In every process of social integration there are many aggregating and disaggregating factors and, certainly, among the most decisive are the economic and the cultural ones. While with the former, characterised by converging or diverging material interests, it is often less difficult to perceive their role, understanding which cultural factors encourage encounter and which discourage it is not always possible without complex multidisciplinary and historical analyses. As regards European integration, this aspect presents at once considerable interest and peculiar complexity, owing to the remarkable evolution over time of the different cultural experiences of the peoples of the European continent.
European history has lived its moments of greatest identity in the periods marked by a growing process of convergence among its languages, its cultures and its laws, which, according to Devoto, evolve with similar mobility, in assonance with that kinship between idea and law intuited ever since Heraclitus.
Among the most significant examples one must count the phase of the reception of Roman law by the peoples no longer controlled by the Roman legions, and its adoption by the barbarian kingdoms, by autonomous choice, after they had perceived at once the capacity of the Latin language for clarity and of its law for social discipline.
In the territories occupied by the Lombards there arose customs steeped in both Latin and Germanic civilisation, the fruit of a mutual capacity for adaptation, regulating relations between occupiers and occupied and within each of the two peoples.
The birth of the universities, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, was at once the sign of the reawakening of studies and of the aspiration to the autonomy of science, including legal science, and an extraordinary stimulus to the encounter of Europe’s cultures, languages and civil experiences.
The medieval ius commune was a fact of civilisation, according to the medievalist Francesco Calasso, because it developed “beyond the land in which it was born”. The Latin legal tradition was respected by the barbarians, who “revived” it. The Visigoths and the Burgundians even reordered the legal sources.
France and Spain, where the Romano-barbarian kingdoms had arisen, opened themselves to the cultural and legal renewal of the School of Bologna between the eleventh and the twelfth centuries. Spain had already unified in the seventh century its existing double legislation of Visigothic-Gothic and Roman origin. Portugal, through the Studia of Coimbra and Lisbon, became steeped in iura communia, in Bolognese doctrine and in Roman and canon law. The national laws of Italy, France and Spain developed analogously to their respective languages, from the Roman foundation to the Germanic elements, to local customs, to the cultural influence of the science of the ius commune. England, which did not have the Latin foundation, was nonetheless precociously permeable to the cultural experiences of the Italian universities and to the texts of canon law. Norway, Poland and Germany received influences from Italian legal science and above all from canon law. The fragmentary nature of the local laws of Belgium and Holland favoured the reception of Roman law.
Medieval legal science stimulated the birth of various universities in Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Denmark and Switzerland. It is therefore only right to count among the roots of European identity law and legal science as well, in the various contaminations that above all the Roman experience had transmitted. If the Christian roots are undeniable, they are nevertheless not exclusive, such is the wealth of experiences and cultures that have over time nourished and conditioned the individual countries and then shaped the common principles underlying the European Union. It would be anti-historical not to recognise this, and unhelpful to the further process of integration of the European peoples. The EU, even amid the considerable difficulties it encounters in fostering this process, has at least chosen to give value to this plurality of its roots, signalling it even in its motto “In diversitate concordia”, although not formally included in the Treaty of Lisbon. Significant cultural contributions to the formation of European identity came from our thinkers in the past. Dante’s appeal in the De Monarchia to the emperor, that he unify the Italic lands as well within his empire, emancipating them from oppressive papal authority, drew its motivations also from yearnings towards the other cultural and civil experiences of the continent. Thanks to Dante and to Novalis (pseudonym of Friedrich Philipp Freiherr von Hardenberg), European culture was able to enrich itself with Oriental sensibilities as well. Their hybrid, non-excluding religiosity nourished that vision of “perennial Christendom” which contributed greatly to the construction of the West. Giacomo Leopardi in 1824, in his Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, draws a parallel between Italian decadence, cultural before being ethical, which reduced political dialectic, asphyxial in itself, to banal personal or corporative disputes, and the more mature socio-cultural condition of the other European nations, above all of the centre and north, which made it possible not to trivialise political divisions. The genius of Recanati, and not only the literary