The sea and Italy: just a flat expanse of umbrellas?

(To Gino Lanzara)
27/08/18

Although it may seem bizarre, geopolitics also affects our country. The fact that it does not belong to the following disciplines national popular, does not prevent the dynamics of international relations from touching our shores leaving tangible signs. The term "banks" is causal: Italy reaches out into the Mediterranean and has always interwoven a symbiotic relationship with the sea, nourishing itself, in fact, of brackish water, in spite of what they see in a few.

What we are dramatically lacking is a maritime strategy, a lack that sounds like an oxymoron for a nation that, from the sea, has drawn its fortunes from the distant past. Like it or not, the evolution of any institutionalized state can only go by its physical geography; not to support it ends up by strategically penalizing the policy, depriving it of valuable, potentially sustainable leadership: in the course of history some of the historically most relevant Italian geopolitical actors, such as Venice, have understood the concept of maritimeity; the Savoys understood this (and badly) with great delay; all the others, especially in the last 40 years, have simply thrown it into oblivion, putting aside, in fact, the very concept of national interest, read as an uncomfortable and "guilty" (strategic) legacy of the past.

With the change in the international geopolitical framework, the Mediterranean context has recalled all the coastal powers to take note of a decrease in the hegemonic role of the American ally, knowingly engaged elsewhere; moving from a role of pure mediation to a proactive part, however, did not find it ready, so much so that it had to undergo a condition of instability that, in a very short time, dissolved the certainties that Italy had put in the exercise of its influence , Libya docet. The assertiveness and the resourcefulness of powers unrelated to the Mediterranean basin like Russia and China, and the search for a balance of power between Israel and Middle Eastern countries, has not found a real and rational Italian strategy, a strategy that should have been broad spectrum, comprehensive, able to summarize the many aspects that, physiologically, characterize international relations.

Like it or not, for our country the sea was, is and will always be vital, and will in any case involve major economic implications; the fact that the national projection on the sea does not collect particular interests does not mean that the maritime climate it's not important. For Italy, the sea is trade, it is energy, it is the junction between a strategic idea and the very existence of national interests; the Mediterranean therefore offers Italy, despite its perceptible underlying political fragility, all the possibilities to rise to an important role in relations between the various coastal States, allowing it to hypothesize an action of decisive protection of national interests in "its" basin, and then projected towards waters that are more distant but fundamental to the fate of the country. Protection and Projection, the basics of a natural power politics for a country based on an economy of transformation, and with companies able to establish themselves in particularly "difficult" contexts, such as ENI, and in need of protection that only an efficient Navy can guarantee.

If it is true that ours Blue Economy it can not ignore the search for sources and resources in areas overseas, it is equally true that it is no longer conceivable not to realize the conceptual construction of a strategic complex of activities dedicated solely and exclusively to the sea, and which summarize both the economic aspects and the more operational strictly linked to a modern and effective Naval Force placed at their defense. From the Mediterranean area, the Italian strategic concept can be expanded, since the sea is triggering ever deeper and more articulated connections for a globalized and multipolar reality which, as far as we are concerned, can not be completed in the Integrated Maritime Policy of European origin.

Italy, never before, needs to find the junction between geopolitics, geoeconomics and strategy; the country needs a true maritime geopolitics, in the same way as the major thalassocracies which, to their foundations and without hypocrisies, have laid the cornerstone of maritime power as a geopolitical concept, not just a strategic and military one. Economics, trade, energy, investment with a valid defense naval component are therefore part of a broader geopolitical conception that must be learned completely and, above all, now that the infrastructural and logistic components of the sea begin to manifest the need for decisive action, perhaps exploiting the economies of scale that the system offers.

International relations, however, and as already seen above, recall the importance of "perceptions", and the perception that the political class has of the maritime complex is extremely labile, low, absolutely not calibrated for its relevance both in the political sphere. internal and external to the borders.

The Italian community, after years of guilty self cultural cancellation, does not even remotely conceive of the possibility of being a founding part of a maritime power, and this led the ruling classes of the country system not to have even a saline alleles in their genetic code, not even one gram of that culture of people that, still today, animates the other continental powers, intelligentsia that has confused the past rhetoric with the objective reality that underlies it.

In fact, there is no strategic center of the sea that subsumes the specific technical functions that, in the last legislatures, have been lost and parceled out; there is no coordination point that holistically integrates all the "sea" subjects under a political-strategic governance that ensures freedom of navigation and access to maritime destinations in a frame defined by international law, a "thinking head" that allows see the expenses for the modernization of the fleet for what it is: an investment aimed at supporting the industrial complex and to ensure the protection of the maritime routes from the asymmetric threats brought by terrorism and piracy, and favored by obligatory passages and fixed routes.

Most of the globe is made of water; to reduce or, worse, to deny the importance of an efficient Navy for a peninsular country means to go against reality and reason, it means to deprive oneself of what has always been one of the most effective instruments of foreign policy, it means to think of Italy as an immense pier of arrival, and not as a port from which to leave and projected beyond an increasingly territorialised Mediterranean despite not being divided into Exclusive Economic Zones, except for France, Secretariat pour la mer.

But Italy is able to think un Mare Nostrum which, to the benefit of political fragility, is not res communis? How to think of establishing and defending maritime "territories" from the strictest limits, even if the call to respect for the pre-established SAR areas raises interpretative doubts that baffle by their conceptual lability? Can ours be a country capable of realistically re-reading the strategic naval theories in the light of the evolution that has led geopolitics and geoeconomics to join the purest military strategy? Is Italy able to accept an increasingly central role of its Navy in light of the principles of maritime control and projection to land? Our country can accept the assumption that "Whoever rules the waves rules the world", and that the naval diplomacy is based on indisputable military capabilities?

The Marina, in its dynamic show the flag, is capable of both soft that of hard power, and is able to guarantee a real one power projection ashore, but it is Italy itself that must be aware of its rights given the assertiveness of the other international actors.

What is at stake is important, but it is necessary to set goals and follow a clear strategy Promptness that has clear the overall picture and its value without setting limits "sabaudi" to the potential of the country, which recalls that the sea is not just tourism and a flat expanse of umbrellas.

(photo: web / US Navy / EU NAVFOR Somalia - Operation Atalanta / Navy)