Articles by: Stanton h. Burnett

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    Understanding Italian Politics: A Pause for Reflection


    Readers may have noticed a three-week delay in the arrival of a new column in this series.  Worse yet, they may not have noticed it.


        Such a pause is rare.  In the series’ former lives, including most recently during the short, brilliant career of USItalia, these notes on how contemporary history, colorations of the Italian political culture, unwritten rules and habitual practices shed light on today’s politics flowed easily.  There was so much to talk about that I worried whether the second two hundred episodes would be as easy as the first two hundred.  They rattled off the typewriter with (my) easy confidence that they were apt.  


    But, it must be admitted, this holiday season brought doubts, some serious, eggnog-supported reconsideration.  We are told, by no less a voice than the New York Times (which, like most American papers, has trouble focussing on Italy if popes, earthquakes, or the Mafia are not involved), that Italy is tired, old, perhaps doomed.  Indeed, her current neuralgia seems to have new elements, from deadly Asian commercial competition, to an aging, pension-demanding population, to a rainbow of crime syndicates from around the globe.  Now the great garbage crisis has, uh, piled up into the ugliest mess imagineable, with organized crime and disorganized dumping leading to the closing of some schools in the south because the refuse had blocked the schoolyard gates.  (It is a bad sign when a country’s leader, in a situation where real citizens are truly suffering, mentions the nation’s image first in his list of concerns.) And some of the faces confronting these problems are new, especially SuperWalter.  So perhaps the rich, informative background we hoped to provide as a structure of understanding is simply passé.   Perhaps the current scene is new and we are old.


    Faced with the current level of economic, social and political malaise, there are some “outcomes”, both felicitous and grave, to which a modern state might be subjected.  For example, the nation could march to the polls and elect a new team to govern its way out of crisis.  But Italy has severe handicaps blocking optimism about this outcome.  


    First, there is the current electoral system.  One of the very few areas of broad agreement among Italian politicos is that the system is a failure and must be changed.  At this point, agreement ends.  While much of the debate swirls around the possible imitation of the German system, this surface argument covers the sharp pain of the real problem: no reform that is not an amazzapartitini reform, erasing more than half of the current parties from the political landscape, will ever provide the legislative wherewithal for the serious economic and social measures demanded by today’s malady.  How Italy got to this situation, and the dynamics of her patterns of coalition politics can only be explained by the explorations of history and culture we’re attempting.


    A second (this is not a list, but a sampling) roadblock to effective change through normal elections is the relationship between political leadership and citizen.  The history of Italian politics does not match the principles of democracy outlined in civics textbooks.  Although, as we have discussed in an early column, the large number of floating voters is a new phenomenon, the prevailing culture is still one of clientelismo.  And for years, the main alternative to this client-and-provider relationship has been movement politics, not loose associations of citizens with some rough harmony of views on many issues, but the disciplined marshalling of coherent political forces tightly constrained by rules of loyalty.  Neither of these styles makes for easy electoral replacement of one large party by another as a way of effecting change.


    So the past, the political culture, some of the ongoing habits… they all conspire to hamper Italy’s emergence from her current pain.  But those same forces from the past also provide some important, often ignored, advantages.  For example, many countries, with maladies no more serious than Italy’s, have turned to demagogues or the military.  


    History has taught Italy to fear demagogues.  When Bettino Craxi considered ways to be a more direct influence on Italian citizens, even via such apparently harmless innovations as televised “fireside chats”, alarms sounded throughout the system, including within his own party.  And Silvio Berlusconi may be a populist, but it would require a far higher dose of serious ideology to make of him even a bush-league demagogue.  Extreme politics have been successfully marginalized, and it will be interesting to see how this was done, and how secure the prophylaxis is.  (Very secure.)


