Much more so than in the recent past, the eyes of Europe and even of the world are on Italy. This attention does not derive from any innovative solutions that Italy may have offered to the grave problems which today face modern states: those of environmental pollution, of unemployment, of racism, of declining political legitimacy. Rather, Italy has attracted intense scrutiny for two principal reasons. First, because certain courageous magistrates, both in Palermo and Milan, have waged an unprecedented and dramatic war against criminal organizations and political corruption, and this in one of the most corrupt democracies in Europe. Their lead has been taken up in France and Spain, and their actions studied by colleagues as far away as Japan and Argentina. Unexpectedly, the Italian state has produced and allowed space for a group of public servants who have earned admiration on a global scale.

The Christian Democrat Party (DC) is at the centre of the current Italian political crisis. It was in some measure responsible for precipitating it and is now suffering the backlash. Unless we take account of the central role that the DC played for so long within the Italian political system, we shall not be able to explain its centrality in the current crisis.

From the perspective of the Democratic Party of the Left (PDS) and the left generally, the 1989-1994 period can be viewed as a political failure in as far as there was a right-wing outcome (albeit ephemeral) to Italy's transition. Yet, it is a failure which has to be viewed in the context of the deep undercurrents of change at work in Italy in this period and the constraints within which the PDS and its leader, Achille Occhetto, were operating

In an interview with William Rees-Mogg, Berlusconi revealed that he had two portraits hanging in his office—those of Mrs Thatcher and of the Emperor Justinian. The place allotted to Mrs Thatcher, the prime exponent of free market economics of our times, can hardly cause surprise, but that given to Justinian is less easily explicable. Berlusconi is not known for his passion for the history and politics of the Byzantine Empire, so the Justinian on whom Berlusconi rests his eyes at critical moments must be the Justinian of Dante, whom Berlusconi would have studied in school. Dante gave Justinian a place in Paradiso as the very prototype of the law-giver and founder of a new political and legal order, so Berlusconi's cult of Justinian can be taken as indicative of a self-image as founder of new order. But there is another, more covert factor. Democracy in any sense was alien to Justinian, who as Emperor of the East enjoyed a sway unknown to any leader of a modern democratic state, and one paralleled in western societies only by the absolute power afforded to the owner of a contemporary business empire, like Ford Corporation, ICI or indeed Fininvest; or the leader of an idiosyncratic, autocratic political movement like Forza Italia.

Wholesale party system transformation is exceedingly rare. Indeed, in taking place within a broadly democratic framework and independently of constitutional change Italy's experience is probably unique. This paper argues that the referendums of 1991 and 1993, and the mobilization of the electorate from early 1990 associated with them, played a significant and not always well understood role in the transformation of the Italian party system.

Many Italian institutions deteriorated in the 1980s as the struggle to consolidate and extend party influence led to the spoils system (lottizzazione) becoming the norm throughout virtually the whole of the public sector. Yet perhaps none was more affected than the public broadcasting company RAI. Once an organization with a strong corporate identity and sense of mission, it lost its sense of purpose as it faced the unprecedented challenge of competition from an unregulated private sector and simultaneously became a resource in the unceasing battle for position between parties and factions. By the early 1990s RAI's credibility had declined dramatically, it was riddled with debts, it lacked a strategy, and it was faring badly in the ratings. Yet the full extent of its crisis was revealed only with the collapse of the parties that had for so long ‘protected’ it from serious scrutiny and genuine public accountability.

An examination of the problem of the ‘Italian crises’ from the perspective of the transformations in Italian capitalism will allow this article to develop a theme particularly dear to me: namely the irreducibility of capitalism to economics. The market cannot be seen simply as a series of interpersonal relations governed by prices; it must instead be seen as a relationship between people distorted by the fetishism of commodities.

Political corruption can be considered as a means by which money influences politics. In the classic studies the causes of corruption have usually been identified in the characteristics of the principal actor in the political system: the party. Samuel Huntington, in particular, has linked the development of corruption to party weakness during phases of growing political participation. Corruption spreads in those specific paths to modernization in which popular participation in political decision-making is not immediately accompanied by a strengthening of those institutions, such as political parties, which should filter and direct collective demands: ‘the weaker and less accepted the political parties, the greater the likelihood of corruption’.