Giuseppe Sacco
A Cautionary Tale
As every child brought up in the English-speaking world knows, a “cautionary tale” is a story that carries a moral and a warning. That is, a tale that teaches them not to do reckless or dangerous things, not to indulge in foolish behavior. And that is exactly what, in the words of the Financial Times, Giorgia Meloni’s experience has become: “a cautionary tale for European leaders tempted to believe that ideological affinity with Donald Trump also entails political protection.”
Until quite recently, the Italian Prime Minister was indeed “one of the US President’s most devoted European allies.” An ally, however, who has recently been taught — and taught the hard way — that the idea of defending one’s country’s national interest does not sit easily with the aggressive “America First” worldview typical of the MAGA movement.
When she was in opposition, Meloni was indeed invited twice to speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, the annual political showcase of American Republicans. And, in 2018, Steve Bannon — at the time a MAGA ideologue — even appeared as a featured speaker at Atreju, Meloni’s party’s political festival.
Giorgia Meloni’s Mistake
Subsequently, however, in her role as Prime Minister, Meloni, with the cautious pragmatism she progressively adopted, disappointed Trump and the fanatical supporters of the “America First” hard line. Namely, “when Rome refused to allow US armed forces to use Italian military bases to bomb Iran, something Italians do not like.” A disagreement “that immediately became a personal rupture”, with Trump stating that Meloni “lacked courage” and even accusing her — at a subsequent meeting of heads of state and government — of “begging” for a photograph with him in order to bolster her standing in opinion polls at home.
Some observers immediately raised the question of whether she had committed a major strategic mistake, pointing out that this had begun a war of mutual insults which — according to Amy Kazmin, the head of the Rome correspondent bureau of this major international newspaper — was, from the outset, unlikely to end up with “the once-friendly relationship being restored.” Also because Steve Bannon joined in the quarrel, telling the Italian media that Meloni had “betrayed her own fundamental principles.” While other observers stressed that “in Trump’s eyes, Meloni had been guilty of lèse-majesté”, as on this occasion she had failed to show the deference owed to the boss by his subordinates.
At the end of August, the Financial Times published a highly instructive and cautionary read, providing the morality of the story. An analysis that clearly supports the point that the Italian Prime Minister had indeed been wrong in assuming that sharing an extreme-right political outlook with Trump could give her government a privileged relationship with the United States. A piece, however, that also shows clearly that the provincialism of the current US President and his attempts to establish himself as a global hegemon make him virtually incompatible with the international position of any country such as Italy, whose society is extremely open to the world at large.
This is witnessed not only by centuries-old historical experiences, but confirmed as well to be true in the more than half-century following the Treaty of Rome, thanks to the sincerity — even somewhat naive — virtually unique among both the original Six and today’s Twenty-Seven, with which Italy has embraced the post-war attempt to build an objectively difficult European unity.
Moreover, in still more recent times, Italian society has confirmed that it holds a well-identified position in the community of nations around the world — and in a way whose impact is bound to prove much more enduring and irrevocable — because, over recent decades, it has integrated a highly significant flow of immigrants and, for better or worse, an important second and even a third generation of “new Italians”.
Two phenomena that the new “European-style” conservatives presently, and opportunistically, blame for having created serious problems of domestic coexistence. Phenomena, by the way, that are apparently the contrary of those that accompanied Italian outward emigration during the 1871–1971 century, but are instead substantially “contrary and equal” to the latter in their impact on creating a permanent relationship between Italy and the rest of the world.
Not only in high-profile political cases such as the Sacco and Vanzetti one, a seven-year-long cause célèbre of denial of justice that triggered an international outcry and nothing less than an international culture war. But also in cases that involved great Italian-American personalities such as Rodolfo Valentino, Enrico Caruso, Arturo Toscanini and Enrico Fermi, as well as Guglielmo Marconi and Antonio Meucci. And then others, less well known but no less important — such as Amedeo Giannini, who in 1904 created the Bank of Italy. Two years later, he played a leading role in San Francisco’s reconstruction; then, in 1930, he changed its name to Bank of America, and ten years latert was rumored to be the strongest bank in the world. Not to mention Federico Faggin, one of the inventors of the Internet.
