Perry Anderson on Italy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v24/n06/ande2406.htm

London Review of Books, March 21, 2002

Land without Prejudice
Perry Anderson

Italy has long occupied a peculiar position within the concert of Europe. By 
wealth and population it belongs alongside France, Britain and Germany as one 
of the four leading states of the Union. But it has never played a comparable 
role in the affairs of the continent, and has rarely been regarded as a 
diplomatic partner or rival of much significance. Its image lacks any 
association with power. Historically, that has no doubt been one of the reasons 
it has long been the favourite country of foreigners. Germans, French and 
English alike have repeatedly expressed a warmth of affection for it they have 
rarely felt for each other, even if the objects of their admiration differed. 
Few of their comments are without some contemporary ring. Escaping from the 
pruderies of Weimar to Rome, Goethe found it 'morally salutary to be living in 
the midst of a sensual people'. In Italy, Byron decided, 'there is no law or 
government at all; and it is wonderful how well things go on without them.' 
Stendhal, who knew the country better, felt at times that 'music alone is alive 
in Italy, and all that is to be made in this beautiful land is love; the other 
enjoyments of the soul are spoilt; one dies poisoned of melancholy as a 
citizen.' Yet Italians were also, paradoxically, masters of another practice:

Never, outside Italy, could one guess at the art called politics (way of making 
others do what is agreeable to us, when force or money is not to hand). Without 
patience, without absence of anger, no one can be called a politician. Napoleon 
was truly small in this respect, he had enough Italian 
blood in his veins to be subtle, but was incapable of using it.

The list of such fond dicta could be extended indefinitely.

In diametric contrast stands the characteristic tone of native commentary. Most 
languages have some self-critical locution, usually a wordplay 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, as 
the familiar contempt of the phrase all' italiana (divorce etc) testifies, 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 1980s, and rising to a crescendo in 
the 1990s, 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: Un paese normale. 
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 who are superior to it.

The full list of the anomalies that set Italy apart varies from one account 
to another, but all highlight three central 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, organised 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 militarised 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.

Long-standing occupation of office has not been peculiar to Italy. Swedish 
social-democracy was in office for more than 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, even if the Mezzogiorno in Italy remains a problem on another scale. 
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 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 that has 
become 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 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. According to legend, the final 
harpooning of this beast ushered in the Second Republic.

For this is how Italians typically label the political order today. In this 
version, the First Republic that emerged at the end of the war collapsed, amid 
dramatic convulsions, in the early 1990s. Out of its demise a more modern 
configuration has emerged, 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, 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 
polarisation, 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, 
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 1990s, 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 1980s by Giulio 
Andreotti, the hunched '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 intruder into the party system, had made 
startling advances in the North, but not enough to affect the national outcome. 
It seemed to be business as usual. But a month later, 
magistrates in Milan issued the first official warnings, avvisi di garanzia, 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 
stabilisation 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 1992-93 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 utilise the 
magistrates' assault on Tangentopoli, with which it had no connection, 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.

Here, however, the analogy breaks down. Once installed in Paris, de Gaulle was 
firmly in charge of the reorganisation 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 populist bandwagon of the referendum launched by Segni, 
lending it mass mobilising 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. 
Excluded from government in Rome at much the same time as the General withdrew 
to Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises - 1947 - the PCI did not, 
however, maintain the same intransigent distance from the political system of 
the First Republic as he had from the Fourth. By the 1980s, the PCI had long 
become a semi-insider at the 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. So it, too, was in some 
degree implicated in the typical practices of sottogoverno 
- commissions on public works contracts, subsidies to affiliated organisations, 
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 distortion, 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 1960s onwards increasingly recognised abroad. 
Here, then, was one purely Italian tradition that was undeniably vital and 
uncompromised. But the PCI in the age of Togliatti - from the mid-1940s to the 
mid-1960s - 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 organisation, still externally associated with Russia. Wrong-footed 
by radical student and worker upsurges in the late 1960s, 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 - the 
so-called Historic Compromise.

The Soviet connection was not severed, however. Typically, the PCI's most 
right-wing leader, the formidable Giorgio Amendola, who openly urged the Party 
to become an Italian edition of British Labour, was also the most firmly 
attached to this, regularly spending his holidays in Bulgaria. When the 
Christian Democrats resisted the hand proffered by the Communists in the 
mid-1970s, preferring the Socialists as more pliable partners, the leadership 
of the PCI began to detach itself more openly from Moscow. But 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 felt safer under the protection of Nato. Its 
well-wishers in the media applauded, 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. De Gaulle, who had been the foremost French imperialist 
of the 1940s, emerged unscathed from the collapse of France's colonial empire 
in the 1960s, deftly negotiating Algerian independence in the higher interests 
of the nation. The relabelled 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 15 years earlier.

Still, by the end of 1993, the political landscape had been scythed so clean of 
rivals or opponents that the Party seemed on the brink of power, if only by 
elimination of alternatives. A coalition built around the PDS had just elected 
the Mayors of Rome, Naples, Venice, Trieste, Palermo. New electoral rules it 
had helped to design, in which most Parliamentary seats would be decided on a 
first-past-the-post system, were in place. The Left looked poised for its first 
victory since the war. Instead came a thief in the night. In the last week of 
January 1994, Silvio Berlusconi, proprietor of Italy's largest media empire, 
announced that he would lead a 'Pole of Liberty' to save the country from the 
clutches of the PDS-led cartel. Within days, he had launched a political 
movement, named after the chant of 
national football fans - Forza Italia - and organised by the executives of his 
holding company Fininvest, and had forged alliances with Bossi's Lega in the 
North and Fini's Alleanza Nazionale in the South, to form a common front 
against the danger of a Red government. Two months later the Pole swept to 
power with a clear majority. The Italian Left had been swiftly and 
completely outflanked in the competition to be the standard-bearer of a Second 
Republic by a coalition of the Right.

