RISULTATI RICERCA

This article presents the findings of a research project on the experiences of negotiated planning in the Puglia region. A questionnaire has been used to gather data with 171 entrepreneurs that participated in the Pacts of Lecce, Nord Barese Ofantino and Polis. The aim is to analyse whether and in what ways negotiated policies have managed to start an effective learning process that implied new economic strategies and actions from the actors involved. Specifically, on the basis of statistical analyses, the article seeks to verify whether participation to the Pacts has had some effects on entrepreneurs’ relational and cooperation abilities.

The article deals with the role of regional development agencies. The author identifies two idealtypes of agency: the first one aims at attracting direct investments via financial incentives and the second focuses on the provision of local competition goods and of external economies. Looking at some empirical cases, the author underlines that both types of agencies can trigger local economic development. At the same time, looking at them more in details advantages and shortcomings of each models emerge. Finally, the possible role of this kind of organization in promoting socio-economic development of the Italian Mezzogiorno is taken into account.

However decisive the role of regional governments in local development policies has tended to become in recent times, it is still quite conditioned by the central government. Yet, regional governments have considerably extended their influence in overlooking the Territorial Pacts a major local development measure. This marks a return to a strategic thinking in planning regional local development. Based on the results of a field research, the paper highlights a number of key factors influencing the future development of regional development polices. At the present, many pacts and other relevant initiatives related to local development are characterized by a lack of coordination: very little coordination exists between European and national funding; a large number of organizations operating at the regional level have little or no contact with each other; it is not at all clear how to accompany the transition from the phase of the so-called ‘concertation’ to the constitution of a ‘local agency’ in charge of coordinating and implementing the pacts. Finally, whether and how the regional governments will be able to undertake cohesive actions within commonly shared development plans and policies remains an open question.

Research concerning the development of Southern Italy is often policy oriented. By referring to Max Weber, the author asserts that this is not necessarily a weakness, provided that such an orientation is transparent (in the sense that there is an explicit comparison between various policy options) and conditional (in the sense that the analyst does not question the ends, but rather explores the appropriateness of the means). Some recent contributions tend to overlook that a Mezzogiorno syndrome is still present. The author mentions two features of such a syndrome: weak legality and dependence. Weak legality refers to the unreliability of public rules and institutions, which hinders development because it distorts medium term economic calculations. Dependence refers to the pervasiveness of the public sector and to the fact that in Southern Italy very often the life chances of social and economic actors depend on the political elite and civil servants. According to the author, in such a context local agents can seldom be the crucial forces of growth. Therefore, an exogenous leverage of socioeconomic change looks more promising.

The article discusses the relevance of policies of local development, starting from the evidence that processes of globalisation have been accompanied by parallel processes of economic regionalisation. The article contends that policies supporting territorial development can have a twofold role. First, they can favour local economic potentialities in the light of wider economic dynamics. Second, local development policies can promote social cohesion through the valorisation of resources that exist locally but are not fully exploited. The fundamental aim for policy should be the production of local public goods.

How to evaluate local development policies? The author presents a critical analysis of the recent experience with negotiated and integrated policies in the Ob. 1 Regions. A central theme for special consideration is the relationship between local growth strategies and the territory as a common pool resource. An articulated set of criteria for evaluating local development policies is presented. Some tentative hypotheses for a more integrated approach and for the revision of current approaches are discussed.

As it is known since long, firms’ framework conditions (external economies and diseconomies) strongly influence their competitiveness.The average firms’ dimension and the strong and rooted territorial diversity make the presence of external economies and diseconomies significantly important in Italy, a country which is losing competitiveness in the last years. To strengthen its competitiveness, Italy needs correct macroeconomic policies, a proper regulation (liberalization and market reforms) and the generation of new external economies for firms. Some external economies depend on national policies while others depend on territorial ones; consequently, good territorial development policies are essential for Italy’s competitiveness raising. Starting from this point, this article tries to examine new territorial policies which are the result of a huge debate on the regional policies (implemented since the second half of the last century, in Italy and other European countries), on their varying effects in time and space and on the growing cultural and political opposition to them, in the nineties. Actually, the new policies are based on the definition of territorial development programs at sub-regional level. Consequently, the paper suggest that nowadays it may be better to substitute the term regional policy with territorial development policies, whose implementation has brought significant results, both in Italy and other European countries. However, good territorial development policies need to be intended not only as local matter but supported by a strong and coherent national policy.

