In this episode of International Horizons, RBI director John Torpey interviews Marla Stone, a historian of Italian fascism at Occidental College, on the resurgence of the far right in Italy. The conversation delves into the origins of this resurgence and how Italy, a fairly homogeneous society, became a recipient of hundreds of thousand migrants, altering the perceptions of threat on Italian citizens that have been successfully instrumentalized by political movements to bring Giorgia Meloni to power. Prof. Stone also discusses the waning of the Italian left, but sees an optimistic future as an increasing number of Italians are promoting diversity.

John Torpey 

It’s a major understatement to say that there’s a great deal of concern in many parts of the world regarding the threat of authoritarian rule, and the deterioration of support for liberal procedures and democratic values. Those concerns were very much in evidence in advance of the most recent Italian Prime Minister election, which brought to the Prime Minister’s Office a strident conservative and opponent of European unification in Italy, namely Giorgia Meloni. And of course, these fears are rife in the contemporary United States, where it seems as though the Supreme Court is perhaps seemingly likely to reject the authority of states of federal states to remove Donald Trump from the ballot on account of his role in the chaos of January 6 2021, when various forces sought to forestall the legal transfer of power, and to keep Trump in office, despite the fact that he had lost the 2020 election.  My name is John Torpey, and I’m director of the Ralph Bunche. Institute for International Studies at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Welcome to International Horizons, a podcast of the Ralph Bunche institute that brings scholarly and diplomatic expertise to bear on our understanding of a wide range of international issues.  We’re fortunate to have with us today Professor Marla Stone of Occidental College in Los Angeles, where she has just returned after three years as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities at the American Academy in Rome.  A specialist in the history of fascism and in questions of dictatorship and genocide in the modern era, her work emphasizes the relationships among culture, politics, and the state in the 20th century.  Professor Stone is the author of The Fascist Revolution: Society, Politics and Culture in Mussolini’s Italy (Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2012) and of The Patron State: Culture and Politics in Fascist Italy (Princeton University Press, 1998), which was awarded the Howard Marraro prize for best book in Italian history by the Society for Italian Historical Studies in 2000.  She is currently finishing a book-length study of the role of anti-Communism in 20th-century Italian politics titled The Enemy: The Politics and Propaganda of Anti-Communism in Italy. Full disclosure: she and I authored a piece in Huffington Post a number of years ago likening Donald Trump to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s recently deceased billionaire populist prime minister.  Thanks for being with us, Marla Stone.

Marla Stone 

Thank you, John, thank you for that lovely introduction.

John Torpey 

So I mean, it’s fantastic to have somebody who’s just spent so much time in Italy and been there basically, through this election, and through the ascendance of the Prime Minister to that office. And so I’m very curious. You had a kind of a ringside seat for the ascendance of this political movement that brothers of Utah out of Italy, the Fratelli D’Italia, that basically openly professed and embraced its ties to his historical fascism. So I’m very curious how’s it going in Italy, under those auspices?

