From the start the blog was intended to be a forum for the discussion and presentation of different views and this year we have had a contribution from Nora Galli de' Paratesi. For the next few weeks the blog will host contributions from AUR students completing the semester's Italian Politics course.
Their own worst enemies?
Alba Lupia
On March 11th terrorism again shook the western world, this time concentrating itself in Europe. Within 3 days of the massacre of innocent civilians in Spain the people chose to change their government. A historical amount of voters flooded the polls to oust Jose' Maria Aznar who had sent troops to Iraq, favorour of the Socialist leader Zapatero. Three days later the Spanish people had spoken. If the UN does not take control of the reconstruction in post-war Iraq by June 30th, Spanish troops will withdraw.
The repercussions of this change over will be felt in all of America's allies. The curiosity lies in how far the vibrations will actually reach. In Italy the biggest left-wing party the DS has since February 14th begun their steps towards at least an electoral alliance with the centre-left Margherita (Daisy) called the Olive Tree Alliance in the hope of an eventual defeat of the current Berlusconi run government. In the coalition Fassino and Prodi are striving for a victory in the June European elections as a prelude to Italian the elections of 2006. This coalition of the left prides itself on bringing peace to Italy once in power. An important question remains: how "united" is this pacifist coalition?
On the anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, demonstrators all over Europe marched through their cities' squares to reaffirm Zapatero's statement and what they had rallied for one year before. The demonstration in Rome was one of the largest with perhaps as many as a million people taking part. The historical centre was swarming with rainbow peace flags and good intentions. That afternoon however, the peace march became divisive. In a very crowded area near Santa Maria Maggiore the demonstrators were forced to stand still for several hours. One of the many supporting groups of the DS, also the most important due to party secretary Piero Fassino's presence, tried to enter the march at this point and found itself face to face with some of the most radical segments of the movement. Soon enough young radicals began casting insults and throwing objects in opposition to the supposed solidarity of Fassino. His offence in their eyes was that he had gone to the previous Thursday's demonstration "against terrorism" where centre right politicians had gone too; as bad, the DS had not voted against the continued financing of Italian missions abroad in Parliament the week before. Fassino had wanted to support the earlier Italian peace missions some of which the DS had initiated but vote against the Iraq mission; the Government made this impossible by combining the vote, hence the DS compromise. At the demonstration, despite the heckling, the tension was shortlived and peace again took to the streets.
In the following days some journalists especially on television and in pro-government papers have taken this event to prove that the centre-left is even more divided. It has been compared to the activities of '77 which climaxed with the death of Aldo Moro. The peace march is now being used as another weapon in Italian political controversy.
It seems that the left's enemies are not the right but instead found on their own side. The right calls this the typical "sickness" of the left. The ostensible unity is in fact in jeopardy. On one side of the spectrum there are the radicals who chant "tutti a casa, via di Baghdad". These absolute pacifists that make up a large part of the voting left are faced with opposition in their own alliance. The dominant idea is backed by the DS. Reform and reorganization for peace is the central plan. The incident on Saturday was a sign for the left to not only discuss their ideas on reform and peace but to revaluate their state of unity. They need to ask themselves What is reform for peace? Is it the unconditional withdrawal of Italian troops or continuing to stay present under UN command in hopes of helping the reconstruction of the Iraqi government? The other day demonstrators yelled for the removal of the troops but the politicians of the left insist that this will not bring peace. Instead Italy would be turning its back on the problem and alienating itself from the rest of Europe. They want a Spanish-style policy of keeping troops in Iraq but under UN command.
If the Olive Tree coalition hopes to win votes these questions must be answered. Their image of unity is dissipating as Fassino is accused of compromising with the pro-Bush government and the Prodi list must be made clearer.
The coalition was not even united for a single peace march let alone on ideas of reform and advancement.
The centre left are full of ideas for change and whether or not they can implement them once in power is arguable. These ideas are mostly anti-Berlusconi instead of ones with a definite programme for change.
Tuesday, March 30, 2004
Tuesday, March 16, 2004
Who's next?
And what do we do about it?
In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley observed wryly that it would take a Martian invasion for humankind to unite; something like that happened briefly yesterday for Europeans as the whole continent stopped in silence for three minutes at midday. Here in Rome the Italian tricolour, the European stars and the city banners had all been at half mast for the previous three days and the shock and solidarity went way beyond media hype and political leaders in dark suits and with grave faces.
But already yesterday, from the moment the Spanish election results were clear, the bickering began again. It is louder here to be sure as is the Italian custom but the underlying issues cut across the continent. They are issues which deserve to be debated carefully, not dispassionately but with accuracy and with as little mystification as possible. It probably will not happen and the tones will be strident and based on deep-seated prejudices walled in by powerful rhetoric and doubtful logic.
But here is an attempt to move in the other direction.
On the increasingly likely hypothesis that the Madrid bombs were a radical Islamic attack, they are traumatic to Europeans for two reasons. The first is the scale of the carnage; the biggest previous attacks, Bologna in 1980 and Omagh in 1998 did not reach three figures. The second, and I think more disturbing element is the alien and for most people totally incomprehensible aim of the attack. Whether it was the IRA, red or black terrorism in Italy, or Spain’s own Basques, these were objectives that most of us can relate to, understand and put in historical and cultural context and then elaborate ways of fighting back.
There is a parallel here in the United States between Oklahoma and 9/11. The first was horrendous in scale but was the work of a lone (American) fanatic. The results are terrible for the bereaved and for the city but did not change society. 9/11 clearly did and not only because of the scale of death and destruction but because of the near invisibility of the enemy.
It has always puzzled me why chemical weapons have been banned soon after their invention while other more traditional weapons continued to kill. Is it worse to die from mustard gas burning your lungs or shrapnel disembowelling you? The reason, or at least one reason, is the perceived insidiousness of gas as opposed to an explosive shell. So it is with this new kind of terrorism.
Most of Europe has had direct experience of terrorism in the last forty years. Sometimes the targets were random, the French Secret Army Organisation, the OAS, the Italian right, sometimes the Basques and both sides of the Northern Irish divide. Other times it was targeted, the Italian left, the Basques again and Ulster again. There were moments when both society and governments were put under serious stress and there were deep divisions. Today’s threat is different because it seems to come from outside our society and threaten the whole of it as much as we can understand.
So we should have the Martian effect with all of Europe united and united with the US. We don’t because since the threat is so vague, there cannot be a single response or even agreement on how the threat is articulated.
The first political effect of the Madrid bombs was that enough Spanish voters changed their minds, either by changing their vote or by actually going out to vote in order to change opinion poll predictions. There are three possible reasons as far as I can see: they punished the lies and equivocations of the government, two: they felt that Zapatero and the PSOE is better equipped to deal with the new emergency and three: a technical reason, that the higher turnout was made up of previously half-committed PSOE voters.
If the second reason is dominant, then, broadly speaking, we have two possible motivations. First, that those voters feel that by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, they will be safe from future attack; the appeasement, or Danegeld argument. Secondly, that this radical Islamic terrorism is best faced by a combined effort of the international community under as broad an umbrella as possible (in Zapatero’s case, he wants to see the UN take over in Iraq).
Coming back to Italy (and the UK, Denmark and Poland all of whom have troops in Iraq), the debate has to be put in terms of how best to deal with the threat which we face (and no doubt even those countries which opposed the war as well). Radical Islamic violence is not just or even primarily aimed at the so-called “West”. Moderate and secular Islamic countries bore the initial brunt of the movement for most of the ‘90s – in Algeria, in Morocco, in Egypt and in Afghanistan. Invading one of those secular countries however brutal a dictatorship Saddam’s Iraq was, has only stoked the fires of Islamic radicalism, allowed it into Iraq, provided fertile recruitment ground for many others, Arab and non-Arab.
But Iraq has been invaded and is policed by a largely foreign force which cannot be removed without causing a complete disaster for west and east alike. So the only way to begin to rebuild consensus and begin to dry up the sources of Islamic radicalism is to make the soldiers into peacekeepers rather than occupiers and give responsibility to the international community. Angelo Panebianco in to-day’s Corriere argues that the Spanish threat to withdraw the troops is the equivalent of Munich 1938. He has misread time and place; the parallels are with Dayton 1995 which began the Balkan piece process. To widen the legality and the responsibility of the foreign presence in Iraq is the opposite of appeasement.
This is hardly an original hope but it is one based on the methods used to successfully stop political radicals in Italy from using terrorist methods. Mr. Zapatero’s victory on Sunday is a model for those in the rest of Europe who were against the invasion of Iraq and who were convinced that tanks and missiles encourage terrorism rather than curb it. The left in Italy, Britain and Denmark will use it in June’s European Parliament elections; the right and Tony Blair are warned that their military support of the US has a political price tag.
And what do we do about it?
In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley observed wryly that it would take a Martian invasion for humankind to unite; something like that happened briefly yesterday for Europeans as the whole continent stopped in silence for three minutes at midday. Here in Rome the Italian tricolour, the European stars and the city banners had all been at half mast for the previous three days and the shock and solidarity went way beyond media hype and political leaders in dark suits and with grave faces.
But already yesterday, from the moment the Spanish election results were clear, the bickering began again. It is louder here to be sure as is the Italian custom but the underlying issues cut across the continent. They are issues which deserve to be debated carefully, not dispassionately but with accuracy and with as little mystification as possible. It probably will not happen and the tones will be strident and based on deep-seated prejudices walled in by powerful rhetoric and doubtful logic.
But here is an attempt to move in the other direction.
On the increasingly likely hypothesis that the Madrid bombs were a radical Islamic attack, they are traumatic to Europeans for two reasons. The first is the scale of the carnage; the biggest previous attacks, Bologna in 1980 and Omagh in 1998 did not reach three figures. The second, and I think more disturbing element is the alien and for most people totally incomprehensible aim of the attack. Whether it was the IRA, red or black terrorism in Italy, or Spain’s own Basques, these were objectives that most of us can relate to, understand and put in historical and cultural context and then elaborate ways of fighting back.
There is a parallel here in the United States between Oklahoma and 9/11. The first was horrendous in scale but was the work of a lone (American) fanatic. The results are terrible for the bereaved and for the city but did not change society. 9/11 clearly did and not only because of the scale of death and destruction but because of the near invisibility of the enemy.
It has always puzzled me why chemical weapons have been banned soon after their invention while other more traditional weapons continued to kill. Is it worse to die from mustard gas burning your lungs or shrapnel disembowelling you? The reason, or at least one reason, is the perceived insidiousness of gas as opposed to an explosive shell. So it is with this new kind of terrorism.
Most of Europe has had direct experience of terrorism in the last forty years. Sometimes the targets were random, the French Secret Army Organisation, the OAS, the Italian right, sometimes the Basques and both sides of the Northern Irish divide. Other times it was targeted, the Italian left, the Basques again and Ulster again. There were moments when both society and governments were put under serious stress and there were deep divisions. Today’s threat is different because it seems to come from outside our society and threaten the whole of it as much as we can understand.
So we should have the Martian effect with all of Europe united and united with the US. We don’t because since the threat is so vague, there cannot be a single response or even agreement on how the threat is articulated.
The first political effect of the Madrid bombs was that enough Spanish voters changed their minds, either by changing their vote or by actually going out to vote in order to change opinion poll predictions. There are three possible reasons as far as I can see: they punished the lies and equivocations of the government, two: they felt that Zapatero and the PSOE is better equipped to deal with the new emergency and three: a technical reason, that the higher turnout was made up of previously half-committed PSOE voters.
If the second reason is dominant, then, broadly speaking, we have two possible motivations. First, that those voters feel that by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, they will be safe from future attack; the appeasement, or Danegeld argument. Secondly, that this radical Islamic terrorism is best faced by a combined effort of the international community under as broad an umbrella as possible (in Zapatero’s case, he wants to see the UN take over in Iraq).
Coming back to Italy (and the UK, Denmark and Poland all of whom have troops in Iraq), the debate has to be put in terms of how best to deal with the threat which we face (and no doubt even those countries which opposed the war as well). Radical Islamic violence is not just or even primarily aimed at the so-called “West”. Moderate and secular Islamic countries bore the initial brunt of the movement for most of the ‘90s – in Algeria, in Morocco, in Egypt and in Afghanistan. Invading one of those secular countries however brutal a dictatorship Saddam’s Iraq was, has only stoked the fires of Islamic radicalism, allowed it into Iraq, provided fertile recruitment ground for many others, Arab and non-Arab.
But Iraq has been invaded and is policed by a largely foreign force which cannot be removed without causing a complete disaster for west and east alike. So the only way to begin to rebuild consensus and begin to dry up the sources of Islamic radicalism is to make the soldiers into peacekeepers rather than occupiers and give responsibility to the international community. Angelo Panebianco in to-day’s Corriere argues that the Spanish threat to withdraw the troops is the equivalent of Munich 1938. He has misread time and place; the parallels are with Dayton 1995 which began the Balkan piece process. To widen the legality and the responsibility of the foreign presence in Iraq is the opposite of appeasement.
This is hardly an original hope but it is one based on the methods used to successfully stop political radicals in Italy from using terrorist methods. Mr. Zapatero’s victory on Sunday is a model for those in the rest of Europe who were against the invasion of Iraq and who were convinced that tanks and missiles encourage terrorism rather than curb it. The left in Italy, Britain and Denmark will use it in June’s European Parliament elections; the right and Tony Blair are warned that their military support of the US has a political price tag.
Who's next?
And what do we do about it?
In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley observed wryly that it would take a Martian invasion for humankind to unite; something like that happened briefly yesterday for Europeans as the whole continent stopped in silence for three minutes at midday. Here in Rome the Italian tricolour, the European stars and the city banners had all been at half mast for the previous three days and the shock and solidarity went way beyond media hype and political leaders in dark suits and with grave faces.
But already yesterday, from the moment the Spanish election results were clear, the bickering began again. It is louder here to be sure as is the Italian custom but the underlying issues cut across the continent. They are issues which deserve to be debated carefully, not dispassionately but with accuracy and with as little mystification as possible. It probably will not happen and the tones will be strident and based on deep-seated prejudices walled in by powerful rhetoric and doubtful logic.
But here is an attempt to move in the other direction.
On the increasingly likely hypothesis that the Madrid bombs were a radical Islamic attack, they are traumatic to Europeans for two reasons. The first is the scale of the carnage; the biggest previous attacks, Bologna in 1980 and Omagh in 1998 did not reach three figures. The second, and I think more disturbing element is the alien and for most people totally incomprehensible aim of the attack. Whether it was the IRA, red or black terrorism in Italy, or Spain’s own Basques, these were objectives that most of us can relate to, understand and put in historical and cultural context and then elaborate ways of fighting back.
There is a parallel here in the United States between Oklahoma and 9/11. The first was horrendous in scale but was the work of a lone (American) fanatic. The results are terrible for the bereaved and for the city but did not change society. 9/11 clearly did and not only because of the scale of death and destruction but because of the near invisibility of the enemy.
It has always puzzled me why chemical weapons have been banned soon after their invention while other more traditional weapons continued to kill. Is it worse to die from mustard gas burning your lungs or shrapnel disembowelling you? The reason, or at least one reason, is the perceived insidiousness of gas as opposed to an explosive shell. So it is with this new kind of terrorism.
Most of Europe has had direct experience of terrorism in the last forty years. Sometimes the targets were random, the French Secret Army Organisation, the OAS, the Italian right, sometimes the Basques and both sides of the Northern Irish divide. Other times it was targeted, the Italian left, the Basques again and Ulster again. There were moments when both society and governments were put under serious stress and there were deep divisions. Today’s threat is different because it seems to come from outside our society and threaten the whole of it as much as we can understand.
So we should have the Martian effect with all of Europe united and united with the US. We don’t because since the threat is so vague, there cannot be a single response or even agreement on how the threat is articulated.
The first political effect of the Madrid bombs was that enough Spanish voters changed their minds, either by changing their vote or by actually going out to vote in order to change opinion poll predictions. There are three possible reasons as far as I can see: they punished the lies and equivocations of the government, two: they felt that Zapatero and the PSOE is better equipped to deal with the new emergency and three: a technical reason, that the higher turnout was made up of previously half-committed PSOE voters.
If the second reason is dominant, then, broadly speaking, we have two possible motivations. First, that those voters feel that by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, they will be safe from future attack; the appeasement, or Danegeld argument. Secondly, that this radical Islamic terrorism is best faced by a combined effort of the international community under as broad an umbrella as possible (in Zapatero’s case, he wants to see the UN take over in Iraq).
Coming back to Italy (and the UK, Denmark and Poland all of whom have troops in Iraq), the debate has to be put in terms of how best to deal with the threat which we face (and no doubt even those countries which opposed the war as well). Radical Islamic violence is not just or even primarily aimed at the so-called “West”. Moderate and secular Islamic countries bore the initial brunt of the movement for most of the ‘90s – in Algeria, in Morocco, in Egypt and in Afghanistan. Invading one of those secular countries however brutal a dictatorship Saddam’s Iraq was, has only stoked the fires of Islamic radicalism, allowed it into Iraq, provided fertile recruitment ground for many others, Arab and non-Arab.
But Iraq has been invaded and is policed by a largely foreign force which cannot be removed without causing a complete disaster for west and east alike. So the only way to begin to rebuild consensus and begin to dry up the sources of Islamic radicalism is to make the soldiers into peacekeepers rather than occupiers and give responsibility to the international community. Angelo Panebianco in to-day’s Corriere argues that the Spanish threat to withdraw the troops is the equivalent of Munich 1938. He has misread time and place; the parallels are with Dayton 1995 which began the Balkan piece process. To widen the legality and the responsibility of the foreign presence in Iraq is the opposite of appeasement.
