OVER THE LAST twenty years Italy has witnessed a socio-economic transformation as dramatic as that of the ‘economic miracle’ of the 50s and early 60s, but strikingly different from it in both content and consequences. The ‘miracle’, with its great flows of emigration first from North-East to North-West, and then from South to North, with its dramatic passages from countryside to city, saw the definitive triumph of a new urban Italy over an older agricultural one. At the heart of this new Italy stood the Fordist factory, dominant not in numerical but in symbolic and technological terms. Paolo Volponi, in his novel Memoriale, written in 1962, described the impact of the factory upon those who went to work there for the first time:
The noise was great and the workshops took my breath away. The factory was big then, but still only a third of the size of what it is today. Each workshop was large, clean, well-ordered and luminous. Every worker had his own place, and worked there by himself with great purpose and confidence… The noise transported me; I heard and felt the whole factory moving as a single engine which pulled me with it and forced my work into its all-embracing rhythm. I couldn't hold myself back, I was as a leaf on a great tree, all of whose branches were shaken by the wind.1
The industrial working class that derived both its sustenance and its oppression from these great machines of mass production emerged as a social and political actor of primary importance. Around it there formed a wider social block, more heterogeneous in geographical and occupational terms, but sharing many of the same aspirations and mobilizations. The 34.4 per cent of the national vote gained by Enrico Berlinguer's Communist party in 1976 was the political high tide of these social trends. In 1977, in a famous speech to his party's intellectuals, Berlinguer described the industrial working class as ‘the social force which is today the principal motor of history’.2
History can be cruel indeed to those who are confident of reading its line of march. In reality, the mid-1970s were precisely the moment when everything began to change and certainly not, pace Tomasi di Lampedusa, in order to stay the same.3 The defeat of a divided working-class movement at FIAT in the autumn of 1980 was the most visible sign of the end of an epoch, the dramatic finale to a whole cycle of struggles,4 but the subterranean movement of Italian society had in fact begun some years earlier. Italian capitalism was changing its skin, in line with the prevailing trends in the world economy. The breakthroughs in electronic research and their application to the world of communications initiated a new cycle in the global economy. No workplace was left untouched, no entrepreneur unaffected by the new technological paradigm. The resulting revolution in modes of production and the organization of the firm diminished the massed ranks of the industrial working class, offering those who remained an environment that had been radically transformed, both materially and ideologically.5
At the same time the tertiary sector increased its dominion over the patterns of employment and the Gross Domestic Product of the advanced economies. The performance of services of every sort became the habitual activity of the great majority of Italy's working population. Services, indeed, are in structural terms one of the principal protagonists of this book.6
The effects or even composition of the newly dominant tertiary sector were, and are, difficult to unravel. On the one hand, the service economy brought in its train a significant increase in the number of highly paid and qualified jobs; on the other, it offered a large number of poorly paid and precarious jobs, in work situations which allowed little space for collective solidarities. Fragmentation became the order of the day. So too did unemployment. The prospect of full employment, which had seemed attainable at least in the Centre and North of Italy in the years of the economic miracle, receded far into the distance. From 1973 to 1993 unemployment in Europe grew from 5–6 million to more than 19 million.7 In 1995 the unemployment rate for those under twenty-five years of age was 33.3 per cent in Italy, the highest in the European Union after Spain.8 Capitalism's new turn – the revolution in communications and the dominance of services – did not appear to have resolved, in the advanced European economies, the basic problem of employment.
The economy and the labour market were not the only sites of radical transformation in the period covered by this volume. There were to be profound changes in many other areas: in gender relations, where the influence of the women's movement and the great strides in girls' education made themselves felt; in families, which became both ‘longer’ and ‘thinner’, in the sense of an increase in longevity and contact between the generations, accompanied by a decrease in the numbers of children and the complexity of family structures; in fertility rates, which declined to the lowest in the world; in modes of consumption, in patterns of emigration and immigration, and after 1992 in politics as well. As a result, the recent history of the Italian Republic acquires a particular fascination because both the public and the private worlds were on the move, simultaneously though not in unison, with connections and consequences that the historian struggles to chart and render visible.
Italian democracy brought to these challenges a number of long-term and structural deficits that limited its capacity to respond, and rendered it vulnerable. One of the most important of these was the continuing relative poverty and degradation of many regions of the South, and the continuing existence in some of them of powerful and ferocious criminal organizations. Another, on a quite different plane, was the weakness of its public administration. In an era dominated by services, to have public services that for the most part did not function in anything like an efficient way was truly to cripple a nation from the outset. Another still, at least until 1992, was the inadequacy and cultural poverty of Italy's political system. Not only did the system prevent the turnover of governmental élites, but it was also profoundly structured on the vertical loyalties of patron–client relations. In the 1980s, this deep-rooted clientelism was accompanied by widespread corruption. Both these meant that the input of the political system to the growth of a culture of citizenship was limited indeed.
