The Economist on Italy
July 1, 2011, 1:27 pm
Posted by Joseph A. Komonchak
The Economist has recently published a 15-page special report on Italy. The emphasis falls on economic matters (duh!), but anyone who loves the country and its people but wonders about its often crazy politics and other aspects of its social and cultural life will find it interesting and illuminating.
Nice. Thanks.
I once heard an Italian — fluent in English, well read, and all that — quote the saying, “That government is best that governs least,” to make a joking point that Italy was therefore well ahead of the rest of the world in the quality of its government.
But I still can’t understand why a highly intelligent people would keep voting in Berlusconi — even though he owns all those TV stations, newspapers, etc., and even though he gets Parliament to pass laws forbidding prosecutions of him or his ministers, no matter what they do. But then they’ve done lots of other dumb things too, viz. Benito M.
(I just looked up the quotation above, and though it seems to be often attributed to Paine or Jefferson, apparently it’s Thoreau. Thus saith, at any rate, Wikipedia.)
Current world trends seem to show that there may be a natural pulling apart among peoples, rather than a pulling together. If there’s not already a sense of national cohesion present in a population, it may make little sense to try to force unity on it. You may just end up with Italy.
The ongoing unity problems of the EU may be a case in point. The union seems to have been created purely by bureaucrats for purely economic reasons, out of nations many of which, I suspect, were already artificially divided for economic reasons (Spain and Italy may be the most outstanding examples). Respect for existing cultural divides – and cohesions – seem to have been disregarded, probably thought of as mere inconveniences.
If nations make sense at all from a human point of view – as opposed to a purely political and economic one – they ought to be based on shared sentiments, shared world views, shared working philosophies of being.