Any historical comparison of urban West Germany and Italy during the seventies may start from a list of converging events and facts during these years.43 The seventies were largely dominated by political mobilizations initiated by the Left in both countries and both countries experienced a »red decade«—»un decennio rosso«.44 It began in the second half of the sixties and combined social protest with political confrontation in parliament and in public. These high levels of political participation were combined with a series of culture wars, putting older and younger generations, conservatives and progressives in confrontation over the definition of social roles and norms of daily life. Particularly in Italy, political mobilization was closely linked to social protest and industrial conflict, producing what has been labeled a cycle of social mobilization whose climax was reached in 1973–74 but levels of conflict were still high until 1976–77.45 In both countries the younger generations were particularly active in these movements and were in high profile in the cultural and social changes behind the spectacular events. And in both countries the mid-seventies saw trade unions at the historical height of their bargaining power. What distinguishes the Italian from the West German case is the strong ideological but also personal and organizational links between the worlds of industrial conflict and of social protest and movements, links that were much weaker in West Germany where Social Democratic trade unions and their own working-class members kept much more distance from the New Left and the student movement than their counterparts in Italy. Nevertheless, from a comparative perspective, the problems resulting from these mobilizations and faced by the two main parties of the Left were similar. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) in the Federal Republic both gained new and more voters for their programs of social and institutional reforms and had similar problems in coping not only with the radicalism of parts of their own rank and file, but particularly with that of the new organizations on the Left taking shape during the second half of the sixties. In Germany, the Social Democrats could take over government in a left-liberal coalition after having shared power with the CDU/CSU between 1966 and 1969 and started their own agenda of reforms in 1969. In contrast, the PCI developed a strategy of external support and parliamentary pressure for larger reform programs in the sixties when various center-left coalitions (Christ Democrats, socialists and other smaller parties of the center) were governing the country. The PCI shifted towards the so-called historical compromise, a reform government in a great coalition with the Christian Democrats, formulated in 1973, but this strategy of governmental cohabitation of the two dominant political parties finally failed in 1978. In both countries the political moderation of the two main parties of the Left delivered opportunities for ideological propaganda, defending political violence and terrorism deployed by the far Left since the early seventies. Italy and West Germany (together with Northern Ireland) were the operating grounds for the most violent and most spectacular forms of political terrorism in the Western world during the seventies.46 Thus the political history of both countries invites us to separate the »red« Left-dominated seventies from the individualistic or »hedonistic« eighties, as they are even called in Italy, when in both countries the culture wars and the political mobilization faded away and gave birth to other political and cultural moods.47
Many chapters in this book deal with episodes from these parallel histories of political strife and social mobilization that left a particularly strong mark in a number of large cities that were the epicenters of these upheavals and became something like the »showcases« for the movements.48 It seems that in the case of Italy more cities were involved than in the West German case but that may need further empirical inquiry. In Italy we may list cities like Turin, Genoa and Milan as centers of mobilization, where the connections between the different forms and groups of protest and revolt were particularly strong, but other urban centers like Bologna, Trento or Rome with large or active student populations were also important centers of these movements. In West Germany, the most visible centers were West Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt—other industrial urban centers like Cologne or the cities in the Ruhr were much less involved in these years. Smaller university cities like Heidelberg or Marburg were more touched by the »red decade« because of their large student population. From an urban history perspective, the most striking difference between Italy and West Germany may be seen in the strong ties, in the Italian case, between social movements mobilized around problems of social housing, town planning or public transport and labor disputes and student protest (in Turin, Milan among other Italian cities) and the much looser connections seen in many West German towns. Here only Frankfurt or West Berlin may be cited as cities presenting comparative levels of interaction between the different groups of the Left.
