Order 1286185: Italian Federalism

Italy Decentralizes Ugo M. Amoretti

Journal of Democracy, Volume 13, Number 2, April 2002, pp. 126-140 (Article)

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ITALY DECENTRALIZES Ugo M. Amoretti

Despite its long history of economic, social, and cultural fragmenta- tion along territorial lines, Italy has had a mostly centralized government since 1861, when the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont became the first political authority since the fall of the Roman Empire to extend its sway across the entire Italian peninsula. On 7 October 2001, however, Italy took a major step away from that centralist tradition. On that day, 64.2 percent of Italian voters (albeit out of a low turnout of 34 percent) ap- proved a referendum that significantly revised the 1948 Constitution in the direction of greater decentralization. The referendum capped a dec- ade of effort, which is a short time when one considers that federalism has no roots in the Italian institutional tradition and was barely heard of before the late 1980s. It is not yet possible, of course, to say precisely how far decentralization will go, what new shape the Italian state will take under its influence, or even how resolutely voters support the fed- eralist option. But there seems little doubt that 7 October 2001 will stand as an important date in the unfolding story of federalism in the Italian Republic.

First proposed by one of the center-left coalition cabinets that gov- erned Italy between 1996 and 2001, the package—which did not actually use the words “federal” or “federalism,” even though its proponents openly did so—made it through Parliament in March 2001, just a few days before the center-left governing parties’ stint in office was to end, but by far less than the two-thirds majority that is required in order to amend the Constitution without any risk that the change can come un- der challenge via a popular referendum.

Ugo M. Amoretti is a researcher in political science at the University of Genoa. He holds a doctorate from the University of Florence, where his research focused on comparative federalism. From 1998 to 1999, and again in the summer of 2000, he was a visiting fellow at Princeton University’s Center of International Studies.

Journal of Democracy Volume 13, Number 2 April 2002

A New Look at Federalism

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In essence, the package redistributes certain lawmaking powers from the central government in Rome to the 20 regions (the largest geographi- cal subunits of the Italian Republic, below which are provinces and municipalities). After establishing that all legislation has to be consist- ent with the Constitution as well as EU and international norms, the new version of Article 117 lists the matters under central jurisdiction, enu- merates the areas of concurrent legislation, and grants all residual powers to the regions.1 In addition, the package introduces changes regarding subsidiarity, taxation, and intergovernmental relations. It devolves pow- ers and responsibilities to the lowest feasible level of government, encourages officials to involve citizens in public affairs, gives regions a nominal and still somewhat hazily defined “fiscal autonomy,” and ends the central government’s power to suspend new regional legislation pend- ing a Constitutional Court ruling on its constitutionality.

The invocation of the principle of subsidiarity is a first in Italian con- s t i t u t i o n a l h i s t o r y . S u b s i d i a r i t y m e a n s t h a t r e s p o n s i b i l i t y f o r implementing a given law or policy should, whenever possible, rest with the lowest level of government, that of the municipalities. A higher level—be it a province, a metropolitan area, a region, or Rome itself— should take over only when carrying out the policy in question makes demands beyond what any lower level can manage.

The taxation provisions, while aiming at the decentralizing goal of giving each region more control over its own finances, also authorize the central government to promote this process by redistributing resources by means of extraordinary grants and the creation of an unconditional equalization fund. The package gives both the central government and any of the regional governments the right to refer any piece of legisla- tion that they think might be unconstitutional to the Constitutional Court for review. Moreover, the central government is given the power to dis- miss regional governments that act against international or EU norms, or which pose a threat to law and order, national unity, or civil and so- cial rights.

Why a Referendum?

The proposal gained only a tiny majority in Parliament because the center-right parties, including the Northern League (LN), objected to it as a set of feeble half-measures designed to curry favor with voters while doing little to change the actual substance of the highly centralized Ital- ian constitutional order. Although they split sharply over the merits of the reform itself, both the center-right parties then in opposition and the center-left parties then in government agreed on the need for a popular referendum, following Article 138, though of course each side had a different reason for wanting such a vote.

The center-left sought legitimacy for a reform that had split Parlia-

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ment, while the center-right and the LN wanted to challenge it for not going far enough toward decentralization, even as they promised voters another round of constitutional reform in the event that they should win the general elections set for mid-May 2001. The question, in other words, was not whether federalism was desirable—every party except the Com- munists favored it—but whether the October referendum, considered on its own merits, was the real thing or an unacceptable substitute.