However, it would be a grave mistake to conclude that these structural deficits, however grave, were bound to condition, in a genetic way, the nature of Italian democracy. Determinism of this sort, whatever its intellectual origins, should be treated with some suspicion. Contrary to the opinion of many Italian intellectuals, there was no permanent handicap which had crippled the country's recent history. Rather, that history is perhaps best presented in terms of deep and unresolved conflicts, which allow for a variety of cultural and institutional outcomes.
In the 1980s and 1990s, significant forces emerged, both in society and the state, which tended towards the strengthening of democratic trends in Italy, rather than to their restriction. The broadening of the structural and educational bases of a critical middle class, far more numerous and influential than in previous decades, had a beneficial effect. The development of associationism and of a plural and extensive civil society, in the South as well as the North, amongst women as well as men, injected its own dynamics into modern Italian society.
As for the Republican state, its historical formation had seen a highly democratic Constitution (that of 1948) laid upon older and anti-democratic structures, while its modern complexity and bureaucratic weakness had rendered it refractory to centralized command. These were profound weaknesses. They were mitigated, however, by relative autonomies within the state of great importance. None was to be more important than that of the judiciary. A minority of prosecuting magistrates was to show extraordinary courage and determination in opposing the old habits and accommodations, the complicity with the Mafia and the corruption of the ‘partitocrazia’. Other voices, too, merged with resonance and determination over the babble of Roman politics; that of the Bank of Italy in particular, which was to have a very significant role in Italy's most recent history.
In spite of the clarity of these voices, they remained fragile and minoritarian within the Italian state. However, they received indirect sustenance from forces which lay outside the Italian body politic. The ‘tyranny of Brussels’ is an oft-heard slogan in many countries belonging to the European Union, but probably less so in Italy than elsewhere. The European Community had not been an unmixed blessing for Italy, nor Italy an assiduous member state, but as time passed the positive values of the Union – its firm commitment to democracy and economic stability, its encouragement of competition within clearly defined rules, its single market, its insistence on certain standards of equal opportunity and environmental protection, its social programme and regional funds – all these wrought slow but inexorable change upon its largest southern member. Italy constrained by Europe was Italy improved.
In attempting to analyse and narrate this most recent and dynamic period of Italian history, characterized by its great sense of movement and the uncertainty of its outcomes, I have adopted certain organizational and methodological assumptions which I would like briefly to explain. The short final chapter of my previous work (A History of Contemporary Italy), that on the 1980s, has been set aside. In its place has grown a new work, originally intended as an update, but which in its writing has acquired ever greater autonomy from its predecessor, as well as, I am afraid to say, ever greater volume. Every author hopes that those who have read a first volume of his or her work will also read the second, and that those who start with the second will then return to the first. Whether this proves to be true in my case or not, I want to assure the prospective reader of the present volume that it has been conceived of as standing in its own right.
In methodological terms, I have again placed a special emphasis on the role of the family. The field of family studies is a very rich and prolific one, but there is a real danger that it remains closed and compartmentalized within the boundaries of separate academic disciplines. In particular, historical studies have very rarely tried to integrate the family into the wider history of a contemporary nation. If there are, by now, many and excellent studies on the history of the family, as well as chapters on the family in more general texts, there are none that try to look constantly at the connections between individuals, families, society and the state, to treat the relationships between different levels of human aggregation as the complex mechanisms around which the history of a nation is constructed.9 To undertake that task, admittedly a very ambitious one, is the aim of the present volume, so that greater recognition may be granted to the family, to use the words of Susan Moller Okin, as ‘a political institution of primary importance’.10
In the case of contemporary Italy, the family has always seemed both to informed foreign observers and to many Italians to occupy a special place in the life of the nation. In this respect Italy is not alone. An even minimal knowledge of China or Japan, of Spain or Greece, is sufficient to understand the often unrecognized significance of family in the contemporary history of many other nations as well, especially if that history is not only conceived of in narrowly political terms. Yet each of these nations is different, for each has formed over time its own highly complex and culturally specific way of combining the elements of family, society and state.11
In Italy family is very important, both as metaphor and as reality. In terms of metaphor, it is omnipresent, from the ‘family’ of managers trained by Enrico Cuccia in Mediobanca, to the ‘family’ of criminals organized by the Mafia. In analysing this metaphor more closely, in terms of emitting and receiving zones, it is striking how often the family is taken as the metaphor for other social or political aggregations, rather than the other way round.12 In other words, it is not the state or any organization in society which provides examples for the family, but the family which provides metaphors and role models for society and the state. Only the Catholic Church, itself the single most influential propagator of the family as an emitting metaphor, has had the pre-eminence to reverse the metaphor as well, calling the family, in the words of John Paul II, a ‘domestic church’.13
As for social reality, the importance of family traverses very many moments of this history, from the dominance of family in the ownership of firms, large and small, to the recruitment to the largest political party by the method described by one political scientist as ‘enforced family membership’,14 from the pre-eminence of family-run shops in the physiognomy of Italy's service sector, to the use of family contacts as a means of coping with Italian bureaucracy, from ‘family days’ at FIAT in the 1980s to widespread nepotism within the state apparatuses. I hope all these points will be sufficiently illustrated as the volume unfolds.