one, perceived almost two centuries ago the cultural handicap, prior to the ethical and political one, of the Italian people, which had seen its national history grow late and laboriously because of the long and difficult coexistence between political authority and the Catholic Church. The comparison between the different socio-cultural levels of our society and the Nordic ones, and the consequent effects on civil life of their differing civic and political maturity, appears, almost two centuries on, strikingly topical. An example of such effects can be seen in the debate under way in the Scandinavian countries on the theme of schooling in relation to the current economic crisis, addressed, regardless of political alignment, not from the perspective of mere cost saving, as in our country, but of investment for the future.
Particularly difficult in our country was the development of popular culture and of its critical and self-critical emancipation. The growth of the civil conscience of Italians, already weak owing to the passive reception over the centuries by broad social strata of the unilateral teachings, and at the same time precepts, of the Catholic Church, was annihilated by the mutual instrumentality between State and Church during the twenty years of Fascism. Civil conscience, individual and collective, and the free will of the person had had no chance to take off or, where in some heroic case they had germinated, they had been strongly opposed at birth, to the detriment of the civic, but also religious and moral, maturation of Italians. Altogether peculiar in Europe had been the Italic asphyxia caused by the absence of different cultural airs, also because our country had not even lived through the travail of the Reformation. The significant intellectual experiences of the Enlightenment, the Risorgimento, liberalism and socialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries either remained elitist or did not really influence, in depth and duration, the emancipation of the broader social strata.
The forty years of Christian Democrat leadership, though with notable exceptions of secularism, in practice all too often frustrated the evolution that had matured in the civil conscience of part of Italian society and the principles of deep renewal that had flowed into the constitutional charter, to which so many democratic Catholics had after all made a significant contribution. In the second republic and, above all, since 2008, the socio-cultural condition of Italians has nevertheless suffered an unprecedented debasement, a numbing of their critical capacity and, what is worse, one owed to a media system preordained to profit and to power, progressively in a monopolistic key, in the hands of a single private group. The cultural and moral regression of Italy that we are living through is experienced by most people in unawareness of this process of decadence, and this makes the formation of healthy problematic dialectics more difficult, despite the active role of criticism and stimulus played by authoritative newspapers of the other European and non-European countries of various political orientations. The high deficit of critical conscience in our society means that fundamental freedoms in Italy are progressively turning into mere formal faculties, devoid of effectiveness, since the centralisation of the power of information has reduced the voices of dissent to a minimum, having created a people of consumers of products, political ones included, conformed of course to the interests of the existing monopoly. Such acquiescence to power, when not imposed, is voluntarily accepted by the operators of information themselves, for deep reasons of historic servility. The result has been a general climate of indifference to intellectual problematicity, the sole source of liberation from ignorance and slavery, yet portrayed for the most part as the bearer of visions negative for the well-being of the country.
The current Italian telecracy weakens every day a little more the already insufficient capacity of Italians for analysis, with a risk of contagion for the other European countries from subcultural demagogic solicitations, among them the inducement to withhold respect for all who are different, with a dangerous drift towards collective incivility and individual impoverishment. This involution, human before being civic, not opposed and indeed too often encouraged by those who ought to restrain it by virtue of their institutional role, induces the most ancestral fears, egoisms, corporativisms, nationalisms and the weakening of pacifist initiatives. Europeans, with their inadequacies before the tasks that the coming effective political unity of the EU would impose on them, risk being pushed by Italy towards a further involution and towards ungenerous factionalisms precisely on the eve of the possible concrete start, with the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon, of unitary policies. Jacques Ziller, professor of European law at the University of Pavia, has felicitously observed that the Europeans who hold back the process of political unity for particular short-term interests resemble those Lilliputians of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver, who kept the giant imprisoned because they did not know him and were afraid he would rise, just as they fear European political unity while ignoring its potential.

