The New Old World (51 page)

In diametric contrast stands the characteristic tone of native commentary on Italy. Most languages have some self-critical locution, usually a word-play or neologism, to indicate typical national defects. Germans can cite Hegel's contemptuous description of local identity politics:
Deutschdumm
; the French deplore the vauntings of
franchouillardise
; Peruvians term a hopeless mess
una peruanada
; Brazilians occasionally mock a
brasileirice
. England seems to have lacked such self-ironic reflexes: ‘Englishry'—the gift of Tom Nairn, a Scot—is without currency in its land of reference. Italy lies at the opposite pole. In no other nation is the vocabulary of self-derision so multiple and so frequent in use.
Italietta
for the trifling levity of the country;
italico
—once favoured by Fascist bombast—now synonymous with vain posturing and underhand cynicism; bitterest of all,
italiota
as the badge of an invincible cretinism. It is true that these are terms of public parlance rather than of popular speech. But the lack of self-esteem they express is widespread. The good opinion of others remains foreign to the Italians themselves.

In recent years, this traditional self-disaffection has acquired an insistent political catchword. Starting in the late eighties, and rising to a crescendo in the nineties, the cry has gone up that Italy must, at last, become ‘a normal country'. Such was the title of the manifesto produced in 1995 by the leader of the former Italian Communist Party.
⁴
But the phrase was a leitmotif of speeches and articles across the spectrum, and remains an obsessive refrain in the media to this day. Its message is that Italy must become like other countries of the West. Normality here, as always, implies more than just a standard that is typical. What is not typical may be exceptional, and so better than it; but what is not ‘normal' is infallibly worse than it—abnormal or subnormal. The call for Italy to become a normal country expresses a longing to resemble others which are superior to it.

The full list of the anomalies that set Italy apart vary from one account to another, but all highlight three features. For forty years of continuous Christian-Democratic hegemony, there was no real alternation of government. Under this regime, political corruption acquired colossal proportions. Intertwined with it, organized crime became a power in the land as the operations of the Mafia extended from Sicily to Rome and the north. Other national shortcomings are often noted: administrative inefficiency, lack of respect for the law, want of patriotism. But in the widespread conviction that the condition of Italy is abnormal, immovable government, pervasive corruption and militarized crime have had pride of place. For a careful and balanced account of them, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg's
Italy and Its Discontents
, the work of an English historian in Florence, originally published in Italian, the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar.
⁵

Long-standing occupation of office, of course, has not been peculiar to Italy. Swedish Social Democracy was in office for over forty years, Red–Black coalitions in Austria for nearly as long; the government of Switzerland is virtually unchangeable. Far from suffering grave ills, these societies are usually regarded as among the best administered in Europe. Japanese political corruption long exceeded Italian; while French and German have not come so far behind. The Mafia is truly
sui generis
in Sicily, but in a less ethnographic sense has its counterparts throughout most of Eastern Europe and, famously, Russia. Northern Ireland, the Basque lands and Corsica are reminders that in Western Europe itself more than one regional periphery is haunted by endemic violence. Many distinctions would have to be made, in each respect, for real analytic comparison. But it can still be argued that it is less any one of its maladies that has marked Italy out as abnormal, than a fatal combination of them to be found nowhere else.

In any case, if an
idée fixe
takes hold in a society, it is unlikely to have appeared from nowhere. In Italy, fascination with foreign models—the desire to emulate a more advanced world—was from the start bred by the belated unification of the country, and ensuing weakness of the national state. Piedmontese attachment
to the French prefectural system, imposed down the peninsula regardless of regional identities, was an early example; somewhat later, Crispi's admiration for Germany as an imperial power another. In that sense, the anxious looking abroad for institutions to imitate, so pronounced in recent years, has deep historical roots: it is the re-emergence of a recurrent theme. Contemporary versions, moreover, are reinforced by the unhappy experience of the one period when Italy did not follow any external model, but in originating Fascism pioneered a major political innovation that spread to other states. To many since then, Italian native invention has seemed damned: better to revert to the safety of imitation. By the 1980s the way in which Christian Democracy came to be imagined by its opponents mapped it onto the disastrous alternative pattern of national singularity. It was the
Balena Bianca
, a monstrous sport of nature, akin to Melville's murderous denizen of the sea.
⁶
According to legend, it was the final harpooning of this beast that ushered in the Second Republic.