We should not forget, that the bi-national levels of exchange and of connectedness between the different protagonists of these »red« years were rather high, even if we must underline that this »histoire croisée« was restricted to a minority, particularly among students and intellectuals speaking or understanding the other language or reading the translations of pamphlets, booklets or larger publications. In West Germany a new kind of »Bildungsreise« (»Grand Tour«) towards the centers of left-wing mobilization in Italy was invented in this period, adding a new clientèle of younger Germans to the »numerous other Germans travelling south in search of sun and art, but also authenticity and a better sense of life.«49 The other direction was still chosen by Italian labor migrants and a very small group of political activists seeking refuge in West Germany, particularly in West Berlin after the end of the great mobilization.
Seen from an international perspective, Italy and West Germany present two very interesting national cases in these years of social mobilization worldwide.50 On the one hand, they are quite different from one another if we look at the modalities of industrial conflict, its themes and forms; in Italy the series of strikes broke all records and put the country at the head of international statistics of industrial conflict; in West Germany trade unions were also very successful in their wage bargaining but achieved many of their goals of social reform and welfare thanks to the reforms initiated by the Social Democratic-liberal government.51 Both countries are again situated at the different ends of a continuum of positions. If we look at the interplay between social mobilization and political system on an international level: we see that West Germany is clearly part of those countries where government and parliament responded to social protest movements and industrial conflicts by quickly initiating reforms. Italy, on the other hand, was a particularly striking case of powerful veto power coming from the conservative forces in economy and politics against any strategy of far-reaching reform. Nevertheless, part of these reforms such as the Statuto dei lavoratori, the law on divorce (1970), or later the new family law (1975), the Servizio sanitario nazionale and the equo canone (1978), were realized as a political answer to social mobilization made by the moderate majorities in Parliament. But the governing party, the DC, survived this »red decade« in power and its conservative wing was rather successful in defending the interests of their clients in economy and society against the tide of social protest. This contrast alone is only somewhat sufficient for explaining the great difference between the two countries at the end of these years. If we look at quantitative indicators of social mobilization, Italy’s cycle between 1968 and 1973 encompasses much higher numbers of participants and events than the West German case where only the large mobilization of peace movement of the late seventies and early eighties changed the balance a little bit in terms of numbers. On the other hand, both countries are very close to each other if we look at the dynamics leading from student protest to political terrorism.
This overview of the main trends of the political life in Italy and West Germany during the seventies may illustrate the limits of a comparative view that concentrates on the short term. Behind similarities and differences we discover a much longer list of particularities resulting not only from the effects of national contemporary history, but also from different stages of economic growth and social change—to say it in the old-fashioned way of Rostow’s modernization manifesto of 1957, it was a program that had found so many admirers in both countries at that time.52 In detail, the causes of discontent and the motivations for mobilization were different and the particularities of national economy and politics make every search for simple explanations covering both national cases a very tricky enterprise.
Thus, it may be useful to restart our inquiry and look for longer trends and structural effects that may lead us to a level of comparison allowing us to better identify convergences and differences behind the »white crest of the events«.53
We may start with a look at the longer-lasting impact of these years of social mobilization on the German and Italian societies in the years that followed: to do this we must expand our view towards the transformations of the eighties and nineties. In the second half of the seventies the political mass meetings got rarer and the slogans changed, but the legal reforms, new institutions and new habits generated in the years of left-wing activism had long-lasting effects. If we look at the outcome of legislation and political bargaining, two facts need to be underlined in a comparative perspective: during the sixties Italy was still very far from the standards of West German welfare; the reform of a deficient pension system and the demands for an unemployment insurance system were central themes of social mobilizations during the late sixties and early seventies in Italy. From then on, social legislation led to an expansion of the Italian welfare system in a period when the German system entered a period of adaptations to rising deficits in the state budget.54 South of the Alps, levels of welfare spending started to rise in the seventies and continued to do so for more than two decades. In Italy, legislative reform often took many years to pass the complicated parliamentary bargaining process due to the complicated balance of power inside the party system and the different pressure groups. Reforms in pensions, the health system, town planning and housing were initiated during the seventies and they started to be (partly) implemented in the eighties.55 Therefore, one difference between both countries becomes visible when looking at a longer time span: reform legislation in Italy took a much longer time to come to life and even longer to be implemented. The case of welfare reforms is a striking example.
