Identity Matters: Italy

Anyone taking a passing glance at European political trends in the past few months might be prompted to ask, along with Alex Harrowell, 'what's going on in Italy?' Harrowell amplifies the considerable angst expressed by the Guardian's Martin Jacques over some of the cultural touchstones that accompanied recent Italian elections. Rome, which has not had a conservative mayor since Italian fascism collapsed in 1943, has elected Gianni Alemanno, a Berlusconi ally who ran on a vociferously anti-immigrant platform, to lead the city's government. At Alemanno's victory rally, his supporters gave the Roman salute while evoking Mussolini, shouting, "Duce! Duce! Duce!" The shift to the nationalist - detractors would say xenophobic - right played out nationally as well, putting Berlusconi in power at the head of a coalition that includes the regionalist and virulently anti-immigrant Northern League, as well as the National Alliance, which descends directly from the neo-fascist Italian Social Movement.

The new government wasted no time fulfilling its promises to crack down on immigrant communities, initiating a massive, high-profile police sweep of migrant shanty-towns and arresting hundreds on various charges. Perhaps more unsettling to those whose political sympathies don't lie with the Italian right, though, were the concurrent vigilante attacks against immigrant communities. The New York Times reports:

On Saturday, [May 10,] several hundred Italians attacked a camp of Roma, or Gypsies, on the eastern outskirts of Naples brandishing sticks and throwing homemade incendiary devices, after a 16-year-old Roma girl was accused of trying to steal a baby. The police were called to restore order and no one was injured, but the episode led national news programs.

This got a paragraph in the Times, but to me this is the real story. Based on accusations of baby stealing (sounds a bit like 'well poisoning' to me, though evidently it's more than just an unattributed rumor), a crowd of Italians rampaged through an immigrant community with clubs and molotov cocktails. That's not just letting off a bit of political steam. That's an ethnic riot - a pogrom if you like - in Western Europe, in the twenty-first century. That the government responded not with outrage that such a dispicable event had blackened Italy's good name, but rather with a police sweep through immigrant shanty-towns, suggests that anti-immigrant violence now has the tacit backing of the Italian state (if you can read Italian, check out some of the charming responses that local school children gave to the violence).

That statement might seem a bit harsh, but the patterns of ethnic violence that we begin to see exhibited in Italy have parallels in other areas of the World. I have referred before to the work of Paul Brass on "institutional riot systems" and the way in which they fuel and direct anti-Muslim violence in India. Based on my (admittedly superficial) reading of the current state of events in Italy, it appears that there are formal elements within the Italian political system that both fuel and feed off of violence against and hatred toward perceived outsiders.

Please understand, I'm not suggesting that Italy is on the verge of breaking out into the kind of orgiastic ethnic violence that has been seen in areas of India and other parts of the World. I have too much faith in the Italian people and in Italian - and European - legal and governmental institutions (however comically dysfunctional they may appear at times) to think that such atrocities would be tolerated there. Still, given the recent virulence of some on the Italian right, given the fact that unabashedly anti-immigrant parties now have a very prominent place in the Italian government, and given the fact that other European countries are or will soon be facing similar political and demographic dilemmas, it is worth analyzing what brought things to this point, and thinking about holistic steps that European elites can take to keep their integrative project from backsliding into poisonous ethnic chauvinism.

Italian Identity

It is worth noting that immigration is relatively new as a national issue in Italy when compared with the experience 0f other European countries. Indeed, until the 1970s, more people emigrated from Italy than immigrated to it (a professor of mine once pointed out that a famous scene in Antonioni's film La Notte had to be understood in the context of an Italy in which black people were virtually non-existent). Before then, the principal cleavage of Italian national identity was regional; in particular, the cultural and economic divide between the industrialized north and the rural, largely impoverished south. Kowalczyk and Popkewitz, in a paper from a few years ago, write that the immigration issue has re-mapped Italian identity, submerging (if incompletely) the north-south divide by introducing a new group to be confined to "otherness." The attitude of many Italians is perfectly encapsulated by an anonymous quote in the paper: "An Italian thief is a thief, a Moroccan thief is a Moroccan."

Channeling Frustrations

There is another element that I think may be at work here, albiet as only part of the story. The Italian political system, it would seem, is in rather severe straits. Italy's economy is anemic, its government inefficient, and its elites corrupt. I bring this up cautiously, because I am generally skeptical of arguments that rest on "false consciousness," whereby people filter the problems and insecurities in some aspects of their lives through an unrelated ideological construct in order to make sense of them. I think this is too often used as an intellectually lazy crutch by (particularly left wing) academics who don't want to admit that not everyone is a socialist who just doesn't know it yet. Still, I think that it is true that, with organization and foresight, political elites can construct narratives that channel and focus generalized frustration in particular directions, at least in certain circumstances.

