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By Root 606 0

but in Italy, where nationalism is as often an exercise in collective self-castigation as it is a celebration of common virtue,9 it was not a sufficiently strong force in its own right to bring about such regimentation until it could be combined with the global economics of heritage management and gentrification. Ironically, it may be at the moment of yielding political sovereignty to the European Union and cultural expertise to the United Nations that Italy has finally been able to assert a collective identity that possesses greater legitimacy than vague and often self-deprecatory ramblings about national character. But it does so, not as an independent entity, but as a module in a set.

Consider the claim that Italy owns 70 percent of the world's great art. That claim itself admits to the subjection of the nation to an encompassing aesthetic hierarchy. Audit culture replaces taste as the arbiter of a country's position within that hierarchy; and this is a development that suits both the nationalists who want some specific basis for their boasting and the neoliberals who find such devices to be an effective means of managerial control.

The picturesque streets of Monti could undoubtedly be included in a similar quantification of cultural capital. The demographic changes now under way and the increasingly sophisticated mapping of the historical fabric would certainly favor such a development. The physical body politic, that inhabited place with which the parish priest has developed such an intense and intimate rapport, that living past in which taxi drivers debate the relative merits of editions of old books, that palimpsest of acknowledged sins against the divine order and infractions of the human-the entire pulsing, complex presence would be displaced by the abstractions of official historiography, commoditized heritage, and real estate values manipulated by absentee landlords and faceless firms. The symbolic and structural violence that erases community life will have achieved the banal finality that was surely never the imagined telos of the Eternal City. But it was the original, fatal infection of civic discord, the divisive germ of fear and menace, that underlay the theatricality of urbane courtesy and working-class irony alike; it eventually breached the body politic's powers of resistance and left it at the mercy of external forces it could not control. The activists may succeed in rolling back these processes to some extent, but there is probably now no nostalgic act of historical reconstruction that can bring the rough, affectionate intimacies of a disappearing social life back from the brink of extinction.

Yet their memory will continue to infuse the actions of those-and they are many-who refuse the bland vision offered by the current civic leadership and by the operators of the new real estate market. In many ways the parabolic career of Silvio Berlusconi, with its remarkably close parallel in the career of his Thai counterpart Thaksin Shinawatra,10 offers a suggestive intimation of both the powers and the limits of the neoliberal machine. Both have faced a critical response from economists and other local critics unpersuaded by the allure of massive globalization, and both were forced out of office without being able to dismantle previously existing structures altogether.

This was perhaps to be expected. I have argued here that globalization, for all the surface similarities that it brings, may not create cultural uniformity in terms of how people locally intercept and interpret these new developments. The failure of the European Union to impose fiscal or legal discipline on the Italian state may at some level be a source of embarrassment; but it also suggests a robust resistance to forms of political life and to civic values that are seen as intrusive and unmanageable in the Italian context. The extraordinary degree of cultural fragmentation that characterizes not only Italy but its capital suggests that attempts to impose a uniform civic code will always be refracted through very different visions of social