Scientific and the professional communities working on local development are apparently in very good health: a regular flow of publications is coming out, meetings and public initiatives on topics under this label are well attended. There are however, among professionals and students of local development, clear signs of discontent and frustration concerning both the performance of local systems (starting from industrial districts) and the results of institutional innovations (e.g. territorial pacts) that have recently characterized the Italian and European model of local governance. Economic performance and cooperative governance, once the strenghts of local government’s paradigm, are possibly becoming its weak points. Emerging responses take increasingly the form of neo-centralistic resort to the state, more rarely to Europe. Interesting innovations are however proposed, concerning both the economics of local systems (e.g. cluster policies) and their politics (e.g. new forms of concertation such as urban strategic planning). In order to evaluate both the coming crisis and its remedies, the author suggests more accuracy in the definition and use of concepts and analytical categories, and closer attention to the factors of organizational isomorphism.

In the last decade the Union European policies devoted a growing interest for local development promoted by civil society. Based on dense social networks, the so called local initiatives shape a public space of proximity which can be seen as an example of local democracy carried out by means of economic activities. In order to be effective, local initiatives ask for a definition of suitable game rules with regard to local partnership, investments, training, institutional and financial support. The forms of Institutionalisation of local initiatives are also discussed.

Some economists argue for the demise of local development and the policies to promote it in Southern Italy. They also claim a return in this area to a centralized system of regulation of economic activities. Nevertheless, the pattern of local development is still topical on academic and policy agendas since it is fostered by the economic transformations (the growth of territorial productive systems) and socio-cultural changes (the growth of intermediate institutions) occurred in the Mezzogiorno in the last two decades. Such pattern is also sustained by the process of globalization which reinforces, instead of devaluating, the role of localities. This does not necessarily mean that national development policies are useless. Rather, their effectiveness might be compromised if they remain confined to the economic dimension and short term perspectives and if they are not tailored to the features of southern society.

For most scholars of contemporary Italy, the term ente pubblico (roughly comparable to Britain’s ‘agencies’) includes only the biggest agencies set up by the Fascist regime: national insurance bodies and state holding companies. Nevertheless, starting from the first years of the past century until the Eighties, the Italian state acknowledged more than 45.000 enti which were active in almost every economic or social field. This essay, after attempting to explain the reason for this lack of memory, focuses on the para-state in two Italian regions, Emilia-Romagna e Puglia. From 1861 to 1978 Emilia-Romagna had 2454 public agencies, Puglia 1551. Their allocation in the different lines of business, the relationship between their growth and that of population, the set of years more meaningful for their birth or suppression, their territorial distribution (with regard to town-country relationship): these are the data analysed in the article. All of them allow to enlarge our knowledge of the Italian social history, and to better understand how the economic and social question of Southern Italy arose.

Hezbollah is a word with many meanings but mainly it refers to the Lebanese Shiite movement, born as a reaction to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. Paradoxically the Shiite minority received the Israeli Army as a liberating force from the OLP Muslim Sunni oppression in the area, but rapidly, pushed by the clerical Shiite Government in Iran, they became the most extremist and terrorist group opposing Israel in the area. Hezbollah used suicide attacks and various terrorist instrument reaching important military and political results against Western and Israeli forces in Lebanon. However in the Nineties the movement evolved into a specialised guerrilla group, restraining area and instrument of action to fighting Israeli army in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah developed also an extensive social and political activity. Iran money facilitated this evolution, but mainly the Syrians transformed them into a disciplined and so efficient military instrument that the Israeli Government finally decided to retreat from Lebanon in 2000. At present the movement maintains its military militia, but it is fundamentally a powerful, indispensable Government party in the new Lebanon, independent from Syria. The Italians as part of the multinational forces in Lebanon operated in the Muslim area in the Eighties. Since then they maintained some relations with Hezbollah.

