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In these pages we will discuss the thesis that in order to understand the present problems of Italy, decisive weight should be given to the end of an era of international politics dominated by the bipolar and conflictual relationship between East and West.

It is clear that the cold war was of diminishing importance after Gorbachev coming to power, but it definitively ended only after the failed Moscow coup in mid-1991. From 1946, without interruption, in a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain, Italy was the frontier's country where the cold war was most bitterly fought, beacause the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was the strongest Communist party in the world outside the Soviet empire.

From many points of view, the Italian Communists were ordinary politicians peacefully involved in cooperatives and in the trade unions. Their management of some important regions and municipalities was judged very positively by many scholars. In public declarations they stated their preference for a peaceful way to socialism, conversion to liberty, independence from Soviet influence, and the acceptance of a democratic system. In actual fact they remained linked to Moscow's orientations in every international problem where East and West were opposed. Now we understand why: they were heavily financed, directly and indirectly, by the Soviets. In brief, after Eltsin had trown out many skeletons from the closets of the Kremlin, we have the proof that the staunch anti-Communists were right. The big lie about Bolshevism concerned also Italy, where the PCI had been on the take from Stalin to Gorbachev. Still in 1985 the Italian Communists declared that the only imperialist State in the world was the Usa; from Palestine to Iran, from Angola to Nicaragua their jugments were always in accordance with Moscow and never in accordance to Washington. As has been said many times, also the PCI fitted Charles De Gaulle's caustic statement: the Communists were neither <<on the left>> nor <<on the right>> but simply <<in the East>>.

In spite of all this, the PCI had some historical merits; for instance, it was a strong antagonist of terrorism (even if many terrorists claimed that they were just true Communists). The Italian Communists (like the neo-Fascists) collaborated in various forms with the coalitions that governed Italy, at local as well as at national level. Moreover, they have contributed in helping to elect decent people to the Presidency of the Republic. On various occasions, they helped in keeping alive many governments, that were based on small majorities and were often exposed to political blackmail and defections. For these reasons, major observers of Italian politics had no prejudices against Stalinist leftists, just as other major observers of Italian politics had no prejudices against fascist and clerical forces.

In the 1950s the containment of the Italian Communists was easy: in the elections of 1950s and the 1960s the PCI augmented slowly. But after the great social uproar of the late 1960s the <<red scare>> grew at the same level of 1947. From 1973 the PCI's strategy was characterized by the proposal of a <<historic compromise>>: both an appeasement with the Italian catholic world and a power-sharing agreement with the Christian Democrats. In these years a Communist was elected president of the Chamber and a quarter of the chairmanships in the Chamber and Senate committees were assigned to communists candidates. The incorporation of the PCI into the governmental area boosted apprhensions.

Influential parts of the country were against the PCI and against the so-called <<modernization>> of the country (minority rights for feminism and homosexuality, legalization of divorce and abortion, rise of the unions, and so on). The backward sector of ruling class looked apppreciatively towards the possibility of giving a reactionary answer to the fear of Communism and to the social and political problems resulting from Italy's social transformation. Other groups were worried only by the foreign policies that Communists could have promoted if they had escaped the political limbo where they would have otherwise stayed for ever.

In the opinion of some observers, years of terrorism and a long list of massacres were handled in order to conserve the status quo in Italy. A <<strategy of tension>> would have accompanied the increase of Communist influence in the governmental area. The tension would have been intended to be a means to intimidate both the electorate and the ambiguous disposition of the Christian Democratic Party (DC), which in some way preferred an under-the-table deal with the Communists in order to conserve power. In this way an invisible and international anticommunist organization (which controlled or influenced Italian and foreign secret services) would have promoted stabilization by destabilization ([1]).

Still in 1990 e in 1991 there has been a furious political debate about presumed involvement in terroristic activities of members of secret military forces formed within NATO in order to combat a possible Soviet invasion. It has been supposed that in the 1970s and 1980s some members of this organisation (formed to defend democracy) took illegal action because the growth of Italian Communism seemed to them to have reached an extremely dangerous level. The President of the Italian Republic, Francesco Cossiga, was accused of having covered up serious responsabilities; obviously the accusation was denied indignately. The ghosts of the cold war are still used to hit political enemies.

