Modern Liberalism
(1982)–Frits Bolkestein–
Auteursrechtelijk beschermd
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Giovanni Malagodi
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Interview with Giovanni Malagodi1. The Legacy of the PastBolkestein: Can the situation in the South of Italy be explained by the partition of your country between Byzantium and the Goths?
Malagodi: When the barbarians from the East invaded and settled in Italy in the fifth and sixth centuries they occupied the North and the Centre. The South of Italy remained largely in the hands of the Eastern Roman Empire. Under Justinian, the great emperor who was responsible for the Corpus Juris, Byzantium undertook the reconquest of the West. It managed to conquer a part of Spain and North Africa and from its bases in the South of Italy it moved against the Gothic kingdom in the North and Centre. The war went on for a long time under Belisarius until he was recalled to Byzantium because of court intrigues. He was replaced by a man of genius, the eunuch Narses, who continued the war against the Goths with success. Again because of palace intrigues in Byzantium he was recalled and as a vengeance, so the story goes, he opened the doors of Italy to the Lombards. They were the most savage of the barbarians. They occupied the North and the Centre of Italy and they moved down to the Northern part of the South, to Benevento. They did not occupy Venice, which was a little village in the reaches of the Adriatic, nor did they occupy Ravenna or that part of Italy which not by chance is still called Romagna. Ravenna was the centre of the military and political resistance to the Lombards. The Lombards did not occupy the South of Italy nor Sicily or Sardinia. This state of affairs has lasted in a way up to our days. There is therefore an historical, political and cultural split between the South/Centre and the North, where in a couple of centuries the | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Germanic invaders were totally absorbed. That part of Italy blossomed in freedom, even in anarchy. In the South the Byzantine government with all its sophisticated machinery was oppressive, in a way without even knowing it: that was its way of being. As it slowly declined it oppressed the native population more and more. In the South of Italy, a few centuries later, you hardly had any free cities. There was Bari and for a certain time there were Amalfi and the Duchy of Naples but on the whole it was the land of the Barons and of the Kings. After Byzantium the Arabs were in Sicily for two centuries, which is often forgotten, and then the Normans occupied Sicily and passed on to the mainland but they never really controlled more than the South of Italy and Sicily. They were bound by the frontier of the Byzantine Empire. Another development was the Church which rapidly developed territorial dominions. From Rome it moved to Umbria and thence up the Adriatic coast across the Apennines to Ravenna and Bologna. That was the start of the territorial dominion of the Church. For many centuries this closed Southern Italy off from Northern Italy. There was an attempt by the first of the great emperors of modern times, Frederick II, who was of Germanic descent but practically an Italian (or even Sicilian more than Italian) to set up an absolute kingdom at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This failed, mainly because of the resistance of the Church and of the Northern Italian cities supported by the Church. So there is not one country, there are two. Which is the bond between these two countries? It is fundamentally a cultural one. It is the common religion and the common language and the feeling of a common descent from the culture and the empire of Rome. This kept them together. Italian poetry, in the vernacular, as distinct from the Latin poetry of the Middle Ages, was born in Sicily and from there spread to Tuscany. From Tuscany it spread to the North of Italy where it met a semi-French semi-Italian poetry. Out of this meeting was born the great poetry of Dante, Petrarca and Boccaccio and of the other remarkable writers of the end of the thirteenth and the beginning of the fourteenth centuries. They were in a way the real Founders of Italy, because they gave a cultural and spiritual message which was felt by the whole of Italy to be its own. Dante never thought of an Italy united politically. He thought of a number of Italian states under the Suzerainty of the Emperor. But he also felt that we were all Italians, that we all spoke Italian, even if in dif- | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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ferent ways and in different dialects. When he wrote his great poem, his idea was to cull the best of all the forms of Italian. Obviously, being born in Tuscany, he wrote and spoke mainly Tuscan but he certainly took in other elements. This has been a great bond all through our history. The great flowering of the Renaissance between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century, followed by the Counter-Reformation, cultural decadence and foreign hegemony, first Spanish and then Austrian, strengthened the cultural bonds between the different states of Italy, but did not unite them. At the end of the eighteenth century, the political map of Italy was a puzzle of states, not very different from the fourteenth century. When Napoleon and the revolution came to Italy at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, it brought with it a very strong unitarian element which was in the tradition of the French state but this did not suffice to create a united Italy. It set up a divided Italy and the main division was again between the North and Centre and the South. There was the Kingdom of Naples, under Murat, the cavalry general and brother-in-law of Napoleon, who in the end, in 1814, conceived the idea of setting himself up as King of Italy in the name of freedom and independence but failed. He was arrested and shot somewhere in Central Italy. So when the unification of Italy came, there was the Kingdom of Sardinia, which really meant Piedmont, Liguria and Sardinia; there was Tuscany; there were small Duchies in the Po Valley; there was the Austrian domination in Milan and in Venice; there were the dominions of the Pope and there were the Bourbon Kings in the South of Italy. This was rougly the same picture as five centuries earlier. The dividing line was what is now the border of the responsibilities of the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno: the frontier of the old Kingdom of Naples. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
2. The SouthBolkestein: It is sometimes said that the people in the South of Italy want to be somebody, while the people in the North want to do something.
Malagodi: If you understand by this that the spirit of individual initiative and responsibility is stronger in the Centre and North of Italy and | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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that the spirit of egotism is stronger in the South, I think you touch upon a point which has some truth in it. But when you speak of the South of Italy you must be careful. There is not one Mezzogiorno, there are several different Mezzogiorni. For instance, Sardinia is quite by itself. Sicily is again quite by itself and very proud of being so. The rest of the Mezzogiorno is made up of the ‘spine’ and the ‘flesh’. There is the middle part, where the mountains are, which is very barren and extremely poor and not very inhabitated, and there are valleys and there is the coast where you have some areas of good land, good harbours, a much denser population and more activity and prosperity. Then there is the great city of Napels which is again something by itself. Some people have asked themselves whether it really is in Italy and not in the Levant. Lastly, there is Apulia, which is very active and thriving.
Bolkestein: Could one say that the people in the South are more prominent in political life than those in the North and that in industry it is vice versa?
Malagodi: No, I don't think you can say that. There has been a considerable number of very eminent politicians from the South and especially from Sicily, but there have been at least as many from the North and from the centre. Cavour, Mazzini and Garibaldi were from the North. Ricasoli was from the Centre. Depretis was from the North. Crispi was from Sicily but Giolitti was from Piedmont and de Gasperi was from the mountains of the North. Segni was from Sardinia, which is a South of its own. Moro was from the South but Togliatti was from Piedmont. The leading Liberals were half and half: Einaudi was from the North, Croce was from Naples, Gaetano Martino was from Sicily. Saragat is from the North but Longo, the Social Democratic leader, is from the South. As for business, if you go to Milan you will find to your astonishment that many of the leading figures in industry, trade and finance are from the South. One sometimes has the feeling that the Sicilians have something in common with the Scots: they come from a poor country with strong individualities and they try their luck at a career in Milan or Rome or in London and being capable and strongly motivated they often succeed.
