Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Can you imagine Kafka coming from China? Or Australia? Or the Americas? Difficult. Actually, only Europe is capable of the state-directed tragedy and farce that gave us the Kafkaesque. And so it remains. Take the tragic. For seven nights now, the world has watched the flames rising from Paris department of Seine-Saint-Denis and tried to make sense of what's going on. Everything from hooliganism to a third intifada has been proposed as an explanation but the truth is more prosaic and more tragic: despair.

Fact: there are almost no jobs in France and the resulting absence of upward mobility breeds the hopelessness that has led to the riots. On top of it all, a suffocating statist culture that micro-manages everything from housing to schooling only serves to fuel the rage. And all the while, a dwindling number of French farmers busy overproducing surplus food is pampered with subsidies while those trapped in the suburban slums are fed multiculturalism by those who regard them with contempt. Kafkaesque. Tragic.

Meanwhile in Italy, it's the farcical that rules. On Monday, Silvio Berlusconi interviewed on the broadcaster La7 declared: "Io ... ho tentato a più riprese di convincere il presidente americano a non fare la guerra." The Italian Prime Minister was saying that he attempted to persuade President Bush not to invade Iraq. In a country used to the implausible, this was a dramatic upping of the stakes. How did the peace-loving Berlusconi end up sending 3,000 Italian troops to Iraq if he was so opposed to the war, many asked? Could his statement have anything to do with his poor showing in the polls, six months before a general election? Coincidentally, Italy's defence minister said in comments published on Saturday that it was "plausible" that the remainder of Italy's 2,900-strong force would return home in the first half of 2006.

For observers of Italian politics, these statements are all too familiar: a government makes decisions that prove to be unpopular and then announces that it wasn't responsible for the decisions at all. Often, the legislators portray themselves as a well-meaning body taken cruel advantage of or misunderstood. So, on the eve of his visit to Washington, Berlusconi presented himself as a peacemaker who was dragged into an unwanted conflict by an ally that had ignored his advice. What might strike outsiders as absurd is treated by Italians with a shrug. Cynicism is so ingrained that no one pays much attention. Kafkaesque. Farcical.