Amid the talk on all sides of the need for a new political start, there was 
some ironic logic to this outcome. Berlusconi, Bossi and Fini were fresh forces 
on the Italian political scene, in a way that the PDS and its associates, most 
of them fixtures of the First Republic, were not. Economically, Berlusconi owed 
his fortune to favours received from the old order. Genealogically, Fini came 
out of the Fascist tradition loyal to the Republic of Salò. But as major 
political actors, they were unknown quantities and could project an aura of 
novelty more easily. As for Bossi, he was the great, genuine interloper of the 
late 1980s and early 1990s. Berlusconi's feat in putting these disparate forces 
together, virtually overnight, was remarkable. Bossi's Lega, based on local 
manufacturers and shopkeepers in the smaller towns of the North, was raucously 
hostile to Roman bureaucracy and Southern clientelism - the electoral 
strongholds of Fini's Alleanza. The former standing for radical devolution and 
deregulation, the latter for social protection and statist centralisation, each 
detested the other.

Forza Italia, the first party in the world to be mounted as if it were a 
company, would have been impossible without Berlusconi's personal wealth and 
control of television airtime. But the key to its political success lay 
in his ability to mediate Bossi and Fini into flanking allies, at opposite ends 
of the peninsula where they did not compete with each other. The Left lost 
because it showed no comparable capacity for aggregation. The coalition of the 
Right took some 43 per cent of the vote; the Left 34 per cent; what remained of 
a Catholic Centre - closer in outlook to the latter than the former - 16 per 
cent. Under proportional representation, there would have been a Centre-Left 
Government. But under a first-past-the-post system, tempered only by a residual 
element of PR, the lack of an electoral 
bloc between Left and Centre ensured defeat for both. The PDS had been hoist 
with the petard of its support for Segni's referendum.

Robbed of victory at the last minute, the Left took its defeat hard. How could 
the Italian people have voted for such a scabrous figure as Berlusconi? Dismay 
was not confined to the PDS and its penumbra. It was shared by wide sectors of 
the Italian establishment: the industrialists Agnelli at the head of Fiat and 
De Benedetti of Olivetti, each with influential mouthpieces in the press, La 
Stampa and La Repubblica; Scalfaro, the President of the Republic; technocrats 
in the Central Bank; many magistrates and most intellectuals; enlightened 
Catholic opinion. Abroad the Financial Times and Economist made their 
disapproval of Berlusconi known early on and have not relented to this day. The 
Left thus had a broad sounding-board when, after the initial shock of its 
setback in March 1994, it started to launch bitter attacks on the legitimacy of 
Italy's new Prime Minister. Two fundamental, interrelated charges could be laid 
against him. Berlusconi's control of the bulk of private television, not to 
speak of his press and publishing outlets, was incompatible with high public 
office - leading not only to obvious conflicts of economic interest, but 
violating a political separation of powers essential to any democracy. 
Moreover, there was good reason to suspect that he had amassed the 
extraordinary wealth that allowed him to build up his media empire by every 
kind of corruption. His propaganda to the contrary, the country's new 
ruler embodied the worst of the old order: a combination of impropriety and 
illegality that would be a standing danger to any free society. Roughly 
speaking, this continues to be the prevailing foreign view of Berlusconi.

Of its factual validity, there can be little question. The son of a minor bank 
official Berlusconi made his first fortune as a suburban developer in Milan, 
mobilising resources of unfathomable origin for construction projects in the 
late 1960s, before moving into commercial television in the 
mid-1970s. The city was the political base of Craxi, the strongman of the PSI, 
who was determined to break the Christian Democrats' priority of power 
and prebends at the top levels of the Italian state. The DC had long relied 
on extensive corruption to finance its machine, but its political force rested 
on its mass base as a Catholic party linked to the Church. The PSI, lacking any 
comparable roots in society, was obliged to resort much more comprehensively to 
extortion to make up for its popular deficit - and by increasing competition 
for the spoils, sharply upped the stakes of corruption. Under Craxi, a 
generation of political street-fighters had clawed their way to control of the 
PSI, liquidating all its old leaders and 
traditions - where their opposite numbers in the PCI rose by obedience and 
conformity within a bureaucracy that put a premium on caution, evasion and 
anonymity. Adept at rapid manoeuvres and tactical turns, the PSI grouping often 
showed a capacity for political initiative that left a lamely defensive PCI 
standing. But it was a machine that required constant financial lubrication. By 
the time Craxi achieved his goal of becoming Premier, the speculative boom of 
the mid-1980s was fostering a climate of ostentatious consumption, in which 
earlier restraints on the political class were anyway dissolving. The PSI now 
set the tone for government, the DC following suit. In 1987 the 'super-bribe' 
dished out between the ruling parties for the creation of the petrochemical 
complex Enimont alone came to 
$100 million.

Berlusconi's career tracked this structural change in the last decades of the 
First Republic. If his first connections were with the right wing of Christian 
Democracy - one of his key aides was linked to the Sicilian Mafia 
- as he moved into television, he developed a close friendship with Craxi, who 
in due course became godfather to one of his children and witness at his second 
wedding. As the PSI moved towards joint power with the DC in the 
political system, so Berlusconi's television empire grew. When Craxi became 
Prime Minister in 1983, Berlusconi already controlled - in defiance of the 
Constitutional Court - two nationwide channels. Finally provoked into action by 
his acquisition of a third, praetors blacked out all three stations one night 
in October 1984. Craxi immediately issued a decree allowing them to return to 
the air, and when Parliament declared this unconstitutional, rammed through a 
law temporarily confirming it. Six years 
later, legislation specifically tailored to ratify Berlusconi's control of 80 
per cent of the country's commercial television - the so-called Legge Mammì - 
was forced on Parliament by Andreotti, under PSI pressure, at the 
cost of a vote of confidence that split his own party. Obviously, it was 
unlikely that such extraordinary state favours were granted to a single 
businessman without considerations in exchange.

