From the First to the Second Italian Republic in Catania (Sicily): politics, economy and society between cosmetic changes and deep continuities

This thesis examines the crisis of the Italian First Republic occurred at the beginning of 1990s, from a local perspective, that of the city of Catania in Sicily. Despite the crisis received a copious amount of academic descriptions and explanations there has not been any attempt to examine it from a specific local context so to reveal what new insights such context can provide in regard to both the causes, development and outcomes of the crisis. Besides, unlike most accounts on these events, this study questions the often vaguely used notion of crisis rather than take it as an analytical starting point. In order to do so, it will be examined not only Reinhart Koselleck’s conceptual history of crisis (1988) to reveal the meaning(s) of the term crisis and the distinction suggested by Burckhardt in his Reflexion on History (1943) between ‘authentic’ and ‘fake’ crises but also what a crisis consist of and what consequences it can trigger, especially in regards to democratic systems so to ultimately establish whether or not it was a crisis what occurred in the Sicilian city.
The study, which is based on 39 in-depth interviews along with electoral, judicial and socioeconomic data gathered from institutional reports, focuses on the city political system, economy and society both before, during and after the crisis of the early 1990s. In doing so it aims first to reveal what kind of democratic system went into crisis in the city so to then identify not only what event or set or events triggered its crisis but more importantly the level of continuity and discontinuity with what came after the crisis, namely the so-called Second Republic.