Could be worse: An example: Italy
Although the US has fallen on hard times, it is still leagues ahead of poor Italy, as described in this note by in the New Yorker:
Anniversaries are uplifting when you have something to celebrate. A couple on the edge of divorce do not rejoice that their wedding anniversary is around the corner. Something of the same uneasiness surrounded the hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of the Italian state, on March 17th. As late as February, the government couldn’t decide whether the day should be declared a national holiday. The Northern League, a major party in the ruling coalition, complained about the loss of working hours; many of the League’s members have a separatist agenda and want to avoid a surge in national pride. The governor of South Tyrol, a German-speaking province ceded to Italy after the First World War, said that it was unreasonable to expect his people to celebrate their subjugation to an alien culture.
Nor does the rest of Italy see much reason to celebrate. The economy lags behind the French and German economies. Unemployment is at 8.6 per cent and youth unemployment at nearly thirty per cent. Wages are low, growth negligible. Meanwhile, Italy’s Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, is on trial for allegedly bribing a lawyer and has recently been charged with paying a minor for sex and then trying to obstruct police inquiries. Far from resigning, he has promised to use the trial to denounce a conspiracy against him by “Communist” magistrates and has introduced a bill to curb their powers. A constitutional crisis is brewing at a time when the government’s energies are required elsewhere.
Deeper than this, there has long been a feeling in Italy that the project of national unity was flawed from the start, and will never work satisfactorily—that the country’s government will always be stalled, and the south forever the unmanageable territory of organized crime. Three recent books express the mood in their titles: Manlio Graziano’s ambitious “The Failure of Italian Nationhood” (Palgrave; $80) seeks to get to the heart of the problem, examining crisis after crisis in the past century and a half in search of some recurrent behavior pattern that might explain Italy’s troubles; “Resisting the Tide: Cultures of Opposition Under Berlusconi” (Continuum; $130) and “Italy Today: The Sick Man of Europe” (Routledge; $47.95) are collective efforts. The first, edited by a group of Italian scholars from the University of Birmingham—Daniele Albertazzi, Clodagh Brook, Charlotte Ross, and Nina Rothenberg—documents the difficulties of opposing a Prime Minister who owns the three major private TV networks, exercises a profound influence on the three public networks, and controls a large part of the press, the publishing world, and the advertising industry. The second, edited by Andrea Mammone and Giuseppe Veltri, examines a range of troubling economic, political, and social issues. Where many accounts of recent Italian history have been prone to overheated rhetoric and cries of scandal, all three of these books are admirable for their sober, businesslike tone. Nevertheless, their findings are far from optimistic.
The idea of laying bare some persistent group dynamic that would explain the vagaries of Italian public life—Graziano’s aim—has haunted me throughout my thirty years in the country. . . .