The overwhelming weight of the Communist question in the Italian situation had various consequences, first of all an abnormal importance of political parties.

The PCI had a widespread and efficient organisation; it had taken over the structures of trade-unions, municipalities, and cooperatives, which had been built up gradually and all over the country by the Socialist party from the end of 19th century. Since the electoral success of the PCI was closely connected with the strength of its organisation, the other parties also decided to create party organisation equally widespread. An enormous amount of money was necessary in order to equal the Communists: the democratic parties were condemned to face a severe competition with a adversary that had an autonomus financing structure throught the cooperatives and throught the disinterested engagement of its members for ideological reasons. Moreover, the PCI had vital access to rubles from Moscow, or directly or indirectly thanks to the intermediation of Italian commercial societies which had privileged relations with the Soviets.

In the years of the cold war, the cost of being in politics rose exorbitantly. The extraordinary expansion of the parties involved above all the DC, which was, in a certain sense, forced to increase its income above what was allowed by the contribution of the industrialists and the support of the catholic world. Instead of going continuously cap in hand to the businessman or to the Americans, the DC preferred to create huge autonomous sources of finance either using the public economy or inventing continuosly other sectors of intervention. For some years this mechanism, which started in the 1950s, did not create difficulties to the economic development of the country. But with time it became terrifyingly gigantic.

Moreover, from the 1960s, democratization of society became hyper-politicization: from universities to hospitals, from the judiciary to the opera houses, the parties entered in a series of public structures renewed and facilitated in order to accomodate the appetite for jobs which was growing greedly within the parties. One of the first consequences of this abnormal enlargement of political activity has been the disappearence of the sense of the State as the seat of rational and impartial powers. The legendary inefficiency of many Italian basic services, from the post office to railways, originates mainly from this factor.

The supreme consequence of the high cost of politics was an almost bureaucratized system of kickbacks. For instance, in the field of public-works contracts, the lavish payoffs were divided respecting rigidly the portion of electoral vote controlled by each party in the elections. When, in February 1992, a bribes scandal came to light in Milan, and a wave of disgust and indignation rocked almost every Italian city, political parties remained in astonished disarray, beacuse they were accused of their routine fund-raising ([2]). In a speech thrown to the wolves, Bettino Craxi sustained that <<Every one knows that a large part of political financing is irregular or illegal>>. Audaciously he affirmed that, during the years of the cold war, every one knew that the cost of politics was paid by methods now called <<an enormous corruption network>>.

In Italy a million people are in full-time politics; they are therefore professional politicians in the strict sense: for some of them politics is a vocation, for some of them is a means of gaining a living, and for some of them is a career for upward social mobility. They live off politics; if all the Italian politics is corrupt, they (and their families and their activities) all live directly or indirectly off corruption (even if personally many of them are not corrupt). For these reasons, while the majority of the country considers the prosecutors as heroes and wants the fat-cat politicians behind bars, others gloomily say something like the words of one protagonist of Measure for meausure against an inflexible magistrate:

At the center of the Italian case there is a peculiar frame of the constitution, which had been written in fear of a one-party-dominated political structure.

The founding fathers of the Italian Republic were so frightened by Fascism and Communism that they preferred to draw up a formula based on proportional system and predominance of Parliament. The proportional system generated a Parliament that was powerful but fragmented and plagued by a diffused power of veto: large coalitions were always necessary in order to elect the Cabinet, and large majorities were necessary for most of legislative procedures. The supremacy of the political parties, the vulnerability of Cabinets and the great influence of little parliamentary groups are other important consequences of this original sin of the Italian Republican system.

Influential scholars suggested that the extraordinary place of politics in the Italian situation produced a successful <<democracy Italian style>>; for others, on the contrary, all kind of malpractice was generated by the main feature of the political system: the impossibility to substitute the leadership. Because of the only alternative to the governamental coalition led by the Dc was a governmental coalition led by the Communists, the regime always remained in the hands of an irremovable power elite. Effectively, the DC maintained the monopoly of government and the PCI maintained the monopoly of the opposition. For the voters, alternation among different political parties was absolutely unachievable, and acceptance of corruption was a consequence of the impossibility of any form of renewal process. As it as been said ironically: <<For almost 50 years, Italian society as a whole has found itself in a situation similar to the one that prevailed in the recent gubernatorial elections in Louisiana, where a former three-term governor, better known for his rakish reputation (an avid gambler with a couple of corruption indictements), managed to triumph over a one-time Ku Klux Klan grand wizard and Nazi sympathizer. Thus, the bumper sticker that bluntly, although perhaps honestly, summed up the sentiments of 61 per cent of all Luisianians, Vote for the crook-it's important, could have been adopted in Italy for almost half a century>> ([3]).

There are crooks of many kinds; the Italian ones, if crooks they are, promoted a system that was opened to many segments of the Italian society. Industrialists, farmers, workers, pensioners, and so on, have benefited from a generous amount of money which is derived from huge public subsidies. It could be said that the government bought social peace by paying the price in cash. All the tensions of Italian society, from the ethnical ones to the trade unionist ones, have been cured by an enormous public-sector debt, wich is 110 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 1991. The public-borrowing requirements stand at nearly 11 per cent of GDP in 1992. The incentive to vote in a clientelistic way rather than in an ideological way has been the means most used by the governmental parties in order to mantain power.

Increasing levels of government expenditure have not caused a devastating inflation because the State has always bought the money from the ordinary people: 90 per cent of the Italian debt is owned to Italian citizens who possess government bonds (but foreign investors have increased their purchase of Italian Treasury securities). Differently from the Japanese economy (characterised by the dominant role of the MITI), or from the German economy (characterised by the dominant role of the Bundesbank), or from the Anglo-saxon economies (characterised by the dominant role of the stock market), the Italian economy is characterised by the dominant role of the public expenditure, which in a pseudo-Keynesian way nurtures all the sectors of the society.

The Achille's heel of the Italian economy is the interest payments linked to government bonds. Each month the State must pay growing portion of money on the expiry date of governmental bonds, so other high-yelding bonds are offered to the public, and so on in a never ending vicious circle. In 1975 the public debt was 54 per cent of the GDP; in twenty years it has doubled. In the great European countries comparable to Italy the total public-sector debt is about 30 per cent.

Since the 1970s, the engagement for social services, wages, pensions and various other subsidies have caused high level of government expenditure, which in 1983 stood at 58 % of GDP. Now the great part of the public debt is caused by the necessity of paying the government's growing interest bills. Important outside bodies such as the International Monetary Fund have ufficially declared many times that this public debt was abnormal and risky. In the Black September of 1992 of the European currencies, the lira was the first victim of speculators and devalued inevitably.

To lower the deficit, a new medium-term plan envisaged severe cuts in spending on health and social security, legislation to counter fiscal evasion, a stop in real terms for the wage increases, a vast programme of privatisation, and abundant taxes for all the sectors of society. Forecasts oscillate among various qualities of pessimism. Some speak about a possible bankruptcy. Presenting the new austerity measures, the Prime minister Giuliano Amato said that the nation was on the <<edge of an abyss>>. Someone else observed that dire predictions are not presented for the first time: at the beginning of the 1970s the Italian economy was reputed the weakest link in the European economy, threatened by the 1968-69 student and worker movements, political polarization, a very high level of inflation and unemployment. Says an anonymous commentator of The Economist (July 18th, 1992, p. 69): <<For years economists have predicted disaster unless the government reduced its bloated public sector; yet, Houdini-like, Italy's economy has burst free. ...The Italian economy may have escaped in the past, but now the deficit poses a new and embarrassing threat: it could block Italy's participation in European economic and monetary union. ...This time the Houdini economy may not find it is so easy to break free>>.