Comparisons of welfare systems are always a very complicated affair and are often misleading. Both countries converged when one looks at the levels of public spending. Italy even surpassed West Germany during the 15 years from 1974 to 1989 in terms of the share of the Gross Domestic Product spent on welfare, rising from 13.7 percent in 1974 to 17.6 percent in 1989, whereas West Germany kept the level of 14.6 percent in 1974, moving to 15.7 by 1989.56 Everybody knows that these figures hide striking differences in the distributions of these transfers, the efficiency of social bureaucracies and the extent of legal entitlements for every citizen. After the Second World War, Italy was a latecomer in welfare legislation and during the seventies and eighties it partly overcame this historical »backwardness«, offering an astonishing level of pensions or unemployment benefits for a part of the Italian population. But it never overcame the exclusionary, clientelistic aspects of its welfare regime, when economic and social trends turned towards larger inequality.57 However, the argument is still valid that from the seventies onwards, Italy had known new levels of social rights and a broader and socially more balanced distribution of welfare services or transfers, bringing these levels of welfare nearer to West German standards which, in turn, had been dramatically improved during the first half of the seventies. But still Italian society was far from the more egalitarian societies north of the Alps (like the Federal Republic, Denmark or Switzerland) when one compares levels of social differences in income, wealth and consumption. Together with the other neighboring countries in southern Europe, Italian society remained nearer to levels of inequality known in countries like the USA or Great Britain, where social inequality increased significantly from the eighties on.58
Another example of convergence is in the reforms in Italy and West Germany that dramatically changed the legal framework of marriage, partnership and family life. The legalization of divorce is the most spectacular Italian case, but the list is much longer, including the rights of all family members but particularly of women. Many demands for more individual freedom were put forward in the legal sphere and changed the boundaries for private and civil liberties in both countries. The importance of this converging shift seems particularly evident because it took place in two countries whose societies had been strongly marked by their recent periods of dictatorial restrictions of liberty. This had been reinforced in the decades between 1930 and 1960 by a mainstream conformism strongly informed by law. Here the transformations of the seventies were very important and in both countries legal institutions had to be adapted to a growing demand for personal liberties, particularly in the field of sexual behavior and gender roles.59
A third point concerns only Italy, but is very important for the framework of a comparative perspective: the transfer of political and fiscal power to the regions and the decentralization of executive power and administrative routines to the regional level that started in the seventies shifted the character of the Italian model of democratic government from its French blueprint of centralized power more in the direction of the federal sharing of authority and a multi-level play of democratic bargaining. From the seventies on, a bi-national comparison has to take into account that a federal system started to take shape. It was surely politically and financially weaker than the West German one, but nevertheless it was effective and profited from the Europeanization that assigned a new place to the regions as basic political and administrative units allowing the newly created regions to deal directly with the European commission and their apparatus and—perhaps more importantly—to distribute the public subventions and subsidies coming from Brussels.60
These last three aspects of change open up new trends that took more time to show effects and they transcend the decade of the seventies. Their importance for urban history seems evident: social infrastructure, housing conditions, options for local and regional planning—all these disputed fields of public intervention directly depended on these structural reforms and they open up interesting fields for regional or national comparisons. Two important aspects may be underlined in a comparative perpective: even if legislative reform in town planning and urban housing during the seventies tended to make legal frameworks in Italy more similar to those in West Germany, social realities were still very different when one looks at the level of social housing and the implementation of urban planning. But as several chapters in this book show, thanks to new legislation, the local or regional balance of power gave urban reformers and planners new options. Therefore, Bologna could become an internationally much-admired case of urban renewal even if the general situation of urban planning tended to vary greatly throughout Italy thus intensifying the North-South divide.61
The examples of legislative reforms and their consequences point towards a more general argument that seems vital for any further discussion on the seventies. If we include larger trends in society, culture and economy, while often covering longer time spans in our picture, the decade does not represent an intelligible unit of historical time. Even less does it represent a convincing time span for a historical period of its own—not even if you try to extend them back into the sixties and into the early eighties. Such a refusal of a decadological approach so popular in contemporary history implies two different options: one to plead in favor of the plurality of periods and the coexistence of different time layers and the other to plead in favor of larger time spans for historical synthesis even in contemporary history—a discipline always eager to cut down the unmasterable recent past into small slices of five to ten years, adding two or three years at both ends and to sell them to a public as »decades« of this or that.