    Nor need we worry about the Italian military.  Even despite the bad taste that Gladio and the involvement of some SISME brass with Licio Gelli’s PS lodge left in our mouths, the Italian military establishment is, politically, exactly what a modern state should have, with leadership firmly committed to constitutional democracy.  During my diplomatic days of the ‘70s and ‘80s, Washington worried regularly about the danger of a military coup, and we sent regular cables assuring the folks of Foggy Bottom that they were worried about the wrong thing.  (They had equal difficulty worrying about the right thing, forever convinced that the Christian Democratic Party was a shining band of democratic, capitalistic America-lovers.)


    Again, history, culture, habitual practices, unwritten rules, all worth examining, have provided the country, even in dark times, with good safeguards against either demagogues or military involvement in politics.


    So we’ll return to our path next week, all the while remembering that the fable of the boy who cried wolf has two morals, not one: don’t sound unnecessary alarms, but, also, don’t fail to respond to real alarms.  In one of the simplifications that made him popular with Americans, Luigi Barzini said that Italians were the most pessimistic of all peoples, which is why they lived so brilliantly in the moment.  However over-simplified that “analysis” may be, there’s a grain of truth there.  The old Russian joke was a response to “How are things?”  The answer: “So-so.  Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow.”  I always thought it worked better as an Italian joke than a Russian joke.


    An old friend, a sad-eyed Tuscan named Enzo, seeing fires blazing in 1968, thought the end was near: Italy, perhaps the West, was immediately doomed.  In 1978 he told me that things had gotten so bad that the Italian republic could not survive another year.  By 1988, seeing the final catastrophe right around the corner, all Enzo wanted was to get his family out before the country tumbled.  In ’98, the end of the Italian world had finally arrived, and all would sink before the end of the year.  No need to call Enzo in 2008.  I know what he’ll say.

     

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    "Readers of i-Italy will be among the very few to have understood Clementina Forleo's strange recent remark that some people seem to be trying 'to make me out as crazy.'  It clearly related to the Tiziana Parenti parallel discussed in Gothic Four."

     

     
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    Understanding Italian Politics: Sommeliers and Judges



    ... Without a good sommelier, most of us would stab blindly at the wine list and wind up with some thin picnic liquid to accompany our hearty venison. The danger posed by judges and magistrates who fail to make proper distinctions, and this goes for the scholars and journalists who follow the legal action, is almost as serious as a bad meal.

    These reflections are forced on us by some recent Italian failures in this regard by people who should do better. And they are significant enough to lure us, once again, away from Gothic’s intended path to a structured understanding of the Italian political culture. Back on track next week, we promise.

     

    The context is a felicitous one. Several distinguished editorialists have recently expressed regret, or at least some doubts, about their unqualified support for the Milan pool of magistrates when, in the early 1990s, it was sweeping through selected parts (there’s the rub) of Italian politics and industry, leaving only scorched earth and forty suicides in its wake. In none of these cases, you can be sure, did the re-thinking stem from a new-found fondness for Silvio Berlusconi, but from sober reflection on what was lost or damaged, and the misconceptions that allowed the massacre to happen (the word guillotine is slipping more and more into these accounts).

     

    Last month it was Eugenio Scalfari. This month it’s Giampaolo Pansa and Piero Ostellino. If anyone doubts the importance of any of these gents, please stay tuned: we’ll devote some future columns to the political press in Italy. The line that stands out in Dott. Pansa’s column in the November 1 L’espresso --- “And more and more often I ask myself whether I did the right thing to defend [Antonio Di Pietro] at the time of Mani Pulite.” [my translation. S.B.] --- is so stark that one tends not to notice what is going on in these essays, by omission in Pansa’s case, by explicit commission in that of Ostellino. Pansa’s comment is an obiter dictum in the course of his warning that De Pietro and Mastella are currently showing why the Partito democratico, although a new vessel, is already leaky. So we do not know precisely what part of Mani pulite now bothers Pansa.