If the primary analytical thrust is, therefore, that described above, it is not the only one. I have tried again to stress the need to write history not only from the top downwards, but also from the bottom upwards, to see how ordinary people experienced these years, to look at ‘low’ as well as ‘high’ politics, to glance at the condition of the foreign immigrant as well as that of the ‘grande borghese’. Many of the themes treated are the same as those in my previous volume, but there are others that are quite new or were previously mentioned only briefly: Italy's relationship with Europe, its civil society, gender relations, mass culture and consumption patterns are among the most significant. Some readers may find the first chapter on the economy rather heavy and slow going, but I ask them to persevere, as it is an indispensable base for the ensuing argument and narration.
To write the history of so recent a period as the last two decades entails the almost complete abandonment of the traditional tools of the historian's craft – the patient work in the archives, the attention to primary documentation, the challenging of established interpretations. Instead I have been at work on virgin territory, heavily dependent on sociological surveys, on the anthropologist's eye, on newspaper reports, oral history, economists' texts, judicial transcripts, parliamentary inquiries. But I have tried to retain a sense of the historian's duty to offer a general interpretation, to make some order out of complexity instead of simply being submerged by it, to draw a general picture from many and diverse fragments of evidence.
I am aware that what follows is very much a hybrid – part history, part political argument, part participant observation. I am aware, too, of how much as a foreigner I have failed to understand. Hugh Seton-Watson, in the Preface to his study of the nineteenth-century Russian empire, wrote some words on this theme with which I concur profoundly: ‘It is difficult to write the history of another country. The foreigner has not grown up in its physical and mental climate, and he cannot understand them, still less feel them, in the same way as its own people do. He can spend long periods in a foreign land, learn its language, work and live among its citizens, to some extent think as they do, and be accepted as a friend. This is not the same thing as being one of the people of the country, but still it is something.’15
One final point. As an intellectual endeavour, preparing this book has felt most like being a cartographer. I have sought to draw a first map of these recent years, a drawing which like an ancient parchment contains many mistakes, with coastlines that are the wrong shape, with some parts of countries that are too short and others that are too long, but which still constitutes a guide, to which future historians of Italy may look back with amusement, curiosity and perhaps even affection.
This book is dedicated to my son and daughter, Ben and Lisa, Cambridge children who have grown up in Florence. Watching them become Italians and hearing them defend the attitudes, styles and passions of their country of adoption have exercised a deep influence upon me.
I also want to thank Ayşe, David and Megan, all of whom have helped me greatly, in different ways.
I owe many other debts of gratitude: to the staff of the Sale di Consultazione of the Biblioteca Nazionale di Firenze for their unfailing courtesy and helpfulness; to Vittorio Foa, whose insight and humanity have continued to enrich the lives of all those around him; to Luigi Bobbio and Andrea Ginzburg, for their great patience and instructive help in their respective fields of expertise, namely the public administration and the economy; to those who read and criticized parts or all of the manuscript: Michele Battini, Luisa Finocchi, Marcello Flores, Claudio Pavone, Francesco Ramella, Mario G. Rossi, and Anna Rossi-Doria. None of the above are responsible for eventual errors in the text.
I was extremely fortunate to have Prisca Giusti as my research assistant during the last months of preparation of this volume; her dedication, intelligence and quick-wittedness were invaluable. My warmest thanks also to Stefania Bernini and Marta Bonsanti for their contributions, and to Giambattista Salinari and Marcella Simoni for their last-minute help. For assistance on individual points I am grateful to Claudia Bona, Anna Bosco, Giovanni Focardi, John Foot, Luca Fonnesu, Stephen Gundle and Luisa Levi D'Ancona. At Penguin, Simon Winder's patience and editorial intelligence were of great comfort; so too was the copy-editing expertise of Annie Lee.