"Italy is a geographical expression", said Metternich in 1849, after the year of revolutions in Europe which first gave popular expression to Italian nationalism. Umberto Bossi, the leader of the Northern League organisation which proclaimed independence for the northern Italian state he has called Padania, seems to concur with the sentiment of the reactionary Austrian statesman who opposed Italian unification.
Commentators agree that although the weekend proclamation partook more of opera buffo than of serious politics, it does contain, if neglected or misjudged, the elements of a much more deep seated problem which will have to be confronted by the Italian political class. The litany of complaint on which Mr Bossi has drawn includes corrupt institutions, high taxes, incompetent bureaucracy and a generalised refrain that northern Italy is burdened with all of these through rule from Rome and the need to support an impoverished south. Mr Bossi has in the last year decisively shifted his position from a radical decentralised federal regionalism to outright secession for northern Italy. This may explain the lower than expected turnout at his weekend rallies and the anti climactic mood that has prevailed after the hyperbolic build up they received.
Italy, it should be remembered, has come through a traumatic period of political turmoil after the end of the Cold War. The political corruption scandals exposed by the Tangentopoli investigations became the occasion for a significant realignment which eventually resulted in the creation of Mr Prodi's governing coalition last April, bringing the former communists into office for the first time. Mr Bossi's rodomontades should not disguise the seriousness of the supplementary agenda he has provided for a reconstructed political class the federal reordering of Italian regional and local government, within the setting of a wider European regionalist movement that pits similarly advantaged regions against their poorer neighbours. The Scottish historian, Christopher Harvie, has used the term "bourgeois regions" to describe the phenomenon, pointing out that "some regions are more equal than others".
In this sense the Italian story could become a metaphor for the European one. It was, after all, Bismarck who observed about Europe, in even more dismissive vein than Metternich about Italy, that whoever spoke about it is mistaken. Padania, too, is a geographical expression. It has no cultural, historical or political coherence. Piedmont, Veneto, Liguria and Lombardy are quite diverse regions, which only came together in the context of Italian unification and Italian cohesion policies. The principle of cohesion is endangered in an enlarging Europe in which the paymasters are unwilling to provide the wherewithal to absorb less advantaged post communist states, just as Mr Bossi resents the south of Italy. Those who will the end of a united Europe without the means should pay close attention to the Italian debate.