by Tim Parks
True Scandal
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[Niccolò Machiavelli]
HE IS STILL a scandal. Yet to read Machiavelli is also and always to take a very deep breath of fresh air, and that despite the almost 500 years that have elapsed since he wrote The Prince. How can these conflicting reactions coincide? The fresh and bracing air blows, no doubt, from our immediate sense that this man is telling the truth about realities normally sugared over with rhetoric. The scandal lies in the fact that Machiavelli himself is not scandalised by the bitter truth he tells.
The very idea behind The Prince overturns any official hierarchy of values, whether ancient or modern. Machiavelli decides to give us a manual not of how a prince, or political leader, should behave, but how he must behave if he wishes to hold on to power. Every action will be judged with reference to that one goal. Power thus becomes, at least for the prince, an absolute value. There is no talk of man’s soul. There is no question of power’s being sought in order to carry out some benevolent programme of reform. The good of the people is not an issue, or even a side issue. The prince must hold on to power … e basta.
Societies and military strategies, individual and collective psychologies are rapidly and efficiently analysed. A wide variety of possible circumstances are established and enquired into. Examples are given from classical literature and recent history. The aim is never to savour the achievements of a given culture, to assess the attractions or otherwise of this or that political system, the balance of weal and woe under this or that regime: what we need to know is how, in each specific situation, a prince can best consolidate his authority and security. The underlying assumption is that, whatever may have been written in the past, political leaders have always put power first and foremost, and indeed that any other form of behaviour would be folly.
The scandal of the book is not felt in its famous general statements: that the end justifies the means; that nothing is so self-defeating as generosity; that men must be pampered or crushed; that there is no surer way of keeping possession of a territory than by devastation. It is easy to imagine these formulations arising from the transgressive glee of the talented writer who simply enjoys turning the world upside down.
No, it is when Machiavelli gives concrete examples and then moves on rapidly without comment that we begin to gasp: the Venetians find that their mercenary leader Carmagnola is not really fighting hard any more, but they are afraid that if they dismiss him he will walk off with some of the territory he previously captured for them: ‘So for safety’s sake, they were forced to kill him.’1
Hiero of Syracuse, when given command of his country’s army, ‘realised that the mercenaries they had were useless … It seemed to him impossible either to keep them or to disband them, so he had them all cut to pieces.’2
Cesare Borgia, having tamed and unified the Romagna with the help of the cruel minister Remirro De Orco, decides to deflect the people’s hatred by putting the blame on the minister and then doing away with him: ‘one morning, Remirro’s body was found cut in two pieces on the piazza at Cesena with a block of wood and a bloody knife beside it. The brutality of this spectacle kept the people of the Romagna for a time appeased and stupefied.’3
Borgia then consolidates his position by ‘destroying all the families of the rulers he had despoiled’.4 ‘I cannot possibly censure him’, Machiavelli concludes, because ‘he could not have conducted himself other than the way he did.’5
This sense of coercion, of there being simply no alternative to brutal and murderous behaviour, is central to Machiavelli’s at once pessimistic yet strangely gung-ho vision. It involves the admission that there is a profound mismatch between the qualities that we actually appreciate in a person – generosity, loyalty, compassion, modesty – and the qualities that bring political success – calculation and ruthlessness. As Machiavelli sees it, this mismatch occurs because people in general are greedy, short-sighted and impressionable and must be treated accordingly if a leader is to survive. ‘I know everyone will agree’, he concedes, ‘that it would be most laudable if a prince possessed all the qualities deemed to be good among those I have enumerated, but, because of conditions in the world, princes cannot possess those qualities …’6
Since the modern English reader of Machiavelli has largely been brought up on a rationalist, utilitarian philosophy which ties itself in knots to demonstrate that, given the right kind of government, self-interest, collective interest and Christian values can all be reconciled, it is something of a relief to come across a writer who wastes no time with such utopian nonsense. Yet though Machiavelli never actually welcomes the world’s awfulness and certainly never rejoices in cruelty, our own upbringing prompts us to feel that he should at least have seemed to be a little shocked by it all.
Seeming is an important issue in The Prince. Given that moral qualities are no longer to be taken as guides for correct behaviour, what then is their importance? They become no more than attractions. It is attractive when a man is compassionate, generous and modest. It is attractive when a man keeps his word and shows loyalty to friends. We are in the realm of aesthetics, not moral imperatives. And what is attractive, of course, can be manipulated as a tool of persuasion. So even if a prince is actually better off without certain moral qualities, he should appear to have them, because people will be impressed. In particular, he should appear to be devout in his religious beliefs. ‘The common people are always impressed by appearances and results’7 Machiavelli tells us. But he leaves us in no doubt that if you have to choose between the two, what matters is the result.
