Berlusconi's Italy: Mapping Contemporary Italian Politics

2. The Geography of the New Bipolarity, 1994–2006

2 The Geography of the New Bipolarity, 1994–2006 One of the high hopes of the early 1990s was that following the cleansing of the corruption associated with the party regime of the cold war period, Italy could become a “normal country.” There were hopes that bipolar politics of electoral competition between clearly defined coalitions formed before elections, rather than perpetual domination by the center, would lead to the potential alternating of progressive and conservative forces in national political office and check the systematic corruption of partitocrazia based on the jockeying for government offices (and associated powers) after elections (Gundle and Parker 1996). From one viewpoint this has happened. A fragile electoral bipolarity between competing center-left and center-right coalitions has seemingly replaced the old system at the national level. Unfortunately , confusion over what is understood by bipolarity has affected judgment by political commentators as to what has been achieved (Franchi 2006). In particular, a populist-plebiscitary conception of elections between rigid blocs who then demonize one another and fail to recognize any deliberative function for parliament once in office has been confused with the need for bipolar competition at election time (Sartori 2006a; Berselli and Cartocci 2006). But in another respect, a persistent feature of Italian electoral politics is the continuing lack of electoral bipolarity at other geographical scales,such as the regional and local. Politically,Italy remains a “geographical expression” with little evidence of either emerging nationwide swing between party groupings or of that opinion voting in which any voter anywhere is potentially available to vote for any party. There is also an absence of institutional bipolarism in the sense of true left and right parties replacing the ad hoc arrangements at work in what remain strange and often ideologically incoherent coalitions. Indeed, from this viewpoint, the old system organized around the two “spheres” of DC and the PCI was more truly bipolar but obviously had an inability to produce alternation in office between the two sides (Bogaards 2005). However, the whole concept of a “normal country” this discussion circulates around is deeply problematic. It is based on an idealized model of electoral politics in Britain and the United States, which countries presumably lack the geographical and ideological fractures of Italy and, as a result, effortlessly produce alternation in national office between distinctive left- and right-leaning political forces (Agnew 2002,Chapter 4). Of course,Italian politics has many unique features. But geographical variance in support for political parties is not one of them. This is a widespread characteristic of electoral politics around the world. The study of Italian politics, as well as the study of other political systems, has lacked an understanding of why this is the case. Crucial has been the seeming difficulty of thinking geographically about national politics. A certain “methodological nationalism” has immunized scholars against thinking in terms of fractured or variegated national territories. A normative commitment to national unification has further undermined attending to the ways in which political identities and interests are made out of local and regional conditions as well as national-level ones. Michel Foucault (1980, 149) has captured most vividly what seems to have happened in conventional thinking about space and time: 16 C H A P T E R 2 Space was treated as the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile. Time,on the contrary,was richness,fecundity,life, dialectic. . . . The use of spatial terms seems to have the air of an anti-history. If one started to talk in terms of space that meant that one was hostile to time. It meant, as the fools say, that one “denied history. . . .” They didn’t understand that space . . . meant the throwing into relief of processes— historical ones, needless to say—of power. As Foucault was suggesting, the devaluation of spatial thinking is a well-established intellectual tradition in its own right. So, it is no surprise that thinking about Italian politics should follow a similar logic—except,that is,because there can be few countries that would seem to be so ripe for the application of spatial thinking. Not only is Italy obviously divided geographically by significant economic and cultural cleavages, its politics has often been understood in spatial terms by students of the “southern question”—the NorthSouth gap in economic development—and of fixed regional political cultures (the red and white zones) as well as...