Identity Politics and the Idea of ‘Autonomy Patriotism’ in South Tyrol

Non siate tristi,
continuate in ciò che era giusto.

A NEW STRATEGY OF SOUTH TYROLEAN INTEGRATION POLITICS – FROM ETHNIC AUTONOMY TO ‘AUTONOMY PATRIOTISM’

The recent history of South Tyrol is linked to the Italian state transition from Nazi fascism to the democracy out of which the political recognition of autonomy for minority groups within the nation state represents a specific section.1 Luckily, South Tyrol has not experienced genocide at the hands of dominant surrounding states, yet, within the local German-speaking population there is still the vivid perception of the humiliation perpetrated by the fascists through their program of territorial Italianization based on ‘the options’ [in German: Die Optionen]’. This set of measures issued between 1939 and 1943 obliged both the German-speaking South Tyroleans and the Ladin-speaking language group to either move to the III Reich or to become assimilated Italians.

After the end of the Second World War, three main historical events summarize the process which paved the way to South Tyrolean autonomy: 1) the Paris agreement on Sept. 5th, 1946 provided the initial albeit restrictive basis of the First Autonomy Statute in 1948; 2) the constitutional approval by the Italian state of the 137 laws of the “South Tyrolean Package” in 1972 grounded the Second Statute and assigned legislative as well as administrative powers to the province of Bolzano; and finally, 3) the notification by the Austrian state on June 19th, 1992, to the UN Secretary-General which cemented an official conclusion of the South Tyrolean controversy through the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Even though many more steps have accompanied this relatively long process of community pacification, a striking element for any analyst is how marginal the role occupied by civil society as a distinct subject within the process of autonomy recognition and multiethnic pacification is. Indeed, there are only a handful of cases that can be recalled in this sense, for instance, the popular gathering of thousands of people at the Sigmundskron Castle under the slogan ‘Los von Trient! (Away from Trient!)’ proclaimed by Silvius Magnago in 1957. Yet, all in all, the construction of South Tyrolean autonomy was the result of an elitist mediation of the ethnically majoritarian party: the SVP. Due to a strategy of self-preservation, it followed that ‘a geometric’ dichotomization of the educational, associative and even mass media systems was adopted and that method which had the aim of ‘separating and polarizing’ public opinion, served the function of shielding the autochthonous communities, particularly the South Tyrolean one which was and still is the most numerous and territorially rooted by far.

This strategy, while successful in granting full political recognition to the minority groups, generated both an ideologically polarized public sphere and social instability.

Has enough time passed, and have political conditions improved sufficiently to move forward from this contingently justifiable but now obsolete strategy of community integration? In the following reflections, I attempt to sketch out a few lines of analysis for an alternative politics of minority identity. The proposal I advance will make use of a novel notion I introduce under the label of ‘autonomy patriotism’.

The idea of ‘autonomy patriotism’ applies at the sub-state level. It intersects, with due differences, the Habermasian notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’ as it was advanced at the European level by Habermas in 2011.

The general thesis on ‘autonomy patriotism’ is premised on two basic assumptions: a) a historical and b) a constitutional assumption. According to the historical assumption, the concept of ‘autonomy patriotism’ refers to the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of Trentino and Tyrol in which both regions experienced a growing conscience/understanding of autonomy based solely on the events which transpired in 1948 and 1949. Concerning the constitutional dimension, the parallel that is drawn is with the recent developments of the EU and peoples’ convergence on common constitutional values. In this respect, the aforementioned notion of ‘constitutional patriotism’, which places multicultural pluralism outside the borders of a nation state requires further development at the sub-state level. Constitutional patriotism and communitarian nationalism are two sides of the same coin. They both consider the nation state as ineradicably connected to a monolithic monocultural/mononational identity model.

In order to overcome this limited view on the structural transformations of the nation state and in view of post-national processes of constitutionalization, it is essential to consider the role that autonomy processes, whether they be federal, regional or provincial, are playing in creating a progressively multicultural and even multinational environment at the sub-state level. The recognition of the sub-state form of cultural and institutional pluralism can be the only guarantee of a socially and politically embedded form of post-national European cosmopolitanism.

So far, I have shown how on the basis of a requirement of democratic legitimacy, it is essential to move from a politics of ethnicity towards a politics of sub-national autonomy. In view of this goal, I have referred to the historical roots of this notion as embedded in post-Imperial Austria, particularly those of its South-Tyrolean communities. The next step is to develop the aforementioned constitutional thesis for sub-national autonomy and to clarify the significance of the idea of ‘autonomy patriotism’.

AUTONOMY PATRIOTISM IN SOUTH TYROL:
TOWARDS A THIRD AUTONOMY STATUTE

As already introduced, the idea of autonomy patriotism relies on both a historical and a constitutional thesis. Under this heading, I expand on the significance of the constitutional thesis in regard to a sub-national form of civic solidarity. There are two meanings that can be assigned to the dimension of a constitutional standard: the first concerns the strictly legal aspect of constitutional autonomy, that is, the framing of sub-national autonomy within a constitutional design; the second regards the political significance of constitutional autonomy. As far as the first element is concerned, it can be claimed that South Tyrolean autonomy has already received consideration at the constitutional level, that is, as a section incorporated within the Italian Constitution. South Tyrolean autonomy is explicitly recognized in Title V, art. 116 of the Italian Constitution which, among other things, makes the conditions for autonomy of special statutes by constitutional law explicit (in the case of Trentino-Alto Adige/Südtirol the reference is made to the constitutional law of 26 February 1948, n. 5, and D.P.R. 31 August 1972, n. 670, modified by G.U. 26 Sept. 1993, n. 226).

