Anti-Europeanism and its resistible rise: it can be dismantled

The Villa Vigoni Manifesto (Ed. launched last year in Rome by a group of young scholars and professionals) came at the right time from the right people. The 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome was not a celebratory occasion like many others. It fell in one of the most difficult moments of our common European life, marked by an apparently unstoppable tide of political movements, which obtain growing support in various countries of the Union with sovereign slogans capable of capturing the unease and anxieties of so many of our populations, promising a better life sheltered by their respective borders, without immigrants, without the budget constraints imposed by Europe and without the too many rules with which it dominates us. With slogans like this, the Brexit referendum was won in 2016. Elsewhere this is not the point, but anti-Europeanism is now feared as the glue for a possible majority in the next European Parliament. 

Should we surrender? Should we do like the current European leadership, which - note the authors of the Manifesto when explaining the reasons that led them to write it - is proving to be lacking in courage and vision, ready at most to limit the damage to the status quo? The prevailing opinion, among pro-Europeans themselves, is becoming this, because Europe's current unpopularity would not allow for more and in particular it would be deaf to the arguments, all rational, with which its cause can be supported, in the face of the strong emotional grip on counterarguments. And here comes the topic of the belly, at least in Italian. Voters are now reacting with their bellies, populists speak precisely with their bellies, and the appeal to reason is for this very reason a loser. 

Vivaddio, it's not necessarily like this, the Manifesto tells us. And he tells us at the right moment, because there is a growing feeling that the invincibility of the belly is the fruit more of cowardice than of truth. And even if it is true, to put it in less vulgar terms, that emotion always plays its part in pushing on one side or the other, it is by no means certain that rational arguments asserted with clarity and energy in favor of causes for which it is also possible to arouse sympathy. 

Certainly, in the first decades of our common history, the cause of integration was able to make use of a message (messianic, as Joseph Weiler defined it) with an unparalleled emotional force, "no more wars between us, no more sons, brothers, fathers who died by the millions , no more endless expanses of crosses on the sides of our streets”. The message initially spoke to the generations that had lost those children, those brothers, those fathers and then continued to speak to those immediately following, who had them at least in memory. After it certainly lost its force, it became itself a (only) rational argument. But it's not at all true - let's have the courage to say it - that a rational argument today lacks the ability to circulate and be accepted. 

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We are in the age of social media, of fake news that goes viral, of widely circulated prejudices. I find it paradoxical that one thinks of legal limitations to combat them and rather does not work to counter them, circulating the truths they deny just as widely. If there is an interest, there are also those who move, and the effect is achieved. Let's think of that mother, worried that her immunosuppressed child might find himself surrounded by unvaccinated children at school. You have collected two hundred thousand signatures against the "no vax" and thus allowed reason to deal a bad blow to prejudice. 

It can also be done for Europe. Meanwhile, it can be presented in a much less hateful way than the unchallenged anti-Europeans do today. Are you a plethora of bureaucrats? No, you have fewer employees than a large municipality. However, they spend their lives writing incomprehensible and abstruse rules that we should apply. No, that's not true either. Let's compare a European directive, made up of short and clear articles, and one of the many Italian laws made instead of articles each three pages long, all full of references to other laws. She does things that don't interest us anyway. This is an even bigger lie. Are we interested in the protection of nature, are we interested in protecting our territories where we have panoramas not to deface and biodiversity not to be destroyed? We Italians were forerunners in this, but then it was Europe that thought of us for everyone with its network of protected territories, Natura 2000, and which has now become the vigilant guarantor of these heritages, also towards us. Do we think it right that before each work the Via is carried out, the environmental impact assessment? Well, this is a European invention, to which we have adapted. Are we against unhealthy and smelly landfills? It is Europe which has banned them and which, if anything, fines us, because we continue to have them. Are we against the extension of concessions without a tender, which always reward the same and prevent others from asserting themselves? It is Europe that takes charge of it and fights against these privileges. 

It cannot therefore be in what it does that we are dissatisfied with Europe. It will initially appear paradoxical to our fake news consumers, but eventually they too will have to digest it: the truth is that we are dissatisfied with what Europe does not do and should do, not with what it does and is right to do. Aren't the sovereigns themselves shooting at Europe, because the southern border of Italy is not an Italian border, but a European one and should therefore Europe take care of it? So they themselves are asking for more Europe, not less, and there is indeed a need for more Europe. There is a need for it in immigration matters, in the fight against terrorism, where a European intelligence would be much more effective for the timeliness of interventions, in social protection, to guarantee a level that cannot be passed (downward) of the same protection, in governing the eurozone, to make risk reduction and risk sharing go together. 

So it's time to tell her these things, patiently, but also firmly, without the fear of being marginalized or disqualified in the name of belly. And then, in the name of whose belly? Here it comes out because the message of the Manifesto, in addition to appearing at the right time, also comes from the right people. The analyzes of the distribution of the vote by generation in the Brexit referendum, which we know well by now, and the polls we have on other countries uniformly tell us one thing, that the belly of young people is not the same as the generations that precede them. Emotionally, in fact, young people are much less averse to Europe than their older fellow citizens: they appreciate the things (to which I was referring) that Europe does, they feel more gratified than offended by borders without bars, they love educational stays and job opportunities, perhaps for a while, in other EU countries. Naturally they are not all like that, there are those no less Gurdulù of the elders in the face of anti-European prejudices, just as there are - and there always have been - those reached by the crude ideologies of ethnic nationalism. 

However, here we touch an important watershed for understanding the strength of the current success of anti-European sovereignty, but also for appreciating its limits. It is the watershed that separates, in the sixty-year history of European integration, the generations that initiated and consolidated that integration, those who took over immediately after, who have lost the strong (messianic) motivation of the first ones and have not yet been joined by the educational and cultural benefits of a European training, finally those who have had or are having this training. Well, fate would have it that one of the most difficult situations Europe has gone through thanks to the accumulation of different crises in the same short span of years (the economy, new technologies, immigration, terrorism), arrived when the middle generations were and still are the heaviest; the least European, those in which the value of Europe is least felt. This applies to voters and it also applies to the ruling elites, who have become increasingly used to putting the national interest before the European one. 

It is striking - and therefore cannot be ignored - that in countries such as Austria and Italy it is also young people, in their forties or even in their thirties, who take over the government on the wave of anti- or very un-European positions. It is striking, however, not to deny what I said about the younger generations, but because it forces us to ascertain - and we had already done so - that the contagion does not spare even young people and, moreover, political opportunism among them too finds its spaces and its protagonists. There are these protagonists, but there are also the authors of the Villa Vigoni Manifesto, young scholars, figures from the professional and business world, all in their thirties or at most forties. They are the right people, because they speak on behalf of generations that largely think like them. 

Hence the reasons for trust; confidence in a European future that is still possible, which today we must protect from the snatches of Eurosceptics, but also advance so as not to frustrate the generations who believe in it and who, over the years, will take it ever more firmly into their own hands. I must also add that I personally feel the urgency, but I also feel the reasons for gradualness. I like the Manifesto, but I don't agree with the proposal, addressed to the national Parliaments, to nominate their delegates, so that they may convene in Rome and immediately draft the Constitution of a Federal Union, to be approved by only the majority of the Member States. Robert Schuman himself would say that the hostility that has grown between us in recent years does not now allow for such a long step. The solidarity of which he spoke is needed and therefore time is needed for it to return to formation. But the path of reforms aimed at greater integration in the various fields must be resumed, knowing that anti-Europeanism will not be numbered, but neither will it have a long life. 

We need not credit these gray middle generations with more resources, and more longevity, than they may have. Therefore, in courageously countering the noise they are able to make today, knowing that history, and demography, are on our side, not on their side, is a not irrelevant detail.