University of Massachusetts Amherst ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst Open Access Dissertations 2-2012 Remaking the Political in Fortress Europe: Political Practice and Cultural Citizenship in Italian Social Centers Angelina Ione Zontine University of Massachusetts Amherst, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations Part of the Anthropology Commons Recommended Citation Zontine, Angelina Ione, "Remaking the Political in Fortress Europe: Political Practice and Cultural Citizenship in Italian Social Centers" (2012). Open Access Dissertations. 526. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/open_access_dissertations/526 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst. For more information, please contact [email protected]. REMAKING THE POLITICAL IN FORTRESS EUROPE: POLITICAL PRACTICE AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN ITALIAN SOCIAL CENTERS A Dissertation Presented by ANGELINA I. ZONTINE Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Massachusetts Amherst in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY February 2012 Anthropology © Copyright by Angelina I. Zontine 2012 All Rights Reserved REMAKING THE POLITICAL IN FORTRESS EUROPE: POLITICAL PRACTICE AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN ITALIAN SOCIAL CENTERS A Dissertation Presented by ANGELINA ZONTINE Approved as to style and content by: ______________________________________ Jacqueline Urla, Chair ______________________________________ Lisa Henderson, Member ______________________________________ Elizabeth Krause, Member ______________________________________ Elizabeth Chilton, Chair Anthropology Department ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The research for this dissertation was funded by a Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation; I thank the Foundation for its support and the anonymous reviewers for their comments. I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Elizabeth Krause and Dr. Lisa Henderson, for their careful readings of the research project as it evolved and the astute suggestions that contributed to improving its focus and outcomes. I am especially grateful to my advisor, Dr. Jacqueline Urla, for her attentive feedback, analytical finesse and ability to help me see inspiring opportunities in even the most daunting obstacles. My writing, analysis and enjoyment of the project all benefitted from her generousity in sharing both expertise and enthusiasm. I am also grateful to my colleagues and friends who offered me excellent humor and unfailing support, and without whom the world would be a less interesting and less fun place to be. I thank the social center participants in Bologna who helped me understand their world, the challenges they face and the visions they are constructing for a better future; their own rigorous self-analysis made my own task easier, more interesting and much more fruitful. I have been pursung higher education now for more than half my life and I could never have made it this far without the material, emotional and edible sustenance provided by my family. Thank you all for not asking more than once or twice a year how it was coming along. Last and most of all, I am more grateful than I can say to my partner iv for support the forms and extent of which I could not begin to quantify but which has pulled me back from “the edge” again and again. Grazie infinite e per sempre. v ABSTRACT REMAKING THE POLITICAL IN FORTRESS EUROPE: POLITICAL PRACTICE AND CULTURAL CITIZENSHIP IN ITALIAN SOCIAL CENTERS FEBRUARY 2012 ANGELINA I. ZONTINE, A.A. SIMONS ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD B.A., THE EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE M.A., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST Directed by: Professor Jacqueline Urla At the current moment, with voter turnout low and mass popular uprisings re- fashioning the political map, questions of political participation and dissent are extremely pressing. In established democracies and newly democratized states alike, an active and potentially dissenting citizenry is often seen as the necessary balance to overreaching state power and unregulated market forces, but scholars struggle to keep abreast of a proliferation of new foci and forms of engagement. This dissertation focuses on the form of collective political engagement enacted at centri sociali occupati autogestiti (occupied, self-managed social centers) or CSOA in Bologna, Italy. As they enact political alternatives through everyday practices of self-management and cultural production, social center participants complicate conventional analytical distinctions between revolution and reform or between individual transformation and larger social change. Through participant observation at three specific centers, interviews with participants and visitors and discourse analysis of recent legislation and policy, the investigator explores vi the character of social center participants’ cultural and political practice, internal organization and decision-making processes, and the heated conflict surrounding social centers in order to discern the opportunities afforded and tensions generated by this form of political engagement. The author argues that CSOA participants experience a form of belonging constructed on the basis of participation rather than ascribed statuses or adherence to shared ideological positions. Furthermore, participants seek to establish an autonomous space wherein key obstacles to participation have been deliberately dismantled or drained of authority in order to render this form of belonging more inclusive. In the shadow of post-9/11 securitization processes at the supra-national, national and local levels aimed at governing migrant mobility and public expressions of dissent, CSOA participants seek to displace the ethnic, religious, linguistic, generational and class-specific norms that define the cultural dimensions of contemporary Italian citizenship. Drawing on the concept of cultural citizenship, the author therefore argues that the political imaginary proposed by CSOA participants represents a deliberate contestation of both the authority and function of state-based citizenship models and can be understood as new model of citizenship characterized by an alternative, less exclusive relationship between belonging and participation. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ vii ABSTRACT ..................................................................................................................... viii GLOSSARY OF ITALIAN TERMS AND ENTITIES REFERENCED IN THE DISSERTATION ............................................................................................................... xi CHAPTER 1. AN INTRODUCTION TO MY APPROACH, OBJECT AND PRIMARY ARGUMENT .......................................................................................................................1 Between civil society, the state and social movements: Investigating Italian social centers .........................................................................................................................8 The civic engagement argument: social centers as a form of civic association .......................................................................................................11 CSOA as illegal phenomena ...........................................................................19 CSOA as a site of activism .............................................................................23 Using the lens of citizenship.....................................................................................28 2. PLACING OCCUPIED, SELF-MANAGED SOCIAL CENTERS IN ITALIAN ASSOCIATIONAL HISTORY .........................................................................................36 Mutual aid for a new industrial working class: the Italian cooperative movement from the 1840s to the turn of the century ........................................................................................... 40 Associations at the turn of the century and the “Red Biennial” ......................................... 48 Associations under the Fascist state: dissolution and co-optation ....................................... 54 Associations and political parties in the post-war boom years ............................................ 57 A new generation and political left: cultural and political dissent overflow institutional confines ................................................................................................................................ 60 Free Radio and the “creative wing” of the autonomist movement ............................ 69 Autoriduzione, occupation and the emergence of CSOA .......................................... 72 The “Years of Lead” : spiraling political violence and state repression .............................. 78 The rise of the third sector and retreat into the private sphere............................................. 83 viii From Tangentopoli to Fortress Europe: the growth of CSOA in the 1990s and post-2001 challenges ........................................................................................................... 90 Political upheaval and neoliberal moves ................................................................... 90 Electoral exodus and extra-parliamentary