In “Passatopresente” the historian reconstructs for Laterza a merciless portrait of our unfinished transition
In the cinema it would be a successful prequel, imposed by the popularity of the series. Like the past of Dart Vader or the youth of Albus Dumbledore. Instead, in the dimension of the great history that is always inconclusive (poor Fukuyama, alas, had taken a… historical blunder), it unravels like a long chain of whys and contributing causes. Why did the First Republic fall? Why was Italy the only Western country crashed under the rubble of the Berlin Wall? Why did it take just two years to dissolve the political class that had ruled it since 1945? Why then was the populist wave generated that still today distorts civil coexistence? And, above all, why was Clean Hands born? What were the premises and the profound reasons for the most famous and devastating investigation of our republican affair?
Past present, published in these days by Laterza, already shows in the title the “Augustinian” thread with which to sew the events of yesterday up to the “present of the present” (at the origins of today 1989-1994): it will be an uncomfortable text for part of the current public opinion, but its reading reveals great qualities, as an uncomfortable historian with great qualities is its author, Simona Colarizi, emeritus professor at Sapienza in Rome and authoritative scholar of political and trade union parties and movements.
The original figure of the book consists in bringing the Milan investigation back to its bed and thus diminishing it of its aura, dismantling its uniqueness: no more solitary meteor that strikes the dinosaurs of the party power, no longer mysterious judicial epiphany but cause among the causes (and, therefore, neither conspiracy nor coup …); explainable in a context of political and economic, social and international factors that generated an unprecedented event in the democracies that arose from the Second World War: the mass extinction of long-hegemonic parties and ruling groups.
Some of these causes still loom in the “present of the present”, threatening the stability of a system that is only apparently new (and actually in strong continuity with the previous one): public debt, crisis of representation, inability to make reforms, multiplication of demagogues . Other causes must be inscribed in the specific of once marked by enormous transformations, the Eighties to which the author only partially attributes negative connotations for many to be taken for granted.
They were also years of aspiration to modernity and more widespread well-being, of course: with a GDP of 4% in 1988 and Great Britain surpassed among the economic powers, Colarizi reminds us, refuting with some generosity the stigma of yuppism and Milan from drink, perhaps a little speckish but still an icon of a politics that acquired consensus by pandering to the corruption of the social fabric. In those eighties, marked by Craxism and then by the unfortunate combination of the Caf, and in the seventies that sowed the seed in terms of welfare, mass irresponsibility and widespread clientelism, the first public scandals and sentimental break with the Italians, we hear the shouting convulsive of the transversal party of expenditure, of the assaults on the budget law and of the fights between allies of cadres and the pentapartite up to paralysis (doesn’t that remind you of something terribly current?). We find the end of the Keynesian illusion and the decline of the entrepreneur state, the farewell to the parastate and the dawn of privatizations that mean the mixing of incomes and roles, of ideas and perspectives to which the historical left is unable to give answers and which at the bottom suck the communist opposition into a fully consociative scheme. We find the race in Maastricht, with a very high bar for our economy, and with expectations that are no longer negotiable in the milieu of big business, finally determined to force our structural fragility, which makes us more fragile in a Union that is moving building.
From all this and much more, such as a bureaucratic statism so close to apparatchik and an expansion of the public economy so peculiar as to make us feel like no one in Europe the Soviet collapse of ’89, a kaleidoscope is generated at the bottom of which we begin to glimpse the profile of the courthouse in Milan, the long shadows of the magistrates of the pool. Shadows just outlined by the author, who nevertheless fails to conceal an aversion for them perhaps not only historical, to the point of hypothesizing a “sort of blackmail” on the party that accompanied its rise with strong myopia, the PCI-PDS, deluded to benefit from what would become a systemic catastrophe of drowning without salvation.
These are pages that could generate controversies, perhaps dictated by too short a distance with respect to events that have marked destinies, dug into lives. And, however, just following its unfolding, we encounter the strongest and most engaging core of the text: the critique of the false and indifferent myth of the virtuous people, decisive totem for the overthrow of the First Republic; that “civil society” sanctified in so many talk shows then (and now), opposed in its virtue to a political caste of profiteers whose sole removal, by consensus or by force, would have been sufficient for palingenesis. “An acquittal myth, perpetuated even in the years to come”, writes Colarizi, projecting his gaze: “Who had imprinted in the imagination of many the false and reassuring image of an uncorrupted people against the evidence, instead, of a citizenship afflicted by the same evils of its rulers, with whom for half a century it had made tacit pacts which guaranteed citizens a sort of right to evasion, but also hiring and promotions in the public service unrelated to merits and service needs, as well as a job for life, absenteeism, inefficiency, the hereditary passage of the role between family members, loyal clienteles of government politicians ».
It is a ruthless and unfortunately very topical portrait, within our thirty-year and unfinished transition, in the light of the new system crises, of the cyclical waves of justicialism and xenophobia, up to the mysticism of one that denies skills, education, even faith in values of civil life. And yet authorizes a further (and unresolved) issue: accepting in the premise that those who govern are no worse than those who are governed, must we also resign ourselves to the idea that they are no better? The inept and inane politics that arises from this story appears paradoxically to be deprived of responsibility. If it can only velliate vices and depress virtues, what is it for? It is the short circuit that still, here and now, leaves us in the dark.
The book and the author
Simona Colarizi’s book, «Passatopresente. At the origins of today 1989-1994 ”, is published by Laterza (pages 216, euro 20). Simona Colarizi is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Rome La Sapienza. For Laterza he published, among other things: «Postwar period and fascism in Puglia. 1919-1926 “(1971); “Biography of the First Republic” (1996); «Political history of the Republic. 1943-2006 “(2007); «Twentieth century of Europe. Illusion, hatred, hope, uncertainty “(2015); «A country on the move. Italy in the Sixties and Seventies “(2019). Simona Colarizi participated with Pierluigi Allotti in a debate, edited by Antonio Carioti, on the figure and work of Luigi Albertini published in «la Lettura» # 526 of last December 27th, available in the App Archive
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January 22, 2022 (change January 22, 2022 | 21:35)
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