by John Hooper
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.
Where this culture of reciprocal favors mixes with the prevalence of favoritism and nepotism is in the raccomandazione, also known as a spintarella and by various other, more innocent-sounding names such as an indicazione or segnalazione. In its widest sense, a raccomandazione can cover any intervention by one person with another on behalf of a third. There are plenty of more or less innocuous examples: the mayor who calls a local garage, for example, to ensure the son of a friend who has just arrived in town gets good service at a fair price. Significantly less innocuous is the widespread practice of influential people intervening on behalf of their relatives, associates or clients to get them moved up hospital waiting lists or given preferential access to public housing.
So ubiquitous is the raccomandazione in this wider sense that politicians sometimes openly admit to practicing it. It has even been endorsed, albeit somewhat grudgingly, in a sentence of the Supreme Court. The judges declared, “The search for a raccomandazione is now so deeply rooted in custom and practice as to appear in the eyes of most people to be an indispensable instrument, not only for obtaining that to which they have a right, but for restoring an acceptable degree of functionality to inefficient public services.”
In its narrower and more commonly used sense, raccomandazione applies to the procuring of jobs. There was a time when this too was pretty innocent. Indeed, it could be argued that until the 1960s the system of raccomandazioni made a positive contribution to labor mobility and making Italy into a fairer, more meritocratic society. Typically, a villager who had decided to seek work elsewhere would turn to the parish priest or mayor for a raccomandazione that could be presented to prospective employers. This would say that he or she was of good character, with no criminal record, and would perhaps add some other details. It was what today would be called a character reference. In some cases, the raccomandazione might be addressed to someone with whom the priest or local official had influence. But for the most part the only possible exercise of power was negative—the local priest or mayor could deny a raccomandazione to someone either out of spite or because of a genuine conviction that he or she was undeserving.
As the parties gradually emerged as the most powerful institutions in Italian society, it was politicians who emerged as the key raccomandatori. In a society where now not only the jobs but the job seekers were largely urban, Christian Democrat bigwigs replaced parish priests as the key arbiters of who was, or was not, worthy of being hired. Several had assistants whose sole task was to collate requests for raccomandazioni and decide whether they should be acted upon. Giulio Andreotti’s sidekick Franco Evangelisti was a legendary dispenser of patronage on behalf of his master.
But the criteria that he and others like him applied were significantly different from those that had been used, or were meant to have been used, by priests and local officials. The key requisite for getting employment was no longer moral rectitude or the absence of a criminal record, but loyalty to a particular party. What is more, in pretty much every case, the politician or his assistant—unlike the rural priests and police chiefs who once handed out raccomandazioni—had the means with which to exert overwhelming influence on the person who was in a position to provide the job or favor requested.
The Clean Hands investigation curbed drastically the power of the parties. But politicians continue to dole out patronage in the form of raccomandazioni, as do a slew of interest groups. Various surveys in recent years have concluded that up to half of all Italians owe their jobs to raccomandazioni. One of the most detailed investigations was carried out by a publicly funded employment research body, Isfol.5 It found that 39 percent of those interviewed had gotten their jobs through contacts of some kind—relatives, friends, acquaintances or existing employees of the firm. Another 20 percent had found work in the public sector by way of open competition. But what stood out in the results of the poll was how few Italians had used the recruitment channels that are considered normal in other societies. Only 16 percent had found their jobs by writing in with a CV, while a mere 3 percent had responded to advertisements in the press.
Some years ago, the newsmagazine L’Espresso discovered that the Italian postal service kept a database specifically for raccomandazioni, complete with the names of the raccomandati and their corresponding raccomandatori. Among the latter was a Vatican cardinal.
Raccomandazioni are inherently unfair. They stand in the way of a more meritocratic society and spread demoralization. I personally know Italians who have worked hard at their jobs only to be overtaken—or, in some cases, supplanted—by raccomandati. In one instance, the raccomandata who led to my acquaintance’s dismissal was the mistress of the incoming chief executive.
Raccomandazioni lead to people being put into jobs for which they are unqualified. They lead to contr
acts being placed with companies that are not the best suited to fulfilling them. They shut out foreign investment. And they encourage corruption: someone who owes his or her livelihood to the munificence of another is in no position to refuse if that other person one days asks for an illicit, or maybe even illegal, favor.
Corruption also holds back the economy and keeps Italians poorer than they need be—a point overlooked by those Italians who shrug at the mention of graft. Just to take one example, a country in which the cost of bribes is routinely added to public contracts is one that is going to have to raise that much extra in the form of taxes. That in turn reduces disposable incomes, lowers consumption, cuts demand and thus limits growth. Corruption deters competition, making the economy less productive and efficient.
Evaluating the cost of graft is an even more hazardous enterprise than making international comparisons. But according to the latest estimates of Italy’s national audit court, corruption costs Italy enough to meet the entire cost of the interest payments on its vast public debts. Ironically, they themselves are, at least in part, the outcome of excess government spending intended to generate tangenti.
If we accept Transparency International’s view that in the 2000s Italy became steadily more corrupt relative to other countries, there are three possible explanations. One is that the other countries became progressively less corrupt while Italy remained the same. A second explanation—a variation on the same theme—is that Italy improved, but that elsewhere in the world the improvement was greater. And finally there is the possibility that Italy simply became more corrupt during those years. Unfortunately, there are reasons for thinking that this last explanation may be the correct one.