The Force of Destiny

A capable recounting of the long, ongoing and perhaps futile struggle to forge a single nation from the many regions, and the many more divided loyalties, of the Italians.Italy, writes Duggan (Modern Italian History/Univ. of Reading; Francesco Crispi, 1818-1901: From Nation to Nationalism, 2002, etc.), was an idea well before it was a reality, an idea impeded by the fact that much of the peninsula was carved into competing states and would be dominated in the 19th century by foreign powers. Yet, Duggan observes, Once unleashed in the 1790s, the idea that 'the people' constituted the nation and that the nation should be coterminous with the state was a genie of ferocious power. The idea spread by way of the intelligentsia, with the government of the first Neapolitan Republic made up of lawyers, clerics, writers, and professors of Greek and botany, but took its time becoming popular, pressed at the point of the bayonet by anti-Napoleonic guerrillas, Garibaldians and even a few mafiosi turned nationalists. Those who remained mafiosi pure and simple would remain an impediment, particularly in Sicily, which, the Tuscan intellectual Leopoldo Franchetti concluded, should be abandoned and allowed to declare independence. The rise of fascism in the early 20th century gave nationalism a new face and ambitions to expand the nation into an empire along the lines of ancient Rome. The postwar economic boom of the 1960s sowed confusion: Italians of all regions increasingly felt they belonged to one country even as wealth ushered in the danger of falling back once again into the exaggerated individualism and materialism that the high-minded patriots of the nineteenth century had sought to correct. As Duggan notes, the collapse of the postwar First Republic in the mid-1990s, marked by the end of the Cold War and the Italian Communist Party and by the rise of Silvio Berlusconi, reintroduced fierce arguments about nationhood, particularly the notion among northerners that their southern compatriots weren't really Italian and belonged elsewhere, an argument that persists.An expressive history, of interest to students of European history and geopolitics. (Kirkus Reviews)