Is Italy Ungovernable?

Broken from Birth

By RAYMOND ZHONG

Silvio Berlusconi seemed exceptionally pleased with himself right up until his last days in office. As Rome's cost of funds climbed early this month, Italy's prime minister maintained that his government's finances were shipshape and that the Italian economy was in fine health. "The restaurants are full and the planes fully booked," he told the G-20 summit in Cannes. Only after Mr. Berlusconi finally lost his parliamentary majority on Nov. 8 did his grin give way to a grimace and his gleaming perma-tan start to look a bit pale.

Did the Berlusconi era have to end this way, 17 years after il Cavaliere was first elected? Perhaps not, David Gilmour says. The historian and author is just surprised the end didn't come sooner.

"It should have ended long ago. It should have ended inside Italy, for Italian reasons. I think in no other country in Western Europe, or the States, would he have survived so long. He would never have survived so long, let alone been elected by an overwhelming majority in three elections."

Mr. Gilmour's latest book, "The Pursuit of Italy," is a wide-ranging ramble through Italian history, a tour in chronological order but with frequent digressions. It was meant to be a much shorter book, Mr. Gilmour says, one focusing on the 19th and 20th centuries. But his editors kept pushing him to follow the threads farther and farther back. "Go back to the Romans, David. Go back to Cicero."

Cicero, in Mr. Gilmour's telling, turns out to have plenty to say about Italy today, but the real cornerstone of modern Italy's woes is nevertheless more recent. According to Mr. Gilmour, the "Italian reasons" for which Mr. Berlusconi ought to have fallen have to do with the country's strong regional divisions, which perpetually fracture national politics and create weak institutions. Unifying the country, therefore, has cost it immeasurably. Seated before a log fire in his study, in a converted cottage deep in the plains of Oxfordshire, Mr. Gilmour explains.

In 1860, a sailor and radical named Giuseppe Garibaldi led a band of soldiers down the Italian peninsula and defeated the armies of Sicily and Naples in the name of the Sardinian King Victor Emmanuel II. Garibaldi had failed in his designs to unite the Italian kingdoms twice before, and he spent years in exile overseas before returning to the island of Caprera, near Sardinia, in 1854.

The third time was the charm. On March 17, 1861, Victor Emmanuel was declared the head of state of a new country called "Italy." But whether any of the peninsula's residents wanted to be "Italians" was uncertain from the start. "The South wasn't united," Mr. Gilmour says. "It was conquered."

The first signs of trouble came early. For five years after unification, Neapolitans waged war against the young national government. When that revolt was finally crushed, the Sicilians rose up. Northerners did not particularly want to share a country with the South, either. In his book, Mr. Gilmour quotes a distinguished politician and judge who told him, some decades ago, that "Garibaldi did Italy a great disservice. If he had not invaded Sicily and Naples, we in the north would have the richest and most civilized state in Europe. Of course to the south we would have a neighbor like Egypt."

Such sentiments endure on the lips of many Italians today. "If you went to Pisa today and you asked a Pisan how he or she identified themselves," Mr. Gilmour says, "I think they would first say Pisan. Then Tuscan. And then, OK, also Italian, and European. But the Pisan and the Tuscan come long before that."

The national government fares no better in popular estimation. "Nobody wants to be run by Rome, and Rome is only the capital because it was the capital of the [Roman] Empire. . . . In fact, there are arguments against every Italian city to be the capital. Because it should be Milan, but it's too far north. It was Turin, but it was too French. And Naples is for other reasons impossible." The capital of the new country only became Rome, in 1870, "because nobody could agree on anywhere else."

Did ancient divisions create the present crisis? Certainly they have made running a national government more difficult. Italian political parties tend to be assemblages of regional interests that lack clear ideological foundations. Factions cohere momentarily to win one election and then scatter before the next. Strong policy ideas get compromised into meaninglessness, and government after government accomplishes nothing of substance. What is regarded as Italian leaders' incompetence at, say, balancing budgets or curbing the size of the bureaucracy is in fact the result of more systemic defects.

In so gray a political landscape, Mr. Berlusconi stood out, if only by sheer force of personality. So long was shadow he cast that Mr. Gilmour isn't sure Mr. Berlusconi is out of the picture quite yet. "He says he won't stand again, but it would be interesting to see how many votes he would get if he did stand in the next elections. I suspect quite a lot."

That another Berlusconi term is even considered within the realm of possibility suggests a disconnect between Italians' choices at the ballot box and their professed attitudes toward their leaders. Italian voter turnout regularly outpaces participation in Britain or America. "They loyally come out at 70-80% and vote for the same party every time, even though they know that not much is going to change," Mr. Gilmour says. "Most Italians regard their government as something that's not going to help them, and as something that is to be avoided as much as possible. But this is the curious thing: They will still go and vote for them."