For such is the usual way Italians label the political order today. In this version, the First Republic that emerged at the end of the Second World War collapsed, amid dramatic convulsions, in the early nineties. Out of its demise there has emerged a more modern configuration, still incomplete, but already a critical improvement on its predecessor. It is the full accomplishment of this Second Republic, for which there remains some way to go, that would at last render Italy a normal country. So runs the official interpretation, widely shared on all sides, of the past decade. Here too, of course, a foreign paradigm is in the background. The passage from the First to Second Republic in Italy is conceived by analogy with the transition from the Fourth to Fifth Republic in France. There were, after all, striking similarities between the regimes created after 1945 in both countries: rapid economic growth, strong ideological polarization, large mass parties, constant changes of cabinet with little or no change of political direction, increasing discredit of the governing class, inability to control violent crises in the Mediterranean periphery.

In each case, there was a supervening international context for the fall of the old Republic: the end of European colonialism in the case of France, and the end of the Cold War in the case of Italy.
Umberto Bossi's Lega Lombarda, merging in 1991 with other parties to form the Lega Nord, the battering-ram that weakened the struts of the traditional party system in Italy, even had its petty-bourgeois precursor in the movement of Pierre Poujade, whose emergence hastened the final crisis of the Fourth Republic. In all these respects, a French reference could seem to make much sense in the Italian situation of the early nineties, legitimating hopes of a cathartic purge of the accumulated ills of the old order, and reconstruction of the state on a sounder basis. The task of the hour was to emulate the historic achievement of De Gaulle in founding a stable Fifth Republic to the north. But who was to figure as the Italian equivalent in such a repro-scenario?

In April 1992 the ruling coalition—dominated since the eighties by Giulio Andreotti, the perennial ‘Beelzebub' of Christian Democracy, and Bettino Craxi, the taurine boss of the Socialists—was once again returned to power at the polls. Bossi's movement, a recent entrant into the party system, had made startling advances in the north, but not enough to affect the national outcome.
⁷
It seemed business as usual. But a month later, magistrates in Milan issued the first official warnings to leading figures in both dominant parties that they were under investigation for corruption. At virtually the same moment, the motorcade of Giovanni Falcone, the prosecutor who had become a symbol of determination to root out the Mafia in Sicily, was blown up in an ambush outside Palermo. Hit by these two thunderbolts, the old order suddenly disintegrated. Over the next months, the Milanese magistrates unleashed a blizzard of further investigations against the political class and its business partners, now dubbed by the press
Tangentopoli
—Bribesville. Within little more than a year, Craxi had fled to Tunisia and Andreotti was charged as an accomplice of the Mafia. By the autumn of 1993, more than half the members of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies had been served notices that they were under suspicion for corruption—taken by public opinion as tantamount to guilt—and a referendum had abrogated the system of proportional representation that had elected them. In this whirlwind, the traditional rulers of Italy were swept away. By the spring of 1994 the Christian Democratic and
Socialist parties had vanished. Lesser allies were consumed along with them.

From the wreckage, only one major party emerged unscathed. The logical candidate for the role of renovator appeared to be the descendants of Italian Communism, recently refashioned as the Party of the Democratic Left (PDS). Like Gaullism in France, Communism in Italy had been excluded from the stabilization of the post-1945 regime, forming an opposition in waiting, with a mass following, undiscredited by the degeneration of the system. Like De Gaulle in 1958, the PDS in 1992–3 was not responsible for the fall of the old order, and just as he had used the colonels' revolt in Algiers, which he did not inspire, to come to power in Paris, so the PDS sought to utilize the magistrates' assault on Tangentopoli, with which it had no connexion, to force open the doors of office in Rome, barred to it since 1947. In constructing the Fifth Republic, De Gaulle drew in a heteroclite range of allies—Antoine Pinay, Guy Mollet and other strange bedfellows formed part of his first coalition, helping him to push through his new constitution, before he discarded them. So too the PDS teamed up with a variegated array of outsiders and opportunists—the self-important notable Segni, from Christian Democracy; the Radical maverick Pannella; the still Fascist leader Fini—to push through the referendum of 1993, undermining the proportional electoral system on which the First Republic had been based.
⁸

