A capable recounting of the long, ongoing and perhaps futile
struggle to forge a single nation from the many regions, and the
many more divided loyalties, of the Italians.Italy, writes Duggan
(Modern Italian History/Univ. of Reading; Francesco Crispi,
1818-1901: From Nation to Nationalism, 2002, etc.), was an idea
well before it was a reality, an idea impeded by the fact that much
of the peninsula was carved into competing states and would be
dominated in the 19th century by foreign powers. Yet, Duggan
observes, "Once unleashed in the 1790s, the idea that 'the people'
constituted the nation and that the nation should be coterminous
with the state was a genie of ferocious power." The idea spread by
way of the intelligentsia, with the government of the first
Neapolitan Republic made up of "lawyers, clerics, writers, and
professors of Greek and botany," but took its time becoming
popular, pressed at the point of the bayonet by anti-Napoleonic
guerrillas, Garibaldians and even a few mafiosi turned
nationalists. Those who remained mafiosi pure and simple would
remain an impediment, particularly in Sicily, which, the Tuscan
intellectual Leopoldo Franchetti concluded, should be abandoned and
allowed to declare independence. The rise of fascism in the early
20th century gave nationalism a new face and ambitions to expand
the nation into an empire along the lines of ancient Rome. The
postwar economic boom of the 1960s sowed confusion: Italians of all
regions increasingly felt they belonged to one country even as
wealth ushered in the "danger of falling back once again into the
exaggerated individualism and materialism that the high-minded
patriots of the nineteenth century had sought to correct." As
Duggan notes, the collapse of the postwar First Republic in the
mid-1990s, marked by the end of the Cold War and the Italian
Communist Party and by the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, reintroduced
fierce arguments about nationhood, particularly the notion among
northerners that their southern compatriots weren't really Italian
and belonged elsewhere, an argument that persists.An expressive
history, of interest to students of European history and
geopolitics. (Kirkus Reviews)
The greatness of Italy's culture and way of life have had a
powerful attraction for many generations of visitors. This has
created an overwhelming sense that Italy is a fundamentally benign
and easy going country. The Force of Destiny, Christopher Duggan's
immensely enjoyable new book, lays waste to this idea. While
sharing everyone's enthusiasm for Italy as a place, he strongly
distinguishes this from its political role over the past two
centuries, which has been both vicious and ruinous for Europe as a
whole.
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