On a different level, there are social forces and trends at work which are more or less immune to social protest, business cycles and political elections. They follow slower rhythms of change and react to other incentives or obstacles. It is this level of change that is also meant when in the title of this article we speak of »structural rupture«. The concept of structure is used in a very broad sense as a category that subsumes all patterns in culture, social life, politics and economy that are more or less stable for a given period of time. These patterns may give birth to not only institutional settings, but they also give birth to mentalities and converging patterns of consumerism or political attitudes. »Structural rupture« means that a larger set of such stable settings, producing continuity, were interrupted, be it by open protest and deliberate change or by the corrugating effects of new social trends or new economic situations.
One such long-lasting trend was the shift towards consumerism.62 Affluence was the most visible and most discussed sign of this change. Since the fifties more and more people in Italy and Germany had entered the magic world of consumer goods. This revolution in domestic equipment and standards of living started at different moments and the social distribution of washing machines, vacuum cleaners and water toilets followed the established inequalities of income and status before becoming a more or less common standard. But in both countries the spread of consumerism had very different impacts on the transformation of the urban landscape. In West Germany, the sixties and seventies were decades when the slow death of small retail shops was coming to a preliminary end, culminating in the rise of the department store (Karstadt, Hertie and Kaufhof spreading into every small town) and the diffusion of the supermarket as the general grocery store. In Italy this trend was much weaker and the survival of the small independent retail shop in the urban centers is the most surprising element during this period. The converging success story of the shopping malls, the giant supermarkets and the spread of boutiques of international brands in the urban centers was a much later trend that would transform both German and Italian cities alike since the new millennium.
These changes in the infrastructure of urban trading and selling were closely linked to the diffusion of two other well-known consumer goods, cars and television sets. Starting in the fifties, their spread deeply transformed West German and Italian societies, continuing their thorough penetration into the social fabric of both societies throughout the seventies and the eighties. Regarding both of these goods, Italy started from a level that, in 1960, was half the level of West Germany, but 30 years later it shared comparable levels of equipment and use of these two consumer goods that have particular impact on patterns of consumerism and social life in general. Germany and Italy were at the European top ranks of cars per 1,000 inhabitants in 1990: Italy had 456, Germany 436 cars. Italy, in her race to the top, had surpassed European countries like Great Britain, Switzerland, France and Belgium in 1970 before overtaking its West German rival in 1990.63 In the case of the equipment of German and Italian households with television sets, both countries followed the common European trend of diffusion since the early sixties, leading to a level of 423 sets per 1,000 inhabitants in 1990 in Italy and 506 in the Federal Republic. It is worth mentioning this in an overview, trying to understand the trends transforming both societies and having a huge impact on their urban and rural landscape. In 1960 both countries still showed great differences when we compare the levels of mass consumption. By 1980, and even more by 1990, the material standards were much closer, but behind these overarching trends, consumer styles and preferences continued to differ.