Bolkestein: Since the last war there has been a tremendous exodus from | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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the South to the big industrial cities of the North. Did the people who moved North lose the framework of their existence? Did they lose their religion?
Malagodi: The loss of religion is a general fact. It is found today amongst those who have remained in the South almost as much as in the North. Certainly, the great migration from the South to the North is a fundamental fact of the last years but it was much less harmful than the migrations from Italy to America which were such an important phenomenon between the end of the 19th century and the First World War, when millions of Italians went to North and South America, mainly from the South of Italy. After the last war there has been a move of about two or three million Italians from the South to the North. At least they have remained Italians, they have not been lost to the community. They have to some extent lost their bearings and are not yet entirely absorbed into their new environment but I don't think that in another generation this will still be the case. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
3. The ChurchBolkestein: How strong is the influence of Catholicism in Italy today?
Malagodi: It is often said that Italy is one of the least religious countries in Europe. That is not true. Up to the sixteenth century there was a very strong vein of orthodox religion and of religious feeling. All the great figures of Italian history and culture are religious figures. The sixteenth century was the turning point of Italian history. We then lost our political independence but also our spiritual independence. The Church which had enlivened intellectual life became an element of oppression. The Church of the Counter-Reformation was not a very good thing anywhere but in Italy it was especially oppressive. It was very oppressive in Spain but the situation there was quite different: after all, the Spaniards, to put it brutally, liked a strong spiritual government. We did not. Italy went to a certain extent to sleep. A few outstanding figures were forced by the Church into an anti-religious position but the people fell more and more into a form of religion which was conformity rather than inner faith. There is a great book on Italy, which is the ‘History of the Italian Re- | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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publics’ by Simonde de Sismonde, a Swiss descended from a family of Italian exiles of the Renaissance, for reasons of religion. The most significant part of it is on the causes of the decay of Italy after the sixteenth century, which he attributes to the Counter-Reformation and its ossified and externalized ethics. On the Catholic side there has been many an attempt to put this in question but I believe that it was indeed a very great factor. It has naturally had repercussions. A form of individualism in moral affairs has developed which is resentful of the Church. In non-Catholic or non-Christian Democratic circles there is a tendency today to overlook the developments in the Church over the last twenty or thirty years, which have brought the Church nearer to a liberal view of society. They have not accepted Liberalism as they have not accepted Marxism, although perhaps they have accepted Marxism a little more, from a practical point of view, than Liberalism. But on the whole they have moved nearer to Liberalism and we must take account of that. It makes for greater competition but it also creates a better atmosphere for liberal ideas. In one of his great speeches on the Roman Question, as it was then called, Cavour suggested that Rome should no longer be the political capital of the Church as a territorial entity. He said: ‘This can bring about the reconciliation of the Liberal and the Catholic forces. The Catholic forces will form the majority and I shall then be very happy to be the leader of the opposition’. This is what over a century has happened. When we emerged from Fascism, the Christian Democrats found themselves to be the main party of democracy and there is no doubt that spiritually they are strongly influenced by Catholic thinking. Some of them point out that they are politically independent from the Church, but what they think of the structure of the state and of society, of the economy, of international relations and so on, is strongly influenced by the Church. One could say that the Church does the thinking and the Christian Democrats do the acting. When I first came into Parliament in 1953 there was a very distinguished lady from the same constituency who was a Christian Democratic Member of the Chamber. Once I asked her: ‘How does one become a Christian Democratic Member of Parliament?’ ‘It is very simple’, she answered, ‘you must be supported by your Bishop or your Bishops, according to the number of them in your constituency, by the religious orders, by the curates, by the Catholic workers' unions and then also by the Party’. Today the Party is more | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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important, but still the real backbone of Christian Democracy is Catholicism.
Bolkestein: Are they then to some extent closer to the Marxists than to the Liberals?
Malagodi: Their position is slightly schizophrenic. There are two tendencies in Catholic thinking. There is a strong current which still reasons as the Church of the nineteenth century. ‘The Liberals are the capitalists; they are the rich; they are the enemies of God and the enemies of the people. Therefore we must be anti-liberal and anti-capitalist’. They confuse, deliberately or unwittingly, liberalism with capitalism. That is their position: ‘Nemici di Dio e del popolo’. This finds its expression, for instance, in Emmanuel Mounier, the personalist of French Catholic thought, who has had and still has a considerable influence on the left of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy. It is also connected with the great effort which the Church has made, starting with Leo XIII and the famous encyclical ‘Rerum Novarum’, to regain contact with the modern world through the masses, without accepting, to start with, the institutions of Liberalism. In a way this was not entirely new because even in the middle ages the Church had very often been more on the side of the free cities than on the side of the Emperors and the feudal nobility. With the rise of absolute monarchies and with the Counter-Reformation this changed but there remained an undercurrent which came up in the second half of the nineteenth century and has continued until now. The encyclicals as such are certainly not Marxist. They are nearer to a modern form of Liberalism, with elements of charitable thought and a certain dislike of the mechanisms of the market, which, in effect, can to some extent be brutal. Liberals try to build institutions which will countervail this brutality but we know that to some extent it is unavoidable. The Church imagines that it is avoidable. However, the main institutions of our social and economic life are not put in question by the encyclicals. So you have these two aspects. On the one hand, a fight against capitalism and Liberalism together with a social policy which really ought to be nearer to the institutions and the free market of our present society. On the other hand, a strong current which finds that modern society is not entirely bad and that more of its institutions | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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should be accepted. The first current is in a way divided between those who have a tendency to seek revolutionary solutions and lend a hand to the Marxists, even if they are not Marxists themselves, and then those that are nearer to us. The essence of the first Vatican Council was an explicit condemnation of Liberalism. The Syllabus is a long list of Liberal tenets and against each one of them is written ‘Anathema sit’. In Vatican II a great effort was made to get nearer to the modern world and to freedom. The constitution ‘Dignitatis Humanae’, On Human Dignity, is the nearest thing to Liberalism which the church has produced over many centuries. If you look at the Syllabus and then at Vatican II, you see two documents that could not be more different from each other. I have heard an eminent churchman say: ‘We have in fact accepted Liberalism’. To my remark that in the constitution ‘Dignitatis Humanae’ there were certain elements that were not yet very liberal, he said: ‘Those have been put in to please some old cardinals. You must not give them any importance’. I don't believe this to be the case, though. There is still an essential difference between allowing liberty and wanting liberty. The attitude of the Church, even in this document, is to allow liberty rather than to believe that out of free discussion a truth can emerge which is a dynamic truth, that there is no static truth given once and for ever. However, it certainly is easier to cooperate with the Christian Democratic Party today than it would have been thirty of fifty years ago. Eighty years ago it was impossible in Italy. Catholics were forbidden to enter the political life of the Liberal State. There was a renewal of the Syllabus under Pope Pius X, about 1904, when modernism was born, which was a mild form of the Dutch Catholicism of today. The Pope condemned it most solemly. When the agreement was made between the State and the Church in 1929, Fascism took upon itself not to allow any priest who was condemned by the Church to be a public teacher.
