Italy
Barkan, Joanne
JUNE 1996. TURIN, ITALY: After a seventeenyear absence, no surprise that I had forgotten how lovely much of this city is: deep porticos running up and down the boulevards, giving shade to posh...
...Some observers argue this has happened to the detriment of both center and left...
...When I met him in 1979, he was teaching a course for Fiat workers on the end of Fordism...
...social spending and investment are up...
...After Rosental's brief introduction, Ferrero recited an exhaustive history of subway plans sent to Rome, endless dickering by rivals in Parliament, revisions made just as another government fell, new Parliaments, new requirements, new plans, new deadlines...
...The Democratici did not come up with a concrete proposal that evening, and yet they might eventually figure out better ways to organize...
...The mayor had already called the minister of the interior in Rome to request backup for the city's inadequate security forces...
...Perhaps the lesser-of-two-evils comes in two versions...
...I asked everyone I saw about the contractionary effect of global competition on Italy's economy...
...All that ended abruptly in 1980 when Fiat workers staged the longest strike in Italy's postwar history and lost badly...
...Yet even if the professor had unanimous backing, he would still lack the wherewithal to accomplish his main task, that is, to relaunch an economy that provides jobs, welfare state benefits, and an infrastructure adequate to the global market...
...Prodi shares this predicament with every other leader of an "advanced" nation...
...FALL • 1996 • 27...
...If Berlusconi's troubled group, Forza Italia, falls apart sometime, a new centrist megaparty would collect even more troops...
...what you try to pin down in one place pops up in another...
...Ferrero, a long-time politico, comes from the PCI and now represents the PDS...
...Turin puts forward a stately facade, appropriate to its place in modern Italian history as seat of the House of Savoy, birthplace of the Risorgimento, and first capital of a united Italy...
...All the while, he and a slew of close business associates were being prosecuted for corruption in the ancien regime...
...Until then, he said, "our problems remain centered in the cities, but we rarely have the tools to solve them...
...Overall, government expenses including payroll are down...
...The concrete results so far include center-left governments with the PDS for both Turin and Italy...
...When I mentioned the mayor's hope to diversify with aerospace and telecommunications industries, Revelli responded, "They're crazy...
...They understand coalition building...
...The political and economic elites see one way to halt the city's decline: build an ultramodern economy based on telecommunications, aerospace research, high-tech services, and specialized management-skills training...
...How many high-tech weigh stations does the information highway need...
...I'd call them "citizen pols...
...Secure in their own professions, they step into the public arena with a fine motive: they want to help clean up the mess left by the defunct Christian Democratic and Socialist parties that governed Italy for decades...
...Castellani explained that a law restructuring all local elections in Italy made running for office plausible...
...He sees himself—if I understood correctly—as a nineteenth-century High Tory...
...The group has a storefront office in the same building as the architect's studio...
...Can we, or should we, completely separate liberale from liberista...
...The defect of the Castellani government," Chiamparino said, "is communication with the citizens—both formal and informal...
...The winning candidate was guaranteed 60 percent of the city council seats for his or her coalition...
...Defeating the Polo was so clearly a good thing that no one on the Italian left raised the old arguments against "the lesser of two evils...
...I wanted to hear more about criticizing capitalism on the global level...
...I hope Mr...
...He despairs...
...They've made politics subordinate to economic power by accepting an alliance with Fiat...
...It's a vice of professionalism...
...I asked about the destabilizing effect of both floating currency exchange rates and massive, computer-propelled capital flows around the world...
...Two minis on the Polo side are already preparing to merge...
...But the question, he maintained, requires investigation of the Italian liberal tradition—Gobetti, Croce, Einaudi, Rosselli . . . the whole gang...
...Everything had changed," Rosental explained...
...I wanted to see what all the hoopla was about...
...Then an older man, not from the dinner group, criticized the organizers for not turning out a larger crowd...
...No one suggested shorter meetings or starting on time or inviting citizens to select topics or trying a format other than the Homeric-length recitation...
...TURIN, ITALY: After a seventeenyear absence, no surprise that I had forgotten how lovely much of this city is: deep porticos running up and down the boulevards, giving shade to posh cafés and shops...
