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![particularly since the early 1980s (Browne and Dreijmanis 1982; Pridham 1986; Budge and Keman
1990; Laver and Scofield 1990; Müller and Strøm 2000; Strøm et al. 2008).2
Italy has traditionally been an interesting case within this field of analysis: the first reason lies in
the scope of coalitions in the Italian government system. Most of the 63 Italian governments that
have been formed in Italy since 1948 (after the transitional years post-Second World War) and until
the time of writing this Introduction have been based on coalitions.3 Moreover, Italian governments
have been quite fragmented (formed by a considerable number of parties), and unstable (as their
total number shows). Yet, only very limited alternation of parties in government occurred for more
than 40 years during the period of the so-called First Republic (between 1948 and 1992), when all
cabinets included the Christian Democrat (DC) party as largest coalition component and dominant
party. Alternation in power, on the contrary, became the norm in the mid-1990s, with the
inauguration of the so-called Second Republic (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007). Considering the large
number (even in comparative terms) of coalition governments in contemporary Italy and also that
coalition politics remain standard politics in the country, despite the change that occurred in the
political system with its transition from the First to the Second Republic, this country certainly
represents a crucial case for the comparative analysis of coalition governments. Despite its shift from
a party system with a dominant centrist party to one of bipolar competition and alternation in
government, the coalition nature of the Italian government has remained unchanged.
As clearly stated by a recent and extensive literature on coalition governments, coalition politics is
not institutionally free (Müller and Strøm 2000; Strøm, Müller and Bergman 2008). That is, we cannot
properly understand how coalitions form, how and how well they make policy, or how and why they
terminate, without taking into serious consideration the institutional environment where the
coalition game takes place.
Some of the important institutions (e.g. fundamental constitutional provisions) are exogenous to the coalition game in the sense that the
actors in this game cannot have any realistic hope of changing them, at least in the short run. Other important institutions are endogenous,
which is to say that they are rules that the party actors impose on themselves, often precisely in order to deal with the problem of
coalition governance.
(Müller and Strøm 2000, 4)
Along this line, it is important to note that in the last two decades, some important (both exogenous
and endogenous) institutions of the coalition game have been substantially altered in Italy.
Constitutional provisions remained fundamentally unchanged. Nonetheless, some other crucial
(exogenous) rules and challenges for government life changed more substantially. To start with, after
more than 40 years of blocked government, alternation has become fully plausible. We believe that
not too many words have to be spent here to convince our readers about the magnitude and the
importance of this change. ‘In a well-functioning democracy, the politicians’ anticipation that they
will sooner or later be held to account by [citizens] is the most powerful constraint shaping their
decisions’ (Müller and Strøm 2008, 2). Italian government parties have not really faced this constraint
during the First Republic, while accountability has become a more concrete ‘challenge’ for them only
with the unveiling of the Second Republic.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-26-2048.jpg)
![and the new religion, in which the former retained more than it lost,
and the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid
priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were
exempt from military service,[254] and often, according to Strabo,
had such influence as to part combatants on the point of an
engagement, nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which
the Christian clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and
fight in battle, in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a
time when that Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider,
than it has ever been since. Historians have scarcely given due
prominence to this fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand
years; for Gregory of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth
century who had killed many enemies with their own hands, whilst
Erasmus, in the sixteenth, complains of bishops taking more pride in
leading three or four hundred dragoons, with swords and guns, than
in a following of deacons and divinity students, and asks, with just
sarcasm, why the trumpet and fife should sound sweeter in their
ears than the singing of psalms or the words of the Bible.
In the fourteenth century, when war and chivalry were at their
height, occurred a remarkable protest against this state of things
from Wycliffe, who, in this, as in other respects, anticipated the
Reformation: ‘Friars now say that bishops can fight best of all men,
and that it falleth most properly to them, since they are lords of all
this world. They say, Christ bade his disciples sell their coats, and
buy them swords; but whereto, if not to fight? Thus friars make a
great array, and stir up men to fight. But Christ taught not his
apostles to fight with a sword of iron, but with the sword of God’s
word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of
man’s tongue.... If manslaying in others be odious to God, much
more in priests who should be vicars of Christ.’ And Wycliffe
proceeds not only to protest against this, but to advocate the
general cause of peace on earth, on grounds which he is aware that
men of the world will scorn and reject as fatal to the existence of
kingdoms.[255]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-56-2048.jpg)
![It was no occasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently,
common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it
some justification by the connection of military service with the
enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that—
as a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately
render a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop—
it is worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a
custom. ‘The bishops themselves—not all, but many’—says a writer
of King Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished
with arms, were accustomed to mount war-horses with the
perverters of their country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture
the knights whom they took in the chance of war, or whom they met
full of money.’[256] It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the
famous Bishop of Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword,
out of respect for the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic
to shed blood. Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the
said bishop prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as
being his own son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the
episcopal coat of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as
that of his son or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the
wit to reply that he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257]
The story also bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing
the command of a division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of
Durham, cried out to his slower colleague, before closing with the
Scots, ‘It is not for you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and
therewith rushed with his followers into the fray (1298).[258]
It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange
may be credited, became more common during the devastation of
France by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid
that was available became a matter of national existence. That event
rendered Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that
monarch had forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy,
save two or three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the
combatants, and a few priests to give absolution and celebrate the](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-57-2048.jpg)
![Mass.[259] It appears that this law was made in response to an
exhortation by Pope Adrian II., similar to one addressed in the
previous century by Pope Zachary to Charlemagne’s ancestor, King
Pepin. But though military service and the tenure of ecclesiastical
benefices became more common from the time of the Danish
irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops who
chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in
active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to
have rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding
as a duty that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but
which the Church herself condemned.
It is a signal mark of the degree to which religion became enveloped
in the military spirit of those miserable days of chivalry, that
ecclesiastical preferment was sometimes the reward of bravery on
the field, as in the case of that chaplain to the Earl of Douglas who,
for his courage displayed at the battle of Otterbourne, was, Froissart
tells us, promoted the same year to a canonry and archdeaconry at
Aberdeen.
Vasari, in his ‘Life of Michael Angelo,’ has a good story which is not
only highly typical of this martial Christianity, but may be also taken
to mark the furthest point of divergence reached by the Church in
this respect from the standpoint of her earlier teaching. Pope Julius
II. went one day to see a statue of himself which Michael Angelo
was executing. The right hand of the statue was raised in a dignified
attitude, and the artist consulted the Pope as to whether he should
place a book in the left. ‘Put a sword into it,’ quoth Julius, ‘for of
letters I know but little.’ This was the Pope of whom Bayle says that
never man had a more warlike soul, and of whom, with some doubt,
he repeats the anecdote of his having thrown into the Tiber the keys
of St. Peter, with the declaration that he would thenceforth use the
sword of St. Paul. However this may be, he went in person to hasten
the siege of Mirandola, in opposition to the protests of the cardinals
and to the scandal of Christendom (1510). There it was that to
encourage the soldiers he promised them, that if they exerted](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-58-2048.jpg)
![themselves valiantly he would make no terms with the town, but
would suffer them to sack it;[260] and though this did not occur, and
the town ultimately surrendered on terms, the head of the Christian
Church had himself conveyed into it by the breach.
The scandal of this proceeding contributed its share to the
discontent which produced the Reformation; and that movement
continued still further the disfavour with which many already viewed
the connection of the clergy with actual warfare. It has, however,
happened occasionally since that epoch that priests of martial tastes
have been enabled to gratify them, the custom having become more
and more rare as public opinion grew stronger against it. The last
recorded instance of a fighting divine was, it would seem, the Bishop
of Derry, who, having been raised to that see by William III. in
gratitude for the distinguished bravery with which, though a
clergyman, he had conducted the defence of Londonderry against
the forces of James II., and for which the University of Oxford
rewarded him with the title of Doctor of Divinity, was shot dead at
the battle of the Boyne. He had, says Macaulay, ‘during the siege in
which he had so highly distinguished himself, contracted a passion
for war,’ but his zeal to gratify it on that second occasion cost him
the favour of the king. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that
history should have called no special attention to the last instance of
a bishop who fought and died upon a battle-field, nor have
sufficiently emphasised the great revolution of thought which first
changed a common occurrence into something unusual, and finally
into a memory that seems ridiculous. No historical fact affords a
greater justification than this for the hope that, absurd as is the idea
of a fighting bishop to our own age, that of a fighting Christian may
be to our posterity.
As bishops were in the middle ages warriors, so they were also the
common bearers of declarations of war. The Bishop of Lincoln bore,
for instance, the challenge of Edward III. and his allies to Charles V.
at Paris; and greatly offended was the English king and his council
when Charles returned the challenge by a common valet—they](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-59-2048.jpg)
![declared it indecent for a war between two such great lords to be
declared by a mere servant, and not by a prelate or a knight of
valour.
The declaration of war in those times appears to have meant simply
a challenge or defiance like that then and afterwards customary in a
duel. It appears to have originated out of habits that governed the
relations between the feudal barons. We learn from Froissart that
when Edward was made Vicar of the German Empire an old statute
was renewed which had before been made at the emperor’s court,
to the effect that no one, intending to injure his neighbour, might do
so without sending him a defiance three days beforehand. The
following extract from the challenge of war sent by the Duke of
Orleans, the brother of the King of France, to Henry IV. of England,
testifies to the close resemblance between a declaration of war and
a challenge to a deed of arms, and to the levity which often gave
rise to either: ‘I, Louis, write and make known to you, that with the
aid of God and the blessed Trinity, in the desire which I have to gain
renown, and which you likewise should feel, considering idleness as
the bane of lords of high birth who do not employ themselves in
arms, and thinking I can no way better seek renown than by
proposing to you to meet me at an appointed place, each of us
accompanied with 100 knights and esquires, of name and arms
without reproach, there to combat till one of the parties shall
surrender; and he to whom God shall grant the victory shall do with
his prisoners as he pleases. We will not employ any incantations that
are forbidden by the Church, but make use of the bodily strength
given us by God, with armour as may be most agreeable to
everyone for the security of his person, and with the usual arms,
that is lance, battle-axe, sword, and dagger ... without aiding himself
by any bodkins, hooks, bearded darts, poisoned needles or razors,
as may be done by persons unless they are positively ordered to the
contrary....’[261] Henry IV. answered the challenge with some
contempt, but expressed his readiness to meet the duke in single
combat, whenever he should visit his possessions in France, in order
to prevent any greater effusion of Christian blood, since a good](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-60-2048.jpg)
![shepherd, he said, should expose his own life for his flock. It even
seemed at one time as if wars might have resolved themselves into
this more rational mode of settlement. The Emperor Henry IV.
challenged the Duke of Swabia to single combat. Philip Augustus of
France is said to have proposed to Richard I. to settle their
differences by a combat of five on each side; and when Edward III.
challenged the realm of France, he offered to settle the question by
a duel or a combat of 100 men on each side, with which the French
king would, it appears, have complied, had Edward consented to
stake the kingdom of England against that of France.
In the custom of naming the implements of war after the most
revered names of the Christian hagiology may be observed another
trace of the close alliance that resulted between the military and
spiritual sides of human life, somewhat like that which prevailed in
the sort of worship paid to their lances, pikes, and battle-axes by the
ancient Scandinavians.[262] Thus the two first forts which the
Spaniards built in the Ladrone Islands they called respectively after
St. Francis Xavier and the Virgin Mary. Twelve ships in the Armada
were called after the Twelve Apostles, and so were twelve of his
cannons by Henry VIII., one of which, St. John by name, was
captured by the French in 1513.[263] It is probable that mere
irreverence had less to do with this custom than the hope thereby of
obtaining favour in war, such as may also be traced in the ceremony
of consecrating military banners, which has descended to our own
times.[264]
To the same order of superstition belongs the old custom of falling
down and kissing the earth before starting on a charge or assault of
battle. The practice is alluded to several times in Montluc’s
Commentaries, but so little was it understood by a modern French
editor that in one place he suggests the reading baissèrent la tête
(they lowered their heads) for baisèrent la terre (they kissed the
earth). But the latter reading is confirmed by passages elsewhere;
as, for instance, in the ‘Memoirs of Fleurange,’ where it is stated that
Gaston de Foix and his soldiers kissed the earth, according to](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-61-2048.jpg)
![custom, before proceeding to march against the enemy;[265] and,
again, in the ‘Life of Bayard,’ by his secretary, who records it among
the virtues of that knight that he would rise from his bed every night
to prostrate himself at full length on the floor and kiss the earth.[266]
This kissing of the earth was an abbreviated form of taking a particle
of it in the mouth, as both Elmham and Livius mention to have been
done by the English at Agincourt before attacking the French; and
this again was an abbreviated form of receiving the sacrament, for
Villani says of the Flemish at Cambray (1302) that they made a
priest go all over the field with the sacred elements, and that,
instead of communicating, each man took a little earth and put it
into his mouth.[267] This seems a more likely explanation than that
the custom was intended as a reminder to the soldier of his
mortality, as if in a trade like his there could be any lack of testimony
of that sort.
It is curious to observe how war in every stage of civilisation has
been the central interest of public religious supplication; and how,
from the pagans of old to modern savages, the pettiest quarrels and
conflicts have been deemed a matter of interest to the immortals.
The Sandwich islanders and Tahitians sought the aid of their gods in
war by human sacrifices. The Fijians before war were wont to
present their gods with costly offerings and temples, and offer with
their prayers the best they could of land crabs or whales’ teeth;
being so convinced that they thereby ensured to themselves the
victory, that once, when a missionary called the attention of a war
party to the scantiness of their numbers, they only replied, with
disdainful confidence, ‘Our allies are the gods.’ The prayer which the
Roman pontifex addressed to Jupiter on behalf of the Republic at the
opening of the war with Antiochus, king of Syria, is extremely
curious: ‘If the war which the people has ordered to be waged with
King Antiochus shall be finished after the wish of the Roman senate
and people, then to thee, O Jupiter, will the Roman people exhibit
the great games for ten successive days, and offerings shall be
presented at all the shrines of such value as the senate shall](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-62-2048.jpg)
![decree.’[268] This rude state of theology, wherein a victory from the
gods may be obtained for a fair consideration in exchange, tends to
keep alive, if it did not originate, that sense of dependence on
invisible powers which constitutes the most rudimentary form of
religion; for it is a remarkable fact that the faintest notions of
supernatural agencies are found precisely among tribes whose
military organisation or love for war is the lowest and least
developed. In proportion as the war-spirit is cultivated does the
worship of war-presiding deities prevail; and since these are formed
from the memories of warriors who have died or been slain, their
attributes and wishes remain those of the former earthly potentate,
who though no longer visible, may still be gratified by presents of
fruit, or by slaughtered oxen or slaves.
The Khonds of Orissa, in India, afford an instance of this close and
pernicious association between religious and military ideas, which
may be traced through the history of many far more advanced
communities. For though they regard the joy of the peace dance as
the very highest attainable upon earth, they attribute, not to their
own will, but to that of their war god, Loha Pennu, the source of all
their wars. The devastation of a fever or tiger is accepted as a hint
from that divinity that his service has been too long neglected, and
they acquit themselves of all blame for a war begun for no better
reason, by the following philosophy of its origin: ‘Loha Pennu said to
himself, Let there be war, and he forthwith entered into all weapons,
so that from instruments of peace they became weapons of war; he
gave edge to the axe and point to the arrow; he entered into all
kinds of food and drink, so that men in eating and drinking were
filled with rage, and women became instruments of discord instead
of soothers of anger.’ And they address this prayer to Loha Pennu for
aid against their enemies: ‘Let our axes crush cloth and bones as the
jaws of the hyæna crush its prey. Make the wounds we give to
gape.... When the wounds of our enemies heal, let lameness remain.
Let their stones and arrows fall on us as the flowers of the mowa-
tree fall in the wind.... Make their weapons brittle as the long pods
of the karta-tree.’](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-63-2048.jpg)
![In 1032 a Bishop of Aquitaine declared himself the recipient of a
message from heaven, ordering men to cease from fighting; and,
not only did a peace, called the Truce of God, result for seven years,
but it was resolved that such peace should always prevail during the
great festivals of the Church, and from every Thursday evening to
Monday morning. And the regulation for one kingdom was speedily
extended over Christendom, confirmed by several Popes, and
enforced by excommunication.[269] If such efforts were not
altogether successful, and the wars of the barons continued till the
royal power in every country was strong enough to suppress them, it
must none the less be recognised that the Church fought, if she
fought in vain, against the barbarism of a military society, and with
an ardour that is in striking contrast with her apathy in more recent
history.