Bolkestein: Does the French phenomenon of the ‘prêtre ouvrier marxiste’ exist in Italy?
Malagodi: I don't think it even exists any more in France. We have priests who are deeply interested in keeping in touch with the workers but that is their duty and their right and we as Liberals should take a leaf out of their book. The ‘prêtre ouvrier marxiste’ is now non-existent in Italy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Take, however, the so-called ‘theology of liberation’, which is very much alive in Latin America. If I were a priest in some parts of Central or South America I ask myself if I would not probably also be a priest with a rifle. The theology of liberation is the admittance of violence as an instrument for charity. In itself, this is a thing which the Church condemns. The present Pope has spoken clearly about it when he went to Mexico and to Brazil. When the first great outbreak of terrorism took place in Italy, the leading review of ideas in the Church, the Jesuits' ‘Civiltà Cattolica’, which is now 132 years old, published two articles on terrorism, which stated that one may not use violence; certainly, violence is used by those who oppress the people but one must refrain from violence oneself. However, conditions may arise where violence is unavoidable. Even the official review of the Church admitted that under certain circumstances violence could be necessary. All political schools of thought admit this, perhaps with the exception of St. Francis and of Tolstoy. Even Mr. Gandhi sometimes acted violently against the British Raj. The first article of the Statutes of our Party in Italy, which are in conformity with Liberal thinking all over Europe, declares that we recognise the right of the majority to impose its will except when this is against freedom. That little word ‘except’ is the same word as the word ‘however’ in Catholic theology. It is a question of spiritual attitude: are you inclined to believe that you can redress the shortcomings of humanity by violence or are you inclined to think that you can do it better by creating greater awareness and responsibility? These seem to be the two fundamental attitudes and we are on the side of the second. So is the Church, on the whole, but some elements of the ‘theology of liberation’ go beyond the ‘however’ of the Jesuits. There are some elements in the Catholic Church in Italy that are rabidly anti-Liberal to this day. They are not pro-Marxist but they are more anti-Liberal than anti-Marxist. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
4. Liberals and RepublicansBolkestein: What is the difference between the PLI and the PRI?
Malagodi: The real difference between the PLI and the PRI is not very great. The programme for the European elections applies to the PLI as | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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it applies to the PRI. It covers the basic ideology of Liberals and the great problems of international politics and economics. What, then, is the difference between us and the Republicans? First of all there is the question how to handle the Communist problem. There is no doubt that some change has taken and is taking place in the Communist area. If we manage to keep the Communists in the opposition but within the parliamentary and democratic system for another generation, the change will become greater and increasingly visible. We believe, on the other hand, ever since the war, that if we make a compromise with the Communists, if we accept from the Communists a part of their policies, this will not make their evolution deeper and quicker - it will make it shallower and slower. They would find themselves not confronted with the need of coming to terms with a free society but in the position of managing a sort of society that is neither free nor really unfree. The position of the Republicans is that if at this stage you take the Communists into the machinery of government of a democratic state, you accelerate and deepen their education. So it is really a dispute between Father and Mother on how better to reclaim a rather difficult child. It is a dispute of fundamental importance. It does not only divide us from the Republicans but to some extent it also splits the Christian Democratic Party. There are those who quite openly believe that the communists should be taken in and those who do not dare to say entirely no but put conditions which in fact amount to saying no - which is a very Christian Democratic way of doing things. Even in the Socialist Party, after the evolution of the last twenty-five years, there is a majority that says: ‘It would be wonderful if we could have unity on the left, if we could have a left wing government, a left wing majority. Unfortunately the behaviour of the Communists makes this impossible today.’ So this dispute is not just between us and the Republicans - it is a deep difference inside the whole democratic front and it corresponds to the dialectic of freedom. It is quite natural that you should have a discussion of this sort. If you look at the world, it is a discussion between those who insist more on detente and those who insist more on military superiority. It is not the same discussion, but is has elements of similarity. The ‘theology of liberation’ is again an instance of the same dispute: do you get the masses to be peaceful and free by shooting the capitalists or by educating | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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them? One of the slogans of the Red Brigades is: ‘To kill one in order to educate a thousand’, which in a sloganly way says the same thing. So it is a dispute which is probably inherent in our society. Apart from this dispute there is a difference in temper that goes back to Cavour and Mazzini. Mazzini had a strong mystical element, an element of ethical intransigence. He very much believed in the people as a mythical entity: ‘il Popolo’, which is not exactly the people, it is the ‘Volk’ as you would say in German. The ‘Popolo’ should save itself, it should work its way to freedom, to relative equality, to happiness and to independence by fighting by itself. On the other hand there was the more pragmatic attitude of Cavour, who believed that one could attain freedom and independence more in the British way, by making use of existing institutions, by bringing an element of novelty into old institutions, by taking account of human weakness and of the realities of the situation. It is the great dispute of Burke, who was first for the freedom of the American colonies and then against the French revolution, because in the one case he found Great Britain too intransigent, while in the other case the French ‘Jacobins’ seemed to him much too rigid. In both cases he wanted his country to adhere to a pragmatic policy and to move with the flow of history. That was the attitude of Cavour. There is also a difference, if you like, between British Liberalism and French Liberalism, the latter being very often ‘Jacobin’ in attitude while the former is sometimes not very far from conservatism. On the one hand, the British Liberals tend to be of different opinions on economic affairs while on the other hand, in political affairs, they are interested in extreme libertarian solutions. The two things do not always go very well together. You can have a Liberal attitude which looks at planning for the market and at civil rights at the same time, but the two things pushed to extremes can contrast with each other, which the British Liberals sometimes should be reminded of. The difference between Mazzini and Cavour has to some extent remained down to our days. If you take the core of the relatively small electoral strength of the Republicans - in the Romagna, the provinces to the Northeast of Bologna, with some islands in Tuscany, in Rome and a small part of Sicily - you will find people who consider themselves to be the ‘left’ against the ‘right’. They have not, so to say, noticed the appearance of the Communists or even of the Socialists. They still see | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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things in terms of ‘résistance’ and ‘mouvement’ as in the France of the Restoration. They are the ‘mouvement’; we, and others, are the ‘résistance’. They are the progressives, we are weaklings. When confronted with a priest, such Republicans are what we call ‘mangia-preti’, ‘priest-eaters’. Today this attitude is obviously much weaker but it is still there. It goes right back to Mazzini, who saw himself as a great champion of the people against the anti-people. He saw the need for religion but a new religion of which he was the high pontiff, a religion which in him was a very noble ethical feeling but which in his followers took the form of ‘priest-eating’. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
5. The Rise of LiberalismBolkestein: When one considers that the creation of modern Italy was a Liberal creation, one wonders what the cause of the decline of Liberalism in Italy has been and whether this had something to do with the rise of fascism.
