Risultati di ricerca

Dal Policy Paper dell’Institut Montaigne: Faire du vieillissement un moteur de croissance: il progressivo invecchiamento della popolazione è comunemente percepito come una “condanna” per i paesi sviluppati ed è spesso ritenuto un ostacolo, se non un pericolo, per il dinamismo e la competitività delle economie nazionali. Ma possiamo affermare con certezza che tale tendenza porterà solo svantaggi? Oppure è possibile trasformare l’invecchiamento della popolazione in una fonte di crescita per il paese? Romain Geiss dell’Institut Montaigne ha preso in analisi alcune politiche pubbliche intraprese dal Giappone. Questo paese, caratterizzato da un tasso d’invecchiamento piuttosto rapido, ha infatti deciso di affrontare in modo positivo e dinamico il fenomeno. Alla luce dell’esigenza di formulare proposte concrete da applicare in altri contesti, l’autore considera particolarmente utile tenere in considerazione l’esperienza giapponese. Per visionare il pdf in francese: http://www.institutmontaigne.org/medias/note_japon_internet_avec_couv.pdf

Il 1° giugno, presso la sala A3E2 del Parlamento europeo di Bruxelles, si svolge il seminario del Gruppo di Lavoro Group 8 di European Ideas Network (EIN) dal titolo “EU Governance: How to improve Accountability and Popular Involvement?”. Dopo l’apertura dei lavori da parte degli eurodeputati Inigo Mendez de Vigo e Alain Lamassoure, si apre la discussione tra Elvire Fabry (Fondation pour l’innovation politique), Ben Crum (Free University of Amsterdam), Stefano Riela (Università Bocconi) e György Schôpflin (MEP, EPP-ED Group).

Secondo Daniel L. Millimet e Trevor Collier, un’immensa letteratura sull’efficacia degli input nel processo educativo ha portato a considerare la questione degli incentivi nel sistema scolastico introdotti tramite la concorrenza. In realtà, se maggiore concorrenza porta ad un aumento dell’input (essendo l’input visibile dai genitori) senza modificare l’efficacia di questi, allora la concorrenza ha poco impatto sulla qualità dell’educazione degli studenti. Usando dati dell’Illinois, la ricerca trova che in situazione di concorrenza l’efficienza prodotta dal mercato educativo privato, ha un effetto positivo pure sulla scuola pubblica.

Secondo Klaus M. Schmidt e Monika Schnitzer (in “Public Subsidies For Open Source? Some Economic Policy Issues of the Software Market”, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology V.16, N.2), il movimento open-source ha creato prodotti competitivi quali Linux, Apache e Sendmail e in alcuni paesi esistono sussidi diretti allo sviluppo di standard open source per le agenzie governative, nelle scuole e nelle università. Gli autori concludono che fissare un prezzo per open source software al costo marginale è efficiente dal punto di vista statico, ma non fornisce i giusti incentivi dal punto di vista dinamico, per attività di R&S. Ma i benefici sociali dell’innovazione sono maggiori rispetto a quelli privati. Il paper conclude affermando che i governi non dovrebbero sussidiare specifici software, perchè ridurrebbe la concorrenza, aumenterebbe i prezzi e ridurrebbe l’incentivo ad innovare. L’intervento del governo dovrebbe essere piuttosto rivolto a sussidiare ricerca di base per la creazione di software e favorendo standard e incoraggiare la compatibilità e l’interoperabilità.

Il bureau politico del Partito Popolare Europea ha adottato, il 9 febbraio, delle proposte per una politica energetica europea basata su: 1) diversificazione delle fonti; 2) maggiore efficienza nell’utilizzo e sviluppo di nuove tecnologie; 3) sicurezza nell’approvvigionamento e politica estera coerente; 4) completamento del mercato comune.

Mauro Moretti, Amministratore Delegato di Ferrovie dello Stato, è stato ospite di Fondazione ResPublica lo scorso 23 novembre per un incontro sul tema: “Il caso F.S: realizzazioni e prospettive di nuovi investimenti”. Moretti ha presentato i traguardi raggiunti negli ultimi anni dal principale operatore ferroviario italiano, soffermandosi sulle sfide e le opportunità per il futuro. Moretti ha ribadito l’importanza dell’investimento nel trasporto su ferro sia per le merci sia per i passeggeri e si è soffermato particolarmente sulla necessità di definire le priorità in termini di linee ferroviarie, consentendo così di convogliare le risorse verso i progetti maggiormente in grado di contribuire allo sviluppo del paese.

Massimo Ponzellini, Presidente della Banca Popolare di Milano (BPM), è stato relatore del quinto appuntamento con il gruppo “Junior Fellows”, tenutosi il 17 maggio presso la sede della BPM. Il Presidente, rivolgendosi ai numerosi giovani manager e professionisti presenti, ha fatto alcune riflessioni sul significato di essere giovani oggi nel mondo del lavoro, con le sfide e opportunità che ciò implica. Il progresso e lo sviluppo non si sono mai ottenuti senza uno slancio d’innovazione e di originalità che in qualche modo rivoluzionasse lo status quo. I giovani non devono quindi limitarsi a replicare il bagaglio d’esperienza di chi li ha preceduti, ma sono piuttosto chiamati ad osare, sperimentare, mettersi e mettere in discussione. Sono legittimati a ciò in quanto “azionisti del futuro”. Ma un trend demografico sfavorevole e un interesse a mantenere lo status quo da parte di chi ha acquisito potere nella seconda parte del XX secolo hanno reso la società italiana poco mobile e dominata da una gerontocrazia. Creare un nuovo futuro è una sfida che deve essere colta per un impegno in prima persona, per un rinnovamento della classe dirigente e quindi per cambiare in meglio il paese. Senza perdere però grandi ideali, come l’amicizia. In conclusione di serata, il dibattito ha anche affrontato temi d’attualità come il rapporto tra banche e territorio, la situazione economica post-crisi e le prospettive del mercato immobiliare, in particolare nella città di Milano.

