The twenty-first century. Worldwide, the term lobby denotes ‘a group of people whose activity aims to influence public decision-makers, the legislature, government and public administration, in order to secure the fulfilment of a particular interest’. But the setting for this analysis is Italy, where professionals in the field prefer to call themselves interest representatives, in the barely concealed awareness that the original English term can arouse populist indignation or memories of the fixers of the First Republic. This common view rests on the mistaken belief that interaction with public decision-makers is based on simple personal-interest relationships, ‘a Fra’ che te serve’, ‘Frà, what do you need?’, rather than on a lengthy process of strategic analysis and back-office work; on promoting dreadful multinational interests rather than a more efficient dialogue between civil society and politics. This is the present picture in our country of an activity whose origins, however, lie centuries in the past, so far back that we might begin with a fairy-tale ‘once upon a time’…
Before history there was myth, the realm of nuance, the limitless and mystery. The land of the hero Achilles, of Agamemnon, king of the Achaeans, but above all of Odysseus, an adviser to Greek sovereigns before the term existed. Then came history, and with it the evolution of human society. Whether one accepts Rousseau's or Hobbes's perspective, Plato's or Aristotle's, human beings remain embedded in a plural context. The need to preserve individuality within plurality has compelled people to impose order on what would otherwise have been chaos. This is the origin of social structures, and from them hierarchies. Among ants and bees, management of the anthill or hive is entrusted to the ‘collective brain’, a distributed neural network whose neurons are the individual insects. In human society, by contrast, an individual can play a decisive role through intelligence alone. It therefore becomes necessary to give a selected group, the elites, the capacity to make decisions that guide the entire social body, even though they are not the only people capable of fulfilling such roles. Hence the notion of power, from the Sanskrit pa, a root referring to categories such as creation, dominion and responsibility. The struggle for power is the most ruthless of human struggles, one that has occupied entire lives throughout history, determined to secure glory, profit or, more simply, a greater chance of survival. But social power is not a clear, marble-like, solid attribute. Rather, it is a plastic and changeable material that escapes as soon as one tries to set definite limits to it. Like a breeze, which can be appreciated only by letting it flow without trying to grasp it, so it is with power, which feeds on exchanges, relationships and connections. Within this indeterminacy, the kind of figures of whom today's interest representatives are an example would come to establish themselves.
In public affairs, the powerful person is the one who appears powerful, identifiable by the ‘purple’, the colour of blood and sacrifice, whose majesty dazzles every gaze. But purple is only one colour within power's chromatic scale, which in its many shades contains a second, more anonymous and neutral colour, though no less representative: grey. This is the characteristic colour of the so-called ‘eminences’, specifically the grey ones, a title borne by those who, throughout history, were able not so much to hold formal power as to influence it.
In the theatre of politics, the mediocre mind will say, ‘Be the protagonist’, while the refined mind will say, ‘Be the stage director’. This is how the world is directed: not by sitting on the throne, but by managing entry to the room in which it stands. Contrary to popular opinion, the original ‘grey eminence’ was not Cardinal Richelieu, Louis XIII's Secretary of State during the Thirty Years' War, but the Cardinal's own assistant, a certain François Leclerc, known as Father Joseph. As a Capuchin friar, he was distinguished by his grey habit, the characteristic garment of the Franciscan order. And so, while Richelieu attended the siege of La Rochelle in his conspicuous purple-red robes topped with remarkable armour, our ‘humble’ friar advised him, dirty and barefoot, sustained by his unshakeable faith in the Almighty and the extensive network of secret agents he had cultivated throughout Europe.
The question immediately arises. Who was the real protagonist? The conspicuous Cardinal, agitated, doubtful and often in the grip of severe nervous crises, or the silent and titanic friar, calm and far-sighted? Let the reader make that difficult judgement. One fact, however, emerges clearly: history seems to become flattened, through a natural human tendency to fall back lazily on the ‘phenomenon’, official appearances and bright colours, neglecting compromises, complexity and nuances. Unfortunately, only these latter conceptual instruments can serve as a compass for cutting through the dense fog that surrounds the affairs of the world and of human beings. An opaque, grey fog, like the great advisers of the past, like ancient myths. Perhaps, then, it is not formally recognised, established and proclaimed power that is truly power, but rather the power capable of influencing, shaping and concealing it. As the doctrine of atomic warfare teaches, it is not the actual use of nuclear warheads that constitutes the real weapon, but the implicit threat of using them. In power, mystery is therefore much, perhaps everything.
