Oh for a New Risorgimento
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SPECIAL REPORT I TA LY June 11th 2011 Oh for a new risorgimento SRitaly.indd 1 31/05/2011 14:42 S PECIAL REPORT I TALY O h for a new risorgimento Italy needs to stop blaming the dead for its troubles and get on with life, says John Prideaux ON A WARM spring morning in Treviso, a town in Italy’s north•east, sev• eral hundred people have gathered in the main square, in the shadow of a13th•century bell tower, to listen to speeches. The crowd is so uniformly dressed, in casually smart clothes and expensive sunglasses, that an out• sider might assume invitations to this event had been sent out weeks ago. Most people are clutching plastic ags on white sticks. Some of them car• ry children wearing rosettes in red, white and green. On a temporary stage a succession of speakers talk about the country’s glori• ous history. Italy has taken the day o to celebrate its 150th anniversary as a nation. Treviso’s mayor, Gian Paolo Gobbo, is not celebrating. The desk in his oce faces a large painting of Venice in the style of Canaletto. This has some signicance for Mr Gobbo, who has spent his political career ghting to resus• citate the Republic of Venice, which nally expired in 1797 after a long illness. Below the painting stands a uorescent• green bear. It’s just like me! exclaims the mayor, a portly man in his 60s. Green is the colour of the Northern League, C ONTENTS a party which has sometimes toyed with the idea of break• 3 The economy ing up Italy and allowing the northern part of the country For ever espresso to go it alone. This particular bear wears a sword, a gift from a champion fencer who is one of the town’s famous sons. 6 Business Mr Gobbo’s opponents might claim that the bear resembles Renaissance men him in another way: last year the mayor was charged with 8 Globalisation and having been part of an armed gang in the 1990s, a low•grade immigration militia intended to protect Treviso. He denies the charges. Benvenuto, up to Italy’s unication is contentious because many peo• a point ple trace the country’s current troubles back to the birth of a nation that, they say, was misconceived. In the run•up to the 9 Education anniversary an egy of Giuseppe Garibaldi, the great hero The ins and outs of unication (pictured), a sort of 19th•century Che Guevara 11 Institutions but with better politics, was burned in the Veneto region. Tangled webs The Northern League, which governs in coalition with Sil• vio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom party in Rome, objected 13 Berlusconi’s legacy to having a public holiday dedicated to an event that it re• The cavaliere and gards as a catastrophe. Unication, the party argues, yoked the cavallo the poor, corrupt, lazy south to the go•ahead north to the detriment of both. Garibaldi did not unite Italy, the North• ern League is fond of saying; he divided Africa. A CKNOWLEDGMENTS From the other end of the peninsula the anniversary can look equally bleak. In the 18th century Naples was the third•largest city in Eu• In addition to those quoted, the author would like to thank the rope after London and Paris. Before being incorporated into Italy it was following people for their help in the the capital city of a great monarchy; now it is ruled by a clique of inept preparation of this report: Roger politicians. These days the city is almost as famous for its stinking Abravanel, Claudio Aspesi, Alberto de mounds of uncollected rubbish as for the bay and the volcano that de• Benedictis, Andrea Bonomi, Melisa Calaresu, Maurizio Caprara, Paolo lighted Goethe and many other visitors before and since. Though the Colonnello, Pietro Como, Annamaria south of Italy benets from transfers from central government, it does not de Crescenzio, Stephen Di Biasio, show much gratitude towards the wealthier northerners, nor enthusi• Tomaso Eridani, Benjamin Fowler, asm for commemorating unication. Terroni, a bestselling book by Daniele Franco, Massimo Franco, Richard Gadeselli, Robert Gordon, Pino Aprile published last year, compared the northern troops who sup• Charles Grant, Richard Holloway, posedly liberated the south in the 1860s to the Nazis. A list of sources is at Massimo Livi Bacci, Emma Marce• All countries argue about their history. America’s recent commem• Economist.com/specialreports gaglia, Mario Monti, Giacomo Oberto, oration of the 150th anniversary of its civil war saw plenty of conict be• Paul O’Brien, Thomas Pietschmann, An audio