Politics
A cosmic gaffe, but do we secretly agree?
Published 08 October 2001
War on Terror: Berlusconi - Despite later denials, the Italian premier meant it when he said that the west is superior to Islam. And the left, argues John Lloyd, implicitly holds similar views
Silvio Berlusconi said the "s" word. He has denied it, but the issue seems to be in little doubt. The Italian prime minister said, in a speech in Berlin just over a week ago, that "we should be confident of the superiority of our civilisation", because its guarantee of human and civil rights "does not exist in Islamic countries".
His fellow European leaders, almost all centre-left, did a mix of Schadenfreude and damage limitation over the weekend. Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, told George Bush in Washington that Europe knows how to "distinguish terrorism from the religious and civil aspects" of Islam. Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, gave an interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung with the express intention of saying that Berlusconi's remarks were "out of place". Chris Patten, the European Union's foreign affairs commissioner and a man occupying the same centre-right space that Berlusconi claims, said "the west must show more humility: it's certainly not the Islamic world which is to blame for the holocaust".
As more evidence emerges, it becomes clearer that it was no careless phrase. A number of sources have attested that the Italian premier said the same thing, with less inhibition, at a meeting of European government leaders on 28 September. Roberto Caselli, his minister of justice and a member of the anti-immigrant Liga Nord, had spoken about terrorism in what were reported as "racist" terms to his fellow European justice ministers at a meeting on 27 September - to the agreement only of Dieter Bohmdorfer, the Austrian justice minister and a member of Jorg Haider's Freedom Party.
Berlusconi spent two days protesting that he had said nothing wrong, and then a day, last Friday in the senate, saying that he had been misunderstood. At the same time, and using the tactics that distinguished the media magnate's rise to power, he and his media went into top gear to throw the blame back on the left. "Communists are always communists," wrote the right- wing politician Gianni Baget Bozzo in Il Giornale, Berlusconi's daily. "You better shut your mouth," shouted the leader of the Forza Italia faction in the senate at Massimo d'Alema, leader of the Democratic Left, when the latter accused Berlusconi of a "cosmic gaffe" on one of the premier's own TV channels.
Berlusconi is proving himself to be a disastrously bad leader of Italy: the "cosmic gaffe" is only the latest indication. He has wholly failed to do what he promised: that is, to separate his media interests (which include almost all of the non-state TV channels) from his political role.
Instead, he has proposed that his own government appoint a three-person commission to oversee all conflicts of interest - the transparent insufficiency of the move seems not to bother his supporters in parliament and the country. Yet, through his private and public functions, Berlusconi ultimately controls 95 per cent of all TV and radio broadcasting - a position unrivalled in any democratic country.
He is going further. The right-wing majority has sponsored a law, now before the parliament, that would make inadmissible in Italian courts any documents originating from abroad that allege criminality on the part of Italian citizens. Many of the allegations of his own malfeasance originate from abroad: the passing of the law will mean that foreign proofs could be deprived of legal standing. Not only is the law flagrantly self-interested: it contradicts the trend, throughout Europe and beyond, of making legal systems more compatible and transparent.
A man of vast wealth, Ber-lusconi makes no division between the state and his own property. He likes to hold cabinet meetings in his own houses - in Rome and outside. He has subsidised all the other parties in his coalition, and topped up the expenses and salaries of their MPs to the point where they are as much his employees as his colleagues. Visiting a member of the carabinieri in hospital, who was injured in the demonstrations in Genoa in July, he told the officer he would send him and his family on a long holiday, at his own expense, once he recovered. From cabinet to carabinieri, Berlusconi seeks to teach that the officials of the state work for him, not for Italy.
His Berlin speech, however, struck a popular chord. A few days later, I had dinner near Milan with a businessman who runs a construction company. He asked, politely but pointedly, what I thought was wrong with Berlusconi's claim that the west was more civilised than the east. "It's nothing more or less than what we all think," he said. "And that includes you." A poll in Il Giornale which claimed to be scientifically based showed more than 60 per cent support.
Berlusconi rules in Rome - the capital city of the Catholic world, as well as of Italy. He must be more conscious than any other national leader of the weight of the west's dominant faith, since he must share power with it as a neighbour and an alternative centre of morality and leadership. In Rome only last year, the Pope signed a document drawn up by the conservative Cardinal Ratzinger, prefect of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, which reasserts Protestantism's inferiority to Catholicism. Catholicism, like any other active and powerful religion, must insist on its own superiority. Why else organise a religion?
In an interview with the daily Repubblica on Tuesday, Ratzinger was asked if he agreed with Berlusconi. Stating his disdain for intervening in mere politics, the cardinal said that superiority and inferiority were not the point, because "social and cultural values on the empirical level changed over time". Islam had been culturally superior in many fields in the first millennium, such as mathematics, medicine, science and architecture. In the next millennium, Christianity had surpassed it and Islam had shown "a certain decadence". The cardinal achieved the aim of declining to agree with the prime minister, while agreeing with him.
There is no question that this was a gaffe. The painfully constructed western consensus that this is a war on terrorists who happen to be Islamic, not on Islam, was damaged. Muslim states, where domestic opposition makes their forced enrolment in the western camp uncomfortable, seized on the speech with relief, and have refused to be content with the non-apology. But the speech resonates beyond supporters of the right in Italy. It poses a problem for the left everywhere.
No modern state has found coexistence with Islam easy. Islam - not extremist, or terrorist, or even particularly militant Islam - demands a subordination of the state to religious ends. It does so in "friendly" (to the west) states such as Saudi Arabia, as well as in hostile states such as Afghanistan. Where a state has been able to retain a secular polity, it does so by refusing to allow Islamic parties to take power, as in Algeria.
Few in Britain have had any sense of what a theocracy is for more than three centuries (the Scots got it, through local Presbyterian tyrannies, a little longer than the English). Only the Irish, with a Catholic Church that exercised huge influence over laws and practice until the 1970s, have a whiff of it (though there is no comparison between banning condoms or Ulysses and executing adulterers).
For the modern left, most countries in which Islam is a force in government are a standing affront - especially in their treatment of women, but also in their denial of free speech, their pursuit of religious interests in disdain of the suffering caused, their distrust of modern solutions to illness, poverty and discrimination, and their readiness to use violence. Their values, or many of them, contradict ours. We think ours are better.
The difference between the Christian and the Islamic worlds is not the moral superiority of the former. The difference is that the west, no longer ruled by a Church or churches, is free to select those parts of the Christian message that are convenient to a liberal polity, in a way that most Islamic states are not. Christian civilisation was never so civilised as when it ceased to be Christian.
In Britain, the end of empire coincided with the rise of the view, most powerfully held on the left, that people should be helped out of poverty and out of the discriminations and habits of less advanced (inferior?) societies. Thus, when the left criticises Berlusconi, it should reflect that he spoke, at the wrong time, with some of the same approaches we have.
We are not crusaders: we do not advance under the sign of the cross. But we are militant in our virtue, all the same.
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