Berlusconi’s Italy: a European Country ruled by a Populist Far Right
Giulio
Ercolessi – Critica liberale foundation
ABSTRACT
– The xenophobic and racist climate
currently existing
in Italy is much more the responsibility of Silvio
Berlusconi’s supposedly “mainstream
centre-right” party than of the boorish Northern League. The
internal
opposition, the EPP, the Catholic hierarchy and foreign governments
largely
underestimated the phenomenon or were actively conniving. A disgraceful
treaty
with Libya is almost ignored. A part of the Italian cultural heritage,
total control
of the most important media, the power of setting the political agenda
that
comes with it, lack of conflict of interests prevention, a mediocre
opposition,
the collapse of cultural paradigms, the widespread “barbarity
of
specialisation”, the consequent lack of responsible
élites allowed Berlusconi
to absorb every populist demand and just merge them with his own
personal
interests. All this has legitimised xenophobic and racist attitudes and
discourses, that at this point are not likely to disappear along with
the end
of Berlusconi’s political venture. Liberals should denounce
and fight all forms
of xenophobia and discrimination and promote the integration of
immigrants as
individuals, not as members of special communities. Strict enforcement
of
separation of religion and public institutions and protection of
individual
freedom, also against families and communities religious impositions,
should be
the path to integration and citizenship.
NOTE
–
This paper was written in November 2010, before the
beginning of the
uprisings in North Africa. The subsequent events made the
xenophobic attitude
of the Italian government even more evident. It
was released as a contribution to the Klagenfurt seminar
“Liberal
Answers to Xenophobia and Community Conflicts in Europe”,
organised on
May 8th 2011 by the European Liberal Forum with the
support of
Liberales Zukunftsforum, FORES and NOVUM .
It
is true that today’s
Italy is the worst regression scenario in Western Europe, «an
example of how
fast racist ideas can gain a foothold once you let the extreme right in
from
the cold», as Lisa Bjurwald
writes in the
conclusions of her essay. The worst aspect of this political
development is
precisely the unprecedented and unpredictable cultural or perhaps
anthropological change it induced in the general public.
Until
a quarter of a
century ago, most Italian media used not only to despise, but also to
make mock
of racism and communitarian riots and troubles occurring in other
countries,
and especially in the US. The assumption was that the more civilised
and
sophisticated Italian cultural tradition – the universalistic
Catholic or
perhaps even ancient Roman heritage – had immunised from such
disease the
country and its population, that would allegedly have
“spontaneously” grown tolerant
throughout the centuries. Even the anti-Jewish laws of 1938 were mostly
ascribed to the sole personal responsibility of Benito Mussolini, and
were
often considered a mere cynical gesture on the part of the dictator,
only aimed
at showing the geopolitical alignment of the fascist regime to Nazi
policies,
rather than a cornerstone of its totalitarian views: their enforcement
was
usually – and wrongly – portrayed as relatively
superficial and mild; and in
any case the general public would just have acquiesced to their
imposition, which
would have in fact marked the beginning of a consensus collapse,
leading in the
end, after 1943, to an almost generalised rejection of the fascist
regime and
to the Resistance movement.
Actually,
it is true
that there was no sign of hostility towards foreigners a quarter of a
century
ago in Italy. The fact is that there was almost no foreign immigration
at the
time.
Spring
2010: in a small
and until then quite inconspicuous town in Northern Italy, the mayor
decides
that pupils in the local primary school whose parents are in arrears
with the
payment of their contributions would only be served bread and water at
lunch in
the school canteen, where their schoolmates get normal meals. Not
surprisingly,
defaulter parents are mostly immigrants. A local small entrepreneur, a
self-proclaimed Berlusconi coalition elector and supporter, says that,
as a
committed christian, he cannot accept such discriminations against
innocent
children and offers to pay the debts himself. And here comes the
unimaginable
reaction, a true sign of the utterly new cultural climate, obviously
inoculated
by the present current political and media discourse on immigration.
The other
children’s parents cry shame on the private benefactor:
«It is an injustice
that we, the local population, have to pay and they, the foreigners,
are
offered free meals for their children: from now on we also
won’t pay if the
foreigners are allowed to do so. If he wants to pay the
foreigners’ bills, let
the gentleman pay for our children as well».
This
uncivilised
reaction is nothing more than the popular translation of growing
uncivilised
political attitudes. Another example speaks more than any general
comment on
growing political xenophobic attitudes, and it is worth relating, also
given it
is inexplicably little known outside Italy.
