Book Reviews Summer 2009
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Bulletin of Italian Politics Vol. 1, No. 1, 2009, 157-167 Book reviews Mark Donovan and Paolo Onofri (eds), Politica in Italia: I fatti dell’anno e le interpretazioni. Edizione 2008 , Bologna: Il Mulino, 2009, pp. 350. ISBN 978 88 15 12542 2. Fifteenth years into the so-called Second Republic, Italian politics is characterised by a sense of fatigue, disillusionment, and scepticism. This is the message that the editors convey in their introduction to this Politica in Italia volume that charts the events of the year 2007. Resisting the temptation to turn this edition of the annual series into an analysis of the making of Prodi’s eventual 2008 defeat, the editors and contributors to the volume turn their gaze to longer-term political developments and offer their own interpretation of these trends. Contingent choices and durable features blend in determining the onset of a general disillusionment about the possibility of a veritable renewal of Italian politics, even as the much longed-for alternation in government appears to gain a firm foothold. The keyword of the Introduction is ‘antipolitics’ – that ‘chronic dissatisfaction’ (p.57) that Italians harbour against their political system, whether of an ‘ideological’ or a ‘pragmatic’ nature. What had been thought to be the key to the solution of Italy’s short-lived and ineffective governments – alternation in government – appears ineffective against the overdrawn identity crisis of the Italian left and its incapacity to reconstitute a reformist-progressive position as a counterweight to the populist- personalist message proposed by Berlusconi. As we will learn, similar difficulties are experienced by the Italian right. It is thus up to a popular and politically engaged comedian, Beppe Grillo, to fill this void by using some of the same simplified language that Berlusconi uses (even though his blog and legislative initiatives are, according to the editors, far from comical). To explain the third electoral victory of Berlusconi and his eventual comeback at the helm of Italian government the authors must analyse the chequered reforms of the 2006-2008 Prodi government, the extreme fragmentation of the coalition supporting him, and the mistakes made during the first few months of his mandate. The contributors to the chapters of the first part of the volume – by Marc Lazar on the birth of the Democratic Party (PD), by Mark Donovan on the sources of fragmentation within the right-wing camp, by Duncan McDonnell on the 2007 local elections, by Gianfranco Baldini on the Bulletin of Italian Politics ISSN 1759 – 3077 www.gla.ac.uk/bip 157 Book reviews referendum campaign and electoral reform – analyse the reasons for the difficult creation of a bipolar political system. Lazar describes the peculiar ‘birth pangs’ of a new centre-left party (the PD) that apparently has fewer difficulties reconciling the confessional and non-confessional positions of the leftist fringe of the old Christian Democrats (DC) and the moderate fringe of the old Italian Communist Party, respectively, than in becoming a truly new political subject which is not just a collation of the old secretariats and the old members. Donovan detects similar difficulties in generating a new political subject within the right camp as this seeks to acquire a unitary identity (Partito delle Libertà) after having been a mere coalitional entente (Polo delle Libertà) and an instrumental cohabitation (Casa delle Libertà). Both alliances respond more to the need to join forces in order to defeat the opposite formation than to the desire to seek convergence towards a common programme and a future destiny. A disturbing element for both projects is the ambiguous position of the DC-splinter parties (UDC, UDEUR) still attempting to reconstitute a centre-party. And yet the contours of a different, more conventional political system can be gleaned also from the outcomes of the local elections, which seem to confirm the rule that the opposition parties tend to do better in ‘second-order elections’, be they local or European. These birth pangs take place ‘in the shadow’ of the electoral-law referendum, which some welcome as the only remedy for the ill effects of the 2005 electoral law – which managed to create an ‘all- Italian forced and fragmented bi-polarism’ (p.135), as Baldini dubs it – and some try to sidestep, without success, by forging a bi-partisan consensus on a German, or Spanish, or French electoral law. The second part of the volume is dedicated to several policies that preoccupied representatives of the Italian political system, and public opinion, in 2007. It includes a chapter on foreign policy, by James Walston, that describes the (moderately successful) attempt to find a new role for a medium-sized power like Italy; a chapter, by Lucia Quaglia, on the reform of the Bank of Italy designed to secure stricter financial controls; a chapter on the thwarted attempts at liberalisation, by Andrea Boitani; a chapter on fiscal federalism and