It is no coincidence that Alexander the Great drew on Achilles and Prometheus: with its evocative force, myth can afford not to submit to the constraints of historiography, which will always seek to resemble it. The real versus the ideal. Mysterious, unrevealed power is of a higher order than power that is flaunted and disclosed. The king reigns but does not govern; likewise, the eminence or adviser guides but does not expose himself. For what is known can be understood and measured, whereas what is unknown recalls the divine and inspires respect and reverence. To be power, power needs an enveloping ritual that places distance between those upon whom it acts and those who wield it. In this intermediate zone of ritual and mediation, between the ‘square’ and the ‘tower’, the ‘antechamber’ and the ‘throne room’, move the Prince's advisers, the imperial mandarins, the eminences.
History flees, presses forward and certainly changes, but only to return to itself. The same principle applies to human nature, which, despite numerous technological and intellectual achievements, remains unchanged at its core. Thus, social dynamics that appear antiquated, often simply because they are identified by equally old terminology, recur today unchanged in substance. In English, the word lobby denotes a corridor connected to a larger room or a series of rooms, used as a passageway or waiting room. What difference is there between Agamemnon's mythical tent, which hosted the council of Greek kings, and the Transatlantico lobby at Montecitorio, home of Italy's Chamber of Deputies? Here a spontaneous, almost self-evident comparison emerges, bringing us full circle to the beginning of this reflection: the lobbyist is merely the latest evolution, the natural cultural heir, of the centuries-old art of the grey eminences, the great advisers to kings. The substance remains the same: influence over power.
Whether or not one wishes to regulate them, given what they embody, we must accept that lobbies, as actors exercising influence over power, exist, have always existed and are here to stay. What legislators can do, faced with this shifting ‘middle ground’, is set its boundaries without claiming to regulate every last nuance. This is not to perpetuate the feared opacity of power, but rather because of an inherent necessity. The places of power will always attract representatives of the vast social world, lawyers, journalists, businesspeople, NGOs and others, wishing in various capacities to engage with public decision-makers. If they cannot do so officially, they will certainly do so in other ways, perhaps very untransparent ones. Better not to pursue the utopia of absolute transparency, but to create permitted spaces for stakeholders to meet, recognising their usefulness. James Madison, a Founding Father of the United States of America, spoke of factions in Federalist Paper no. 10: ‘A number of citizens, whether a minority or a majority, who are united and moved by common impulses of passion or interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.’ The great American thinker recognised the unavoidable presence of interest groups within the institutional system, which therefore needed to be rationalised. Thus the Constitution of 1787 already contained the right to petition, understood in the meaning of the time as the ability to engage with public decision-makers. Always ahead of the world, in 1946 the United States introduced comprehensive regulation of lobbies through the Federal Regulation of Lobbying Act.
In Italy, the most fashionable perspective is one of a fight without quarter, a blind crusade towards the Jerusalem of transparency. This has led, naturally in conjunction with many other factors that cannot be analysed here, to the failure to introduce informed and systematic regulation of interest representation. As Pierluigi Petrillo has perceptively observed in his book Teorie e tecniche del lobbying, in our country we face a body of rules that is ‘creeping, with a schizophrenic pattern’. Without even positively defining the activity, legal provisions such as the offence of illicit influence-peddling have been introduced to punish a phenomenon with imprecise boundaries. Of no fewer than 82 bills on lobbying, none has been passed. Yet at ministerial and regional level, through some noble attempts and others that are wholly excessive, semblances of regulation have emerged. To dispel possible doubts about the legitimacy of interest representation, however, it is enough to refer to Constitutional Court judgments nos. 1 and 290 of 1974, which established the right of interest groups to exercise influence over public authorities.
