Berlusconism and Italy

A Historical Interpretation

G. Orsina

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137438676
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Italian History
• Index: History

From the outset, Silvio Berlusconi's career was expected to be short, and he has been considered finished several times, only to have reemerged victorious. This fascinating political and historical study shows that Berlusconi's success and resilience have lain in his ability to provide answers to longstanding questions in Italian history.

1

The Italian Question

All countries are historically peculiar, but some are more peculiar than others. Italy is one of these countries, high up the table of peculiarity, and it is particularly unhappy about being there, because its historical and political uniqueness is based on characteristics that are more negative than positive: institutional weakness, reciprocal delegitimation by opposing political forces—what Cafagna (2003) has called “divisiveness”—verbal and other kinds of radicalism, and deep mistrust between the state and the citizenry.

Much has been written, in some cases extremely well, about the causes of this unhappiness. In fact, almost all scholars of Italian history and politics have implicitly made this problem the starting point of their analyses. The debate is a long way from reaching a conclusion, and there is a sense in even the best work that something is missing and that certain key elements have not been identified or described. However, if the premise put forward in the introduction to this book is correct—that Berlusconism was both a product of the uniqueness of Italian history and an attempt to resolve it—then this peculiarity needs to be explained. This first chapter will therefore attempt to put this “Italian question” into its proper perspective.

In this chapter, the years between 1861 and 1992 will be treated as a single entity. This does not mean that liberal Italy, fascist Italy, and republican Italy—an oligarchy, an authoritarian regime with a strong totalitarian streak, and a democratic regime—are in continuity and can be assimilated to one another. Their historical, ethical, and political differences are glaringly obvious. Yet despite their diversity, there remains a common thread running through these regimes whose strength and persistence is all the more startling precisely because the transformations taking place around that thread have been so radical. One of its most important features is the constant and widespread separation between the “legal country” and the “real country”: a dysfunctional relationship characterized by profound mistrust between the political elite and state institutions on the one hand and “the people”1 on the other. It is argued here that the relationship between the political elites and “the people” is the best perspective from which to view Berlusconism.

Modernity and the Mediterranean

Modernity/backwardness is the most important conceptual pairing in the history of unified Italy and has characterized it since its beginnings. The Risorgimento political elite was acutely aware that between the end of the eighteenth and the start of the nineteenth centuries, several North European countries, particularly Great Britain, had entered a different historical era or, in Henry Maine’s (1996) words, had left the vast, serried ranks of the stationary societies and had formed a small union of progressive ones. Although the Italian liberals were well informed of the dangers of this historical transformation and were determined to reduce its possible negative impact and potential risks (e.g., see Romeo 1995 on Cavour), they generally had a very positive opinion of progressive societies and a negative view of stationary ones. For the liberals, modernity, though it needed to be managed carefully, was a good thing. They also thought that Italy had no choice and that a country that was unable to jump onto the bandwagon of progress was destined for an irrelevant life on the fringes (Greenfield 1934; Romani 1994).

At the same time, the Risorgimento leaders were also convinced that Italy was in a serious state of economic, social, and cultural backwardness and that it was about to lose out on an important historical opportunity—possibly the only historical opportunity—for progress. The origins of unified Italy, and to a certain extent the entire history of unified Italy, have been positioned between these two polar opposites—European modernity on the one hand and the “Mediterranean lateness” of Italy on the other.2 If, for the liberals, the aspirations were European and the diagnosis Mediterranean, then there could only be one cure: to make sure that the whole country, willingly or unwillingly, took off in pursuit of modernity as soon and as energetically as possible. Guglielmo Ferrero, who was born in 1871 and died in 1942, was one of the most acute contemporary observers of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century European history, particularly of liberal Italy and its collapse into fascism. According to Ferrero (1942, 249), the fall of the ancient régime and Napoleon’s invasion of Italy in 1796 had opened up “a vacuum, an immense vacuum, a frightful disease from which Italy has suffered since 1815 . . . What efforts have not been made to fill this vacuum with something, to rekindle the fragments of the old spirit, to kindle a new spirit! Into it have been thrown all the mysticisms and all the philosophies of every age and every country, authoritarian and liberal, bourgeois and socialist, religious and atheistic, Catholic and anti-Christian, nationalistic and humanistic, Guelf and Ghibelline, materialistic and idealistic, immanent and transcendent. Everything slid into this immense vacuum and disappeared, swallowed up by nothingness.” Everything fell into the vacuum and disappeared, says Ferrero, but for two basic passions that are “easy to kindle but hard to satisfy”: the desire for wealth and the need for power—that is, the aspiration for Italy to be put on a par with the great nations of Northern Europe, which were both rich and powerful, and that it should do so as soon as possible, because the “exalted desires of the country” would not let time take its course. “National feeling . . . always wanted to push forward with all haste, was constantly impatient with the inevitable inferiorities of the youthful state, never accepted either the long delays in a necessary period of preparation or the momentary checks.”

