What happens when a parliamentary constitution
is imposed on an underdeveloped society? The
answer is not without relevance to conditions in
the Third World in the twentieth century. Italy
provides an interesting early case history. In population
size Italy, Austria-Hungary, France and
Britain belong to the same group of larger
European nations, but the differences between
their development and power are striking. The
greater part of Italy, especially the south, was in
the late nineteenth century among the poorest
and most backward regions of Europe. But its
rulers in the north imposed parliamentary constitutional
government on the whole of Italy, over
the more developed as well as the undeveloped
regions. Furthermore, a highly centralised administration
was devised dividing the whole country
into sixty-nine provinces, each governed by a
prefect responsible to the minister of the interior.
Parliamentary institutions suited well enough
the north-western region of Italy, formerly the
kingdom of Piedmont, the most advanced region
of Italy, where parliamentary government had
taken root before unification. The problem arose
when the Piedmontese parliamentary system was
extended to the whole of Italy in 1861; it was now
intended to cover the very different traditions and
societies of the former city states, the papal
domains and the Neapolitan kingdom. It was a
unity imposed from above. For many decades
‘unity’ existed more on paper than in reality.
Italy had the appearance of a Western European
parliamentary state.
A closer look at the Italian parliament shows
how very different it was from Britain’s. To begin
with, only a very small proportion, 2 per cent, of
Italians were granted the vote. This was gradually
extended until in 1912 manhood suffrage was
introduced. But in the intervening half-century,
the small electorate had led to the management
of parliament by government; a few strongmen
dominated successive administrations. There
were no great political parties held together by
common principles and beliefs, just numerous
groups of deputies. The dominating national
leaders contrived parliamentary majorities by
striking bargains with political groups, by bribes
of office or by the promise of local benefits. When
a government fell, the same leaders would strike
new bargains and achieve power by a slight
shuffling of political groupings.
In such a set-up, parliamentary deputies came
to represent not so much parties as local interests;
their business was to secure benefits for their electors.
Politicians skilled in political deals dominated
the oligarchic parliamentary system from 1860 to
1914. In the early twentieth century Giovanni
Giolitti became the leading politician. These leaders
can be condemned for their undeniable political
corruption as well as for undermining the
principles of constitutional parliamentary and,
eventually, democratic government. The ordinary
voter could scarcely be aroused in defence of parliament
which seemed to assemble only for the
benefit of politicians and special-interest groups.
On the other hand, the particular conditions
of recently united Italy have to be taken into
account. It had a strong tradition of local loyalties.
Central government was regarded as an alien
force. The difficulty of building bridges between
the political oligarchy of those who ruled and the
mass of the people was great. Outside Piedmont
there was little tradition of constitutional parliamentary
government of any sort. At the time of
unification three-quarters of the population could
neither read nor write. The poverty of southern
and central Italy was in great contrast to the
progress of the north. And the enmity of the
papacy, which had lost its temporal dominion,
meant that Catholics obedient to the Pope were
alienated from the state and would not participate
in elections. In a country so rent by faction and
regional rivalry as well as so backward, it can be
argued that the firm establishment of unity and
the solid progress achieved represented, in themselves,
a notable success. The franchise was
extended, and illiteracy greatly reduced so that by
1911 almost two-thirds of the population could
read and write; in the south the proportion of
literate to illiterate was reversed.
Politics cannot be divorced from society and
poverty. Compared to France and Britain, Italy
was a poor country; the greater part of Italy, especially
the south, was caught in the poverty trap of
a backward agrarian economy. A larger proportion
of the population remained dependent on
agriculture right down to the First World War
than in any other Western European country,
including France. Some agricultural progress was
achieved as landowners and peasants turned to
exporting olive oil, fruit and wine, but protection
against the influx of low-cost wheat from the
Americas benefited principally the great landowners
of the south, while high food costs bore most
heavily on the poorest landless labourers. The
masses of the south were exploited in the interests
of the north. Deforestation, exhaustion of the
soil and soil erosion, taxation and overpopulation
forced some of the peasantry to emigrate in search
of a less harsh life elsewhere in Europe or across
the Atlantic. During every year of the 1890s, on
average 280,000 people left Italy, rather more
than half this number to go overseas; this human
stream rose to 600,000 a year in the first decade
of the twentieth century and reached 873,000 in
1913, by which time about two-thirds went overseas,
principally to the US. No European state
suffered so great an exodus of its population in
the early twentieth century. By 1927, the Italian
government calculated there were more than 9
million Italians living abroad, where they formed
concentrated communities: among them, half a
million in New York, 3.5 million in the US as a
whole, 1.5 million in the Argentine and 1.5
million in Brazil.