It
is a well known fact
that only a tiny percentage of illegal immigrants land in Southern
Europe, or
used to land until recently, on board of small unsafe overcrowded
boats. They
are not at all the bulk of the total number, but a highly spectacular
and
impressive minority. At the time of the Prodi government, every new
boat
approaching the coast of Sicily was prime time news on Berlusconi and
state TVs
alike (after Berlusconi came once again to power, they were no longer
given any
relevance, strangely enough). That traffic was facilitated by the
Gaddafi
regime, whose officials used to get large amounts of money in bribes
and extortions
out of it.
The
Berlusconi
government signed a “friendship treaty” with Libya
last year, committing Libya
to systematically push back by force all immigrants trying to cross the
Mediterranean on their route to Italy. Two thirds of those immigrants
are
asylum seekers, more than half of them recognised as such in the end by
Italy
in previous years. Now they are all indiscriminately sent back to Libya
by
patrol boats, provided to Libya by Italian taxpayers and with Italian
liaison
officers on board, ready and willing to open fire in international
waters
against any vessel disobeying their orders. Once in Libya, immigrant
and asylum
seekers (obviously including possible Libyan asylum seekers) are not
given the opportunity
of any, even summary, check of their legal position, and are locked up
in
concentration camps built, many of them in the Libyan desert, with
financial
means also provided by Italian taxpayers (Italy has also committed to
finance a
lot of other public works in exchange for that service). A few months
after the
treaty came into force, the Libyan regime expelled the handful of UNHCR
inspectors trying until then to prevent at least the most awful abuses
committed in those camps. That is, the Italian government is using the
Libyan
regime to hand it over all would-be immigrants and asylum seekers, and
charge
it with a dirty work impossible to be carried out on European soil: no
international controls and no media watch.
Even
more astonishing
if possible, the so-called opposition joined the majority in ratifying
the treaty
in Parliament, on the ground that it was a long-overdue compensation
for what
colonial and fascist rule had done to Libya: in fact, because they did
not want
to be exposed by the Berlusconi coalition as the gauche-caviar
advocates
of asylum seekers’ rights. The decision was dictated on the
Democratic Party by
its former prime minister Massimo D’Alema (now the president
of FEPS, the Foundation
for European Progressive Studies, the network of foundations and think
tanks
connected to the European Socialist Party), who described the treaty
with Libya
as having «strategic importance». Only members of
the two small Italian parties
connected to ELDR (the radicals and Italia dei Valori), and a handful
of
Democratic Party dissidents voted against the ratification (greens and
the
extreme left are not represented in the present Italian Parliament).
In
another move, the
Berlusconi coalition introduced the new crime of illegal immigration:
not its
organisation, not human trafficking, just individual illegal entry on
Italian territory,
or overstaying after the expiration of residence permit. The largely
predicted
consequence has been an atrocious overcrowding in all Italian prisons,
appalling living conditions in jails, lack of sanitation, sky-rocketing
suicide
rates among inmates.
It
would be an
extremely reductive explanation to blame these developments on the sole
or main
responsibility of the Northern League: after all, it is just a regional
party,
its influence being limited to a number of Northern regions, with just
a tiny
although growing presence in the central ones and totally absent in a
large
part of the country, including the entire South. Furthermore, the
Northern
League was born in the Eighties not as an openly racist, but as a
mainly
anti-tax party, its most important claim being the alleged imbalance of
the
fiscal burden between a tax-dodging South, largely ruled by a
mafia-linked
political establishment always ready to off-load lavish public
expenditure on
the shoulders of a supposedly law-abiding and more European-minded
North. At
the beginning, the Northern League was more radical than it is now in
its claim
for a secession of the Northern regions from the rest of Italy, but it
pretended to act as a modernising (sometimes almost libertarian) rather
than as
a traditionalist Blut und Boden party,
claiming noticeably that the more developed North of Italy was
artificially
kept distant and separated from its Central and Northern European
natural
markets and hinterland, thus preventing a virtuous deeper integration
among
similar territories because of the backwardness of the South of Italy.