local utility reforms, by Massimo Bordignon and Gilberto Turati; and a chapter on the social policies of the centre-left government, by Massimo Baldini and Paolo Bossi. Together, these chapters offer an analysis of the objective challenges facing Italy and the economic policy theories that could provide an answer to both right-wing and left- wing governments, and hence provide a narrative that spans well beyond the year 2007 and a sometimes sophisticated discussion of the economic and technical issues involved. The overall impression is that while ‘what needs to be done’ in most policy areas is unequivocally clear to both sides of the political spectrum, neither is willing to incur the political costs of carrying it out (with the partial exceptions of foreign policy and financial oversight reform, which are more shielded from public attention). So 158 liberalisation, local, and social policies prove a hard testing ground for both right- and left-wing governments. Finally, the third part of the volume is dedicated to two issues that particularly agitated Italian public opinion in 2007: unconventional family formats ( unioni di fatto ) and personal security. The chapter by Luigi Ceccarini on unconventional family formats – non-married and same-sex couples – constitutes an opportunity to discuss the new way in which the Catholic Church has been intervening in Italian political debate since the demise of Christian Democracy, in turn a testing ground for the new way in which the Church intends to be present in the global political debate by taking a stand on issues on the ‘bio-political agenda’ such as abortion, the day-after pill, in vitro fertilisation, stem-cell technology, living wills, euthanasia and human cloning. Laura Sartori discusses the widespread sense of personal insecurity, often rightly or wrongly associated with illegal migration and the problematic integration. In both cases, we discover that Italian public opinion is not so different from public opinion elsewhere, yet its cultural heritage constrains the official debate within narrower alternatives. All in all, this is a very informative and pleasant book to read which, however, changes ‘register’ several times – from the exquisitely political to the more technical, from the short- to the long-term perspective. The Italian political system changed also during 2007, but at a slower pace and with greater hesitation than Italians probably wished for themselves. Simona Piattoni University of Trento Arnaldo Forlani, Potere discreto: Cinquant’anni con la democrazia cristiana, a cura di Sandro Fontana e Nicola Guiso, Venezia: Marsilio, 2009, pp. 256. ISBN 8831796836. Arnaldo Forlani (1925- ) may not provoke the sinister feelings we sometimes associate with the name of Giulio Andreotti; nor has he shown the resolute attitude of Amintore Fanfani, or the intellectual subtleties of Aldo Moro. Within the Christian Democratic galaxy, however, he has played a crucial role, and at the heart of the party; in fifty years of militancy he has always been at the forefront, and often in key positions: he was twice political secretary (1969-72 and 1989-92), Minister of Defence (1974-76), Minister of Foreign Affairs (1976-79) and Prime Minister (1980-81). This book is framed as a long interview on the whole of his political experience, including the years following his involvement in the Tangentopoli scandal (1992) and his subsequent retirement from public life. 159 Book reviews The editors, Sandro Fontana and Nicola Guiso, are well-known Christian democratic journalists and intellectuals, whose public positions were already important in the final years of Forlani’s career. The interview starts with the ‘Epilogue’, which is devoted to Forlani’s dramatic exit from politics, within the context of the corruption scandals that overthrew the First Republic in 1992. The assessment of those events is still highly problematic and we cannot but register Forlani’s defence of his mandate as political secretary (pp. 27-29). If we leave aside for a while the much debated controversy between the main ruling parties and the judiciary in the early 1990s, we can more calmly appreciate the political significance of an interview which touches on all the main aspects of Italy’s contemporary history within the European and Atlantic framework. Moving on from the Resistance and the Cold War, Forlani’s measured answers deal with the age of the economic miracle, the subsequent descent into the ‘years of lead’, up to the rise of Craxi and eventually Berlusconi. More than the large variety of the issues discussed, what is here deeply striking is the centrality of the role of the Christian Democratic party ( Democrazia Cristiana , DC). There is no better guide than Forlani to the turning points, the key moments, and the main protagonists of its history. The party is omni-present, omni-pervasive, with its relentless dialectic within and without, its factions, wings, allies, opponents, and above all its gradual but restless evolution within the framework of Italian and European politics.