The Quirinal Treaty that will be signed on Friday by Mario Draghi and Emmanuel Macron in Rome “is ambitious, anything but symbolic”, something that could still be feared until recently, and in fact represents a victory over the “Italian nationalists who they have a Risorgimento vision “of the relationship with France. Jean Pierre Darnis, professor of Franco-Italian relations at the Cote d’Azur University of Nice and of contemporary history at Luiss, acknowledges that the text of which the final details are being negotiated goes beyond expectations.
“Given the premises – he says in an interview with Adnkronos, in a reference to the ‘brakes’ put in the course of the work on the text by various ‘anti-French’ circles – one could fear that it was only a symbolic document. an ambitious text, defines a road map on various French and Italian sectoral policies. It contains a strong political direction that I feared would not exist and provides for the creation of several concrete fora of collaboration and every small Italian-French forum is a kind of victory ” .
Until a few days ago, the text “could have seemed a bit shy – insists Darnis, author of a forthcoming book entitled” Les relations between France and Italy and the renouvellement du jeu europeen “- but in recent days more relevant measures from a structural point of view have been included, such as the council of foreign and defense ministers, the permanent committee on industrial policy with senior executives from both countries which will make it possible to keep a discussion table open on the economic game “. And this, he stresses, is particularly important if one thinks of the recent cases involving the subsidiaries, from Stx-Fincantieri to Edison-Edf to Enel-Suez.
The French expert notes that civil society has seen an important mobilization in support of the Quirinal Treaty, which was launched by the French president in September 2017, in full crisis with Rome on Stx, Libya and migrants. And strong support came from the beginning from Confindustria and Medef (the French Confindustria): “It is not just a support, given the phase of strong integration underway between Italian and French industry and of which they are the tip of the iceberg the luxury and distribution companies, but also in the technology sector, where there are strategic companies with top-level binational control of capital, such as Stmicroelectonics or Telespazio “.
And then, continues Darnis, there is already “a structured agreement on European launchers, there is the banking sector and potentially, with the Turin-Lyon, the integration between the economic system of Northern Italy and the French one, on the Venice-Milan-Turin-Lyon-Paris axis “. To all this, the Quirinale Treaty will provide a framework that will serve to regulate that integration and to strengthen governance.
In spite of the “usual nationalists – comments the Luiss professor – who carry on nineteenth-century and Risorgimento speeches in which the problematic relationship with France is recalled, the rivalries on the colonies, but which today can be quite marginal”. Once the Treaty has been signed, comments Darnis, “it will be necessary to see how this relationship will be structured, an exchange of a priori analyzes will be important, which does not mean that the positions must be the same, but at least there can be greater mutual understanding, a relationship of knowledge that will come out of the convergences “.
Source-www.adnkronos.com