Marla Stone 

Oh, thank you, John. It’s a it’s a great question. I think the best way to think about it is almost in layers, or levels. So when Giorgia Maloni’s party Fratelli D’Italia won 28% of the vote in the parliamentary elections of September 2023, there was certainly a ripple of fear that went through the center. And really what remains of the left in Italy to this day, and people were having visions and fears of a return to sort of historic classical fascism because we have to be honest Fratelli D’Italia is an inheritor party of the MSI Movimento Sociale Italiano, The Italian social movement, which after World War Two, when Fascist Party was banned, saw itself very clearly as the inheritor party and Brothers of Italy. Maloni’s party is still used as a symbol of the flame, La Fiamma, the tricolour flame so they are proud of that lineage. And it was terrifying to many people, and she got into office and so far, in many ways, it has been a normal parliamentary government. And then in others, there has been this awareness of the fascist passing of her nationalist populist agenda. So certainly in terms of foreign policy, she is presenting herself and her party as a traditional conservative party.  She has pivoted on her position on Ukraine, supporting aid to Ukraine, celebrating the the Ukrainian state, and the like. And I think what’s behind that actually, is less Ukraine than she has taken on the mantle. And this is also true. In some meetings with China and some of the relationship with African countries: There’s a long term feeling in Italy, this goes back to the 19 century, of not being taken seriously as a great power as a player in the international community. And so she’s playing that card, a little bit of the strong man, a little bit of the nationalist who’s going to make the other countries take Italy seriously. And she can lead this kind of coalition of right wing parties and governments in Europe, in terms of foreign policy. So that part, I don’t think has been a huge shift, or huge surprise, and in a lot of a lot of economic policy, she has not surprised anybody. In fact, she is a protector of the of the social state of the welfare state.  And I think it’s important… I talk to my students a lot about this. And I think it’s important for listeners on your podcast to realize that these European nationalist, populist liberal parties, by and large support the welfare state that this is what historic fascism in Europe was. So one of the first thing she did is called for an increase in the pensions for retired people. And, of course, it makes a great contrast to the American far right, in which you get primarily sort of hatred and resentment, and anger towards the state.

John Torpey 

Yeah, but not exactly to Trump. I mean, Trump is not a traditional conservative, and certainly not a traditional Republican in the sense that he was a defender of Social Security and Medicare. And so one of the things the traditional Republican establishment has not been very enthusiastic about. So that’s part of I think, is appealed to working class people. I mean, whatever else you might want to say about him, part of the reason that they embraced him, I think, is that he came out right away in the early stages of the 2016 campaign saying he was not going to cut Social Security and Medicare.

Marla Stone 

That’s true, he’s not running on that. Now. It’s much more pivoted to the border. But anyway, the point being that, so in domestic politics, she’s protecting the social state. Now, the shifts where it’s clearly a right wing government is, I would say, in two areas, certainly culture wars, and immigration policy. She is very much seeing herself as wanting to crack down sees immigration as a threat. So she ran her famous speech, “I am Giorgia, I am Italian, I am Catholic, I am a woman.” So she is the discourse of protecting traditional culture and society is there and then attaches to her anti immigrant politics. So she has promoted and gotten passed laws, cracking down on NGOs on the rescue boats in the Mediterranean, instead of being able to float in the Mediterranean looking for ships in trouble, they can take one ship and then they have to go to a farther port. They can’t go back to Sicily. So she’s criminalizing NGOs if they have any infraction, and then she’s beginning to talk about this is the thing perhaps I find most frightening: an American model of immigrant detention. She wants to start using immigrant prisons and deportations without due process. According to immigration policy in the EU, you cannot lock in migrants. So the welcome centers are open and people can go into the local town. She would like to put an end to that and have it be much more like American immigrant prisons.  So we see the the far right imprint, certainly in immigration policy, and then culture wars, she has been replacing museum directors. She has been replacing Opera House Director, so getting at this kind of cultural left enemy. So this is a standard play across the board from Hungary to the United States that culture has been infected by a kind of “woke society”. Part of her… the culture wars, she’s anti gay, she’s anti surrogacy, she calls for traditional Italian support for the traditional Italian family, which is, of course, again, like Trump very ironic, because she’s not in a traditional Italian family by any means and her boyfriend got into all kinds of trouble and misbehavior. But so I think thinking about it on levels is really important and that she’s playing mostly the social and cultural game in terms of foreign politics. Now, also, we do have to keep in mind though, she’s been strategic so she can present herself as a traditional politician, but she has people in her cabinet like La Russa, the interior minister, who is an explicit far right extremist. On April 25, is the day of the liberation the day in which Mussolini was killed and fascism ended, April 25, 1945, is a holiday in Italy less so every year. And he was interviewed on Giorno della Liberazione asked if he was an anti fascist. And he didn’t really answer it, right. He couldn’t say he was an anti fascist. And he has said all kinds of fascist like things.