When the new center-right government of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (formed following the 13 May 2001 elections) set the feder- alism referendum for October 7, it was probably expecting a more dramatic campaign and higher turnout than actually occurred. The May parliamentary elections plus a string of nationwide referenda in recent years had given Italian electors a seeming case of “voter fatigue” that probably would have depressed interest and turnout even had the Sep- tember 11 terrorist attacks and their aftermath not overshadowed all other public events that fall. With September 11 dominating news cov- erage and public discourse, the issue of federalism faded into the back of the public mind.

Flagging interest and low turnout aside, the referendum was approved by a large margin because the parties of the left (the Communists ex- cepted) stayed rallied behind it while the rightist parties suffered cracks in the unity of their opposition. This happened in part because it was not easy to justify the rejection of the reform simply on grounds that it was, in effect, “good as far as it went, but not enough.” After all, from a federalist viewpoint the referendum undeniably represented an improve- ment over the highly centralized status quo. Then too, after the victory of the center-right in the parliamentary elections, unity over a pure ques- tion of policy (that is, one in which no office was at stake) no longer seemed as vital as it had during the spring, when the LN and the center- right parties had been in opposition. Hence the division of opinion in which some right-of-center regional presidents and mayors favored a “yes” vote, others remained opposed to the referendum, and still others (such as LN leader Umberto Bossi) professed their desire to boycott it by staying home that weekend (Italy holds national referenda on Sun- days). As it happened, the day of the referendum was the very day on which the U.S.-led coalition launched its military campaign against the terrorists of al-Qaeda and their Taliban hosts in Afghanistan.

Once the voting was over, the center-left parties cheered the 34 per- cent turnout, claiming that it was an achievement in light of the unsettling and intensely distracting world events then unfolding. From the camp of the ruling “House of Freedom” coalition came comments that ranged from the LN’s outright denunciations of the referendum to observations that minimized its significance and stressed how much the reform left to be desired. Yet however one reads the meaning of this low turnout, it did not affect the legality of the referendum or its verdict. The fact re-

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mains that the “yes” ballots had changed the Italian Constitution, and that those casting these ballots had amounted to less than a quarter of the entire registered electorate, marking the lowest-ever level of active voter consent to such a major change in the history of Italian democ- racy.

Unitary System, Fragmented Country

The roots of today’s decentralizing pressures can be found in Italy’s history of territorial fragmentation and overlapping layers of cultural, social, economic, and political differentiation. The Roman legions brought the peninsula under unified rule by the first century B.C.E. But from the fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth century C.E. until the 1860s, when the House of Savoy and its Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont brought the modern unification project to near-completion, Italy was hardly more than a geographical expression.

During the millennium-and-a-half that separated ancient Rome’s last emperor from modern Italy’s first king, the polities that formed on the peninsula south of the Alps developed in a largely independent way. Springing all alike from the ruins of the Roman Empire, some grew fully autonomous and played a major role on the international scene for a long time. Others became little more than protectorates of foreign pow- ers. Yet it was this diverse array of historical experiences—among which were those of the free cities in central and northern Italy as well as the Norman kingdom in the South—that sowed the seeds of a territorial dif- ferentiation which political unification could not wholly overcome.2

Doubtless one reason for this was that unification itself was such a “top-down” process. It was engineered almost entirely from above; the vast bulk of the peninsula’s people were spectators and objects of the unification process, not actors and subjects within it.3 As a result, Italy remained far from united even after 1870. Regional and local identities, rooted in the fragmented political and social past of the peninsula, re- mained strong.4 The North was economically far ahead, and no more than 10 percent of the population could speak the Tuscan language, which in a process that began with Dante Alighieri, had become standard mod- ern Italian.5 In short, as the royal prime minister Massimo D’Azeglio of Sardinia-Piedmont put it in the nineteenth century, political unification had made “Italy but not Italians.”6

Today, Italy is still territorially fragmented in many respects, even after 140 years as what political scientists call a constitutionally “uni- tary” polity—meaning one in which the central government is supreme and there is no intermediate lawmaking authority between that govern- ment and the localities. Although Italy’s regional differentiation is highly complex, the biggest and best-known single divide separates the urban- ized, economically developed North from the poorer, more rusticated,

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and less fully modernized South or Mezzogiorno. In spite of a series of nation-building policies designed to overcome regionalism with a su- preme sense of shared “Italian-ness,” Italians as a whole have never developed a sense of national identity strong enough to stand compari- son with what one finds in countries such as France. Except for the displays of patriotism evident during the once-every-four-years World Cup soccer tournament, Italy remains an entity toward which most Ital- ians show little obvious attachment.

