ITALY VOTES
Why has Italy fallen apart so badly over the past 20 years? Bill Emmott
says the country's implosion is reminiscent of the decline of the
city-state of Venice.
ITALY VOTES
- Bersani leads Berlusconi in Italian polls
- Can a Bersani-Monti coalition work?
- Will anyone win a majority? | Issues
- Profiles: Bersani | Grillo | Berlusconi
- Berlusconi neither down nor out
- Changing Italy from the outside
By Bill Emmott, Special to CNN
February 20, 2013 -- Updated 1816 GMT (0216 HKT)
Pier Luigi Bersani, leader of
Italy's Democratic Party, is the man most people expect to become the
next prime minister of Italy. He has pledged to keep outgoing premier
Mario Monti's austerity reforms, but says stimulus is needed to boost
the country's flagging economy.
HIDE CAPTION
Austerity-hit Italy chooses new leader
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
- Bill Emmott: "Good Italy and Bad Italy" represent spit personalities of troubled country
- In 1950s, Italy was Europe's "emerging economy" and a pioneering center for design
- Old demons, including corruption and bloated public pensions, nearly bankrupted Italy
- Today Italy's biggest problem is the country's refusal to take responsibility and change
Editor's note: Bill Emmott is a British journalist and was the editor of The Economist from 1993 to 2006. His book "Good Italy, Bad Italy" was published in English in 2012, and he is the narrator of "Girlfriend in a Coma," a documentary about Italy's current crisis.
(CNN) -- On my first visit to Italy, at the age of
18, I fell in love with the country and its amazing history almost at
first sight, as I and my friends sailed across the lagoon on the ferry
to Venice. When we returned and found our camper van had been emptied
out by thieves, I felt a little less enamored, to say the least.
This was my first glimpse
of the split personality of a country that is expressed nearly 40 years
later in the title of my 2012 book, "Good Italy, Bad Italy," and is the theme of the new film I have just narrated for the Italian director Annalisa Piras, "Girlfriend in a Coma".
Yet what I didn't realize
then, as a (fairly) innocent teenager, was quite how significant
Italy's history is for the whole of the West.
Bill Emmott
The greatest case study,
or cautionary tale, comes from Venice itself. In medieval times La
Serenissima, as Venice is known, became the richest and most powerful
city-state in the Mediterranean. It was run by a quasi-democratic "grand
council", made up of the merchants who were making the city rich, an
elite that was open to newcomers if they had new ideas and new energies.
But in the 14th century
the elite decided to close its doors to newcomers, allowing in only
those related by family to the old guard, and nationalizing trading
rights. The decline of Venice began with that decision.
Italy today is like a
huge re-run of that sad Venetian story. During the 1950s and 1960s, the
country was Europe's own "emerging economy" of the period, enjoying the
third fastest average annual GDP growth rate in the world during those
decades, beaten only by Japan and South Korea. It was helped by the
global move towards freer trade and by the early European Union, but
also by its own then very dynamic society and economy.
New, entrepreneurial
companies were formed, new ideas blossomed; Italy became a pioneering
center for design, for cinema, and for fashion, and the migration of
millions of workers from the poor south to the industrializing north
provided the factories with labor at a competitive price.
Filmmakers: Italy needs a wake-up call
But then old demons came
back to haunt Italy. The sharp polarization, combined with fear, between
left and right that was a legacy of the fascist period of Mussolini
from 1917 to 1943, returned first in the form of a huge wave of strikes
in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and then in a deadly form of
political violence. Nearly 500 people died in shootings, bombings and
other tragedies during the decade and a half from 1970 as extremists on
both left and right fought a running battle.
As well, sadly, as taking
part in the violence, governments responded by trying to buy social
peace -- first by implementing a very restrictive labor law which had
the effect of making the law courts the principal arbitrator in
industrial disputes; and second by an explosion of public spending (and
thus borrowing) chiefly on pensions and a national health system.
