Giorgia Meloni: The hard work is just starting

 

Giorgia Meloni, October 21, 2022

 

In the space of four years, Giorgia Meloni has gone from being the leader of a minor party to being the leader of Italy, with an absolute majority in both houses of parliament. But she will not find it easy to put her electoral platform into practice.

 

 

Four years ago, when I last wrote about Italy’s political situation, Giorgia Meloni was leading a party that had won only 2% of the popular vote. Her party was, in fact, the smallest member of a coalition dominated by Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia and Matteo Salvini’s Lega Nord. All of that changed with this year’s election. Her party took 26% of the vote, and the coalition 43%. She is now Prime Minister.

 

Meloni rose to power because she lacked the weaknesses of her two coalition rivals. She wasn’t an establishment conservative like Berlusconi, and she wasn’t a northern regionalist like Salvini. She was thus seen as the one who could best represent the entire country and deal with its problems, especially the existential crisis of rising immigration and falling fertility. Will Italians continue to have a homeland for themselves and their descendants? Or will they go the way of other nations that are now footnotes in history?

 

That may sound like hyperbole. With a population of sixty million, Italians will surely enjoy a supermajority in their country for years to come. Keep in mind, however, that their mean age is 47; therefore, more than half are past the age of reproduction. With a fertility rate of 1.3 children per woman, the smaller "procreative fraction" of the population will fall by almost 50% with each generation. Meanwhile, the foreign citizen population has risen from 1.3 million in 2002 to 5.2 million in 2021. The total number of immigrants is actually larger:

 

In 2021, Istat estimated that 5,171,894 foreign citizens lived in Italy, representing about 8.7% of the total population. These figures do not include naturalized foreign-born residents (about 1,620,000 foreigners acquired Italian citizenship from 1999 to 2020, of whom 130,000 did so in 2020) as well as illegal immigrants, the so-called clandestini, whose numbers, difficult to determine, are thought to be at least 670,000. (Wikipedia 2022)

 

The demographic crisis is key to understanding Meloni’s electoral platform:

 

·         taxation that takes the size of the nuclear family into account

·         a lower sales tax of 4% on goods for young children

·         public funding of housing for Italian families who do not own a home. Eligible families must have at least one gainfully employed member

·         no birthright citizenship and no decriminalization of illegal immigration

·         a naval blockade to halt illegal immigration across the Mediterranean

 

Although her coalition enjoys an absolute majority in both houses of parliament, she will not find it easy to put her platform into practice:

 

She will very soon have to deal with the European Court of Human Rights, the Court of Justice of the European Union and the United States, if she does not respect the treaties on the management of immigration, Islam, free and undistorted competition and the European Union's defence policy.

 

If she is really very brave, she will carry on regardless and continue her policy. That is when the European Central Bank will deal with her. Indeed, Italy has become, thanks to Berlusconi, a beggar. It owes its survival only to the accommodative policy of the ECB, which massively buys its abysmal debt, and protects it from hedge funds. Remember that the ECB holds 780 billion [euros] of Italian public debt (30% of total debt), and that this is only growing. Italy's 10-year borrowing rates have already exceeded 4%, which is completely unbearable for the country's budget. Then it would be enough for the ECB to stop its purchases, or even to sell part of its stock on the market at a low price, to immediately raise this rate to stratospheric levels, and make Italy look like Zimbabwe. And the same people who were yesterday in the street with signs of support will throw stones at her while insulting her. (Falento 2022)

 

Looking to the future

 

To date, nationalist victories have been on the periphery of Western Europe, and not in its core. The periphery is home to people who have not fully assimilated into the Western world-system, largely because they are less proficient in English—the main conduit of neo-Western culture. So it is difficult to make them understand ideas and social norms that emanate from the core, let alone comply with them. As a general rule, the periphery is where a world-system has the most trouble imposing its will, not only politically and economically but also culturally and ideologically.

 

The next decade will see rising tensions between the core and the periphery, and it’s difficult to say which will prevail. The periphery is being taken over by nationalists, like Giorgia Meloni, while the core remains dominated by elites who are pushing the globalist project: on the one hand, they want to export high-wage jobs to countries where labor is cheaper; on the other, they want to import low-wage labor for jobs that cannot be exported, i.e., jobs in construction, agriculture, and services.

 

That is why median wages in the West have scarcely risen over the past half-century. High-wage “breadwinner” jobs in manufacturing are largely gone, and the jobs that remain are increasingly low-paying ones in services. During the 2020s, wage stagnation will give way to a leveling downward of wages throughout the West. Elsewhere, the leveling upward will be modest and uneven. The inner periphery will get the worst of both worlds: they’re not poor enough to attract low-wage industries, but not rich enough to attract the financial industry jobs that are concentrated in London, New York, and other world centres.

 

It is doubtful whether globalization will be a net benefit for the average person in the world.  Wealth is created most efficiently in high-trust societies, and those societies are the ones most affected by “replacement migration.” We may simply end up with a world where most workers are equally poor and equally mistrustful of each other.

