On an economic-energy basis, it no longer makes sense for Europe and Italy to invest in new gas infrastructure, such as pipelines or re-gasification plants. Already before COVID the existing ones were used at 50% of their capacity and the new TAP pipeline will contribute to this excess. Diversification of sources and security of supply are already guaranteed as assessed by the European Commission. The drop in demand for gas in Italy (minus 13%) and Europe has been structural since 2010. Post COVID this trend will be accentuated through the Green Deal. In the first five months of 2020, demand for gas in Europe plummeted by 7%, the sharpest drop recorded worldwide. The International Energy Agency estimates that gas demand in Europe will never again return to pre-COVID levels due to the advance of renewables. If we add the effect of energy efficiency in reducing gas consumption for heating (just think of the “ecobonus”) and within the industry, this trend will only increase. The Mediterranean gas thus loses the overly extolled strategic value, with the national interest changing towards securing a Green Deal also for the Mediterranean countries that will be most affected by climate change. Italy must therefore rethink its foreign policy in this perspective and use its diplomacy and alliances in a strategic way to influence the choices of others towards new cooperation objectives that shift from fossil to clean energy. – Luca Bergamaschi

A dangerous rearmament has been going on in the Mediterranean for some years now, accompanied by a return to power politics and a serious retreat of multilateralism. Not only does arming Cairo not protect our national interest, but it threatens our own strategic objectives: al-Sisi’s Egypt is on the side of Haftar in Libya, therefore on a path contrary to Rome’s interests.
It is not, therefore, an operation, as has been said and written in its defence, which strengthens peace and security in the Mediterranean. Rather, it contributes to strengthening what is defined in international relations as the security dilemma: that situation which is triggered in the international system when the instruments used by a State to increase its security (such as the purchase of weapons systems) provoke a reduction in the security of other States, thus triggering a spiral of mutual insecurity which inevitably leads to conflict. If the objective, by arming Egypt, is to rebalance the relations of force towards a Turkey perceived as too aggressive, the final result may not be as hoped.
The assumption that Egypt is an indispensable partner for the stabilization of the MENA region is also false: we have all too often made the mistake in recent years of confusing authoritarianism with stability, but until individuals are guaranteed individual security and civil rights, any stability will only be a facade.
It is therefore not by militarily strengthening a military dictatorship that the foundations for stability and security in the region will be laid. – Annalisa Perteghella

For Italy, supplying armaments to Mediterranean countries is not simply a commercial or labour policy (issues whose importance I do not underestimate). In the Mediterranean, Italy has always tried to bring the contenders into contact and to promote peace and stability. At the moment, two camps are facing each other in the Mediterranean, one led by Turkey, the other by Egypt. In this context, given which we should strengthen our naval presence in the Mediterranean, instead of controlling the arms embargo in Libya and reduce tensions in the eastern Mediterranean, we do something totally different: we take away two ships that were commissioned by our navy and sell them to Egypt. Could we have done something different to pursue our strategic interests? I think so: we could have raised the issue of arms supply at the EU level, promoting a European initiative with Germany for a moratorium on arms sales (many of which end up being used in Libya, where we, on the other hand, are loudly demand parties to comply with the embargo). Italy has already raised the issue of arms sales to Egypt: Emma Bonino did so after the Al Sisi coup in 2013. Once the frigates are sold, how can we tell other European countries that we must promote peace instead of arming troops on the ground? Let’s not be mistaken: Al Sisi’s Egypt is not Mubarak’s Egypt. During Mubarak’s era, Western countries hypocritically closed their eyes to internal repression, in exchange for the protection that Mubarak gave to Western interests in the Mediterranean. Now this is no longer the case: Al Sisi employs a very heavy internal repression and at the same time “set himself up on his own” at international level, unscrupulously pursuing his own interests on the international chessboard. Finally, we no longer call Egypt an “ally” since it did not want to provide us with real assistance and cooperation in the judicial field on the Giulio Regeni affair. To the Regeni issue has been added the unwillingness to cooperate also for the fate of Patrick Zaky. This is a matter of national interest: for Italy (irrespective of government) it is necessary to get to the truth about the murder and torture suffered by the young Italian researcher in Cairo in 2016. The prestige of our nation is at stake, and it cannot accept incomplete and convenient explanations. Such a heinous act, carried out by the security forces of a country as important as Egypt, cannot remain without an attribution of responsibility certified by an impartial process. – Lia Quartapelle

