The democratic colonization. Land struggles, land reform, and constitutional implementation in the postwar period

Abstract

The essay discusses the land reform that emerged in 1950 with the Sila Law, the Stralcio Law, and the Sicilian Law, setting aside the prospect of a general reform. On the one hand, the government's response was the democratic response, prompted by the United States, to the revolutionary tensions in the countryside; on the other, the peasants’, the minimal result of the land struggles of the previous years. This reform was identified with the overcoming of large estates in the name of fighting unemployment, which, from the Christian Democratic party perspective, combined colonization with democracy. The redistributive mechanism constituted a truly new type of property, analyzed by civil law scholars with some technical remarks. A specific sales contract was established between the public bodies for the reform and the assignees of the expropriated lands, with a retention of title and payment agreement over a thirty-year period. The assignee entered a regime of "limited dominion" governed by the technical requirements of colonization, subject to the direction of the public body for the reform, almost like a "state settler" rather than a true owner. But with all its limitations, the reform determines the entry of those known as rural people into the circle of working citizenship, through the sudden anthropological leap from day labor to small property, in keeping with the historical tenets of Catholic social doctrine.