Eventually, Berlusconi's empire came to include not only his television 
stations and hugely profitable advertising agency, but some of Italy's most 
prestigious publishing houses, its most popular retail chain, and one of the 
country's most successful football clubs. But from the start there was another 
side to Berlusconi, closer in self-image to Reagan than Murdoch. As 
a young man, he had been a crooner on Adriatic cruise-ships and Milanese 
dance-floors, warbling into the microphone, with Fedele Confalonieri, later 
his tough chief executive in Fininvest, tinkling on a white piano at his side. 
He wanted not just to accumulate companies and dominate markets, but to charm 
and impress audiences as well. Vain of his looks - there is an almost naive 
touch of the bounder in the sleek face and over-large smile - Berlusconi has 
always sought glamour and popularity, attributes more of the 
stage than the boardroom. The trademark of his conversation is the barzelletta 
- the kind of 'funny story' of which Reagan was a tireless store, somewhat more 
off-colour. Such vulgarity is not the least of the reasons Berlusconi is so 
detested by many Italians. But this is the culture 
of his television stations, with their popular ratings, and was no handicap 
when he entered the political arena. The educated might grit their teeth as 
he became Premier, but large numbers of voters were attuned to this style.

In office, however, Berlusconi's lack of previous political experience soon 
told. Rather than displaying any resolute autocratic drive, he was curiously 
hesitant and indecisive, quickly backing down when his first initiatives - 
attempts at an amnesty for Tangentopoli offences, and a scaling back of 
pensions - ran into strong opposition. But his tenure was in any case 
short-lived. In the months leading up to the election, the Milan magistrates 
had started public investigations against a whole series of leading Italian 
industrialists - among others, the bosses of Fiat, Olivetti and Ferruzzi - but 
had not yet reached Berlusconi. When he became Prime Minister, they went into 
top gear. The Milan pool of magistrates, the 
posse of Mani Pulite, the 'Clean Hands' that had cracked open Tangentopoli, 
was not a neutral or apolitical force. Italian prosecutors and judges - it is a 
peculiarity of the system that there is no career division between them - are a 
highly politicised body, in which tacit party affiliations and 
overt professional factions are taken for granted. The Milan pool was by no 
means ideologically homogeneous - one prominent member was close to the PDS, 
another to Fini's AN - but it was united in hostility to the venality of the 
First Republic. The dismay felt by the Left at the way Berlusconi had usurped 
the promise of a cleaner democracy was a lesser affair than the 
anger of the prosecutors in Milan. In late November, a phone call from the head 
of the Milan pool tipped off Scalfaro, President of the Republic, that 
an avviso di garanzia was about to be issued against the Prime Minister on 
suspicion of corruption. Berlusconi was just preparing to leave for Naples, 
where he was due to preside over a UN Conference on the Fight against Organised 
Crime. The next day, the humiliating notice was served on him in full session 
in Naples.

Amid the uproar that followed, a political trap was sprung. Since its defeat in 
the spring, the PDS had acquired a new leader. In his early forties, Massimo 
D'Alema was cast more in the mould of the PSI's Young Guard under Craxi, 
skilled in the arts of ambush and volte-face, than of his slow-moving forebears 
in the PCI. Behind the scenes he had been working 
on Bossi, feeding his personal jealousy of Berlusconi, who had upstaged his 
own revolt against the old order, and the class dislike of the rough-neck for 
the magnate. By December D'Alema had achieved his aim. The Lega, which held a 
third of the seats in the ruling coalition, suddenly announced it was pulling 
out of the Government. Berlusconi had lost his majority and was 
forced to resign. The first Government of the Second Republic had lasted just 
nine months - below the average even for the First.

According to the doctrine that all major parties now swore by, political 
transparency required the calling of new elections. Since 1992 no vice of the 
First Republic had been more unanimously decried than the practice of 
constantly shifting alliances in Parliament to form new cabinets, without 
resort to the consent of the voters. In the Second Republic, so this doctrine 
went, voters who cast their ballots for a ticket could be assured that their 
intentions would not be turned upside down by opportunist switches of 
allegiance in the Chamber of Deputies. Bossi owed most of his Parliamentary 
delegation to voters who had chosen the Pole rather than the Lega, in 
constituencies where Forza Italia had stood down for his party. When Bossi 
abruptly switched sides, Berlusconi had every reason to feel betrayed, and to 
demand fresh elections to determine where the democratic will lay. Dissolution 
of the Chamber was the prerogative of the President, whose Constitutional role 
was supposed to be supra partes. Scalfaro, however, fearing Berlusconi might be 
returned to office if voters were allowed to express their feelings too soon, 
spatchcocked together another cabinet under the banker Lamberto Dini. His more 
than willing collaborator was D'Alema, who - fully in keeping with the habits 
of the First Republic, and entirely contrary to the professed principles of the 
Second - orchestrated Centre-Left support for the Government, in order to gain 
time and prepare conditions for a more favourable electoral result down the 
line. Bossi's truculently xenophobic party, the PDS leader explained, was 
really 'a rib of the Left'. In due course Dini himself - another defector from 
Berlusconi's team - was transmuted into a pillar of the Centre-Left coalition.

