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Published on 2024-12-31 19:30:00 | words: 1435
This article is published on 2024-12-31, and within the (data-based) CitizenAudit series.
Anyway, it will contain more commentary on data, than data per se, as the purpose is to summarize the year and look forward to what would derive from trends that evolved in 2024.
There is a reason to put it within this section: both this article and this section are not just focused on presenting and assessing data, but on sharing mindsets to allow other citizens do informed choices.
It is quite interesting the local feed-back that I used to get when number crunching and highlighting issues that initially are discounted, then confirmed.
In Italy, dissenting from the tribes generates something worth USSR relationships between State and citizens- but the net results are the same, as you can see across statistics looking not just at instantaneous answers: decline that would require a different mindset to reversed.
In the Italian case, a mindset that should stop being parochial and tribal, and acknowledge that many choices, for European Union Member States, cannot anymore be viable if lack an element of structural orchestration with other Member States.
And this applies also the other way around: if you want success to any European Union initiative, it cannot be detached from its structural impacts within the European Union, cannot just be a delusional projection of a "Fortress Europe".
We Europeans need a strategic posture, not a supermarket cart filled with a bit of everything, and then "cooking up" something on a weekly or monthly basis.
Like it or not, the European Union is not a nimble mini-state, it is increasingly getting closer to Hobbes Leviathan blended with a Bentham Panopticon, also if we present to present it as if it were a new More Utopia or even a Campanella City of the Sun.
Also, we European should remember our history of dealing with non-European countries, and quit assuming that we went up the mountain Moses style, and can lecture everybody.
Italy is a founding Member State of the precursor of what eventually became the European Union, and in past surveys routinely was in the top league of Europe-enthusiasts.
For various reasons, as shown also by the decline in participation to national and local elections (see the previous article on this series), interest declined.
Personally, what I see in the data is not a decline in interest, but a decline in willingness to trust what is presented, and how meaningful is to vote.
Which is a trend shown also in other countries, but in Italy, where whatever was the government, political patronage turned into each election into an employment opportunity for jobs whose "shelf-life" extended way beyond the next election, this has some ripple-effects.
But more about this in a later article- let's just say that we at the national level generate disincentives to participation, and the Byzantine approach to reality of the European Commission, notably on the various transitions and investments plus reforms, is extending this continent-wide.
If you detach from reality just to confirm what you had already decided in the first place, you can feel as a perfect social engineer, even a great architect of the universe, but what you will really do is make your own constant stream of proposals and statements met routinely with a deafening silence, when you instead would need all the cogs and wheels of society to be part of a cathedral-building and evolution design.
Why the title about the European Union at large while so far the discussion is just about Italy?
Because, to use 2024 to look forward, Italy is a testing ground.
Since the last elections, we had a political government that until the confirmation of the (re)new(ed) President of the European Commission was not aligned with the supposed majority of the European Parliament.
Then, we had a shift during the confirmation process, and suddenly we are getting a slightly different perception of political alignment.
As an American friend said a while ago, and I concurred, President Trump will be unpredictable enough to keep friends and foes alike on their toes, and today an Italian newspaper reported the same concept.
So much for calling lunacy being realistic, when it is just not suffering from the political cognitive dissonance that is spreading as a virus.
Saw first in Turin from 2012, then in Italy overall, and gradually, a bit since the inception of Covid, and more so after the first side-effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine (energy, potentially raw materials and semiconductors).
Look at the data since 2020: we keep announcing at the European Union level initiatives and associated funding, and then assume a Gosplan attitude, as if a mechanistic structured planning were enough to change reality and "freeze" the context.
We misread the war in Ukraine, and misread the war in Gaza and Lebanon.
The key point is that we are assuming to have more impact that we really have or can have.
Hence, the title "Rocking the EU Ship".
I will write in the next few days a commentary another article within the EP2024 series, but today the aim is more about the transition.
Somebody summarizes 2024, and I agree that frankly summarizing a year in the news is boring- unless you were on the Moon during 2024, and want to know what happened.
But moving forward requires observing choices that did not deliver (the data is there) and choices that set in motion unexpected consequences (ditto).
The key element, and why it makes sense to insert this article within the Citizen Audit series, is simple: if you want to do this exercise, you require few elements
_ visibility on the context
_ expertise on the specific domain
_ data that are relevant, not just that confirm your assumptions.
All the articles in this series are short by design- and this one makes no exception.
For the first point, the context, I suggest that you read the short article that posted yesterday (or the whole series).
Specifically on the EU, I think that no matter what is your specific expertise, the starting point (context) should be the macro-initiatives taken 2019-2024, the proposals for reforms (the French-German, Letta, Draghi reports), and the discussion during the confirmation of the (re)new(ed) European Commission.
If you skip that step that should represent the "common knowledge ground", whatever you derive from your expertise and your selection of data would risk suffering from a long list of biases- starting obviously from the confirmation bias.
The European Commission gradually became too self-referential to actually really influence reality (or understand it), and while the European Union is still relatively rich, it is increasingly assuming that "helicopter money" is the solution.
2025 is around the corner, and, beside dealing with the side-effects of 2024 events and choices, will be one step closer to reconsidering in 2026 the side-effects of the first large initiative based on shared debt, the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
So, 2025 will probably need a significant "rocking of the EU boat"- but based on rational analysis, not on announces ignoring the real current weight of the European Union.
The European Union and the Euro are experiments in social engineering on a large scale, but need to be supported by a constant re-assessment and tuning.
It is tempting to keep spinning more balls in the air (e.g. new initiatives), but the orchestration of all of them should be based on the specific absorption capability of the organizational structures involved.
Meaning: you can keep launching top-down initiatives from Brussels, but if the execution relies on the operational capabilities of local, regional, and national organizational structures, plus integrated efforts by the private sector across the European Union, piling up is not an opportunity, it is a collective egotrip based on cognitive dissonance.
See you tomorrow for another article- and happy new year!