Amici come prima? Italy and Germany in times of crisis

ABSTRACT

This introduction justifies the decision to focus on Italo-German relations – and in particular on the way in which prejudices and stereotypes affect them – in light of a long history of parallel political and economic development of the two countries and the central role that they are likely to play in the next phase of European integration. After briefly presenting the chapters that compose the special issue, the introduction dwells on the importance of analysing both bilateral and transnational relations at EU level as they reciprocally influence the role that these two major EU member states may play in Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Italy
• Germany
• prejudices
• stereotypes
• Europe
• crisis

Introduction

The main goal of this special issue is to reflect on the alterations produced during the crisis years (2007–2017) in the political systems of Italy and Germany and the mutual dependencies that have developed between the two countries, looking at various historical, institutional and political factors. This will help us reconstruct a descriptive map of the magnitude of the change in political mood, broadly conceived, and allow us to advance some theoretical implications concerning the likely impact that this change may have on bilateral as well as transnational and supranational relations in Europe.

The distinct analytical frames offered by each of the contributions to this special issue propose a series of stimulating arguments regarding: 1) the extent to which the Great Recession of the past decade and its differentiated impact have been responsible, in Germany and Italy, for populist reactions and anti-system stances; 2) whether the mass and elite reactions to the policy measures taken to counter the crisis have changed relations between Italy and Germany and their perceptions of each other, and 3) whether the changed perceptions and relations put at risk the process of European integration which so critically depends upon strong collaborative ties between these two countries. More specifically, we ask whether we can attribute the current difficulties to the resurrection of national prejudices and stereotypes, and thus explain the sources and dynamics of the current European crisis, by reference to their mediating influence. We are afraid that, if the European Union was meant to shelve once and for all the prejudices and stereotypes that were forged and periodically reinforced in Europe during centuries of internecine wars, the recent crises – in the plural to denote, among others, the refugee crisis, the copious security threats within and at the borders of the EU and, more generally, the legitimacy crisis of the EU – appear to have resurrected them.

Our argument is that these ‘cognitive shortcuts’ – prejudices and stereotypes – gain particularly wide currency during times of crisis when unspoken, nationally divergent, assumptions about the appropriate way to run the economy and govern society become stridently clear. The crisis, in other words, becomes the external trigger of these assessments. While there may well be specific institutional reasons why the Euro crisis erupted and what impact it would have, these more complex explanations can hardly dislodge simpler accounts based on prejudices and stereotypes. More dangerously still, prejudices and stereotypes may well tinge the formal arguments that are the basis of EU policymaking. The articles contained in this special issue aim to provide both a long-term perspective on German-Italian relations, and more contemporary observations of how they have played out in mass opinion, elite surveys and media coverage of election campaigns during the recent crisis years. They take a number of analytical perspectives, from the historical longue-durée to legal-institutional analysis; from the analysis of media coverage to the elaboration of mass and elite sentiments.

Within this frame, we have selected a cluster of contributions that, focusing on the evolution of the relationships between Germany and Italy in the past decade or so, try to identify the roots of the more recent social and political divergence from a diachronic perspective. Such an approach allows us to assess the impact of the recession on the economic and political development of these countries as well as on the unfolding of their relationship at the core of Europe.

Why Italy and Germany?

Germany and Italy were among the first and largest founders of the European Economic Community, sixty years ago, and still today represent the main drivers, together with France, of a possible re-launch of the process of integration. If there has ever been a time when the European Community/Union needed a solid core of pro-integrationist member states, then this moment is now. But while Germany and Italy are commonly perceived as lying at opposite ends of the European spectrum in terms of their economic performance and political stability, France has occupied a more intermediate position, being sometimes assimilated to Germany and the northern member states, and sometimes to Italy and the southern member states. Correspondingly, the relationship of either Germany or Italy with France has been more nuanced and multifaceted, and also changing over time. While most commentators would place the French-German entente, and not German-Italian relations, at the core of the process of European integration, we think that a comparison between Italy and Germany and an analysis of German-Italian relations are in fact more compelling.