In this paradoxical outcome of the first test of the new order lies a clue to 
the genetic code of Italian political culture. Critical to it is a notion that 
has no corresponding term in other European languages: spregiudicato. 
Literally, this just means 'unprejudiced' - a term of praise 
in Italy, as it is elsewhere. Such was the original 18th-century meaning of 
the word, when it had a strong Enlightenment connotation, which it preserves to 
this day. The first entry in any Italian dictionary defines it 
as 'independence of mind, freedom from partiality or preconception'. In the 
course of the 19th century, however, the word came to acquire a second meaning, 
which the same dictionaries render as 'lack of scruples, want of restraint, 
effrontery'. Today - this is the crucial point - the two meanings have 
virtually fused. For other Europeans, the 'unprejudiced' and the 'unscrupulous' 
are moral opposites. But for the Italians spregiudicatezza signifies, 
indivisibly, both admirable open-mindedness and 
deplorable ruthlessness. In theory, context indicates which applies. In 
practice, common usage erodes the distinction between them. The connotation 
of spregiudicato is now generally laudatory, even when its referent is the 
second rather than the first. The tacit, everyday force of the term becomes: 
'aren't scruples merely prejudices?' An occasional hint along these lines can 
be found in the libertine literature of pre-Revolutionary France, when 
characters were described as sans préjugés, signifying lack of sexual 
inhibition. In contemporary Italy, however, the elision is systematic and its 
principal employment is in the field of power.

Understood in this sense, spregiudicatezza appears a common denominator of the 
most variegated figures and forces of the Italian scene. It does not abolish 
the political differences between them, as if they were indistinguishable in 
cynicism, but rather bathes them in a general ether, in which the technicolour 
contrasts of moral battle, as perceived elsewhere, give way to a spectrum of 
glinting half-tones - moiré surfaces 
that continually alter according to the angle from which they are viewed. 
Examples could be multiplied at will: the eminent theorist of democracy, 
universally respected as a personification of ethical principle, with no qualms 
about tanks bombarding the Russian Parliament; the incorruptible former judge, 
nemesis of subversion, offering kind words to the youth gangs 
of the Republic of Salò, when his party needs them; the rising politician, 
declaring Mussolini the greatest statesman of the 20th century at one moment, 
certified as a guardian of the Constitution by a Resistance veteran 
at the next; the fearless prosecutor, utmost foe of bribery, in receipt of 
limousine and free loan from business friends. The prevalence of double 
standards does not mean that the standards themselves are always the same; 
ideological and political contrasts are as real and robust as anywhere else. 
Nor does a ubiquitous pragmatism preclude genuine outbreaks of moralism. No 
national culture is ever entirely coherent, and it would be a mistake to 
dismiss the intensity of civic indignation at Tangentopoli, which formed the 
exceptional backdrop to these years, as insincere. But coexisting with popular 
disgust at official venality, and underlying it as a bedrock default attitude, 
was the traditional lack of prejudice of the Italian public at large: what 
could be a more apt description of voter indifference to Berlusconi's flagrant 
reputation from the start?

The Dini Government brought further vivid illustration of the same sensibility. 
Most of its members were handpicked by Scalfaro, whose Presidential role in the 
crisis was hailed by the Left as setting a high example of responsibility and 
probity for the Second Republic. In fact, Scalfaro was a not untypical 
Christian Democrat of the old order, who had adorned some of the Governments 
most execrated by the advocates of system change. Unctuous in diction, with the 
profile of a portly Punch, in those days he was noted for an occasion when, 
sitting in a restaurant, he had risen to his feet and slapped an unknown woman 
at the next table for a frock he found too décolleté. For four years, however, 
he had served as 
Craxi's Minister of the Interior. In this department of state, amid the cascade 
of scandals that tumbled out in Tangentopoli, functionaries of Sisde - the 
secret service that is the Italian equivalent of MI5 - reported 
in 1993 that they had been in the practice of passing a monthly envelope 
stuffed with 100 million lire, no questions asked, to successive heads of the 
Ministry. Four Ministers were named. The Roman prosecutors opened 
investigations into two of them, both already politically dead in the water, 
and cleared the third, who happened to be the current incumbent.

The fourth was Scalfaro, now President. Not only did the prosecutors refuse 
to consider any evidence against him: they charged the witnesses, in the 
memorable formulation of Chief Prosecutor Vittorio Mele, with 'subversion' for 
their testimony - 'independently of whether what they say is true or not'. Not 
an eyebrow was raised on the Left. A commission of enquiry into the whole 
affair, chaired by a Sicilian judge, in due course declared Scalfaro blameless. 
When the Dini Government was formed, the judge - Filippo Mancuso - was rewarded 
with the Ministry of Justice. Soon, however, 
frictions arose over his handling of the magistrates in Milan, widely judged 
vexatious. Scalfaro was also put out by his conduct, and the Centre Left moved 
a no-confidence vote against him in Parliament. When the day came for the 
motion in the Senate - the debate was televised - the gravel-voiced Mancuso 
mounted the tribune, and announced to a stunned nation that he had been asked 
to alter his report on the Sisde slush-funds at the instigation of Scalfaro, 
acting through his palace familiar Gifuni. Uproar followed. The Centre Left, 
beside itself with indignation at this aspersion, voted Mancuso out of office 
and into oblivion. A President who had spared the country a dangerous ordeal at 
the polls was above suspicion: 
only the prejudiced could associate him with malversation.

In the short run, such acrobatics were not misjudged. Scalfaro's delaying 
tactics had given the Centre Left a respite, and D'Alema made good use of it. 
When elections were held in the spring of 1996, the PDS had found a credible 
candidate to put up against Berlusconi in the person of Romano Prodi - an 
economist of Catholic background generally respected for his management of the 
state holding company IRI - and had cemented a broad coalition, dubbed with the 
sturdy image of the Olive Tree, behind him. Berlusconi, on the other hand, had 
been unable to repair his alliance with the Lega, which fought the election 
alone. Total votes cast showed an actual increase in support for the Centre 
Right, but since it was now divided and the Centre Left united, the result was 
a narrow Parliamentary majority for an Olive Tree Government. Prodi was 
installed as Premier, with 
a PDS Vice-Premier. The promise of the winning coalition was a coherent 
modernisation of Italian public life, eliminating national anomalies and 
bringing the country fully up to Western standards. Now, surely, the hour of 
the Second Republic had struck.

