But do we really want to liquidate friendship in an amen, indeed the brotherhood, which binds us Europeans to America? Do we really want to believe that the era of atlantism is closed, archived, dead and buried under the mobile sands of Trumpian geopolitics? On Repubblica Michele Serra, protagonist of the Pro Europa event of 15 March last, speaks of acknowledgment, but I am not liquidating a brotherhood that has lasted for centuries after two months of a weird American presidency. Donald Trump and JD Vance accuse us of being antidemocrats and “parasites”, in agreement, and launch us duties like missiles: but who are we talking about? Of a New York building accustomed to playing golf (European sport) in the midst of the lake mar-a kitsch, in Florida, and a former instructed inhabitant of the Appalachi mountains, the “frontier of nothing” that runs from Pensylvania to Alabama. Where his “hillbilly”, the “country burins”, as Bob Dylan already called them in “Talking New York (1961), believe that Ferrari is in Dallas and not in Maranello, eat carbonara with cream and garlic by diminishing the spaghetti with a knife and believe that neorealism is a genre of Mexican cinema. Acting De Profundis is with all the terrible consequences of the case – on a link that lasts from 12 October 1492, when a Genoese discovered America.
There are very tenacious threads that bind Europe to the United States. A tenacious warp of memory, exchanges, cultural affinities, sedimented in history, which resists geopolitical storms, even when the two partners fight, misunderstand, move away. The friendship between Europe and America is not a passenger flirt to be liquidated with a tweet. It is a true, genetic kinship.
America was born from Europe. Not only geographically – the Pellegrini Fathers, leaving out Colombo, sail from Plymouth in 1620. The American Constitution is the daughter of European Enlightenment, the revolution of the 13 British colonies feeds on the same ideas that animated the French one. Washington, Jefferson, Madison read Montesquieu, Locke, Rousseau. On the other side of the Ocean Tocqueville embarked to travel to America and understand the future of democracy.
Migratory flows brought millions of Europeans to the United States: Italians, Irish, German, French, Greeks, Poles. Their surnames – Russo, Caputo, De Niro O’Connor, Muller, Kowalski, Papadopulos – fill the telephone lists of the United States. They built neighborhoods, identities, churches, unions. Even today European ethnic roots moderate the American identity. It is impossible to understand Chicago without the Irish or New York without the Neapolitans. European diaspora has become social fabric of America. Crossing it is like traveling in an atlas of transposed Europe, in a sentimental geography of immigrants: every Italian city, or almost, has its double in America and even more. There is a Bergamo in Texas and one in California, a Treviglio Drive in Nevada, Piedmont Baptized Cities in California, Alabama South Carolina, Missouri and Oklahoma, founded by immigrants who came from villages in the province of Alba, Asti, Cuneo or Vercelli.
If Europe has given America blood and thought, America has returned cultural influence, economic models, lifeblood. The US Army saved us from the Nazi -fascist fingering, when Europe burned in the fire and England was about to succumb to Hitler. Churchill with his irony proclaimed that the United States and the United Kingdom are two brothers’ peoples divided by a long municipality. The Marshall plan helped Europe exhausted to recover. From the post-war period onwards, the American power has conquered the European imagination: Hollywood, Coca-Cola, Jazz, Blue Jeans. We have enhanced fashion, art, cuisine, pizza, sports, culture, classical music. In short: beauty.
On the economic level, the constraint is equally firm. United States and European Union are the two main commercial partners in the world. Commercial exchanges between the European Union and the United States represent one of the most significant economic relations globally. In 2023, the total value of the exchanges of goods and services between the two economies exceeded 1,600 billion euros, the multinationals move on both continents. NATO, born in 1949, was the pillar of European security for seventy years. Without the Atlantic Treaty, the Cold War would have had who knows what outcome. The interchange between the American and European war industries is very clear and you cannot see how it can be stopped, there are American bases everywhere in the old continent. In terms of education, the two banks of the Atlantic continue to mirror each other. American universities are a sagged destination for European students, and vice versa. The American Catholic Church has also always promoted the dialogue between the two banks of the Atlantic. One of its symbols is certainly the Archbishop of New York Francis Joseph Spellman.
In a world increasingly dominated by the Russian-Cinese axis, with wars that redesign the maps of power, that invisible thread that binds Europe and America remains ours. Cut with the United States would be like cutting a limb. So let’s go slow. Before scrapping the American friend, ask ourselves if we are ready to be alone, unarmed and aphons. In a world where democracy defends itself with more than some hashtags or some tweets. If we give up the American friend only because today he stutters, tomorrow with whom we will talk, when the world will be more and more a duel between Beijing and Moscow?
