5Stars leader Luigi Di Maio met with prominent Yellow Jacket protesters | Vincenzo Pinto/AFP via Getty Images
The highly emotional dispute between the two capitals risks dredging up historical grievances and bringing deeply rooted cultural biases back to life. It also predates the current populist government, and has been building over several years, as a result of clashes over military intervention in Libya and control of France’s largest shipyard.
But there’s a silver lining too: This type of public bilateral dispute, by bringing disagreements into the open, may end up creating a new political space in which to hash out common European challenges.
One of the merits of national leaders paying greater attention to their neighbors’ domestic affairs is that it turns their focus away from Brussels, whose “faceless bureaucrats” are still too easily caricatured and scapegoated for the Continent’s ills, and shifts the EU blame game to where responsibility truly lies: national capitals.
It’s a mistake to believe Europe would “render the national question obsolete or relativize it,” as the French philosopher Etienne Balibar wrote. “Every single country is afraid of being exploited by a neighbor.”
A politician who calls out another EU leader for political behavior they find objectionable — whether at a national level or in Brussels — shouldn’t be seen as undermining European unity. Rather, they are holding each other accountable in the eyes of both a domestic and European electorate.
Source link : https://www.politico.eu/article/italy-france-dispute-real-winner-europe/
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Publish date : 2019-02-08 08:00:00
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