Modernity and Secession

<p> The northern Italian 'Padanian' identity fostered by the <i>Lega Nord</i> is rooted in the long-standing tradition in political and scholarly discourse of casting regional differences within Italy in terms of a North-South geographic 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 - this imagined geography acquired political centrality in that 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.</p><p> In response to this discourse many scholars both in Italy and abroad have started to question this perception of the South as a backward and implicitly inferior society. Starting from this critical tradition Michel Huysseune provides a new systematic and interdisciplinary approach that re-interprets the premises behind Italy's imagined geography of modernity. He moves beyond an understanding of the South as a backward and implicitly inferior society and problematizes normative notions of modernity thus offering a new perspective on the North-South divide which has a significance well beyond the case of Italy.</p>