At the
beginning they played according to the traditional national
stereotypes: the
North was also more secular than the South and the historical ground of
the antifascist
Resistance battle, unlike the more opportunist, clerical, obscurantist
and
fascist-minded South; it had voted for the Republic and against the
monarchy in
1946, for the introduction of the divorce and abortion laws in 1974 and
in 1981,
each time defeating neat clerical majorities in the South; leaders of
the
Northern League even claimed that smaller Northern Italian families had
to
provide social benefits for the traditionally much more prolific
Catholic South
(even if birth-rate trends were already converging to the present
lowest levels
of the entire planet). A Northern League gay movement was very active
and
publicised for years in the front pages of the Northern League daily
paper “La
Padania”, and Roberto Maroni, already the Interior minister
in the first
Berlusconi government in 1994, gave an interview to a gay magazine in
which he
stated his support not only for gay families legal recognition, but
also for
the possibility of children adoption by gay couples –
something that was not
even in the agenda of the Italian gay movement at the time.
Actually,
and oddly
enough, the Northern League MEPs had initially even joined the liberal
group in
the European Parliament. They left it in 1996, a few hours before being
expelled because of their growing populist and xenophobic attitude.
It
is in fact very
difficult for a populist party to play at the same time the role of a
modernising movement and that of a movement rooted in ancestral
traditions;
especially if the tradition has to be invented outright, as no unitary
Northern
Italian state, political entity, nation, culture, language or dialect
ever
existed. Already since the early Nineties the flow of foreign immigrant
workers, initially even more than nowadays concentrated in the North,
had
prompted a more and more racist attitude of the party, more than ready
to take
on board, with no filter or mediation, every complaint towards the
central
state power: foreign immigrants became more and more a target of
discrimination, partly replacing the previous enemy, i.e. traditional
internal
immigrants from the South of Italy. But the great shift actually only
took
place in 1998, when the Northern League leadership lost its bet that
the Prodi
government would not be able to take Italy into the Eurozone. Until
then, one
of the “economic” reasons put forward by the
Northern League to advocate the
secession from Italy was that the unity of the country was the millstone round the neck of Northern
Italy, preventing it
from entering the Eurozone: the North should break away from Italy in
order to
be free to adopt the Euro as its currency and be a part of a prosperous
Central
Europe. From then on, instead, Europe and Eurocrats – and
alongside all
supporters of globalisation and “cosmopolitism”
– became the chief enemies of
Northern Italy. And with the Catholic Jubilee of the year 2000, the
Northern
League leadership, that previously had even threatened the Catholic
Church that
the North of Italy could join the Protestant Reformation with a delay
of 500
years as a consequence of its charitable help to immigrants (Italian
Protestants, who are mainly liberal and progressive, had obviously been
horrified), suddenly became the most clerical party of the Italian
political
system, swiftly turning into the staunchest advocates of the
“Catholic roots”
of Italy and Europe, boycotting individual rights reforms, de facto
families
legal recognition, gay rights, artificial insemination, the
availability of
“day-after pill”, living will legal validity, any
legalisation of euthanasia,
etc., and overcoming in their novice clerical zeal even
Berlusconi’s party and
the heirs of the most clerical sectors of the former Christian
democrats.
The
primary political responsibility
for Italy’s new racist and xenophobic attitude is not to be
ascribed to the
Northern League (that is just the tip of the iceberg, the most bizarre
and
ludicrous side of the phenomenon), but to what has been unfortunately
for more
than fifteen years now, the largest Italian political party, that of
Silvio
Berlusconi, a large and manifold party indeed, but basically a radical
right-wing populist party, whose “centre-right”
supposed qualification is
largely endorsed for social and political convenience both in Italy and
abroad.
Neither most of the Italian political opposition nor Italy’s
European and
international partners and allies are willing to recognise that one of
Europe’s
biggest players is being ruled for years by a radical right-wing
populist
coalition. And almost no one in Europe is charging the European Popular
Party
with the disgrace of taking on board Berlusconi’s Italian
party, thus helping
him cover the true nature of his entire political venture, in the eyes
of so
many Europeans and indeed of so many Italians.
Yet,
the nature of
Berlusconi’s policy should have been obvious from day one: in
the very first
press conference when he announced his decision of starting a political
career,
Berlusconi’s first commitment as a political leader was
supporting the then
secretary general of the then openly neofascist party in the run-off
ballot for
the Rome municipal elections of 1993 (that party was named Movimento
Sociale
Italiano, after the name of Repubblica Sociale Italiana, i.e. the
puppet state
established by Mussolini between 1943 and 1945 in the last, bloodiest
and
darkest stage in the history of the fascist movement, when it really
acted almost
as a local branch of the Third Reich). Is then Berlusconi a fascist?
Not
necessarily, he simply doesn’t care, he just needed some
already existing party
in the political system in order to build up a winning coalition, and
the MSI leaders
had no other possible coalition partner: Berlusconi offered them, for
the first
time in almost half a century, the opportunity to be a partner in a
possible
governmental majority.
