THIS IS THE SECOND PART OF A THREE PART BLOG POST
Introduction
Hello again, I hope you have all kept well (this is an unfortunate recurring opener, I know!),
This blog post is going to start to look at some of the comparison between the European Union and Italy. (It is the title!). We have discussed the situation in Italy in the 19th Century, and I am assuming that most are relatively familiar with the basics of the politics of the European Union. We finished last week with the focus on some core aspects of post-Risorgiomento nation-building – discussing largely well-placed policies that were ultimately limited in their capacity for meaningful reform.
This makes a good bridge into the consequences of the failure to forge this common political community. I think that there are three of these. Firstly, a lack of an ability to have real national debate, and therefore effectively deal with national problems. Secondly, an overzealous emphasis on the need to create to artificially forge some sense of commonality. Finally, the worsening of regional divisions due to the quality of politics. Two of these are shared by the European Union – the first and the third. I will be dealing with these two in this blog post. The unnervingly similar nature of these problems gives us a better understanding of where the issues with the EU are, and what sort of policies tend to better at solving the problem. What is essential here is that the problems are roughly equivalent, because they come from the same ‘root’. All problems are as a result of a recognition of a lack of political community. In this case this shared ‘root’ facilitates the transferability of political lessons – for in essence it is the same problem which has the same consequences.
The second of these three consequences is more complicated – as the European Union shares elements with Italy, but we have to be careful in drawing direct parallels given differing conceptions of what action is acceptable in different time-periods. We will look at this final consequence in the final blog post.
Before we get into the main meat of the article, I think it is important to give a definition. I will be using the word ‘sectional’ a lot. Why? Because it means something very, very specific that other words do not get to the essence of in this context. Sectional means a section or part of a greater whole. In this context, I will mainly be referring to sectional loyalty – sectional loyalty is when you have primary loyalty to a part or section of a greater whole. This is contrasted with a loyalty to the community as a whole – or the what I have called the ‘general good’. In Italy, for example, a sectional loyalty would be owing primary loyalty to Milan. A loyalty to the nation or ‘general good’ is, in contrast, owing loyalty and working for the betterment of Italy as a whole.
Sectional and General Good
A common sense of what it is to be a member of a national community is essential to having successful national political debates. To act in the general interest of a society you have to have a sense of the importance of that community. Essentially you have to care about others to want good to come to them at your own expense. This makes sense - it is the basic reason why people in the UK, for example, don’t give all their money up as foreign aid, yet are so willing for the government to provide society things which they may not get immediate benefit from. In fact, one of the traditional responses to complaints about the 0.7% of GNI that the UK gives to developing and emerging countries each year is an appeal to the national community which people care so much about. The defence goes something like this – by reducing social and economic desperation abroad, we are reducing pressures on our own national system. Lower migration, less terrorism and greater geopolitical influence come from us giving aid – which benefits the nation, and the nation is what we all agree we care about. Whether you like this or not, it’s how the system works and is one of the only ways in which universal morality can be applied across a society if that big and important liberal principle – the primacy of consent in all things – is to be simultaneously maintained. The myth of the nation therefore facilitates morality in politics – very interesting considering the barrage of criticism of the centrality of the nation for most liberals.
The problem - in Italy this was missing. There was neither national or political community, and therefore Italy’s democracy functioned poorly. As people with primary loyalty towards only sections of society became politically influential through parliament this became especially corrosive. Sectional interests by definition do not share the interests of the nation as a whole. When these actors become politically decisive the consequences are therefore really significant. Sectional interests failed to act with satisfactory vision to fix deep structural issues that affected the nation as a whole, and tended to obstruct policies that acted in the national good. A symptom of this malady was a tendency for deputies to be ideologically malleable – they would support whoever would meet the needs of those local grandees responsible for putting them into power. Ad hoc reconciliation of two former nominal political enemies became common in Italy from the 1870s onwards - a tendency known as ‘Transformism’. Deputies would regularly shift between two opposing ideological positions en masse. From the 1880s up to World War One, the moderate leftist Depretis, the charismatic moderate leftist Crispi and the conservative pragmatist Giolitti all were able to continue their political parliamentary dominance largely as a result of the flexibility of these political agents. This is not a trait of a well-functioning parliamentary democracy. There were serious consequences – policies that were bad for Italy were promoted to make particular interests satisfied. Tariffs introduced to protect Southern landowners, for example, prevented the efficacy of initiatives to reform deeply rooted structural issues in the South[[1]](#_ftn1). From the experience of Italy we can create a general maxim for well-functioning democracy, therefore. This is that the inability to transcend local interests through reference to a national political community makes national political debate a lot harder, and this has significant consequences when dealing with deep-rooted structural interests.
