Italian challenge to the ideal of European unity

Date: 10/07/1997

INTEREST in the problem of foreign lettori in Italian universities has crossed the Atlantic.

Following nine months of research, Stanford University political scientist Dr Brad Blitz conducted a series of interviews in Brussels, Verona, Milan, Naples, Florence, Venice and Rome.

His research was completed in the winter of 1996 after he had interviewed European Commission officials, MEPs, lettori and their lawyers, state advocates, magistrates, Italian university deans and professors, trade union officials and students.

He concludes: “Italy is one of the founding member states of the European Union and yet 40 years after the Community was created - on its very soil - we are confronted with an episode that challenges the ideal of European unity.

“The lettori problem reveals that non-Italian citizens have historically been discriminated against by the Italian state and the university system, and that their suffering accelerated during periods of economic crisis. The fact that non-Italians were the first, and only, victims suggests that there are institutional patterns of prejudice working against the goals of integration.”

The European Court of Justice has twice ruled in favour of the lettori, with a third case pending in which the advocate-general has already delivered his opinion, stating that Italian rules governing access to supply teaching posts were tantamount to “unlawful covert discrimination” on the grounds of nationality.

The Commission, for its part, is now poised to move to the judicial phase of proceedings under Article 169 of the Treaty of Rome.

The European Parliament has passed two resolutions. Its youth and education committee has substantially confirmed Dr Blitz's conclusions, and the social affairs committee is about to vote on rapporteur Hugh McMahon's opinion.

But the Italian state resists.

There are more than 1,200 foreign lettori working in Italian universities. The majority are citizens of the Union, while some have dual nationality, usually through marriage.

A lettori's average age is 40-plus and many have families here. The best paid earn just over 1,000 ecu net per month and some earn as little as 470 ecu.

Many have been fired, reinstated and then re-fired. The courts are shamelessly abused in an orchestrated attempt to break our spirit - legal filibustering is the order of the day. I personally can chalk up at least 20 lawsuits and more than 150 court appearances. In Verona, 22 of us have been locked out on full pay for eight months despite a court order for immediate reinstatement.

Similar abuses are taking place throughout the country, the most serious in Naples, Bologna and Salerno.

This record would discourage the most enthusiastic litigant, but instead we have gone from strength to strength, organising international academic conferences, providing a lifeline to Erasmus students, advising migrant teachers in Germany, Spain, the UK and Sweden.

Our confidence is such that with swelling numbers we are now forming a professional organisation and trade union.

How is it possible that a group of foreigners on very low pay could have financed a legal and political battle which has involved several lobbying trips to Strasbourg and the setting up of a press office impressive enough to state its case and reach the front pages of national newspapers as well as ARD1 television in Germany and the BBC World Service, amongst others?

Although our financial position did not favour a protracted battle, other circumstances did.

Italy is discriminating against not one member state but all member states. Although Italian is the common language of our meetings, a ready-made advantage was that we could lobby and send out press releases in any language.

Moreover, there has been no need for ideological discussions inside our committee. My French colleague, Françoise Salnicoff, co-founder of our trade union, is president of the Alliance Française in Verona. She remains above politics and her level approach gives the lie to any idea that Italy is under attack from foreign radicals.

Nor was there much need to discuss tactics. It is our very existence which is under attack - and from this we have drawn strength. And this, to put it in a nutshell, is because we are willing to integrate, but not be assimilated into an archaic structure which is anathema to the very idea of education.

The concern of the neo-corporative state that has governed Italy since the 1980s is the vested interest groups that comprise it. Once each group is assured a slice of the cake in terms of money and status, the government is indifferent as to how shares are allotted within the group.

This approach results in the sacrifice of rights - above all individual rights - including those enshrined in the EU's Treaty of Rome.

In our case, we found ourselves exposed to attack from all of Italian academia, a political family whose members are prominently represented in both houses of parliament and include the vice-chancellors, the National University Council and the government's contracting agency, as well as the neo-corporative trade unions.

This 'clan' survives the rule of law and organises its internal affairs not on the basis of free discussion but by fine tuning. The old boy network of personal relations has given way to social stratification à l'ancien régime, built up by decisions that use the rules, or the letter of the law, as a mere formal code.

Tenured appointments are secured first and foremost on the basis of alliances between academic tribes and then of favours earned by vassals who have shown respect to the tribal chiefs. This is the unwritten rule, familiar to everyone, and in force for years.

Yet it also has a public face, its double, a fiction which pays lip-service to the law: it is called the concorso, the open competition exam which was closed to foreigners at the lower rung of the ladder until 1994.

The denizens of academia know the inner law, and only the ingenuous or the sarcastic talk of the concorso as an objective rating of a candidate's qualifications by a disinterested commission super partes.

Faced with such a formidable adversary, we lettori from all over the Union look to Europe.

The Commission is in the penultimate phase of a second case against Italy under Article 169 of the treaty, after the Italian state shifted the goalposts by abrogating its discriminatory legislation and introducing a new law and a new name for lettori - 'linguistic experts' - hoping that nobody would notice that this strips us of our status as teachers.

The Parliament has been very supportive, but if it has teeth, we have yet to see them.

In the meantime, we expect the Court of Justice to receive more referrals as we now prepare to open cases on discrimination on the grounds of nationality concerning women on maternity leave, increments for years of service, pay rises, and even access to car parks and subsidised meals in the canteen, to name but a handful of issues in the pipeline.

The Italian state's reply will be “there is no discrimination since these foreigners have not done a concorso”.

One high-ranking Italian government official asked me, somewhat sadistically: “How old are you, 45? I know my state, it is a rubber wall. You will still be at this when you are an old man.” On this, at least, I think we can agree, but I reminded her that nobody - but nobody - had predicted the collapse of the Berlin wall.

Another senior Italian government official in Brussels told me that the state will cut back on all language teaching if we do not back off. They are, of course, entitled to wreck their own education programmes - but if they do not wish to fall foul of Union law, they will have to cut back on Italian teachers too.

Ours is not a labour dispute: it is a political battle to decide whether the Union is a real union of citizens or merely a free-for-all for the movement of goods.

David Petrie has taught English at the Università degli Studi di Verona since 1984. He is chairman and founder member of The Committee for the Defence of Foreign Lecturers, which defends the rights of migrant teachers in the Union.