Fascism, Anti-Fascism and the Idea of Nation: Italian Historiography and Public Debate since the 1980s

It is common to consider 1989 as a kind of ‘zero hour’. This applies to East Central European and to Italian history alike. A thought-provoking book, published in 1993, evoked the image of ‘an avalanche that swells downhill, speeded up and enriched by the great landslide of the nearby great mountain’. In this way the historian Luciano Cafagna described the impact of the fall of the Berlin Wall on Italian democracy. As a matter of fact, the Italian party system, based on the leading role of the Christian Democratic Party and of the West's major Communist Party, suddenly collapsed in the three years that followed the end of the Cold War because of a growing loss of legitimacy. In hindsight, though, I argue that the first, mostly invisible, movements of this ‘avalanche’ went further back in time, to well before 1989. The early 1990s simply marked its spectacular acceleration.