...Now many minileaders are trying to reconstitute a single centrist party—one large enough to isolate the left for years...
...So much of the left began redefining itself, figuring out how much liberalism to add to its mix and what brand to use...
...Thanks to several factors—the political skills of the PDS, Prodi's commitment to the coalition, and the Northern League's decision not to ally with the Polo as it did in the 1994 elections— Italy was spared back-to-back victories for Berlusconi and his major ally, the ambiguously reformed fascists...
...A mayor could actually govern...
...According to leftist mayor Massimo Cacciari of Venice (another citizen pol), the far left has joined its fate to that of the center-left government...
...Turin iiber alles . . . Frankfort iiber alles . . . Tokyo aber alles . . . put in any name you like, says Ferrero...
...Since many a political group has committed suicide, one cannot rule out this scenario, but long-term trouble from the center looks more serious...
...The electoral reform was designed to favor broad coalitions rather than the old host of squabbling parties...
...Each was completely autonomous and brought in people who'd never done politics before...
...The Mayor I expected to meet the current mayor in the same immense hall with frescoed walls, carved ceiling, and antique furnishings where I had interviewed Diego Novelli, Turin's long-time Communist mayor, in 1979...
...The job becomes more complex during a long political transition, like Italy's, when a new "political class" is being born...
...Rosental belongs to a new breed of public official, found in small but perhaps growing numbers, scattered across Italy...
...Radical Revelli argues (correctly, I believe) that the problem is political, not technical or economic...
...Part of the economic "establishment" decided to drop him...
...In 1993, citizens voted directly for a mayoral candidate, rather than a party, for the first time...
...The search goes on...
...I doubt Revelli or Montani would like having the old parties back...
...In fact, most commentators agree that the opposing coalition, the Liberty Pole (Polo della Libertd), blew the race...
...What makes Turin a potential winner as opposed to, say, Milan or Paris...
...The architect gave me a copy of the electoral program for his 1993 city council campaign...
...Prodi belongs to the let's-free-upthismarket majority, but as he told author Alexander Stille (New York Review of Books, June 6, 1996), "To put it in American terms, we are closer to the positions of Robert Reich than to Gingrich...
...He also overexposed himself on his own private television stations...
...Put another way, the Italian left can count on only 30 percent or so of the electorate...
...They assume markets as a given, and many refuse to call themselves leftists because the term conjures up for them traditional Italian party politics, state interference, and a hostility to private enterprise...
...About a dozen people showed up, most of whom had been at dinner...
...Gastaldo had just returned from Lyons, France...
...baroque palazzi whose carved decoration stands somewhere between French and Italian in style...
...Moreover, no one anywhere has found a satisfactory formula for sustaining grassroots participation in the age of television...
...I got a clearer picture of his politics when he commented, "I'm close to the tradition of the PCI in Bologna [a city governed by the Communists, and now the PDS, since the war...
...No one knows how long they will stick around or how much solidarity they feel with less privileged folks or if they recognize how fundamental is the need to rein in an increasingly foolhardy capital-gone-global...
...they won...
...Most people found the PCI, and the left in general, guilty of insuf22 • DISSENT Politics Abroad ficient liberalism...
...Whites fought African immigrants whom they blame for drugs, prostitution, rowdiness, and the general decline of the neighborhood...
...The day I interviewed the mayor, several hundred citizens—almost all of them white— marched on city hall to denounce what they called Castellani's abandonment of San Salvario...
...Then he added, "Few of them have consolidated political experience...
...If "federalism" ranks as the number one buzz word these days, "liberal" is number two...
...Formerly associated with the Christian Democrats, he spent much of the 1980s overseeing the privatization of IRI, the massive stateowned conglomerate inaugurated by Benito Mussolini...
...Choosing it—like voting in Italy for the Olive Tree—is interesting, even a little rousing, because there is potential...
...I heard a similar complaint from Gianni Montani, a Fiat worker turned left-wing journalist who currently works for Reuters news agency...