It must also be granted that the idea of what the Papacy might do
for the peace of the world, as the supreme arbiter of disputes and
mediator between contending Powers, gained possession of men’s
minds, and entered into the definite policy of the Church about the
twelfth century, in a manner that might suggest reflection for the
nineteenth. The name of Gerohus de Reigersperg is connected with
a plan for the pacification of the world, by which the Pope was to
forbid war to all Christian princes, to settle all disputes between
them, and to enforce his decisions by the greatest powers that have
ever yet been devised for human authority—namely, by
excommunication and deposition. And the Popes attempted
something of this sort. When, for instance, Innocent III. bade the
King of France to make peace with Richard I., and was told that the
dispute concerned a matter of feudal relationship with which the
Pope had no right of interference, he replied that he interfered by
right of his power to censure what he thought sin, and quite
irrespective of feudal rights. He also refused to consider the
destruction of places and the slaughter of Christians as a matter of
no concern to him; and Honorius III. forbade an attack upon](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-65-2048.jpg)
![Denmark, on the ground that that kingdom lay under the special
protection of the Papacy.[270]
The clergy, moreover, were even in the most warlike times of history
the chief agents in negotiations for peace, and in the attempt to set
limits to military reprisals. When, for instance, the French and
English were about to engage at Poitiers, the Cardinal of Perigord
spent the whole of the Sunday that preceded the day of battle in
laudable but ineffectual attempts to bring the two sides to an
agreement without a battle. And when the Duke of Anjou was about
to put 600 of the defenders of Montpellier to death by the sword, by
the halter, and by fire, it was the Cardinal of Albany and a Dominican
monk who saved him from the infamy of such a deed by reminding
him of the duty of Christian forgiveness.
In these respects it must be plain to every one that the attitude and
power of the Church has entirely changed. She has stood apart more
and more as time has gone on from her great opportunities as a
promoter of peace. Her influence, it is notorious, no longer counts
for anything, where it was once so powerful, in the field of
negotiation and reconcilement. She lifts no voice to denounce the
evils of war, nor to plead for greater restraint in the exercise of
reprisals and the abuse of victory. She lends no aid to teach the duty
of forbearance and friendship between nations, to diminish their idle
jealousies, nor to explain the real identity of their interests. It may
even be said without risk of contradiction, that whatever attempt has
been made to further the cause of peace upon earth or to diminish
the horror of the customs of war, has come, not from the Church,
but from the school of thought to which she has been most
opposed, and which she has studied most persistently to revile.
In respect, too, of the justice of the cause of war, the Church within
recent centuries has entirely vacated her position. It is noticeable
that in the 37th article of the English Church, which is to the effect
that a Christian at the command of the magistrate may wear
weapons and serve in the wars, the word justa, which in the Latin](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-66-2048.jpg)
![form preceded the word bella or wars, has been omitted.[271] The
leaders of the Reformation decided on the whole in favour of the
lawfulness of military service for a Christian, but with the distinct
reservation that the cause of war should be just. Bullinger, who was
Zwingli’s successor in the Reformed Church at Zurich, decided that
though a Christian might take up arms at the command of the
magistrate, it would be his duty to disobey the magistrate if he
purposed to make war on the guiltless; and that only the death of
those soldiers on the battle-field was glorious who fought for their
religion or their country. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop
Cranmer, complained of the utter disregard of a just and patriotic
motive for war in the code of military ethics then prevalent.
Speaking of the fighters of his day, he thus characterised their
position in the State: ‘The rapacity of wolves, the violence of lions,
the fierceness of tigers is nothing in comparison of their furious and
cruel tyranny; and yet do many of them this not for the safeguard of
their country (for so it would be the more tolerable), but to satisfy
their butcher-like affects, to boast another day of how many men
they have been the death, and to bring home the more preys that
they may live the fatter ever after for these spoils and stolen
goods.’[272] From military service he maintained that all
considerations of justice and humanity had been entirely banished,
and their stead been taken by robbery and theft, ‘the insatiable
spoiling of other men’s goods, and a whole sea of barbarous and
beast-like manners.’ In this way the necessity of a just cause as a
reason for taking part in actual warfare was reasserted at the time of
the Reformation, and has only since then been allowed to drop out
of sight altogether; so that now public opinion has no guide in the
matter, and even less than it had in ancient Rome, the attitude of
the Church towards the State on this point being rather that of
Anaxarchus the philosopher to Alexander the Great, when, to
console that conqueror for his murder of Clitus, he said to him:
‘Know you not that Jupiter is represented with Law and Justice at his
side, to show that whatever is done by sovereign power is right?’](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-67-2048.jpg)
![Considering, therefore, that no human institution yet devised or
actually in existence has had or has a moral influence or facilities for
exercising it at all equal to that enjoyed by the Church, it is all the
more to be regretted that she has never taken any real interest in
the abolition of a custom which is at the root of half the crime and
misery with which she has to contend. Whatever hopes might at one
time have been reasonably entertained of the Reformed Church as
an anti-military agency, the cause of peace soon sank into a sort of
heresy, or what was worse, an unfashionable tenet, associated,
condemned, and contemned with other articles of religious dissent.
‘Those who condemn the profession or art of soldiery,’ said Sir James
Turner, ‘smell rank of anabaptism and quakery.’[273]
It would be difficult to find in the whole range of history any such
example of wasted moral force. As Erasmus had cause to deplore it
in the sixteenth century, so had Voltaire in the eighteenth. The latter
complained that he did not remember a single page against war in
the whole of Bourdaloue’s sermons, and he even suggested that the
real explanation might be a literal want of courage on the part of the
clergy. The passage is worth quoting from the original, both for its
characteristic energy of expression and for its clear insight into the
real character of the custom of war:—‘Pour les autres moralistes à
gages que l’on nomme prédicateurs, ils n’ont jamais seulement osé
prêcher contre la guerre.... Ils se gardent bien de décrier la guerre,
qui réunit tout ce que la perfidie a de plus lâche dans les manifestes,
tout ce que l’infâme friponnerie a de plus bas dans les fournitures
des armées, tout ce que le brigandage a d’affreux dans le pillage, le
viol, le larcin, l’homicide, la dévastation, la destruction. Au contraire,
ces bons prêtres bénissent en cérémonie les étendards de meurtre;
et leurs confrères chantent pour de l’argent des chansons juives,
quand la terre a été inondée de sang.’[274]
If Voltaire’s reproach is unjust, it can of course be easily refuted. The
challenge is a fair one. Let him be convicted of overstating his
charge, by the mention of any ecclesiastic of mark from either the
Catholic or the Protestant school within the last two centuries whose](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-68-2048.jpg)
![CHAPTER VIII.
CURIOSITIES OF MILITARY DISCIPLINE.
La discipline n’est que l’art d’inspirer aux soldats plus de peur de
leurs officiers que des ennemis.—Helvetius.
Increased severity of discipline—Limitation of the right of matrimony
—Compulsory Church parade, and its origin—Atrocious military
punishments—Reasons for the military love of red—The origin of
bear-skin hats—Different qualities of bravery—Historical fears
for the extinction of courage—The conquests of the cause of
peace—Causes of the unpopularity of military service—The
dulness of life in the ranks—The prevalence of desertion—
Articles of war against malingering—Military artificial ophthalmia
—The debasing influence of discipline illustrated from the old
flogging system—The discipline of the Peninsular army—
Attempts to make the service more popular, by raising the
private’s wages, by shortening his term of service—The old
recruiting system of France and Germany—The conscription
imminent in England—The question of military service for
women—The probable results of the conscription—Militarism
answerable for Socialism.
Two widely different conceptions of military discipline are contained
in the words of an English writer of the seventeenth century, and in
those of the French philosopher, Helvetius, in the eighteenth century.
There is a fine ring of the best English spirit in the sentence of
Gittins: ‘A soldier ought to fear nothing but God and dishonour.’ And
there is the true French wit and insight in that of Helvetius:
‘Discipline is but the art of inspiring soldiers with more fear for their
own officers than they have for the enemy.’[275]](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-73-2048.jpg)
![But the difference involved lies less in the national character of the
writers than in the lapse of time between them, discipline having by
degrees gained so greatly in severity that a soldier had come to be
regarded less as a moral free agent than as a mechanical
instrument, who, if he had any fear left for God and dishonour, felt it
in a very minor degree to that which he cherished for his colonel or
commander. This is the broad fact which explains and justifies the
proposition of Helvetius; though no one, recollecting the evils of the
days of looser discipline, might see cause to regret the change which
deprived a soldier almost entirely of the moral liberty that naturally
belonged to him as a man.
The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of
course the effect of rendering military service less popular, and
consequently recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any
corresponding diminution in the frequency of wars, which are
independent of the hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise,
something might be said for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys
none of the common rights of man. There is therefore no gain from
any point of view in denying to the military class the enjoyment of
the rights and privileges of ordinary humanity.
The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference
to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In
the Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and
the offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying
without royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent
of the commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German
war so great was the social disorder found to be consequent upon
these restrictions, that a special law had to be made to remove the
bar of illegitimacy from the marriages in question.[276] In the English
army the inability of privates to marry before the completion of
seven years’ service, and the possession of at least one badge, and
then only with the consent of the commanding officer, is a custom so
entirely contrary to the liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that,
whatever its incidental advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-74-2048.jpg)
![deterring motive when the choice of a career becomes a subject of
reflection.
The custom of what is known in the army as Church Parade affords
another instance of the unreasonable curtailments of individual
liberty that are still regarded as essential to discipline. A soldier is
drummed to church just as he is drummed to the drill-ground or the
battle-field. His presence in church is a matter of compulsion, not of
choice or conviction; and the general principle that such attendance
is valueless unless it is voluntary is waived in his case as in that of
very young children, with whom, in this respect, he is placed on a
par. If we inquire for the origin of the practice, we shall probably find
it in certain old Saxon and imperial articles of war, which show that
the prayers of the military were formerly regarded as equally
efficacious with their swords in obtaining victories over their
enemies; and therefore as a very necessary part of their duty.[277]
The American articles of war, since 1806, enact that ‘it is earnestly
recommended to all officers and soldiers to attend divine service,’
thus obviating in a reasonable way all the evils inevitably connected
with a purely compulsory, and therefore humiliating, church parade.
[278]
It may be that these restrictions of a soldier’s liberty are necessary;
but if they are, and if, as Lord Macaulay says, soldiers must, ‘for the
sake of public freedom, in the midst of public freedom, be placed
under a despotic rule,’ ‘must be subject to a sharper penal code and
to a more stringent code of procedure than are administered by the
ordinary tribunals,’ so that acts, innocent in the citizen or only
punished slightly, become crimes, capitally punishable, when
committed by them, then at least we need no longer be astonished
that it should be almost as difficult to entrap a recruit as to catch a
criminal.
But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service, it
would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose
essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-75-2048.jpg)
![have made discipline not merely a curtailment of liberty and a
forfeiture of rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme
limits of human endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world,
political, judicial, or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern
in some military system. It has been from its armies more than from
its kings that our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals,
tortures, and cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely
have devised a more excruciating punishment than the old English
military one of riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made
to sit astride planks nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to
resemble a horse, with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed
to his legs to drag them downwards; or again, than the punishment
of the Picket, in which the hand was fastened to a hook in a post
above the head, and the man’s suspended body left to be supported
by his bare heel resting on a wooden stump, of which the end was
cut to the sharpness of a sword point.[279] The punishment of
running the gauntlet (from the German Gassenlaufen, street
running, because the victim ran through the street between two
lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course) is said to have
been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps, from the fact
of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a single
comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet found
favour among military authorities.[280]
But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons, its
floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do more
than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that have
never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the
disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to
bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle-
field should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of
the soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a
blank without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a
comrade, who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-76-2048.jpg)
![cheap a rate men may be reduced to value their lives after
experience of the realities of a military career.
Many of the devices are curious by which this indifference to life has
been matured and sustained. In ancient Athens the public temples
were closed to those who refused military service, who deserted
their ranks or lost their bucklers; whilst a law of Charondas of
Catana constrained such offenders to sit for three days in the public
forum dressed in the garments of women. Many a Spartan mother
would stab her son who came back alive from a defeat; and such a
man, if he escaped his mother, was debarred not only from public
offices but from marriage; exposed to the blows of all who chose to
strike him; compelled to dress in mean clothing, and to wear his
beard negligently trimmed. And in the same way a Norse soldier who
fled, or lost his shield, or received a wound in any save the front part
of his body, was by law prevented from ever afterwards appearing in
public.[281]
There are, indeed, few military customs but have their origin and
explanation in the artificial promotion of courage in the minds of the
combatants. This is true even to the details and peculiarities of
costume. English children are, perhaps, still taught that French
soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not
frighten them in war-time; and doubtless French children imbibe a
similar theory regarding the red coats of the English. The same
reason was given by Julius Ferretus in the middle of the sixteenth
century for the short red frock then generally worn by the military.
[282] The first mention of red as a special military colour in England
is said to have been the order issued in 1526 for the coats of all
yeomen of the household to be of red cloth.[283] But the colour
goes, at least, as far back as Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, who
chose it, according to Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by
cloth and most lasting; according to Plutarch, that its brightness
might help to raise the spirits of its wearers; or, according to Ælian
and Valerius Maximus, in order to conceal the sight of blood, that](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-77-2048.jpg)
![raw soldiers might not be dispirited and the enemy proportionately
encouraged.
The bear-skin hats, which still make some English regiments so
ridiculous and unsightly, were originally no doubt intended to inspire
terror. Evelyn, writing of the year 1678, says: ‘Now were brought
into service a new sort of soldiers called Grenadiers, who were
dexterous in flinging hand-grenades, every man having a handful.
They had furred caps with coped crowns like Janizaries, which made
them look very fierce; and some had long hoods hanging down
behind as we picture fools.’ We may fairly identify the motive of such
headgear with the result; and the more so since the looking fierce
with the borrowed skins of bears was a well-known artifice of the
ancient Romans. Thus Vegetius speaks of helmets as covered with
bear-skins in order to terrify the enemy,[284] and Virgil has a
significant description of a warrior as
Horridus in jaculis et pelle Libystidis ursæ.
We may trace the same motive again in the figures of fierce birds or
beasts depicted on flags and shields and helmets, whence they have
descended with less harmful purpose to crests and armorial
bearings. Thus the Cimbri, whom Marius defeated, wore on their
plume-covered helmets the head of some fierce animal with its
mouth open, vainly hoping thereby to intimidate the Romans. The
latter, before it became customary to display the images of their
emperors on their standards, reared aloft the menacing
representations of dragons, tigers, wolves, and such like; and the
figure of a dragon in use among the Saxons at the time of the
Conquest, and after that event retained by the early Norman princes
among the ensigns of war,[285] may reasonably be attributed to the
same motive. The legend of St. George killing the Dragon, if it is not
a survival of Theseus and the Minotaur, very likely originated as a
myth, intended to be explanatory of the custom.
Lastly, under this head should be mentioned Villani’s account of the
English armour worn in the thirteenth century, where he describes](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-78-2048.jpg)
![how the pages studied to keep it clean and bright, so that when
their masters came to action their armour shone like looking glass
and gave them a more terrifying appearance.[286] Was the result
here again the motive, and must we look for the primary cause of
the great solicitude still paid to the brightness of accoutrements to
the hope thereby to add a pang the more to the terror desirable to
instil into an enemy?
Such were some of the artificial supports supplied to bravery in
former times. But there is all the difference in the world between the
bravery appealed to by our ancestors and that required since the
revolution effected in warfare by the invention of gunpowder. Before
that epoch, the use of catapults, bows, or other missiles did not
deduct from the paramount importance of personal valour. The
brave soldier of olden times displayed the bravery of a man who
defied a force similar or equal to his own, and against which the use
of his own right hand and intellect might help him to prevail; but his
modern descendant pits his bravery mainly against hazard, and owes
it to chance alone if he escape alive from a battle. However higher in
kind may be the bravery required to face a shower of shrapnel than
to contend against swords and spears, it is assuredly a bravery that
involves rather a blind trust in luck than a rational trust in personal
fortitude.
So thoroughly indeed was this change foreseen and appreciated that
at every successive advance in the methods of slaughter curious
fears for the total extinction of military courage have haunted minds
too readily apprehensive, and found sometimes remarkable
expression. When the catapult[287] was first brought from Sicily to
Greece, King Archidamus saw in it the grave of true valour; and the
sentiment against firearms, which led Bayard to exclaim, ‘C’est une
honte qu’un homme de cœur soit exposé à périr par une miserable
friquenelle,’ was one that was traceable even down to the last
century in the history of Europe. For Charles XII. of Sweden is
declared by Berenhorst to have felt keenly the infamy of such a
mode of fighting; and Marshal Saxe held musketry fire in such](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-79-2048.jpg)
![contempt that he even went so far as to advocate the reintroduction
of the lance, and a return to the close combats customary in earlier
times.[288]
But our military codes contain no reflection of the different aspects
under which personal bravery enters into modern, as compared with
ancient, warfare; and this omission has tended to throw
governments back upon pure force and compulsion, as the only
possible way of recruiting their regiments. The old Roman military
punishments, such as cruelly scourging a man before putting him to
death, afford certainly no models of a lenient discipline; but when
we read of companies who lost their colours being for punishment
only reduced to feed on barley instead of wheat, and reflect that
death by shooting would be the penalty under the discipline of most
modern nations[289] for an action bearing any complexion of
cowardice, it is impossible to admit that a rational adjustment of
punishments to offences is at all better observed in the war articles
of the moderns than in the military codes of pagan antiquity.
