Post-War Italy: The Making of a Difficult Democracy

The course is an introduction to Italian history after World War II. After 1945, Italy (now a democratic republic) left behind the structures and values of its traditional peasant society and, with the ‘economic miracle’, entered into a modern consumer society: the majority of Italians were now free from poverty and illiteracy and enjoyed the benefits of a modern welfare State. In 1991, Italy could even (wrongly) boast to be the fifth economic world power, overtaking the UK. However, democracy did not develop with the Italian economy. Among Western countries, Italy was probably the most affected by the Cold War. External forces regularly threatened democratic stability (the Italian Communist Party and the neo-Fascist MSI were the largest in the West of their kind) and gave rise to a sort of ‘civil cold war’. Consequently Italian democracy was, at the same time, blocked and feeble. Italians experienced the most stable political system in the world, with the same party - the Christian Democrat Party (DC), in power from 1945 until 1992. However, governmental stability was low and representative democracy continuously at risk. The duration and impact of students’ and workers’ protest were among the more imposing in the world; threats of a coup d’état frequent; the level of diffused political violence and terrorism extremely high. In the 1970s Italy seemed destined to be the first western democracy to have a Communist participation in government. Furthermore, the impossibility of any political alternation in power favoured one of the worst evils of Italian life: the mixture between party politics and the public economy and consequent risks of corruption. Deeply conditioned by the Cold War, the Italian political system did not survive its end. It’s no surprise that, since then, such a difficult democracy has not yet found stability.