The New Old World (63 page)

55
. For this background, see Remo Bodei,
I noi diviso: Ethos e idee dell'Italia repubblicana,
Turin 1998, pp. 16–19, 63–9, 113.

56
. The most penetrating account of this syndrome is to be found in Ernesto Galli della Loggia's fundamental work,
L'Identità italiana
, Bologna 1998, pp. 31–42, 116–21.

57
. His first collection on these themes,
Apocalittici e integrati
, dates from 1964.

58
. Not that the Italian cinema produced no directors of the first order after the post-war generation. In the eighties and nineties, Gianni Amelio would develop out of the contrasting legacies of Antonioni and Visconti one of the finest bodies of film in Europe; but in a classical tradition, distant equally from avant-garde and popular forms. For Amelio's distinctive achievement, see Silvana Silvestri, ‘A Skein of Reversals',
New Left Review
II/10, July–August 2001.

59
. The post-war culture of the Left had never been a monopoly of the PCI. The Socialist tradition long retained a good many independent-minded figures of stature, among them the poet and critic Franco Fortini, the theatre director Giorgio Strehler, the philologist Sebastiano Timpanaro, not to speak of Lelio Basso, a PSI leader of greater intellectual distinction than any PCI counterpart. Later, of course, Norberto Bobbio, originally of the Partito d'Azione, would join the PSI with bad timing, just as Craxi was taking it in hand.

60
. For all this, and more, see Claudio Pavone,
Alle origini della Repubblica
, Milan 1995, pp. 132–40.

61
. For a more detailed analysis of Gramsci's texts, and uses subsequently made of it, see ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci',
New Left Review
, I/100, November 1976–February 1977, pp. 5–78.

62
. Giovanni Sartori,
Mala Tempora
, Rome–Bari 2004, pp. vii, 124:
un paese desossato
. Sartori's historical allusions were, of course, a considerable simplification. Apart from anything else, the Risorgimento and Resistance may have been the work of minorities, but they were hardly exercises in submission.

63
. Renzo De Felice,
Intervista sul fascismo
,
a cura di Michael Ledeen
, Rome-Bari 1975. Without the war, Mussolini's regime would no doubt have evolved in much the same positive direction as Franco's: pp. 60–2.

64
. In heading the Republic of Salò, Mussolini was neither moved by a desire for vengeance, nor political ambition, nor a wish to redeem Fascism by reverting to its radical origins, but by ‘a patriotic motive: a true “sacrifice” on the altar of the defence of Italy':
Rosso e nero
, Milan 1995, pp. 114–5.

65
. See, for his final judgement of the whole work, ‘Mussolini: Reservations about Renzo De Felice's biography',
Modern Italy
, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000, pp. 193–210.

66
. ‘Letteratura e Rivoluzione',
Contropiano
, No 1, 1968, pp. 235–6.

67
. Ideas in part first developed in ‘Sulla genesi del pensiero negativo',
Contropiano
, No. 2, 1968, pp. 131–200, at a time when Cacciari was still writing prolifically in the same journal on factory struggles in Italy, student revolts in France, guerrilla warfare in Latin America, Soviet debates on planning.

68
. ‘A virile acceptance of the administered world', as Cristina Corradi dryly describes the end-point of Cacciari's itinerary in her
Storia dei marxismi italiani
, Rome 2005, p. 231; for an earlier, and less temperate, critique, see Costanzo Preve,
La teoria in pezzi: La dissoluzione del paradigma operaista in Italia (1976–1983),
Bari 1984, pp. 69–72. Politically speaking, the contrast with Asor Rosa and Tronti is marked, as the successive retrospects of the latter make plain. See Asor Rosa,
La Sinistra alla prova
.
Considerazioni sul ventennio 1976–1996
, Turin 1996, and Tronti, ‘Noi operaisti', in Giuseppe Trotta and Fabio Milana (eds),
L'operaismo degli anni sessanta. Da ‘Quaderni rossi' a ‘Classe operaia'
, Rome 2008. One of the traits that linked the group in the sixties, as Tronti notes in his much more personal recollections, was a ‘passionate love-affair with the turn-of the-century culture of
Mitteleuropa
'.

69
. See Tobias Jones,
The Dark Heart of Italy
, London 2003, p. 173.

70
. For a profile, see Claudio Sabelli Foretti (intervista),
Marco Travaglio. Il rompiballi
, Rome 2008. Among his books: with Elio Veltri,
L'odore dei soldi. Origini e misteri delle fortune di Silvio Berlusconi,
Rome 2001; with Gianni Barbacetto and Peter Gomez,
Mane pulite: La vera storia, Da Mario Chiesa a Silvio Berlusconi
, Rome 2002, and
Mani sporche: Così destra e sinistra si sono mangiate la II Repubblica
, Milan 2008; with Peter Gomez and Marco Lillo,
Il bavaglio
, Milan 2008. For a devastating taxonomy of Italian journalism, see Travaglio's
La scomparsa dei fatti
, Milan 2006.

71
. The most extended and original example of this comparison is Michele Salvati's ‘Spagna e Italia. Un confronto', in Victor Pérez-Diaz,
La lezione spagnola. Società civile, politica e legalità
, Bologna 2003, pp. 1–82.

72
. Among others, from myself: see ‘Italy in the Present Tense: A Roundtable Discussion with Paul Ginsborg',
Modern Italy
, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000, pp. 180ff.

