I’m Italian and I live here in the northern parts of Italy that directly abut Switzerland. We’re not happy-go-lucky (or at the very least we aren’t anymore, haven’t been since the end of the nineties). We’re mostly exhausted and desperate about the apparently endless slide into destitution that our former political class failed to prevent (by failing to foresee the downsides of ‘globalisation’ for a cheap manufacturing economy such as ours was) and that our present political class apparently cannot reverse. It’s horrifying to live in a country that is literally falling apart around you.
It’s often described as a shift to the ‘right’ but it isn’t really. It’s a problem of terminology: there’s a definite element of euroscepticism (more on that later) which is misconstrued as ‘nationalism’ (and hence right-wing) but I’d prefer the term ‘sovreignist’. This has become the backdrop of the new political discourse, and it arises from the political class’ tendency to blame external forces “beyond their control” for the sad state of affairs. In this particular instance, as elsewhere, the supra-national EU has been called in to shoulder the blame. The new political landscape is one of new or reinvented political parties taking on the mantles of yesteryear’s left/right and decking it out in the latter-day sovreignist guise. The population, humbled and distraught, take solace in being told that all harm came from outside and buy into this narrative by voting for the new parties.
I’m a mathematician and macroeconomist by training and the fourth generation of family business-owners. It’s difficult to see a happy end to the current predicament. The Euro currency’s stipulations are now seen as strictures imposed upon European peoples by intransigent Germans. Native spending power is contracting and only exports are growing. Deficit spending gave us an unmanageable debt-load and this basically excludes deficit spending to reboot the economy. The much-maligned Euro is the only thing that keeps the interest rates on this debt marginally manageable. Devaluation of the currency, the go-to choice of the 1960s-to-1990s is no longer available.
It really is a pickle. If anything I’m amazed that basic services such as universal healthcare and education have been largely untouched. Some of the welfare state has been under fire but mostly the effects have been cosmetic. For now, at least.
You seem to be in a good position to judge or at least sense how much the EU is to blame in countries demise (be it Italy, Greece, Spain, or even France[1]).
[1] here too there's a very easy reflex to say Europe caused our problems, even though it's clear people forget other causes to issues.
If the EU is at fault then it’s all our collective faults, as Europeans, for having failed to make a success of this extraordinary period of peace and prosperity the European Union has fostered for us. The economic problems are less a fault of the EU and more (in my opinion at least) the result of having slowed the construction of a truly federal super-state. Had that been accomplished earlier, we wouldn’t be in this quagmire we find ourselves in.
I worry about the feasibility of such a large federal body. One that doesn't fail (even partially). It would require a lot of learning from citizen and I don't think they're ready. Usually what unite people of that scale is a clearer polarization point (war..).
This crysis might lead to something quite disruptive. Energy, political technology (information)..
