Italy's government showed the world how to take responsibility in a pandemic
If there ever was an unlikely country to be designated a model of collective civility, that’s Italy. My native land is usually depicted as a beautiful place whose abundance of natural and cultural treasures is entrusted, alas, to its disorganised, corrupt, unruly inhabitants.
And yet everybody these days seems to be lavishing praise on us: the New York Times, the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal are all describing as exemplary the way in which we
Italians have clawed ourselves out of the tragic pit we were in this spring, as
coronavirus raged and convoys of military trucks had to be deployed to carry the coffins – they were so many.
We’ve certainly come a long way from being described, as we were at the pandemic’s start, as the usual irresponsible incompetents for allowing such a disaster to happen, or for sentencing to death an already terminally ill economy with an ultra-rigorous lockdown. Now, an article on the US website Foreign Policy presents Italy in almost mystical tones, as the country that “snatched health from the jaws of death”.
What should we Italians do exactly with all this praise? Is this global surprise at our collective behaviour flattering or patronising? Most of all, our national pride is sobered by the understanding that things are far from over.
We are now in a much better situation than in March, so we have certainly done something right, but the infection numbers are rising again. Claiming victory over Covid-19 when a vaccine is still out of reach and a winter in closed spaces is approaching, feels like hubris. More poignantly, we are still too much in the middle of the pandemic to say who was right and who was wrong, which policy was the best, who has saved more people from the mouth of the monster.
Take Sweden, a country that, as of today (yes, this is an essential little phrase when navigating a pandemic) is seen as an example of how wrong things can go when no lockdown is implemented. However strongly I might feel, as I do, that my government did something extremely right, even brave, in implementing a strict lockdown so early, the hard truth is that we do not know yet which country – Italy or Sweden or any other – will ultimately come out in better shape when we are eventually on the other side of this horrible pandemic. It’s still far, far too early to be able to say.
So do we Italians deserve this praise or don’t we? The short answer is: yes, but not for the reasons everybody is praising us for.
We should acknowledge that these pandemic curves are only freezeframes of a situation still very much in flux: the only epidemiological opinions worthy of being listened to are those of experts in the present time, and eventually of the analysts of the future – at a point in which full tallies will be possible. What we, the general public, can and indeed should, talk about now is politics.
What Italy’s government has done right, paradoxically, is exactly what the Swedish government has done right, although with opposite strategies: namely, to have taken full responsibility for its public health policy in facing Covid-19.
Both the Italian and the Swedish governments followed closely the advice of experts. Both, on the basis of this advice, then chose the strategy they deemed more suitable to the national sentiment, culture, political and social history. Both governments communicated this strategy to their citizens, and said how they were expected to act.
Italians, for instance, were told we had to stay at home. It wasn’t advice, it was the law. If you didn’t comply, you were fined or even risked a trial. I think the reason Italians complied mostly without protest, in the orderly fashion everybody seems so stunned about, is because of the responsibility the government took for giving these instructions, just as it has for its mistakes (and there were many). Sweden is on the opposite end of the spectrum as far as its strategy goes – but on the same side as Italy if the divide is not about lockdowns, but about governments that rely on the advice of experts to present their policy decisions to the public in an accountable, consistent way, and those who don’t. So the line I would draw when looking at positive or negative experiences, is neither about the number of infections or deaths, nor about the devastating effect all of this is having on our economies: Covid-19 is a marathon and we don’t know if we have even reached the halfway post. The line I would draw is between those governments that are taking full responsibility for their actions, and those that leave their citizens in a haze of uncertainty, and have unaccountable leadership.
And I am not talking about authoritarian countries, but about some western democracies that have given citizens muddled and often conflicting instructions. You don’t need to have a degree in history or politics to see how the lack of a leadership clearly devoted to the public good in times of deep crisis opens the door for the worst demons of society – not to mention of human nature.
We are living in a world in which the president of the greatest military power and, as of today, its greatest democracy, refuses to reassure his citizens that he will peacefully concede defeat if that is the result of the upcoming election. In this context, one looks in a new light at governments that humbly take responsibility for their humanly imperfect decisions in the uncharted territory of a pandemic, providing consistent instructions without shying away from criticism.
Accountability and transparency no longer look like the outer frame of democracy into which the more relevant policy details are placed. We now see them clearly as democracy’s very fabric. Something without which everything else – health, society, peace, life itself – is in grave danger.
• Francesca Melandri is an Italian author. Her “Letter from the future” published in March in the Guardian was translated into 32 languages
(How We Became What We Are, currently only available in German), by Heinrich August Winkler, one of the country’s most eminent historians. He identifies the first Reich – the Holy Roman Empire – as a fundamental, constitutive fact of German history, just as what he calls the “freedom-favouring island position” is of English history. Unlike England, Germany’s whole medieval and early modern history involved multiple layers of law, sovereignty and authority. Winkler’s most famous work is an enormous history of Germany called The Long Road West. He starts this new volume by quoting the then federal president, Richard von Weizsäcker’s, carefully crafted statement on 3 October 1990: “The day has come in which for the first time in history the whole of Germany has found its lasting place in the circle of western democracies.” Yet what strikes me about this late work of the now 81year-old historian ( born in Königsberg, now Kaliningrad, in 1938) is the sceptical, concerned, even warning tone in which he admonishes his compatriots to remain firmly embedded not just in Europe but also in the transatlantic west.
The concern seems to me justified. Despite the xenophobic Euroscepticism of the AfD, we need have few worries about the European part. The word “Europe” appears in German political speeches as often as Amen in church. Most Germans understand very well how their future is inseparable from that of the European Union. That is no longer true of the west, which, if mentioned at all, features almost as a relic of the cold war, as outdated as the telex machine. Most Europeans are appalled and sickened by Donald Trump, but there is a special edge to German attitudes towards the United States altogether. In the German media, the US is now routinely talked about in the same breath as China and Russia.
Emmanuel Macron’s battlecry of “European sovereignty” has been taken up with corresponding enthusiasm. If “European sovereignty” means “We Europeans should do more to stand up for our own interests,” that is clearly right. If, however, it means “We can manage on our own now, Yanks,” then it is dangerously wrong. Precisely the worldwide challenges we will face over the next 30 years, such as the climate emergency, AI, pandemics such as Covid-19 and the aggressive posture of a Leninist-capitalist Chinese superpower, demand a global partnership of democracies, not just a regional one.
In a loose historical analogy, post-1990 Germany’s great good fortune has been to be part of the Holy Roman Empire of the EU, which has secured Germany’s prosperity and greatly enhanced its citizens’ freedoms and opportunities, and also to be part of the Roman empire of the US-led western alliance, which has guaranteed its military security and given a wider framework of shared values and global reach.
That American Rome will never again be what it once was. If Trump wins a second term, all bets are off. His former national security adviser John Bolton says he might even take the
US out of Nato. Then Europe would be compelled to fend for itself on security, a task for which it is still ill equipped. But if Joe Biden becomes president, the US can return to being an indispensable proponent of the liberal international order on which Germany depends more than anyone. In this sense, the next important date in German history is not 3 October, which is just a nice anniversary, but 3 November, which will see probably the most crucial US election in the history of the modern transatlantic west.
• Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist