Keep up the momentum, Europe! And You, Italy, too!

During the pandemic crisis and because of it, Europe has been facing, and will be facing also after it, some main dramatic changes, that could deeply modify its intimate structure. The first main change is connected to a social and economic paradigma, assumed in the European Constitution in art. 3, paragraph 2, of the TEU, but badly interpreted and betrayed in the last thirty years. According to its Constitution, European Union is oriented to “a highly competitive social market economy”. In the dramatic choice that was made after the II World War, the Europeans (the lucky part of the European people) choose the market economy, but then, during the years, wrongly focused on the aspect of competition and forgot the first characteristic of the European market economy: it was born as social, it is social and need to remain social. We followed the chimeras of a global uncontrolled competition and we forgot to balance competition with the principles of solidarity and of the protection of weak areas of our societies, accepting that the social cohesion could be put at risk: this attitude is not in the history of Europe. Witness of a blind contraposition between competition and social protection is the directive Bolkenstein, which was approved by European Institutions without taking in account the social consequences. Already before the crisis we had some first signals of a different attitude, but the pandemic forced the Union to reconsider its paradigma, suspending the restrictive discipline of State aid and the silly rules of the fiscal compact, accepting that European Union could finance state debts. It is difficult to believe that the old rules will be totally reintroduced without deep changes and that these new directions could be suddenly abandoned. At the same time, before and during the pandemic crisis, Europe was facing the most dramatic theme of a constitutional structure based on the democratic principle: that of the secession of a unity from the whole, id est Brexit. It is not worth in these few pages to discuss the constitutional model of the European Union: if it is federal or confederal, if we wish a Europe of States or of Nations or of Peoples. Emphatic words thrown in the wind just to push the unqualified public opinion in one direction or in a different one. The truth is that 500 million citizens and 28 component units of this structure have been ruled for many years by regulations approved in a democratic procedure involving the representatives of European peoples, sitting in the European Parliament, and the representatives of the European States, sitting in the Council. One of the 28 component unit decided to withdraw: and we, from the two parties, managed a difficult situation, arriving – with many troubles – at a final result, politically unsatisfying, but corresponding to the will, expressed according constitutional procedures, of one of the two parties, followed by procedures aiming at a consensual separation. I personally regret the exit of the UK, and hope that such experience will not be replayed with other component units of EU: Europe must be tolerant, accepting different positions and must remain a large structure, avoiding distinctions between members of different status and niveau. I don’t know who won, if the UK or the EU: but the important point is that the institutional procedure designed by art. 50 of Tue has been successfully managed... (segue)