INTERVIEW WITH FURIO COLOMBO

Furio Colombo, currently Senator in the Italian Parliament, is former editor-in-chief of daily L’Unita, former Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, former correspondent for La Stampa and La Repubblica from the USA, and professor of journalism at Columbia University.

European Alternatives: The name of Europe seems to resonate less and less, referring in the minds of its citizens more to the grey corridors of Brussels than the extreme creative diversity that always characterised this continent. Is it too unrealistic to imagine the possibility of a renewed and concerted cultural effort that may truly open up the possibility of a new understanding of the European project?

Furio Colombo: This question hits a crucial problem that is difficult to answer. Europe is politically and culturally weak, but has an immense economical force. It is the first time in history that an economic force refuses to have pride in its culture and identity. Usually when a subject achieves independence and economic strength it becomes self-satisfied and tries to send out messages of its successes. Maybe not necessarily celebrative, perhaps instead critical, for after all in regimes of liberty it is wealth that brings critical vitality. But this does not happen, neither as the celebration of a new sense of belonging nor as a distinction or contraposition from it, and this is surely a problem not easy to solve for as long as Europe remains voiceless. Europe looks itself at the mirror but does not see anything, which is sad and representative of the crisis we are currently living through. Having realised almost everything apart from a constitutional chart, Europe currently exists mainly in its bureaucratic aspects. I am convinced kids in schools do not feel “Europe”, aside from some privileges in travelling with greater ease in what was once called “foreign countries”, but they don’t have, even distantly, that pride that even the last of the Americans who passed the frontier illegally has for the simple fact of living in the territory of the United States. The united states of Europe have never been born, there is unfortunately no European pride, and in the best of cases we see a frankly pathetic race between Spain who claims to have surpassed Italy, France claiming to have surpassed the UK, Germany claiming it has surpassed France and the UK, etc., which is all very modest because these claims are not being made in relation to India, China or Japan, but to one another, where one should think that the growth of one is the growth of the other and the crisis of one the crisis of the other. But these thoughts do not enter the minds of European politicians, who have only given up minimum parts of their powers, and seem unable to govern Europe instead of merely governing a fraction of it.

But let us say something that may give us an element of hope. When there are very strong crises it is not always the case that the way out becomes apparent much before its arrival; it can very well happen that we continue moving in a desolate landscape when suddenly that landscape becomes animated and alive, completely different and new. This was, for example, the case with the United States in the passage from the 1950s to the 1960s, when I was living there. There was nothing in the America of Eisenhower predicting the America of Kennedy and Luther King, the cultural renaissance, from the beat generation to Woodstock, the free speech movement in Berkeley and the 1968 of Chicago. This was an immense revolution that has revitalised and redefined the United States, leaving behind with an incredible force the unbelievably boring, irrelevant, and pitiful 1950s where everything was ugly, where cinema, literature and music was boring, middle-class and claustrophobic. And suddenly a country without borders emerged, without limits, open to the world, with the most extraordinary creative capacity. But all this happened unexpectedly and at once. America redefined itself and its relevance in the world beginning from a few months in which it revealed itself as a new country. Why couldn’t this happen with Europe? After we have made the list of all that does not work in the European Union, its sense of solitude, of void, of aphasia, after we have pictured this edifice where only bureaucratic commas and precepts resound full of instructions for use but devoid of ideas on meaning or direction, this giant and rich ship left anchored in a harbour from which it does not have the courage to move, why could it not be that suddenly there will emerge a great land called Europe?

EA: Next month our journal will organise a Congress of European writers, artists, and critics to reason on the meaning and responsibility of artistic creation in the current European panorama. You are amongst the founders of “Gruppo 63”, which self-consciously called itself an “avant-garde” movement. Does this term still have a meaning today? Can one still imagine a movement of social rejuvenation arising from cultural actors?

Furio Colombo: An artist does not have other obligations apart from his aesthetic, poetic, or personal code, his expressive capacity and his courage. The rest remains dependant on temporal circumstances difficult to predict. For example, Gruppo 63 was born in a situation that greatly favoured aggregation between different kinds of artistic practices; from writers to painters, from architects to musicians, there was a strong desire to get together, to theorise together ways of understanding a cultural renovation of one’s country, something that in other epochs has not been the case and that the present era lacks entirely. The current period is rich in talent and expressive capacity, but they don’t tend to get together, they don’t want to do it, nor do they have a particular nostalgia for us who have done it or a particular desire to imitate us. On the contrary, maybe I see a negative judgement towards groups that have been pivotal for the cultural production of the twentieth century but that are now looked at with distance. Today a strong personal solitude is more typical, which is another way of being protagonists of a creative life. I believe this protagonism under conditions of adequate freedom will continue to express itself even without giving birth, or at least not for now, to clearly labelled groups, or “great” magazines serving as a cultural push for particular modes of expression. In the United States, for example, the New York Review of Books is a great publisher managed with insight by its editors, but it is not and does not represent a group, which it did when it was first founded.

