ΠΑΝΕΠΙΣΤΗΜΙΟ ΘΕΣΣΑΛΙΑΣ
2ο Διεθνές Συνέδριο Οικονομικής και Κοινωνικής Ιστορίας
Οι "Αγορές" και η Πολιτική
Ιδιωτικά συμφέροντα και δημόσια εξουσία (18ος-20ός αιώνας)
Βόλος, 10-12 Φεβρουαρίου 2012
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Περιλήψεις
- Giulio Mellinato The origins of Finmare. A technocratic reform beyond state and market in fascist Italy
Since national unification, the Italian political elites have considered the transport sector as one of the main tools to fill the economic gap with the more developed countries. For this reason, in unified Italy a true competitive maritime transport market was unknown, and it was substituted by a convoluted relationship between state incentives, public funding and private enterprises. This complex and unstable system carried out public services through the activities of private enterprises, inside an economic environment marked by a long lasting protectionism. In the first half of the 1880s, a national shipping policy tradition began to replace the sum of maritime activities inherited from the different states of pre-unification period. The new maritime policy subjected the shipping Companies to the interests and wishes of the dominant political groups, heavily influenced by regional lobbies. Often the expectations of a part of the country were privileged at the expense of others, creating tensions and large dissatisfaction. During the following decades, Italian maritime policy was an exhausting search for a compromise among different needs, often satisfied by increasing state payments to ease the disappointment. The political power also defined the internal architecture of the maritime transport sector, with the distribution of services and profit opportunities among shipping companies, using public expenditures as a corrective for business distortions or suboptimal allocation of resources. After several failed attempts to rationalize the system, in 1936 was founded the holding Finmare, wholly owned by the state, which controlled about 90% of the national fleet engaged in transcontinental shipping lines. Finmare was created together with the design of a new plan for public financing directed to maritime transport, which lasted almost fifty years. Finmare was actually a hybrid: a company wholly owned by the State, but working along market criteria, within a highly competitive sector, as international ocean freight market. As a matter of fact, this ideal approach was not always maintained. Interferences coming from political interests were frequent, and repeatedly extra-quota state financial help was allocated to Finmare to cover its budget. But the original picture, based on a technocratic model of governance, remained as an ideal type for the everyday activities. In subsequent years, many managers coming from private companies became leaders inside the renovated Finmare state-owned shipping companies. In a peculiar case, former owners of a shipping company were co-opted as top managers inside the Finmare group. Even after the Second World War, the Finmare technocracy maintained the control over key technical decisions, confining the political intervention inside roles of pure representation or some secondary positions. The technocratic elite who led this change was composed of people who had much in common with the mid-level fascist leaders: middle-class origins, subordinate command experiences during World War I and nationalist political ideals. Their experience and their skills were used extensively during the difficult 1920s, when the shipping companies had to find new ways to contrast the steady decline in profitability of transport activities. They were then entrusted the task of managing the reconstruction of the national shipping and it was their choice to set up a working scheme that combined the dynamics of the market on one hand, state ownership and public funding on the other, and a key role of governance for themselves. Their political and ideal consistency with fascism has ensured to the technocrats free space during the dictatorship, while the technical expertise accumulated made them able to maintain their leadership posts also during the first republican years. The experience of Finmare can be presented as an example of relative efficiency in managing a service of primary importance for the national economy, both in overcoming the crisis following the Wall Street crash, and during the complete reconstruction of the national fleet after the Italian defeat in World War II. At the same time, the 1936 Italian maritime reform and its subsequent developments presents a model of interaction between economics and politics that may be interesting for those who want to understand the role of technical elites in the process of decision making.
