The Liberal, the Neoliberal, and the Illiberal - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 27

structures the powerful claim to represent. The resulting micropolitics produces
shifting social fractures at multiple levels. while this may make the population
of Rome relatively ungovernable in a formal sense, it also allows for a more robust
pursuit of self-interest than is possible in more directly regulated and politically
compact populations. it also, however, makes resistance to official power ex-
tremely difficult to sustain over long periods of time: protectors too easily decline
into opponents; neighborhood associations collapse in furious rivalry; promises
evaporate; and imagination about an ideal urban future far outstrips willingness
to turn plans into places.
in such a context, ideologies are as evanescent as the alliances through which
they are given material existence. Declarations of cultural tolerance morph, with
dizzying unpredictability, into the rejection and violence that they potentially
always encompass. from a liberal pope who became one of history's notorious
oppressors to a left-wing regime that “liberalized” home ownerships and thereby
launched the current orgy of gentrification and its attendant emergenza casa, and
from a culturally diverse imperium celebrated as the glorious past of a despised
capital that practices a localism worthy of its disaffected northern and southern
provinces, Rome's urban and political ecology has always defied simple catego-
rization. The planners and bureaucrats who are charged with the future of Rome
are trying to reverse this pattern, which—as they apparently fail to realize—is at
least as ancient and entrenched as any of the virtues they attribute to the eternal
City. They want to turn productive forms of conflict and confrontation into pas-
sive acquiescence in a grandiose vision of undying glory in which urban harmo-
ny emblematizes national unity.15 They resist the perception that it is precisely the
aspects of Roman life they most fear and despise—in a nutshell, its segmentary
fractiousness—that have the deepest historical roots, the best fit with the expe-
rienced proclivities of the national political order, and thus the most convincing
lien on, if not eternity, at least a promising future. Their chances of reversing that
reality are as vanishingly slim as those of keeping the graffiti artists away from
the architectural inventions of the maxi-stars.
Notes
i would like to thank the co-editors of this volume as well as two anonymous reviewers, both
for their helpful comments and for their encouragingly enthusiastic reception of the contents
of this essay.
1. for a full account of monti and of my field research there, see herzfeld (2009), as well as
herzfeld (2007a, 2007b, 2011).
2. see, e.g., tiziana Guerrisi, “alemanno e il menu etnico: 'Da mal di pancia ai bimbi,”
La Repubblica, Rome section, 19 July 2008, p. 1; http://www.06blog.it/post/3339/via-il-menu-
etnico-dalle-scuole-si-torna-alla-carbonara; the petition against alemanno's policy at http://