The alliance between northern industry and the
large, and frequently absentee, landowners growing
wheat in the south impoverished the mass of
the peasantry: protected by a high tariff, these
landowners were able to farm large tracts of land
inefficiently and wastefully without penalty; unlike
in France, no class of peasant proprietors, each
with his own plot of land, would emerge. Almost
half the peasants had no land at all; many more
held land inadequate even for bare subsistence.
By the turn of the century, there was a growing
recognition that there was a ‘southern question’
and that the policies of united Italy had been
devised to suit the conditions of the north; special
state intervention would be necessary to help the
south. In December 1903 Giolitti, when prime
minister, expressed the will of the government to
act: ‘To raise the economic conditions of the
southern provinces is not only a political necessity,
but a national duty’, he declared in parliament.
Genuine efforts were made by legislation to stimulate
industrial development in the Naples region,
to improve agriculture and reform taxation, build
railways and roads, improve the supply of clean
water and, above all, to wage a successful campaign
against the scourge of malaria. But too little
was done to improve the wealth of the peasants
and to increase peasant proprietorship; the middle
class was small and, in the absence of industry,
mainly confined to administration and the professions.
Government help on the economic front
was but a drop in the ocean of widespread poverty
and backwardness. Despite the undoubted progress,
the gap between the north and south continued
to widen. Little would be achieved until
after the Second World War, but even at the
beginning of the twenty-first century the problem
of the south persists.
Italian industrialisation was handicapped by the
lack of those indigenous resources on which the
industrialisation of Britain, France and Germany
was based: the amount of coal in Italy was negligible
and there was little iron ore. But helped by
protection (since 1887), Italian industry developed
in the north. The first decade of the twentieth
century was (apart from the brief depression of
1907 to 1908) a period of exceptionally fast
growth, overcoming the depression of the 1890s.
Textile production, led by silk, rapidly expanded
in Piedmont and Lombardy and dominated
exports. Large quantities of coal had to be
imported but as a source of energy coal was supplemented
by the exploitation of hydroelectrical
power, in which large sums were invested. Italy
also entered into the ‘steel age’, building up its
steel production to close on a million metric tons
by the eve of the First World War, a quantity five
times as large as in the 1890s. A start was made,
too, in promising new twentieth-century industries
in typewriters (Olivetti), cars (Fiat), bicycles
and motorcycles. A chemical industry producing
fertilisers rapidly developed. State aid, in the form
of special legislation aiding shipbuilding or by
stimulating demand through railway construction
and through tariff protection, contributed to this
spurt of industrialisation in the early twentieth
century. The banks provided investment funds;
the help of tourist income and the money sent
back by Italians abroad enabled a greater investment
to be made than was earned by the industrial
and agricultural production of the country.
But a weakness of Italy’s industrialisation was
its concentration in three north-western regions,
Piedmont (Turin), Lombardy (Milan) and Liguria
(Genoa), thus widening further the gap between
administrative political unification and industrial
economic unification.
The growth of industry in the north led, as
elsewhere in Europe, to new social tensions as
factory workers sought to better their lot or
simply to protest at conditions in the new industrial
centres. During the depression of 1897 and
1898, riots spread throughout Italy, culminating
in violence and strikes in Milan. They were met
by fierce government repression. But the year
1900 saw a new start, a much more promising
trend towards conciliation. The Socialist Party
was prepared to collaborate with the Liberal parliamentarians
and accept the monarchy and constitution
in order to achieve some measure of
practical reform. This was the lesson they learnt
from the failure of the recent violence in Milan.