 

 

References

 

Falento, A. (2022). Giorgia Meloni ne pourra rien faire si elle ne sort pas de l’Union européene. Riposte laïque. September 26. https://ripostelaique.com/giorgia-meloni-ne-pourra-rien-faire-si-elle-ne-sort-pas-de-lunion-europeene.html  

 

Frost, P. (2017). Terra Nostra, for how long? Evo and Proud, November 23. https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2017/11/terra-nostra-for-how-long.html  

 

Wikipedia (2022). Immigration to Italy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Italy

Cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula

 

A recent polygenic study has shown that mean cognitive ability is higher in the North of Italy than in the South. Cognitive evolution seems to have gone the farthest in the Northeast, perhaps because the Northwest earlier went through the Industrial Revolution, which severed reproductive success from economic success.

 

 

 

As a country, Italy came into existence only a century and a half ago. Regional differences are still strong, particularly between the North and the South. The “Southern question” is usually said to date from the unification of Italy in the 19th century:

 

In the decades following the unification of Italy, the northern regions of the country, Lombardy, Piedmont and Liguria in particular, began a process of industrialization and economic development while the southern regions remained behind. At the time of the unification of the country, there was a shortage of entrepreneurs in the south, with landowners who were often absent from their farms as they lived permanently in the city, leaving the management of their funds to managers, who were not encouraged by the owners to make the agricultural estates to the maximum. Landowners invested not in agricultural equipment, but in such things as low-risk state bonds. (Wikipedia 2022a)

 

De Rosa (1979) argues that the South had already fallen behind the North by the 18th century. At that time, its middle class was small, and economic relations were still structured by paternalism and familialism. One could go back even farther, to the Renaissance or even the late Middle Ages, to identify the moment when northern Italy, and Western Europe in general, embarked on sustained economic growth and thus pulled ahead of the rest of the world.

 

That sustained economic growth brought sustained demographic growth, particularly of the middle class. Gregory Clark found that the English middle class expanded steadily from the twelfth century onward, its descendants not only growing in number but also replacing the lower classes through downward mobility. By the 1800s, its lineages accounted for most of the English population. That demographic change coincided with mental and behavioral changes: higher cognitive ability, lower time preference, and a lower threshold for violent behavior. In a word, the English became more middle-class in character. “Thrift, prudence, negotiation, and hard work were becoming values for communities that previously had been spendthrift, impulsive, violent, and leisure loving” (Clark 2007, p. 166).

 

Elsewhere in Western Europe, the middle class similarly expanded during late medieval and early modern times. The result would be a growing contrast between regions that had participated in this economic and demographic change and those that had not, such as southern Italy. The contrast can be seen not only on purely economic measures but also on mental ones, like the INVALSI standardized test—an annual test of skills in Italian schools. It is divided into two sections: Italian language skills and Math skills. On both tests, northern Italian students do better than southern Italian students, the difference being a little over half a standard deviation:

 

Yes, the North-South gap in academic achievement could have a purely environmental cause—and this is a recurring problem when we try to tease apart genetic and cultural evolution. If economic development is held back by a culture of poverty, that same culture may discourage students from trying to do better at school. Those students may also have less access to proper nutrition, medical care, libraries, and so on.

 

Polygenic scores for cognitive ability

 

That is why there is so much interest in measures of innate cognitive ability. The most promising one is the polygenic score (PGS)—the summation of alleles (genetic variants) that have been associated with cognitive ability, as measured by educational attainment.  At present, we have identified enough of these alleles to explain 11-13% of the overall variation in cognitive ability (Lee et al. 2018).

 

Yes, those alleles are just a sample of the total number, but why would they be an unrepresentative sample? More to the point: why would PGS data show certain geographic patterns and not a lot of random noise? The mean PGS does indeed differ geographically among human populations. It is highest in Eurasia, with East Asians, Ashkenazi Jews, and Finns having the highest scores. That geographic pattern is in line with IQ data (Piffer 2019).

 

Polygenic scores on the Italian Peninsula

 

In a recent study, Piffer and Lynn (2022) have found regional differences in Italy for alleles associated with educational attainment. They used two datasets: one encompassing 129 Italian individuals and the other 947. All of these individuals had all four grandparents born in the same part of Italy (this requirement was imposed to eliminate the effects of recent interregional migration). When the authors grouped the data into three large regions—North, Central, and South—they found “a clear north-south gradient, with central Italians occupying an intermediate position.” There was more overlap between central and southern Italians than between central and northern Italians.

 

The datasets were too small to show genetic differences within each of the three large regions. If we go back to the INVALSI data, we see that academic achievement is much stronger in the North-Northeast (Lombardia, Trentino, Veneto, Friuli) than in the Northwest (Valle d’Aosta, Liguria).

 

At first thought, that geographic pattern may seem counter-intuitive. In northern Italy, industrialization began in the northwest and came later to the northeast: “the diffusion of industrialisation that characterised the northwestern area of the country largely excluded Venetia and, especially, the South” (Wikipedia 2022b). If economic development had driven cognitive evolution on the Italian Peninsula, why would this evolution have gone farther in the northeast? Why would it be negatively associated with industrialization?

 

Because the Industrial Revolution put a stop to cognitive evolution. It severed the link between economic success and reproductive success. Previously, businesses were family-run, and the family provided the workforce. Successful business owners were incentivized to have larger families, and their children would have the means to marry at a younger age. Then, in the late 19th century, that stage of economic development began to give way to industrial capitalism. Financial success no longer translated into early marriage and large families who could help with the work. If more workers were needed, they would simply be hired. Business owners now tended to have smaller families because of the high maintenance costs of middle-class children (Canlorbe and Frost 2020; Frost 2018).

