The Judges and Political Corruption in Italy

In the two years following April 1992, all the established parties of government in Italy were swept away in the course of judicial investigations, which revealed centrally organized systems of illegal financing of political parties and corrupt agreements between politicians and businessmen. Some of these parties, founded as long as a hundred years before, had played notable parts in the construction of the Italian Republic but, since the Second World War, they had formed an apparently immovable bloc which kept the opposition parties and especially the Communists from any hope of taking power. The judges' campaign to remoralize Italian public life came to be known as 'mani pulite' (clean hands), a code-name given by the policemen involved in the earliest investigations. Because these investigations radiated out from cases of corruption uncovered in Milan, where the 'pool' of most active judges was based,2 the whole process also came to be known by the collective term 'Tangentopoli' (kickback-city). In this paper, I want to discuss some of the issues raised for the student of political corruption by the remarkable success of these investigations. Does Tangentopoli represent a victory for the 'rule of law' against widespread 'crimes of the powerful' and what was it about the institutional framework of law in Italy which allowed this to happen? What do these investigations reveal about the place of judges and the role of law in Civil Law countries as compared to those of the Common Law? What politics of corruption were at work here? Why, for example, were politicians rather than businessmen singled out as the main targets of investigation? After saying something more about how these events unfolded, I shall then offer some analytical reflections which may help to throw light on these and other questions.