Italy's Ails ... Sound Familiar?

We are arriving at the core of the problem. As a nation, Italians will strike temporary bargains among themselves, but they don’t seek genuine conflict resolution. They seek to win, or at least not to lose, and so prefer to keep the conflict open, much as if they were involved in a soccer league, with matches to be won or lost each year by fair means or foul. The identity that counts for them is not national; it’s one constructed around arguments with other sections of Italian society. As early as 1824, Giacomo Leopardi, in "Discourse on the Present State of the Customs of the Italians," concluded that society in Italy was above all "a vehicle of hatred and disunity." Vivacious by nature, but brought, through a series of historical accidents, to a state of skepticism about anything and everything, the Italians, as Leopardi saw it, did nothing but "deride and torment each other."

Is it no surprise that the similarities between Italy's ails and those of Lebanon are so similar?  See if you can pick out any other similarities from this article in The New Yorker, some more quotes below:

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... I recall being struck by how the interiors of homes and cafés and shops were so carefully cleaned and cared for, while the streets, as soon as one was away from the showcase city center, were often in a state of abject disrepair. The traffic was aggressive and choked, the pedestrian crossings deadly, the buses overcrowded, the train stations scruffy and underfunded. The bureaucracy was maddeningly complex (one stood in line for hours for residency papers only to hear that documents were required that you had not been told to bring); public-sector jobs seemed to be handed out mainly on a political basis (you’d hear bus drivers remark that the next job in the depot had to go to a Socialist rather than to a Communist or a Christian Democrat); public officials were often corrupt (I had to pay a considerable bribe to two tax officials who threatened to make my life unpleasant otherwise), and the lira was constantly being devalued, keeping Italian industry competitive abroad by nullifying concessions on wages and pensions.

Graziano’s book sets out to show that this mixture of apparent economic success and behavioral backwardness had its roots in the distant past. His argument is complex, and takes us back to the late medieval era, when Italy was ahead of the rest of Europe. In the power vacuum that accompanied the decline of the Holy Roman Empire, a number of large and efficient city-states evolved, all having an unusually potent sense of a separate identity. Venice, Florence, Milan, Naples, and Rome were aware that Italy might eventually be considered a territorial unit, and did everything they could to avoid being swallowed up in it: they were, as Graziano comments, “too weak to absorb others, too strong to let themselves be absorbed.” This proud disunity is exactly what allowed foreign powers to overrun and carve up the peninsula in the sixteenth century, a situation that, aside from the interlude of a Napoleonic invasion, remained largely unchanged until the mid-nineteenth century.

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... Graziano notes that the two competing postwar visions of Italy’s future, Christian Democrat and Communist, were both subservient to foreign models and financed by foreign backers. ...

Graziano even suggests that Italian statesmen have deliberately played down Italian nationalism, insisting on the country’s Catholic-inspired internationalism or “European credentials,” in order to sell the country’s allegiance to the highest bidder. Foreign money could then be used to fund and facilitate agreements within Italy: new political players and contentious interest groups could be brought into the governing coalitions for a share of the spoils. ...

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In the nineteen-nineties, Graziano points out, Italy’s external point of reference shifted from America to the European Community. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Italian Communists began to transform themselves into a social-democratic movement, and lost their Russian sponsors. America no longer needed to finance the Christian Democrats. Desperate for cash, the politicians milked businesses pursuing government contracts. At the same time, a newly united, confident Germany accelerated the process of European unity and preparations for a single currency. Italy suddenly needed to introduce austerity measures to meet the Community’s monetary requirements. But how could this be done with parties that were, as Graziano observes, “incapable of playing the liberal role put upon them by the new free-trade era”?

The answer was Clean Hands, a vast police operation that exposed the so-called Tangentopoli, or “Bribesville,” behind public-sector contracts and led to corruption charges against more than a third of the deputies in the Italian parliament. This insured that they would vote for anything the government proposed, however Draconian, since to bring the administration down would mean losing parliamentary immunity. The Clean Hands judges, Graziano concludes, “were to a certain extent the ‘secular arm’ charged with administering the European verdict that condemned this torpid political system.” Again, change had effectively been imposed from outside, rather than arising from internal resolve.

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Many of the essays in “Italy Today” describe situations that tend to support Graziano’s gloomier analysis. One focusses on an aging political élite that “is indecisive and creates obstacles,” and “hides itself cynically in nepotistic protection.” Another argues that “Italian media owners have always pursued politics, not profit,” so that newspapers recruit journalists on the basis of political affiliation rather than talent. It is common for the media to deny that objectivity is possible, a cynicism that was reinforced by the decision, in the nineteen-eighties, to allow the three major political parties to control one each of the three public TV channels.