We must look back to the fifties and sixties to identify the genesis of a particular situation common to the so-called advanced economies and consumer societies since the seventies: the ongoing growth in levels of consumption measured in monetary terms did not result in a parallel improvement of the quality of life. This led to diminishing returns if we include—as nowadays a lot of mixed indicators do– environmental damage, costs of commuting or traffic in general as well as income inequalities. In short, this basic process is vital to urbanism and more generally to the spatial structuring of both societies. In both countries, the private use of cars in daily life has started to profoundly change the urban landscape and its surroundings, imposing priorities that often were in open contradiction to goals of town planning. The unplanned spread of parking spaces in the inner cities, the overcrowding of main streets linking the inner cities and the newly built housing areas in the suburbs and finally, the transformation of regional structures in function of the new motorways built during these years are telling examples of a general trend. In Italy, the particular case of the conservation and transformation of the historical center of Bologna64 must be integrated into the larger picture of suburbanization of the whole region of Emilia Romagna along the main motorways and the road network, completely blurring the traditional borderline between countryside and city.65
Another long-term trend that should be taken into account is what has been labeled the second demographic transition. Since the late nineteenth century, German and Italian women had given birth to less children than their mothers and if we don’t consider the deaths caused by the two Worlds Wars, people grew older than their ancestors. They shared this trend with their European neighbors. But in the sixties this long-lasting trend accelerated and led to radical changes in the demographic structure. By 1960 Germany and Italy were still in the middle of national European averages, with 2.37 births in Germany and 2.41 in Italy. By 1980 they were the first countries to reach the lowest figures of fertility, 1.44 births in West Germany and 1.69 in Italy, and by 2000 levels were lower than 1.4 births, now more or less common to many other countries in south and central Europe.66 Behind the notion of a second demographic transition, the historian discovers comprehensive cultural and social change. This transformation was a bit slower and started earlier in the West German case than in Italy. South of the Alps, the turn to the single-child model occurred in less than ten years, during the eighties, and is the most striking European example of a rapid demographic change—comparable only to the ex-GDR in the nineties. Once again, differences must be noted, but the overall picture does not need to be changed. In the late sixties and seventies, the patriarchal family model—in Italy well underpinned by official Catholicism—underwent a profound crisis, young women turning their backs on the model their mothers had adopted or had been forced to adopt. And Italian families entered a new period—closer to other European situations, as far as wishes of their members, legal rights and social opportunities are concerned. But still we should not forget the differences: in Italy larger households consisting of more than four members were more frequent (14 percent in 1980) than in Germany (8 percent in the same year).
From the seventies on, it is much easier to compare German and Italian family and household structures and strategies than before. What strikes most is that both countries converged towards a more equal distribution of gender roles inside the household and a trend towards inclusion of more people into marriage and partnership, independent of their gender, but in both countries the dual earner model with full-time employment for married women was slow to be socially accepted, particularly in southern Italy. Here in the early nineties the percentage of wage-earning women was still clearly below West Germany (46.5 percent in Italy, 61.3 percent in Germany).67 Whereas national stereotypes were maintained by mass tourism (e.g. the stereotype of the Italian »mamma«), social realities have produced silent convergences. Again these transformations have created new social demands for housing and urban living, multiplying the need for smaller but affordable apartments particularly for younger people. In Italy this kind of new consumer demand was growing when the older needs for social housing for larger families were still far from being fulfilled. Some of the particularities of the Italian household structures such as the long cohabitation of young couples with their parents in the eighties and nineties resulted from the unresolved reform programs of social housing and urban planning of the seventies.68
There are many options for integrating these long-term trends into a framework of historical explanation that is capable of identifying interactions and connections between the different spheres we have listed until now. One option is to choose a perspective that links the ruptures of social and cultural revolutions of the late sixties with the political and economic upheaval caused by the end of the Bretton Woods system and the two economic crises of 1973–74 and 1980 to 1982.69
