The Italian transition that never was

Abstract

The recent argument that the notion of ‘transition’ should be set aside in attempting to explain the trajectory of Italian politics in the past two decades is to be welcomed, but does not go far enough in explaining why we, as Italianists, got our case wrong and how exactly we might get our case right today. The transitional ‘myth’ was born and maintained despite growing evidence of its inherently problematic nature, in both conceptual and empirical terms. The concept of ‘transition’ needs more serious conceptual treatment and empirical application, but even with this work it is unlikely to be concluded that Italy is in transition. Freeing Italy and Italianists from this conventional wisdom, while, at the same time, not abandoning the idea that something exceptional happened to Italian politics in the early 1990s will help enrich the debate on the nature of the political change that Italy has experienced in the past 17 years.

Keywords:

• Transition
• Italy
• political change
• Italian politics
• Italian democracy

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank two of the journal's anonymous referees for their suggestions and the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Turin, where a Research Fellowship in 2010 allowed the completion of the article.

Notes

1. Indeed, it would be tempting to argue that Newell's ‘man that never was’ never had been for some of us. However, a trawl through my own work would reveal its inconsistencies on this front. My modest claim would be that I was an early sceptic (see Bull 1997, 1998).

2. Newell's argument, in fact, is made in the context of the 2008 elections, so it is not intended to be developed in a wider manner.

3. There is now a vast literature on the political changes since the early 1990s. For a flavour, see Caciagli et al. (1994), Bull and Rhodes (1997), and Bull and Rhodes (2009a).

4. And comparative political scientists (i.e. non-Italian specialists) were relatively quiet in commenting on the Italian case.

5. ‘As is well known, though often neglected and underestimated in its concrete consequences, the Italian regime has been in transition since 1993’ (Pasquino 2007, 277). See also Grilli di Cortona 2007). The exact date, however, was always open to question (see Pasquino 1997, 34 and note 2, 51–2).

6. Historians, of course, use ‘transition’ without concern for the time span, but the word has not been developed conceptually as it has in political science (see note 7 below).

7. Symptomatic of the persistence of this debate was the inclusion of ‘Second Republic’ in the third edition of David Robertson's Dictionary of modern politics, where he notes that ‘the phrase [“Second Republic”] has entered the terminology of political science. The idea that Italy is now living under a second constitution arises from the sense that the changes were so extreme as to amount to a peaceful revolution...’, even though ‘Technically there is no Second Republic’ (Robertson 2002, 254–45).

8. Of course, by implication, this suggests that much of the literature was a lot more casual in its use of transition. Indeed, ‘transition’ was often used quite loosely by political scientists (besides its use in other disciplines such as history) and echoed a tradition dating back to the 1970s (e.g. Lange and Tarrow 1979). Evidently, however, this would be no defence for those political scientists who have used the words to advance an argument that Italy is undergoing a transition to, or arrival at, a Second or Third Republic, without exploring the meaning of concepts such as ‘transition’ and ‘regime’.

9. Although he was also at pains to point out the differences and difficulties, arguing that other countries such as Spain and Central Eastern Europe should also be considered, and that ‘the Italian transition deserves to be treated in a comparative perspective in a very flexible way’ (Pasquino 1994, 2–5, 8; and Pasquino 2007).

10. See also Allum and Newell (2003, 181), where the title of first section of their article is ‘Italy's “uniqueness”’; and Fabbrini's ‘transition without transformation’ (2000) appears to have been constructed to capture the Italian case.

11. Which is not to say that viewing the Italian case on its own terms is always necessarily wrong (see Newell 2004) or that the Italian case might be seen as still ‘anomalous’ in other (related) terms (see, for example, Bull and Newell 2009).

12. On the difficulties arising from the profusion of concepts with qualifying adjectives see, for example, Armony and Schamis (2005) and Collier and Levitsky (1997).

13. This is not to question the value of much of this detailed research, only its implicit or explicit framing by an overall transitional paradigm. For a discussion of the problem, and an attempt to overcome it in relation to writing about the political system as a whole, see Bull and Newell (2005, 1–3 and ch. 1).

14. This is not to imply criticism of the way this sentence attempts to capture the Italian case (indeed, Newell and I used it in our book to help shape our approach – Bull and Newell 2005), or even of the phrase ‘of sorts’, which quite neatly captures the essential dilemma confronting Italianists in this period (for analogous use see Bull and Newell 1997).

15. This may explain why more recent attempts to capture the political change Italy has undergone since the early 1990s have focused as much on the ‘point of arrival’ as the ‘point of departure’ e.g. Morlino (2009) and Fabbrini (2009). On the one hand, these approaches give a clear sense of the type of ‘regime’ change to be expected; on the other hand, they run the risk of being (wittingly or unwittingly) associated with the logic of the ‘transitional’ approach, i.e. by using an ‘end-point’ to evaluate the change that has thus far occurred, there is an implicit assumption that future developments are likely to be in the same direction until that end-point is reached. Fabbrini (2009, 44) is fairly clear on this expectation, Morlino (2009, 24) argues that it is, in fact, impossible.

16. Some British specialists might even cite their own case based on the process under way following devolution.

17. Space permits only the introduction of these issues, not their development, which is for future work.

18. Pasquino's distinction between ‘challenges to the regime’ and ‘challenges to the performance of a regime’ and the outcomes they can produce (2001) provides a basis for exploring some of the issues outlined here.

19. For attempts in this direction see, for example, Morlino (2009) and Fabbrini (2009), which are based on ‘models of democracy’ (à la Lijphart).

20. For an excellent example which shows an awareness of the complexities at the sub-system level, see Bardi (2009).

21. For example, Calise (2006, 3, 12), besides arguing for the existence of a Third Republic, notes, at the same time, that Italy remains in transition.

22. The contrast with science is useful here to illuminate the argument. A biologist, for example, knows – from scientific analysis and repeated observation of the same process – that, once a chrysalis is formed, a butterfly will emerge. He or she also knows roughly how long this process will take and what are its chief characteristics. It is therefore entirely legitimate to describe a chrysalis as a ‘transitional’ state. Political scientists are not in a position to predict regime changes and outcomes with such certainty (I am grateful to one of the anonymous referees for drawing my attention to this comparison).

23. Inevitably, what follows is only an outline of the argument.

24. Moreover, while at one level all of this might appear to be a rather ‘closed’ and not very useful debate between Italianists about ‘transition’, it might also be suggested that this debate, in fact, exercised an influence on the high expectations generated about Italian politics in the 1990s, expectations which help explain the pessimism of the subsequent decade, when they were widely felt to have been dashed.