RAI beyond national boundaries: The case of 'Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona

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JICMS 3 (1+2) pp. 171–183 Intellect Limited 2015

Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies Volume 3 Numbers 1 & 2

© 2015 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jicms.3.1-2.171_1

Keywords

transnational televisionpublic service

broadcastingItalian media systemglobalizationlanguageRAIcross-bordersminorities

Paolo CarelliCatholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan

rai beyond national

boundaries: The case of

‘Comunità radiotelevisiva

italofona’/‘italophone

Broadcasting Community’

aBsTraCT

In 1985, during a decade of many transnational television experiments in Europe, RAI launched a project in cooperation with public service broadcasters of neigh-bouring countries; the collaboration involved the Swiss public service (RSI) and the Yugoslavian experience of RTV Koper. This project was called ‘Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona’/‘Italophone Broadcasting Community’ because the aim was the promotion and development of Italian language and culture all across the world. The experience of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona represents one of the clearest examples of the so-called ‘Italicity’, as defined by Bassetti – that is, the admixture between Italian culture and the foreign cultures with which it blends. The aim of this article is to retrace the history of this experience following multiple perspectives: an overview of the most significant transnational broadcasters that arose in Europe; the concept of ‘Italicity’ and the role of Italic and Italophone media in the world; the key stages and the most important changes in the history of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona. Ideally, the result would be a complete overview of a project that has been

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1. In previous decades, there were indeed other transnational projects often made on a local and regional scale. For instance, as pointed out by Andreas Fickers (2013), the first commercial television in Europe was a clear example of transnational broadcaster: Tele-Saar – this was the name of a television station born during the 1950s in the German border region of Saarland – operated as a cross-border television, thanks to the negotiation and cooperation between France and Germany. For details, see Fickers (2013).

primary in making Italian public service (and its international branches) and Italian culture known beyond national boundaries.

In the last decades of the past century, the western world – specifically European countries – has seen an exponential increase in transnational exper-iments in television systems. This proliferation has been favoured both by new electronic opportunities and by attempts to build a European public sphere during a period characterized by new organizations and connections beyond national boundaries at a political, economic and cultural level. In this positive climate, the relationship between national states and mass-media has been shown by many studies as always being very strict and related. For instance, the concept of ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) began to crack under the thrust of globalization and technological development, involving a complete ‘remapping of media spaces’ (Chalaby 2010: 101). In my recent book (Carelli 2013), I tried to draw up a detailed literature review about the trans-formation of media systems and their relationships with national boundaries, emphasizing the need to reconsider variables and parameters within which they are studied and analysed.

Since the early 1980s Europe has been crossed by several projects of transnational television – that is, ‘television which in its technology, owner-ship, programme distribution and audiences operates across the boundaries of nation states and language communities’ (Barker 1999: 45). One of these actively involved the Italian public service broadcasting: the birth and devel-opment of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona, the first attempt of a transna-tional television founded on Italian language, which will be the main topic of this article, as well as the historical, cultural and political legacies that have made it possible.

The article is divided into different parts. First, I will try to provide a brief overview of the most significant transnational broadcasters that arose in Europe during the 1980s. Then, I will focus on the concept of ‘Italicity’ and the role of Italic and italophone media in making Italian language and culture known in the world. Last, I will reconstruct the key stages of the historical transformation of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona, highlighting the main changes that occurred in content, actors and communities.

TransnaTional BroadCasTers in euroPe in The 1980s

The debate around the requirement of cross-border televisions in Europe began in the early 1980s,1 combining the opportunities offered by new technol-ogies and the needs of a market that was increasingly oriented towards global flows and exchanges of goods and images. Thus, public service broadcasting found itself caught between the preservation of cultural national identity on one hand and the new supranational horizons (Gaggini Fontana 2010: 10) on the other. The explosion of commercial and private broadcasters forced the public service to rethink its role, going back to its cultural, educational and pedagogical functions.

