The bleak European outlook

Sottotitolo: 
The crisis hits the major countries as France and Italy, along with the Middle-East boundary.

The economic and political situation in Europe, is clearly unpleasant , and all the various crises that we see every day seem declining towards the worse. A large and powerful country, the UK is at risk of losing a part of its territory, and almost all the money coming from the North Sea oil, because the population does not want to live in a large, multiethnic country.

In France , the socialist minister of a socialist Government , a man that had brilliantly run the merger of General Electric and Alstom , has lost his seat because he dared to criticize the German method of running the European economy, which has put a number of countries in a very negative situation. In Italy, instead of deal with the hard economic and social crisis that hits the country, the Renzi’s government has constrained the parliament to discuss quite violently the cancellation of a Constitutional organ, the Senate – an overhaul that will pervert the Italian Constitution, and put the political and administrative system in a great uncertainty.

These difficulties are not limited to Europe; the entire international system by now in a serious crisis. A passenger plane has been hit by a missile and destroyed, and nobody has been accused as a culprit, punished, at least , incriminated. Clearly, there is a big power which allows some of his friends to perpetrate such a crime in full safety. This is a true serious break of the international legal system, but the matter did not create a great reaction in Europe, or in the USA.

On the other side of the world, the crisis involves Middle East, and particularly Iraq. Events developing there bring to the mind the great massacres of the middle Ages. The antique enmity between Sunnis and Shiites is open again. The Sunnis , not well treated by the American created government show some sympathy for the be headers coming from Syria to create the Islamic Kingdom, which would have only the Sunni variant , and then must fight the other.

Not much different is the Libyan situation where the forces are divided in a great number of different groups, some strictly following a harsh sectarian religion, while other thinks that the country should have some religious and political liberty. In the meantime, Egypt has followed a general, a man of order, and surely not a democrat. On the other hand, Europe ran in detail by the German system, is getting increasingly weaker: the German primacy goes with the degradation of a good part of Europe, Italy included.

However, Italy has perhaps some way to start a new phase of development. At the end of the second world war, in 1945, the country utilised the new discoveries of natural gas and of oil , and the same could be happen now , with a campaign of research and utilisation of the resources which still exist in the country. They are well known and, although not enormous , they might be enough to spark a new economic phase. So happened after the war, and, later, with the development of the Adriatic. The idea of renouncing to those resources in order not to have e negative effect on tourism is completely unlikely.

Many years ago, the development of the Adriatic gas reserves was realised with a clear agreement between the oil company and the touring industry, both interested in the success of each other. Clearly, the oil industry did not damage the tourism business; but in fact it gave some different elements, like the artificial island that were accepted with curious attention.

Everybody knows that what is now called "La Riviera Romania" is still well patronised and still in a very good position. Other parts of the peninsula are not so well kept, as often the unregulated building both in the cities and near the sea, have often isolated the cities from the sea because of the excessive building. An increase of production of gas and oil will create a possibility of a new development. And the work should start quickly, before it may become impossible.

Marcello Colitti

Economist. He was President of Enichem. His last book is "Etica e politica di Baruch Spinoza". Member of the Editorial Board of Insight