This, at least, is clear, from the history of military discipline, that only
by the most repressive laws, and by a tyranny subversive of the
commonest rights of men, is it possible to retain men in the fighting
service of a country, after forcing or cajoling them into it. And this
consideration fully meets the theory of an inherent love of fighting
dominating human nature, such as that contended for in a letter
from Lord Palmerston to Cobden, wherein he argues that man is by
nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. The proposition is true
undoubtedly of some savage races, and of the idle knights of the
days of chivalry, but, not even in those days, of the lower classes,
who incurred the real dangers of war, and still less of the
unfortunate privates or conscripts of modern armies. Fighting is only
possible between civilised countries, because discipline first fits men
for war and for nothing else, and then war again necessitates
discipline. Nor is anything gained by ignoring the conquests that
have already been won over the savage propensity to war. Single
States no longer suffer private wars within their boundaries, like](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2661505-250529111028-f3e9411d/75/The-Challenge-Of-Coalition-Government-The-Italian-Case-Conti-80-2048.jpg)
The Challenge Of Coalition Government The Italian Case Conti
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- 14. 77 A PoliticalTheory of Identity in European Integration Memory and policies Catherine Guisan 78 EU Foreign Policy and the Europeanization of Neutral States Comparing Irish and Austrian foreign policy Nicole Alecu de Flers 79 Party System Change in Western Europe Gemma Loomes 80 The Second Tier of Local Government in Europe Provinces, counties, départements and Landkreise in comparison Hubert Heinelt and Xavier Bertrana Horta 81 Learning from the EU Constitutional Treaty Democratic constitutionalism beyond the Nation-state Ben Crum 82 Human Rights and Democracy in EU Foreign Policy The cases of Ukraine and Egypt Rosa Balfour 83 Europeanization, Integration and Identity A social constructivist fusion perspective on Norway Gamze Tanil 84 The Impact of European Integration on Political Parties Beyond the permissive consensus Dimitri Almeida 85 Civic Resources and the Future of the European Union Victoria Kaina and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski 86 The Europeanization of National Foreign Policies towards Latin America Lorena Ruano 87 The EU and Multilateral Security Governance Sonia Lucarelli, Luk Van Langenhove and Jan Wouters 88 Security Challenges in the Euro-Med Area in the 21st Century Mare nostrum
- 15. Stephen Calleya 89 Societyand Democracy in Europe Oscar W. Gabriel and Silke Keil 90 European Union Public Health Policy Regional and global trends Edited by Scott L. Greer and Paulette Kurzer 91 The New Member States and the European Union Foreign policy and Europeanization Edited by Michael Baun and Dan Marek 92 The Politics of Ratification of EU Treaties Carlos Closa 93 Europeanization and New Member States A comparative social network analysis Flavia Jurje 94 National Perspectives on Russia European foreign policy in the making Maxine David, Jackie Gower and Hiski Haukkala 95 Institutional Legacies of Communism Change and continuities in minority protection Edited by Karl Cordell, Timofey Agarin and Alexander Osipov 96 Sustainable Development and Governance in Europe The evolution of the discourse on sustainability Edited by Pamela M. Barnes and Thomas C. Hoerber 97 Social Networks and Public Support for the European Union Elizabeth Radziszewski 98 The EU’s Democracy Promotion and the Mediterranean Neighbours Orientation, ownership and dialogue in Jordan and Turkey Ann-Kristin Jonasson 99 New Democracies in Crisis? A comparative constitutional study of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia
- 16. Paul Blokker 100 PartyAttitudes towards the EU in the Member States Parties for Europe, parties against Europe Edited by Nicolò Conti 101 The European Union and Occupied Palestinian Territories State-building without a state Dimitris Bouris 102 Portugal in the European Union Assessing twenty-five years of integration experience Laura C. Ferreira-Pereira 103 Governance and European Civil Society Governmentality, discourse and NGOs Acar Kutay 104 The EU, Migration and the Politics of Administrative Detention Edited by Michela Ceccorulli and Nicola Labanca 105 Political Representation in the European Union Democracy in a time of crisis Edited by Sandra Kröger 106 New Approaches to EU Foreign Policy Edited by Maciej Wilga and Ireneusz Pawel Karolewski 107 Democracy, Law and Religious Pluralism in Europe Secularism and post-secularism Edited by Ferran Requejo and Camil Ungureanu 108 Contemporary Spanish Foreign Policy Edited by David Garcia and Ramon Pacheco Pardo 109 Reframing Europe’s Future Challenges and failures of the European construction Edited by Ferenc Miszlivetz and Jody Jensen 110 Italy’s Foreign Policy in the 21st Century A contested nature? Edited by Ludovica Marchi, Richard Whitman and Geoffrey Edwards
- 17. 111 The Challengeof Coalition Government The Italian case Edited by Nicolò Conti and Francesco Marangoni
- 18. The Challenge ofCoalition Government The Italian case Edited by Nicolò Conti and Francesco Marangoni
- 19. First published 2015 byRoutledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Nicolò Conti and Francesco Marangoni The right of Nicolò Conti and Francesco Marangoni to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the contributors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The challenge of coalition government : the Italian case / edited by Nicolò Conti and Francesco Marangoni. pages cm (Routledge advances in European politics) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Italy—Politics and government—1994- 2. Coalition governments— Italy. I. Conti, Nicolò. II. Marangoni, Francesco. JN5452.C46 2015 320.945—dc23 2014024379 ISBN: 978-1-138-81510-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-74693-7 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Swales & Willis Ltd, Exeter, Devon, UK
- 20. Contents List of figures Listof tables Notes on contributors Introduction NICOLÒ CONTI AND FRANCESCO MARANGONI 1 The government and its hard decisions: how conflict is managed within the coalition FRANCESCO MARANGONI AND MICHELANGELO VERCESI 2 Party priorities, government formation and the making of the executive agenda ENRICO BORGHETTO AND MARCELLO CARAMMIA 3 From words to facts: the implementation of the government agreement NICOLÒ CONTI 4 Looking beyond the aggregate figures: an investigation of the consensual approval of Italian government bills ANDREA PEDRAZZANI 5 Governing by revising: a study on post-enactment policy change in Italy ENRICO BORGHETTO AND FRANCESCO VISCONTI 6 The support for and popularity of the government VINCENZO MEMOLI Conclusion NICOLÒ CONTI AND FRANCESCO MARANGONI Index
- 21. Figures 1.1 Percentage distributionof conflicts by actors involved 2.1 Evolution of party/coalition manifestos by legislatures 2.2 Evolution of government speeches 2.3 Convergence scores between party agendas and government agendas over time 3.1 Government agreement with the Berlusconi IV cabinet by policy area 4.1 Distribution of the degree of parliamentary support and of the degree of opposition support for government legislation (1988–2008) 4.2 Marginal impact of parliamentary changes on the degree of parliamentary support and on the degree of opposition support in the First and Second Republics 5.1 Jitter plot of number of revisions 5.2 Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival probabilities until the first revision 5.3 Kaplan-Meier estimates of survival probabilities until the first revision by type of law 6.1 Support for the government (2001–2011)
- 22. Tables 1.1 Italian cabinets,1996–2011 1.2 Party composition of government coalitions (at time of inauguration), 1996–2011 (including parties giving external support) 1.3 Number of party leaders in cabinet by government, 1996–2011 1.4 Absolute and monthly average number of conflicts by government 1.5 Percentage distribution of conflicts by main issue (and by executive) 1.6 Percentage distribution of conflicts involving the prime minister by issue (and by executive) 1.7 Percentage distribution of arenas by executive 3.1 Fulfilment rates of government pledges in different countries 3.2 Fulfilment rates of the pledges of the Berlusconi IV cabinet by policy area 3.3 Fulfilment rates of government pledges in different Italian legislatures 4.1 Degree of parliamentary support and degree of opposition support of government bills in Italy (1988–2008), by legislature 4.2 Independent and control variables (1988–2008) 4.3 Policy domains in government bills (1988–2008) 4.4 Fractional logit estimates of the degree of parliamentary support for government legislation (1988–2008) 4.5 Fractional logit estimates of the degree of opposition support of government legislation (1988– 2008) 5.1 Distribution of amending acts per type of parent act 5.2 Distribution of size of legislative revisions per type of act 5.3 Distribution of amending acts according to timing of amendment 6.1 The determinants of popular support for the government (2001–2011)
- 23. Contributors Enrico Borghetto isa Postdoctoral Researcher at CESNOVA, Centre for Sociological Studies of the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. His research has focused on compliance with EU policies, the Europeanisation of national legislation, legislative studies and European decision-making. He has published articles in international journals such as European Union Politics, Journal of European Public Policy, South European Society and Politics and International Review of Administrative Sciences. Marcello Carammia is a Senior Lecturer at the Institute for European Studies of the University of Malta. His research focuses on political institutions and agenda-setting processes, with a special interest in political parties, EU policy-making and migration policy. His research has appeared in such journals as European Union Politics, Italian Political Science Review and Policy Studies Journal. Nicolò Conti is Associate Professor of Political Science at the Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome. His main research focus is on parties, elites and the EU and on coalition governance. He has recently edited Party Attitudes towards the EU in the Member States: parties for Europe, parties against Europe (2014, Routledge). He has published articles in journals such as Acta Politica, South European Society and Politics, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Modern Italy, Modern Italian Studies and Contemporary Italian Politics. Francesco Marangoni is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Siena where he collaborates with the Centre for the Study of Political Change (CIRCaP). His main research interests focus on political elites, legislative behaviour and coalition politics in parliamentary democracies. He has published articles in journals such as Acta Politica, Journal of Legislative Studies and Contemporary Italian Politics. Vincenzo Memoli is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Catania. His main research interests include democracy and public opinion. His articles have been published in Acta Politica, British Journal of Political Science, Democratization, Governance and International Political Science Review. Andrea Pedrazzani is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna. His research interests include parliamentary processes, legislative
- 24. behaviour, executive-legislative relationsand intra-coalitional politics. He has published articles in journals such as European Journal of Political Research and Government and Opposition. Michelangelo Vercesi is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Democracy of the Leuphana University Lüneburg. His research mainly focuses on coalition governance, political parties, comparative government and political elites. He has published articles in journals, such as Government and Opposition and Contemporary Italian Politics. Francesco Visconti is a PhD candidate in Comparative and European Politics at the University of Siena. His main research focus is on legislative change, policy processes and public opinion.
- 25. Introduction Nicolò Conti andFrancesco Marangoni Coalition governments have traditionally been a major object of political analysis and one of the main topics within political science literature. They represent an attractive subject as they provide a particularly apt focus for inquiring into the major problem of who governs (Browne and Dreijmanis 1982). At least in theory, single-party governments are those making the political process more straightforward and effective. Single-party governments keep the executive (or better, the party controlling the executive) fully accountable to voters: the sole incumbent governing party does not share responsibilities with any partner for its own decisions and cannot blame any other political counterpart for any eventual poor performance. At the same time, single-party governments are relatively homogeneous for the simple reason that no interparty divisions characterise these executives. Everything else being equal, that makes decision-making potentially rapid and smooth (no interparty confrontation or compromises are needed). Multi-party governments, on the contrary, not only entail shared (and potentially less clear) responsibilities, they also require some forms of interparty compromise not always easy to reach and to maintain, while the necessity to bargain among coalition partners is likely to frustrate at least some of the policy desires of individual coalition parties. Therefore, there is always a possibility inherent to this kind of government that internal divisions hamper the stability of the executive and lengthen government decision-making. The rationale of the title of this volume lies behind the following consideration: governing through coalition represents a challenge and it is potentially full of risks. That notwithstanding, the empirical records of coalition governments in contemporary parliamentary democracies are quite impressive. Parliamentarism – especially under a proportional electoral law that tends to multiply the number of parties in a system – quite often entails interparty bargaining and coalition formation, since the electoral process usually fails to provide a political party in office with an absolute majority in parliament. In Western Europe, the heartland of parliamentarianism, almost all major countries have been governed at some point by coalitions. Actually, only Spain has never experienced such kind of governments in the post-Second World War period. Taken as a whole, about 62 per cent of all the governments that have been formed in West European countries since 1945 were formal coalitions of parties (Müller and Strøm 2000; Müller 2008).1 Coalition governments, in other terms, represent a necessity (although a challenging one) in many countries. It is not at all surprising, therefore, that studies providing detailed empirical accounts on the politics of coalitions (interparty bargaining, coalition formation and maintenance), mostly but not only in Western Europe, have proliferated
- 26. particularly since theearly 1980s (Browne and Dreijmanis 1982; Pridham 1986; Budge and Keman 1990; Laver and Scofield 1990; Müller and Strøm 2000; Strøm et al. 2008).2 Italy has traditionally been an interesting case within this field of analysis: the first reason lies in the scope of coalitions in the Italian government system. Most of the 63 Italian governments that have been formed in Italy since 1948 (after the transitional years post-Second World War) and until the time of writing this Introduction have been based on coalitions.3 Moreover, Italian governments have been quite fragmented (formed by a considerable number of parties), and unstable (as their total number shows). Yet, only very limited alternation of parties in government occurred for more than 40 years during the period of the so-called First Republic (between 1948 and 1992), when all cabinets included the Christian Democrat (DC) party as largest coalition component and dominant party. Alternation in power, on the contrary, became the norm in the mid-1990s, with the inauguration of the so-called Second Republic (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007). Considering the large number (even in comparative terms) of coalition governments in contemporary Italy and also that coalition politics remain standard politics in the country, despite the change that occurred in the political system with its transition from the First to the Second Republic, this country certainly represents a crucial case for the comparative analysis of coalition governments. Despite its shift from a party system with a dominant centrist party to one of bipolar competition and alternation in government, the coalition nature of the Italian government has remained unchanged. As clearly stated by a recent and extensive literature on coalition governments, coalition politics is not institutionally free (Müller and Strøm 2000; Strøm, Müller and Bergman 2008). That is, we cannot properly understand how coalitions form, how and how well they make policy, or how and why they terminate, without taking into serious consideration the institutional environment where the coalition game takes place. Some of the important institutions (e.g. fundamental constitutional provisions) are exogenous to the coalition game in the sense that the actors in this game cannot have any realistic hope of changing them, at least in the short run. Other important institutions are endogenous, which is to say that they are rules that the party actors impose on themselves, often precisely in order to deal with the problem of coalition governance. (Müller and Strøm 2000, 4) Along this line, it is important to note that in the last two decades, some important (both exogenous and endogenous) institutions of the coalition game have been substantially altered in Italy. Constitutional provisions remained fundamentally unchanged. Nonetheless, some other crucial (exogenous) rules and challenges for government life changed more substantially. To start with, after more than 40 years of blocked government, alternation has become fully plausible. We believe that not too many words have to be spent here to convince our readers about the magnitude and the importance of this change. ‘In a well-functioning democracy, the politicians’ anticipation that they will sooner or later be held to account by [citizens] is the most powerful constraint shaping their decisions’ (Müller and Strøm 2008, 2). Italian government parties have not really faced this constraint during the First Republic, while accountability has become a more concrete ‘challenge’ for them only with the unveiling of the Second Republic.
