Taxpayers, Thieves, and the State: Fiscal Citizenship in Contemporary Italy

As, burdened by its massive public debt, the Italian state nears the verge of default, the debate on taxation and distribution raging in this country's public sphere provides citizens with a means to conceptualize their responsibilities and rights vis-à-vis the state as well as each other. Italian fiscal citizenship thus emerges as an unstable relational category that is negotiated along and across the split between the rhetoric of fiscal and distributive fairness on the one hand, and its actual denial on the other. By fostering the breakdown of solidarity and the intensification of ethnic chauvinism, the failure to implement equity in taxation and distribution shows the extent to which the Italian state is implicated in the divisiveness of social categories that cast each other as an impediment to the fulfillment of their respective rights.