Italy from Crisis to Crisis

Political Economy, Security, and Society in the 21st Century

Matthew Evangelista, Matthew Evangelista

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351586924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Italy from Crisis to Crisis seeks to understand Italy's approach to crises by studying the country in regional, international, and comparative context. Without assuming that the country is abnormal or unusually crisis-prone, the authors treat Italy as an example from which other countries might learn.

The book integrates the analysis of domestic politics and foreign policy, including Italy's approach to military interventions, energy security, economic relations with the European Union (EU), and to the NATO alliance, and covers a number of issues that normally receive little attention in studies of "high politics, " such as information policy, national identity, immigration, youth unemployment, and family relations. Finally, it puts Italy in a comparative perspective – with other European states, naturally – but also with Latin America, and even the United States, all countries that have experienced similar crises to Italy's and similar – often populist – responses.

This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of, and courses on, Italian politics and history, European politics and, more broadly, comparative politics and democracy.

Part I

Introduction

1

Italy in crisis

Eppur si muove

Matthew Evangelista

For politics, our time is well known as a time of crisis. Sorely tried by globalization, Western democracies are weakened both on the side of order and on the side of conflict. The crisis of sovereignty, of representation, of participation; the crisis of universalism, the crisis of the rule of law; populism, political apathy, mass-media manipulation; the catalogue of the political pains experienced by democracies is clear to all.

Ida Dominijanni (2010, 168)

Emergencies, in Italy as elsewhere, serve as a political technique that bypasses and makes exceptional what would need to be thoroughly, more deliberately addressed via democratic methods. Emergencies methodically procrastinate to a never attainable future the analysis of the conditions that enable them.

Maurizio Albahari (2015, 13)

On 24 March 1999, US fighter aircraft set off from Aviano air base in Northeastern Italy to launch the first war in the fifty-year history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The war, carried out against the Republic of Yugoslavia in response to Serbian forces’ violent repression of the Albanian population of the province of Kosovo, was not the only NATO “first” during that period. The Italian prime minister at the time was Massimo D’Alema, leader of the center-left Olive Tree coalition and former editor of the Italian Communist Party’s daily, L’Unità. D’Alema was the first (ex-)communist to serve as Italy’s prime minister and the first to govern any NATO country. His government’s endorsement of NATO’s war enjoyed the support of the center-right opposition, led by Silvio Berlusconi, but was criticized by the far left and was divisive within the coalition government itself.¹ In fact, the previous prime minister, Romano Prodi, in an interview in 2015, cited a widespread belief among journalists of “pressures from the American government aimed at sinking my government in order to have a green light for the bombings in Serbia,” and “the thesis that a deciding factor was D’Alema’s commitment to bombing Serbia and Prodi’s presumed reluctance to intervene militarily.”²

In any event, D’Alema’s commitment was short-lived. Facing a potential crisis within the government, D’Alema was within days calling for a halt to the bombing and a return to the negotiating table at Rambouillet, where Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević had rejected NATO’s ultimatum to sign an agreement ending the conflict, because it allowed NATO access to the entire territory of Yugoslavia, not only the disputed province of Kosovo. Despite D’Alema’s plea, the bombing continued for 78 days. Starting in mid-April Italian aircraft began joining in the attacks against targets in Serbia.

Italy in 1999 was in many respects unrecognizable from the Italy of just ten years earlier and even more so from ten years before that. In that year, 1979, the Einaudi publishing house of Turin put out a two-volume study called La crisi italiana (The Italian Crisis), edited by Luigi Graziano and Sidney Tarrow. The present study is a kind of sequel, intended to assess the current state of “the Italian crisis,” and perhaps understand why Italian and foreign observers so readily adopt that alarmist language to describe the country, and whether it is still appropriate. This book differs from most studies of Italian politics in three ways: 1) as the above example of the Kosovo crisis suggests, it integrates the analysis of domestic politics and foreign policy, including Italy’s approach to military interventions, to energy security, to economic relations with the European Union (EU); and to the NATO alliance and its leader, the United States; 2) it covers a number of issues that normally receive little attention in studies of “high politics,” such as information policy, national identity, immigration, youth unemployment, and family relations; and 3) it considers Italy in comparative perspective and explores whether its crises and responses are shared by fellow members of the EU and beyond.