- 27. The electoral reformsof the last 20 years, moreover, have profoundly influenced the making and functioning of government coalitions. Starting with the Mixed-Member Majoritarian (MMM) system introduced in 1993,4 electoral rules have fostered the process of coalition formation and selection and have led to a bipolarisation of the Italian party system, frustrating the ambitions of third poles. Furthermore, new significant practices have emerged in the process of government formation. Differently from the past when all the following decisions became the main object of post-electoral transactions, parties have been induced to form pre-electoral coalitions and to indicate at the same time (in a formal way) their leader and candidate prime minister, as well as their policy programme (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007). As repeatedly stated through the chapters of this book, all these phenomena make Italy a perfect, quasi-experimental scenario to study both causes and effects of change to consolidated patterns of government formation and life. Certainly, a main determinant of the nature of governments such as the institutional environment has changed substantially with the advent of bipolar confrontation and alternation in government. At the same time, it is our goal to assess in the book whether coalition politics in Italy has also changed. With respect to this challenge in knowledge, the contribution offered by this volume can be useful and innovative in many ways. First, our focus is on the activity of governments. The fundamental idea, in this sense, is that we can reach a better understanding of the basic dynamics (and of the effectiveness) of coalition politics, and of its transformation through time, beyond the phase of formation and through the analysis of governments ‘at work’; that is, by looking at their institutional behaviour and overall performance. In order to meet this goal of moving beyond a very initial phase in government life and to analyse the most mature phases of government activity, the authors in this volume present fresh and novel analyses on various aspects of government: the formation of the government agenda and the following implementation of the government policy priorities, the management of (interparty) coalition conflicts, the relation with the parliament in the law-making process, and the government linkage with citizens. We share with Strøm, Müller and Bergman (2008) the fundamental assumption that coalition politics must be understood as a series of interconnected events, or phases. How and how effectively a coalition government is able to avoid or manage internal conflicts, for instance, should have an impact on the ability to define a common agenda of policy priorities and to implement them through law-making. This will influence the executive–legislative relationship in the decision-making process. The policy-making capacity of the government, in turn, has a potential impact on popular support for the same government. Therefore, instead of considering these different components as if they were independent and separate from each other, this book aims at providing a dynamic and coherent perspective of all these aspects. In doing so, we bring together areas of inquiry such as government, legislative, party and public opinion studies that have been developed largely in isolation from one another by the comparative literature. In this sense, we believe that an in-depth analysis of a crucial case, such as the Italian one, could be beneficial not only to the comprehension of Italian politics, but also to comparative theories on governments and coalitions. We present in the volume a huge and up-to-date collection of empirical evidences and discuss their interconnectedness in a way that could lead to a real advancement in the comprehension of Italian politics (and of its
- 28. more recent evolution),but could also become a point of reference for future works of a comparative nature. In the remainder of this chapter we discuss in more detail the objectives of the book and the main questions that it is intended to answer. Then, we discuss the analytical approach that has been adopted and the empirical dimensions that have been analysed in the various chapters. Finally, at the end of the chapter we describe the structure of the volume.
- 29. The challenge ofcoalition government in a changing democracy A general ‘anxiety for change’ has been said to represent one of the main silent factors for the sudden collapse of the First Republic at the beginning of the 1990s. The fragmented and polarised nature of the party system (Sartori 1976), the institutional weakness of the executive (Cassese 1980) and of the prime minister (Hine and Finocchi 1991; Elgie 1995), the blocked nature of government coalitions in the absence of any real chance of alternation5 were the main ingredients of a rather ineffective government system that relied almost exclusively on micro-distributive (and resource- intensive) policies for survival but proved unable to promote the major reforms and re-distributive policies that were instead necessary for the system (Di Palma 1977; Cotta 1994). As a matter of fact, this system proved no more sustainable when the resources to be distributed started to run out at the end of the 1980s with the explosion of the Italian public debt which, at that point, was out of control. At the time, moreover, external challenges and constraints added to this domestic context of stagnation, such as those stemming from global economic competition and from the advancement of the European monetary convergence under the Maastricht criteria. These factors urged the Italian government to show real capacity for policy innovation and to lead an overall change in the policy paradigm in the country. Those parties that had been in government for more than 40 years proved unable to interpret this challenge their own way and to conform with the required changes; on the contrary, they remained trapped in a weak decision-making circuit affected by abundant mutual vetoes and micro-policy, but also by widespread government corruption and consequent mounting popular de-legitimation (Cotta and Isernia 1996; Di Palma et al. 2000).6 The need for a ‘grand reform’ was long advocated by many domestic actors who understood the fragility of the system, and by a large number of external observers, as the ultimate cure for the numerous problems of the country. Indeed, some important attempts have been made in the last 20 years to promote a transition toward an intended more majoritarian and efficient Second Republic, aiming at the simplification of the Italian party system from polarised to a bipolar multi-party type, alternation in power and, thus, the improvement of government transparency, accountability and overall performance. The fundamental change to the previous situation concerned the creation of strong incentives to form pre-electoral coalitions with the introduction of a quasi-majoritarian (mixed-member) electoral law in 1993 (D’Alimonte and Chiaramonte 1995). Even with the re-introduction of a proportional electoral system in 2005, a number of corrections were maintained to create disproportionality of the system and a pressure on parties to form pre-electoral coalitions – such as a majority premium assigned to the winning coalition and more severe electoral thresholds for those parties that contest the elections alone – hence, although the pattern of coalition-making has changed substantially between the pre- and post-1994 period, from then on it has remained rather stable. Not only have coalitions been encouraged to form before the elections. They have also been induced to present a common electoral programme and a leader and de facto candidate prime minister. The Second Republic, in this sense, has gone through two ideal-typical models of
- 30. government formation. Froma ‘transaction’ model (typical of the First Republic), which privileges bargaining on the allocation of seats and portfolios (while postponing policy decision) to a ‘compliance’ model aiming at the fulfilment of a programmatic platform formalised before the elections and ratified by coalition partners (Verzichelli 2003). Personalisation and even ‘presidentialisation’ of Italian politics have also been observed (Venturino 2001; Calise 2007)7 under the Second Republic because the prime minister receives a more direct legitimacy from voters as leader of the winning coalition and figure mainly responsible for the implementation of the policy programme. Pre-electoral coalitions also introduced a shift from centrist politics in the First Republic, to bipolarism and hollowing-out of the centre in the Second Republic, also due to the collapse of the Christian Democrat party in 1992–1993 which was severely sanctioned for its misconduct, corruption and policy inefficiency in the final years of the First Republic. The establishment of real alternation in power between the two main competing coalitions has introduced a sort of majoritarian turn to the Italian government system (Blondel and Battegazzorre 2002). Indeed, not only is alternation of government (or even the perception that it could occur) supposed to strengthen the prerogatives of the executive vis-à-vis the parliament (Zucchini 2010), it also, and foremost, changes the horizon and some basic rules of broad political competition. Only where alternation is possible are elections really contestable. After freezing the government composition for so many years during the First Republic, with the advent of the Second Republic, government accountability has become crucial and a real parameter in public assessment of the government: different party (coalition) alternatives contest the elections with a promise to really change things and voters decide about their credibility. On the contrary, with the absence of alternation, the Italian First Republic represented a paradigmatic example of input democracy in which the main effort of parties in this polarised system was simply to provide citizens with an ‘entrance’ into the circuit of representation through the parliament (Fabbrini 2000), not to give a real perspective of change in executive politics. In contrast, systems where alternation is plausible – as in the Second Republic – are output democracies where the government becomes a key actor and attention is paid to its capacity to provide citizens with tangible output through policies. Whereas governments in the First Republic were characterised by amorphous policy-making, mostly based on micro-policy of a clientelistic nature and by the allocation of public offices (Di Palma 1977; Motta 1985; De Micheli 1997), in the Second Republic parties and their leaders present themselves to voters as transformative forces able to deliver concrete policy change. Thus, since the advent of the Second Republic in the mid-1990s, a new generation of politicians has announced a shift in the system toward greater governmental leadership, policy innovation, government accountability and responsiveness to the citizens. Has this transition to a new system been successful? The answer to this fundamental question cannot be fully positive. The government has, in fact, experienced frequent crises and deadlocks, policy blockades, undisciplined parliamentary majorities even in the presence of a prime minister with a clear popular mandate. The average duration of governments has increased; however, by comparative standards they remain more unstable than other governments, even of a multi-party type (Müller and Strøm 2008). The incapacity to deliver
- 31. effective outputs hasbecome more macroscopic due to the economic crisis in the late 2000s, as the government was called to make prompt and serious reforms and a real policy shift that it was actually unable to deliver. This opened the way to a series of consequences, such as the advent of a technocratic cabinet in 2011–2013 that should correct the inefficiency of political governments, an increase in electoral abstention and the rise of the protest vote, with the consequent emergence of new radical parties. So, has the attempt to change the nature of the Italian government totally failed, or are there some achievements that should be acknowledged? The main purpose of this volume is to address this question empirically. With this aim in mind, in the different chapters the authors provide a series of original analyses on the activity and performance of Italian coalition governments in the last two decades. We now briefly discuss the empirical dimensions that are addressed in the different chapters and the analytical frame that is common to the whole volume.
- 32. The empirical dimensionsunder investigation The following chapters explore in-depth if and how the challenge of the intended shift toward a more majoritarian output democracy has been met by the Italian government. Moreover, to what extent the phenomena that we have discussed above concerning alternation, bipolarisation of the party system, presidentialisation of executive politics, changing patterns of coalition and cabinet formation have produced a more efficient and responsive government. The very nature of the broad research question raised in this book led us to a preliminary analytical choice. We decided to focus exclusively on the performance of governments and on the results of governmental activity. Several factors reinforced our choice. First of all, quite surprisingly, the direction and the outcomes of governmental change in Italy have been little explored empirically, while more efforts have been devoted so far to the analysis of government composition, maintenance and termination (Verzichelli and Cotta 2000). The joined effort in this volume is, therefore, novel as it is specifically designed to fill this gap and to provide an in-depth empirical investigation that is rich in evidence about the inner difficulties in changing modes of governance in an established democracy. While recent studies have focused on some specific phases of government activity during the Second Republic,8 this book is more far-reaching as it provides an integrated analysis of different (but interdependent) aspects of government performance that have been treated separately by many former studies. Drawing largely from comparative theory (but also considering the impact of country-specific determinants), the analyses carried in the volume describe aspects of intra- coalitional conflicts and their management, policy-making, executive–legislative relationships, and government linkage with voters, and discuss their theoretical implications within the broader comparative literature. The ability to manage conflicts among partners (either individual ministers or parties) has been argued to be a crucial challenge for coalition governments (Nousiainen 1993; Damgaard 2008). Naturally enough, it is crucial because any given government cannot easily survive high and uncontrollable levels of interparty conflictuality and maverick behaviour of its internal components. For this reason, the analysis of intra-coalitional conflicts and conflicts management provides a useful empirical perspective to unveil coalitions’ internal equilibria. In this sense, the objects of conflicts, the actors involved and the arenas and mechanisms of conflicts management are important objects of inquiry that are influenced by the very nature of governments and by the dynamics and rules of electoral competition and government formation (Andeweg and Timmermans 2008) which, as we have seen, have changed considerably with the advent of the Second Republic.9 At the same time, the occurrence of conflicts is a thermometer of the (in-)ability of coalition members to ‘stay together’, to share priorities and decisions and to find a compromise on their implementation. Conflict management (or conflict avoidance), in other terms, is a necessary pre-condition for effective government decision-making. To define a common agenda of policy priorities and objectives would actually be a major task for
- 33. parties governing incoalition in the supposedly more majoritarian Italian democracy. A task that is all the more decisive when, thanks to the possibility of alternation, the incumbent government faces the urgency to provide outputs to voters (and the serious risk of being punished by them in case of poor performance). With respect to this problem, the analysis and understanding of the content and formation of policy agendas has seen great developments in recent years. This is thanks, in particular, to the joint efforts of scholars to develop theories of policy change and systematic indicators of issue attention and prioritisation within national political systems (Baumgartner and Jones 1993; Jones and Baumgartner 2005; Baumgartner et al. 2006). The formation of the government agenda in Italy offers, again, an ideal quasi-experimental case to be discussed within this bulk of literature. The purportedly majoritarian turn of Italian politics during the Second Republic has opened the way to pre-electoral coalitions and, thus, to pre-electoral competing coalition agendas. How are the cabinet policy priorities consequently defined? How do individual parties influence coalition cabinet agendas? And to what extent are the priorities of individual coalition parties translated into the government agenda? In the book, we show that in the Second Republic, differently from the First Republic, the definition of the cabinet policy agenda has become a priority since the government formation stage. Yet, governments have not only to define the outputs they engage to provide. They also face the urgency to deliver these same outputs since, in the new alternational system, they are held accountable for their performance and for the goals they have been able to reach throughout the electoral cycle. The comparative literature has shown an increasing interest in measuring the capacity of governments to implement policy priorities and fulfil programmatic pledges (Dalton et al. 2011; Naurin 2011). Coalition agreements, in this sense, have been analysed as a form of ‘contract’ between parties and voters, but also (and foremost) among government partners, and, as such, as a guidance to government decision-making (Moury 2013; Müller and Strøm 2008; De Winter 2004). While in the First Republic ‘transaction’ model of government, coalition agreements were either non-existent or completely disregarded, with a general shift toward a ‘compliance’ model in the Second Republic, programmatic agreements have been progressively introduced by the party coalitions (Moury and Timmermans 2008). Whether this has taken the system to better government responsiveness and to what extent a traditionally ineffective government has managed to improve its capacity to fulfil its own pledges, is a matter of empirical investigation here. Needless to say, government policy outputs are influenced by the behaviour and capabilities of that same government in the law-making arena. The analysis of the law-making of the executive in parliamentary democracies can profit hugely from the recent development of ‘institutional theories’ in legislative studies that stress the importance of parliamentary organisational features and procedural rules in shaping the relationship between executive and parliament and in influencing the legislative outputs and final policy outcomes (Döring 1995; Shepsle and Weingast 1994; Döring and Hallerberg 2004). The focus, in particular, has been on those ‘devices that, on the one hand, favour majoritarian decision-making and, on the other, give protection to the rights of minority parties and to individual deputies, both at the government-opposition and at the cross-party level’ (Döring 1995, 13). Italy has traditionally been characterised as a peculiar case by this stream of literature. During
- 34. the First Republic,governments could only count on a very weak power to determine the parliamentary agenda (Döring 1995). Yet, government-proposed laws were most commonly of a non-conflictual and micro-distributive nature and exhibited a manifestly consensual appeal, with bills being usually approved by significant large majorities (Di Palma 1977; Cazzola 1974). One might expect, once more, that the shift to the alternational and bipolar Second Republic has resulted in more majoritarian law-making patterns. As it was argued by Zucchini (2010), the introduction of alternation should improve the parliamentary agenda power of the Italian government. The necessity for the incumbent executive to deliver policy outputs and to fulfil programmatic priorities through legislative means (i.e., laws) should lead to more adversarial approval patterns of bills. This is simply because, in alternational systems, the opposition has a (strategic) interest to denounce, block and delay those cabinet bills that are more directly linked to the policy goals and priorities of the government, and for which the incumbent parties are supposed to be held electorally accountable (De Winter 2004). In fact, scholars found that a surprising level of consensualism has survived the passage to the Second Republic (Giuliani 2008) and that Italian government laws continue to be generally approved in a consensual manner (i.e., by large majorities). We strongly believe, however, that the analysis should go beyond aggregate figures. It has already been demonstrated that there is some variance in the support received by government-sponsored legislation during the Second Republic (De Giorgi and Marangoni 2013; Marangoni 2010). An inquiry into the factors that explain this variance is necessary for a better understanding of the legislative behaviour of Italian coalition governments, and of its evolution through time. Not only could this kind of analysis unveil basic dynamics between government and opposition, it is also useful for a better understanding of the equilibria within the same government majority in the law-making arena. As recent comparative research has demonstrated (Martin and Vanberg 2004, 2011), legislative processes and institutions are used by government parties as a tool of coalition governance (to monitor each other and to correct potential ‘ministerial drift’),10 and this can also influence the approval patterns of government bills. The analysis of the passage of government- sponsored legislation through the parliament, therefore, can effectively cast some light on the changes of the Italian government system and on the real extent of its intended evolution toward a more confrontational and government responsiveness-maximizing model. Moreover, we believe that this analysis can be extended to cover not only the enactment process, but also the post-enactment phase of government laws. Sure enough, in an ideal-typical majoritarian alternational system, incumbent governments should be more inclined to revise the laws approved by previous executives and majorities than in a pivotal party system with a blocked government as in the Italian First Republic. The study of the post-enactment phase is quite recent (Berry et al. 2010; Ragusa 2010; Maltzman and Shipan 2008) and it has focused almost exclusively on the American Congress. By contributing to this novel research agenda with an unprecedented in-depth analysis of the Italian case, this volume will also (start to) cover this gap and will provide an example of empirical post- enactment research in parliamentary democracies. Finally, whatever the characteristics of the processes of conflict management, agenda formation, fulfilment of policy priorities and law-making, government face an ultimate challenge. Especially
- 35. where alternation ispossible, government parties need to meet citizens’ satisfaction and gain their support if they aim at being confirmed in power. It has been argued that the popular expectations toward the public sector, and the public opinion’s capacity to scrutinise government action (at least in the democratic world) have largely increased in more recent decades (Rothstein 2005; Radin 2000). In this regard, the analysis of cabinet popularity during the Second Republic offers a stimulating empirical perspective in the assessment of any shift of the Italian government system toward a more responsible and popularly mandated executive.