 

Cognitive evolution thus ended earlier in the Northwest of Italy than in the Northeast. By the same token, interregional migration has had more time to erode the cognitive advantage that evolved in the Northwest. Yes, the datasets were limited to people who had all four grandparents born in the region, but, for most people, that limitation would not eliminate the effects of interregional migration before the mid-20th century.

 

 

References

 

Canlorbe, G., and P. Frost (2020). Why are human groups so different? American Renaissance, March 20. https://www.amren.com/features/2020/03/why-are-human-groups-so-different/  

 

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, 1st ed. Princeton University Press: Princeton, NJ, USA.

 

De Rosa, L. (1979). Property Rights, Institutional Change, and Economic Growth in Southern Italy in the XVIIIth and XIXth Centuries. Journal of European Economic History 8(3): 531-551.

 

Frost, P. (2018). Rise of the West. Part II. Evo and Proud, December 27

https://evoandproud.blogspot.com/2018/12/rise-of-west-part-ii.html  

 

Lee, J. J., Wedow, R., Okbay, A., Kong, E., Maghzian, O., Zacher, et al. (2018). Gene discovery and polygenic prediction from a genome-wide association study of educational attainment in 1.1 million individuals. Nature Genetics 50(8): 1112-1121. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41588-018-0147-3

 

Piffer, D. (2019). Evidence for Recent Polygenic Selection on Educational Attainment and Intelligence Inferred from Gwas Hits: A Replication of Previous Findings Using Recent Data. Psych 1(1): 55-75. https://doi.org/10.3390/psych1010005    

 

Piffer, D., & Lynn, R. (2022). In Italy, North-South Differences in Student Performance Are Mirrored by Differences in Polygenic Scores for Educational Attainment. Mankind Quarterly 62(4), Article 2. https://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2022.62.4.2  

 

Wikipedia (2022a). Economy of Italy – Southern Question

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Italy#Southern_question  

 

Wikipedia (2022b). Economic history of Italy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Italy  

 

We make the environments we adapt to

Distribution of malaria in Italy, 1944 (Wikicommons). Malaria used to be common in parts of Italy, particularly Sardinia.

Gene-culture coevolution seems to be attracting more interest. According to Google Scholar, this term is appearing in more and more scientific articles:

2010-2017 - 248 mentions per year

2000-2009 - 107 mentions per year

1990-1999 - 22 mentions per year

1980-1989 - 31 mentions per year

I’d like to take some of the credit, but most of it actually goes to John Hawks and the landmark paper he authored in 2007 with Eric Wang, Greg Cochran, Henry Harpending, and Robert Moyzis. That paper, more than any other, changed the way we view the relationship between genetic evolution and cultural evolution in our species.

Rinaldi (2017) provides a good review of this field of research. He starts off with a definition of gene-culture coevolution:

"[All] organisms adapt to their environment, and in humans much of our environment is defined by our culture. Hence, cultural change can actually spur on adaptive evolution in humans", wrote evolutionary biologist Alan Templeton at Washington University in St. Louis, MO, USA. Following this argument, culture, social learning and technology have not replaced biological adaptation. Rather, human evolution is driven by the environmental conditions we created ourselves through culture, a process that has been accelerating since the beginning of agriculture and urban civilization.

Indeed, human genetic evolution sped up more than a hundred-fold some 10,000 years ago, when hunting and gathering gave way to farming, which in turn led to population growth and larger, more complex societies. Our ancestors were no longer adapting to relatively static natural environments but rather to faster-changing cultural ones of their own making. They created new ways of life, which in turn influenced who would survive and who wouldn't (Hawks et al. 2007).

Among other changes, farming exposed humans to new diseases. "Virulent epidemic diseases, including smallpox, malaria, yellow fever, typhus, and cholera, became important causes of mortality after the origin and spread of agriculture" (Hawks et al. 2007). This causation has been amply documented in the case of malaria:

If malaria was contracted by humans in the Pleistocene, it likely would have been in isolated incidences. For example, recent genetic analysis of the glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase gene, some variants of which confer resistance to the infection, confirmed that malaria is a recent selective force in human populations, occurring within the last 10,000 years. Based on the mitochondrial genome of the parasite itself, Joy et al. concluded that though the parasite that causes falciparum malaria originated long ago (perhaps 50,000-100,000 YBP), a sudden increase in the population size of the parasite did not occur until around 10,000 years ago when humans began to practice agriculture.

[...] Livingstone argued that slash-and-burn agriculture in West Africa would have exposed populations to Anopheles gambiae, the mosquito that serves as the vector for Plasmodium falciparum, the cause of malaria. Slash-and-burn agriculture resulted in sedentary populations surrounded by the pools of sunlit water required for propagation of the Anophelese mosquito. (Harper and Armelagos 2010)

Farming changed the adaptive equilibrium between the human body and Plasmodium falciparum. A new equilibrium arose in those human populations that had to coevolve with a high incidence of this parasite. Now, modern health measures are upsetting this equilibrium, and those same populations are falling prey to certain diseases—ironically, because of efforts to fight another disease:

The increase in multiple sclerosis and probably other autoimmune diseases such as type 1 diabetes in Sardinia, Italy, has been linked to the elimination of malaria from the island in the early 1950s. Centuries of exposure to Plasmodium falciparum would have shaped the human immune system to aggressively fight the parasite with a tendency to over-respond to triggering factors even after the disappearance of the parasites. Recent research has indeed identified a number of gene variants involved in malarial resistance and increased risk of multiple sclerosis in Sardinians. (Rinaldi 2017)

Human culture has created new environments of biological adaptation, and these environments differ from one human population to the next because human culture likewise differs from one to the next. Subsequent cultural change will therefore have a greater biological impact on some populations than on others. This is a general principle and is not limited to the above example of malaria.

