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Mediterranean Political Culture and Italian Politics: an Interpretation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2009

Samuel H. Barnes  and
Giacomo Sani
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Extract

Both the classical Romans and the classical Fascists of Mussolini referred to the Mediterranean as Mare Nostrum, ‘our sea’. The rugged peninsula of Italy cuts the sea in half, making Italy, at least by geography, a Mediterranean country. At the same time, it is a European country, a central actor in the long history of both the Mediterranean and Europe. When the center of Europe gravitated toward that sea, the peninsula was near the center of the world and Italy was a major link between Europe and the Middle East, North Africa, and the Moslem world. As the focus of Europe moved north and west, Italy became more marginal; but as a Catholic country it remained oriented largely to Europe. The Christian and Moslem sides of the Mediterranean developed in different directions.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 4 , Issue 3 , July 1974 , pp. 289 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

1 John Clarke Adams and Paolo Barile articulate this interpretation well: ‘Southern Italy is essentially Mediterranean in its culture pattern, while northern Italy forms an integral part of Western civilization’ (p. 10). ‘The Mediterranean culture is native to insular Italy and to peninsular Italy up to and including Rome. This culture extends around the Mediterranean basin from Spain to North Africa, to Asia Minor, to Greece and Italy… The culture of Mediterranean Italy is more foreign and more exotic to Americans than is that of European Italy… ‘ (p. 14). The Government of Republican Italy, 2nd edn. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966).Google Scholar

2 Among a wide range of works that deal with this theme we suggest, in particular, a special issue of the Anthropological Quarterly, XLII (1969)Google Scholar devoted to ‘Social and Political Processes in the Western Mediterranean’ and edited by Schorger, William D. and Wolf, Eric R.; Banton, M., ed., The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London: Tavistock, 1966)Google Scholar; Pitt-rivers, J., The People of the Sierra (London: Tavistock, 1966)Google Scholar; Tarrow, Sidney, Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), pp. 40–95.Google Scholar

3 Foster, George, ‘Peasant Society and the Image of the Limited Good’, in Potter, Jack M., Diaz, May N., and Foster, George, eds., Peasant Society: A Reader (Boston: Little, Brown, 1967), p. 304.Google Scholar

4 Triandis, Harry, et al. , The Analysis of Subjective Culture (New York: Wiley, 1972), p. 306.Google Scholar

5 Banfield, Edward, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society (Glencoe, Ill: Free Press, 1958), p. 85.Google Scholar

6 A recent unpublished paper by López-Pina, Antonio discusses the role of the state in Latin political cultures: ‘Spain as an Anti-Model: From the Latin American Area Studies to the Latin Cultures Approach’, presented to the Comparative Politics Seminar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 05 1973.Google Scholar He emphasizes the precedence of political over other forms of power.

7 For example, Lemarchand, René and Legg, Keith, ‘Political Clientelism and Development’, Comparative Politics, IV (1972), 149–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Tarrow, , Peasant Communism, p. 74.Google Scholar

9 Frankel, Francine R., ‘Democracy and Political Development: Perspectives from the Indian Experience’, World Politics, XXI (1969), pp. 448–68;CrossRefGoogle ScholarLemarchand, René, ‘Political Clientelism and Ethnicity in Tropical Africa: Competing Solidarities in Nation-Building’, American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 68–90;CrossRefGoogle ScholarScott, James C., ‘Patron-Client Politics and Political Change in Southeast Asia’, American Political Science Review, LXVI (1972), 91–113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Lapalombara, Joseph, Interest Groups in Italian Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 These themes in the Italian bureacracy are being investigated in a novel manner by Robert Putnam in work in progress.