Malagodi: Modern Italy was the creation of a very small élite. It was an élite which was born out of the shock waves of the French Revolution and of Napoleonic rule and which in its first decades consisted of very small groups. When Cavour came and the Monarchy of Savoy adopted the national cause, it took a Liberal élite to govern in Piedmont and then in Italy. In the third quarter of the 19th century the electorate numbered roughly a million and a half, of which about half did not vote because they were Catholics to whom the Pope had forbidden to take part in the political activities of the new Liberal state, through the famous ‘non expedit’. The elections were fought between, say, 300 electors on one side and 310 on the other, in a constituency of 1,500 electors of whom perhaps 700 or 800 did not vote. It all turned around a few heads of families whom one had to get on one's side. You would give one major speech to which everybody went, then you would give a great dinner and that was the electoral campaign. The beginning of real democracy in Italy came when the franchise was extended in the late eighties and early nineties and the number of electors went up to three million. In some constituencies candidates began to buy votes. It has been said that when the poor peasants found that they could get 10 lire for their vote, they suddenly understood that | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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it meant something. It was a strange awakening. However, between 1861 - when the Kingdom of Italy was born - and the beginning of the 20th century politics remained restricted to a very small group. There was the beginning of a Socialist movement which dates back to the early nineties. There was a slow movement of the Catholics towards participation. When the male franchise became quasi-universal in 1912, the Liberals were still a small group. The number of Liberal electors before universal franchise would, proportionately to the population, not be very different from what it is now. It was a Liberal élite, surrounded by Catholic and potentially Socialist masses, which did what is the great title of honour of the Liberal élite all over Europe. It opened the doors of power, knowing very well what it was doing. It opened the doors of power to masses which it knew were not born Liberal. Giolitti said that the main purpose of the Liberal Government was to extend the basis of the Liberal State and to make the Liberal Monarchy more secure. In order to do that one would have to run risks.
Bolkestein: Is this not in contradiction to what you have said about your position as regards the Communists?
Malagodi: My answer is ‘no’ for two reasons. The first is that Giolitti had tremendous support in the monarchy and in the Liberal élite. The monarchy controlled the political world. The Senate was designated entirely by the King, who ruled the higher bureaucracy, the army and the police. When Giolitti opened the doors, he knew that he could close them at any given moment, should it be necessary. Around 1905 he once survived in the Senate by only two votes, because the Senate considered him to be too left-wing. He wrote in his memoirs that he was very happy to be able to show to the left in the Chamber of Deputies what the limits of their power were. In fact, he asked the King to dissolve Parliament and the Chamber came back with a much more moderate majority. Secondly, he could play the game in conditions of relative security because the Socialists were not Communists. There was in them a strong vein of democracy. They were not as organized as the Communists are and they did not enjoy the support of Soviet Russia. The world was entirely different. The Catholic forces were anti-Liberal but from a social point of view they were conservative. For these reasons Giolitti | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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could take a different attitude towards the fundamental problem of the opening. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
6. The Rise of FascismBolkestein: What caused the polarisation that preceded the rise of Fascism?
Malagodi: The cause of the polarisation was the emergence of the Socialist and the Catholic masses on either side of a relatively small élite of Liberals. Several phenomena occurred. Before the war, in Italy as in other European countries, especially France and Germany, a wave of philosophical, ethical and political irrationalism was born. In Italy it was considered a sort of freak but it was deeper than that. There was futurism on the one hand and nationalism on the other, which was closely connected with the nationalism of the Action Française. It was fundamentally anti-Liberal and with regard to the Church it consisted of what in France were called ‘les Catholiques athées’. With respect to the Socialists, it was made up of people who considered the masses to be brutes but at the same time useful tools against the Liberals. This weakened the Liberal establishment because a part of the bourgeoisie followed this trend. Then there was the First World War which Italy joined because it was impossible not to join it. It was obviously the occasion to round off the Risorgimento by annexing Trento and Trieste, which were the two remaining areas of Italians which were not in Italy. There was also a question of general equilibrium. We could not see Europe tear itself to pieces and not take part. The effort of the war was in a way too much for us. Giolitti had seen this clearly and was against joining the war early. He wanted us to enter at the end, as Russia did against Japan in 1945, but he misread the temper of the times. He did not understand the irrational forces that were loose in the world. The war further weakened the Liberal élite. Through a terrible bloodletting we lost about 600.000 men. Of these, about 100.000 were young non-professional officers, the cream of the Liberal establishment. This is a loss which you cannot easily replace. Then there was a feeling, fed by irrationalist and nationalist elements, that we had not got enough out of the war. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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On the other hand, the Russian Revolution, together with the restiveness of the Italian Socialists, produced between 1919 and 1921 a wave of revolutionary threats. I don't think they were more than threats but they were very visible. I remember going to visit relatives in Turin as a boy. When the train entered the town through the industrial districts, one could see the workers with rifles and red armbands standing guard on the roofs of the factories. I also remember the Italian Socialist Party's newspaper, the ‘Avanti’, publishing the full text of a constitution for the imminent Italian Soviet Republic. There were disturbances in the streets. Officers were insulted, spat upon and knocked down, and this gave birth to a strong reaction. In the countryside, especially where reforms were needed but not the confiscation of the land that was threatened by the Red Cooperatives, a movement of reaction was started by the farmers and their sons who had been in the war, generally as officers. They made common cause with groups of other officers and non-commissioned officers and formed bands in the larger towns that were largely made up of the ‘arditi’, the commandoes of the First World War. They were frustrated by the fact that they had been in command in war, they had had the excitement of war and now they were faced with everyday drabness, by threats to their way of life, by ‘defeatist’ positions in foreign policy. These various elements together formed a strong reaction to the Socialist restiveness.
Bolkestein: What was the attitude of the Liberal establishment with regard to this situation?
Malagodi: There were some people, especially in the government, who took it rather calmly. Giolitti with his immense sang froid managed to defuse the occupation of the factories. He also defused the D'Annunzio adventure. D'Annunzio was a leader of the more scatter-brained form of irrationalism which spilt over into politics. In 1920 he occupied the city of Fiume which was a bone of contention between us and the Yugoslavs and set up a very strange Republic which in a certain way was a forerunner of the Fascist State. Giolitti managed to get him out of Fiume and there he used force, because when necessary he was quite ready to do so. He put the finances of the state in some order. When he fell in 1921 the situation was already on the mend. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkestein: Why did he fall?
Malagodi: He fell because he was a very old man. He was still wonderfully active but over eighty and he was confronted by the Catholic Party, the Christian Democrats of the time who were called the Popular Party, and he represented everything they disliked. They supported him but as soon as they could they limited their support. Not being quite aware of how serious the situation was in respect of these great irrational movements, he did the proper thing from a parliamentary point of view and resigned. The Socialists were divided. Their better leaders knew quite well what nonsense was going on but the lower cadres were revolutionary Socialists who felt that it was wonderful to be able to attack the capitalists and the King and the officers. Then there was a group of Liberals who were not sufficiently unyielding in front of the Fascists. Giolitti thought the Fascists were a relatively small movement that would put the fear of God into the Socialists and disappear at the next elections. Part of the Liberal establishment reacted by going back to the conservative tendencies of the end of the nineteenth century. Another part of the establishment toyed with reactionary temptations and believed that it would be possible to make a deal with the Fascists: to set up something more conservative and more disciplined; which would put the Socialists in their place and use the Catholics without giving them too much power; which would create a kind of bourgeois-capitalist garden of Eden. These also were grievously mistaken because they underestimated the lust of power and the irrationalist tendencies of Mussolini and his followers and also the social needs of the times, which were distorted by the Socialists but real. When Mussolini came into power with the blessing of the King, another part of the establishment believed that the only thing that could be done, would be to ‘flank’ the Fascists and try to moderate them, to exert some sort of Liberal influence on them. Between 1920 and 1922 the Monarchy could have pushed the Fascists out of the picture easily. Even at the end of October 1922, when they threatened to march to Rome, the very weak Liberal government under Facta asked the King to sign an order of ‘état de siège’. There is no doubt that under an ‘état de siège’ there might have been a few wounded or a few dead but Fascism would have disappeared. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkestein: Why did the Monarchy bring Mussolini into power?
Malagodi: There was a medley of reasons. There was a ‘conservative’ feeling of the Monarchy which was akin to the one of part of the Liberal establishment. On the other hand, there was a feeling that after all it was not right to suppress a new movement. It should be put into the picture and the establishment and the Monarchy were strong enough to keep it in its place. There was a feeling that shedding blood among Italians was a very bad thing. There may also have been the feeling that the time had come to stop the democratic game which was going too far. Victor Emmanuel III was ‘the Liberal King’ but the Liberal King betrayed Liberalism. If you put all these things together, you have an establishment weak in numbers, starting a quite new experiment of cooperation with the Socialists and the Catholics but weakened by the restiveness of the Socialists who were encouraged by the Russian Revolution; at logger heads, to some extent, with the Catholics although needing them in order to form a government; the establishment divided, the Monarchy wavering and in the end coming down on the side of the Fascists. It is true that a part of the Liberal establishment fought against the Fascists very strongly. A man like Amendola was a leader of resistance and paid for it with his life. Croce and Giolitti, who at first had thought they could use the Fascists, came down on the side of the opposition as soon as they noticed that this was impossible. In fact Croce was the mainstay of cultural and moral opposition during the whole of Fascism and we owe it largely to him that we still exist. Einaudi came into the picture a little later. On the whole there was a nucleus in the Liberal establishment which remained staunchly and openly faithful to the values of Liberalism. But on the whole, the rise of Fascism weakened the Liberal establishment very considerably when it was already weak politically. Had it not been for the war, had it not been for fascism, had the monarchy been more faithful, the Catholics more understanding and the Socialists more moderate, the Liberals would have been stronger. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
7. The Left versus the RightBolkestein: And now we are faced with this polarisation between the left | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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and the right.
Malagodi: We entered Fascism with a Socialist Party divided between maximalists and moderates but still it was one party. We emerged from Fascism with a very strong Communist Party and with a diminished Socialist Party which for a long time felt that it was its duty to be the close ally of the Communists. So the left was strengthened and radicalised. When Fascism came, the future Christian Democrats were about 100 in a Chamber of 500. When we came out of the war in 1945 they had an absolute majority in the country and in the Chamber because they gave the impression that they were the only force which could stop Communism. Therefore we were faced with an increased polarisation and this situation has not changed very much since. Fortunately, the Socialists have recently moved to the Centre. It is a miracle, due in part to men, but very largely to the inherent strength of our ideas, that both we and the Republicans subsist today and have a political influence out of proportion with our numbers.
Bolkestein: When one looks at the French Communist Party one notices a gradual decline since the Second World War. Why has this not happened in Italy?
Malagodi: The polarisation in our country is greater than in France. France has been a united community since at least Louis XI. We have been a united community since 1861. In France one sees on the right a conglomerate of more or less Liberal parties and also the Gaullist forces which are conservative and nationalist but not anti-democratic. On the left there is a very large Socialist Party, much larger than the Communist Party, which is divided as all Socialist parties are between moderates and non-moderates but which on the whole has participated in the Government of the country, off and on, since about seventy years ago; and then you have the Communists. Certainly France is divided too. Léon Blum once shouted in the Chamber: ‘Je vous hais’, against the moderates of the centre and of the right. That is revealing for a man who was an intellectual of the higher bourgoisie. But France is less divided that Italy. The coherence of the French State and the efficiency of the French bureaucracy are greater. The bureaucracy is the bureaucracy of Louis XIV, of Napoleon, of the | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Third Republic, of the ENA. It is a very strong bureaucracy. Our bureaucracy was not bad before the First World War, under much easier circumstances. Today it is weak. The strong polarisation obviously makes for a strong Communist Party. It is also stronger, and here I am not contradicting myself, because in a way it has always been a more moderate party than the PCF. The French Party has inherited the tradition of Jacobinism and of Saint Just. The Italian Party has always been more political and more understanding of the real situation. A man like Togliatti was 100% Communist but he was also a man of Italian humanist culture, which is a thing not without importance. He had learned thoroughly the lesson of Gramsci. Gramsci was again a Communist but deeply influenced by Croce. Gramsci understood that if one wanted to come to power in Italy, one must first get hold of the centres of cultural and social influence. That process changes the centres but it also changes the Party. Either you are an invading barbarian, like Lenin, and you change the situation by blood and fire, or you proceed gradually and unwittingly you find yourself on a Social Democratic road. When I had just entered Parliament a discussion took place after the Tiber had flooded the lower quarters of Rome, which damaged very considerably not only the dwellings of many poor and middle class people but also a great number of shops, small industries and artisans. The Communist speaker, a powerful lady married to one of the great theoretical leaders of the Party and the daughter of an extremely rich man, said: ‘I'm very sorry but you are not doing enough. Think of these poor industrialists, shopkeepers and artisans whose way of life has been destroyed! We must help them to start again’. She made a speech which was half way between Liberalism and Social Democracy. Certainly this was done in order to get the votes of those people but when you reason in a certain way and you get certain votes you are to some extent conditioned by what you have been saying and by the votes you are getting. How many Communist votes come from communists? In the elections of 1976 the Communists made a great spurt forward. They went from 30% to 35%. Why have they gone back to 30%? Because the experience of governing with them and of the crisis which is largely owing to left wing policies has persuaded 5% of the electorate that the Communists are not really their party. Even among the 30% which they now have there is another 5% to 10% which will in due course be taken away | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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from them. Their normal standing in Italy today would probably be 25% and in due course it will be 20%. Once the Socialist Party is perceived to be really and factually independent from them, the polarisation will not be as great and we, as Liberals, should also certainly gain ground.
