Italy in 2022 underwent what some people thought of as a radical, political change for the first time since World War II. Italians saw the rise of Giorgia Meloni a leader of the major right-wing party Alleanza Nazionale and according to critics, an inheritor of the Fascist party of Mussolini that ruled Italy prior to World War II. After a hundred days, she has succeeded in receiving the support of at least one-third of the electorate. Italy’s contemporary politics should be seen in light of the catastrophe of World War II where the Italian State was confronted by military defeat, destruction, occupation, and civil war. Italy as a modern state was created in 1861 as the Kingdom of Piedmont in Northern Italy conquered within the span of a decade all of the peninsula with the exception of the northeastern regions which remained under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. That area was eventually annexed following the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, though some of it was lost to Yugoslavia following World War II. By Western European standards, it is a modern country, analogous to the creation of the German state by Otto Von Bismarck as he led Prussia in several wars to unify Germany.
Italian politics should be analyzed in terms of not only history but also geography, economic development, culture and ideology. There are some key historical episodes in the evolution of Italian history that stand out, most importantly the Roman political heritage and the Roman empire, the establishment of the Catholic Church and its preeminence in Western civilization and its control of the city of Rome, and last but not least the Renaissance.
The Italian peninsula is geographically embedded in the middle of the Mediterranean thus occupying a strategic position that is not matched by any other power in the region. Its economic development has been characterized since World War II by spectacular growth and reconstruction that has come to a virtual stop after 2000.
Ideologically speaking, Italian political culture has been shaped principally by Catholic, Fascist, and Socialist Marxist ideologies that created what the Italians call “The First Republic” after World War II. In terms of international ties, since 1949 Italy has been tied to an alliance with the United States, NATO the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and the European Union. It has also been tied to all the major international institutions that have shaped the international system, such as the International Monetary Fund, The World Bank, and OSCE, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe. Italy’s commitment to the charter of the United Nations has seen the engagement of the Italian state in international security peacekeeping, development aid, and humanitarian activities.
Since 1945 Italy has relied for its security in the Mediterranean and Europe on its alliance with the United States, its membership in NATO, and in time to the European Union’s economic and political dimensions, heavily influenced by the Franco-German alliance. In the Mediterranean itself, Italy tried to befriend the Islamic world, especially oil and natural gas producers such as Algeria and Libya. In the near east itself, Italy kept very strong ties with both Arab states and Iran. An ostensible commitment to Israeli security was always superseded by Italy’s economic interests in the Arab and Iranian worlds.
Any analysis of Italian foreign policy and Mediterranean security cannot avoid salient details of Italian political history in the last hundred years, as the unification of the Italian peninsula by the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont, created a state that tried to be a major power in Europe by juggling its national interest between France, Wilhelmine Germany and Austria-Hungary. Like every other European country, the prevailing ideology that shaped the political culture of Italy was nationalism, matched internally by socialism and Catholicism.
Italian and European Politics: Nationalism, Irredentism, World War I, and Fascism
Any understanding of contemporary Italian politics, whether domestic or its interaction with Europe and the international system cannot avoid the experience of World War I, and the rise of Fascism. All the ideologies of the 20th century trace their origins through the 19th century and earlier in the European historical experience: socialism, communism, nationalism, corporate Catholicism, precede the 20th century. Only fascism is a term that denotes a 20th century political movement and the ideology that, while shaped by 19th century and 18th century political thought, challenged liberal and Marxist ideologies.
Historically, it is the French revolution that comes to shape European continental politics, Napoleonic defeat prevented the French Revolution experience from shaping English politics. After over two centuries, the European continent has been shaped by the ideological experiences of France and by the English and American Revolution. Fascism in this case drew its inspiration from the French revolution and the nationalist upheavals of the 19th century in Europe. It is always very revealing that Mussolini and his supporters expressed themselves in revolutionary terms, while connecting to Italian history and culture. Italian nationalism in the 19th century and its influence on Fascism drew inspiration from the Roman and Renaissance chapters in the history of Italy. By 1922 the Italian state came to be conquered by the Fascist party lead by Benito Mussolini who was committed even more than Italian nationalists to make Italy a great power and a worthy successor of the Roman Empire. Fascism as an ideology came to be acceptable in Europe and Latin America as a third way between Liberalism and Communism.