73
. For the flavour of this event, see the full set of speeches and reactions in the special issue of
Micromega
, entitled
Il regime non passerà! Piazza Navona
,
8 luglio 2008
.

 

Enlargement, widely regarded as the greatest single achievement of the European Union since the end of the Cold War, and occasion for more or less unqualified self-congratulation, has left one inconspicuous thorn, amid the bouquets it regularly hands itself, in the palm of Brussels. The furthest east of all the EU's new acquisitions, even if the most prosperous and democratic, has been a tribulation to its establishment, that neither fits the uplifting narrative of deliverance of the captive nations from communism, nor furthers the strategic aims of Union diplomacy, indeed impedes them. Cyprus is, in truth, an anomaly in the new Europe. Not, however, for reasons Brussels cares to dwell upon. For this is a member-state of the EU a large part of which is under long-standing occupation by a foreign army. Behind tanks and artillery, a population of settlers has been planted relatively more numerous than those on the West Bank, without a flicker of protest from the Council or Commission. From its territory are further subtracted—not leased, but held in eminent domain—military enclaves three times the size of Guantánamo, under the control of a fellow-member of the EU, the United Kingdom.

The origins of this situation date back over a century, to the era of High Victorian imperialism. In 1878 the island was acquired by Britain from the Ottoman Empire, as a side-payment for Turkish recovery of three Armenian provinces, ceded to Russia, and restored thanks to Disraeli at the Conference of Berlin. Coveted as a naval platform for British power in the Middle East, the new
colony had from antiquity been Greek in population and culture, with a Turkish minority introduced after Ottoman conquest in the sixteenth century. But in the nineteenth century, distant four hundred miles from Greece, it remained relatively unaffected by the national awakening that produced, first, Greek independence itself, then successive risings against Ottoman rule in Crete and its union with Greece before the First World War. In Cyprus, unrest did not materialize for another half century. Eventually, in 1931 desire for an equivalent
Enosis
boiled over in a spontaneous island-wide rebellion against British rule that left Government House in flames, and required the descent of bombers, cruisers and marines to quell.
¹
Thereafter, Britain's response to this outbreak of feeling was unique in the annals of the empire: a colonial regime that ruled by decree until the day the flag was formally hauled down in Nicosia.

It was not until the post-war period, however, that a national movement really crystallized as an organized force on the island, in a strange mixture of times: post-dated in emergence, pre-dated in form. Pan-Hellenism was in many ways, as Tom Nairn pointed out long ago, ‘
the
original European model of successful nationalist mobilization', producing in the Greek Wars of independence the first victorious movement of national liberation after the Congress of Vienna. Yet, he went on, ‘the very priority of Greek nationalism . . . imposed a certain characteristic penalty on it', conferring on Pan-Hellenic ideology increasingly ‘anachronistic and out-dated' features by the twentieth century. But it was still quite powerful enough to capture the expression of popular revolt on the island after the Second World War. Once they awoke politically, the mass of the population ‘found the fully-fledged, hypnotic dream of Greek nationalism already there, beckoning to them. It was inevitable that they should answer that call to the heirs of Byzantium, rather than attempt to cultivate a patriotism of their own'.
²
Union, not independence, was the natural goal of this self-determination.

Such Hellenism was not, however, an archaic import, out of season in a society that had moved beyond its conditions of origin. Its appeal was irresistible also because it found so powerful a sounding-board in an indigenous institution that was much older than romantic nineteenth-century nationalism. The Orthodox Church in Cyprus was without equivalent on any other Greek island. Autocephalous since the fifth century, its archbishop was equal in rank to the patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria or Antioch, and under the Ottomans had always been the acknowledged head of the Greek community. Since the British had made no attempt to offer education on the island—to the end, they ensured it had no university—the school system remained under the control of the Church. Clerical leadership of the national movement, with its inevitable freight of religious conservatism in moral and political life, was thus all but guaranteed in advance.

Not that the hegemony of the Church was complete. From the twenties onwards a strong local Communist movement developed, that was regarded by London as much more dangerous. Mindful of overwhelming majority aspirations, AKEL—as the Cypriot CP was now called—too campaigned for union with Greece when the war came to an end.
³
In 1945, it had every reason to do so, since the Communist resistance in Greece had been by far the leading force in the struggle against the Nazi occupation, in a strong position to take power once the country was cleared of it. To avert this danger, military intervention by Britain—on a scale exceeding later Soviet actions in Hungary—installed a conservative regime, complete with the discredited Greek monarchy. The result was a bitter civil war, in which the Left was crushed only after Britain and America, playing the role of Italy and Germany in Spain, weighed into the conflict to ensure the victory of the Right.

So long as the outcome in Greece was in the balance, AKEL could continue to support Enosis without undue strain, at least outwardly. Indeed, in November 1949—a month after the final defeat of the Democratic Army on the mainland—it fired what became the starting-pistol of national liberation in Cyprus, by calling on the United Nations to organize a referendum on
‘the right of self-determination, which means union of Cyprus with Greece'. But this was to be its last moment in the van of the movement. In January 1950, moving swiftly to pre-empt this initiative, the Ethnarchy organized its own plebiscite, held in churches across the island, to which AKEL rallied. The result left little doubt about popular sentiment: 96 per cent of Greek Cypriots—that is, 80 per cent of the population of the island—voted for Enosis.