PIETRO GIUSEPPE GRASSO

Critiche alla costituzione ed ostacoli alle riforme istituzionali

N. 155

Summary — According to Norberto Bobbio, "the exigency to change the Constitution arises from the ascentainment, by now almost obsessive, that our political system is inefficient. It is just the inefficiency of the system that till now has made it difficult, if not impossible, the change". Complying with a suggestion of Gianfranco Miglio, the a. proposes adequate diagnoses to explain such resistance to the change. Some factors of immobility manifest themselves in Italy as a consequence of the decline of the national State, meant as a historical type of political organization peculiar to continental Europe. With reference to a first aspect of a spiritual character, it is noted that the former conceptions of life and politics have become insufficient, but as yet no new conceptions are foreseen. From a second aspect of an institutional order, it must be taken into account that NATO, even before a military organization, has represented a "supplement of statuality " to support and integrate the declined state organization of Europe. As regards the factors more properly national, it must be noted first of all the uncommon fact for which the Italian Republic, though inspired at a laical conception enunciated in the Constitution of 1947, could rise and go on thanks to a compromise with the Catholic Church. The original structure and the evolution of the republican organization have then exclusively depended on force relations and on the agreements among the political parties, without the assistance of any home authority super partes unlike what happened in France in 1958 (with General De Gaulle) and in Spain in 1978 (with the restored monarchy). Also to that traces back the insufficiency of the Constitution to ensure an adequate "governability", as complained, among others, by Massimo Severo Giannini. The difficulty in reaching solid constitutional reforms in our context dominated by the political parties, is illustrated also in recent books by Giuseppe Ferrari who has pointed out the conditions necessary to an orderly civil living.