The Italian Legal Order and the Making of a National Cultural Identity

This article explores the variety of regulatory techniques and processes through which the Italian legal order has tried to shape the Italian cultural identity, here meant as the overall set of values, beliefs and traditions through which a plurality of individuals and groups are reciprocally inter-linked in a broader society. Our perspective is mainly historical: we are interested in providing an account of the evolution of the public law instruments used by the Italian political and administrative bodies to shape the national cultural identity in the last fifty years, to identify the forces are work in this process, and to explain its overall dynamics. The historical perspective, however, is used not only to reconstruct the process so far, but also to understand the current situation, which should be seen as only one step of a wider historical process. In addition to this, the historical approach also provides the basis for a prospective reflection on possible future developments. The interpretative key that we propose in this article is that the shaping of the Italian cultural identity in the last fifty years reflects and encapsulates a dialectic between unity and pluralism. The action taken by the Italian political and administrative bodies in a number of relevant policy fields have promoted such dialectic as a fundamental internal tension of the national cultural identity. This is true, for example, of the legal arrangements governing the relationships between central government and local communities, the rules regulating the main cultural activities, the legal regime of the linguistic interactions between the subjects of the legal order, the discipline of the relationships between the Italian culture and the culture of other European countries. The article considers the measures adopted by political and administrative institutions in three different groups of sectors: (i) art, cultural heritage and media; (ii) education; and (iii) language. The study of these sectors shows that the Italian public institutions have been only in part capable of building and shaping a national cultural identity. The cultural identity of the country is partly the product of the measures adopted by public institutions, sometimes conceived as a top-down, even paternalistic project, and partly the product of the free and spontaneous of Italian society. The picture that emerges from our investigation also points to a number of unresolved tensions, that the legal order should recognize and govern, rather than passively accept.