Taxpayers, Thieves, and the State: Fiscal Citizenship in Contemporary Italy

Abstract

As, burdened by its massive public debt, the Italian state nears the verge of default, the debate on taxation and distribution raging in this country's public sphere provides citizens with a means to conceptualize their responsibilities and rights vis-à-vis the state as well as each other. Italian fiscal citizenship thus emerges as an unstable relational category that is negotiated along and across the split between the rhetoric of fiscal and distributive fairness on the one hand, and its actual denial on the other. By fostering the breakdown of solidarity and the intensification of ethnic chauvinism, the failure to implement equity in taxation and distribution shows the extent to which the Italian state is implicated in the divisiveness of social categories that cast each other as an impediment to the fulfillment of their respective rights.

Keywords:

• State
• citizenship
• taxation and distribution
• universalism and particularism
• welfare and social rights
• Italy

Acknowledgements

I am deeply indebted to my anonymous reviewers as well as Jennifer Patico, Katherine Hankins, Faidra Papavasiliou, and Cristina Moretti for their detailed comments. An early version of this paper was presented at the Anthropology Seminar of Ca' Foscari University in Venice in May 2009; I am grateful to my Venetian colleagues and their graduate students for their valuable insights. Any errors and omissions are entirely my own.

Notes

http://www.beppegrillo.it/2006/07/chi_evade_le_ta_1/index.html#comments (accessed 25 March 2009).

‘Pressione fiscale, l'Italia sesta fra i paesi industrializzati’ (no author, Repubblica, 15 October 2008, at http://www.repubblica.it/2008/09/sezioni/economia/fisco-evasione/press-ocse/press-ocse.html (accessed 15 October 2008).

‘Niente voto agli evasori fiscali recidivi’, l'Espresso, 26 February 2009, at http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio//2059587 (accessed 19 May 2009).

‘Una lotteria per premiare chi segnala gli evasori’, l'Espresso 24 April 2009, at http://espresso.repubblica.it/dettaglio/premiare-chi-segnala-gli-evasori/2079925&ref=hpstr2 (accessed 12 May 2009).

Conservative leader Silvio Berlusconi owns the majority of Italy's private television channels. When he serves as Prime Minister (which, at the time of writing in 2010, he has already done three times), Berlusconi also exercises a tight control on Italy's three public television channels.

Agitating the specter of ethnic divisions as he panders to his North Italian electorates, Bossi often inveighs against a ‘Roman’ state administration that has been allegedly co-opted by Southern Italians. As a deft tax minimizer (Maurer 2007) who has managed to recast fiscal avoidance as a form of prudent financial management (Palan 2003:67), Berlusconi, instead, has opted for an only slightly less inflammatory rhetoric, occasionally reminding his electorate that it is ‘normal’ for overtaxed citizens to exercise the option of evasion.

This article is based on informal conversations, participant observation, and semi-structured interviews with 31 fixed-income and self-employed taxpayers. Several of the interviews spanned many sessions over a number of years. Fieldwork for this project was conducted in Genoa, a northwestern city hosting a heterogeneous mosaic of perspectives that speak to several of the many threads running through contemporary Italian political discourse. Known as ‘il meridione del nord’ (the south of northern Italy) for the comparatively high unemployment and poverty rates that ensued from its de-industrialization in the late 1970s, Genoa is a historically blue-collar, and now largely tertiarized, city (Cavalli 1965; Arvati 1988). Its electorate is predominantly left-leaning; however, conservative parties can count on vocal supporters, whom they recruit mainly among the local bourgeoisie, professionals, and business owners as well as disgruntled former communists. While I am well aware of the lack of a unified ‘Italian’ stance on the state (Agnew 2002), my inevitably local, and inevitably situated engagement seeks to highlight some standpoints as well as discursive contributions to the narratives of the social contract that crisscross the peninsula, frequently converging even as they interrupt each other. Following Gupta's (1995:214) close attention to the mediatized contexts through which the state is discursively constructed, my analysis also includes an exploration of relevant Italian media: especially, though not exclusively, the interactive arenas provided by internet blogs and forums.

Framed as a failure of solidarity and trust, the focus on the lack of cohesiveness in Italian society is a theme that, historically, has characterized much US-based liberal scholarship inspired by a blend of Tocquevillean principles, modernization theory, and a good dose of ethnocentrism. Operating from within this paradigm, US political scientists like Banfield (1958), Almond and Verba (1963), and Putnam (1993) have described Italy (especially the south) as the cradle of a lethargic, familistic, and uncooperative citizenry. Theirs is the portrait of a particularistic, (un)civil society that is strikingly unable to pick itself up by the bootstraps and rise to the heights of US advancement: not enough associationism, thus goes the diagnosis, and not enough mutual trust (see also Fukuyama 1995). What is remarkable about these studies is that the Italian state, in their narratives, is either absent (Banfield 1958; Almond & Verba 1963), or it is a somewhat marginal player that awaits the awakening of an associational civil society capable of fending for itself (Putnam 1993).

For recent journalistic reports on political corruption, conflict of interests, nepotism and clientelism in Italy, see Rizzo and Stella (2007), Rizzo (2010), as well as the works by investigative journalist Marco Travaglio.