Italian society has indeed established, and to a certain extent is still maintaining, permanent ties with all the major nations, as well as making a permanent contribution to the high-quality scientific, academic, cultural, entrepreneurial and professional communities of other countries, such as France and the USA.
Contributions, however, that have in fact ended up highlighting something rather unexpected: that there is an evident cultural and civilizational difference between Italy, on the one hand, and the main European nations such as France, Britain and — most of all — Germany, on the other. And a political gap.
Italy Seen from Abroad
The assumption that a right-wing ideological and worldview affinity with Donald Trump could guarantee a European right-wing coalition a privileged channel to Washington has therefore ultimately proved — at least in the Italian case — a serious error of perspective.
First of all, because, as already pointed out, American nationalism tends — as it has always done — to be deeply isolationist and “exceptionalist”, with little inclination to grant preferential treatment to its European NATO partners or to understand the nuances of their institutional needs. A political gap that helps explain the serious difficulties that have finally emerged in the relationship between the American President and Meloni, who, despite coming in every respect from a historically marginal neo-fascist subculture, is nevertheless constrained by the fact that she is — and is inevitably seen from abroad as — the Prime Minister of the Italian Republic born in 1946.
Yet, secondly, we must also take into account how this difference fits into a broader cultural and sociological context, in which Italy has historically displayed a distinctive character. It is indeed no hazard if two very different international personalities have, in their own ways, offered complementary observations on contemporary Italian society: a person well versed in the glamorous and sophisticated world of fashion, and of mixed Afro-Jamaican and Chinese-Jamaican descent, such as Naomi Campbell; and a rugged creature of the desert, an expert in the fierce struggle for life and power, such as Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.
The former, probably drawing on her first-hand experience, once said that the only people, among those she had known, who were not racist were the Italians. Likewise, the latter, knowing very well what he was talking about, said that he preferred dealing with Italians rather than with any other people, because Italians were the only Westerners who had no colonial nostalgia.
These observations, made by figures such as the supermodel and the Libyan leader about the distinctive character of Italian society and the absence of racial prejudices or nostalgia for Mussolini’s imperial illusions and crimes, are indeed more than credible, and they touch upon deep-seated aspects of the nation’s collective identity.
An openness that, on the one hand, facilitates the country’s international projection and dialogue, while, on the other, creates structural frictions when it encounters rigid leaders or European partners — France or Germany, for instance, as well as, most recently, Labour-ruled Britain — shaped by very different histories and ambitions of colonialism and imperialism.
For an Italian head of government, the challenge of international positioning therefore does not lie in ideological alignment, but in managing the many objective constraints imposed by the country’s geopolitical and economic role, balancing superficial political affinities against enduring national interests.
The crude fascist conviction that whoever is in government can do whatever they want on the international as well as the domestic scene, provided that they have first subordinated the media and diplomacy to their own power, ultimately runs up against the fact that the international role of Italy, and that of other similarly advanced and open democracies, actually rests upon a broad and complex economic and social fabric.
In other words, foreign policy is conducted not only by the state but also by society; an extremely important fact that provides the true driving force behind the country’s international interactions.
Thus, whereas a fascist regime, or an occasional authoritarian power coalition, could try to subordinate the nation’s behavior and the projection of its image on the world scene through strictly controlled means and channels of global communication, Italy’s international action is structurally unlikely to end up emanating from ministerial offices or the directives of a central government.
It mostly travels the world scene riding on the international success of Italian scientific and cultural production, thanks to Italian management consultants, through the widespread network of fashion companies, along the sophisticated value chains of luxury products and the field of food, together with tourist flows, and via the community of affluent foreigners who choose to live in the Peninsula in order — as they themselves openly explain — to profit from the country’s “quality of life”.