Later
he also offered
the Catholic hierarchy, that had lost its decades-long Christian
Democrats
traditional political representation, all they could demand: not only
he
imposed on a more and more secularised society the most
clerical
legislation in
Western Europe in all the controversial social issues involving the
interests
of the Vatican, and a round-the-clock Catholic programs presence in all
public
media, but also a flow of taxpayers money that can approximately be
estimated
to amount to about eight billion Euros yearly. Enough to convince the
Vatican
hierarchy to keep extremely discreet or silent on
Berlusconi’s own insouciant
personal lifestyle.
Indeed
Berlusconi had
no political ideas of his own to defend: he started a political career
just
because it was the only way to escape criminal prosecution for himself
and
bankruptcy for his companies. This would have been the most likely
consequence
of the anti-corruption investigations and rallies of the early
Nineties, that
had already brought to jail a huge number of prominent politicians,
industrialists and businessmen. For all the rest, his political agenda
was open
to be entirely written on the basis of the demands of the public,
pinpointed
with the same techniques used in commercial marketing. The agenda was
repeatedly
changed later, throughout the years, in order to fit the changes
registered by
opinion polls and focus groups. He just managed to combine those
demands with
the vested interests included in his social coalition and to package
the result
with the most sophisticated and updated techniques of commercial
advertising.
Berlusconi offered his public the political product they demanded,
deliberately
bypassing and spurning any filter provided by civility, intellectual
prudence, civilisation,
established political cultures, respect for individuals’
dignity and
the existing constitutional
framework, care for possible unintended regressive consequences of his
political
and social actions, international commitments and so on. Whatever
political
promise he is not able to keep, it is the fault of others: public
prosecutors,
judges, academics, intellectuals – all labelled as
“communists” or “useful
idiots” in the hands of communists – and
unidentified “strong powers”. Everybody
is allowed to fill this label with whatever one’s own
stereotypes, prejudices,
personal aversions suggest, from financiers to communists, from
old-established
industrialists to free-masonry, from Eurocrats to islamists. No
surprise, he
appeared to his supporters as the child claiming that the king wasn't
wearing
anything at all: a simple truth that the previous hypocritical and
ossified
establishment was no longer able to perceive, as ordinary solid
hard-working
citizens – and Berlusconi himself – naturally are.
So,
even if nothing
suggests that Berlusconi is a true racist in his private life, he has
no
problems in showing a totally uninhibited racist attitude if he is
convinced
that his customers like that: a few days before a crucial election he
can utter
with no unease or regret that he «reject[s] a multiethnic
Italian society», the
growing multiracial look of many Italian cities being for him a reason
of
annoyance. He commits his coalition to «zero tolerance
towards gypsies, illegal
immigrants and criminals». He can state that «a
decrease in the number of
non-EU immigrants means fewer recruits for criminal
organisations» (he made
this statement a few days after a pogrom was organised by the local
mafia
against immigrants in the Calabrian town Rosarno). He repeatedly joked
on
President Obama being very “tanned”, on gays and
even on the Holocaust. Critics
of such statements, “jokes” and comments are
systematically dismissed by
Berlusconi and his supporters (ministers, MPs, prominent journalists
and
commentators) as hypocritical and “politically
correct”.
The
treaty with Libya
is just one of the most horrible among the consistent consequences of
this
general attitude. So are the sadistic bureaucratic ordeals continuously
imposed
on legal immigrants, the brutal evacuations of Romanies ordered by
local mayors
in many cities, the customary racial characterisation of crime news
reporting,
especially on TV. So is the general cultural climate where all this
appear
normal and, most of all, is passed off to public opinion as
“moderate” by most of
the mainstream media.
How
has that been possible,
after almost half a century of nearly normal liberal parliamentary
democracy?
And how is it possible that Italians accept as prime minister an
individual
that refused to take the oath in a mafia trial, whose two closest
political and
personal friends were convicted respectively for corrupting judges to
his
personal advantage and for cooperating with the mafia, who was himself
acquitted
of an incredible number of ignominious accusations only because
judgements were
barred by the statute of limitations (he was entitled to refuse and
claim a judgment
on the merits – something he never did), or because he took
advantage of a
general amnesty (which he also would be entitled to refuse), or because
his own
parliamentary majority reduced the amount of time required for the
statute of
limitation to be applied to the crimes he was indicted for, or even
because
legislation was rushed through Parliament so that one of those crimes
be simply
cancelled from the penal code a few days before he is sentenced (in a
trial
that had been going on for months)?