In 1982, a project named Eurikon was launched by five radio and television broadcasters, including Italian RAI and Swiss SSR; in the 1960s, the aim of Eurikon, which had already been attempted, was to create a transnational media product such as a community magazine and promote

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a sort of European schedule, thanks to the collaboration and participa-tion of different national broadcasters prepared in turn by an actor each week. The presence of eleven different languages obstructed the success of the initiative, and the project was interrupted after only five weeks of programming.

Another example of the difficulty in promoting a European media actor in a continent crossed by a plurality of languages is represented by the attempt of Europa-TV, launched in 1985 by the public services of five coun-tries (Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Ireland and Portugal), based in the newsroom of Dutch television in Hilversum. The original schedule included a generalist programming, with news, ample space for sport and educa-tional programmes for children, in addition to information on institutional, economic, cultural and European tourist life. One of the main difficulties, even in terms of cost, was represented by translation services; the absence of BBC, in fact, was considered the main reason for the failure of the project, which ceased programming and switched off its signal on 27 November 1986 (Chalaby 2010: 103).

In contrast, the experiments of cross-border television had a different outcome: if linguistic diversity restrained the ambitions of the Europeanization of media, broadcasters based on linguistic (and geographical) contiguity strengthened their credibility. Francophone and germanophone commu-nities built the most advanced experiences in this field: in 1984, two cross-border projects arose: the French TV5Monde and the German 3Sat. The first was born on impulse of Patrick Imos, a French ‘diplomat who realized the role that satellite television could play in asserting French influence in the world’ (Chalaby 2010: 103): TV5Monde was the result of the fruitful collabora-tion of the three French public channels (TF1, Antenne 2 and FR3), the public television of the Belgian region of Wallonia (RTBF) and the public television of French-speaking Switzerland (SSR). This project expanded two years later with the entrance of a network of broadcasters from Quebec, a predomi-nantly French linguistic and cultural region of Canada. The involvement of a region geographically distant, but close from the point of view of the language, enabled the project to achieve some success since it was enclosed within the boundaries of the French language. Its fortune was precisely due to the fact that it could unify different francophone communities, increasing the knowledge and dissemination of francophone culture. A couple of months after the birth of TV5Monde, another cross-border television arose: 3Sat was a project involving three public broadcasters: the German ZDF, the Austrian ORF and the German-speaking Swiss SRG. They were joined by ARD, the other German public channel, in 1993. TV5Monde and 3Sat represent two good examples of a transnationalization of media founded on the language sharing facilitated by geographical proximity.

In the wake of francophone and germanophone transnational television experiments, even Italian public service broadcasting took charge of achieving a similar Italophone media actor; thus, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona was born as an organization able to gather cultural agencies operating in geographic areas adjacent to Italy, such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Alps, where Italian language and culture were dominant or particularly widespread. Therefore, before dealing with the history, content or activities of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona, we need to reflect on the concept of ‘Italicity’ – that is, the admixture between Italian culture and foreign cultures with which it blended.

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2. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the original (e.g. Italian) are mine.

iTaloPhone CommuniTies and The ConCePT of ‘iTaliCiTy’

Piero Bassetti gave a complete definition of ‘Italicity’ when he affirmed that it collects not only regional and municipal points of view that have always characterized cultural and political Italian life but also people who are interested in the Italic system of human and social relations. Bassetti underlined that

Italic identity is […] other than old idea of citizenship; it’s a belonging that build and strengthen around interests and values able to aggre-gate in the perspective of a unifying world. To feel Italics, in fact, is not in conflict with feeling Italians, Swiss-Italians or Italian-Americans since Italic identity is a second belonging typical of the glocal scenery conveyed by globalization.

(2005, original emphasis)2

As pointed out by Magatti, Italy is a typical case where the nation developed before the State and national cultural identity was created ‘maintaining a clear autonomy from the political identity’ (2003: 198). Italy is a classic example of a nation that ‘appeared from nowhere, unable fully to interpret the national sentiment which already existed among the Italians’, says Magatti. Thus, we can observe how nation and state dimensions do not necessarily coincide. This is the reason why the Italian media system, as any other aspect of economy, society and culture of the nation, has to be studied by looking at the relation-ships that occurred outside the administrative and geographical boundaries of the nation state. In fact, in the construction of ‘Italicity’, a predominant role has been played by the media system as a whole; the birth of television and public service in 1954, for instance, contributed to the unification of Italian people around a unique language that became, for an accurate but not undis-puted political choice, an identity of the nation (De Mauro 1963).

