by Adrian Lyttelton Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Bologna Center
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On March 17 this year Italy celebrated its 150th anniversary as a united nation state. Many observers feared that the celebrations would be a failure, and that this would show the scarce attachment of Italians to the nation. The low point was reached in early February, when both the Minister of Education and the president of the Confederation of Industrialists (Confindustria) announced that they did not intend the anniversary to be celebrated as a holiday, either in schools or in manufacturing plants.

This prompted an outburst by the highly respected former president of Italy Carlo Azeglio Ciampi. Ciampi had been the head of the committee managing the celebrations, but had resigned in 2010, ostensibly on grounds of health. Now he made plain that his reasons had been political. He wrote: "I feel humiliated…the situation seems even worse than when I resigned." The Berlusconi government's attitude had been indifferent and unhelpful, primarily because of their dependence on their allies in government, the Northern League, whose attitude to Italian unity ranges from the sceptical to the downright hostile. They identify with the mythical nation of Padania (the Po Valley and its watershed).

Ciampi warned that the League's opposition to the celebrations, expressed locally by actions like the burning of the tricolore flag or the refusal to sing the national hymn, Fratelli d'Italia, meant that its threat to secede from Italy should be taken seriously. He concluded: "looking at the Italy of today, I am afraid that my generation should unfortunately recognise that it has failed in its task and left to the young only a moral desert." Strong words!

Happily, in the end things did not turn out nearly as badly as expected. In fact, I think that the League's hostility ended by provoking a patriotic backlash. The controversy made the celebrations more interesting, and large crowds attended the main events. The defence of Italian unity was often linked to the defence of Italy's republican constitution of 1947. The leader of the largest opposition party, the Partito Democratico, Pierluigi Bersani, appeared on election placards with the caption "Beyond the Divisions, There is a United Italy." The current president, Giorgio Napolitano, used his role as head of state with great skill to promote consciousness of Italy's cultural heritage and of shared national values. He rejected the criticism that celebration of Italy's movement for unity, the Risorgimento, was mere empty rhetoric. But he insisted that the celebration must lead to "a critical consciousness of the problems that have remained unresolved and a collective examination of conscience."

Nevertheless, the celebrations have revealed a state of confusion, uncertainty and conflict over the meaning that should be attached to the events that led to the unification of Italy, and over its results.

This prompts one to ask several questions: what is there to celebrate? And what has gone wrong? Why is the existence of Italy as a nation-state more subject to criticism than it was at the time of the 50th or 100th anniversaries?

To answer the first question briefly. Over the 150 years of Italian unity, Italy's economic and social progress has been remarkable. It is hard to remember now how backward most of Italy was in 1861. True, there were always the cities like Bologna, which preserved something of their ancient splendour, but most were infested by crowds of beggars. The majority of Italians were peasants who lived off the land, and most of them struggled to meet even the basic needs of subsistence. Illiteracy in some regions was over 90 percent. Now, Italy has an advanced economy, and in some years its GNP has probably exceeded that of Great Britain, the world leader in 1861.

Even compared with when I first came to Italy, more than fifty years ago, the prosperity of the country is unrecognisable. So why so much dissatisfaction? It is common to blame Italy's troubles and complaints on a weak sense of national identity. But I don't think that this is really the case. What I would suggest comes nearer the truth is that there is a deep dissatisfaction with the Italian state and with national politics, and here history can, I hope, help to provide some explanations.

In the nineteenth century the creation of the Kingdom of Italy—even if it still lacked the Veneto and Rome (acquired in 1866 and 1870 respectively)—was often described as a "miracle." And there was indeed something almost miraculous about the manner in which it came about. Garibaldi's invasion of Sicily with his Thousand Redshirt volunteers had succeeded by an amazing combination of courage, skill and luck, and had triggered the collapse of the rule of the Bourbon kings first in Sicily and then in Naples. The meeting between Garibaldi and King Victor Emmanuel on October 23, 1860 at Teano, a small town north of Naples, provides the most arresting image of Italian unification. In a magnificent gesture, Garibaldi handed over his conquests to the King. The unification of northern and central Italy under the monarchy of the House of Savoy during 1859 was a triumph for the diplomatic and political skills of the prime minister Cavour, which was almost equally remarkable if less heroic.

The problem with political miracles is that because they are improbable they are hard to live up to. Cavour as late as 1856 talked of those who believed in Italian unity" and other such nonsense." He did not believe in it as a practical possibility and was quite unprepared for the annexation of Naples. This point should not be misunderstood; if the circumstances of Italy's unification in 1859-60 were improbable and even astonishing, in a longer time span Italian unification had a logic and a high degree of probability.

What was the downside of the "miracle"? The Teano meeting shows how precarious the union of forces that brought about unity was. It involved the "miraculous" reconciliation of a popular, revolutionary guerrilla leader and a king of ancient lineage. Garibaldi, through his moderation, realism and the priority he put on independence, had prevented conflict, but he was a product of the republican and revolutionary wing of the Italian movement led by the great prophet of Italian nationalism, Giuseppe Mazzini.

Mazzini and his most faithful followers contested the legitimacy of the Italian state, because it had not been founded on the will of the people. The plebiscites by which the peoples of the various Italian states had expressed their "consent" to union with Piedmont had been mere shams, as there was no alternative. There had been no constitutional agreement on the terms of the union and its basic laws, as, for example, there had been in the United States.

