Modernity and Secession. The Social Sciences and the Political Discourse of the Lega Nord in Italy

The northern Italian, 'Padanian' identity, fostered by the Lega Nord, is rooted in the long-standing tradition in political and scholarly discourse of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South divide. Trying to come to terms , in the late 1980s and 1990s, with Italy's real or presumed inadequacies such as inefficient government, corruption and organized crime, the North became associated with the virtues of modernity and the South with the vices of un-modernity. It was not only politicians but also social scientists who fostered and perpetuated this conceptualization of the North-South divide, thus imposing a normative hierarchy between the two parts of the country. The volume provides a new, systematic and interdisciplinary approach that reinterprets the premises behind Italy's imagined geography of modernity.