They didn't vote for Mario Monti, though, and on Italy's new prime minister Mr. Gilmour is bullish, with some reservations. He notes that technocratic governments have precedent in Italy. A cabinet of able-minded ministers and bureaucrats took office in 1994, after the collapse of Mr. Berlusconi's ruling coalition forced him to end his first term as prime minister. Then too, intimations of corruption and other, more serious crimes at the top made voters eager to bring in "wise men" to clean up the mess that their elected leaders had made.

Such experiences may also help explain Italians' attitude toward Europe and the European Union. I ask Mr. Gilmour why, if Lombards are so averse to being yoked with Calabrians, they should feel any keener to share a government with Spaniards and Greeks and Germans. "Italians feel, and felt, that Europe can solve problems for them which their governments don't dare," he says. Long before the present crisis, Italians had viewed Brussels and the EU as the responsible adults in the room. "I think distrust of their own government is always much higher than their distrust of Europe."

Mr. Gilmour takes longer to respond when I ask why, if a unified Italy was always doomed to failure, it hasn't failed yet. "Well, you could say that it has more or less failed, but without quite breaking up. If the second party in the government is against a unified Italy, then that's pretty serious, isn't it?"

That party would be the Milan-based Northern League, a longtime member of Mr. Berlusconi's coalition. Northern League voters have agitated for greater fiscal federalism and even the outright secession of 11 northern Italian regions. In many circles they are viewed as dangerous populists, the sort who sit in bars grousing about the uncivilized South.

But there are also those in the North whose separatist feelings are more grounded. "In Italy," Mr. Gilmour says, "Northern businessmen really resent that they're competing with businessmen in Austria, in Slovenia, in Switzerland. They really resent that when they try to remain competitive, they've got to give so much money to the South. Especially when they feel they're not really part of the same country, and when they know that so much of that money is being wasted and getting into the hands of the Mafia."

Devolution is one clear solution, and it is only due to the Northern League's efforts that the issue of fiscal federalism is on the table in Rome at all. It's unlikely that Mr. Monti's government will be able to do much on this front before the next elections, but to Mr. Gilmour at least, greater regional autonomy is the only long-term fix for the country's dysfunctional politics. "I think if Italy has a future as a united country, it has to be as a federal state, or it will break up," he says. "But it's difficult ever to be optimistic about what happens in Italian politics."

Optimism about the Italian economy is hard to muster, too. "There's so much red tape in these countries. You can't even become a taxi driver in Milan because there's a cartel that must give you your license. And so many professions in Italy are inherited. If you're a dentist, you more or less hand over your dentistry to your son, which in Britain or America would be impossible unless you were incredibly well-qualified."

But, he adds, "There's a basic talent and resourcefulness in Italy that if unharnessed, if they're not shackled by current labor laws and so on, could work. It worked before."

He isn't just referring to the postwar boom of the 1950s and '60s, or to the period in the '80s and early '90s when Italy's GDP briefly surpassed Britain's. "Italians have always been obsessed with what the rest of Europe thinks of them," Mr. Gilmour says. "They're very aware that for centuries they were not only the most civilized people in Europe, they were also the richest. They didn't want to fight wars, and they built beautiful cities full of art. They exported banking to Germany. The Genovese were the bankers of the Spanish empire."

"And then by the end of the 18th century, they realized that they were poorer than Europe and were often derided. Mussolini was obsessed: 'The world thinks we're mandolin-players and innkeepers, and that we're just a museum which foreigners come to enjoy.'"

Despite the professional distance he maintains as a historian, Mr. Gilmour doesn't deny being an ardent fan of Italian culture—a devoted scholar but also a serial enjoyer of Italy. As research for "The Pursuit of Italy," he spent time in each of the country's 20 regions. He found that the best of Italy was found away from the big cities, in the experience of life in small towns and villages.

"This is the Italian identity at its strongest: in a town of 80,000 people, where you will still have the theaters and the concert halls." Referring to the town nearest to his home in the village of Alkerton, he says, "If you go to Banbury, you're lucky to see a film at the cinema that you wanted to see. There's no question of having a concert or anything like that."

Italian culture, in other words, is both deeply provincial and highly international. It's just not very national. This is a curious reason for any country to have experienced so much tumult over the last 150 years, let alone for it to be at risk of felling a major currency bloc. It is a "crisis" when a system breaks down. What is it called when the system never worked in the first place?