The European Dimension
This is where the European Union comes in – I know, I know, I know this is a set of blog posts about the EU that only adds substantive material on the EU 3,500 words in – but I think this is largely justified as the argument has been effectively implicit throughout. As I am sure you will have gathered from my heavy hints and the title, the European Union has very similar problems to Italy. The reason for this is that shared ‘root’ of the problems between the EU and Italy I mentioned earlier. This, of course, is the lack of recognition of both Italy and Europe as the primary entity to which an individual should identify. In fact, the similarity goes deeper than that – for there are politically communities with which individuals self-identify in both cases, but these necessarily conflict with the larger common political community. In Italy, people primarily identified with cities or institutions– be it Florence, Milan or the Catholic Church. In Europe it is to smaller national political communities like Hungary, England or France. Both these sectional loyalties conflict with identification with Europe and Italy as the ‘section’ has political priorities which can be gained at the expense of the larger entity.
We have already set out how this became a problem in Italy – through parliamentary institutions with significant legislative power. In the EU, however, this becomes a problem for different reasons. Like Italy, sectional interests have significant power, however it is through the mixture of informal and formal power of European member states – rather than through a singular formal institution like the Italian Parliament - that this problem arises.
In order to understand this, we need a sense of how power works within the European Union. Political agents in the European Union influence decision making in a complex and subtle way. Nation states are very important in policy formation and increasingly decisive, however, between nation states there is no formal voting structure protecting the rights of all members of the political entity. Power is thus exercised informally by nation states within the EU. This concentrates power into already politically influential large states – as only larger states have the necessary concentrated power to start initiatives, block them and act as the informal ‘face’ of the EU. Although there are nominal mechanisms and institutions that try to enforce some regulated formality into decision-making – like the European Council and voting with QMV - major powers like France and Germany have major political heft resulting from economic and geopolitical leverage over smaller powers. Smaller states can therefore rarely resist diktats and political moves from largely ones. It must be noted in this analysis that the ECB, European Parliament and European Commission cannot be discounted as politically irrelevant – far from it, in terms of the exercise of day-to-day formal powers of the EU, they dominate decision-making. However, in the complex matrix of formal and informal power relations in the halls of the Berlaymont building, the power over structural and transformational reform – the specific power I am concerned with in this context – lies primarily within the hands of nation states, especially large ones. These large and politically influential states also happen to be the ones in western and northern Europe – i.e. France and Germany – which is worth noting when we get onto the prevalence of regional inequality in Europe.
My basic argument is that the extent of the political influence of nation states creates significant barriers to solving structural problems and European-wide crises. The effective reason that this is the case is the same one as Italy – and any full explanation to why both were not able to have national deliberation to solve basic problems must reference the lack of community across these political entities.
Let me spell this out for you with an example which is common to both Italy and the European Union. So dominant to the history and politics of both post-Risorgiomento Italy and the EU, the problem of regional divisions – in both cases between the North and South of the political Union – illustrates perfectly the similarity in problems between both.
The North-South Divide
As mentioned, this would be a good time to draw out in greater detail and depth the discussion of the north-south divide in both Italy and the European Union. In Europe a lack of a political community has meant that the northern European member states focus their political attention on solving European problems only when their interests are directly threatened. This is not to say that other members of Europe are innocent – this is not just a northern European disease. The Visagrad group, for example, works explicitly with the intention of furthering the interests of its members. The ability to solve European structural problems, therefore, rests on a coincidental alignment of national sectional interests and the good of the European political community. One prominent and notorious example of this is France. France has consistently attempted aggrandisement and used Europe as a means to achieve this. It has been jealous in guarding its military pre-eminence and has been insistent in need for its symbolic presence at the centre of the EU, much to the annoyance of MEPs which are legally bound to work in Strasbourg several days a year. This shows how, where the feelings of European solidarity should be strongest – with those symbolic features of a collective European identity, European concerns still play second fiddle to national ones.
