Gaddafi's regime is over, but it is still unclear who will be his successor. Certainly the provisional government set up by rebel forces in Benghazi is now Libya's official representative abroad, but no one knows how much support it garners internally. This problem will naturally have to be solved by the Libyans themselves, with procedures that everyone hopes to be as democratic as possible, but the reality is that after more than forty years of dictatorship and about sixty years after the creation of a united and independent Libya, this country it could have great difficulties in going down the road of a real reconstruction of the state.
This will require the help and support of the countries that supported the uprising. But above all it is necessary to avoid more or less explicit attempts to place the country under the protection of this or that power, perhaps even with the justification of a supposed "key role" played in this first phase of the civil war. Already at the end of World War II the risk of a tripartite division of Libya had emerged, with Tripolitania more autonomous, Fezzan under French protection and British Cyrenaica. Today the games and divisions would perhaps be different, but the result would be equally disastrous, fueling the inevitable conflicts and internal jealousies from the outside and effectively blocking both the peacemaking and reconstruction processes.
One of the ways to avoid disaster is to entrust the political leadership of this second phase to an international institution. If during the military phase this was NATO, in this second phase it should clearly be the European Union. The Treaty of Lisbon gives the Union the tools and skills necessary to carry out this task, provided that some of the major European powers do not go in a completely different direction.
Certainly this would also be the best solution for Italy, which has enormous interests in Libya and which remains the natural partner of this country thanks to the many commercial, industrial and technological ties established in all the past years (before and during the dictatorial regime of Gaddafi). A clear-cut position of Italy, which refuses a national management of relations with the new regime, in favor of a European management, would be a strong signal, difficult to ignore even by those who, today, present themselves as the guarantor of the new Libya .