Such a general view on contemporary history is strongly informed by a macro perspective that is mostly based on facts and arguments coming from political economy. The institutional arrangements organizing the Western industrial world since the Second World War entered a period of crisis during the seventies.70 The collapse of the system of Bretton Woods and the two oil crises mark a kind of watershed that separate two different ways to integrate economy and politics. On the surface the new phenomenon of stagflation, the unusual combination of high rates of inflation and high and rising rates of unemployment, is the most visible aspect of the decline of the postwar regime. These international arrangements have been crucial for the two economic miracles that have transformed both Italy and West Germany profoundly from the fifties well into the early seventies. Both countries were struck by the same problems when the old growth machine came to a halt in the middle of the seventies. The return of mass unemployment, a massive squeeze of profit margins and the collapse of older industries and big enterprises confronting higher energy costs and new competitors mainly from East Asia were the most intriguing problems of the day. The declining efficiency of the Keynesian formula of macro-economic deficit spending and the rise of monetarism as the new paradigm for stabilizing Western economies, defeating inflation and restarting a new business cycle on the basis of more power and higher profits for the enterprises, were the most spectacular outcomes of this long crisis of »Great Inflation«, as it has been called recently by Adam Tooze.71
Every detail mentioned until now would need further explanation and would lead us to a more sophisticated »model« of the political and economical shift that started in the second half of the seventies and that opened a set of dynamics leading directly to our present. This would need much more space than available here. Therefore, the following remarks try only to outline the specificities of the German and Italian cases in this general scenario.
Both countries entered the period of the Great Inflation as highly industrial societies—with more than 45 percent of their active population working in industry, sharing that feature with many other European countries from the United Kingdom to Switzerland. By the end of the twentieth century, in 1997, Italy and Germany were still members of a then much smaller club of Western European countries with still more than a third of their active population working in the manufacturing industry, besides Austria and Spain, still giving this economic sector a central importance for their national economy. Restructuring of their industries, not full-scale deindustrialization, has been the common feature of both the Italian and the West German economic performance in the last three decades of the twentieth century and this marks a clear difference from other Western European countries.
Both industrial systems underwent comparable difficulties in adapting to new international market conditions, but on different levels of urgency– high energy costs and profit squeeze in big industry (automobile, home appliances, chemical or textile industry). In both countries power relations between capital and labor had already shifted in the long growth period of the last decade: dramatically in Italy during the long cycle of strikes and social movements from 1968 to 1973, in West Germany much more gradually but starting from a higher level of bargaining power in the hands of trade unions. Reinventing big industry was a common task both in West Germany and Italy and the conflicts over the rules and conditions of this structural adaptation had dominated cycles of industrial conflicts since the mid-seventies.
On a more general level, what is common to both countries is often forgotten: West Germany and Italy entered the eighties with a long list of old and new industrial products traded in international markets and they were very successful in defending their positions or even in conquering new positions in these rapidly changing markets.72 One common feature of the processes of industrial restructuring in both countries was that of growing flexibility and successful specialization. Often, small and medium-sized firms were the champions or pioneers of these transformations of the industrial basis in a period of Western European deindustrialization. As a result, in both countries, the industrial workforce and, even more, the economic weight of manufacturing remained high in comparison to many other Western European countries. Another similarity is the central role industrial districts assumed as important regional units, condensing and promoting these shifts.73
It would be very interesting to compare the strategies of Italian and West German firms, which can only be hinted at here. Comparative economic studies have underlined that in the case of Italy the central problem was to transform their own competitive advantages, switching from low labor costs and devaluations towards technological innovation, product changes, design and services—a path that has also been taken by many West German export industries.74 Both countries specialized in different products and branches: consumer industries were predominant but not exclusive in Italy, supplier industries and particularly machine tools production were most successful in the West German case. Another difference should not be forgotten: science-based industries organized into big or medium-sized firms were central to the adaptations north of the Alps but they played a minor role in Italy where investment in research and science remained low and fell back in comparison to other Western European countries as that time went on.
