Italy is currently the democratic world’s most underestimated European ally. Many commentators seem to have forgotten that despite its notorious institutional and debt problems the country remains one of the richest and most technologically innovative Western nations. While its politics are often theatric and superficial, its labour market inflexible and its bureaucracy opaque, Italy’s real economic basis remains one of the strongest in the world. The continuing paradoxy of systemic failure and coeval structural productivity characteristic for modern Italy originates in the very foundation process of the nation in the 1860s. It is thus deeply rooted in the socio-political culture and is not likely to change anytime soon. However, these challenges might be viewed as good news in times of crisis: Unlike other Western democracies, Italy’s economy and civil society are accustomed to functioning amid enduring institutional and political obstacles and crises. Disregarding alarmist voices, the country’s outlook remains positive after all: Its systemic weakness is balanced by structural strength. In order to assess the situation of countries more properly in the future, we need a more sophisticated system of indicators that takes into account a greater, more complex picture; and this presupposes a more diverse and multi-polar system of rating agencies.
This two-fold paper discusses 15 years of privatization of Italian cultural and architectural heritage between 1996 and 2010. The paper is composed by I) an introductory talk between Salvatore Settis und Roland Benedikter, and II) an essay by Roland Benedikter. It builds upon a 2004 publication by Roland Benedikter in the International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS), London. The present paper is one of the first attempts to get an overall view of the privatization process of Italian cultural and architectural heritage of the past 15 years. Part I is an easy to read introduction into the outstandingly complex topic. Part II is an in-depth elaboration that builds upon a review of the history of Italian heritage conservation, including the laws of the “Berlusconi culture” since the second half of the 1990s. It discusses some case studies and assesses the perspectives of the process at its 15-year-anniversary. The importance of the issue derives from the fact that the privatization process of Italian cultural heritage, numerically speaking the most important in Europe and one of the most important in the world, can be seen as to some extent exemplary for the development of the sector in Europe, including both its ambivalences and chances.
From 2007 to 2010, a financial and economic crisis gripped the United States, Europe and the world. 7 million Americans and 2 million Europeans lost their jobs, and 10 million were pushed below the poverty line. Thousands of families lost their homes, and many lost their savings. A global recovery from the effects of the crisis will take years.
As a result of the crisis, social banking and social finance have become important trends among bank customers in Europe. In fact, European social banks are the big winners of the crisis, growing by more than 20% per year and doubling their assets between 2007 and 2010. The crisis transformed social banks from niche institutions to large, publicly visible players. This success is due to the conviction of a growing number of bank customers in Europe that social banking is a less speculative and more responsible, ethical, and community-oriented way to deal with money than traditional banking. In the aftermath of the crisis, many see social banking as less egoistic and more caring for the overall progress of society than mainstream banking. Thus, social banking may provide important lessons for the banking and finance sector as a whole, in order to avoid further crises in the future.
In order to see what can be learned from social banking, let us first take a look at what social banking is; second, review the most important social banks today; and third, examine lessons from the success of social banks.
This roundtable engages the causes, courses and consequences of the policy of mass population exchanges that have shaped the political and ethnographic boundaries of modern Eurasia.
Co-sponsored by the Department of History, Mediterranean Studies Forum, Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies, and the Stanford Humanities Center.
Levinthal Hall
Matthew Frank
Lecturer in International History
Speaker
University of Leeds, UK
Catherine Gousseff
Researcher at Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and FSI-Humanities Center international visitor for February 2012
Speaker
European leaders converged in Brussels to figure a way out of a worsening debt crisis and agreed to greater financial oversight and centralization. England refuses to go along with the plan, and Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama says he expects some countries will start bailing out of the eurozone.
Fukuyama talks about the summit, the euro’s chances of survival and what’s at stake for America if the currency collapses.
What does the Brussels agreement mean for Europe’s debt crisis?
We will have to see how much of a binding constraint this agreement actually is. It’s just an informal agreement at this point. Political leaders can promise anything at this kind of summit and fail to deliver.
I think the most interesting thing going on is the eurozone – the 17 countries that participate in the euro – is actually splitting off from the greater EU. The reason that’s happening is that in order to save the eurozone, they need to make certain decisions on this type of deepening control. And countries like Britain will never go along with this. The 17 countries have to create their own unit that can make decisions at the expense of the larger EU.