Although many observers continue to use the contrast between Iran and Saudi Arabia as the main filter for understanding the Middle East, since 2011 this dividing line has become less and less meaningful. For Europeans who wish to understand the southern shore of the Mediterranean, it is now appropriate to look at another much more important fault line of political division, namely the one that contrasts some nations such as the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia – which have become engines of the restoration of the authoritarian status quo in the Middle East after the shock of the Arab Spring – with emerging protagonists such as Turkey and Qatar, which since 2011 have become supporters of political Islam in various Middle Eastern contexts with the aim of overturning the balance of power in the region. Both these factions flirt with the West – Turkey is a NATO member while the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Qatar have close relations with the US and the EU – but neither is in itself aligned with Western political goals and interests. The West, and especially Europe, today continue to be divided, with individual countries playing the game of squeezing one of the two factions, supporting it in the hope of making economic and/or political gains (as does France, which has been close to the UAE for years and is increasingly advocating an anti-Turkish policy), or to play on the side, trying to keep channels open with both factions in the hope, also in this case, to be able to draw contingent benefits (as do, albeit in different ways, both Italy and the USA of Trump). Both the first and the second strategy have shown all their limits in recent years in dossiers as vital for energy security and EU policy as Syria and Libya. The time has come for Europe to rediscover the great Mediterranean power that is – much more influential than the medium-small powers that are the individual European Mediterranean countries taken individually – by developing its own strategy modelled on its values and interests. – Eugenio Dacrema

L'articolo Italy in the Mediterranean proviene da MondoDem.

There is no etymological equivalent to the word ‘emergency’ in German. The most common translations are “Ausnahmezustand”, a state of exception, or “Notstand”, a state of necessity. In any case, it denotes an extraordinary situation, a rupture from normality, not that the crisis is rooted in an order to which it is not advisable to return.

Language is not destiny, with all due respect to philologists. Nevertheless, in Berlin one will hardly perceive anything beyond the simple desire to return to a state of affairs which was already showing signs of poor health before the pandemic. Resistance to the mutualization of debt (Eurobonds), more systematic redistribution of funds between Member States, the slowness in making a big show of solidarity towards Italy, grudges and suspicions (largely unfounded) about the actual number of casualties claimed by the virus: in 2020, Germany seems to be anything but the leader of a continent dangerously adrift. Admittedly, Angela Merkel is perhaps the only European leader to have adequately reacted to the catastrophe, showing apprehensive but still calm self-confidence in her decision-making. Where other leaders have fallen victim to their own indifference (Johnson) or enthusiastically embraced the privileges of “wartime” leadership (Macron and Conte), the Chancellor has maintained her classic modesty, embodying continuity and institutional stability at a very dangerous juncture.

Control by inaction

This placidity, if you will, is what always distinguished Merkel’s Berlin, for better or for worse. It is what enabled to welcome migrants in 2015 despite opposition voiced within the CDU. It is also what determined the atrophic response to Emmanuel Macron’s proposals to relaunch the European project. Writing during last Big Crisis, the 2008-12 recession, Ulrich Beck commented how Merkel, the CDU (the ruling party par excellence) and by extension Germany used hesitation as a control tactic. German conservatism can blackmail through non-action because its political contribution is crucial for the exercise of power: just as no government can exist without the approval of the Konrad-Adenauer-Haus, no European solution can exist without the participation of Europe’s economic juggernaut. Still, German institutional capacities, both in terms of personnel and political will, are no greater than those of other Member States. German power is therefore reduced to a pure policy of veto, as is painfully evident today.

The need for increased “global responsibility” has now become an irritating leitmotif of German foreign policy. Certainly, avoiding a continental collapse should be a priority to an export economy, as is the preservation of its international supply chains, which for epidemiological reasons correspond to the regions hit the hardest by Covid-19 (French Grand Est, Rhine basin, Lombardy). But there’s also an internal dimension to a real German leadership — an element completely absent from the Christian Democratic vision for Europe.

A Federal Republic leading the Union by taking the interests of other member states into account would need to pursue an agenda of social justice and redistribution — which goes very much against the desires of CDU’s core constituency.