...The national government holds the instruments of industrial policy—money and authority— but no one can remember when it last did something other than gum up the works...
...The necessary background for an outsider is that Turin has no subway but has been lobbying Rome for funds and authorization for years...
...He named Turin's high cards: the greatest concentration of telecommunications laboratories in Italy (the mayor's field of expertise is electronic communications), a small but expandable aerospace research sector, a valuable historic identity that could be developed like Philadelphia's, cultural resources for a moderate-size tourist industry, the LyonsGeneva connection with Mont Blanc at its center . . . . Not an overwhelming inventory, some would say...
...Given all this, one wonders why Prodi did not do better in the election...
...The strategy has possibilities, especially since Lamberto Dini has made it his own...
...I asked Marco Revelli...
...I asked about his professional and political background...
...The debate goes on not only among leftists, but between leftists and centrists...
...As a sign of the times, Turin's citizens elected a new type of center-left city government in 1993, proudly hailed as the prototype for Romano Prodi's national government, elected last April...
...But the rest is good...
...He described a proposal designed by leftists to break Fiat's monopoly: Turin would invite German and Japanese automakers to set up in the city...
...funding for street repair, lights, and trees in outlying neighborhoods...
...most operated as democratically as the average feudal manor...
...Mayor Castellani and journalist Montani (who reports on finances) replied that regulation at the global level is technically impossible...
...Castellani, like most Italians, hopes that Romano Prodi's government will stay aloft long enough to pass a federal reform...
...In the worldwide race for market share and profits, Revelli does not see Fiat, Turin, or Italy as a winner...
...Now he is mulling over the role of volunteerism in what he calls "an age of partial solutions...
...Should we drop the "e" and try the English word...
...To think of Turin is to think ofAntonio Gramsci and the Ordine Nuovo group, the "red biennium" of 1919-1920 with its revolutionary workers' councils and factory occupations, the massive antifascist strikes in 1943 and 1944, when workers risked death or deportation to Germany, and the long workers' insurgency that began in the late 1960s and lasted well into the next decade...
...Thus Prodi's center-left rests on a shaky foundation of party alliances and popular support...
...Here is how the evening went: white wine for the organizers in the courtyard outside the architect's studio and then dinner at a nearby restaurant that served exquisite grilled tuna...
...the necessary leadership, coordination, and stability do not exist...
...All critics, left and right, had to "deal" with the party...
...The meeting, called for nine o'clock, began when we got back to the storefront at nine-thirty...
...For Revelli, the left within Italy's national government has also allied with large industry in order to cope with the globalized economy...
...Prodi will hold his band together long enough to find out...
...A more astute analysis identi26 • DISSENT Politics Abroad fies the greatest threat as the centrists...
...Castellani pointed out that citizens like himself—professors, magistrates, and so on—serve as mayors in Venice, Florence, Genoa, and Messina...
...Prodi now has a very mixed bag of forces, reflecting the election results, in his cabinet: nine PDS ministers, seven assorted centrists, three "nonpolitical technical experts," and one Green...
...verbal commitment to an ill-defined socialism complete with economic planning went along with local governance of the social democratic kind, which lived happily with capitalism...
...The Olive Tree won 51 percent of the Senate and only 46 percent of the Chamber of Deputies...
...it reveals how centralized government in Italy is...
...This is volunteerism for us, a commitment to civic life...
...Federalism is also a necessary response to the belligerent Northern League party and its antitax, anti-immigrant, anti-South campaign...
...Only the PDS understands being a mass organization...
...Most of us had managed businesses or other institutions...
...it would be political suicide to bring down Prodi, thereby creating another opening for the centerright (which includes the "postfascists...
...Since then, the city has been looking for that elusive "post-Fordist identity in the global economy" (who isn't these days...
...Rosental wrapped up the meeting with circumspect advice: "We can't get discouraged...
...I asked some authorities on the city's politics...
...Revelli also commented that city politics had become less participatory...
...Now the friend of a newspaper editor gets to be a politician...
...He, like every other local politician, points to Rome as his biggest problem...
...What began as a protest against drug dealing turned into a Saturday night riot...
