Surveillance, Repression and the Welfare State: Aspects of Continuity and Discontinuity in post-Fascist Italy

Abstract

This paper seeks to explore political, cultural, legal and socio-economic legacies of the Fascist regime (1922-1943) in Italy. With the fall of the regime, in fact, the overall surveillance apparatus did not fade away. Former fascists were not purged from political and cultural life and very few were found guilty. The transition to democracy was thus marked by a substantial continuity of men and institutions (Della Porta and Reiter 2004) due to the active involvement of ex-OVRA (Organization of Vigilance and Repression of Anti-Fascism) officers in public institutions (Author 2011). It comes as no surprise that forms of pervasive non-technological social control continued for more than twenty years after the fall of the duce.

Moreover, police state surveillance was combined with a meaningful continuity in other areas. For instance, the welfare state immediately after World War II was actually based upon the model built during Fascism. The “Fascist Social State” (Silei, 2000) had a corporative and authoritarian inspiration and was a strategy of social control and a tool to create consensus. In the 1950s and 1960s the institutional features of the Italian social security system remained fundamentally unchanged (Giorgi, 2009; Silei, 2000): an excess of bureaucracy and discretionary power; a system based on specific categories of people needing assistance and not on a more universal approach. The Italian post-fascist experience is a paradigmatic case-study that allows us to deal with ambiguities of the welfare state experience, described either as a tool of social control or as a vector of social justice.

This paper is an attempt to analyze “social control strategies” in post-Fascist Italy with a focus both on aspects of continuity and on crucial socio-political discontinuities that are often overlooked in the literature.