Italy and the Dirty Don

Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s sleazy and priapic prime minister, is a puzzle. This shady, corrupt, dirty old sexual predator, ever preying on young girls, should have been ejected from office long since. He would have been…in any other country but Italy. But the Dirty Don is a product, a product of history, a product of the Risorgimento, the nineteenth century ‘resurgence’, which saw the creation of the modern state, the imperfect end of an imperfect process.

There is a very interesting piece by Alexander Lee in the History Matters section of the March issue of History Today, in which he argues that Berlusconi type – yes, he is a type – is a direct consequence of Italy’s democratic deficit. It’s a timely article, coming on the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the country’s unification, which falls on 17 March.

The thing is, you see, Italy emerged as a state before it became a nation. I would go further: Italy is the nation that never was. Unification was only a partial process, a political process unaccompanied by any deep-rooted sense of common identity. Even today one of the strongest forces in Italian politics, the Northern League, is committed to separation from the south, the old Kingdom of Naples, frogmarched into Italy by Garibaldi and his Red Shirts in 1860.

So there it was: the new nation thrown up on the European shores. But while there may have been some enthusiasm for the ideal of Italy, at least among the educated classes (peasants in Sicily thought it was the name of the king of Piedmont's wife!), there was little or none for democratic accountability. Garibaldi himself saw the individual as less important than the state. The old bone-head and his Red Shirts; Mussolini and his Black Shirts - there is really no difference, just so long as there is a shirt!

Cynicism over democratic accountability was compounded by the style of parliamentary politics that emerged after unification: one of cronyism, localism, corruption and naked self-interest. As Lee says, even for leading figures of the Risorgimento parliament was no more than a market place for sinecures, jobs and contracts. The kickback culture was king; it remains king.

Parliament, then, was simply a theatre of organised abuse, which explains why Italian ‘democracy’ died so readily in 1922, typically in a backstage deal, not in Mussolini’s ludicrously theatrical March on Rome. After the end of the fascist dictatorship it was back to business as usual, with the post-war Christian Democrats retaining a prolonged hold on power by a mixture of cronyism and patronage. Prime ministers Giulio Andreotti and Amintore Fanfani even made government contracts dependant on support of the party, a situation that would not have been tolerated elsewhere.

Politics was just about manipulation and management, not transparency and accountability, and management was about largess and bribes. This culture was aided by the failures of unification, which left people with a local rather than a national consciousness. Italy, Prince Metternich once said, is no more than a geographical expression. Really, once the dust of Garibaldi had settled, once he had taken off his shirt, that’s exactly what it remained, even so far as today. Fragmentation effectively means that politicians can get way with all sorts of chicanery and malfeasance.

Berlusconi is not the antithesis of the Risorgimento, a bogus ‘rebirth’ which never valued liberty and accountability. In so many ways he is its modern representative, the inheritor of a long tradition of corruption and democratic abuses. He continues to hold power not by the will of the people, assuming it’s possible to identify such a thing in Italy, but by the will of a cabal; by deals done behind doors, by offers made that could not be refused. Hey, chase those girls and cue the music. :-)

Satyrs and nymphs

Last weekend the Times carried a rather censorious leader, tut tuts and finger-wagging, all taking Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s premier and Europe’s premier dirty old man, to task. He must go, it said, for the ridicule that he has brought both on himself and his country. This comes after the latest revelations about his sexual shenanigans, which allegedly included sleeping with underage call-girls. Anyone, young or old, who agrees to go to bed with this old goat surely deserves some kind of compensation, but let that pass.

To the Times I have to say Italy is Italy; it’s a foreign country: they do things differently there. For the rest of us politics is such a serious business; we need some diversion; we need some light entertainment; we need the ongoing farce that is Italian politics; we need silly, theatrical Italian politicians, a blessing on the simple, silly souls. Above all we need dear old Silvio, this seventy-four year old King Knut, desperately trying to hold back the advancing tides of time, with dyes, hair weaves and what have you. Contrary to the Times assertion, we need the opera buffa that we have come to expect from the Italian political class.

My sincere apologies to all my Italian friends; I mean no offence, though offence some of you have doubtless taken. I dare say you are one of the more serious among your nation, one who did not vote for this endearingly comic man, one of those who are not beguiled by his boyish machismo. You may favour the fall of his coalition, you may vote against his party, but do please consider the rest of us. After all what will we be left with if Silvio departs the stage? Herman van Rumpuy and Angela Merkel, that’s what, and not that much in the way of fun and frolics is to be expected from them!

