‘Bastion of Italian-ness’: the nationalization of welfare and the changing meaning of rehabilitation in post-war Italy (1945–59)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The article analyses social welfare programmes set up by the Italian state to manage and provide assistance to refugees coming first from Dalmatia, then from Istria and finally by the territories near Trieste, between the immediate post-war period and the late 1950s. It connects the literature on these refugee flows and the historiography of the Italian welfare state by providing new insights into how the recognition of minority rights deeply affected the organization of the social welfare system throughout the 1940s and the 1950s. The article focuses on the shifting meaning of the term ‘rehabilitation’, an outcome of post-war transnational circulations of ideas about the renewal of welfare. It identifies three chronological sections: the aftermath of the war, when social assistance to refugees was organized in Italy in the context of a project to renew the state and its relations with the individual and society; the period after the signing of the Luxembourg Peace Treaty, when in response to the emergency but also out of purely political considerations public authorities significantly changed the guidelines of the entire social welfare system’s development; and finally, the policies set up in the 1950s, which aimed not only at providing stable accommodation for refugees but also at other geopolitical, socio-cultural, social engineering and electoral objectives. Thus, this contribution not only explains how the construction of the welfare state in Italy has been shaped by the problem of refugees, but also shows another side of the same issue: the role of welfare provision in constructing social groups, which in this case took on a strong ethnic and political character.