The alliance with Nazi Germany by Mussolini in 1938 brought the catastrophic defeat of Fascist Italy in World War II. It relegated the Italian political experience to a more marginal role because of the rise of the Soviet Union, its ideology of Marxism-Leninism, and socialist revolutionary movements in Europe and the developing world. They were all poised against Anglo-American liberalism and capitalism. Fascism, however, never disappeared as a true alternative to the two conflicting ideologies that shaped Europe and the international system until the end of the world war. If anything, the argument could be made that today the political systems of the world can be classified in two very broad categories inspired by forms of liberal capitalism and pluralistic politics, as in the case of Europe and some countries in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, such as India and Japan, or Brazil. Systems that are basically inspired by the fascist political experience namely totalitarian, highly authoritarian, repressive, imperialistic characterize the Sunni Islamic World such as Turkey. Iran, China, and North Korea, for example are political systems with the features of the neo-totalitarian fascist experience.
Some decades ago, Hanna Arendt in her classic essay on totalitarianism, compared Fascism, Nazism, and Communism, by noting some of the similarities.[1] It is interesting to note that the generalizations she made are still valid to this date, such as her focus on the repression of civil rights, the limitation of freedom of speech, propaganda, and control of the mass media, which in the 21st century have been even more pronounced than during her times.
But the Italian experience, even during the late 20th century and the 21st still stands out and its unique and possibly the harbinger of political movements of the 21st century in Europe as the experience of Italian Fascism points out. However mystifying sometime, the success of some new political movements in Europe see a precedent in the rise of Silvio Berlusconi in the Italian political system by 1989. His preeminence derived from his success in the business of mass media and his outstanding success in managing the world of television, entertainment, and sports in Italy. He created a new political party and became the central actor in the Italian Republican system. It is very revealing that by 1987 the Italian parliament saw a Hungarian-born representative, whose professional life was that of an adult film star. It is also interesting to note that a few years later in 1992, Alessandra Mussolini, Benito Mussolini’s granddaughter, became a Member of Parliament for a post-Fascist party in addition to being a member of the European Parliament. By 1990, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Cold War division of Europe and Germany brought about a shift in the ideological configuration of the Italian party system, in turn, expedited by what the Italians call a collapse of the first republic, falling political scandals that saw in time the disappearance of the socialist and Christian Democratic parties and the official end of the Italian Communist Party. One should add here that it is also during this period that Italy saw the rise of La Lega party that had begun as a quasi-secessionist party in Northern Italy, and eventually a generation later became a nationalist party and sat in the government.
Even after Berlusconi’s political defeat and relative withdrawal from politics in 2011, Italy still displayed political phenomena that are now shaking European politics. A hundred and more years after World War I, Italian political ideologies still have resonance on the European political landscape. The rise of parties and political movements in, for example, Germany, Italy, France and Hungary in the second decade of the 21st century have been seen by many critics as being inspired by Fascism or analogous to the rise of Fascism in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. In Italy these political movements are seen in the regional political parties which eventually became nationalist and came to power in 2018. In the same period a new political aggregation, Cinque Stelle, founded by a comedian, Beppe Grillo rose to power. This last party received the plurality of votes and by 2018 along with La Lega was running the Italian government.
These are phenomena that are evolving as the Catholic Church, which has been a very important if not the most important component of the Italian political experience, is challenged by a crisis of belief, scandals, and spiritual disappointment, not only among Italians, but also many Europeans. The dynamics of the Italian political system should be analyzed from the salient standpoint of an ideological conflict between a Marxist influenced left, a catholic center, and a conservative right wing component influenced by the Italian fascist experience. Regardless of the fact that Italy became a republic in 1945 and has been a democratic, representative, stable political system under the shadow of Anglo-American and NATO protection, memories of fascism and the civil war that followed the fall of Mussolini have left a deep imprint on political debates. Italian political discussions on the subject of immigration, and the challenge of security problems arising from the collapse of political systems in the Arab and Islamic world, were and are continuously reduced to Fascism and anti-Fascism, a progressive left, and a reactionary conservative establishment. The case of Italy is not unique, in that often these debates also characterize contemporary Spanish and Greek political debates, as in the case of relations with the European Union, economic crisis, and last but not least illegal immigration from Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East.
This last issue has been a lynchpin of many political crises in Western Europe, with illegal immigration and Islamic terrorism giving a boost to Italian populism in the early 2000s, as the Mediterranean world saw millions of illegal migrants come from the so-called developing and poverty-stricken world. It was a world-wide phenomenon as it also confronted the United States, for example. But in the Italian case, the Italian state was faced with literally millions of people landing on its shores. As the rest of Europe refused to cooperate with Italy in helping the resettlement or stopping the migrants, Italy became ever more critical of the European Union and some of its European partners.
[1] See Hannah Arendt, The origins of totalitarianism (New York: Schocken Books, 1951).
Dr. Morris Mottale 
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