In my next post, I will explore the biological impacts of another cultural change: the shift from a "thick" to a "thin" social environment. A "thick" social environment is characterized by intense interaction with a relatively small number of people. This interaction is not only recurrent but also predictable because it is constrained and structured by social rules. A "thin" social environment is characterized by interaction with more people on a less frequent basis, and this interaction is less predictable because social relations are less constrained and less structured.

Human cultures fall along a continuum from "thick" social environments, such as exist in small bands of hunter-gatherers, to "thin" social environments, such as exist in large societies where conditions for personal autonomy are optimal. In the latter, people are freer not only to change their networks of social interaction but also to reduce them to the minimum necessary for personal survival.

For several centuries, the West has been expanding personal autonomy by transferring collective authority from personal “bottom-up” structures (family, clan, ethny) to impersonal “top-down” structures (the State). Beginning in the 19th century, we have exported this cultural model to the rest of the world. Have there been adverse effects? And have they been worse in some human populations than in others? Most experts would answer “Yes” to both questions, while adding that the adverse effects are temporary. Once everyone has grown accustomed to being merely individuals, the effects should be pretty much the same everywhere. 

I will argue that some of these adverse effects will be permanent in all human populations. This is because no population has ever fully adapted to a social environment where individualism is at a maximum and where the State has largely replaced traditional “bottom-up” structures. I will also argue that these permanent adverse effects will be worse in some populations than in others.

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I've been trying to measure the degree to which my blog is being "deplatformed," i.e., intercepted by blocking software. This search took me to the site Easy Counter, which told me that Evo and Proud is "poorly socialized" and may be "penalized." I also learned something else: on March 13, 2018, my blog was set to expire in 4 months. To date, no one has notified me of this decision, and I would still be unaware if I hadn’t gone to Easy Counter.

As I understand it, this sort of thing happens when a blog is inactive. Blogger is supposed to be free, and I've never had to renew my registration through an annual payment. So I'm asking you for advice. For whatever reason, Google wants to terminate this blog. Should I fight this decision or migrate to another platform? If so, which one would be best? And what is the easiest way to transfer all of my blog posts?

References

Harper, K. and G. Armelagos. (2010). The changing disease-scape in the third epidemiological transition, Int J Environ Res Public Health. 7(2): 675-697.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2872288/

Hawks, J., E.T. Wang, G.M. Cochran, H.C. Harpending, and R.K. Moyzis. (2007). Recent acceleration of human adaptive evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 104: 20753-20758.

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Henry_Harpending/publication/5761823_Recent_Acceleration_of_Human_Adaptive_Evolution/links/0c9605240c4bb57b55000000.pdf

Rinaldi, A. (2017). We're on a road to nowhere. Culture and adaptation to the environment are driving human evolution, but the destination of this journey is unpredictable, EMBO reports 18: 2094-2100

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Andrea_Rinaldi2/publication/321214867_We%27re_on_a_road_to_nowhere_Culture_and_adaptation_to_the_environment_are_driving_human_evolution_but_the_destination_of_this_journey_is_unpredictable/links/5a2692eaa6fdcc8e866da26e/Were-on-a-road-to-nowhere-Culture-and-adaptation-to-the-environment-are-driving-human-evolution-but-the-destination-of-this-journey-is-unpredictable.pdf 

Thoughts on the Italian election

Matteo Salvini - leader of Lega and the center-right coalition (Wikicommons)

What do I think of the Italian election results? How well do they bear out the predictions I made last November? In some ways, the nationalists did better than I expected, and in some ways worse. First the good news.

Western Europe's first nationalist government

Lega Nord (now simply Lega) went into the election as a junior partner in a center-right coalition led by Silvio Berlusconi. It is now the senior partner. Berlusconi's party, Forza Italia, did poorly, getting only 14% of the popular vote in comparison to Lega's 17%. Given that 4% of all votes went to the other nationalist party in the coalition, Fratelli d'Italia, we see that Italian support for the center-right is much more nationalist than conservative.

With a plurality of seats in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, Matteo Salvini will likely form the next government. He will bring a new perspective to the job of Italian prime minister:

Matteo Salvini embraces a very critical view of the European Union (EU), especially of the euro, which he once described a "crime against humanity". Salvini is also opposed to illegal immigration and the EU's management of asylum seekers.

