Posts Tagged ‘Italian politics’

(Almost) nowhere to run to

February 22, 2011


Tunisia, Egypt, Libya… the list of north African countries to which Italian politicians may no longer be able to flee in exile gets longer every day. Bettino Craxi, the politician who ‘made’ Sivio Berlusconi, fled of course to Tunisia (here he is, all remorseful, on the beach). Italian spooks assisted the coup which brought the lately chased out Mr. Ben Ali to power.

Silvio himself might have been expected to skip off to his friend Muammar Gaddafi in Libya if things had gotten really nasty at home. But the way it is looking in Tripoli just now (here is some text from the first US tv crew in), there may be no north African option left. One feels for Silvio after all the effort expended smoothing the path of Gaddafi’s third son Saadi into Italian Serie A football, where he ‘played’ for four seasons and managed a cumulative half an hour on a first-team pitch. It is a wonder that Perugia, Udine and Sampdoria dared to leave him on the bench after his bodyguards in Libya had in 1996 killed eight opposing fans and wounded 39 for mocking this (please note) much underrated footballing prodigy.

Berlusconi has made multiple trips to Libya, including to Benghazi (search ‘Cooperation with Italy’) where the current rebellion started, but he likely won’t be going back soon. Gaddafi came to see Silvio in Italy several times, including just last August when he paid a modelling agency to supply him 200 nubile young women he could give a lecture to on the merits of (his version of) Islam. Muammar and Silvio were such a great team, but the former’s (liberal, London-educated) second son Saif going on telly and promising to keep shooting until the last bullet has put the relationship in a rather poor light.

I guess that in a worst case scenario Silvio can always go to Russia and see his best mate Vlad. But how would he keep his suntan up in Moscow? He could call in some of those unpaid holiday letting favours from Tony and Cherie (‘Flowers for me, Silvio?’) Blair, but he won’t get any more bronzed in north London. Surely there must be somewhere hot and dodgy left in the world where a man on the run can put his feet up? I know. Singapore!

Meanwhile: Stanley Ho, if you are watching, check this out. Perhaps you and Muammar should swap family management tips. Well, you both like ballroom dancing…

Police and thieves

February 21, 2011

Why don’t I feel happier? In the past week, Arsenal beat the best soccer team in the world (Barcelona), I went skiing and a metre of snow conveniently fell from the sky, Berlusconi was scheduled for trial in April, and Berlusconi’s soccer team Milan lost to Spurs. Surely that is a pretty good week?

Milan are clearly rubbish, the snow-boarding was definitely excellent, and Arsenal have a slither of a chance of holding on to their advantage in the return leg at the Nou Camp. So the problem must be with Berlusconi’s trial. It is. The press coverage grates on me because of the drearily repeated notion that one desperate old fool is the sum of Italy’s problems (here is the FT with some typically superficial coverage, though you likely need a subscription).

In reality, the investigation into Berlusconi’s latest lies and idiocies is a tale of a system failing to change. Details of the investigation, including testimony and wire tap evidence, have been leaked by police/magistrates in the standard contravention of the law and due process. (Here is one of many leaks, translated into English in The Guardian)

You would have thought that just once those who represent the legal system could have said to themselves: ‘Why don’t we try doing things the correct way this time? After all, we are dealing with an elected prime minister, so it might be smart to be impeccably professional.’ But oh no. Not for this lot the quiet, calm comportment of the thoughtful professional. For this lot, it is showtime, freshly-ironed magistrates’ togas, newly-pressed carabinieri trousers, and the rest — all of which allows Berlusconi’s followers to nurture their persecution complex.

I am reminded of remarks made by one of China’s bravest and most sensible lawyers, Mo Shaoping, at a conference last year. Mo, who defended as best he could the Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo, offered his analysis of why the rule of law has been regressing in China in recent years. Strikingly, he said that one of the biggest problems is judges overstepping their role: ‘Originally [at the beginning of efforts to stregthen the rule of law in the 2000s], there was emphasis on judicial neutrality and passivity: the judiciary should be passive and neutral,‘ he remarked. ‘Now, the emphasis is on the active initiative of the judiciary. I myself consider this a step back.’ You are not alone, Mr Mo.

