Around the characters and “reasons” of the gap, which exists between the regions of the South and the more developed areas of our country, rivers of ink have been spilled. The “southern question” is perhaps the most recurrent leitmotif in the debate among economists, political scientists, historians, and sociologists.
On some of today’s readings of the phenomenon, a certain convergence seems to be shown: the South experiences a strong lack of infrastructural type, which is associated with a chronic inefficiency of the public administration, these factors, combined, restrain development opportunities, which, of course, generate scarce job opportunities, fostering the persistence of endemic pockets of unemployment and “underground”, in which organized crime finds nourishment, whose capillary presence in the territory strongly conditions the way the political and institutional apparatus functions, generating serious phenomena of collusion, embezzlement and clientelism.
A dimension of widespread insecurity that discourages investment, preventing the creation of new job opportunities and thus feeding the cycle of marginality and thus the breeding ground for the underworld. It is a vicious cycle. A cat biting its own tail. Clearly, there are strong elements of truth in this reasoning; in short, this is not an abstract analysis untethered from the facts of reality.
– Questo articolo fa parte del terzo numero cartaceo de IlNewyorkese: ACQUISTALO QUI
These are the essential lines on which contemporary “meridionalist” reflection is moving, and they certainly cannot be dismissed with a shrug of the shoulders. Yet, I have wondered on several occasions, whether the meridionalist “discourse” is not itself a piece of the vicious circle that imprisons our South.
The “rhetorical” framework that has provided, for too long, alibis and justifications for the failure to take off in southern Italy. Because the real figure is this, and one indicator alone is enough to highlight it. In the southern regions, per capita income is roughly half of what is available in the more developed areas of the central north.
But let us go in order. According to many scholars, the reason lies entirely in the errors by which the unification of Italy was achieved. It is a thesis held by some of the most classic theorists of the southern question: the prosperous kingdom of the two Sicilies despoiled by the Piedmontese and singing company. In my opinion, if this affected it, it did so in a limited and partial way. The gap was there before and was very sensitive. After all, if the Bourbon kingdom was the paradise of efficiency and modernity of which it is fabled, one cannot explain how its sudden collapse was possible, the endless theory of complicity and betrayal that overwhelmed the state’s ruling group, in all its compartments, which was the main reason for the success of Garibaldi’s enterprise.
In fact, the political, military, administrative dimension of the South was already in a deep crisis. The nascent industrial revolution was already accentuating it. For the advent of mechanization in agriculture brought formidable production increases to the fertile irrigated plains of the Po Valley area. But it was not the same for the small arable, arid, hilly and mountainous areas of our South. In which the latifundium still reigned, while in the center-north “entrepreneurship” of sharecropping character was already progressing. The seed capitals of northern “success” came from there.
From the point of view of orography then the differences still weigh heavily. Building a highway in the Po Valley, to give a striking example, can cost as much as 100 times less than building it in certain parts of Calabria or Basilicata. And this is not and has not been irrelevant.
But back to our contemporary “vicious circle.” The question is: how to get out of it once and for all? The discourse seems to have a self-referential trend, it turns in on itself and we find ourselves back at square one. According to Bateson when one finds oneself in such a condition, in order to escape the systemic “paradox,” one must displace oneself on a “metasystem.” Here, the first point is that the South must look outside itself. It must think of itself for what it represents in a broader dimension: a great Mediterranean platform of exchange, development, and progress. With the Middle Sea regaining its centrality, not only on the economic level, but on the global geopolitical terrain, the South of Italy is, naturaliter, the hub of a new season of innovation, in the development strategy that “must” invest the Maghreb, MO, the Balkans, and through Suez the entire eastern basin.
Now, this horrible “world war in pieces” makes the whole vision more opaque. But it will have to end, with a “just peace” as is hoped. And then our South will reveal its full potential as a vector, for the socialization of the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean, to the values of democracy, freedom, pluralism, stimulating civic progress, market dynamics, technological innovation and with them prosperity for great masses. It will no longer have to be the subject of the news for the dramatic shipwrecks of migrants. But it will have to be the station of mercantile export, commercial exchange, technology transfer. The South will have to be for the entire Mediterranean basin as much and more than Apulia, which has become a decisive terminal for development between the two sides of the Adriatic.
The indications of this possibility are many. Because, it must be said, the Mezzogiorno is not just backwardness, in the South there are many productive realities, far-sighted entrepreneurs, entire districts that function and have a development potential that has not yet been fully expressed. Recent export data are very encouraging. And tourism (which can in no way be a substitute for industrial development) is also making a useful contribution, which can be even more pressing if we improve the infrastructure endowment and the fundamentals of the economy.
In short, the take-off of the South will not be able to result from an old-fashioned welfarist and whining Southernism. But it must result from the realization of a far-reaching project. The South as a “Mediterranean Bridge.” And its emblem will have to be the bridge over the Strait, the most daring work of human ingenuity ever conceived. “The strange attractor” destined to generate tens of thousands of jobs, to revive steel, mechanics, construction, chemistry. To bring thousands of travelers to our South to see the sublime symbol of humanity joining, unifying and progressing.
The article The South: Mediterranean bridge comes from TheNewyorker.
