Written into the constitution: How Italy nurtures and protects its co-ops

This week on the Changing the Narrative podcast, Chris speaks with Vera Zamagni, Professor of Economic History at the University of Bologna, Senior Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SAIS Europe, and a former Vice President of the Emilia-Romagna regional government.

Since 1948, Article 45 of Italy's constitution has recognised the social function of cooperation — and, as Vera explains, no government since has been able to legislate against it. In her own region, that constitutional footing helped build something unusual: more than 3,600 cooperatives, which she says account for up to a fifth of Emilia-Romagna's economy once you include the firms they control, sitting alongside — not against — a dense network of small, export-focused private firms. Bologna, where Vera lives, is what she calls the packaging-machinery capital of the world.

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Vera traces the roots of the "Emilian model" back to centuries of civic self-government, and explains why an economy built on small firms and cooperatives never adopted the American big-business approach. She's candid about the harder questions too: whether cooperatives can keep growing, whether any of this can travel beyond Italy — to Britain, or to New York, where she was recently asked to advise a group working with Mayor Zohran Mamdani on rebuilding the city's childcare system — and why she believes the real threat to the model today isn't politics. It's artificial intelligence.

What we get into:

• Article 45 — the article that names cooperatives in Italy's constitution — and why every party, from the Liberals to the Communists, backed it in 1948
• What actually distinguishes the "Emilian model": centuries of civic self-government, and an economy of small and medium-sized firms that never wanted to imitate American big business
• The scale of cooperative Italy today, and the newer forms it keeps producing — social cooperatives, community cooperatives reviving depopulated villages, and renewable-energy communities
• Why cooperatives and small private business coexist rather than compete to the death — and where capitalism won't share the ground
• Whether the model can travel: Britain's "identity crisis" and the demutualisation of its building societies, and the New York childcare experiment Vera was asked to advise on
• Why culture, not law, comes first — and what that means for anywhere trying to build co-ops from a standing start
• Why Vera thinks artificial intelligence, not politics, is the real threat — and what "not in my name" looks like in practice
• Italy's networked model: consortia, sector federations, and the levy on co-op profits that funds the next generation of co-ops

Chapters:

00:00 — Introduction

00:58 — The cooperative economy of Emilia-Romagna

02:15 — The historical context of Italian cooperatives

05:55 — The roots of the Emilian model

11:21 — The scale of cooperative Italy today

16:32 — Can cooperatives keep growing?

22:00 — Cooperatives and capitalism: is coexistence possible?

26:08 — Can the model travel beyond Italy?

31:45 — Resisting the AI tsunami

33:54 — Britain's identity crisis and the Anglo-Saxon trap

38:44 — Culture before everything: growing co-ops without the Italian foundations

47:08 — Italy's constitutional shield

50:32 — Building from below: the New York childcare experiment

56:41 — Cooperation among cooperatives: Italy's networked model

About Vera Negri Zamagni

Vera Negri Zamagni is Professor of Economic History at the University of Bologna and a Senior Associate Fellow at Johns Hopkins University's SAIS Europe in Bologna. She holds a doctorate in economic history from the University of Oxford, co-founded the European Review of Economic History, and is a former Vice President of the Emilia-Romagna regional government. She has written extensively on Italian economic development and the cooperative movement. (Sources: SAIS Europe / Bologna Institute for Policy Research; University of Bologna.)

Resources mentioned:

• Article 45 of the Italian Constitution — Senate of Italy, official text
• Vera Negri Zamagni — University of Bologna
• Vera Negri Zamagni — SAIS Europe / Johns Hopkins University
• Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, Anne Case and Angus Deaton (Princeton University Press, 2020) — the book Vera references (see flag below)