FORZA ITALIA ! ONLY LATIN ALCHEMY CAN SAVE THE UNION / THE FINANCIAL TIMES COMMENTARY & ANALYSIS ( HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

July 15, 2011 10:54 pm

Forza Italia! Only Latin alchemy can save the Union

By John Lloyd

Each man, according to Oscar Wilde, kills the thing he loves, and countries can, too. Greece and Portugal, Spain and Ireland, all love the European Union dearly: the first three because membership gave their democrats and their democracies an anchor after decades of postwar dictatorship, all four because European transfers helped them boom. Now, they cling about the neck of the beloved and are likely to drown it in their desperation.


But when we move to Italy – as the markets have, like circling carrion, this past week – we are in another dimension. Italy was a founding member of the Union. The anti-fascist journalist Altiero Spinelli wrote, in a wartime Fascist camp, a manifesto, Toward a Free and United Europe, that was among the first of its kind: he spent his life seeking to make it a reality. Alcide de Gasperi, still the longest continuously serving Italian prime minister (eight years, from 1945-1953), made joining the European project his priority. The first was a youthful communist, the second a lifelong Christian Democrat, but the two men, from opposite sides of the political field, sealed a lasting compact between their country and the Union.


Yet could it be the assassin of the Union it has loved, largely uncritically? Could Italy slip the stiletto between the shoulder blades?


The generous spread of the eurozone to countries of sharply differing polities and cultures means that what fellow Europeans once found charming, they now find intolerable. National habits have become European vices. So Britain’s tendency to euroscepticism, its shifts between cautious enthusiasm and incautious anathematising, infuriate dedicated Europeanists: in an interview with Corriere della Sera last month, Helmut Schmidt, the 92-year-old former German chancellor, snapped: “There is no crisis of the euro! It’s all nonsense spread about the world by a little group of British financial journalists!”


In the case of Italy, the fiscal chaos and organised criminality of the south; the widespread tax evasion; the bloated, unproductive public sector; and the exciting but wholly damaging grotesqueries of the Berlusconi style and administration have left a government drained of much of its authority, based on a fractious parliamentary coalition, whose ageing leader has spent too much of his three separate periods in power safeguarding his own interests and avoiding acting radically in the interest of his state.


For a decade and a half, Silvio Berlusconi has swaggered on the Italian stage, sucking the oxygen out of any other political force by the energy and drive of his show. A fascinating composite of brilliant and unscrupulous entrepreneur, joker in the bar, clan boss and Latin lover, the prime minister relied too much on his seductive powers to be able to point out, let alone act on, the blemishes on the face of the nation he wooed. This week, as he presided over votes to take €48bn ($67bn, £42bn) out of public spending over the next three years, the sunny optimism with which he has seemed to greet every passage in his private and public life loses credibility.


And thus he declines. In this, there is a parallel with another large figure who sought to marry media and political power and who, these past weeks, has also been declining – though not, in both cases, without a fight. Rupert Murdoch has had to cut as well – in his case, the News of the World and the BSkyB bid – and he too, a little further on in his ageing, has seen his enemies, once silenced, now emboldened; his life’s work besmirched. The Italian was the more audacious: he asked, directly, for his people’s mandate, while the Australian exercised his power over those who had it. That audacity, so much part of the nature of a country which has innovation in its bloodstream, now seems like hubris.


Those of us from northern countries, buffeted by a capricious summer, longing for the beach umbrellas in the torrid afternoons and the linguine con gamberetti in the soft evenings, now see Italy’s dark side turning upwards. For Italians, it is a constantly lived experience – as the irresponsibility, the self-absorption, the hatred of the judges, the flagrant clash of interests between his media interests and his political responsibilities, the tacit encouragement to evade taxes which were manifest in their national leader now emerge from behind the painted mask and force a reckoning.


And it may be a hard reckoning to make, for the dark side is dark. The productive and wealthy north is the country’s locomotive – but it has not been able to pull the country out of a still anaemic growth rate, the lowest of any large European economy over the past decade. The south remains a huge drain – on the treasury, the security forces, the national mood. Worse, having sucked the air out of political challengers left and right, Mr Berlusconi has allowed the emergence of no big figure or force able to rise to the challenge of confronting a relatively pampered electorate with the sober truth: that they cannot go on like this. They need to retire much later, work much harder (at least in the public sector), pay taxes much more diligently and become much more civic-minded. Yet who can perform the alchemists’ trick, of turning base Italians into golden Swedes?


Only the Italians themselves. Here is a country which had some of the highest growth rates in the world in the decades after the last war; which tightened its belt in the late 1990s to get into the euro (it defied many forecasts in doing so, though it may think less of that now than it did); and which has real successes in business, courage in opposition to the mafias, professional dedication in making reforms to the overloaded judicial system. Forza, Italia! (Courage, Italy!), written by the former Economist editor Bill Emmott, is an invocation, from a man with much form in opposing Mr Berlusconi, of this go-go Italy – even if it is no accident he is not Italian.

Only the Italians themselves. And they may. They must, if they are to save the Europe they love.
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The writer is an FT contributing editor
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Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2011