‘Orientalising Italy: The British and Italian Political Culture’

This paper exposes a longstanding British tendency to orientalise Italy on account of its political culture, and explains it as being rooted in an inclination to regard the British system as a superior model. It reveals how quickly British leaders who had supported Italy's national unification were disappointed by the political and legal practices of Italy during the nineteenth century, how the Italian experience of Fascism led many British observers to conclude that Italy was perhaps not suited to democracy during the twentieth, and how recent media treatment of Silvio Berlusconi's government remains dominated by the same old stereotypes of corruptness and an alleged inability to establish and operate a 'normal' democratic system during the twenty-first.