MakeVenetoA State Again

A thousand years of republic

"Again" is not a borrowed slogan: it is a fact. For more than a thousand years Venice was a republic.⁶ It is the longest-lived republic in history: even counting only from the first securely documented doge, the Serenissima lasted more than a thousand years. The Roman Republic, by comparison, fell short of five centuries.

A republic, not a kingdom. The doge did not inherit a throne: he was elected, and from 1268 he was chosen through a ten-stage procedure alternating lots and ballots, designed to make fraud and factional manoeuvres almost impossible.⁷ On election he swore a promissione that limited his powers; magistracies were short and checked one another. It was not a democracy as we understand it today, since it was governed by an aristocracy of patrician families. But it was a State of laws, stable for centuries, whose institutions Gasparo Contarini described in a treatise read all over Europe.⁸

1. 697–726Tradition places the election of the first doge by the lagoon communities in 697. The first securely documented doge, Orso Ipato, dates from 726. A republican history lasting more than a thousand years begins.
2. 1268Venice adopts its law for electing the doge: ten stages of lots and ballots. It will remain in force until the end of the Republic.
3. 1339–1484Treviso, Vicenza, Padua, Verona, Belluno and finally the Polesine join the Serenissima. For centuries almost all of today's Veneto is part of the Republic: its mainland State, the Stato da Tera.⁹
4. 12 May 1797Under pressure from Napoleon, the Great Council, meeting without even a quorum, votes to end the Republic. The last doge is Ludovico Manin. In October, with the Treaty of Campo Formio, Venice is handed to Austria.¹⁰
5. 1848–1849Venice rises against Austria and proclaims the Republic of San Marco, led by Daniele Manin. A few months later its assembly votes to join Piedmont in the Italian cause: Venetian and Italian at once, even then.¹¹
6. 22 October 2017More than two million Venetians vote in the autonomy referendum: turnout around 57%, "yes" around 98%.¹²
7. 13 October 2026For the first time, the Italian Council of Ministers approves the final agreements on Veneto's "differentiated autonomy". Parliament has yet to pass the law.¹³

Differentiated autonomy is a first step, and we support it. But a few extra powers granted by Rome, one subject at a time, one negotiation at a time, are not enough. We are asking for something else: for Veneto to be a State again.

A federated State, not a separate one

In Europe, "State" does not necessarily mean absolute sovereignty. It means a constitution of one's own, a parliament, a government, its own revenue, and responsibility for what it decides.

The Bavarian constitution opens with "Bayern ist ein Freistaat": Bavaria is a Free State.¹⁴ That of Canton Ticino, right next door: "Canton Ticino is a democratic republic of Italian culture and language", part of the Swiss Confederation.¹⁵ Nobody thinks Bavarians or Ticinesi want to leave. They are States within a federation, and the federation is stronger for it.

We have three levels in mind, each with clear tasks, following the principle of subsidiarity: decide at the level closest to citizens, and move up only when it is truly needed.

The list is a starting point, not a treaty. The principle, though, is clear: Italy does not disappear, it changes its job. Less of a central State running everything from Rome, more of a common home holding different federated States together.

Further from Rome, deeper into Europe

Today's Union is too weak on big things and too fussy about small ones. On foreign policy and taxation it decides by unanimity, which often means it does not decide.

The idea of a federal Europe was born in Italy, and half of it in the North. Carlo Cattaneo, a Lombard federalist, wrote it down in 1849:

«Avremo pace vera, quando avremo li Stati Uniti d'Europa.»

We shall have true peace when we have the United States of Europe.

In 1941, confined on the island of Ventotene, Altiero Spinelli and Ernesto Rossi wrote that the real political dividing line no longer ran between left and right, but between those who clung to the nation State and those who wanted "the creation of a solid international State".¹⁷

Even the first autonomist movement of the North was pro-European. In March 1982, in the first issue of Lombardia Autonomista, Umberto Bossi wrote:

«Il governo accentratore di Roma […] chiacchiera di autonomie e di Europa, ma di fatto non vuole né autentiche autonomie né lo Stato Federale Europeo. Abbiamo infatti un parlamento Europeo fantasma perché creato apposta senza poteri.»

The centralising government in Rome chatters about autonomy and Europe, but in fact wants neither genuine autonomy nor a Federal European State. That is why we have a ghost European Parliament, deliberately created without powers.

And in 1991, at Pontida: the traditional nation State "is at the same time both too small and too big".¹⁹ Too small for defence, climate, currency; too big for schools, healthcare, land.

