The Italians (37 page)

This is a view I have often heard voiced in respect of other countries in the Mediterranean: that corruption is simply a matter of economics, or rather poverty. Before Spain or Portugal joined what was to become the European Union, foreign diplomats and visiting journalists would often assert as an axiomatic truth that as soon as the two countries did so, they would become richer, and that when their inhabitants were richer, they would start to behave in exactly the same way as people in the north. But, in the case of Italy at least, time has shown that the relationship between corruption and wealth—or the lack of it—is not as straightforward as was imagined.

The 1980s, for example, were a time of rapid economic growth in Italy. As seen earlier, it is possible that toward the end of the decade Italians were richer than Britons. Yet it was precisely in those years that the tide of sleaze later uncovered by the
Mani Pulite
—“Clean Hands”—investigation reached its height. What the prosecutors in Milan uncovered—or rather, brought to court for the first time—was nothing less than a system of ingrained bribery, dubbed
Tangentopoli
, on which the country’s postwar political order had come to depend. In essence, the price of everything supplied to the public—from airports to paper table napkins in an old people’s home—had been inflated. And the difference between the inflated price and the fair one was siphoned off to provide a
tangente
(bribe) to the party or parties in a position to award the contract. For the most part, the cash was used to maintain the parties and pay for the patronage they dispensed. But some of it stuck to the fingers of individual unscrupulous politicians.

The clampdown by the prosecutors in Milan seems to have had an effect. Each year, the NGO Transparency International publishes a table that ranks most of the countries in the world according to the level of corruption among politicians and officials as perceived by independent bodies specializing in governance and analysis of the business climate. The higher the ranking, the “cleaner” the public sector of the country concerned. By 2001, Italy had climbed the ranking to occupy twenty-ninth place—six places behind France. But then it plunged. By 2012, Italy had fallen to seventy-second place, fifty places behind France. Countries ranking higher than Italy included Lesotho, Georgia and Uruguay. Italy was only three places ahead of Bulgaria and six places
behind
Romania, which was deeply ironic since Romania, like Bulgaria, was being kept out of the EU’s passport-free Schengen area largely because of concerns about the extent of corruption there.

Italy may be worryingly corrupt, but I have to say that I am skeptical as to whether it is really
that
corrupt. Other soundings, and assessments based on data rather than perceptions, all suggest Romania is still sleazier than Italy. Of itself, that is scarcely anything for a rich nation and member of the elite Group of Eight to boast about, especially since most of the other attempts to measure corruption have given Italy pretty awful marks. In the World Bank’s 2012 assessment of corruption control, on a scale from −2.5 to +2.5 Italy was fractionally below zero. Spain and France both scored more than one. Romania was −0.2. The same year the World Economic Forum, using a measure running from 1 to 7, gave Italy 3.9 under the heading of “Irregular Payments and Bribes”—again, better than Romania, but worse than Spain or France. A recent study that looked at the way the EU’s structural funds were handled in various countries between 2000 and 2006 found that some element of fraud was suspected or proved in almost 30 percent of cases in Italy—the highest proportion in any of seven countries studied.
²

So what is it that makes Italy so prone to graft? One theory, often put forward in Italy itself, is that it has to do with its being a relatively young country. According to this view, Italians’ loyalty to the state is so tenuous that they have a weaker sense of identification with society in general, and are thus more likely to indulge in activities like tax evasion and the giving or taking of bribes that benefit them individually while undermining fairness and, more generally, the well-being of the broader community. But then what about Germany? Unification there took place in the nineteenth century at almost exactly the same time as in Italy. And, it could be argued, Germany is inherently more divided because of the split between Catholics and Protestants in the population and the separation of east and west during the Cold War. Germany is certainly not free of graft. But corruption is nothing like as serious a problem there as it is in Italy.

Another view is that it all stems from the family. Unquestionably, certain forms of corruption can be traced directly to the strength of family ties in Italy. But in recent years—as seen above—a considerable gap has opened up between the levels of corruption in Italy and other countries in Southern Europe where family ties are also strong. In the latest survey published by Transparency International as of the time of writing, Italy was thirty-nine places behind Portugal and forty-two places behind Spain—both poorer countries than Italy, and with less recent experience of democracy.

It would seem that the answer to the question of why some countries are more corrupt than others has to take account of a much wider range of social, cultural and maybe political factors. Italy’s still inflexible bureaucracy is almost certainly among them: one of the ways in which officials wangle bribes is by offering to bend otherwise unyielding rules. It is also probably true to say that, to a greater extent than in Spain or Portugal, Italy remains a society in which many of the most crucial dealings take place between influential patrons and their various clients. Italy developed economically later than the other big countries in Western Europe (though not later than Spain or Portugal), and as recently as the end of the Second World War, it was still a predominantly rural and agricultural society. Many of the characteristics of that society have survived. Notwithstanding its high-speed trains and glitzy TV shows, today’s Italy is in some respects reminiscent of Jane Austen’s England or Émile Zola’s France—a country where advancement in many areas of life depends less on talent than on your family’s position in society and/or the backing of a powerful sponsor.

What is more difficult to explain is the widespread toleration of corruption in Italy. The crisis in the eurozone brought to light quite a lot of graft in Spain too. But it is noticeable to anyone moving between the two countries that the misbehavior of politicians in Spain arouses among their compatriots a degree of furious indignation that is often lacking among Italians, many of whom react with a shrug and a comment to the effect that they expected nothing better. On occasions, it goes further than that.

