Political Order and Political Decay (16 page)

At the root of the problems of Greece and Italy is the fact that both countries have used public employment as a source of political patronage, leading to bloated and inefficient public services and ballooning budget deficits. Germany, as we saw in chapter 4, inherited an autonomous, merit-based, modern bureaucracy from absolutist times. Modernization of the state occurred prior to the arrival of full democratic participation. Political parties when they appeared were based on ideology and programmatic agendas; clientelism was never a source of political power. Greece and Italy, by contrast, did not develop modern bureaucracies before they became electoral democracies, and for much of their recent history used public employment as a means of mobilizing voters. The result has been a chronic inability to control public-sector employment and hence the wage bill up until the present day. Greece and Italy followed a sequence closer to that of the United States in the nineteenth century than to their Northern European counterparts: democracy arrived before the modern state, making the latter subservient to the interests of party politicians.

As we will see in chapters 9–11, although the United States invented clientelism, it also uprooted this practice and laid the groundwork for a modern, merit-based state by the end of the Progressive Era. While patrimonialism has returned in the form of interest group politics, the particular clientelistic form that it took in the nineteenth century is no longer widespread. In Greece and Italy, by contrast, old-style clientelism continues, despite the fact that both are wealthy, industrialized societies. In the United States, economic development created new middle-class groups that were the basis for a progressive coalition. The Greek and Italian experiences, by contrast, suggest that economic growth by itself is not sufficient to explain the disappearance of clientelism. New social actors can be recruited into well-established clientelistic systems and be induced to play by their rules. This is further evidence that political development does not follow a single path, and that the different components of development can proceed along parallel but ultimately divergent trajectories.

LOW-TRUST SOCIETIES

I should note at the outset that when speaking of Italy, I am referring to a society that was politically unified only in the 1860s and that brought together a relatively prosperous and well-governed North with a poor and underdeveloped South. Many of the characteristics of clientelism and political corruption that foreigners associate with Italy as a whole were far more characteristic historically of the Mezzogiorno (the area south of Rome, including the island of Sicily) than of Lombardy, Piedmont, Veneto, and Tuscany. In Italian historiography this is known as Italy's “Southern Question”—the puzzle of why the historical differences between the two parts of the country exist in the first place, and why they seemingly have not narrowed over the course of the century and a half since unification. There is in fact a certain degree of political correctness among Italians about even raising the question of how the South is different, but these differences are too well established to be ignored.
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What is striking about sociological accounts of traditional life in southern Italy and in Greece is how similar they are with respect to the absence of social trust and of the importance of the family as the primary basis for social cooperation.
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There is a long tradition of writing on southern Italy that notes the absence of civic structures—informal groups and associations—between the family and the state. Political scientist Edward Banfield, in his ethnographic account of a small, impoverished town in Basilicata, posits the concept of “amoral familism,” whose code he describes as “Maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise.” Cooperation within the immediate family came at the expense of a broader capacity to trust strangers: “any advantage that may be given to another is necessarily at the expense of one's own family. Therefore, one cannot afford the luxury of charity, which is giving others more than their due, or even of justice, which is giving them their due … Toward those who are not of the family the reasonable attitude is suspicion.”
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According to political scientist Joseph LaPalombara, “Primary associations are still dominant; family, kinship, neighborhood, village are still the associational forms that have the greatest call on individual loyalties.”
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Another political scientist, Sidney Tarrow, in his study of peasant communism in southern Italy, writes of a culture built around “the prevalence of violence and the consciousness of death, the modest place of woman in society, and the almost occult role of corruption in economics and politics.” Building on Banfield, he asserts that “in the Mezzogiorno, individuals participate in and directly perceive modern secondary organizations, but for some reason reject them as illegitimate or corrupt.”
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His insights were given broader empirical validation in Robert Putnam's classic study
Making Democracy Work
, in which he devises various empirical measures of civic engagement like newspaper readership or membership in sports clubs, and finds a striking divergence between the strong associational bonds in northern Italy and the weak or nonexistent ones in the South.
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Very similar observations have been made about the traditional Greek rural society that existed in the nineteenth century, in which, according to sociologist Apostolis Papakostas, “The only available way to organize people was through the family—a social organization which, in spite of local variations in its structure, has always played an important role in the social life of modern Greece.”
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As in southern Italy, loyalty to the family has a counterpart in distrust of strangers. According to political scientist Keith Legg,

family members must join together to meet the threats from outsiders … To deceive the state, strangers, or even associates is accepted, and often applauded as evidence of cleverness. Villagers do not often attempt to establish new or direct relationships with strangers, since the Greek is in a relationship of tension even with associates and neighbors … Village houses are so placed that events in all but a few are shielded from the eyes of the rest of the community … When a rural Greek is hospitalized, relatives are in constant attendance to keep a check on the doctor and the treatment he prescribes.
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Greece by this description resembles not just southern Italy but also other low-trust societies of the sort I described in
Trust
, like those of southern China and many parts of rural Spain and Latin America. In such societies, neighbors are not potential helpmates but dangerous rivals, which is why domestic architecture in all of these places tends to turn inward to hide the family's wealth from prying eyes. In such societies, businesses tend to remain small and family owned over the generations, rather than evolving into large-scale modern corporations run by hierarchies of professional managers. Businesses often keep two sets of books, an accurate one for the family and another for the tax collector; rampant tax evasion is socially approved because the state is regarded as just another dangerous stranger.
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The urbanization that occurred in Greece in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did little to disrupt these social patterns. In Western European countries such as England, Belgium, and Germany, urbanization was the by-product of industrialization and the need of modern industries to locate in cities with communications links like ports and rivers. Under these circumstances, the discipline imposed by factory labor transformed Gemeinschaft into Gesellschaft, reorganizing traditional communities into a modern division of labor.

