Identity Crisis in Italy This Page Intentionally Left Blank IDENTITY CRISIS in ITALY
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168 25 168 Spurred by ongoing conflicts between city-states and the nobility, unification for Italy was a gradual and difficult process. While such divisions shortly subsided to allow the peninsula to become unified, Italy has always been troubled by the difficulties of cultivating a national identity. Identity Crisis Throughout the past and in the present, Italy has been a nation of division. But recently this division has become deeper because of the growing differences between the various parts of the country caused by ITALY IN DENTITY CRISIS unresolved political, institutional, economic and secu- rity problems. The need for academic discourse on the in Italy division encouraged scholars to cooperate and identify the most important causes and elements of the Ital- ian identity crisis such as the political crisis caused by feelings of lack, instability or injustice, the economic 238 and financial crises leading to the erosion of social cohesion and the insecurity linked to immigration. This book presents the result of this dialogue. Fanni Tanács-Mandák (ed.): I (ed.): Tanács-Mandák Fanni The work was created in commission of the National University of Public Service under the priority project PACSDOP-2.1.2- CCHOP-15-2016-00001 entitled “Public Service Development Establishing Good Governance.” Edited by: FANNI TANÁCS-MANDÁK European Social Fund INVESTING IN YOUR FUTURE Identity Crisis in Italy This page intentionally left blank IDENTITY CRISIS IN ITALY Edited by Fanni Tanács-Mandák Dialóg Campus Budapest, 2019 The work was created in commission of the National University of Public Service under the priority project PACSDOP-2.1.2- CCHOP-15-2016-00001 entitled “Public Service Development Establishing Good Governance”. Authors Paola Bordandini Stefano Bottoni Lorenzo Castellani Miklós Losoncz Anna Molnár Fortunato Musella Geny Piotti Luigi Rullo Daniele Scalea Paolo Soave Fanni Tanács-Mandák Balázs Vizi Revised by Stefano Bottoni Annarita Criscitiello Pál Germuska Fanni Tanács-Mandák Sándor Gyula Nagy Norbert Tóth © The Editor, 2019 © The Authors, 2019 © Dialóg Campus, 2019 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. Contents Introduction 7 Stefano Bottoni: Wasted Opportunity? Italy and Central Europe at the End of the Cold War 9 Daniele Scalea: How Immigration is Changing Italian Demography: Statistics and Perspectives 25 Fortunato Musella: The Italian Governors from the Constitutional Reform to the Crisis of Regionalism 37 Paolo Soave: The Middle Power at the Geopolitical Crossroads: Italy and the Dilemma of Foreign Policy 51 Luigi Rullo: The Corruption of Regional Presidents in Italy from 1990 to 2015 65 Paola Bordandini – Geny Piotti: A Geography of “Identity” Trust in Italy 79 Lorenzo Castellani: Administrative Traditions Matter 95 Miklós Losoncz: Italy’s Major Economic Challenges: Large Government Debt and Fragile Banks and the EU 117 Balázs Vizi: Linguistic Rights and Small Minority Communities in Italy from Trento to Sicily 131 Anna Molnár: Italy and the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis 149 Fanni Tanács-Mandák: Italian Immigration Policies – Legal Frameworks between 1980 and 2017 167 This page intentionally left blank Introduction The rich historical context of the Italo–Hungarian relations and partnership, the common problems and challenges of the two countries inspired and motivated the National University of Public Service in Budapest to launch an international research project entitled Challenges of the Contemporary Italian State in 2016. The project spurred an international academic dialogue by organising conferences and workshops with the participation of Italian and Hungarian professors and involving famous Italian and European universities and research centres (Bocconi University, European University Institute, LUISS Guido Carli, Sapienza University of Rome, the University of Bologna, the University of Milan, the University of Naples Federico II and the University of Siena). One of the most important events of the project was a workshop held in Budapest in the summer of 2017, organised in cooperation with the Italian Cultural Institute. The workshop, among others, addressed the Italian identity crisis, which consists of a political crisis, an economic and financial crisis, the crisis of the regional state and the crisis of insecurity. The workshop discussed several of the most important causes and elements of the different aspects of the Italian identity crisis. The participants identified the causes of the political crisis such as the clear deficit