John Lloyd

We Europeans are in the mud of agony, but our hearts are among the stars of bliss. Our anthem is Beethoven’s setting – in the last movement of his 9^th Symphony – of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, a work of transcendent romantic idealism, above all in its central claim – “All men will be brothers!” (“Alle menschen werden bruder”: in the fashion of the time, Schiller meant all humanity).

Adopted as Europe’s official anthem 40 years ago, it is supposed to be played rather than sung – one wouldn’t want to give the impression that Germans dominated the continent!  But it is sometimes voiced, as in 2004, when an orchestra was playing it on the German-Polish border on the occasion of Poland’s accession to the European Union, and the crowd sang Schiller’s words. Given Polish-German history, to sing that humanity will be united in love was a moving event.

The union of Europe was conceived and furthered in much that same vaulting romantic spirit. To be sure, it had its feet on the ground: a coal and steel community was the foundation of the Union. Among its most solid – and perhaps most lasting – achievements are in furthering common rules for trade, for investment and for services: the common market.

But the ideal behind it, the moving spirit of its founders, was to create structures which would make war impossible – to so bind the economies and the societies of the continent together that attempts at conquest of one over the other would be unthinkable. Thus it would work to bring Europeans together in amity, and have them explore their common European, rather than national, identity.

Later, from the seventies on, it became a democratic home for countries coming out of dictatorship – Greece, Portugal and Spain first, then the former Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe. The explicit promise was that a European framework would be a protection against domestic dictators and foreign tyrants – the shades of the Soviet Union/Russia lay darkly across the invocation of the latter.

For the more ardent spirits among the pro-Europeanists – and a few of these remain, though their voice is muted – Europe’s destiny was the achievement of statehood. It would of course have a federal structure to give substantial autonomy to the nations, but it would also have a centralized power which could and would express a unified political will, one capable of standing beside the current global hegemon, the USA and any future great power, like China.

But in these grand constructions and visions, two elements were forgotten – or at least ignored. One was the people of Europe; and the second was that the people of Europe thought of themselves as Europeans only sometimes: they otherwise stubbornly cleaved to their national identities.

The people of Europe had approved of much that was done. Especially in the years after the war, when Europe was reconstructing itself from ruins (leaning heavily on Marshall Plan aid from the U.S.), and the horror of war was fresh in the minds of all, the prospect of No More War was both a hope and an inspiration. For the political classes of the vanquished, in Germany and in Italy, the new Union was a means of national civic renewal: an implicit pledge to their neighbours that they were no longer militaristic in outlook, nor did they seek national glory through conquest.

National pride was taken, instead, in the renunciation of conquest. For Germany in particular, where war-guilt was by far the heaviest, a European destiny was a means of purging that guilt. And there was a largely uncontroversial acceptance on the part of the Germans, which lasted for decades, that they would show their pacific, good-European, side by paying the largest share of the bills.

For the nations on the winning side, Europe was both an insurance policy against war and a means of increasing national wealth through supranational agreement. France, the mostly undisputed political leader of Europe (the UK stayed on the sidelines, a late joiner, semi-detached after joining), saw the Union as a means of extending its power and its culture.

But in its growth, the Union became increasingly complex. Its centers of power proliferated, and these were led and administered by people of whom most Europeans knew little or nothing. Though most of the media (British newspapers were the major exception) were friendly to – indeed, dangerously uncritical of – the project, it became common journalistic parlance that stories with “Europe” in the headline were seen by readers or viewers as boring. Journalism, however large its democratic claims, is largely a for-profit business. It does not stick with boring for long.

Distance bred resentment; ignorance bred suspicion. As “Europe” dealt with issues that became increasingly arcane or high-flown or both, the concerns of the Europeans who thought of themselves as French, Dutch, Italian, or German took precedence. When, in 2005, the first two of these voted in separate referenda on the ratification of the treaty establishing a European Constitution, the proposal to ratify was defeated – decisively in France, resoundingly in the Netherlands.

Not all politics are local, but few are more than national. The ideals of Europe were and are fine: but the purchase its institutions have on the hearts and minds of Europeans was and is too slight. Beneath the current financial and banking crises, there lies a longer-lasting democratic one: a failure of identification with the human side of what seems an impersonal engine, created by elites and largely confined to them.

The Europeans see, in the governments, parties and  parliaments  of their countries, figures they know. They may dislike them for their beliefs and their actions; hold their politics in contempt; vote against them when they can. But popular movements have, through the centuries, fought to establish these institutions to express common wills – to both conduct national business and to confine the antagonisms of class and ethnicity to arenas in which compromises can be made. “Europe” was not built like that. It did not come through struggle, through agitation for reform, through popular campaigns. It was conceived for the best of reasons – for peace and unity; yet it has been built and administered in the worst of ways – from the top.

All men have not become brothers, and are unlikely to be so soon. Men and women require a politics which resonates with their collective history and contains figures who are in some measures like them. “Europe” has not supplied these. If and when the immediate crisis is surmounted, the fundamental limits of democratic and civic engagement must be explicitly recognized. If a new house of Europe is to be attempted, its foundations must be laid, as is customary, from the bottom up.

A woman looks at a billboard showing a photo montage with France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy kissing German Chancellor Angela Merkel displayed on a Benetton store in Paris November 17, 2011. REUTERS/Charles Platiau (FRANCE – Tags: POLITICS MEDIA BUSINESS)

He called himself the best leader in Europe, even in the world: but he was, by quite a way, the worst (in Europe at least: the rest of the world offers more competition). In part, this was due to the sheer force of his personality: if, to adapt his favored slogan, he gave little Forza to Italia, there was much Forza in Silvio.