More detrimentally, Northern European countries continue to promote their own interest at the expense of Southern Europe – mainly by continuing the lucrative status quo. This status quo is flawed for an economic union – the mismatch of monetary union that promotes an economic climate suited uniquely for Northern European economies, and no fiscal policy to allow economic integration and intra-European standardisation is a toxic environment to economic development and stability. Southern Europe is unable to become more internationally competitive because of its inability to either devalue currency or let market mechanisms automatically do this. It goes without saying that this has had very real and raw recent consequences. Germany and other northern Eurozone countries promoted low interest rates pre-2010 in order to promote borrowing and growth in industries suited to Northern European Economic patterns. In Southern Europe, this posed significant problems. Low interest rates encouraged high borrowing in countries like Spain, Italy and Greece. These low interest rates encouraged risky ventures that normally could and would be disincentivised. National governments had limited influence over monetary policy so interest rate changes that should have happened did not. This encouraged unnecessarily high debt in firms which quickly turned sour post-2008. Even worse, these countries did not have the essential and necessary policy levers to respond to the economic shocks we saw in 2008.
A pan-European national consciousness would be able to address these basic structural errors. If Europeans were to care about Europe as much as they cared about their states, they would stop acting in their national-sectional interest and look at reforms seriously. The lack of any real semblance of political community has meant minor issues become real problems. For member states, this actually hinders their long-term interests. The European Union is an economic union – so the economic problems in one region can easily spill over into Europe-wide malaise. The low growth in places like Greece and Italy has had exactly this affect – with the Brexiteers claim of member states being tied to a corpse not being far off the mark. This means that – like Italy – sectional interests exist under formal state structures, meaning that acting within one’s sectional interest against the general good of Europe often also acts against long-term sectional interest of the member state.
In Italy, we see something similar with the North-South national divide post-Risorgiomento. Although to compare the precise roots of the two as somehow similar would be false equivalence, the absence of a willingness to look at structural reform where it was needed because of the essential diversity of the political community is a striking parallel. Post-Risorgiomento Italy had a massive structural regional inequality that held the whole of the country down. Instead of, like Europe, this occurring because of the sectional-national reasoned self-interest of the more economically prosperous region, in Italy, this occurred due to the parliamentary strength and social dominance of the southern galantuomini. These southern landowners saw their self-interest in maintaining the status quo in the South and more importantly acted upon it. The status quo provided them with assurance of stable incomes and a maintenance of a traditional role that these galantuomini felt had essential worth in and of itself. Due to the relatively restrictive electoral laws, which were easy for local officials (and therefore the galantuomini) to manipulate due to being based on very subjective and abstract criteria, Christopher Duggan puts the proportion of parliamentary seats this social grouping held at about 40%. What is more, as Duggan astutely points out, the unity of their demands made them really powerful because it was clear what they thought they stood for and acted largely as one bloc. As a result, the leading parliamentarians (i.e. prime ministers like Depretis Crispi and Giolitti) that ran the country had very little choice but to give into their demands, promoting the galantoumini’s interest at the expense of Italy.
Conclusion Part 2
Clearly then, there is significant similarity between the problems of 19th Century Italy and the EU. Both failed to develop the essential mechanisms for national deliberation of the political community. In both, progress in finding solutions to structural, economic and political problems was not only arrested, but often retarded.
The similarities do not exist just in an abstract philosophical sense. They are also run along the same north-south fault line. What is amazing here is not that the inequalities are not just geographically parallel, but the fact that they actually do exist between the north and south of the Italian peninsula. The poverty of current Southern Italy contrasts with the relative wealth of Northern Italy both today and in the 19th Century. The failure to solve the structural problems in the 19th Century in Southern Italy allowed this to become part of the larger European structural problem of intra-European socioeconomic inequality. Economic recovery of the South of the Peninsula post-2008, like the rest of Southern Europe, has been both painful and not been helped by the European Union.
With these reflections in mind, I will leave you – the third section of the argument will be released shortly, which will aim to draw some of these reflections together,
Yours,
WFF