This is hardly an original hope but it is one based on the methods used to successfully stop political radicals in Italy from using terrorist methods. Mr. Zapatero’s victory on Sunday is a model for those in the rest of Europe who were against the invasion of Iraq and who were convinced that tanks and missiles encourage terrorism rather than curb it. The left in Italy, Britain and Denmark will use it in June’s European Parliament elections; the right and Tony Blair are warned that their military support of the US has a political price tag.
And what do we do about it?
In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley observed wryly that it would take a Martian invasion for humankind to unite; something like that happened briefly yesterday for Europeans as the whole continent stopped in silence for three minutes at midday. Here in Rome the Italian tricolour, the European stars and the city banners had all been at half mast for the previous three days and the shock and solidarity went way beyond media hype and political leaders in dark suits and with grave faces.
But already yesterday, from the moment the Spanish election results were clear, the bickering began again. It is louder here to be sure as is the Italian custom but the underlying issues cut across the continent. They are issues which deserve to be debated carefully, not dispassionately but with accuracy and with as little mystification as possible. It probably will not happen and the tones will be strident and based on deep-seated prejudices walled in by powerful rhetoric and doubtful logic.
But here is an attempt to move in the other direction.
On the increasingly likely hypothesis that the Madrid bombs were a radical Islamic attack, they are traumatic to Europeans for two reasons. The first is the scale of the carnage; the biggest previous attacks, Bologna in 1980 and Omagh in 1998 did not reach three figures. The second, and I think more disturbing element is the alien and for most people totally incomprehensible aim of the attack. Whether it was the IRA, red or black terrorism in Italy, or Spain’s own Basques, these were objectives that most of us can relate to, understand and put in historical and cultural context and then elaborate ways of fighting back.
There is a parallel here in the United States between Oklahoma and 9/11. The first was horrendous in scale but was the work of a lone (American) fanatic. The results are terrible for the bereaved and for the city but did not change society. 9/11 clearly did and not only because of the scale of death and destruction but because of the near invisibility of the enemy.
It has always puzzled me why chemical weapons have been banned soon after their invention while other more traditional weapons continued to kill. Is it worse to die from mustard gas burning your lungs or shrapnel disembowelling you? The reason, or at least one reason, is the perceived insidiousness of gas as opposed to an explosive shell. So it is with this new kind of terrorism.
Most of Europe has had direct experience of terrorism in the last forty years. Sometimes the targets were random, the French Secret Army Organisation, the OAS, the Italian right, sometimes the Basques and both sides of the Northern Irish divide. Other times it was targeted, the Italian left, the Basques again and Ulster again. There were moments when both society and governments were put under serious stress and there were deep divisions. Today’s threat is different because it seems to come from outside our society and threaten the whole of it as much as we can understand.
So we should have the Martian effect with all of Europe united and united with the US. We don’t because since the threat is so vague, there cannot be a single response or even agreement on how the threat is articulated.
The first political effect of the Madrid bombs was that enough Spanish voters changed their minds, either by changing their vote or by actually going out to vote in order to change opinion poll predictions. There are three possible reasons as far as I can see: they punished the lies and equivocations of the government, two: they felt that Zapatero and the PSOE is better equipped to deal with the new emergency and three: a technical reason, that the higher turnout was made up of previously half-committed PSOE voters.
If the second reason is dominant, then, broadly speaking, we have two possible motivations. First, that those voters feel that by withdrawing Spanish troops from Iraq, they will be safe from future attack; the appeasement, or Danegeld argument. Secondly, that this radical Islamic terrorism is best faced by a combined effort of the international community under as broad an umbrella as possible (in Zapatero’s case, he wants to see the UN take over in Iraq).
Coming back to Italy (and the UK, Denmark and Poland all of whom have troops in Iraq), the debate has to be put in terms of how best to deal with the threat which we face (and no doubt even those countries which opposed the war as well). Radical Islamic violence is not just or even primarily aimed at the so-called “West”. Moderate and secular Islamic countries bore the initial brunt of the movement for most of the ‘90s – in Algeria, in Morocco, in Egypt and in Afghanistan. Invading one of those secular countries however brutal a dictatorship Saddam’s Iraq was, has only stoked the fires of Islamic radicalism, allowed it into Iraq, provided fertile recruitment ground for many others, Arab and non-Arab.
But Iraq has been invaded and is policed by a largely foreign force which cannot be removed without causing a complete disaster for west and east alike. So the only way to begin to rebuild consensus and begin to dry up the sources of Islamic radicalism is to make the soldiers into peacekeepers rather than occupiers and give responsibility to the international community. Angelo Panebianco in to-day’s Corriere argues that the Spanish threat to withdraw the troops is the equivalent of Munich 1938. He has misread time and place; the parallels are with Dayton 1995 which began the Balkan piece process. To widen the legality and the responsibility of the foreign presence in Iraq is the opposite of appeasement.
This is hardly an original hope but it is one based on the methods used to successfully stop political radicals in Italy from using terrorist methods. Mr. Zapatero’s victory on Sunday is a model for those in the rest of Europe who were against the invasion of Iraq and who were convinced that tanks and missiles encourage terrorism rather than curb it. The left in Italy, Britain and Denmark will use it in June’s European Parliament elections; the right and Tony Blair are warned that their military support of the US has a political price tag.
Monday, March 01, 2004
Telekom Srbija: scandal or electioneering?
In the general scheme of things political in Italy, the Telekom Serbia story is pretty low in terms of real significance even in its effects on politicians let alone on the rest of the country. But it does provide a useful microscope with which to examine the broader workings of the system.
Last week saw one of the chief accusers being arrested and charged with perjury and at the moment, at least, it looks as if the story will deflate and disappear.
Like all good scandal stories, Telekom Serbia had layers under layers and it was never clear if the right metaphor was an onion where you peel and peel and end up with nothing, or an artichoke where at the end of the leaves, there is a succulent heart covered with a spiky beard. Today we are closer to the onion.
There were alleged bribes and slush funds; there are shady Balkan and Italian characters, top names in Italian politics as well as of course Slobodan Milosevic, respectable and louche bankers and their agents in London, Switzerland and Monte Carlo. Magistrates, parliamentarians and journalists are all searching for the truth, or for some, the most useful “truth”. Beneath the hype was the more banal possibility of a badly thought out deal with insufficient political control exercised, one one which seemed a good idea at the time and then turned out to be much less of one.
First of all the few facts which almost no one disputes: on 9 June 1997, Italian Telecom, then a state-owned company, bought a 29% share in Telekom Serbia for 843 million D-marks. The shares were sold back to the now privatised Telecom Italia in February 2003 for 193 million euros. Beyond this, all is interpretation, hypothesis or evidence before court and Parliament.
The accusation from the centre-right is that a good portion of the purchase price went into a Milosevic slush fund and thus indirectly contibuted to the war crimes he is accused of. Worse for the centre-left as we move towards European elections this year and Italian ones in ‘06, are the allegations that then senior members of government received hefty kickbacks on the deal. Happen that two of the names belong to present leaders of the Olive: then Prime Minister Romano Prodi and Undersecretary for Foreign Trade, and Piero Fassino, the most likely Prime Ministerial and Deputy Prime Ministerial candidates in ‘06; the third name is Lamberto Dini, then the Foreign Minister and still an important figure. At one stage last year, a whole raft of Olive leaders’ names was being bandied about from Mastella to Veltroni to Rutelli. Finally, there is a shadow in the background, the then Economics Minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, now President and therefore supposedly worthy of respect and above party politicking. Still, he has already blocked the government’s media reform bill and Mr. Berlusconi has been clear that he does not appreciate the President’s powers so any lever on the person or the insitution is useful.
The slush fund story was broken by the centre-left Repubblica in 2001 but for most of last year, it was the ultra-pro-Berlusconi Libero and the Prime Minister’s brother’s paper, Giornale which made the running so much so that DS leader Piero Fassino accused Mr. Berlusconi of being the “puppetmaster” organising a campaign of defamation.
There are judicial investigations in Turin which began in 2001, looking into possible bribes, fraud and tax offences around the deal plus accusations of kickbacks. The two main witnesses accusing the centre-left politicians have now been indicted, one for money-laundering last year and the other, Antonio Volpe, for perjury last week. At the same time, a special Parliamentary Committee was set up in 2002 to investigate the possible political involvement. It only had the support of the centre-right.
With Volpe’s arrest, the centre-left is trying to close the Parliamentary Commission saying that Volpe’s perjury is proof that the whole “scandal” was invented. The government is playing for time. Mr. Berlusconi has repeated that the deal was a mistake though he has retreated from saying it was criminal. The centrist UDC Marco Follini has suggested a compromise where Prodi and the others will admit to political or economic errors and any suggestion of criminal activity will be dropped.
It is not going to happen; Mr. Prodi has already explained that the deal actually profitted the Treasury as Telecom shares went up between the Serbia purchase and privatisaiton (Repubblica.it/politica: Prodi: "Con Telekom S...). In any case the bitter accusations have been so serious that it has become impossible to discuss the merits of the business.
Arguably, the deal was justified both politically, diplomatically and economically in 1997 and arguably with hindsight it turned out to be a mistake on all counts. There is also a fair chance that some of the commissions paid ended up in the hands of shady middlemen. But we are not going to hear those arguments or the evidence, at least not in the near future.
If, as seems likely today, the Prodi-Fassino-Dini connection is shown to be a complete fabrication, there will always be the lingering doubts. We know that there will always be the possibility of disclosures close to the elections; on the other side, the substance of the deal will not be aired and above all, the presumptions of guilt, innocence and conspiracy will continue for months, years and maybe decades.
In the general scheme of things political in Italy, the Telekom Serbia story is pretty low in terms of real significance even in its effects on politicians let alone on the rest of the country. But it does provide a useful microscope with which to examine the broader workings of the system.
Last week saw one of the chief accusers being arrested and charged with perjury and at the moment, at least, it looks as if the story will deflate and disappear.
Like all good scandal stories, Telekom Serbia had layers under layers and it was never clear if the right metaphor was an onion where you peel and peel and end up with nothing, or an artichoke where at the end of the leaves, there is a succulent heart covered with a spiky beard. Today we are closer to the onion.
There were alleged bribes and slush funds; there are shady Balkan and Italian characters, top names in Italian politics as well as of course Slobodan Milosevic, respectable and louche bankers and their agents in London, Switzerland and Monte Carlo. Magistrates, parliamentarians and journalists are all searching for the truth, or for some, the most useful “truth”. Beneath the hype was the more banal possibility of a badly thought out deal with insufficient political control exercised, one one which seemed a good idea at the time and then turned out to be much less of one.
First of all the few facts which almost no one disputes: on 9 June 1997, Italian Telecom, then a state-owned company, bought a 29% share in Telekom Serbia for 843 million D-marks. The shares were sold back to the now privatised Telecom Italia in February 2003 for 193 million euros. Beyond this, all is interpretation, hypothesis or evidence before court and Parliament.
The accusation from the centre-right is that a good portion of the purchase price went into a Milosevic slush fund and thus indirectly contibuted to the war crimes he is accused of. Worse for the centre-left as we move towards European elections this year and Italian ones in ‘06, are the allegations that then senior members of government received hefty kickbacks on the deal. Happen that two of the names belong to present leaders of the Olive: then Prime Minister Romano Prodi and Undersecretary for Foreign Trade, and Piero Fassino, the most likely Prime Ministerial and Deputy Prime Ministerial candidates in ‘06; the third name is Lamberto Dini, then the Foreign Minister and still an important figure. At one stage last year, a whole raft of Olive leaders’ names was being bandied about from Mastella to Veltroni to Rutelli. Finally, there is a shadow in the background, the then Economics Minister, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi, now President and therefore supposedly worthy of respect and above party politicking. Still, he has already blocked the government’s media reform bill and Mr. Berlusconi has been clear that he does not appreciate the President’s powers so any lever on the person or the insitution is useful.
The slush fund story was broken by the centre-left Repubblica in 2001 but for most of last year, it was the ultra-pro-Berlusconi Libero and the Prime Minister’s brother’s paper, Giornale which made the running so much so that DS leader Piero Fassino accused Mr. Berlusconi of being the “puppetmaster” organising a campaign of defamation.
There are judicial investigations in Turin which began in 2001, looking into possible bribes, fraud and tax offences around the deal plus accusations of kickbacks. The two main witnesses accusing the centre-left politicians have now been indicted, one for money-laundering last year and the other, Antonio Volpe, for perjury last week. At the same time, a special Parliamentary Committee was set up in 2002 to investigate the possible political involvement. It only had the support of the centre-right.
With Volpe’s arrest, the centre-left is trying to close the Parliamentary Commission saying that Volpe’s perjury is proof that the whole “scandal” was invented. The government is playing for time. Mr. Berlusconi has repeated that the deal was a mistake though he has retreated from saying it was criminal. The centrist UDC Marco Follini has suggested a compromise where Prodi and the others will admit to political or economic errors and any suggestion of criminal activity will be dropped.
It is not going to happen; Mr. Prodi has already explained that the deal actually profitted the Treasury as Telecom shares went up between the Serbia purchase and privatisaiton (Repubblica.it/politica: Prodi: "Con Telekom S...). In any case the bitter accusations have been so serious that it has become impossible to discuss the merits of the business.
Arguably, the deal was justified both politically, diplomatically and economically in 1997 and arguably with hindsight it turned out to be a mistake on all counts. There is also a fair chance that some of the commissions paid ended up in the hands of shady middlemen. But we are not going to hear those arguments or the evidence, at least not in the near future.
If, as seems likely today, the Prodi-Fassino-Dini connection is shown to be a complete fabrication, there will always be the lingering doubts. We know that there will always be the possibility of disclosures close to the elections; on the other side, the substance of the deal will not be aired and above all, the presumptions of guilt, innocence and conspiracy will continue for months, years and maybe decades.
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
This week the blog is by Nora Galli de’ Paratesi who has just published “La lingua di Berlusconi” in MicroMega (1-2004) p.85, and who will be speaking at The American University of Rome on Wednesday 25 February (see details at the end of the article).
Silvio’s verbal incontinence; or does he really mean it?
Nora Galli de’ Paratesi
This last week has confirmed Silvio Berlusconi’s reputation as a politician who speaks his mind on all subjects whatever the consequences.
He has accused politicians of being good-for-nothing thieves who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Then he said when taxes are more than a third of income, tax evasion is “morally authorised” and then, on Sunday afternoon when most of the country was glued to the television watching the football matches, he monopolised the airwaves with detailed advice to his football team’s coach. Even his friend Vladimir would not dare to hog the limelight so much.
But the attack on politicians, especially opposition ones is an old tune which he has free associated on before, especially when he began as a politician himself. The professional politician is the negative model with which he compares himself. He is “new” and therefore clean and good. It was a club to break the opposition.
The language that Berlusconi uses about politics and politicians is charged with contempt. Not having achieved anything else in life apart from having been a professional politician for him amounts to failure. One’s success, one’s being a winner must be measured against something else. What it takes to work in politics is merely to transfer not very uncommon non political (and therefore real) experiences and get on wih it. The panoply of metaphors that he uses are revealing: politics is like a family, a home which any good pater familias can run; it is like an enterprise, an ordinary one not a giant one, that one can manage with common sense; it is like a condominium, where the property is with all of us and the running with an administrative “light” state at our service, with the magistrates as mere “staff” (do they clean the stairs?). Inequality of resources and opportunities can be dealt with by solidarity, the pious, Catholic unilateral remedy that can be dispensed by the privileged if and when they feel like it, but it is not a right that can be exercised or a problem that presents complex functionl relationships between social benefits and expenses, workers’ rights and public moral duties. The dimensions suggested by these metaphors are diminutive, domestic, derogative and unworthy of “big” and unpleasant words like ethics, social strife, incompatibility. They evoke reassuring and anesthesised domains, like home, shop or nursery or some kind of fairyland in which cakes can be eaten and had on a shelf with lots of toys by greedy children.
If denigrating professional politicians is original from one who has spent 10 years in Parliament, a prime minister who encourages tax evasion is decidedly curious: “if you ask a citizen to pay a third in taxes, he’ll pay; if it’s half his income, he feels he’s morally authorised to evade.
This is an old friend; it appeared in his early speeches; in 1988 he was even stronger when he said 50% was “theft”. The justification? “Our minds and our hearts”.
Then on Sunday, 22 February, he used the public broadcaster to give tactical instructions to the football team he owns, Milan.
Berlusconi’s relationship with football is a key point in his private and political persona. The football game metaphor, that existed before him in journalistic language, has flourished and prospered in his language as a huge totem, a magic fable. The reasons are more than one: sport has always been a political metaphor because it is a sublimation af war and war is an image close to the heart of politicians (it will be interesting to see what happens when more women join the game); it is also in his case a domain in which he is a winner (not a loser like left-wing politicians) and therefore it smacks of machismo as well as power, his own power; football is the national sport. But above all it is a game and, as such, an anasthetised world in which only enjoyment is at stake. When one reads his speeches, the image that is evoked of his voters, his accolytes and himself is the one of spotty, podgy preadolescents with knobbly, cold, red knees running around screeching in the school playground. An encouragement to regression, amusement and superficiality, and therefore a special communicative channel between him and “my voters”. That, he thinks, allows a prime minister to use public television time and resources to be close to “his people” in the domain of Neverland, rather than use his image and energy for the domain of politics as a dignified, serious realm of ideas to which his actual role should confine him.
The Department of International Relations
The American University of Rome
Via P. Roselli 4, 00158 Rome
25 Feb 18.30 – 20.00 B204 Seminar “Berlusconispeak – Italy’s new political language”
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Silvio’s verbal incontinence; or does he really mean it?
Nora Galli de’ Paratesi
This last week has confirmed Silvio Berlusconi’s reputation as a politician who speaks his mind on all subjects whatever the consequences.