Confronting the victors lay a complex agenda. The collapse of the First 
Republic had been triggered by corruption and criminality. But behind these 
long-standing ills, two other pressures had played a critical role. The first 
was the Treaty of Maastricht, signed in 1992, setting out the 'convergence 
criteria' for entry into European Monetary Union. These required a drastic 
compression of Italy's public debt and budgetary deficit, which for years had 
been running at levels far above the other major EU economies. Abroad it was 
widely doubted whether Italy was capable of such belt-tightening. The second 
urgency came from Northern regionalism. 
The revolt of the Lega threatened to undermine the unity of the country, if 
no federal solution was forthcoming. Besides these supra and sub-national 
forcing-houses of change, there was the unfinished work left by the national 
crisis of 1992-93 itself. By mid-decade the militarist turn of the 
Mafia in Sicily had been crushed, and excesses of political corruption curbed. 
But no stable legal order had been established: justice remained a word, not a 
system. Deficiencies of taxation, administration and education were widely 
advertised. Last but not least, the new electoral system had proved 
unsatisfactory to nearly everyone; instead of reducing the number of 
parties in Parliament, as intended, it had multiplied them. To strengthen the 
executive, many argued, it would be necessary to rewrite the Constitution.

In this forest of tasks, Prodi was in no doubt which had priority. By training 
and temperament, his principal concerns were economic. As Premier, 
his overriding objective was to ensure Italy's compliance with the Maastricht 
criteria for entry into the single currency in 1998. Normalcy, in this version, 
was conceived as full integration - without any of the surreptitious 
derogations and defaults of the past - into a liberalised European economy. 
That meant tight budgetary discipline to control inflation, reduce the deficit 
and moderate the volume of public debt. In short, an orthodox macro-economic 
framework, mitigated where possible - Prodi was committed to this - by 
traditional social concerns.

In its pursuit of this goal, the Centre-Left Government was consistent and 
effective. To the uneasy surprise of German bankers, the Maastricht targets 
were met on schedule, Italy entered Monetary Union, and has benefited from 
lower interest payments on its public debt ever since. This strenuous effort 
was accompanied, not by any sweeping tax reform - Italy is still a country 
where the state extracts proportionately more from workers than from 
restaurateurs or lawyers - but at least by more effective and somewhat 
less inequitable fiscal catchment. The cost of convergence was also high: the 
slowest growth of any major industrial society in the 1990s, and virtually no 
reduction in very high levels of youth and regional unemployment - over 20 per 
cent in the South. Still, there is no question that entry into European 
Monetary Union was the major achievement of the Ulivo experience. It was also 
the one most obviously continuous with the directives of the past. Maastricht 
was signed, indeed partly shaped, by Andreotti, and the most drastic fiscal 
squeeze to implement the Treaty was the work of Giuliano Amato, a lieutenant of 
Craxi's in the last days of the 
First Republic. In this sense Prodi acted as competent executor of a legacy 
handed down by the DC and PSI of old, on which financial and industrial elites 
had always been united.

Monetary integration was not, however, the main plank of the modernisation 
promised by the slogan of the Second Republic. That was to be Constitutional, 
electoral and administrative reform, to give Italy the kind 
of honest and efficient government its neighbours enjoyed. Here it was not 
Prodi but D'Alema and the PDS who were to the forefront from the start. In 
early 1997 D'Alema pushed through the creation of a Bicameral Commission to 
revise the Constitution, with himself as chairman. Since Constitutional changes 
required a two-thirds majority in Parliament, hence some kind of deal with the 
opposition, the effect of the Bicamerale was to give him a public arena for 
tractations with Berlusconi and Fini, inevitably at Prodi's expense as head of 
Government. In the Commission, D'Alema, with the 
aim of drawing them into a pact to marginalise smaller parties in the political 
system, under a stronger - if necessary, semi-presidential - executive, went 
out of his way to express respect for both leaders, hitherto objects of the 
fiercest obloquy on the Left. Soon all three were exchanging mutual 
compliments, as prospective partners in the task of bringing responsibility and 
clarity of government to Italy. The effect was to confer a quite new level of 
political legitimation on Berlusconi.

At this many ordinary members of the PDS itself, not to speak of other 
supporters of the Ulivo Government, had to swallow hard. The charges that had 
helped bring Berlusconi down three years earlier had been by the standards of 
Tangentopoli relatively small beer: pay-offs to the Guardia di 
Finanza, tax police not above suspicion of their own shake-downs. By now 
Berlusconi had been convicted in the lower courts both on this count and on 
a further charge of falsifying company accounts, and the Milan pool was 
widening its trawl through his labyrinth of holding companies. For lay opinion, 
however, the various cases against him could still seem somewhat technical. But 
in early 1996, bugs planted under the ashtrays of a bar led to the arrest of a 
leading Roman judge, Renato Squillante - the name means 'trilling' - and two 
colleagues, on charges of delivering a favourable verdict to the tune of 678 
billion lire, in a bankruptcy suit brought by the Rovelli family, in exchange 
for bribes of more than 60 billion lire.

The trail that led to them had started from a pretty blonde antique-dealer in 
Milan, Stefania Ariosto. When he went into politics, Berlusconi took with him 
his two most prominent legal advisers, Vittorio Dotti and Cesare Previti - one 
from Milan, the other from Rome - who hated each other. Ariosto had been the 
mistress of Dotti, and possibly of Previti too. Questioned by the pool in 
Milan, she reported seeing Previti hand over large sums in cash to Squillante 
on a festive boat-trip along the Tiber, and on other occasions. In due course 
Swiss bank accounts confirmed a pattern of transfers between Previti and two 
colleagues and the Roman judges that matched exactly the bribe with which they 
were charged. Further 
investigations indicated that Berlusconi himself had paid nearly half a million 
dollars to Squillante, through Previti, for a favourable ruling in his takeover 
battle for the SME food and catering conglomerate. The nature of these 
allegations - the systematic purchase of senior judges in the capital itself - 
exceeded any previous scandals in the downfall of the First Republic, most of 
them concerned with corruption in the executive, not at the heart of the 
judiciary.

