TUTELA E VALORIZZAZIONE DELLA DIVERSITÀ CULTURALE NELLA COSTITUZIONE PLURALISTA

This work tries to afford some of the issues of the multiculturalism as a phenomenon that involve and challenge the Italian constitutional legal order. First of all, the existence of new cultural and linguistic minorities implies new needs of protection of diversity, since new minorities, composed by immigrants and second and third generations of immigrants, show different characteristics from the so called “national” or “historical” minorities existing on the territory of the State: it is required, on one hand, the development of new instruments of protection and valorization of their cultural diversity, but, on the other hand, new policies of integration. Thus, the first part of the work start from considering the protection of the so called “national” minorities, underling the link existing with the typology of the form of government in Italy, moving from the liberal State, to the authoritarian State and, finally, to the pluralist democracy, in order to achieve a better understanding of the system of protection of minority groups through article 6 of the Italian Constitution and through the principle of pluralism contained in article 2 of the Italian Constitution. The second part of the work tries to evaluate the possibility of an evolution in the interpretation of article 6 of our Constitution, which provides for a special protection of linguistic minorities. Until now, article 6 of the Constitution has constituted the constitutional grounds for a protection of the so-called “historical minorities” existing in the Country, while the new cultural and linguistic minorities have been excluded from the protection. Thus, the observations carried out start from identifying the constitutional grounds for a protection of the new linguistic minorities, underlining how it is possible to move from a literal interpretation to an extensive and evolving interpretation of article 6 of the Constitution. Then, taking into account the evolution both in jurisprudence and in literature, the proposal is to set aside the citizenship criterion as a condition to be entitled of the protection provided by article 6 of the Constitution in place of new criteria. A third part of the work tries to show how the safeguard of the cultural diversity of new minorities may be considered not only as an instrument of protection but also as a new and more inclusive constitutional value shared by all the political community, considering the Constitution not only as a legal instrument but also in its cultural and ontological nature as the expression of the values of a political community. Finally, the last part of the work is centered on the necessity of managing the phenomenon of multiculturalism, through a new “model” of integration which is able to fill the gaps shown by both the French model and the Britain model of integration, in order to afford the issue of the intercultural dialogue. In particular, the use of the intercultural dialogue may permit the coexistence of different cultures on the same territory, while maintaining the social cohesion of the society, the unity of the political community and guaranteeing the stability of the public order and it may suggest the possibility to move from the idea of a Nation that is culturally homogeneous to a dialogical Nation, where the cohesion of the political community is not based on cultural and linguistic homogeneity but on the mutual understanding of diversity, always within the limits of the respect of fundamental rights as protected in the Italian Constitution.