He has accused politicians of being good-for-nothing thieves who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives. Then he said when taxes are more than a third of income, tax evasion is “morally authorised” and then, on Sunday afternoon when most of the country was glued to the television watching the football matches, he monopolised the airwaves with detailed advice to his football team’s coach. Even his friend Vladimir would not dare to hog the limelight so much.
But the attack on politicians, especially opposition ones is an old tune which he has free associated on before, especially when he began as a politician himself. The professional politician is the negative model with which he compares himself. He is “new” and therefore clean and good. It was a club to break the opposition.
The language that Berlusconi uses about politics and politicians is charged with contempt. Not having achieved anything else in life apart from having been a professional politician for him amounts to failure. One’s success, one’s being a winner must be measured against something else. What it takes to work in politics is merely to transfer not very uncommon non political (and therefore real) experiences and get on wih it. The panoply of metaphors that he uses are revealing: politics is like a family, a home which any good pater familias can run; it is like an enterprise, an ordinary one not a giant one, that one can manage with common sense; it is like a condominium, where the property is with all of us and the running with an administrative “light” state at our service, with the magistrates as mere “staff” (do they clean the stairs?). Inequality of resources and opportunities can be dealt with by solidarity, the pious, Catholic unilateral remedy that can be dispensed by the privileged if and when they feel like it, but it is not a right that can be exercised or a problem that presents complex functionl relationships between social benefits and expenses, workers’ rights and public moral duties. The dimensions suggested by these metaphors are diminutive, domestic, derogative and unworthy of “big” and unpleasant words like ethics, social strife, incompatibility. They evoke reassuring and anesthesised domains, like home, shop or nursery or some kind of fairyland in which cakes can be eaten and had on a shelf with lots of toys by greedy children.
If denigrating professional politicians is original from one who has spent 10 years in Parliament, a prime minister who encourages tax evasion is decidedly curious: “if you ask a citizen to pay a third in taxes, he’ll pay; if it’s half his income, he feels he’s morally authorised to evade.
This is an old friend; it appeared in his early speeches; in 1988 he was even stronger when he said 50% was “theft”. The justification? “Our minds and our hearts”.
Then on Sunday, 22 February, he used the public broadcaster to give tactical instructions to the football team he owns, Milan.
Berlusconi’s relationship with football is a key point in his private and political persona. The football game metaphor, that existed before him in journalistic language, has flourished and prospered in his language as a huge totem, a magic fable. The reasons are more than one: sport has always been a political metaphor because it is a sublimation af war and war is an image close to the heart of politicians (it will be interesting to see what happens when more women join the game); it is also in his case a domain in which he is a winner (not a loser like left-wing politicians) and therefore it smacks of machismo as well as power, his own power; football is the national sport. But above all it is a game and, as such, an anasthetised world in which only enjoyment is at stake. When one reads his speeches, the image that is evoked of his voters, his accolytes and himself is the one of spotty, podgy preadolescents with knobbly, cold, red knees running around screeching in the school playground. An encouragement to regression, amusement and superficiality, and therefore a special communicative channel between him and “my voters”. That, he thinks, allows a prime minister to use public television time and resources to be close to “his people” in the domain of Neverland, rather than use his image and energy for the domain of politics as a dignified, serious realm of ideas to which his actual role should confine him.
The Department of International Relations
The American University of Rome
Via P. Roselli 4, 00158 Rome
25 Feb 18.30 – 20.00 B204 Seminar “Berlusconispeak – Italy’s new political language”
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Monday, February 16, 2004
“United we stand…” at least for the moment
The Roman poet Trilussa did not have many illusions about politics; a latterday Aesop, his animals illustrated very human foibles. In that fateful year of 1922, he described a feline get-together. It was the Socialist Congress of Intransigent Cats where one delegate exhorted his fellow moggies thus:
No, compagni! E’ necessario/ch’ogni membro der partito, favorevole o contrario,/ nun se squaji e resti unito./ P’evità l’inconveniente/c’è un rimedio solamente:/ se legamo tutti assieme/pe’ la coda, e famo in modo/che se un gatto vô annà avanti/è obbrigato de sta’ ar chiodo, ’ché, se tira, strigne er nodo/e stracina tutti quanti. [No, comrades! It is necessary/ that every party member whether he’s for or against/ doesn’t split and stays united/ To get over this/ there is only one answer:/ we must tie ourselves together/ by the tail and we’ll do it in such a way/ that if one cat wants to go forward/ he’s obliged to stand still because if he pulls, he tightens the knot/ and pulls everyone after him.]
Instead of tying tails together so that all will move united, a triumphal “convention” in Rome this weekend decided that the two big parties of the centre-left and two of the smaller ones would fight June’s European Parliament elections from a single list of candidates.
The high point was when Romano Prodi, a non-candidate, gave a rousing speech against an unnamed opponent; he is going to stay as President of the European Commission until the end of October and he was not going to even mention Berlusconi. The other leaders all reiterated their commitment to work together towards the immediate goal of winning the EP and Italian regional elections in four months time and the long-term goal of winning the Italian elections probably in 2006.
In practical terms this means that the Democratici di Sinistra, the Margherita, the Social Democrats (SDI) and the European Republicans will present a single list of candidates under the symbol “United for the Olive Tree”. The first two make up just over 30% of the Italian Parliament and are the backbone of the opposition led by Piero Fassino and Francesco Rutelli. The other two are the rumps of two parties from the “first republic”; the SDI is led by Enrico Boselli and went left (Craxi’s supporters went rightwards either to tiny parties or into Forza Italia) while the already minute Republican Party also split with Giorgio La Malfa going right and Luciana Sbarbarti going to the Olive. The “convention” was also a way of bringing in the grass roots and fringe groups, the so-called girotondi and movimenti. They have grown up spontaneously over the last couple of years, a sign of the frustration felt by centre-left sympathisers towards the official parties. To really bring them on board would be a huge fillip for the centre-left.
The elections are still fought with preference votes which means that voters will be able to choose which candidates they prefer and there will no doubt be big fights within the list over personalities as well as policies but it is a first step towards a united front in 2006 where most seats are won on a first past the post system.
Left out of the arrangements on the right is Clemente Mastella’s UDEUR and on the left, the Greens and Communists and not surprisingly, Bertinotti’s “neo-coms” of Rifondazione, on the other side is Di Pietro and a small breakaway group from the DS.
The declaration of intent (l'Unità online-La dichiarazione di intenti...) is just that, a vague and hopeful document but very much a small beginning. It is based on Romano Prodi’s January statement and promises a detailed manifesto for the election to be drawn up by former prime minister, Giuliano Amato.
But to win elections, you need a leader, a programme and organisation.
The leader is there, albeit waiting in the wings. Prodi was stabbed in the back last time in 1998 and he is a more cautious man today but in his apparently bumbling way, he has already shown that he can beat Berlusconi and could certainly do so again. In 1996 he also showed that he could draw up a manifesto; he won with it as did Berlusconi with his “Contract with the Italians” in 2001. The organisation is the difficult part. It is not only Trilussa’s cats who are intransigent; the bane of Italian politics has always been glorification of division: “better to stick to my principles (and tho’ I do not admit it, my position) than compromise”. The ultimate success of the weekend’s meeting can only be judged by the number who do accept compromise.
All in all, “United for the Olive Tree” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a centre-left victory and there will have to be a lot more work if they are not to end up like the Intransigent Socialist Cats, scattered by a large and fierce black (shirted) dog.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
The Roman poet Trilussa did not have many illusions about politics; a latterday Aesop, his animals illustrated very human foibles. In that fateful year of 1922, he described a feline get-together. It was the Socialist Congress of Intransigent Cats where one delegate exhorted his fellow moggies thus:
No, compagni! E’ necessario/ch’ogni membro der partito, favorevole o contrario,/ nun se squaji e resti unito./ P’evità l’inconveniente/c’è un rimedio solamente:/ se legamo tutti assieme/pe’ la coda, e famo in modo/che se un gatto vô annà avanti/è obbrigato de sta’ ar chiodo, ’ché, se tira, strigne er nodo/e stracina tutti quanti. [No, comrades! It is necessary/ that every party member whether he’s for or against/ doesn’t split and stays united/ To get over this/ there is only one answer:/ we must tie ourselves together/ by the tail and we’ll do it in such a way/ that if one cat wants to go forward/ he’s obliged to stand still because if he pulls, he tightens the knot/ and pulls everyone after him.]
Instead of tying tails together so that all will move united, a triumphal “convention” in Rome this weekend decided that the two big parties of the centre-left and two of the smaller ones would fight June’s European Parliament elections from a single list of candidates.
The high point was when Romano Prodi, a non-candidate, gave a rousing speech against an unnamed opponent; he is going to stay as President of the European Commission until the end of October and he was not going to even mention Berlusconi. The other leaders all reiterated their commitment to work together towards the immediate goal of winning the EP and Italian regional elections in four months time and the long-term goal of winning the Italian elections probably in 2006.
In practical terms this means that the Democratici di Sinistra, the Margherita, the Social Democrats (SDI) and the European Republicans will present a single list of candidates under the symbol “United for the Olive Tree”. The first two make up just over 30% of the Italian Parliament and are the backbone of the opposition led by Piero Fassino and Francesco Rutelli. The other two are the rumps of two parties from the “first republic”; the SDI is led by Enrico Boselli and went left (Craxi’s supporters went rightwards either to tiny parties or into Forza Italia) while the already minute Republican Party also split with Giorgio La Malfa going right and Luciana Sbarbarti going to the Olive. The “convention” was also a way of bringing in the grass roots and fringe groups, the so-called girotondi and movimenti. They have grown up spontaneously over the last couple of years, a sign of the frustration felt by centre-left sympathisers towards the official parties. To really bring them on board would be a huge fillip for the centre-left.
The elections are still fought with preference votes which means that voters will be able to choose which candidates they prefer and there will no doubt be big fights within the list over personalities as well as policies but it is a first step towards a united front in 2006 where most seats are won on a first past the post system.
Left out of the arrangements on the right is Clemente Mastella’s UDEUR and on the left, the Greens and Communists and not surprisingly, Bertinotti’s “neo-coms” of Rifondazione, on the other side is Di Pietro and a small breakaway group from the DS.
The declaration of intent (l'Unità online-La dichiarazione di intenti...) is just that, a vague and hopeful document but very much a small beginning. It is based on Romano Prodi’s January statement and promises a detailed manifesto for the election to be drawn up by former prime minister, Giuliano Amato.
But to win elections, you need a leader, a programme and organisation.
The leader is there, albeit waiting in the wings. Prodi was stabbed in the back last time in 1998 and he is a more cautious man today but in his apparently bumbling way, he has already shown that he can beat Berlusconi and could certainly do so again. In 1996 he also showed that he could draw up a manifesto; he won with it as did Berlusconi with his “Contract with the Italians” in 2001. The organisation is the difficult part. It is not only Trilussa’s cats who are intransigent; the bane of Italian politics has always been glorification of division: “better to stick to my principles (and tho’ I do not admit it, my position) than compromise”. The ultimate success of the weekend’s meeting can only be judged by the number who do accept compromise.
All in all, “United for the Olive Tree” is a necessary but not sufficient condition for a centre-left victory and there will have to be a lot more work if they are not to end up like the Intransigent Socialist Cats, scattered by a large and fierce black (shirted) dog.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Sunday, February 08, 2004
Religious freedoms in Italy – the Concordats 75 and 20 years on
Seventy five years ago on Wednesday, on 11 February 1929, Italy and the Vatican were “reconciled”. Three treaties were signed in which Pope Pius XI recognised the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Italy, which had removed most of his predecessor Pius IX’s temporal powers. It was the solution to “the Roman Question” which had blighted the first 60 years of united Italy and which had been at the basis of a troubled relationship between Church and State.
On one side, the Vatican and successive Popes were loath to forego their temporal powers; on the other, the young Italy had doubts about her real sovereignty and independence with such a large cuckoo in the nest. As a result, for most of Italy’s history, “religious issues” have invariably consisted of tension between a nominally secular Italy and Roman Catholicism represented by the Vatican and the Church in Italy (not always the same thing).
One of the 1929 treaties was a concordat, an agreement between the Vatican and another state regulating the status of the Roman Catholic Church in that country. This one gave priests special protection under the law, special tax concessions for Church income and property, religious education in schools was put under the control of the episcopate, Church marriages were recognised and Catholicism became the state religion. Secular Italians fought for a 19th Century separation but with little success, especially in the Christian Democrat period from 1945 to 1992. In most Italian villages until at least the ‘60s, the parish church carried more political weight than the DC section.
In 1984, 20 years ago next week, the Concordat was revised; Catholicism maintained some of its privileges but there was - at least in theory - more pluralism possible in religious education at school (though the Church maintains its prerogative in choosing teachers) and taxpayers were able to choose to give part of their taxes to the Church.
Over the whole period and until very recently, other religions were hardly present and in practice not perceived. When a group of Jewish refugees arrived in an Alpine village during World War II, the kind and welcoming parish priest exhorted his flock to look after them because even if they spoke a foreign language, were city folk and different in so many ways, they were after all “cristiani come noi”, Christians like us.
There was no irony to the remark as “cristiano” meant and for many still means just a human being. Now, though, Italians are having to come to terms with religious differences. There are perhaps 400,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and many other smaller non-Catholic Christians, mostly dismissed by the hierarchy as “sects,” but who have growing followings. The biggest single non-Catholic group are the Muslims, maybe a million, coming from a wide variety of national origins.
There have been requests by some Muslim communities for separate gym facilities for boys and girls in state schools, for prayer areas and for halal meat. The first request has been turned down so far but without a firm declaration of principle; the other two requests have usually been fulfilled, at least when possible practically.
Far more controversial was the case last year when a very vocal Italian Muslim, Adel Smith demanded that the crucifix in his daughter’s school be taken down. He won his case but the uproar was such that the school appealed and, for a moment at least, Italy discovered that it was still a Christian country. Previously, the only calls for the removal of crosses from public spaces came from secularists and were usually unsuccessful.
The defence of the crucifix was so heated that if I believed in conspiracy theories I might have thought the whole affair was a fiendishly clever Vatican conspiracy to kill secularism in the country and insert references to Europe’s “Christian roots” in the EU’s Constitution then being discussed. But I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, though I am sure that the French and now German debate on laicité will spill over into Italy. Mr. Smith has promised to continue his battle, providing much heat but little light, while the wider debate might just provide another opportunity for Italy to develop into a pluralist and multi-cultural society.
If so, it will be the previous dominance of the Church that ironically prevents French extremes. Precisely because religion in Italy has been a matter of politics and power more than spirituality, open to compromise rather than dogma there are good chances of compromises as new religions grow.
For most Italians, the crucifix has little overt religious significance; it adorns churches of course but few Italians consider them very spiritual. And among the “faithful,” it hangs stylishly over bronzed and muscular torsos or between decoratively supported cleavages. To turn the headscarf or hejab into a fashion statement would be a very Italian way of dealing with the question.
Already the media remind us of Eid, the Chinese New Year, Yom Kippur, unheard of even a decade ago. Despite the long battles between the Church and the secularists, Italy does not have France’s militant revolutionary secular tradition and will never be a completely secular country, but it won’t be fundamentalist either.
The Department of International Relations at The American University of Rome will be marking the Concordats’ anniversaries with a seminar:
11 Feb. 18.30 - 20.00 B204 Seminar "Religious freedoms in Italy 75 years after the Lateran Pacts"
The relationship between Church and State in Italy has never been straightforward and seldom been easy. Before unification, the Pope was one of the many sovereigns reigning in Italy, a political actor as well as a spiritual one. The Lateran Pacts answered “the Roman Question” but created new questions. Seventy five years on and 20 years after the revision of the Concordat, the role of religion in Italy is being questioned once again as the country becomes multi-religious for the first time since the Roman empire. John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter will look at "Church/State Relations in an Increasingly Pluralistic Italy". Anna Foa Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome, Sapienza, “The Church and the religious freedom in Italy (1848-1929)”, Giulio Ercolessi, Fondazione Critica liberale “Secularism in Italy”
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog:
The blog’s address is http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
International Relations email is internationalrelations@aur.edu
Seventy five years ago on Wednesday, on 11 February 1929, Italy and the Vatican were “reconciled”. Three treaties were signed in which Pope Pius XI recognised the legitimacy of the Kingdom of Italy, which had removed most of his predecessor Pius IX’s temporal powers. It was the solution to “the Roman Question” which had blighted the first 60 years of united Italy and which had been at the basis of a troubled relationship between Church and State.
On one side, the Vatican and successive Popes were loath to forego their temporal powers; on the other, the young Italy had doubts about her real sovereignty and independence with such a large cuckoo in the nest. As a result, for most of Italy’s history, “religious issues” have invariably consisted of tension between a nominally secular Italy and Roman Catholicism represented by the Vatican and the Church in Italy (not always the same thing).
One of the 1929 treaties was a concordat, an agreement between the Vatican and another state regulating the status of the Roman Catholic Church in that country. This one gave priests special protection under the law, special tax concessions for Church income and property, religious education in schools was put under the control of the episcopate, Church marriages were recognised and Catholicism became the state religion. Secular Italians fought for a 19th Century separation but with little success, especially in the Christian Democrat period from 1945 to 1992. In most Italian villages until at least the ‘60s, the parish church carried more political weight than the DC section.
In 1984, 20 years ago next week, the Concordat was revised; Catholicism maintained some of its privileges but there was - at least in theory - more pluralism possible in religious education at school (though the Church maintains its prerogative in choosing teachers) and taxpayers were able to choose to give part of their taxes to the Church.
