Human Rights Watch released a report on the state of racism and xenophobia in Italy yesterday. The results are not cheerful reading.
I wrote about this two years ago for the American, and it’s not heartening to see that things have been in a continued downward spiral.
As usual, the Italian press reacts with typical oversimplification and indignation: “Human Rights Watch says Italy is racist,” say Liquida. The timing of the report is important, as the island of Lampedusa is receiving an ever-greater influx of refugees from the ongoing war in Libya. The Italian press stokes unfounded fears of military retaliation (nicely debunked here) while interior minister Roberto Maroni asks the EU for €100m ($138m) and stokes fear by quoting wildly-vacillating numbers of immigrants in Libya (presumably destined for Italy’s shores).
The goings-on on the other side of the Mediterranean have got normally isolated Italians in an ever-more pessimistic tizzy, abated, in some part, by the festivities last week, which I found were a nice distraction from an otherwise parlous state of affairs – although everynewsoutletout there took pains to explain to unfamiliar readers that Berlusconi’s hold on power is thanks to the anti-immigrant or xenophobic Northern League.
What remains to be seen is whether the government will cynically rush through more anti-immigrant measures based in the culture of fear stoked by the media. If so, then the question remains to the aging elites in Rome who push for such legislation in a country with one of the world’s lowest birth rates that posted a 0.1% growth rate at the close of last quarter: who will do the work in the Italy of the future?
In the era of the image, media and spin presentation is ever-important. Avid followers of Premesso will recall a post offering interpretations of an old photo of Berlusconi with a sidearm a few weeks back. This time we turn our attention to Obama’s announcement of American support in the current war in Libya.
What’s interesting about the video is how Obama stands completely alone. Unlike Bush in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, there are no medalled officers or sober government ministers flanking him. It suggest certain things about our individualistic culture, of course, but it’s also profoundly misleading – how often is it that a single leader takes a country to war? Furthermore, is it odd that a country as large and diverse as the United States invest so much power in the office of the president?
Italy’s political situation, overshadowed lately by events in Middle East, is grim. Berlusconi’s coalition totters. Fini’s breakaway group seems waiting for the right moment. Indeed this fall March was bandied about as the right time for a vote. More power has flowed to Lega Nord’s Bossi, whose ministers voted again making the 17th a holiday, and Berlusconi even showed up tot he vote with a handkerchief in green — breakaway Lega’s color.
As the case was in WW2 and the anni di piombo, the north is again the battleground for Italy’s future. Lega parliamentarians are in the middle of passing aggressive decentralization reforms that could be completed as early as May. If so, Berlusconi will lose ground as Bossi’s secessionists take Italy back to a past of campanilismo and freedom from taxation.
With typical Italian flair for a big show, Turin is prepped for an unlikely show of Italian nationalism. Italian’s lukewarm sentiments towards their nation are legendary. The political crisis going on for the better part of a year highlights this, especially when a member of the ruling coalitions regularly insists that unification is not worth celebrating. It leads one to ask, what’s all the fuss about?
John Foot, a professor at University College in London and sometimes-Milanese, has a good piece up in today’s New York Times exploring the links between Qaddafi, Italian football (notably Juventus) and investments. Worth your time.
(Video primarily in Serbian although the judge speaks in English.)
Readers of yesterday’s post, which quoted Rory Stewart questioning the ability of the UN and similar organizations to do much of anything, might’ve detected a hint of disappointment. This view was informed in some measure by the inability of the UN to prevent carnage in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. That drama is still being played out at the ICTY in the Hague, and although there are sometimes questions to be raised about the institution, when it convicts those like the former assistant minister of the interior Vlastimir Đorđević of crimes against humanity and war crimes it is redressing a real wrong.
Đorđević, as assistant minister of interior, was head of Serbia’s police forces and paramilitaries who played an active role in using violence and intimidation to force Kosovars out of their homes and off their land. In additional to charges of mass killing, the judge also brought up the removal of the victims’ bodies to mass graves inside Serbia proper, and sentenced Đorđević to 27 years’ imprisonment.
Belgrade’s silence on the matter bodes well for Serbia’s European future.
Perhaps international justice comes out ahead of international development here because the results are so much easier to measure. One can debate the merits of the sort of justice it is, but for those familar with Kosovo and the Milošević regime, Đorđević’s sentencing is just.
The ICTY’s indictment of Đorđević can be found here. Names of the victims, including the 47 members of the Berisha family who were killed on a single day in March 1999, can be found in Schedules A-L, pages 25-48.