The history of Italy since the Risorgimento has thus been dominated, though in different ways, by the question of how the country could be forced (i.e., dragged willingly or unwillingly, and very quickly) out of its state of moral and material decay. This operation could only be carried out by political means (the state, a party, a revolution), and “the enforcer” could only be a modernizing elite—a cohesive group, clear in its objectives and able to frog-march the country to its destination at double speed. This is the common thread running through Italian history, from the Risorgimento to the Republic, that was mentioned before: the conviction that a public apparatus should be constructed and defended that would be able to correct Italy in the shortest time possible, both morally by reeducating its “soul” and materially by setting its “body” straight.3 This common thread is not the key to understanding the whole of Italian history, but it does open the door to an understanding of a number of important areas that are particularly relevant for interpreting the events of the last twenty years.

This “corrective frog-march” thread can also be viewed from the perspective of Michael Oakeshott’s dichotomy between the politics of faith and the politics of skepticism, which is particularly helpful in understanding Berlusconism and its electorate. The politics of faith is one in which—to reduce a complex and nuanced argument to its core—“the activity of governing is understood to be in the service of the perfection of mankind” (Oakeshott 1996, 23). It has a clear idea of what is good and bad, claims to know how to achieve the good and avoid the bad, and hence tries to take control of historical processes. At its most extreme it becomes totalitarian, but it also has more moderate reform-minded versions: what is important is not the radicalism with which it pursues its aims but the fact that it is pursuing them. Nor is a politics of faith worried about extending the scope of political power, which it regards as positive; it thinks that power should not be too restricted by rules and regulations, that politics is morally superior to any other activity, and that politicians are “at once the servants, the leaders and the saviors of society” (ibid., 30). The politics of skepticism, on the other hand, does not seek perfection at all and does not think that government is necessarily a good thing. Rather, it believes that it is a necessary thing, given that human interaction needs to be ordered to prevent it from degenerating into conflict, but that the pursuit of perfection is for individuals—if they wish to pursue it. From this skeptical position, then, politicians are human like the rest of us, and their power needs to be regulated and restricted: “Finally, in the politics of skepticism the activity of governing is manifestly nothing to be enthusiastic about, and it does not demand enthusiasm for its services. The rulers will occupy an honored and respectable, but not an elevated, place; and their most notable qualifications will be that they claim no godlike capacity for directing the activities of their subjects.”4 According to Oakeshott, the contemporary world is indelibly marked by the politics of faith prevailing over that of skepticism. In the last two centuries, the idea that the functions of politics should be regarded as fundamentally corrective and pedagogical is not just an Italian phenomenon but a Pan-European one, as the example of France shows (Jaume 1990 and 1997; Rosanvallon 2007). It could be argued, however, that experience of this phenomenon has been more intense in Italy and that it has had uniquely Italian characteristics5—that in Italy the politics of faith has not only prevailed over the politics of skepticism but also itself become lost in the complexities and contradictions of its national history.

There are many reasons for this (Galli della Loggia 1998), and some can be mentioned here. First, the idea that Italy had only a few centuries previously been in the vanguard of civilization has had some bearing. This awareness served to increase the sense of frustration, the haste, and the impatience, and it widened the gap between Italian intellectual aspirations and the concrete reality of Italy’s situation (Chabod 1996). The fragility and inefficiency of the state apparatus also played its part. There were no instruments immediately available that could be used to “correct” the country, so they had to be designed on the spot at the very moment that they needed to be used, and this led to serious complications (Romanelli 1995a; Cassese 1998; Pezzino 2002). Another major influence was the social and cultural effect of Catholicism, which was slow and reluctant to accept modernity (Mozzarelli 2003).

