I’ve been considering reading Luigi Barzini’s The Europeans for some time now, but Mencius Moldbug’s recent mention has finally pushed me to borrow a copy. An excerpt — on Italy, but with wider implications:
Miscalculations, sometimes irreparable, are also constantly made by foreigners in their estimates of the Italian political and economic perspectives. Inevitably, cures for Italian ills based on authoritative diagnoses, cures that might be excellent for other countries, are disastrously wrong.In the late fifties and early sixties, when the Italian economy was enjoying a boom and political problems were being gradually solved, save one, the Communist threat, foreign specialists decided the only hope for the country was not what common sense would have recommended, the strengthening of the coalition of center parties, which, with American help, had rapidly reconstructed the country after the war (all efficient governments are, whatever they call themselves, center governments). Foreign experts thought that a new Center-Left government would be the right medicine, a coalition of Christian Democrats and Socialists.
It must be honestly pointed out that, as usual, these foreigners were deceived by Italian words, which seldom mean exactly what they seem to say. Italian Socialists of that generation were not what these people imagined. They were also very dissimilar from the Italian Socialists of today. They were then incredibly behind the times. Most of them were verbal extremists. Many clung to the 1870 myths of La Commune and to the excessive impossible hopes of the beginning of this century, some were Anarcho-Syndicalists, others were pure anarchists and a few were terrorists at heart. They believed the economy was the only motor of history but knew almost nothing about economics. They were openly pro-Communist, resigned to accept Soviet leadership in international affairs, resigned also to see the Italian Communists take power, and worked strenuously to help them destroy what was left of the bourgeois liberal state. The secretary of the party, Francesco de Martino, repeatedly threatened: “We’ll nationalize everything in the country except barber shops.” (The odd exception was probably because Professor de Martino, being Neapolitan, presumably did not use a razor, but like most middle-aged southerners, was shaved every afternoon after the siesta by a friendly barber, whose autonomy from the state he was understandably determined to preserve for the safety of his own hirsute jowls.)
[...]
The plan to form a Center-Left coalition was first conceived by Italian politicians for many different reasons of their own, but also custom-designed to seduce the Americans, without whose approval and backing the Italians curiously believed it could not be carried out. The Americans immediately saw in it a wonderful way to fulfill their double vocation: the pragmatic one of leaving no problem unsolved and their missionary obligation to spread democracy and improve everything in sight.They spared neither effort nor money to implement the plan as quickly as possible. They thought it was the only way to cure all the Italian ills at once, so why wait? It would strengthen the decaying state; check rampant corruption; generally enforce law and order; defeat the Mafia, the Camorra, and the emboldened unattached criminals; discourage the class struggle; decrease the number of ruinous strikes; swell production and imports; slow down inflation; levitate the standard of living; and as a result, encourage domestic and foreign investments.
Above all, they believed it to be a certain way to isolate and weaken the pro-Soviet Communists, by depriving them of their Socialist vassals, and free Italy once and for all from the menace of a totalitarian takeover. A Soviet-dominated peninsula cutting the Mediterranean in half obviously would have thrown all NATO plans and the security of the United States itself into disarray.
[...]
The plan might possibly have produced in some other country all the wonderful effects the Americans expected. In unpredictable Italy, it produced the exact contrary. It was estimated that in the end the plan cost as much as a lost war and retarded social and economic progress for at least one generation. Its failure also came from external circumstances, to be sure, the rise in the price of oil, the revolt of the young and the workers in the late sixties, but was principally due to the wrong diagnosis. The state (what was left of it after twenty years of arbitrary dictatorship and a crushing military defeat) practically collapsed under the burden of a vastly enlarged number of new tasks, some of them admittedly useful and necessary, but with which the bureaucracy, such as it was, was absolutely unprepared to cope. Among them was the enforcement of some of the most ambitious and intricate legislation ever passed outside Byzantium.Furthermore, the Christian Democrats and the Socialists, who had considered with hostility the secular liberal democratic state since its inception in 1861, joyfully kept on dismantling it. Too late they realized it had become an indispensable tool, not only to govern in the ordinary way, but above all to carry out any left-wing policy, which notoriously relies on an ever-increasing state intervention in every sector of the economy. Corruption grew to Levantine proportions. The police were demoralized, paralyzed, and ordered not to use their weapons even when attacked.
Only after Aldo Moro was kidnapped and killed did the more responsible politicians in power begin to realize that the dismantling of law-enforcement agencies did not harm their “class enemies” alone but was detrimental for the whole country and could be mortally dangerous for each of them. Law and order were violated by everybody as a matter of course with impunity; even sedate elderly drivers allowed themselves to cross red lights. Bank robberies and kidnappings of well-to-do gentlemen proliferated. Terrorists dynamited trains, cars, and office buildings and murdered innocent people almost every day. Every request of the trade unions was immediately granted without discussion. The endemic riots, the perennial strikes, the occupation of factories, and the continuous threats of universal nationalizations discouraged new investments. Capital surreptitiously fled the country in vast quantities. Production slowed down and sometimes came unexpectedly, without a reason, to a standstill in many plants. The state deficit, incredibly, grew higher than that of the U.S. federal government, and the inflation rate threatened to reach South American levels. The “economic miracle” of the fifties became but a nostalgic memory, a lost golden age.
Finally the Communists, who, deprived of their Socialist vassals and isolated in their ghetto, were supposed to wither away, acquired instead an all-pervading tentacular influence they had never previously enjoyed or hoped for. They seduced or terrorized the intelligentsia, more or less controlled schools, universities, newspapers, magazines, publishing houses, all means of communications, and through the trade unions, the economic life of the country. They infiltrated the bench and the bureaucracy. Many Italians, who were not convinced Communists, saw the way the wind was turning, and prudently, resignedly behaved as if they were true believers, naturally with the neophyte’s fanatic zeal, somewhat as their fathers had done as Blackshirts. Democratic opponents to the Center-Left, who did not fully trust the government’s programs and still thought the Communists a possible threat to freedom, somehow found themselves without jobs or occupying obscure positions inferior to their capacities. As a result many bright and ambitious young men emigrated to countries where advancement was based on merit and not political affiliation. One Italian writer I know changed language to make a living.
The Communists’ source of power was principally their capacity to stage riots anywhere at any time. The party had money enough to organize noisy and turbulent mass meetings a few blocks from the seat of the government by concentrating hundreds of buses and dozens of special trains on Rome within days. It could also paralyze the whole country overnight by means of general strikes, brutally enforced by strong-arm squads. Sometimes the party did not have to do anything. Threats were enough, veiled threats in Unità leading articles, in a speech in Parliament, or even unspoken threats. The saying went at the time that the Christian Democrats could do nothing that displeased the Socialists, the Socialists could do nothing that displeased the Communists, and, in the end, even if the Communists did not always get all they wanted, nothing could be decided that they did not like. Some of the most controversial laws were in fact passed with their votes or thanks to their abstention.
The idea that the Center-Left coalition could best defend the people’s liberty from the Communists was best criticized by Giovanni Malagodi, parliamentary leader of the handful of democratic opposition deputies, with these words, “You are making the same mistake the Romans made at the end. They entrusted part of the defense of the empire to Germanic tribes, related by blood, customs and religion to the Germanic tribes pressing on the border.”
Specialists in Italian affairs (diplomats, journalists, and professors of international relations in the best universities) were frightened by what they had helped to bring about. They concluded the country was hopelessly, incurably sick, as sick as Imperial China or the Ottoman Empire on their last legs, ready for extreme unction. They saw it correctly as rudderless, irreparably torn by irreconcilable social strife, led by weak, incompetent politicians, and drifting toward final bankruptcy and collapse, or at best, a totalitarian police regime on the Soviet model. They had to conclude that the Center-Left coalition, while inspired by the best intentions and based on sound information, had been a costly mistake that had produced more terrifying problems than it had solved, possibly only because its aims were too high and because it had been set up before the country was ready for it.