The Sicilian thesis

In late January 1990, during the celebration of Carnival in Florence, about forty youths, masked and armed and calling themselves “avengers,” beat several North Africans and a Slav. Chanting “get the Moroccan” and “sporchi spacciatori, tunisini di merda” (“dirty dealers, shitty Tunisians”), they chased immigrants, destroyed property, and clashed with police (La Repubblica, 1 March 1990). This brutal expedition to “clean up the city” was not an isolated incident. A week earlier, merchants in the historic center of Florence had sponsored a march to gain public support for their objections to the presence of unlicensed immigrant street vendors. Posters warned ominously of giustizieri della notte (“avengers of the night”) (La Repubblica, 1 March 1990). The neo-fascist party, the Italian Social Movement (MSI), joined the march and led the chants of “rimandiamoli a casa” (“let's send them home”) and “facciamo la giustizia da soli” (“let's take justice into our own hands”) (La Repubblica, 21 February 1990). The party's poster, depicting hands ripping apart a map of Florence, was plastered throughout the city. Although the party claimed the hands represented corruption, to observers they appeared significantly dark skinned.

From the vantage point of Palermo, these events, well publicized in the national media, prompted one to question why anti-immigrant violence and political mobilization had exploded in the prosperous north while the question of razzismo had remained muted in the impoverished south. Sicilians from all walks of life with whom I spoke tended to view the Florence episode – and similar ones to follow in other northern areas–as evidence of pervasive northern intolerance.

The question of working-class racism

This chapter examines the form, content, and extent of racism and other reactions towards Africans and Asians among working Palermitans. Observers agree that, of all groups, European workers reveal the most hostility towards immigrants (Balibar 1991c, 1991e; Castles and Kosack 1985; Husbands 1983; Reeves 1983; Van Dijk 1987; Wieviorka 1992). Trade union representatives, for example, regularly find themselves caught between their aspirations to international solidarity of labor and the protectionist and nationalist demands of their indigenous members (Castles 1984; Grillo 1985). Yet little direct research on the problem has been carried out because most scholars, concentrating on the benefits to capitalists of a racially divided labor force, have too often reduced race to class and overlooked or dismissed the possiblity of racism from below (Roediger 1991: 6–11). However, the few studies to have investigated the ways in which class shapes views on immigrants and essentialist ideologies suggest valuable lines of inquiry.

In their study of a London neighborhood, Annie Phizacklea and Robert Miles (1979, 1980) argue that “working-class racism” derives not so much from adherence to ideologies of racial inequality as from the daily experience of competing with immigrants for jobs and public housing. For the English workers, the visible “coloureds” thus appear as the cause of what are in fact broader trends of industrial decline and rising unemployment. This “racist explanation for material disadvantage and decline,” it is important to note, “is only one of a number of explanations which are often as vague and inconsistent as the former” (Phizacklea and Miles 1980: 176).

The question of bourgeois racism

In this chapter I again address the question of class variation with regard to European reactions to immigrants, this time by discussing bourgeois interactions with and interpretations of African and Asian immigrants in Palermo. This contrast with working-class views: (1) permits a disaggregation of public attitudes otherwise seen as homogeneous; (2) points to the class bases of divergent views and actions; and (3) reveals different capacities for public discourse and political action. The findings show, in fact, highly contrastive and class-specific views on immigration, racism, and anti-racism. Against the often inconsistent, locally informed, ambivalent, and stubbornly pessimistic working-class views, bourgeois Palermitans espouse a sophisticated pro-immigrant, anti-racist position, grounded in universalist ideologies.

I explain these divergent views on immigration with reference to broad differences in class experience and consciousness. Tenuous security and class self-hatred on the one hand, and empathy born of shared poverty and emigration on the other, structure working-class ambivalence. By contrast, the unhesitating enthusiasm of the bourgeois high-school and university students for paradigms favorable to immigrant rights and recognition stems from the equanimity born of a relatively secure class position, knowledge of generally accepted views on race transmitted through higher education, membership of self-styled progressive circles in a national political culture dominated by the rhetoric of anti-racism, and aspects of local culture and history deemed pertinent to these paradigms. As regards the form of these divergent views, little education and the lack of access to influential public discourse undermine the consistency of working people's opinions. Among the high-school and university students, by contrast, higher education, familiarity with paradigmatic interpretations of immigration, in particular, and political discourse, in general, all contribute to the consistency and sophistication of expression.