From a socio-political perspective, the realization of the second condition is a more complex task. To begin with, multinational state identities, in order to develop a sentiment of commonality and institutional self-identification, should perceive local institutions as politically representative of all electoral bodies and residents. Accordingly, what appears as crucial in order to proceed in such direction is the activation of a process of de-ethnicization of party politics and party-candidate selection through, for instance, the removal of the requirement of ethnic declaration from party statutes (as in the case of the Südtiroler Volkspartei, the major party in South Tyrol).

Obviously, this process cannot take place if forms of interethnic and intercommunity trust are not prompted beforehand. Indeed, the activation of channels of public reasonability would allow groups to advance their critical perspectives on historical responsibilities, as well as promote forward-looking reconstructive approaches. This seems appropriate in order to open a new phase of reconciliation throughout civil society that would also contribute to the reshaping of the political consociative model adopted thus far. The immediate effect of this policy strategy – even in the hypothesis of a maintenance of the law on ethnic proportionality (Law of Proportionality/Proporz) – would certainly cause a qualitative revision of the legitimacy of political decisions, through the fulfillment of a counterfactual test for which: ‘only those political decisions taken in the interest of the local political community as a whole can be considered as valid’.

This last point shows how a strict correlation between the previously anticipated historical thesis and the constitutional thesis subsists, in that only based on a historical remedy and a redefinition of a fragmented public sphere along ethnic lines, is it possible to proceed to a complete political reformation.

It is true that the social context in the period considered was formed by a large primary sector – that of the German speaking South Tyrolean community, and that the growing secondary sector concentrated on heavy industry – both for the Italian and non-Italian immigrants. This meant that the degree of local education, as in many other post-war contexts, was exceptionally low and not very receptive of active engagement in the political debate. The transition from post-fascist Italy to the recognition of South Tyrolean autonomy was thus a process mediated essentially and exclusively by political elites on both sides.

All these considerations suffice to explain the limits we are facing nowadays. Even with its imperfections, it is undeniable that the autonomy process in South Tyrol has made noteworthy progress since the Paris Agreements in 1946 and the First Autonomy Statute of 1948. Progression has been possible not only because of the Second Statute’s newly formed recognition of provincial autonomy throughout South Tyrolean civil society rather than a regional one, but also because in addition to administrative powers, it was assigned with legislative competences. The rejoining of the historical and constitutional thesis lies precisely at the intersection of social change and post-ethnic patterns of reasoning. From this shift, the concrete possibility of a new civic and institutional conscience is emerging which can now and finally be imagined.

Finally, the idea of autonomy patriotism in the case of South Tyrol can be understood comparatively in reference to the notion of the constitutional patriotism suggested at EU level. The main divergence between the two notions can be grasped by the inverse proportional weight that universalism of human rights and active democratic engagement receive, respectively, in the local and European dimension. This means that in comparison, the notion of solidarity is constructed by assigning an extensive role to active democratic engagement at the local level and to a right-based solidarity at the EU level. These different proportions of active power exercise and rights solidarity are also paralleled by the progressive and decreasing relevance of the territorial-centered vs territorial-dispersed power sharing as shown in the table below:

Table 1

These categories require some clarification. First, the expression ‘active democratic involvement’ implies that citizen are able to participate more directly in the institutional level of decision-making should they choose to.2 This is not to deny that the form of constitutional patriotism envisaged at the EU level, also asks for civil-political engagement, however, the differencies, that sub-national forms of autonomy patriotism would allow for a wider spectrum of directly participatory and deliberative forms. Deliberative tools organized in view of discussion-tables, polls or other forms of consultation improve not just the participatory aspect of small-scale regions but also the qualitative outcome of policy resolutions. Accordingly, deliberation exhibits an epistemic function, that is, it provides a privileged tool for the exchange of varied reasons and improvement of the quality of the arguments while simultaneously providing a democratic legitimization of political choices. The increase in the exercise of democratic power at the local level is significant only as far as political control over the territory is granted, that is, only in as much as a strong form of autonomy is provided through the delegation by the central government in ever more areas of competence.

As suggested above in Table 1, this process could only be put into effect if stronger territorial control at the local level is compensated by a parallel implementation of non-ethnic and non-discriminatory policies – such as those based on the Law of Proportionality (Proporz). In other words, the increase of power-conferral from the central state to the local level must be accompanied by compliance with human rights standards set both at the state and the European level. Autonomy patriotism, therefore, does not need to be based on an idiosyncratic charter of human rights that in an ideal world, would provide extra normative criteria to national, European, and International human rights charters. Accordingly, while it might be important to charter principles of cooperation between different ethnicities in view of overcoming ethnocentric politics, it does not follow that a further bill of rights would serve the purpose of meaningfully integrating pre-existing national and international standards as a result. This further dimension of different balances of rights and power-checks, also contributes to the clarification of how local, state and EU levels mutually integrate through extensive application of the EU principle of subsidiarity. Finally and in contrast to the EU’s territorial construction, which was not based on a predefined enlargement design, the territorial identification of the South Tyrolean area has never been an issue of significant debate.

The picture just described does not aim at being exhaustive but only to suggest some lines of thought for further reflection. The model of autonomy patriotism falls within the view of a cosmopolitan theory of rights and democracy. Inclusion beyond ethnic lines is a necessary step forward in the socio-political stabilization of South Tyrol and – paraphrasing Rawls – the only way to realize inter-communities’ justice as a form of “realistic utopia” (Rawls 2001).

REFERENCES

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1 The paper is an extensively revised version of Corradetti (2013b).

2 On the importance of strengthening the participatory aspect within civil society as well as of pushing for a relativization of minority/majority positions see Marko (2008).