Giolitti, who became prime minister for the
second time in 1903, saw the involvement of the
masses in politics as inevitable and so sought to
work with the new forces of socialism and to tame
them in political combinations. But he looked
beyond this to genuine social and fiscal reforms.
The rise of socialism in the 1890s had one beneficial
result for the embattled state. It alarmed the
Church and led to a revision of the papal interdiction
against such activities as participation in
government and parliamentary elections. The
temporal rights of the Church – the ‘occupation’
of Rome – were becoming a question of history
rather than one of practical politics. Pope Leo XIII
expressed the Church’s concern for the poor and
urged social reform as a better alternative to
repressive conservativism on the one hand and
atheistic socialism on the other. The Church was
coming to terms with twentieth-century society.
His successor, Pope Pius X, though more conservative,
in 1904 permitted Catholics to vote wherever
Socialists might otherwise be elected. This
marked the cautious beginning of collaboration
between Church and state, and a beginning, too,
in creating a Catholic political force (Christian
Democrat) to keep the Socialists out of power in
collaboration with other groups. Catholic support
was welcome to Giolitti. His progressive social
views did not mean he wished to allow Socialists a
decisive voice in government.
From 1903 onwards the Socialists were split
into violently hostile factions: a minority, the
reformists, were still ready to collaborate within
the constitutional framework and to work for
practical reform; the majority, the syndicalists,
were intent on class revolution to be achieved by
direct action and violence through syndicates or
trade unions. The weapon that they hoped would
overthrow capitalist society was the general strike.
The split into reformist socialists, revolutionary
socialists and syndicalists further weakened the
Socialists, faced in the new century with the overwhelmingly
difficult task of changing a wellentrenched
capitalist state. The great strikes of
1904, 1907 and 1908 were defeated, the Socialist
Party in parliament was small, the forces of law
and order, strong; a Catholic labour movement,
too, successfully diverted a minority of peasants
and industrial workers from socialist trade unions.
The absence of strong parties and the commanding
position established by a few politicians
were the most noteworthy characteristics of Italian
political life before the First World War. The
Catholic political group was embryonic, unlike
those in neighbouring France and Germany.
Italian socialism could not overcome the handicap
of the fierce factional struggles that characterised
the emergence of socialism in Europe. Regionalism,
the Church and the backwardness of much of
the country also prevented the development of a
broadly based conservative party. So government
was dominated by the ‘liberal’ groupings of the
centre, agreeing only on the maintenance of law,
order and national unity, and bound by a common
opposition to conservative extremism and revolutionary
socialism. Were these characteristics of
Italian political life the inevitable consequence of
this stage of uneven national development, of the
continuing regional particularism of a sharply differentiated
society and of a limited franchise? Or
should the arrested form of parliamentary government
be regarded as forming the roots of the later
fascist dictatorship and the corporate state? It is
not helpful to look upon Giolitti as a precursor of
Benito Mussolini. The two men and their policies
must be examined in the context of the conditions
of their own times. The shattering experience of
the First World War separated two eras of modern
Italian history, Giolitti’s from Mussolini’s.
Giolitti was a politician of consummate skill in
parliamentary bargaining. He followed broad and
consistent aims. The first was to master the
whirlpool of factions and to reconcile the broad
masses of workers and peasants with the state, to
accept the upsurge of mass involvement in politics
and industrial life and to channel it away from
revolution to constructive cooperation. ‘Let no
one delude himself that he can prevent the
popular classes from conquering their share of
political and economic influence’, he declared in
a remarkable parliamentary speech in 1901. He
clearly accepted the challenge and saw it as the
principal task of those who ruled to ensure that
this great new force should be harnessed to contribute
to national prosperity and greatness. He
was not prepared to accept revolutionary violence,
yet repression, he recognised, would only lead to
unnecessary bloodshed, create martyrs and alienate
the working man.
Giolitti utilised the revulsion against the strikes
of 1904 to increase his parliamentary support by
calling for a new election which he fought on a
moderate platform. His tactics succeeded and he
never, down to 1914, lost the majority of support
he then gained. But this support was based as
much on the personal loyalty and dependence on
political favours of individual deputies as on
agreement with any broad declaration of policy.
His management of parliament (and the electoral
corruption) undeniably diminished its standing
and importance.
