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MODERNITY AND SECESSION

The Social Sciences and the Political Discourse of the lega nord in Italy

Michel Huysseune

298 pages, bibliog., index
ISBN 978-1-84545-061-8 Hb $90.00/£50.00 Published ( 2006)
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The northern Italian, ‘Padanian’ identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition, in political and scholarly discourse, of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic divide. Trying to come to terms, in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy’s (real or presumed) inadequacies – such as inefficient government, corruption, and organized crime – this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists, who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country.

In response to this discourse many scholars, both in Italy and abroad, have started to question this perception of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition, Michel Huysseune provides a new, systematic, and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy’s imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a “backward” and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity, thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide, which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.

Michel Huysseune teaches Political Science at the Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). He has published numerous articles on nationalism in scholarly journals and contributed to various encyclopedias, such as the UNESCO Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (2003) and the Ethnopolitical Encyclopaedia of Europe (2004). He is the author of La franc-maçonnerie. Mythe et réalité (1992) and co-editor of the volume Secession, History and the Social Sciences (2002).

Series: Volume 5, Ethnopolitics

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Table of Contents (Free download)

Preface (Free download)

Acknowledgments (Free download)

Modernity, National Identity and the Social Sciences

An Interpretative Framework

An analysis of the relation between scholarship and political discourses requires a framework for interpretation.

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Narratives of Italy's Incomplete Modernisation

The debates sparked off by the Lega Nord's challenge to the Italian nation-state should be interpreted in the light of Italy's hegemonic political and intellectual discourses in the late 1980s and 1990s.

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Theories on Italy's Modernisation

Explaining the Italian Sonderweg

Because of Italy's long-standing status as an example of otherness for Western standards of modernity, theories of modernisation have frequently been formulated using the Italian case.

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Representations of Northern and Southern Italy

Theories on the particular nature of Italy's modernisation are all closely intertwined with interpretations of the country's North-South divide, and more specifically with the particular characteristics attributed to these two parts of Italy.

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The Political Discourse of the Lega Nord

The Lega Nord emerged during the crisis of Italy's political institutions in the early 1990s, and transformed the crisis of the party system into what was perceived as a crisis of the nation-state. In this context, the issue of Italy's incomplete modernity, previously a focus of intellectual criticism, came to dominate the public debate, which was marked by anxiety over the country's international economic position and its proposed membership of the European Monetary Union.

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Anti-Secessionist Discourses in Italy

The Lega's political discourse and its deployment during a political crisis have meant an overall challenge to the legitimacy of the Italian nationstate. Responses to this challenge by Italian politicians and intellectuals have led to the articulation of what may be described as anti-secessionist discourses.

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Conclusion

As a case-study of the relation between social-science and nation-building discourses, this volume has analysed the relation between the Lega's political discourse and research on Italy in the social sciences.

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Index (Free download)

Bibliography (Free download)