European leadership through social justice

Let’s see what overlaps exist between the country’s economic interests and the policies demanded by the rest of Europe. The issue of Eurobonds, for example, would have important strategic ramifications for European financial autonomy. It would inject more euro-denominated assets in the global market, making it more competitive against the dollar and working towards the emergence of the euro as a global currency. German exports would become comparatively cheaper and would render Europe autonomous from the policies of Washington D.C. It would also defuse the dangerous “doom loop” that regularly threatens to turn the default of banks holding national bonds into systemic crises, which also endanger German lenders and investors. A more secure and thus diversified European financial market is precisely Berlin’s long-term goal, as indicated by the attempts to complete the so-called banking union. Only these measures would provide a big enough market to allow the merger of domestic banks such as Commerzbank and Deutsche Bank. Such consolidation would create institutions large enough to fuel the transition towards a green economy capable of competing with its Chinese peers.

More liquidity, bolstered by safer debt, would also be the best alternative to the interest rate cuts imposed by the ECB to maintain inflation at tolerable levels. The latter policy has been notoriously criticized for the burden it imposes to small German depositors. However, the Central Bank’s difficulty in imposing its line also stems from Berlin’s policy to pursue low wages, which continues with much more obstinacy than restriction to public investments. The German economy has failed to adjust wages to workers’ growing productivity, which coupled with a failure to act decisively against skyrocketing rents has eroded the income of the middle and lower classes. This has meant less consumption and thus reduced imports — a fact directly responsible for the German trade surplus, the other major European grievance. Put simply, pursuing long-term goals for the benefit of the continent’s economy is first and foremost a question of domestic economic justice. This alignment of interests alone should be more than enough to spur progressive forces in the Federal Republic to be more… well, progressive. It’s time to move away from dogmas that equate the interests of the wealthy with those of Germany. Europeanism is social justice. Europeanism needs redistribution. A well-managed Union is the boon of the many, not the few.

10 years, one month

It is clear that many of the required measures, as well as a weakening of the conditionality clauses to access ESM funds, would come very close to the transfer system feared by many German politicians. It is also true that managing such a revitalization of the European project would require considerable political change, shifting dialogue as well as control of such mechanisms from the executive to the parliamentary and regional levels. Financial reforms on their own can’t be shortcuts. The involvement of the Bundestag is crucial for constitutional reasons: the partial transfer of fiscal sovereignty to European institutions is a non-starter for the Federal Constitutional Court. In its case history, Karlsruhe has shown that it considers instruments such as the bailed-out fund to be insufficiently democratic at best. But the political fact is also inescapable: the weakening of the German party system has led to a change in its institutional structure, making the chancellery an increasingly powerful entity detached from the dynamics of the Bundestag. The real danger is that with the fragmentation of the German legislature, unscrupulous political entrepreneurs such as the liberal Lindner or the CDU candidate Merz could jeopardize government policy by mobilizing a relatively small minority of MPs. The effectiveness of such maneuvers was seen in Thuringia, when the conflict between party currents and Berlin almost led to a government tolerated by the radical right.

The Federal Republic is essentially too strong not to play a leading role in the Union, but it is also too weak to be able to impose its will. Aware of this, Germany was able to negotiate its return to the European community, both after 1945 and 1989, thanks to what the historian Andreas Rödder called “safeguarding power by renouncing power”. An example? For some months now, a so-called “network approach” to Russia has been emerging in the corridors of Berlin, i.e. the elaboration of a three-way consensus between France, Germany and Poland to allow us to manage our shared, troublesome neighbor without bypassing or irritating the nations most suspicious of the German overtures to Moscow. Perhaps it would be time for the same blueprint to be adopted for the Eurozone governance. Progressive parties (the Social Democrats and Greens above all) will be crucial to wrestle Germany’s national narrative on Europe away from the conservative rule-by-immobility and propose immediate reform packages. The proposal to introduce a bank deposit insurance by finance minister Scholz followed precisely this logic: to serve Europe by escaping the trap of immobility and framing the discussion in terms beneficial to the country. Given the depth of the reforms that fiscal integration will inevitably require, this time the proposals will have to come from several political levels: from MPs, as already mentioned, but also from banking authorities, economists, political parties. German authorities are well-placed to launch this debate thanks to its dense network of companies, schools abroad, unions and foundations. Germany is also endowed with immense moral capital and, when willing, with the ability to listen and mobilize ad-hoc coalitions.

It will not be easy. A political revolution will have to be carried out, linking internal and external policy and achieving in few months what should have been a decades-long roadmap. Political fragmentation, stagnation and a succession of crises have accelerated the train of European decline that departed in 2008. But as Walter Benjamin once put it:

Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train — namely, the human race — to activate the emergency brake.

L'articolo Germany, Emergency Hegemon proviene da MondoDem.