‘Better thieves than reds’? The nationalization thesis and the possibility of a geography of Italian politics

• Published in: Political Geography Quarterly 1988-10, Vol.7 (4), p.307-321
• Main Author: Agnew, John A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Bgi / Prodig; Europe; Geography; GEOPOLITICS; Human geography; ITALY; NATIONALIZATION; POLITICAL AND POWER PROCESS; Political geography; POLITICAL PARTY; Politics
• ISSN: 0260-9827; 0962-6298
• DOI: 10.1016/0260-9827(88)90002-X

A widely-accepted assumption of modern political science is that as the national ‘societies’ defined by state boundaries modernize, citizens are mobilized as individualized voters into a national political community. The locality and the region lose their significance as settings for the constitution of political conduct as allegiance is transferred to the national community and political parties draw support on. functional (class or religious) rather than geographical grounds. This idea has become a central element in Italian political science over the past 20 years. Yet the empirical evidence in support of it is tenuous at best. Acceptance of the nationalization thesis is based largely upon intellectual foundations independent of empirical demonstration. The most important of these are the importation of ideas from American political science to define an autonomous Italian political science and the biases implicit in the Hegelian—Crocean tradition of political thought long-dominant in Italian universities. For reasons more intellectual than empirical, therefore, Italian political science has come to deny the possibility of a non-residual geography of Italian politics.