Gino Moliterno. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Italian Culture

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agriculture) and mafia have been presented not as inherent southern blights but as

specific modern responses to the economic problems produced by unification. These new

studies have also shown how, together, the market and state intervention as well as

original conditions have created a number of very diverse ‘souths’.

Nonetheless, despite the validity of these new studies and new ways of interpreting the

problem, objective and major differences remain. Unemployment in the South at 23.6

per cent is almost double the national average of 12.4 per cent (North 6.0 per cent, centre

9.7 per cent) (ISTAT, January 1999) and thus investment and job creation in the South

remain as high on the agenda of governments of the ‘Second’ Republic as they were in

the ‘First’. A major attitudinal change, however, has taken place in the North.

For the first time there now exists a political party, the Lega Nord (Northern League)

which is hostile to the uncontrolled redistribution of resources from North to South and to

the ‘southernization’ of the civil service. Furthermore, there is a growing voice of

northerners in the other parties who accept many of the Northern League’s premises,

albeit less stridently. The economic aspect of the question has also become strongly

coloured by a perception of a ‘lawless’ South with different cultural norms from the

North and centre, a belief not based solely on the existence of organized crime (mafia,

’Ndragheta, Camorra, and so on) but on more widespread and capillary illegality, for

example in the building industry and in the general distribution of public resources (see

clientelism).

This contrasts with the way in which the Southern Question was generally perceived

in most of the postwar period, during which scholars and politicians agreed that the

problem was primarily economic. In their different ways, writers like Carlo Levi,

agriculturalists and economists like Sereni, Rossi Doria and Compagna argued that once

the economic imbalance between North and South had been righted, social, cultural and

ethical differences would automatically be reduced, a view shared by the politicians. In

fact, from the Constituent Assembly onwards, there came to be a consensus among

Italy’s political class that resources had to be transferred from North to South, although

they did not always agree on how it should be done.

Already in 1944 the Communist Minister of Agriculture Fausto Gullo, himself a

Calabrian, had passed a series of decrees aimed at transforming the southern peasantry.

The decrees produced enormous mobilization but ended in failure because of the hostility

of the DC and Liberals. The unrest in the southern countryside continued after the war,

and the subsequent Christian Democrat-led government was forced to face agricultural

reform despite opposition from the right of the party and the PLI. In 1950, agrarian

reform laws were passed affecting Sicily and Calabria as well as parts of the centre and

North. Almost half a million hectares were appropriated and distributed to landless

peasants. In practice, many of the plots were not economically viable, but the reform did

provide many with the necessary capital to emigrate as well as being a powerful

instrument for building up electoral support for the DC.

Also in 1950, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno (Southern Development Fund) was

founded. Until 1957, it concentrated on creating infrastructure, including water mains and

sewers, electricity, roads and railways. It then started a policy of industrialization,

ambitiously aimed at the creation of ‘development poles’ in activities such as

petrochemicals (Gela) and steel (Taranto). Though billions were spent on preparation (for

example, the Gioia Tauro steelworks) many were never finished or utilized, and the

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abandoned projects were soon labelled ‘cathedrals in the desert’. The Fund’s stated brief

was to provide ‘extraordinary’ financial support for economic development but, in the

event, even more than the land reform agencies, the Fund merely developed a clientelistic

network of patronage which utilized public resources for the consolidation of DC power.

In 1986 the Fund was changed into the Agenzia per la Promozione e Sviluppo del

Mezzogiorno (AGENSUD, Southern Promotion and Development Agency) but this

produced no better results and in 1993 ‘extraordinary’ intervention was finally integrated

with ‘ordinary’ development, meaning that state funds went through the various

ministries rather than a special agency. In January 1999, in line with the policy of

privatizing what were formerly completely public agencies, a new company called

Sviluppo Italia (Italian Development) was formed, with the task of promoting

development in depressed areas throughout Italy and not just the South.

That other litmus test of the South, migration, had also changed in the meantime.

Between 1946 and 1976 more than 4 million people had left the South for the North and

abroad (mainly Europe). In the 1980s, the South, along with the rest of Italy, has become

a place of immigration, mainly but not exclusively from North Africa.

The Southern Question has thus persisted, although it has changed more since the

Second World War than it did since unification. It is no longer a question of rural misery

and a quasi-feudal ruling class, since problems such as imbalances of wealth distribution

or urban decay are not so different from the rest of the Italy, as with many other statistical

indices. Furthermore, the problems of the South are coming to be analysed within a wider

European context. Nevertheless, beyond the economic questions, many of which are

being solved, there remain the cultural and ethical differences which provide evidence of

the continuing existence of a Southern ‘question’.