Internationalization is a process that my generation saw progressing at an accelerating pace, and whose rewards it harvested and is still harvesting, but which today is causing concern to most people, as every day also its distressing aspects are displayed before our eyes. Anyone who as a child has seen the ruins of war finds in internationalization a reason for hope and security; but what shall think of those who, being young, have no memories of war?
A few words, first, on the term "nation". Today "homeland", "nation" and "State" are matching terms. But we shall not forget that such matching - in language and then in institutions - is a recent achievement; it comes from the Napoleonic era and the culture of Romanticism. An ancestor of ours of six or seven generations ago, should he awake from the sleep of death, would call internationalization the increase of trade between Lombardy and Piedmont. The form of the nation-State, founded on the idea that absolute independence is the guarantee of liberty and peace, originated in Europe in the 19th century and spread to the whole planet during the last century, although that idea soon showed to be deceptive and a source of tragedies. Today we count in the world about two hundred nation-States, almost all of them doggedly sticking to the illusion of unlimited sovereignty. Three principles you should have in store concerning the issue of internationalization: identity, competition and politics.
Identity is multiple
First principle: the identity of each individual is multiple. There is no incompatibility between being Milanese, Lombard, Italian, European and, finally, citizen of the world.
On the contrary, multiple belongings constitute the very individuality of each of us. This statement has a very concrete meaning. The identity of each individual is that mix of qualities, inclinations, interests, beliefs, blemishes, frailties, temperament traits, life experiences, hopes that makes him an individual, that is, a unique and unrepeatable entity. And that mix is one thing with being part of many communities. No one of its components fully defines the experience and the awareness of ourselves that are our hallmark; in no one could we identify ourselves to an exclusive degree without losing, let it not seem a play of words, our identity.
Well, acknowledging that principle shall bring out the awareness that our belonging in the community that we call today national is not in contradiction with, nor lessens our belonging in other communities, be they the narrower ones centered around our hometown or region, or the wider ones on a continental or planetary scale.
Among the latter, the European community is today the most present in our everyday life: suffice it to mention the many Brussels laws which prevail over national laws, the euro, the Erasmus project and the migrations within the Union. But we strongly feel that we also belong in the global community, to which we are tied by both the universal thrust of our moral convictions and, more and more, the threats to climate and the biosphere that can only be countered on a world scale.
In the wealth of our multiple belongings, feeling oneself Italian can, even must, find an appropriate place. I am convinced that, among the most serious faults Italy has suffered from in its short history as a community organized in a unitary State, there is the difficulty to find the right measure of national ambition, i.e. how to place itself in the balance point between indifference, even negation, of any sense of national belonging, and, on the other hand, a heated nationalism, which led to defeat and humiliation. Giving the correct importance to one's ties with the national community is, for a young Italian, less natural than for a youngster of the same age in another country.
Accepting competition
Second principle: we must accept international competition. Should I suggest an interpretation of the idea implied in the word "internationalization", I would formulate it thus: a peaceful intensification of the relations between countries. Neither armed clash, nor mutual isolationism; instead, exchange and competition.
Today, the intensification of relations between countries is, to a non-small degree, the consequence of economic and technical progress: goods, people, crime, know-how, images move on a planetary scale, rapidly and at low-cost. Scholars have recollected other situations in human history which -with respect to their time - can be qualified as "globalization", and have highlighted the differences with the present one. Those epochs have been followed by others when the world fragmented again into isolated communities.
We do not know whether the current globalization process too can be reversed. It may well be that today's technology has simultaneously given mankind the tools for destroying the planet and taken away those for going back to a fragmentation into isolated communities, as happened after the fall of the Roman Empire or after the First World War. We are led to think so by the quasi-impossibility to stop the migration waves, and also by how easily a young expert in Internet-surfing could sidestep the filters that Google had accepted to put up for its Chinese users.
That is the reason why we can and must ask ourselves at what conditions the internationalization in progress can continue without giving rise to conflicts and destructions. Internationalization cannot be stopped or rejected; we must make it, as we use to say, sustainable.
It is often stated that international relations differ from those practiced within the borders of a State, due to the fact that the former can be settled through the force of arms. With reason, the use of arms is associated with hatred, because the latter is both a cause and a consequence of the former. A very popular slogan among the students of my generation was urging to "make love, not war". Can we let us be guided by that slogan and say that the condition for making internationalization sustainable is the advent of universal, or global, love? Judging from the atmosphere in most condominium assemblies I would say no. In my opinion, the twofold condition is a different one: that competition be accepted, and that it be subject to the ruling of a higher political order.
