In fear that ISIL fighters might enter Europe as irregular asylum-seekers, EU policymakers are scrambling to implement new policies to prevent the arrival of these groups
The EU lacks a common foreign policy to tackle immigration. Thus, national policies fill this gap. For this reason, political initiatives at the local level are crucial.
There is widespread domestic consensus that Enrico Letta’s government is the only road that Italy can travel for now. How long it will survive Italian and European politics is another matter.
Many agree on the fact that Italy needs reform. One of every four youngsters are jobless, the sixth worst situation in Europe. One wonders whether the “Arab Spring” rising North from the Mediterranean may bring the winds of change and jasmine that Italy, as well as other troubled countries in Southern Europe need.
Kant defined enlightenment as the proliferation and cultivation of critique and reason as the vehicles to intellectual, cultural and political evolution: an ethos based not on any one body of knowledge but upon a constant critical interrogation of the present and of ourselves. Dissent, contradiction, argumentation and debate are key to the betterment of society through democracy. If this is true, Berlusconi has turned off the light.
Glimpses of post-9/11 anti-terrorism machinery are not particularly edifying, whatever one’s views. The real solution to terrorism is more rule of law, not less.
Revelations about the alleged payment by Italian troops of protection money to local Afghan commanders to stop attacks on their forces have reignited a recurrent debate among scholars of international affairs: does Italy have a coherent foreign policy, or even a foreign policy at all? In the long term, Berlusconi or not, Italy is poised to remain where it firmly belongs: in the Atlantic and European camps.
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