We would like to unreservedly recommend reading a book. It is not a funny book (it talks about a great tragedy), nor easy (it is a historical essay), nor quick to read (it consists of 700 pages and for now it is only found in the original English version), but an interesting and innovative reconstruction history of a decisive event for us Europeans: the First World War, one hundred years after its explosion. It is metaphorically titled "The sleepwalkers", The sleepwalkers and, explanatory, "How Europe went to war in 1914" by Christopher Clark, professor of history at Cambridge.
The historiographical originality lies in the fact that Clark does not go, as is more commonly the case, in search of the causes of the conflict, an approach which inevitably leads to the identification of a culprit. Instead, he bases the analysis on the multiple events, major and minor, that followed one another, intertwined and crossed over, complicating beyond all limits the background picture, increasingly difficult to manage and increasingly characterized by the progressive unawareness of governments towards the tragic final solution .
In short, the complexity of the facts and the inadequacy of the ruling classes and therefore the call for co-responsibility of all the actors. In fact, Clark argues, the crisis that led to the war in 1914 was the result of a political culture shared by all the protagonists, which is why the final event cannot be assimilated to an Agatha Christie novel, where the aim is to unmask the murderer, perhaps with a still smoking pistol, because, if we must speak of pistols, in this case there was one in the hands of each of the actors, especially the older ones.
The war was therefore a tragedy, not a crime to be attributed to the malevolent will of one or more states. And what was this political culture? It emerges from the many episodes that followed one another from the last decades of the previous century up to the fateful summer of 1914, amidst changes of alliances, strategic repositioning, risky military actions with uncalculated outcomes, ambiguities, simulations and dissimulations of a diplomacy in perpetual fibrillation, internal antagonisms to political alignments and transversal agreements even between countries deployed on different fronts, the struggle for primacy between politics and the military classes, up to the easy and self-interested optimisms of a short war.
The aggressive policies of Russia towards the Straits and the self-interested protection of little Serbia, the Libyan adventure of the Italians which offered the right hand to Slavic nationalisms to attack the decaying Ottoman Empire on other fronts, the alliance with aggressive aims between France and Russia are just some of the elements at play. In short, for Clark, it was not only the imperial paranoia of Germany and the expansive and vindictive aims of Austria/Hungary, after the attack on Sarajevo, that unleashed the conflict.
On the other hand, the lack of understanding of how high the stakes were, despite some prophetic reflections on the scenario that was opening up, is paradoxical. And the manifestations of narrow-mindedness in the press were also significant. That is why the protagonists went to war like sleepwalkers, looking but not seeing, pursuing their absolute reasons, yet blind to the horror they were bringing into the world.
A century later, the question of how it could have happened is still topical, but what should interest us, Clark wonders again, is whether that intricate complexity is still part of the present European political scene, in which the actors of the crisis of Eurozone, while aware of the catastrophic outcomes of an extreme situation such as the bankruptcy of the euro, can act in favor of specific and conflicting interests, without calculating the consequences due to increasingly complex decision-making processes, and perhaps not as transparent at least for the municipality citizen.
Above all, it should be avoided that the individual actors put themselves in the position of exploiting the possibility of the final catastrophe, as a lever to secure prefigured advantages. Fortunately, the differences compared to then are considerable, above all as all countries have a clearer understanding of the essence of the problem and greater mutual trust, thanks to the supranational institutions which did not exist at the time.
But this is not enough if there is no systematic compromise action between the opposing interests. The rigors of an untempered monetarism of Germany and the Nordic countries in the face of a progressive reduction of the economic policy levers of the countries with greater economic/financial imbalances such as those of southern Europe are not an easy terrain to govern.
Among some of these, until recently listed among the weakest, the resentments of those who made the reforms towards those who instead promised without keeping them have recently emerged. But advertising policies that have found it difficult to implement have not been effective either, serving to buy time and create illusions.
And neither are the controversies, even angry ones, of those who want to give lessons to others and of those who neither want nor can accept those lessons. Nor does the succession of economic forecasts help, with data churned out in bursts which, instead of helping, prevent the evaluation of decisions in a context of more stable knowledge; this too is the result of the excesses of the financialisation of the economy which has radically transformed the temporal value of information and its interested use.
With speculation placed in a position of absolute advantage, thanks to the perennial state of uncertainty. The most serious threat, and with incalculable effects, of Greece's exit from the euro hitherto buffered has reached its maximum dramatization and no concrete actions can be glimpsed at the moment to make it ineffective. We believe that the average citizen, who does not want to fall into the demagogic excesses of both sides, thinks of three essential questions, currently unanswered, as the founding elements of his or her confidence.
They are: lack of leadership of the rulers and representatives of the bodies of the Union, lack of representation of some of them, who are not sure about the positions of the national electorate on the best (and most painless) recipe for exiting the crisis , excessive concentration of power in the hands of the European Central Bank. (The demiurge, also in Greek tragedy understood as a theatrical genre, has a salvific but ambiguous role when he makes up for the emptiness of others).
The sentiment is that the lack of rebalancing of these imbalances will hardly lead to acceptable solutions, also because, in many cases, the situations of individual countries, already diversified by history and starting conditions, in recent years have certainly not come close to the macro credit, finance and public debt activities and therefore to the profiles of the real economy. We hope that the Banking Union and the newly born single market for payments will contribute to this as soon as possible, necessary but not sufficient conditions, outside of a more cohesive overall picture.
We don't want to give recipes, too many are busy doing it. Indeed we want to add another perplexity, even at the risk of carelessness. The ordinary citizen does not understand why a community of 550 million inhabitants, highly civilized and with tragic and recent stories of conflicts, has so far failed to manage the conditions, however precarious, of a country that has 10, with the 1,8% of total GDP, avoiding the rupture, whose consequences he says are most feared, all the more serious the more difficult to predict.
And he wonders if the "Greek ghost" had to materialize even with the aggravating circumstance of the post-referendum catastrophe (we are marching ad horas with the banks closed for a week), since so far there has been no structural approach to the problem, but certainly not the use of ethical labels. In short, everyone believes they are right and have the solution in hand, without being willing to compromise.
Far be it from us to trivially bring up the recurrence of history, but it must be clear from now on that the responsibility, as Professor Clark has tried to show us for other tragic circumstances, would also lie with all the actors in this case. (especially of the majors), for not having been able, like XNUMXst century sleepwalkers, to effectively promote and govern cooperative gaming inside and outside their respective countries.
But do you want to put the satisfaction of leaving such a vast field of study to the historians who will come?