The essay looks at the repercussions of the end of the Cold War on Italy’s domestic politics and foreign policy, criticising the stereotype of an internal political system heavily conditioned by the international one. Refusing this assumption, the author argues that the basic continuity of the Italian domestic system is above all the result of the country’s internal balance of power, upon which international influences have only a limited impact mostly when the internal elites decide to use them to reinforce their position. The essay then describes the evolution of Italian politics since the mid 1970s by exploring the interplay between the country’s three main political forces, the DC, the PCI and the PSI. Faced with an apparently insoluble stalemate between a declining DC and a PCI which could not force itself to break free from its original ideological attachment to the USSR, the Socialist party tried to revolutionize the essential bipolarism of Italian politics by becoming a third dominant force a project which ran into the opposition of the two other major parties and was therefore almost doomed from the start. The resulting failure to renew the structural flaws of the domestic political system entailed its total collapse in the early 1990s, making it more difficult for Italy to grasp the opportunities offered to its foreign policy by the end of the Cold War. In the last part of the essay, the author looks at the structural interests of Italian foreign policy in the post-Cold war era, stressing their continuity from the Middle East to the Balkans with some of its basic outlines since the unification of the country.

This work deals with the organization of aid committees on behalf of Soviet political prisoners in the 1920s. After a brief overview of the main groups operating on the Soviet territory, it focuses on the relief activities of Russian émigrés in Paris and Berlin. There, various political Red Crosses attempted to arouse European public opinion on the horrors of the Red Terror. They also asked European and American workers to show socialist solidarity to their imprisoned comrades. At the hand of two specific organizations of Berlin émigrés, the Aid Society for Political Prisoners and Exiles in Russia and the United Committee on behalf of Imprisoned Revolutionaries in Russia, this works explores the principles of solidarity towards political prisoners in the 1920s, as well as some issues related to Russian political emigration in Berlin.

The author polemizes with the definition of contemporary history given by René Rémond in the first number 2005 of «Mondo Contemporaneo». He argues that the word «contemporary», from a formal point of view, is nearly synonymous of the word «modern» and that Rémond’s idea of contemporary history as a mobile frontier until protagonists and witnesses survive, put the historian in a very drastic perspective of research. In fact it cuts off or it reduces the possibilities of looking deeper in the past to better understand the present. On the contrary contemporary history must be studied with broad horizons because actual issues are always interlinked with the past and we need a perspective able to connect them to it.

The author deals with the concept of modern history and agrees with its definition and use given by the Anglo-Saxon and German historiography. Therefore we may distinguish between an early modern history which consists in the shaping of modern world, and the late modern history with the rise of the market, of the State and of liberalism and democracy. He argues that modern history is essentially European history which is now over. The role of Europe in modern history is a matter of fact, and it has nothing to do with any idea of European or Western superiority. In fact Prodi underlines how Europe in the XV century was a sort of appendix of Asia. He thinks that modern history can be considered the age of the paper, which for historians it means written documents and archives. The computer might be the tool of the new frontier of history, the contemporary history. He argues then with the American information scientist Nicholas Negroponte who said «I have always hated history. It is a useless and heavy burden». The author finally emphasizes the role of history in our telematic society arguing that historical knowledge is essential to understand what luggage we go with in the globalized world.

The article examines Italy’s relations with the Palestinian Arabs from the mid-1930’s until Italy joined World War II, placing them within the wider context of the Fascist regime’s policy towards the Muslim world and of the Anglo-Italian rivalry in the Middle East following the Ethiopian Crisis. A central part of the article is dedicated to the Italian involvement in the Arab revolt in Palestine (1936-1939), providing an analysis of Italian political maneuvers, of the regime’s pro-Arab propaganda, of the mechanism by which financial assistance was given to the leaders of the Palestinian Arabs and the failed attempts to supply them with arms. The article shows that Italian policy towards the Palestinian Arabs was more coherent than is commonly thought. It claims that Italian policy was motivated by two main interests: 1) exerting pressure on Great Britain (the Mandatory power in Palestine), forcing it to recognize Italy’s African Empire; 2) increasing Italy’s political, economic and cultural penetration into Palestine.