of general trust, the low level of trust in political institutions and the limited institutional legitimacy, feelings of instability, injustice, the heritage of Tangentopoli and its long-lasting consequence: an extremely powerful wave of antipolitical sentiment, as well as some aspects of the crisis of the regional state and Italian regionalism. Furthermore, the scholars, among others, presented the aspects of the economic and financial crises leading to the erosion of social cohesion; the dilemmas of the Italian foreign policy and the crisis of insecurity linked to the intensity of immigration flows in recent years and the late and, in some cases, less efficient regulations in this area. The papers of the present volume are mostly based on the discussions and talks presented at the workshop. Despite the inevitable eventuality of the topics discussed by the authors, I believe that this volume gives an instructive overview of the Italian identity crisis. It presents the challenges to be faced and hopefully offers some possible solutions. I am grateful to all the scholars who put their time and effort into participating in the workshop and working on this volume, for thinking together and for the common reflection in the two-year period of the project. Budapest, August 2019 Fanni Tanács-Mandák Editor This page intentionally left blank Stefano Bottoni Wasted Opportunity? Italy and Central Europe at the End of the Cold War 1. Introduction: Scope and Methodology of the Research The aim of this chapter is to describe the Italian role in the elaboration of a policy of pragmatic convergence towards the Eastern European countries of the Soviet Bloc during the last decade of the Cold War. As the less dogmatic communist regime in the region, Hungary played a pivotal role in the establishment of good working relations with Italy. This rapprochement was facilitated by the fact that Italy occupied a special position in East–West relations, in which the PCI, the largest and most influential communist party in the West, served as an especially important intermediary. Literature has focused so far on the economic aspects of the intensification of bilateral relations (Bottoni 2016, 245–249; Fava and Gatejel 2017, 11–19; Kansikas 2017, 345–369).1 The activities of business enterprises specialising in East–West trade during the Cold War constituted a parallel economic system, which political and state security officials were familiar with, and largely accepted. Behind the persistent political and diplomatic conflict between the countries of Western Europe and Eastern Europe, there existed a formal and, to an even greater degree, informal sphere of cooperation, and investigations of the transnational economic contacts that took place within these formal and informal spheres of cooperation produced surprising and valuable results. This contribution examines the issue of bilateral cooperation from a broader, diplomatic and political perspective. After briefly summarising the international context, the paper focuses on the milestones of the gradual re-discover of Central and Eastern Europe by the Italian foreign policy through local initiatives like Alpe-Adria, and secondly on the decisive role Hungary played in the late Kádár era in the creation of regional networks such as the Quadrangular Initiative. The final part of the paper explains the complex set of reasons that made bilateral and regional cooperation efforts ineffective after the demise of the Soviet Union, and determined the overall failure of the Italian strategy of economic and political penetration into the post-communist region. The study relies both on a critical reassessment of existing scholarly literature, and on new archival evidence. As a general rule, Italian archival sources tend to be limited, 1 I have summarised the state of the art on this field of study in the introduction to a study devoted to interparty trade between Italy and Hungary (Bottoni 2016, 245–249). See also the researches carried out on East–West trade and economic cooperation in the car industry by Fava and Gatejel 2017, 11–19. Intro into the special issue and into the energy sector by Kansikas 2017, 345–369. 10 Identity Crisis in Italy due to the severe restrictions to the access to important collections, such as the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or the operative files of the internal secret service during the Cold War period. However, sources from the Gramsci Institute (Fondazione Istituto Gramsci) in Rome concerning the Italian Communist Party’s activities represent a valuable, albeit limited, exception to this rule.2 For the purposes of this study, I have gained crucial insights from the