It is remarkable how many studies of Italy over its postwar history have invoked the concept of crisis (Graziano and Tarrow 1979; Caciagli et al. 1994; Salvadori 1994; Bull and Rhodes 1997a, 1997b; McCarthy 1997; Bono and Giardini 2000) – suggesting an overall pessimism about the country’s prospects. On the other hand, the concept of transition figures prominently – and presumably more optimistically – in much of the literature as well, over several decades (Lange and Tarrow 1980; Carli 2015; Gentiloni Silveri 2015a, 2015b), with many studies employing both concepts (Caciagli 1994; Bull and Rhodes 1997a, 1997b; Gentiloni Silveri 2015a). The combination of the two concepts implies that Italy is in transition away from its crises, but toward what? Even the editors and contributors to collections with “transition” in the title have their doubts (Bull and Rhodes 1997a; Gentiloni Silveri 2015a, 2015b). As one scholar pointedly put it in a recent contribution, “the concept of an institutional ‘transition’, which began in 1994, is in any case not very meaningful when applied to processes whose outcomes are still uncertain, and the last two decades cannot be viewed as some sort of a ‘bridge’ between an old and a new system that as yet remains undefined” (Palermo 2015, 246). Despite such qualifications, it is hard to avoid the sense of a teleological and even normative undertone in many of the academic studies of Italy: The country might overcome its crises by effecting a transition to the political and economic models of “normal” countries – the Federal Republic of Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States, perhaps even France.

The present authors resist treating Italy as sui generis and in most respects understand it already as a normal country, facing multiple normal crises and dealing with them in various normal inadequate ways. They are inclined to agree with Perry Anderson, who, while characterizing Italy as a “disaster,” nevertheless claimed that “Italy is not an anomaly within Europe. It is much closer to a concentrate of it” (Anderson 2014). Our authors take seriously the admonition from Bull and Rhodes not to go to the opposite extreme and assume that Italy’s “many problems could be disregarded on the basis of eppur si muove (nevertheless it works).” Despite its (possibly apocryphal) pedigree from Galileo, Bull and Rhodes (1997a, 4) dismiss such an assertion as “glib” – but many of our authors are nonetheless drawn to the notion that Italy has exhibited an unusual degree of adaptability in the face of crisis. Italy has, after all, managed to muddle through for two decades since Bull and Rhodes and their contributors described multiple crises (of the political parties, of the political class, of institutions, of the state), as well as those of a systemic, structural, and conjunctural sort (Bull and Rhodes 1997a, 1997b); and it has been nearly twice that long since Graziano and Tarrow (1979) and their contributors identified La crisi italiana. Since then Italy has emerged as the third-largest economy in Europe and eighth-largest in the world. Eppur si muove – from crisis to crisis perhaps, but it still moves. The present study seeks to explain how. It does so, in part, by putting Italy in comparative perspective with other European states, naturally, but also with Latin America, and even the United States, all of which are countries that have experienced similar crises to Italy’s and similar – often populist – responses. Not only do these comparative examples shed light on the Italian case; Italy has something to say about the other cases as well. In the spirit of Anderson’s analysis of Italy as a “concentrate” of more widespread European pathologies, Sidney Tarrow, in his chapter in this volume, calls Italy the “canary in the coal mine,” a warning sign of worse to come, but also an opportunity to understand better the sources of the problems.³

In an insightful study of international crises, Alessandro Colombo (2014) describes the phenomenon of “not wasting the crisis” (non sprecare la crisi). He suggests two variants. His first is that proponents of a particular model, such as the neoliberal reforms of the economies of the European Union, will describe a crisis as evidence that something “hasn’t worked” because of certain institutional barriers or legacies. In an “optimistic and reassuring” fashion, they see the crisis as a way to wipe away those barriers that hinder progress in normal periods and to proceed forward, often analogizing a crisis as a war to be won (Colombo 2014:10, 160–161). Naomi Klein (2007) has described a similar phenomenon in her notions of the “shock doctrine” and “disaster capitalism.”

Many of our authors are skeptical of the EU’s neoliberal project, and its attendant austerity policies, and see them as a major cause of the current crisis, rather than an opportunity to break through barriers and continue as before. Thus, we are more inclined toward Colombo’s second variant of not wasting a crisis. He advocates “not rushing to ‘get beyond’ what has just been revealed” through the crisis: “conflicts of values and interests, incoherence, internal fractures, inequalities, a decrease in loyalty toward institutions” (Colombo 2014:11). In that spirit of analysis rather than policy promotion, our authors seek to understand the sources of Italy’s crises and their relevance for Europe and beyond.

