SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 2001
EURO VISION / Rashmee Z Ahmed Italy's clash of values: Political correctness vs plainspeak
RASHMEE Z. AHMED
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
The clash of civilisations is hardly the state policy of officially Catholic Italy for all that its elected prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, publicly said as much this week in Berlin in full view of the aghast German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and a thoroughly disapproving world. Europe-wide condemnation was swift, Arab anger slower to come, but steady and scorching. Berlusconi recanted but only just, apologising for remarks he said had been "badly translated and misinterpreted", but objecting to a "supreme tribunal of ideological correctness" that is unable to call a spade a spade. So far so reasonable-going for America's painstakingly-cobbled coalition to undertake the "war on terrorism". But, look a little further to the left and right of the Italian prime minister, just four months in office, whose election victory centred on the businesslike promise to build a tough-talking, fast-acting, wealth-making "Italy Incorporated" in much the way he consolidated his vast media empire. Look to the Italian people, unkindly stereotyped as bottom-pinching, excitable lotharios, but capable too of deep, if defiant thought. An astonishing 60 per cent of them apparently endorsed Berlusconi's paean to Western civilisation's "love of individual freedom" and his finger-wagging admonition that "this is not the heritage of other civilisations such as Islam". Admittedly the approval ratings were published nowhere else but in Il Giornale, a newspaper owned by the prime minister's brother Paolo, but they were followed up by a former president insisting Berlusconi had accurately voiced the wordless emotions surging in Italian breasts. The ensuing and ongoing Italian debate on the rights and wrongs of cultural relativism is hardly good-tempered, but it allows some of the poison to flow out of the system. For, this is a country that recently accorded official recognition to two minuscule minority religions, Buddhism and Jehova's Witnesses, but has been unable to extend the same privilege to its largest minority grouping, the one-million strong Muslims. The so-called land of the black mantilla, worn fetchingly by all women, including Madonna and the late Diana, Princess of Wales, when calling on the Pope, is a crucible of combustible cultural mixtures. With a greying population, notoriously-leaky borders that run along four countries and 5,000 km of coastline, Italy is resentful of the influx of newcomers who pour in at an approximate rate of 100,000 a year. This year, some 50,000 Asians and Africans are to be granted legal status to live and work in Italy, doing the jobs no one else wants but helping to keep the economy ticking over. In an ugly echo of the German rights response to green cards for Indian techies, Italians have been calling for "more children, not immigrants" to reverse the unsustainable birth rate, which is the lowest in Europe. This is also the country whose popular, Oscar-winning director and star of the film Life is Beautiful, Robert Benigni, spoke earlier this year about the unnaturalness of current events in Italy: "the Pope entering a mosque for the first time, genetically modified children, Berlusconi likely to become prime minister, unnatural stuff". Benigni's opinions followed another "civilisational pasta war", as some papers unfunnily called it, when an Italian cardinal advised the government to conduct racial profiling of immigrants, choosing Catholics over Muslims to maintain Italy's religious identity. But then again, it is the Italian electorate that halved the vote of the anti-immigrant, radical right-wing Northern League, which is part of Berlusconi's governing coalition. Who can say if it was a rejection of the right-wing's personalities or its politics. One rather hopes not, but perhaps Il Giornale, the Berlusconi family paper is right and the prime minister does have his people with him, even as he engages in a clash of values between unvarnished plainspeak and political correctness.
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