...But Palazzo di Città was being renovated, and an assistant ushered me into a small makeshift office...
...I saw a Torinese version of these problems one night when the architect Rosental invited me to a meeting...
...We wanted to use politics to solve problems...
...PCI in Bologna, critical of global capital, but not a leftist...
...As a student activist, he joined a left-wing offshoot of the Socialist party and then the PCI...
...I'm capitalistic on the local level, but I criticize capitalism on the global level...
...A couple FALL • 1996 • 25 Politics Abroad of people asked technical questions, and Ferrero was off again...
...In an interview for Turin's newspaper, Castellani repeated what he had told me, "Mayors don't have the tools they need, and it's unfair to unload problems on our shoulders that are within the state's province...
...Once a month or so, the Democrats send out fliers for a public meeting...
...The consolidation of that particular alliance in power would have undermined working people economically, the left politically, and Italy morally for a long time...
...The Tory I got a dose of the left-right-liberal debate one evening when I asked another citizen pol, Piero Gastaldo, where he positioned himself on the spectrum...
...liberista" veers off toward libertarianism and a strict version of the free market...
...Turin once had a Fordist duality of power— Fiat on one side, the PCI and the union on the other...
...So what did my Torinesi interlocutors say when I suggested we need a global equivalent of the 1950s Keynesian arrangement, to include regulated capital flows, fixed exchange rates, and full-employment growth policies...
...FALL • 1996 • 23 Politics Abroad Castellani left the northeast Friuli region in 1958 to study engineering in Turin...
...Gastaldo argues that right and left no longer make sense as categories in Italy...
...He, like everyone else, obeys the rules of deregulated capital markets, floating currency-exchange rates, and deflationary schemes (the Maastricht treaty for a single European currency tops the list...
...Yet anyone who underrates the worth of the Olive Tree's victory makes a serious mistake...
...Four days before the Democratici meeting, trouble broke out for the umpteenth time in the San Salvario neighborhood around the architect's studio...
...More important, although everyone agrees that unemployment is Turin's (and Italy's and Europe's) most serious problem, no one has shown that the postFordist industries will create many jobs...
...Of course, how you evaluate these alliances is another matter...
...The city was in bad shape after a series of inept, unstable governments...
...Fiat, the sagging mainstay of Turin's economy, has been shifting production to Brazil, Argentina, Poland, Turkey, and Italy's South...
...The younger Rosental always steered clear of politics, espousing his father's mix of antifascism and anticommunism, even during the late 1960s, when most other students were making the revolution...
...Even the petition to end petitions by federalizing the state goes to Rome...
...So why do 60 percent to 70 percent of all Torinesi support him...
...Can anything good happen until international finance is reregulated and the most economically powerful nations switch to expansionary, full-employment policies...
...He has a degree in econometrics but has spent most of his adult life working for the party...
...Castellani believes that in order to survive, "every Italian city must find its own niche of excellence...
...The city's unemployment rate is over 12 percent...
...They were successful, but their impact in terms of grassroots participation is superficial...
...For decades, Italy's large, militant, and well-organized left revolved around the Italian Communist party (PCI...
...the group seems to have an authentic desire and some energy...
...What to make of it all...
...Most parties don't like having new people around...
...and an in-the-black budget with a surplus for old-age homes and youth services...
...a rational being might still wonder if something decent could happen down the line...
...As Prime Minister Prodi assumed responsibility for the fifty-fifth government in the postwar period, Italians had high hopes for change . . . perhaps too high...
...Rosental is the son of an East European Jew who managed to elude the Nazis more than once before settling in Turin...
...Since the Berlin Wall came down, a majority of the Italian left has been obsessing over these words...
...Furio Colombo, former president of Fiat USA and now an Olive Tree deputy in Parliament, believes regulation would "freeze" all capital movement...
...The Democrats The Associazione Democratici is an informal local group that Rosental and some friends try to maintain in order to strengthen the constituency for Castellani's government...
...When we spoke, he was making a job transition—from secretary of the PDS for the Piedmont region to member of Parliament in Rome...
...People outside the network can't enter...
