The future of Europe, beyond the pandemic

The ongoing pandemic caused the confrontation between northern and southern Europe to explode, which was already underway, but with less heated tones. If in the immediate term the most serious urgency is to contain the health effects of the pandemic, a factor that has already caused divisions with the lack of cooperation from European countries, the economic aspect promises to be just as, if not more, serious. The recession is now an unexpected, but certain fact and, worse, it is grafted onto an already difficult economic situation due to the contained growth, due to structural aspects, but also to the tightening of financial policies, which have had the only objective of limiting the deficit: an objective functional only to some continental economies to the detriment of others. The seriousness of the pandemic affected, in the initial phase, more than the countries of Mediterranean Europe, which requested financial measures at Community level, unrelated to the punitive logic to which Greece was subjected and which were, instead, invoked, by Holland and Germany. The gravity of the Dutch position appears to be unjustifiable as the practice adopted in the tax field, such as to attract companies from other countries, especially from those to which it wants to refuse aid, which provides for a sharp decrease in taxation compared to other European countries to be able to existence of unfair competition practices. Berlin's behavior, although showing less rigidity, cannot arouse any suspicion about wanting to rage against its main manufacturing competitors, in order to reap substantial advantages for the German industries. Now these considerations are both economic and political in nature and the second aspect assumes a very significant gravity within the relations between European states and their possible developments. The assumption that cannot be waived is the need for Europe and the need to contrast Eurosceptic parties and movements. If for southern Europe the need to combat skepticism is to have an interlocutor in the Union willing to lighten its positions regarding financial rigidity, in Northern Europe it is the means to combat opposition to the Union is to maintain the attitude against what is considered the attitude to create debt of southern countries. The two trends appear equal and opposite and therefore difficult to reconcile, but a factor of concordance can certainly be the need to grow as a single subject in the contrast of globalization and its main interpreters: China, Russia and the USA, especially if Trump were to be re-elected. A dissolution of the Union, despite everything, would not suit anyone economically, keeping the European market, which is also the richest in the world, united and privileged, remains a necessity of survival for each member of the Union, taken individually. It is also necessary to consider that to increase the danger of a dissolution of the Union, even if only partial, there is now the English precedent, which could foster similar sentiments more strongly, especially in the short term. The way out is only political: considering the Union as a whole not only economic and financial, as it has actually been so far, but a supranational political structure capable of tackling the problems of each individual territory in a united way; of course this implies sacrifices in terms of partial loss of sovereignty in both senses, but it can mean a new appreciation gain in favor of Brussels. Unfortunately, the pandemic has generated a disturbing number of victims and others announce themselves from an economic and social point of view: only an action by Europe in support of populations can solve problems in a practical way from which individual states could emerge devastated; it is a human and economic necessity to which the European institutions must respond absolutely, under penalty of their very survival. The pandemic also represents an opportunity to harmonize tax procedures in order to eliminate the differences that generate dangerous competition and that has nothing to do with the free market: it is a further factor to raise the positive perception of Europe.