On economic issues, he supports flat tax, tax cuts, fiscal federalism, protectionism and, to some extent, agrarianism. On social issues, Salvini opposes same-sex marriage, while he supports family values and the legalisation of brothels. In foreign policy he opposed the international embargo against Russia of 2014 and supported an economic opening to Eastern Europe and to countries of the Far East such as North Korea. (Wikipedia 2018)

Lega's success is in contrast to the situation in France, the Netherlands, and Germany, where nationalist parties have done well but have never been part of a ruling coalition. We thus have the strange sight of Angela Merkel looking for coalition partners on the left and even the far left, while studiously ignoring Alternative für Deutschland, a party that won 13% of the popular vote in her country's last general election.

Now the bad news:

A hung parliament and false friends

Without a majority in the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the center-right coalition will need support from the Movimento 5 Stelle (Five Star Movement), which came second with 33% of the popular vote. Unfortunately, that party will be far from supportive. It is not at all nationalist—contrary to what you may have read or heard.

Yes, the co-founder of the Five Star Movement, "Beppe" Grillo, has called for deportation of "terrorists" and people with no right to asylum:

"The migratory situation is out of control," Grillo wrote on his blog. "Our country is becoming a place where terrorists come and go and we are not able to recognise and report them and they can wander all over Europe undisturbed thanks to Schengen." "Those who have the right to asylum should stay in Italy, all the others should be repatriated at once, starting from today." "Schengen must be revised," he said, adding it should be suspended "immediately and border controls reinstated" when there is an attack until the suspects have been captured. (ANSA 2016)

Also, the current leader of the Five Star Movement, Luigi Di Maio, has called for "an immediate stop to the sea-taxi service", i.e., the ferrying of African migrants to Italy by NGOs (Reuters 2017).

Tough words. Keep in mind, however, that similar words have been spoken by conservative politicians elsewhere—Deport terrorists! No fake refugees! The problem, here, isn't that such promises have often been broken. The problem is that the issue of population replacement isn't even being addressed. The deconstruction of Europe thus continues, and at an ever higher rate.

Furthermore, if we look at actual party policy, and not personal opinions, we get a different picture of the Five Star Movement. In 2014 its members voted to decriminalize illegal immigration:

The Five Star Movement activists say no to the crime of illegal immigration. The majority of votes, which were cast online on Beppe Grillo's blog, were in favor of repealing the crime of illegal immigration. Yes for the repeal: 15,839. No: 9,093. There were 24,932 voters. (Corriere del Sera 2014)

Admittedly, that was four years ago, but only this year Luigi Di Maio reacted angrily when “extremist” remarks were made about immigration by the center-right candidate for Lombardy, Attilio Fontana.

"Berlusconi says that we are worse than the post-communists, that they are moderate and we extremists, but after Fontana's phrase about the white race are we sure that they are the moderates? If they are moderate then I am Gandhi. [...] We want to know if Fontana remains their presidential candidate [for Lombardy]." (ANSA 2018b)

Were Fontana's remarks extremist? Judge for yourself:

This is not an issue of being xenophobic or racist, but a question of being logical or rational. We cannot [accept all asylum seekers] because we won’t all fit in, so we have to make choices. We must decide if our ethnicity, if our white race, if our society, should continue to exist or if it should be wiped out. A serious State should plan and program a situation of this type. It should say how many we consider it right to receive and how many migrants we don't want to allow in, how we want to assist them, what jobs to give them, what homes and schools to give them. At that point, when a government prepares a project of this type, it submits it to its citizens.

It is absolutely unacceptable to say that we have to accept them all. It is a scheme that we must react against, that it is necessary to rebel against. We cannot accept them all because, if we did, we would no longer be ourselves as a social reality, as an ethnic reality. Because there are many more of them than us, and they are much more determined to occupy this territory. (ANSA 2018a; ANSA 2018b)

On March 4, the people passed judgment on Fontana: he was elected governor of Lombardy.

In all this, the Five Star Movement comes across as being too worried about its image and not sufficiently concerned about offering a coherent policy. This is a common failing of populist movements.

Conclusion

With this election, the bloc of nationalist states has welcomed a new member—a country near the core of the Western world-system. There is now a continuous stretch of territory from the Baltic to the Mediterranean where post-nationalism is no longer a “consensus.”

This new reality has not gone unnoticed, and there will likely be efforts to turn back the clock. The Italian parliament will become mired in one stalemate after another, and Salvini may have to go directly to the people, using his bully pulpit to rally support for his measures. Don't expect to see the Five Star Movement play a constructive role.

Salvini will also face determined opposition from the courts, the civil service, and the media—what we call the deep state. The situation, however, isn't the same as in the United States, where the elites don’t feel much in common with the American people and see no reason why they should. If Salvini can present his arguments boldly and energetically, he will mobilize support even among his country’s elites.

References

ANSA (2018a). White race at risk - Fontana on migrants (2). Centre-right Lombardy candidate says not question of racism, ANSAen Politics, January 15

http://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2018/01/15/white-race-at-risk-fontana-on-migrants-2_f044a79f-dc1e-43fa-aa42-d69c42f2e5cb.html

ANSA (2018b). Attilio Fontana si scusa per la 'razza bianca' ANSAit. Lombardia, January 17

http://www.ansa.it/lombardia/notizie/2018/01/15/fontana-razza-bianca-a-rischio-per-i-migranti_bcda489a-d3fe-49d7-84f8-e20ac2c338ef.html

ANSA (2106). Grillo calls for mass deportations (2).ANSAen Politics, December 23

http://www.ansa.it/english/news/politics/2016/12/23/grillo-calls-for-mass-deportations-2_c2583737-0f97-4157-a2f3-d2a9137728b6.html  

