Stefano Silvestri

Still in Need of a Strategy

Altiero Spinelli’s 1967 article was an objective, logical analysis of Italian foreign policy and, at the same time, a manifesto for what had to be done and what he intended to foster and encourage. A small part of this he had already achieved by establishing the Istituto Affari Internazionali, in Rome, in 1965. How do things stand today, almost fifty years later? Is it still possible to think that the tension between supranational integration and national sovereignty will determine our future and to think of Italy as that basically opportunist international actor lacking inspiration that Spinelli described? Understandably, one of the effects of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc was to breathe new life into nationalistic policies, abruptly putting an end to the forced integration that Moscow had imposed on its “allies” through the Comintern first and later the Warsaw Pact and Comecon. The reunification of Germany and the independence regained by the former ‘socialist’ countries, including not only the three Baltic republics annexed to the USSR during the Second World War, but also states that had been absent from the international scene for centuries (and in some cases had never really existed as sovereign states in the full sense of the word), brought on a nationalist inebriation which first showed its disastrous effects on the Balkan peninsula and now threatens to produce even more serious ones in the former Soviet territories. If the newly united Germany became, from the beginning, a moderate country and a full member not only of the Atlantic Alliance, but also of the European Union, avoiding a return to old European nationalisms, the merit goes to Germany’s leader at that time, Helmut Kohl, as well as the willingness of other large European countries to accept these developments. The same recipe was attempted with the rapid enlargement of the European Union and NATO to the other countries of Eastern Europe and the small Baltic republics, but by that time the situation was quite different and the generous integrationist enlargement was not able to play a systemic role. Unfortunately, the effects of the ‘sovereignist’ intoxication were soon felt within the integrated structures as well. The obligatory and in some cases increased ceding