Sardinia

At the beginning of the 20th century Camillo Bellieni, one of the founders of the Sardinian Action Party (Partito Sardo d’Azione) wrote that Sardinia had been the victim of an unsolved paradox: despite having the geographical, historical, cultural and linguistic features that are typical of a nation, it had never managed to become a State. In previous centuries, Bellieni explains, this had happened because the Sardinian people had not been aware of their identity; now that they have achieved this awareness they have begun to think with an Italian intellect: Sardinia is therefore to be considered a “miscarried nation” (Bellieni, 1985). Camillo Bellieni and other important intellectuals and theorists of “the Sardinian movement” would begin with these considerations when criticising the centralist organisation of the Italian Kingdom and asking for the acknowledgement of an independent administration and legislation for Sardinia that would enhance Sardinian identity. The majority of the theorists of the Sardinian movement did not believe Sardinia should become an independent State separate from Italy, but that independence could be obtained by readjusting Italy as a federal state. The “Sardinian” theory in the first half of 1900, did not therefore develop separatist solutions, but made a persistent call for the creation of institutions that would allow Sardinia and its people self-governance. The history of Sardinia’s autonomy in the 20th century revolves around key words like “federalism”, “identity”, “people”, “nation”; words that have been (to this day) inflected in the on-going financial and institutional claims made to the central State, in the search for solutions to the social and economic recession that, though in a reduced measure, still characterises Sardinia. It is probably due to this very conflictive relationship that independence proposals regularly appear, even recently, in the political and cultural world, promoting the separation of Sardinia from Italy.