Greece, by contrast, fits a pattern more characteristic of many contemporary developing societies elsewhere in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa, where urbanization was driven not by industrialization but by the movement of entire villages to cities, preserving Gemeinschaft intact. In the words of Apostolis Papakostas, “Greek cities can be described as ‘cities of peasants' and their inhabitants as ‘urban villagers': a high level of social cohesion in the cities is based on interwoven networks and a high frequency of primary contacts with familiar faces.”
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The low-trust, family-oriented society of the Greek countryside thus became the urban society of the early twentieth century.

Events would conspire to make already low levels of trust even lower. Greece was occupied during World War II first by the Italians and then by the Germans. Greek society had split by this point along ideological lines, and a bitter civil war broke out just prior to the end of the German occupation between the Greek Communists and a government supported first by Britain and then by the United States. The war involved numerous atrocities on both sides and led to more than fifty thousand casualties, leaving a legacy of polarization that continues to this day.

There are of course important differences between southern Italy and Greece. The Mafia, which has been so prominent in the history of the Mezzogiorno, does not really have a counterpart in Greece. Nonetheless, both regions are notable for their familism, high levels of distrust, and lack of civic community. It is not at first glance obvious that social distrust should be related to the phenomena of clientelism and low-quality bureaucracy, but it is: strong, effective government produces social trust and is in turn facilitated by the existence of trust. Both trust and strong government were lacking in Greece and southern Italy.

What was the source of this distrust? To anticipate an argument I will make in the following chapter, it had less to do with culture than with the historical absence of a strong, impersonal state and a rule of law. Lacking a trusted public authority, families and individuals were thrown back on their own resources and engaged in a low-level war of “every man against every man.”

GREECE'S EARLY DEMOCRACY

The Greek state never had a chance to consolidate into a strong, legitimate, autonomous body prior to the arrival of democracy in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as part of the Ottoman Empire, there was no sovereign Greek state at all, and the territory had a long tradition of resistance to tax collection by the Ottoman authorities,
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who were known as
armatoloi kai kleftes
(guerrillas and thieves). The Greeks, inspired in part by the ideals of the French Revolution, declared independence in 1821 and began a revolt against Turkish rule. They did not succeed on their own, however; they achieved independence only after intervention by France, Britain, and Russia, which sent naval forces and an expeditionary army to drive the Turks out. The liberation of Greece was in a sense one of the first instances of what is now called “humanitarian intervention,” in which strong moral concerns on the part of the international community were combined with strategic self-interest to promote military intervention. Greek independence had become a cause célèbre in liberal European circles, with the poet Lord Byron acting as the Bernard Henri-Lévy of his era.

Foreigners continued to dominate Greek politics long after it achieved formal independence in 1830, with the Great Powers placing Otto, prince of the Bavarian Wittelsbach family, on the Greek throne. The Bavarians brought in troops and skilled administrators in hopes of setting up a modern, centralized, impersonal administration. But like the outsiders in many contemporary efforts to build a modern state in a developing country, Otto's advisers were unable to control his Greek subjects. Facing increasing resistance to his rule, Otto conceded a constitution in 1844 and opened the country up to universal male suffrage by 1864. Greece thus became one of Europe's first electoral democracies, preceding Britain by a full generation. As in the United States, democracy was established before an indigenous modern state could be created.
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Britain, France, Germany, and Belgium began the process of industrialization well before the consolidation of democracy, which meant that there were already the beginnings of an organized industrial working class before the franchise was expanded. This permitted the emergence of programmatic Socialist or social democratic parties based on trade union movements. This sequence was reversed in Greece, as it has been in many contemporary developing countries. The Greeks were always superb traders and merchants, controlling a large proportion of commerce within the Ottoman Empire and serving as a bridge between the Middle East and Europe.
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But Greece itself remained a predominantly agrarian society up through the 1870s, when foreign investment began to flow into the country. Large-scale urbanization occurred around the turn of the twentieth century, but this was based more on cities as administrative, cultural, and commercial centers than as sources of industrial employment—a process sometimes referred to as “modernization without development.” A real industrial sector did not emerge until the late 1920s and early 1930s, and even then, it remained of a smaller scale than in Western Europe.
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This combination of a weak state dominated by foreigners, the absence of a strong entrepreneurial capitalist class, and the early opening of the franchise and democratic contestation laid the groundwork for Greece's pervasive clientelism. Politics in nineteenth-century Greece was not organized around broad social classes and their respective interests; rather, it was region and clan based. Constantine Tsoucalas argues that Greece had no bourgeois landowning class (as in England), no industrial proletariat, and none of the kinds of middle-class elites that organized politics as in Western Europe. People retreated into their families for security, and politics was organized around clientelistic chains of kin relations whose raison d'être was not ideology or programmatic policies but personal security.
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