In the currently desolate global political panorama, largely bereft of leaders with vision or values, it is tempting to look to the past for more authoritative political exemplars. This carries its own danger. While faraway hills are almost inevitably greener, there is a danger, as historian AJP Taylor once remarked, of taking “the characters of the past too seriously” and blowing them up “beyond their deserts”. The figure at the centre of this book, Alcide De Gasperi, is one figure, however, who has not been given his just place in the 20th-century European pantheon of political leaders.
Mark Gilbert’s Italy Reborn: From Fascism to Democracy fixes that. It is an eloquent and readable book that needed to be written. Perhaps for the first time, in a full-length English language volume, many lazy stereotypes about 20th-century Italy are successfully challenged. Gilbert’s book is a meticulously documented revisionist work that rehabilitates the reputation of De Gasperi, the Christian Democrat statesman who, in the decade between 1945 and 1953, laid the foundations for a modern Italy based on a functioning and enduring democracy in which 90 per cent of the population exercised the right to vote.
He also led his country away from the allure of communism (the Italian communists were being heavily financed from Moscow and enjoyed huge popularity in many areas) and positioned his country in a European context, playing a key role with his friend and ally Konrad Adenauer in creating the conditions that would lead to the creation of the European Economic Community and eventually, the European Union, with Italy as one of the founding states.
More often than not, if we look to influential Italian leaders of the 20th century, most eyes turn to the most negative and destructive of figures, Benito Mussolini. Few, too few, look to De Gasperi, the Italian leader who more than any other took on the burden of lifting Italy out of the horrors, the economic and moral bankruptcy of Mussolini’s disastrous “ventennio”, of leading a fragile government through the months of the Constituent Assembly which delivered a constitution that enshrined democratic values and important social reform aspirations in record time and in eloquent yet functional language. The constitution served and continues to serve as a powerful antidote against any fascist or authoritarian leanings while also being an inspirational and inclusive framework within which the state, centre and periphery, functions.
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Following a referendum which approved the abolition of the monarchy, De Gasperi immediately showed his mettle and compelled the king to stand down. As presidente del consiglio (prime minister), despite having only a fragile majority, he also introduced serious and lasting economic measures, including important land and social reforms, and measures – through Einaudi – that got inflation under control and guaranteed the value of the lira. These and other measures would transform Italy from post-Mussolini ruin and pariah status into a successful industrial and popular nation, a functioning market economy, at the heart of Europe.
De Gasperi is a figure that would be uncomfortable in today’s panorama, where politics is reduced to personality and soundbite and has little long-term vision. Born in 1881 in Trentino, in what was then part of Austro-Hungary, he was a fluent German speaker and a devout Catholic who led the Italian Popular party before being imprisoned by Mussolini. He was measured and incisive, no great orator, a practical man of undoubted probity who he did not shy away from difficult decisions.
To win American political support and substantial financial aid, he had to break with communist leader Palmiro Togliatti, after an initial period in which they coalesced to guarantee the passage from dictatorship to democracy. He later refused to enter a coalition with the Movimento Sociale Italiano – the neo-fascist MSI – much to the irritation of Pope Pius XII, who feared the rise of communism in the country.
In Gilbert’s words, De Gasperi walked “a tightrope” with “the Americans jerking the rope”. Yet he managed, through state investment, to kickstart “the miracolo economico that put 10 million scooters and a million Fiat mini-cars on the roads and made Italy one of Europe’s most dynamic countries within a decade”, the home of the dolce vita of 1950 and 1960s Rome.
Like so many great political careers, De Gasperi’s ended in failure. He overreached in 1953 in hammering through an electoral law to try to guarantee that the centrist parties would hold power. It was a giant misstep, as he himself soon acknowledged. His health was by now compromised and he would die, out of office, within a matter of months.
Seen from a longer perspective, however, De Gasperi’s importance cannot be overstated. The solid rules enshrined under his watch somewhat limited the damage caused by infinitely inferior political successors in the decades that followed, decades initially dominated by his sidekick, Giulio Andreotti, and later by Silvio Berlusconi in which clientelism was the order of the day. As Gilbert writes: “The house of Italy’s democracy must and would have crumbled during the upheaval of the past three decades, had it not been built on solid foundations.”
No one more than De Gasperi was responsible for the solidity of the foundations.
John McCourt is rector, University of Macerata
