Director of the Italian geopolitical review Limes, Lucio Caracciolo casts a realist eye on Italy: a country under American influence, Mediterranean by rhetoric more than by fact, confronted with the Turkish push, with its dependence on gas, and with a world in which its old protections are wavering. Interview.
Interview conducted by Guy-Alexandre Le Roux. An article to be found in Issue 65 — « Rome: the permanence of the Empire ».
Rome founded its power on its provinces. In the aftermath of the Second World War, Italy itself became a kind of province of the American Empire. Does it still see itself that way today?
From a historical and geopolitical point of view, there can be little doubt that Italy was, after 1945, a province of the American Empire. I would even say a semi-protectorate. We have institutions, a certain degree of autonomy, but within the framework of NATO and of a military presence that endures, the bases are the base of the American Empire.
Let us be precise: these bases are Italian, but Italy signed treaties (partly public, partly secret) regulating their use with the United States. Where there are no bases, as in France, that is one thing; where there are, it is quite another. The idea, founded on the famous Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, was simple: by hosting these bases, one enjoyed an almost automatic American protection. The trouble is that we never had any proof of its effectiveness, other than that there was no aggression.
Above all, this protection rested on the threat of the Soviet Union and of communism. All that has disappeared: the basis of the system no longer exists, and it is now the Americans who decide, alone, whether or not to intervene. And even today, the Gulf states are becoming targets because they host American bases.
Does Italy need this American tutelage?
The observation I make is that Italy is not fully sovereign — and besides, who really is, in this world? It is less so than France, because we lost the war: this remains in the Charter of the United Nations, with the famous enemy clauses. The Japanese and the Germans sought to contest them; we, for our part, accommodated ourselves to them. We therefore live in a limited sovereignty, and I doubt that anyone in Rome really wishes to leave it. It is still better, in our eyes, to be in a distant and familiar sphere of influence (after all, it was we who discovered the Americans) than in that of Germany, France or Spain.
It is often said that Giorgia Meloni has cast herself as a mediator between Europe and Donald Trump. Can Italy play that role?
I am always surprised by the attention the French, German, British and even American press pays to her: she is made out to be, if not a General de Gaulle, at least someone who would count enormously. With all the respect I owe my Prime Minister, that is somewhat beyond reality: Italy cannot represent Europe. The idea that you would need the head of the Italian government — rather than the Germans, I would even say the Luxembourgers — to counterbalance the Americans belongs to fantasy. And people continue, in Italy as in France, to speak of Europe as if it existed; one thus passes from the reality principle to a dubious principle, founded on desire and not on facts.
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What, at bottom, is your forecast for Europe?
Germany is equipping itself with a military doctrine that wants it to be Europe’s leading conventional and technological power in 2039 — that is, exactly one hundred years after 1939. Not ’38, not ’40: ’39. Why write it so openly? What worries me is not so much Germany as the reaction of the others — the French of course, but also the Poles, and perhaps even the Swiss. For it is a fact: if the Americans leave us to our own affairs, we shall revive our old quarrels. We have had eighty years of peace thanks to the division of Europe between Americans and Soviets; I am not sure we have twenty ahead of us before 2050, because we are in the process of resurrecting the myths, the legends and a few realities of the past.
« The time when Europe could delegate its security and forget geography is drawing to a close. »
This history of Europe, in my view, is over. One can go on talking about it, but everyone now has a narrow idea of it. In Franco-Italian relations, for example, we must have done with our squabbles — which sometimes had, from my point of view, a strong justification: not to feign affection, but to be a little realistic. It remains to be seen whether all this can hold when, from the Middle East, currents of war rise that are fairly uncontrollable. We shall see.
In the end, does Italy consider itself European?
