Book Review: Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State: Understanding the Roots of the Crises by Adriano Cozzolino

‘This is what markets expect from us’ (p. 83). No, the excerpt is not taken from some Gordon Gekko’s personal diary. Tragically, it comes from one of the Documento di Programmazione Economico-Finanziaria (Economic and Financial Planning Document, DPEF), which Italian governments started to produce from the mid-1980s. It is just one, distillate piece of evidence in Adriano Cozzolino’s Neoliberal Transformations of the Italian State: Understanding the Roots of the Crises. With this work, the Neapolitan scugnizzo explores some of the changes of the Italian State under the aegis of the neoliberal turn of the 1970s.

The substance of this book lies in its second half, on which this review will focus. Cozzolino scrutinizes 30 odd years of DPEF (1988–2017) – a great feat of remarkable empirical and analytical value – which stand out as some sort of Tinker Bell illuminating the way to Neverland. His diligent study of the practices and lexicon wielded by the technocrats to force down Italians’ throats neoliberal legislation is revealing of different things. Not a single document contains any examples of alternatives to neoliberalism, obliterating the ‘cognitive spectrum in terms of the policy solutions judged to be feasible’ (p. 83). What technocrats narrowed down was not just the range of conceivable policies but also the physiognomy which the Italian polity must replicate: a speculative market-kingdom within a series of larger ones (the EU, the global market). Dismantling the Keynesian welfare state – getting screwed progressively – was camouflaged by words the connotation of which varied depending on what needed to be done. Intimidating terms for what the Italian State was (‘weakness’, ‘vulnerability’, ‘urgency’, ‘disease’, ‘exceptionality’) alternate alluring ones for where Italy should, nay, must go, that is, Europe (‘modernisation’, ‘dynamic’, ‘prosperous’, ‘progressive market’, ‘stabilise’). In fact, from the 1980s,

‘credibility’ to financial creditors became the main concern of policymakers, which put risanamento, that is, permanent structural adjustment of public finance, at the top of the political economy agenda ... Financial creditors became, thus, the principal interlocutors of Italian state representatives. (p. 83)

The anti-democratic growth of an organizational form based on free market principles is displayed with gravity.

Centre-left governments vigorously promoted ‘neoliberal-progressive Europeanism’ (p. 93); centre-right were more reluctant towards Europe. Rhetoric aside, they did not differ in their implementation of austerity policies: some combination of market liberalization, flexibilization of labour, wage moderation, more risanamento. It is significant that the right produced Silvio Berlusconi, the charismatic personage who weathered the storms of Italian politics from the 1990s. He died last year, going down with State funerals. The centre-left belched out many faceless masks who came and went, some with fanfare, others quietly: a list of anonymous etceteras. They constitute a good portion of Cozzolino’s ‘technocratic collective intellectual’. This prince(ly) body claimed technical expertise (hollowing out, by concealing, the intrinsic political nature of organization), worked in State institutions (Cozzolino eyes the Bank of Italy in particular) and pushed hard the neoliberal restructuring of the Italian State, legitimizing it. The fact that the white-collar scab march known as the ‘rally of the forty thousand’ (p. 65) did happen (1980) shows just how deep go the historical roots of the daunting problem of the leadership of the working-class movement and therefore of historical and political analysis of a changing society.

How, then, did the neoliberal project mutate the Italian state? It centralized its power in the executive, at the expense of parliament (legislative). Law no. 400 was passed in 1988 and, among other things, introduced the ‘confidence question’. The government can impose on parliament its law proposals

to reduce the risks of a parliamentary rejection of the bill. In this case, the executive warns its parliamentary majority that it will call for new elections in case of a negative vote on the bill covered by the confidence question. (p. 105)

This is troubling for a Republic which an anti-fascist alliance founded at the end of the Second World War on the centrality of parliament (legislative power), and not of the executive (the government). Law no. 400 withered parliamentary debate (which should shape governmental bills) more gradually than Order 66 wiped off Jedis, but was likewise effective in emptying out some coffers in the galaxy of Italian democracy.

Decree-laws – fast-tracked by the executive in exceptional cases due to necessity and urgency, in theory – spiked in the early 1990s, but equally shrank in the late 1990s. Technocrats must have known their Lenin because the decree-laws became fewer, but ‘better’. That is, as Cozzolino acutely notices while moving with agility in the legalistic discourse, decree-laws started to include norms that touched a growing variety of domains (converging especially on structural reforms and public finance), something which was unconstitutional and prompted the Constitutional Court to call for mitigation of its use (p. 111). Still, the point is proved time and again that the executive consolidated its ruling post while Italian parliament grew marginal.

Tangible results of all this politicking have been multifarious, yet tendential. The

national share of income has dramatically shifted towards the richest households since the early 1990s ... in 2016 the national share of net wealth held by the bottom 30 percent of the households amounted to 1 percent, while the richest percent of households held 75 percent of the share of net wealth. Within this, the top 5 percent held a staggering 40 percent. (p. 132)

Cozzolino’s framework is informed by Critical International Political Economy, which is uncommon in Italian academia, and he wields one interpretation of Gramsci to build a theory of the State in Chapter 3. He later (Chapter 4) trails the narrative by which the 1960s and 1970s were a period of mass struggle for workers, to which a neoliberal counter-offensive followed in the ensuing decades. Subsequently, the 1980s are understood as a phase of war of position and the 1990s as one of war of movement for neoliberal reaction (p70), apparently capable of establishing a neoliberal hegemony. This narrative contains certain issues, which we do not pursue here, and which a reading of, among others, Giuseppe Vacca would contribute to problematize further and synchronize. But a book is valid because, like Cozzolino’s, it contains the strength to help us raise questions, producing a dialectical tension that moves the limits of our current knowledge forward.

To many, the price for a hard copy of this book will be prohibitive; the digital version is a welcomed alternative. Those striving for liberation from capital shackles and eager to read critical scholarship on the mutations of the (Italian) State will find this scugnizzo liberato’s work a step in the right direction, in whichever format they choose to fetch, as they should, his book.