27 January 2009, European Parliament, Brussels The second half of 2008 will be remembered as having been beset by fears of a return of the Great Depression of 1929, with the deadly spiral that led from Black Thursday on 24 October to the rise of Europe’s totalitarian regimes. This is not the first time this shadow has been evoked – it was mentioned at the start of the first oil crisis, in 1973. Never before, however, has it brought with it so clear a presentiment of disaster. If we take a serious look at the causes and historical context of the disastrous situation in the 1930s and compare them with the current situation, we can immediately see huge differences both in the economic and financial dimensions and in the historical contexts of the two crises. Despite this, there are striking similarities between the effects of the two crises on political thought processes, even if we may hope that the impact of the current crisis will be less dramatic, and even if the 1929 crisis served to speed up the political shifts of the interwar years, rather than to trigger them. Finally, my third point will be that it is all the more surprising to identify analogies between the impacts of the two crises on shifts in ideas and the behaviour of the masses. A. Economic and financial differences For the purposes of what I am setting out to demonstrate to you, it is important to emphasise the economic and financial differences between the two crises. What I intend to show is as follows: in 1929 people believed that a world was ending, and today, similarly, one of the themes most regularly elaborated upon by those commentating on the crisis, whether they be economists, politicians or intellectuals, is the idea that we are entering a new world. In both cases, now and in the last century, it is the free-market and parliamentary capitalist system that is called into question. It is not difficult to show that, whereas the 1929 crisis was triggered in a context that was comparable to the situation of capitalism at the start of the 21st century, that crisis was not on anything like the same scale. Similarly, rather than speaking of capitalism breaking down and needing to be rethought or, indeed, of making it more ethical, which makes no sense since capitalism per se is neither ethical nor unethical, it would be more sensible to create the conditions that we all know are necessary in order to ensure that the same crisis cannot arise again in the future. Nevertheless, we are well aware that whatever plans we put in place and whatever precautions we take, nothing will prevent economic and financial stakeholders from being caught out by a fresh crisis, however cautious they may be. In other words, what I aim to show in this brief presentation is that the main risk we have to guard against is one of allowing public opinion and thought processes to be led, in a somewhat irresponsible process of creative prediction, in the same direction of a radical challenge to liberal values as the one that almost destroyed democracies in the decade preceding the Second World War. I now come to a brief reminder of the differences. The basic economic difference between the two events stems from the fact that the main cause of the 1929 crisis was not the collapse of the banks, as was the case this time, but the consumer frenzy that followed the First World War. Seen from this perspective, 1929 was one of the 4 consequences of the disastrous first major world war of the 20th century. In the United States, a wave of unprecedented growth initiated following an early warning in 1921 encouraged a climate of euphoria, which in turn launched a process of overproduction, inevitably followed by a drop in prices. At the same time, farmers and wage-earners, seized by a frenzy for equipment, ran up big debts. The unfortunate policy of stabilisation practised by the central banks and the anarchy of stock-market speculations conducted at an inopportune time accelerated the rate of deflation and precipitated a recession, a rise in unemployment and the proliferation of banking collapses. This spread only slowly to Europe, apart from the spectacular bankruptcy of Vienna’s Kreditanstalt in 1931. However, it must be made clear that the European crisis did not come from the United States alone. It corresponded to the end of the period of reconstruction, which had led Europe to assist in the development of the new countries that came into being following the Treaty of Versailles, which had industrialised sufficiently to become competitors. Thus the same chain reaction took place – a collapse in credit, recession, deflation and unemployment, which gradually affected all sectors and all countries. In France, the state was obliged to intervene to bail out Citroën, the General Transatlantic Company and the Banque Nationale du Commerce. While the economic consequences of the two crises may appear to be similar, it is obvious that the causes are not. I shall pass over this point very quickly, as others before me have made this very clear. The cause of the current crisis was part of a process that was the reverse of that of 1929; it developed in three stages: At the outset, we find that the principal course was the starting point in the extremely lax monetary policy practised by the United States Federal Reserve System at the beginning of this century. It reduced its rates twice, faced with the internet bubble and then to prevent a slowingdown of activities following the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, which consequently bear an indisputable share of the responsibility for the current crisis. The desire to make home ownership accessible to the poorest in society then gave rise to the notorious arranging of variable-rate loans, the subprime mortgage, without always checking that the borrowers were solvent, resulting in the inability of the most vulnerable to repay their loans. At the same time, the brokers who sold subprime mortgages were careful not to hold on to them. They resold them to banks, which converted them into products that could be exchanged on the market, the notorious securitisation, in such a way that once these securities were in circulation, nobody had any way of knowing of what they were composed. The securitisation technique was so sophisticated that the credit rating agencies saw nothing suspicious about them, and often awarded them the AAA rating representing top quality! We all know what followed – the proliferation of outstanding payments, the fall in property prices, the guaranteed losses for the banks, and the drying-up of the interbank market. The collapse of Lehman Brothers triggered the chain reaction that I mentioned in connection with the 1929 crisis – a collapse in credit, recession, deflation and unemployment, which is gradually affecting all sectors and all