Political Order and Political Decay (19 page)

THE WEAK STATE AND THE RISE OF THE MAFIA

The Mafia—the first and sometimes only thing that outsiders associate with Sicily—is not an ancient institution that somehow succeeded in surviving into the present era. It, as well as the Camorra in Campania and the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, had very specific origins in the Mezzogiorno of the nineteenth century. One theory of the Mafia's origins is that the mafiosi were originally
gabelloti
, richer tenants who exploited their role between landlords and poor peasants to extort rents from both.
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Diego Gambetta, however, presents an elegant economic theory of the Mafia's origins: mafiosi are private entrepreneurs whose function is to provide protection of individual property rights in a society in which the state fails to perform this basic service. That is, if one party to a private transaction is cheated by the other, he would normally take his partner to court in a well-ordered rule-of-law society. But where the state is corrupt, unreliable, or perhaps altogether absent, one must turn instead to a private provider of protection and task him to threaten to break the legs of the other party if he doesn't pay up. By this account, the Mafia is simply a private organization providing a needed service that is normally performed by the state—that is, use of the threat of violence (and sometimes actual violence) to enforce property rights. Gambetta shows that the Mafia arose precisely in those parts of southern Italy where there was economic conflict over land, mobile wealth and a high volume of transactions, and political discord in connection with the changes taking place in the nature of the Italian state after 1860.
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There are, of course, good reasons why the use of violence to protect property rights should be a monopoly of a legitimate state. Without a monopoly, protection markets themselves can become an object of violent competition. It is easy for a mafioso to move seamlessly from protection to extortion, protecting individuals from a threat that he himself creates. Private protection also easily evolves into other illegal rackets, such as prostitution and drug trafficking. The Mafia, as Gambetta argues, thrives in a low-trust society like that of Sicily because it can provide credible protection services in the short run. But it perpetuates a climate of violence and fear, which lowers levels of trust for the society as a whole.
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The inverse relationship between state strength and organized crime is illustrated by Italy's Fascist interlude. Fascism is generally understood to be a much stronger form of authoritarian government than the traditional absolutist governments of nineteenth-century Europe, involving as it does a mass party, guiding ideology, total monopoly over the state, charismatic leadership, and suppression of civil society.
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Though Italy's Mussolini created fascism, his version never achieved quite the same degree of centralized power that Hitler's regime did, much less that of Stalin's Soviet Union. Mussolini's fascist party was never able to penetrate the South and reorganize politics on a mass basis. What the Fascists couldn't tolerate, however, were competitors in the violence game, and so they began a successful campaign to suppress the Mafia. But the latter's networks were not completely dismantled, and many of its leaders were co-opted into the system rather than killed or jailed. So the Mafia was poised to reemerge quickly after the foundation of a democratic regime in 1946.
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CLIENTELISM ARRIVES

Italy opened up the franchise shortly before World War I, but this democratic experiment was cut short a decade later by the rise of Mussolini. In this period, however, the first mass political parties emerged. On the left was the Socialist party, founded in 1894 by Filippo Turati, which then split in 1921 when the radical wing broke off to join the Third International as the Italian Communist Party (the Partito Comunista Italiano, or PCI).
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On the right was the Partito Popolare, conceived by Don Luigi Sturzo, a Sicilian priest, as a mass-based Catholic party that sought to organize peasant cooperatives and pushed for land redistribution. All of these parties were banned under Mussolini, but they reemerged quickly after the fall of fascism in 1943.

The Italian Christian Democratic party—the Democrazia Cristiana or DC—was founded in 1943 as an heir to the Partito Popolare and originally conceived of itself as a progressive, mass-based party that would compete with the Italian Communists. Like the early American parties, however, the DC faced the problem of how to get masses of voters to go to the polls as the first democratic elections began under the new postwar republic. Even though it had strong connections with Catholic workers in the well-organized North, it faced a problem of penetrating the South where society remained organized around local elites and their patronage networks. In early elections after the war, a number of right-wing parties including the Monarchists and the populist Uomo Qualunque proved successful in gaining votes, and the DC shifted to a strategy of building on the region's existing traditions of patronage. However, the DC did this using modern organizational methods, building a centralized party hierarchy based in Rome, with networks of party bosses who could recruit voters on a clientelistic basis.

Under Amintore Fanfani (who would go on to be a long-serving prime minister in the 1950s), the party was transformed into a modern mass-based clientelistic party.
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The shift was similar in many respects to the transformation of American political parties from ad hoc coalitions of patronage politicians to highly organized national political machines between the 1840s and 1880s. While ideology—and particularly the split between Italy's Catholic and Marxist subcultures—continued to play a critical role in post–World War II Italian politics, groups like the Socialist Party had increasingly to resort to clientelistic tactics themselves in order to remain competitive.
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Clientelism in the South was reinforced by the government's economic policies. Modern Italy established a highly centralized state modeled on that of France, in which Rome was able to reallocate resources among regions. In order to alleviate the region's poverty, liberal governments of the late nineteenth century began large investments in infrastructure, though this tended to facilitate the dominance of northern industries over southern ones.
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In 1950, the government of the new republic set up a development arm, the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno, which was tasked with promoting economic growth in the South. It also made heavy use of the Institute for Industrial Reconstruction, a conglomerate of state-owned industries that could provide financing, jobs, and party patronage. The state spent considerable sums on infrastructure and made large investments in steel, petrochemicals, and other heavy industries.

