Italian discipline and stability
Posted by Harry Stotle on February 11, 2008
Seen from abroad, Italians are undisciplined and their politics chaotic. Forget the cliché. Having inherited from Ancient Rome, one of the most militarily societies in history, they are disciplined. Having inherited from the Florentines, they consider politics as a science.
When a bill of law was introduced a few years ago prohibiting smoking in restaurants, bars and public buildings overnight, you might have bet anything that it would have been treated as a joke. You would have lost. The rule was instantly enforced with total efficiency. Likewise, if you believe that the Italian government is utterly unable to collect taxes, you may find it difficult to explain why this is the only place on earth where any citizen has a personal tax number which must be reported on every invoice.
It is true that each and every Italian citizen violates some law at any given time. The reason for this is not a bizarre anthropological inclination against law and order, but a legal system cunningly designed to make it impossible to abide fully with the law. Such system allowing the authorities to go after you whenever you start being a nuisance, it is necessary for anyone to belong to a political network which will be of critical assistance in many circumstances: finding a job, avoiding a fine, obtaining a market, just name it.
Political networks are the very essence of the Italian society. They have little to do with ideology, although (minor) differences can still be noticed between right and left. Tens of millions of Italians, for instance, are or have been “communists”, including a large majority of artists (an essential profession in the Peninsula), intellectuals and journalists, and communists have participated in dozens of governments. None of them are bolsheviks. Being a communist simply means you belong to a certain network (often since your birth), and you dislike Berlusconi. You can be a billionaire, an aristocrat and a dandy, you are still a communist as long as other communists are the first people you call when you are in trouble, and vote for the left.
These various networks interact under the form of mutual checks and balances. This is why the Italian constitution favours proportional elections instead of majorities, and protects regional powers from federal authorities. No one is allowed to be dominant or dominant for very long, and no government can take the country into dramatically different directions. Cabinets succeed each other at high speed (61 governments since 1945) and Italy is nevertheless stable, being ruled on a day to day basis by a bureaucratic elite, formed of members of all networks, closely connected to the corporate world, unions and/or to the Church, with a Pro-European tilt and a strong Western commitment. When something important needs to be done, such as cleaning up a gigantic public debt to adopt the European currency, or reducing the influence of the Mafia, it gets done.
Although it would take a lifetime for a foreigner to fully understand Italy, this highly sophisticated democracy remains one of the richest and most pleasant countries to be in, and is a threat to no one. Instead of analyzing its mysteries or bothering about the name of the next Prime Minister, count Italy as an ally, open a bottle of Chianti, walk slowly in the streets of almost any village, and enjoy!
This is also how the world goes.