12 ‘Communism, Urban Budgets, and the Two Italies: a Case Study in Comparative Urban Government’, Journal of Politics, XXXIII (1971), 1008–51.Google Scholar

13 Fried, , ‘Communism’, pp. 1031–6.Google Scholar

14 Fried, , ‘Communism’, p. 1036.Google Scholar

15 See Tarrow, Peasant Communism.

16 See Tarrow, , Peasant Communism, p. 81Google Scholar; Graziano, Luigi, ‘Patron-Client Relationships in Southern Italy’, European Journal of Political Research, I (1973), 3–34, p. 20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar One of the few attempts to look at clientelism in a way that permits generalizations about the entire country is a study by Alan Zuckermann of national coalition-building in the Christian Democratic Party. He found the DC fractions were almost wholly based on personal, clientelistic machines within the party organization. And these were by no means limited to the South; indeed, they existed in all parts of the country. That this point has seldom been made is probably due to the tendency of researchers to contrast findings from southern communities with largely undocumented notions of the political process of the ‘North’. Zuckermann, , ‘On the Political Institutionalization of Clienteles’, paper delivered at the 1973 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, New Orleans, 1973, especially pp. 9, 16.Google Scholar

17 Almond, Gabriel and Verba, Sidney, The Civic Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).CrossRefGoogle ScholarIn Apathy and Participation (New York: Free Press, 1970)Google ScholarPalma, Giuseppe Di reanalyzes these data and also finds Italy consistently very low. See especially pp. 38–43; and 229–37.Google Scholar

18 Almond, and Verba, , Civic Culture, pp. 402–3.Google Scholar

19 ‘Region as a Political Variable: Within-Nation Differences and Political Culture in Italy’, paper delivered at the 1967 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, West Lafayette, Indiana, 1967; quoted in Zariski, Raphael, Italy: The Politics of Uneven Development (Hinsdale, III.: The Dryden Press, 1972), p. 95.Google Scholar Tarrow, using the Almond-Verba data, also emphasizes the relatively higher levels of political understanding and interest in the South (Peasant Communism, pp. 76–7).

20 Muller, Edward N., ‘Cross-National Dimensions of Political Competence’, American Political Science Review, LXIV (1970), 792–809.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 ‘The Comparative Impact of Regionalism Upon Political Attitudes in Italy’, unpublished manuscript, Department of Political Science, Ohio State University, 1972Google Scholar. Town was responsible for scale construction and the data analysis that is based on the scales. Their interpretation in this paper, however, is that of the authors.

22 For a description of these subdivisions see Capecchi, Vittorio, Polacchini, Vittoria Cioni, Gall, Giorgio and Sivini, Giordano, Il comportamento elettorale in Italia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968), pp. 73–5Google Scholar; or Galli, Giorgio and Prandi, Alfonso, Patterns of Political Participation in Italy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 44.Google Scholar

23 Galtung, Johan, in Members of Two Worlds (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), pp. 190–1Google Scholar, concludes on the basis of interviews in three villages in western Sicily that ‘those who try to move are overrepresented among the most valuable from the point of view of modernization’ (italics in original). His ‘movers’ include local, regional, national and international moves; his sample is quite limited. Nevertheless, his evidence suggests that the movers in our sample may be quite different from those who stay, which would suggest an additional source of the North-South differences that are often noted — selective migration. We must await additional evidence.

24 We tried to approach this problem through cohort analysis, but the results are confusing; that is, in some areas the old are more traditional, in some the young, and in some they are quite similar. We do not find that there is a greater North-South difference between the old than between the young. In other words, our data do not indicate that convergence between the two areas is increasing because of population replacement. It may be. But nothing supports this explanation.

25 On North-South differences in education within the postwar parliamentary elite see Sartori, Giovanni, et al. , Il portamento italiano (Naples: Edizione Scientifiche, 1963).Google Scholar

26 See, for example, Galtung's, conclusions about three villages in Western Sicily: ‘the structure we have tried to unravel is not only the structure of ultrastability within, but also the structure that best renders itself to manipulation from above, precisely because the forces that would favor that manipulation are united, whereas the forces that might oppose it are divided,’ Members of Two Worlds, p. 250.Google Scholar