There is an important cultural and political event in Italy right after Ferragosto, around the 20th as the starting date, when many Italians are still bathing their limbs in the beautiful sea of the peninsula. This is the Rimini Meeting, a historic event organized by CL, or Communion and Liberation, now in its 45th edition, presented moreover on a warm July evening in Brussels at the Italian Embassy. I was there too, in the Belgian capital for other reasons, and I was struck by the double symbolic sphere of that presentation: our embassy and the place of the European institutions, of Europe. In fact, many Italian MEPs were present.
In this vein, this year’s Meeting was opened by Mario Draghi, who spoke lashingly about the EU. The great economist, our former President of the Council of an enlarged majority born on Covid issues, the former great governor of the European Central Bank, the man who saved the euro with the famous Whatever it takes in 2012, gave a very eloquent and very tough speech about Europe at the historical moment we are living.
“No more illusions,” he said, “the era when we thought we counted for something is over. We are condemned, in short, through no fault of our own, to a kind of secondary status while others rewrite the world order. They do it economically, financially, technologically, militarily.”
What about the dear old continent? The cradle of civilization and culture, still a major market, 500 million citizens just to stay in the EU, which is still smaller than geopolitical Europe. A potentially still decisive world, but plagued by fatal divisions in foreign policy and suffocating bureaucratic centralism. Plagued by a lack of vision. The unified political creature that so many intellectuals dreamed of was never in fact born.
Draghi is disappointed but consistent with his theories, expressed in a paper branded as idealistic a few months ago. There was talk of a new Marshall Plan, of giant collective investments in digital and ecological transition, to prevent the Green Deal from becoming an economic trap. There was talk about communication technologies, a common army, a new weight in the world’s big issues, starting with Ukraine and Gaza. None of this has happened.
Lots of applause in Rimini, even bipartisan applause. But it was not an end-of-summer epitaph. Some say Draghi wants to scale the Von der Leyen role. We shall see, the die is cast … and besides, the Rubicon (of Caesarian memory) is that way.
The article Will this be the year of the Draghi? comes from TheNewyorker.