Finally, the relationship between politics and society was made even more complex by the view that the North and South of the country had reached different stages of civic development. Modernity has been at the same time a model to be imported to Italy from abroad and a model to be imported to Southern Italy from the North. This overlap between the “external search” (Italy looking out to Europe) and the “internal” one (Southern Italy looking to Northern Italy) did not make the frog-march any easier (Dickie 1999; Huysseune 2006). The inclusion of the territories of the Kingdom of the two Sicilies in unified Italy boosted the statist and corrective attitudes of the liberal establishment: in theory it would have been much more moderate, but its deep mistrust of Southern Italy caused it to act against its own convictions and opt for a centralized state (Scirocco 1990, 420ff.; Romeo 1995, 499ff.; Romanelli 1995b; Ziblatt 2006).

To sum up, if the experience of Italian history has been “more peculiar” than that of other countries, and if the politics of faith has been stronger but less successful in Italy than elsewhere (France is the obvious point of comparison in this case), this is partly due to a uniquely complex set of circumstances. These include genuine backwardness, perceived backwardness, real and perceived geographic differences in degree of backwardness, frustration regarding the backwardness, aspirations to (some form of) modernity, a need to define the modern objectives to be pursued as “articles of a politics of faith,” a desire to speed up the historical transformation process, a need to define a virtuous elite that could lead the operation, and finally the inadequacy of the instruments needed to carry it out.

Popper and Plato

In The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper accused Plato of causing “a lasting confusion” in political philosophy by starting his argument with the wrong question—“who should rule?” According to Popper, the right question is, “How can we so organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented from doing too much damage?” (Popper 2011, 114–15). Throughout the history of unified Italy right up to the present day, the striving for modernity and the need to identify a modernizing political class has meant that the question that has been asked has been the Platonic one.6 The consequence of this has been that once the elite was identified, it immediately became irremovable, thus contravening one of the most important corollaries of Popper’s theory—namely, that one of the basic limits on power is that bad or incompetent rulers can be replaced. It is no accident that in the history of Italy no political class—liberal, fascist, or republican—has ever been peacefully replaced (Salvadori 1994). Moreover, any internal changes within those political classes, such as the rise of the so-called Sinistra storica (Historical Left) in 1876 or the creation of the center-left governing majority in the early 1960s, only came about as a result of the shifting power balance within the political elites rather than from the pressure of public opinion. So it is no accident either that these changes never occurred after an election; on the contrary, elections were always held after the changes had been made in order to legitimize them ex post (Sabbatucci 2003).

The argument in the first section of this chapter suggests that the Platonic rather than the Popperian option might well seem the sensible choice for Italy. If the basic problem was the country’s backwardness, and the main solution was a form of enforced modernization, it was fairly natural to assume that the identification of a modernizing elite was a more urgent priority than deciding on the limits to its possible abuse of power. This is because limiting the abuse of power might limit the power itself, which was badly needed to carry out the work effectively, and because introducing the possibility that the elite could be replaced would mean putting it at the mercy of the society that it was supposed to be modernizing, thereby making it far less able to operate efficiently. The oligarchical structure of Italian politics should not necessarily be regarded as the consequence of the selfishness or dishonesty of the Italian political class or its supposed need to defend and reproduce social hierarchies, as the prefascist Italian liberals were often accused of doing. On the contrary, on many occasions in Italian history oligarchies came about with the best of intentions and from a sincerely held conviction that this was the only way for Italy to save itself from a Mediterranean destiny of misery, hardship, and stagnation. Indeed, in some cases, the elite’s corrective and pedagogical approach was only supposed to be temporary—a walking stick that could be thrown away once the modernizing process of moral and material growth was under way and had become self-sustaining.

