Political Order and Political Decay (18 page)

One observer describes Sicily's leading city in the following terms:

Capital of the mafia, a national symbol of venality and corruption in local government, Palermo, Italy's sixth largest city, is balanced precariously between Europe and Africa. Behind the façade of a prosperous modern metropolis, the crumbling slums, narrow twisting alleyways, and dank courtyards of the old city harbor conditions of housing, health, and sanitation more reminiscent of a Cairo or a Calcutta than of a major European city. Life in Palermo is a perpetual drama, from the daily torment of the city's chaotic traffic to the routine collapse of yet another
palazzo
in the old city to the periodic breakdown of basic services like garbage collection or public transportation to not infrequent outbursts of mafia warfare, which leave the city's streets strewn with bullet-ridden corpses.
1

One of the continuing failures of local government in southern Italy has been trash collection. In 1976, uncollected garbage piled up in the streets of Palermo for months at a time. In Naples during the late 2000s, a similar crisis reached up to the cabinet of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
2
Road building fared little better.
The New York Times
noted that between 2000 and 2011 Italy spent $10 billion, including $500 million in European Union subsidies, on the A3 highway from Salerno to Reggio Calabria. Due to high levels of graft and corruption, the highway remains unfinished.
3

In what has become a minor classic of contemporary political science, Robert Putnam demonstrated empirically the huge variance that exists in the quality of local governments across the different regions of Italy, and ascribed those differences not to structural economic or political factors but to different levels of civic engagement, or what has been labeled social capital. He argued further that one of the important sources of poor government performance was the region's long history of clientelism.

While much of the literature on Italy's “southern question” had previously been anecdotal, Putnam devised twelve quantitative measures of government performance, including cabinet stability, the promptness with which budgets were completed, legislative innovation, numbers of day care centers and family clinics, and bureaucratic responsiveness. He then collected data across all of Italy's regions over several decades and demonstrated that there is a consistent north-south axis in government quality, with Emilia-Romagna, Lombardy, and Umbria scoring consistently higher than Sicily, Basilicata, and Calabria. His measures correlate strongly with surveys of Italian citizens' satisfaction with their own local governments.
4

At this point in his analysis, Putnam was providing only statistical confirmation of what Italians had long perceived. His argument became more controversial, however, when he posited the causes of these differences. An economic determinist might argue that the quality of government is the product either of a region's overall level of socioeconomic modernization or of resources. Since southern Italy is poorer than the North, it might simply not be able to afford good-quality government. Putnam pointed out that the gap between the regions has persisted over many generations and existed at a time when the North was poorer than today's South. Moreover, resources alone could not explain the difference, since postwar Italian governments had transferred enormous resources from north to south in the first couple of decades after World War II in a deliberate effort to help the region catch up. While the South did in fact develop substantially during this period, the North did so at a faster rate, such that the overall gap was maintained.

Nor is it possible to attribute the difference between regions to different institutions or policies. Italy's postwar political system was highly centralized; all the regions were ruled through French-style prefects in a uniform manner. This system was reformed in the 1970s when the central government devolved substantial local decision-making authority to the regions, within an overall structure that sought to equalize resources across the country.
5
Either way—as regions of a centralized state ruled from Rome, or as regions granted autonomy with more or less equal access to resources—it is hard to argue that the political order that has existed since 1861 is responsible for the developmental differences.

This is what led Putnam, following Edward Banfield and many other observers of the South, to argue that the region's dysfunctions lay in long-standing inherited cultural values, or social capital. Putnam argued that social capital was generated in self-governing city-states such as Genoa, Florence, and Venice, that flourished during the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. These republics cultivated virtues of loyalty and trust, and were organized around oligarchic institutions of self-rule. Southern Italy, by contrast, was shaped by the centralized and autocratic rule of the Norman kings of Naples and Sicily, whose predominant mode of social organization was the patron-client relationship. Thus the ultimate cause of the difference between the regions was political in nature, but this difference according to Putnam perpetuated itself across the centuries as social or cultural habits regarding trust and community.
6

THE ORIGINS OF CLIENTELISM IN SOUTHERN ITALY

There are unfortunately several problems with a historical account that adduces strong authoritarian government as the cause of the South's lack of civic community. In the first place, the Norman kingdom of Sicily to which Putnam attributes the region's hierarchical politics formally ended in 1194, when it was succeeded by a Hohenstaufen dynasty whose base of power was in the North and whose members included a number of Holy Roman Emperors. (The story of how the southern Norman kingdom fought on the side of Pope Gregory VII against the Emperor Henry IV during the investiture conflict on behalf of an independent Catholic church is told in chapter 18 of the first volume of this book.) Even if one considers the Hohenstaufens a continuation of the earlier Norman tradition—Emperor Frederick II was indeed a great centralizer—this dynasty itself ended in 1268. At this point in European history there was also a powerful, centralized Norman kingdom ruling England, and a Viking kingdom in Denmark, yet neither England nor Denmark developed a pattern of clientelistic government. Needless to say, a lot happened in Italy between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries that might better explain contemporary patterns of government.