A
lot of answers have
been proposed throughout the years, ranging from the cultural heritage
of the
Counterreformation to that of fascism, from the late XVI and XVII
century “refeudalisation”
process to the inculcation of authoritarian and servile attitudes in
education
and social relations since the time of Renaissance seigniories, to the
heritage
of courtliness and long foreign domination.
The
author of this
paper is far from underestimating the importance of such historical or
perhaps “culturalistic”
explanations.
Yet,
even if that sort
of historical heritage is still to be considered rooted in some
cultural depositories
of important segments of the Italian society, its fast and effective
reactivation
at the end of the XX century has probably also more obvious and
pedestrian
reasons. And many of these reasons are much less peculiar to the
Italian case.
Indeed, in interpreting Italian history one is often led to mistake
what actually
is the vanguard of a common European regression for some sort of
peculiar
national backwardness. The same had already happened about
ninety years ago.
A
first possible explanation
is the lack of any effective anti-trust media legislation, that had
allowed
Berlusconi to get the control of the entire sector of commercial TV at
national
level and of a huge proportion of the existing printed media
– from daily
papers to all kind of specialised magazines – before he
decided to make any
political use of it and to enter into the political arena. According to
some
estimates, up to half of Italian professional journalists are
Berlusconi’s
employees: that means that even those who are not his employees for the
time
being can reasonably think that they too can be sooner or later
absorbed in
Berlusconi’s media empire or find better career opportunities
in one of his
media. That obviously does not stimulate widespread critical attitudes
by media
professionals.
Freedom
of the media
exists, although Berlusconi has the habit of suing many of his most
severe opponents
for defamation damages in civil (not penal) courts, counting on the
lengthy
times of civil justice, and thus forcing his most dangerous critics to
advance
often unbearable legal costs. But he found that in order to achieve a
deep and
decisive political influence one does not need to crush media freedom
in
general: one only needs to control the media that count most. In Italy,
one of
the countries with the fastest ageing population on earth, that
basically means
controlling the major TV news. If 80% of the population have TV as
their main
source of political information, five of the major national TV journals
provide
a virtual control of the information reaching 60% of the Italian
public: a
sector of the population unlikely to be particularly avid for more than
one
source of information. Berlusconi’s control over those TV
news is total.
A
previously marginal
or even ridiculous political thesis becomes that of a respected
minority when
continuously repeated and not seriously challenged for weeks, and has
good
chances of becoming majority in a matter of months; and of representing
the general
common sense and wisdom after a few years. Most of all, the control of
the
major TV news allows Berlusconi to set the political agenda, forcing
the
opposition to play on the ground he decides, obviously the most
favourable to
him.
A
majority of the
Italian public is nowadays convinced that Berlusconi has been
consistently and unjustly
persecuted for years by an almost thoroughly
“communist” judiciary and thinks
that he was always acquitted of all charges rather than almost always
saved
just thanks to the statute of limitations.
A
second condition for
Berlusconi’s success has been the lack of an effective
legislation on conflicts
of interest, preventing the holder of huge economic and media interests
to make
use of them to acquire and exercise top political power. Both these two
first explanations
describe situations that are obviously also a consequence of the poor
quality
and cultural frailty of the main political opposition, the Democratic
Party, basically
composed of surviving former communist and christian democrat party
rank and
file.
But
the most important
lesson to be drawn from the Italian case is that liberal democracy
continues to
be almost as fragile as it used to be before World War II: perhaps it
is fragile
again, after its main identitarian enemy collapsed together with the
Soviet
block – communism had after all been for decades the main
identity supplier for
Western democracies in their effort to build an opposite and rival
model of
organisation of society.
When
liberal democracy
is given for granted, just because regular elections are held in due
time, when
the basics of its foundation are no longer considered at risk, the
quality of
democracy is probably bound to decline.
Education
of the public
should be considered paramount. But citizens’ democratic
education should
require a widespread historical awareness, an aim that is probably more
and
more difficult to pursue when sequential and diachronical knowledge
becomes
obsolete. Even more than that, the very early specialisation in the
plans of
studies especially required of the most brilliant students in our
universities
– and certainly not liberalism or
“relativism” – is the real cause for the
“closing of the Western
mind” and for the growing
short-sightedness of all Western élites. It is
retrospectively amazing to
recollect how this development could have been predicted by Ortega y
Gasset
since 1930.