John Torpey 

But I mean the usefulness of the fascism label is I think something that really needs some discussion. And became I think, in American Left discourse, just this label for anything you kind of didn’t like that was from the right. But historically, as you well know, it meant something very distinctive and very disruptive. But it came out of a situation of the world of the First World War. And there was a lot of stuff about fascism and national socialism that had to do with violence. So, I mean, okay, this guy hems and haws about whether he’s a fascist or an anti fascist, but is anybody recommending that we go beat up certain kinds of people in the society as they did in the 1920s?

Marla Stone 

Well, that’s a great question. So no, nobody in the government is saying that, but there are links between Brothers of Italy and far right extremist violent groups. So Italy did have its January 6, they had it on September 6 (after January 6) in which cause a pound and various neo Nazi groups attacked the main union headquarters, the largest union had and has its national headquarters in Rome, and they attack the building, set it on fire. Some of them were wearing costumes, very similar to the January 6 insurrection is one of them had one of those hats with horns on so they and that I think is really interesting phenomenon is kind of transnational, extreme right, that they were trying to copy what they had seen on TV of, of the insurrection in the Capitol. So they’re there, that group is there and like Trump’s, I think Maloni, and certainly La Russa’s relationship to those groups are similar to Trump’s relationship to those groups. They’re there, they disavow them, but they have a connection to them.

John Torpey 

So tell us more about how did the Italians think about Trump? I mean, when we were writing our piece on Berlusconi, I mean, I don’t know, that Berlusconi was any great big fan of Trump’s. I recall partially Trump was too borish and more outrageously anti feminist or whatever you want to call it than, than he would then Berlusconi.

Marla Stone 

That’s hard to believe Berlusconi, parties, and his…

John Torpey 

Well of course, but it was all was all in good fun with him. I mean, with Trump, there was always abuse of women involved and that sort of thing. So it’s a very different kind of sensibility. It seems to me, I mean, for for Berlusconi was it’s fun. Sure, let’s import these 18 year old women to parties and pay them whatever we paid them and have fun with them. But Trump wasn’t getting away with anything like that. I mean, was much more, much more nasty and mean spirited. Really.

Marla Stone 

Yeah, the we don’t find that out, till, later. But But yeah, I don’t know. I still think Trump and Berlusconi have have a lot in common, though. Interesting. I have shifted. I remember when you did an event right after Trump was elected and is Trump a fascist? And we all say Well, no, not quite. He doesn’t have an arm movement. You know, he’s not advocating violence and all of these things. And he wasn’t at that point advocating, you know, as he’s saying, now, he’ll be a dictator for one day, and we’re not advocating any anti constitutional moves. I think now he’s moved much closer to wanting to amend or abrogate the Constitution. For sure. In terms of Italian thinking about Trump, you know, it’s hard to say I met a cross section of Italians who think so many things about American politics are absurd. I mean, the main thing that they they talk about, and that made me think about, see America in a different way, is the gun situation, you know, Italian will really sincerely ask, why is it people go into schools in America and shoot at school children? They can’t figure it out? And then why don’t you do something about why don’t you ban? Why are there weapons of war, you know, for sale in American cities?  That’s the thing that’s most shocking to them. I think they’re scared of Trump that what Trump could do to destabilize for sure, for sure, I think at times are very worried about the political future, on a lot of levels. And and you know, the time economy is quite stagnant salaries are very compressed, Meloni wants to raise the pension, the pension payments are very, very shockingly low. I think that’s the main issue. Confronting Italians right now is cost of living.

