No abstract

This article explores the ways in which a post‐peasant society in the Trentino region of northern Italy reworked its past history at a time of political turmoil when the rise of regionalist parties with an Italian version of Thatcherism in their agenda challenged the legitimacy of the Italian state. It illustrates how making a regional, local history entails representing the past as a period characterized by the repetitiveness of events. It is argued that everyday accounts of the past, because they centre on the ideas of social and political order and private property, form the background against which ‘official’ politics is understood. In this sense, everyday local‐level discourses about the past are as political as the ‘official’ ones of party leaders. In making this argument, the article shows that ‘repetitive time’ also represents a device through which social actors place themselves outside ‘national history’ and cast the encompassing nation‐state as the outsider.

This article analyzes the reorganization of public memory space in postsocialist Poland and how the state and municipal councils use it to legitimate themselves. Drawing on research conducted in Gdańsk, the birthplace of the social movement (Solidarność) that questioned the legitimacy of the socialist state in the 1980s, it examines the proposed redevelopment of the shipyard where the movement was formed. While the redevelopment sets out to create a public memory space, it is rife with contradictions, for it involves demolishing many buildings associated with the movement. What legitimated the municipal council’s authority over its memorial landscapes was not so much its rediscovery of complex local histories as it was its ability to define the local past in “material” terms.

This article explores the ways the Italian state was represented as a spatial entity when the ascendancy of political forces with a neoliberal agenda challenged its role as the dominant framework for organizing the economy. Drawing upon ethnographic information collected in the Alps of Trentino, I discuss the role played by a mayor in “translating” between the world of officialdom and that of the local community, and particularly in affecting local perceptions of the state at a time of significant political transformations. The article draws parallels between the discursive practices of this mayor and those of media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, who was Italy’s Prime Minister for eight years. It highlights the contradictions that inform these politicians’ constructions of the Italian state. When they want to present themselves as the leaders close to the people, they represent the state as an entity protecting its citizens. In contrast, when they get into legal troubles or when state laws work against their economic interests as businessmen, they avail themselves of the language of business, and cast the state as a distant and bureaucratic entity that needs to be modernized and rationalized. The spatial dimension of the state figures prominently in such constructions. Yet, while state officials often use spatial discourse to “encompass” people and link them to a particular territory, the mayor casts the state as a space “outside” of the people he represents. In suggesting that representing the state as a spatial entity may also serve to cast it as the “Other,” especially at the local level, this article pursues the argument that examining the spatiality of different forms of government also entails understanding the localized social processes through which state “spatialization” takes shape.

At a time when European cities redefine themselves through 'culture' in an attempt to attract tourists, investors and potential residents, policymakers have to negotiate different notions of 'local culture' defined by state governments on the one hand and by the EU on the other. Drawing upon research conducted in the Polish city of Gdańsk in the context of the redevelopment of its urban landscape, the article illustrates how 'local culture' is redefined as 'culture of freedom' by municipal and state institutions in order to establish a relationship of historical continuity between the time when Gdańsk was a thriving multicultural city and the post-socialist present. The article puts forward the argument that while the reformulation of local culture as 'culture of freedom' involves reconciling notions of national identity with new norms of local, regional and European integration, it does not necessarily entail the supersession of nationalism.