Even the rise of literacy and the arrival of television and other mod- ern mass media over the last half-century have not extinguished cultural localism. Although today nearly everyone can speak standard Italian, local languages or dialects remain popular.

For a long time, this situation was stable. National and subnational identities coexisted fairly easily, and such dualities raised no urgent political issues. The 1990s saw this equilibrium imperiled, however, especially in the North. There, surveys reported that nearly a fifth of all residents would have been happy to trade their dual national-subnational identity for a single regional affiliation. A mere 6 percent of southern- ers listed themselves as feeling the same way about their own region, perhaps because the South continued to lag behind the North in indus- trialization and economic growth despite decades of central-government programs designed to redistribute resources to poorer regions.7

In the aftermath of unification, when the Italian state was still a new and somewhat tenuous thing and the potential for the political exploita- tion of territorial cleavages was high, it took a mailed fist to foreclose the possibility. Armed action was needed to put down Southern Italy’s brigantaggio, a form of banditry born out of some southerners’ disaf- fection from what they saw as an alien regime. The casualties suffered in this internal police action were higher than those inflicted by the fight- ing against Austria before unification. Territorial differences continued to make themselves felt politically, however, especially through a two- party system in which the right dominated the North while the left ruled the South.8

By 1900, the politicization of territorial differences was a waning force in Italian national life. Elites in nearly all regions of the country were coming to sense a common interest in a united Italy. A number of other trends diminished the political saliency of regionalism. These in- cluded economic modernization, the gradual rise of popular political participation, the sharpening of church-state tensions, and the growing influence of nationalist ideologies, with their emphasis on scale and bulk as factors in the competition for power and wealth among Europe’s ambitious nation-states.

The rise to power of the socialist-turned-extreme-nationalist Benito Mussolini and his Fascists in 1922 suppressed regionalism even further. The postwar years might have seen a modest revival of the legitimacy

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of regionalism, but the ideological polarization that characterized the political life of the new Italian Republic (declared by referendum in 1946) ensured that any political expressions of regionalism would re- main informal and sublimated for the duration of the Cold War.

The Postwar Scene

The stark division between pro-Western and pro-Soviet forces that dominated Italian politics in the years after World War II meant that the very identity of Italy was at stake in each national election. The Christian Democrats (DC) led one camp, which looked to the Atlantic alliance, democracy, and free markets. The Italian Communist Party (PCI) led the other, which looked to the Soviet bloc, its dictatorships, and the com- mand economy. Here lay the master issue of postwar Italian politics. The salience of this question inhibited any persons, parties, or movements that might otherwise have wanted to organize political competition along regional or territorial lines. Moreover, the DC and the PCI each created nationwide networks of social and cultural organizations, from trade un- ions to youth groups, thereby reinforcing ideological loyalties. There was a regional dimension to all this, of course: The northeast was known as “white” while much of central Italy leaned strongly “red.” But the divi- sions were first and foremost ideological, rather than regional as such.

The Constituent Assembly elected in 1946 also helped to push terri- torial issues into the background. This Assembly, which produced the Constitution of 1948, was split along the line that was polarizing Italy, with the DC and its small centrist allies facing off against the pro-Soviet left (which at this time included the Italian Socialist Party [PSI] as well as the Communists). Since the situation was close to a deadlock, the contenders produced a compromise Constitution that spread power as widely as possible and served each camp as a kind of political insurance policy. These circumstances more than anything else explain why the 1948 Constitution features such a broad array of antimajoritarian deci- sion-making mechanisms. Because the framers did not see the devolution of authority to territorial subunits as a key concern, such devices were mainly “horizontal” rather than “vertical.” The most important of them were the privileging of legislative over executive power (this was also part of a reaction against Fascism and its cult of the leader) and the adoption—albeit by ordinary law rather than the Constitution—of pro- portional representation (PR).

