Prodi’s Padania

By Patrick McCarthy
SPECIAL TO ITALY DAILY

It is no coincidence that Romano Prodi’s troubles in Brussels should coincide with Umberto Bossi’s new initiative in northern Italy. Mr. Prodi may have made some fairly minor mistakes in his choice of collaborators and in his dealings with his fellow-commissioners and civil servants, but the real reason for the attacks on him is political. The leading EU members — not just Britain — simply do not want a strong head of the Commission with ideas of his own. Whether one likes it or not, power in the EU lies in the Council of Ministers, that is in the governments of the member-states. They make the decisions and the Commission carries them out. Mr. Prodi wants the Commission to have power and to exercise it on behalf of an EU that is an entity in its own right. How does this battle overlap with Mr. Bossi’s campaign to create, after the regional elections, a united Northern Italy with a good deal of autonomy from Rome? Well, first we must make a leap of faith and believe that Mr. Bossi will do what he said. This is in fact highly improbable both because his coalition partner, the crooner and yachtsman Silvio Berlusconi, says just about anything to gain a handful of votes, and because Mr. Bossi himself is essentially a man of protest. But let’s assume he tries it out. The EU plays a vital part in Mr. Bossi’s plan because the small firms, which are the backbone of northern Italy’s economy, need export markets, a tariff-free Europe and ultimately, to use an overworked term, globalization. The Northern League is a product of globalization because it offers a concrete, local identity to people whose livelihood depends on their ability to compete in far-flung markets. But that does not mean the EU would welcome this new, semi-autonomous “Padania” that Mr. Bossi is proposing. The member-states and their Council of Ministers are fighting on several fronts: against the Commission but also the European Parliament, which is trying to increase its power, and against outside forces like NAFTA. Meanwhile, the Council of Ministers is weakened by the troubles that have beset its hard core, the Franco-German relationship. Precisely at this moment the EU member-states find themselves confronting a new challenge from the regions. Traditionally, poor regions, often endowed with their own language — Wales and Brittany — protested to their national governments to demand more resources. Now rich regions — Catalonia and “Padania” — go over the heads of the national governments to Brussels. The German Laender have severely restricted the power of the Berlin government to make decisions on their behalf. Moreover, when the rich regions of a country group together, they encourage the poor regions to do the same. In the initiative announced by Naples Mayor Antonio Bassolino at Eboli last month, which proposes to create a coordinated block of southern regions, one may see the first, distant glimpse of a Southern League. One could imagine — to spin out a scenario — that the Italian state would be gravely weakened if some of its richest regions had greater autonomy and it was left to cope with the grumbling, poorer regions. The same could happen in other countries like Britain, where the socio-economic gulf between the Southeast and the North grew steadily wider under Margaret Thatcher. Europe would thus split up into regions, which would not, however, be simply rich or poor. There are pockets of poverty in northern Italy: the areas of smokestack industry like Porto Marghera, near Venice. The split in the working class has created highly skilled technical workers who see advantages for themselves in liberal policies, who do not have to worry about mobility of labor and do not belong to trade unions. In the same neighborhoods of the same town there may be unskilled workers, fearful of unemployment and virulently opposed to immigration. To hold such diverse groups together requires political skills of a high order. To bargain with the EU on their behalf would be difficult as they are asking for very different things. Anyway, the EU is a union of nation-states and has no interest in letting the more modern regions split off, leaving it to look after Sicily or Andalusia. We should all hope Mr. Bossi’s plan is just another of his tall tales like the tale of Celtic Padania rebelling against an English king in Rome, with help from Mel Gibson and “Braveheart.”

Mr. McCarthy is a professor of European Studies at the Johns Hopkins University, Bologna Center.