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Bigotry and xenophobia are rife in modern Italy, says Andrea Mammone – and the problem goes all the way to the top of politics

EMMANUEL is a young student from Ghana. In September 2008, he was arrested because the city police of Parma in northern Italy mistook him for a drug dealer. The only thing the police regarded as evidence – circumstantial or otherwise – appeared to be his skin colour. Both Emmanuel and the actual dealer were black. Emmanuel was then beaten in custody and humiliated. When he was finally released, the police gave him an envelope containing his documents. Written on the envelope were the words: “Emmanuel negro”. Ten policemen are currently under investigation over the shocking treatment of Emmanuel and four have already been arrested.

In an earlier incident, officers of the same Parma city police force arrested a Nigerian prostitute and left her in jail, dirty and on the floor. All this was documented by the media.

Italy is not an isolated case and, in the present financial crisis, people on both sides of the Atlantic face new challenges and are having to confront old fears. On June 4 last year, the International Herald Tribune reported that the United States was facing “a great immigration panic”. Acknowledging that some anxieties are linked with national identities and the fear of losing them, the newspaper stressed the key point as “the sense of who we are and what we value”. So how are we to preserve common values in a globalised world when national boundaries are breaking down, national identities are changing and people are fearful of losing them?

The response of right-wing ultra-nationalists is hardly sophisticated. But there is a horrifying clarity in their crude and poisonous pronouncements. Contemporary extremists, along with some other ultra-conservatives, allude to fascistic imagery to promote the rejection of foreigners, incomers or just anyone who seems different in order to preserve the notion of indigenous races.

Italy is a particularly notable and unavoidable example of this unhappy trend. It has become a bizarre nation.  Prominent neo-fascist Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce, and the would-be “post-fascists” of the National Alliance are working with Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s ruling conservative coalition. Berlusconi’s other key ally in government is the reactionary and ethno-regionalist Northern League. This powerful organisation proposes xenophobic responses to the  “immigration problem” – the latest of which is a paradoxical “integration” of immigrant pupils through an apartheid-like segregation in state schools. This would mean the creation of separate classes for immigrant children with early – but normal and perfectly surmountable – difficulties with the Italian language.

No one should be surprised by any of this. When the United States was considering the possibility of electing its first non-white President, the Italian government was more interested in plans to use the army to fingerprint gypsies (including children) living in camps. It was also contemplating one of the strictest immigration laws in Europe with all illegal migrants facing the risk of a prison sentence.

Both the European Union and the Roman Catholic Church have warned against such virulent anti-immigrant policies. Unfortunately, many in the academic and intellectual milieu have remained silent. The only notable conference on Italian racism was organised – in English – by the American University of Rome.

While Barack Obama’s election as President of the United States was widely celebrated, including throughout Europe, some in Italy struck a discordant note. Maurizio Gasparri, a leading National Alliance politician, declared that: “With Obama in the White House, al Qaida is probably happier.”

Prime Minister Berlusconi attempted and failed to find humour, describing America’s first black President as “young, handsome and suntanned”. Many on the left and in the media were far too reticent in condemning this pathetic wisecrack as a throwback to old colonialist behaviour and hardly disguised xenophobia.

What is happening in Italy should concern everyone in Europe of a liberal and tolerant disposition. Italians were once the targets of racism. They were celebrated for their easy-going approach. Now statements from the likes of Berlusconi and Gasparri are symptomatic of all-too prevalent attitudes toward the “different” and the “other” in Italian society.

This leads to questions of people’s sense of belonging, the place of migrants in multicultural societies and the moral responsibility of the West for developing countries that have been exploited for centuries. These issues are linked with the extent to which anti-immigration discourses and biological or cultural forms of racism have been legitimised in some countries more than in others. Italy may be a prime instance of where these unhappy developments are unfolding, but it is not the only one.

There are instances of “ethnic competition” in many different countries – including Britain, with the recent protest against Italian workers in Grimsby. The growth of the British National Party shows that this country is also afflicted by racism and the fallout from economic chaos. And Britain has seen its own ethnic competition for jobs: indigenous workers against poorer migrants prepared to work for less.

And to be fair, the politicisation of immigration in Italy began later than in other European countries. Politicians only started to portray immigration as a national problem and area of conflict in 1989-1991. The role of the Northern League was significant here. Ideologically, anti-immigrant policies are founded on doctrines of exclusion and discrimination which are promoted by dominant political forces. A focus on immigration encourages the distraction of public opinion from an economy in serious trouble, and politics and society in general in crisis.

In Italy, crimes committed by immigrants can be discussed for weeks. Yet in May 2008, some neo-fascists in Verona murdered an Italian because he refused to give them a cigarette. This story disappeared from most newspapers after no more than a few days. Il Giornale, a daily newspaper which supports Berlusconi, even disputed that those arrested belonged to the far right.

So it is not just a matter of race. This case illustrates how the whole political climate in Italy has been changed by the electoral victory of Berlusconi and his allies on the far right.

The night before Obama’s capture of the White House, a group of young neo-fascists burst into the Rome headquarters of the RAI, the Italian public television station, to threaten journalists who had reported on violent attacks by neo-fascist thugs on high school students demonstrating against the government’s education policy.

This attack on democracy was hardly censured by anyone in Berlusconi’s coalition. In fact, the Prime Minister did not seem to have a word to say on the subject.

Can anyone imagine a group of yobs launching an assault on the BBC to protest against one of its programmes and politicians excusing their commando-style raid as “a childish act”?

So what’s next for Italy? The answer is probably the official sanction of the proposed – and in some cases already operating – citizens’ squads to “protect” local communities from acts of criminality and to deter illegal migrants.

This establishment of such groups might seem strange in a country that was terrorised by fascist squadrismo under Mussolini’s dictatorship and was liberated by outsiders – in this case, Anglo-American troops. But we should remember that there are still Italians who believe Mussolini’s only mistake was to make an alliance with Nazism. There are those in the current government who would like to see a revision of national history and a humanisation of Mussolini’s regime.

Berlusconi recently declared that he was not interested in anti-fascism per se, because he had much more important issues to address. And when the new mayor of Rome from the National Alliance was greeted with some fascist salutes after his election, not many on the right thought this merited criticism.

In such a climate, with mainstream politicians apparently unwilling or unable to stand up to racist violence and xenophobia, and some even prepared to justify these reprehensible acts, it is hardly surprising that right-wing extremists are not afraid or embarrassed to show their true, violent faces and broadcast their bigoted rubbish.

We might ask when Italy will be ready for its first black Prime Minister. Or should it merely hope for a suntanned one? And when will there be a non-white head of state in another of the so-called advanced European countries?

Andrea Mammone is a research fellow at the University of Leeds and author of Italian Neo-Fascism from 1943 to the Present Day