The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  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 eighteenthcentury 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 nineteenth 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 regrettable 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 has become 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 judge, nemesis of subversion, offering kind words for the youth gangs of the Republic of Salò when his party needs them; the rising politician, declaring Mussolini the greatest statesman of the twentieth 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. But coexisting with popular disgust at official venality, and underlying it as a bedrock default position, was the traditional lack of prejudice of the Italian public at large: what could be an apter 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. In those days, he was noted for an incident in which, once sitting in a restaurant, he had risen to his feet and slapped an unknown woman at the next table, for a frock he judged too decolleté. For four years, however, he had served in the shadows as Craxi’s minister of the interior. Amidst the cascade of scandals that tumbled out in 1992–3, functionaries of SISDE—the secret service that is the Italian equivalent of MI5—reported 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, Antonio Gava and Vincenzo Scotti, both already politically dead in the water, and cleared the third, Nicola Mancino, by coincidence the current incumbent.

  The fourth was Scalfaro, now president. Not only did the prosectors refuse to consider any evidence against him, but they charged the witnesses with ‘subversion’ for their deposition—in the memorable formula of Chief Prosecutor Vittorio Mele, ‘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, this judge—Filippo Mancuso—was handsomely rewarded with the Ministry of Justice. Soon, however, frictions arose over his handling of the magistrates in Milan, widely judged vexatious. Scalfaro was now 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 gravelvoiced Mancuso mounted the tribune, and announced to a stunned nation that he had altered 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.17 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 Ulivo (Olive Tree) coalition 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.18 Prodi was installed as premier, with a PDS vice-premier. The promise of the winning coalition was a coherent modernization 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.

  3

  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 background 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 those of the other major EU economies. Abroad it was widely doubted whether Italy was capable of such belttightening. 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 1992–3 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. Neither fish nor fowl, 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 fores
t of tasks, Prodi was in no doubt which had priority. By training and temperament, his principal concerns were economic. As premier, his over-riding 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 liberalized 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 enjoyed 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 more effective, and somewhat less inequitable, fiscal catchment. The cost of convergence was steep: the slowest growth of any major industrial society in the nineties, 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, however, the one most 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 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.

  But, of course, monetary integration was not the main plank of the modernization 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 marginalize 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 a further charge of falsifying company accounts, and the Milan pool was widening its trawl through his labyrinth of holding companies. For lay opinion, the various cases against him still seemed 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.19

  The trail that led to them had started from a pretty blonde antiquedealer in Milan, Stefania Ariosto, an intimate of Berlusconi’s milieu. When he went into politics, Berlusconi took with him his two most prominent legal advisers, Vittorio Dotti and Cesare Previti. One was from Milan and the other from Rome, and they 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, 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 take-over 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 itself.

  Such was the background that Italians, reading in their newspapers 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, 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 a draft scheme 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 (RC) had since taking 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 under himself, while he lingered far from the scene in South America, 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. When Prodi’s resentment threatened to become dangerous, it was deftly neutralized 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, in its view, more important. The heirs of the PCI were the centrepiece of the ruling coalition—in fact, the only substantial party organization in it—and freely referred to as the ‘principal share-holder’ 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 fruit
s 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 a drastic electoral reform, abolishing the hated ‘Mattarellum’, or hybrid system concocted in the throes of crisis five years earlier, was the key to founding a stable Second Republic.20 Virtually the entire press clamoured for one, 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. 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.21

  The PDS was not enamoured of a French-style presidency, fearing that its personalization of power would give an advantage to Berlusconi or Fini. But it urgently wanted the double tour. In fact, this had been its over-riding 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 still 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.