Thread by @mccourtitaly

Diary from Italy, 1 April 2020 - on the need for the EU 27 to get their act together before it is too late. Includes English version of @CarloCalenda's letter to @faznet Thread. Full diary: facebook.com/john.mccourt1/…
@IBN_Berlin

Social unrest is growing in #Italy Italy as people are worrying not simply about catching the #coronavirus coronavirus but about running out of food and money particularly in the poorer southern regions of the country.

The 27 countries of the European Union remain split and the European Commission has never seemed less effective. Europe risks a division that will be irreparable. And Italians are rightly exasperated with countries that seem to favour the economic over the human, wealth over life

#Italy is frustrated with grossly insensitive comments from #EU president @vonderleyen, who dismissed the “corona bond” as “really just a slogan”; Dutch Finance Minister, @WBHoekstra, who said EU should investigate why some countries were not better prepared to weather the crisis

On Tuesday, leading Italian city and regional administrators published a full-page letter written in @faznet Signatories included @sbonaccini @GiovanniToti Toti, President of Liguria, and the mayors of #Milan #Bologna #Bergamo #Venice Brescia Ancona, #Padua, #Genoa Syracuse.

“Dear German friends, with coronavirus, history has returned to the West. After thirty years in which the only thing that mattered was the economy, today the challenge has returned to being, as it was in the past, political, cultural and human.

The first challenge concerns the very existence of the European Union. Today the EU has no means of responding to the crisis in a unified way. If it doesn't prove that it exists, it will cease to exist. For this reason 9 European states have proposed issuing Eurobonds

The letter recalls how 21 countries (“including France, Italy, Spain and Belgium”) allowed Germany to "halve its debt and postpone payments" in the aftermath of the Second World War. “Germany's debt after 1945 was 29.7 billion DM, a figure Germany could never have paid."

The letter says that Italians are "proud" of that choice and stresses that Italy is not asking Northern countries to pay off its former or its current debt but instead wants them to join with them so as to issue shared debt at the lowest possible rate.

"We are not asking for the mutualisation of previous public debt, but that the EU be provided with sufficient resources for a large European, health, economic + social "rescue plan" managed by the European institutions. Holland leads a group of countries that oppose this strategy

and Germany seems to want to follow this line. Holland is the country that has been subtracting tax resources from all the major European countries for years through a subsidized tax regime. Our welfare systems and therefore our weaker citizens pay the price. …

Every aspect of the Dutch attitude shows a lack of ethics and of solidarity. Solidarity that many European countries showed Germany after the war+ until reunification. Dear German friends, memory helps us to make the right decisions. Your place is with the big European countries.

#Germany's place is with the Europe of the institutions, of values, of freedom, and of solidarity. Not following the selfishness of small nations. Let's show together that Europe is stronger than those who want it to be weak.” Letter ends

Italy is not asking anybody to repay its existing debt. It has and will pay its own way. It is asking for a common effort to ensure that debt arising as a result of Coronavirus be collectively negotiated by the EU 27 and not by weaker single states

that will be charged far higher rates of interest precisely because their economies are more fragile. The EU has too often in the recent past being strong with the weak (#Greece) and weak with the strong (#Germany). This is a time for it to pull together for the common good

Back in 2009, Seamus Heaney, spoke of the common sense of connectedness to and within Europe: “The word ‘Europe’”, he said, “is one of the first cultural underpinnings to our lives in this part of the globe.” He also said that Europe was “more than a bureaucracy, it’s an ideal”.

It is not clear if that is still the case or if it is an ideal all member countries still subscribe too. Abandoning weaker southern European countries, who have contributed so much to Europe’s culture but not only, is to reject a European ideal + the idea of a common humanity.

Heaney’s lines from Cure at Troy, A Version Sophocles' Philoctetes, + a prime example of common European culture, read
History says, Don’t hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme

The way we are headed now, the idea of justice risks being put into abeyance but if this happens it will be despair and history that will be yoked together. And that will be at a huge human cost. Not just in the poorer countries of Europe but in the world as a whole.

We cannot give in to scepticism or despair. The words of Vaclav Havel have a special resonance today:
“Complete scepticism is an understandable consequence of discovering that one's enthusiasms are based on illusion. This scepticism leads to a dehumanization of history

(Havel) — a history drifting somewhere above us, taking its own course, having nothing to do with us, trying to cheat us, destroy us, playing out its cruel jokes.
But history is not something that takes place elsewhere; it takes place here. We all contribute to making it.

If bringing back some human dimension to the world depends on anything, it depends on how we acquit ourselves in the here and now.”
Some countries + some individuals are acquiting themselves better than others.

The Eurozone’s “frugal 4” – Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Finland – risk undermining + weakening our individual + collective effort. We and they must move beyond slogans and tokens of European solidarity to fully embrace our common burden, our common history, our common hope