Italian Regionalism in the Aftermath of the First World War

After the First World War, the renewal of Regionalism in Italy was a sign of the crisis of Liberalism. After the elections of 1919, a number of deputies from different political parties supported the strengthening of local governments. Some of them, moreover, suggested the maintenance of local governments in the former Austrian territories annexed to Italy after the war, following the idea of Francesco Salata, Chief of the Kingdom’s Office for the administration of the New Provinces/ Districts since 1919. While in 1921 the rise of Fascism weakened those parliamentary groups who were in favor of Regionalism, a number of other political personalities and intellectuals all over Italy took a stand in favor of regional governments: these were both democrats and laic intellectuals like Salvemini, Zuccarini and Gobetti, members of the Republican Party or Sardinia’s Partito d’azione, as well as Catholic members of the Popular Party. All of these positions clashed with the politics of Fascism, who was in favor of a strong central government. Therefore, it was only after its fall, that a new kind of Regionalism was born with different characteristics, than the one which had developed at the beginning of the 1920s.

Keywords: Regionalism, centralization, federalism, Fascism, local governments, annexed provinces, ex servicemen

Valerio Strinati, Aspetti del regionalismo italiano del primo dopoguerra in "MONDO CONTEMPORANEO" 1/2013, pp 5-42, DOI: 10.3280/MON2013-001001