Democracy and wealth depend on 'civicness'

Robert Putnam demonstrates that regional government in Italy in the late twentieth century works best in regions with high levels of 'civic community' - patterns of social cooperation based on tolerance, trust and widespread norms of active citizen participation - and that the distribution of civic community among the Italian regions was evident as long ago as the thirteenth century. Contrast, for example, the communal republicanism of medieval Florence, Bologna and Milan with the autocratic patron-client politics of the Neapolitan and Sicilian kingdoms. Italy's past lives on, decisively, in its present.

Putnam argues that economic development does not explain political development. Rather, long-established patterns of civic community explain both a region's capacity for economic growth and also its capacity for democratic self-government. 'Civicness' is what matters. Where it exists, everything is possible. Where it does not, nothing is.

Social capital is far harder to accumulate than physical capital. Patron-client relations, with their cycles of dependence and norms of favour-seeking, are almost impossible to eradicate.

The implications of this book are enormous. Western policy-makers will wish to identify which former communist states already possess the necessary 'norms and networks of social engagement' and which do not. They will then have to decide whether to write off the chances of countries that resemble Calabria more than Emilia-Romagna or whether to try - how? - to encourage them in developing civic norms.