Together, these mechanisms were designed to restrain majority rule by encouraging multiparty politics, broad coalition cabinets, and “bal- anced” executive-legislative relations (with a tilt in favor of Parliament). They were meant to prevent one branch of the central government (and by extension the party or parties in charge of it) from wielding too much power over the others, and had little to do with modifying or restraining

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the authority that the national government in Rome could wield over “lower” levels of government such as regions, provinces, and munici- p a l i t i e s . J u s t h o w l i t t l e i s r e v e a l e d b y t h e f a t e o f t h e m o d e s t decentralization provisions in the 1948 basic law, which lay inactive for 25 years until Parliament at last got around to passing enabling leg- islation to put them into force in the 1970s.

As an effect of the incentives set up in 1948, the daily workings of Italian democracy were much less adversarial than one might gather from inspecting the records of electoral competition alone. Since the antimajoritarian mechanisms encouraged accommodation and power sharing, behind-the-scenes horse-trading among rival elites usually pro- d u c e d — d e s p i t e t h e i d e o l o g i c a l p o l a r i z a t i o n — a c o n s o c i a t i o n a l decision-making process that rested on oversized majorities. Even the PCI—despite the other parties’ tacit agreement to exclude it from gov- ernment—often had a de facto voice in the decision-making process.

Under this system, relations between the central government and the geographic subunits of the Republic revolved around the informal prac- tices adopted by the political parties. Under this unwritten constitution, for instance, regional factors were nearly always taken into account when ministerial portfolios in a new cabinet (and Italian democracy produced many new cabinets) were being filled.

Though this system denied the regions qua regions any explicit role, it was fairly effective in giving territorial interests some say in the deci- sions emanating from Rome. Because the regions were not places where policies were made, the form assumed by territorial politics was chiefly distributional. Following a custom that had its roots in the Kingdom of Sardinia-Piedmont, local or regional party bosses—particularly those from places that yielded strong voter support for the governing party or parties—could arrange to have the central government transfer consid- erable flows of resources back to their home areas. Moreover, since the size of the ministerial contingent from any given region—and thus the likelihood that that region’s desires would be fulfilled—depended on the electoral support for the governing party or parties in that region, the system discouraged the transmission of regional demands to the center through alternative channels. In this way, it undercut regionalist movements and effectively prevented the overt political mobilization of clashing territorial interests.

To manage competing demands, those who wielded power at the center used several devices familiar to any student of consociational democracy. Since the regions’ interests were obviously heterogeneous, one favorite strategy was what U.S. political scientists call “logrolling”— lawmakers (usually working in the relative obscurity of parliamentary committees) would craft complicated deals across ideological lines in order to satisfy different interests with diverse benefits. Whenever an agreement proved elusive, other approaches could be brought into play.

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A favorite was to “grow the pie” by increasing the total quantity of resources to be distributed. This strategy could get very costly, of course, and it fed Italy’s growing public debt to the point where it became the second-largest in all of Western Europe, ranking behind only Belgium’s as a percentage of gross domestic product.

The supremacy of the DC and the other “insider” parties and the de- mobilization of territorial cleavages were products not only of ideological polarization and these parties’ skill at informally representing regional interests but also of party control over the institutions and resources of the central government—a crucial lever that gave the established par- ties an edge over potential challengers. Consociational decision making allowed the governing parties—and to a lesser extent the never-allowed- in-government PCI—to build elaborate patron-client networks that enabled them to take advantage of public resources through shrewd per- sonnel appointments and the distribution of benefits to loyal districts, groups, and individuals. Especially in the South, where ideology had less weight, such networks allowed the Christian Democrats and later the Socialists to exchange resources for votes.

The Parties and Regionalism

Between the 1940s and the 1960s, interestingly, the Christian Demo- crats and the Communists swapped positions on decentralization. During the earlier decade the DC had been for it (Catholic social teaching commends subsidiarity) while the PCI had been against (regional or other “archaic” ties have never had a place in Marxist thought, and the PCI believed that through centralization lay the path to economic de- velopment). Two decades later, however, the PCI was so frustrated by its continued exclusion from every new government formed in Rome that it looked to regionalism as its best hope of being able to take con- trol of some administration, somewhere. The DC, fearing precisely that prospect, had turned centralist in response.

