The New Old World (55 page)

Programmatically, in fact, not a great deal separated Centre-Right from Centre-Left in the electoral contest last year. The familiar agenda of governments throughout the Atlantic world—privatization of remaining state assets, deregulation of the labour market, scaling back of public pensions, lowering of tax rates—
belongs to the repertoire of both. How far the House of Liberties in practice moves beyond its predecessor remains to be seen. Private education and health care will be given a longer leash. Berlusconi has also promised tougher measures against immigrants, whose fate—this is the one terrain on which a knuckle-duster Right has space in Europe—will certainly get worse. But in general socioeconomic direction, far from representing any radical form of reaction, Berlusconi's regime is already suspect of being too moderate—that is, insufficiently committed to the market—in the judgement of the business press, distrustful of his pledges to launch a major programme of public works and steer investment to create a million and a half new jobs. In the EU, the new government has been less automatically compliant with establishment opinion than its predecessor, earning furrowed brows in Brussels and laments from the opposition in Rome that it is jeopardizing Italy's reputation abroad. But its self-assertion has so far been essentially gestural, amounting to little more than dropping the dreary functionary from the WTO first imposed on it as foreign minister, and quarrelling over the location of a branch office of the EU's alimentary bureaucracy. On issues of any real significance, there is unlikely to be any serious departure from today's official European consensus.

All this might suggest that the upshot of Berlusconi's government will be as unexceptional as that of its closest ally in Europe, the Centre-Right in Spain. Aznar's party, after all, is the direct descendant of a fascist regime that lasted twice as long as the Italian, and killed many more of its citizens; yet today it is a veritable model of political propriety, indeed a favourite interlocutor of emissaries of the Third Way from London. What is to stop Forza Italia from emulating the Partido Popular, and becoming yet another indistinguishably respectable member of the comity of democratic parties? Not much, it would seem. Yet there remains a fly in the ointment. Since taking office, one objective alone has been pursued with real energy by Berlusconi: to change the laws that still might bring him to book in the courts. The speed and determination with which his government has acted here—ramming through measures designed to make evidence against him found in Switzerland unavailable for adjudication in Italy, and attempting to set the Ariosto case back to zero, so as to defer a verdict till after the statute of limitations—is a measure of its fear that he could still be struck a mortal blow by the magistrates. Manipulating accounts and evading taxes may
attract little censure in Italy. A conviction for corrupting judges on a grand scale would be more difficult to shrug off. Given the record of Italian justice to date, few would bet on one. But a surprise cannot be excluded.

Should that come, it would be a test of what has happened to the political culture of the country in the past decade. Ideological demobilization, long called for by proponents of ‘normal' Italy, has been among the fruits of the Centre-Left experience. About a quarter of the electorate now abstains from expressing any preference at the polls. But if the US is taken as a model of normalcy, only half the population should vote anyway—the surest sign of popular contentment with society as it is. Gramsci thought Italy was the land of ‘passive revolution'. Maybe this will prove the right sort of oxymoron for the birth of the Second Republic. Its arrival has not yielded a new constitution; rationalized the party system; modernized justice; or overhauled the bureaucracy, in any of the ways its advocates hoped it would. But—so they could equally contend—corruption has dropped from its intolerable peak in the eighties back to the manageable levels of the fifties and sixties; the Mafia has retreated, after defeat on the battlefield, to more traditional and inconspicuous forms of activity; at least Parliament is now divided along conventional lines between government and opposition; no deep disagreements set the policies of the principal parties apart; public life is increasingly drained of passion. Isn't this just the passive renovation the country needs?

Judged against these standards, the First Republic, however decomposed it became towards the end, appears in a better light. At its height it included a genuine pluralism of political opinion and expression, lively participation in mass organizations and civic life, an intricate system of informal negotiations, a robust high culture, and the most impressive series of social movements that any European country of that period could boast.
²⁸
Intellectual conflict and moral tension produced leaders of another stature. In that respect, as well as others, there has been a miniaturization
since. Italy needs honest administration, decent public services and accountable government, not to speak of jobs for its unemployed, which the old order failed to provide. But to create these, destruction of what it did achieve was not required.

Even today, not every trace of this better past has disappeared. Impulses of rebellion against the worst aspects of the new order persist. In the autumn of 1994, the trade-union movement was still capable of the largest mobilization in the post-war history of the country, putting a million people into the squares of Rome to block Berlusconi's first attempt at pension reform. In May 2001, the vacuous rituals of the G-7 were finally shattered by multitudes of young protesters in the streets of Genoa. In Italy alone there was a march of some 300,000—from Perugia to Assisi—against the war in Afghanistan. Where French Communists and German Greens have been painlessly annexed as fig leaves or sandwichboards of the status quo, Rifondazione has remained resistant to either sectarian closure or absorption. Of the three European dailies born out of the radical movements of '68,
Libération
in Paris and
Tageszeitung
in Berlin are demoralized parodies of their original purpose;
Il Manifesto
, flanked by its monthly, is unswayed. To date the two leading contenders for a vision of globalization from the Left both come from Italy, via America:
Empire
and
Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System
—originators, Antonio Negri and Giovanni Arrighi.
²⁹

The hope of the Second Republic has been to root all this out. But to standardize a society at the expense of its past always risks being a violence in vain. Where, after all, does the idea of ‘normalization' come from? The term was coined by Brezhnev for the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, designed to force it back into conformity with the Soviet bloc. We know how that ended. Contemporary efforts to normalize Italy have sought to reshape the country in the image either of the United States, or of the Europe now moving towards it. The pressures behind this process are incomparably greater. But its results may not be quite what its proponents had in mind. Rather than lagging, it might be wondered whether Italy could be leading the march towards a common future. In the world of Enron and Elf, Mandelson and Strauss-Kahn, Hinduja and Gates, what could finally be more logical than Berlusconi? Perhaps, like others before them, the travellers to normality have arrived without noticing it.