Such was the background that Italians, reading in their newspapers of the 
cordial debates in the Bicamerale, were invited to forget. In exchange for a 
Constitutional deal, Berlusconi wanted curbs on the magistrates, which D'Alema 
was ready to consider. But the complicated manoeuvres of the PDS in 
the Bicamerale eventually foundered on the hostility of the Lega - which saw 
that it would be cut out of the deal - and the calculations of Berlusconi's 
shrewder advisers, who were content with the degree of absolution he had 
already gained, and disinclined to let D'Alema claim laurels as the architect 
of a new Constitutional settlement. In the summer of 1998, after many draft 
schemes had been swapped back and forth, the opposition abruptly announced no 
dice.

This was a serious blow to the PDS, but a few months later D'Alema recouped. 
From the start, the Government had depended on the support in Parliament of one 
force that did not belong to the coalition, the fraction of the PCI that had 
rejected the terms of its mutation in 1989, and as Rifondazione Comunista had 
since taken root as a party to the left of the PDS. That autumn, when Prodi's 
budget made too few concessions to keep Rifondazione in line, D'Alema took the 
opportunity to topple him. This was done with a silken touch - just enough 
informal dangling of hopes to Rifondazione for a more left-wing government 
(which he would lead), while he lingered in South America, far from the scene; 
and fortuitous failure to 
ensure that every available deputy in the coalition was present for the motion 
of confidence, when he got back. Prodi fell one vote short in the Chamber, and 
was not deceived. D'Alema had shown himself master of the skill Stendhal 
rightly saw as peculiarly Italian: the art of politics as a virtuoso exercise 
of subjective will and intelligence, without - an effect of the long absence of 
national unity - any corresponding sense of the state as an objective structure 
of power and obligation. This is the combination already visible in 
Machiavelli, whose inverse could be found in 
the Imperial culture of Spain which cut off his dreams. After a decent interval 
of days, the identity of the new Prime Minister was no surprise.

There was a cost to this elegant operation. Prodi's resentment, when it 
threatened to become dangerous, was deftly neutralised by exporting him to 
Brussels as President of the EU Commission, where he was soon out of his depth. 
But a spectacle of intrigue and division, recalling only too vividly 
the mores of the First Republic, had been given to the public, damaging the 
credibility of the Ulivo as a renovating force. Still, for the PDS the 
Parliamentary coup was a necessary step towards Italian normalcy in a sense 
that was more important in its view. The heirs of the PCI were the centrepiece 
of the ruling coalition - in fact, the only substantial party organisation in 
it - and freely referred to as the 'principal shareholder' in the Government. 
Yet an anachronistic prejudice still prevented them from 
converting effective into symbolic power, as would have occurred in any other 
European country, so they argued. Determined to break this taboo, D'Alema 
installed himself in the Palazzo Chigi.

What were the fruits of this closing of the gap between the pays réel and 
the pays légal in the Centre Left? The top priority of the PDS had all along 
been to change the electoral system. Constitutional reform, much bruited, was 
always a means to this, rather than an end in its own right: a 
bargaining chip in negotiations with the Right, which had initially wanted a 
strong Presidential system. But the former Communists were not alone in feeling 
that drastic electoral reform, abolishing the hated 'Mattarellum', the hybrid 
system concocted in the throes of crisis five years earlier, was 
the key to founding a stable Second Republic. Virtually the entire press 
clamoured for it, while Segni and Pannella - the authors of the original 
referendum abrogating proportional representation - were agitating for a second 
referendum to finish the job. Different foreign models, most of them 
Anglo-American in inspiration, were advocated by the interested parties. By 
far the most trenchant and lucid intervention in these debates came from 
Giovanni Sartori, the world's leading authority on comparative electoral 
systems, occupying a chair at Columbia and columns in the Corriere della Sera, 
who in a series of coruscating polemics championed the French model of a 
directly elected Presidency and two-round majority voting.

The PDS was not enamoured of a French-style Presidency, fearing that its 
personalisation of power would give an advantage to Berlusconi or Fini. But 
it urgently wanted the double tour. In fact, this had been its overriding 
strategic priority from the start. The reason was always clear. Under the 
existing rules, the Party was stuck at around 20 per cent of the electorate 
- the largest party in the mosaic of the Centre Left, but a smallish one by 
European standards. Unable to advance further in straightforward electoral 
competition, it needed a restriction of the range of voter choice to eliminate 
its rivals to the left, and potentially somewhat to the right of it. Above all, 
the PDS wanted to clear the decks of any challenge from Rifondazione, as a 
force capable of attracting disaffected voters from its own ranks, and 
subjecting a Centre-Left Government to unwelcome pressure from without. This 
was an objective, however, that had to remain tacit. Sartori, more candidly and 
consistently, argued that the double tour was vital to wipe out both the Lega 
and Rifondazione, as twin menaces to the emergence of a stable, non-ideological 
order in which all policies converged towards the liberal centre.

A huge amount of energy was invested by D'Alema and his party in trying, by 
one means or another, to force this change through, in the hope that Berlusconi 
would find it to his advantage, too. But, though tempted for a time, Berlusconi 
soon realised that a much quicker and surer route back to power lay in renewing 
his alliance with Bossi, who was implacably hostile to the double tour. The 
eventual result of five years of unremitting, and increasingly desperate, 
efforts by the PDS to change the rules of the political game was little short 
of farce. After strenuous demands for the double tour on the French model, when 
D'Alema fell from office in the spring of 2000 with only a year to go before 
new elections, the PDS suddenly backed the Segni-Pannella referendum for a 
complete first-past-the-post system of British stamp (which it had always 
hitherto rejected) and when that failed, unsuccessfully converted to a full 
proportional system along German lines (anathema to it for a decade) purely 
as a means of staving off looming defeat in the upcoming polls. A more futile 
and ignominious pilgrimage of self-interested opportunism would be difficult to 
imagine. As for the ledger of Constitutional reform, it remains bare.