Two great Italians did not share this myopia, though in some of the most dramatic moments of European history and though of profoundly different cultural formations: Luigi Einaudi, who in 1915 called for the United States of Europe, and Altiero Spinelli, who in 1941, from internal exile, wrote, with Eugenio Colorni and Ernesto Rossi, the Manifesto for a Federalist Europe. In those dramas and in those armed divisions, these Italians managed to conceive strong utopias of peace, not mere dreams but visions of the world which, though far from the present in which they were intuited, carried within themselves the concrete designs for achieving them, giving proof of an elevated cultural breadth.
Today, a few weeks away from the possible concrete start of European political unity, after the ratification of the Treaty of Lisbon by Ireland as well, the governing figures of our country, with attitudes unheard of among Italian statesmen since the post-war period, frequently display ill-concealed impatience with directions taken by the EU and, more seriously, frequently violate various founding principles of the Union that are already legally effective.
They stimulate sentiments of rejection of those who are different and approve liberticidal and inhuman rules. They propose prison for journalists who report crimes learned of through prohibited wiretaps, while the EU, in order to protect information, permits even piracy on the Internet, and the USA attributes primary constitutional rank to the right to report news, to which it subordinates the right to privacy of the powerful. The Italian Parliament approves, and the Government implements with unusual and ostentatious efficiency, the push-backs of so-called illegal migrants, denying in fact the right of asylum and the most elementary protections for minors, despite the Catholic Church’s calls for welcome and the admonitions of the European bodies.
All of the above the Italian government continues to do despite the fact that Article 1a has been inserted into the Treaty of Lisbon, under which respect for human dignity, freedom, democracy, equality and human rights, including the rights of persons belonging to minorities, stands among the founding values of the Union: “These values – it provides – are common to the Member States in a society in which pluralism, non-discrimination, tolerance, justice, solidarity and equality between women and men prevail”. Under Article 67 (ex Article 61 TEC and ex Article 29 TEU) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union “The Union shall constitute an area of freedom, security and justice with respect for fundamental rights and the different legal systems and traditions of the Member States”. Under Article 78 (ex Article 63, points 1 and 2, and Article 64(2) TEC) “The Union shall develop a common policy on asylum, subsidiary protection and temporary protection with a view to offering appropriate status to any third-country national requiring international protection and ensuring compliance with the principle of non-refoulement. This policy must be in accordance with the Geneva Convention of 28 July 1951 and the Protocol of 31 January 1967 relating to the status of refugees, and other relevant treaties”. A convention and a protocol that many jurists consider to have been repeatedly violated by Italy in 2008 and 2009.
Italian honour, amid the almost general indifference of the national press and television, was saved by the Anti-racist Manifesto of 21 July 2008, in which numerous Italian scientists declared that “cultural mixing is the founding basis of the hope of progress that derives from the constitution of the European Union”. Respect for the plurality of values, protected by the Treaty of Lisbon, though ratified unanimously by the Italian Parliament on 31 July 2008, is too often denied in our country both by government declarations and by the almost monotone public and private media chorus that takes it upon itself to support and justify them, and by the concrete measures of the government and its parliamentary majority, in growing conflict with European principles and with the European legal order. Were such anti-European propensities debated in real institutional dialectics and in the country, they could in any case only enjoy respect as the fruit of free confrontation; but, since a dialogue within and between the national institutions is at present lacking, violations of the current European legal order constitute mere acts contra jus, which must be judged as such and which cannot, unfortunately, remain without negative consequences, in the short or the long term, for Italy’s role in the EU. The present is a sad example of how violations of law – because the European rules are not only law, but of higher legal rank than the national legal order, even if this escapes most people -, above all when perpetrated by the ruling classes, frequently accompany in history phases of cultural degradation. And the national contradictions with respect to the European unitary process and to its legal order, already existing even if incomplete, occur without in-depth discussion of the merits, but mainly through media announcements that can give the public nothing more than advertising slogans can, that is, either indifference or rejection, without the possibility of dialectical confrontation, or an uncritical adhesion docilely permeable to the dominant line, tele-injected in large daily doses, and carry for that very reason a subcultural drift.
The dichotomy between the underlying culture that inspires the current Italian political majority and is spread through the media, and the principles on which the Union rests, emerges, in relation to other aspects of social life as well, from the combined reading of paragraph 1 of Article 17 of the Treaty, under which “The Union respects and does not prejudice the status under national law of churches and religious associations or communities in the Member States”, and of paragraph 2, under which “The Union equally respects the status under national law of philosophical and non-confessional organisations”. While the EU therefore provides no lesser legal protection for philosophical and non-confessional organisations than for religious ones and, in so doing, raises its secular respect for diversity of opinion to a remarkable level of tolerance, in Italy only teachers of the Catholic religion, appointed without the state vetting of qualifications required of other teachers, are now allowed to take part with voting rights in end-of-year assessments, awarding credits to those who attend their lessons, with an advantage over those who do not attend; and the minister of public education now proposes also to grant teachers of the Catholic religion alone a mark expressed in arithmetical values, as for the other subjects, thus allowing only the recipients of such marks to improve their grade average and, consequently, to find themselves advantaged in the award of study grants, thereby encouraging not a deep faith, lived in intimacy, but a bigotry of convenience, whose price is the debasement of religious feeling. The violation of Article 3 of the Constitution, on the equality of citizens, and of the aforesaid European rules that such a mark would bring about appears patent.
