Tired of war, like Jorge Amado’s Teresa, Europe is unable to look after and be self-sufficient. All around resounds only a frightening warlike clang, made up of places and words that evoke the terrible tragedies of the twentieth century. From Warsaw, while setting fire to the powders in the Royal Castle destroyed by Hitler’s Luftwaffe fighters, Biden relaunches the new “clash of civilizations” of the Third Millennium, no longer against radical Islam but against the “butcher” of Moscow: in Ukraine an epochal conflict is being fought between democracies and oligarchies, who will prevail between us and them, what values? From Moscow, while counting the dead and wounded in his criminal “special military operation”, Putin responds by launching a grotesque takeover bid on Harry Potter’s mother and relaunching a delusional anathema: it is the West that wants to destroy Russia, the “cancel culture” applied to Pan-Slavic thought, it recalls the book burnings made by the Nazis.
From Brussels, where it has just wasted ten very long hours of plenary discussion, the European Union does not have much to relaunch, if not its emptiness to lose. True, we have never been so morally convinced and compact. We are strongly supported by the idea of opposing the Little Father of the former KGB who, as the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff explains, will not stop because he is now a prisoner of his ideological narrative, therefore he cloaks this war with a messianic and civilizing dimension, passing it off as a battle almost metaphysical between the materialist West and Russia, the bearer of religious, spiritual principles. Faced with a threat of this magnitude, which is no longer only military but also of values, we know well what our place is in the world and for this reason we are strong-willed and eager to make a “common front”.
Where we lack and struggle, however, is in translating moral cement into unity of political action and economic innovation.
The European Council of two days ago is authentic. It had to shield not so much and not only hypersonic missiles, but also and above all the energy blackmail of the Russian Federation, which will sell gas and oil only to those who pay in rubles. But that summit unfortunately confirmed the fears already expressed in our newspaper by Domenico Quirico, Massimo Cacciari and Lucio Caracciolo. The EU appears fatally squeezed between the “three empires”. And, behind the facade, the formidable sanctioning array expressed so far by Euroland remains marked by the cultural incompatibilities and divergent interests of the individual Member States. Let’s think only of the right Italian proposal to set a maximum ceiling on the price of gas, which would reduce costs for the European energy market and margins for the Russian currency market: the Netherlands and Germany have stopped it, which plan to free themselves from oil and gas Moscow already within the first half of 2024. Or to the “special treatment for the Iberian Peninsula” in managing electricity prices: Spain and Portugal requested and obtained it, because they have so many renewable sources and few grid interconnections.
United in words, divided in deeds. So we end up playing the enemy’s game. While in Ukraine he destroys lives and cities, Putin in the West is betting on our weaknesses. He identifies the cracks in the Euro-Atlantic wall and slips into them to widen them. Why is he being tough in Italy, threatening ministers and denouncing newspapers, while he is softer with the other chancelleries? He knows well that here the murky Russophilic marsh is more abundant with fish, because he himself has been feeding it in the days of the yellow-green government. For the League, the Moscow Metropol is not just a beautiful Art Nouveau hotel built before the Bolshevik Revolution. For the Five Stars “From Russia with love” is not only the second chapter of the James Bond saga. We Italians should forget and make us forget these black pages of our history forever, when we risked handing over the keys of our democracy to a Russian dictator and a Chinese emperor. But above all we should realize that from Kiev to Lviv, from Mariupol to Odessa, a game is underway that will forever upset the rules of the game, on a local and global scale.
Let’s go back to Biden: who will win? Autocracies or democracies? That is, “we” or “them”? And if we win, as I believe and hope, how will democracies change? This is the key question that Giovanni Orsina formulated in these columns on March 3. His thesis is that democracies, based on consent and individual freedom, by definition generate centrifugal forces. This is why the presence of an enemy always helps them. After 11 September there was jihadism, after the austerity triggered by the Big Crash of 2008 there was populism, in the last two years there was Covid. Now there is the reincarnated Tsar, filling our psycho-political imagery with the old ghosts of the USSR: the Iron Curtain and the atomic threat, the SS-20s and Sigonella. These fears will have a centripetal function for democracies. And they will inevitably push public opinion towards a return of Power, bringing its lexicon back to the fore now and forcefully: “sovereignty”, “strength”, “national interest”, “security”, “defense”. In this scenario, the political fractures of the last decade – pro-European and sovereign, party and populism – seem destined to recompose.
Orsina’s thesis is fascinating. But it brings with it another crucial sub-question: can we imagine that with Putin’s dirty war the populist season is destined to end? Here the question becomes more complex. If we look at the dynamics that are already characterizing European leaders, the answer is not univocal. In Germany it would seem so: the government seems to be intent on not loosening the cords of the Stability Pact, and Scholz has just announced a $ 100 billion arms expenditure that transforms the German army from a “gang of aggressive campers” (see Limes, issue 2-2022) to third military power on the planet. In France one would say no: the presidential elections of 10 April have arrived, and despite the frenetic diplomatic activism of recent weeks Macron collapses by 8 points, while the two extremes of Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Melenchon are dangerously recovering.
In Italy, home of contradictions, both dynamics seem to coexist. As already happened in the times of the former Yugoslavia and Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq, war gives and war takes away. It defines identity and sanctions marginality. Mario Draghi, on the international front more secluded due to the country’s objective irrelevance, on the domestic front embodies that “return of power” of which Orsina speaks: the war has restored centrality to his government, whose fate seemed irremediably sealed before 24 February. On the left, the Democratic Party of Letta, despite its arithmetic limitations and its political contradictions, confirms itself as a system party and pillar of the coalition: the enemies call it “governance”, friends “responsibility”, but the result does not change. On the right, Meloni’s party continues its rise: whether real or instrumental, the clear Atlanticist turn gives it a “quarter of nobility” in the West, even if now a similar turn on the economic agenda is expected, a true black hole for Fratelli of Italy. In the background, with equal and opposite criticalities, there remain Lega and Movimento Cinque Stelle, the two no-longer-forces of the first tricolor populism. On the one hand Salvini. He crowned Putin as the planet’s highest statesman and now that he bombs civilians he can’t even call him by name. He wanted to give guns to the traffic police but now that we should send weapons to the Ukrainian resistance he says “not in my name”. On the other side is Conte. He signed an agreement as prime minister to bring defense investments to 2 percent of GDP, a “commitment made with NATO”, but now announces no to the 5S to the same increase in military spending, even at the cost of bringing down the government because “everyone will make their own choices”.
How the comic Italian guerricciola will end, inside the tragic Ukrainian war, is difficult to say. But in a year we vote. The outcome of the conflict promises to be devastating on the economic and social front: inflation and recession, rationed energy and Sundays on foot, food shortages and universal poverty. Among the war rubble, we can glimpse the dramatic “after” of which Tacitus wrote: “They make a desert, and they call it peace”. A desert made of fear, discomfort, social anger. And however confused, faded, battered, cricket-league populism seems ready to cross it.