Explain Britain’s refusal to have its budget reviewed by the European Commission
The UK is like the United States – they’ve always been jealous of their sovereignty. If you go to England and talk about crossing the Channel, they’ll say, “Oh, so you’re going to go to Europe.” While an American would say “England is a part of Europe.”
There’s a strong strain – especially within the conservative party – that really does not want to give up authority to what they regard as a bunch of French socialists in Brussels. That’s their vision of what the EU really represents. So they’re resistant about being dragged into any German scheme to deepen the powers in Brussels to include control over national budgets because that is a core element of sovereignty. The majority of people in Britain will say that will happen over their dead bodies.
What is the likelihood that countries will begin exiting the eurozone?
I don’t think it makes sense for a country like Greece to stay in the eurozone. It’s a matter of national pride that they don’t want to be the first country out, but it’s very hard to see how they actually return to growth under a system that links them to Germany in terms of the price of their currency. Long before there’s any kind of centralized fiscal reform that’s imposed on Greece, Portugal and these other peripheral countries, I think it’s more likely that they’ll exit. The euro will probably remain, but it will be at the core of the more stable countries.
What mechanism is there for countries to exit the eurozone?
There is no mechanism. Not only is there no legal way of exiting, there’s no disciplining mechanism. You have a stability pact where countries agreed they wouldn’t run a budget deficit greater than 3 percent, and Germany was really one of the first counties to violate that. But there were no sanctions. That’s the problem right now – there’s neither discipline nor an exit mechanism. That’s why everyone is fearing a disorderly, messy breakup of the EU, which would be extremely damaging.
President Obama has said the U.S. “stands ready to do our part" to help Europe resolve its crisis. What can America really do?
It’s an indication of how far we’ve fallen, but there’s really nothing concretely we can do apart from possibly increasing our International Monetary Fund share. But the IMF doesn’t have the ammunition to really help at all in this particular crisis. So all we can do is sit on the sidelines and try to get the Europeans to take our advice, which a lot of them are not inclined to do given the mess that happened on Wall Street three years ago. It’s a mark of the diminishment of overall American influence that we’re simply relegated to the sidelines of this crisis.
What’s at stake for America in the wake of a total European financial meltdown?
There’s a lot at stake. We are slowly crawling out of the biggest recession since the Great Depression. The one thing that could really send us back into a second leg of a recession is collapse of the European financial system and panic in Europe. If Europe doesn’t do well, the United States isn’t going to do well.
The Fall 2011 Europe Center distinguished “Europe Now” speaker, Robert Harrison is a research affiliate at the Center. At Stanford University, Harrison is the Rosina Pierotti Professor of Italian Literature. A profound thinker on medieval Italian literature, Harrison has also established himself as one of our preeminent analysts of western culture, and its preocupation through literature, religion, and mythology in the interchange of secular and sacred realms.
Professor Harrison's publications are as prodigious as they are influential. In his first book, The Body of Beatrice (1988; editions in English and Japanese) Harrison writes of medieval Italian lyric poetry, with special emphasis on Dante's early work La Vita Nuova. This was followed by Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, (1992; editions in English, French, Italian, German, Japanese, and Korean), in which he deals with the multiple and complex ways in which the Western imagination has symbolized, represented, and conceived of forests, primarily in literature, religion, and mythology. Rome, la Pluie: A Quoi Bon Littérature? (1994; editions in French, Italian, and German) takes the creative form of dialogues between two characters and deals with various topics such as art restoration, the vocation of literature, and the place of the dead in contemporary society. His next book, Dominion of the Dead Dominion of the Dead, (2003; editions in German, French, and Italian) focuses on the relations the living maintain with the dead in diverse secular realms. Professor Harrison's most recent book is Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (2008; editions in English and French).
Known widely among students and the engaged public, Robert Harrison has hosted the lively and meaningful literary talk show on Stanford KZSU radio called "Entitled Opinions". The show features wonderful hour-long conversation with a variety of scholars, writers, and scientists. To be a student of Professor Harrison is to be mentored by one of the world’s preeminent scholars who also embodies the ideal of his humanist subjects. To be chosen for Robert Harrison’s radio interview is to be engaged in the rich experience of making the humanities matter to our world’s deepest concerns. In his spare time, Robert Harrison is also lead guitarist for the cerebral rock band Glass Wave.