...The first is the known quantity...
...The PDSer, the Radical, and the Journalist Sergio Chiamparino is not a citizen pol...
...In an effort to adapt to globalization, Turin's government hopes to create one of those high-speed, hightech, post-Fordist, postnational, economic-development links among Turin, Lyons, and Geneva...
...I've never been a leftist," he insisted...
...If political lines have blurred, it is most likely those between progressive centrism and liberal leftism...
...The announcement for the meeting I attended read: "Everything You Want to Know about the Turin Subway: An Informational Meeting with Giovanni Ferrero, City Government Member in Charge of City Projects and Strategic Development...
...everyone knew it made a great deal of difference whether Prodi or Berlusconi won...
...he pays the rent...
...choosing it is necessary but truly frustrating—like voting for Bill Clinton in 1996...
...Yet given their commitment to the social welfare state and their acknowledgment of the link between redistribution and equality of opportunity, they look decidedly left-of-center to the average battered American radical...
...When the PCI officially became the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) in 1991, almost everyone recognized that an era had ended...
...The Polo's candidate for prime minister, media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi, ran a shrill, anachronistically anticommunist campaign gussied up with wild promises of economic prosperity...
...endless rhetoric about democracy in Italy butted up against a Leninist party structure that squelched internal debate...
...But Castellani argues reasonably that Turin can no longer live on autos alone...
...The Olive Tree would have lost decisively without the "outside" support of not only the far-left Communist Refounding party, but also the personal party of Lamberto Dini, who served as treasury minister in Berlusconi's 1994 center-right government...
...Thus all roads still lead to Rome...
...Such as . . . ? Chiamparino rattled off the list: Turin's first system of paid public parking downtown, which has streamlined traffic in the city...
...Prodi cannot utter a word about economic policy without making the lira teeter and the stock market quake...
...Gastaldo was director of the Agnelli Foundation until he joined the mayor's government (the equivalent of a cabinet) with responsibility for economic development...
...The word "Turin" appears only twice in the document, both times on the last page in connection with specific railway lines...
...There's no emotion...
...Then came a series of brief "general considerations" on the tax system, labor, federalism, health care, democratic capitalism, and transportation...
...In fairness, the document reflects not only the continental penchant for abstraction...
...Montani described the "Prodi Committees" that sprang up to work for Romano Prodi's coalition last spring...
...The debate is anything but irrelevant...
...Political pundits have warned repeatedly that Communist Refounding could topple Prodi at any moment...
...The Architect Giorgio Rosental has a successful architectural practice with offices in the San Salvario neighborhood, down the street from Turin's synagogue and the little piazza named for author Primo Levi...
...Prodi's coalition of ten parties, called the Olive Tree, barely won the election...
...If the mayor needs more police, if the Torinesi plan a subway, if Fiat wants subsidized payments for another ten thousand laid-off workers, petitions go to Rome...
...Rome controls most everything down to the fine details of taxes, labor regulations, health care— leaving precious little for local governments to decide...
...The second is new or untried...
...One wonders if this is a helpful observation in a country where thefar right (part of which has reproclaimed itself fascist) gets 15 percent of the vote...
...When I asked the architect Rosental these questions, he said, "Talk to the mayor...
...an international management-training center that attracts European Union personnel and East Europeans...
...Citizen pols (including Prime Minister Prodi) often bring fresh perspectives to ancient problems, technical expertise, and even a meaFALL • 1996 • 21 Politics Abroad sure of idealism...
...Prodi will suffer, not solve, the big problems...
...First of all, those industries won't create enough jobs...
...Since the turn of the century, it has also represented industrial society—home to Fiat and "Fordism," and—for leftists—heart of the Italian workers' movement...
...Another citizen pol...
...They've done a lot...
...The professor-prime minister holds elected office for the first time...
...Second, Italy will never do much in aerospace because it's tied to military spending, and France and Germany control military policy in Europe...
...We must have low expectations...
...and just across the tree-lined banks of the Po river, steep green hills dotted with villas and, higher, cherry orchards and meadows...