Another example not only of the European Union’s tolerance of cultural diversities, but of their assumption as a value in themselves, is found in the final act of the Treaty of Lisbon, where the Declaration concerning Article 53(2) of the amended Treaty on European Union is incorporated: «The Conference considers that the possibility of producing translations of the Treaties in the languages mentioned in Article 53(2) contributes to fulfilling the objective of respecting the Union’s rich cultural and linguistic diversity as set forth in Article 2, paragraph 3, fourth subparagraph».
A moral and cultural lesson to the ruling classes was given by Bertrand Russell in 1933 (cf. Religion and Science, Fabbri Edit., 1996, p. 228) with great simplicity, in keeping with his style, when he wrote «Those to whom intellectual freedom is personally important may be a minority in the community, but among them are the men of most importance to the future». The Italy of the present historical moment, instead, prefers generalised consensus, from which it draws generic and emotional confidence for the future, demonising those who ask for a critical and rational confrontation on current problems.
What a debt of conscience, of culture and of civilisation the Italy of today is taking on towards Europe and also towards its own past! The dangers of an involution of European civilisation do not, however, come only from Italy, since current European legislation contains more than a few rules born of compromise and therefore, in their vagueness, susceptible of dangerous interpretations.
After the partial and hard-won success of the Italian government in 2007, with the approval of the moratorium on capital punishment by 105 States, despite the contrary vote of the USA, China, Sudan and Iran, some jurists have raised the doubt that the Treaty of Lisbon, by referring to the Charter of Fundamental Rights, which contains references to articles of the 1950 European Convention on Human Rights and to Protocol 2007-C302-02 of 14 December 2007, while not directly providing for the death penalty, might in certain hypotheses tacitly permit it in the event of killings of demonstrators by the police, where the demonstrations are considered seditious. If this interpretation were confirmed or not officially denied – and unfortunately no official denials by the EU appear from 2007 to today -, a grave step backwards in the protection of fundamental rights in Europe too could emerge, above all through the deviant use that could be made of the rule, given also the broad discretion that the assessment of the seditiousness of a public demonstration can entail.
The Holy See, for its part, though it has made a significant contribution of civilisation in repeatedly urging Italy towards a policy of solidarity with migrants, has not shown the same tolerance towards homosexuals. One cannot fail to note the current difficulty of the politics, but also of the culture, of the Vatican apparatus in addressing with tolerance problems such as that of diversity of sexual orientation, if the representative of the Holy See at the United Nations, Msgr. Celestino Migliore, denied a favourable vote on the decriminalisation of homosexuality as such, that is, independently of the commission of crimes, despite the fact that in many countries of the world homosexuality is still punished in itself with capital punishment and torture. Nor can the motivations subsequently adduced for that refusal, such as fears of legitimising gay unions, lighten the cultural, before the political, gravity of the choice. In this picture, the vote of the Italian Parliament of 13 October 2009, which will prevent parliamentary examination of the measure that included among the aggravating circumstances of crimes acts committed «for purposes relating to the sexual orientation or the sexual discrimination of the person offended by the crime», is the price paid to the residual, stubborn culture of intolerance, which has brought upon our country a negative judgement from the UN for this step backwards in so delicate a matter. This is another signal of the insufficient level of confrontation between diversities and hence of cultural regression, because where culture becomes impoverished the space for dialogue between diversities, which always enriches individuals and communities, is restricted.
The worst enemy of the EU’s unitary path has been, in past decades, the use of the veto by some countries for reasons extraneous to the general interests of the Union. Never in the past had Italy threatened to resort to it. This has made all the more serious the express and useless threat of a veto on the measures in defence of the climate, addressed to the European Council on 15 October 2008 by the Italian premier, at the suggestion of Confindustria, a few months before the possible start of the political unity of the EU, and in a matter that would have required a broad assumption of responsibility by all statesmen for the healing of the planet. A stance of this kind on the international level would not have been possible in a national context of less inadequate knowledge, including scientific knowledge, on the part of the ruling class.
The problem of the non-effectiveness of fundamental human rights, too, before being a political and legal problem, is a cultural problem, since the level of civilisation and knowledge of peoples must be measured primarily by the respect they have for other peoples and for single individuals in relation to their most significant needs and rights. Unfortunately the European Union must still reckon with the insufficient real protection in many countries, ours among them, of primary human rights. Prof. Antonio Cassese, formerly President of the Council of Europe’s Committee for the Prevention of Torture and then first President of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, honoured in 2002 by the Académie Universelle des Cultures for his contribution to the protection of human rights, declared at the end of 2008 that the Italian authorities have assumed all the international obligations provided for by the conventions and treaties on human rights, but have often failed to implement those obligations concretely. Cassese denounced the fact that Italy ratified the UN Convention against Torture in 1984 and then forgot to enact a law providing for the crime of torture. In concrete terms this has meant the absence of effective justice, among other things, for the very serious mistreatment of those arrested at Bolzaneto. The 2008 report on Italy by Amnesty International denounced the violence of the police in Genoa in 2001, the killing of Carlo Giuliani, the violence in Val di Susa in 2005, the death of Federico Aldovrandi, the scant cooperation of the Italian Government with the investigations of the international bodies that established Italian responsibilities in the illegal transfers of Abu Omar, Maher Arar and Abou El Kassim Britel, which culminated in arbitrary arrests, disappearances, detention without trial and torture, the killing of Gabriele Sandri by a policeman and the very strange death of Aldo Bianzino in 2007 in Perugia prison.