There are reasons for pessimism, and reasons for optimism. The Italian economy was once a success story. After the Second World War, Italy experienced tumultuous development and was transformed into a modern industrial society. From 1946 to 1991, the average annual increase in overall gross domestic product was the highest in the world (after Japan); still in the 1980's Italy's annual rate of growth has been among Europe's highest. GDP will develop by an estimated 1.0 per cent in 1992. The backbone of the Italian wealth is the small or middle-sized company, whose largest international successes in such fields as fashion, machine tools, furniture design, jewelry, are well known.

In September 1992, during the meltdown of Europe's exchange rate mecanism, the lira devalued, but the Swedish krona hiked a key-short term interest rate to 500 per cent, and also the pound and the peseta sank ingloriously. Europe as whole is in recession, and the currency chaos is the expression of the general transformation of the industrialized world. Nations like Italy, or Germany, or the USA, were the most engaged in the cold war, and now are the countries most stressed by a conversion from a war economy to an other economic system, characterised among other things by the confrontation with the exceptional growth of productions and wealth in different Asiatic capitalisms. For western countries, the changes will be more than cosmetic. The Italian bent to alchemyst invention will undergo the severest trial.

Without reference to the cold war it is impossible to understand why the Mafia had support in some political circles; and without reference to the end of the cold war

it is impossible to understand why the government is engaged today in an all-out war against the mafia.

In the 19th century, from the birth of a political power deriving from an electoral vote, the mafia sought protection and complicity in the high sphere of politics. The great difference between yesterday and today is that relations with public powers have dramatically changed. Yesterday the old Mafia was subordinate to institutional power. Now in the hands of the new mafia there is such a fantastic amount of money that politicians are sometimes complices and sometimes modest employees.

The interpenetration between the mafia and key sectors of political power distinguished the Sicilian mafia from ordinary criminality. In the past the mafioso sow himself as a law-abiding citizen rather than an outlaw. The colossal earnings in the drugs trade during the last two decades have eclipsed the old mafia, now replaced by less deferential drug lords, who are not afraid of resorting to the systematic use of terrorist methods. A consequence of these changes is the unusual wave of atrocious violence which exploded in Sicily in mid-1992. The victims were high-ranking public figures such as Giovanni Falcone, the best-known Mafia fighter in Italy, and his closest collaborator, Giovanni Borsellino, both blown to pieces together with their bodyguards.

Those deaths have closed an era of underground collusions, which in some respects started with the Allied Invasion of Sicily on July 10, 1943. The fascists had fought the mafia because they could not bear any obstacles to their totalitarian control of Italian society. During the war the Anglo-American military powers woul have signed a pact even with the devil just to be able to beat the Nazifascists. In 1943 the mafia was used in order to make the landing of the troops and the control of the territory easier. It has been said quite rightly that in the Second World War there was <<no alternative to victory>> and it is in this light that the alliance with the mafia during the war must be examined. The Allied offensive overwhelmed the Fascists using all the means at its disposal.

Some years later the mafia was maneuvered again, in the same way as the yakuza were used in Japan against Communism. This was the great new change in the relations between the mafia and the political class, which was connected with the outbreak of the cold war. After the electoral consultations in 1946 and in 1947, Italy went straight on to parliamentary elections in 1948 amid the worst fears of the communist bogey. In Sicily the game could be lost or won in a decisive way for all the country. Had the South been influenced by the Socialist and Communist tendencies which prevailed in the North, a Communist regime would have come to power by electoral and legal means - and there was a real possibility of this happening: in Sicily the two left-wing parties gained more votes than the Christian Democrats in local elections of 1947.