We take up that insight, without the identity-based closures that came with it and without the Eurosceptic turn that abandoned it after Italy joined the euro.²⁰ In 2023 the European Parliament called for a Convention to reform the Treaties.²¹ We want a Veneto that pushes that reform forward, not one that just endures it.

Identity in the plural

Wanting a Venetian State does not mean disowning Italy. This is not just our conviction: it is what anthropology and the social sciences have been saying for decades about how identities work.

Nobody is just one thing

The first to describe it precisely was Edward Evans-Pritchard, in 1940, studying the Nuer of Sudan: their word for "home" meant the village, the tribal section or the whole tribe, depending on who was speaking and to whom. To make himself clear, he added an example from home: an Englishman met in Germany will say he comes from England; met in London, from Oxfordshire.²² Thomas Hylland Eriksen later showed that this logic of concentric circles is the opposite of nationalism's, which divides the world into two categories only, inside or outside: here instead "segmentary ideologies entail degrees of inside- and outsideness".²³

Later research confirmed and broadened the idea. In 1969 Fredrik Barth explained that a group is defined not by an inventory of cultural traits but by the boundary it draws with others: "the ethnic boundary that defines the group, not the cultural stuff that it encloses". And those boundaries persist even as people cross them, moving in and out over the course of their lives.²⁴ Being Venetian, then, is not an exam in polenta and dialect: it is a belonging you can arrive at.

As early as the 1950s Clyde Mitchell observed in the mining towns of southern Africa that tribal belonging mattered in some situations and not in others.²⁵ Rogers Brubaker found the same in a European city divided between two nationalities, Cluj in Romania: there too, ethnicity matters only at certain moments of everyday life. "Ethnicity is not a thing, not a substance", he writes: it is a way of reading the world, and "always only one among many".²⁶

Benedict Anderson called the nation an "imagined community": no Italian will ever meet most other Italians, yet each feels part of the same community. Imagined does not mean false. Every community larger than a village is imagined, and "communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined".²⁷ That holds for Italy, for Europe and for Veneto. So does Eric Hobsbawm's warning: many traditions that seem ancient are recent, sometimes invented.²⁸ We know it, which is why we are not selling myths.

The real risk is not plural identities but single ones. The anthropologist Francesco Remotti wrote that identity "is a concept, but we use it as if it were a myth", and warned against the identity obsession that has run through northern Italian politics too.²⁹ Amartya Sen, Nobel laureate in economics, called "solitarist" the idea that each person belongs to one group only: "a very efficient way of misunderstanding nearly everyone in the world".³⁰ That is why we do not speak of a Venetian identity to defend against anyone, but of a belonging to cultivate alongside the others.

What the data say

Italians already live this way. In the Eurobarometer on values and identities, 82% identify with their region, 80% with their nationality and 64% with Europe: all three figures are higher than the EU average.³¹ In Veneto, at a time when over half of the North-East said they favoured independence for their region, 78% still said they were proud to be Italian: the pollster Demos called it "double pride".³² Political scientists speak of nested identities, like Russian dolls: a Rhinelander within a German within a European.³³

And plural identities are good for living together. Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks showed that what matters is not how attached one feels to one's nation, but whether that identity is exclusive or inclusive: those who feel only national lean towards Euroscepticism, while those who feel at once "Catalan, Spanish, and European" support integration. In Belgium, people who feel only Belgian or only Flemish oppose multi-level governance; those who feel both support it.³⁴ Social psychology reaches the same conclusion: harmony between groups is "best achieved by maintaining, not weakening, subgroup identities" within a shared one, while imposing a single identity increases prejudice precisely among those most attached to their own community.³⁵

That is exactly the logic of the three levels. Federalism is the political form of plural identities: it recognises Veneto within Italy and Italy within Europe, and for that very reason it holds people together instead of dividing them.

What we propose

1. A standard Venetian, taught in schoolsVenetian has an unbroken written tradition of more than seven centuries: it was an official working language of the Serenissima, then the language of Ruzante and Goldoni.³⁶ And it is still alive: 55% of Venetians use it at home, against an Italian average of 38%. But in 2015 the figure was 62%, and UNESCO lists Venetian as a vulnerable language.³⁷ So as not to lose it, we propose a written standard Venetian, defined by an independent academy of linguists, that stands alongside local varieties without replacing them, and is taught in every school next to Italian and English, to every child, whatever family they come from. The Basques did it with euskara batua from 1968; Romansh in Graubünden shows it must be done together with speakers, not imposed from above.³⁸
2. Venetian recognised in lawToday Venetian is not among the languages protected by Italy's 1999 national law, and the Constitutional Court has ruled that a Region cannot add it on its own. Italy also signed the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages in 2000 but has never ratified it.³⁹ We ask for both: Venetian in national law, and ratification of the Charter.

