Adrift Southern Italy. European Regionalization and the Decline of our Country

Over the past fifteen years, the UE has pursued a process of socio-economicconvergence, spending about one third of its budget in regional policies to reducedisparities between underdeveloped areas such as Southern Italy and richerregions.The aim of this paper is to understand if these disparities have been actuallyreduced from 1996 to 2009, and therefore to analyze the gap between North andSouth Italy referring to the dynamics of European regional development.In the first paragraph the theoretical debate on convergence is briefly reconsidered,focusing on national territorial disparity. Then, in the second paragraph,an operational definition of the concept of socioeconomic development is proposedand a methodological path for the analysis of territorial disparities is illustrated.In the other paragraphs (3-4-5), following a perspective that combines themost critical sociological thesis about convergence with Myrdal's analytical categories,the increasing polarization between central and peripherals local societiesis highlighted. The results show the decline of the Italian development modeland a downright Southern Italy's drift, namely its socioeconomic separation fromthe rest of Europe.The conclusions are: the EU, like Italy, seems incapable of producing a longrange development. This raises a question about the actual capacity of currentEU's institutional architecture to produce social and territorial cohesion.