Enjoying the support of King Victor Emmanuel
III, Giolitti’s power was virtually unfettered for a
decade. He used it to administer the country efficiently,
to provide the stability that enabled Italy,
in the favourable world economic conditions, to
make progress and modernise its industry. His
concern for the south was genuine, and state help
pointed the way. In order to preserve the state,
Giolitti appeased the left and claimed to be a conservative.
His most startling move towards the
politics of the masses, away from those of privilege,
was to introduce a bill in 1911 to extend the electorate
to all males. The bill became law in 1912. It
was not so much the new extension of the franchise
that undermined Giolitti’s hold over his parliamentary
majority: he secured the return of a
large majority in the new parliament of 1913.
What transformed Italian politics was the unleashing
of ardent nationalism by the war with Turkey
in 1911 which Giolitti had started in quite a different
spirit of cool calculation.
It was Italy’s misfortune to be diverted in the
twentieth century from the path of highly necessary
internal development to a policy of nationalism
and aggressive imperialism. Italy lacked the
resources and strength for an expansionist foreign
policy. But for its own ambitions, Italy could have
remained as neutral as Switzerland.
Italy was favoured by its geographical position
in that it did not lie in the path of the hostile
European states confronting each other. Luckily
for Italy, its military forces represented to its
neighbours a ‘second front’ which they were most
anxious to avoid opening while facing their main
enemy elsewhere. However little love they had for
Italy, they were therefore anxious to preserve
Italian neutrality and even willing to purchase its
benevolence with territorial rewards. Thus, the
diplomatic tensions and divisions of Europe were
extraordinarily favourable to Italy’s security,
which its own military strength could not have
ensured.
One of the most virulent forms of nationalism
is that known as ‘irredentism’, the demand to
bring within the nation areas outside the national
frontier inhabited by people speaking the same
language. There were two such regions adjoining
the northern Italian frontier: Trentino and
Trieste. Both were retained by Austria-Hungary
after the war with Italy in 1866. A third area, Nice
and Savoy, which had been ceded to France in
return for French help in the war of unification,
also became the target of irredentist clamour.
Besides this irredentism, Italian leaders also
wished to participate in the fever of European
imperialism. Surrounded on three sides by the sea,
Italians looked south across the Mediterranean to
the North Africa shore where lay the semiautonomous
Turkish territories of Tunis and
Tripolis and perceived them as a natural area of
colonial expansion. They saw to the west the
island of Corsica, now French, but once a dependency
of Genoa; to the east, across the Adriatic,
the Ottoman Empire was the weakening ruler of
heterogeneous Balkan peoples.
National ‘egoism’ gave Italian policy the
appearance of faithlessness and inconsistency. But
it would be facile to make the moral judgement
that Italian nationalism was either better or worse
than that of the other European powers. What can
be said with certainty is that it served Italian interests
ill, but then it would have required vision and
statesmanship of the highest order to have resisted
the imperialist urge which swept over all the
European powers. The Italians had not distinguished
themselves in imperial wars. They were the
only European country to be defeated by indigenous
African people, the Abyssinians in 1896, but
the Italians did not lose their appetite for empire.
In October 1911 the Italians, after declaring
war on Turkey, landed troops in Tripoli. A month
later Giolitti announced the annexation of Libya.
But the Turks refused to give in. The Italians now
escalated the war, attacking in April 1912 the
Dardanelles and occupying a number of Aegean
islands. By October 1912 the Turks had had
enough and the war ended.
The consequences of the war were, however,
far from over. As peace was signed, Montenegro,
Serbia, Bulgaria and Greece began a new war, the
first Balkan war, attacking Turkey. Italy’s policy
cannot be said to have caused the Balkan wars but
its success, and Turkey’s proven isolation, had
certainly encouraged the Balkan states. Setting
the Balkans alight was the last thing Giolitti
wanted, yet that is what occurred. Just as serious
were the reactions at home. Giolitti desired only
limited expansion, but a reversion to a cautious
pacific policy had been difficult. The nationalists
thirsted for more colonies, more territory. And
so it came about that Giolitti had unleashed a
political force more powerful than he could
control.
World History