One of the great pleasures of reading and rereading The Prince is the way it prompts us to assess contemporary politicians and the wars of our own time in the light of Machiavelli’s precepts and examples. To read The Prince in the 1980s was to have Thatcher and Reagan very much on one’s mind, to think about American interference in Nicaragua, about the British adventure in the Falklands, as Machiavelli might have thought of them. Returning to the book in 2006, the reader is struck by how many of his observations could be applied directly to the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, or indeed to many other such enterprises. This for example would seem applicable to any post-invasion situation:
a prince is always compelled to injure those who have made him the new ruler, subjecting them to the troops and imposing the endless other hardships which his new conquest entails. As a result you are opposed by all those you have injured … and you cannot keep the friendship of those who have put you there. You cannot satisfy them in the way they had taken for granted, yet you cannot use strong medicine on them as you are in their debt. For always, no matter how powerful one’s armies, to enter a conquered territory one needs the good will of the inhabitants.8
Future readers, no doubt, will have other wars to think of as they turn the pages of The Prince. That fact alone is a sad confirmation of Machiavelli’s understanding of international politics. Yet after the obvious parallels have been made and we have marvelled at how applicable this Renaissance writer’s precepts still are, the further surprise is our growing awareness that, like it or not, the way we judge the wars of our times is indeed ‘Machiavellian’. Would we be so critical of Suez, of Vietnam, of Iraq, if those adventures had succeeded? Wouldn’t we rather begin to think of them as we think about Korea, or the Falklands? We do not, that is, judge the action in and for itself on a moral basis, but for the consequences it produces. Which is the same as saying that for us, as for Machiavelli, the end justifies the means.
‘The wish to acquire more’, The Prince laconically reminds us, ‘is admittedly a very natural and common thing; and when men succeed in this they are always praised rather than condemned. But when they lack the ability to do so and yet want to acquire more at all costs, they deserve condemnation for their mistakes.’9
If there is a difference between ourselves and Machiavelli in this regard, it is that he remembers to condemn the adventurers for their mistakes, while most of us prefer the comfort
of a moral high ground, imagining that we would have condemned the adventure even had it been successful.
Are we then simply to accept Machiavelli lock, stock and barrel? In many ways he presents us with the same problem as the lesser known but even more disturbing Max Stirner who in The Ego and His Own (1845) extended the amoral Machiavellian power struggle into the life of every individual, rejecting the notion that there could be any moral limitation on anyone’s behaviour. For Stirner the only question a person must ask before doing what he wants or taking what he desires is: do I have the power to get away with this or not?
Certainly it would be foolish not to be warned by what Machiavelli has to tell us about politicians and politics in general. We must thank him for his clear-sightedness. Yet a charming ingenuity in The Prince allows us at least to imagine a response to what appears to be a closed and largely depressing system of thought. Why did Machiavelli publish the book?
Ostensibly written in the attempt to have Lorenzo de’ Medici give him a position in the Florentine government, The Prince is obviously self-defeating. Who would ever employ as his minister a man who has gone on record as presenting politics as a matter of pure power? If Machiavelli himself remarked that leaders gain from appearing to have a refined moral sense and strong religious belief, why did he not at least hint at these qualities in himself, or find some moral camouflage for his work, or put the book in Lorenzo’s hands for private consultation only?
The answer has to be that as he was writing Machiavelli allowed himself to be seduced by the desire to tell the truth come what may, a principle which thus, at least for him, in this text, takes on a higher value than the quest for power. And in exposing the amoral nature of politics he actually and rather ironically threatens the way the political game is played. If it has not been possible, for example, for our contemporary armed forces in the West simply to lay waste to the various countries they have recently invaded, that may, in some tiny measure, be due to the kind of awareness that Machiavelli stimulated with this book, not in princes, perhaps, but in their subjects.
A Model Anomaly
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[Silvio Berlusconi and Italian Politics]
OVER EVERY DEBATE about Italian politics hovers the tyranny of the model. Italy is out of line. ‘The Funding of Political Parties and Control of the Media: Another Italian Anomaly’,1 proclaims the title of one essay in an annual round-up of developments in the bel paese produced by the Istituto Cattaneo, a private political think tank in Bologna. ‘The End of Italy’s Referendum Anomaly?’ enquires another. And yet another: ‘Towards a New Political Economy for a “Normal country”?’
The model, or normality, that Italy falls short of has a moral value. It is the morality of the modern Western democracy. So anomaly is also scandal: ‘In any other country of the European Union,’ claims Elio Veltri in the introduction to L’odore dei soldi (The Smell of Money), a book written to show that Silvio Berlusconi is a crook, ‘the facts we describe would lead to a political earthquake. At the very least those responsible would be forced to quit the political scene. But in Italy this is not the case.’2
Fortunately, it turns out that our Western model is not merely abstract, or invented, but a state of affairs to which humanity, or history, naturally tends. Italy is thus frequently seen as being on the way to, or even on the brink of, normality (sometimes revealingly described, by the authoritative historian of Italy, Denis Mack Smith, for example, as ‘maturity’). The decision of the Italian Communist Party, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to change its name to the Partito Democratico della Sinistra (The Left-wing Democratic Party) and later just Democratici di sinistra (Democrats of the Left) could thus be interpreted as part of a process of ‘normalisation’.3 The world need no longer feel, as it had since 1948, that one of Italy’s major political parties was unelectable. On the other hand, Tangentopoli, the network of political corruption whose unmasking in the early 1990s destroyed the main parties of the centre right, was a step back: no sooner had the left become legitimate than the parties traditionally opposed to it vanished. ‘Italy’s “exceptionalism”,’ comments the book Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy, ‘which had been thrown out by political analysts, was thus fully reinstated by sociologists, historians and social anthropologists’ who put the blame on ‘a persisting culture of familism and particularism’.4
In this Hegelian interpretation of the world, the scandal of the anomaly is not, then, just its deviation from the proper model, but, more precisely, the extent to which it obstructs the beneficent historical process that will one day bestow on every country a parliamentary democracy with strong and morally admirable political groupings who alternate in honest government according to the sovereign will of the people. The most recent such spoke in history’s wheels is Silvio Berlusconi. ‘Berlusconi’, wrote the respected journalist Indro Montanelli in Corriere della Sera, ‘is the millstone that paralyses Italian politics.’5 ‘Why Silvio Berlusconi is unfit to lead Italy’ proclaimed The Economist’s cover headline shortly before the Italian elections of 2001. The leader article began: ‘In any self-respecting democracy it would be unthinkable …’6 etc. etc.