Even though an in-dept ethnography of the bureaucratic experience is beyond the scope of this article, it should suffice here to mention that, as they go about their everyday life, Italian citizens are required to engage in a thick traffic of documents meant to prove anything from their ‘existence in life’ (esistenza in vita) to their ‘healthy and robust constitution’ (sana e robusta costituzione). Engulfed in the task of interpreting and applying a body of 150,000 laws (Foot 2003:76–99), the public administration keeps implementing the authoritarian Fascist theodicy (Herzfeld 1993) of the primacy of the state over the society it is called to regulate (Cassese 1998:59). In turn, exasperated citizens may respond by seeking to bend the rules with the help of well-connected friends and patrons (Pardo 1996).

The Italian state's contradictory stand on the practice of evasion among Italy's self-employed dates back to the 1980s: this is when, as Italy's industrial sector kept withering, the ensuing proliferation of small businesses and family firms seemed to be a viable solution to rising unemployment rates (Cantaro 1990:32; McCarthy 1995:125–6; Ginsborg 2003:50–1). Trickling in from Ronald Reagan's America and Margaret Thatcher's UK, the North Atlantic rhetoric about the benefits of an unbridled free market (Harvey 2005:7–8) persuaded subsequent Italian governments that a lenient approach in the face of less than transparent business practices would benefit the Italian economy, and hence society as a whole (Cantaro 1990; Ginsborg 2003). Since then, tax evasion among business owners and professionals has reached record levels (Sani 1989; Ferrera 1996; Ginsborg 2003; Koenig Archibugi 2003).

The town name is fictional.

As of 7 April 2010, the site had collected information on evasion that amounted to €17,524,372.11.

‘Nemmeno un Euro all'Abruzzo, ho gia’ dato'. Il Secolo XIX, 18 April 2009.

http://informazionesenzafiltro.blogspot.com/2009/04/ma-io-per-il-terremoto-non-do-nemmeno.html; http://www.siciliainformazioni.com/giornale/cronaca/49168/terremoto-larticolo-giacomo-girolamo.htm, http://politicaesocieta.blogosfere.it/2009/04/terremoto-in-abruzzo-su-facebook-zero-euro-giacomo-di-girolamo-e-labuso-di-solidarieta.html, http://blogosfere.it/2009/04/giacomo-di-girolamo-un-terremoto-su-facebook-labruzzo-dellabuso-di-solidarieta.html, http://www.comedonchisciotte.org/site/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=5782; http://www.cloroalclero.com/?p=794 (accessed 21 April 2009).

Aside from resonating with a Keynesian culture of rights, Di Girolamo's words were taken all the more seriously since writer Saviano (2006), who had been forced to go into hiding after publishing his Gomorra report on organized crime in Naples, cautioned from the pages of national daily Repubblica that the criminal organization known as camorra was already poised to intercept the public aid meant for the reconstruction of Abruzzi (‘La ricostruzione a rischio clan. Ecco il partito del terremoto’, by Roberto Saviano, 14 April 2009, at http://www.repubblica.it/2009/04/sezioni/cronaca/sisma-aquila-5/saviano/saviano.html (accessed 21 April 2009). The warning sounded realistic, since camorra had already been able to profiteer greatly from the reconstruction process that had taken place after the 1980 earthquake in Irpinia (Cento Bull & Gilbert 2001; Chubb 2002).

At the dawn of unification, a modicum of social protection was exercised through Church charities and Socialist associationism. At the turn of the twentieth century, Prime Minister Giovanni Giolitti established the first principles of welfare for the sake of integration as well as social control. Later on, the Fascist state expanded its grip on society by granting benefits to select social and occupational categories (Ferrera 1984; Van Kerserberger 1995; Quine 2002).

‘Indovina chi é l'ultimo?’ http://leganordbasilicatamanifestievolantini.blogspot.com/, also at http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/politics/, (‘Lega Nord’). Both sites were accessed on 21 April 2009.

In 2008, a similar kind of revanchism was also successfully tapped by conservative politician Daniela Santanché. After leaving the post-Fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, Santanché created a new conservative party (La Destra-Fiamma Tricolore: The Right – Tricolor Flame) whose platform included, among others, ‘national preference … in schools of any grade, starting with daycare and kindergarten’, as well as in the assignment of public housing. In the parliamentary elections of April 2008, Santanché's Destra earned 2.4% of the electorate – not a small feat for a party that was just a few weeks old. See ‘Programma elettorale’ at http://www.danielasantanche.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/programma_elettorale.pdf (accessed 15 February 2009).

The difference in the discourse on public health care in Italy and the USA is a case in point. At the time of writing, for example, that of a potential tax hike is one of the many deterrents that Republican Party activists are using in order to undermine support for the expansion of the health care system in the USA. Conversely, most Italian conservatives never question the need for public health care. What they seek to do, instead, is to deny access to immigrants for the sake of conserving resources for those whom they regard as legitimate users.

As Ide and Steinmo (2009) pointed out, lack of trust in how a state spends taxpayers' moneys is likely to undermine consent to the fiscal contract.