Studies of postwar immigration reveal much about the causes and consequences of population movement for European societies, economies, and polities, and poignantly describe the often arduous life of the immigrants themselves. All but absent from this substantial body of research, however, is a concern with everyday European responses to immigrants. A similar lacuna prevails in many studies of race in the United States, and for similar reasons. From the late 1960s, the shift in focus from the “prejudice” of individual whites to the broader framework of “institutional” or “structural” racism generated powerful insights into the nature of inequality at the same time as, in important ways, it dismissed the questions of white racism, ambivalence, and anti-racism (Miles 1989: 50–6). Thus critical, often Marxian, analyses of race tend to attribute racism to systems, and ultimately to the elites who are thought to benefit from a divided workforce, and to overlook the actions of white workers in shaping their racial identity and protecting their own privileges. As a result, too many concerned scholars on both sides of the Atlantic take for granted how whites think about and act with regard to race and immigration, how they give or do not give political expression to notions of difference and similarity, and how class, culture, and gender shape views and practices. This oversight has obscured our understanding of the role of power, ideology, and everyday experience in contemporary societies.

Questions

Italy, long a country of emigration, has become a country of immigration in the past two decades with the arrival of nearly one million Africans, Asians, and others. This transformation has surprised politicians and citizens, who had come to regard emigration as part of Italian life. This change is particularly striking in the southern region of Sicily. For most of the last 100 years, oppression and poverty have generated waves of emigration from Sicily, first overseas and later, in the postwar period, to the Italian north and to western Europe. For much of this century, one out of every eight Italian emigrants was a Sicilian; and in the decade 1951–61 alone nearly 400,000 Sicilians left home (Renda 1989: 122–3; 18). From Brooklyn to Toronto, from Milan to Frankfurt, Sicilians have built bridges, dug tunnels, and constructed office buildings; and, as even the casual tourist knows, they have brought their shops, bakeries, and restaurants to far-flung Little Italies.

The 1970s witnessed a profound change in migratory patterns as many Sicilians returned and newcomers arrived. Among the first to arrive were Tunisians, who toiled in the fields, vineyards, and fisheries. Cape Verdian, Mauritian, and Filipino women served as domestics in homes of the urban rich. In the course of the 1980s some two dozen other nationalities, mostly from Africa and Asia, joined them, swelling the ranks of immigrants to about 15,000 in Palermo alone (Giornale di Sicilia, 6 September 1990).

In this chapter we evaluate the assumptions underlying the model of intercameral bargaining developed in Chapter 4. We do so by analyzing six laws passed by the French legislature between 1971 and 1981. In Chapter 4 we argued that impatience to reach agreement drives bicameral bargaining and that impatience is generated by a number of factors: the desire of legislators to be viewed as efficient, the need to resolve fiscal or political crises, and the concern that legislators will defect from the political coalition supporting the bill. Moreover, we concluded that the relative power of each house in bicameral legislatures is a function of institutional constraints and the impatience of each legislature to reach a deal. In this chapter, we examine the assumption that impatience for legislative outcomes (1) drives the negotiating process and (2) determines the outcomes of bicameral negotiations in France (within the limits set by institutional constraints). As in Chapter 6, because we focus such attention on a single country, we also address the relevant French legislative analyses on relative house power. One explanation of senatorial power, expertise, is common to many countries, as noted in Chapter 1. The second explanation, presidential politics, is peculiar to France.

We proceed by defining the concept of impatience and our approach to operationalizing that concept. We then briefly present the two alternative models of French legislative behavior against which we pitch our own. In the third section, we evaluate the three competing hypotheses in light of six pieces of legislation. The detailed examination of the bills as they shuttle from one chamber to the other allows us to focus on the process of bicameral negotiations.

Bicameral legislatures are those whose deliberations involve two distinct assemblies. As such, they are relatively modern political institutions that only gained popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, despite much earlier origins in the fourteenth-century English parliament. Nonetheless, earlier political institutions share some of the features of more modern bicameral legislatures, and the intellectual debate over the merits of multiple deliberative assemblies is centuries old. In this chapter, we trace the evolution of bicameral institutions and the intellectual justifications that underpin those structures. We do so by following two threads of analysis, what we call the political and efficient dimensions of bicameralism.

We begin with a definition of the political and efficient dimensions of bicameralism, as these two themes surface repeatedly in the text. We proceed via a chronological overview of the institutional evolution of dual deliberative structures in various eras, accompanied by an intellectual history. In Sections 1 through 3, we review the pre-bicameral institutions of ancient Greece and Rome, the development of the first, class-based bicameral legislature in Britain, and the creation of an alternative federal model in the United States. In Sections 4 and 5, we trace the divergent paths of institutional development in Europe that privilege the distinctions between federal and unitary political systems. Finally, we summarize the contemporary debate on bicameralism, which tends to emphasize either the political or the efficient dimension of bicameral legislatures.

