LIBRI DI GIOVANNI GOZZINI

L’intervento cerca di illustrare le principali differenze nei modi di avvicinamento alla politica delle due generazioni nate negli anni venti e negli anni cinquanta. Che possono essere riassunte in due eventi: la seconda guerra mondiale e il 68. La prima provoca una acculturazione politica traumatica e oppositiva, obbligando ciascuno a scelte drammatiche. Il secondo è un fenomeno di nicchia, altrettanto oppositivo ma molto meno traumatico, che produce mutamenti antropologici di più lungo periodo: meno matrimoni e più tardivi, parità tra i sessi, più alte percentuali di solitari, cura per l’ambiente.

State and extermination: Two recent works on Nazi extermination plans and concentration camps are reviewed in order to show the basic differences between two main approaches to modern totalitarian dictatorships. The first approach, embodied by Timothy Snyder, refers to Hitler’s ideology as the most important source to analyse the entire reality of the Third Reich. On the basis of a similar utopianism, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union jointly worked without any regard for millions of civilians who were deported, enslaved, and killed in the «Black Earth» of Eastern Europe. The second book, by Nikolaus Wachsmann, depicts the whole evolution of the Nazi concentration camps, focusing on their changing functions within the regime’s institutional framework. Time after time, the KL camps worked as a multipurpose weapon against political opponents, everyday criminals, social dropouts, Jews, prisoners of war, foreign workers. Until the end of WW2 the SS leader Heinrich Himmler used that network of power to increase his personal leadership in front of the Führer.

Political myths and gender ideologies: The mondine in the 20th century: The image of the so-called mondine, women working hard in the paddy fields, compelled to migrate far from their families, was incompatible with the 20th-century middleclass vision of a fragile female identity. As Barbara Imbergamo’s book shows, political myths, gender ideologies, and welfare policies were built by social and political institutions in different seasons to face the peculiarities of these figures and make them coherent with the underlying cultural frameworks.

The historical problem of Italian terrorism has recently been brought back at the centre of the historical debate: a new wave of research has been carried out by a new generation of young scholars who have not directly experienced those years. We addressed them a few questions, focused on: the methodological aspects of the comparison, especially between the Italian and the German case; the relationship between the so-called «Black Terrorism», oriented by neofascist groups in the first half of the 1970s, and the second wave of terrorism led by insurgent groups of Marxist and revolutionary tendencies; the possibility to acquire new sources, in order to open new fields of research and gauge new interpretations; and finally, what they consider to be the main causes of the end of Italian terrorism. Our questions have been answered by Giovanni Mario Ceci, Guido Panvini, Luca Falciola and Monica Galfré.

The debate on inequality has been recently revived by Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st century. The first point of the article concerns the sources: Piketty uses in an exclusionary way the documentation provided by the tax records without any comparison with other quantitative series (household surveys) and other categories (disposable income after tax, levels of consumption) commonly analyzed in the scientific literature. Even though a recent rise of income inequality is documented in US and Great Britain, the current trends in the rest of the Western countries are less linear and constant. The second point relates to the limits of a Eurocentric approach, which ignores how economic development in Asian countries (e.g. China, above all) is currently increasing the income and the wealth not only of the richer élite but also of an emerging middle-class. The third point focuses on the active role played by international finance in the building of new, albeit volatile, fortunes, putting into question the centrality of inheritance stressed by Piketty. The crucial and still unsolved problem is to exert a global regulation of the phenomenon.

The essay elaborates some statistics about world’s industrial labour force (including building activities and energy suppliers) and underlines its growing concentration in developing countries and particularly in China and India. The overall effect is a global re-equilibrium between demographic and economic weight, which comes to close in a foreseeable future the historical parenthesis of Western industrial (and colonial) predominance. The bad news for the West is an unknown shortage of industrial employment which cannot be overcome by the current tendency toward part-time and temporary occupations. On the contrary, the only way out is a gradual shift from low-skill manufacturing jobs in favour of high-skill advanced service jobs.

Il "ventennio" berlusconiano, le particolarità biografiche, il linguaggio politico e il sistema di potere di Berlusconi, le caratteristiche sociologiche del suo elettorato nonché l’incapacità delle sinistra e dei sindacati di cogliere i cambiamenti sociali in atto dagli anni ottanta sono stati oggetto di numerosi studi. L’autore, pur tenendo costantemente conto dell’intera produzione storiografica, e anche socio-politologica ed economica, su questi temi, prende in considerazione specificamente i lavori, pubblicati tra il 2010 e il 2013, di Antonio Gibelli, Simona Colarizi e Marco Gervasoni, Guido Craiz, Giovanni Orsina, Giuliano Amato e Andrea Graziosi. Di queste opere, sia singolarmente sia in chiave comparativa, esamina le principali argomentazioni interpretative.

A widespread accepted view about theItalian political crisis, which goes back to the end of the Cold War, is that thepresence of the largest Western communist party halted any possible change ingovernment and encouraged corruption. The article proposes an alternative interpre-tation and locates the origin of the current crisis to the 1980s, when Italian politicslost its reforming drive and the most entrepreneurial sector of civil society chose toabandon it in order to develop the so-called "Third Italy" composed of smallenterprises and self-employment.

In the Editorial Giovanni Gozzini reflects on the relationship between religion and politics, in which the former seems to have taken the place of the latter in recent years. He analyses a number of crucial episodes from the bloody Algerian crisis and the Balkan wars of the 1990s to the role of religious parties in India and Turkey, the electoral victories of Ahmadinejad in Iran and Hamas in Palestine, and (last but far from least) the political culture manifest in the USA in this second term of the Bush presidency. He observes that, in this phase of a new global terrorism since 11 September, the phenomenon of religion in politics can be utilized as a sort of unifying cover, to all appearances capable of reviving Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the conflict of civilizations.

Il saggio di Giovanni Gozzini mette a confronto le migrazioni internazionali degli ultimi trent'anni con quelle a cavallo tra Otto e Novecento, da cui emergono alcune significative novità: una moltiplicazione dei paesi di origine e di destinazione dei migranti, una crescente femminilizzazione dei migranti, il ruolo decisivo svolto dalle organizzazioni criminali nel traffico e nella compravendita di esseri umani. Emergono però alcune continuità: la diffusione a grappoli della scelta migratoria, la funzione di integrazione sociale esercitata dagli insediamenti comunitari e dalle catene migratorie degli immigrati precedenti, la scarsa produttività delle rimesse.

Nell’Editoriale Giovanni Gozzini ripercorre i mutamenti di significato della parola globalizzazione nel dibattito delle scienze sociali e nel lessico comune: in questo caso, dall’enfasi posta in origine sullo sviluppo dei mezzi di comunicazione (il «villaggio globale» di McLuhan) siamo passati alla centralità della questione ambientale, intesa come questione globale. In tempi più recenti l’ascesa del movimento «no global» ha diffuso un’immagine negativa della globalizzazione, intesa come aumento degli squilibri economici del mondo a causa degli interessi delle potenti compagnie multinazionali private. Storici, economisti e sociologi suggeriscono di ricorrere a un’immagine più neutra della globalizzazione, intesa come interdipendenza culturale e politica tra Stati-nazione, attraversati da masse crescenti di persone, merci e capitali