- 36. Preview of thevolume In dealing with the analytical dimensions discussed so far, this edited book presents a series of original investigations, based on new and extensive data collection on the activity and performance of Italian coalition governments in the last two decades: a period that corresponds by and large to the Second Republic.11 In Chapter 1, Marangoni and Vercesi provide an in-depth analysis of intra-coalitional conflictuality and its management by the Italian governments. Drawing from the comparative literature, they first measure both the intensity (number of conflicts) and the content (issues involved) of governmental conflictuality. Conflict management mechanisms and arenas are then analysed. The chapter shows some important elements of change with respect to the past, for example in terms of the object of conflicts (increasingly, the policies to be implemented by the executive) and of the mechanisms adopted by coalition partners to cope with them (increasingly centralised and internalised within the cabinet). However, equally important elements of continuity with the First Republic are highlighted by the analysis, for example some arenas that are external to government have not disappeared from the management of intra-coalitional conflicts and the overall dominance of the executive on the parliament and on the party central offices – as would be typical of majoritarian democracies – is far from being in place. In Chapter 2, Borghetto and Carammia focus on the process of formation of the government agenda. In particular, they investigate how and to what extent the priorities of the different coalition components (i.e., parties) are accommodated in the construction of the cabinet agenda. The two authors develop their analysis through systematic content-coding of party and coalition manifestos and then contrast these results with those stemming from the analysis of governments’ investiture speeches. They show that the consolidation of a bipolar pattern of party competition and the over- time variations between the First and the Second Republic12 have really influenced the nature of the programmatic declarations of the prime ministers. These have moved, for instance, toward the inclusion of more policy-oriented content. The two authors also demonstrate that the prioritiesdeclared by the prime ministers of the Second Republic in their investiture speeches tend to be far more congruent with the policy agendas issued before the elections by their respective sponsoring coalitions, than used to be the case under the First Republic. However, the authors do not find strong evidence that the introduction of coalition agreements (as opposed to individual party platforms) has fostered the correspondence between these pre-electoral commitments and the actual cabinet priorities. On the contrary, the manifestos of individual parties sometimes translate better into the government agenda. This result seems to cast some doubts about the institutionalisation of pre-electoral programmatic agreements as underlying mechanisms of coalition governance in Italy. Coalition agreements are specifically analysed in Chapter 3 by Conti. In coalition governments, this kind of agreement often disciplines the relationship among parties (the principal) and the executive (the agent), as the former compel the latter to a set of policy priorities, thus giving rise to expectations among voters. Public and progressively more formal coalition agreements have actually
- 37. been introduced inItaly. Through the systematic analysis of both government agreements and legislative outcomes, the chapter shows that the Italian government has slowly moved toward the goal of better fulfilment of its pledges; however, this is not happening in a linear way and does not increase over time but has had some recent fall-backs. The shift of the Italian government toward a compliance model focused on fulfilment of pledges is therefore only partially satisfied. In Chapter 4, Pedrazzani investigates the ‘life’ of government bills in parliament, looking in particular at the variance in the support enjoyed by government-sponsored legislation. Through the analysis of roll-call votes, the author shows that levels of consensus depend on the management of conflict between majority and opposition, and on the complexity of the bargaining environment in theparliament at the voting stage. Moreover, the presence of vote trading among legislators helps explain whether the approval of bills is more consensual or majoritarian. In addition, other features of the bills – such as their proposers and their internal complexity – are proved to influence the kind of support they gain in the end within the parliament. Finally, the length of the legislative process and the extent to which bills are modified before approval are also influential factors. The overall picture is one of a very dynamic (but also intricate) final voting stage in the parliament that does not anticipate full control by the government on the law-making process. Chapter 5 by Borghetto and Visconti extends the analysis of the life cycle of government acts to the post-enactment phase (i.e., once government bills have become laws) through an examination of amendments to government legislation. This is a topic totally neglected by previous studies on the consequences of the evolution of the Italian political system. This contribution aims to examine how post-enactment policy change has developed from the point of view of its intensity (how much does a law change?) and pace (how long does a law last before being amended?). The two authors show that between-government changes are not greater than those introduced by the same incumbent coalition during its life cycle due to intra-coalition bargaining. This is evidence of the fact that, despite alternation in power, policy innovation does not display at the level many would expect and that policy continuity has, instead, remained a solid feature, even after the advent of the Second Republic. Finally, Chapter 6 by Memoli analyses patterns of popular support for the Italian government. Through the analysis of public opinion surveys, the chapter shows that policy outputs do in fact have an influence on popular support for the executive, as does the state of the economy. However, political scandals and government respect for the rule of law are also very influential and add to public support for the incumbent. Ultimately, Italian citizens seriously question not only the policy- making capacity of the Italian government (a main focus in this volume), but also its overall conduct and public image. The main findings of the volume are summarised and the research questions raised in the introduction find answers in the Conclusion by Conti and Marangoni. Here, the results of the analyses carried in the different chapters are brought to a unified picture. Some important changes to coalition governance in Italy need to be acknowledged. However, the Italian system shows, at the same time, clear features of resistance to change of its long-run equilibria and, beyond the formal rules of the system that might really push in the direction of greater adversarial politics and
- 38. government responsiveness, theway both government and opposition interpret these rules only partially fits a supposedly majoritarian democracy and a popular mandated executive. Resemblance with the mechanics of cabinet governance in the First Republic is persistent in many respects within the Italian system and its overall transformation appears characterised by lengthy adaptation to the new institutional environment and by incremental change.
- 39. Notes 1 There areof course important variations between (few) countries that have only occasionally (but not so rarely) experienced coalition governments, such as Norway (about 35 per cent of cases) and Sweden (about 29 per cent of cases), and those countries (the majority) where the formation of coalitions has proved to be a common process. 2 Together with other more theoretically driven and formal works on various aspects of coalition politics (for instance, Austen-Smith and Banks 1990; Lupia and Strøm 1995; Laver and Shepsle 1990). 3 There have been few exceptions of single-party government, especially during the First Republic, as a transitional device of very brief duration in order not to leave a vacuum in executive politics, whenever a full and public agreement could not be reached among coalition partners (Cotta and Verzichelli 2007). Technically speaking, these were minority governments supported in parliament by several parties. 4 The literature makes a fundamental distinction among mixed-member electoral system between Mixed-Member Proportional (MMP) systems and Mixed-Member Majoritarian (MMM) systems (Shugart and Wattenberg 2001). The main difference is that in the MMP system nominal and list tiers are ‘linked’, which basically means that in these systems, such as the one in Germany, the absolute number of parliamentary seats received by any given party is proportional to its list-tiers results. The MMP system, therefore, is intrinsically more proportional than MMM, where, conversely, the ‘list and nominal tiers both allocate seats independently, not trying to maintain proportionality between seats and votes’ (Thames and Edwards 2006, 2). 5 During the First Republic the power to govern never passed from the rulingmajority built around the Christian Democrats (DC) to the opposition. The only possible outcome of this transfer of power would actually entail giving power to the Italian Communist Party (PCI), ‘whose electoral appeal and ideological breath was second only to the DC’s own. The PCI, however, was perceived (or labelled) as an “anti-system” party’ (Edwards 2011, 311), and as such it was excluded from being part of executives. The result was that alternation was not even considered a realistic possibility by the main political actors and the government parties felt rather secure in this position. 6 In the early 1990s, the ‘Clean hands’ investigation by Milan prosecutors revealed a large web of corrupt exchanges and illegal party- financing (‘Bribesville’) built around political parties that had managed to politicise and control vast sectors and aspects of public life (from bureaucracy to civil society). This corruption scandal led definitively to the collapse of the then-dominant DC, together with the DC’s main governing partner, the Italian Socialist party (PSI). 7 Coherently with a process that has been argued to be common to many contemporary parliamentary democracies (Poguntke and Webb 2007). 8 Typically, law-making capabilities (Marangoni 2013) and cabinet decision-making (Moury 2013). 9 A more systematic discussion of these arguments is presented in Chapter 1. 10 I.e., the possibility that individual ministers drive the content of the bills they draft closer to their (own parties) ideal point, than to the agreed-upon coalition compromise. 11 Although the time span of the analysis is extended in some chapters to cover also the final part of the First Republic, as a source of comparison. 12 From post-election coalitions with no programmatic agreement to pre-election coalitions with no programmatic agreement to pre-election coalitions with programmatic agreement.
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- 44. 1 The government andits hard decisions How conflict is managed within the coalition Francesco Marangoni and Michelangelo Vercesi1
- 45. Introduction Conflicts are intrinsicin the nature of coalitions. Government parties, in fact, are allies but, at the same time, they are organizations competing (with one another) for maximizing votes in the electoral arena (Panebianco 1988). Individual components of the executive, ministers above all, are agents of the whole cabinet, in their respective departmental policy domain, but they are also (at least some of them) representatives of their own party within the government (Andeweg 2000). A tension between centripetal and centrifugal drives, therefore, is inherent in the very nature of coalition executives: something that might be conducive to more or less frequent and serious conflicts among partners. If intense enough, conflicts might weaken the basis of the alliance and challenge the stability of the executive. Even when less threatening, in terms of risks for government survival, intra-coalition conflicts can undermine cabinet decision-making and government performance. It stands to reason, therefore, that conflict management is an essential commitment for coalition governments. Coalition governance, indeed, is supposed to be a matter of conflict avoidance, even more than conflict management. Coalition agreements, discussed in depth by Conti in Chapter 3, are supposed to be crucial mechanisms in this regard (Andeweg and Timmermans 2008). Unforeseen, or deferred, issues of conflicts, however, might always arise during the government life cycle (Strøm et al. 2008) and need to be addressed by government partners. The analysis of conflict management, from this point of view, has proved to be a precious perspective for observing internal dynamics of coalition governments2 and, in this respect, Italy is a very intriguing case to study. Before the 1990s, it was traditionally ruled by often conflictual and ineffective (in most of the cases coalition) governments (Di Palma 1977; Spotts and Wieser 1986). In the absence of any real chance of alternation, fragile governing coalitions were constantly formed around the Christian Democratic party (DC), which traditionally controlled the prime-ministership and the most influential cabinet portfolios (Verzichelli and Cotta 2000). On the one hand, resulting government majorities used to be fragmented and internally divided (as far as the main policy preferences are concerned). On the other, governments used not to be based on formal coalition agreements (Moury and Timmermans 2008). The attitude of Italian First Republic governments to rely largely (if not exclusively) on arenas of conflict management and resolution that were external to the cabinet, therefore, is perfectly coherent with the arguments raised by the most advanced comparative literature on this issue. The common hypotheses, in fact, postulate that conditions like the fragility of coalitions, the bias in favor of one of the governing parties (as in the case of the DC) and the absence of any prior policy agreement among coalition partners, make government members more likely to resort to institutions that are external to the cabinet (such as a committee of parliamentary party leaders), or mixed arenas, open to both cabinet and non-cabinet actors (such as the renowned Italian ‘majority summits’ between ministers and party leaders), rather than to internal (and closed) arenas (i.e., the cabinet) for conflict resolution (Andeweg and Timmermans 2008). The analysis of intra-coalitional conflicts (and of conflict management) during the Italian Second
- 46. Republic, therefore, promisesto be interesting and valuable. Not only because, as said, it will provide a precious empirical perspective for the observation of the government internal dynamics in an era, as emphasized in the introduction of this volume, of profound (but also uncompleted and even contradictory) transformation of the Italian political system. From a broader comparative perspective, it will also serve as a dynamic test of the same bulk of hypotheses on coalition governments and conflict management mentioned above. It is true, on the one hand, that the evolution of the Italian political (and institutional) system between the First and the Second Republic has proved largely incomplete (Ceccanti and Vassallo 2004; Almagisti et al. 2014), and that traditional features (and problems) of the Italian governments have remained substantially unaltered (or become even worse) as a result. Fragmentation and heterogeneity have continued to plague government coalitions that were assembled to win the elections and to defeat the ‘opposite pole’, but were also unable to govern (Diamanti 2007) and to produce stable executives (Pasquino and Valbruzzi 2011). Coalition fragility and cabinet instability, moreover, have opened the way to frequent government crises and, sometimes (as in the case of the executives formed after the crisis of the Prodi I government in 1998), to more traditional – First Republic-like – patterns of government formation and coalition governance: i.e., pure parliamentary (not electoral) legitimation of majorities, no pre-electoral coalition deals and policy agreements, subordination to partisan actors outside the cabinet. Under these premises, we could hardly expect to find evidence of a diminishing intra-coalitional conflictuality. On the other hand, however, the structure of Italian governments has experienced some evident changes in the last 15 years, that we expect to have had an impact on mechanisms of intra-coalitional conflict handling. To say the least, the new bipolar electoral competition between center-right and center-left pre-electoral coalitions (Golder 2006) has led to executives (and prime ministers) with a more direct electoral derivation (and legitimation). The new (for Italian governments) habit of drafting coalition agreements focused on policies with constraining implications on coalition governance (Moury 2012), and the increased cabinet membership rate of party leaders who, instead, used not to sit in the executive during the First Republic (Verzichelli 2009) are two of the main corollaries of this ‘majoritarian turn’ in Italian politics. Drawing from the already quoted study by Andeweg and Timmermans (2008), who have found that when governing parties have prior coalition policy agreement to rely on, and when party leaders take a seat in the executive, conflicts tend to be solved within closed and internal arenas, we should expect conflict management by the Italian governments of the Second Republic to be somehow ‘internalized’ within the cabinet. With the aim of verifying these general expectations, the next pages are organized as follows. We first present some basic features of Second Republic governments, with particular focus on the composition (and fragmentation) of the supporting coalitions, as these same characteristics are expected to have an impact on the dynamics of conflict occurrence and management. Intra- coalitional conflictuality is then measured for each single government (by means of an extensive newspaper analysis), as regards to both quantity (the number of conflicts that occurred) and quality (the objects of conflicts and their ‘seriousness’ in terms of the risks they posed to cabinet survival).
- 47. Third, we providesome information about the role and the involvement of prime ministers in conflicts. The decision-making and conflict management arenas are finally examined (again using newspaper analysis as the main source of information) with particular regard to their openness or closure to actors outside the cabinet.
- 48. Government coalitions between1996 and 2011 The starting point of the empirical investigation presented in this chapter is 1996. While we already have access to sufficient knowledge about intra-coalition conflicts and conflict management during the First Republic (Nousiainen 1993; Criscitiello 1996; Verzichelli and Cotta 2000), no systematic studies regarding more recent years are available. At the same time, we decided not to consider the period immediately following the crisis of the First Republic in 1992, as this was characterized by extreme instability of the Italian government system, and it was ruled, almost entirely,3 by non- partisan, technocratic or quasi-technocratic executives (Fabbrini 2000). Between 1996 and 2011 four politicians alternated as prime ministers and six coalition governments were appointed. For the sake of simplicity we treat as a single executive two governments following one another, without any change in the prime-ministership and without a general election occurring in between. According to these criteria, the six cabinets are Prodi I; D’Alema I–II;4 Amato II;5 Berlusconi II–III;6 Prodi II; Berlusconi IV. Only the Amato II and Berlusconi II–III cabinets did not terminate prematurely; and only the latter lasted for the entire legislative term.7Table 1.1 indicates the first day in office, the date of resignation of each government, and the duration (in days) with full powers8 of these executives. The four prime ministers, with the exception of Berlusconi, were not leaders of their own parties when in office.9 Table 1.1 Italian cabinets, 1996–2011 With regard to the party composition, we consider as coalition members all parties explicitly supporting the cabinet in parliament, whether or not they have any representative in the Council of ministers, or any of their members appointed as junior minister.10Table 1.2 reports the party composition of the coalition supporting each government, together with a measure of coalition fragmentation, computed as the number of parties that were strictly necessary to hold the absolute majority in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate (i.e., parties with veto power). Some coalitions were oversized, but the number of parties that were necessary to hold a majority was actually smaller. Table 1.2 Party composition of government coalitions (at time of inauguration), 1996–2011 (including parties giving external support)
- 49. Taken as awhole, data in Table 1.2 confirm that complexity and fragmentation have characterized Italian government coalitions (also) during the Second Republic. There are some variations among governments, but there is not any clear pattern toward simplification of government teams. On the contrary, the most fragmented coalition was the rather recent center-left alliance supporting the 2006–2008 Prodi II executive (ten necessary parties). As we will also discuss in the following pages, even the more homogeneous coalition supporting the Berlusconi IV cabinet (only two necessary parties) experienced significant troubles, due to an increasing level of internal conflictuality during the life of this government (ending up with an early dissolution of the executive). Another aspect to be taken into careful consideration, because it is expected to have a significant impact on the attitude of governments toward conflict management, is the presence of party leaders within the cabinet. We find quite significant differences among the governments under scrutiny on this regard. Overall, the ‘majoritarian’ governments (those led by Prodi and Berlusconi) form a group on their own compared to the more First Republic-like governments (led by D’Alema and Amato), with the exception of the first Prodi government. Indeed, only one party leader entered this latter cabinet. On the contrary, more than half of the parties represented in the Berlusconi II–III and IV and Prodi II cabinets had their own leaders inside the (senior) ministerial group (Table 1.3).