There is a second problem in attributing clientelism to strong vertical political power in the South, in contrast to the republican traditions of the northern city-states. As I argued in Volume 1, the development of centralized state authority is a necessary condition for modern government, but it tells you little about the degree of political freedom that will exist in a given society. As Europe exited feudalism, the key to the eventual emergence of accountable institutions was the balance that existed between the monarch (or state) and the other elite power holders in the society. Where the monarch succeeded in co-opting the aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie, as in France and Spain, weak absolutism emerged; where the monarch and aristocracy joined hands against the peasantry, as in Prussia and Russia, there was strong absolutism; where the aristocracy was stronger than the monarchy, as in Hungary and Poland, there was local tyranny and national weakness. Only in England were the state and aristocratic elites relatively balanced; constitutional government arose out of the fact that neither one could prevail over the other. The English state often threw its weight into the balance in favor of nonelites against the aristocracy, not out of egalitarian ideology but because it wanted to clip the wings of a rival for power. While we are familiar with the story of King John's barons limiting his power through the Magna Carta, English kings were also instrumental in limiting the power of the barons and lords against their tenants and nonelite vassals.
7

Putnam argues that the Normans established strong centralized government in southern Italy and that this vertical power undermined the ability of citizens to form horizontal linkages of trust or association. But at this point in the Middle Ages, no European government was able to set up a truly dictatorial centralized state capable of penetrating and controlling the whole of society in the manner of the Chinese or, later, the Russians. In the centuries following Frederick II, the reality of southern Italy was rather the opposite: a persisting weakness of centralized authority that was unable to prevent exploitation of the peasantry by the aristocracy. Southern Italy, in other words, resembled Hungary or Poland much more closely than it resembled Prussia or Russia.

As in the case of Greece, the weakness of indigenous central government in southern Italy had a lot to do with politics at an international level. The kingdoms of Sicily and Naples passed from the Hohenstaufens eventually to the House of Aragon, whose dynastic possessions were united under Spanish rule in the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella. These possessions were consolidated in the empire of their grandson Charles V, who became the Habsburg heir and Holy Roman Emperor. Southern Italy remained a possession of first the Spanish Habsburgs and then, after the War of the Spanish Succession, the Spanish Bourbons, until it was invaded by Napoleon, who put his brother Joseph on the throne. Thus for nearly five centuries, the nominal sovereign over the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies was a distant foreigner, the legitimacy of whose rule was frequently contested in local uprisings. One school of Italian historiography maintains that the region's low trust emanates not from centralized dictatorship but from the policies of divide and rule practiced by the Spanish Habsburgs.
8

In any event, the clientelism that persists in southern Italy is a modern phenomenon, and there are more proximate historical factors than the practices of an ancient Norman kingdom or even of the Spanish Habsburgs. We should look instead at the unified Italy that was created in 1861 under the aegis of the northern Piedmontese monarchy, after the Bourbons in the South were overthrown by Giuseppe Garibaldi. When the northerners first confronted the social reality of the South, they were shocked: the new governor of Naples after its liberation by Garibaldi reported to Italy's first prime minister, Camillo Benso, Count of Cavour, “This is not Italy! This is Africa: the bedouins are the flower of civic virtue besides these country bumpkins.”
9

Unlike Prussia, which was able to “nationalize” its bureaucracy and institutions when it unified Germany, Piedmont was too small a player to accomplish a similar feat. Faced with peasant revolts and chaos in the wake of the fall of the Bourbons, the northern bourgeoisie controlling the new national government made a pact with the local oligarchy in the South, what Antonio Gramsci labeled the “
blocco storico
,” or historic alliance.
10
According to political scientist Judith Chubb, “In return for access to government patronage and for complete freedom of action in local administrations, [the southern elite] were prepared to provide unquestioning support in Parliament to any government majority, regardless of its program.”
11

Traditional patron-client relations have long existed in Italy. The very terms
patronus
and
cliens
were Roman and referred to a highly formalized legal relationship between a superior and an inferior that was the basis of power for Roman elites from the days of the late Republic onward.
12
The feudal relationship of lord and vassal can be seen as a contractual form of patronage in which respective duties and privileges of the two parties are clearly laid out. With the abolition of feudalism in the South, these formal relations shifted to informal ones, in which local landlords used their wealth and political connections to control the peasants living on their lands.

This traditional type of patronage (which existed in many rural communities around the world) evolved into a modern system of clientelism in stages, and as in the case of Greece had to do with the early introduction of democracy in a society that did not have a strong, autonomous state. According to Luigi Graziano, under the liberal republic that was in place between 1860 and 1922, “The organization of politics around personality and patronage rather than ideas and practical programs not only absorbed and neutralized the opposition but ultimately emptied the very concept of ‘party' of any meaning beyond that of loose congeries of personal clienteles.” As in America under the patronage system, this had a devastating effect on the quality of government: “The particularistic nature of the incentives which kept the system going required that the minister had to dispose of rewards and sanctions of an equally particularistic nature; that is, he had to be as free as possible from bureaucratic norms of conduct.”
13
This system was by our earlier definitions not yet truly clientelistic because the country lacked mass politics. The franchise was expanded much more slowly in Italy than in Greece; in 1882, only 6.9 percent of the population had the right to vote, and universal male suffrage was not introduced until 1913.
14

As in Greece, industrialization came relatively late to southern Italy. Under a unified national Italian government, tariffs were introduced to protect northern industry and the inefficient landowners of the South. It was now northern industries that increasingly supplied the South. This heightened the role of the local landowning classes at the expense of industry and encouraged the middle classes there not to go into entrepreneurship but to buy land for themselves and join the local oligarchy. Opportunities to do so expanded rapidly with the division of communal lands after the abolition of feudalism by Napoleon (which happened later in Sicily than in the continental Mezzogiorno), and the division of church lands after 1860. This led to a large number of social conflicts over land among different social classes. Thus the interests of the northern middle class were very much aligned with the project of creating a new and modern state, while the southern middle class was absorbed into the traditional oligarchy. The peasantry was deprived of a potential ally and relegated to an increasingly impoverished and marginalized state. According to Graziano, “The hate [the peasantry] harbored previously for a distant central authority, a hate somewhat mitigated by the paternalism of the Bourbon kings, was now concentrated against the new local ruling class.”
15
There was no entrepreneurial middle class in the South that could lead a drive for state modernization.