Here, however, the analogy breaks down. Once installed in Paris, De Gaulle was firmly in charge of the reorganization of the French political system, controlling all the initiatives, taking up and casting off assorted camp-followers, as he set about reconstructing the state. The PDS, on the other hand, jumped on the makeshift bandwagon of a referendum that had been launched by Segni, lending it mass mobilizing capacity, but not political direction. The contrast points to a larger difference. Notwithstanding the parallels between them, the heirs of Italian Communism were in a far weaker position than De Gaulle. Permanently excluded from government in Rome at much the same time as the General withdrew to Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, the PCI never kept, however, the same intransigent distance from the political system
of the First Republic as he had from the Fourth. By the eighties, the PCI had long become a semi-insider at regional level in Italy, embedded in various provincial coalitions, and a tacit partner of the DC at the national level, where most legislation was passed with its assent.
⁹
So it too was in some degree implicated in the typical practices of
sottogoverno
—commissions on public works contracts, subsidies to affiliated organizations, residences for party notables—that marked the old order. When the crisis broke, it was risky for the PDS to pose too aggressively as a champion of clean government.

A larger difficulty lay in the overall evolution of the PCI since the war. The party had received from Antonio Gramsci, whose
Prison Notebooks
were first published in 1948, a great intellectual inheritance. Out of it, with whatever elements of tactical selection or suppression, the PCI created a mass political culture without counterpart on the European Left. In Italy no other party had a comparable patrimony—the originality of Gramsci's ideas was not only widely accepted at home, but from the sixties onwards increasingly recognized abroad. Here, then, was one purely Italian tradition that was undeniably vital and uncompromised. But the PCI in the age of Togliatti was not just a sprig of native growth. It was a component of a disciplined international movement, commanded by the USSR. After the war, its strategy was for its own reasons—if in line with Moscow's wishes anyway—consistently moderate, and over time the party became increasingly independent of the calculations of Soviet diplomacy. But in internal structure it remained a Stalinist organization, still externally associated with Russia. Wrong-footed by radical student and worker upsurges in the late sixties, completely at variance with its parliamentary outlook, it reacted by purging the liveliest dissidents in its own ranks—the gifted Manifesto group—and gradually vesting its hopes in a deal with Christian Democracy to run the country jointly.

But the Soviet connexion was not severed. Typically, the PCI's most right-wing leader, the formidable Giorgio Amendola, who openly urged his party to become an Italian edition of British
Labour, was also the most firmly attached to it, regularly spending his holidays in Bulgaria. When the Christian Democrats rejected the ‘Historic Compromise' offered by the Communists, preferring the Socialists as more pliable partners, the leadership of the PCI detached itself more openly from Moscow. But by the eighties, it was very late, and after years of caution the only way it could think of doing so was to swing to the opposite pole of Washington—its last real leader, Enrico Berlinguer, declaring that the party now felt safer under the protection of NATO. Its well-wishers in the media applauded warmly, but it did not gain greater electoral credibility. When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, a new leadership hastily jettisoned the party's name, and soon began to repudiate most of its past. Conducted without much intelligence or dignity, the operation was of little benefit.
¹⁰
De Gaulle, who had been the foremost French imperialist of the forties, emerged unscathed from the collapse of France's colonial empire in the sixties, deftly negotiating Algerian independence in the higher interests of the nation. The re-labelled PDS, abandoning its heritage for a lukewarm ideological pottage, no longer seemed to represent any distinctive Italian tradition, and was not respected by the electors for its sacrifice. In the elections of 1992, on the eve of the national crisis, its vote sank to a record low—16.5 per cent, or less than half its score fifteen years earlier.