- 50. Intra-coalitional conflictuality andconflict management The level of conflictuality In our effort to measure government conflictuality, we have first defined the concept of ‘conflict’ as any quarrel or explicit disagreement between two or more executive members and/or coalition (individual or collective) party actors. Table 1.3 Number of party leaders in cabinet by government, 1996–2011 The number of (so defined) conflicts is the first indicator (rough) of the level of conflictuality a given government coalition has experienced. In this regard, we used newspaper reports as a source of information to detect single episodes of conflicts among coalition partners. Technically speaking, we operated a systematic keywords search11 through the digital archives of two of the most relevant Italian national newspapers, Il Corriere della Sera and Il Sole 24 Ore, on all the articles (at both title and text level) published between May 1996 (the inauguration of the Prodi I executive) and November 2011 (premature end of the Berlusconi IV executive). Once we had collected the articles presenting at least one of the selected keywords, we went through a more in-depth analysis of the content of each piece, in order to find the commentaries effectively covering conflicts within government coalitions (excluding all other conflicts) and to isolate single episodes of conflicts. At the end of this process, as reported in Table 1.4, we were able to observe more than 850 conflicts in the entire period under analysis: almost five conflicts per month, on average. Table 1.4 disaggregates data by individual governments. Interestingly, the absolute degree of conflictuality seems to vary quite independently from (or, better, not exclusively as a consequence of) coalition fragmentation and internal heterogeneity. The quite homogeneous (at least initially, before a split
- 51. within the partyof the prime minister) Berlusconi IV’s coalition, for instance, experienced quite a high level of conflictuality (almost six conflicts, on average, per month). This was even higher than the level shown by the more fragmented Prodi II supporting coalition (on average, 4.7 conflicts per month). As already said, however, the number of conflicts is only a rough indicator of the real level of intra-coalitional conflictuality. In fact, we cannot assume that all conflicts present the same (potential) risks for cabinet survival and for an effective and smooth functioning of government decision-making. Simply speaking, indeed, some conflicts are more ‘dangerous’ and serious than others. A coalition might frequently have to cope with minor internal disagreements or, vice versa, be affected by few, but very threatening conflicts. The simple observation of the frequency of conflicts can, therefore, be a good point of departure, but it is not enough for a detailed and reliable picture. Table 1.4 Absolute and monthly average number of conflicts by government The seriousness of conflicts, therefore, needs to be carefully analyzed: a problem that we decided to consider, coherently with the literature on the topic (Nousiainen 1993; Müller and Strøm 2000; Andeweg and Timmermans 2008), by referring to the actors involved in the conflicts and the roles they perform within the government arena. The actors in conflict All else being equal, intra-party conflicts are commonly considered to be relatively less risky for government survival. This kind of conflict, indeed, does not directly affect the interparty cooperative basis of the coalition, unless the object of intra-party disputes is precisely the support for the government, or if internal conflicts result in party splitting (with one component leaving the majority). In these cases, even intra-party conflicts might lead to cabinet termination (Damgaard 2008; Saalfeld 2009). Three different types of conflict do not involve (only) actors belonging to the same party: these are interdepartmental conflicts; party–government conflicts and interparty conflicts. As one might note,
- 52. these different typesare ordered according to the increasing involvement of partisan actors (the ‘partyness’ of conflicts): from conflicts where parties are not directly involved (interdepartmental conflicts) to conflicts between partisan actors (interparty conflicts). The same classification is also ordered according to increasing risks they cause to cabinet stability, as the partyness of conflicts is commonly considered a critical factor in determining the seriousness of conflicts (Huber 1996; Andeweg and Timmermans 2008). The actors of interdepartmental conflicts are individual ministers acting as heads and in the interests of their departments, and not (purely) as representatives of their own party within the cabinet.12 Conflicts between party and government are, instead, characterized by the actions of a coalition party (or some components of it) against the policies (even a ministry) or the overall trajectory of the government. Clearly, the prime minister is the most prominent among possible government members who can be involved in conflicts (Vercesi 2013). The partyness of conflicts reaches its maximum strength in interparty conflicts. ‘The most serious conflict in parliamentary systems generally ( . . . ) lies between parties ( . . . ) that are represented both in the government and the parliament’ (Huber 1996: 270). Their dangerousness can be explained by the fact that the struggle occurs between two (or more) constitutive parts of the coalition, that is, the parties establishing a pact for government. Each conflict in our dataset has, therefore, been classified in one (and only one) of these four categories.13Figure 1.1 presents the relative distribution of the episodes of conflict by type and by executive. As a whole, interparty struggles, which we mentioned as being potentially the most risky type of conflicts, cover the larger area of the figure: almost 36 per cent of the conflicts we detected can be classified in this category. Rather interestingly, we noted an exceptionally high level of interparty conflictuality with the D’Alema I–II and Amato II executives (respectively, about 56 per cent and little less than 46 per cent). These data are coherent with our expectations and can be explained when one considers the origins of these two cabinets based, like the governments of the First Republic, on complex and fragile interparty bargaining and compromise in parliament after the crisis of the former executive and so under emergency conditions, rather than on electoral legitimation or a clear post-electoral agreement.
- 53. Figure 1.1 Percentagedistribution of conflicts by actors involved This pattern changes quite substantially with the new ‘majoritarian’ executives, as we define those governments resulting from pre-electoral coalitions and popular legitimacy in a context of bipolar competition (i.e., Prodi I; Berlusconi II–III; Prodi II and Berlusconi IV). The interparty conflictuality area shrinks, while conflicts progressively move into the cabinet. Interdepartmental struggles, in fact, rise from 17 per cent during the Prodi I government to almost 40 per cent during Berlusconi II–III and Prodi II governments and about 30 per cent during the Berlusconi IV. It has been argued (Marangoni 2013) that this might be due to the relevance of the decisions taken by the executives of the Second Republic, given the tighter constraints of the EU on the Italian government and due to the fact that policy stagnation cannot be a rewarding strategy in the alternation system of the Second Republic (Curini 2011).14 On the other hand, one might read this data as indicating the consolidation of these executives as the locus of party leadership. As already noted (contrary to the First Republic), in the ‘majoritarian’ executives the leaders of the coalition parties usually took office in the cabinet,15 hence some interparty frictions might have boosted the interdepartmental conflicts. The attempt by the ‘majoritarian’ executives of the Second Republic to play a more autonomous (from parties) and active role in the decision-making process can probably explain the high percentage of government–parties conflicts (27 per cent). At the same time, although a sign of their leadership, this type of conflict destabilized the same executives. The early termination of the Prodi I and Prodi II governments, for instance, was the consequence of open conflicts between the executive and some party components of its supporting coalition. Naturally enough, government–parties and interparty conflicts might end up nourishing one another. The opposition of a coalition member to a given government decision can easily lead to conflicts between the former and the other party components of the majority (those more aligned with the executive). In other terms, in this kind of situation, the same government acts could become the target of interparty conflicts. This was the case, for instance, of the formal crisis ending with a reshuffle of the Berlusconi II government in April 2005 (Vassallo 2005). An important consideration here relates to the relatively high percentage of intra-party conflicts during the Berlusconi IV government (20.5 per cent). We assumed this type of conflict is, in general, not too risky for government survival. However, sometimes intra-party conflicts can be severe enough to threaten the stability of the coalition as a whole. The Berlusconi IV executive is a perfect case in point. The increasing tensions within the People of Freedom party that ended with the decision of Gianfranco Fini (one of the founding fathers) to abandon the party16 and to give birth in parliament to a new party (Future and Freedom) that did not support the executive, weakened the majority coalition and opened the way to a crisis in the government and to its resignation in 2011. The objects of conflicts
- 54. Conflicts do notonly differ from one another according to the actors involved. Quite evidently, the issues at stake can be of a very different nature, entailing different dynamics and risks for the government. We suggest, in this regard, classifying the issues of conflicts into three macro-categories: policy issues, structure of the cabinet, and coalitional equilibria. This latter category refers to struggles over the basic rules keeping coalition partners together: contrasts over the leadership of the coalition or on the strategies and goals to be followed by the executive are typical examples of conflicts falling in this category. Policy conflicts involve the decisions to be implemented (in terms of public policies) by the executive (the focus, therefore, is on the outputs of the government activity). Conflicts on cabinet structure are typically disagreements on the division of labor and prerogatives within the executive (starting with portfolio allocation). Data in Table 1.5 show that, on the whole, the majority of conflicts (almost 63 per cent) concern policy issues (note that the few conflicts we have not been able to unequivocally classify into one of the three categories have been excluded). On the one hand, once again, this seems to confirm the relevance of the policy decisions the Italian executives have been called to deal with in the last two decades. On the other hand, however, these same data suggest that reaching a compromise over the policy measures to be implemented is still a difficult (and sometimes ineffective, as Conti demonstrates in Chapter 3) exercise for the Italian government coalitions. Disaggregated data by executive are really interesting on this regard. We note, in fact, a significantly smaller percentage of policy conflicts during the D’Alema I–II and the Amato II executives (about 36 per cent and 48 per cent, respectively). This is very unlikely to be due to the more homogeneous nature of their supporting coalitions, or to their capacity to hold larger and more solid agreements (and a smoother decision-making process). The exact contrary is, instead, true. The rather composite nature of the majority coalitions, and the limited time (and policy) horizon of these two governments prevented more relevant and conflictual policy issues entering the government agenda.17 Conflicts over the coalitional equilibria and the structure of the cabinet, somehow (numerically) residual under most ‘majoritarian’ executives (with the partial exception of the Prodi I), have largely characterized the life of these two governments (they make up about 65 per cent and 52 per cent of the episodes of conflict, respectively), a phenomenon echoing the typical nature of conflicts in the First Republic (Nousiainen 1993). Table 1.5 Percentage distribution of conflicts by main issue (and by executive)a
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- 56. and the newreligion, in which the former retained more than it lost, and the latter gave less than it received. Considering that the Druid priests of ancient Gaul or Britain, like those of pagan Rome, were exempt from military service,[254] and often, according to Strabo, had such influence as to part combatants on the point of an engagement, nothing is more remarkable than the extent to which the Christian clergy, bishops, and abbots came to lead armies and fight in battle, in spite of canons and councils of the Church, at a time when that Church’s power was greater, and its influence wider, than it has ever been since. Historians have scarcely given due prominence to this fact, which covers a period of at least a thousand years; for Gregory of Tours mentions two bishops of the sixth century who had killed many enemies with their own hands, whilst Erasmus, in the sixteenth, complains of bishops taking more pride in leading three or four hundred dragoons, with swords and guns, than in a following of deacons and divinity students, and asks, with just sarcasm, why the trumpet and fife should sound sweeter in their ears than the singing of psalms or the words of the Bible. In the fourteenth century, when war and chivalry were at their height, occurred a remarkable protest against this state of things from Wycliffe, who, in this, as in other respects, anticipated the Reformation: ‘Friars now say that bishops can fight best of all men, and that it falleth most properly to them, since they are lords of all this world. They say, Christ bade his disciples sell their coats, and buy them swords; but whereto, if not to fight? Thus friars make a great array, and stir up men to fight. But Christ taught not his apostles to fight with a sword of iron, but with the sword of God’s word, which standeth in meekness of heart and in the prudence of man’s tongue.... If manslaying in others be odious to God, much more in priests who should be vicars of Christ.’ And Wycliffe proceeds not only to protest against this, but to advocate the general cause of peace on earth, on grounds which he is aware that men of the world will scorn and reject as fatal to the existence of kingdoms.[255]
- 57. It was nooccasional, but an inveterate practice, and, apparently, common in the world, long before the system of feudalism gave it some justification by the connection of military service with the enjoyment of lands. Yet it has now so completely disappeared that— as a proof of the possible change of thought which may ultimately render a Christian soldier as great an anomaly as a fighting bishop— it is worth recalling from history some instances of so curious a custom. ‘The bishops themselves—not all, but many’—says a writer of King Stephen’s reign, ‘bound in iron, and completely furnished with arms, were accustomed to mount war-horses with the perverters of their country, to share in their spoil; to bind and torture the knights whom they took in the chance of war, or whom they met full of money.’[256] It was at the battle of Bouvines (1214) that the famous Bishop of Beauvais fought with a club instead of a sword, out of respect for the rule of the canon which forbade an ecclesiastic to shed blood. Matthew Paris tells the story how Richard I. took the said bishop prisoner, and when the Pope begged for his release as being his own son and a son of the Church, sent to Innocent III. the episcopal coat of mail, with the inquiry whether he recognised it as that of his son or of a son of the Church; to which the Pope had the wit to reply that he could not recognise it as belonging to either.[257] The story also bears repeating of the impatient knight who, sharing the command of a division at the battle of Falkirk with the Bishop of Durham, cried out to his slower colleague, before closing with the Scots, ‘It is not for you to teach us war; to your Mass, bishop!’ and therewith rushed with his followers into the fray (1298).[258] It is, however, needless to multiply instances, which, if Du Cange may be credited, became more common during the devastation of France by the Danes in the ninth century, when all the military aid that was available became a matter of national existence. That event rendered Charlemagne’s capitulary a dead letter, by which that monarch had forbidden any ecclesiastic to march against an enemy, save two or three bishops to bless the army or reconcile the combatants, and a few priests to give absolution and celebrate the
- 58. Mass.[259] It appearsthat this law was made in response to an exhortation by Pope Adrian II., similar to one addressed in the previous century by Pope Zachary to Charlemagne’s ancestor, King Pepin. But though military service and the tenure of ecclesiastical benefices became more common from the time of the Danish irruptions, instances are recorded of abbots and archbishops who chose rather to surrender their temporalities than to take part in active service; and for many centuries the whole question seems to have rested on a most uncertain footing, law and custom demanding as a duty that which public and ecclesiastical opinion condoned, but which the Church herself condemned. It is a signal mark of the degree to which religion became enveloped in the military spirit of those miserable days of chivalry, that ecclesiastical preferment was sometimes the reward of bravery on the field, as in the case of that chaplain to the Earl of Douglas who, for his courage displayed at the battle of Otterbourne, was, Froissart tells us, promoted the same year to a canonry and archdeaconry at Aberdeen. Vasari, in his ‘Life of Michael Angelo,’ has a good story which is not only highly typical of this martial Christianity, but may be also taken to mark the furthest point of divergence reached by the Church in this respect from the standpoint of her earlier teaching. Pope Julius II. went one day to see a statue of himself which Michael Angelo was executing. The right hand of the statue was raised in a dignified attitude, and the artist consulted the Pope as to whether he should place a book in the left. ‘Put a sword into it,’ quoth Julius, ‘for of letters I know but little.’ This was the Pope of whom Bayle says that never man had a more warlike soul, and of whom, with some doubt, he repeats the anecdote of his having thrown into the Tiber the keys of St. Peter, with the declaration that he would thenceforth use the sword of St. Paul. However this may be, he went in person to hasten the siege of Mirandola, in opposition to the protests of the cardinals and to the scandal of Christendom (1510). There it was that to encourage the soldiers he promised them, that if they exerted
