Ginsborg - Italy and its Discontents 1980-2001

PENGUIN BOOKS

ITALY AND ITS DISCONTENTS

For a careful and balanced account, there is no finer study than Paul Ginsborg's Italy and Its Discontents the latest monument to critical admiration of the country by a foreign scholar'
Perry Anderson, London Review of Books

[A] splendid, panoramic analysis of recent Italian history Has the mastery and complexity of a canvas by the Venetian master, Canaletto, where a precisely drawn cityscape is peopled by real characters, humdrum or eccentric, going heedlessly about daily business
Scotsman

Excellent Ginsborg compares the turbulent state of Italy with the condition of Britain during the same period
Alexander Chancellor, Guardian

Thorough and perceptive Ginsborg's skills at synthesis and his impressive grasp of the intricacies of Italian politics come into their own. It is no easy task to pull together the salient points in some twenty separate governments, most of them coalitions, but Ginsborg does so with considerable panache
Caroline Moorehead, Spectator

Essential reading for anyone who wishes to understand how and why Berlusconi came to power
John Foot, Guardian

Italians have a famed ability to make the best of a bad deal. Their disregard for the rules has been the undoing of the political system, but it has created a vital and wonderful people. As well as a valuable reference, Ginsborg has written a substantial guide to the virtues and misdeeds of Europe's most foxy political class
Ian Thomson, Evening Standard

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Paul Ginsborg was born in London in 1945. He is currently Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Florence and was formerly Reader in European Politics at Cambridge. His last book for Penguin was the now famous A History of Contemporary Italy, 19431988.

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First published by Allen Lane The Penguin Press 2001

Published in Penguin Books 2003

Copyright Paul Ginsborg, 2001

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-14-193168-5

For Ben and Lisa

Chapter 1
The Italian Economy: Constraints and Achievements

Chapter 2
The Social Hierarchies of a Prosperous Nation

Chapter 3
Families and Consumption

Chapter 4
Civil Society and Mass Culture

Chapter 5
A Blocked Political System, 198092

Chapter 6
Corruption and the Mafia

Chapter 7
The State Within and the State Without

Chapter 8
Dnouement, 19924

Chapter 9
From Berlusconi to Berlusconi, 19942001

O VER 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.

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

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.

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.

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 56 million to more than 19 million. 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.