Prime Minister (still) Berlusconi was the Boss, in every sense. He commanded his party, his coalition of the right and his governments through the power of his money and his media – but also because he had the strength of will to project himself, unceasingly, on his country and the theatrical chutzpah to make of his private life a fascinating public spectacle. He refused to bow to the customary rules of protocol, decorum or correctness of any kind. He was a man in full in the sense the novelist Tom Wolfe used it in his novel of that name: having achieved great success, he gloried in it, and wished others to see his glory.

Let us not say that the woes of Italy are due only to him, for that would be to believe that his promised resignation would end the crisis – in Italy, in Europe and the world. The productive base of the country had been, unusually for a West European economy, too long bound up in textiles, furniture, footwear and other medium technology goods which the Eastern powerhouses often do as well and more cheaply.

Its northern engineering companies often remain world class, but with increasing difficulty. Even Fiat, greatly re-energized by the forza of Sergio Marchionne, the Canadian-Italian chief executive, has a huge challenge to turn its Chrysler subsidiary around in the U.S., and to raise efficiency in its remaining plants in Italy – where its large market share depends heavily on the brilliantly-designed, but low profit, Pandas and Cinquecentos.

Its wealth has always lain very much with its creative and lively people; but their numbers are declining fast, and immigration, about which many Italians are at best ambiguous, hasn’t made up for the loss. Organized crime hasn’t been substantially reduced; on the contrary, according to its bold chronicler, Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah now living under constant police guard, it is spreading from south to north.

Berlusconi offered, after all, to lead, and brought together the disorganized and demoralized right wing forces after the party which had ruled Italy since the war until the late eighties, the Christian Democrats, collapsed. Together with the quite separate collapse of the Communist Party at around the same time, the political tectonic shifts of that period had political leaderships floundering, unsure of their base and their beliefs. And if the left remains splintered and at times unconvincing in what it offers the country in the way of an alternative, that may have benefitted him – yet he is not its cause.

But if the woes are not due only to him, he has deepened them, made the bad chronic, the disturbing threatening. The conflict of interests are vast – with the control of three commercial TV channels, the largest publishing house, national and regional papers, the largest advertising agency and the largest insurance company all retained in his family. More than any other figure in the 20^th/21^st century, he is a capitalist in power. In the course of governing, he has brought the state broadcaster, RAI, more closely under his command than before – with the result that RAI 1, the most popular channel, now broadcasts news which is at times near to propaganda.

He has sought to weaken or suborn every other center of power but his own – especially the judiciary, which he charges with being communist, and the parliament, which at one time he proposed should cease to vote. At the same time, he has so cowed and /or flattered his party’s deputies and his allies that they have, until recently, acted as echo chambers – or, in the case of Umberto Bossi, leader of the Northern League, his major ally, make wild charges and level gross insults at his enemies.

He has had some twenty serious charges against him, usually for one form or another of corruption. Four cases are presently pending, one for bribing the British lawyer David Mills. He has beaten the previous charges by technical means – usually by dragging them out so long that they breach the statute of limitations. He retains a team of some fifty lawyers, many of whom he has made MPs by placing them high on the party lists. Corruption in government – which he pledged himself to end when first elected – has probably worsened.

That which he seemed most fit to effect has been all but wholly ignored or botched. His claim was that his success as an entrepreneur made him the fittest among all contenders to turn round Italy’s sluggish economy, and that he would govern in the spirit and with the conviction of Margaret Thatcher in the eighties. Nothing of the sort. Italy’s bloated state sector has been a little – but only a little – cut; the state pensions have been a little – but only a little – reformed; the labor laws remain discouraging to employers and the unemployed alike. Above all, his governments have allowed the government debt to rise to close to 2 trillion euros.

He has been less a man for all seasons as a man for the holiday season. His constant, implicit pitch to the Italian people was – “don’t worry: be happy – see, I am.” A little too old to be a sixties man, he nevertheless embodies some of the elements of that era – sexual license, a determination to have a good time, a vague benevolence to all. Many thought of him as a nice guy: he was, to be sure, always smiling, often witty, sometimes impulsively generous. As Tony Blair, one of the few European leaders who would confess to an affection for him, said: it’s never boring when Silvio is around. And since boredom is one of the modern world’s great antipathies, his dramatic, sometimes farcical, always intriguing passage through life made for a stimulating reality show.

But reality is now a two-trillion euro debt burden. It is the consistently lowest growth in Europe. It is a near seven per cent yield on government bonds – a sign that there is great skepticism in the market over Italy’s ability to service its debt. It is the fact that Italy’s fate is the largest single threat facing the Eurozone. And it is the even more alarming fact that there is no guarantee that the absence of Berlusconi guarantees the coming of a solution.

Italy remains a vibrant and creative country still. Silvio Berlusconi, among his other sins, has played into the stereotype common of Italians – fun-loving, sex-mad, irresponsible – a kind of aging Latin lover on steroids and under a transplant. There are many other Italys: one is a group of men and women, of left and right, concerned for their country’s future. It is that group which must now step forward, willing to make sacrifices – including of their own popularity – to put the truth before a people starved of it, and harsh solutions to an electorate used to honeyed falsehoods. Italy surely needs them now.

PHOTO: Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (L) holds League North Party leader Umberto Bossi’s hand during a finance vote at the parliament in Rome November 8, 2011. REUTERS/Tony Gentile