Place and Politics in Modern Italy (review)

Historians have benefited from geographers' inspiration since Herodotus introduced the geo-ethnographical approach to historical investigation. Those of my generation grew up on Fernand Braudel's famous ouverture to The Mediterranean: "tout d'abord, les montagnes." After a long period of disciplinary dependence on anthropology and literary criticism, today's historians turn again to geography and cartography, now properly understood as cultural and political constructs. In our mapping, and contextualizing, of space and our exploration of global and local ecosystems, we are indebted to political and economic geographers, such as David Harvey or Saskia Sassen. This turn has become particularly important with the breakup of the national state and the growth of localisms and separatisms all over the world, fueled by the growth of supranational governing bodies and the end of the Cold War. Indeed, subnational identities have become as powerful a force in the latter part of the twentieth century as national independence and unification were in the nineteenth century.

In Place and Politics, Agnew applies a geographical perspective to show how place figures in the national politics of Italy. Agnew's main interest is a theoretical one, to establish an overarching theoretical framework, a sort of a "geography of socialization" (35). He proposes to bring together the key explanatory concepts used by sociologists and political scientists—agency, difference, and association—through "the place perspective," in which place figures as a dynamic component (the locatedness) of people's experience. Socialization, he claims, follows a strongly territorial pattern: "The geographical context of place channels the flow of interests, influence, and identities out of which emanate political activities" (26).

Agnew's general (and radical) point is that place-based politics account for all of the features of national politics. He posits an intrinsically geographical basis to the drama of organized politics: "Political parties . . . organize themselves and their ideologies through the ways they divide, order, and organize space" (189, 214). Space is experienced, and deployed, on different socially constructed geographical scales—global, national, regional, and local. Agnew privileges the local one, on which active socialization takes place—a sociability suggestive of concrete spatially anchored contexts à la Simmel.¹

Italy enters the discussion as a means to demonstrate the usefulness of Agnew's theoretical framework; he takes one feature of politics, its place-to-place differences, as a key to analyze Italian politics throughout the past 130 years, in particular since World War II. Agnew sees Italy as an exemplary case where local scale, in the absence of a strong national identity, is most relevant. Because of Italy's failure to achieve a shared identity, internal cultural-geographical divisions have always remained significant, particularly the cleavage between North and South (197). This failure is both exemplified and caused by the absence of a unified and representative national landscape imagery. Unlike the case of England or Germany, "creating a match between a representative landscape and an Italian national identity" has been a belayed, difficult, and artificial process (41).

Popular political behavior in Italy depends on enduring sociogeographical differences among regions with distinct histories and political traditions, and consequently often results in regional and local, rather than truly national, political parties. The bulk of Agnew's analysis is devoted to the post-World War II electoral politics, dominated, in his view, by a geographical dimension (national shifts in voting patterns are tied to changes in the political geography of electoral choice) (93). The postwar period is divided into two sub-periods, separated by the ominous year 1992, when the First Republic and its old parties collapsed following the criminal investigation into political corruption. During the first period, 1947 to 1992, the old parties set up a system of managing geographical cleavages. In the second, the "new" parties "have geographically structured their conceptions of 'Italy'" in ways that vary from the old system's (188).

The "geography" of the first period is summarized by the well-known picture of the "opinion voting in the Northwest, identity voting in the Center...