By the early 1970s, this interplay had led to the creation of regional governments (as the PCI had wanted), albeit of a very weak nature (as the DC had wanted). But the real significance of this change lay beyond the calculations of both parties: Regional governments soon turned out to be arenas in which both the Communists and the Christian Democrats were more vulnerable than either had been before. The reason was two- fold. First, ideology mattered less at the regional level, and large portions of both the DC’s and the PCI’s support came from people motivated by the communism-anticommunism cleavage. Second, regions, being closer to citizens, were also more accessible to parties challenging the bipolar logic of the DC-PCI face-off. In keeping with this logic, it was not long before new parties, including regionalist forces, began to score some local and regional successes.

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At the national level, however, nothing seemed to have changed. The original regional devolution was a timid affair, and in the 1976 national elections the Christian Democrats and Communists won a combined 73.1 percent of the total vote—an all-time high. Thanks to ideological po- larization and each party’s skillful use of central resources, other political forces found themselves blocked, for the time being at least, from gain- ing influence. The major parties’ colonization of civil society and the central government made them so powerful and their presence so per- vasive that some observers began to speak of Italy as a partitocrazia, yet the dominance of the major parties also contributed, at least to some extent, to the territorial integration of the country. On the whole, how- ever, Italians seem to have been far from pleased with this situation. Their dissatisfaction with the workings of their political system was unmatched anywhere else in Europe.9

The crisis of the Italian system of polarized consociationalism began in the second half of the 1970s. In 1976, the PCI joined the parliamen- tary majority supporting the fourth government formed by the DC’s Giulio Andreotti. As more voters began to find the DC-PCI divide less relevant, new parties began to win votes. These new parties, including several regional movements, gained support especially in the North, where urbanization and postwar prosperity had created a new middle class that no longer identified with either the Communist or the Catho- lic political subcultures, and increasingly turned away from associations with traditional party ties.10

Initially, the small regionalist movements that had begun forming in several regions in the North during the late 1970s were weak and poorly funded, with little voter support. After this slow start, the most success- ful appeared to be the Venetian League (LV) in the Veneto Region. Building on the comparatively strong cultural identity of Veneto, in the 1983 general election the LV won 4.2 percent of the vote in Veneto, enough to send a single deputy and a single senator to Rome.

Within a few years, however, the most popular regionalist organiza- tion was the Lombard League (LL) in the Lombardy Region. Under the leadership of Umberto Bossi, the LL gained ground year by year, send- ing Bossi himself to Rome as a senator in 1987 and winning almost half a million votes in the 1989 elections for the European Parliament. This success lifted the LL into a position of leadership among the northern regionalist groupings, which together commanded 3.7 percent of the vote across the entire North of Italy. In 1989, several of them coalesced around the LL to form the Northern League.

The rise of regionalism in the North upset the traditional regional balance within the established parties, which as late as 1979 had been able to sway the votes of nearly equal numbers of citizens north and south. To face the challenges posed, especially in the North, by new competitors and an increasingly unpredictable electorate, the governing

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parties took to handing out more and more resources as the national debt mounted.

When the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union collapsed, the inher- ently centrifugal logic of Italy’s full-bore PR system reasserted itself. Both the DC and the PCI (which officially embraced social democratic politics and renamed itself the Democratic Party of the Left, or PDS) found themselves hard-pressed to retain support as a number of smaller new parties claimed votes and parliamentary seats. In 1992, the DC and the PDS together won just under 46 percent of the national vote, down a full 25 percent from what they had managed just five years before. It was in the net-taxpaying North—not in the tax-absorbing and there- fore more party-dependent South—where the worst hemorrhaging took place. One consequence of this further alteration of the electoral geog- raphy was the formation, between 1992 and 1994, of governments that were increasingly southern-based, while two different oppositions, one regionalist and one leftist, controlled Northern and Central Italy, respectively.