Before the advent of public television, Italian language, as we know it nowadays, was reserved for the high and formal spheres of power, education and communication; the majority of the population spoke specific varieties of Italian dialects. Some of them still persist and in some cases they have been recognized as real minority languages, protected and enhanced. But mass-media also had another function; in fact, a lot of Italian language media grew up in the countries characterized by massive Italian migration. Therefore, the development and diffusion of the Italian language in the world through the media followed the trajectories of different migration flows. Since the first migration to the United States and South America during the first decades of the last century until the second and third flow into Europe during the fascist dictatorship and then during the post-war period, many types of mass-media such as newspapers and radio stations have been born around Italian commu-nities that had settled in foreign countries. Since the 1970s, many scholars (Briani 1977; Deschamps 2002) have studied and analysed these Italic media types, highlighting their central role in the representation of the life of Italian communities in adopted countries and the complex and difficult process of emancipation and accreditation.

Thus, the natural coincidence between the Italian language and geograph-ical and administrative boundaries of the nation state is pressed by claims of minority languages on one hand and by propagation in different areas of the world on the other; this double level explains how ‘Italicity’ is disconnected

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from the borders and how Italophone media could help scattered communi-ties to condense through images and communication. In this sense, Bassetti said that satellite and digital television, the web and all the other types of new media and social and mobile communication are tools that could play a key role in approaching and connecting Italian people all over the world in order to create ‘new forms of ethnic identity’ (2005). Furthermore, the author underlined the need of a real ‘Italic media system’ that increases awareness of belonging to common linguistic and cultural roots in a globalized world; this media system should be based on three main features:

1. Multilingualism: in the new deterritorialized spaces and flows of globali-zation, it is important to recover a shared koine, whereas Italian people living abroad speak more languages (Italian and that of the nation they live in). Therefore, Bassetti underlined that an ‘Italic media system in the world, and above all in Europe, has to deal creatively with the issue of language’.

2. Circular information: this is a step forward compared to traditional mecha-nisms of information and communication of Italic media. In fact, an Italic media system has to ensure information to the Italic communities without ties with the territories of feeling part of a widespread system of relations.

3. Multi-belonging: in such a communication system, an audience conscious of belonging to multiple identities that refer neither to the country of origin nor to the adoption but rethink and reshuffle them in a new different organizational and identity model is necessary.

The experiment of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona was an inspiration, as aforementioned, for similar projects of TV5Monde and 3Sat, but it differed because there was a strong imbalance between the Italian public service on one hand and two small broadcasters of language minorities of neighbour-ing countries on the other. Besides, the development of new transnational projects among many broadcasters in Europe, as well as in North America, South America and Australia, revealed the typical landmarks of the diffusion of Italian language in the world.

iTalian PuBliC serviCe Beyond The Boundaries: The BirTh of ComuniTà radioTelevisiva iTalofona

Italian language, Italic media system

The seed of a transnational television community based on Italian language and culture was sown in 1983 with a bilateral agreement signed in Lugano by Cherubino Darani, director of RTSI, the Italian-speaking Swiss public broad-caster, and Sergio Zavoli, president of RAI, who laid the foundations for an association of media actors operating in the Mediterranean area. The dream of a radio and television community founded on language sharing, similar to the experiences of francophone and germanophone countries, developed in the ‘media micro-laboratory of trilingual Switzerland’ (Gaggini Fontana 2010: 12) where several attempts to create a European audio-visual space originated. Two years later, precisely on 3 April 1985, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona was established in Florence as an institutional cooperation project involving Italian public service broadcasting (RAI) and two other public services from neigh-bouring countries: RTSI, the Swiss public broadcasting in Italian language, and RTV Koper, a Yugoslavian state broadcaster, with regional coverage in the