Italy is fundamentally a Mediterranean country, and it is also a sign of our limited sovereignty to accept, not without suffering, the idea that we are not quite European. France, thanks to General de Gaulle, narrowly avoided becoming a province of the American empire and was able to think of itself as European. We had AMGOT; you avoided it, and that makes a difference. Our vital interest is an open Mediterranean, connected to the oceans, through which energy and raw materials arrive and through which our products leave. For it is forgotten: Italy is the world’s fourth-largest exporter, which is remarkable for a country without raw materials.
What, precisely, does « being Mediterranean » mean for an Italian?
I fear the question has no real answer, for our Mediterranean consciousness is above all rhetorical: a Mediterranean of peace, of dialogue… that is to say, the opposite of the facts. Lucien Febvre, or Marc Bloch, or both, said that Europe began with the end of the Roman Empire, that is, with the end of the Mediterranean circuit. That is more or less Henri Pirenne’s thesis. It takes us back to the seventh and eighth centuries, to the penetration of Islam. Since then, there has been no true Mediterranean circuit, and that is our problem: either we remake the Roman Empire (which is not for tomorrow), or we accept that there exist, in what the Russians call the « near abroad », fractures that limit our power and constitute a permanent risk factor.
One cannot understand Italian geopolitics without this shadow cast by the past. Besides, Rome did not make Europe: it was Caesar who, having reached the Rhine, « invented Germany » — I put it in quotation marks — by separating off the Germanic peoples. The longue durée is not merely a theory; the representations, the stereotypes inherited from the past still weigh heavily on today’s decisions.
And France? Is it, for its part, a Mediterranean country?
I recall a French geographical atlas — an Atlas of the Mediterranean — in which a map classified, by colour, the Mediterranean countries and the others. France appeared there in white: neither one nor the other. That is quite accurate. It is at once Latin, Germanic and Celtic, and this indeterminacy is doubtless a strength. The word « Mediterranean » spoken by a German does not, moreover, have the same meaning as in the mouth of a coastal country such as Italy, Greece or, precisely, the south of France. Each projects onto this sea its own ulterior motives.
Being Mediterranean, for Italy, means opening onto the sea? Does it think of itself as a maritime power?
Its maritimity is potential, not real. The difference is that the maritime country looks at the land from the sea, whereas the other, even endowed with coasts, looks at the sea from the land. For us, the sea is where one swims in the summer. In volume of traffic over twelve months, the port of Rotterdam is more important than all the Italian ports combined. For lack of coordination, Venice and Trieste are fierce enemies. And yet, from the point of view of the Anglo-Saxons, the Germans, the countries of the North, we remain a Mediterranean country; which is not without ulterior motives, very much bound up with national character. I remember a conversation with a senior German diplomat, about Maastricht. I ask him: « Why did you accept Italy into the euro? » Answer: « Wir wollten euch nordifizieren« , « we wanted to nordify you ». I quoted The Leopard to him: when the Prince of Salina sees the Garibaldians landing under British protection, he says of those officers: « They’re coming to teach us good manners, but they won’t succeed, because we are gods. » The idea that one can change the mind of a people is perhaps German; in Sicily, it has no purchase. To nordify us because we were entering the euro: it did not work.
How, then, does Italy think of its place in the Mediterranean?
There is this doctrine, borne by the navy and become a national strategy: the Mediterraneo allargato, the « enlarged Mediterranean ». The trouble is that its limits are unknown — some include even the Arctic. At bottom, the Mediterranean in the strict sense is a lake, and therefore something closed; yet one cannot have as an ambition to remain in a lake. One must reach the open sea, and for that cross straits: Gibraltar, Suez, Bab-el-Mandeb, the Strait of Hormuz. What has changed is that, with the exception of Gibraltar, all are today at war or contested. American power is no longer, as they say, willing and able to hold these lines of communication with the South. For what we call the Mediterraneo is not only the north-south axis, but also the west-east axis: the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Pacific. Our vital interest is that this extension towards the world-ocean should remain free, peaceful and open. Failing which, Italy finds itself locked in its lake.
