Italy after Berlusconi

Italy and Berlusconi: all you have heard this summer is wrong. It is wrong, because it is part of the problem, not of the solution. It’s not only about sexual scandals. Berlusconi’s story needs to be analyzed more deeply in order to understand contemporary Italy properly, and pose the challenge of Italy after Berlusconi. Not after Berlusconi’s death, but now.

Italy is undoubtly Berlusconi’s Italy. In 1993 he said “Italy is the country I love”. And, well, Italy has undeniably loved him back. If three words out of four should be chosen to describe Italy, Berlusconi would be in the shortlist with amore, pasta, pizza and mafia. This is certainly a remarkable achievement. Berlusconi’s success is not only to due to his conflict of interests, to an offensive idea such as “Italian stupidity” or to the exaggeration that Italy is currently under a “dictatorship.” Underrating Berlusconi is the real act of stupidity: consider his new “Mediterranean” engagement with Libya and other countries, with the concurrent rebuttal of colonialism. This isn’t simply business between “dictators”. Moreover, Berlusconi is the perfect example of pragmatic resilience. He has been able to rise, fall, then rise, then fall and rise again. He can lose, but then he always fights back. Berlusconi’s most compelling problem, in fact, would be his own transition of power, both politically and personally. As King Lear shows, retirement can be difficult. Berlusconi is familiar with King Lear, according to this long-time friend, Mr. Confalonieri, Mediaset’s President. So we’ll see what happens.

Before the unavoidable joys and sorrows of the king’s retirement, an analysis of Berlusconi as a statesman shows the limits of his survival strategy. Berlusconi is no Deng Xiaoping. Even if he claimed to have suggested the TARP plan to Bush and Paulson (yes, seriously), his economic record is pitiful. Just consider two simple facts. First, Italy has suffered a lost decade with an enormous and still unmeasured damage in terms of human capital, and almost nobody talks about it. Second, Italy is actually splitting: the North/South issue is dealt with a curious mix of rhetoric and debt and it is not going to be tamed just by a contradictory political bargaining.

Where is Italy after Berlusconi? Well, where is the opposition? There, more than an imagination of Italy after Berlusconi, one can find the responsibility of his success. The center-left opposition lacks a political and cultural identity. Its crisis is deeper than the general crisis of the European left. The Democratic Party is strikingly unable to follow Antonio Gramsci’s advice: it is absolutely unable to write the “autobiography of the nation”. The first government of Mr Prodi, credited for Italy’s surprising entrance in the euro area, seems very distant. People like Amato, Ciampi, President Napolitano, and Prodi himself are now out of politics or possess just a symbolic power, and the so-called new generations (in their 50s or 60s, of course) defend their position emphasizing their expertise. However, as the philosopher-Mayor of Venice Massimo Cacciari has argued, their expertise is limited only to one thing: losing. In Italy’s Berlusconi, they can only offer more evidence of this.

So, where is Italy after Berlusconi to be found? Not certainly in the silly hunt for an Italian Obama that has characterized Italian politics in the last months. However, Italy after Berlusconi is a necessary exercise of political imagination because it poses the issue of taking politics seriously again, even in a country in which, to paraphrase the US President, “almost everything is impossible”. The thing is that we should stop complaining about Berlusconi’s incapability to be serious. We should reflect on his remarkable success in making Italy incapable of being serious about herself and then “stop and think”, in order to act in multiple ways because, after all, Italy is the country  we love, too.

First, the urgent issue of Italy’s existence. Does Italy really exist? Is Italy a state? How far goes our so-called polyarchy?

Second, the issue of “BRICsItaly”. It’s too easy to say the world’s new middle-class will fall in love with Made in Italy because it is beautiful, and this is going to save us. In today’s world of network power, Italy’s image needs to be properly supported, even politically, in a comprehensive and flexible strategy.

Third, an issue related with the “autobiography of the nation”: Italy currently lacks a narrative, not only in political terms. So, we should think again the task of re-narrating Italy, starting from a re-discovery of our space, recently proposed by Stefano Boeri. The effort of renarrating Italy involves also the task of imagining new ways to communicate politics.

Fourth, we should imagine a new engagement with the rule of law and with issues of immigration and citizenship, from the standpoint of the national interest.

Fifth, the consideration of Italy’s role in the EU needs more than a general and rhetorical endorsement of the “Erasmus generation”. What does Italy know about Europe? What does Italy want from Europe?

Sixth, where are the women? Why their role is so neglected in Italian society? Why they don’t fight back? We need them to fight back.

Seven, where is Italian environmental policy? Where is our strategy to get to resources we lack? Where has it been in all these years?

On all these issues, the record of Berlusconi’s Italy has been remarkably poor. That’s why Berlusconi’s Italy didn’t work. So, the challenge of Italy after Berlusconi needs to be assessed taking these issues seriously. What is already evident is that Italy needs a shock, because, as a country, is getting irrelevant. Even the debate on Italy’s future leaders needs this exercise of political imagination, based on an “exist strategy”.

In another age, Italy has tried to achieve the status of a great power, but the reality was that our nation, as  Richard Bosworth aptly remarked, “had more in common with… a small Balkan state or a colony than a Great Power”, considering its economic and institutional backwardness and lack of resources. Today, Italy is still backwards and at crossroads. It is no great power, but the enduring ability to fake everything is putting one interesting nation on the track of a new genre of failed state. (by A. Aresu, M. Gasparri, R. Mauro, M. Scurati)