16.4: National Unifications---Italy

The most spectacular successes were in Italy and Germany, two areas with ancient regional identities but a total lack of political unity. Italy had last been united during the period of the Roman Empire, whereas Germany had never been truly united. Note: Italy and Germany referred to a region and a language, not a kingdom or nation, places where people spoke similar lingual dialects and had some kind of a shared history, but were divided between various kingdoms, cities, and empires.

Italy

During the first half of the 19th Century, a lack of unity was a source of inspiration for the nationalists. For example, Giuseppe Mazzini's Young Italy movement inspired comparable movements all over Europe in the 1830s. Mazzini was the quintessential romantic nationalist, who believed that nations would organically emerge to replace the tyranny of the old feudal order of conservative monarchs. Young Italy was just one of a number of “Young Europes” (e.g. Young Germany, Young Ireland) that shared this essentially optimistic, even utopian, outlook.

However, in the aftermath of 1848, even kings accepted that the popular desire for nations was too strong to resist forever. In Prussia and elsewhere, conservative monarchs began maneuvering to co-opt the very idea of nationalism. There was no great, sinister master plan. Instead, high-ranking royal officials completed a series of pragmatic political calculations. Through a combination of deliberate political manipulation and sheer chance, Italy was the first nation to unite under conservative leadership.

During the Renaissance, Spain and France had jostled for control and extinguished the independence of most Italian city-states. Later, Austria came to dominate the north, adding Italian regions and cities to the Austrian Empire. The south was essentially a feudal kingdom. The Kingdom of the Two Sicilies being dominated by lesser branches of the Habsburg and then the Bourbon royal lines. In the middle was the Papal States, ruled by the pope. Despite the popularity of the concept of nationalism among the members of the small northern-Italian middle class, it had relatively little mass support. Indeed, less than 3% of the population was literate in the standard “Italian” language, the dialect spoken in the region of Tuscany.

Italian unification was the core focus of the kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia, consisting of a large island in the Mediterranean and a chunk of land wedged between France, Spain, and the Austrian-dominated northern Italian states. King Victor Emmanuel II was from the old royal house of Savoy. The kingdom had retained independence following the Napoleonic period because it served as a useful buffer state between the French and Austrian spheres of influence. Victor Emanuel enjoyed interfering in foreign policy and took pride in his military prowess. Yet, he was too lazy to become involved in domestic affairs, which he left to his ministers. As a result, Count Camillo di Cavour (1810-1861) became the true architect of Italian unification.

Figure 26.4.1: Victor Emmanuel II of Piedmont-Sardinia. Even by the standards of the time, he favored an impressive mustache.

Cavour used Italian nationalism to increase Piedmont-Sardinia’s power. He did not have any sentimental attachment to the concept of “Italy.” Instead, he wanted to make Piedmont-Sardinia the center of a larger, more powerful kingdom. As of the 1850s, the Crimean War had torn apart the system of alliances that had been so crucial in maintaining the balance of power after the Congress of Vienna, and Cavour knew that he could play one great power off against the other to Piedmont’s benefit. His plan was to use the rivalry between France and Austria. By having France support some kind of Italian independence from Austria in order to weaken the Habsburgs. In 1859, with French military support, Piedmont-Sardinia pushed the Austrians out of northern Italy and gained political ascendancy in the name of a new “Italian nation.” In return, France received the city of Nice for continued support in holding the Austrians in check.

At this point, Giuseppe Garibaldi, an unexpected political leader, brought southern Italy into the equation. Garibaldi was an adventurer, a romantic nationalist, and a revolutionary who had spent most of his adult life as a mercenary battling in independence campaigns and wars, mostly in South America. During the Revolutions of 1848, he returned to Italy, only to see his hopes of both a united Italy and freedom from foreign control dashed due to the machinations of the Austrians, the French, and the papacy.

After Piedmont-Sardinia’s success, Garibaldi returned. In May 1860, Garibaldi, with a tiny force of 1,000 red-shirted volunteers (mostly townsmen from the north, including numerous under-employed professional men and students hoping to avoid their examinations) packed aboard two leaky steamships, set out to invade Sicily. Garibaldi rapidly captured Palermo, the chief city of Sicily, with the support of the Sicilian peasants, who had been promised suspended taxes and land. Sicilian landowners realized the only hope of law and order was in protection by this radical dictator. Their gradual and reluctant transference of allegiance to the insurrection was a decisive event.

On August 18, Garibaldi crossed to mainland Italy for a planned invasion of the Papal States. However, Cavour convinced Napoleon III to block the further progress of Garibaldi's adventurers, with an assurance that the papacy itself (under French protection) would not be affected. Cavour threw the bulk of the Piedmontese army into the Papal States. When he arrived, Garibaldi ceded his conquests to Victor Emmanuel. Thus, the northern conquests of Piedmont-Sardinia were united with Garibaldi’s bizarre conquest of the south. Italy had grown to encompass both Sicily and the south.

In a real sense, southern Italy emerged as the unfortunate loser of the wars of unification. In order to pay for the war of 1859, taxes had to be increased. In addition, the new Italian state needed a larger army and navy. Further, the extension of low tariffs from Piedmont to economically backward regions often completely extinguished the few local industries that existed. Nor did the new state have funds to alleviate distress or to undertake public works and infrastructure projects in the south. As a result, the rural poor became more totally dependent than ever on the local landowning class. Some members of the lower classes became "brigands" and immediately rose up against the new political order. To restore and maintain, the so-called Bandit Wars cost more lives than the wars of the unification itself. In the aftermath of the wars, the south was treated almost like a colony rather than a full-fledged part of the Italian nation, and politics revolved around the growing relationship between the official Italian government and (as of the 1880s) organized crime.

In 1861, at the time of Cavour's death, the new state had a population of 22 million, but an electorate of only half a million, limited to property-owners. Although a constitutional monarchy, Italian politics was about patronage: getting jobs for one's cronies and shifting the burden of taxation onto those who could least afford to pay it. In many respects, unification had amounted to the occupation of the rest of the country by the north. Many years would pass before the new state began to serve the needs and interests of the majority of its citizens.

Source: Insightsonindia.com