04/2019 – L’Europa dopo il voto del 2019: le sfide, le paure, le speranze

Abstracts

Beda Romano, Institutional Scenarios after the European Vote

For the first time since the 1950s, a German political leader has become president of the European Commission in 2019. Ursula von der Leyen has little experience on the European scene, as she was formerly Social Affairs Minister and Defense Minster in her country. This said, she wants the European Commission to be “geopolitical”, more assertive in defending Europe’s interests in the world and in competing against China, the US, Russia or India. Although her agenda is shared by most, her political room of maneuver is paradoxically limited. Over the next five years, Ms von der Leyen will have to deal with a number of nationalist governments in member states, a fragmented European Parliament, an embarrassing split between East and West in the EU and a difficult relationship with a long-standing ally, the US. The new president of the European Commission has made the fight against climate change a key policy. Her objective is both political and economic. She wants to boost the European economy, fight political extremism and strengthen the EU democratic accountability. While Germany might see the EU has a safe harbor at the time of increasing tensions with the US, Italy’s euroscepticism has become a source of uncertainty in European affairs.

  

Edoardo Bressanelli, Margherita de Candia, A Vote on or against Europe? The Union’s Resilience between Euroscepticism and Politicization

 This article analyses the European Parliament elections held in May 2019, calling into question some important aspects of the ‘second order election’ model. Through an assessment of the electoral campaign on social media, and the role played by the lead candidates to the Presidency of the Commission, it argues that the European Union is increasingly politicised, and has thus become a mobilising factor for the electorate. Placing the focus on the new Parliament, the article shows that the transnational groups have experienced significant changes: the People’s Party and the Socialists are no longer able to form a majority, while the Eurosceptics have gained strength. Yet, despite some remarkable results, parties challenging the mainstream remain a divided minority in Parliament, systematically marginalised by the pro-EU groups. This article concludes by claiming that, if the 2019 elections are to be considered a referendum on the Union, then the result was a resounding, and to some extent unexpected, proof of its resilience.

 

Daniele Pasquinucci, The Europeanisation of the European Eelections. The Vote of 26 May 2019 in Italy

 In the field of European elections studies, “testing” the second-order thesis has become a sort of compulsory rite. All in all, such a ritualization proves the emergence of doubts on the euristic value of a conceptual framework coined in 1980. The 2019 European election in Italy provided further evidence of its growing obsolescence. As the article shows, in this country the increasing osmosis between European and national politics has had a crucial impact on both the election campaign and the results of the elections. By the way, such a context put under strain one of the underlying assumptions of the “second-order thesis”, that is the sharp distinction between EU and national level.

 

 Silvia Bolgherini, Germany: European Elections and New Political Balances

 In the 2019 EU elections pro-Europe parties confirmed themselves as a majority despite the increasing strength of the right-wing nationalist forces. Nonetheless, the new EU Parliament differs sensibly from the previous one and several novelties marked this electoral event. Germany was no exception in this regard, with its thorny domestic situation at the eve of the EU election. The article dwells into these peculiarities by providing, first, a picture of the German electoral results and of the geographical vote distribution for the EU, and then a discussion on the new EU Parliament and Commission, led by the former German Minister of Defence, Ursula von der Leyen. Some final remarks on the role of Germany and of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in the new domestic and European equilibria are proposed.

 

 Michele Marchi, From the European vote to the pension reform: Macronian voluntarism against French decline and European irrelevance

The first aim of this article is to describe European elections in France and if you can consider their result as a part of the evolution of the French political system, as started and developed after the presidential election of 2017.

The second aim of this article is to describe Emmanuel Macron’s choices in European politics during the first half of his presidential mandate and how these choices are connected to the results of the European elections.

The third aim is to connect all that with Macron’s internal political choices in the direction of a full reform of the French economic and social system; all that in particular in the light of the two huge crisis, the one of the so called gilets jaunes and the other linked to the strikes against the full revision of  French welfare system, in particular of the retirement age.

 

Alberto Basciani, East wind? The European Elections of May 2019 in Eastern Europe in a Historical Perspective

In recent years Eastern Europe has been described as one of the main vectors of the populist and nationalist wave that seems capable of jeopardizing, if not the European construction, at least some of those universal principles (tolerance, integration, multi-ethnicity, etc.) considered among the foundations of the EU. This article, starting from the general results of the May 2019 European elections, aims to examine from a historical perspective the origins of the fortune of nationalist, xenophobic and more general populist parties now firmly in power in many Central and Eastern European countries. It is the author’s opinion that only by investigating in depth the difficult legacy left between communist totalitarianism and the controversial phase of transition towards democracy and capitalism, it is possible to identify the causes of the fragility of the democratic institutions in force in Eastern European partners, and the aggressiveness of a part of their ruling classes towards some of the moral and institutional cornerstones of the European Union.

 

Paolo Pombeni, What Remains of Europeanism Today?

In this short essay the author describes how the European integration project started with a huge connection with the building of the so called affluent society. Its crisis and the simultaneous end of the Cold War age created the conditions for a possible relaunch of the European integration project but all the different European leaderships haven’t found yet a new and finally unambiguous legal and institutional form for European Union.

 

Alessandro Campi, A Long Ideological Post-war: “National Socialism” in the Political and Cultural History of the XX Century

‘War socialism’, ‘national-productivism’, ‘organized community’, ‘socialism of capital’, ‘community economy’, ‘Prussian socialism’, ‘national unionism’: these are some of the expressions with which, in political-ideological history of the twentieth century, the synthesis or fusion between Nation and Class was presented. ‘National socialism’ – in the form of a union between capital and work – takes root as a propaganda myth and a political perspective starting especially from the First World War. But since then it has not stopped reproposing itself, even outside Europe. Isn’t the political-ideological model of contemporary China a variant of ‘national socialism’? And what are today’s populist critics of neo-liberal globalization aiming at if not for the creation of an economic-political system capable of reconciling, once again, the State and the People, National sovereignty and Social justice? Hence the usefulness of retracing the origin and fortune of this controversial political formula.

 

 Alberto Mingardi, Anthony de Jasay. Taking the State – and Liberalism – Seriously

 Hungarian-born economist Anthony de Jasay (1925-2019) was one of the most original voices in contemporary classical liberalism. Jasay started as an economist, had a go at finance and eventually became an independent scholar, being mostly interested in political theory. His magnum opus is The State (1985), which apparently contradicts one of the pillars of the contemporary economics of public choice: that is, methodological individualism, as it analyses the state as its operations were those of a power-maximizing individual mind. Yet Jasay was not trying to anthropomorphize collective action. He was advancing the thesis that there are incentives inherent to bureaucratic machineries, which necessarily tend towards the enlargement of state action.

Jasay did not share the traditional liberal allegiance to written constitutions: for he had a liberal sensibility but was a political realist. Likewise, he refused the traditional rationales for the very institution of governments: from arguments based on public goods to the very rhetoric of natural rights.

His political realism merged with his taste for analytical clarity in trying to use direct concepts as building blocks of his political theory. His liberalism was of the Humean bent, based on conventions rather than on rights.

Lack of an academic affiliation may contribute to explain the fact his vast intellectual production has not been noticed as its originality deserved.