In vaguely related news:

The parents of Amanda Knox have been committed to trial for criminal libel for saying that their daughter was mistreated by police investigators. The trial, scheduled for July, will be the perfect opportunity for Perugia police and magistrates to produce THEIR TAPE-RECORDING of Knox’s illegal all-night interview. Then everyone can listen to what happened and make an informed judgement. Presumably the tape also includes the police explaining to Knox her right to have a lawyer present. (Note that The Guardian article behind the link is wrong that libel is only a criminal charge in Italy; it can be either criminal or civil — the police have opted for criminal. It is fair to say that criminal libel laws are typical of institutionally backward societies; such laws are opposed by all major writers’ and civil liberties groups that I am aware of.)

 

Book Review: The Dark Heart of Italy

January 29, 2010

Much of my life (because it is part of my work) is spent reading books, but so far on this blog I have not attempted a book review. Somehow it seems apt to begin with a book about Italy, and one which has aroused extreme passions.

The Dark Heart of Italy is not an original book. It fits into a post-Second World War tradition of informed foreigners deconstructing Italy at a national, political level (think of Banfield, Ginsborg, Stille, Lane). Sometimes this goes from the local and particular to the general (Banfield); more often, it is top down.

So The Dark Heart of Italy is not so much a book in its own right as another iteration of a genre. Myself, I find this genre to be a serious one characterised by serious authors. None of those mentioned thus far is a flippant or publicity-seeking writer. (Think of the opposite tradition, typified by Frances Mayes’ romantic fantasy, Under the Tuscan Sun). The Italy deconstruction is a serious business. This applies equally to the Italians who have practised the craft: Levi, Sciascia, Pirandello, Lampedusa… Indeed, it is striking how seriously non-fiction authors treat Italy, a country that could easily be handled in critical books in the way it is in the UK and American tabloid press.

At least as interesting as the content of The Dark Heart of Italy is an attempt to understand why it elicits extreme responses. A quick read of 46 reviews on Amazon’s UK site shows the book to have 20 five-star and nine one-star verdicts. In other words, the great majority of reviewers say this is either a very good book or a very bad book.

First, however, to the content. The Dark Heart of Italy flits in an out of personal experiences of the author while he was living four years in Parma. But its narrative drive comes from a potted history of post-Second World War communist and fascist terrorism and Italy’s failed attempts to attribute responsibility for this, most particularly through the legal system.

Intellectually, Jones’ approach follows your archetypcal northern European, post-Englightenment logic: if I do enough work, and think very carefully, I will arrive at plausible, rational explanations. Needless to say, this does not happen, and much of the book details the endless paper trail that the author follows to nowhere.

Along the way, there are astute observations. On the nature of the legal system: ‘What is important is not the principle, but the points of law. Codify, recodify, encrypt. Quod not est in actis non est in mundo: anything not written down, documented, simply doesn’t exist.’ On the failure to reach decisions: ‘No one is ever entirely guilty, no one is ever simply innocent. It’s part of the rewiring process of living in Italy that you can never say, even about the most crooked criminal, that they are factually, legally guilty: there’s always the qualifier that they’re “both innocent and guilty”. Sooner or later the accusation will be dropped anyway, because the deadline for a judicial decision has been superseded.’ On the politicisation of the judiciary: ‘If you point out that the Italian parliament (of 650 senators or deputies) currently has fifty politicians inquisiti (under investigation), people simply shrug: “the magistrates must be out to get them, that’s all.”’ On the reality of a political class that changes affiliations but not personnel: ‘in 1960… of the 64 first-class provincial prefects, all but two had served under Fascism, as had all 241 deputy prefects, and 135 questori (provincial chiefs of the state police). As late as 1973, 95% of all civil servants had been appointed to the service before the fall of Mussolini.’ On the concurrent presence of political extremism: ‘”There must be a reason,” an Italian academic wrote recently, “why it was Italy which was the fatherland of Fascism and of the largest Communist party in the western world.”’ On conspiracy theories: ‘Surrounding any crime or political event, there is always confusion, suspicion and “the bacillus of secrecy”. So much so that dietrologia has become a sort of national pastime. It means literally “behindology”, or the attempt to trump even the most fanciful and contorted conspiracy theory.’ (The recent Sollecito-Knox case in Perugia, about which I blogged in February 2009 and in December 2009, bears some of these hallmarks.)

On the contrast between the beauty you see around you and the cultural condition of contemporary Italy, Jones quotes a friend: ‘What you don’t realise, what none of you British realise, is that Italy is a cultural desert. You come here to gawp at buildings and chipped statues from 500 years ago, and imagine that we’re still in that level of cultural production. Which is, of course, absolute balls: Italy’s now, culturally, completely arid. If I were you I would go back to the 50s and 60s. Switch off the television and watch some old films instead…’

And there is a good description of the celebrated Sofri case, which led to a highly questionable 22-year term for a stubborn and principled political activist for, as one journalist put it, ‘not having doffed his cap to the bureaucratic cast of the judiciary’. There is a long interview with Sofri in which the jailed man observes of the judicial system: ‘Dietrologia is the air that you breathe in Italy. It’s the result of paranoia and jealousy, and it simply exalts an intricate intelligence. It’s like Othello and Desdemona’s handkerchief: one innocent object can spark off endless suspicions. It’s a game off endless suspicions. It’s a game which people play, almost to show off. I prefer not to see a conspiracy which exists than to see one where it doesn’t.’

Finally, there is a useful outline of the origins, the playing out and the undermining of the Mani Pulite anti-corruption movement in the early 1990s. Craxi is pelted with coins outside the hotel Raphael in Rome and soon flees into exile, the public sprays town walls with exultant graffiti about the defeat of dark forces, and Silvio Berlusconi creates a new political party named after a football chant, inviting top anti-corruption judge Antonio di Pietro to be his Minister for Justice. ‘His [di Pietro’s] moralising anxiety,’ declared Berlusconi, ‘belongs to everyone.’ Today that remark seems even funnier than it did 16 years ago. Di Pietro turned him down, but Berlusconi convinced at least one other Clean Hands magistrate to join Forza Italia.

The problem with the book, I think, is that it does not clearly separate institutions from people. The realisation that Jones comes to is of the low institutional quality of Italy. But because this is bound up with the individual stories of politicians, journalists, lawyers and others, the tale becomes an unduly general one of a failed society. There is a tendency to see failed institutions as the product of a failed people. On the contrary, I think it is more accurate to see failed individuals – terrorists, corrupt politicians, egomaniacal magistrates – as symptoms of institutional weakness rather than proof of societal failure. This leaves open the possibility – to me a certainty – that in Italy’s atomised, localised and family-centric sociology there are not only people who are unsullied by institutional weakness, there are also those who react against it by becoming ‘super-moral’ contributors to society. The biggest challenge of a deconstruction of Italy, which is always drawn to critique its institutions, is not to explain why there are so many crooks, but rather why there are not more.

In addition, one has to give a nod – which Jones does not – to odd areas of institutional strength. On many trains, and in many schools and hospitals in Italy – to give a few examples – my experience is that the attitude and morale of the ‘public servants’ one encounters is often better that what I see in the UK (though I have less recent experience there). The school system has an institutional integrity that comes from not being ghettoised between state and private provision like the UK one, even if more and more people are lamenting the condition of secondary education. There are clear benefits to the less centralised institutional structure of the country, something that all major political parties in the (super-centralised) UK have been talking up in recent years. And town centres in Italy are maintained with a loving care and pride that is much rarer in the UK. These points, and others, don’t wipe out the sins of Italy’s vampiric state-linked professional classes, but the points are nonetheless valid.

And so to those wildly divergent Amazon reviews. It is notable that among those who give The Dark Heart of Italy five stars and particularly rousing praise are Italians who have moved to the UK. Among the one-star reviews, meanwhile, are slightly hysterical Italians living in Italy and English women married to Italian men.

 

The book deserves ratings in the middle, and this is where the more thoughtful comments are found. One that is hard to disagree with is the observation that Jones could, of course, ‘write a book called the Dark Heart of Great Britain. Where we all live in this hellish society trapped in houses by rain, where everybody is overworked, bank holidays and Sundays are spent in the shopping centre and our only escape is through the good people on the TV who will find us a new life somewhere in Tuscany, Spain or France.’ Myself, I am giving the book four stars, which is above the current average of 3.6. (It is notable on Amazon that it is very hard to get a high score for a non-fiction book on Italy.)

‘Corrupt, smut-driven, racist and lawless’…

January 11, 2010

 … that’s right, it is The Guardian’s columnist Martin Kettle explaining why he has fallen out of love with Italy.

