Char posted:

After turning into a single country, no Italian government except for the fascist regime tried to give the whole population a foundation of values, ideals, minimum guaranteed services, and so on. Before globalization, the stratified vision of groups was easy to decipher:
If you're from my street, you're a friend.
If you're from a different part of town, you're a rival.
If you're from the outskirts, you're an ignorant peasant who should pay the taxes to benefit my services.
If you're from a nearby town, you're my economic competitor.
If you're from another region, you're a foreigner, which means I'll have to refer to the notorious stereotypes regarding your region to communicate with you.
If you're from another country, well, you're a foreigner as well, but you don't even speak my language and your stereotypes are even broader, and built on past history your country has with mine.
(oh, and if you're from Pisa... well. You know. Everywhere in the world, some expat or tourist has written somewhere "Pisa Merda". It's one of our oldest proto-meme.)

Then globalization hits and your stratified vision of outgroups is outdated, because there's this huge void: foreigners whose history you know nothing about that end up living in your street. Everything in your model is messed up, friends end up going abroad, the outskirts become the cradle of the new middle class, your economic competitors shut down and you start wondering if you're next on the chopping block, you name it.

It's a bit roundabout way to say that the average Italian still has a mindset where the foreigner is everyone born outside your 20km radius of existance, and no government managed to alter, much less break, this way of thinking. Even worse, some governments even colluded with it: our role in the European economy until the early '90s was providing cheap manifacturing. Our most used short term monetary strategy was constantly de-valuing the Lira Italiana becuase if it got too strong we'd stop being cheap to other countries. Never try to become bigger and never try to unify with your allies.

Anyone who has a different mindset is the byproduct of either the efforts of individuals who wanted to show their children the outside world, or the victim of globalization.