A quick look at the longue-durée allows us to justify this choice. The political and institutional development of both countries shows remarkable similarities and led to similar hurdles on the path to democratic consolidation. Both were the result of a process of national unification that drew together many larger and smaller states, as Italy and Germany completed their respective processes only in the second half of the nineteenth century. Both were initially ruled by a rather restricted and exclusionary economic and political oligarchy: the presence of a not particularly enlightened mostly landed bourgeoisie acted as a check on democratisation rather than as a support for it, and managed politically to incorporate the working classes only after an authoritarian ‘revolution from above’ (Moore 1966). Consequently, both countries experienced the breakdown of their still fledgling democracies after World War One. Both were late-industrialisers, though German industrialisation took off somewhat earlier and was supported almost exclusively by banks, while Italian industrialisation lagged somewhat behind and was supported by the banks and the state (Gerschenkron 1962). Initially allied at the outbreak of both world wars, Italy and Germany found themselves fighting each other towards the end because of Italy’s change of sides during both wars. Both saw the rise of fascist dictatorships in the interwar period. Both were reconstructed after World War Two under the watchful eye of the Allied forces and both benefitted significantly from the help coming from the United States (European Recovery Programme or Marshall Plan). Both had to deal with deep internal Cold War divides, Germany being geographically divided for more than fifty years between a Federal Republic and a Democratic Republic and Italy being politically and ideologically polarised between a pro-USSR Communist party and a pro-USA Christian Democratic party. Both were reconstructed surprisingly quickly after World War Two – the German Wirtschaftswunder finding its match in the Italian miracolo economico – and both competed in international markets in similar industrial sectors. Both were considered in the post-war period as prototypical cases of party-dominated political systems in which parties occupied a particularly large space in the sinews of the state (Parteienstaat, partitocrazia) (Von Beyme 1993; Cotta 2015). Both have had to deal with economic (and sometimes also political) disparities, Germany between the West and the post-communist East, and Italy between the prosperous North and the Mezzogiorno in the South. Finally, both interpreted the construction of the European Economic Community and, subsequently, of the European Union as a way of overcoming their pasts and consolidating their presence among the stable democracies of the West.

Then, towards the end of the 1970s, divergence set in and today we observe a remarkable distance between these two countries, which raises important questions. The main cause of this polarisation has to be attributed to the overall better performance of the German political system vis-à-vis the Italian one during the post-war period and the consequent greater capacity of Germany to keep societal demands under control and to channel the energies of the country towards growing productivity and increasing standards of living. The performance of the Italian economy – export performance, industrial transformation, macroeconomic management, welfare construction – never lagged too far behind the performance of the economy of Germany, but always far enough to accumulate a significant distance over time. It is thus that the performance indicators of the two countries, both in political and economic terms, started to diverge from the 1970s onwards. Even the fundamental challenge of closing the North-South gap in Italy, and the West-East gap in Germany, appears to have been met better north of the Alps. While the cultural, social, economic and political unification of the two Italys and of the two Germanys is far from over, Germany seems farther along the way than Italy.

Our perspective becomes even more relevant if we consider that Italy and Germany are connected to one another in various ways, not least economically and culturally. Bilateral economic collaboration at all levels is intensive, not only because of the geographical proximity. Tourism is certainly one of the most important factors of exchange. Italian ‘high culture’, as well as la dolce vita are admired by many Germans. Schools increasingly offer the language of the other country as an option. But various stereotypes of the lazy Italian and the cold German, or jokes about spaghetti or krauti also exist, and they do not seem to be fading with the passage of time and the progress of supranational integration (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung 2017).

Despite these growing differences, the political elites of both countries will have to make a decisive contribution to relaunching an even closer Europe (Haller 2008; Best, Lengyel, and Verzichelli 2012) – or might have to bear responsibility for ending the European integration project. The very fact of being protagonists of a difficult but fascinating process of supra-national integration, which has assured the transition of the two countries from totalitarianism to democracy, is not the only reason to focus on their political systems. Italy and Germany represent, for a number of reasons, two very different examples of reaction to the challenges of democracy, as the recent crisis has shown. The indicators of the political change that occurred in the wake of the economic crisis show that the two systems reacted very differently. This can be seen by looking at electoral volatility, the degree of party-system continuity/discontinuity and, as a consequence, changes in the government coalition ‘formula’.

Why look at the years of the crisis?

When we were about to deliver the manuscript for this special issue, the political scenarios that would unfold after the elections scheduled, again, roughly during the same time period in both countries – those in Germany took place in September 2017 and those in Italy were scheduled for the Spring of 2018 – were still uncertain. However, we can easily foresee the contours of what lies ahead: a less changeable and more stable political setting in Germany, where inter-party programmatic differences will likely find an acceptable resolution, and an ever more polarised and fragmented party system in Italy, where the processes of government formation and policy-making will probably be as complicated and erratic as ever.

