The Force of Destiny, by Christopher Duggan

Italy seems blessed with most of the advantages a nation could desire: a glorious ancient history, extraordinary achievements in art, philosophy and science, a humanistic tradition that has nourished the Western world. Yet the story of the Italian nation state, as recounted in this ambitious and brilliant history of the country from 1796, has been a long succession of failures and humiliations. Now and then the story is illuminated by flashes of inspired statesmanship – but even the successes generated disasters, by encouraging wildly inflated hopes.

It is a desperate story, and Duggan, author of important books on the 19th-century statesman Francesco Crispi and the relationship between the Mafia and fascism, tells it forcefully. Italy's problems begin with the invasion by Napoleon, which disseminates the desire for the emancipation and unification of the peninsula. But from the outset the contrast between the desired unity and equality and the reality of a peninsula fractured and enslaved for centuries is glaring.

It is a problem aggravated by the idealistic cast of the Italian mind. Intellectuals and revolutionaries envisaged a glorious future as master of the Mediterranean, the honoured peer of the French and British, but the awful reality was poverty, illiteracy and subjection.

The first imperative was to be a nation. As imagined communities went, Italy held promise. It had territorial integrity, give or take Sicily and Sardinia. Pretty well everyone was a Catholic. Their dialects were not radically unrelated like, say, English and Welsh or Hindi and Tamil. And most of them had belonged to the greatest empire Europe had seen.

Wasn't that enough? It was not, and Italy's makers knew it. One stumbling-block was that the very idea of belonging to a single Italian "nation" was outlandish. In Naples, after Italy's unification in 1860, a French observer heard a man "ask bemusedly: 'What is Italy?'; and in Sicily it was... quite widely maintained that 'La Talia' was the name of the new king's wife."

The ground rules of citizenship were missing. "Bonaparte made kings, England makes nations," boasted the new commander William Bentinck on arriving in Sicily, then ruled by Britain, in 1811. Next year he sanctioned "a British-style constitution that...created a two-chamber parliament". It was a shambles. "In the absence of firmly established traditions of compromise and trust, and without any clear sense of a higher collective good... a series of bitter power struggles flared." Bentinck shut the parliament down, concluding that the nation "was still in its 'infancy and weakness'". The islanders had to be governed with "bonbons in one hand and il bastone [the stick] in the other".

But the most fundamental flaw was the Italians' inadequacy in the arts of war. Italy was unified by lucky breaks that required little military initiative, except from Garibaldi, who emerges from Duggan's account with his halo in place. In 1866 a follower of the great man declared that Italy "would never be considered a great nation until it had fought and defeated Austria". Now war with Austria beckoned, the opportunity to impress the outside world and forge one people.

But when it broke out, "no adequate preparations" and "a hopelessly muddled command structure" led to two devastating defeats. At the battle of Custoza, the commanding officer, Lamarmora, "raced along the lines muttering to himself, 'What a defeat!... what a disaster!'". Confusion among the Italian forces resulted in chaos.

The same story was repeated over and over again during the subsequent 80 years: a macabre yearning for bloody battle ("When will we be able to celebrate a great victory won by the valour of Italians?") followed by either another bloody disaster or a cheap victory. After a rare Italian success in the First World War, at Vittorio Veneto, the British ambassador remarked caustically, "They all say that the signal for an armistice was the signal for Italy to begin to fight."

You could say it wasn't Italy's fault. It was the pathology of bellicose nationalism that harried this civilised people into the madness of Fascism, a fevered attempt to compensate for the decades of humiliation which ended in the most comprehensive debacle of them all.

Italy cannot escape blame, however, for its refusal to confront the true shame of what happened under Mussolini – his order to Badoglio, his commander in Libya, for example, to "employ any kind of gas... even on a massive scale", which was duly carried out. When Berlusconi insisted that Mussolini was not nearly as bad as Saddam, he was voicing standard saloon-bar wisdom.

Europe's nightmare era of the "baptism of blood" is blessedly over. Yet, like a man traumatised in childhood, Italy is still hobbled by its failure to forge a persuasive collective identity. "If states are to function well they need an overarching sense of a greater whole to which the interests of the individual, the group or the party are ultimately subordinate," Duggan argues. And few Italians would dispute that their "sense of a greater whole" is still badly defective.

Peter Popham is Rome correspondent of 'The Independent'

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