lunedì 28 febbraio 2011

Avanti

As Italy prepares to celebrate the 150th anniversary of its unification next month, some Italians are asking themselves whether it did more harm than good

Feb 24th 2011 | from the print edition

THE tourists who flood into Rome’s forum, Florence’s Uffizi gallery or St Mark’s Square in Venice might be surprised to learn that Italy is one of the youngest countries in Europe. It was unified only in 1861, and not until ten years later did Rome take over from Florence as Italy’s capital. This youthfulness may help to explain the country’s fragility, which is being tested anew under the messily embarrassing rule of Silvio Berlusconi.

David Gilmour’s splendid book tells the story of Italy from Roman times. He canters through the early years, with a few diversions to explore the importance of city-states in medieval days or the glorious offshoot that was Venice. But the heart of his book is its account of the unification, or Risorgimento, and of Italy’s subsequent chequered history.

His broad themes can be summed up in two famous quotations about Italy. One is Prince Metternich of Austria’s dismissive 1847 observation that Italy was just “a geographical expression”. The other is the comment made in 1861 by Massimo d’Azeglio, a pioneer of unification, that “we have made Italy; now we must make Italians.”

Like most foreign visitors who experience Italy’s culture, buildings, physical beauty, food and climate, Mr Gilmour, a British historian and journalist, is a passionate fan. That makes his skewering of Italy’s myths more striking. Giuseppe Verdi, he insists, may have been a great opera composer but he was neither a great patriot nor a nationalist. The men who unified Italy, notably Camillo Cavour, Giuseppe Garibaldi (pictured) and Giuseppe Mazzini, as well as Azeglio, were patriots (at least for Piedmont), but by no means heroes. Mazzini was a dreamily unsuccessful revolutionary, Garibaldi an unscrupulous adventurer whose invasion of Sicily in 1860 was illegal and Cavour an old cynic who never travelled south of Pisa.

The book dwells on two other weaknesses in the Italian Risorgimento. The first is the lack of enthusiasm of so many Italians. The church was against it—hence the undignified spectacle of Pope Pius IX scampering out of the Palazzo del Quirinale in 1870. Venice never wanted to join. Most important, although many in Naples and Sicily welcomed the takeover from Turin, this reflected disillusion with their Bourbon monarchs, not enthusiasm for Piedmont’s Victor Emmanuel II.

Quite soon after 1861 both northerners and southerners were questioning the wisdom of unification. The snobbery of the north towards supposedly backward Naples was (and still is) striking. Yet Naples was for many years the biggest city in the peninsula; it built the first steamboat, suspension bridge and railway in Italy and, even more surprising, was as late as 1800 more liberal than most of the rest of the country.

The second weakness in the Risorgimento was an unabashed desire for military success. This theme was well explored in Christopher Duggan’s recent history of Italy, “The Force of Destiny”. Despite the influence on Italy’s fortunes of wars involving France, Austria and Prussia (the German chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, claimed that Italy sprang from three battles beginning with “S”: Solferino, Sadowa and Sedan), unification was achieved with little fighting. That left Italy’s leaders thirsting for a war to demonstrate their new country’s greatness.

This thirst proved a scourge. Some 6,000 Italians were killed in the disastrous battle of Adowa in Abyssinia in 1896. More than 1m died in the first world war, most through incompetence in a conflict that Italy could easily have sat out. An unslaked desire for military glory propelled Benito Mussolini to power in 1922, making him in a sense another child of the Risorgimento. Mussolini at least conquered Ethiopia, but for him and his people the second world war was yet another disaster.

The best bit of modern Italian history had to wait until 1945, when Alcide de Gasperi began the country’s post-war boom. Although Italy had problems, including a revival of the Mafia and a merry-go-round of weak governments, 50 years of rapid growth have made it a rich country. Its big concern now is the struggle to stay rich—something that years of economic stagnation under Mr Berlusconi, Italy’s longest serving prime minister since the war, makes far harder.

Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines). Indeed, the country’s diversity is a constant feature of Mr Gilmour’s book. He notes that in 1861 only one Italian in 40 spoke the language (Victor Emmanuel barely did so). He cites surveys from 1960 finding Sicilians ignorant of Italy. And he quotes northerners whose disdain for the south, or Mezzogiorno, leads them to call it Africa or Egypt.