Italy's political-economic stagnation is serious, and the usual stopgap measures that governments have used in the past to mollify the Italian populace (economic protectionism, currency devaluation) are now off limits due to the constraints of the E.U. In such an environment, the creation of a narrative of immigrants as a cancer on Italian society (never mind that, with Italy's pathetic birthrate, they are in fact an urgent economic necessity), fits logically into a larger picture of national malaise and an uncertain future. Some of the Northern League's iconic posters (one reading "Further from Rome, Closer to You," another calling for "Fewer Taxes to Rome, More Money to Pensioners," and another provocative one that pictures an American Indian and reads "They Allowed Immigration, Now They Live on Reservations") support this link between frustration with Italy's political institutions and virulent animus towards immigration from abroad. Certain Italian elites have managed - at least among some constituencies - to link immigration to the widely shared sense that something is rotten in the state of Italy. The fact that some on the radical right, who are now in positions of real power, have openly advocated state violence against immigrants, as well as made reference to the mobilization of extra-legal mobs to support their cause, adds up to an environment that is conducive to the kind of ethnic violence that Italy witnessed in May.

What is to be Done?

As I noted when opening this series, the multi-level reconstruction of the notion of citizenship that is now taking place in Europe - wherein citizenship is at once local, national and European - is almost certain to produce a certain amount of dislocation. Sensible immigration policies that seek to integrate immigrants into Italian society through schools, job and language training, and social support are critical to reversing the kind of ethnic balkanization that can prime a population for violence and regressive politics. Likewise, extensive government reforms that restore popular faith in civic institutions may be able to blunt the appeal of purosangue narratives of Italian identity.

It is finally worth noting that Italy's shift to the nationalist right - though notable for its extremity - is not unique within Europe. Problems of identity will need to be confronted at every step of Europe's integrative project. Europeans need to find a better way of navigating their perils.

Identity Matters: Language

By way of introduction to what I intend to be a series of posts examining the politics of identity in the twenty-first century (a subject that any regular readers will know is near and dear to my heart), I'd like to direct readers to a great post at Freakonomics on language and globalization. Four thinkers give their thoughts on the interaction between economic globalization, cyberspace, colonial legacies, and language. I found a few quotes to be particularly illuminating.

John Hayden, president of Versation, speculates on the effects that emerging economies will have on the primacy of English as the World's lingua franca:

English is a tool, just like a piece of technology. Much of the world’s economy is tied up in English-speaking countries and for that reason, English is like a cell phone provider offering the best plan. But if the dollar continues to drop, the most viable option could shift. Mexico and Korea don’t need English to communicate if Korea begins to find it profitable to learn Spanish.

Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at UPenn, addresses some of the more overtly political implications of language in the coming years:

Much of today’s linguistic politics are rooted in the residues of colonial rule, itself an earlier form of globalization — but paradoxically, the recent spread of former colonial languages is sometimes driven by local resistance to domination by outsiders...

Kurdish officials resist being forced to do business with the central government in Arabic, and sometimes insist on English, even if their command of Arabic is excellent. They recognize that they can’t force the central government to deal with them in Kurdish, but they see English, the language of the former colonial power, Britain — and of the current occupying power, the United States — as a symbol of resistance to the cultural and political hegemony of the Arabic-speaking majority...

And at the same time that big languages like English, French, Chinese, and Arabic have been spreading among present or past imperial subject populations, local linguistic nationalism has been increasing in strength, and winning some victories.

In Belgium — which is number one in the 2007 KOF Index of Globalization — Flemish cultural nationalism, very much based on language, is threatening to split the country in two...

Paradoxically, the force that freed “regional and minority” languages throughout Europe was exactly the economic and political unification created by that poster child of globalization, the European Union.

If you’re going to combine many countries with different national languages — and do it by political compromise rather than by military conquest — then you can’t impose any single national language on the result. And once you admit a dozen or so national languages to official status in the resulting union, why not throw in a hundred more — even if the local nation-states have been busily trying to promote national unity by suppressing them for the past few centuries?