...The explanation is simple: a majority of Italians prefer the right and center-right...
...He did graduate work at MIT, married a Torinese, and settled into the life of a university professor...
...The rest of the document could apply to any city or town in northern or central Italy...
...Then the centerleft coalition took shape, and its organizers suggested he run for mayor...
...Dissection of the Italian Communist legacy began: critical support of the Soviet Union had been hitched uncomfortably to a successful effort to conduct independent domestic politics...
...restructured electrical and water utilities to permit some private investment...
...So what's not to like...
...This is one reason why Rosental in his document, and everyone else in Italy, talks about federalizing (decentralizing) the system...
...Now that the union and PCI aren't what 24 • DISSENT Politics Abroad they used to be, there's no counterweight to Fiat...
...The coalition put up its candidate for mayor...
...The mayor, Valentino Castellani, was as relaxed as the surroundings and amiable...
...I have rarely heard anyone in Italy, except feminists, consider these alternatives...
...Four people make the decisions...
...This launched a discussion— the evening's liveliest moment—on political participation...
...A few people decide who will be the coalition's candidate," Revelli said, "then two candidates compete, and everyone else just watches...
...When the others find out, they're disappointed...
...The mayor-elect could also choose all members of the giunta (cabinet or government...
...Close to midnight, Rosental offered a numb audience the opportunity to comment...
...Revelli argues that Turin must stop being a one-company town...
...In 1980, the company employed 147,000 people in Turin's metropolitan area...
...But don't all cities in the post-Fordist game propose exactly the same solution...
...After the huge Christian Democratic party imploded a few years ago, some of the wreckage (in the form of centrist miniparties) allied with the Polo and some with the Olive Tree...
...It was . . . well . . . molto italiano...
...No problem...
...The courts unmasked the political corruption in Italy, the old party system fell apart, the Communists had become the Democratic Party of the Left...
...This is a mistake, Revelli maintains, because many large Italian industries, including Fiat, are weak and live off direct and indirect state aid...
...Thus a solid council majority and a united giunta were assured...
...No one escapes post-Fordist perdition as long as global competition remains one big race to the bottom: falling wages, underconsumption except for the rich, slow growth, and shrinking government resources...
...The introduction ended with a general statement of purpose: We want to do our part so that, out of the crisis we are living through, a society can be born that is above all liberal with respect to rights, democratic in opportunity, sensibly free-market, tolerant and solidaristic, and, finally, secular in method...
...Are we sufficiently liberal or excessively so...
...After two hours, anyone previously ignorant of the malfunctioning Italian state got the picture...
...He finds the orientation of Castellani's government completely offbase...
...With no young hirees to offset layoffs and retirements, the average age of Turin's Fiat worker is now fifty...
...The others have decided to play what subway mavin Ferrero calls the iiber alles game...
...According to Revelli, the government rejected the plan because it did not want to clash with Fiat...
...The Professor It seems hard to dislike Romano Prodi—the chubby-faced, soft-spoken, bicycle-riding professor of economics from the University of Bologna...
...They identify a problem, hypothesize a solution, and go forward with it...
...Meanwhile the center and right parties were claiming liberalism as personal property...
...Rosental ran for city council...
...For Italians, the 1980 strike marks the end of both Fordism and the centrality of the industrial workers' movement...
...He regularly voted left (he voted for Novelli) but never got involved in politics...
...It's like a soccer match...
...With support from middle and upper-middle strata and part of the left, Castellani defeated Novelli in a runoff election...
...You can find it all over Rosental's document in both its Italian forms: "liberale" connotes freedom, individual liberty, and limits on the state...
...The story sounded like Dante's Inferno rescripted by Fellini...
...In fact, the left's reconsideration of liberalism has probably made the center-left dialogue possible...
...Revelli is a political scientist at Turin's university and one of those radical academics in the thick of intraleft debates...
...by 1996 that figure had shrunk to about 50,000...
...Then suddenly in 1993, he decided to help organize the new center-left coalition, Alliance for Turin, headed by a troupe of neophytes, professionals from other fields like himself...
Vol. 43 • September 1996 • No. 4
