Beniamino Andreatta, the founder of Arel, was one of the most original and creative public figures of the twentieth century. Economist, politician, statesman, he played a leading role in the decisive turning points of four decades of Italian and European history (born in Trento on 11 August 1928) – from the early Sixties until 15 December 1999, when he suffered a medical episode during a budget vote in the Chamber of Deputies. He never regained consciousness and passed away in Bologna on 26 March 2007.
Most of his long academic career unfolded in Bologna. Before that, he had taught at the Catholic University of Milan and at Urbino University; in 1968, in Trento – where he was among the founders of the Faculty of Sociology – he faced head-on the wave of student protests. He went on to establish Bologna’s Institute of Economics and the Faculty of Political Science.
Andreatta – “Nino” to family and friends – had arrived at economics and academia after studying law in Padua, where in 1950 he won the prize for best graduate of the year. Those were the years of Cronache Sociali, the journal led by Giuseppe Dossetti, Giuseppe Lazzati, and Giorgio La Pira. Through La Pira’s essays on «the poor» Andreatta discovered economics, Keynes, Catholic solidarism – opening up new readings and a path that first took him to the Catholic University as a volunteer assistant, then to Cambridge as a visiting professor.
In 1961, after marrying Giana Petronio, with whom he would have four children, he moved to India to work at Nehru’s Planning Commission on behalf of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). In 1962, aged just 34, he became a full professor. A great innovator, in the early Seventies he founded, together with Paolo Sylos Labini, the University of Arcavacata in Calabria, modelled on Anglo-Saxon campuses – a genuine wager on the South of Italy, not as a land to be subsidised but as one to be developed.
(See: Rector Andreatta at Arcavacata https://www.arel.it/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Il-rettore-Andreatta-ad-Arcavacata.pdf)
In 1974 Andreatta, already part of the intellectual circle around Il Mulino, founded Prometeia in Bologna (an association for econometric studies) and, at the end of 1976, AREL in Rome – an unprecedented association at the time, conceived as a place where politicians, entrepreneurs and scholars could meet to debate the country’s major issues, often anticipating problems and drafting legislative solutions.
His entry into politics came in the Sixties, when he became Aldo Moro’s economic adviser. Alongside a group of academics – Siro Lombardini, Giuliano Amato, Giorgio Ruffolo, Franco Momigliano and Alessandro Pizzorno – he laid the foundations of centre-left economic policy.
From 1979 onwards he held numerous government posts, but the most memorable came during his time as Treasury Minister: the “divorce” between the Treasury and the Bank of Italy, achieved with Governor Carlo Azeglio Ciampi; 200 banking appointments freed from party patronage; the dismissal of public managers whose names had appeared in the P2 lodge lists. And finally, the most radical decision, which cost him ten years of ostracism from much of his party and exclusion from government: the liquidation of Roberto Calvi’s Banco Ambrosiano. On that occasion, Andreatta resisted pressure from the highest levels of his party, the Christian Democrats, and in Parliament openly denounced the Vatican Bank’s responsibility. A deeply Catholic man, yet uncompromising and secular in the exercise of power.
Through the Eighties, Andreatta chaired the Senate’s Budget Committee, often fighting a lonely battle against «the party of spending and deficit», which had many supporters in his own ranks.
A staunch Europeanist, he became vice-president of the European People’s Party and, from the early Eighties, forged strong ties with Helmut Kohl, remaining a key interlocutor even after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Andreatta returned as minister in 1993, when Tangentopoli wiped out much of the political and government establishment and the country needed figures untouched by any suspicion of corruption. First as Budget Minister under Amato (where he wound up the Cassa per il Mezzogiorno), then as Foreign Minister under Ciampi (where he put forward a detailed plan to reform the UN).
With the rise of Silvio Berlusconi and the centre-right, Andreatta led the opposition of the Italian People’s Party (PPI, born from the ruins of the DC) in the Chamber of Deputies. He was pivotal in blocking Rocco Buttiglione’s attempt to align the party with the right, and then in the so-called “ribaltone” that brought down Berlusconi’s first government.
From there Andreatta engineered the breakthrough that gave birth to the Ulivo – the broad centre – left alliance that marked the meeting of two great political cultures of the twentieth century, Catholic and post-Communist. Its leader would be his former student, Romano Prodi.
In Prodi’s first government, as Defence Minister, Andreatta reformed the General Staff, launched Operation Alba (the first Italian-led mission), pushed for every step towards a European defence, and started both the abolition of conscription and the expansion of civil service.
After Prodi’s government fell in 1998, he founded Carta 14 Giugno, a pro-Ulivo association aimed at widening democratic participation and curbing the power of parties – an idea he had pursued since his Christian Democrat years, which earned him strong hostility within the PPI during the 1999 European elections, when he advocated a convergence between Christian Democrats and Democrats and a renewed «pooling of sovereignty» among centre-left parties.
«When it comes to intellects of that calibre, you only see one in a century», Giuliano Amato said when Nino Andreatta collapsed in the Chamber.
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