Who decides pays, who pays decides

A State without its own taxes is not a State: it is a branch office spending money decided by others.

Every year Venetians pay the Italian State far more than comes back to the region as public spending. How much more, nobody can say precisely: depending on the method and the year, estimates differ by several billion euros.⁴⁰ That in itself is the problem. Citizens should be able to know how much they pay, to whom, and for what.

Meanwhile, right on our borders, Trentino-Alto Adige and Friuli Venezia Giulia have special statutes and keep most of the taxes raised on their territory. No wonder several Venetian border towns have asked to switch sides, and in 2017 Sappada did.⁴¹

We propose a simple rule:

• The Venetian State collects and keeps the taxes needed for its responsibilities, and answers to Venetian voters for them.
• It contributes to an equalisation fund between federated States, with fixed rules and public figures, as German Länder and Swiss cantons do.
• Solidarity stays, but it becomes declared, measurable and tied to results. Not a bottomless pit, not a blackmail.

We are not asking to stop helping those who have less. We are asking to know how much we give, and to decide how we spend the rest.

Markets, yes, but for citizens

We believe in capitalism and free enterprise: Veneto is made of hundreds of thousands of businesses, almost all small, almost all started from nothing.

But the Europe we want is centred on its citizens. A broad welfare state, and a Union able to intervene in the economy and act as referee: to reduce inequality, regulate markets when they are unbalanced, and stop a few giants from setting the rules for everyone else.

This is not utopia. It is already written in the Treaty on European Union, which promises "a highly competitive social market economy, aiming at full employment and social progress".⁴² We only ask that this promise be given the tools to be kept: a real federal budget, common rules on labour and on taxing large corporations, a European safety net.

Nor is it an imported idea. Italy's first rural cooperative bank was founded in Veneto, in Loreggia near Padua, on 20 June 1883: Leone Wollemborg gathered some thirty farmers and smallholders to lend money to one another instead of falling into the hands of usurers.⁴³ Rural banks, mutual aid societies, cooperatives: here enterprise and solidarity have always gone together. That is what we ask of Europe.

To avoid misunderstandings

• Not secessionWe want more Europe and a federal Italy, not new borders. A federated State stays inside the federation.
• Not against the SouthEqualisation between regions stays. We ask that it be transparent and tied to results, not that it disappear.
• Not against ItalyWe are Italian and we stay Italian. Italy is one of the three levels, not an opponent.
• Not ethnicA Venetian is whoever lives and works in Veneto, wherever they came from. The Venetian language is a heritage, not an entrance exam.
• Not nostalgiaThe Serenissima is not coming back. What comes back is the idea that a land can govern itself well, inside something larger.
• Not a partyIt is an idea. Whoever shares it can take it wherever they like.

