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Title: Italy and Its Discontents: Family, Civil Society, State by Paul Ginsborg ISBN: 1-4039-6152-2 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan Pub. Date: 01 December, 2002 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (1 review)
Rating: 4
Summary: Italy: the ABC Murders
Comment: Paul Ginsborg's previous book, "A History of Contemporary Italy 1943-1988" is perhaps the best history of the postwar period of any country. It benefited not only from thorough research and fine organization but from a coherent and compelling thesis. Despite the many signs of vitality and progress in the Italian Republic, it faced severe problems in government and society which required urgent and farlasting reform. However, Italian political life was structured in such a way to make sure that reform never happened.
"Italy and Its Discontents" is the sequel. Although at times Ginsborg is somewhat cheery and optimistic, this is a depressing tale. In many ways it is a complex and nuanced tale, as Ginsborg discusses with enviable nuance the strengths and weaknesses of the Italian economy, the decline of the industrial working class and the plague of youth employment, the always persistent "Southern" problem, the clash between mass culture and a rising "civil society," and the many weaknesses of the Italian bureaucracy. He pays particular attention to the changes in the family, the rise of secularism, and the decline of Catholic and Communist cultures. He also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Italian politics, the complexities of corruption and the mafia, the less than impartial judiciary, and the complexities and failures of political ideologies.
And yet in some crucial ways Ginsborg's tale is very simple. Italian democracy in the 1980s was severely flawed both by corruption and by the success of vested interests in preventing, delaying or diluting vital reforms. The most honest and thoughtful party were the Communists, so much of the energy of its political class was dedicated to making sure they never had power. Italian politics in the eighties and nineties would be dominated by three people: Andreotti, Berlusconi, and Craxi. Andreotti was a "Christian Democrat" and deeply complicit in its corruption, patronage and ties with the mafia. Craxi was a "Socialist" who drapped himself in fashionable "Anti-Marxist" rhetoric while taking shakedowns and bribery to new heights. It was a politics of secret anti-communist forces (the Gladio), murdered anti-Mafia prosecutors, the strange and sinister P-2 Masonic lodge, sycophantic intellectuals, and one demagogic president. It was also a politics in which the Vatican banker would pay $7 million to Craxi's secret Swiss bank account and then be found hanging a year and a half later from Blackfriars' bridge. Craxi and Andreotti dominated Italian politics until 1992-93 when revelations of massive corruption decimated the Christian Democratic and Socialist parties. But just when it appeared that the Italian Left would finally be able to take power, Berlusconi appeared. Having been granted monopoly control over Italian television by Craxi, and having used that to help coarsen Italian cultural life, Berlusconi simply bought his own political party. Forza Italia became the new party of the Italian Right, replacing the factionalism and debate of the Christian Democrats with a cult of personality around Berlusconi. He ostentatiously disassociated himself from the Christian Democrats with Thatcherite rhetoric, notwithstanding the fact that he would face charges on ten trials over the coming decade. Making deals with selfish Northern Regionalists and Neo-Fascists, Berlusconi decisively won the elections of 1994 and 2001.
It is a pretty depressing sight by the end of Ginsborg's book. Measures to improve women, the environment and education have all been limited or delayed. Concerns about the gap between formal democracy and everyday life, the presence of clientelistic politics, politics that take into account the modern family: "these seem all to be far down the agenda of government, if indeed they are present at all." The Democratic Party of the Left has purged itself of its Communist Past, it fears that any sign of prinicple or vigor will be cursed as Stalinist. Instead of the popular mobilizations of the past, it pursues an unimiginative Technocracy that so far can't compete with Berlusconi's media monopoly and demagoguery. Ginsborg points to some positive signs. Despite the increasing xenophobia, the crassness of Italian television and the shallowness of soccer culture, there is also increasing interest in literature and culture. Working-class involvement in political and associational life declined, but there was rising voluntarism. And most of all there was the rise of feminism, many of whose challenges could not be ignored. One should not be too optimistic on this score. Certainly Ginsborg's account is full of qualifications and he notes that the new "civil society" is limited to a minority of the middle class. There are good reasons to suspect that it will not succeed or become an isolated minority dismissed as bien pensant elitists. Much of the chattering classes spent much of the past two decades, when not gushing about Craxi, searching for the "normalization" of Italian politics. Leftist and "utopian" ideas have been purged, while Silvio Berlusconi is now a mainstay of Bush's coalition of the willing. Now he is to be honored by an American right, once so easily appalled by Monica Lewinsky. Apparently money can buy you happiness, and much else.
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Title: A History of Contemporary Italy: Society and Politics, 1943-1988 by Paul Ginsborg ISBN: 1403961530 Publisher: Palgrave MacMillan Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Cambridge Companion to Modern Italian Culture by Zygmunt G. Baranski, Rebecca J. West ISBN: 0521559820 Publisher: Cambridge University Press Pub. Date: 01 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Dark Heart of Italy by Tobias Jones ISBN: 0865477000 Publisher: North Point Press Pub. Date: 01 June, 2004 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: The Montesi Scandal: The Death of Wilma Montesi and the Birth of the Paparazzi in Fellini's Rome by Karen Pinkus ISBN: 0226668487 Publisher: University of Chicago Press Pub. Date: 01 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $27.50 |
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Title: Italian Cultural Studies: An Introduction by David Forgacs, Robert Lumley ISBN: 0198715099 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 December, 1996 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
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