countries. As a result of the subprime mortgage, the reversal in the US property market triggered a global economic crisis. This is just a brief list of the differences between the two crises, but I hope that it shows clearly that each of these historical situations was likely to give rise to different problems. It is true that in 1929, it took a long time to re-establish the balance between supply and demand (in reality, this was because of the war, rather than the New Deal), but there were four reasons for this: the lack of compensation for unemployment; the lack of confidence in democratic institutions, combined with the population decline and parliamentary instability ensuing from the First World War, the lack of international economic organisations capable of curbing protectionist reflexes, and, lastly, the lack of monetary zones, which allowed a spate of devaluations to occur, in the vain hope of keeping up exports. These factors explain the de facto failure of Roosevelt’s New Deal, since, as we all know, the United States had not recovered in 1938 its GDP level of 1929. And naturally they also explain the political consequences, to which I shall return. Today, the difficulty of regulating the banking system is the main cause of the problem, and even if there is a risk that the consequences of the crisis will last longer than anticipated, the prospects of successful intervention and consultation among the states are incomparably better than they were for the United States and Europe 80 years ago. Not only does it seem as if the 1929 crisis would not have led to the same disasters if the players at the time had had the benefit of the global organisations of today, but it also seems possible that if an international organisation is put at the heart of the financial system, as many have been demanding for some time, this will prevent our current crisis from recurring. B. Political consequences The main lesson that we should be learning from such different crisis situations is that their political consequences cannot be on the same scale. Even if today we delight in holding forth on the crisis of representation affecting all elected assemblies and all institutions, even the trade unions, this phenomenon of distrust, which tends to turn into indifference, has nothing in common with the way the former combatants felt about parliamentarians and civilians following the First World War. The phenomenon of a weakening of the Community and of identity that we rightly deplore represents a minor threat in comparison with the nostalgia for the kinship of the trenches which, from the 1920s onwards, one way and another fed resentment of the pleasures of individualism, and of the materialism that associations of former combatants and leagues on the extreme right saw as being caused by the liberating ideology of the Enlightenment, although communists and most socialists regarded capitalism as being responsible for it. They all came together in adopting antiparliamentarianism, which seems to me to be much less virulent today, inasmuch as it no longer has a substitute ideology to put forward, as was the case in the days when fascism and communism prevailed. In the face of all opposition, the vast majority of our contemporaries are opposed to dictatorship and attached to the rule of law. Freedom of speech, publication and assembly still mean something to them. They know that you cannot have free and responsible citizens without education. In the Europe of the interwar years, the rise of dictatorships and fascism might genuinely have given the least prejudiced observers the impression that the model of liberal democracy had had its day, and that the future belonged either to communism or to authoritarian regimes. When we count up the democratic regimes that managed to continue to function in regular fashion throughout the interwar period, between 1918 and June 1940, we are amazed by their small number – Great Britain, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland and Finland, which was to succumb soon afterwards. We understand how, in this historical setting, loyalty to democracy and lucidity faltered. As we know, this was the case with Vichy France. The 1929 crisis served to accelerate and accentuate this general drift in the continent of Europe, but did not cause it. It supported totalitarian regimes already in power, such as fascism and Stalinism, in their state economic control – Stalin’s famous article promising to send the NEP to the devil, winding up Lenin’s new economic policy and again taking in hand the industrialisation of a Russia faced with the threat of European imperialism, dates from September 1929; however, Stalin’s first five-year plan was launched in 1928, and Mussolini’s fascist laws go back to 1926. As for Nazism, its ideology did not come out of the crisis. All the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century possess a lengthy chronology, whose starting point goes back to the calling into question of rationalism that began in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and even in Britain in the 1890s. It is likely, however, that Nazism found some of its militants in the mass of unemployed white-collar workers when the crisis reached Germany in 1930, when Hitler had already formed his party. It is also likely that the crisis provided Hitler with the masses of electors he needed to attain power by democratic means. However, he would certainly not have come to power if German socialists and communists had been sufficiently clear-sighted to join forces against him. Perhaps he would then have risked a coup d’état, which, to turn history into fiction, would have helped to relieve the weight of German responsibility for the crimes that he committed. The most direct effect of the 1929 crisis on Nazi Germany was the Keynesian policy deliberately and explicitly implemented by Hitler’s Finance Minister, Dr Schacht, in conditions that were admittedly exceptional – the great works and investments in arms enabled Nazi Germany to return to full employment just before the war, in 1938. As for the democracies, they were all faced with the contradiction between, at bottom, a crisis of confidence, and, at the top, strengthening of the state’s role. The result of this was a general malaise and difficulty in seeing through effective reflationary policies, which encouraged protectionism. Let us start at the top. Most democracies were oriented towards strengthening state intervention, towards planning and technocracy. It was at that point, specifically in 1932, that the word was first used in the United States, before asserting itself in France in 1945. This development was seen as a defeat for liberalism. It is not difficult to imagine the political shock that the abandonment of free trade by Ramsey MacDonald’s Labour