Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr Fred
More or less. There are human contructs and nations made out of natural/ethnic boundaries. England (or Japan, or Ireland or Spain) is the opposite of Belgium in this matter, there is a geographical reality in the existance of England, since it is delimited naturally by sea except the border to Scotland (I am not sure what made the scottish border) and Wales, which is a natural reality too (mountains). Belgium is completely artifical. Italy might be modern but there is still a geographical reality for the existence of Italy. It is no hasard that the most nationalistic people in the world are insular people (naturally defined by sea) and nations naturally defined by mountains.
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Actually ital hosts diverse parties whose political orientation is similar to the old vlams' Blok's one: as for a starter, the Lombard league and its many little rivals in the north, the Sardinian independentist is Sardiania.
In Sicily immediately after the war a powerful pro-independence party was created ex-nihilo in a short time, even if the mafia decided negatively about its existence pretty soon.
Don't forget that Italy stretches for more than a thousand miles, so an ihabitant of Milan would be closer to Innsbruck than to Rome.
The difference between our parties and the Vlams blok lies in the better leadership the Vlams has and in the lack of a serious unitarian past in Belgium, at least from a rethorical point of view: after unification generations of italians were told they descended from the Romans and that hey were the legitimate heirs to the roman empire.
The latter idea, which was not born out of fascism but out of the pen of the pre-unitarian apologists of a united Italy, did deny te reality of an Italy made of so many peoples as one can count in a not so big territory: that past was still evident in different languages that were spoken in every province, with even surviving pre-roman languages as in the South, where some tiny villages were still speaking homeric age greek until a few decades ago.