I Trenta ingloriosi? Riforme, crisi e frammentazione in Italia, Ungheria e Jugoslavia (1975-2005)
Project description
The project investigates the professional and intellectual networks (economists, sociologists, political scientists, demographists, journalists, NGO members) and their understanding of the processes of globalization and de-globalization between the late 1970s and the mid-2000s.
It focuses on three specific case studies: Italy in the culminating point of the Republic of Parties and its crisis; Hungary in the late and post-communist period; the Yugoslav Federation in the phases of late-socialist crisis, dissolution, and the successor states’ transitions. Through examining the elaborations of reform-minded intellectuals in these countries, the project assesses how they conceived and shaped internal transformations, and how they responded to the common challenges of globalization and de-globalization.
The project’s time span is here defined as the “Inglorious Thirty”, which is identified as a period when phenomena of financial and technological interdependence, political cooperation and European reintegration coexisted with trends of economic crises, social insecurities, democratic delegitimation, populist and nationalist fragmentation. Contrary to common dichotomous assumptions of globalization vs. de-globalization as mutually opposed processes, the project aims to provide a more dynamic and inter-related analysis of these phenomena in both analytical and historical terms.
The project also intends to overcome the usually rigid analytical distinction in contemporary and present history between the Western and Eastern Blocs. It rather emphasizes the regional and sub-regional dimensions of transitions and transformations, shedding light on a range of common problems related to (de-)globalization that all these three countries had to tackle: transnational circulation of capital and goods; financialisation and external debt; inflation and austerity policies; role of international institutions; EEC/EU integration; regional imbalances. A transdisciplinary and comparative perspective is offered, combining intellectual and political history approaches with inferences from political science, sociology, and macroeconomics.
The project is supported by the Università degli Studi di Firenze through co-funding of the NextGenerationEU and the Cassa di Risparmio di Firenze.