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    ITALY: A CLEAN-UP AFTER THE COLD WAR

                                      Francesco Sidoti

In these pages we will discuss the thesis that in order to understand the present problems of Italy, decisive weight should be given to the end of an era of international politics dominated by the bipolar and conflictual relationship between East and West.

    It is clear that the cold war was of diminishing importance after Gorbachev coming to power, but it definitively ended only after the failed Moscow coup in mid-1991. From 1946, without interruption, in a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain, Italy was the frontier's country where the cold war was most bitterly fought, beacause the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the strongest Communist party in the world outside the Soviet empire.

   From many points of view, the Italian Communists were ordinary politicians peacefully involved in cooperatives and in the trade unions. Their management of some important regions and municipalities was judged very positively by many scholars. In public declarations they stated their preference for a peaceful way to socialism, conversion to liberty, independence from Soviet influence, and the acceptance of a democratic system. In actual fact they remained linked to Moscow's orientations in every international problem where East and West were opposed. Now we understand why: they were heavily financed, directly and indirectly, by the Soviets. In brief, after Eltsin had trown out many skeletons from the closets of the Kremlin, we have the proof that the staunch anti-Communists were right. The big lie about Bolshevism concerned also Italy, where the PCI had been on the take from Stalin to Gorbachev. Still in 1985 the Italian Communists declared that the only imperialist State in the world was the Usa; from Palestine to Iran, from Angola to Nicaragua their jugments were always in accordance with Moscow and never in accordance to Washington. As has been said many times, also the PCI fitted Charles De Gaulle's caustic statement: the Communists were neither <<on the left>> nor <<on the right>> but simply <<in the East>>.

   In spite of all this, the PCI had some historical merits; for instance, it was a strong antagonist of terrorism (even if many terrorists claimed that they were just true Communists). The Italian Communists (like the neo-Fascists) collaborated in various forms with the coalitions that governed Italy, at local as well as at national level. Moreover, they have contributed in helping to elect decent people to the Presidency of the Republic. On various occasions, they helped in keeping alive many governments, that were based on small majorities and were often exposed to political blackmail and defections. For these reasons, major observers of Italian politics had no prejudices against Stalinist leftists, just as other major observers of Italian politics had no prejudices against fascist and clerical forces.

   In the 1950s the containment of the Italian Communists was easy: in the elections of 1950s and the 1960s the PCI augmented slowly. But after the great social uproar of the late 1960s the <<red scare>> grew at the same level of 1947.    From 1973 the PCI's strategy was characterized by the proposal of a <<historic compromise>>: both an appeasement with the Italian catholic world and a power-sharing agreement with the Christian Democrats. In these years a Communist was elected president of the Chamber and a quarter of the chairmanships in the Chamber and Senate committees were assigned to communists candidates. The incorporation of the PCI into the governmental area boosted apprhensions.

   Influential parts of the country were against the PCI and against the so-called <<modernization>> of the country (minority rights for feminism and homosexuality, legalization of divorce and abortion, rise of the unions, and so on). The backward sector of ruling class looked apppreciatively towards the possibility of giving a reactionary answer to the fear of Communism and to the social and political problems resulting from Italy's social transformation. Other groups were worried only by the foreign policies that Communists could have promoted if they had escaped the political limbo where they would have otherwise stayed for ever.

    In the opinion of some observers, years of terrorism and a long list of massacres were handled in order to conserve the status quo in Italy. A <<strategy of tension>> would have accompanied the increase of Communist influence in the governmental area. The tension would have been intended to be a means to intimidate both the electorate and the ambiguous disposition of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), which in some way preferred an under-the-table deal with the Communists in order to conserve power. In this way an invisible and international anticommunist organization (which controlled or influenced Italian and foreign secret services) would have promoted stabilization by destabilization ([1]).

   Still in 1990 e in 1991 there has been a furious political debate about presumed involvement in terroristic activities of members of secret military forces formed within NATO in order to combat a possible Soviet invasion. It has been supposed that in the 1970s and 1980s some members of this organisation (formed to defend democracy) took illegal action because the growth of Italian Communism seemed to them to have reached an extremely dangerous level. The President of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga, was accused of having covered up serious responsabilities; obviously the accusation was denied indignately. The ghosts of the cold war are still used to hit political enemies.

THE AWAKENING OF THE <<DROWSY AND NEGLECTED ACT>>

 The overwhelming weight of the Communist question in the Italian situation had various consequences, first of all an abnormal importance of political parties.