Corriere della Sera. (2014). Grillo, gli iscritti del M5S dicono no al reato di immigrazione clandestine, January 13

http://www.corriere.it/politica/14_gennaio_13/grillo-lancia-consultazioni-reato-clandestinita-dissidenti-politica-non-sia-videogame-b474ad60-7c49-11e3-bc95-3898e25f75f1.shtml?refresh_ce-cp

Reuters (2017). Italian prosecutors widen investigation to include MSF over migrant rescues: source, World News, August 5

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-italy-migrants-medecins-sans-frontier/italian-prosecutors-widen-investigation-to-include-msf-over-migrant-rescues-source-idUSKBN1AL0HZ?il=0

Wikipedia (2018). Matteo Salvini

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matteo_Salvini

Terra Nostra, for how long?

Giorgia Meloni, president of Terra Nostra. (Wikicommons: Niccolò Caranti)

A nationalist bloc of nations now extends across much of eastern and central Europe, but Italy seems like another world. In the Italian parliament the leading nationalist party, the Lega Nord (LN), has lost seats at each general election since 1994, except for the one in 2008. The party is also under pressure from members to distance itself from Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders, particularly after both failed to make major electoral gains this year. Finally, by its very nature, the LN is limited in its potential for growth—it’s a regional party whose support is confined to northern Italy.

Ironically, Italy had once been Europe’s epicenter of political change, as novelist and literary critic Umberto Eco pointed out:

Italian fascism was the first right-wing dictatorship that took over a European country, and all similar movements later found a sort of archetype in Mussolini's regime. Italian fascism was the first to establish a military liturgy, a folklore, even a way of dressing—far more influential, with its black shirts, than Armani, Benetton, or Versace would ever be. It was only in the Thirties that fascist movements appeared, with Mosley, in Great Britain, and in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, Yugoslavia, Spain, Portugal, Norway, and even in South America. It was Italian fascism that convinced many European liberal leaders that the new regime was carrying out interesting social reform, and that it was providing a mildly revolutionary alternative to the Communist threat. (Eco 1995)

What would have happened if Italy had stayed out of the Second World War? Would fascism have remained an “interesting” alternative not only to Communism but also to liberal democracy? Probably not. It would have fallen prey to dry rot and eventually collapsed, like in Spain and Portugal. There were fundamental problems with fascism besides the obvious one of stupid jingoism. There was also the problem of maintaining traditional values in an increasingly urban and anonymous mass culture, and this mission was assigned to a state/clerical bureaucracy that might, one day, have other ideas …

As a credible postwar movement, fascism persisted longer in Italy than elsewhere. Indeed, a neo-fascist party was represented in the Italian parliament throughout the postwar era. This was the Movimento Sociale Italiano (MRI), which held seats in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate from 1948 until its dissolution in 1995, when the MRI rebranded itself as the Alleanza Nazionale (AN) in a bid to gain mainstream support. 

Although it was for a long time preoccupied with the debate of fascism and anti-fascism, the party distanced itself from this in the early 1990s to rather focus on contemporary Italian issues. [...] When the party transformed itself into the AN, it outspokenly rejected fascism, as well as "any kind of totalitarianism and racism." In contrast to other far-right parties in Europe which increased their power in the late 1980s, the MSI chose to not campaign against immigration, because [there] was less than [in] other European countries. (Wikipedia 2017a)

This transformation paid off, electorally. In 1996 the AN peaked at 16% of the popular vote, and in 2001 it joined a coalition government with its leader as Deputy Prime Minister and Silvio Berlusconi as Prime Minister. Finally, in 2009 it was absorbed into a new party created by Berlusconi, Il Popolo della Libertà (PdL).

There is a lesson in this. If you imitate the mainstream in order to gain power, you may destroy your reason for seeking power, which is to promote your ideas and make them public policy. The end becomes cannibalized by the means.

And yet ...

One may conclude that nothing points to a nationalist breakthrough in Italy, at least not in the near future. Yet things aren't necessarily what they seem. Although the Lega Nord has lost support at the national level, it has gained support at the regional level, particularly in the 2015 regional elections. A party member, Luca Zaia, was elected president of the Veneto region with 50% of the vote, the combined score for the LN and Zaia lists being 41%. The party came second in Liguria (22%) and Tuscany (16%) and third in Marche (13%) and Umbria (14%). These were record successes.

One doesn't have to look far for the reason. Over the past three years half a million migrants, mostly from Africa, have poured into Italy. And the end isn't in sight. The migrant wave is being driven by population pressure in Africa, and not by specific events like the civil war in Syria:

While irregular crossings in the Mediterranean to reach Europe have been growing for a number of years, 2015 marked the sharpest rise in sea arrivals to the EU with a four-fold increase from 2014.

[...] There has been a rapid decline in the presence of Syrian nationals who went from 24% of arrivals in 2014 to just 5% in 2015. While Eritreans were the largest single nationality group in 2015, it is the presence of young single men from a wide range of African countries that truly characterises the Central Mediterranean route in 2015. (Crawley et al. 2016)

Meanwhile, an alternative to the Lega Nord has been taking shape. In 2012 the Fratelli d'Italia (FdI) was founded with Giorgia Meloni as president and a membership drawn largely from the old AN. Its ideology is described as follows:

[The basic principles are] nationalism, national conservatism, and the Social Right [a French movement of social conservatism].