Immediately, a furious anti-Communist campaign began in the whole of Italy and above all in Sicily. A complicated network took form between the mafia, the political power, and the State structures. All kinds of expedients were utilised to achieve an anti-Communist majority; in 1947 Socialists and Communists dominated, and if they had been victorious they would have led the country to institutional experiments like those of the so-called <<popular democracies>> of Eastern Europe. The outcome of the elections in the North was clear even before starting; in the South however it was undecided: in the referendum on Monarchy or Republic of 1946 the vote in favor of the Republic had just reached 20,1 in Naples and 15,8 in Palermo. All the South was ready to be caught up by a compelling anti-Communist campaign.

The Christian Democrats in Sicily carried out a masterful takeover of the old Monarchical troops; the outstanding men, the clientelistic vote, and the administrative personel moved to their side. The Mafia's collaboration was decisive in this proceeding. Originally the DC was an opposition party, genuinally <<Christian, anti-Mafia and left-wing>>. The new party that took form in 1947, to rise from the 20 of the first regional elections to an astonishing 48 per cent of the vote cast on 18 April 1948 was to become a thoroughly different thing: a mixture of honest ends and machiavellian means.

The Southern contribution to Italian political stability was made at any cost. During all the following elections, the polical collaboration with the Mafia remained specific to the Sicilian situation. The cold war opened a period of unadmitted compromises: for many years the problem that had given rise to that new fase of the organisation of the Mafia was to remain unsolved and frightening. Through the 1950s and the 1960s, right up the killings and massacres of the 1970s, a tremendous and sometimes bloody anti-Communist campaign was carried on influencing public opinion and the political class. From 1947 a particular way of speaking of the Mafia links, connections, protections began, and this was to continue until 1992. The cold war had to end so that the type of policy of organized crime begun in 1947 could also come to an end.

Now against the Mafia an all-out war has been declared. Differently from previous purely verbal declarations, the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino marked the turning point in the history of incapacity and complicity - allegations formulated not only by leftist and radical opponents, but also by conservative or moderate observers. After having ignored for years or having tolerated the growth of the new Mafia, the ruling class has been forced to understand that the attack on the State had surpassed any bearable limit. Mid-1992 was the beginning of a series of revelations, infiltrations, arrests and trials which could lead to the definitive ruin of a type of organized crime. The Mafia will exist still for many years, but in a very different way from the recent past.

After the end of the cold war, the electorate rapidly de-froze. In April 1992 The Italian legislative elections were an earthquake. The DC and PCI's oligopoly was challenged by the victory of opposition forces. But while the old majority was beaten, the alternative was not clear, because of the electoral system of pure proportional representation created a Parliament highly fragmented and incapable of guaranteeing a government to cope with recession, corruption, mafia, and fiscal crisis.

Changes in the country's electoral law and in the constitution are requested by everyone. There are many speculations for electoral, institutional, constitutional reforms. The main realistic proposals are: a special premium for the winning coalition, a threshold of 5 per cent of the national vote for a party to win seats in Parliament, election of the president of the republic by direct popular vote, chancellorship. An electoral system based on single-member-district, such as exists in England or France is highly favoured. But British-style voting system is seen as an extreme hypothesis, like pure proportional representation. Beyond of the winning formula, the goal most searched for is a reduction of the political spectrum: two principal parties (as in the USA) or two principal parties coalition (as in France). Every proposed reform is intended to produce stable governments, not blackmailed by a plethora of tiny factions. Many constitutional corrections are required, such as a federalistic reorganization of the country, and also many institutional corrections, such as a power veto of the Treasury (as in Germany) or a veto power of the government (as in France) in order to contrast the pressures on the budget promoted by Parliamentary groups.

In Italy a new phase has opened, with widespread fear for an unusual political vacuum. After the First World War, high minded critics of the graft system ended with the triumph of Fascism. From 1870 to 1940, the French Third Republic was tipified by a great governmental instability nothwithstanding the electoral system based on sigle-member-district, which is seen by many observers as the unique panacea for all the Italian ills.