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3. www.comunitaitalofona.org. Accessed 26 May 2014.

western coast of former Yugoslavia. This treaty of foundation also included the adhesion of 47 American and Canadian broadcasters, which had at least one hour of Italian language programmes in their schedules. During the open-ing ceremony, the President of RAI Sergio Zavoli talked about the ‘cultural weight’ of the project; moreover, he specified that Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona was not an operation ‘to conform the language vehicle [but] to use the language as main “tool” for a historical growth’ (Turchi 1985).

Actually, as we can read on the official website of the community, the goal of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona is to create, through the convergence of different media, a connection between Italy and those who speak Italian around the world, with initiatives and programmes thought and made with RAI, ‘trying to reach not only the communities of Italian people, but also those who love the Italian language and culture, because it is undeniable that nowa-days millions of people recognize more and more the Italian way of life’.3

Then, in 2006, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona was reorganized as a more complete and structured association for the diffusion of ‘italianism’, a complex system of values and sectors able to define the so-called ‘Italian way of life’: cinema, design, style, gastronomy and so on. Under the chairman-ship of Remigio Ratti, the third after Cherubino Darani and Marco Blaser, the community enlarged for the accession of nine new media organiza-tions: HRT, the Croatian public broadcaster; Radio Romania Internazionale, the Romanian international radio; Radio Colonia, a German radio for Italian people (broadcasting since the 1960s); Radio Tirana, the Albanian state radio; TV2000, an Italian Catholic television; Italradio, a radio for the promotion of Italian language in the world; Radio 24, a commercial radio specialized in economic issues; and two press agencies like News Italia Press and 9Colonne. Furthermore, alongside these broadcasters, seven cultural associations joined the project: Accademia della Crusca (the most important national institute for the study and safeguard of Italian language), Broadcast & Production (a specialized magazine for radio and television operators), Società Dante Alighieri (an institute for the teaching of Italian language to foreigners), Globus et Locus (an association engaged in education on the issues of globali-zation and glocalization), Istituto di Studi Italiani (an institute for the study of Italian culture based in Switzerland) and the Universities for foreigners of Perugia and Siena.

After the new statute was approved in Lugano on 15 March 2006, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona embarked on a path of redefinition of principles, purposes and organizational aspects: this led to drawing up a new manifesto signed the following year by Remigio Ratti and Loredana Cornero, President and General Secretary of CRI, respectively. In this document, the foundations of a strategy oriented to the development of the dimension of ‘Italicity’ were laid out. The organization is structured at three levels: the first is composed of the founding members and includes areas and media actors of neighbouring states or enclaves of Italy: Slovenia, with the area of Koper, Italian-speaking Switzerland, Republic of San Marino and Vatican City. The second sphere is that of Mediterranean and Balkan regions, such as Croatia, Albania and Malta, the aim being to stimulate cooperation with foreign broadcasters aggregating actors and communities and to experience a new offer in terms of products and content. The third level consists of the attempt to anchor Italian language media and products in the new paradigm of globalization and digitalization. This last sphere represents the new fron-tier of the so-called ‘Italicity’, a concept that changed its connotations from

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the existence of territorially circumscribed communities (the result of long and different process of Italian emigration in the world) to new social groups and identities variously interested in the main features of Italian culture and Italic common feeling.

Cross-border productions

During its life, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona promoted a lot of cross-bor-der projects and media initiatives, focusing specifically on the geographical areas characterized by the diffusion of the Italian language and the contiguity among countries and communities: one of these, perhaps the most important, was regarded the zone of the so-called ‘High Adriatic’. Since the end of the 1990s, several collaborations of local and regional broadcasters have developed.

