Keynes believed - not without a slightly perfidious attribute for the continentals of his island - that Montesquieu was the greatest French economist, when in France he was celebrated for other merits. All in all, Keynes had good reason. One could be caught in the insights of the baron de Secondat et de la Brède on Italy's ills. In his time, only Italy and Germany were "divided into an infinite number of small states" with governments "martyrs of the sovereignty" of others. The great existing nations crushed every sprout of that sovereignty which the small states pretended to exercise without succeeding. All this also had heavy implications in economic matters and not just politics. The Italian princes were halved in matters of currency, customs, taxation and, in other words, industry and prosperity of their subjects.
The present era of globalization threatens to push our economy back into a similar situation. United Italy had made a great effort to free itself from a condition of servitude towards foreign powers. Only slowly had our country escaped a destiny entirely marked by great powers. The conquest of sovereignty passed through a process of political resurgence, but corroborated only on condition that national governments knew how to create a territorial environment of civil coexistence in which to allow everyone to pursue, in peace, security and freedom, and achieve the objectives of prosperity according to their own qualities of skill, intelligence and industriousness. The state guaranteed that sociality necessary for the enhancement of skills. Achieving economic sovereignty was a condition for being able to effectively pursue economic policies according to the priorities established by successive governments. In modern terms, full employment, monetary stability and widespread prosperity could be coveted and, in large part, achieved only if it was possible to keep at bay what in economics are called the "external constraints" of the balance of payments with abroad and foreign exchange. Sovereignty was the requirement for being able to want and decide, otherwise everything was in vain and there was nothing left but to submit.
Understanding the starting conditions is of no small use in understanding those in which we find ourselves today. Montesquieu helps us again by indicating two aspects: critical mass and degree of openness. In the 700th century – he sarcastically reminds us – some states of the peninsula had almost fewer subjects than the concubines of some oriental sultan. This had economic and, then, political consequences of no small importance. States too small to have any claim to sovereignty were necessarily "open as a caravansary," obliged to receive and let go of anyone. In such regimes freedom of "passage" was often combined with oppressive political systems for residents: "open societies" in one sense only. To create a country-system it was necessary to bring order to such a chaotic situation in which no one could seriously wish to take root with affection and capital. The diaspora of Italian intellects was at its peak just then and continued afterwards, with two parentheses for the first 50-60 years after unification and in the first decades after World War II.
In the eighteenth-century lexicon those who settled in a territory, permanently or temporarily, were distinguished by nation in reference to origin, language and customs. The caravansary-type country, lacking a ius loci, limited itself to hosting them. Not even the natives could feel at home.
In Italy a certain critical mass was reached only after unification, but today the same is no longer sufficient to give a homeland and sovereignty. This also applies to Germany. Europe is our inescapable critical mass in order not to find ourselves in the caravansary again. We ran the risk of falling back on it, and we also saw what consequences can derive from politics as an exchange of pleasures and from the law as an instrument of power, and we ascertained towards which subjects a head of government prostrated himself in that same servile way with the which demanded to be treated at home. If a country wants to get out of the satrapies of the oriental type and does not accept that it is the sovereignty of others that decides its own destiny, it is also necessary to resume (with Europe) that arduous task called the Homeland, partially completed with Italy. In other words, it is a question of building not only a union but a system of solidarity in which justice is respected and given, the reputation honored for the merit that each one demonstrates and the same happens for the right recognition to be given to the civil and social commitment which is the fruit of a continuous collective cooperation. Without the homeland there is the caravanserai.
There are other risks of falling back into that 700th century of small states, emporiums of goods and crossroads of merchants, at the mercy of "the reverses and caprices of fate". The European Union itself, as it stands, does not help. Protection from reverses and the whims of fate, today as in the culture of two or three centuries ago, translates into protection of and from the markets. The spaces for political action are in there. The protection of the markets is an obvious need today and corresponds to the promotion of the integration and proper functioning of the mechanisms of open and competitive markets. In a good economy, sovereignty does not belong to the markets, but to consumers (the market is a tool, not a value), as can be learned from any elementary economics textbook. To be a truly good economy it is necessary that sovereignty, the legitimate one, knows how to defend itself from the markets when these are far from functioning well and from being as open as they should. In 2008, the collapse of a major bank like Lehman Brothers was enough to create the worst crisis since 29. The Lehman case demonstrates that, this time, the financial crisis did not occur through contagion but through the landslide of a pillar that was not considered load-bearing. The task of making markets work well is not an easy one, but the second task is far more difficult: to protect the economy and society. The sovereign debt crisis in Europe has demonstrated all the limits and incompleteness of the European project from this point of view. The current dimension of finance and financial markets dominates that of the state as it was in Montesquieu's time and even before. Especially in the financial sphere, the market power achieved in recent decades by some conglomerates is not tolerable due to the suspension of bankruptcy law against them and the danger of revising the sovereignty of states expropriated by merchants and bankers (again in this the history of lordships Italian should teach). Capitalism without bankruptcy is no longer capitalism. Someone rigs the game when failing becomes blackmail that questions the survival of the market itself, with all the social consequences of the case.
Faced with this, Europe has not protected its economy from the crisis in the financial markets and from the speculation that has taken hold of it. Citizenship rights in the euro area (still undefined) quickly melted away showing that it was not the same thing to have residence in one part or another. Pre-existing (and non-convergence) imbalances have been accentuated in the absence of precise adjustment rules, established in advance. The old logic of the retaliation of the ants on the cicadas has prevailed. A Europe as it exists neither protects the markets nor protects us from the markets and the risk that everyone finds themselves in their own caravanserai exists.
Since the 700th century, some national states have begun to build their own sovereignty following England belatedly which, in addition to the political revolution and the rule by law principle (i.e. to govern in compliance with the law), had endowed itself with a bank of issue and of a unified and default-proof public debt to rescue one's own state from the tyranny of the markets. Today's Europe has yet to complete the same step in order not to betray its tradition of open civilization. It also implies placing the law above everything and everyone, with a constitution that is not dictated by lobbies and merchants, otherwise, the danger is that of falling even further backwards, into a perhaps opulent feudalism, connected via the internet, but with new forms of vassalage and corvée. What is the advantage of replacing the world of knights, clerics and peasants with a new world, all technological and made up of a disturbing and less romantic triad of mercantile companies chasing rents, high bureaucrats ready to offer them and masses of ragged proletarians? Even in this way authentic and arbitrary power would be elsewhere, with a destiny that once again slips away from our hands.
