The New Old World

by Perry Anderson

  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 realized 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, 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 (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 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 country’s prison population. Not only can witnesses be guaranteed immunity from prosecution, under the rules of pentitismo, but 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 manila envelopes that, according to SISDE operatives, were pocketed every month by Scalfaro and his peers. In the magistracy, as noted, there is no separation of careers, and little of functions, between prosecutors and judges: in Italian parlance, 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, whose average length runs for ten years, and the backlog of cases in the courts is now more than three million.22 In this jungle, inefficiency mitigates brutality, yet also compounds it.

  Such was the system suddenly mobilized 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 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 inconveniently committed another murder while on the public payroll for his deposition. Any idea of separating the careers of prosecutor and judge was attacked with ferocity. The rationalization of these practices was always the same. Italy was in a state of emergency; justice could not afford to be overnice about individual rights. But, of course, they were not just responses to an emergency, but 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’,23 Piercamillo Davigo, the clearest mind of the Milan pool, is said to have declared, 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 nineties, 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 over-rode any coherent set of principles. For the most part, conscious of the popularity of the magistrates, the PDS sought to capitalize 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 self-interested 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.24 At the end of five years of Ulivo government, the magistrates had overreached themselves in pursuit of Andreotti on too gothic charges of which he was acquitted, yet failed to clinch far more plausible accusations 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.25 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. There was 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 run-way for NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a step further than Christian Democracy ever went in bending to the will of the United States, and 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 before them.

  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 could see the writing on the wall and quickly stepped down, to avoid being tarred with impending defeat. The most astute Italian politician of his cohort, he once tersely remarked 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 somewhat 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 re-tread of the decade, Craxi’s former counsellor Amato.26 Understandably, it did not care to present him as its candidate to fight the Centre-Right a year later.

  4

  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 damning verdict of the electorate 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.27 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 is 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 organized 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 of mass insurgency against the established order from below—the danger that the ‘revolution against capital’ Gramsci had hailed in Russia mght spread to Italy. Today there is no such ferment in the lower depths. The working class is atomized, 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, in fact, not a great deal separated Centre-Right from Centre-Left in the electoral contest last year. The familiar agenda of governments throughout the Atlantic world—privatization of remaining state assets, deregulation of the labour market, scaling back of public pensions, lowering of tax rates—belongs to the repertoire of both. How far the House of Liberties in practice moves beyond its predecessor remains to be seen. Private education and health care will be given a longer leash. Berlusconi has also promised tougher measures against immigrants, whose fate—this is the one terrain on which a knuckle-duster Right has space in Europe—will certainly get worse. But in general socioeconomic direction, far from representing any radical form of reaction, Berlusconi’s regime is already suspect of being too moderate—that is, insufficiently committed to the market—in the judgement of the business press, distrustful of his pledges to launch a major programme of public works and steer investment to create a million and a half new jobs. In the EU, the new government has been less automatically compliant with establishment opinion than its predecessor, earning furrowed brows in Brussels and laments from the opposition in Rome that it is jeopardizing Italy’s reputation abroad. But its self-assertion has so far been essentially gestural, amounting to little more than dropping the dreary functionary from the WTO first imposed on it as foreign minister, and quarrelling over the location of a branch office of the EU’s alimentary bureaucracy. On issues of any real significance, there is unlikely to be any serious departure from today’s official European consensus.

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

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

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

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

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