Common defense, it's time: for peace and democracy

Among the many and incomprehensible choices of our political system, the debate on the so-called rearmament of Europe is disconcerting. This last word is totally inadequate to testify to the need for a defense of the European Union surrounded to the east by a Russia that with Putin is trying to restore the old territory of the Soviet Union and to the west by the new American president who does one thing and thinks of a hundred others. An action, that of Trump, that oscillates between an isolationism out of time and the desire to command the free world in an attempt to "steal the jobs" of his old friends, and naturally also of his enemies, not with the logic of a market economy but with medieval taxes.

But let's get back to our debate. First of all, we must strongly reject the attempt by pacifists à la page to define those who support the urgency of a defense of Europe as a sort of warmongers. This has already been seen several times in Italy. For example, when in 1990 many countries agreed to liberate Kuwait from the operetta invasion by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, some Christian Democrat friends like Roberto Formigoni and Vittorio Sbardella held a pacifist march against the armed intervention. At the time, it was an attempt to shift the inspiration of Communion and Liberation into politics, and in fact it had no effect and Kuwait was freed again. Thus, today's pacifists think that Europe does not need a defense that is up to the current international context. They are wrong, and with them, all those who believe that the European Commission's invitation that Europe should think about defending itself alone is right, without specifying what, how and when. We believe, for example, that the first defense is that of the airspace of the 27 countries of the Union and of the whole of physical Europe. Little Israel, in the center of a region that is almost entirely against it, manages to defend itself by intercepting missiles and drones because its airspace is guaranteed by modern technology. This is how we could start to equip Europe with a weapons system capable of guaranteeing the airspace that in itself remains only a defensive instrument. Furthermore, the defense of the airspace can only be financed, pro rata, by all European countries and therefore for the first time there would be a common financial effort for an equally common defense, thus dropping any instrumentalization.

In the same way, concerns would fall in front of a rearmed Germany for which, however, it would be time to understand that today's Germany, Christian Democrat and Socialist, is absolutely not that of the first half of the twentieth century when the culture of extreme nationalisms prevailed throughout Europe. Today's politics should understand that the clash on the highest systems inevitably leads to stupid immobility while on the contrary, getting down to the merits of things to be done, the operational meeting between countries different in sensitivity and economy would be decidedly easier. Moreover, never before has the Old Continent been the bulwark for parliamentary democracies and for the freedoms connected to them in a phase in which even the old myths of the past like the United States risk an authoritarian drift, not armed but economic. The world's crying has increased both for the piecemeal war as Pope Bergoglio said, and for the growing poverty inside and outside the West and for the contextual great financial wealth that is undermining the role of politics without which everything is lost. For those who think, and we are with them, that Europe must get moving, this is an unrepeatable opportunity to demonstrate that unity is strength and, what's more, a force for peace and democracy.

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