EA: As we speak, representatives of the African diaspora, supported by the president of Senegal, are protesting in front of the European Commission in Brussels against what they perceive as unjust trade agreements reached at the last EU-Africa summit in Lisbon. In a recent interview for our journal Gianni Vattimo joined the chorus of those who see in the EU merely a “neoliberal war machine”; Vattimo used the term “a new office of the world bank”. Do you believe this criticism is grounded?

Furio Colombo: The issue is not whether these critiques are grounded; the moment one side feels an injustice, even only as a subjective perception, it has a right to protest and to make this protest heard. The problem is that this protest is destined to fall in the void because there is no European political power capable of responding. One imagines an action and a reaction but one of the protagonists is absent, and this is Europe. Defining it as an office of the World Bank is clever but does not mean very much, for it would imply that it has a will, a coherence, a structure, and a leadership, all things that Europe does not have.

EA: Let’s come to Italy. There is currently a large discussion in the media about the so-called “Italian decline”, ranging from a relatively weak economic performance over the last 15 years to the scandal of garbage in Naples and the weakness of the government to take action on sensible issues. The foreign press, from the New York Times to the Financial Times, has been particularly critical of the country lately. Some commentators suggest that the responsibility lies with the political class, pointing to the vivacity of Italian society, the successes of its export and the creativity of its industries; some claim that the political situation is just the expression of a sick society. You have been on both sides of the barricade: I wonder what opinion you have on the current crisis?

Furio Colombo: Each country is a container inside other containers, and Italy, often judged on its own, is instead part of Europe and the economy reality of the West, sharing the problems that affect the entire globalised world. We can think of the current torment in the United States, where the primary elections are seen as so important and dramatic precisely because Americans are longing for a change, perceiving their situation as one of difficulty or crisis. In the United States there is also an economic crisis manifesting itself both in the stock exchange and the price of oil that is shacking the group of industrialised countries, including the largest and most powerful nation. There is still a lot of uncertainty surrounding this crisis, neither the collapse of the stock exchanges nor the rise in energy prices are yet completely understood phenomena; of course we know about the effects of industrialisation in China and India on the increase in global demand, the never-ending war in Iraq, the deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan, the explosion of sub-prime loans, etc.

Now if we think how much the political and economic life of the largest and most powerful country of the series to which Italy belongs is affected, we become aware that Italy is shaken with force by similar torments. And when these reach Italy they increase in magnitude. Firstly, because by the time they reach Italy they have diffused in the world and have influenced the many other economies that influence Italy’s; secondly, because Italy is a smaller country, with a more tormented past; lastly because Italy has generated and is living an additional profound crisis that is entirely of its creation.

Indeed, in Italy there are two concurrent crises, determining a risk similar to the transversal and undulatory oscillations of a bridge; experts tell us that a well-built bridge does not fall just for a transversal or undulatory shock, but only when the two happen simultaneously. Italy is living two crises at once, and this is the difference between the Italian crisis and that of France, Spain, United States, etc. And what is this peculiarly Italian crisis? It is a profound crisis in trust from the bottom up, from public opinion towards politics, and from the top down, in the incapacity to create new leadership and create confidence; it is a profound break between the upper and lower economical strata, where the poor are becoming more and more poor and the rich are barely affected; it is a crisis of communication and information, which in Italy has reached its lowest point.

To understand the analogy we made with the United States we could think of a recent and much celebrated film, “Lions for Lambs”, by Robert Redford. This a particularly dramatic scenario for a country like the US, which has always been admired as the home of great journalism, where the film shows that journalism can at times betray the trust of citizens, the “consumers” of news with a right to the truth, and accept to become a partner of power by diffusing false information, in this case about the war. In Italy this situation is aggravated by a uniquely Italian historical accident; Italy has been governed for five years by a man who is the owner of most sources of information in the country, controlling virtually all private TV channels, a large share of radio and newspapers, and having arrived to control public broadcasting when he assumed the role of prime minister.

This phenomenon has never come about elsewhere. It is deeply connected with another problem, which many Italians see as the most serious, and it is that of the conflict of interest, which means that someone can pass laws in his own favour and then cover his traces because he disposes of virtual control of all information. This is what happened in five years of Berlusconi government; Italy has been gravely damaged in its economy, in its international prestige, its image, its international relations, without Italians knowing it because information has been forcefully manipulated. The particular ability of this system is to have prepared an “afterwards”, so that if it’s true that now Berlusconi is no longer in power, the continuous intimidations that the Berlusconi government made towards the Italian information system over the years lasts still today. Every journalist who wants to have a career, a future, the possibility to transfer from A to B, must be palatable to one person. This shows the caution of the news, the prudence of the newspapers, the extreme lightness with which at times enormous gaffes of Berlusconi are treated. This is a clear cessation in the function of journalism that has made much more tepid and weak the action of the Prodi government following the Berlusconi administration.

This interview was recorded on January 16th, 2008. On January 25th the Prodi government was forced to resign after only two years in office following the defection of a centrist party. Early elections are scheduled for the month of April. Silvio Berlusconi is currently indicated by most surveys as around 10 point ahead the centre-left coalition.

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