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Reviews / Comptes Rendus

Robert A. Ventresca, From Culture to Democracy: Culture and Politics in the Italian Elections of 1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004)

ROBERT VENTRESCA has written an important book on the 1948 elections. It is the first of its kind in English and it reveals many things that other works on Italy's first parliamentary election after the ratification of the 1948 Republican Constitution have not clearly analysed, such as the impact of the 1948 electoral campaign on all future Italian elections from 1953 to 2006. I want to discuss the contents of the book by looking at three distinct elements: the documentary sources used to buttress the analysis, what the 1948 election campaign and results tell us about the external factors that have operated on the Italian political system in the post-war period, and how the memory of 1948 has influenced internal party relations within the Italian political system.

With regard to the documentary sources used to support the analysis, the book uses the numerous studies that have appeared in English in articles and chapters in books touching directly or indirectly on the election and the transition of the Italian political system between 1946 and 1948. Where the book is weakest is in the use of Italian sources. Here, the selection is not as thorough. It is more selective and the articles and books that are cited are not always the most pertinent to understanding the political event under discussion. An example is provided by Ventresca's citation of Giorgio Bocca's biography of Palmiro Togliatti, the secretary of the Italian Communist Party [PCI] from 1943 to 1966 while omitting mention of Paolo Spriano's five-volume history of the PCI that provides an ample discussion of inter-party developments as well as the party's relations with other political forces on the Italian left in the run-up to and aftermath of the 1948 election. In addition, there are other histories of the Italian Christian Democratic Party [DC] that are not cited to provide a more in-depth view of what was happening within the ruling centrist party and how the 1948 election result was subsequently managed by the Christian Democrats.

The real winner of the 1948 election was undoubtedly the DC which within five years was able to sterilize Luigi Gedda's Civic Committees and rebuff Pope Pius XII's demand in 1951–1952 for the DC to coalesce with the Monarchist and Neo-Fascist Movimento Sociale Italiano [MSI] in order to keep the city government of Rome out of the hands of a leftist coalition. From 1954 onward under the leadership of Amintore Fanfani the DC undertook to build its own autonomous political party organization that made it independent from the Church, Catholic Action, landowners, industrialists, and the Americans. One other missing piece of the puzzle is what happened in southern Italy between January 1947 (DeGasperi's trip to the US) and December 1947 when the centrist coalition was forged. There is a suggestion in the book that DeGasperi used the support of the far-right Uomo Qualunque and surviving Fascist organizations during this period, but there is no systematic discussion of the repression exercised by the government in collaboration with Fascist squads and the Mafia in suppressing organized labour, land occupation movements, and leftist parties in the name of social order and political stability. What political prices were paid for this support? An alarm bell should have sounded in his ear as he cites in passing that Lucky Luciano made statements in support of the DC on the radio. (63) In 1948 Luciano was not in a US jail but rather was living in style in Naples under the watchful and at the same time benevolent eyes of the Italian justice system. What deal did Mario Scelba (the Minister of the Interior, who was from Sicily) and/or DeGasperi make with the Mafia for their grassroots support during the election? This is also one of the legacies of 1948 that has taken the Italian political system 58 years to shed with the capture on 19 April 2006 of the boss of bosses, Bernardo Provenzano, who has lived as a fugitive for 40 years close to his family and "business" interests in Corleone, Sicily.

Ventresca describes quite clearly how the 1948 election represented a watershed event for US foreign policy. In 1948 the US convinced itself that the DC was going to lose and that the Marxist parties would consequently organize an armed insurrection as was undertaken in Czechoslovakia in February 1948. The author argues that, in part, this hysteria was encouraged by DeGasperi and his government as a means of extracting favours and aid from the US. A convincing case is made that the breaking of the logjam in the US Congress created by Republican reluctance to fully finance the Marshall Plan was to a great extent attributable to the upcoming Italian elections. However, US hysteria also led to the creation of the CIA's dirty-tricks and covert intervention program by James Angleton and William Colby who then went on to use their bag of covert tricks in other countries where the results were less positive, and sometimes utterly disastrous (e.g., Cuba and Vietnam). We can observe that the ability to whip up hysteria based on little information on the ground as a justification for covert and even overt US intervention is still with us today. Ventresca does not mention it, but DeGasperi and other DC leaders never felt completely at ease with US domination of Italian foreign policy and sought in European unity an alternative and more balanced orientation of policy options. Thus, Italian support of the 1950 Schuman Declaration may have been in part encouraged by the lessons learned in 1948.

The third element that is extremely interesting in the Ventresca account of the 1948 election is how so many features of that campaign have continued to permeate Italian national parliamentary elections to the present day: freedom versus dictatorship, Catholicism versus atheism, communism versus democracy, good versus evil, truth versus falsehood. In 1948 the charge was that communists ate babies. In the 2006 election the outgoing prime minister stated that in China babies are boiled and ground up to make fertilizer. What also is similar between today and 1948 is that the losing side never admits to having made mistakes or that, in the end, the winning side conducted a better campaign and was more successful in getting out its core voters. Instead, defeat is attributed to the nefarious undertakings of the other side in stealing ballots and nullifying the votes of the opposing camp, and finally the loser never admits to defeat. The losing side always hopes for a better day in the future when the tables can be turned on the current winner. Fair play has never been part of Italian political discourse in facing electoral defeat.

What Ventresca does not emphasize enough are the positive outcomes from the 1948 election. The events between 18–19 April and 14 July 1948 — that is, between the election results and the attempted assassination of Palmiro Togliatti—did not cause the PCI to mount any attempt at armed insurrection. On the contrary, the leadership around Togliatti kept a strong hold on the party activists and did all in their power to bring PCI mobilization within the confines of parliamentary politics. By 1951 Pietro Secchia, the leader of the "insurrectionists" in the party, had been effectively marginalized to be substituted by a large group of leaders, such as Giorgio Amendola, who had always favoured the parliamentary road to power. It is this initial group of reformist leaders that gravitated toward Togliatti which allowed the PCI to transform itself into the PDS in 1991 and eventually into today's DS [Democratic Party of the Left]. The second positive result of the 1948 election was that the contents of the Republican Constitution became the common patrimony of a broad spectrum in the Italian political system, that is, left, center, and right. The years that followed the 1948 election were characterized by the slow but steady implementation of the Italian Constitution and all of its innovative elements, from a national system of regional governments to the creation of the Constitutional Court and the self-governing Council of the Judiciary that has kept the control of the judiciary free from existing governments. How far-sighted this provision was became abundantly clear to Italians during the last five years under the Berlusconi government. Finally, the other positive aspect of the 1948 election result was that DeGasperi and the leadership cadre of the DC were, in effect, social Christian Democrats, who may not have introduced reforms immediately but did do so over a reasonable period of time (i.e., between 1950 and 1970). Their reform of land tenure, education, social services, pensions, economic incentives for artisan and small enterprises, gender equality in the workforce, and civil rights have served to gradually change Italy from the backward, agricultural economy that predominated in 1948 to the vibrant socio-economic and political system it represents today.


Robert Leonardi London School of Economics

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