Italy as an Eastern European Country?: Italian Circulation and Reception of East Central European Dissent Cultures (Late 1970s-Early 1990s)

• In Event: Liberation through Transition: Democratic and Economic Transformation in Central Eastern Europe towards the End of the Cold War, 1975-1991

Abstract

This paper will focus on the East Central European dissidents’ analyses and reflections that reverberated in the Italian intellectual and political debate since the 1970s onwards, with ambivalent results. On the one hand, they contributed to the search for new hybrid versions of liberal communism or socialism based on the critique of 20th-century statism and the myth of civil society; on the other hand, they legitimized the need for a kind of “normality” equated to “Europe”, which fostered the implicit or explicit perception of Italy as an Eastern rather than a Western European country, especially in the wake of the transition of the early 1990s.

Author

• Marco Bresciani, U of Florence (Italy)