Italian politics has always been characterised by deep regional divides. While the north and centre are well integrated into the European economy, southern regions struggle to keep up their productivity and employment levels. Although this divide has a long history, the Covid‐19 crisis is set to worsen the inequality separating the two parts of the country. This article looks at how the coronavirus pandemic immediately assumed a regional dimension, which was reflected not only in the geography of the contagion, but also in how the central state struggled to manage the contrasting demands coming from northern and southern regions. Although the north has been the epicentre of the health crisis, the south is set to pay the highest economic and social price for the lockdown measures. The conclusion suggests that, while the Covid crisis has confirmed the salience of regional divides for Italian politics, it might also strengthen autonomist forces.
Bicameralism is traditionally considered necessary to the principle of the limitation of power and, as such, a key feature of the liberal constitutional state. Yet the history of the French Revolution reveals that this has not always been the case and that bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism is more complex than is traditionally assumed. This article will discuss how the Abbé Sieyès, one of the founding fathers of modern constitutionalism, rejected bicameralism not only because it was contrary to the revolutionary principle of equality, but also because it did not actually succeed at limiting power. Even worse, bicameralism would threaten the constitutional system by forcing the legislative power into procedural impasses that would eventually open the way to despotism. Putting Sieyès's claims in historical perspective, the paper aims to offer some historical nuance and insights into bicameralism's relationship to liberal constitutionalism.
Historians and political theorists have long been interested in how the principle of people's power was conceptualised during the French Revolution. Traditionally, two diverging accounts emerge, one of national and the other of popular sovereignty, the former associated with moderate monarchist deputies, including the Abbé Sieyes, and the latter with the Jacobins. This paper argues against this binary interpretation of the political thought of the French Revolution, in favour of a third account of people's power, Sieyes' idea of pouvoir constituant. Traditionally, constituent power has been viewed as a variation of sovereignty, but I show it to be an independent conceptualisation of people's power. Sieyes' political theory led him to criticise and refuse contemporary theories of sovereignty in favour of what he understood as a fully modern account of people's power. Based on extensive research in the archives, I show how Sieyes opposed the deployment of sovereignty by the revolutionary Assemblies and recommended replacing it with the idea of constituent power.
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