The advantages of not having a foreign policy can be summarized essentially in three points:
- You save a lot of time;
- You can rely on the lucky star, trusting that of the others;
- The effort to criticize it is avoided.
With this premise we return to Libya, gateway to African issues, with an analysis articulated in two stages.
In the fall of 2011, Gaddafi and the 4th Berlusconi government fell. Without going into the merits of the executives and the jokes of fate, let us look at the drafts of Italian foreign policy of those days, origin of the current scenario in the Bel sole of love.
We are talking about drafts because it is easier to find a curly and blonde Chinese than to recognize an independent act of the Farnesina from Yalta and above all from the birth of NATO onwards.
To date the Sigonella Crisis of the 85, with the carabinieri surrounding the American SEALs on the airport runway, remains the only Italian action against the US will since the end of the Second World War.
If Yalta and Washington were not enough, with the Maastricht Treaty of '93 (evolution from the EEC to the European Union) we accepted the transfer from Rome to Brussels of other national sovereignty. The same thing applies to other subsequent steps such as the entry into force of Schengen, the creation of the ECB, the assumption of the Euro or the signing of the Dublin Treaty, just to name the best known to public opinion. It is good to consider them not so much in the light of the consequences generated, but for their meaning: the renunciation of a considerable part of the independence of the States of the Union.
It is a precise path that Italy has accepted (more or less) consciously, even without popular consultation.
If we think of the close strategic dependence between Brussels and Washington, it goes without saying that any national political act outside the structures reached at European level, not only conflicts with the logic of a compact Union but risks coming into conflict with the entire global geopolitical balance. . That unipolar equilibrium that has been configured since '91, with the end of the USSR and the birth of the American planetary super policeman.
It is not easy to quantify the angle of divergence between the Berlusconi governments and the more pro-European chancelleries. Nor can it be determined to what extent the transition to the "accounting" of the Monti government has depended on that angle or the real state of public finances. But we can argue that the very timid signs of foreign policy of the executive Berlusconi froze the international support for their own evolution. Personal friendship with Vladimir Putin and Qaddafi's customs clearance weighed heavily, that's for sure.
In both cases it was a question of developing bilateral diplomatic relations far beyond the normal good protocol reports for a gift exchange and a joint press conference. An unusual diplomatic dynamism for Italy, outside the narrow corridor envisaged by Brussels and indirectly by the USA. So tight that the same Italian government in March of 2011 was forced to join operations in Libya before with Odissey Dawn and then with Unified Protector, aligning itself with French intervention lust and NATO, de facto renouncing national interests in the area. Italian membership on the model "We send the planes but only for a ride ..." or "We bomb but we plan ..."... but still a membership.
In a few days we saw evaporation of the visits to Rome by Gaddafi of 2009 and 2010 that at the price of clowns and humiliations (the photo of Al Muktar on the collar of the colonel, hostess forced to undergo lessons of Quran ...) had imagined a new Realpolitik italica in the Mediterranean. A concrete policy aimed at bridging Italy's energy deficit that appreciates the antics of a leader, however in permanent debt with Rome.
The impossibility and the inability to have an independent foreign policy have forced Italy to digest the "French snatch" on the Libyan question and the cooling of relations with Moscow, creating two major strategic-energy deficits.
In particular, the management of the Libyan phase has shown the Italian impossibility to place itself autonomously, either by marrying an interventionist line or by denying it. In the first hypothesis, anticipating the coalition as it didArmée de l'air French, regardless of the agreements with the allies. In the second, opposing the operation or maintaining a defiled position.
In the 2011, Italy has shown, without it being necessary, that it has no room for maneuver in the world of international relations. Considering the pacifist altar to which every progressive government must somehow sacrifice itself, subsequent executives have managed to do even worse. In other words, to the wet powders due to impotence, there was also an endemic reluctance to action.
At the military parades the parade of declarations has been replaced, with the highest joy of grammarians and linguistic scholars.
Minister Gentiloni's intervention on the solution to the smuggling problem is summarized in a "We will hit them but we will not hit them ..." passed only by Minister Mogherini denied by the British and French 30 seconds after securing the agreement on the shares of migrants from Libya.
Sigonella thus remains far away. If the leash of the Farnesina and Palazzo Chigi at that time seemed short, now that the World War is thirty years farther away, it seems very short for the absurd.
It will be Africa that pushes, but Libya gets closer and closer.