The Italian way of flexible specialization is best known as the »fabbrica diffusa« of the so-called Third Italy—the north-east and central regions of the country—and it is mostly based on small and medium-sized enterprises.75 The West German variety encompasses both big enterprises and small and medium-sized companies and their geographical location was more variegated. Since 1974, however, the shift towards the southern regional centers of new industry has been accelerating, whereas the older industrial agglomerations near the coast and in the Ruhr were hit by the ongoing crisis of traditional industries like shipbuilding, steel production or coal mining.
In both countries, the effects of these economic transformations on geography and topography were remarkable: since the mid-seventies the core regions of this kind of flexible production systems, like parts of Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria in West Germany or the Veneto or Emilia Romagna in Italy, were following comparable lines of regional development: a continuing process of suburbanization, privileging the sub-centers and creating a particular type of semi-urbanized spaces, mixing industrial parks, housing areas and commercial surfaces. The economic basis data on income and occupation tend to follow parallel lines and converge, making these regions part of the core regions of European affluence.
We should not forget one central aspect of the shared histories of both countries during this period of transition: that of migration, or more precisely the migration of people from the Italian south towards the industrial regions of northern Italy and of the Federal Republic of Germany.76 In accordance with the Rome Treaty, in 1969 German federal law gave Italian labor migrants the same rights as Germans and therefore they were better protected than their Turkish or Yougoslav colleagues when with the start of the economic crisis in 1973–74, administrative pressure and public opinion joined forces to urge migrants to return home. But nevertheless, many Italians did lose their jobs and went back. More important for our topic here and for a comparative history of southern immigration to the industrial cities both in northern Italy and West Germany are two trends: those Italian migrants who did not return started to settle permanently in their new cities of arrival, bringing in their wives and children.77 In this way the number of Italians in West Germany remained high since late 1970—with about 600,000 to 800,000 residents, many of whom were living permanently there. The majority of them were living in the southern regions of Bavaria, Hesse and Baden-Württemberg, which together made up 57 percent. North and south of the Alps this migrant workforce had been mainly recruited for manufacturing industries as unskilled workers, but the shrinking labor markets for these kinds of jobs made their socio-economic life much more precarious than before. Yet a majority of them became part of the permanent staff in many firms. A second trend was also typical for the southern immigrant workers in northern Italy and West Germany: having themselves attended school only for short periods and often lacking a professional vocation or diploma, they invested much less than others in education for their children. A second trend is also very striking: like Portuguese migrants, southern Italians were very active in maintaining social contacts and networks with their native regions. They were creating transnational social spaces for themselves and their children or families.78
Therefore, in Wolfsburg, Stuttgart, Turin or Milan, not only conditions of urban life but also problems of communal adaptation to the new conditions tended to become more comparable. Everywhere the demands for social housing, schooling of linguistically and culturally »different« students as well as the recognition of new cultural and religious needs inside the cities challenged the agenda of urban governance.79 North and south of the Alps, urban segregation, higher rates of unemployment and discrimination in education were general social trends undermining the social chances of southern Italian and other immigrant households. But they were also counterbalanced by local or regional trends of inclusion via labor and local politics of inclusion via schooling and housing, ending up in very different situations throughout West Germany or northern Italy. In both countries the recent history of this social subgroup of the industrial working class has yet to be written.
But until 1990 Federal Germany did not see a trend towards regional polarization comparable to that in Italy since the turn of the seventies: the decline of the southern regions interrupted a trend that had taken shape during the growth years and that had moved the economy of the southern regions closer to that of the central and northern parts of the peninsula. After 1975, the participation of the southern regions in the growth of the national income became more and more dependent on public transfers, occupation in public service, or in new forms of informal economic activities—a very successful »economia sommersa«, whose fruits can only be measured indirectly through the astonishing levels of private consumption in the south.
