ABSTRACT: The crisis in the Persian Gulf puts the spotlight on the irremediable and decisive crisis in which the formation of the European Union finds itself. With Italy holding the presidency of the European Community, it should have seized this tragic occasion for accelerating the process of European political integration and, at the present moment, the European Community's assumption of full responsibility for managing the crisis. But Italy rejected the European and community context, conditioned and blackmailed as it was by the common interests operating with Saddam and his regime.

("La Stampa", August 21, 1990)

It was not against (or for) Baghdad, but against or for

Rome, the government, De Michelis that the political and information spheres moved in reality in recent weeks. Interventionist or pacifists, as ever, worse than ever. Above all, fighting among themselves. Parlato and Natta [PCI] against Occhetto [PCI Party Secretary] and Sergio Romano, or Giorgio La Malfa [PRI Party Secretary] against Gianni De Michelis [DC,Foreign Minister]. As in the case of Lebanon, the Red Sea...

Leading the pack in the violation of Community directives, leading in non-respect of European jurisdiction, leading now - and it takes some doing! - even in national-populism - here you have the "European federalist" Italy of the referendum for the United States of Europe, of the Spinelli project for the European Parliament, which the Italian Parliament has favoured almost unanimously for more than a decade.

Tragic as this nth Middle Eastern crisis is and for what it forebodes today, what in any case threatens to remain as a consequence is the concluding and irremediable crisis for the formation of a European Union just at a time when the events in Eastern Europe, which demand a "political and legal" response more than an economic one, might be transformed into the greatest political and democratic, economic and cultural "power" in the world.

The Italian presidency of the EEC already began badly, almost like a caricature, in comparison to what most people were expecting of it. A pseudo cosmopolitanism of a provincial stamp, smacking of parvenu activism had received its first negative reaction in Europe. One expected and urged a leap forward - also by means of repeated deliberations which had by now achieved the character of an assault - from the European Parliament and Jacques Delors, the President of the Commission; expected a resumption of the federal initiative which had marked the last Italian presidency very well-directed by Craxi and Andreotti [PSI and DC leaders respectively, ed.] and which ended in the bribe of the Single Act which Italy had been "the last to sign with explicit reservations". Inter-governmental conferences on monetary and economic unity, to establish an agenda for a certain minimum of classic and democratic federal authority, great parliamentary sessions in Rome, the acceleration of the Community's unification obje

ctively coinciding with German unification - these were the issues, the extraordinary "capital" which the Italian presidency could and should have made use of. The month of August should have been used to the maximum for this purpose.

The bursting of the Iraqi bomb could and should have helped the maturating of a full assumption of responsibility by Europe. The Italian presidency should have immediately pushed for, publicly, a meeting of the Twelve of the most solemn, critical and reasonable kind. The Commission would not have failed to adhere to the initiative, as far as regards its president Delors. For this there would have sufficed the framework of the so-called "political co-operation"; even the Geinsher-Colombo Act, not only the Single Act of Luxemburg.

Certainly the guarantee of unanimity would have rested upon an executive decision. But the world - including Saddam - would have found in the European Union a strong point of reference, of reasonableness, of new aggregation and expression even for the USSR (whose following of the Washington line is not useful for anyone) and for many Third World countries. Up to now I have used the imperfect and the conditional inasmuch as it is probable that the logic of events rather than human ones will continue to reign and go to the worst kind of ruin. Besides the miserable ideals and politics of so great a part of the political leaders, too many inadmissible realities join together to form the most unanimous, paralysing conformity, which for two weeks by now have been manifesting themselves on the European continent. By rejecting the communitarian and European framework on the institutional and political level, Italy and France, first of all, cannot help but move in a way conditioned and blackmailed by the giganti

c accumulation of common interests and complicity certainly working together with Saddam and his regime.