    For Ostellino it’s that current hot question: how should magistrates disport themselves in public? It may be the television appearances of Forleo and De Magistris that attracted his attention, but he well recognizes that it is not a new issue: he goes back to the campaign waged by the Milan pool in July 1994 against the Biondi decree which would have interfered, a little, with the use the Mani pulite magistrates were making of preventive detention to pry information, or at least some kind of statement, out of suspects and witnesses, a use that is not one of the three allowable justifications listed in Italian law. The magistrates stood on the steps of Milan Palace of Justice, addressed an assembled media throng and, according to Ostellino, nobody on the Center-Left or in the media raised questions about the propriety of this political act (Anzi, tutti si erano schierati a fianco del pool. --Ostellino, in the October 30 Corriere.)

     

    Many media commentators are now saying that the public acts of Forleo and De Magistris are not what magistrates should do, that judges should judge, politicians should debate and vote, and sommeliers should not comment on the dessert. Ostellino has the courage to go back in recent history and ask for consistency in such views. His choice of the Biondi decree example struck a nerve here. The cover of my book (The Italian Guillotine) on the politics of Mani pulite carries a photo of exactly that incident: the Milan pool, Di Pietro in the foreground, haranguing the crowd from the steps of the Palace of Justice.

    But crucial distinctions are being lost in all this. What was wrong, I believe, with the pool’s politicking in that hot summer of ’94 was (1) the substance of their position against moving Italy even a small step toward the norms that limit preventive detention in other Western countries and (2) the fact that it showed the glaring hypocrisy of their claim to non-involvement in Italian politics. But no argument was made for a gag rule.

    In fact, it is precisely the protective silence of the magistrates which constitutes a danger. The key distinction should be between public comments about current cases, comments that would compromise the possibility of those involved in the cases to find justice… and comments on general issues of law, including past history, institutional functioning, etc. To block magistrates from engaging in debate on the larger issues is, besides robbing them of rights enjoyed by everybody else, a loss to the nation by depriving it of the wisdom of those who have the most practical knowledge about many of these issues.

    Worse yet, much worse yet, it allows the magistrates to hide behind such a ban, to make use of the patent absurdity of the claim that since the law requires them to open a case on any sliver that slips through the door of the Palace of Justice in order to say, as the Milan pool consistently did, that they could not have operated with political bias because the law does not permit them the luxury of discretion. It was on just that absurdity that the then-Minister Flick weighed in after Stefano Vaccara had lured two stars of the pool into an interview for America Oggi. Flick attacked the claims the magistrates had made about having no discretion (a welcome attack) but also, most regrettably, brought disciplinary action against them for speaking out publicly.

    The point about which we should all be concerned is this: if, in addition to the magistrates’ vaunted independence, an independence more extreme than elsewhere in the West, we add a shield of silence around their actions and policies, we have the very definition, not of independence, but of irresponsibility.

    So distinctions must be made about the subjects of their public statements. Some lie clearly on one side or the other of the line suggested above, and are easy calls. But there will always be, of course, questions closer to the line, requiring a finer discrimination. But that’s what judges and magistrates do. In the Anglo-Saxon system, with its emphasis on precedent, the distinctions in case law, the question of the similarity to, or difference from, preceding cases, is the whole game. But even in continental systems, based more on a close reading of the written law, the definitions must be fine, and there must be, here too, a consistency with past findings. Otherwise the legal system is unpredictable. And unpredictability has long been recognized as a fundamental element of state terrorism.

    Participation in the public debate on political issues should be a possibility for an Italian magistrate, although hemmed in by the fine distinctions that prevent the corruption of current cases. But distinctions are supposed to be special talent of magistrates, judges, and sommeliers.

     
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    Understanding Italian Politics: Forleo in History


     

    ... By making some wire-taps available to attorneys, she so damaged two of the three principal ex-Communist contenders for leadership of the then-unborn Partito democratico that the field was left open for Walter Veltroni. What the intercepted phone calls revealed was not so damning in itself, but it was enough to puncture the balloon of exceptionalism (the idea that Marxists live on a different moral continent from other politicos) which surrounded them.