   The PCI had a widespread and efficient organisation; it had taken over the structures of trade-unions, municipalities, and cooperatives, which had been built up gradually and all over the country by the Socialist party from the end of 19th century. Since the electoral success of the PCI was closely connected with the strength of its organisation, the other parties also decided to create party organisation equally widespread. An enormous amount of money was necessary in order to equal the Communists: the democratic parties were condemned to face a severe competition with a adversary that had an autonomus financing structure throught the cooperatives and throught the disinterested engagement of its members for ideological reasons. Moreover, the PCI had vital access to rubles from Moscow, or directly or indirectly thanks to the intermediation of Italian commercial societies which had privileged relations with the Soviets.

    In the years of the cold war, the cost of being in politics rose exorbitantly. The extraordinary expansion of the parties involved above all the DC, which was, in a certain sense, forced to increase its income above what was allowed by the contribution of the industrialists and the support of the catholic world. Instead of going continuously cap in hand to the businessman or to the Americans, the DC preferred to create huge autonomous sources of finance either using the public economy or inventing continuosly other sectors of intervention. For some years this mechanism, which started in the 1950s, did not create difficulties to the economic development of the country. But with time it became terrifyingly gigantic.

   Moreover, from the 1960s, democratization of society became hyper-politicization: from universities to hospitals, from the judiciary to the opera houses, the parties entered in a series of public structures renewed and facilitated in order to accomodate the appetite for jobs which was growing greedly within the parties. One of the first consequences of this abnormal enlargement of political activity has been the disappearence of the sense of the State as the seat of rational and impartial powers. The legendary inefficiency of many Italian basic services, from the post office to railways, originates mainly from this factor.

   The supreme consequence of the high cost of politics was an almost bureaucratized system of kickbacks. For instance, in the field of public-works contracts, the lavish payoffs were divided respecting rigidly the portion of electoral vote controlled by each party in the elections. When, in February 1992, a bribes scandal came to light in Milan, and a wave of disgust and indignation rocked almost every Italian city, political parties remained in astonished disarray, beacuse they were accused of their routine fund-raising ([2]). In a speech thrown to the wolves, Bettino Craxi sustained that <<Every one knows that a large part of political financing is irregular or illegal>>. Audaciously he affirmed that, during the years of the cold war, every one knew that the cost of politics was paid by methods now called <<an enormous corruption network>>.

   In Italy a million people are in full-time politics; they are therefore professional politicians in the strict sense: for some of them politics is a vocation, for some of them is a means of gaining a living, and for some of them is a career for upward social mobility. They live off politics;  if all the Italian politics is corrupt, they (and their families and their activities) all live directly or indirectly off corruption (even if personally many of them are not corrupt). For these reasons, while the majority of the country considers the prosecutors as heroes and wants the fat-cat politicians behind bars, others gloomily say something like the words of one protagonist of Measure for meausure against an inflexible magistrate:

<<...But this new governor

Awakes me all the enrolled penalties

Which have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall

So long that nineteen zodiacs have gone round,

And none of them be worn; and, for a name,

Now puts the drowsy and neglect act

Freshly on me: -'tis surely for a name.>> (Act I, scene III)

THE HOUDINI ECONOMY

   At the center of the Italian case there is a peculiar frame of the constitution, which had been written in fear of a one-party-dominated political structure.

   The founding fathers of the Italian Republic were so frightened by Fascism and Communism that they preferred to draw up a formula based on proportional system and predominance of Parliament. The proportional system generated a Parliament that was powerful but fragmented and plagued by a diffused power of veto: large coalitions were always necessary in order to elect the Cabinet, and large majorities were necessary for most of legislative procedures. The supremacy of the political parties, the vulnerability of Cabinets and the great influence of little parliamentary groups are other important consequences of this original sin of the Italian Republican system.

   Influential scholars suggested that the extraordinary place of politics in the Italian situation produced a successful <<democracy Italian style>>; for others, on the contrary, all kind of malpractice was generated by the main feature of the political system: the impossibility to substitute the leadership. Because of the only alternative to the governamental coalition led by the Dc was a governmental coalition led by the Communists, the regime always remained in the hands of an irremovable power elite. Effectively, the DC maintained the monopoly of government and the PCI maintained the monopoly of the opposition. For the voters, alternation among different political parties was absolutely unachievable, and acceptance of corruption was a consequence of the impossibility of any form of renewal process. As it as been said ironically: <<For almost 50 years, Italian society as a whole has found itself in a situation similar to the one that prevailed in the recent gubernatorial elections in Louisiana, where a former three-term governor, better known for his rakish reputation (an avid gambler with a couple of corruption indictements), managed to triumph over a one-time Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Nazi sympathizer. Thus, the bumper sticker that bluntly, although perhaps honestly, summed up the sentiments of 61 per cent of all Luisianians, Vote for the crook-it's important, could have been adopted in Italy for almost half a century>> ([3]).

    There are crooks of many kinds; the Italian ones, if crooks they are, promoted a system that was opened to many segments of the Italian society. Industria