Public pensions became
the main form of unemployment insurance, as unwanted workers were
permitted to retire early and draw pensions. But public debt became the
main albatross around Italy's neck as governments ran budget deficits
that in 1975-95 averaged (yes, averaged) almost 10% of GDP each and
every year. The result: a pioneering crisis of sovereign debt and a
foretaste of the crises now roiling the eurozone, as Italy's debt load
reached 120% of GDP in the early 1990s and sent the country into near
bankruptcy.
That financial crisis,
in the course of which the Italian lira was ejected from Europe's
pre-euro exchange-rate system (along with Britain's pound sterling)
coincided with a huge political crisis, as corruption investigations
brought crashing down the parties that had dominated Italian politics
for the past 40 years.
The crisis brought talk
of a new start, a "second republic" (to succeed the first, formed with
the postwar constitution in 1945-48) and even a renaissance. In the
interim, governments led by so-called technocrats (a professor, a
governor of the Bank of Italy, an ex-diplomat) were brought in to make
reforms and give the country a much needed "reset" before normal
politics would be resumed.
It didn't happen. Hence,
20 years later, Italy finds itself in yet another crisis, one that
looks eerily similar. The country's sovereign debt is -- you guessed it
-- 120% of GDP. A mix of financial crisis and scandals brought down the
long-running government of the media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi,
while also discrediting establishment politicians of all parties.
In November 2011 a
technocrat, the economics professor and former European Commissioner
Mario Monti, was brought in to stabilize the country's finances, make
reforms and give the country a "reset" before normal politics commence
again after the upcoming elections.
It is too soon to say
that the "reset" -- or, to use a broader metaphor, the upgrading of
Italy's cultural, political and economic software -- will fail again.
But it can be said that progress has been slow and disappointing.
Prime Minister Monti
succeeded in stabilizing the public finances, but at the cost of a
deeper recession than in all other eurozone economies except Greece and
Spain. Beyond that, however, no major reforms have been implemented --
so the justice system remains painfully slow, the labor laws still
discourage hiring while leaving millions of young people on poorly paid
temporary contracts, competition remains overly restricted, too many
markets are over-regulated, meritocracy remains stunted, corruption
remains rife, and the huge cost of politics and political privileges has
been left unchanged.
These tasks all remain
for whichever coalition succeeds in forming a government after the
elections. They should, however, have been done during the previous 20
years. Some progress in liberalizing markets was made, but not enough to
stop Italy's GDP growth rate during 2001-10 from being the 180th worst
in the world, just ahead of Haiti's.
Why not? Resistance from
entrenched interest groups has been strong. Berlusconi's entry into
politics in 1994 was essentially designed to obstruct change, to
preserve his quasi-monopolistic businesses, and to ensure the old
political ways could continue. On the left, suspicion of capitalism has
remained rife, trade union powers have been maintained more successfully
than in Germany or even France, and the use of political patronage to
build power networks and reward supporters has helped destroy
meritocracy.
The big question,
however, is why Italians have allowed this to happen. The answer in our
film, "Girlfriend in a Coma", is taken from Italy's, and arguably
Europe's, greatest ever poet: Dante Alighieri. In his "Divine Comedy" of
the 14th century, the sin he condemned most vigorously was "ignavia,"
by which he meant sloth -- the failure to take responsibility, the
failure to show moral courage and to change things.
That is the coma that
filmmaker Annalisa Piras and I diagnose as the Italian condition:
economic stagnation, yes, but also a failure of consciousness and
responsibility, which is in effect a moral failure.
Umberto Eco, the
philosopher and novelist, adds a further explanation in the film.
Italians, he says, "do not have a sense of the state." They had and
respected a very powerful state in Roman times but that collapsed. The
only states that have successfully replaced it since then have been the
city states of Venice, Florence and elsewhere, which produced great
riches and even the Renaissance of art, science, humanism and culture of
the 15th century, but never achieved a set of stable, respected,
still-less national institutions.
To get Italy out of its
coma, its second crisis of 20 years, new governments will have to work
hard to fix that problem. To make sure they do so, Italians will need to
shed their ignavia and to become more active and demanding -- not in
their sectional or local interests, but in the national interest.
- COPY http://edition.cnn.com
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário