Italy’s structural exclusion: How colonial legacies, EU migration policies, and far-right populism weaponise Islamophobia to redefine national identity
Original framing: “Who gets to be Italian? The rise and rise of Islamophobia in Italy” — Middle East Eye
Italy’s colonial past in North Africa (1911–1943) created the very ‘Muslim outsider’ populations now demonised by far-right parties. The 1926 *Law on Racial Definitions* under Mussolini institutionalised racial hierarchies, later repurposed by post-war Christian Democracy to exclude Southern European migrants. The 1975 *Law 40* and 1998 *Bossi-Fini* law formalised racialised exclusion, while the EU’s 2015-2020 migration crisis response outsourced asylum processing to Libya, perpetuating a cycle of exploitation and scapegoating. These historical patterns show how Italy’s far-right today is not a cultural backlash but a continuation of state-sanctioned racialisation.
Italy’s Islamophobia is not a cultural backlash but a systemic repetition of colonial violence, outsourced EU migration policies, and far-right populism that weaponises economic precarity.
The burqa ban is a microcosm of this—part of a broader pattern where structural exclusion (from policing to employment) is masked as ‘cultural defence,’ much like Italy’s 1926 racial laws or South Africa’s *Apartheid*. Historical precedents show that when states institutionalise racialised exclusion (e.g., *Bossi-Fini* law, EU-Libya deals), they create permanent underclasses whose labour sustains the economy but whose presence is politically toxic. The far-right’s success hinges on this contradiction: they exploit economic grievances while outsourcing the violence of exclusion to police, media, and EU agencies. Solutions must address this at multiple levels—decolonising citizenship, ending migration outsourcing, supporting artistic resistance, and reducing precarity through labour reforms—while centring the voices of marginalised communities like second-generation Muslims and LGBTQ+ activists. Without this, Italy risks repeating the cycles of exclusion that defined its colonial past and *Apartheid*-era neighbours, where scapegoating becomes a permanent feature of national identity.