cabinet in 1932 constituted for Great Britain after 80 years of economic liberalism. In the same year, the Swedish Social Democratic Party came to power with a programme focusing entirely on a voluntarist policy of battling to achieve full employment. In Belgium, Hendrik de Man, who was then at the head of the Belgian Workers’ Party research institute, launched his work plan in December 1933. The elements of this plan, which naturally included planning of the national economy, but also a system of mixed economy, in short what today we would call a policy of purchasing power, fascinated the rest of Europe. In France, where the executive was increasingly governing via ‘decree laws’, the ‘Young Turks’ of the Radical Party, with Bertrand de Jouvenel, Gaston Bergery and the writer Jules Romains, launched a draft plan known as the Plan of 9 July 1934. The CGT had its own plan, as did the employers, with the ‘X-Crise’ Ecole Polytechnique group, some of whom met again in Vichy. The socialists, and Blum in particular, put forward plans for reforming the state, along the lines of a more concentrated and more efficient government organisation, as did the right wing, particularly André Tardieu, who wanted to strengthen the executive at the expense of Parliament, and who aroused de Gaulle’s interest in his time. As for the bottom, the crisis affected the workers in particular; they were hit by unemployment without the ability to organise themselves, such that trade unionism was considerably weakened. The middle classes were also affected by foreign competition, and manifestations of xenophobia spread throughout Europe, with the Jews being the main victims. The state was both increasingly appealed to and increasingly criticised for its powerlessness. The populace’s exasperation in the face of the incapability of power found expression in the agitation of the extreme right leagues, culminating in France in the riots of 6 February 1934. It is striking to note that in 2009, even though the political context has changed substantially and the threats are much less significant, anti-liberalism is, more than ever, filling virtually the whole 7 expanse of power, and seems, more than ever, to be the majority opinion. Such an anomaly is explained by the impact of ideology. C. Ideological consequences 1. The great conjuring trick. When undergoing the ordeal of a historic crash, every society feels the need to neutralise it. However, it is rare for it to see the crash coming. This was the case in the 1930s. For this we have the retrospective testimony of Sartre, who, reflecting in 1947 in Qu’est-ce que la littérature? on the situation of the writer, notes that for his generation, the great upheaval of the war came before the war, and that it occurred in the 1930s, when the approach of the catastrophe became blindingly obvious. He writes that it seemed to his generation that the ground was giving way beneath them, and that suddenly the great historical conjuring trick was beginning for them too. […] It seemed to them that their life was being governed in every detail by obscure collective forces, and that its most private aspects reflected the state of the world as a whole. […] Something was waiting for them in the shadowy future, something that might reveal them to themselves in the blinding flash of a last moment before it annihilated them (the language he used in the last sentence showed that he was thinking of the apocalypse). This text is so clear-sighted that it might seem to have been reconstructed, and it still speaks to us today to such an extent that it can be regarded as having been written as a response to any situation whatever. Just as in the last century, today’s France feels that it faces a fear of ‘obscure collective forces’ in a concealed historical setting. However, Sartre’s intuitive testimony is corroborated by the political literature of the interwar years, in which the analogies are striking, from Britain to Spain, from Huxley to Unamuno, in all the countries of Europe. Two themes run through it, with an obvious link between them. 2. The crisis of civilisation. In a leaflet introducing the journal Esprit, dating from the end of 1931, the journal’s founder Emmanuel Mounier set out its governing idea, which expressed profound sympathy for a ‘left-wing Catholic’ European viewpoint, all the more revealing of the intellectual destabilisation of the 1930s in that it was profoundly hostile to nationalism, communism and fascism. This governing idea, conceived in the face of the 1929 crisis and of unemployment, was a break with what Mounier called established disorder. Esprit was founded in October 1932 by a group of young men determined to eliminate the failure of the modern world and to realise a new order based on the primacy of spiritual values. If we look at the spirit of 1900, we find in these few words many of the ingredients of the desire for identity – the band, the ‘real’ (in the verb ‘to realise’), the need to revert to a conception of the spiritual which makes of it not a private matter, but a principle of organisation of society. The rejection of the modern world was aimed at individualistic materialism, which was accused of favouring the rule of the strongest, i.e. today the rule of the wealthiest, in other words the capitalist jungle – and this indictment of individualism and the conflicts it engendered called for a revival of ‘civilisation’. It must be stressed that the leaflet clearly names two other targets, the second of which would have had to rule out any compromise with the new regime on Mounier’s part. The first target was collectivist materialism, which we understand as a reference to communism, and the second was false fascist spiritualism, which was accused of diverting man’s true vocation into the tyrannical idolatry of inferior spiritualities – racist exaltation, national passion, anonymous discipline, devotion to the state or the person in charge, when it is not solely devoted to protecting combined economic interests. On this point, Mounier is clear. The enemies he cites are unambiguous; they are the same – racism, nationalism, fascism – as those of the Republicans. Unfortunately the founder of Esprit attacked the latter also, and initially even took on the Republic. And when he targeted the Republic, it was not the Third Republic or its system alone. Nor was it the betrayal by the governments of 1926, 1934 and 1938 of the majorities won in the polls in 1924, 1932 and 1936. It was its foundations, its principles, its values that he called into question in radical fashion. In his view the ‘established disorder’ was the individualism institutionalised by parliamentary logic, and the materialism that he saw as the source of all corruption and as indissociable from the bourgeoisie. One of the last writings Mounier published in