Asks whether globalization is turning Europe into a museum
Barkan, Joanne
IT'S A TRITE observation, but April in the region of Umbria in central Italy is breathtakingly beautiful: olive groves in new leaf, small vineyards with tidy rows of meticulously pruned plants,...
...That was the first time I'd ever seen a Chinese product in an upmarket Italian shoe boutique (not that I've done a rigorous survey...
...It was Christmastime, and I asked my mother if she could bake us a cake...
...By the mid-1970s, they could no longer afford city rents...
...It's hard to fathom what the continent will rely on, in addition to its cultural patrimony, decades from now when the center of the global economy is lodged in the Far East and low-cost labor produces the world's weapons...
...Umbria has been one of Italy's "red" regions since the Second World War...
...Elderly former sharecroppers and some of their middle-aged children now work as decently paid caretakers and gardeners for the weekenders...
...It made me wonder what Umbrians will be selling five years from now...
...Before the 1970s, Venetian workers commuted daily across the lagoon to Mestre and Porto Marghera on the mainland, where they had industrial jobs, mostly in chemical plants...
...Mecozzi, a longtime pacifist and the union's representative in the international peace movement, added, "Obviously this issue is more difficult for a metalworkers' union to deal with than for other unions...
...Then his daughter served on the town council for nine years...
...Today close to 60 percent of the local vote goes to the center-left coalition...
...Left politics are the rule, not the exception, in Umbria...
...DISSENT / Summer 2005 n 13...
...Until recently a family could live well on two incomes," said Gino Calzetta, the sixtythreeyear-old caretaker of the house in Umbria where I was staying...
...Close-up, the shoes didn't POLITICS ABROAD look as well made as usual...
...After he returned to Umbria from Rome, he headed up the local party for four years and took charge of public works for the town's leftist government for fourteen years...
...In Umbria many of the old case coloniche—the buildings where landowners housed their sharecroppers along with a few animals—have been sold and remodeled into spiffy weekend retreats for city dwellers and foreigners...
...From 1994 through 2003, Italian multinationals increased sales abroad by only 0.9 percent...
...JOANNE BARKAN, author of Visions of Emancipation: The Italian Workers' Movement Since 1945, lives in New York City and Truro, Massachusetts...
...In the "art towns" that attract tourists, specialty-food boutiques selling Umbrian olive oil and wines line the streets between architectural monuments...
...The center-left trounced his coalition in April's regional elections...
...Venetians have been saying for thirty years that their city is nothing more than a museum...
...The arms industry has been expanding here, too," said Alessandra Mecozzi, head of DISSENT / Summer 2005 n I I POLITICS ABROAD the international office of the Italian Federation of Metallurgical Employees and Workers (FIOM), one of Italy's largest unions...
...You can't ask workers to give up their jobs...
...then heavy industry began to decline...
...A harsh system of sharecropping, mezzadria, still dominated the economy in the early post–Second World War period...
...RIGHT NOW the Italian economy is doing somewhat worse than the European average...
...Umbria has its own version of this transformation...
...In the past, the Communist and Socialist parties together sometimes won 80 percent of the vote in our town," Calzetta said...
...In April a consortium of banks saved the company from financial crisis by agreeing to convert a huge loan into a purchase of 27 percent of the company's stock...
...I turned one over and saw that it was manufactured in China...
...Now families can't make ends meet...
...Textile and garment manufacturing—an important industry in central Italy—has been drowning in the tidal wave of Chinese imports...
...Calzetta, like all Italian leftists, hopes the squabbling coalition will hold together until parliamentary elections, which must take place by May 2006...
...He took a job with the Italian railroad and lived in Rome for years before he could realize his dream of returning to his hometown...
...According to post-election polls, the economy and jobs topped the list of voters' concerns...
...Beyond the tourist industry, Italy's economy is sputtering, having produced a meager 1 percent growth in 2004...
...The European Union (EU) will likely impose sanctions on the country for going too far beyond the limit set for budget deficits...
...this is significantly higher than the center-left's vote in Italy as a whole...