Where what we write comes from

1. Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, VI, 63; on the concept: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Cosmopolitanism".
2. A. Marzo Magno, L'alba dei libri. Quando Venezia ha fatto leggere il mondo, Garzanti, 2012; AGI, 2017 (Italian).
3. Venetian emigration 1876–1900: Finestre sull'Arte; Biblioteca delle Radici (Italian).
4. Veneto's exports in 2025, about €80 billion: ICE, Istat data (Italian).
5. K. A. Appiah, "Rooted Cosmopolitanism", in The Ethics of Identity, Princeton University Press, 2005, pp. 213–272: PhilPapers.
6. Republic of Venice (traditionally 697–1797): Wikipedia.
7. M. Mowbray, D. Gollmann, "Electing the Doge of Venice: Analysis of a 13th Century Protocol", 2007: PDF.
8. G. Contarini, De magistratibus et republica Venetorum, 1543; English edition: The Republic of Venice, University of Toronto Press (Lorenzo Da Ponte Italian Library).
9. The Republic's mainland domains: Wikipedia.
10. The fall of the Republic, 1797: Wikipedia.
11. Republic of San Marco (1848–1849): Wikipedia.
12. Veneto autonomy referendum, 22 October 2017: Wikipedia; Il Post, 23 October 2017 (Italian).
13. Regional Council of Veneto, press release, 14 October 2026: ANSA (Italian).
14. Constitution of Bavaria, art. 1: gesetze-bayern.de.
15. Constitution of the Republic and Canton of Ticino (1997), art. 1: Canton Ticino statute book.
16. C. Cattaneo, Corollarii alle Memorie, Brussels, 1849; quoted in Zanichelli anthology.
17. A. Spinelli, E. Rossi, For a Free and United Europe (Ventotene Manifesto), 1941: Wikipedia.
18. Lega Nord, Cronistoria 1979–1987, pp. 34–35, reproducing the first article of Lombardia Autonomista, March 1982: archived copy.
19. Lega Nord, Cronistoria 1988–1995, p. 9, Pontida speech of 16 June 1991: archived copy.
20. M. Huysseune, "A Eurosceptic vision in a Europhile country: the case of the Lega Nord", Modern Italy 15(1), 2010, pp. 63–75, doi:10.1080/13532940903477880.
21. European Parliament resolution of 22 November 2023 on proposals for amending the Treaties: Eunews (Italian).
22. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, The Nuer, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1940, pp. 135–137 and 142–148: archive.org.
23. T. H. Eriksen, "Ethnicity versus Nationalism", Journal of Peace Research 28(3), 1991, pp. 268–269: PDF; Ethnicity and Nationalism: Anthropological Perspectives, Pluto Press, 1993.
24. F. Barth (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Bergen–Oslo/London, 1969, Introduction, pp. 9–10 and 15.
25. J. C. Mitchell, The Kalela Dance, Rhodes-Livingstone Papers 27, Manchester University Press, 1956, pp. 30–34: text.
26. R. Brubaker, M. Feischmidt, J. Fox, L. Grancea, Nationalist Politics and Everyday Ethnicity in a Transylvanian Town, Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 15; R. Brubaker, Ethnicity without Groups, Harvard University Press, 2004.
27. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 1983 (Verso, 2006 edition, p. 6).
28. E. J. Hobsbawm, T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge University Press, 1983, p. 1.
29. F. Remotti, Contro l'identità, Laterza, 1996; L'ossessione identitaria, Laterza, 2010; "L'ossessione identitaria", Rivista Italiana di Gruppoanalisi XXV, 2011, pp. 9–29 (Italian).
30. A. Sen, "Violence, Identity and Poverty", Journal of Peace Research 45(1), 2008, p. 6; Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Norton, 2006.
31. European Commission, Special Eurobarometer 508: Values and Identities of EU citizens, 2021, pp. 50 and 69: EU Publications Office.
32. Demos & Pi, Osservatorio sul Nord Est, March 2015: demos.it (Italian).
33. T. Risse, "Neofunctionalism, European identity, and the puzzles of European integration", Journal of European Public Policy 12(2), 2005, pp. 291–309; J. Díez Medrano, P. Gutiérrez, "Nested identities", Ethnic and Racial Studies 24(5), 2001.
34. L. Hooghe, G. Marks, "Calculation, Community and Cues", European Union Politics 6(4), 2005, pp. 419–443, doi:10.1177/1465116505057816; "Does Identity or Economic Rationality Drive Public Opinion on European Integration?", PS: Political Science & Politics 37(3), 2004, pp. 415–420.
35. M. Hornsey, M. Hogg, "Assimilation and Diversity", Personality and Social Psychology Review 4(2), 2000, pp. 143–156, doi; R. Crisp, C. Stone, N. Hall, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32(2), 2006, pp. 230–243; for a critical reading: J. Dovidio et al., Social Issues and Policy Review 10(1), 2016, pp. 6–46.
36. F. Ursini, "Dialetti veneti", Enciclopedia dell'Italiano, Treccani, 2011: treccani.it (Italian).
37. ISTAT, L'uso della lingua italiana, dei dialetti e delle lingue straniere. Anno 2024, January 2026: istat.it (Italian); UNESCO, Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger, 2010, cited in F. Ursini, "Sono vitali le varietà venete?", Quaderni Veneti, 2012.
38. Euskaltzaindia, Arantzazu congress, 1968; Rumantsch Grischun, 1982, and the return to local idioms in many schools from 2011: Historical Dictionary of Switzerland.
39. Law no. 482 of 15 December 1999, art. 2; Constitutional Court, judgments 170/2010 and 81/2018; Italian Senate dossier on ratifying the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages: senato.it (Italian).
40. AGI fact-check on Veneto's fiscal residual, 2019; L. Loiacono, L. Rizzo, R. Secomandi, University of Ferrara Economics working paper, 2025.
41. Sappada, moved from Veneto to Friuli Venezia Giulia in 2017: Wikipedia.
42. Treaty on European Union, art. 3(3): EUR-Lex.
43. Italy's first rural bank, Loreggia 1883: Milano Finanza (Italian); Leone Wollemborg.