Even
though what can be described as the Italian national academic and
intellectual establishment in the strictest sense of the words has so
far largely
resisted to political corruption –
on average and despite many remarkable
exceptions – better
than one
could expect (and much better than under fascist rule), the overall
poor quality
of the Italian élites is another major clue to understand
Berlusconi’s success.
It
is indeed frightening to realize how little the awareness of the
current cultural decline is generally perceived by the present Italian
political and economical establishment. The collapse of the
totalitarian
ideologies of the XX century is often described as a sort of liberation
from
every cultural framework enabling individuals to combine their
intellectual
knowledge with ethical-political values and historical awareness.
Popular media
and TV trash political discourse are thus establishing their influence
also on
those segments of society that should be normally expected to act as
the most
aware civic conscience of the society. Individuals who are articulate,
learned
and very knowledgeable in their own professional field often discuss
political
affairs – and notably immigration and integration –
within the same superficial
framework provided to the general public by trash TV programs and
political
charlatans.
Can
liberal democracy expand or even survive when élites are no
longer
able to provide any accepted filter or framework for the discussion of
public
affairs? I think this is a good subject for European liberals to debate.
Discussing
the xenophobic influence of the new extreme and far European
populist Right obviously entails another question: is there a peculiar
liberal contribution
that can be proposed to immigration and integration policies?
Fighting
all forms of xenophobia is obviously paramount. Hate crimes
should be a public order top priority and always severely persecuted.
Hate towards
minorities should always be taken into consideration as a special
aggravating
circumstance to any crime, and involve much more severe punishment.
Actually
these crimes always have a double criminal intent and double victims:
the
directly targeted individuals and all those belonging to the groups
they are
part of, who suffer intimidation and stigmatisation. Ethnic, racist,
gender or
sexual orientation discrimination also deserves rigorous repression,
prompt and
effective legal remedies and should entail punitive compensation.
But
in my opinion liberals should always treat individuals as
individuals, never accept to ascribe them to homogeneous communities on
the
basis of their ethnic or family origin. And if religious freedom is to
be taken
seriously, no public authority should ever be allowed to make any
assumption on
an individual’s own religious or cultural belief or
affiliation based upon
his/her ethnic or national origin. We should never accept towards or
inside
immigrant communities behaviours and attitudes that we would fight
– and
actually always fought in the past and in the present –
towards our fellow
citizens or within the native population. Even minors’
religious freedom is nowadays
protected in our countries by our constitutional laws and by the New
York 1989 international
convention on the Rights of Children. This states that «the
child who is capable of forming his or her own views» must be protected from religious impositions, also
by his/her own
family or community.
Intolerant
religious communities often consider the freedom of
criticising their beliefs, as well as separatism and secular public
institutions, as an infringement to their religious freedom. Such has
been, for
example, the traditional attitude of the Roman Catholic Church
hierarchy every
time that neutrality of public institutions is enforced or religious
signs
removed from public buildings in order to respect equal rights and the
equal
social dignity of every individual. Liberals always opposed this
attitude of
intolerant religious leaders, advocating (in the words of Thomas
Jefferson) «a
wall of separation» between the public and the religious
spheres. Requiring the
respect for this principle on the part of all organised religions, and
also on
the part of non native ones, should not be considered a sign of
disrespect –
or, in the case of Islam, a sign of islamophobia.
The
subject is very delicate indeed, because there is no doubt that
populists
often do make use of secularist issues and attitudes as excuses to
cover their
own xenophobic ones. But liberals, at least in traditionally Catholic
European
societies, have such a consistent, centuries old and still ongoing
history of
opposition to clerical authoritarian claims that they cannot give up to
similar
or identical claims when laid down by immigrant communities or
individuals
rather than by natives.
Individuals
should always be rigorously protected by law against any form
of defamation, but we should never accept that religious beliefs be
protected
against freedom of speech: we can by no means accept to outlaw Voltaire
again.
Moreover,
in the case
of Islam, there is no reason for supporting fundamentalists’
positions against
those of more liberal or even more traditional Muslims, just because
some of
our fellow citizens like the idea that the immigrated population has to
be as
much exotic as possible and as much entrenched in communitarian
enclosures as
possible. This idea, according to which immigrants should
“naturally” behave
and appear as much separate, exotic and cohesive as possible, is
paradoxically
shared by populist xenophobes and by those most naive supporters of
multiculturalism that appreciate communitarian co-existence more than a
society
of individuals based upon a common civic and constitutional covenant.