...IT'S A TRITE observation, but April in the region of Umbria in central Italy is breathtakingly beautiful: olive groves in new leaf, small vineyards with tidy rows of meticulously pruned plants, ranks of green hills receding into a blue mist, medieval towns that seem to grow right out of the hilltops, churches decorated with some of Western civilization's most prized early Renaissance frescoes...
...Italy is the world's fourth largest producer of light arms and the second largest exporter of them...
...Now he does construction and garI2 n DISSENT / Summer 2005 dening work in the new Umbria, has a comfortable home, and is proud of his daughter, who embarked on a teaching career after finishing her university degree...
...The youngest child of sharecroppers, Calzetta left rural Umbria in the late 1950s to find work...
...It also reinforced a vision I have of Europe's future...
...The pair cost ninety Euros (about $120), not cheap but about half the price of well-made Italian shoes in a similar style...
...Extreme poverty and the despotic power of the landowners radicalized sharecroppers and their children...
...As a young man, Calzetta joined the Italian Communists...
...In 2000 Italy's center-left government allowed the delivery of unspecified military equipment worth thirteen million Euros to Algeria, despite the ongoing conflict there...
...In fifty years, all of Europe will be a museum catering to a half-billion upwardly mobile Chinese tourists...
...She told me that we had no more eggs because she'd taken them all to the landowner...
...Fiat, still Italy's largest private employer, continues to lay off workers...
...Even more sobering, no matter what the coalition comes up with on paper, it will have trouble solving the country's fundamental economic problems...
...I remember exactly when I became radical," he said...
...Just last Monday [May 2], Parliament approved—without the support of the left—accords for military cooperation in arms, technology, and research with various countries, including Israel, Algeria, and Kuwait...
...Statistics for the entire EU are staggering...
...Most Italians blame this on Silvio Berlusconi's center-right government...
...He plans to withdraw Italian troops at the end of this year...
...In the 1950s and 1960s, the children of sharecroppers left the region en masse to escape poverty— just as the children of peasants fled the South in the same period...
...Old Europe" hasn't discovered a fix for industrial stagnation other than arms exports...
...Since quotas ended in January, imports of Chinese sweaters to the EU have increased 895 percent, slacks for men and women 738 percent, and linen cloth 555 percent...
...Berlusconi will try to keep his government afloat until then...
...His chances don't look good...
...In April Italy's vice minister for production, Adolfo Urso, and France's president, Jacques Chirac, asked the EU's trade commissioner to enact emergency measures to stop the deluge of Chinese imports...
...I wasn't surprised to find out that Calzetta has been a leftist since the age of seven...
...Italy has also been losing ground in the global economy...
...Sad to say, the center-left coalition doesn't have a credible program yet...
...That's why we focus above all on international disarmament campaigns...
...Now Venetian workers live on the mainland and commute back to Venice every day for jobs in the tourist industry...
...Even 74 percent of the center-right's usual supporters think Berlusconi's much vaunted tax cut didn't help them at all...
...Of course I loved seeing Umbria again...
...But Berlusconi's government has undermined the economy...
...He wants to rebuild his personal popularity and turn his equally fractious coalition into a single conservative party that will dominate Italian politics for the foreseeable future...
...One afternoon in Orvieto—home to Umbria's most magnificent cathedral, I stepped into an attractive shop to check out a pair of multicolored flats—this season's rage in Italian female footwear...
...The flow of commuters demonstrates this...
...Meanwhile, indifferent to double standards and the consequences for global stability, Chirac continues to press for lifting the ban on arms sales to China so that France can export weaponry there...
...The Chinese government initially threatened retaliation but in June gave the Europeans a temporary reprieve: it agreed to limit the growth of certain textile and apparel exports through 2008...
...the EU average was 12 percent...
...I knew the landowner couldn't possibly use that many eggs, and the injustice of the situation turned me into a leftist...
...Berlusconi did manage to diffuse one serious issue—widespread opposition to Italy's military presence in Iraq...
...Clients include such notorious human rights violators as Sierra Leone and the Republic of the Congo...
...Each sharecropper family had to give the landowner seventy eggs as a holiday tribute...
...Italian law doesn't restrict the sale of semiautomatic weapons, so Italy has supplied almost a hundred countries with tens of millions of dollars of these arms...
...It beats sharecropping by a lot...
Vol. 52 • July 2005 • No. 3