In economic matters, these [principles] mean abandoning the euro, implementing protectionism for products made in Italy, and repealing the European Fiscal Compact.

On the issue of taxation, the electoral program calls for a "family quotient" [taxation that takes the size of the nuclear family into account], a lower sales tax of 4% on goods for young children, and tax deductions substantiated with receipts for such goods.

The party also calls for a social mortgage, i.e., establishment of a publicly funded institution to build housing and living quarters for sale to families who do not already own a home. Mortgage payments will not exceed one fifth of family income, and an eligible family must have at least one gainfully employed member.

At the international level the party declares that it is close to the Front National of Marine Le Pen and the Law and Justice party in Poland. (Wikipedia 2017b)

The party is opposed to birthright citizenship and decriminalization of illegal immigration, and it supports a naval blockade in the Mediterranean. Finally, in the field of civil rights, it opposes gay marriage and parenting, stating that it wants to safeguard the traditional family.

Although the FdI won only 2% of the popular vote in the 2013 general election, it has done better in subsequent municipal and regional elections. In the 2016 election in Rome it received 12% of the popular vote. In the 2017 regional election in Sicily, a politician close to the party was elected president. In preparation for the 2018 general election, the FdI is working to form a broader nationalist front called Terra Nostra (TN) (Wikipedia 2017c).

Conclusion

At first glance, Italy’s nationalist scene looks moribund. Over the past twenty years the Lega Nord has steadily lost support in general elections. In the 1990s the Movimento Sociale Italiano lost its raison d'être and eventually disappeared into the political mainstream. A closer look, however, shows that the LN has been increasing its support at the regional and municipal levels. The last few years have also seen a new nationalist party come into being: the Fratelli d'Italia, now renamed Terra Nostra. Time will tell, but it has already shown promising growth in municipal and regional elections. The TN is partly a response to electoral successes by similar parties in other countries, notably the Front National in France and the Law and Justice party in Poland, but its main impetus seems to be events in Italy itself, particularly the sharp rise in immigration from Africa over the past three years.

Both parties will have to overcome several barriers to electoral success:

- The Lega Nord cannot fully mobilize the nationalist vote. Its support is confined to northern Italy and is fueled by a perception that the north is subsidizing the south and an overgrown central government. It has in fact tried to build support in southern and central Italy, but with little success.

- Terra Nostra is new, and new parties are prone to problems that plague any new team of people: disagreement over vision and ideology, uncertainty over direction and strategy, etc. Since many of its founding members had formerly belonged to the AN, and previously to the MRI, they will tend to follow old visions and old ideology. In particular, belief in a strong central state will block cooperation with the LN.

- There is a lack of time. Immigration to Italy has reached high levels. With a fertility rate of 1.2 children per native-born woman, the most likely scenario will be rapid demographic replacement. Indeed, this fate awaits the entire southern tier of Europe.

Although both parties may do very well in the upcoming 2018 general election, they will probably not do well enough to form a coalition government on their own. The outcome will likely be a three-way coalition: Lega Nord, Terra Nostra, and Forza Italia, i.e., Berlusconi's party. This raises the prospect of absorption into the political mainstream, as was the case a decade ago. This time, however, the tail might wag the dog; there are signs that Forza Italia voters are realizing that Italy, like Europe as a whole, is facing an existential crisis. On the other hand, their party is still a mix of liberal and traditionalist tendencies:

In October 2014 Berlusconi personally endorsed Renzi's proposals on civil unions for gays and a quicker path to citizenship to Italian-born children of immigrants. However, recent developments proved the party more socially conservative. FI clarified that it considers marriage solely as the union between a man and a woman. The majority of its members voted against civil unions, whereas the NCD voted in favour. Moreover, the party is critical of teaching gender studies in schools. Party members are generally pro-life and therefore seek to limit abortion and euthanasia. The party has criticized illegal immigration and the way it has been managed by centre-left coalition governments. It has also declared itself against the introduction of jus soli in Italy. In addition, the party is opposed to drug liberalization, which it considers potentially negative for health and not useful for solving criminal matters. When FI's predecessors were in power, they restricted the legislation on the matter, with the Fini-Giovanardi law. Finally, FI considers Italy as a country with a Christian civilization and, thus, favours displaying Christian symbols in public places. (Wikipedia 2017d)

This is typical conservatism, and on several points it is vulnerable to the sort of manipulation by outside interests that we have seen with conservative parties elsewhere. If, for example, only illegal immigration is problematic, why not solve the problem by legalizing it? Perhaps Berlusconi has learned his lesson, but the example of conservatives elsewhere isn't reassuring. Again, time will tell.

