Apostles and agitators Book

POST WAR ITALY

Paul Ginsborg's "A History of Contemporary Italy" begins with the Italians reaping the disastrous rewards of over two decades of Mussolini's rule. The Allies have invaded southern Italy, and on the removal of El Duce the Germans invade from the north. The author expertly portrays the chaotic situation, with an increasingly popular Resistance in the north fighting the Germans who are themselves trying to consolidate their control and stop the Allied forces from battling their way up the peninsula towards Germany itself.

Ginsborg is particularly good on the tensions between the Resistance (largely formed of Communists) and the Allies along with the Italian government formed after Mussolini was deposed. It is clear, that as in Greece, the Allies have no intention of leaving the Italians to sort out their own political future and clearly favour the right, particularly but not exclusively those who kept their hands relatively clean during the fascist era. This goes as far as - minimally - looking the other way as the Mafia re-established themselves in Sicily.

The book is broadly sympathetic to the left in Italy but without compromising on impartially telling the story of Italy's recovery under the Christian Democrats, or the limitations of the left themselves. This reader, for one, ended up wishing that the Communists had sent their leader Togliatti back to Moscow, along with the Stalinist style structures which weighed the party down and his policy of appeasement vis-à-vis the Christian Democrats which achieved nothing.

Ginsborg's attention is focussed primarily on social, political and economic developments as they evolved during the post-war recovery and beyond. A constant authorial eye is kept on changing programs and policies of all parties whether it's the Christian Democrats in central government, or other parties at the local level, as well as the economic and the social circumstances of the country, from the industrial and relatively advanced north to the impoverished rural south. Other topics covered include developments in the working class movements, the upheavals of 1968, agrarian reform, organised crime and industrial policy. There is also a substantial amount of social, political and economic data in a statistical appendix at the end of the book.

This is a substantial work that is very well written. Ginsborg, who himself has spent a good deal of time in Italy, conveys an enormous amount of information about the changing circumstances of post-war Italy. This is frequently accompanied with first-hand accounts from all manner of people, from the world of high politics and business to the southern rural migrant in the industrial north, that leave the reader with a vivid sense of developments. If there is one problem it is that though the book claims to tell the story of Italy up until 1988, most of the detail is with regard to the period up to 1980 with a short final chapter of twenty or so pages covering the main developments in the 1980's. Otherwise this is a book I would whole heartedly recommend to anyone who is interested in Italy in particular, and more generally in how a western European country developed during the economic "golden age" up until the 1970's and how afterwards things changed . . .