Watching Decolonization from the Sidelines. The Fall of European Colonialism as told to Italians (1950 – 1962)

Italy lost its empire during the World War II, and its former colonies gained independence through a political way during the next years. For these reasons, Italy didn’t take part in the global revolution engendered by decolonization, on the contrary Italy attended it as a spectator. At the same time, because Italy didn’t lost its colonies because a national liberation movement spread out, it was never forced to re-think over its colonial experience and behaviours. During the post-war period Italian scholars, journalists and politicians have never started debating about the meaning of colonialism or its cultural heritage. On the contrary, before the end of the war and during the following years, it has been shaped the stereotype of the “good Italian”, who was supposed to be less cruel than the other colonizers, and not really a racist. Issues as racism and racial segregation, colonial violence, the supposed supremacy of white people over non-whites reached the Italian public debate in connection with ‘the colonialism of others’: the violence of the decolonization process of the French colonies, the fall of British empire, the apartheid system in South Africa forced for the first time Italians to think of colonialism, its crimes, and its cultural results. In some cases, as in the magazine L'Europeo, readers wrote to the editor expressing their idea about the news. How have Italy experienced the process of decolonization in Africa and Asia? Has this process ever encouraged a self-criticism, or have it strengthened the idea of a ‘diversity’ of Italy? Furthermore, does the way in which Italian press represented national liberation movements and former colonized people reveal the persistence of a colonial mind-set, or not? The essay aims to answer these questions analysing newspaper and journals published in Italy from post-war period until 1960 in order to investigate how the process of decolonization has been shown, described and explained to Italian people.