Rory Stewart‘s The Places in Between, an account of his walk through Afghanistan in 2002, is every bit as good as critics say it is. (I can’t remember the last time when I read a book that proudly announced that it was a “New York Times Bestseller” on the cover, but publishing is a tough business.) That it is worth reading for anyone who wants to seriously understand the region, what it means to travel, or man-dog friendship is unquestionable. It is also worth reading for the few but trenchant words it offers up to so-called development specialists who seem to populate places like Afghanistan, the Middle East and the Balkans. One wonders if they will be flocking to the Maghreb next.
In light of what’s happening there and watching Western news organizations try to make sense of it, I’ll quote Stewart’s footnote from near the end of his extraordinary travelogue. The parts of the book that barely mention the West at all are the best parts, of course.
Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a 19th century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and conducted countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn’t, their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly the population would mutiny.
Postconflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies and there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgment they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation and oppression.
Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan.
This is an excellent summary of everything I have seen and heard of development experts in two years in the Balkans, and two more years of attending school with many who aspired to be development experts. What must one do to understand a people? Walking staying in their houses, speaking their language, and walking with them is a start, Stewart seems to be admitting, although even that barely scratches the surface. I’ve long been impressed at the long view that the British Crown took in sending young men to India in the 19th century. Our 21st-century development agencies and governments typically send people out on two-year rotations.
To be fair to development experts, I should mention that for awhile I made a living teaching the local employees of international businesses how to understand monolingual English-speakers who made zero effort to learn or speak in a local language, and for whose sole benefit department-wide meetings were often translated, despite everyone else having a common tongue. There is no monopoly on loutishness or cultural imperialism, but it can also be said that these monophones demonstrably added value to the company that they put through so much grief. If they didn’t, they lost their jobs.
Can the same be said for the would-be architects of the new quasi-protectorates?
A side recommendation: I had heard for some time that there was a book out by a Scotsman who had walked across Afghanistan, but the New Yorker’s (paywalled) portrait of Stewart cemented my interest in this remarkable and powerful book. Ian Parker’s portrait is recommended as well. Read both with a strong cup of sweet tea on the side, and perhaps listen to PJ Harvey’s veddy English album afterwards.
There’s way too much news this week, from the Libya to the milleproroghe, from Macedonia’s electoral crisis to the role of social media in the events that have shaken the Arab world. Fini’s proclamation that the PM was not ‘anointed by the lord’ may hint at the beginning of the end on this side of the Mediterranean as well.
Look for a more thorough weekend update as your chronicler has other deadlines to meet this mild Friday morning.
For those who’ve spent time east of Apennines, ponder this bit from the Economist’s review of David Gilmour’s The Pursuit of Italy: A History of a Land, its Regions and their Peoples.
Italy’s north-south divide remains gaping, too (though, as the author says, there is a less well known east-west divide either side of the Apennines).
This week’s l’Espresso features Berlusconi getting ‘clowned’ (as old school hip hop might have it) by the US, via the leaked Embassy cables. Coverage is running in English as well, and the magazine promises to publish more than 4,000 cables this week.
It’s interesting to see this perspective, and to read it in English, but as is usually the case with Italian journalism, it is so heavily politicized that’s it difficult to know what to make of it. Published by the same group that puts out the daily la Repubblica, both publications are rabidly anti-Berlusconi. That is the first issue.
The second, which is more interesting, lies in how Italy sees the US and how the US might see Italy. There is a component of Italian society that is extremely distrustful of American materialism on both the political left (PCI) and right (MSI), both in some ways informed by Catholicism. Berlusconi made it acceptable to flaunt wealth, especially if it was made by dint of ingenuity — one reason why the American press, even on the left, is much less reflexively anti-Berlusconi that similar British publications. In Italy, Berlusconi’s self-made image and aggressive pursuit of material goods give him (and the city he comes from) an American flavor. Whether heartland Americans would be able to forgive his amorous pursuits or turn a blind eye to rewriting of Italian laws at any opportunity is unlikely — Berlusconi is entirely an Italian creature who could not have come to be or could not have survived in any other political reality. But in Italy, there is something American about him, as far as Italians see America.
As for how Americans see Italy: Italy’s key position in the middle of both Europe and of the Mediterranean has made it strategically important since at least the time of Thucydides and probably longer. The local particulars have varied, of course, and in the last century the existence of West Europe’s biggest communist party set the tone for US-Italian relations from the post-war period until the Berlin Wall fell and with it the First Italian Republic. Interference from a great power in such a valuable piece of real estate is perhaps not welcome, but certainly not unexpected.
