POLITICS,
universities and the Roman Catholic Church are often held to be Italy's
three greatest scourges, respectively responsible for the promotion of a
Machiavellian mentality, insensitivity to truth and merit as values and the
repression of an independent social and moral conscience. Together they have
helped maintain a long-standing system, rooted in the Counter-Reformation
and reaching back perhaps even as far back as the late Roman Empire, in
which corruption continues to be not only socially acceptable but also
virtually indispensable for survival.
Like all Italian institutions, including the judiciary and the police force,
they are viewed by many as quite literally mafias, sharing identical ground
rules with the notorious and more dramatic Sicilian variety, the main
difference being that while the latter eliminates its victims physically,
the former tends to do so psychologically and spiritually. Common to both
are the principle of exchange of favours, gross over-concern with power and
money, a cynical disrespect of the law, strict observance of the code of
silence and the complete disregard of all social and moral criteria.
History shows that a peculiarly Italian corporative spirit has always
automatically transformed any collective undertaking into mafia, rendering
it impossible for even the most passive participants to avoid complicity in
corruption. The popular saying "In Italia tutto è mafia" (In
Italy everything is mafia) warns that any resistance to the system would be
about as futile as trying to stem the tide.
Viewed in this light, it is both ironical and perplexing that an Italian
professor-politician (over 40% of Italy's politicians are university
lecturers) with a permissive Christian Democratic background, should have
been unanimously approved on a "soul for Europe" ticket to take
over from an outgoing Commission accused of fraud, nepotism and
mismanagement - activities in which Italians have traditionally been past
masters and of which Mr Prodi himself has certainly had first-hand
experience.
It was the Church which, through the customary channels of
"raccomandazione" (recommendation on the basis of criteria other
than merit), obtained for Mr Prodi his first major government appointment as
industry minister in the later 70s under the premiership and spiritual
guidance of Giulio Andreotti. Mr Andreotti, who has been Christian Democrat
prime minister a record seven times, is currently standing trial for his
alleged involvement with the Sicilian mafia in the 1979 murder of a
journalist who made him the subject of a damning article. That an elusive Mr
Prodi may have managed to escape Mr Andreotti's questionable influence is
supported by the fact that a number of letters addressed to Mr Prodi at his
own ministry are reported to have been returned "addressee
unknown".
Mr Prodi began to make his presence felt in 1982 when the Christian Democrat
leader, Ciriaco De Mita, another former prime minister who later faced
allegations of corruption, placed him at the head of Italy's mammoth state
holding company, IRI (the Industrial Reconstruction Institute). When it was
decided that he had failed to fulfil his brief of reducing patronage,
inefficiency and waste, Mr Prodi was sacked but reinstated again for one
year in 1993. During his premiership in 1996, a public prosecutor who
accused him of abuse of office and criminal offences in connection with
exploiting the privatisation of public companies for personal gain while
chairman of IRI was suddenly transferred without explanation.
The chief private company involved was an economic research centre,
appropriately named Nomisma (numismatics, or coin collecting), which Mr
Prodi founded in his home town of Bologna and ran together with some one
hundred shareholders. Mr Prodi's company, which the centre-right national
daily newspaper Il Giornale called "a sort of mafia cosca clan",
secured numerous contracts from the Emilia regional council in record time
to produce study reports on topics such as public holidays (£86,000), the
state of research and innovation (£70,000) and the economic impact of the
Italian army (£48,000).
Although these and similar studies are said to have been either plagiarised
or simply thrown together, several were readily purchased by the Bologna
provincial council, which just happened to be chaired by Vittorio Prodi, Mr
Prodi's brother, who in turn commissioned a Church history of Bologna (£80,000)
from another of Mr Prodi's brothers, Paolo Prodi, a university professor.
Another of Nomisma's clients, the Tobacco Documentation and Information
Centre, had previously been created at the behest of the Philip Morris
company, which subsequently signed lucrative contracts with the Italian
Finance Ministry for the production and sales of cigarettes in Italy. Mr
Prodi's wife too, Flavia Franzoni, is reported to have performed
remunerative part-time work providing study reports for public institutions
(£140,000). She is also said to have benefited from a deal which privatised
a former school for social assistants.
But Nomisma's biggest single killing was a piece of research on high speed
carried out for the national railways. Netting a cool £4 million and
working out at over £2 per word, it carried such gems as "The
advantage of high speed is speed", "Speed is greatly appreciated
because it saves time", "Preference for the train is inversely
proportionate to distance from the station: those who live closest to the
station use the train more readily" and "The market value of a
flat whose view across a bay is blocked by an eight-lane flyover inevitably
falls".
A recently published book which courageously names names - always a perilous
practice in Italy - places Mr Prodi's Bologna mafia high among the country's
major power groups. Should a new law be approved, says its author, Bologna
will as European capital of culture for the year 2000 receive £33 million -
£9 million in the first three years and £24 million over the next twenty
years - in order to encourage restoration work, which would leave the Prodi
family laughing all the way to the bank.
It is an open secret that Mr Prodi obtained his professorship at the
University of Bologna, again, through Church recommendations, thus forcing a
potentially more deserving candidate to wait up to ten years under the
present system for another opportunity, change career or attempt entry
through the usual corrupt means depending on his or her level of moral
integrity. It is sadly indicative though hardly surprising that in the
course of his 25 years of teaching economics and industrial policy at
Bologna, Mr Prodi never once spoke out against Italy's universities, one of
the country's most criticised mafias, sometimes said to merit the title of
universities only by courtesy and arguably the most grotesquely corrupt in
the civilised world.
Pending the improbable event of his being brought to trial and convicted of
corruption, Mr Prodi seems likely to continue enjoying his foreign
reputation as Italy's honest politician, rendered more plausible by an
ingratiating priestly manner, an affable nature and an engaging
down-to-earth human approach. But the average Italian remains convinced that
Mr Prodi has as much chance of being morally upright and free of corruption
as he has of being fully immersed in the nearby River Po and stepping out
bone dry.
Within this context Tony Blair's words, "I have always made it clear
that Romano Prodi has all the qualities to be an excellent president of the
Commission", seem decidedly over-generous and Mr Prodi's robust backing
by European Socialists for a full five-and-a-half year mandate perhaps
ill-considered. Just last month the Socialists argued that Mr Prodi's
candidacy for European elections was morally unacceptable - a fine point
under the circumstances.
Doubtless Mr Blair's judgement is at least partly based on Italy's
successful entry into the European Monetary Union under Mr Prodi's
premiership last year. But as Italy's greatest living historian and social
observer Indro Montanelli has pointed out, whatever the official records may
have shown, there was no legitimate way that Italy could have brought
herself into line with the entry conditions in such a short term. Only time
will tell whether the Bank of Italy is the one Italian institution
miraculously exempt from a mafia mentality. The real miracle was that Mr
Prodi's 55th post-war government somehow managed to survive for as long as
28 months. This, as it turned out, had little to do with Mr Prodi himself
and much to do with the widespread Italian fear that failure to enter the
EMU would have had disastrous consequences for Italy, a fear shared also by
the Communist Refoundation party and trade unions which lent Mr Prodi their
backing.
As Italy continues to look to Europe for political, economic and moral
salvation, Mr Prodi has had a dream, which he has set down in the form of a
new book published just last month, An Idea of Europe. "The search for
a European soul", he writes, "is beginning to appear as the
dominant problem for the future of our continent. It is certainly a sign of
weakness to think in terms of a possible future path for Europe's
institutions (the strengthening of Parliament, the resolution for the right
of veto in exceptional cases and the reorganisation of the European
Commission and its powers) while no one is able to dictate to us the path
for the reconstruction of a European soul." But in the course of a
chapter entitled "A Soul for Europe", which makes copious
reference to the Roman Catholic Church, it emerges fairly clearly that Mr
Prodi himself intends to dictate such a path while at the same time
stressing the prior need for a "great moral revolution".
One might be excused for hoping that in calling for a "specific mandate
by EU leaders for reform", Mr Blair intends to leave as little
initiative as possible for Mr Prodi's creative capabilities and that he also
understands that Italians can be made to work efficiently and even honestly
provided they are kept under close surveillance.
To many bemused Italians, stunned by Mr Prodi's windfall appointment but
already planning to cash in on it, entrusting Mr Prodi with the presidency
of the European Commission is tantamount to entrusting the running of a
brewery to a chronic alcoholic, the operation of a casino to an inveterate
gambler or the governorship of the Bank of England to the Sicilian mafia.
Fortunately, Italy is also an unpredictable country of exceptions, where the
only thing that is certain is that nothing is certain. Given the right
conditions, Mr Prodi might even succeed. Should he fail, he can always
confess his sins.
NOTE: Parliament Magazine is an English-language quality weekly
published in 30,000 copies and densely circulated in Brussels, Strasbourg
and Luxembourg. It is read mainly by members of the European Parliament, the
European Commission, the Court of Human Rights and the European Court of
Justice.
