Half-life autonomy | Secció Història Contemporànea Món actual

After World War II, it was characterized, throughout Western Europe, by the downsizing of the European superpowers and by the consolidation of the US interference on European countries, through the aid of the Marshall plan. The placement of the European countries in the US orbit obviously led to a declared anti-communist policy. As in Spain, Franco was left in his place, in the name of anti-communism, in Italy, theoretically democratic state, we had to look for other solutions to avoid the rise to power of the strong left parties. Sicily is in this situation, always linked to Italian history, but always with its own history and particular evolution.

This work aims to retrace the fundamental stages of Sicilian Autonomy through, above all, the analysis of the Statute in its application and its evolution, from the post-war period to the seventies-eighties.

The allied landing reawakened the ancestral desire for freedom, which on the Island was inevitably translated into hunger for land. In fact, the peasant movement that emerged grew massive and almost unstoppable. The mafia violence, in fact, was not enough to stop the movement, but the political will, yes.

The end of the war led to the reawakening of political ideologies and the consequent rebirth of mass parties that immediately had to give Italy a new constitutional and democratic structure. However, Italy, in the partition of Yalta, came to be in the US orbit, and this meant above all the mandatory prohibition to bring to power the political groups of the left and in particular the Communist Party and the Socialist Party. At this juncture, the draft Statute of the Autonomous Region of Sicily was approved, which almost imposed the regional order on the Italian State. Specifically, the Bylaws permitted the legislation concerning sectors such as agriculture and industry, effectively freeing the island from state control and slowing down the development of the island’s economic fabric. A devious model of the management of public affairs, a progressive removal of politics from the people, and the formation of a megapartite, the Christian Democracy that incorporated the whole Region into itself, was developed. This involved the ramification of a patronage network and a spread, never seen before, of organized crime.

he fundamental laws that the newly established Region approved were above all the Agrarian Reform and administrative reform; the first destroyed the latifundium, but created a layer of small landowners, evading the redistribution of land that was wondering, that badly conformed to the imposition of liberalism and the birth of the European Union and above all was the main cause of emigration massive that occurred from Sicily to northern Italy and to continental Europe; the second and served for the creation of a social class, the state bourgeoisie, that is the class in charge of the management of public affairs, fertile ground for clientelism and corruption. The History of Autonomous Sicily develops on these bases. The mafiosi and the agrarians who had enriched themselves with the sale of the estates, went to invest the proceeds in the new business, the building industry. In Sicily, a whole network of services had to be invented from the streets to the popular quarters of the three major Sicilian cities, to the dams, schools, sewage networks, everything had to be built. The funding of Article 38 of the Statute only served to fatten the pockets of mobsters and politicians and all their entourage, leaving the island with its endemic problems. This process of fusion of powers found its peak in the seventies and eighties, where now the political and mafia no longer distinguished, interchanging, many times the roles, the most striking example are in recent years the Cugini Salvo, great voters DC , owners of the majority of Sicilian tax offices and themselves as mafia boss. Sicily continues to pay for the atrocities committed by its political class, incompetent and collusive. Relegated to a subordinate condition in the European economy.