The system that had dominated Italy since the late 1940s, however, did not come to an end just because of decreased polarization and the logic of PR. An additional factor was the process of European and mon- etary integration.11 By setting economic standards as a precondition for further integration, the European Community was putting severe limits on the use of lavish public spending as a means of building political support. The days of the growing public pie were over, and politicians from Italy’s established parties found themselves facing a hard choice: They could keep spending, which would hurt Italy’s fiscal standing within Europe, or they could cut back and watch their base erode even further from lack of feeding. On the whole, they chose the first option. Voters in the economically modern, net-taxpaying North saw this, and reacted accordingly. Distributional and territorial conflicts were over- l a p p i n g , o f f e r i n g n e w o p p o r t u n i t i e s f o r r e g i o n a l i s t p o l i t i c a l entrepreneurs. The LN capitalized on them by reinterpreting the classic themes of regionalism through its own brand of antiparty, anti-estab- lishment rhetoric. Boosted by massive public-corruption scandals implicating numerous figures from the traditional parties, the LN sky- rocketed. Federalism moved to the heart of the Italian political agenda.

Toward a Federal Republic?

The October 2001 referendum has been widely criticized for keeping the Senate in its current form, which denies the regions qua regions representation at the center.12 As of today, their only institutional chan- nel of influence is the consultative State-Regions Standing Committee, a body charged with coordinating the policies of the central govern- ment and those of the several regions, but in which the regions hold a

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clearly subordinate place. Thus the transformation of the Senate into a territorial chamber would appear to be a necessary complement to the recent constitutional amendment. At the same time, however, enacting this reform will not be easy: The current senators, many of whom will not be able to win seats in such a new-model Senate, must first vote to approve the change, in effect putting themselves out of work.

A second problematic aspect of the October reform package is the confusing way in which it distributes legislative powers. In part, this is due to the long list of areas in which the central government and the regions are given concurrent jurisdiction. This problem is common among federal systems, of course, and given the complexity of today’s policies, it is hard to see how even the clearest division of powers can prevent the actions of one level of government from affecting the oth- ers. But Italy’s October reforms may make matters more confusing than they have to be as a result of a clause in the newly amended Article 117 that grants the central government sweeping authority to determine the “essential” levels of civil and social rights to be guaranteed across all of Italy. This norm is clearly intended to avoid odious discrimination while assuring the same public services across the country. There will almost surely be conflicts over this clause. What exactly does “essential” mean? Can it vary from place to place, or must it be the same from Sicily to the Alps? What if, on the basis of this clause, the central government legis- lates on a concurrent matter in such a way as to preempt regional prerogatives?

This problem touches on another politically sensitive issue. In any federal system, disputes among levels of government are inevitable. Normally, the country’s highest judicial authority is the supreme arbi- ter. In Italy that means the 15-member Constitutional Court, as Article 134 stipulates. But the make-up of this Court could be a problem. Five of its judges are chosen by Parliament, five by the President of the Re- public (who is elected in and by the Parliament), and the remaining five by the whole body of the national judiciary, which is notoriously split into politicized factions. The regions have no role at all.

Despite the vital role that the Constitutional Court will doubtless play in shaping the future of Italian federalism, the prospects for reforming the manner in which it is appointed appear bleak. Substantial blocs of party opinion on the left and the right agree in their opposition to giving the regions any role in naming high-court judges. But if the Senate be- comes a true territorially based chamber, senatorial “advice and consent” regarding presidential nominees to the high court could perhaps be adopted as a compromise solution acceptable to all parties.

The last major shortcoming of the October 2001 reform package con- cerns the regions’ financial autonomy. While the reform package specifies how the central government will transfer resources to the fiscally weaker regions, it is not as clear how all these regions will ob-

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tain the financial autonomy that they will need in order to take on their new tasks. It is likely that the referendum’s drafters found this question too sensitive to resolve, and so retreated into ambiguity. Yet sooner or later a decision will have to be made about what regional financial au- tonomy is actually supposed to mean and look like. And upon this decision will hang much of the outcome of the current process of fed- eral reform.

Poised at the Halfway Mark

In the end, a candid observer must conclude that the October 2001 referendum is a half-measure. It moves the Italian Republic toward fed- eralism, but does not go all the way. The country finds itself in a halfway house. The center-left parties, meanwhile, find themselves in a quan- dary. Federalism is not their issue. The LN put it on the national agenda, with the center-left parties as somewhat reluctant bystanders. Their ini- tial stance toward federalism was highly critical (a posture also far from rare on the center-right).