While populist parties are to be found throughout Europe, according to Kriesi and Pappas (2016) the success of populist appeals has so far had a clearer impact on the process of government formation in southern than in northern Europe. In Italy, in particular, the emergence of the Movimento Cinque Stelle has made the political scenario extremely uncertain (Bordignon and Ceccarini 2013) forcing each of the three main poles to seek unconventional and ultimately disadvantageous alliances or to try to exist in ‘splendid isolation’. Expectations of a new phase of policy-making dramatically declined after the failure of the Italian constitutional referendum in December 2016 and the crisis of the Renzi government. While the German political system too was shaken by the significant growth of the populist Alternative für Deutschland on the right of the spectrum and has known a certain degree of fragmentation, the German party system still conforms to a classic bipolar format, although there too grand coalitions are becoming increasingly necessary, and innovative constellations of coalitions may trump the more traditional ones.

It is therefore evident that there is a lot to be learnt from an accurate analysis of the similarities and dissimilarities present in two political systems like Germany and Italy in such a complex historical conjuncture as the present one. This is why we have planned this special issue, consisting of very different pieces of research which, however, have a common methodological trait: the development of a robust binary comparison between two politically comparable systems and an in-depth analysis of their interrelationship. Our project¹ is driven by the desire to exploit such an intensive assessment by adopting a two-level research strategy: from a purely supra-national perspective we want to establish whether Italy and Germany are amici come prima, still friends, as in the post-war period, and whether they still share a similar identification with the European project; from a bi-national perspective we want to monitor the effective capacities of the two systems to cooperate in this context. We also want to assess whether the existing interactions, routines and images, including those negative stereotypes, prejudices and challenges that have been so relevant in the past, have by any chance re-emerged in recent times, when the costs of European integration have become ever clearer and euro-sceptical narratives ever more popular.

We believe that a systematic comparative analysis of Italy and Germany may help us understand better the current troublesome predicament in which European member states find themselves, providing us with a number of important implications to be discussed from both of the above-mentioned perspectives. Hence, if we look at the relationship between Germany and Italy from a supra-national perspective, we arrive at an in-depth examination of the distance between two very relevant European demoi and the prospect for a truly European identity emerging out of a multitude of political, economic, social and cultural differences. As mentioned before, the historical occurrences and the origins of Italo-German Europeanism have allowed these two political systems to form, in the post-war period, probably the most powerful core of a truly pro-Europeanist polity. If we want to envisage a possible new perspective on the future of European integration – and probably the very persistence of the EU – we certainly have to start from these countries at the core of the European quasi-polity.

On the other hand, if we look at these countries from a mere bi-national comparative perspective, we gain an accurate appreciation of a number of growing dissimilarities. The different trajectories of these two models of democracy point, in many respects, to an unbridgeable diversity. The following questions, derived from this binary comparative approach, concern the likelihood that these dissimilarities give rise to an inevitable worsening of the bilateral relationship between Germany and Italy. To what extent do the growing difficulties in their relationship and the harsh reciprocal appraisals concern exclusively the elites, and to what extent has, rather, the increasingly constraining dissensus (Hooghe and Marks 2009) resulted in a large divide between the public opinions and civil societies in the two countries? These questions are of course important for all the scholars involved in the comparative study of European democracies, and in particular for those interested in the development of these two political systems. However, as some of the studies included in this special issue show, the bilateral relations between Germany and Italy also represent a relevant indicator of the current state of European integration, since a deterioration of the relationship between these two ‘similar but dissimilar’ founders of the EU would be a threat for the future of the supranational European entity.

In order to understand the prospective evolution of Italo-German relations we need to investigate the main determinants of their most recent development. In particular, it is important to determine whether the different outlook on the future of European integration prevalent in Italy and Germany, and the growing Euroscepticism and bias against ‘the other’, may affect the prospects of a harmonisation of the economic policies of the two countries. In particular, the negative visions Italy and Germany have of each other will be at the core of the analyses in this special issue.

We believe that an intensive comparative analysis of the changing relationship between Germany and Italy will be possible only if we concentrate on the period bracketed by the beginning of the economic crisis, at one end, and the new political phase that is opening up following the national elections in both countries, at the other. Indeed, we know already that the emergence of an economic – and subsequently political – crisis has heavily influenced the success of populist stances within public opinion, thus determining the conditions for a number of changes in the party systems and in the political elites. At the same time, increasingly widespread Euroscepticism has been accompanied by the growing defence of national (or local) interests above all else and the decline in prevalence of sentiments of openness and solidarity across Europe.