Over the whole period and until very recently, other religions were hardly present and in practice not perceived. When a group of Jewish refugees arrived in an Alpine village during World War II, the kind and welcoming parish priest exhorted his flock to look after them because even if they spoke a foreign language, were city folk and different in so many ways, they were after all “cristiani come noi”, Christians like us.
There was no irony to the remark as “cristiano” meant and for many still means just a human being. Now, though, Italians are having to come to terms with religious differences. There are perhaps 400,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses and many other smaller non-Catholic Christians, mostly dismissed by the hierarchy as “sects,” but who have growing followings. The biggest single non-Catholic group are the Muslims, maybe a million, coming from a wide variety of national origins.
There have been requests by some Muslim communities for separate gym facilities for boys and girls in state schools, for prayer areas and for halal meat. The first request has been turned down so far but without a firm declaration of principle; the other two requests have usually been fulfilled, at least when possible practically.
Far more controversial was the case last year when a very vocal Italian Muslim, Adel Smith demanded that the crucifix in his daughter’s school be taken down. He won his case but the uproar was such that the school appealed and, for a moment at least, Italy discovered that it was still a Christian country. Previously, the only calls for the removal of crosses from public spaces came from secularists and were usually unsuccessful.
The defence of the crucifix was so heated that if I believed in conspiracy theories I might have thought the whole affair was a fiendishly clever Vatican conspiracy to kill secularism in the country and insert references to Europe’s “Christian roots” in the EU’s Constitution then being discussed. But I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, though I am sure that the French and now German debate on laicité will spill over into Italy. Mr. Smith has promised to continue his battle, providing much heat but little light, while the wider debate might just provide another opportunity for Italy to develop into a pluralist and multi-cultural society.
If so, it will be the previous dominance of the Church that ironically prevents French extremes. Precisely because religion in Italy has been a matter of politics and power more than spirituality, open to compromise rather than dogma there are good chances of compromises as new religions grow.
For most Italians, the crucifix has little overt religious significance; it adorns churches of course but few Italians consider them very spiritual. And among the “faithful,” it hangs stylishly over bronzed and muscular torsos or between decoratively supported cleavages. To turn the headscarf or hejab into a fashion statement would be a very Italian way of dealing with the question.
Already the media remind us of Eid, the Chinese New Year, Yom Kippur, unheard of even a decade ago. Despite the long battles between the Church and the secularists, Italy does not have France’s militant revolutionary secular tradition and will never be a completely secular country, but it won’t be fundamentalist either.
The Department of International Relations at The American University of Rome will be marking the Concordats’ anniversaries with a seminar:
11 Feb. 18.30 - 20.00 B204 Seminar "Religious freedoms in Italy 75 years after the Lateran Pacts"
The relationship between Church and State in Italy has never been straightforward and seldom been easy. Before unification, the Pope was one of the many sovereigns reigning in Italy, a political actor as well as a spiritual one. The Lateran Pacts answered “the Roman Question” but created new questions. Seventy five years on and 20 years after the revision of the Concordat, the role of religion in Italy is being questioned once again as the country becomes multi-religious for the first time since the Roman empire. John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter will look at "Church/State Relations in an Increasingly Pluralistic Italy". Anna Foa Professor of Modern History at the University of Rome, Sapienza, “The Church and the religious freedom in Italy (1848-1929)”, Giulio Ercolessi, Fondazione Critica liberale “Secularism in Italy”
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International Relations email is internationalrelations@aur.edu
It’s not the BBC – the RAI, broadcasting and media law in Italy; the verifica.
This week was supposed to have seen the consolidation of the government coalition, the so-called verifica. There should have been discussions between the coalition leaders, decisions taken on issues to give priority to and - perhaps - a cabinet reshuffle. Instead, Mr. Berlusconi found that his allies were not as loyal as they ought to be and that they do not always follow the party line. So far, the process has dragged on for two weeks and little has been verified apart from the muddle.
The Gasparri media reform bill is a controversial piece of legislation that would protect one of the Prime Minister’s television channels and allow broadcasters to move into the print media and, arguably, allow a single operator to take a larger share of the total market. It has been strongly criticised as being blatantly in the interest of Mr. Berlusconi’s own media conglomerate Mediaset. For some of these reasons, President Ciampi refused to sign it last year and asked Parliament to reconsider the draft. This draft came very close to defeat on some crucial amendments, so instead of steaming through Parliament propelled by a huge majority, it was been ignominiously withdrawn to Committee to languish there probably till after the European Parliament elections in June.
There were exchanges between the otherwise usually amicable Umberto Bossi and Berlusconi. The first said the other was “cooked” and the Prime Minister replied that the opponents in the coalition would end up cooked by the Euro-elections. Not the most edifying or even witty exchange of political invective.
Whatever happens in this coming week, a process that should have given new impetus and energy to the government has ended up weakening it. The differences remain unresolved and there have been no clear winners or losers in terms of either jobs or programmes. Pressing issues like pensions, devolution and the new financial regulator will no doubt be given many words, but none of them definitive.
At the same time, the media, the issue most closely linked to Silvio Berlusconi, keeps on bubbling away.
It is revealing to compare Italy with the British experience of the last fortnight. The Hutton report gave the BBC a bloody nose but since then, there has been a very audible honing of weapons in the Corporation ready for the return match which will be the Butler report on intelligence gathering leading up to the war in Iraq. It is just possible that investigative reporting and criticism of government will be muted. On the other hand it seems more likely that by tightening their procedures, the BBC will enhance and strengthen its powers of criticism.
Here in Italy, in a 3 January report “Reporters sans frontières” reckoned that media pluralism was at risk in Italy as a result of Berlusconi’s control. Many others are worried; Guglielmo Epifani, the secretary general of the left-wing union CGIL, told an opposition conference on the media that the sector was “a patient with a 39 degree (102F) fever”.
There has been criticism of RAI’s techniques, especially the Channel 1 news; one of its senior editors resigned accusing the director of doctoring the news in the Government’s favour, omitting embarrassing material like Berlusconi’s famous “Kapò” speech at the European Parliament last July or “sandwiching” critical material between wads of pro-government padding, called a “sandwiche” or panino in RAI newsroomspeak. Paolo Serventi Longhi, the Secretary General of the Journalists’ Union, used the example that print media and most of the other televisions recently criticised economics minister Tremonti one evening, but nothing appeared on RAI 1.
And the opposition-leaning RAI President Lucia Annunziata accused Berlusconi of “calling the board members to murmur names and influence programme choice”. The government supporters on the Board hotly denied these accusations but the reputation of the RAI sank even lower. In contrast to Britain, the battle between Government and public service broadcasting in Italy is a bloody street fight, hand to hand, desk by desk, news item by news item.
Even the humorists have had a tough time; a cartoonist declared that it was impossible to make fun of what was already ridiculous, while a court accepted imitator Sabrina Guzzanti’s appeal against the suppression of her programme “RAIot, Armi di Distrazione di Massa”. The judge affirmed the right to satire, but then declared that all the offending sketches were not satire at all, they were true. Guzzanti impersonates Berlusconi (as well as Massimo D’Alema, Annunziata and a number of other public figures) better than they do themselves. She fills theatres, but was removed from the RAI in November. No wonder that despite judgement in her favour, we still do not have a broadcast date.
The other battlefront is in Parliament. Last week about 40 deputies voted against the Gasparri Bill. Almost unheard of elsewhere, in Italy Parliamentarians may vote secretly on occasions, so we do not know the names of the rebels. Some of these votes were National Alliance and others were from the centrist UDC; last year they had voted compactly in favour but with a secret division, many of them used it to fire a shot across the Prime Minister’s bows. The rebellion was a warning to Mr. Berlusconi that he will not have everything his own way for the rest of the legislature.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog.
The blog’s address is http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
International Relations email is internationalrelations@aur.edu
This week was supposed to have seen the consolidation of the government coalition, the so-called verifica. There should have been discussions between the coalition leaders, decisions taken on issues to give priority to and - perhaps - a cabinet reshuffle. Instead, Mr. Berlusconi found that his allies were not as loyal as they ought to be and that they do not always follow the party line. So far, the process has dragged on for two weeks and little has been verified apart from the muddle.
The Gasparri media reform bill is a controversial piece of legislation that would protect one of the Prime Minister’s television channels and allow broadcasters to move into the print media and, arguably, allow a single operator to take a larger share of the total market. It has been strongly criticised as being blatantly in the interest of Mr. Berlusconi’s own media conglomerate Mediaset. For some of these reasons, President Ciampi refused to sign it last year and asked Parliament to reconsider the draft. This draft came very close to defeat on some crucial amendments, so instead of steaming through Parliament propelled by a huge majority, it was been ignominiously withdrawn to Committee to languish there probably till after the European Parliament elections in June.
There were exchanges between the otherwise usually amicable Umberto Bossi and Berlusconi. The first said the other was “cooked” and the Prime Minister replied that the opponents in the coalition would end up cooked by the Euro-elections. Not the most edifying or even witty exchange of political invective.
Whatever happens in this coming week, a process that should have given new impetus and energy to the government has ended up weakening it. The differences remain unresolved and there have been no clear winners or losers in terms of either jobs or programmes. Pressing issues like pensions, devolution and the new financial regulator will no doubt be given many words, but none of them definitive.
At the same time, the media, the issue most closely linked to Silvio Berlusconi, keeps on bubbling away.
It is revealing to compare Italy with the British experience of the last fortnight. The Hutton report gave the BBC a bloody nose but since then, there has been a very audible honing of weapons in the Corporation ready for the return match which will be the Butler report on intelligence gathering leading up to the war in Iraq. It is just possible that investigative reporting and criticism of government will be muted. On the other hand it seems more likely that by tightening their procedures, the BBC will enhance and strengthen its powers of criticism.
Here in Italy, in a 3 January report “Reporters sans frontières” reckoned that media pluralism was at risk in Italy as a result of Berlusconi’s control. Many others are worried; Guglielmo Epifani, the secretary general of the left-wing union CGIL, told an opposition conference on the media that the sector was “a patient with a 39 degree (102F) fever”.
There has been criticism of RAI’s techniques, especially the Channel 1 news; one of its senior editors resigned accusing the director of doctoring the news in the Government’s favour, omitting embarrassing material like Berlusconi’s famous “Kapò” speech at the European Parliament last July or “sandwiching” critical material between wads of pro-government padding, called a “sandwiche” or panino in RAI newsroomspeak. Paolo Serventi Longhi, the Secretary General of the Journalists’ Union, used the example that print media and most of the other televisions recently criticised economics minister Tremonti one evening, but nothing appeared on RAI 1.
And the opposition-leaning RAI President Lucia Annunziata accused Berlusconi of “calling the board members to murmur names and influence programme choice”. The government supporters on the Board hotly denied these accusations but the reputation of the RAI sank even lower. In contrast to Britain, the battle between Government and public service broadcasting in Italy is a bloody street fight, hand to hand, desk by desk, news item by news item.
Even the humorists have had a tough time; a cartoonist declared that it was impossible to make fun of what was already ridiculous, while a court accepted imitator Sabrina Guzzanti’s appeal against the suppression of her programme “RAIot, Armi di Distrazione di Massa”. The judge affirmed the right to satire, but then declared that all the offending sketches were not satire at all, they were true. Guzzanti impersonates Berlusconi (as well as Massimo D’Alema, Annunziata and a number of other public figures) better than they do themselves. She fills theatres, but was removed from the RAI in November. No wonder that despite judgement in her favour, we still do not have a broadcast date.
The other battlefront is in Parliament. Last week about 40 deputies voted against the Gasparri Bill. Almost unheard of elsewhere, in Italy Parliamentarians may vote secretly on occasions, so we do not know the names of the rebels. Some of these votes were National Alliance and others were from the centrist UDC; last year they had voted compactly in favour but with a secret division, many of them used it to fire a shot across the Prime Minister’s bows. The rebellion was a warning to Mr. Berlusconi that he will not have everything his own way for the rest of the legislature.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog.
The blog’s address is http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
International Relations email is internationalrelations@aur.edu
Sunday, January 25, 2004
Berlusconi’s first ten years in politics
Silvio Berlusconi actually “came onto the field” on 26 January 1994, but always the early bird, he celebrated the anniversary yesterday at an extravagant ceremony at the Palacongresso in EUR here in Rome. The 105 minute speech was remarkably consistent with his opening message a decade ago.
In 1994, he was going to save Italy from Communism. “Then” he declared to rapturous applause from the six thousand supporters, “it was called by its real name and went under the symbol of the hammer and sickel. Today, the Communists and the left have tried to disguise themselves. They’ve had a facelift, but it didn’t work”, proudly vaunting his own successful cosmetic surgery. No false modesty here; he had “saved Italy” and would do it again if necessary, to end what he called “a permanent civil war”.
Not surprisingly, Berlusconi launched his second salvo at the magistrates he calls “Jacobins”, the Milan prosecutors who dealt with the kickback system known as Tangentopoli and then indicted Berlusconi himself along with many of his business associates and employees.
He quoted the ex-Socialist Genoese priest, Gianni Baget Bozzo at length “Fascism was less odious than the begowned bureaucracy which used violence in the name of justice” (Italian magistrates wear gowns in court). “If there was any freedom,” he went on reading Baget Bozzo’s article, “the names of the Milan magistrates, the Di Pietros, the Borrellis, the Davigos, the Bocassinis would be remembered with horror.”
This is strong stuff and he has attacked the magistrature many times before; still, each time, it comes as a shock. To hear an Italian Prime Minister saying that members of one of the institutions of a democratic state are worse than fascism is or should be unusual, especially as it is Mr. Berlusconi himself who resembles Robespierre with all his certainties. There is also something surreal and maniacally illusory to hear him attacking a non-existent political force… and even more peculiar that he has an audience that believes it and laps it up.
For his followers, his charm, part messianic and part variety show compère, is still obviously strong. He still knows how to play the populist chords and work his audience.
He has less of a shine for his allies. He also used the speech to try throw out lines to them to try and bring them in closer ready for the cabinet reshuffle and programme adjustment due this week or next. Rocco Buttiglione criticised the anti-magistrate remarks and Umberto Bossi once again huffed and puffed over the lack of progress towards greater devolution. Fini made no comment.
In practice, yesterday’s event was the beginning of the European Parliament election campaign, five months before the elections. Mr. Berlusconi knows that his strength is as an electioneering politician. Not only does he obviously have the resources – money and media – he is actually very good at it. The operation of “coming onto the field” 10 years ago was a brilliant success. To invent a party in six months and then pull it out of a hat two months before elections, and then win, was unique. Even more so, when he put together the improbable alliance between the Northern League, National Alliance and his new party.
After the inevitable rupture with Bossi and the League seven months later, Berlusconi showed a different quality, persistence in the face of adversity. From having been a “company party”, a “nimble party”, Forza Italia became something approaching a traditional party but despite the growing organisational structures, it remained and remains dependent on the founder. Yesterday’s performance was proof if any were necessary.
It showed once again how 10 years ago Italian politics veered off any other track, not just European. Wealth, control of the media and political power combined in one person are not part of any democratic norm but Berlusconi managed to do it as well as sustaining criminal prosecutions that would have been impossible elsewhere.
But Berlusconi’s decade in politics is not just due to his own ability however great that might be; without the support of parts of the centre-left, in particular Massimo D’Alema who accepted him as his interlocutor for the Bicameral Commission’s proposed constitutional reforms instead of clearing up the conflicts of interest or even applying existing laws. In 1998, Romano Prodi was defeated in Parliament, again with the connivance of part of the left which wanted to see D’Alema as Prime Minister. Those divisions remained till the elections and almost certainly allowed Berlusconi to win in 2001.
If they continue, then tomorrow will mark just the first decade of Silvio Berlusconi political career.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Silvio Berlusconi actually “came onto the field” on 26 January 1994, but always the early bird, he celebrated the anniversary yesterday at an extravagant ceremony at the Palacongresso in EUR here in Rome. The 105 minute speech was remarkably consistent with his opening message a decade ago.
In 1994, he was going to save Italy from Communism. “Then” he declared to rapturous applause from the six thousand supporters, “it was called by its real name and went under the symbol of the hammer and sickel. Today, the Communists and the left have tried to disguise themselves. They’ve had a facelift, but it didn’t work”, proudly vaunting his own successful cosmetic surgery. No false modesty here; he had “saved Italy” and would do it again if necessary, to end what he called “a permanent civil war”.
Not surprisingly, Berlusconi launched his second salvo at the magistrates he calls “Jacobins”, the Milan prosecutors who dealt with the kickback system known as Tangentopoli and then indicted Berlusconi himself along with many of his business associates and employees.
He quoted the ex-Socialist Genoese priest, Gianni Baget Bozzo at length “Fascism was less odious than the begowned bureaucracy which used violence in the name of justice” (Italian magistrates wear gowns in court). “If there was any freedom,” he went on reading Baget Bozzo’s article, “the names of the Milan magistrates, the Di Pietros, the Borrellis, the Davigos, the Bocassinis would be remembered with horror.”
This is strong stuff and he has attacked the magistrature many times before; still, each time, it comes as a shock. To hear an Italian Prime Minister saying that members of one of the institutions of a democratic state are worse than fascism is or should be unusual, especially as it is Mr. Berlusconi himself who resembles Robespierre with all his certainties. There is also something surreal and maniacally illusory to hear him attacking a non-existent political force… and even more peculiar that he has an audience that believes it and laps it up.
For his followers, his charm, part messianic and part variety show compère, is still obviously strong. He still knows how to play the populist chords and work his audience.
He has less of a shine for his allies. He also used the speech to try throw out lines to them to try and bring them in closer ready for the cabinet reshuffle and programme adjustment due this week or next. Rocco Buttiglione criticised the anti-magistrate remarks and Umberto Bossi once again huffed and puffed over the lack of progress towards greater devolution. Fini made no comment.