In these circumstances the Platonic option was a sensible choice; it was so sensible, in fact, that for certain historical periods it was regarded as inevitable by a number of scholars. In one of the most significant analyses of the prefascist era, historian Alberto Aquarone wondered how a unified Italy had been able to “overcome all the crises of its infancy and adolescence without reneging on its liberal origins.” In his view, the reasons were to be found mainly in “political-administrative centralism and in the exclusion of most people from the political process during the first crucial post-unification phase” (Aquarone 1972, 282). In another classic historiographical study, Pietro Scoppola produces a not totally dissimilar argument from Aquarone’s in his description of the origins of republican Italy and the early role that political parties played in it. According to Scoppola, “the rise of the mass parties as the leading protagonists of Italian politics” cannot by itself be equated with “the unqualified success of the new Italian democracy”—on the contrary, the former contained “a number of problems and contradictions which were destined to characterize Italian political life for a considerable time.” Despite this, however, the preeminence of the parties was “a necessary and inevitable premise” and even “a historical necessity” (Scoppola 1991, 98).

Although the new generations of historians would do well to question the use of the word “necessity” when describing Italian history, Aquarone and Scoppola have strong arguments on their side. However, whether or not particular choices were avoidable or inevitable, the problem of their adverse side effects, of which Aquarone and Scoppola were both well aware, still needs to be addressed. One such example is the fact that the corrective programs, which were originally supposed to be temporary, were extended indefinitely; Italy never made enough progress, or was never considered to have made enough progress, to render the programs no longer necessary. Another is the slow but sure degeneration of the programs and their moral foundations when they came into contact with society. Another is the inability of these programs to close the gap between the elite and the people—in fact, overlapping interests, opportunism, and clientelism produced utilitarian relationships between the elite and the people that reinforced their mutual distrust. Why was it, then, that the corrective and pedagogical strategies used by the Platonic elites for the last 150 years did not work as well as was hoped?

Italy’s Varied Backwardness

Some of the components of Italy’s backwardness are objectively quantifiable: lack of infrastructure, productive capacity, technical skills, wealth, and low levels of literacy. It is much harder, however, to identify and measure its ethical/political deficiencies and to provide simple, immediate solutions to them. The first page of Carlo Levi’s novel Christ stopped at Eboli, published in 1945, provides a powerful illustration of how complex the divide was that separated, or was thought to separate, the more backward parts of Italy from European civilization:

Christ did stop at Eboli, where the road and the railway leave the coast of Salerno and turn into the desolate reaches of Lucania. Christ never came this far, nor did time, nor the individual soul, nor hope, nor the relations of cause to effect, nor reason nor history. Christ never came, just as the Romans never came, content to garrison the highways without penetrating the mountains and the forests, nor the Greeks, who flourished beside the Gulf of Taranto. None of the pioneers of Western civilization brought here his sense of the passage of time, his deification of the State or that ceaseless activity which feeds upon itself. No one has come to this land except as an enemy, a conqueror, or a visitor devoid of understanding. The seasons pass today over the toil of the peasants, just as they did three thousand years before Christ; no message, human or divine, has reached this stubborn poverty. We speak a different language, and here our tongue is incomprehensible. (Levi 2000, 12)

Until the 1960s, it could be claimed that Italy’s moral backwardness was dependent on its material backwardness and that once the latter had been solved, the former would automatically disappear. However, after the impressive economic growth of the 1950s and 1960s—the so-called economic miracle—it became clear that the two were to a certain extent independent of each other. To make things even more complicated, Italy’s moral backwardness is made of cultural and ideological components, which can be distinguished in the abstract, even though from a historical point of view they are closely intertwined.

Italy’s ideological backwardness is the consequence of the considerable impact of the political schisms brought about by the French revolution on Italian history (Salvadori 1994; Bedeschi 2002; Di Nucci and Galli della Loggia 2003; Ventrone 2006; Cammarano and Cavazza 2010). The breadth and degree of polarization of Italian ideologies, spanning the gulf between the radical left and the radical right, meant that the elites’ approach to the modernity problem was continually having to face up to completely incompatible alternative approaches. Whenever the modernizing elite represented “the system,” the opposition took on the ideo...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Italian Question
• 2. The Antifascist Republic and Its Parties
• 3. Berlusconism
• 4. The Berlusconi Voter
• 5. The Rise and Fall of Berlusconism
• Epilogue: The Fly in the Bottle
• A Note on the Most Relevant Center-Right and Right-Wing Parties and Coalitions, 1994–2013
• Notes
• Bibliography