What I've Learned about Italian Nationalism from David Gilmour

Before this weekend, I knew enough about European history to know that Italy was/is "a geographical expression,"--a cut-and-paste smoke-and-mirrors nation-state, held together by the delusions and fantasies of its sponsors more than any durable threads in the fabric.  I more or less knew that  the fantasy was largely the fault responsibility of Giuseppe Mazzini and his ilk--19th Century dreamers/intriguers who imagined the Italian community:

[T]he goal that he and his democratic followers aimed for was simply an Italy that would be both independent and undivided. Only a unitary state, they believed, would liberate Italy from its age-old rivalries.

Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2698-2700). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.

What I didn't know is that there were others on the left--not just the old fogeys of authoritarianism and empire--who did not see it that way.  These "others" believed

that only regard for [Italy's endemic internecine]  rivalries would allow Italians to respect each other’s differences and live together in harmony: a unitary state could never conceivably work in so diverse a country. The foremost federalist was the brilliant Milanese intellectual Carlo Cattaneo, who considered ‘the ancient love of liberty in Italy’ to be more important than ‘the cult of unity’. Like Guicciardini 300 years earlier, he believed that Italy had prospered from competition between the cities and argued that a political system that failed to take the communal spirit into account would not succeed. In his eyes this spirit was far from being a medieval irrelevance: it was alive – as it still is, 

remaining a vital component of the national identity even today. Cattaneo did not greatly exaggerate when he claimed, ‘The communes are the nation: they are the nation in the most innermost sanctuary of its liberty.’  Cattaneo was no romantic nationalist. Indeed he believed that nationalism was essentially illiberal – an unusual credence in those days – and he suspected with some reason that this would be the case with Piedmont. As a Milanese historian, he was aware of the old Piedmontese custom of grabbing and annexing bits of Lombardy, and he was rightly apprehensive about the ambitions of the Savoia monarchs in his own time. As a Lombard, he was also aware of his region’s ancient trading relationships beyond the Alps and recognized that there could be advantages, administrative and economic, in becoming a self-governing part of the Habsburg Empire. Such advantages would obviously disappear if Lombardy were to be annexed by Piedmont. 

 Gilmour, David (2011-10-25). The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, Its Regions, and Their Peoples (Kindle Locations 2699-2705). Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Kindle Edition.


I've spent a bit of time in and around Italy and I have to admit I don't remember ever hearing  of Carlo Cattanio before.


 

Where's Chechnya?

In all the harmless merriment over the "where's Chechnya" meme, I'm happy to see that some people are remembering "Pine Barrens," the very best episode of The Sopranos, infra.  They might also have recalled what Neville  Chamberlain said after he handed the Czechs over to Hitler:

"a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing."

And now that I think of it, I keep hearing reports that folks were confusing Chechnya with "The Czech republic."  Not likely, IMO.  My guess is that anybody who made that blooper would have said "Czechoslovakia," not knowing that "Czechoslovakia" closed up shop back in '93. 

Confusing Kyrgizstan with Kazakhstan is perhaps a bit more forgivable.  From what I read, apparently there were/are a lot of Chechnyans in Kazakhstan, just not the current lot.

Wait a Minute, What? (National Identity Dept.)

Kenneth Rogoff, discussing our fiscal challenges, says "The US remains an incredible franchise..." (Financial Times, paywalled).

Wait a minute, what? Now we are a brand, like American Express or Saralee or the Green Bay Packers--one more locus for a network of IP contracts?  Let me think about that..

[And while thinking, I suppose I should go back and reread Monroe Price's prescient paper, The Market for Loyalties: Electronic Media and the Global Competition for Allegiances link.]

The Great Also-Ran

I'm totally in the tank for those maps of Europe as it might have been, with all the also-rans in full majesty.  Ruthenia, Provence, Pomerania, that sort of thing.

Waverly Root understands.  In his Food of France, he explains Burgundy:

Burgundy is as much basic country, elemental country, country of long-rooted traditions as is the Ile-de-France and its attendant territories to the west, and if it is the latter territory which has been described as the most French part of France rather than Burgundy it is only because its continuous history has been attached longer to the name of France than has that of Burgundy. Burgundy's contribution to what is France today goes back as far and is of comparable cultural importance to that of the Ile-de-France, and its capital, Dijon, is one of the great cities of France, a sort of eastern Rouen, whose buildings attest to its rich past; but three quarters of its history was unrolled under a name other than that of France, and in the days of its greatness it was a dukedom that was the peer of the kingdom of France, and for all any fourteenth-century prophet could have foretold, seemed quite as likely to make France part of Burgundy as the other way around.

At a time when the Ile-de-France had added to its possessions only the Orléanais, the Berry, Champagne, and Normandy, Burgundy had expanded eastward through the Franche-Comté, and possessed also, on the far side of the territories of France, Picardy, Artois, and Flanders, a great part of what today is Belgium, all of Holland (which is to say, the southern half of the modern Netherlands)except an island around Utrecht, and the Duchy of Luxembourg.  The territories of Burgundy, more extensive than those of France, had the disadvantage of not being continuous; but they had the advantage of pinching France between them, which could be decisive in area with such well-developed means of communication as our own.  Even then France and Burgundy battled as champions, equally matched.  It was the Burgundians, you will remember, not the English, who captured Joan of Arc; the English only purchased her from her captors when Charles VII, the kind whom she had crowned,proved too parsimonious to pay her ransom.

 --Waverly Root, The Food of France 174-6 (1992)

What Was Woodrow Wilson Thinking Of ...

...when he tried to reorganize the world on the basis of nation states? Certainly not central/eastern Europe which was and remains an intractable jungle of loyalties and betrayals.

The latest to step his foot into this beehive is Edward Lucas, the estimable Russia expert at The Economist. In the second of his recent columns on the subject, Lucas reports on some distillations from his mailbag:

Anyone who spells the capital of Galicia as Lwów is a Polish nationalist who bayonets Ukranian babies for fun. Anyone who says it is spelled Lviv is a Ukrainian fascist who bayonets Polish babies for fun. Anyone who spells it Lvov is a Soviet mass murderer. And anyone who calls it Lemberg is a Nazi. See you in Leopolis for further discussion.

Prompts me to remember I.J. Singer's marvellous Brothers Ashkenazi which I read with great interest and profit last year, not realizing that Lvov/Lwów/Lviv/Lemberg is not even in Poland. For the moment at least.