As a good Italian you will know something of your modern history. Silvio admires Benito, you know, that man in the black shirt who only sent opponents ‘on holiday.’ Silvio should admire Benito, for he, too, was very much in the tradition of Italian farce. Now you are even angrier with me. But do remember what Benedetto Croce, the best of your modern philosophers, said in contrasting Nazism and Fascism. You’ve forgotten? Let me remind you then. He said that while National Socialism was a dark shadow, deep and brooding in German history, Fascism, even in the midst of its worst excesses, never quite lost its carnival atmosphere. Yes, and it also did wonders for the sale of castor oil!

So let’s hear it for farce, let’s hear it for carnival, let’s hear it for opera buffa, let’s hear it for Silvio! Italy is the theatre of the comically absurd. Let it remain in a permanent state of emotional adolescence, a place where satyrs are perpetually chasing nymphs. We need it so, a little southern colour in our gloomy northern light.

Operation Barbarossa

When Barbarossa begins the world will hold its breath and…yawn!

It has begun, though I suspect it’s not the Barbarossa that you are thinking of, the Barbarossa invoked by my opening sentence. It is, rather, an all Italian production, a cinematic epic released under the title of Barbarossa (Red Beard), the name once given to Frederick I of Hohenstaufen, king of Germany, king of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, who reigned in the twelfth century. But the real hero of the movie is one Alberto de Giussano, the Milanese blacksmith who, according to legend helped defeat the Imperial forces at the Battle of Legnano. Alberto is the hero because he just happens to be the symbolic figure favoured by the Northern League and by its leader, Umberto Bossi. And hereby hangs a tale.

The Northern League is best envisaged, if you can picture such a thing, as a kind of combination of the British and Scottish National Parties. Bossi and his followers, who dream of an independent state in Northern Italy to be called Pandania, have a racist antipathy to the peoples of the south, so much so that they recently threatened to form a human chain along the line of the River Po to keep out further migration northwards. But this does not stop Bossi being a chum of Silvio Berlusconi, the Prime Minister, and it does not stop him from having a seat in the Italian cabinet.

Having Berlusconi as one’s Padre padrone carries other rewards, not least of which is access to funding for favoured cultural projects; and the one project most favoured by Bossi was Barbarossa: he even managed to get a bit-part. However, this celebration of ‘northern pride’ which features such international stars as Rutger Hauer as Frederick, and Céline Cassel, a French actress, as the Empress Beatrice, is turning into a cinematic disaster, the occasion for a fresh political storm. Only in Italy!

The problem is, you see, there are simply not enough ‘Pandonians’ to make Barbarossa a going venture, and those there are clearly prefer other things. In the opening weekend it took only 441,000 Euros at the box office compared with 1.8 million for Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Last week L’Espresso was suggesting that Bossi’s baby might turn out to be the biggest flop in the history of Italian cinema. Even in Erba in Lombardy, a stronghold of the Northern League, only a handful of members showed up for the opening night, prompting the local paper to say, “If the Lombards don’t go and see it, who will?”

Rai, the state television network, which partially funded the project, is also committed to showing it as a two-hundred minute mini-series. Here Berlusconi was the decisive influence in securing funding and support, telling a Rai manager, whose phone had been tapped in a corruption investigation, that “Bossi is really on at me…about this Barbarossa.” Yes, Prime Minister!

Would you like to know something about the movie itself? Well, The Observer reports that when one Roman cinema-goer was asked about his impressions he replied;

With the swirling violins, the fighting and the constant cries for liberty, it’s like spending two hours inside Bossi’s brain.

It may be that, in the light of past usage, the very name Barbarossa may now be said to carry the same curse of misfortune as…the Scottish Play. :-))

Seedy Silvio, Italy’s Second Rate Tiberius

My mind turned this morning for entirely unexplained reasons to Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s worst son since, well, Il Duce! Sorry:that’s unfair; Mussolini at least had a sense of style!

Yes, I know now why Berlusconi, that seedy old Lothario, has intruded on my consciousness: it’s because I caught the tail-end of a story about girls-meaning prostitutes-who had been paid to attend one of his gruesome parties. I really do have to make some concessions to the perspicacity of Karl Marx; everything in history does indeed occur twice, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. On reflection I think I will amend that to suggest that many things in history occur twice, the first time as farce and the second time as even more farce. Seedy Silvio calls to mind the long-dead Emperor Tiberius. If you want to know the exact parallel I’m drawing read Seutonius, particularly his account of those lovely parties at the Imperial retreat on Capri.

Seedy Silvio has such a stranglehold on the Italian press that it’s doubtful if Italy has a free press at all, one of the essential props, arguably the essential prop, of a proper working democracy. But Italy came late to democracy and, I suspect, has never been entirely comfortable with the idea or the practice. After all, this is a country that no sooner had it cast off Fascism than it almost embraced Communism. Now it has another ‘benevolent dictator’, who, like his predecessor, would probably much rather send people ‘on holiday’ than murder them. I wonder if there are still places on Capri. :-))