From an economic historian and a counter-current intellectual like Julius Sapelli never expect trivial remarks. It's like this again when FIRSTonline asks him for a comment on the Fiat tear (read related articles 1 - 2 - 3 - 4)and on the effects that Sergio Marchionne's move will have on the largest Italian entrepreneurial organization. Sapelli takes it from afar and rethinks the past, bringing back Guido Carli – the Carli president of Confindustria wanted by Gianni Agnelli as a foreign Pope – and Intersind and Asap (the organizations of public companies that were dissolved and which then brought public groups to join Confindustria) as a benchmark. The result can be seen. Here is the interview
FIRSTONLINE – Fiat's exit from Confindustria seems destined to revolutionize or distort the major organization of Italian entrepreneurs: what will happen now? Can a business organization give up the largest and most representative Italian private industry without losing its mission?
KNOW – The mission of Confindustria is redefining itself by its own force due to the change in its membership base and due to the gap that will open up in the social body between state-owned companies, albeit listed (and this is no small thing) and nationally managed companies on the one hand and small and medium-sized private enterprises on the other. Furthermore, Europeanization is at work: Confindustria must and will increasingly have to lobby in Europe rather than in Italy. Many of its trade federations already perform this task well while Viale dell'Astronomia has not yet grasped the change that is necessary. If Fiat really abandoned Confindustria, as it announced, little would change in my opinion, also because Fiat has always been a private company that disburses public aid, as demonstrated by the disastrous ministerialism of Fiat which had its climax in the tragedy entirely Agnellian of the unification of the single point of contingency whose harmful consequences we still bear today
FIRSTONLINE – The absence of Fiat is destined to increase the weight in Confindustria of the public groups whose leaders are politically appointed: will Confindustria become increasingly governmental?
KNOW – Confindustria is governmental by its essence like all the industrial lobbies in the world, which are not only in times of crisis, as seen in France with MEDEF. Only in common law legal regimes are there many business associations that are completely autonomous from politics, which in effect regulate when they do not control and often with advantages for the public good, contrary to what is trivially believed.
Ultimately I think what counts is the stuff of the people: no one was more "public" than Carli but he was the best president of Confindustria because he was a true civil servant. Rather we have to evaluate how disastrous the elimination of Intersind and Asap was: now everything is an indistinct mash in which the roles are confused at the expense of transparency
FIRSTONLINE – How will Fiat's exit affect the forthcoming Confindustria electoral campaign for the succession to Emma Marcegaglia as president? What degree of consensus can a presidential candidate who explicitly proposes to avoid further divorces and recover the first Italian industry likely to gather among entrepreneurs?
KNOW – That's a question I can't answer. None of the hypothesized candidates has yet presented a programme, a project. Time will tell.
