The crisis and transformation of Italian politics

Daedalus

Volumn 130, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 1-24

  Berselli, Edmondo ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 1542351796     PISSN: 00115266     EISSN: 15486192     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (39)

1. Among the many books containing an outline of events in Italy after the war, see especially: Paul Ginsborg, Storia d'Italia dal dopoguerra a oggi (Turin: Einaudi, 1989);
2. Pietro Scoppola, La Repubblica dei partiti (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991);
3. Silvio Lanaro, Storia dell'Italia repubblicana (Venice: Marsilio, 1992);
4. Aurelio Lepre, Storia della prima Repubblica (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993; new ed., 1999).
5. In particular, on the situation that led to the establishment of the Center-Left, see Pietro Di Loreto, La difficile transizione: Dalla fine del centrismo al centrosinistra 1953-1960 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993).
6. On the evolution of the Italian parties, besides the classic book by Paolo Farneti, Il sistema dei partiti in Italia 1946-1979 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983),
7. see the essay by Piero Ignazi, "I partiti e la politica dal 1963 al 1992," in Giovanni Sabbatucci and Vittorio Vidotto, eds., Storia d'Italia, vol. 6, L'Italia contemporanea (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999).
8. The formula "imperfect two-party system" was coined by the political scientist Giorgio Galli. Under this title, midway through the 1960s, he published an essay that for a long time was a landmark in the analysis of the Italian political structure. See Galli, Il bipartitismo imperfetto (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1966).
9. This was an abridged version of a broader collective work coordinated by Galli, Il comportamento elettorale in Italia 1946-1963 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1968).
10. Among the numerous books that describe the trajectory of the PSI, see Giovanni Sabbatucci, Il riformismo impossibile: Storie del socialismo italiano (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1991).
11. A debate between several authors, written at the time of the triumph of Craxism, can be found in the collective work La questione socialista: Per una possibile reinvenzione della sinistra, ed. Vittorio Foa and Antonio Giolitti (Turin: Einaudi, 1987).
12. A more recent book is Massimo L. Salvadori, La Sinistra nella storia italiana (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1999).
13. Giuseppe Di Palma, Sopravvivere senza governare: I partiti nel Parlamento italiano (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1978).
14. The jurist Gustavo Zagrebelsky formulated the "reform paradox": "The Italian political system works badly because it is not able to make decisions; the Great Reform is a Great Decision; so the Italian political system will never be able to make such a Great Decision as the Great Reform." Quoted in Gianfranco Pasquino, La Repubblica dei cittadini ombra (Milan: Garzanti, 1991), 32-33.
15. The latter was beginning to be defined with an increasingly widespread, derogatory name that had been used up to then almost exclusively by the right wing: that of "partitocracy."
16. A lively portrait of the DC, as a party where many political currents are united and a mirror of the variety of the Italian social scene, can be found in Marco Follini, La DC (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).
17. For a more analytic approach, see Agostino Giovagnoli, Il partita italiano: La Democrazia cristiana dal 1942 al 1994 (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 1996).
18. One of the most effective interpretations of the Italian political and institutional crisis, viewed against a long-term backdrop, can be found in Massimo L. Salvadori, Storia d'Italia e crisi di regime: Saggio sulla politica italiana 1861-1996 (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994; new ed., 1996).
19. The scholar who has described the rise of the Lega Nord most assiduously is Ilvo Diamanti. See his works La Lega: Geografia, storia e sociologia di un nuovo soggetto politico (Rome: Donzelli, 1993; new ed., 1995),
20. Il male del Nord: Lega, localismo, secessione (Rome: Donzelli, 1996).
21. For an analysis of the Lega's "ideology," see Stefano Allievi, Le parole della Lega (Milan: Garzanti, 1992).
22. This is Diamanti's analysis in Il male del Nord, quoted above.
23. To understand the trouble the Communist leaders had in accepting the ideological and programmatic revision of their party, see Piero Ignazi, Dal PCI al PDS (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1992): the majority of the delegates at the extraordinary meeting of 1990, called in order to debate the proposal of the party leader Achille Occhetto to "create a new political party," felt that Italian society was "unfair" (54.5 percent), that Gramsci was "very topical" (89.9 percent), that "Gorbachev's policy demonstrated the great self-reforming capability of the Communist system" (53.4 percent), and that "the United States was an imperialistic power" (92.9 percent).