     

                There are some serious issues to be explored here --- the political and juridical meaning of the release of documents concerning current cases and the method of their release, the political motivation of magistrates’ choices about what cases to pursue and with what level of energy, etc. --- but it would be rash to try to pronounce on those topics at our current level of information about Forleo and Catanzaro magistrate De Magistris. So we confine ourselves today to the most bizarre elements, the tabloid stuff, which may give more clues than tabloid stuff usually gives.

     

                On this level we have Forleo’s effort to refuse police escort, her expressed belief that she has more to fear from inside the law enforcement establishment than outside it, the perhaps-irrelevant death of her parents this summer, and, especially, the tone of the polemics. The extreme edges of these polemics are, on the one hand, the suggestion that La Forleo is deranged and, at the other extreme, the comparing of her intrepid and dangerous struggle with those of Falcone and Borsellino, the heroes who fell in the war against the Sicilian Mafia. Wacko the lady may be, but until there is some proof of this, she deserves to be taken seriously. And any comparison with Falcone and Borsellino is also, for the moment, ridiculously exaggerated and completely misses a more interesting parallel with recent history.

     

                Who today recalls Tiziana Parenti? A quick refresher may lead the reader to some interesting reflections on the Forleo hubbub.

     

                Of the prominent members of the Milan pool of magistrates who kept us entertained in the early 1990s with the great and terrifying circus of Mani pulite, two of them did not have a history of links with Magistratura democratica, the party (yes, it deserves that name) that had promised two decades earlier to bring about political revolution in Italy via the courtroom: Antonio Di Pietro and Tiziana Parenti. 

     

                Parenti, like the others, labored at following leads along the trails of probably-illegal financing of Italian political parties. But her leads took her to the Red cooperatives of Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna. She had some knowledge of where to look: a handsome Tuscan from Pisa, she had youthful political experience in the Marxist-Leninist extra-parliamentary groups that disturbed Italy in the 1970s. She had been a magistrate in Milan for more than a decade when she joined the Mani pulite pool. 

     

                Parenti discovered the financial links between an official of the Communist Party, Primo Greganti (“Comrade G” in some newspapers) and Ecolibri, a publishing house run by Paola Occhetto, sister of Achille Occhetto who at that time was national secretary of the PCI (and, later, leader of the new-born PDS). Her further investigations turned up illicit financing to the party coming from Eumit of East Berlin, a company controlled by STASI, the East German secret service. The funds went to the PCI/PDS through a series of Red cooperatives. So Parenti sent avvisi di garanzia to Paola Occhetto, to Marcello Stefanini, the national chief of administration of the PCI/PDS, and to several other party officials.

     

                While the Greganti part of the case turned to low comedy (Greganti testified that when “ a stranger” handed him 621 million lire he had no idea why and so used his unexpected good fortune to buy himself an apartment on Via Tirso in Rome), Parenti made two other discoveries. One was a huge cache of documents detailing the East German support of the PCI. 

     

    The other thing she discovered was that her colleagues who swam in the Magistratura democratica stream play rough. 

     

    The deputy chief of the pool, Gerardo D’Ambrosio (card-carrying PCI member later elected to parliament) came to the party’s rescue. He took the case away from Parenti with the statement that Parenti “was not in line with the Pool.” Her colleagues publicly attacked her mental health (a reminder of how things were once done in Eastern Europe, or does the Milan Palace of Justice just attract nutty lady magistrates?). In June 1996, Panorama revealed that the documents Parenti had sequestered in the offices of the PDS, in several cooperatives, and specifically in Greganti’s office, had been lost.

     

                The deranged magistrate Parenti miraculously overcame the mental problems that so worried her solicitous colleagues and was elected to parliament in 1994, re-elected in1996, where she served until 2001. Modern medicine is truly wonderful.
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    Why Gothic? Why a Yank?


    Gothic will draw on some earlier commentary that first appeared in the very distinguished, but short-lived, journal USItalia directed by Stefano Vaccara. We will update, re-think, and weed some of those pieces, and add others that seem apt for the moment, but the purpose will be the same: to develop a structure of understanding of the background, practices, code words and quirks of Italian politics --- a framework most people think they don’t need.


    We, Italians and Americans, have the impression that the politics of the other country is clear and familiar. We both use the common vocabulary of Western politics. Italy has a parliament, parties, elections, a president, a prime minister (sometimes mysteriously called “President”), scandals and television debates. But, to our dismay, nothing works quite as one might expect. Italians read American articles on Italy and shake their heads: the facts may be accurate, but the sense of what’s important, what isn’t, and what it means, is usually not there. Our confidence in our understanding is misplaced. It ignores the fact that the familiar words and forms hide a political culture that is profoundly different from what Americans know, even if their family background is Italian, even if they have a good understanding of how the rest of Europe works. (Fact: one reason American newspaper editors run fewer stories about Italian politics than about those of the other big Western countries is that the stories from Italy are usually much longer. The few good correspondents reporting from Italy need more space to make an event or a situation coherent; cut it and it becomes nonsense.)


    So why should a framework of understanding appear to be Gothic?


    In a Gothic novel, the innocent heroine (that’s us) enters the mansion with an easy heart, only to find that things are not what they seem. Besides the locked closets and trap doors, there is history there. Ecco.


    In Gothic architecture, things are not supposed to be what they seem. The flying buttress does not fly, or leap, as it appears to do, but is, despite appearances, a serious buttress for the whole structure. The keys to the entire structure may be hidden behind ornament and illusion. Ecco.


    Frankly, we saw no reason to change the name Gothic. But we certainly do not intend to suggest that Italian politics is entirely dysfunctional (a widespread belief these days in Italy) or past-bound. The successes of the postwar Italian republic are singularly impressive. But the understanding of the workings of that politics is tricky, fascinating, and always highly provisional. Forget dietrologia --- the study of what lies behind --- for a while: reading the surface is difficult (and intoxicating) enough.


    So, in weeks to come, we’ll explore such mysteries as:

    ---how to follow a political crisis;

    ---the personality phenomena: Berlusconi and Veltroni

    ---the relation between culture and politics;

    ---autobiography and intellectual integrity;

    ---how to read the political press;

    ---how the parties tried to use cinema;

    ---re-writing Communist Party history;

    ---north and south;

    ---the failure of the two churches (political Christianity and Marxism);

    ---the politics of terrorism;

    ---the geometry of convergent parallelism;

    ---the role of the U.S. embassy;

    ---the politics of the magistrates: Milan, Rome, Palermo, Catanzaro;

    ---what Craxi did to the Left…


    Finally, let me anticipate a doubt that should be in your mind: the gap in political culture between Italy and other countries (see above) is so great that it’s generally a mistake to look for guidance from anybody but an Italian. Nevertheless, there are some exceptions to this good rule:

    ---George Trevelyan was such a brilliant story-teller that his three volumes on Garibaldi constitute one of the best reads on either side, fiction or non-fiction, of the library.

    ---The British historian Paul Ginsborg has a unique facility for tying Italian politics to Italian society and so has produced political histories rich in humane understand.

    ---The great Yale political scientist Joseph LaPalombara has written so cogently about Italian political institutions that political figures from Andreotti to Giuliano Amato have declared that they learned from him.

    ---As for me, well, one learns something from several decades of being wrong about Italian politics. For example, after some lunches a quatr’occhi with a Milan entrepreneur seeking Hollywood product for this television stations, I once reported to the Department of State that, aside from being a sincere anti-Communist, Silvio Berlusconi had no serious interest in politics.


    With that kind of shrewd analysis on tap, we’ll begin our voyage of exploration/explanation next week.

