Historical and Political Analysis of the Decentralization Process in Italy

The author of the article examines the peculiarities of the Italian political space through a retrospective analysis of that country’s longstanding decentralization process. As a starting point, the author takes the end of the Risorgimento era, during which the national liberation movement of the Italian people united against foreign domination of their fragmented nation. A periodization of the decentralization process is given, indicating its main milestones: 1) the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy (1815 to 1871); 2) the Fascist regime (1922 to 1943); 3) adoption of the Italian Constitution and the Statutes of the Special Regions (1947); 4) regional reform (1970) and; 5) constitutional reform (2001). The key criteria for assessing the degree of decentralization in Italy are considered, including whether the regions have the right to adopt their own laws, initiate legislation at the central level, and participate in international activities. The author concludes that the Italian political elite has succeeded in decentralizing the republic and building a new regional policy based on the principles of subsidiarity. The reforms of the political and legal institutional design were mainly related to the delineation of the spheres of competence between the state and the regions, the consolidation of autonomous status for all regions, the abolition of the government commissioner, and the challenge of regional legislation exclusively by the Constitutional Court, creating the basis for the quasi-federal features of the Italian political and legal system. Thus, it is natural to say that Italy belongs to a special “transit” form of state structure of the regionalist type, located at the juncture between unitarianism and federalism.