24. Some hypothetical projects for an institutional reform had already appeared in the 1960s, but they attracted attention mainly at the end of the 1970s, when it seemed necessary to rationalize the Constitution in order to ensure the efficiency and stability of the governments. The most ambitious attempt to amend some parts of the Constitution was perhaps that of the Commissione Bozzi (chaired by the Liberal member of Parliament Aldo Bozzi, and active from November of 1983 to January of 1985). This commission's project was of a parliamentary type, but it was never debated in Parliament. In 1992, another commission was established. It was chaired by Ciriaco De Mita, whose mandate expired in 1994 as a result of the dissolution of Parliament. For an overall investigation, see Enzo Cheli, La riforma mancata: Tradizione e innovazione nella Costituzione italiana (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).
25. One of the first attempts to interpret the collapse of Italian politics was carried out by Luciano Cafagna, La grande slavina: L'Italia verso la crisi della democrazia (Venezia: Marsilio, 1993), where he described the decline of the parties, due to the weight of a welfare system based on patronage, against the background of the fiscal crisis of the state.
26. The presence of an "antagonistic" left wing that was not bound by any organic alliance turned out later to be severely detrimental to the stability of the Center-Left alliance. For a description of the irreparableness of the split between the Social Democratic forces and the extremist components, see Marco Revelli, Le due destre (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996).
27. Among the very few voices dissenting on the campaign for the referendum and the adoption of the plurality system, a work that deserves mention is Mauro Calise, Dopo la partitocrazia: L'Italia tra modelli e realtà (Turin: Einaudi, 1994). It criticizes the optimistic simplifications on which the consensus for the uninominal system was based.
28. An early balance of the transition from the Movimento Sociale to Alleanza Nazionale was drawn by Piero Ignazi, Postfascisti? (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1994);
29. an overall examination of the anti-Fascist issue can be found in Gian Enrico Rusconi, Resistenza e postfascismo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995).
30. "1994 was the nadir in the history of the Partito Democratico della Sinistra and of the entire left": Martin J. Bull, "Il fallimento dell'Alleanza progressista," in Politica in Italia: I fatti dell'anno e le interpretazioni, ed. Piero Ignazi and Richard S. Katz (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995).
31. As for the Patto per l'Italia, on March 27-28, 1994, it lost 5.5 million votes, in comparison with the DC's result in the elections of 1992, and managed to acquire only 77 members of Parliament, most of them through the proportional recovery. On the effects of the plurality rule I shall take the liberty of mentioning my essay "La macchina bipolare," Il Mulino 2 (1994),
32. now in L'Italia che non muore (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1995).
33. The experience of the Berlusconi government was troubled from the beginning because of Berlusconi's position as television entrepreneur and owner of three national networks. For this reason he was at the center of a very objectionable overlap between information and politics that led the president of the Republic, Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, to offer to act as "guarantor" of the political correctness of the new executive. The most dramatic moments of the Center-Right followed the issue of a decree on preventive detention that gave rise to an extremely sharp public reaction of the magistrates of the "Mani Pulite" investigation in Milan, and to a judicial initiative launched by these magistrates against Berlusconi: a notice of preliminary investigation was delivered to the head of government during an international meeting in Naples.
34. For a reconstruction of the turnaround of national accounts in order to ensure admission to the European monetary system, see Luigi Spaventa and Vincenzo Chiorazzo, Astuzia o virtù? Come accadde che l'Italia fu ammessa all'Unione monetaria (Rome: Donzelli, 2000).
35. An excellent outline of Italian economic policy can be found in Michele Salvati, "Dal miracolo economico alla moneta unica europea," in Sabbatucci and Vidotto, eds., Storia d'Italia, vol. 6.
36. For instance, once an irruption of the members of Parliament of the Lega Nord caused an agreement that had already been made (on a form of premiership) to be shifted in the direction of a presidentialist model: this gave observers the impression that any accident might change the commission's decisions, and that which model was chosen had practically no significance.
37. The crisis was solved by walking on a tightrope: the compromise with Rifondazione Comunista was recovered by adding to the government program a law for the reduction of the working week to thirty-five hours.
38. This definition is in Mauro Calise, Il partito personale (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2000), a very polemical essay on the outcome of the plurality system.
39. An efficient dictionary of Italian politics during the last decade is Gianfranco Pasquino, La transizione a parole (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2000).