The results of this industrial policy were highly mixed. There were large increases in per capita income and industrial output in the South, and a huge movement of peasants off of the land, with agricultural employment shrinking from 55 to 30 percent of the population between 1951 and 1971. Some went to cities in both the South and North, but many others left Italy altogether for the United States, Europe, and Latin America. There were, in addition, large improvements in social indicators such as literacy and infant mortality that made the South far less like “Africa” than in the nineteenth century. The years 1951–1981 in particular were ones of catch-up, in which the gap between North and South closed somewhat (see
Table 1
). What did not happen as a result of this investment was the creation of a large, self-sustaining industrial base in the South. Many of the successful companies in the South were offshoots of northern ones. Northern Italy grew even faster, and by the 1970s the development gap between the regions remained as wide as ever, despite the huge sums of money that had been transferred. Like Greece, southern Italy was a case of “modernization without development.”
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TABLE 1.
Per Capita Value Added in Italy's Regions, 1891–2001 (Italy
=
1)

More important from a political standpoint, the growth of government-directed investments in the South proved to be a bonanza for political clientelism. In the words of one observer, “It is never the State or the national community that appropriates sums for this or that project, for the construction of houses or schools, for the realization of public works or industrial programs: it is always thanks to the interest of this or that local deputy or the local secretary of the DC.”
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As in Greece, political connections and the ability to manipulate the state became a much surer route to wealth and personal security than private entrepreneurship, thus reinforcing the existing north-south gap while creating a culture of political favoritism that would soon get out of hand. In addition, heavy public spending provided ample opportunities for more overt forms of corruption. The Mafia had played an important role in securing the electoral base for the DC in the South after the war; as in many other countries, they were rewarded through their control over public contracting. The rise of the 'Ndrangheta was tied to the completion of a highway from Salerno to Reggio Calabria in the 1960s, and that of the Camorra to the rebuilding of Naples in the 1980s.
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TANGENTOPOLI AND THE END OF THE COLD WAR

As in Greece, the Communists were the least clientelistic of Italian political parties because of their ideology-based organization. But the PCI was an ally of Moscow and widely suspected of wanting to use the democratic process only to seize power; it was therefore excluded from ruling coalitions despite the 25–30 percent and higher of the electorate that regularly voted for it. Also as in Greece, the government's American ally strongly preferred a democratic party tainted by corruption to a nonclientelistic Communist one and threw its weight into the balance. Except during the few interludes when the Italian Socialists and other minor parties were able to name a prime minister, the Christian Democrats dominated postwar politics. For all of its constantly changing cabinets, the Italian system was highly stable and oversaw the country's rise as a major industrial power.

This changed suddenly with the end of the cold war in 1989. The Italian Communists lost their link to Moscow with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the decline of Marxism as a legitimating ideology. The party was disbanded in 1991 and replaced by the Party of the Democratic Left (Partito Democratico della Sinistra). The end of the internal Communist threat in turn undermined the rationale for the continuing dominance of the DC, which by this point had dragged the country as a whole into a morass of corruption and criminality. New parties appeared, in particular the Lega Nord, or Northern League, a regional party based on small and medium-sized entrepreneurs who were sick of the Italian state's corruption and its constant subsidization of the South. The Lega Nord suggested at times that the North ought to secede entirely from the rest of Italy in order to make a break from southern corruption.

Many believed that the Mafia, clientelism, and corruption represented traditional social practices that would gradually erode as the country modernized economically. Instead, all three became stronger over time, breaking out of their southern redoubts to infect the whole of Italy. A culture of impunity had emerged by the 1980s surrounding the use of public resources for private gain, reflected in the words of a politician of an older generation:

Maybe I'm ingenuous, but I would never have believed that there was such deep-rooted and diffuse corruption. I could certainly imagine that buying packs of membership inscriptions, financing conferences, offering dinners, publishing journals on glossy paper, all cost vast amounts of money. But—and I insist because it is the honest truth—I could never have supposed they were such blatant thieves. When I learned that the parties and factions were taking regular percentage cuts of public contracts, I was utterly appalled.
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All of this exploded in the 1992 “Tangentopoli” scandal. Surprisingly, this did not come out of the South but rather involved a Socialist politician from Milan, Mario Chiesa, who was arrested trying to flush a $6,000 bribe down the toilet and was soon found to be involved in a much larger series of scandals. The widening investigations netted Bettino Craxi, secretary of the Socialist Party, which had proved just as eager as the Christian Democrats to get in on the winnings.
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At the same time, the Mafia's influence spread beyond Sicily to infect the country as a whole. In the 1970s and '80s, the power of Italian organized crime grew dramatically due to the rise of the international drug trade, just as it did in Latin America. Conflicts over turf led to bloody battles between rival families in Palermo and other southern cities, and the rise of a particularly violent faction, the Corleonesi. While many individual southern politicians had Mafia ties, these became more systematic with the defection of Salvo Lima, the ex-mayor of Palermo, to longtime prime minister Giulio Andreotti's faction of the DC. Lima brought with him not just a formidable political machine but also all of his extensive ties with organized crime.
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