Curiously Italy’s uneasy and in some ways incomplete unification is now re-emerging as an issue for Mr Berlusconi alongside his squalid legal cases. His government survives thanks to the support of the Northern League, which wants a far more decentralised Italy—and some of whose voters favour a new country, Padania. Perhaps the celebrations of Italy’s 150th birthday will reignite national fervour and revive morale. Sadly, shallow politicking is more likely.

http://www.economist.com/node/18226545?story_id=18226545

martedì 15 febbraio 2011

Berlusconi to Face Trial in Under-Age Prostitution Case

giovedì 3 febbraio 2011

In search of a leader






The Economist

Italy's ineffective opposition

How Silvio Berlusconi is helped by having a fragmented and weak opposition

Feb 3rd 2011 | ROME | from PRINT EDITION

FOR the daughter of a penniless immigrant, Karima el-Mahroug (otherwise known as “Ruby the Heartstealer”) has had quite an impact on her adoptive land. The Moroccan runaway-turned-dancer’s friendship with Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has put him in a perilous fix. Prosecutors in Milan are expected soon to seek his indictment on charges of paying an under-age prostitute and abusing his position to hide the fact—offences that in Italian law could carry a combined jail sentence of as long as 15 years.

The scandal over Ms el-Mahroug and her suspected presence at allegedly dissolute “bunga-bunga” parties at the prime minister’s villa has also changed Italy’s economic policy. Or rather, given it one. On January 31st, after nine years as prime minister, Mr Berlusconi at last spoke like the liberal he has often claimed to be. He said he wanted to drop from the constitution a clause imposing social obligations on entrepreneurs. He promised tax breaks and deregulation for Italy’s lagging south. Less liberally, he also vowed to bring together representatives of employers, trade unions and local authorities to debate an action plan to secure annual growth of 3-4% over five years. As a first step, he offered co-operation with the opposition.

Nice words. But do they mean anything? Mr Berlusconi announced his plan without consulting, or even informing, senior ministers. It seemed to have been conjured up just to dispel the impression that his government has been paralysed by sex scandals. The opposition parties flatly rejected his offer. But in doing so they allowed Mr Berlusconi to brand them as churlish, something they can ill afford.

Pollsters agree that the “Ruby” affair has eroded the prime minister’s already battered standing. One sounding for larepubblica.it, a website, found his approval rating down a full five points in January, to 35%. But the polls also suggest that Mr Berlusconi’s flagging popularity is translating neither into less support for his party nor into more backing for the opposition.

Large numbers of Berlusconi voters disapprove of him (13%, according to a poll forCorriere della Sera, a newspaper). Yet few seem ready to desert his People of Freedom movement. This is particularly striking now that they have the alternative of a centre-right opposition as well as the centre-left: a tentative alliance between followers of Mr Berlusconi’s former lieutenant, Gianfranco Fini, with Pier Ferdinando Casini’s Christian Democrat Union of the Centre, and a smaller party led by a former mayor of Rome, Francesco Rutelli.

But the creation of a broader opposition has only accentuated what voters identify as its main weakness: its heterogeneity, and thus susceptibility to disunity if it were ever elected. Together, the parties ranged against Mr Berlusconi account for almost 60% of voters’ preferences. But at one extreme they offer post-fascism, and at the other Marxism blended with environmentalism and feminism.

The recurrent problem of the opposition has been that not enough Italians are willing to vote for a party of the moderate left like those that have held power for long periods in other European countries. Italy’s Socialist party was largely destroyed by the corruption scandals of the early 1990s, so the centre-left is nowadays represented by a fundamentally unnatural coalition of former progressive Christian Democrats with former Communists, who not surprisingly find it hard to agree on clear common policies. Their joint party, the Democratic Party (PD), has proved incapable of rejuvenating its leadership and breaking free of the cronyism that blights Italian politics. The PD is heavily influenced by two men, Massimo D’Alema and Walter Veltroni, who have (like Mr Berlusconi) been in leading positions since the mid-1990s. The party leader, Pierluigi Bersani, who was Mr D’Alema’s candidate, is a personable, capable man. But he seems to lack the magic ingredient that enables politicians to break through to a wider electorate.

This is not his only problem. On January 26th Mr Bersani called off a national assembly due the next weekend after claims that the winner of a ballot to choose the PD candidate for mayor in Naples had been helped by local organised crime (with Chinese immigrants paid €5, about $7, a vote). This will scarcely persuade Italians that there is an alternative to the tarnished, ineffectual Mr Berlusconi.

http://www.economist.com/node/18073418?story_id=18073418&CFID=155309372&CFTOKEN=24092953