History against Europe?” “

“Europe ought to have abolished history. History has abolished Europe”. With this provocative remark begins the editorial in the last number of “Limes” (1-2006), Italian bimonthly review of geopolitics. Entitled “The vendettas of history”, the editorial is dedicated to the difficult process of European integration, now ever further than ever from the dream of its founders. It’s a Europe in which national and regional forms of particularism seem to be gaining the upper hand over Community solidarity. We present some passages from the editorial for reflection. A GOAL NOT REACHED. “In a world ever more crowded with competitors, a European subject continues to be lacking”; if no one denies the existence of the European Union, “who can pretend she’s a global player?” says the editorial. “To give itself an identity and hence a subjectivity – observes Limes -, any organization has a need to delimit itself from the external world. But this is an exercise which pro-Europeans have always scrupulously avoided”. The main cause of the non-achievement of the European objective, born from the laudable aim of “pacifying an area martyred by the futile massacres of the first half of the twentieth century”, consists, says the editorial, in the “sin of intellectual arrogance” which underlies it. According to Limes, “the objective was not reached especially because it was improbable”: it was based on “the illusion of ground zero: from the suicide of the Old Europe must – or at any rate may – rise the sense of a shared destiny. End of national selfishness. Birth of a higher common interest… Hypotheses – comments Limes – that are rather paradoxical for an area of the world that had only recently given rise to forms of authoritarianism and totalitarianism supported by displays of popular enthusiasm, from Fascism to Nazism to the Communism of Soviet stamp”. BETWEEN SELF-DETERMINATION AND PARTICULARISM. After 1989, continues the editorial, “the principle of self-determination swung into action”. It was “applied with devastating results in the Balkans. In the name of the right of peoples to choose their own destiny, ostensibly oppressed nations mobilized for war”, often cultivating “more prosaically economic interests”. It was an act of distancing themselves from the Old Continent represented, according to Limes, also by the “ Mitteleuropa of Habsburg stamp”, the “Baltic macro-region”, the “Atlantic projection of the Spain of Zapatero which looks to Hispanic America”, and the “vocation of Great Britain” to be the priority ally of the USA: a reality of “geopolitical representations considered obsolete”, to which should be added “the decline of new axes conceived to wipe out the past in the name of Europe”: especially the “Franco-German axis, which is no longer either the motor or the steering wheel” of the Eu. In addition, regions like Scotland, Corsica, the Basque Country and Catalonia “are rediscovering presumed particular roots and interests”. What’s more, according to the analysis of Limes, “the utilitarian federalism of Delorian type (those who have more money should distribute it to those who have less) is losing ground. National and regional forms of particularism prevail over Community solidarity. The old members of the club don’t like financing enlargement”. This has given rise to the tendency “to renationalize regional policies”: a re-affirmation of a “sacred egoism” of which “Great Britain is the standard-bearer”, as she demonstrated “at the European summit of 15-17 December 2005”. And while “France holds jealously onto her common agricultural policy”, other countries “tend to claim from the State the funding that, following enlargement”, they will no longer receive via Brussels. WHAT EUROPE IS POSSIBLE? “Decomposition of the fabric of the European Community and disaffection of the Europeans”: that, in sum, is the diagnosis of Limes on the state of the process of integration. “So fragmented and unstable an area could create more problems than it solves. Without any kind of European subjectivity, the economic and geopolitical decline of the continent seems inevitable. And it may produce explosive mixtures, especially in more fragile and disoriented societies”. So what then is the solution? It is, the editorial suggests, a healthy and constructive realism: “Let us look at what remains of EU construction from our point of view, not from some improbable European heaven”. Two objectives in particular are identified. First, we need to “reduce the geopolitical complexity of the continent (45 states in 10 million square kilometres)”, “not to re-compose entities that defy amalgamation”, but “to aggregate states and territories around common interests, cultures and projects, so that the frontiers within Europe are bridges, not barriers”. So, yes to the “rapprochement between former Habsburg countries or between the Baltic States, so long as it be not hostile to neighbouring countries”. Second, concludes the editorial, Europe cannot “ignore the Mediterranean area that” some members “ignore or intend to cut out” in order to protect themselves from migratory pressures from the south”; a field in which, due to its own history and geography, Italy is called to play a key role, with “her Mediterranean responsibility also towards the rest of the continent”.