Bolkestein: How will Berlinguer get out of the dilemma between, on the one hand, a revolutionary party and, on the other, a reformist one? Does he know what sort of party he wants?
Malagodi: When Togliatti arrived from Russia in 1944 we had until 1947 a government of six parties which included the Communists. They were part of the government, with the idea of taking it over later, but in the meantime they were conditioned by the fact of governing with five other parties. When Mr. de Gasperi decided to kick them out, they did not rise in arms against his decision. Even from the beginning of his stewardship of the Communist Party, Togliatti had the idea of short circuiting the ascent to power of the Communist Party by some sort of agreement with the Christian Democrats. The Christian Democrats were for a long time against this. What they had in mind was to add to the alliance with smaller parties such as ourselves an alliance with the Socialists in order to detach them from the Communists and put the Communists under pressure so that their evolution would speed up. They actually came to an agreement with the Socialists at the beginning of the sixties but they made two great mistakes. One was that they did not clarify sufficiently the relationship between the Socialists and the Communists. They left a large area of haze which was in part due to their intrinsic aversion from clear-cut issues. The tradition of the Church in its worst aspect has always been that, faced with an heretic, it either made him a saint or burnt him. It was never quite clear which of the two solutions would be chosen. With regard to the Communists, one either took them into the majority or the government, or one burnt them by keeping them outside. The other mistake was that they did not clarify the main points of economic policy with the Socialists and this had as a consequence that over the next ten to fifteen years they followed a policy of great disorder, which was also due to the fact that in the Christian Democratic Party there were strong elements of populism. I am reminded of a | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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saying of Jo Grimond, that the Labour Party in England, a few years ago, had given up the idea of bringing in Socialism but was still so averse from the free economic order that it did not know how to make it work. When the Christian Democrats did this operation with the Socialists they had a double purpose: on the one hand, to keep the Communists at bay and under pressure and on the other, to work through the Socialists towards an agreement with the Communists. When Mr. Moro once in one of his cryptical phrases said: ‘We are now in the second phase’, (speaking of the agreement with the Socialists) ‘but then will come a third phase’, he probably had in mind some sort of agreement with the Communists. This is what is called the ‘historical compromise.’ The Communists have thought of the historical compromise ever since. They came very near to it in 1977/78 when a one party government was formed under Mr. Andreotti with the support of all parties, including the Communists, against our solitary opposition. This government fell because of its inner contradictions. Mr. Berlinguer found himself faced with the question of what to do. ‘The attempt to get into government through the majority has failed. The Christian Democrats tell us that they are ready to keep us in the majority but not to admit us into the government. The Socialists are no longer our close allies. They are competitors rather than allies. What shall we do?’ The answer has been to revert to a much sharper opposition, without, at the same time, working for a ‘third way’ and coasting away from the USSR. The climax of this took place during the fierce Fiat strike in Turin when Mr. Berlinguer went to hold a major speech in front of the main gate and told the workers: ‘If ever you need to occupy these factories, occupy them, we shall be with you’. When they picketed the entrances to Fiat the pickets were mainly activists from outside Turin, from the region of Emilia Romagna where the PCI is especially strong. They were therefore the private army of the Communist Party. This was also a culmination of the contradiction between the Communists' political strategy and the economic and social development of the country. Italy still remains a country with a relatively free economy. We are a part of the European Community; we are in the European Monetary System; we have contributed to GATT; through the Community we are party to the Lomé-agreement. We are a country wedded to the only kind of economic policy which we can have and which is a free economic policy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This is in contradiction to the sharp attitude of the Communist Party, which puts their present leadership in a very awkward position. As a result of these several weeks of general strikes at the Fiat factories, the so-called march of the forty thousand took place. It was made up of forty thousand people, partly lower cadres and skilled workers of Fiat and partly from the many smaller factories that feed Fiat with component parts. They marched through Turin asking that the strike should be ended. This has given a terrible jolt to the unions. The unions are divided in the same way as the Communist Party. Two years ago when the Communists joined the majority, they took an open position in favour of a compromise with the liberal economy. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
8. EurocommunismBolkestein: How do you see Eurocommunism develop over the next few years?
Malagodi: I don't think that the change has as yet gone very far and these contradictions in the attitude of the Communist Party prove it. When the Communist Party says: ‘We are either in the government or we are in a strong opposition’, it really means that it wants to conquer power, not that it wants to adapt. But the PCI must adapt itself in order to get power. This is not without connection with the international situation. Even today there still remains a sentimental and political bond between the Italian Communists and the Kremlin. How far does the Kremlin believe that it is dangerous to allow the French and the Italian Communists to move in the direction of cooperation with non-Communist parties? Certainly the French Party has hardened its line very much over the last few years and so, in its Italian way, has the PCI. Does this mean that the Kremlin has the feeling that it is going to have Europe in its hands in the course of the next few years, not through war perhaps but through prevailing military force, encirclement, pressure on the oil resources, the weakness of America and the internal divisions of Europe? Maybe the Kremlin sees itself already as the potential master of central and western Europe and therefore tells the Communist Parties not to settle for a low price today when they can ask a much higher price in a few years' time. That is an element which is difficult to evaluate. One of the old leaders | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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of the Italian Communist Party told me recently: ‘We know what we are not but we don't yet know what we are.’Ga naar voetnoot* | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
9. Christian DemocracyBolkestein: Somebody once said that you can recognise an Italian Christian Democrat just by looking at him. Is there something in that?