John Torpey 

And old age, that is the demographic situation, which is not very optimistic for the older Italian population, because there simply aren’t enough younger people to support it. This dependency ratio is just very doesn’t look good for older people. But of course, you know, people keep bringing up that one way to resolve kind of problem with the with the fertility rates of dependency ratios is to let in more immigrants. But that doesn’t seem like the kind of response that you’re getting from Giorgia Meloni. So talk a little bit about her view of these problems. I mean, you’ve said she’s very punitive, basically, in orientation, and I guess plans to throw a lot of people out if she gets the chance, just as Trump has said he will do. But we’re in a somewhat better situation when it comes to immigration and fertility rates. But you know, is Italy going to survive? I mean, it’s eternal city going to survive?

Marla Stone 

Well, it will survive, it will be quite different. And you’re right, that the birth rate is below replacement. There is a need for a bigger workforce. There’s absolutely and as you right, as you say, to support the social state, you need more people? Well, this is where, where the racism and prejudice and it is there an Italian culture across the political spectrum. You know, there’s it has been a white homogenous country for a very long time. And it has been a struggle for Italians to think about a multiracial democracy. And they’re, they’re quite far from it at this point. And then the contradiction between, you know, a Maloni wants to pass subsidies, or has passed subsidies for Italians that have more children, but doesn’t want to increase immigration and allow people to come and work in Italy. So it’s Yeah, I think there’s there’s a racism attached to that for sure. But the Eternal City will survive and given conditions in America, more and more Americans are coming to live in Rome. Rome is still cost of living wise, much less than Berlin or Paris. So there’s certainly a growing expat community in Rome. Rome is also becoming much more of a tourist center than it used to be, it’s becoming more more like Venice. But so you’ll get this increasingly in cities like Rome, Florence and Venice, Italians don’t live in the center. The center is this kind of precious, tourist, almost Disneyland type place with pizza shops and ice cream shops.

John Torpey 

Right, I’ve heard about that. As you know, I have a daughter who has spent some time being a tourist. And I don’t think there was any ice cream left after she left town. But I’m sort of curious, I guess I have this, you know, sort of optimistic reading of the Catholic Church here in one respect, which is that the Catholic Church historically, was essentially a reflex of the Roman imperial bureaucracy. Right, it’s built along the same lines, and it had this universalistic kind of claim. And I mean, all roads lead to Rome and there was a kind of idea of citizenship after the Edict of Caracalla, if I recall, correctly.

Marla Stone 

Oh, good Roman history.

John Torpey 

And yeah, everybody within the Roman defense perimeter was a citizen, and was to be protected by and I mean, Pope Francis is, was selected, it’s my think generally thought to, because the future of the Catholic Church is really in the what we used to call the Third World. So I’m just curious, we used to talk about Italy, is this country with two churches, right, the Catholic and the Communist. And, you know, both of those were anti racist kind of forces, it seems to me, Does that have any impact? Does that make a difference that Francis is purely an anti racist?

Marla Stone 

Well, the the Communist church is gone, completely disappeared and that is part of the problem. There is no real left. Matteo Renzi took the Democratic Party into a kind of Clintonian party and that space on the left disappeared. And, like in the United States, a lot of working class Italians moved to the populist right. Either the Five Star Movement, the Salvini, the League Movement, moved finally to Brothers of Italy. So you have the disappearance of this key element of identity and worldview in Italy. And I think that has had a huge political impact.  In terms of racism, yeah, Pope Francis is an anti racist and wants to open the church in a lot of ways. But he’s not Italian. Right. And there are a lot of people in the church and also outside the church that are not completely on board with him. And in terms of how to describe Italian racism, it’s all I almost call it under exposed racism, that Italians have lived in this homogenous society for so long that they say things and think things that they think are not offensive, that they think they’re just observing. Things that would be found very offensive in the United States. There needs to be a way to kind of introduce the Italians to the idea of diversity. They’re very long way far away from it.