The center-left government that drew up the October reform package and moved it through Parliament may have done so more because of federalism’s popularity than because of any principled commitment to federal reform. The traditional concern of the left is economic and so- cial equality, a goal that is easier to pursue under a unitary as opposed to a federal government. Federalism, after all, is one of the foremost institutional devices to secure the protection of liberty and the recogni- tion of diversity, ends that can be and often are in tension with the pursuit of economic and social equality.13

The “House of Freedom” coalition voted into office under Silvio Berlusconi in May 2001 is now the agent charged with implementing the changes mandated by the October referendum. This coalition ran on a promise to complete Italy’s transformation into a federal republic. Yet as of this writing in January 2002, the prospects for a turn to full-blown federalism remain uncertain. The Berlusconi government is about to present a new bill of constitutional reform that would give the regions, within the limits established by the Constitution and its enabling laws, the option to assume exclusive jurisdiction over large new areas of health, education, and law-enforcement policies.

This new bill promises to foster decentralization, but it leaves the shortcomings of the October referendum unremedied. Thus it does not promise to complete Italy’s journey to federalism. Rather, what seems interesting in this proposal, as compared to prior ones, is a twofold change of strategy.

First, by allowing but not requiring the regions to take on new pow- ers and responsibilities, this proposal seems to envision a system of asymmetrical federalism similar to Spain’s, in which those regions that

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want to acquire new powers and duties can opt in, while the others can opt out. Given the vast disparities of wealth and institutional endow- ment that exist among Italian regions, and the varied degrees of eagerness and wariness with which regional publics and politicians view the pros- pect of greater autonomy and responsibility, this type of optional devolution may well turn out to be a wise choice indeed.

Second, the minimalist character of this proposal suggests a deliber- ate strategy aimed at amending the Constitution through incremental changes rather than by means of a single comprehensive reform. This, too, could be a successful choice. As the experience of Canada teaches, a comprehensive constitutional-reform measure is an exceedingly diffi- cult thing to pass and implement. Then too, one should not overlook the possibility that the limits of Berlusconi’s federalism proposal reflect disagreements within his own coalition.

Despite the “House of Freedom” bill’s minimalist character, the op- position has criticized it as incompatible with the notion of equality enshrined in the Italian Constitution. Some opposition voices even com- plain that it is a high road to anarchy or even to the breakup of the country.14 Critiques have also come from the right-wing president of the Lazio Region. This confirms the wide divisions that exist over fed- eralism and suggests that, as with the October referendum, this bill—if it succeeds—will not have been wafted to passage on the gentle breeze of consensus, but instead will have been blown into legality by the fur- nace blast of heated public debate. Should this turn out to be the case, then it will become a matter of even more pressing urgency to reform the way in which Constitutional Court judges are chosen, and perhaps also the procedures that are used to amend the Constitution. Otherwise, Italians may wind up seeing their Constitution changed every time the parliamentary majority changes (without the regions playing any role at all).15

What Comes Next?

It is, of course, too early to offer anything like a full assessment of the federal reform that Italian voters enacted last autumn. Many of the changes have not even been implemented yet. By expanding the con- current jurisdiction of the regions and the central government and by reserving residual powers to the former, Italy’s voters have taken their country a big step away from unitary centralism. Yet Italy still does not have federalism, and large swaths of political opinion—particularly on the left—remain unreconciled to the prospect.

Thus further measures are needed if Italy is to evolve into a federal state. The new majority in Parliament, which came to power last May at least in part because of its support of federalism, is committed to putting forward such measures. Yet the types and degrees of federalist feeling

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evident among the parties that make up the new government vary enough to raise doubts about whether the Italian Republic’s journey toward fed- eralism will be completed any time soon. These doubts can only grow when one considers the Berlusconi government’s apparent belief that other issues, including foreign policy and internal justice, are more ur- gent than federalism. Yet the process may already have gathered enough momentum to ensure its final success, regardless of whatever inertial drag some of the parties may be able to exert. All things considered, the Berlusconi government’s strategy of incrementalism plus “opt-in” asym- metry seems like a good bet to succeed. And one thing is certain: Italy is a democracy, and the voters will have the final say. If their support for federalism remains strong and becomes more geographically widespread, the process of federal reform will be hard to stop. Even those parties (mostly but not exclusively on the left) that find the prospect of an Ital- ian Federal Republic ideologically unappealing would then have to make their peace with its advent.