Malagodi: Yes, something. You can also say it of a Communist, even if it is more difficult because the Communists have lost to some extent the puritan look they used to have ten or twenty years ago. Now they look more like normal bourgeois but certainly there is in their make-up an element of political bureaucracy which one finds to a much greater degree when one goes to Soviet Russia. With the exception of a few leading figures, the people there seem to be just bureaucrats. The Italian Communists are not so fat and heavy as most of the Russians but they are still political bureaucrats and sometimes you can recognise them. Sometimes they are intellectuals, bourgeois, lawyers or doctors and it is not easy to distinguish them from one of us. One can generally distinguish the Fascists because there is a sort of artificial dash in their ways - they are ‘schmissig’, as the Germans would say. In the case of the Christian Democrats, there is an element of watered-down ecclesiastical suavity. They often speak in slow voices with a special kind of understatement which is not the understatement of an opinion so clear-cut that it needs not to be stated strongly: it is the understatement of somebody who does not want to give you a very clear-cut opinion. That reflects itself often in their way of being. Some years ago I was giving a major speech in the Chamber. We were in opposition against one of the many D.C.-led centre-left governments. Having criticised the government and the Christian Democratic party, I went on to say that there were, however, some positive elements in the Christian Democratic attitude which we had to recognise. The then Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, Mr. Rumor, who is a suave man from the Northeast, from Vicenza, interrupted me sharply: ‘We | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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don't need your compliments’, to which I answered: ‘Well, you Christian Democrats are quite impossible. If one criticises, you're angry; if one pays you compliments, you're angry. What should one do?’ People around me laughed and I went on. After my speech Rumor (we are old friends) came and sat near me and said: ‘Now look here, Giovanni, you must excuse me, I am a little nervous, you know what it is to be Secretary of a Party’. I said, ‘Yes, I know, even of a small party like ours’. He went on: ‘I was a little nervous, I should not have said it. You know, after all there is a difference between us. You Liberals have a much longer tradition of government and politics than we have.’ I answered: ‘That is quite true. Almost all of us have had a father and sometimes a grandfather in politics. In my case, for instance, my father was well known as a journalist and a Liberal Senator and my grandfather was a volunteer in 1848/1849 in the Liberal battalions that fought against Austria and then in the defence of Rome against the French’. Then he asked me: ‘Where did he fight in 1848?’ ‘Well’, I replied, ‘Just by chance he fought to defend your native town of Vicenza against the Austrians’. Rumor remarked: ‘The Emperor was then Franz Joseph, who was still Emperor in 1917. I had two old aunts who had a very old friend, a Monsignore. Once in 1917, when it seemed as if the Austrians would break through the mountain line and come down to Vicenza, this Monsignore paid a visit to my aunts. Upon entering the room he said in the local dialect: “He's coming back, our Emperor, he is coming back”.’ ‘That is the difference’ - I concluded - ‘my grandfather was shooting at the Emperor's troops in 1848 and your aunts were greeting the Emperor in 1917’.
Bolkestein: What is the historic achievement of de Gasperi?
Malagodi: De Gasperi's achievements were that faced with an entirely new situation - the paramount importance of the Christian Democratic Party in Italy - and entrusted with the formation of the government after the elections in 1948, when he obtained an absolute majority in the Senate and in the Chamber, he clearly saw that his great purpose must be not to raise again the ‘historical fences’, by which he meant the fences between the Liberal lay forces and the Christian Democratic forces. Therefore, even when he had an absolute majority, he never formed a government without one or more lay parties. He always called | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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upon us, the Republicans and the Social Democrats to join the government. Not that in numbers we counted for much, obviously, but politically it was very significant. Also he brought Italy into the Atlantic Alliance against very strong resistance by the Socialists, the Communists and a part of his own party, including Mr. Moro, who was then a young undersecretary. He also brought us into the European Coal and Steel Community. He brought Mr. Einaudi, who was an outstanding Liberal economist, into the government, first as governor of the Bank of Italy and then as Minister of the Treasury, and later got him elected first President of the Republic. He followed a general line of moderation which corresponded with the logic of a free system. He worked towards an agreement with the Socialists but on clear conditions which were not respected by his followers. Having found the country deeply divided and devastated by the war, he left the country in relatively good political order, properly aligned with the West and enjoying the benefits of the Marshall Plan. He avoided the raising of the fences against the lay parties and initiated the first move towards what was in fact the centre of the future centre/left. It was a very considerable achievement. He was a man of great moral strength and intelligence. He had some resemblance to Giolitti. I was drafted into the Italian delegation to the Marshall plan in September 1947. The then Minister in charge of the delegation took me to Brussels in order to introduce me to de Gasperi. The occasion was the celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Social Christian Party in Belgium. In Brussels we went to dinner at the Embassy and I met Mr. De Gasperi in tails, which was a very remarkable sight, as they did not suit him. The next morning I had to be in a certain theatre to listen to his speech. I thought it would be a boring celebration and was astonished to hear instead a most interesting speech in a ‘français rocailleux’. The main point was that if you are a Christian and you enter politics you have to make one great choice, which is the choice between Catholic pessimism and evangelical optimism, and that to his mind the proper choice was evangelical optimism. That is extremely important, if you compare him to a man like Mr. Moro, who was always a man of more subtle intelligence than Mr. de Gasperi but a deep Catholic pessimist. Moro conceived of the agreement with the Socialists first and with the Communists later as the lesser evil, as a kind of slow retreat. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Bolkestein: Is Christian Democracy in Italy capable of reforming itself?
Malagodi: As we say in Italian, there are no limits to God's providence. It may happen. It may be that if the Church finds the proper balance between the orthodoxy of the present Pope and the novelties of the Council and if this influences sufficiently the Christian Democratic Party, it will become a lay Christian party, not a Catholic Christian Party. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
10. The SocialistsBolkestein: What is the importance of Bettino Craxi? Is there a permanent re-orientation of the Socialist Party towards the centre?