Far more pressing, in reality, was the need for reform of Italian justice, with 
its mixture of a Fascist-derived legal code, arbitrary emergency powers, and 
chaotic procedural and carceral conditions. Here, indeed, has long been a 
panorama without equivalent elsewhere in Western Europe. There is no habeas 
corpus in Italy, where anyone can be clapped into jail without 
charges for over three years, under the system of custodia cautelare - 
'preventive detention' - that is responsible for locking up more than half the 
prison population in the country. Not only can witnesses be guaranteed immunity 
from prosecution under the rules of 'repentance' or pentitismo: they can be 
paid for suitable testimony by the state without even having to 
appear in court, or any record being visible of what they receive for their 
evidence - perhaps from the manilla envelopes that, according to Sisde 
operatives, were pocketed every month by Scalfaro and his peers. In the 
magistracy, there is no separation of careers, and little of functions, between 
prosecutors and judges: in Italian parlance, as in French or Spanish, those who 
lay charges are simply identified with those who are supposed to weigh the 
evidence for them, as giudici. In the prisons themselves, some fifty thousand 
inmates are jammed into cells built for half that number. The trial system has 
three stages, the average length is ten years, and the backlog of cases in the 
courts is now some three million. In this jungle, inefficiency alone rivals 
brutality, in part mitigating, in part compounding it.

Such was the system suddenly mobilised by crusading magistrates against 
political corruption in the North and the Mafia in the South. The personal 
courage and energy with which the pools in Milan and Palermo threw themselves 
at these evils had no precedent in the recent history of Italian 
administration. In Sicily, investigators risked their lives daily. But they, 
too, were the products of a culture that discounted scruples. Custodia 
cautelare was deliberately used as an instrument of intimidation. Illegal leaks 
of impending notices of investigation were regularly employed 
to bring down targeted office-holders. Tainted evidence was mustered without 
qualms: in the case against Andreotti, a key witness for the state was a thug 
who, embarrassingly, committed another murder while on the payroll of the 
authorities for his deposition. Any idea of separating the careers of 
prosecutor and judge was attacked with ferocity. The rationalisation of these 
practices was always the same. Italy was in a state of emergency; justice could 
not afford to be over-nice about individual rights. But, of course, they were 
not just responses to an emergency, they also perpetuated it. A widespread 
contempt for law is not to be cured by bending its principles. 'We will turn 
Italy inside out like a sock,' declared Piercamillo Davigo, the clearest mind 
of the Milan pool, as if the country were a discardable item from the laundry 
basket.

At the height of the prestige of Mani Pulite in the first half of the 1990s, 
when its star prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro topped all media ratings, 
few doubts were voiced about the work of the magistrates on the left. D'Alema 
himself was never caught up in this uncritical acclaim. But here, too, 
short-term tactical calculations overrode any coherent set of principles. For 
the most part, conscious of the popularity of the magistrates, the PDS sought 
to capitalise on their role. D'Alema eventually 
recruited Di Pietro as a Senator in a safe PDS seat in 1997, even while 
upholding Berlusconi's credentials as a national leader, regardless of the 
legal charges against him. Whatever private misgivings may have been felt in 
the upper reaches of the Party, there was no public criticism of the worst 
features of Italian justice - preventive detention, mercenary testimony, fusion 
of prosecutors and judges. The field was thus left open for the Right to make a 
case for more defensible alternatives, with a cynicism that only discredited 
them. In this field of force, no structural reforms of any moment were 
possible. At the end of five years of Ulivo Government, the magistrates had 
over-reached themselves in pursuing Andreotti with assorted gothic accusations 
of which he was acquitted, yet failed to clinch much more plausible charges 
against Berlusconi. Meanwhile Italy was treated to the tragic spectacle of the 
head of the Milan pool applauding Adriano Sofri's imprisonment, on the evidence 
of a pentitismo that the Left defending him could never bring itself to 
disavow. Conditions 
in the prison system remained as disastrous as ever.

Elsewhere the Centre Left's performance was more respectable, if nowhere very 
striking. Administrative regulations were to some extent simplified - no minor 
matter for the citizen, in a country with over fifty thousand laws 
where Germany has about five thousand - and fiscal resources devolved to the 
regions. Higher education saw a limited reform of the university system, where 
traditionally three-quarters of students never complete their 
degree; but without more funding, substantial progress remains unlikely. On 
the other hand, the chance of improving the quality of the Italian media was 
thrown away when the PDS, in its pursuit of a deal with the heads of Mediaset 
in the Bicamerale, chose to reject the term-limits independently set by the 
Constitutional Court on Berlusconi's television franchise. In foreign policy, 
D'Alema made the country the runway for Nato bombing of Yugoslavia, a step 
further than Christian Democracy ever went in bending to 
the will of the United States. In general the Centre Left showed less 
independence of Washington - in the Middle East as well as the Balkans - than 
the regimes of Andreotti or Craxi had done.

Little in this record was calculated to inspire enthusiasm among the electors 
of the Ulivo coalition, let alone those who had voted against it. In the spring 
of 2000, regional elections handed the Centre Left a heavy defeat. With a 
national reckoning only a year away, D'Alema quickly stepped 
down to avoid responsibility for impending fiasco. The most astute Italian 
politician of his generation, he once remarked tersely after meeting Blair: 
'manca di spessore.' 'A bit thin.' But if he noticed the beam - the 
disc-jockey's vacant smirk - in the eye of the other, he could not see the mote 
in his own. His culture was no doubt a little more solid. But it was not 
enough. Excess of tactical guile, shortage of ideal reflection: the eventual 
upshot was a self-destructive reduction to standard neo-liberal clichés of even 
the poor remains of 'European social democracy' to which the PDS nominally 
aspired. The Party would have done better to remain loyal 
to Prodi, who was respected by the public, and accept the rules on which he 
was elected. Voters had looked to the Ulivo for steady government, which 
D'Alema's ambitions had undermined. As it was, the experience of the Centre 
Left came full circle, when its final Premier became the initial retread of 
the decade, Craxi's former counseller Amato. Understandably, it did not care to 
present him as its candidate to fight the Centre Right a year later.