The common currency and, more generally, the macro-economic governance at the basis of the monetary union have obviously been the main targets of the growing tensions. However, the alienation of several political actors (and millions of citizens) from the idea of an ever closer union is not limited to the issue of economic and monetary performance. Actually, with their contrasting political and institutional settings, both Italy and Germany are poised to defend the single currency in the future, and they will probably confirm their commitment to further integration. At the same time, a flowering of different positions has accompanied the recent developments, concerning other delicate issues on the political agenda, such as security problems and immigration. As recent research shows, in many European countries the explosion of the Euro crisis and the concomitant decline of the European Union’s credibility have evidently brought adaptations and changes in the positions of several parties, including mainstream and governing parties (Williams and Spoon 2015).

Divergent views on the future of Europe have thus emerged even in two political systems where the permissive consensus used to be safe and strong (Laffan 2018). This, in turn, has entailed a growing tendency for each to blame the other and a greater scepticism regarding European solidarity: the anti-German (or anti-Italian) narratives, together with some Eurosceptic stances, are not necessarily a peculiar aspect of the political discourse of the so called populists, but also characterise the public debate and the positions of some of the traditional parties in government. In the end, this is the most important reason we were led, through a detailed binary comparison, to reflect on the implications of political developments in Germany and Italy at the end of the great recession.

Structure of the special issue

The first two articles of this special issue investigate the roots of the interesting and chequered evolution of German-Italian relations. The first contribution provides a historical overview since the Second World War and chronicles the slow sedimentation of reciprocal prejudices and stereotypes in both countries. In the opening article, Gabriele D’Ottavio shows how, drawing liberally from the historical record, the myths of the ‘bad German’ and the ‘good Italian’ were created in Italy during the war and that of the ‘unruly and untrustworthy’ Italians and of the ‘disciplined and trustworthy’ Germans were fashioned in Germany during the same years. After a period of respite immediately after the war, these stereotypes re-emerged in the context of the European Monetary System and then, even more strongly, in the context of European Monetary Union. In both cases, stereotypes and prejudices were clearly self-serving. By depicting the Germans as ‘rigid and browbeating’, Italians certainly sought to cast their own macroeconomic policies in a more favourable light. Likewise, by depicting Italians as lax and excessively lenient, Germans were trying to justify a monetary system that favoured countries capable of controlling the social costs deriving from having to meet the pressure of competition with constant increases in productivity through a system of industrial relations and party alliances that Italy did not (and does not yet) possess. D’Ottavio shows that the tactical use of these prejudices and stereotypes escalated during the Euro crisis and that they later fuelled the rhetoric of the populist parties in both countries.

The article by Stefania Baroncelli reports on the difficult negotiations that followed the eruption of the Euro crisis in the 2008–2013 period and that led to the creation of the European Stability Mechanism, the tightening of the Stability and Growth Pact, and eventually the signing of the Fiscal Compact (formally, Treaty on Stability, Coordination and Governance or TSCG). Adopting a currently prevalent narrative, Baroncelli places the many different ‘southern European’ crises in the same category – though the crisis of Ireland and Spain are in fact rather different from those of Portugal and Greece – and adds to them the Italian fiscal and budgetary problems. While the accuracy of such a narrative can be and has been disputed (Stiglitz 2016; Notermans 2017), she adds an important element to the mainstream picture, namely the contrasting fiscal and monetary orientations that supposedly prevailed in Germany and Italy and that, according to this view, were entrenched in the different economic cultures of the Bundesbank and the Banca d’Italia respectively. But even more importantly, Baroncelli details the role played by the two constitutional courts in the discussion of the balanced budget clause that the TSCG required to be entrenched in legislation, possibly having constitutional force – the courts revealing, according to her, a greater sensitivity for ‘Keynesian’ growth in Italy and a greater attachment to ‘monetarist’ rigour in Germany.

From historical and (legal) cultural analysis, the special issue then switches to the current situation and looks at how public opinion in the two countries currently sees Italo-German relations, considering whether opinions are a cause or an effect of (changing) orientations towards the European integration project and whether they are influenced by how the press covers relevant political events in the two countries.