Malagodi: I must protest against the word ‘centre’ because if Craxi heard it he would say: ‘I am not in the centre, I am a man of the left and I want an alternative of the left.’ In reality there is a movement towards the centre. The history of the Italian Socialist Party, as of other Socialist Parties in Europe, is a continuous infight between a moderate wing and an extremist wing. Take what happens in Labour today in Britain or the emergence of a large number of Jusos in the Social Democratic Party in Germany. In Italy this fight has always been bitter, ever since the Party was founded in 1892. After the Second World War the Party went through a period of extremism. In 1948 they fought the elections together with the Communists. It is very typical that as a counter-sign they chose the portrait of Garibaldi. Now if Garibaldi was anything he was anti-Socialist and if he had known of the Communists he would have been anti-Communist as well, but he was a popular figure and there was an element of ‘historical compromise’ even in the choice of Garibaldi's face as a kind of bridge between the Communists and the Socialists. Later Mr. Nenni became the leader of the autonomous current inside the Party. He was also leader of the Party so it started moving towards the Centre, especially after Budapest, after 1956. Then the Party moved back to the left and changed leaders. There had been the split with Saragat in 1947, there were other splits and some people moved to the left. In 1956-7 they re-united with the Social Democrats, there was a split on the left, then they separated again from the Social Democrats in 1959 and again moved to the left. This has been a permanent see-saw. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The moves of Mr. Craxi in the direction of the centre are perhaps more important than the preceding moves in the same direction. I don't trust the Socialist Party to be already a party of the centre, even of the centre-left, but they are on the brink. Mr. Craxi has put forward a theory which goes by the incredible name of ‘governability’. He says that it is the duty of the Socialist Party to contribute to the governability of the country. This means that he must make an alliance with the Christian Democrats. He has also asked to be Prime Minister, he has been refused by the Christian Democrats, he would ask again and would be refused again. Someday he may get the job but not until he has ten or fifteen percent of the electorate. We would not mind. We believe that he is by now in the democratic fold. I have known him since we were together in the Municipal Council in Milan, in 1955-1959. He was already inclined as he is to-day. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
11. The Liberal MissionBolkestein: You have said that the main task of Liberalism in Italy is to broaden its base. Since the Renaissance we have striven for individually accepted solidarity. How does one broaden the base of Liberalism when the masses have been captured by visions of total power and of total prosperity?
Malagodi: The problem of broadening the base is a two-fold one. First of all it is a problem for the country itself. Here I refer to what I said about the Risorgimento. There were Cavour's efforts to govern with the centre/left and the centre/right at the same time; Depretis' efforts to do the same thing in the eighties; the efforts of Giolitti to bring the Socialists into the government and to make an alliance with the Catholics; the work of the Gasperi and the continuing efforts of the different parties to come together and give the government the broadest possible base, even including the Communists. Some say: without the Communists for the time being, but we have never thought of outlawing them. We have always thought that the Communists must remain in the democratic system, even if they cannot yet be in a majority or in a government. This problem of broadening the base of liberal democracy is a problem not only for Italy. Perhaps not for North America, perhaps not for some of the Northern countries where one is not faced with the | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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double problem of Communism and Christian Democracy. You don't have fascist remains. In Italy the problem still exists. It is certain that we have made immense progress over the years, notwithstanding all disasters. If one compares the situation today with that of 1861 or of 1941, under fascism, one sees a much, much wider basis for democracy. That is the fundamental reason for which I am not pessimistic about the future of my country. Somehow we shall muddle through because we have a certain base on which to muddle through. Then there is the problem of the Liberal forces in Italy. I have already told you the reasons, political and historical, for which we are today a small component of the total picture in Italy, even if you put us together with the Republicans. Taken together today we are just over six percent. When I became secretary in 1954, some elements in the Party thought I was a rabid anti-Socialist. They tried to set a trap for me by asking me to hold a major speech in Rome on this subject. I said that at that time it was impossible to have an alliance with the Socialist Party because it was in close alliance with the Communists. If however the Socialist Party moved away from this position and nearer to ours, the day would come when we would give them ‘il saluto delle armi’ - the salute of the arms. Perhaps later on we would move towards cooperation. As we were squeezed into this polarised situation with these voting habits formed against us, it is a miracle that in 1964, just after the formation of the centre-left coalition, we got 7% in the national elections and 8% in the regional elections. We went down again in the elections of 1976, due in part to the extreme polarisation but also to the influence of the revolution of 1968 (in Italy really of 1969) plus the fact that many people saw the Communist danger approaching and therefore threw themselves into the arms of the Christian Democratic Party, with that beautiful saying: ‘You look at yourself in the mirror, you spit at yourself and then you go and vote Christian Democrat’. We have regained some ground afterwards because the situation has grown a little less tense. The future is ours if we understand that the answers of the populist right and of the populist left to the new problems of the world are no real answers. The Socialists, even when they are Social Democrats, are by now barren. They repeat the watered-down Socialist formulae. There is a crystalisation of their mental position and the same holds good of the Conservatives. In Italy we have no official Conservative Party. We | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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have the Christian Democrats who are a mixture of Conservatives, Populists and left-wing Christian Socialists, but on the whole they are the Italian equivalent of a Conservative Party. They do not have real answers to the new problem either. To some extent they are more open to possible new answers because of the influence of the Church which is quite visibly trying for new answers but which has a strong limit within itself. We are free from the orthodoxy of conservatism as we are free from the orthodoxy of economic liberalism. We do not believe that you are a Liberal only if you believe in an absolutely free market or if you think that ‘Money is no longer a responsibility of the State’. We know very well all that is true in the criticism which is levelled against the contemporary conditions. But we also know how much the world has changed and is changing. The novelties require novel Liberal answers. Modern Liberal thought is the only one that can really bring into focus the new synthesis which is necessary between public intervention and the initiative, the autonomy, of the individual. For a modern Liberal the individual should be autonomous. He should at the same time be responsible. You can not have autonomy without responsibility. Autonomy without responsibility is anarchy. Anarchy in the last resort means totalitarian government as an unavoidable reaction. The individual, being autonomous and responsible, is also necessarily freely solidary with other individuals. If the individual is educated to be so, if the institutions are made in such a way as to help him to be so, one has a situation where the State intervenes frankly where it is necessary, but recognises that unless its intervention is founded upon the freedom and the free initiative of responsible individuals it is not efficient. It becomes merely bureaucratic intervention, it defeats itself and smothers the whole of society under its weight. Finally bureaucracy becomes totalitarian even in a soft spoken way, which is the great fear that Tocqueville already felt in 1835 and which Burckardt spoke of in the 1860's. This danger is very much around. We are threatened with it. But the reaction should not consist of trying to go back to a totally free market which has never existed nor can it be solved by more elements of Socialism. The situation can only be solved by understanding the interplay of state intervention and individual initiative and responsibility. The thrust of the Liberal appeal should be for free men to understand what their freedom implies as a responsibility | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
[pagina 138]
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and therefore as an aid to the State to intervene but as an opposition to the State if it tries to intervene too much. We are not a brake, right or left, or a mere balancing force. We are a force of invention, a new synthesis between the free individual and the free community. |
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