RISULTATI RICERCA

First came newspapers edited in Western countries, then satellite television: in the last decade the Middle East and the Arab world have witnessed a flowering of news media that transcend national boundaries. The Internet and the new digital age are pushing a step further the movement toward delocalization of media production and distribution. This represents an excellent opportunity for the development of the po-litical and cultural discourse in Arab countries. Here control over the flow of informa-tion is traditionally considered a matter of national security. The commercial and technical structure of the new media is already erasing the possibility of centralized control. The West should consider this development favourably and help it, even if it seems to go against their immediate political interests. Walls are bound to crumble anyway: should they go down with their last advocates.

This short methodological note deals with picture postcards as sources of contemporary history. The author investigates three slightly different cases out of the Italian colonial production which all belong to the same typology of falsification due to the mercenary motives of the publishers. The three examples under exam have in common the captions all asserting a subject other than the one of the picture: street musicians of Tripoli instead of Eritrean musicians; a Libyan girl instead of a Tunisian girl; an Ethiopian medicine-man instead of an old Zulu.

Historical research is not a neutral exercise, but it often answers current political questions and the self-definition of society. Lost wars always generate a special necessity to deal with the motivations of the actors, and the nonsense of mass slaughter. After both World Wars the debate among German historians was influenced by the publication of documents and the discussions on the German guilt for mass destruction, atrocities and after 1945 for Holocaust and genocide. The establishment Western German military historians created and developed a critical military historiography against apologetic writings and army commanders’ memoirs. A political interpretation of World War II as a consequence of Hitler’s war aims and of the Nazi aggressive war strategy created an important basis for Western German society. Military historians rarely dealt with the German occupation policies which became instead a favourite topic for academic research at Universities and Institutes such as the Munich Institut für Zeitgeschichte. After 1989 a major internationalization of research led to a criticism of the Western German military and political historical approach on WW II. This called for a new perspective especially on German perpetrators and bystanders, capable of dealing with the detailed description of the implementation of the Holocaust and of mass slaughter in anti-partisan war and in extermination camps.

This article deals with the two German dictatorships of the 20th Century and their memories. The difficult pasts indicated in the title are two: the memory of German Third Reich, which affected the Germans of the two states founded after the Nazi defeat of 1945; and the memory of the German Democratic Republic, which involved its former citizens after the implosion and the collapse of the Communist regime after 1989. The author compares the two dictatorships and their respective and differentiated collective memories, and their evolution through time. Collective memories are considered for their relevance in the way historical experiences are perceived by people, and therefore for the crucial role they have in history. The author concludes that, although our common identities, responsibilities and capabilities continue to be defined in national terms, research is increasingly shedding light on the transnational dimensions of our pasts: Europe is becoming a reality.

René Rémond’s notion of contemporaneity as a phenomenon linked with the lifetime experience of the last witness of a past event is questioned by the author. He argues that one needs to understand the specific nature of contemporaneity and then identify the major turning points in the period. The author then states that the decline of rural civilization at the mid of the 18th Century is the corner stone of the initial process of modernization. This is the main cause of the end of ten thousand years of rural civilization in our world. If this approach is accepted, then contemporaneity will span two and half centuries, with a likely need of further partitions.

This essay takes into account the attitude of the Italian Catholic world towards the decision to accept the modernization of the nuclear weapons taken by NATO in 1979, and the consequent installation of American nuclear warheads, the so-called euro-missiles, in Comiso, Sicily. The essay is made up of three different levels of analysis: the first level introduces discussions and interpretations that took place within the Italian Catholic world, and the attitude of the two main institutional actors, the Church and the Christian Democratic Party; the second level analyses the cultural aspects of the Catholic tradition and how it influenced the positions related to the issue of war and weapons; the third and last level is the one concerning the political system. The issue of the new missiles became a very important turning point in Italian politics, leading to changes which passed through the different parties and, therefore, gained a systemic dimension.

The Italian Socialist Party represents an anomaly within the European family of Socialism, which, in 1947, at the beginning of the Cold War, made a clear choice for the West. On the contrary, the PSI refused to break the link with the Italian Communist Party, although this loyalty would cause for the rejection from the International Socialist Organization (COMISCO) and the rupture of the Party’s unity. Italian Socialism, divided in two parties (PSI and PSDI), became a weaker political force in the Italian political system, dominated by the Catholics (DC) and Communists’ (PCI) big organizations. At the beginning of the Fifties, and in particular in 1956, in order to regain a central role in the Italian political scene, Pietro Nenni, leader of the PSI, attempted to reach an agreement with Giuseppe Saragat, leader of the Democratic Socialist Party. Based on documents available in international archives such as the International Socialist Organization Archives in Amsterdam and the Archives of the Labour Party in London this essay analyses, step by step, the rupture with the COMISCO (1947-1949) and the attempts to rebuild the unity of the party and to re-enter the ISO (1955-1963).

Amerio si propone con ambiziosa lucidità di esprimere una teoria sociale che ci permetta di interpretare gli eventi, sottraendoli agli sterili cimiteri di dati per consegnarli al confronto fra modelli di lettura. L’autore parte da un’idea del Sé come sistema non solo dotato di stati mentali, ma della capacità e della volontà di agire nel mondo; il mondo fondamentale degli esseri umani è quello sociale, e quindi l’azione chiave da spiegare è quella rivolta non tanto all’ambiente fisico ma verso le persone. La tesi chiave del libro è che occorre riconoscere il senso delle interazioni tra il Sé e l’Altro, essenza costitutiva della soggettività stessa degli esseri umani. Di questa tesi, egli espone coerentemente aspetti centrali e derivati.

Comunità e senso di comunità sono concetti polisemici, che spesso assumono consistenza solo nella declinazione del contesto specifico cui si riferiscono. Il lavoro di ricerca che presentiamo parte: a) dalla consapevolezza che tali concetti, tra loro interrelati, rischiano di essere caricati, nel linguaggio scientifico, di aspetti semantici lontani dal senso ad essi attribuito dalle persone comuni; b) dalla constatazione di una non sempre soddisfacente rilevazione del senso di comunità, costrutto ampiamente utilizzato in psicologia di comunità anche in relazione al tema della partecipazione. La ricerca si pone l’obiettivo di contribuire al dibattito sul significato del termine comunità (e, come derivazione, del senso di comunità) analizzando le rappresentazioni di persone comuni, di cui alcune implicate in diverse forme di azione sociale. 76 persone (45 uomini e 31 donne) residenti a Torino e a Lecce di cui una parte reclutata all’interno di partiti politici, associazioni culturali e di promozione territoriale, gruppi di volontariato sono state intervistate sui significati del termine comunità e su dimensioni ad esso connesse (il senso di appartenenza, la dimensione ideale della comunità, la relazione con il contesto territoriale). I testi derivanti dalla trascrizione delle interviste sono stati sottoposti ad analisi gerarchica discendente e ad analisi delle corrispondenze: i risultati evidenziano che non c’è una grande distanza tra i significati attribuiti al concetto di comunità nelle definizioni teoriche e quelli che emergono nel linguaggio e nell’esperienza comune; essi indicano, tuttavia, nuove e interessanti organizzazioni dei nuclei semantici, anche in relazione al senso di appartenenza dei soggetti alla comunità territoriale ed, in particolare, al loro impegno in diverse forme di azione sociale.