Like the steady stream of northern European literary greats from Goethe to Browning to Keats and Shelley (stay in a house in Rome associated with these and more if you wish…), Kettle admits to a youth in which he fell for ‘a world of the senses, where the heart ruled the head, where beauty replaced ugliness and where easygoing moral naturalness replaced all the buttoned-up severity of the protestant world’.

All that, however, is over for Kettle. He dismisses his love affair as a naive, adolescent fling: ‘Italy has never been the liberal Eden that progressive Europeans sometimes delude themselves into imagining it to be,’ he writes. Instead, Kettle is now focused on an all-too-common kind of Italian who allows Silvio Berlusconi to be elected three times, just as a certain kind of parallel American allowed George W. Bush to be chosen twice. The difference, says Kettle, is that where Bush gave rise to Obama, Berlusconi has produced no such credible, corrective liberal reaction. It’s all right, right and more right.

The outburst gives rise to a riposte in The Guardian from the deputy head of the Italian embassy in London, Giovanni Brauzzi. There isn’t much to Brauzzi’s comment – beyond its inevitable counter-indignation – yet there may be something to Brauzzi’s tangential implication that Italians are less racist than popularly perceived.

The hook for Kettle’s article was a house-to-house search by police in a town near Brescia for illegal immigrants in the run-up to Christmas. Kettle referenced John Hooper’s report for The Guardian from Coccaglio where what has been dubbed ‘Operation White Christmas’ (the conservative town council denies having come up with the racist epithet) took place. He didn’t however reiterate Hooper’s point that in a town of only 8,000, 3,000 people marched in protest against Operation White Christmas.

How racist is the average Italian? I confess that I have no answer to this question about which I can demonstrate any conviction. I am willing to say that the average Italian is parochial – little-travelled, largely ignorant of the wider world, unaccomplished in foreign languages – but that is not the same as the charge of malicious racism levelled by Kettle.

In defence of Italians (inasmuch as this term means anything), poll results published on December 3 by the German Marshall Fund of the US, which cover each major European and north American state, show Italy in quite a liberal light.

Less than one-quarter of Italians, for instance, agreed with the statement ‘Immigrants take jobs away from natives’, whereas more than half of Britons did. Only about one-tenth of Italians agreed with the statement ‘Legal immigrants have no equal rights to benefits’, but 45 percent of Britons did. Most Italians favour giving voting rights to immigrants where most Britons do not. And marginally fewer Italians than Britons agreed with the statement ‘Legal immigrants increase crime’. Both Italians and Britons are against giving illegal immigrants the chance to obtain legal status (unlike the super- and uber- liberal French and Germans).

In the Brit-Italian comparisons it should probably be borne in mind that Britain has a higher proportion of immigrants in its population than Italy does, and that the number in Britain increased very rapidly in the past decade (though quite rapidly in Italy as well; in Britain the demand came from economic growth, in Italy from a shrinking indigenous population).

There is, of course, one constant in attitudes to immigrants around the world: everybody, in every country, thinks there are way more of them than there really are. In the survey cited, the average American estimated that immigratnts make up 35% of the US population (versus reality of around 14%). In Canada the estimate was 37% (reality 20%). And in Europe the average stated was 24% (versus actual highs of around 13% in Spain and Germany). Which all reminds me of the following conversation with a local bar owner some years ago… Bar owner: ‘I’m thinking of getting a Rottweiler.’ Me: ‘What for?’ Bar owner: ‘Albanians.’ Me: ‘But we haven’t really got any Albanians around here.’ Bar owner: ‘But we might have.’

Go and wait for me in the big bed

June 30, 2009

I am not a big fan of newspaper editorials, most of which are underreported and worth even less of your time than regular newspaper copy. And I am not a big fan of the regular newspaper copy of The New York Times, which I think is overrated by people who think The New York Times must be good cos it’s the NYT (notwithstanding occasional brilliance). Yet I am a fan of the editorial content of The New York Times. Strange? Here is a reasonable example of what their columnists do well, week-in and week-out. It’s a nice wrap, and a nice rap, about Our Silvio as opposed to Dear Obama. But before you Fedex Obama a cigarette, read Clive Crook in The FT who fears, as I have since long before he was elected, that Obama is destined to do what the left does best: disappoint. It might make you think that shagging a teenager or somesuch is the sensible middle road. Or not… (Apologies if you require a subscription to access the FT article; I have one and so cannot tell you.)