Esprit during the war, ‘Fin de l’homme bourgeois’ [The end of bourgeois man], was the most virulent attack imaginable on the utilitarian spirit of bourgeois individualism – fiercer even than Emmanuel Berl’s Mort de la pensée Bourgeoise, published in 1929, in which he said that individualism was the bourgeois. Every man for himself was his motto. He could conceive of no human communion other than in the form of fixed-price, contracted, market exchange. Woe betide those who could not count! Going further, in 1934 Mounier said that the ideology that they were fighting against was that of 89 […]. What they were fighting against was the individual void of all physical and spiritual substance and connections, fortified by resentments and claims, setting himself up as absolute; freedom regarded as an end in itself, with no relation to devoting oneself to anything, going so far as to consider choice itself and loyalty as impurities; equality through the emptiness between neutral and interchangeable individuals (in this sense the proletarian was the citizen’s crowning achievement); political and economic liberalism that consumed itself; the devout optimism of national sovereignty; purely negative opposition to socialism; attachment to an abstract and false parliamentarianism, which, furthermore, was discrediting itself day by day. Such a democracy ignored both the original and complete individual and the organic community that should bring people together. Where, then, in the battle that was conducted during the war were his friends, his enemies? Mounier did not delay in joining the Resistance, in autumn 1941. For him, however, the crucial test was the issue of collaboration with Germany. His repugnance for the posterity of Rousseau and Kant and his detestation of the bourgeoisie supported him for much too long in the illusion that he could be (admittedly with restrictions of conscience), the fellow traveller of Pétain’s ultra-reactionary national revolution, in the same way that he believed that, after the war, he would be able to join forces with the communist party. In the 1930s, the ideology of recognition of the community, which emerged from the trenches of the Great War and the anti-capitalism of the great crisis, was the elusive object of desire of an entire younger generation. It is much more paradoxical that the questioning of the Enlightenment’s plan for emancipation, which was understandable in the early 1930s, has today been trivialised to the extent that this plan has been made responsible for all the totalitarianism of the 20th century, whereas we know at what cost we battled for human rights and ‘abstract and false’ parliamentary, capitalist and individualist democracy after Nazism and Stalinism. 3. The theme of decadence. An explanation of the reasons for this return, owing to the current crisis, of what had long been repressed may lie in the fact that the very real shock of the war, the trenches and unemployment has been replaced, as we start this new century, by the addition of millenarian fears which, while they do not take on the spectacular nature of the ordeal of the Great War, nonetheless have the most profound impact on human consciousness – a fear that the world will end, with global warming, a fear of major invasions, with globalisation of means of communication and the creation of a gulf between north and south, a fear of religious wars, with terrorism, a fear of major pandemics, and so on. These resurgences, arousing as they do the anti-progressive feeling of cyclical time, of the eternal return, are superimposed on the obsession with death associated with linear time – here we have one of the keys to the idea of decadence. Destruam et aedificabo, aedificabo et destruam… This return of what had been repressed, which cast doubt on the future of civilisations, manifested itself immediately after the First World War in the form of a specific force. It was Valéry who, in La crise de l’esprit (Variété I), in 1919, commenced his reflections on the discovery by the West of its finite nature, Spengler, who, in Le déclin de l’Occident, compared the programmed end of western civilisation with the end of the Hellenic era, and the geographer Albert Demangeon, who in 1920 announced Le déclin de l’Europe. It was also Croce, Mosca, meditating on the cyclical and ineluctable reawakening of brutal instincts, and G. Ferrero, returning in 1921 to the classic theme of La ruine de la civilisation antique, which he had addressed in 1902, and which led him to describe the dialectic between the principle of authority (based on force and fear) and the principle of liberty, and to deplore the ineluctable disintegration of the hierarchical principles on which societies were based. The economic crisis of 1929, occurring as it did after these concerns had been aroused about the precariousness of civilisations, appeared to justify the theories of the recurrence of phases of growth and decline and revived the cyclical philosophies of history, on which the theme of decadence is based. Beginning in 1934, Arnold Toynbee drew up a model of the life and death of civilisations, which made decadence into the ineluctable and constantly repeated outcome of a cyclical history conceived along the lines of the ancient Chinese annals. This approach was accompanied by fascination with dying civilisations, as evidenced in 1932 by the bad translation of the title of J. Huizinga’s masterpiece Herfstij der Middeleeuwen (‘Le déclin du Moyen Age’, translated into English as ‘The Autumn of the Middle Ages’) – this is one of the abiding features of crisis periods, the fact that historians project the confusion of the present onto the past. And the other way around – at the same time as the fear that the barbarians would destroy the West was developing, the idea was gaining currency that the barbarians would not be able to overcome the West had it not already been destroyed from within – anti-Americanism which, as now, had been stimulated by the major crisis, was complacently based on the metaphor of cancer, with the American disease supposed to be eating away the developed world from within, from Georges Duhamel’s Scènes de la vie future (1930) to Cancer américain, by Arnaud Dandieu and Robert Aron (1931). How limited the range of political ideas and sentiments is! Has history no imagination? The themes have scarcely changed from the intellectual crisis of the 1900s and the effects of the 1929 crash to our current concerns. The subject of protest that has recurred most often and remained most acrimonious is criticism of the damaging effects of modern civilisation, as personified by liberal capitalism. One thread has run throughout Europe, whatever its level of development, in both West and East, from Nietzsche to Drumont, Sorel, Spengler, Carl Schmitt, even Heidegger, right through to Alain Badiou. Of course none of these thoughts can be reduced to this thread alone, but it runs through all of them right up to our time. Mistrust of the masses, contempt for bourgeois mediocrities, denunciation of the dehumanising effects of technology and, by calling all these into question, an attack on democracy and capitalism, deemed to be the source of all evil – these were and are the main grievances. Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell believes he has identified a factor common to all these rejections: anti-materialism, defined as repudiation of the rationalist, individualistic, utilitarian and hedonistic heritage of the 17th and 18th centuries. Book by book, this phenomenon imposed itself upon him as the dominant ideological source of fascism. In this connection, Sternhell recently wrote, notably in his first work, which was dedicated to Maurice Barrès, that from the end of the 19th century onwards, France, where this movement was strong, had been the true cradle of fascism, and even of national socialism. This argument, to which he has systematically returned, was at the origin of the wave of purification of the memory and actions of a xenophobia that is, at it were, in the genes of French political culture, which Bernard-Henri Lévy’s l’Idéologie française inaugurated with redoubtable skill. Already retreating in comparison with this caricature in an earlier book with contributions from several writers, Naissance de l’idéologie fasciste (Fayard), published in 1989 and dealing with the same period, nowadays Zeev Sternhell’s view is more balanced. Not only does he acknowledge that anti-materialism affected continental Europe as a whole, and even Britain (including, in particular, a little-known writer who was once famous, Thomas Ernest Hulme – who died in 1917, at the age of 34), but he also accepts that this movement merely prepared the ground on which fascism evolved, which is quite different from making it responsible for fascism. I regard this analysis as much fairer – and it is helpful in shedding light on our present situation. Ideology prepared the ground. The specific historical circumstances – the First World War and the 1929 crisis – did the rest. Otherwise all major examples of adventurous thinking would have to be called into question. In the name of the noblest ideals and in the light of frequently prophetic analyses, thinkers of the stature of Nietzsche, to whom anti-Semitism was foreign and who would have been appalled by Nazism, weakened the West’s defences before the irrational forces of protest, aroused by events. Not only did the calling into question of the heritage of the Enlightenment caused by the Great War and the 1929 crisis almost overcome democratic systems, but it also aggravated, by legitimising totalitarian aspirations, the processes of massification and the financial ravages for which anti-materialist intellectuals had specifically blamed democracy. The German ‘conservative revolution’, which Jeffrey Herf felicitously christened ‘reactionary modernism’, perfectly illustrated the contradiction in the origins of Nazism described by Fritz Stern – at the start of the historical process, the crisis of civilisation supposed to be affecting the modern world was denounced in the name of the individual, of moral values and of what Bergson famously described as the supplément d’âme. Ultimately there were totalitarian organisations, praise for 11 technology (in association with the great forces of nature – air, water, fire) in the service of power, and, finally, concentration camps. How did this come about, this shift from the original criticism of the dehumanising effects of technology to getting man bogged down in matter? The anti-materialism criterion put forward by Zeev Sternhell is not sufficient. We can all see that the inverse criticism, expressed of the liberal democratic system by Marxism-Leninism, specifically in the name of historical materialism, also culminated in the establishment of a totalitarian regime. Identifying anti-materialism as the origin of evil amounts to according a positive content to materialism, and implicitly admitting that the Enlightenment was materialistic – which it was not. The real difficulty lies in understanding why thinkers who were all effectively anti-materialists were led to call the liberal democratic model into question in the name of this principle. The real question is that of grasping at its source the reasoning that incited so many thinkers of the late 19th and 20th centuries to see in massification and excessive materialism the determining factors behind the Great War and the 1929 crisis, and to attribute responsibility for them to the revolution of the Enlightenment. To account for this intellectual error, explaining it by ‘anti-humanism’, as recently proposed by Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut in relation to May 1968, certainly comes closest to the heart of the problem. Anti-humanism involves rejecting the premise of Rousseau and Kant, according to which every individual possesses moral capacity at the heart of his consciousness, without needing to make reference to a religious tradition or to internalise a superstructure. If we reject this premise, which is in the principle of liberal thought, secular freedom and tolerance are no longer possible. The individual is immediately and ineluctably reduced to his economic and social environment, where he is forcibly imprisoned in obligatory community solidarities and entirely subservient to an ideology, a religion, a master. And this same individual finds himself tempted to expect a response to his spiritual needs from his group, from society, from the state. This makes it easier to understand how the calling into question of the heritage of the Enlightenment, accentuated by the Great War and re-legitimised by the apparent collapse of capitalism in 1929, helped to undermine the intellectual and psychological bases of democracy. Twenty years after the hopes of 1989, when we believed that we were glimpsing the definitive victory of liberal ideas, we cannot avoid feeling anxious when we see this undermining being repeated, in a process that has taken place in two stages. The first was in the 1990s, in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, owing to the failure of liberal experiments. The second followed the most significant financial and economic crisis since that of 1929. In the early years of the 20th century, the trend was already affecting the entire continent of Europe. However, the key difference between the two eras is the absence of war. We are threatened by outbreaks of intolerance, by setbacks for public freedoms and a renewal of state intervention; we are not facing the threat of a return to totalitarianism, and the worst is not always certain.