The impulse to excel, to do better than others, to win, is called by psychiatrists aggressiveness, by economists animal spirit. We have to believe not only that eradicating it from human nature (i.e. not from a single man, like Prince Myshkin or Billy Budd, but from all living people) is impossible; it is even reasonable to believe that its disappearance is not much desirable, and that the moral thing to do is to control it and direct it towards doing good, not to suppress it.
Relations among human communities move between the two extreme models of conflict and union. At one extreme, war; at the other extreme, competition. On the one side, conflict, open war, the lack of any law but force: the force of arms, of deceit, of money, of intimidation. On the other, institutions, goals, shared instruments. Competition, in its various forms, is placed at some point in the intermediate area: it is a contest where armed conflict is replaced by a commercial struggle as a means for establishing the primacy of one competitor over the other.
Trade is not always "soft", as Montesquieu defined it in contrasting it with wars triggered by passions. It, and with it the competition through which it is generally practiced, can often be carried out in harsh, violent, ruthless ways: by stealing inventions from one's opponent, by pushing him out of the market through dumping practices, by corrupting governments in order to get orders, by exerting political pressures to support national enterprises. The commonly used metaphors highlight how competition could be placed quite close to the first of the two extremes of war and union: war of prices, invasion of a market, trading assault, cut-throat competition, and so on.
Such strong words must not surprise, most of all if we consider that they apply of course to competition between enterprises, but even more so to competition between countries. On being successful in the competition between countries development and wealth depend: also for Italy, the periods of a sizable improvement of its standard of living have always coincided with a good performance of its foreign accounts.
The economic order implies a political order
Third principle: the economic order implies a political order. Peace is not to be established by suppressing, in individuals and in human communities, the impulse to excel, to do better than others, to win. Instead, it is to be established by bringing about a situation, an order, where those impulses continue to express themselves, but subject themselves to rules; rules that are rooted in ethical principles (do not kill, do not steal, do not bear false witness), and whose recognition, however, has a practical usefulness too.
That situation is competition. However, in order for it not to degenerate into war, it needs strong rules; and those can only be given by politics, by a strong political power. In fact, to issue rules is a task peculiar to the political sphere, not to the sphere of the market.
The European area is where, for the first time in history, international competition has taken on a truly peaceful form. War among nations has been replaced with a contest, through renounces of portions of national sovereignty, and the establishment of a supra-national power that institutes and ensures the free movement of goods, services, capitals and people. Competition with agreed-to rules has become a single market, a common physical, economic, juridical, conceptual space.
In the global arena, the issue of rules, hence of politics, is still far from a satisfactory solution. Globalization is the great change that upsets our lives, although we cannot fully understand its nature and implications. Extreme and opposed interpretations have been put forward. That of its opponents, who make it the ultimate cause of all of today's evils, the terrain where the capitalists' greed is getting loose. Or that of its supporters, who consider it the wonderful mechanism which, setting free the forces of the market, universally spreads wealth, liberty, democracy and tolerance.
In my opinion, the two interpretations have in common the same error: they see the economy as the only bedrock of the social order. I believe, instead, that globalization is posing a challenge of an essentially political nature, namely, one concerning the difficulty of ruling it in peaceful ways with rules that shall move it away from the model of war and shift it closer and closer to the model of contest. The search - intellectual and practical - of instruments for ruling globalization is the fundamental challenge affecting the destiny of each of us. Without adequate institutions and means, which international cooperation alone can provide, globalization will not be ruled. And if it will not be ruled, we shall suffer from it and finally we will revolt against it. And it is very unlikely that the revolt will not assume repressive and violent forms.
Reading the names of the young students of this Technical University fallen in the First World War, one cannot but think that their infancy and adolescence were spent in a world of peace and globalization, not dissimilar from today's. The illusion that that world was going to last was of short duration. Soon they realized that they had been able to enjoy it, but not to prepare the instruments and institutions necessary to rule it. The passage from contest to war was very fast.
Difficult as it may be, the challenge of internationalization can be won if we will be able to face it on the political plane, with determination and clear-sightedness.