Moreover, this economic and relational pluralism also constitutes a kind of structurally untouchable barrier: it makes foreign policy effectively immune to ideological improvisation or the propagandistic subordination of the “premier” or minister of the day, because it is bound by the characteristics, real interests and interdependencies of our country with the rest of the world.
Between State and Society
The foreign policy of a country — or rather of a nation, as would be more precise to say in order to emphasize the sociological and cultural dimension (and as Meloni herself would prefer to put it) — cannot be the creation of one man alone, whether that be a foreign minister such as Bismarck, a dictator such as Mussolini, or even an ex-lobbyist who had the bright idea of irritating both Ukraine and Russia by hiring the former Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov, as a consultant on military technology to Meloni’s government (and, on top of that, declaring that he had done it “thinking only about Rome, not about Moscow, Kyiv or Washington”).
Foreign policy is always the collective creation of society, which contributes to it according to its own culture, its creative character and its attachment to freedom, as in the Italian case. Or else — as happens in other European countries — through a tendency toward uncritical discipline, a preference for militaristic brutality, and a habit of obedience and subservience.
Foreign policy conceived as an authoritarian monologue — the exercise of force imposed from above by a “one-man ruler,” whether it takes the form of Machiavellian calculation or the muscular projection of a dictatorship — presupposes a society regarded as formless material that can be shaped or repressed, trained to obedience and identity-based closure. Practices notoriously difficult to impose on the Italian people.
But when a nation possesses a profoundly different social and cultural DNA — rooted in spiritual openness, a drive for research and exploration, cultural refinement, hospitality, historical heritage, widespread economic exchange, curiosity about the world, and a deeply ingrained resistance to authoritarianism, dogmatic hegemony or militaristic brutality — that hierarchical model inevitably begins to crack.
Foreign policy then becomes the faithful mirror of the civic virtues (or vices) of a people: if society is vibrant, creative and accustomed to breathing at a global level through work, enterprise and culture, every attempt to confine it within narrow ideological cages or ill-calculated forms of subordination is bound to collide with the reality of the facts.
It is precisely this friction that makes nationalist rhetorical statements so fragile when they face the test of government: when they seek to impose a narrow and provincial vision on a country that, by history and economic vocation, lives and breathes through its osmosis with the rest of the world.
One may therefore argue that this subterranean resistance of Italian society is today the real bulwark preventing permanent, or at least recurrent, autarkic tendencies in our international positioning and projection.
A Gap in History
There is no doubt that Italian society at large can still today be deemed a community of considerably higher quality than the tragicomic pack that has seized the functions of government and has so far made the Meloni government’s foreign policy such a failure.
All the more so because, si magna licet componere parvis, one might easily see that the same applies to the other party in the Meloni–Trump quarrel: the United States. The USA as a nation is undoubtedly going through a period of decline, but not to the extent — frankly hard to believe — that can be seen when one cannot avoid assessing the quality of its present political class, the gap between today’s America and the America we knew under politicians such as the Kennedy brothers and popular leaders such as Martin Luther King.
This gap — that between the historical greatness of a nation, embodied in periods of great idealism and civic “leadership”, and the contingent mediocrity of those who occasionally end up today controlling the levers of power — is a phenomenon that runs throughout the history of all great republics.
But when the level of the ruling class declines, the resilience of a country is no longer entrusted to the proclamations of those who govern, but to the moral, cultural and civic fiber of its deeper society. And it is this almost invisible infrastructure, made up of free citizens, independent institutions, scientists and people of culture — and of civic awareness — that continues to sustain the social edifice even when politics is going through its darkest ages.
Relations with other peoples and, ultimately, a country’s place in history are, in short, the result of a complex dynamic in which there are two active subjects: on the one hand, the state and, on the other, society. The historical position of a nation can therefore never be the product of a top-down imposition or of the solitary exercise of power, but rather the result of a continuous tension and osmosis between the state structure and the intimate fabric of civil society, with its culture, its productive capacity and its openness to the world and to other peoples.
