ABSTRACT
In this chapter we see how the policy process was structured by the hectic and difficult reconstruction after the war. In particular, the distribution of basic political resources, the objectives and the strategies were moulded by international and national constraints and sanctioned by a long and highly pluralist constitution. Not least, the conventional norms controlling the rules of exchange of resources were fixed into a relatively rigid pattern which ensured the dependence of most of the actors on a particularly uncertain source of authority, namely the Christian Democrats. The process of reconstruction, in which a new politics emerged and was fixed into the Constitution, is of particular importance not just because it represents the relatively radical aspirations of the period and transmits them to later generations, or because it shows how difficult it is to wipe away past practices and institutions. What this reconstruction passed on to the future operators was an awkward compromise, which is both byzantine where it was detailed and ambiguous where it was not. It was a compromise between the past, represented by the old mainly preFascist institutions of state, the future, represented by the radical idealist hopes of the Constituent Assembly, and the present, in the shape of the international and domestic constraints on freedom of action for the new political classes. The constitutional compromise has shown a perhaps surprising intractability in the face of great changes in international and domestic conditions. This intractability is in itself a drawback; worse still, the compromise has been revealed to be flawed and unsound, and now seems to hold back future development. The process of reconstruction is therefore of more than antiquarian interest, and had a profound effect on the contemporary political system. Its effect on policy-making is particularly important, since as I describe later in this chapter and in chapter 4, in the Italian legal tradition the Constitution provides the highest expression of law, within which all state activity must take place. The Constitution therefore expresses the principles, values and methods of the new state and attempts to provide a formal framework for political development.