The project of Televisione Transfrontaliera/Transfrontalier Television was the most enduring one: it was established in 1999 and provided coop-eration between the newsroom of the regional RAI of the eastern region of Friuli Venezia-Giulia, situated in Trieste, and the Broadcast Regional Centre of Koper, in Slovenia. The main item of Televisione Transfrontaliera consists of the daily retransmission of the news and information of the respective regional channels and the co-production of a television magazine in half an hour once a month. Since 2008, a weekly programme named Caleidoscopio Istriano/Istrian Kaleidoscope has been enriching the schedule of Televisione Transfrontaliera; it is a new information magazine about culture, tourism and institutional events made by Croatian Radio Pola and Slovenian Radio Koper in the three languages of the area: Slovenian, Croatian and Italian.

Another fruitful collaboration concerned the birth and development of a particular TV programme broadcasting since 1982; it is the case of Alpe-Adria magazine TV/Alpe Adria Magazine TV, a co-production of different public service broadcasters involving seven countries, five different languages, but a partially common history and traditions belonging to the large area of ‘Mitteleuropa’. The project of Alpe-Adria magazine TV arose from the joint work of seventeen broadcasters, both with national and regional coverage, where the role of the leader was played, and continues to be played, by ORF, the Austrian public television, which contributes to the production with all its regional offices (the other public broadcasters involved are the Bavarian public service, the RAI regional offices of Bolzano and Trieste situated in two border regions of Italy, in addition to public broadcasters of Slovenia, Croatia and Hungary). Alpe-Adria could be considered one of the most successful attempts at implementing a transnational production without taking into account the linguistic proximity, but instead focusing on a cultural homog-enization referring to a particular area of Europe, rich in history and ancient cultural and political legacies. In a certain sense, we can say that Alpe-Adria was successful, whereas other cross-border cooperative efforts failed; in fact, when the heavily structured transnational projects that we described above could not guarantee continuity and reach large audiences because of the lack of a common language, this magazine was able to play a public role in terms of socially useful programming and exchange of best local practices for the knowledge and appreciation of single territorial peculiarities. The strength of Alpe-Adria within a system where transnational broadcasters and produc-tions are struggling to expand lies in a particular type of synergy that allows the reduction of the costs of keeping a high and diversified qualitative level based on the free exchange of content. Thus, each single broadcasting office

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4. For a detailed description of the role of Italian media – television, above all – in the construction of the cultural imaginary of young Albanians in the late 1980s and early 1990s, see King and Mai (2011).

involved in the project creates and finances its products and receives those of other broadcasters without any cost.

Moreover, a privileged space for interaction and cooperation by Italophone cross-border media concerns the large area of south-eastern Europe, between the Mediterranean Sea and the Balkans; there is a strong legacy, in this sense, between Italy and Albania, two countries whose history and sociocul-tural transformation have always been mutually connected. Since the 1960s, when the first television sets spread across Albania, Italian public television was captured by Albanian people, often in an illegal way, in ironic contrast to the censorship and limitations imposed by the regime. Italian language and culture entered Albanian society through Italian media in a complex system of interactions and dependency4 that lays the foundations for further collabora-tions in the public and above all private media sector. Only at the end of the 1980s, after the death of the dictator Enver Hoxha, the regime allowed the transmission of RAI news in the evening at 20, moving at 20.30 the traditional Albanian news propaganda of the regime (Roqi 2009: 49). Then, at the end of 1989, a troupe of Linea Verde/Green Line, an RAI TV magazine on agriculture, entered Tirana with a reportage that was transmitted on Albanian television in Italian language and that met with great success among the Albanian people. From that moment on Albanian public service broadcasting began to transmit programmes in Italian, paving the way for lasting cooperation in this field.

An effective example of the efforts undertaken by the actors of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona in building bridges between the two shores of the Mediterranean Sea is represented by two programmes airing on Catholic broadcaster TV2000, whose former name until 2009 was Sat2000: Detto tra noi/Between Us and 42.12 Nel Mediterraneo d’Europa/42.12 In the Mediterranean of Europe. These cultural and entertainment television shows identify Italy both as a crossroads of cultures and as the land of connection between the Mediterranean region and the rest of the European continent. Unlike the programmes described above, these productions of TV2000 stand for the other side of ‘Italicity’ and Italophone feeling – that is, not only cross-border co-productions but even the self-perception of Italian broadcasters to function as agents of disclosure for promoting the discovery, exchange and encounter of different cultures.

The pillars on which transnational media projects of the community are based are substantially three – globalism, multilingualism and proximity – and they represent a sort of local and territorial response to the question of globalization (Beci and Cornero 2010). The first paradigm (globalism) refers to the aspects of collective cultural identities and their redefinition in the period of globalization and digitalization. Globalism is not reduced only to economic issues but also involves social and cultural aspects: it refers not to homogeni-zation, but to pluralism and appreciation of differences, according to a point of view for which globalization ‘has been perhaps the most significant force in creating and proliferating cultural identity’ (Tomlinson 2003: 270). The second paradigm is the multilingualism and concerns, as we already said, the plurality of languages spoken by Italic communities in different coun-tries and in contemporary societies. In fact, language trajectories are less and less tied to territoriality, as they occurred in the historical phase of the nation states, and ‘they pass from a spatial dimension to a functional one’ (Beci and Cornero 2010: 37). The third paradigm, linked to the previous one, is the prox-imity. In the era of globalization, proximity is no more only a geographical concept, but invests other dimensions, such as linguistic, cultural and even

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thematic contiguity. Media systems, in this sense, could help the perspective of a ‘geolinguistic common sphere’ (Sinclair, Jacka and Cunningham 1996), favouring unification and aggregation of disconnected communities around the common element of language, sharing and belonging.

Minority languages

A further element that characterized the history and mission of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona is the relationship between Italian language and the language of the ethnic and cultural minorities of Italy and other neigh-bouring countries. The concept of national minorities has been examined by Bereciartu when he resumed the difference between ‘nationalities’ and ‘ethnic minorities’ and explained it as follows:

Within the category of ‘nationalities’ are included social formations with a series of demarcated characteristics, such as a home territory occu-pied by a stable community, a clearly defined language, a certain level of self-consciousness regarding one’s own identity, and some capacity to press demands. The ‘ethnic minorities’ would be constituted by another complex of social formations that are less defined with respect to the foregoing aspects, except for language. Language then becomes their differentiating trait in the sense that they then may be regarded as ethn-olinguistic minorities within their wider state setting.

(1994: 121)

Thus, as language is the distinctive feature of ethnic minorities, since the beginning of its life CRI tried to examine languages that were not widely used and were almost forgotten, and were spoken and studied in border regions of Italy, Switzerland and Slovenia, the founder countries. This was the aim of one of the first radio programmes promoted by Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona, named Sintonie/Syntonies, created and made with the collabora-tion of Italian regional network Radio3, Italian-speaking Swiss radio Swiss public service (RSI), international Swiss radio Radio Svizzera Internazionale and Yugoslavian Radio Koper. Aired from 1987 to 1998, it was a weekly radio column that explored minority languages, cultures and populations by listen-ing to the sounds and discovery of pronunciation and the wide phonetics. During eleven years of programming, Sintonie described the minority languages and communities of Occitan, Walser, Ladins, Slovenians of Friuli and many others.

Sintonie was a diversified and plural set of radio services and enquiries where the thread was represented by the discovery of Italian language and the protection of minority languages. Afterwards, an idea of increasing insights into the relationship between Italian language and minority languages took shape in 2004, thanks to the joint commitment of CRI and Radio Uno, the Italian-language radio of RSI broadcasting. The cooperation materialized in a co-production programme named Fuori la lingua/Out the Language, which aired between April and May 2005; it was a radio programme broadcasting by Radio Koper, Swiss Radio Uno and some regional offices of RAI. The main issue of the programme was the music, the discovery of local musical tradi-tions within the communities through a real journey into Italophone minori-ties (Friulian, Sardinian, germanophone people of South Tyrol, francophones of Valle d’Aosta), as well as into the new foreign linguistic communities of

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metropolitan areas (in particular, Milan), such as Asians, Africans, South Americans, eastern European immigrants and so on.

