The neoliberalisation process in Italy after the 2011 sovereign debt crisis: social forces, consensus and common sense

Abstract

The demise of concertazione (tripartite bargaining) by technocratic and centre-left governments constituted a key trait of the neoliberalisation of the Italian political economy after the 2011 sovereign debt crisis. The pattern of government unilateralism represented a radical departure from practices followed by previous technocratic and centre-left executives in the 1990s and 2000s, when social pacts were instrumental in building consensus around neoliberalising reforms. As concertazione's trajectory is illustrative of the rise and demise of neo-corporatism in the European Union (EU), the present project investigates the reasons behind the end of social pacting in Italy against the backdrop of the EU-wide 'authoritarian neoliberal' management of the Eurozone crisis. To this end, the thesis devises a historical materialist framework which foregrounds the role of social struggles under capitalism and centres on the Gramscian notion of 'common sense'. Analysis of common sense versions developed and advanced by (collective) organic intellectuals (trade unions, employers' associations, political actors) in hegemonic struggles functions as a heuristic device to examine the formation of consensus (or dissensus) behind Italian crisis management. The research employs a mixed-method approach involving case-study comparison, examination of 23 in-depth qualitative interviews, content analysis of key documents, and an original Gramscian approach to narrative analysis. The thesis finds that concertazione's demise occurred due to the emergence of dissensus among social and political forces over how to solve the 2011 crisis. At the same time, government unilateralism was underpinned by a narrative portraying neoliberalising 'structural reforms' as both 'necessary' and 'urgent' to enact. The rise to dominance of this narrative was favoured by the confluence of pressures from within and pressures from without. On the former, the transnationalisation of (part of) Italian capitalism reinforced the view that material prosperity depends on external competitiveness, while an emerging transnationalising capital fraction pressured for the adoption of neoliberalising reforms. On the latter, European crisis management was key in facilitating neoliberal restructuring by tilting the terrain of struggle in favour of a neoliberal project integrating capital's common sense version, and promoted at state's level by technocratic elites and the centre-left. In this respect, the comparison between developments in two policy areas selected as case studies (i.e. the labour market and collective bargaining in the private sector) illustrates that the unilateral adoption of neoliberalising reforms necessitated the alignment of supranational pressures with a coherent project advanced by a unified capital front on the national scale.

Date of Award	31 Dec 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Dimitris Papadimitriou (Supervisor) & Ian Bruff (Supervisor)