If the European peoples prove unable to avoid their subjection to commercial culture – above all if it standardises political orientations as well and becomes systemic -, a culture that has already given proof of a rapid and subliminal capacity to subjugate broad Italian social strata, the European Union will lose its first identity value, that of the plurality of the values in which to recognise oneself: a factor of civilisation, through the critical capacity of different ideas within their mutual respect, and a factor of morality, through the freedom to choose among them with an assumption of responsibility. Free will and critical civil conscience are the Catholic and the secular goals to be won for the moral growth of the person and for the political growth of the citizen. Europe will be able to resist the homologation of lifestyle and thought, that is, the currently invasive subculture, only if it can defend the free formation of opinions and above all if it can prevent concentrations of power over the sources of information, which inevitably lead to a progressive attenuation of the critical sense and of individual and collective intelligence itself. The European Union, by assuming in the preamble of its Treaty the diversity of values as a value in itself, in the awareness that the positions of others are in any case to be respected even if to be assessed critically, has chosen to enrich its own culture by opening itself to the different cultures of others. It is to be hoped, therefore, that Europe, which was able to conceive this value and set it as its rule, will know how to defend its culture as an open, living and autonomous culture, how to guarantee this value concretely in the daily life of its Member States and how to propose it beyond its borders. An enormous contribution of civilisation and peace Europe will thus be able to give to the whole world. Otherwise, a Europe deprived of its soul will not be able to meet other souls, but only to reject them or submit to them. The first indispensable instrument at hand, if Europe is to keep faith also with its value of tolerance, is the concrete application of the Treaty of Lisbon, even with all its significant limits. Not to allow the EU finally to express itself through unitary choices, and hence to live as a political subject, would be a graver limit. Unfortunately in Italy there is almost never any talk of the factors that still hold back Europe’s take-off as a political subject, though the solution of many problems of its peoples depends on it. This stems from a sort of autarkic closure within one’s own illusions. The Treaty of Lisbon, even in its reduced function as an agreement between States and no longer as a constitutional charter that would have bound citizens directly, will allow common European choices and responsibilities, necessary for a better government of the world, as well as of the individual European countries, but also for winning a battle of civilisation: to let our continent and Italy live a culture of which we can be protagonists and not unwitting consumers. Europe must win its real battle on the cultural level, and it will achieve true political unity all the more, the more it can defend its vitality and, therefore, its capacity for confrontation with different opinions and values. Without real confrontation there may be the supremacy of one or more countries over the others, but not unity, which entails a synthesis of different positions.
If in past centuries there came from our country to the whole continent stimuli to culture and the arts and lights of civilisation, today the modest cultural level of our national ruling class – in the sense of the capacity to engage with choices and models different from one’s own – often induces demagogic temptations, apt to validate summarily its own assumptions before our people and the other European partners without laborious critical and self-critical confrontations. As in other phases of our history, politics by itself may not be sufficient for our rebirth and for the start, at last, of a European Union that is a protagonist of a less unequal and inhuman world, and it needs an exceptional cultural impulse, one that banishes banalities and helps dialogue.
As in our Risorgimento, it will fall to a minority, if not to an elite that has remained free of media conditioning, to give our people and the whole of Europe the cultural and moral reference points for coming out of the tunnel.

Works consulted
Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degl’italiani, 1824.

Francesco Calasso, Medio Evo del diritto, Giuffré, Milano 1954.

Altiero Spinelli, Eugenio Colorni, Ernesto Rossi, Manifesto di Ventotene (Manifesto per un’Europa federalista), 1941.

Bertrand Russell, Religion and science, Fabbri Editori, Milano 1996.

Giuseppe Galasso, Storia d’Europa, Laterza, Roma 2001.

Paul Krugman, La coscienza di un liberal, Laterza, Roma 2008.

Emidio Speranza, Che Europa vorresti?, Lìbrati Edizioni, Ascoli Piceno May 2009.

Avv. Paolo Franceschetti, lapraticaforense.it, 11 November 2008, article.