State Building and Political Power in Europe - (Re)Thinking the EU from the South
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The newfound alliance
Vi propongo il mio intervento di aperture del Town Hall Meeting sulle relazioni italo-tedesche organizzato dal Progressives Zentrum e dall'Istituto Affari Internazionali in collaborazione con il Ministero degli Esteri tedesco. L'incontro si è svolto il 5 aprile scorso presso la Fondazione Romaeuropa. This Town-Hall Meeting in Rome is a strong political sign of the importance of Italian-German relations and I’m in hope that this series of Meetings could represent a-bridge-building-opportunity for all concerned. Not only because this year marks the two hundredth anniversary of Goethe Italienische Reise . Far more important is it to re-establish the conditions for a fruitful relationship between Germany and Italy. The political dialogue between Germany and Italy has clearly been, and still is, going through a difficult phase. The various crisis which have hit Europe – economic, political and humanitarian – have raised old stereotypes and opened the way to new forms of nat...
November 9: The New German National Identity
The history of the evolution of Germany is summed up by two pictures taken at a distance of seventy years one from the other. The first is the photograph of a frightened boy in the Warsaw ghetto standing in front of a Nazi soldier, the second one is of another boy wearing the hat of a German policeman, happy to be welcomed as a refugee in Germany. The two pictures are symbolic of the long path of rehabilitation of a country that after the Second World War risked disappearing and becoming a simple ‘geographic entity’ (Stalin). As German philosopher Helmuth Plessner recounts in his book Die verspätete Nation , a few days after the German surrender on 8 May 1945, a friend and colleague in forced exile told him: “You really want to go back to Germany? But the country no longer exists!”