Who was there and what was said at the international conference organized by the Craxi Foundation on the theme “1991 and Europe thirty years after the collapse of the USSR”
“1991 and Europe thirty years after the collapse of USSR “. It was the Craxi Foundation yesterday that turned the spotlight on a forgotten anniversary, crucial to history. With an often distracted or dismissive look when we talk about the destinies of Eastern Europe, Poland and Hungary, countries branded, with a touch of contempt, with the label of “sovereignists”.
But “the transition of the 30 years” (as Giovanni Orsina, president of the historical and scientific committee of the Craxi Foundation, political scientist of Luiss, called it), since the red flag of the Kremlin was lowered, a deeper reflection requires it.
Starting with what are the relations between Europe and the Russian Federation today. And this in the wake of Bettino Craxi’s far-sighted gaze. That is, remembered his daughter Stefania Craxi, creator of the homonymous Foundation, senator of FI and vice-president of the Foreign Affairs commission of Palazzo Madama, the leader who “since the 70s has fought to support dissidence in Eastern countries, among the personalities who worked harder to bring about the collapse of the Berlin Wall (whose anniversary is today 9 November, ed) “.
Craxi was the first Western party leader, not surprisingly, received in 1981 in Poland by Solidarnosc di Lech Walesa, as a great supporter of those battles for freedom. For the socialist statesman, who was also visiting GDR Germany in 1984, “the countries of the East played a fundamental role in breaking down the Wall, the Iron Curtain and starting democracy in the USSR”, noted the historian Andrea Spiri, of the Luiss Guido Carli. And now what are the relations between Europe and the Russian Federation
The fateful question was posed by the director general of the Craxi Foundation, Nicola Carnovale, to a prestigious parterre of academics, Italian and Eastern European scholars, who alternated, in the Chapter House, of the Senate, in Piazza della Minerva, for the full day, which also saw the presence of the Russian ambassador Sergej Razov. Who observed that with the collapse of the USSR “radical nationalisms developed”.
Senator Craxi was clear: “Recovering relations with Russia is fundamental for Italy and Europe”.
In the final round table – which was also attended by the exponents of the Democratic Party Piero Fassino, president of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Chamber, and the Undersecretary for European Affairs, Vincenzo Amendola, who recalled “the multipolar flexibility” of the premier and leader of the PSI – the Craxi emphasized that “in the great international chessboard it is not us Italy and we Europe who are playing the cards”.
And this “especially if the European Union continues to live in a sometimes comatose limbo, made up more of rhetoric than of facts, in which the unavoidable need for a common defense is evoked without realizing that first of all a common foreign policy is necessary and, even before that, the formation of a European interest that is the result of a democratic process and not of a hierarchy of powers ”.
Therefore, no to “a mercantilist policy, which puts economic and commercial issues before strategic ones”. The challenge with China is epochal and for this reason Russia cannot be left alone in comparison with the hegemony of the Asian giant.
For Craxi, we are moving towards “a new bipolarization”. We need a Europe that also confronts the US with “a clearer identity”, said Ambassador Giampiero Massolo, president of the Institute for International Political Studies, who added a personal memory of when “from young diplomat I went to Moscow with Bettino ”.
The key is called the West.