In practice, yesterday’s event was the beginning of the European Parliament election campaign, five months before the elections. Mr. Berlusconi knows that his strength is as an electioneering politician. Not only does he obviously have the resources – money and media – he is actually very good at it. The operation of “coming onto the field” 10 years ago was a brilliant success. To invent a party in six months and then pull it out of a hat two months before elections, and then win, was unique. Even more so, when he put together the improbable alliance between the Northern League, National Alliance and his new party.
After the inevitable rupture with Bossi and the League seven months later, Berlusconi showed a different quality, persistence in the face of adversity. From having been a “company party”, a “nimble party”, Forza Italia became something approaching a traditional party but despite the growing organisational structures, it remained and remains dependent on the founder. Yesterday’s performance was proof if any were necessary.
It showed once again how 10 years ago Italian politics veered off any other track, not just European. Wealth, control of the media and political power combined in one person are not part of any democratic norm but Berlusconi managed to do it as well as sustaining criminal prosecutions that would have been impossible elsewhere.
But Berlusconi’s decade in politics is not just due to his own ability however great that might be; without the support of parts of the centre-left, in particular Massimo D’Alema who accepted him as his interlocutor for the Bicameral Commission’s proposed constitutional reforms instead of clearing up the conflicts of interest or even applying existing laws. In 1998, Romano Prodi was defeated in Parliament, again with the connivance of part of the left which wanted to see D’Alema as Prime Minister. Those divisions remained till the elections and almost certainly allowed Berlusconi to win in 2001.
If they continue, then tomorrow will mark just the first decade of Silvio Berlusconi political career.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
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http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Friday, January 23, 2004
A comment on "Zitto italiano…" from a diplomat who worked for a long time in Italy and knows the country well:
while I agree with a lot of what you say about Parmalat, I'm surprised you take the Bank of Italy's side on financial regulation. For too many years, and especially under Fazio (who with the euro has less to do elsewhere, and a huge staff), the Bank has promoted cosy cartels in the Italian banking industry and not acted as an effective supervisor of the financial industry. I'd be very happy for Consob to take over.
while I agree with a lot of what you say about Parmalat, I'm surprised you take the Bank of Italy's side on financial regulation. For too many years, and especially under Fazio (who with the euro has less to do elsewhere, and a huge staff), the Bank has promoted cosy cartels in the Italian banking industry and not acted as an effective supervisor of the financial industry. I'd be very happy for Consob to take over.
Friday, January 09, 2004
Zitto italiano se no, pompare tutta la notte
or
Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream. W. S. Gilbert
There is an old Venetian story about a sailor who takes ship on a leaky Greek schooner. That night, he wakes to find the water pouring in through a gash in the hull. Alarmed, he shakes the Greek sailor in the bunk next to him “zitto italiano” mutters his companion, “se no, pompare tutta la notte” (shut up Italian, otherwise we’ll be pumping all night). ” And he turns over and goes back to sleep.
As far as Parmalat is concerned, the ship has actually sunk and there must be bankers and regulators of many national hues who acted just like that Greek sailor. One American banker who on the contrary must be feeling pretty smug today, asked Parmalat three questions five years ago. What is the corporate structure of the company? Why do you want to borrow $7bn when you have $5bn in the bank? And finally, why does a milk and yogurt business need so many offshore subsidiaries? He received no satisfactory answers and to the chagrin of his superiors refused to OK a loan and his bank does not appear in the top ten losers. A Bologna relation of the young man, also a banker declared bluntly that he would “rather give a dollar to a beggar than lend one to Calisto Tanzi”, Parmalat’s founder.
These stories were told me off the record; on the record Mr. Tanzi threatened to sue any bank that even suggested Parmalat’s finances might be shaky. In March last year, he made a formal complaint to the Milan Stock Exchange and the Consob, the regulatory body. For the rest of last year, investigations moved slowly forward but as the world now knows, by then, it was not a question of pumping, the ship was already full of water; it just had not sunk yet.
The immediate financial consequences are huge losses for big banks and small investors. The Milan prosecutors have opened a link (Procura della Repubblica di Milano) inviting reports by anyone who feels they have been cheated or lost out over the Parmalat collapse. There will be a raft of civil litigation as well as the criminal cases in all of the countries where Parmalat either operated or where it borrowed money. The globalisation of the fraud is another reason why comparisons with Enron are weak (the other as the FT pointed (29 December), is that Parmalat is missing about €10 bn “This is about 0.8 per cent of Italy's gross domestic product. In terms of relative GDP, the Enron case in the US is peanuts by comparison”.
But there is one connection with Enron; one of the consequences of that case was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which makes no distinction between American and foreign companies. Banks and accountants who have had dealings with Parmalat could well be liable under the act’s anti-fraud provisions.
The Italo-American divide is visible in the long term consequences too. In the US, when there is a crisis, visible action is taken immediately. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. In Italy, partly through the mechanics of coalition government, partly through the intangibles of national culture, there is much talk and little concrete action. These differences will clash over how to deal with Parmalat.
Credibility and confidence in Italian business and business practice has taken a terrible bashing this last year. For very different reasons, two other giants of the Italian corporate world got into trouble, Fiat and Cirio. The fact that this government reduced penalties on false accounting and the Prime Minister’s own companies and employees have been convicted of bribing tax inspectors clearly does not inspire confidence in Italian capitalism either. As Marco Vitale (ex-member of the Consob) hoped for in a series of articles in Corriere della Sera 31 December, 2 and 6 January), now is the time for major reforms.
He knows, though, that they are not going to happen; at least not on the same time span as Sarbanes-Oxley.
The Parmalat fiasco has engendered a turf war between part of the Government and the Bank of Italy. Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti wants to set up a new regulatory authority taking power from the Bank and Consob promising that it would be operative by March Super-authority operativa entro marzo. He is supported by the Prime Minister and his usual ally, Mr. Bossi, but other coalition members are lukewarm and the issue is adding serious strains to the alliance, not critical yet, but they could develop. The opposition is strongly against the proposal “The independence and autonomy of the Bank of Italy are for us a constitutional value” said the DS’s leader Piero Fassino. And indeed in the whole post-war period, the Bank of Italy was one of the few institutions not part of the political spoils sharing.
If put into effect, whatever real or possible efficiency it might have, the new body would be a further concentration of power under the executive’s control.
Finally, a month after the first explosions, there have been almost no suggestions of political involvement but it is difficult to believe that no politician or party had dealings with Mr. Tanzi. The sparring has begun but the real battles are to come.
This is a business story which is going way beyond the dairies of Emilia.
Next week: “Media pluralism? Or how to make money and win elections too” The Gasparri Media Bill back in Parliament and programming control in RAI.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog and let us know of others who do want to receive it:
The blog’s address for back numbers is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
or
Things are seldom what they seem, skim milk masquerades as cream. W. S. Gilbert
There is an old Venetian story about a sailor who takes ship on a leaky Greek schooner. That night, he wakes to find the water pouring in through a gash in the hull. Alarmed, he shakes the Greek sailor in the bunk next to him “zitto italiano” mutters his companion, “se no, pompare tutta la notte” (shut up Italian, otherwise we’ll be pumping all night). ” And he turns over and goes back to sleep.
As far as Parmalat is concerned, the ship has actually sunk and there must be bankers and regulators of many national hues who acted just like that Greek sailor. One American banker who on the contrary must be feeling pretty smug today, asked Parmalat three questions five years ago. What is the corporate structure of the company? Why do you want to borrow $7bn when you have $5bn in the bank? And finally, why does a milk and yogurt business need so many offshore subsidiaries? He received no satisfactory answers and to the chagrin of his superiors refused to OK a loan and his bank does not appear in the top ten losers. A Bologna relation of the young man, also a banker declared bluntly that he would “rather give a dollar to a beggar than lend one to Calisto Tanzi”, Parmalat’s founder.
These stories were told me off the record; on the record Mr. Tanzi threatened to sue any bank that even suggested Parmalat’s finances might be shaky. In March last year, he made a formal complaint to the Milan Stock Exchange and the Consob, the regulatory body. For the rest of last year, investigations moved slowly forward but as the world now knows, by then, it was not a question of pumping, the ship was already full of water; it just had not sunk yet.
The immediate financial consequences are huge losses for big banks and small investors. The Milan prosecutors have opened a link (Procura della Repubblica di Milano) inviting reports by anyone who feels they have been cheated or lost out over the Parmalat collapse. There will be a raft of civil litigation as well as the criminal cases in all of the countries where Parmalat either operated or where it borrowed money. The globalisation of the fraud is another reason why comparisons with Enron are weak (the other as the FT pointed (29 December), is that Parmalat is missing about €10 bn “This is about 0.8 per cent of Italy's gross domestic product. In terms of relative GDP, the Enron case in the US is peanuts by comparison”.
But there is one connection with Enron; one of the consequences of that case was the Sarbanes-Oxley Act which makes no distinction between American and foreign companies. Banks and accountants who have had dealings with Parmalat could well be liable under the act’s anti-fraud provisions.
The Italo-American divide is visible in the long term consequences too. In the US, when there is a crisis, visible action is taken immediately. Sometimes it works, sometimes it does not. In Italy, partly through the mechanics of coalition government, partly through the intangibles of national culture, there is much talk and little concrete action. These differences will clash over how to deal with Parmalat.
Credibility and confidence in Italian business and business practice has taken a terrible bashing this last year. For very different reasons, two other giants of the Italian corporate world got into trouble, Fiat and Cirio. The fact that this government reduced penalties on false accounting and the Prime Minister’s own companies and employees have been convicted of bribing tax inspectors clearly does not inspire confidence in Italian capitalism either. As Marco Vitale (ex-member of the Consob) hoped for in a series of articles in Corriere della Sera 31 December, 2 and 6 January), now is the time for major reforms.
He knows, though, that they are not going to happen; at least not on the same time span as Sarbanes-Oxley.
The Parmalat fiasco has engendered a turf war between part of the Government and the Bank of Italy. Economics Minister Giulio Tremonti wants to set up a new regulatory authority taking power from the Bank and Consob promising that it would be operative by March Super-authority operativa entro marzo. He is supported by the Prime Minister and his usual ally, Mr. Bossi, but other coalition members are lukewarm and the issue is adding serious strains to the alliance, not critical yet, but they could develop. The opposition is strongly against the proposal “The independence and autonomy of the Bank of Italy are for us a constitutional value” said the DS’s leader Piero Fassino. And indeed in the whole post-war period, the Bank of Italy was one of the few institutions not part of the political spoils sharing.
If put into effect, whatever real or possible efficiency it might have, the new body would be a further concentration of power under the executive’s control.
Finally, a month after the first explosions, there have been almost no suggestions of political involvement but it is difficult to believe that no politician or party had dealings with Mr. Tanzi. The sparring has begun but the real battles are to come.
This is a business story which is going way beyond the dairies of Emilia.
Next week: “Media pluralism? Or how to make money and win elections too” The Gasparri Media Bill back in Parliament and programming control in RAI.
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email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Friday, January 02, 2004
Looking back, looking forward.
Italian Politics in the new and old years
Iraq, Berlusconi’s legal trials and perhaps tribulations, the European Parliamentary elections and Prodi’s return.
Certainly, no one can complain that Italian politics were boring last year.
There was the war, of course, which produced some nifty acrobatics and some unlikely alliances. In the build-up the Prime Minister had veered from supporting the American interventionist policy after seeing Mr. Bush at his ranch in Texas to supporting diplomacy after conversations with Mr. Putin.
As the invasion drew closer, Mr. Berlusconi took a free ride, using the Constitution as a shield to avoid committing Italian forces at the same time as giving verbal support to Messrs. Bush and Blair. Unlike his friend José Maria Aznar, he did not even have to decide on which way to vote in the UN Security Council as Italy was not a member. Obviously the Prime Minister did not spell out Italy’s refusal to commit troops; the Constitution is not wholly pacifist and does allow Italy to take part in legally sanctioned wars as happened in the 1991 Gulf War. The implication this time was that Government lawyers reckoned there was insufficient legal foundation for going to war. Far from condemning the Prime Minister for being two-faced, many Italians, not only Government supporters, reckoned that he was being an able and furbo player.
In any case, there was certainly insufficient political support; coalition allies were lukewarm and most of the country was strongly against the war. The result was the improbable linking of arms between nuns and no-globals, former anti-clericals and cardinals plus a good sprinkling of secular and moderates of all colours, much like in the rest of Europe and some of the US.
As it turned out, Italian intervention in the post-war occupation was far more bloody than anyone had dared predict. Nineteen carabinieri, soldiers and civilians died in a suicide bomb attack in Nasiriya in November. It was also a surprise to see how the Italian tricolour appeared at windows almost as much as the rainbow peace flag had in the previous months. Often the two flags flew from the same balcony. Previously non-nationalistic Italians discovered the patria. It was a moment high on emotion and patriotism but low on debate as to what the forces are doing in Iraq.
Obviously, Iraq is not a problem which is going to go away; the debate will, or may, begin when the mandate to keep the troops deployed comes up for renewal or if there are more deaths. A year ago, Iraq looked like a political minefield for Berlusconi but despite the real bomb in Nasiriya, he has managed to avoid any political responsibility.
Not so with the EU Presidency; there the furbizia brought few prizes and to tell you the truth, apart from the final Intergovernmental Conference in Brussels last month, the problem was not slyness. On the contrary, once again Mr. Berlusconi showed how seriously he is affected by foot-in-mouth disease. His outburst at the very beginning when he called the German MEP Martin Schulz a kapò has been replayed endlessly since then by delighted tv editors (apart from in Italy, of course). Deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini was sitting next him at the time and his expression of despairing embarassment says more than any words.
His diplomacy was personal as ever, disturbing enough for a democracy like Italy, relatively powerful in its own right but downright improper for the EU. Once again, he defended his friend Valdimir, suggesting that Russian action in Chechnya was the right policy. Turkey too where Berlusconi was the honoured guest at the Prime Minister’s daughter’s wedding, was given unconditioned commitment. Ditto Isreal’s decision to build the fence. Pity that the EU’s position (and even the US’s for the fence) is highly critical on all these issues.
In the final IGC, Berlusconi promised he would pull a compromise out of the hat at the last minute and save the EU’s draft Constitution. But as a British MEP told the BBC “All Silvio Berlusconi had up his sleeve was a gelato-stained napkin with a few bad jokes scribbled on it”. Chris Patten was even more damning in his reasonableness “A fiasco but not a disaster”. Another anonymous participant said it was the worst-prepared summit that anyone could remember as Mr. B. put on on his “cheeky chappie” air and suggested that they should talk about lighter topics, such as "football and women” (BBC NEWS | Europe | Italy's chaos-prone EU pr... ).
The Italian Presidency is over but the tussles with the EU are bound to continue for all of 2004. Some will be over matters of substance, from milk subsidies to how much support the government can give ailing Italian companies. The more headline-grabbing fights will be between Berlusconi and Romano Prodi as Spring’s European Parliamentary elections approach.
Prodi himself is playing Sisyphus once again as he tries to bring the sniping elements of the Olive Tree Alliance into shape ready for this years Euro elections and Italian elections in 2006 or before when he would like to see himself Prime Minister once again.
The present incumbent told his end of year (two hour, live on prime time) press conference that he was the most popular head of government in Europe and that he would be around in government after the next elections and in politics for another 10 to 15 years.
He’s probably not wrong… unless.
There are a few unlesses but none seem imminent.
There are the rumours about his health but for the moment they are just that, rumours.
Sometime soon in the new year the Constitutional Court will give its verdict on the Immunity Law passed in June to prevent Berlusconi’s trial for bribing a judge from proceeding while he is Prime Minister. If they hold that the law is unconstitutional, then the trial will start again and would certainly reach a verdict within the year. But he has already said that he would not resign even if found guilty. It is after all the trial at first instance and the appeal would take years.
After all that has happened in the Berlusconi era, to have a Prime Minister found guilty of bribery might not even surprise us.
He will have to deal with the Gasparri media bill, turned down by President Ciampi last month. It would have saved his Rete 4 channel (instead a stop-gap decree was passed just before Christmas allowing Rete 4 to continue broadcasting terrestrially for another months) and given him the possibility of expanding his media holdings into print. The alternatives are either a climbdown or a clash with the President, neither very attractive options.
Finally there is the economy; in general, slumbering, with crises like the Parmalat scandal exploding with alarming frequency. This is the real risk for Mr. Berlusconi. Local and EU elections will give us an idea or how serious that risk is but either way, he will not step down.
With all this and a fair chance of Papal conclave, it does not look as if 2004 is going to be boring either.
Next week: “Crying over split milk” and other Parmalat puns.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog:
The blog’s address is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Italian Politics in the new and old years
Iraq, Berlusconi’s legal trials and perhaps tribulations, the European Parliamentary elections and Prodi’s return.
Certainly, no one can complain that Italian politics were boring last year.
There was the war, of course, which produced some nifty acrobatics and some unlikely alliances. In the build-up the Prime Minister had veered from supporting the American interventionist policy after seeing Mr. Bush at his ranch in Texas to supporting diplomacy after conversations with Mr. Putin.
As the invasion drew closer, Mr. Berlusconi took a free ride, using the Constitution as a shield to avoid committing Italian forces at the same time as giving verbal support to Messrs. Bush and Blair. Unlike his friend José Maria Aznar, he did not even have to decide on which way to vote in the UN Security Council as Italy was not a member. Obviously the Prime Minister did not spell out Italy’s refusal to commit troops; the Constitution is not wholly pacifist and does allow Italy to take part in legally sanctioned wars as happened in the 1991 Gulf War. The implication this time was that Government lawyers reckoned there was insufficient legal foundation for going to war. Far from condemning the Prime Minister for being two-faced, many Italians, not only Government supporters, reckoned that he was being an able and furbo player.
