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Colombia’s Civil War in Comparative Perspective 153 In comparative analysis, the method of agreement and difference is employed by identifying similarities in the dependent variables associated with a common outcome, such as a war system, and by identifying the independent variables that produce different outcomes: in other words, political and criminal violence that do not lead to war systems. This chapter considers three cases: Italy, Lebanon, and Angola. Italy was chosen because in spite of its violent nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century history, a war system did not develop. The goal here is to explain why this outcome was possible in Italy and not in Lebanon, Angola, or Colombia. In Lebanon, violence became institutionalized in a war system that collapsed after a fifteen-year life cycle. The Angolan war system continues three decades after the Angolan war of independence. For the most part, the literature on Colombian violence has focused on the historical peculiarity of its sectarian struggles between the Liberal and Conservative parties. Such interpretation is based on the numerous civil wars that erupted in Colombia during the nineteenth century: 1830–1831, 1839–1842, 1851, 1854, 1860–1862, 1876–1877, 1895–1902, and thirty-four rebellions (according to historian Malcolm Deas).1 This chapter discusses cases of violence that demonstrate that Colombia’s political and criminal violence is not unique if seen in comparative terms, as Deas has argued. ITALY: AN ABORTED WAR SYSTEM Italy in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suffered from the typical problems of state building with which most of the Third World nations are still contending in the twenty-first century. Italy’s weak state, mafias, and hired assassins were notorious, which gave some grounds to comparative analysis with Colombia such as the one Deas advances. The importance of this comparative exercise is to dispel the notion that countries are locked into their own histories and are thus doomed to a perpetual cycle of violence as some of studies of violence suggest. I concur with Deas’s view that Colombia – 7– 154 SYSTEMS OF VIOLENCE was not a particularly violent country in the nineteenth century by regional or international standards. The case of Italy is particularly useful because it does not fit the mold of comparative analyses that limit the exercise to either regional schemes or to an overarching underdevelopment concept. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Italian state was “weak” in the sense that the dominant classes were unable to produce a hegemon, in Antonio Gramsci’s terms, and persuade its subjects to accept the logic on which the political system is based. The Italian elite in the late nineteenth century did not yet satisfy Gramsci’s most advanced condition of hegemony, which he labeled the “third moment” (see chapter 3). Historian John Davis’s study of nineteenth-century Italy describes a state whose weakness manifested itself in an inefficient judicial system, corrupt and ill-equipped police, and private armed vigilante groups and paramilitarism.2 By the late nineteenth century, the outcome was a high level of violence whose toll was more than 4,000 homicides a year (sixteen times more than in Britain), and more than 40 percent of all crimes remained unsolved.3 In many parts of the country the state’s legitimacy was uncertain. Many notables were alienated, disliked the state’s intentions from the start, and obstructed its officials. The influence of those notables, however, was at the same time being eroded by economic change. The impression was that even if such notables had been the class base of the new state, they would have been weak pillars.4 When the state took repressive measures, such as the military occupation of Milan (whose toll was 80 killed and 450 wounded), or repressive measures under Crispi, inspired by the anarchist menace and almost ending in the elimination of the opposition, the resulting backlash forced the state to abandon these measures.5 The Italian police apparatus was corrupt; it did not enjoy the confidence of the dominant classes and even less the subordinate groups, the main subject of their repression. The weakness of the state stemmed from the lack of a hegemon as a leader-group that transcended its own corporate interest and projected a moral authority widely acceptable to the other factions of the dominant classes and the subordinate groups. For such an objective, hegemony would need effective and functional political and judicial apparatuses to allow the mediation, arbitration, and adjudication of social conflicts, thereby averting the...

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