When North Meets South

The case study on how the citizens of L’Aquila, Italy mobilized in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake that destroyed their city and their response to the G8 summit was of particular interest to me given my knowledge of the Italian language, culture, and society due to the time that I had spent studying and traveling there. Putnam characterizes L’Aquila’s low level of civic engagement prior to the earthquake as due to the lack tradition of civil society in the southern regions of Italy. I agree with Padovani’s assessment that Putnam’s heavy emphasis on historical determinism ignores the regional and cultural differences between the north and south, and is insufficient in explaining the development of other forms of political organization that do not fit the democratic mode. Despite unification under one banner in 1871, Italy has long been geographically divided along cultural, social, economic, and linguistic lines. The wealthier, more industrial, more cosmopolitan, standard Italian-speaking North has always operated differently from the more rural, feudal, dialect-speaking South. Therefore, cultural reasons for the reluctance of citizens from towns outside of L’Aquila to take a politically active part within the mainstream of reconstruction is unsurprising, as many Italians do tend to identify more strongly with their town/region than with their national identity. However, the emergence of citizen activists using ICT to garner international attention indeed challenged traditionally accepted notions of the provincial south. This may be explained by Bennet’s observation that “personal digital media offer capacities for change if people are motivated by various conditions in their environments to exploit those capacities…[these] are more the results of the human contexts in which the communication occurs than the result of the communication media themselves.”