Week 78

 

I had begun this week with the intention of answering a question asked by /u/suil99 and putting together something for this “week” - likely covering the assault against the Avanti! of April 15^th – sadly there's only seven days in a week, so that I am not sure I have managed either.

The question – to summarize it – was about the rise of Nationalism in the first decades of the XX Century, whether the people were aware of it, and possibly whether they looked at it with concern. And perhaps whether a parallel with our current political climate is warranted.

The last point though, may be out of the scope of these periodical contributions which, after all, deal with the rise of Fascism in Italy and not with contemporary trends. At the same time, themes and ideas of nationality, nationalism and national identity appear to have experienced a resurgence of general interest during these last years, so that it is possible to be inspired to form more or less implicit analogues to make sense of our historical experience.

For what matters, I would encourage against it. It believe it is possible to engage with historical events in a way that is significant and relevant to our present day reality, without reducing history to an instrument to unpack a reality that challenges our understanding. In other words, that our experience of the past and our experience of the present are natural analogues, but that the analogy exists first and foremost within us and we should be mindful of carrying it over into the past – that, if ideas of nation and nationality appear to hold a special place in our approach to history, then we should perhaps start by asking ourselves if and why those ideas are, above all, relevant to us.

 

At risk of stating the obvious, people did realize that Nationalism was a thing – it would have been hard to miss. How this realization came to be, and what part of the Nationalist themes inspired or mirrored a general national sentiment is a much more problematic question. We know that the Nationalists were (and always remained) a politically organized minority, rather than a mass movement – we also know that the Nationalist political action exerted an impact on the general population and we can point out a few moments of genuine “nationalistic”, more than “national”, enthusiasm. We can't read minds though, and certain aspects of the “psychology of the masses” are destined to remain obscure to us.

With the XX Century we do begin to witness a “modern” attitude where a political movement is no longer confined to the expression of an intellectual elite and to being the practical outlet of certain interests groups: there is a new need to appeal to the masses, which often becomes a dominating factor, even beyond the actual impact of those appeals, in the definition of the character of the aspiring mass movement. Nor was this idea of appealing to the great forces unleashed by the Century, forces which had been until then confined in a state of political and historical minority, an exclusive of the “subversive” movements – the masses might have become a force of order, if the bourgeoisie proved capable of leading them.

The realization of the new role of the masses in the political, economical, social life of a nation – and of how this role was becoming something different than what the liberal leaders of the XIX Century had hoped, with much more tension, struggles, classes and far less unity and “nation” - didn't really require a large amount of foresight. At the same time, it's certainly true that every nation must have its own nationalism – and perhaps also that every age and time have their own feeling, ideas, sounds and sentimental follies – so that I'll limit myself to the only Nationalism I can conveniently discuss: the Italian Nationalist movement, and specifically within the 1900-1920 time frame.

According to the famed sociologist “of the crowd” and future Nationalist – albeit not for long – Scipio Sighele, who had already offered a contribution on the “collective psychology of parliamentarism” during the last years of the previous Century, there was a sound of the new one (L'intelligenza della folla, 1903):

It is the grandiose collective sound of the crowd that drives our world [...] It has by now become clear that the true protagonist of history [...] has been the people, that is the nameless crowd on which the individualities of the great men worked as if on a brute material to build the architectures of their power [...] and which was, in turn, the dark immense cave whence those greats drew unconsciously their ideas and the means to put them into action. [One can't ignore] this new mighty and irresistible collective factor of social life which, thanks to political freedom, has awakened from its unconsciousness and finds itself free at last to act in the light of public speeches, press, elections and strikes.

It is this symphony of humankind that one has to examine to find the Nationalist themes, and to follow their evolution towards the Great War and through it. If anything, we may expect telling them apart from the others to be quite easy. Of the many groups, organizations and parties which played their role in the Great War, the Italian Nationalists were among those who had been expecting it, and looking forward to it.

The Italian poet and essayist, Giovanni Boine illustrated the nature of war in one of his “military speeches” (Discorsi militari May 1914, collection published in Florence 1915), during the great season of the Italian interventionism:

[Italy was] under the threat of a kind of spiritual gangrene, which had taken root inside every soul and was going sooner or later to spread, leading to either civil war or foreign servitude. [...] What usually cured a nation of similar gangrenes [...] what treated such materialistic and individualistic dispersions, was a common enthusiasm which could violently carry each one away from themselves and turn them, from individuals, or gregarians at most of either family or corporation, into a conscious citizen. And it could be a common misery, some larger event, a new faith, any thing that could drive and stir passions [...] And most of the times, as for an universal law, that thing was war. Comes war and any other voice within the nation becomes silent; the nation apart returns one, leaning towards one goal, as if made into one man alone [...] it found itself united under a sole desire, one mighty desire... the nation takes knowledge of itself.

Silence or not, the Nationalists had accustomed themselves to the sounds of war well before they could experience them first hand; so that they might have earned Vilfredo Pareto's sarcastic remark that “they were at risk of resembling the choirs of Opera, singing their marches while standing on place”. Now that the war had come, they had found themselves more or less where they wanted to be. It remained to be seen whether this would result in their transformation into a proper and substantial political force, whether they would remain a marginal group, no matter how loud and noisy, or whether their impact on the Italian society was even necessarily dependent on their evolution into a mass party.