Today’s Europe, the one for which we citizens go to vote every five years, is a political construction that arose from the Second World War. We all know what we are, but do we have clear ideas about what we are not? Which is our Europe and which is not? Comparing ourselves with the United States, to the West, and with the Russian Federation to the East, let’s try to see what the differences are and what we should do to be able to compete on equal terms with these two powers that flank us.
In Europe, the classic division of the three powers, legislative, executive and judicial, is quite defined. As for legislative power, the European Union has a unicameral Parliament (i.e. composed of a single chamber) elected by the citizens of the Union, while the United States and the Russian Federation have an Upper House (or Senate) and a Lower House (House of Representatives or State Duma).
As for executive power, Europe has a President of the Commission proposed by the European Council (which in turn is composed of the heads of state or government of the 27 member states). As a government team, the President of the Commission has a group of ministers, called commissioners, one for each EU country. This means that the President is not chosen directly by the citizens or by the Parliament, but by the heads of state or government of the member states. The same goes for his ministers, who are not chosen by the president, but by the individual states with a game of alchemy and balances of power that are often not very transparent. All this makes the determination and implementation of decisions less rapid and effective. But what makes the difference, or a further difference, are the attributions that the legislative and executive powers have, or rather, that they do not have.
In short, is the European Union a federal state, that is, a sovereign state? No, it is not, because it is not composed of federated states belonging to a unitary body governed by a common Constitution, with a common executive to which all common policies are delegated. And it is not even a Confederation. The European Union is an association of sovereign and independent states, established by an international treaty, but the matters delegated to it are limited, and do not include some truly strategic ones such as common foreign policy, common defense, common foreign trade, even if it has common and permanent constitutional bodies.
In short, the European Union, today, finds itself in a limbo between these two models: we have a more advanced level than a confederation because we have common institutions and policies, but our executive bodies do not have strategic prerogatives that allow them to decide and interface autonomously with the surrounding world, so we are not a true federal state. This is why, speaking of foreign policy, it is said that the US Secretary of State, Kissinger, when he wanted to get in touch with the European Union, did not know who he should speak to, meaning the lack of a single minister who represented the entire Union, because the political line was exercised by each of the states separately, and often in contradiction with each other. Ditto for defense and trade policy.
What did Mr. Altiero Spinelli’s Ventotene Manifesto and Gen. Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Sant’Angelo in Formis Manifesto (but we could also quote Mr. Carlo Cattaneo in 1848 when he wrote: “Italy can only be free in a free Europe) foresee? Beyond the anachronisms, both manifestos advocate a European Federation or Confederation, on the same model as the United States of America: a unitary state in which foreign policy and defense policy would be totally delegated to the Union’s executive.
This is why the Italian Prime Minister forcefully stated that “the Europe of Spinelli’s Ventotene Manifesto is not her Europe”, and for her it wouldn’t also be Gen. Garibaldi’s Europe, if she knew about it, but that would be asking too much. Mrs. Meloni wants to hold on to the prerogatives of foreign policy and military defense and does not intend to cede them to a supranational body to keep her power undisturbed and intact.
When Mr. Donald Trump questioned the Atlantic Pact and she was asked what she would choose between the interests of the European Union and the United States, Mrs. Meloni answered just Italy. But the answer is laughable, as it would be like asking the same thing to the governor of a US state, for example Kansas with respect to the United States and Europe and he answered Kansas. This would really be a “Kansas answer” (impossible to translate this joke into English, but an Italian would understand it as a “silly answer”)!
In a situation of extreme weakness for Europe, that is, weakness for all the European states that make up the Union, we should all hope and work for a strengthening of Europe, because this would also indirectly strengthen all the states that make up the Union, and therefore also us. But to understand this concept, would be needed a statesman in power, not a politician.
Given that Mrs. Meloni’s party still refers, through the allegory of the flame that it carries in the electoral logo, to the ancestor party A.N. and, through this, to the late Social Movement, these political formations, since their birth, always considered “Europe a central and inalienable factor”, a myth linked to the mature Mussolinian ideology, elaborated in the last spasms of the Italian Social Republic, when during WW2 Italy was divided into two countries. In essence it was the myth of “Europe as a Nation”, that is, to quote the historian Mr. Adriano Romualdi, “a Europe in which all peoples, united in culture, blood and tradition, could free themselves from the grip in which they had been relegated after the defeat of the Second World War, thus constituting an outpost against the advance of the imperialisms of the USA and the USSR”. In short, “Europe as a Nation” was intended as a “third way” of international politics, not only between capitalism and communism (when these myths were still in vogue), but between the opposing blocs that crush us politically and militarily.
Well, Mrs. Meloni’s position, which repudiates the dream of a “European Homeland” that can stand out in the world as a third way (or fourth if we consider China) and, on the contrary, exalts the fragmented nationalism of European states, a rearguard nationalism, is important news, worth reflecting on.
It seems that the positions between Mrs. Ursula von der Leyen and Mrs. Giorgia Meloni have reversed. Mrs. von der Leyen is leaping forward trying to fill the power vacuum and, with her latest moves, seems to have taken the long and difficult path to propose herself as the first Chancellor of a Federal Europe equipped with broad political, military and economic powers, through a full political mandate and a continental military apparatus, as well as perhaps a nuclear deterrence that can protect Europe from pseudo-mafia conditioning by other imperial players. Mrs. Meloni, on the other hand, by denying her origins, tends to keep that power vacuum open in order to continue playing a small and obsolete national populist game, and in Europe, to try to influence the political power of the President of the Commission as the twenty-seventh governor of the European Council. A shame, because such an intelligent and prepared Italian woman, at least linguistically, could have competed with the German and, perhaps, won… on penalties.
