The dreams of the Sun on PNRR and EU
Because the political scientist Fabbrini of Luiss – columnist for the Sole 24 Ore – is wrong about the PNRR and the EU. The italics by Giuseppe Liturri
Like (almost) every Sunday, we participate in the secular rite of reading Professor Sergio Fabbrini's editorial on Sole 24 Ore .
The hope is always to tap into otherwise unexplored heights of knowledge. But, once again, we come out disappointed, if not really impoverished.
This time Fabbrini even inconveniences Aristotle to take it out on the “sovereign right” (anything, that is, nothing, it means) which, in his opinion, simultaneously supports an argument and its opposite, regarding relations with the EU.
Only he does everything: he draws the playing field, decides the rules and the teams, indicates the referee and, in the end, even takes the ball away.
There are two examples of this allegedly contradictory behavior:
- the intent – manifested by the right – to want to modify the NRP in light of the emergency of the increase in energy costs and the inflationary fallout. Fabbrini points out that pursuing this goal necessarily involves hard negotiating work at Commission level and also the search for solid alliances. In short, you need to have your feet firmly planted in Brussels and therefore recognize its centrality.
- "If the Brussels bureaucrats don't come out of their glass building, let's go it alone." It is the intent attributed to the right, in case of inaction of the EU in front of the problem of energy costs. From these statements, Fabbrini deduces the will to do without the EU, in defense of national interests. But the energy crisis has no borders or self-sufficient solutions and must find the necessary solution at the European level, concludes ours.
Hence the contradiction: does the right want to stay in or out? He cannot ask for both.
What we allow ourselves to observe to Fabbrini that asking for an update of the PNRR does not at all mean "opposing the EU", as he apodictically affirms.
Using the “sovereign versus pro-European” scheme of convenience is equivalent to using lenses to see well up close when the problem is to see well from afar, the result is that everything is distorted and out of focus. And this unfortunately happens when you have only those two classification possibilities, created and used artfully. We do not know if in good faith or in bad faith.
What he hastily classifies as "sovereignty" opposing the EU by waving the banner of an autarchy of yesteryear, is instead something much more complex and profoundly different.
The essential premise is that the EU is only the mere projection of the intergovernmental power relations of its member states, which regularly see some interests prevail over others. From this acknowledgment arises the need – under penalty of irreparable damage to the country – to stay in those forums without starting from prejudicial subordinate positions and negotiating hard and decisively. Without any negotiation alternative being excluded, including the abandonment, albeit tactical, of the table. Neither more nor less than what the other 26 members do. Only we get to those tables prone and prisoners of a federal "dream" that does not exist elsewhere. This is the ideological approach that the right has, or should have, towards the EU, not the distinction of convenience made by Fabbrini.
It is this approach that also explains and takes into account the "denounce it because it does not do enough" followed by the threat to go alone. Thus resolving the apparent contradiction.
In fact, this statement is the full recognition of the fact that that intergovernmental seat is the one suitable for solving problems whose scale and level of interconnection requires a negotiating level necessarily higher than the national one. Nobody is so shortsighted as to think that Italy could be a monad in possession of all the levers to resolve an energy crisis that threatens to make that of the 1970s pale.
But Fabbrini finds it all too convenient to adopt his bipolar scheme because in this way he avoids making the reflection that would make his "dream" fall: if the problems are solved in international fora in which the logic of the strongest prevails, without any solidarity, such as has been happening for centuries in relations between nations, so what's the point of keeping an institution running with the same old logic, shrewdly cloaking it with a federal spirit that doesn't exist?
A very quick institution in determining the size of courgettes and desolately immobile for months, in seeking a solution to this energy crisis because it is torn apart by the conflicts between different national interests.
If the EU is not there when it should be used, then what is it for? To reason and negotiate on the basis of intergovernmental power relations, a permanent pact of consultation and coordination, on the model of the G7, would be enough. Or not?
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/pnrr-ue-fabbrini-sole-24-ore/ on Mon, 29 Aug 2022 05:19:09 +0000.