Ecco chi ha causato la crisi secondo l'Independent

[POVERAITALIA]

Peter Popham: Blame the Vatican for Italy's latest crisis

Italy is not one state but two: the state created in 1870; and the papacy coiled in the heart of Rome

It was a blast from the past. The Italian government, nine months into its term, was chugging along stolidly under Romano Prodi, raising taxes to cover some its ballooning debt, going after tax evaders, taking some preliminary snips at the forest of restrictive practices in retailing and the professions, drafting a law to legalise "civil unions", including homosexual ones.

Then suddenly on Wednesday it was all over. On a vote on foreign policy in the Senate, where its majority is tiny, the government went down by two votes. Suddenly on the 8 o'clock news there was Mr Prodi smiling ruefully as he wandered up to President Napolitano at the old papal headquarters on the Quirinale Hill, now the presidential palace, to hand in his resignation.
After two days of intensive talks involving all and sundry Prodi is now back in the job, supposing he can get through confidence votes in both houses of parliament. As Napolitano said, explaining why he had given Prodi a second chance: "There is no realistic alternative." The outcome should be clear within a week.
And the outside world was left wondering whether Italy really is a hopeless case. For decades after the Second World War, Italy seemed to get nowhere, because no sooner was a government in power than it had collapsed in disarray. The desperate state of many things in Italy is a legacy of those revolving door governments - whether it is ramshackle infrastructure or the power of mafias in health, education, football or any other field you care to think of. The state was weak because governments were fleeting.
The ostensible culprit for Prodi's pratfall last week, jumped on hard by the mainstream Italian media, was the far left component of the coalition. Two members of Rifondazione Comunista were so angered by Prodi's determination to continue the same foreign policy line as Silvio Berlusconi, fighting alongside the Americans in Afghanistan and giving the US the go-ahead to build a new base in the city of Vicenza, that they quit the Senate debate before the division, thus depriving the government of two vital votes.
Yet as the days passed, even Corriere della Sera woke up to the fact that the Trotskyite and the pacifist were not actually the ones to blame. Three senators for life, including Giulio Andreotti, a powerful Christian Democrat politician for more than 40 years, now aged 87, had been expected to vote for the government but instead one voted against and two abstained. These were the votes that sank the government.
The suspicion quickly arose that Andreotti and the others had voted as they did, not because they were opposed to Italy's philo-American foreign policy (which they ardently support), but to bring down the government: the reason being that Prodi had insisted, despite strenuous opposition from the Catholic Church, on bringing in a law to legalise civil unions.
And it was the Catholics who emerged from this week's chaos in triumph, because to secure extra support Prodi has been obliged to dump the civil unions law. Cohabiting Italians, gay or otherwise, will continue to have no rights, unlike their counterparts in most parts of the EU. Poland is the other exception.
This little piece of modern Machiavelliana exposes the true reason for the chronic weakness of Italian governments. Italy is not one state but two: the unified Italian state, created in 1870; and the papacy coiled in the heart of the capital, the ultimate legatee of the original Roman empire, which surrendered temporal power over the papal states but has never relaxed its grip on Italians' hearts and minds.
Imagine that Hitler did not die in his bunker in 1945 but instead cut a deal with the new West German government, giving him continued sovereignty over a small patch of Berlin - and continued intellectual hegemony over the millions he had brainwashed during the previous decade. How could a new German dispensation function with this incubus at the heart of the state, second-guessing its every move, checking and trumping every effort to dismantle its ideology?
Italy's Vatican problem is a lot like that, with the difference that the church has been wielding its mind-control for nearly two millennia. The result is that Italy does not function like other western European states. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 that ended the Thirty Years' War gave birth to the concept of the sovereignty of the nation-state, with states independent both from the Holy Roman Emperor and from the Catholic Church. The "sovereign" of such a state now had the right to determine the religion of his subjects, while Christians belonging to a different branch were allowed to practice their own rites in private. Thanks to this treaty, sovereignty as the underlying principle in the formation of nation-states spread across the planet.
But because Italy was host to the Pope, it never attained real sovereignty. Mussolini achieved an uneasy cohabitation with the church, but after the war the Vatican was back in power through the the Democristiani, who provided all Italy's post-war prime ministers until 1981.
With the collapse of the established political parties in the early 1990s, Italy had another chance to gain control of its destiny. But 15 years on, one former Christian Democrat (Prodi) is PM, while the first prime minister he served, Andreotti, is still fighting the good fight for the Pope. The long, bitter struggle for Italy's soul goes on.

[Piotr (POL)]

Esatto ... è proprio quello che dicevo io :

INVADIAMO IL VATICANO !!!

[Paul Z. (POL)]

Troppo bello il paragone tra Hitler e il Vaticano.

Solo l'Independent poteva fare una cosa del genere.

[Socrates (POL)]

lo sanno tutti...tranne gli italiani.

[Antitesi]

immaginatevi un articolo così su un giornale come Repubblica... che succederebbe?