I have just read an article by one of the many correspondents of our newspapers in Brussels. Some are excellent pens and having spent years and years in the Belgian capital they also have a fair amount of experience in European affairs. I knew them all when I was Ambassador and often invited them to my residence.
However, I remained perplexed during our conversations as I am now after reading an article similar to many others and unchanged over time. It seems that the work of a foreign correspondent is interpreted as a special mission: to justify the EU, the void of common policies, the inconsistency of choices and to place the stigma on the Italian government, no matter what colour, if it dares even for sacrosanct reasons, to come into conflict with the Brussels hierarchies. Sometimes we wonder whether they are paid by the European bureaucracy or by the newspaper in which they write. Let’s take the two most common examples: monetary governance and immigration policy.
Financial asymmetry
As is known, from the Maastricht Treaty (1992) onwards, the European monetary architecture has failed to complete itself. It remained asymmetrical. The single currency was not accompanied by a common tax system. The banking union considered imminent a thousand times has not yet been launched. Any honest economist would consider the current system, and the pro-cyclical policies that characterize it, to be of clear advantage to creditor countries. Debtor states are penalized.
It should therefore be expected that the Italian correspondents, handsomely paid to analyze European Affairs, in addition to denouncing – as is right – the waste of Italian public spending, the corruptions of our local politics which have fueled an indecent debt, are sometimes able to complain about the lack of European political will to correct the shortcomings of a system capable for years of increasing the burden of the poorest, peripheral countries (this is how they consider us from Stockholm and they don’t even realize the comedy of such a name addressed to a founding country of Europe) of the so-called PIGS.
On the contrary, the journalist, expert of the “Club”, feels ashamed every time Italy rises up against hypocritical austerity (non-existent when it comes to financing military spending) and at least tries to distinguish productive investments from the rest of the deficit. The correspondent then criticizes the unfortunate Minister of Finance with tired paternalism, expressing compassion for an unrealistic action that can only increase the stigma on the country.
Dublin victims
Likewise in the case of a common immigration policy never implemented by the European elites. The Commission, after Jacques Delors, has no longer been able to represent the community pillar and has remained towed by the will of the member states who express themselves in the European Council.
In a situation in which the Dublin system penalizes the states of first entry, while the selfishness and cynicism of each country wins, leaving Greece and Italy above all as scapegoats, our friendly journalist shakes his head and preaches to the Italian rulers who allow themselves to raise their voices a little. Oh no, for goodness sake, on your knees! The Club does not forgive!
It goes without saying that Germany imposed, with sacrifices shared among all member states, the indecent agreement with Erdogan: 6 billion so that useless migrants were held in Turkish detention camps, protecting Berlin from the flows coming from the Balkan routes at the time of the war in Syria. It is useless and stupid to make a comparison with the emergency that is affecting Italy today, also thanks to the war in Libya decided by France, the United Kingdom and the United States, and which does not receive any European solidarity! For goodness sake, let’s not dot the i’s, put a finger in the wound!
Divided on everything, always
Better to pretend that everything is fine, to hope for a small compromise, at the lowest common denominator, which will leave the asymmetries, injustices and indecent cynical policies standing.
Yet this is not how politics is done. It is as possible to have a straight back in NATO as in Europe. In the Alliance, Turkey, an honored member, teaches us this every day, pursuing its interests with extraordinary skill.
In Europe, Sweden teaches us this, capable, for example, of having even the national custom of chewing tobacco accepted and considered practicable in Stockholm, a sacred exception to the common rules imposed on the other member states.
I remember that when I was Ambassador, a former social democratic prime minister, to whom I described the unfair European rules and the Italian reasons, asked me why a founding country of sixty million inhabitants was not able to count and impose respect for its own interests . And he added with a smile that Sweden with its 11 million inhabitants and without having been a founding country was listened to in Europe. At the time I didn’t want to give negative elements about Italy and glossed over the topic.
However, we know why Rome is not like Stockholm, because it loses its communication battles. In Stockholm, when national interests are at stake, the country is a single block: Government, opposition, press. In Italy there are a thousand Italys against each other. Furthermore, the press, with a classic guilt complex inherited from the Italy of other times, takes the side of the strongest: Europe which, like all masters, is right especially when it is wrong.
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