In any case, there was certainly insufficient political support; coalition allies were lukewarm and most of the country was strongly against the war. The result was the improbable linking of arms between nuns and no-globals, former anti-clericals and cardinals plus a good sprinkling of secular and moderates of all colours, much like in the rest of Europe and some of the US.
As it turned out, Italian intervention in the post-war occupation was far more bloody than anyone had dared predict. Nineteen carabinieri, soldiers and civilians died in a suicide bomb attack in Nasiriya in November. It was also a surprise to see how the Italian tricolour appeared at windows almost as much as the rainbow peace flag had in the previous months. Often the two flags flew from the same balcony. Previously non-nationalistic Italians discovered the patria. It was a moment high on emotion and patriotism but low on debate as to what the forces are doing in Iraq.
Obviously, Iraq is not a problem which is going to go away; the debate will, or may, begin when the mandate to keep the troops deployed comes up for renewal or if there are more deaths. A year ago, Iraq looked like a political minefield for Berlusconi but despite the real bomb in Nasiriya, he has managed to avoid any political responsibility.
Not so with the EU Presidency; there the furbizia brought few prizes and to tell you the truth, apart from the final Intergovernmental Conference in Brussels last month, the problem was not slyness. On the contrary, once again Mr. Berlusconi showed how seriously he is affected by foot-in-mouth disease. His outburst at the very beginning when he called the German MEP Martin Schulz a kapò has been replayed endlessly since then by delighted tv editors (apart from in Italy, of course). Deputy prime minister Gianfranco Fini was sitting next him at the time and his expression of despairing embarassment says more than any words.
His diplomacy was personal as ever, disturbing enough for a democracy like Italy, relatively powerful in its own right but downright improper for the EU. Once again, he defended his friend Valdimir, suggesting that Russian action in Chechnya was the right policy. Turkey too where Berlusconi was the honoured guest at the Prime Minister’s daughter’s wedding, was given unconditioned commitment. Ditto Isreal’s decision to build the fence. Pity that the EU’s position (and even the US’s for the fence) is highly critical on all these issues.
In the final IGC, Berlusconi promised he would pull a compromise out of the hat at the last minute and save the EU’s draft Constitution. But as a British MEP told the BBC “All Silvio Berlusconi had up his sleeve was a gelato-stained napkin with a few bad jokes scribbled on it”. Chris Patten was even more damning in his reasonableness “A fiasco but not a disaster”. Another anonymous participant said it was the worst-prepared summit that anyone could remember as Mr. B. put on on his “cheeky chappie” air and suggested that they should talk about lighter topics, such as "football and women” (BBC NEWS | Europe | Italy's chaos-prone EU pr... ).
The Italian Presidency is over but the tussles with the EU are bound to continue for all of 2004. Some will be over matters of substance, from milk subsidies to how much support the government can give ailing Italian companies. The more headline-grabbing fights will be between Berlusconi and Romano Prodi as Spring’s European Parliamentary elections approach.
Prodi himself is playing Sisyphus once again as he tries to bring the sniping elements of the Olive Tree Alliance into shape ready for this years Euro elections and Italian elections in 2006 or before when he would like to see himself Prime Minister once again.
The present incumbent told his end of year (two hour, live on prime time) press conference that he was the most popular head of government in Europe and that he would be around in government after the next elections and in politics for another 10 to 15 years.
He’s probably not wrong… unless.
There are a few unlesses but none seem imminent.
There are the rumours about his health but for the moment they are just that, rumours.
Sometime soon in the new year the Constitutional Court will give its verdict on the Immunity Law passed in June to prevent Berlusconi’s trial for bribing a judge from proceeding while he is Prime Minister. If they hold that the law is unconstitutional, then the trial will start again and would certainly reach a verdict within the year. But he has already said that he would not resign even if found guilty. It is after all the trial at first instance and the appeal would take years.
After all that has happened in the Berlusconi era, to have a Prime Minister found guilty of bribery might not even surprise us.
He will have to deal with the Gasparri media bill, turned down by President Ciampi last month. It would have saved his Rete 4 channel (instead a stop-gap decree was passed just before Christmas allowing Rete 4 to continue broadcasting terrestrially for another months) and given him the possibility of expanding his media holdings into print. The alternatives are either a climbdown or a clash with the President, neither very attractive options.
Finally there is the economy; in general, slumbering, with crises like the Parmalat scandal exploding with alarming frequency. This is the real risk for Mr. Berlusconi. Local and EU elections will give us an idea or how serious that risk is but either way, he will not step down.
With all this and a fair chance of Papal conclave, it does not look as if 2004 is going to be boring either.
Next week: “Crying over split milk” and other Parmalat puns.
Please let us know if you do not want to receive the blog:
The blog’s address is:
http://italpolblog.blogspot.com/
email: International Relations internationalrelations@aur.edu
Monday, September 15, 2003
The benign dictator and his holiday camps: Italian “patriotism” 60 years on.
Italy commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the 8 September 1943 armistice this week; a few days later, the English weekly The Specator published an interview with Silvio Berlusconi in which he said that Mussolini was a “benign” dictator who “never killed anyone” but instead “sent them on holiday” to internal exile. Not surprisingly, there was an immediate furor from the Italian centre, left and Jewish communities. Mr. Berlusconi’s political allies froze and took their distance. Even, or rather especially, Gianfranco Fini and Alleanza Nazionale whose roots are in fascism were clear “he could have spared us that remark on Mussolini” said Fini. If it hadn’t been for the murder of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh and the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the foreign media would have given the remarks far more coverage.
Comparative evil
Berlusconi’s remarks were part of a comparison with Saddam Hussein and if “comparisons are odorous,” this one left quite a stink. They are essential in the classroom and in academic analyses but are dangerous in short interviews.
In one sense, Mussolini and Fascism have always had it easy compared to most other dictators past and present, Saddam or Hitler. Whatever Mussolini did before and during the war, Hitler and the Nazis did far more and worse. So although Mussolini was far less noxious than Hitler, there is the risk that by saying so, his actions are somehow rendered harmless. When you add Stalin into the formula, Mussolini again goes into a second division of dictators.
But benign? Hardly. Forget about gulags and concentration camps; look at Italy before and after Mussolini instead. Thankfully Mussolini’s government was corrupt and incompetent and many of its servants were less than convinced of the righteousness of Mussolini’s aspirations. This tempered the effects of Fascist aggression and cruelty and it was a relief for many Italians as well as those attacked by Italy: the Greeks, Maltese, Yugoslavs, Russians, French, British and Americans.
But little relief was available to the Libyans where hundreds of thousands died in the brutal repression and concentration camps even before Hitler set up his own. Nor for the Ethiopians massacred with mustard gas during the war and killed in their thousands even after the official war was over. Here there is indeed a comparison with Saddam as only he and Mussolini have used gas on their enemies since the 1920s conventions banning them.
For Italians, thousands of trade-unionists and socialists were killed or beaten up before Mussolini came to power. After 1922, a whole series of anti-fascist leaders were killed, notably the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, the liberals Amendala and Gobetti and the Roselli brothers. Thousands were sent to prisons or to what was called confine, a concept usually translated as “internal exile.” Neither the prisons nor the places of confino were gulags -- much less extermination camps, but to call 10 or 15 years in close confinement a “holiday” is obscene and to giggle at the idea that some of these places are now summer resorts, as the Spectator journalist does, is grotesque. Of course, some, like political writer Antonio Gramsci, died in prison.
In 1938, Italian Jews were deprived of their civil and political rights, their jobs, and their property. They were catalogued making it all the easier to round them up 5 years later. Hardly benign. During the war, Mussolini knowing that they would be “exterminated,” authorized the transfer of Jews to the German authorities.
And then to say that Mussolini never killed anyone once he declared war on Britain and France shows insensitivity as well as ignorance. Here again, there are faint echoes of Saddam for anyone with keen enough hearing; going to war presuming it would be a walkover and then finding that there was real fighting to be done as Saddam did with both Iran and Kuwait. Mussolini’s overstreched ambition cost millions of lives, Italian for the most part but there were thousands of French, Maltese, Greek, Yugoslav and British killed by the Fascist aggression.
There were concentration camps, like Rab in the Adriatic, where the death rate was as bad as a gulag or German camp and after 1943 Mussolini’s puppet republic hosted an extermination camp in Trieste.
By no stretch of the imagination could he be called “benign.”
Patriotism and the fatherland
When the predictable furor exploded on Thursday (11 September), Mr. Berlusconi dug his hole deeper in his defense. “I reacted like any true Italian would have had the duty to react”. The implication is that Mussolini might have been a dictator but as an Italian patriot, Berlusconi is obliged to defend him.
This is a very dangerous vision of “fatherland” and “patriotism,” one that removes principles, ethics and reason and substitutes them with nationalism. Sixty years ago millions of Italians had to make a choice and decide where their loyalties lay; they had to give their loyalty to the king, the anti-fascist alliance and the Anglo-Americans or to Mussolini, Italian fascists and the Nazis. For many it was a question of life and death, coloured by expedience and personal loyalties. Today, with hindsight, there are very few indeed who argue that the real Italian “patria” was the Nazi-Fascist one. It was not Italy then and most definitely not Italy today, and for a Prime Minister to suggest that to defend Mussolini is “patriotic” colours Berlusconi’s own position in a sinister way.
Post-scriptum:
As a contribution to an understanding and the debate on “8 settembre” and the subsequent division of Italy, the American University of Rome will be hosting a seminar on the subject on Monday, 15 September 17.00 - 19.30 with Rosario Bentivegna, former partisan in the GAP and Carlo Mazzantini, former volunteer in Mussolini’s neo-fascist RSI. They wrote a book together in 1997 explaining their choices of 60 years ago and on Monday will describe what that period meant to them then and what it means today. Dr. Bjørn Thomassen will give a presentation on the significance of the date in today’s popular consciousness.
If you are in Rome, come along. Call 39-06-58330919 to reserve a free seat.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Italy commemorated the sixtieth anniversary of the 8 September 1943 armistice this week; a few days later, the English weekly The Specator published an interview with Silvio Berlusconi in which he said that Mussolini was a “benign” dictator who “never killed anyone” but instead “sent them on holiday” to internal exile. Not surprisingly, there was an immediate furor from the Italian centre, left and Jewish communities. Mr. Berlusconi’s political allies froze and took their distance. Even, or rather especially, Gianfranco Fini and Alleanza Nazionale whose roots are in fascism were clear “he could have spared us that remark on Mussolini” said Fini. If it hadn’t been for the murder of Swedish foreign minister Anna Lindh and the continuing crisis in the Middle East, the foreign media would have given the remarks far more coverage.
Comparative evil
Berlusconi’s remarks were part of a comparison with Saddam Hussein and if “comparisons are odorous,” this one left quite a stink. They are essential in the classroom and in academic analyses but are dangerous in short interviews.
In one sense, Mussolini and Fascism have always had it easy compared to most other dictators past and present, Saddam or Hitler. Whatever Mussolini did before and during the war, Hitler and the Nazis did far more and worse. So although Mussolini was far less noxious than Hitler, there is the risk that by saying so, his actions are somehow rendered harmless. When you add Stalin into the formula, Mussolini again goes into a second division of dictators.
But benign? Hardly. Forget about gulags and concentration camps; look at Italy before and after Mussolini instead. Thankfully Mussolini’s government was corrupt and incompetent and many of its servants were less than convinced of the righteousness of Mussolini’s aspirations. This tempered the effects of Fascist aggression and cruelty and it was a relief for many Italians as well as those attacked by Italy: the Greeks, Maltese, Yugoslavs, Russians, French, British and Americans.
But little relief was available to the Libyans where hundreds of thousands died in the brutal repression and concentration camps even before Hitler set up his own. Nor for the Ethiopians massacred with mustard gas during the war and killed in their thousands even after the official war was over. Here there is indeed a comparison with Saddam as only he and Mussolini have used gas on their enemies since the 1920s conventions banning them.
For Italians, thousands of trade-unionists and socialists were killed or beaten up before Mussolini came to power. After 1922, a whole series of anti-fascist leaders were killed, notably the Socialist Giacomo Matteotti, the liberals Amendala and Gobetti and the Roselli brothers. Thousands were sent to prisons or to what was called confine, a concept usually translated as “internal exile.” Neither the prisons nor the places of confino were gulags -- much less extermination camps, but to call 10 or 15 years in close confinement a “holiday” is obscene and to giggle at the idea that some of these places are now summer resorts, as the Spectator journalist does, is grotesque. Of course, some, like political writer Antonio Gramsci, died in prison.
In 1938, Italian Jews were deprived of their civil and political rights, their jobs, and their property. They were catalogued making it all the easier to round them up 5 years later. Hardly benign. During the war, Mussolini knowing that they would be “exterminated,” authorized the transfer of Jews to the German authorities.
And then to say that Mussolini never killed anyone once he declared war on Britain and France shows insensitivity as well as ignorance. Here again, there are faint echoes of Saddam for anyone with keen enough hearing; going to war presuming it would be a walkover and then finding that there was real fighting to be done as Saddam did with both Iran and Kuwait. Mussolini’s overstreched ambition cost millions of lives, Italian for the most part but there were thousands of French, Maltese, Greek, Yugoslav and British killed by the Fascist aggression.
There were concentration camps, like Rab in the Adriatic, where the death rate was as bad as a gulag or German camp and after 1943 Mussolini’s puppet republic hosted an extermination camp in Trieste.
By no stretch of the imagination could he be called “benign.”
Patriotism and the fatherland
When the predictable furor exploded on Thursday (11 September), Mr. Berlusconi dug his hole deeper in his defense. “I reacted like any true Italian would have had the duty to react”. The implication is that Mussolini might have been a dictator but as an Italian patriot, Berlusconi is obliged to defend him.
This is a very dangerous vision of “fatherland” and “patriotism,” one that removes principles, ethics and reason and substitutes them with nationalism. Sixty years ago millions of Italians had to make a choice and decide where their loyalties lay; they had to give their loyalty to the king, the anti-fascist alliance and the Anglo-Americans or to Mussolini, Italian fascists and the Nazis. For many it was a question of life and death, coloured by expedience and personal loyalties. Today, with hindsight, there are very few indeed who argue that the real Italian “patria” was the Nazi-Fascist one. It was not Italy then and most definitely not Italy today, and for a Prime Minister to suggest that to defend Mussolini is “patriotic” colours Berlusconi’s own position in a sinister way.
Post-scriptum:
As a contribution to an understanding and the debate on “8 settembre” and the subsequent division of Italy, the American University of Rome will be hosting a seminar on the subject on Monday, 15 September 17.00 - 19.30 with Rosario Bentivegna, former partisan in the GAP and Carlo Mazzantini, former volunteer in Mussolini’s neo-fascist RSI. They wrote a book together in 1997 explaining their choices of 60 years ago and on Monday will describe what that period meant to them then and what it means today. Dr. Bjørn Thomassen will give a presentation on the significance of the date in today’s popular consciousness.
If you are in Rome, come along. Call 39-06-58330919 to reserve a free seat.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Manichæan Silvio - a tactic or does he really mean it?
Unspun Berlusconi or how not to deal with the press
There have been two episodes and as many rows in The Spectator saga (6 and 13 September) and, at this rate, there’ll be more next week; in them Silvio Berlusconi confirms his frequent claims to “tell it the way it is” or at least the way he thinks it is.
Last week, he said that to be a judge in Italy, “you need to be mentally disturbed, you need psychic disturbances. If they do that job it is because they are anthropologically different!” This week, he said that Mussolini was a “benign dictator” who “never killed anyone” but had sent the opposition “on holiday” to internal exile.
By any standards, Berlusconi is a serial brickdropper, but the question is, does he do it to cultivate an image of a plain-talking guy in touch with his supporters or does he actually believe what he says? I fear it is the latter; Berlusconi is a master of promotion and advertising, but when it comes to spin or even presentation of difficult issues, he is a tyro. He presumes that he does not need to be subtle, give nuances, or room for manoevre. Given his background as a businessman whose word was not contradicted plus his present wealth and control of the media, one can see where the presumption comes from. Hence, too, the all-or-nothing, Manichæan tone to so many of his outbursts.
With a long tradition of “ideological” politics, Italy has always had this tendency that paradoxically continues despite the end of the Cold War and, as some have put it, the “end of ideology.” Berlusconi is still very much an ideologist, one of those Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle still fighting World War II after 20 years since the end of hostilities. Except that he does know exactly what has happened since the end of the Cold War. Surely that means he is in bad faith then and that all these bricks are knowingly dropped? Too easy. Apart from a few great actors, most good liars manage to convince themselves that they are telling the truth. Berlusconi falls into this category. Furio Colombo put it nicely in L’Unità (12 September). He wrote that the Prime Minister is “overcome by hyperactive narcissism” that excludes interaction with the real world. This allows him to keep a straight face when he says that judges are part of a Communist plot when they prosecute him and honest servants of the law when they acquit him. Or when he implies that the “left” equals “Communism,” conveniently forgetting that in Italy and abroad strong opposition to Soviet communism came from the left. To make such an equation is to show political and historical ignorance and to denigrate the sacrifices made by that opposition. It would be like saying that all conservatives are either real or crypto Nazis.
When he is caught out on any of these scores, he never retracts, he just says he was misquoted, taken out of context, or that it was meant as a joke.
Last year, the Minister of the Interior was forced to resign because he called a consultant murdered by the Red Brigades “a ball-breaker only interested in having his contract renewed” after he had the dead man’s escort removed. The Minister’s boss feels he has no such obligations to take responsibility for what he says.
He does not apologize; instead he attacks and says the opposition (usually defined as “leftwing” or even “Communist”) is exploiting the situation. Tullia Zevi, the former president of the Union of Jewish Communities (herself a victim of fascism), was explicit, “What need does the left have to exploit his words? ... you just have to listen to him because what he says is truly eloquent” (Corriere della Sera, 12 September).