interview with John Purtell, Giovanni Sanfelice, tween nostalgics for the old South, with all its carbuncles, and fans of the author is at Barbara Serra, David Stürken and Abraham Lincoln. But it is hard to nd anybody in America who thinks Economist.com/audiovideo/ others who prefer not to be named. that the states should never have been united. Italy is di erent. Plenty of 1 specialreports The Economist June 11th 2011 1 S PECIAL REPORT I TALY 2 peo le feel that the regions making up the country were too dis• tinct to be squeezed into a single nation and that, as a result, Italy In brief has shallow roots. According to this line of thinking, the lack of Key figures consent to the national project has resulted in weak institutions and dysfunctional government. Manlio Graziano’s The Failure GDP 2010: ¤1.5 trn Government spending of Italian Nationhood and David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Ita• Per person, 2010: ¤25,600 As share of GDP, 2010: 50.5% Average annual % change, Exchange rates, May 30th 2011 ly, the two most serious attempts to grapple with Italy’s rst 150 2001-10: 0.25% 1¤ = $1.43 ¥115 £0.87 years, both take this view. In political terms, the rise and rise of the separatist Northern League over the past 15 years, to a point where it now occupies key ministries in Rome, underlines the ALTO GDP per person ADIGE 0.5 3.1 FRIULI- power of this idea. VENEZIA 2008, ¤’000 One reason why the past seems to have an unusu• TRENTO GIULIA >30 ally strong hold over the present in Italy is that the VALLE D’AOSTA 9.7 5.4 1.2 4.7 25.0-30.0 country’s long•term problems seem impervious to 0.5 4.8 Treviso changes of party, government or constitution. The 0.1 5.0 Milan VENETO 20.0-24.9 <20 most striking of these is the north•south divide. PIEDMONT LOMBARDY 4.9 5.2 Venice Most countries have richer regions and poorer Turin 4.4 6.9 ones. What is unusual about Italy is the south’s fail• Parma EMILIA- 0.0 Population ure in recent years to catch up with the north in any Genoa 2009, m 4.3 4.7 ROMAGNA way at all. Data from the Bank of Italy show that GDP LIGURIA Bologna per person is over 40% lower in the south than in the Unemployment 1.6 5.7 Prato 0.0 centre and north, and has been for the past 30 years 2009, % Florence 1.6 8.5 (though there was some catching up before then). A third of Pisa 3.7 6.6 Italy’s population lives in the south, making it the largest and MARCHE most populated underdeveloped region in the euro area, accord• TUSCANY 0.9 6.6 ing to Mario Draghi, the bank’s governor. UMBRIA 1.3 8.0 The wonders of commune•ism L’Aquila LAZIO If this problem were only 30 years old it might be easier to ABRUZZI Rome x, but the gap between the north and centre of the country and 0.3 9.0 4.1 12.6 the south goes back much longer. If you know how any place in 5.6 7.2 MOLISE APULIA Italy was governed in the 14th centuryas a self•governing com• CAMPANIA Bari mune, as part of the Papal states or by a monarchy in the south Naples you can predict with reasonable certainty what proportion of 5.8 13.0 0.6 11.1 people there would come out to vote in a referendum tomorrow SARDINIA Capri BASILICATA or donate blood. That is an awful lot of history to push against. NATIONAL TOTAL: And if you plot indicators of a successful societyfrom the ease 1.7 12.5 of doing business to turnout in elections to educational attain• 60.1 7.8 2.0 11.4 menton a map of Italy’s boot today, you get the same di eren• Cagliari tiation between north and south. 6th-highest 17th-highest Catanzaro What has caused this strange predictability? Since the pub• in Europe in Europe CALABRIA lication of Robert Putnam’s book Making Democracy Work in 1993, the main explanation put forward has been that the self•go• Palermo verning communes and city states that sprang up in the north of the country during the late Middle Ages built up reserves of so• 250 km 5.0 13.9 cial capital (or trust in fellow citizens) that have proved remark• ably enduring. The south of the country, ruled by a monarchy SICILY Regional GDP per person and characterised by large landholdings worked by peasants, Lampedusa lacked this crucial resource. Three economists who studied this 2008, ¤’000 subject recently, Luigi Guiso of the European University Institute, Centre-north 30.8 Paola Sapienza of Northwestern University and Luigi Zingales of South & islands 17.7 the University of Chicago, found that at least half of the gap in social capital between the north and south is due to the absence of free city•states in the south.