NOTES

1. For a full list of which powers remain solely in the hands of the central govern- m e n t , g o t o w w w . p a r l a m e n t o . i t / p a r l a m / l e g g i / e l e l e t i p . h t m o r w w w . g o v e r n o . i t / sez_costituzione/2_titolo5.html. The main areas subject to concurrent jurisdiction are: regions’ international relations and relations with the EU; foreign trade; labor; educa- tion; professions; scientific research; public health; alimentation; sport organization; territorial governance; ports and airports; transportation and navigation networks; com- m u n i c a t i o n o r g a n i z a t i o n ; e n e r g y ; c o m p l e m e n t a r y a n d i n t e g r a t i v e p e n s i o n s ; harmonization of public budgets and coordination of public finance; promotion and organization of cultural activities; saving, rural, and regional banks.

2. Robert D. Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 121–62.

3. Lucy Riall, The Italian Risorgimento: State, Society, and National Unification (London: Routledge, 1994), 64. Adrian Lyttleton, “Shifting Identities: Nation, Region, and City,” in Carl Levy, ed., Italian Regionalism: History, Identity, and Politics (Ox- ford: Berg, 1996), 33.

4. Adrian Lyttleton, “Shifting Identities: Nation, Region, and City,” in Carl Levy, ed., Italian Regionalism, 33.

5. As recently as the 1990s, slightly less than a fifth of the population used Italian exclusively, and more than three-fifths switched between Italian and a local language according to the social setting. Moreover, 36 percent said that they never used standard Italian at home, as compared to 34 percent who spoke only Italian, and a remaining 30 percent who switched between standard Italian and a dialect in the family circle. See Anna L. Lepschy, Giulio Lepschy, and Miriam Voghera, “Linguistic Variety in Italy,” in Carl Levy, ed., Italian Regionalism, 69–80.

6. K.J. Holsti, The State, War, and the State of War (New York: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1996), 52.

7. See Roberto Biorcio, “La Lega Nord e la transizione italiana,” Rivista Italiana di Scienza Politica 29 (April 1999): 68–69.

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8. Istituto Centrale Statistica e Ministero per la Costituente, Compendio delle statistiche elettorali italiane dal 1848 al 1934 (Rome: Istituto Poligrafico dello Stato, 1947), 120–22. It is worth recalling that the meaning of Left and Right was at that time radically different from today’s.

9. Joseph La Palombara, “Italy: Fragmentation, Alienation, and Isolation,” in Lucian W. Pye and Sydney Verba, eds., Political Culture and Political Development (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965). Leonardo Morlino and Marco Tarchi, “The Dissatis- fied Society: The Roots of Political Change in Italy,” European Journal of Political Research 30 (July 1996): 41–63.

10. Dwayne Woods, “The Centre No Longer Holds: The Rise of Regional Leagues in Italian Politics,” West European Politics 15 (April 1992): 56–76.

11. Kenneth H.F. Dyson and Kevin Featherstone, “Italy and EMU as a ‘Vincolo Esterno’: Empowering the Technocrats, Transforming the State,” South European So- ciety and Politics 1 (Autumn 1996): 279–99.

12. The lack of a real territorial chamber complicates the workings of federalism, as widely illustrated by the literature on Canadian federalism. For example, see Richard Simeon, “Canada: Federalism, Language, and Regional Conflict,” in Ugo M. Amoretti and Nancy Bermeo, eds., Federalism and Territorial Cleavages (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming).

13. Daniel J. Elazar, Exploring Federalism (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 99–104.

14. For an example of this kind of full-throated denunciation from the center-left, see La Repubblica (Rome), 14 December 2001, 20–21.

15. In Italy, it should be recalled, a simple majority of Parliament can initiate a constitutional amendment, and a two-thirds majority can pass it without any need to go to the regions or the national electorate for ratification. As in all unitary states, the Constitution (Article 138) gives the regions no role at all in the process of constitu- tional amendment, while the voters do get a say if (as in the case of the October 2001 referendum) the amendment passes by less than a two-thirds majority of both houses of Parliament.