It is all the more ironic that his bricks were published in an otherwise fawning interview where the authors complimented his physical features (“…nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pajama-suit.”) and political prowess (“Is he a good thing? Our answer is an unambiguous yes.”) and made snide comments about Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minster killed this week. The Economist, the other English scourge of Mr. B., is explicitly highly critical, but would support his policies if he only set about implementing them.
A final (ironic) word on the Spectator interview; it begins with a rapturous compliment from Berlusconi on the power of an olive tree ‘Look’ he says, pointing his flashlight. ‘Look at the strength of that tree”. Perhaps the opposition, the Ulivo or Olive Tree Alliance, should have taken more solace from that remark than rage at the bricks.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Unspun Berlusconi or how not to deal with the press
There have been two episodes and as many rows in The Spectator saga (6 and 13 September) and, at this rate, there’ll be more next week; in them Silvio Berlusconi confirms his frequent claims to “tell it the way it is” or at least the way he thinks it is.
Last week, he said that to be a judge in Italy, “you need to be mentally disturbed, you need psychic disturbances. If they do that job it is because they are anthropologically different!” This week, he said that Mussolini was a “benign dictator” who “never killed anyone” but had sent the opposition “on holiday” to internal exile.
By any standards, Berlusconi is a serial brickdropper, but the question is, does he do it to cultivate an image of a plain-talking guy in touch with his supporters or does he actually believe what he says? I fear it is the latter; Berlusconi is a master of promotion and advertising, but when it comes to spin or even presentation of difficult issues, he is a tyro. He presumes that he does not need to be subtle, give nuances, or room for manoevre. Given his background as a businessman whose word was not contradicted plus his present wealth and control of the media, one can see where the presumption comes from. Hence, too, the all-or-nothing, Manichæan tone to so many of his outbursts.
With a long tradition of “ideological” politics, Italy has always had this tendency that paradoxically continues despite the end of the Cold War and, as some have put it, the “end of ideology.” Berlusconi is still very much an ideologist, one of those Japanese soldiers lost in the jungle still fighting World War II after 20 years since the end of hostilities. Except that he does know exactly what has happened since the end of the Cold War. Surely that means he is in bad faith then and that all these bricks are knowingly dropped? Too easy. Apart from a few great actors, most good liars manage to convince themselves that they are telling the truth. Berlusconi falls into this category. Furio Colombo put it nicely in L’Unità (12 September). He wrote that the Prime Minister is “overcome by hyperactive narcissism” that excludes interaction with the real world. This allows him to keep a straight face when he says that judges are part of a Communist plot when they prosecute him and honest servants of the law when they acquit him. Or when he implies that the “left” equals “Communism,” conveniently forgetting that in Italy and abroad strong opposition to Soviet communism came from the left. To make such an equation is to show political and historical ignorance and to denigrate the sacrifices made by that opposition. It would be like saying that all conservatives are either real or crypto Nazis.
When he is caught out on any of these scores, he never retracts, he just says he was misquoted, taken out of context, or that it was meant as a joke.
Last year, the Minister of the Interior was forced to resign because he called a consultant murdered by the Red Brigades “a ball-breaker only interested in having his contract renewed” after he had the dead man’s escort removed. The Minister’s boss feels he has no such obligations to take responsibility for what he says.
He does not apologize; instead he attacks and says the opposition (usually defined as “leftwing” or even “Communist”) is exploiting the situation. Tullia Zevi, the former president of the Union of Jewish Communities (herself a victim of fascism), was explicit, “What need does the left have to exploit his words? ... you just have to listen to him because what he says is truly eloquent” (Corriere della Sera, 12 September).
It is all the more ironic that his bricks were published in an otherwise fawning interview where the authors complimented his physical features (“…nipples showing through his white Marlon Brando pajama-suit.”) and political prowess (“Is he a good thing? Our answer is an unambiguous yes.”) and made snide comments about Anna Lindh, the Swedish Foreign Minster killed this week. The Economist, the other English scourge of Mr. B., is explicitly highly critical, but would support his policies if he only set about implementing them.
A final (ironic) word on the Spectator interview; it begins with a rapturous compliment from Berlusconi on the power of an olive tree ‘Look’ he says, pointing his flashlight. ‘Look at the strength of that tree”. Perhaps the opposition, the Ulivo or Olive Tree Alliance, should have taken more solace from that remark than rage at the bricks.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Wednesday, August 27, 2003
On heroism at sea and pusillanimity on land
To go down with your ship with all guns blazing is supposed to be the honourable thing to do for a sailor. Politicians have a different reputation and tend towards excessive care even when the risks are slight.
One man, though, is prepared to come out fighting and very likely will not even have to go down with his ship but, nonetheless, his comrades in arms are trying to stop him. Antonio Di Pietro has always been a bulldog as a prosecutor and as a politician; his allies much less so.
A Risorgimento battle parallels today’s politics.
In 1866, Italy went to war with Austria to bring Venice and Venetia into the new country. In six years of unification, millions of lire had been spent on a new steam-driven, ironclad navy and the politicians in Rome were itching to show their mettle, defeat the Austrians and make the Adriatic an Italian lake. The commander in Ancona, Carlo Pellion di Persano had different ideas. Admiral Persano was approaching retirement and he knew his own limitations; he had never commanded in a combat situation and he really did not think that now was a good time to start.
He delayed and found endless excuses for not seeking the enemy. When the Prime Minister explicitly ordered him to sea, Persano did his best to avoid the Austrians whose fleet, by the way, was smaller and mostly timber and sail. When the engagement finally took place because the Austrian admiral Wilhelm v. Tegethoff was actually on the offensive, the Italian fleet was horribly and ignominiously defeated.
Worse, Persano fled his crippled and sinking ships and back in port used all his belligerent abilities to accuse his subordinates of incompetence and cowardice.
A Parliamentary inquiry finally established the truth and Persano was lucky to escape with his life, unlike the British admiral Byng a century earlier.
Despite the disaster, honour was not entirely lost for the Italian navy. One officer, Emilio Faà di Bruno more than fulfilled his duty. He engaged the enemy with skill and courage and went down with his ship. He was given the Gold Medal, Italy’s highest award for valour and is remembered across Italy with streets named after him that do little more than perplex the passerby with the pronunciation. A pity, as he deserves more.
What is the relevance to today’s politics? The setting is far less dramatic but the lesson is there.
In June, Parliament passed a bill protecting the country’s five top institutional posts. President, Prime Minister, Speakers of Senate and Chamber and the President of the Supreme Court are immune from criminal prosecution while they are in office. In practice, of course we know that only the Prime Minister Mr. Berlusconi is actually on trial and that the law was rushed through before Italy took over the EU presidency.
Not surprisingly, the opposition would like to see the law removed but they are by no means certain how they would like to do it. A long term possibility is to change the law if and when they win the next elections.
Another possibility is that the Supreme Court declares the new law unconstitutional. The Milanese court where Mr. Berlusconi is on trial for bribing a judge has appealed to the Supreme Court for a ruling. It should deliver its verdict in between six and twelve months.
The third option is a referendum to repeal the new law. In order to do so, half a million Italian voters’ signatures have to be gathered, the Court of Cassation must determine that the law is neither budgetary nor an international treaty nor constitutionally relevant. The proposal is then voted on and if more than half the electorate vote, the result is valid; the law is either confirmed or repealed.
The only risk for the anti-Berlusconi opposition is that one of these conditions is not met. Now, it is relatively easy to find 500,000 signatures and the immunity law will certainly pass muster at the Court of Cassation. The next two conditions are trickier and are bringing out all the worst in the centre-left. The lack of interest in the issue might mean less than half the voters turn out which would mean the result was invalid. The worst possible case would be a defeat with the immunity law confirmed.
Antonio Di Pietro is well on his way to collecting the signatures but the two main parties of the opposition have been less than helpful. The DS has been ambiguous on the question. The official position is against the referendum but they have still given space to Di Pietro’s people collecting signatures at their summer Feste dell’Unità .
The Margherita is actively against the initiative and has lauded the Verdi and Comunisti italiani for also being on their side.
The logic, according to the Margherita spokesman, the deputy Maurizio Fistarol is that they should leave it all to the Supreme Court. He reckons that the referendum could end up as a boomerang against the centre-left and in favour of Berlusconi, if it failed, Berlusconi would be endorsed by a popular vote. He even promised a campaign to try and stop Di Pietro; one centre-left party fighting another in order to prevent an anti-Berlusconi initiative. Self-destructive? Well, yes.
This is where the parallels with the 1866 battle come in; Persano had a bigger and more powerful fleet but no stomach for a fight so when he did go into battle, he made a terrible mess of it.
The centre-left has a perfect weapon against Berlusconi in the referendum and a highly principled and moral reason for using it but if they fight each other, pull punches and show the world that they lack the courage of their convictions, then they really do risk losing the battle. If the professional opposition is not convinced, why should the public be?
In contrast to the big parties, Di Pietro has no such doubts. He is prepared to go down with his ship like Faà di Bruno. But the absurdity of the whole business is that for once the moral and political choice coincides with the pragmatically most winnable one. The referendum should be easily winnable.
If the Supreme Court hands down a verdict before the referendum, all well and good but the campaign will have had its effect in the meantime.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
To go down with your ship with all guns blazing is supposed to be the honourable thing to do for a sailor. Politicians have a different reputation and tend towards excessive care even when the risks are slight.
One man, though, is prepared to come out fighting and very likely will not even have to go down with his ship but, nonetheless, his comrades in arms are trying to stop him. Antonio Di Pietro has always been a bulldog as a prosecutor and as a politician; his allies much less so.
A Risorgimento battle parallels today’s politics.
In 1866, Italy went to war with Austria to bring Venice and Venetia into the new country. In six years of unification, millions of lire had been spent on a new steam-driven, ironclad navy and the politicians in Rome were itching to show their mettle, defeat the Austrians and make the Adriatic an Italian lake. The commander in Ancona, Carlo Pellion di Persano had different ideas. Admiral Persano was approaching retirement and he knew his own limitations; he had never commanded in a combat situation and he really did not think that now was a good time to start.
He delayed and found endless excuses for not seeking the enemy. When the Prime Minister explicitly ordered him to sea, Persano did his best to avoid the Austrians whose fleet, by the way, was smaller and mostly timber and sail. When the engagement finally took place because the Austrian admiral Wilhelm v. Tegethoff was actually on the offensive, the Italian fleet was horribly and ignominiously defeated.
Worse, Persano fled his crippled and sinking ships and back in port used all his belligerent abilities to accuse his subordinates of incompetence and cowardice.
A Parliamentary inquiry finally established the truth and Persano was lucky to escape with his life, unlike the British admiral Byng a century earlier.
Despite the disaster, honour was not entirely lost for the Italian navy. One officer, Emilio Faà di Bruno more than fulfilled his duty. He engaged the enemy with skill and courage and went down with his ship. He was given the Gold Medal, Italy’s highest award for valour and is remembered across Italy with streets named after him that do little more than perplex the passerby with the pronunciation. A pity, as he deserves more.
What is the relevance to today’s politics? The setting is far less dramatic but the lesson is there.
In June, Parliament passed a bill protecting the country’s five top institutional posts. President, Prime Minister, Speakers of Senate and Chamber and the President of the Supreme Court are immune from criminal prosecution while they are in office. In practice, of course we know that only the Prime Minister Mr. Berlusconi is actually on trial and that the law was rushed through before Italy took over the EU presidency.
Not surprisingly, the opposition would like to see the law removed but they are by no means certain how they would like to do it. A long term possibility is to change the law if and when they win the next elections.
Another possibility is that the Supreme Court declares the new law unconstitutional. The Milanese court where Mr. Berlusconi is on trial for bribing a judge has appealed to the Supreme Court for a ruling. It should deliver its verdict in between six and twelve months.
The third option is a referendum to repeal the new law. In order to do so, half a million Italian voters’ signatures have to be gathered, the Court of Cassation must determine that the law is neither budgetary nor an international treaty nor constitutionally relevant. The proposal is then voted on and if more than half the electorate vote, the result is valid; the law is either confirmed or repealed.
The only risk for the anti-Berlusconi opposition is that one of these conditions is not met. Now, it is relatively easy to find 500,000 signatures and the immunity law will certainly pass muster at the Court of Cassation. The next two conditions are trickier and are bringing out all the worst in the centre-left. The lack of interest in the issue might mean less than half the voters turn out which would mean the result was invalid. The worst possible case would be a defeat with the immunity law confirmed.
Antonio Di Pietro is well on his way to collecting the signatures but the two main parties of the opposition have been less than helpful. The DS has been ambiguous on the question. The official position is against the referendum but they have still given space to Di Pietro’s people collecting signatures at their summer Feste dell’Unità .
The Margherita is actively against the initiative and has lauded the Verdi and Comunisti italiani for also being on their side.
The logic, according to the Margherita spokesman, the deputy Maurizio Fistarol is that they should leave it all to the Supreme Court. He reckons that the referendum could end up as a boomerang against the centre-left and in favour of Berlusconi, if it failed, Berlusconi would be endorsed by a popular vote. He even promised a campaign to try and stop Di Pietro; one centre-left party fighting another in order to prevent an anti-Berlusconi initiative. Self-destructive? Well, yes.
This is where the parallels with the 1866 battle come in; Persano had a bigger and more powerful fleet but no stomach for a fight so when he did go into battle, he made a terrible mess of it.
The centre-left has a perfect weapon against Berlusconi in the referendum and a highly principled and moral reason for using it but if they fight each other, pull punches and show the world that they lack the courage of their convictions, then they really do risk losing the battle. If the professional opposition is not convinced, why should the public be?
In contrast to the big parties, Di Pietro has no such doubts. He is prepared to go down with his ship like Faà di Bruno. But the absurdity of the whole business is that for once the moral and political choice coincides with the pragmatically most winnable one. The referendum should be easily winnable.
If the Supreme Court hands down a verdict before the referendum, all well and good but the campaign will have had its effect in the meantime.
For comments, please write to James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Friday, July 18, 2003
WHOSE MEDIA?
There have been times over the last few years when it has been difficult to sell stories on conflict of interest. “No doubt terribly important in abstract terms,” sighs the editor. “But what does it matter in real terms to our readers?” Then he challenges, “Give me examples of how Mr. Berlusconi has profited or other people lost because of his position. Then let’s talk.”
These last two years have seen a few plums but now we are in the middle of a major harvest.
For starters, a month and a half ago, the government’s tax amnesty law (condono) put €162 million into Mediaset hands, mostly directly to the Berlusconi family. While they were not the only ones to benefit, last year Silvio Berlusconi himself had said that he would not even apply for the amnesty.
A month ago, the Prime Minister was given immunity from prosecution. The bill was rushed through Parliament so that he would not lose face by possibly being given a guilty verdict while sitting as European Union President. In theory, of course, there are four other beneficiaries of the law even if none are on trial at the moment.
The third, latest and biggest conflict of interest is directly beneficial to the Prime Minister.
The Gasparri Bill is being fought over in the Senate at the moment and, unless it undergoes major re-working when it returns to the Chamber, it will in practice protect the Prime Minister’s broadcasting empire from regulation and allow him to expand into other fields. The danger is primarily for freedom of information and secondly in the consolidation of Italy’s broadcasting cartel to the detriment of other players in broadcasting and print.
Minister of Communications, Alleanza Nazionale’s Maurizio Gasparri maintains that his bill will liberalise and regulate broadcasting and act as an anti-trust barrier in the field. Since about 1990, Italian media have been in increasing need of overall regulation, undergoing stopgap and sometimes contradictory legislation and Constitutional Court sentences. Despite its promise, the Gasparri bill does not fulfill its declared aims.
In practice, the areas where Mr. Berlusconi’s Mediaset is acting illegally or at least irregularly will become explicitly legal and the present anti-trust limits that prevent the extension of Mediaset will be expanded so that the Prime Minister’s company will have an even greater share of the market. As added extras, the bill also damages the print media and puts the public broadcaster (RAI) even more under government control.
No wonder there is a major demonstration planned for Tuesday 22 July in piazza Navona outside the Senate. It is the day of the final vote but also the anniversary of President Ciampi’s speech appealing for pluralism in the media.
Mediaset’s most immediate problem is how to keep its Rete4 on the ground. In 1994 the Constitutional Court declared that no single company could own more than two terrestrial channels. Last year they reiterated the decision that Rete4 should move onto satellite (90% of Italian television is analogue terrestrial so changing would mean losing most of the audience). Apart from being the home of the fawning Emilio Fede (who spends most of the news adoring Berlusconi, Mediaset’s precursor of Comical Ali), Rete4 has an audience share of over a million and is a good earner.
The bill would allow Rete4 to stay terrestrial.
The other main regulator, the 1997 Broadcasting Law (usually called the Maccanico after the then minister) caps the market share of publicity to 30%. By almost any calculation Mediaset is above that limit but each year has appealed and discussed the findings so has never had to sell any of its assets. The new bill reduces the share to 20% but vastly increases the definition of the “market.” Today, the “market” is made up of publicity, license fees and subscriptions to pay-TV. Tomorrow, when the law passes, it will include almost all media: print, books, cinema, public relations and promotional material as well. In practice, it will be a universe impossible to calculate. Nonetheless, the Mediaset CEO Fedele Confalonieri has reckoned that it is around €25-27 bn. and Mediaset’s turnover between €3.5 and €4 bn., meaning that, instead of slimming the company down, the new law will allow Mediaset to expand by another €1.5bn.
One and a half billion euros means they could take on the Sky publicity concession, they could buy an existing newspaper or found their own and, in addition, they could buy up any number or smaller local papers.
