Reflections starting from participation in the Radio Popolare broadcast “Everything flows” of November 14, 2024 (Roberta De Monticelli’s speech starting from minute 38)
- A singular expression
I’ll start with Elon Musk’s first tweet, which sparked a series of replies and rejoinders. «These judges must go», Musk had written on the digital square he owns and governs, “X”, referring to the decision of the judges of the Court of Rome to have the migrants detained in Albania returned to Italy. Harmless or devastating? Devastating in that it pantographs, on different scales, a terribly widespread attitude even among right-wing leaders in the world: perfect indifference, if not open aggression, towards those legal (but also ethical) constraints without which politics is not only blind, but also criminal. This is also the essence of similar cases, such as Netanyahu declaring the UN secretary general “persona non grata” and the UN itself a den of anti-Semitism, or Benny Morris – a private individual, yes, but also the first of “new historians” of Israel, who after having dismantled the prevailing narrative of the history of that State and revealed all the violence, argued that it was wrong then and it would be absurd now not to “finish the job” in Gaza and West Bank, and to make it clearer he called Guterres an “idiot” and called his words in defense of the population of Gaza “disgusting”. Musk’s intervention is only apparently less “devastating”. A philosopher would say that it constitutes an assault against legality and its institutions on two levels: the “pragmatic” one, that is, in his own words – as now spokesperson for the elected president – arrogating to himself a normative authority superior to that of the institutions of another State; and that of the content, the thing said. Said not only against the judiciary of another state (although in agreement with its executive) but against the law superior to those of the European member states of the EU, whose law absolutely prevails over national laws that should never authorize deportation or collective rejection of migrants (articles 18 and 19 of the Charter of Rights of the European Union). This is a symptom of an enormous problem, which a “global constitutionalist” like Luigi Ferrajoli (2022) has highlighted: the desperate absence, and therefore the absolute need to establish, a public sphere that is equal to the economic powers and politicians who decide the disorder of the world today.
- Creating a public space worthy of the new global powers
A public sphere: certainly, the digital square today: but today that too is private. And speaking of privatisation: someone like Musk, who lives off public contracts, because his empire is driven by NASA commissions – apart from the immense conflict of interest that will be created as soon as he takes on a role in the US administration – will end up directing he, in the name of his private interests, American space policy. He will be the master of space, the lord of future star wars… And then, it is no longer just a question of space for public debate, of “square”. The other pillar of a democratic public sphere are the institutions that embody and make effective the norms of civil and peaceful coexistence.
And so I want to remember a man, an Italian, who in unsuspecting times had understood in detail the direction in which the world would go if his battle ended up being lost. Altiero Spinelli wrote it in all his founding papers of a global supranational authority, of which the European Union was to be the driving force and guarantor force. He wrote it right after the war and made this thought effective, with titanic tenacity, until his death in 1986. Ventotene poster al Draft Constitution of the European Union of 1984, the famous and very detailed Spinelli Project, sunk then and yet largely implemented later, starting from the moment in which Mikhail Gorbachev opened the Iron Curtain towards a “common European home”.
This was his thought: we need to create a public space that is worthy of the new “wild” powers, of their enormity. A public space, in its two components: the “square”, of course, the space for debate, but also evidently the institutional structure for the democratic exercise of power – starting from the United States of Europe. Today the problem is not only that the EU risks its de facto dissolution, under the combined weight of national interests and subordination to North American ones, but that the UN and its International Court of Justice, like the other guarantee institutions of universal justice, such as the International Criminal Court, have never been so despised and mocked in the public squares by the mainstream media: and precisely at the moment in which their voice and the impartial dictation of their sentences with respect to the crimes of war, to genocidal actions and to the responsibilities of states and also of individuals.
- Evolution of the conflict between law and force: anarcho-capitalism or fascism?
Finally, as the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella recalled not only in his response to Musk but also on previous occasions and perhaps always, supranational rules are needed to constrain the arbitrariness of private individuals with power now superior to that of national states. In fact, the opposition between Mattarella’s response and Giorgia Meloni’s subsequent response almost photographs the most classic of conflicts between law and power, and the paradox that has always nourished it: law exists, has force, by virtue of a force that must also bind and regulate, which tends to erode these constraints. But in the new scenario of Musk and Trump there is the novelty of the libertarianism of a Musk, who absolutely does not conceive or tolerate constraints of any kind, and seems to give an explicit “political” guise to what has been called anarcho-capitalism . Now, libertarianism is an aporetic position, because no society can function without norms, and in fact who knows how long the Trump-Musk duo will last. And yet, the ambiguous response of our Prime Minister highlights a stark alternative. Because one of two things: either we reject every institutional rule, to the point of demolishing, in principle, state institutions, towards a scenario of private decision-makers of the universe, halfway between the Middle Ages and the star wars; or we speak in the name of a State, or rather of a nation and its sovereignty, therefore of a constrained exercise of public power: but if the only constraints that I accept are those that I like, and not those of the Constitution and the human rights that trample, then I am simply fascist, in the sense that I embody the eternal essence of an autocracy whose nationalist version is fascism.
I don’t believe that the anarcho-capitalism in which Musk’s libertarianism consists is the necessary evolution of capitalism, as many believe. Apart from the generic nature of this notion, which makes it a sort of prosopopoeia, that is, the personification of an occult force that does and decides everything – and instead it is all of us who are involved up to our necks in it – if you try to be a little more analytical, it seems to me that there is not a question of capitalism here, but of rules: no economic system can function without rules, and it is a question of building the most correct regulatory framework. Proof of the fact that there is not this unstoppable tendency of capitalism towards deregulation is Europe, that is, that little bit of confederal or basically federal organization that had existed, and which up to a certain point had concentrated precisely on this: regulating the economy and prevent its drift. Up to a certain point, successfully. Indeed, it has concentrated so much on this regulatory task that it has lost sight of the rest, the construction of a supranational political power, including that common defense which would have meant the transfer of national sovereignty as a function of a common foreign policy: and not the current one ” free everyone”, where each statelet rearms according to its talent and what’s more with community funds that promote national war industries, with the risk that the horizon of this madness could be an explosion of small local autocrats where there was the common home.
- A public sphere not only of sufficient power but also of universal justice.
Without forgetting, however – as both Mario Draghi and Enrico Letta forget today – that a public sphere capable of living up to the new savage powers must by no means only be sufficiently powerful, both on an economic and political level; it must above all be sufficiently universalistic in its principles, as the European charters proclaim with one voice. Reminding us that the EU should have only been the first step towards a world federation of republics. Towards a UN that is the real one, the one that does not yet exist and that we must build, faithful to the reasons from which it was born, for which it is not and must not be true that some states are more equal than others.
The tragedy is this limit that the victors placed on the universality of the norm. No, whoever wins is not right, no, it is not history that judges better than our ethical and legal reason, as some unfortunate journalist writes in the pages of our leading national newspaper. Because the need for universalism denied by all our double standards and by all the vetoes of the strongest was also felt, in the ruins of the Second World War. absolute – all the best minds and all the spontaneous impetus of the peoples of the Earth had affirmed it, as a condition for humanity not to fall into other wars.