John Torpey 

Well, that’s interesting. I mean, of course, I’m sure it’s true. You’re right. And I can remember seeing a guy who looked as though he was from Sub Saharan Africa on, I think that was on Sicily, 25 years ago, or something, I thought, What is this guy doing here? He was trying to sell little packets of tissues and things like that, I thought, “How is this guy going to survive?” But in any case, I mean, what you’re describing is true in the relatively recent past, but proposed the issue of the Roman Empire. I mean, Augustine of Hippo was from what is today Tunisia, if I recall correctly, and so it was a big place with a lot of people who look presumably very different. I mean, does that how did that legacy…

Marla Stone 

I think there are lots of legacies that have come since then, and but let’s not romanticize the Roman Empire, most of the most inhabitants of the Roman Empire were slaves. So it was a deeply hierarchical society. Yes, the division was not by ethnicity, necessarily, but it was certainly by social status. And I think..

John Torpey 

It’s not my purpose to romanticize the Romans, just to try to get a sense of what was what has happened.

Marla Stone 

But what has happened in between, you know, the creation of the Italian nation state in the 1860s, the attempts at imperialism at the end of the 19th century, another failed attempt at colonies under fascism. So, a tiny experience of other people’s and of immigration has been quite limited, right? You know, that the colonies were quite small. Certainly, there was interaction between the Metropole and Libya, and Ethiopia. And there are Italians of Ethiopian descent as Libyan descent, for sure. But in the 1950s, in Libya, Italian citizens were thrown out. So you know, the connection to Libya now is really just an economic and political one.

John Torpey 

Right. So okay, so more on contemporary issues. I am curious, you said a little bit about this, but I’d be curious if you could say a little more about Meloni’s transformation in regard to the issue of the invasion of Ukraine. She had before the election she had been kind of grow Russian, whatever exactly, that means. But, you know, not particularly critical of Putin’s invasion. And since getting into office, she seems to have changed her tune. And I’m wondering whether you could say a little bit about that, or why that?

Marla Stone 

Sure. I mean, I read it as purely strategic. I don’t think she’s suddenly has a love for the Ukrainian people, I think she realized and solidifying her position as prime minister, her relationship with the United States and her relationship with the EU, no other EU leaders that this would look good. I don’t think it’s a philosophical ideological position. I think it’s, as I said, Italy’s position in the world community in the in the EU and relationship with the United States. And perhaps a disillusionment with Putin, for sure. And also a fear of a spreading war. Italy is not that far. And a fear of Ukrainian refugees ending up, I think, a very, very calculated position, for sure.

John Torpey 

Right. So and I guess the other question, which in some ways is more at the heart of your work? Is the question of the left in Italy, I mean, we always thought of the Italian left as a certain kind of liberal communism or something like that, and a kind of beacon for the left Western democratic countries. But you’re saying basically, it’s sort of gone. And I wonder, how does that change? Or does it change?

Marla Stone 

Right. Well, you know, the Italian left went through similar things after the fall of the Berlin Wall than other lifts went the Italian Communist Party had been the strongest Western European Communist Party winning in the 70s, at certain points 30% of the vote. So as you said, at the beginning, a key part of Italian life, a key place of identity and politics for so many people. And then with the transition, in the early 90s, of the Italian political system, the collapse of the Christian Democratic Party, the collapse of the Socialist Party, the collapse of historic communism, the Communist Party moved more and more to the center, eventually becoming the Democratic Party, leaving behind a couple of splinter communists, traditional communist parties like Reconversione Comunista, that itself disappears by the late 90s. Now, what has happened very recently, in the last year and a half after the near disappearance of the Democratic Party in the September 2023, elections, like the Labour Party, they elected a new chair of the Italian Democratic Party, this woman Elly Schlein, quite young, in her 30s Have with an American Jewish father, academic, I think he’s an economist, and an and an Italian mother. And she, she has the politics of Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn.  There’s a big concern in the Democratic Party that she doesn’t represent the base, but she’s very much a social democrat, in contrast to the previous chairs of the Italian Democratic Party, so it’s an experiment, and I think it’s an attempt to revive the left along, you know, to return to that message of trying to get the working class back, to return to a message of economic justice, and the beginnings of a message of racial justice.