After more than twenty-five years living in Italy – years in which we have interminably been told that the country is about to become normal – it seems to me that this way of approaching Italian politics, prevalent both in Italy and abroad and so seductive in its simplicity, is entirely unhelpful. It is thus reassuring to find that Social Identities and Political Cultures in Italy, the only one of the books under review that draws on interviews with voters in an attempt to understand the relationship between their voting choices and their lives, comes to the conclusion that ‘Reassessing the degree of change (but also of continuity) in Italy’s social identities and political cultures also means reassessing concepts of modernity and modernisation.’7 And again: ‘Solutions which may appear ideally suited to the Italian case … can easily backfire.’8 There is, in short, no ideal model towards which history tends. Or not in Italy.
L’odore dei soldi was tossed like a hand grenade into the Italian election campaign of 2001, when, on 14 March, its author, Marco Travaglio, was interviewed on Satyricon, an ‘experimental’ programme produced by public TV and famous for having plumbed new depths of bad taste when a pretty model slipped her red panties from under her dress to offer them as a gift to the show’s presenter, Daniele Luttazzi. On another occasion guests were given chocolates in the form of turds. Two months before election day, Travaglio claimed to have discovered a lost, indeed suppressed, TV interview with the murdered anti-mafia magistrate Paolo Borsellino which spoke of relations between Berlusconi and the mafia. The burden of Travaglio’s book is that the Berlusconi fortune is based on dirty money and hence, quite apart from the problem of his ownership of three of the seven national TV channels, he is unelectable. ‘You’re a courageous man in this shit of a country,’9 Luttazzi told the writer.
In the days following the programme, L’odore dei soldi soared up the bestseller list. The Berlusconi camp claimed that this was further proof that the three public channels were biased towards the government and the left. There were calls to boycott the television tax that funds the public channels (despite the fact that these channels also carry advertising). The commission that assesses the fairness of TV programmes during an election campaign agreed that the rules had been broken and suspended Satyricon for a week. Despite the furore, there was almost no debate about the content of the book.
It is not hard to understand why. L’odore dei soldi opens with an attempt to establish that Berlusconi is connected to the Sicilian mafia. In the early 1970s, while still a young man embarked on a career of property development in Milan, he gave employment, on the advice of his Sicilian assistant Marcello Dell’Utri, to a certain Vittorio Mangano who was to be gardener at the Berlusconi villa and possibly a horse breeder (horse breeding is apparently mafia jargon for drug smuggling). Mangano was later fired when suspected of being resp
onsible for a number of thefts and even of trying to organise the kidnap of a rich guest. Later still, it turned out he was a member of a mafia family.
Travaglio floats the idea that it was through the mafia and the person of Mangano that Berlusconi acquired the finance to start his business. There are long quotations from various pentiti (those mafia members who have decided to collaborate with the magistrates) that support this interpretation. At the end of the opening section we are given the interview, just four pages, with magistrate Borsellino, an interview that, far from being suppressed, was published in the popular magazine Espresso in April 1994 (shortly after Berlusconi entered the political arena) and shown on public television. It is unremarkable. To the key question ‘It has been said that he [Mangano] worked for Berlusconi’, Borsellino replies: ‘I wouldn’t know what to say about that … even if I must make clear that, as a magistrate, I’m reluctant to talk of things I’m not certain of …’ ‘There is an ongoing investigation though?’10 ‘I do know that there is an ongoing investigation.’
There are some frequently used Italian words which may be useful here for conveying the effect of the stories told in Travaglio’s book: polverone (a great cloud of dust) is the confusion generated by extravagant and hotly contested versions of the same ambiguous incident; fantapolitica refers to fantastic, scandalous, usually paranoid accounts of what is going on in political life; dietrologia (behind-the-scenesology) is the obsessive study or invention of fantapolitica and of the way life is pilotata, secretly and illegally manipulated (by one’s enemies); insabbiare (to clog in the sand) describes the process by which an overwhelming quantity of red herrings (often provided by mafia pentiti) and/or red tape can lead to a criminal investigation’s being archiviato, filed away and forgotten.