In these conditions, Berlusconi's victory in May 2001 - with Bossi securing 
his flank once more in the North and Fini in the South - was a foregone 
conclusion. The actual shift in votes, as in the previous election, was small. 
The Centre Right, which already had a majority of voter preferences in 1996, 
this time converted it into a Parliamentary landslide. Berlusconi had retained 
his following among housewives, conservative Catholics, small entrepreneurs, 
the elderly and the thirty-year-olds. But now the renamed 'House of Liberties' 
got more votes than the Centre Left from the bulk of the working class, in the 
private sector, as well. The key to the scale of its victory lay in the 
electorate's damning verdict on the record of the Centre Left in power - large 
numbers of those who actually voted for the Ulivo confessing they had more 
confidence in the capacity of the Centre Right to solve the various problems 
facing the country. In the two epicentres of the crisis of the First Republic, 
Lombardy and Sicily, Berlusconi scored the cleanest sweeps of all.

Retrospectively, the Centre Left is now faced with the bill for its manoeuvres 
to abort Berlusconi's Administration in 1994. Then his Parliamentary majority 
was far smaller; his political experience shorter; his financial empire weaker; 
his legitimacy more fragile. Thinking to gain time for itself by keeping him 
out of power, the Centre Left merely allowed 
him to become better prepared for exercising it. For this time, Berlusconi's 
position is much stronger. Forza Italia is no longer a shell, but an effective 
party, capable of playing something closer to the role of Christian Democracy 
of old. Fininvest has recovered from its difficulties. His allies are unlikely 
soon to challenge him. His opponents have conceded his status as a national 
leader. In these conditions, fears can be heard that Italian democracy will be 
at risk should Berlusconi and his unsavoury outriders succeed in consolidating 
their grip on the country. Could Italy be staring at the prospect of a creeping 
authoritarianism, once again organised around the cult of a charismatic leader, 
but this time based on an unprecedented control of the media - now public as 
well as private television - rather than squads and castor-oil?

Two structural realities tell against the idea. Fascism rose to power as a 
response to the threat from below: the danger that the revolution Gramsci had 
hailed in Russia might spread to Italy. Today there is no such ferment in the 
lower depths. The working class is atomised, there are no factory councils, the 
PCI has vanished, radical impulses among students and youth have waned. 
Capitalism in Italy, as elsewhere, has never looked safer. Historically, the 
second condition of Fascist success was nationalist self-assertion, the promise 
of an expansionist state capable of attacking neighbours and seizing territory 
by military force. That, too, has passed. The days of the autarkic state are 
gone. Italy is closely enmeshed in the European Union, its economy, military 
and diplomacy all subject to supranational controls that leave little leeway 
for independent policy of any kind. The ideological and legal framework of the 
EU rules out any break 
with a standard liberal-democratic regime. There is neither need nor chance 
of Berlusconi becoming an updated version of Mussolini.

Programmatically, 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 - privatisation 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 
proceeds with these 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 knuckleduster Right has space in Europe - will 
certainly get worse. But in general socio-economic direction, far from 
representing any radical form of reaction, Berlusconi's regime is already 
suspected of being too moderate - that is, insufficiently committed to the 
market - in the judgment 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 jeopardising 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 Euroconformism.

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. Already leading figures in the 
opposition have been explaining that Berlusconi should not necessarily resign 
as Prime Minister - 'after all he was democratically elected' - even 
if he is found guilty of suborning the judiciary. A rebellion of public opinion 
against such complaisance is possible but not certain. Ideological 
demobilisation, 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, rationalised the party system, 
modernised 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 1980s back to the manageable levels of 
the 1950s and 1960s; the Mafia has retreated, after defeat in the 
battlefield, to more traditional and inconspicuous forms of activity; 
Parliament is at least 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 we need?

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 organisations 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. Intellectual 
conflict and moral tension produced leaders of another stature. In that 
respect, as well as others, there has been a miniaturisation. 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. 
'Normality' is little more than the ideal of a provincial conformism.

Even today, not all the traces of this better past have 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 mobilisation 
in the postwar history of the country, putting a million people into the 
squares of Rome to block Berlusconi's first attempt 
at pension reform. In May last year, the vacuous rituals of the G7 were finally 
shattered by multitudes of young protesters in the streets of Genoa. In Italy 
alone was there a march of some 300,000 - from Perugia to Assisi - against the 
war in Afghanistan. Where French Communists or German Greens have been 
painlessly annexed as fig-leaves or sandwich-boards of the 
status quo, Rifondazione has remained resistant both to sectarian closure and 
to absorption. Of the three European dailies born out of the radical movements 
of 1968, Libération in Paris and Tageszeitung in Berlin are demoralised 
parodies of their original purpose: Il Manifesto, flanked by its monthly, is 
unswayed. The most striking political cinema of contemporary Europe is arguably 
the work of Gianni Amelio. Whatever the wisps of dew in each, the two leading 
visions of globalisation from the Left to date both come from Italy, via 
America: Empire and Chaos and Governance in the Modern World System - 
originators, Antonio Negri and Giovanni Arrighi.

The hope of the Second Republic has been to root all this out. But to 
standardise a society at the expense of its past always risks being a violence 
in vain. Where, after all, does the idea of 'normalisation' 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 normalise Italy have sought to reshape the 
country either in the image 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. For rather than lagging, could not Italy be leading 
the march towards a common future? After all, 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 at the terminus without noticing it.


Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.



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