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ROME - It was a blast from the past. The Italian Government, nine months into its term, was chugging along stolidly under Romano Prodi, raising taxes to cover some of its ballooning debt, going after tax evaders, taking some preliminary snips at the forest of restrictive practices in retailing and the professions, drafting a law to legalise civil unions - including homosexual ones.
Then suddenly on Wednesday it was all over. On a vote on foreign policy in the Senate, where its majority is tiny, the Government went down by two votes. Suddenly on the eight o'clock news there was Prodi smiling ruefully as he wandered up to President Giorgio Napolitano at the old papal headquarters on the Quirinale Hill, now the presidential palace, to hand in his resignation.
After two days of intensive talks involving all and sundry Prodi is now back in the job, supposing he can get through confidence votes in both houses of parliament. As Napolitano said, explaining why he had given Prodi a second chance: "There is no realistic alternative." The outcome should be clear within a week.
And the outside world was left wondering whether Italy really is a hopeless case. For decades after the Second World War, Italy seemed to get nowhere, because no sooner was a Government in power than it had collapsed in disarray. The desperate state of many things in Italy is a legacy of those revolving-door Governments.
The ostensible culprit for Prodi's pratfall last week, jumped on hard by the mainstream Italian media, was the far-left component of the coalition.
Two members of Rifondazione Comunista were so angered by Prodi's determination to continue the same foreign policy line as Silvio Berlusconi that they quit the Senate debate before the division, thus depriving the Government of two vital votes.
Yet as the days passed, even Corriere della Sera woke up to the fact that the Trotskyite and the pacifist were not actually the ones to blame. Three senators for life, including Giulio Andreotti, a powerful Christian Democrat politician for more than 40 years, had been expected to vote for the Government. Instead, one voted against and two abstained. These were the votes that sank the Government.
The suspicion quickly arose that Andreotti and the others had voted as they did, not because they were opposed to Italy's philo-American foreign policy (which they ardently support), but to bring down the Government: the reason being that Prodi had insisted, despite strenuous opposition from the Catholic Church, on bringing in a law to legalise civil unions.
And it was the Catholics who emerged from this week's chaos in triumph, because to secure extra support Prodi has been obliged to dump the civil unions law.
This little piece of modern Machiavelliana exposes the true reason for the chronic weakness of Italian Governments. Italy is not one state but two: the unified Italian state, created in 1870, and the papacy coiled in the heart of the capital, the ultimate legatee of the original Roman empire, which has never relaxed its grip on Italians' hearts and minds.
The result is that Italy does not function like other western European states. The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, gave birth to the concept of the sovereignty of the nation-state, with states independent both from the Holy Roman Emperor and from the church.
The "sovereign" of such a state now had the right to determine the religion of his subjects, while Christians belonging to a different branch were allowed to practise their own rites in private. Thanks to this treaty, sovereignty as the underlying principle in the formation of nation-states spread across the planet.
But because Italy was host to the Pope, it never attained real sovereignty. Mussolini achieved an uneasy cohabitation with the church, but after the war the Vatican was back in power through the Democristiani, who provided all Italy's post-war prime ministers until 1981.
With the collapse of the established political parties in the early 1990s, Italy had another chance to gain control of its destiny. But 15 years on, one former Christian Democrat (Prodi) is PM, while the first prime minister he served, Andreotti, is still fighting the good fight for the Pope. The long, bitter struggle for Italy's soul goes on.
- INDEPENDENT