In a dichotomous relationship joining black and white, like Yin and Yang in refined Taoist doctrine, there inevitably takes shape a connecting thread, a ‘bridge-builder’ for the encounter between the two opposites, without whom the relationship would not exist. Here again is grey, no longer as the colour of a Franciscan habit, but as the hue identifying the various combinations of black and white, which individually can exist only as absolutes. As in the meeting and clash of particular interests within a given market sector, the energy sector, for example, the lobbyist is that figure who works through shades of nuance, capable of providing the public decision-maker, understood as formal power, with the most satisfactory mediation between the various interests of stakeholders affected by a measure, new infrastructure or a new scientific discovery. A proper balancing of interests is the guiding star for the true lobbyist, who can swiftly anticipate solutions that the public decision-maker may only be able to reach after a long time, which is in short supply, and clashes between the parties, which may undermine electoral support.
Despite the many similarities, one element distinguishes the work of the eminence of the past from that of today's interest representative: the decentralisation of power, which is held less and less by individual people and increasingly by institutions considered as a whole. Corridors multiply, and throne rooms give way to independent authorities, ministerial offices and parliamentary committees… how simple the days when there was an absolute sovereign, the sole centre of power! A new Father Joseph will therefore have to take off his habit, stop travelling on foot, a mandatory sacrifice prescribed by the ancient monastic order, and equip himself with a consultant's backpack, strictly black, since status symbols matter, a helmet and a scooter, until the transition to the electric scooter is complete, in order to move faster and reach decentralised decision-makers as quickly as possible. Decentralisation, however, is accompanied by centralisation of another kind: in the private sector, among large national and multinational companies with extraordinary economic firepower. The in-house lobbyists of large companies can undoubtedly exert far greater influence on public decision-makers who are ever less competent and centralised, potentially producing an excessively fragile balance in the marketplace of interests. To stabilise the playing field, expertise is a necessary condition for effective lobbying, whereas social relationships alone are insufficient. That expertise will benefit not only the interest represented by the lobbyist but the entire ecosystem, which will be able to settle at a more informed point of balance.
Faced with the barbarian invasion that characterises today's politics, perhaps the time has come to recognise the nobility of the lobbyist's work. Through back-office and front-office activity, a synthesis of expertise and relationships, the lobbyist can advise the ‘ruler’, bringing before them the interests of the ‘ruled’ and ensuring that a healthy balance is maintained between the ‘square’ and the ‘tower’. Only the art of compromise, mediation and respect for others' positions can restore the country's institutional order, which is in the grip of improbable absolutisms and a non-existent bipartisan dialogue.
Public opinion must be enabled to understand the fundamental role of a skilful integration of the galaxy of private and particular interests within the macrocosm of the general public interest. This is not about favouring some at the expense of others, but about finding a fair compromise between all the positions at the table. If the much-maligned lobbies are placed in a position to operate with greater regulatory clarity and general trust, they will be able to dispel the cultural distortions accumulated over recent decades and become agents of greater mediation between citizens and businesses on one side, and Parliament, government and public administration on the other.
Finally, then, to close on a more theoretical plane, which prevails: substantive or formal power? Without Kissinger and Zhou Enlai, would Nixon and Mao Zedong, alone and distrustful, have been able to bring about an epoch-making rapprochement between the two powers now competing for global geopolitical supremacy? What would France be today if Napoleon rather than Talleyrand had sat at the Congress of Vienna? And again, what country would ours be if De Gasperi had not been accompanied by ‘Il Divo Giulio’, Giulio Andreotti? ‘History was made by Nixon, Mao Zedong, Napoleon and De Gasperi!’ many will say. ‘But only because Kissinger, Zhou Enlai, Talleyrand and Andreotti steered it,’ a few will say. No one can provide an exhaustive answer. In any case, a few decades ago, to anticipate what some readers may be thinking, someone said something roughly like this: ‘Yes, exactly, the situation was a little more complicated.’
Let this be kept firmly in mind: myth is far more important and true than history. History is the real, while myth is the ideal towards which the real inexorably tends. If lobbying is the history of influence over power, the grey eminences are its myth.