Austrian empire and Italian unification

Abstract

The conviction, so powerfully efficacious, of the political necessity of national States, homogenous on an ethnic basis, which, starting from 1848, had become the “political guide idea” everywhere in Europe, could ideally connect with the process of transformation of political participation (from the juridical order according to social classes to parliamentary constitution) that was affirming itself at the same time. This brought, as a consequence as it happened in Germany and Italy, to the construction of “exemplary” national States. Where, as in the case of Germany and Italy, an apparently homogenous people not only claimed rights of participation on the basis of citizenship, but also pretended to have them inserted in a well-defined national State, the pretension of a national State and of a parliamentary constitution – of “unity” and “freedom” as the contemporaries said – could proceed side by side. Where, instead, as in the case of the Austrian empire, ten different peoples fought for political equality, remaining however “imprisoned” in territorial traditions which expressed themselves in sixteen different ways, the possibilities of reaching a constitutional parliamentary State, based on popular sovereignty, presented themselves in a much more complicated way, a part from the fact that the actual Austrian situation of a multi-people State, made up in such an heterogeneous way, ipso facto diametrically opposed the “political guide idea” of the national State. In such a meaning, the Italian movement of independence determined the first decisive passages towards the national disintegration of the Habsburg monarchy, which was multi-ethnic and therefore opposed the paradigm of the national State. Even admitting the understandable Italian euphoria for its “success story”, the juridical-structural presuppositions of a completely different nature of the multi-people Austrian State – it seems to me – should not be neglected. They, in the 19^th century, seemed definitely overcome, but they have surprisingly recovered their actuality in the 21st century within the process of European unification.