I did not think that to repost Europeans with no ifs and buts thirteen years after the first edition I would have had to rewrite three quarters of it. Instead, it was to be expected: in a short time both the scientific data we have and the social and political context in which we live have changed. Genetics, to begin with, has made progress, fueled by formidable technological innovations. If the structure of our reasoning has remained the same, the fundamental works of Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Robert Sokal grafted onto the trunk of Darwinian thought, so much of what we could only guess thirteen years ago, now we can go directly to see : in the DNA of millions of Europeans, past and present.
We have understood many things; at the same time, for each answer found new questions have emerged, but it goes like this, when science works: with each step forward the perspective changes and we try to look a little further.
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Europe has also changed. Thirteen years ago, under the not disinterested push of Tony Blair, there was discussion of expanding the borders of the Union, even including Turkey. However, we were careful not to question the decision-making mechanisms, maintaining the principle of unanimity which, as we have seen, paralyzes every choice at the slightest breath of wind, even now that the United Kingdom is gone. Blair later expanded his reach, even wreaking havoc in the Middle East, but in the meantime the great recession sparked the sovereign debt crisis. The low-interest policy adopted by the European Central Bank, the ECB, has led to massive investments by northern banks in southern countries, which quickly accumulated unsustainable debts.
Misunderstandings and conflicts
Since then, the conflict between the so-called Club Méditerranée, the indebted southern countries, and the so-called frugal northern countries with their accounts in order, has marked European policies, generating misunderstandings and conflicts. The austerity measures imposed on the most indebted countries have plastically demonstrated the fragility of many social achievements, throwing millions of citizens (not only Greeks) into misery and most of the others in anguish for the future. Cuts in health care, pensions and education, job insecurity and, finally, the growing inflows of migrants have done the rest. A Europe already in difficulty has found a cat to deal with where it did not expect it, to those borders that until a short time before it was thinking of enlarging. He reacted in a broken way: forcing the country of first landing to take charge of asylum seekers, and whoever has seen has seen. The 2013 Dublin Regulation is the product of a myopic approach, in which one pretends not to understand that the problem (like many others) can only be tackled by the European Union as a whole, not downloading it to the first unfortunate border country . In the meantime, we are witnessing scenes that have already been seen: well-coordinated media campaigns cry out for invasion and blame immigrants for everything that doesn’t work, calling for a closure of the borders that is clearly impossible to achieve, even if it were decided. . The phenomenon has hateful, but also interesting aspects. For example, public opinion in the Mediterranean area shows feelings of rejection and even contempt for immigrants; but they resent when, from the public opinion of the so-called frugal countries, similar sentiments are expressed towards them. Everyone is someone else’s southerner, and realizing it could help.
When the first edition of this book came out, there was still no talk of sovereignty. The attitude towards the European institutions was more nuanced: it included mistrust of the so-called Brussels bureaucracy, but also some hope that at European level problems could be solved that we did not know or did not want to tackle on our own. In short, I don’t think I’m oversimplifying it if I say that over the last thirteen years the very foundations of European democracy have been questioned, with pushes towards authoritarian models, which meet with consensus and to which it is difficult to find an antidote. But the big picture isn’t just bleak. The health emergency in which we find ourselves seems to have also set in motion energies that were too timid to express themselves, which perhaps will allow us to revise old rules and mitigate old rigidities.