L’Espresso’s coverage is interesting, but it seems basic misprision of the trade of diplomacy flows through it. After CGIL-led strikes paralyzed FIAT in 1954, American ambassador (and virulent anti-communist) Clare Booth Luce voiced concern to FIAT managing director Vittorio Valetta that communism was continuing to grow in Italy despite millions of dollar in Marshall Plan aid. What right the ambassador had to manage FIAT is disputable — but that the Marshall Plan aid to Italy was an incentive to stop the flow of communism from the east is not. That a half-century later Ambassador Ronald Spogli should seek concessions from Italy — a larger base at Vicenza to house the Army’s African Command — for example is part of the game of diplomacy. But instead l’Espresso says that “the White House has essentially the same vision as Mussolini: Italy is a natural aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean.” Of course it is; that is a lucky accident of geography. Invoking Mussolini’s comment — which was originally intended to explain why fascist Italy had not build an aircraft carrier — adds an unnecessary level of histrionics to the argument. But this goes with the territory of Italian journalism, whether it’s written in English or its own language (where it reads better, incidentally).
Regardless, I look forward to the rest of their coverage.
I’m not sure what’s more depressing — the amount of ‘worst’ categories that my adopted country is in, or the amount of ‘worst of the worst’ categories that my native country is in. But something about the data seems off to me — was this chart assembled by the paper of record or actually by the IMF? I don’t doubt that other industrialized nations routinely outperform us; some of these categories are quite well-documented (healthcare availability, life expectancy, income disparities) but all the same, this reeks of a certain school of woe-is-me-American declinism that’s of limited use, if not simply tiresome. But: statistics are interesting, as long as one understand their uses and abuses.
Intuitively, I’m not sure what to make of Italian food security being at the same level of Israel (who, incidentally, did not get the dark red ‘worst of worst’ mark that the belpaese did). Unscientifically, it’s hard to believe that anyone starves in Italy — but much easier to believe that many families find it hard to ‘make it to the end of the month,’ to translate the Italian phrase. Rising food prices play a role in that, but according to a recently-unveiled Euripes report (quoted here on MSN), public debt and the cost of energy and housing are the main culprits.
Mortgages and rents are not affordable for two out of five Italian families, and 40% of households have difficulties in paying rates and fees. A worrying picture emerges when you compare the data of 2011 with the previous year: 40% of Italian families has trouble paying their mortgage, compared to 23.2% in 2010, and 38.1% have trouble paying rent, versus 18.1% in 2010.
What’s great about Friday morning? Having the Economist placed at your feet. And even though this is a blog, sometimes it takes having the paper placed in your hands to do a good scan.
Tying together all the threads
Premesso’s not-quite week in review, drawn from the weekly of record:
2. As the holes in the immigration walls get harder to plug, shifting from Ceuta and Melilla to Lampedusa to the Greece-Turkey land border, Greece talks of suspending the Dublin Convention for asylum seekers. The Economist’sCharlemagne comes out with the following sound idea: “A painful compromise might be tried: if Greece wants to suspend Dublin II, it should accept a temporary suspension of Schengen and the return of border controls.” Me likey.
4. In Lexington, Obama’s handling of Egypt gets a look. Much howling and gnashing of teeth from John Bolton, Niall Ferguson and Michael Scheuer, among others. But maybe No-Drama Obama was the Decider?
Obama is said to have been more certain in private that Mr Mubarak’s jig was up than America’s public pronouncements (especially those of Hillary Clinton, his sometimes behind-message secretary of state) let on. He flatly rejected the Israelis’ analysis that the Egyptian president could hang on and that America should do everything to help him. Mr Obama’s conversation with Mr Mubarak on the evening of February 1st is said to have been the toughest between an American president and an ally since Ronald Reagan’s scolding of Menachem Begin during Israel’s bombing of Beirut in August 1982.
5. In Schumpter, the uneasy art-business axis is examined. Damien Hirst is one shrewd businessman.
Damien Hirst was even more audacious. He not only realised that nouveau-riche collectors would pay extraordinary sums for dead cows and jewel-encrusted skulls. He upturned the art world by selling his work directly through Sotheby’s, an auction house. Whatever they think of his work, businesspeople cannot help admiring a man who parted art-lovers from £70.5m ($126.5m) on the day that Lehman Brothers collapsed.
And following in his footsteps in Venice, perhaps the Zero Group? Stay tuned.
