page_title: Nationalism
section_title: Italy
hierarchical_section_title: Nationalism / History / 19th century / Italy
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: La sortie de Missolonghi (détail).
context_page_description: Nationalism is an idea and movement that promotes the interests of a particular nation especially with the aim of gaining and maintaining the nation's sovereignty over its homeland. Nationalism holds that each nation should govern itself, free from outside interference, that a nation is a natural and ideal basis for a polity, and that the nation is the only rightful source of political power. It further aims to build and maintain a single national identity—based on shared social characteristics of culture, ethnicity, geographic location, language, politics, religion, traditions and belief in a shared singular history —and to promote national unity or solidarity. Nationalism, therefore, seeks to preserve and foster a nation's traditional cultures, and cultural revivals have been associated with nationalist movements. It also encourages pride in national achievements, and is closely linked to patriotism. Nationalism is often combined with other ideologies, such as conservatism or socialism.
context_section_description: Italian nationalism emerged in the 19th century and was the driving force for Italian unification or the Risorgimento (meaning the "Resurgence" or "Revival"). It was the political and intellectual movement that consolidated the different states of the Italian peninsula into the single state of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The memory of the Risorgimento is central to Italian nationalism but it was based in the liberal middle classes and ultimately proved weak. The new government treated the newly-annexed South as a conquered province with ridicule for its "backward" and poverty-stricken society, its poor grasp of standard Italian (as Italo-Dalmatian dialects of Neapolitan and Sicilian were prevalent in the common use) and its traditions. The liberals had always been strong opponents of the pope and the very well organized Catholic Church. The liberal government under the Sicilian Francesco Crispi sought to enlarge his political base by emulating Otto von Bismarck and firing up Italian nationalism with a hyper-aggressive foreign policy. It crashed and his cause was set back. Historian R.J.B. Bosworth says of his nationalistic foreign policy that:
  (Crispi) pursued policies whose openly aggressive character would not be equaled until the days of the Fascist regime. Crispi increased military expenditure, talked cheerfully of a European conflagration, and alarmed his German or British friends with this suggestions of preventative attacks on his enemies.  His policies were ruinous, both for Italy's trade with France, and, more humiliatingly, for colonial ambitions in East Africa. Crispi's lust for territory there was thwarted when on 1 March 1896, the armies of Ethiopian Emperor Menelik routed Italian forces at Adowa ... in what has been defined as an unparalleled disaster for a modern army. Crispi, whose private life (he was perhaps a trigamist) and personal finances...were objects of perennial scandal, went into dishonorable retirement.
  — R.J.B. Bosworth, Italy and the Wider World: 1860–1960, 2013, Routledge, p.29, ISBN 978-1-134-78088-4
  Italy joined the Allies in the First World War after getting promises of territory, but its war effort was a fiasco that discredited liberalism and paved the way for Benito Mussolini and a political doctrine of his own creation, fascism. Mussolini's 20-year dictatorship involved a highly aggressive nationalism that led to a series of wars, an alliance with Hitler's Germany, and humiliation and hardship in the Second World War. After 1945, the Catholics returned to government and tensions eased somewhat, but the former two Sicilies remained poor and ridiculed. The working class now voted for the Communist Party, and it looked to Moscow rather than Rome for inspiration, and was kept out of the national government even as it controlled industrial cities across the North. In the 21st century, the Communists have become marginal but political tensions remained high as shown by Bossi's Padanism in the 80s (whose party has come to partially embrace a moderate version of Italian nationalism over the years) and other separatist movements spread across the country.
caption: Beginning in 1821, the Greek War of Independence began as a rebellion by Greek revolutionaries against the ruling Ottoman Empire.
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