Bloomberg has a couple of excellent pieces out this week on what’s going on with the French and German economies. The story of how Germany lately managed to rally its growth and drive down its unemployment rate is of particular interest to the Italian observer, in that a lot of the success seems to have to do with Germany’s Mittelstand — small- and medium-size businesses similar to Italy’s — and the long-term financing that underwrites their successes. (Check out Konrad Adenauer’s grandson taking a nice swipe at those profligate Anglo-Saxons.)
Want to borrow some money?
Germany’s response to unemployment — to have workers work less hours with no reduction in pay — is redolent of how Italian managers of SMEs deal with their problems as well, but obviously more to the story than that, since Italian unemployment keeps climbing and is now nationally at 8.5%, compared to Germany’s 7%. Of course Italy has undertaken labor reform — most famously the Marco Biagi reforms in 2002 — but has not managed to introduce the level of flexibility that Germany has.
The end of the article reminds us that Germany’s export-driven growth and wage depression at home recall China. This is true, but hardly news: Martin Wolf, warning of global deflation, told his listeners this back in March.
European stereotypes have been entrenched since at least the time of the first Grand Tour. But as organizational tools, maps have the power to change the way one perceives the world. Personally, I’ve found alternate maps fascinated by maps ever since getting a Gall-Peters world map sometime in the eighties. So for a little Saturday morning fun, let me point you in the direction of Bulgarian artist Yanko Tsvetkov’s Mapping Stereotypes website.
But... mummies are in Egypt
It’s an improvement over the ages-old “French courteous. Spanish lordly. Italian amorous. German clownish” saw or the old “in hell everything is organized by the Italians” joke. In fact, Tsvetkov gives Italy special attention, subtly highlighting that Italy’s North-South problem and the attendant political use of it is not something confined only to Italy.
Speaking of divided states, don’t miss the visually-funny Cyprus map at the bottom.
He’s saved. For now. But rumors are afoot, thanks to no less than leading leghista Maroni, that the government will fall in March. But for now, Fini has relented and they’re in it together for a bit longer. How long? It’s anyone’s guess but word over at UniCredit today didn’t contradict Maroni. My contacts there, who I deeply doubt vote Lega, were in agreement with Maroni on this point.
Discussing study opportunities in the US with my wife’s cousin’s 15 year old, he suddenly interrupted his excited line of questioning about the Hard Rock Cafe and eggs for breakfast to ask something more serious: “Is it true that they execute women there, too?” Teresa Lewis’ execution in Virginia (a state that I’m not exactly from but that I have many associations with) was big news here, and as if to put it in counterpoint, I was reminded of the huge banner stating solidarity with Sakineh that was draped over Verona’s Roman arena.
Whereas certain European attitudes towards modernity might seem backwards to us — see Twitter for the Gallic sniff on Chinese work habits — we must realize that to them, lethal injection in Old Dominion is not much different than a stoning in Iran. I think we lose of sight of this sometimes as a consequence of our exceptionalism.
I realize how remiss I’ve been to have a blog on Italian politics without addressing, at least directly, the very acute crisis that Italian politics is going through right now. Angelo Panebianco’s front-page editorial in yesterday’s Corrieredirectly assigned the problem to factionalism. The following quote jumped out at me:
In the early ’60s, in the years of DC, Italian politics was judged incomprehensible by then-American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Things have not changed much. Why are Italian politics so opaque for voters? Because, in a democracy, transparency and the comprehensibility of politics is inversely proportional to the number of factions present in the game.
Well, I’d never heard that rule before, but I suppose it fits here. While not uniquely Italian by any means, it does encourage one to look back at one’s Machiavelli. I cribbed the following quote from Bufacchi and Burgess’s excellent Italy Since 1989 (in case those of you following my Twitter feed have been wondering):
Having carefully considered the subject of the above discourses, and wondering within myself whether the present times were propitious to a new prince, and whether there were elements that would give an opportunity to a wise and virtuous one to introduce a new order of things which would do honour to him and good to the people of this country, it appears to me that so many things concur to favour a new prince that I never knew a time more fit than the present.
What was true in 1513 and 1989 still rings true today. It is clearly time for a new prince, and how this unfolds will be interesting. What it will change, of course, remains to be seen, though — in many ways I feel that Berlusconi has become a sort of bugbear for the left (as evidenced by films like Videocracy, which is not bad in and of itself but which seems to ascribe far more sinister powers to the prime minister’s lowbrow TV shows). Will Fini as PM wake Italy up? He does at least boast a book and a think tank to his name — as well as, of course, the oft-cited fascist roots. We shall see.
MTV.it has an interesting series of videos up on the youngest members of the Lega Nord. I saw in the Corriere, mainly because I’d never imagine that MTV in the US would be capable of anything less than totally vapid. Have a look; although the one I watched (Filippo) is filmed in Novara province, the terrain reminded me a lot of the Polesine.
