frame of reference of the parties in the 
old system. In particular, in its rhetoric and organization each of these par- 
ties has been constructing different conceptions of the geographical 
scales — international, national, regional, local — in terms of which they 
understand Italy. The collapse of the old system of parties in 1992-94 cre- 
ated an opening for a reorganization of parties more in line with recent 
trends toward a fragmented Italian political economy and society that are 
now also more open to non-Italian influences. 

The Italian case, however, illustrates a more general point: political par- 
ties must organize themselves and their ideologies through the ways they 
divide, order, and organize space. There is an intrinsically geographical ba- 
sis to the drama of organized politics even when all parties structure a na- 
tional space in the same ways. This is all the more obvious at times of dra- 
matic political change, when there are competing conceptions of how to 
organize potential constituencies and interests in different places. Geo- 
graphy therefore is not external to the operations of political parties, a Eu- 
clidean surface or a stage on which the drama of politics is played out. The 
drama of party politics is scripted in terms of the geographical horizons 
parties set for themselves and how these appeal in different places. 

In contemporary political studies geographical scale is almost always 
treated in terms of either the fixed or the emerging dominance of one level 
over others in political organization and behavior. The national and the 
global in particular have achieved a privileged status as the geographical 
scales at which political activity is said to be determined. In the former 
case this is