References

Crawley, H., F. Duvell, N. Sigona, S. McMahon, and K. Jones (2016).  Unpacking a rapidly changing scenario: migration flows, routes and trajectories across the Mediterranean. Unravelling the Mediterranean Migration Crisis (MEDMIG) Research Brief No.1 March 2016

http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/media/PB-2016-MEDMIG-Unpacking_Changing_Scenario.pdf  

Eco, U. (1995). Ur-Fascism, The New York Review of Books, June 22

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/  

Wikipedia (2017a). Italian Social Movement.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Social_Movement  

Wikipedia (2017b). Fratelli d'Italia - Alleanza Nazionale.

https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fratelli_d%27Italia_-_Alleanza_Nazionale

Wikipedia (2017c). Brothers of Italy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_of_Italy  

Wikipedia (2017d). Forza Italia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forza_Italia_(2013)#Ideology_and_factions  

The evolution of Cavalli-Sforza. Part II

Guido Orefice (Roberto Benigni) explaining Italian race science to a class of schoolchildren. La vita è bella

What were Cavalli-Sforza’s initial views on race? The question does not come up in his publications before the 1960s, so we can only presume that his beliefs were like those of his peers, particularly Italian anthropologists.

But just what were those beliefs? A Latin version of Nazi racism? This seems to be the premise of the film Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella). The hero visits a local school and ridicules “racist Italian scientists” by posing as the perfect Italian:

Our race is superior. I've just come from Rome, right this minute... to come and tell you in order that you'll know, children... that our race is a superior one. I was... chosen, I was, by racist Italian scientists... in order to demonstrate... how superior our race is. Why did they pick me, children? Must I tell you? Where can you find… someone more handsome than me? (link)

In reality, wartime Italian anthropologists did not consider the Italian people to be a race, let alone a superior one. Nor did they conceptualize ‘race’ in sharply defined terms. Renato Biasutti (1878-1965), Raffaello Battaglia (1896-1958), and others promoted the view that human populations are dynamic, variable, and evolving. Meanwhile, Adriano Buzzati-Traverso (1913-1983) was contributing to the new field of population genetics.

Their world view actually differed little from that of most postwar anthropologists. If we take “the most important single work produced during the war period” (Cooper 1946), Le razze e i popoli della terra, initially published by Biasutti in 1941, we find that it was republished several times in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1959, it earned a favorable review from American Anthropologist, the harshest comments being: “The theoretical positions […] are often uncongenial to those reared in the epigonous Boasian tradition. […] Social structure is inadequately handled, and in contrast, minor racial differences are lavishly presented” (Hewes 1959, pp. 618, 620).

This is not to say that Cavalli-Sforza’s peers were antiracist. Clearly, they endorsed the race concept and accepted that human populations differ statistically not only in anatomical traits but also in mental ones. In this respect they were like many British and American anthropologists of the same time period. Race denialism, as we know it today, did not become predominant until the 1970s.

Such was the reality of ‘race science’ in fascist Italy. But reality is not everything. There is also mythology—the popular narratives that help us make sense of reality. In the years after World War II, this conflict would become a founding myth for the postwar era—the triumph of Good over Evil and the advent of a freer, fairer world... As such, it would energize the quest for social justice on many fronts: the Civil Rights movement in the U.S.; the struggle against colonialism; the peace movement, and so on. The terms ‘racist’ and ‘fascist’ would be used far more often after 1945 than during the war itself.

Thus, in pursuing his postwar career, Cavalli-Sforza soon realized that his past was a handicap. There were others like him: Kurt Waldheim, François Mitterand, Pierre Elliot Trudeau ... For such people, fascism was not the god that failed. It was the god that died. The world had irrevocably changed, and the time had come to bury the past.

After 1947, he would no longer cite his wartime publications. Later on, he changed his name from L.L. Cavalli to L.L. Cavalli-Sforza. The reason appears in his autobiography:

My father, Pio Cavalli, had died (while we were at Cambridge, in 1949), and Francesco Sforza, the second husband of my maternal grandmother, Maria Fumagalli, widow Manacorda, wanted to adopt me, in order to join his name to my family name.
(Cavalli-Sforza & Cavalli-Sforza 2008, p. 107)

The autobiography places the name change in 1950 (1). In that year, he would have been 28, was already married, and had children of his own. Such circumstances were not normally a basis for adoption, either under Italian law or by custom. Even more inexplicably, he was still publishing under his old name as late as 1953—four years after his father’s death. Google Scholar lists three publications by L.L. Cavalli in 1950, one in 1951, five in 1952, and two in 1953 (2).

Notes

1. Stone and Lurquin (2005, p. 27) state that he changed his name at the age of 27, hence in 1949 (date of birth = Jan. 25, 1922). This is impossible, since it was not until the summer of 1950 that he returned to Italy after two years of research abroad.

2. Sometimes more than a year will elapse between the submission of a manuscript and its publication. Perhaps this explains the 3-year lag in “implementing” his name change. On the other hand, one can easily make minor changes to a manuscript before it goes to press, particularly when one gets the galley proofs.

References

Biasutti, R. (1941). Le razze e i popoli della terra. Torino: Unione Tipografico/Editrice Torinese

Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and F. Cavalli-Sforza (2008). La génétique des populations : histoire d'une découverte, Odile Jacob.

Cooper, J.M. (1946). Anthropology during the war III. Italy, American Anthropologist, 48, 299-301.

Hewes, G.W. (1959). World ethnographies and culture-historical syntheses, American Anthropologist, 61, 615-630.

Life is Beautiful - script
http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/l/life-is-beautiful-script-transcript.html

Stone, L. and P.F. Lurquin. (2005). A Genetic and Cultural Odyssey. The Life and Work of L.Luca Cavalli-Sforza. New York: Columbia University Press.