 

Today the Second Republic, as it has come be called, is fifteen years old, equivalent to the span of time stretching from Liberation to the arrival of the Centre-Left in the First Republic. An era has elapsed. What is there to show for it? For its promoters, commanding an overwhelming consensus in not only the media but public opinion in the early nineties, Italy required a comprehensive political reconstruction, to give the country government worthy of a contemporary Western society. Probity, stability, bi-polarity were the watchwords. Public life was to be cleansed of the corruptions of the old order. Cabinets were not to fall every few months. Alternation of two moderate parties—or at worst, coalitions—in office, one inclining to the right and the other to the left, would be the norm. Once the political system was overhauled along these lines, the reforms needed to modernize Italian society, bringing it up to standards taken for granted elsewhere in the Atlantic community, could at long last be enacted.

By the turn of the century, the balance-sheet of the new Republic was, for its champions, a mixed one—frustrating in many ways, but not definitively disappointing. On the positive side, the political landscape had been transformed, with the extinction of all the parties that had populated the First Republic, and the distribution of their successors into two competing blocs see-sawing in office. A great economic change had followed with Italy's entry into the Eurozone, barring henceforward the country's traditional primrose path of devaluation, inflation and mounting public debt. On the negative side, two developments were disturbing. The first, decried across the board by polite opinion, was the failure of the electoral reform of 1993 to purge the political system of lesser parties, of more radical persuasion, on the flanks of the competing coalitions now ranged against each other, and capable of extracting concessions from these in return for their support. The work of the new Republic would not be complete until such blackmail—the term invariably used—was eliminated.

The second cause for concern was, in the nature of things, less universally pressed. But the prominence of Berlusconi, as the most spectacular newcomer on the political scene, aroused anxieties that were not confined to those most averse to him. Not only was he deeply implicated in the corruption of the last phase of the First
Republic, but as a media magnate turned politician he embodied a conflict of interests felt to be intolerable in other democracies, controlling at once a private empire and public power, each at the service of the other. Fears were repeatedly expressed that here could be the makings of an authoritarian system of rule distinct from, but genetically related to, the nation's previous experience of plebiscitary power. Still, in the opening years of the Second Republic, these remained more notional than actual, since between 1994 and 2001 Berlusconi was only in office for seven months.

When, in the spring of 2001, he finally won a full term of office, warnings were widespread on the left of the danger not only of a semi-dictatorial development, but of a harsh regime of social reaction, an Italian version of the radical right. The reality, however, proved otherwise. The social and economic record of the Berlusconi government was anodyne. There was no significant attack on the welfare state. Social expenditure was not cut, pensions were raised, and employment increased.
³⁰
Measures to loosen the labour market and up the legal retirement age remained gingerly, and tax cuts less significant than in Social Democratic Germany. Privatizations, abundant under the Centre-Left coalition of 1996 to 2001, when Italy held the European record for selling off public assets, were minimal. The main advantage of the regime for the rich lay in the amnesties it granted for the illegal stacking of wealth abroad, and flouting of building controls at home. Ostensibly tougher legislation on immigration was passed, but to little practical effect. Externally, Berlusconi joined Blair and Aznar in sending troops to Iraq, a contribution to the American occupation that the Centre-Left did not oppose. A package of constitutional reforms giving a more federal shape to the state, with greater powers for the regions—the top priority for the Northern League,
headed by Umberto Bossi—was pushed through Parliament, but came to nothing in a subsequent referendum. No great drive or application was displayed by Berlusconi in any of this.

The principal energies of his government lay, starkly, elsewhere. Berlusconi's over-riding concern was to protect himself from prosecution, amid the thicket of cases pending against him for different kinds of corruption. At top speed, three successive laws were rammed through Parliament: to block evidence of illegal transactions abroad, to decriminalize falsification of accounts, and to enable defendants in a trial to change their judges by shifting the case to another jurisdiction. When the first and third of these were voided as unconstitutional by the courts, Berlusconi reacted with a fourth, more drastic law, designed to sweep the board clean of any possibility of charges against him, by granting him immunity from prosecution as premier, along with the president, the speakers of the two Chambers, and the head of the Constitutional Court, as four fig-leaves. Amid widespread uproar, this too was challenged by magistrates in Milan, where the major trials in which he was implicated were underway, and was ruled unconstitutional six months later. But the barrage of
ad personam
laws, patently the government's most urgent agenda, had immediate, if not yet definitive, effect. No sooner was Berlusconi in office than he was absolved by an appeals court of bribing judges to acquire the Mondadori publishing conglomerate—not for want of evidence, but for ‘extenuating circumstances', defined in a memorable précis of Italian justice as ‘the prominence of the defendant's current social and individual position, judged by the court to be decisive'.
³¹
Before formal immunity against prosecution was struck down, it had closed another leading case against Berlusconi, and when it was reopened, a new court delivered the requisite judgement, absolving him.