We cannot
accept that religious uniformity be imposed, by
fair means or foul, inside immigrated communities and families, more
than
we would be prepared to accept that in the native population. We cannot
ascribe
children of immigrated families to the supposed culture of origin of
their
parents or ancestors, assuming that it is, or should be,
“their” culture. In
the end we should never forget that religious
freedom is
not only the freedom to practice the religion of one’s
ancestors as it was. It
is also the individual freedom to abandon and relinquish
one’s ancestors’
religion.
As
liberal
organisations and individual rights advocates, we cannot afford
underestimating,
or even be perceived as playing down, such social – and not
just criminal – issues
as genital mutilation, forced marriage, abuse of chastisement, domestic
violence, only because xenophobes and racist scandalmongers use to
exploit
these issues to their ends. Liberal campaigns aimed at fighting
xenophobic and
racist foes, exposing the benefits of open borders and diversity and
fostering
integration can only take advantage and gain in credibility from the
most
unequivocal and most uncompromising stand on such issues.
And
if a cultural policy is to be encouraged, we should favour the
interaction and knowledge by Western
Muslims of
modes
of argument, techniques of texts
exegesis, contaminations with principles and values typical of
democratic,
liberal, egalitarian modernity that could possibly even lead to a
renewal of
Islam, if not a full-fledged Reformation: should it ever occur, it will
probably spring precisely from the immigration in the West, and may
have
enormous and beneficial consequences for the entire global Islamic
world as
well as for international understanding, cooperation, peace and
security.
In
Italy, as a reaction against a
naive centre-left coalition that was never prepared to take seriously
their
demands for protection from communitarian and domestic impositions and
violence,
just like it was not prepared to openly fight the government xenophobic
agenda
and discourse, the leader of the Association of Moroccan Women in Italy
was even
led to accept a parliamentary candidature within Berlusconi’s
party rather than
with the opposition! Maybe she understood or cared little about Italian
politics, but she was even too much aware of what communitarian and
religious
violence meant for her and her sisters.
It
is common wisdom to note that both the two main models of integration
policies – the French individualistic one and the Anglo-Dutch
communitarian one
– have failed. And to an extent it is probably true. But the
reasons are very
different. In my opinion the real shortcoming of the French experience
does not
lie in the legal model, but in the widespread social racism existing in
the
French society, that creates an explosive contradiction between the
principles,
the promise of legal equality and equal opportunities and the actual
results.
On
the one hand it is
true that in the French political tradition separation was not born as
a
defence of religious freedom in the first place, even though, like
everywhere,
it liberated native religious minorities from oppression by the
dominant
religion. In the French tradition the emphasis is
rather on the sovereignty of the nation
above any sort of religious, cultural or political membership or
affiliation of
individuals, and on the prominent cultural role of the state. But on
the other
hand, if the Jacobinic ideological framework is not acceptable from a
liberal
point of view, in real terms all debates on immigration and integration
policies in France today have much more to do with the protection of
individuals
from de facto religious impositions than with the alleged
“sacralised”
neutrality of republican institutions.
Take,
for example, the integral veil issue (burqa or niqab): there obviously
are also
practical public order concerns (the same that in some countries
motivate the
prohibition to walk in the streets wearing an integral motorcycle
helmet), but
the main problem is that individuals in the public sphere should be
made
individually responsible for their acts, and that requires that they
are
individually recognisable.
One
could argue that religious freedom and respect for ethnic identity
should
suggest a more “open-minded” attitude and therefore
an exception. But the veil is
not only a religious sign. On the contrary, as a religious sign, the
Koranic
foundation of the prescription of the veil – of whatever kind
of veil, not only
the integral ones – is disputed by non fundamentalist Islamic
scholars – and by
the way, very reasonably, according to the letter of texts. The veil
has been,
rather, a traditional, and indeed almost universal, not merely Islamic,
sign of
patriarchal subjugation of women in the past, and, as such, is
conflicting with
a very basic principle of our constitutional fabric as equality between
men and
women. In the balance between the two ethical and constitutional values
–
equality and equal social dignity of women on the one hand and respect
for
religious and communitarian identity on the other – why is it
that the second
should prevail and allow an exception to a general rule? It is true
that today the
integral veil is used by a tiny minority. But failing to regulate it
now could entail
being barred from doing it if and when many more women would decide or
could be
forced to wear it – and the evidence of the imposition be
almost impossible to detect.