By using a longitudinal and cross-sectional approach, Francesco Olmastroni and Alessandro Pellegata analyse the evolution of the orientations of public opinion and political leaders with regard to the European integration project, supranational cohesion, and the perceived image of the other member state in the last four decades. Despite the fragmentary quality of the available data, they arrive at two important, interlinked conclusions. First, the Euro crisis (and the refugee crisis) affected the two countries differently and therefore also differently affected their orientations towards the European integration project. In this troublesome scenario, conclude Olmastroni and Pellegata, Germany and Italy stand out as ‘members apart’. Second, because Italian public opinion at both mass and elite levels tends to assimilate the EU with Germany, this downturn in pro-European sentiments negatively affected orientations towards the latter country as well, and the position has in fact worsened during the last four decades. Given the very different impact of the crisis (or crises) on Germany, public opinion in this country was not affected to the same degree and therefore the orientation of German public opinion towards the EU and Italy did not worsen as much.

Cristian Vaccari and Claudius Wagemann tap into the same sentiments by analysing German press coverage of Italy and Italian press coverage of Germany during the parallel electoral campaigns in the two countries in 2013. They distinguish between what they call ‘outside-in’ and ‘inside-out’ transnationalisation. The former obtains when the press in one country covers the other country’s election campaign and assesses how it is going to affect its own political life. The latter refers to the attention devoted by the national press to the domestic electoral campaign with an eye to what the other country’s politicians comment on it. By looking at the main newspapers in Italy and Germany they also arrive at two very interesting main conclusions. First, the Italian press pays more attention to German political events than the German press does to Italian events. Second, because it is politically more neutral than the Italian press, coverage by the German press of the Italian campaign was more fulsome (outside-in transnationalisation) and more factual than was Italian press coverage of the German election campaign (inside-out transantionalisation); Italian newspapers, instead, covered both aspects equally. Vaccari and Wagemann conclude that the press plays an autonomous filtering role in the transnationalisation of information about other member states, which is the stronger the more disparate the power attributions are.

We believe that through this set of articles we contribute in three ways to the discussion of how the Euro crisis has impacted on the relationship between two core European countries and indirectly on the project of European integration. First, we document how prejudices and stereotypes buried in history may re-emerge with a vengeance in times of crisis and exert an independent effect on the unfolding of the crisis. Second, we lay the groundwork for an in-depth exploration of the causes of the asymmetries we have identified between German and Italian political and economic performances, orientations towards the EU and sentiments towards one another. Third, we raise a number of significant questions regarding the ultimate causes of these asymmetries, questions which we plan to investigate in a more detailed way in the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst [grant number 57218962].

Notes on contributors

Simona Piattoni

Simona Piattoni (BA/MA Economics, Bocconi University; PhD Political Science, MIT) is Professor of Political Science at the University Trento where she teaches Comparative politics, European politics and Local government. She has written on clientelism (S. Piattoni (ed), Clientelism, Interests and Democratic Representation, Cambridge University Press 2001), governance (with T. Christiansen (eds), Informal Governance in the European Union, Rowman & Littlefield 2013; S. Piattoni, The Theory of Multilevel Governance, Oxford University Press, 2010), and democracy (S. Piattoni (ed), The European Union: Democratic Principles and Institutional Architectures in Times of Crisis, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

Luca Verzichelli (BA Political Science, University of Siena; PhD Political Science, University of Florence) is Professor of Political Science at the University of Siena. He has written on political elites and comparative political institutions in Europe. Among his books, The Europe of Elites (Oxford University Press, 2012, co-edited with H. Bert and G. Lengyel) and Political Institutions in Italy (Oxford University Press, 2007, with Maurizio Cotta).

Claudius Wagemann (BA/MA Political Science, University of Konstanz; PhD Political Science, EUI) is Professor of Qualitative Empirical Political Science Methods at the Goethe University Frankfurt. He studies the relationship between Italy and Germany, new forms of populism and questions of the quality of democracy in general. Furthermore, he is an expert in Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) and Fuzzy Sets and has published Set-Theoretic Methods for the Social Sciences (co-authored with Carsten Q. Schneider) with Cambridge University Press (2012).

Notes

1. The present special issue is based on contributions presented during a conference organised within the framework of a broadly focussed project entitled Populism, Prejudices and Perspectives: Italy and Germany in Today’s Europe which was held in Frankfurt in the Autumn of 2016 and financed by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. We take this opportunity to thank the DAAD and the University of Frankfurt for their generosity and the excellent conditions in which we were able to develop our ideas.