While a exotic debate excites appetite and jealousy, traditional parties are losing ground every day. Even the traditional supporters of the governmantal parties, such as the businness community and the Catholic hierarchy have publicly and clearly declared that things cannot continue in this way. In 1992 many local elections in important northern towns produced considerable political tension: the DC experienced a major loss of votes to a new protest party, the Lega. The ascent of DC was part of a complex reaction to Communism; the decline of the DC is a consequence of the inutility of still having a bastion against Communism.

Though still the biggest party, the DC in the North is the second party, numerically much more smaller than the Lega. Governmental parties draw electoral support from southern constituencies, linked to patronage, favors, public subsidies, and sometimes the Mafia. Notwithstanding, there is also in the South a large number of disaffected voters, which is shown by the high percentage of abstentions, non voters and annulled votes. As has been said, <<In the wake of the 1992 elections little is less clear than that the first Italian republics is all but dead. Contrary to the views of eminent academics, anticommunism was the only reason why the Italian people tolerated it. As soon they were able to junk the system safely, they set about the task with gusto. What will follow the first Italian republic is less clear>> ([4]).

Communism and anti-Communism were the two features characterizing the political identity of the Italians. Now the fall of Communism has signified the loss of the supreme reference point for better and for worse. It is relevant that the Lega satisfies primarily the need for an exhaustive political identification. The surveys reveal that those who vote once for the League do not change their vote in following elections. Whereas single-issue parties (for example, the party of the retired people, the green party, the party for the legalization of drugs) enhance participation, the Lombard league promotes identification, and above all a negative identification. The Lega supports a reorganization of the country into federal areas mainly beacause of the reaction of the northern people against public policies, which are seen as too favorable to the southern people ([5]). Everyone knows that the Lega is against, but not many know for what the Lega is pro. Mainly the Lega is the gatherer of popular exasperation for corruption, criminality, high taxes, and inefficient basic services. In the Lega's electoral campaign frequently have been found stereotypes, scapegoats, themes of ethnic conflicts. The Lega did not offer a respectable image in order to convince the nation that it is an alternative to the chaos of the present situation, and has developed as the prominent container of political mistrust and anti-system tendencies.

While a transformation is underway in the political system, the Italians have never before confronted this appointment: massive crime and massive corruption connected with all-out fiscal crisis and tremendous unemployment. The politics of the cold war is a Pandora box which contains fraudulent businessmen and ideological terrorists, drug lords and pseudo-religious leaders, diverted state apparatus and mercenary warriors, international secret associations and mafia organizations. This vast and unpleasant domain deserves a clean-up. The true debate about Italy is not between the marvelous forms of electoral, institutional, constitutional reforms, but between the people who prefer a spectacular and relentless clean-up, or a selective and didactic one.

Obviously, Italy is no more the delicate cornerstone of the western political alliance. But, as at other times in history, from the beginning of national unity, the thread of the Italian labyrinth runs through the hands of many international organizations.

[1]) For more information on these themes, see F. Sidoti, Terrorism Supporters in the West, in N. Gal-Or, Tolerating Terrorism in the West, Routledge, London 1991.

[2]) It is very important to remark that besides being <<the price for democracy>>, many kickbacks were token for personal enrichment and caused ominous misgovernment. For these reasons the magistrates become popular idols. A rampant corruption had great benefits and little costs: the political class organized a appropriate system of impunity for political graft (parlamentarian immunity, frequent amnisties, control over the judiciary, and so on). See A. Pizzorno - D. Della Porta, Lo scambio occulto. Casi di corruzione politica in Italia, Il Mulino, Bologna 1992.

[3]) G. Sacco, Italy After Communism, <<The Washington Quarterly>>, Summer 1992, p. 29.

[4]) A. Codevilla, A Second Italian Republic?, in <<Foreign Affairs>>, Summer 1992, p. 164.

[5]) The best study on the Italian political system and on differences among local governments: R. Putnam, R. Leonardi, R. Nanetti, La pianta e le radici, Il Mulino, Bologna 1992; for an analysis of the same problems in a wider perspective on the general democratic theory, R. Putnam, R. Leonardi, R. Nannetti, Making Democracy Work, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1993.