- 59. themselves valiantly hewould make no terms with the town, but would suffer them to sack it;[260] and though this did not occur, and the town ultimately surrendered on terms, the head of the Christian Church had himself conveyed into it by the breach. The scandal of this proceeding contributed its share to the discontent which produced the Reformation; and that movement continued still further the disfavour with which many already viewed the connection of the clergy with actual warfare. It has, however, happened occasionally since that epoch that priests of martial tastes have been enabled to gratify them, the custom having become more and more rare as public opinion grew stronger against it. The last recorded instance of a fighting divine was, it would seem, the Bishop of Derry, who, having been raised to that see by William III. in gratitude for the distinguished bravery with which, though a clergyman, he had conducted the defence of Londonderry against the forces of James II., and for which the University of Oxford rewarded him with the title of Doctor of Divinity, was shot dead at the battle of the Boyne. He had, says Macaulay, ‘during the siege in which he had so highly distinguished himself, contracted a passion for war,’ but his zeal to gratify it on that second occasion cost him the favour of the king. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that history should have called no special attention to the last instance of a bishop who fought and died upon a battle-field, nor have sufficiently emphasised the great revolution of thought which first changed a common occurrence into something unusual, and finally into a memory that seems ridiculous. No historical fact affords a greater justification than this for the hope that, absurd as is the idea of a fighting bishop to our own age, that of a fighting Christian may be to our posterity. As bishops were in the middle ages warriors, so they were also the common bearers of declarations of war. The Bishop of Lincoln bore, for instance, the challenge of Edward III. and his allies to Charles V. at Paris; and greatly offended was the English king and his council when Charles returned the challenge by a common valet—they
- 60. declared it indecentfor a war between two such great lords to be declared by a mere servant, and not by a prelate or a knight of valour. The declaration of war in those times appears to have meant simply a challenge or defiance like that then and afterwards customary in a duel. It appears to have originated out of habits that governed the relations between the feudal barons. We learn from Froissart that when Edward was made Vicar of the German Empire an old statute was renewed which had before been made at the emperor’s court, to the effect that no one, intending to injure his neighbour, might do so without sending him a defiance three days beforehand. The following extract from the challenge of war sent by the Duke of Orleans, the brother of the King of France, to Henry IV. of England, testifies to the close resemblance between a declaration of war and a challenge to a deed of arms, and to the levity which often gave rise to either: ‘I, Louis, write and make known to you, that with the aid of God and the blessed Trinity, in the desire which I have to gain renown, and which you likewise should feel, considering idleness as the bane of lords of high birth who do not employ themselves in arms, and thinking I can no way better seek renown than by proposing to you to meet me at an appointed place, each of us accompanied with 100 knights and esquires, of name and arms without reproach, there to combat till one of the parties shall surrender; and he to whom God shall grant the victory shall do with his prisoners as he pleases. We will not employ any incantations that are forbidden by the Church, but make use of the bodily strength given us by God, with armour as may be most agreeable to everyone for the security of his person, and with the usual arms, that is lance, battle-axe, sword, and dagger ... without aiding himself by any bodkins, hooks, bearded darts, poisoned needles or razors, as may be done by persons unless they are positively ordered to the contrary....’[261] Henry IV. answered the challenge with some contempt, but expressed his readiness to meet the duke in single combat, whenever he should visit his possessions in France, in order to prevent any greater effusion of Christian blood, since a good
- 61. shepherd, he said,should expose his own life for his flock. It even seemed at one time as if wars might have resolved themselves into this more rational mode of settlement. The Emperor Henry IV. challenged the Duke of Swabia to single combat. Philip Augustus of France is said to have proposed to Richard I. to settle their differences by a combat of five on each side; and when Edward III. challenged the realm of France, he offered to settle the question by a duel or a combat of 100 men on each side, with which the French king would, it appears, have complied, had Edward consented to stake the kingdom of England against that of France. In the custom of naming the implements of war after the most revered names of the Christian hagiology may be observed another trace of the close alliance that resulted between the military and spiritual sides of human life, somewhat like that which prevailed in the sort of worship paid to their lances, pikes, and battle-axes by the ancient Scandinavians.[262] Thus the two first forts which the Spaniards built in the Ladrone Islands they called respectively after St. Francis Xavier and the Virgin Mary. Twelve ships in the Armada were called after the Twelve Apostles, and so were twelve of his cannons by Henry VIII., one of which, St. John by name, was captured by the French in 1513.[263] It is probable that mere irreverence had less to do with this custom than the hope thereby of obtaining favour in war, such as may also be traced in the ceremony of consecrating military banners, which has descended to our own times.[264] To the same order of superstition belongs the old custom of falling down and kissing the earth before starting on a charge or assault of battle. The practice is alluded to several times in Montluc’s Commentaries, but so little was it understood by a modern French editor that in one place he suggests the reading baissèrent la tête (they lowered their heads) for baisèrent la terre (they kissed the earth). But the latter reading is confirmed by passages elsewhere; as, for instance, in the ‘Memoirs of Fleurange,’ where it is stated that Gaston de Foix and his soldiers kissed the earth, according to
- 62. custom, before proceedingto march against the enemy;[265] and, again, in the ‘Life of Bayard,’ by his secretary, who records it among the virtues of that knight that he would rise from his bed every night to prostrate himself at full length on the floor and kiss the earth.[266] This kissing of the earth was an abbreviated form of taking a particle of it in the mouth, as both Elmham and Livius mention to have been done by the English at Agincourt before attacking the French; and this again was an abbreviated form of receiving the sacrament, for Villani says of the Flemish at Cambray (1302) that they made a priest go all over the field with the sacred elements, and that, instead of communicating, each man took a little earth and put it into his mouth.[267] This seems a more likely explanation than that the custom was intended as a reminder to the soldier of his mortality, as if in a trade like his there could be any lack of testimony of that sort. It is curious to observe how war in every stage of civilisation has been the central interest of public religious supplication; and how, from the pagans of old to modern savages, the pettiest quarrels and conflicts have been deemed a matter of interest to the immortals. The Sandwich islanders and Tahitians sought the aid of their gods in war by human sacrifices. The Fijians before war were wont to present their gods with costly offerings and temples, and offer with their prayers the best they could of land crabs or whales’ teeth; being so convinced that they thereby ensured to themselves the victory, that once, when a missionary called the attention of a war party to the scantiness of their numbers, they only replied, with disdainful confidence, ‘Our allies are the gods.’ The prayer which the Roman pontifex addressed to Jupiter on behalf of the Republic at the opening of the war with Antiochus, king of Syria, is extremely curious: ‘If the war which the people has ordered to be waged with King Antiochus shall be finished after the wish of the Roman senate and people, then to thee, O Jupiter, will the Roman people exhibit the great games for ten successive days, and offerings shall be presented at all the shrines of such value as the senate shall
- 63. decree.’[268] This rudestate of theology, wherein a victory from the gods may be obtained for a fair consideration in exchange, tends to keep alive, if it did not originate, that sense of dependence on invisible powers which constitutes the most rudimentary form of religion; for it is a remarkable fact that the faintest notions of supernatural agencies are found precisely among tribes whose military organisation or love for war is the lowest and least developed. In proportion as the war-spirit is cultivated does the worship of war-presiding deities prevail; and since these are formed from the memories of warriors who have died or been slain, their attributes and wishes remain those of the former earthly potentate, who though no longer visible, may still be gratified by presents of fruit, or by slaughtered oxen or slaves. The Khonds of Orissa, in India, afford an instance of this close and pernicious association between religious and military ideas, which may be traced through the history of many far more advanced communities. For though they regard the joy of the peace dance as the very highest attainable upon earth, they attribute, not to their own will, but to that of their war god, Loha Pennu, the source of all their wars. The devastation of a fever or tiger is accepted as a hint from that divinity that his service has been too long neglected, and they acquit themselves of all blame for a war begun for no better reason, by the following philosophy of its origin: ‘Loha Pennu said to himself, Let there be war, and he forthwith entered into all weapons, so that from instruments of peace they became weapons of war; he gave edge to the axe and point to the arrow; he entered into all kinds of food and drink, so that men in eating and drinking were filled with rage, and women became instruments of discord instead of soothers of anger.’ And they address this prayer to Loha Pennu for aid against their enemies: ‘Let our axes crush cloth and bones as the jaws of the hyæna crush its prey. Make the wounds we give to gape.... When the wounds of our enemies heal, let lameness remain. Let their stones and arrows fall on us as the flowers of the mowa- tree fall in the wind.... Make their weapons brittle as the long pods of the karta-tree.’
- 64. In their beliefthat wars were of external causation to themselves, and in their endeavour to win by prayer a favourable issue to their appeal to arms, it could scarcely be maintained that the nations of Christendom have at all times shown any marked superiority over the modern Khonds. But in spite of this, and of the fierce military character that Christianity ultimately assumed, the Church always kept alive some of her earlier traditions about peace, and even in the darkest ages set some barriers to the common fury of the soldier. When the Roman Empire was overthrown, her influence in this direction was in marked contrast with what it has been ever since. Even Alaric when he sacked Rome (410) was so far affected by Christianity as to spare the churches and the Christians who fled to them. Leo the Great, Bishop of Rome, inspired even Attila with respect for his priestly authority, and averted his career of conquest from Rome; and the same bishop, three years later (455), pleaded with the victorious Genseric that his Vandals should spare the unresisting multitude and the buildings of Rome, nor allow torture to be inflicted on their prisoners. At the instance of Gregory II., Luitprand, the Lombard king, withdrew his troops from the same city, resigned his conquests, and offered his sword and dagger on the tomb of St. Peter (730). Yet more praiseworthy and perhaps more effective were the efforts of the Church from the tenth century onwards to check that system of private war which was then the bane of Europe, as the system of public and international wars has been since. In the south of France several bishops met and agreed to exclude from the privileges of a Christian in life and after death all who violated their ordinances directed against that custom (990). Only four years later the Council of Limoges exhorted men to swear by the bodies of the saints that they would cease to violate the public peace. Lent appears to have been to some extent a season of abstinence from fighting as from other pleasures, for one of the charges against Louis le Débonnaire was that he summoned an expedition for that time of the year.
- 65. In 1032 aBishop of Aquitaine declared himself the recipient of a message from heaven, ordering men to cease from fighting; and, not only did a peace, called the Truce of God, result for seven years, but it was resolved that such peace should always prevail during the great festivals of the Church, and from every Thursday evening to Monday morning. And the regulation for one kingdom was speedily extended over Christendom, confirmed by several Popes, and enforced by excommunication.[269] If such efforts were not altogether successful, and the wars of the barons continued till the royal power in every country was strong enough to suppress them, it must none the less be recognised that the Church fought, if she fought in vain, against the barbarism of a military society, and with an ardour that is in striking contrast with her apathy in more recent history. It must also be granted that the idea of what the Papacy might do for the peace of the world, as the supreme arbiter of disputes and mediator between contending Powers, gained possession of men’s minds, and entered into the definite policy of the Church about the twelfth century, in a manner that might suggest reflection for the nineteenth. The name of Gerohus de Reigersperg is connected with a plan for the pacification of the world, by which the Pope was to forbid war to all Christian princes, to settle all disputes between them, and to enforce his decisions by the greatest powers that have ever yet been devised for human authority—namely, by excommunication and deposition. And the Popes attempted something of this sort. When, for instance, Innocent III. bade the King of France to make peace with Richard I., and was told that the dispute concerned a matter of feudal relationship with which the Pope had no right of interference, he replied that he interfered by right of his power to censure what he thought sin, and quite irrespective of feudal rights. He also refused to consider the destruction of places and the slaughter of Christians as a matter of no concern to him; and Honorius III. forbade an attack upon
- 66. Denmark, on theground that that kingdom lay under the special protection of the Papacy.[270] The clergy, moreover, were even in the most warlike times of history the chief agents in negotiations for peace, and in the attempt to set limits to military reprisals. When, for instance, the French and English were about to engage at Poitiers, the Cardinal of Perigord spent the whole of the Sunday that preceded the day of battle in laudable but ineffectual attempts to bring the two sides to an agreement without a battle. And when the Duke of Anjou was about to put 600 of the defenders of Montpellier to death by the sword, by the halter, and by fire, it was the Cardinal of Albany and a Dominican monk who saved him from the infamy of such a deed by reminding him of the duty of Christian forgiveness. In these respects it must be plain to every one that the attitude and power of the Church has entirely changed. She has stood apart more and more as time has gone on from her great opportunities as a promoter of peace. Her influence, it is notorious, no longer counts for anything, where it was once so powerful, in the field of negotiation and reconcilement. She lifts no voice to denounce the evils of war, nor to plead for greater restraint in the exercise of reprisals and the abuse of victory. She lends no aid to teach the duty of forbearance and friendship between nations, to diminish their idle jealousies, nor to explain the real identity of their interests. It may even be said without risk of contradiction, that whatever attempt has been made to further the cause of peace upon earth or to diminish the horror of the customs of war, has come, not from the Church, but from the school of thought to which she has been most opposed, and which she has studied most persistently to revile. In respect, too, of the justice of the cause of war, the Church within recent centuries has entirely vacated her position. It is noticeable that in the 37th article of the English Church, which is to the effect that a Christian at the command of the magistrate may wear weapons and serve in the wars, the word justa, which in the Latin
- 67. form preceded theword bella or wars, has been omitted.[271] The leaders of the Reformation decided on the whole in favour of the lawfulness of military service for a Christian, but with the distinct reservation that the cause of war should be just. Bullinger, who was Zwingli’s successor in the Reformed Church at Zurich, decided that though a Christian might take up arms at the command of the magistrate, it would be his duty to disobey the magistrate if he purposed to make war on the guiltless; and that only the death of those soldiers on the battle-field was glorious who fought for their religion or their country. Thomas Becon, chaplain to Archbishop Cranmer, complained of the utter disregard of a just and patriotic motive for war in the code of military ethics then prevalent. Speaking of the fighters of his day, he thus characterised their position in the State: ‘The rapacity of wolves, the violence of lions, the fierceness of tigers is nothing in comparison of their furious and cruel tyranny; and yet do many of them this not for the safeguard of their country (for so it would be the more tolerable), but to satisfy their butcher-like affects, to boast another day of how many men they have been the death, and to bring home the more preys that they may live the fatter ever after for these spoils and stolen goods.’[272] From military service he maintained that all considerations of justice and humanity had been entirely banished, and their stead been taken by robbery and theft, ‘the insatiable spoiling of other men’s goods, and a whole sea of barbarous and beast-like manners.’ In this way the necessity of a just cause as a reason for taking part in actual warfare was reasserted at the time of the Reformation, and has only since then been allowed to drop out of sight altogether; so that now public opinion has no guide in the matter, and even less than it had in ancient Rome, the attitude of the Church towards the State on this point being rather that of Anaxarchus the philosopher to Alexander the Great, when, to console that conqueror for his murder of Clitus, he said to him: ‘Know you not that Jupiter is represented with Law and Justice at his side, to show that whatever is done by sovereign power is right?’
