Roberto Bertoni Let us hope we are wrong, that we are being too pessimistic — but watching the tragic affair unfolding between Iran and the United States, which at times takes on almost grotesque proportions, one gets the impression that the world no longer knows how to live without war. And given how things have unfolded in Ukraine, with the continuation of the Russian occupation (let us not forget that Putin’s rise is also a consequence of globalisation’s limits and of the West’s betrayal of an honest statesman like Gorbachev) and Zelensky still ordering long-range missile strikes against Russian targets, along with the failure of any prospect of a truce after four years of conflict, the bitter feeling is that the Old Continent has slipped back to 1913 — the year of the “sleepwalkers,” those who drifted into barbarism without even realising it. ...

Francesca Tortorella The diagnosis of a demographically ill Europe is entirely accurate: the active workforce is shrinking, while economic dependency — young people, retirees and inactive populations — is increasing. National social systems are therefore becoming more fragile, raising questions about their long-term sustainability. However, it is precisely on this issue that federalist ideas could provide a solution. First of all, a genuine European federal system would make it possible to pool demographic risks. Today, although the European Union as a whole is clearly a “very old” continent, population ageing and productivity decline do not occur at the same pace in all Member States. A coordinated European fiscal and social policy could help compensate for these differences, just as a federal state redistributes resources among its regions. ...

Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history,” prophesied in the final stretch of the twentieth century, now seems to have reversed itself — by a paradoxical twist of fate — into its very opposite. We feel surrounded by unrelenting conflicts, a sensation compounded by a “globalized” world that delivers news in real time and appears to erase every distance, physical and psychological alike. Our era exists in a permanent state of crisis — whether economic, social, political, strategic, military, or humanitarian in nature. ...