City Versus Metropolis: The Northern League in the Milan Metropolitan Area

Nowhere does the cosmopolitan character of a city as a node in an international network of cities stand so clearly in contrast to its role as the center of a territorial economy as with Milan. Located in the ‘city studded center’ of Europe, to use Rokkan’s (1975: 576) evocative phrase, Milan has always been embroiled in the ‘entanglements of European cities and states’ (Tilly, 1994). For centuries a city-state and then, under Austrian rule, connected to central Europe more than to the peninsula to the south, since 1861 it has served as both an economic center for Italy as a whole, a service center for its surrounding region, and, increasingly, as a global center for the fashion and design industries. As its European and global roles have deepened, therefore, the tension between this city’s role as a central place for a hinterland and its wider network role have become increasingly apparent. In this article we want to tell a story about the tension between the two roles of Milan by focusing on the recent history of a new regional political party in northern Italy, the Northern League, that emphasizes the difficulties that face new regionalist movements in mobilizing voters and supporters across a range of places from large cities to rural areas within their chosen region. In this case the difficulty is that posed to the League by the city of Milan, the most important city in northern Italy and a most vital place for the League to capture if it is to either achieve its avowed goal of an independent northern Italy or ‘Padania’ (as the League calls it) or maintain its influence in Italian national politics. We suggest that contemporary political-economic trends are producing in the case of Milan and its hinterland an increasing political cleavage between the two, with the Northern League colonizing much of the hinterland and more nationaland social classoriented parties dominating the city (Bull, 1997; Dente, 1997: 178–9).