Hayden and Liberman touch on a whole mouthful (brainful?) of issues, which I couldn't begin to fully address here; but, I'll offer a few thoughts on which I hope to later expand. There are many "dark sides" to the emergence of the global economy, and though I think that globalization on the whole has been - and can continue to be - an immensely positive phenomenon for people all over the World, our political institutions have done a poor job addressing the very serious environmental, economic and cultural dislocation that has accompanied its emergence. The immense changes that have taken place in the past few decades have upended the lives of billions of people in the space of a single generation, affecting not merely the size of their pocketbooks and the cleanliness of their drinking water, but also the way in which they perceive their place in the emerging global order. The complex mix of family, tribe, race, gender, religion and language that defines the boundaries of political kinship is changing, and if we as a species are to address the myriad economic, political and environmental challenges that face us, we must have a handle on the opportunities and limitations that such changes will present.

Liberman's comments on the European Union, for example, are particularly intriguing. Europe as a society is playing a fascinating multi-level game with the identity of its citizens. Just as the ethno-nationalist project that has occupied European peoples for the better part of two hundred years has come to fruition, Europeans are being encouraged to subsume their national identities in favor of a larger, pan-European one. At the same time, increased immigration from other areas of the World is challenging Europeans' identities at a time when they are uniquely plastic. Responses have run the spectrum from ethno-localist xenophobia to cosmopolitan acceptance, with most people falling somewhere in between. Language, as the premier marker of nationalism in the modern era, remains powerful in its potential to both unify and divide Europeans as they lurch haltingly towards their post-modern "paradise."

The situation around the rest of the Globe is no less complex.

Before I launch into what I hope will be a fruitful discussion, I do want to make a couple of things clear. First, though a person's political identity is, in my opinion, a social construct - "imagined" if you like - that is not the same thing as saying that it is false. The facile crutch of "false consciousness" has blinded thinkers and politicians from Marx to Obama to the very real concerns of people whose identities are inseparable from their dignity, and who legitimately seek to pass both on to their descendants. Second, identity is not an inherently moral concept. What a person does with their identity, whether they harness it for peace and unity or for power and violence, is of course morally relevant, but identity itself simply is. If we as citizens - and this is one issue in which citizen involvement at all levels of global society is absolutely crucial - are going to navigate the complex and treacherous waters of twenty-first century geopolitics, we must all give due respect to the values and aspirations of communities with whom we do not feel an immediate bond, and we cannot do that while sitting in perpetual judgment.

Much has happened in recent weeks that is highly relevant to this discussion, from elections in Europe to violence in India and South Africa. I hope to address many of them soon, but in the mean time, I would love to hear what readers think of this issue, where they see trends in global political identity heading, and what role, if any, language plays.

The Moral Complexity of Nationalism

Barnett Rubin at Informed Comment has a piece entitled Against Holocaust Denial, Against Naqba Denial that ought to be required reading for anyone who pays attention to 21st Century geopolitics. Though the principal focus of Rubin's post is the (extraordinarily well articulated) history of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, he manages to highlight the painful tension that underlies the very notion of nationalism everywhere, and provides powerful insight into who we all are as members of political communities.

To be sure, I don't accept everything implied by Rubin's analysis. In particular, I am more forgiving, even supportive, of the Zionist project than he. I do, though, take to heart the tragic contradiction at the bedrock of modern nationalism that his account illuminates; namely, that nationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, is both abhorrent to liberal morality and necessary to its exercise.

Allow me to explain. The story Rubin tells, of genocide, migration and ethnic cleansing, of a catastrophic chain reaction of misery from Spain to Russia to Jerusalem to Tehran, lies at the heart of the modern world. The creation - still in progress - of the political communities in which we all reside has necessarily involved the disruption of that same community for others. The nations of Western Europe were midwifed by the oppression and expulsion of national minorities and the forcible suppression of local culture. Through a complex interplay of private enterprise and state policy, Provence, Bretagne and Languedoc became France, Piemonte, Sicilia and Napoli became Italy, and dozens of tiny duchies, principalities and bishoprics east of the Rhine became Germany. As old continental and colonial empires - which had been ethno-linguistic melting pots, composed with no thought to nationalist logic - faded, even more dramatic events preceded the formation - again, still in progress in many places - of modern nation-states. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire set off nationalist powder kegs across the Balkans and Eastern Europe. Within a few decades, the hellish tides of the Second World War swept across the continent, leading to history's greatest genocide, as well as to unprecedented population movements as Soviet troops cleared conqured territories of ethnic Germans. Meanwhile, the great European colonial Empires gave way to the resistance of nascent national movements worldwide, and in the wake of their retreat left a state system grafted onto polygot mosaics of ethno-linguistic and religious communities. As in Europe, this often led to conflict to resolve the tension of states and political communities that were alien to each other. Millions of refugees flowed back and forth across the borders of India and Pakistan, fleeing the violence and chaos that accompanied partition. Jewish and Arab inhabitents of British Palestine violently tore their land asunder, bringing one of the modern world's most intractable conflicts into full flower. Sectarian divisions flared up in new states across Asia, Africa and the Middle East as people sought harmony between the bounds of geography and those of identity.

