Democracy Bought and Sold and the Ship of the Constitution

At the end of 2010 students all across Italy took to the streets to protest against the university reform proposed by the Minister of Education, Mariastella Gelmini. They occupied some of the foremost Italian monuments: the Tower of Pisa, the Colosseum in Rome, the Mole Antonelliana in Turin and the Basilica of St Anthony in Padua. Places that are symbolic of Italy. Their actions were intended to rouse the country from more than ten years of slumber, from the myopia that has prevented it from believing and investing in Italy’s greatest endowment, which is culture and erudition. It is as if they had wanted to send this message: ‘The Italy we yearn for, that we dream of, that we want to try to build, must start out from these places.’ It was a gesture at once new and age-old: delving into Italy’s history to seek continuity and consequently a different future. Taking control of the future by reclaiming the past, by recouping Italy’s bygone treasures.

One of the treasures of our nation is the Italian Constitution. It may seem like a stock phrase, the kind of thing your grandparents might say when they’re trying to teach you. Nevertheless I realized that it was actually true when I read the speech about the Constitution that Piero Calamandrei delivered to students at the University of Milan in 1955. In this speech Calamandrei, a member of the Constituent Assembly and one of the fathers of the Constitution, says that the Constitution ‘is not a machine that once it has been started it goes on by itself. The Constitution is a piece of paper: I drop it and it doesn’t move. To make it move you need to put in fuel every day, you need to put in your commitment, your spirit, your will to keep these promises, your sense of responsibility.’ The Constitution as a covenant, then, to be forever and continually kept alive through our own sense of duty.

Perhaps the revolt of the Italian universities was aimed squarely at defending the Constitution. Article 34 speaks of the right to education:

Capable and deserving pupils, including those lacking financial resources, have the right to attain the highest levels of education.

In legal terms the Constitution is the first principle. A nation should aspire to move towards the realization of the principles contained in it. Whether you are on the right or on the left, the Constitution is both a starting point and a destination. A way of saying: this is how we want to be, let’s try to be that way.

What is the duty of the Republic in all this? Calamandrei cites Article 3: