Italy Since 1800: A Nation in the Balance?

Appearing at a critical moment in Italy's history, the book offers a timely exploration of the current tensions at the heart of the country. It explains what 'Italy' has been, and why; and poses the essential questions about what it may now become. For, as Roger Absalom reveals, Italy is one of modern history's most fascinating paradoxes. Since unification little more than a century ago, it has grown from a largely backward agrarian country into one of the world's seven leading industrial powers, with an economy and average living standards that had outpaced those of great Britain by the 1980s. Yet these achievements exist alongside no less spectacular disunities, inconsistences and contradictions. With Fascism still a living memory, Italy's domestic politics have been dominated by political Catholicism since 1945. Yet it has also been home to the world power of the mafia; to the largest and most influential Communist movement outside the Soviet and Maoist blocs; and to the most prolonged and effective campaign of terrorism mounted in any Western country since the Second World War. It has developed the largest, best adapted and most successful networks of small and medium enterprises in any Western economy - but at the same time its welfare state is more open to corruption than any other. Its political system, too, has been a byword for instability and corruption: hundreds of its leading politicians and businessmen are under investigation on charges that range from electoral malpractice to collusion in murder and terrorism with organised crime. Recent developments in Italian political life suggest that the nation is at a highly significant turning point, as the Northern Leagues, in astrange alliance with a media mogul turned 'Man of Providence' and with the neo-Fascists, swept to electoral success in 1994 on a tide of popular revulsion against the 'old politics'. What shape the 'new politics' will assume, however, is still far from clear. As so often in the pa