I won't belabor the point further. Suffice to say that the conflict in Israel and Palestine is but one example (albiet a very instructive one) of the fundamental conflict of liberal nationalism. With its notions of individual freedom, liberalism does not sit well with a conception of political identity that, to quote Benedict Anderson, is "both limited and sovereign" in the sense that nations can by definition never be universalized (we cannot imagine a scenario in which the whole world is French) and must find political expression in a sovereign community. Nationalism necessarily includes some, excludes others, and thus limits the freedom of all.

On the other hand, from a practical perspective, a liberal society requires that its members have a basic level of affinity with one another, a kind of loose bond of political kinship that can serve as glue for the social contract. Since the industrial revolution, nationalism has proven to be by far the strongest adhesive. Jerry Muller's recent Foreign Affairs piece Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism should be required reading for anyone interested in a brief exposition of nationalism's enduring vitality. Even one of the founding lights of the modern study of Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, the British socialist who famously labeled nations "imagined communities" was spurred to write not out of a belief that progressive ideologies like socialism would trump nationalist feeling, but out of puzzlement at nationalism's enduring power even within (what was at the time) the communist world. The fact is that nationalism is a uniquely effective social glue, perhaps a necessary one if the freedoms promised by liberal champions are ever to be exercised.

Coming back to Rubin's piece, the question becomes what is to be done going forward. Europe presents both a compelling and unsettling model to follow. On the one hand, European populations seem to be slowly-but-surely recasting their political community based on shared value affinity and history that goes well beyond their own national groups. On the other hand, as Muller argues, that transformation may only be possible in an environment where the separatist nationalist project - the desire to give every nation a state and every state a nation - has largely succeeded. It should rightly bother us that this success rests on some of the greatest atrocities - murder, ethnic cleansing and conquest - in the history of mankind. Need the route to the transcendence of our more parochial national attachments be paved in misery and soaked in blood?


I answer with a qualified "no." Even if the kinds of actions that were once employed to bring about ethno-nationalist unity weren't as ethically problematic as they are in this day and age, the major movements of global population that emigration has brought about in recent years make the creation of nationally homogeneous societies impossible today. One needs only to look at the problem Japan is having with an aging populace to see that state policies of ethnic stasis create as many problems as they prevent. Still, this only further illuminates the need for ethnic polities to be honest about the contradictions of their own pasts, and to recognize the necessity of carving out space - within and without state borders - for nationalist aspirations to operate. Sometimes this will happen through the devolution of power and the recognition of group rights, problematic as this can be for true liberals. Other times this will mean a re-fashioning of a dominant national identity to include the history and ideals of those formerly confined to "otherness." This is something that, on balance, the United States does exceptionally well, and with enlightened leadership is something that we can help other societies to achieve.

Nationalism in the 21st century needn't be the immiserating, bloody mess that it was during the 20th. That will only be avoided, though, if we are honest about our collective history, honest about the tensions that exist within our own ideals, and honest about the fact that neither is going away any time soon.

Fire the Graphics Department

Sorry for the sub-par picture. I got this latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly in the mail today, and evidently they haven't posted an image of the cover anywhere on the Web yet. Ah, the magic of cell phone cameras. Now, I look to magazines like the Atlantic for something resembling intelligent discourse on current culture and politics. Generally speaking, they deliver, but this cover had me pretty annoyed. I understand that provocative headlines and arresting images sell magazines, and I'm not expecting Kant's Critique of Practical Reason to be spelled out in the bylines, but could we please try for something a bit more sophisticated than betting lines on the victor of the latest Crusade? It's the twenty-first century for God's sake. It would be nice if some of the more respectable popular media could bring a little bit of subtlety and sophistication to the way they present the complex global interaction of identity, faith, economics and power.

What really gets me is that the issue actually has a number of well-researched, insightful articles on the globalization of religious politics, none of which are particularly inflammatory. The cover, though, does nothing to communicate this, presenting the oh-so-original image of a clashing cross and crescent with a sensationalized headline about which religion will "win." Oy.

Group Loyalty

Check out John Robb's post on group loyalty in the age of Globalization over at Global Guerrillas. Definitely worth a read.