«It is better to light a small candle than to curse the darkness», said Confucius. Many will have thought so, regarding the landing of Mimmo Lucano at Parliament European with a landslide of votes. The politician from Riace embodies, according to Gioacchino Criaco, “the filoxenia that has always nourished the people of Locride”, and is considered the symbol of a new humanity in the heart of the Mediterranean, marred by tragedies such as the unforgettable one of Steccato di Cutro. Recurring idea is that, with Lucano in Strasbourg, the European Union cannot evade the issue of migrants nor avoid the confrontation, also due to the simultaneous election of Ilaria Salis, on the advisability of common rules regarding personal precautionary measures. It is a live desire in the radical left environment; nourished for example by Mario Oliverio, who supported Lucano for the European elections and had shared his judicial victory, similar to his own: both recipients of mandatory coercive measures; one, the former president of the Calabria Region, later fully acquitted, the other acquitted of the most serious charges. Instead Luigi de Magistris underlined his personal friendship with the (recently re-elected) mayor of Riace and praised his sensitivity, given, he added, that “politics is too often polluted by those who use and abuse human beings”. But we can burden Lucan, on his person, on his history, on his supranational role and on the charisma of man, with the responsibility, regarding the fate of migrants, of opening Europe’s eyes alone, as if electoral legitimation assigned to him was an unlimited delegation? And who, if so, should assist Lucano in this enormous task, given that the EU Parliament does not have the powers of the European Commission, which is a decision-making body of individuals not chosen directly by the people? And Lucan’s simplicity, goodness and honesty are sufficient for human rights to be included among the priorities of the European Council, which in the Conclusions of 17 and 18 April, in a context of full international crisis, limited itself to pre-packaged exhortations on Ukraine and Israel, to conceptual repetitions on the single market and to tepid admissions on the lack of an “authentic” common energy policy?
The values of the “Charter of Nice”
On human rights, it is widely believed that there should be no asymmetries between the states of the European Union, nor arbiters or autonomy at a local level, as the Hungarian Salis affair suggests. Article one of the Charter of Nice, i.e. the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, proclaimed for almost 24 years, establishes that “human dignity is inviolable” and “must be respected and protected”. Article four prescribes that “no one may be subjected to torture or to inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” Article five prohibits slavery, forced labor and human trafficking. Article 18 regulates the right to asylum, “guaranteed in compliance with the rules” listed there. Finally, Article 19 of the Nice Charter prohibits collective expulsions and does not allow the removal, expulsion or extradition of someone “to a State where there is a serious risk of being subjected to the death penalty, torture or other punishment or treatment inhuman or degrading”. The combined provisions of the aforementioned rules refer to the legal civilization and the history of European thought, which the EU is unable to fully translate into concrete and which, indeed, it seems to have partly forgotten.
Kant’s “For Perpetual Peace”.
In 1795, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote the volume “For Perpetual Peace”, of which it is worth remembering the preliminary articles. To begin, «no peace conclusion, which has been made – Kant warned – with the secret reservation of the material of a future war, must be valid as such». Furthermore, “no State which subsists independently shall be capable of being acquired by another by inheritance, exchange, sale or gift.” If that were not enough, “standing armies must in time completely cease.” Furthermore, “public debts must not be incurred in relation to external conflicts of the State”. Then, “no State shall interfere by force in the constitution and government of another State.” Above all, “no state at war with another should allow itself such hostility as to make mutual trust in future peace impossible.” It is impressive to reread these words from the late eighteenth century with today’s eyes. The late Unical professor Michele Borrelli, a philosopher and pedagogist of rare logical and scientific rigor, dedicated a new chapter (in its own right) of his “Letters to Kant” to their shocking current situation. Returning to Kant’s premises on perpetual peace helps, moreover, to ask ourselves where Europe is going and where it can go, the one for which Altiero Spinelli hoped for a «concentration of thought and will to seize favorable opportunities when they arise, to face defeats when they arrive, to decide to continue when necessary.”
“Latent” thought in Europe
But in Europe it is precisely thought that is missing, if the Covid-19 pandemic was not followed by any modification to the institutional architecture of the EU; if that tragic and shocking two-year period 2020-2022 was not enough to review the economic and monetary policies of the Union itself; if Kant’s approach to armaments was abandoned in favor of convenient political positions, gradually declined with instrumental variations in language; if the philosopher Jürgen Habermas’ warning about the war between Russia and Ukraine, of February 2023, was never taken up again and remained rather in the shadows, in the electoral campaign for the latest European elections. Western governments, the former exponent of the Frankfurt School had observed, «must take into consideration other interests in addition to Ukrainian ones in this war; they have legal obligations towards the security needs of their citizens and furthermore, regardless of the positions of the Ukrainian population, they have a moral responsibility for the victims and destruction caused by the weapons supplied by the West”. Therefore, Habermas concluded, Western governments “cannot pass on the Ukrainian government with responsibility for the brutal consequences of a prolongation of hostilities, which is only possible thanks to the military support offered.”
The role of the four Calabrians
This is the general framework – of dulling, compression and at times refusal of thought – in which the European parliamentarians elected (also) in Calabria will find themselves working, who, called to maintain a close connection with their (and our) region, are : Mimmo Lucano, Denis Nesci, Giuseppina Princi and Pasquale Tridico. What can they do for Calabria, which has long been contested due to the often unproductive use of European funds? Lucano and Tridico, expressions of a real left, will be able to dedicate themselves, if they wish, to political action to try to build a European welfare state on the model outlined several times by the former president of the INPS himself, who had insisted on a universal citizen’s income financed through common resources. And Nesci and Princi, representatives of the centre-right, will be able to push, if they want, to simplify access to European financing and credit from the European Investment Bank; perhaps even to include preferential conditions for companies presenting projects linked not only to the EU objectives but also to the reduction of the economic and social gap between the South and the North.
The four chosen ones could, hopefully together, intervene on a political level to broaden the concept of health protection contained in the Nice Charter in Article 35, which subordinates access to health prevention and medical care to the dictates of national legislation and practice, but says nothing about the free nature of the services at least for the less well-off and about the health needs of the individual territories of Europe which can be obtained from the respective epidemiological data and corresponding conditions of climatic adversity, road conditions and deprivation.
Stability, healthcare and internal areas
Above all, the European parliamentarians Lucano, Nesci, Princi and Tridico they could fight on a political level, if they were on the point of agreement, for the Stability Treaty to be reformed, coordination and governance in the economic and monetary union, in the sense of making sustainable and compensated – for citizens, not only Calabrians – the individual and collective sacrifices corresponding to the obligations to reduce public spending contained therein, as in the sense of modifying the article 3, paragraph 2, of the same text, so that health expenses can be removed from the constitutional obligation of a balanced budget, which severely limits the financing of public health and directs the Health Service towards its progressive replacement with an insurance system that it would penalize the poor excessively and create irremediable injustices.
Another issue, then, could be – and we hope so – a political commitment of the four EU parliamentarians so that the problem of the Internal Areas is framed in a European perspective, also with the identification of specific measures that consider the particularities of each of them: the nature, vocation and consistency of their economy; the available infrastructure; the relative lack of services; the care needs and the potential to invest in, perhaps without tortuous bureaucratic paths.
Here we have suggested topics that would be appropriate to discuss in depth, precisely because analysis, comparison and in-depth analysis are the basis of critical thinking. Which politics should promote. In Strasbourg as in Brussels, in Rome as in Catanzaro and Reggio Calabria. ([email protected])
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