The World Remembers Bonino; Italy Remembers an Argument

Emma Bonino has died at 78. The Guardian called her a radical politician who stood up to the Vatican; France 24, a champion of the battles to legalise abortion and divorce; the New York Times, an Italian campaigner for civil rights who in nearly five decades helped erode the political sway of the Catholic Church. The three notices agree on the shape of the life: a militant feminist of the 1970s who went on to serve as foreign minister and as a European commissioner, and who was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2015.

It is worth pausing on how uniformly the foreign press organises that life around the Church. To read the obituaries from outside is to be told that the central drama of Italian public life is a contest between a secularising state and a religious authority, with Bonino as its most legible protagonist. That is not wrong. It is simply a story told from the doorway, by observers for whom the Vatican is the most recognisable thing about this country.

The framing carries a cost. When the world reduces Italian politics to a referendum on Rome's other sovereign, it struggles to see anything else: the ordinary machinery of coalition, the regional bargains, the patient work of a legislator on matters no foreign desk would print. The New York Times noted that Bonino wielded outsize influence on Italian discourse. We would add that influence is measured differently at home, where it is felt in the slow drift of institutions rather than in the headlines of a death notice.

There is something clarifying, all the same, in reading these accounts together. They remind us that Italy is one of the few countries whose internal arguments are, by their nature, international news — that a vote in the Chamber of Deputies can be reported in London as a chapter in a longer contest over conscience. Whether that attention flatters or flattens us, it is the attention we have. The Board notes her passing without eulogy; the foreign pages have already supplied the eulogy, and they have supplied it well.