Durante l’incontro organizzato dalla Fondazione Res Publica, Jacques Attali ha svolto una riflessione sulle trasformazioni socio-economiche in atto nel nostro Paese e in Europa in generale e sul connesso tema delle riforme necessarie per affrontare tale cambiamento. In apertura, il Presidente della Fondazione ha ricordato l’attuale felice momento perché finalmente è possibile parlare di problemi e prospettive a lunga scadenza sulla base di autorevoli libri e pubblicazioni: • “La Paura e la speranza” – G. Tremonti; • Breve storia del futuro” – J. Attali; • Rapport de la Commission Attali; • “The world in 2025” – European Ideas Network. Situazione Generale. Secondo Attali, la situazione economica che stiamo attraversando non solo a livello europeo, ma a livello globale comporterà, secondo l’analisi fornita, una importante riduzione della crescita in Europa, con rilevanti conseguenze di tipo occupazionale e sociale. I governi al potere in questa fase così delicata non saranno in grado di far fronte a molte delle promesse elettorali e dovranno prendere decisioni impopolari che deluderanno inevitabilmente il proprio elettorato. Per coloro che devono affrontare le elezioni in questo periodo, è pertanto difficile immaginare un rinnovo della fiducia o una vittoria significativa sugli avversari. In questa prospettiva, un errore che i governi europei devono evitare è quello di promettere delle soluzioni a breve termine per problemi a lungo termine. L’unica via d’uscita per affrontare questa fase di recessione è quella di fissare degli obiettivi di lungo periodo e identificare i metodi per raggiungerli, tramite riforme profonde, urgenti, non necessariamente tutte previste nel programma del candidato premier e che non porteranno miracolistici effetti immediati. Sostiene Attali che non è sempre premiante inserire le riforme nel programma elettorale: essendo impopolari rischiano di influire negativamente sull’esito delle votazioni. Ma una volta vinte le elezioni, il capo del nuovo governo dovrà avviare le riforme prima possibile (come esempio, è stato citato il caso di Tony Blair, che ha avviato riforme significative che non aveva inserito nel programma elettorale). Le riforme. Per evitare che la situazione degeneri è necessario intervenire con riforme importanti. Le riforme – ha sostenuto Attali – non sono né di destra né di sinistra: sono giuste. Per questo egli ritiene che “la mano non deve tremare” : le riforme devono essere fatte, anche se impopolari. Anzi, in questo sta proprio la differenza tra il politico e lo statista: quest’ultimo infatti è in grado di assumersi il rischio di diventare impopolare nel giro di 24 ore. Il risultato della Commissione Attali istituita in Francia è che oggi una proposta su due elaborata dal think thank voluto da Sarkozy diventerà legge, nonostante il rischio di impopolarità (è stato citata a questo proposito, la riforma di liberalizzazione dei taxi). L’Italia e la Francia – sostiene Attali – condividono le stesse sfide per la competitività nel villaggio globale e molte delle proposte del piano Attali potrebbero essere prese in considerazione per l’Italia. Le infrastrutture. Per quanto riguarda le infrastrutture, ad esempio, per l’Italia sarebbe strategica la creazione di un grande porto. Il suggerimento di Attali parte dalla considerazione che già due volte nella storia l’Italia è stata una potenza mercantile dominante in Europa, con Venezia prima e Genova poi. Lo sviluppo di un porto importante per il Mediterraneo consentirebbe all’Italia di estendere le sue relazioni internazionali, poiché nel nuovo equilibrio economico mondiale gli Stati Uniti non sono più il baricentro del mondo, pesantemente spostato ad Oriente, e nuovi protagonisti sono entrati in gioco. La ricerca. In questo nuovo equilibrio, diventa fondamentale lo “scambio di cervelli” tra i Paesi: rilanciare le università è una delle principali sfide del domani. Già oggi l’India non riesce a soddisfare la domanda interna di ingegneri. L’impegno è quello di formare “cervelli del domani” europei, o comunque formati presso centri di eccellenza europei. L’Italia nello specifico ha dato al mondo una “classe creativa” importante che ha contribuito al progresso del Paese. Negli ultimi secoli ha ridotto il suo ruolo sulla scena mondiale, ma con un buon investimento nelle università potrà formare o accogliere scienziati, finanziatori, creatori d’impresa che oltre ad amministrare, saranno in grado di assumersi dei rischi con l’obiettivo della crescita e dello sviluppo. La finanza. Un’altra sfida importante per l’Italia è la creazione di una grande piazza finanziaria: ci sono tutti gli elementi perché Milano lo diventi. L’educazione. Tra le proposte della Commissione per la liberazione della crescita presieduta dallo stesso Attali, molto spazio assumono inoltre le riforme relative al sistema educativo, alla formazione degli insegnanti (dagli asili nido all’università), allo sviluppo della ricerca in biotecnologie e all’innovazione.Internet deve essere promosso in Francia come in Italia, perché si deve garantire l’accesso universale alla banda larga. La BEI. Un ruolo chiave in questo senso lo svolge anche la Banca Europea degli Investimenti, che dovrebbe finanziare più progetti di ricerca e innovazione nei nostri Paesi. Tali programmi di investimento nell’innovazione e nella tecnologia sono fondamentali per un Paese che deve competere con i nuovi giganti.

Lo Stockholm Network ha pubblicato il primo di una serie di documenti realizzati sul sistema sanitario, nel quale viene affrontato il tema della riforma del sistema sanitario nei paesi dell’Europa Centro Orientale. L’analisi svolta esamina la trasformazione e le riforme nel sistema sanitario dei paesi europei centro orientali a seguito del crollo dell’Unione Sovietica all’inizio degli anni Novanta. Gli esempi della Polonia, Ungheria, Repubblica Ceca, Slovenia e Romania rappresentano dei casi di successo, ma vengono anche evidenziate le opportunità perse o le conseguenze derivanti dalle riforme attuate. Per consultare il documento in PDF: la riforma del sistema sanitario nell’Europa Centro Orientale

