The Failure of Italian Nationhood The Geopolitics of a Troubled Identity [Hardcover]

This book explains Italy s endless political instability and its historical, cultural and economic roots. It also illustrates why, even after the creation of the Italian state, Italy was never really unified. Piero Gobetti described fascism once as the autobiography of the Italian nation. This book explains why today it is possible to describe berlusconism - a cultural, political and social phenomenon in Italy- as the most recent version of this country s autobiography.How Premature Development Became a Factor of Backwardness The Phantom Nation The Northern Question Inventing Ancestors The Unhappy Consciousness of Italian Development A Culture without a Nation The Difficult Italianization of the Piedmont The Difficult Piedmontization of Italy The Moderate Social Bloc Transformism Internationalization Crises and Transformism Emerging Sectors and Transformism The Southern Question A?Counter-Reformist Identity A Civil 'Guelph' Religion The Quest for a Civil Italian Religion A Petit-Bourgeois Fatherland A Country of Limited Sovereignty Identity and Development The Failure of 'Democratic Nationalization' Italian Metamorphoses Between Europe and the Mediterranean The Internationalization Crisis of the 1990s

Graziano adopts an interdisciplinary approach and opens various windows on the political, economic, sociological, and cultural history of Italy since its unification. He weaves a thick and rich cloth on which he also presents various shiny pearls in the form insights, images, and references. It is a rich and erudite book that makes an important contribution to the recent debate on 'the absence of an Italian nation' - a debate on which Grazian builds but which he also carries forward. - Forum Italicum

Manlio Graziano's ambitious The Failure of Italian Nationhood seeks to get to the heart of the problem, examining crisis after crisis in the past century and a half in search of some recurrent behavior pattern that might explain Italy's trolc*