A far more serious challenge to the legitimacy of the new state came from the Papacy. For Pope Pius IX, Italian unity was no miracle but a work of the Devil. Ironically in 1846-8 Pius IX had been the great hope of the national movement—the so-called "liberal Pope." It was always a mistake to view Pius IX as a liberal, although he had shown sympathy for Italian independence. But not unreasonably, given his role as the head of a universal Church, he refused to lead a national crusade against Austria for the liberation of Lombardy and the Veneto. Later, the growing radicalisation of the patriotic movement led to his flight from Rome and the proclamation of the Roman Republic in 1849. When Pius IX was restored, by French troops, he went all the way.

There was to be no constitution, and no limits on Papal power, and he was determined never again to give any ground to nationalism or liberalism. The annexation of Rome in 1870 deepened the split. Both Pius and his successors insisted that there could be no reconciliation with the Italian state until the Holy See had been granted a territory, however small, over which it had sovereignty. Any other solution, they believed, would not guarantee the Papacy's religious freedom. In fact, it can be argued that the Papacy's divorce from secular political power has been essential for the remarkable recovery of its religious authority.

During the last year, the polemics of traditionalist Catholics against unity have found a wide public, which overlaps to some extent with that of the Northern League. For them, Pius IX is the hero, and the Risorgimento was a "forgotten war of religion" against the Church, inspired by freemasons and Protestants. However, the highest Church authorities have made unusually clear and positive statements about the value of Italian political unity. For the Secretary of State, Cardinal Bagnasco, "National cohesion is a precious conquest that cannot be renounced…the relationship between secularists (laici) and Catholics should cast no shadow on the unity of Italy." Implicitly criticizing the nature of the League's federalism, Bagnasco called for "a federalism of true solidarity, formed by esteem, respect, sympathy, justice…towards everyone, and in particular towards those who are poor, weak, and undefended."

In his defence of national unity, Napolitano was careful to admit the legitimacy of the critique of the centralized model of the state bequeathed by the Risorgimento and to agree that its federalist reorganization, which started with the creation of the Regions in 1970, should be completed and made more coherent. In fact, there is a strong tradition of federalism that goes back to thinkers of the Risorgimento like the Milanese democratic intellectual, Carlo Cattaneo. In 1860 the Sicilian economist Francesco Ferrara warned Cavour about the dangers of disappointing the Sicilian desire for home rule: "fusion would turn Sicily into the Ireland of Italy, and hence, instead of making our nationality more compact and secure, would be a real and perennial source of weakness… ideas of rigid centralization are not native to Italy…and no other part of Italy is so distinctive as Sicily." In fact, in 1866 a major revolt broke out in Palermo and a whole army corps had to be sent to suppress it.

At the time of unification, Cavour and other northern Italian politicians knew very little about the South. Cavour had never visited Naples. Not surprisingly, they had very little idea about how to govern these unknown and often rebellious territories. "The great brigandage" in Naples during 1861-5 was really a full-scale civil war, which at one time kept half the Italian army employed. Faced with a lack of consensus and of information, the new rulers were forced to turn to powerful local forces to ensure governability. These forces included the organized crime networks of the Sicilian mafia and the Neapolitan camorra.

After 1866, there were no major revolts in the South against the Italian state, and in fact from the 1880s onwards the majority of Southern parliamentary deputies voted with the governments of the day. What happened was that the Southern political class entrenched its power as a class of mediators between the state and their constituents. They worked through a network of personal patron-client relationships; it was a moral duty for patrons to find jobs and procure favours for their friends and clients, and a moral duty for the latter to give them their votes in exchange. Unfortunately, the mafia and the camorra were able to use these political networks to secure immunity from prosecution.

This way of doing politics has proved remarkably tenacious. So far from disappearing with the economic development of the South, organized crime flourished and expanded thanks to the profits from public works contracts. A lot of the money allotted by the Italian state and by Europe to modernizing roads, hospitals and other infrastructures has ended up in the wrong hands. This means that Southerners remain dissatisfied with their economic and civil inferiority, and labour under a sense of historic victimhood that has some justification, while Northerners resent paying taxes, as they see it, to support a class of corrupt politicians.

Ironically, hostility between North and South seems to have grown sharper after a period in which their styles of life and social and family behaviour have become much more homogeneous, thanks to the mass media and common models of consumption. The crudely xenophobic rhetoric of the Northern League should not, however, obscure the realities of the North-South divide. Although there has been considerable progress in some regions of the South, the aim of creating a single economy and civil society that follow the same rules has not been achieved.

In Sicily, thanks to the heroism of magistrates like Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, police officers, and ordinary citizens, the mafia has been driven back and its leadership decapitated. But so long as the rich undergrowth of patronage and kickbacks survives more or less intact, the mafia's influence will remain considerable. Unfortunately, the battle against the Sicilian Cosa Nostra for a long time has distracted the attention of law enforcers from other criminal organizations. The Calabrian ‘ndrangheta has grown from a loose association of rural godfathers into what is now probably the richest and most dangerous of all the Italian crime syndicates. In Naples and the whole of Campania the involvement of leading politicians with the camorra appears particularly serious, and poverty, extraordinarily high levels of youth unemployment, protection rackets and the discouragement of legitimate investment create a vicious circle from which it is hard to escape.

This situation has been brilliantly described in Roberto Saviano's hugely successful bestseller, Gomorra. Saviano's success, which has continued with a successful prime-time TV program, and the recent results of the elections in Naples, when two-thirds of the electorate voted for a charismatic magistrate and rejected the candidates of the older parties, show that there is still hope for change, which, if it is to be effective, must come from below, from the South itself.

Italy has other serious problems (like most European states), particularly those of a top-heavy and inefficient bureaucracy, and a dysfunctional legal system, but the North-South divide remains the most urgent and dramatic.

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