THE TWO DIMENSIONS OF BICAMERALISM

Legislation changes the previously established way of doing things. Whether it regulates behavior in a new way or deregulates behavior and permits individual choice, legislation changes the status quo. In bicameral legislatures, the status quo may be modified in two ways.

Given the diverse national paths in the development of bicameral legislatures, it is not surprising to find substantial institutional variation. In this chapter, we explore these institutional differences. The characteristics of lower and upper legislative houses differ on a number of dimensions, and analysts have relied on these differences to explain cross-national variations in upper house power. Although there are variations in size, legislative term of office, turnover, membership, representativeness, and institutional power, two particular characteristics have been emphasized. The first is the membership of the two houses, based on selection methods and categories of citizens represented. The second is the relative power of the two houses as reflected in their mechanisms for resolving intercameral differences. Here we focus on these two critical dimensions of variation.

Political analysts who examine the variation in bicameral institutions argue that bicameralism produces disparate results across countries. Lijphart (1984) attributes variation to the degree of congruence between the two legislative houses and power asymmetries, whereas Mastias and Grangé (1987) focus on upper house legitimacy as the important independent variable.

Lijphart (1984: 99) defines “congruence” as similarity of political composition. Regardless of the variations in selection methods, if the two houses have similar political representation, they are deemed congruent. Disparities in power range from full symmetry, where agreement of the two houses is necessary to enact a law, to total asymmetry, where one house is granted decision-making power. Using these two categories, Lijphart constructs three types of bicameralism. He argues that “strong” bicameral legislatures are characterized by significant differences in composition and by relatively symmetric power. “Weak” bicameral legislatures are characterized either by asymmetric power or by congruent chambers.

As we discussed in Chapter 2, conference committees are frequently employed to reconcile intercameral differences. Conference committees are important because, in most cases, they are the last stage where legislative compromises are worked out and legislation is forged. The outcome of conference committee deliberations is then introduced to the parent chambers for approval under closed rule, that is, without possibility of amendment. Consequently, a strategic conference committee can select, from among all the proposals that the parent chambers prefer over the status quo, the one that is closest to its own preferences. The parent chambers may dislike one provision or another of the compromise bill, but they cannot alter the specifics; they can only reject the whole bill and start the legislative process again. Consequently, if a bicameral legislature resolves its differences through a conference committee, the compromise elaborated in this committee usually becomes the law.

In all countries where the institution exists, except for the United States, the committee is composed of an equal number of members from each chamber, and it decides as a unicameral institution. In the U.S., the size of the conference committee varies as does the number of delegates from each house. Decisions are made by the so-called unit rule, that is, by concurrent majorities of each chamber's delegation. In countries where committees decide as unicameral institutions, the decision-making rule is by majority, with the exception of Japan, which requires qualified majorities.

To analyze the U.S. conference committee, we refer the reader to Chapter 3, since the unit decision-making rule is the same as bicameral decisions. However, before proceeding, we point out one aspect of the unit rule that we will refer to subsequently.

In the next four chapters we empirically investigate the predictions developed in Part II and compare our findings with alternative theories of bicameralism outlined in Chapter 1. In Chapters 6 and 7, we draw on data from the French Fifth Republic. The prominent position of France is attributable to the complexity of its institutions: the two houses may be equal or, upon decision of the government, unequal; the deliberation may involve a conference committee or not; the navette may conclude after a single round or last indefinitely. With the exception of the United States and the European Union, no other country or institution has bicameral procedures that vary so extensively. Thus, France presents an opportunity to test various dimensions of our models and to evaluate institutional features of the bicameral systems described in Chapter 2 within a single country, so that we can hold a variety of conditions constant.

Chapter 8 relies more heavily on data from other countries in order to capture the variations in conference committee composition, decisionmaking rules, and constraints imposed by the parent chambers – the characteristics of conference committees that are important independent variables in our theoretical models. The tests presented here are far from exhaustive. We strongly believe our models should undergo additional evaluation employing data from a wide variety of countries. Nonetheless, the evidence presented here helps to establish the plausibility of the models developed in Part II.

In Part III, we employ both statistical analysis and case studies to evaluate our theoretical arguments. Undoubtedly, it would be helpful to extend statistical analyses further than we have done in this book.