At a party to which my wife and I were invited not long after we arrived in Italy for the first time in the 1990s, I found myself chatting with a woman in her late thirties. At some point, I must have expressed my dislike of a certain politician.

“Why don’t you like him?” she asked resentfully.

“Because he’s a crook,” I said.

“But I don’t want my politicians to be honest,” she replied. “If they were honest, it would mean they were stupid. I want my country to be run by people who are
furbi
.”

Not long before that encounter, a journalist had carried out what became a celebrated test of attitudes toward corruption in a sector of the population where you might assume it would incur universal censure. With the Clean Hands prosecutors hard at work in Milan and new scandals involving graft coming to light almost every day, he set off around Italy to visit the confessionals of churches known to have politicians and businesspeople in their congregations. The journalist who wrote a book about his experiences posed as the secretary of an important Christian Democrat politician and told the priests that for years he had been demanding and receiving illegal party contributions in return for awarding public contracts. With only one exception, his confessors imposed trifling penances.
³

The journalist’s experience touched on a fundamental point: people, of whatever nationality, will get away with what they can. I know of no evidence to show that Italians who immigrate to the United States, for example, are more or less corrupt than Americans of Scandinavian, African or Latin American extraction. But what they all find when they get there are stringent and effective deterrents.

In Italy, the legal sanctions against corruption are much weaker, and in some cases manifestly inadequate. Take, for example, the ban on vote trading between politicians and organized criminals. The penal code outlaws the payment of
mafiosi
in exchange for guarantees of electoral support. But votes are seldom purchased with money. Usually candidates promise favors, confidential information or preferential access to lucrative contracts. And the law does not make that illegal (though, if it can be detected, the supply of favors at a later date is, of course, illegal).

The issue of legal sanctions poses the ticklish question of what does and does not constitute corruption. Italians often point, for example, to the activities of lobbyists in Britain and the United States as an example of how the boundaries of the acceptable vary between cultures. There is undoubtedly some truth in this argument: there are activities that are perfectly legal in some other developed nations that would put you in jail in Italy. But, by the same token, there are practices in Italy that, while they may be seen by many as reprehensible, are not actually defined as corrupt.

The very word
corruzione
is often used—and especially in courts of law—in a much narrower way than “corruption” and its equivalents in other languages. In its legal definition,
corruzione
is what an English speaker would call “bribery.” Some of the other activities that are corrupt in the wider sense constitute separate offenses under Italian law. If, for example, a public official coerces someone into paying him or her for a service, whether in cash or in kind, that is
concussione
. Helping yourself to public money is
peculato.
Taking advantage of public office to inflict damage on another person is
prevaricazione.

Nepotismo,
which is not illegal, covers the giving of jobs to relatives. The word, which derives from the Latin
nepos
(nephew),
^*
originated in Italy during the Middle Ages. It was inspired by the privileges and sinecures showered on the “nephews”—in reality, illegitimate sons—of some highly placed Catholic prelates (and even some popes).

Nepotism is scarcely confined to Italy. But it is certainly rife there. One of the most flagrant cases in recent years involved the founder of the Northern League, Umberto Bossi, who launched his party in the 1980s on the back of a wave of revulsion at the mounting evidence of sleaze emanating from what he termed
Roma Ladrona
(“She-thief Rome”). The whole idea underpinning the Northern League was that honest and industrious Lombards, Venetians and Piedmontese had a right to hold on to more of their wealth, which would otherwise just be squandered or pilfered by the irredeemably corrupt politicians of the capital.

This high moral stance did not prevent Bossi’s son from being put up for election to the Lombardy regional assembly at the age of twenty-one. Had Renzo Bossi been a political and intellectual prodigy, his place on the Northern League slate—in a position that guaranteed his election—might have been understandable. But the younger Bossi, whose father conferred on him the unfortunate nickname of
Il Trota
(“The Trout”), had struggled to get even a high school diploma; he’d finally passed the required exams on the fourth attempt a few months before his election to the parliament of Italy’s biggest region and the one that encompasses its business capital, Milan. Two years later, his career in politics came to an abrupt end when he resigned in the midst of a scandal over the Bossi family’s alleged misuse of public funds.

While
nepotismo
crops up often in the discussion and reporting of politics in Italy, less is said or written about
favoritismo.
For decades, for example, left-wing local authorities have made sure that contracts of all kinds are steered toward “red” cooperatives. But this thoroughly incestuous, iniquitous and anticompetitive relationship is widely accepted. Every so often, a politician on the right will point to it as evidence that not all the controversial behavior in Italy can be laid at the door of Silvio Berlusconi and his followers. But no one much seems to care.

Even less controversial is the exchange of favors. This is central to life in Italy and, I would guess, at the root of quite a lot of corruption. A few years ago, a social research body carried out a survey to discover how often Italians sought a helping hand from their compatriots.
⁴
It found that in the previous three months almost two-thirds had asked a favor from a relative, more than 60 percent from a friend and more than a third from a colleague at work. If the favors were given without any expectation of a return, then there would be no problem. But there is a well-established tradition in Italy, going back to classical times, that one good turn ought sooner or later to be repaid with another.
“Omnia Romae cum pretio,”
wrote Juvenal—“Everything in Rome comes at a price”—and it is as true today as when he was writing in the time of Trajan.