John Torpey 

Can you say a little bit more about the sort of racial transformation if that’s not too big word of Italian, everyday life at this point? I mean, is this being part of life outside of Rome or Milan? Or not Really?

Marla Stone 

Not really. I mean, what you see is people of color working in restaurants, or, as you mentioned selling things at the beach. Non-white Italians have not been really integrated in a visible or sort through Italian society. (I think this is a sign of perhaps hopefully, where things are going) you see on Italian television, often commercials for pasta or ice cream, where you see a multiracial family. And I always find that interesting, because the commercials are way ahead of the actual demographics of Italian society. So I think there’s a desire for this in certain segments of the population, for sure. And you do see more people of color on television, some of the newscasters are biracial or Italian African.

John Torpey 

But the general assessment that seems to me that you’re giving me is that things are not particularly optimistic. I mean, it’s not to say they can resist the influx of unfamiliar populations forever and ever, but they’re not necessarily very enthusiastic about it.

Marla Stone 

Yeah. Ah, I think there’s a long way to go. And I and I will also say there are incidents in the schools. You know, I knew several people who had put a number of people who put their kids in Italian schools. And some of these kids were non white and had experienced racial incidents in school. And I think this is also related to the Maloni thing that like Donald Trump, she has opened the doors for Italians to say things they wouldn’t have maybe said five years ago, they know that kids are hearing things at the kitchen table and then repeating them at school, including anti semitic comments, there’s been a real resurgence or real increase in anti semitic incidents in Italian culture in the schools at the soccer games.

John Torpey 

So do you see Meloni as somebody who’s going to be around. I mean, Berlusconi was was episodic. But he was around for a long time as the head of Italian politics. Is she going to be? I mean, she’s very young, as you’ve already pointed out, she could be doing this for a long time.

Marla Stone 

She could so far, she’s played it very well. She’s played it very well. I mean, who knows? Right? You can’t predict the future. But she is a very smart politician. And I think she’d like to be around for a long time. And I think she’d like to be the leader of a kind of European far right, a new European populist, nationalist, right. As you said at the beginning, she has a good relation with Orban. So I think that’s revision. Absolutely.

John Torpey 

So we should get to know her because she might be around for a long time.

Marla Stone 

And, of course, the irony that the first female Italian Prime Minister is from a far right party, from a party that really terrified people for many years in its earlier iterations.

John Torpey 

Well, this is somewhat like the kinds of things that somebody like Helmut Kohl could do when he was chancellor of Germany, but something that he could get away with, but somebody on the left would never have survived it because it would have been attacked by the right. So it’s the same kind of dynamic, maybe she can do things because her credentials as being on the right or more or less on assailed or unassailable.

Marla Stone 

Yeah, yeah. She’s quite to the far right.

John Torpey 

Yeah, yeah. No, I don’t mean to compare that in that sense. But just in the sense that, you know, a certain politician can do certain things… Oh, well. I’m thinking of Nixon’s, you know, whatever, rapprochement with China?

Marla Stone 

Yeah.

John Torpey 

In the 50s. The question was, who lost China? Right? Well, Richard Nixon could do that, because his conservative credentials were basically in good standing. I mean, he also ended up supporting things like affirmative action and national health insurance and things that make him seem an odd conservative to us today, but nonetheless. Okay, well, that’s it for today’s episode of International Horizons. I want to thank Professor Marla Stone of Occidental College for her insights about the fascist past in Italy and its bearing on politics in contemporary Europe. I also want to thank Oswaldo Mena Aguilar for his technical assistance and to acknowledge Duncan Mackay for letting us use his song International Horizons as the theme music for the show. This is John Torpey saying, thanks for joining us and we look forward to having you with us again for the next episode of International Horizons.