     
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    Facts & Stories

    i-Italy Gothic One


    The debate rages as to what the PD will prove to be. Some have even suggested that the event will not prove to be of historic importance. They’re wrong. What exactly is being launched is an excellent question, but when the Democrats of the Left (the twice-reformed Communists) closed their final congresso by singing “Over the Rainbow” rather than the Internationale, you knew that Italy’s political furniture was being seriously re-arranged.


    This regular column will not follow the events of (and before and after) October 14, will not recount and analyze the day-by-day infighting of power brokers, the electoral gamesmanship, the management of spoils, nor the doctrinal disputes. Well, maybe a little of that last one. Some of our time’s best political analysts will be doing that elsewhere on this web site. We will be furnishing something else: the conceptual framework for understanding the events, the historic context, the relation to the written and unwritten rules of Italian politics, perhaps some of the color of the personalities and mysteries involved. What, we will ask, is dietro the dietrologia?


    So what is happening on October 14? What’s the proper conceptual framework?


    Is it the next, perhaps the last, step of the transformation of Italian Communism, the final leg of the great trek toward democratic normalcy that began in Salerno in 1944?


    Put another way, is it the final burial, the true liquidation, of the holy war between the churches of Catholicism and Marxism which defined post-war Italian politics and has left more than a few glowing embers among the ashes of the old conflict?


    The creation of the PD has been seen as both an effort to save the Prodi government from its slim and unruly supporting coalition… and as an effort to hasten its end by producing a personality (Veltroni) who will loom so large that the pigmy-seeming Prodi cannot endure.


    The salvation concept is linked to another prism through which the event may be seen: the fear and loathing produced in approximately half of politically-active Italians by the threat of the return of Silvio Berlusconi.


    And the Prodi-submergence theorem is itself linked to a whole set of historic doubts about strong individual leadership. Although, in a recent poll, a surprising number of Italians extended a cautious welcome to the idea of a “strong man,” they clearly did not represent the political class. Even Bettino Craxi’s closest collaborators were appalled when, while in Palazzo Chigi, he once suggested a series Rooseveltian “fireside chats.” A man on a balcony still looks like a man on a balcony, even in his favorite cardigan sweater. So, after the Unipol affair took D’Alema and Fassino out of the running for PD leadership, October must also be analyzed in terms of SuperWalter.


    Or should we also see the ringing applause earned by Anna Finocchiaro at the final DS conclave as, in part, an expression of relief that this new stirring of the pot will sideline, for a while at least, the painful issue of quotas for women?


    Without question the birth of the PD should be seen as opening a space to the left of the opposition coalition. When Fabio Mussi walked out of the PDS congress and into that space, he took a large chunk of Leftist sentiment with him. How will the working man view this son of a Tuscan steel worker, while seeing Bertinotti dress so much better then he used to?


    The other part of the slide to center is an effort to lock in the reform wing of the Socialists. So the new game must also be seen in terms of DeMichelis and Bobo Craxi.


    And the new party must, of course, be related to electoral reform. Since electoral reform has long since detached itself from the ongoing rhetoric about democracy and representation and has reduced itself to computer calculations of relative party benefit, the computers are humming as speak.


    We could keep going, but you get the idea. If the PD founders on any rocks in the near future, it will be the turbulent passage between the serious Catholic politicians who are essential to its success and its intensely secular Leftists (and moderates). The fact that the spring foreign policy vote of confidence in the Senate turned, not on foreign policy, but on deals made with Andreotti and others over gay rights, shows that a Herculean (Veltronian?) effort of leadership will be required to keep these two centers of passion in the same political house.


    So this one date, October 14, raises many of the issues of history, political practice, and culture on which we will try to shed light. Next time we’ll explain the column’s peculiar name and consider the very real question of whether an outsider can truly say anything sensible and interesting about Italian politics.

     

    Stanton H. Burnett is Senior Adviser at the Center for Strategic & International Studies.

    His column, "Gothic", appears regularly in the "Bloggers" secion of i-italy.