The project of recovery and revaluation of minority languages spoken and widespread in Italy also affected a particular regional language that has been passed down through the centuries: the Sardinian. This language was banned during fascism and rediscovered only in the second half of the twentieth century as a dialect bearer of a strong cultural identity, as witnessed by the experience of Radio Sardegna, a local network born in 1943 during the period of the partisan resistance and aired for 50 years, until 1992.

At the beginning of the new millennium, an agreement between RAI and the regional government of Sardinia for the restoration and digitalization of the archives of Radio Sardegna was stipulated; furthermore, since 2008, Radio Sardegna has restarted its programming with new radio programmes in Italian language on the chronicles, culture and events (above all cinema, theatre and music) of the region.

a new linguisTiC sPaCe

After more than 25 years of history and programming, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona is again faced with a challenge that will force it to rethink its role in the transnational media landscape subject to changes in global and digital society. The project of CRI was planned and achieved during the 1980s in an institutional perspective where the goals were co-productions, distribu-tion agreements and exchange of information among neighbouring countries; original actors were, in fact, public service broadcasters grounded in their educational orientation and not yet fully prodded by the private sector. The explosion of commercial broadcasters and the development of digital media led Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona to modify its organizational structure and content, with increasing interest in thematic issues in order to satisfy the fragmentation of the audiences and the communities. Since the end of the 1990s – and then from the beginning of the twenty-first century – Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona began to focus its schedule and promotional activi-ties on minorities, local languages and Italian-speaking communities living in other countries. This transformation from an institutional to an identity para-digm allowed Italian language and culture to be placed at the centre of social processes and flows in the whole area of the Mediterranean and rediscover the ‘Italian linguistic space’ (Banfi 2009: 25) as a significant vehicle of cultural identification and imaginary production in the era of globalization.

To conclude, the historical, cultural and organizational evolution of Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona is a privileged object of study to draw some specific features of the Italian media system in a transnational perspec-tive: first of all, the origins of CRI revealed the ‘expansive’ nature of Italian language, which crossed the borders and joined linguistic and cultural alli-ances in neighbouring small countries where it is historically widespread, deep-rooted and spoken. Moreover, the transformation of the institutional and organizational structure of this transnational television project follows the trajectories of Italian migration and its flows during the nineteenth and twen-tieth century: the dislocation of Italian people (and Italic media) in different and distant regions and countries of the world fragments and isolates Italic communities, whose strength is the pluralization of languages and identity belonging (Carelli 2013: 255). Thus, since its birth, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona gave attention to promoting Italian-language broadcasters in coun-

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tries where there were Italian communities, such as the United States, Canada or South America. Finally, as globalization accelerates the process of margin-alization of nation states not only in a transnational way but also as a result of sub-national and regional influences, as Saskia Sassen (2007) has clearly pointed out, Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona stimulated and promoted various local languages and cultures existing within the boundaries of Italy, valuing them with specific offers and content production.

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suggesTed CiTaTion

Carelli, P. (2015), ‘RAI beyond national boundaries: The case of “Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona”/”Italophone Broadcasting Community”’. Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies 3: 1+2, pp. 171–183, doi: 10.1386/jicms.3.1-2.171_1

ConTriBuTor deTails

Paolo Carelli (Ph.D in Communication Cultures) is Assistant Lecturer in Intercultural Communication and Political Communication at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Milan, and researcher at Research Centre on Television and Audiovisual Products (Ce.R.T.A.). He is the author of the book: Confini mobili. I sistemi mediatici nazionali tra globalizzazione e digitalizzazione/‘Mobile boundaries. National media systems between globali-zation and digitalization’ (I libri di Emil, Bologna 2013).

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Contact: Dipartimento di Scienze della Comunicazione e dello Spettacolo, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Via Sant’Agnese, 2 20123 Milan, Italy.E-mail: [email protected]

Paolo Carelli has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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RAI beyond national boundaries: The case of 'Comunità Radiotelevisiva Italofona