Lo scorso marzo, subito dopo le celebrazioni del cinquantesimo anniversario dei Trattati di Roma, un attento commentatore di questioni europee aveva paragonato l’Europa ad un aereo lanciato alla massima potenza su una corta pista di decollo. La Dichiarazione di Berlino impegnava infatti i 27 a rilanciare il processo di integrazione con le opportune modifiche istituzionali entro il giugno 2009; in altri termini, dati i necessari tempi di ratifica, la Dichiarazione implicava la necessità per gli Stati di trovare un accordo sulle linee guida di queste riforme durante il Consiglio europeo del giugno 2007, ossia in meno di tre mesi di tempo, pena una crisi forse irreversibile. Le conclusioni del Consiglio europeo, come sempre arrivate al termine di una estenuante trattativa tra gli Stati, ci dicono che il decollo è avvenuto, la crisi è stata evitata, ma restano alcune zone d’ombra. Per quanto attiene il meccanismo di voto, il compromesso raggiunto come è noto perpetua l’inefficiente meccanismo decisionale deciso a Nizza (ponderazione dei voti degli Stati) almeno fino al 2014, con la possibilità di una sua ulteriore estensione sui singoli provvedimenti, a richiesta di uno Stato, fino al 2017. Dopo di che si passerà alla più efficace e flessibile regola decisa dall’accordo costituzionale, ossia maggioranze decise dal 55% degli Stati che rappresentino almeno il 65% della popolazione . Molti commentatori si sono espressi sulla problematicità dell’attuale meccanismo, lamentando la scarsa capacità decisionale dell’UE negli ultimi anni, e dunque traggono una valutazione negativa dell’accordo raggiunto. In realtà, su questo punto fondamentale la sostanza è migliore delle apparenze. Teoricamente, è infatti sicuramente vero che il meccanismo di voto deciso a Nizza riduce drasticamente il numero complessivo di coalizioni che possono raggiungere la maggioranza (da circa il 7% delle coalizioni possibili a 15, a poco più del 2 per cento). Tuttavia ciò vale se tutte le coalizioni “vincenti” sono egualmente probabili. Se invece gli Stati tendono a mantenere nel tempo le stesse “alleanze”, la perdita di efficienza è sicuramente inferiore a quella calcolata teoricamente. A riprova di ciò, si può constatare come dopo Nizza il numero di decisioni prese ogni anno dal Consiglio si è in parte ridotto (anche se i dati nel 2006 sembrano mostrare una ripresa), ma in misura meno che proporzionale alla perdita di efficienza prevista. In aggiunta, non possiamo essere certi che il numero inferiore di decisioni raggiunte dal Consiglio negli ultimi anni sia interamente attribuibile alla sua scarsa efficienza decisionale, in quanto il Consiglio, insieme al Parlamento, decide su proposte che vengono elaborate dalla Commissione europea. E quest’ultima negli ultimi tempi non ha certo brillato per attivismo, in quanto da organismo collegiale è ormai diventata una mini-assemblea con 27 teste. Poiché l’accordo raggiunto prevede che dal 2009 la composizione della Commissione europea venga limitata a 15 Commissari, è dunque probabile che la maggiore efficienza decisionale della Commissione dal 2009 compensi in parte il mantenimento delle regole di voto di Nizza fino al 2014/2017, dunque rendendo meno negativo di quel che sembra il compromesso raggiunto. Un’ulteriore notizia positiva deriva dalle regole di funzionamento dell’Unione. Certo, il progetto di Costituzione è stato definitivamente accantonato, e l’UE continuerà a funzionare con i suoi due Trattati, quello sull’Unione Europea che ne delinea le caratteristiche essenziali, e il vecchio Trattato della Comunità Europea, che diventerà un Trattato sul funzionamento dell’Unione. Tuttavia quest’ultimo, di fatto, incorporerà la gran parte delle innovazioni prese in sede di accordo costituzionale. In particolare, la codecisione (maggioranza qualificata al Consiglio e potere di veto del Parlamento) diventerà la procedura legislativa ordinaria dell’Unione, restringendo la regola dell’unanimità a poche, ben definite eccezioni. Inoltre, si amplia l’area di competenze su cui l’UE (a maggioranza) potrà decidere in maniera sovraordinata rispetto agli Stati (le cosiddette competenze concorrenti), su tematiche nuove ed essenziali per il futuro del Continente quali l’immigrazione, l’energia, il clima, la sicurezza. Sarebbe dunque auspicabile che il dibattito italiano in materia, in particolare su immigrazione e politica energetica, si ricolleghi al più presto alle dinamiche europee che inizieranno a negoziarsi nei prossimi mesi. Infine, a tutela delle specificità nazionali, è stata approvata la clausola sul controllo di sussidiarietà, per cui la maggioranza semplice dei parlamenti nazionali, per la prima volta ufficialmente inseriti nel trattato, potrà richiedere il riesame di una proposta legislativa nel caso in cui si ritenga che la decisione stessa possa più efficacemente essere normata a livello nazionale o locale. Se il progetto legislativo non verrà ritenuto conforme al principio di sussidiarietà da parte di Parlamento europeo o Consiglio, a maggioranza semplice, la proposta legislativa sarà ritirata. Anche la Carta dei Diritti Fondamentali è ricompresa nell’accordo. Quest’ultima non sarà inserita nei nuovi testi legislativi, ma è stato chiarito che il Trattato conterrà un riferimento ad essa, conferendole valore giuridicamente vincolante e stabilendone il campo di applicazione (in particolare rispetto alle pratiche del Regno Unito, oggetto di una specifica Dichiarazione). Notizie negative vengono invece, non a caso, dalla Politica Estera e di Sicurezza Comune. Al di là della rinnovata veste dell’Alto rappresentante per la politica estera, che diventa Vice Presidente della Commissione e dunque “capo” unico della diplomazia comunitaria, le decisioni prese dal Consiglio europeo ridimensionano ulteriormente la possibilità di significativi passi avanti in questo ambito, prevedendo il mantenimento della regola dell’unanimità (come del resto già in Costituzione), ma precisando ulteriormente che la sicurezza nazionale resta di competenza esclusiva degli Stati; che le eventuali nuove competenze che gli Stati possono attribuire all’UE attraverso la cosiddetta clausola di flessibilità (art. 308) non si applicano alla politica estera; e che la personalità giuridica che verrà attribuita all’UE in ogni caso non inficia la rappresentanza dei singoli Stati presso le agenzie internazionali, in particolare nel Consiglio di Sicurezza dell’ONU. Dunque, arrivati a fine pista con i motori al massimo ed un baratro davanti, sicuramente non stiamo volando troppo alti, ma se non altro ci siamo staccati da terra ed abbiamo evitato un tragico impatto. In altri termini, valgono ancora le parole di Robert Schuman, quando il 9 maggio 1950 diede il via a questo processo: “l’Europa non potrà farsi in una sola volta, né sarà costruita tutta insieme; essa sorgerà da realizzazioni concrete che creino anzitutto una solidarietà di fatto”. Insomma, una volta decollati possiamo iniziare a preoccuparci se il carburante a bordo è sufficiente per arrivare a destinazione. (a cura di Carlo Altomonte)

La Fondazione Res Publica ha organizzato un convegno sui confini dell’Occidente e sul ruolo dell’America Latina, il 17 luglio alle ore 18.30. All’evento, che si è svolto presso la Basilica di San Lorenzo in Lucina (situata nell’omonina piazza al num. 16/A) hanno partecipato: Josè Maria Aznar, Fausto Bertinotti e Giulio Tremonti. Modera: Roberto Arditti. Qui il video integrale dell'evento: http://www.radioradicale.it/scheda/231071/ai-confini-delloccidente-lamerica-latina-come-nuova-frontiera