[Debate] How Italy Is Adjusting

[Riaz K Tayob]

  How Italy Is Adjusting


            By LUCA RASTELLO and STEFANO PAROLA

Turin, Italy

"MY friend, the only true fortunetellers are the judges: when they send 
you down for 30 years, you can be sure they've made a pretty accurate 
prediction of your future."

El Viejo laughs and asks for only his nickname to be used. He is nearly 
70, has been convicted of crimes linked to drug smuggling for one of the 
most powerful criminal organizations in the world and has three 
passports --- Italian, American and Venezuelan. In other words, he has 
all the right credentials for talking about the so-called informal 
sector, which, to many Italians, is the fundamental cause of our current 
economic troubles.

El Viejo mocks the Italians' newfound passion for predictions. As stocks 
fell, politicians (our Parliament members are the highest-paid in Europe 
and our prime minister is, perhaps, the most farcical) fumbled, and the 
country risked a fate comparable to that of Greece, Italians discovered 
a hitherto unknown interest in analysts, agencies and financial oracles. 
We've been leafing through newspapers and punching remote controls in 
search of news about the spread between Italian government bonds and the 
German bund, even if we have only the vaguest idea of what it all means.

As so often happens in Italy, anxiety manifests itself in 
individualistic survival strategies. People turn away from government 
and broader society, fall back on family and clan loyalties and the 
informal sector. Sociologists call the result "amoral familism," a term 
Edward C. Banfield coined in the 1950s.

There are upsides and downsides to this phenomenon. Italians have a 
great capacity for reconstruction after hard times --- as after the 
Second World War, when the country emerged from ruins to become one of 
the most industrialized in the world. We tend to associate those 
resurrections with what we call the "art of muddling through," of which 
we are masters. It's the capacity to be flexible in the face of change 
--- something families tend to do better than governments.

But this is allied to a deep mistrust of government and the public 
sector. As many sociologists have pointed out, localism and clannishness 
are the enemies of an open and meritocratic society. Access to the 
professions is considered almost a hereditary privilege here. And tax 
evasion is seen as a legitimate defense against an inefficient state.

Reducing the debt, balancing the accounts and stimulating growth seem 
distant objectives in these conditions. We are only now admitting there 
is even a problem. For 10 years, our society has imposed a rose-tinted, 
optimistic view of things --- we have told ourselves that there is no 
crisis, that Italy overcomes every difficulty. Whenever the facts 
happened to burst rudely onto the scene, the reflex has been to shift 
the blame onto unspecified others: the markets, speculators, the 
European Central Bank. Moreover, the perception of individual well-being 
is still strong. Italians don't feel poor; our public debt is alarming, 
but our private debt is not, unlike that in the United States. But the 
downside is near-zero growth: the economy is expanding at a rate of less 
than 1 percent per year.

And when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi dons the robes of rigor and 
demands sacrifices, he is no longer credible: he even tried to avoid a 
confrontation with the facts by spreading the recovery measures over 
four years, so as to leave the most unpopular task to the government 
that will succeed him after the 2013 elections. Europe intervened, and 
the premier was finally forced to introduce more immediate budget cuts 
and new taxes, with the typically melodramatic comment, "Our heart bleeds."

As it should, particularly for the young, who are at the mercy of a 
labor market consisting increasingly of temporary jobs, which has 
abolished protections without creating opportunities. Routinely 
dismissed by the left and right as "layabouts" and "overgrown babies," 
they draw little comfort from emergency legislative measures like the 
reform of pensions they expect they'll never receive.

The crisis will push them deeper into the informal sector and the system 
of clan and family welfare, or force them abroad to find jobs. In other 
words, the very society that led to this will be strengthened.

Perhaps that means we'll muddle through again. Organizations like El 
Viejo's, with their capacity for rapid accumulation of cash and their 
investments in every sector, will do fine. And as always, there are some 
who make a small profit out of the crisis --- like the cross-border 
workers of Lombardy, who receive their salaries in Swiss francs 
increased in value by the weakness of the euro.

But we are reminded of that saying: we don't inherit the world from our 
forebears, but receive it on loan from our children. How can we 
resurrect Italy this time without that generation?

Luca Rastello, the author of "How to Smuggle Cocaine by the Ton, in Five 
Easy Lessons," and Stefano Parola are journalists at La Repubblica. This 
essay was translated by Jonathan Hunt from the Italian.
NYT

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