Mediaset could do this also thanks to the end of cross-ownership prohibition. At the moment a broadcaster cannot own a newspaper and vice versa. The new bill allows cross-ownership, in theory a liberalising measure. In practice, as Giovanni Sartori pointed out “big fish eat little ones, not the other way around” (Corriere della Sera 16/7). There are no newspapers big enough to go into the broadcasting business, but Mediaset can easily move into print.
These are the big battle lines, but on the edge of the conflict there is the dominance of television over print in Italy for publicity, above all, but also for audience and information. The new bill will consolidate RAI’s position even though it will be partially privatised. Salvatore Bragantini argues that it just strengthens the RAI-Mediaset duopoly (Corriere della Sera 9/7). Not surprisingly it has been Mediaset’s press office that has been busy at damage control over the last few days - they are very conscious that the bill is to their almost exclusive advantage, but do not want it to be presented as such.
Obviously the centre-left criticises the Gasparri bill, the Margherita’s Paolo Gentiloni states, “1990 to 2003 has been the story of an endless chase for a solution to the problem; now a highly concentrated market is being accepted.”
But others too are worried.
Enzo Cheli, President of the Communications Authority, said in his annual report last week that “pluralism in television was unsatisfactory”. He maintained that present legislation is ambiguous and that there is a need for “clear laws that respect the Constitution”. And the President of Italian Publishers’ Association, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said, “This is a law that goes against the pluralism called for by the President and Speakers of the Parliament”.
It is another move towards the concentration of power and wealth in Italy and there are no prizes for guessing to whose advantage.
Contact James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
There have been times over the last few years when it has been difficult to sell stories on conflict of interest. “No doubt terribly important in abstract terms,” sighs the editor. “But what does it matter in real terms to our readers?” Then he challenges, “Give me examples of how Mr. Berlusconi has profited or other people lost because of his position. Then let’s talk.”
These last two years have seen a few plums but now we are in the middle of a major harvest.
For starters, a month and a half ago, the government’s tax amnesty law (condono) put €162 million into Mediaset hands, mostly directly to the Berlusconi family. While they were not the only ones to benefit, last year Silvio Berlusconi himself had said that he would not even apply for the amnesty.
A month ago, the Prime Minister was given immunity from prosecution. The bill was rushed through Parliament so that he would not lose face by possibly being given a guilty verdict while sitting as European Union President. In theory, of course, there are four other beneficiaries of the law even if none are on trial at the moment.
The third, latest and biggest conflict of interest is directly beneficial to the Prime Minister.
The Gasparri Bill is being fought over in the Senate at the moment and, unless it undergoes major re-working when it returns to the Chamber, it will in practice protect the Prime Minister’s broadcasting empire from regulation and allow him to expand into other fields. The danger is primarily for freedom of information and secondly in the consolidation of Italy’s broadcasting cartel to the detriment of other players in broadcasting and print.
Minister of Communications, Alleanza Nazionale’s Maurizio Gasparri maintains that his bill will liberalise and regulate broadcasting and act as an anti-trust barrier in the field. Since about 1990, Italian media have been in increasing need of overall regulation, undergoing stopgap and sometimes contradictory legislation and Constitutional Court sentences. Despite its promise, the Gasparri bill does not fulfill its declared aims.
In practice, the areas where Mr. Berlusconi’s Mediaset is acting illegally or at least irregularly will become explicitly legal and the present anti-trust limits that prevent the extension of Mediaset will be expanded so that the Prime Minister’s company will have an even greater share of the market. As added extras, the bill also damages the print media and puts the public broadcaster (RAI) even more under government control.
No wonder there is a major demonstration planned for Tuesday 22 July in piazza Navona outside the Senate. It is the day of the final vote but also the anniversary of President Ciampi’s speech appealing for pluralism in the media.
Mediaset’s most immediate problem is how to keep its Rete4 on the ground. In 1994 the Constitutional Court declared that no single company could own more than two terrestrial channels. Last year they reiterated the decision that Rete4 should move onto satellite (90% of Italian television is analogue terrestrial so changing would mean losing most of the audience). Apart from being the home of the fawning Emilio Fede (who spends most of the news adoring Berlusconi, Mediaset’s precursor of Comical Ali), Rete4 has an audience share of over a million and is a good earner.
The bill would allow Rete4 to stay terrestrial.
The other main regulator, the 1997 Broadcasting Law (usually called the Maccanico after the then minister) caps the market share of publicity to 30%. By almost any calculation Mediaset is above that limit but each year has appealed and discussed the findings so has never had to sell any of its assets. The new bill reduces the share to 20% but vastly increases the definition of the “market.” Today, the “market” is made up of publicity, license fees and subscriptions to pay-TV. Tomorrow, when the law passes, it will include almost all media: print, books, cinema, public relations and promotional material as well. In practice, it will be a universe impossible to calculate. Nonetheless, the Mediaset CEO Fedele Confalonieri has reckoned that it is around €25-27 bn. and Mediaset’s turnover between €3.5 and €4 bn., meaning that, instead of slimming the company down, the new law will allow Mediaset to expand by another €1.5bn.
One and a half billion euros means they could take on the Sky publicity concession, they could buy an existing newspaper or found their own and, in addition, they could buy up any number or smaller local papers.
Mediaset could do this also thanks to the end of cross-ownership prohibition. At the moment a broadcaster cannot own a newspaper and vice versa. The new bill allows cross-ownership, in theory a liberalising measure. In practice, as Giovanni Sartori pointed out “big fish eat little ones, not the other way around” (Corriere della Sera 16/7). There are no newspapers big enough to go into the broadcasting business, but Mediaset can easily move into print.
These are the big battle lines, but on the edge of the conflict there is the dominance of television over print in Italy for publicity, above all, but also for audience and information. The new bill will consolidate RAI’s position even though it will be partially privatised. Salvatore Bragantini argues that it just strengthens the RAI-Mediaset duopoly (Corriere della Sera 9/7). Not surprisingly it has been Mediaset’s press office that has been busy at damage control over the last few days - they are very conscious that the bill is to their almost exclusive advantage, but do not want it to be presented as such.
Obviously the centre-left criticises the Gasparri bill, the Margherita’s Paolo Gentiloni states, “1990 to 2003 has been the story of an endless chase for a solution to the problem; now a highly concentrated market is being accepted.”
But others too are worried.
Enzo Cheli, President of the Communications Authority, said in his annual report last week that “pluralism in television was unsatisfactory”. He maintained that present legislation is ambiguous and that there is a need for “clear laws that respect the Constitution”. And the President of Italian Publishers’ Association, Luca Cordero di Montezemolo said, “This is a law that goes against the pluralism called for by the President and Speakers of the Parliament”.
It is another move towards the concentration of power and wealth in Italy and there are no prizes for guessing to whose advantage.
Contact James Walston at internationalrelations@aur.edu.
Tuesday, July 08, 2003
The Berlusconi reality show
A week into Italy’s presidency of the EU, there are two fundamental keys to understanding Silvio Berlusconi’s disastrous debut on 2 July. The first is the personal, almost psychological insight that the explosion gave us. Here is a man who is unable to control his anger and pique, who is unable to take harsh criticism but has learnt that he can vent his anger less dangerously by covering it with a veneer of “humour”.
The second key is in the actual words which provoked Berlusconi’s insults. The brouhaha which followed the “Nazi” attack has nicely obfuscated the substance of Martin Schulz’s initial attack which covered a number of important issues both for Mr. Berlusconi personally and for Europe.
First, the events: on Wednesday 2 July, Mr. Berlusconi delivered the opening speech of the Italian presidency to the European Parliament. It was 11 pages long and covered the semester’s agenda. Almost all of it was predictable and uncontroversial: agreement in the Convention leading to the signature of a European Constitution; preparation for next year’s enlargement of the EU and planning for further enlargement; a major public works and infrastructure programme to relaunch the Union’s flagging economy; cooperation on security measures to combat terrorism and illegal immigration.
He did not go into detail about the constitution which would certainly have rubbed someone up the wrong way. He did not mention enlarging the EU to include Russia and Israel as he had before. Only the very vigilant noticed a couple of omissions which were more substantial; no reference to combating racism at the same time as illegal immigration and no mention of confiscation of criminals’ assets as part of the Union-wide justice deal. Both points were in previous EU policy statements.
One of the replies came from Martin Schulz, head of the European Socialist Party group at the EP. Schulz asked Mr. Berlusconi explicit questions on all these issues which are European problems certainly not just Italian ones. The language was tough but Parliamentary and the substance of the criticism was wholly relevant to the European Parliament.
Instead of replying to the criticism or avoiding the questions as most politicians do, Berlusconi went for the man, not the ball. The attack had been against Berlusconi’s political and judicial position and his statement of European objectives and was couched in Parliamentary language. The counterattack was personal and unparliamentary.
Now the whys.
First the personal side. In 1993 Berlusconi exploded with real anger when a foreign journalist pressed him at a press conference he was giving with Gianfranco Fini, then candidate for mayor of Rome. Since then he has kept his temper under control but only by smiling while he delivers the insult as he did last Wednesday. As CEO of Fininvest, as leader of Forza Italia and the House of Liberties and as Prime Minister, he is unused to being criticised and when someone dares, Berlusconi lashes out against the presumed lesè majesté. On top of this, he has little sense of function and role. If I swear at a motorist who tries to knock me off the road, it is maybe uncontrolled behaviour but acceptable for most people. If I swear at a student who is being provocative, that is wholly improper. It is wholly improper for the President of the EU to insult an MEP in the Parliament and then refuse to apologise. But Mr. Berlusconi still insists that he is the injured party.
On the substance side, the issues are serious. As Mario Pirani pointed out (Repubblica 4 July ‘03: 1&17) it was not only Schulz’s immunity taunts which maddened Berlusconi but the very clear questions about him and his allies. EU statements about controlling illegal immigration have always been accompanied by proposals for measures to curb racism. Berlusconi’s speech had no such reference while his Minister for Reforms, Umberto Bossi, has been making some very offensive remarks which would not be tolerated from Le Pen or Haider, let alone a member of the cabinet of the EU’s presidency.
Directly relevant to Berlusconi were the questions on EU cooperation over justice. Roberto Castelli, the Leghista Minister of Justice said in Il Giornale (30 June) that there was a “wide-ranging plot” against Berlusconi which included the proposals for cooperation on European justice: “the European arrest warrant, freezing and confiscation of goods belonging to physical or legal entities”. “It is not difficult,” Castelli added allusively, “to imagine which Italian company will be the first to be investigated.” He presumably meant Berlusconi’s Mediaset.
The underlying intentions behind the measures are to deal with cross-border crime both normal and political: mafia, drugs, money laundering and international terrorism. For Castelli and implicitly Berlusconi to think that all this fuss is just in order to get Mediaset is not so much paranoia as arrogance. But Berlusconi’s over-reaction and “Nazi” insult do show how close to bone Shulz went.
For the next 5 months and 3 weeks, Europe will be looking very carefully at any, but any, measure which might benefit the EU’s President and his companies.
If all this talk about conflict of interest and parliamentary insults bore you, go to the Italian presidency’s website where the really pressing issues are analysed and debated. There is a section called Vostre opinioni; given events in the first week, one might expect an interesting and heated exchange. No way. There is only one subject that you can express your opinion on - the burning issue which divides the continent - should there be a one euro note? Happily for decision-makers, the 2,730 who responded showed near consensus, 50.51% in favour, 47.69 against and the rest don’t know.
Next week:
“Now is the time to bury bad news… about news” or how to bounce through media reform when everyone is looking the other way.
and
God bless Silvio: why the left needs Berlusconi.
and
Scandals in politics: what is the Telekom Serbia scandal all about?
A week into Italy’s presidency of the EU, there are two fundamental keys to understanding Silvio Berlusconi’s disastrous debut on 2 July. The first is the personal, almost psychological insight that the explosion gave us. Here is a man who is unable to control his anger and pique, who is unable to take harsh criticism but has learnt that he can vent his anger less dangerously by covering it with a veneer of “humour”.
The second key is in the actual words which provoked Berlusconi’s insults. The brouhaha which followed the “Nazi” attack has nicely obfuscated the substance of Martin Schulz’s initial attack which covered a number of important issues both for Mr. Berlusconi personally and for Europe.
First, the events: on Wednesday 2 July, Mr. Berlusconi delivered the opening speech of the Italian presidency to the European Parliament. It was 11 pages long and covered the semester’s agenda. Almost all of it was predictable and uncontroversial: agreement in the Convention leading to the signature of a European Constitution; preparation for next year’s enlargement of the EU and planning for further enlargement; a major public works and infrastructure programme to relaunch the Union’s flagging economy; cooperation on security measures to combat terrorism and illegal immigration.
He did not go into detail about the constitution which would certainly have rubbed someone up the wrong way. He did not mention enlarging the EU to include Russia and Israel as he had before. Only the very vigilant noticed a couple of omissions which were more substantial; no reference to combating racism at the same time as illegal immigration and no mention of confiscation of criminals’ assets as part of the Union-wide justice deal. Both points were in previous EU policy statements.
One of the replies came from Martin Schulz, head of the European Socialist Party group at the EP. Schulz asked Mr. Berlusconi explicit questions on all these issues which are European problems certainly not just Italian ones. The language was tough but Parliamentary and the substance of the criticism was wholly relevant to the European Parliament.
Instead of replying to the criticism or avoiding the questions as most politicians do, Berlusconi went for the man, not the ball. The attack had been against Berlusconi’s political and judicial position and his statement of European objectives and was couched in Parliamentary language. The counterattack was personal and unparliamentary.
Now the whys.
First the personal side. In 1993 Berlusconi exploded with real anger when a foreign journalist pressed him at a press conference he was giving with Gianfranco Fini, then candidate for mayor of Rome. Since then he has kept his temper under control but only by smiling while he delivers the insult as he did last Wednesday. As CEO of Fininvest, as leader of Forza Italia and the House of Liberties and as Prime Minister, he is unused to being criticised and when someone dares, Berlusconi lashes out against the presumed lesè majesté. On top of this, he has little sense of function and role. If I swear at a motorist who tries to knock me off the road, it is maybe uncontrolled behaviour but acceptable for most people. If I swear at a student who is being provocative, that is wholly improper. It is wholly improper for the President of the EU to insult an MEP in the Parliament and then refuse to apologise. But Mr. Berlusconi still insists that he is the injured party.
On the substance side, the issues are serious. As Mario Pirani pointed out (Repubblica 4 July ‘03: 1&17) it was not only Schulz’s immunity taunts which maddened Berlusconi but the very clear questions about him and his allies. EU statements about controlling illegal immigration have always been accompanied by proposals for measures to curb racism. Berlusconi’s speech had no such reference while his Minister for Reforms, Umberto Bossi, has been making some very offensive remarks which would not be tolerated from Le Pen or Haider, let alone a member of the cabinet of the EU’s presidency.
Directly relevant to Berlusconi were the questions on EU cooperation over justice. Roberto Castelli, the Leghista Minister of Justice said in Il Giornale (30 June) that there was a “wide-ranging plot” against Berlusconi which included the proposals for cooperation on European justice: “the European arrest warrant, freezing and confiscation of goods belonging to physical or legal entities”. “It is not difficult,” Castelli added allusively, “to imagine which Italian company will be the first to be investigated.” He presumably meant Berlusconi’s Mediaset.
The underlying intentions behind the measures are to deal with cross-border crime both normal and political: mafia, drugs, money laundering and international terrorism. For Castelli and implicitly Berlusconi to think that all this fuss is just in order to get Mediaset is not so much paranoia as arrogance. But Berlusconi’s over-reaction and “Nazi” insult do show how close to bone Shulz went.
For the next 5 months and 3 weeks, Europe will be looking very carefully at any, but any, measure which might benefit the EU’s President and his companies.
If all this talk about conflict of interest and parliamentary insults bore you, go to the Italian presidency’s website where the really pressing issues are analysed and debated. There is a section called Vostre opinioni; given events in the first week, one might expect an interesting and heated exchange. No way. There is only one subject that you can express your opinion on - the burning issue which divides the continent - should there be a one euro note? Happily for decision-makers, the 2,730 who responded showed near consensus, 50.51% in favour, 47.69 against and the rest don’t know.
Next week:
“Now is the time to bury bad news… about news” or how to bounce through media reform when everyone is looking the other way.
and
God bless Silvio: why the left needs Berlusconi.
and
Scandals in politics: what is the Telekom Serbia scandal all about?
Welcome to the latest contribution to comment on Italian politics. The International Herald Tribune’s Italy Daily supplement provided a good forum for opinions on politics and much more and italpolblog will be at least a partial substitute.
For the moment at least we will not be able to provide ID’s summary of events but I hope that in the not too distant future we’ll have daily postings of political goings-on in the country. Until then, there will be weekly articles on current issues by me, James Walston, and others, both orphans from ID and new commentators.
We welcome suggestions, comments and criticism on both style and content. What do you feel about the length of articles, the amount of background knowledge we can take for granted, the amount of references to other articles in the text?
Write to
internationalrelations@aur.edu
and tell us what you think
For the moment at least we will not be able to provide ID’s summary of events but I hope that in the not too distant future we’ll have daily postings of political goings-on in the country. Until then, there will be weekly articles on current issues by me, James Walston, and others, both orphans from ID and new commentators.
We welcome suggestions, comments and criticism on both style and content. What do you feel about the length of articles, the amount of background knowledge we can take for granted, the amount of references to other articles in the text?
Write to
internationalrelations@aur.edu
and tell us what you think
Thursday, July 03, 2003
Welcome to a forum for new insights to Italian politics with me, James Walston, a professor of international relations at the American University of Rome. Last month saw the end of Italy Weekly, published in conjunction with the International Herald Tribune, and now we have our first editorial comment in English on Italian politics on this blog.
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