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Does that explain the rapprochement with China?
It is rather a rapprochement of China with Italy: what interests Beijing is the European market. We were part, for two years, of the « Silk Roads », before being called to order by Washington. Rather late, moreover, which shows that American pressure did not have the harshness it would have had in the Soviet era. The most Italian thing of all is that we instituted the Golden Power to control Chinese investments… and that, in practice, it served above all against the Americans.
These are not plans, they are the wonders of Italy… Everything, moreover, began with a negotiation between the director of the port of Trieste and the Chinese state. On one side Xi Jinping, on the other a port director: a rather asymmetrical relationship. And the attitude of the government of the day was to say: « That is not our business, it is the business of the port of Trieste. » For Trieste, formally Italian, is in reality very far from Italy: historically, it is the port of Central Europe, that of Austria, of the Germans, the Czechs, the Hungarians, more than ours. It is also, militarily, the Americans’ port in the north-east, for the bases of Aviano and Vicenza; there was even talk of a data centre controlled by the Chinese… hardly to their credit.
It was, finally, the piece targeted by the IMEC corridor, meant to link India, the Gulf, Haifa and the Mediterranean: a project today more or less impossible, since the war. The Chinese, for their part, quickly understood: there is no point in negotiating with Rome, better to deal directly with the local actors.
And the Italian projection towards North Africa and the Levant?
Here again, everything is done the Italian way. We are the only Mediterranean state not to have really delimited its exclusive economic zone — except, in part, through agreements with France and Croatia, on the Adriatic-Ionian side. ENI discovered a large gas field off Libya, but the Libyan coast is now Turkish, and that is a little because of you French, and also of us… Rather than oppose the folly of Mr Sarkozy, we even took part in it. As for Algeria, become central to our gas supply since the war in Ukraine, it regards the Sardinian Sea as Algerian. But since we are buoni di cuore — good-hearted — why fall out with friends?
There is also Malta, that sort of tortoise set down in the Sicilian Channel, which holds a power of blockage that is at least theoretical. During the Cold War, we had a brilliant policy: good relations with Gaddafi, whose life we saved several times, Malta was well guarded, we had even managed to place our man in Tunisia, Ben Ali, against the French candidate. Today, facing us, stands an expanding Turkish empire, endowed with its « Blue Homeland » doctrine and, almost incredibly, supported by the United States. For the Americans support at the same time Israel and Turkey, the two fiercest enemies in the Mediterranean.
France, precisely, seems to be revising its position towards Turkey. To Italy’s detriment?
There is a difference here between us and you: your approach is rather anti-Turkish, ours rather pro-Turkish. But I believe that, in the end, France will moderate its opposition to Ankara. It will therefore at the same time limit its support for Greece and Cyprus, for it has no interest in a war against the Turks in the Mediterranean. The real risk lies elsewhere: if Israel attacks Turkey, to forestall it before it becomes too strong. We would then all be in a very, very complicated situation. That is why I believe no one — neither in Paris nor in Rome — really has an interest in pushing the Turkish game to its conclusion.
A question internal to Italy, a little provocative for the Roman that you are: is Rome becoming a province of Milan?
No, frankly. Milan is the city of fashion and finance, granted, but between the two kinds of standing there are a few millimetres of difference. And if you go there, you will see that Milan is in decline. That is, for once, a rather too Italian way of looking at things: part of the country, especially in the North, does not like Rome. What we Italians do not see is that Rome is not an Italian question, but a universal one: a reference point that the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Turks can all mobilise. The problem of Rome is a problem with Italy, not with the rest of the world — rather like « Paris and the French desert », is it not? And what makes it today more than the capital of Italy is the Church — for two thousand years, so it will last — and a current pope who, consciously or not, reinvests this universal role.
« Rome is not an Italian question, but a universal one — a reference point that the Americans, the Russians, the Chinese, the Turks can all mobilise. »
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