The strong divide between labor markets and job offers in the north and the south of Italy leads to another difference between West German and Italian responses to the international economic upheavals. The new strength of the recently unionized industrial workforce led to a legally sanctioned system of protection against the rising risks of unemployment and the high rates of inflation for the core of employed industrial workers—a situation that was becoming more and more a social privilege shared only with the employees of the public service. The young and those outside these protected areas of the Italian labor markets had to pay the price in the form of precarious, low-paid jobs or long periods of unemployment. Italy entered a period of more or less stable high rates of youth unemployment, with more than a third of those under 25 years being unemployed since the late seventies.80 This general trend was by no means uniform but was highly differentiated by region, class and gender. The renaissance or renewal of family dependence and clientelism were both cause and effect of this trend. Again we find »Third Italy« as the exception to the general national trend: here the great majority of young adults did find jobs before the age of 25 and entered the local labor markets, whereas the southern regions, including Rome and the older industrial centers were areas of high youth unemployment.
In West Germany mass unemployment returned at the end of the seventies after more than two decades of full employment. National levels climbed up to ten percent. However, unemployment did not primarily hit the young who were entering the labor markets but it affected migrants and the unqualified—creating a small but persisting number of long-time unemployed.81 During the eighties, regional differences on the West German labor markets grew more and more important, but seldom reached Italian levels. Therefore, any comparison of urban youth protest and urban subcultures of the seventies and eighties must keep in mind the growing structural differences between both countries. As early as 1977, when a new wave of youth protest started in Western Europe, the difference was striking and continued to inform the structure of urban youth culture.82
The governance of these economic strictures and confusions was very different in Italy and Germany. Just to begin with the trivial but inevitable: as mentioned earlier, reformism and the shift of political power was much stronger in West Germany than in Italy. The West German political system as a whole was able to absorb the shock of both the radical protest of 1968 and of the later crises of 1973–74 and 1980 through social reform and democratic renewal while basically keeping intact a corporatist compromise between the large organized interest groups and political forces—from churches to trade unions and business organizations. The return of the Christian Democrats to power in 1982 did not change this consensus model. The established interests and institutions in the Federal Republic were never shattered in any comparable way to their Italian counterparts in these years. As a result the »culture wars« never invaded the hidden areas of economic bargaining and restructuring after 1975.
Socially Italy saw a much larger protest movement and fell prey to a much deeper economic crisis. Both hit a political system that was still in a precarious situation as the normal democratic alternation of government and opposition was structurally blocked by the exclusion of the communist party. The reformist communists were never admitted to power on the national level and the late sixties and seventies saw a long and, in the end, failing project to establish a stable center-left government based on a kind of elementary consensus among the different political and social groups in the country. Italy’s political system was weakened and its society was deeply divided when the country had to adapt to the new rules of the international economy during the eighties and nineties. In a longer historical perspective, the social mobilization of the seventies renewed the deep-seated historical antagonism between the Left and the Right—in the end it even strengthened the veto power of vested interest groups on the Right. An informal division of power and a kind of sub-political corporatism was the result, leading towards political solutions in parliament that often combined the costs of clientelism with that of social reform.
Therefore, we may note another great divide between the two countries opening under the double impact of social mobilization and economic crisis: the institutions of both post-fascist/dictatorial democracies entered very different periods. In Italy the seventies opened a long period of delegitimization and growing weakness ending in the collapse of the whole party system in the early nineties, whereas the parties and institutions of the Federal Republic entered a cycle of change and adaptation in response to the challenges of protest and economic instability.83 The founding of the Green Party and its slow integration into the existing party system during the eighties may be interpreted as a paradoxical effect of this new strength.
This article makes a case for considering the seventies both in Italy and West Germany as a decade of transition, underlining the importance of the breaks in the political, social and economical frameworks or structures both at the international and national levels in both countries. Behind the political scene and its strong divergences, long-lasting social trends like new family and gender models in addition to an ongoing trend towards consumerism combined with the new economic trends opened the gate to a longer period of social transformation that ended in the nineties when both countries, then closer than ever in their basic elements of social and economic life, got full membership in the club of neoliberal globalizers.