American History: The View from Italy

Abstract

Each time the subject arises of relations between Italy and the United States, 1945 is inevitably seen as a watershed. It is since that date that American influence in Italy has become decisive, initially in military and affairs, and then more gradually in cultural matters and lifestyles. This does not mean that the United States was totally absent from the Italian scene up until 1945. American presence and influence, however, were indirect and made themselves felt in the guise of a political myth or of a 'social myth. Ever since the end of the eighteenth century, the United States has represented diversity and to some extent has appeared as a challenge to Italian society. The American system, for example, exercised a strong, albeit subterranean, influence during the decades of struggle that led to the unification of Italy. Both the federal structure and the democratic features of the United States provided topics of discussion for Italian patriots who sought to form a united country from a group of previously existing states.1 Discussion of the United States, however, was generally based on superficial knowledge the Milanese patriot Carlo Cattaneo was the exception that proves the rule and, as a result, American influence had only an ideological and mythical quality. After the unification of Italy in 1860, social, political, and intellectual elites in Italy showed little interest in the United States, considering it to be a peripheral and uninfluential nation. This attitude even survived the wave of emigration to America and United States intervention in the First World War. The official ideology of liberalism until World War I, and subsequently that of the Fascist regime, viewed American democracy with a mixture of suspicion, loathing, and haughtiness, judging it to lack tradition as well as any adequate theoretical framework capable of guiding its actions. Italian culture, struggling to accomplish rapid modernization therefore turned with growing interest to Germany, and to a lesser extent to France, quite immune to the attraction of the American model. Naturally, this situation was reflected in the field of historical studies. After the famous works by Carlo Botta and Francesco Compagnoni 2written at the beginning of the nineteenth century in a and intellectual climate characterized by the first stirrings of the Risorgimento American history was largely neglected. Academic historiography, brought into being following the unification of Italy, adopted a markedly Eurocentric outlook and