- 68. Considering, therefore, thatno human institution yet devised or actually in existence has had or has a moral influence or facilities for exercising it at all equal to that enjoyed by the Church, it is all the more to be regretted that she has never taken any real interest in the abolition of a custom which is at the root of half the crime and misery with which she has to contend. Whatever hopes might at one time have been reasonably entertained of the Reformed Church as an anti-military agency, the cause of peace soon sank into a sort of heresy, or what was worse, an unfashionable tenet, associated, condemned, and contemned with other articles of religious dissent. ‘Those who condemn the profession or art of soldiery,’ said Sir James Turner, ‘smell rank of anabaptism and quakery.’[273] It would be difficult to find in the whole range of history any such example of wasted moral force. As Erasmus had cause to deplore it in the sixteenth century, so had Voltaire in the eighteenth. The latter complained that he did not remember a single page against war in the whole of Bourdaloue’s sermons, and he even suggested that the real explanation might be a literal want of courage on the part of the clergy. The passage is worth quoting from the original, both for its characteristic energy of expression and for its clear insight into the real character of the custom of war:—‘Pour les autres moralistes à gages que l’on nomme prédicateurs, ils n’ont jamais seulement osé prêcher contre la guerre.... Ils se gardent bien de décrier la guerre, qui réunit tout ce que la perfidie a de plus lâche dans les manifestes, tout ce que l’infâme friponnerie a de plus bas dans les fournitures des armées, tout ce que le brigandage a d’affreux dans le pillage, le viol, le larcin, l’homicide, la dévastation, la destruction. Au contraire, ces bons prêtres bénissent en cérémonie les étendards de meurtre; et leurs confrères chantent pour de l’argent des chansons juives, quand la terre a été inondée de sang.’[274] If Voltaire’s reproach is unjust, it can of course be easily refuted. The challenge is a fair one. Let him be convicted of overstating his charge, by the mention of any ecclesiastic of mark from either the Catholic or the Protestant school within the last two centuries whose
- 69. name is associatedwith the advocacy of the mitigation or the abolition of contests of force; or any war in the same period which the clergy of either denomination have as a body resisted either on the ground of the injustice of its origin or of the ruthless cruelty with which it has been waged. Whatever has yet been attempted in this direction, or whatever anti-military stimulus has been given to civilisation, has come distinctly from men of the world or men of letters, not from men of distinction in the Church: not from Fénelon or Paley, but from William Penn, the Abbé St.-Pierre (whose connection with the Church was only nominal), from Vattel, Voltaire, and Kant. In other words, the Church has lost her old position of spiritual ascendency over the consciences of mankind, and has surrendered to other guides and teachers the influence she once exercised over the world. This is especially the case with our own Church; for before the most gigantic evil of our time, her pulpit stands mute, and colder than mute. Whatever sanction or support a body like the Peace Society has met with from the Church or churches of England during its seventy years’ struggle on behalf of humanity has been, not the general rule, but the rare exception; and recent events would even seem to show that the voice of the pulpit, so far from ever becoming a pacific agency, is destined to become in the future the great tocsin of war, the loudest clamourer for counsels of aggression. This attitude on the part of the Church having become more and more marked and conspicuous, as wars in recent centuries have become more frequent and more fierce, it was not unnatural that some attempt should at last have been made to give some sort of justification of a fact which has undoubtedly become an increasing source of perplexity and distress to all sincere and reflective Christians. In default of a better, let us take the justification offered by Canon Mozley in his sermon on ‘War,’ preached before the University of Oxford on March 12, 1871, of which the following summary conveys a faithful, though of necessity an abbreviated, reflection. The main points dwelt upon in that explanation or
- 70. apology are: ThatChristianity, by its original recognition of the division of the world into nations, with all their inherent rights, thereby recognised the right of war, which was plainly one of them; that the Church, never having been constituted a judge of national questions or motives, can only stand neutral between opposing sides, contemplating war as it were forensically, as a mode of international settlement that is amply justified by the want of any other; that a natural justice is inherent not only in wars of self- defence, but in wars for rectifying the political distribution of the world’s races or nationalities, and in wars that aim at progress and improvement; that the spirit of self-sacrifice inseparable from war confers upon it a moral character that is in special harmony with the Christian type; that as war is simply the working out of a problem by force, there is no more hatred between the individual combatants than there is in the working out of an argument by reasoning, ‘the enmity is in the two wholes—the abstractions—the individuals are at peace;’ that the impossibility of a substitution of a universal empire for independent nations, or of a court of arbitration, bars all hope of the attainment of an era of peace through the natural progress of society; that the absence of any head to the nations of the world constitutes a defect or want of plan in its system, which as it has been given to it by nature cannot be remedied by other means; that it is no part of the mission of Christianity to reconstruct that system, or rather want of system, of the world, from which war flows, nor to provide another world for us to live in; but that, nevertheless, Christianity only sanctions it through the medium of natural society, and on the hypothesis of a world at discord with itself. One may well wonder that such a tissue of irrelevant arguments could have been addressed by any man in a spirit of seriousness to an assembly of his fellows. Imagine such utterances being the last word of Christianity! Surely a son of the Church were more recognisable under the fighting Bishop of Beauvais’ coat of mail than under the disguise of such language as this. Why should it be assumed, one might ask, that the existence of distinct nations, each enjoying the power, and therefore the right to make war upon its
- 71. neighbours, is incompatiblewith the existence of an international morality which should render the exercise of the war-right impossible, or very difficult; or that the Church, had she tried, could have contributed nothing to so desirable a result? It is begging the question altogether to contend that a state of things is impossible which has never been attempted, when the very point at issue is whether, had it been attempted, it might not by this time have come to be realised. The right of the mediæval barons and their vassals to wage private war together belonged once as much to the system, or want of system, of the world as the right of nations to attack one another in our own or an earlier period of history; yet so far was the Church, even in those days, from shrinking from contact with so barbarous a custom as something beyond her power or her mission, that she was herself the main social instrument that brought it to an end. The great efforts made by the Church to abolish the custom of private war have already been mentioned: a point which Canon Mozley, perhaps, did wisely to ignore. Yet there is, surely, no sufficient reason why the peace of the world should be an object of less interest to the Church in these days than it was in those; or why her influence should be less as one chief element in the natural progress of society than it was when she fought to release human society from the depraving custom of the right of private war. It is impossible to contend that, had the Church inculcated the duties of the individual to other nations as well as to his own, in the way to which human reason would naturally respond, such a course would have had no effect in solving the problem of enabling separate nationalities to coexist in a state of peace as well as of independence. It is at least the reverse of self-evident that the promotion of feelings of international fraternity, the discouragement of habits of international jealousy, the exercise of acts of international friendship, the teaching of the real identity of international interests, in all of which the pulpit might have lent, or might yet lend, an invaluable aid, would have had, or would still have any detrimental effect on the political system of distinct nationalities, or on the motives and actions of a rational patriotism. It is difficult to believe that the denunciations of a Church whose
- 72. religious teaching hadpower to restrain the military fury of an Alaric or a Genseric would have been altogether powerless over the conduct of those German hordes whose military excesses in France, in 1870, have left a lasting blot on their martial triumph and the character of their discipline; or that her efforts on behalf of peace, which more than a thousand years ago effectually reconciled the Angles and Mercians, the Franks and Lombards, would be wasted in helping to remove any standing causes of quarrel that may still exist between France and Germany, England and Russia, Italy and Austria. There are, indeed, hopeful signs, in spite of Canon Mozley’s apology of despair, that the priesthood of Christendom may yet reawake to a sense of its power and opportunities for removing from the world an evil custom which lies at the root of almost every other, and is the main cause and sustenance of crime and pauperism and disease. It is possible that we have already passed the worst period of indifference in this respect, or that it may some day prove only to have been connected with the animosities of rival sects, ever ready to avail themselves of the chances that war between different nations might severally bring to their several petty interests. With the subsidence of such animosities, it were reasonable to expect the Church to reassert the more genuine principle of her action and attitude—that no evil incident to human society is to be regarded as irremediable till every resource has been exhausted to cope with it, and every outlet of escape from it been proved to be a failure. Then, but not till then, is it becoming in Christian priests to utter the language of helplessness; then, but not till then, should the Church fold her hands in despair.
- 73. CHAPTER VIII. CURIOSITIES OFMILITARY DISCIPLINE. La discipline n’est que l’art d’inspirer aux soldats plus de peur de leurs officiers que des ennemis.—Helvetius. Increased severity of discipline—Limitation of the right of matrimony —Compulsory Church parade, and its origin—Atrocious military punishments—Reasons for the military love of red—The origin of bear-skin hats—Different qualities of bravery—Historical fears for the extinction of courage—The conquests of the cause of peace—Causes of the unpopularity of military service—The dulness of life in the ranks—The prevalence of desertion— Articles of war against malingering—Military artificial ophthalmia —The debasing influence of discipline illustrated from the old flogging system—The discipline of the Peninsular army— Attempts to make the service more popular, by raising the private’s wages, by shortening his term of service—The old recruiting system of France and Germany—The conscription imminent in England—The question of military service for women—The probable results of the conscription—Militarism answerable for Socialism. Two widely different conceptions of military discipline are contained in the words of an English writer of the seventeenth century, and in those of the French philosopher, Helvetius, in the eighteenth century. There is a fine ring of the best English spirit in the sentence of Gittins: ‘A soldier ought to fear nothing but God and dishonour.’ And there is the true French wit and insight in that of Helvetius: ‘Discipline is but the art of inspiring soldiers with more fear for their own officers than they have for the enemy.’[275]
- 74. But the differenceinvolved lies less in the national character of the writers than in the lapse of time between them, discipline having by degrees gained so greatly in severity that a soldier had come to be regarded less as a moral free agent than as a mechanical instrument, who, if he had any fear left for God and dishonour, felt it in a very minor degree to that which he cherished for his colonel or commander. This is the broad fact which explains and justifies the proposition of Helvetius; though no one, recollecting the evils of the days of looser discipline, might see cause to regret the change which deprived a soldier almost entirely of the moral liberty that naturally belonged to him as a man. The tendency of discipline to become more and more severe has of course the effect of rendering military service less popular, and consequently recruiting more difficult, without, unhappily, any corresponding diminution in the frequency of wars, which are independent of the hirelings who fight them. Were it otherwise, something might be said for the military axiom, that a soldier enjoys none of the common rights of man. There is therefore no gain from any point of view in denying to the military class the enjoyment of the rights and privileges of ordinary humanity. The extent of this denial and its futility may be shown by reference to army regulations concerning marriage and religious worship. In the Prussian army, till 1870, marriages were legally null and void and the offspring of them illegitimate in the case of officers marrying without royal consent, or of subordinate officers without the consent of the commander of their regiments. But after the Franco-German war so great was the social disorder found to be consequent upon these restrictions, that a special law had to be made to remove the bar of illegitimacy from the marriages in question.[276] In the English army the inability of privates to marry before the completion of seven years’ service, and the possession of at least one badge, and then only with the consent of the commanding officer, is a custom so entirely contrary to the liberty enjoyed in other walks of life, that, whatever its incidental advantages, it can scarcely fail to act as a
- 75. deterring motive whenthe choice of a career becomes a subject of reflection. The custom of what is known in the army as Church Parade affords another instance of the unreasonable curtailments of individual liberty that are still regarded as essential to discipline. A soldier is drummed to church just as he is drummed to the drill-ground or the battle-field. His presence in church is a matter of compulsion, not of choice or conviction; and the general principle that such attendance is valueless unless it is voluntary is waived in his case as in that of very young children, with whom, in this respect, he is placed on a par. If we inquire for the origin of the practice, we shall probably find it in certain old Saxon and imperial articles of war, which show that the prayers of the military were formerly regarded as equally efficacious with their swords in obtaining victories over their enemies; and therefore as a very necessary part of their duty.[277] The American articles of war, since 1806, enact that ‘it is earnestly recommended to all officers and soldiers to attend divine service,’ thus obviating in a reasonable way all the evils inevitably connected with a purely compulsory, and therefore humiliating, church parade. [278] It may be that these restrictions of a soldier’s liberty are necessary; but if they are, and if, as Lord Macaulay says, soldiers must, ‘for the sake of public freedom, in the midst of public freedom, be placed under a despotic rule,’ ‘must be subject to a sharper penal code and to a more stringent code of procedure than are administered by the ordinary tribunals,’ so that acts, innocent in the citizen or only punished slightly, become crimes, capitally punishable, when committed by them, then at least we need no longer be astonished that it should be almost as difficult to entrap a recruit as to catch a criminal. But over and above the intrinsic disadvantages of military service, it would almost seem as if the war-presiding genii had of set purpose essayed to make it as distasteful as possible to mankind. For they
- 76. have made disciplinenot merely a curtailment of liberty and a forfeiture of rights, but, as it were, an experiment on the extreme limits of human endurance. There has been no tyranny in the world, political, judicial, or ecclesiastical, but has had its parent and pattern in some military system. It has been from its armies more than from its kings that our world has learnt its lesson of arbitrary tribunals, tortures, and cruel punishments. The Inquisition itself could scarcely have devised a more excruciating punishment than the old English military one of riding the Wooden Horse, when the victim was made to sit astride planks nailed together in a sharp ridge, so as roughly to resemble a horse, with his hands tied behind him, and muskets fixed to his legs to drag them downwards; or again, than the punishment of the Picket, in which the hand was fastened to a hook in a post above the head, and the man’s suspended body left to be supported by his bare heel resting on a wooden stump, of which the end was cut to the sharpness of a sword point.[279] The punishment of running the gauntlet (from the German Gassenlaufen, street running, because the victim ran through the street between two lines of soldiers who tormented him on his course) is said to have been invented by Gustavus Adolphus; and is perhaps, from the fact of thus bringing the cruelty of many men to bear on a single comrade, the most cowardly form of torture that has ever yet found favour among military authorities.[280] But the penal part of military discipline, with its red-hot irons, its floggings, and its various forms of death, is too repulsive to do more than glance at as testimony of the cruelty and despotism that have never been separated from the calling of arms. The art of the disciplinarian has ever been to bring such a series of miseries to bear upon a man’s life that the prospect of death upon the battle- field should have for him rather charms than terrors; and the tale of the soldier who, when his regiment was to be decimated, drew a blank without the fatal D upon it, and immediately offered it to a comrade, who had not yet drawn, for half-a-crown, shows at how
- 77. cheap a ratemen may be reduced to value their lives after experience of the realities of a military career. Many of the devices are curious by which this indifference to life has been matured and sustained. In ancient Athens the public temples were closed to those who refused military service, who deserted their ranks or lost their bucklers; whilst a law of Charondas of Catana constrained such offenders to sit for three days in the public forum dressed in the garments of women. Many a Spartan mother would stab her son who came back alive from a defeat; and such a man, if he escaped his mother, was debarred not only from public offices but from marriage; exposed to the blows of all who chose to strike him; compelled to dress in mean clothing, and to wear his beard negligently trimmed. And in the same way a Norse soldier who fled, or lost his shield, or received a wound in any save the front part of his body, was by law prevented from ever afterwards appearing in public.[281] There are, indeed, few military customs but have their origin and explanation in the artificial promotion of courage in the minds of the combatants. This is true even to the details and peculiarities of costume. English children are, perhaps, still taught that French soldiers wear red trousers in order that the sight of blood may not frighten them in war-time; and doubtless French children imbibe a similar theory regarding the red coats of the English. The same reason was given by Julius Ferretus in the middle of the sixteenth century for the short red frock then generally worn by the military. [282] The first mention of red as a special military colour in England is said to have been the order issued in 1526 for the coats of all yeomen of the household to be of red cloth.[283] But the colour goes, at least, as far back as Lycurgus, the Spartan lawgiver, who chose it, according to Xenophon, because red is most easily taken by cloth and most lasting; according to Plutarch, that its brightness might help to raise the spirits of its wearers; or, according to Ælian and Valerius Maximus, in order to conceal the sight of blood, that
- 78. raw soldiers mightnot be dispirited and the enemy proportionately encouraged. The bear-skin hats, which still make some English regiments so ridiculous and unsightly, were originally no doubt intended to inspire terror. Evelyn, writing of the year 1678, says: ‘Now were brought into service a new sort of soldiers called Grenadiers, who were dexterous in flinging hand-grenades, every man having a handful. They had furred caps with coped crowns like Janizaries, which made them look very fierce; and some had long hoods hanging down behind as we picture fools.’ We may fairly identify the motive of such headgear with the result; and the more so since the looking fierce with the borrowed skins of bears was a well-known artifice of the ancient Romans. Thus Vegetius speaks of helmets as covered with bear-skins in order to terrify the enemy,[284] and Virgil has a significant description of a warrior as Horridus in jaculis et pelle Libystidis ursæ. We may trace the same motive again in the figures of fierce birds or beasts depicted on flags and shields and helmets, whence they have descended with less harmful purpose to crests and armorial bearings. Thus the Cimbri, whom Marius defeated, wore on their plume-covered helmets the head of some fierce animal with its mouth open, vainly hoping thereby to intimidate the Romans. The latter, before it became customary to display the images of their emperors on their standards, reared aloft the menacing representations of dragons, tigers, wolves, and such like; and the figure of a dragon in use among the Saxons at the time of the Conquest, and after that event retained by the early Norman princes among the ensigns of war,[285] may reasonably be attributed to the same motive. The legend of St. George killing the Dragon, if it is not a survival of Theseus and the Minotaur, very likely originated as a myth, intended to be explanatory of the custom. Lastly, under this head should be mentioned Villani’s account of the English armour worn in the thirteenth century, where he describes
- 79. how the pagesstudied to keep it clean and bright, so that when their masters came to action their armour shone like looking glass and gave them a more terrifying appearance.[286] Was the result here again the motive, and must we look for the primary cause of the great solicitude still paid to the brightness of accoutrements to the hope thereby to add a pang the more to the terror desirable to instil into an enemy? Such were some of the artificial supports supplied to bravery in former times. But there is all the difference in the world between the bravery appealed to by our ancestors and that required since the revolution effected in warfare by the invention of gunpowder. Before that epoch, the use of catapults, bows, or other missiles did not deduct from the paramount importance of personal valour. The brave soldier of olden times displayed the bravery of a man who defied a force similar or equal to his own, and against which the use of his own right hand and intellect might help him to prevail; but his modern descendant pits his bravery mainly against hazard, and owes it to chance alone if he escape alive from a battle. However higher in kind may be the bravery required to face a shower of shrapnel than to contend against swords and spears, it is assuredly a bravery that involves rather a blind trust in luck than a rational trust in personal fortitude. So thoroughly indeed was this change foreseen and appreciated that at every successive advance in the methods of slaughter curious fears for the total extinction of military courage have haunted minds too readily apprehensive, and found sometimes remarkable expression. When the catapult[287] was first brought from Sicily to Greece, King Archidamus saw in it the grave of true valour; and the sentiment against firearms, which led Bayard to exclaim, ‘C’est une honte qu’un homme de cœur soit exposé à périr par une miserable friquenelle,’ was one that was traceable even down to the last century in the history of Europe. For Charles XII. of Sweden is declared by Berenhorst to have felt keenly the infamy of such a mode of fighting; and Marshal Saxe held musketry fire in such
- 80. contempt that heeven went so far as to advocate the reintroduction of the lance, and a return to the close combats customary in earlier times.[288] But our military codes contain no reflection of the different aspects under which personal bravery enters into modern, as compared with ancient, warfare; and this omission has tended to throw governments back upon pure force and compulsion, as the only possible way of recruiting their regiments. The old Roman military punishments, such as cruelly scourging a man before putting him to death, afford certainly no models of a lenient discipline; but when we read of companies who lost their colours being for punishment only reduced to feed on barley instead of wheat, and reflect that death by shooting would be the penalty under the discipline of most modern nations[289] for an action bearing any complexion of cowardice, it is impossible to admit that a rational adjustment of punishments to offences is at all better observed in the war articles of the moderns than in the military codes of pagan antiquity. This, at least, is clear, from the history of military discipline, that only by the most repressive laws, and by a tyranny subversive of the commonest rights of men, is it possible to retain men in the fighting service of a country, after forcing or cajoling them into it. And this consideration fully meets the theory of an inherent love of fighting dominating human nature, such as that contended for in a letter from Lord Palmerston to Cobden, wherein he argues that man is by nature a fighting and quarrelling animal. The proposition is true undoubtedly of some savage races, and of the idle knights of the days of chivalry, but, not even in those days, of the lower classes, who incurred the real dangers of war, and still less of the unfortunate privates or conscripts of modern armies. Fighting is only possible between civilised countries, because discipline first fits men for war and for nothing else, and then war again necessitates discipline. Nor is anything gained by ignoring the conquests that have already been won over the savage propensity to war. Single States no longer suffer private wars within their boundaries, like
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