Italy's secessionists

...SUMMER • 1994 • 315...

...The Northern League's drive for enhanced regional autonomy reveals yet again the ambiguities of that troublesome Enlightenment ideal, "self-determination...

...The desire for selfdetermination has been fraught with contradiction ever since...

...The Northern League's striving for autonomy thus reverses the usual relationship between culture and economics at the heart of minority feelings of maltreatment...

...It represents a social group that has been generated by economic developments over the last two decades or so that has never before had political representation: small and mediumsized entrepreneurs...

...Beyond its contribution to the shakeup of party politics in Italy, the League's larger significance lies in its talk of pulling "Northerners" away from the rest of the Italian state in order to exercise greater control over their "own" affairs...

...the League seeks to right this disparity by bringing the two together—by acquiring greater autonomy for the North...

...The implications of this attitude are obviously disturbing for anyone concerned about social equality...

...Ethnocultural concerns were by no means the only ones involved...

...The League has re-opened the "national question" in Italy on terms that resonate far beyond the Italian peninsula...

...In response to this global upsurge of identity politics, conservative political scientist Samuel Huntington has drawn up a map of the post– cold war world that emphasizes fissures of culture—Western, Islamic, Hindu, and so on—as the main fault lines of the new world disorder...

...First, breakaway territories may perceive that the center's discriminatory treatment is the cause of their relative backwardness...

...An extraordinary transformation had begun, including striking indications of disenchantment with the Mafia in Sicily, where it is generally regarded as firmly woven into the fabric of daily life...

...The political success of the Northern League has resulted largely from the perception that it offers a bold departure from the corrupt ways of the postwar Italian "partyocracy...

...Its aspirations were democratic...

...Given the lack of any sharply defined ethnocultural basis for its antipathy toward the South, the Northern League's push to absolve itself of the burdens of an economically laggard Mezzogiorno recalls Staten Island's recent vote to secede from New York City...

...Despite its regionalist origins, the Northern League lacks the traditional sense of ethnic grievance that would undergird irredentist enthusiasms...

...It thus has veto power in the right-wing coalition with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia and the neo-Fascist National Alliance that won a clear legislative majority in March...

...But the League's vigorous assault on the "crooks in Rome" resonated well beyond the ranks of the new entrepreneurs...

...The rise of the Northern League in Italian politics throws the importance of the economic aspects of regional autonomy movements into high relief...

...In Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, and Catalonia, the spread of secessionist sentiments sprang in substantial part from the belief that the central state had been sucking the lifeblood of their economically more vital area...

...Each of these cases represents a territorially specific version of the withdrawal by relatively affluent groups from inherited conceptions of the commonweal...

...By doing so primarily for economic reasons rather than because of ethnocultural differences, the Northern League represents a notable departure that may tell us much about the character of political and social conflict in the years to come—both in Italy and beyond...

...Perhaps only in the case of Slovenia did the economic grievances against the central state outweigh considerations of ethnicity and nationality...

...Of these, the Lombard League under the leadership of Umberto Bossi was the largest and most significant...

...Among recent secessionist movements rooted in complaints that their region's relative economic underdevelopment is a product of the character of relations with the central state, the cases of Slovakia, Scotland, and Quebec stand out...

...Bossi is not especially interested in folklore, but he has talked about separating the North from the rest of the country or at least about instituting a — federalism that would grant substantial autonomy to three "macroregions" of the North, Center, and South—as a solution to "northern" grievances...

...The emergence in early 1992 of the "Bribe City" (Tangentopoli) scandals and the subsequent "Clean Hands" (Mani Pulite) investigations only confirmed everyone's assumption that political corruption was pervasive in Italy (See "Italy: Corruption Metastasized," by Joanne Barkan, Summer 1993 Dissent...

...He commands a fervent following among League loyalists, who view him with some reason as a political tactician of remarkable intuition and acuity...

...Yet insistence on the ethnic and cultural dimensions of conflict within and between states diverts our attention from the possible economic sources of nationalist, irredentist, and secessionist strivings...

...The insignia is intended to evoke the original twelfth-century Lombard League, which wrested considerable autonomy for several northern city-states from Barbarossa, the Holy Roman Emperor...

...In other words, the League has sought to create a quasi-ethnic identity around the core assertion that its potential adherents are more productive and useful than those elsewhere in the country...

...Having dropped much of the separatist rhetoric in favor of "federalism," the League set its sights on Rome...

...But a number of League supporters that I spoke to recently also indicated that they were most troubled not by the low quantity of services, but by their poor quality...

...Alone among comparable movements, the League has had no serious recourse to ethnic identity, linguistic distinctiveness, cultural variation, or minority status in its efforts to loosen the grip of the Italian state—or, more precisely, the League had little success as long as it defined itself primarily in these terms...

...The Northern League stood for rationalization in Max Weber's sense: the separation of official from private life, the creation of an efficient, law-abiding corps of state bureaucrats, and the reduction of stateimposed barriers to entrepreneurial activity...

...At bottom, the rise of the League can be attributed to the fact that the economic and political "core" areas of the country are disjunct...

...press as "separatist," "racist," and "anti-immigrant," and has even been likened to the National Front in France and to German neo-Nazis...

...To the hard-core leghisti, northerners are good because they are wealthier and more valuable to society, while southerners are bad because they are economic losers...

...In short, the Italian South is to the Northern League what welfare mothers are to American conservatives...

...Because the North produced something like 70 percent of the GNP with only 15 percent of the Italian population, Bossi loudly insisted that Lombards and other northerners were being robbed by the clique at the center of power...

...Yet the League's shield has been stained by a kind of original sin...

...Typically, the drive for autonomy emerges from the feeling that one's group is oppressed for reasons of ethnic, cultural, or linguistic differences relative to the group that dominates the state...

...What is the Northern League and what do its supporters want...

...Yet the League is also one of many contemporary 312 • DISSENT Politic's Abroad regional autonomy movements...

...The Northern League was officially formed in late 1989—less than two weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, in fact—as an amalgamation of several already existing regional movements...

...The point was to bring to a head the looming historical showdown over the choice: kings or people...

...Yet as a result of the concentration of that vote in the northern part of the country and of new electoral arrangements intended to break the hold of the country's entrenched "partyocracy," the League secured slightly more than one-sixth of the seats in the lower house of the new Parliament...

...The idea of self-determination retained these democratic aims through the revolutions of 1848, serving as the justification for subject nationalities to confront their imperial rulers...

...After the "springtime of nations" had passed, however, self-determination—and its twin, nationalism— began to assume uglier, more selfish overtones, reflecting an opposition between ethnos and demos...

...But in each of these cases, the ethnonationalist component of the secessionist drive—rooted in a sense of the historical injustice attending the region's incorporation into the larger state union—has been quite pronounced...

...In economic terms, regions may desire a divorce from the dominant state, or at least a slackening of ties with it, for two quite distinct reasons...

...Their solution to these problems was to call for a federalism that would both give them greater control over their own resources and force the South to "stand on its own two feet...

...Doubts surfaced quickly, however, when they shouted to the West Germans, "We are one people...

...The collapse of the Soviet and Yugoslav federations largely along ethnic lines, and the military conflict these processes have provoked, have heightened fears that the world is headed into a seething maelstrom of ethnic ha treds...

...Instead, the League has advanced politically by castigating the profligacy of a central state dominated by southerners that recycles tax revenues toward a south, or Mezzogiorno, rendered corrupt and inefficient by this government "assistancism...

...By one estimate, indeed, the province of Lombardy—the heartland of the League's support—contributes 25 percent of national revenues and gets back only 18 percent of government disbursements...

...The growing perception of the nation-state's waning efficacy has done little to still enthusiasm for the founding of new states designed to fulfill aspirations for "self-determination...

...For these views are by no means confined to the Italian North, even if they appear there in a particularly crystalline and geographically compact form...

...One of the League's favorite images is of a cow named "Lombardy" being milked by the party bureaucrats in Rome...

...The notion of self-determination entered modern political discourse as the rallying cry of the oppressed in revolt against outmoded autocracies...

...As the economy contracted and the costs of corruption grew more difficult to bear in the late 1980s, entrepreneurs outside the structures of the large private and state-owned industries began clamoring in the mid-1980s for a new kind of politics consistent with their needs...

...In order to gain a voice in Rome, however, it needed allies in the 1994 election...

...The League has variously been described in the U.S...

...Most of the republics that left the Soviet Union once it decided not to force them to stay fall into this category...

...In part, this was because people who disliked communists no longer had to hold their noses and vote DC once the "communist threat" had subsided...

...At the Berard Braunthal same time, it has rejected the obligation toward a shared well-being that is implicit in the idea of national belonging...

...This aspect of Slovenia's departure from Yugoslavia is consistent with the fact that it joined the SUMMER • 1994 • 313 Politics Abroad South Slav federation voluntarily after World War I. The Slovenians thus had less cause to develop the enmity toward the center long nurtured in Catalonia and the Baltic states...