Meanwhile, the first week of school last week meant tons of education reform excitement in Italy (as well as less posted from your chronicler). Yes — a subject that usually makes most Americans huddle and cry while as vaguely-defined horrors like state-mandated testing and No Child Left Behind is actually exciting in Italy. This year, Minister Gelmini has halved the number of teaching positions. Official state-certification bodies at all major universities continued to pump out teachers in droves till just a few years ago. The intelligent reader sees where this leads — lots of teachers sitting at home, waiting for a substitution assignment. I should point out for the unaware that Europe’s university system, far more specialized than America’s liberal arts-organized model, is less tolerant of job-switching. (Doubtlessly there’s something cultural to this as well.) The upshot is that in the last couple of years, the level of opprobrium directed at Minister Gelmini — who is, incidentally, a lawyer and not a teacher by training — has moved from the graffiti-laden walls near student quarters to the headlines. In her somewhat feeble defense, I usually say that this is to avoid the sort of public sector glut that crippled Greece. But there’s no question that it could’ve been handled better — like by closing the certification schools a few years earlier, or at least limiting enrollment.
Alpine Sun in front of Adro's Il Polo scolastico Gianfranco Miglio
Last week’s other interested drama was a private school in Adro, in nearby Brescia that festooned its entryway with the “Alpine Sun.” There’s a particularly prominent one at the entryway to the school.
Apparently it’s just a ‘cultural symbol.’ Of course this doesn’t take into account that the school is named after a prominent member of — guess what party? One that just coincidentally happens to use the Alpine Sun as the main symbol of their made-up country. Let’s compare.
Obviously a coincidence.
Adro’s mayor, Oscar Lancini, has been at the center of this debate. Not entirely surprisingly, he is also a leghista. Gelmini has come out and told him to order to have the symbols removed from the school. He’s saying today it will cost 30 thousand euros. The whole idea of branding teenagers with your political party’s symbol would just seem pathetic if, as I try to highlight on this blog, immigration in Europe were not such a pressing issue. I’ll keep you posted on how it plays out. Gelmini, linked to Berlusconi, is playing a risky game by coming down hard on Bossi, of course, lest he go the way of Fini, but I’d like to think it’s inconceivable that she not endorse this move.
As a side note, the left, in their predictably opportunistic fashion, is trying to make educational spending an issue, without really saying much other than ‘time to roll up out sleeves.’
Ok, money for education is shrinking, you're out of patience, you're rolling up your sleeves, and -- what next?
One expects political upheaval in Italy. After all, the country has had as many governments as Boliva since World War Two, and my primer on Italian politics had a photo of parliamentarians fist-fighting on the cover.
From the back cover, "Fisticuffs in the Italian Parliament"
But — Sweden? As Stephen Castle wrote in yesterday’s New York Times, Swedish politics are usually “worthy, high-minded and often utterly predictable, Swedish politics has rarely offered much by way of excitement” — pretty much the exact opposite of Italy’s opportunistic and treacherous circus, in other words. It’s certainly new to me — I’d have expected to hear more about the Netherlands, France or, if you want to look at the Scandinavians, Denmark — but inasmuch as it traces all the main themes common to the Italian debate — the future of the welfare state, the decline of industrial society, and rising immigration — I’ll be following it closely.
Berlusconi comes out with Sarkozy against criticism on France’s treatment of Roma. Quoted in Le Figaro yesterday, “[EU Citizen’s Rights Commissioner] Reding would have done better to treat the subject in private with French leaders before speaking publicly as she did.” Some of the right-leaning Italian press is calling it a new French-Italian “axis” against immigration. Meanwhile, the NYT does a story on the Rom, and the comment of a Romanian official bears a striking resemblance to a comment on this blog a couple weeks back.
Well, Rachel Donadio has been a busy woman lately, and she’s hitting all the right places. Observing Bossi’s Lega Nord has been one of my preoccupations since a wealthy Amerophile in Parma told me in late 2004 that Italy should ship all its Communists off to North Korea and Cuba. But that’s neither here nor there. Donadio’s piece today is good, informative and clearly designed for the casual outside-of Europe observer — which, of course, is understandable given the audience of the NYT. But I have to take issue with the implication that LN is any kind of rising power. Bossi declared during LN’s first electoral rout in 1996 that they were the ‘new Christian Democrats,’ and many the observer of Yugoslavia’s dissolution in the early 1990s was eager to compare Slovenian and Croatian separatism to Bossi’s. They were wrong, of course — Berlusconi is no Milosevic — but consciousness of the League’s substantial populist power is nothing new. And finally, in 2010, is it really Bossi and his absurdly bearded, myth-aspiring vikings that we need to pay attention to, or is it Fini? As a note to an upcoming post, Bossi’s Po River water hardly has the mythic heft of Napoleon’s coronation with Charlemagne’s crown, which one can reflect on outside in Milan in Monza.) I haven’t read Fini’s new book, but it’s on my list, and although I’m most aware of his origins within MSI, I do grow tired of hearing him referred to as a ‘neo-fascist’ as if he routinely dressed in all black and used a Roman salute. Of course, in some, but my no means all, European countries that would a difficult label to shake off, but it’s not in Italy. But Italy’s level of de-Nazification is a different subject. What is not is that most likely, we are looking at the end of the Berlusca years and thus, the end of an era.
