Different yet the same. The United States and Russia attack Europe, subtly, with interference on public opinion in the Union, but also publicly, as they do not bother to hide the document on the Trump administration’s National Security Strategies which explicitly talks about encouraging the decline of the EU. Vittorio Emanuele Parsi, professor of international law at the Catholic University of Milan and founder of the Society for the Study of Democracy (SSD) explains why the USA and Russia want a weak, if not non-existent, Europe.
“Even though they are different, they share a similar vision,” says Parsi. «For Trump the point is to eliminate a commercial competitor, his strength. Which is a reactive force as we saw with the negotiations on tariffs, and to support those forces of the European conservative right who are sovereignist and anti-Union. There is a coincidence with the vision of Vance and this world of the American reactionary right. On the other hand, Russia has a hegemonic project on the European continent that is incompatible and alternative to the hegemonic project of the European Union. Our hegemonic project was the expansion beyond our borders of the role of laws and institutions, the rejection of force, as the Italian Constitution also says, as an instrument of international politics to resolve disputes, because that is what we apply within our European political space. And we wanted and still intend that the European continent, even beyond our borders, be governed in this way: by the civilization of law, by 80 years of post-war history. Russia has a project in which it applies the model it applies within its borders outside its borders. Therefore violence and the use of force and with this he clearly intends to eliminate the Union which is the obstacle he faces to continue this hegemonic project. Then both Trump and Putin do exactly what all autocrats do: they abuse their positions of power.”
Is it also an attack on democracy?
«There is no doubt. The Russian system is an authoritarian system and corrupt in nature, as all authoritarian systems are. He attacked Ukraine because it is the example of a large population, of a large Slavic, former Soviet country that is finding the path to democracy, the market, and the approach to the liberal and social democratic values of the West. For Putin it was intolerable for Putin, because it was the demonstration that it is possible to emerge from the situation of prostration in which the entire former Soviet Union was in after ’89. And we can get out not with a dictator, but through the difficult path of democracy, with its contradictions, with its errors, with its defects. But even Trump, when we ask ourselves why America has changed its position towards us so radically, wants to change the nature of the American political system. He is trying to transform it into a system in which the power of man alone in command is not limited internally or even externally. And Europe is a limit for him. So there is the tragic cross-confirmation that the nature of the domestic political regime defines the vision of international politics one has.
Are European sovereignists the great allies of the USA and Russia?
«In this project both European sovereignists and those nostalgic for communism, therefore the two extremes which, as usual, end up touching, are allies of this vision. They are the indifferent ones, that is, that mass of political representatives, media and partly indifferent public opinion, who are Italy’s eternal evil. In the last 20 years in Italy, indifference has taken on the guise of populism and sovereignism, which are variants of the same evil. They are those who, as the latest Censis report says, take refuge in pornography and the myth of the strong man.”
The US document explicitly speaks of Europe’s decline as a prophecy but also as an objective. Are there any antibodies in Europe and if so which ones to counteract this vision?
«Meanwhile, the US document has an intellectual paucity, a distortion of analysis and an obscenity of language that makes one forget that it was issued by what was the great bureaucracy of an important ultra-century-old democracy. They seem like ravings written by Putin’s foolish servants or Orban’s friends and cousins. Having said that, the contrast is about who we are. The Germans immediately responded: “We do not accept lessons from outside.” Because we are Europeans, we have a long history behind us, a long path of building institutions. Of course, it was a path made possible by the long American leadership, but which today is also possible outside of this leadership, because we have built institutions that did not exist at the beginning of the 1950s and at the end of the 1940s. Today we have institutions, we have a long common history. It’s about believing in these institutions and this history while trying to correct anachronistic things. We need to update these institutions, but always maintain our culture, our identity, which is an identity based on three pillars.”
What are these pillars?
«They are the competitive free market, representative democracy and open society. This generated European society after the Second World War. I repeat, Europe started thanks to fundamental American support for the protection of our borders. Today we have worked hard to build, within this protection, the entire infrastructure of our institutions, to build our now decades-long culture of experience of common life. Now that this protection network is no longer available, we must give it to ourselves. That’s why we need defense capabilities now, not fifty years from now. The world around us has changed. We have an authoritarian Putin who has used violence against a sister democracy for four years, and has threatened our security in word and deed for four years. And American protection has disappeared, the United States has repositioned itself. So faced with this we must take note of it and understand that Europe remains a civil power, both in the sense that it behaves in a civilized manner and in the sense that it believes that military force should be used exclusively for deterrence and defense.”
What are the boundaries of this defense?
«Defense, in a world like ours, defense cannot stop at physical borders, this must be explained. folkloristic characters like Salvini or Conte. Defense is the protection of all that space that allows European institutions, and therefore European peoples, to continue to choose their future freely, without being enslaved by old and new masters. Our destiny, especially the destiny of our children, cannot be that of the choice between American servitude and Russian servitude, it cannot be that of the forced choice between slavery and war. We have to wake up. It will be expensive, it will be risky to do it, but these are risky and expensive times. These are times in which we need to be ambitious, not because we are arrogant, but because in such difficult times, even the goal of surviving is an objective that requires extreme ambition, otherwise we will not be able to achieve it.”
