This article examines Austrian policy towards the Italian states from the Congress of Vienna to the revolutions of 1848. It argues that the paramount concern of Habsburg policy was not revolution, but rather the maintenance of a hegemonic position in the peninsula against threats from the Habsburgs’ traditional enemy - the French. Revolution caused significant concern only because it might provide the French with a pretext for intervention in the peninsula. Consequently a number of strategies were adopted both to forestall insurrection (vigorous policing, encouraging moderate reform programmes, armed intervention), and to retain influence over the peninsula's rulers (diplomatic pressure, dynastic and military alliances, promises of assistance against unrest). However, by the 1830s the Austrians were faced by increasing challenges to their position of dominance. This was in part because of the personal ambitions of individual Italian rulers, but it also reflected the changing situation in Paris after the July Revolution, and in Vienna after the death of Francis I.

This article examines the social and political responses to the new flow of immigrants to Italy from outside the European Union. First, the Italian experience is compared with the rest of Europe with respect to such questions as the characteristics of the immigrants themselves, and the response to them on the part of political parties, the church, the unions, and the state at local, regional and national levels. Next, broader comparisons are drawn between the Italian case and that of classic ‘societies of immigration’, particularly with regard to the structure of economic opportunity available to the extracomunitari in Italy.

In united Italy, assertions by Catholic militants about their nation's true identity have been bound up with polemic against secularist forces and with claims about the position due to the Church in Italian society. They have insisted that Italy's authentic traditions are Catholic and that her true greatness resides in her being the heart of Christian civilization. Hostile or threatening ideologies, e.g. idealist philosophy and Communism, have been stigmatized as alien to Italian tradition. In the face of Fascism, with which the ‘Catholic world's’ relations were ambivalent, there was a major ideological campaign to assert a Catholic definition of the keyword romanità. The way in which Catholic theoreticians have defined the ‘nation’ in organicist terms have been linked to strategies of ideological defence against state forms, whether liberal or Fascist, perceived to be overweening.

I am taking the opportunity created by the recent introduction of a section entitled ‘Contexts and Debates’ to put forward some considerations regarding Bevilacqua's contribution on the southern question, which appeared in the last number of this journal. By doing so, I hope to promote a stimulating debate on the South of Italy today and on the way forward for reversing the current process of de-industrialization in the region and the widening gap between the South and the rest of the country. Ideally, the debate should encourage different points of view and interpretations without reopening old wounds or leading to entrenched positions.

Carl Levy (ed.), Italian Regionalism. History, Identity and Politics, Berg, Oxford 1996, 197 pp., ISBN 1–85975–131–7 hbk, 1–85973–156–2 pbk, £12.95.

It would seem to be self-evident that we cannot say what regions (and regionalism) are until we have said what nations (and nationalism) are, for the concept of region was formulated in response to, and to some degree in opposition to, that of nation. It would be overstating the case, even in the France of the Restoration or of the July Monarchy, to define ‘regionalism’ as belonging on the Right of the political spectrum, for there are liberal counter-examples to pit against de Gobineau, and yet many did indeed construe regional identity as a threat to the principle of nationality. Thus, in the Italian context, as David Hine observes in the volume under review, the real explanation for the limited nature of the challenge to the highly centralized state ‘probably lies, at least for the period from 1860 to 1922, in the cultural dominance of the myth of national popular resurgence on which the Risorgimento was based’ (p. 110). On this reading, critics of unity, who were often advocates of diversity also, were bound to remain unheeded.

Report on the Convegno internazionale di studi nel centenario della battaglia di Adua, Piacenza, 10–12 April 1996, now published as, Angeld Del Boca (ed.), Adua. Le ragioni di una sconfitta, Laterza, Rome - Bari, 1997, 468 pp., ISBN 88–420–5196–9, 45,000 Lire.

In April 1987, I turned up at Trento's Centro Santa Chiara expecting to see a screening of Mustapha Akkad's The Lion of the Desert and discovered instead, due to a forced entry into the auditorium and confiscation of the reels by the Digos, that Italy faced its colonial past with real anxiety. This film recounts the life of Omar al-Mukhtar, the man who made Italy's conquest of Libya a vicious and bloody war of attrition complete with the whole set up that empirebuilding required for its cheerful accomplishment: concentration camps, mass deportations, massacres of civilians, carpet bombing of villages, etc. Omar al-Mukhtar was hanged, of course, and for Gheddafi Libyan patriotism was born, hence his pleasure in pouring enough oil money into the film to attract big names like Anthony Quinn and Irene Papas. But in Italy the film was banned because considered ‘damaging to the army's honour’. It is strange, but perhaps not altogether without logic, that the Italian army should feel threatened by people being able to see soldiers of Fascist Italy behaving as the soldiers of Fascist Italy behaved, when taking into consideration that the Italian Republic was born, like Libya, out of the Resistance. As in Germany (or so goes the story), the army remained impervious to the excesses of fascist ideology and, of course, played an important part in countering it. But if there was a project that the Italian army (before and during Fascism) made very much its own it was the colonization of Africa.