For
other forms of veil
– or scarves, if we accept the euphemism – dilemmas
are less dramatic, but
still serious. In a secular state neutrality should be required of
public
institutions, or at most of those acting in their name. In theory, in
the
French interpretation of laïcité it
is also required of private individuals entering the public sphere. But
if one
listened to the hearings of the Stasi commission (the presidential
commission
set up a few years ago to discuss “religious signs”
in public schools), the
real point was not that. I confess that, due to listening to those
hearings on
TV, I myself entirely changed my initial position: at the beginning I
opposed
any prohibition, in the name of individual religious freedom. In the
hearings
the point appeared not to be the sacred public sphere of the French
Republic, the
point was the protection of the free development of the individual
personalities
of minors of age, in face of a previously unimaginable widespread
family and
community imposition of religious uniformity that had been established
in large
areas of the French territory. The tragic choice of the French
legislator was
between either prohibiting the use of the veil also to those
school-girls who
really wanted to wear it or accepting its imposition on those who were
victims
of a silent violence that was possible to detect only in a few number
of
extreme situations and only in case of a stubborn and almost heroic
resistance
on the part of the girl. And in any case its constant imposition from
the age
of puberty onwards would inevitably turn out in a life-long
conditioning, because
everybody understands that through the years a garment that must be
constantly
worn in public can develop into nothing less than a second skin. But
the real rationale
of the French prohibition of the veil during school time is the respect
for the
free development of the personality of minors of age and not, as
officially
stated by the French authorities, the mere (and unacceptable)
protection of the
sacralised neutrality of the public sphere, extended to include even
the garments of private individuals: the proof of this is that,
unlike
in Turkey, wearing the veil is an available option for students in
French
universities, and rightly so, because university students are not under
age.
Immigrants
have an
indisputable right to build their own churches, temples or mosques.
That does
not mean that they should be entitled to do it with
taxpayers’ money (nor
should Catholics), nor that every mosque built in Europe should be an
architectural copy of those of Saudi Arabia: like the sort of imposing
“Gulf
spacecrafts” that were built in Bosnia after the recent war,
replacing the destroyed
elegant old Turkish-style mosques traditional in the Balkans. Not
surprisingly,
given the donors and sponsors, the change in the architectural patterns
has
carried along a change in the brand of teaching and preaching. Modern
architecture has changed the way Christian churches are built: it has
not to be
considered islamophobia negotiating the appearance of buildings, the
same way
it is routinely done for the designs of every kind of new buildings,
houses,
edifices or structures, including Christian churches, to be built in
our cities, so that the horrible
Bosnian experience
is not replicated in other European countries.
Even
in Italy, and
already a lot of years ago, courts decided that churches bells would no
longer
be allowed to wake up citizens early in the morning or to ring every
hour of
day and night in our cities, after long and sometimes quite bitter
legal disputes:
it should not be considered a sign of islamophobia in the next few
years preventing
imams from using minarets loudspeakers the way they are now claiming
they have
the constitutional right to use them in some towns of Northern Germany,
the
same way that has been customary in some traditionally Muslim countries.
In
conclusion, I think
that we should take up the challenge of populist fear-mongers, explain
the good
reasons and the beneficial economic and cultural consequences of
immigration
and diversity, fight racism and xenophobia openly rather than adopt the
typical
cautious low profile that always results in an implicit legitimation of
populist discourse. But we should at the same time refrain from playing
down
the problems for individual freedom and human rights arising from any
attempt to
re-introduce authoritarian or patriarchal traditions and from growing
religious
fundamentalisms. If a part of the Catholic Church hierarchy is more
than ready
to join the xenophobic and populist wave as means to claim the
restoration of
its old own privileged stand, it is revealing that other Catholic
leaders are
tempted to seize the opportunity of a new multireligious society in
order to
try re-imposing religious supremacy in a joint venture with the most
fundamentalist
among newcomers, aimed at repealing the secularisation of the public
sphere, sharing
out
more public resources and taxpayers’ money and restoring a
privileged status of
religious beliefs, leaders and institutions at the expenses of secular
citizens
and their cultures and associations. In some European countries the
“interreligious dialogue” has already replaced
integration policies aimed at
individuals and based upon a shared constitutional and civic covenant.
Liberal
values and
principles can only be enforced in an institutional framework of
religious
neutrality and separation – as large as practically feasible
– between religion
and political power, that has proved so successful in our liberal
tradition. A
multireligious society needs neutrality and separation more, not less,
than the
European more homogeneous societies of the XIX and XX centuries.
