The parliamentary debate on the Draghi government and a subsequent letter to Republic they allowed Giorgia Meloni, president of Fratelli d'Italia, to reiterate his deepest feelings Europeanism, but of the confederal type. Quite different from the clearly federal path traced in his speech by Mario Draghi. Federalism means transfer of sovereignty by the States, gradual or immediate, total or partial, and in the case of the EU it is gradual and partial, but a transfer of sovereignty. There is a reality that goes beyond the States and in that forum, with the due procedures, decisions are made together, and the States adapt. Confederalism instead means cooperation agreements, alliances, in full autonomy, without the constraints of treaties if not, precisely, of alliances, which, as known, fully respond to the ancient norm of the pacta sunt servinda, rebus sic stantibus. And the rebus they change often. So all pro-Europeans, but in a different way as Giorgia Meloni says?
It's not like that at all. Behind the constant use of the confederal model there is the attempt to reassert the total supremacy of the nation states, an attempt which re-emerges from time to time and from which theMsi, the party of origin of the Brothers of Italy, instead remained well away for a long time. The party that will be owned by Giorgio Almirante, secretary for the second time from 1969 to 1987, voted for the Czech Republic in 1951, an openly federal project and certainly not a confederal one; for the even more federal Treaties of Rome in 1957, with a warm greeting of common European hopes from Augusto De Marsanich, then president of the party. And the same distinctly pro-European tones were adopted by MSI Pino Romualdi in December 1978 when he announced the vote in favor of the EMS, forerunner of the euro, and declared: “It is one thing to talk about Europe, another thing to express one's own Europeanism and another thing is to seriously want to build a European reality that could definitively make Europe regain political consciousness, as well as the economy, and make it a term of new respect in the framework of international politics". A healthy European nationalism, more or less. Even because the PCI always voted against Europe, from '51 to '78, and the MSI was therefore on the opposite side. Then between 89 and the very early 90s the party system changed, the former PCI became social democratic and pro-European, the far right moved from the MSI to AN and 10 years later to Fratelli d'Italia, and the fascination of nationalism in the strict sense, national, traditional, and a little nostalgic relaunched confederalism.
To have clearer ideas on what confederalism is and how it works, and to experience the lack of credibility of Meloni's theses first hand, it would be useful to reread the very first pages of the autobiography of Jean Monnet, the French grand commis who was the inspirer and director of the European projects then launched by Schuman, De Gasperi, Adenauer and various other statesmen, and first president of the Brussels Commission. They open with a motto: "Let's not unite states, let's unite men". The first chapter was titled "The limits of cooperation”. And on page three you read this statement: “You can't imagine how far the word alliance, which has such a strong reassuring force for peoples, is instead empty of content in the field of action when one entrusts oneself to the traditional mechanisms of cooperation”. Committees, joint commissions, joint decisions taken by the committees, transmitted to the capitals, and there systematically changed, cut, mutilated, canceled, emptied by governments, parliaments and bureaucracies.
Monnet spoke on the basis of a semi-century of experience which began as a young man in 14-18 in the inter-allied executive commissions, especially Anglo-French, where it took two years, for example, to arrive at a common management of merchant naval tonnage while the German submarine war raged without quarter because no one wanted to relinquish control over their transport fleet. The same happened initially during the Second World War. This means confederal: together, but in the name of goodwill, as known perishable goods; or of a treaty without constraints and without penalties, heck we are autonomous, and therefore of the value of the paper on which it is written. Czech, Mec, Cee, Eu and the euro were born on another logic.
"We have a different vision and we are not anti-European for this”, he writes now Giorgia Meloni. A "different vision" that says that Europe needs to be redone. With the magical "alliances" mentioned by Monnet?
A better reflection, by Giorgia Meloni, also deserves the theme Health. “Where is Europe? What is Europe doing?” asked the leader of the Brothers of Italy a year ago, at the outbreak of the pandemic. And he writes now, after having recalled that it is the European Conservatives, the sovereign group of which he is president, who are asking for "a better Europe": "Let us take the fight against the pandemic as the last example: it makes sense that the ubiquitous EU does not have a strategy not even unique in terms of health or lockdown? And so on, from foreign policy to defense via research". We are at the paradox, to be kind. Does the Union do nothing in healthcare, or little? But health care is outside the federal project, it is confederal. It was essentially defined as a national competence and not of the Union by the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 (art.129) where the Union is called «to encourage cooperation between member states», that's all. Cooperation, read carefully, cooperation. The Treaty of Amsterdam (1997) extended various EU competences, prepared for enlargement to the East, but prohibited – exactly, it prohibited – health care harmonization because it was a competence of the States and because the States wanted it that way. Giorgia Meloni forgets that states are always jealous of their respective prerogatives.
On the Research, however, the EU is not absent, on the contrary, but operates with funds much more than with control of strategies. Foreign policy and defense? But does the leader of the Brothers of Italy have any idea what transfers of sovereignty would be needed to have a limited, but real and if necessary effective, common defense and diplomacy? Giorgia Meloni does not even want to hear about transfers of sovereignty. So she doesn't expect miracles.
Finally, a note on method. Giorgia Meloni proudly indicates that she belongs to the group in the European Parliament ecr, which defines itself as a conservative reformist and antifederalist, and which has its pillar in the Polish PiS, the ruling clerical-sovereign party in Warsaw, and a very combative ally in the Hungarian Fidesz by Viktor Orbán, in the EPP until they kick him out. I am great pars of the Visegrad group – Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Hungary – so mentioned up to months ago also by Matteo Salvini, nations that knew freedom only in 1919, after centuries of foreign domination, of the more fortunate Viennese Habsburgs and the less fortunate Russian Romanovs. After 19, twenty years of illusions and confusion followed, intoxicated by a freedom to which they generally failed to give shape before being subdued again, with weapons, and divided in 39 between Hitler's Germany and Soviet Russia to exit the eventually exhausted and controlled by Moscow, with the Moscow systems, until 1989. It would be useful to read a few pages of Georges Simenon, a Parisian journalist sent to those lands in the 30s to describe the misery, the confusion, the shapeless myth of freedom unable to give itself a purpose, the dream of an independence never had for seven or eight generations and which they only rediscovered in the last decade of the last century, and which still intoxicates them, to the sweet sound of the euro which every year the detested Europe semi-federal sends them to better sing the confederal glories. These are countries that have been very mistreated by history and that still have to recover themselves. It is not far-sighted for a reality like Italy to join their school.