...By the time of the last national elections in 1992, the League won 23 percent of the votes in the North, establishing itself as the most powerful political force in the region...

...But the League also reflects changes in the social structure of the Italian North...

...As a regional party hostile to Rome's efforts to develop the South (denounced by the League as assistenzialismo and symbolized above all by the "Fund for the Mezzogiorno"), its conception was, in the minds of non-northerners, anything but immaculate...

...Meanwhile, Bossi would have no part of Berlusconi's ally to the far right, the neo-Fascist National Alliance (formerly the Italian Social Movement or MSI...

...Rome is Bossi's Babylon because, as he never tires of inveighing, in the course of postwar Italian political development it had been laid siege by politicians of both the left and the right who soaked the state for the SUMMER • 1994 • 311 Politics Abroad benefit of their party comrades...

...Bossi, now fifty-two, is a Lombard who had failed at medical school and virtually everything else he tried before getting involved in regional politics in the late 1970s and early 1980s...

...The "mother of all Leagues" was the Liga Veneta, which entered its first election in 1979, but Bossi suppressed its more folklorist emphases in favor of the diatribe against Rome that has become his trademark...

...In part because many rank-and-file leghisti regarded this alliance as a betrayal, Bossi excoriated Berlusconi as a creature of the discredited past during the final weeks of the election campaign...

...Those seeking greater autonomy view the larger entity from which they wish to disentangle themselves as a drain and a drag, both economically and metaphorically...

...Each of these instances of "national" conflict, of course, also contains a more or less sharply defined ethnic component...

...While the images of the South and of southerners held by the League's activists are undeniably negative, the massive migration of southerners to the North during Italy's postwar economic boom years renders implausible the notion of distinctive ethnic identities in North and South...

...Culture, usually the aqua vitae of group identification, takes a decided back seat to economics in the preoccupations of the Northern League and its supporters...

...Everyone applauded when the East Germans defied their communist masters in 1989 with the claim, "We are the people...

...The losers in Italian social development, the League suggests, are simply no longer "our" responsibility: they must learn to fend for themselves...

...The best it could find was Berlusconi, the media magnate whose shaky empire was built with considerable assistance from Bettino Craxi, the Socialist party leader recently put on trial for corruption...

...The National Alliance wants a strong central state, which is anathema to Bossi, and it has raised irredentist claims to parts of Slovenia, an issue that has had no place in the League's rhetoric...

...The revolt against Rome and the parties that controlled it for more than forty years, especially the Christian Democrats (DC) and Socialists (PSI), caught considerable fire in the North after the collapse of the cold war...

...Still, of course, the Slovenes had plenty of historical reasons to view themselves as ethnically distinct from the rest of Yugoslavia...

...The Northern League thus seeks to create a nation not of victims but of victors...

...Rather than seeing ethnic or national identity as the cause of discrimination by the dominant society, the League takes alleged discrimination in the form of its disproportionately high contribution to the national budget as the basis for invoking an "ethnic" identity—that of "northern Italians...

...The parallel between the Northern League and Proposition 13 suggests that the "secession of the affluent" 314 • DISSENT Politics Abroad need not take exclusively territorial forms...

...Nonetheless, proponents of greater autonomy in each of these regions have argued that they would do better economically if given more control over their own affairs...

...The Northern League's official banners portray an armor-clad warrior holding a raised sword in one hand and a shield in the other...

...Until now, this outlook has generally taken the shape of the "tax revolt," a movement that found its starkest recent expression in California's Proposition 13 movement nearly two decades ago...

...The League's leading intellectual figure, Milanbased constitutional theorist Gianfranco Miglio, has frequently stressed northern Italy's historic ties to Austria, with its tradition of efficient state administration, and the baneful legacy of Bourbon laxity in the South...

...Spurred on in the late 1980s by the obvious failings of the Italian partyocracy, the Northern League has contested the legitimacy of the common political life instituted in Italy at the time of unification some 130 years ago...

...In contrast to these examples, relatively advantaged regions may object that they have been mistreated because they generate a larger proportionate share of the social product and have been wronged by state redistribution schemes...

...It has been expressed in this way in Italy simply because the affluent happen to inhabit a particular region of the country...

...In keeping with the "tax revolt" aspect of its identity, the League has complained that the North contributes more to the state budget than it receives in return...

...In the national elections held in Italy in late March that ushered in a "Second Republic," the enfant terrible of Italian politics over the last several years, the Northern League, won only 8.4 percent of the national vote...