This Introduction proceeds as follows: It reviews the political and economic history of Italy through periods of crisis and seeming transition, with an emphasis on the period since the end of the Cold War. It reviews the upheaval in the party system that brought an end to the so-called First Republic; various societal changes, including secularization, modernization, and the (slowly) changing role of women and gender in society and politics; the economic transformations that have attended Italy’s involvement in the European Union and its forerunners; the challenge posed by secessionist movements to center-regional relations; and the decline in Italian political participation and disillusionment with electoral politics, combined with the rise of populist alternatives. This background sets the stage for the topics covered in more depth in the rest of the book. The second half of this Introduction summarizes the contributions offered here, organized according to the book’s three sections: 1) The political-economic nexus; 2) Foreign, energy, and security policy; and 3) Societal change and adaptation. I seek to identify common themes among the contributors as well as disagreements. Because we are an interdisciplinary group of historians, sociologists, and political scientists, we have not tried to impose a uniform theoretical framework on our project. Instead, the contributors draw on the relevant theoretical literatures of their own disciplines as they focus on the common themes of crisis and adaptation.

Change, crisis, and transition

For nearly a half century postwar Italian politics was defined by the dominance – albeit relative and uneven – of the centrist Christian Democratic Party and the exclusion from power of the Communist Party on the left and the Italian Social Movement on the fascist right. The communists’ assumed allegiance to the Soviet Union was deemed a threat to Italy’s commitment to a US-led military alliance historically characterized by its anti-communist ideology. Thus, the surprise – and, in some circles, discomfort – that greeted the specter of an Italian government of former communists leading their country into a war on behalf of NATO, a war that the United Nations Security Council had refused to endorse.

The factors that made these dramatic changes possible – a center-left government and a mostly nonpartisan foreign policy – are familiar, but worth reviewing, as they set the stage for much of the discussion in subsequent chapters. The changes in Italian domestic and foreign policy stem from interrelated internal and external causes. At the level of the international system, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the mainly peaceful overthrow of communist regimes in Eastern Europe (with the notable exception of Yugoslavia) signaled the end of the Cold War, with the reunification of Germany in 1990 and the break-up of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991 leaving even the greatest skeptics convinced that a fundamental change had transpired. Within Europe, the signing of the Maastricht Treaty of European Union in February 1992 demonstrated that the process of European integration that began four decades earlier with the founding of the European Coal and Steel Community would continue even in the absence of an external Soviet threat to compel cooperation. Maastricht provided for a common currency, the euro, and “convergence criteria” imposing limits on inflation, public debt, and long-term interest rates. It represented a continuation of European policies pursuing exchange-rate stability and the elimination of capital controls in the interest of enhancing trade and investment, and in that respect reflected broader trends in the globalization of the international economy. While perhaps not being “the canary in the coal mine” for those who view these developments toward European unity positively, Italy nevertheless was an innovator at the level of ideas: Luigi Einaudi, the Italian Republic’s first finance minister and second president, was already arguing in 1943 for a federated Europe, whose monetary policy would be controlled at a supranational level, with member states unable to issue their own currencies (Sarcinelli 2006; Oddenino and Silvestri 2011).

Upheaval in the party system

International factors held profound implications for the Italian political and economic situation. Whereas many observers would highlight the end of the Cold War as the trigger for the collapse of the First Republic, Stefano Guzzini (1995) has convincingly argued for a focus on longer-term transnational processes, especially those associated with globalization of the international economy and its relationship to organized crime. They posed financial constraints on Italy’s ability to sustain what he calls the “consociational/clientelistic bargain” upon which the country’s welfare state depended – a view congenial to many of this book’s contributors. Nevertheless, the changes in the USSR that contributed to the end of the Cold War should not be dismissed entirely. The reforms initiated by Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that ultimately led to the demise of communism in Eastern Europe could not but affect the Italian Communist Party (Partito comunista Italiano, PCI), the largest in Western Europe and the largest in any country not governed by a communist party. In November 1989, just a few days after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Achille Occhetto, the PCI leader, at a meeting in Bologna to commemorate an important anniversary of the World War II partisan resistance, signaled the likelihood of major changes in the party, starting with its name. He quoted Gorbachev, with whom he had met on several occasions in the mid-1980s (Gorbachev 1995, 319, 341; Rubbi 1996), to the effect that “we must not cling to the past but devote ourselves to making great changes” (Kertzer 1996, 3).

During the Cold War the PCI had traveled far along the road from revolutionary socialism (abandoned already during the wartime “popular front”) to social democracy. In the “historic compromise” (compromesso storico) of the 1970s the Christian Democratic Party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC) came to consider the PCI a plausible partner for a coalition government – until the Red Brigades’ kidnapping and murder of DC leader Aldo Moro derailed that project. In 1991, the PCI took the next step toward mains...